Category: Uncategorised

Last week most of the world agreed a ban on geoengineering — that is, on trying to counter climate change by large-scale modifications of the atmosphere or landscape.

At the risk of revealing the Enlightenment demon inside my treehugging persona: this ban strikes me as a Bad Thing. Or somewhat backwards, at least: there’s no outright ban on activities that

cause

global warming, just on those aiming to control it.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to distrust geoengineering proposals. Large-scale engineering projects have a tendency to centralise money and power, cost more than planned, cause large and unexpected side-effects, and wind up corrupt and unaccountable to the people they affect.

But a blanket ban? Surely there exists

some

engineering intervention which could have a good effect on the climate. As one generally critical article puts it:

everything that matters most about each of these proposals in terms of deliberation about their plausible effects, their costs, their risks, their benefits, their stakeholders differ from one another in absolutely indispensable ways. And it is hard to see why, given these differences, anything much about the relative success of one of these efforts would necessarily justify confidence that any of the others would have comparable success.

If the projects are so varied, doesn’t it make much more sense to evaluate them indivudually? Try out the safest-seeming ones, prepare for the worst, and hope the benefits outweigh the side-effects?

It probably won’t matter much, in the end. I can’t imagine global-scale projects being stopped by a vaguely-worded agreement in a mostly-overlooked international conference. Besides, it doesn’t apply to the USA — and we all know that is the best source of megalomaniac mad scientists, green or otherwise.

Something I find shocking, but nobody else seems to have much noticed: there are 18 elected MEPs who have not been allowed to sit in the European Parliament.

The Treaty of Lisbon is to blame — or rather, the EU Council and Commission’s reluctance to implement awkwardly democratic parts of it. So the new unelected positions created by the treaty were filled immediately after ratification. The elected positions created — 18 new MEPs, to take office immediately — remain unfilled almost a year later.

There are a bunch of — frankly ridiculous — procedural excuses for keeping the MEPs out of parliament. The real reason seems to be that, in some countries, the MEPs elected were from opponents of the national government. Thus those national governments have taken advantage of the (extensive) procedural uncertainty to keep their opponents out of Brussels.

France is the main villain here. By the 2009 election results they should have 2 new MEPs: one UMP (conservative) and one Green. Sarkozy doesn’t like this; he’d rather replace the Green with a socialist, taking them from the French parliament rather than the previous EU election candidates. The French Prime Minister beautifully explains that appointing MEPS would avoid the “useless controversies” involved in following the previous election results, or holding a new election.

Because the Parliament wants all the new members to arrive simultaneously, none of them can take office until France sorts itself out. So MEPs elected in Sweden or Spain (which sensibly sorted out their rules before the 2009 election) can’t vote because Sarkozy doesn’t like the French greens. And all the other EU centres of power are willing to let France slow things down; it’s not worth rocking the boat just to demand implementation of an election result.

In fact,

nobody

seems all that bothered. Admittedly the Mail and the Telegraph objected — not to the failure of democracy, but because they (wrongly) believed that the disenfranchised MEPs would still be able to claim pay and expenses.

I also probably wouldn’t have noticed, if I hadn’t come into contact with one of the affected MEPs, Amelia Andersdotter from the Swedish Pirate Party. She’s also one of the most coherent, inspiring and intelligent politicians I’ve ever encountered.

The pirate movement are a bit like the Greens — some members are just interested in homoeopathy or downloading True Blood, but the geeky core have a

very

persuasive economic and social programme. Amelia’s definitely part of that core; she has not only an impressive knowledge of trade treaties and EU procedures, but more importantly the ability to fit the details into a broad picture of how they are changing society. I’m a fan.

Of course it’s equally outrageous that obnoxious-but-elected politicians are kept out of parliament (the extra UK MEP would probably be a Tory). Still, I can’t help being particularly infuriated that a politician with so much to say is being excluded.

[

disclaimer: this post is based on a lot of confusing and contradictory information, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood some of the details]

Following khalinche‘s example, I’m going to try writing a daily lj/blog post through November, as a kind of ersatz NaNoWriMo. This strikes me as an excellent idea, pilfering the best bits of nanowrimo (friendly pressure and a vague sense of community), and making it an excuse to write things I already want to write.

On day one, though, I’m already half-cheating with a couple of links. First is something head-slappingly obvious in retrospect: if you want social/political critique in China, science fiction is the place to look:

Who says that science fiction/fantasy is only good for escapism? Over the course of two hours we got: the Communist ideal as science fiction; designs for anti-urban-demolition weaponry, to be distributed to the populace; both internet firewall technology and anti-firewall-technology as China’s two greatest inventions since the compass; correlations drawn between The Matrix and Lu Xun; multiple references to Liu Xiaobo’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize.

I have

never

heard any Chinese writers speak as incisively or as passionately about the Chinese condition as did these few sci-fi writers tonight.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, none of the authors he mentions are available in translation. Shame; publishing Chinese SF in English must make more financial sense than publishing Serious Literature.

Second is a delightfully vicious profile of Peter Thiel — billionnaire co-founder of Paypal and early investor in Facebook. What’s depressing is not so much the unpleasantness of his politics (he’s hardly the only person with scary views), but that, through wealth, he has more power than any thousand of the rest of us.

Thiel announced: “

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible

.” The public, he says, doesn’t support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn’t support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the

extension of the franchise to women

—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have

rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron

,” he writes.

Even here there’s a silver lining; Thiel has just spent $100,000 to support marijuana legalisation in California.

Ha! Is this really true? Harry Rowohlt is perhaps Germany’s best-known translator from English, and also sports a beard that could compete with Alan Moore or Richard Stallman. Apparently he moonlights on the soap Lindenstrasse, playing a hobo? Brilliant

Not only is Helene Hegemann a bona fide genius, but she can put together a delightfully sharp response to her (many, 90% stupid) critics:

Im Januar wurde mein Roman Axolotl Roadkill veröffentlicht. In diesem Roman geht es nicht primär um Drogen oder Sex oder eine bestimmte Generation. Schon gar nicht geht es um Grenzen zwischen Generationen, Geschlechtern, Altersgruppen oder sozialen Schichten. Wenn es überhaupt um irgendeine Grenze geht, und das muss es ja in einer alles und jedem bestimmte Wertesysteme und Raster überstülpenden Gesellschaft, geht es um eine Grenze, die sich durch jeden Menschen zieht. Und um eine Gruppe von Leuten, die ihr Leben dieser Grenze, diesem Riss, dieser Widersprüchlichkeit verschreiben, anstatt das abzulaufen, was unter glatter »Normalität« verstanden wird und genauso wenig funktioniert wie »Asozialität« oder »Verwahrlosung«.

Aber, obwohl wir 2010 haben: Rebellion ist eben doch nicht bloß die leere Geste, die sich insgeheim eigentlich alle aus Bequemlichkeit erhoffen. Wir sind an einem Punkt angekommen, an dem sich nicht mehr gegen konkret abzusteckende Altersgruppen rebellieren lässt und an dem sich sowohl 13-Jährige als auch 60-Jährige als »linksalternative Spinner« und »rechtskonservative Wichser« beschuldigen oder sich streiten, weil einer von ihnen bloß Black Metal hört und der andere, wie nennt man das, Indiemusik und natürlich so Sachen von früher. Na ja.

Charles Stross rages against Steampunk

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans’ Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn’t bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right?)

…which is almost appealing enough to make me try NaNoWriMo.

Almost

In recent weeks, I’ve been becoming increasingly dependent on art to get me through the day. My actual life is bland and featureless; working on things I believe in and care about intellectually, but boring myself silly doing it. The only way to con myself into concentrating is with a kick of words or music or pictures. Then 20 minutes of hand-waving ecstasy, settling down to a lingering vague sense of meaningfulness, that can easily be transferred to whatever dreary task I’m supposed to be working on. It feels somehow nastier than achieving the same effect with caffeine or self-discipline; like using manuscripts as firelighters or something.

Particularly useful is anything implying that the current moment is somehow important, that there’s some reason to be emotionally focussed on now, rather than listlessly comparing it to tomorrow. So there’s the line from _Possession_, for example:

“when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.”

And when that’s too bleakly romantic for me, I look back to Alba De Cespedes’ poems of love in Paris ’68, in a last night of closeness before normality is restored:

Encore un soir, le dernier, nous serons entre nous: les fous d’amour et de révolte. Cette rive sera encore la nôtre; à nous seuls, prison, ghetto, léproserie.

One more night, the last, we’ll be together: delerious with love and revolt. This bank will still be ours, ours alone: prison, ghetto, lepers’ colony

Similarly, on Sunday I went to see a friend playing in a small band. What really shook me were the support band. And then not musically, but because the singer was obviously in the midst of some fairly serious depression**. Being able to spend an hour staring at somebody in that state was — terrifying? powerful? horrifying? All the little traits that I can normally only see in isolation, blending together into self-reinforcing patterns.

* necessary guilt-disclaimer that, for all this talk about work, I’m not in fact doing a huge amount of it.

** or yes, maybe it was all an act. If so it was simultaneously an impressive feat of acting and not at all suitable for a gig.

My squeamishness about violence and competition doesn’t stop me enjoying martial arts films. I skip quickly through the big fights, and concentrate on what I’m really there for: the training scenes. There’s place in my heart for anything that fetishises hard work and long hours: the West Wing, the Devil Wears Prada and Press Gang all fit the bill. But martial arts is the only film genre to really place this on a pedestal (with other sports films coming in a distant second).

I’ve just discovered Million Dollar Baby, a boxing film with a particularly harsh light on the training process. Maggie Fitzgerald is a female boxer, who with difficulty persuades washed-up coach Frankie to train her.

Frankie’s gym has the low-rent grubbiness typical of boxing films. So as Frankie starts to clock up the hours — training late into the night after everybody else has left — she’s doing so in an impressively unglamorous environment. Just a punching bag, a dim pool of light, and Frankie.

We don’t rely on gritted teeth or fixed stares to show how determined she is. Because determination — here and in reality — is present less in the moments of peak work, than in months and years of hard work and sacrifice. It’s present in her diet of leftovers filched from the diner where she works, in the monastic environment of her home, in the dollars saved for boxing equipment. Above all it’s in that late-night pool of light, the activities she returns to because she doesn’t have — doesn’t believe she _can_ have — anything else in her life.

To make a fighter, you gotta strip ‘em down to bare wood. You can’t just tell ‘em “forget everything you know”, you gotta make ‘em forget it in their bones. Make ‘em so tired they only listen to you, only hear your voice, only do what you say, and nothing else.

the Global War on Terror (the officially retired title soldiers on in popular usage, despite the Obama administration’s weird new appellation “

Overseas Contingency Operation

”)

Peter Thiel, Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor, on politics and women:

Thiel announced: “

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible

.” The public, he says, doesn’t support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn’t support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the

extension of the franchise to women

—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have

rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron

,” he writes.

[from a delightfully vicious Slate profile]

It’s scary to think that this guy’s wealth and power are orders of magnitude above anything I could ever come close to attaining.