tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34099275834065751692024-03-13T00:29:40.869-07:00The New InternationalismPart travelogue, part polemic. This blog covers topics including travel, international development, urban planning, music, film, literature, aesthetics and current events. The focus of this blog is both international and local with special emphasis paid to the impacts of actions across nations and regions.Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.comBlogger100125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-63731294490514389352018-02-06T05:17:00.000-08:002018-02-06T10:38:01.429-08:00Super Bowled 2018<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Watching <a href="https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/super-bowl-mayhem-philadelphia-celebrates-fires-looting-and-shooting">footage from the scenes of mayhem</a> on the streets of Philadelphia last night over football results, four things were reconfirmed for me:<br />
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(1) We as a society have our priorities firmly in the wrong place.<br />
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(2) Sport remains one of the few genuine outlets our society allows people to vent their grief at their failed dreams, diminishing prospects and existential dread while simultaneously living vicariously through millionaire athletes pitched in modern semi-gladiatorial style battles.<br />
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(3) Sport-based mayhem seems to indicate how perilous most people's relationship with the tenets of late capitalism really are and how easy it is to ignite the powder-keg of resentment that lies deep within our social fabric and crumbling civic institutions.<br />
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(4) When do we get to move on from the 'killing capitalism with kindness' phase to the 'killing capitalism with pointy objects' phase?<br />
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I have nothing against sport in and of itself (though I doubt I'll ever be able to give a good goddamn about American football - no offense intended to everyone who loves it). I just think the centrality of watching sport in most people's lives seems to be a replacement for other things that are lacking. Sport, at its best can and should be a great shared experience of awe at genuine and sublime physical art some humans are capable of, but the coded jingoism and Riefenstahl-derived Nazi-chic aesthetic that attends so much of the pageantry and presentation around televised sport clearly operates as a substitution for certain more important parts of our culture/ politics/ society that are, at present, largely absent.</div>
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-11010672839467367562015-05-27T11:06:00.000-07:002015-05-27T11:06:00.449-07:00Gentrification and its Discontents in Portland<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Did you see the controversy generated by Tyler Hurt’s obnoxious <a href="http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-33247-im_sorry_you_hate_my_apartment_i_think_its_nice.html">piece on the new Burnside26 development in Portland</a>?<br />
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Upon reading a recent, somewhat inflammatory, piece published Hurst as a defense of his decision to move into the new Burnside26 development and much of the angry community response that it generated, there seems to be a lot of issues around housing, displacement and development that should be unpacked around gentrification.<br />
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To begin, I do not oppose the construction of Burnside26 or think poorly of Tyler for choosing to live there, though his choice in how he defended this let a great deal to be desired. That said, the city has done a poor job managing rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. This has been particularly galling in traditionally black neighborhoods like Mississippi, Albina and Alberta that have seen the displacement of thousands of black families to Gresham and elsewhere. The city should be working hand-in-hand with Community Development Banks/Organizations in order to retain and provide meaningful housing options and provide some combination of micro loans and workforce/vocational trainings to help secure livable economic futures for many of the individuals who were living in those areas. This would help make sure that people could stay in their communities and become local business owners and the like as those neighborhoods change. Instead, the City set-up a Tax Increment Finance (TIF) district and let developers call the shots. This is a huge problem and people should be pushing the City to do a better (or any) job of mitigating gentrification outcomes. The City tries from a policy perspective: I was on a Policy Expert Group around "Infrastructure Equity" a few years back and the group came up with some good recommendations that the City is trying to implement as part of the ongoing (though nearly finished) Comp Plan Update. The push to allow inclusionary zoning again at a state level, which was banned for decades in Oregon, may also prove to be beneficial.<br />
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One of the more interesting critiques leveraged against this piece came from Chloe Eudaly (who owns and operates the venerable Portland business Reading Frenzy). Eudaly made some remarks that focus on the idea that a lot of this development is bad because they lose track of 'historic preservation' and 'proportionality of scale' To me this is problematic in that a lot of that is coded "I don't like in-fill development". However, in-fill is really the only way Portland is going to be able to meet future affordable housing needs if it continues to grow at the rate that it does. Portland, despite doing some very smart things with the urban growth boundary and comprehensive land-use management, is an extremely low-density city. Much of the inner East Side is zoned at 4-8 units per acre. This makes it, basically a suburb from a planning perspective. The ability of the City to meet future housing needs is going to necessitate building large buildings that those already in the area dismiss out of hand as eyesores, or worse. Neighborhoods constantly change and increasing housing stock through in-fill development is, to my mind, Portland’s best chance of staying relatively affordable. Under the status quo, Portland's rental vacancy rate is around 3%, which means rents are likely to continue to rise and displacements are extremely likely to continue. The solution is to increase housing stock and densities in areas that are desirable to live. Saying that all or most of the new development is bad because it "doesn't look to scale" seem to imply that the scale isn't ever going to change. We need to consider the scale of building in many communities in order to boost housing stock.<br />
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By contrast, where I currently live in Washington, DC, rents are completely crazy. A lot of high rents in DC is a product of a regulatory height limit on development that effectively limits urban densities. That said, DC is already significantly denser by several orders of magnitude than much of Portland, despite having only 40,000 people more living in the District itself. The rapid on-boarding of a number of new developments (some affordable, some market-rate) is the only thing that has really arrested and even slightly decreased rents over the last year.<br />
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Back to Portland, the areas that are predominantly residential with the highest urban densities in town is, curiously, NW and the Pearl. This does not necessarily make either of these a model for future development, but it is pretty telling that people are so quick to cry foul the minute new development goes in. I think there is a strong tendency for people to distrust neighborhood change and as a result to adopt a reactionary positon whereby they want neighborhoods to stay the same way forever (- something that in the history of cities has yet to happen - often at the expense of interventions that may be helpful. Burnside26 clearly is not the model that every development should follow, but having it accompanied by other similarly sized buildings that offer quality affordable housing, either through market rate affordable or subsidy (via LIHTC or some other federal or local program) seems entirely reasonable. <br />
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I also find it a bit curious that the controversy surrounds displacements from East Burnside (and the inner-East side), which has always been pretty Lilly-White with very little said these days about gentrification outcomes affecting more diverse areas like Lents or, historically, the Mississippi/ Albina area. This is not to say that lower-income white people don't also deserve good access to transit and nice neighborhoods, but it is curious that people always bring up issues with fairness to minorities around gentrification yet the loudest outcry always seems to be in displacement of white residents from historically white areas. The 28th Ave corridor has always been affluent (the main anchor businesses are high end restaurant/retail and a Whole Foods, with Hollman's serving as the outlier), and so resistance to this area spreading down a couple of blocks seems to be divorced from a lot of the more pressing issues. Portland-proper has grown dramatically whiter demographically between 2000 and 2014 at time where the metro area as a whole has grown significantly more diverse. Where activist pressures should be pushed is in ensuring that historic minority communities continue to receive ongoing housing support, quality urban services, and that new development of affordable units happens. A lot more needs to be done to beyond that to directly engage people and make sure that they are part of the planning/development process and to insure that their needs are met.<br />
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A lot of people will suggest that we should just let developers have freer reign to build new housing stock until supply exceeds demand and rents start to decrease. There a few issues with this argument that I will address. Housing is one of those things where markets don't automatically equilibrate given enough time, particularly as in a lot of cities, what developers built is often initially unaffordable and because a lot of new construction gets bought up by wealthy absentee owners who almost never set foot in the units. In, for example, a large number of new New York City and San Francisco developments, there is are extremely high absentee rates (often up to 70-80%). This is also true in New York, Vancouver, BC and numerous other “hot” housing markets, including, increasingly Portland.<br />
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So even if we could easily control the number of absentee owners and renters driving up the costs of housing, a market-based strategy of exclusively new development is still likely to cause a large numbers of displacements. New construction is expensive and developers want to make their money back and maximize profits. With a lot of neighborhood dynamics already being the product of downright racist historic housing restrictions, including redlining and restrictive covenants, fragile low-income and minority communities frequently bare the brunt of displacements. For the good of these individuals, low-income people shouldn't have to be forced out every time an area becomes hot and a market heats up. With policy interventions to build more affordable housing, impose limits on how often buildings can be flipped, and interventions by Community Development Corporations, people don't have to be displaced and can enjoy the benefits of improving neighborhoods while retaining their communities. There is, after all, case to be made that people should have an absolute right to housing. Unlike many other commodities that are subject to markets, housing is something that people inherently need. Real wages haven’t risen against inflation since the late 70s, while housing costs have skyrocketed across much of the country. The situation is increasingly one by which median housing costs are becoming absolutely unaffordable for a good number of, not just low-income people, but formerly Middle-class working people. In San Francisco, which seems to be the end product of where a lot of these trends lead, you need to be making around $140,000 a year to avoid spending significantly more than the HUD guidelines of 30% of income on rent and utilities. Cost burden is becoming increasingly the norm in Portland and it is only a matter of time before it starts affecting everyone, reasonably affluent or otherwise.<br />
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Beyond this, cities need their artists and musicians and teachers and a whole lot of other creative types of people that are never going to be able to pull in substantial salaries, to be vibrant places that we might all want to live. When housing rates are painfully unaffordable for these people, then your city becomes less interesting, less dynamic and less livable. Being a good neighbor largely means fostering a sense of community. Communities usually have people with different backgrounds, skills and gifts that contribute in different ways. Obviously, as I mentioned above, cities cannot stay the same forever, they always change, but local governments can have a lot of say in how those places change.<br />
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There is also a thesaurus of both Federal and local housing programs and initiatives that directly deal with rising property values. I suspect, when we start seeing direct funding for the National Housing Trust Fund (NHTF) which is scheduled to start in 2016, we will start seeing a lot more permanent assistive and market rate affordable units. Right now, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is responsible for roughly 90% of existing affordable housing stock in this country. LIHTC can be problematic because it means relatively generous handouts to developers to build some affordable units, but with 15-year expirations on affordability (the units then revert to market rate, unless they are remodeled/redeveloped, which can further extend the LIHTC). NHTF, on the other hand would build permanent, low-cost housing. Additionally, there are a huge number of permanent housing assistance programs, many of which are simply underfunded federally, or lack local push by municipalities to see implemented. There are also strategies that tie housing, economic development and community development together, including a number of Community Development Banks (CDBs) and Community Development Corporations (CDCs) have done a huge amount to mitigate gentrification outcomes.<br />
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In his development of the Ramona on NW 14th and Quimby, Ed McNamara, who owns and runs Turtle Island Development has done some great things with permanent workforce housing for lower-income working families in the Pearl. He has also managed to do so without subsidy. This project was designed and developed by McNamara as something of a labor of love and has been hugely successful. Housing advocates tend to overlook the development, largely because it is located in the Pearl, but it is an attractive new building that is energy and water efficient, includes quality facilities for children, built in internet and is designed to remain permanently affordable. It is located near transit and caters to working minority families. This is precisely the type of development that Portland needs more of.<br />
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The issues around housing and displacement are complicated. Like many people who grew up in Portland, I get frustrated seeing institutions and communities I care about get pushed out of business or forced to move. I think Portlanders need to put a lot more pressure on the City to not give developers carte blanche and to insist on community development along with redevelopment. Now that the state ban on inclusionary zoning has been lifted, it is time for people to get serious with the city and start demanding that affordable units be tied to new development. I also think it is incumbent on people to find a way to reframe the way we talk about neighborhood change. To the uninitiated, the conversation can often sound like, "We hate all changes and outsiders aren’t welcome here. Hands off my neighborhood!" As a result, a lot of valid concerns are swept under the rug. Instead, Portlanders fearing displacement need to be saying something more along the lines of: "We understand change is inevitable, we want to be part of that change in a way that mutually reinforces the existing community as well as allowing the city to grow."</div>
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-34454374390575834542014-07-29T09:06:00.002-07:002014-07-29T09:06:58.154-07:00Dancing About Architecture<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Sorry for the lack of frequent updates on this site. I will continue to occasionally update it with longer-form essays/ my thoughts about current events.<br />
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That said, I have started a new blog of, what I hope to be, daily record reviews. I'm a big music collector and these seemed a great way to talk a little bit about my collection, what I like about music and the rest.<br />
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The goal of this blog is to take a slightly sardonic touch to record reviewing. The reviews are largely a bit self-consciously jokey and otherwise not entirely serious.<br />
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The blog is called "<a href="http://dancingarchitecture.tumblr.com/">Dancing About Architecture</a>" and takes its name from a Frank Zappa quote about music writing.<br />
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I hope you enjoy it.</div>
Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-38696012556291641832014-01-23T11:15:00.000-08:002014-01-23T11:32:43.332-08:00Whose Redevelopment?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This post is culled from some loosely edited material from an e-mail exchange with a friend. Please excuse it being slightly informal. I just feel this is an important issue that warrants a post.<br />
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A <a href="http://www.booksandideas.net/Exploiting-the-Urban-Poor.html">recent article</a> on the site Books and Ideas article on displacements/evictions of inner city poor referenced an important article by a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology professor on the same subject. The <a href="http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/faculty/docs/goffman/Goffman_ASR_09.pdf">article</a>, <i>On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto</i> by Alice Goffman should be required reading for anyone interested in the plight of American inner-cities and the urban (and increasingly suburban) poor.<br />
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While I think the article speaks for itself, what I want to talk about is I think one of the most interesting aspects of urban displacement is how preventable it is the policy milieu in which the situation described within the article operates. Through housing subsidy, inclusionary zoning and a host of other policy levers, we have the ability to provide dramatically increased affordable housing. Obviously, this does not solve problems of underemployment and unemployment in many of the communities at risk, but it is at least an important start. I think we should societally be looking at things like a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html">basic income</a> (which I plan to write more about in a future post).<br />
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So why don't we see more affordable housing? The answer is that, when municipalities do site redevelopments, predominantly what they are interested in is maximizing tax revenues in the long term. That is why they are willing to use tools like Tax Increment Financing (TIF) or tax abatements as a means of making redevelopment more attractive. As Harvey Molotch <a href="http://socschoolspbu.ru/files/Molotch-City_As_Growth_Machine.pdf">observed years ago</a>, cities are growth machines. This means that, it costs more money every year to provide the same level of services, which means that municipal taxes need to gradually go up to pay for serves or cities need to expand to increase their tax base. As a result, rather than subsidize the poor, most municipalities see it as more in their long term interest to push people into a neighboring (now often suburban) municipality so that they don't have to pay for it.<br />
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I recently saw an example of this passing of the buck during an event I attended on "sustainable cities" including a panel discussion featuring the director of planning for DC. While much of the discussion centered around transportation systems and transit-oriented development (TOD - a planning buzz term that really just means building stuff around transportation hubs) someone eventually broached the question of displacements and gentrification stemming from site redevelopment featuring heavy tax subsidy to encourage development and then market driven pricing for redeveloped parcels. The director said something about how "pleased" she was that the bulk of DCs development was done around transit corridors then said something to the effect that "our partner municipalities really need to do their part to provide affordable housing". <br />
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Now, anyone in the least bit familiar with the economic straights that Prince George County (for example) is in, knows that they are not in the position to build more affordable housing, they can barely keep the lights on in the schools. Well-to-do Montgomery County maybe (they do have inclusionary zoning on the books) but what would compel it, or many of the conservative well-to-do counties in Virginia (Arlington, etc) to actually provide affordable housing. They also are happy to pass the buck, especially knowing that they are largely unaffordable for many of the poor displaced. What this largely means is ghettoization in extremely poor suburbs for displaced minority people who previously at least had access to urban services (by virtue of living in the inner-city) but now literally have nothing. Effectively what this policy does is manages to further lower the socio-economic plight of those already near the bottom and places them in a situation of absolute isolation. We are burying the urban poor in suburbs and leaving them to die.<br />
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People from these communities are fully aware of this. This awareness is why we are seeing targeted violence from at-risk minority communities against the tech industry in the <a href="http://pando.com/2013/12/20/breaking-protesters-attack-google-bus-in-west-oakland-smashing-window/">Bay</a> <a href="http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2013/12/20/bus-blocked-again-in-tech-boom-backlash/">Area</a>. This has included attacks on the Google and Apple employee commuter buses and assorted hostility towards tech sector workers. It is also something that I expect we will see much more of across the United States if current trends in inequality and urban displacements persist.<br />
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As I noted, their are ways around this. Working in partnership with Community Development Banks (rather than with large retail establishments) as part of site redevelopment so that those at-risk in a community can become business-owners and gain the skill-sets needed to be business owners and the like over the course of a redevelopment project is an example that I am trying to learn more about. Shore Bank in Chicago and some similar organizations have really done some great things that cut against the tendency outlined above. That said, all of this costs money and reduces overall profitability of site redevelopments and as long as we are unwilling to pay taxes and force municipalities to scrap for every dollar and make annual decisions about what city staff they are going to have to lay off next to balance the books, we are not going to see any change. </div>
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Certainly a lot of the feel good, City revitalization talk that has become the stock and trade of my profession (City Planning) is a way of ignoring a lot of this. This is not to say I don't think urban redevelopment is not a good or important. Place-making is something that planning can really excel at - I just think that it is obvious that we need to be doing a hell of a lot more for our urban indigent to make sure that they are indeed part of the future being planned. (Token "minority outreach" which is part of any redevelopment project. This is because planners now see themselves as facilitators who bring people together - not that we do a great job of actually soliciting opinion from minorities, but as long as you held the meeting, you can say you did it. </div>
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Most of the meetings I've attended that were designed to garner minority inputs were held at times that would not suit working parents (often with two jobs). They also viewed things like child care (which is a necessity) as being too expensive. Planning staff, to their credit, do spring for the translator, who, inevitably sits in the back with nothing to do - further exemplifying the difficulty planners seem to have in engaging minority communities, but I digress. It is obvious that many more of the conversations around planning processes should occur in partnership with churches, community groups and other organizations that have direct access to at-risk and minority populations at risk of displacement such that the input of those at risk can be thoroughly considered. Unless we can actually include at-risk people in a meaningful way, we are working to put the final nails in the coffin in the creation of a permanent underclass of people for whom eviction, displacement and just about any other inner-city social ill you can think of are the norm.<br />
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Regarding gentrification and the response of planning and public policy to it I cannot recommend highly enough Sharon Zukin's fabulous <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Naked-City-Death-Authentic-Places/dp/0199794464">book</a>, <i>Naked City: The Life and Death of Authentic Urban Places</i>. It is clear that planners can be doing a lot more about planning and gentrification and we should be having a much more active and informed public debate on the subject. Attempts, like <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264528139/long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma?sc=tw">this piece</a> by <i>NPR</i> to put a positive spin on gentrification for minority populations are active mechanisms for disinformation. They exist to make gentrifiers (many of whom likely make-up much of <i>NPR</i>'s listenership) feel better about themselves. The article is actively ignorant of <a href="http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/454027">the</a> <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=erdM7YpQZogC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=gentrification+and+displacement&ots=O3ICnV1YD7&sig=Zzsv0IUYbmyp_j0XXPddM-wzWFw#v=onepage&q=gentrification%20and%20displacement&f=false">long</a>, <a href="http://usj.sagepub.com/content/37/1/149.short">rich</a> <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604810902982250#.UuFo3mQo5O0">and</a> <a href="http://www.getcited.org/pub/100335988">international</a> <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604810902982268#.UuFpCWQo5O0">literature</a> <a href="http://www.popline.org/node/466398">linking</a> <a href="http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/nyuls13&div=35&id=&page=">gentrification</a> <a href="http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/urban14&div=15&id=&page=">with</a> <a href="http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/waucl28&div=6&id=&page=">displacement</a>. It also avoids more complicated questions on the nature of gentrification and <a href="http://www.marealtors.com/content/upload/AssetMgmt/Documents/Gov%20Affairs/QoL/doesgentrificationharmthepoor.pdf">the (rather complicated) instances </a>when it may in-fact prove beneficial. The argument that we should be pursuing is not how to avoid making dilapidated urban areas better places to live (I think development is a necessary and good thing), but how to insure that those changes and improvements benefit everyone, particularly those that are most at-risk of displacement.</div>
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-7158369752366668692014-01-09T09:21:00.002-08:002014-01-09T09:21:49.821-08:00Africa in DC shares some thoughts on South Sudan + Update<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have a new post that I'm working on coming down the pipeline in the next day or so - sorry for the lack of updates here. Part of the problem is that I largely post essay length stuff which takes some doing. I will try to incorporate more short posts as well.<br />
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In the meantime, my friend Brooks Marmon, who runs the Africa in DC blog has a great post on Beltway insider Hank Cohen and his frankly mindless read on the South Sudanese state. You can read the piece <a href="http://africaindc.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/silly-sights-for-south-sudan-from-a-beltway-bandit/">here</a>.<br />
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I would only add that it is very rare that former colonial holdings benefit from the infrastructure handed to them by their former colonial masters. With the exception of the oft-cited railroads and democratic institutions in India (which we will soon see, is a questionable example), rarely has colonial investment in infrastructure given anyone a leg up - often this infrastructure is damages or destroyed upon the exist of said colonial power. Even in India (as was well documented by Stanley Wolpert in his excellent "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shameful-Flight-Years-British-Empire/dp/0195393945">Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British In India</a>" among others), British disengagement had horrible outcomes: leaving behind mountains of dead, political instability (likely setting in motion the eventual fracturing of Pakistan and Bagladesh from India), heavily damaged infrastructure, regional instability stretching all the way to Singapore and the active undermining of the new Indian state before it even came to fruition - dramatically undermining Nehru and the Congress Party's ability to govern. <br />
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In the end, it reminds me of the words of my undergraduate Southeast Asian History Professor (in a survey course on the Philippines), who pointed out that with colonialism, even when one can cherry-pick a few good outcomes of that colonialism, the base relationship remains one that is abusive and thus the underlying legacy can only be assessed as such.<br />
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It is amazing (though not at all surprising) to see the type of discussions about Africa as critiqued by Marmon in the above post persist on the Beltway.</div>
Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-57538194176080572013-12-12T10:16:00.000-08:002013-12-12T10:16:19.031-08:00Shameless Self Promotion<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Dissident Voice</i> picked up a piece I wrote last year on Bob Dylan and plagiarism. It was something that was interesting to investigate. Dylan, love him or hate him, is certainly a cultural phenomena. The issue is a difficult one and speaks to some of the other recent plagiarism controversies (<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/jonah_lehrer_plagiarism_in_wired_com_an_investigation_into_plagiarism_quotes_and_factual_inaccuracies_.single.html">including that of Jonah Lehrer</a>, which coincidentally also involved Dylan). <br />
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Whether what he has been doing the last couple of years is completely above board is certainly a subject of some debate. In my piece, I make the case that, based on his own behavior in cases where he felt his "intellectual property" was being misappropriated, he used every legal weapon at his disposal.<br />
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You can read the piece <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/12/bob-dylan-and-plagiarism/">here</a>.<br />
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-19643437665053515262013-11-12T12:19:00.000-08:002013-11-12T12:19:06.167-08:00John Gray on The Nature of Beliefs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Philosopher John Gray, who is a favorite of this blog, has an interesting brief interview that was conducted by the <a href="https://www.nexus-instituut.nl/">Nexus Instituut</a>. He asks questions about the inability of humanity to advance ideological goals or systems due to the lack of uniformity of humanity as a whole and the innate simplifying nature of those goals. Gray is always provocative. Note here that he speaks of certain need for universal agreement around particular facts in law, medicine, etc (with the knowledge that these may need to be changed in light of new evidence). Gray has also previously spoken about a sense of semi-universal ethics and I was disappointed that he didn't pursue this line further in his most recent book <i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/03/silence-animals-john-gray-review">The Silence of Animals</a></i>, which is especially notable given the world views Gray expresses in the video below and in his writings.<br />
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Gray's arguments are similar to those made by the likes of Daniel Dennett (in <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/books/review/19wieseltier.html?pagewanted=all">Breaking the Spell</a></i>) regarding the nature of belief and the problems humans present for themselves by attempting to impose colonizing ideological systems. Further, due to the <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/confirmation_bias.htm">confirmation bias</a>, people are particularly bad at using feedback mechanisms and thus responding to data. (I have written at length on this tendency <a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-our-cognitive-shortcomings-drive.html">here</a> and <a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2012/08/behavior-change-and-its-discontents.html">here)</a>. Science, the scientific method and Popperian "falsification" are ways of getting around these limitations, but they only function within particular narrowly defined constraints.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="236" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/kkyrnyapGSI" width="420"></iframe></div>
Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-57718157632288805842013-11-06T09:15:00.002-08:002013-11-06T09:27:14.646-08:00"Mix Tape": Ethnographic Impostors and Other Outer National Nightclub Classics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Music has always been a big part of this blog. This has a lot to do with it being a compulsive obsession for me. <br />
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Of recent, I've been making the occasional mix and posting them to <a href="http://8tracks.com/">8tracks</a> which is a great internet radio service that lets you upload your own music (unlike say, Spotify, which relies on what is made available to them under license). <br />
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I'm not actually sure how the fair usage works under 8tracks or how people get paid, all I know is that it has been a real boon for me because a lot of what I listen to is on vinyl, is stuff I have ripped myself, or is stuff I've gathered from obscure (many now sadly dead) international music blogs (<a href="http://bodegapop.blogspot.com/2012/01/guilty-until-proven-innocent.html">particularly</a> <a href="http://nonotnyet.blogspot.com/2012/01/rip-holy-warbles-2010-2012.html">missed</a> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=310619722322952&id=116809378331982">is</a> the great library of ethnographic musical obscurities: Holy Warbles).<br />
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People that know me well know I have a pretty far reaching and sometimes weird musical taste. I'm a big jazz guy, but I also listen to a huge amount of international music - particularly from West Africa, the Sahel, The Middle East, India, SE Asia, Brazil, Cuba and elsewhere. I also tend to like a lot avant-<br />
garde stuff and 'exoticism'. That said, I try to make these mixes pretty accessible.<br />
<br />
So that said, I would like to share with my readership my new mix: "Ethnographic Impostors and Other Outer National Nightclub Classics" <a href="http://8tracks.com/alex-deley/ethnographic-impostors-and-other-outer-national-nightclub-classics">available for your listening pleasure here</a> or embedded below:<br />
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<iframe height="250" src="http://8tracks.com/mixes/2756554/player_v3_universal" style="border: 0px none;" width="300"></iframe><br />
<div class="_8t_embed_p" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 12px;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3409927583406575169">Ethnographic Impostors and Other Outer National Nightclub Classics</a> from <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3409927583406575169">alex.deley</a> on <a href="http://8tracks.com/">8tracks Radio</a>.</div>
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<br />
I have a handful of older mixes and I will be posting future new mixes to this blog as well.<br />
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-60779017960366961342013-10-23T09:08:00.000-07:002013-11-05T14:55:29.885-08:00What's Left?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
There is something disparagingly rotten about the present
American condition. Everyone seems to know this. The last couple of weeks in which the US government was placed on gardening leave while Congress squabbled over a budget and the Congressional Republicans tried to include the anti-democratic roll-back of a law they didn't like managed to take center stage. Meanwhile, that old bug bear, the negotiated debt ceiling made its reappearance and we were warned of the threat of potential economic catastrophe on a day to day basis. For the last couple of weeks, politics, government and the failure of the politically class to actually govern was hammered home. This was a crisis seemingly manufactured by the hard-right, however, it was allowed to occur through decades of acquiescence by the American left to an extreme right wing, market economy driven agenda.<br />
<br />
We exist in a
society that is divided, anti-scientific, self-involved, frivolous and
otherwise disengaged. Nowhere is this decay more apparent than in the
contortions of the American left. While
the American right has proven itself notorious for its takeover by radical
revolutionaries who seek to ruthlessly transform society, the left has shown
itself idyll, complacent and smug. There
exist a set of underlying problems, both in theory and practice, with the
American left that undermine the stated present and historic beliefs of the
left and prevent genuine dialogue with those that favor a policy of public good
across the spectrum. This essay is an
exploration of these tendencies.<br />
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One of the underlying problems that continues to undermine
American liberalism is its ongoing, almost demur, obedience to neoliberal
market assumptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These manifest
themselves in both a tendency to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kowtow</i>
to political authority and an emphasis on consumer activism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Effectively, the emphasis on markets has
resulted in, to borrow Evgeny Morozov’s terminology, a deeply 'solutionist' mindset that has further undermined political dialogue - this outside of the
very obvious obstructionism of the American right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has been furthered undermined by
persistent belief in material progress that has become inexplicably tied to the
belief in markets.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This tendency is further undermined by the ascendency of the
utopian cult of Meliorism within the American lefts purview.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This often time quasi-religious (according to
the English political philosopher John Gray) belief in persistent material
progress undermines the ability of the American left to genuinely enact
meaningful policy while further reaffirming the cult of the individual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The notion that things are always socially
‘progressing’ or that a narrative of perpetual marginal improvement drives
history is entwined with the ‘solutionist’ mindset.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While this belief is unjustifiable and
results in political dis-engagement in the form of perpetual mindless
sloganeering through social media platforms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thus we have a form of unquestioning “reposting’ from anointed channels often
at the expense of genuine political thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Rather than question the explicit and self-destructive
tribalism within American politics, people have only dug deeper into those
tribal distinctions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This tendency, has
resulted in a failure of the American left to thoroughly question the excesses
the American Democratic party, which is, at present, actively waging a war
against independent reportage, 'whistle blowing' and the very constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has also driven a dangerous cult of
personality around individual charismatic politicians that has precluded
adequate questioning of the political agendas to be advanced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As national consensus appears to begin to
arrive around many of the more contentious social issues, such as gay marriage,
immigration reform and the like, it becomes increasingly odd to watch the
triumphalism of members of the American left who appropriate these victories,
that belong more to the individual groups historically discriminated against,
as their own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This largely by virtue of
their “Facebook-activism” rather than from actual diligent social campaigning
around said issues.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally, the left appears to be afflicted by the same
anti-scientific bias that blights the American right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This tendency to cast aside scientific
claims, specifically those that do not adhere to individual beliefs in
alternative medicine, perceptions of purity, or which undermine the utopian
belief system that underpins notions of ‘progress’ are made to give way to a
set pseudo-scientific, quasi-spiritual justifications often elevated in the minds
of the proponents to that of science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That this is precisely the same process engaged in by religious
fundamentalists of the right – specifically discarding of scientific evidence
in favor of higher “moral” beliefs - does not seem to enter into consideration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This tendency runs deep through American
public life and remains as dangerous as it is tragic. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In identifying these issues, the goal is to force members of
the American left to examine their positions and convictions in the hope of
driving both a wider public debate in how to conduct politics but also to beg
the question, what we actually wish our society to resemble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mine is a generation, the Millennial, that
have been brought up to collectively believe that we are each individually
special, gifted and likely to rise above the fray and correct the problems of
the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, we have actively
continued the politics of previous generations and simultaneously engaged in
the same wasteful, unsustainable behaviors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We have also pursued these aims with a sense of self-righteousness that
remains unjustified. While numerous pressures and hardships abound – and people
should take pride in having stood up to the pressures of student-loan
hardships, a miserable economy, dealing with the anti-tax/pro individual (though not collective) service gorging of the baby boom generation, etc. – this does not excuse us from the callings
of civic obligation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Only in questioning how we go about engaging with politics
can we truly engage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The radical
political right – specifically the Tea Party, which is effectively engaging in
an open fantasy of restoration of libertarian utopian past that never was -
does the left no favors in its obstructionism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That said, many conservatives hold highly sensible beliefs are fully
open to engagement yet are partially prevented from doing so by the assumptions
of the American left.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much can be
learned from classical conservatives, such as Michael Oakeshott and Edmund
Burke as well as from conservative peers who, for the moment, appear to be
alerted to the dangers implicit in many of the above-mentioned assumptions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The American left is peculiar by international standards in
that it is not really of the historic left. It has never really been for large-scale upheavals of the existing order, regardless of what the collective rhetoric around the radicalism of the 60s states. Instead, American Leftism has largely been a highly statist, largely partisan beast. Marx, the traditional touchstone of many international leftist movements never had a great deal of traction in the United States. Much of this likely has to do with the outright persecution of Marxists during the early days of the Cold War and the ongoing threat (largely rhetorical) of the Soviet Union. Some of the Presidential Administrations viewed as most liberal, such as that of John F. Kennedy were firmly anti-communist, seeing escalations of the Cold War, with the Cuban Missile Crisis (fall-out from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion) almost bringing us to the brink of international thermonuclear annihilation. </div>
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It may also be that leftism within the US has done little to directly dissent from free-market capitalism, for which Marxism is anathema. Marx of course, has very real limitations: his prescriptive ideology, adherence to a form of social Darwinism and presumed knowledge of "social evolution" place his ideology soundly in the category of religious thinking, however, as an observer and critic of capitalism he is inimitable. Because of the failure of the American left to take onboard Marx's critique of capitalism, (with the exception of certain academic circles that responded by obsessive naval gazing at the arcana of Marxist <i>dialectics</i>) much of what was held sacred by left-wing counter-culture, particularly around environmentalism and the aesthetics, has been monetized and marketed. Thus, the activism that remains is built around consumer-choice. That this is largely a false activism goes without saying.</div>
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This co-option has also seen the failure of the left to address issues of income inequality and declining social services. The last Democratic presidential candidate to truly define themselves with wanting to improve the plight of the poor was Hubert Humphrey, a reviled figure who lost the 1968 election to Nixon and is viewed by many retrospectively as some sort of out-of-touch dinosaur. Jimmy Carter, for example, ran on a platform of economic conservatism (though he did eventually prove to be America's least imperialist president, at least when it came to international affairs), while Clinton, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_loriwallach.html#3">who surprisingly initially ran on a platform of anti-globalization</a>, was rapidly co-opted by free-markers and joined with the Newt Gingrich's Republicans in actively gutting the welfare state. Clinton's roll in orchestrating many of these reforms, which have been fiercely destructive to many lower income and particularly minority families has been well documented, particularly in Jason DeParle's <i>American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare</i>. This has resulted in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM&hd=1">shocking income inequality</a>, the decline of social cohesion and the undermining of civil society as a whole Income inequality is growing so rapidly in the United States that <a href="http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/files/Global_Inequality.pdf">a recent Unicef Study on global income inequality predicted</a> that, if current trends continue, the United States will have similar income inequality to the current most inequitable country, the DR Congo, inside of 30 years.</div>
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As the left seems unwilling to deal head on with inequity, to reform financial markets to actively protect people from shocks or to address austerity policies in any meaningful way, this has left with an agenda largely constituted by "solutionist" policy agendas that pay lip service to the idea of environmental improvements and equity while simultaneously reaffirming the same neoliberal economic polices that are actively driving inequality. As the economist Paul Krugman points out almost weekly in his <i>New York Times</i> column, the stimulus implemented at the start of the 2008 financial crisis was insufficient and we should be actively pursuing a policy of full employment. Instead we have implemented a series of financial reforms that have <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-wall-street-killed-financial-reform-20120510">deregulated as much as they have regulated</a>, such that it is questionable that even the Volcker Rule, which would once again require that financial institutions receiving FDIC insurance not engage in high-risk investment and instead limit their activities to standard commercial banking, seems unlikely to ever come into force. Never mind that all this rule would do is to let financial institutions know that they are not guaranteed public support if they want to run a casino.<br />
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'Solutionism' comes in the form of believing scientific, or more commonly, technological solutions will solve many of our problems. By relying on silicon valley to solve our social problems, many of which are pressing and require, active engaged public debate, we instead rely on quick fixes that not only fail to deal with the underling problems but also rob us of the ability to have the necessary debate. Many of the solutions proposed to the financial crisis have taken the form of 'solutionsim'. Rather than have a larger debate about what we value societally and where we want to direct resources, we sought quick fixes to short-term budgetary problems and largely failed to regulate in accordance of what we would determine to be of societal value. Austerity policy is one form of short term 'solutionism'. Rather than determine where emphasis should be placed, instead we are seeing across the board cuts that effectively damage the ability of government to actually govern and to provide basic services for those most in need. </div>
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Austerity, however, remains one of the biggest problems we are facing and is further driving the income inequality that is disrupting our society. The anti-union bias that many on the left seem to carry is indicative of just how difficult it will be address these issues and just how deep neoliberal ideology runs through the American Left. Everyone in theory believes in the notion of an honest days pay for an honest days work, however, when it comes to actually fighting for this ideal, and organized labor is really the only game in town equipped to demand this, the American left is largely missing from the table. Union busting laws and increased austerity, most often targeted towards welfare recipients, have received limited protest and only the attempt to cut SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - an acronym for the food stamp program) benefits as part of a the last Farm Bill, a policy so callous that it sounds the subject of a Dickens novel, that have any serious questions been asked.</div>
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Meanwhile, we are told, we have been told that we need to hold faith in Obama. Never mind that the administration has embroiled us in <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/hugh-roberts/who-said-gaddafi-had-to-go">an unnecessary conflict in Libya</a> that is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/19/assassination-libya-civil-war-gaddafi-benghazi">now driving that country into civil war</a>, while escalating drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. This has also included an attempt to commit us headlong in the active civil war in Syria, before a gaff by Secretary of State John Kerry led to a last minute demilitarization. <a href="https://www.cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks-surveillance-post-911.php">At the same time, the administration has done everything it can to limit transparency, increased NSA surveillance of its own citizens, pursued journalists and whistleblowers left and right using such draconian policies as the Espionage Act and generally been the most secretive and repressive administration since that of Nixon.</a> While we have seen some policy improvements, notably a health care bill that remains untested when it comes to actually achieving its goal of reducing costs and some necessary investment in domestic infrastructure (particularly around transit) none of this is really enough. There is a serious lack of transparency, and the financial industry has <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/13-8">been given undue ability, by the administration, </a>to determine what rules they would like to play by, thus failing to adequately protect American consumers and failing to take preventative measures that would avoid further historically unparalleled bail-outs of the financial services industry. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that notion, the American Left's faith in this administrations ability to transform itself should be put forward as Exhibit A in its insanity defense.</div>
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Then there is the anti-science bias that appears to eat away at both political parties across the political spectrum. While the left does seem to be (mercifully) on board with climate science, it seems to fail to grasp a lot of the logical outcomes of this. While paying lip service to dealing with climate, <a href="http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/10/07/new-reasons-to-be-terrified-of-xl-pipeline-obama-is-considering-part-of-1-of-a-2-part-series/">the Obama administration seems hellbent on pursuing Keystone XL</a>, which renowned climate scientist James Hanson (formerly of NASA) has <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/04/opinion/la-oe-hansen-keystone-obama-20130404">noted</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/04/james-hansen-keystone-xl_n_3015136.html">repeatedly</a> represents such a large economic investment in non-renewable energy that it would largely render any climate legislation null. Further, the preferred suburban settlement patterns, general NIMBY-ism when it comes to denser nearby development and use of lower emission (or hybrid) vehicles rather than transit by many do almost nothing to actually address this issue and instead simply slightly reduce or relocate carbon emissions.</div>
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Then there is the matter of willful obstruction when it comes to public health interventions that might actually benefit the working poor, based on anti-scientific hysteria. The <a href="http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/the-sanest-arguments-against-fluoride/Content?oid=9212701">controversy</a>, <a href="http://www.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2013/05/01/keep-your-fluoridation-chemicals-out-of-my-water-chemicals">incredibly heated public vitriol against</a>, and <a href="http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/fluoridation-defeated-portland-oregon">eventual defeat </a>of a plan to introduce water fluoridation in my home town of Portland, Oregon is a definitive example of this. Never mind that water fluoride is exceptionally <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/safety/systematic.htm">safe</a> and <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2681730">efficacious</a> once <a href="http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2011/01/8384/fluoride-levels-some-water-supplies-may-be-coming-down">correct dosing for a particular municipal water supply</a> is determined. The debates that ranged around this subject indicated that, despite claims to the contrary many people on the left (a) have no idea how to read a scientific survey, (b) have no idea how to select a reliable scientific source, (c) have little understanding of how science is actually conducted and (d) instead rely on emotional response around a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=all">"purity" taboo</a>. The sheer volume of studies cited by critics of fluoride, for which it was clear that they had never read the studies or willfully misunderstood them was terrifying. Many studies that were pointed to purporting to prove that fluoridation was unsafe were either based on doses 20-30 times higher what would be added to Portland's water supply, showed stronger correlation elsewhere, were heavily redacted to mask other findings, or in many cases, said the exact opposite of what their proponents were claiming of them. Fluoride was actively defeated by many people firmly of the left, proving time and again that they were as actively contemptuous of science as the creationists of the right when the scientific facts do not fit their particular agenda.<br />
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For those that remain engaged in providing services to the American indigent, the revolutionary ideology of the old left hardly seems relevant. Indeed, it has been the right which has become a truly revolutionary movement, willfully disrupting the very nature of civil society in order to realize economic development "potentials" often at the cost of the working poor. Meanwhile, European Social Democracy relies on notions of social security and overall avoidance of socio/economic disruption. As the late historian Tony Judt pointed out in <i>Ill Fares the Land</i>, this was more the purview of classical conservatism than of the left itself. In our effort to provide effective social services, perhaps we should be looking to thinkers like Edmund Burke, who had a strong interest in limited revolution and systems that protected people from social shocks than we should revolutionaries with prescriptive ideologies like Marx. Similarly, the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott (who many have retrospectively declared a 'liberal') also held a remarkably 'statist' view. While Oakeshott believed that the answers to most problems reside in tradition, he was particularly fond of a cooking metaphor: what good is a recipe without a pre-existing cultural knowledge of the process of 'cooking', this places him closer to Keynes than many on the left who have bought into the neoliberalism. After all, both Oakeshott and Burke spoke extensively about our shared responsibility to one another, hinting strongly at the need for the state to maintain institutions to care for our poorest.</div>
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The American left remains in only lightly better standing than the American neo-right. While the right has become a truly revolutionary force, smitten with the (frankly dystopian) visions of Ayn Rand and set upon revolutionizing society by destroying government, civil society and the right, never once acknowledging the individual entitlements and subsidies through mortgage tax credits and the rest that many of the Tea Party's staunchest organizers are the recipients of, the left dithers in cult of personality believing that the Obama administration will somehow rise, phoenix-like, and implement some kind of as of yet unspecified liberal agenda. There is a word for both sides, it is "delusional". Until we insist on genuine accountability, protect our whistleblowers, and transform our political dialogue such that we insist upon equity and effective public services, the situation will only continue to deteriorate, particularly for our most needy. This is a shame.</div>
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-35130273282835868432013-10-21T18:43:00.002-07:002013-10-24T05:36:25.917-07:00Michael Jackson was a Cultural Imperialist<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Michael Jackson was a cultural imperialist. No, really! This idea occurred to me while reading a recent post by my friend over at <a href="http://africaindc.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/afrobeats-in-dc-white-folks-fearing-black-folks-segregating">Africa in DC</a> which came as shortly after a lengthy debate I incidentally initiated over Facebook. This has got me thinking a lot about the nature of art, culture and what people listen to, particularly in the age of wildly proliferated communications technology. Music obviously means a lot to people, however most people do not put a lot of thought into the music that they listen to.<br />
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The issue raised by my friend over at Africa in DC is that there is a lack of diversity in what people listen to here in DC and what shoes they go to, particularly when it comes to African music. Listeners are segregated. Contemporary African Pop music features a small, largely African ex-patriot audience, while older African genres, like the afro-beat pioneered by the late Fela Kuti manage a healthy white audience through DJ shows and the like. A lot of this appears to be come down to a type of consensus within peoples listening habits established through media outlets like NPR and Pitchfork Media which often drive exposure, canonize certain acts that fit the aesthetics of both outlets and ultimately determine cultural preferences. I agree with my friends assessment to some degree here, but find three additional points of interest: (a) pop music is in itself a form of cultural imperialism, (b) what is canonized is rarely "serious music"and (c) increased access to information technologies is creating a global monoculture that is narrowing rather than widening listeners' musical palates.<br />
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To begin with, there is absolutely nothing morally abhorrent about liking pop music. I like pop music and as a record collector, I own quite a bit of it. Pop songs can speak to us and move us sometimes more readily in ways that more serious art does not mostly because it works largely on the subconscious. It's easy and it's pleasant - by definition it largely does not challenge the way more serious art does - hence: pop. Where pop music runs into problems is when it is exported internationally and begins to change existing cultures. In some cases, as with Thai Molam music, which saw the blending of traditional rural Thai folk music idioms with the soul and rock and roll records brought over by US GIs during the Vietnam War, this led to the creation of interesting new hybrid forms. A lot of these forms are interesting because they were downright weird and often didn't quite work. The more formulaic Molam became, arguably the less interesting.<br />
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Often times though, the export of Western popular music results in replacement of existing ethnic musical forms. A lot of this process started int he 80s when, Western record companies, looking to capitalize on overseas (and thus larger) markets for their super acts started pushing Michael Jackson records and the like down the rest of the world's throat. Now, there is nothing wrong with Michael Jackson's music (his personal life, being another matter) however, many of the places that Thriller and the rest were exported and heavily marketed had their own vibrant musical traditions and ideas. <br />
The ascendance of Hip-Hop of course further changed everything by further driving interest away from the instrumental, rhythmic, harmonic and melodic parts of the music and placing the emphasis increasingly on lyrics. This trend seems to have begun with 60s singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan but with hip-hop, this became the case with African American musical forms as well. No longer did anyone have to write an actual tune, now all that was necessary was a hook and a beat.<br />
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In the end, this process seems to be actively impoverishing a lot of contemporary African music. While hybrid styles like Hip-life claim to blend the musical aesthetics of highlife music with hip-hop, the outcomes are, for all extensive purposes, indistinguishable from contemporary Western Top 40s radio hits. While this strengthens the point made on the Africa in DC blog that it is bizarre there isn't a bigger audience for contemporary African music from white people with an interest in Africa (especially as the music in question is hardly radically different - in fact it's pretty close to the Western pop music they may already be listening to) it also represents music that is, ironically extremely un-African. The African music tradition has always been reliant on polyrhythm and intense rhythmic complexity. Much of this is rhythmic complexity is culturally inherent, as anthropologist John Miller Chernoff argues in his book, <i>African Rhythm and African Sensibility</i>. As James Gleick further elaborates in his book on information theory <i>The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood</i>, a lot of this rhythmic complexity was linguistically present in the tonal languages spoken in central Africa and carried to drums as a means of long distance communication. Thus, in much of Africa it is innate to communication. This polyrhythmic sensibility was later exported to the West (through forced relocation of Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas via the slave trade) and makes up the basis for a lot of latin as well as jazz music.<br />
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Thus to hear contemporary African pop music built around stagnant 4/4 rhythms in order to more fully line-up with the aesthetic of hip-hop indicates not only a serious cultural loss, but also the clear emphasis of the domination of American cultural exports. Just as Hollywood has pushed its conventions upon other countries film industries, American popular music has undermined a lot of what made traditional popular music forms culturally relevant. It drives a sort of internationalized, sanitized lowest common denominator consumer culture. The exception to this rule appears to be the Bollywood Film music coming out of India and the Tamil Film music of Sri Lanka. Sure it borrows from Western musical traditions, but then again, Bollywood has always borrowed from a lot of different sources and remains incredibly creative. (Legendary Bollywood composer, R.D. Burman, appears to have have long absorbed not only the entirety of the Western and Indian musical traditions, but also far Eastern, Latin and African at the same time that the Beatles were just starting to mess around with sitars. Burman isn't the only one. His closest Western contemporary is probably someone like the ever inventive, ever open, Ennio Morricone.)</div>
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That said, this leads to a lot of questions about who is the gatekeeper for international music for Western culture. This appear to have largely fallen into the hands of National Public Radio (NPR) and the "indie" music website Pitchfork Media. (A nuanced critique of both sources can be found <a href="http://thebaffler.com/past/oh_the_pathos">here</a> and <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/54">here</a>.) What both overwhelmingly do, in their gatekeeper rolls is to create an extremely lazy, incurious white mono-culture that predominates a lot of people’s thinking, particularly when it comes to other cultures artistic outputs. What both elect to anoint as canonical are usually a lot of old safe oldies or gimmicky newsworthy acts (i.e. <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/troubadour-champion-edition-french-version-mw0000805153">K'naan</a>) while ignoring a great deal of what people actually listen to within the cultures being studied. This mono culture pretends to be reasonable but never really allows its own assumptions be challenged. It also feeds back what is "commercially viable" in the West to those cultures, further driving an internationalized mono culture.</div>
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So, given that a lot of pop music may serve as a form of cultural imperialism, the NPR/Pitchfork Media consensus does nothing to acknowledge this and instead pushes itself as a gold standard of cross cultural awareness, despite having an extremely narrow focus and positively dripping an non-acknowledged Orientalism. This Orientalism though is careful not to go too far. A little exotica is fine, too much of “the other” makes people feel uncomfortable. Orientalism is not in and of itself a bad thing. I think in engaging with other cultures, it is almost impossible not to project onto or fetishize "the other" in some way. That said, some musicians are able to play on this notion of Orientalism and use it to their advantage. The guitarist <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlfIoJwhu-0">Sir Richard Bishop</a> (a favorite of this blog) takes on a lot of the negative Orientalist stereotypes and <a href="http://jugaadoo.blogspot.com/2007/12/rock-casbah-william-dalrymple-sir.html">appropriates these as virtues</a>, actively incorporating them into his own work. Richard Bishop, however is a serious artist with a strong interest in music who has been ignored (due to the marginal nature of his work) by NPR while Pitchfork has <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10468-while-my-guitar-violently-bleeds/">tended</a> <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13057-the-freak-of-araby/">to</a> <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1139-improvika/">condescend</a> in their reviews of his work, speaking of his "impressive amount of skill" as though this were somehow a bad thing. It has also, similarly condescended in reviews of Jazz musicians, a genre that NPR has instead elected to treat as some sort of venerated museum piece, something to be wheeled out and "recognized" as important rather than as an actual living genre full of still-living practitioners that could be, you know, actually listened to. To its credit, NPR occasionally takes risks promoting more difficult music, but always in back alleys of its website and only after that work has received wider cultural acclaim.<br />
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This is especially telling when contrasted with the Americana derived roots/ folk rock that both NPR and Pitchfork have been in lockstep as being the work that speaks to our times. The gentle, guileless work of Wilco or Mumford & Sons or the retro rehashing of The Arcade Fire and Phoenix. None of this work is terrible, it is all perfectly 'pleasant'. It is more that none of it is particularly novel, most of it is quite disposable popular music which, because of lyrical stance, is now canonized as new classics that will stand the test of time. NPR and Pitchfork readers see themselves as being part of two very different sub-strata yet they seem to be largely in lock-step when it comes to "recognizing" work. NPR, the more conservative middle of the road source perhaps a bit slower on the uptake. So we have a situation in which arguably the two most active, determinant and influential sources are both affirming a particular style of (limited) music as being great art (which arguably it isn't: instead it's pop) and feeding this back internationally by limiting channels of exposure. Thus, the selections made by these sources become self fulfilling prophecies and we have variations on the same works. Add to this the odd endorsement of international music and hip-hop (in order to demonstrate that both sources are "cultured" and lather, rinse, repeat.<br />
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These ideas are then spread online through the endless cycle of posting and reposting on social networking sites, twitter, internet radio (which effectively creates echo chambers by broadcasting 'similar' works to listeners to help them discover 'new' music) taste and review aggregation and the like. No one ever really stops to question the wisdom or agendas of those making decisions about what is popular, but what is remarkable that, despite the incredible variety of music available and one-click through the internet, everyone seems to listen to and watch the same things. Critics lament the lack of a shared cultural background as a result of internet stratification, but this could not be further from the truth. Instead, there has been a remarkable shift of the non-threatening, canonized classics and semi-pleasant pop music through repeated self-reification, with limited questioning. This tendency is now becoming internationalized.</div>
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<o:p>So yes, this does result in a <i>de facto</i> segregation of work, however it is ironic that much of this work not being listened to should be accessible to people across the spectrum of “pop music listeners” because feedback mechanisms have already prevented it from being genuinely challenging, culturally specific or different. It is as much a failure of telecommunications technology to actual broaden people’s scopes as much as anything else.</o:p><br />
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<o:p>Or, we can also just blame Michael Jackson, because this tendency seems to have started with him. Go on, he's an easy scape goat.</o:p></div>
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-87045124747135130412012-08-23T14:56:00.001-07:002013-11-12T15:18:00.077-08:00Behavior Change And Its Discontents<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Post-enlightenment Western society is built on the belief that reasoned argument <span style="background-color: white;">should be able to change people's minds about a given issue.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> It is understood that </span><span style="background-color: white;">if a case is made clearly, factually and without pejorative; it should be able to sway the opinion of similarly rationally minded others. This, like the<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9780374270933"> myth of permanent social progress</a>, is a fallacy. More often than not, it represents another form of wishful thinking.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">In a previous <a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-our-cognitive-shortcomings-drive.html">piece</a>, I addressed both the cognitive difficulties we experience associated with rational thinking (we are much more likely to "intuit" the world than to rationalize our way through it) and the problem of verification bias (by which we reject data that competes with deeply held views out of hand), however neither of these completely describe the extent to which behavior change is difficult to implement. Indeed, it can be said that people change their minds about major issues with some frequency, people evolve their belief systems and <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781429528764?&PID=34273">our brains are endowed with incredible neuroplasticity</a>, allowing us to change almost anything about ourselves. As neurons that wire together also fire together, is behavior change simply not a measure of developing alternative repetitive cognitive programming? Should sufficient exposure to an alternative script not simply create new neural connections that spring a cognitive frame around that script?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Unfortunately</span>, it is not that simple. Just as <a href="http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=15100">research</a> <a href="http://www1.american.edu/ia/cfer/0630test/stein.pdf">seems</a> <a href="http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/sics/SICS%202007%20Papers/1.pdf">to </a>indicate that increased exposure to negative political advertising does not really seem to affect people's voting choices, simple exposure to a particular ideology is unlikely to result in prescribed behavior shift. Further, increased cognitive sophistication does not increase self-awareness, and thus capacity for behavior change. As a <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=west%20stanovich%20meserve">study</a> (<span style="background-color: white;">brought to my attention by way of the </span><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html">now disgraced</a></span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html" style="background-color: white;">Jonah Lehrer</a><span style="background-color: white;">)</span><span style="background-color: white;"> in </span><i style="background-color: white;">The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology</i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span>indicates<span style="background-color: white;">, cognitive sophistication may actually serve to mask cognitive blindspots. Thus, smart people (the cognitively sophisticated) may be more likely to believe in fallacious information as they have increased neural capacity to self-delude.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">While this helps to explain the enduring popularity of certain counter-factual ideologies, it does not answer the questions of why we have trouble eventually shifting to an alternative script. Daniel Kahneman may have a response to this in noting that we are very poor at thinking statistically and much better at thinking intuitively, thus a data driven script is not one that we are particularily wired to latch on to. We <a href="http://www.education.umd.edu/EDMS/mislevy/papers/MakingSense.pdf">are extremely poor at making meaningful snap judgements in the face of complex data</a>, regardless of what <a href="http://www.education.umd.edu/EDMS/mislevy/papers/MakingSense.pdf">Malcolm Gladwell</a> might tell us. We also, arguably, tend to dramatically overestimate our capacity to be swayed by rationale argument, requiring alternative means of pushing behavior change. In my<a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-our-cognitive-shortcomings-drive.html"> earlier piece</a>, </span><span style="background-color: white;">I spoke to some of the strengths and limitations of community-based social marketing as a means of affecting </span><span style="background-color: white;">behavior</span><span style="background-color: white;"> change and so, will not rehash them here. What is interesting about all of this is that our process of accessing data and coming to new positions is slow, collective and incremental.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">While certain early adopters may adhere immediately to a new ideology, and repetition tends to blunt the ability of a message to get through, eventual social conditioning to an idea may eventually drive acceptance of that idea. My observation has tended towards noting that once something has happened, we are more likely to be willing to repeat that process even if the first case ended in failure or catastrophe. I recently used the case of "<a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2012/07/problem-of-political-labels.html">liberal intervention</a>" becoming mainstream across the political spectrum, which I think is a clear case of collective acquiescence to a formally controversial concept in the face of repeated exposure to the outcomes of that concept. I have not encountered any research that completely substantiates this exact point, though there has been <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/30/10/977/">some work</a> on the subject. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Further, it may simply be the case that if things don't go as badly as some would predict, or if a situation seems to have been salvaged in some way, our natural tendency towards optimism will allow us to count an idea as a success, even if it was not one <i>per se</i>. This is the same principle at work as that which sees us fall victim to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect">Dunning-Kruger Effect</a>- we overestimate our abilities in fields we lack expertise in because we lack the knowledge to meaningfully access our skills in those fields. Dunning-Kruger may tell us more about ourselves than we would like to believe.</span><br />
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Behavior change can also often by rendered through the construction of narratives that tap into the emotional rather than the rational. By creating a good versus evil dialogue around a given topic, and creating a clear sense of heroes, victims and villains, the dialogue around a given issue can be altered. This does not necessarily work around all issues - many are likely to prove resistant to this form of framing. This process of reshaping and dictating the dialogue is close to the recommended by George Lakoff in his pamphlet: <a href="http://www.saltpepa.org/Story%20Framing/lakoff1.pdf" style="font-style: italic;">Don't Think of an Elephant</a> and in the various <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6761960">pronouncements </a>of the Republican speech writer Frank Luntz. Both believe that the way the enact behavior change around a particular issue is to actively adjust the cognitive frame through which people understand an issue. Lakoff in particular has been a pioneer in the theory of how this works in his seminal <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio?inkey=62-0226468011-0"><i>The Metaphors We Live By</i></a> (written with Mark Johnson), while Luntz has been a master of implementation.<br />
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The problem that is implicit in the sort of issue framing that Luntz and Lakoff recommend is that it tends to obfuscate the issue. While Luntz has fatuously compared himself to George Orwell, claiming that his approach to political discourse is perfectly in line with Orwell's prescription put forward in "<a href="http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/">Politics and the English Language</a>", in effect, issue framing achieves the exact opposite. Luntz is correct when he paraphrases Orwell as noting that honest political speech requires the speaker:<br />
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“(S)peak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.</blockquote>
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That said, Luntz (and for that matter Lakoff's) suggestions that politicians alter the language used to allow only one particular 'frame' or avenue for discussion around are given topic are far closer to another Orwellian construction: "newspeak". In the novel, <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>, the forced <i>lingua franca</i>, "newspeak" worked by limiting vocabulary in order to suppress dissent altogether by simply eliminating the ability to put that dissent into language. </div>
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This practice is precisely the tone that much political speech has taken on, however it is unlikely to drive successful behavior change as people that do not share the belief system implicit within a given frame are likely to ignore that frame or simply to ignore the issue. The internet and speciality cable news channels have further given people the ability to increasingly select which media, and thus world view, they consume, which further limits the effective of trying to fight it out for dominant framing device in the court of public opinion. Beyond this, the shift in the way we consume media means that there is no longer a singular, consensus news 'court of public opinion' where these matters are decided (if there ever was one to begin with). This shift away from "framing" has been seen to play out increasingly in the business-end of political practice. Most leading political thinkers have quite suddenly grown very quiet about "framing" issues despite the topic having been very much in<i> </i>vogue just a few years ago.</div>
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So, if simply controlling the language by which an issue is addressed or using a community-based social marketing mechanism are both insufficient to enact behavior change, what works? I'm increasingly of the belief that most behaviors are generationally learned. To that end, it often takes generational shifts in order to drive social change. Younger generations grow up with greater exposure to particular issues that are of the moment and at an age when their brains are at their most plastic. As a result, they have significantly greater capacity to question and diverge from prior generations' thinking patterns. Further, no ones wants to replicate the mistakes of their parents generation. While some repetition does occur, a certain degree of generational backlash frequently occurs resulting in different sets of belief systems or outlooks that are generationally determined or the product of generational rebellion. While nature and nurture are both important, many cognitive neuroscientists increasingly argue that nurture is increasingly key to determining thinking patterns. Different important cultural events or touchstones can also help to inform the views of a particular generation depending on when they occur and the wider social impacts of said event. Thus the norms of a society and of our generation have important impacts. We tend towards not only "group think" but also "generation think" and these tendencies can result in different paradigms or beliefs predominating across different generations.<br />
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Also of value in encouraging behavior change is the capacity of some for scientific thinking. The ability to think scientifically, alter belief systems in response to data and actively falsify predictions or theories is an important cognitive tool. It is also one that is criminally underrated. One of the reasons many Americans seem to cling to beliefs or belief systems that are factually insupportable likely has something to do with a general public incredulity and even hostility towards science. Scientific thinking encourages greater flexibility in thinking patterns and as a result can serve as a vehicle for behavior change. The ability to analyze data in a rational, comprehensive away, utilize research statistics and other features of a basic scientific education cut away the limitations of dogmatic thinking and encourage cognitive flexibility. To this end, if one is used to using data to prove or disprove theories, then one is less likely to adhere to a rigid ideology when it comes to personal or social matters. In that regard, science may be, once again, one of our most precious assets as a species. It may also be the most important tool we have when it comes to trying to encourage behavioral or cognitive shifts.</div>
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-83444271628453952872012-07-15T11:07:00.001-07:002012-07-24T14:49:37.863-07:00'Hit'ch Piece<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b style="background-color: white;">Disclosure:</b><span style="background-color: white;"> Post-mortem character assassination is not the aim of this writing. The goal is simply to demonstrate how varied the thinking of the late Christopher Hitchens could be. I feel that enough time has passed following Hitchens' death that I can write a more nuanced piece about his beliefs, strengths and weaknesses as a intellectual.</span><br />
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<i style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: white;">"I will not be reconstructed!" - Shane MacGowan</span> </i></blockquote>
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<i>“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." - Christopher Hitchens</i></blockquote>
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Christopher Hitchens once accused me of being soft on fascism. This happened after I had expressed reasonable doubts about the Iraqi-Niger "yellowcake" link- a particular canard of the Bush administration <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/07/plames_lame_game.html">that</a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/04/wowie_zahawie.html">Hitchens</a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/04/clueless_joe_wilson.html">treated</a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/07/case_closed.html">repeatedly</a> as a smoking gun rationale for liberal intervention in Iraq. As part of his refusal to admit miscalculation in Iraq, Hitchens could never quite give up on the Niger yellowcake claim, even after evidence emerged revealing that members of the Bush administration <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/politics/18niger.html?&oref=login&pagewanted=print">acknowledged the speciousness</a> of said link as early as 2002. The claim itself has been <a href="http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/yellowcake.asp">well-proven false</a> while the documents purported to have supported it were <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries">themselves exposed as forgeries</a>.<br />
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The great irony of the argument came that the venue at which Hitchens' elected to attack my unwillingness to to agree to magical claims regarding Nigerien yellowcake and Iraq was at a conference whose purpose was the promotion of freedom from Religion. So here was Hitchens, the great champion of atheism, engaging in deeply ideological, determinist, and in its own way, 'religious' thinking in lambasting me for not sharing his faith in a war of choice. <span style="background-color: white;">I bring the issue up only because it speaks to a certain contradiction within Hitchens' character. </span><span style="background-color: white;">I doubt that someone of Hitchens' intelligence could possibly have meant everything that he was saying, however, there certainly came a point with the man where it proved to be anathema to doubt his faith in the belief system he espoused. <a href="http://abidnyc.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/a-few-words-on-christopher-hitchens-fondness-for-noam-chomsky/">This point was echoed by Noam Chomsky</a> regarding Hitchens' proselytizing for foreign military action to destroy "Islamism". Hitchens' tendency to take certain ideological beliefs on faith also showed in his </span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/09/hitchens.htm" style="background-color: white;">strange affinity</a><span style="background-color: white;"> for Trotsky and Lenin despite the pair's well documented roll in laying the ideological, intellectual and policy groundwork for later Soviet </span><span style="background-color: white;">atrocities</span><span style="background-color: white;">.</span><br />
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With Hitchens, there seemed a certain need to believe in ideological revolutionary thinking, regardless of the facts supporting the ideology. In this way, Hitchens was never the intellectual heir to Orwell that he seemed to perceive himself as. Certainly, Orwell was committed to causes, but never to ideology. In fact, the great narrative of Orwell's career is, in many ways, his extrication of himself from ideological systems (well-illustrated by his eventual anti-communist stance). Hitchens himself, in his excellent book: <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780465030507-3">Why Orwell Matters</a></i>, described Orwell as a naturally conservative and inherently biased with the predilections of the British Middle class of a particular period who, through education and exposure, managed to talk himself out of many of these petty biases. Thus with Orwell, we see active moral assertions but tempered by a strong mechanism for self examination. Orwell increasingly stepped further and further away from ideology and previous beliefs, denouncing first colonialism, then Marxism and antisemitism. <br />
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With Hitchens, we do not see this same flexibility, but rather a strongly held belief in the inherent rightness of his initial positions. A <i>New Yorker</i> profile on Hitchens went so far as to title the somewhat unflattering piece, "<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_parker">He Knew He Was Right</a>". The narrative of Hitchens' political education is a sort of Orwell in reverse - early extreme pragmatism followed by the engorgement upon ideology, culminating with <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/ends-war#">Hitchen's </a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2007/03/so_mr_hitchens_werent_you_wrong_about_iraq.html">unshakable </a><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/22/christopher-hitchens-decca-aitkenhead">belief</a> in the moral rightness of the Iraq war. Beyond this, Hitchens sought, to his dying day, to expand the war against Islamism, demanding the <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/09/pakistan_is_the_enemy.html">opening of new fronts in Pakistan</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n-STlCzn8s">Iran</a> <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/05/christopher-hitchens200905">and</a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/10/hezbollahs_progress.html">elsewhere</a>, while framing the debate as part of a greater war between fascism and civilization.<br />
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There was always the element of the flat-track bully about Hitchens. We see evidence of this in the misogynistic attacks Hitchens takes on the political predilections of two women in the profile, <span style="background-color: white;">"</span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_parker">He Knew He Was Right</a>". He refers to said women sarcastically as "honey" and "sweetie" and generally gives the impression of the barroom bully and tremendous bore. Further, <span style="background-color: white;">the slightly dubious claims of</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/2010/01/an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens-part-i.php" style="background-color: white;">wishing he had been able to serve in combat </a><span style="background-color: white;">and the mental exercise of equating ongoing support for the Iraq war with a battle for civilization, remain troubling. Hitchens slight megalomania even went so far as </span><span style="background-color: white;">allegedly </span><a href="http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_archive.html" style="background-color: white;">claiming of the Iraq War</a><span style="background-color: white;">: </span><span style="background-color: white;">"It is glorious and it is my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">The veracity of this claim is questionable, bordering on self-delusional. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), within which many of the advocates for the war within the Bush administration had received their intellectual foundations, had long advocated for the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Beyond this, following 1998's Operations Desert Fox and Desert Storm, the official policy within the United States government was regime change in Iraq.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">This is not to say that Hitchens was not actively critical of the Bush administration. He did refer to Bush's America as a "</span><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612" style="background-color: white;">banana republic</a><span style="background-color: white;">": stunted by incompetence and ideology. This was a nice blast of the old Hitchens - the one who actively criticized systems of power and authority rather than providing unflinching support for the policies of them - yet much of this also seemed opportunistic. In 2004, </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/oct/31/uselections2004.comment2" style="background-color: white;">Hitchens had endorsed Bush over Kerry</a><span style="background-color: white;">, identifying himself as a </span><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/339134?auto_log" style="background-color: white;">"single-issue voter"</a><span style="background-color: white;">. His later criticisms of Bush, while in line with the thinking of the old pre-9/11 Hitchens, had the ring of the </span><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612" style="background-color: white;">well-documented 2006</a><span style="background-color: white;"> divorce of neoconservative intellectuals from the war in Iraq on the grounds that the Bush administration was ill-equipped to adequately carry out the lofty policy goals proposed. Thus, like Hitchens after them, these neoconservatives did not so much as acknowledge past errors, as simply state that their policy was too perfect and beautiful for the harsh realities of the world. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">The position is, of course, an intellectually disingenuous one- allowing these thinkers to have their cake whilst simultaneously stuffing it down their gullets. On Iraq and the wider war on terror, Hitchens proved to be fundamentally neoconservative in his prescriptions - effectively joining the very group he <a href="http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/norman-podhoretz-crit_10/">had formerly lambasted</a> as hucksters and peddlers of American imperialism. Indeed, the decision to attack in print two of the great intellectuals of the left and popular targets of neoconservative thinkers: <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/09/19/hitchens-smears-edward-said/">Edward Said</a> and <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/">Noam Chomsky</a>, demonstrated that Hitchens had an innate understanding of neoconservative ideology and how he could announce his joining of the group. While Hitchens was always careful to avoid labeling himself as a neoconservative individually, it became increasingly clear from the friends he kept where he now stood ideologically.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">With Hitchens, it is also hard to say where his new found hatred of Islamism suddenly emerged from. Hitchens stated that much of it <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/hitchens200902">resulted in response to the <i>fatwa</i> against his friend Salman Rushdie</a>. He claimed that his compassion for Rushdie was instrumental in his realizing that Islamists were targeting civilization itself. <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/rushdie-on-hitchens-201202">Rushdie himself </a>notes that Hitchens had not really been a close friend until after the <i>fatwa </i>and that Hitchens had made the effort to tie himself to Rushdie in partial response to said <i>fatwa</i>, so there may be something to this, however it seems altogether too facile a rationale on it's own. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Beyond the Rushdie explanation, the historian Tony Judt had some <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/tony-judt/bushs-useful-idiots">profound thoughts</a> on the strange death of liberal America and the seemingly mainstream acquiescence to liberal intervention. Judt's explanation goes some way in explaining what may have happened to Hitchens, but, as with the Rushdie explanation, it does not tell the full store. Curiously, Hitchens also wrote a hit piece <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/10/how_uninviting.html">about Judt</a>, for Judt's protestation in the face of Israeli policy - a position that Hitchens' both <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781859843406-2">historically</a> and <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2008/05/can_israel_survive_for_another_60_years.html">at the time of his attack on Judt</a>, shared. This said, beyond simply Judt's outlined wishful thinking as a result of neoliberal ideological domination, or even fraternal compassion and outrage resulting from the <i>fatwa</i> placed on Rushdie, there must have been something further feature driving this shift in Hitchens' thinking. The most likely suspect: shameless self promotion.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: white;">Hitchens appears to have jumped on the Iraq bandwagon and an opportune moment - </span><span style="background-color: white;">aligning</span><span style="background-color: white;"> himself with liberal interventionism just as it became fashionable following the public perception of </span><span style="background-color: white;">successful</span><span style="background-color: white;"> military action in Bosnia and Kosovo. </span><span style="background-color: white;">While Hitchens' latter day militarism may derive from the experience of his father, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1757119467">a deeply conservative man who had</a></span><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780446540339"> served as a low-ranking officer in the British Navy</a>, a shift later in life towards macho posturing <a href="http://www.dailyhitchens.com/2011/05/noam-chomsky-responds-to-hitchens.html">has</a> <a href="http://www.dailyhitchens.com/2011/05/noam-chomsky-responds-to-hitchens.html">disturbed</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qjnjw3YIp8">many</a> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/19/london">of</a> Hitchens' old allies on the Left who knew him as a staunch critic or the Vietnam and First Gulf Wars. </span>
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<span style="background-color: white;">In a way, Hitchens' pro-war position was careerist. Hitchens was excellent at predicting social trends and perhaps saw a way to tie his atheism to a controversial but increasingly socially accepted rationale for conflict. Hitchens himself called himself a <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780465030323-2">"contrarian"</a> and sought to be unpredictable, but despite this, his contrarianism was never that outside of the realm of the mainstream. The case can be made that Hitchens sought to recast uncontroversial though slightly unconventional beliefs as edgy in order to feed into a cult of celebrity. He realized that the <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781859847367-11">anti-Clinton bandwagon he had shackled himself to</a> throughout the 90s (a position seen as controversial only because Hitchens self-identified as being explicitly <i>of</i> the left) had reached a natural expiry date as Clinton left office. Hitchens needed to reinvent himself do so in a way that would seem unpredictable in order to retain his outsider credibility.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">This is a point noticed by Norman Finkelstein (of all people) and quoted below in a </span><a href="http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/02/triangulations-of-christopher-hitchens/">piece on Hitchens' triangulations</a><span style="background-color: white;">:</span><br />
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Norman Finkelstein at the time explained that Hitchens was forever attempting to be unpredictable. Finkelstein contrasted this with Chomsky, who is quite predictable in terms of the positions he takes but is read because he marshals evidence and facts that one learns from.</blockquote>
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Hitchens' advocacy for the War in Iraq was a way to take a controversial (for a self described <i>Trotskyite</i>) stance on an issue that would dominate the coming decade but would be palatable to great portions of mainstream society. Must as with Oscar Wilde's edict that the only thing worse than being talked about is not talked about, Hitchens found a way to controversially insert himself into the regular ebb and flow of cable news chat shows. The arch-liberal intellectual turncoat - armed with a glass of whiskey, the memorized complete works of Blake and soaring moral conviction. This position seemed novel following the great moral relativism that so completely characterized the end of the Clinton years. 9/11 served as the great catalyst to recast good and evil for the American public and Hitchens star rose. Around this time, he gave up his position as a columnist with <i>The Nation</i> opting instead for the wider, and more mainstream readership of <i>Vanity Fair</i>.<br />
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While the war on terror and soon, in Iraq, was extremely popular among pundits when first prosecuted, Hitchens' decision to hold to the moral justifications for intervention war after it had been abandoned as a failure by many of its original supporters further insured that we would be talked about - further drawing linkages from the Iraqi insurgency to <i>Salafist</i> militants as a means of also promulgating upon his equally controversial (in America, at least) uber-atheist credentials. It was this that catapulted Hitchens to <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/spot/topintellectuals.html">celebrity "public intellectual"</a>.<br />
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That said, this is not to discount the importance of Hitchens on issues outside of the scope of the war on terror. If Islamic terror was a topic on which Hitchens seemed to take leave of his gift for rationality, it did not seem to affect his other work as a brilliant social critic. As John Gray <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/09/hitchens-trotsky-convictions">makes clear</a> in a review of Hitchens' collected journalism:<br />
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To fasten on [Hitchens'] role as a celebrity journalist (as many of his critics have done) is to underestimate his achievements, because, when he leaves behind the certainties of ideology, he is an incomparable truth-teller.</blockquote>
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Hitchens' best work has always included polytechnic prose, deep critical thinking, compassion and an unerring appreciation for comic irony. Some pieces that immediately spring to mind include Hitchens' promulgations on the death penalty, "<a href="http://www.neiu.edu/~circill/F1608B.pdf">Scenes from an Execution</a>" (which along with Camus' "Reflections on the Guillotine" should be considered the last word on capital punishment), <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/95-9780786740062-0">his response</a> to the modern banalities of a heavily commercialized Route 66, the examination of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/16/classics.history">Karl Marx's career as a journalist</a>, the brilliant books on <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780465030507-3">Orwell</a>, <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/65-9781859843987-2">Henry Kissinger</a> and the<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781844672523-2"> Elgin Marbles</a>. <span style="background-color: white;">As I mentioned in my </span><a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html" style="background-color: white;">immediate reaction</a><span style="background-color: white;"> to Hitchens' death, the man was also extremely generous with his time and </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ana-marie-cox-blog/2011/dec/16/christopher-hitchens-defined-ana-marie-cox?INTCMP=SRCH" style="background-color: white;">genuinely seemed to care</a><span style="background-color: white;"> about the thinking and well being of his readership. As embodied in his best work, the man's prose could be absolutely stunning. </span><span style="background-color: white;">Hitchens had a kinetic, full-voiced style of writing. He disparaged cliché and mined the English language and literature for always just the right turn of phrase. </span><span style="background-color: white;"> It may have been, ironically, that horror of </span><span style="background-color: white;">cliché that lead to Hitchens to take some of his more ludicrous and reactionary stances. </span><br />
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The defection of Hitchens to neoconservatism seems to have brought out the very worst in him. Many of his later pieces on Iraq war and on <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/09/simply_evil.html">Islamic terror</a> have a somewhat deflated feel about them. In some ways, Hitchens came to resemble the reactionary latter day Evelyn Waugh. Unlike Hitchens; however, Waugh at least had the good sense at self parody, writing what <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=KzG7cgnLfngC&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=his+voice+was+not+the+instrument+of+old+-+evelyn+waugh&source=bl&ots=ISi4DLWi8u&sig=w-1Oa_TniYLePcmdlf1F0JnofRU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dQADUJSYC-Km6wGHgb3bBg&ved=0CE0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=his%20voice%20was%20not%20the%20instrument%20of%20old%20-%20evelyn%20waugh&f=false">Hitchens himself called</a> his 'own literary obituary' in <i>Basil Seal Rides Again</i>:<br />
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His voice was not the same instrument as of old. He had first assumed it as a conscious imposture; it had become habitual to him; the antiquated, worldly-wise moralities which using that voice, he had felt himself obliged to utter, had become his settled opinions.</blockquote>
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If there is a clear summary of Hitchens' views post 9/11, this is it. Full of bluster, pressed with sound and fury and saying nothing - but also, at the same time, saying everything about Hitchens himself. Hitchens' gifts as a writer and as a thinker were prodigious, but so too was his gradual intellectual dilapidation. If there is any justice, he will be remembered more for all the good than for the bad. However, justice would also dictate that the unknowingly self-parodying and self-imposed asterisks of ideological thinking will always remain as a blemish on his legacy.<br />
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<br /></div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-3944809927034884612012-07-10T14:49:00.000-07:002012-07-18T10:21:32.230-07:00Why Ideas Matter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I've been writing a lot <a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-our-cognitive-shortcomings-drive.html">about</a> <a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2012/07/problem-of-political-labels.html">ideas</a> recently. The tendency has become to overlook ideas and the theoretical basis that drive people to make decisions and instead focus on the outcomes of those decisions. This is a jaundiced view, increasingly taken in much modern analytic work, presuming that the motivations for action should be ignored as long as the outcomes eventually line-up with our desired world view. While I do agree with the case for pragmatism in the construction of public policy - there is a necessity to work with a broad set of actors who may have radically different motivations for their actions - it is also wrong to ignore the ideologies that drive people to act. Further, the semi-predictable outcomes of our decisions may often have their seeds in the ideologies that informed these actions. People in general, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/political-scientists-are-lousy-forecasters.html?pagewanted=all">and particularly political scientists</a>, may be poor forecasters of the future, but the shortcomings of our ideas and the "propaganda"-driven frames we use to interpret the world have a roll in shaping those outcomes all the same. Belief in an ideology paves the way to a set of outcomes that may have otherwise been off the table.<br />
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In an <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-i/">interview</a>, the filmmaker Adam Curtis, summarizes what he sees as the importance of ideas:</div>
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...I believe that ideas have consequences. And why I like people like [19th century conservative sociologist, Max] Weber is because they are challenging what I see as that crude left-wing vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society, that we are just surfing, our ideas are just expressions—froth on the deep currents of history, which is really driven by economics. I’ve never believed that. Of course, economic forces have a great effect on us. But actually, people’s ideas have enormous consequences. And to be honest, if you had to reduce what I do, I spend my whole time just looking at<i> </i><b>how ideas have consequences, not necessarily what the promoters of them intended,</b> because I think that’s a really big thing in our time.<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>(emphasis added)</blockquote>
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I think that Curtis articulates a very important point here. Just because our limitations at making predictions are very real does not mean the ideologies that we use to make those predictions will not have some resonance upon the outcomes. No one would initiate grandiose mechanisms of social upheaval if they did not intrinsically believe that their ideology would result in a desired impact. Stalin did not agriculturally collectivize the Ukraine with the goal of starving millions of his own citizens, he did it because he believed that he was implementing a scientifically derived socio/political framework that would help deliver the Soviet Union to a greater degree of resource independence. It was in part, because of the near religious nature of the prescriptive Marxist dialects involved that the policies were implemented on the scales that they were and resulted in the level of destruction that they did. The same case can be made for the decision of the Khmer Rouge to return Cambodia to the technological stone age or by neoliberal economists to subject developing economies to the cruelties of structural adjustment throughout the 1980s. The beliefs <i>themselves</i> shaped and determined the outcomes, even if they were not the outcomes predicted.</div>
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Further, the extent to which ideas have shape the values of a society will help to determine how resilient a society is in the face of systemic shock or crisis. Jared Diamond, in his book, <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/18-0143036556-0">Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed</a></i>, makes a case for culturally determined ideological factors that can equip societies to fail or succeed shortages regardless of preexisting resource conditions. The ideas that shape these societies and the values that the societies hold will help determine ability to adapt and withstand shock. Cultural ideas determine how effectively resource management can operate within a particular society. Within this context, ideas, and how they are constructed and implemented, can mean the difference between life or death. While environmental conditions may to some extent drive cultural distinctions or ideas, the belief in how a society should be structured or operate <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/what-makes-countries-rich-or-poor/?pagination=false">cannot in and of itself be dismissed</a>.</div>
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While it may seem too ideologically inflexible to insist that people and particularly political leaders do the right things for the right reasons - perhaps it is enough that they <span style="background-color: white;">merely </span><i style="background-color: white;">do</i><span style="background-color: white;"> the right things - rationale will always guide implementation. Rationale must also always be given to build public support. It can be difficult to get someone to implement a policy they do not believe in unless they can be coerced in some way: whether this is through propaganda, threat of force or bribery. While ideology should not be inflexible, people need to understand the reasons they are being asked to act. It is in this explanation for action that ideas become so powerful. Some of the worst excesses of 20th century ideologies - Nazism, Soviet Marxism and American Neoliberal Capitalism -were</span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFb4KyogCDc" style="background-color: white;"> all derived from an erroneous belief in Social Darwinism</a><span style="background-color: white;">. This idea proved to be pervasive and allowed for systematic destruction of societies and their reconstruction around absolutist systems on a scale never before imagined. Ideology and the widespread public acceptance of that ideology can result the full-scale reshaping of society. None of the results of the dramatic social shifts of the ideologies of the 20th century could have been achieved simply by "muddling through".</span></div>
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Ideas remain important and will likely remain, in response to environmental or resource conditions, the underlying engine that drives social, political and structural transformation. This is the raw power of ideas. While the outcomes of an ideology may not always be easily predictable, those outcome often lie as a shard within the very core of the idea itself. Ideas may be the most powerful dictators of human action that exist. We should bear this in mind as we plan the future of our societies.</div>
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</div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-42202487289278561972012-07-09T15:36:00.001-07:002012-07-23T05:25:23.296-07:00The Problem of Political Labels<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The standard and often interchangeable political labels that continue to underpin many conversations about politics are ill-suited to the political realities of today. Notions of liberal and conservative no longer hold their historical precedents. As the historian Tony Judt pointed out in his book, <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781594202766-8">Ill Fares the Land</a></i>, the left has lost much of its radical bent, while the right, particularly the American Right, has become increasingly <span style="background-color: white;">revolutionary. As a result, modern would-be leftists, or those who believe in the preservation of the social state and public institutions, have more in common with traditional conservatives such as Edmund Burke. Meanwhile it is the radical right, with its ideology of repealing 'entitlement' programs and eliminating the roll of the state in public life, that represents a new strand of revolutionary thinking. There is good reason why the Tea Party has co-opted 18th century radical, Thomas Paine, to it's cause, even if Paine would have been at odds with much of the Tea Party agenda.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Modern political distinctions becomes all the more confused when we further consider the political triumph of economic neoliberalism throughout most of the Western economies. While it may be a fallacy, as John Gray notes, to speak of "The West" as unified place, it is true that ideals centered upon deregulated markets, privatized industries and the like have become the dominant paradigm throughout the American and European world. While the current economic crisis has demonstrated the fallacies of neoliberalism, the dominance of this economic/political ideology has not been slowed. This is partially due to a lack of politically implementable alternative. Social Democracy and the social state persist in several Western European (particularly Scandinavian) states and as vaguely autocratic neo-Marxist holdovers in parts of Asia and the Americas, however, the notion of developing new and meaningfully implementable ideologies from these frameworks seems to be impossible.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">The lines have been further blurred to with the emergence of a consensus around liberal intervention and that ideologies close alignment (acknowledged or otherwise) with neo-conservatism. The distinction in the position of someone such as Christopher Hitchens regarding the case for War in Iraq and those of neo-conservatives who orchestrated the war, such as Paul Wolfowitz are so minute, they represent the parsing of the very finest of hairs. This is also true of other liberal interventionists, such as Samantha Power who is, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/159570/samantha-power-goes-war">according to consensus, the intellectual architect of recent US action in Libya</a>. Indeed, the speed with which the United States along with many of European states jumped to intervene in Libya last year - <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/hugh-roberts/who-said-gaddafi-had-to-go">despite</a> <a href="http://peripheralrevision.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/libya-threats-of-impending-bloodbath-were-exaggerated-to-justify-intervention/">gross</a> <a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/04/14/false_pretense_for_war_in_libya/">exaggerations</a> as to the nature of the situation on the ground </span><span style="background-color: white;">in Benghazi </span><span style="background-color: white;">and</span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/29/diplomat-gaddafi-troops-viagra-mass-rape"> sensationalist intelligence</a><span style="background-color: white;"> marshaled in favor of intervention that was </span><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42824884/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa">acknowledged as bogus at the collection level</a><span style="background-color: white;"> at the time it was being peddled - speaks to how liberal intervention has become politically uncontroversial. The ease with which modern states are willing to go to war- largely in part as a response to the new found </span><span style="background-color: white;">mechanization of warfare, allowing for most killing to be done by way of remote controlled drone aircraft or long-range bombing - has further erased barriers between right and left. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">The remnants of radical militarism inspired by ideologies of the old left seem to have ended with the Soviet Union, while former Marxist radical groups like the militant wing of the PFLP or the SDS collapsed. This shift is best dramatized in the French miniseries on </span>Ilich "Carlos the Jackal" Ramírez Sánchez, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1321865/"><i>Carlos</i></a>, in which we see an aging Carlos realize he has become truly irrelevant, finds himself persona non grata in his old client state of Syria and eventually finds himself in Sudan, where the Khartoum authorities eventually sell him to the French for the long-standing bounty.<br />
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What is likely to emerge may be a new paradigm of culturally divergent forms of capitalism that compete with one another. As the English political philosopher, John Gray, notes in his shockingly clairvoyant book <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9781565845923">False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism</a></i>, the variety in culturally determined forms capitalism is enormous and there is no reason to expect, as much neoliberal economic theory suggests, that any of the emerging and soon to be dominant world economies will necessarily take on Western characteristics. Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Russian and Japanese capitalism all have their own important traits and <span style="background-color: white;">characteristics which are likely not reproducible outside of their cultural contexts. Thus, while economists may <a href="http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/trioshrt.html">criticize</a> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704615504576172381917735372.html">Japan</a> for its years of apparent economic stagnation, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/aug/11/paul-krugman-japan-lost-decade">the Japanese economy may be far more robust than many Western neoliberals may realize</a>, or as Gray points out, may be simply returning uniquely Japanese development of high standard of living at zero economic growth. The irony of globalization is that, while it drives deregulation internationally, it also manages to strengthen certain culturally determinant characteristics of societies and economies. It has also internationalized the actions of new types of internationalist militant organizations, such as Al-Qaeda that <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781565849877-1">are simultaneously products of modernity</a> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/">while reacting against it</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">If and how a Western political left may re-emerge is difficult to tell. It may take the form of the mass civil society uprisings that the <a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-and-civil-society.html">Occupy Wall Street</a> movement and </span><a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2011/03/stephane-hessels-imperative.html">Stéphane Hessel</a> agitate towards, however there is a question of if it can even re-emerge amid the new Western neoliberal consensus. Especially as this consensus, technology and entertainment industries take center stage, appears to increasingly conform to that Neil Postman forecasted in his seminal <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780143036531-1"><i>Amusing Ourselves To Death</i></a>. Political alternatives may very likely proliferate in different cultural settings or contexts, however it remains to be seen how these alternatives will be able to be translated cross-culturally. Political conflict, in the United States at least, has been transformed such that, as David Bromwich <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n13/david-bromwich/diary">points out</a>, one political party: The Democrats have won on the cultural issues, while the other: The Republicans, have won on the public policy and economic ones. Both parties, however, remain largely preoccupied by political tribalism without articulating a clear view of the public good. This distinction is important and is rarely acknowledged in mainstream political discourse. Until there is some consensus as to which public services are valued by society - and that these services historically represent the backbone from which functional civil societies are built - the dominance of a dehumanizing and destabilizing neoliberal economic theory will continue to go unchecked.<br />
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So what of our political labels then? Without the above-mentioned shift away from neoliberalism, they remain absolutely meaningless.<br />
<br /></div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-50855659743540514062012-07-07T14:32:00.001-07:002012-07-16T18:57:34.225-07:00How Our Cognitive Shortcomings Drive Utopianism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white;">Humanity's attempts at utopia have ostensibly failed. Instead, hubris has been the ultimate outcome of most human attempts at social engineering. We have a marked tendency, as a species to embark on grandiose projects driven not by rationality or data, but rather by ideology or magical thinking. Often, these ideologies are masked by pseudo-scientific rationale or portrayed as necessary, albiet painful steps towards a public good. Some of these projects can exist for cultural reasons: the ridiculous opulence of Dubai, for example, while others may simply be utopian thinking: </span><a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2011/08/biosphere-2-cautionary-tale-in.html" style="background-color: white;">Biosphere 2</a><span style="background-color: white;"> or Soviet, (and later Chinese), efforts at agricultural collectivism spring to mind. The question becomes, what drives much of this ideology? Where are the rationale checks that should prevent our leaders from pressing the self destruct button? Two observed tendencies in neuroscience seem to hold some form of explanation.</span><br />
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The first of these tendencies is that noted by Cognitive Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his recent book: <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/7-9780374275631-5">Thinking, Fast and Slow</a></i>. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for <a href="http://www.math.mcgill.ca/vetta/CS764.dir/judgement.pdf">proving (along with his now late collaborator, Amos Tversky)</a>, that people do not make rationale decisions under uncertain conditions, particularily in markets (market rationality has long been regarded as a necessary condition for markets to function by many economists). <span style="background-color: white;">Kahneman</span><span style="background-color: white;"> notes that our thinking is determined by what he calls two systems. System 1, which is our instinctual, immediate response tends to predominate, while System 2, which is our rationale decision making system, has to be cajoled or forced to activate. Because of this, though we tend to delude ourselves into believing that we are rationale actors, instead, we tend to make most of our decisions based on immediate, emotional or intuitive reasoning rather than using reason. As a result, the types of ideas that are likely to appeal to us are those that seem to hold a form of intuitive logic. We are very poor at thinking statistically and as a result, we have a hard time of making decisions in the face of data. As a result, ideas that may appeal on emotional grounds but be difficult to verify via data have greater pull societally. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Kahnemans work also indicates why planning, and particularily social planning, are so difficult for us as a species. It explains why Sir Peter Hall's wonderful history of planning policy, <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/7-9780631232520-3">Cities of Tomorrow</a></i>, can almost be read as a history of failed ideas and why necessary actions, such as the development of a comprehensive climate management plan, or even some system of governance to comprehensively manage resources is likely beyond us as a species. Sadly, how we make decisions and engage in planning seems to further make a case for a deeply Malthusian view of the world and society. In the face of our cognitive inabilities to engage in long effective range planning, we act as little more than bacteria, actively overusing resources until such a point that we manage to make the environment we operate in sceptic to ourselves. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/14/daniel-kahneman-psychologist">As Kahneman himself laments</a>, despite all the work his on the subject, he has been unable to dramatically change the way he intuits the world and is as susceptible to over-use or over-dependency on System 1 thinking as the rest of us.</span></div>
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The second notable explanation for our tendency towards persisting with magical thinking comes from the researchers Brenda Nyhan and Jason Reifler. In their study, <i><a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf">When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions</a></i>, Nyah and Reifler look at what is called the "verification bias" and its impact on political thinking. The verification bias indicates that when given data, no matter how compelling, that contradicts a strongly held viewpoint, rather than rationality integrate this data into our understanding of the world and use it to change our beliefs, we instead have a tendency to simply reject the data and then use this act of rejection to actually <i>strengthen</i> our initial underlying misconception. As a result, many political arguments are intractable even when one side may have a factual basis for believing what they do, while the other operates solely on conjecture. This tendency appears to render much meaningful behavior change impossible. As a result, new fields have spring up, <span style="background-color: white;">including that of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_marketing">community-based social marketing</a><span style="background-color: white;"> dedicated to finding alternative means of </span><span style="background-color: white;">subverting an embedded ideology. While efforts can be successful, they frequently involve dramatically changing the nature of the discussion around a given issue and can have <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/18/5/429.short">mixed</a> <a href="http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.26.021304.144610?journalCode=publhealth">success</a>. That said, the approach by no means guarantees results and calls for cultivating agents within given ideological communities who are receptive to change in order to cultivate different beliefs within that wider community. This can, in some instances, be seen as manipulative.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">The neurological fallacies outlined above appear to be inextricably linked to how our minds function. As a result, there appears to be something innately human in attempting to intuit the world around us while rejecting unwelcome truths. There is a reason, after all, that Aristotle and Plato are the fathers of modern Western philosophy while uber-rationalists such as David Hume and Karl Popper seem to inhabit a lower spot in the pantheon. It also seems to explain why we will continue to make decisions about society strongly linked to ideological belief systems rather than developing true data driven public policy. The question becomes, will sufficient self-awareness of these limitations result in dramatic changes in how we see the world? In light of human history thus far, it would represent a wildly optimistic wager.</span></div>
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</div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-56804284148923780542012-01-08T10:46:00.000-08:002012-07-16T19:00:01.269-07:00In Praise of Sublime Frequencies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I recently stumbled on this <a href="http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/10/25/no-sleep-till-beirut-a-conversation-with-alan-bishop-by-brandon-stosuy/">interview</a> with Alan Bishop from the sadly now defunct <i>Arthur Magazine</i>. Alan is probably best known for founding, along with his brother (guitar genius) Sir Richard Bishop and drummer Charles Gocher, the seminal group the <i>Sun City Girls</i>. The Sun City Girls were insufferable punks from Arizona who enjoyed taking the piss and played an unpredictable mixture Arabic, Asian, Gamelan, hardcore punk, and free jazz, (or occasionally incredibly sloppy covers of classic rock numbers) depending on how their modds. The SCGs came to a sad end when the groups when Gocher died of a mysterious illness, leaving Richard to his solo career and allowing Alan to focus on his other love: recording other people's music.<br />
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Alan Bishop (along with his brother, Richard) founded the label <i><a href="http://sublimefrequencies.com/">Sublime Frequencies</a>,</i> which periodically issues what can best be called travel soundtracks. They will record stuff they heard in markets, right of the radio and elsewhere and then walk around accosting the locals or anyone who will listen until they figure out who recorded what, and where they can find more. The label has put out everything from Tuareg music from northern Niger to Burmese pop music to Syrian wedding music to North Korean radio. Suffice it to say, they tend to capture stuff that no one else in the West is listening to. The labels' <i>Group Inerane </i>release: <i>Guitars From Agadez Vol. 1</i> is a burst of seemingly impossibly loud guitars, hand clapping, feedback and aggression that makes Black Flag sound like Pat Boone.<br />
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What I think is great about Sublime Frequencies is that they edit bizarre and exotic stuff in a completely non-Orientalist way. The music is not treated as fetish properties or overly scholarly documents but rather as a collection of sounds presented within the context that they were (a) heard and (b) aspects of the culture they emerged from. The label does this without losing its sense of humour. When song names are unknown (which is frequently the case), the label invents their own, often irreverent but still descriptive English titles. The liner notes also frequently make intuitive sense, though would never be the type of narrative expressed by ethno musicologists or most reissue labels. For example, Alan Bishop's notes to<i> Princess Nicotine: Folk And Pop Sounds Of Myanmar</i>: </div>
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How do they do it? Are they smarter? Are they better? How can it be ignored or denied? How is it possible that one of the most unique, perfectly composed and performed, intense and awe-inspiring musical legacies the world has ever known is looming north of the equator physically tucked-between world cultural giants India, China, and Thailand, without more than a whisper from ethnomusicologists or those who define themselves as “purveyors of world music”? Not only are the roots of this music unique, but so are the results after incorporating outside instrumentation from modern colonial and (unavoidable) international influence. What the Burmese have done with a piano is so precise in the adaptation to their existing form and melody that one would think they invented it. Burmese music has a very distinct sound and whatever instrument is assimilated into its core only seems to magnify the original intent without depending upon outside ideas relating to each component utilized.</blockquote>
And a clip from the music described below:<br />
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Or from the liner notes to the Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra compilation:</div>
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The equator runs through only ten countries on earth and I bet that you cannot name them all without consulting a map. Indonesia is one of them and the only nation in Asia with the equatorial stripe impaling it. There are so many different cultures spread-out on this chain of islands that it would take several lifetimes to experience them all properly. Within this umbrella of diversity is one of the world's richest and most dazzling sound museums.</blockquote>
In a way, what is being achieved with Sublime Frequencies is something very much akin to what Alan Lomax was trying to do: namely to document various musical forms, stemming from sources both folk and professional. Like Lomax, Sublime Frequencies is a vehicle for exposure to new musical sounds and ideas from people who are genuine enthusiasts for the music. The judgements are left to the listener. Further, Alan Bishop appears to be well aware of the political dimensions that music can take on, and specifically the political dimensions behind many of the SF releases.<br />
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An example of this can be found in the quotation below. Alan Bishop is discussing a couple of (then) recent compilations of music from North Korea and Iraq that the label had decided to release following Bush's 'Axis of Evil' Speech. Where questioned about whether people would obviously add political anecdote to their discussions of these discs, Bishop responded: </div>
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We don’t worry about that. It is what it is. Everybody plays the role of an unqualified judge, so all that is routine now. When people start worrying about what other people will say about their work, they are dead and successfully under hypnotic control. Most people are not qualified to even discuss politics because they mimic what any dolt could hear from pundits on television. They are mimics, not free thinkers.</blockquote>
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We can see this continued engagement with representing aspects of musical culture from other Countries the US remains at odds with. A recent SF release features surf pop instrumentals from Pakistan in the 60s and 70s:<br />
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The type of music that Sublime Frequencies releases is not necessarily going to appeal to everyone - a lot of it has been released because it consciously sounds alien to Western audiences. That aside, it is impossible to deny the quality of much of it and it is great to see these musical ideas made available.<br />
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The final clip, below is from the Syrian wedding singer Omar Souleyman's live album. Souleyman plays a combination of traditional Syrian folk music and electronic music. His long travelling group includes an electric Saz player (a middle eastern string instrument - sort of a compact Oud) a keyboardist with sampler, and a poet and writer who whispers poetry into Souleyman's ear (while in performance) which Souleyman then transposes into song lyrics live.</div>
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</div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-14191848948923663402011-12-15T22:35:00.000-08:002012-07-15T11:28:56.988-07:00The Hitch in Memoriam<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It is often tragedy, outrage or joy that conspire to force one to write. Writing at it's best is a compulsion, with words pouring out in torrid waves and smashing onto the page. Words can be weapons, far deadlier than any sword, or they can be tools of diplomacy, the well crafted essay shifting the Zeitgeist and molding it as though it were something malleable. Very few writers can be said to truly matter - to have the necessary brain and talent to shift debate. This can be said all the more so for political writers: pamphleteers - the ill fancied bastard children of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and Orwell. Those that can make a difference are few and far between. <br />
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Christopher Hitchens was one such writer. For him, to write was a compulsion -an almost animal response to the world in all of it's joys, sufferings and inequities. At his best, Hitchens seemed able to meld tragedy, outrage and joy into a singular kinetic whole - a fire breathing prophet one moment, a demure coiner of witticism the next. The man could take complicated political, social or literary issues - score a cheap though frighteningly funny joke on the back of them - and make an often controversial point that forced one to come to recalibrate ones belief system. I certainly can't say that I agreed with him on everything, but Hitchens served as one of the architects of my intellectual foundation and I will remain indebted to him.<br />
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Hitchens liked to encourage the young, and clearly liked it better when one disagreed with him. The man clearly lived for intellectual debate and rarely lost. His skill at winning debates, and his ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - even in those rare occasions where the facts seemed to stand against him probably earned him as many supporters as critics. Yet there he was, always there with a strikingly original one-liner and an opinion. Always an opinion.<br />
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I had the pleasure of meeting him twice. The first time was a drunken flurry of conversation and ideas - the man seemingly unfazed by mega doses of Johnny Walker as we, sitting on Monona terrace in Madison, Wisconsin one cold October afternoon managed to polish off the better part of a bottle of the stuff. The man was magnanimous with both his time and his whisky (although he did appear to drink most of the bottle with almost no debilitating effect whatsoever, while I was rapidly in my cups, so to speak). I still remember looking at him, even then, and thinking that he looked like he was made of some kind of parchment - the cigarette smoke and whisky clinging to his skin and infusing him with the essence of the pages of a book that he lived to turn. Despite the omni present booze and smokes, it was the love of the printed word that always was the most telling and that was perhaps his deepest addiction. Still he was no sedentary creature confined to a library - Hitchens was someone who exuded energy and who wrung from life everything it could give him and then some.<br />
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I met him again a couple of years later on a rainy night in Portland, he saw me in a crowd, astoundingly remembered me, served a refutation to the one point I felt I had bested him at years earlier and remarked how the dreary Portland rain overjoyed him because it reminded him of his boyhood in Portsmouth. Stubborn to the end, but stubborn with purpose. From all accounts, the man was not always lovely to deal with, and he proved unwilling to admit to any error of judgement when it came to Iraq. I will one-day have to write a longer essay about Hitchens' uneasy relationship with the Left, his flirtations with neo-conservatism and the rest. Despite this, even where I disagreed with Hitchens, I tended to respect his rationale for believing what he believed.<br />
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While his death seemed eminent for some time - very few people walk away from Stage IV Esophageal cancer (a malady which even if detected in it's early stages is often considered a death sentence) - Hitchens' death still feels like a shock. This may be because, for so long, he seemed to cheat the odds with his apetites for self destruction. Despite his diagnosis, part of me seemed to hold on to the belief that he would somehow cheat the odds and live to be 100 - if anything as an act of spite designed to give the incredulous a bloody nose. Sadly it was not to be. Wherever you are when you read this, raise a drink to Christopher Hitchens. The world will be a drearier, sadder and most importantly, a less interesting place as a result of his passing.<br />
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<br /></div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-43589316128795551722011-10-26T22:16:00.000-07:002011-12-16T12:27:20.470-08:00Obama Paints Occupy Wall Street in Awfully Broad Strokes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Let us take pause for a moment and consider what may be the most important, and most missed point that Obama made during his visit to the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2011/oct/26/barack-obama-jay-leno-tonight?INTCMP=SRCH">Jay Leno show the other day</a>: Obama views the Occupy Wall Street Movement as being equivalent to the Tea Party.<br />
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To wit quoth the President:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Look, people are frustrated. And that frustration expresses itself in a lot of different ways. It expressed itself in the Tea Party, it's expressing itself in Occupy Wall Street ... Everybody needs to understand that the American people feel that no one is looking out for them right now.</blockquote>So basically, both are manifestations of frustration - but in painting them with the same broad stroke it reinforces with a false extremist left vs extremist right dichotomy. <br />
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The reality of course is that Occupy Wall Street is that it is the first nominally leftist protest movement in a while, and has still yet to find it's principle cause, however is a means of for a lot of people who have been divested of a real future of systematic economic and social corruption to express their problems with that system. It is a form of political civil society in the vain of John Stuart Mill and with strong <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Roots-of-Wall/129428">academic</a> roots. The Tea Party meanwhile are a bunch of wealthy and middle income white people who want to pretend they are an aggrieved minority and drive back what little is left of the social state to satisfy their own short-term interests.<br />
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I know it's an election cycle and all, but come on Obama, you can at least pretend to be part of the left.</div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-81386283266185566332011-10-19T12:37:00.000-07:002011-10-19T15:09:49.288-07:00Occupy Wall Street and Civil Society<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<i>"Anger cannot be dishonest."</i> - Marcus Aurelius<br />
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This morning I woke up thinking I may be allowing the single most important moral imperative of my generation pass me by. Though I have been vocally supportive of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and have attended one in Portland – my lack of more in depth engagement with said protests is telling. My difficulty with engaging has more to do with a personal discomfort with mob mentality – I think sloganeering can be important to drive group solidarity - I just find it unpalatable to utter them. I also share <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts">Adam Curtis’ discomfort</a> with individualist and heavily decentralized driven protest movements, as the lack of predefined goal and rationale dilutes message and allows for the easy infiltration and misdirection of a movement by opportunists and the nefarious. This was the very problem that is presently seeing the declared advances of the so-called 'Arab Spring' <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/bogged-down-libya/">rolled</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amir-madani/arab-spring_b_1016269.html">back</a>, while <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/27/world/la-fg-egypt-political-battle-20110627">elections</a> <a href="http://english.ahram.org.eg/~/NewsContent/2/8/24564/World/Region/Tunisias-Islamists-warn-of-election-fraud-risk.aspx">prove</a> problematic in many of the involved countries.<br />
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At the same time, I feel that the re-engagement with ideas and the venting of anger and frustration at the appropriate targets is a necessary. The recklessness of Wall Street in particular and how the United States has conducted capitalism in particular has endangered the retirements and futures of much of it's population. The gradual regression of middle class incomes against inflation (something I talked about <a href="http://thenewinternationalism.blogspot.com/2011/08/definition-of-insanity.html">here</a>) further intensifies matters. Why more ire is not being directed at the Obama administration - an administration which may even be more corporatist than that of the administration directly before it - speaks more about wishing to avoid feelings of culpability on the part of Wall Street protesters than anything. That said, it is time that this country began to look at what unregulated capitalism has wrought - both in terms of human and environmental costs borne elsewhere. I agree with Chris Hedges in his book "<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9781568586441-7">The Death of the Liberal Class</a>" when he points to the fact that many supposed liberals have been co-opted by money and the capitalist system and have become apologists for powerful economic interests that practice institutional violence against the poor. The policies of the Obama presidency is clearly symptomatic as is the branding as an extremist of anyone who is willing to speak out about the disadvantaged in terms of economic policy. This is also clear in the terror of third-party candidates and the vilification of Ralph Nader as a spoiler, despite the 10 million registered Democrats that voted for Bush in the 2000 election is further proof that Nader is one of the few still willing to express ideas that run counter to what the modern American liberal consensus has sold-out to.<br />
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I think where the protests are most successful is in that they have returned, to some extent, conversations about Capitalism and most importantly social class to the fore. Thus, we have the rebirth of Marxist analysis of economic and political systems without the determinist trappings of applied Marxism. Marx may have been wrong about a good many things, however he at least presented a tangible counter ideology to free-market capitalism, which has proven itself a force similarly virulent to the old Soviet Command economies. The triumph of singular ideology is always going to lead to extremes and human misery because ideologies can never explain the complete picture and often, by nature, willing to sacrifice human beings at the expense of self-reaffirming. Pragmatism and competing notions of how to structure economies and governmental systems tend to lead to better outcomes in that they encourage us to look at data and develop systems that most effectively serve humanity in it's variety.<br />
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</div><div>This dialogue is crucially important as so much of our culture has become commoditized. The death of Steve Jobs and his subsequent veneration says it all. Steve Jobs was an incredibly skilled salesman who managed to more completely integrate the seamlessness of consumerism and identity politics built around products into our lives. Instead, he seems to be weirdly regarded by many as a singular force for good in the world, despite his <a href="http://gawker.com/5847344/what-everyone-is-too-polite-to-say-about-steve-jobs">repeatedly documented</a> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/10/10/steve-jobs-was-a-jerk-good-for-him/">unkindness and unpleasantness</a>. That so many people seem to feel so strongly about someone who effectively sought to sell them more firmly on a consumerist lifestyle and asked them to define themselves through products (no matter how well designed) should be seen as chilling. Instead people seem to have expressed genuine loss - which speaks to the extent of Jobs' success. This has of course manifested itself in my generation with <a href="http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html">Hipsters</a> - a vapid leisure class whose sole rationale for existing seems to be to define themselves by insuring that their consumer choices are cooler than anyone else. They, like the recent consumerist driven looting in North London, are the end-result of late Capitalism. Creatures that exist not to create, but only to destroy and perpetually consume.<br />
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Valid questions are being asked, in one form or another, by the Occupy Wall Street movement. These include not just questions about the Free-market capitalism, but also about the roll of higher education, whether institutions should be allowed to charge the usurious rates that condemn students to decades or even lifetimes of indebtedness to financial institutions and why a country of the affluence of the United States cannot create living wage jobs or provide adequate health care or affordable housing for much of it's population. Whether this movement will inspire the appropriate degree of terror in politicians to shift thinking somewhat in Washington or if entrenched financial interests will find convenient means to undermine change remains to be seen. Economic ideology has been skewered so far to one-side of the debate that the centre may be beginning to come apart. This is cause of hope as it may prove to drive an eventual restoration of civil society altogether. </div></div></div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-80353786548045183312011-10-01T18:45:00.000-07:002011-10-01T18:47:57.931-07:00Music Parable # 8: Stravinsky Encounters Charlie Parker<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
1951<br /><br />At the Birdland club in New York Charlie Parker is onstage playing the tune "Koko" and incorporates the main theme from Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s "the Firebird" into his solo. Stravinsky, who is visiting New York, is sitting in the front row and spills his scotch in ecstasy.<br /><br />Parker had tried to contact Stravinsky previously while on a tour of West Germany and had purportedly been playing bits of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” in his solos, but before the New York club date, he had never managed to connect with the Russian composer.<br /><br />Stravinsky would later go on to try to write Orchestral jazz pieces. They sound a lot like Gil Evans arrangements.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #eeeecc; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><br />
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-17931562595257405412011-09-19T17:22:00.000-07:002011-09-19T17:22:39.571-07:00Music Parable # 7: Joe Strummer 'Runs Out' on The Clash<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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1982<br />
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It is April and The Clash have just finished recording what was to become their biggest selling album “Combat Rock.” The band are gearing up for a tour in support of the album, but are mired by internal strife. Drummer Topper Headon has a crippling addiction to heroin and is being told to either clean up or leave by the rest of the group. Meanwhile guitarist Mick Jones and front man Joe Strummer are locked in a battle for power for the ideological and existential future of the band. Manager Bernard Rhodes decides that what is needed is a publicity stunt to help sell the new album, and hopes the success of the new album may help bring internal cohesion to the band. It is decided that Joe Strummer would “disappear” for a few days, while checking in with Bernie throughout this period.<br />
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Strummer took this to heart, and really did disappear. He went to Paris for three weeks, without once contacting the rest of the band or Rhodes. When asked what he had been doing upon his return Strummer notes, “I grew a beard and ran the Paris marathon.” It was not Strummer’s first marathon - he had run the London marathon in 1981 and would run it again in 1983. His training regimen apparently consisted of simply drinking 10 pints of beer the night before the race.<br />
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The Clash would eventually collapse after the firing of Mick Jones by Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon. Headon had already been given the sack and the band had toured with their original drummer Terry Chimes throughout 1983. Strummer and Simonon tried to resuscitate the Clash with two replacement guitarists and a back to basics approach, but this failed miserably. Strummer would spend years in the Wilderness, doing soundtrack work here and there, before reemerging in the late 90s to some success with his new group, the Mescaleros. Jones would front Big Audio Dynamite. Strummer would die of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect at the age of 50 in December of 2002. It could have killed him at any point during his life. Strummer and Jones reunited at an impromptu gig only a week before Strummer’s death in support of higher wages for British firefighters. Both said that the old magic was still there.<br />
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-83076027423245828162011-09-18T16:26:00.000-07:002011-09-18T16:26:41.553-07:00The Final Frontier of Absurdity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For those that believed Dubai to be the final frontier in human hubris, <i>The Guardian</i> has put together a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/27/space-hotel-rich-thrill-world">handy profile</a> of holiday the ultra wealthy, the flagship projects being the 'space hotel' and new 'artificial countries'. The latte of these described as: "billionaires may soon be able to buy their own artificial countries – built in international waters on oil rig-type platforms – where they can indulge in their dictatorial fantasies." These artificial countries in particular seem to have taken a page (a-la the failed, '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(archipelago)">World Project</a>') from Dubai's already particularily bulbous book of projects that only those with far too much money and far too little sense might initiate.<br />
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The Guardian article continues:<br />
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Peter Thiel – who co-founded PayPal and who was one of Facebook's earliest backers – has revealed that he wants to create communities that would be run according to extreme laissez-faireideals. According to Details magazine, he wants to build artificial islands – based on oil-rig designs – that would be a "kind of floating Petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage and few restrictions on weapons." A billionaire's dream venture, in other words.</blockquote>
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Indeed, the desire to build ones own floating oil-rig country strikes one as equal parts Machiavelli, PT Barnum and Ayn Rand at her most adolescent. The opulence and sheer wrong headedness of these endeavors has now left Dubai looking sheepish by comparison. Alas, with Dubai financially on the brink, how can they ever fight back against the opulence on offer. Is a solid gold pyramid suspended above the desert via maglev too much to ask? Come on Dubai: the world needs you to rise to the challenge.<br />
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-22131793874586337012011-09-18T15:59:00.000-07:002011-09-18T15:59:10.765-07:00Music Parable # 6: Elvis Costello's Unfortunate Outburst<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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1979<br />
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Elvis Costello is completely drunk at the bar at the Columbus, Ohio, Holiday Inn. He is sitting with Stephen Stills and journalist Bonnie Bromlett. Stills is deeply annoying Costello who in turn is going out of his way to be obnoxious in order to offend Stills. Stills keeps banging on about old soul musicians. In order to get Stills’ goat, Costello refers to Costello to James Brown as a "jive-ass nigger", then upped the ante by pronouncing Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant nigger". Bromlett is appalled by Costello's language and writes up the exchange in her column igniting a tinder box of media accusations directed at Costello.<br />
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Costello almost immediately apologized for the incident in the cold light of morning, indicating that he had only said what he had in order to annoy Stills and because he had been drunk. Costello pointed to his work with Rock Against Racism, and swiftly recorded 'Get Happy!!!': an album of largely obscure soul covers that went far to demonstrate Costello’s long-standing love of soul music – but controversy over the incident continued to follow Costello. In a Rolling Stone interview with Greil Marcus, Costello recounts an incident when Bruce Thomas was introduced to Michael Jackson as Costello's bass player and Jackson said, "I don't dig that guy..."<br />
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Costello remained mortified by the incident and declined an offer to meet Charles as a result of long standing guilt and embarrassment - though Charles himself had apparently long-since forgiven Costello ("Drunken talk isn't meant to be printed in the paper"). Costello’s ongoing championing of black music, from soul to jazz to blues would eventually see the incident put behind him.<br />
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One of the songs on Costello's 'Get Happy!!!' album, entitled ‘Riot Act’, deals with the incident.<br />
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Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-73979368300730521912011-08-30T12:41:00.000-07:002012-07-11T12:49:47.384-07:00Music Parable # 5: Keith Richards and Muddy Waters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The Rolling Stones are recordings sessions at the legendary Chess Studios in Chicago. The label owner, Leonard Chess, tells the stones that there is someone who really wants to meet them. The Stones are taken around the corridor and into one of the studio rooms which is being painted. There they find Muddy Waters, paint brush in hand and white paint rolling down his face touching up the roof of the studio. Waters looks to at the Stones, laughs and says, “I like what you boys are doing with my music.”<br />
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Muddy Waters (born McKinley Morgansfield), like most black blues musicians, did not sell many records until the late 60s when a white blues audience, having their attention drawn by white rock groups like the Stones and the Beatles began to listen to the original versions of the blues classics that were the staple of many early rock bands. At the time that the Stones first met him, Waters would occasionally take odd jobs, when not working, to try to make ends meet. He lived in a very modest house in a working class neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. Waters, along with Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Little Walter and a score of others would be the first to electrify the blues, effectively inventing the template that rock and roll would be built upon.<br />
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Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards would worship Waters - the Stones even taking their name from the Waters song "Rollin' Stone". Richards and Waters would eventually become good friends and Richards would actively advocate for Waters' music citing it as one of his main influences for picking up the guitar in the first place. Richards notes that whenever the Stones were in Chicago, he would stay with Muddy and his wife, where he fondly remembers that: “Every morning, you would be pulled out of bed, thrown in the bath tub, and shoved full of food – whether you wanted it or not.”</span><br />
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</span></div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3409927583406575169.post-25725843164433442812011-08-15T11:56:00.000-07:002011-08-15T11:56:26.345-07:00Music Parable # 4: How Thelonious Monk met Harry Colomby<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
1955<br />
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High School music teacher Harry Colomby (who’s brother Jules worked as a recording engineer for Signal Records) was involved in the jazz scene in New York. He was watching Art Blakey & the Jazz Messnager play. Blakey was to come to Colomby’s high school the next day and play a concert for the students. Colomby had come to insure that Blakey knew the way to the school and the time that he was scheduled to appear. It was already 1:30 AM, and Colomby had to teach a class the next day at 7:30. At around this time, Thelonious Monk walked into the club. Colomby had met him before, but it took someone yelling “Hey Monk!” for him to make the connection. It took Monk a couple of minutes to recognize Colomby, but once he did, he asked Colomby if he could give him a ride home. Colomby said, okay, but that he had to be up at 6:30. Monk assured him that he just wanted to see Blakey for a couple of minutes, so once Blakey’s set had ended, they both went up to see him.<br />
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Monk proceeded to involve himself in a lengthy conversation with Blakey, much to the distress of Colomby. Finally, Monk tried to draw Colomby into the conversation:<br />
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“You’re a s school teacher?” Monk asked. “Yeah,” replied Colomby, “And I have to get up very early. I’ll probably only get an hour or two of sleep.” He added with a bit of a laugh. “You don’t need much sleep,” offered Monk, “Really, I haven’t slept for two days myself. You feel more alert with less sleep.”<br />
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Finally, Monk was ready to go at around 3:00 AM. As he was driving him home, Colomby noted that Monk was his favorite musician. Monk wasn’t receiving the accolades that he would later, but Colomby stated that he should just keep doing his thing and that he would make it big eventually. Monk seemed to like this, it was what he was planning on doing anyways, and by the end of the car trip had hired Colomby to become his manager.<br />
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Colomby would remain Monk’s manager for the rest of his musical career. Monk would gain enormous national prestige in 1964 when he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, one of only five jazz musicians to do so in the history of the publication. Colomby always referred to Monk as "a man of great personal courage and great dignity."<br />
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</div>Alex Deleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12829454896859341159noreply@blogger.com0