From The Pleiades Mailbag

GFC Redux (More Like Reflux)

Here's a goodie! Satyajit Das, one of the few people who had a grip on why the GFC unfolded tells us that we're ripe for another one but we've really not accomplished the damage repair we promised ourselves.

The signs are obvious to all. The World Bank estimates the ratio of non-performing loans to total gross loans in 2015 reached 4.3 per cent. Before the 2009 global financial crisis, they stood at 4.2 per cent. 

If anything, the problem is starker now than then: there are more than $US3 trillion ($4 trillion) in stressed loan assets worldwide, compared to the roughly $US1 trillion of US subprime loans that triggered the 2009 crisis.


European banks are saddled with $US1.3 trillion in non-performing loans, nearly $US400 billion of them in Italy. The IMF estimates that risky loans in China also total $US1.3 trillion, although private forecasts are higher. India's stressed loans top $US150 billion. 

Once again, banks in the US, Canada, UK, several European countries, Asia, Australia and New Zealand are heavily exposed to property markets, which are overvalued by historical measures. 

In addition, banks have significant exposure to the troubled resource sector: lending to the energy sector alone totals around $US3 trillion globally.

It sure doesn't get any better. For all the talk about fixing balance sheets and prudential lending and all the excess printing of money to reflate assets, we're not really in better straits than at the peak of the GFC. QE bought time, but instead of using that time to really fix things up, the banks have gone with business as usual.

The asset price issue is probably the elephant in the room. The asset price slide brought about the bubble burst of the subprime mortgage bonds. To shore up the banks, the asset price drop had to be stopped, and so the massive amounts money printed was injected into banks as liquidity, essentially to keep the music going in the musical chairs. While the music keeps playing we don't have to find out just who it is that is without the chair.

It's kind of funny because Australia being so far away from the centre of this mess, our own property bubble was barely touched by the GFC. Everybody who was in property has essentially been able to keep their asset price, and even with more ridiculous gains. It's easily arguable that for all the storm clouds over the horizon, the GFC didn't hit Australia at all - thanks even to Kevin Rudd. It's one thing to have nice asset prices but if it's being held up by tricky central banking, you might want to think about what prices might look like if theydroppes around 30-40%.

Oh, and wonder about the fundamental cogitation going on when the RBA looks to be cutting interest rates again soon. Maybe what it's doing is exactly what they say they're not doing, which is pandering to the interests of the banks who want more asset price rises in the housing sector.

The French Are Asking Questions

It turns out the guy who went and slit the throat of the priest in Normandy was known to the French authorities and yet was left free to roam free and do as he did. Now questions are being asked.

A Mass at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, reserved for the most solemn state occasions, was held Wednesday evening in memory of Father Hamel, 85, whose attackers forced him to kneel before killing him in the old stone church of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy. Much of the government and two of France’s three living former presidents attended.

At the same time, a new feeling of helplessness was setting in. One of the attackers, Adel Kermiche, 19, had tried twice to go to Syria. On Wednesday, the Islamic State released a video that it said was recorded before the attack by him and his accomplice in which they pledged allegiance to the group.

Mr. Kermiche, like the Nice attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, had a documented history of psychiatric troubles, according to the newspaper Le Monde, which leaked his judicial files in Wednesday’s editions and whose report was confirmed by the Paris prosecutor’s office, which leads terrorism investigations.

But unlike Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel, Mr. Kermiche was also already in the government’s books as a terrorist threat.

Indeed, barely four months ago a judge released him from detention, convinced by the young Franco-Algerian’s arguments that he was ready for a normal life and no longer wanted to become a jihadist. 

At the time, the Paris terrorism prosecutor’s office appealed the judge’s decision, arguing that Mr. Kermiche should stay behind bars.

The prosecutor was contemptuous of the judge’s arguments for limited surveillance, calling them “perfectly illusory, given the context,” according to the documents quoted in Le Monde. “He’s claiming a mistake, and arguing for a second chance. But there’s a very big risk.”

Once before, in 2015, after his first failed effort to go to Syria, Mr. Kermiche had been allowed to go free but was required to check in with the police and probation authorities. He violated that order within about six weeks trying a second time to go to Syria. This time he made it as far as Turkey where authorities arrested him.

When he was caught the second time, he was put in preventive detention until March 18 of this year, when he came before the judge who ultimately let him go.

This time he was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet, forbidden to leave his local department of Seine-Maritime and made to report to a probation officer at the police station once a week, and ordered to live in his parents’ house, where he was allowed to leave only between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m on weekdays.

You can't make this stuff up. They had him. Twice. And they fitted an electronic tracking device on the guy. They knew he was dangerous. They denied him access to Syria. They gave him curfew to follow. He violated his probation, twice, which put him behind bars for a little while but the same judge that freed him the first time let him go again. And of course this happens while the whole country is under 'heightened security' thanks to the Nice truck driving bastard. You'd think somebody somewhere would have done something about this guy. But they didn't, and so we have yet another instance of state incompetence in apprehending a terror perp.

Get your head around that one. The French at least are trying and they're finding it awfully hard. I don't blame them; I find it hard.

It may even be that we're getting the whole thing wrong. The cross over between the spree-killing and terror act is really quite small. Many of these people around he world doing these spree-killings are probably adding on an ideological dimension to what is simply an act of mass violence. After all, it is a very fine distinction between killing 50 people in a spree killing and killing 50 people in an act of terror. The latter merely appears to have a plausible motive. What if this were an illusion?

What if what was really going on was simply spree-killings giving themselves the cover of ideology? Then it would be easier to understand the danger of crazy people walking around on the streets, and in some countries, being able to purchase weapons of tremendous destructive power. It suits the government far more to have narrative where a crime can be made out to be a political problem than a medical problem. Consider for a moment a lot of spree-killings are done by people who struggle to find meaning in their lives. Whether that be Wade Frankum in Strathfield or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Columbine. Ideology offers an ad hoc assignment of meaning to such acts. This offer politics a tremendous amount of leeway to then enact things that maybe need-not-ought to be enacted.

Back in the 90s, - way before 9/11 made terrorism a front line issue - with the cases of Wade Frankum in Sydney and the Columbine boys in Colorado, the state had no such recourse. Thus back in their day, the governments respectively went after things like 'American Psycho' by Brett Easton-Ellis and violent computer games while completely ignoring the problem having weapons readily available to the general population - something the USA under the threat of the NRA is still insisting upon to this day. At the moment the discourse has turned availability of weapons in America, but all the same it misses half the point.

It is laughable to think 'American Psycho' or 'Crime and Punishment' caused somebody to go on a killing spree. It is equally laughable to think the problem in Columbine was computer games or the Rap music the boys listened to. In the same way, it is laughable to think the attacks in Nice and Normandy were because of the Koran. These acts of 'terror' in Nice and Normandy were done by people who were willing to exchange their meaningless lives for a sliver of metaphysical meaning. That's desperate, violent and crazy, but not driven by ideology first.

There are a lot of desperate people walking around this planet without much meaning in their lives. Some of them are mentally ill, and filled with violent mentation. Demonising an ideology merely offers these people an excuse in an otherwise meaningless, lacking life. If the state thinks it is getting closer to the ideological problem through anti-terror laws and going after radicalised people, they're missing the point because they release the mentally unstable ones back into the public. As the cases in Nice and Normandy amply demonstrate, it is the crazy people who are willing to do this stuff. This can be corroborated with Man Monis of the Lindt Cafe siege who also fell off the AFP watch list exactly because he was deemed crazy.

I'm sure the politicians don't want to hear it but the real problem is mental illness, not ideology. That would be because they've been cutting mental health budgets to support budgets for 'Anti-Terror' for a good decade and a half.  Nobody wins elections advocating for sanity; they only seem to win on the basis of being tough on other people. They need an army of mental health workers, not guys with guns and bulletproof vests.

View From The Couch - 18/Jul/2016

Ain't So Nice Deeds Going On In Nice

This business of the Nice Terror Truck thing this last Bastille Day is turning into one of those media circuses. From the best we can glean from the media, the perpetrators seems to have been some lone nut - exactly the kind that goes and assassinates a Kennedy. The media have been trying to pin the Islamist terrorist thing on this guy, but it seems like as far as muslims go, he wasn't even very good at being a good muslim. The more likely explanation is that he was so angry about his small, lowly station in his life, he decided to go for a spree killing; and instead of doing it with an MR-15 like you do in America, he opted for the more Terminator-inspired truck-stunt of running over innocent people. Turns out it's more effective than shooting up a room full of gay people in disco if you time your attack on a big parade day.

The rest of this is baffling too. He was carrying ammunition including grenades but he didn't get time to set them off because he was gunned down before he could use them. So it is clear he really only had one purpose, which is to kill as many people as possible before going out in a blaze of glory. Just when it looks like it was a spree-killing, the French authorities arrest 5 other people in connection to the killer, and ISIL claim responsibility. I mean, really? Thus it turns out that the spree-killing was indeed to do with the Islamic State.

You have to get a little incredulous when you try to form a picture of just what has happened and what it could possibly mean. For one, I can say it would suck to be a muslim having to defend their religion ever more vigorously in the west. The line going around is that you can't take what Westboro Baptist Church thinks is christian faith as being christian, and so equally, one cannot go around thinking what Islam extremists thinks is islam. Let's not forget that there's also evidence to believe that the Islamist extremists aren't all that well read up on aspects of their religious texts, but that is another discussion.

There are globally, 1.16 billion muslims. If 0.1% went batshit crazy and violent, you're talking about 1.16 million people on the planet. Judging from the numbers flocking to ISIL and carrying out these acts, 0.1% might actually be over-estimating just how big the portion of batshit crazy and violent makes up the population. It is however worrying that any old spree-killing asshole can tie-up their spree kill with religious extremism.

Turkey Coup Attempt

Talk about a wet firecracker. The coup attempt in Turkey has fizzled, and now they are reporting 6000 arrests. The old wisdom being paraded around was that Turkey tends to experience coups when the government gets a little too religious. It may have been the case in the past but it seems distinctly that with a failed coup and the rounding up of these officers, it is looking like that historical mission has failed. Not to mention of course the democratic voices in support of a democratically elected government in Turkey and you get a growing feeling that this coup was not only mis-executed, it also misjudged of the mood of the country. This is clearly not the Turkey of your parents and grandparents.

That being said, the coup is likely to play into the hands of Erdogan and his power block who are in private helping ISIL sell their crude oil, as well as bombing the crap out of Kurdish separatists. Some of these relations and hostilities go back to the conquest of Turkey by the Turks so you don't really know if modern political discourses going to be able to rein in the Erdogan government. It's a fun sight as it was in Egypt to see a religious government rely on arguments for Western Democracy to take power in elections, then set about dismantling secular western institutions.

It illustrates how uneasily western values like democracy and separation of powers sits with islam. If the islamic countries want to benefit from western style living standards, they need to adopt some of the posturing of the west. But with the posturing comes capitalism which has the effect of eroding traditional values, and this creates a desire in people to go back to time before capital, but of course this is nigh impossible. So instead the people adopt a regressive sentimental position on the past and embrace older ideas as if they will withstand the eroding power of capitalism, especially global capitalism. There is going to be a lot of gnashing of teeth where ancient settlements are undone and ancient entitlements are rescinded.

No wonder people are angry.
James Baldwin allegedly said that people hang on to their anger in order not to confront their own pain. When you look at Nice in light of estranged, alienated, disenfranchised, mentally unstable angry people involved the attacks; and then you look at Turkey in terms of how much it embraces the west and then recoils in horror from the west, you get a clearer understanding of how the anger and pain manifest itself as these social ructions. It's enough to make you wonder about muslims who come to the west looking for a better life and just how much they are willing to give upon their identity to get it. It may not be so invalid to at least be sceptical of these things.

View From The Couch - 16/Nov/2015

The Aporia Visited Sam Harris As Well

The recent attacks in Paris had a certain depressing quality that comes with repetition. My own sense of expended aporia has not left me, and yet here I am writing about it because ultimately the more I work towards articulating the problem, then maybe the problem will show itself in at least an outline. Notable today was Sam Harris who had a podcast up, and perhaps unsurprisingly he was making the point that the philosophical points to be made had already been made in response to acts of terror. Indeed, as Harris points out, if people are calling this attack a wake-up call, then they've been missing a lot of things along the way.

While I am not of the atheist persuasion to bang on about the the problem of Islamism and Wahibbism that is is funding the Sunni extremists, I do relate to Sam Harris' position that the Western small-'l' liberal mindset is so effete and navel-gazing, it can't dare name an enemy when it is there; it cannot bring itself to properly brand the enemy for exactly what it is, lest it offend people. I'm not one to be so vocal about this, but if religion is what drives you to do some of this stuff, then there's a problem with your religion.

Yes, it's not exactly a popular thing to say. Neither does it mean we go around pinning the blame on any and every muslim for the events in Paris. Yet it does seem pertinent for the small 'l' liberal people to get up and take notice of the fact that the events in Paris this week, and Charlie Hebdo earlier this year, tells us there are people who would piss upon the values we hold dear, and shit upon our niceties and politesse. These cunts want to kill us all if they could, and maybe, just maybe, we ought to take philosophical note of that.
Just writing that is going to put me at odds with my friends.

A Year On From The Man Monis Thing

Back last year when I was still working with the Events Lighting company, we got this job from the City of Sydney whereby we would install colourful "disco lights" to be shone upon silver sequin fabric flags. The flags would flutter in the wind as they reflected lights like a mirror ball. It was a fabulous idea. Not content with that, there were colourful lights installed everywhere along Martin Place. Then of course on the first week it was up, the Man Monis Lindt Cafe siege happened.

If you go back and look at the news footage of the Monis siege, you can see in the background of the shots where people were running out of the cafe, the changing lights. Early on in the evening, it occurred to the City of Sydney that the disco banner lights were somewhat inappropriate to the unfolding situation. They rang up our office and asked to have it turned off. The Little Tyrant replied,

"I tell you what, if you can find a bullet proof vest, I'll tell you how to turn it off from a phone, far away."

Needless to say, the lights stayed on. The incongruity of the disco banner lights grew as the evening wore on. Eventually the siege was broken that night, but the disco banner lights were there, all night long, adding colour so to speak. Man Monis turned out to be a lone nutter more than a proper jihadist, and we all chalked that one up to the terror threat being over-stated.

Still, a year on, I can't but help think what a fiasco the whole thing was.

The Enemy Isn't Like What You Think

Here's a must read article about the kind of person who ends up in ISIL. It makes for sobering reading because it illuminates the depth of the problem.

For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

So there you have it; the perils of buying into identity politics. Not only that, we can see full well what the dividends are for America's misadventure in Iraq. In a bid to - allegedly - strike at the heart of terror by bringing down Saddam Hussein, thus ending the terror threat of things like 9/11, they turned a whole generation of men in Iraq into exactly the sort of people who become terrorists. Talk about snatching a bomb from the jaws of defeat. There's been nothing more self-defeating than American imperialism in the Middle East.

Paris Burning

This Is Serious, François

France seems to be the easy underbelly for terrorist strikes. The abject evil, the banal brutality and the inferiority-complex-charged vitriol walked into Paris and opened fire. The carnage that is being reported is staggering in scope as well as qualia, quantity as well as quality. Whoever the perpetrators were, they meant to do maximum damage and if we're keeping score, they did a heck of a job on the French - because the French are promising a merciless retaliation. 

It has only been a mere ten months since the Charlie Hebdo incident. If anything, the ferocity of this attack underscores the notion that Charlie Hebdo was just the beginning. We may opt to ridicule the terror threat, but in reality, it is a bit like the exchange in Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil', where the minister says the terrorists are bad sports. It's looking like a certain amount of terror-threat paranoia is a healthy option. let's face it, we've been at war with Islamists for some time now, whether we admit it to ourselves daily or not.

Look, just today we drone-bombed Jihadi John. Remember Jihadi John?  That idiot English boy who got himself wrapped up in the ISIS business of beheadings and video? Well, the US is reasonably certain they got the twerp. And that usually means, they found where he was staying and called in a drone that launched a smart-missile and the-rest-is-history-Jihadi-John. Is this good? Is this ethical? We don't know, but this seems to have turned into the frontier of our wars; and let's be honest with ourselves, this is a kind of post-colonial backlash war that's been repressed since the end of World War I, so nearly hundred years on, it's sort of on for young and for old. Foolishly, the western retreat from its own colonial aggression in the late twentieth century opened up the vacuum to be filled by some genuinely awful antagonists.

It's not some kind of mistake. The West shrunk back far enough and the islamists are trying to seize the moment. I'm not advocating the West go back in, but we have to understand that we're in some kind of war right now, and that events like in Paris aren't just blowback, they're efforts to hurt our polity. And while we strike this pose of "no compromise with the terrorists", we're locking ourselves further into this cycle of violence. Make no mistake, the asymmetry of the war is misleading, and we might fool ourselves into thinking we're not at war in the same manner that a citizen in 1939-1945 was at war.

The only reason we think that is because in light of the 9/11 attacks, the war we unleashed upon
the Taliban and Saddam was so remote, it left us the luxury to imagine we are not at war. Yet, since the fateful invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, we've had war. And as wars go, it's a pretty crappy protracted affair, with very vague victory conditions - far worse than the Hundred Years War or the Thirty Years' War, where people were waging wars wherein the context was lost and it was just more people fighting for the sake of fighting; Wars with reasons and processes that make 'Game of Thrones' look stream-lined in its plot perspicacity. Frankly, this one has the sort of metaphysical idiocy of the Crusades, once waged by the West on the Muslim world. This time the metaphysical idiocy is coming back from the Muslim world, but on the whole we have the recipe for something that could last a very long time.

Worse still, it's a war without decisive battles. There won't be land forces meeting on the field to contest terrain. There won't be battleships or aircraft carriers going toe-to-toe on the high seas. There won't even be a dogfight between fighter jets. Instead, it's going to be one side with the high tech espionage with drones and the other side with the suicide bombers. And it will drag on, tit-for-tat for decades to come.

That's just about how over a hundred people have ended up dead in Paris. It's insanity on a stick.
I don't know how to express just what I feel about all this, except to say that whatever it is that I feel, it's overwhelmingly negative, grim, and distressed. Whatever it is France intends to do, whoever it thinks is going to hold accountable and punish, so far the language says it's going to be war and more war as they re-commit to expanding the cycle of violence. John Kerry might bang on about finding the culprits and punishing them, but it just goes to show that the Secretary of the State for the United States of America hasn't got any historic perspective on this war, and he's even a veteran of the Vietnam War. The rhetoric is practically schoolyard-childish; and it just doesn't look like he's got a grip on what kind of hell kind war that's been unleashed.

You see why this is all so distressing, beyond the violence and the body count and the metaphysical idiocy.

Being Charlie Hebdo Part 2

The Aftermath of Crazy Is More Craziness

Pleiades sent me an article by Guy Rundle where he argues that the western ideology is so bereft and bankrupt of ideas, when it argues in principle, it ends up arguing something incoherent. Instead of heading for a transformative idea, our commentators and politicians alike sink back to old Left-Right partisanship, seeking opportunistic angles to score points within our own polity.

It's content behind a pay wall so I can't link to it, but here's something worth bringing up.

The Right is falling apart as a political formation so fast you’d need stop-action photography to catch the process. Bruce Petty was quite correct, in his cartoon this week, to draw the Right sloping to the drawing board to sketch out a new plan for surveillance and control. But he was wrong I think, to draw it as a great beast. It’s more a Caspar Milquetoast/Monty Burns figure, barely able to hold up the pencil. The failure of Iraq, free-wheeling capitalism, the collapsed legitimacy of Western Right governments, and increasing wars between its liberal and conservative factions sees it without a program, coherent worldview, common sense, or much cheer as far as I can see. 

The Hebdo massacre brought all these contradictions to the fore. Hebdo’s nihilism is actually culturally corrosive, as conservatives charge such obscene desacrilising with being. Conservatives know that a viable culture is a closed system to a degree, and unless it has pinion points -- usually religious -- which are not themselves, by matter of custom, subject to a general back-and-forth, then it is quickly in trouble. This week, sundry idiots have been suggesting that "free speech is part of our cultural tradition".
What nonsense. 

Until the 1960s, hundreds of books, films and plays were banned, even in the US, as way of maintaining the limits of what was publicly talked of, in terms of sex, religion and the like. That maintained a Christian division between profane body and sacred soul. Once abolished, Christian Western culture collapsed. A transitional period lasted into the 1990s. Remember the furore over Madonna’s hokey video "Papa Don’t Preach?". Remember when the porn industry was some marginal thing, and not another career option?

Yes, does anybody remember the furore over things like 'Piss Christ?'

How about the PMRC/Mothers of Prevention episode when a bunch of conservative mothers formed a committee to censor rock music in the 1980s? And Frank Zappa had to testify to Congress?

As Frank would say, "I mean seriously, folks! This is altogether a ridiculous state of affairs!"
It's all well and good that the Conservatives like David Cameron and Tony Abbott are thundering that  Freedom of Expression is our way of life but you sort of wonder if this is because it's just bloody expedient. As somebody who was on the side that supported 'Piss Christ and liked listening to Frank Zappa and certainly never yielded from the position of letting gangsta rappers kill as many cops in their songs, I find it tremendously strange that the very same conservatives now want to stand up for Freedom of Expression. Yay for Free Speech, it's finally self-evident even to the dumbest Conservatives.

You know what? I somehow doubt Cory Bernardi is stocking up on Gangsta Rap music on his iTunes. Anyway, Rundle goes on to have a hack at the Left too:

But much of what remains of the organised Left has revealed its own exhaustion and bankruptcy too. Though Left figures were not the first to repeat the "this has nothing to do with Islam" meme -- Merkel and Cameron joining Hollande in repeating that mantra -- many were quick to adopt it, and to focus on a revival of Islamophobia due to such an event. 

The event itself was barely glanced at, not even in an analytic way. The only response to the ludicrous pseudo-politics of declaring for free speech when no one had declared against it, was to reconstitute Western Arab-originated/descended Muslims as a whole, a subject of history, and then become their representative against oppression. The old, old accordian, got out for one last wheezing squeezeplay. But the wave of attacks against Muslims failed to eventuate. Maps of such events showed about 20 such, not good, but no Muslim-pogrom. 

It was cautioned that the attacks would create a surge of support for the French anti-immigration party Front National. But there was no sign of that (though it may come), giving a strong suspicion that the FN had reached near-saturation level. Charlie Hebdo’s nihilistic style was taken as racism, its physical depiction of Arabs vastly exaggerated. Some jokes against the Right, using their language, were taken as witless Bill-Leakesque curmudgeonliness (the eternal fate of the satirist - if Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ were published today it would have a beyondblue tagline, a body image trigger warning at the top, and a "Visit Ireland" google ad pop up). This shoehorned French political style into Anglosphere political divisions, where such a robust space for pre-identity politics Leftism has largely ceased to exist. Implicit was a causal model, which constructed Charlie Hebdo as having a FOX News-ish right-wing, pseudo-populist style, which it was using to rag on racial-religious minorities only -- this effectively accusing it of a certain naivete as regards race and oppression, with lethal results. As Daily Kos’ selection of some of Hebdo’s anti-imperialist cartoons showed, that wasn’t the case at all. 

But the causal/determinative model dies hard. And one popular article tweeted around was one about the "anomie of the banlieues". Ah, the anomie (i.e. lack of meaning) of the banlieues (the featureless, high-rise housing around Paris and other cities) -- Shift-F1 on the keyboard of a certain type of feature writer.

There's been a growing opinion that maybe Charlie Hebdo with its crude, rude and pointed satire in some way had it coming, and that no, some of want to say 'Je ne suis pas Charlie' because some ideological sticking point makes it "none-of-my-concern". Which is probably more honest but also goes to show why the identity politics being exercised is (as Helen Razer would have it...) Stupid.

The added absurdity of arguing that Islamism is not to blame in the face of people who yelled "Allahu Akbar" after they shot 12 people is, you know, pretty Islamophilic - as in, an unnecessary love of things Islamic, - to excuse that crime on some level.

Nobody in their right mind is pinning the blame on all the Muslims the world over for what happened. Yet the guys who did it are saying they did it for Allah. So somewhere in the discussion of ideas, we have to tackle Islamism and ask it some probing questions. To date, the argument the Left-side commentators is mounting as whole is a kind of "it was just provocation by the magazine when they insulted their faith". In other words, simultaneously abandoning Freedom of Expression and condoning violent action. If we accept that, we're essentially accepting the brothers arguing "look what you made me do."
I don't think we're ready to dumb ourselves down to that level for the sake of political correctness. At least, I'm sorry, I'm not going there. And why is the Left suddenly acting Stupid?

None of this is going to play out properly without a major argument with Islamism. In Northern Iraq, it's being contested with lethal force. They are winning in parts because they have a lot of conviction in their bullshit. If we are to contest our ideas against them, we'd better get our shit straight. If it is going to be Freedom of Expression and that's where we plant a flag, it's a good start. Somehow I share Guy Rundle's doubts that what we have is just massive cognitive dissonance and a bare cupboard for transformative ideas.

Being Charlie Hebdo

Islamophobia Isn't Like Homophobia

In the years since I wrote this entry here 8years ago, the world has become just that little bit more volatile. Back then Islamophobia was a new word. Now it has gained currency - much in the way that a general acceptance of such things as Anti-Terror laws have become acceptable. I guess etymologically speaking Islamophobia would mean a fear of Islam. It doesn't mean hatred of Islam, but if we are to believe Yoda, fear leads to anger and anger leads to hate so we're two steps away from hating on Islam if we admit we're phobic, under that schema.

Based on the recent events in Paris where 12 journalists and cartoonists were shot to death by terrorists, it seems to be a legitimate fear to possess.

8 years ago, I joked that the term likens Islam to spiders, heights and homosexuals. I kind of stand by that. I'm not a big fan of the way the term is bandied about in shows like Q&A as if the term actually has some definitional - and therefore epistemological - truth to it. I wince every time I hear some talking head on the TV mentioning it, whereas the term Homophobia never struck me as odd in the same way. It really is a little like Muslims want to get a pass on the same identity-politic basis as LGBT people - even though their own religion wants to stone LGBT people. I smell hypocrisy there.

I guess whoever coined the term did so in the hope that if you could identify the phobia, you can smoke out the prejudices; which is exactly what the term homophobia has done for the gay community. If anything the construction of the term homophobia is even more precarious than Islamophobia because what we really mean by a homophobe is not somebody who fears homosexuality, but somebody who has gone straight on to hating on homosexuals. Even allowing for the more precarious construction, the term homophobia has allowed the world to move in to a direction where there is genuine emancipation of the LGBT community so in some sense there is hope yet for the term Islamophobia.

Be that as it may, the problem of all this is that terms like 'Islamophobia' force you into accepting a version of their identity politics, even if you don't accept identity politics at all. Identity politics is a pretty crappy tool. You can only claim so much ground arguing on behalf of the specific conditions of your birth. You can argue a position right up to equality, but arguing for exceptions is going to get you in trouble. Identity politics is at its core, pretty dumb. Ultimately it's the business of showing your scars and saying "somebody pay up or else back off".

I'm sorry, I'm done buying bullshit. I don't want more identity politics - my own included - when there already is enough in the world. I want more honest appraisals of what real equality means and how it gets achieved. And I dothink it gets achieved through such things as Freedom of Expression (heck, as much as it gets held back by religious dogma, but that's a separate topic). So if anybody calls you an Islamophobe, your answer should be "I'm not stupid enough to buy into your identity politics". If they shoot you for that answer, I guess that would be the point. They want the conversation to go to the Sword or the Koran.

All the same, the claim is that mocking the Prophet is simply not acceptable. That it's somehow reasonable for fatwahs to be put upon Salman Rushdie or that it is somehow understandable that people get so angered they go and shoot a bunch of cartoonists.

The law applies to us equally. There's no scope for identity politics based exceptions. That's how "equal in the eyes the law" works. So if somebody goes around shooting people, regardless of the perceived provocation, they have go before the law. And if they argue in court that cartoons were enough provocation to commit acts of murder, then they may find society and its values are dead set against you. And this would have nothing to do with their religion being belittled or persecuted. This is basic law-&-order kind of stuff. There isn't going to be some exception in French Law or European Law that is going to make this kind of thing okay.

If holding to equality makes somebody an Islamophobe, then maybe the fears are well-founded.

Takes Two To Terrorise

This business of shooting the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo could have been carried out by once person. In which case we might have involved the lone-nut theory; yes, the same one I invoked with the Martin Place Siege. The, "that's not an act of terror because it's just one person." argument. I've been wondering a little about that call but I'm a little less certain of it now. I am now thinking that maybe we have a fear of the possibility that terror acts carried out by one suggests each and every individual is potentially a terror threat. And if that were true we would opt to abandon trust and liberty and give into our darkest xenophobic needs.

If anybody on their own is a terror cell then we have to start building a category outside of the individual and say "all muslims are potentially terrorists". It flies in the face of our own tolerance to say such things. So we opt with saying the lone gunman is a nutter. It may not even be true, when properly diagnosed.

Two brothers on the run with guns however constitutes a legitimate terror cell. This seems to be our acceptance of things base on events at the Boston Marathon as well as this week's Charlie Hebdo massacre. I guess it takes two people to have a conversation, which could then be characterised as a conspiracy. A lone person talking to himself is by most social counts, more crazy than conspiratorial.

'We' Do Terrible Things - But Do We Deserve What We Get?

One of the discussions I had this week in the aftermath involved talking about what the Colonial powers of the 19th century - that is Western Europe and Russia and the USA - still do today in the middle east. For a start the USA supports Israel and Israel isn't exactly a joy for the Arab world. Then there are the puppet regimes with dictators that dominated the second half of the Twentieth century. Name like Hussein, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Assad, tell us exactly how problematised the Arab world has been for a overlong time. Those countries have fallen into various states civil distress and in all these cases they offer up terrible choices.

We found out that much as we dislike Saddam Hussein, his government was stable enough to keep the waring factions from erupting into violence. We found out in Egypt that the alternative to a military government was the Muslim Brotherhood who essentially ruled in a way that made things worse, and whose democratic credentials quickly paled. Libya is oner-reported but it doesn't seem like things are getting better there, and Syria is in a terrible civil war where the enemy of our enemy ashore Assad, is ISIL. Even without the issue of religion - ignoring it outright, even - the Arab world is filled with difficult political issues.

The argument offered to me this week was that 'we' in the West are dropping bombs and insulting their prophet. That we should be more understanding when they rise up and exact their vengeance. As if Charlie Hebdo and its irreverent cartoons were just too much to bear; that this magazine constituted just provocation.

I have no problem with the notion that their grievances are legitimate. I have immense difficulty accepting that the terror act in paris this week is a legitimate act of war or defiance. At some point we are responsible or our own actions. These guys knew what they were doing. It doesn't matter that bombs are falling Syria or drone strikes are happening in North Pakistan or that Iraq and Afghanistan are in strife, if you live in Paris (or Boston or Sydney).
Yes, it's political. But it's shitty politics.

There Is A Problem With Islamism

This is hard to write because I have Muslim friends, but you're allowed to disagree with friends. My own reading of the Koran is mostly idle interest and morbid curiosity. There are parts of history where Islam found tremendous high points worthy of admiration and awe. Even so I'm really troubled by the way it keeps expressing itself in the contemporary world with violent bursts.

Bill Maher was seen in an interview talking about the problem of Islam as a religion and in it he has an interesting point. This is a religion where they behead people in Mecca for falling-out of religion. It's violently hostile to secular thinking. As Maher notes, it's amazing the world doesn't look at this a bit closer and harder. It would be like crucifying people in the Vatican forecourt for lapsing as Catholics.

Islam is ideologically opposed to our tolerance, even of Islam itself. Even though we talk about moderate muslims who are not violent benighted majority the 1billion-plus believers on the planet, at its very core is this beheadings at Mecca. There are crazy off-shoots of all the religions. Christianity alone has things like the Ku-Klux Klan and the Westboro Baptists Church but they are fringe. There are militant Buddhists in Burma rounding up and persecuting Muslims in Myanmar - but that is fringe stuff too; in the main Buddhism at its core is temples and tourism and selling trinkets. Hinduism, and Confucianism, alike have their odd violent fringes but it's not central to the practice.

Looking into Islamism at its core is like staring in to 8th century Dark Ages thinking in the desert of Arabia. it's unflinchingly uncompromising and brutal. It's so extreme one can think we're lucky they didn't enshrine cannibalism. There isn't a heart that says "turn the other cheek". It's "mock our prophet and we come shooting."

If we are indeed small-'l' liberals, it is worth considering how tolerant one must be to tolerate that which would kill you for your tolerance. Because that's a principle at stake. Our credo for tolerance says we believe in Freedom of Expression and standing by the cartoonists who lampoon Islam. They believe it's their duty to retaliate against the words (and especially images) with violence. It keeps coming around to the same collision point. If we're strictly talking the ideas, then Islam has a problem.
Yes, we're phobic for a reason.

The Martin Place Siege

Wog Day Afternoon

Yes, I'm being rude because I'm incensed. I'm particularly hating on the identity politics being drawn out like one of those outlines they draw on corpses in old American movies. If this is allowed to become an identity politics issue, we'll see it feed in to the asylum seeker issue, and no good is ever going to come of it.

As the dust and gun smoke settles on the dramatic siege, we now understand that the culprit was a misfit with a gun and the wrong song in his heart. He wanted to have us frame his hostage-taking as a political act, but it seems it was the desperate final act of a cornered man.

I have to say the way things unfolded seemed very strange and disjointed, what with the media embargo and the self-censorship by the mainstream media. But at its heart was the burning question was "What kind of idiot walks into a cafe and turns it into a siege?"

The Lindt Cafe, was across the street from some major banking headquarters as well as the Reserve Bank of Australia. It was also in the vicinity of the consulate generals for the USA and Japan. It was a  target rich environment and the man opted to take hostages in the Lindt Cafe. Clearly this wasn't an act of terror, it was a cry for help -but he waved the black flag with the arabic squiggles on it and the media all went, "oh that must be ISIL."

It's only the day after that we're learning the whole thing was ad hoc; he took the wrong flag to his own hostage taking; he wasn't really all that together to begin with; and maybe perhaps should've been behind bars and not out on bail. It's not like I have any special analysis that somebody else isn't hurling around - I'm just jotting down my own outrage at the whole media circus.

It seems incredibly pathetic to me that for the better part of the day while it was unfolding that we were led to believe that it was a political act. It was only political if you take the view that the personal is ipso facto political - the way that Carol Hanisch said it, but applying identity politics to Islam instead of gender. It's kind of stupid to take a bloated subjective sense of one self and seeing in it the universal-political. In the same sense that it's hard to buy this Man Haron Monis' own views about his own political importance, it is hard to buy into the notion that a black flag with arabic writing on it is ergo Terrorism-with-a-capital-'T'. It was more terrifying because it was so gratuitous, so ridiculous in the end-analysis and so bloody stupid. This was not 9/11.

The truth is a lot more easily understood as the random violent undertaking by the unhinged - and more's the pity that two people had to die in all the unleashed chaos. The politicians are making a field day out of this, what with flags flying at half mast and praising the NSW police for their expertise, courage and dutifulness. Look, I don't mean to be the party pooper but it was one middle-aged guy with a shotgun holding hostages in a downtown cafe. It wasn't exactly the public beheading on YouTube of the American journalist somewhere in Syria. Whatever this was, it was not that.

He was just this angry, misplaced future-shocked human being who was looking for an out - an elaborate dramatic - sensationalist even - plot for an assisted suicide. His hostage taking venture was about as stupid as 'Dog Day Afternoon' and went about as well.




What Kind Of Man Reads Playboy The Koran?

Still, we must ask ourselves what kind of manner stupid we were dealing with.

Some years ago there was a dickhead writing letters to the family of dead Australian soldiers castigating them. That was this guy Man Haron Monis.

Some months ago it was reported that some sheikh was offering 'spiritual healing' but turned out he was sexually molesting his customers. That was also this guy Man Haron Monis.

Sometime last year it was reported that some religious dude had stabbed his wife to death and set the corpse on fire. That was this same guy again, Man Haron Monis.

Do you see a pattern emerging where neither the law nor media draws a line to connect these things? This guy was disturbed.

Now the same guy somehow gets bail from his 40 charges of sexual assault and being an accomplice to murder, and goes and does this shitty little thing. I think we're entitled to ask, just what the hell happened inside the system that failed us so badly? The community outrage is going to centre on this issue and the governments - both Federal and NSW - had better have some good answers. So far the indication is pretty cruddy.

Showdown In The Lindt Cafe

Turns out, ASIO knew about this guy and he wasn't on the Terror watch list.

Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday after laying flowers at a spontaneous memorial for the victims at Martin Place, Mr Abbott said Monis was well known to federal and NSW police and ASIO, but "I don't believe that he was on a terror watch list". 

"If I can be candid with you, that is the question that we were asking ourselves around the national security committee of the cabinet today," Mr Abbott said. 

"How can someone who has had such a long and chequered history, not be on the appropriate watch lists, and how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?" 

He said the federal government had acted upon hearing "terrorist chatter of acts of random violence against Australian citizens", such as upgrading security at Parliament House in Canberra and raising the terror alert. 

"But … we do have to ask ourselves the question, could [the Martin Place incident] have been been prevented?"

The answer is, you can't. Unless you're like the Woody Allen joke where he fails a metaphysics exam because he looked into the soul of the student next to him.
More to the point, there's every indication this guy was mentally ill, but nobody diagnosed him.

Short of that, what could they have done? Picked him up on the street and tortured him until he confessed to plot when he himself had no idea what he was going to do until 3 days before? The unknowable is the unknowable for a reason.

A Side Note On Torturing Terrorists

Look, it's not about the Martin Place siege but more about the CIA report, which has been bugging me all week and then this siege happened. We in the wider community know what's right and what's wrong. And we know it right into the heart of democracy. Then suddenly, once in power, these politicians condone the unthinkable. It's such a weird phenomenon.

I found this on YouTube which is tangential, but has something important to say about this stuff:



You tell'em Denzel because they sure didn't listen to the real people who objected after 9/11. After a near-deacde of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think by 2011 we'd descended into this kind of fiction:



We're really not in a good spot in the moral high ground stakes here.

View From The Couch - 06/Oct/2014

They Gave Up On The 40 Job Applications Thing

I have to tell you I am feeling great relief that the Federal Government has backed off its crazy idea of making unemployed youths send 40 job applications a month. Eric Abetz originally made it out that it was no big deal without considering the impact of 30million half-hearted job applications a month might actually be a great hindrance to the productivity of businesses in Australia.

In backing down, Tony Abbott made it out like, this is the nature of consultations. I have to tell you Mr. Abbott, if it's genuine consultation, it would have taken place before you came to announcing the eminently stupid idea. The fact the stupid idea got aired as policy without the consultation beforehand   tells a sorry story of how this government is run.

Now that I think of it, this stuff came out of consultation with a body he appointed to give recommendations. So somebody is definitely giving crap advice to the government and the government is so crap it just goes with it until it hits a wall of common sense popular opinion.

Anti-Terror Laws

It's mostly flying under the radar because we've been so freaked out by this business of Islamist terror cells allegedly planning behaedings in Australia, but really these laws are so Orwellian it's not funny. They can jail journalists for reporting on special intelligence operations.

They're obviously written so they can grab hold of the future version of Wikileaks and jail the future version of Julian Assange. The only problem is that it steps all over freedom of expression and the role of the media as the 'fourth estate'. I have said it before and it bears repeating that it is the antithesis of liberalism to try to gag the press, and it is anti-intellectual to justify this gagging of the media is somehow for our own good. It's alarming that the man pushing this is Attorney General George Brandis, who earlier this year was banging on about people's right to be a bigot.

What we can learn from the Brandis scorecard is that it's okay to be a bigot, because that's freedom of expression; except if you are Islamic in which case you deserve all the surveillance coming to you. I'm just not interested in the doublethink and hypocrisy that this demands of me.

This is an eminently bad government that's never going to find its way.

It's War At Home

Sheikh-ing All Over

Okay, bad gag. But you know what I mean. Today's big news is that upward of 800 Federal and State police were involved in multiple busts of alleged terror cells sympathetic to the ISIS/ISIL//Caliphate. Thwarted by the AFP was a plot to randomly snatch somebody in Martin Place and behead them as a demonstration. The mind boggles, but there you have it. The imagery is almost something out of a comic book tending to gore rather than strictures from scripture. Basically some people out there were being wire-tapped and they plotted to do something savage and stupid, so the AFP got them.

This would be the moment we're supposed to praise the terror laws, including the APEC laws which had (and continue to have ) no sunset clause. I know, we forgot all about them - even I forgot about them until I started moving back here to Blogger - but these same snooping spook laws would have been the ones deployed to nab these ISIS/ISIL/Caliphate sympathisers.

Thanks to the efforts of the AFP, nobody random got beheaded in Martin Place. It's so good to be alert but not alarmed!

Multiculturalism Is Not The Problem

You're going to read it in the papers soon where people are going to take this little conspiracy of crazies as a sign that multiculturalism "failed" in Australia. They're winding up to throw their best junk ball pitch right now as I type this. You know those opportunistic xenophobes are out there.

There's really a simple explanation for this phenomenon of angry radicalisation of these muslim youths: it's cultural alienation. It's really hard growing upon anglo Australia and all the heroes of masculinity are blonde sporting gods or whatever. It's hard growing upon the west when all the movies and TV shows portray your cultural heritage as the potential enemy. A kid from a muslim family will inevitably live in a kind of cultural shadow. Not much gets done to bring them in from the cultural alienation, which explains why a distant call-to-arms may appeal so strongly to these youths.

Australian multi-culturalism is a bit of a fudge. The big demand put on immigrants is that they give up on their cultural heritage and go naked, and instead don the shallow cultural, icons of a largely artificial nation. It's a difficult call. in some ways the cultural distance and chasm is unimaginably large, and unfathomably deep. I don't condone people who run to radicalism as a desperate ploy to shore up self esteem but it's not like I'm without empathy for their plight. They don't need our sympathy - yet they do need us to understand them a lot more.

It's tough to navigate this stuff in Australia and establish a sense of identity. It's hard to feel like you belong in a place that denies you your history or metaphysics. People may say they need to get over it, but it's not easy getting over your family heritage.

Worse still are the people who go around pointing to this sort of thing as a reason way multiculturalism "fails". They say the failure to assimilate is the ultimate failure - but it is often spoken by people who have never experienced any alienation in their lives. Rich white people who went to distinguished private schools, selling down the prospect of people finding a place in Australia because they don't abandon everything that came with them in their cultural suitcase, are not helping.

At best, multi-culturalism in Australia sets up a halfway house safe zone where people can feel a certain amount of legitimacy in holding on to the things that are important from their origins. If the rich white people didn't bleat so loudly about the alleged failure of multiculturalism in Australia, maybe the children of these immigrants wouldn't feel the need to radicalise in the shadows.

Ask Questions... Never

Shoot To Kill

I found this in the economist. It's an interesting insight into the contradictory demands placed upon a commander in chief.

After more than a year in power, Mr Obama has still not figured out what to do with terrorist suspects captured on foreign soil. He has not yet fulfilled his promise to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay because he does not know what to do with the remaining inmates. Some are deemed too dangerous to release, but cannot easily be prosecuted. In some cases, evidence was obtained by coercion; in others, through intelligence sources that the administration does not want revealed in court. Mr Obama will not rule out holding them indefinitely without charge, but he knows this makes America look bad. He does not want to add to the problem by bringing more foreign jihadists into American custody. Instead, American forces are either killing them or letting less squeamish allies detain them.

In September, for example, America tracked down a much-wanted terrorist in Somalia. Saleh Ali Nabhan was accused of helping to blow up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and was thought to have been the main liaison between al-Qaeda and its Somali ally, al-Shabab. Had he been captured and questioned, he could have been a mine of useful intelligence. But there is no functioning Somali government to hand him over to, so American helicopters vaporised him. This seems to be the rule, not the exception. A recent Washington Post investigation of Mr Obama’s war against al-Qaeda leaders abroad found “dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions” by American forces.

Suspected terrorists caught on American soil are of course taken into American custody. But those caught in Iraq are swiftly handed over to the Iraqis. Those spotted in Pakistan are detained by the Pakistanis—as several senior Taliban commanders were in recent weeks, thanks in part to American intelligence. America maintains a prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, but this will be turned over to the Afghans by the end of the year. None of these countries has a reputation for comfortable cells and polite jailers. In short, it is far from clear that Mr Obama’s policies have led to gentler treatment for terrorist suspects abroad. The opposite may be true. Hence the howls of anguish from human-rights activists who once thought Mr Obama was their man. Hence, also, the urgent need for a coherent detainee policy.

Yeah, that would be a problem. Just what do you do with people who are not in the enemy regular army, who are motivated an skilled to do guerrilla warfare or suicide bombing, and are capable of organising cells to do this stuff? You can't try them in a civil court, they're not technically POWs, they're a danger and menace to the civilised world and you have people screaming human rights at you back home. Best to just blow them away and let God sort them all out - which is essentially us, devolving to the level they're on, because that's about the ethical and moral sophistication they're coming with as they attack the western world.

But it's that Nietszchean problem of staring into the darkness until the darkness stares back at you. If you traffic in the assassinations of these leaders, then how long before they start using assassinations as their modus operandii? This isn't just a problem for Obama alone (or his predecessor GW Bush for that matter), this is a problem for the entire civilised world in dealing with those who would choose such a tactic to weaken us through the binding agents of our very civilisation.

When camp X-Ray was created in Guantanamo back in the early part of this decade, it struck me as almost fiendishly funny how the Bush administration created a sort of legal lacuna into which they bracketed the whole problem and tried to keep it out of civillian courts in the USA. Was this right? I didn't and still don' t think so - but you had to hand it to Rummy and Wolfy for coming up with such a unique *space*, just to deal with the unique problem.

The quick answer I guess, is that fighting such a foe is going to demand that we adapt ourselves either ethically, - that is to say developing a proper legal frame work to tackle such *suspects*/*perpetrators - or compromise ourselves from our moral frame work by doing a deal with the metaphorical devil. So far, the latter option has won over the former, and it doesn't say anything good about our civilisation.

The states dealing with the problem need a sort of Geneva Convention to cover guerrilla combatants and Terror cell combatants, on which they can all agree, rather than trying to reach for the higher moral ground. After all the water is rising way too fast.