T.M. Scanlon has a very nice little piece in the Boston Review, discussing and rejecting the main grounds adduced by libertarians in favour of limited government and lower taxes. I’m not sure that I’d express the distinction between the limited rights a person has over things in a state of nature and property rights in quite the same terms as he does, but that’s probably just linguistic. His discussion of the crop-stealing marauders case is important because it grants the force of a libertarian intuition whilst limiting the mileage that libertarians can get from it for a complex society. Good stuff. Read the whole thing.

A few weeks ago, the Tesco a playing field away from my house re-opened with a new look and a Costa café. The new look seems to be simply the re-situating of the booze section to the middle of the shop, so you now have to pass by the beer offers before getting at frozen foods or cleaning products. And the eggs have been put somewhere so unlikely – and of course miles from other staples like milk or bread – that the staff laugh or frown when you ask where, they have to answer so often.

Not much else has changed; the vegetable section is either bulging with unlikely and out of season produce or empty like in a zombie movie or communist Russia. The price war turns out to be just lower prices than in August when they were hiked up ahead of time. And there are a couple more self-checkouts barking orders and requiring on average two staff interventions to make each transaction go through.

But the Costa. That’s changed everything.

This is a suburb of Edinburgh about a mile from the nearer villages and with a mix of public and private housing. It’s by no means isolated, but on a wet and blustery day twenty minutes walk feels too far for a pint of milk or the morning paper. I can’t imagine I’d do it more than once a week if I had a buggy to push or arthritis, no matter how lonely or fed up I was. And when you work from home, a burst of fresh air and a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend.

Now, one of my daily highlights is my overpriced, under-caffeinated and much loved light latte sipped at a plastic table under piped music drowned out by the endless cheeping of supermarket scanners. A mix of the same people is there most days.

One is an elderly woman bent over a stick who waits discreetly at her table while the counter staff bring over her tea and biscuits. Another is any one of the buggy-pushing set enjoying a guilt-free sit down before getting on with the shop. My favourite is the older woman I always have to repeat my order to but who always seems uncommonly pleased to be there.

I suppose the point is that however annoying the perpetual encroachment of large corporates and their vertical integrations and tie-in deals, the day to day of mega-commerce can still boil down to people in a community using the place to find, talk to or just quietly appreciate each other.

The Government is worried about women. Not worried in the sense of;

‘Concerned the female unemployment rate is higher and getting worse’;

‘Troubled that axing child benefit nudges middle class women out of work for good’;

‘Alarmed that women know health and education cuts doom their children to shorter, poorer lives’;

‘Horrified that targeted cutbacks to legal aid mean demonstrably more women will be murdered by the men they love’.

Not at all.

Silly women, the government thinks! Just because of our blue-sky thinking to cut parental leave in the never-ending War on Red Tape, why would women think we have it in for them?

But the UK equivalent of the American soccer mom is deserting the coalition government in droves, and she must be won back. How? The coalition can’t miss this once-in-a-generation chance to destroy the welfare state in order to pay for banks and the imaginary economy they’ve destroyed. The cuts must go on.

Then what shall they do to win women back? How about some cheep ‘n cheerful eye-catching measures that show our hearts are in the right place? Let’s;

• Ban forced marriages, because that’s too simple an issue to cock up
• Pretend we can stop porn on the Internet, because women are too stupid to know it doesn’t work like that, and we can still get ours anyway
• Talk very loudly about how hideous it is to sexualize children, especially working class ones who don’t know any better
• Spend bazillions on our buddies’ flagship ‘free schools’ in west London to show we really care about the kids
• Remind everyone constantly that the Prime Minister’s heart is in the right place; he has NHS frequent flyer miles and he feels our pain

And you know what? Cameron is right to be a little perplexed that women are losing faith in him. Because the government’s faux-regretful gouges at the post-war social contract don’t just hurt women. They hurt everyone who’s not been sensible enough to be born or become wealthy. It’s just that women voters seem to be among the first to cop on to it.

But you can’t play the ‘trust me because I’m a reasonable, personable man with a clever wife I adore’ card more than once. Women aren’t stupid, and neither is the electorate.

Watching footage of the Occupy protests suddenly reminded me of Pete Seeger’s marvellous song (played at Jerry Cohen’s funeral btw). I thought it would be a nice thing to share.

The Liam Fox/Adam Werritty scandal largely happened when I was away in the US, so I’m only now catching up on the details. These are, in brief, that Werritty, a close friend of Fox (the British Secretary-of-State for Defence, now resigned), paid by various shadowy backers and lobby-groups, accompanied him to a very large number of meetings, including ones involving foreign governments. Some of the details of the financial backing for Werrity and the background in the pro-American think-tank Atlantic Bridge are covered by the Guardian “here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/15/liam-fox-atlantic-bridge?newsfeed=true . Now there’s talk of “prosecuting Werrity for fraud”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/8829803/Liam-Fox-affair-Adam-Werritty-facing-fraud-investigation-by-police.html for allegedly misrepresenting his status with Fox to lobbyists in order to get their cash. What I don’t understand is why nobody is pursuing the question of whether there’s been a breach of the Bribery Act. It looks to me _prima facie_ like there’s a case to answer.

Looking at the “statute”:http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/23/section/1 :

It is clear that Werritty’s backers promised or gave “a financial or other advantage to another person [Werritty]” , intending “to induce a person [Fox] to perform improperly a relevant function or activity”. In which connection note (1.4) that “… it does not matter whether the person to whom the advantage is offered, promised or given is the same person as the person who is to perform, or has performed, the function or activity concerned.” So an offence can be committed where Werrity is paid to influence Fox. The case also seems to meet the “function or activity”:http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/23/section/3 provisions, since Fox is “performing a function of a public nature” and “is expected to perform it in good faith”, is “is expected to perform it impartially” and “is in a position of trust by virtue of performing it” (though meeting any of those last three clauses would do).

So why aren’t Labour MPs demanding an investigation into whether there has been a breach of the Act?

Via several blogs where it was mentioned (I saw it on NewApps and Feminist Philosophers), a link to a new blog, called Occupy Philosophy. I’m no longer sure what the word ‘Occupy’ is supposed to mean when we are not only using it in connection with seats of capitalist power (as in ‘Occupy Wall Street’) but also in connection with seats of systematic/critical reflection (‘Occupy Philosophy’). But let’s not spend our energy on that quibble, but rather applaud efforts to involve professional philosophers (and other academics) in contributing to the discussion of the issues that the Occupyers are trying to put on the political agenda.

Two related things perhaps worth mentioning.
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The Guardian has “an interview with Steven Pinker about his new book”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/15/steven-pinker-better-angels-violence-interview _The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes_ . It presents me with a problem. In order to evaluate its claims properly, I’d actually have to read the book, but everything tells me that doing so would be an immense waste of valuable time, so I probably won’t. I can, however, comment snippily on the material that surfaces in interviews and reviews … so here goes.
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It is a testament to my deep dislike for Zizek that even this piece by Niall Ferguson wasn’t enough to turn me Zizekian on the spot. But it was a near thing.

I think Nobel Prize winning economist Chris Sims has a much shrewder take on this whole 99 vs. 1 business.

Honestly, almost all these defenses of the status quo make more sense than Ferguson’s alternative, ‘never trust anyone over 30’ rabble-rousing proposals. (What is this, 1968?)

I emailed to congratulate Sims and he was very modest about his prize.

UPDATE: On second thought, I take it all back. That deftly-dropped hint that Zizek grew his beard to look as as wild-and-crazy as Krugman was worth the price of admission. Karl Marx sort of had a ‘Krugman beard’, too, if you think about it. Makes you think! And that’s why they pay Ferguson the Big Bucks, I presume.

Australia’s House of Representatives has just passed legislation for a carbon tax[1]. Passage by the Senate is assured, so that, as long as the government can survive another year (it needs the support of three independents to muster a one-vote majority), the tax will come into effect in mid-2012. The political history of this proposal is too complicated to recount, but is symbolised by the current Prime Minister (who previously dumped the policy, but has now succeeded in bringing it into effect) receiving a congratulatory kiss from the previous Prime Minister (who supported the policy but was unable to get it passed into law, and was replaced as a result of this).[2]

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So I’m informed that the _Occupy Wall Street_ movement has a pretty good library, and that it’s possible to donate books to it by sending them to:

The UPS Store
Re: Occupy Wall Street
Attn: The People’s Library
118A Fulton St. #205
New York, NY 10038

I’ve just sent them a copy of “Pierson/Hacker’s Winner Take All Politics“:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/15/review-jacob-hacker-and-paul-pierson-winner-take-all-politics/, which I think is both very readable (important if you are trying to get through it under not exceptionally wonderful reading conditions) and terrific on the substance of why we are in a 99%/1% society. I encourage CT readers (a) to send books that they think might be good reading for OWS people, and (b) to leave comments saying which books they think should be in the library, and why. You certainly do not have to do (a) to write (b), but if you are in a position to send a book, it would obviously be nice (and a good, albeit small gesture of solidarity – I may be atypical, but if I were sitting and camping out, I’d really like to have something good to read during the duller moments). Also – these don’t have to be weighty tomes of policy analysis or whatever – you may reasonably think that the people occupying Wall Street don’t need to read those books, or that they may want lighter and livelier stuff.

Reading the literature on social media and the Arab Spring, there’s a recurring sentiment I’ve run across:

– Jeff Neumann: Social Media Didn’t Oust Tunisia’s President — The Tunisian People Did

“Did social media have an effect on events in Tunisia? Undoubtedly, yes. Is this a social media revolution? Absolutely not.”

– Achalla Venu: What happened in Tunisia and then in Egypt?

“So the common trait between the revolution in Tunisia and the ongoing revolution in Egypt is — they all are human revolutions not caused by Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Flickr and many others but they all played their part.”

– Jillian York: Not Twitter, Not Wikileaks: A Human Revolution

“I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring attention to their plight. But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi–or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause–by dubbing this anything but a human revolution.”

Despite their affirmation of the importance of social media during the uprisings, these authors (and many others) want to assure us that their analysis remains appropriately human-centered, that they are not making the terrible mistake of describing tools as if they had some sort of agency.

But here’s the funny thing — we describe our tools as having agency all the time. This isn’t a mistake, or an accident. It’s an essential part of our expressive repertoire around technology.
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