"What’s wrong with Labour?" Quora board

 Paul Evans, Quora, unclassifiable, What's wrong with Labour?  No Responses »
Jan 032012
 
TumblrShare

I’ve just created a “What’s wrong with Labour?” board over at Quora.  I suggest you read Paul Evans’ blogpost of the same title, which has served to frame the starting-point for the board.

I’m still working out how the system works and have already invited a few authors.  If you’d also like to contribute to the board in such a capacity, why not post a comment at the foot of this post requesting I add you – or, alternatively, if you prefer, you can send me an email to mil@pobox.com.

You can of course simply follow the board – and although as owner it would appear I can actually add followers without their permission, I assume it’s also possible for you to follow the board without my permission!

In which case, please do feel free to do exactly that.

Oh … and Happy Quora-boarding …

TumblrShare

Do left-wing politicians need to learn how to be shameless?

 Calvinism, Catholicism, good versus bad, Labour, left-wing politics, Paul Evans, politics, redemption, unclassifiable, winning  No Responses »
Jan 032012
 
TumblrShare

Paul has just posted an excellent piece called “What’s wrong with Labour?” – well worth reading in full.  I wonder as a result whether the problem with our left-wing politicians is that they are too ashamed of what they do – of the mistakes they have made and will continue, as ordinary human beings, to inevitably be responsible for.

Let’s look at it from a broader progressive perspective.  Do we go into politics to do good and make the world better?  If so, does going into politics to make the world better require us to be better people than the people who vote for us?

I note the Spanish experience.  The losing candidate in the latest Spanish general election, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, is already reappearing on Spanish radio and TV with all guns blazing.  Compare this behaviour with Gordon Brown’s post-election disappearance without a trace – and even the Shadow Cabinet’s relative restraint since then in the face of the biggest deconstruction of a body politic since World War Two – and we surely must ask ourselves why this is happening.

Is it, perhaps, because the UK Labour Party is far closer to the politicised Christian beliefs of Northern European Calvinism – and finds itself unable to accept the relief of redemption and repeated renewal which Catholicism unconsciously offers those peoples who still claim to be a part of its philosophy? 

We must, it would seem, as British progressives, pay publicly for our sins and suffer for a respectable period in silence and political mourning.

So whilst the Coalition government has been getting away with figurative murder, the Labour Party and its followers have been affording themselves the luxury of repentance – at the expense of a hugely important minority of defenceless voters who neither have a ready-made voice nor the means to fashion one.

Perhaps it is time that those who would describe themselves progressives choose whether they are in politics to do right or be good.

For it would appear that – at least for now – any attempt to act out both sides of the coin is simply incompatible with the aim of forging a generation which might one day win an election.

*

There is one final thought which serves only to depress me even further: whilst some might effectively choose between doing right or being good, and still manage to serve a constructive purpose on the planet, others – on a quite different moral plane – might decide quite the opposite: that is to say, choose either to do wrong or be bad. 

With the added advantage that it’s probably quite seamlessly easy to manage to do wrong and be bad at exactly the same time.

TumblrShare

Do we really want more macho Darwinism in left-wing blogging?

 blogging, crowdsourcing, Darwinian capitalism, in a hole, Labour Uncut, left-wing blogging, online constitutions, politics, Rob Marchant, software, websites  No Responses »
Jan 032012
 
TumblrShare

This piece by Rob Marchant over at Labour Uncut – on why we must continue with our critically, and sometimes apparently internecine, political blogging – has many things going for it.  But I am inclined to take issue with the following argument:

LabourList and Labour Uncut, started more recently, have been doing a sterling job in taking back the internet agenda for Labour, but we still see much apparent discomfort in the comments sections. We fall into easy habits, talking of “loyalty” and “unity”, in order to try and keep party thinking aligned. It is easy to confuse “unhelpful comment” and “comment that I disagree with”. But all comment, in the end, is helpful. Robust debate is, on the contrary, an overwhelming positive, and it is precisely this Darwinism of ideas that can lead us all to arrive at a decent, defensible common view of where the party is at and where it needs to be. The wisdom, in the words of James Surowiecki, of crowds.

This was my response:

The Darwinism of Ideas is all well and good in theory. But I have two reservations: firstly, in terms of the intellectual debate that should be conducted, it closely mirrors in its dynamics precisely the kind of capitalism which is currently being imposed on us. And secondly, precisely because this capitalism – and its analogous debate – does not take place on a level killing-field, the ideas which will win out will proceed from those with the biggest clout (the biggest virtual networks, the largest number of real-world followers etc.) and not necessarily because the ideas themselves have intrinsic virtue – or are of intrinsic value to the Labour Party as a whole, and by extension those who might wish to vote for it in general elections. 

Less macho Darwinism, more humane communication I think might be the order of *my* day.

Crowdsourcing ideas is – of course – an undeniable positive of many modern virtual environments.  But we shouldn’t conflate “robust” with “trolling” – nor argue in a rank relativism that “all comment is helpful”: much of what Marchant describes that takes place on the Internet is clearly so unhelpful as to impede an effective crowdsourcing of absolutely any procedure or process.

The million eyes of interested participants that good crowdsourcing environments coordinate are of course grand pluses we should observe and learn from in the way that Marchant suggests.  But as in the politics he so clearly understands, the constitutional structure of the environment you are dealing with is key to ensuring those million eyes act with either intelligence or a wasteful energy.

And it does so happen that on the few occasions I have commented on the Labour Uncut website, comment moderation has always been in place.

Hardly an inspiring example of where the crowd is shown to be in the driving-seat.

So before we go down the lazy route of justifying the tool of Darwinism in the very hub of all our debate, let us be accurate about the systems we use to give precedent and priority to some choice thinkers over that crowd.

And if we are truly interested in giving the crowd its head of steam, let us be consequential and act in good faith when we create the environments in which such a crowd should be allowed to perform.

TumblrShare

Not for the first time in history does being right mean being wrong

 agenda-setting, editorial mission, evidence-based blogging, left, politics, right, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jan 032012
 
TumblrShare

There are some quite superlatively excellent evidence-based blogs out there.  From the precise idiosyncrasies of Though Cowards Flinch to the focussed pedagogy of Stumbling and Mumbling; from the persistent ideologies of Norman to the breadth of vision of Liberal Conspiracy; from the self-proclaimed champion of the genre Left Foot Forward to the occasionally explosive but always clearly fashioned coherences of Shuggy … all in all, these bloggers and many more I have neglected to mention this morning strive to pursue logical trains of thoughts with evidence clearly to hand.

Yet one of the plagues of our modern society and Western civilisation – a plague which has led to recent white-collar crime, economic misery and an emptying of the public coffers in the interests of a painful socialism for the rich and already wealthy (a socialism which I am afraid a lost generation will have to end up paying for) – is precisely the kind of Chinese walls of specialisation which evidence-based blogging is simply one more unhappy example of.

The whole financial services sector, built as it is on the backs of heavily corporate structures (and their corresponding intensely separate divisions of labour), failed to have that keen overview of its highly specialised areas of functioning which might otherwise have avoided the disastrous decline of its solvency and effectiveness.  And the very fact that this is a paradigm for the rest of Western civilisation – those fragile links between complex machines which serve to make our society function so tenuously – doesn’t seem to have struck anyone usefully in power for the moment: everyone continues blithely on in their corresponding silos of ingenuity, as if nothing untoward had happened in the last five years – or, perhaps, as if anything that might have happened was nothing more than a simply unpredictable and unpreventable Act of God.

And so to our dearly beloved evidence-based blogging.  Whilst incredibly perceptive, accurate and effective on the terms it cares to perform, no one can argue with the following reality: all the time, it is operating in the context of the agenda the right has been setting for years.  In specialising in the process of rebutting any and every right-wing incoherence, it leaves little time to re-imagine the future in any other way.

What we are missing, then, from the modern didactic left-wing landscape, is a space where the futile and barren puerilities of our political right are left to suppurate in their own sour juices; for by choosing to rebut each and every one of them, and by a contamination and pollution through an almost physical contact, we have become as futile, barren and sour as they have shown themselves to be.

And if we continue to specialise in a detailed deconstructing of the enemy, whilst this will allow us to have the intellectual satisfaction of preaching the truth to our converted, the future which should surely belong to the imagineers in society will revert to the conservatives and their capacity to set a course of inimitable and tragic thought.

However two-dimensional, lacking in creativity and ingenuity that course might be.

Perhaps it is not time to discard evidence-based blogging entirely.  But what we do need to add to the mix is an editorial mission to combine reactivity with pro-activity; reaction with action.

Not a hoary old desire or instinct to triangulate the opposition out of existence but a truly intellectual impulse to pursue a series of better truths: a mission to make the world a better place for everyone who treasures coexistence; an ideology which consciously accepts that to progress, certain ways of thinking must be visibly disregarded.

Not for the first time in history does being right mean being wrong.

It’s time for us now to recognise and accept this reality.  As well as, in the light of such recognition, act in a coherent consequence.

Even as our moral philosophies have – to date – encouraged us to respect almost everyone.

*

I saw Brian de Palma’s “The Untouchables” last night – and wonder if its message is weighing heavily on my soul today.  Chicago in the Thirties was an evil place of physical danger.  Western civilisation in the early 21st century is simply an awful place of morally unacceptable decisions.

No comparison, right?

No comparison.

TumblrShare

On conflating the old and the new

 blogging, Christian ethics, Christmas, left-wing blogging, old and new, personal and political, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jan 032012
 
TumblrShare

I caught this modern manger yesterday in the centre of Salamanca’s main square.

A beautiful example of how the old and the modern can inform and support each other in appropriate consonance.

And it makes me wonder if I am in the right business.  Talking about a politics which makes me feel bitter and sad – anything but consonance, in fact; a politics I cannot change; a politics my words have no impact on.  What is the point?  Far better to walk around my wife’s hometown in the pleasurable company of the two women in my life; watch the groups of people congregating and discussing their personal problems and occurrences; look forward to a warming cup of coffee and churros; take in the sharpening evening air as the Christmas lights embrace the golden streets …

All the latter is so much more personally gratifying than getting unhappy with and underlining the cruelty of people who have so much more real power than myself.

The Spanish have a saying: “Hay que aportar tu granito de arena” – in English “You have to add your grain of sand”; but I am inclined more and more to believe that in the grand scheme of universal matters, neoliberal technocratic instances of rank and outright foolishnesses mean less to us than our very social need to continue walking the streets of our hometowns in the company of our nearest and dearest.

And this blog, while wishing to sustain the mission of exemplifying a position on the critical left of political thought, can’t really do very much in the face of the massed forces of the self-interested rich and wealthy.

This may be a kind of mental hangover from a holiday where I have had more time to think than is perhaps useful.  But I don’t think so.

In any case, and however I try and deal with my quandaries, I am a writer by nature and cannot avoid the process of putting word to electronic paper.  So I will continue to blog here as much as I am able to; but if you do notice a change of topic, and feel you need to desert me, please try and understand the personal thoughts I have laid out before you today.

For there comes a time when the personal ends up overriding the political, even as the political is always going to be personal.

And I’d much rather post a picture of a Christmas scene which shows how we might conflate the old and the new than complain for a millionth time how our politicians don’t even comprehend the option exists.

Wouldn’t you?

TumblrShare
Check Our FeedVisit Us On TwitterVisit Us On Facebook