Daniel Bell, whose book The End of Ideology shaped the way many of us think about politics, has died at the age of 91. This nice anecdote comes from the NYTimes obit.
Mr. Bell liked to tell of his political beginnings with an anecdote about his bar mitzvah, in 1932. “I said to the Rabbi: ‘I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God. I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said, ‘Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares?’ ”
Further to my post about Obama’s Tucson speech…
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Gary Wills wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books in which he compared Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race with Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union address during his own 1860 campaign. Wills noted that both men had had to separate themselves from embarrassing associations—Lincoln from John Brown’s violent abolitionism, and Obama from Jeremiah Wright’s black nationalism. They had to do this without engaging in divisive attacks or counter-attacks. They did it, Wills argued, “by appeal to the finest traditions of the nation, with hope for the future of those traditions. Obama renounced black nationalism without giving up black pride, which he said was in the great American tradition of self-reliance”.
On the NYRB blog Wills says:
The New York Review wanted to publish a booklet printing the Lincoln and Obama speeches together, but the Obama campaign discouraged that idea, perhaps to avoid any suspicion that they were calling Obama a second Lincoln. Well, I am willing to risk such opposition now, when I say that his Tucson speech bears comparison with two Lincoln speeches even greater than the Cooper Union address. In this case, Obama had to rise above the acrimonious debate about what caused the gunman in Tucson to kill and injure so many people. He side-stepped that issue by celebrating the fallen and the wounded and those who rushed to their assistance. He has been criticized by some for holding a “pep rally” rather than a mourning service. But he was speaking to those who knew and loved and had rallied around the people attacked. He was praising them and those who assisted them, and the cheers were deserved. He said that the proper tribute to them was to live up to their own high expectations of our nation. It was in that context, and not one of recrimination, that he called for civility, service—and, yes, heroism—in the country.
Best speech he’s given — better even than the Philadelphia speech. It’s long (over 33 mins) but worth watching in full. Echoes of Martin Luther King and JFK, but marvellously controlled.
It’s interesting also to see how little of this came over in conventional news media reporting of the speech. Just a couple of soundbytes topped and tailed by the perfunctory analysis of tired and cynical reporters. Long live YouTube.
Nick Robinson and a chap whose name I can’t quite remember. Photographed on June 15, 2009.
Lovely open letter on Net Neutrality from Steve Wozniak in The Atlantic. Some snippets:
To whom it may concern:
I have always loved humor and laughter. As a young engineer I got an impulse to start a Dial-a-Joke in the San Jose/San Francisco area. I was aware of such humor services in other countries, such as Australia. This idea came from my belief in laughter. I could scarcely believe that I was the first person to create such a simple service in my region. Why was I the first? This was 1972 and it was illegal in the U.S. to use your own telephone. It was illegal in the U.S. to use your own answering machine. Hence it also virtually impossible to buy or own such devices. We had a monopoly phone system in our country then.
The major expense for a young engineer is the rent of an apartment. The only answering machine I could legally use, by leasing (not purchasing) it from our phone company, the Codaphone 700, was designed for businesses like theaters. It was out of the price range of creative individuals wanting to try something new like dial-a-joke. This machine leased for more than a typical car payment each month. Despite my great passion and success with Dial-a-Joke, I could not afford it and eventually had to stop after a couple of years. By then, a San Francisco radio station had also started such a service. I believe that my Dial-a-Joke was the most called single line (no extensions) number in the country at that time due to the shortness of my jokes and the high popularity of the service.
[…]
I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the country. When I’m asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open truth. When I was first asked to “sign on” with some good people interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the other hand, I’m a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.
[…]
We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one of the most important times ever for the FCC, it’s probably the most momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the FCC itself.
And here’s a nice illustration of why this really matters.
Dave Winer thinks he knows. And my guess is that he’s right.
Here’s how he tells it.
Today I got a promotional email from Kay Kinton, Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon Web Services, entitled “Amazon Web Services Year in Review.” It contained a paragraph, quoted below, that explains how their government business grew in 2010.
“Government adoption of AWS [Amazon Wb Services] grew significantly in 2010. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board became the first government-wide agency to migrate to a cloud-based environment when it moved Recovery.gov to AWS in March 2010. Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments. The U.S. General Services Administration awarded AWS the ability to provide government agencies with cloud services through the government's cloud storefront, Apps.gov. Additional AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE’s National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. The current AWS compliance framework covers FISMA, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS70 type II, and HIPAA, and we continue to seek certifications and accreditations that make it easier for government agencies to benefit from AWS. To learn more about how AWS works with the federal government, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/federal/.”
Dave writes that “It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon’s web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that business. There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary.”
This strikes me as being spot on. Amazon’s original reasons for dropping WikiLeaks always seemed feeble — and indeed unlikely to stand up in court. But the company’s decision has been useful in drawing attention to the underlying issue. Political discourse is increasingly conducted via cloud services like Amazon’s. That means that it’s moved into a space that is essentially private. As someone observed at the beginning of the WikiLeaks affair, it’s as if our political discourse had moved from the parks and streets and into shopping malls. And that means that important aspects of free speech will henceforth exist at the mercy of corporate whim. This is bad news for democracy.
This and John Humphreys’s Radio 4 interview provide a fascinating case-study in the efficacy of different interviewing styles. Humphreys’s confrontational approach revealed interesting thngs about Assange’s personality. Frost’s softer style elicits much more information about WikiLeaks.
One of the most unsettling experiences of the last decade has been watching Western democracies sleepwalking into a national security nightmare. Each incremental step towards total surveillance follows the same script. It goes like this: first, a new security ‘threat’ is uncovered, revealed or hypothesised; then a technical ‘solution’ to the new threat is proposed, trialled (sometimes) and then implemented — usually at formidable cost to the public; finally, the new ‘solution’ proves inadequate. But instead of investigating whether it might have been misguided in the first place, a new, even more intrusive, ‘solution’ is proposed and implemented.
In this way we went from verbal questioning to pat-down searches at airports, and thence to x-ray scanning of cabin-baggage, to having to submit laptops to separate scanning (including, I gather, examination of hard-disk files in some cases), to having to take off our shoes, to having all cosmetic fluids (including toothpaste) inspected, and — most recently — to back-scatter x-ray scanning which reveals the shape of passengers’ breasts and genitals. It may be that we will get to the point where only passengers willing to stip naked are allowed to board a plane. The result: a mode of travel that was sometimes pleasant and usually convenient has been transformed into a deeply time-consuming, stressful and unpleasant ordeal
The rationale in all cases is the same; these measures are necessary to thwart a threat that is self-evidently awful and in that sense the measures are for the public good. We are all agreed, are we not, that suicidal terrorism is a bad things and so any measure deemed necessary to prevent it must be good? Likewise, we all agree that street crime and disorder is an evil, so CCTV cameras must be a good thing, mustn’t they? So we now have countries like Britain where no resident of an urban area is ever out of sight of a camera. And of course we all abhor child pornography and paedophilia, so we couldn’t possibly object to the Web filtering and packet-sniffing needed to detect and block it, right? A similar argument is used in relation to file-sharing and copyright infringement: this is asserted to be ‘theft’ and since we’re all against theft then any legislative measures forced on ISPs to ‘stop theft’ must be justified. And so on.
So each security initiative has a local justification which is held to be self-evidently obvious. But the aggregate of all these localised ‘solutions’ has a terrifying direction of travel — towards a total surveillance society, a real national security state. And anyone who expresses reservations or objections is invariably rebuffed with the trope that people who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear from these measures.
In the UK, a novel variation on this philosophy has just surfaced in Conservative (capital C) political circles. A right-wing Tory MP who is obsessed with the threat of Internet pornography has been touting the idea that broadband customers who do not want their ISPs to block access to pornography sites should have to register that fact with the ISP. (This is to ‘protect’ children, of course, in case the poor dears should mistype a search term and see images of unspeakable acts in progress.) Last Sunday a British newspaper reported that the communications minister, Ed Vaizey, is concerned about the availability of pornography and says he would quite like ISPs to do something about it for him. According to The Register, “he plans to call the major players to a meeting next month to discuss measures, including the potential for filters that would require those who do want XXX material to opt their connection out”.
The Register doesn’t take this terribly seriously, because it’s convinced that Vaizey is too shrewd to get dragged into the filtering mess that afflicted the Australian government. Maybe he is, but suppose he finds himself unable to hold back the tide of backbench wrath towards the evil Internet, with its WikiLeaks and porn and all. The implicit logic of the approach would fit neatly with everything we’ve seen so far. First of all, the objective is self-evidently ‘good’ — to protect children from pornography. Secondly, we’re not being illiberal — if you want to allow porn all you have to do is to register that fact with your ISP. What could be fairer than that?
But then consider the direction of travel. What if some future government decides that children should not be exposed to, say, the political propaganda of the British National Party? After all, they’re a nasty pack of xenophobic racists. And then there are the animal rights activists — nasty fanatics who put superglue in butchers’ shop doors on Christmas eve. Why should thay enjoy “the oxygen of publicity”? And then there are… Well, you get the point.
Stowe Boyd has an interesting post about another bright security wheeze which has really sinister long-term implications. Since terrrists and drug barons use cash, why not do away with the stuff and switch over to electronic money instead?
In a cashless economy, insurgents’ and terrorists’ electronic payments would generate audit trails that could be screened by data mining software; every payment and transfer would yield a treasure trove of information about their agents, their locations and their intentions. This would pose similar challenges for criminals.
Who would such a system benefit, asks Boyd?
Not the part-time sex worker, trying to make ends meet in a down economy. Not the bellman at the airport, whose tips might disappear after the transition to cards. Not the homeless guy I gave $2 to the other day, or the busker playing guitar in the train station. Or the Green Peace folks collecting coins at the park.
The ones that benefit are the those selling the cards and the readers. And the policy-makers who want to see the flow of cash to find — supposedly — drug lords and terrorists, but secretly want to know everything about everybody.
But this is the argument for pervasive surveillance again. In the name of security and safety, they say we should all accept the intrusion of the government into our private lives so that the state can be protected from its enemies. After all, they say, if we aren’t doing anything illegal, why should we care? What have we got to hide?
But we have the right to privacy in our doings. We don’t have to say why we want privacy: it is our right.
And the shadowy doings at the margins of people’s lives are exactly the point of privacy. The man funneling money to a child born to his mistress without his wife’s knowledge, or a woman loaning money to her brother without her husband knowing: they want anonymous cash.
Boyd thinks that cash is a prerequisite of a free society, and he’s right.
“Cash”, he says,
is not a metaphor for freedom, it is a requirement of freedom. A strong society that accepts human nature without moralizing will always have anonymous cash. Only totalitarian governments — where everything not expressly required is illegal — would want to monitor the flow of every cent.
.
Yep.
Good NYT column by Paul Krugman. Opens thus:
When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.
How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?
This is not just about the US, either, Krugman says.
The free-market fundamentalists have been as wrong about events abroad as they have about events in America — and suffered equally few consequences. “Ireland,” declared George Osborne in 2006, “stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.” Whoops. But Mr. Osborne is now Britain’s top economic official.
And in his new position, he’s setting out to emulate the austerity policies Ireland implemented after its bubble burst. After all, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic spent much of the past year hailing Irish austerity as a resounding success. “The Irish approach worked in 1987-89 — and it’s working now,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute last June. Whoops, again.
But such failures don’t seem to matter. To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn’t, we’re still — perhaps more than ever — ruled by “zombie economics.” Why?
Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead. And this is especially, though not only, true of the president.
The thing about zombies, though (as every schoolboy knows) is that they eat your brains.
