Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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While I take the point that there are significant differences between Obama and, say, Friedman, I still think Obama might be more of a market fundamentalist than people realise.
Reading between the lines of this ra-ra bit of cheerleading in the Guardian, Obama and his economic adviser come off sounding a lot like Tony Blair, c.1997. If an Obama administration gets in in November, expect to see school vouchers, public-private partnerships, and lots of extra business for the insurance industry.
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Back in 2004, I worked with an ex-pat American Democrat who claimed that she would actually vote for Bush in the November presidential election so that Hillary Clinton would get the Democratic nomination in 2008. As far as I know, she did, too. Since then, I haven't had that high an opinion of HRC supporters.
This isn't to say that Obama is all sweetness and light from a progressive perspective either. He's basically a Chicago-school neoliberal and as truly 'left-wing' as Michael Bassett is these days. I really can't understand why self-identifying 'progressive' Americans are getting so excited about him. They seem to view the fact that he's been able to raise so much money and has got Rupert Murdoch's support as a good thing, rather than a giant, flashing warning sign of where his real interests and sympathies lie.
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American? In my mind the identification of the hoodie with delinquent youth is mostly a UK thing.
Well, yeah, but the UK's been subject to wave-upon-wave of Americanization since the end of World War II. Hip-hop street culture is only one aspect of that one-way cultural exchange. But, yes, the 'hug a hoodie' movement is an English thing.
I'm sure Foucault would be wearing one right now, if he weren't dead.
Thanks for that image!
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Damn that shift button!
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A few of us at Public Address will be wearing hoodies for Hoodie Day, Friday May 30, which is one of the events for Youth Week, May 26 to June 1. The choice of garment isn't accidental: hoodies are a sort of sartorial shorthand for stigmatisation of youth ...
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That's well and good, but doesn't this, in a strange way, sort of add to the stigmatization? Rather than allowing the hoodie to be merely a piece of early-00s fashion that youth are free to adopt, or discard, as they see fit, doesn't a 'Hoodie Day' now essentialize it as part of youth identity?
There's been a weird ethnologizing of markets and consumer groups in the last ten or so years. (I blame the phenomenon of anthropology Ph.D.s getting jobs in marketing firms.) Now consumers are viewed as 'tribes' with their own customs and costumes, which it is the marketer's job to understand, co-opt, and appropriate. These poses and outfits then get packaged and sold as 'authentic' culture -- part of what Thomas Frank calls the 'conquest of cool'.
I have real problems with this whole 'hug a hoodie' movement, because of the element of covert control involved. In a way, the hoodie becomes mandatory -- a uniform. It's imposed from above (by the fashion and music industries), and then it gets taken as some kind of authentic cultural expression. It's not. It's just a piece of fashion, part of the larger phenomenon of the American cultural hegemony that we're all subject to. Why do we have to imbue it with a significance and authenticity it just doesn't have?
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One of the rare points of agreement between myself and Winston Peters was related to his throw-away remark to journalists about looking to foreign ownership of New Zealand's media. I've been around long enough to see the change from the Horton family to Sir Tony O'Reilly has wrought on the NZ herald in particular.
While I generally agree with this, one of the interesting things about the New Zealand news media is how enduring these traditional biases are. The Herald has pretty much always been a right-wing paper. In the years leading up to WWI, for instance, it was edited by the eugenicist and proto-fascist William Lane. Its editorial pages endorsed Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria, and systematically opposed the first Labour Government.
The Dominion was explicitly established as an organ for the political opinions of the right-wing Reform Party (one of ancestors of the modern National Party). When Robin Hyde was writing parliamentary reports for the Dom in the '20s, she was instructed by her editor to ignore all Labour MPs:
By the way, though the Labour Party provided at least 90 per cent. of the speeches and almost all the dramatic incidents of the long night watches, one wasn't, in writing flippancies about the House, supposed to mention them, no matter how unkindly. They were to be ignored. I was finally requested, point-blank, to omit all mention of the Labour Party from my daily column ...
In the '20s, it wasn't unheard of for a prospective MP to buy the electorate's local newspaper and use its editorial pages as part of the campaign.
I think what's changed is the public's general lack of political education now, as opposed to a few decades ago. How many Herald readers even realize that their buttons are being pushed, let alone know the history of the paper? And, of course, the left-leaning papers that once competed with the Herald and the Dom no longer exist. Even that last bastion of Leftish opinion, the Listener, has gone way to the Right under Pamela Stirling.
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Perhaps the public service ethos has eroded over time....
Perhaps the events of 1984-99 had something to do with that as well.
The point about managerialism in the public sector is a good one. The proliferation of managerial layers is what you get when you decree that the public sector's role is to be 'efficient' or provide 'value for money' (whatever those things actually mean). Measuring -- or pretending to measure -- these imponderables incurs heavy compliance costs, yes. This process started in the '90s and is by no means limited to the state sector.
And do you seriously think that a round of 'cuts' and downsizing won't require a large cadre of managers and consultants to oversee and administer? I think that managerialism and compliance costs are big problems. I have absolutely no confidence that downsizing is the solution. In fact, the downsizing mentality and its associated languages of efficiency and cost-effectiveness are the primary generators of managerialism.
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I'd be very surprised if National doesn't have a fairly good idea of what it wants to achieve in office. The privatization of ACC, for instance.
The matter of public-sector politicization is a complex one, in this context. A lot of public sector employees will be naturally leery of a National administration, for the very good reason that they think their jobs will be at stake. If they work in ACC, MSD, MED, MCH, Kiwibank, or TEC, I imagine that these concerns will be well-founded.
National was rather surprised last election by the margin with which Labour took Wellington Central. It shouldn't have been. The memory of National's wholesale disembowelment of the state sector is still fresh, and there's no reason to think they won't try it on again. And Key's recent talkback-baiting blather about cutting hundreds of millions of dollars of public spending isn't really going to bring on the warm fuzzies, is it?
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So, can I assume that the region-free DVD player I've had for the past five years is now an uber-felonious TPM-spoiler?
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On the topic of media uselessness, there's a good article by John Lanchester in the LRB on journalists' increasing reliance on press releases here. It's written from a British perspective, but the issue's equally applicable here.