Category Archives: Surveillance

Russell Brand, The Entitled Opportunist Rapist, and the Liberal Party-Mainstream Media Comms Kids

I live in a hinterlands province where I once had the opportunity of public service, at the respectable level of policy making. To be sure, in my one year of service, as my boss mostly plotted backstage to overthrow the Premier, I wasn’t allowed within a ten-foot pole of policy making. I just researched, learned to write political briefings based on the research, presented my boss’ neoliberal policy choices, occasionally was threatened with a gratuitous (I once deigned to say “neoliberal” out loud.) political set up which was quickly snuffed out by the bosses (presumably because they had bigger fish to fry and didn’t want people to get wind of the big plotting underway), grew increasingly uneasy about what was going on in that political party, and sat powerless in provincial construction meetings, where all the action took place without me, offstage, in a bafflingly-protracted frenzy of construction graft. On my neighborhood walks, I leave my shambling middle-class hovel and regularly walk past the always-expanding, gleaming, massive mansion of the provincial construction fixer middleman who regarded me disdainfully at all those meetings and would afterward at neighborhood soirees allude to the political “incompetence” he encountered in his sinecure. I have to guess that was code for how he couldn’t imagine including the little lady in the good ole boy graft network. Why women are whistleblowers.

In that job, however, I learned what comms people are! Tragically for democracy and us all, they are the lazy, venal, narcissistic, undereducated idiots that not only blab at us from mainstream media but also reluctantly, crabbily cobble together political messaging for political parties out of the basements of legislatures. In my province, the uneducated progeny of the neoliberals and conservatives who organized and ran their parties in the early neoliberal era, these entitled brats are especially bitter because the liberal party here is still connected with the labour unions, so the CBC won’t employ them when the opposing party comes into power, as it will serve as a job parachute for real Liberal Party and Conservative Party comms hacks. Their Kampf. It seems to me the years that the party was out of power would have been golden opportunities for the comms kids to turn in their teasin’ comb and go back to junior college.

I presume from the indirect evidence that this is more or less the same situation everywhere in the Anglo-American world.

For instance, apparently some British mainstream media comms kids finally got around to investigating Russell Brand’s famously manic-depressive and sexual life in order to root out the women who had quite-rotten sexual encounters with him and to use those women to take Brand down as a public voice. This crusty political comms strategy was in Brand’s case shooting fish in a barrel, but I presume that it took so long for the comms kids to get around to it because they are such lazy fucks and too busy having drunken, sub-consensual affairs with themselves in leg basement and city bar bathrooms.

There is no world in which a prominently-sexual, manic-depressive man has not in barely-coherent, bourgeois, Australian anti-rape activist Chanel Contos’ term, been an Entitled Opportunist Rapist now and again. Contos thinks that with early intervention, the affluent men of her class can be re-educated to avoid Entitled Opportunist raping, by learning to practice mutual consent.

I was once raped by an Entitled Opportunist Rapist, an IDF solider who left an IDF soldier tour bus for an hour to stake out my home until I returned from my national park job (where he had met me). I hope that the Me-Too movement can promote consent education and reduce Entitled Opportunist raping, not only within the Master Class, but also amongst free thinker and socialist men– Particularly because it is the latter group who will be targeted and hunted down by the comms kids of the mainstream parties/media job logroll. I doubt, however, that IDF soldiers are going to stop raping. Stopping soldiers from raping is definitely not what the comms kids are in it for.

It may never be that a man with manic-depression has consistently-sufficient self-control to always practice consensual sex, and thereby both treat women better and not set himself up to be silenced by the political enemy. Brand is now silenced and lost as a freethinking working-class voice. But I remind the douchey comms kids that others will take his place, and hopefully, with the Me-Too movement’s gentle guidance, they will be able to act in their personal lives for long-term public effectiveness. Then too, patriarchal tyranny will suffer a very slight (practically unnoticeable) reduction in its vast repertoire of assaults upon women.

…

I get uncomfortable if I license myself to disparage individuals or a group. So having read a lot of The Guardian and NYT news stories lately until I am filled to the nauseated brim with their vacuous, narcissistic, no-other-interpretations-permitted messaging, and I retreat into the LRB and Piketty and other academic works, I rethought and this is what I think about what produces the detestable creature, the comms dude/dudette: Capitalist dependency. Comms kids, like so many of us, are stunted. They are not organizers. They are earnestly making a living without any off-ramps or alternatives.

The Reproduction of Inequality: Mechanism + Altruism

There are two important moments in the reduction of Enlightenment science to positivist-mechanism:

  1. The founding of the Royal Society in Britain. (See Margaret Jacobs)
  2. The rivalrous alliance between the US military and the US Anglo ruling class that emerged from WWII. See Michael J. Hogan (A Cross of Iron) and Mark Solovey (Shaky Foundations, MIT Press; Social Science for What, podcast part 2).

Characteristics of imperial Anglo-American positivist-mechanism include:

  1. Jettisoning of autonomous scientific community; military and business assume direction over scientific agenda. This dependency relationship is transformed into a patriarchal moral virtue.
  2. Rigorous focus on simplified mechanisms in isolation qua science tout court.
  3. Austro-Hungarian Empire inegalitarian governance expertise is relocated to AngloAmerican empire. In the US, this Antienlightenment infusion gives new wings to slavers.
  4. TBD

These reductions violate scientific epistemology in the following ways (TBD):

  1. Per Varoufakis 2011, there is no path forward from paradigm limits. Discipline is toggled between hard and soft premises, depending on whether evidence of limits is prominent.
  2. Compare Econ with Biology, which did transcend anti-epigenetics paradigm through pursuing that paradigm to its limits. Is the difference the degree of top-down disciplinary control? As well, there is still moral policing around a positivist-mechanist version of epigenetics, confining epigenetic knowledge to Mother-blame.
  3. Revisit Kuhn in light of Varoufakis 2011. Was he studying a specific form of scientific revolution, based in discipline & context?
  4. No knowledge goal internal to discipline (tasks and paradigm set by military and business) means Enlightenment science’s rigorous comparativism (with context, presuming scientific knowledge development across positionalities) is dropped in favor of closed equations as knowledge (See Varoufakis 2011).
  5. TBD

TBD: Interwar to Cold War history of American engineering: social composition, politics, academic politics.

Per Solovey, engineers including Vannevar Bush and Hungarian fascist/H-bomber Edward Teller worked postwar to exclude the social sciences from state funding (both the NSF and the military). The concern was that traditionally, the social sciences had formed to pursue egaliberte knowledge; under the military-finance alliance, the US was positioning to attack and reverse democratic socialism. Sneaking into NSF funding with Alpert’s quiet assistance, the social sciences worked around the engineers’ exclusionary organization, by excluding traditional Enlightenment research into comparative equality and inequality.

  1. Economics organized like engineering as a top-down fraternal hierarchy (cite). Their collective goal, per Clara Elisabetta Mattei, 2015, was to produce an inegalitarian positivist-mechanism, proving their worth to the US’s 20th century capitalist-imperial consolidation.
  2. Elite universities established an elite Sociology, modeled after Austrian empire philosopher Simmel’s intellectual agenda, and aiding the state in urban population surveillance.
  3. Area Studies, Security Studies, Anthropology: foreign population surveillance.
  4. Psychology: assisted military with foreign population control and domestic population control, military employee optimization.
  5. History: Novick 1988
  6. Creative Writing:
  7. Biology: Erik Peterson 2017, The Life Organic; Lucy Cooke 2022, Bitch.

Excluding Enlightenment science produced Counterenlightenment social sciences: Where the aim was not to help engineer inequality, the complementary goal was to manage the distribution of affliction across the working class–to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable” (as Ed Yong recently described his post-lockdown communication goal at The Atlantic). As women have entered the social sciences (and been excluded from Engineering and Economics), affliction management has been seen as patriarchal feminine moral virtue (See Elsie Parsons Clews’ and Virginia Woolf’s sociological critiques of this division of patriarchal labor).

Together, patriarchal engineering and feminine population management institutionalized inequality and reproduced inegalitarian dispositions. A key tool and virtue in inegalitarian engineering is isolating and immobilizing the population.

Case study one: Militarism (Hogan, Schrader); Carceralism (Gilmore, Davis, et al), including drugging of the incarcerated (Anthony Hatch, UMinnesota 2023).

Materialism & Cultural Anthropology

Anderson (1968) cites Britain’s two areas of home-grown intellectual expertise (as opposed to importing White Emigre intellectual hit men) as literary criticism and Anthropology. [Revise: Metaphysics were esoterically permitted within literary criticism, as long as there was no scientific acknowledgement of the metaphysics.] Anthropology had imperial utility for Britain. How has Anthropology, as an imperial tool of surveillance, fit into the larger British avoidance of political-economic and classic sociological contribution to Enlightenment knowledge?

“…(C)laiming culture as foundational, anthropology approached mind and body alike as social constructions, and knowledge practices as phenomena of symbolic exchange. Culture represented a totality of symbol-systems…The imposition of meaning (was the) condition of human existence…Knowledge was a matter of an encompassing, collective, public and shared cultural context…Geertz concluded that while ‘becoming human is becoming individual‘, we nevertheless ‘become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns'” (Nigel Rapport, 2010: 9). Geertz and Evans-Pritchard built Anthropology in deference to White Emigre Wittgenstein’s imperial-friendly linguistic reduction and dismissal of time and change (Rapport 2010: 10; Anderson 1968).

Two Unreconciled Strivings; Two Warring Ideals in One Dark Body

Pagden (2013) shows that Enlightenment knowledge has always emerged from a community of philosophers launching social science, in order to know, via comparison, the range and associated contexts of human capacity, disposition, and institutions–for the purposes of establishing the possibility of and conditions for institutionalizing distributed sovereignty and freedom, or democracy (though not in its conservative-degraded sense). We recognize that Enlightenment philosopher-cum-human scientists were naive, their understanding was developing, and they relied on commercial ventures to span out across the world and gather comparative knowledge. We also recognize, per Melville, Rediker, & Linebaugh, that internationalist “motley crews” contributed to the advancement of the most valid Enlightenment knowledge.

When Rapport describes cultural-determinist Anthropology, he is describing a collective of both Enlightenment and anti-enlightenment scholars, constrained by anti-enlightenment parameters selectively augmenting and quieting voices, and at best wholly substituting the Anthropologist-interpreted insights afforded by (often bunkered and imperially-constrained) research subjects in place of the important, corrective insights of the autonomous, internationalist motley crew. In conceptualizing knowledge as “a matter of an encompassing, collective, public and shared cultural context,” the status work of the Anthropologist in an anti-Enlightenment social context was to make culture systems legible to imperial intervention strategists.

Losing the Enlightenment, Staying Paid

Subsequent collective efforts to maintain status while containing Anthropology’s imperial surveillance function have resulted in failed projects to serve indigenous communities, as where Anthropologists retained imperial cultural-determinism but dumped out Enlightenment social-scientific knowledge, with the Ontological Turn. They reasoned that cultural-determinism without humanism corresponds to a radically-parochialist aspect of contemporary, colonized, Christianized cosmology within some indigenous communities, and adding their academic voice to amplify that separatist cultural construct, Anthropologists testified ineffectively for already-imperially-culturally-interpellated indigenous communities in colonial court and parliamentary contests over territory and resources.

Anthropologists dropped the humanist Enlightenment aspect of knowledge within a context in which the cultural-determinist mode remains steadfastly, primarily useful to imperial-commercial power. It is useful to commercial-imperial power when their expropriation target does not have the capacity to inform ideas about made connections and making reconnections in relation to the flow of pleasures (and pain) over time, across Earthly life–when their target does not have the capacity to clarify what is at stake and ignite coalitional interest in building toward human institutional and dispositional possibility. Anthropologists romantically failed to grasp imperial centre-periphery history, power distribution, and political-economic relations, as overdetermined by the culturalism conferred by prestigious imperial-function constraints.

Materialism, in Anthropology and Beyond

Nigel Rapport (2010: 2) cites Kantian cosmopolitanism, as the combination of local diversity and global commonality, to legitimate his proposal that Anthropology adopt a materialist conceptualization of human nature as species capacities and liabilities.

Rapport cites a physiologist to describe how to undertand humans not via identity or idealism, but as a specifiable kind of process. “An organism is not made distinctive by the existence of a boundary, a skin, animal physiologist Scott Turner explains (2000), but by way of what its boundary does: exert an active, adaptive control over the flows of matter and energy such that the organism’s internal state is regulated in the face of changing external conditions” (Rapport 2010: 2). I would add that the external conditions may also change so that sufficient adaptation, sufficient control over the flows of matter or energy, sufficient internal regulation is no longer possible. Or the adaptation may itself impose limits, precluding further regulation, control, or adaptation, in which case inherent/internal change reaches its limits. In either case, the animal suffers or even dies. I am saying that a liability or capacity of humans is that we are not infinite or gods.

Rapport cites the organism’s boundary interpellation with its environment to emphasize not our susceptibility to having our dispositions reorganized, but rather more masculinely, to emphasize human control over an external environment. “Regulating the flows of energy and matter across its boundary effects an orderliness in nature such that the generating organisms may be described as ‘architects and engineers of their environments’ (Turner 2000: 7). To be human is to have the capacity to attend to the world in a particular way, to direct that traffic..Human beings have unique capacities to become; they can be uniquely fulfilled and thwarted” (Rapport 2010: 2).

At this point, Rapport digs materialism into a comfortable idealist, capitalist pit for his anthropological audience, arguing in purple-tinted prose that humans are specially gifted, in that their environmental “engineering” is “uniquely subtle, complex and flexible,” and more importantly, in that humans are infinitely “becoming,” adaptable (fortunately, for neoliberals and their expropriative masters). However, Rapport’s romantic reversion to imperial Great Chain of Being logic, as well as his romantic intimations of the posthuman (Do I smell the restoration of private-property slavery upon the wind?), are unnecessary and inimical to socio-materialism or historical materialism.

It is enough and better to say–and perhaps from a more-responsible sociological perspective, easier to notice–that human capacities and limitations exist within definite ranges (observable by comparative methods, and subject to organization and disorganization), within which humans are observably plastic, developmental–and their development can be appropriated and stunted. Of interest to Enlightenment human science, human capacities include communicative and  organizational capacities, interventionary cooperative and boundary-setting capacities, and a limited range of senses as well as technological capacity to augment those senses; and human limitations include non-omniscience.

Spooks

Elite British Spooks Had Sovereign Agency

“If in the years 1941-3, when the Russians were carrying almost the whole burden of the war against Germany, they were dying in substantial numbers because (Britain) denied (them) the war’s most important source of secret information (the “Ultra” intelligence), the actions of the (socialist) Cambridge (double-agents) at that time must appear in a better light. What justification could the British advance for withholding this information – the military radio traffic of the enemy – from their own ally? Only one: that Britain’s best interest was to stand aside and watch Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia slaughter each other to the last man. Nearly forty years later, we have drifted so far to the right that many young people of liberal mind can accept that as a good policy” (N. Ascherson’s 1980 LRB 2(2) review of A. Boyle).

…

“British Intelligence, in Boyle’s chronicle, remains as weird a community as ever, in spite of all the author’s new information and captures of confidence. Amateurism, class prejudice and what Boyle calls ‘the sad pleasures of sodomy’ composed its peculiar flavour. The circumstances of my own unhappy brush with the service only confirm it. My background was ‘right’, and I was duly recommended as a likely lad by a Cambridge don (Boyle rids us of the myth that Cambridge tutors recruited assiduously for Russia, but does not add that they recruit assiduously for the home side). There followed a lunch at the Reform Club, where this 23-year-old ass received the proposal that he should go to the new Communist state of Betelgeuse in order to write a biography of its ferocious leader. An argument about where Betelgeuse was had to be settled by a visit to the Times Atlas, dated 1910, in the Club library. My real assignment, they said, was to approach leading Betelgeusians and ‘get them round to our point of view’. Uneasy, I objected that I knew nothing of the place or its language. ‘Old D. will put you in the picture,’ they chortled, returning to their port. A few days later, I was summoned to meet D. in his home. After a silent but delicious dinner, D. asked me to sit next to him on the sofa. I supposed that I was at last to be put in the picture, but D. merely grasped me tightly and wordlessly by the penis. I extracted myself and ran away, and after some days of great confusion, wrote to say that perhaps I was not mature enough for this service.

An outfit like that – and these events took place years after the ‘flight of the diplomats’ – deserves everything it gets. I suppose there was a wild brilliance about the Betelgeuse project, which would almost certainly have cost me my head. But what most impresses me, in retrospect, is their sublime confidence that after that lunch and dinner I would still be their loyal man and true” (N. Ascherson 1980).

…

An analysis of the inegalitarian, totalitarian liberal conditions that create double agents out of elites: The British double agents “all leave one with the odd impression, even Philby in his early years, that they became Soviet agents faute de mieux. What they needed was something else: a British movement of total opposition to the régime which was both respectable and formidable. They needed a divided Establishment, an alternative régime-in-waiting which they could join. Continental republics know this dualism… In Britain, still an ancien régime in this respect, Labour did not offer such an alternative, while the price of CPGB activity would obviously be impotence and ostracism. The spies didn’t see why they should be impotent and ostracised” (N Ascherson 1980).

The advantage of the US (v. 1930s UK) is that the spy agencies can rely on the dogmatic, even mysticist, sons and daughters of Chamber of Commerce ideologues, and don’t have to risk Cambridge free thinkers.

“The Thirties were a decade of rapid social change and improvement in popular living standards, as well as a time of poverty and misery for many. But Britain remained governed, financed, exploited and largely represented by the upper class…Labour was a party which, as far as the student leftist could see, would deferentially leave the old élite in place. The Cambridge spies wanted something else for Britain, something which now sounds absurd: a socialist revolution which would both smash the patrician hegemony to which the spies were such guilty heirs, and restore British greatness and independence…one could argue that the Cambridge spies betrayed their friends, in this instance, but not necessarily their country.”

https://www.lrb.co.uk/…/neal…/what-sort-of-traitors

As a political sociologist with a natural interest in how agential and other forms of social change interact, I am intrigued about Ascherson’s observations upon the inversion of liberal-conservative totalitarianism and the grand tradition of inegalitarianism at the heart of the imperial beast, amongst elites with esoteric strategic capacity. (Obviously, it wasn’t all that disruptive, though. It seems impossible to shake inegalitarianism at the imperial core.) In addition to reminding me of Streunsee’s influential intervention in Danish monarchical governance, the role of 1930s global socialism in prompting Cambridge spy autonomy strikes me as faintly analogous to the role of the Enlightenment in prompting the more-consequential class “betrayal” of the female Swedish nobility in the early 19th century (cf Barton 1986). Global surges of Enlightenment ideas can prevent the capitalist-rentier class from relying on institutionalized reproduction of inegalitarianism and incapacitation security. Hence, the deployment of excess profits and rents into military, police, and comms/political organization.

The CIA, James Jesus & the Lovestone Empire

Jay Lovestone (nee Liebstein) built and ran the Lovestone Empire for the CIA, under the direction of James Jesus Angleton. The Lovestone Empire consisted of anticommunist unions. An anti-Stalinist, Lovestone was groomed by David Dubinsky to direct labour union organization and resources to anti-communist and pro-war causes. Lovestone had started out a socialist before his eventful hard-right move, like so many men of his social background in the 20th c. He insisted that the US could never become socialist; and he influenced the antistatist economic modernizer Bukharin.

James Jesus Angelton was a Latino-Anglo son of a Chamber of Commerce guy who invested in ATMs. Angelton was an anticommunist who worked with the Israelis and Jay Lovestone to kill off communist organization in unions. Angleton’s work ensured the electoral victory of Christian Democrats over communists in Western Europe. Angleton supervised the CIA’s comprehensive domestic covert surveillance project (called Operation CHAOS) to control US citizens. He targeted both Olaf Palme and Pierre Trudeau, amongst so many others. The LRB’s May issue 40(9) reviews a history of Angleton’s work. His is a story of how you get carte blanche, all possible credibility and credit in capitalism.

Angleton was educated in the Ivies, in literature–poetry–and New Criticism. That institutional base was an anticommunist hotbed. But that’s not all. I can’t recommend the “doth protest too much” Thomas Power LRB article, but it does show how the adoption of a literary analysis technique like New Criticism could buoy a career, in spookery. Like today’s Neo-materialism, New Criticism eschewed sociological craft and context as a triangulator for interpretation. The effect was to, for the moment, permit the critic greater authority…until he’d spent institutional credibility. If the same technique were imported by a spook king to the interpretation of the world, it would bestow, for a time, the same mystical institutional authority. At an institutional and social cost.

This is the way with the importation of all anti-scientific textual analysis to analysis of the world. Good career move while you can produce the performance to get away with it, and apres moi, le deluge.

Angleton was preparing the US-Israeli secret police relation. Shin Bet chief Amos Manor described Angleton, one of the US and global capitalism’s leading spooks, as “fanatic about everything”, with a “tendency towards mystification.”

Fanatic mystification: What passes for credible, what is given all credit in this system.

Absolute Corruption

The citation for the NYTimes story on the limited, censored release of CIA FoI documents in 2007, RE: the CIA attempts to assassinate Castro, as well as domestic spying, torture, and CIA-mafia connections, from the 1960s and early 1970s:

Mazzetti, Mark and Tim Weiner. 2007. “Files on illegal spying show C.I.A. skeletons from Cold War.” The New York Times, June 27.