One of the old canards we’ve had a look at here before is the (typically) generationalist argument that if the kidz aren’t marching in the streets, then politics must have disappeared from contemporary culture. Here, culture is a key term because “68 thought” (to Anglicise a useful if ill-intentioned phrase from conservative French philosophers - representatives of what Dominique Lecourt calls the “mediocracy”) exploded the links between politics and culture, yet arguably dissolved itself into culture. That’s a more complex story than I have time to tell here, but I wanted to have a look at some of the afterlives of the protests against the War on Iraq that happened all across the world on February 15 2003.
It’s often argued that the protests failed to “stop the war”, and thus were fruitless. This, of course, is a rather odd criterion by which to judge them, because I’m unaware of any protests which have actually succeeded in stopping wars… So the second argument we’re normally confronted with is that the protests failed to translate into an ongoing movement. That might again be the wrong yardstick - in that the “peace movement” of the 60s had its conditions of possibility in its antecedents in the anti-nuclear struggles of the Cold War era. Possibly quite wrongly, disarmament and nuclear proliferation are no longer perceived as subjects for mobilisation because 1989 and 1991 dissolved the fear of nuclear holocaust in our social imaginary, a fear sort of displaced onto “terrorism” but largely now absent.
I think you could make an argument, though, that the anti-War concerns of 2003 translated into powerful sources of electoral change - in a number of countries - Spain, Australia being two that spring immediately to mind and now America and Britain, where the bellicose regimes of Bush and Blair/Brown are now in their final stages of dissolution for reasons closely linked to the Iraq War. It would be very interesting to map the influence in all this of what we might call Open Source Protest, and here I’m not just thinking of GetUp!, MoveOn.Org and the “netroots” but the more explicitly cultural aspects of anti-war sentiment.
Here, I want to offer - not as evidence, because these thoughts are very preliminary and sketchy, and I’m throwing them out there for discussion rather than as theses I’d defend as such - Le Tigre’s video for the 2004 song New Kicks. You can download the song from their website. Perhaps because the video is proprietary content, it can’t be embedded, but can be watched on YouTube. And perhaps because of that concern with intellectual property, the song itself has inspired a number of montages prodused on YouTube and indeed a commercial for Mike Gravel’s anti-war Libertarian Party candidacy.
There’s another story to be told here about notions of purity and commercialism in music (and I’d defy anyone to suggest that the big 60s protest songs and artists were any less mixed up in commercial considerations), and indeed the purported absence of any activist inspired music and bands in this millennium (which is completely untrue - that absence is only in the eye of the beholder).
But what I think is particularly interesting in this context is that Le Tigre themselves might be understood as exemplary of a certain “mash up” culture - a distinct phenomenon of the 80s and 90s which has been gathering speed and diffusing its reach ever since. Larry Lessig is interesting, as always, on the legal impediments to “mash up” culture, and it’s perhaps not surprising that a form of cultural practice which challenges notions of property and propriety meets its match in the legal system. But I suspect that - as a vehicle for political expression - this usually behind the scenes activity (as far as analysts, commentators and the meejah are concerned, that is) is a major vehicle of disseminating counter-cultural messages in these new times.
Precisely. All war protests are failures.
I was army until’63 and was anti Vietnam however the supporters were in the majority at that time.It seems to me , and I have no figures to back this up, that opposition to the war in Iraq far exceeded those of the early days of Vietnam, and now have few supporters at all.
Craig Mc, flirts with the fringes of opacity with this comment.
Asserting that protest movements ought to be counted as failures because they failed to stop wars from starting is setting the bar much too high. Regimes usually don’t go to war in the first place unless they are certain enough of the tractability of their populations. Nevertheless, how many wars were prevented by the hangover of the “Vietnam Syndrome” in the US” between 1975 and 1991?
Many wars have been stopped at least in part by concerted civilian action:
Russia, 1917.
Germany, 1918.
Italy, 1943.
US civil rights protestors faced down the paramilitary of segregationist states in the 1960s.
US, 1974. By that date, under the influence of civilian protest, the US Armed forces had suffered severe collapse in discipline and morale.
Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Civilians in Eastern Europe stopped supporting Communist regimes, which ended the Cold War. Especially in the soviet Union, soldiers changed sides due to the determination of civilian protestors.
Blair, Howard and Bush suffered a collapse in credibility in the eyes of voters because the anti-war movement has keep their lies in the minds of electorates.
I don’t think the protests were a failure because they didn’t immediately stop the war. It would be extremely rare for that to happen, I’d say. However, they did lead to a shift in public opinion, seen in the moratorium marches in the 60s and protest marches against the Iraq invasion.
In the US, several Kent state University students were killed while protesting against the Vietnam War, when State Troopers were called in. That was a huge, widely reported shock and I think it was the catalyst in changing public support for the war. I also think the anti-Vietnam War protests were interesting because protesters were mainly under voting age and were the ones most likely to be conscripted.
And as Katz has pointed out, protests keep public attention focussed on what the protesters are on about.
Well, that’s the argument in the post!
Does anyone actually read posts? There’s a more interesting point made in there than is dreamt of in Craig Mc’s philosophy!
Wow, Gravel’s a Libertarian now? This blows my mind considering Nader was all but endorsing Kucinich and Gravel in the early part of the primaries.
Gravel’s switch:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Gravel#Switch_to_Libertarian_Party
Kim says:
Yes, who can forget how Howard and Bush both lost office in 2004 after a wave of anti-war protests discredited their candidacy. And then Blair lost the 2005 UK election, against the anti-war Tory Michael Howard.
Ohh, wait a minute, that must have happened in the alternative Kim-verse. The one that she seems to spend an awful lot of time thrashing about in.
In the real world Bush, Blair and Howard all won office in the elections held after the Iraq war. As I predicted they would over 2003-4. Mainly because of property booms and incumbent pork-barrelling. The Iraq war was not a major political factor for swinging voters.
The AGE reports a general decline in youth political engagement, relative to the sixties and seventies. Ex-radical Dr Burgmann laments the latte-sipping cultural elites who wont get off their bums and onto the streets:
More generally most forms of traditional civic engagement - parties, churches, unions - are in secular decline. So its little surprise that more fashionable political activism should also suffer from the ennervating effect of post-modernist solipsistic coccooning.
Katz: “Blair, Howard and Bush suffered a collapse in credibility in the eyes of voters because the anti-war movement has keep their lies in the minds of electorates.”
Mmm. Which no doubt goes far to explain why each of the above was re-elected following the war.
Mark simply asserts as a self-evident truth that the anti-war movement played a significant part in electoral defeats of governments in Spain, Australia, the US and UK.
Yeah, OK, I’m willing to accept the argument re Spain. But regarding the others, all governments get turfed out sooner or later. Does Mark have any psephological data to quantify how big an effect the war had?
Also, don’t count your chickens. What if McCain gets in or UK Labour clings on at the next general election? Would that then prove the opposite — that the anti-war movement has actually had very little effect on domestic elections?
Finally, Katz’s statement that “Many wars have been stopped at least in part by concerted civilian action,” while true, shifts the focus away from protest movements to the more general concept of “civilian action”.
For example, Italy leaving the Axis in 1943 was, as I understand it, the result of civilian elites coming to the conclusion that Italy was on the losing side. That’s a very different thing from street protest movements.
Sorry, ridicule heaped on Kim in comment #8 should properly have been directed at mark. Kim’s posts are ridiculous enough as it is without pressing dodgy charges against them.
Slow burn, Paulus.
Bush has a lower popularity than any other President, Blair threw away Labour’s huge majority and “New Labour” is now terminal, and Howard’s gone.
Note also that the post is trying to complicate simple equations of protest and defeat, and suggest a broader and longer acting cultural shift, whose fires are stoked away from the streets.
The Age peddles a narrative that baby boomer ex-protesters want to hear.
Try some empirical evidence, much as it goes against the grain, Jack:
http://www.anu.edu.au/howard/Vromen%20-%20Youth%20participation%20Howard%20conf%202006.pdf
http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2004/03/vromen.html
Some antidotes for Paulus’ simplism:
1. It takes time for protest movements to change the democratic masses. To say that protest movements alone ended Howard’s rule, or the GOP majority in Congress is incorrect. The situation in Blair’s Labour Party was still more complex.
2. The future of British Labour and of McCain are quite different. Labour may win by exculpating itself from the Blair legacy. And a vote for the Tories is likely to be understood as a vote for Bushist policies. McCain may or may not win. Let’s find out what happens before we argue over its significance.
3. In 1943 Mussolini was restored as a German puppet ruler of the Italian Social Republic. Italian partisans rose up against that government and against its German puppeteers. Mussolini awas eventually captured and killed by Communist partisans.
Paulus’ distinction between “protest movements” and “civilian action” is quite unclear. All of the cases I mentioned, except those surrounding the Iraq War, involved illegal action and often violence.
I read the post and didn’t really understand what it was about, sorry, but Ian McEwan wrote a novel about 15 feb 2003; also, mashups are not exactly a 1980s and 90s phenomenon! Try 2002-2006? Dorian used to make mashups, here are of his two classics:
Cyndi vs Mariah: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRtO3FKurho
Supertramp vs Gnarls Barkley vs Rockwell vs The Who: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOoMRTKZa2Y
Mashup culture, Laura - see the talk by Larry Lessig linked in the post.
Mark linked the wikipedia page on mashups. Do you not consider actual mash a part of mashup culture, Kim?
To say the war in Iraq cost Howard and Blair their jobs is a hopeless stretch as has been pointed out above. The “Slow Burn” argument is in the same category. We are talking about years later, more like slow fossilisation. Particularly for Howard. I think Britain has a stronger anti-American streak now than Oz.
You could mount an argument that perhaps it was a member of a suite of negatives but to go beyond that is just silly.
I think the anti-war movement has longer term problems however. With Petraeus deploying COIN so successfully in Iraq the anti-war movement is losing its mantra of guerilla wars are unwinnable which it managed to manufacture out of the Vietnam “defeat”. That isn’t the only arrow in the antiwar quiver but its a big one that’s drying up and disappearing.
Rightly or wrongly wars that are won are still very popular.
That said even with McCain in he Whitehouse next year the absolute most we are likely to see is airstrikes and some SF operations against Iran beyond cleaning up Iraq and Afghanistan. Absolutely no land invasion despite the media trying to whip this one up repeatedly
Mashups (in the general sense, as combination/repurposing/re-signifiying) I think have a long tradition in for example, detournement and “conform to deform”. If you consider detournement it’s a tradition that dates to the the late 50s or early 60s and via the Situationist International and Lettrisme to Surrealism.
Musically it goes back - directly - to at least the 1980s. Notwthstanding the much earlier examples given on the wikipedia page there’s always things like Culturcide’s “Tacky Souvenirs from Pre-Revolutionary America” that consists of them, basically singing over and otherwise mutilating big 1980s hits. I can never hear Pat Benetar “Love is Battlefield” without thinking “Love is a Cattleprod” …
#12 Kim May 18th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Kim, the Age article I linked to quotes Ms Vromen, a tireless booster of youth political agendas and the source of both your “empirical” links. A funny way for that paper to peddle a flattering “narrative that the baby boomer ex-protesters want to hear”.
Kim says:
Ms Vromen’s work does not rise to the level of credible empirical evidence, no matter how many puff pieces she publishes in the obscure Left wing jounrals. It was too small (400) and lacked longtitudinal perspective (compared to previous cohorts).
I would rather rely on the evidence of my own lyin’ eyes than take the word of a leftwing sociologist. THey see a current generation of youth heavily populated with lard-assed couch potatoes playing video games or glued to ipods. Not exactly promising activist material.
Young people want to be where the action is. Politics no longer attracts ambitious young people because politics is no longer where the action is. Action is in the financial markets or in the mines or chasing fame in the Anglospheric metropolises.
The youth disengagement from politics is most obvious in the collapse of student unionism and the “Young” wings of the major political parties. These are the breeding and trainging grounds of future politicians. Young people have better things to do than stack branches, close ranks behind factional heavies or sit through dreary meetings ignored by head office.
Net roots or on-line virtual ommunities are no substitute for actual political participation because they are not political actors. They are voyeurs and tend to watch event unfold with impotent rage.
Sorry, Kim, but I think that’s a meta-narrative that Gen X boomer-haters want to hear. Speaking as a “baby boomer ex-protester” and as someone who’s watched the changes in student life and student demographics over more than *cough*three*cough* decades, (1) I don’t believe the Age, (2) I wouldn’t want to hear it even if I thought it were true, and (3) practically everyone I know well in the Boomer cohort has an individual take on this stuff, depending on how they vote and whether they went to university and and whether they’ve got kids and how old the kids are and Goddess knows what-all else. There really is not any generational lockstep about this. Or anything else, if it comes to that. A lot of the Vietnam protest activity happened because some of us were directly affected: there was a very real fear that the blokes would be conscripted, which some of them were. It was personal and fairly age-specific.
The Age is just beating up a line on a slow news day; I know Verity Burgmann and I’m quite sure (having just read it carefully) that the quotations have been cherry-picked by Janet de Silva and then the pickings have been picked by Jack, whom we know has a barrow to push.
Katz, I don’t particularly disagree with your points 1 and 2, except that when you say, “It takes time for protest movements to change the democratic masses”, you are just stating an assumption. Maybe, in general, protest movements actually have very little real effect, in the shorter or longer term, on the grand flow of democratic politics. I’m open to be persuaded otherwise, but I would like to see evidence that goes a little deeper than the pop songs Mark invokes (interesting though that is).
As for your point 3, the Salò Republic was an irrelevant (though amusing) footnote to history. Mussolini’s fate was decided earlier by the elites of the Grand Council of Fascism and the King.
My wider point is that while “civilian action”, as a general term, has achieved all sorts of political outcomes, even in military dictatorships, it’s not the street theatre by itself that ever changes anything. You can have a million street marches, but they will achieve precisely zip unless government and/or business elites get on board.
11 Kim May 18th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
SHorter Kim: Swap Occams Razor for a blunt instrument, to bludgeon the facts into convenient spin.
Kim’s cred as a psephologist would carry a little more weight if she actually managed to competently predict an election. Instead of incompetently retrodicting them.
The main reason why the LN/P, GOP and BP will lost/lose power is because of the periodic recession of the electoral pendulum. A subsidiary reason is the slow down in economic activity, esp property boom.
Kim says:
Kim apparently believes this sort of thing, given her delivery is with face unerringly straight. I am trying to imagine David Cameron (Blair-lite) and Kevin Rudd (Howard-lite) as politicians whose “fires” are somehow being “stoked” by net-roots activists. SOmehoe the image refuses to jell.
Laura, there are two links - the first I’m assuming is to define mash up for those who don’t know what it means. But it’s part of the phrase “mash up culture” which refers to something broader which Lessig talks about - and the aside points people to Lessig for more. I also agree with what Tyro has written.
Dr Cat, my response, being a response to Jack Strocchi, should be understood as heavily laden with irony.
I’m sure it’s The Age (and Jack Strocchi) who think in these dumb arsed categories, not Dr Burgmann.
Now, for all the “war doesn’t matter” folks - really?
I think Tony Blair would disagree with you. I suspect George W. Bush, if he ever stops to ask himself why he’s so unpopular, might as well. If we don’t grant him that degree of self-reflexivity, his constant “history will judge me (and my war) more favourably” bleh might be a clue to the fact that someone or someones in the White House gets it.
Kim, the issue is not that “the war doesn’t matter”. It’s whether the organised anti-war movement matters.
Maybe, Bush’s and Blair’s standing has more to do with the reporting of the war in the media, and the sustained criticism of the decision to go to war and its subsequent handling (including from many centrist and right-wing commentators).
I know of no one who saw the big marches in 2003 and changed their opinion of Bush/Blair/Howard simply because there were x thousand protesters in the streets.
Righteo. A bunch of “lard-arsed couch potatoes playing video games” are “chasing fame in the Anglospheric metropolises”. Perhaps if you shortened your comments, Jack, the risk of self-contradiction by repeating incompatible anecdotal stereotypes from your “lyin’ eyes” might be mitigated?
Tell Hillary that. I’m sure she’s well aware of the influence of virtual communities in turning out votes for Obama and raising cash.
Well, neither really is “x-lite”, but let’s leave that aside for a moment. [One “social scientific prediction” made by Lefty E is that Jack Strocchi would be the last person standing in the blogosphere equating Howard and Rudd. It seems to be coming true.]
The whole point is about the shaping or the movement of public opinion towards a specific goal. Political elites have to be at least minimally responsive to public opinion, when strongly held. Thus the recognised impracticality in almost all quarters of American elite opinion on continuing the war in its current form. No one is arguing that the opposites to the incumbents are somehow some lefty pin-up politicians.
The only reason you can’t see this, Jack, is that you cling to your “all politicians are cultural dries” narrative under circumstances where it’s entirely irrelevant. But if we’re going to stick to electoral politics, why did Howard give up the “terrorists will win in Iraq if Labor withdraws” line after his Obama baitin’ in March last year, with idiots like Nelson only resurrecting it as a sign of desparation during the campaign itself? Why were the Libs so keen to avoid discussing the war?
And - everywhere outside the Strocchiverse - a lot of people are quite happy to think that Australian combat troops will not be in Iraq in a matter of a few months, and many are quite happy to think public opinion had something to do with that.
No, that’s not the issue, Paulus, or at least not the issue the post raised. Does anyone actually try to read posts, or just assume it’s the same old same old comments opportunity?
The whole point of the post is that anti-war sentiment diffused among the populations of several nations through more complex means than a Vietnam War style peace movement with repeated and sustained marches.
I thought that would be clear to anyone who read it for meaning.
Forgot to say, very cool vid by Le Tigre and very hot song (as always!)…
You’re being insulting now, Kim.
I have not argued with Mark’s observation that political activism finds cultural expression in modern forms, such as the mashup music that Mark refers to.
What I do wonder is whether any forms of anti-war political activism — including marches, “netroot” campaigns, music — actually contributed to the “powerful sources of electoral change” that confront Blair and Bush and unseated Howard.
There is no doubt an understandable desire on the part of those who organise protest movements or write protest songs to believe that, when the target of their attacks finally collapses, that their efforts have contributed to his demise. But correlation does not always equal causation. That’s all I’m sayin’.
25 Kim May 19th, 2008 at 12:43 am
YOung people are not a uniform blob. Trust a diversity-booster to confuse complexity with contradiction.
My implied classification of young people into active “goers” and inactive “stay-at-homers” is exclusive, if not exhaustive. I am focusing on the “goers”, who are now not going into politics. That was once a career path for “movers and shakers”. This kind of person has better things to do than get back-stabbed by staffers or rolled by factional heavies.
That class of young people were never the kind who now veg out on the couch in their droves. There are now so many oppportunities for the un-motivated young person to do nothing, its just embarassing.
Kim says:
Wrong on all counts. (And notice the slide from virtual communities of youth activists to some amorphous “public opinion”. Talk about bait and switch.)
Rudd is leaving a military contingent remaining in Iraq. The contingent Howard sent to Iraq was in any case, vanishingly small and engaged in civil re-construction (rotten war criminals!). Also, Howard was reportedly planning to bring them back sometime over the next period of office, probably after Bush leaves office.
In general the Iraq war did not damage the LN/P that much, nor help the ALP. You can see that from the issues polling, where HOward continued to trump the ALP leader on national security well after the war went sour.
The war is a political non-starter as most Australian voters realise what I predicted from the outset: that the ADF’s participation in Iraq was symbolic US-AUS coalition bolstering and not a serious war effort. Icensed Left-winge net-rooters are expert at missing the bleeding obvious.
Kim says:
Tell Lefty E that his social science predictive skills are as lousy as yours. Peter Hartcher just uncovered yet another case where Rudd/Swan have stolen Howard/Costello’s policy clothes.
And of course on cultural policy Rudd is Dry as a Bone in matters of policy substance as opposed to political symbolism. I see that Chris Evans is amping up Howards skilled immigration program whilst underplaying fatuous multicultural guff. ANd the interevention remains in place and will continue indefinitely, much to the disgust (and disgrace) of the Cultural Left.
A good thing to for those citizens who would prefer indigenous children to remain unraped and hate crime waves to remain un-spreed.
I invite Lefty E to to lay money on a bet that Rudd will stop me-tooing Howard on those issues before the next election. My guess is that he lacks the ticker.
YOu seem to have a desperate need to exaggerate the political differences b.w Howard and Rudd in order to boost your sagging ideological self-esteem. I believe Freud somwhere diagnoses this complaint as “the narcissism of small differences”. Pointing to a love that none dare name.
Sorry, Paulus, I’m not trying to be insulting! I just get a bit frustrated I suppose, as someone who writes posts, when the discussion just follows the usual patterns without much reference to the post itself. That wasn’t supposed to be directed at you, and I apologise if it was! The tone must have come out wrong - I really wasn’t trying to be snarky.
I think the post was trying to suggest that it’s difficult to measure causation in these things. There are some very interesting questions raised as to how public opinion (and no one denies - whatever inferences might be drawn about electoral consequences - that public opinion in all countries concerned is now overwhelmingly against the war) is formed and shifts under conditions which are quite different from those of previous wars in terms of how that opinion can shape itself as well as being shaped.
The irrelevant diatribes of Jack Strocchi certainly don’t assist in exploring what are some interesting questions. I think the reason why the post advanced the points it did as tentative hypotheses was to stimulate a discussion that might go beyond the usual stuff.
No probs, Kim.
And don’t get mad at Monsieur Strocchi — I’m sure he’s just ‘negging’ you!
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/the-science-of-insulting-women/
Anyway, back on topic, the one “form of cultural practice” concerning the Iraq War that most appeals to me (boring sod that I am) is the documentary. And this conflict has arguably produced better documentary coverage — while the war is still underway — than any previous conflict in history.
Unfortunately, it often doesn’t get out to Australia — not even to the art-house cinemas. I’m thinking particularly of this film, which the US critics were raving about — “the best and saddest film of the year” — but which, as far as I’m aware, never got a release in this country (at least not in Adelaide).
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/noendinsight?q=no%20end%20in%20sight
Does anyone know if SBS has shown it and I missed it? Will I have to buy a DVD from the States (and then somehow get around the NTSC vs PAL issue)?
I don’t necessarily disagree with this.
The great exemplar was Vietnam. In Feb and March of 1968, the “Wise Men” counselled LBJ, against his own better judgment, to dump Nam.
One of their arguments was that they were disturbed by the noise in the streets and the noise from their own children at the dinner table.
These elites may well have hung tough, but for the disquiet over dessert.
So in this case at least the argument can be made that the elites were responding to the protest movement.
The same applies in different setings to the women’s, union, and Irish Unionist movements in Britain up to 1914, as described by George Dangerfield.
In sophisticated polities this is how it often works, because elites are usually intelligent enough to know when they have been backing a loser, and when everything has to change in order that everything remain the same.
Perhaps the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003 were the first nail in the coffin for Howard. There was similar, but nowhere near as widespread unease about Howard’s anti-terror laws, refugee policies, which were extremely widely publicised via the internet so far as I can work out. Anti-globalisation protests were also prominent, but again only a relatively small number of people protested, usually to negative TV news coverage. I reckon the biggest cultural influence in Oz was the Chaser programs, culminating in the Ben Laden APEC stunt. But the week after week bashing of Howard by the Glass House team must’ve had some effect. After all, the RWDBs on the ABC Board pulled it off air.
Mashups (in the general sense, as combination/repurposing/re-signifiying)
yes, but in that general sense, why not go all the way back thru the entire history of adaptation? Because once you do you end up with nothing less & nothing smaller than the system of textuality and the mechanics of mimesis themselves: every text quotes and every text re-presents.
Lessig and other crusading types (eg the authors of the ‘libre society’ manifesto http://www.makeworlds.org/node/66 ) have a rhetorical stake in emphasising the unbroken continuity of traditions of quotation because doing so places current copyright principles in the worst possible light. And Lessig, with respect, is a lawyer, not an aesthetician, and I don’t think he really cares much about understanding different mutations of intertextuality.
I prefer to hold for as long as possible a sense of the historical and formal differences between different modes of adaptation. Mashup or bootlegging in the limited sense I find most interesting is a specific product of the present age and its combination of the following elements - P2P and fast internet, DIY culture, cheap easy and ubiquitous audio engineering technology, the heroic romance of bricolage and piracy, and the notion that the archive of culture is now the matrix in which we are all wandering.
I do agree that some people (Negativland in particular) were doing a version of mashup before it got popular but minus the internet element I think it’s better to call the previous iterations something else.
Remix artiste Vicky Bennett (People Like Us) has the right idea: she calls her work ‘avant-retard’, a wonderfully appropriate and specific label for her practice.
Thanks for the comments, folks. I’m aware of the fact that it’s difficult to assign relative causality to different pressures on voting, but it’s correct to say what I’m more interested in teasing out in this post is the cultural differences between previous periods where anti-war sentiment became widespread and the Iraq War experience. Obviously to adjudicate on this definitively would require a lot of research, but contra Jack Strocchi, I thought the point of blogging was to throw out some ideas and see what others think, rather than indulge in some sort of competition for who can pick election results dressed up in pseudo-scientific terminology. In many ways, what goes on with politics and popular culture *understood in the broadest possible sense* is much more interesting than horse-race politics.
I’m in approximately the same demographic as Dr Cat, and have three sons aged 24, 30 and 33. They are all, in their own ways, at least as politically engaged as I was (and am), in fact the oldest is probably slightly more bolshie than I. We all marched against the Iraq military adventure, as did a lot of other people ranging in age from aging hippies like myself to Gen-Y yoof. On purely anecdotal evidence (and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking), I’m reluctant to accept that young people today are any less politically engaged than we boomers, or for that matter our parents’ generation. (I clearly recall just exactly how popular those of us protesting against the Vietnam military adventure weren’t with the bulk of our peers, as an aside.)
It’s very lazy thinking to assume that, just because young people do things differently from us, that they’re doing nothing, and to substitute a few stereotypes for reality.
Can we leave ‘opensource’ alone, please? I’d prefer it to retain its original meaning and focus on software. You can co-opt ‘whatever two point oh’ if you like, as it doesn’t mean that much.
Open source doesn’t exactly work like that, Jacques, and neither does linguistic change!
Mark;
Oh really? What would happen if I start to rail about firemen, chairmen, workmen, husbandry, midwifery, etc etc? A lot of these terms have been evicted from the language and bugger linguistic evolution.
It just saddens me when words lose their original meaning because they become applied to anything and everything willy bloody nilly. “Paradigm shift”, for instance, used to have real explanatory power. Now it’s pretty much expected language for the introduction of things as ‘revolutionary’ as new toasters.
I don’t want to see ‘open source’ go the same way. I am reclaiming this word, this term, for the geeks to whom it rightfully belongs. If it’s OK (and it is) for my GLBTI brothers and sisters everywhere to reclaim queer, gay etc then it’s OK for me to reclaim ‘open source’ for oppressed geeks everywhere.
Jacques, it’s hardly open source open source if you lay exclusive claim to usage rights. You’ve got to allow others to make modifications and distribute the concept (as long as they acknowledge in full the derivation, I agree with you).
…
“Midwife” is not a deprecated word. There can be male midwives.
If you are going to co-opt a term, you should borrow the terminology of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, which is generally about the constitutions of software societies, if you like. Cathedral politics is then the ultra-central, ultra-controlled mainstream politics, and Bazaar politics is the free-wheeling, anyone-can-join-in stuff that the net has facilitated.
This works better because open source does not necessarily dictate a social structure. It specifically refers to a model of licensing for software; that’s what it was coined to describe. Some FLOSS projects are highly cathedralesque, some are bazaaresque. Some practice structured anarchy, some are feudalistic, still others are democratic. Some use rotating dictatorships.
Do you see my point?
For the benefit of those following along with Liam’s point made above, refer to the Open Source Definition: http://opensource.org/docs/osd
Also worth reading (on OSD and the subject of the original post) is John Robb’s irregular blog Global Guerrillas which has made extensive use of the term Open Source War.
I guess the problem, here, Jacques, is that you’re trying to hold back the floodgates when they’re already open. Terms like “bazaar politics” require explanation, while “open source politics” has a connotation most people immediately understand! I do feel for the oppressed geeks, though, but on the other hand, you could take the linguistic extension and expansion as a compliment?
No Mark. Nobody ever celebrates the co-opting and misuse of their jargon.
I don’t feel for the oppressed geeks about OSD. They made a wonderful term and a very workable concept and forgot to reserve all rights to its use.
It’s too late now—the humanities people have taken it back to their places and forked it (ahem).
Not sure about that, FDB. Sociologists are quite happy to have people talking about “Protestant work ethic” even if it’s a bit of a distortion of Weber’s argument!
There’s an irony in this. Liam just nailed it.
Nifty, I know this one too. Why are you blaming the victim, Mark?
Amusing, Jacques, but no cigar!