Expensive
I’ve stayed relatively clear of the commentariat’s dive into the Torygraph’s shark pool. Obviously, people needed to comment: for example, when the they smeared MPs someone needed to be telling them off.
Monthly Archives: May 2009
JQP in Brief
38 Degrees: Avalanche != Landslide
These guys deserve to be high-lighted. I’m interested in what they want to do; we’ve seen that this kind of project can succeed, but we’ve also all seen them fail. Don’t hold their domain name against them; the name-space is pretty polluted these days.
Pause for thought
Dropping off-line altogether for four days has left me very seriously short on my reading and thinking. Bank-holiday weekends put on a lot of pressure at work even when I haven’t been away from my post for half of a week right before; so I’m not going to get it together enough to post ’til I’ve caught up on some sleep. Back as soon as I’ve something to say.
The Great Machine VI: The Best Lack All Conviction
Because it was There
The success of statist/hierarchical capitalism over all other models is due to its effectiveness at defeating problems of scale in a low-bandwidth, low-tech civilisation. It is, if you want to look at it from the opposite end of the process, the most effective way of inventing the internet as quickly as possible. The ability to support, use and above all disseminate technological advances at a large scale in a low-bandwidth environment is why this model of organisation has always won. And it has now created the answer to its own success. Let’s look back at why Britain got the industrial revolution first.
Clegg-iscite
JQP will undergo a brief hiatus as I’m away from the keyboard doing some Ack-Ting. I leave you with Andy May’s summary of the downfall of Speaker Martin.
Point of Order!
It looks like he’s going.
[ Edit: 14:37 ] And he’s gone. Well, maybe. In a month. Then Parliament can start sorting out the mess. Oo, I wonder what’ll happen between then and now?
Oh yes. The 4th June election will be over.
The Great Machine V: Full of Passionate Intensity
Our story so far: in a thrilling series of bold acquisitions and mergers, occasional plague- or famine-related downsizing and aggressive management restructuring rounds, the human race has managed to invent, in approximate sequence: banditry, tax, cities, bureaucracy, capital wealth, relative wealth, underclasses, social revolutions, writing, statist/hierarchical models of governance and universities. [1] This brought us to the point of answering the initial query: “Just what is it that centralised, statist/hierarchical models of capitalist civilisation are better at than all of the competitor systems human ingenuity has suggested?”.
The answers are scaling, and technological boot-strapping
Reflections on the current economic climate
My articles average 1200 words or so. Using the basic exchange rate of 1(picture) = 1000(words), I believe this submission from Andy May to be worth at least 1175.
The Great Machine IV: The Centre Cannot Hold
Relative Wealth
At the end of our last episode, our proto-capitalist tax baron has collected enough food from enough places to build an urban settlement, and has in the process created a situation of wealth imbalance: he has more than he needs, everyone else has slightly less but not so much less that they’ll die off.
JQP in Brief
Courting Public Opinion II: “Nyer nyer nah ner ner”
I did warn you, Ms. Harman. This, what you see around you? The slavering hacks of Wapping dragging all the senior members of your government through the Westminster Perp-walk, as people bay for your Prime Minister’s blood? This is the court of public opinion. This is what you turned loose on Fred the Shred; beating a man with the stable door has found you no horses. But nailing your trousers to the mast does make it very hard to climb down.
The Great Machine III: The Widening Gyre
[ Editor’s Note: 8.6.09:- I have only just got around to answering questions by Eithin, posed below, about where my source data and civilisation models come from. I have replied in two parts below, but want to include the basic details here.
The Emergence of Civilisation, Charles Maisels 1990
Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, Michael Roaf, 1990 ]
One can tell that the Great Machine series were not planned that way because this would probably have been post one, if they had been. However, I should be able to fix that by offering a different reading order on the Series page.
As an illustration of a point I was making about ideology, I discussed in detail why both ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’ do not necessarily mean what you think they mean. The functional definition of ‘capital’ that I arrived at is “accumulations of unused wealth”; implying that capitalism is any social system in which it is possible to accumulate and defend unexploited wealth. In the same article I also posed the question “What is it that statist/hierarchical systems are good for?”
Idiotology
Studying Idiots
I have expressed before my frustration with ideologies. As I understand the term it is a functional equivalent in politics to the expression ‘dogma’ in religion; a group of ideas that someone famous held which hereinafter must be adhered to as a group. I have several problems with this, not least being that it means people who think ideologically write off what I’m saying without ever stopping to understand it. If I agree with someone famous (e.g. Lenin) about $idea, and the famous person was wrong about $idea2 (which I don’t agree with them on anyway) I can be safely ignored by ideologists, who write me off as ‘a Leninist’. Or ‘a post-modernist’, or a whatever-the-hell-else-ist. I’m really not an anyone-ist. I’ve learned from lots of different thinkers: I can operate within someone else’s paradigm when I need to, provided their paradigm is internally consistent and coherent. But when I’m thinking as me, I have a set of paradigms derived by standing on the shoulders of giants yet not uniformly adherent to any of my source paradigms. I don’t believe there is a single influence on my thinking who I don’t also argue was wrong about something.
Culpability VII: Bootnote
Liberal Democrat [ MP. –Ed ] Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.
Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.
— The Guardian
You know, I’m beginning to wonder about this journalistic integrity thing. It’s a bit odd for me anyway, since I’m an historian. As a discipline we’re inclined to the long view; we’re inclined to use a lot of caveats about data and provenance thereof, and we’re inclined to be very careful to leave room for new data to change our interpretation. It was in this spirit that I wrote the Feast of Fools and Culpability series; I kept seeing things in eye-witness reports which I either cited very carefully, noting that eye-witness reports were unsubstantiated, or left out altogether because there wasn’t enough data and I genuinely hoped they weren’t true.
Little Brother
JQP note: This article re-appears here by kind permission of the editors (one of whom is the Head Research Otter) over at PSUK, for whom it was originally written. I urge anyone concerned about the balance between citizen autonomy and state control to read and contribute to their project.
Sometimes, I wonder whether the human habit of gerontocracy can survive in a high-bandwidth society. Clearly, the experienced are better administrators than those who haven’t learned the hard way; not necessarily better policy makers, but certainly better administrators. But when Moore’s Law has taken over your world and the pace of change, particularly in the sphere of data generation, acquisition and analysis, has become so fast that the map can shift under the territory faster than you can draw, how can we ask people born before the fax machine to understand and legislate about technology?
Serve and Protect
This is a phrase famously associated with police officers in certain high-profile cities in America but it’s also a phrase I associate with the job of landlord. It’s a pun first made to me by the landlord at my local down in Southampton mumble years ago. The pub was a tiny Victorian establishment with a 2-barrel brewery that was visible through a glass panel behind the bar, so you could drink your Sweet Sensation [1] and watch the next batch brewing. I was told “Our job is to serve drinks and protect peace of mind. The brewer sells beer: the landlord sells happiness.”
The view across the bar. 