politics – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

What being privileged is like

Published on January 17, 20131 Comment

One fine evening, journalist Jamelle Bouie decides to sell his old tv to a friend and sets out to bring it over to them there and then, when considers what this would look like:

As I was getting ready to go, it occurred to me that this would be a terrible idea. Not because I would have been carrying a TV at 10pm down a quiet city street—I actually feel pretty safe doing that. But because I would have been a black dude—in a hoodie, no less!—carrying a nice-looking TV down a quiet city street at 10pm.

Had he been white, would he have thought about this? Jamelle himself thinks not, and I think he’s right. For myself, while I do occassionally wonder when doing something that could look dodgy, I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve been stopped by police because what I was doing looked suspicious. In fact, police officers here and abroad have always been respectful and polite to me, whenever I had to interact with them. The same really goes for any sort of interaction with authority; I’ve always been treated respectfully even when in the wrong, have more often than not been believed on my word when there was no real reason to do so, always gotten the benefit of the doubt when I needed it. In short, I’ve never had to worry about people judging me negatively just of how I look.

That’s something that’s incredibly powerful, in which I’m very lucky as I’ve done nothing to earn this respect, but which from the inside feels like the normal way the world should work; it doesn’t feel like I’m priviledged. This dichotomy, where it’s easier for those without these privileges to see how privileged those with them truly are, is I think responsible for much of the heat around internet debates about privilege.

On the one hand, people like me who enjoy these privileges need to make an effort to see them for what they are, while on the other hand they have never or rarely experienced the sort of harassement people without them encounter regularly. It makes it hard for us to believe them, even when everybody is arguing in good faith and it’s even harder to transform this intellectual understanding in an emotional one, to understand what it is really like to live without this privilege we take for granted.

That’s why simple, to the point and most importantly, unjudgmental post like Jamelle Bouie’s one here are so important, as they provide a way in which we can understand something of how other people live.

Of course not

Published on April 15, 20111 Comment

Alex asks whether politicians learned anything from the News of the World phone hacking scandal:

Also, did the central government have any communications security at all? Did CESG or MI5 not have anything at all to say about this? Didn’t any of them just change their damn password, or even change their damn number?

Of course not. As a class politicians are the group most clueless about ICT and worst placed to make decisions on anything to do with it and that gets worse the higher up the ranks you get. Most modern politicians these days have never been anything but politicians and in that job you only need a pc as a glorified typewriter, while once you get high enough on the ladder the normal computer scutwork most of us have to deal with day to day can all be fobbed off on interns who’ll print out all the important documents for you. So I doubt they’ve spent any time at all thinking about communications security.

Case in point: several Dutch politicians got hit with a variant of what the News of the World did recently, as investigative reporters from the newsshow Één Vandaag “hacked” their voicemails by trying the standard Vodaphone pincode on them. Quite a few ministers turned out not to have bothered resetting this or even knew that they had to do that. Worse, neither did their IT department. Personally I think having voicemail at all is way too much of a security risk anyway and I’d switch it off altogether if I were in such a responsible function, but than that’s too much of a hassle.

What doesn’t help either is that is how much party political business is interwoven with government responsibilities for modern politicians, meaning that there’s a high risk for cross pollution anway. In an ideal world government ministers would have two or three separate mobiles: one for their job, one for journalists and party workers to reach them on and another for the family, but I suspect most people use the same phone for everything…

Inventing Ruritania – Vesna Goldsworthy

Published on April 6, 2009

Cover of Inventing Ruritania

Inventing Ruritania
Vesna Goldsworthy
254 pages including index
published in 1998

What immediately came to mind when I picked up this book from the library was Edward Said’s cite>Orientalism. Where that book looked at how Europe created its image of the Middle East, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination looks at how the western idea of the Balkans has been shaped or even created by writers of popular fiction and travel literature. Goldsworthy focuses mainly on British literature, as for British writers “the Balkans are sufficiently close to remain in the field of vision, yet remote enough to be relatively free of the ‘traditional friendships’ and ‘historical alliances’ which frequently inspire the specific interests in the area of other European powers” while they are “too far away to be of consistent interest to American writers”. Historically, she limits her inquiries to relatively modern times, from the early nineteenth century up to now, as she argues that the Balkans as an area of interest only emerged as Ottoman supremacy in the area was broken. Before there can be stereotypical images of the Balkans, there first has to be a Balkans, obviously and until the Ottoman empire started to disintegrate there wasn’t.

A book like Inventing Ruritania, which wants to expose the cliches with which western thought has been riddled about the Balkans, can’t help but be political. This is more so when you consider when it was published, in 1998, barely a year before NATO would wage its first humanitarian war against Serbia, just after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia had ended. You could see Inventing Ruritania as a sort of metacritique of the sloppy thinking in Britain and elsewhere with which these events were explained and written about. One of Goldsworthy’s points in this book is indeed to lay bare the sort of racist stereotyping language about the Balkans that is still used thoughtlessly, often by people who would never dream about deescribing areas like Africa or India in similar terms… Yet Inventing Ruritania isn’t a polemic, not even to the extent Orientalism was.

Alex calls for the end of “call for”

Published on March 9, 2009

In the midst of a splendid takedown of David Hare’s onemanshow on Berlin, Alex Harrowell articulates his disdain of the phrase “to call for”:

There is a broader issue here; the phrase “to call for” repels me more and more. Its function is to get you out of responsibility for your opinions. I didn’t want war – I merely called for solidarity with the US in fighting terrorism. It also acts as a way of escaping the healthy discipline of detail. It is telling that it is fashionable with the neoconservatives, the Decents, and the hard left all at once – all the retailers of the goods dream-hungry youth demand, according to Leszek Kolakowski.

I call for action on Darfur! But I say nothing of the mountainous problems of projecting force into the roadless and railless interior of western Sudan, nothing of whose infantry are to actually go and get killed there, nothing of who exactly they are meant to kill or threaten effectively to kill, or for what aims. I just called for. Let’s decommission this phrase, like a worn-out nuclear power station – switch it off gracefully, sever the lines and fill the damn thing with concrete, and watch it carefully for a hundred years to see nothing leaks out.

One minor quibble is that by and large the socalled “hard left” (which in any case usually sems to mean whomever is to the left of the speaker) isn’t the main offender in this. Socialists, anarchists, communists all have a healthy, historically validated distrust of relying on the state to further their projects. Social democrats and liberals on the other hand have a history of enthusiasitc support for state intervention. If Iraq and Afghanistan are too obvious, take a look at who the main cheerleaders for intervention in Yugoslavia were.

UPDATE: Interesting discussion of Alex’s post over at Aaronovitch Watch in which ejh takes exception to Alex’s thesis:

The problem comes not when people without power express principle, provided they don’t do so ungenerously: it’s when people do have power and piss about. This is why it’s problematic (though not necesarily entirely wrong) to suggest that Macmillan should have called for an uprising against the bulding of a Berlin Wall, because it would quite likely have been writing a cheque he couldn’t cash*. Geroge Bush Sr wrote a cheque in Iraq 1991 that he probably could have cashed, but then didn’t: that was worse still. But to be honest, in just saying “Stop Apartheid Now” (“Now”? What does that mean, “now?”) more than half my life ago, I wasn’t writing any cheques or taking any risks.

Except the risk of becoming Andrew Anthony. Well, yeah, I’ve met a few. But there’s an opposite but equal risk, that many have also fallen victim to, that people who want to concentrate on practicals to the exclusion of ideals turn into New Labour. That’s what that particular movement in politics was and is all about. Lots of the Anti-Apartheid people ended up like that – and I don’t think I’d err in detecting a large crossover between the people who were most keen to follow the ANC line in toto in the Eighties, and those who were the keenest Blairites ten and twenty years later. I think there are as many ill consequences in going one way as in another.

The Battle of Venezuela – Michael McCaughan

Published on March 10, 2008

Cover of The Battle of Venezuela

The Battle of Venezuela
Michael McCaughan
166 pages
published in 2004

If there’s any subject where the failure of the western news media to fulfil its supposed function of objectively informing its audience is completely uncontroversial, it should be Venezuela. This was especially apparant during the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez, when leading western newspapers like The New York Times portrayed it as a democratic uprising against a dictator. It ignored the fact that while Chavez had been democratically elected and had made no attempt to suppress political opposition against his government, the coupists immediately suspended the constitution, started imprisoning Chavez supporters and in generally behave like the traditional juntas off Latin America. Even after the coup failed the agitation against Chavez in western media continued, again portraying him as a dictator and a lunatic for withdrawing the broadcasting licence of a television station heavily involved in the coup. In short, it’s impossible to get an objective view of Venezuela from
the mainstream media.

And while there are alternative news sources that attempt to correct the skewed portrayal of the country, but I’ve found for myself that these are not enough to get the whole picture if like me you don’t speak Spanish. Which is why The Battle of Venezuela was such an excellent find, as here you have a short to the point history of Venezuela and the Boliverian revolution, written by a “proper journalist” with no axe to grind against Chavez. At this length (only 166 pages in the edition I read) you can’t expect an in-depth analysis, but as a general introduction it would be hard to beat.