As it's interesting (to me, at any rate) to see which posts go somewhere and which ones languish unread.
1. Science-fiction as mind bomb
2. Science-fiction needs you - join me as a Hugo Awards voter
3. If Meta Filter were filk fixated - File 770
4. Trouble at the business end of democracy - the #usepens affair
5. Cute title, sad book - Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
6. Noblesse oblige
7. Town and city names in song titles - a non-definitive list
8. YA goes gothic - Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree
9. In the Lovecraftian mode, but not the Lovecraftian mood - Stephen King's Revival
10. Space is the worst frontier - Andy Weir's The Martian
Or, by topic:
Book reviews - 4
Politics - 2
Lit criticism (after a fashion) - 2
Website reviews - 1
Random music geekery - 1
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Monday, August 8, 2016
Story Of Self/Us/Now
Inspired by my Campaigns Contact Weekend follow-up (see last post), here's the first of an occasional series of noticeboard posts with handy links to more activist and organising resources I have used or otherwise come across.
Some of it still lives in one form or another on Campaign Hubs, Friends of the Earth's discussion space, but as that's not being used much of late I thought I might as well consolidate it here.
Story of Self//Us/Now
What kind of stories do we tell people about ourselves as campaigners? How can we make them compelling to others while authentic and sustaining for ourselves?
The Story of Self/Us/Now structure allows you to present a compelling narrative of your own to other people when talking about your campaign or group. You can also ask questions of others to elicit the same material.
Here are a couple of explanations together with a workshop outline.
http://workshops.350.org/toolkit/story/
http://www.wholecommunities.org/pdf/Public%20Story%20Worksheet07Ganz.pdf
Some of it still lives in one form or another on Campaign Hubs, Friends of the Earth's discussion space, but as that's not being used much of late I thought I might as well consolidate it here.
Story of Self//Us/Now
What kind of stories do we tell people about ourselves as campaigners? How can we make them compelling to others while authentic and sustaining for ourselves?
The Story of Self/Us/Now structure allows you to present a compelling narrative of your own to other people when talking about your campaign or group. You can also ask questions of others to elicit the same material.
Here are a couple of explanations together with a workshop outline.
http://workshops.350.org/toolkit/story/
http://www.wholecommunities.org/pdf/Public%20Story%20Worksheet07Ganz.pdf
L'esprit de la noticeboard - some links from the Campaigns Contacts' Weekend
Back in July I helped out at the MND Association's Campaigns Contacts' Weekend - a get-together for the Association's marvellous campaigning volunteers.
I facilitated (or assisted with) sessions on mindfulness and involving others in your campaigning. Over the course of those sessions I referred to quite a bit of external material. While I've already shared the following links with the Campaigns Contacts I'm also adding them here as an aide-memoire.
L'esprit de la noticeboard and all that.
Mindfulness
I facilitated (or assisted with) sessions on mindfulness and involving others in your campaigning. Over the course of those sessions I referred to quite a bit of external material. While I've already shared the following links with the Campaigns Contacts I'm also adding them here as an aide-memoire.
L'esprit de la noticeboard and all that.
Mindfulness
Thursday, August 4, 2016
My Hugo Award picks
Thanks to a last-minute reading binge, I managed to get a fairly comprehensive Hugo Award ballot in. Here are my first preferences, links are to reviews where completed:
Best Novel - Seveneves, Neil Stephenson
Best Novella - Binti, Nnedi Okorafor
Best Novelette - Folding Beijing, Hao Jingfang
Best Short Story - No Award
Best Related Work - No Award
Best Graphic Story - The Sandman: Overture, Neil Gaiman and JH Williams III
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) - Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) - Jessica Jones: AKA Smile
Best Professional Artist - No Award
Best Semiprozine - Uncanny Magazine
Best Fanzine - File 770
Best Fan Writer - Mike Glyer
Best Fan Artist - No Award
John W Campbell Award for best new writer - Alyssa Wong
Best Editor (Long Form), Best Editor (Short Form) and Best Fancast - abstentions (I don't feel qualified to vote about editing and I don't listen to podcasts)
For the record, that's four first preferences that were part of the Rabid Puppies slate -
Seveneves, Folding Beijing, Sandman and File 770 - although none of these writers/artists/bloggers are associated with the slate organisers.
It's still (still!) another month or so to MidAmericon and the Hugo Award ceremony, so I do have time to crank out a few more reviews if the mood takes me. Certainly Seveneves deserves a write-up, as it manages to be hugely interesting in spite of considerable flaws - for me it was the best novel on the shortlist rather than necessarily the best book of the year.
Best Novel - Seveneves, Neil Stephenson
Best Novella - Binti, Nnedi Okorafor
Best Novelette - Folding Beijing, Hao Jingfang
Best Short Story - No Award
Best Related Work - No Award
Best Graphic Story - The Sandman: Overture, Neil Gaiman and JH Williams III
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) - Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) - Jessica Jones: AKA Smile
Best Professional Artist - No Award
Best Semiprozine - Uncanny Magazine
Best Fanzine - File 770
Best Fan Writer - Mike Glyer
Best Fan Artist - No Award
John W Campbell Award for best new writer - Alyssa Wong
Best Editor (Long Form), Best Editor (Short Form) and Best Fancast - abstentions (I don't feel qualified to vote about editing and I don't listen to podcasts)
For the record, that's four first preferences that were part of the Rabid Puppies slate -
Seveneves, Folding Beijing, Sandman and File 770 - although none of these writers/artists/bloggers are associated with the slate organisers.
It's still (still!) another month or so to MidAmericon and the Hugo Award ceremony, so I do have time to crank out a few more reviews if the mood takes me. Certainly Seveneves deserves a write-up, as it manages to be hugely interesting in spite of considerable flaws - for me it was the best novel on the shortlist rather than necessarily the best book of the year.
Sunday, July 24, 2016
Political fragmentation - interesting times ahead for FPTP?
Even as little as ten years ago, the UK's (mainly) two-and-a-half party system seemed surprisingly stable.
Taking the 2005 General Election as a baseline, you get:
Labour - 355
Conserative - 198
Liberal Democrat - 62
Democratic Unionists (DUP) - 9
Scottish Nationalists (SNP) - 6
Sinn Fein - 5
Plaid Cymru - 3
Ulster Unionists (UUP) - 3
Health Concern - 1
Respect - 1
Social Democratic & Labour Party (SDLP) - 1
Independent - 1
Speaker - 1
Moving onto 2010 - again, the two-and-a-half pattern remains unchanged, as does broadly their total number of seats.
Conservative - 306
Labour - 258
Liberal Democrat - 57
DUP - 8
SNP - 6
Sinn Fein - 5
Plaid Cymru - 3
SDLP- 3
Alliance - 1
Green - 1
Independent - 1
Speaker - 1
If you take into account that four of the other parties plus the independent are all from Northern Ireland, the dominance of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the remainder of the UK (at 98% of all available seats) is even more pronounced
But now for the first of our gamechangers - the 2015 election:
Conservative - 330
Labour - 232
SNP - 56
Liberal Democrat - 8
DUP - 8
Sinn Fein - 4
Plaid Cymru - 3
SDLP- 3
UUP - 2
Green - 1
UKIP - 1
Independent - 1
Speaker - 1
We all know what's happened here - the electoral collapse of the Lib Dems in the wake of their coalition experience in parallel with the Westminster breakthrough of the Scottish Nationalists following the independence referendum (which might have been a narrow defeat in the short term but so discredited the other parties north of the border as to in retrospect appear a triumph for the SNP)
But is this not just a straight swap in a stable system? Exit Clegg, enter Sturgeon?
Possibly, but there are also other factors at work which may lead to further change, party fragmentation and political imbalance:
And of course more generally no-one yet knows what impact Brexit will have on the country's political culture, the relative strength of any of the parties and the possible emergence of other groupings as a form of protest or otherwise.
There's nothing wrong with more political diversity, of course, and I can think of several European polities that have made cooperation and collaboration work really well over a long period of time. However, none of them use our first past the post voting (FPTP) system, preferring ones with at least a little proportionality.
For FPTP to work effectively, it requires one of two things - preferably both. It should have
a limited number of dominant political actors (that's parties to you and me, guv), all with a reasonable expectation of either winning a majority and forming a government. The system has to hold out the prospect of a swing great enough that office is realistically attainable - one dominant party is not enough.
Ideally, parties should also be ready to work together, both in the event that a majority cannot be achieved (that's coalitions or looser arrangements like the wonderfully named 'confidence and supply') as well as on an ad hoc basis where consensus can be found, to mitigate the inherently adversarial nature of FPTP.
For at least the last 30-40 years, I would argue UK has been in the interesting situation of having the former (competition) but not enough of the latter (collaboration) and has managed to get away with it, albeit at some cost to its political culture.
However, future fragmentation and political imbalance would I believe threaten the stability of that first pillar and thus the electoral system as a whole, if not taken seriously.
All of this doesn't amount in itself to an argument for changing how we elect our MPs, although it certainly could be used to suggest that. It isn't even an argument against splitting the Labour Party - as an outsider that's a conversation I'm certainly not blundering my way into.
What it does at the very least point to is the likelihood that FPTP and our political culture - our way of doing political business, if you like - will have to work harder to provide good government in the future if we're to carry on in this vein.
Perhaps much harder.
*While devolved and local governments have often had co-operation baked in to their electoral systems or at least had it thrust upon them, the Coalition Government of 2010-2015 arguably demonstrated how inimical politics at the highest level could be to cross-party collaboration, despite its undeniable successes and continuation for five years.
Taking the 2005 General Election as a baseline, you get:
Labour - 355
Conserative - 198
Liberal Democrat - 62
Democratic Unionists (DUP) - 9
Scottish Nationalists (SNP) - 6
Sinn Fein - 5
Plaid Cymru - 3
Ulster Unionists (UUP) - 3
Health Concern - 1
Respect - 1
Social Democratic & Labour Party (SDLP) - 1
Independent - 1
Speaker - 1
Moving onto 2010 - again, the two-and-a-half pattern remains unchanged, as does broadly their total number of seats.
Conservative - 306
Labour - 258
Liberal Democrat - 57
DUP - 8
SNP - 6
Sinn Fein - 5
Plaid Cymru - 3
SDLP- 3
Alliance - 1
Green - 1
Independent - 1
Speaker - 1
If you take into account that four of the other parties plus the independent are all from Northern Ireland, the dominance of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the remainder of the UK (at 98% of all available seats) is even more pronounced
But now for the first of our gamechangers - the 2015 election:
Conservative - 330
Labour - 232
SNP - 56
Liberal Democrat - 8
DUP - 8
Sinn Fein - 4
Plaid Cymru - 3
SDLP- 3
UUP - 2
Green - 1
UKIP - 1
Independent - 1
Speaker - 1
We all know what's happened here - the electoral collapse of the Lib Dems in the wake of their coalition experience in parallel with the Westminster breakthrough of the Scottish Nationalists following the independence referendum (which might have been a narrow defeat in the short term but so discredited the other parties north of the border as to in retrospect appear a triumph for the SNP)
But is this not just a straight swap in a stable system? Exit Clegg, enter Sturgeon?
Possibly, but there are also other factors at work which may lead to further change, party fragmentation and political imbalance:
- The resumption of the review of parliamentary constituencies will probably not only reduce the overall number of seats but reduce the number of safe seats for Labour in England, with the Conservative party being the prime beneficiaries.
- Rumours of a breakway party from Labour continue - although any movement is likely to happen after the current leadership election.
- UKIP have continued to poll solidly in the teens in the last few months, although it remains to be seen how that would translate into gains in Parliament. To date, their wins have generally come at local level or in elections with an element of proportional representation, like this year's Welsh Assembly elections.
- With a power base in Holyrood as well as Westminster and now a strong pro-EU mandate to differentiate themselves from the rest of the country, the SNP show no signs of returning to the margins any time soon.
- Plaid Cymru performed well at the Welsh Assembly elections this year with 20% of the vote.With an eye on the Scottish experience, they would be well placed to capitalise in key seats should Labour's internal problems continue.
And of course more generally no-one yet knows what impact Brexit will have on the country's political culture, the relative strength of any of the parties and the possible emergence of other groupings as a form of protest or otherwise.
There's nothing wrong with more political diversity, of course, and I can think of several European polities that have made cooperation and collaboration work really well over a long period of time. However, none of them use our first past the post voting (FPTP) system, preferring ones with at least a little proportionality.
For FPTP to work effectively, it requires one of two things - preferably both. It should have
a limited number of dominant political actors (that's parties to you and me, guv), all with a reasonable expectation of either winning a majority and forming a government. The system has to hold out the prospect of a swing great enough that office is realistically attainable - one dominant party is not enough.
Ideally, parties should also be ready to work together, both in the event that a majority cannot be achieved (that's coalitions or looser arrangements like the wonderfully named 'confidence and supply') as well as on an ad hoc basis where consensus can be found, to mitigate the inherently adversarial nature of FPTP.
For at least the last 30-40 years, I would argue UK has been in the interesting situation of having the former (competition) but not enough of the latter (collaboration) and has managed to get away with it, albeit at some cost to its political culture.
However, future fragmentation and political imbalance would I believe threaten the stability of that first pillar and thus the electoral system as a whole, if not taken seriously.
All of this doesn't amount in itself to an argument for changing how we elect our MPs, although it certainly could be used to suggest that. It isn't even an argument against splitting the Labour Party - as an outsider that's a conversation I'm certainly not blundering my way into.
What it does at the very least point to is the likelihood that FPTP and our political culture - our way of doing political business, if you like - will have to work harder to provide good government in the future if we're to carry on in this vein.
Perhaps much harder.
*While devolved and local governments have often had co-operation baked in to their electoral systems or at least had it thrust upon them, the Coalition Government of 2010-2015 arguably demonstrated how inimical politics at the highest level could be to cross-party collaboration, despite its undeniable successes and continuation for five years.
Saturday, July 23, 2016
The radical centre - a place to be?
From Rebecca Solnit's mighty Hope In The Dark. The quote relates to environmental activism, but could apply to any field of social change or anyone weary of simplistic left-right divisions.
It's also very much in keeping with a community organising approach.
'Arizona environmentalist-rancher Bill McDonald [...] may have been the one to coin the term "the radical centre", the space in which ranchers, environmentalists, and government agencies have been able to work together and see the preservation of rural livelihoods and the land itself as the same goal.'
'The radical center, as writer and New Mexico land manager William DeBuys defines it is "a departure from business as usual," is "not bigoted. By that I mean, to do this kind of work, you don't question where someone is from or what kind of hat he or she wears, you focus on where that person is willing to go and whether he or she is willing to work constructively on matters of mutual interest.
Work in the Radical Centre also involves a commitment to using a diversity of tools. There is no one way of doing things. We need to have large toolboxes and lend and borrow tools freely.
Work in the Radical Centre is experimental - it keeps developing new alternatives every step of the way. Nothing is ever so good that it can't stand a little revision and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question."
It's also very much in keeping with a community organising approach.
'Arizona environmentalist-rancher Bill McDonald [...] may have been the one to coin the term "the radical centre", the space in which ranchers, environmentalists, and government agencies have been able to work together and see the preservation of rural livelihoods and the land itself as the same goal.'
'The radical center, as writer and New Mexico land manager William DeBuys defines it is "a departure from business as usual," is "not bigoted. By that I mean, to do this kind of work, you don't question where someone is from or what kind of hat he or she wears, you focus on where that person is willing to go and whether he or she is willing to work constructively on matters of mutual interest.
Work in the Radical Centre also involves a commitment to using a diversity of tools. There is no one way of doing things. We need to have large toolboxes and lend and borrow tools freely.
Work in the Radical Centre is experimental - it keeps developing new alternatives every step of the way. Nothing is ever so good that it can't stand a little revision and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question."
Friday, July 22, 2016
YA goes gothic: Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree
A quick review for this remarkable YA-goes-Victorian-gothic novel from last year, recommended to me by family and friends.
Can lies, disinformation and fakery ever serve a higher purpose? What if you felt so passionately about an as-yet indeterminate truth that you were willing to fabricate evidence in its favour? To what extent to we make our own reality?
Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree wraps these questions in a 19th century magic realist murder mystery and tells the surface story so elegantly it's easy to overlook the themes that lie below.
The tree of the title is both the central metaphor and the plot engine for the book. A legendary plant, when fed with a widely believed falsehood or rumour, it grants its keeper oracular visions of the particular truth they seek, be that as mundane as one's medical condition or as profound as evolution.
People will kill to possess the Lie Tree for the answers it purports to give, as the novel demonstrates. One such unlucky owner and murder victim is the Reverend Erasmus Sunderby, a fossil expert drawn to a remote island with his family under false pretenses. His young daughter Faith's clandestine investigation of his death and burgeoning relationship with the Tree forms the heart of the novel.
One of the great thing about a whodunnit is that it provides a clear foundation for a book - the pendulum of suspicion can swing back and forth, clues are progressively accquired, new insights into character are gained. The Lie Tree is a very nicely structured book in that sense.
But, more than that, it means that Hardinge can weave in sophisticated themes around this tough yet flexible structure, like the phantasmagorical experience of grief, the evolutionary debates of the Victorian era and the limited options facing middle class women of the time. These very much enhance rather than detract from the story itself.
A real doozy of a concept, then, but also a very good, extremely readable book.
Can lies, disinformation and fakery ever serve a higher purpose? What if you felt so passionately about an as-yet indeterminate truth that you were willing to fabricate evidence in its favour? To what extent to we make our own reality?
Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree wraps these questions in a 19th century magic realist murder mystery and tells the surface story so elegantly it's easy to overlook the themes that lie below.
The tree of the title is both the central metaphor and the plot engine for the book. A legendary plant, when fed with a widely believed falsehood or rumour, it grants its keeper oracular visions of the particular truth they seek, be that as mundane as one's medical condition or as profound as evolution.
People will kill to possess the Lie Tree for the answers it purports to give, as the novel demonstrates. One such unlucky owner and murder victim is the Reverend Erasmus Sunderby, a fossil expert drawn to a remote island with his family under false pretenses. His young daughter Faith's clandestine investigation of his death and burgeoning relationship with the Tree forms the heart of the novel.
One of the great thing about a whodunnit is that it provides a clear foundation for a book - the pendulum of suspicion can swing back and forth, clues are progressively accquired, new insights into character are gained. The Lie Tree is a very nicely structured book in that sense.
But, more than that, it means that Hardinge can weave in sophisticated themes around this tough yet flexible structure, like the phantasmagorical experience of grief, the evolutionary debates of the Victorian era and the limited options facing middle class women of the time. These very much enhance rather than detract from the story itself.
A real doozy of a concept, then, but also a very good, extremely readable book.
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