Atomic Razor

I Predict a Riot

The 2000 election was stolen. The 2004 election was probably stolen. But the 1960 election was also stolen. It goes both ways. Stealing elections is what political parties do, especially political parties in which the electoral system is run by partisan administrators. It is how the system works. As Callum might say "Get over it." Now, it's easier to steal a close election. 1960 was very close. 2000 was very close - and Al Gore didn't even win Tennessee. 2004 was pretty close, although Kerry was not a strong candidate and had the Dems won Ohio he'd have the election. The current election is, according to the polls, not close. Obama has had a solid lead for several weeks in the national polls, and, more importantly, he has had even more solid leads in most of the key battleground states. If you had win California, Illinois and New York, you are already nearly 40% of the way there. Of course, that extra 60% isn't easy, but, it seems, Obama has plenty of leeway.

It's going to be difficult for the Reps to steal this one. There is only so far that a "McCain Miracle" can reasonably be ascribed to the McCain Effect and the Palin Effect. On Panorama a couple of Mondays ago, they had some interesting voxpops from Ohio - a wingnut spewing anti-Obama bile - OK, a wingnut, but the bile is out there - and another guy saying he himself would vote for Obama, but that he thought Obama would lose because many people wouldn't vote for a black man. The voiceover made the interesting point that Obama represents a multicultural, multiracial, cosmopolitan, urban, northern, liberal, intellectual, post-industrial (in Obama's America, people don't make things, they make *deals*) America, but that that is an America that doesn't look much like the America that many people living in the heartland see everyday and, more particularly, it is an America that is deeply threatening to them in just about every way that can be listed. Could we see a late surge to McCain in suburban, exurban and rural areas in states like Pennsylvania, where McCain was campaigning yesterday and pretty much a must-win for Obama, or Ohio, definitely a must-win for McCain? This is an election about the future direction of America. Could we see an unusually high turnout, as in 2004, with many values voters turning out to confound the pollsters and casting their ballots for Jesusland over Smartland? Or, at least, could a plausible story be concocted that that was how the vote was delivered for McCain?

There have been Democratic presidents before. There are plenty of Democratic election officials out there. There is surely only so much the Reps can do on the ground. And as I've said, if the Dems were running a different kind of candidate, I would be fairly confident. And if he lived in a different world. This isn't 1992 anymore. We live in a post-911, post-neoliberal economic dispensation world. The old rules simply don't apply anymore. As I said, the markets don't matter any more and, in fact, it would be better for them to be closed for a few weeks or months. We can already see the preparations for the story being put in place. I read over the weekend, in The Economist, I think that the police in the US are expecting large scale rioting if the election is called for McCain. We know that there are now regular army units on active service in the US. Widespread rioting will quickly lead to National Guard and regular army units being called out on to the streets with shootings and mass arrests of anti-Republican elements. Evidence will be adduced that Obama was an al-Qaeda deep sleeper agent. George W. Bush will appear on television to announce that Obama has been indicted before an military tribunal for high treason, tried, found guilty and executed. The Electoral College electors will still meet as scheduled on 15 December to cast their votes formally for John McCain for President (but not necessarily Sarah Palin) with the votes tallied on 8 January and the inauguration on 20 January, which would allow the markets to reopen in late January. By February, we will be able to look back on the events of November 2008 with much the same degree of resigned acceptance as we do the 2000 election and 911. There will be some of us who will still be angry, but the life, political and personal, will go on in some fashion, and we will be encouraged by the bien pensants to look to the future and get on with things. And we will, because there will be no alternative. 

Interesting Times

The Diebold Effect in action? Probably nothing to worry about. Probably.

In other news, it looks as though the emerging markets in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia are now in meltdown. The Nikkei closed at its lowest level for 26 years (1982) - and that doesn't even take into account inflation (OK, probably not that high in Japan) and the FTSE is down 3.67%.

But the Sun is shining, well, at least it is shining at the moment even if the clocks went back yesterday and they are still Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges and Michael Frayn Books to be read.

I haven't ruled out the possibility of a coup.

We'll see.

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Windfall

I recall my O-level history teacher, the late, great Barry Gemson, opining in the early 1980s that if the Labour Party were ever in a positioned to try and implement its manifesto commitment to nationalise the clearing banks then they would find that the assets of the banks had mysteriously disappeared abroad overnight. Barry died in 1983 so he never got to see the victory of the neoliberal economic dispensation - or its defeat (if he hadn't had that MI then, perhaps he would have it had now, but Barry was very much a One Nation Tory, certainly on social issues). It occurs to me that when the current economic dispensation (whatever name we are going to give to it) is, in its turn (in about 30 years I would think, but perhaps we are already living in accelerated pre-Singularity time), replaced by the neo-neoliberal one then whoever is Chancellor at that time will get a nice little windfall by selling off the the government's stakes in the banks.

Electoral Projections Done Right?

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right

If a white, male, conservative, Southern governor were the candidate, I would, looking at the trends in the numbers, be fairly confident of a Democratic victory on 4 November. My concern is that the pollster aren't taking the Bradley Effect fully into account in their numbers. Some people say they are going to vote for Obama who won't, but we don't what percentage of people that might be. It's possible that the Bradley Effect is less strong now than it was in the past, especially with a non-traditional African-American candidate. Furthermore, we've never had an African-American candidate running in a national election, much less one running during the complete meltdown of the domestic and foreign economic systems, much less a palpably strong candidate running against a palpably weak one. So, it is quite difficult to estimate how the Bradley Effect will affect Obama. I'm worried that we will make up on 5 November to find McCain president. It that happens it is likely to blamed on the Bradley Effect (and the Palin Effect - "She galvanised value voters, especially female ones, more than was originally anticipated" - and the McCain Effect - "In the end, voters, especially male voters, simply felt that in a crisis, and America was certainly in a crisis, they could trust a gnarly old war hero - the kind of guy it was very easy indeed for them to imagine having a beer with - to an young, inexperienced, effete, liberal, elitist intellectual - definitely not the kind of guy they could imagine splitting a six-pack of certainly domestic and possibly generic beer with while watching the Rays/Red Sox v. the Dodgers/Phillies in the World Series) even if it really the Diebold (passive and active) Effect that did for Obama, America and the world. I worry about the Bradley Effect, the Palin Effect, the McCain Effect, but I worry about the Diebold Effect even more. And the thing that makes it so powerful is that it does not have to rely on some grand top-down conspiracy organised by the Secret Masters of the Universe. It just has to rely on local partisan (Republican) election officials doing their job (in particular, taking into the account the historical juncture at which America stands and the immediate threat to the Republic).

And even if we do wake up on 5 November, to find that the voters have chosen a majority of electors pledged to vote for Obama and even if the electoral college elects Obama as president, I will not be completely confident about matters until 20 January 2009. nd not even then. Assassinations have a time-hallowed role in American politics. And I haven't completely ruled out the possibility of a coup. Three months ago I would have dismissed the suggestion out of hand. It just wasn't the way things were done in a neoliberal state. It would spook the markets for heaven's sake and in a neoliberal state the markets are God. Well, that was before the nationalisation of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG and, for what its worth, pretty much the whole of the UK banking system. The markets have been spooked, but, more importantly, they just don't matter any more - if Main Street doesn't choose to give to Wall Street then it must be made to give to wall Street. The military and legal arrangements for the takeover are already in place. Given thir behaviouer over the last eight years, we cannot expect the kleptocrats to go quietly, quickly or easily.

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Understanding the Web, Scalzi's Comments on Blogging and the US Election...

I read an article by John Scalzi of Whatever about authors getting Blogs to promote their work and it occurs to me that we might be seeing something in how the McCain campaign is operating at the moment.

Is Ayers Turning Off Voters?

This is quite an interesting post which links to others on just what the McCain Campaign is trying to do with the Ayers play.  Marc Ambinder outlines 3 scenarios that McCain could do but hasn't:

(1) He could put lots of money into an Ayers ad -- video press releases don't cut it.
(2) He could devote a stump speech to Obama's associations and Obama's associations only
(3) He could mention Ayers in a debate.

At a meta level I think money is becoming a serious problem for the McCain campaign.  They're playing defense in safe Red States and being outspent, according to some reports, by up to 8 times in a lot of the Battlegrounds.

However, I think that's part of the picture.  I suspect that what the McCain campaign team have been trying to do is utilize the web and virally create a news event using the approaches they've seen the Obama team employ.

Scalzi was successful in getting a book deal from his Blog but had the blog and the track record of blogging before portions of Old Man's War were put online.  A new author wanting to use a blog in this way might not find they get too much traction, nor might they be interested in producing the required content, day in, day out, to attract readers to the blog.

Likewise, the McCain campaign seems to be playing to the last couple of elections.  They haven't been harvesting email addresses and mobile phone numbers for a year.  They haven't got a system sending multiple email updates and text messages.  They didn't release Palin's name to a select few by SMS.  They probably, and I'm going out on a limb here, don't have their GOTV teams linked into a central SMS-C allowing for push messages to remind people to vote come election day.  When Obama's team hit back over Ayers with a response linked to the Keating 5, they had a viral marketing push to millions of subcribers and a complete website with documentary ready to role.

I can't help but feeling we're watching the old pre-web world in a fight for survival with the new one and it ain't pretty.

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It's the End of the World as We Know It - and I Feel...

BBC NEWS | Business | Germany clinches bank rescue deal "The UK finance minister, Alistair Darling, has said he is ready to take "pretty big steps that we wouldn't take in ordinary times" to help the British economy." What seems to be happening. those "pretty big steps that we wouldn't take in ordinary times" is the nationalisation (on a global scale) by stealth of the banking sector. including the nationalisation of individual bank accounts (which is, after all, what the guarantees, mean, because government's will be forced to use inflation to control the relative size of these obligations). Do we see a new paradigm emerging here? Just as we have had central reserve banks for many decades (and surely such things shouldn't exist according to neoliberal economic theory), are we now coming to the realisation that a smoothly functioning world banking system is essential to the operation of the real economy and such a smooth functioning can only be guaranteed by ensuring that the banking system is not subject to the vagaries and caprices of the market. The real economy (with its Schumpeterian gale of creative destruction) can carry on much as ever provided the underlying banking infrastructure is reliably in place. It used to be thought that the provision of an effective postal system was the minimal characteristic of a state. We now that the private sector is more than capable of providing for the timely delivery of letters and parcels, but that it is the provision of an effective banking system that will now characterise the state.

Are we in fact moving towards distributism ("Distributism favors the elimination of the current private bank system, or in any case, its profit-making basis. This does not necessarily entail nationalization, but would probably require government involvement of some sort.")? What would G.K. Chesterton, J.RR. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh make of current events? Or, for that matter, E.F. Schumacher?  And, of  course,  Jacques Delors? We all know from whom and where he obtained the idea of subsidiarity. The Sun's legendary headline was, after all, a yelp of insular Protestant Anglo-Saxon neoliberal rage at the grand Catholic distributist European project. What direction is the gale of history blowing us? How strange will be the bedfellows with whom are required to lie down?

It's also possible that Iceland may go bust this week. The population is only 320,000 and there is no earthly reason why anyone would really need to live there and, as with Tristan da Cunha in 1961, it will be entirely possible to evacuate the population to Denmark in an orderly fashion allowing the island of Iceland to become, like Antarctica, a preserve for nature and scientific research and an ecotourism destination.

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How Bad is Bad?

One thing I have been pondering in my sometimes overly twisted head is what is the game plan here for McCain and, by extension, the Republican Party.

In the UK in 1992, the Conservative Party were _meant_ to lose the election, the events of the 16th September 1992 would probably have happened a few months earlier, forcing Neil Kinnock to probably lose a No Confidence Vote and see his Chancellor John Smith die of a massive MI at the dispatch box explaining it...  I exaggerate for effect.

On the other hand, in the years following Black Wednesday Major and Clarke actually did a lot of things right economically and that helped.

However, looking at the situation in the US I'm now struck that this is a poisoned challis for any party.  Whoever wins has a record deficit, financial markets in turmoil, a credit crunch biting (see the news about California today), unemployment rising etc...  Given the very real problems in the US fundamentals at the moment (Healthcare (lack thereof), Infrastructure (lack and need for repair thereof), economy (foreclosures, falling property prices, over reliance on credit etc...) the next government could well be screwed.

Is the McCain campaign, therefore, a Patsy?

Discuss.

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A Quote from a Troll on a Political Board I've Been Reading...

However, on a serious note, I think last night was a train wreck for Sarah Palin and the Rep ticket. She is not ready to be president. As much as I hate to say it, Obama/Biden may be the lesser of two evils.

Palin did better than expected.  Not exactly hard given that the expectations were set somewhere pretty close to the centre of the planet.  Still, the real problem for McCain is that Joe Biden did MUCH better than expected.

We had some people round to watch the soap opera that is the US electoral process and one of the most interesting comments was that while they were going to vote for Obama anyway, they'd never much liked Biden.  Watching him in the debate they realised that they were still digesting what he'd been saying while Palin was halfway through her canned response.

The point where he slapped her "I'm a mom" thing into the middle of next week by almost crying over the memory of his late wife and son was impressive and stunned everybody in the room I was in.

It's not over.  But it might be soon.

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The Rule of Phase Applied to History

It's more than three weeks nearly four months now since I went to the Gresham College symposium on Science Fiction as a Literary Genre. The event did generate some discussion and debate in the sf blogosphere.

I couldn't go to the drinks event afterwards, so I never got the chance to mingle with the Great and the Good of the British science fiction community, much less corner Neal Stephenson and spend a hour and a half pitching Le Grand Projet to him (note to self: develop an hour and a half pitch for LGP - and find a snappier and more apt title - well, at least I have got that now - The Mundanomicon); I had to do some work on British Grove and, more interestingly, I was going to the David Lodge event at the London Review (of Books) Bookshop. Unlike Gresham College event, this was not free; no generous funding from the City.   

I had been reading Gore Vidal's seminal New York Review of Books essay on the New Novel, "American Plastic: the Matter of Fiction" and arrived at the section on Thomas Pynchon. Vidal didn't have much time for the other American writers working the manner of the roman nouveau, such as Donald Barthelme and John Barth, but he saw something in Pynchon, partly Pynchon's refusal to sell out to the academic world and secure a cosy sinecure for himself in some liberal arts college in New England and partly Pynchon's interest in and use of science and scientific metaphors in his novels.

Henry Adams is not an obscure writer. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams are available in Penguin Classics (or certainly were). The Education of Henry Adams contains the essay "A Law of Acceleration" as Chapter 34. The notion of exponential accelerating change is important to the idea of the Technological Singularity and it is interesting to note that here we have the idea initiated by as mainstream thinker as one could hope for.

But it is a second essay "The Rule of Phase Applied to History" mentioned by Vidal as a prime influence on Pynchon that Adams fully crystallised the idea of the Technological Singularity in terms of the notion of the phase change - ice, water and steam are all forms of H20, but their physical natures are radically different, even if controlled by the same laws of physics and thus intimately connected through the principles of thermodynamics. Adams saw the phases of history as linked a similar way. The post-Singularity epoch will be as different from the current epoch as steam is from water. Adams even provided a bounded prediction of the date of the Singularity: some time between 1921 and 2025 (we had better get on with it).

The essay is available (I believe) in The Degradation of Democratic Dogma. The book is almost certainly worth £22.84 and is presumably to be found on the shelves of all good research libraries to which Pynchon and Vidal would have easy access (to be fair, so do I, although there is no equivalent of the New York Public Library in London).

The notion of the Singularity then is absolutely central to the projects of hyperreality and postmodernity. It can be casually alluded to by as established a writer as Gore Vidal in as establishment an organ as The New York Review of Books. It is very far from being the sole preserve of the geeks. Now Henry Adams (1838-1918) was the near exact contemporary of Henry James (1843-1916) - they weren't in fact close, but there are, of course, letters, and it is quite likely that James had read "A Law of Acceleration" and "The Rule of Phase Applied to History". David Lodge wrote a novel about Henry James, Author, Author (about which I will have much more to say anon), and a long essay about writing the novel that appeared in a collection of essays that I have just finished reading The Year of Henry James. One of the other essays is the introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of The Name of the Rose, which inspired me to finally get round to reading The Name of the Rose; at the suggestion of C I had also finally got round to reading Possession,  the New York Review of Books review of which compares it to The Name of the Rose ("The Name of the Rose is another such "Victorian" novel") and says that the characters "might have come from the small world of David Lodge". Lodge, of course, like Vidal, is a regular reviewer for the New York Review; Eco is an occasional contributor.

Stephenson has often compared to Pynchon. And now we have Stephenson's Anathem. A novel about Platonism, with a cast of avouts (i.e. monks) living in a concent (i.e. convent/monastery) dedicated to the study of mathematical philosophy. Well, yes. We have a pretty good idea which kind of country we are in now, I think. I am anticipating some sort of (implicit or explicit) solution to the Problem of the Technological Singularity. I also know that I am going to revise my own novels in the light of the food for thought with which Anathem is going to provide me. Everything is connected.