The ever-expanding scandal surrounding hacking, bribery, perjury and obstruction of justice by News Corporation in England has already brought about the closure of the venerable (at least in years) News of the World newspaper, but looks likely to go much further, with significant implications for the Murdoch press in Australia, where Murdoch started out in my hometown of Adelaide (I should mention that, despite being born here, Murdoch is not an Australian by either citizenship or residence. He took out US citizenshup citizenship quite a while ago to further his ambitions there) .

The scandal over hacking and other criminal behavior has now become an all-out revolt of UK politicians against Murdoch’s immense political power , which has had successive Prime Ministers dancing attendance on him, and rushing to confer lucrative favors on his News Corporation. Those, like Labour leader Ed Miliband, who are relative cleanskins, are making the running, while PM David Cameron, very close to the most corrupt elements of News, is scrambling to cover himself.

The hacking and bribery scandals appear (as far as we know) to be confined to the UK, but the greater scandal of Murdoch’s corruption of the political process and misuse of press power is even worse in Australia. The Australian and other Murdoch publications filled with lies and politically slanted reporting aimed at furthering both Murdoch’s political agenda and his commercial interests. Whereas there is still lively competition in the British Press, Murdoch has a print monopoly in major cities like Brisbane.

It seems likely that News International will be refused permission for its impending takeover of BSkyB on the grounds that it is not “fit and proper” for such a role. That would have important implications for Australia (and perhaps also for the US, though Australian regulators are more likely to be influenced by UK precedents).

Regardless of how the current scandal plays out, we need to remember that while the Australian productions of News Corporation may be papers, what they print is certainly not news.

Another really bad employment report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment has been essentially static for the last couple of months, and most of the ground gained in 2010 has been lost. Unsurprisingly, public sector job cuts are leading the way downwards, as the stimulus fades into memory and austerity proceeds at the state and local level. In this context, it’s hard to know what outcome of the current negotiations over the debt limit would be worse: unconditional surrender to Republican demands for yet more spending cuts, or a failure to pass any legislation, with consequences that remain unclear[1].It’s hard to see US unemployment falling substantially any time soon. The decline in the participation rate (it’s fallen by about 3 percentage points of the population, equal to about 5 per cent of the labor force) means that the standard measure seriously understates the severity of the problem. If employment growth were to resume, lots of people would re-enter the labor market, so that unemployment would not decline fast.

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Tabloid Shutters Doors.

Brooks Cries Crocodile Tears as Reporters Go Home Jobless to Tots.

Union Scum Pick Fight at Sun.

Filthy Rich Editor Weeps in Chelsea Townhouse.

Portugal’s debt has just been downgraded to junk bond status. Ireland’s efforts to boost investor confidence are under threat; Italy is starting to look wobbly.

European politicians are openly expressing their anger at the three main ratings agencies’ oligopoly, accusing them of attempting to exercise improper influence over policy-making – the timing of their downgrades is ‘not a coincidence’, and they are ‘playing politics, not economics’.

Evidence from Ireland bears this out – there seems to be no consistency in the way the ratings agencies evaluate the decisions of governments in the Eurozone periphery. Governments are put under pressure to engage in ‘orthodox’ fiscal retrenchment, in line with the EU’s excessive deficit procedures, and as required of Greece, Ireland and Portugal in line with their IMF-EU loan programmes. But as soon as they take relevant action, they find their ratings downgraded on the ‘heterodox’ grounds that taking money out of the economy will damage growth potential. Two bodies of economic theory seem to be at work here: ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ when the aim is to enforce cuts, Keynesian counter-cyclical policy when the objective is to punish excessive contraction. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Take a look at this graph, from the IMF’s May report on Ireland.

Each of the vertical red lines I’ve added represents an ‘orthodox’ fiscal adjustment on the part of the Irish government between February 2009 and December 2010. The balance was about 65% spending cuts and 35% tax increases, entirely consistent with conventional thinking. The profile looks like this:

The overall adjustment between 2008 and2014 is €29.6bn. This would be equivalent to about 19% GDP and 22% GNP in 2010. Yet Ireland’s ratings have been consistently cut.

Very odd.

My performance/recording vs. oral/literary post has gotten lots of comments, so let’s see if I can drive you all off with a follow-up.

Two other books about the evolution of reading culture I read recently: Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, by Paul Saenger; and Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, by Elspeth Jajdelska.

The Saenger book concerns the Rodney Dangerfield of punctuation marks: the space. (Why do you think that’s the largest key on your keyboard, hmmm?) Let me quote the publisher’s blurb in a way that makes Saenger’s point. Once upon a time, European scribes wrote like this: [click to continue…]

This is a good post about why rape victims are likely to lie…about the circumstances of the rape in order to make their rape conform to the narrative they think the cops/prosecutors/jury needs to hear.

Thanks to prevailing rape mythology, many people also have very definite ideas about what happens before, during, and after a “real” rape. Real rape victims want no sexual contact of any kind with their attackers and make this crystal clear right from the start. When attacked, they don’t just say “No;” they scream, fight, yell for help, and/or try to escape. Ideally, the victim will duke it out with her attacker to such an extent that she is left with obvious physical injuries. After the rape, she will be visibly distraught and in tears, but this will not prevent her from reporting the attack right away. In the days and weeks following the assault, she will spend a lot of time in the shower and be too traumatized to appear to function normally.

Some rapes do indeed happen like that; most don’t. And the more a rape departs from this script, the harder it is for the victim to be believed and taken seriously. She didn’t fight or try to escape? She must’ve wanted it. She wasn’t crying or visibly upset right after the rape? She’s probably lying about being attacked. She was seen laughing and seemingly having a good time just days after being raped? It couldn’t have been that bad.

Rape victims know this. Realizing that many people won’t understand why you acted in a way that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions of “how rape victims act,” or worse, knowing that many people will automatically disbelieve you because of your background or even blame you for being attacked brings some rape victims to the conclusion that there’s only one way they’re going to see their rapist punished: lie.

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I’m at the beach and kid-wrangling, so not in any position to write long blog-posts. But I am intrigued by this “James Fallows post”:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/google-so-far-so-good/241426/ suggesting that Google Plus is reasonably non-privacy invasive (for values of non-privacy invasive that include all your search data etc are belong to us).

bq. One of the immediate appeals is how quick, ergonomically easy, and aesthetically nice it is to set up “circles” that match the natural patterns of your real life. One for immediate family, one for “friends you actually know,” another for “professional acquaintances who are sort of friends,” etc. Or by interest. In my case: airplane people, beer people, China people, tech people, Atlantic people, NPR people, etc. …. The other immediate appeal is that the privacy bias seems set in your favor, rather than constantly playing hide-the-ball with you, as Facebook does. The reason I hate and mistrust Facebook is its constant record of changing the privacy terms, not saying it’s done so until it’s caught, and always setting the default in the least private and most advertiser-exploitable way.

This suggests that Google Plus doesn’t have the deficiencies that “drove me away”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/14/an-internet-where-everyone-knows-youre-a-dog/ from Facebook (which is not to say that it doesn’t have others). I’d be interested to hear from those who are better connected than I am, and have Google Plus accounts, whether this is true, how they find the experience, etc etc.

I just read two books back to back to good effect: Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Elijah Wald’s How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music [amazon]. (This post is stray book-thoughts, a bit weak in the conclusion department; only so-so in the adequate summary of what the authors are arguing department. Read on at your own risk.) [click to continue…]

“Ta-Nehisi Coates”:http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/in-defense-of-awful-police-work/241196/

bq. Emily Good was arrested for video-taping a police officer–despite the fact that in Rochester, New York, video-taping cops isn’t actually a crime. Accordingly the charges were dropped yesterday. Here’s a defense of Good’s demonstrably illegal arrest … I’m really trying to wrap my head around this: In what world do we defend the right of people to be arrested for non-crimes? Obviously this one. But it can’t continue this way. I deeply believe, that in a world of viral video, it slowly erodes the brand and legitimacy of law enforcement. It’s already happened in many black communities, where the police are simply viewed as another power to be contended with. I’m sure, like a lot of you, I’ve had some talks about my son about how he should interact with the police. “Trust” is a small portion of that conversation.

Here’s a simple proposal – which I am stealing shamelessly from Charlie Stross’s near-future sf novels “Halting State”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441016073/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0441016073 and “Rule 34”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441020348/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0441020348 (which is _every bit_ as good as its predecessor – I’m waiting for it to come out before I write more about it). Rather than relying on viral video from random passers-by as a possible deterrent to bad behavior, police should be required to wear a perpetually running video camera with audio recording while they are carrying out their duties, with undeletable footage that could be subpoena-ed in the case of either an arrest by the police officer or a complaint by a directly affected individual within a reasonable time period.

This is now well within the realm of technical feasibility as far as I can see, and should not be vastly expensive (certainly no more expensive than e.g. the data retention requirements that police and legal authorities impose on ISPs and telcos). I can imagine some significant problems (e.g. with respect to the privacy rights of third parties caught by police footage), but they don’t seem to me to be insuperable. Of course police could have ‘accidents’ with the technology so that it didn’t work at key moments – but if this happened systematically, it would be a boon for defense lawyers. The actual objections would (I suspect) be more based on sociological arguments than on technology or costs. Police claim (see “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/23/police-discretion-a-different-perspective/ for an argument to this effect that we guest-hosted on CT) that they require a certain amount of discretion to do their job properly. Giving the public the right to look over their shoulders in the case of arrests or complaints would severely curtail, or perhaps even eliminate that discretion. There may be something to that argument – but I’m skeptical of it. Much of it reduces down, I think to an implicit Jack Nicholson “you can’t handle the truth” claim – that in order to do their job properly, police officers sometimes have to cut corners in ways that might not look appropriate in the light of day, even if they were appropriate under real world circumstances. Perhaps this is so – but if it’s so, it should be debated rather than taken as a given, since even under the most generous possible interpretation, it also allows a lot of shitty and self-serving behavior along the lines that Ta-Nehisi is complaining about.

I’ve been writing series of posts examining the question – what is left of Marxism, as a way to understand the world, and as a way to change it, once it is accepted that capitalism is not going to be overthrown by a working class revolution. The first was about class and the second about crisis. Now for the final instalment: capital.

By the way, the first post got translated into Spanish, here. It’s one of the things that I still find stunning about the Internet that things like this can happen.

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A sort of postscript to my “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/13/embassytown/ on _Embassytown_ a couple of weeks ago. Sam Thompson’s “LRB review”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n12/sam-thompson/monsters-you-pay-to-see had a brief discussion in passing of Miéville’s earlier children’s novel, “Un Lun Dun”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345458443/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0345458443.

bq. In a novel he wrote for children in 2007, _Un Lun Dun,_ a despotic entity called Mr Speaker turns language into flesh in a literal sense: when he talks each word takes animate form as a weird creature dropping from his mouth. The word ‘jealous’ manifests as a ‘beautiful iridescent bat’, ‘soliloquy’ is a ‘long-necked sinuous quadruped’, ‘cartography’ a ‘thing like a bowler hat with several spidery legs and a fox’s tail’. These ‘utterlings’ are obedient slaves, existing to do their creator’s will. Like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, Mr Speaker thinks that when it comes to words, the only important question is ‘which is to be master’: he has none of Alice’s doubts about ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’. Miéville’s modern Alice is a pre-teen Londoner called Deeba, who, when she encounters Mr Speaker on her journey through the looking-glass city of UnLondon, delights him with fresh vocabulary like ‘bling’, ‘lairy’ and ‘diss’, spawning new kinds of word-critter. But when Mr Speaker orders his words to take her prisoner, she turns the tables by pointing out the flaw in his theory of language. ‘Words don’t always mean what we want them to,’ she says. ‘Like … if someone shouts, “Hey, you!” at someone in the street, but someone else turns around. The words misbehaved.’ Deeba’s subversive logic shows the utterlings that they don’t have to obey Mr Speaker after all, and she escapes as the tyrant is overwhelmed by his own mutinous verbiage.

It was only when I saw this quote singled out that I realized that Deeba’s response is in part a joke very specifically aimed at structural Marxism. I give you Louis Althusser, as “quoted by our own Michael Bérubé”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/theory_tuesday_iv/

bq. I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called _interpellation_ or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’

bq. Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a _subject._ Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was _really him_ who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed.

This is a class of an “Easter Egg”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_%28media%29, but also a serious point, I think. For Miéville, the delight of language is that it _isn’t_ determinative in the fashion that Althusser says it is. Not all who are hailed recognize it – and if they do recognize it, they can choose to ignore or subvert the fashion in which they are being hailed. It’s also a nice example of how a metaphor can be framed in two registers at once – most readers of _Un Lun Dun_ will have no very great familiarity with defunct Marxist theorists, but they don’t have to be to get the point (it’s more fun for readers who recognize the target of the joke, but it’s not really necessary to the underlying point).

Asks “Jeffrey Goldberg”:http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/why-is-ireland-such-a-bastion-of-anti-israel-feeling/241067/, in a blogpost that relies in its entirety on a column by Irish opinionator “Kevin Myers”:http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-how-can-dogooders-possibly-think-that-gaza-is-the-primary-centre-of-injustice-in-middle-east-2804748.html. A cogent question, to be sure. But only one of a number of such questions which have been investigated by the indefatigable Mr. Myers. I look forward to future Myers-inspired Jeffrey Goldberg posts, asking the hard questions about why we give aid to Africa, “when Africa has given nothing to anyone – except for AIDS”:http://web.archive.org/web/20090422225329/http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/africa-is-giving-nothing-to-anyone–apart-from-aids-1430428.html. After all, the “wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.” Myers is indeed quite emphatic about the threat of African priapism, warning us about “violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts,” and “an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents,” where politicians indulge in “voodoo idiocy” about “the efficacy of a little tap water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against infection.” And this is not even to mention the threat on the home front of “a welfare state”:http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82069?condense_comments=true which encourages teenage girls to “consciously embark upon a career of mothering bastards because it seems a good way of getting money and accommodation from the State.” I’m looking forward to Goldberg’s in-depth investigation of the “cash-crop whelping” scandal in a forthcoming issue of the _Atlantic Monthly._ Very likely, the Israel hating, handwringing politically correct liberals who have targeted Myers in the past will start to target Goldberg too. But I’ve no doubt whatsoever that he has the moral courage to withstand them.

Katie Roiphe recently wrote an article on the new book “Go the F#$k to Sleep.” She makes rather sweeping claims about miserable, sexless yuppies who have mollycoddled their children so extravangantly that the parents can no longer even steal enough time to watch a single episode of Mad Men together. During which they could take notes on parenting tips, one imagines!

Are our enlightened, engaged, sensitive parenting practices driving a certain segment of the population insane? Is the nice, liberal father who has just this Saturday carted his kids to soccer practice, play dates, piano lessons, made sunflower-butter sandwiches, and read Goodnight Moon three times seething with quiet desperation? The surprise ascendance of Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés’ Go the F**k to Sleep on all sorts of best-seller lists eloquently answers that question….One wonders if this hostility [evident in the book] toward the child, who is naturally and rightfully manipulative, is just a tiny bit misplaced….The book, in all its cleverness and artfulness and ingenuity, raises certain other questions: Are they having sex, these slouchy rageful parents? Not enough, perhaps. When the father turns back to the waking child’s bedroom, we look out at the comfy, sexless, vaguely depressive scene of his wife sprawled asleep on the couch under an ugly old blanket. No wonder the slouchy dad is full of rage.

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Well, if you aren’t reading all the posts and comments about same-sex marriage over at the Corner – but why wouldn’t you be? wow, K. Lo – maybe you would be interested in some YA comics. Mercury, by Hope Larson, and Anya’s Ghost, by Vera Brosgol. I really have only one complaint, and it concerns Hope Larson’s art. When she draws people running … oh, I’ll just show you.

The right arm and the left leg should be forward. Or left arm and right leg. Opposites. She’s a good cartoonist. As Scott McCloud says in his blurb: “The best work to date from a powerful cartoonist.” So there! So I don’t know why she draws people running in this strange, unnatural way that the human body would never move in. The rest of the art is fine.

On we go. I bought both books for my older daughter, who is almost 10 – and for me, who am I kidding! Turns out they’re a bit too much for her. Somewhat mature teen themes – maybe PG-13 – also murder and ghosts. She can read them next year, or the year after. (Your 9-year old daughter might be harder-boiled than mine. I couldn’t say.) Well, I enjoyed them. But they sort of had the same plot. I’ll explain under the fold, thereby semi- but not really spoiling the plot(s). [click to continue…]