Monday, 24th of November, 2003

Forgettin’ to advertise myself again! Late notice, gig tonight featuring myself on cello and Danny Weltlinger of many variegated fabulosities (ex-Monsieur Camembert, now of Ticklers, Nadia’s gypsy band, so on and so forth) on violin. We’re doing free improv as part of a duos night at the ‘if you like Improvised Music, We like you’ improv night at Space 3. Come along if you can :)

Sunday, 23rd of November, 2003

Perth author Greg Egan is pretty much universally considered the apex of hard science fiction writing the world over. For the last couple of years, however, he’s hardly written any science fiction at all. Why? He’s been devoting his energies to publicising the plight of refugees in Australia. In early 2002 he wrote a piece called No Sugar, and he’s now followed it up with The Razor Wire Looking Glass - essential reading.

A Just Australia, who Greg links to, are holding Daybreak in Detention events around Australia; one’s happening on December 12-14 at Bondi Pavillion. I’ll be there for some of it, and I hope lots of other will too.

Tuesday, 18th of November, 2003

Here’s an alternative to the Political Compass - another two-dimensional alternative to simple left/right political analysis, but in this case the second axis is utilitarian/pragmatic rather than libertarian/authoritarian.
It’s entirely open-source, so when you go look at my results you’re able to basically see all my answers. This is a bit annoying in a sense, because, as with anyone I imagine, my answers change every time I take such a survey. What’s more, some of the questions were worded as their opposites in the survey (and they change each time), and obviously one answers the questions differently depending on whether they’re positively or negatively worded. If you don’t believe me, take the test a couple of times.

I’m not sure whether I like it better than Political Compass (henceforth PC): my results are actually a lot more variable with this one (henceforth PS) than with PC, suggesting that I’m less sympathetic to the way the questions are worded here than I am with PC. Strangely, PS’s rationale suggests that PC might be skewed “to make respondents lean towards an economically right-wing, socially liberal (’right libertarian’) position”… Maybe I really am extremely left-wing (as my results seem to suggest this time, although I was quite a bit less far-left last time) but I’ve always come out about -7 or 8 towards both left and libertarian in PC, and all my friends are pretty left too.
I’d question less, though, the implication just that PC is designed to skew people towards the libertarian position… This seems reasonably likely to me. Still, it’s given me a lot of pause for thought, and I’m inclined to think that the libertarian/authoritarian divide brings out more differences between otherwise left- or right-wing economic positions than this not-very-well-defined pragmatism/utilitarianism axis.
And if you look at their “Scatter plot” of politicians, Tony Benn (old-school British Labourite), Tony Blair, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Margaret Thatcher all seem to fit within about ±10% from the median with respect to pragmatism/idealism. Is this really that informative? I was slightly idealist the first time I took the test, and slightly less than halfway leftist. This time I’m almost 2/3 leftist and slightly pragmatist.

Anyway, both are a good step in the right direction - that is, away from a simple left/right divide, which leaves out a lot of detail. All in all, one’s political views are a lot more nuanced than either of these analyses can show. For instance, I’m very much a social libertarian, but very much a Green leftie as well, which means that I believe that markets should be regulated with respect to environmental issues and workers’ rights… which sounds authoritarian doesn’t it? All in all, I’m still happier saying I’m a “left-libertarian” (or “green-left-libertarian-feminist-atheist”? Ah… yes well, sometimes too much detail is just silly) than a “left-slightly-more-pragmatic-rather-than-idealist”.

Thanks to Mr Stross’s LiveGerbil for this’un.

There’s a nice review of Timmy Koch’s Please Don’t Tell Me That’s Your Remix album here. “In recent times,” it says, “we’ve seen B(if)tek’s Frequencies will be remixed, Prop’s cut, cook, copy, destroy and Fourplay’s great double remix album.” Hey! That’s my band! Maybe they couldn’t remember the title of Digital Manipulation. (Naw, I jest…)
But lookee here, what it says about my track (I’ll leave in the egregious misspelling of an Aphex Twin track *tee hee*):

There is so much good stuff here it’s hard to choose highlights to talk about… Raven’s version of ‘Boybie Socks’ is the frenetic Aphex Twin-sounding ‘Buccubus Bouncing Ball’-esque mélange of frenetic, syncopated, abstract drum’n'bass, resplendent with gurgling noises, static hiss and lost radio waves bouncing back from outer-space, broken down, re-built, and made new again.

Find out more about Raven, like, here. If you like. Don’t feel like I’m pressuring you or anything.

Friday, 7th of November, 2003

To all my faithful readers, and I know there are, well dozens of you out there in the woodworks somewhere, I hereby apologise profusely for my lack of reading updation lately. This will be resolved at the earliest opportunity.
I am currently finishing Terry Pratchett’s latest, Monstrous Regiment, which is quite possibly the best yet. The man is insanely brilliant. I might review that one first, then jump back to the three excellent novels I read before this - Justina Robson’s Natural History, Adam Roberts‘ Polystom and Charlie Stross’s Singularity Sky. In addition, I may furnish you - nay, bless you - with a review of the anthology Live Without A Net. I’m also in the middle Cory Doctorow’s short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, which is damn fine too.

Postscript: Pratchett review up now! See sidebar.

Tuesday, 4th of November, 2003

Right now, over at The WELL Charlie Stross is in conversation with Well members and others. The conversation is lead by fellow author Cory Doctorow (whose short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More is out now and highly recommended).

They’re talking about all sorts of stuff, not least the ol’ Singularity.

Here’s a fascinating interview with linguist George Lakoff, explaining how conservatives (he’s American, so this means Republicans, who are simultaneously seeming both more reactionary and more radical these days) have learnt to use language phenomenally effectively to “frame” an issue, and thus subtly control the way the public thinks about it.

That progressives/liberals (the political left/Green) are being left behind comes as no surprise to some of us on the left, and Lakoff’s call for progressives to use framing ourselves to challenge the right’s world-building should not be ignored as some kind of academic issue. Framing of particular concepts can entrench them as real in an insidiously misleading way. Consider:
“tax relief” - implying that there is an affliction, an afflicted party, and creating a metaphor of tax as that affliction, requiring relief, and
the “free market” - no market is free, and the progressive left should be stressing this. There are rules and regulations in place even in the futures market. Re-framing talk about economics in a consistent way will make alternative visions clearly graspable, and this contrast will make starkly clear the moral (or morally bankrupt) underpinnings of the right-wing framings.