To Hell with Neoliberal Environmentalism

Length Estimate: Long (words > 1000)

I was poised to write a piece on the linkage between present-day veneration of duplicitous political elites and the crisis of national identity when I found the following op-ed in the Guardian:

How to make a profit from defeating climate change

No Post Today

But one on Wednesday from 13,500 feet above the ground. I promise it will be worthwhile.

The Material Basis of Right-Wing Populism in 500 Words

Globalization and its Discontents: Explaining Brexit* (below) is a thing I wrote about Brexit for an essay contest in the Undergraduate Berkeley Economics Review. The essay  had to account for the economic factors that have driven the rise of right-wing populism*, a subject that kicked off this blog, in 500 words. The analysis turned out to be worth $50 in Amazon credit, so it may be worth your time.

The State of Surveillance

The UK is about to wield unprecedented surveillance powers. So runs the headline of a Verge article detailing the new Investigatory Powers Bill that was recently passed in the British parliament and is awaiting royal assent. A short summary of the bill’s salient features:

The bill will legalize the UK’s global surveillance program, which scoops up communications data from around the world, but it will also introduce new domestic powers, including a government database that stores the web history of every citizen in the country. UK spies will be empowered to hack individuals, internet infrastructure, and even whole towns — if the government deems it necessary.

The Sycophantic Belief in the Actions of “Great Leaders”

Length Estimate: Long (words > 1000)

As Indian parliamentary democracy approaches the seventieth year of its existence, it has come to be typified by two dominant motifs that are reflective of a deep malaise in its relationship with its constituents. The first is an enduring faith of the voting public in the actions of the mythical “Great Leaders” – defined as those at the apex of the political hierarchy either at the local or national level. The second is a vague but persistent dissatisfaction that manifests as inchoate calls for “changing” the “system”. The linking together of these two sentiments – especially by the advanced, politically conscious part of the public – is at best a misguided articulation of good intentions and at worst a sycophantic excuse for inaction.

Demonetization: Too Much Too Soon

Length Estimate: Long (words > 1000)

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Sorry for the absence last week. I was derailed by an event of world-historical proportions – the American election results  the conclusion of my research on Indian land reforms and colonial peasant revolts. I actually wrote the following piece on the Great Indian Demonetization last Monday and sent it out to various online news outlets as a contribution. Due to the lack of response I have decided to post it below. A week has passed since this piece was written and many of the concerns that are outlined below have been vindicated in the meantime. The long-running tropes of administrative inadequacy and legislative myopia were baked into the demonetization cake and many commentators were similarly skeptical about its likely outcomes. Although I don’t want to ascribe more importance to this event than it deserves by making it the subject of an article, its resonance with the themes covered in this blog makes it fair game.

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Using Cheat Codes

Length Estimate: Long (words > 1000 )

Anyone who played video games in the era of the early Grand Theft Autos and Warcraft remembers the amazing power of cheat codes. Here was a way to transcend all the grinding and hard work through a simple keyboard or controller combination to progress further in the game. I recall punching in “allyourbasearebelongtous” to advance through nearly all of Warcraft III just to get through its incredibly compelling storyline. The problem with cheat codes, quite obviously, was that they didn’t make you better at the game at all; I realized that after I got comprehensively beaten in almost every Warcraft game I played online. Cheat codes unlinked the theoretical relationship between game completion and player competency that made video games a nominally productive exercise. On the other hand, being competent at Grand Theft Auto makes for rather low stakes.

The purpose of this labored meditation on cheat codes is to set up an analogy.

Of States, Narco-Outfits and the Economist

Length Estimate: Long (words > 1000)

In its August 27th, 2016 issue, the Economist magazine ran articles on two prominent extralegal organizations that relied on the trade in narcotics for funding their organization. The organizations in question are Camorra, the Italian mafia outfit and subject of Robert Saviano’s book Gomorrah, and the FARC, a Colombian left-wing guerrilla army. The magazine’s treatment of these topics is a glaring example of the inconsistencies of its liberal, free market ideology.

A Technical Issue

Length Estimate: Medium (500 < words < 1000)

In his books Thinking Like A State and Two Cheers for Anarchy, the scholar James C. Scott writes extensively about how high-level bureaucratic actors like governments and corporations attempt to fit existing situations into a legible schema in order to achieve some pre-determined goal. One of his striking examples is the advent of scientific forestry in Germany, where monoculture forests were designed in order to maximize the output of lumber per unit of forest. The state saw the forest not as a complex ecosystem with multiple uses but as the repository of a single useful resource that ought to be extracted with the greatest possible efficiency. This experiment yielded spectacular results for a century – i.e., three generations – before things fell apart. Disaster struck when the benefits of a rich soil created by centuries of mixed, natural forest wore out and the “scientific” forest was exposed to threats that it had not been designed to overcome. This is only one of the many times that an understanding of a problem in purely technical terms – as something to be solved through the application of scientific understanding of natural laws – has resulted in utter failure.

Today’s post tomorrow

Due to entirely foreseeable circumstances (academic commitments) the blog that should have been up today is delayed till tomorrow.