Election 2011 is the most important political event in the history of the state. It provides the people of Ireland with the chance to play Bill Cullen and hire the best, those with the liathróidí, nimbleness and expertise to find different ways of telling us there is no alternative. Gavan Titley introduces Crisisjam’s election week celebration of technocracy, now.
As Dan Hind points out in The Threat to Reason, "Reason and science can be empolyed for swindling ends but they can also serve in the cause of human liberation. The decision to treat human beings as objects of rational administration does not derive from the operations of rationality. It is an act of will." Below, Eadaoin O'Sullivan tries to rescue science from its ideological hijacking, and suggests that in fighting against technocracy, we should be wary of being drawn into a fight about who's got the smallest p-values.
Illan Rua Wall has been playing with Fine Gael's latest addition to its already bulging sack of horrendous digital animation, 'Go Ireland - the Videogame', and has found it as, if not more, illuminating than their five point plan.
American companies are usually considered to be at the forefront of attempts to push the boundaries of possibility when it comes to branding things, but in Ireland, two parties - Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - are true innovators. They have dispensed entirely with the thing a brand is usually attached to, says Nyder O'Leary, and have become all brand.
In part two of his series on neoliberalism, Aidan Regan asks who, exactly, is homo economicus, and finds that he's a mythical beast composed mostly of bits and pieces of brus from the bottom of an ideological barrel.
There is an idea abroad. It is the idea that the Irish people are inveterately thick; incapable of rational choice or decision making. Saying that people are too stupid to understand something is the first refuge of the terminally technocratic when faced with dissent. More than that, considering the people “too stupid” for real change reveals one's own unwillingness to be self-critical and constructive about failure as well as revealing an ironic disdain for others, argues Angela Nagle.
In the first of a two-part series, Aidan Regan traces a history of neoliberalism, and shows why its supremacy as explanans for all economic activity is based neither on the rigour of its methods or the predictive power of its hypotheses, but on a simple moral argument about the superiority of the individual over the collective; the private over public.
As has been noted on CrisisJam before, failure is no barrier to success in the thin air that prevails in the offices off the topmost corridors of power. The IMF’s dismal record in evaluating and forecasting economic performance – and its tenured poistion as arbiter of same - bespeaks a very special kind of insulation from the consequences of stupidity and failure.
Week three of the 2011 general election is now underway, and the agenda is still largely dominated by the state of Ireland's beleaguered economy. Econospeak has overtaken Irish as our second most popular language, and the front pages are still filled with stories of bailouts, banks, bondholders, budgets and Brussels. The other big issue of the election, political reform, occasionally gets a look in, but the broadsheets are dissecting daily the minutiae of our economic situation - and with good reason.
We are constantly reassured that there is immense talent and creativity in the country. What a gift, then, when an elite Brains Trust bands together to put Ireland First, relatively speaking. Mary Gilmartin examines the anatomy of yet another proposal for national management.