Only a Blockhead

They occupy that we may be inspired

I marched against the war in Iraq. I was in Tokyo. There were millions of us around the world. We were ignored. The war went ahead.

I expect governments and corporate bodies are similarly waiting for Occupy Wall Street to go away.

The Occupy movement should inspire the rest of us to discuss what kind of society we want to live in. It’s utopian to expect government/corporations to bow out and let us set up a new order. But perhaps there’s a purity to idealism that makes it worth talking about.

Here’s what I’d support for starters:

One common suggestion: income taxed at the necessary level to provide public services, and food, shelter, education and healthcare as a right for all. People who want more than a bare minimum will choose to work/pay taxes.

One less common idea: Jobs paid according to their desirability/popularity: for example, if more people apply to be university teachers than people apply to be cleaners, then teachers' pay is lowered and cleaners' pay is raised to the point that the popularity levels out. The desirability of making a difference to a classroom of students rather than making a difference to the cleanliness of a bathroom will still inspire some of us to go to school to be qualified as teachers. And the higher wages of cleaners will make that calling a desirable one with its own dignity and status.

I’m open to negotiation on all of this. If not in the comments of this blog, then with friends over our next beer.

Meanwhile: Power to the people.

--Julian

Who is Ai Weiwei?

My review of Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants is up at the Japan Times.  You can read it here.

Ironically the review came out while I was traveling in China.  I conducted, during my trip, an entirely unreliable survey and found that two young women, the sort who move to Shanghai from the country and are hustling to make it--and include among their hustling a job leading decadent Westerners on bicycle-tours of the city--had never heard of Ai, and thought, at first, that I was talking about an actress or singer named Weiwei.  Two other Chinese women I spoke with, the sort who have beautiful apartments in the city, spend mornings doing yoga,  and take decadent Westerners out to dinner at fantastic restaurants had also never heard of him.  This doesn't make Ai less of a hero, but it does remind us how tightly the Chinese government controls information.

--David

Taming our wild kingdom

There are few things as stimulating as someone challenging my most cherished beliefs. A recent example was Stewart Brand arguing for nuclear power, GM crops, and megacities (Whew! Three cherished beliefs in one go). At most, I’m won over and develop a new position on the subject. At the least, processing the counter-arguments leaves me with a more deeply reasoned and clearer opinion on the issue at hand.

 It happened again this week: I read an Observer book review of Renata Salecl’s The Tyranny of Choice.  My life is based on working toward happiness. Just the other day I finished a book by someone doing the same: a New York writer who spent a year exploring who she really was, making choices about how to spent her time, and disciplining herself to follow through. The result: more happiness. But Salecl writes about another person’s eerily similar project.“Using… the advice contained in… self-help books, she set about cleaning her home, losing weight, becoming a better partner and parent and generally cultivating a more serene approach to existence.” But for her, the result was less contentment plus panic attacks. Too much choice, and the imperative to do better, says Salecl, bring anxiety and dissatisfaction rather than freedom.

 And, darn it--it’s stimulating but also a little galling--if I wasn’t faced with the chance to test yet another of my bedrock beliefs this week. I hold that gainful employment should be a human right. Right? No, argues Douglas Rushkoff in a CNN.com opinion piece. Given that we collectively already have more than enough “stuff,” and technology is eroding the need for humans to produce more of it, “Are jobs obsolete?”

 Rushkoff says that the fundamental problem isn’t finding work for people. It’s an issue of how we organize ourselves. Communism didn’t work (it “sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised”), but the current alternative--libertarian capitalism—is swelling the suffering underclass. The policy toward the have-nots appears to be “cut social services along with their jobs and hope they fade into the distance.”

 Salecl, according to the Guardian review, “argues that capitalist society uses the ideology of choice to keep the wheels turning and also to safeguard its very existence: if we’re wrapped up in our own private desires, we have no time to think about choosing a new, improved way of structuring society.” Which is fine, except I think my happiness depends on everyone else being happy as well.

 Do you have any ideas for a better way to organize society?

 --Julian

Is Sanity Sufficient?

In a well-argued and eloquent post Chris Clarke explains why he's not planning to vote for Obama in 2012.  As part of that post he outlines his "bottom line" in determining who to vote for.  He writes:

In order for me to vote for any candidate for office, that candidate:

• must neither openly nor tacitly support the use of torture in any circumstance.
• must pledge to defend women’s access to abortion against any threatened limitation, whether that obstruction be political, religious or economic.
• must pledge to oppose the enshrining in law of social discrimination against any group of people based on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, language, religious belief or lack thereof, disability, social class, or other arbitrary division.
• must agree that the rich – who have after all profited most from the country’s natural wealth, infrastructure and financial policy – ought to pay their fair share of taxes.
• must at least hold as an aspiration the provision of a tolerable standard of living to all people in the US, including shelter, food, clothing, education, health care and access to communication, regardless of the individual’s ability to pay.
• must support the continued existence of labor unions.
• must pledge not to punish individual migrants for the failures of the country’s immigration policy.
• must at least pledge to value the ecological integrity of the United States’ landscapes over the possibility that profit might be extracted from them.
• must possess at least a high-school level understanding of science, especially regarding but not limited to crucial topics such as climate change and evolutionary biology.
• must oppose any interference in the routine and proper teaching of science in our public schools by religious groups.
• must abide by the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

Makes sense to me, except for the, you know, not being able to vote for anyone thing.

In discussing this with several friends it becomes clear that for a lot of people the bottom line is simply that the candidate not be, a la Bachmann and Perry, nuts.  If that criterion is met, a little torture, a little trashing of the environment, and so on, can be forgiven.

So, what's your bottom line?

—David

Not only the poor

Liberal Conspiracy blogger Sunny Hundal, arguing against claims that "only poor people go looting," says "rich people do go out looting; they just do so in other ways."

(via BBC Live Text)

--Julian

The Song that Should be the American National Anthem

 

but for the traditionalists out there:

 

—David

Gender is Dead! Long Live Gender!

Perhaps this summer, while munching your edamame and sipping your Suruga Bay (or the local equivalents) you'll enjoy reading Alva Noë, a philosopher who writes on NPR's Cosmos and Culture blog.  I always find what he has to say stimulating.  From his most recent entry:

If biology is the measure of all things, then many of the categories we use to group ourselves into kinds of person — man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, professor, cheerleader — are, in fact, unreal. You don't find them in nature as it is apart from our attitudes and beliefs about that nature. At the same time, what could be more real than the way we experience ourselves as being?

Question: Would you want to free yourself from your self-categories, if you could?

Read the whole post here.

—David

On

- NC Tate

Snoop

David Simon, creator of The Wire, writes with typical intelligence about the arrest of Felicia Pearson, the actress who gave a brilliant performance as Snoop in that epic:

In an essay published two years ago in Time magazine, the writers of The Wire made the argument that we believe the war on drugs has devolved into a war on the underclass, that in places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring and where the educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners, a legal campaign to imprison our most vulnerable and damaged citizens is little more than amoral. And we said then that if asked to serve on any jury considering a non-violent drug offense, we would move to nullify that jury's verdict and vote to acquit. Regardless of the defendant, I still believe such a course of action would be just in any case in which drug offenses—absent proof of violent acts—are alleged.

Simon's whole piece is here.

—David

Ronald and Nancy Reagan on Drugs

 

--David