Wis[s]e Words

Fun with stereotypes

Published on September 30, 20112 Comments

Germany digging a hole on the beach

Last Tuesday Teresa at Making Light posted about what Scandinavians thought about each other, which included a link to the delightful new to me webcomic Scandinavia and the World. I read this post on Wednesday; I also had a job interview the same day. Looking through a huge archive of slow loading but funny cartoons is not the ideal preparation for this.

Worth it though, if you like cartoons that gently poke fun at national stereotypes, mixed in with a bit of yaoi. Such as the tendency for Germans to dig holes in our beaches, as shown above. The characters btw are the countries they’re representing, so that is Germany digging a hole while Holland (with the joint) and Denmark (beer) look on.

What do y’all think of this sort of casual stereotyping, where it’s largely reciprocal, the countries involved are on a roughly equal footing and nobody really seems to take them very seriously?

The Wars of the Roses — Christine Carpenter

Published on September 29, 2011

Cover of The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses
Christine Carpenter
293 pages including index
published in 1997

I’m not really that familiar with English history of the kings, queens and battles variety, neither having been taught it in school nor having had much interest in it during my own dabblings in history. So all I knew about the Wars of the Roses was that they were what got the Tudors their start. Most of my current historical interests lie in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, but that doesn’t mind I wouldn’t be interested in this particular period, if the right book comes along. Christine Carpenter’s The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437-1509 was that book.

Though this isn’t quite a history of the Wars of the Roses as such but rather, as the subtitle indicates, more of a look at how the politics and the constitution of England evolved during this period. Carpenter attempts to show how governance was supposed to work in the fifteenth century and how and why it went wrong, how it was put right again and what the effects of this restoration were. It’s in this context that Carpenter then discusses the wars themselves, having first build herself a firm theoretical foundation. This approach makes for some abstract and frankly dry reading at times, especially in the first chapters, with Carpenter even recommending that readers new to the period should start with chapter four.

Truth will out

Published on September 28, 2011

Of course this video is bagatalised, made fun off, “revealed” to be a fake, dismissed as “old news”. All of which should not distract you from its message, which is not so much what this douchenozzle says but what it means. There’s no such thing as “the markets”, there are only people who have no problem profiting from sending the whole of Europe back into recession again.

(Via Vuijlsteke.)

The Last Valley — Martin Windrow

Published on September 27, 2011

Cover of The Last Valley

The Last Valley
Martin Windrow
734 pages including index
published in 2004

Dien Bien Phu is the battle which as The Last Valley‘s front cover blurb succintly puts it, “doomed the French empire and led America into Vietnam”. An European army, equipped with the most modern weaponry it could field and superior in firepower was defeated by a peasant guerilla army in exactly the sort of standup fight all the experts said such a guerilla army could never win. It was proof that France could never win this war and all it could do now was withdraw with honour. At the same time Dien Bien Phu was both the proximate cause for the United States to get itself deeper involved in Vietnam as well as a terrible warning, a warning that was not heeded, that its involvement would not be succesful. Finally, for those so inclined, it was yet more proof of France’s inherent incompetence at waging war, the way its army allowed itself to be caught in a trap and destroyed. For all these reasons Dien Bien Phu is one of the few post-war battles that have stayed in the general public’s consciousness.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean that this image of the siege is accurate of course. As The Last Valley shows, Dien Bien Phu wasn’t a trap the French just blundered into, but part of a deliberate strategy to get an elusive guerilla enemey to stand down and fight. It was a strategy that had worked before and had been designed to make the most of the limited resources the French forces in Vietnam had available. Because unlike the Americans after them, the French neither had the money nor the men or material to go after the Viet Minh, so had to find some way to get them out where they could be got at. Dien Bien Phu wasn’t lost because the French were dumb or cowardly, but because the Viet Minh were smarter, had prepared better and had learned from their experiences at earlier battles.

Why we need populist anger

Published on September 26, 20111 Comment

Amongst the best example of trolling your own blog I’ve ever seen, Dsquared does make one point that, if not convincing, does deserve some consideration:

However, of course, there were plenty of people who didn’t own houses in the 90s and 00s, and who thus didn’t benefit from the boom, who are suffering as a result of the recession, including the benefit claimants from whose mouths I was accused of taking the bread. Even in this case, though, I think that making a big deal about “the bankers caused this crisis/stole from us/etc” is a big mistake.

And that’s basically for the simple reason that there is no hope for egalitarian politics if you are going to build it on such weak grounds. This was the lasting contribution of Jerry Cohen’s criticism of Marx. The demands of egalitarian justice are not based in some convoluted proof that the rich have in some way stolen from the poor. The case for redistributive taxation does not rest on bankers’ bonuses being stolen goods, or even on them being undeserved. If you try to agitate for egalitarian policies based on this kind of argument, you are never going to make a strong case, because in the first place, “bankers” didn’t actually steal that money, for the most part, and secondly, if you are giving all the agency to “bankers” then you are accepting the first premis of the “wealth creators” rhetoric, and this is going to destroy you, politically, across the business cycle.

…even if it does feel like special pleading. Moreover, it sounds like exactly the sort of claptrap centrist Democrats put out whenever the hoi polloi get too uppity, that emotions and populist anger have no place in grownup politics. It’s trying to discredit genuine feelings of anger by throwing up procedural objections. It’s wrong too. Sure, populist anger at the bankers and their crimes isn’t enough to drive change, but it is necessary. If left to the financial sector and the politicians nothing will change, reasoned argument won’t work, only fear and anger will.

Because we’ve seen what happens when the financial world thinks it’s business at usual again. Only moments after they were bailed out and rescued from their own follies and criminality the banks started to complain about how they couldn’t possible be expected to pay more taxes on their unearned bonuses or actually adhere to rules that would stop another crisis. They hadn’t learned a thing from the economic meltdown because they hadn’t suffered enough. They still had their money, their power, their freedom, but for the incidental scapegoat. That obviously needs to change.