A Principle Without Limits, Jamming, 21/05/2018

So I read this fascinating and very sad article about Alan Dershowitz. He pretty much single-handedly invented the political theory and ideology of civil libertarianism, the activist path of the principles in John Rawls’ liberalism of ideal fairness.

Very short version – because I actually want to keep today’s post short. The article is a pretty detailed argument, based on Dershowitz’s history and approach to his career, that his natural ego is leading him into a substantive mistake. He doesn't want to leave the media limelight yet, and so he’s continuing to advocate for the rights of a prominent individual against government scrutiny.

Trouble is, that individual is Donald Trump. Now Dershowitz’s rhetoric has gotten pretty slippery, probably because the atmosphere of his more frequent conversations on FOX News* will tend to push you into more heated casual declarations than you’d make if you were able to think for a second.

* If you're going to defend Donald Trump, then this is the only American network that’ll have you on quite so regularly.

Consider for a moment what kind of person would think intuitively
that civil liberties are always of absolute importance. It would be
someone who never had to question seriously his access to the
material grounds of all the other liberties he needed.

Read the article as Dershowitz becoming an example of the limits of his own ideas. Ever since the brief flowering of open naziism in the United States last summer, circles on the left have been talking about the paradox of tolerance.

If you're going to allow free speech for all perspectives, that has to include perspectives that all those who live differently than me deserve no rights. So the liberal, taking his views to the absolute, can allow people to destroy liberalism. People can elect a dictator at the ballot box who will never allow them to exercise democracy again. And they’ll want it.

A liberal can’t conceive of someone who would want to be enslaved, or would want to enslave others. They’re unable to conceive of enemies.

The nationalist right can definitely conceive of enemies. I see it every day in the everyday talk of nationalist circles online. Their entire political agenda is based on identifying the enemy and purging it from their society.

So we on the progressive side have to overcome both problems. We can’t think of the nationalist as an enemy on the racializing terms that they do – that would make us nationalist. We also can’t accept the liberal paradox of tolerance – that would leave what social freedoms we have open to attack.

Our answer is that we recognize our enemies in those who would define politics as eradicating enemies. And instead of eradicating them, we neuter them. We block them from building power. Instead of a strong leader, show them a greasy criminal. Mock their dehumanizing rhetoric as the bullying it always was.

Always encourage people to conceive of the power of their own potential, their own ability to reshape the world if they join in the effort even a little. Let society become revolutionary.

Case Studies in Open and Closed Minds, Advocate, 20/11/2017

I was originally going to talk some more about Gilles Deleuze’s conceptual engineering today. But a fairly viral article in my social network of Newfoundlanders inspired a few new insights about the culture of my home province and the mess it faces.

The wreck of the Charcot in Conception Harbour, Newfoundland.
Certainly not a metaphor for the island's current economic position.
I swear.

James McLeod – who for the last eight years has been a stalwart reporter for The Telegram, the major newspaper for St John’s – probably doesn’t remember meeting me. We shared a few beers in Toronto when I first moved to Ontario, and I was visiting an old friend.

McLeod was just about to move to Newfoundland, a Torontonian going to work in St John’s. He did fantastic work at The Telegram and loved living in St John’s, but he couldn’t stay in the city following its economic downturn.

Newfoundland’s entire economy depended on high oil prices – government revenues depended on stupidly low offshore petroleum well royalty rates, and much of the rural workforce commuted to the Alberta tar sands. As the island has traditionally done, its leaders put all their economic eggs in one volatile, risky basket.

Right now, Newfoundland and Labrador is on the threshold of an even bigger economic crisis than the cod moratorium and the end of much of the inshore fishing industry. And those crises – the oil crash, the massive government debt burden of Muskrat Falls, the massively aging population – will drive a huge migration from NL to the rest of Canada.

What I find most illuminating were the different reactions to McLeod’s article in my social networks. It’s anecdotal evidence of wide social trends, but it displays a depressingly common cross-section of the attitudes about the future of my birthplace.

Solid headshot. The bow tie is pretty cool too.

One friend, when he posted the article, agreed with McLeod that the province was heading for an economic disaster – he was depressed that there seemed to be no way out, but resigned to another outflux of population. He has plenty of experience working around Canada and the rest of the globe, an open, progressive point of view.

Another friend was resigned to the disaster as well, but also expressed an incredible bitterness that any of Newfoundland’s leaders could ever handle it. This friend is a very perceptive man – I remember through the Williams years of the mid-2000s, he was very skeptical of his leadership.

He showed very little of the sad worship of Danny that swept Newfoundland’s culture in those years. There’s a kind of disgust at the province’s leadership – a combination of bitterness, resentfulness, and hopelessness. A loss of faith in any hope or optimism at all. I worry about that.

And another friend – a Facebook connection from having shared some friends and some conferences in the New Democratic Party back in the early 2010s – who expressed what I find to be a very sad and all-too-common attitude.

Go on back to the mainland. No matter all the time you spent here, no matter how much you came to love Newfoundland, no matter how much the island shaped you – if you’re leaving, then good riddance. You were never our friend.

It’s an inward turning. When resentment boils into contempt. When it’s in triumph, it’s the attitude of the Williams partisan – “How does it feel now, mainlander?” When it’s under a weight, it’s the spite of disgust – “Fuck off back to the mainland!”

The rocks will outlast the people.

Turning away, no matter what’s on offer. Whether it’s multiculturalism, true economic diversity, business and trade links, or even just inter-community friendship. Turn away. They’re not one of us. They don’t count – and they never did.

No matter how much McLeod contributed to my home province over the last decade, it’s the feeling that the province owes him nothing. No mainlander is worth respect.

I’m not a mainlander. I live in Toronto, and my spouse is Torontonian. I grew up in Newfoundland. But being Italian, I never really fit in – my name and the fact that I had a large extended family in Quebec made me a foreigner. Even though I was born at the old Grace Hospital in St John’s and lived there until I was 25.

The irony is that I’ve actually written for Cleary’s paper about the political and cultural insularity of Newfoundland’s culture. It wasn't the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador that drove me to build a life elsewhere. It was the insularity of so many popular attitudes that made my more open perspective feel unwelcome.

There was also the feeling that, despite having been born and grown up in St John's, that I never truly belonged, that my Italian heritage and my connections to Quebec kept me from being a real Newfoundlander. Well, if you don't want me, I won't come . . . .

A Face of Canada’s Future, Advocate, 03/10/2017

He really is that good-looking. Photo by
Bryan Adams because: Why not?

I had a feeling he was going to win, but I didn’t think he’d do it on the first vote. I’m really glad he did, and that his support across Canada was so widespread.

Jagmeet Singh is a historic figure in Canadian history as of Sunday afternoon. I’m happy to have been in the room to see it. Jagmeet faces some unique challenges that fit our moment unfortunately well. I think he’ll come out on top, but not after confronting the essential challenge of progressive politics today.

I’m talking about race.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t say that race would soon become the essential challenge of politics. But I didn’t expect such an intense reaction to the two major popular movements against systemic racism – Black Lives Matter and Idle No More.

I saw nothing wrong with those protest movements – their goals of being treated as genuine equals in their countries and communities are perfectly benign democracy. Yet the reactionary movement has been horrifying.

There’s Donald Trump, the elderly racist dick who’s become President of the United States. There’s the revival of genuinely genocidally-aiming white supremacist groups through social media communities.

In Canada, our own militia groups are forming, thanks to the online radicalization of white nationalism worldwide. There are the Proud Boys, Soldiers of Odin, and the folks who organized the Storm Alliance protests last week.

Tommy Douglas, David Lewis, Ed Broadbent, Audrey McLaughlin,
Alexa McDonough, Jack Layton, Tom Mulcair, Jagmeet Singh.

They and their supporters have tricked us into giving them space to organize by appealing to our democratic values. These very energetic, confident young men may tell you they support free speech and democracy. Freedom to be who and what you want to be, believe what you want to believe.

They’re lying. They are radical white nationalists. They want to enforce a permanent black underclass in America, slaves in all but name. They want to finish the genocide that John MacDonald ramped into high gear – there’ll be no more Indigenous languages whispered or religions appearing. No more Indigenous people, by any means expedient.

This is what white nationalists want. And they want you to want it too.

There is nothing the New Democrats could do to provoke such people more than elect a young, hip, charismatic, intelligent Sikh politician our federal leader, and give him a mandate to work as hard as he can to become Prime Minister. The first Prime Minister from Canada’s only political party to consistently embrace social democracy.

Barely 24 hours after his election as federal leader, other federal leaders were so condescending to him, treating him like a fool who didn't even know how parliament worked. I doubt that if Charlie Angus had won, and his speech included an appeal to make him Prime Minister, Elizabeth May would have read from her tenth grade civics textbook.

Then, Elizabeth May has always been more malignant than she appears.

Even Jagmeet's brightest hopes are tainted with epithets disguised as double entendres. Is his appearance not 'secular' enough to earn Quebecer's support? Let's just call a spade a racist here.

I happen to think that the political party founded by a Baptist minister has room for a leader who defines himself in part through piety to his religion. In Jagmeet's case, that's a religion whose founding values are community solidarity and the fundamental equality of all people. Social democracy, the values of the New Democratic Party.

Jagmeet’s election was a direct message to the white nationalist radicals who threaten to overthrow the principles of equality at the heart of democratic values. Jagmeet’s campaign slogan was “Love and Courage.”

Well, in Punjabi, the phrase also translates* as, “You want to mess with us? Come at me, bro.”

* Very, very, very, very loosely.

I never thought I’d spend my political life in my 30s fighting Nazis. But I’m fighting a bunch of fucking Nazis. So put me on Team Jagmeet.

Each Together IV: A Family of Millions, Research Time, 21/09/2017

I’m not going to answer that question about our mortal desire for immortality right away. I don’t really have one right now. When I do, it’ll probably involve some complex examination of the relationship between memory, personality, culture, history, and knowledge of the past.

Instead, I want to riff on a few more ideas I encountered about community, social unity, and nationhood in the early chapters of The Human Condition. I’ll lay it out with a bold, blanket statement that I feel isn’t getting through to enough of popular culture as it should.

Humanity in servitude is a mass of indistinguishable organs.

My blanket statement:

There are a ton of people who hate all forms of socialism and even just basic caring for your community because they think it’s all creeping communism. And I’m sick of that ignorant shit.

I mean, there are clear sources for this. Ever since Friedrich Hayek helped launch the Mt Pelerin Society and the network of think tanks it inspired, that notion has flooded our popular culture through pretty much all channels of media.

It’s been in the right wing ever since The Road to Serfdom blew up – that any form of collective action or identity contains the conceptual seeds of totalitarian communism. Whether it’s a trade union, a single-payer state-funded health care system, or even simple community organizing to lobby a government or a private company.

For Hayek, solidarity is the same as communism. So it’s gone for a growing chunk of conservative North America. The idea began in the populist work of a Nobel Prize winning economist, and is now in the mouths of dim-witted pundits with terrible moustaches.

At least when Hayek was talking about this, his ideas had some bite. They were wrong, but they bit.

Here’s how the most brutal communism conceives of humanity. Each person has no real meaning in their lives as individuals. Our authentic roles are as members of a class, so our individual personalities express only our general class interests. Because class interests are fundamentally shared, each of our lives are indistinguishable from each other.

Friedrich Hayek gets his Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974.

For Hayek and the modern North American right wing that followed him, this is the ideology of any political philosophy which accepts any kind of collective action or identity. They see this in the labour movement and marxism.

But Karl Marx didn’t invent this concept. Hannah Arendt identifies the root of how comradeship becomes collectivization in nationalist movements and the modern concept of nation itself.

The heritage is pretty straightforward. European society was dominated by feudal relationships through the medieval period. The ethics of these feudal societies were based on paternal responsibility expressed on the scale of entire towns.

The local lord or royal is the father, and the only political relationship of which anyone is capable is subjection. The community consists of one paterfamilias and all others are bowed heads. The lord has the unquestioned authority of a household head, and all members of the community are one family.

As lords disappeared, says Arendt, the morality of subjection and the community as family persisted. That morality became a force of peer pressure to conformity in your identity and political beliefs.

A political morality of subjection, without a monarch to which we’re subject, becomes subjection to the popular morality itself. Dissent of any kind is considered immoral. It would be dissent from the only body that makes your existence legitimate – the nation.

A community of millions who subject themselves to the will of all, as popular morality expresses it. That’s the vision of the dedicated nationalist. Human dignity is only realized in the achievements of the nation itself. This is the ideology that brought us racialization, colonialism, and the two Great Wars of the 20th century.

The nationalism that consumes the modern Western right wing makes them more like their boogeyman communists than the social democrats they hate.

Kill Your Idols I: Followers, A History Boy, 07/08/2017

When I first started blogging my early research for Utopias, I was concerned to stay away from conventional marxism. I was going to write a very left-wing book, but it wasn’t going to stick to the typical answers of the left.

Yes, I was concerned about oligarchy, just as I am now. I’ve since developed a more communitarian side to my political thinking – the strength and resilience of social networks and bonds of brotherhood throughout a community are the foundation of a healthy culture.

All the typical nationalist idols – religion, ethnicity, language, beliefs in national myths – don't mean shit, if I can put it in technical terms. Solidarity is built from actual friendships among people – from working, playing, clubs, school, partying, volunteering, whatever. The resilience of a society’s networks are its strength.

The basic idea of this series of posts is: If you want to
progress your society, and how you understand the
world, you need to kill your idols.

When I started this blogging project four years ago, I was still sorting out my more political ideas. At the time, I often said I very much wasn’t marxist, for a variety of reasons.

Here’s one anecdote from the time. When I got my proposal reviewer’s notes from Palgrave on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, he kept on talking about marxism, and telling me I should include more marx in a book about environmental philosophy.

He did that because the word ‘alienation’ is really important in a lot of environmental ethics approaches. They’re talking about the different ideologies and concepts humanity has used to separate our self-image from nature. We literally make ourselves alien to the Earth.

But this reviewer kept thinking I was a marxist. All he knew of the idea was Marx’s conception of alienated labour.

At first I was nervous that my book would be rejected because of this misunderstanding. But I got some good advice from my colleague who’d connected me with Palgrave. So I gave my usual response to reviewers who clearly didn’t know what they were talking about. I told the book series editor that the reviewer had no idea what he was talking about.

The bigger question is: What does it mean to be a marxist anyway? I don’t think I’m one, but most folks on the right wing of politics today would call me a cultural marxist.

See, I’ve met some self-identified communists and marxists over the years who are kind of genuine in their very doctrinaire belief in the very basic processes Marx himself was describing. Some see the economy as continuing to cleave into producers and proletariat. Some believe that they can affect a revolution of the working class from an academic’s office.

But people in the communist movement believed all this in Antonio Gramsci’s own time, nearly 100 years ago. They thought that all of Europe was going in the direction of the Russian revolution because they believed in a very doctrinaire marxist theory of the totally deterministic nature of human history.

They ended up being horribly wrong, and a lot of them – including Gramsci – paid the price with their freedom and their lives. Why would someone believe something just because it’s in a theoretical, scientific book?*

* That’s a very complex, multifaceted book that’s open to many interpretations. Most of these folks were following a blueprint from Capital, and Capital was never meant to be a straight blueprint in any universal sense. Yet it still became one.

Here’s the truth about social change. Revolutionary change can come from anywhere in society, if the particular conditions are right to enable some class or community to understand that it can act, then actually act.

Civilization is dynamic, always open to change, never clockwork in that too-simple sense of how people used to think about reality. Am I giving people too much credit by not presuming them to believe in a clockwork reality? . . . To Be Continued

A Metaphor That Will Devour Your World, Doctor Who: Eaters of Light, Reviews, 19/06/2017

“Eaters of Light” is a very old-fashioned Doctor Who story, but it’s also perfectly in tune with the rebellious tone and message Doctor Who is expressing in 2017. Several stories this season have staked out what Doctor Who can be in the Britain of Brexit nationalism and cultural delusion. “Eaters of Light” is another one.

The Doctor’s Harsh Words for Brexit Nation

The British nationalism of Brexit is an ideology that’s trying to resurrect the spirit of the British Empire, a time when Britain as a country needed no partners, no friends. Brexit ideology is the image of Britain as the dominant power in the world.

Quite simply, the Doctor does not have time for any of your shit.

That’s why the ideology rejects the European Union – for all that its execution remains flawed, the core promise of the EU is that it’s a confederation of partners who are stronger together than they ever could be separately or at war.

Brexit nationalism remembers an alternative arrangement – when Britain was independent of all such confederations, and wanted war because Britain would conquer.

Nigel Farage’s vision has two elements: domination and racism. Reject the European Union because Britain’s true greatness lies not in becoming one partner among ostensible equals, but in dominating all rivals. Reject a multicultural society because those who aren’t ethnically and culturally traditional British are no equals, but slaves.

The victory of Brexit was a reactionary eruption of this demented vision – a demand to return to the patriotism of the empire, of conquerors.

We’ve seen several reactions Doctor Who has had to this vision of Britain – all variations on “NO!”

Doctor Who could never have embraced this kind of ideology without falling apart. It would be a bigger ethical crisis for the show than the collapse of the Doctor’s character in the metafictional suicide of 1985.

One flaw of the retro nature of Rona Munro's script was that the
supporting cast didn't get much development in their dialogue that
wasn't directly related to the theme of the story. Which was fine,
since the theme was brilliant. But I found Rebecca Benson's Kar
had the best performance in relatively thin material.

Doctor Who was designed as a take on the Victorian character trope of the travelling scientist-adventurer in a post-empire world. The Doctor explores the ethic of the imperial scientist-adventurer who rejects empire. So of course Doctor Who could only ever stand against Brexit ideology.

Thieves and Killers, Eaters of Light

Several stories this season have attacked different expressions of Brexit ideology. “Thin Ice” depicted the Victorian-era version of Nigel Farage for exactly the kind of petty, pathetic, small-minded, racist twit he is.

“Oxygen” shows how the world is perverted into a horror-show of exploitation, where people are treated as disposable machinery in the name of profit. A society whose core values are those of remorseless, pitiless, rapacious libertarian capitalism where everything can be for sale, even the air we breathe. This society is the monster whose death the Doctor sets in motion.

The flawed yet terribly ambitious Monks Trilogy carries among its many dense philosophical themes a running resistance to apparently invincible empire. Each episode features an act of resistance and hope that eventually forces that empire to crumble.

“Empress of Mars” is probably the biggest middle finger to the Faragean romanticizing of brutality and theft. It’s not a subtle story. The Victorian English soldiers that Brexit ideology considers the height of British nobility are petty thieves and chauvinist murderers.

Romans are romanticized as the ultimate warriors, ever since the
original histories of their empire. Livy was as much a propagandist
for his country as its chronicler. But when the chips are seriously
down and your enemy is a hungry killing machine from another
dimension whose very material nature is a destructive cancer on
your own universe, they're a bit in over their heads.

The only one among the major soldier characters with any honour or ethics is the deserter. I mean, naturally. This is Doctor Who – anyone who deserts from a brutal conquering army bent on looting the world is a hero.

Which brings us to “Eaters of Light,” which is simultaneously straightforward in its rejection of Brexit nationalist ideology and a little more complex.

Impotent Empires

This week’s story is straightforward, though a warning of

SPOILERS!! 

is needed. Phil Sandifer’s review already described how the structure of the story was so straightforward, it was straight out of the classic series. Rona Munro, who wrote the last story of the classic series “Survival,” turned in a very simple Doctor Who story. Its narrative wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1970s.

The TARDIS team gets split up and meets the two sides of a terrible conflict. Bill meets the last teenage soldiers of the Roman legion while the Doctor and Nardole meet the child and teenage survivors of the area’s Pictish people. When they reunite, they bring the two sides together to fight a greater evil. The monster receives no greater detail than its monstrousness, its concept as a light-eater.

The episode's ending, with Pict and Roman warriors and shamans
locked together in a time-out-of-joint pocket battling eternally for
the safety of our reality, reminded me a lot of the end of the classic
Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor," but much more hopeful.

The Romans of 2000 years ago are, along with the British of 150 years ago, the most legendary empires of Europe. Their armies and conquests are remembered fondly in the current age. Mussolini’s nationalism regarded imperial Rome in much the same way Farage’s remembers Victorian Britain.

But Kar herself, the young Pict shaman, describes what they were in their own times. Armies of mass murderers, thieves, looters, not warriors but despoilers. The reason the few teenagers are left in the Roman legion is because the Light Eater monster killed them all. As for the adult Picts, the Romans killed all of them.

The episode itself demonstrates the pathetic nature of this kind of imperialist killing. You wouldn’t think that we’d have to demonstrate how horrible imperialist killing is, but that’s Brexit ideology for you, and it’s a serious danger.

Peace Conquers All

Simply demonstrating the inherent wrongness of invading a country, massacring its people, and looting its wealth isn’t enough, however. The problem is one of intuitions, the kind of ethical thinking to which you’re accustomed.

I can very easily say that invading a country, massacring its people, and looting their wealth is a terrible thing, because that is what I believe. And I can argue for its rightness using appeals to historical evidence and philosophical principle. History provides my cases to analyze, and philosophy provides my principles and the means to justify them.

The last scene (whether written by Munro herself or Steven Moffat,
credit to them both anyway) is a vast improvement on Toby
Whithouse's brick-headed attempt to show the Master's ethical
transformation. "Eaters of Light" is bold and sophisticated
enough to show us the deeply erotic aspects of this season's arc
of the Master's relationship with the Doctor as the means to her
ethical change. It's territory that Doctor Who has never really
explored (officially, anyway). Like I said last time, I'm
disappointed that it turned out to be a straight pairing, as is
everyone else who wrote a little Davison Doctor / Ainley
Master slash-fic in our day. But that's especially so for this
episode, which made such a touching moment of queer
conversation when Bill got to know her Roman friends.

The problem is that a rabid imperialist nationalist can do the same. They believe that the glory of a people is in dominating, conquering, brutalizing, and looting them. They use cases from history and philosophical analysis to determine and justify their principles too. What can break the deadlock?

“Eaters of Light” provides an answer, one similar in a fashion to that of “Empress of Mars” last week. They prove that domination through violence is ultimately a fool’s game, because you can never win those contests forever. You might believe that you can, as Catchlove did last week and the most deranged Farageans do most every day.

But if the British Empire had lasted long enough (or made it to Mars), they’d have eventually discovered some alien civilization with far superior technology who would have made short work of their glory. The same goes for Rome – the all-consuming army is destroyed by a locust from another dimension.

What can actually ensure the continuity of your civilization and culture through such a challenge is peace. Last week, we saw a human who’d rejected empire making peace with Martians. This weekend, we saw the remnants of conquerors joining with the remnants of the conquered to defeat a force that threatened their whole world.

That's the message of Doctor Who for those who worship empire. Not only are our values of peace and friendship better ethically, they’re better for our very survival.
• • •
My reviews on this season of Doctor Who so far. Unranked, at least for now.
The Pilot / The Girl with The Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World (1)
The Pyramid at the End of the World (2)
The Lie of the Land
The Monks Trilogy
Empress of Mars

The Pathetic Impotence of Empire, Doctor Who: Empress of Mars, Reviews, 12/06/2017

"Empress of Mars" is Mark Gatiss’ swan song to Doctor Who, and another explicit contribution to a vision of Doctor Who for the Brexit era.

Iraxxa is one of Mark Gatiss' best characters, and I'd love to see the
show engage her again. I've seen very few clues emerging so far
about the style and priorities of the Chris Chibnall era, so I'm
interested in seeing what they'd do with the Ice Warrior
matriarch.

A Man of Tradition

Gatiss was literally the second writer whose script appeared since the revival back in the Christopher Eccleston year. “The Unquiet Dead” was one of Gatiss’ best scripts, and I’d put “Empress of Mars” in the same category.

He’ll probably leave Doctor Who television with Steven Moffat, and the two of them – lifelong friends and creative partners – have had a wonderful run on the show of a decade and a half. Gatiss, however, always had a reputation as the lesser half of that pair.

In all fairness, aesthetically that’s the case. Moffat has always been able to deliver trippy concepts, complex narratives, and detailed story arcs. Gatiss can put a solid script together, though some of them feature some unfortunate holes and problematic implications.

If Gatiss’ work has one running flaw, it’s that he’s an inescapable traditionalist. His stories are all fairly simple. There are evil aliens of some kind, and the supporting cast usually has an engaging story.

It isn’t always the existential rejuvenation of Charles Dickens, the family drama of “The Idiot’s Lantern” and “Night Terrors,” or the metafictional mythmaking of “Robot of Sherwood,”* but there’s always some idea beyond the base under siege.

Mark Gatiss is often called a traditionalist Doctor Who writer. But
while his style typically sticks with the creepiness and camp that
dominated the show's styles in the 1970s, many of his stories
actually turn the traditional story forms of classical Doctor Who
on their heads. Like in "Empress of Mars," where the humans are
the invaders of a Martian base, and they're more dangers to
themselves than the Ice Warriors.

* Which wasn’t really all that successful, and is a top candidate for Gatiss’ lowest-ranking story.

Because Gatiss stories are fundamentally bases under siege – locations or worlds that are disrupted by alien invasions. The Gelth, the Wire, the Daleks, the Tenza child, the Sweetville community, the Ice Warriors, the robots, and the sleep creatures all invade Victorian London, 1950s London, the council estate, Victorian Yorkshire, a Russian submarine, the metafictional Sherwood Forest, and the Le Verrier space station.

The TARDIS crew with their local allies defend the invaded space, or else figure out how the invaders and invaded can make peace. Gatiss doesn’t religiously follow the old base-under-siege format.

His more complex character dynamics put him above that tired format, for one. As well, the fact that some siege conflicts can be settled peacefully is another form of progress over the traditional. “Sleep No More” was probably his most ambitious work, using the camera itself as a deceptive narrative device. That story was his biggest creative leap.

Paint Mars Pink

“Empress of Mars” isn’t such a leap. It’s reactive, but in a good way. This is an explicitly anti-imperialist political story that subverts its own traditionalism. It’s a base under siege, but the base is the Martian cryogenic complex, and the invaders are Victorian English soldiers.

Catchlove is a caricature, but he's a sadly accurate one. He's exactly
the kind of person who the most blindly nationalist Brexiteer would
hope a Britain free from the constraints of the European Union's
prissy, pansy, peacenik ideology will grow among its next
generation.

The soldiers have explicitly enslaved the Ice Warrior they found shipwrecked on Earth. They even named him Man Friday, after the Pacific Islander Robinson Crusoe enslaves. The characters admit it – their own reference to Robinson Crusoe parallels Bill’s references to her contemporary television serials and movies.

It portrays the soldiers as ordinary British people, just like Bill. But their attitudes show the violence and rage that was ordinary in British society at the time. They aren’t on Mars to explore it, but to conquer it, rob it of its mineral wealth, and subjugate its inhabitants. Just like they did throughout India, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

The humans are the invaders, but their invasion is incompetent. They’ve been easily manipulated by Friday’s promises of precious gems on Mars. Their apparent shipwreck was entirely intentional, since the English camp was so close to the Empress’ cryo chamber.

The most the English crew could manage for mining equipment was a repurposed laser cannon. When the fighting starts, their guns are pathetically ineffective. These are the most incompetent invaders in years of Doctor Who.

Yet they’re poster boys for British greatness. The red uniforms, aggressive courage, and will to conquer is the worshipped image of the Brexit crew’s campaign to Make Britain Great Again!.

A political persona as ridiculous as
this idiot was never supposed to win.

Blinded by Dreams

It isn’t a stretch to identify the same chauvinist nationalism in the leaders of Britain’s Brexit movement as in those pathetic soldiers. The motivating sentiment of Brexit is to return to an era when Britain on its own was powerful enough to conquer the world. And in the case of “Empress of Mars,” beyond.

Except Britain isn’t powerful enough to conquer the world beyond Earth. It never was. Even in this sci-fi scenario where they make it to Mars, they fail miserably. Their weapons are no match for the Ice Warriors’ sonic guns, and they seem incapable of conceiving of any tactic but standing in a line and firing their useless rifles.

They’re deluded into thinking that this millennia-old starfaring civilization is simply a bunch of walking crocodiles. We’re British! they say. We can conquer anything! British conquer and destroy!

The rhetoric of Brexit had more than one parallel to these toy soldiers. Boris Johnson’s boisterous strutting national pride, Michael Gove’s supremely dorky sense of self-superiority, Andrea Leadsom’s quaint social conservatism – they were all deluding themselves that Britain could be powerful enough to conquer Earth again if they just cut their ties to these pansy democratic institutions.

Nigel Farage is the worst of them all, an unreconstructed racist nationalist who’s offended by the mere presence of Muslims and Poles on pure, white English shores. “Empress of Mars” is a slap in all their faces – a story that depicts blatantly what an idiotic bumble chauvinist nationalism really is.

The only reason Britain was able to conquer the world was because of the contingent fact that they actually were, for the most part, technologically superior to many of their enemies. They never faced down Iraxxa.

The last shot of "Empress of Mars" is a brief moment of what seems to
be a slow-brewing sexual tension between the Doctor and the Master.
It's a much more nuanced way to handle the Master's ethical reform
than Toby Whithouse's pathetic Frank Miller retreads. My only
regret is that, by the time Doctor Who started making the Doctor-
Master sexual tension explicit and obvious, they were a straight
pairing.

Nothing about empire is inherently great – it’s simply delusions on top of delusions.

More Than Monsters, True Alien Worlds

“Empress of Mars” also does a lot to make the Ice Warriors a unique fictional people. He got this started a little bit with his nuanced character of Grand Marshal Skaldak. But he gets the most done here.

In their original appearances during the Troughton era, the Ice Warriors were generic evil aliens invading a series of bases as part of evil schemes to conquer to Earth. But the Pertwee years saw the creatures gain some depth and complexity.

By the Peladon stories of 1972 and 1974, their characters had motivations just as complex as the others. Some were uncertain allies with their own priorities in a complicated political backdrop, and some were manipulative villains. Hulking monsters they weren’t.

The Big Finish audios, for the most part, weren’t too kind to the Ice Warriors. They basically just made them into hissing green Klingons.

In this short story, Gatiss adds a remarkable amount of nuance to Ice Warrior culture. For one thing, matriarchal values are central to their society. Iraxxa puts special weight on Bill’s assessment of the Mars-Britain standoff when she makes her decision – as a woman, Bill’s is a calm voice amid the shouts of strutting men.

Do these guys seriously think their rifles can stand up to the sonic
weaponry of Ice Warriors? Also, "Empress of Mars" was the first
Doctor Who story that rendered the Ice Warriors' sonic weaponry
in contemporary visual effects. It looked fantastic.

The perspective of a woman is that of careful thought – sanity in a world of madness, shouting, and rage. A woman is wise and noble, well-suited for leadership and the responsibility to make high-stakes decisions.

The most important cultural development for “Empress of Mars” comes through Iraxxa’s contrast to the most violent of the British soldiers. Ice Warriors are creatures of war, battle, and honour. But they aren’t imperialists. Iraxxa’s values revolve around solidarity and courage, not conquest and theft.

The British are, for the most part, cruel egotists. Jackdaw is a petty thief, getting himself killed over stealing ornamental jewels from Iraxxa’s cryogenic chamber. Catchlove is the most obvious example of what the story holds in contempt. He embodies all the racism, arrogance, aggression, rage, and violence that makes him wretched filth.

The nobility of Iraxxa, Friday, Bill, and Godsacre are a contrast to that petty arrogance and cruelty. What better role models could we have?
• • •
Here are my previous reviews of Peter Capaldi's last season of Doctor Who. I won't do a formal ranking until the end of the season, after "The Doctor Falls" broadcasts and I can look into the season as a whole.

The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World (1)
The Pyramid at the End of the World (2)
The Lie of the Land (Screw you, Whithouse)
The Monks Trilogy

Dank Enough for the Dreamers, Research Time, 08/06/2017

You read John Jay and you feel all the brutality of Henry Kissinger. In a few pages, he describes a world of war. Not constant war, not a world without any peace at all.

Jay’s world is of inevitable war – the knowledge that whatever peace and community exists between peoples at some time, corruption will erode that brotherhood like a swift river along clay banks. Best to make yourself one people, to avoid that old killing hatred.

Since I’ve already painted Alexander Hamilton as the pragmatic idealist of the group, you might think that he gives the uplifting account of national unity. It’s true – Hamilton’s vision of patriotism is inspiring.

I saw some prideful, self-aggrandizing, embarrassing patriotism during
the Harper years here in Canada. I'm thinking particularly of his
tasteless celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812.
The government arranged a spectacle of imperialist military history,
basking in the glory of Canada as the faithful northern diamond
of the British Empire. Gag me.

It’s also rooted in a vision of humanity that will tear each other apart for the sake of ego and fleeting glory, musket bullets turning to metal teeth devouring the flesh of our brothers.*

* I listened to Bob Dylan’s strangely haunting, fragmentary vernacular poem of a Nobel acceptance lecture the other day. I feel like throwing down a few naturalistic metaphors. It’s the Herman Melville in me.

Yes, says Hamilton, commercial trade and the multicultural fermentation that goes with it builds an impressive brotherhood among peoples. But those long relationships ultimately can’t stop war and hatred arising. It’s always possible for long-loving brothers to throw punches and draw blood.

A collection of neighbours becomes a people when they develop a shared concept of patriotic solidarity, and devote themselves, at least a little, to its force. That solidarity among a community is the productive kind of patriotism.

Patriotism is the virtue that grows out of that feeling of solidarity in each individual. That virtue in turn makes community solidarity possible, and encourages its growth. But such virtuous patriotism can become corrupt when solidarity turns to pride.

A prideful soul aggrandizes itself. A prideful man seeks the honour and glory of demonstrating his superiority over others. A prideful people, says Hamilton, seeks the same. The corruption of patriotism is a raging desire throughout a people to aggrandize themselves – to demonstrate their greatness by subjugating and humiliating others.

The patriotism of solidarity consolidates communities and individuals into a people. One of the essential beliefs such a virtue of patriotism generates is the notion that all of our countryfolk rise and fall together.

The patriotism of pride corrupts that solidarity through the belief that our rise requires others’ fall.

To Be Incorruptible IV: Directions of Force, Jamming, 21/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . Reading Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, you can find a positive, progressive concept of patriotism – knowledgeable devotion to work for the public good of your community and country.

This patriotism of the public good is the patriotism that progressives need to take back from the reactionary and nationalist forces who seem to have a monopoly on patriotism, at least when it comes to public relations. For most of my adult life, folks on the left have been tarred as anti-patriotic.

I came of age at a time when Americans and many Canadians had been overcome with hysteria after the September 11 attacks. We think back on this era with kitsch like Come From Away now, but at the time, a culture of 300,000,000 people were thrown into mass hysteria and rage.

Patriotism was a blunt instrument of intimidation and contempt swung blindly around the Earth’s furniture smashing the architecture of our fragile civilization. It justified the toppling of governments – however grotesque those governments were – and unleashing a never-ending war in the Middle East.

Patriotism was a personality-consuming devotion to country that justified the rapid inflation of the surveillance state. So many patriotic Americans believed the military could do no wrong.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know;
Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me: but were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.

As a result, there’s enough military equipment trickling down to police forces that every county with more than four cows got its own squadron of armoured personnel carriers, mortar-proof flak jackets, and enough crowd control gear to evacuate downtown Chicago at rush hour.

Patriotism today means that anyone who believes that maybe we should step back from militarizing your own country is a traitor. Patriotism is all-too-often becoming a victim of nationalism. Less than two decades after America’s most recent great trauma, love of country is flowering into hatred of Muslims, Hispanics, and African-Americans.

Machiavelli is a key figure in the tradition of Western thought that gives us a patriotic antidote to this hellmouth.

His patriotism is distinctly minoritarian* – punching up for your own power. Rather like the original American revolution, actually. Machiavelli’s patriotism is the spirit of revolt against oppression or control. It’s the spirit of the colony becoming a country, of a slave breaking her chains. The spirit of a new beginning.

* I’m saying this to emphasize Machiavelli’s connection with modern radical democrats, particularly Gilles Deleuze’s vocab, a radical democratic vision of reality itself. An ontology for free spirits.

Machiavelli’s patriotism is the creative energy of a new society coming to consciousness as they carve out a niche for themselves in a world of long-established powers. It’s national self-consciousness of a shared desire for freedom.

Patriotism is the desire that others respect and recognize your community as an equal. It’s the same drive as an individual human’s desire to be an equal in her society – only articulated on a cultural scale.

It’s an antidote, for sure. But it has its own problems.

Never Let Yourself Become Useful, Jamming, 03/04/2017

The title of today’s post refers to a particular kind of idiot. The 2016 election and part of its aftermath created a particular subset of useful idiot that I want to talk about right now. Because that peculiar blend of idiocy grows a black, obsidian rock in the pit of my stomach.

Setting the stage. Sunday morning, I came across an article by Leah McElrath, a journalist I follow on Twitter. She described how she’s processing her own feelings since learning, through the American House and Senate committees on Russian subversion of the 2016 election, that enormous numbers of Twitter accounts were bots controlled by Russia’s intelligence agencies.

Not only that, but many of those bots were designed with personalities as Bernie Bros. Always the most vile, abusive, misogynist Bernie Bros. There were plenty of real incidents of Sanders supporters saying some awful things about Hillary Clinton. Plenty of awful things Bernie Sanders himself said about Hillary Clinton.

It’s not as though she didn’t deserve to have those things said about her. I would never have supported Clinton as the nominee if I was an American Democrat. I disagreed with her about many different policies, and I would have been an advocate in the party to move its ideas beyond the failed new liberalism in which Clinton’s perspective was trapped.

But I remember the horribly hostile tenor of the 1990s, and all the sexist attacks Clinton sustained against her for the entire time her husband was President. I never would have supported Clinton, and I would have fought against the party’s cliquishness and insularity at the level of the DNC.

Yet the bile of the online misogyny against Clinton was horrifying. And too many Sanders supporters played too deeply into that. Sanders himself definitely shares some culpability for Clinton's defeat at the hands of Donald Fucking Trump. It’s not like no one said anything before the election.

Rifts exist within the Democratic Party. Of course they do. In any state political system with only two parties, their coalitions are going to be big and diverse. Socially liberal and feminist neoliberals* are on the same team for control of the state with bourgeois eco-hippies, anti-vaxxer nuts, and radical democrats like me.

* Who still can’t see that there’s a serious problem with new liberal economics. How could you not by now?

Even in Canada, it’s the same. There’s an old joke that the New Democratic Party is where Canada throws all its crazy leftists. But there’s an intense hostility between the trade unionists and environmentalists, anti-colonial pragmatists and borderline anti-Semitic anti-Israel activists. And radical democrats like me.

Canadian progressives have plenty of other conflicts we generally sweep under the rug.

Now to discover that all those volleys of extra-hot boiling hate that hit so many women over the last year are Russian bots? Yes, the big, messy alliance called the progressive left has a lot of divisions.

But progressivism has been most effective when the radical democrat impulse – Get out to the streets! Mobilize the people! Demonstrate with your life that a better way is possible! – finds common ground in a struggle that unites us all.

It’s the struggle that’s always united democrats: the struggle for real, material freedom. Not the abstract and one-dimensional freedom of those sad libertarians. I mean the struggle for a society where more and more people are able to pursue their talents to the fullest.

The victory of Donald Trump was that of a kleptocratic white nationalist regime of oligarchs to the executive branch of the most powerful state machinery in the world. The elected representatives lost so many seats in the national legislatures that they have no real effective opposition.

The social movements against Trump and the radical Republican agendas that dominated pretty much every level of the American state are the only effective opposition.

That’s fantastic. And we shouldn’t let our resentment toward the insular idiots of progressive political parties overpower our need to drive that social movement.

The most depressingly illuminating perspectives I’ve seen on this issue are those on the left who refuse to let go of that rage. The people who say, “I’m glad Trump and the nationalists are fucking up our environment, our economies, and throwing millions of minorities in detention camps. At least it’s sticking one to Clinton and Obama!”

If you give in to hate, you’ve accepted dystopia.

Come Together I: A Citizen of the World or Nowhere, Research Time, 15/03/2017

I'm looking through some classics of Western political philosophy for ideas and concepts to help understand and live in our own turbulent times. You can’t apply a 300 year old idea directly to the problems of the current era.

But the classics are fertile launching points for a complex engagement with perennial problems as they appear in different forms and contexts. You need as many concepts in your thoughts as you can if you want to build a versatile, adaptable politics and way of thinking.

So read the classics. Read them critically. Let the ideas that have inspired people for literally centuries inspire you too.

In one of Theresa May's most infamous speeches since becoming UK
Prime Minister, she threw down a challenging gauntlet: that if you
considered yourself a citizen of the world, you were really a citizen
of nowhere. The speech was an expression of May's curious new
vision of conservatism: paternal nationalist communitarian. But it
also showed the power that remains in citizenship and membership.

The West’s most fraught and volatile ethical conflict today is about the right to citizenship. Who should have it? Whose citizenship deserves respect? Whose doesn’t? Who do we want to be part of our community? Refugees? Migrant workers? Hyper-wealthy businessmen with eight passports? Stateless people with no citizenship protections at all?

All of these questions reflect different aspects of that core ethical question – Who deserves to join my community?

Citizenship isn't just the brand name of our passports. It's a set of institutions in which we're deeply enmeshed, relationships that determine significant parts of our identities. Citizenship implies a bond among all those who share it that the same set of institutions will, to some degree, protect you.

That umbrella of institutional responsibility defines the boundaries of our community just as much as national borders. It’s a promise of the institutions themselves to the people, that you are welcome here. Yet at its heart, your membership in that community remains voluntary. You really can give it up.

That’s the fact that anchors a lot of Rousseau’s thinking in The Social Contract. That citizenship is always voluntary became a point of political activism. What more blatant way to demonstrate your broken faith in the promise of the state than to give up your citizenship?

A few months ago, I was reading a short book about the – very twisted – politics and economics of citizenship in the 21st century. Atossa Abrahamian described a man named Garry Davis.

I hadn’t heard of him until I read her book, but he was a fascinating and admirable man. Disgusted by the violence of the Second World War, he renounced his American citizenship and literally became a world citizen.

An elderly Garry Davis holding the latest edition of the World Passport.

Technically, he was stateless, but he helped found a non-governmental organization that distributed the World Passport. Oddly, he actually got this travel document accepted as legitimate by many governments around the world. The World Passport was Davis’ lifelong demonstration that a post-national order based on peace and brotherhood was possible.

Mike Gogulski is an American computer programmer Abrahamian wrote about for VICE a couple of years ago. In the mid-2000s, he was living in Bratislava with his girlfriend at the time.

Disgusted with the violence of the American state in Iraq, he gave up his US citizenship. He’s made a living as a bitcoin trader (and launderer) ever since. His wife is a Slovak who works at the Chinese embassy processing visa applications.

His life is happy, if a little dreary. He’s not a globetrotting peace activist like Davis. Instead, he’s content to live in Slovakia with his wife and cat, plugging away in relative at crypto-currency projects.

In their own way, Davis and Gogulski demonstrated in real life what Rousseau argues in The Social Contract. No matter how much we may rely on our governments for a lot of our needs in life, that relationship is voluntary. Fundamental human freedom means that we can walk away at any time.

The practical question is whether you’re willing to live with the consequences. . . . To be continued

How to Be a Progressive Activist Without Having a Daily Nervous Breakdown, Jamming, 11/03/2017

That’s actually a pretty tough achievement these days. Right now, it’s easier to push for more progressive politics as a Canadian than, really, pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Charlie Angus, the MP for the eastern half of Northern Ontario, is
running. He's long been a strong advocate of a new national 
consensus and institution to restore – at long last – justice for
indigenous people in Canada.

For example, our social democratic party, the NDP, is having its first leadership debate this Sunday for our contest later this year. I’m the Vice-President of my electoral district’s riding association, so I’m helping promote the event on social media, and through personal posts like this.

But I’m in a very privileged position here in Canada. At least relatively speaking. This seems to be one of the few Western countries where the white nationalist alt-right isn’t taking hold of our politics.

Of course, I haven’t adopted some born-again complacency in the three weeks since I posted about my generation’s confrontation with reborn Nazism. Nothing about that has changed.

White nationalism is still a major political problem facing Canada – people wouldn’t be holding demonstrations against the existence of Muslim people in front of our largest city’s house of government if it wasn’t.

Our major conservative party has had its youth wing pretty much entirely compromised by white nationalists. One leading Conservative leadership candidate is openly courting them, declaring that people who don’t share white Christian values shouldn’t be welcome in Canada. Even the more traditional conservatives leading the race throw bones to the alt-right or channel Trumpism in their rhetoric.

Manitoba MP Niki Ashton has made one of her core initiatives the fight
for a more fair economy, often working with groups of young white
collar workers around Canada who are advocating for better working
conditions and more security in their often precarious jobs and careers.

I’m confident that Canadians and the Canadian government can resist and prevent a takeover by white nationalist leaders and activists. They’ll fight hard, and we’ll have to work considerably harder to fight them. But we have better material defences against them.

For one thing, significant portions of Canada already have majority-minority populations, or close enough to it that far fewer people in our cities have stereotypical or racist misconceptions of Asian and Latin American immigrant groups.

Too many white people in Canada’s cities already know Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans to be turned against them with racist fearmongering. These people are our friends.

As well, our political parties have never had to marginalize social democratic multiculturalism to succeed. Here’s what I mean.

Right now in the USA, the Democratic Party and its activists are in a serious rebuilding mode. They’re leaders in the anti-Trump resistance, but the party itself is still figuring out how best to overcome Republicans electorally.

Guy Caron is the MP for Rimouski, so far the only leadership
contender representing the strong Quebecois base of the New Democrats.
He made universal basic income as a central point of his policy platform,
restoring to the front of Canadian politics an important idea that's been
blown away to the wind by the hurricane of Trumpist nationalism.

They have a tough road ahead, especially because they seem to be shooting themselves with infighting – typical of the American left over the years. You could see it in the way progressive activists continued to argue over Tom Perez or Keith Ellison taking over the DNC chair.

The Sanders wing saw Perez as continuing Clinton-style neoliberalism that ignored the real economic suffering of millions. The Clinton wing saw Ellison as continuing the blind populism that made what should have been Democratic votes peeling off for Trump in the name of some amorphous ‘change.’

That division among the American left is a hangover from the three biggest mistakes Sanders and his campaign made.

1) Vilifying Clinton so much that he provided Republicans almost as much ammunition as FOX and no take-backs could ever sound sincere. 2) Pushing a protectionist economic populism whose core principles hewed too close to Trump’s. 3) Completely failing to even bother considering black outreach seriously.

Meanwhile, many conservative Americans think Perez is a radical left-wing loon. And the spectre of Perez’s (or Ellison’s) advancement being purely a matter of identity politics continues to haunt American discourse.

Peter Julian is probably the most senior parliamentarian among the
leadership contenders, and a strong voice for social democratic policy
from the west of the country, thanks to his strong constituency in
Vancouver.

The truth is that American politics have been radicalized already along white anglophone ethnic lines. That was the substance of “Make America Great Again,” taking the country back from minorities, and painting the advancement of non-whites as theft from the rightful lot of white Americans.

The Democratic Party in the United States today has, as its core constituency, women of colour. It’s the party of multiculturalism and the fight against inequality along all vectors. Arguing over which inequality to emphasize – whether to, as Sanders did, divorce racializing inequities from inequities emerging from economic processes – ignores the real integration of all these inequities and oppressions.

Canada, in contrast to the United States, has had a mainstream social democratic party for decades. So these ideas have never truly had to fight against institutional opposition to the same intensity as in America, when the Democrats spent decades embracing Reaganism with hugs.

There again is the ultimately flaw with Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic standard-bearer – the formative decades of her modern political identity was in that era of conservative liberalism.

In Canada, we never had to make that compromise. Those who refused it could always find an institutional home in the New Democratic Party. The core reason why we lost the last federal election to Trudeau was because he doubled down on that language while our strategists got scared and pursued a triangulation campaign straight out of 1994.

That institutional home of the NDP unites all the intersectional politics of liberation – economics, gender, racialization, class – in one coalition. One box on a ballot.

The best defence against Canadian white nationalism is strengthening the voice and growing the platforms of the New Democratic Party. Our next leader has to stand for that total liberation – no one is free if a single person still wears their chains.