Rising Tides Lift Only Boats That Can Pay for Maintenance, Research Time, 17/07/2018

So yes, the conception of prosperity as abundance has all those problems I talked about yesterday. Ultimately, the concept can’t escape the perennial problem in human history – the conflict of the powerful and powerless.

I'm wondering – Do they all have to wear the shirts?

Lords and peasants. Nouveau riche and factory boys. Oligarchs and Taskrabbits.

Society is always much more complex in all the dynamic processes and knit us all together, of course. But this question of distribution always comes up because of the disastrous results of extreme inequality. When so much of a civilization’s wealth is locked up and never returned to the market, there’s a mass slide into poverty.

When the bulk of a population slides into penury while a small elite become earthly gods from their extreme wealth, you have a potential revolution on your hands. Oligarchy’s survival mechanism is to bring all the counter-revolutionary powers of the state – both military and messaging – to bear.

The counter-revolutionary state is a fascist one, because its purpose is to suppress and deceive the desires of its people. That’s why such an important message in democratic organizing is “fight the real enemy.”

I was lecturing in my Business class today about how inadequate general measures of a country’s wealth – like Gross Domestic Product – are to understand how that economy actually functions. Pure aggregates of economic measurement collapse too many distinctions to make the world comprehensible. They measure nothing about how many people in that society are comfortable and who is not.

So what does the concept of prosperity as abundance show us? It does lead us, productively, to focus on the phenomenology of economic anxiety. Abundance is the image of the world’s perfection for the economically insecure.

It’s what you dream of as you weigh how much you can fill up your car today against how many groceries you can buy that week. Progressive political philosophy could use a few more phenomenological accounts of that state of consciousness.

The Anxiety of Having to Work For a Living, Research Time, 13/06/2018

We think of the millionaire – or billionaire these days – businessman as the bold entrepreneur. A fearless experimenter. We hear the rhetoric all the time, and have for years. The startup business is where people take risks – develop new ideas – transformative new ventures.

Can't spell adventure without venture (capital), after all.

Look, I know that wasn’t even funny. It wasn’t supposed to be. I just want to make one brief point that I found very insightful – it appeared in Jeremy Gilbert’s book on the history of Cultural Studies, and Antonio Negri’s new book Assembly.

The will to become epochal is equally inspirational and ridiculous.

Entrepreneurial culture is a homogenizing force, risk-averse to the point of cowardice. Their fear is a psychological affect of life in capitalistic economies. It’s the fragility of the wealthy.

The entrepreneurs we lionize in our culture are those few who’ve taken great risks and been incredibly successful. They’ve transformed our culture with new technologies and business models. For better or, from many perspectives, worse.

But that’s only a very small number of people. They were uncommon, not just in their luck but their personalities. Every biography of a legendary entrepreneur is fascinating because they are genuinely remarkable, singular personalities. Brilliant to the point of mysticism, ruthless to the point of infamy, driven to the point of mania.

Such people are rare. Very rare.

So what about all those thousands of people I see in shared office spaces all over Toronto?

Graphic designers. Intellectual property lawyers. Call centre. Dudes developing an app to create insurance packages for you. A really good SEO guy.

But innovators? People out to transform the structure of an entire economic sector? An entire global economy? My buddy is a really good SEO guy, but that is not his goal. Dude just wants to pay off the mortgage on his condo, maybe pump out a kid or two with his wife in a couple of years.

Only a few people understand how rare that combination of the
inspirational and ridiculous truly is in society. So rare you can, for
the most part, only find it in fiction. Usually, they're the
supervillains. The fictional versions too.

The losers of a rat race die in poverty. That’s the problem with the rat race of a new liberal economy. It doesn’t actually empower most people to innovate their way to a bold new future. Desperation drives people to anxiety and heart disease, not creativity and risk. When you know you can lose the mortgage on a bad bet, you’re less likely to make bets at all. You’ll just be desperate for some security.

This is how most people live under our economic system. It’s a desperation that breeds poor decision making, anxiety that perverts reason with constant worry. People do not take risks when they are terribly worried, unless they’re so brilliant, ruthless, and driven that they can drown worry out with the raw screams of a sustained explosion of all-consuming volcanic will.

My buddy is a really good SEO guy, but I don’t think he’s really capable of that kind of thing. I haven’t asked him yet, but I’m pretty sure he’d agree.

When a dense theorist* talks about how capital is a homogenizing force, this is one of the actual mechanisms they’re talking about. The anxiety that quiets most people into complacent, frightened, risk-averse, desperate conformists whose judgment has been warped into thinking selfishness is a virtue.

* In both senses of the term.

Concepts express life at its most abstract. A good philosopher unfolds her concepts into reality, not more and more ideas.

Feeding Off Its Own Destruction, Research Time, 19/03/2018

I live in Toronto. It’s a vibrant economy and culture, but there’s plenty of simmering conflict here. The tech, finance, and film/tv industry are the major drivers of the city’s economy, but there are plenty of people left behind.

Rent control and housing affordability is a crushing pressure on people all over the city. There’s pressure on the middle classes. People now able to afford a condo’s mortgage are locked out of a townhouse market with not enough supply, and a detached home market whose value has ballooned ridiculously.

I have plenty of bias – my New Democrat affiliation is in my Twitter
bio. What amazed me was, when my part association posted this
image, how quickly we got our first racist comment about Muslims.
Far from our last, too. The real irony is that, the more shit-posters
we get on this image – and the comment thread is ridiculously long
without my having to do a thing – the more visible Facebook's
algorithm will make it in news feeds all over the networks of the
commenters.

There’s pressure on the lower classes. High demand entices building owners and property managers to raise rents beyond what many in already run-down buildings can afford. Elected political leaders in city and provincial offices are no longer interested in subsidizing low-income housing directly, which pushes more disadvantaged people out of housing and into cars or parking garages with few security cameras.

Both Ford brothers – alive and dead – have given lip service to affordable housing. Former mayor Rob would visit the city’s public housing to highlight its unsavoury character.

For the most part, the Ford brother who has a good chance of becoming Ontario’s next premier has taken a Not-In-My-Neighbourhood attitude toward disadvantaged people.
• • •
Toronto’s housing pressure is a function of a very basic process of capitalism, one Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explored in Anti-Œdipus. It’s a social / economic system that’s remarkably durable, which is strange.

There have been plenty of economic crises in capitalism – 47 major recessions in the history of the United States alone. The system was unstable enough that a union activist turned social scientist could write an analysis of capitalist economics describing it as a system heading inevitably for self-destruction.

The contemporary left doesn’t take Marx’s ideas at face value anymore. At least the intelligent ones don’t. Anti-Œdipus was another generation’s updating the basic idea of Capital to unexpected, contingent, new conditions.

Parkdale has been a source of artistic creativity in Toronto for a while,
and a big part of that was how many affordable – if kind of scuzzy –
homes were available in the region. It's been a poor neighbourhood
for a while, which means artists and new Canadians often end up
living here. The Tibean and Roma communities have made serious
impacts here for a while. But they're also squeezed by condo
developers putting pressure on property owners to seek bigger
profits. All those poor and weird people who made the place
interesting and drew people to the area will have to leave so the
boring people with fat wallets can live in this interesting place.

Capitalism’s promise is prosperity and freedom – growth of the whole economy is good for everyone.* But capitalist economic systems drive these cycles of expansion and collapse. Usually, a key commodity’s value is inflated beyond sustainable price ranges by wider economic conditions, and there’s a lot of direct and collateral financial damage in the crash.

* As long as the size of some people’s shares of the pie grows at a greater rate than the size of the pie. That’s how an oligarch’s class is created.
• • •
Toronto’s high-pressure real estate market is one of those systems squeezed by affordability crunches. Profiteering people and organizations – property owners, investors in new condo developments – build these massive structures for middle class and professional class renters and homeowners.

Protests of these developments happen when people worry that they’ll be squeezed out of their homes – squeezed out of any homes at all – by the pressure of ubiquitous development that leaves them behind. That’s the injustice of property development – growing supply of middle class housing can stabilize the pressurized prices, but force those of more modest means away.

Gentrification’s irony. We all know it. A neighbourhood is filled with people of modest means who are all somehow marginalized from the mainstream. Working class. Artists. New immigrants. Marginalized people, whether by ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or some other racial or caste marker. Home of the minorities of a society.

Even the far-right nutters who think Trudeau and Bill Morneau are
communists just help drive our messaging to more people. Don't
tell them that. Hell, even if you do, they'll probably just keep trying
to start flame wars to own us socialists and libtards. Resentment and
cruelty seem to be the only things keeping North America's
conservative coalitions together these days.

Minorities in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception. People whose existence, identity, way of life separates them from the mainstream, others them. Their central example was Franz Kafka – a Czech man working and writing in German; an intellectual, curious, deeply spiritual Jew living in a Christian, rather anti-Semitic culture. It often puts them at a disadvantage.

Contemporary Toronto has its equivalents. Refugees from all over the world live in the Toronto area, as well as immigrants who come to Canada having to rebuild their entire lives. They’re the disadvantaged of our economic system, where we most value people who are already rich.

Yet a culture of entirely rich people is boring. It’s dull. It’s creatively dead. All this class knows how to do is commodify – invest for a higher return. But if you need sources outside your own class to invest in, you need to find difference-makers – new trends, new businesses, new ideas.

The minorities of our societies are the creative classes – they’re already mixing and realigning cultural codes and traditions in their own identities as they adapt to their new social worlds. Capitalism as a social system needs such people – hustlers, artists, new people – because the elite of a capitalist system don’t have the capacity to think anymore.

The margins of a society bring the energy to the next growth and creative process in a capitalist economy. Yet the very success of those processes force marginalized people out of a society, since the prosperity of an unrestrained capitalist system tends to cluster in oligarchical shapes.

Oligarchs hate those filthy poor people, and they aren’t smart of worldly enough to know how profoundly they depend on them.

Macro-Economy and Micro-Poverty, Jamming, 02/06/2017

I'm pausing my look through The Federalist Papers until next week because I have a political rant to get off my chest. A few friends of mine have posted and spoken about the new minimum wage law in Ontario. I like it. They don’t. And I don’t like their reasons why.

To introduce my blatantly biased point of view – I think the reasons frequently given for opposing minimum wage hikes (and across-the-board wage increases in general) are terrible reasons. They’re ideas that come from an intellectual tradition that seeks to marginalize poor and working people.

You can probably see where I’m going with this, if you’ve been a regular reader over the last few years. But I’m going to lay it down step by step.

Basically, the argument against minimum wage hikes is that it would harm small and half-medium sized businesses. By the start of 2019, Ontario will have raised the minimum wage by about 25%, from $10-11 to $15. It’ll index itself to inflation after that.

When I want to be cool and reference popular culture from 1997,
I say we should say "All About the Bennetts."

But if a business can’t afford the extra labour costs of paying their minimum wage workers 25% more per hour, it will fold. And those businesses that don’t fold will pass the extra labour costs onto the consumer, driving inflation. So the wage hike would be useless, and the economy would be in worse shape.

What Can Break Money?

Here’s one, more macro-economic reason. Inflation isn’t only a product of individual business decisions to raise prices (though that is one significant impact). A country’s central bank exerts even greater control over inflation by controlling the money supply.

The international value and purchasing power of a currency is a complex function of how much of that currency exists. Any country needs to trade with others, but even the smallest trade imbalance creates shortages or excesses of currency in a country.

If a country imports more than it exports, then its currency is always leaving the country. To prevent domestic currency shortages, its central bank might print more currency or produce it electronically through bank transfers.

But relying solely on this would be a horrible mistake, because driving up the global supply of a currency shrinks its value for international exchange. That means more currency has to leave that country to pay for all its imports. The cycle continues.

Every now and then, a Canadian Liberal party panders for votes in a
way that actually helps people and the country as a whole. So
thanks, Kathleen Wynne, for getting at least one thing right in
nearly a decade.

Net exporters have the same kind problem. People around the world buy Canadian goods. They convert their local currency into Canadian dollars when they buy that stuff, so Canadian money shows up in exporting companies’ accounts.

That’s a really straightforward way of expanding the local supply of Canadian currency. The more Canadian companies export, the more Canadian currency is floating around Canada.

But domestic buying and selling remains about the same, while our excess is usually exported. So it’d seem we’re stuck with inflation – price increases that come from a surplus of domestic Canadian currency.

Thankfully, central banks have a more sane way to restore our currency balances – the technical term is balance of payments. They buy and sell government-issued bonds from the central banks of our importing and exporting partners.

Our trade outflow to the United States was X last month? Well, let’s buy X worth of US government bonds and call it even. Because then it’s even.

Why the Standard Anti-Raise Arguments Are Totally False

Uneven balances of payments in global trade flows are the big macro-economic causes of inflation and currency depreciation. These days, pretty much every country is linked to every other one through some kind of trading relationship.

Hungary went through some weird stuff that
illuminates some unexpected corners of our
current era. For economics as well as
terrifying racist politics.

There are more than 200 countries on Earth, and I’m even taking North Korea out of this (even though they have trade links of their own). So keeping a perfect balance is a pretty tough act. That’s a main reason why there’s always a little bit of inflation, and why currencies always fluctuate so dynamically.

Not that many people know about this complicated process, though. It’s complicated. I only really figured this out through reading economic theory and a lot of well-informed papers in respected journals, magazine, and journalistic outlets about currency stability. I will give props to Milton Friedman* for teaching me a lot about economic fundamentals.

* Lots of disagreement, but that’s coming.

But that argument against minimum wage hikes isn’t only false because of the importance of currency management policy. It’s also empirically false.

When there’s a minimum wage hike, the prices of goods never raise to match that increase exactly. A 25% minimum wage hike may be followed by an overall price rise of 5% or less.

It won't have an impact on employment either. Businesses all of a sudden won’t start firing people because their minimum pay has to increase by 25%. As long as those businesses aren’t run by such incompetents that an expense like that is a make-or-break deal.

Most empirical studies of job stability after universal minimum wage hikes show that the rising minimum has little to no effect on hiring and employment. What really matters is the difference between the average wage of everyone and the legal minimum.

The average wage in Ontario is just under $25. The minimum wage in a healthy economy should be between half and two-thirds of the average wage. 15:25 = 3/5. So the new minimum wage will be three-fifths of the overall average. Right now at $11, it’s less than half.

At less than half of the average wage, that means minimum wage workers are too poor. Even though business owners post the gigs and sign the paychecks, they aren’t the real job creators of an economy – that’s the customers. People have to inject money into businesses to generate success.

Yeah, you know I'm going to have something to say about this guy.

If people are too poor, they won’t have the money to spend in businesses. With consumer spending too low, the economy will stagnate. People need enough money to live, if a society is going to live.

Why Do People Believe This Falsehood?

I’m coming back to the Mt Pelerin network again – the network of think tanks that began at the 1955 conference of new liberal economists and politicians. Reading Friedman, as I’ve been recently, I actually do respect him. He’s a vigorous economic scientist.

His preferred solutions to the problems of inflation and imbalance of payments rub me the wrong way, but that’s only because of his ideological differences. If I could have met Milton Friedman, I think we’d have had a very enlightening conversation, even though we’d agree on very few things. He could be a conservative friend. I have those.

No, I think the real villain of this mess is Friedrich Hayek. In his The Road to Serfdom, he openly advocated that inflation be stopped at all costs. Inflation – and most dangerously, hyper-inflation – was the primary economic danger in his eyes.

That’s understandable. He’d lived in Austria during the German economic collapse of the Weimar era. But Hayek was speaking to American audiences, for whom the most relevant example of hyper-inflation wasn’t Germany under the reparations regime. No, it was Hungary at the height of the Second World War.

The need for massive military production made the Hungarian government print so much currency to finance it all, that inflation drew the pengö from a value of US$33.50 in mid-1944 to $US460,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 by mid-1946.

What's your lesson for today?

Yeah, that really happened.

So Hayek understood the kind of hyper-inflation that a mega-productive economy like the United States in the late 1940s could cause. And how fast it would go. So he was worried.

Preventing inflation isn’t a bad thing. But he advocated that large-scale wage reductions were the only route to saving a currency’s value and the stability of a nation’s economy.

Yes, you heard that right. Mass poverty as the cure to an ailing economy. Either poor people plunge into greater poverty through their currency collapsing, or they creep slowly into greater poverty by lowering wages to prevent the currency collapsing.

Hayek’s network of think tanks joined with a conservative media establishment whose power grew exponentially from 1955 to today. That relationship perpetuated the idea that the economy could only avoid disaster if the poor kept getting more and more poor.

Don’t Believe the Hype

Yeah, seriously. Don't believe the hype.

Everything Is for Sale, Doctor Who: Oxygen, Reviews, 14/05/2017

“Oxygen” is a bold story. Not just for its ending, which seems literally to have created a new kind of cliffhanger for Doctor Who. But socially, it’s bold. Brash, even.

It’s a coincidence, in part at least. When “Oxygen” was written and filmed, no one knew that it would air in the middle of an election whose likely result will put Britain on a fast track to mass poverty and servitude to a few powerful corporate actors.

Pictured: A marching force of commerce, indifferent to the needs of
the humans whose desires ostensibly drive and fuel that commercial
system. No obvious symbolism here.

The Doctor’s World

I can’t say for sure how the British election will go. I can’t say for sure what the eventual result of Brexit negotiations will be. It could be that the entire process will collapse when Theresa May can’t get the perfectly sweet-spot of a deal to which she thinks she and Britain are entitled by winning a large election mandate and voting to leave the EU, respectively.

I care about Britain. On an individual level, I have many friends who are British or have immigrated there, or are studying there on an EU passport in a very precarious position. Plus, it produces Doctor Who, the TV show closest to my heart.

I’ve been exposed to British culture through its television and journalism about the country for my entire life. While I haven’t really ever had much desire to go to England, the culture’s art, ideas, and history have been deeply influential on my sense of humour and personality.

So it makes me sad to see the seeds of Britain’s economic destruction falling into place. Brexit will force the country to lurch with almost no transition time from an economy deeply integrated with the globe, to a country with hardly any trade agreements at all.

I'm disappointed with Jeremy Corbyn and the political movement he's
trying to lead. His platform has proposals that would restore the role
of the British state as a support structure for the dignified life of all
people in the country. But I don't think anyone would say it's
implausible that I think he voted Leave. Corbyn is an EU critic for
the right reasons – lately, it's been locking people into an economic
system that prioritizes short-term fiscal balancing acts and service to
financial industry priorities over the material welfare of people. But
if he thinks a media landscape dominated by the Murdoch press is
going to give him an opportunity to run a left-wing Brexit, he's mad.

In barely a year of its exit, the government will still have managed no trade deals as an individual country to replace the massive web where it lived as an EU member. Britain will snap from a densely and multi-vectored integrated member of the global economy to a near-autarky. Its trade relationships will be on par with North Korea.

A rash judgment. But I think it’s a possibility. Given the density and complexity of negotiating any trade agreement, it’s a near-impossible task to renegotiate entirely new ones in two or three years. Britain needs an army of expert marketers / negotiators to scour the globe at breakneck speed.

Instead, they’re having an election, thinking that a stronger parliamentary majority will give them some kind of mandate to negotiate a better deal with the EU. There is no reason why the election result of a foreign country would affect the priorities of one’s own.

To Rage at Last

Britain faces a future that frightens a lot of the people in that country who’ve struggled with deeper and deeper poverty as its Tory government’s brutal austerity program choked away any possibility of a recovery from the 2008 crash. A stress-free subsistence is now nothing but a dream.

Pearl Mackie's performance in "Oxygen" is fantastic. It's been so long in
the show that we've seen a companion who, in such an intense adventure,
gets so clearly in over her head. She loves the adventurousness and can
handle most situations. But "Oxygen" is the most intense and dangerous
situation she's been in yet, the most number of times she's literally
almost died in a single episode. And they are potentially brutal deaths.

This is the Doctor’s world. In a literal sense. It’s the world into which the Doctor is beamed. Britain has always been Doctor Who’s first and primary audience. Even as the last decade has seen the show’s global success on a never-before-seen scale, Britain remains its home.

As Phil Sandifer has built the foundation of his whole career saying, Doctor Who has often been a voice of Britain – its rebellious, utopian spirit. As the tension builds in Britain’s looming disaster, the rage is breaking through the surface.

“Oxygen” is an expression of rage. Jamie Mathieson’s script is a howl of rage. The initial concept from the episode’s publicity is already a campily transparent mockery of capitalist values. The Doctor and company land in a world where even the air has become a commodity to be bought and sold.

A basic enough crime against human decency, and one central to Western politics. One of the most brutal battles in American politics right now is the Republican Party dismantling the health insurance laws and exchanges Barack Obama’s government instituted.

It’s far from a perfect system for delivering health care equitably. But without those institutions, millions will lose their health insurance, ruining their lives. Either you decline far faster without health care, or you bankrupt yourself trying to live. When health care is a commodity, universality is impossible – There’s always someone too poor.

I like watching Matt Lucas in the show too, though he doesn't yet carry
nearly the same dramatic weight as Bill. Right now, he plays an
important role, especially in the more intense and frightening stories
like "Oxygen." He's a needed comic relief. "Some of my best friends
are bluish." Yeah, that's what you say, Nardole.

Who would not be enraged at this?

A Price on Your Life Is Also Its Cost

The central lie of absolutist capitalism as an ideology is that the market and profit motive always promotes the most free and fair society. But when everything is open to commodification, life is horribly profaned.

Now, I’m not talking about some special aura of a being’s essential existence that’s choked away as a commodity. I’m not going the full Walter Benjamin today. Commodification profanes life because a world of total commodification kills people. The people of “Oxygen”s world measure space in breaths because they have to budget their personal oxygen use based on their income.

I don't think there’s been such a transparent condemnation of Britain and the West’s current economic problems since “The Sunmakers.” In that story, Robert Holmes described a world where service fees, charges, and taxes in a corporatized world destroyed every life but that of the officials who administered them.

Jamie Mathieson achieves the same in “Oxygen,” arguably better. Holmes’ story was limited by the semi-censorship Doctor Who faced in 1978 – After the social conservative activism campaign against the show when he and Philip Hinchcliffe were showrunners, Doctor Who had to tone down its frightening imagery. So “The Sunmakers” mostly stuck to broad parody.

The dead crewmembers' scarred nerve pathways and cold, vacuum-
burst eyes makes for the most nightmarish makeup I've seen so far in
this season.

Not so for “Oxygen,” as the TARDIS team and the space station’s survivors are assaulted by the shambling corpses of their co-workers and loved ones. Did I mention that their bodies have been mutilated by the total electronic shutdown of their nervous systems and long-term exposure to the vacuum of space?

No Longer a Viable Investment

Yeah, it’s good and creepy. The makeup is suitably nightmarish. And the central concept of the episode is an even more terrifying indictment of our modern capitalist attitude. I can’t explain it without warning you of

SPOILERS!!!

at last. So here it goes. The space station staff’s survivors, throughout the episode, think that their spacesuits are “deactivating their organic components” because of some malfunction.

But the Doctor figures out the real cause, almost inconceivable even to the characters who live in this perverse world. They’re on a mining station, stripping an asteroid of its copper ore. The problem is, their returns are dropping.

Our heroes enter the system to help destroy it.

Throughout the episode, there are small hints in the dialogue that they’ve had to shut down production. There were errors, issues with their equipment, and repairs were taking a while. Their company’s artificial intelligence and algorithms declared their employees not worth the money.

They were fired. All 40 of the mining station staff were fired. Getting the sack in Mathieson’s imagined future of hyper-capitalist human society doesn’t just mean you could die. It’s literally the axe. Execution on grounds of losing your division’s profit margin.

And I thought some of the contracts I’ve signed for freelance writing and marketing gigs were bad.

It reflects a real fact about our world. Britain today has weakened its safety net terribly over the last decade of Conservative Party rule. People who lose their jobs quite often lose their unemployment benefits because, ever since David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity regime, social welfare administrators have a mandate to remove as many people as possible from the rolls.

Getting fired or being otherwise unable to work in Britain today can often cause extreme poverty and death. Just ask Daniel Blake.

This is the world we live in now. Doctor Who has spoken directly to the indignity and torture of life as a working person in the West today. Call out the powerful. It’s what art is for.
• • •
So yeah, about that cliffhanger. Only a brief note so far – I want to see how it plays out in the next episode, which looks like another terrifying and creepy story. But it does more than simply teasing the next episode.

The last seconds of "Oxygen" showed that, after exposure to the vacuum of space in this story, the Doctor remains blind. And he isn't sure how or when it will ever heal. It completely transforms how the Doctor will have to act in the next adventure (at least).

Doctor Who's tradition of cliffhangers began when it was a more conventional serialized adventure show. The cliffhangers typically foregrounded a threat to the main characters, which is fine at a surface level.

But the best cliffhangers don't actually do this – the threat to the main cast isn't a profound form of tension. When we see names in the opening credits, we can be pretty sure they'll survive story to story. No one reading Superman will ever think Superman will ever die from a generic cliffhanger.

In such a context, a cliffhanger works best when it has nothing to do with threats to the main cast. It's about some revelation that will transform the story. "Oxygen"s cliffhanger, leading into "Extremis," is one of these radical transformations. The Doctor, at least for now, has been radically transformed in his abilities. And I hope for next week, the story takes seriously how a personality like the Doctor's deals with the sudden onset of a real disability.
• • •
Here are my previous philosophical reviews of this season of Doctor Who. I don't plan on ranking them until I see the whole season this Spring. So seven more weeks to go.

Knock Knock
Thin Ice
Smile
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye

White Privilege in Miniature, Research Time, 28/09/2016

I wrote last week about the Shallow Pond Problem. It’s a common problem in contemporary moral philosophy – a seemingly straightforward way to apply abstract principles to large, complicated political issues.

That’s what you want philosophy to do, right? Take complicated practical matters to the most abstract level, where you can apply simple concepts and arguments to the problem and get clear answers for intractable problems. 

Looks innocuous, doesn't it. But don't be fooled by its simplicity. Or
maybe I should say, don't let yourself prefer the simple.

The Shallow Pond goes like this. You’re wearing an expensive suit while walking past a shallow pond. In the pond, you see a child drowning. Obviously, the ethically correct decision is to wade into the pond and rescue the kid. It ruins your suit, but ruining your suit is acceptable collateral damage for saving a child’s life.

That’s the simple setup. Here’s the application to complex real-world problems. Because your slight sacrifice (wrecking your suit) is obviously a worthwhile price for a great good (saving a drowning child), then your slight sacrifice (donating all you possess but a subsistence income) is obviously a worthwhile price for a great good (donating it all to charities that provide live-saving care to the desperately poor).

I've known professional moral philosophy academics who find this argument seriously compelling. Peter Singer first put forward the argument in a professional philosophy journal, but it’s inspired other philosophy professors to become activists / lobbyists on behalf of global poverty relief.*

* Though like most human projects, corruption and hypocrisy have followed. 

How effective those projects actually are at work doesn’t undercut the moral imperative, which is entirely conceptual. 

From the first time I heard the argument, I had deep suspicions about it. But I couldn’t always put my finger on it. I think back to my earlier days in the academy, and I remember one common factor in all these times that I felt suspicious of a straightforward, clear argument. But I couldn’t argue against it myself because I couldn't root my suspicions in reasons. It was just a feeling at the time.

I learned how to explain and understand my suspicions as reasons when I learned one deceptively easy way to argue against such seemingly obvious conclusions. It’s deceptive, because I don’t think a lot of folks realize how easy it is to undercut an obvious conclusion.

He's a good writer in that he can easily suggest complex ideas in very
simple writing, but I want Appiah to dive into the complexity!
I know he can.

Cut up the premises.

Last time I talked about Kwame Anthony Appiah’s arguments around the Shallow Pond, I did it in a spirit of disappointment. Because it was an annoying example of the academic’s mistake – considering replies to others’ objections to your ideas as actual elaborations of your idea.

I wanted to read cosmopolitan moral / political attitudes and principles in application to policies and examples, or work through other social problems with a cosmopolitan lens. I wanted to see the idea become complex, not defend itself against arguments that are from a whole other world.

And I mean that seriously. There are many ways you can divide philosophical thinking into categories. However many ways you feel like splitting them up, however many principles you can think of for categories. 

But for the same of understanding what I (and Appiah too) think of approaches like the Shallow Pond problem, let’s think of methods and goals. Two categories of philosophical thinking:

1) Simplifying complex problems to develop obvious, straightforward answers.
2) Developing concepts adequate to real-world problems, so we can better understand very complex situations.

I don’t consider simplifying complex problems as a sensible way to live. Thinking that complex problems always have easy answers gets people into ridiculously horrible messes. 

That's really all Appiah’s response to the Shallow Pond problem is. Incredulousness. Do you really think you can solve world poverty by throwing money at it? It seems like you can, but in a world as complex as ours, everything short of real systematic change is nothing but a patch that falls away after a while.

Speaking of global transparency and corruption, Trump-connected
consultant Paul Manafort is only the most recently-visible one of
literally tens of thousands of people who become multi-millionaires
skimming the money from the activities of massively corrupt
national leaders and wealthy businessmen around the world.

Look at one project in Pogge’s Global Justice Program – advocacy for global financial transparency to stop illicit financial outflow from poor regions of the world. Whether through outright corruption or corporate tax cheating, more than a trillion dollars leaves the holdings of local economies in poor regions of the world. Ending global poverty has a simple answer – keep that money in the local region.

But think about what you’d have to do to achieve that. Yes, you can build a system of international law and well-funded international agencies to support it. Yes, you can advocate for laws against such financial chicanery in the countries most victimized, and local agencies that enforce those laws.

You also have to change global corporate culture so that people don’t naturally gravitate to behaving as tax cheats and money launderers in the first place. So that everyone in the culture feels shame when they fail to pay taxes or pay their hosts and collaborators their fair share. 

Donald Trump bragged that not paying his taxes and stiffing his business partners made him a smart businessman. He’s an ordinary part of an international business culture where this stance is also ordinary. Imagine what you’d have to do to change that entire culture.

So yes, the statements are easy. But understanding what it would take to achieve them is tremendously difficult. How to build airtight laws, how to shepherd those laws through the legislatures of many different institutions and governments (which requires understanding the cultural, moral, and political dynamics of billions of people), how to isolate a moral principle in a society and develop activist techniques to push that principle out of popular favour.

Thinking complicated problems are easy to solve because stating the solution is itself easy. It's a key sign that you haven't dealt with very many actually complex problems in your life. If you want a definition of white privilege that won't get anyone's ethnic hair up on their backs, explain it in this abstract way.

The statements are easy. But the world is complex. I prefer to work in the thought that adapts us to the complex. We can get the work done that way.

Sick of the Old Stories, Composing, 28/06/2016

You know what’s been taking up my creative energy lately? My actual creative writing. Work has been busy, and I try to devote as much spare time as I can to getting the You Were My Friend script ready to hit the indie fundraising circuit of Toronto. 

Today, I wanted to talk a little more about some of the motives I had for telling the story that I chose for this film project. From an ethical and political sense, I think it’s important to tell the stories of people who are genuinely struggling in the urban economy of the 2010s. 

An intense mixture of smog, stress, and enthusiasm.

A lot of the hype that comes from the leadership of my current home base city of Toronto is about the wonders of our dynamic business sector. It’s true that the startup / tech sector of Toronto is growing. But there are some severe problems with it. 

Toronto’s tech sector suffers from a similar problem as Silicon Valley. There’s a lot of investment capital chasing a lot of business development plans. And those plans themselves are chasing trends that are already dying out in Silicon Valley itself. 

A lot like the Toronto hipster culture that dominates the aesthetics and fashion of the Toronto startup scene, its business culture isn’t an organic development of Toronto’s own people and potential. It’s an emulation – maybe you could call it a simulacra – of a business culture that organically arose in northern California. 

There's a devotion to the image of libertarian Silicon Valley business culture – just read some of the job ads if you want to be disheartened – without really understanding or embracing the philosophy behind it. Contingent, insecure working lives are celebrated for their freedom without taking seriously their risk and danger.

You Were My Friend is the story of one person who suffers the fallout from that risk, but accepts that the ‘every one for herself’ attitude is ordinary. Even as it causes a horrible result. 

It’s not a story that’s told enough. At least not yet.

The Killing Joke was a story of angst-ridden men battling
each other while a woman is brutally tortured to make
out brooding male hero brood even more. Apparently,
Alan Moore can't stand this book now.

That’s really the motivation behind the kind of stories I’ve been writing in the last few years. When I started my first major writing project, A Small Man’s Town, I thought a novel with an uncritically self-absorbed male protagonist was still worth telling. And it isn’t that the story isn’t valuable, or can be told well. It’s that we already have enough.

I want to take those kinds of characters and just lay them in the background for the next couple of decades. Then we’ll see what stories can come from other characters. Maybe we’ll pick the self-absorbed male up again when our literary and creative conventions have had a good, strong muckabout. They’ll be quite different in such a new world.

It’s why I'm so glad to see so many vibrant stories in the mainstream comics scene, even though I rarely get a chance to read them. But I follow them and their artists, at least looking at their personalities and the ideas they promote while they promote their work.

When the graphic novel version of Ta’Nehisi Coates’ first volume of Black Panther comes out, that’s going on my list. Maybe a Comixology download of G. Willow Wilson’s best stories with Ms Marvel. Miles Morales seems to be the one Spider-Man I’ll never want to punch in the face. And I really want to get my hands on Chris Hastings’ Gwenpool, not just because I’ve loved his Dr McNinja for more than a decade.

I’d like my plucky little indie film about the friendship between a girl struggling to survive and a woman on the verge of losing hope to contribute something to that.

And I’ll sometimes dream of even more ridiculous stories. Especially when I look at comic book culture. If only because the last decade of films about these archetypal characters* have so closely followed the aesthetics and trends of the 1980s.

* And they are archetypes. One of my co-workers was arguing that my weird idea for a Batman story wouldn’t work because Batman has never been quite that way. I like the guy, but I don’t think he’s right. There is no one realistic Batman character to whom all the events of the comics lines happen. He’s been the same age for almost a century, except those stories where he isn’t. Comics archetypes are characters in the public storehouse we can play with – even though we can’t get permission to make money from our play without approval from corporate.

I think what I love most about Chris Hastings' work is his
innocent and enthusiastic embrace of the absolutely
demented, surreal, deranged, and unapologetically happy.

I’ll be blunt. Frank Miller is old hat. Even Alan Moore has come to hate the grimdark effects his own masterpieces from the 1980s have had on culture. That’s why I like the vibrance coming out of these new comics. 

It resurrects the joy of mid-century mainstream camp, but having learned the lessons about complex character development and ethically evocative storylines. I feel like it could only culminate in a gay Batman.

Remember how, in the paranoid days of the Comics Code Authority, ignorant, insular, rich white advocates for moral purity read so much homosexuality into the Batman-Robin relationship. They saw it as a way Batman was disgusting, morally evil, and corrupting.

So take the aesthetics of the flashy and bright Ms Marvel, Gwenpool, and Morales’ Spider-Man, and unite them with a relationship between Batman and Robin that is openly that of an older male taking on a younger trainee as a vigilante crimefighter and as a lover at the same time. And write a story that explores that relationship of deep, abiding love for exactly the joy that it is.

It'd sell, you know.

Hopeless Helpless I: Power to Poor People, Research Time, 21/04/2016

It's been a pretty busy time for me lately, which is why I haven’t been able to go through Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth as thoroughly as I’d like to have done yet. The first of the book’s six chapters is about understanding the material powers of poor people. It’s something that actually needs a little work to get done.

Understanding that poor people have real, material power in the world is a tough proposition. We seem, as a society, accustomed to thinking of poor people as inherently passive and powerless. 

Does a boy like this, working in a Pakistani brick
foundry, deserve only our pity? Or can we learn from him?

They’re recipients of welfare benefits or charity, the passive role of waiting for handouts or aid. Their passivity could be used to encourage sympathy for them, like calls for charity or for poverty alleviation policies from government. Or their passivity could be a reason to despise them, like the (often racialized) accusations that the poor are lazy, contemptuous, or criminal. But they remain passive.

Negri discusses two of the most profound ways to dismiss and obscure the power of poor people. One of these was Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical God Is Charity. This was the Pope’s official dismissal of all calls for social justice as unrealistic for people to strive for in the modern world. All that we could achieve for the poor is to pity them and give them our charity.

When Negri and Michael Hardt wrote Commonwealth, Benedict XVI was still the Pope. Given Francis I’s election shortly after his predecessor retired for health reasons, it makes me wonder if there weren’t many in the College of Cardinals who thought true social justice needed restoration in the Catholic Church’s mission.

Benedict’s dismissal of poor people’s power and dignity rains with a common theme of contemporary life – hopelessness. It’s really only in the past few generations that the idea that humanity will likely drive itself to extinction has really become mainstream. To the point where it’s a casually accepted discussion point.

This is a radical idea compared to human history – the idea that the entire human race would be gone within a few generations. Not raptured or elevated, or any other religious apocalyptic visions. There have always been those as long as there’s been religions that imagined the end of the world at all. 

In many ways, Francis I is the Pope of hope.

I just mean sad, final, plodding extinction. The base indignity of cold, simple, stupid death. We will drown in our own shit. This is the endpoint of our global ecological crisis – we will either dig ourselves out of it or we won’t. 

This hopelessness began before the ecological crisis, if we’re talking about the general feeling of cultural dread that comes with the first shocks of the most thorough atheism. I mean this in the sense that we now realize that we live in a world that has no absolute meaning or transcendent justification beyond the brute fact of its existence.

That feeling of hopelessness about the aloneness of humanity and the indifference of the universe to us kicked into gear in the West in the late 19th century. But that was only for an elite of intellectuals and philosophers – the foundational existentialists and their fellow travellers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,* or the young Max Weber.

* If you make sure you take his devout Orthodox Christianity not as a dogmatic religious experience, but as a mystical gesture of gratitude to the Czar who spared him from a firing squad.

The true popular shocker about the irredeemable, hopeless nature of humanity was the terror of the First World War. I keep returning to this epoch because I’m trying to find the best way to deal with the heritage of this influential period in human thought. 

It’s vital for Utopias because the hope of utopian thinking meets its opposite in the profound pessimism that dominated the last century of thought. This is the fight that hope needs to survive in politics and in human society. The book Utopias itself will be a dramatization of that fight in philosophical writing. 

Understanding the power of the poor could be a major element of hope’s victory in this battle. Because if the abjectly poor can generate this hope from their own horrid condition, then we can all dream of a better world for us all.

But I have to understand the most profound conception of that horror, dread, profane, abject, hopeless pessimism. There are many ways you could go. The immediately intuitive path to the profound would, I suppose be Martin Heidegger. Well, let’s have another look . . . To be continued.

It’s Your Free Choice, Research Time, 10/10/2014

There’s a line in my play You Were My Friend, when both characters have two private monologues with the audience, as their worlds and their friendship are starting to collapse under the weight of being overworked, underpaid, and overstressed. Vicki contemplates the growing nihilism of her friend and asks “What’s the point of being alive if you’re just going to give up? Giving up on finding work means starving, and who wants to starve?”

Even in this dilemma, libertarians see freedom. It isn’t just an exaggeration or a joke, like in the “Mr. Nozick’s Neighbourhood” cartoon on Existential Comics. Remember G, my more dogmatic libertarian former friend I’ve spoken about before? He once wrote to me that if you had a choice between taking a job that couldn’t even keep you out of poverty and actually starving, you were still perfectly free in your decision. In the libertarian perspective, even the most terrifying material destitution doesn’t degrade your precious liberty. At the time, I couldn’t understand it, and G couldn’t explain it to me. Oddly, C never really did explain that idea to me either, even though he always had a firm intellectual grasp of libertarian philosophy across several disciplines. 

It's not as though he's ever late getting home from work.

At least Robert Nozick could explain it to me this morning as I was taking the train home from Oakville. No action is ever totally free. I can’t speed-run home from Sheridan College in the afternoon like The Flash because it’s physically impossible, so I read philosophy on the train instead. Even if I owned a car, I’d still take the train because so many other people decide to drive that the highway between Oakville and Hamilton is often catastrophically blocked, and I’d face the irritation of spending too long in a traffic jam unable to read philosophy at all. So the free decisions of many other people to drive constitute an environment that constrains my choice of transport to the GO Train.

According to Nozick’s conception, I voluntarily choose an action if another person, agency, or institution doesn’t actively interfere with my body and force me to do that action. The free decisions of many other people constitute an ecology of actions that put environmental constraints on what is physically possible for you to do. Here’s something like the analogy that Nozick uses to describe this.

Bob wants to date Alison, but Alison is already married to Bill, and has been happily married to him for four years. They began their own relationship long before Bob even met Alison. So Alison and Bill’s free choice, to date and marry each other, constrain Bob’s actions because Bob dating Alison is off the table. But because its ultimate effects on Bob never played a factor in Bill and Alison’s decision to marry, they never made Bob’s actions involuntary, never took away his freedom. Their decision simply constituted an environmental constraint on what Bob could do.

The same, says Nozick, is true of economic constraints on your actions. The ecological relationships and dynamics of a free market are the products of millions and billions of individuals’ decisions that interact to create an immense set of environmental constraints on our actions. No one is directly forcing Vicki into a choice between finding one drudgery job after another or starving on the street, but nonetheless, those are her only alternatives. 

Even though you are materially extremely constrained, you still have your liberty because only the intentional actions of people or institutions, taking you as an object, can remove your liberty. 

The other day, I spoke about how I found John Rawls’ philosophy inadequate to the real problems of politics because his vision of justice lays aside too much about a person’s identity and history as morally irrelevant. Well, Nozick has similar blinders on his own moral philosophical vision. Moral relevance for him rests with individuals only: intentional acts to coerce and constrain which violate the liberty of an individual are immoral. But the suffering that can emerge from an environment constituted by a billion individual decisions includes no intentional acts. Most of the people whose actions contribute to these conditions of suffering, myself included, never meet the people who suffer because of the global economic and ecological relationships in which I am embedded. 

Vicki and Madison, the protagonists of You Were My Friend, suffer and are broken because of an ecology of acts that constrain their choices to desperation. Yes, they’re free in the sense that no one is physically and directly constraining and coercing them, but freedom in destitution is materially worthless.

The Problem of the Poor, Research Time, 12/09/2014

The left and right over the last 100ish years has been defined, at least from one prominent perspective, by their relationship with the state. Those who wish there to be a big state to provide social services that help the poor and discourage inequality are the left; those who desire a small state to avoid the oppression of a government forcing one to contribute to causes that you don’t wish to are the right. This is only one way to break down the division, and there are other possibilities.

Colin Ward describes a critical part of the history of the modern state that we often forget about when we think about left and right this way. When the institution of the state as we know it today was first developed in Europe, there were already many voluntary associations who assisted the poor. These networks fed and clothed people who had very little, and gave poor people work in fields and towns to earn their keep and contribute to communities. 

We didn't always hold the poor in contempt in our society.

When the state arrived in Europe, these networks were destroyed, and the poor found themselves oppressed. The networks of medieval guilds and communities encouraged the poor to be fed. When the state and its military and police services began taking over all aspects of human life in Europe, it became legal (and widespread and common) to whip beggars in the street. Poor Laws forced the destitute not into employment and engagement in their communities, but to confinement in workhouses as little more than slave labour.

This attitude toward the poor persisted until the 20th century, but the modern welfare state wasn’t instituted out of some newfound heart of charity, according to Ward. He understands it as an element of the model of total war that began with the First World War and reached its apogee in the Second. 

When a country’s entire civilian population becomes a legitimate military target, to the point where the attacking army actively intends to kill enemy civilians,* then the civilian population must be mobilized as soldiers, or at least as combatants of a new and twisted sort. Mobilizing civilians means providing for their welfare, not only during the current war, but to prepare them for future totalizing wars. This is how the welfare state continues to be promoted in peacetime.

* A definite sidebar. I was dismayed and saddened by the Israeli bombing of Gaza this year, but I was at least given some small stream of hope by the fact that the IDF did its best to provide hospital care to Gazan civilians harmed in the conflict. It was a flicker of conscience and ethics that remained in a situation that had largely gone mad with rage and hatred. Until there is a complete reorientation of the Israeli right away from the blanket and essential vilification of Palestinians and a total social change in the Arab world to move beyond their crude and terrifying anti-Jewish indoctrination, there can be no peace in Israel. 

Those who have become accustomed to state authority today have a similar hostility to the poor as existed in the original states. This is why many on the right today have disdain for social welfare programs. Their opposition is often coded by race, especially in the United States, but the point remains the same. When an entire society is shaped, or overcoded in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, by the state and its centralized, exclusive, absolute political authority, the poor become victimized. 

Ward’s perspective, which he calls anarchism and I prefer to call network politics (see, I’m already becoming a good PR person), actually agrees with the economic conservative who would see the welfare state collapse. He and I agree that a state-administered system of welfare largely reduces populations of the poverty-stricken into permanent lethargy and dependence on systems in which they have no stake for their survival. They lose initiative, and grow content with the feeds by which they take from state coffers, instead of taking control of their own lives.

But where the right-wing perspective advocates letting such people starve, or at least casting them out from any social support systems at all, I have a much more radical solution. The right-wing perspective I describe is still dependent on the state: if the state does not maintain the poor, then they receive no welfare support at all. The state remains the only arm through which society expresses itself.

Reorienting society so that our neighbourhoods and communities are composed of networks of associations would transform the entire way in which we care for poor people. Under state politics, I give up tax dollars to an impersonal state to distribute to those in poverty, and it distributes that money to the poor as a handout with no further responsibilities, so I can shut my door to them. 

If we could develop the social norms to make friends with the poor of our communities and take them into our own homes and public houses, then we wouldn’t need state welfare systems, and the disadvantaged would be integrated thickly into their societies. 

But I’m a hypocrite about this, because even though I believe it’s the right course of action, I’m not yet sure how to organize a neighbourhood or a community so that a majority of its residents take this attitude to their neighbours. And I don’t know how to do it myself — I don’t know which poor people wouldn’t take advantage of me or who need more intense mental health care that I don’t know how to provide.