Wis[s]e Words

Dutch airline pilot was junta murderer

Published on September 24, 2009

Julio Ponch

Last Tuesday a Dutch airline pilot, a naturalised Argentinian, was arrested in Spain, just when he was stepping aboard his plane for his last flight back to the Netherlands before retirement, with his wife and son present for it. The reason for this heavyhanded arrest? He’s been charged with having been involved with the death flights carried out by the junta that ruled Argentinia between 1976 and 1983. Julio Poch supposedly was stationed at the infamous ESMA, the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics, which was turned into a prison and torture centre, from which hundreds. if not thousands of prisoners were taken into flights over the open ocean, then dropped out of the plane. Allegedly Poch had been bragging about this to some of his co-workers once the Argentinian junta was back in the news again due to the marriage of crown prince Willem Alexander to Maxima Zorreguita, daughter of one of the ministers involved with the junta…

That was back in 2000, so why it took nine years for this guy to be arrested is a question the Dutch justice ministry needs to answer. The Netherlands doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Argentina, unlike Spain, which is the reason he was arrested there, but the Dutch authorities could’ve at the very least informed their Argentine colleagues about Poch. It’s a bit of a trend, I’m afraid. The Netherlands is very lax when it comes to dealing with known war criminals and such like, despite its rhetoric. It just isn’t a priority for either the government or the police.

But the arrest of Julio Ponch, though decades after his suspected crimes, is still good news for those wanting some justice for the victims of America’s War on Terror. Thirty years from now, will we see arrests of pilots of extraordinary rendition flights?

John Mullan is a silly ass

Published on September 23, 2009

Booker Prize judge made a bit of a silly ass of himself responding to Kim Stanley Robinson’s challenge to the Booker Prize about the lack of science fiction on its short lists, by saying:

John Mullan, Naughtie’s fellow judge for this year’s prize and professor of English at University College London, said that he “was not aware of science fiction,” arguing that science fiction has become a “self-enclosed world”.

“When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres,” he said, but now “it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”

He’s so wrong. Science fiction has always been “in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other”! Even when he was eighteen this was the case unless he was that age sometime in the early thirties or so, science fiction cons have been around longer than he has. It has never been fully seen as acceptable literature by the sort of people who sit in Booker Prize juries and there has never been “a genre as accepted as other genres” though admittedly there have been times when mainstream authors and critics have been more in tune with it than others.

The responses to such backhanded snobbery are predictable. As seen in the comments to Ken’s post on this, many science fiction fans are defensive and hurt and respond like a teenager bounced from the Kool Kids Klub — “I don’t want to join your smelly club anyway”. Some, as seen on Torque Control ignore the insults and earnestly try to explore the question of why the Bookers boycott science fiction and what to do to change it. Finally, there are the people who’ve seen it all before, amused both by the snobbery and the philistine defensiveness of many fans.

For myself, I’ve sort of lost that reflexive defensiveness, where you take out your annoyance at the casual dismission of science fiction by erm casually dismissing everything else, but I don’t like to entirely dismiss this reflex either as seem to be the trend amongst sections of online fandom. Look at how grownup and above it all we can be, not like those stinky nerds still living in their mommy’s basement who actually take all that stuff seriously. In the high school reenactment society that’s fandom, that’s just pandering to the jocks by making fun of your fellow nerds, not realising they’re laughing at you as much as with you…

The collapse of Rover – Triumph of capitalism

Published on September 22, 20092 Comments

Alex has a link to the long awaited report on the collapse of Rover and also links to a contemporary post of his predicting the main findings of the report:

Since then, though, we’ve seen one of the most horrible examples of shameless self-enrichment at others’ expense in British history. The restructuring of the Rover complex was conceived to get all the profitable bits of the firm out of the MG-Rover Group, the car factory, and into the hands of the Phoenix chaps. This may not seem that bad, until you remember that a sizeable chunk of the original capital was put up by Rover workers themselves. They got shares in MG Rover Group, not Phoenix: so they have now lost everything. Another point: the famous £427 million interest-free loan from BMW was paid to Phoenix (well, actually to another shell company, Techtronic, but this can be collapsed for clarity), not MG. They then charged MG Rover interest on it. What this means has only just dawned on me-as shareholders, the Phoenix group have only the same minimal claim on the assets as the workers who bought in. But as creditors, they are at the top of the heap behind only the Inland Revenue.

Expect a very big supermarket on the site.

Which to me sounds like a textbook example of what Naomi Klein called disaster capitalism in her book The Shock Doctrine (or more precise, capitalism). A natural or artificially induced crisis is “solved” by throwing money at private parties because government is unable, forbidden or ideologically incapable of solving the problem itself. And because it’s an emergency, the money needs to be spend now with any oversight forgotten and neglected. But the first goal of any profit driving company is making a profit and hence even “good faith” companies will strive to do the least amount of work for the largest amount of money, will be tempting into rent seeking behaviour. Which is what the Phoenix group did; getting that interest free loan themselves and then charging Rover interest on it, taking away much of the benefit Rover could’ve had from that loan. Instead of adding value, they took away value because their first loyalty was to their own interests, not Rover’s.

And this is an essential feature of capitalism, not a bug. Capitalism is profit driven and any goal which is supposed to be achieved by making use of this will be secondary to this. What Phoenix did to Rover is not a crime, not a regretable exception, but the rule, even in day to day transactions between companies. Which is why it’s nonsense to talk about the greater efficiency of the private sector as opposed to the public sector, unless you judge it in the context of making profits.

Which is also why so many big public sector IT projects fail of course. The NHS or the Home Office might want to get their working IT systems, but for the companies who have gotten the contract the goal is to keep the project alive as long as possible and “goldplate” it…

The Real-Time World – Christopher Priest

Published on September 20, 2009

Cover of Real-Time World

Real-Time World
Christopher Priest
158 pages
published in 1974

After finishing Camp Concentration I was in the mood for some New Wave science fiction and since I’d just bought this Christopher Priest collection of short stories this was as good a choice as any to read. Most of this I actually read while at the gym, on the treadmill — short stories being ideal, quickly enough read in a forty minute session and not requiring too much sustained concentration like a novel would. Some of the stories in Real-Time World I’d read before, in Dutch translation, some were new to me. All but one of the stories were published between 1970 and 1974, perhaps the height of the New Wave, and all are very much of their time. As a writer Christopher Priest has always seemed more comfortable to me at novel length than at shorter lengths, which is also notable here.

The reason why I wanted to read these stories was because I knew how seventies they were, but as often when confronted with the reality of what I was looking for, I was disappointed with it. None of the stories were entirely satisfactory and although each was competently written, they were written to formula. You could see they were written to achieve a specific effect and how Priest achieves that effect and as a result most of the effect is lost. The first story for example, “The Head and the Hand”, about automutilation as a form of performance art, with some graphic scenes including a final auto-guillotining which may have been shocking when first published, but certainly aren’t now and without this shock effect the story falls apart.

I knew there was a reason I liked them

Published on September 20, 2009

When I started following the Premier League seriously last year for no reason whatsoever I started cheering for Middlesbrough, who were promptly relegated to the Championship…. Turns out I was right to support them:

Middlesbrough footballers have given their backing to thousands of steelworkers whose jobs are under threat.

The players wore Save Our Steel T-shirts on Saturday as they warmed up before their home game against Ipswich Town in the Championship.

Workers were welcomed to the ground and invited to march round the pitch 15 minutes before kick-off at the Riverside ground and fellow fans clapped in support from the stands.

Up to 4,000 Teesside-based Corus employees and contractors face redundancy after a consortium pulled out of a 10-year deal to continue producing steel from its Redcar plant, effectively mothballing it.

Corus multiunion committee chairman Geoff Waterfield said how important the club’s support was to the workers.

“It is long recognised that the steel industry is the heart of our community. The foundations of Middlesbrough and Redcar are forged and built on the steel families of this region,” he said.

“Likewise, Middlesbrough Football Club is and has been part and parcel of our community for generations.

In this age of multi-billionaires buying up clubs like so many subuto sets, it’s good to see a club recognise its local roots.