Control

In a new blog post, Adam Curtis discusses the problems with economics and the difficulty of treating the socio-political sphere as if it was a machine. This repeats arguments advanced in his series The Trap and Pandora's Box - that the Thatcherite/laisser-faire (and even Blairite) project of marketizing all aspects of public life (education, the health service, social services, etc) is not truly a freeing, but the construction of an incredibly complex network of measurements, penalties, and rewards, all of which are susceptible to manipulation by the people involved (politicians, managers, staff) who gain rewards or punishments depending on the data fed into the system; inspired by cybernetics, feedback engineering, and systems theory.

One good example is British railways. Before privatisation, almost the entire railway system was run by a single entity, British Rail, which combined passenger and freight operations, rolling stock, track, stations, safety, planning, staffing, and all other aspects of running a railway. The 1993 railways act broke British Rail into over 100 companies: the track is controlled by one company, which contracts out maintenance, and train services are put on by a number of different companies, who lease rolling stock from other companies. A hugely complex bureaucracy is required to adjudicate between all these organisations: train operators are penalised for unpunctual trains, but have found tricks like cancelling trains or adjusting timetables that can be used to manipulate the metrics. Subsidies doubled in real terms from 1994 (just before privatisation) to 2005, with no increase in punctuality or quality of service. Wikipedia has a good summary.

As a result you do not have a free-market system where people are free to innovate and provide new services; you have a huge costly bureaucracy which constrains people into maximising semi-arbitrary metrics rather than competing directly for customers. Of course, with a railway system, it is hard to allow two operators to run rival services and compete against each other, but this reduces the choices to state ownership or unregulated monopoly (with each company building their own lines, as happened in the 19th century). The present system is neither free enterprise nor state control, but the worst of both worlds. The toughest question is why such a system exists: when railway privatisation was planned, some people wanted BR privatised as 1 or 4 companies, but the Adam Smith Institute, a group of right-wing semi-libertarian ideologues pushed for the bizarre system now in place. Their reasoning remains opaque: it cannot be motivated by naive laisser-faire economics, but can only be a product, as Curtis suggests, of strange counter-intuitive ideas lifted mistakenly from cybernetics about how a complex system of data flows (and money flows) can produce a self-regulatory system, little considering the effects on either the cost of the system or the services it provides.

Proscribed

It has just been announced that Islam4UK (founded by Anjem Choudary) and parent group al-Muhajiroun (founders Omar Bakri Muhammad and Anjem Choudary) are to be banned under 2000 Terrorism Act, which allows the home secretary to proscribe groups which are "concerned in terrorism". Its offshoots the Saviour sect and al-Ghurabaa are already banned. But who else is banned? The following list is taken from the Home Office website; see also Guardian and Wikipedia.

Irish groups

Continuity Army Council (CAC) - NI Republican group, split from Provisional IRA in 1986
Cumann na mBan - Irish women's paramilitary group, linked to Irish Volunteers, formed 1914
Fianna na hÉireann - Name used by various Irish Republican groups, originally a youth group in West Belfast early in 20th century
Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) - Northern Irish Republican group, split from Official IRA in 1972 because they believed the OIRA was too moderate, has now renounced violence
Irish People's Liberation group (IPLO) - Split from INLA in 1986, shut down by PIRA in 1992
Irish Republican Army (IRA) - Various Irish Republican groups going back to early 20th century, of which Original IRA, Provisional IRA (traditionalists who split from OIRA in 1969 after OIRA recognised British and Irish governments), Continuity IRA (broke from PIRA in 1986 when PIRA recognised Republic of Ireland), and Real IRA (broke from PIRA in 1997 over PIRA's support for peace process) are most well-known
Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) - Loyalist Northern Irish group, founded by Billy Wright, who left or was expelled from UVF in late 1990s; claimed it was ceasing operations in 2005, but may continue as a purely criminal gang
Orange Volunteers - Loyalist NI group, formed from members of Loyalist Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association following 1998 Drumcree conflict
Red Hand Commando - Loyalist NI group, linked to Ulster Volunteer Force
Red Hand Defenders - Loyalist NI group, with members of Ulster Defence Association and Loyalist Volunteer Force
Saor Éire - Trotskyite Irish Republican group active 1967-75
Ulster Defence Association (UDA) aka Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) - Loyalist NI group; used UFF name for terrorist actions; formed in 1971 and ended armed campaign in 2007
Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) - Loyalist NI group, founded 1966, ended armed campaign in 2007

Other international groups

17 November Revolutionary Organization (17N) - Greek Marxist group; named after 1973 rising against Greek military junta; anti-USA
Abu Nidal group (ANO) - militant Palestinian group, secular and socialist
Abu Sayyaf (ASG) - Filipino Islamic group fighting for autonomy for Bangsamoro region; name means "father of swordsmith"
Al-Gama'at al-Islamiya (GI) - Egyptian Islamist group
Al Gurabaa (aka Al-Ghurabaa) - British Islamist group, formed from Al-Muhajiroun which disbanded in 2004. Name from hadith "Islam began as something strange and will end as something strange ... paradise is for the strangers (al Ghurabaa)."
Al Ittihad Al Islamia (AIAI) - Somali Islamist group allegedly linked to Al-Qaeda; now defunct
Al-Qaeda aka Al Qaida - Islamist movement formed by combining the wealtho of Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden with the expertise of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, inspired by ideas of Sayyid Qutb
Ansar Al Islam (AI) - Kurdish Sunni/Wahhabi group
Ansar Al Sunna (AS) aka Jamaat Ansar al-Sunna - "Army of the Followers of the Sunna", Sunni Iraqi group founded in 2003, possibly linked to Al-Qaeda in Iraq
Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armée) (GIA) - Algerian Islamist militia who hijacked Air France Flight 8969 and killed thousands of Algerians
Asbat Al-Ansar - Lebanese Sunni group, allegedly linked to Al Qaeda; name means "League of Partisans" or "Band of Helpers"
Babbar Khalsa (BK) - Sikh group trying to create independent Khalistan in Punjab; founded in late 1970s
Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) - campaigning for independence for Pakistani region of Baluchistan/Balochistan
Basque Homeland and Liberty (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) (ETA) - Basque separatists, Marxist
Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) - Egyptian Islamist group led by Ayman al-Zawahiri; affiliated with Al-Qaeda
Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain (GICM) - Moroccan terrorist group responsible for Madrid train bombings
Hamas Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades - Palestinian Islamists, military wing of Hamas
Harakat-Ul-Jihad-Ul-Islami (HUJI) aka Harkat-Ul-Jihad-Ul-Islami - Sunni terrorist group founded in Pakistan during Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; backed by Pakistan government and linked to Osama bin Laden
Harakat-Ul-Jihad-Ul-Islami (Bangladesh) (Huji-B) - Bangladeshi branch of above
Harakat-Ul-Mujahideen-Al-Alami (HuM/A) and Jundallah - Pakistani Islamic group; active in Kashmir; formerly Harakat Ul Ansar (HuA); links with Osama bin Laden
Harakat-ul-Mujahideen (HM) - Pakistani Islamist group, split from Harakat-Ul-Jihad-Ul-Islami
Hezb-E Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) - Afghan Islamist faction of Hezbi Islami Party; funded by Pakistan in 1980s
Hizballah External Security group aka Hizballah Military Wing - Lebanese Shia Islamist group
International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF) - Sikh pro-independence group
Islamic Army of Aden (IAA) - Yemeni Islamist group
Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) - Uzbek Islamist group, split from Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) - Uzbek Islamist group, operated out of Tajikistan and Afghanistan trying to overthrow President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan
Jaish e Mohammed (JeM) - Pakistani Islamist group, "The Army of Mohammed"
Jammat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) - Bangladeshi Islamist group, set off 500 bombs in August 2005
Jeemah Islamiyah (JI) - Southeast Asian Islamist group, active in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Brunei; derived from Indonesian Darul Islam movement
Khuddam Ul-Islam (Kul) - Islamist group sprung from Jaish-e-Mohammed
Jamaat Ul-Furquan (JuF) - Islamist group linked to Khuddam Ul-Islam
Kongra Gele Kurdistan aka Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan or Kongra-Gel) (PKK) - Kurdish Marxist nationalists active in Turkey, formerly led by Abdullah Öcalan
Lashkar-e-Taiba or Lashkar e Tayyaba (LT) - South Asian Islamist group, based in Pakistan; seek independent Kashmir
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) - Tamil militia fought for independence from Sri Lanka until defeated by Sri Lankan armed forces in 2009
Palestinian Islamic Jihad - Shaqaqi (PIJ) - Palestinian Islamic group descended from Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
Revolutionary Peoples' Liberation Party - Front (Devrimci Halk Kurtulus Partisi/Cephesi) (DHKP/C) - Turkish Marxist-Leninist group; split from Devrimci Yol aka Dev Yol which in turn split from People's Liberation Party-Front of Turkey (THKP-C), which split from Revolutionary Youth Federation aka Dev Genç; "Party" refers to political side of organisation, "Front" the military
Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb - Algerian Islamist militia; formerly Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat) (GSPC); founded by Hassan Hattab, formerly of Armed Islamic Group (GIA) who broke with the GIA because of their slaughter of civilians; decimated by mysterious disease in January 2009
Saved Sect (al-Firqat un-Naajiyah) or Saviour Sect - Islamist group from UK, descended from Al-Muhajiroun; believed to be headed by Omar Bakri Muhammad; founded 2005, banned 2006
Sipah-E Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), renamed Millat-E Islami Pakistan (MIP) in April 2003 - Pakistani Sunni Islamist group
Lashkar-E Jhangvi (LeJ) - Palestinian Islamists, splinter group of Millat-E Islami Pakistan
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) - Libyan Islamist group, opposed to Colonel Gaddafi; some people link them with Al-Qaeda, but they claim to oppose attacks on civilians; may have been involved in MI6 plan to kill Gaddafi in 1996
Tehrik Nefaz-e Shari'at Muhammadi (TNSM) - Pakistani Islamist fundamentalist group; control area around Swat in Pakistan; founded by Sufi Muhammad in 1992; may now be in alliance with Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
Teyre Azadiye Kurdistan (TAK) aka Teyrebaz Azadiye Kurdistan - Kurdish group active in Turkey, attacking tourists; may have split from Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) or may be subgroup of PKK

Ideally someone from Rock Family Trees could produce a more visually appealing presentation of this data.

Where are the right-wing writers?

It's a common supposition on both left and right that everyone in the arts is a liberal, lefty, communist, or fellow traveller; at most there's one or two exceptions writing from a conservative position. Thus, Tony Kushner in Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy has Laura Bush say:

The liberals may have nearly all the poets and painters and everybody else but WE have Dostoevsky and he obliterates the whole kitandkaboodle, we have Dostoevsky and so we win.

But is this the full story? For your consideration, I present the following. From libertarians to upper-class high-church snobs, with a smattering of one-nation tories, Nazi sympathisers, and the unprincipled rich, here's a list of notable novelists, poets, and a few other literary types of a rightist persuasion.

1. Kingsley Amis - despite early socialism, he moved rightwards through his life to become a curmudgeonly conservative
2. Martin Amis - in recent years has followed his father's path, with his views on Islam condemned by many left-wingers; also anti-communist, writing books about Stalin
3. Jeffrey Archer - popular novelist and former Conservative Party MP; also convicted perjurer
4. Honoré de Balzac - royalist and chronicler of a society in decline
5. Hilaire Belloc - the poet and writer, known for his verse for children, was an admirer of fascism and especially Mussolini; he was a devout Catholic and has been accused of anti-semitism
6. Saul Bellow - a youthful leftist he moved to the right, was culturally conservative, opposing political correctness and multiculturalism
7. John Betjeman - a small-c conservative: an admirer of the English upper classes, a campaigner to preserve disappearing aspects of England, scornful of mass culture, and a Catholic
8. William Peter Blatty - the Exorcist writer is a donor to the US Republican party
9. Robert Brasillach - French novelist and journalist who collaborated with the Nazis
10. Rupert Brooke - upper-middle-class poet known for his patriotic World War One verse, although he also moved in liberal circles
11. John Buchan - the author of the 39 Steps was an MP for the Unionist Party in Scotland (which later merged with the Conservative Party), a keen imperialist, and has been accused of racism
12. Jorge Luis Borges - the Argentinian postmodernist was an admirer of Latin American dictators, including Pinochet
13. William F. Buckley, Jr - writer, tv presenter, and occasional novelist, a leading intellectual of US Republicanism from the 1960s to the 2000s
14. Roy Campbell - South African poet and Catholic, he moved to Spain in the 1930s and supported Franco (unlike most writers who went to Spain); turned against the Bloomsbury group after his wife had an affair with Vita Sackville-West
15. Orson Scott Card - best known for science fiction novels such as Ender's Game, he is also a pro-Republican commentator and a Mormon
16. Thomas Carlyle - Scottish historian, satirist, and essayist who distrusted democracy and modernity, and believed nations needed great men to lead them, writing an admiring biography of Frederick the Great
17. Willa Cather - a novelist who was conservative both in aesthetics and politics
18. Louis-Ferdinand Céline - the modernist novelist was an anti-semite and supporter of Vichy France
19. François-René de Chateaubriand - French royalist and a devout Catholic
20. GK Chesterton - humorist and Christian apologist, converted to Catholicism; George Orwell accused him of writing "endless tirades against Jews"
21. Agatha Christie - reactionary conservative who portrayed a bygone England, her early books included various racial caricatures
22. Winston Churchill - winner of Nobel prize for literature for his non-fiction, and Conservative prime minister
23. EM Cioran - Romanian philosopher and essayist, a pupil and follower of far-right philosopher Nae Ionescu
24. Tom Clancy - popular spy novelist, has donated large amounts of money to the US Republican party
25. Robin Cook - the thriller writer, not the deceased British Labour politician, is a Republican donor
26. James Fenimore Cooper - wrote widely on political matters, influenced by Jefferson, notably supporting the landowners in the New York Anti-Rent Wars in the 1840s and 50s
27. Patricia Cornwell - crime writer and Jack the Ripper enthusiast who has made large donations to the US Republican party, despite being a lesbian who has spoken out for equal rights
28. Noel Coward - naturally conservative, author of comedies about the upper middle classes, although he was an agnostic
29. Michael Crichton - climate-change denialist who satirised political correctness and accused liberal magazine editor Michael Crowley of being a small-dicked paedophile
30. Ian Curteis - British writer whose play about the Falklands war was allegedly a victim of censorship by the left-wing BBC
31. Robertson Davies - Canadian novelist with old-fashioned literary style and reactionary politics
32. Benjamin Disraeli - Conservative prime minister and novelist, the father of moderate one-nation conservatism
33. Michael Dobbs - conservative politician and prolific novelist, best known for Francis Urquhart books
34. John Dos Passos - modernist novelist, initially a communist, he moved all the way across the political spectrum to become an admirer of Joe McCarthy
35. Feodor Dostoyevsky - a reformer in his youth, he later moved to the right, seeking to defend the traditional Russian spirit
36. Mircea Eliade - Romanian fiction writer and philosopher of religion, a fascist in the 1930s
37. TS Eliot - former banker, socially and politically conservative, also accused of anti-semitism, said: "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics"
38. James Ellroy - critically acclaimed crime novelist has expressed right-wing authoritarian viewpoints, e.g. defending the LAPD over the Rodney King beating, but elsewhere claims this was just controversialist nonsense
39. William Faulkner - although a liberal in his attitudes to race, the Southern US novelist is generally judged to be overall conservative
40. Julian Fellowes - a writer whose subject is the English upper classes, his Conservative politics are no great surprise, and he's often on lists of celebrity Tory supporters
41. Fillià - Italian futurist writer and painter known for his religious art, had links with fascists
42. Frederick Forsyth - the British thriller writer has long been a supporter of the Conservative Party
43. George MacDonald Fraser - the author of the humorous Flashman novels was a military man and a traditionalist in many areas of life, prominently campaigning against the metric system
44. Robert Frost - American poet of conservative political views who became a national treasure and spoke at Kennedy's inauguration; he played at being a farmer but earned his money from teaching
45. JW von Goethe - romantic conservative, admired the upper classes, and opposed the numerous revolutions of the late 18th/early 19th centuries
46. Terry Goodkind - Ayn Rand-influenced sword and sorcery writer with enormous sales
47. Knut Hamsun - Norwegian Nobel laureate (Hunger) and later a Nazi sympathiser
48. Robert Heinlein - right-wing libertarian militaristic writer of (mostly) intelligent science fiction
49. Hergé - Belgian comic-book writer of conservative politics, accused of racism and collaborating with the Nazis
50. Michel Houellebecq - anti-political correctness, anti-Islam, anti-women, for his admirers he offers a critique of modern liberal humanism
51. Ted Hughes - misanthropic violence-loving nature poet who detested modern life and became poet laureate and friends with the Queen Mother
52. JK Huysmans - in his early life, a writer of Zola-influenced liberalism, he dallied briefly with fin de siecle decadence but converted to Catholicism and became a conservative
53. PD James - English crime novelist and a Conservative peer in the House of Lords
54. Antony Jay - Thatcherite writer of satirical sitcom Yes Minister
55. Ernst Jünger - German writer who glorified the military following World War I and opposed democracy
56. Jack Kerouac - the beat novelist moved right in the 1960s, supporting the Vietnam war, becoming friends with William F Buckley, and returning to the Catholic faith he was raised in
57. Rudyard Kipling - poet of British patriotism and imperialism, defender of the British soldier
58. Dean Koontz - thriller writer and supporter of US Republican party
59. Philip Larkin - his posthumously-published letters revealed a racist, misogynistic, right-wing private man, while his poetry showed a kindlier backward-looking conservatism
60. DH Lawrence - novelist and poet had liberal views early in his life but later moved towards fascism
61. CS Lewis - Christian apologist and a moderate conservative, though he avoided political association and refused a CBE from Churchill
62. Wyndham Lewis - influenced by the Futurists, he was briefly a supporter of Hitler, and often anti-semitic
63. Liu Xiaobo - the Chinese writer, poet, and Nobel Peace Prize-winner was an admirer of George W Bush and a defender of American imperialism who criticised John Kerry for being insufficiently right-wing; also anti-Islam
64. Mario Vargas Llosa - once a supporter of Castro, he became a free-market centre-right politician, while defending human rights, and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru
65. André Malraux - the novelist, art historian and resistance fighter fought for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, but in the 1960s he served as Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs
66. Thomas Mann - a supporter of the Kaiser in his youth, he moved in a liberal direction during the Weimar republic
67. FT Marinetti - Italian proto-fascist poet, active as both an artistic and political leader; he split with Mussolini because he felt the Fascist party was too backward-looking
68. Allan Massie - Scottish conservative historical novelist and journalist
69. HL Mencken - satirist who opposed the New Deal and hated Franklin Roosevelt
70. Stephenie Meyer - Mormon vampire novelist of conservative views
71. Yukio Mishima - right-wing anti-democratic Japanese novelist and playwright who attempted a military coup
72. Marianne Moore - like many in Pound and Eliot's circles, she was right-wing, a defender of American capitalism
73. Iris Murdoch - a youthful communist and populariser of Sartre, she seemed to move rightwards, and like Ayn Rand was a fan of strong-willed almost demonic men; her philosophy focused on topics such as moral virtue; she opposed literary experimentalism, and demanded striking miners be shot
74. Vladimir Nabokov - a conservative aesthete who fled Stalin's Russia
75. VS Naipaul - Indo-Trinidadian Nobel laureate, conservative, accused of disliking the third world and Muslims
76. Flannery O'Connor - Catholic moralist who mocked the godlessness of modern life in grotesque fiction
77. Alexander Pope - conservative satirist
78. PJ O'Rourke - satirist of right-wing sympathies
79. John Osborne - angry young man who turned into a cantankerous old man
80. Luigi Pirandello - experimental playwright allied himself with Mussolini, although his supporters claim it was purely from self-interest
81. Ezra Pound - sophisticated and erudite aesthete, accused of being sympathetic to Mussolini in World War Two and imprisoned
82. Anthony Powell - his Dance to the Music of Time chronicled rich English bohemians and he was an upper-class conservative
83. Marcel Proust - upper-class aesthete, although homosexual, came from a conservative background; he avoided politics and his political position is contested
84. Ayn Rand - popular philosopher and author of very long novels, known for her defence of entrepreneurs and for championing reason over emotions
85. John Crowe Ransom - conservative US Southerner, involved with the Southern Agrarians (backward-looking pro-Confederate grouping) for a time
86. Tim Rice - the lyricist, writer, and TV personality has supported the Conservative party for ages; he also does a lot of good work for charity
87. Walter Scott - Scottish historical novelist of Tory sympathies, active in conservation but condemned by Mark Twain for romanticising war and chivalry; while pro-Jacobite and romantic about Scottish history he also defended the union with England
88. Moshe Shamir - Israeli novelist, playwright, and politician, moved from early socialism to right-wing Likud and Tehiya parties
89. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the Soviet dissident had an understandable hatred of communism; on his arrival in the USA he allied himself with the neo-conservatives who believed the Soviet Union was the gravest threat to the USA's existence, and called for its destruction
90. Nicholas Sparks - the author of drippy romantic fantasies donated to Republican senator Elizabeth Dole
91. Gertrude Stein - collaborated with Vichy France; claims that she called for Hitler to be given the Nobel Peace Prize were probably a joke
92. Wallace Stevens - insurance company executive who wrote abtruse modernist poetry
93. Tom Stoppard - playwright is generally reckoned to be slightly right of centre despite his human rights work; an anti-communist long-associated with east European dissidents
94. Jonathan Swift - conservative, devout Anglican satirist, converted from Whig to Tory
95. Allen Tate - American agrarian poet, who later became a Roman Catholic and a legendary womaniser
96. Alfred Lord Tennyson - the poet laureate was a traditional English gentleman who celebrated military virtue and the chivalrous middle ages, but was more liberal on some causes - he refused a baronetcy from Disraeli and was agnostic
97. Hunter S Thompson - a libertarian and great believer in gun rights, although he hated most Republicans (despite a grudging respect for Nixon)
98. JRR Tolkien - deeply conservative and strongly Catholic throughout his life, he supported Franco in the Spanish civil war, although he hated Hitler for perverting northern-European myths and traditions
99. John Updike - novelist who wrote about suburbia with a conservative viewpoint
100. Robert Penn Warren - poet, critic, and novelist (political satire All the King's Men), who had links with the Southern Agrarians but moved left and later became a father figure of American liberalism
101. Keith Waterhouse - the author of Billy Liar was a Daily Mail columnist for decades until his death
102. Evelyn Waugh - satirist of the British upper classes and author of Brideshead Revisited, a right-wing Catholic
103. AN Wilson - British novelist, biographer, and newspaper columnist for the right-wing press, of firmly Conservative views
104. PG Wodehouse - although he satirised British fascism in the 1930s, he did broadcasts from Nazi Germany in World War Two, and has been condemned as a collaborator; certainly a small-c conservative
105. Tom Wolfe - satirist, journalist, and winner of the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, an admirer of George W Bush and long-time Republican
106. William Wordsworth - a radical in his youth, he became more conservative as he got older, repudiating his initial support for the French Revolution and eventually becoming a member of the establishment
107. WB Yeats - Irish nationalist and mystic, a Nobel laureate for his poetry, who became increasingly conservative and eccentric and even flirted with fascism

Some suggestions from: Sans Everything, Ranker, WP, Bookslut, Iain Dale, BBC, ChuckerCanuck, Daily Mail, LibraryThing.

Give a man a twitter account and he thinks he's Edward R Murrow

Recently there have been a number of outrages against public decency that have broken as stories or been heavily promoted by celebrity Twitterers: these include Jan Moir being rude about a dead gay singer; Carter-Ruck and Trafigura injuncting the Guardian; and the Scottish Sunday Express intruding on Dunblane.

What's curious is that the voices promoting these issues are not in the main political reporters, politicians, or even political bloggers. Instead the likes of Graham Linehan (instrumental in the Dunblane issue), Stephen Fry (credited with publicising Trafigura), and Charlie Brooker (promoting a variety of liberal causes from drug policy to being nice to Stephen Gately) are comedy writers and/or presenters. The tone is summed up by this tweet from Brooker: "RT @arusbridger: Thx to Twitter/all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech. #trafigura #guardian". The Guardian makes use of Twitter for advertising as well as campaigning so this is a happy collision of both.

The JCPR Twitter Index attempts to rank Twitter account holders based on retweets and other measures as well as the number of followers. The top 10 British Twitterers as of 30 Oct are:

1 Jonathan Ross 438,099 followers
2 Fry 921,760
3 Linehan 33,458
4 Downing Street 1,523,922
5 Jason Bradbury (The Gadget Show) 39,913
6 Philip Schofield
7 Alan Davies
8 Russell Brand
9 Coldplay
10 Phil Jupitus

Brooker was further down, 51st of the British, but with 83,856 followers was more popular than many above him. He does retweet a lot, though.

In contrast, when The Independent asked "Who are the most influential bloggers on Twitter?" on 3 Aug 2009, the top 3 were Guido Fawkes (notorious right-libertarian blogger) (as of 30 Oct, he has 5672 followers), Jon Snow (Channel 4 newscaster of somewhat liberal persuasion) (8800 followers), and Iain Dale (mainstream Conservative) (6411 followers). None of them feature in Twitter Index's list. So it's clear that (with the uncertain exception of Downing Street) it is comics, not politicans or political writers, who are getting their message across on Twitter.

While Fry is in the popular imagination something of a polymath, with plentiful books (fiction and non-fiction), numerous factual TV shows, newspaper columns, dramatic acting, as well as being funny, the others have less obvious claim to be moral guardians. Linehan has written or co-written some amusing TV comedy (working on Father Ted, Big Train, Black Books, the IT Crowd, and others).

Brooker's story is perhaps the most interesting example of a man pushed to fame by his ability to spout opinions in easy to package doses. He started off as a video-game journalist before progressing to mock bad TV online and in the Guardian. Eventually he progressed to an all purpose ranter, mocking the obsession with Twitter (1, 2), attacking the mob mentality of the outraged who rush off to complain about everything they see or hear, saying "I hate offended people", and that he hates opinions. The self-contradiction is almost-certainly tongue in cheek.

In October 2008 he penned a column about how maybe it's not so good to mock celebrities, after reading some of the megabytes of hate-filled email he gets from wannabe comedians seeking his seal of approval: "Perhaps I'm mellowing in my old age, or perhaps I've grown 15% more human, but kicking real people when they're down doesn't really activate my chuckle cells." A few weeks before he'd talked about his spiritual emptiness, suggesting a kind of personal crisis.

Since then his columns have been less sneery, and Brooker's career has had its ups and downs: You Have Been Watching, a Channel 4 panel game in which he sneered at TV got mixed reviews, while Newswipe in which he reported more seriously on TV news coverage was widely appreciated as one of the few TV programs to take television seriously. His tweets and columns reflect a growing interest in the reporting of science, as well as the more obvious expressions of outrage (Trafigura, Moir).

Will the growth of the comic-turned-twitter-politician be the start of a new popular movement? Fry, being intelligent, sees the risks and has expressed sympathy for Moir in the witchhunt she suffered:

I feel sorry for her because I know just what it is like to make a monumental ass of oneself and how hard it is to find the road back. I know all too well what it is like to be inebriated, as Disraeli put it, by the exuberance of my own verbosity.

He continued musing on his own Twitter popularity:

And what am I after all? What right have I to wield this kind of influence? A question people have been asking about journalists for years, but which they have every right to ask about me too. I don't know what business I have wielding influence either. This whole thing has just grown up around me and now I cannot help wondering if, despite my preference for turd-sucking over politics, I have found myself in a new Fifth Estate political assembly, willy-nilly hailed as some sort of tribune by friendly people on one side and being yelled at by unfriendly people on the other. I am not cut out for the hurly-burly of adversarial politics. I am not qualified to represent anyone nor, I cannot repeat often enough, do I wish to. So I should shut up.

Fry continued for another 1000 words.

---

ADDENDUM: Further controversy has accompanied Fry's Twitterings (Guardian 2009/10/31, 2009/11/02). A twitterer called brumplum called Fry's postings boring, and Fry announced his retirement: "You've convinced me. I'm obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone." Large number of Fry-followers attacked brumplum (some names removed):

@brumplum IS SO BORING HE FUCKS SHEEP @brumplum ur soo gonan be fucking sorry for callin my fav celeb boring u fukin turded faceless arsole

@brumplum You sound like a prick and I only half read your Twitter.

@brumplum r u the reason that stephen fry is thinking of leaving Twitter?Shame on u -he's a national treasure with a kind soul y b so nasty?

@brumplum you truly are a nasty little individual.

I can think of fewer things worse really. Who the fuck is @brumplum to upset Twitter's and England's darling?

@askjeevesdotcom guess what the arsehole @brumplum called @stephenfry boring when stepehn fry isnt

Fry defended brumplum and the two made up:

stephenfry: @brumplum I am so sorry to hear ppl have been abusing you. You had every right to say what you did. Pls accept my apols. This is so awful.

brumplum: @stephenfry Thanks. Can we all be friends again? *tweet favourited* (I have an ego as big as the next man!) ;-)

As already mentioned, the whole story was covered in detail in the Guardian and much of the other media.

Annoy a liberal: work hard. Annoy a conservative: tweet?

The new Freakonomics book from Levitt and Dubner has caused controversy. Critics have accused them of wilful contradictarianism, and moved on to question why their controversialism is anti-liberal, and thence to ask why it seems to be so much more fun to contradict liberals than conservatives.

Andrew Gelman asks:

why is it that "pissing off liberals" is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas "pissing off conservatives" is boring and earnest?

He mentions Nate Silver and Michael Moore as people who successfully piss off conservatives, but they're in the minority of all the counterintuitive argumentation in the world.

Kieran Healy complains that it's impossible to get a liberal equivalent of the rightwing bumper sticker "Annoy a Liberal. Work hard. Succeed. Be happy." Commenter Anthony (referencing a remark of LBJ's) relates this to the apologetic nature of liberals:

American liberals have a problem because it's altogether too easy to force them to deny that they're pig-fuckers, and they have no clue why.

Another commenter, Bad Jim, may get closer to the problem

It's a waste of time to piss off conservatives. They're already as angry as can be.

John Quiggin continues the debate by questioning the idea of whether it's really so wonderful to be contrarian (even though it does sell books.

Contrarianism is a cheap way of allowing ideological hacks to think of themselves as fearless, independent thinkers, while never thinking (in fact reinforcing) the status quo. [...] To sum up my current view: "contrarianism" is mostly contrary to reality, the "conventional wisdom" is probably wiser than the typical unconventional alternative, and "politically incorrect" views are almost always incorrect in every way: literally, scientifically and morally.

Mark Liberman, in a blog post called "Freakonomics: the intellectual's Glenn Beck?" is suspicious of the contrarian economists, referencing Barbara Ehrenreich's recent critique of their claim that statistics show women are more miserable now than pre-feminism. He points out that contrarianism of whatever stripe sells books. And J Bradford Delong offers advice on how Levitt and Dubner could rewrite their own book.

Disputes about global warming are hardly novel, and nor is worrying over the lack of left-wing polemic, particularly in an America where Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck call the shots. In Britain the more common complaint is that all satirists are left-wing (except Ian Hislop). But the right still have Jeremy Clarkson, Jeremy Kyle, possibly James Whale. The left may have jokes and sandals, but they're not ranting, with even civil liberties being as likely to be defended by crazy hate-filled right-libertarians as by bleeding heart liberals.

Despite this, Twitter's British membership (which sometimes seems to be the entire Guardian readership and their electronic devices) seems quite adept at conducting nice witch-hunts with liberal ideals, with the last few days seeing agitated action against Carter-Ruck and Trafigura injuncting newspapers and Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir being homophobic following Stephen Gately's death, following the more benign welovetheNHS Twitter campaign.

But is it the left shouting here? Much of the antipathy to Carter-Ruck came from right-wing bloggers: Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes, and the Spectator. It's fun having a go at judges and shady multinationals, playing the game of figuring out what's being injuncted; your politics isn't important. Likewise, based on most people's uninterest in the Mail's past transgressions it seems to be mainly Boyzone fans who're really upset with the coverage of Gately's death. Sometimes you need to join a crowd and shout against conservatives and capitalists, but that doesn't make you a socialist. Though maybe Gately did more for gay rights than Peter Tatchell.

Book of historical failures

An amusing old conspiracy theory has recently come my way. In 1981 many right-wing Labour party members quit to form a new party, the SDP. The year before, the Labour party had elected the very left-wing and pro-disarmament Michael Foot as its leader. Some of those who formed the SDP voted for Foot despite their political differences. Why? Nevil Sandelson, an MP for Labour and later the SDP, claimed that he was one of six right-wing Labour members who conspired to elect Foot and thus destroy the Labour party. Sandelson went even further: as an SDP MP in 1987 he called on voters to vote for the Tories rather than his own party, in order to destroy Labour more thoroughly. Could any MPs today have similar plans? (The Telegraph's obituary of Sandelson)

Impartial opinion

As Britain approaches a general election in early 2010, thoughts turn to opinion polls. Prominent market research organisation YouGov was founded by Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim Zahawi. Shakespeare, now their Chief Innovation Officer, also owns the ConservativeHome website (formerly 18 Doughty Street), was Conservative parliamentary candidate for Colchester in the 1997 general election, and worked as Jeffrey Archer's spokesman in the late 1990s. Nadhim Zahawi, the CEO, was a Conservative councillor in Wandsworth, a Conservative parliamentary candidate, and campaign manager for Archer's bid to be mayor of London.

YouGov is not the only polling organisation with political connections. ICM chairman Nick Sparrow was private pollster to the Conservative Party Central Office from 1995 to 2004. Ipsos Mori life president Robert Worcester was knighted by Tony Blair in 2004. This does not mean that opinion poll results of any of these organisations are biased, and it doesn't look like being a hard election to call, but it will be interesting to track differences between pollsters as the election approaches.

EDIT: In April 2010, YouGov were caught out doing a biased poll on one of the election leaders' debate, in which they timed the survey so people would have to give their opinion having watched David Cameron but not Nick Clegg. This was seen as part of a wider conspiracy by the Tories and right-wing media against Clegg (see e.g. Guardian; Iain Dale).

Thin line

The British government spending nearly half a million pounds on xenophobic propaganda? UK Border Force on Sky One is the latest of many fly-on-the-wall documentaries for the channel that reduce issues like immigration policy to a black-and-white conflict between heroic know-it-all officers and devious foreigners. An endless stream of dark-skinned people arrive from the middle East, Africa, and Asia, wanting for some reason to get into the country, but instead are mocked, ridiculed, and condescended to, by people who Sky trailers call partisanly and presumptuously "our own".

UK Border Force is part of a lineup of cheap Sky shows that in some ways recall 1990s docu-soaps, but unlike Airport which mixed lighthearted stories about rodent infestations with more serious immigration issues and made a star of jolly rotund Aeroflot worker Jeremy Spake, the new shows are one-sided in who you sympathise with and laugh at. People in authority make sarcastic comments as they track down petty criminals and confused or drunken members of the public in shows like Road Wars (traffic cops) and Night Cops (cops on night shift), both on Sky more than once this week. These show replicate boring days at work for a cynical, uneducated, occasionally vindictive workforce, who assuage their boredom by playing for the camera roles like the tough cop, the street philosopher, or the joker; some have a degree of humour or social comment, others are entirely mindless.

Like many of these series on various channels, UK Border Force was funded by the Home Office, which gave 400,000 GBP for eight one-hour-long shows (the Daily Mail hates it too). Promoting the immigration officers as "human lie detectors" offers a nice tie-in to Tim Roth drama Lie To Me, which Sky is also screening. When you're running a channel with a budget a quarter of Channel Four's (source: Guardian) you need all the help you can get.

EDIT December 2009: The show has started referring to illegal immigrants as "clandestines", making them sound like aliens from a science fiction series.

How to hate the working classes

Walter Benn Michaels reviews Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson in the London Review of Books, and he feels the authors have started in the wrong place. For the last 40 years there has been a movement from class-based politics (Marxism) to identity politics (feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, etc). He considers how the division between rich and poor is being ignored by many people, and when it is given attention it is considered as another form of identity politics. Nice liberals condemn the mocking of the poor (chavs, Jade Goody, etc), but this application of identity politics is focussing on the wrong thing: opposing how the working classes are regarded and ignoring their poverty. American universities are more elitist than ever, more home to the wealthy. As blacks, women, and gays become more equal with heterosexual white males, we're facing a world where injustices are "produced not by discrimination but by exploitation".

Michaels claims identity politics is antithetical to class-based politics - the former will be satisfied when "[i]f about 1.5 per cent of your population is of Pakistani descent, then ... 1.5 per cent of every income quintile is Pakistani", the latter wants the entire working class, black and white, to be better off. Identity politics doesn't merely deflect attention from attacking economic inequality, it create phoney solidarity e.g. between rich blacks and poor blacks, or rich women and poor women, making class conflict less likely. For a long time Marxists have accused the west of using nationality in a similar manner, so that national interest is placed ahead of class interest, which means the needs of the poor are not addressed.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we've made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we've made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven't isn't. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won't be cured by – they aren't even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing.

The war against modern poetry

The 20s and 30s saw a flourishing of experimental, modernist poetry, often with marxist or left-wing politics. According to Al Filreis's book Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, this all changed after World War Two when conservative critics launched a counter-attack; they reasserted a more traditional form of poetry based on the lyric and expressing emotion, helping to kill off literary experimentation and ushering in a post-ideological age. Two reviews, by Charles Bernstein and Sarah Ehlers (pdf) explain Filreis's argument, and largely agree with it.

Ehlers explains how

in the middle of the 20th century, conservative critics decried experimental verse forms in an attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde and to undo its associations with the Left. Yet by treating modern poetic experimentalism as a form of communist subversion, and by privileging a traditional lyricism defined by individual expression and reflection, it appears that these critics effectively convinced American audiences that poetry and politics don't mix.

The anti-communist critics, such as Stanley Coblentz's League for Sanity in Poetry, attempted to remove the politics from earlier poets. They rewrote the history of poetry to their own ends, turning Whitman from a radical socialist (and homsexual) into a nationalist, an epic poet to match Virgil or de Camoes, and used attacks on poetical experimentalism to discredit the political views of the largely left-wing experimental poets of the 1920s and 30s.

The anti-communists focussed on the difficulty and non-accessibility of modernist poetry, using its apparent rejection of the mass audience to discredit it: modernist poetry became an enemy of the public. The conservatives feared modernist poetry's rejection of hierarchy, with Donald Davidson condemning paratactic verse for its "treacherous political irresponsibility in the act of eschewing relations of cause and effect while the related elements [are] left to stand in unordered, unsubordinated lists." (AF) Bernstein points out the contradiction that leftist writers were often seen as democratic, yet in the 1950s left-wing modernist forms were accused of elitism and anti-populism.

Traditional lyric poetry was seen as staying true to individual emotions, while modern verse was about abstractions. The 1950s anticommunists used similar language to that of Hitler's art criticism: "The vocabulary of thirties-bashing was cast in the idiom of incurability; tropes of cancer and mass death abounded. Leftist writing of the 1930s was dismissed 'in a phrase: it was an alien growth' ... 'poison'" (AF). Lucien Burman condemned Gertrude Stein's influence "still to be found in many strategic strongholds, like the lurking germs of a yellow fever, they must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection."

As the conservatives tried to shape poetry to their will, modernists were accused of imposing critical orthodoxy and perpetrating a "Big Lie": the lie that their work was poetry at all. Coblentz claimed modernist leftists would use the state security apparatus to impose their poetic ideas on the nation. Pinnacle, the magazine of the League for Sanity in Poetry, compared modernism to genocide. Peter Viereck linked the modernist "anything goes" philosophy with totalitarian mass murder.

The effects of this conservative campaign were long-lasting. 1950s magazines like Poetry refused to publish new verse by writers with radical politics even if the poets had been previously published there. Many poets saw their reputations ruined. The critical landscape shifted from the radicalism of the early 20th century to the system we now have. Bernstein sees traces of the anti-modernism persisting, in a belief that mainstream aesthetic principles are common sense, and a continuing pressure towards non-ideological poetry that accepts the dominant norms; the literary establishment claims that the avant-garde has won, as an excuse to say experimentalism's time has past.

---

It is common on the left to explain post-ideological traditionalist poetry and literature as an inevitable product of late capitalism, but the account given by Filreis seem to show that contemporary ideas about poetry were creations of people with a specific political program and perhaps not historically necessary. It also shows how decisions about the literary canon often reflect political needs; battles over the interpretation of classic poets are frequent, and it can be seen here that they often have very high stakes.

Filreis's work follows earlier studies such as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders (Reviews Monthly Review; CIA) which described how the CIA and other anti-communist organisations funded journals such as the Partisan Review, promoted writers such as George Orwell, and most famously supported abstract expressionism. The influence of these policies is debatable; while some people claim abstract expressionism was otherwise worthless and its valorisation is all a CIA plot, a more measured response sees the CIA as attempting to shift the world's cultural balance from Europe (with its strong left-wing tendencies) towards the USA. Promoting abstract art also damaged the left-wing representational art that had been popular in public contexts in the 1930s and 40s, funded by New Deal money, with the many followers of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and black artists like Jacob Lawrence. And art is not a matter of isolated geniuses: they require money, often from government or institutional sources (most American poets seem to earn their living through universities), but also a supportive creative and critical community.

There was certainly debate in the 1950s as to whether anti-communists should fund the abstract expressionists or more traditional artists, so it's noteworthy that in poetry the opposite side seemed to win compared to what happened in painting. And now we have an art world dominated by abstraction and conceptualism, and a literary world that seems shy of experiment. Cultural history often seems to conservatives to be a history of great men and women, and to those on the left as a story of historical inevitability under the wheels of capitalism, but Filreis shows that neither view is sufficient, and literary reputations and the success of artistic movements often hinge on political expediency and decisions that have little to do with art.

Reading columnists and commenters so you don't have to

For years Speak You're Branes has been ridiculing people who post insane (and generally rightwing) comments on the BBC's Have Your Say discussions.

Mail Watch has been chronicling the Daily Mail's insanity for even longer, with considerable critical intelligence and wit. From the same source but with a wider remit: Enemies of Reason. The Daily Mail Tendency and Stirring Up Apathy do the same thing but less well.

Tabloid Watch goes wider. While Bristol Evening Post Watch goes narrower, and has recently shut up shop.

David Aaronovitch Watch follows the Blairite journalist, but also has a lot of information on Martin Amis and similar intellectuals. They did at one point post a link to the metatextual Aaronovitch Watch Watch, but it seems to have been taken down.

Angry Mob keeps an eye on Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, and much more.

Christopher Hitchens watch follows the maverick alcoholic.

MediaWatchWatch follows the TV-complaining organisation Media Watch and other pro-censorship groups like Christian Voice (whose voice doesn't seem to have much in common with the Church of England or indeed Jesus).

Opinion Beyond Education monitors Biased BBC (one of a large number of organisations who monitor the BBC for left-wing bias).

Any more?

Godwin's Law goes Web 2.0!

Twhitler (seemingly put together by a fan of the B3ta website) collects Twitter posts about Hitler. Some of them are perfectly sensible, discussing the movie Valkyrie, mustaches, or really unpleasant people. Other posts are not:

• Obama's Czars are similar in power to the "ministers" under Stalin or Hitler. Communism, Marxism, Facism, same. USA capitalists! Bye Obama
• all atheists are not evil, yet you would defend atheists like Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and their murderous actions?
• but criticizing organic producers makes you no better than Hitler. Did you not consider such things ?
• In that case, perhaps the ultimate insult is: "God is YOU. You killed more Jews than even Hitler! Hitler didn't let Jesus die!"
• There was another guy whose government who ran the Health Plan for his country. His name: Adolph Hitler. He killed 6 million Jews using it.
• Stickers on the back of a truck: 'Ill forgive Jane Fonda when the Jews forgive Hitler' and one with an eagle giving the middle talon tha ...
• Its not politically correct to say so but islamofacists are selling us down the river Somebody should bring back Hitler Im voting BNP in
• WOW: Justice Scalia Said Supreme Court Will Hear Case of Obama Birth Eligibility- Hitler's birth records were c...
• Obama is just a black version of Hitler and Stalin...each brought their country to fall
• next obama will call for experiments on humans in his health care plan, like hitler did
• Have you ever noticed that if you rearranged the letters in mother in law, they come out to Woman Hitler?

So it's nice to find the occasional reasonable Hitler reference:

• After the Gottfried as Hitler movie, watched Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Dreamed that Hitler was a Jewish clown who juggled popcorn.

How it works? You can search Twitter for posts containing any word, and their API (application programming interface) makes it easy to write a website that reads information from Twitter. This makes it easy to use Twitter for market research, but also makes it easy to find all the stupidness being posted. I've removed the names from the above posts, but it would be really easy to find them.

"Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda"

Slavoj Zizek compares Silvio Berlusconi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the London Review of Books. Like Putin in Russia, the two men have implemented a kind of dictatorial democracy, where the failings of democracy and its inability to represent the genuine popular will (e.g. people hate the government but still vote for it) are exploited to preserve a self-interested, corrupt leader. Quotes:

The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a 'Teflon' president no longer expected to stick to his electoral programme, and therefore impervious to factual criticism (remember how Reagan's popularity went up after every public appearance, as journalists enumerated his mistakes). This new presidential type mixes 'spontaneous' outbursts with ruthless manipulation.

[...]

Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of [Niels] Bohr's country house, a visiting scientist said he didn't believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: 'Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn't believe in it!' This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don't believe in them.

He also reflects on the liberating possibilities of Islam (e.g. in the 1979 Iranian revolution) and Berlusconi's brutal anti-immigration policies: declaring a state of emergency and jailing a ship's captain who failed to sink a rubber dinghy full of immigrants.