Peter Frase

I’m in Brussels for the rest of the weekend, so I’m putting these up a little early before I descend into a haze of *moules frites* and trappist beer.

- I know I said the media was failing extra hard last week, but this week might have been even worse. The Oakland march/strike/shutdown of the port was one of the most remarkably huge, dynamic, unexpected mass protests I’ve ever seen, at least as best I can tell from here in Europe. But if you watched TV or read the major papers, you’d think the whole thing was nothing put window-breaking, arson, and fighting with the cops. I’m grateful to all the folks who have been on the ground covering Occupy Oakland on the web an Twitter–some of whom ended up in jail for their trouble.

- Speaking of throwing journalists in jail, Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah has been imprisoned by the military once again. Read his [letter from a Cairo jail](http://sultanalqassemi.blogspot.com/2011/11/translation-of-article-by-detained.html).

- [This post](http://www.macroresilience.com/2011/11/02/innovation-stagnation-and-unemployment/) (via Steve Randy Waldman) is long and fairly dense, but the core argument is simple, and it explains how technological unemployment and “great stagnation” theories of the economy can both be true at the same time. In a nutshell, we’re seeing lots innovation in *making the same stuff with fewer workers*, but not much innovation in *coming up with new stuff to make*. See the post for an explanation, and make sure to read all the way to the end: the concluding recommendations make me think once again that if you’re thinking seriously about economic policy that addresses fundamental problems, all roads lead to a guaranteed income.

- Superstitions of the bourgeoisie: how the meritocratic elite [mentally cripple](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-death-of-preschool) their own children.

- ["The City of London will remain outside the authority of parliament. Domestic and foreign banks will be permitted to vote as if they were human beings, and their votes will outnumber those cast by real people. Its elected officials will be chosen from people deemed acceptable by a group of medieval guilds..."](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval)

- I hate to pick on somebody who’s just an intern at the *American Prospect*, but [this post](http://www.prospect.org/article/you-say-tomato-i-say-potato) is an absolutely perfect example of the kind of confused un-ideological partisanship I recently wrote about. This guy claims that Obama is a “pragmatist” who believes that “realism, data, and debate—not ideology —make for effective long-term policy”, whereas Mitt Romney is only out to “get more votes, even if bad policy is the price.” But if Obama has no ideology, what criterion does he use to determine what counts as “good” policy? Pragmatism has to be in the service of some ideologically driven goal, otherwise it’s just…opportunistic flip-flopping in the pursuit of votes. Relatedly, I agree that [there is no such thing as a disinterested technocrat](http://ipeatunc.blogspot.com/2011/11/there-is-no-technocracy-qotd.html), merely “different, competing interest groups with different, competing preferences”.

- Cops are [the worst](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/nypd-scandals-keep-rolling-in/247752/). One reason I’m thankful to my parents for sending me to urban public schools with lots of non-white kids and punks and skaters and graffiti writers: despite being an upper middle-class straight white guy, I learned early on that police are dangerous and scary, and you should do whatever you can to avoid getting anywhere near them. If I ever have kids, that’s what I’ll teach them as well.

- At last, the [Orwell take-down](http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2011/11/orwells-other-island.html) we all needed. The bonus Perry Anderson quote is great as well.

- The Occupy movement has mostly chosen good targets and strategies, but “Bank Transfer Day” is [kind of a dumb idea](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/01/why-the-big-banks-arent-sweating-bank-transfer-day/). Doug Henwood [covered this](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Move_your_money.html) back when it was called “Move Your Money” and was being promoted by Arianna Huffington.

- Here’s a call for ["another anarchism"](http://www.zcommunications.org/towards-another-anarchism-by-andrej-grubacic), which will “fight for and win reforms short of revolution in way that both improve people’s conditions and options now, and that also create opportunities for further victories in the future.” Uh, that’s what Gorz called the strategy of “non-reformist reform”, and us Marxists and social democrats at [Democratic Socialists of America](http://dsausa.org) have been advocating it for years. But hey, call it anarchism if you like–welcome aboard!