Andrew Hickey

1.02 million 16-24 year olds are unemployed and not in full-time education in Britain currently. 17.35 million are unemployed in the US, slightly over a quarter of the potentially employed in that age group. And it’s getting worse, not better.

And all this time, the message you’re told as young person, much too young to make choices like ‘what piece-of-shit thing do you want to do for the rest of your life?’ you have to make the decision as to what you want to specialise in. You might do it age 14, you might do it age 16, you might (if you’re super lucky) get through to 18 or even 21 before you really narrow your options.

If at any of those points you give employment a try and it doesn’t work, you’re told that the answer is another qualification- whether it’s sneering at your lack of whatever high school completion certificate(s) or the view that if you just converted your degree to law, that’ll work this time.

You’ll never fulfil your potential (whatever some varied but predetermined social expectations and maybe, hopefully, your own particular talents and interests make that) unless you get back to school and really hone your specialism, this particular ability you’ve bargained your future on and which everyone either told you wouldn’t amount to a real thing or was hopelessly second-hand ambitious for you to become a world leader in.

Or you stop that. You stop that and you try and work out what you’re actually doing because you can’t take on any more mortgage-sized debts against unsecured futures and you need a minute to work out what’s going on here. Except then you have to pay the rent.

So you, if you’ve played your cards right and got a bit of luck in your teenage draw, use the bit of your Masters in Bee Conservation (because if the bees die, we all die- you always knew it was important and now all this shit you did to stop extinction… you can’t even think about it) that involved making some Powerpoint presentations to maybe, maybe get yourself an admin job somewhere. And by admin I mean the data entry no one else wants to do and the weird phonecalls no one else wants to take. And it’s probably temp and so you’re being paid half what everyone else is.

And you maybe have this moment at some point where you wonder exactly who the fuck this ‘everyone else’ is and how come they managed to sort this out so they got the proper job. And how come none of them have this lingering anxiety every time something buzzes outside the window that there was something that they’d truly convinced themselves they ought to be doing, that wasn’t this and which they’re not sure they weren’t right about.

It’s all part of a particularly doldrums-and-scratchy-unhappiness filled stage of “growing up.” The sort of thing people say everyone went through (they lie! young people have never been expected to be more young and less people) and so it must be somehow good for you. Like being told your £30,000 debt and nights spent angstily poring over chemical formulas mean you’re a reasonably strong contender for a job in Subway is somehow comparable to getting your first period or some pencil-case-graffiti teen heartbreak.

It’s not that you don’t want the job in Subway- of course you fucking do because otherwise you might starve and die or have to live on your parents’ settee again -an unbearable indignity of kindness by these people who well-meaningly had such high hopes for you.

It’s not the job- if the last five years have taught you anything it’s that you bloody love sandwiches but you wish they hadn’t lied. It’s embarassing, adults. Not even angry, just massively disappointed. Ok and a bit angry.

And some of your friends don’t seem to have the difficulty you have in reconciling that- best days of their lives! Reunions, everyone! School photos on Facebook. Remember how we were? But you can’t turn off the perception of causality between then and the now and you feel better about the now, even if it’s ostensibly shittier.

Of course, sometimes you never do anything with that niche again. Your special powers have been turned off by the ‘reality’ that’s pushed on not-quite-everyone by a small percentage of super-powerful and fairly fucked up people. Ah, mutants; I don’t know if you’ve heard but they’re kind of a metaphor.

This issue was, as with the previous ones, terrific. Kate Brown took on art duties, to give Jamie McKelvie time for July’s bumper crop and her emotive, witty style fitted in perfectly- every panel full of rich detail and expressive gestures.

To do a superhero comic about two young men who are, at best, conflicted about the whole superhero thing in the first place (the Young Avengers’ bad boy, Tommy, has never been entirely comfortable with the do-good aspect and well, turns out he and David both spent awhile hanging out with Magneto) and then place them in a context where they’re using their powers for neither good nor evil but mundaneity is the sort of pleasingly subversive trope that an indie comic might sometimes congratulate itself for. And it would feel quite twee. I might like it but it would be whimsy, in the end.

But if you do it from inside the powerhouse, then it’s just the natural detail of the universe where people have these earth-shattering abilities. Because saying superheroes have to poop and eat noodles and drink coffee is only important if you’re in a world where they’re also seen doing all the other things.

It’s about using your powers for a different sort of survival. It’s about being in a situation where you need them but you’ve become not-them or maybe they’ve become not-you and you used to find them defining and comforting. And you can’t go back to the way it was, not even if you amputate and forget things but they’re redundant, vestigial or completely phantom limbs much of the time, except when you sometimes put them to work on the sort of thing no one ever really intended.

What’s anything ‘intended’ for, though? Intention isn’t naturally occurring, so even a return-to-wildness fantasy doesn’t quite cut it. And it’s better to inhabit the present and its petty annoyances than feel miserable about it. Except you had this niche and you know all these things and sometimes you just look at other people and wonder how they can think so slowly? Everybody does it sometimes, it’s an inevitable product of being bored enough to have really thought about your own thoughts. And the thoughts of all these other people you’ve had to think about the thoughts of, whether it’s books or films or some innate or trained ability.

And Prodigy, of course, is full of not just the mundane details of his own life but “how all the major X-Men like to wipe themselves.” Tommy and David are perfectly balanced as underemployed outsiders here, not exactly ungrateful for it but not able to pretend it’s stimulating and rewarding, for all that. The first chance they get, they both leap (David more cautiously but nonetheless, he doesn’t exactly fight it) at other things- new friends, new opportunities to beat up things in the dark, noodles.

There’s an important actual-superhero-business plot here, of course; another parasite manifesting as someone you trust, someone (sort of, in a righteous way) responsible. That friend with all the ambitions who wouldn’t have ended up here, too angry to have that happen. Who’s trying to force you and your friend to be …beholden to something. When you were really all about that not being a thing anymore. Legacy! Everybody hates it. And no one should have this many, this young.

MP salaries are in the news, and perhaps a little unfairly the MPs themselves are getting flack over an idea that has been made by an independent body set up in the wake of the expenses scandal to stop MPs from being able to keep inflating their own pay and expenses. However the result of this is the idea that MPs should be paid £75k, up from the current £66k. Being around three times the amount of the average salary in the UK already, at a time when the public sector (tax payer funded, like MPs) is facing a freeze year after year, at a time when those on benefits are having their benefits cut even at the most essential level by allowing the cost of food to increase over the basic benefits given, it's understandable why there are those that would be angry at MPs that accepted such a rise at this time.

However there are a few people that seem to defend the notion, if not the specific idea. Unfortunately it comes through several different myths and the convenient aligning of the job role out of context of the actual job. I just wanted to say a few things about those fallacies here...

The nonsense

MPs need to be paid more to attract the right people

I have a few different strings to my bow, and some things in my profession that excite me more than others. If I see jobs advertised I usually have two types of reaction. On the one hand I may take a job that is offering a lower salary if it is involving something that is more exciting and adds more worth to my life (or that I can add more worth to myself in a reciprocal nature), on the other I may take a job that is offering a higher salary if the conditions and opportunities are no worse than where I am right now.

The former kind of thinking comes from the "right people" for the job, and the latter comes from the "maybe right people" for the job. If an MP is using salary as a measuring stick when we're talking about 3 times the national average wage then they don't have their priorities straight.

"But Lee" I hear you cry, "What about all those extremely responsible business managers, lawyers and nepotised up-and-comings that will just go for a job in the City if we don't offer the right money?"

Let them.

If they are letting the figure they put in their pocket dictate whether or not they want to be involved in how a constituency is represented in parliament, then they shouldn't be going in to politics. The vast majority of people that work in the UK would be getting a significant pay rise to become an MP. It comes with other baggage, and certainly extra hours, but it is a huge rise for most.

For the rest, it's a bit of a pay cut...though likely not with much difference in terms of the hours or the stress that comes with the role, but those people are in the minority in this country, and part of the problem with politics is that it is a minority, demographically on quite a few different measures, of people that end up making up a majority of our policy decisions.

This isn't to say that they shouldn't be paid well. It cannot be denied that in general they work much longer hours than the average person, even the idea of parliamentary recess being a break is a nonsense that we should stop perpetuating ASAP. It's been said time and time again that if you put the wage too low you will *only* get people that are wealthy enough to afford to be able to devote their time to it. It's true. This doesn't mean we have to pay a luxurious wage of course, but it does mean that we have to accept that an MPs wage should be comparable to other public sector roles. Some have compared the MP salary to that of the average head teacher (£55k) and with this in balance what they are paid now might seem particularly fair.

MPs work longer hours, they should be paid more

Now, I did say that they work longer hours, but that doesn't mean that no-one else works just as long. For a start doctors, teachers, nurses, GPs, Lawyers, SME business owners, city traders all work very long hours...as, no doubt, do those at the other end of the wage scale that are taking on multiple jobs just to be able to afford the ever increasing rent.

There is, of course, a solid argument for an annual wage to be higher if you know the job is going to have longer hours. After all we are really paid by the hour or the day, though it is easier to pay by the month. If your job is 35-40 hours a week and an MP is doing 70, then their salary could quite happily be twice yours and still they'd be earning the same money as you. If we use a common "time and a half" model we can also say that they should be paid at least 2.5 times the average salary, it's just not worth it otherwise. But this would still only put their salary at around £55k.

MPs are running our country! There's nothing more important!

Jobs are rarely salaried based on how important, dangerous or high in responsibility they are. If they were a soldier wouldn't be starting on £18k while middle managers of fairly inconsequential if not successful businesses passed responsibility from below them to above them and vice versa for £50k+.

But all this is besides the point because an MP does not have an important job, not individually. Most of the time they don't even have a say of their own thanks to the party whip. If we're paying people for how much they're running the country then we should only pay more to those actually doing the running. Of course this is ministers on the government side, but it is also those involved in the policy creation for each party (not necessarily an MP), those providing the real advice and implementation solutions (civil servants) and those making sure those individual MPs don't upset the party (the Whips).

The majority of MPs, some back bench notables excluded, may well do a fine job of representing you and I, and doing their party's bidding, but they are by no stretch actually running the country, they don't have the kind of responsibility.

£66k is not that much compared to GPs' or Police Chiefs' salaries

True, but then it's a stupid comparison to make. For a start a GP has to have gone through years of training to get to the position of being able to practice, indeed they need to have put a lot of money in to the system to pay for the education needed to get the qualifications they require to practice. And Police Chiefs? They don't suddenly find themselves parachuted into the role of organising the police after they graduate from university.

A basic MP, freshly elected for the first time, they get a basic salary of £66k but may have no political experience. They may not have practiced any politics at all, and even if they did the rigor required in scrutinising legislation and debating it would be a different beast at the national level.

There are opportunities for progression. up to 109 MPs will become ministers of the government, another 30 or so will get a smaller supplement for chairing the various committees that are responsible for discussion policy and scrutinising matters of the day. This may not be enough, and I would actually welcome financial reward for those MPs that do the parliamentary side of their job properly, and for longer service.

A diversion

Of course all this talk of salaries is a side-issue really; for a start it is a drop in the ocean, though this isn't an excuse to just let the wage bill increase. Ultimately the problem is, as alluded to above, that the wrong measure of the "right kind of MP" is being used.

We live in a country where we are rarely represented by the "common man/woman" in our constituencies. There are dozens of constituencies where the MP has little to no local knowledge simply so that the party can preserve key members in their ranks from being outside of the bubble. We have pretty terrible turn out at elections and our electoral system doesn't allow for anyone but the big-two/three/four (depending on your area) to win. We as a people had a chance to really make a difference on this with electoral reform and we threw it away in favour of spiteful hatred.

Yet even if we did have a more accessible voting system, the process of getting elected is not accessible at all. Candidates have to pay a deposit to run, essentially removing all but the rich that can afford to lose some money for an opportunity to represent their area, and don't get it back if they poll less than 5%. How are elections "free and fare" is someone who is disabled cannot financially afford to enter the race to be an MP without aligning themselves with a party who will pay for them (as long as they vote as they're told)?

Yet even if we had a voting system that encouraged people to be able to vote for who they really wanted rather than being forced to choose first from the most likely winners, and people didn't have to pay to just have a go at joining politics, we'd still have a problem because in the type of closely fought areas where there is even slim hope of attaining some kind of significant support, Lord Ashcroft and Unison's money will swoop in from upon high and figuratively drown out your voice in a sea of green...or well, red blue and yellow.

Without free access to run, a voting system that doesn't force people to hedge their bets, and a set of campaigning rules that gives all candidates a basic level of funding to promote themselves with, with strict limits on party funding for election campaigns, we are forcing ourselves to severely constrict the pool of people we can look to and from them search for the best person to be an MP.

The right people for the job

Do we want the right people in politics? Who are the right people? We seem to be tacitly accepting that the right people are high flying businessmen (and sometimes women), lawyers, eton graduates (though very rarely scientists or researchers), but that they should be happy they're being paid by the state.

I say bullshit. The right people are the people that are chosen. We have no other measure as to how good or not an MP is other than that they have the trust of their constituents for 5 years to do what they said they'd do. Without recall (which is it's own nest of honey badgers) the only option is to not elect them again in the future, but at least that is an option.

Rich or poor, educated or not, male or female, none of this makes one bit of difference as to whether the prospective MP will listen to local issues, consider carefully laws they are voting on, and lobby the causes that their constituents want a louder voice about. We have to trust the public to inform themselves, there is only so much hand holding you can do, but it is the kind of person that is a true advocate that we should be trying to encourage to the job. Something tells me that salary plays a low part of the consideration for those type of people when they consider politics, knowing the salary as it stands now.

The bottom line

My overall opinion? I don't mind their salary going up if their role is better defined and if they are held more accountable. I think that the idea that they hold positions on boards and directorships of organisations while an MP is a disgrace...declared or not they cannot act independently with direct pressure to get "mates rates" for their business from partners. But I also think that their expenses arrangements are extremely generous, especially for London based MPs, and that the potential that MPs have to earn after they retire or are no longer elected to their constituency is huge compared to the average person. We also have to realise that as the salary goes up, and the "talent" comes from the "right" pool, all we do is move the barrier so that an even higher salary needs to be considered to attract an "even more talented" set of people to the job.

I would go with IPSA's recommendations this time but only if there was (as is rumoured) a realignment of the pension conditions for MPs, and a change in the law to mean that MPs cannot have second jobs or responsibilities while holding a seat. This is not because I think that their role is particularly deserving of a rise, but that for any other job in the public sector I'd want society to be fair and say that if we're going to constrain your working arrangements and conditions, we're going to at least try to leave you roughly as well off as you were before the changes. It's more than those in government deserve given how they've treated the poor and the vulnerable...but then I was taught two wrongs don't make a right.

My awareness and understanding of gender issues is … well, let’s just say there’s an ongoing and deliberate evolution.

As a kid, I got the basic Kindergarten Cop lesson: Boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.

By the time I got to college, I was starting to recognize more layers. I distinguished between sex (a biological binary) and gender, the (again binary) performance of cultural sex-roles.

I met a friend who introduced me to the concept of transgenderism. He (at the time we met) was in the process of coming out as female. I stumbled over pronouns a few times, but then got it through my head that she was now R—-, a woman, and that was that. No problem.

Along the way I also sorted out transgender vs. transsexual vs. transvestite in my head (a process that might have gone more quickly if I had been into Rocky Horror half as much as some of my friends were).

Later on, the term “cis” started popping up. “Cisgender” and “cissexual” both threw me for a loop the first time I encountered them, and they still don’t feel like an entirely natural part of my vocabulary. Yet. But I recognize them as useful terms to identify “an individual whose self-perception of their gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth.” (From Wikipedia.) They also help move away from the flawed premise that cisgendered individuals don’t need a particular terminology because we’re “normal.”

I’ve finally started getting past the deeply-ingrained binary assumptions I grew up with. I learned the genetics a while back. Yes, we have XX and XY chromosome sets. We also have XXY, XYY, and other variations. They may be less common, but they certainly exist. If we have that much range at the genetic level, why the hell should gender identity be fixed or binary? For that matter, why the hell should gender be tied to biology at all?

I’m still learning, I’m still struggling, and I’m certainly still screwing up from time to time. I tossed out a joke yesterday that a few people challenged as cissexist. I didn’t get that at first. After walking away … well, I still may not agree with every single comment, but I think I better understand and agree with a lot of what people were saying.

I went through the typical defensive reactions in my head, of course. But that’s not what I meant! Why are you attacking people who are on your side? How hard do you have to be looking for offense to find it in that comment? Look how many people thought it was funny. And so on.

All bullshit. But bullshit that still goes through my brain when people call me on stuff like this.

Where I usually seem to mess up here is by asserting the implied equivalence of biology and gender. Or, to put it bluntly, with dick jokes.

I don’t make them often, because I try to keep a generally PG tone out of personal preference. But in my opinion, penises are goofy-looking bits of equipment, and as such, are useful elements for humor. (Or maybe a part of me is just perpetually stuck at age 12.) So when another all-male anthology or awards ballot comes out, I find myself wanting to make quips like, “Because everyone knows True Literature must be typed using only your penis!”

I think that’s a rather funny (and disturbing) image. It’s also problematic, because it equates “male” with possession of a penis. It reinforces that limited, binary, and demonstrably false worldview.

Defensive Brain immediately jumps in to say, “Okay fine, maybe you’re right, but it’s not like I’m committing hate crimes here or intentionally trying to hurt anyone!”

Defensive Brain needs to shut the &%^$ up. Because what I am doing is suggesting that a subset of people don’t exist. As they struggle for rights and recognition and legal protection, I’m making them invisible. Sure, it may not seem like a big deal to me … any more than “lady editors” was to a pair of SF authors from a recent sexism flap. But it’s one more unthinking erasure. One of a thousand daily slights, indignities, and assaults.

And I’ve contributed to that.

I won’t say that I fully get it yet, but I’m working on it, and certain things have finally begun to click. What can I say … sometimes I can be a little dense.

I apologize for my mistakes and missteps along the way.

—
The cardinal photo is from http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/a-gynandromorph-cardinal-one-half-male-the-other-half-female/

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Commenter Nixon, on another thread, asked this: “we’re now past the 40-year mark, long enough for trends to emerge… do you think that the list of UK number ones, taken as a weird at-a-glance sweep of British music history, very broadly accurately reflects that history?“. I gave a long reply, and writing it, it struck me that my answer was fairly central to the Popular project and that the question deserved more exposure than being Comment #44 on an Outhere Brothers thread was likely to give it. So here we are, slightly edited from its original form.

This is sort of the central question Popular wanted to answer – it reflects *a* history, but which one? I don’t think “accurately reflects that history” is meaningful though – there isn’t an accurate pop history to reflect, there’s a sense of ‘what happened’ and ‘what mattered’ which is a mix of personal memories, received wisdom, critical takes and commercial realities, which themselves may not be realities given the distortions of sales data methodologies.

When pop history is written – literally written, in books or articles or lists, the version of pop history that is PLAYED is different again – it’s usually written by the critical winners, not the commercial ones. So if the question is – how well do Number Ones map onto that? – the answer varies. If you look at it by genre, then for some things – Merseybeat, glam, new wave, the house music revolution, 00s R&B – it does very well. For others – metal, punk, Britpop, progressive rock, hip-hop up to a point – it seems to do quite poorly.

Looked at as a more material history: of technology, format changes, sales channels, etc. – the Number One lists work better but have disastrous gaps because methodologies and definitions can’t or won’t always keep pace with realities.

Looked at as a history of British cultural interests – the chart as a seismograph of wider trends – they are an interesting if incomplete fossil record: Robson And Jerome is a case in point.

And they’re best understood as half a picture – adding the LP charts makes things much fuller.

You can definitely see broad trends. The overall history of the No.1 spot – I worked this out with graphs once and should again – is broadly speaking a history of increasing diversity: the more you go on, the fewer white men (with guitars or otherwise) you tend to see. (There’s some evidence in the US that increasing digitalisation of music may be reversing this a bit – not sure that’s true of the UK). Depressingly, it seems to me that this process runs parallel to decreased critical respect for the charts and number ones, accusations of irrelevance, the rise of the dread adjective “manufactured” etc. (Having raised this spectre I really do need to do the statistical work, so expect more on this another time).

Another trend that comes out – relevant to Britpop, which sparked this whole discussion – is that, since the early 80s, “indie” music in its fuzzy wide cultural sense has rarely if ever sold well enough on singles to dominate the charts. Britpop is its high watermark – I think it’s fair to say that some bands and singles were unlucky not to reach number one, but that’s also how pop works and it does seem it couldn’t quite mobilise the buyers. Before and after that, indie music has been an important part of pop but, from a singles sales perspective, not THAT important.

Obviously this doesn’t match up to the attention paid to it critically and culturally – it’s easy to buy into a version of the mid-90s where Britpop DOMINATES the charts and the music scene, despite plenty of opposition to that idea at the time and since. There’s also – as the relatively massive excitement on Twitter over a silly poll suggests – a lot of warm feeling towards the idea of Britpop as a movement and a moment. Other styles have enjoyed far more dominant periods in the chart but haven’t been lavished with attention by the music press, let alone the mainstream news.

In other words I think in this instance the number ones list gets Britpop right representationally, though the actual selections leave a bit to be desired. And the number ones list is a vastly imperfect version of history, but anyone dismissing it as irrelevant is still revealing their own biases as much as the charts’.

BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today featured actor and comedian Hugh Laurie.

His selection of music was intelligent and heavily biased to the blues. However, the reason for drawing this programme to your attention is an interesting observation he made:

I heard the other day that there have been more photographs taken in the last twelve months than there have ever been taken, in the world, ever. Because people are now photographing – I shudder to think what they are photographing – everything and nothing. No interaction is deemed to have actually happened unless somebody has a picture of it. Nobody is satisfied with having met a person without having a photograph to prove it. I think that is odd, and I think it’s so odd that it might actually be starting to alter the way we think about each other and the way we think about general day-to-day social interaction.

What prompted this observation was the fact that digital photography has meant there is no longer any escape for a celebrity in a public space. But even when there are no celebrities around, it is notable how people with digital cameras and camera phones seem to be taking pictures constantly, so that they are no longer experiencing life directly but at one remove.

The problem is not photography or even digital photography per se but its incessant and indiscriminate use. As Laurie says, photography has become a curious form of validation of experience. It also makes you wonder what people do with all the photos they take. Digital photography means that people rapidly accumulate vast collections and, since they probably never look at most of these pictures more than a few days after taking them, it would seem that the act of capturing images is more important than the images themselves.

It has reached the point where some restaurant customers consider it quite normal to photograph each dish put in front of them, so that the image rather than the taste assumes greater importance.

It is a strange world where people think of ‘memory’ as something stored on a memory card rather than stored in their brains, and where life becomes something to capture rather than experience directly.

A snapshot of some of today’s headlines on Nick Clegg’s comments on MPs’ Pay is quite revealing. To refresh your memories, yesterday he told journalists at his new monthly press conference that he wouldn’t take the proposed rise himself, that he couldn’t control what other MPs so, but:

But I think all MPs, whatever status they hold, whatever position they hold, will know from their own constituents that there are millions of people in the United Kingdom at the moment who’ve had a remorseless squeeze on their living standards for some years now and that we’re asking millions of public sector works, in our schools, in our hospitals, to have their pay only increase by 1%.  You know, MPs of whatever description at the end of the day are public servants paid by taxpayers.  And that’s why I think it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to explain to the public why MPs should be treated at this time so very differently to their constituents.

Just look how differently this is covered by the press:

We’ve always suspected that Daily Mail journalists dip their keyboards in poison before writing about Nick Clegg. This rather backs that theory up.

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

Here’s how we know that Walmart’s claim to be paying an “average” wage of $12.40/hour is hogwash: The retail giant is not lobbying aggressively in support of a minimum-wage increase.

If you’re a retailer with millions of employees all making several dollars more than the minimum wage, then seeing that wage raised from $7.25/hour to, say, $9.50/hour doesn’t cost you anything when it comes to your own payroll. But it would mean a great deal to the people your company can’t live without: your customers. About 74 million Americans are paid minimum wage — with nearly half of those being adult women. If those 74 million Americans were to get a raise of  another $2.25/hour, they would spend that money. And they wouldn’t spend it at Macy’s. They would spend it at Walmart. A minimum-wage increase would be a huge revenue windfall, a sales bonanza for Walmart.

Granted, it gets more complicated when you factor in Walmart’s supply chain. Many of the goods they sell are cheaper because they’re made by companies paying the lowest legal wages possible, so a minimum-wage increase wouldn’t be entirely cost-free for the chain. (Calculating stuff like this is another reason businesses need to hire economists, not just accountants.)

But if Walmart were honestly paying an average wage of $12.40/hour, then they ought to support a minimum-wage increase. They do not support such an increase, and so I have to conclude they are not honest when they claim to be paying that.

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June 28th, 2013: I am back from Austin! While in Austin I signed 13 thousand paperback books and blew a world record out of the water. Austin was - kind of amazing? I think I love Austin. One year ago today: the stunning and educational followup to The Scary Ghost Who Learned About Different Kinds Of Rocks – Ryan

This article by Laurie Penny on the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the manic pixie dream girl trope is really good.

I’m the same age as Laurie Penny, so was plagued by the same cultural stuff as her- I don’t know if it’s just egocentrism for my own timeline but I feel like the 90s marked a real rise of the manic pixie. Britpop had a fair chunk of them, they appeared as outsider girls in offbeat, dry comedies. How quirky! Wow! A lady with a guitar and a fringe perhaps she is supah speshul and liking her will be a meaningful growth experience for me. Level up!

And that’s reductive of ladies with guitars and fringes, of course. Because they’re real, awesome people. But that’s not my reductivism, it’s the eighty millionth interview with Brody Dalle when in 2012 people are still fascinated by the idea of a woman in a rock band as something unusual or somehow defiantly implausible. Jesus wept.

One of the things I intensely dislike about some sorts of indie music is the way it creates this easy vision of crush-girl. Somethingsomething about her hair and how she probably won’t look at you but somethingsomething thought maybe she was deeper and more meaningful than the other girls [nb: that's because that's how a crush works, boys with guitars] and the worst thing about these basic, rolled-up character tropes is that they come with some implication that because manic pixie dream girls are special, all other girls, all these other people with their real people things are less. All those annoying real things are faded into a muddy background blur against the special, shiny limitedness of the trope.

I’ve always liked Bright Eyes because Conor Oberst’s absolute distilled concentration of the 500 Days Of Summer Boy is so intense that it subverts itself. Is he romantic? Good god, no. He’s, like, the worst. And I know that during each of our manic pixie dream girl phase we might want a boy to write First Day Of My Life about us but can you imagine what kind of suffocating, weird nightmare that would actually be? Someone who placed so much meaning in you that they saw you as a magic amulet?

I know exactly how suffocating, as it happens because like Laurie Penny, I have looked into their faces and been alarmed to discover this person I thought I was becoming super chums with has transfigured me into a symbol. Because they’ve seen a girl like me on TV and they wanted to …I don’t know, be the boy who loved her, maybe? Have that meaningful and sensitive thing? Be as special as the girl was (fictionally, damagingly) portrayed to be? Have their Precious Little Life?

(Scott Pilgrim is a delightful explosion of these tropes)

Taylor Swift plays with this in reverse. She’s toned it down a little (ok, she probably hasn’t- but I quite fancied her in the I Knew You Were Trouble video) but she’s often playing the unusual girl, the one the boy’s not seeing because somethingsomething hair somethingsomething other girls are slutty and brash, somethingsomething Zooey Deschanel and you should be with me, which is what makes it ok to stalk you and murk on your girlfriend, who is presumably not special and therefore, a minor character who can get killed off or something.

Of course, the fucking Spice Girls didn’t enormously help. As much as I love Geri Halliwell, there’s an awful lot of weight to an accusation that they taught eight-year-olds to throw off the shackles of personhood and become a squeaking girl-thing. Like man-thing, only with more hair. Girl-thing was all about your criminal actions (see: the Wannabe video) not mattering because you were “cheeky” and because you are “just having fun” so that’s ok. About you not really mattering as a real person in a real way because you were GIRL now and so you were freed of consequences and responsibility in favour of not mattering. I don’t think that’s how they intended it but it’s a reading I’d have no problem with.

(Comparatively, Girls Aloud’s complex, dense lyrics and defiant attitude were all about personhood, about being rude ginger bitches and girls overboard; oh, band of my heart 4eva)

(See also: Madonna, Kylie, Rihanna, Mariah Carey, Beyonce, the Shangri-Las, Cyndi Lauper, etc.)

While writing this, I started thinking about male tropes- the Strong Mysterious Silent Dude and the Rogue With A Heart and indeed, the one I see most frequently projected by girls onto (fictional) boys; the poor, misunderstood villain. And all of those are about seeing the heart and the psychology of someone, when they’re portrayed in a female gaze and comparatively, the manic pixie is a mystery to our male protagonist’s eyes. An impossible girl, full of holes.

But I am genuinely interested if this happens to people of the male persuasion; whether they find themselves frustrated to discover they are poorly summarised and made incomplete and simple. A challops-y bit of me wonders if that’s why so many people have beef with the Big Bang Theory; finally, a seemingly sympathetic and frequently sweet, recognisable-but-innaccurate-and-dehumanising look at yr menfolk geeks?

I don’t want to be hard on geek boys, really. They go through some shit. And it’s as bad when people assume that they’re all panting, cis, white heterosexuals spaffing over Vampirella as when us ladygeek specialists are poorly hammered into the manic pixie niche. But I do wonder how much the tropes bleed out into the boys? Do they feel like they’re becoming the characters? This gawkish but heroic leads- I used to genuinely and enormously relate to Mat in the Wheel of Time; I don’t know if he’s a trope for a boy, though?

(I genuinely don’t know this! I am trying to work it out- feel free to comment with yr experiences, geek boys; I would like to think of you all as proper people too, I have known and loved many of you)

Which brings me around to the title; I was never a manic pixie dream girl. Not for want of trying- it’s the sort of thing that seems appealling when you’re 14 and hopped up on The Sandman but the basic fortitude was never there. I was That Girl, sure but I was a different fantasy archetype. At 5’11″ and with a good-three-and-a-half feet of midnight hair, there was nothing particularly pixie or indeed, thanks to a steady diet of sulky gothicism, manic about me.

(I’d later cut the hair off with some paper scissors, dye it pink and give the pixie thing a go; it didn’t work, my true trope showed through)

No, I was that other trope; the magic slut. I get actually angry when I see these now- I think I threw something across my bedroom when I read Warren Ellis’ Freakangels and discovered KK at the start of it, firstly because it looked almost as though someone had stolen me and put me in a book and secondly because for fuck’s sake did the magic slut trope get any… tropier?

Magic sluts, you see: we are maternal, competent, confident and brassy where a manic pixie might be interesting and shy, we own a collection of spanners and can be called upon to heft huge pieces of plate glass around on a barge, standing in two inches of water, in high heels and a sparkly dress and come out totally unscathed. We cannot be killed by alcohol consumption, although we might try and then allow the mask to slip and get all emotional for a chapter or so. We provide healing and growth experiences with our magical sexual allure and provide a safe background for teenage boys to bounce off when they realise the trope they actually think they’re in love with is the manic pixie. We’re angry, really angry and yet despite all our competence somehow beholden to some Secret Shame Thing that forces us to pretend to be an extra-decent person long enough that we might even actually be one. Eventually. Some of the time.

And god help me, I’m a technical, legally savvy and business-headed person (I’m a charity database manager) with enormous boobs, a somewhat liberatedly goth dress sense and a good line in angry swearing. I just dyed my hair back to its natural colour, after three years of masquerading as a blonde. I have a degree in, of all the fucking things, genocide studies. I’m rather old-before-my-time and I can use my mutant powers of basic psychological understanding to offer reasonably good advice. I’m bloody made up. If I was in a book, I’d give up on it.

Of course, that’s not actually me. Or at least, not all of me. It’s a series of surface tropes that make me That Girl, if that is your bag. Thing about being That Girl is that I own lots of Dungeons and Dragons manuals and was never allowed to play with anyone. I’m the sort of girl that’s drawn in every comic book and then gets called a fake geek when I show up to a convention all fleshy and inconvenient, like. Being all magical and slutty with tits and mascara and that.

It fucked me up when I was a teenager. It’s hard enough trying to work out what you’re doing when you hate yourself, without being forced to provide meaningful heartbreak experiences to people you don’t want to hurt just because it gives everyone a feeling of self-righteousness. But you’re, like, fantasy hott. So your feelings are all tied up in being special, not human and sad.

As Penny says about the manic pixie dream girl; it’s easy to become the trope, to play this role. It’s still easy for me to slip into it because being body-confident and unembarassed about sex are things I think are good and I’m hardly going to forget how to grout a wall just to avoid tropeishness. Sometimes it’s hard to work out if you’re accidentally being That Girl again, where you end and the trope begins and sometimes there might not be any line to delineate that. And then you look round and the Zach Braff-a-likes she mentions are looking hopefully at you and you realise you’ve been inadvertantly mothering them into thinking they can have some important pubescent growth experience all over your chest. And I still like these boys who don’t see how sexy they are, bearded dudes in longsleeve t-shirts and if it wasn’t that I have a better half at home I’d probably still be playing a therapeutic part in someone’s pseudoromantic revelation.

And because I am, deep down, this thing, what I’m thinking there is ‘well, I shouldn’t be harsh. It’s good for them to have any weird nascent sexual feelings and Talking To Ladies experiences on me, I’m an old hand at this.’ But that’s a professional view on it and my personality and personage isn’t a job role.

(And professionals are real and fully formed people who can spin you a fantasy, with great skill and worth lots but not them in their brilliant entireity, any more than you’d get the whole of me in a meeting, no matter how well I solved your data architecture problems)

(And the boys who I was once this thing for; they’re real people too- they didn’t always see me as a limited fantasy, they were my friends and I loved them, still love most of them. But there was always the trope, guiding some permissiveness or comfort.)

No one should have to dislike or interrogate themselves because of the fear of fitting into a poorly-formed trope and being misunderstood to be only that, because that trope has been so conditioned. Whether you’re a magic slut or a manic pixie dream girl or a sassy authoritarian scientist or any other character you’ve accidentally found playing you, man, woman, child or big, blue furry cat-thing.

The part of Laurie Penny’s article that I really, really liked was this-

So here’s what I’ve learned, in 26 years of reading books and kissing boys. Firstly, averagely pretty white women in their late teens and twenties are not the biggest, most profoundly unsolvable mystery in the universe. Trust me. I should know. Those of us with an ounce of lust for life are almost universally less interesting than we will be in our thirties and forties. The one abiding secret about us is that we’re not fantasies, and we weren’t made to save you: we’re real people, with flaws and cracked personalities and big dreams and digestive tracts. It’s no actual mystery, but it remains a fact that the half of the human race with a tendency to daydream about a submissive, exploitable, transcendent ideal of the other seems perversely unwilling to discover.

It doesn’t help us that media and pseudopsychology condition us to believe that there’s no way we can ever understand people of a different gender to us, that we must wear different colours and perform different rituals in different places in order to level up, that our experience points will vary and that our predetermined skillsets will be weighted in different directions. But this was very much my experience. I am a much more interesting person now than when I was 15; when I am 36 I will be moreso, I might even have learnt exactly how much wine is too much. Maybe when I am 46 I will have learnt to stop getting quite so het up about people being wrong on the internet, giving myself time to write seven novels a year. Or been eaten by a mutated cockroach. The future is an endless and full of genuinely meaningful growth experiences, with real people as they happen in their present.

As a recent thing I saw on Tumblr said; your life is not an episode of Skins. And if it was, it would be really boring and exhausting and you’d hate every one of those fuckers.

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Footnote: some time ago I wrote an article about how, because I am an unreasonable and largely unpleasant individual, I found myself unable to do anything other than loathe Laurie Penny for having succeeded where I’d failed, as a writer. It would be reductive of some of my other internet meltdowns to suggest that this even features as one of the godawful lowpoints in my writing career but it’s not something of which I’m at all proud. And because I’m not actually a trope; that was me then. Sometimes I wasn’t nice.

As per trying to be a real person, I am trying to work more on writing things that don’t make me hate myself six months later, so here we are. Sorry but not-actually-sorry to anyone who has issue with that.

(magic sluts hate manic pixie dream girls, of course but then they’re also not real)

It is fun to laugh at the fruitcakes, but Nigel Farage is nobody's fool. Here he is talking to the Eastern Daily Press today:

"Whatever anyone thinks of Lib Dem politics, Ashdown was a brilliant leader of the Lib Dems and they focused on building up by winning by-elections, by building up clusters of district and county council seats and once you hold a number of council seats that you won on first past the post at county level, the perception that you are a wasted vote and you can’t win at Westminster goes. 

"The Lib Dems build up to 60 MPs using this approach and my approach is 'let’s build the clusters and use May 22 next year to do it'."

So he intends to learn from the Liberal Democrat playbook. The irony is that someone in Nick Clegg's circle recently briefed the media to the effect that we are about to throw those lessons away.

Here is what the Independent told us on the morning of Nick speech to the ALDC conference:

Before 2010, the only way the Lib Dems could get a foothold against the two biggest parties was through targeted, street-by-street campaigns. But he will argue this will not be an option at the 2015 election now that his party has been in government and demand a disciplined central message about a "stronger economy and fairer society". He will say: "The idea that in a general election we can be under a national spotlight and yet run the campaign as a series of loosely linked by-elections just isn't possible."

It's a good thing this briefing is nonsense, otherwise the threat UKIP poses to us would be even greater.

Content note: this post discusses sexual violence and systematic transphobia

The Court of Appeal has codified into UK law that trans people who do not disclose their trans status could be considered sex offenders. For full commentary and exploration of this ruling I urge you to read this whole post on Complicity, but to summarise:

The judgement goes on at length beyond this and is also concerned with the accuracy of legal advice given, but there appears to have been some doubt as to how aware M was about the gender situation. Given they were both teenagers, possibly confused about sexuality and on one side gender, this perhaps isn’t surprising.

Essentially it goes on to say that although the burden of proof is with the prosecution, if you’re trans and out yourself to someone prior to any sort of sexual act – even touching – then it would be best if you can prove it, in case they (or their parents) later try to prosecute. A Gender Recognition Certificate would, I hope, be a defense – but having read the judgement, I’m not certain.

Quite how you prove you told a partner without outing yourself to all and sundry, putting yourself at risk of physical violence, loss of employment, homelessness etc is not addressed in the judgement.

As zoeimogen points out on Complicity, similar precedents do not exist for not disclosing, for example, marital status. They do not even exist for not disclosing whether or not one has HIV. It is a really, really bad ruling with potentially horrifying implications for the trans community. It creates a climate of fear, a hostile environment. Ultimately, it means that if a trans person is raped by a cis person, the cis rapist could turn the tables and declare that actually their survivor was the rapist for not disclosing.

If you think this is some kind of exaggeration, I invite you to look around the world to see other examples of how legislation has been set up to stop trans people from being able to seek justice through legal channels, and cis people claiming trans people are rapists. In Singapore, in the US, in Sweden, in India where they recently rewrote their rape laws so only cis women could be raped. They are legislating away the possibility of a group of people–already more vulnerable to rape–to be raped.

This is common, and this is systemic. It grows from a combination of factors making it sadly inevitable. The general attitude of dehumanisation towards trans people. The notion that it is genitals that are gender. That “trans panic” is considered a valid defence. The insistence that trans people are some sort of intruder and deceiver, sneakily infiltrating the dominant cis supremacist order. And yes, we cis feminists are complicit in this. When trying to make change, we sometimes forget our trans sisters, accidentally throwing them under the bus. Then there’s the actively bigoted feminists, who want to see this happen. It’s not just feminists, generally social justice activists are very poor on remembering that trans people exist, and bigoted when they do.

Tomorrow, the Pride celebrations are going on in London. Ostensibly a celebration our pride in being LGBT, the whole thing is built on a history of throwing trans people under the bus. The role of trans women in kicking off the Pride movement is all but erased from memory, and tomorrow we shall be celebrating the passage of the UK same sex marriage law which throws trans people under the bus.

We look away, far too often, but for trans people the option of looking away is not there. And if we are to make things right, we must not look away. We must look and talk about these horrors, because our silence has allowed them to grow and grow. We must address cissexism, within ourselves and within society. We need to talk about this ruling, because it is an entirely logical extension of a system that many of us have unwittingly contributed to. We must look, and we must work to unpick every thread which wove this vile cloth.

We need to talk about all of this, because it is not OK.

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Thanks to @metalmujer for the links to worldwide instances of similar cases.

ETA: some shit I’ve cocked up on. Link to what I did wrong. Unedited post in the interest of honesty and transparency.

June 29, 2005, on this blog: Hegel’s Bluff

Simply find two extreme views roughly equidistant from your own along whatever spectrum you see fit to consult. Declare one the thesis and the other the antithesis, and your own position the synthesis. Without actually having to defend your own position, or to explain the shortcomings of these others, you can reassure yourself that you are right and they are wrong. Your position, whatever its actual merits, becomes not only the reasonable middle-ground and the presumably correct stance, but the very culmination of history.

Adding a remote kill switch to cell phones would deter theft.

Here we can see how the rise of the surveillance state permeates everything about computer security. On the face of it, this is a good idea. Assuming it works -- that 1) it's not possible for thieves to resurrect phones in order to resell them, and 2) that it's not possible to turn this system into a denial-of-service attack tool -- it would deter crime. The general category of security is "benefit denial," like ink tags attached to garments in retail stores and car radios that no longer function if removed. But given what we now know, do we trust that the government wouldn't abuse this system and kill phones for other reasons? Do we trust that media companies won't kill phones it decided were sharing copyrighted materials? Do we trust that phone companies won't kill phones from delinquent customers? What might have been a straightforward security system becomes a dangerous tool of control, when you don't trust those in power.

From The Boston Globe:

IT’S TOUGH to get a room full of writers to agree on anything—the best wine, the best Shakespeare play, the best time of day to work. Perhaps the only belief that today’s writers share is that to produce good writing, you have to revise.

This principle appears everywhere—in classrooms, in newsrooms, in writing guides, and especially in author interviews. “I’ve done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story,” Raymond Carver once told The Paris Review. “Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.” Joyce Carol Oates, who is so prolific she leaves other authors shaking their heads, has said: “I revise all the time, every day.”

. . . .

It’s easy to assume that history’s greatest authors have been history’s greatest revisers. But that wasn’t always how it worked. Until about a century ago, according to various biographers and critics, literature proceeded through handwritten manuscripts that underwent mostly small-scale revisions.

Then something changed. In a new book, “The Work of Revision,” Hannah Sullivan, an English professor at Oxford University, argues that revision as we now understand it—where authors, before they publish anything, will spend weeks tearing it down and putting it back together again—is a creation of the 20th century. It was only under Modernist luminaries like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf that the practice came to seem truly essential to creating good literature.

. . . .

In the age of Shakespeare and Milton, paper was an expensive luxury; blotting out a few lines was one thing, but producing draft after draft would have been quite another. Writers didn’t get to revise during the publishing process, either. Printing was slow and messy, and in the rare case a writer got to see a proof of his work—that is, a printed sample of the text, laid out like a book—he had to travel in person to a publishing center like London.

All of these factors suggest that revision was not something that happened on the page. Indeed, during the 19th century, the Romantics made resisting revision a virtue. The best literature, they believed, flowed from spontaneous and organic creative acts. “I am like the tyger (in poesy),” Lord Byron wrote in a letter. “If I miss my first spring—I go growling back to my Jungle. There is no second. I can’t correct.”

Link to the rest at The Boston Globe and thanks to Meryl for the tip.

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From The Week:

The hunt for the Higgs boson was one of the most expensive and labor-intensive particle physics projects ever undertaken, and promised to answer the fundamental but elusive question of why our atoms stick together in the first place. And yet, when CERN researchers finally announced that they’d glimpsed the Higgs, the world’s first reaction wasn’t to cheer; it was to stifle collective laughter. The institution’s scientists, cradling the most important scientific discovery of the decade, had chosen to present their findings to a breathless public using a peculiar font face: Comic Sans MS.

. . . .

The whole kerfuffle underscored just how important typefaces are to the way we process information. Words hold power. But the aesthetic manner in which those words are presented can affect the way we read, and the way we think about the information presented.

“Typography is one ingredient in a pretty complicated presentation,” Cyrus Highsmith, a typeface designer and author of the book Inside Paragraphs, told me over the phone. “Typography is the detail and the presentation of a story. It represents the voice of an atmosphere, or historical setting of some kind. It can do a lot of things.”

. . . .

When readers came to the site, the story was presented in different typefaces: Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, and Trebuchet. Roughly 40,000 people responded to the quiz, and the results were weighted to evaluate which fonts inspired more confidence in the research, and which fonts made the information appear less believable.Here’s what Morris found:

The conscious awareness of Comic Sans promotes — at least among some people — contempt and summary dismissal. But is there a typeface that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is.

It is Baskerville.

Believe it or not, the results of this test even show a disparity between Baskerville and Georgia — two apparently similar serif typefaces.

Baskerville’s weighted advantage wasn’t huge — just 1.5 percent. “That advantage may seem small,” Dunning told the Times, “but if that was a bump up in sales figures, many online companies would kill for it. The fact that font matters at all is a wonderment.”

Link to the rest at The Week and thanks to James for the tip.

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Most inspired political-economic idea of the week: Irish blogger Jason O’Mahony proposes updating a centuries-old idea to capture taxes from offshore corporate tax-dodgers. Governments should privatise the hard-to-land tax liabilities at auction and let the hungriest privateer capitalists harry the behemoths. Memo to Danny Alexander: it may sound like a joke, but how better to harness innovation?

“Back in the day, governments used to issue letters of marque to ships, permitting them to engage in legal piracy against the vessels of other specified countries. Privatising sea war. Hence the phrase ‘Privateers’.

“Hoist the Jolly Roger, and set sail for Starbucks!”

Some privatisations make sense. Some don’t. I quoted Conrad Russell a couple of months ago on how Liberals need to think more carefully about them than Tories or socialists do: what will work? What’s the empirical case economically? Socially? Will it reduce or boost monopolies? I read about two privatisation ideas this week that reminded me of such tests and prompted more: is it politically bat-shit-crazy? And can it do something the state can’t?

Tuition Fees Again? Danny, Please, No

First, and with no pleasure at all, as part of the Coalition Government’s latest spending review, Danny Alexander announced this week that they’re privatising the Student Loan Book. It’s a tiny change to promote off-the-book borrowing that makes little economic and no social sense, and will probably have adverse consequences for students and ex-students. For those reasons alone, Danny shouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. But in his role not as Chief Secretary to the Treasury but as a senior Lib Dem MP and, having known him for twenty years, a person with a sharp brain, there’s a much more political reason why rather than agreeing to it Danny should have retorted, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

I disagree with plenty of Simon Titley’s you-have-to-have-been-on-my-side-in-Liberal-Party-infighting-in-1982-for-your-views-to-count school of Lib Dem commentary, but there’s no doubt he got it bang on the money here:

“What political genius thought of this? Yes, let’s pick at some old scabs, shall we?
“…reopening the issue of student loans makes no political sense either. That issue has become a byword for mistrust of the Liberal Democrats. So why revive the controversy?”

The tuition fees fiasco was by common understanding the most politically disastrous single action for the Liberal Democrats since the party was formed (and arguably the most damaging to the British Liberal family since the First World War and Lloyd George’s egomania). The economic effects of this new change are minimal, giving the Tories very little leverage to insist on it as part of the wider plan, but the political effects are pure poison. Why on Earth are our ministers reminding everyone of this Lib Dem suicide pill?

However, while student loans are a very straightforward and easy form of debt for the government to recover – another reason, of simple inertia, not to sell them off – there are other liabilities that it’s a lot harder for governments to recover, and for those, having established the principle that you can sell off government debts just as you split off banks’ ‘toxic assets’, there’s a brilliant case for privatisation…

Labour Government By Debt and Tax-Dodging

Another piece of my reading in the last week – which deserves my coming back to on its own, but just in case, here it is as an aside – is Nick Thornsby’s table of “UK tax revenue and public spending 1997-2012”. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? But – shockingly – in the last 15 years, UK governments have only balanced the annual budget once, relying on massive borrowing in every other year while lying about “prudence”, and dating from a full decade before Labour could blame the international crisis. The thirteen-year-Labour Government’s sole credit year: +£16bn. Biggest debt year: -£186bn. No wonder the deficit’s taking a while to fix.

Labour simply decided that it was better to make people happy with a public and private credit boom, spending oodles of money that they didn’t have long before the financial crisis – in their ten years of power before the storm hit, nine of them were already on tick. That’s the problem with Keynesianism: the broad idea makes simple economic sense, but no-one ever practises it because of the politics. Borrow in a downturn? Absolutely. Run a surplus of taxes when the economy’s doing well? Nah, we’d rather not. And part of Labour’s long-running credit-fuelled feel-good factor was that they laudably wanted to pull in jobs from multinational corporations, so they let them get away with dodging taxes by the supertanker-load.

It’s only since the Coalition came to power that the UK Government’s focused on tax-dodging – partly because the Lib Dems insisted it be a priority, partly because the Tories realised that (for all they wanted to) they couldn’t get away with sucking up to big business like Labour did, and partly because, as even Labour admitted (though not of course that it’s their fault),

“there is no money”

and the Coalition Government now has little choice but to chase the money that Labour nodded and winked at companies to say they needn’t bother with and that’s harder to get even now the Government is actually trying.

But some of the tax that’s been dodged is very hard to get hold of indeed.

From Privatisation To Privateers

As an innovative way of prying taxes out of the biggest avoiders, it’s time to look again at the empirical case for privatisation. Will it work? Does it make economic sense? And can it do something the state can’t? The oft-quoted reason for many Thatcherite privatisations, even those that set up new private monopolies that logic suggested would be worse than public ones, was that even when there was no boost to competition, privatisation would automatically lead to ‘innovation’ and so ‘efficiency’. Sometimes this was true, sometimes not. One where it sounds more than worth a try is a case of very ostentatious state failure – the power of massive multinational corporations to avoid paying taxes. And so I come to my second and far more exciting piece of privatisation reading this week (though it was actually published the previous week, before you correct me).

Jason O’Mahony is a former Progressive Democrat and, if he counts himself as any sort of cousin to the Liberal family, is definitely at several removes from me (let alone Simon Titley). But, cover me in advertising and call me a Thatcherite, I think his “here’s a mad thought” blog post “Want to tax multinationals? How about privatising their tax liabilities?” is a brilliant notion.

“One of the challenges of taxing large multinationals is the fact that corporate taxation is like a war at sea. The fronts keeping changing, and you’re fighting on many different fronts at once. On top of that, the fact is that multinationals, because of the huge sums involved, pay huge money to their tax advisors, and so tend to attract the best. Tax authorities, on the other hand, get quietly competent but under resourced people…

“Auction off their tax liabilities to the highest bidder, as a legally recoverable asset, in the same way banks are selling off distressed, toxic assets. If company X owes state Y a nominal €100 million, auction it off. The state gets a chunk of money with ease, and the asset, the tax debt, becomes a private liability.

“Sure that’s mad, says you. Sure, who’d buy that debt? Some entrepreneur would, at a knock down price, and would pay hotshot young lawyers out of the finest universities in the world big fat bonuses for figuring out ways of recovering the debt. In short, we’d fight rogue tax dodging capitalists with the most innovative, hungry force on Earth: other capitalists.”

And he’s quite right about the counter-argument – people would scream that we’re “losing some of that tax revenue” to “mercenary taxmen”. That’s the tax revenue that we’re not getting. Half of something still being better than all of nothing. Because that’s the beauty of the idea – you only auction off the tax liabilities that you’ve already failed miserably to get hold of. And this way, you don’t have to pay all the lawyers to do battle in court and board the boardrooms. The auction-winners do that. You don’t need to sell off the lot – perhaps just some of the worst, pour encourager les autres – and you can set a ‘reserve price’ at the auction to prevent too big a disparity between liability and profit, or bar the dodgers from bidding on their own debts, or whatever… But it can’t be beyond the wit of government to set rules that are both lucrative for the public purse and exciting for innovators.

If it doesn’t bring in much money for the privateers, governments will already have had their cash up front by privatising the risk, and few will cry about it. If it brings in a lot of money for the privateers, the multinationals might be forced to settle with governments instead and agree to a binding international system of tax in future. And if the privateers’ lawyers hit on innovative arguments that spike the dodgers’ guns and set legal precedents, then government lawyers can move in and capitalise on those to rake in all the other liabilities.

So how about it, Danny? It would certainly bring in vastly more cash – and do far less political damage – than making more students walk the plank and keelhauling the Lib Dem vote.

Yes, let’s pick at some old scabs, shall we?

The New Statesman reports that Danny Alexander has confirmed the student loan book will be privatised. The report explains why this makes no economic sense.

What the New Statesman doesn’t say is that reopening the issue of student loans makes no political sense either. That issue has become a byword for mistrust of the Liberal Democrats. So why revive the controversy?

Oh yes, I forgot. Everybody who used to vote Liberal Democrat is a ‘protest voter’ who can be safely jettisoned in favour of hard-working-centre-ground-alarm-clock-Britain. I hope these imaginary voters will be impressed.

In which case: Whoo-hoo!

(I wrote this up so that when the award was announced, if Redshirts won I would be able to press a button and have it post, because I am otherwise occupied at the American Library Association conference this weekend. If it doesn’t win, of course, then none of you will ever see this, and I will delete it at some point. I recognize this explanation is a little meta. But then, so is Redshirts.)

The other finalists for the award were Iain M. Banks’ The Hydrogen Sonata; Lois McMaster Boujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance; James S.A. Corey’s Caliban’s War and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312. This is a very fine field of finalists, any of whom would of course have been an excellent winner. I was thrilled to share a slate with all of them.

As I was unable to be at the Locus Award Weekend because it conflicted with ALA, my wife Krissy went to Seattle on my behalf. If the award won (and if you’re reading this it did), this is the acceptance speech she gave for me:

Let me begin by apologizing for not being here today to accept this award; I am in Chicago, hanging out with librarians. As you can see, in my place you have my wife, and I’m sure you’ll agree this is a more than fair substitution.

I am delighted by this award, more than I can express in this speech. Thank you Locus and to the voters in its annual poll. Thanks also to everyone at Tor and in particular my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Thanks also to the folks at Audible, including Steve Feldberg, and also to Wil Wheaton. Additional thanks to Ethan Ellenberg, my agent, and my wife Kristine.

However, I have one confession to make: I was hoping for a different outcome for this award. I was pulling for Iain M. Banks to win, not only for The Hydrogen Sonata, which is amply deserving of the award, but for the entire body of his science fiction work, and his for universe of The Culture, which is, simply, one of the great imaginative achievements in our genre.

I did not know Iain Banks personally, but I was a fan. I was honored to be a finalist with him, and would have been honored to lose this award to him. Since I did not accomplish that I will instead ask your indulgence as I dedicate this award to him and his work. He is missed; his work remains. Thank you.

And indeed, thank you. This is a lovely way to wrap up June.

Yes, he photographed Marilyn Monroe. But also: with Aram Avakian, he created the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959), a documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. It makes 1958 look like the coolest year in history.

Bert Stern, Elite Photographer Known for Images of Marilyn Monroe (New York Times)

[A jazz fan looking at the program for the 1958 festival will wince upon discovering who’s missing from the film.]

A report released by the Moral Philosophy Research Group this week confirms what many have long suspected: Sean Hannity’s commentary is entirely devoid of cognitive content. “Yes, except we mean it literally,” says Anthony Vega, the report’s lead author. “When Hannity utters a sentence, he’s not asserting a proposition that might be true or false – he’s simply expressing an attitude.”

The researchers first became interested in Hannity after noticing a startling contrast between his apparently successful use of language and what seemed to be a never-ending string of blatant falsehoods. “Most of what he says seems to be demonstrably false,” Vega notes, “and yet he engages in these back-and-forth exchanges in which his guests somehow just don’t seem to care. I found myself wondering: What if Sean Hannity isn’t even in the business of describing reality?”

The hypothesis turned out to yield remarkable success in interpreting many of Hannity’s otherwise puzzling statements, Vega says. Consider, for instance, Hannity’s repeated claim that America has the greatest health care system on Earth. “There’s just no plausible standard by which that could be true,” explains Vega. “What he’s really saying is: ‘USA! USA!’ It’s a little more obvious when he says things like: ‘The US is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.’ This particular pro-attitude is a common theme for him.”

Hannity’s locutions often manifest the superficial grammatical and logical properties indicative of assertions, Vega continues, “which is probably why he’s typically interpreted as at least making an attempt at engaging in reasoned discourse. But don’t be fooled: his goal isn’t actually to describe some mind-independent realm of facts – much less to present others with reasons for believing his claims about those facts.” The full report, “A Non-Cognitive Analysis of Sean Hannity,” is available for download on the Moral Philosophy Research Group’s website.

[Speaking of assertion, I’ve just had a paper on assertion and epistemic regress accepted for publication in Thought. You can read the abstract and download the paper here.]

On the Telegraph blog, Bernard Brogan reports that Nick Clegg is “safe”. The “leadership crisis” is over. There will no longer be “a coup at the Liberal Democrats’ autumn conference”.

A crisis? Excuse me, but did I miss something? A post here on 16 January explained why it was unlikely there would be a leadership election anytime soon. There has been no ‘crisis’ in the intervening months. The arguments in January’s post remain valid.

But despite the lack of a coup, Clegg is increasingly deserving of one. It isn’t because the Liberal Democrats joined the coalition – the party agreed to that overwhelmingly. And no matter how much you may think Clegg has subsequently made a poor fist of being in coalition, it is hard to see any of his potential rivals being able to make a significant difference at this late stage in the game.

The problem isn’t the coalition but the survival of the Liberal Democrats after 2015 as anything more than a fringe party. Clegg seems to have little idea of what makes the party tick or how its campaigning strength was built. The nature of this problem was revealed in a series of speeches and statements he has made over the past year.

In May, I posted here about Clegg’s statement after the local elections and his speech to last September’s party conference. On both occasions, he said that his way is the only way; anyone who disagrees is simply not interested in winning power. His way is the future; anyone who disagrees wants a return to the past.

He referred to the Liberal Democrats as having been a “party of protest” before he took charge. He travestied party members as people who want to “turn back” and create a “stop the world I want to get off” party. He warned them to “stop looking in the rear view mirror”.

In his speech at the ALDC conference in Manchester last Saturday, he repeated similar arguments. He scorned party members who want to “turn back the clock” and be “the third party forever”, who are calling for “an eternity in opposition” and “hankering for the comfort blanket of national opposition”.

These are straw men. We know this because in none of these attacks does Clegg ever name his critics or supply specific references to the speeches or writings where they have expressed such views. These imaginary enemies are conjured up because Clegg needs a ‘defining other’, a pantomime villain against whom he can contrast his virtues. He’d like his audience to shout out, “they’re behind you!” They won’t because they do not share his illusion.

Indeed, following Saturday’s speech, several have censured this smear campaign:

• Jonathan Calder was depressed by the spin in advance of the speech, which promised Clegg would “take on his internal party critics”, and mocked his “very real fork in the road”. He pointed out that Clegg’s strongest critics are not the dilettantes Clegg would have you believe: “...the fellow Liberal Democrats who are most likely to be critical of Nick’s leadership are precisely those who have lost power under his leadership – councillors and group leaders in Northern cities who have seen the gains of years of hard work wiped out”.
• Caron Lindsay, usually a loyalist, complained on Liberal Democrat Voice, “we’re not a bunch of unrealistic hippies, you know”. She warned: “Nick ought to realise that if he wants us to do something for him, then inferring that we need to grow up and get real is hardly the best motivational tool, especially when it’s not even accurate. Activists, who are already working hard, are going to think ‘Is that how little he thinks of us?’”
• Gareth Epps asked on the Social Liberal Forum blog whether Clegg was resorting to “megaphone diplomacy”. He observed that it was perverse of Clegg to lecture members about power at an ALDC conference of all places:  “...an audience of councillors is a strange one to lecture about being in power, especially those who did just that successfully for many years before national political trends voted good Liberal Democrats off councils we formerly ran. They are people who have long been a party of Government, who have suddenly found themselves in some cases relegated from first place to third thanks to taking the path Clegg seems to advocate.”

Only one notable commentator excused Clegg’s attacks. On Liberal Democrat Voice, Stephen Tall suggested, “That’s the way you get journalists’ attention, y’see”. If it really were the case that this is merely a PR tactic, it is a stupid one because it is extracting a disproportionately high price in terms of the alienation and demotivation of members. Y’see.

Meanwhile, writing on his blog on Sunday, David Boyle detected signs in the latest issue of Liberator magazine of a change of mood in favour of Clegg, which seems a charitable interpretation. If anything, the mood towards Clegg is continuing to deteriorate. The articles in the latest Liberator by Tony Greaves and Chris White indicate increasing exasperation with a leader who is effectively hollowing out his party.

In Saturday’s speech, Clegg warned that, unless members follow his “very real fork in the road”, “we condemn our party to the worst possible fate: Irrelevance; impotence; slow decline”. In fact, it is Clegg’s disregard for the long-term health of the party as a thriving campaigning organisation that is condemning the party to slow decline.

Clegg likes to lecture members about the ‘realities’ but the problem is that his narrative is remarkably unreal:

1. Until Clegg became leader, the Liberal Democrats were merely a party of protest.
2. Until Clegg became leader, the party had no experience of power and no interest in winning it.
3. The power the party has won is entirely due to a transformation brought about by Clegg. The gains have been made despite the party rather than because of it.
4. There is only one viable way forward, which is Clegg’s. Anyone who disagrees is backward looking and would rather be in permanent opposition.

This narrative is not just an insult to the party; it is bogus in every respect. Anyone who seriously believes in it is deluded. Anyone who promotes it while knowing it to be false is a liar. Either way, when a leader is promoting such an obviously dishonest prospectus, how can he expect his members to respect him or work for him?

Clegg is not the first leader to try and define his leadership qualities in terms of opposition to his own party. The tactic of making yourself look tough by attacking your own members is straight out of the David Steel playbook. With Steel, it reached the point where his closest allies (led by Richard Holme) worked for merger with the SDP as much as anything to achieve ‘Year Zero’ – to erase the Liberal Party and all those pesky radical activists and start with a clean sheet of paper, so that a centralised party could be run with no interference from the members.

Clegg seems to have reached a similar stage in his leadership, where he can no longer disguise his contempt for his own party. The problem is more acute with Clegg than his predecessors because he’s never assimilated. He joined the party only in 1997, became an MEP in 1999, an MP in 2005 and leader in 2007 – little wonder he’s never really understood the party’s culture. This problem is evident not only in the repeated slurs against activists but also the crass insensitivity on issues such as secret courts and immigration.

So will there be a coup? It is less a question of whether the party wants to get rid of Clegg than whether Clegg wants to get rid of his party.

Current theory points to the Enterprise being responsible for medieval Earth legends about the Skyships of Magonia.

The following is an excerpt from the archives of the United Federation of Planets Temporal Integrity Commission. It appears to be a fragment of an introductory text for prospective Agents educating them on proper temporal mechanics and etiquette.

It is common knowledge the the United Federation of Planets of our time requires all Starfleet officers to observe strict adherence to the Temporal Prime Directive. As its name would suggest, this directive is an extension of the earlier Prime Directive, which was a policy of nonintervention with the natural development of cultures less developed then ours. The logical outgrowth of this core premise, the Temporal Prime Directive clearly states that interference with historical events is strictly forbidden, and the current timeline must be upheld at all costs. In our age of freely available and accessible time travel, the preservation of the sequence of events leading inevitably to this glorious present is of paramount importance. Under no circumstances will any time travel event that could jeopardize or even nullify the possibility of this particular future coming to pass be tolerated, and the stewardship of our timeline can only be seen as our primary responsibility as Starfleet officers.

Once time travel technology became commonplace in all the civilized cultures of the galaxy, an interstellar pact was signed between all the major political powers mutually agreeing to prohibit the use of that technology for any purpose other than pure, untainted scientific research. Furthermore, the agreement outlines explicit guidelines, instructions and procedures on how time travel can be undertaken safely, rationally and virtuously without contaminating or endangering the timestreams that lead to our reality. The ratification of this treaty and related documents, which collectively became known as the Temporal Accords, remains the fundamental guiding tenet of Federation and Starfleet policy to this day. Although most governing bodies freely accepted the new terms, many more did not, and broke off their Federation alliances, feeling that temporal mechanics should be used to change the past for self-centered and misguided notions of “personal improvement”. Such temporal incursions are the greatest threat to our safety and sovereignty, and it is the sworn duty of all temporal agents to track down and repair the damage caused by such incursions, and ideally preventing them from occurring in the first place whenever possible.

Although time travel of any sort is discouraged if it can be avoided, Federation and Starfleet policy does acknowledge that the past holds merit from a scientific perspective. One of the reasons it is imperative that we do not change the past is that studying it both teaches and gives us perspective for how to live in the present. In this regard, a history of time travel is beneficial to help us better understand the moral and ethical ramifications of temporal mechanics, why Federation policy has evolved to the point it has and how best to handle a time travel situation should you happen to find yourself in one. it is the past that provides us with a map with which to chart our behviour in the future, both for helping us to decide what choices it is in the best interest of the majority to take, and which it is in their best interests to avoid making again.

The earliest known record of Federation time travel occurred on stardate 3113.2 when the U.S.S. Enterprise, registry number NCC-1701, under the command of James Tiberius Kirk encountered a black hole, resulting in the ship travelling several centuries into the past to the Earth of July, 1969. The event has since become the ideal template for the handling of all time travel events, both those of an accidental nature and incursions of malicious, selfish intent. As with much history on file regarding Captain Kirk, the example he sets in this case is one to which we all should strive, for the good of the timeline, the galaxy, and our most sacred freedoms.

There is, of course, troublingly inconsistent data on record about the actual origin of this event. Captain Kirk's recorded logs of the event posit his time warp took place on stardate 3113.2 as the result of a chance encounter with a black hole while in the middle of a routine supply run, although there is also evidence the event actually took place on stardate 1704.4, and was instead the result of a contained matter-antimatter implosion in the Enterprise's warp engines, a last-ditch attempt to free the ship from a decaying orbit around the planet PSI 2000. Such contradictory evidence would seem to support the hypothesis that a temporal incursion occurred prior to the events on file, possibly the doings of Federation enemies acting in opposition to the Temporal Accords for some unknown, yet most certainly nefarious purpose. While the origin of the mysterious “Lost Kirk Incursion” is a hotly debated topic amongst Federation scholars and Starfleet temporal agents alike, the time travel event that we have on record is undeniably a significant one, and a cornerstone for the temporal stability policy we maintain and strictly enforce to this day.

The events as we know them begin shortly after the Enterprise's encounter with a black hole, thus leading to the discovery of the “gravitational slingshot effect” that has since become the foundational theory of modern temporal mechanics. After communications officer Uhura and science officer Spock were able to corroborate to Captain Kirk that the ship had, in fact, travelled back in time to July, 1969 the Enterprise was intercepted by a crude jet-propelled scout vehicle from the atmospheric military organization that existed on Earth at the time, in the region then known as the United States of America. As the ship was carrying nuclear weapons that could have jeopardized his ship, Kirk correctly made the decision to use a sustained tractor beam pulse to entrap the vehicle and transport the pilot aboard before it broke apart.

Although it is regrettable Kirk was forced to beam the pilot aboard, thus revealing to him the true nature of the Enterprise's temporal displacement and endangering the stability of the timeline, it would have been much worse for Kirk to have let him die, as the pilot was in fact Captain John Christopher, the father of Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher, the pilot of the first manned mission to Saturn and thus a historically significant individual. Kirk also wisely chose to withhold strategic information about the Federation of the time to Christopher and a guard who was subsequently accidentally beamed aboard the ship due to a failed attempt to retrieve visual evidence of the Enterprise's approach into US airspace, claiming to Christopher that he instead represented the interests of the archaic United Earth Space Probe Agency. In particular, it would have been a grave threat to the integrity of future events had the true nature of the black hole been revealed to any of the corrupted individuals, as Earth scientists were just beginning to formulate the theory positing the existence of such phenomena approximately the same time this event took place, albeit in the corrected timeline.

Perhaps the most praiseworthy action Kirk undertook during these events was his keen reasoning that a reverse slingshot effect would send the ship forward in time and, if a precise transporter beam-out occurred, then Captain Christopher and the guard could be returned to the exact moment they were removed from their timestreams and, as the events had no longer happened, they would remember nothing. this allowed Kirk to cover his tracks in such an elegant manner it has rightfully become standard operating procedure for all Federation temporal research ships. The only exceptions to this standing order are, of course, granted to temporal agents acting in the interest of the Temporal Accords who are allowed to interact with timestream natives should they judge it to be appropriate and necessary to sufficiently respond to crises and emergencies and maintain structure and stability. Agents desiring such privileged access should seek Level 10 Security Clearance from the managerial offices of the Temporal Integrity Commission and are encouraged to seek a positing on a Federation timeship.

There is little wonder why James Tiberius Kirk and the U.S.S. Enterprise are the most storied captain and most storied ship in Federation history. The exploits of this fabled pairing are decorated and celebrated such that they could almost be seen as modern-day legends. Thankfully, however, rationality prevails in our more enlightened age. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise were no more mythic heroes than this year's graduating class of the academy: They were merely competent and professional human beings who were as dutiful in their day as any officer is expected to be today. This is why we should study and learn from Kirk: He is a fitting role model for valour, honour, and sober respect for the virtues of law, order and the inevitable march of history. We must not give in to the temptations of misty-eyed romanticism and declare Kirk or others like him heroes, icons or legends, but we should look to their stories for advice and guidance on how best to craft ours.

From Amazon’s Media Room:

The Kindle Worlds Store and Self-Service Submission Platform are now open. Customers can enjoy works from dozens of authors including Barbara Freethy (writing in Pretty Little Liars), Charles Sasser (Foreworld Saga) and Anita Clenney (The Vampire Diaries). Kindle World’s Self-Service Submission Platform enables any writer to publish fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so. To browse the store and learn more about Kindle Worlds, visit www.amazon.com/kindleworlds.

Kindle Worlds is a new publishing model that allows any writer to publish authorized stories inspired by popular Worlds and make them available for readers to purchase in the Kindle Store, and earn up to a 35% royalty while doing so. Kindle Worlds stories will typically be priced between $0.99 and $3.99 and will be exclusive to Kindle. To learn more and get started writing, visit kindleworlds.amazon.com.

. . . .

“It’s actually a gift to be able to take someone else’s creation and see whether you can take it in a new direction. Watch every show; read every comic book. Honor the canon and honor the fans. There is a reason these stories have become so popular. And don’t feel restricted by the universe that has already been created. It reminds me a bit of writing a haiku or a sonnet. There are rules that must be followed, but within those rules, you can go anywhere. Your imagination is the only limit.” —Carolyn Nash, writer in Archer & Armstrong

. . . .

“Today, we launch the Kindle Worlds Store and the platform that will enable any writer to benefit from writing in one of the Worlds we’ve licensed,” said Philip Patrick, Director, Business Development and Publisher of Kindle Worlds. “We look forward to hearing feedback from readers and writers, and hope to learn and improve as time goes on.”

. . . .

Amazon Publishing has already secured licenses from:

• Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment division for its New York Times best-selling book series Gossip Girl, by Cecily von Ziegesar; Pretty Little Liars, by Sara Shepard; and The Vampire Diaries, by L.J. Smith
• Valiant Entertainment for Bloodshot, X-O Manowar, Archer & Armstrong, Harbinger and Shadowman
• Best-selling authors Hugh Howey for Silo Saga, Barry Eisler for his John Rain novels, Blake Crouch for his Wayward Pines Series, and the Foreworld Saga by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo and more

Link to the rest at Amazon Media Room

This is basically author-approved and Amazon-published fanfic. Both the author of the original book/series and the fanfic authors get paid when a fanfic book is sold.

There are some interesting copyright and rights issued involved in pulling this off. You’ll see how Amazon has handled some of those in the Kindle Worlds Publishing Agreement that governs fanfic authors. As with all contracts, it is important that prospective fanfic authors read the contract carefully to understand their rights and obligations before jumping in.

Indie authors will note the 35% royalty rate for ebooks of more than 10,000 words and 20% on shorter ebooks. On the other hand, sales of fanfic books will receive marketing benefits from the familiarity readers have with the original books.

As you’ll see at www.amazon.com/kindleworlds, fanfic short stories and novellas are offered, so a prospective fanfic author can dip a toe in the water without committing to a novel. Amazon calls the original works the “Canon” and the fanfic pieces are part of “Kindle Worlds.”

UPDATE: For a little clarification on the fanfic publishing agreement, this is not the same as the Kindle Direct Publishing Terms and Conditions that indie authors are accustomed to.

As one example, under the KDP terms, an author can withdraw some or all of his/her books from Amazon at any time. If an indie author wants to enter into a traditional publishing agreement, this is very important.

Under the new fanfic agreement – Paragraph 4.(a) – once Amazon releases the fanfic work, it has an irrevocable license to that work for the full term of the copyright (the rest of the author’s life plus 70 years in the US and a similar period of time in other countries). In Paragraph 4.(b), the author gives Amazon very broad rights to make derivative works based on the author’s work with no additional royalty payments. There are no out-of-print or reversion rights the author can exercise.

In these and some other respects, the fanfic agreement is similar to some traditional publishing contracts.

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(February 2014: Read my Open Letter to Eric Lefcowitz here)

Ok, Ok, my initial gobsmacked reaction on Tumblr, where I compared Davy Jones to Fredo Corleone, was a trifle overblown. But not much.

The new closing chapters of Eric Lefcowitz’s Monkee Business present a series of events that clarifies all the seeming contradictions and confusion in the demise of the final Threekees 1.0 tour in 2011, as well as the birth of Threekees 2.0 and the 2012 Gazpacho tour. There are two big bits of news here. I’ve been something of a cynic about Davy Jones for a good long time (read: 15-ish years), but the first of Lefcowitz’s claims damn near broke my heart.  The second bombshell, while it may be startling, is completely of a piece with Davy’s behavior in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. Neither of these bits of news is terribly pretty, and I am left with something of a bad taste in my mouth. However, I decided long ago that I would accept and embrace the real story of my once and future favorite band, even the parts that make me queasy. Monkee fans, and especially Davy fans, you might want to grab your TUMS. This will be a long ride.

Revelation 1: Why the 2011 tour imploded.

To the extent that anyone thought all that deeply about the demise of the 2011 tour, I think we mostly chalked it up to Standard Monkee Tale of Woe A (Interpersonal squabbling, in this case possibly due to substance abuse or the newest Mrs. Jones), grumbled something about the guys being their own worst enemies, and moved on with our lives in that last golden summer before Davy died and the fandom changed forever. If Eric Lefcowitz can be trusted (and please read as if every sentence of this post is preceded by that disclaimer), then the guys were telling the truth about Financial Troubles scuttling the tour. Sort of.

As most know, Davy was the director of the 2011 tour, his first time in total control of the band’s activities. Per Lefcowitz he “chose the band, the set list, and oversaw every aspect of the production” up to and including the infamous Flamenco stylings of Jessica Pacheco. Then we are rather ominously introduced to Davy’s manager Joseph Pacheco, the brother of the much-maligned 3rd and final Mrs. Jones. The next passage in these types of stories is usually Standard Monkee Tale of Woe B (Financial shenanigans), where our Noble Heroes are bilked out of their money and/or artistic integrity. However, Lefcowitz claims something different, and if true, both nauseating and heartbreaking.

This is a long and slightly condensed passage from chapter 71 (starting Kindle location 3812 in the 2013 edition), but the, erm, money quotes need to be seen in full context.

…Without warning, the enterprise came to a screeching halt. On August 8, 2011, news broke: ten dates added to the tour had been cancelled. “I’m not really at liberty to get into detail about what happened,” Tork told Rolling Stone. “But there were some business affairs that couldn’t be coordinated correctly. We hit a glitch…I can’t say anything more without getting into the stuff we have to keep down.”

What was the “stuff we have to keep down?” Rumors circulated that Dolenz had been admitted to rehab. “Absolute horseshit,” was Dolenz’ response.

…

As for Jones, his explanation seemed vague at best. “The tour was only supposed to go until July. And it was great, the best time we’ve had because we’re all on the same page now. We gelled onstage and off. But then more dates were being added…and we were like, ‘Wait a second. This is turning into something more than a tour.’ “

This was cagey logic (were more tour dates really a problem?) and it conspicuously avoided addressing the “business matter” that Tork and Dolenz had alluded to in interviews. And what exactly was that matter? A source privy to the ugly details spilled: Joseph Pacheco had been allegedly engaging in strong-arm tactics on Jones’ behalf, extracting cash payments from concert promoters in advance of the group’s appearance.

Bolding and underlining are mine. I don’t know about you, but I actually felt physically ill when I read that paragraph. Lefcowitz continues (bolding still mine):

Had Jones privately encouraged this alleged behavior at the expense of his band mates? Although the source could not be corroborated, and therefore the answer remains speculative, even a shred of truth about the suspected hanky-panky (the scheming duo had reportedly benefited from the arrangement to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars, all without the knowledge of Dolenz, Tork, or the tour managers) represented an unprecedented breach in trust and civility.

This news never reached the public. Once the chicanery was discovered, the tour was summarily canceled and Dolenz and Tork zipped their lips. Legal scrutiny hung in the balance, not to mention the reputations of everyone involved. But the damage was done…”We need to work on this stuff outside the public eye,” Tork told Rolling Stone.

In other words, Eric Lefcowitz claims that Davy Jones and Joseph Pacheco allegedly extorted 6 figures of kickbacks from concert promoters, all without the other guys’ knowledge. Also, note the wording above, kids. Eric Lefcowitz, our long-time purveyor of semi-trustworthy Monkee-related gossip, rampant oversimplification and gross hyperbole, is very, VERY cautious and conservative in his wording. There’s an “alleged” and a “reportedly” and a “speculative” in almost every sentence of this brutally short tale. These few paragraphs read like they were revised by a lawyer with a fine-toothed comb in one hand and a red ink pen in the other.

Again, I am WELL AWARE of Lefcowitz’s lax research skills and occasional tendency to leap to wild conclusions and portray his extrapolations as fact. But think about it–if we believe Lefcowitz’s source, then everything about the end of the 2011 tour suddenly makes a hell of a lot more sense. Nobody alive but Peter, Micky, and the other members of the inner circle will ever know for sure what happened. But as wild a speculator as Lefcowitz can be, I don’t recall him ever being accused of inventing a fact out of whole cloth. Correct me here if I’m mistaken. As of now, I believe that Joseph Pacheco was shaking down concert promoters—or at least that Lefcowitz was told that he was. If that’s what actually happened, it was in everyone’s best interests to keep it all quiet.

If anyone had blown the whistle, does anyone doubt it would have been the end of the Monkees? Whether or not anything actually criminal occurred, this is all obviously deeply unethical. A scandal or worse, a lawsuit, could well have shattered Micky and Peter’s reputations as well as Davy’s, even though, if the source is to be trusted, Micky and Peter didn’t know a damn thing about the kickbacks. If true, the whole Monkees “family” and reputation was put at risk so Joseph Pacheco and Davy Jones could make a few hundred thousand bucks. Now you can understand why in that first moment of shock, Fredo Corleone is the person who came to my mind.

This is the hardest Monkee-related post I’ve ever written for this site—Yes, harder even than Gazpacho, Grief, and Gratitude. I desperately want Lefcowitz’s story to be wrong. My inner ten year old probably NEEDS this story to be wrong. I would like nothing better than for one or more Monkees to come out in the upcoming pre-tour promotional interviews, debunk this whole mess loudly and clearly, and for me to have to post the mother of all retractions.  That said, I keep looping back to one incontrovertible fact.

First Micky, then Peter shared a link to a Lefcowitz interview discussing the revised book on their Facebook pages. That’s actually how I found out about the revised edition in the first place.

If this was all a lie, I can’t imagine the two of them letting their teams pass it along, or leaving it up now that the contents of the revisions have been made clear. And I can’t imagine them or a trusted lieutenant not vetting links set for release. Now, it’s possible that the story slipped through both their screening processes, as the article was mostly about the R&RHOF’s continuing snub, not the new chapters. However, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Micky and Peter knew exactly what was going on when those links went up the other day within 12 hours of each other, while they were together in rehearsals. (Suggestion: Watch their FB pages if the Lefcowitz story gains traction beyond us hardcore Monkee Nerds. If this was a mistake, I predict that one or both of them will quietly delete the links from their timelines. As of June 27^th, 2 days later, they’re still the top link on both pages.)

Of course, even if we concede that both the source and Lefcowitz were telling the truth, was Davy really in on it? Or was he being used as a puppet by the brother of the woman who could give Kirshner a run for the money in the Worst Monkee Villain Ever competition? Broadly speaking, I see two three possible explanations for what we are told occurred:

Possibility A. Davy was hoodwinked by Joseph too.

Given the available options I would be thrilled if this theory were true. Even given everything stated above it certainly isn’t beyond belief. We all know that Davy, rest his soul, did not exactly have the best track record in selecting trustworthy advisors. It also seems quite possible that Mr. Jones was not thinking clearly in matters Pacheco-related.  However, Davy when taken advantage of was often swift and vicious in his retributions. (A legendary truckload of horse manure on an ex-manager’s doorstep comes screaming to mind). If I had been bamboozled in that way, I might have kept my silence publicly in the interest of the Greater Good, but I would have kicked that man (and possibly his sister) out of my house and life before you could say “China Clipper calling Alameda,” and made sure none of them would ever have access to a dime of my assets. That didn’t happen. Davy went back home, and Jessica withdrew the divorce she filed earlier in the summer. In fact, Joseph Pacheco gave Davy’s eulogy. The only thing that keeps me holding on to this hypothesis as my favorite in the wake of those facts is the following: Davy could well have been so devastated by the betrayal, and scared of being alone again, that he couldn’t find the strength to deal with Joseph’s perfidy and break free of the Pachecos. Alternately, he may have been blackmailed in some way and lacked the ability or will to fight back. In any case, stronger people have been broken by less.

Possibility B. Davy was in on the shakedowns.

In my reading of the above passages, Lefcowitz seems to come as humanly possible to saying this without saying it flat out. I want to be clear that if this was the case, I don’t believe (can’t believe?) that the scheme was Davy’s idea. My guess is that if this is what happened, Joseph Pacheco played on Davy’s well-known and long-held bitterness over (in his opinion) being the most financially shafted and commercially underachieving of the four. Joseph could have made a compelling argument that grabbing a few bucks from promoters was simply his long-awaited chance to make the same kind of money that the others had made and which Davy had been denied. Further, Joseph could have (with some justification) argued that a little gentle squeezing here and there was nothing compared to the high crimes and misdemeanors of Kirshner, Bob, Bert, and God knows how many of Davy’s sleazy managers and agents. Bless Davy’s soul, but if I search my feelings, I could see him buying that argument in a moment of weakness, and putting his own self-enrichment over the best interests of his closest collaborators in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. If possibility B is true, given everything the Threekees fought for and overcame to achieve legitimacy and success in recent years, such a betrayal seems like just about the only unpardonable sin a Monkee could commit against his comrades in arms.

***REVISION***

Possibility C: Davy was Responsible…but not Guilty (Or, “Bluemoonalto’s Third Way“)

(As I was completing the edits of this post, Bluemoonalto mentioned in a vague way that she saw a “third way” to explain what went down, but that she didn’t want to post it till after this essay went live. It did, and then she posted a VERY intellectually and emotionally compelling argument that lies somewhere between my possibilities A and B, and I believe she is most likely the closest of us all to “the truth”. If you want to read her whole reply do so–I highly recommend her cautionary tale to anyone who has ever or might ever work with budgeting or accounts payable in any form–but the key part is below.)

So here’s the 3^rd possible scenario, as I see it:  Davy was in on it—on paper.

The extortion scheme—assuming there was one—was probably more subtle than Lefcowitz’s book would have us believe…Davy may have been “in charge” of the tour, but I seriously doubt that he had the accounting skills to manage the tour’s finances, much less audit the books.  His understanding of Pacheco’s scheme may have been rudimentary at best; he may not have known the nature of the additional payments, or the magnitude of the amounts involved, or he may have believed that the money was a reasonable compensation for his additional responsibilities.  He may even have believed that the money was going to benefit everybody on the tour, and not just himself and his manager.  But whatever his level of understanding, the basic problem was that his signature was on the paperwork.  And that made him responsible.  For all of it.

Please note:  When the shit hit the fan, Peter and Micky didn’t throw Davy under the bus.  They cooperated in the abrupt cancellation of the tour and—this is significant—they kept their mouths shut.  They dodged questions.  They made plausible excuses.   They maintained a low profile.  They kept everything private.   There were no pointed fingers, no public outbursts, no snide remarks.  There was just a uniform, unison, unified silence. A stonewall as strong as a stone wall.

They were protecting Davy.

Because they knew that it wasn’t really his fault.

Everyone retreated to his own corner of the country and it all got turned over to the lawyers and the accountants.  I doubt anyone ever made a criminal case out of it, or we would have heard about it by now.  I think the lawyers—especially Davy’s lawyers—would have been working furiously behind the scenes to find a way to cut the damned Gordian Knot and set all the parties free from this god-awful mess.   And in the middle of it all, Davy was still trying to salvage his relationship with Jessica.  Whether their marriage was still viable or not—Lefcowitz claims that she was away on a cruise when he died [ed. note--I've read this in other sources and buy it]—a divorce in the middle of this financial/legal quagmire would have been a public-relations disaster.

So there’s my theory.  Davy may have been any or all of the following:  careless, naïve, incurious, trusting, ignorant, unobservant, even a little bit greedy.  Or a lot greedy.  But the bottom line was that he was responsible.  Responsible for planning the tour, responsible for executing the tour, responsible for managing the tour, responsible for keeping an eye on the people working for him, and ultimately, responsible for fixing the mess.

Question: What could cause a healthy, physically active, 66-year-old vegetarian to have a heart attack?

One Possible Answer: Stress.

***END REVISION***

At the end of the day, Davy was either the most incompetent and naive tour director in the history of tour directing, or he betrayed two men he called his “brothers” and risked his band’s 45-year public image for a few hundred grand in kickbacks, knowing full well that only one whistleblowing promoter or venue could bring the whole Monkee Machine down around their heads, or, most likely, was responsible for a more “shades of Grey” scenario that lies between the two. Those are the only possible options I see other than Lefcowitz inventing this out of whole cloth, and frankly that’s not the most probable of these improbable explanations. The most damning bit of corroborating evidence is that Possibilities A, B, and C lead logically toward and lend credence to Revelation 2.

Revelation 2. The real Gazpacho recipe.

After that bombshell, Lefcowitz moves on to tell us of Andrew Sandoval’s eleventh-hour attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of the 2011 defeat. Back to another, and mercifully shorter passage from Monkee Business (kindle location 3835). This one pretty much speaks for itself.

Meanwhile Dolenz and Tork could only lick their wounds. It must have been doubly galling to have a financial transgression mar their moment of glory, especially now that the critics were in their corner. How could they capitalize on the good will? The answer arrived in the form of an idea proposed by Monkees archivist Andrew Sandoval–a one-off performance of the group’s classic Headquarters album to be staged in Los Angeles in the spring of 2012.

Sandoval…received a quick endorsement from Dolenz and Tork. Astonishingly he also lassoed the “missing Monkee,” the one who had previously claimed the group’s 1997 UK tour was the “final chapter”: Michael Nesmith.

Jones however, would not be involved. This bit of intrigue–Nesmith In, Jones out–was never revealed to fans. Before the show could go into rehearsals a stunning event changed everyone’s plans.

The rest you know. The book proceeds to cover Leap Day 2012, Gazpacho, and everything that followed up to the end of the US Nez tour and the announcement of the summer dates. In this passage Lefcowitz is intriguingly mute on another key question: Did Davy decline an invitation to perform at the Headquarters concert due to his long-standing grudge toward Nez after the 1997 debacle, or was he simply not invited to participate in the first place due to what took place in 2011? On my first reading I assumed the former, but the text leaves room for the possibility of the latter.

***REVISION 2, July 20 2013***

The Day Before yesterday (July 18), Peter was quoted in the Raleigh News and Observer verifying Revelation 2, and further stated that an invitation to a 2012 “Headquarters tour” was given but declined by Davy, though for a different stated reason than I proposed above:

Although Jones’ death was sudden, Tork said Jones had not planned to join this tour.

“Davy wasn’t interested in doing a reprise of ‘Headquarters,’ ” said Tork. “He didn’t feel like he participated in it very much, and Mike, Micky and I felt like it was our album.”

Also, related to the long-standing grudge issue, Nez went on the record last week in his awesome Rolling Stone interview stating that he and Davy did not have any problem with each other post-Justus, and broadly hinted that media misquoting and manipulation had created a “feud” that didn’t exist. I refuse not to take the word of the surviving party involved in this matter on general principle, and to pursue this issue much further anyway starts leading us out of evidence-based analysis and into outright speculation and celebrity gossip, which is NOT what this website is about. There are many other sources for that kind of thing, and I am not that. (In fact, if I ever turn into that, call me on it.)

Finally, while I didn’t put this in the original post, it seems more germane in the light of Peter’s most recent interview. There were several interviews around the time of Davy’s Death and again around the time of the fall 2012 tour, that (in the light of this confirmation that Davy, not Nez, was the missing link) suggest that Peter and/or Micky was still trying to get Davy on board at the time of his death. At least at the time those interviews were given, they didn’t really consider his “no” final. Whether or not Davy would have changed his mind, and if we would have seen a Threekees 2.0 tour if Davy had lived, is ultimately unknown and probably unknowable. I have stricken out the latter possible explanation for revelation 2, but have kept it in for the sake of completeness. Also, short of a truly major revelation (like a Monkee confirming the kickbacks story in their own words to the press), I will NOT be revising this essay or even revisiting this issue again.

***END REVISION 2***

In either case, if we take Revelation 2 as fact (and Lefcowitz seems to all but say it’s sourced from Sandoval) suddenly all the statements made about Nez being involved in the tour before Davy’s passing become 100% true. It also might well partially explain why Nez suddenly got those cataracts taken care of after almost 5 years of living with what must have been a nightmare–and suddenly opened up to us all on Facebook about his painfully literal Dark Night of the Soul a few weeks BEFORE Davy died. All indications are that Nez was indeed preparing to emerge from his self-imposed exile and perform as a Monkee while Davy was still alive. I am very happy to have my Moment of Gazpacho Rage forever rendered moot, but sad at the reason my wrath was misplaced.

~~~~~~~~

So that’s it. If Lefcowitz can be trusted, the 2011 tour was torpedoed due to financial wrongdoing committed by a member of Davy’s camp, and possibly with the involvement of Davy himself. Nez was then finally convinced that the time was right to return to the fold, and Davy either refused or was not invited to take part in a climactic celebration of the album that truly started it all.There’s other, wilder bits of speculation I could add here, but after so many words of close reading and analysis, I’ve lost my heart for it for now.

Two final memories from the past few months flit through my head. The first is the experience of walking down the grubby streets of Manchester, only a mile or so from the neighborhood where Davy grew up, soaking in the visceral sights and sounds and smells of Davy’s childhood, in the same way I’ve been long acquainted with the hot sticky oppression of Nez’s hometown. Davy’s always been the hardest Monkee for me to wrap my head around (Extroverts in general are kind of hard for me to understand), but when I flew out of Manchester airport I could imagine a bit of the sense of escape he likely felt as he took flight for Broadway, and the kind of very un-British grit it likely took him to succeed at the level that he did.

The second memory is one I’ve related before, of singing along to Daydream Believer in Lakewood, Ohio. That night last November stands as the happiest two hours of Fandom in my entire life, and nothing said or hinted or suggested above could ever change that. At the end of the day, Rainbow Room Davy existed, just as the older and sadder Davy of 2011 and 2012 did. The same is true of all of us. All of us children and teens who sang along to that record while practicing their dance moves grew up, and we all had to make hard choices and compromises as we grew. Some were right, some were wrong, and none were clear. The surviving Monkees gave us several wonderful gifts in 2012, but above all they let us remember Davy as that innocent, puckish kid, and by extension invited us all to honor and embrace that side of ourselves one last time in those interludes. If even a tenth of what Lefkowitz said is true, then my already-deep respect for these three talented, strong, and forgiving men is raised to a whole new level.

While I think that it’s important for us all to be honest with ourselves about Davy’s merits and failings (otherwise this post would never have seen the light of day), at the end of the day, I keep coming back to the following quote, from one of Davy’s last interviews:

Remember me as you hoped I’d be.

We can remember both things–the way Davy made us laugh and cry and swoon, while also remembering the ways that gaining (and losing) fame and fortune damaged that generous and professional showman. One perspective on Davy’s life does not negate the other. By embracing both facets of Davy’s life, we gain a fuller understanding of the true complexity of humanity and celebrity. Given everything he gave me in terms of hope, laughter, and sanity, I always hoped Davy would be happy, and am sad beyond words that he may not have been in the end. But maybe by looking at the truth of Davy’s last years, we can learn more about true Joy, and how to find it. As Davy said in a message to fans around the same time as that interview:

…Time is Precious…life alone is not where anyone with dreams should find comfort.

You said it, Cowboy.

~~~~~~~~~

Author’s note: I really want to thank my perennial beta readers Cin and Mich, as well as the awesome Tumblr-ers Bluemoonalto, Cellomouse, Rose-of-Pollux, and Chaoskirin, all of whom volunteered to serve as extra voices of reason as I refined this essay for publication. (I owe all of y’all a Beta read and/or a cookie). I needed to write this to put my own thoughts in order, but I spent a possibly embarrassing amount of time this week agonizing over whether it needed to be published. These talented ladies convinced me that this post would be a helpful counterpoint to Lefcowitz that went beyone simply denial or discounting, and that it could also possibly be a catalyst for a needed intelligent public conversation. More than that, they helped me craft and hone my arguments, and helped me spot a few logical holes. That said, any errors of fact or logic within are mine. Also, it was not my intent to hurt anyone’s feelings or cause anyone pain, and if I did I am truly, truly sorry.