Astronauts, Judges and Feckwits

Wasn't in the best of moods today and then made the mistake of having a look at the front page of the South China Morning Post which was a veritable smorgasbord of feckwittery.

First up was the main headline "Astronauts confident HK can weather financial turmoil". Hard to know what aspect of this headline is worse. Is it the fact that the CCP sees fit to insult our intelligence with the kind of 'patriotic education' that the astronauts' visit represents (patriotism of course meaning for the CCP our continued acceptance of the rule of a bunch of corrupt fascists rather than the more common meaning of love of one's country)? Or is it the idea that we are taking economic advice from freakin' astronauts? Or is it rather that the SCMP is so far up the CCP's arse as to go along with the idea that this kind of PR bullshit represents some kind of news story?

Next to the astronaut story was the story about your friend and ours, Judge Pang, chairman of the Electoral Affairs Committee and also chair of the Advisory Committee on Protecting Institutionalised Corruption (or the Advisory Committee on Post-service Employment of Civil Servants to give its official title) recently in the news for approving the former housing director's application to work for a property developer he had made some rather unusual arrangements with. This time he made a ruling in favour of overturning a magistrate's conviction against a manufacturer for operating unsafe machinery and then forgot what he had ruled in his written summing up and argued for the opposite. The key sentence in the article was "It said no action would be taken against Mr. Justice Pang." We're surrounded by feckwits I tell you.

Under the article sharing the sage words of the rocket-driving economists was an article praising the fact that Beijing was moving towards a free market because it was using a slightly different system of price-fixing for fuel.

Finally, the page was completed with an advertisement for a freakin' watch with the tagline "Introducing the first talking watch from IWC: it says everything about its owner." Now don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against people buying nice things but the idea that buying an expensive watch says anything about a person other than "I've just bought an expensive watch" requires a particularly shallow and simple-minded kind of feckwittery. So if you wish to purchase a watch that says "I'm a stupid feckwit" IWC would seem to be the brand for you.

Here endeth today's rant, I feel much better now.

Stevie Wonder

I've been on a bit of a music binge recently and have been exploring some musicians that I've never really been into and trying come to them with fresh ears. First up was Stevie Wonder. I've been listening an album of his early stuff and three of what are widely regarded as his 'classic period' albums; Music of My Mind, Talking Book and the double album Songs in the Key of Life. His upbeat, positive stuff is great. He can take something as seemingly cheesy as a paean to his new-born child -Isn't She Lovely- and make it work where for anybody else it would collapse under the weight of it's own schmaltz. Other songs like I Love Every Little Thing Thing About You and Sir Duke are similarly upbeat and effective. And of course he can do proto P-funk stuff like Keep On Running with his eyes closed (so to speak). Where it all goes a bit pear-shaped is when he tries to 'educate' us and it all gets a bit pompous and bogged down in tracks like Love's In Need Of Love Today, where Stevie reveals that he has discovered that love is a good thing and is really much better than evil, which I'm sure comes as a revelation to us all..

City Speak IV

I went to the forum City Speak IV the other day and gave a bit of spiel about Freedom Ball which seemed to go OK. The forum was organised by Paul Zimmerman at Designing Hong Kong and was particularly interesting as they managed to get a diverse range of speakers discussing issues around the regulation of public space, including representatives from the government, hawkers, market traders, academics, activists and street performers. Part of the reason for the forum was the upcoming review of hawker licensing by the government.

One of the things that struck me about the debate was the number of times that the discussion started to revolve around whether we should support or discourage different 'kinds of people' (hawkers, street performers, etc) rather than direct discussion of the issues and problems that might or might not need regulating. This was particularly true of the government discussion paper which talks about the types of problems that hawkers (and particular types of hawker) tend to cause, with the resulting recommendation that licenses be granted/phased out for this type of hawker.

Personally I feel that when we do need to regulate then the regulation should be as minimal as necessary to get the job done and should directly address the issue rather than dealing with generalised groups. For example, the government feels that hawkers tend to create hygiene problems and uses this as a reason not to issue hawker licenses in general. If hygiene is an issue then it would, in my opinion, be better to draft legislation that directly addresses hygiene and apply this to everybody equally whether hawkers, restaurants or five-star hotels.

Another issue, which I've posted about before, was the contradictory way the Hong Kong government expects people to take responsibility for themselves rather than relying on government handouts and a welfare state in the economic sphere and yet regulates them to death in other areas.

Room Full of Mirrors

I've been reading Charles R Cross's biography of Jimi Hendrix; Room Full Of Mirrors. As a biography it's OK, it's pretty detailed and does what it needs to do. As you read it you realise just how short Hendrix's career was. Hendrix released his first album (Are You Experienced) in 1967, two more studio albums (Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland) in 1967 and 1968 respectively and it was all over on 18th September 1970.

Are You Experienced? was no.2 in the UK charts that year (the year I was born). It was only topped by Sergeant Pepper, regarded by many as the greatest pop album ever, so I picked up a copy of it. Quite frankly, it's a bit cack really. I mean, there are some nice jingly-jangly little compositions and all, but nothing of the power and emotional impact of other great pop artists recording during that era like Hendrix, Marvin Gaye etc. Then again I've never really understood what the appeal of The Beatles was, all their stuff is pleasant enough and there's a lot of it but there's nothing that really grabs you by the balls.

Reclaiming the streets

I went up to Sham Shui Po to visit Cally and her friends doing their letter writing project the other Sunday. They write letters and draw for people to help reclaim public space for non-commercial use and to give people in the community a chance to communicate and have their stories heard. Their project touches people in a way that is deeper and more personal than many social activist projects.

Cally also suggested I have a look at a community-based exhibition in an abandoned building in Sham Shui Po whilst I was there. The exhibition was organised by, for and in the community. There was lots of information about individual people and families in the neighbourhood but one of the common themes that stood out for me was the way that the government often just negatively impacted on peoples' lives and livelihoods. People who weren't asking for help but who were struggling to look after themselves and their families had the rug pulled from under them by government officers obsessed with 'tidying things up'. From changes to hawking regulations, refusing new licences for dai pai dongs etc the government on the one hand says that people should look after themselves, which to some extent is fair enough, whilst at the same time taking away the means for the poorest to do so. At the same time of course it uses large amounts of public funds to subsidise and 'support' its friends in big business and in particular the large property developers.

One example of this spiteful approach to the poor is the story of a man who had previously lost his job and home. He ended up on the streets but he managed to construct a small plywood box to live in in a backstreet. Government officers came in and destroyed it whilst he was at work, took his few belongings including octopus card etc, left no contact details so that he could reclaim his possessions and offered no assistance in finding alternative housing. A purely negative impact on a struggling person's life. If they can't or won't do anything constructive they should at least leave people the hell alone to get on with their lives.

More balls

The SCMP have said that they will run an article about the Freedom Ball project in the Sunday paper tomorrow so pick up a copy!

Freedom Ball

Just a quick link to the Freedom Ball project I've been working on recently. If you want to get involved in challenging the rules that Hong Kong parks and other public spaces let me know!

Freedom Ball

Quotes for Mr. Evil

I've been reading Orwell's 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. Orwell was a committed Socialist and social activist who always tried to look at the real conditions and concerns of working people and who was always prepared to cut through the bullshit spouted by many who claimed to share his concern for the conditions of the working class. This made him something of a pariah with much of the left, of course. I thought these quotes might be of particular interest to a certain Mr. Evil of Discovery Bay.

"Sometimes I look at a Socialist--the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation--and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard."


...and...

""The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists,revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders."

National Identity

I've been reading John King Fairbank's China, A New History recently and one of the key ideas he expresses is the importance of the Chinese concepts of 'wen' and 'wu' in Chinese history. Wen is culture and moral civility and wu is military power. Under the influence of scholars and bureaucrats Chinese culture has typically valued wen much more than wu; indeed for an emperor to employ military might has traditionally meant that he has failed in his moral and ethical duties, causing him to fall back on power rather than culture. That said, military power was needed to consolidate the empire and unify China and Fairbank argues that this was usually supplied from outside China as China did not value or cultivate military power. He argues that the new dynasties that often provided a fresh injection of wu into a society that had become stagnant were often the 'barbarians' on China's borders. Although they provided the military power necessary to re-unify China and impose a new regime the essentially foreign dynasties were soon absorbed into the Chinese cultural system.

In some cases these were obviously foreign powers such as the Yuan (Mongolians) and the Qing (Manchurians) but Fairbank goes further in arguing that many dynasty founders, even of dynasties such as the Tang, were actually barbarian leaders who had married into Chinese society. To some extent this obviously undercuts the element of Chinese national identity that thinks of China as an essentially self-contained 5000 year-old culture.

Of course, this is nothing unusual about this. All nations inevitably contain this intermixing of cultures, ideas and leaders. Many English people would regard England as, until recently, a fairly self-contained island culture, but of course we have been invaded many times. To name a few examples we have been invaded by the Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Normans and more debatably (and recently) by the Dutch.

The Dutch invaded in 1688, the army of William of Orange taking London and imposing Dutch rule on England. We like to tell ourselves that it wasn't really an invasion, however, as William was invited to invade in a letter written by six noblemen and a bishop, basically on the premise that they would rather a foreign Protestant king than the Catholic James II. William was followed by Queen Anne and upon her death rule passed to King George, a minor member of the Hanoverian royal family, thus starting the unbroken rule of Britain by German royal families, the House of Hanover being followed the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (or the Windsors as they prefer to be known nowadays as it sounds more British).

Whilst it's fine to admit that we have been invaded many times, it happens to every nation after all, one misunderstanding should be cleared up. Some people have the crazy idea that we were invaded by the French in 1066. In fact the Normans were Vikings (Norman literally meaning North Man) who had invaded and settled in a part of what is now France. After some time they then went on to invade England, another of the Viking invasions of Britain. Admitting that we have been invaded many times and ruled by the Germans for centuries is one thing but accepting that we've been invaded by the French is just too much.

Young at heart or juvenile twat?

Much to the chagrin of my long-suffering darling wife, I have been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 recently. Women generally find it hard to understand that however old we get we never get too old for juvenile activities such as computer games. Team Fortress 2 is a particularly splendid game though, it has just the right mix of simplicity and err... tactical sophistication, plus it has a built in voice facility so you can plug in a mike and hurl abuse at people whilst killing them with your flamethrower. How could anyone possibly not enjoy that?

Soft Pawn

Went to new bar The Pawn in Wan Chai for an after-work drink with the missus. In some ways it's very pleasant; who can argue with a nice old building with balconies overlooking the street, nicely tarted up and a bit of ska and rocksteady on the sound system on a Friday night?

The problem of course is that they have chosen to charge ridiculous Lan Kwai Fong prices, part of the increasing poncification of Wan Chai spreading down from the benighted Star Street area like a particularly virulent virus. Working class culture has been turned into a theme pub for yuppies (or whatever they're called nowadays) it seems.

Halve the price of the beer and park a kebab van outside and it would be the place to go.

Hong Kong Film

Times have been interesting in Hong Kong cinema in the last few years, with something of a revival from the doldrums experienced after the Hong Kong action style and personnel were absorbed by Hollywood. Pretty much every Hollywood action film nowadays incorporates the Hong Kong action aesthetic, from Matrix to Casino Royale via Charlies' Angels although with much bigger budgets and Hong Kong film has been struggling to find a new identity, led by the prolific Johnnie To. At the start of 2007 we had had a couple of years of pretty strong offerings from some of the more interesting directors in Hong Kong. To in particular produced some of his strongest work in the Election films, particularly Election 2 whilst still showing he can still do stylised action in his own way with films like Exiled. Pang Ho Cheung also made probably his best film to date in Isabella, bringing elements of his film making and scriptwriting to a cohesive whole at last. Together with newer directors making interesting films like My Mother is a Belly Dancer as part of the Focus: First Cuts film development programme for young directors, things were looking good.

That's why the last year has been a such a disappointment. Johnnie To seems to have gone off the boil with the weak Mad Detective, Pang disappointed with the stylishly shot but otherwise limp Exodus and I find it hard to think of a Hong Kong film that has impressed in the past year or so. Here's hoping things get back on track in 2008.

Crossing the road

I was out at Tsing Yi yesterday on a school visit. We lived on Tsing Yi for a few years, first in a flat and then in a village house in Tai Wong Ha Tsuen. I was teaching then, finishing work at 4.00pm and walking home to practice my saxophone or read a book on the rooftop. Those were the days. The sax is now gathering dust on the top of the wardrobe.

Anyway, as I left the god awful shopping centre, Maritime Square, to cross to the park I noticed the huge, unsightly pedestrian bridge that was built to connect the park to the shopping centre. The bridge is massive, concrete and ugly with stairs, a massive ramp, a lift etc just to enable people to cross the road. It was built when I was living in Tsing Yi and after it was built everybody avoided using it, preferring to just cross the road normally as grown up people are able to. Of course the bureaucrats were not happy with people using their own initiative so they tried to force people to use their pointless bridge by planting bushes either side of the road to block access. People just walked through the bushes, gradually creating a path. Next came a wooden fence, in which a gap soon appeared to enable people to walk through. As the battle escalated the wooden fence was replaced with the unsightly metal railings that you see everywhere. Of course some people still hopped over it, but it forced many to use the bridge.

Yesterday, as I left the shopping mall I noticed that the metal railing had been opened up and a simple crossing had been created, with the pavement sloped for wheelchair access etc, a few yards from the bridge, so that people could cross the road at street level. Almost everybody was crossing here rather than using the stupid bridge. Nice to see a small victory for common sense and these crossings have been appearing more recently. Opposite Wan Chai Police Station, where I get off the bus to the office, another has appeared, giving people a sensible option to get to where they want to go rather than being herded across a single crossing point as before. Is that a sign that someone with a bit of common sense has started working in the Government Urban Planning Office? We live in hope.

Cheese fondue and the fear of freedom

I've been living in Hong Kong for many years and until recently had never used any of the 'expatriate' forums. To be honest I've never really known what an expatriate is. I'm a bloke, originally from the UK, who lives in Hong Kong. Does that make me an expatriate, an immigrant, a resident? Who knows? Some people seem to have a very clear idea about these things, however.

Anyway, I occasionally post on forums such as Asiaxpat where I have to admit that I get an unseemly amount of childish pleasure from continually getting banned for any number of increasingly absurd infringements of the sites posting regulations. This particular site is well-known for being run by a little Nazi chap (I don't really know if he's little but I always imagine such people sitting behind their desk in a Napoleon costume) who likes to ban people for such thought crimes as 'being a bit sarcastic'.

Recently, for example, I was banned for posting unacceptable opinions about cheese fondue, an achievement of which I am perhaps unduly proud. Somebody asked for recommendations for cheese fondue restaurants so that they could compile a list of said restaurants (this is what passes for entertainment around these parts). Several people posted suggestions of restaurants where they had enjoyed the aforementioned melted cheese delicacy, at which point I lumbered in with my unseemly and offensive opinions about cheese fondue. I pointed out that, historically, the purpose of cheese fondue was as a way to use up stale bread and cheese that had become hard and inedible during the course of the cold European winter. As we now possess refrigerators this was no longer necessary so perhaps the posters might consider simply purchasing some nice cheese and eating it, thereby negating the need for a fondue. I was of course immediately banned for the statutory 7 days for posting such a scurrilous and offensive suggestion.

What is interesting about this is not the fact that there is a little man somewhere who likes to exercise the little bit of power he has managed to gain by banning people from his website. This is, I'm sure, quite common and is similar to the officious bureaucrat, traffic warden, security guard etc. What was more interesting was that the banning came at the request of the person who started the thread who demanded that I be banned for suggesting that she might like to try unmelted cheese. This small piece of psychology interests me.

What goes through peoples' minds when they choose the solution of requesting that people be banned or censored for expressing opinions that they disagree with, even about something as insignificant as melted cheese? There are of course many perfectly reasonable responses she might have made to my point. She could have said that she didn't care what the historical purpose of cheese fondue was, that she enjoyed the taste and was going to continue eating it regardless, for example. A position for which I would, of course, have the utmost respect. Instead she decided that she needed to appeal to the leader to protect her from exposure to unsettling anti-fondue opinions.

I realise that I am in danger of making rather a meal (ha ha) of a cheese fondue incident but it reminded me of reading Eric Fromm's the Fear of Freedom, where he explores the psychological reasons that people end up submitting themselves voluntarily to fascist or other authoritarian regimes. Fromm is right to feel that the interesting thing is not the psychology of the leader in these circumstances, who has some fairly obviously explainable motivations, or of his opponents, but the psychology of people who voluntarily choose to submit themselves to his rule.

So next time you see someone asking for you to be banned from a forum for upsetting their notions about cheese fondue, beware. It's the thin end of a wedge that leads to totalitarian dictatorship I tell you.

Anybody fancy some cheese?

Different but the same

I have been reading a couple of books recently which deal with Twentieth Century history from very different writers. The first was re-reading Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, covering the period from the end of the First World War to the nineties. The second was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, not a history as such but a book that covers a range of post-war events in support of her shock doctrine theory.

On the surface you couldn’t imagine two more different writers. Johnson is a conservative, Catholic writer, closely associated with and supportive of Margaret Thatcher and her free-market reforms in the 1980s. Klein, on the other hand, is the darling of the anti-globalisation movement and is very critical of the free market and globalisation. What struck me, however, were the similarities rather than the differences between the two books.

In Johnson’s book there are some main threads that he picks up in his history of the twentieth century. He lays the blame for many of the problems and tragedies of the twentieth century firmly at the door of the tendency in this century towards utopian solutions to society’s problems. He argues strongly that the arrogance that makes people feel that they know how the ideal society should be organized, and the conviction that revolutionary change is therefore necessary to achieve this utopian dream, leads inevitably to moral relativism, totalitarianism and corruption. The idea that they are working towards some utopian future leads to the justification of atrocities in the here and now in order to achieve them. The examples he gives are those that you would expect; Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot etc. He is conservative in the sense that he thinks that these radical tabula rasa solutions are doomed to failure and ignore the needs of real people. He sees the work of leaders like Reagan and Thatcher as a move back towards a more liberal world, based on individual freedoms and gradual progress.

Klein comes from a very different perspective and certainly when it comes to particular historical figure and events her analysis couldn’t be more different. Her descriptions of figures like Pinochet, Thatcher and Yeltsin, for example, are very different from Johnson’s, to say the least. That said, for me, the central and most interesting argument of Klein’s is not the Shock Doctrine described in the title (which is often quite poorly argued) but rather her placing of the free market policies advocated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics in precisely the utopian, tabula rasa-like sphere that Johnson describes so well in taking apart left-wing movements in the twentieth century. Klein, rather than being the radical that many would imagine her to be, is in fact a conservative. A conservative of the left rather than the right, for sure, but a conservative none the less.

Klein argues also that the Chicago School free market advocates have gone down a similarly utopian path to the communists described by Johnson, arrogantly believing that their economic system leads to an ideal society and justifies extreme measures to achieve it. Like the utopianism described by Johnson, Klein argues that this utopian vision leads also to moral relativism, supporting dictators like Pinochet for example and turning a blind eye to the atrocities because they were less important than the utopian economic reforms. Like Johnson, she also argues that these utopian visions do not serve the real needs of people who don’t want the slate wiped clean but want gradual reform and development within a democratic framework. It also leads to corruption, as in totalitarian regimes, with people taking the opportunity to line their own pockets whilst telling themselves that they are serving a higher cause. Johnson and Klein have different targets but their criticisms of those targets are remarkably similar.

All in all, reading these two books together drives home for me the point that the late nineteenth and twentieth century cul-de-sac of left and right based politics has been a disaster. What we need, rather than the utopian solutions of either the right or left, is a return to the classic liberalism of individual freedom and a pragmatic approach to what Karl Popper calls ‘piecemeal engineering’, trying to improve institutions and solve problems in a practical way, based on the needs of real people and with democratic institutions that enable the people to remove leaders when they go against the needs of people.

Marxist Nutters

Since the collapse of communism there has always been an argument that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were an aberration from real Marxism and therefore that real Communism had never really been tried. This has enabled some on the left to keep alive their belief in Marx despite the seeming failure of communism. Of course this is nonsense because, rather than being some accidental aberration, the totalitarianism that has resulted in every attempt to implement Marxism was an inevitable result of Marxism’s closed, utopian system and of the class-based demonization of whole groups of people, however well-meaning Marx’s original sentiments may have been in some respects. It does at least have some semblance of a basis for discussion, however.

This cannot be said of a whole other group of nutters who, rather than regarding Stalin and Mao as aberrant monsters, regard the real problem that caused the failure of communism as being that these great leaders were sold out by wishy-washy liberals like Kruschev and Deng Xiaoping. If only hard-core Stalinists and Maoists had inherited the mantle of communism, they argue, they could have carried on the good work, exterminated the last few million reactionaries opposing them and achieved the glorious world communist revolution. I first came across this weird field of human thought when reading some of the work of the French Structuralist, Marxist influenced philosophers like Badiou and Althusser. Badiou, for example, was for many years a Maoist, regarding the Culural Revolution as a great event. He has since gone on to create a new definition of the ethics of evil, which can accommodate his previous support for Mao, rather than simply `fes up and admit that he had been a bit of an idiot and wasn’t quite as smart as he thought.

Whilst this sort of behavior is perhaps not so unexpected from ivory tower French intellectuals, my prize for Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist Nutter of the year goes to this guy, Comrade Zero. It`s hard sometimes not to think that this site is a satire but he is seemingly for real. The site is replete with a multitude of ironies, for example simultaneously campaigning against police brutality in the USA whilst also arguing for the implementation of the policies of Stalin; that well-known advocate of caring, community policing.