The Breaking Time

Discussion Time: science vs. democracy

Because cat pictures help every discussion

Several recent items brought this particular discussion topic to mind. A column by Dr. Barry Starr asks if voters are qualified to decide issues like the labeling of GMOs, given that polls point to some massive scientific misunderstandings on the part of the public.

Part of the problem with the GMO debate is that the term encompasses everything from cattle pumped full of hormones (questionable/bad) to Vitamin A rice (good). But then that's the issue: popular will isn't known for fine distinctions.

Let's add to the mix the Portland mayor's grand fuck-off to anti-fluoridation activists, the North Carolina legislature's bill banning sea rise and the ongoing fights over vaccination.

On the other hand, science is a human process, and there are plenty of historic cases to give one pause in making policy based on today's science too quickly. As North Carolina battles over compensation for people whose lives were ruined by eugenics programs, it's worth remembering the damage done based on what seemed like sound science at the time, especially when good scientists' aversion to absolute certainty is removed and democratic rights are ignored.

For a more modern example, throw in Sam Harris' misreading of neuroscience to conclude that we should start brain scanning people accused of a crime. 

This is a classic conflict of two desirable goals running into each other: in this case people should have a say in what goes on in their communities and ideas are tested by observable evidence and experiment. 

So where's the dividing line? When science and democracy seemingly collide, who decides what wins? Plebiscite? Grand Science Council? What are systems are possible that respect science and popular will? Is that impossible?

Let's discuss below.

Coptic saints and old bargains

An Egyptian Coptic monk before a 2009 Easter Mass. Photo via Getty Images.

There's a bleak, interesting piece over at NSFWCorp (to which you should subscribe) by Gary Brecher on how a Coptic emigre came to cooperate with Protestant fundamentalists in turning a YouTube video into a weapon. It's a glimpse to the absolutely fucked-up mentality that a history of pogroms and capricious authority inflict.

But there's a part I have issues with (I also disagree that the region's swinging towards jihad, but that's another post), when Brecker talks about the Arab Conquest of Egypt, way back in the grand 'ol seventh century:

Egyptian Christians have been trying the other way, the turn-the-other-cheek way, from the beginning. When the Arab horsemen took on the few Greek garrisons in Egypt in the 7th Century, the Egyptian Christian civilians reacted the way peasants everywhere react to kings hacking at each other: They stayed out of it and figured it didn’t make much difference whether it was a Greek or Arab profile on the coins, since they weren’t likely to have any either way.

What the fellahin (peasants) found out too late is that this was one of those invasions that really does make a difference. That’s one of the hardest judgment calls anyone has to make: a peasant deciding whether to fight or let the guys who can afford swords use them on each other. Most times, the right answer is “stay the Hell out of it,” but there are times it’s worth helping your local vampire lord, because something worse is coming over the horizon. For Egyptian Copts, there were about 1370 years of bad times—and counting—in the dust cloud behind that Arab cavalry.

This is not exactly how things played out. The Copts actually had really good reasons for not helping out the Byzantine Empire and equally sensible reasons for not just turning the cheek but actively cooperating with the Arabian invaders. It actually worked: the Copts got a much better deal from the Caliphate than from the Byzantines.

For awhile, anyway. It's an interesting story, and a reminder of how much of the world is littered with the consequences of old bargains.

Ain't no saints in politics, including Abraham Lincoln

Do not screw with Honest F'ing Abe...

An interesting tidbit in the New Yorker profile of William Seward — Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State and wheeler-dealer — on the lengths Lincoln went to in securing re-election:

“Nineteenth-century elections were played by rough rules,” Stahr writes laconically, and Seward knew exactly how to exploit them. After the New York Draft Riots, in 1863, and a string of defeats by Union troops, many people in the North began agitating for peace. As the election of 1864 approached, even loyal Republicans considered calling for a convention to nominate another candidate. That August, Weed went to the White House to tell Seward and Lincoln that the election was lost. Seward disagreed, and deployed Weed, the consummate party boss, to activate what Gideon Welles aptly described as the “vicious New York school of politics.” Welles’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy was enlisted to tell workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that if they didn’t vote for Lincoln they would lose their jobs. Lincoln did his part, too, appointing “a few Seward-Weed men to key posts in New York City.” Welles, meanwhile, scribbled in his diary about the “miserable intrigues of Weed and Seward.” Outmaneuvered by his nemesis and undercut by a subordinate, Welles wrote after the results came in, “Seward was quite exultant—feels strong and self-gratified. Says this Administration is wise, energetic, faithful, and able beyond any of its predecessors."

Doesn't exactly fit the narrative does it? Lincoln has long-since been enshrined in the secular pantheon, and when that happens, one's more brutal moves get glossed over.

That's unfortunate, because the reality is more revealing. It's not that Lincoln's positive traits are a lie, it's that they co-exist with others. This is, after all, the man who prosecuted an extremely bloody war, suspended habeas corpus, and kept a lock on his own party through constant manipulation of his rivals.

But the above shines even more light on Lincoln's ruthless streak. When you believe, with good reason, that your opponents will lose a war and ruin the nation, who gives a shit about threatening some dock workers and handing out bribes?

This is the reality of power: even when used for noble ends, it's never pretty. Those who do it well, like Lincoln, had some lines they wouldn't cross (he adamantly refused to suspend the election) but didn't stint from doing damn near anything else to get victory.

If you need another example, remember that the civil rights movement guarded its leaders' homes with machine guns and used fear tactics to keep the troops in line. Pretty? No. Justified? Absolutely.

That's why our tendency to turn people like Lincoln (or Anthony, Gandhi, King the list goes on...) into secular saints is such a damagingly dumb thing to do. It obscures the reality of how positive change happens — with all the ruthlessness sometimes required — and replaces it with a narrative where heroic figures prevail through personal purity.

Then, when someone looks to these past successes for inspiration, they miss the reality and go straight for the myth, which doesn't work. When they assess their own politicians, they hold them accountable to a fiction. And when they try to actually win a battle, they get their ass kicked.

So please, whatever your cause, let's not have saints. This is not the place for them.

Holding up a funhouse mirror: An interview with Vermin Supreme

One of the many fan-made posters for Vermin Supreme.

This is the second of two very different interviews I did while covering the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte that I felt were worth highlighting in their entirety. The first was with blogger and activist Imani Gandy.

Longtime prankster Vermin Supreme has been running for a variety of offices — some of them non-fictional — since the 1980s. Wearing a boot on his head and promising a free pony for all Americans (along with zombie power and mandatory tooth-brushing) if elected, his 2012 run for the Presidency came to greater prominence when he glitter-bombed fundamentalist Randall Terry during the New Hampshire primary and showed up for numerous protests throughout the year. I talked to Vermin Supreme while he was preparing for his own "victory rally" in Charlotte.

So why are you running for President? 

Because I want to make America a better place, but still even.

But still even?

Still even better.

How?

Ponies, the secret ingredient, of course.

Ah, and why the boot on the head?

When I get in a different environment it serves different purposes. When I'm actively campaigning for the Presidency, after the primary, it's become somewhat of a trademark. Different people read different symbolism into it, “we're gonna boot 'em out” or the jack-booted thugs or a boot on the face, the Orwell reference.

But ultimately it's just something I started putting on my head in a rather absurdist, surrealist tradition. The people liked it and responded to it. Out in the streets, in the police environment, it's a disarmament technique. I'm disarming, through my charms, to officers who might otherwise see me as a threat if I was without the boot. If I was a normal-looking wild guy talking shit over the megaphone, I think I'd be perceived differently than with the boot.

It sort of signifies the jesterishness, the commitment to this absurdist aesthetic, it's a shorthand. Sometimes I've worn a clown nose in the past to telegraph that. It draws curiosity. I get into a lot of conversations, meet potential voters. Of course it draws the media, I've been saying as part of my media critique that the boot is a pile of shit and the media are the flies buzzing around it.

On Talk Like a Pirate Day, rant like Black Sam Bellamy

The Jolly Roger, used by Capt. Sam Bellamy

It's Talk Like a Pirate Day, where people worldwide are encouraged to imitate a bundle of behaviors and accompanying accent popularized by English actor Robert Newton (thanks for that bit of info, Josh Ellis).

Meanwhile, it's worth remembering how pirates (according to the romanticized accounts we have, mind), actually talked:

"I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?"

That's Captain "Black Sam" Bellamy, quoted by Daniel Defoe, ranting at the captain of one of his prizes. A brilliant raider, he was one of the originators of the Jolly Roger, capturing slave ships and assembling his own fleet. Also, given that he was elected to his spot by a gang of fierce raiders assembled from all corners of the globe, Bellamy had to be pretty damn cunning.

Say what you will about piracy, the man had dash:

"I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me! But there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure."

Culture and action: An interview with Imani Gandy

Image courtesy of Imani Gandy

While at the Democratic National Convention, I did a lot of interviews. I'm still working on a larger piece on my thoughts about the DNC in our Breaking Time, but two interviews in particular stood out — for very different reasons — enough that I felt they deserved to be featured in whole.

The first is with activist and blogger Imani Gandy, who founded the Angry Black Lady Chronicles and the Team Uterati coordinating resource for feminist action. She's advocated an aggressively pragmatic approach to politics, often clashing publicly with other progressives about President Barack Obama's actions and drawing attention to what she perceives as misogyny and racism among some leftists. We talked about divisions among liberals, different approaches to activism, and how race plays into today's politics.

How did the Angry Black Lady Chronicles start?

I started a pop culture blog with a group of women in 2008, and we were tossing around ideas of a column I would do, titled something like “Ask a black lady.” I was just kind of throwing it around, and I don't know why but I just decided my column would be called Angry Black Lady chronicles. I don't really know why, it just sort of came out of nowhere.

Then, when I stopped blogging with them, I decided to move my column onto its own blog, and it just become angryblacklady.com 

And then it got contributors, etc...

I started out blogging on my own in 2009. I went on medical leave. I had a pituitary tumor. That's sort of the cause of the anger, because I would have hormonal fluctuations. Have you ever been around a first trimester pregnant woman?

Yes.

You know how they get real irritable? Flashes of anger for no reason? I'd get that, but at the most ridiculous things, like “that light went out! Goddammit!” So that's kind of where the angry moniker comes from, but I also like to poke at people because of the stereotype of the angry black woman. Then when people meet me they're like “wait, you're not that angry,” and no, I'm very nice person, but I can be pretty strident in my writing and on Twitter. I like to juxtapose those, like a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde type thing.

I started blogging on my own in 2009, I picked up my first two contributors in 2010, right around the 2010 elections. It's right around that time that I dropped all the pop culture stuff and became fully political, because I started to get really frustrated with the way progressives on the left were hounding President Obama for stuff that I thought he shouldn't be hounded for, like the public option and “why didn't you close Gitmo?”

I felt like there were facts about how the administration had done things and facts about how he didn't have a Democratic majority for as long as people think that he did. I just began to get really frustrated.

I also began to get really frustrated at what I saw as underlying racism on the left.

The old gold cross: The mutation of the American political convention

William Jennings Bryan, carried victorious through the 1896 Democratic convention

If I walk out the door from where I live, away from downtown and into the rich, quiet part of town, I will encounter an old house where William Jennings Bryan spent his summers. According to local legend, he had a soundproof room where he could practice his oratory.

In the summer of 1896, Bryan — then a young, populist Nebraska congressman — took his famous booming voice to the Chicago Coliseum, where the Democratic Party was holding its convention.

The Democrats at the time were deeply divided on a number of topics, most immediately whether to issue coinage in gold or silver as well. It sounds dry, but the issue was one of those political icebergs, striking at deeper problems of class and power. With no certain nominee for President, Bryan took the stage, broadening his condemnation of gold into a fiery attack on the power of the wealthy:

We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!

---

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Forget the currency issue; Bryant's genius was to capture common outrage so perfectly that it's still energizing to read.

Thundering to the assembled delegates, he declared "you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." He finished, arms outstretched, and the crowd went wild.

The results were a populist wet dream: "the Great Commoner" Bryan won the nomination over fat cat incumbent Grover Cleveland and became the first liberal to head the Democratic Party. The convention was one for the books: a genuinely suspenseful battle for control of the country's politics.

Now, I'm leaving for Charlotte, just down the mountain, where the Democratic Party — 116 years later — will again have its convention. To say "they don't make 'em like they used to" is an understatement. The nature of the event is the mirror opposite from Bryan's day, and how the American political convention stumbled from popular decision point to stage-managed spectacle is a revealing story.

Zombies, Mutants, Cyborgs and Aliens: Fight for the Future

Welcome back Damien Williams for a riveting rant on, well, the aforementioned bogeymen, and what kind of future our culture is choosing.

Please pick another apocalypse. Image by Quidditch.

I don't like zombies. I don't mean I'm afraid of them, or that they skeeve me out. I mean that I don't like the current use of them as trope, or a modern cultural cipher. I told you this the last time we spoke, and I told you that I'd tell you why.

You see, back in the day, when Romero was using zombies to talk about consumer culture and the death of individual preference in the face of mass markets, a zombie horde was a potent symbol. It was crushing, endless, homogenizing death. Why do you think Dawn of the Dead takes place in a mall? It was a terrifying indictment of what Romero believed was happening to our society.

Later, when the zombie symbol came to be applied out to Western society as a whole, and not just its consumerist leanings, the fast zombie became the stand-in for the hyper-connectivity and infectious nature of concept, idea, and emotion. Unthinking Rage just spreads and spreads.

That was all well and good. The problem is, zombies don't represent that anymore. Honestly, so far as I see it? Zombies don't represent anything anymore. The modern zombie is an empty symbol, representing only itself. The fight against zombies is now only the pure expression of futility, of never giving up in the face of odds which will defeat us. Zombies are just about Fear. They are collapse and terror and, yes, also the changes that survival of terror wreaks on people. But, in the final offing, I think that's boring.

I'm what some might call a pop culture junkie. I'm interested in all aspects of the popular media (even if, as I say, I don't exactly enjoy every single one of them), because I believe that our pop culture is reflexively connected to the wider culture. It tells us what we're thinking, it tells us how we're feeling, and in turn it influences those thoughts and emotions.

Pop culture amplifies and exaggerates our existing beliefs, distilling them down and reflecting them back to us in a glittering panoply of spectacle and story. What this means for you and me is that, as long as I'm here at The Breaking Time, I'll very often talk to you about the nature of our society — and our perception of its imminent and immanent collapse — through the lens of our pop culture and what it is doing for and to us. If the ascension of “Reality” television is Jean Baudrillard's nightmare scenario, then the rise of zombie apocalypse narrative is mine.

The Breaking Time on the (internet) radio

On Aug. 19, Epiphany Ayla Paris was kind enough to invite me on her online show, The Space Between, for an in-depth interview about the Breaking Time.

It ended up a great conversation that hit a huge variety of topics, from the political system and "There is no They" to generational optimism and public reaction to tragedy. I ramble plenty (as I do when I get on a tear), but I think it's some interesting ground and she kept the questions sharp.

The whole interview is below. Thoughts and comments welcome.

Tax haven invasion

The Cayman Islands, 2026? Photo from U.S. Department of Defense.

Two related pieces of today's news got me thinking. First, China's super-rich are increasingly moving their money offshore, to the point that it's starting to cause some issues with the country's financial system. The other item was Gawker's document dump about Mitt Romney's tax haven dealings.

Tax havens are one of those big deals (a low estimate puts their holdings at $5-7 trillion) that weren't noticed that much until times got really tight. 

What would happen if a country like China — or hell, even a smaller regional power — invaded a tax haven, declared it occupied territory, and forced the transfer of the funds stored there to its own system?

While all those funds might be ones and zeros zipping around out there in the ether, they touch down at some points. Banks, even offshore ones, are legal entities staffed by people with the power to approve transfers, account freezes, etc.

I'm not an electronic finance expert (and if you are, please feel free to weigh in here, I'm sure there's plenty I'm missing), but my impression from seeing things like a near-collapse due to trading algorithms is that the financial system resembles a lot of aging infrastructure: ad-hoc, spliced-together hybrids of old and new models. For that reason, it seems hard to wholesale control or have a "break glass in case of invasion" switch stopping transfers or moving all the funds in a given country's system to somewhere safer.

Banks are well-prepared against robbers pointing a gun at a branch manager and shuttling away money, but when an invading army can force multiple levels of a hierarchy to quickly comply, it becomes a much more problematic scenario.

Of course, this won't happen tomorrow. In addition to the financial, diplomatic, military, and legal clusterfuck that would ensue, a lot of the elites of said nations use these same havens.

But it's an interesting possibility, and there's more here than meets the eye.