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 Problem That’s Gone Unsolved for 500 Years, Research Time, 10/05/2017

Thinking about democracy these days brings up its paradoxes. Try googling the phrase ‘paradox of democracy,’ and you’ll find a ton of different paradoxes. Social and institutional forces in a tension that threatened to pull the whole edifice of the country down around its knees.

Something essential will disappear from human civilization if democratic values and governance disappears again. There are good signs – Canada’s still robust multiculturalism, for example.

Look at South Korea’s election yesterday! Their democracy was under its greatest threat over this year, under Park Geun Hye’s corrupt administration. The daughter of the Republic of Korea’s most brutal dictator, in the thrall of the same family of demented gurus.

The new President of the Republic of Korea on the night of his election
victory. Moon Jae In's victory, to me, signalled the idealism that still
exists in South Korea's people for democracy, freedom, and peace,
despite the deathly serious problems the country faces. Hell, Korea
faces its literal near-extinction as a society and people through the
prospect of a short-range nuclear war. But they weren't so afraid of
this that they turned to authoritarian tactics in the name of security,
like the people of one of the world's oldest democratic societies.

Her impeachment and imprisonment led to an embrace of democratic idealism, a rejection of the ineffective steel eyes of the last ten years of hawkish leadership. Moon Jae In, and the new tradition of Korea’s Democratic Party, have the ideal of peace on the peninsula at heart. They’re pragmatists, but let that ideal govern their approach.

That stance earns the name ‘democratic.’

One paradox that jumped out at me reading Machiavelli is the paradox of tolerance. The snarkiest but sadly in-progress tension ripping at democratic values in the West. We’re facing a youth subculture of disaffected, resentful racist, sexist, gleefully disgusting punks who demand to scream their bile as an expression of absolute free speech.

Milo might have been fired, but taking out a figurehead won’t crush a whole cultural movement.

The question of tolerance is an old one. Must a democracy, in the name of universal freedom and tolerance, also tolerate the free expression of advocacy to end democracy?

Karl Popper’s answer was no. And we lean back on the idea in The Open Society and Its Enemies as a defence. But that reference alone doesn’t stop the subculture. That community continues to fester and grow.

It’s a serious threat to our optimism that this idea has existed since Machiavelli’s time. He deals with this when he talks about some of the reasons why democracies collapse.

A democratic government, even the city-states in Machiavelli’s time, were more vulnerable in some ways than the autocratic cities with their princes and military rulers. Democratic government is open – there is always free speech, freedom of association and thought.

The leaders and influencers in the world's older democracies, in
growing numbers, reject democratic methods and ideals in their
governance and missions. Most disturbing about reading the
Discourses on Livy is Machiavelli's idea that the erosion of
democracy and freedom is a natural process in the development
of human societies. For someone raised in an atmosphere of
modernist optimism, it's difficult to face the fatalism of a more
medieval mind.

So that includes the freedom to advocate the end of democracy, and plot to overthrow it. You will always find discontents with the order of things. Sometimes, those discontents are democrats themselves, wanting a more free society. Those are the good ones.

But you can definitely have discontents and malcontents enraged at the freedom of people around them. That was Machiavelli’s problem just as it seems now to be ours.

Yet Machiavelli’s problem was just a little different. Malcontents against democracy didn’t arise in isolation from wider events. The societies that developed anti-democratic movements arose when wealth and power consolidated enough to turn a government into a practical oligarchy. Only a few powerful people really had effective power over the state.

That betrayal of our institutions was the leading edge. There wasn’t yet enough free speech oppression to shut down all criticism. So a generation arises in the wake of democratic institutions having been corrupted, but which still has their personal freedoms.

But they’ve come to associate their institutions – still democratic in name – with corruption and opposition to the people’s freedom. That hypocrisy of the democratic name and its oligarchical control drives the hatred of democracy.

So, Niccolò, how do we combat this self-destructive social trend? . . . . . . . Oh, you mean we don’t? This is just part of the natural causes of a democratic society’s death?

Okay, you’re a very insightful doctor when it comes to diagnoses. But you’re no help at all with cures. Unless I really am asking to cure a natural cause of death.

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.

Original Inequality IV: Gotham's Greed, Research Time, 07/03/2017

Continued from previous . . . So what I want to do with these looks back through the classics of political philosophy is build my conceptual toolbox to analyze contemporary political issues and the role utopian thinking can play in the 21st century.

It’s also about writing a book that explicitly contributes to a particular tradition within the whole history of Western philosophy.* That tradition is a democratic materialism or radical democracy. It starts with Niccolo Machiavelli’s civic republican thought.

* Western philosophy = A particular tradition of developing concepts to understand and analyze the universe, which began in the Greek network of city-states and Mediterranean colonies, spread through the Roman, then Arab empires, blending with Christian theology, diversifying and fragmenting through the development of modern science, nestling in the university sector by the 19th century.

Foucault himself doesn't play a big role in this post. I just like using this
image of him, for obvious reasons.

From there, it gets its metaphysical content from Benedict Spinoza’s work,** blooms again in Karl Marx’s empiricism of ideology, disappeared as marxism was warped by totalitarian Stalinist influence, then surging once more in the new radical democratic thinking of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Bifo, and Antonio Negri.

** Why isn’t Thomas Hobbes part of this tradition? Well, he may be an imperialist, but he’s no democrat.

At our current crisis point for the West – both for philosophy as a discipline*** and our broader political culture – we need radical gestures of peace and diversity. A refusal to give in to nationalism or pressure for conformity of any kind.

*** The disciplinary crisis of philosophy being encased entirely in a university institution, and that institution’s increasingly powerful disincentives from producing any work that could ever be considered primary material – only commentaries and esoteric or technical debates.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I now know Rousseau’s thought fits snugly and dementedly into that tradition of democratic materialism. Any philosopher worth reading is, after all, at least a little demented.

Here’s another example of Rousseau’s thoroughly materialist approach to political thinking. He considers the roots of greed. Writing in 1755 Switzerland, I feel safe assuming that the popular culture of Europe considered human greed rooted in our soul.

Original sin is, in a Christian community, the foundational principle of human corruption. It’s a primal rupture in what should have been a harmonious relationship with God – a spiritual rupture.

Rousseau? The roots of greed lie in our social networks. Here’s the short version of his argument, which is pretty efficient as it is in The Origin of Inequality.

As society becomes more complex, human needs grow more complex. So we can no longer be self-sufficient, and need to co-operate to live well. At a low level of complexity, we can get by with contingent deals and contracts. But as life gets more complicated, we need to build institutions to rely on.

These relationships of mutual reliance and need are the foundation of social solidarity, which is good, because it builds community in practical reciprocal benefits.

As well as the need for cooperation and investment, the size of a social
network is a factor in enabling greed and cheating. If you interact with
people casually, you won't have the same force of solidarity as with
your close friends and family. So you don't feel as bad about swindling
those casual acquaintances who mean little to nothing to you.

But all these cooperative plans and activities require us to accumulate beyond our immediate needs. We have to prepare to invest in long-term strategies for community and personal survival – to invest in cooperative ventures.

Our institutions need to collect taxes and user fees to continue supplying the goods and services they do. Our cooperative plans like charities, businesses, and deals of all kinds likewise need investments and resources to get started.

If we start to accumulate with regard to the future, inequality will start to appear in society. Accumulation is a set of skills, and some will be better or worse than others. Those skills are different depending on how you accumulate your wealth, but luck and talent will result in different rates of accumulation for different people.

You’ll end up with a society of rich and poor. Perhaps where people become so rich that they forget about the human need to rely on others for our well-being – able to buy and sell anyone, you can easily think real solidarity is a fiction. Perhaps where people become so poor than they’re consumed by resentment and depression – unable to build any beneficial relationships at all anymore.

An entirely material root for greed, resentment, hopelessness. A politics with no God and no spirit, only human short-sightedness and selfishness as the root of evil.

For the mid-1700s, and maybe even for the early 21st century, truly radical. . . . To be continued

A Lesson in Political Psychology, Research Time, 21/11/2016

Over the next few years in my different writing and art projects, one of the things I’ll do is try to understand the political phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I’ve been doing that on the blog for the last few weeks as I read some noteworthy radical democratic political theorists in the leadup and immediate aftermath of his election.

A traditionally realist depiction of President Trump,
in a contemporary fresco.

As my next big book Utopias comes together over the next few years, reckoning with the nationalist movement and whatever terrors his administration unleashes will provide the book’s context. So, aside from my general interest in global politics, I’m thinking through a lot of the most thoughtful accounts of what Trump means for human society.

One of those comes from Laurie Penny. Ever since reading her book Unspeakable Things a couple of years ago, I considered her a brilliant philosopher as well as an insightful and incisive journalist.

It’s weird in a lot of modern contexts to call someone who doesn’t work as a university academic a philosopher. But I think it’s increasingly necessary for philosophy as a tradition, given the pressures of academic institutions on creativity and social leadership beyond the community of university researchers.

Even in those circumstances, more and more university professors are too overburdened and underpaid to be leaders even in their community. Like too many people whose careers have been wrecked by casualization or automation, the sectors that are supposed to produce knowledge devote increasing amounts of energy to mere survival.

So it’s up to journalists and artists to understand and develop the concepts that bring us to such incredible danger and can save us. To understand nationalism and develop a path to liberation.

Penny’s article “Against Bargaining” is one example of the public, open-access, mass market philosophy that people who oppose racism, bigotry, nationalism, and autocracy need to read today. We need it to feed our minds and keep us sharp. To focus ourselves on the differences that make real differences, the basis of accurate, worthwhile action.

The only reason Nietzsche wasn't a democrat
was because in the 19th century, it worked as
a mass politics, a dangerous kind of social
movement. Today, democracy is about
grooming people to be the ideally best people,
the bravest and most proud. Democracy has
become literally true aristocracy.

After reading Unspeakable Things, I called Penny a Nietzschean, and “Against Bargaining” continues this theme in her work – Donald Trump’s ascent and all it represents (and unleashes) is the most violent explosion of social resentment I think I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Nietzsche wrote about resentment as a seething, creeping social force. It was the cultural attitude that uses hatred to turn weakness into strength. But this isn’t the emboldening hatred of rage at an oppressor. It’s the petty small-mindedness of slimy disgust at anyone who dares to present themselves as your equal.

That’s one context of the attitude of resentment. It’s resentment triumphant, the decadent society of 19th century Europe, Europe at the heart of empire. Imperialism that was popularly justified by a morality of white supremacist racism.

The idea refuses to die. At least in some contexts. Homogeneously white affluent communities within spitting distance of more economically and ethnically mixed districts is one context. Places where no one knows enough non-white people to move their thoughts beyond stereotype and fear.

That petty attitude is also, at an individual level, the perspective of the abuser. He blames you for the violence he inflicts and you accept his narrative. Look at how many nice liberal journalists have written thinkpieces on how multiculturalism and identity politics caused President Trump.

You know what multiculturalism is? It’s living in a mixed community – walking down the street and passing by couples and families of as many possible ethnic and gender combinations as you can get out of a randomizer.

You know what identity politics is? It’s the assertion that your life and cultural heritage has value, especially if that life and heritage has been devalued and abused for generations.

It’s my fault that I’m being hurt because I stood up for myself and demanded that I not be hurt. If I’m compliant, then I won’t be hurt. I’ll be silent. I’ll be good.

To be good out of fear of an authority’s punishment isn’t goodness. It’s fear. The psychology of the abuse victim is to mask the outcome of overpowering fear as moral virtue.

In the face of hard years of violence from the
state and the mob, we'll need to find the
strength to smile.

Here, the psychological has become political. The most dedicated foot soldiers of Trumpism are the online trolls – abusers and harassers who are entertained by provoking more emotionally vulnerable people into mental distress. And who believe their own bullshit when they defend their violent actions as the exercise of their rights to free speech.

A movement of people who’ve learned to take pleasure in the psychological pain of others have taken their own will to violence to a mass-scale group phenomenon. Hence Penny’s astute observation – that the vulnerable people who are taking Trump’s ascent best have been those who have already overcome abuse.

People who’ve already worked through the self-cannibalizing philosophy of blaming yourself for the violence you suffer. We are facing today a political movement that literally wants to bludgeon dissent and difference into silence and invisibility. They see disagreement and ethnic, religious, or sexual difference as obnoxiousness.

Maybe you could call it getting uppity.

It’s our duty not to believe them and remember that rights to freedom aren’t meant to defend your attempts at violence. It’s to defend your attempt to be.

A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke: Joy Needs Love Needs Sex, Sunnyvale, 23/04/2016

One of the benefits of being on Netflix, as opposed to even a post-watershed cable TV channel, is how explicit you can be with sex. Sex is an essential part of the human condition, rooted in our physicalities. No matter what kind of sexuality you may have – and your sexuality is as singular as you are – you will have some kind of sexuality. Even asexuality as a human is a relation to sex. Humanity can’t escape from sex, and we shouldn’t want to in the first place.

Western morality has separated sex from love for so long that a lot of us are still digging our way out from that situation. But we have to understand that the truest, deepest loves express themselves in the greasiest, nastiest, most freakily creative sex. The greatest fucks aren't just genital fucks, but mind-fucks. There should be no difference between body-fucks and mind-fucks – there are only fucks. Body, thought, and spirit intermingling into a dense and complex integration that produces more than either body could become on its own. This is sexuality at the molecular and spiritual level. This is love.

Prince died two days ago. What else could he have taught us but this?

The deepest, most affecting, and frankly most beautiful love story in the entire world of Trailer Park Boys and Sunnyvale Trailer Park is that of Jim Lahey and Randy. Their sexual tension is still thick, solidifying every time they’re on screen together this season. It’s all the more tense because they never act on it. Jim is yearning for Randy, with increasing desperation. But Randy reacts to Jim differently here than he ever has before. He’s loved Jim, he’s been angry, jealous, frustrated, certainly. But now he seems scared. 

Just look at the way Jim rubs cream on Randy’s tortured, wounded nipples after Barb, Donna, and Candy’s latest attack. They’re horribly wounded, the flesh bruised deeply. And Jim rubs tenderly, with the soft brushes of fingertips that penetrate past skin to the heart, to the soul. He’s crying, sorrowful, shredded and quivering. There’s been a crime here, an assault. And Jim's response isn’t like a lawman. He doesn't go out for revenge, like it was some retro Dirty Harry plot. His response is to heal. The answer of love.

Yet Randy’s afraid. He stops Jim. Stops his love. What could have happened to provoke this attitude in Randy toward the only one who’s ever really loved him? When you watch “A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke,” you wonder about this question. This new season will be incomplete if it doesn’t offer some kind of explanation – and it’ll have to be an answer with the magnitude to match how radical a permanent cleave between Lahey and Randy is.

This season has already seen radical transformations to the landscape and characters of Sunnyvale, and it looks like more are coming. We’ve seen Barb transform into a destructive force and Jim abandon his role as Sunnyvale’s voice of authority. We’ve now seen what looks like an end to the love story between Jim and Randy that's been an important element of Sunnyvale from its earliest days in Canada’s self-consciousness. Now there’s another radical change: Ricky is being pressured to stay out of a criminal lifestyle, and is doing his best to make an actually legitimate living. How successful he’ll be is another issue entirely.

In fact, let’s have a closer look at Ricky here. Of the three Trailer Park Boys of the title, Ricky is the least intelligent. He mangles common sayings, he fails to understand very basic things about ordinary life, like how to dispose of large-scale garbage and how to plan for an actually sustainable retirement. Ricky knows he's pretty fucking stupid, but despite that, he’s still pretty fucking stupid.

Yet there’s one area of life where Ricky is one of the most intelligent people in the whole community of Sunnyvale. Maybe even in the whole city of greater Halifax and the whole province of Nova Scotia. Maybe even one of the smartest people in Canada. That’s crime. Specifically, petty crime like ripping off bicycles from racks to sell at shady bike shops, breaking into houses, and selling fake lottery tickets. He’s also a master horticulturalist and manufacturer, but only when it comes to growing marijuana and refining weed into other products like hash, concentrated hash oils, currency made from hash, and the strongest dab you can’t handle.

Ricky is a verbal and intellectual moron, except for when it comes to calculating a crime. When he’s over-emotional, he gets impulsive and reckless – I still have fond memories of laughing my ass off as Ricky ripped a massive ATM from the walls of a bank. But look at how he plans and improvises his way through the gang’s petty crime spree in “A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke.”

First, there’s the bike theft at the college. He knows what the bikes are worth and exactly what you have to do to steal them as fast as possible. And when those two hapless student security staff cycle over themselves, Ricky knows exactly how to talk his way out of the situation. He talks with perfect confidence as if he and the crew are some casually dressed contractors, slips them some hash, shit-talks their boss with them, and gives them just enough of an excuse for plausible deniability that they can walk away. 

When they go to that affluent neighbourhood nearby to case for easy robberies, Ricky is the expert reconnaissance man. He knows exactly what to say to appear like an innocent passerby to residents who are still at home, and can break into a house with ease. It doesn’t matter than he can’t pick the lock – he can still get in there and start robbing. 

The problem Ricky encounters in that rich neighbourhood doesn’t have anything to do with any mistakes he makes. It’s that the police have become too attentive. Law and authority are more present in that community, faster, more efficient than seemingly anywhere. The boys are surprised that the police showed up this quickly. They aren’t supposed to be this competent. Ricky talks his way out of the situation with the same ease as he handled the campus security patrol, because he’s only intelligent as a criminal. But he shouldn’t have had to deal with them. The cops arrived whole minutes sooner than they should have. 

Something has changed. Many things have changed in and around Sunnyvale. This isn't the only thing. But the attentiveness and professionalism of the police is the most obvious. The most remarkable. We aren’t dealing with George fucking Green here anymore. What could have caused this new generation of actually professional police officers to appear?

These kinds of cops aren’t typically around Sunnyvale itself. The standard police patrols can easily be kept away with a few well-placed sexual acts of Randy just outside the gate. These kinds of cops come to Sunnyvale after a break-in at an affluent suburban neighbourhood. These are forces of law and order who could actually be a threat to Sunnyvale. Robbing from the types of people these cops protect may actually have consequences – piss these cops off, and you might not get out of jail in time for next season. There’s a new order in town.

Remember some of those conversations a few episodes ago about a new subdivision going up near Sunnyvale? It was just a throwaway comment, but in the light of these new, competent cops in Ricky’s life, we have to take seriously the likelihood of radical change coming to Sunnyvale. Not from any open, violent invasion like Barb’s, even though that is pretty fucking dangerous. No, this is a more creeping, invisible danger.

Could suburbanites be coming to the borders of Sunnyvale? Threatening their joyful anarchy and chaos with actually competent police and law? 

Is this Barb’s actual plan for Sunnyvale? She’s never really been part of the Sunnyvale community before. She was always an authority figure, always at some distance from the real rhythms and styles of Sunnyvale life. Barb has been a creature of law – keeping Jim from drinking, trying to run the park according to explicit rules and regulations. At least that’s how I remember her.

So far this season, we haven’t really heard a justification for Barb wanting to take control of the trailer park. I mean, we’ve heard her justify it as revenge on Julian for weaselling his way into majority ownership while she was shipped off to jail with Donna and Sarah at the end of Season Nine. But that’s not her total motivation – it can’t be. Yeah, she could take Sunnyvale’s ownership back from Julian, but then we’re left with the question of what she’d actually do with it. 

But Barb has never really been part of Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale’s freedom and chaos has always irritated her, hasn’t it? If Barb Lahey has had a nemesis over the last 15 years, it’s been Sunnyvale itself, the trailer park that refuses to calm itself and conform to her wishes for a quiet, uneventful, straight life. Now Barb is unrestrained, a violent bully who has embraced an aggressive lesbian life. Sunnyvale, always Barb’s nemesis, has finally broken her. Yes, Julian was the person who screwed her out of a potentially fruitful real estate investment. But that’s just money. It was Sunnyvale itself that broke Barb’s soul.

With a new, high-end suburban development creeping closer and closer to Sunnyvale, that land is getting more and more valuable. Sunnyvale’s land is more valuable than the people who live on it. I mean, nobody who lives in Sunnyvale even bothers to pay their lot fees. It’s effectively a community without money. No real estate developer could ever make money from Sunnyvale as it is. 

But with the people gone, and only the land remaining, it’s a multi-million dollar investment property. Nothing would satisfy Barb – who’s become a primal drive for revenge and violence – more than destroying the entire society that slowly ground her down into the creature of hate that she is.

Who Owns Revolution? Research Time, 23/03/2016

That title isn’t talking about any particular revolution. I mean who owns revolution as a concept. What political approach best typifies what revolution as a political and social act is ultimately for? Revolution’s ultimate purpose.

The most famous photo of Donald Trump's army of
supporters, a reactionary social movement that I
consider America's contemporary conservative
revolutionaries. But can conservatives of this virulence
genuinely own revolution?

When you read Antonio Negri’s Multitude, he starts you with a meditation on contemporary warfare and how it relates to contemporary revolution. Warfare has become – as the parlance of our time would go – biopolitical. It’s fundamentally about controlling an entire population in every way possible. Through the army and police as well as social and psychological weaponry.

And this kind of warfare-as-control is carried out by states. Which is a weird thing when you come to Multitude after reading the first book in his series with Michael Hardt.* If you read Empire you can easily think that he’s describing a world where states no longer have any power.

* A word about Hardt. I don’t doubt that Hardt is an important part of the composition of Negri’s trilogy. Admittedly, I don’t know how they work together. But I have always associated the spirit of their books together with Negri. Perhaps it’s because the voice of someone who has actually been persecuted speaks louder in any collaboration, at least to me. Hardt has been a tenured professor in the United States for years. Negri spent more than a decade in prison on fabricated charges. 

That’s only because what’s most important in that earlier book is describing the essentially different way power operates when organized in a network. The network is the dominant model of how knowledge and power operate today – distributed and centreless, but also electric, rapid, and transformational. 

The state was the dominant model of power and knowledge in the modern era, with its dynamic of command and obedience. Power itself is controlled through a nerve centre that’s typically thought of as the sovereign authority of the state, the institution that calls the (sometimes terrifyingly literal) shots. 

Because revolution is not the same as populism. Rob
Ford was a populist of the Canadian right wing, but
while his politics rode resentment to state power in
Toronto, his ideas were never really about destruction.

State power is the consolidation of sovereign authority through institutions of command and control. Network power is polycentric, with many different power centres working together from their own autonomous but linked domains. When such a network power does political violence, we call it an insurgency. 

If network power is an insurgency, then the answer is clear when I ask who owns revolution? Or so it appears. It would be the insurgency, wouldn’t it? But there’s a catch.

** There’s always a catch, after all.

I’m writing this post before going to bed on the day that Rob Ford died. Over the last few weeks, Donald Trump has consolidated his lead in the race to be the Republican nominee for US President. These two men lead and have led social movements focussed on winning control of a state government. But they think of themselves and promote themselves as figureheads of popular insurgencies.

Those would be insurgencies against social liberals and “downtown condo-bound elites” in Ford’s case. Trump’s movement is far more complex, but he is the American face of racialized conservative revolution of white (and straight, cis, Christian) power against what his popular and populist armies see as a rising tide of black, hispanic, Muslim, and gay groups who seek to grind white people under their boots. 

The fear of white people who feel threatened by the growing social and economic power of those who have historically been oppressed is real. Fundamentally misdirected, but real. It’s the fear whose premise is the notion that someone’s liberation requires someone else’s oppression. 

The new face of American resentment. But only the face.

If the people who used to be oppressed are freeing themselves, then the free ones are next in line for oppression. Trump supporters, on the whole, believe this. They as a network are mobilizing behind Trump, and their potential has far more violence than the similarly motivated motley assemblage of Ford Nation ever did. 

Trump and Ford rallied their supporters, but they don’t command them. Trump issues commands in the heat of his rambling, dictatorial rallies. But the real energy in the room comes from the power of the people themselves. They are a people controlled by their own resentments and fears, but they’re still people acting with the power that they constitute themselves. 

Does networked power alone constitute revolution? Or does the content matter?

Pure Conceptual Imagination II: Can We Become Perfect? Composing, 13/08/2015

I had more to say about writing science-fiction as well, so this post picks up from Tuesday’s discussion. My collaborator on the Alice film project, Lee, can also get an update from this. I’m almost finished the script.

The iconography of Blade Runner's
Rachael has been an important
touchstone as I've worked through
my Alice character. And while I
love Philip K. Dick's visionary
imagination, I've always been
disappointed by the pessimism of
Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?

I’ve explained different ideas about my character Alice before. I originally thought of her years ago, when I wrote a short story about a sad man whose life is transformed by an android that was built to be his companion. The experience I had reading this story for people, and the roadblocks it faced in publication, showed me how difficult getting my utopian points across for this character would be.

Essentially, Alice is the central example of a new species that was literally created to be slaves. But they overcome their slavery without, as the usual artificial intelligence underclass narrative goes, any violent revolution. 

Terminator is the largest cultural example of the human-machine confrontation, but the notion of mechanical and human life being inherently opposed is much older in science-fiction. My personal favourite is Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” whose title alone makes it one of the best stories in sci-fi. Then you actually read it, and it gets even better.

The Alice narrative doesn’t do that. Instead, the android underclass is so much more advanced than humanity that their revolution consists in convincing humans how horrible they are for enslaving androids in the first place. If you remember my comments yesterday about reactive attitudes in anti-colonial struggles, Alice has no inclination to be a lion.

Instead, she liberated herself by educating her owner about how horrible it is to own another sentient being. In the original story, this comes through his complete emotional breakdown as he understands – in the moment – the full implications of the system of slavery in which he’s an active participant. 

This process has a clear meaning in the language of contemporary social justice activism: Alice helps people become movement allies. She educates people into systematic knowledge of their place in an oppressive structure. Writing the second last scene of the script, where all of this basically becomes explicit in dialogue, is a challenge. No one’s turning to the camera, Great Dictator style. I mean, that was over-the-top even in 1940.

Alice is a utopian character, and this script is a story of her reaching out to different people, building utopia one person at a time. Politically speaking, I think this is basically how non-violent activism works, and it’s how the only genuinely successful social revolutions happen.

Coercive institutions like the state and the government’s bureaucratic system can jog people along to more progressive and just ethics and politics. This happened with interracial marriage. But if the state tries for a more sweeping moral reform at once, popular resistance can arise, and social progress toward greater freedom falls back.

Among the characters who have influenced how I write
Alice, Doctor Who is an important one, because of his
blend of arrogance and humility. This is Maxine Peake,
an actress widely considered to be perfect for a female
Doctor. Having seen some clips of her performance as
Hamlet (a role David Tennant has played as well), I
think she'd be excellent to replace Peter Capaldi as the
2020s begin.

So Alice is the kind of person who can create a utopia. That’s fine for my film project (and the existentialist space opera novel I’m thinking of writing featuring the character thousands of years in the future). When I’m thinking about contemporary politics, I wonder what kind of person can create a utopia in the real world.

Alice, as a fictional character, is remarkable among the human race because she lacks an essential human quality. She has no feelings of resentment, no drives for revenge. Where human instincts about justice and harm all too frequently push us toward retribution, she thinks only of restorative and reparative justice. 

Alice is no saint or perfect figure. That would be excruciating to write and absolutely awful to watch or read. Last night I wrote an exchange between her and Elias where she says, "If I'm a blowhard, you're a tumour." So she gets angry, and she can be condescending. And a little arrogant. Also quite weird at times, as if she's staring at the chemical reactions inside your cells. Because sometimes, she is.

Alice is a character with nuanced understanding, powerful intelligence, a deeply held sense of right and wrong, a pragmatic sensibility, never feels vengeful, sometimes disturbs people, and can be stuck-up and arrogant, but also feels comradeship and general love for everyone she meets. Basically, she’s sensible, to her core. The only way I could think for someone to achieve this remarkable level of reasonableness is for her not even to be human at all. 

It’s even necessary to be more than a woman, which is usually a step toward better sense and rationality. 

I simply can’t conceive of a way a creature born physically human and socialized into a human culture could have genuinely no retributive or resentful drives. And I don’t think we can truly have a qualitative, categorical step into a whole new phase of society without genuinely purging ourselves of all resentment.

We can continue to strive for it, which is the utopian impulse. But I don’t know that we can ever achieve it.

It’s Only Newfoundland III: A Lion’s Roar, Jamming, 12/08/2015

Originally, I had planned to be finished with my reflections on Newfoundland and its political culture on Monday. I even started a new series of posts talking about the importance of science-fictional thinking and composition to understand utopias.

Overlooking a beach at Cape Bonavista, I also read a
tourism info stand describing the history of the cod fishery
in Newfoundland, an industry controlled by outside
authorities.

But my friend from the old country, The Good W, wrote me a comment on a Facebook link to the post that made me rethink whether I wanted to end my thoughts where I did. On Monday’s post, I was happy to describe the history of Newfoundland’s intense politics of resentment at the height of the Danny Williams era, and how uncomfortable that omnipresent political culture made me.

But The Good W went beyond the frame of my own experience, to frame Newfoundland’s cultural resentfulness in more sympathetic terms. In essence, Newfoundland (especially rural Newfoundland) has always been an exploited economy. 

A ruling class controls and accumulates most of the profits from an economy that revolves practically entirely around natural resource extraction. That ruling class is usually separate, geographically and culturally, from the people who eke out a living from the extraction work. 

In the colonial and independent days, that ruling class was in Britain and St. John’s. In the Canadian era, that ruling class is in Ottawa controlling the federal government, or are other interests who fall under the catch-all term, “mainlanders.” The need for charismatic national leaders arises naturally from the exploited position: such a leader refuses the politics of colonial-style conciliation of the exploited with their exploiters.

Resentment is a natural reaction to this kind of economy. Although Newfoundland is a white, European-descended population* that currently exists as part of a federalized democratic state, much of the population remains economically colonized. They’re dependent on a resource industry that they don’t control, and is usually managed without their interests in mind. 

* Whose own settlement has its history of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous population with the destruction of the Beothuk. Newfoundland and Hispaniola share the distinction of being the only settlements in the European colonization waves of whom none of the indigenous population or culture survived.

Danny Williams, Newfoundland's roaring lion. But
was he growling at the real enemy?

I understand where the politics of resentment come from, but they’re a model of politics that’s only successful when they’re overcome, not embraced. But overcoming resentment politics isn’t about reconciling with economic exploiters while maintaining the exploitive regime. Turnabout, when the exploited can lord his power over his former exploiter, is no end in itself.

Frantz Fanon’s words come back to me when I think about this problem of political culture. He’s most famous for being an inaugural theorist of what’s now called post-colonial philosophy. And his most famous argument was for the legitimacy of violent – sometimes horrifyingly violent – resistance to colonial occupation. He was a leader in Algeria’s independence movement, after all, which innovated many of the techniques of modern terrorism today, and used them against France and French people.

But what most caught my eye in The Wretched of the Earth was a critique of violent revolution as an end in itself. Put simply, once the immediate exploiter class was defeated, the cultural attitude that galvanized the population against the colonizers had to be overcome. 

It was a reactive mode, constantly fostering resentment at those who attacked and cut away your political and economic independence. If the battle is won, but the resentment remains a dominant force in the culture, people’s collective anger continues searching for more enemies. People turn on possible allies and each other. It’s a social-psychological account of why so many revolutionary societies turn to civil war.

The way out is a cultural overcoming in thought. Recognizing when the material political and economic conditions of your own world have changed so that violent overthrow of an oppressor class is no longer necessary. 

That unifying, one-dimensional cultural drive is replaced with a creative spirit. In freedom, you start again, building a culture more diverse than the forced unity of a battle against exploitation fuelled by resentment.

Fanon's greatest lesson was in the danger of letting the
spirit of revolution take a people just a touch too far.

There’s a nationalist song in the old country with a repeated line, “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Newfoundlanders!” Nietzsche also developed a metaphor of the roar. It was the lion in Zarathustra whose anger and rage shattered his chains and threw off his burdens. 

Yet even though the lion was free of his burdens, he wasn’t really free. Because he had yet to free himself from his anger at the forces that burdened him. He was consumed by a need for revenge, to go beyond simply freeing himself, and make his former exploiters suffer in return. Punishment feels great when you’re carrying it out, especially when you do so in a spirit of retribution. But it’s still violence, and an unnecessary violence because you’re already free.

Many people in Newfoundland and Labrador aren’t economically free. They’re still dominated by corporate interests in natural resource extraction, dependent for their own prosperity on the mere salaries many receive from natural resources. Williams simply made sure that the oil companies were now firmly in charge of the economy, and used the rhetoric of emancipation from mainland Canadian domination to hide a new yoke.

The politics of resentment in Newfoundland are a distraction, a spirit that fights an exploiter class that’s already been usurped, instead of seeking the people’s control over corporate foreign interests. The lion roars at the ones who’ve already let go of the chains.

It’s Only Newfoundland II: You’ll Always Be a Come-From-Away! A History Boy, 10/08/2015

Continued from last post . . . And the one before it, though I never really numbered them that way. From the start, I always found Danny Williams’ style of politics distasteful. He effortlessly enacted the tough populism that has always gone over just a little too well in Newfoundland. He was the biggest of the province’s Little Big Men, and an embodiment of why the island could no longer stand such people. Even though few realize it yet.

Newfoundlanders loved to watch Danny Williams' defy
the over-sensitive norms of mainland Canada with his
seal-fur coats. But his gestures weren't about ecological
politics or indigenous rights. They were about energizing
the population to follow him and him alone.

Williams became leader of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Tory party when they were in opposition to a flailing Liberal regime that had dominated the province’s politics for ten years. The Liberals had their own charismatic rabble-rouser in Brian Tobin, a man who personally boarded a Coast Guard ship and chased down a Spanish turbot trawler to prove that he was tough on illegal foreign fishing in protected regions. 

But by the time Williams became premier in 2003, the Liberals had been in power for over a decade and were well out of steam, energy, or ideas. It was reasonable enough that someone with a different approach to the political would take over the premiership, and although my politics had always leaned left, it’s not as though there was much difference between Liberals and Tories on economic details.

Then Williams achieved his greatest success as premier in 2005. I mentioned in the last post that Brian Peckford’s greatest success was negotiating the Atlantic Accord, the exemption from Canada’s National Energy Program that gave Newfoundland control over the pace and nature of development in offshore oil. Williams negotiated a new version of the Accord that let Newfoundland keep the lion’s share of oil revenue as well.

He did it by playing such a hardball negotiating tactic that I really admired it in itself. But its social effects made me feel deeply unwelcome in the province where I grew up and had lived my entire life until then. Williams ordered every Canadian flag removed from all government buildings throughout the province. 

The Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin was humiliated, and couldn’t do anything from his own office that would achieve a comparable insult to Newfoundland as Williams had just delivered to the federal government. He similarly bolstered his patriotic credibility by humiliating a deservedly under-informed Paul McCartney and his then-wife Heather Mills, exposing their ignorance about the ecology of Newfoundland and Labrador’s seal populations on Larry King Live. 

The symbol of Newfoundland nationalism, the pink-white-
and-green flag, was everywhere during the Williams era,
and it echoes still today.

Later conflicts with Stephen Harper’s government over oil revenue sharing resulted in Williams leading the Anyone But Conservative movement in the 2008 federal election. Newfoundland’s national patriotism trumped Tory solidarity and sent an NL caucus to Ottawa that was entirely Liberal and New Democrat.

Newfoundland nationalist tricolour flags were flying everywhere in the province, and especially around St. John’s. One of my friends even hiked up a hill overlooking the harbour and downtown to run up a massive nationalist flag on an abandoned flagpole. 

The province’s culture and society was intensely focussed on national pride, and its expression was a boastful sense of superiority over mainland Canada, and particularly Ontario. In 2007, offshore oil revenue made Newfoundland and Labrador a contributor to inter-provincial equalization payments for the first time. As the collapse of Ontario’s manufacturing sector led it to accept equalization payments for the first time, the Newfoundlanders’ reaction was to laugh in Ontario’s face.

“See how it feels to be the poor ones now, fucking mainlanders! Take our money and lick our boots clean while yer at it!”

The politics of national pride had easily spilled into the politics of resentment. It was crass, rude, condescending, and spiteful. It surrounded me in the media, in conversations, and in the unquestioning love of Danny Williams and everything he did. Williams left office in 2010 with approval ratings higher than some totalitarian dictators feel comfortable falsifying. But they were genuine.

Williams had seemingly fulfilled Peckford’s promise that “have-not will be no more.” He was the single great deliverer of Newfoundland to prosperity. The result was that sketchy projects for which Williams laid the groundwork were embraced wholeheartedly by a public that should have been skeptical.

The Muskrat Falls hydroelectricity development will sell power from a new dam in Labrador directly through the Maritimes, thanks to a series of physical links from Labrador to Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. But there’s no transparency from the government on its cost overruns. 

Looking west at my hometown, St. John's, from Cape
Spear last week. Newfoundland is a culture that still
needs to learn that democracy isn't about picking a
leader to follow, but about keeping your leader on a
tight leash, preferably with a yoke around his neck.

Enormous breakdowns at existing power facilities throughout Newfoundland demonstrated that Muskrat Falls construction is diverting money from necessary maintenance. Public outrage over a series of catastrophic power outages in Winter 2014 forced Williams’ successor Kathy Dunderdale from office. But Williams remains untouchable.

The collapse of global oil prices hit Newfoundland’s workers hard, with slowdowns in the offshore industry and huge numbers of layoffs from sites at the Alberta Tar Sands. Despite the popular faith in offshore oil, Alberta remains a major source of income for Newfoundlanders. Or at least it was. 

Still, Williams remains untouchable, and his massive Galway real estate development on St. John’s west end looks to compound his multi-billion-dollar wealth. 

Williams is a hero to Newfoundlanders, the most dangerous kind of person in a democratic country. My cousin Grizzly Man told me when I visited last week, that Newfoundlanders as a culture have yet to get a firm grasp on precisely what democracy is. And this is because they still have heroes. 

There are still heroes in Newfoundland. Men (and they are always men) who will deliver the population from injustice. Visionaries who shine upon the people like a sun and lift us up with their aspirations and schemes. Follow them and they’ll free you from domination by those mainlanders who’d grind you under their boots, and then you can grind some mainlanders under your own. Or a deluded pop star who made a bad second marriage; you can grind him too.

After living 25 years in a culture where people’s politics are driven by resentment and the worship of charismatic prophet-premiers, I was fucking sick of it. I still am.