Viva la Revolución Bolivariana!

March 6, 2013 by Leave a comment

I woke to sad news today; Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, had lost his final battle against illness. It seems like only yesterday we were celebrating his reelection; now we mourn his passing.

Hugo Chavez will undoubtedly be remembered as a great figure in left politics; his legacy not just the vast improvement in living standards he brought to the people of Venezuela, but also the movement he built that will carry on his work, and the inspiration he gave to others fighting poverty and injustice in neighbouring countries and around the world.

That inspiration is captured in the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which covers the abortive 2002 coup against Chavez, and the popular uprising that defeated it. It’s available in full on YouTube, and well worth watching.

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There is no land beyond the Volga

February 2, 2013 by Leave a comment

Today is the 70th anniversary of the final surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad, the last act in the most significant battle of the Second World War. It marked the end of the Nazi dream of eastward expansion, and the beginning of the Soviet counteroffensive which would end two years later with the Red flag flying over the Reichstag in the ruins of Berlin.

Whatever one thinks of the wartime Soviet regime (and even a committed communist like myself has some serious reservations about Uncle Joe) it’s impossible to read the story of the struggle for the city without being inspired by the remarkable courage and tenacity of the troops who fought and died to turn the tide of fascism on the Eastern Front. Units like the young women of the 1077th AA Regiment, who stood against the advancing Panzers to the last shot, or Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division, 10,000 strong at the start of the campaign, of whom barely 300 lived to see the German surrender. The battle made heroes of Vasily Zaytsev and Yakov Pavlov, among many more of the thousands of soldiers who crossed the burning Volga to defend the last Soviet enclaves on the west bank of the river, knowing that their life expectancy could be measured in hours. Their sacrifice stalled the Nazis while Soviet forces built up on the German flanks, ultimately springing the pincer movement that trapped and destroyed the once-mighty 6th Army.

The resolve of the Soviet troops was undoubtedly bolstered by harsh discipline – Stalin himself commented that it took a brave man to be a coward in the Red Army – but it’s clear from contemporary accounts that the soldiers on the front line were well motivated to fight the invaders, partly by ideology, but mostly by a desire to protect their homeland.

Although with hindsight the Soviet victory at Stalingrad seems as if it was inevitable, given their ability to replace losses in a way that the overstretched Germans never could, at the time it must have been much less certain. The decisive factor may have been that communism, even in the distorted form of Stalinism, is essentially rational – coldly and brutally rational at times, but always more effective than the half-baked mysticism of Nazi ideology. Hitler may have believed that Aryan destiny and fighting spirit could substitute for food, ammunition and winter uniforms, but Stalin knew that the war would be won by the side which could bring the most force to bear on the enemy, and at Stalingrad the Soviet armies proved that with ruthless efficiency.

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The Griefing Games

January 13, 2013 by Leave a comment

Internet addicts in China have a mixed time; while government-run centres provide some of the most up-to-date treatment in the world, patients who check into the wrong clinic might find themselves getting electroshock therapy, or being beaten to death.

In a new twist, it was reported this week that a Mr Feng, exasperated by his son spending hours online in preference to getting a job, had hired assassins to kill his slacker offspring. OK, these were virtual hitmen, who repeatedly offed the boy as he tried to play World of Warcraft, but still, that’s tough love. (If you believe the story; there is some scepticism.)

I doubt that this approach would work with Second Life addiction (if one accepts that such a thing exists), since anyone who puts up with the frustration of SL long enough to develop a problem is unlikely to be deterred by a bit of low-level griefing. In fact I’m not sure that having a couple of hired killers tracking me, like I was in some sort of exciting spy story or something, wouldn’t make me more likely to log on, though I guess it might get a little irritating after a while.

There might be a business opportunity here – for a fee operatives could stalk a resident around the grid, befriending them and winning their trust, before unexpectedly delivering a virtual whacking, a bit like the CRS Corporation did to Michael Douglas in The Game.

I think there could be quite a bit of demand for such a service, playing as it does on the paranoia and narcissism that are such prominent features of the Second Life experience. On the other hand, the revenue model might be undercut somewhat by the fact that there are plenty people in SL who are willing to provide unsolicited harassment free of charge.

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2012: The Year in Review – Part 1: Culture

December 30, 2012 by Leave a comment

Back in February I had the brilliant idea of starting up a Tumblr, upon which I intended to note every record I bought, every film I watched for the first time and every new book I read, so that come December I would have the raw material for a review of my year’s cultural highlights.

I have managed to keep this going (unlike the Pinterest project, but that’s another story), and it has revealed, disappointingly, that the cultural landscape of my life is more akin to an arid desert than the tropical rainforest I imagined it to be.

I did best on the recorded music front, with 24 albums purchased, a fraction of what I consumed back in the 90s, but perhaps not too bad for an old dog. Books read numbered an embarrassing 11, none of them published this year, while my movie intake was a mere dozen, with only two actual trips to the cinema (and one of those was to see The Muppets). I seem to have managed to completely avoid going to concerts and exhibitions.

Have I descended then into philistinism? Has the pernicious effect of the accursed internet completely rotted my brain? Not quite yet I hope. I spend rather more time than I should on idle web browsing, but I do try to keep up with the Arts sections of the papers, so I can join in conversations about contemporary culture, even if most of my opinions are gleaned from reviews rather than direct experience. I still listen to music pretty much all the time, though I stick more to stuff I know I’ll like than I used to. I do need to start watching more films again, starting with the stack of DVDs I accumulated this year that I never quite got round to viewing.

Anyway, on with the review. Music first; here’s my 2012 mix-tape, made up from my favourite track from each of the records I bought this year, mostly new releases, but some older stuff too:

Chocolate Boy – Guided By Voices (Let’s Go Eat the Factory)
Norgaard – The Vaccines (What Did You Expect from the Vaccines?)
On a Neck, On a Spit – Grizzly Bear (Yellow House)
Wasted Days – Cloud Nothings (Attack on Memory)
Boyfriend – Best Coast (Crazy For You)
Secrets – Headlights (Wildlife)
Love Interruption – Jack White (Blunderbuss)
Can We Really Party Today? – Jonathan Wilson (Gentle Spirit)
Better Girl – Best Coast (The Only Place)
Be Impeccable – Guided By Voices (Class Clown Spots a UFO)
No Cars Go – Arcade Fire (Arcade Fire)
Neighborhood 3 (Power Out) – Arcade Fire (Funeral)
Yet Again – Grizzly Bear (Shields)
June – Unrest (Imperial f.f.r.r.)
Harnessed in Slums – Archers of Loaf (Vee Vee)
Polyester Bride – Liz Phair (Whitechocolatespaceegg)
Don’t Pretend You Didn’t Know – Dinosaur Jr. (I Bet on Sky)
Season in Hell – Dum Dum Girls (End of Daze)
Pinhole Cameras – …And You Will Know Us By the Trail Of Dead (Lost Songs)
He Gets Me High – Dum Dum Girls (He Gets Me High)
Waking Up The Stars – Guided By Voices (The Bears For Lunch)
Keep Believing – Bob Mould (Silver Age)
The House That Heaven Built – Japandroids (Celebration Rock)
The Anarchist – Rush (Clockwork Angels)

There are several contenders for my record of the year, including Attack on Memory, Silver Age, Celebration Rock and both the Dum Dum Girls’ EPs, but I’ll give the nod to the pleasingly complex Shields by Grizzly Bear.

The best book I read this year was The Cambridge Modern History Volume IV – The Thirty Years War, a majestic tome published back in 1906, available on the Kindle for pennies, which covers not just the titular conflict but also the English Civil War and religious, philosophical and cultural developments of the period. The editors’ Victorian prejudices do show to some extent, but the raw material is so dramatic that it can’t miss being a gripping read.

My fiction reading this year mostly consisted of catching up with books I’m faintly embarrassed to admit I hadn’t read already, like The Trial, The Gambler, Crash, and, my favourite, The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing. I liked it for its depiction of life in the CPGB in the 50s, which is a little specialised I guess, but it’s also worth reading for the experimental structure and proto-feminist sensibility.

Film of the year? I hardly feel qualified to comment, but I thought On the Road was quite good. The Muppets was OK too I suppose.

So, that sums up my year of culture. Not my best ever, but not too shabby. Hopefully I’ll be inspired to try a bit harder in 2013…

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The Lay of the Last Avatar

December 24, 2012 by 4 Comments

So the world didn’t end last week after all, which is a good outcome, I guess, not least because it means that the $80 I spent last month on renewing my Second Life premium membership for another year hasn’t been completely wasted.

It has been almost completely wasted though, since I don’t currently possess a computer capable of running the viewer, and I have no plans to purchase one in the immediate future, which will obviously limit my enjoyment of the service a bit (unless the Lindens get their act together and release some sort of mobile client). I did hesitate a little before handing over the cash, but in the end my sentimental attachment to my virtual land was strong enough to convince me that the relatively modest investment was worthwhile.

Sir Walter Scott, in his narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, wrote:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

There are a few places I have stayed in the real world that have seemed like home, for a while, but that feeling invariably faded, as time moved on and people and places changed. I have occasionally tried to recapture it, but without success – you can revisit a physical location, but you can never really go back, because the person you used to be exists only in your fading memory.

So I find it comforting to think that there is some corner of a virtual field that will be forever the same, a home for my eternally youthful avatar. I can only hope that there are enough other people who feel the same to keep Linden Lab in business…

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End of Daze

December 19, 2012 by Leave a comment

I’ve not had much time, nor inclination, for blogging in the last month, for one reason or another, but I thought I had better get myself together to post a final word or two ahead of the end of the world on Friday.

Of course the rational side of my brain is aware of the cosmic narcissism implicit in believing that the Universe turns according to an arbitrary schedule pulled out of the air by a long-dead member of our insignificant species, but my more fanciful side can’t help hoping that the promised UFOs will show up, bearing benevolent aliens who will issue us with personal rocket-ships and immortality pills.

Failing that I guess I might be able to shake off my torpor long enough to compile our usual year-end review. We’ve been pretty quiet over the last twelve months (and we already did a five-year retrospective back in May), so it shouldn’t take too long…

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Four more years

November 7, 2012 by Leave a comment

So Obama won fairly comfortably in the end, though Romney turned out to be a much better candidate than I had expected, especially after he quietly dumped most of the wingnut baggage he had been obliged to pick up to get through the primaries.

It’ll be interesting to see what lessons Republicans learn from this defeat, and their failure to dent Democrat control of the Senate, which was at least partly thanks to the blunders of Tea Party favourites Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. The obvious, sensible, conclusion would be that they have to move towards the centre, but that’s the obvious, sensible conclusion they have repeatedly failed to appreciate in the last four years.

Other results approving same-sex marriage and legalising marijuana made it a good night for the progressively-minded. Obama will probably end up disappointing us again, but let’s enjoy this while it lasts.

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Guess I’ll go eat worms

October 19, 2012 by 4 Comments

Second Life Shrink has been going for well over five years now, and in that time we’ve racked up nearly 400 posts. Our Second Life coverage may have waned a little recently, for one reason and another, but we do have an extensive archive of articles on the topic, and our pieces on SL demographics and SL addiction are still highly ranked on Google. We have a Facebook profile and a Twitter feed, not to mention our associated Tumblr and Pinterest sites. We featured in the last big survey of the SL-blogosphere, just outside the top 100.

So if you heard that someone had set out to compile a new list of SL-related blogs, and had managed to identify over two thousand examples of the genre, then you might think that we would be in there somewhere. Well, you would be wrong. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know why we bother…

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Power and ideology on the internet: thoughts on the Violentacrez case

October 18, 2012 by Leave a comment

I guess anyone reading this will already be familiar with the story of Gawker’s exposé of notorious Reddit mod Violentacrez; if not, the short version is something like this: Violentacrez was well known on the social media site as the éminence grise behind various unsavoury subreddits, like “Jailbait”, which featured pictures of young girls culled from their Facebook pages, and “Creepshots”, a collection of leering photos of unsuspecting women; writer Adrian Chen, feeling that Violentacrez should accept responsibility for his actions rather than hide behind a pseudonym, did a little detective work which revealed Violentacrez’s real identity, one Michael Brutsch, a programmer from Texas; following the Gawker article Brutsch lost his job, and presumably has had some awkward conversations with friends and neighbours.

What are we to make of this? Gawker and Chen have been heavily criticised by the Reddit community for supposedly limiting Brutsch’s right to free speech by violating his privacy and exposing him to intimidation. On the other hand, Brutsch was happy to get his kicks by trespassing on the personal space of countless girls and women without their knowledge or consent, so he can hardly claim that his own boundaries should be sacrosanct.

So three cheers then for Chen and his righteous take-down of a sleazy douchebag. But isn’t there a nagging problem? Like, who elected Chen to be sheriff of the interwebs? How is he accountable? What if tomorrow he, or someone like him, decides that bloggers I agree with, like critics of repressive governments, deserve to be stripped of their anonymity too? What if he thinks I need to be exposed for my serial offences against good literary style?

There are two issues to consider here. The first is the liberal notion of Free Speech, as summed up in Voltaire’s (misattributed) dictum “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”. I fundamentally disagree with this. Not all opinions are equally valid, and there are some that are so toxic that they need to be suppressed. I may get upset when viewpoints which have my sympathy are censored, but I’m not so bothered, in principle, when the likes of Brutsch are marginalised in the public discourse.

(That’s the theory anyway; in practice it’s a little more complicated. The second thing we have to think about is who actually has the power to regulate the promotion of ideas. The people who run the world are not, by and large, fans of my leftist ideology, so if there was an effective mechanism for controlling what appears on the internet, most of the time it would be employed to squash things I am in favour of. Thus I generally find myself campaigning against web censorship, though on pragmatic rather than principled grounds.)

The underlying point is that society is divided between classes whose ideas are incompatible; the liberal ideal of a society where all points of view are given equal respect, presided over by a benign state that sits above the class conflict, is an illusion. The dominant ideology of the ruling class finds its expression in many ways, from the high politics of a presidential debate to the low culture of Reddit’s misogynist underbelly. We can fight this as it presents itself, but we will never fully defeat it until we build up our forces to a point where we have the power to eradicate the ideology of our class enemies; a dictatorship of the proletariat for the information age. This will solve the problems of democracy and accountablity, for, as Lenin put it:

…proletarian dictatorship is the forcible oppression of the resistance of the exploiters, i.e. an insignificant minority of the population, the landowners and capitalists. It follows that proletarian dictatorship must inevitably entail not only a change in democratic forms and institutions, generally speaking, but precisely such a change as provides an unparalleled extension of the enjoyment of democracy by those oppressed by capitalism…

As ever, the problems that arise in the course of online life turn out to have their roots in more fundamental aspects of society; the solutions lie in the offline world too.

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Hooray for Hugo

October 13, 2012 by Leave a comment

After giving last year’s award to worthy women’s rights activists, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee seem to have rediscovered their sense of ironic black humour. They haven’t quite managed to top their 2009 masterstroke, when Barack Obama got the nod for his work in spreading goodwill and understanding by escalating wars and terrorising whole populations with killer drones, but giving the medal to the European Union, at a time when EU macroeconomic policy is spreading fear and despair through much of the continent, does come a close second.

It’s been rather a depressing week all round, from a left point of view, what with Romney making up ground in the US and our own Tory government promising all-out class warfare. There was a bright spot though; Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution marches on in Venezuela. Chavez has his critics on the left round here – proletarian bonapartism is a phrase one sometimes hears – but his record of improving the lot of the poor beats anything we’ve managed in the last half century, so more power to his elbow I say.

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