Reflections of a stormy petrel

Against the two-party system

fpb — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 18:56:49 GMT

Democracy means rule of the majority. No system in which 36% of voters get to kick around the remaining 64% has any claim to be called democratic. You may be happy that your lot get to dictate how the rest of us live, but please don't try to make out it's anything but the power of a minority. (That is valid across the board. I detest UKIP. But the notion that one MP is proper representation for three million votes is a very, very unfunny joke - and I'm being polite.)

"The smack of firm government" is, in my experience, badly overrated. My country used to be mocked for having governments that lasted six months. But these governments, whose ever-shifting names reflected nothing more than constant politicking within a fairly stable majority, somehow managed to get a shattered and starving country out of the shadow of military catastrophe and civil war and into the peaks of the industrialized world - the world's seventh largest economy by 1960, even sixth or fifth for a while in the eighties, still the eight or ninth today, in spite of the rise of China and East Asia.

Sure, much of that was a part of the great recovery that took place across western Europe and Japan in the fifteen years aftter World War Two. It was not only in Italy, but also in Germany – a country that had been at the head of European economy since 1870 – that people spoke of an “economic miracle”. But Italy came from a considerably lower level. The country, which had been the richest in Europe until 1500, had suffered from increasing foreign dominance, and since 1796 and the Napoleonic invasion, had been practically strangled. She had missed the Industrial Revolution altogether. By the time an Italian state was created by brute force in 1860, she was what we would call today a third-world country, with four people out of five unable to read and write, no national transportation, and no capital. As if that wasn't enough, the country had practically no raw materials (except for the food grown from its fertile soil) and certainly none of the great iron and coal fields that had powered the industrial development of America, Britain, Germany and other countries. This meant that any industrial development would require further outflows of capital for raw materials and, for a while, technologies. Since 1860, Italy took great strides, but by 1939 the distance from the great industrial powers – Britain, Germany, America – was still enormous. The progress after 1945 staggered everyone; it was like nothing anyone had experienced within living memory – and it took place as that quarrelsome, six-month-government majority led it.

We are not talking only about economic progress. The much-derided six-month governments improved laws across the board, introduced rights for the disabled and for minorities, took great strides in the protection of Italy's beautiful environment - national parks went from 4 to 21 in twenty years - and its incomparable historical and artistic heritage, broadened the reach of education and built massive infrastructure. Starting in the seventies, the State took on the seemingly omnipotent mafia, fought itt to a standstill (thanks to the sacrifice of many brave and unforgotten magistrates, policemen, journalists, and common citizens) and turned the citizens of Sicily against it. There certainly was considerable corruption, but that could have been tackled too, and at any rate it did not actually halt national progress and prosperity.

From 1945 to 1994, Italy experienced the same kind of politics that is becoming common across Europe now. Basically, in an increasing number of countries, the traditional parties have become unable to form a majority on their own and have seen a third party rise which cannot be trusted with power. In Germany the Christian-Democrats and Social-Democrats face Alternative for Germany; in Ireland, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael see Sinn Fein come out of nowhere, or rather out of the nefarious politics of Belfast, as the real opposition; in Sweden, worst of all, the so-called Sweden Democrats, a party with undeniable Nazi roots, is getting up to 20% of the vote. The result are going to be unstable coalition governments. Likewise, Italy, from 1945, had a large Catholic grouping that may not even be described as a party, since it had an enormous range of groups - called “currents” - within itself, ranging from Socialist to near-Fascist. You must understand that until 1945, the Catholics had been practically excluded from Italian politics, and that they still were regarded as untrustworthy and potentially corrupt. However, the next largest party were the Communists - and they were the real thing, taking orders from Stalin. In this period, the third largest party, the Socialists, blindly followed the Communists and made one bloc with them. Then there were three smaller parties, which represent the secular continuity of Italian institutions since the revolutions of the nineteenth century, the Liberals (conservative), the Republicans (left of centre) and the Social Democrats (exactly what it says on the tin). There was also a legacy Fascist party, but it never mattered. The point is that each of these parties represented something different; and there was a considerable three-way dislike between the secular parties, the Catholics and the Communist-Socialist bloc. The secular parties accepted that they had to govern together with the Catholics, but they never regarded them as better than rabble and superstitious old women (the Liberal and Republican parties had a definite aristocratic touch, and Gianni Agnelli, head of FIAT and the uncrowned king of Italy, was known to be a Republican); and the Catholics regarded them as self-regarding vanity enterprises. And nobody trusted the Communists, who in turn made hay of the bad image of Catholics and the aristocratic image of the secular parties. So any government that was made had to be a coalition of four or five parties - and keep all the “currents” within the Christian Democrats happy, to boot. Clearly this was not going to be a stable set-up, from the point of view of visible heads of government. I remember one crisis being caused by the little Liberal Party - two to three per cent of parliament - walking out on some policy they rejected.

The remarkable thing is that the system worked; certainly better than what has replaced it after 1994. The country grew economically and socially. Necessary reforms were enacted. Business was done. An instance I like to bring is how, somehow, between scandals, yelling, personalities, and early elections, the number of National Parks grew from 4 to 21. Another is the number of laws and court sentences that eventually granted disabled people the rights of full citizens, removing the demeaning status of “protected persons” that had been fastened on them by Mussolini’s Code Rocco The fact is that all the parties, including Communists and Fascists, had learned how to negotiate with each other, making sure that the work of parliament was done; and as the majority, however many government crises and early elections there might happen, was pretty much fixed, people who needed to do business with the Italian government knew who to go to. The country has ceased to progress since 1994, and in my view this is exactly because the messy but functional multi-party set-up that had run the old republic was replaced by an even messier, and entirely non-functional, left-right two-way split, where both parties mostly spent their times in internal quarrels, both being the unwholesome fusion of several different tendencies from the past.

Having a single voice, a single party, in government, inevitably narrows and stultifies all aspects of politics. Let me give you an example of why a multi-party system is more efficient – and, mind you, it is a case in which I dislike the result on principle, even as I admit it was necessary. By the fifties and sixties Italy had become the only Western country with no divorce at all. The Catholic party, the largest in the majority, had repeatedly blocked attempts to introduce divorce in Italy. This was a serious problem, because tens of thousands of Italian citizens living abroad or with foreign spouses had got divorces in foreign countries, and remarried, only to risk prosecutions for bigamy in Italy. In 1967, the non-Catholic parties of the majority made common cause with the Communists and created a parliamentary majority for a divorce law in despite of Catholic opposition. As it happened, there was a referendum on the law in 1973 which showed that numbers for and against it among the electorate were pretty much parallel to the majority formed in Parliament for that particular law. Representative democracy had worked as it was supposed to, representing the views of the people.

Then came Berlusconi. The scandals of 1992 had devastated the moderate and conservative area, who needed a new identity. He offered it to them, and used his great media power and immense wealth to create a new, united centre-right front. Berlusconi had one goal in politics, to force the Italian system into a two-party shape, and he had support in this, for their own obvious reasons, from the former Communists, now the Democratic Party. (The Italian Communists had always had a very individual character, and by 1978 or so could be considered little more than a normal West European social democratic party with a few red trappings.) These two groupings largely succeeded in their goal, and Italian politics was dominated from 1994 to the last few years by the two "poles", as they called themselves. Italy had "stable" governments that lasted whole legislatures.

The result? Catastrophe. The country stagnated. No serious reform was put in place, and those that already existed were left to wither. Administration, civil life, care of the environment and of the national heritage, business, investment , infrastructure, all went backwards, The struggle against the mafia stalled, and the mafia gained a new and terrible fortress in the urban wilderness around Naples, documented in the famous movie GOMORRA.

Why? Because the constant and ultimately productive debate within the majority and between majority and minority had simply ceased, and not just ceased, but been replaced by a sterile and everlasting struggle to get and keep all your ducks in line, Both blocs were really grotesquely heterogeneous, made of groupings that had little or nothing culturally in common - former fascists, Northern League, and Catholic and non-Catholic moderates, on the right; socialists, left Catholics, and radical liberals on the left. The struggle to keep such heterogeneous groups marching in step obviously stifled individuality and effort. So the "stable" structure of Italian government meant that politics really withered on the vine.

The attempt has now effectively collapsed, with Parliament broken up into at least a half dozen rival groups. But the fact that two decades were wasted into a sterile attempt to reduce politics to Left And Right means that the tradition of mediation and debate such as kept Italian politics going in the old days have been lost. The parties of today, which have the thinnest of institutional continuities with the parties of the First Republic – in many cases, none at all – don't know how to do anything except yell at each other. This is certainly at least in part Berlusconi's individual fault. He certainly was and is a lousy politician; and he built his political position on bad manners and insults. But Bismarck or Richelieu in person could not have achieved what he set out to do. I doubt they would even consider trying.

Incidentally, consider and compare the progress made by Italy, across the board - economically, culturally, in terms of rights, in terms of environmental protection, ina ny field you care to mention - from 1945 to 1992, under the messy old system of six-month governments that made the British laugh so much,and the "progress" made by Britain in the same period thanks to the "smack of firm government". I suggest that one system was more successful than the other, and it was not the British. In other words, you people sacrifice your rights to be represented and to have your views heard to a monolith that does not even work as it claims to. Nice deal. And you have the nerve to call it democracy!

One last point: there is one country that has kept an absolutely perfect representative system, with no two-party system, no encouragement to “stability”, no agglomerations. What is this terrible land of instability and inefficiency? The State of Israel. Which, oddly enough, in the intervals of party quarrels and insults, has managed to survive four wars and seventy years of terrorism, develop the most efficient military on Earth, and become a world leader in technology and agriculture from a tiny number of quarrelsome people who originally spoke dozens of different languages and who remain insanably divided on religious, ethnic and political grounds. How strange, eh?

Demeaning crimes

fpb — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 11:20:39 GMT

An American broadcaster called Bill Maher has seen fit to mark the passing of Stan Lee with negative and mean-minded comments. It is a law of nature that when some important figure in the arts passes away, some twerp tries to prove his superiority by running him down. Part of the law of nature is that the twerp punctually proves that he has no understanding of art, of popular art, and of the person he unchivalrously attacked. It’s as if the passing of a great man or woman were not complete without an idiot coming and destroying any reputation they had as a sort of perverted homage.

It can be said of Stan Lee, as of Christopher Wren, that if you want to see his monument, you should just look around yourself. The superhero concepts that dominate cinema and TV today could not even have been conceived without him. And that is because of one specific thing that Lee, himself, invented. We know that he worked with creative giants such as Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, the King of comics - people well able to create their own masterpieces. But the one thing that can be traced back to Lee is the concept of “continuity”: that all the heroes in his company live and move in the same time and space, may meet and interact with each other, and that what is done in one series (e.g. one particular villain suffering a humiliating and perhaps life-changing defeat) can have effect in all the others.

In comics, of course, this device has often become constrictive and overwrought. It is, however, at the heart of Kevin Feige’s Marvel movie universe, and of many of the TV superhero series. Without Lee’s original idea, Feige would never have conceived the interrelated Marvel movie franchise - the most successful and influential series of movies in the history of the art. It is right that each movie should contain a cameo of Lee, because it was Lee, specifically, who had the idea that made it all possible.

That is hardly his only merit. Lee has often been blamed for taking credit for the work of others, but in so far as that was the case - and nobody denies that the comic book industry treated artists execrably - that was the fault of how the industry had been set up, long before Lee had any position in it, and by people some of whom had mafia backgrounds. Jack Kirby and several other cartoonists have been treated in ways that disgrace business and America; but then, so had Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster at the very start of the story. The birth of the business of comic books, and the superhero genre, had been in fraud and malpractice - the creators of Superman had been issued cheques which contained acts of surrender of their right to their characters, so that they could not be paid without at the same time being swindled out of their own creations. Stan Lee had not yet entered comics when this took place.

The truth is however that in so far as Lee innovated within this corrupt industry, to that extent he was working to improve the position of the creative artists. He was the first to give detailed credits at the start of each story; and he was responsible for letters pages of unprecedented length, literacy and faithfulness. Just as he credited writers and artists, so he gave the exact names and addresses of each letter writer, which did much to start comics fandom. The overall result, in spite of the cheap format and paper and ads, showed a belief that Lee and Marvel were doing work that deserved attention and respect. It was wise marketing, but it was more than just marketing: in spite of the occasional boastfulness, of the overwrought English and poor word choices, and of the inevitably cheap format, it reflected the reality of what was going on. Marvel was something special, and it was so because of Stan Lee’s editorial choices.

First and foremost, Lee, was the best art director in his generation - even though his title was never art director. His eye for drawing talent was nearly flawless; only Don Heck, of the Lee generation of long-term artists at Marvel, can be said not to be a success, and Heck was in fact a capable illustrator who simply did not suit the superhero genre. Every one of his choices worked out, otherwise: John Romita, John Buscema, Gene Colan, John and Marie Severin, Dan Adkins, Gil Kane. And not only were they good choices, they became better - and more like themselves - as they went on working at Marvel. John Romita, Gene Colan, Gil Kane, all worked themselves more and more in their distinctive styles. The most groundless charge ever brought against Lee was that he required people to imitate Kirby. Any glimpse at any page of any of his artists will show that no such thing happened. Indeed, practically the opposite did. Lee did twice hire artists who were visibly imitating Kirby: one of them was Jim Steranko, the other was Barry Smith. Both of them took no more than a year or two to move far away from the Kirby imitation and into styles that were not only wholly individual but absolutely outstanding. How it was that he saw their potential, we may never know.

As a writer, I don’t feel like praising him as highly. He could do funny down-to-earth language with the best of them, but his frequent efforts at elevated language are mostly rather embarrassing, and his stories have a tendency to the simple-minded and sentimental. However, he did have one absolutely fundamental talent: he knew what would work. Time and again, when looking at his disagreements with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, one has to remark that Ditko’s or Kirby’s idea may have more intellectual dignity - but Lee’s would fly better with readers. For instance, Lee and Ditko’s Spider-Man had been facing a mysterious masked crime-lord who had been cutting a swath through New York’s underground. When it comes to the revelation, Ditko wanted to make him someone whom nobody had heard of before. This would certainly have been more like life and less like an ancient melodrama in whch the climax shows the masked villain unveiling and revealing himself as the hero’s long-lost brother, lover, or relative. And in this Ditko was right, and Lee was to that extent disingenous when he answered: “What you have a story where the hero sticks to walls and can lift a Buick, and you want realistic?” But Lee was right in a deeper sense. The super-hero genre inevitably personalizes all conflicts - look at how the movie Captain America: Civil War makes a conflict about the powers and limits of the state into a face-to-face battle between a dozen superheroes. And we can still see the point, but the superhero genre requires a face or a mask to express the ideas. Lee clearly understood this, which is one reason why he so rarely had flops.

That is not the only way in which I want to define, and to that extent limit, my praise of Stan Lee. You can never forget the he spent thirty years coasting in a second-rate comics publisher, and fifty years basically living on his record. His important and foundational years go, at best, from 1962 to 1968. And yet these years are so important that one can safely say that Stan Lee is one of the most important figures in the history of American arts, and of the few of whom it may seriously be said that he changed the world.

fpb — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 10:12:49 GMT

Reverse racism

fpb — Sat, 08 Sep 2018 18:58:49 GMT

The ferocity of American racism is becoming more intense by the day. But it may surprise you where I see it happening and why. I say that it really scares me with what hatred "white men" are described in ordinary discourse, among people who regard themselves as opposing racism and prejudice; and how impossible it is becoming to discuss any social subject without bringing in racism (of the "black"-bashing kind, of course).

Now, I cannot think that it is a coincidence that the increasingly heated, increasingly feverish obsession with "toxic whiteness" and such is moving pari passu with a dramatic and increasingly swift social change in America: the increasing pauperization of the lower and middle classes and the violent separation between the middle and upper classes. People like Lisa Denham and her repulsive father, with their disgusting duo about the coming "extinction" of "white man", are one per centers who would never have been noticed by anyone, let alone have had a media and arts career, otherwise; and the despicable little racist Sarah Jeong is an upwardly mobile person aiming to a place in the top one per cent, and doing none too badly in that goal. The more vicious the social split is becoming between the middle and the upper class in America, the more wildly "white privilege" and "cultural appropriation" are claimed to be issues.

Frankly, at this point I think a little Marx and Freud are not out of place. These people demonize the average white man because they feel guilty; they project their guilt on their victims. They feel guilty because they know they are sucking the life out of the society most of their fellow-citizens live in. Every drop of privilege among the seriously rich is taken away from the common pool of opportunity. And when we hear that more than 50% of Americans find that they aren't able to meet a sudden $500 expense, when any long-term illness is apt to reduce them to beggary, then it becomes clear that there is something to feel guilty about. When these things are left largely unspoken, whereas all the "socially concerned" persons obsess about an increasingly abstract notion of "racism" - and do so in an increasingly intolerant manner - I think we have a danger signal.

To be brutal, I believe that, consciously or unconsciously, the dominant classes intend to exclude from discourse anything that comes from "white men" as defined by them, by investing them with imagined racism and insulting ideas of white privilege, so as to disguise from themselves the reality of their own reverse class war. "See, these people themselves live somehow by robbing "blacks" and depriving them of their own proper deserts; see, when they whine about being robbed and abused, that is just yer everlasting commonplace racist black-bashing" - even if the unhappy "white" may never have either mentioned or intended colour at anytime in whatever protest they made. That Tea Partyism and all such phenomena are not only racist but essentially and basically racist is a fundamental tenet of this reverse racism, never even discussed. And that is why Farrakhan and his insane and dangerous followers are never treated as the intellectual and political horror, or as the terrible shackle on the "black" communities, that they are: because their racist resentment works very well within the reverse-racist narrative, behind which, if you pay attention, is nothing but the most brutal class war.

Certainly there is such a thing as black-bashing racism. More importantly, there is such a thing as the devastating exclusion of many "black" communities from any benefit in the common citizenship, their reduction to reservoirs of manpower for organized crime and for the armed forces. The point is that by casting the guilt for these horrors upon "white men" who are themselves increasingly in the same plight, who have no say in national social policies - because they would never have been so thrown to the wolves if they had - the two groups are made to hate and fear each other, while taking their eyes altogether off the conditions that really grind them down. "Blacks" and "whites" should stop accepting these categories, realize that they are in the same plight and that the same class is robbing, oppressing and abusing both. WORKERS OF THE WORLD ARISE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!

- ahem! - But it is true that this old-fashined Marxist analysis is the best way to understand what is going on. Yet Marxism itself, under the guise of "critical theory", has been abducted by the reverse-racist class warriors. The idea that it is about examining class discrimination - and, above all, the deformities that class discrimination forces upon the thinking of both oppressors and oppressed - seems to have been forgotten; and now we have a neo-Marxist discourse in which one per centers cast themselves as oppressed victims. Old Karl turns in his grave.

The despicable Boris Johnson

fpb — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 13:02:08 GMT

Boris Johnson has hit bottom. I really think there is nothing more despicable and dishonourable that he could have done than his article on today's Telegraph. Knowing perfectly well that the Brexit he howls for is both impossible and largely not defined at all, he covers his own party leader with insults for not achieving it. He is appealing to the most stupid, deviant, grotesque part of the Brexiteer crowd, to those to whom real life is far less important than their self-pleasing fictions and diseased fantasies. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the demagogue in his full and shameless shape, such as Britain has not seen in living memory. He makes Trump sound like an honourable man, and I mean it.

A Quora answer: why were there no fascist movements in Britain, France and America?

fpb — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 15:50:31 GMT

As I have been saying in various places in Quora, what made Mussolini’s Fascism, and Lenin’s Communism too, was a specific and unique situation, never to be repeated in later history: namely, the presence of enormous masses of disaffected veterans, with recent experience of war at a very high technical level of skill, and angry about the condition of their country. (And of enormous amounts of weapons.) Fascism was not made by speeches or by money, but by tens of thousands of men gathering in armed bands to beat up enemies. And that being the case, what happened to the similar masses of veterans who came home to France, Britain, and America too, after 1918?

Well, France was exhausted. She had fought with her full strength from day one, whereas Britain had taken time to deploy its whole strength, and America and Italy had only entered the war much later. For five years, every man who could be spared had been at the Front. Her losses were larger in proportion than those of any other great power. And on the positive side, France, like Britain and America, was prosperous. The veterans went home to a country that was comparatively able to receive them, give them a place to be, and not foster any dangerous mass disaffection. This is of course relatively speaking. There will have been anger enough, irritation enough, even some disaffection. But the only real case of violence from below due to disaffection was the riot in Paris that followed the Stavisky affair in early 1934, and that, compared to what took place daily in other countries, was a very pussycat of a riot.

ON the other hand, both America and Britain experienced situations that had more than a taste of Fascism, but that failed to develop into freedom-destroying movements. In America, Fascism could have come from above. The last few years of the Wilson administration were horrendous: the Red Scare fanaticized large strata of the population, and the hatred came from the top, from Wilson and his terrible AG Palmer. (Palmer was a Quaker. So was Richard Nixon. Is there a reason why Quakers in politics should prove particularly dangerous?) Hate and fear of “reds” was also the driving force of Italian Fascism; and Wilson and Palmer mobilized it in ways and with goals that Mussolini would have understood. Had Wilson not suffered his famous collapse, he might have been a real danger: he intended to run for a third term in office. And the nationwide spread of the new KKK, well beyond the bounds of the old South, shows that he might have found a pool of willing stormtroopers. Altogether, I think America dodged a bullet the size of a Gatling shot when Wilson collapsed in office.

Britain’s own Blackshirt moment took place in Ireland. Sociologically, culturally, psychologically, the Blacks and Tans were the Blackshirts of Britain - masses of disaffected veterans sent into the streets to harass and terrify political enemies, bullies in non-standard uniforms with a loose relationship with the authorities. Only, their relationship with public opinion developed in an exactly opposite direction. Whereas Italy’s majority, horrified by Socialist violence at home and by Communist brutality abroad, tended increasingly to excuse the Blackshirts and wink at their violence, in Britain - possibly because of the influence of the American media, which were largely against British rule in Ireland - the paramilitary force found itself increasingly isolated from the country’s mainstream, and eventually their evil reputation became an asset to their own enemies and contributed to British acceptance of Irish independence.

Steve Ditko has passed away

fpb — Sat, 07 Jul 2018 12:44:42 GMT

My attitude to Steve Ditko and his work is complicated, and to publish about it now, in the hour of his death, might seem ungenerous and rude. But if there is one thing Ditko himself despised, it is sentimental half-truths; I don't think I would honour his memory by posting a wholly positive essay - which, given my view of his work, would involve considerable suppression. Instead, I will post, behind the cut, an essay I wrote in the nineties about one of his last published complete works, STRANGE AVENGING TALES. It contains pretty much everything I think about this great artist, good and bad.

STEVE DITKO'S STRANGE AVENGING TALES 1

Steve Ditko would make us all a lot happier if only he would grow senile. He would make a critic's life a great deal easier, if only his political work would show evidence of declining faculties and trembling hands. He is, after all, just turned seventy; and he still plows on his own individual path, rooted - some might say mired - in fifties attitudes and dress (dig those crazy hats, man!). As far as he is concerned, the sixties, let alone the nineties, might never have happened; even his scruffy left-wingers are more like fifties beatnik bohemians than modern underground figures, never in any other dress than jeans and a sloppy sweater (aw, c'mon, man! Where's the leather? Where's the studs? Where's the ethnic dress, tattoos and odd-coloured hair?)

Unfortunately he does us no such favour; doing anybody any favours is not in his nature. He is not senile, bemired or declining. You cannot call this book a feeble rehash of past rants; you cannot, as you would expect from such a narrow mind, point to the evidence of sterile repetition. There is no sterile repetition. In language, in style, in approach, Ditko's new book Strange Avenging Tales is a step forwards, full of strikingly innovative features, and the art - the reason why most of us put up with him - has in some ways grown, becoming cleaner, more controlled, more varied. It helps that Gary Groth has allowed Ditko the printing facilities to use wash, but his linework is just as impressive. Some pages are quite sparse, but never sloppy; rather there is a daring stylishness about it, a controlled economy that never fails. Every single page is masterly.

The first thing to strike you is a new smoothness, a new fluidity, in the linework. While it has not changed in any major way, it has moved away from the bald chunkiness that seemed to have become its hallmark, and which, in the worst of his recent work, amounted to clumsiness if not to sloppiness. In the fifties Ditko was known from time to time to draw very fine lines, but as time went on he seemed to lose the ability or desire for it. Now, at seventy, he seems to have more interest in a graceful, finished inking approach than ever before. There is - if this is not blasphemy - something almost Image-like, Jim Lee-like, about this new liquid, flexible brushwork.

Along with this goes a new daring in design. In the two Spoilers pieces and the dream sequence in In due time, he leaves large areas of panel white and untouched: their emptiness becomes not only a significant, but a dominant part of the whole. In the first Spoilers, his bad left-wing character tosses a paper cup on the ground, a little act is given a lot of dramatic power and meaning by the way Ditko has bunched a lot of solid objects - a car, the man himself, some rubbish, and, most tellingly, an empty rubbish bin - around a large expanse of white space. Into this clean, untouched emptiness goes the can, its materiality emphasized by Ditko's still massive brushstrokes: he means us to feel a sense of intrusion. Here, the untouched whiteness stands for order, and something more than order, being invaded and befouled. The value of small, nearly invisible acts like this is brought out without exaggeration: Ditko is not blowing trumpets, only rendering and orientating the situation so that the full significance of it will come out. Around and in front of the "spoiler" are the clean patterns of the car and, especially, the dustbin; behind, almost marking his passage, there is a lot of scattered rubbish. Ditko is however making the point that the "spoiler" is one of many. He has not tossed all the rubbish on panel - only the can. There are, he is saying, many more like him on the streets; and the bin stays empty.

In due time opens with a nightmare sequence of a man, his whole body paralized and helpless, ticking away as if turned into the hand of an invisible clock. We are not allowed to see anything except the stiff body itself, and it is only the fact that the various panels suggest circular motion that puts us in mind of a clock. The man is in the grip of what is, at first, an invisible yet unbreakable pattern behind reality. We can only partially see it, but it has bodily seized him, ticking away with mechanical relentlessness. It is only after this typically ferocious opening are we allowed a realistic picture of who he is and what he has done (murdered an antiques dealer for the sake of his property, and especially of a beautiful watch). But soon we are returned to the thief's nightmare visions of the cosmic clock; we find out that he is dying, and that the whole picture had been about his wasted time on Earth.

None of this is a revolution as compared with his previous work, but all of it shows a marked forwards progression. He has taken his very individual approach to design and drawing a step further; there is more coordination, and, as I said, a finer understanding of the value of empty spaces.

As for the writing, there are one or two weak items, such as the closing page, which is scarcely more than an illustrated slogan, though even there the art is brilliantly imaginative. It does actually state the theme of the whole book - and pretty much of his whole oeuvre - which is that there is an underlying order in reality which crushes such as break it, for instance, by claiming as theirs what is not, or otherwise by making unjustified demands of reality. An earlier Ditko title was called Avenging World, and that is the way he claims to see reality: as the power of vengeance.

The problem is that Ditko scarcely proves his point here. In order to make his own beliefs triumph, he has to, a) blackguard his opponents and, b) bring in the supernatural, showing "reality" materialized in the vindictive will of one man-like individual. In In due time, the dying thief sees his victim's head towering above him as his own body ticks away the minutes of his wasted time: a powerful statement of the horror of a wasted life, but hardly a convincing demonstration of the avenging power of reality - in order to bring the story to the conclusion he wanted, Ditko had to crush the thief under a large, fallen watch. This is more than close to superstition: in reality, falling objects crush good and bad alike. What, can Ditko tell me, had those two scoutmasters who were recently crushed by a ton of rock ever done to deserve it? For what was the world taking vengeance? It is only in tales of the supernatural that revenge is so neat and needs no human hand to enforce it; in reality, criminals do not suffer vengeance unless a human hand seizes them and takes them on the long walk to Nuremberg. There is something almost idle in this sort of confidence that all crooks get theirs in the end; no doubt they die, but so do all of us, and how is that justice? (Ditko is an atheist, or at least sees himself as one, so the question-begging seems pretty obvious.)

All Mine is equally supernatural, if not indeed superstitious. The story actually has a fine point. A thief has stolen a precious pendant and beaten, or killed, a witness: the shadow of vengeance (incarnate in one of Ditko's typical fifties characters with jacket, tie and hat!) points out to him that things are only his if he has paid for them and can keep others from taking them. And the thief goes insane, seeing everywhere hands that snake out to take the pendant from him. Not a bad way to illustrate a principle; but not about reality. In reality, thieves are not found in alleyways, babbling delusionally about what is theirs and what is not; if they were, the work of the police would be much easier. Ditko has short-circuited the story by bringing in a supernatural figure of his thief's fears, which is nothing to do with reality, but on the villain's abnormal psychology. Ditko wants to have his cake and eat it, by inserting an individual will, with a more than passing resemblance to his hero Mr.A, and yet pretending that his is not a human and purposeful need for justice but the superhuman voice of reality itself.

This will never do; it simply contradicts our whole experience. We imagine superheroes, not to be cosmic transhuman forces to enforce universal blind law on evildoers, but individuals trying their best, and sometimes failing, to put right what reality and/or human failure have left undone. As Luke Cage once tells Storm, "We are superheroes, Ororo, not God"; but Ditko has broken the division. The justice he incarnates in such figures as Mr.A is divine, not human: infallible, relentless, denying the doubt that must be at the bottom of any rational process - because nothing could be less rational than failing to accept that our mental processes are always in doubt and our knowledge of facts is naturally limited. Any judgement passed by a human being must be regarded as provisional, even if no evidence ever turns up to contradict it; human knowledge is in the nature of a hypothesis, not of a steel girder.

Hence the superstitious and supernatural aspects of Ditko's vision; and hence, too, the potency of his images of supernatural worlds and madness. He is superstitious and does not know it. He thinks that the great, blind, indifferent forces of nature can focus on one man because he has broken the moral law; itself a paranoid notion. It is only when we are in the grip of the most irrational fear that we imagine the world as Ditko imagines it, with great iron clocks there only to crush us, with hands and voices reaching out to grip us. It's very fine, but it's not reality. In Dr.Strange, in Shade, in many other books, Ditko gives an unsurpassed glimpse of the worlds behind worlds, of the hidden realities behind reality, and it is clear that they are not rational realities. In the earlier books he had incarnated these visions into the worlds of Dormammu and such evil figures, or in the zone of madness hidden around the world of Meta; but in All mine, he places the same wild designs around his figure of vengeance. Mr.A and the Madness Area of Meta
are one and the same.

Of the two humour pieces, Spoilers, the second is better, but there is an irritating and petty spitefulness about both: a moaning-minnie Leftie throws some rubbish on the pavement, so he is himself thrown among the rubbish; another moaning-minnie leaves a book display in chaos, so he is himself turned into a mangled mess. Despite Ditko's claim to speak for reality, I'm afraid this is just point-scoring and wishful thinking; in "reality", slobs never pay for being selfish; and in "reality", more to the point, it is simply not true, as liverish reactionaries are prone to believe, that the people who make demands for various causes are always the first to pollute the world. There are plenty of self-disciplined envirnmentalists who would no more think of litter-bugging than they would smoke or steal. Most litterbugs are Sun reader types, natural reactionaries, though of a type that Ditko would spew out of his mouth; and I find it interesting that he never seems to discuss, or even see the possibility of, right-wing louts.

Ditko claims to believe in objective truth, but his depiction of ideological opponents is as completely the reverse of objective truth as anything can be. The claim that people concerned with the environment are themselves the first to throw litter on the street is not only an obvious slander, but a pointless one. Even if that was true, it would do nothing to contradict the case for the environment; that would still have to be argued on its own terms, which Ditko notably fails to do. Second, as I said, it is in fact false.

Much the best is Claud & Clyde, whose villain is, unusually for Ditko, given strong and credible treatment. A jealous husband whose suspicions are perfectly justified murders his wife and her lover under the influence of a "voice" he hears. The voice is in fact that of his own split personality, Clyde, but it goes silent as soon as the murder is done and leaves the wretch alone with the results of his crime. This is exceptionally good writing: the concept is executed with a pregnant economy worthy of the very best, and it is enormously suggestive. The problem from Ditko's point of view is that it contradicts everything Ditko is about. The murderer has a reason for his deed which, however evil, is weighty and meaningful: he is not seized with the pointless greed of Ditko's thieves, but rather he is being cheated and lied to by his wife. And the analysis of his abmormal psychology, making it clear he is so nearly insane as not to be legally responsible for his acts, is clean out of Ditko's frame of reference. Plus, his wife is such an unsympathetic, unattractive bitch as to make us feel, if not approval, at least some sympathy with him.

But the best feature of the writing is to do with the book as a whole: its brevity, its economy, allowing Ditko to put no less than half a dozen varied items in a thin $2.95 booklet. That, ma'am and sir, is value for money. He has completely cut out all the long reflections on the nature of reality and justice that used to be such an aspect of his more political work, and now he lets the story alone make his point. He does not tell us that the world is an avenger; he shows us. That the point is questionable takes nothing away from the excellence of his treatment.

But this is a book for strong stomachs. Ditko's views have great intellectual dignity and intellectual strength; but they are rotten at the core. They start from the wrong premise. His worship of reason is, as I have shown, irrational, and his belief in reality is unrealistic. He regards anyone who disagrees with him as a weak-kneed, immoral compromiser, and the contempt for opposing opinions evident in every line of his work has not really mellowed with age. When he dies, he will die with a snarl on his lips. His obsession with vengeance is significant in a different way from what he thinks: he is clearly a vindictive person, and his long fascination with "bondage" comics (as well as his hypocritical refusal to give his name to them) seems to me highly significant. I'm sorry to say he is still a genius, but there is no reason to genuflect in front of his moral insight or intellectual clarity when he obviously has so little understanding of his own motives. If a man assumes the claim of universal clarity and insight, his evidence for it should not include spiteful slander of his opponents.

It is you, the fan, who must judge whether it is worth your while to put up with this sort of thing for the sake of really exceptional artwork and unusual, original writing.

When will this sorry bunch of twerps ever resign?

fpb — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 13:18:18 GMT

The sorry caricature of a government led – but only in the sense that the front fender leads a car – by Teresa May has hit yet another scandal, one that should by rights lead to its collapse. But we have little hope of that, because even the least self-respect, let alone respect for habits and laws, is so absent among this rabble, that they would probably all dance naked in public rather than give up their posts.

Five months ago, the government was reshuffled and the department for social security was given to a very unsuitable person, Esther McVey. This glamorous blonde, a former TV newsreader, had made such a bad impression in her previous stint as a junior minister in the same department that her own voters in a Lancashire seat had voted her out by way of thanks. She was widely regarded as having all the empathy of a rock and, in spite of her pretty features, half the charm. In fact, if Teresa May weren't notoriously straight, there would be every reason to suspect that McVey had slept her way back into office. The truth, of course, had to do with that miserable death-rattle of politics, brexit; to “balance” the factions in her government, May needed a hard-line brexiteer in the vacant social security seat, and McVey had at least some experience in the place – in the sense that a Communist union agitator has an experience of private business.

Now McVey has shown her entire quality. She has twice lied in Parliament – a resigning matter; and not only lied, but put words in a top civil servant's mouth that were the very reverse of what he had said, and implicitly charged him with incompetence. The facts are these. For the last few years, the Tories, first under Cameron and now under May, have been pushing an ugly nostrum called Universal Credit for the reform of social benefits (unemployment, disability, etc.). This meant basically taking all the state benefits and bundling them together. There have long been serious doubts as to whether this monster could possibly be implemented and as to whether it would do any good if it were, and in the last few months, the head of the Government Accounting Office, Sir Amyas Morse, has been preparing a report into the matter.

Not once, but twice, Esther McVey has stated in open Parliament that Sir Amyas had stated concerns – that Universal Credit wasn't being rolled out fast enough; that he had no problems with the reform as such; and that at any rate the report was out of date. These things seemed unlikely on the face of it, and today, two days after her second such statement, Sir Amyas Morse, head of the General Accounting Office, one of the most sensitive and senior posts in the civil service, has exploded in public with an open letter that all but calls her a liar. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/04/amyas-morse-auditor-general-universal-credit-letter-esther-mcvey

This is a resigning matter. If you lie to Parliament, you resign. That is a simple and well known principle, although of late some notorious instances have got away with doing just that. But I don't think that anyone has ever been called a liar in such an enormous matter, a primary government policy, and to such a disgraceful extent – yes means no, not just once, but all across the line. This is not only a lie, but a stupid lie – I am tempted to say, in homage to the colour of Ms.McVey's hair dye, a dumb blonde kind of lie. The only way she could hope to get away with it was if Sir Amyas turned out to be such a fantastic coward that he would allow himself to be treated like that and not set the record straight. Well, apparently McVey has no idea what a backbone is, because she seems to have been very surprised to find that Sir Amyas Morse had one.

Mrs.May needs McVey to stay in her post, for the same reason why she placed her in it: it is needed to “balance” her self-splitting government. And so McVey has been dispatched to apologize to Parliament for “unwittingly misleading” them. But above and beyond the matter of political convenicence, there is something very May about this July scandal. McVey has been guilty, basically, of thinking that if you just paper over the cracks and lie over matter of fact, your policies will move ahead by some sort of inner inevitability, and people will be convinced or knuckle under. And this is, in fact, a very Teresa May sort of behaviour; it is the same way in which May continues to sail blithely on with the Irish border issue, just talking as though everyone will soon be convinced of her magnificent brilliance. It is the “What could possibly go wrong” kind of politics.

One of the few good things about getting older...

fpb — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 04:18:10 GMT

... is the fact that the annual bout of hay fever is getting weaker and weaker. These days, I often go for days without taking the usual Loratadine pill, with no worse consequences than the occasional loud sneeze. When I was a young man - let alone a teen-ager - hay fever was a nightmare. I would get styes in my eyes, large enough to almost blind me; and I remember one occasion when I sneezed so hard and so long I was nearly dehydrated. I bought a 330-cl bottle of Kronenbourg beer and drank it on the spot. It made me feel better, but I am sure that all the good people on that bus in Rome must have thought I was the most desperate kind of drunk. Drinking from the bottle, in public, is never done in Italy, for any reason whatsoever. But I needed it and it helped. Now I just get a nasty itch over my eyelids every now and then, and of course the sneezing.

A sketchy thought about the study of politics

fpb — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 16:04:25 GMT

A historian called Andreas Herberg-Rothe has written an interesting study of the famous Prussian military theorist, "Clausewitz's Puzzle: The political theory of war," part of whose thesis is that Clausewitz's celebrated study of war, though completed and published with great success, is in effect unfinished - Clausewitz wanted to rewrite, it, and it bears notable problems within itself, as Rothe points out. That made me think. A number of the most influential writings about politics are either unfinished, or self-contradictory, or both. Karl Marx' Das Kapital is unfinished. Machiavelli's The Prince bears problems of interpretation so formidable that it would be hard to find two scholars who read it exactly the same. And going back to the grandest and strangest of them all, Plato's dialogues are full of contradictory and speculative views. The two most important political texts among them, The Laws and The Republic, contradict each other in many ways, and The Republic, though one of Plato's most famous and popular texts, is also an outlier among its work in some ways, such as its doctrine of the tripartite soul, which also reflects on its politics.

I have a suspicion that sufficiently ambitious and brilliant studies of human society and history will always either taper off into silence, or include severe self-contradiction, or both. Of all objects of study, humanity in action is probably the most complex and confusing. It is possible that, at the highest levels, these things are not signs of failure, but of as much engagement with the subject as a single mind, however brilliant, may manage.

I think I owe my surviving LJ friends some apologies

fpb — Mon, 28 May 2018 17:58:48 GMT

I had been meaning to make some sort of return to LJ, at least every now and then. However, as part of that, I unwisely decided to have LJ upload my Facebook entries. From what I can see, the result must have been to crowd some people's friends pages with space-devouring links they may not be interested in or may already have seen. This setting has now been altered, and my apologies.

However morally stinky a comics story may be, some fan on Facebook will defend it.

fpb — Mon, 28 May 2018 16:12:47 GMT

However morally stinky a comics story may be, some fan on Facebook will defend it.
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 28 May 2018, 16:04

Boris Johnson launches fresh attack on customs union

fpb — Mon, 28 May 2018 12:41:33 GMT

Boris Johnson launches fresh attack on customs union
Foreign secretary and Jacob Rees-Mogg continue to put pressure on Theresa May
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 28 May 2018, 12:36

Watch This Real-Life "Spiderman" Climb A Building In Paris And Save A Dangling Child

fpb — Mon, 28 May 2018 12:41:33 GMT

Watch This Real-Life "Spiderman" Climb A Building In Paris And Save A Dangling Child
Mamoudou Gassama, the man who saved the 4-year-old, said he arrived in France from Mali just a few months ago.
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 28 May 2018, 12:28

AFRICA/CENTRAL AFRICA - Assault on Bambari; even the Church is not spared

fpb — Mon, 28 May 2018 11:41:22 GMT

AFRICA/CENTRAL AFRICA - Assault on Bambari; even the Church is not spared
Bangui (Agenzia Fides) - "The population is devastated, houses burned and looted. The bodies of the
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 28 May 2018, 11:21

Il presidente Mattarella ha agito secondo la Costituzione e in obbedienza al suo dovere…

fpb — Mon, 28 May 2018 09:10:39 GMT

Il presidente Mattarella ha agito secondo la Costituzione e in obbedienza al suo dovere…
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 28 May 2018, 08:55

My reaction to the catastrophe in Ireland

fpb — Sun, 27 May 2018 06:32:12 GMT

Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre, mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lytlað... A mæg gnornian se ðe nu fram þis wigplegan wendan þenceð. Ic eom frod feores; fram ic ne wille...

Thought must be harder, heart be keener, courage greater, as our strength sinks... If anyone thinks of leaving this battleground, may he weep for ever! I am old; I will not move hence.

Abortion is wrong. Period. End of story. The horrendous surrender of one more nation to this evil does not change that. And it does not change my duty as a citizen to oppose this wrong by every power I have.

One down. More to go, I guess.

fpb — Sat, 26 May 2018 18:01:53 GMT

One down. More to go, I guess.
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 26 May 2018, 17:52

Is Trinity/Trimurti an ancestral Indo-European belief? Did that belief migrate to the Roman Empire…

fpb — Sat, 26 May 2018 17:01:34 GMT

Is Trinity/Trimurti an ancestral Indo-European belief? Did that belief migrate to the Roman Empire…
Fabio Paolo Barbieri's answer: No. You’ve been reading very bad sectarian literature. First, the Trimurti has nothing in common with the Trinity except the number three. Second, it is a fairly recent development - I don’t expect Hindus will agree with this, but the triad of Brahma, Visnu and Siv...
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 26 May 2018, 16:52

Progress

fpb — Sat, 26 May 2018 15:10:52 GMT

PROGRESS

Except perhaps for the most mindless and extreme rainbow cheerleaders, I can't imagine that anyone living in our time can honestly say that they see a good future. Politics, in particular, is broken. We think of Trump with weary revulsion, but he is not an exception, not even the worst figure around. Different kinds of buffoonery prevails in Canada with Justin Trudeau, in Britain, in Italy, in Turkey. Who is up to the challenge? The heads of state and government of India, China, Japan, and Russia make crass use of the lowest kind of nationalism, coming, especially in India, to support the most cruel and superstitious brand of Hinduism at the expense of scholarship and civil peace. Where democracy is not subverted or absent, it is made such use of as to sicken the sight. In half a dozen European countries, popular rage has borne up out of nowhere parties with Fascist or Nazi antecedents or cruelly nationalistic attitudes. In Hungary and Italy, these people have reached government; in Germany and Sweden they are the official or actual opposition. Not only is nobody happy; nobody can see a way for matters to improve. Optimism, except for a few fanatics, is dead.

Now what occurred to me may not necessarily help or do anything to point to a solution; rather, it is a small matter – of what might be called style. Or even content. Of the things we take for granted even if we rape our language in so doing. Just how many of us do not use the word “progress” in an unmitigatedly positive meaning? Even though this word, in its daily use, has no such meaning. We may speak of the progress of a cancer, of a dictatorship, of an avalanche, without any sense of incongruity. And yet “progress” as such is uniformly taken as positive. To understand just how absurd this is, try to think of a good disease, a good tyranny, a good avalanche. Absurd, isn't it? Or if not absurd, at least weakening the subject to the point of near-vanishing. A good dictator, surely, is a man who is almost not a dictator; a good cancer (yes, there is such a thing as a benignant tumor) is one that is practically ineffective. And I defy you to think of any circumstances in which an avalanche may be said to be good. But what is more, these things have progress just in so much as they are not good. It is a malignant tumor that progresses; an avalanche is the more destructive, the more it progresses; a tyranny progresses in so far as it gains further and further control.

Our politics has now gained pretty much the character of the progress of a cancer or of an avalanche – the advance of a progressive and inevitable misfortune. It was not always so. For a few centuries, riding the progress of European power and European science, improvement in material matters seemed to everyone the inevitable lot of our society. That was the progress of our society, and it was good. Then came the period of revolutions and reforms; and people, by unconsciously squinting and editing all the bad and allowing themselves to see only the good, confirmed their acquired view that “progress” is good as such. Most of the revolutionary work was indeed good, restoring European civilization to its natural inner balance as seen in the Middle Ages; but along with it went fanaticism, violence, and above all falsehood – and that falsehood was primarily provoked by the increasingly irresponsible concept of progress.

To me, it looks as though we should be at the end of this cycle. The “progress” of world and local politics is so increasingly bad, everywhere, that it would take iron shutters over one's eyes to preserve this concept of “progress”. Indeed, the “progress” of recent politics is in only one direction, only it is not a direction that can be defined as political at all. The American presidential elections, the Brexit referendum, the Italian elections, the Irish abortion referendum, are occasions where the party that lied the most won; where hucksterism and mendacity were not only used without shame, but triumphantly. No amount of well-argued refutation of the lies of Trump, of the Brexiters, of Di Maio and Salvini, of Leo Varedkar and his accomplices, could make a dent in the will of the majority – or of the victorious minority. Why? IN part because the electors hated and despised the opposition – that was the case with America and Italy – so intensely that they did not believe a word they said, and all responses went in one ear and out the other; and in part because of the corrupt and committed role of the media – both Brexit and Irish abortion were won by revolting abuse of media power. And these two things go together; because a vague awareness of the corruption and mendacity of the media is one of the main reasons, if not the main one, why answers from an enemy who is perceived as having always lied are not believed.

We should at least get rid of this increasingly grotesque joke of a concept of “progress”. We should be aware, even if we hate each other so much, that however we regard moral improvement, it is not here and it is not happening. But the concept goes on occupying the background of our minds, idle, hollow, damaging and unchallenged. Why is this?

I would say, because of the need to sell. The mass media are only a part of the big-business skeleton of our society, and big business has a natural interest in making people believe, one, that things are always changing, and, two, that they are always changing for the better. “Progress” is certainly a good thing in, say, computers. Except where it isn't – printers have become worse, not better, with the passing of the years. But above all, this way of thinking, that is natural to people who always have to promote something to the public, is never challenged, because it would not occur to corporate persons to think that there is anything radically mistaken about it. They spend their lives in a progressive environment, how can they think that there is something mistaken about the concept? And the mass media dominate our communications across our society to the extent that they pretty much decide what is important and what not.

And this brings out another important point. The inevitable goodness of progress is the typical view of the huckster. If selling is the main business of your life – selling, that is, in itself, as opposed to selling some product you made and that you regard as good – then the first thing you say is that it is new, never used before (and so your prospective client is made to think he ought to try it) and improved on previous models. Is it a coincidence, you think, that ours is the age of hucksters, with salesmen such as Berlusconi and Trump dominating politics?

Lousy news from Ireland. It seems the homicidal scum have won again. Of course the BBC was jumping…

fpb — Sat, 26 May 2018 07:29:03 GMT

Lousy news from Ireland. It seems the homicidal scum have won again. Of course the BBC was jumping…
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 26 May 2018, 07:16

What is the role of social anthropology in the study of African history?

fpb — Sat, 26 May 2018 03:58:12 GMT

What is the role of social anthropology in the study of African history?
Fabio Paolo Barbieri's answer: That’s a good question with a long and uncertain answer. Because of the shortage of written sources in most inland African societies, social anthropology - the study of societies as they are at present - objectively takes the lead in the study of African societies. ....
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 25 Jan 2018, 10:01

What is the luckiest thing you've ever done?

fpb — Sat, 26 May 2018 03:58:12 GMT

What is the luckiest thing you've ever done?
Fabio Paolo Barbieri's answer: Four years before, I had completed my university course in very unpleasant circumstances, with the university compelled to give me a honours degree because they could not find a legal excuse to expel me. Since then I had not visited the place once. Now I was invited...
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 25 Jan 2018, 16:25

Full Ban of Sarahah

fpb — Sat, 26 May 2018 03:58:12 GMT

Full Ban of Sarahah
A mobile phone app called Sarahah lets bullies send abusive messages anonymously. And it’s already spreading like wildfire across our schools - countless children’s lives are being made miserable right now We’ve seen apps like Sahara before, and the danger they put our children in. Last year S...
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 28 Jan 2018, 13:49

Opinion | How Mick Mulvaney is dismantling a federal agency

fpb — Sat, 26 May 2018 03:58:12 GMT

Opinion | How Mick Mulvaney is dismantling a federal agency
A consumer agency gone truly rogue.
Posted by Fabio Paolo Barbieri on 26 Jan 2018, 14:04