Category: Society

Existence and greatness

I commented before on the home secretary’s announcement of a plan to require companies to report on the number of foreign employees they have. Just to keep an eye on things, of course. Information is a good thing, natch. I missed this quote:

She justified that policy on the following grounds: “The state must draw a sharp line of distinction between those who, as members of the nation, are the foundation and support of its existence and greatness, and those who are domiciled in the state, simply as earners of their livelihood there.”

Far be it from me to boast that I am supporting Britain’s greatness, but surely I am somehow contributing to its existence? They don’t seem to mind taking my taxes, anyway, and they’re awfully keen to get their children into Oxford in order to be taught by domiciled livelihood-earners like me.

Locker rooms and Trump’s arena of masculinity

Among the many weird things about the Trump groping scandal is the defense of this vile banter as “locker-room speech”, by a man who avers that the closest thing he does to exercise is public speaking. But then, this is of a piece with his contention that he is a better military strategist than America’s generals. There’s nothing unusual about insecure plutocrats trying to associate themselves with conventional symbols of masculinity: buying sports teams, military medals, weapons, military-style vehicles. I imagine the dominance displays of business, being almost entirely verbal and symbolic, must leave a nagging hole of insecurity in the core of your average wealthy psychopath.

I am reminded of a book I read many years ago, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality and the Meaning of Sex, about the role that sports play in the performance of masculinity in the US. It’s pretty far off my usual reading, but I picked it up off the new-book display at the Lamont Library at Harvard, and it was extremely helpful to me in trying to understand why people are so interested in sports (which had always mystified me), and why people are so interested in masculinity (ditto). Well, it didn’t get me very far. I mean, sociologists and psychologists like to talk about “fragile males”, constantly under threat because “masculinity” needs to be performed anew or it is lost, unlike femininity which (in this account) is an inherent quality. (Tell that to a mid-40s Hollywood actress…) Continue reading “Locker rooms and Trump’s arena of masculinity”

‘Euphemism’ as euphemism

Journalist Yoni Applebaum of The Atlantic describes asking delegates at the Republican Convention whether they really wanted a victorious President Trump to “lock up” his opponent. Some gave variants of “hell yes!” One, slightly abashed, said

the chant was “a euphemism for ‘hold her accountable,’” and was frustrated that the media insisted on taking it literally. 

Of course, this is the opposite of a “euphemism”, which is a polite form of words for something unpleasant. In the brave new world of Trump, “euphemism” is a euphemism for “vile and threatening exaggeration”.

It has become common for left-leaning Americans to joke about “moving to Canada” if the hated Republican wins the next presidential election. This time, in case of a Trump victory, I fear the first one across the border will need to be Hillary Clinton herself.

Encouraging discrimination

A pretty universal anti-discrimination principle in the West has long been that companies should not discriminate against workers on the basis of their national origin. Everyone with a right to live and work in the country should compete on the same basis. But now the Conservatives are pushing the opposite view, proposing to force companies to publish the number of international staff, obviously in an effort to embarrass them into not hiring foreigners in the first place. (It is up to the government to decide how many foreigners get work permits; this is about putting pressure on companies not to employ those who the government has granted the right to be here.) Myself, my partner, my children — even the younger one who was born and has lived all her life in this country — should all be discriminated against in employment.

At least they are following their own advice. According to a new report

Leading foreign academics from the LSE acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked to contribute to government work and analysis on Brexit because they are not British nationals….

One of the group is understood to be a dual national, with citizenship of both the UK and another EU member state.

Obviously you can’t expect simple British civil servants to judge the value of advice from wily foreigners. British Beliefs are Best!

When I moved to Britain nine years ago I was immediately shocked by the xenophobic tone in the press, emanating from both major parties. Unlike other countries I have lived in, where universal problems of racism and xenophobia are balanced by a near-universal sense that it is the job of responsible politicians (and responsible journalists) to oppose these dark impulses, the major parties in Britain seem to compete with each other to show that they hate immigrants the most. Occasional platitudes about racial harmony are swamped by the need to publicly bash foreigners, supposedly because it would be irresponsible to let the foreigner-bashing be taken over by dangerous demagogues. I wrote then

I can’t figure out whether the UK is the most xenophobic country I’ve ever lived in, or whether it just acts like it. On the one hand, the UK has a well-deserved reputation as a sanctuary for the persecuted and would-be persecutors temporarily out of office. On the other hand, UK politicians, who (one presumes) know better, seem to cheer themselves up when they’re feeling blue by attacking immigrants, either directly or (more commonly) by insinuation. The same is true for pillars of society like the BBC.

It’s getting worse…

All-you-can-eat

Ars Technica reports on testimony by Mediacom, a large US cable company, explaining why they should not be required to stop capping data usage:

People thus shouldn’t complain when Internet providers impose data caps and charge more when customers go over them, he wrote. “Even though virtually every other industry prices its products and services in the same way, some people think that ISPs should be the exception and run their businesses like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

“Virtually every other industry”… Yes, it’s pretty hard to think of any industry that offers all-you-can-eat buffets. Who could possibly afford to offer all-you-can-eat? It’s a fantasy.

The sound of one invisible hand clapping

There is a Rand-ian trope (or Mises-macherei) that attempts to reverse the Marxian notion that labour is the unit of economic contribution, that working people are the creators of our world, and capitalists mere parasites. The opposing view — pushed by Ayn Rand, and advocated in increasingly stark terms by right-wing politicians, is that the capitalists and managers are “job-creators”, that everything exists because of their contributions. From Adam Smith’s idea that capitalism enables the private greed to be channeled into promoting the public good, we have come to the notion that private greed is itself almost a form of charity.

The reductio ad absurdum has been provided (of course) by Donald Trump, in the less commented upon portion of his bizarre attack on the family of killed-in-action Muslim American soldier Humayun Khan. Responding to Khizr Khan’s attack “You have sacrificed nothing — and no one,” Trump said

I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.

For Trump, a rich man’s “tremendous success” is itself a sacrifice, to be matched against an ordinary man losing his child.

Brecht’s take on this question is below. I cited it in the last US presidential election as well.

Continue reading “The sound of one invisible hand clapping”

No more fun and games

2016-07-28 09.26.08I’ve been in Britain long enough to know most of the peculiar verbal overlaps between this country and my native USA, but I still tend to overlay the British words with their American meanings. So it was several years ago when I was told by my daughter’s Hebrew teacher “Today we’re going to be revising the alphabet”…

Of course, this sort of linguistic alienation can happen even within a country, in the intersection between different language registers. Thus, a number of years ago UC Berkeley put the legend “REFUSE ONLY” on its outdoor trash bins. When I saw this text, my immediate reaction was to read it as an absurdly formal version of the slogan “JUST SAY NO”.

Predicting the future of communication

I just had the thought: Who would have predicted, thirty years ago, that in 2016 bookstores would still be thriving, but video stores would have all but disappeared?

I am reminded of this essay by Isaac Asimov, “The Ancient and the Ultimate”, that I read about 1980, but was written in the early 1970s, about the future of video technology. He was at a conference on communications and society, where a speaker was praising the new technology of videocassettes, and suggesting that authors such as him would soon be tossed on the scrapheap of history. The essay speculates about possible future improvements to video technology, inferring tongue-in-cheek that the pinnacle of the technology would be attained when it had turned into books.

Health choices

From the Guardian:

In February Prof Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England,… told a parliamentary hearing: “Do as I do when I reach for my glass of wine. Think: do I want the glass of wine or do I want to raise my own risk of breast cancer? I take a decision each time I have a glass.”

Umm… Wine or cancer? Are those really the options? Seems like an easy choice to make…

Metathreats

Even in America it is illegal to attain political ends by threats of violence. But what about threats of threats of violence? From Florida:

A south Florida mosque that has served as a polling location since at least 2010 will no longer receive voters thanks to complaints and threats from local residents.

“We began receiving complaints from voters,” she said Wednesday in an email to the Post’s editorial board. “Some felt uncomfortable voting at the Islamic Center. When we received a call that indicated individuals planned to impede voting and maybe even call in a bomb threat to have the location evacuated on Election Day…

I suppose this is familiar as a kind of protection-racket negotiating stance. “We’re just having a friendly chat here. Nobody is making threats. If you want to make threats, we can also make threats, but there’s no need for any of that.”