Review: Collateral Damage, by Zygmunt Bauman

Reviewed by Shelley Walia

Cambridge: Polity. Pages 182. £14.99.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20140223/spectrum/book1.htm

COLLATERAL Damage as a term is not unique to only armed conflict. As argued by Zygmunt Bauman in his recent book Collateral Damage, it is also "one of the most salient and striking dimensions of contemporary social inequality. The inflammable mixture of growing social inequality and the rising volume of human suffering marginalised as ‘collateral’ is becoming one of most cataclysmic problems of our time."

Bauman goes on to elaborate this idea: "For the political class, poverty is commonly seen as a problem of law and order — a matter of how to deal with individuals, such as unemployed youth, who fall foul of the law. But treating poverty as a criminal problem obscures the social roots of inequality, which lie in the combination of a consumerist life philosophy propagated and instilled by a consumer-oriented economy, on the one hand, and the rapid shrinking of life chances available to the poor, on the other."

Collateral damage is contextualised within a broader global scenario where order and rationality have ended in an "uncertainty and randomness of 'liquid' modernity". Dreams of a progressive society now lie buried under consumerism that is central to the crisis of modernity. Those at the margins stand neglected in a world order where exclusivity of a few is guarded against any encroachments from below.

Such a cultural struggle, as argued by another contemporary cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, is needed at every level to fix the problem of this damage. His concern is with an economic life that is pervaded by culture and is dependent on moral bonds of social trust. Only societies with a high degree of social trust can create the kind of flexible, large-scale business organisations needed for successful competition in the emerging global economy and international order. 

Joining hands with Marx and Walter Benjamin, Zizek castigates the lack of aura in late capitalism: "While capitalism does suspend the power of the old ghosts of tradition, it generates its own monstrous ghosts. That is to say: On the one hand, capitalism entails the radical secularization of social life — it mercilessly tears apart any aura of authentic nobility, sacredness, honour, and so on."

But where does this 'trust' come from especially in a society where you have a new global class with citizenships of various countries and ownership of mansions, cottages and bungalows strewn across the globe? These global citizens live a private life of seclusion, which is dotted with well-planned itineraries to the most exotic of places and adventures in the most exhilarating of terrains. The farce lies in the very idea of ‘fear’ that haunts the super rich who endeavour to keep themselves away from disease, violence and crime. In such a world there is the absence of the other less-'fortunate' classes.

All this opulence is obviously gained through the predatory workings of the free-market economy under capitalism. Bauman holds on to his faith in the emancipatory thinking of Marx and Engels, who wrote in The Communist Manifesto that "capitalism had drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." In such a world of technological development in the area of communication and surveillance, privacy is dead, and "consumerism, built on capitalism's wager on the infinity of human needs, makes the attempt to solve humanity's problems by finding or imposing ordered solutions which is an impossibility, given the permanent state of recasting needs and desires." Though global transformist thought in areas of social justice, universal human rights, rule of law, global anti-war movements and transnational goodwill remain an aspiration of survival, the free market dramatics is underneath designed to accept casualties without questioning the rationality of the system. Clearly "casualties are dubbed 'collateral' in so far as they are dismissed as not important enough to justify the costs of their prevention, or simply 'unexpected' because the planners did not consider them worthy of inclusion among the objects of preparatory reconnoitering."

Possibility Of First Head Transplant Fraught With Ethical And Medical Dilemmas

Friday 5 July 2013 - 8am PST

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/262948.php

A leading neurosurgeon has revealed a project to carry out the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage within the next two years. The project is code-named HEAVEN/GEMINI.

Published in the June issue of Surgical Neurology International, the project has been outlined by Italian neuroscientist and functional neurosurgeon, Dr. Sergio Canavero. He says the procedure would take 100 surgeons 36 hours to complete, and would cost around £8.5 million ($12.6 million).

In 1970, US neurosurgeon Robert Joseph White performed an operation to transplant a monkey's head onto another monkey's body. However, the inability to repair the severed spinal cord due to lack of required technology proved a problem, and the monkey was left paralyzed, passing away days later.

But Canavero believes today's technology will overcome this hurdle and refers to previous studies in which scientist have reconnected spinal cords to rats. Canavero explains that the transplant will work if surgeons can successfully link the spinal cord to the head by fusing severed axons, the nerve cells that transmit information to different neurons, muscles and glands.

In the paper, Canavero explains:

"The greatest technical hurdle to such endeavor is of course the reconnection of the donor's and recipient's spinal cords. It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage."

He explains that cut axons can be reconstituted using molecules such as poly-ethylene glycol (PEG), used in many areas ranging from industrial manufacturing to pharmaceutical products. Another molecule that can be used is chitosan.

The surgery would involve putting the recipient's head into a "hypothermia mode" for around 45 minutes between 12°C and 15°C (the HEAVEN process). It is thought that this time frame would create virtually no neurological damage.

The GEMINI procedure would involve surgeons cutting the cooled spinal cords with an "ultra-sharp blade," before reconnecting the recipient's head to the donor body. In the paper, Canavero explains that this clean cut is the key to spinal cord fusion, as it allows the severed axons to be fused accurately with the molecules.

He explains that what is equally important is that the motorneuronal pools, responsible for the contraction of muscle fibers and skeletal muscle, remain fully intact so they can be engaged by spinal cord stimulation. Canavero says that this is a technique that has proven effective for motor control in patients with spinal injuries.

As the human brain can only survive without oxygen for one hour, the surgeons would have to remove both heads and connect the recipient's head to the circulatory system of the donor body within this time frame.

Canavero says that it is clear the procedure would extend some patients' lives and would be far-reaching. However, he says that a select group of gravely ill individuals would be the target, such as people with muscular dystrophies.

But he cautions that as the procedure is deployed within the clinical area, it needs proper regulation. He adds that a risk could develop whereby people with adequate funds try to secure the bodies of healthy young individuals on the black market and have them transplanted by dishonest surgeons - something he says needs to be addressed by society.

Written by Honor Whiteman

James Clapper might as well be called director of US fearmongering

by Michael Cohen

theguardian.com

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/06/james-clapper-us-threat-assessment-fearmongering

[...]

Last week the man who serves as America's Director of National Intelligence trudged up to 

Capitol Hill to tell the assembled members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (pdf) that the annual worldwide threat assessment, put together by the intelligence community, has filled him with dread. He told the room:

Looking back over my more than half a century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we have been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.

That is some scary stuff.

However, if you think you've heard this before from Clapper … well you have.

Last year he appeared before Congress for a similar purpose and, lo and behold, he was very, very concerned then too (pdf):

I will say that my almost 50 years in intelligence, I do not recall a period in which we confront a more diverse array of threats, crises and challenges around the world. This year's threat assessment illustrates how dramatically the world and our threat environment are changing.

And here he was in 2012 testifying (pdf) on that year's threat assessment report, "Never has there been, in my almost 49-year career in intelligence, a more complex and interdependent array of challenges than that we face today."

Of course, one must consider the possibility that over the past five decades the world has never been as dangerous, complex and challenging as it's been over the past three years (putting aside for a moment that whole "threat of nuclear holocaust" that defined much of the 60s, 70s and 80s.) If, however, you're skeptical about this, well you have good reason because Clapper's alarmist tone is hardly matched by the threats he cites.

So what precisely is worrying Clapper? There are the old stand-bys like "the scourge and diversification of terrorism" both of the global jihadist and home-grown variety. We'll simply put aside for a second the fact that significantly more Americans die each year from falling furniture and exponentially more die from freedom … er, I mean guns.

Clapper is concerned about "implications of the drawdown inAfghanistan", which is a nice pivot from a few years ago when Afghanistan was a vital national interest that necessitated a ramp up of US military engagement there (pdf). There's also the "sectarian war in Syria" and "its attraction as a growing center of radical extremism", which is compelling evidence that Syria is poised to take up the mantle of"failed state that foreign policy elites are really worried about."

There is the habitually frightening adjective war front, "an assertive Russia, a competitive China; a dangerous, unpredictable North Korea, a challenging Iran." The sober-minded might look at these countries and conclude that a more accurate set of descriptors would be "an enfeebled and corrupt Russia, an economically slowing and environmentally challenged China, a contained and sort of predictable North Korea and an isolated and diplomatically-engaged Iran". But that would be a pretty lame threat assessment, wouldn't it?

Then there are the really scary sounding threats that aren't actually threats to Americans. Things like, "lingering ethnic divisions in the Balkans, perpetual conflict and extremism in Africa; violent political struggles in … the Ukraine, Burma, Thailand and Bangladesh." I for one am troubled by each of these, as well as Clapper's reference to "specter of mass atrocities" and "the tragedy and magnitude of human trafficking" and "the increasing sophistication of transnational crime" and even the "insidious rot of inventive synthetic drugs" but the idea that any of these are serious "crises" or "threats" to America and its citizens is ludicrous.

This is what makes Clapper's argument – and indeed the entire process of writing a "worldwide threat assessment" so fundamentally unserious and distorting. America doesn't face a single truly serious security threat. We are a remarkably safe and secure nation, protected by two oceans, an enormous and highly effective military and dozens upon dozens of like-minded allies and friends around the world. Truly we have nothing to fear – except perhaps global climate change, which oddly merits a one-paragraph mention (pdf) in this year's threat assessment.

To listen to Clapper and others in the intelligence community one might never know that inter-state war has largely disappeared and that wars in general are in the midst of a multi-decade decline. For all of Clapper's expressed concern about "the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction", one might not know that 2013 was a landmark year for non-proliferation with important progress made in slowing down Iran's nuclear aspirations and enforcing the norm on chemical weapons usage.

With Clapper offering worrying words about "the increasing stress of burgeoning populations" and "the urgent demands for energy, water and food" one might be surprised to find out that global poverty continues adramatic free-fall; that people around the world are living longer lives and have better access to healthcare, food and education than ever before. You also probably wouldn't know that these indicators of material and political progress point in the direction of continued global stability.

It's almost as if Clapper and the intelligence community that he helms are playing up foreign threats in order to justify bloated post-9/11 budgets and broadly supported intelligence capabilities. Now granted, it's uncomfortable to accuse public officials of purposely hyping potential foreign threats, but how else does one react to arguments like this about the community's perpetual bête noire, cyber:

Iran and North Korea are unpredictable actors in the international arena. Their development of cyber espionage or attack capabilities might be used in an attempt to either provoke or destabilize the United States or its partners.

Or "Terrorist organizations have expressed interest in developing offensive cyber capabilities."

I've expressed interest in playing second base for the Boston Red Sox … and yet the man currently holding that job (Dustin Pedroia) seems blithely unconcerned that he will soon be unseated. Balancing intentions versus capabilities is (or at least should be) a crucial element of threat assessment and yet in Clapper's telling virtually every threat is of equal significance and likelihood.

All of this is not to say that there aren't real challenges facing the United States. There certainly are terrorists who still want to kill Americans; there is the potential (albeit slim) for instability in the Far East; and there are international criminal networks and even global pandemics that could harm America's economic interests as well as pose health risks. The United States should hardly ignore these – and other ongoing challenges – but policymakers like Clapper should also be able to talk about them in sober, evidence-based, non-hysterical terms.

The irony of all this is that Clapper has been under fire for months now because he allegedly lied to Congress over the extent to which the National Security Agency was collecting phone and e-mail records of individual Americans.

Yet, the yarn he spun on Capitol Hill last week was far worse than that: deceiving Americans about the nature of the world today and the threats facing the country. But in a political environment in which threat mongering and exaggeration is the norm rather than the exception, Clapper not only gets a pass – hardly anyone even noticed.

[...]

The True Utopia

F Bombs over Europe

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/victoria-nuland-f-bomb-020714

by Charles P. Pierce

As it turns out, there are many ways to say, "Fuck The EU." Millions of Greeks say it every day. They turn in the general direction of Angela Merkel, order up some ouzo, and in the language of Plato and Euripides, say, "Hey, fuck the EU!" The people in Iceland and Ireland say, "Fuck the EU," by putting bankers on trial and, in the case of Iceland, in jail. And every day, Vladimir Putin, the World's Host for the next two weeks, is saying "Fuck the EU" with armored vehicles and firearms, and he would like the Ukrainian people to say it, too, but they have thus far declined, preferring instead to say, "Fuck Vladimir Putin and our own government."

None of these, however, have caused the flap over the fact that Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state, has caused by saying "Fuck the EU" over her telephone, which had been tapped, and her conversation was then leaked to the world.

Read more: Victoria Nuland F Bomb - F Bombs Over Europe - Esquire
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