Tag Archives: Culture

Virtual politics and real bullets

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The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her reporting on the North Caucasus wars, was murdered yesterday in an evident assassination (three shots, two to the chest and one to the head) in the lift leading to her home. It was the birthday of the Russian President, and just after the birthday of the Russian-appointed prime minister of Chechnya, who she was about to accuse of torture. After a week of rising hysteria in the Russian media and state, with a wave of goon-squad assaults on Georgian businesses and the collection of sinister lists of Georgian-sounding schoolchildren – what, pray, is the purpose of this? – this ought to inter any lingering myths of Russian democracy. It is time to grasp that we are sharing a continent with a very large tyranny, in fact, that we never ceased to do so.

Exactly what will happen next is unclear, but the worst must be assumed. The reaction of Europe so far appears to be deafening silence. See the BBC report above for a tasty quote from the secretary of the Council of Europe, Terry Davis, suggesting she was killed by “self-appointed executioners”. Self-appointed? I don’t think his Midlands constituents lost very much when they voted him out back in 2004. No Baltic gas pipelines were involved, so German silence is a given, France will presumably continue to find Russian support on the UNSC useful, and Britain will probably shut up – hasn’t Tony Blair prided himself on his personal relationship with Putin? (Personal politics, the great delusion of the last hundred years.)

If you need any convincing, I recommend Andrew Wilson’s book Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World. This is a truly impressive march through a morass of deceit and state-sponsored bullshit, whose central thesis is simply that most of Russian politics, as it was marketed both to the Russians and also to the western politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats who funded it through the 1990s, does not exist. Parties do not have members, policies, or constitutions, and do not represent real interest groups. Even when, like the Communist Party, they actually do exist, they are frequently not actually trying to win the elections-sensationally, Wilson quotes a senior Communist as being horrified how close the party came to unwanted victory in 1996.

Instead, parties, movements and politicians are usually prepared from whole cloth for specific political projects, and created in the public mind by a barrage of TV advertising for the mass and outrageous web propagandists for the elite. It is possible to buy an entire political party, tailored to one’s specifications, from $100,000.
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An Experiment in Globalization: Results

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First off, Apple did get back to me within the time frame that they promise. (I was in New York on business part of this week and last, thus the lack of blogging.) So far, so good.

But I can’t say I’m satisfied with the results. Instead of finding a way for me to acquire music from iTunes, they replied:

Currently, iTunes Music Store Gift Certificates can only be redeemed in the country where they are purchased. It is not possible to send an iTunes Music Store Gift Certificate to a recipient in another country.

Because of this, the order was canceled and a refund was issued in the amount of $[foo] to the sender’s credit card. This credit should post to the their account within 3-5 business days of [date]. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Upshot is no tunes for me, no money for Apple, or the artists, or anyone else interested in making some euro cents from legal downloads of music. (I suppose I could log onto iTunes US whenever I happen to be in the States; how’s that for convenience?) Market failure, thy name is copyright lawyers.

Indigènes

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France is, finally, honouring its North-African war heroes in the wake of the release of the film Indigènes. The film is by French director Rachid Bouchareb and its main cast of five were collectively awarded the Best Actor prize at the film festival of Cannes. The title of the film means “natives” but the official English-language title is “Days of Glory”. From BBC News:

The film is about the campaign from Provence through to Alsace in 1944-45 as seen through the eyes of four soldiers, who leave their homelands in Algeria and Morocco to fight for France.

President Chirac has seen the movie, was moved by it and:

…has announced that the pensions of foreign soldiers who fought in the French army are to be brought into line with those of French ones.

Another interesting quote from the same article:

Many in the audience were themselves of North African origin, and had no idea of this part of French history. “I never saw an Arab or an African soldier in my history books”, says 23-year-old Salima, a student from the Paris suburb of Seine-St-Denis. Her parents come from Morocco and her grandfather fought in the war. (…) “When you go to Africa, people tell us we’re not African. In Europe they tell us we’re not European. We are, and we’re staying. “We’re a bridge that Europe and Africa needs, especially in these times”.

An Experiment in Globalization

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Nowadays, people’s lives often take them far from the land of their birth, right? And the internet is supposed to be able to help diminish the problems arising from distance, yes? We will see if Apple and iTunes are up to the challenge.

Dear Sir or Madam,

My sister, who lives in the United States, sent me an iTunes gift certificate for my birthday. I would like to use it to purchase music. Your software tells me that I cannot use this gift certificate for iTunes Germany. It also tells me that I cannot sign on to the iTunes store for the United States, where the certificate was purchased.

How can I use this gift certificate to purchase music?

Sincerely,

Douglas Merrill

The FAQ says to expect an answer within 24 hours. I will keep you all posted.

Superfast Update: The “thank you” page says that they will be in contact within 72 hours. This is not an auspicious start.

Noted With Pleasure: Reindeer People

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One of the other books that I picked up while in Helsinki was Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, by Piers Vitebsky. (US paperback coming in December.) He’s an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, and the reindeer people are his research specialty. The book, however, is an engrossing synthesis aimed at a general audience. More than that, though, it’s a personal account of living with nomads, clashes of cultures (ancient, Soviet and post-Soviet) and vivid personalities, all played out in a beautiful and harsh land. I picked up the book in part because I had just missed meeting some reindeer people when I was in northern Mongolia a few years back, and I wanted to learn what their way of life was all about.

I got much more: how reindeer are partially domesticated, what the coming of Soviet power meant to the far North, how people are surviving its ebb, how reindeer migrate, what Arctic cold means in practical terms, to name just a few. Vitebsky writes well, he’s chosen interesting ground to cover, he can sketch people, relate key anecdotes and sustain narratives about their conflicts. Layer upon layer, like the clothing the Eveny wear in winter, Reindeer People envelops the reader, imparting something of those distant lands.

Baltic Framework

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Our recent posts on governments in Stockholm and Schwerin are as good a reason as any to highlight Northern Shores, by Alan Palmer. (It’s published in the US as The Baltic.) I had intended to write a premature evaluation, but then I finished the book, which I picked up during a business trip to Helsinki, so this is slightly more considered.
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Analytic philosophy

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This anniversary guest post is from the brilliant John Emerson.

“It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me ?…..

He holds him with his skinny hand,
`There was a ship,’ quoth he.
`Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon !’….
(Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner”)

“I alone have escaped to tell thee. ”
(Job 1:19)

When I attack analytic philosophy, a very common response is bafflement: why do I dislike it so much, and just what it is that I would prefer? I have recently come to understand that this bafflement is sincere and real, and that no one younger than forty-five or so can remember a time when analytic philosophy was not dominant. Even by the time of my own undergraduate years (1964-7) the kind of thing I wanted to see was being phased out, and by now I am effectively a fossil. This post is my attempt to clarify my objections to analytic philosophy, and to sketch what it is that I would have wanted.

I think that it is agreed that analytic philosophy descends from Frege, and the short way of expressing my dissatisfaction is to say that Fregean philosophy does some of the things philosophy used to do much better than any earlier philosophy did, but at the cost of ceasing entirely to do some of the other things that philosophy used to do. Analytic philosophers speak with condescension and scorn of anyone who regrets the loss of the old “big picture” philosophy, but I think that their condescension and scorn are not justified and, in fact, justify my own low opinion of them.

By and large the problems I see in analytic philosophy come from the attempt to make philosophy into a scientific, technical, professional activity. In particular, I think that the standards of truth and clarity, the general bias toward analysis as opposed to synthesis, and the skittishness about “thick” or mixed discourse have played a malicious role. The philosophy I would prefer would be more inclusive and more enterprising, but less certainly true, and in this would resemble the pre-Fregean philosophies.

I’ve put my criticisms / proposals in four categories, which I will just sketch. By and large, my criticisms are especially of analytic philosophy’s approaches to social, political, historical, ethical, and other “humanistic” questions, though I suspect that the analytic philosophy of science is dubious too.

First, I think that at least some philosophers should reverse the priority that analytic philosophers give to rigor over comprehensiveness. Rather than reducing problems to a size which can be successfully handled with rigor and certainty, I think that philosophers should try as best possible to handle large questions in their entirety. And these should be actual, real questions in all their thickness, and not questions about formalized models or imaginary hypothetical questions.

Second, if questions have both a normative (political or ethical) and a factual component, as most do, both components should be discussed together, rather than simplifying them by the “bracketing-out” process, and assigning the separate parts to the respective specialists.

Third, discussions should be oriented both to persuasion and to truth, and this means, to a degree, the renunciation of expert professionalism. The kinds of philosophical questions I’m talking about are of very general concern, and to treat them as specialized subjects not accessible to laymen has not only the disadvantage of elitism or even authoritarianism, but also that of presumption. The technical devices by which philosophers exclude laymen from their discussions have the effect of excluding very intelligent, concerned
non-philosophers from the argument. There are reasons why fluid dynamics, for example, should be a specialized topic, but ethics and politics should not be. (To put it differently: philosophy can be as
difficult as it wishes, but it cannot intentionally reserve itself for professional philosophers alone. And yes, Kant and Hegel were more accessible than contemporary philosophy is, because they did deign to address “the things that matter in [people’s] little lives”. )

Finally, philosophy should be constructive, and for that reason cannot be truth-functional. Every writer and every reader faces an uncertain future which can be influenced by his or her actions. Comprehensive
philosophies are by nature, and absolutely should be, constructive proposals or projects about how we should make our futures. And proposals and projects cannot be true, but can only be constrained by truth.

All past philosophies exaggerated their claims to truth, and the Fregean critique was a powerful one. But Fregean philosophy cannot produce a thick, constructive, persuasive, comprehensive world view,
and has thus renounced one of the functions of philosophy. Not all analytic philosophers fail on all four of the counts I have listed, but as far as I know they all fail on at least one of them. In effect, the philosophy profession has delegated some of the most important traditional functions of philosophy to journalists, freelancers, politicians, administrators, and charlatans.