Elliott Hall's Blog, page 5

Gear-queer mall ninjas

From Gibson's Zero History, a discussion of men's trousers:

"-Our best analyst thinks it's not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas."

"For what?"

"The new Mitty demographic."

"I'm lost."

"Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively ben on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another."

Gear-queer is the fetishization of forces-type gear, especially special forces. I used to wear combats because I like to have a lot of pocket options (in Canada they were called 'cargo pants'), but some of what Gibson describes must have been floating around my subconscious. He's right that playing soldier is endemic in a way I don't think it's ever been. Military design has always had an influence on culture, the romance of the uniform has been around for centuries, but as far as I know Victorian men's fashion doesn't evoke the battlefield. Nor was there a pseudo-military fashion after World War II. So many men had been in uniform, or in National Service after that, I guess there wasn't anything to romanticize. Now that we have a much smaller percentage of the population engaged in warfare, but so much more reporting and depictions of war, it seems like every third guy thinks he's some kind of badass because he beat Call of Duty on hard.

Cause for Alarm – The Heavy

The Rapture released in german as 'Evil with Evil'

The german translation of The Rapture has just been published by DTV:

It's not unusual to change the title of translations, so I'm told, but luckily I'm a big fan of 'Evil with Evil.' I think it perfectly captures the mentality of so many people in the book. So if you're German, or can speak german, or know a German who deserves a present (maybe you are all three,) visit your favourite Bücher retailer today.

It's a story, not a brand

I tweeted yesterday about plans to make a "ultra-modern" Oliver Twist, called Olivia Twisted, because someone thought that was clever. Here is the premise, as explained by the AV Club:

will star Twilight's Ashley Greene as a 19-year-old girl who falls in with a group of "highly-trained, orphaned street urchins," despite the fact that 19 is plenty old enough to be living on her own and becoming a responsible member of society, rather than consorting with urchins, trained or otherwise. Regardless, she does, and after a "kidnapping job" gone awry, she and her urchin friends soon find themselves in the middle of a gang war. According to Variety, the film will boast a "unique gothic backdrop" and "classic Dickensian elements,"

Now, I know 'plans made to make stupid movie' ranks up there with 'building did not burn down' in terms of surprising news, but I think this more than just another bout of remakeitis. It reminded me of the execrable Jack Black Gulliver's Travels, a crime against literature and God. It's not just that they murder the source material; I think they are completely uninterested in the books. All they want is the name, because they know people will recognize 'Oliver Twist' and 'Gulliver's Travel's,' and they think they can fill that shell with whatever junk will most appeal to their 'key demos.' To them, Oliver Twist is just a recognized brand, nothing more.

The next iteration of Dickens' story will probably be another musical, but this time set in a high school with the young urchin hunting the undead while trying to win the school talent contest.

What is the point of a University?

I found a link to this interview in the comments of a story about Edinburgh University's fees (h/t commenter maclean3.)

I think I have little outrage about the change in university fees because this is the second time I've been through it. The Ontario government was allowing universities to massively increase their fees year-on-year, and if I hadn't had the dumb luck to be born to smart parents who planned ahead I would have been massively in debt by the end. At uni I heard similar cracks to the one Lee mentions all the time, all boiling down to 'have fun talking about Kafka when you're stacking in a video store' back when videos and the stores that sold them still existed. The general view was that university was basically a four-year orgy that was supposed to train you for a job. Historically the university system was only ever meant to explicitly train people for are in academia and the clergy. The rest of the student body were mostly aristocrats who weren't going to work a day in their lives anyway. The laments about the decline of vocational training have a certain irony, since now we're trying to force all forms of higher education to be just that.

To academics the point is simply to advance human knowledge. It was academics who sequenced DNA and studied radiation before anyone had thought of a 'real' – that is, economic – use for them. The Theory of Relativity didn't do much for GDP. Most science is only economically valuable with a lot of hindsight, unless you think it was easy to look at quantum mechanics and see credit cards.

These discoveries only help students in indirect ways, so is university just a scam then? What uni should teach is the ability to analyze and articulate complex, abstract concepts. Rather than bestowing particular knowledge, it should teach you how to understand knowledge itself, a skill that people use every day of their lives in our information-rich age. (I have to admit that one look at our culture and politics says this project hasn't been going too well.)

The real question is not whether a degree is a sound economic investment, but what value we place on knowledge itself. While I don't agree with Lee that the attempt to tie university to business was a conscious attempt to marginalise artists and intellectuals – celebrity culture has been far better at accomplishing that – I think the attitude was a natural outgrowth of seeing every single human interaction as economic. (The recent book Honey Money is an example.) If you can't put a price on something, it might as well not exist.

Privatized torture

When you set up a worldwide campaign of kidnapping and torture, it's important to control costs:

The manner in which American firms flew terrorism suspects to locations around the world, where they were often tortured, has emerged after one of the companies sued another in a dispute over fees. As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the mass of invoices, receipts, contracts and email correspondence – submitted as evidence to a court in upstate New York – provides a unique glimpse into a world in which the "war on terror" became just another charter opportunity for American businesses.

…

The New York case concerns Sportsflight, an aircraft broker, and Richmor, an aircraft operator. Sportsflight entered into an arrangement to make a Gulfstream IV executive jet available at $4,900 an hour rather than the market rate of $5,450. A crew was available to fly at 12 hours' notice. The government wanted "the cheapest aircraft to fulfil a mission", Sportsflight's owner, Don Moss, told the court. But it was the early days of the rendition programme, and business was booming: the court heard that Sportsflight told Richmor: "The client says we're going to be very, very busy."

The client in this case is the US Government. The report also states that detainees, who 'were usually sedated through anal suppositories before being dressed in nappies and orange boiler suits, then hooded and muffled and trussed up in the back of the aircraft,' were described by the head of one of the charter companies as 'invitees.' Classy.

I modelled the torture business in The Rapture on what I had read about the near-complete privatization of the US security state. So much of the CIA, NSA and the rest of the alphabet soup have been contracted out that they are now effectively unable to do things on their own. It's bad enough that torture became a profit centre for these companies, but you also have to wonder how much lobbying went the other way. How much did companies compete for this 'business'? The firms involved don't sound big enough to increase the number of renditions on their own, but if you think big national security industry players like CACI International and Halliburton don't have an effect on US policy, then I have a Vice-President to sell you.

The flights are detailed in mind-numbing detail, down to the cost of the snacks being consumed by the crew. These logs are a gold mine of intelligence, as the charity Reprieve has proven. They used the expense claims to tie specific planes to those who were rendered, and then to probable locations of black sites. That's how intelligence works, not smacking someone until they say what they think you want to hear.

The Antlers, Every night my teeth are falling out

Sectarianism for fun and profit

Crybaby asshole Glenn Beck has decided he hasn't been in the news enough lately:

The temperature may have dropped a little in Jerusalem on Wednesday night, but it was more than compensated for by the heat produced by Glenn Beck as he brought his "Restoring Courage" rally to the Old City.

The former Fox News presenter and devout Mormon stood at a podium beneath the gunmetal grey of the dome of the al-Aqsa mosque to direct a tirade of invective at governments, human rights organisations, the United Nations, Europe and Arab states – and sometimes just "them", whoever they are.

…

Dressed as though attending a funeral, Beck stood in sharp contrast to the casual attire of his overwhelmingly white American Christian audience, many of whose baseball caps and T-shirts denoted their state of origin, their church or their adherence to the US Tea Party movement.

But the surprising number of empty seats belied the organisers' claims that demand for tickets had outstripped availability at the 2,000-capacity Davidson Centre.

Beck, in a rare moment of honesty before his new fame, called himself a 'rodeo clown.' He's pulling these stunts to make sure his name is in the news, and suckers keep throwing money at his mini-empire of paranoid bullshit. American conservatism has its own ecosystem in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else. It's a collection of radio shows, TV pundits, books and personalities that create a whole alternate reality of FEMA camps and black helicopters. It's why the Republican field is full of candidates like Newt Gingrich, who are grifters strictly there for the money being a pretend candidate can bring in.

More interesting to me is how perfectly the rally captures the weirdness of Christian Zionism. A number of American Christians have come to Israel in the name of a Biblical prophecy its citizens do not share. Far right Israelis and their supporters in the West have tried for several years now to equate any opposition to government policy as anti-semitism. Christian Zionists are a strange mirror-image of this smear: they are resolutely behind Israel the nation (as long as it holds the West Bank) but are against Judaism:

But the accompanying belief that Jews must then convert to Christianity in order to be saved has prompted widespread opposition to Christian Zionism – and Beck's rally – within Israel. Some rabbis denounced the broadcaster and called on Jews to boycott the event.

For Christian Zionists, Jews are merely a means to an end.

Panic sets the guilty free

The Guardian reports an 18 year-old man has been cleared of setting a fire in Salford during the riots:

A teenager who spent nine days in prison after being charged with setting fire to Miss Selfridge during the Manchester riots has been cleared after new evidence emerged confirming his innocence.

Dane Williamson, 18, said he had had a nightmarish ordeal after he was charged with being involved in causing £500,000 damage to the Market Street store during the riots, despite having five alibis.

He was charged with criminal damage and being reckless over property damage or endangering life. His name was widely reported and Facebook groups were set up on which he was identified and subjected to abuse.

Williamson's flat in Salford was damaged by fire while he was on remand in Forest Bank prison; he lost all of his possessions and is now homeless. He suffered panic attacks after he was targeted by other prisoners who taunted him about what he had supposedly done.

These are the cases we need to keep in mind when the Prime Minister and the media talk about rough justice for the rioters. Too often people still fall into the frame of thinking that evidence and correct investigation is somehow a gift to criminals, or about their 'rights,' when it's actually about sussing out the son of a bitch responsible. Dane Williamson was one of the usual suspects — young, had spent most of his life in care with two previous convictions — and he kind of looked like one of the rioters captured on CCTV. A little extra investigation revealed that his clothing wasn't the same as the arsonist and another polic officer had already identified someone different as the suspect.

So the slow methodical justice of the courts prevented an innocent man's life being destroyed (at a cost to us of around £40 000 a year.) More importantly the police are still on the hunt for the real suspect. Had passion overruled procedure we might as well have been patting the real arsonist on the back and sending him on his way.

The Debt Ceiling and the yearning for apocalypse

I don't expect anyone to follow American politics as I do; most Americans sure don't, and they can actually vote. The debt ceiling nightmare is an exception, because if these assholes sitting an ocean away default on the US debt, it will screw up the economy of the whole world.

If the debt ceiling had a threat level, it would be moving from 'this is incredibly stupid' to 'stock up on canned goods' (from Think Progress):

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said today that some members of his own caucus who are refusing to agree to a compromise debt ceiling deal are hoping to unleash "chaos" and thus force the White House and Senate Democrats to make bigger concessions than they're already offering. As many as 40 House Republicans, especially Tea Party members and freshmen, have demanded nothing short of changing the Constitution to include a balanced budget amendment before they would vote to raise debt ceiling, even though that has zero chance before the U.S. faces potential default on Aug. 2.

He's speaking on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham's program. The assumption has been that this kind of talk is for negotiation, but Boehner is before an audience of believers here. The supposed leader of the House is basically admitting that he isn't in control of his own caucus.

BOEHNER: Well, first they want more. And my goodness, I want more too. And secondly, a lot of them believe that if we get past August the second and we have enough chaos, we could force the Senate and the White House to accept a balanced budget amendment. I'm not sure that that — I don't think that that strategy works. Because I think the closer we get to August the second, frankly, the less leverage we have vis a vis our colleagues in the Senate and the White House.

So the President is trying to negotiate with a party that doesn't have a coherent position of its own. The money-worshippers are down on their knees praying their billionaire employers will come and save them from the people they've always treated as useful idiots, while the idiots in question actively hope for the second worldwide economic crisis in five years.

So basically we're on track to have the largest economy in the world crashed purely by magical thinking. What kind of jackass would want such a disaster?

It's all in Boehner's quote. The Tea Partiers yearn for economic apocalypse the same way fundamentalists yearn for a Christian one. There's obviously some overlap between those two groups, but these prophetic ideas are so deeply embedded in our culture that you don't have to be up on your testaments to follow their thinking. Both groups think the world(or nation) is too corrupt to reform on its own, and what is needed is a great cleansing fire to sweep away the old order. Then a new, better one can be built, better in this case meaning conforming exactly to their own ideas, whether it's the Ten Commandments or a constitution that forbids deficits and gay marriage. They will be the phoenix that rises from the ashes. And when you try to tell them that the phoenix is a mythical beast, the only thing that will prove is that you're an enemy.