Andrew Hickey

Hidden in my papers with Chip Sebens on Everettian quantum mechanics is a simple solution to a fun philosophical problem with potential implications for cosmology: the quantum version of the Sleeping Beauty Problem. It’s a classic example of self-locating uncertainty: knowing everything there is to know about the universe except where you are in it. (Skeptic’s Play beat me to the punch here, but here’s my own take.)

The setup for the traditional (non-quantum) problem is the following. Some experimental philosophers enlist the help of a subject, Sleeping Beauty. She will be put to sleep, and a coin is flipped. If it comes up heads, Beauty will be awoken on Monday and interviewed; then she will (voluntarily) have all her memories of being awakened wiped out, and be put to sleep again. Then she will be awakened again on Tuesday, and interviewed once again. If the coin came up tails, on the other hand, Beauty will only be awakened on Monday. Beauty herself is fully aware ahead of time of what the experimental protocol will be.

So in one possible world (heads) Beauty is awakened twice, in identical circumstances; in the other possible world (tails) she is only awakened once. Each time she is asked a question: “What is the probability you would assign that the coin came up tails?”

(Some other discussions switch the roles of heads and tails from my example.)

The Sleeping Beauty puzzle is still quite controversial. There are two answers one could imagine reasonably defending.

• “Halfer” — Before going to sleep, Beauty would have said that the probability of the coin coming up heads or tails would be one-half each. Beauty learns nothing upon waking up. She should assign a probability one-half to it having been tails.
• “Thirder” — If Beauty were told upon waking that the coin had come up heads, she would assign equal credence to it being Monday or Tuesday. But if she were told it was Monday, she would assign equal credence to the coin being heads or tails. The only consistent apportionment of credences is to assign 1/3 to each possibility, treating each possible waking-up event on an equal footing.

The Sleeping Beauty puzzle has generated considerable interest. It’s exactly the kind of wacky thought experiment that philosophers just eat up. But it has also attracted attention from cosmologists of late, because of the measure problem in cosmology. In a multiverse, there are many classical spacetimes (analogous to the coin toss) and many observers in each spacetime (analogous to being awakened on multiple occasions). Really the SB puzzle is a test-bed for cases of “mixed” uncertainties from different sources.

Chip and I argue that if we adopt Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) and our Epistemic Separability Principle (ESP), everything becomes crystal clear. A rare case where the quantum-mechanical version of a problem is actually easier than the classical version.

In the quantum version, we naturally replace the coin toss by the observation of a spin. If the spin is initially oriented along the x-axis, we have a 50/50 chance of observing it to be up or down along the z-axis. In EQM that’s because we split into two different branches of the wave function, with equal amplitudes.

Our derivation of the Born Rule is actually based on the idea of self-locating uncertainty, so adding a bit more to it is no problem at all. We show that, if you accept the ESP, you are immediately led to the “thirder” position, as originally advocated by Elga. Roughly speaking, in the quantum wave function Beauty is awakened three times, and all of them are on a completely equal footing, and should be assigned equal credences. The same logic that says that probabilities are proportional to the amplitudes squared also says you should be a thirder.

But! We can put a minor twist on the experiment. What if, instead of waking up Beauty twice when the spin is up, we instead observe another spin. If that second spin is also up, she is awakened on Monday, while if it is down, she is awakened on Tuesday. Again we ask what probability she would assign that the first spin was down.

This new version has three branches of the wave function instead of two, as illustrated in the figure. And now the three branches don’t have equal amplitudes; the bottom one is (1/√2), while the top two are each (1/√2)² = 1/2. In this case the ESP simply recovers the Born Rule: the bottom branch has probability 1/2, while each of the top two have probability 1/4. And Beauty wakes up precisely once on each branch, so she should assign probability 1/2 to the initial spin being down. This gives some justification for the “halfer” position, at least in this slightly modified setup.

All very cute, but it does have direct implications for the measure problem in cosmology. Consider a multiverse with many branches of the cosmological wave function, and potentially many identical observers on each branch. Given that you are one of those observers, how do you assign probabilities to the different alternatives?

Simple. Each observer O_i appears on a branch with amplitude ψ_i, and every appearance gets assigned a Born-rule weight w_i = |ψ_i|². The ESP instructs us to assign a probability to each observer given by

It looks easy, but note that the formula is not trivial: the weights w_i will not in general add up to one, since they might describe multiple observers on a single branch and perhaps even at different times. This analysis, we claim, defuses the “Born Rule crisis” pointed out by Don Page in the context of these cosmological spacetimes.

Sleeping Beauty, in other words, might turn out to be very useful in helping us understand the origin of the universe. Then again, plenty of people already think that the multiverse is just a fairy tale, so perhaps we shouldn’t be handing them ammunition.

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Arguably the most anticipated home video release, like, maybe ever, Batman '66 has finally been remastered and slated for release this November. The television show is both a classic interpretation of the Dark Knight but also an influential and beloved pop culture phenomenon in its own right, but arcane rights issues kept the complete series from the home video market for decades.

As announced earlier this week, Batman: The Complete Television Series will be available November 11 on Blu-ray, DVD, digital, and, of course, a super expensive collector’s edition that comes with all sorts of groovy stuff, including a selection of photos from star Adam West’s personal archives (when you’re as mature and sophisticated as West, you get to have “personal archives”).

In observance of the news, series stars Adam West, Burt Ward and Julie Newmar sat for a press conference at Comic-Con International in San Diego over the weekend, and ComicsAlliance's Chris Sims was there to document the event for your immense pleasure.

Continue reading…

A guaranteed income would eliminate poverty and it wouldn't destroy the economy.

(If you’ve missed the previous posts in the series, they’re here: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and the original post.)

After nine posts and a lot of words, we’ve come to the end of my odyssey through An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism, and I hope it’s been of some interest. It’s been an interesting exercise for me, as it’s a good framework for examining liberalism, and the way Russell frames his vision of it allowed me to take a step back from current discussions and conceptions of liberalism to take a wider view. Progressing through the different chapters, I’ve picked up on a few different ideas that run across the book and the conception of liberalism I’ve developed from it, which I’ll go through.

Liberalism as radicalism. By starting back in the 1600s, Russell’s historical account of liberalism doesn’t begin with it as an already accepted and prominent ideology. He points out that British liberalism arose from a turbulent and revolutionary century when all the old certainties had been turned upside down, and early liberal thinkers and writers were on the side of those seeking to overturn the older, not those who wanted to maintain it. This sense of radicalism and of seeking to do things differently is a thread Russell picks up again and again, with the implication that the aim of liberalism is not merely to reform power, but to change it utterly.

Liberalism is concerned with power. I found this one of the most refreshing and interesting ideas from the book. We can too often become obsessed with the idea of liberalism as being about freedom that we forget about the existence of power, or simply wish it away, assuming that it will simply wither away once we have solved the problems of freedom. The problem with this vision – especially when it slides into libertarianism – is that it can tend to assume that the state is the only power that we need concern ourselves with it. To reach its potential, liberalism has to recognise that power – and particularly unaccountable power – can exist outside the state, and indeed the pattern of the future may well be that we need to be more concerned with that form of unaccountable power than traditional state power.

Liberalism evolves. Again, this comes from Russell’s historical analysis, but it frames liberalism as an adaptive philosophy, centred around core principles. Starting from (and always keeping) that principle of controlling arbitrary power, liberalism has been shaped by circumstance, picking up new ideas along the way, but never letting them become its entire focus or overwrite the initial purpose. That’s why talk of ‘classical liberalism’ as though it’s something that can be held up as a yardstick for assessing the value of contemporary liberalism is meaningless. To claim there is some pure form of liberalism that others must be subservient to is to miss the point of it.

Liberalism rejects utopias. Or, liberalism does not believe the ends justify the means. This does not mean that liberalism joins conservatism in denying that things can improve or that people can’t make a utopia but more that we cannot know or predict what utopia will be like until we get there. Decreeing that there is only one way, and we must get there elevates the importance of the end above the means, and allows illiberal measures to slip in from the sides. This can happen for good intentions, but it’s easy for those intentions to be corrupted into a Platonic utopia, where everyone is happy and fulfilled because they’re told that this is the only way they can be happy. A liberal society is an open society, and any power within it must be open to question and be able to be shown to be wrong.

Liberalism needs diversity. If the key to liberalism is to reject that there’s any one central authority that can be correct for everyone, then it needs that plurality of voices within it to provide alternatives and to challenge ideas. To come up with a way that’s good for everyone, everyone’s voices must be heard and no one can assume they can speak for someone else with a different experience to them. A diversity of power at different levels is also important – it may be that one solution doesn’t fit everyone and we need to try different things to see which is the best.

Liberalism must persuade and convince. This sounds obvious – what ideology doesn’t want to persuade and convince? – but we must always remember that consent is a vital part of liberalism, and a vital part of making power accountable. This isn’t just about getting their passive support, but rather their active participation in creating a liberal society which has to be built by the people, not for the people by some elite who know what’s best for them. A truly liberal society can make power accountable by ensuring everyone can control it and participate it, but to build that we need to go out and convince people it’s a good idea, not just sit around and tell ourselves how good we are.

I’m sure I’ll talk about these and other issues more over the coming weeks and months, but it’s been an interesting and an enlightening experience. For me, the most interesting part is to frame liberalism as politics about power, and the implications that come from that. I think we are sometimes very simplistic about power and its implications and tend to assume that going in with good intentions is enough to overcome the strategies of embedded and unaccountable power, and on others we become so obsessed with one form of power that we forget that there are other sources and forms of power that we strengthen by pretending they’re not important.

I think modern liberalism is often comfortable talking about freedom, but uncomfortable when it comes to talking about power, especially in admitting that power exists outside the state. This is shown a lot in a belief that shrinking the state is automatically freeing people, ignoring that removing the protection of the state opens them up to the whims of far more unaccountable and arbitrary powers. It’s also seen in the belief that a free market is intrinsically a good thing, not something that has the potential to be good, but also the potential to be corrupted if power within it is allowed to centralise and dominate.

Beyond these, I think we also need to think much more deeply about how liberalism adopts to the threat posed by climate change (and ‘pretending it’s not happening’ is not a response). Is it possible to develop a fuller ecoliberalism in the light of an understanding of the power we can wield over the environment, or do we continue with an environmentalist liberalism that regards it as an issue of policy and management, rather than one of fundamental principle?

These are important issues that we need to address as we move forward, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to them. What I do hope is that those of you who have read this have found it interesting, and that it’s helped to spark off your own thoughts. Liberalism is not something carved in tablets of stone that can never be changed or altered, it’s a living thing that we are free to debate, discuss and persuade others to adopt, and I hope I’ve done a bit to encourage some more debate.

While I’ve always been opposed to the death penalty, I cannot say it has always been for lofty moral reasons.  I’m certainly not opposed to killing in self-defense, and there are absolutely a lot of people who will leave the world significantly improved once they are rotting away in a frequently defiled grave.  (That said, the list of people I would like to see kneel before la raccourcisseuse patriotique is topped by the likes of Henry Kissinger over garden-variety multiple murderers.)  But for many years, my objection to capital punishment was based on a theoretical and principled — some might say downright libertarian — belief that allowing the government to have the power of life and death over its citizens was a very bad idea.  Even today, I think I’m on pretty sound footing saying that I don’t think the state ought to be able to murder me, no matter how much a number of my fellow citizens might want it to.  Public opinion being the fickle thing that it is, one never knows when one might find one’s self on the wrong edge of that particular sword.

Nowadays, though, my objection to capital punishment has become far more rooted in practical matters.  Leaving aside all the ethical questions over how, why, whether, and when we should be able to take a convicted felon’s life, we seem to lack competence in  actually doing it once we have decided to do so.  Of all the hurdles that the death penalty must clear, surely the lowest must be “Is the person we are going to execute actually guilty of the crime for which they have been convicted?”; and yet, even that most basic question has been increasingly difficult to answer in the affirmative.  Since the death penalty was reinstated over forty years ago, 144 death row inmates have been exonerated — which, and let us be frank here because, this being a matter of law, the blunt meaning of certain information is often lost in a misty gauze of obfuscating legal language, means that they were completely and utterly innocent of the heinous crimes for which they were arrested, tried, convicted, and very nearly put to death.  While this is only a small portion of the total number of people on death rows, it is not a small number of innocent human lives, and life, after all, is what we proposed be taken from them.  Since life is the one quality than precludes any repayment once lost, this alarmingly high number has so spooked a number of state governors, ranging in locale from liberal Washington to conservative Illinois, to suspend the death penalty entirely until it can be determined that it is not, in fact, killing innocent people.

Of course, that’s not all — as many as 200 other inmates, whose ultimate fates rest entirely on the thankless effort of capital punishment opponents who are largely unpaid as the state has zero interest in uncovering its own mistakes, are believed to be likewise either entirely innocent, or innocent of the specific charges that sent them to the death house.  In far too many cases, the question before the jury is not “Did this person commit an act of murder, and if so, was it sufficiently heinous to justify execution?”, but “Were the authorities able to secure an easy conviction?”, “Did this person receive an inadequate legal defense?”, or “Was this person found to be scary and African-American by the correct number of police officers?”.  Race, class, and gender disparities in death row populations are egregious enough; add to them the innumerable legal and social barriers to finding a judge and jury who are genuinely impartial regarding the infliction of capital punishment, and it’s clear that the real surprise isn’t that so many death row prisoners are innocent, but that so many of them have been exonerated and freed.

Lately, we have been forced to contend with the further fact that not only are we incompetent at making sure the people we send to death row are actually guilty, but also, we suck at the physical task of executing them, even when we know they’re guilty.  Three months ago in Oklahoma, convicted killer Clayton Lockett, in the elegant phrasing of Dahlia Lithwick, was murdered in the process of being executed; the administration of the cocktail of drugs meant to end him was botched, and his heart exploded before the situation could be set right.  Last night, Arizona inmate Joseph Wood, too, found himself the victim of an incompetently mixed dose of death potions (at least, we assume they were incompetently mixed; in one of the most staggeringly undemocratic rulings in recent history, the Supreme Court has decided that the state does have the right to kill you, but it does not have the obligation to tell you how you’re going to die), and spent an agonizing two hours slowly gurgling to death on a steel gurney.  That this happened is less of a shock than the fact that it doesn’t happen more often, as many states are engaged in a ‘let’s just stick some shit in there until he dies’ experimental phase of the most allegedly humane form of execution.  (Jonah Goldberg, once again proving that he can be wrong about anything, recently tweeted his support for the notion that if you oppose all forms of the death penalty, your opinion on which forms are more or less humane has no value.)

In light of increasing evidence that, in addition to not being able to figure out who to execute or when to execute them, we also are unable to master the process of how to execute them, one is tempted to agree with the conservatives who argue that the government is simply no good at anything.  Oddly, though, the same people who think the Affordable Care Act should be revoked in its entirety because its website wasn’t ready on time, and who think that the SNAP program should be eliminated because there is a 1% fraud rate with food stamp disbursement, don’t seem to agree that it might be wise to rethink the death penalty just because we convict a bunch of innocent people and can’t seem to get the act of poisoning someone to death right.  To the contrary, they think we should be executing more people, guilt or innocence be damned, and if it hurts, good!  This is, of course, because they conceive of capital punishment in caveman terms and feel that watching a convicted criminal shake himself to pieces on a bad dose of chemicals has the same moral value as swatting a mosquito.  To them, we have a vengeance system, not a justice system; the idea that sticking someone full of toxic goop and watching the suffer to death places them on the same level as the Hillside Stranglers makes no sense to them, because they don’t think it’s what you do, it’s who you do it to.  They do not accept the reasoning that a code of laws is meant to reduce the overall amount of suffering in the world, not to double it so that it spreads around to the just and the unjust alike, and they do not credit the belief that the most notable effect of putting murderers to death is to create two dead bodies instead of one.

Unfortunately, they seem to be in the majority, as evidenced by the fact that America, alone among democracies, clings to the death penalty.  So nobody’s really concerned with what I think about our complete incompetence in its, well, execution.  So I’ll just suggest that if the budget-cutting hawks want someplace to start, they might want to consider shaving a quick billion by getting rid of this particular boondoggle before their turn their eyes to the NEA.

(This is the sixth in a series of posts looking in depth at issues from Conrad Russell’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. Previous posts in the series are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and my original post on the book is here.)

Out of all the posts I’ve done on this book, this one is going to have the least of Russell and the most of me in it because while Russell does embrace the idea of green liberalism, he was writing at a time when awareness of environmental issues was a lot lower than it was today, and it was less of a political priority too. I have also been reading Andrew Dobson’s Green Political Thought recently, so it’s possible that ideas from that may creep in too.

One thing that struck me while looking around for some inspiration on this post is that there’s still very little out there that looks at ways to philosophically or theoretically include the environment within liberalism. One can find lots of assertions about how liberalism has a strong environmental record, and lots of talk of green policies implemented by liberals, but as the French philosopher is supposed to have said ‘that’s all very well in practice, but how does it work in theory?’

Russell looks at the idea of sustainability, arguing that liberal attachment to the idea comes from the principle that power is a trust and trusteeship implies stewardship. This stems from the seventeenth century foundations of liberalism with Locke taking the idea from the critique of Charles I’s abuse of that trust. Trusteeship is not just about using power wisely in the present but ensuring that the environment is preserved for the future. This fits in with the principle of controlling power – if power is to exist, what is it’s proper role? We can also bring principles of internationalism and pluralism into this train of thought, perhaps embedded in the phrase ‘think globally, act locally’. It’s undeniable that protection of the environment is a global issue and needs at the very least co-ordination from a higher level, but effective action needs to be carried out at a lower level and with consent, not just something handed down from above.

One point to make here is that while there is much literature and debate on the concept of ecosocialism, there is little or none in developing comparable concepts of ecoliberalism. (Indeed, the term ‘ecoliberalism’ seems to be used as much, perhaps more, as shorthand for ‘economic liberalism’ as it is in an environmental context.) To borrow from Dobson’s formulation, liberalism appears to have no problem with environmentalism as ‘a managerial response to environmental problems, secure in the belief that they can be solved without fundamental changes’ but balks at any attempts to move on from that to a fuller ecologism, which ‘presupposes radical changes’. This difference comes from a different understanding of the scale of the response needed to respond to environmental crisis – in crude terms, green thought holds that the crisis is so severe it can only be thwarted by a fundamental change, while liberalism holds that the crisis is not severe enough to require that level of change.

However, I would question whether liberalism is necessarily as conservative about maintaining the status quo of society as it is sometimes depicted. As we’ve seen already, if we start from Russell’s conception of liberalism as primarily a philosophy of power and accept its radical roots, we can see that liberalism is capable of endorsing widespread change – indeed, Locke wrote to justify a change in power that had seemed completely unthinkable to many before it happened. The key, perhaps, is not the potential radicalism within liberalism but the rejection of utopias and the resistance to the idea of working towards some desired goal and elevating ends above means.

Conversely, there’s also the question of whether green ideology/ecologism is necessarily as authoritarian as it is sometimes depicted. Much of it is based on decentralisation and doing things locally, and there’s a compatibility with liberal ideas of pluralism, internationalism and the need for actions to be taken at the appropriate level. There is an authoritarian streak amongst some greens, and it is part of some strands of green political thought which hold that the necessity for ecological action takes precedence over any other concerns which perhaps eliminates the possibility of a complete synergy of liberalism and green thinking, but I don’t feel it’s entirely impossible.

What, then, might a more developed green liberalism – ecoliberalism – look like? I’m not going to attempt to define an entire new strand of ideology here, but we can look at how some of the principles and themes I’ve looked at already might drive it. I think it’s important for liberalism to be able to not just point to actions to show green credentials but to have a firm philosophical basis for those actions. As we see more and more information about the state of the environment, liberalism needs to be able to react and adapt to changing circumstances, and we do that best when we have firm principles to base that reaction on.

Any ecoliberalism has to address the joint issues of power and harm, and how they apply to the environment. The problem here is that we must confront existential threats, rather than ones that we can directly see. Someone being thrown out of their home as the result of an unjust law applied buy a corrupt government is clearly suffering harm from an unaccountable power, and we can see how that can be rectified and systems changed to ensure it does not happen again. What do we do, though, if that harm is at the end of a long causal chain? Who has exercised the power that forces someone out of their home because of rising sea levels or drought, and how do we make that power accountable? And what if the harm is dispersed more nebulously across a wider population – how do we account for the harm, restriction of freedom and reduction of opportunity caused by a lack of food and water because of climate change?

A potential ecoliberalism faces the same issues as liberalism in dealing with power being exerted globally while systems and structures to control that power and make it accountable haven’t kept up. Identifying the sources of power is not by itself sufficient, but merely a first step to finding the ways to make them accountable and disperse that power. This will likely mean coming up with new systems and new ideas, not just relying on the existing mechanisms we have. This is a radicalism that should not scare liberals, even if the task seems vast, because liberalism has done it before. From overthrowing monarchies to establishing the United Nations, things that would have seemed impossibly radical steps to take have become accepted and normal because people went out and made the case for them, so they could be built on consent.

Consent and persuasion is a key issue for any ecoliberalism to address. I’ve already discussed the importance of consent and the rejection of arbitrarily imposed utopias, and it’s an important issue to address as we look towards the future. Ecoliberalism cannot lay down a certain way of doing things as a goal and insist everyone comes along on the journey to that point. Instead it has to make sure that it goes out and involves everyone in building a future that we can’t know the shape of until we get there. The message of ecoliberalism should be that we can and should protect the planet for the benefit of all life upon it, but there are many ways of doing it and we need to work together to find out which is best, not arbitrarily decide that only one way should be followed.

Yes, I’m being vague, but this is an issue that needs a lot more thought from a lot more people than just one blogger. However, I do believe that we can move beyond a simple liberal environmentalism to a fuller ecoliberalism, and that it’s vital we do so to keep liberalism moving forward, adapting to circumstance and developing as it has done for hundreds of years.

In the past week I’ve written about antibiotics and the rate of technological progress. So when a graph about using antibiotics to measure the rate of scientific progress starts going around the Internet, I take note.

Unfortunately, it’s inexcusably terrible. Whoever wrote it either had zero knowledge of medicine, or was pursuing some weird agenda I can’t figure out.

For example, several of the drugs listed are not antibiotics at all. Tacrolimus and cyclosporin are both immunosuppressants (please don’t take tacrolimus because you have a bacterial infection). Lovastatin lowers cholesterol. Bialafos is a herbicide with as far as I can tell no medical uses.

“Cephalosporin” is not the name of a drug. It is the name of a class of drugs, of which there are over sixty. In other words, the number of antibiotics covered by that one word “cephalosporin” is greater than the total number of antibiotics listed on the chart.

If I wanted to be charitable, I would say maybe they are counting similar medications together in order to avoid giving decades credit for producing a bunch of “me-too” drugs. But that doesn’t seem to be it at all. They triple-count tetracycline, oxytetracycline, and chlortetracycline, even though they are chemically very similar and even though the latter are almost never used (the only indication Wikipedia gives for the last of these is that it is “commonly used to treat conjunctivitis in cats”)

They also leave out some very important antibiotics. For example, levofloxacin is a mainstay of modern pneumonia treatment and the eighth most commonly used antibiotic in the modern market. That’s a whole lot more relevant than cats with pinkeye, but it is conspicuously missing while chlortetracycline is conspicuously present. Maybe it has something to do with levofloxacin being approved in 1993?

(also missing from the 90s and 00s: piperacillin, tazobactam, daptomycin, linezolid, and several new cephalosporins)

I can’t find a real table of antibiotic discovery per decade, so I decided to make some.

Antibiotic classes approved per decade. An antibiotic class is a large group of drugs sharing a single mechanism. For example, penicillin and methylpenicillin are in the same class, because one is just a slight variation on the chemical structure of the other. There are some arguments over which new drugs count as a “new class”. Source is this source.

Anbiotic classes discovered per decade. The first graph lists when classes got FDA approval, this one lists when they were first discovered. Both have different pluses and minuses. This one is likely to undercount recent progress because the chemicals being discovered now haven’t been tested and found to be valuable antibiotics and approved (and so don’t make it onto the graph). But the last one might overcount recent progress, because a drug being “approved” in 2010 might represent the output of 1980s science that just took forever to get through the FDA. On the other hand, it might not – a lot of times people find a drug class in 1980, decide it’s too dangerous, and only find a safer useable drug from the same class in 2010.

Individual antibiotics discovered per decade. Individual antibiotics can still be vast improvements upon previous drugs in the same class. Source is here. I have doubled the number for the 2010s to represent the decade only being half over and so make comparison easier. About half of that spike around 1980 is twenty different cephalosporins coming on the market around the same time.

I conclude that antibiotic discovery has indeed declined, though not as much as the first graph tried to suggest, and it may or may not be starting to pick back up again.

Two very intelligent opinions on the cause of the decline. First, from a professor at UCLA School of Medicine:

There are three principal causes of the antibiotic market failure. The first is scientific: the low-hanging fruit have been plucked. Drug screens for new antibiotics tend to re-discover the same lead compounds over and over again. There have been more than 100 antibacterial agents developed for use in humans in the U.S. since sulfonamides. Each new generation that has come to us has raised the bar for what is necessary to discover and develop the next generation. Thus, discovery and development of antibiotics has become scientifically more complex, more expensive, and more time consuming over time. The second cause is economic: antibiotics represent a poor return on investment relative to other classes of drugs. The third cause is regulatory: the pathways to antibiotic approval through the U.S. FDA have become confusing, generally infeasible, and questionably relevant to patients and providers over the past decade.

A particularly good example of poor regulation from the same source:

When anti-hypertensive drugs are approved, they are not approved to treat hypertension of the lung, or hypertension of the kidney. They are approved to treat hypertension. When antifungals are approved, they are approved to treat “invasive aspergillosis,” or “invasive candidiasis.” Not so for antibacterials, which the FDA continues to approve based on disease state one at a time (pneumonia, urinary tract infection, etc.) rather than based on the organisms the antibiotic is designed to kill. Thus, companies spend $100 million for a phase III program and as a result capture as an indication only one slice of the pie.

And one more voice, which I think of as a call for moderation. This is Nature Reviews Drug Discovery:

Most antibiotics were originally isolated by screening soil-derived actinomycetes during the golden era of antibiotic discovery in the 1940s to 1960s. However, diminishing returns from this discovery platform led to its collapse, and efforts to create a new platform based on target-focused screening of large libraries of synthetic compounds failed, in part owing to the lack of penetration of such compounds through the bacterial envelope.

Sometimes stagnant science means your civilization is collapsing. Other times it just means you’ve run out of soil bacteria.

In a way, this points out the unfairness of using antibiotics as a civilizational barometer. This is a drug class first invented in the 1930s and mostly developed by investigating soil bacteria, which have since been mostly exhausted. Of course progress will be faster the closer to the discovery of this technique you get.

If instead you use antidiabetic drugs – a comparatively new field – this is an age of miracles and wonders, with new classes coming out faster than anyone except specialists can keep up with. If antidiabetic drugs were used as a civilizational barometer, we would be having the Singularity next week.

Liberals are used to hating Rep. Paul Ryan.

And it's not hard to see why. He's an Ayn Rand fanboy who's authored budget after budget that purportedly balances itself by cutting taxes for the rich and cutting spending for the poor even more—to almost comically low levels. Indeed, the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that 69 percent of his latest proposed cuts would come from programs that primarily serve low-and-moderate income households. It's enough that, back in 2012, even Alan Viard of the conservative American Enterprise Institute said that Ryan's cuts would "target lower-income people to a degree that is greater than preferable."

So it was easy to be cynical about Ryan's new poverty plan. Wouldn't it just be more of the same regressive spending cuts and rhetoric about "bootstraps" and "opportunity"? Well, no. Unlike his budgets, Ryan's new plan wouldn't cut safety net spending at all. It would just take the money we're using to fight poverty, and try to use it better. Now, there's still plenty for liberals to criticize—as my colleague Emily Badger points out—but there's also plenty to like.

Here are the three ideas that Democrats should copy-and-paste from Ryan's poverty plan, and try to pass tomorrow.

1. Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for childless workers

It turns out there's a pretty proven way for helping poor people. It's called giving them money. Now, that's not on the agenda here, but the next best thing is: doubling the EITC for non-parents.

The EITC is as simple as it is effective. It's a refundable tax credit that subsidizes wages for low-income workers, which means they get the full value of it regardless of how little income tax they owe. Conservatives like it, because it promotes work. (Although some of them don't like how it creates "lucky duckies" who owe no, or even negative, income tax). And liberals like it, because it does work.

The only problem, as CEA Chair Jason Furman points out, is that it isn't available to more workers. As you can see in his chart below, tax policies, like the EITC and Child Tax Credit, have markedly reduced poverty for parents the past few decades, but have actually increased it for non-parents. That's because childless workers aren't eligible for most of these credits, and have been hurt by other tax changes.

Take the EITC. If you don't have a kid, you can't get much from it: just $503 a year. But, building on similar proposals from President Obama and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Ryan wants to make this much more generous. Specifically, he wants to: 1) double the maximum benefit to $1,006, 2) double the phase-in and phase-out rates, so lower and higher-income people can get it, relative to today, 3) decrease the minimum age from 25 to 21, and 4) send the money out each month, instead of as a lump-sum at the end of the year.

You can see exactly what this would mean for childless workers in the chart below.

This is almost identical to Obama's plan—except for how to pay for it. Ryan wants to take money from social programs he doesn't think are working, ag-subsidies, and, maybe, green energy subsidies. Obama wants to get money from closing both the carried interest loophole, which lets hedge funders pay capital gains rates on what should be ordinary income, and the "S-corporation loophole."

A functioning political system would figure out a compromise.

2. Prison sentencing reform

The U.S. imprisons far more people than any other rich country, in part because we imprison so many non-violent people. But it's not just that we're sending people to jail who we probably shouldn't. It's that we're sending them to jail for so long. This leaves them all-but-unemployable when they do get out—which can push them back into crime.

Why are we doing this? Well, part of the problem is that "mandatory minimum" laws dictate harsh sentences for some non-violent offenders. So part of the solution should be relaxing these laws. At least that's what Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who have sponsored a bill that would give judges more sentencing discretion in non-violent cases, think. Ryan agrees, and Democrats should too.

3. Occupational licensing reform

Nobody ever asked if their hypnotist had a license. Same with their hair-braider. But more and more state governments are making people complete long classes to work in these kind of jobs. This is supposedly about protecting consumers, but it's often about protecting incumbents instead. See, licensing requirements limit competition, which raises wages—one study found as much as 18 percent—at the expense of jobs.

Ryan criticizes these kind of rules, but he doesn't actually propose doing anything about them since they're a state, and not a federal, issue. But as Matt Yglesias points out, the federal government could offer states incentives to streamline these licensing requirements. How big an incentive—and where the money would come from—are tougher questions, but not so tough that Congress shouldn't try.

***

Liberals will never love Paul Ryan, but, if his poverty plan is any indication, they can work with him. Wouldn't that be something for Washington.

I’m not going to be around this weekend, so I’d planned to just not write a blog post until next week. However, I have time to kill and experiences I’d like to try and make sense of, so here I am!

You know that horrible feeling where you really want to cry but for some reason just can’t make it happen? During intense and/or prolonged sensory overload, I get a very similar feeling, a feeling of “I wish I’d just go into meltdown already.” Both, at least to an extent, seem to me to be based on validation; we’re all constantly pressured to hide our feelings for as long as we can help it, so at least if we reach the point where we genuinely can’t, somebody might take notice and give you the support you need. For those of us who are neurodivergent, the insistence on hiding right up until breaking point is tenfold; we’re taught to lie that we’re okay to avoid inevitably being dismissed as over-reacting or even manipulative, and the tell-tale signs that escape anyway are often ignored or misinterpreted by those around us.

Having said that, both feelings are also based on the need for a release, and the frustration of being denied one by your own resilience.

Regular readers will roll their eyes at this sentence but just to make sure everyone’s up to speed, I don’t handle heatwaves well, which I’ve written about here and, well, generally all over the place on my blog and Twitter. Sorry about that. Anyway, with a lot of avoidance, distraction and then guilt about it later, I’ve so far evaded the threat of a meltdown or a full shutdown, but a couple of days ago I seem to have hit some sort of wall and I’ve been in what I can only describe as a constant state of “almost shutdown” ever since; so, I thought, seeing as I still seem to be thinking clearly enough to write a blog post, I might as well talk about it!

This is the weird part, for me; I feel like I’m in shutdown, but I can still motivate myself to write a blog post; in fact, having been fortunate enough to be invited to contribute to a compilation of tips for working with autistic children (EDIT: that piece has since been published on the AutismPlusLandE website and can be found here), this is realistically the second short blog post I’ve written in 24 hours. I’ve yet again developed an insatiable appetite for music as a distraction, but it seems I now can’t blog and listen to music at the same time because that’s too much input; yet I still can’t help but hear all ongoing conversations, which make me anxious because of the loud intertwining voices and chance of potential conflict. My unscripted verbal ability is very variable, sometimes minimal, but I could go to the shops with my parents this morning without incident, albeit quietly and unenthusiastically, and I even made actual conversation happen with Dad just now. I’ve started to find eating difficult but I know when I need to eat and can make myself do so. Sometimes I feel too alert, really oversensitive and overloaded and I can feel the beginnings of the vibrations of a meltdown or shutdown in my arms, but other times I just feel completely wiped out. I’ve been stimming a lot more overall – pacing around; repeating the same few lines of a song over and over again; agitated hand flapping, shushing to myself and covering my ears when I’m really overloading – but in contrast, other times I’m really lethargic. Frankly I’ve been sleeping much better than the neurotypical people around me in this heat because I’m so massively tired that once I manage to take my mind off it I’m just gone, and that makes me feel so guilty for still feeling as completely drained as I do. Talking is so much more difficult, but thinking – and writing – is almost as clear as usual.

In short, it’s a contradictory mess.

I’m thinking of this almost-shutdown as more of a “safe mode”; I don’t exactly feel brilliant, but if I stop using energy where it isn’t essential, passing for neurotypical and the like, and cut off particularly difficult tasks, I can cope relatively well until the actual problem – sometimes all but forgotten in all this – is resolved. The issue in this case is that there isn’t really a definite end point at which the constantly-overloading-thing will go away, which plays into a bit of a fear I have of being trapped too, plus the nerves and conflict-potential and reduced-ability-to-hide-away-on-my-own of a weekend away always makes me anxious beforehand anyway. At the moment, then, I’m so worried it’s going to ruin this weekend, whether it eventually escalates or not.

I’m not literally having a meltdown right now, clearly, but in terms of coping ability I’m running on empty. Something’s got to give, and if it has to be me then I just wish I’d get on with it, instead of being so so scared of it happening in the wrong place at the wrong time.

…Answers on a postcard please?

Tagged: actuallyautistic, Autism, meltdowns, sensory processing, shutdowns, stimming

#806, 31st October 1998

In an age of one-week wonders, “Believe” was a phenomenon – a massive global hit, bossing the charts for close to two months. It has a formidable legacy: as well as a triumphant capstone for Cher’s career, it sets the tone for a surge of dance-pop successes over the next couple of years, and opens the pop career of writer/producer Brian Higgins and his Xenomania team, whose idiosyncratic approach to pop will illuminate the early 00s.

Except none of that matters. “Believe”’s place in history and conversation has been all filled up by that unnatural bend in Cher’s voice in the verses, the moment the public discovered Autotune. So “Believe” stops being a rather good pop song about rubbing your ex’s face in their folly, and instead is treated as Patient Zero in an epidemic that defines or ruins modern pop. All the debate and the disdain over Autotune starts here, and all of it since lands back here. Cher, what have you done?

Before I talk about what “Believe” does specifically it’s worth recapping a couple of very obvious points. First, Autotune is not a standardised technique or a magic wand: it’s a brand – a software package designed for pitch correction. It’s something like Hoover or Google – not the first of its kind, not the last, but the one whose fame struck at the right time to define an unfamiliar category.

And second, “Believe” is not the first number one record to use it. I don’t know what is, either. The point about Autotune (and its ilk) is that when you hear it used like “Believe” uses it, you’re meant to hear it. Ordinarily, it should be invisible to the average ear. “Believe” is the sound of technology being abused, pushed to places it wasn’t designed to go. The standard debate around pitch correction – are singers deceiving the public by disguising their mistakes? – is completely irrelevant to “Believe”. It’s like criticising the bullet time sequences in The Matrix on the grounds that the actors didn’t do their own stunts.

Technology taken beyond its limits just to see what happens – that’s a pretty big part of pop history. From amplification came distortion. From drum machines came the distressed squelch of acid house. And from the discreet touch ups of pitch correction comes Cher’s wonderful cyborg bravura. Once those limits were breached – to the delight of Cher herself and the reported distress of her label, at least until the money came in – anyone could and did jump beyond them.

Let’s go back to 1998 though, and remember what “Believe” sounded like at the time. Not a revolution. For a start, I’d guess most people imagined the pitch-bending effects were Cher using a vocoder, and vocoders were a known quantity. Vocal distortion wasn’t exactly uncommon in 90s dance music, either – The Tamperer’s “Feel It” has plenty of slowing down and snapping back. At the same time, the way Cher was using vocal tricks – suddenly dropping them in to mutate words – was startling and effective. But if you’ve somehow found yourself unfamiliar with “Believe” over the last fifteen years, you might be surprised at how little there is of the Autotune extremity effect – occasional verse words, but its presence on the chorus is far more discreet: the belt-it-out defiance there is barely adulterated Cher, and just what even a technophobe fan of hers might want. Would the song have been a smash without Autotune? Maybe not, but separating the two is foolish: if the technical trickery helped make “Believe” a success, the strength of the song and sentiment is what sustained it.

Even so, it’s worth a final thought about what the pitchbending does for this singer, and this song, specifically. The distorting effect really suits Cher, whose strength as a performer is those deep, showy vowels – she’s already the kind of singer who puts thick comic-book emphasis on words, so going over the top on that is perfect for her. But it also really fits the song. “Believe” is a record in the “I Will Survive” mode of embattled romantic defiance – a song to make people who’ve lost out in love feel like they’re the winners. It’s remarkable that it took someone until 1998 to come up with “do you believe in life after love?”, and perhaps even more remarkable that it wasn’t Jim Steinman, but the genius of the song is how aggressive and righteous Cher makes it sound. There are records sung by divas, and there are records that need divas to sing them: this is the latter – without Cher’s weight of performance and life experience behind it, the dread admonition of “I really don’t think you’re strong enough” might fall flat.

So in this context – using your strength to turn a position of weakness into one of complete victory – what does the Autotune actually do? In a 90s context, without its familiar name and use cases, the vocal effect on “Believe” seems more like a kind of CGI for the voice – something obviously artificial but exciting, a kind of liquefying and reforming of Cher’s singing in the space of a single word. It feels like morphing – that classic 90s CGI trick, used on all manner of distorting alien beasts, failed clones, supernatural possessions and most germanely the gorgeous liquid silver of the T2 robot in Terminator. And that’s how it works here: Cher isn’t only bouncing back from a romantic disappointment, she’s becoming something more than human to do it. No wonder everyone else wanted an upgrade.

If I lived in Gaza I would...

If I lived in Gaza I would what? If I lived in Gaza I wouldn't be me. I certainly wouldn't be a middle-aged British Liberal Democrat.

So there was something silly about David Ward pondering what he would do if he lived in Gaza. Whatever that conflict there is about, it isn't about you, David.

Still, David has not been half as silly as some of his critics. Last night Conservatives took to Twitter to demand his instant expulsion from the party:"

One bladder-on-a-stick called Nadhim Zahawi has even written to the Metropolitan Police calling for David to be prosecuted.

If anything,  it is Zahawi who should be prosecuted - for wasting police time.

And David, in his cack-handed way, was making an important point: anti-terrorist and police operations can be counterproductive. We have examples of that - internment without trial in Northern Ireland; police us of stop-and-search powers - much closer to home.

You may not agree with these arguments when they are used, but it must surely be possible for someone to advance them without being expelled or prosecuted.

One amusing thing this affair is done is show us that the right is just as politically correct as the left. Force them to encounter an argument they don't like and don't normally here and they will nor argue back: they will try to silence you.

You can tell something odd is going on when Spiked emerges as the voice of reason. Under the headline "Let Lib Dems commit 'tweetcrimes'" it says:

David Ward, Lib Dem MP for Bradford East, is not sharpest of political tools, but his tweeting over the past 24 hours has been an expression of his political views. ‘The big question is - if I lived in #Gaza would I fire a rocket? - probably yes’, he wrote on Tuesday. And then in a follow-up tweet, he tried on Kennedy cliché for size: ‘Ich bin ein #palestinian - the West must make up its mind - which side is it on?’ 

It’s not big, and it’s definitely not clever, but it is a genuine expression of Ward’s political views: he thinks Palestinians are being oppressed by the Israeli state (or ‘the Jews’, as he referred to it last year), and he thinks the West needs to come down hard on Israel. So far, so right on. 

But what has been astonishing is the response of the Tories. Not only have they, like Labour, sought to make a big deal of Ward’s flight of imaginative sympathy after which he concludes that he, too, would be firing rockets at Israel if he was David Ward born in Gaza, now battling Israel, rather than David Ward born in Lincoln, and now boring in Bradford. No, the Tories have gone one depoliticising step further and suggested that Ward’s mal mots are not only a bit simple; they’re possibly illegal.

Adam Gorightly's new book is hardcore. The most battle-hardened historian would blanch at writing a history of Discordian Society.

As you can imagine with a society whose major contribution to world culture was a conspiracy called Operation Mindfuck, telling accurate stories of their origin was not their thing. Discordians thought it was far more useful and enlightening to make stuff up. That this book exists is, frankly, something of a miracle. But it was clear from his earlier biography of Kerry Thornley that if anyone was going to pull this off, it would be Adam Gorightly.


This is a large-sized, coffee table book full of reproductions of original Discordian Society documents, the Holy Grail of which is a complete reproduction of the long assumed lost first edition of the Principia Discordia. Only five copies of this were ever made, ironically on the photocopier of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who would later suspect co-author Kerry Thornley of involvement in the JFK assassination.

This first edition reveals how much of later Discordian lore appeared fully formed at the start, most notably the Law of Fives. What is particularly interesting to readers of Robert Anton Wilson is seeing his influence appear after this point, bringing with him concepts such as the 23 Enigma and Timothy Leary's reality tunnels.

This is a treasure-trove of odd revelations. Who knew, for example, that a Discordian had once gone by the alias Rev. Jefferson Fuck Poland?  I had never taken seriously the claim that Discordians were responsible for introducing  the two-fingered peace sign, as adopted en masse by hippies in the 1967 Summer of Love, because this sounded too much like the sort of thing they would make up. Yet here we have proof that the Discordians were promoting the sign in 1965.

I tend to see Discordianism's development as akin to a musical genre where the real creative fire occurred at the very start, when people were still working in the dark and clueless about they were manifesting. Later developments, such as the Church of the Sub Genius, seem like a form of diet-Discordianism to me - great for what they are, and clued-up enough to preserve the good stuff, but ultimately restrained by being reproductions of earlier maps. So what Gorightly has assembled here is, to my eyes, very precious.

Historia Discordia is out now for £15 (Amazon UK / Amazon US). For those who don't like to use Amazon, try BookDepository which offers free worldwide shipping.

Post-Spoilerocalyptic.


I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  Banalities first:  A well-crafted film.  Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as "Maurice").  Nicely acted by the principles. 

Now.

In The Dark Ape Rises, the 'good' ape leader is Caesar and the 'bad' ape leader is Koba.

Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans.  Koba is the nasty one who can't let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn't trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.

Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome.  Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don't help him up and dust him down.  No.  You stand on his neck.

Here's Koba, riding straight at the enemy (who are armed with rocket launchers by this point) while simultaneously holding (and firing) two machine guns instead of the reins of his horse.  Caesar never does anything this fucking spectacularly brave and principled in the entire course of the movie.

It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand.  She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind... which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.

Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or - horror of horrors - winning.  You're allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure.  That's why Rosa Luxemburg - through no fault of her own, may I stress - is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.

There's been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well.  Bollocks.  Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy.  He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.

Koba is certainly a bastard.  You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar's benevolent dictatorship.  As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil.  The radical is, by definition, an 'extremist', and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.

Caesar isn't the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history.  'Koba', you'll no doubt remember, was a nickname once used by Stalin.  Hence the title of Martin Amis' truculently inconsequential book Koba the Dread.

It will be noticed that, after his insurrection succeeds, Koba immediately sets about herding humans into a gulag, killing any apes who defy his authority, and locking up any potential dissidents who may be too loyal to Caesar's old regime - presumably to await show trials.  His revolt takes on the inevitable contours of any radical change - as told by the drearily predictable liberal view of politics.

Koba is, once again, the revolutionary as maniacal murderer, as traitor and tyrant, as cheerleader for slaughter, as the foaming radical who really just wants power.  This characterisation sits perfectly happily alongside the efforts made in every other bit of the script to indicate nuance and complexity - precisely because, in the mainstream liberal view of politics, the depiction of the firebrand as instant tyrant is considered a nuanced and complex view (instead of, say, a childish, smug, ahistorical oversimplification).

There is simply no need for the text to explain how and why Koba goes from his entirely reasonable mistrust and hatred of humans (see below) to his conspiracy, his bid for power, his betrayal of his old comrade Caesar.  It is so self-evident to this way of thinking that it requires no explanation.  The opponent of 'peace' and 'stability' (i.e. Things As They Are) is, by definition, also the tyrant-in-waiting.  The radical is, by definition, a psychopath.

But, until he fails to die the hero and thus lives long enough to see himself become the villain, Koba is objectively a better judge of what's going on that Caesar... or, apparently, the writers.

We're supposed to be watching a story about 'two tribes' who mistrust and fear each other, with 'extremists' on both sides who hate the other side unreasoningly.  The idea is the standard liberal accounting for inter-group rivalry and violence.  Ethnic differences + fear + extremism x misunderstanding = war.  But in this movie, the equivalence between the two groups and their responses - which we are clearly meant to take for granted - is always false.

On the human side, the warmonger characters hate the apes because they started the Simian Flu which wiped out most of the human race (a view explicitly shown to be wrong and unfair by another human character), or because "they're animals" (thus bigotedly rejecting the apes' claim to fair treatment by disputing their sentience).  That's it.  On the ape side, by marked contrast, the warmonger characters - chiefly Koba - hate the humans because they kept apes in cages (true) and tortured them (true) and mutilated them (true) and experimented upon them (true), and because they're dangerous owing to their enormous stockpile of deadly weapons (true).  The initial contact between Caesar's groups of apes and the human survivors in San Francisco comes when humans trespass upon ape terrirory (albeit unwittingly) and immediately shoot an ape without provocation, nearly killing him.

In measured response to this, Caesar decides upon a show of strength and a warning.  The apes turn up on the humans' doorstep and say "don't come back".  Whereupon the 'goodie' human character - Malcolm (played by some guy who isn't Mark Ruffalo) - goes back into the apes' forest, this time fully aware that he is trespassing and unwelcome.  Okay, he's trying to prevent an attack upon the apes by Dreyfuss (the boss of the survivors, played by Gary Oldman)... but his aim is to get permission for his team to work on the dam situated in the apes' forest, and get power flowing back to San Francisco. Malcom tacitly accepts the premise that the apes must agree to human terms or be annihilated.  He doesn't like it (you can tell because he frowns a lot) but he accepts it.  He never gives any apparent thought to challenging Dreyfuss' authority.  There doesn't appear to be any semblance of democracy in the human camp.  Malcolm certainly never raises the possibilty of asking the people what they think.  The film seems to work on the assumption that the ordinary people are a fearful mass who alternate between mindless panic and obedience to the guy with a megaphone... at least until they get too hungry, whereupon they will tear him to pieces.  (An essential corollary of the 'two tribes' paradigm is that people are 'tribal' in the worst and most racist sense of that term, i.e. a cowering mass of ignorant savages waiting on the word of the Chief.)  So Malcolm undertakes to explain to the apes that they must let humans fix their dam.

Gee, giving humans power.  What could possibly go wrong?

Let me ask you something.  If you were living in the ruins of a planet destroyed by the technology of a specific group of people, and that same group of people had kept you in cages, tortured you, experimented upon you, maimed you, dissected your kids and hunted you almost to extinction (or wrecked the ecosystem to the point where your people found it increasingly hard to survive), and that group of people was powerless... wouldn't you feel safer?  And would you think it a tremendously attractive and sensible idea to let said group of people add a constant source of electrical power to their already existing stockpile of high-tech weaponry?

Okay, so I get that the human survivors in San Francisco are not specifically the same humans who are personally responsible for all that stuff... but the logic of the film depends upon that 'two tribes' thing I was just talking about, and thus depends upon the idea that we're seeing two groups with essentialised and generalised features who face each other across a chasm.  By that logic, Koba's mistrust of humans as a group, or a race, is entirely reasonable.  It's not how I look at humans (balls to collective responsibility - most of what's wrong with this planet is the work of a minority and their system), but it seems to be how the filmmakers do - and Koba has, quite reasonably, picked up on this facet of how his world works.

At the point where Koba tries to kill Caesar, Caesar is handing the humans access to electricity.  Caesar is himself a despot, albeit a benevolent one from 'our' point of view (i.e. he is sympathetic to humans and wants peace... or, to put it another way, he's a reasonable negotiating partner 'we' can get round the table with... because that's all 'we' ever want, right?).  When Koba shoots Caesar, it isn't like he's stepping that far out of the established ape custom of settling disagreements over status through fights.  Yes, he's violating the commandment 'APE NOT KILL APE', but then Caesar is endangering the lives of the apes by helping the humans.

Let's be honest here.  The humans, at this point, have a huge stockpile of deadly weapons, no semblance of a liberal democratic political structure, urgent needs for land and food, a miserable track record when it comes to apes, newly restored electricity and - as is soon shown - contact with other groups of armed humans!  They are, by any sane definition, a deadly threat to the apes.  It's ludicrous to pretend otherwise, even within the schema of the text.  (Outside the schema of the text, such pretence depends upon complete ignorance of how armed modern Westerners behave towards small groups whom they consider 'primitive' and who happen to live on land they want.)  Koba is, sadly, absolutely right in his judgement.  It's all very well to shake one's head and say, echoing the movie's familiar tagline, "it was our last hope for peace"... but that view depends upon the idea that a few compromisers on either side can efface that fact that one group is the long-established historical oppressor and now, once again, has access to overwhelming strength.

In the end, Apefall is just another new reiteration of a very old American story: the struggle over land, with the role of Americans taken by humans ("there's humans and then there's Commanches") and the role of 'Indians' taken by apes.  In the old days, the narrative was fairly simple and crude.  Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties.  These days we're more nuanced.  Now it's Guilt-Ridden Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties, some of whom are almost as reasonable as 'us'.

(BTW - if you think I'm being racist when I compare the apes to, say, Native Americans... well, it was the film that started it.  I'm just running with their logic.  And you should note that it is a racial logic deeply embedded in the franchise.  The original Charlton Heston movie is a 'satire' of the civil rights movement - via an employment of the 'world turned upside down' trope - in which black people are implicitly represented as apes.)

In yet another way, the idea that the two sides are balanced is untrue.  The film tries to put roughly equivalent characters on either side of the human/ape divide.  But Caesar's counterpart is Malcolm and Koba's is Dreyfuss.  So on the ape side we have a well-meaning leader, and on the human side we have a well-meaning subordinate (thus effacing the important reality of power in favour of the value of intentions - a classic liberal mistake).  On the ape side we have a psychopathic killer driven by personal ambition versus a human warmonger who is actually shown to be a well-intentioned leader.  Dreyfuss wants to save the human race and is humanised via a scene where he cries over photos of lost sons.  Thus an evil revolutionary is pitted against a misguided patriot - we even see Dreyfuss' old photos from his army days in the desert.

Even as the film strives to create a morality play about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, and there being faults on both sides, etc, it falls back into ideology.  It falls back into the classic ideological demonology of fearful liberalism: those who strive stumblingly for compromise versus the vicious zealot.

Koba is outnumbered.  He has to shoulder all the burden of radicalism, and thus become a monster, while the rest of the protagonists - even the most bastardly of the humans - get at least partially absolved.

In Ape Trek into Darkness, as always, the oppressed are held to a higher standard of morality, forgiveness and forbearance than the oppressors (or, in this case, the erstwhile oppressors).

Koba's great crime is that he refuses the onus of greater moral responsibility foisted upon him by his former oppressors (and the filmmakers).  He quite rightly tells them to go fuck themselves, and the pleas for peace they bring too late to the table, alongside their quest for back-up and juice.  And then he starts fighting against what is, as I say, by any sane definition, a proven and deadly threat (I'm sure someone, if the roles were reversed, would call it a 'clear and present danger' and authorise drone strikes against it).

I bow to no-one in my loathing of Stalin.  He was arguably the most despicable human being who ever lived.  He is a smear of blood and shit on the good name of socialism.  But he was the embodiment of class forces, and rose to power on his opportunistic co-optation of those class forces, not on a wave of charisma and evil stemming directly from his ideology or fanaticism.  He was the most ruthless and well-placed representative of the bureaucratic layer in the Soviet government which filled a gaping hole in the power structure after the Russian Civil War (which was forced on the Bolsheviks by Western capitalist aggression) decimated the Russian working class, thus gutting the soviet system.  He wasn't the bogey man.  He wasn't Bolshevism in its true and terrible form, or any such ahistorical nonsense.  He was the head of a bureaucratic state capitalist government (in which capital still existed, but as an exploitative relation between the worker and the state) which put Russia through a speeded-up and concentrated form of capitalist development and industrialisation.  Russia did in the space of a couple of decades what the European capitalist powers had taken a couple of centuries to do.  Stalin matched them point for point.  All the horrors of primitive accumulation (the early stage of capitalist development) are represented in the Stalin years.  In the West they were called the enclosures, in Stalin's Russian it was called 'collectivisation'.  It was essentially the same thing: the state-enforced destruction of feudal property and the peasantry - and its transformation into capital of one kind or another - leading to dispossession, famine, the theft of common lands, the severing of people from direct access to agricultural production, and the forcing of people into wage labour.  Stalin engineered terrible famines.  The British Empire did exactly the same thing in Ireland and India.  In Stalin's Russian you had the horrors of the Gulag; in Europe and America you had the horrors of plantation slavery, child labour and the industrial revolution.  The state owned and controlled all capital in Russia, and it was administered by a class of bureaucrats.  In rising European capitalist formations, the state played a less direct but no less crucial role in enforcing the 'rights' of private capital, and financially supporting the new system.  Both Russia and the West engaged in ruthless imperialism to acquire territory, manpower and resources to feed into the system.  If Russia was 'totalitarian', the Britain of Pitt was no democracy. Stalin was a monster because he was the dictator of a state engaged in industrialisation at breakneck speed.  All the horrors of emergent capitalism were squeezed into the tight space of the rule of one man.  Stalin is horrific because he is Russia's version of all the capitalists and prime ministers of Europe, fused into one bloated personage.  That isn't to excuse him, any more than to point out that capitalism is a systemic evil is to excuse Rupert Murdoch, but it does put him in context.  He may have been a psychopath, but millions didn't die solely because he was, and it wasn't Bolshevism that made him one.  It was the logic of capital, albeit state capital.  Industrialisation, squidged into a sliver of historical time, because - as Stalin himself pointed out - of the need for the Soviet Union to compete militarily and economically with the Western capitalist powers.  (This, by the way, is why I find it beyond comprehension how anyone can fail to see the state capitalist nature of Stalin's Russia - if it competed economically with capitalist powers in a capitalist world system, how can it possibly have been anything other than some form of capitalism?)

(Quite apart from anything else, if we allow Koba the Ape to stand for Koba the Dread, this does the Dread a massive favour.  Stalin was a nonentity and a workhorse in the early Bolshevik party, who played little significant role in the Russian Revolution, contrary to his own subsequent mythmaking.  He certainly never charged at rocket launchers.)

It is, by the way, explicitly capitalism that the humans want to bring back.  The dam is a symbol for holding back the tide of untamed and destructive nature (and/or time), and a vast engineering project of modernity that reshapes the natural world to human needs, and a way of providing water and power to settlements and thus making 'civilisation' possible.  By 'civilisation', in Planet of the Apes 2.2: Age of Extrinction, we are to understand capitalism.  The humans explicitly talk about wanting to bring back the life they once had.  In other words, they want ourworld back - the very world that caused its own downfall in the first place.  The film makes it aesthetically explicit that the return of capitalism is aimed at.  When the humans manage to get their dam working again, and thus get power to flow back to San Francisco, they celebrate in the reactivated shell of a petrol station, and people dance through a relit shopping mall.  Dreyfuss celebrates by turning on his expensive Apple rectangle for the first time in years and looking through his My Pictures folder.

It's only to be expected.  Popular movies are currently absolutely stuffed with the motif of the hero and/or the world fallen and trying to arise.  You don't need to be a particularly subtle critic to work out what that's all about (though, needless to say, it escapes most of the professionals).  It stretches from Bond and Batman recovering their mojos, to the de rigeur device of the fallen paradise that must be reclaimed (Oblivion, Elysium, The Hobbit, etc).  It is a current inflection of the perennially-popular apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movie.  The Apeit: The Desolation of Koba is no exception.  It fits into the currently popular trope in a way similar to Game of Thrones, with its mantra "Winter is coming".  A great crisis has come or is approaching (Game of Apes manages to at least make the crisis something of our doing... though there is something to be said for GRRM's great inevitable cycles of boom and slump that helpless people get caught in).   In both, the legions of the disavowed will swamp us along with the glaciers or germs of doom.  We squabble about the political organisation of structures that will soon be rendered obsolete by waves of inexplicable and uncanny and unappeasable apocalypses that steadily approach.  The White Walkers are the unknowable shock troops of the big freeze that will paralyse the clockwork and the engines that we currently rely on.  The apes, similarly, are the post-apocalyptic hordes, resentful and out for revenge.  Again, in the midst of the biggest recession since the 30s, none of this is especially hard to parse.

Of course, by enjoying Koba's brave rebellion, I am only really doing something the text wants me to.  The moral rhetoric of the narrative may not support him (even though the facts of the plot do), but the whole aesthetic logic of the film is predicated upon him and his war.  We go to see films like this for the same reason that we recessionitizens go to see so many zombie films.  We want to see the world smashed up by the monsters in a state of riotous assembly and insurrectionary carnival.  It connects with a deep-seated desire to see the world turned upside down.  Of course, the dominant ideology demands that the carnival of the oppressed be curtailed in salutary fashion.  But even so...

I wrote here about how attractive villains are, about how they often appear to have an objectively better moral and political position than the goodies (who are often only good by default because they represent established power structures and their violence is institutionalised), about how seeing the monsters rip the world to bits can be very thrilling if you're not keen on the world as it stands, about how the villains shoulder the burden of perpetual defeat so that we can learn our lesson of obedience... but also so that we can get a charge from their rebellion against the status quo, and about how the evil objections of the villain often represent a garbled form of protest against the established order.

For instance, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise represents - like so many villains - the distant and distorted echo of the snarl of radical anger.  He is himself thoroughly unsympathetic, as Koba comes to be when he starts murdering other apes.  However, even thoroughly unsympathetic villains like Voldemort (who, as the snobbish fuhrer of the magic-Nazis, is not someone I’d vote for) tend to represent the - to use a hackneyed phrase - ‘return of the repressed’.  And repression is political.  That which is oppressed is also repressed in mainstream discourse.  Voldemort can ascend because he takes advantage of faultlines in Wizarding society that reveal deep, structural injustice and hypocrisy, ie the ethnic cleansing of the giants, the economic ghettoisation of the Goblins, the resolutely undemocratic and unaccountable nature of Wizarding government, the enslavement of the Elves, etc.  Now, J.K. Rowling never really addresses these problems.  She occasionally has goodie characters display a bad conscience about them (ie Hermione’s patronising SPEW campaign and Dumbledore’s occasional remarks to Harry about how badly Wizards have treated other races) but the addressing or remedying of these injustices is NEVER made crucial as a precondition of saving the Wizarding World.  The Wizards never really have to face the consequences of these injustices, or change them.  Harry & Co fight to reinstate the status quo that includes all these structural injustices.  The happy ending involves no emancipation of the Elves, no change in Wizarding attitudes to giants (indeed, Rowling makes it clear that the Wizards are essentially right about the respectively servile and primitive nature of these races!)  The happy ending involves no real tackling of the deep strain of racial prejudice about bloodlines.  The happy ending involves one of the goodies being ‘appointed’ the new (unelected) Minister of Magic.  Etc.  It’s clear what this means.  The only person fighting to change the Wizarding World was Voldemort.  The baddie.  The goodies were all fighting to, a few tweaks aside, keep it exactly the same.  This is why I have a sneaking sympathy even with Voldemort.  He was, at least, trying to change things.  Like Koba, he represents the deep-seated assumption in capitalist media culture that any attempt at radical social change must be, by definition, evil: fanatical, twisted, dangerous, pathological, selfish, etc.  Voldemort doesn’t espouse values I’d embrace… but I do feel a certain kinship even for him, as a figure within the text.  Because he’s the guy who says ‘this society is broken and we need to radically change it’.  His ideas about how it’s broken are noxious, but that’s because he’s a bourgeois echo - distorted and distant - of anyone who wants radical change.  It’s like with Shinzon: he’s personally vile, but - being the leader of a slave rebellion which confronts the oppressing empire - he’s also a reflection (in a shattered mirror) of Spartacus.

Similarly, in Koba and the Deathly Humans, Koba is the only one fighting to radically change the status quo, the only one with a practical grasp of what needs to be done to keep the apes safe from the danger they clearly face, and the first one with the guts to pick up weapons and fight.  If he has to trick the rest of the apes into following him, that just shows that the filmmakers are working on the same assumption about the 'ordinary' apes as they made about the 'ordinary' humans: they're sheep.

The passivity of the masses is a theme right the way through the film.  There are a quartet of Alpha Males (of different styles) making all the running.  The climax of the film depends upon two seperate sets of Alpha Males duking it out between them.  (Incidentally, the only women in this film are... well... incidental.  Malcolm has a girlfriend who is there to give people antibiotics and look sad and be supportive; Caesar has a mate who is there to have babies, be ill and then get better - much to his relief.)

It's possible that the Alpha Males, the submissive Beta Males and the Obedient Females are there on both sides as part of the declared strategy of showing the humans and apes mirroring each other, of showing how much they have in common.  If so, its not really exceptional in terms of being reactionary and reductionist and biological determinist - these sorts of assumptions are widespread, especially in narrative culture - but it is noticeable how they do it without so much as whispering about evolution or common descent.  Presumably this is from fear of incurring the wrath of America's Christian Creationist hordes (just goes to show how seriously they take ideological sensitivities when they sense box office impacts). 

On a related issue, I personally found it irritating how undecided the filmmakers were about how to present ape culture.  On the one hand they want the apes to be 'advanced' and human-like in their social organisation, yet they also want them to act like stereotypical apes.  So you end up with a mish-mash.  The apes are shown to have a literate culture, with written words and sign language alongside the few who can speak, and with a school for the little 'uns - complete with anachronistic lessons in chalk on an improvised blackboard (insert blackboard jungle joke here).  They have midwives, buildings in their settlement, etc.  Yet they have none of the broadly egalitarian social structure that you tend to see in real hunter-gatherer groups untouched or unmenaced by exterior threats.  Of course, they're apes rather than human hunter gatherers... but then, with such intrusions of human social structure into the apes' society (including such wholly anachronistic ones as school and the nuclear family), why not also bring in egalitarianism?  The answer lies in the overarching view of people as 'tribal' in the negative sense.

It's this view that ultimately underwrites all the stuff about Koba the demagogue, swaying the apes to become his whooping pawns in a race war.  If people - hairy or smooth - are hierarchical, sheeplike, aggressive, fearful, passive, prone to obedience, naturally separated into Alpha Males and their subjects... and if they're prone to this because of their essentially apelike nature... then no wonder attempts to rebel against the status quo always end up with someone like Koba taking charge and becoming the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.

This is the logic of the work, and it has never been more necessary for the capitalist culture industries to peddle this message than at times of crisis.  If you think I'm being paranoid, then you're missing neoliberalism's skill at regulating opinion using marketised ideology.

I hear that Andy Serkis (who plays Caesar in this film via motion capture) is going to be doing a CGI/mo-cap version of Animal Farm.  Another retelling of that simplistic fable that puts an allegorical revolution into the world of the beasts, showing the inevitable course of that revolution from liberation to tyranny, from the charisma of the leader to the totalitarian rule of the dictator.  In the film I just saw, the animal/tyrant is indirectly named after Stalin.  In Animal Farm, the animal/tyrant who represents Stalin is called Napoleon.

Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin.  The inevitable gravediggers of revolution* - as long as you ignore all context and look upon them as ahistorical bogeymen.

You see, you animals, where trying to change the world gets you every time? 



*It's actually a bit more complicated than that in the case of the real Julius Caesar.

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July 21st, 2014: This Wednesday the final issue of The Midas Flesh comes out! You can read a preview here, and catch up with all you missed at midasflesh.com! – Ryan

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July 22nd, 2014: DID YOU KNOW: I LEARNED A LOT ABOUT SHARKS WHILE WRITING THIS? This Wednesday (tomorrow!) the final issue of The Midas Flesh comes out! You can read a preview here, and catch up with all you missed at midasflesh.com! – Ryan

Look, here’s a picture of my party’s leader being impressive with a world leader:
Yes, that’s certainly an impressive sight of him looking not at all uncomfortable with a major world figure. Or it’s a picture of him doing a weird thing with his hands while talking to Mitt Romney. That’s all right, though, as I’ve definitely got a picture of him looking confident and relaxed while President Obama is hanging on his every word, and definitely not looking past him on his way out of the room:
I only bring this up because apparently Lib Dem Voice and others think this is meaningful political commentary:

Compare and contrast. pic.twitter.com/yDCqau4CYw

— Adam Shaw (@Shawzybaws) July 23, 2014

Ho ho ho! Ed Miliband’s looking awkward again, isn’t it hilarious! There’s no way he’s just having a serious discussion with one of the world’s most powerful people in a time of several international crises and, by applying basic common sense, has realised it’s not a time to look relaxed and jovial.

When they said ‘politics is showbiz for ugly people’ they didn’t mean that it needed its own version of Heat magazine or the Sidebar of Shame, yet that’s what a lot of supposed commentary has descended to. ‘Hey look! In this one picture we’ve plucked out of the thousands that were taken of them yesterday, politician X looks a bit awkward! That fits our narrative, so we’ll print it!’ is merely the political equivalent of ‘Are Celebrities X and Y about to break up? Look at these pictures of them out together, where we’ve only chosen the ones where they’re looking away from each other or not smiling to prove the point we’ve already decided. By the way, there’s absolutely no way that they’re looking angry or glum because what they thought was some private time has been disturbed in order for us to fill some space and attract some clicks.’

Cherry-picking photos to make a fatuous point makes showbiz journalism look stupid, and if political commentary is going to go the same way, then we might as well give up now and replace voting with asking who’s got the best diet for fitting back into your Parliamentary suit after a recess.

But to be fully equal opportunity, here’s a picture of David Cameron hovering awkwardly in the background while Obama plays table tennis. Happy now?

There are sometimes diminishing returns in publishing material that a long-dead writer never saw fit for publication; sometimes, when the work is put away in a drawer for the rest of the creator's life, it is the right decision. Adam Roberts has written of his disappointment with this publication of Tolkien's translation of Beowulf, though I actually found there was enough here to keep me entertained. As well as a 200-page prose translation of the poem itself - which did give me some new insights, in particular in that Tolkien is not at all shy about the Christian content - we get Tolkien's lecture notes on the first two-thirds of it, which are full of fascinating and wide-ranging Anglo-Saxon speculation (Scyld Scefing's name points to ancient corn cults, for instance).

We also get "Sellic Spell", a reworking of the Beowulf story by Tolkien to get nearer what he would have liked the original version to be - a very interesting riff on ancient tales, which I think is in the same respectful spirit of innovation as, say, the 2005 Icelandic version starring Gerald Butler, or the 2007 Robert Zeleckis animated version whose script was co-written by Neil Gaiman. It's an interesting insight into how Tolkien conceived of story-telling, and a snapshot, or a series of snapshots, of his own take on the poem that inspired his best known academic work and clearly lay behind his writing.

Let's be clear, Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation is far superior, but also veers a little further from the original meaning, if creatively so. Here's a good example from lines 286-289 of the original, where the watchman on the beach resiles with dignity from his initially hostile reaction to Beowulf's arrival:

Weard maþelode,                ðær on wicge sæt,
ombeht unforht:                "æghwæþres sceal
scearp scyldwiga                gescad witan,
worda ond worca,                se þe wel þenceð."

Heaney's translation:

Undaunted, sitting astride his horse,
The coast-guard answered, "Anyone with gumption
And a sharp mind will take the measure
Of two things: what’s said and what’s done.["]

Tolkien:

The watchman spake, sitting there upon his steed, fearless servant of the king: ["]A man of keen wit who takes good heed will discern the truth in both words and deeds[."]

Tolkien's lecture notes, recasting the spoken sentence:

"A man of acumen, who considers things properly, will naturally show discernment in judging words and deeds."

Note the differences:

1. Tolkien's translation is potentially ambiguous as to whether the watchman or the steed is the fearless servant of the king! His "fearless" is anyway not as good as Heaney's "undaunted", in that the original "unforht" clearly refers to the relationship between the speaker and Beowulf; Heaney's coast-guard is standing up to a suspicious bunch of armed men, Tolkien's watchman is just generally not frightened. And the king, mentioned by Tolkien, is not mentioned in this part of the original, though I guess he's implied as the employer of an "ombeht"; Heaney takes it as read that we understand who the coast-guard works for. (I am tickled by the link to Dutch "ambtenaar", meaning "civil servant", which comes from "ambacht", which now means something different but was originally the same word as "ombeht".)
2. Tolkien is consciously archaic: "spake" instead of "answered"; "steed" instead of "horse". Heaney uses the good colloquial word "gumption" rather than "keen wit" or "acumen" to translate the standard that the coastguard sets himself.
3. In both the translation and the lecture notes, Tolkien dissipates the force of the final line's "worda ond worca" - "words and deeds" is not bad in English, but doesn't have the same ring as "what's said and what's done"; more importantly, the fact that the sentence starts with "æghwæþres" flags that there's a choice involving two things coming up (yeah, I am simplifying a bit), and Tolkien's "both words and deeds" tagged on at the end loses that emphasis, whereas Heaney builds up to it and delivers a punchline.

Of course, it's deeply unfair to make the comparison. Heaney produced this towards the end of a long career, shortly after winning the Nobel prize; Tolkien knocked this off as a teaching aid in the 1920s, years before he started on his best known writing, and with no intention of ever publishing it. We Tolkien completists will not be too disappointed by it.

People have asked me if I have any particular thoughts on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription plan, and whether my own work will be on it (and one presumes, on other similar subscription services, like Oyster and Scribd). So, some thoughts:

While one should never say never, I don’t anticipate any of my novels being on subscription services in the immediate future, no. One, Macmillan, who has published all my novels to date, hasn’t started working with any of the subscription services. Speaking with no direct knowledge whatsoever of their corporate thinking on the matter, it seems unlikely to me that they will, unless there’s a clear economic benefit to them in doing so. Two, even if Macmillan decides to opt in, contractually they’ll probably have to ask my permission first — at which point I have to decide whether there is a clear economic benefit in doing so.

And is there a clear economic benefit to me putting my novels on a subscription service right now? At the very least, some early analysis suggests there would be a better economic benefit for me than for many self-published authors, thanks to the fact I am “traditionally published” — an irony for those who still labor under the impression that publishing is an “us vs. them” sort of business — but I have to say I would want to see some actual, useful data on how writers actually get paid from subscription services before I’d want to jump in with the novels.

Part of that hesitation is based on the experience of musicians with their own streaming services, such as Spotify or Rhapsody — many musicians earn substantially less from streaming than from sales, and unlike musicians, most writers can’t really try to make money from touring (some could. Not many). Now, to be clear, early reports say that the subscription services credit a full sale after someone reads 10% or so of a work (although how much a “full sale” counts for seems to be contingent on several factors, including whether one is “traditionally published” or not — again, see the link above).

That’s not bad. But I’m less than entirely convinced that there won’t be near-immediate pressure to push that compensation downward; say, by trying to cut into the money credited for a “full sale,” or by pushing back the percentage of a book read before a “full sale” to 25% or 33%, or by any other number of ways which I can’t now think of off the top of my head but which the subscription model will in some way enable. For me the question is not if such a push will happen, because it will. The question is when.

So the question becomes: Why would I want to do that?

(Note: This question is asked not in the “why would I want to do something that stupid?” sense but in the “so, what’s in it for me?” sense. As is the next question –)

Why would I, as a writer and a businessperson, want to enable a model that introduces another layer of opportunity for others to drive down the amount I can make from my work? The uninformed may fulminate about how publishers are parasitic middlemen, but in point of fact my publisher does a lot of work for me: Editing, copy-editing, art and design, marketing and publicity and distribution. I argue with my publisher on what my cut of the takings should be (these are called negotiations) but there is an exchange of services. So what is the exchange of service a subscription model would offer me? Does it offer enough to compensate for another potential slice to be taken out of my income? Does it offer enough to replace or at least augment the distrubtion model which already exists, and from which I benefit?

If it does — and it might! — then that’s great. Let’s get to it. If it doesn’t, however, then we have a problem.

(This line of inquiry does not consider at all whether a subscription service might be good for readers. It may or may not; I suspect the answer will entirely depend on how many books one actually reads a month. Be aware that buffets make money because they charge you more for the food you eat than you the amount of food you can on average consume, and that this is a buffet, with books instead of crab rangoon. Also be aware, in the case of Amazon in particular, that the long term plan is to make it so you never ever have to go anywhere else to buy anything, ever, and that running Kindle Unlimited at a loss for a while would be fine if it serves that long-term goal. Neither of these things are particularly good or evil in themselves — once again Amazon (and other subscription services) is acting in its own self-interest, as businesses do.

However, none of that conversation is of interest to me when I have my “working writer” hat on. My immediate focus is my own interest — whether a subscription service is good for me, and my business, and my ability to make a living. And you may see this as immaterial or even selfish, especially if you like the idea of drinking from the book subscription firehose. But I gotta tell you, if the amount I can make writing fiction falls through the floor, so will the amount of fiction that I write, as my time will have to be spent doing things that pay my mortgage. We do not live in a glorious socialist paradise here in the US; I have to make money. So do other writers.)

The flip side of this is that every new distribution model offers opportunities tuned to that particular model of distribution — the question is whether one is smart enough to figure out what the strengths of any distribution model are, and then saavy (and lucky) enough to capitalize on them. For example, I think a subscription model might be a very fine way to make money from shorter works: short stories, novellas, less-than-book length short fiction and so on. That’s something I could definitely see pursuing aggressively, while (if necessary) keeping longer-length work in distribution channels that are more profitable for it.

The key is not seeing any distribution model as a threat, even as you’re looking at it critically, but in finding the way it can work for you, and how you can take advantage of it. Right now, I’m in the “still looking at how it can work for me” phase of things. We’ll see how it goes from here.

Avengers NOW! and Marvel in the 2010s

Marvel Comics’ announcement that its new Thor is going to be a woman has attracted plenty of froth and comment – especially since it turned out that this was part of a general refreshment of their core titles under the Avengers NOW! banner brand. Captain America is to be replaced by long-standing partner The Falcon (who happens to be a black guy), and Iron Man is going to become a dick (they may have trouble presenting this as a radical change).

There have been a range of responses. Superhero comics are built on the “illusion of change”, but apparently have the most reliably troll-able audience in media history, so some people are upset at the idea of a status quo change. That it’s a status quo change away from a white guy in two cases – and those two cases are the ones drawing all the heat, nobody is saying “I love Tony Stark! How dare they make him even more of a jerk” – is not coincidental to the level of rage.

But then you have people who are well aware of the illusion of change thing, and think Marvel are pulling a fast one – it’s a gimmick, it’ll just change back, haven’t we all grown out of this stuff? These people point to the 2015 release date of the next Avengers film – which won’t, most likely, star a lady Thor and a black Cap – as evidence of an expiry date on these plots. This sort of “wrestling – it’s fixed!” metacommentary (ongoing serials have subplots that begin and end – pass the smelling salts!) isn’t a great revelation but it stings more here because the spin on this has been that this is part of an important push towards greater diversity in comics – reaching to new audiences, launching more female-led titles, and so on. So if this is just the usual headline-chasing plot twister they’re playing with fire presenting it as something else.

And the third reaction is enthusiasm, broad or guarded – Falcon Cap and Lady Thor and maybe even Dickbag Tony will be good stories well told, and diversity really is important, so well done Marvel.

What do I think? I think the Avengers NOW! initiative is interesting as a clear progression in terms of Marvel’s current creative direction and recent history – and probably also needs to be understood through the lens of previous superhero replacements (there have – gasp – been a few) and what they mean.

STARS OF THE SILVER (AGE) SCREEN

Marvel Comics right now is in a position that’s both familiar and unusual. It’s the biggest fish in a fairly small comics industry pond – that’s the familiar part. It’s also the publisher of several enormously popular and vastly profitable sets of movie IP – one it owns (the Marvel Studios films) and some it doesn’t (the X-Men and Spider-Man films). This is unusual, historically.

So there’s a reasonable expectation that the movies will influence the comics, which is at the root of the “everything will reset by the time the next Avengers film comes out” response to Avengers NOW! And in the broad sense that Marvel’s publishing initiatives recently seem to have played up the properties Marvel Studios owns, and that more comics with THOR on the front show up when a Thor film is in cinemas, this is true: Marvel is Avengers-centric now to a degree that would have seemed absurd for most of its history.

But an actual lockstep between the films and the comics? No. Marvel put out a “movie Avengers” title, Avengers Assemble!, with the film characters and much Whedon-esque banter, which opened to high-ish sales numbers then quickly declined and was cancelled by issue #25 – not a disgraceful performance these days, but certainly not proof that “comics reflecting the films” is what the comics audience want, or that publishing such things brings new readers in. As we’ll see, there’s a difference between publishing comics designed to appeal to new fans from the films and comics designed to imitate the films. Marvel haven’t taken the latter path much since their film success started, so there’s no real reason to imagine they’ll suddenly begin that in 2015.

NUKE ME WITH THE NOW

So if they haven’t been tracking the films, what have Marvel been doing in the last couple of years? Avengers NOW! is the third annual refresh of the line – following 2012’s Marvel NOW! and last year’s All-New Marvel NOW! (and yes, the branding is getting a bit exhausting). And the comics now do genuinely feel somewhat different from the comics of a few years ago. What has the company been changing – for better and worse?

MID-LIST BOOKS: The most influential Marvel comic of the 2010s is Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye, which pushed the company to an unfamiliar level of critical acclaim and trade paperback success. Hawkeye’s ground-level, beautifully designed take on the everyday life of the Avengers’ everyman character showed that breaking away from a house style and giving creators license to find an individual angle on a book could pay off. Marvel have always had the occasional quirky book, but it feels like Marvel NOW! is actively chasing them as a publishing strategy. Since Hawkeye the company has established a thriving tier of low- to mid-selling comics with strong individual voices and visual identities – She-Hulk, Silver Surfer, Ms Marvel, Ghost Rider, Black Widow, and more. Not all of these work for me, but they feel less like each other than Marvel books have in a very long time, and the company’s critical stock has risen accordingly.

NEW AUDIENCES: Marvel has made it an increasingly public priority to attract new audiences to its comics – new meaning younger, more female, more diverse. It’s exactly the right time to be doing this – to take advantage of people switched on to characters by the films, of the wider availability of digital comics, and of the terrific fit of comics to social media platforms where new audiences live. It’s also the right thing to do, commercially – dragging comics to the same broader-based fandom that other kinds of ‘geek media’ have enjoyed for a while. It hasn’t paid instant and obvious dividends for Marvel, but it’s helped keep them the number one publisher at a time when rival DC has been particularly commercially aggressive.

The extent to which Marvel has won the PR battle over diversity, in fact, is embarrassing for DC. By the metrics of creator diversity – bad at both companies – and series fronted by female characters, the two organisations are well matched. (Marvel’s public pride at having eight female-led ongoing comics may be down to it being the first time it’s topped DC’s ‘New 52’ launch total of seven.) But unlike DC, Marvel has largely avoided fuck-ups and firestorms around its handling of female characters, and – helped enormously by the very high quality of comics like Muslim superheroine Ms.Marvel – it’s made diversity part of its creative branding in a way it’s never managed before.

EVENTS: Marvel is now more than ten years into an era of line-wide events, and seems more invested in the format than ever. Marvel events of the 00s had two purposes. One was to sell exceptionally well. But they were more directionally important than ever, too – they built a sense of a universal meta-plot that was driving Marvel along, letting the company play the “illusion of change” game across the whole line at once. This impression of a single larger storyline, so prominent between hero-versus-hero slugfests Civil War (2005) and Avengers v X-Men (2012), has dissipated in the Marvel NOW! era. But not because the company has de-emphasised events – far from it. The pace has increased to two tentpole events a year, with a couple of breather months in between. Age Of Ultron (robots take over) last spring was followed by Infinity (space war) last summer, with a few months before Original Sin (cosmic detective romp) almost overlaps with the upcoming AXIS (villains get their shit together).

By shipping individual issues of these comics more often – so a six issue story takes three months not six – the overall footprint of event months doesn’t change, but twice as many books and tie-ins can come out. But this frenetic pace leads to a marketing situation where currently-running events are drowned out in the hype for the next one. And it means the thing Marvel did so effectively with its 00s events – use them to set up and shift status quos on a yearly basis – is off the table: the universe is too incoherent for that. While event comics are obviously still selling, in the 00s they also had a longer-term effect as a springboard for new titles: the damp squib of “Inhumanity”, Marvel’s one recent effort at a cross-line branding a la 00s efforts “The Initiative” or “Dark Reign”, suggests that might not be the case now.

FRANCHISES: One of the more interesting and risky decisions of the Marvel NOW! era – and a revealing one vis-à-vis the company’s priorities for the Avengers books – was its choice in 2012 to tie the future of most of its major books to long-term storylines by its biggest-name writers. This included the Avengers. Hot off the most popular superhero film in history, Marvel locked their Avengers franchise into not one but two parallel, sometimes contradictory, multi-year uber-plots reliant on a single writer apiece (Jonathan Hickman on Avengers, Rick Remender on Uncanny Avengers). Each of these has leaned heavily on characters who weren’t in the films. Neither have finished yet.

This suggests that Marvel have decided that the comic audience and the film audience are basically irrelevant to one another: even when they’re the same people, they’re the same people wanting different things. So instead Marvel use the comics as an ideas lab – things the films can do 5 or 10 years later, not as an attempt to make a tiny smidgen more money off what they’re doing now. Of course, if you don’t like the idea of Jonathan Hickman doing a prog rock Avengers epic, you get to sit out three years of comics. And there’s another downside to this, which is that the uber-plots dominating Avengers actually cut off some commercial room for experiment – they immediately demarcate which titles “matter” and don’t for a plot-driven reader, making it hard to extend a franchise in the way DC have been doing with Batman. Not that this stops Marvel trying: there are still 8 or 9 Avengers titles a month.

A MIGHTY MARVEL NON-EVENT

What does all this add up to? A pretty happy reader, in my case. I’m not especially invested in events, I am very interested in books with individual voices and creators doing their things, and I think a broader range of featured characters is good politics, good storytelling, and good for the medium’s future. But I also think it’s fair to say that going into Avengers NOW! Marvel feels a bit unbalanced. Looked at over the last couple of years, the House of Ideas is on a creative high, putting out fun, individual comics with an abandon it hasn’t shown since its chaotic, fertile 1970s. But this vibrant 2010s Marvel co-exists with and commercially relies on the declining 2000s Marvel, driven by events and macro-plots, an approach whose wheels seem close to falling off.

(The last time I paid attention to DC it seemed to have the opposite issues – no surprise, the two companies’ approaches often cycle – a sense of direction at the top end of its range and then a completely stagnant mid-list milling around waiting for the mercy of cancellation. I don’t know to what extent the weeklies DC recently launched have changed this. And the old rivalry isn’t strictly relevant to this post anyhow.)

This is all the context in which Avengers NOW! happens – a convenient rolling up of existing plans and plot developments into a marketing event, if not an in-universe one. Back in those wayward 1970s, Marvel put out The Defenders, which it liked to describe as a “non-team”, a bunch of characters who just happened to star in a comic together. In this sense, Avengers NOW! is a non-event, a similar bunch of things that just happens to be happening simultaneously.

But that non-event status might play to Marvel’s current strengths – it’s a potential way of squaring the circle between what it does well now and what it seems to struggle with, of absorbing the better parts of its 00s model and pushing its 10s one forward. It promises individualised approaches and new angles for its higher-selling books, and greater diversity to boot. But it also leaves the door open for a meta-plot along Civil War lines – how well will the new heroes respond to crises, work together, and so on. And it opens up their franchises in more interesting ways.

Which is necessary, because of the other big long-term trend in comics, one Marvel is on the wrong side of. Marvel’s viability is based on its intellectual property, and its intellectual property is largely very old. The House Of Ideas finds it harder than ever to create new ones. There have never been great incentives to create brilliant characters for Marvel or DC – you won’t own them, and you might get to look on as the people who do make lots of money off them. But there haven’t always been great alternatives to work-for-hire, either. Increasingly over the last twenty years there have been, and breakout characters and ideas – the kind people cosplay – are coming more from independent publishers. The story of Marvel since its bankruptcy and rebirth is the story of a company adjusting to this reality – a world where new IP is scarce, so you expand and burnish the old to its maximum potential. In the ‘metaplot’ years this was done mostly by re-arranging existing major characters in new configurations: Cap and Iron Man hate each other now! So do Cyclops and Wolverine! So do the Avengers and X-Men! It was a very effective way around the problem, but always a short-term one.

THE THIRD ACT TRAP

Which brings us to the other question people have been asking – what is Marvel’s endgame with replacing its heroes? How long will this last?

It could- of course – all end terribly as a set up for a big event in which your regular white dude heroes turn up and save the day. That’s your Hero’s Journey, third-act-plotting logic – where the “hero” in question is the one going through the trauma of getting replaced – and its gravity is very strong. But by publically raising the stakes about this – stressing the diversity angle rather than settle for a meeker “good story” approach – Marvel have made that option a bit less easy for themselves.

But it’s easy to see why people are worried about lady Thor and Falcon Cap being just plot devices against which the standard-issue characters can Prove Themselves for the umpteenth time. That’s how it’s tended to happen in the past. The first Marvel comic I read was Secret Wars, a 12-issue advert for a toy line which happened to reflect the status quo of the day, and the status quo was that Iron Man was a guy called Jim Rhodes, who was a) black and b) worried he couldn’t do the job. And indeed he couldn’t: by the time I caught up with the American Iron Man, Tony Stark was back. Meanwhile another replacement plot was underway – Captain America had quit because the Reagan administration wanted him to be its stooge, and said government promptly hired the kind of Captain America the 80s deserved: a punch-first right-winger. It went poorly; the original Cap was back after a year or so.

These were the planned executions of long-term story arcs, and I was an absolute sucker for them. The replacement hero storyline is one of comics’ corniest moves, but it’s a move I will always fall for. But despite my affection for this stuff, it’s something Marvel have only really ever pulled off in the context of extended storylines. Attempted permanent replacements are rarer: it’s worth noting that the Reaganite Cap storyline came only a few years after then-Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter had tried to push through a permanent change for Cap, making him a high-flying Wall Street yuppie: nobody except Shooter thought this was a remotely good idea.

Of course, the line between permanent and temporary is a tricky one in serialised comics – rare is the editor who won’t keep a ball juggling a little longer if the readers are paying for it. But most of Marvel’s reboots, from Rhodey to Bucky’s stint as Cap a few years ago, feel like planned stories. And the Marvel reinventions that feel most like they were meant to be permanent are often also the biggest disasters. Spider-Man’s replacement by his clone, most famously, but also – from the same mid-90s swamp of foolish decisions – Tony Stark’s replacement by his teenage self. Even I couldn’t bear that one.

What’s the point, though? A short term sales boost, of course, but replacements are also a safe way of creating new characters – it’s no surprise they start surfacing at Marvel Comics after the company’s great 60s and 70s waves of original, profitable new properties begin to retreat. James Rhodes is still around – he just got a very short lived solo series. Reaganite Cap shows up now and then. Bucky’s reinvention as Cold War assassin/relic The Winter Soldier gave him a much more useful and resonant 21st century backstory than Cap himself could manage. We should expect a long afterlife for Lady Thor.

FAMILY MATTERS

Historically, the company that’s played around with replacements and refreshments and legacies most successfully has been DC, not Marvel. In fact it’s been argued that “legacy”, as an organising principle of their storytelling, is DC’s major difference from Marvel. There exists a “Batman family” – a group of heroes (who can mostly sustain mid-selling books) ultimately drawing inspiration from Batman – in a way that isn’t the case for Captain America or Iron Man.

It was DC who seemed to have worked out, in the 80s and 90s, how to replace characters permanently – they switched out the Flash and Green Lantern for younger versions, and brought even older versions back into play around the same time. So perhaps Marvel’s long game is the establishment of Marvel equivalents of Wally West, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner or Dick Grayson – supporting characters who earned the spotlight long enough to build their own enduring fandoms.

The interesting thing about those characters is that – even though all but Stewart were straight white dude for white dude swaps – they helped DC get a broader audience. One of the reasons, I think, is that the establishment of legacy of ‘family’ characters inevitably throws the spotlight on inter-character relationships. For a primary hero, relationships with the supporting cast are often more nice-to-have than need-to-have – motors for a plot or character study piece, perhaps. The most important relationship within a Batman story is changeable – Bruce can find himself defined against Robin (pick a Robin), his parents, his secret identity, Commissioner Gordon, The Joker or Riddler or whoever… but in a Dick Grayson story, Dick is always already defined in relationship to Bruce: it haunts the comic, even if never mentioned. It forces a character to be defined in part by their feelings about someone.

Such unbreakable pairings seem to be fan gold – it’s hard to think of a character in the 1990s who had such vocal and creative fans, women fans in particular, as Dick Grayson, and Bucky and Steve have caught the imagination in a similar way. DC’s error was seeing this dependence as a weakness rather than a strength: they became obsessed by the idea of the ‘iconic’ versions of characters, and replacements with ten or twenty years of development were shunted aside. If DC were ever ‘about’ legacy, they aren’t any more.

But the idea is there as a strategy, waiting to be rediscovered – a mechanic that lays down a bedrock for stories based in character contrasts as well as conflict, a sense of family, and close relationships. The kind of stories the Hawkeye and Winter Soldier generation of fans want to see – doubly so if they’re increasing diversity and positive representation too. And I would see Avengers NOW! as Marvel making a grab for this strategy. So yes, it’s a gimmicky sales boost, and yes, it’s also part of a long-term and admirable push for diversity. But it’s more than those things: it’s an important way of moving Marvel from its 2000s approach to a 2010s one, and of fortifying itself in a twilight era where its new ideas of necessity have to build on the old.

We picked this up at the commemoration of the Battle of Wavre. It's pretty awful; not just a case of the English being an imperfect translation from the French, but I suspect the French original is as poorly structured and rambling as the English version. Readers will, for instance, be startled to learn that "Wellington was an Englishman, a bit like Paddington Bear." None of those things is quite like the other. Wellington was born in Ireland, and Paddington Bear was a) from Peru and b) a bear. The book is aimed at the 6-12 age group, and they will like the illustrations but may not learn much from the text.

(This is the fifth in a series of posts looking in depth at issues from Conrad Russell’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. Previous posts in the series are here: 1, 2, 3, 4 and my original post on the book is here.)

When it comes to internationalism, Russell’s historical account of the development of liberal thought shows how the application of consistent principles to international affairs over the years have resulted in very different outcomes of liberal policy as the international situation has shifted. It’s interesting – and not at all coincidental – to note that liberalism began to form as a coherent ideology in the middle of the seventeenth century, just as the modern world system of nation-states came into being after the treaties of Westphalia. As we’ve seen from previous posts, liberalism is centred on the principle of consent, and Westphalia, in a very limited fashion initially, introduced the idea that political power did involve consent and was not merely about the application of absolute power downwards.

However, while there may have been a nascent potential for internationalism in liberalism from its beginnings, it couldn’t develop into a fully-formed part of it until it became practical from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Even at that point, internationalism was primarily an idea of the elites, particularly in Britain, as mass transport and mass communication were yet to arrive on the scene and most people would have had little conception of what was happening within the rest of the country, let alone outside its borders. As Russell notes, during that period there was an alliance of liberalism and nationalism, as revolutionaries sought to overthrow the old systems to replace them with nation-states built on the consent of the people, but then the two diverged as the realisation dawned upon liberals that nationalism had released the monsters that would haunt the twentieth century. At first impression, nationalism had seemed to Gladstone and others as a way to create governments based on consent rather than authority, but time would reveal that the complexities of identity and community would make that wish impossible to realise.

Thus, while the principle of consent remains important, in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond we can see the other core principle of liberalism at work in the international system – that all power must be able to be controlled. The principle of consent believed that control could be solely applied from below and that states would be controlled by the granting or refusing of power from their people, which may have seemed plausible to nineteenth century elites. However, the twentieth century had shown that states now had enough power (following industrialisation, mass media etc) to be able to influence and control their people. If power could not be controlled solely from below, then liberal internationalism would support control from above.

This is how we come to have the liberal internationalism we see today, and that I touched on in the post on pluralism, where power is controlled by being dispersed and no one – especially no government – is above the law. It’s actually one of the great successes of international liberalism that so much has changed since 1945 in establishing an international system that’s generally in line with liberal principles. Perhaps there’s an interesting lesson in the way the international system has developed, in that it’s mostly been an organic and responsive process rather that’s been driven by necessity rather than by campaigning?

That is not to say that we have a perfect system, as can be seen by either looking at the world we live in or looking at how many people are out there propounding their theories of international relations (still one of the consistently growing fields in academic social sciences). There are many liberals who are absolutely sure they know the way to fix everything – in domestic and international affairs – if only everyone would agree to adopt their specific way of doing things. This is something Russell notes, and explains why his section on internationalism ends with a Popper-esque warning against dreaming of utopias:

All utopias depend on one person’s vision taking priority over another’s and therefore they all come into existence, if at all, by the draconian enforcement of one person’s vision on others. All utopias are potentially dictatorial. The beauty of the idealism is soon taken to obscure the beastliness of the enforcement. This is why utopias are not a liberal pursuit. A creed which is founded on consent and on respect for difference of ideals is one which can dream dreams, but when awake, it can never be utopian without abandoning its own essence.

This, I think, is the core of liberal internationalism that is sometimes forgotten by those that use the term. It’s interesting that Russell wrote this four years before we were led into war in Iraq in service of a supposed ‘liberal internationalism’ that essentially argued that it could bring about a liberal end by the use of illiberal means. Those ends, of course, were never delivered, but even if they could have been, the true meaning of internationalism within liberalism is that it applies to everyone. Part of the lessons liberals learnt in the twentieth century was that the elite liberalism that had encouraged nationalism in the nineteenth century had been a mistake, and one of the lessons twenty-first century liberalism is learning is a similar lesson that liberal ends cannot be achieved, no matter how tempting they may appear:

However desperate the need for haste, there are no short cuts. Desperate need for haste does not make it possible to do a job faster than it can be done. The route by consent may be painfully slow, but it is the only route which does not become dictatorial and therefore self-defeating. It may not be fast enough to do what is needed, but it is the only route there is.

I think this rejection of utopia and promotion of the importance of consent provides a very interesting idea for liberalism in international affairs. It’s not a vision of ‘this is where we must get to, now plot a route to get us there regardless’ more ‘these are the routes available, which best represents our principles?’ It fits in with Russell’s general view of liberalism as principles that have emerged from dealing with power in reality, rather than drawing up utopian visions and then expecting to be able to conform reality to fit with that vision. However, it also rejects the conservative interpretation of ‘this is how things are, and we better not change much in case we make it worse’ in saying that things can be better as long as we hold on to our principles.

Even though Russell doesn’t acknowledge it, this is surely borrowed from Karl Popper’s vision of the Open Society (and I sense that I may need to follow up this project with a reread of The Open Society and Its Enemies) which rejects the utopias of Plato and Marx but advocates that it is possible to make a better world if we accept that it is not a simple thing to do and we must be aware of the pitfalls of believing in utopias. We cannot use the end of a supposed liberal utopia to justify means that are not liberal, because once we abandon our principles, they do not automatically come back and forgive us our deviations. A liberal order can only be built by people acting liberally and the final shape it might take can only be based on consent.

Yesterday Labour's national policy forum confirmed that an incoming Labour government would keep to the Coalition's spending plans for 2015-16. An attempt to commit Labour to abandoning those plans was defeated by 125 to 14.

So next time you see a Labour politician, blogger or tweeter demanding more spending on something, you can ask them what taxes they would raise or cuts they would make elsewhere to fund it.

I certainly would not defend all the Coalition's spending decisions. I think the cuts to local government have been too severe - in fact, given that the worse is still to come, I wonder if it will be politically possible for those cuts to be made in full.

But what this vote does mean is that Labour wants to have any intellectual credibility then it is going to have to curb its reflex reaction of promising more spending on every issue that comes up. That will not come easy to most Labour activists.

The Guardian reports Ed Balls as saying after the vote:

"We will balance the books, deliver a surplus on the current budget and get the national debt falling as soon as possible in the next parliament."

That is pretty much what Tim Farron said when we bloggers interviewed him on Saturday. I wondered if it was not too fiscally constrictive, but his position is fast emerging as the new orthodoxy.

Listening to Tim Farron’s Beveridge Memorial Lecture at the Social Liberal Forum (SLF) conference yesterday – the New Statesman has reproduced the full text – I was puzzling to work out who he reminded me of.

Then I worked it out.

Take this passage:

So, while the right argument for HS2 is about capacity not speed, the argument for HS3, 4, 5, 6 is about speed. A high speed link between Hull and Liverpool, through Leeds, Bradford and Manchester; from the West Country, from East Anglia to the Midlands, from Wales to the Midlands and the north, from Carlisle to Newcastle; connecting our great towns and cities to one another; connecting East and West as quickly and as seamlessly as we connect north and south, that is where our focus must be and we must start right away. 

It could almost be a passage from Jeremy Browne’s Race Plan – Britain needs modernising and massive spending on infrastructure is the way to achieve it.

It is reassuring to find leading figures of the economic and social liberal wings of the party sounding so similar, but there is an important difference here.

Jeremy is very much a London-as-a-world-city man, whereas at the heart of Tim’s analysis of Britain’s problems is that too much spending and wealth is concentrated in the South East of England.

Talking to him afterwards – in a bloggers’ interview kindly arranged by the Social Liberal Forum – he sees this concentration as being at the heart of the current housing crisis. There is plenty of land and even plenty of houses available outside the South East, it’s just that not enough people want to live there.

With massive spending on railways and broadband and regional airports we can stimulate development in the regions and take the pressure of the South East.

It’s not just investment that Tim wants to see for the regions: he also wants to see devolution of political power. In the interview – the other bloggers there were Mathew Hulbert, Caron Lindsay, Joe Otten, Mark Pack and Iain Brodie Brown – we discussed how this might be achieved. Should we go for devolution to regions or accept the more pragmatic solution of using existing cities and counties?

I asked Tim if he would be happy with neighbouring counties having different education systems. My reason for asking this was that, looking for somewhere quiet to work over the lunch break, I inadvertently found myself in a fringe meeting on education, called to launch a pamphlet by Helen Flynn, where Tim happened to be the guest speaker.

It was something of a celebration of the fall of Michael Gove and its heroine was the head teacher of Barrowford Primary School for her rather toe-curling letter. And, fairly or not, I gained the impression that those present had no great love of diversity in education.

When I asked Tim the question during his interview he said he would be happy to see different systems in different counties, but I am not sure his heart was in it. Still, he did make the important point that Michael Gove’s most far-reaching and questionable changes have been made in teacher training, not at the margins with free schools.

If I had been Jeremy Paxman, my first question about the speech would have been: “This is a leadership bid, isn’t it?” I am not sure how fair that would have been, but it was certainly how many members of the Social Liberal Forum saw it, jumping up to give him a standing ovation.

As to my own views, back in 2011 I wrote of him:

He is clearly a formidable campaigner, having turned Westmorland and Lonsdale into what looked very like a safe Liberal Democrat seat until the Boundary Commission got hold of it. He is young and personable, and he has other attributes that may be useful to someone standing for the leadership of the party in the future. He is Northern, did not go to public school and has not held ministerial office under the Coalition. 

So my feeling is that we should take Tim Farron very seriously. 

I still think we should, even if his oratory yesterday was not that impressive. Too many important lines were swallowed or thrown away. And he did not make the unpopular speech that I went on to ask for in that post.

Still, in singling out the way London dominates our national life Tim has identified an issue that is too little remarked and put himself on the right side of the debate.

It is also an issue that marks him out within the party and could mark out the party as a whole in a future election.

The former world chess champion and brave liberal wrote as follows for the Wall Street Journal in March after Vladimir Putin had seized the Crimea from Ukraine:

If the West punishes Russia with sanctions and a trade war, that might be effective eventually, but it would also be cruel to the 140 million Russians who live under Mr. Putin's rule. And it would be unnecessary. 

Instead, sanction the 140 oligarchs who would dump Mr. Putin in the trash tomorrow if he cannot protect their assets abroad. Target their visas, their mansions and IPOs in London, their yachts and Swiss bank accounts. Use banks, not tanks. 

Thursday, the U.S. announced such sanctions, but they must be matched by the European Union to be truly effective. Otherwise, Wall Street's loss is London's gain, and Mr. Putin's divide-and-conquer tactics work again.

For this week’s blog post title, I was massively torn between the entirety of the lyrics from two Muse songs; so, this is Showbiz, this is Citizen Erased, both really resonate with me for reasons I’ll discuss below, and both are really worth a listen. [SPECIAL INTEREST INTENSIFIES]

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I never really got the “autistic people can’t lie” stereotype because, I admit it, I think I’m quite a good liar. I mean, I’ve kept this blog hidden from almost everyone I know (I only know of two real-life friends, and one online friend from outside my FeministAspie stuff, who are aware of it, all by choice) for over a year and a half now. In my teens, I used to write song lyrics (in hindsight, pretty awful with a side dish of internalised misogyny) and also kept those hidden. For some reason, in the early stags of a special interest, I tend to keep that hidden too. Then there’s the usual “I’m fine” stuff. Sometimes, I think being autistic actually helps; I’m constantly fidgeting and I never make eye contact anyway, so all the traditional neurotypical-centred “tells” get lost in my usual mannerisms. Autistic Stereotype In “Not Always Absolutely True For Absolutely Everyone” Shocker.

But frankly, that’s all a little bit beside the point. This stereotype particularly bothers me because, for a group of people who are supposed to be unable to lie, we’re very rarely believed.

Autism is, and has always been, defined and discussed almost entirely from the point of view of a neurotypical outsider. We’re seen, not as autistics living in an autism-unfriendly world, but as defective neurotypicals. I’ve essentially always known my diagnosis, yet it wasn’t until I ventured into the autistic community on Tumblr, aged around 16, that I was told sensory issues are an actual real thing. Autism is seen as a social disorder, a behavioural disorder, with no thought for how we experience the world, why we behave the way we do. Hence why stimming is seen as a bad thing, meltdowns are seen as tantrums, and any attempts to avoid or minimise sensory overload are seen as manipulative.

A lot of things held up as almost universally fun, I find overwhelming. Summer. Parties. Summer. Crowds. Summer. People. Summer summer summer summer summer. I’m a giant bundle of sensory overload wrapped in panic wrapped in a very thin layer of “I’m fine, why wouldn’t I be?” because the alternative would be attempting to explain it and getting mocked and ridiculed and told I’m over-reacting. But when I’m overloading like that, I’m, well, not that good a liar; I’m too drained for that. From my point of view at least, my entire tone and body language is a giveaway; not really making much of an attempt to continue conversation, muttering to myself, fingers fluttering, that ubiquitous “sorry!” and an occasional “ugh” noise and a facial expression that’s probably very blank. Most other people, who are supposed to be amazing at picking up non-verbal communication signals, either don’t pick this up at all, or just pick up “she’s being Visibly Neurodivergent and this is A Bad Thing and she needs to stop that”. Most other people, who are supposed to be better than me at really thinking about a person’s motivations and feelings rather than taking their words at literal face value… just take my words, fabricated out of a learned desperation to not be Visibily Neurodivergent, at literal face value.

So I get desperate, I get frustrated, I get really moody and blunt and pushy. It’s not something I’m proud of, I feel awful once I feel safer and calmer, but I feel like I’ve run out of options. Everyone else seems to interpret this as “Well, as you all know, I hate fun, and I don’t have the social skills to be nice and polite and quiet about it, so I’m going to threaten a tantrum because I’m just that manipulative” when the reality is “This is really painful and horrible and I’ve managed to cope with it for this long but now I’m seriously worried I’m going to have a meltdown if I don’t get out to somewhere safe right this second”. For a long time, I even believed the former interpretation myself, and thought myself to be a pretty horrible person for acting in that way.

These problems are constructed, through viewing autism only from the outside, and then used to justify our elimination.
We’ve been taught to put “looking normal” before our own needs. To hide away.
To lie at all times, at all costs.

Tagged: ableism, actuallyautistic, Autism, passing, sensory overload, sensory processing