Flash Theory

Love.
Love like a swirling tornado, tossing my limp body,
Love like a raging storm; I cower in fear.
Sometimes it beats the ribs of my chest with animal desire, animal anger,
Sometimes it melts my cold heart with sympathy and woe.
But beneath the rain, within my warm embrace,
My love shelters you, and you are eternally safe.

This is so sweet! By entering songs and artists that you like, and telling it whether you like the songs it chooses, Pandora tries to find you new music to listen to. Give it a try!

The sentries of the night
Are watching all you go,
Are you branded by their light,
Or balmed by their warm glow?

No ground is yours alone,
But you are safe within your grave.
The water shimmers in unnatural tones,
But so pretty are the gentle waves.

I don't want to live on guard,
But take this light away from me!
For only in the blackest dark,
Alone, are we truly free.

Every day you look at art.
There is a masterpiece,
Ever changing,
Always moulding the colour of your heart.

The world paints on this canvas,
A multititude of hues,
Blue is a bountiful joy,
Grey a melancholic death,
Orange the deep breaths
Of a hazy nostalgia
Of a day never to return.

Imagine the poverty of knowing too little,
Imagine the agony of knowing too much,
Either way it's pain,
The way our minds are made,
Is knowledge a need,
Or a drug we crave?
Must know more.
Must know more.
Is knowledge a saint
Or a dirty whore?

The AUT marking boycott is approaching the end of its second month, and what does one receive from the Principal, but an email targeted at the AUT. He writes, "I have considerable sympathy for you in this predicament, and I deplore the actions of those AUT members at the University of St Andrews which are overtly designed to threaten actual damage to your education and possibly to your future career." Well, as I replied to him, I have considerable sympathy for his position as the Principal of the University of St Andrews, but I deplore the anti-Union sentiments he expresses in his email. Presumably he is on the side of the Vice Chancellors of UK universities, who have abandoned their commitment to raise lecturer salaries, using money from top-up fees in England, and from taxation in Scotland. Lecturers were assured that they would receive pay increases and improvements in working conditions, but this has been flatly refused them. They had no choice but to strike.

The Principal also writes "as you may know, this is a national dispute which did not begin in St Andrews and will not be resolved by anything that happens in St Andrews." Just imagine if every university said this - there would be no strike! Then again the Principal presumably opposes any kind of industrial action that hampers the universities' spending priorities, whatever those might be. More pay rises for him and his buddies perhaps? It looks like it - the NUS has highlighted the hypocrisy of the Vice Chancellors, who have "awarded themselves a 25% pay increase while their staff languish on low pay!" Is it just me, or does a tendency to raise one's own pay seem a ubiquitous feature of positions of power? The NUS stands in solidarity with the AUT, a position I strongly support. Unions have to stick together to support each other's actions, especially when they as closely linked as university staff and students.

This strike seems justifiable to everyone; broken promises, low pay, and stubborn management are here combined. However, my personal position is that I favour almost all strike action. As long as our system is so superbly unequal in both pay and power, strikes must be used to try to bring the big men down, and raise ourselves up. Workers must be conscious of their position in a system of exploitation, and of their power to change that system for the better. Workers unite! Strike! Strike! Strike!
.

This article, from the Guardian, is rather aptly named "The Culture of Chaos", because this must be what is going on inside its author Brian McNair's head. His premise is that chaos theory/science, a legitimate and scientific area of study, can be extended to world society in general. Now I hope he doesn't mean this literally, because this would be complete stupidity, but even as a metaphor it is pretty limp. He then writes:

The quantity of news and other information available has increased exponentially; the scale of today's online media is truly mind-boggling. This has been felt by all the world's populations, whether they live in an advanced capitalist society, an emerging economic superpower such as India or China, an authoritarian middle eastern state, or a developing country in Africa. And information, like knowledge, is power.

Given that, as Noam Chomsky says, "most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call," this "digital revolution" has not been felt by much of the world's population, just a rich elite. His second deduction is correct but slightly backwards; wealth, and therefore power, leads to information, which *then* leads to more power - the "developing" countries don't have much of a chance. His next point is rich indeed:

Consequently, as Rupert Murdoch put it in his March speech on the knowledge revolution, "power is moving away from the old elite", towards the consumers of media, who are demanding content delivered "when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it". These consumers are better educated than ever before and "unwilling to be led". Last week's lecture by Mark Thompson on the future of the BBC hit similar notes, with its recognition that emerging digital technologies will create "seismic shifts in public expectations, lifestyle and behaviours". From the offices of News Corp to the boardrooms of the BBC, the age of top-down, elite-controlled media is passing, replaced by a decentralised global infosphere of unprecedented accessibility and diversity.

If Rupert Murdoch was really losing his power, do you think he would say it? Or would he cynically stroke his customers' egos when it wasn't? The consumers may be better educated, but as Chomsky has said, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to stay within the comfortable consensus range of thought. Oh, how the media do like phrases like "decentralised global infosphere", casting themselves as some kind of renegade hacker journalists in a lawless land of information chaos. Have we seen any of this decentralisation in any major form? Or have we instead already seen threats to the freedom of the internet itself?

To the impact of technology we can add that of increased competition in the media industries, and the emergence of a counter-cultural marketplace where the books and films of commentators such as Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky can bestride the global best-seller lists alongside Dan Brown and JK Rowling. As long as there is someone willing to pay for it, just about anything can be said about any government or leader, no matter how critical, and find its place in mainstream media.

Oh really? Truly dissident voices, like Noam Chomsky, are still held at arm's length by most of the mainstream media, occasionally portrayed as supporters of massacres, or invited on mainstream talk shows that allow them no time to explain their ideas. The best way for these voices to be heard would be in documentaries or opinion pieces for television or newspaper, which are allowed all too infrequently.

Another factor in this emerging climate is the ideological vacuum created by the end of the cold war. In these pages last week Jeff Jarvis argued that the internet "makes obsolete old orthodoxies and old definitions of left and right."

Does it ever strike you that the only people who ever talk about an
"ideological vacuum" are die-hard capitalists? There is no ideological
vacuum to anyone who isnt trapped in a neoliberal consensus, and all those
"obsolete old orthodoxies" are still there for the taking. And the effect of
the internet on political ideology? Virtually none.

The categories of left and right cannot make sense of the complexities of environmental or identity politics, or the savage logics of ethnic and sectarian strife. No longer is the world dominated by the competition between capitalism and socialism. Instead we have what Samuel Huntington in 1996 presciently called "the clash of civilisations", meaning the clash between modernity and medievalism, authoritarianism and democracy, secularism and religious totalitarianism.

What postmodern neoliberal nonsense. The first sentence begs the question, "why on earth not?" and the second is true in so far as it *hasn't been for ages*. The "clash of civilisations" thesis ("we are the noble knights, and they are the evil dragons", as I like to think of it) has been taken apart by Lenin of Lenin's Tomb here: he calls it "the ridiculous Clash of Civilizations thesis, developed by the extremely unpleasant Samuel P. Huntington as a riposte to Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' bilge. Huntington's idea is incoherent - he infers a fundamental cultural sympathy between Islam and Confucianism - Iran and China, united at last. The very notion of 'civilization' as deployed by Huntington is so nebulous as to be useless. The Islamic-Confucian connection that he posits is somewhat undone by the ongoing tensions between, for instance, Vietnam and China...I'm being far too generous in treating Huntington's ideas seriously, of course - they're bilge, intellectual detritus emanating from one of the most obnoxious apologists for US power (and, once upon a time, apartheid) to soil a page with his thoughts."

On another front, the erosion of traditional liberties in Britain and the US has been widely condemned, as have the excesses of the war on terror overseas.

This implies that no one has the condemned the *very principle* of a "War on Terror", as I and many other have. McNair continues with a nice but uncontextualised bit about human rights progress in Iran, then finishes with this gem:

Climate change, nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, conflict with Chinese nationalists over Taiwan - all are scenarios which threaten global progress, and over which no one has much control. All we can do is to stand firm against authoritarianisms of every hue, and in defence of the freedoms we value, without apology or qualification. In doing so we recognise that the defining struggle of our time is not a war on terror, but a culture war, in which the globalised media are more powerful weapons than bombs and bullets. Its outcome will determine the shape of the 21st century.

So *no one* has control over climate change? What a nice cop-out. Looks like we don't have to do anything then - oh wait! "All we have to do" is "stand firm" in "defence" of our freedoms and we'll be fine! I'm guessing (correct me if I'm wrong) that this guy's version of "standing firm" in "defence" included an illegal invasion of Iraq, and includes supporting US imperialism in just about every form. And I'm also guessing that his version of "without apology or qualification" excludes good old "us" from the equation. This man seems to be a typical "new left" kind of person; full of liberal pieties but lacking any sense of class consciousness, criticism of capitalism or western imperalism.