Quotulatiousness

October 8, 2012

“It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead”

Filed under: Education, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

Camille Paglia in the Wall Street Journal:

Today’s blasé liberal secularism also departs from the respectful exploration of world religions that characterized the 1960s. Artists can now win attention by imitating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege. This trend began over two decades ago with Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine, and was typified more recently by Cosimo Cavallaro’s “My Sweet Lord,” a life-size nude statue of the crucified Christ sculpted from chocolate, intended for a street-level gallery window in Manhattan during Holy Week. However, museums and galleries would never tolerate equally satirical treatment of Judaism or Islam.

It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell’s soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

The vulnerability of students and faculty alike to factitious theory about the arts is in large part due to the bourgeois drift of the last half century. Our woefully shrunken industrial base means that today’s college-bound young people rarely have direct contact any longer with the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship.

[. . .]

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.

October 2, 2012

Why (some) business experience is valuable for politicians

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Education, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Megan McArdle writes about the worsening problem of government officials who have never spent any time in the business world, but have huge power over the business environment:

Of course, we’ve had many good presidents with no business experience. But Obama’s whole administration tends to be light on people from outside the academia — NGO — government triangle. It’s something that’s increasingly true of Washington in general — and, I think, increasingly problematic.

[. . .]

The increasingly mandarin elite, hygienically removed from the grubby business of scrounging for customers, frequently seems to have no idea at all what goes on in companies. Stop grinning, Republicans; I mean you too. Yes, too many liberals seem to believe that all infelicitous market outcomes can be cured by appointing a commission composed of really top-notch academics — during the debate over health care reform, the words “peer reviewed study” were invoked by supporters with no less touching a faith than an Italian grandmother performing a rosary for the salvation of the godless Communists. On the other hand, here comes the GOP claiming that entrepreneurship can be started or stopped with small changes in marginal tax rates, as if one were turning on and off a light. This is no less of a technocratic fallacy, even if, as with many technocratic fallacies, there is a grain of sound theory buried somewhere under that towering mountain of unwarranted assumptions.

The result is that companies usually get treated as a rather simple variable in a model rather than the complex organizations they are. For example, you see people reasoning from corporate behavior to efficacy: if fast food companies spend a lot of money on advertising, then said advertising must make kids eat more fast food; if hiring managers demand a college degree for positions that didn’t used to require one, there must be a good business reason. “They wouldn’t do it,” says the argument, “if it didn’t work.”

If you’ve actually worked at a company, this is a ludicrous statement. Companies do stuff that doesn’t work all the time, and it can take decades to unwind even the stupidest expenditures and rules. More importantly, when they do have good reasons, they are often not the reasons that outsiders think. The elite projects their own concerns onto the company, instead of asking the company what it’s worried about.

[. . .]

The flip side of this is the people who think that companies don’t do anything at all that couldn’t be done better by government or academia … except sit back and rake the money in. This is particularly prevalent in discussions of health care, but it frequently pops up elsewhere. My favorite in this genre is Jerry Avorn, the professor of pharmacoeconomics who told Ezra Klein that we didn’t really need drug companies because now academics with good drug prospects could simply go straight to the capital markets and raise money to fund their own projects.

This is simply breathtakingly wrong. For one thing, venture capitalists want an exit strategy before they will put money in, and in biotech, exit is often a sale to a big pharmaceutical firm; no Big Pharma, no VC funds. And second, few newly hatched biotech firms have the complementary capacities to bring a drug to market by themselves. Forget the sales force; I’m talking about the expertise to get the thing through the FDA approval process and produce it in massive quantities. How do they acquire those capacities? They partner with Big Pharma, or license to them.

September 28, 2012

Reason.tv: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring at 50 Years

Filed under: Books, Environment, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

“It’s not polite to talk about brown and black people dying because rich white people in America feel better about themselves when the brown and black people don’t get to use DDT,” says the University of Alabama’s Andrew Morriss, co-editor of the new book Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson.

Published by the Cato Institute, the collection of essays by environmentalists, law professors, economists, and other analysts argues that the legacy of Carson’s best-known book — widely considered the starting point of the modern environmentalist movement and the international ban on the malaria-fighting pesticide DDT — has caused many more problems than it has solved.

Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Morriss to talk about Carson’s work and influence on environmental policy.

September 27, 2012

Yahtzee Croshaw reviews Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

September 22, 2012

The spectre of Ayn Rand is haunting America

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:45

Terence Corcoran on “the most dangerous woman in America”:

Weird, I thought. Why would a world-famous economist, followed by millions, advisor to UN officials and presidents, launch into a personal attack on a novelist who’s been dead more than 30 years by citing one of her novels and paraphrasing the words of one of her characters? How many people have even heard of Ayn Rand? And who the hell cares what one of her characters said in a novel published 60 years ago?

Lots of people, it appears. Ayn Rand may be long dead, but she seems to have been resurrected as the most dangerous woman in America. Judging by the barrage of attacks and references in the media, one can only conclude that Ayn Rand is a pervasive and increasingly powerful force in U.S. politics, possibly on the brink of toppling the prevailing orthodoxies of modern American liberalism.

Media references to Ayn Rand have skyrocketed over the last year, many of them elaborate putdowns. Her name is dropped like a hand grenade into articles and commentaries, as if readers will instantly recognize the menace. Her name has become an explosive device — like Karl Marx’s or Chairman Mao’s — apparently enough to rankle and send shivers down spines.

[. . .]

Rand’s supporters appear to be moving in on Washington’s Cato Institute, a libertarian bastion long headed by Ed Crane but now presided over by John Allison, the Ayn Rand Institute board member. Allison, a former banker from North Carolina, with funding from the billionaire Koch brothers, themselves characters out of Occupy/liberal nightmares, has said he aims to reshape Cato along Randian lines.

This is war. Rand condemned liberals and conservatives, but had even stronger views about libertarians. In a 2009 biography of Rand, author Jennifer Burns records that during Rand’s public speeches, she called libertarians “scum,” “intellectual cranks” and “plagiarists.”

It’s hard to tell today who has more to gain or lose from the seeming resurrection of Ayn Rand as an ideological enemy of the statists. She had no time for most other worldviews, right, left or libertarian. She would have fought the Cato Institute, she would have rejected the Tea Party movement, and she would have sought to demolish the Jeffrey Sachs of the world.

September 17, 2012

The chilling of free speech: corporate defamation suits

Filed under: Australia, Business, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:07

An interesting article in the Toronto Star looks at the idea of reducing the ability of corporations to launch SLAPP lawsuits against private citizens:

Fed up with suits like this (sometimes called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs), Australia changed its laws to prevent most corporations from being able to sue for defamation. Canada’s provinces should do the same.

Canada is no stranger to SLAPPs. For example, when Mark Prince created a website inviting people to describe their customer service experiences with Future Shop, he was threatened with a defamation suit. On the advice of a lawyer, Prince shut the site down. It wasn’t that what he’d done was necessarily defamation, but it would simply have cost too much to defend himself.

Cases like this highlight the fact that defamation is easy to allege and hard to defend. Those who claim to have been defamed need only prove that the defendant published something about them to at least one other person, and that a reasonable person would think less of them as a result. Plaintiffs do not have to prove they suffered any actual loss to their reputation, or that the statement was false. Instead much of the burden falls to defendants to prove a defence, such as that the statement was true.

As a result, most people will retract or apologize, even if a statement is true, rather than spend a small fortune defending their right to say it. This chilling effect doesn’t only affect individuals; the news media’s publishing decisions are also influenced by defamation law.

H/T to Bob Tarantino for the link:

September 16, 2012

The other side of the Philip Roth/Wikipedia spat

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

I admit that I didn’t follow this story when it got (for a literary spat) saturation coverage in various media outlets. Here (speaking in a private capacity and not as an official Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson) is Oliver, and he’s got a bit of refuting to do:

First, this is not a fundamental flaw in Wikipedia’s central precepts — this is one author and his agents being unable to navigate the internet and/or report the truth with any degree of accuracy. This is our attempt to make our information not only accurate, but verifiable — to ensure that readers have a hope in hell of actually checking the accuracy of our information. This is not achieved by enabling subjects to become the oracles of truth for any article that mentions them, or telling readers “we know it’s accurate because Philip Roth said so, and you’ll just have to trust us on that”. We don’t want readers to trust us. We want readers to think and be able to do their own research.

Second, maybe (although I doubt it) we need to have a frank debate over how we handle primary and secondary sourcing. But for all of the reasons explained above, Philip Roth and the Editorial of Azkaban is a terrible poster boy for such a debate.

Third: people should perhaps start having a debate about the way authors are treated in “proper” sources. The New Yorker, the Guardian, ABC News and the Los Angeles Times — all respected bodies. And all, without being able and/or willing to do their own research, happily published or republished Roth’s assertions. We rely on these organisations for reporting what our politicians do, what our armed forces do, how entities with the power of life and death over humanity are accountable to the people. And they happily gulp down the glorified press releases of anyone who offers to let them touch his Pulitzer.

There’s also a follow-up post providing more information and explanation.

September 11, 2012

Thomas Szasz, RIP

Filed under: Books, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

A brief obituary notice for Thomas Szasz:

Thomas Stephen Szasz, M.D., 92, died at his home in Manlius, N.Y. on September 8, 2012. He was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1920, and emigrated to the United States in 1938. He graduated the University of Cincinnati with an undergraduate degree in physics in 1941, and as valedictorian of the medical school in 1944. After medical internship at Boston City Hospital and psychiatry residency at the University of Chicago, he pursued psychoanalytic training. [. . .] He argued that what are called mental illnesses are often better described as “problems in living,” and he opposed involuntary psychiatric interventions. His reputation in defense of these principles was launched in 1961 with The Myth of Mental Illness. He published 35 books, translated into numerous languages, and hundreds of articles in the subsequent 50 years.

September 8, 2012

QotD: The European Project

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

Like all people with bad habits, politicians and bureaucrats are infinitely inventive when it comes to rationalizing the European Project, though they’re inventive in nothing else. Without the Union, they say, there would be no peace; when it’s pointed out that the Union is the consequence of peace, not its cause, they say that no small country can survive on its own. When it is pointed out that Singapore, Switzerland, and Norway seem to have no difficulties in that regard, they say that pan-European regulations create economies of scale that promote productive efficiency. When it is pointed out that European productivity lags behind the rest of the world’s, they say that European social protections are more generous than anywhere else. If it is then noted that long-term unemployment rates in Europe are higher than elsewhere, another apology follows. The fact is that for European politicians and bureaucrats, the European Project is like God — good by definition, which means that they have subsequently to work out a theodicy to explain, or explain away, its manifest and manifold deficiencies.

[. . .]

The personal interests of European politicians and bureaucrats, with their grossly inflated, tax-free salaries, are perfectly obvious. For politicians who have fallen out of favor at home, or grown bored with the political process, Brussels acts as a vast and luxurious retirement home, with the additional gratification of the retention of power. The name of a man such as European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, whose charisma makes Hillary Clinton look like Mata Hari, would, without the existence of the European Union, have reached most of the continent’s newspapers only if he had paid for a classified advertisement in them. Instead of which, he bestrides the European stage if not like a colossus exactly, at least like the spread of fungus on a damp wall.

Corporate interests, ever anxious to suppress competition, approve of European Union regulations because they render next to impossible the entry of competitors into any market in which they already enjoy a dominant position, while also allowing them to extend their domination into new markets. That is why the CAC40 of today (the index of the largest 40 companies on the French stock exchange) will have more or less the same names 100 years hence.

More interestingly, perhaps, Hannan explains the European Union’s corruption of so-called civil society. Suppose you have an association for the protection of hedgehogs because you love hedgehogs. The European Union then offers your association money to expand its activities, which of course it accepts. The Union then proposes a measure allegedly for the protection of hedgehogs, but actually intended to promote a large agrarian or industrial interest over a small one, first asking the association’s opinion about the proposed measure. Naturally, your association supports the Union because it has become dependent on the Union’s subsidy. The Union then claims that it enjoys the support of those who want to protect hedgehogs. The best description of this process is fascist corporatism, which so far (and it is of course a crucial difference) lacks the paramilitary and repressive paraphernalia of real fascism.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rejecting the European Project”, City Journal, 2012-09-07

September 3, 2012

A bit of common sense in food news

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

Rob Lyons reviews a new book by Mike Gibney that attempts to bring some common sense back to counteract the epidemic of fear-mongering about food:

Given much of the popular discussion about food, it would be easy to despair that we face a future where half the world’s people starve to death while the other half drown in their own fat. The words ‘new food research’ in a news report are often just the lead into another sorry tale about how some aspect of what we eat is going to kill us or how some specific food will provide ‘miracle’ protection against the chronic illnesses of our age.

Professor Mike Gibney’s new book, Something to Chew On, is a welcome step back from all this noise, offering an expert take on many of these claims. Gibney is director of the Institute of Food and Health at University College Dublin and has served on many national and international advisory committees.

[. . .]

Take pesticides, for example. Many people are prepared to pay through the nose to buy organic food which is free of artificial pesticides. But as Gibney points out, those people are actually consuming a far greater weight in natural, plant-produced pesticides that are potentially every bit as cancer-inducing as modern chemicals. ‘Nature abounds with chemicals which, while beautifully natural, are nevertheless risk-laden’, he says, from the deadly poison ricin, found in castor beans, to substances in fava beans that induce a lethal form of anaemia in some susceptible people. The key is in the dose: for both natural compounds and their highly regulated artificial counterparts, the amounts that we actually eat are too small to represent any threat to health.

Indeed, Gibney goes on to make mincemeat of all of the claims made for organic foods: they don’t taste better than conventional crops, they offer no nutritional advantage, and, by being less productive, they are actually wasteful of land. That’s hardly environmentally friendly.

Part of the reason we get such overblown nutritional and health “advice” from the media is the difficulty of conducting nutrition research:

While trying to figure out the effect of eating, or not eating, a particular kind of food on cancer or heart disease, for example, there are numerous confounding factors that get in the way of drawing robust conclusions. People lie about what they eat or simply don’t record it accurately; factors that look like cause and effect can turn out to be mere associations. Even finding enough subjects to look at the effect of diet on a relatively unusual disease, like ovarian cancer, can be very difficult.

[. . .]

The truth is that every study’s results need to be treated with caution and there needs to be open-mindedness about other possible explanations. While it is relatively easy to see the effects of vitamin deficiency, for example, for the most part nutrition research moves forward on the basis of a lot of evidence that is unsatisfactory in one way or another. The endless stream of claims that red meat, sugar, eggs and myriad other foodstuffs cause harm should be treated with an almighty pinch of salt (as do claims about salt, for that matter).

Along the way, Gibney offers his thoughts on personalised nutrition — the possibility of creating diets specifically suited to our own DNA — and epigenetics — the idea that different elements of our DNA can be switched on or off by environmental factors in the womb or the first years of life. He also offers a Jacques Cousteau-like tour of the human gut. Did you know there are 10 times more bacteria living in our guts — 100 trillion — than there are cells in the human body? Did you know those bacteria can sometimes switch on or off changes in our bodies to suit their own needs? Gibney describes our relationship to this mass of bugs as a permanent state of ‘armed peace’, with mutual benefits to both parties: body and bacteria.

August 27, 2012

Restarting the age of space

Filed under: Media, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

sp!ked reposted an older article by James Woudhuysen on the long-term importance of space exploration and the stay-at-home attitudes that oppose further development of the “final frontier”:

One thing unites the critics of lunar exploration. Forty years after man first landed on the moon — on 20 July 1969 — they share a disdain for the grandeur of extra-terrestrial endeavour; for the scale of human ambition involved; for the very idea that human beings should climb into space, as up a mountain, ‘because it is there’.

I have no special preference for size, thrust during lift-off, or the traverse across vast distances. The development of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s, so important to the Apollo programme, was a tribute to miniaturisation rather than to high energy or physical scale. No, my admiration for both Saturn boosters and tiny electronics grows from a respect for open-ended curiosity, for human achievement, and for taking risks. With space travel, a lot of bravery was also at stake. And with both space and the development of semiconductors, there is much teamwork to celebrate — teamwork that, in the case of Apollo, involved not just three astronauts, but the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people.

[. . .]

(more…)

August 14, 2012

Anecdotes are not data: Demise of Guys based on anecdotal evidence

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Jacob Sullum on the recent ebook The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan.

Zimbardo’s thesis is that “boys are struggling” in school and in love because they play video games too much and watch too much porn. But he and his co-author, a recent University of Colorado graduate named Nikita Duncan, never establish that boys are struggling any more nowadays than they were when porn was harder to find and video games were limited to variations on Pong. The data they cite mostly show that girls are doing better than boys, not that boys are doing worse than they did before xvideos.com and Grand Theft Auto. Such an association would by no means be conclusive, but it’s the least you’d expect from a respected social scientist like Zimbardo, who oversaw the famous Stanford “prison experiment” that we all read about in Psych 101.

[. . .]

One source of evidence that Zimbardo and Duncan rely on heavily, an eight-question survey of people who watched Zimbardo’s TED talk online, is so dubious that anyone with a bachelor’s degree in psychology (such as Duncan), let alone a Ph.D. (such as Zimbardo), should be embarrassed to cite it without a litany of caveats. The most important one: It seems probable that people who are attracted to Zimbardo’s talk, watch it all the way through, and then take the time to fill out his online survey are especially likely to agree with his thesis and especially likely to report problems related to electronic diversions. This is not just a nonrepresentative sample; it’s a sample bound to confirm what Zimbardo thinks he already knows. “We wanted our personal views to be challenged or validated by others interested in the topic,” the authors claim. Mostly validated, to judge by their survey design.

[. . .]

Other sources of evidence cited by Zimbardo and Duncan are so weak that they have the paradoxical effect of undermining their argument rather than reinforcing it. How do Zimbardo and Duncan know about “the sense of total entitlement that some middle-aged guys feel within their relationships”? Because “a highly educated female colleague alerted us” to this “new phenomenon.” How do they know that “one consequence of teenage boys watching many hours of Internet pornography…is they are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects”? Because of a theory propounded by Daily Mail columnist Penny Marshall. How do they know that “men are as good as their women require them to be”? Because that’s what “one 27-year-old guy we interviewed” said.

Even when more rigorous research is available, Zimbardo and Duncan do not necessarily bother to look it up. How do they know that teenagers “who spend their nights playing video games or texting their friends instead of sleeping are putting themselves at greater risk for gaining unhealthy amounts of weight and becoming obese”? Because an NPR correspondent said so. Likewise, the authors get their information about the drawbacks of the No Child Left Behind Act from a gloss of a RAND Corporation study in a San Francisco Chronicle editorial. This is the level of documentation you’d expect from a mediocre high school student, not a college graduate, let alone a tenured social scientist at a leading university.

August 7, 2012

QotD: The musical decline of Bruce Springsteen

Filed under: Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

The musical decline of Bruce Springsteen has been obvious for decades. The sanctimony, the grandiosity, the utterly formulaic monumentality; the witlessness; the tiresome recycling of those anthemic figures, each time more preposterously distended; the disappearance of intimacy and the rejection of softness. And the sexlessness: Remnick adores Springsteen for his “flagrant exertion,” which he finds deeply sensual, comparing him to James Brown, but Brown’s shocking intensity, his gaudy stamina, his sea of sweat, was about, well, fucking, whereas Springsteen “wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, ‘with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!’”, which is how you talk dirty at Whole Foods. Remnick lauds him also for his “exuberance,” which is indeed preternatural. I was twice at The Bottom Line in August 1975 and I have never been in a happier room. But there is nothing daft or insouciant, nothing crazy free, about Springsteen’s exuberance anymore. The joy is programmatic; it is mere uplift, another expression of social responsibility, a further statement of an idealism that borders on illusion. The rising? Not quite yet. We take care of our own? No, we do not. Nothing has damaged Springsteen’s once-magnificent music more than his decision to become a spokesman for America. He is Howard Zinn with a guitar. The wounded workers in his songs do not have the authenticity of acquaintance; they are pious hackneyed tropes, stereotypical class martyrs from Guthrie and Steinbeck. Springsteen’s sympathy is genuine, but his people are not. His 9/11 and recession songs are bloated editorials: “where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?” His anger that “the banker man grows fat” is too holy: “if I had a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight” is not a “liberal insistence.” I prefer Dodd-Frank. The drawl in his voice is a production value, the grit a mannerism. A few minutes with one of Johnny Cash’s last records and it is impossible to take Springsteen’s vernacular seriously.

Leon Wieseltier, “Washington Diarist: A Saint in the City”, The New Republic, 2012-08-01

July 29, 2012

A brief critical analysis of Olympic merchandise

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Stephen Bayley – Founder of the Design Museum – gives the Olympics merchandise a critical mauling.

In ‘Rule Britannia: The Vice Guide to The Olympics’ VICE takes an in-depth look at the British public’s reaction to The Games coming to London this summer and the negative impact it’s having on certain people’s lives.

The six week festival promises to bring a a celebration of unity and sporting achievement, not to mention a huge cash injection to our beleaguered capital. VICE questions the real effects of The Games on a city as complex and tempestuous as London and discovers that they go much deeper, and murkier than the Olympics’ media spin-machine would have us believe.

H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.

July 27, 2012

If Boris wasn’t mayor of London

Filed under: Britain, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

Lawsmith imagines what Boris Johnson would write about the London Olympics “major international sporting event” in a “certain major city in the UK” if he were not mayor:

I can imagine his perfect article in this alternative history in my dreams. Written in the Spectator and littered with self-deprecation, references to dead or fictitious Greeks, Liverpool and wiff-waff, Boris would have danced across the pages as he gleefully excoriated the Labour administration for the absurd idea of inviting a bunch of prima donna athletes and bureaucrats, most of them foreign, to compete in an outdoor stadium during the coldest, wettest summer in British history.

He might have pointed out that all this would take place in Newham, a place not altogether unlike Portsmouth and, in any case, one most Londoners consider more alien than Paris, with among the highest incidence of robbery and assault in the entire city. He might have joyfully foretold the pain and suffering of millions of income taxpayers on account of the shut-down of major roads and TfL advising know-nothing tourists to hop the tube at rush hour to make the 10 AM events, and seriously questioned the wisdom of erecting a steel wall around Hyde Park for an entire summer before fouling it up beyond recognition.

In our alternative history he would have savaged, rather than prodded, the implementation of widespread censorship undertaken by a hit squad of intellectual property ninjas; he would have lamented the fact that our police were arresting “marginal” (i.e., possibly innocent) suspects – living, breathing, thinking people – on terrorism charges which they might not be able to prove. If he had really driven it home, he would have pointed out that, under normal circumstances, those arrests would never have been made. He would also have asked why nobody seems to care.

By this point, his oeuvre would have been the most hilarious political essay ever written. He would flay alive in full public view the pathetic, uncritical, fawning news-media industry which crafts its Olympic stories with all the creative flavour of an oak plank, their proxy world to escape from our own inadequacies where professional athletes become “heroes” (seriously, find a different word), washed-up “heroes” become “legends,” and civil liberties violations and government largesse are completely ignored.

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