Posted 9:52 pm by Ken

The Spite of Woo

Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Hume, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Stirner, Anton la Vey, the Marquis de Sade ... I've read at least some of the works of all of these. None of them has ever given me the faint tremor of taboo-breaking, of danger, of subversion that I feel from just glancing at the cover of a book I got for Christmas. The dust-jacket shows the contorted remains of an entity that is not quite a bird, all splayed wings and feathers and tiny teeth.

The book is Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters by Donald Prothero. It's a detailed, superbly illustrated explication of the fossil record by a professional palaeontologist, specifically written to refute - no, to expose the lies and deceits of - Young Earth Creationism and Flood Geology. There's been nothing like it since Arthur Strahler's magisterial Science and Earth History, which came down on creationism like a ton of sedimentary rock. Though accessible to beginners, it doesn't talk down, and it doesn't mince words. Prothero isn't afraid to bring out the areas of evolutionary theory that are controversial, or where there are unsolved problems. Nor does he hesitate to call what the creationists write 'lies' and 'drivel'. He points out that Christians, even otherwise fundamentalist Christians, who work as geologists for oil companies just laugh at Flood Geology. They'd never dream of using it to find oil.

Creation science is a purely destructive enterprise, like comment trolling or wiki vandalism. Its entire impact results from scrawling across the work of real scientists questions and cavils phrased in a manner just scientific-sounding enough to trouble anyone who knows nothing in detail about the field being traduced. The habit of deceit starts early:

Q: What advice would you give young-earth creationists about their future education and research in their given field?

Initially, I would suggest that they contact creation scientists in their field of interest to obtain advice as to what area to study and which university is the best from which to obtain a Ph.D. Those creation scientists can then mentor and help students while they remain silent, get the best possible degree from the best suited university for the chosen field—one that would assist future creation research.

This advice is guaranteed to damage the lives of two young people: the 'silent' student, going through the motions of acquiring a PhD with a mind firmly shut, and the genuinely interested student who isn't there, because the place they might have had - the opportunity of a lifetime, perhaps - was taken by a creationist troll.

The creationists' claim to piety deserves no more credit than their pretence at science. What can be the faith of those who cut and crush to fit this ludicrous chronology the work of the Ancient of Days?

And the frisson when I look at the book? Well, that's another story, which I've told elsewhere.

Posted 3:07 pm by Ken

the eXile does the Large Hadron Collider ...

... in its own inimitable way: At its heart, the project is a human effort to understand the most fundamental constituents of the physical universe. But it's not as boring as it sounds.

Posted 9:33 pm by Ken

What I've been doing

Two-score and seven days ago, Martin Wisse kindly listed this as one of the top five socialist blogs that are not updated enough. I don't know about socialist, but I'll take my compliments where I find them, so thanks. The lack of updating is mainly because I'm very close to finishing a novel, which has taken longer than I expected.

The Night Sessions is a crime novel set in a future Scotland (and New Zealand) (and space), about fifteen years after the end of the Faith Wars, which began in 2001 and ended in 20--. It's taken so long because (a) I made false starts on two other novels earlier this year before hitting on this one; (b)I made the mistake of spending a lot of time planning it, in what turned out to be not quite enough detail to let me sit down and just write the damn thing; (c) the theme of the story (religious terrorism in a militantly secular society) got me distracted by, um, research.

Stuff like this:

The new atheists use this acultural modernity rhetoric in almost every argument that they make and every topic they touch.

For example, there is a cute saying that many of them trot out every once in a while: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." Is this not a shining example of the acultural view of modernity? For the new atheists, it is simply a matter of opening your eyes and getting rid of all the "extra" (non-reasonable) beliefs one might have.

This is a good example of how an intelligent person can completely miss the point. For one thing, I don't know where he gets the 'acultural view of modernity' from - well, he cites where he gets it from, but I don't know of anyone it applies to. And the saying he refers to is not a good example of it. The new atheists (and the old atheists, like George H. Smith, who I think coined it) are using it to try to crowbar in closed minds an opening for the thought that you routinely apply to other religions the same kind of critical reasoning that they - as well as atheists - apply to yours.

And, having read far too many online apologists and sceptics than is good for my productivity, I have to agree. Towards other religions (and, in some cases, towards rival interpretations of their own religion) the typical believer who has considered the matter at all is not only an atheist, but a sceptic, a scoffer, and a higher critic. 'Every sect as far as reason will help them, gladly use it; when it fails them, they cry out it is a matter of faith, and beyond reason.' - John Locke

Posted 10:26 am by Ken

Privacy is Surveillance

WASHINGTON (AP) - A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.

Posted 12:41 pm by Ken

The Germans have a word for this

I was going to make a joke about comedy writers on strike, but I mustn't, because that would be scabbing. So I'll just put in a sympathetic word for the dollar. Losing the supermodels - that's got to hurt.

Posted 10:27 am by Ken

Fame

I've just been referred to in an online science fiction short-short story. The Singularity is near.

Posted 7:37 am by Ken

The Space Age is Fifty

Happy Sputnik Day, boys and girls!

The launch of Sputnik 1 is the first historical event I actually remember. If you want to know what I think about it fifty years later, you can drop by at Satellite 1 in Glasgow this Saturday. I'm a GoH, on a couple of panels, and hope to be there through to the Dead Laika Party.

In other local news, the Space Settlers Society is celebrating tonight in Glasgow (scroll down).

Those who can't be there can still raise a glass to the memory of the Chief Designer.

Posted 10:55 am by Ken

Anarchist bankers

At a Libertarian Alliance conference a few years ago, I heard an anarcho-capitalist economics lecturer explain that financial regulation was no big deal because the speculators were always one step ahead of the regulators - as soon as the regulators had one financial instrument tied up in red tape, the financial services industry came up with another instrument even more complicated and opaque than the one before, and by the time the regulators had caught up with that one ... and so on.

Britain has now had a run on a bank.

Posted 6:01 pm by Ken

Down the rabbit-hole

There I was, about to plug the latest dire warning from Paul Craig Roberts, when it occurred to me to emphasise his right-wing street cred, and to mention in this connection his great book Alienation and the Soviet Economy (1971, 1991). Building on the brilliant insights of Michael Polanyi's The Contempt of Freedom, Roberts explained, much more clearly than Hayek or Mises ever did, exactly why the central planning of an industrial economy is impossible - impossible 'in the sense', as he put it, 'that it is impossible for a cat to swim the Atlantic'. He did more: as the title indicates, he linked Marx's critique of the market to the actual attempts of Soviet and Soviet-type economies to replace the market. He described how these economies were not, in fact, centrally planned despite continuous efforts to centrally plan them (which explained both how inefficiently they functioned, and why (despite that) they did function and didn't simply collapse like all actual centrally planned industrial economies have invariably done).

But while googling up various references to his work, I discovered to my astonishment that after all that and more to his lasting credit, he's a 9/11 Truther! (He never hints at this in his articles that appear on Counterpunch and Antiwar.com, neither of which will touch 9/11 Truth with a bargepole.) This shock followed on the heels of my dismay at seeing the redoubtable Robert Fisk taking an exploratory trip down that same rabbit-hole. The slightest serious recourse to the internet Fisk so despises whould have shown him the naivety of his rhetorical questions. (The temperatures at which kerosene burns and steel melts are not the same. Makes you think, dunnit?)

Last summer I stumbled across 9/11 Truth while researching conspiracy theories for the novel I was writing, and was intrigued enough to go downstairs and watch for the first time the videotape I'd made of the news on the fateful day. I replayed the impacts and the collapses over and over - slo-mo, freeze, second by second, rewind - and came away convinced that the official, government-approved, state-sponsored, media-hyped truth about the physical causes of the collapse of the WTC towers was beyond reasonable doubt. It's astonishing to watch Truther videos that show the collapses side by side with clips of controlled demolitions, which make the contrast between the phenomena as clear as clear can be, with a voice-over insisting that they're identical. The only similarity is that the towers fell vertically. How, I ask, would you expect a tower slammed near the top by a jetliner and weakened by fire to fall? Sideways?

Suppose it were true that the some sinister cabal in the US government pickled the Roswell aliens, shot JFK, faked the Moon landings and brought down the Towers. You know what? Compared with what the US and other governments do in plain sight, these would be as dust in the balance. The real radical challenge is to make that as evident to your neighbours as it is to you.

Posted 10:37 am by Ken

The IMG remembered

Whenever he made a speech, the late Tony Cliff looked and sounded like a mad scientist, explaining how his apparatus of cogs, wheels, transmission belts and rank and file movements was about to transform the diaphanously-draped damsel of trade union reformism into the capering chimpanzee of revolutionary socialism. There was no personality cult of Cliff, but his personality left an imprint on the party he founded. The same was true of all the grand old men of British Trotskyism. It's no surprise, as John Sullivan puts it somewhere, that the SWP is excitable, Militant long-winded, and the Healyites [redacted] had anger management issues.

In the 1970s I was a member of the International Marxist Group. It was the largest British Trotskyist group not led by one of the grand old men of British Trotskyism. This was less of an advantage than might be supposed. Lacking a grand old man the IMG settled for a squabbling coalition of alpha males (and females). The resulting frenzy of competitive nit-picking has often stood the group's ex-members in good stead in their later careers. It also helps to explain why the intelligence of so many of the group's individual members seldom showed itself in the group's political line, which lurched hither and yon as the squabbling alphas wrested the joystick from each other. Opening the weekly bundle of the group's newspaper was always a thrill. One week there was a supplement on surrealism; the next, the editorial office had been briefly occupied by feminists and an apology inserted for the sexism of the surrealists. People familiar with the IMG only from its press, or hearing of its political interventions, could be forgiven for thinking that its members were half-wits. Who can forget the argument of the IMG's Women's Liberation Commission that the demand of South African mineworkers for a family life was reactionary?

The IMG had a great deal of similarly helpful advice (worked up by the Colonial Revolutions Commission) for every national liberation movement, except those directed against the USSR and its allies. They supported every anti-Soviet-bloc movement without offering any advice. To orthodox Communists this seemed senseless, if not suspect, but there was a logic to it. The Fourth International hoped to displace the Communist parties. So, in the case of an anti-imperialist national movement, the point was to criticise its Communist component for peaceful co-existence/guerrilla tactics/popular frontism/whatever. In the case of a national movement opposing a Soviet or Soviet-aligned state, the point was to criticise the Communists who ruled or supported that state for their incorrect handling of the national question. The movement itself could be relied upon to be, or to become, socialist and progressive without any advice from the IMG. This needs a little further explaining.

The Fourth International, of which the IMG was the British section, maintained that was worth defending in the then-existing socialist states was state ownership and planning, and what was not to be defended but attacked was the bureaucratic dictatorship. What the planned economies needed to overcome their well-advertised deficiencies was democracy. Any movement, therefore, that did not inscribe upon its banners the privatization of heavy industry was not counter-revolutionary, but instead ('objectively') revolutionary. After all, it was not directed against 'the economic foundation of the workers' state', but against its bureaucratic and tyrannical superstructure. This applied to almost every anti-Soviet (etc) movement and dissident, so the Fourth International hardly ever regarded any of them as counter-revolutionary. To be fair, when the Australian section started sharing platforms with a local offshoot of the Ustashe, this was considered a mistake.

The Fourth International was taken completely by surprise when the overthrow of the Communist dictatorships was followed in short order by a nationalist welter and a complete dismantling of the bureaucratically planned economies. After thinking about it for a year or two, the IMG's successor, the ISG, brought out a pamphlet with the title 'Socialism After Stalinism'. Its front cover consisted of a portrait of Stalin. Say what you like about the grand old men, they always kept a watchful eye on the printshop and wouldn't have countenanced something as stupid as that.

Posted 9:56 am by Ken

Plugs

The International Socialist Group has broken with decades of tradition and published a worthwhile book: Karl Kautsky's Foundations of Christianity. It's a long time since I read this Marxist classic but I remember learning a lot from it. It's a fine example of how to use the materialist method to work over the best available information. This means it's very dated now, but it remains worth reading, and at £11 or $22 on Amazon it's a good buy.

Another resurrected work, this time available for free, is the complete run of Benjamin Tucker's Liberty. (Via.)

Posted 8:16 pm by Ken

Gigs

I'm doing a couple of events next week around the Edinburgh Book Festival. As part of its Edinburgh Book Fringe programme, the independent radical bookshop Word Power is hosting "Glory Days: Fiction, Free Speech and the Terrorism Act", where Hal Duncan and I discuss issues raised by the SF and fantasy anthology Glorifying Terrorism, to which we both contributed stories. The meeting will be chaired by Andrew J. Wilson and is at Word Power, 1 pm on Wednesday 15 August.

On a lighter note, I'm doing a ten-minute short-short-story reading at 4 pm on Friday 17 August, at the Story Shop venue at the Book Festival, sponsored by the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust.

Posted 7:01 pm by Ken

21st Century Atheism

I went out walking
With a bible and a gun
The word of God lay heavy on my heart
I was sure I was the one

- U2, 'The Wanderer'

In comments below, Renegade Eye asks why I haven't said anything about the new atheists. I've read the new atheist books by Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Onfray. I haven't read Hitchens' book yet but I've read and listened to enough of Hitchens on religion to have some idea where he's coming from. I've also read David Mills' Atheist Universe, the first (self-published) edition of which preceded them all as a surprise success. I don't really have much to say about them, so instead I'm going to give lots and lots of links.

But first, I should mention that I clean forgot a third atheist paperback, and one I'd written about elsewhere at that: Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity, (1970, translated 1971.)

The first 21st century atheist books were popularizations of atheist arguments that had developed within philosophy. (A few humanist philosophers in Britain had become Guardian columnists: Julian Baggini, Simon Blackburn, A. C. Grayling. In the US it was a bit different: atheist columnists felt isolated. (Via.)) Daniel Harbour's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism (2001, paperback 2003) and Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (2003) were both well-written and, in their differing ways, original. But the only way they prefigured what was about to break was that were each published as part of a series of brief guides to large subjects. Baggini explicitly counselled against atheist militancy: "Religion will recede not by atheists shouting condemnation, but by the quiet voice of reason slowly making itself heard."

On September 15 2001 the voice of reason, or at any rate of Richard Dawkins, made itself heard in a very different tone. Dawkins followed this up within days with a call to stop being polite about religion, repeated here and here, and reprinted in his essay collection A Devil's Chaplain (from which I quoted it after Beslan, which was my moment of having had enough of being polite - though what actually got me to rejoin the National Secular Society was this (PDF).)

OK, on to the links.

Michael Fitzpatrick puts forward materialist arguments against, as he puts it, baiting the devout. Ronald Aronson has a more sympathetic radical take. Terry Eagleton wrote a hilariously pretentious review of The God Delusion, which called forth P.Z. Myers' memorable Courtier's Reply, as well as some patient and puzzled commentary by my fellow SF writer Adam Roberts.

The charge that Dawkins et al are 'atheist fundamentalists' led to the formulation of Stacey's Law. Stacey is not the only one bored with the anti-Dawkins backlash.

The prominence of the new atheists has led to more atheists coming out. One reporter who worked the religion beat for years explains how he lost faith. (Both via.) Dawkins himself has a very civilised conversation with one of his Christian critics, the eminent scientist Francis Collins.

Another scientist, David Sloan Wilson, criticises Dawkins' speculations on the evolutionary origins of religion, to which Dawkins gives a spirited reply; their disagreement is discussed here. There's further intelligent commentary on the cognitive and behavioural roots of religion by Abbas Raza, Pascal Boyer, and Paul Bloom (these two via an earlier good piece by Raza.

Former fundamentalist New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman is interviewed on the documents. Taner Edis, a physicist from Turkey and harsh critic of Islam's relation to science, warns secular humanists against their own simplistic interpretations of the Muslim world and Islam, particularly the egregious tripe peddled by Sam Harris.

If you make through all these, you may be relieved to hear from John Emerson: I’m surprised that people are still talking about “God” any more. I disproved his existence a couple of weeks ago. Despite this amazing feat of logic, the discussion will, no doubt, go on.

Posted 2:38 pm by Ken

The New Weird

Kathryn Cramer is hosting the New Weird archive. This is a legendary online discussion of the New Weird involving all the participants, and then some. It's to the New Weird what a decade's worth of pamphlets, manifestos, pub conversations, opium dreams and police-spy reports would be to the Romantic movement or the Shelley circle or the Dadaists. Someday people will get doctorates on it.

Posted 1:37 pm by Ken

Iran

Every time I think I've banged on enough about Iran, Arthur Silber shames me by urging us all to bang on about it some more. In a just world this eloquent and erudite libertarian blogger would be paid by some vast conspiracy. In this one he has trouble paying the rent. Read him, link to him, and drop some money in the jar.

That other indefatigable drum-beater, Justin Raimondo, is banging on too:

At this point, unless the American people wake up in time – which I very much doubt – war with Iran seems all but inevitable.

. Today's Guardian reports

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.
The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."

Yes, limbo isn't what comes to mind. There's no need for panic, however. The report continues:

Almost half of the US's 277 warships are stationed close to Iran, including two aircraft carrier groups. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise left Virginia last week for the Gulf. A Pentagon spokesman said it was to replace the USS Nimitz and there would be no overlap that would mean three carriers in Gulf at the same time.
No decision on military action is expected until next year. In the meantime, the state department will continue to pursue the diplomatic route.

Elsewhere, and in no particular order: Russia has suspended its participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty. The US is sending a squadron of flying killer robots (the new Reaper drones) to Iraq. Iran's Jews aren't leaving. Yesterday's Sunday Herald, in an article not online, reports from Bucharest that US soldiers, sailors and aircrew are 'pouring in' to bases in Bulgaria and Romania. Again, there's no need for panic: it's only an exercise.

Meanwhile, another power in the Middle East has been making open threats against Iran. Yes, Al-Qaeda in Iraq has threatened to attack Iran within two months if Iran doesn't stop supporting Shia militias. Like Abu Sarhan's comments (see below) this seems to be a bit of public diplomacy. 'We're all on the same page here, people! Do we have to draw you a picture?'

Posted 10:34 am by Ken

Hearts and minds

Iraqi resistance leader Abu Sarhan recently expressed 'a more restrained view' of the United States than might be expected from a veteran of the insurgency.

"I personally don't have a hatred of the American people, and I respect American civilization," he said. "They have participated in the progress of all the nations of the world. They invented computers. Such people should be respected. But people who are crying over someone who died 1,400 years ago" -- referring to Shiites and their veneration of a leader killed in the 7th century -- "these should be eliminated, to clear the society of them, because they are simply trash."

I wish this was another squib, but it isn't.

"The real enemy for the resistance is Iran and those working for Iran," he went on. "Because Iran has a feud which goes back thousands of years with the people of Iraq and the government of Iraq."

Posted 10:29 pm by Ken

Ursine defecatory habits indicate arboreal locational preference, studies show

The Pope's recent shock announcement of his continuing Catholicism has brought a rare confluence of condemnation from otherwise divided denominations.

'It is, frankly, a little disappointing that His Holiness should hark back to such a twentieth-century view,' said Bishop Stella Artois, leading Anglican theologian. 'The Church of England has always regarded itself as holy, apostolic and catholic. It just draws the line at papistry.'

'We're well aware that the Pope doesn't regard us as a church,' said the Rev. Jack Black, Moderator of the Presbyterian Reformed Church of the United Kingdom (Continuing). 'And we're more than willing to return the compliment. According to Reformed tradition, the so-called Church of Rome is a synagogue of Satan, the Whore of Babylon, the Scarlet Woman that sitteth on the seven hills; furthermore, the Papacy is Antichrist and the Pope is the son of perdition. We say this sorrowfully, in the spirit of charity.'

Brother Theodosius, of the Orthodox monastery on Athos, was marginally more temperate. 'Rome is indeed a church, but unfortunately that doesn't get Catholics off the hook. They're going straight to hell, along with Jews, apostates, Muslims, Freemasons, homosexuals, fornicators, adulterers and Protestants.'

Labels: squibs

Posted 2:12 am by Ken

Under an Atomic Sky

I went into a church house
where the citizens like to sit.
They say they want the kingdom
but they don't want God in it.

- U2, 'The Wanderer'

Between 1970 and 2000 there were, to my knowledge, exactly two new atheist books that found mass-market paperback publication in English: The Misery of Christianity by Joachim Kahl (Hamburg, 1968; English translation Pelican, 1971) and God is Not Yet Dead by Vítězslav Gardavsky (Pelican, 1973; originally published in German in 1968 following serial publication in Prague, 1966-1967). Kahl, like Gardavsky, was a Marxist, but there they parted. The significance of Gardavsky's book is exhausted by its dates; by the tenure of its author: Professor of Philosophy at the Brno Military Academy (retired 1968, aged 45); and by the Christian-Communist dialogue over whose brusque interruption the book's provenance placed a cross. Kahl's work, on the other hand, is an underground classic: the most caustic, contentrated critique of Christianity written in the 20th century (and most others, for reasons all too obvious from Kahl's tally of the Church's resort to the rack). One mainstream book, Michael Arnheim's Is Christianity True? (Duckworth, 1984) gives the eponomous question its Jewish answer. (No.) Muir Weissinger's The Failure of Faith (1984) was sceptical, eccentric, and fell dead-born from the presses. Richard Robinson's donnish but plain-spoken An Atheist's Values (Oxford, 1964) was reissued as a Blackwell paperback in 1975.

And that, more or less, was it. The freethought publishers - the Rationalist Press Association in England, Prometheus Books in the US - kept plugging away. Hume, Nietzsche, Russell remained in print. Academic presses published philosophical critiques: Michael Martin, J. L. Mackie, Anthony Flew. Three lively translations of Lucretius came out in paperback. But most of my six-foot shelf of godless books, three decades in the filling, consists of small hardbacks from the RPA's Thinker's Library, long out of print, and two or three 60s Pelicans on humanism, all picked up in second-hand bookshops.

The uptick of interest in humanism was part of the 60s ferment around religion. I sometimes think the best mood-capture of that ferment is the second appendix to Frank Herbert's SF epic Dune (1965): new Bible translations, novel theologies, ecumenical congresses, the shock of space travel ... it's all there. Everyone (so it seemed) had heard of Bishop J. A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, which popularised the radical theologies of Bultmann and Tillich. The publication of the complete New English Bible was splashed in Sunday colour supplements. Questionings of Christian orthodoxy, from the loopy (Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods) through the bizarre (John Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross) to the far-fetched (Hugh Schonfield's The Passover Plot) saw major extracts published in British popular newspapers. In the words of one of Herbert's fictitious scholars: 'Those were times of deep paradox.'

In retrospect, one of the deepest paradoxes was that the Christians and the atheists were singing from the same hymn-sheet. All of them took as given what science and scholarship had established in the nineteenth century: that the Bible, whatever else it might be, was not history, and not science. The quarrel was over what message it still spoke. Darwin and the Higher Critics had done their worst. The Thinker's Library had spread the word. Kahl's scathing contempt - and Gardavsky's wary respect - were for the most radical modern readings of the scriptures. 'The final conclusion,' said Kahl, 'can only be this - the modern theology based on interpreting the Bible existentially and symbolically is not modern and is completely worn out. What really arouses my anger and scandalizes me deeply is that so much of university theology has tried to justify its existence for more than two hundred years by means of apologetic tricks of this kind.'

Beneath the polar radar of the superpowers in this cold war lay a contraflow of dissent. One deep current was the silent withdrawal of belief. The other was the rise of fundamentalism. In 1975 I mentioned to one of my professors - a palaeontologist and a Christian whose faith was as sound as his science - the creationist critiques of evolution. 'Nobody,' he said, 'takes these people seriously!'

In 2001 the iceberg struck.

I haven't found out what happened to Gardavsky, but I can guess. Kahl's still going strong, an independent philosopher, still an atheist, and no longer a Marxist. I don't know why he repudiated Marxism, but I can guess. A recent re-reading of his book reminded me of some of his points against Christianity: the complete emptiness of the signifier, covering total disagreement in belief and ethics; the endless splintering of its sects; their sanguinary mutual persecutions; the apologetic and academic 'manipulation of authoritative texts so that they can still be put to use today'; above all, its complete failure 'measured by the yardstick of its own claims'. 'Immanent criticism', as he says, 'lays bare the ideological limitations of the conceptual structure of theology'. The problem with the universal acid, as the old joke goes, is to find a container.

Posted 2:13 pm by Ken

The doctors' plot

The perpetrators of three failed terrorist attacks were not, it now seems, alienated teenagers misled by hook-handed clerics (etc etc) but NHS medical personnel. This is disturbing. It means it's possible to qualify in and to practice medicine with almost no knowledge of physics and chemistry. A British bomb-disposal expert gives them a severe dressing-down here. 'The jihadi threat has seemingly sunk to animal-lib levels.' Oh, the shame.

As any science undergraduate will tell you, medical students tend to be well-meaning and intelligent, but only slightly better-informed and better-behaved than students of divinity. When it comes to fundamentalism the people you have to keep a watchful eye on are engineers, who are predisposed to fall for design arguments and to follow literal interpretations of The Book.

Posted 10:41 am by Ken

More reviews of The Execution Channel

The Execution Channel has been reviewed by two of my favourite bloggers: Avedon Carol and the inhabitant of Lenin's Tomb. It's been mentioned by Marc Andreessen, in his much linked-to list of the top ten
SF authors of the '00s. Cory Doctorow, another legend in the biz, now has his review up at BoingBoing. Paul Di Filippo has a review in Sci Fi Weekly, and Gary Wolfe in Locus. Paul Kincaid gives it an exacting audit at Strange Horizons. In the mainstream press, it's been noticed in the San Diego Union Tribune and the Denver Post. Lenin's own Socialist Review gives it, not surprisingly, a socialist review.

The book - along with several strong contenders in the category, to whom congrats - has been nominated for the Quill awards, which I don't know much about but which look big.

Labels: reviews, writing

Posted 11:33 am by Ken

Antichrist role 'could hinder' Blair's conversion

Tony Blair's conversion to Catholicism could be hindered by his longstanding ambition to become the Antichrist, according to sources close the Holy See. While undoubtedly securing the aspirant a distinctive historical legacy, the role of global tyrant of the Last Days, enemy of God's people and scourge of the earth, is seen in Vatican circles as incompatible with even lay membership of the Catholic Church.

Tony Blair's imminent resignation as Prime Minister has led to considerable speculation as to his future role on the world stage, and colleagues say he has long felt that his talents and abilities could best flourish as the Beast with seven heads and ten horns foretold in Biblical prophecy. This has not so far raised problems with his continued membership of the Church of England. Queried about the position of the Antichrist within the Anglican Communion, a spokesman for the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury would only go so far as to say that it is 'something of a theological grey area.' The older confession, however, is known to take a more stringent view on activities such as the pouring out of the vials of wrath upon the inhabitants of the earth.

Through the rolled-down window of his armoured limousine in the Plaza del Fiori, a senior member of the College of Cardinals expressed his concern about Blair's recent private audience with the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI. 'This in itself could be a sign of the End of Days,' he remarked. 'When the abomination of desolation stands in the holy place, the time has come to flee to the hills.' He then leaned forward and tapped his chauffeur on the shoulder. 'That was an instruction, Luigi.'

Labels: squibs

Posted 2:32 pm by Ken

Torture flights

A friend in Amsterdam has urged me to blog this Guardian report on the Council of Europe document (PDF) on European complicity in CIA secret prisons and torture flights, which, claims last week's Mail on Sunday (P.S. article now lost), continues, to the horror of this Tory patriot.

Labels: War on Terror

Posted 4:41 pm by Ken

As if you lived in the latter days of a smaller nation

It's been said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Things are very different in the Best Small Country in the World (TM). In Scotland history is a farce the first time around.

The Scottish Parliament has a system of proportional representation where the voters select one candidate from two lists. The constituency list is first-past-the post. The regional lists, covering wider areas, top up the representation according to some formula which needn't detain us. The system was used in two elections and worked fine. It wasn't broke. Someone decided to fix it.

Apart from replacing two lists on separate ballot papers with two lists on one paper, and presenting the voters with another ballot paper, using a new and different voting system, for a different election on the same day, and implementing a completely unnecessary and expensive electronic counting machinery which broke down repeatedly and spectacularly on the night, the geniuses who signed off the arrangements which resulted in a hundred thousand rejected votes ... never thought to user-test the new voting forms.

But enough squabbling amongst ourselves! Let's turn and face the real enemy, the Judean People's Front! Thanks to its divisions the far left has been wiped off the electoral map, going from six MSPs to nil. The Scottish Socialist Party was not only beaten handily by Solidarity - in five of the seven regions it won fewer votes than the Socialist Labour Party.

The what? Precisely. The Socialist Labour Party has next to no presence on the ground in Scotland (*). Socialist Labour got one election broadcast, fronted by the popular English actor Ricky Tomlinson, who emphasised that the party stood firmly against Scottish nationalism. Around a third of Scotland's far-left voters must have agreed.

* The Socialist Labour Party was founded by Arthur Scargill back in the 90s and was immediately joined by a plethora of far-left groups. Scargill cannily courted a succession of these groups, using each one that rose to the top of the stack to displace its precursor. After thus getting rid of the Trotskyist sects one by one he repeated the process with at least two sects of Stalinists, and then delivered the coup de grace to the last one standing. This single-minded application of salami tactics left him holding that twisty bit of cellophane at the end and not enough salami to cover a biscuit.

Labels: far left, Scottish politics

Posted 12:30 pm by Ken

Early Days Yet

Scottish politics is in a somewhat febrile state. This Thursday's election to the Scottish Parliament may return a plurality of pro-independence MSPs: Nationalists, Greens, Independents and (perhaps) Socialists. If the SNP is able to form a government, or lead a governing coalition, a referendum on independence is promised within the four-year term of the parliament. The electoral arithmetic is complicated by proportional representation, so at the moment the composition of the future parliament is in Schrodinger's Box.

Anyone who is interested in how the election is going should check out the innovative, left-leaning, pro-independence site YouScotland. One of its founders, Alan Smart, has an engaging introductory piece on his video blog at YouTube's new political channel, CitizenTube.

Personally, I'm going to vote Labour in the constituency poll as (futilely as) usual, but I can't help relishing the prospect of Labour getting a drubbing. For one reason, watch First Minister Jack McConnell demonstrate his grasp of his brief. (Besides, he regards the smoking ban as his proudest achievement. His other achievements are pilloried on the hilarious, if hardly fair, video The Best Wee Numpty in the World). For another, there's the prospect of never seeing Justice Minister Cathie Jamieson's stupid, sour face on television again.

Labels: Scottish politics

Posted 9:42 am by Ken

Socialism for Desperate Housewives

After socialism in a matchbox, the SSP's second election broadacast gives us socialism in a frilly apron. The mommy state has never been so dazzlingly presented. (Also shown here).

Scotland's rival socialist party, Solidarity, has its election broadcast here. Perhaps it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Posted 4:42 pm by Ken

Wars, Revolutions, Plagues of Frogs ...

The Ministry of Defence recently published some speculation on possible future problems (PDF). Climate change, resource wars, Sino-Islamist conflict, AI, nanotech, middle-class radicalization, global flash mobs, a revival of Marxism and populism ... Why can't science fiction writers come up with imaginative scenarios like that?

In other news, my new novel The Execution Channel is getting some attention. Cory Doctorow gave a rave review to the forthcoming US edition. The UK edition, just out, has been reviewed in the Financial Times, Guardian, Morning Star, Times, the Daily Telegraph's book blog, and The Book Bag. A long and thoughtful blog review is here.

Posted 1:40 pm by Ken

Socialism in a Matchbox

Have you ever seen a party election broadcast that you wanted to see again? Me neither. Until now. The Scottish Socialist Party has come up with a little gem. You can see it here or here. You can disagree completely with the policy and still find yourself smiling.

Posted 12:08 pm by Ken

Talk for Birmingham SF Group 13 April 2007

First of all, many thanks for inviting me. There are so many writers and scientists and other interesting people out there that - according to careful scientific studies - statistically, a writer can expect to be invited to speak to any given local SF group at the most twice. The first time it's when their first book comes out and they're new and exciting. The second time is when people are saying things like, 'If we want to hear him again we better invite him now before the Brain Eater comes for him.'

It's great to be back.

What I'd like to talk about is what I've been doing since I was here last. A very little about what I've written and a lot more about how I write.

The first time you asked me here I was asked to say something about the actual process of writing. I had written one book so I was supposed to know all that. And I think I explained that it starts with one or two characters in a situation, and out of the logic of that situation they go into action, and the world sort of builds up around them. I must have said something about writing down lots of notes and cutting them up into little strips and laying them on the floor and crawling around. This was when I was writing on an Amstrad. And I probably explained the whole thing by an analogy with the computer game Civilization II, where you start off with a little guy holding a spear and standing in front of a hut, and as he walks around and steps on to new tiles the world gradually takes shape around him, with the rivers and forests and other societies coming into view.

Now this might not have been the best of analogies because what I didn't mention was that I was absolutely crap at Civ II. There I would be, Emperor Abraham of the Americas - Honest Abe, they called me, at least my flatterers and courtiers did - with my people clawing their way up to some kind of crude early form of feudal system somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard, and my emissaries would keep bringing me alarming news from the science front, like: 'Sioux medicine men discover genetic engineering,' and 'Egyptian priests launch solar observation satellite.' And my adviser would pop up and say: 'Pay the soldiers! Pay the soldiers! ....aaaagghhh'

What I may also have ommitted to tell you was that writing in that gloriously unplanned, make it up as you go along manner takes a very long time. I started writing The Star Fraction in 1987 and it was accepted for publication in 1994. I was working as a programmer all those years and technology had moved on so much that by the time I finished I was working with computers more advanced than those my characters had in chapter one. I had to go back and cut out all the references to Amstrads.

Now this manner of writing is all very well when you have all the time in the world, or think you do, but it doesn't stand up very well to deadlines. So ever since then I've had to plan my books much more in advance. This turned out to be a process rather like programming. It starts with days of staring at a blank screen and sheets of paper with a few scrawls and coffee-mug rings and tear-stains on them. Then you write a few lines of code and you find they don't compile. At least that's what programming was like for me. I mentioned this to a friend who is still a programmer and he said, yeah, that's what it's like for most programmers. Except Charlie Stross, he said. He would look over the spec and then start coding like a man possessed. So writing is like programming for Charlie too. I hear he has eight books coming out this year.

It was while I was writing my second novel, The Stone Canal, that I was shown a very good trick. It's a difficult one to learn for yourself but once you've been shown it it's very easy and you can then do it for other people. The way I learned it was this. I was working at Edinburgh University and I had one novel published and I noticed that the writer in residence, Andrew Greig, was a poet whose work I had much admired. So like any shy student I took a sheaf of poems I'd written over the years and left them in his pigeon-hole, pencilled in an appointment for about a week later and tiptoed away. When the appointment came round and I met Andrew Greig I found he was a sound chap and he quite liked my poems. The longest and most pretentious of them you can find in last year's Novacon special, I'm sure Rog Peyton can sell you one later. More importantly it turned out that Andrew Greig lived about ten minutes walk away from where I live and about thirty seconds walk from the local pub. You can see where this is going. I introduced him to all my skiffy friends and he introduced us to the Scottish literary mafia. And to Shirley Manson, which impresses a lot more people, which is why I take every opportunity for name-dropping.

Anyhow, one evening in the pub I showed Andrew a few pages from Chapter 2 of the manuscript of The Stone Canal, and he read through them and showed me the good trick. He took a sharp pencil and worked over a few paragraphs, crossing out phrases and sometimes whole sentences. He called this removing the fluff. The effect was indeed like removing fluff from a record needle. (If you don't know what that means, ask someone older.) Once he had shown me how to do it I could do it for myself, and since then I've shown other people how to do it.

Another good trick was what he called the massacre of adverbs. You go through your text and take out as many adverbs as possible. You can drop them or you can replace the verb with a more precise one. 'He ran quickly.' No, it's: 'He sprinted.' If you have a word processor, you just use 'Find' on ell wye space ('ly ') and ell wye stop ('ly.'). This works. There are entire genres where people don't use these techniques, you know. There's some minor character in fiction, I forget the novel, but the character is a novelist and she writes historical romances 'full of rapes and adverbs.' Imagine an Arthurian fantasy novel with the fluff removed and the adverbs slaughtered. It would more like Chandler than Mallory. 'That Morgan dame was fey.' 'Down these mean glades a knight must ride.'

As it happens, one of the books I read partly for pleasure and partly for research for The Stone Canal in fact does read like a historical novel written in the hard-boiled style. It's called Njal's Saga. Here's how it begins: 'There was a man called Mord Fiddle, who was the son of Sighvat the Red. Mord was a powerful chieftain, and lived at Voll in the Rangriver plains. He was also a very experienced lawyer [...]' The femme fatale of this saga is a woman called Hallgerd. Here are the descriptions of her. At the beginning she is a little girl her playing on the floor, and: 'she was a tall, beautiful child whose hair hung down to her waist.' A little later:

'We now return to Hallgerd, Hoskuld's daughter, who had grown up to be a woman of great beauty. She was very tall, which earned her the nickname Long-Legs, and her lovely hair was now so long that it could veil her whole body. She was impetuous and wilful.' Somehow that last bit doesn't come as a surprise.

Later still, Gunnar meets her at the Althing:

'Hallgerd was wearing a red, richly-decorated tunic under a scarlet cloak trimmed all the way down with lace. Her beautiful thick hair flowed down over her bosom.' These six sentences are all the description you'll get of her. And from them you quite understand why two of her husbands have already been killed and why there are a lot more men murdered before the story is over.

There are a lot of court scenes in Njal's Saga. That's what the Icelanders did, by the way. Every so often they'd kill each other and then they'd sue each other. There's one scene where they're about to start killing each other in court, until somebody - obviously an experienced lawyer - points that it's going to be far too expensive, and everyone backs down. About two thirds of the way through the book the whole of Iceland converts to Christianity. It slowly dawns on them that it's OK to forgive people. You don't need to keep up all this vengeance business. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. You can just see them thinking, 'Christ, what a relief.' Of course, because it is a tragic tale, that happens too late. Towards the end there is the most moving single line of dialogue I've ever read, but you can find that for yourself. My advice to anyone here who is writing fantasy is: walk past the shelves of fantasy trilogy bricks. Head for the black Penguins. Steal from the best.

The research reason I had for reading Njal's Saga for was to steal the legal system. The American libertarian writer David Friedman had held up mediaeval Iceland as a model of anarcho-capitalism, and I took him at his word. I sent him a copy of The Stone Canal, and when he read my next book, The Cassini Division, he spotted an inconsistency in my physics which no one else had noticed. So don't try to outrun an economist. He may accelerate faster than you think.

My first four books were what I later called the Fall Revolution books. They had as their theme the collapse of socialism and the persistence of revolutionary politics and especially of obscure revolutionary sects. When Andrew Greig had read the final one, The Sky Road, he said, 'I'm all Fourth Internationaled out.'

I took the hint. I then wrote the three Engines of Light books - they were meant to be a series but they ended up as a trilogy - and a couple of stand-alone space operas, Newton's Wake and Learning the World. Around about this time I started muttering about how we'd done New Space Opera, and now maybe we should try New British Catastrophe. My editor and my agent got wind of this and pointed out that near-future political stuff and SF disguised as technothrillers were doing very well in the charts, and if this time I promised to write something like that with no obscure TLAs - which as you know stands for Three Letter Abbreviations - for obscure political sects they would be very happy for me to do it, so I did.

Here it is, The Execution Channel. Or I could read from the opening chapter of the book I'm writing now, The Night Sessions.

Which I did. Thanks again to the Brum Group for their invitation, and their hospitality, and special thanks to Rog Peyton.]

Posted 9:19 am by Ken

Avec sang-froid en anglais, excitable in French

Russian press agency Novosti's reporting of the US/UK confrontation with Iran is a little more calm in English than it is in French. In particular, two recent articles citing 'Russian military experts' including Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences, claiming that an air attack on Iran is imminent (a date mentioned is 6 April), have so far appeared in French (and German) but not in English.

I have no idea what this signifies, but I'm sure someone out there does.

Me, I'll believe it when I see it in the eXile. Read the War Nerd on 300 to cheer you up.

Posted 7:30 pm by Ken

Glory Days

Unknown Soldiers: How terrorism transformed the modern world Matthew Carr, Profile Books, London, 2006.

(In the US as The Infernal Machine: a History of Terrorism).

There are many good books about terrorists. There are very few good books about terrorism. This is one of them. The trail from Narodnaya Volya to al-Qaeda is long, tortuous and beset with pitfalls. Carr traces it while hardly ever putting a foot wrong. Along the way he shows that the book's subtitle is no exaggeration: terrorism, overblown by its opponents as a menace to society and by its proponents as a strategy for changing it, has shaped it to an extent that is easy to to overlook. Without the tactic invented by a handful of Russian idealists in the 1880s, the world today would be a very different place.

Carr's account begins with these self-described Terrorists of nineteenth-century Russia, and moves on through the anarchist dynamiters of the turn of the century to the Irish War of Independence. The guerilla campaigns of the IRA and the British state terror of the Black and Tans became the prototype of much subsequent insurgency and counter-insurgency, and the moral rationalizations of both sides the stereotype for later apologetics for atrocity. The tale continues from the Resistance movements in occupied Europe, through the savage wars of peace that followed in the colonies, to the futile left-wing terrorism in the West and the more consequent but no less disastrous romance of the urban guerilla in Latin America. In this history the Middle East gets proportionate, rather than exclusive, attention. In 1984, as the US withdrew from Lebanon after the marine barracks bombing, the USS New Jersey bombarded the mountain Shia villages with '40 percent of all the 16-inch ammunition in the entire European theatre'. One witness to this futile devastation was the then apolitical Osama Bin Laden. The rise of Islamist terrorism and the spectacular attentats of the 1990s bring the story, via 9/11, to the War on Terror and to the grim future it foreshadows. Carr tells a disillusioning and demystifying tale with verve and humanity. His central point is that terrorism is a tactic in political conflict and as such can be understood, and that in public it almost never is, being presented instead as a uniquely evil threat to civilised life. Carr urges that we, as citizens, ignore the rhetoric and deal with the reality.

There was a War on Terror before. In the 70s and 80s elements of the mainstream Right and the secret services lumped together genuine nationalist guerillas and their callow Western wannabes as 'international terrorism', a vast communist conspiracy orchestrated from the Kremlin and co-ordinated with liberal dissent, trade-union militancy and electoral Left advance. The response to this phantasmagoric hydra was to create its mirror image. One US theoretician of 'low-intensity conflict' is cited by Carr as justifying the carnage of the 80s thus: 'Revolution and counterrevolution develop their own morality and ethics that justify any means to achieve success.' The 1980s saw an unprecedented global paroxysm of counter-revolutionary terror: regimes and movements aligned with the Soviet bloc reeled under assault from the Khmer Rouge remnants in Indochina, the Afghan mujahedin, Renamo in Mozambique, UNITA in Angola, the contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in the rest of Central America. Far from being a tool of the Kremlin, much of the Western Left was oblivious to, where it wasn't complicit in, this offensive. Billions of dollars and millions of lives later, the Soviet bloc buckled - along the fault-lines of its notorious flaws, for sure.

Out of that conveniently-forgotten era, when 'mujahedin' and 'jihad' tripped favourably on tongues that now jabber about 'Islamofascism', when Maoist journalists from America trekked with the Afghan resistance, and Trotskyist militants smuggled CIA-financed propaganda past Soviet-bloc border guards, arose the terrors of today. There are credible reports, summarised here, that clandestine US support for various muj has resumed. Tomorrow's unknown soldiers will no doubt better the instruction.

Posted 1:01 pm by Ken

Vista with Gates and Demon

I worked in IT for about ten years, but that doesn't mean I'm tech-savvy. The programs I worked on were usually big suites of commercial or admin programs - some of them monstrously complicated, modified over decades of accretion, where changing one line required long thought and anxious consultations with wise old men, like the British Constitution. (Reading Burke and Paine one after the other, it struck me that the difference between the conservative and the radical could be seen as a difference in programming style.) In 1989, fixing old programs at London Electricity for the impending decade rollover, some of us pointed out that we might as well deal with Y2K while we were at it. I documented one such fix with a comment line I'm still proud of: This will work for 2000 and 2100 but subsequent century dates may require amendment. The closest I ever got to tech was working on manufacturing control and change control programs, and even these were about scheduling or tracking processes, not actual hardware. And I was happy to leave that side of the job to those who were good at it: the Women With Screwdrivers, as the highly competent hardware support team at my last job called themselves.

Anyway ... a few weeks ago young Master Early moved out. He moved all his personal files to his laptop and insisted that we use his PC - a recent model, with Windows XP and a fast processor, unlike the one I've been banging on for a decade or so. Buying a new PC with an unused one in the house would be a complete waste of money, he said. I agreed, saying that I could use that PC and get Mrs Early her promised laptop. Mrs Early, used to my foot-dragging over technological change and increasingly critical of the kind of web access achievable with the PC we used - Windows 95, a low-number IE and dial-up - insisted that this wouldn't do. I had to get a new PC. OK, I said, but let's get broadband first. At least with that I'll be able to shop online for a new PC without the damn thing crashing whenever anyone phones.

So I phoned up for Demon Broadband, and a few days later the disk arrived, and a Speedtouch modem and a couple of ADSL filters. Several foot-dragging days later, I psyched myself up to install it on Master Early's PC. The set-up disk was very clear: do not connect your USB modem until the modem drivers are installed. Fine, I thought: I had hardly got the hardware out of the box, let alone hooked up. So I installed the drivers, and was prompted to plug in the USB modem.

Looking at the cables and filters and the modem, I belatedly figured out that the phone line from the PC wouldn't fit into the ADSL socket. I picked up the phone to consult my tech-savvy friend Tony. No dial tone.

What an inconvenient time for the phone to go dead, I said to myself, or words to that effect. Then I suspected this might be more than a coincidence. I tried fitting an ADSL filter between the phone socket and the phone. No dial tone. I logged the fault with BT and was told it would take a couple of days to fix. Meanwhile I could divert incoming calls to my mobile. Down the pub with Charlie, Feorag and Tony, I told my tale of woe and was told that a cheap adaptor was all I needed for the plugging things together problem. I drew a circuit diagram and Tony pointed out where the ADSL filters should go. I put them in, but to no avail. I took them off again.

At the weekend a BT engineer finally checked out the line problem. At this time I was in Dublin for P-Con. My mobile rang at an admirably early hour. The engineer said the problem seemed to be inside the house. Could he have access? Afraid not, I said. Nobody in but Zhukhov, the Early Dog. Perhaps, said the engineer, some piece of equipment is connected wrongly to the line? Ah, I said. I'll check that. Master Early was due to drop by later that day. I got him to disconnect his PC from the extension, put the ADSL filters on the phone and the extension, and voila - dial tone!

Everybody was so relieved to get the phone back, and more importantly get dial-up back, that they clean forgot to remind me that we were supposed to have broadband. But in due course they did. Tony kindly came around, figured out where I'd put an ADSL filter on the wrong side of a splitter. And, after much more faffing about, I got access to Demon Broadband on Master Early's PC.

So I checked out Dell, and checked out PC World, and decided there wasn't much in it and we could go to PC World today, so Mrs Early and I drove to Corstorphine and bought a shiny new Packard Bell with Windows Vista. I took the Speedtouch modem off Master Early's computer, intending to instal it on my new one. Dropping by that evening, Master Early plugged the line back in for the dial-up, tried to connect, and got the message: No Dial Tone. How odd, I said. I picked up the phone. No dial tone. When we disconnected his phone line from the splitter in front of the ADSL filter, we got dial tone back. The phone extension, on the same splitter, worked fine.

Oh well. It was getting late.

Bright and early the following morning, I installed the Speedtouch modem in my shiny new computer. The little green LEDS on the modem glowed happily. I tried to connect. No joy. I rang the Demon helpline, to be told that, oh yes, the Speedtouch modem doesn't work with Vista. There'll be a patch for the drivers available for download in April. I decided I might as well by a wireless router and be done with it.

Mrs Early was at work, with the car. I got the bus to Barnton, trekked over the hill to Corstorphine, and explained the problem to the tech guy at PC World. Oh yes, he said. That's all the fault of the manufacturers, Microsoft has given them months and months of notice. I refrained from saying that I could have done some notice when I bought the PC yesterday. He then told me that only the very latest wireless router (ninety quid) worked with Vista. I was about to bite the bullet when a sales guy helpfully pointed out that I could install the router on the PC running XP, and stick the dongle on my new PC, and get online that way. Great, I said, buying the cheapest router I could see (Philips, fifty quid).

Back over the hill I trekked, hopped on the next bus home, and set to work installing the Philips. Hit a brick wall on configuring ISP details: a drop-down selection that didn't drop. Phone the Philips helpline. After being talked through the install and hitting the same brick wall, I mentioned why I was doing this in the first place, and was told that the router could be installed on a PC running Vista, no problem. I tried this, and the problem went away, and all the lights came on, but the thing wouldn't connect to the Demon server. I rang Philips again, and was told to get DNS details from my ISP.

And the following day, yesterday, I did just that. But I didn't ring the Demon helpline. I got the numbers off the right bit of help documentation, put them in myself and felt very smug when I got online on my shiny new computer, and even more smug when I installed the dongle on Master Early's PC, and got online with that.

All that remained then was to configure my email, which only took a couple of hours and two calls to the helpline.

The only outstanding issue is the dial-up line to Master Early's computer. It still makes the line go dead. It's connected to the correct socket of an ADSL filter. It's not really necessary - his email client pickes up his mail over broadband just fine - but I'm still curious about it.

Posted 2:52 pm by Ken
We have liftoff

I now have broadband, so expect to hear more from me.

Posted 2:04 am by Ken

The Last of the Deliverers

It was the winter of '77, if I remember right, a winter when the snow squeaked in the cleats of my boots. 'Mull of Kintyre' was a Christmas hit. I had found myself, quite unexpectedly, on my own in London and with no plan and no money to go home. Perhaps it was the aching nostalgia incited by that MacCartney song on the radio that sent me, some time between Christmas and New Year, tramping through the snow from Hayes to Southall for a party in a comrade's flat. The heart and soul of that party was a guy with a beard and long hair and a guitar. He was an Irish trade unionist who lived in London. He was pro-Moscow: a stickie or a tankie, I don't remember. He loathed the Provos, anyway. He sang old Irish rebel songs.

Some men fight for silver
and some men fight for gold
but the IRA is fighting for
the land De Valera sold.

And he also sang:

The Chinese they have Mao Tse Tung
the Vietnamese have Ho
and we have Harold Wilson
and Daz and Fairy Snow.

Oh China, me old china,
they must have gone astray
So send them over here to us
and we'll show them the way ...

The leader of China's communist revolution was an educated peasant who became enthralled by a Western ideology. Around this ideology he built an organization, then an army, which took on the old regime in millions-strong clashes. Conquering the countryside, bypassing the towns, his peasant legions eventually captured the imperial capital. The redivision of land was accompanied by a massacre of land-owners. The population was subjected to mind-numbing compulsory indoctrination in the ideology. Millions, perhaps tens of millions, died in civil war, internal turmoil, and famine. At the same time, there can be no doubt that the revolutionary regime forced through long overdue reforms, abolishing as it did foot-binding and concubinage, and fighting drug addiction and many other evils. A classless society was proclaimed, a rigid hierarchy installed. Ensconced in the old imperial palace, the leader became in his later years a virtual recluse, devoting his time to philosophical rumination and sensual indulgence. After his death, his regime was speedily repudiated and much of its work, for good or ill, undone.

So much for the life of Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, leader of the Taiping Rebellion, self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus and God's Chinese Son.

In 1976 I heard on the radio that Mao had died. Mao once said: Marx is dead. Engels is dead. Lenin too has passed away. Without Stalin, who would there be to give instructions? To my immediate and immense chagrin, I heard in my own mind a faint echo of that grotesque thought. Where, I asked myself, had it come from? Not from my political consciousness, but from my political unconscious. There is such a thing. Much, much earlier, as a curious schoolboy tuning another radio to the broadcasts of the other side in the Cold War, I'd heard the rival Communist powers' bulletins about the war in Vietnam. Radio Moscow talked about peace. Radio Peking talked about battles. Radio Tirana gave body-counts.

In 1972 Glasgow University's only Maoist, a music teacher as mild in manner as he was militant in outlook, had gleefully told me of a piece of graffiti down at the docks that for sure he and his comrades had not written:

FUCK KING BILLY AND THE POPE
CHAIRMAN MAO'S OUR ONLY HOPE

Mao represented revolution in the minds of millions who weren't Maoists. It wasn't the repressive aspects of his rule that inspired them. Another trade unionist, a social democrat and an Englishman this time, the father of a friend of mine, told his more radical son: 'If you must be a communist at least go with the Chinese - they've done it without all the violence like in Russia.'

Ha ha bloody ha.

June 1989 saw an eerie, thousands-strong demonstration in Soho, London's Chinatown. It was a protest against the Tianenmen Square massacre. Most of the marchers were Chinese and most of the rest were British leftists. Everybody joined in with a catch in their throats and tears on their cheeks when the Chinese sang The Internationale. The veteran Communist and anti-Stalinist Monty Johnstone carried the banner of the Communist Party of Great Britain. I walked beside him and listened to his reminiscences. (He had been a fraternal delegate to the CPSU's Twentieth Congress. During Khrushchev's 'secret speech' denouncing Stalin, from which the fraternal delegates were excluded, Johnstone was sent off to talk to a group of Soviet factory workers who were studying the works of ... Bakunin.) Up ahead of us a small clot of Maoists kept chanting 'Free Chiang Ching now!' 'Send her to hell!' I shouted, over and over. 'That evil woman!' I snarled to Johnstone. 'Oh yes,' he murmured.

In the winter of 2005 I read the then chart-topping anti-Communist blockbuster, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jon Halliday and Jung Chang. The last-but-one biography of Mao to be published, a serious, well-researched and well-received work by Philip Short, was at that time thirty-three thousand places lower in the Amazon UK sales ranking. Reading with one thumb and two fingers in Chang and Halliday's infuriatingly complicated and tellingly indeterminate system of footnotes, I alternated between outrage at the horrors recounted, and dismay at the shaky nature of the evidence offered. The old China is presented as a harmonious land into which the Communists introduced class conflict. Points that might tell against this are hurried past: massive rallying to the Reds on the Long March is accounted for because in a first province the warlord was 'unusually cruel', in the next the people were dirt poor, in a third they were Muslims ... And it's easy to make a case that Mao was interested only in personal power and not in politics if you refrain from quoting so much as a complete paragraph (as far as I can recall) from Mao's extensive political writings.

Why did a minority of Western communists, and many who were by no means communists or even - in some cases - on the left, find Mao's ideas worth attending to? Why did many Chinese people rally to the Chinese Communist Party's line and practice, even at its most repellent? Why is Mao's rule remembered as workers' power by some workers who lived through it? You might think that the authors - a former Marxist intellectual who once greatly respected Mao's thought, and a former Red Guard whose Communist parents were cruelly persecuted in the Cultural Revolution - would be well placed to answer, in the most self-critical terms if need be, these questions. Yes, you might very well think that. You would be wrong. You could close this long book with very little clue as to Mao's ideas, and only the haziest impressions of the society he grew up in and fought to overthrow. And those impressions would contradict some much more vivid ones left by Jung Chang's earlier bestseller, Wild Swans.

These and other shortcomings of the Chang/Halliday book are detailed by Andrew Nathan, one of its few detractors in a sea of glowing reviews. (The authors reply here.) Charlie Hore gives it an informed and nuanced Marxist review, and points out that many on the left had the low-down on Mao while Chang and Halliday were still brandishing their Little Red Books (and in the case of the veteran Chinese Communist and later Trotskyist Peng Shuzi before Chang and Halliday were born). Other critical comments on the book can be found here and here. Nor should the bitter, decades-long denunciation of Maoism by the orthodox Communists be forgotten. A quarter of a century ago, one notably orthodox Communist drew a line under that critique: 'The present Chinese leaders themselves describe what happened in the period of the so-called cultural revolution in their country as "a most cruel feudal-fascist dictatorship". We have nothing to add to this assessment.' (Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, 1981.)

I was never a Maoist. As a schoolboy I was intrigued, to be sure. I read with some scepticism a copy of the Little Red Book given to me by a Maoist classmate. By the time I read Han Suyin's rose-tinted Maoist tract China in the Year 2001 (1967, Penguin 1970, 1971) I had encountered the theory of state capitalism, which seemed entirely applicable to what was then going on in China. In that perspective the puritanical and iconoclastic frenzy of a millennarian jacquerie was all too understandable, and all too facilely fitted into that conflation of the Communist revolutions with the bourgeois revolutions to which I have too often adverted since. The actual effect of Communism, in Russia and China, was to complete the overthrow of the old order, feudal or Asiatic or whatever; and to clear the ground for capitalism. I saw it as part of, or a continuation and radicalisation of, the Revolution that was what my parents meant when they spoke of 'the Revolution': 1640 and 1688. Its scale and ferocity in China were commensurate with the antiquity and conservatism of the social order it overturned. The actual effect of Maoism in China, like Stalinism in Russia, was to complete the bourgeois revolution: to accomplish the overthrow of the old order, and to clear the ground for capitalism. That was no small or savoury work. In the little British Isles, 800 000 perished in the bourgeois revolution; a revolution that in the memory of all but the Irish is remembered only for a few civilised battles and execrated only for the execution of a king.

The December before last, walking along George Street in the rain, an idea struck me with great force. It had never crossed my mind before. It was inspired by gloomy pondering on the Mao book. It is this. The stated aims of Communism are the same as those of democratic socialism, which are in turn much the same as, and are rooted in, those of liberalism. I'd always seen that continuity as a point in Communism's favour, amid all its evils: in Marxist terms an ironic, back-handed, 'historical justification'; which is not the same, incidentally, as a moral justification.

What if, instead, the evils of Communism cast condemnation back on its roots? Let me be quite clear what I mean here. I don't mean just liberalism. I mean that every ideal of progress, of liberty, equality and fraternity, of humanitarianism and egalitarianism, and every last one of their ideological offspring and offshoots - liberalism, democracy, anarchism, socialism, feminism, libertarianism - and every last consequence of all of them, might be intrinsically evil.

What if the liberal, republican ideology of Sun-Yat-Sen was the real origin of China's disasters? Or, going a little farther back, western thought itself? China's first communist revolution, the Taiping Rebellion which led to millions of deaths, was inspired by Christianity. Liberal British imperialism fought two wars for the right to sell opium to China. The effect, however justifiable in terms of libertarian doctrine, was hideously destructive. The closest parallel, indeed, might be the famines in British India. India had had its famines in the past, but it took minds informed by Liberalism, by laissez-faire, by Mill and Malthus to pass the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act. What if Liberalism is evil?

It could certainly be ruthless:

On January 3, 1793, the first Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Short, the American ambassador to Paris, who had criticized the early excesses of the French Revolution. Praising the insurrection, he asked whether "ever such a prize" had been "won with so little innocent blood?" His "own affections," Jefferson added, "have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is."

Half the earth desolated? Now that's revolutionary zeal!

The Glorious Revolution's great theorist Locke, in his justification of private property, made one well-known proviso: that the initial appropriator of the commons should leave 'enough and as good left over'. He made, in passing, another: that the appropriator should not waste what he appropriates, and may be punished (and, by implication, expropriated) if he does. Little celebrated in political theory, this get-out clause has been of great help in practice. It justifies, after all, the expropriation of anyone - savage, peasant, or despot - whose appropriation is less efficient than that of the capitalist. It could also justify, in theory, the expropriation of the capitalist, should capitalism turn out to be wasteful in comparison to a feasible alternative. The libertarian fancy that the depredations of imperialism and colonialism represent some deviation from the theory of property proclaimed by the bourgeois revolution is false. Actually existing capitalism has been true to its ideologues: that revolution was never betrayed.

Liberalism was the first secular revolutionary ideology, in fact the first secular ideology. Before Locke, people got along for thousands of years without political ideals or ideologies. Plato's Republic is a philosophical fantasy, not a political programme. Aristotle's Politics is a scientific classification of different forms of government, not an outline of an ideal government. Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses are practical manuals.

Is the pursuit of political ideals just the frenzy of a few recent and atypical centuries?

One can go further than that. The Liberalism of Locke has its roots in Christianity. In all the iniquities of antiquity there is not, I think, one ideological frenzy. Some emperors persecuted the Christians - for their odious, scrupulous and ostentatious displays of disloyalty, not for their beliefs, which were beneath the notice, let alone the concern, of the Caesars. In power the Christians persecuted each other, over matters comprehensible, if at all, only to themselves. The general tenor of ancient thought, East and West, was humane, rational and realistic. In the works of Epicurus and Lucretius, of Lucian, of Marcus Aurelius and Confucius there shines a way of thinking and being that you may not find again until you meet the mind of Hume. What if the original revolutionary disaster within whose coils we still struggle was the overthrow of Rome, and the original revolutionary ideology was that symbolised by the cross? In that sign, what conquered? And what was conquered?

To that Nietzschean question there may be only a Marxian answer:

English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

On India Marx may have been over-optimistic, at least in the short run. The British Empire did not bring to India progress at all commensurate to the cost:"India's overall annual rate of growth between 1820 and 1950 - 0.12 per cent - was pitifully low". How would Marx have estimated a regime that, whatever may have been its crimes, vile have been its interests, stupid its means of enforcing them, and sickening as it must be to human feeling, did a hundred times more to advance China than the British ever did to India?

Ah, but - some may say - Hitler built the autobahns, and Mussolini made the trains run on time. Does that justify their regimes? That rhetorical question is frightful in its frivolity. A humanity that takes such canards seriously has not met the last of its deliverers.

Posted 4:59 pm by Ken

The lone and level sands

In 2002 I was in Cracow as a guest of the Polish national SF convention, who had put me up in a newly-opened hotel in the Old Jewish Quarter. The quarter was quite visibly becoming the new happening place, and - most hearteningly - a new Jewish quarter, with kosher delis and Israeli cafes sprucing up its neglected streets. The big pre-war synagogues are still there, and open. I think it was the sight of them that gave rise to a premonition I'd never had before. Something very bad is going to happen. Nothing I'd seen in Poland had given any occasion for gloom. Quite the reverse. But my unease had nothing to do with Poland, and it remained. I tried to shake it off as a side-effect of sombre hindsight: it's hard to look at those massive, ornate synagogues without thinking of the fate of those who once worshipped there, and of how little they must have suspected of what was to come. And maybe gloomy hindsight is all it was. At that time, the confrontation with Iraq was a cloud no bigger than a man's hand.

I'm no prophet, and nor are you, but you know what I'm going to say next.

Yes, Iran. Israeli historian Benny Morris claims it is preparing a second Holocaust: it is striving to acquire nuclear weapons and when it does, it will nuke Israel. (Via.) Morris acknowledges that this would mean nuking Palestine, and destroying or contaminating some of Islam's holiest sites, but believes Iran would go ahead and do it anyway. The Iranian leadership consists of mad mullahs, fanatical and undeterrable. Not even the prospect of an Israeli counterstrike would stay their hand. Israel might not have the capability to retaliate anyway. The US wouldn't retaliate and the rest of the world would do essentially nothing. Millions of Jews would die and the world would shrug it off. So the only thing to be done is to nuke Iran before it nukes Israel. Morris's only worry is that the Israeli leadership isn't up to the job.

Iran's own Jews don't seem to believe they're living under a Jew-hating regime, if their reluctance to leave (via) is anything to go by. Morris's evidence that the Islamic Republic of Iran has such a heinous intent as to nuke Israel amounts to little more than the familiar litany of Ahmadinejad's rants and stunts: the Holocaust cartoon competition, the Holocaust denial conference, and the infamous remark that 'Israel must be wiped off the map'. The fascinating story of that alleged remark has been traced in some detail by Arash Norouzi - an apparently liberal artist and no fan of the Iranian president - and is well worth reading, both for its demonstration that Ahmidinejad did not in fact say it and its explanation of how the mistranslated phrase went around the world. But whatever about that, Ahmadinejad's undoubtedly provocative and reactionary antics are a somewhat inadequate basis for advocating a nuclear attack on Iran. The very fact that they are constantly cited is evidence enough that the Islamic Republic has not actually threatened Israel with nuclear attack. Meanwhile, far more representative and responsible voices in Israel and the United States most definitely have threatened Iran with nuclear attack.

Worry that a US and/or Israeli attack is in the works has spread beyond the usual suspects of left and right, and has seeped into the mainstream. Some even see it as imminent. By next month there will be two carrier groups in the Gulf. The Israeli air force is practicing bombing runs to Gibraltar and back. Bush blames Iran for instability in Iraq. The pieces are moving into place. You'll find lots of links to details of troubling recent developments here (As you can see from Jorge Hirsch's sidebar, he's cried wolf about an imminent attack before, but it's a useful collection of links.)

Very likely there will be no US or Israeli attack on Iran. No, what's far more probable is what will be presented as an Iranian attack on the US. As conservative pundit William S. Lind puts it:

It now looks as if the Bush administration may have realized that an out-of-the-blue, Pearl Harbor-style air and missile attack on Iran's nuclear facilities is politically infeasible. Instead, the White House will order a series of small "border incidents," pinpricks similar to last week's raid on an Iranian mission in Kurdistan, intended to provoke Iranian retaliation. That retaliation will then be presented as an Iranian attack on [US] forces, with the air raids on Iranian nuclear targets called "retaliation."

A Humvee blasted by an IED with Revolutionary Guard fingerprints on the circuitry, some luckless patrol-boat drawing fire, whatever. No matter how minor the skirmish, that's how it could be spun. And then, purely in self-defence, the stealth bombers and cruise missiles and who knows what else would be on their way to turn Iran's defences and nuclear facilities into 10 000 points of light.

It would be a mistake to predict immediate and inevitable disaster ensuing. The mullahs might sit and take it, even tactical nukes, refraining from retaliation for fear of worse. (This assumes, interestingly, that the 'mad mullahs' are in fact rational and deterrable, as well as cowardly.) The Strait of Hormuz might stay unblocked, thanks to Iranian caution or US boldness. Iran's supposedly unstoppable sea-skimming cruise missiles might be all destroyed in the first strike, or held in reserve, or turn out not to be unstoppable after all. Russian or Chinese technicians might not be killed, or if they are, Putin might be content to let communists and nationalists rage in Red Square until it all blows over; modulo Beijing. After a brief spike in the oil price the markets might settle their nerves and resume their upward trend. The Chinese banks might decide not to dump dollars. The Shia militias in Iraq might stay on side. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq could remain a bulwark of democracy against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Brits might withdraw from the south in good order, or hunker down, leaving Badrists and Sadrists to fight it out with each other. And if there does happen to be some kind of blowback in Iraq, well, the 'surge' of 21 500 more troops might be enough to hold the line.

I'm not saying that doesn't add up to a lot of things that could go wrong, any one of which could flip the world on its back, but hey. It could work. The Islamic Republic could fall, or fold, and the US bestride the Middle East like a colossus.

That victory would be the moment we'd some day look back on, and say, 'And that was when our troubles began.' Fortunately for America and its allies, such a victory is unlikely. What is far more likely is an ever-widening catastrophe across the Middle East if not beyond. But if a US victory does come about, the rest of the world would find itself facing a lone superpower that had successfully carried out an attack, perhaps even a nuclear attack, on a country that had no nuclear weapons and that had not attacked or threatened it. From then on we would all be living in interesting times; and on borrowed time. The time to do what we can to stop this is now.