Monbiot's blog

George Monbiot, of whom I'm a fan, finally started blogging at the Guardian. I've been waiting for this. In fact, I don't really see how I could have missed this since I visited his website just a week or two ago.

Anyway, the man already writes a huge amount of thoroughly researched column inches, but I've always suspected him of being well-suited for this kind of writing, with his focus on sources, fact-checking and processual writing. I look forward to following his blog.

I recently linked to a series of videos with people who were in the climate destruction business. Now I see he has a follow-up to his interview with the CEO of Shell Oil.

Political science-people plan your sex-life

This is an awesome little post on Crrrooked Timberrrr which neatly illustrates that yes, the gendered division of labour is still a problem.

Now, the corollary to that - which, btw, I only remembered where I had read due to intense psychological strain, seeing as how I read that stuff yesterday. Am I supposed to remember where I read things for more than 24 hours now? - is this post by Ezra Klein:

The Cowans found that the drop in marital satisfaction was basically a localized phenomenon: It came among the parents who didn't share the same outlook on parenthood. But "couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born." More interestingly, the financial strains matter. "Once a child arrives," writes Koontz, "lack of paid parental leave often leads the wife to quit her job and the husband to work more. This produces discontent on both sides. The wife resents her husband’s lack of involvement in child care and housework. The husband resents his wife’s ingratitude for the long hours he works to support the family."

In conclusion, we may say that this week's hot tip from the political science crowd is to check that you and your partner think similarly about having kids before jumping in bed (which you just bought, together, at IKEA) with them. Word for the wise, people.

Politics in the time of cholera

They drink too much coffee up in the North of Norway. So now I can't sleep and I'm reading through old tabs.

I've had this moving and unsettling article in the NY Times open in my browser for two weeks now, since the morning after we returned from Africa. It deals with the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe which Mugabe seems to be largely dealing with by hoping it goes away.

Does anyone even remember cholera anymore? Cholera is a gastrointestinal bacterial disease, fatal in roughly 50 % of untreated cases. It is one of the most unpleasant ways of dying known to man: basically death by diarrhea-induced dehydration, with victims evacuating - that's the clinical term - as much as 30 % of body mass in a matter of hours. It is simultaneously an easily cureable disease. It is one of those many "easily preventable causes" which kills 30.000 children every day, according to UNICEF.

Treatment for cholera is oral rehydration: drinking lots of water with salt and sugar in it. Also, washing your hands a lot. I told you it was easy. Not so easy when your government isn't doing it's job though. Not so easy when you don't have clean running water.

The failure to stop the death of many hundreds, possibly thousands, of people, is an indication of the profound, criminal incompetence of the Mugabe government. How criminal? Well, Oxfam & Unicef indicates that there will be roughly 60.000 cases by the end of January alone, and that 10 % of these will be fatal. The disease is still spreading.

A cholera outbreak is a good indicator of a failed state in two ways: 1) how it spreads and 2) how it is treated.

1) The disease spreads orally, via faecal matter. Basically the faeces of sick people needs to get into the drinking water. This represents a collapse of infrastructure: the government is not securing the water supply, containing and disposing of sewage and preparing properly for the rainy season (the direct cause of the outbreak, "leading to contaminated faeces being washed into water sources, as well as providing readily available but contaminated water", according to the excellent Wikipedia page on the subject. Incredibly, the administration is blaming the outbreak on the colonial days, despite having responsibility for the water & sewage system for almost 30 years. A spokesman is also claiming that the British are deliberately causing it as an act of genocide, instilling great confidence in the competence of the Mugabe regime.

2) Since treatment of cholera is simple, it should be possible to contain and deal with an outbreak provided one has a functioning health care system. It has not been remotely contained. It has not been dealt with (in fact, it seems to be spreading, with cases now being reported in Mozambique, Botswana, Zambia and South Africa). Unpleasant to think I was one day's travel by car away from a cholera epidemic.

Because of the economic crisis in the country, many of the country's hospitals have been forced to close in the middle of an epidemic. They can't buy supplies or pay staff b/c of lack of public funds and hyperinflation. Bad timing.

The crisis has intensified calls for the removal of pathological asshole Robert Mugabe from power in Zimbabwe. As well it should. Not dealing with this means you're not dealing with the most basic business of governing: securing health, security and care for the community.

So that was two weeks ago. The latest development is that two days before christmas, the US announced it had now changed its official stance from a nose-holding, but Mugabe-tolerant policy to an actively anti-Mugabe one. An American envoy calls Mugabe "a man who's lost it". Basically, they are saying they will no longer support any kind of power sharing deal (the deal which is still being negotiated now) that does not involve kicking Mugabe out on his octogenarian ass.

The problem is that the current interrim government in South Africa (since Thabo Mbeki stepped down a few months back) remains Zimbabwe's linchpin ally in the region. It is still trying to get the old power-sharing deal through. The one good thing about the almost certain fact of a Jacob Zuma presidency is that he might put renewed pressure on Mugabe to leave office. One of the very few policy differences between Zuma and Mbeki (notorious rivals) is on the Zimbabwe question, where Zuma has voiced slightly stronger objections to Mugabe. Though not a lot, mind you, and also, this is a man who believes that you can avoid AIDS by having a "vigorous shower" after unprotected sex. Good thing he won't be sitting at the top of one of the most HIV-infected countries in the world. But I digress.

In short, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish someone would magically create a completely new government in Zimbabwe as well as a functioning health system. That seems to be the best solution right now. Anyone out there have any strong connections in the underworld?

Updated to add: Just learned that the Nordic foreign ministers have released a statement calling for mr Mugabe's head on a pike (I paraphrase).

Collective action problems: a pox on the body politic which must be eradicated at any cost - or a big, fluffy, puppy-like animal? You decide!

At the end of the day, a short observation. Something I've been thinking about for years, but which keeps cropping up in conversation these days for some reason, so I feel like writing it down:

I think that the greatest single obstacle that I can think of to the advance of human civilisation is collective action problems in all their forms. The most basic form is, I think, the prisoner's dilemma, in which the solution obviously is honour among thieves - or rather, well-founded trust, the trick of the imagination on which our societies and economies are built, and the sense of collective responsibility which that trust creates. 

If the measurement of value is projected beyond the yardstick of the self into the society surrounding it as a whole, the collective action problems go away, or at the very least become organisational and not existential. This also avoids freeloading, the cause of collective action problems, commonly presented in the form of the Tragedy of the Commons.

In short, the reason we spend more money on weapons than anything else, the reason we can't raise taxes to the proper level across the globe, the reason we can't implement proper work management laws and human rights, the reason we need to put up with populist tabloid newspapers rather than substantial vehicles for public discussion is either:

a. The value system for the change does not yet exist on a large enough scale. (Not a problem e.g. with war - who doesn't oppose war?)
b. We can't organise a change on such a massive scale for reasons of coordination costs.
c. We can't change for fear of competitive oppositional advantage. "Somebody else is doing it, so we can't stop doing it!"

C is the reason that we...

- Have an army. If not, other countries will invade us with their armies which they have for fear that you will invade them. (I still think that standing armies represent the single greatest failure of the human imagination we have.)

- Can't fix the environment. Because if we start having carbon taxes and spending lots of tax money on green infrastructure, other countries will gain a purely temporary competitive advantage which they will later lose again when they are all drowned in the seas of armed refugees, mad with hunger, pouring out of the third world as their ecosystems collapse, a problem which we should maybe have thought about sooner.

- Can't have good labour laws in, say, Malaysia - because other countries might get Malaysian manufacturing jobs.

- Can't raise taxes in states struggling to create welfare societies. If they raise taxes, business will flee.

- Have to keep making bad tv and bad newspapers, or the other tv stations/newspapers will sell more. Because God knows we're not in the business to make good tv/newspapers - we're in the business of making money.

I think that the "solution" to a lot of these issues at the present time, since "...oh, you're such an idealist, Martin! [exasperated sigh, rolling of eyes] It will never happen, dreamer!" is the proliferation of welfare states. People who are hungry and uneducated are generally not capable of projecting value into things or other people, other than their own survival.* I read somewhere recently (I forget where) that the paradox of being poor is that you have less of a buffer, so every decision you make has to be right. But you are also lacking in the resources and personal security which help you make right decisions.  I think this is exactly right. The path towards the decline of collective action problems lies in welfare and education. 

Does any of this make sense? 

* However, the opposite can also be true. Some affluent people invest a lot of personal commitment to ideology which values selfishness. I remember sitting at my computer at University a year and a half ago, seeing the person at the desk in front of me reading Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. I was reading an article on child mortality rates in the third world (30.000/day of easily preventable causes) and felt like: 

a. I wanted to smack him in the back of the head for callousness. 

b. I couldn't leave my laptop there when I went to lunch. I just couldn't trust him. 

This just in

Mikkel changes his mind about Obama:

"OK, I change my mind. I'm all for Obama. But the little fucker better not let me down."

Welcome to the club, Mikkel. Here's your Kool-Aid.

"There's a funny name for the place they call 'outside the beltway' - it' called America"

I just watched this great interview with Jon Stewart on Charlie Rose.



It's fascinating seeing Stewart without his persona on. He's obviously a passionate (he uses that word a lot), intelligent, thoughtful activist. I mean, you always know that he is, watching the program, but you get so used to thinking of the persona as him that it's interesting to see what's going on behind the scenes.

Astroturf® - for the Greater Good™

Interesting moral dilemma in the comments to the preceding post. Let me explain.

First off, there's a word you should know, if you don't already. It's Astroturfing. Astroturfing (internet venacular) is defined by Wikipedia as "a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising that seek to create the impression of being spontaneous, grassroots behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass AstroTurf, initially developed for the Houston Astrodome."

Like most people engaged in honest open debate the usual internet muckslinging, I hate astroturfing. I hate it with a cold fury most people reserve for Adolf Hitler or their income tax returns*. These people are the scum of the Earth and they are wrecking the public sphere for all of us hard-working, honest debaters.

So astroturfing happens quite a lot on the net. Typical astroturfing is when somebody creates a website or a discussion forum of some kind trying to create the impression that a whole lot of people are really interested and excited about Brand A or Movie B or Politician McC. One commonly used technique is to have somebody just dropping by a large number of blogs, leaving behind anonymous comments that usually start off with some unusually flattering compliment about your blog (because we should never underestimate the power of vanity). If you’re lucky, you get a sentence or two about the topic you have posted on. Then the post goes off the rails and starts talking about something completely different.

So in this case, I post on economic studies of organised crime and prostitution. Somebody comes in, compliments me, and then starts talking about climate change and linking to sites about climate change and tries to get a discussion going (to help the buzz, natch).

So the unique moral dilemma here is: I actually agree with this astroturfer. I think climate change is a huge issue that everyone – especially the Republicans – should get taken to the cleaners about. Agreeing with astroturfers has, in fact, never happened to me before. I have never encountered astroturfing that was not conservative, right-wing propaganda or commercial pap about some obscure product.

So here is my self-serving and evasive response:

See, now you're placing me in a difficult situation. You're obviously astroturfing, you're obviously just somebody clicking through blogs and leaving links - and btw you'd think you'd know how to make link tags, dude - but on the other hand, you're obviously doing it for one of the best causes there are. So do I

a. tolerate your comment, thus making me a hypocrite for accepting bad faith rhetoric (I am guessing you've never read my blog before) when I am in political agreement with the person making the statement.

b. delete your comment, thus infitesimally lowering necessary media exposure for one of the defining political issues of our time, and therefore possibly have cause to feel guilty about it.

or

c. make a long metaargument explaining how I actually thought this through, but decided to keep your comment after showing that I was aware that you made those links while in bad faith, said metaargument established only in order to reflect well on myself while also feebly trying to draw attention to the cause, despite the fact that I have also damaged the credibility of the followers of that cause. [I should have added: but leave you up under the pretense of having made an informative ”case” out of you.]

I think C. But see? See what you made me do? Couldn't you just behave like a real person and not leave those astroturfing comments with their habitual opening compliments about what a great blog this is and bla bla bla. It hurts the cause more than it helps it. Get in the fray and make some honest debate and spread the links properly, the way they should be spread.

* Note: not the income tax itself. We pay our taxes with Joy and Pride, citizen.

Taxi Driver

(OR: Big Blue Taxi took away my left wing of American politics)

Grand unified theory of American politics. A sweeping post on some serious issues with Obama's both-sides-now rhetoric that also happens to tell an admirably compressed story of movement conservatism in the US.

I'm still not entirely convinced that Obama's rhetoric isn't just rhetoric, but I find that lately, every time he opens his mouth, I start thinking about Edwards, and sometimes even Clinton. At least all three alternatives (Clinton, Obama, Edwards) are sane, as opposed to Huckabee, Romney or McCain. Right now, I'd be happy if we got any one of the democrats, because the species of conservative that breeds in the wild in the US is just crazy. That they are so well-funded, organised and embraced by institutions with money and power is very unnerving. Our local variety is much more sidelined, for which I am thankful, but as I've said before: when the US does things, it affects everyone. The president of the United States is one of the people that exercise the most influence on my life and well-being. Our local movement conservatives are energised and schooled by the US variety. Sooner or later, this could lead to something. For now, they are sidelined but they have powerful friends.

To wit: My cab driver today turned out, during the course of ordinary chit chat to be a central-ish figure in the Norwegian Christian coalition. He was a member of the board of so-fundamentalist-they-had-to-split-from-the-other-fundamentalists-newspaper Norge IDAG (because sometimes you need to capitalise words in newspaper titles so that people can tell you're serious!). He was fresh from a paid trip to Washington DC to a meeting where people of the conservative persuasion from around the world met the GOP candidates.

Our driver was all about Huckabee. Such a firm handshake, Huckabee. Also, never gave an inch on abortion. And I mean, really, what with US schools being positively awash with sodomy and perversity, you really need a man like Huckabee. ("They teach it, you know!" Of course they do. The stories I could tell you from GV Junior High School.) That firm handshake, that steady gaze - hearing the arguments, in front of those tv cameras, so you knew he wasn't lying - you really got the sense that this was a great president in the making. And he never voted for any law about abortion, and with that handshake, you knew he wasn't lying.

(also: Chuck Norris supports him. Run-to-the-hills-scary and funny! And he plays bass! Though not very well. I'm way better than he is. His right-hand technique stinks and while he keeps rhythm, his groove is bland and boring. Also, in this clip, he's playing Sweet Home Alabama which contains the lyrics "Watergate don't bother me." Seriously. Btw, remember that Bill Clinton played the saxophone? He wasn't very good, either. And Alan Greenspan played the clarinet very badly, they say.)

So anyway, I hope that the US puts its house in order now and puts the conservatives back in their cabs and church bands where they belong. Not deciding the geopolitical fate of the rest of the world.

...Time to get ready for primary season, anyway. I think I'm with Krugman on the Obama issue. I'm just about to start the health-care chapter in Krugman's latest book.

*

And almost just in time for Christmas: way to be in the spirit of Jesus.

Knol

Google takes on Wikipedia. Usually, I'd just be happy for the couple of minor improvements in the technical design over Wikipedia, but for reasons I am not yet completely able to articulate, I am skeptical. I think it has to do with Knol apparently being rigged in the Google results, but maybe this tool will be a supplement to Wikipedia? Whatever happens, it will certainly take many years to reach the level of detail that Wikipedia has.

Btw, one of the internet tricks I use most is to google [topic] + wikipedia. You go straight to the top-ranking Wikipedia article (almost universally the English-language one) and you can use that as the beginning of a research process. It's a nice way of just quickly touching base with the most basic facts about something, and can also be used to find specific information to supplement my vaguer understanding about what I'm researching. Like today, for purposes of a bad joke coming to this space soon, I wanted to double check whether the birth of Derrida did indeed coincide with the birth of New Criticism. It did, sorta.

UPDATE: Ezter Hargittai from Crooked Timber raises some excellent issues here.

Also, I think I have worded my initial skepticism more thoroughly: Google should no longer be just a private company. It has now become such an integral part of the infrastructure of the entire world that it should either act entirely like infrastructure and not as a corporation with a separate agenda from the people it serves or it should be supernationalised, become a UN body. If Google starts rigging the results according to their own agenda, they are no longer doing what they should be doing to fulfill their part of the Google - Public contract.

Manifester i alle land, manifester eder.

Hvis du er på venstresiden i norsk politikk bør du ta og abonnere på Manifests nyhetsbrev Orientering. Det er veldig gode. Masse gode, tankevekkende artikler og debattinnlegg fra ukens løp som formidles til den travle sosialisten i tidsklemme.

Eksempelvis denne ukens utspill fra Victor Normann, et utrolig interessant intervju om opptøyene i Frankrike for to uker siden eller en artikkel om politisk islams samspill med imperialisme fra forrige uke.

Om du lurer på hva jeg mener om manifester kan du forresten gå hit. Jeg har sterke, sterke meninger om manifester. De er meninger, jeg har dem og de er sterke.

I detect the aroma of rattus norvegicus

Some excellent reporting in the NY Times today:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

Isn't that weird, though? That they destroyed the tapes because it could "expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy"? Why it's... it's almost as if they knew they were doing something wrong. Or even illegal.

I want to write a book called Speaking Truth to Power - how the rise of citizen journalism and the blogosphere changed everything

Former White House communications director and counselor to the president (Bush jr. that is) Dan Bartlett (no relation to Jed Bartlet) in an interview with Texas Monthly:

Yeah, or what if [conservative blogger] Hugh Hewitt called?

That’s when you start going, “Hmm . . .” Because they do reach people who are influential.

Well, they reach the president’s base.

That’s what I mean by influential. I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

Meanwhile, in the forgotten countries

My friend Ingeborg, a very talented reporter and photographer, is visiting Hebron and the West Bank these days. She writes stories to Norwegian newspapers, but she also blogs about it in English and Norwegian at Den dejlige tid.

photo: Ingeborg Refsnes

While the meeting in Annapolis was happening, there was street fighting and clashes in Hebron, leaving at least 24 people injured. On the same day, Israeli fighter jets killed two Hamas members and injured 10 people.

Elephants in Porcelain Shops

I'm breathless. The Republican primary debates in the US really makes our local right wing parties seem wonderful. They are coherent, realistic and humane. The most interesting thing in these videos is almost seeing the crowd that the candidates have to pander to. Check out the question marked "Do you believe every word in the Holy Bible?" Or the guy who asks the candidates what kind of guns they have. (McCain, knowing he has to answer, and probably hating every second of pandering to people like this sucks it up and says "I've used guns in Vietnam. I know how to use a gun. I don't currently own a gun." Poor guy.) It's like watching a horror movie, only real. When they say that the Christian fundamentalists have gotten control of the GOP, they weren't kidding. Also note what makes the crowd applaud.

And then, check out question 8. "What three federal programs would you cut?" Watch, as with one fell stroke, they cut away the dept. of Education, the Dept. of Energy and then go all one-upmanship on each other: "I'm gonna cut the Dept. of Education!" "Yeah, well I'm going to cut even MORE departments!" "Yeah, well, I'M GOING TO CUT THE IRS!" "WELL I'M GOING TO CUT EVERYTHING, EVEN MYSELF. LOOK, I'M SLASHING MY ARMS WITH A KNIFE. THE BLOOD! THE BLOOD! THE DARKNESS COMETH! COME, DARK ONE!" Or anyway, that's what it sounded like to me. These people are politically crazy. Cut the department of education, social security and the IRS? Seriously? You can say that at the top level of American politics and not get laughed out of office?

Pacifism & the left

Manifest publishing of Norway has directed me to these handy little charts from socialistworker.org. Our priorities - that's us as in the species - are just all wrong. We are quite literally spending more money on killing each other than any other thing.

I think the left needs to get back in touch with their pacifist roots. Obviously, we should be sensible about security and not bla bla the errors of Chamberlain bla bla bla appeasement bla bla useful idiots bla bla. I'll be the first to tell you that peace is not just the absence of war. But seriously: why don't we get back to moving towards these long-term goals: the complete elimination of organised violence and a greatly reduced proportion of standing armies? I can't think of a single reason not to. But here are 200 million good reasons.

Yup. That's us.

Well, well, well. This morning Norway is about to be criticised by the UN Commision on Torture for handing over prisoners to the Afghan government. In Afghan prisons, there are numerous reports of prisoners being beaten with cables or bricks and having their nails pulled out, among other things. A week or two ago, a Foreign Affairs Dept. memo leaked in which a recent Amnesty International report on torture in Afghanistan was criticised as being "too political" and not balanced. Of course, this also happened back during the "Boomerang cases", where police officers in Bergen had been systematically abusing prisoners for years and years. Amnesty International really and truly got the shaft from the Norwegian media and police.

Jonas Gahr Støre, the Norwegian foreign minister, despite being an intelligent man, went on NRK this morning saying that basically "well, I mean, the Afghans tell us that everything is allright, so we trust them. We are, after all, there for their sake." On the one hand, he is saying that the Afghans are in control of their prisons and institutions so torture obviously isn't happening. On the other hand he is saying that we just got a deal in place so that we can check on them. Sigh.

We've known this was coming for a while. I'm ashamed.

Humiliation ⇒ Terrorism ⇒ Al-Qaeda (⇒ George Bush)

A while back, I linked to a video of Lawrence Wright talking on Al Qaeda. I finally got the time to watch it - home internet I worship at thy fibre-optic'd feet - and it's even better than I thought. Wright is a commanding public speaker, fluently speaking from a rich reserve of first-hand, historical and statistical knowledge to paint a lucid portrait of the islamic radicalism of the previous 50 years. If you want to have a sensible picture of Islamic terrorism, you should take the hour-and-change out of your day it takes to watch this. If nothing else, watch the first 15 minutes or so, in which the most important points pop up. If you have a little more time, watch the 40 minutes of his prepared speech, and quit after the questions (there are too many not-questions-but-comments (to one of which Wright gives only a delightfully dry "I agree"), but Wright gives interesting, well-composed, eloquently improvised answers).

And really, we should have a sensible picture of terrorism. Not because terrorism is a threat to us* but because it has become the universal symbol of evil which is used to justify political oppression. When we juxtapose the minor but very real threat of Al-Qaeda with the massive, completely insurmountable political and social problems of which the terrorist organisation is merely a symptom, one realises just how completely and utterly the Bush administration has destroyed any hope of ending radical Islam in our lifetime. In unilaterally and single-mindedly pursuing the military "war on terror", they have exacerbated the demographic, sociological and political problems which are causing the problem they are trying to defeat. Like slamming your fist repeatedly into an anthill to stop the ants from biting you. The increasing alienation of immigrant populations in Europe; the continuuing conflict in Israel/Palestine; world poverty (Islam encompasses roughly 1/5th the world's population, but roughly 1/2 the world's poor); the reinvigoration of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the general sense of cultural humiliation which Wright describes so vivily. These are the real problems.

But I don't want to make this a rant against Bush. That's an easy strategy. The problem is far more decentralised and far more subtle than that. The basic premise of Wrights speech is that what Al-Qaeda really is, is a manifestation of cultural humiliation and alienation. The overriding sociological factor of islamic extremists is that they are generally young men who feel alienated from the culture they are in. They find other young men who feel the same way, one thing leads to another, and they go blow something up. This happens easily in societies with little or no social life - 15 of the 19 terrorists on 9/11 were Saudis, you will recall - but it can just as well happen in cultures that have social lives that exclude young men of their religion. In short: the backlash, when it happens, will be easy to blame on the terrorists, but a more correct way of putting what is happening is that we are helping to create the problem ourselves. Sowing the wind, as it were.

And in the end, it is us here in Europe who will be at the receiving end of the backlash. The gap between the native populations and immigrant populations in Western Europe are widening, and recent events like the Muhammed caricatures of Denmark are just flashpoints in the development of a smug cultural identity founded on intolerance and exclusion. The idea that we can stop globalisation is childish and selfish. The idea that we should combat Islam and muslims - Huntingtons clash of civilisations - is a part of the very structures which produce terrorism and extremism.

Last words of the film: "I don't think the future in Europe looks very attractive." Boy, no.

* "More people die in car chrashes every day than died on 9/11", to use a common comparison. Other things that kill more people every year than terrorism: WAR. FAMINE. PLAGUE.

Oh, and this Crooked Timber essay on the netroots looks interesting, but I don't have time to read it now.

"In other words, they were a lot like us"

Lawrence Wright talks about Al-Qaeda. He's the author of The Looming Tower. The central argument is that the uniting sociological factor among jihadists today is alienation and cultural displacement. Most members join in a different country from where they were born. Also: moslems are 1/5th of the world's population, but roughly half of all poor people are moslem.

Looks like an incredibly interesting talk. I'm going to watch it later.

socialism & basic income

I'm hard at work alternately painting walls in our new apartment in Oslo and doing a pretty big translation job, but I do find some time to sneak in a little political work ("work") as well. This weekend I was at a seminar of the left wing of Oslos under-30 crowd, and I've got to say, I haven't felt this energised by politics in a long time. Not least by the fact that there seems to be a sort-of agreement that the thing to do is to try to build a broader left-wing alliance, to which I say: it's about time. On the left, we have been too fond of dividing ourselves into thinner and thinner fractions for a long time.

In my copious free time, I am attempting to find out why the socialist left (in Norway, at least - what's it like abroad?) is not interested in the idea of a guaranteed basic income.

(I like the Norwegian word better: borgerlønn, which means wage for being a citizen, or literally a 'citizen wage').

In Norway, only the centre-right liberal party Venstre is advocating this solution. I'm still just starting out researching the question, but everything I've been reading makes it more interesting as a potential, practical idea for a redistribution of wealth and power, and a radical restructuring of society. Not least because it increasingly seems to me to resonate wonderfully with socialist ideals. Why it has remained a centre-right-liberal idea in Norway is beyond me. I'm going to be looking into this for the next couple of months if and when I find the time.

But anyway, I just wanted to share this post at Crooked Timber with you: Should feminists support basic income?

Also check out the interesting discussion which follows. The post is a discussion of potential outcomes of a guaranteed basic income, as seen from a feminist viewpoint. What would happen to the role of women in a society with a basic income? It's possible that the gender gap in work/pay would widen, according to the author. Some interesting arguments, which would need to be taken into consideration if the basic income idea is going to work. The post is based on this 16-page paper (.pdf) which is much more thorough, but I haven't read the whole thing yet. Also more info and links in this post. I'm also going to have to read this article by Philippe Van Parijs, which I've seen several references to.

If anyone knows of any good books or websites discussing this, leave a comment. Also if you have any good arguments pro or contra to the idea. I need to find out more about this.