Chasing Dragons

Bigotry, Duplicity, and the Politics of Scandal

There have been two recent cases in the UK election that demonstrate a double-standard with the popular identification of bigotry and how its appearance is produced as scandal.

Case 1: On Wednesday, Gordon Brown made private comments--picked up by a Sky TV microphone--that described a pensioner named Gillian Duffy as 'this sort of bigoted women' after she made anti-immigrant statements while chatting with the Prime Minister on the streets of Rochdale (note this was after she first heckled him). The incident has been dubbed 'bigot-gate'--the 'gate' suffix a sure sign of a  scandal bound to be forced down our throats into the zeitgeist by the 24 hour news cycle--and Brown presented as a two-faced bully, desperately out of touch with the concerns of 'real' 'salt-of-the-earth' people.

Case 2: In an interview with the Gay Times, David Cameron is unable to keep his stories straight. First he argues that the Conservative Party believes that gay equality is a fundamental human right. He then lets slip that he thinks Tory MPs, Peers, and MEPs should be allowed to freely vote over whether gay equality is a fundamental human right. Not only is this duplicitous in its characterization of party policy, it reveals that the Conservatives are open to manifest bigotry within their own party and having this bigotry potentially institutionalized through the legislative process. Yet, apart from some initial coverage on the Channel 4 national news, this story falls by the wayside.

There are lots of things that one can say about how this becomes possible including the influence of media (specifically Rupert Murdoch's Sky News and his newspaper empire), the different ways that the two leaders had been characterized prior to the election campaign, or broader cultural representations of pensioners as compared to homosexuals.

But in the end, they lead us to this bizarre turn of events: Gordon Brown calling a person who adopted the discourse of bigotry a bigot is treated as a scandal whereas David Cameron admitting that his party is willing to enable the expression--and perhaps even the implementation--of bigoted views through the legislative process is not. 

This just goes to show that scandals, quite like crises, are complex, yet contingent, socially manufactured products. It also demonstrates that more reputable media outlets--like the BBC--ought to think more closely about how they adopt the narratives of particular tabloid presses in covering this election.

Reading the Financial Crisis Through the FT's UK Deficit Buster Simulation

With the UK election campaign in full swing, it has recently begun to dawn on media commentators that the focus on the high probability of a hung parliament and what kind of coalition might be formed--if any--has meant that very little attention has been placed on each party's specific plans for cutting the national deficit.

To help voters understand the scope of cuts that the parties are pledging to undertake based on their manifestos and their effects, the Financial Times has designed a UK Deficit Buster simulation where players get to choose what will be slashed in order to meet deficit reduction targets.

As a simulation, what makes the Deficit Buster effective is that it is able to convey how deeply unpleasant and intrusive these cuts are going to be. Vital front-line services are going to be effected and the impacts are going to be disruptive no matter the assurances that Brown, Cameron, and Clegg have given the public over the past three weeks.

Where the simulator is genuinely dishonest is that it provides no mechanisms for raising revenue from measures like an increase in tax rates on those with incomes over £150K a year (the wealthiest 0.6% of the population), the introduction of a financial transactions tax, or the elimination of out-dated military programs like Trident.

But beyond these specific points of weakness, what strikes me as most interesting is how the Deficit Buster simulation is indicative of a deeper problem with the way in which in the UK deficit is being understood as a political issue. And that problem is that the source of the current deficit is being willfully forgotten.

The origins of the current deficit have been completely de-contextualized. It did not appear out of thin air or as a product of carefree spending. It resulted from the financial crash and the UK government's attempts to mitigate its worst consequences. Just over a  year ago, Bloomberg reported that government bailouts to UK banks had already reached £1.4 trillion. This was in addition to other forms of economic stimulus spending. And the financial crisis itself arose from a failure to effectively regulate the banking sector, a failure made possible by the total acceptance of the necessity of financial deregulation across the big three political parties.

What is so amazing is the astounding feat of jedi mind trickery that Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats have been able to pull off despite these circumstances. In securitizing the deficit--that is by representing public spending as an existential threat that requires the imposition of emergency budgetary measures-- they have managed to deflect all responsibility for bearing the cost from the banking sector and placed it squarely on the laps of the general public.

The current situation--regardless of who gets elected--is one where those least culpable for the financial crisis--those on benefits, front-line public sector workers, children, and universities--are being asked to take primary responsibility for sorting its lingering effects as though this is a common-sense and uncontroversial solution to the problem.

Therefore, in the waning days of the election campaign, I would argue that if people are interested in real change, it will not come from accepting the deficit as a political issue and seeing which cuts you find the least objectionable. Rather, real change will only emerge if the electorate makes it clear that it understands that the positioning of the deficit as a political issue is itself extremely political and that it is not prepared to accept this framing. One can only hope that someone raises this as a question at tomorrow night's debate...

And here's a slogan: It's finance capital, stupid.

Photo credit: Helga's Lobster Stew

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 50

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Ash and Infrastructure' by Martin Coward at martincoward.net

• 'The Children's Crusade' by John Lucaites at the revamped bagnewsnotes.com

• 'The Bones of Francois Robert' by Michael Bierut at designobserver.com

• 'English: The International Language of Police Power' by Hariman at nocaptionneeded.com

• 'Monsters, Pliny, and Races' by Jeremy Crampton at the foucaultblog

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: extranoise

UK Election 2010: Shiver Me Timbers, It's Mad Cap'n Tom

Since I moved here, one of the things that I've noticed that the UK does really well is light-hearted eccentricity. And as an article by Toby Lichtig in today's Guardian outlines, what better opportunity for the gregarious eccentric than an election?

What strikes me as important here is what can eccentricity tell us about the political culture within which it  becomes manifest? In North America, when one thinks of an eccentric, images of compounds, weapons caches, messianic pretensions, and hard-core paranoia come to mind. This is not to say that the UK does not have its own share of this type of eccentric. But more often British political eccentricity appears to be expressed in humorous and less confrontational ways. And Map Cap'n Tom seems to embody the best of that goofy self-deprecating spirit.

Call for Papers: 'Security Studies as Critique', June 24-25, 2010

At the danger of committing a shameless act of self-promotion, I thought that the following conference would be of interest to the chasingdragons readership. I'm very humbled to have been asked to give a presentation by the conference organizers. More importantly, I'm looking forward to meeting other early career scholars who are working at the intersections of critical social theory and the politics of security.

Call for Papers

'Security Studies as Critique': The Third Annual Graduate Conference in Security Studies

Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Kyle Grayson (Newcastle University) and Columba Peoples (University of Bristol)

June 24-25, 2010

Over the past two decades the field of security studies has become ever more concerned with critique.  For those sympathetic towards critical approaches to security this is a development to be applauded, with critical security studies being built upon a prevailing dissatisfaction with ‘traditional approaches’.  Critique has been a vital part of the broadening and deepening of the field: opening up new possibilities for thinking and practising security; showing the promise of opportunities for transformation; helping scholars understand the numerous flaws of previous approaches.  Critique has helped to enliven the field, and maybe even to humanise it.  Yet perhaps we should now turn to the matter of critique itself and ask to what extent it has come to define the field of security studies.  It may well be the case that critical security studies has become too absorbed in critique, too focused on trying to devalue neorealism, so much so that by continually comparing itself to ‘traditional approaches’ it only serves to tighten the neorealist grip on international political thought.  Moreover, it is possible that the intellectual integrity of critical security studies is compromised when understandings of both ‘security’ and ‘critical’ are so hotly contested.  Whereas some authors would happily embrace an ethos of critique, others argue this is an unsatisfactory and intellectually self-indulgent way to engage with the profound matter of security and suggest a need for reconstruction.  After all these years of questions, what is now the role of ‘critique’ in security studies?  

We invite you to join us for a friendly and collegial graduate conference. Bursaries for travel and accommodation will be available.  We encourage papers from research students addressing, but not limited by, any of the following questions:

• How useful and relevant is the traditional/critical distinction in security studies?

•  To what extent should security studies be normatively driven - whether under the leitmotif of emancipation, resistance or liberation?  What is ‘critical’ about critical approaches to security?  What is ‘traditional’ about traditional approaches? 

• To what extent have critical approaches to security posed a challenge to contemporary power relations?  How much should be expected?  Are critical security studies, more provocatively, merely enmeshed in what Foucault termed the ‘great warm and tender Freemasonry of useless erudition’? What is the relationship between theory and practice in traditional/critical approaches?  

• How successful have critical approaches been at traversing the analytic spectrum from meta-theory to ‘real world’ empirical analyses?  Are traditional approaches more successful in this endeavour and if so why?

• What is the relationship between the different critical approaches to security? Are they incompatible? Are they synergistic? Are certain approaches more conducive to the ‘critical’ project’, however that is defined?

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to pgsecurityconf@warwick.ac.uk by 30th April, 2010.

Click here for more details.

Photo credit: kk+

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 49

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• Malcolm Tucker--everyone's favourite fictional political consigliere from The Thick of It--has been providing election briefings over at guardian.co.uk

• Ethan Nadelmann's Testimony to Congress Hearings on the War on Drugs at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation's blog

• 'Lost Children of the Audit Revolution' by Stephen Logan at timeshighereducation.co.uk

• 'Human Terrain Systems and Military Intelligence' by John Stanton at counterpunch.org

• 'Amazing Rats' by Brian Mossop at thescientist.com

• 'The New Ecology of Information: How the Social Media Revolution Challenges the University' by David Campbell at the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: kevindooley

Rating the Leaders' Debate

Here are my impressions of last night's leaders' debate, the first ever of its kind in British history.

• Best overall performance: Nick Clegg (Lib Dems). Clegg's mission last night was to raise his public profile and that of the Liberal Democrats. He did so admirably. Clegg also provided some of the best analysis of the pathologies of Labour and the Conservatives by noting that their shared commitment to renewing the Trident nuclear weapons program demonstrated the inability to think beyond a Cold War geopolitical mindset and that the more Brown and Cameron argued, the more they sounded the same. Hands down he came across as the most impressive of the three candidates. Could this make the public less adverse to the prospect of a hung parliament? 68

• Biggest surprise of the night: Gordon Brown (Labour). Even outside of the Labour spin that attempted to lower expectations to the point where anything better than passing out on stage could be framed as glorious, most analysts expected that he would be pretty rubbish in a televised debate format. But Brown was solid, delivering his message clearly, and pressing Cameron at every available opportunity. He actually provided the two wittiest lines of the night while pounding the Conservative : 'you can airbrush your posters, but you cannot airbrush your policies' and 'this is not Question Time, this is answer time David'. 60

• Most predictable performance of the night: David Cameron (Conservatives). He was poised, confident, and articulate. But most of what he had to say lacked  depth, substance, or details apart from repeating the necessity of a £6 billion government spending cut to be financed through the euphemism of 'efficiency savings' . You also have to wonder about someone who is unable to comprehend that one can cut waste while maintaining spending levels. To give him credit, he put his public school education to work by starting with a clever rhetorical trick known as a captatio benevolentaie by personally apologizing for the MP expenses scandal. Still, I suspect that overall, Cameron's performance was a wash; it probably reinvigorated the Tory base but did not do enough to woo anyone on the fence or poach supporters from the other two parties. 55

• Biggest rhetorical flop of the night: The use of 'real people' anecdotes by all three candidates. This kind of folksy presentation is a staple of North American debates and psychological studies have shown that anecdotes have a more profound impact on audiences than systematic evidence. However, when Clegg, Brown, and Cameron deployed them, it seemed forced. Moreover, the anecdotes missed the mark by often being tangential to the issue being debated.

• Worst attempt at trying to appear 'normal': Cameron repeatedly stating that his son goes to a state school. Dave, you don't earn prol points for putting your child into the same system used by 93% of the population and then presenting it like some kind of heroic achievement.

• Most disgraceful consensus of the night: All three leaders showed a lack of creativity, imagination, and humanity in positioning immigration as a necessary evil imposed by EU rules that constitutes a security threat to the UK. It was disheartening to see the latent influences of UKIP, the BNP, and the Daily Mail coming through here.

• Biggest elephant in the room left unacknowledged by all three leaders: Why is it that public sector workers and the general public get targeted for massive cuts in wages and services in order to pay for the costs of mitigating the damage caused by the excessive risks taken by City bankers? How is that fair or equitable exactly?

Update: Post-debate polling indicates a big swing to the Lib Dems...

Design for the First World: The Rest Saving the West

As a design student at NYU, Carolina Vallejo became increasingly uncomfortable with how the global south is represented as devoid of agency in political discourses and how this perception is then transposed into the world of design.

After being tasked with an assignment  where the aim was to solve a 'third world' problem, she got angry with the latent paternalism and neo-colonialism embedded in the notion that solutions to issues facing the global south will only be found by those with technical acumen in the global north. So, she decided to do something about it.

Enter 'Design for the First World: The Rest Saving the West' a competition that reverses the typical dynamic by encouraging designers from the global south to offer innovative solutions to the following 'first world' problems:

• reducing obesity
• addressing aging populations and low birth rates
• reducing the consumption rates of mass produced goods
• integrating immigrant populations

Individual and/or design teams from the developing world can submit up to five design solutions via an on-line submission portal. These will be judged by an international jury. One winner and up to 15 honorary mentions will be selected and their designs will be exhibited and collected into a catalog. The deadline for submissions is 11.59pm EST on the 30 May, 2010.

All in all, this sounds like an interesting project.  I, for one, can hardly wait until the best designs are revealed in June!

Photo credit: canvascanoe

'This is How These Soldiers Were Trained to Act': Putting the Wikileaks' Video into Context

There is an interesting interview over at Democracy Now! with Josh Stieber, a former member of Bravo Company 2-16, the unit whose actions are documented in the Wikileaks Collateral Murder video. In addition to providing tactical context , he confirms a point that I made in my previous post on this incident: it is broader political, cultural, strategic, and legal structures that make horrible events like this possible.

Thus, if we find what we see in the video shocking, outrageous, shameful, and morally reprehensible, it is not sufficient to pathologize the soldiers or argue that proper procedures were not followed. Rather, we need to focus on the political imperatives, military culture, forms of training, and strategic objectives that allow, enable, encourage, and condone these kinds of killings.

In 2009, as a part of its season of violence, BB2 aired a documentary called Fighting Passions in which five former British military personnel who had killed in the line of duty discussed their views on combat. Many of the points raised by Josh Steiber echoed through their individual testimonies. Similarly, Joanna Burke's An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in 20th Century Warfare also sheds light on how killing in war and acts of collateral murder come to be normalized.

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 48

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'The Collapse of Complex Business Models' by Clay Shirky at shirky.com

• 'Universities are not businesses' at timeshighereducation.co.uk

• 'Welcome to Fandora' by Robert Lipsyte at tomdispatch.com

• 'Stupidite d'etat at Guantanamo Bay' at nocaptioneeded.com

• And whatever happened to Elian Gonzalez? find out at guardian.co.uk

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: Bob Jagendorf