Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Trailers
An exclusive chapter excerpt from my forthcoming novel The Night Sessions is up at FantasyBookSpot.com.
Free PDF copies of the fine forthcoming anthology Seeds of Change (in which I have a very short story, 'A Dance Called Armageddon') are available to reviewers and bloggers here.
How to win friends and influence people
Over at Liberal Conspiracy, the typical liberal hand-wringing gets almost out of hand:
If we get involved, we may also end up looking silly.Sean Gabb, for whom the phrase 'made of sterner stuff' might have been coined, swings the massed ranks and vast funds of the Libertarian Alliance (Official) behind Davis. Tory qualms about damaging the Conservative Party are firmly stomped:
It may be that the Conservatives are less evil than Labour. But so are the BNP and al-Qa’eda.The Yorkshire Ranter likewise lays to rest liberal mutterings about Davis's sometimes less than liberal views:
In terms of classical conservatism, it makes perfect sense to think that the State should have the power to cut your head off, and that its power must be constrained by law as much as humanly possible.Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Glenn Greenwald riffs off the Davis candidacy to take the Democrats to task, and is himself taken to task for failing to mention the most conspicuous current example of a Democrat with a backbone.
In other news ...
I see (via - no one's told me) that The Execution Channel has been been shortlisted for the 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Given the strength of the shortlist, 'It's an honour just to be nominated' is the sensible reaction. Still, fingers crossed ...
Horseman of the Apocrypha
That last is a lapse of understanding. The rest are matters of fact. None of these errors and misconceptions is important to Hitchens' argument in God is not Great. Getting the facts straight would have been easy - not just for a man of Hitchens' parts and learning, but for anyone with access to the Internet or a library and half an hour to spare.
Reasons to be Cheerful
The privatisation of the Labour Party, mooted here and discussed in the post below, may or may not be a joke. What is well past a joke is the need for creative market-based solutions to the problems of the farther left. The way forward has long since been pioneered by two groups at opposite poles of the British Marxist spectrum: the ultra-left RCP became the contrarian, libertarian think-tank spiked, while the right wing of the old CP morphed smoothly into the left-of-centre think-tank Demos. Both are more influential than they ever were as parties: a strong indication that a wealth of untapped talent and assets await the enterprising venture socialist within the crumbling edifices of democratic centralism. A thousand weeds are ready to bloom, just as soon as the walls are knocked down and the roof blown off.
So how could the rest go?
Let's start from the top. The diverse, diminished, but still millions-strong international Communist movement has global brand recognition, and could very well be run as a franchise. Who better placed to do that than the mighty CPC? This is less outlandish than it sounds. In the 1970s, squabbling sects of US Maoists contended for what they quite openly referred to as 'the China franchise' (the losers had to make do with Albania). Meanwhile, China's official Foreign Languages Publishing House even-handedly flooded the market with cheap, excellent translations of the Marxist classics, whose font and print were so easy on the eye as to make reading even Stalin's duller pages tolerable. With China's more general turn to the market, FLPH disposed of its surplus Marxist stock by shipping bales of the stuff to any Communist party that would take the books and pamphlets off its hands for nothing. Local stocks around the world are now dangerously low, and the Chinese Communists could earn some much-needed goodwill on the left by cranking up the presses again, in whatever slack time the FLPH has between production runs of business manuals. As for the supply of baseball caps, flags, T-shirts, ball-point pens and other agitational ephemera, it would merely be a matter of changing the stencils in the sweatshops. If 'Free Tibet' flags can turn out to be Made in China, why not Red ones? With its decades of diplomatic experience and ingrained sympathy for national prickliness, the CPC would be well placed - and could well afford - to take an above-the-battle view of the minor differences among its clients.
Trotskyism presents a knottier problem. The only answer here is in radical restructuring. Trotsky himself was notably better at producing interesting descriptions of reality than at devising practical policies to change it, and the flaw has replicated down the entire clade of his successors. However, the whole point of this exercise is to turn setbacks into opportunities, and here the answer just drops out of a clear statement of the problem: separate the analysis from the actions! The Socialist Workers Party is the obvious case in point. If only the intellectuals who produce International Socialism would concentrate on what they're good at, and the rank-and-filers who sell Socialist Worker and who hand out placards and leaflets did likewise, everything would be fine. It's when the intellectuals try to formulate a policy that they tend to come to grief. Policy formation should therefore be taken out of the hands of the Central Committee and hived off to a think-tank (details below). Having no say in the policy of the paper they sell shouldn't embarrass the sellers, who have no such say at the moment in any case.
OK, so we have our Marxist intellectual book publishers, and our socialist street newspaper sellers. That leaves the little matter of the policy that will inform the papers they sell. How is that to be decided, if not by the intellectuals? Why not the rank and file? We search the blogs of the far left with a sinking feeling. How is it that so many bright, well-informed, intelligent people can bear to either carry the cross of their party's line, or drift into inactivity (disguised, often enough, as left-wing blogging)? Again, a clear statement of the problem provides the answer: turn the army of lefty bloggers into a prediction market! The clearing-house of that market would then determine policy from week to week; and a small automated system, from day to day.
Speaking of predictions and markets, the rigour of Marxist economics spokespeople would be greatly stiffened if they had to put their money where their mouths are. If their salaries were to be linked to the performance of shares bought and sold on the basis of their predictions, many economic crises that have never happened would never have been predicted. Again, there's a real-world precedent for this: in 1987, while more excitable Marxists (and others) were predicting the final crisis, the Communist Party's pension fund did very well by buying shares hand over fist at the bottom of the crash.
To take this further with more detailed suggestions for the smaller groups - to consider, for example, the Scottish Socialist Party's potential as a relationship counselling service - would take us too far into the realms of speculation.
Labour Party to be privatised
The People's ink is deepest red. Blood and Treasure draws our attention to a possible market solution to the crisis of the Labour Party's finances:
The party's impending insolvency is beginning to concentrate minds, not least those of a group of previously Labour-friendly businessmen, who can spot a bargain when they see one. The New Statesman has learned that the unnamed, secretive group - whose members have track records in helping turn round left-leaning institutions in the past - is considering approaching hedge funds with a view to buying out the Labour Party, or rather the remaining individual members, who would be offered shares instead. "Turning the members into shareholders could offer the same opportunities as the demutualisation of the building societies," says one who is involved.Gives a whole new meaning to 'market socialism', not to mention anarcho-capitalism.
[...]
Quite how those who are courting this rapidly declining asset stand to benefit is unclear. Another businessman who is part of the "Syndicate", as he puts it, is less guarded. If new Labour became a "limited liability party", it might be possible, he says - not entirely jokingly - to "sell non-core policies, from a customer perspective, as three-to five-year options on implementation in office". These could include policy sales to the nuclear industry or to the green lobby. "This," he points out, "could help ensure that national policies achieve the highest returns. And that could only benefit the shareholders - or, as they used to be known, the party members."
Cognitive dissonance
Pic: Traces of primitive man in South Queensferry
Yesterday I came across this fascinating documentation of the heresy trial of Dr. Terry M. Gray, all the way from the initial offence to the recantation.
What I found most interesting was this elaboration of the charges (Dr Gray himself firmly denies that he holds the view attributed here):
Dr. Gray repeatedly speaks as though we ought to interpret Scripture subject to the findings of science. He seeks to conform the teaching of Scripture to a current evolutionary view.[..] His hermeneutical method is more dangerous even than his specific view of human origin. Clearly, the application of this hermeneutical method cannot be limited just to the teaching of Scripture regarding the origin of Adam's body. It may be that Dr. Gray is content not to extend the application of his hermeneutic to other areas, but the method itself consistently applied undermines the authority of Scripture in any area of scientific inquiry.The following, from Dr Gray's recantation, is also remarkable:
The study of evidence in God's creation using scientific methods in keeping with a Biblical worldview leads to the apparent conclusion that the human body originated via evolutionary mechanisms from animal ancestors. While there are some who deny that this is a valid inference from the data, I am unable to find fault with this conclusion held by the majority of the scientific community.What can you say?
6. The simplest reading of Genesis 2 makes no suggestion that Adam's body had animal ancestors. [...]
7. Thus, my response is simply that I do not know how bring these two ideas together and that I am willing to remain in a state of agnosticism and cognitive dissonance on this issue. Perhaps future findings of science or future refinements of our understanding of the Genesis text will allow for resolution.