The Boy Who Would Be King

I really liked The Boy Who Would be King, even seen on a small in-flight screen. I liked that it had fantasy, and that it had a sense of hope – of people overcoming adversity, through goodness of character, rather than as a weary trade-off of cynicism and an inability to aspire to moral actions for their own sake. This isn’t life-changing cinema, but it is fun, and wholesome, and well worth watching.

From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage by Judith Brett

I always think elections, politics, and the mechanics of Parliamentary processes are fascinating, so I was excited to read Judith Brett’s From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting. Judith Brett is a professor of politics, but this isn’t a dry academic piece – it’s a very readable coverage of some of the history of key features of the Australian electoral system.

I’d recommend this as worth a read if you’re at all interested in Australian politics, or in voting systems in general. There are a few key things that I think Brett captures:

• Australia is unusual, if not unique: Our voting system (compulsory registration and voting on a Saturday) differs from some of the systems in major English-speaking democratic systems like the UK and US.
• Part of that is a cultural difference: Australians have, from the starting point, been very comfortable with bureaucratic involvement in electoral systems. That’s meant that the system has been a little bit removed from politics, and hence more impartial.
• There are definite benefits to compulsory voting – in particular, it creates a culture of voting, which has flow-on impacts for political understanding and engagement, and in turn political culture.

One of the things that I think Brett could have highlighted a little more was the political nature of voting – that in essence, who gets to exercise a vote is itself an intensely political question. She touches on this at points, but I think in a superficial way that makes it seem like a small tactical issue, rather than something that enormous political battles have been fought over. More importantly, I think she could have linked it to a set of broader issues – who has political, economic and social power in the country? I think those are interesting questions, and that relate directly to the minutiae of electoral administration.

As we will see, the newly formed Labor Party was trenchantly opposed to postal voting and abolished it as soon as it got the chance.

A bill introducing preferential voting, already in process, was rushed through in time to apply to the by- election.

The politics were obvious: these were just the sort of people who depended most on the state supports that neoliberals were trying to dismantle.

Without compulsory voting, for example, the Liberal Party would likely have abolished Medicare long ago, relying on the fact that those who needed it most were least likely to vote.

Permanent residents who do not become citizens cannot vote, even if they have lived here and paid taxes for years, so around a million people subject to our laws have no say in them.

An interesting historical quirk is that it seems South Australia lead the nation in a lot of reforms – and because Federation involved integrating different systems, South Australia’s leadership played an influential role.

South Australian women would vote in the referendum on the constitution. If it looked like federation would disenfranchise them, they and their male supporters might vote No and jeopardise the birth of the new nation.

… they adopted the organisational model Boothby had developed for South Australia and applied it to the nation, with a Chief Electoral Officer for the Commonwealth, a Commonwealth electoral officer for each state and a district returning officer for each division. All would be permanent, salaried public servants with their duties defined by law and set out in detailed printed instructions.

Brett argues strongly against the characterisation of Australia’s electoral system as an historical accident – instead, she sees it as the product of careful thought.

This was not, as has sometimes been claimed, an accidental decision carelessly made by inattentive parliamentarians, but the result of Australia’s confidence in government, its commitment to majoritarian democracy and its willingness to experiment with electoral matters. Our early federal politicians were proud of Australia’s reputation as a democratic laboratory. Determined to create a fair and accessible electoral system, they tinkered away until they got it right.

Clever, dedicated senior bureaucrats drove the rationalisation of electoral processes to make them more efficient and comprehensive.

Other quotes

Liberal democracies are hybrid political systems which combine the rule of law and commitment to civil rights with popular elections and majority rule.

The new parliament would determine the franchise, but the constitution would include a clause which read, ‘No adult person who has or acquires a right to vote at elections for the more numerous Houses of the Parliament of a State shall, while the right continues, be prevented by any law of the Commonwealth from voting at elections for either House of the Parliament of the Commonwealth.’

What a different time – when a potential increase in ministerial salary could not only lead a minister to disagree, but to resign from Cabinet because of that disagreement!

… [Alfred Deakin] had just written to Barton resigning from the ministry over a proposed increase in the salaries of members of parliament.

Quotes and articles

Quite some time ago I came across this quote by Eric Hoffer, and it’s stayed with me since: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Hoffer wrote The True Believer, a book on mass movements and fanaticism. I think it’s a fascinating idea of how organisations that are founded for good reasons can be slowly hollowed out by baser instincts (greed and other things, including the iron law). I think I originally came across it in a piece about a Bush conservative during Trump’s rise through the presidential primary.

A good piece in the New Yorker argues that social biases that have evolutionary benefits (or have had) underpin the apparent shortfalls in our cognitions (“Why facts don’t change our minds“).

Finally, an excellent piece in Wired on the internal politics of Facebook (“15 months of fresh hell inside Facebook“), with enormous ramifications for the rest of the world. In particular, the fact that their news algorithm is based on a model for identifying politics and tragedy reflects typical bureaucratic shortsightedness, with tremendous implications for everyone using the system.

Richard Morgan’s writing

I went through a phase reading Richard Morgan. It’s easy reading sci-fi and fantasy, that manages to not be too terrible, but is not amazing or groundbreaking.

Altered Carbon is the book that’s been made into a Netflix series. A former special agent awakes in a new body, one of many in a universe where consciousness can be downloaded and uploaded into new bodies. From there, it’s a noire feel – a grimy detective solving a grimy murder with double crossed deaths, and the rest.

A thing that detracted from this book, and the others, is a somewhat juvenile approach to sex. Morgan writes as though he were Fleming and Takeshi Kovaks his Bond, sleeping with multiple new conquests each book, tick-marks on a list he’s crossing off. It is … a downside to what is otherwise a reasonably well paced set of plot points.

To be honest, at points it all gets convoluted – but, fortunately, there’s just enough exposition to wrap things up and explain it all. You can read it easily, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t follow it too closely. Worth it for something light.

Quotes

What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only was to beat that was to go on stack [virtual upload] forever.

… they would drift forever, because the universe is mostly night and darkened ocean.

Broken Furies is the second in the Altered Carbon series. This time, Kovaks wakes up searching for a Martian relic in the midst of a warzone. I liked how this one had a historical revolutionary in the background, set in the distant past, the Quellists, who inspires with her mythical exploits.

There’s alien spaceships to explore, strange technologies, betrayals by different sides, and again, a checklist of sexual experiences that Kovaks ticks his way through. That last detraction aside, it’s fun reading.

In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.

… all peace, has been paid for somewhere, at some time, by its opposite.

Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it’s harder than you’d think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts.

Woken Furies is the final, and I think best of the Kovaks trilogy. Stumbling through his haphazard adventures, continually pursued by random miscreants, this time Kovaks stumbles across what may be the consciousness of a long-lost revolutionary leader / religious figurehead, Quellcrist Falconer. It links back to the complex Martian relics that orbit a particular world, destroying anything that flies above a certain heigh (or is that all they were doing? perhaps they were absorbing their consciousness as well).

This story goes a little beyond Kovak’s random adventures, and gives a sense of something slightly larger.

Quotes

‘This enemy you cannot kill,’ I murmured.

He nodded and finished the quote for me. ‘You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return’.

It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that for all of us. Maybe people would rather slobber over gossip and fleshshots of Josefina Hikari and Ryu Bartok than worry about who’s running the planet. Did you ever consider that? Maybe they’re happier that way.’ Scorn flickered on her face. ‘Yeah, maybe. Or just maybe that period you’re talking about was misrepresented. Maybe premillennial constitutional democracy wasn’t the failure the people who write the history books would like us to believe. Maybe, they just murdered it, took it away from us and lied to our children about it.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe they did. But if that’s the case, they’ve been remarkably good at pulling the same trick time and again since.’ ‘Of course they have.’ It was almost a shout. ‘Wouldn’t you be? If the retention of your privileges, your rank, your life of fucking leisure and status all depended on pulling that trick, wouldn’t you have it down? Wouldn’t you teach it to your children as soon as they could walk and talk?’ ‘But meanwhile the rest of us aren’t capable of teaching a functioning countertrick to our descendants? Come on! We’ve got to have the Unsettlement every couple of hundred years to remind us?’ She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the weed bale. She seemed to be talking to the sky. ‘I don’t know. Yes, maybe we do. It’s an uneven struggle. It’s always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse.’

The Steel Remains is a fantasy novel that follows Ringil, a hero from a noble house, who now rots away in a remote village. I liked that Morgan had a gay central character – it’s a nice reversal of a set of traditional tropes. Because of it, Ringil stands against a society that mistreated him, an outsider who understands it like only someone who was born to power can.

He’s dragged out of obscurity when his mother hires him to rescue a cousin sold into slavery, only for him to stumble on a wraith-like creature from another realm. Together with old acquaintances, he and others must fight to defend the human realm against creatures gathering in the night, as former lovers become deadly foes.

It’s hard to connect with Ringil – he’s arrogant, often angry, and as one reviewer on goodreads noted, there isn’t much tenderness in the book – it’s pure conflict the whole way. That can drive narrative, but it can make it harder to connect with some of the characters. Still, a fun read if you’re after some good fantasy writing.

The Cold Commands is the second series in A land fit for heroes, Richard Morgan’s fantasy series. It follows more closely one of Ringil’s companions from the first book; but again, it pits a small group against the wraith-like creatures seeking to destroy humanity. It’s fun sci-fi, but it’s nothing incredible.

Market Forces is one of Morgan’s first books. It shows in the writing, which is rougher at points, but it has an interesting idea. It imagines a world where consultancies rule countries, replacing rulers at whim although they’re technically ‘hired’ by them, when in fact they compete with other consultants. Inside each company, as well, consultants battle each other, and across company lines, when they drive to the death to win contracts. It’s a weird little thought experiment, but one that makes for fun reading, and pulls out some of the absurdity of the corporate form. I also liked that it featured a protagonist who wasn’t seeking love, but instead was in the middle of a relationship that was falling apart (and that in fact he walks away from at the end of the novel) – it was a refreshing break from the usual romantic lines in a novel.

Another interesting thought experiment Morgan follows is of cities divided – between militarized, protected zones (liked walled compounds) where the wealthy and aspiring middle classes live, and those outside the walls, the once-working classes, who struggle and scrabble without the resources to survive as their society falls apart.

The protagonist struggles against those above him in the corporate hierarchy, and at times Morgan seems to suggest that he’ll throw them over over, for some kind of genuine change. In the end, though, he settles for simply ousting them, replacing their acolytes with his. It’s a disappointing ending, but perhaps one in line with Morgan’s view of humanity.

Quotes

Wearing a suit doesn’t make you smart, Chris. It just makes you greedy.

Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.

Everything is about politics, Carla. Politics is everything. Everything in human society anyway.

I’d say a practising free-market economist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t doing his job properly.

Books I won’t be finishing: Probably Approximately Correct and Nerve

There are a few books I’ve started, but not finished.

Probably Approximately Correct sounds very exciting. It’s about … it’s about learning, and algorithms, and universal laws. It’s about probably approximately correct learning theory. Beyond that, I couldn’t really tell you. I should have heeded the warnings, but this really does feel like I needed a stronger sense of computational mathematics, more time, and more focus to get anything out of it. If someone can dumb this down a level, I’d love to read a little more. Until then I’m passing.

Nerve is about teenagers playing an online game that gets too real and dangerous and … ugh. I couldn’t finish the book. I can’t remember if it was too awkward, characters making decisions that were too frustratingly dumb, or … what it was. Didn’t do it for me.