Two stories about the rise in knife crime. The first from Lizzie Dearden in The Independent, the other from Temi Mwale for DoubleDown News. One is direct and to the point, the other is not.
The royal family are there to distract us
Branko Marcetic in Jacobin offers some much needed perspective on the royals. “A just world would be one without royalty – and celebrity humanitarians.”
Marcetic is right, Meghan Markle can’t save the world, but I don’t think that’s what any of them are there for. The royal family, all of them, are there to distract us. They’re the public face of an economic system that allows trillions of dollars to be hidden in tax havens.
While we are praising these “celebrity humanitarians” we’re not pursuing, correcting, the morally bankruptcy that keeps them where they are.
Real power is not with the throne, real power hides behind it.
George Monbiot on political journalism
Rebel for life
I hope I am as active and committed as this gentleman when I am his age. Hero’s walk among us.
Thatcher decline caused crime
Jamie Doward in The Guardian reports a first of its kind study linking the “industrial collapse of Thatcher years” to a rise in crime.
“Four decades after Margaret Thatcher swept to power, research has found that in areas where the coal, steel, ship and railway industries were hit during the 1980s, young people were much more likely to find themselves in trouble with the police.”
Those people currently wringing their hands over the rise in knife crime might want to take a long hard look at this study. It confirms what anyone who doesn’t look the wrong way down a telescope knows, there’s a “link between offending and economic factors”.
Prohibition doesn’t work, never has, never will
Daniel Boffey’s report for The Guardian exposes a couple of things. Not only are drugs being bought anonymously online, and shipped using the relative anonymity of the postal service, it also confirms what the authorities don’t want to admit, prohibition doesn’t work, never has, and most definitely never will!
We’ve got to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it
Novara Media reports George Monbiot’s impassioned attack on capitalism, as seen on Frankie Boyle’s New World Order (2017-).
I agree with him, but it does feel a bit like one of the podium speeches from the film Reds, Warren Beatty‘s 1981 biopic of Jack Reed.
The question I have for Monbiot is simple. Where do I plunge my sword? I’d love “to go straight to the heart of capitalism” and strike the fatal blow.
Personally, I don’t think you can, because this version of capitalism doesn’t have a heart, and because it doesn’t, there is no focus for our rage, no place for my aim to strike.
Contemporary capitalism isn’t the capitalism of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, the one Jack Reed was reporting in Ten Days that Shook the World (1919). That seems almost quaint by contemporary standards. Cut the head off the bosses, take control of the means of production, job done. These days you can cut the head off as many bosses as you want, capitalism just grows another head, or two, like the spawn of Hydra.
It strikes me that capitalism is more like an all-consuming ball of viscera, held together with clots of blood, and the chimeric limbs of a virus, grabbing at everything in its path.
I think we should adjust my understanding of the monolith.
For me the metaphor for contemporary capitalism has always been the panopticon. The panopticon I’ve written about in previous posts is a machine of control, a prison. It has a tower at the centre, with cells arranged around the perimeter. The watchers watch, and the tenants comply, because they never know when they’re being watched. With the visceral image in mind I think I have to revise my vision of the prisons architecture. It needs to accommodate this unrelenting ball of viscera.
If contemporary capitalism is a ball, always rolling, always consuming, where do the cells of the panopticon fit? I can only think they line the inside of the ball like the proteins lining the wall of a virus. This changes the orientation of the cells, tipping them over. That means we’re no longer being watched along a horizontal axis, instead we’re being monitored from above.
If we’re inhabiting these six-sided boxes, hermetically sealed cells, what are we seeing when we look out? If we look left or right, front or back, we should be able to see the other tenants of the panopticon, but we don’t. They should be there, staring in on us, as we stare in on them. Could we be so similar to each other we mistake them for our own reflection? Is it that we see them, but like Narcissus we’re so transfixed by our own reflection, all we see is a haze of movement in the background.
If when we look around we only see reflections, what are we seeing when we look up? Can we even see the spherical version of the tower, all watching, all knowing, omnipotent? Do we see the virus gnome, hovering above us like oil sliding on water?
Are we seeing God?
Is that why capitalism hasn’t destroyed our notions of God? It needs us to believe in the almighty so we keep looking up. If we’re always looking up, we’re not looking down. If we’re not looking down, we don’t see the viscera, the clots of blood, the chimeric limbs of the virus. We don’t see the true horror of capitalism swirling beneath our feet. We’re told the fiery chambers of hell are waiting should we transgress, but they’re not. All that is beneath us is the bloody intestine of the beast that has swallowed us.
If the Devil is the beast, and the beast is the machine, how many of us have the courage to cut into its flesh? How hard is it to kill an animal? How much fear and loathing must we have to slice through the flesh and bone? How much more courage would you need to slice and escape through those chimeric limbs? Their entire reason for existence is to grab everything in their path, and draw it into the beast? Any individual escaping their cell would become just another resource for the machine, more protein for the wall of the virus.
It’s no wonder that beast seems impossible to slay. We’ve been shadow boxing our reflection for so long, we’re exhausted. But strength must be summoned from somewhere. Any attack on the beast must be coordinated. It requires a vast percentage of the panopticons prisoners to break through the walls of their cell, and slice into the beast simultaneously. The trauma must be so catastrophic that the beast is unable to repair or mutate. Each and every chimeric limb must rendered irreparable. The unrelenting production of heads must be hacked until the machine has neither the will or the energy to produce more. Only then will we be able to hack through the clots of blood, and escape.
This wouldn’t be the end of it. Who knows what will be found on the outside? Will there be anything left? It could be so depleted it can no longer sustain us. Consider also, how prepared are we for this new life? After forever in a box, will we have the skills we need to thrive? A practical life is not a technological existence. The abstract thinking needed to thrive in a cell is not the same as the practical skills needed to survive in the wild. Can you create fire from nothing? I’m not sure I have such a basic skill.
It’s not an excuse to stay where we are. We have a choice. Escape the panopticon, destroy the beast, they’re one and the same. If we don’t the beast will continue until it has consumed everything, then it’ll feed on us until that resource is gone. Finally, alone, the beast will wither and decay, it will not matter, no one will cry, there will be no one left to notice.
We have a choice. Learn to make fire.
Brexit group covered up its targeting of right-wing extremists
Fatima Manji for Channel 4 News reveals “Brexit-backer Arron Banks repeatedly denied that Leave.EU appealed to National Front supporters – in a bid to get the BBC to drop an investigation”.
Look past your own reflection and see into the tower. One of Facebook’s paymasters is on show for all to see. All you have to do is look.
Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy
Possibly the most explosive TED talk I’ve seen, ever. Carole Cadwalladr breaks down “Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy”.
Carole Cadwalladr’s investigations may be the most important of a generation. Her work has exposed the workings of the tower at the centre of the panopticon, the machine that manipulates democracy.
For those unfamiliar, the panopticon is an idea, a circular prison with cells that have glass walls. Watched from a central tower, compliance is teased from its tenants because we never know when we’re being watched.
Michel Foucault used it as a metaphor highlighting the way power, since the destruction of absolute monarchies, has sought to hide itself from view. If there is no focus for our anger, it’s impossible to remove the cause of our pain.
If we are tenants of the panopticon, Facebook has made themselves the warders, and they’re stressing us into compliance. What I’d like to know is who pays them? Because whomever pays the warder calls the shots.
The biggest obstacle to finding that, is what we see when we look out of our cells. It’s not the looming black tower at the centre, but our own reflections in the glass.
We need to find ways to get a light into that tower.
Cadwalladr has gone some way to doing that. With the help of whistleblower Christopher Wylie, she was able to expose a small part of the tower’s mechanism, how the various platforms, stairs, landings, and corridors, link.
There are still questions to be answered. Where do the corridors lead, who is behind the various doors of the labyrinthine maze? I have theories, I’m sure Cadwalladr does too.
I just hope she keeps looking, because we all need her answers.
Once she does have more answers, we have to decide what we do with her revelations, because they will be revelations. Keep in mind that the structure we’re all part of is designed to have us stare like Narcissus at our own reflection. Do we have the will to see past our own image, to the structure of the tower, and what’s hidden within?
This will take great effort and the will to see it all? I think we must.
How Leave.EU faked migrant footage
I struggle to find something to say that makes any sense of what Leave.EU have been able to get away with. I keep returning to the idea that the logic of what has been done cannot be unpicked.
You can do as Fatima Manji has done, and dismantle the lie, prove the footage has been faked, that the story being told is a fiction. It makes no difference. The perpetrators deny the accusation with accusation, belittling the question with the gall of a playground bully. You can offer as much proof as you like, you can never shake the resolve of the faithful.
These aren’t confrontations between two logics, it’s a war between empiricism and faith, and faith will always win.
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