Transcript of Paul Mason at the Left Forum 2011 Opening Plenary

Update: This is the most popular post on my blog, and I’ve found that in the two years since I put it up, the original YouTube video (with better sound quality) has been removed and the Essential Dissent site is cleared out. I’ve tried to fix it up as best I can.

I watched the video below of Paul Mason‘s speech at the Left Forum 2011 Opening Plenary and was flabbergasted. It’s packed with incisive analysis of our current historical moment. I couldn’t find a transcript, so wrote it up myself. For more, see what used to be Essential Dissent.

Hey, if you’re gonna do your internationalism, I think, you know, inviting a white guy from England, you could do better. [laughter]

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Book Review: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson is one of the best books I have read recently, by far. At first glance, this looks like one of those mediocre-to-terrible books that seem to dominate the intellectual landscape. But Steven Johnson is the absolute opposite of the idiotic Thomas Friedman (see also: Thomas Friedman, idiot), and a far cry from the pseudo-intellectual Malcolm Gladwell.

Johnson actually has expertise in the study of innovation. He’s written a book that delved quite deeply into a case study of John Snow’s invention, essentially, of epidemiology, and has written a book each on neuroscience and “the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software”. Not only is this book about innovation, but its creation backs up some of its insights.

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The dazzling hypocrisy of "Don’t Make Us Pay"

I came across these ads recently:

Oh my god! The bad mean government wants to make you pay more to use debit cards! Are they levying a tax?

Of course not. This is a campaign by the banks to repeal a law that limits the fees they can charge retailers. They really don’t like any limitations at all, do they?

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Bastille Day in Egypt: Amn Dawla and the coming floods

There’s been very little that’s hit any mainstream news sources, but the Twitter hashtag #AmnDawla follows an astounding story.

Amn Dawla (أمن الدولة) means “State Security”. This is Egypt’s equivalent of the Stasi – spying on, controlling, and torturing the citizens of Egypt under Mubarak. And – this is really important – don’t forget that the US outsourced most of its torture to Egypt. The CIA kidnaps people off of the streets of cities like Milan, or takes them from battlefields, and then engages in “extraordinary rendition”: delivers them to third parties like Egypt to be tortured.

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Movie Review: I AM

Yesterday I got free preview tickets to the movie I AM (warning: embedded YouTube starts immediately).

Here’s the blurb:

I AM, a prismatic and probing exploration of our world, what’s wrong with it, and what we can do to make it better, represents Tom Shadyac’s first foray into non-fiction following a career as one of Hollywood’s leading comedy practitioners, with such successful titles as “Ace Ventura,” “Liar Liar,” and “Bruce Almighty” to his credit. I AM recounts what happened to the filmmaker after a cycling accident left him incapacitated, possibly for good. Though he ultimately recovered, he emerged a changed man. Disillusioned with life on the A-list, he sold his house, moved to a mobile home community, and decided to start life anew.

Shadyac was there in person and fielded questions from the audience at the end of the screening.

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Why the New York Times sucks

The excellent CounterPunch website has snarky t-shirts one can buy to support them. I own one, no longer available it seems, whose front displays, in a Gothic font, “NYT” crossed out in red and “14 Per Cent Club”. On the back it says

“14 per cent of Americans believe almost nothing of what they read in the New York Times.”

CounterPunch
You Can Believe What You Read

In August, biking through wine country, I stopped at a winery in the middle of a scorching afternoon to cool down, drink prodigious amounts of water, and then try a little wine. An older gentleman asked me about that shirt, which I was wearing at the time. He asked what I had against the New York Times. I don’t think I gave a very good answer – he had not caught me at my best. So I thought I’d present my ideas here.

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Žižek on Wikileaks

Two of my favorite things, together. Slavoj Žižek’s article on Wikileaks: Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks. He ends with this:

This is precisely our situation today: we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.

Net Neutrality and Corporate Power

Arguing with libertarians about net neutrality is like trying to convince the Pope to open a condom factory. If you succeed, you’ve converted them. Belief that an unregulated market is always best is a fundamental libertarian plank. With the Pope you actually have a head start because he has admitted that there might be situations in which using a condom might be moral.

I’m not naïve. I’m no fan of state power. But neither of corporate power. The world in which we live today is a complicated one, in which corporate and state power are often intertwined or interdependent, but sometimes antagonistic to each other. A properly crafted net neutrality law would limit corporate power in the critical arena of internet access, and as a consequence would limit state power as well.

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Listing and Reversing Media Lies about Wikileaks

Update 2

In San Francisco, our part of the January 15th global protests for Wikileaks will focus on this issue; we are calling it a Media Intervention for Wikileaks.

Update

The article I was looking for is here. Doesn’t mention Time or TNR, though.

The Big Lie

The biggest lie is that Wikileaks “indiscriminately dumped” 250,000 unredacted cables on the Web. The truth is that as of January 4th, 2011, they have released just under 2000 diplomatic cables, each of them carefully vetted by one of their partner news organizations. Glenn Greenwald has done a great job of attempting to slay this dragon.

Many, many mainstream media outlets have repeated this lie. Sometimes an organization is inconsistent, and tells the truth sometimes and the lie other times. We need to force each and every one to always say the truth.

NPR recently corrected their lie and apologized. This is great news! But just the beginning….

Somewhere out there I thought I read a list of all the other orgs and quotes and links to this big lie. Can’t find it – so I’m putting up this. Please add examples in the comments.

Easy start: Time: “But the law is too broad a brush to try to draw a distinction between WikiLeaks’ indiscriminate posting of the cables — which Burns called “nihilistic” — and the more careful vetting evidenced by The New York Times, Abrams said.” This was the subject of an article by Glenn Greenwald.

The New Republic: “…Wikileaks would have dumped that information, along with the other 250,000 cables.”

Corrected!

Information Week

Žižek

If you haven’t heard of Slavoj Žižek yet, well, now’s the time! He’s a Slovenian philosopher. In many ways he fulfills the stereotype that the phrase “Slovenian philosopher” brings to mind. He has an intense yet approachable speaking style, strangely charismatic while being slightly disgusting. YouTube has many videos of his speeches. He clearly doesn’t seem to care how he’s dressed and exhibits tics worthy of a cokehead at 3am on a Saturday night.

He’s also a genius.

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