Book Review of Traitors by Alex Shaw

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This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via NetGalley.co.uk

A fast-paced spy thriller with a charismatic (French) heroine.

This novel is set in places and involves the sort of (Ukrainian) people and politics which the author knows about and this makes it a palpable improvement on his earlier works. Those tended to be set mainly in American settings, perhaps to appeal to an American readership, and also featured highly-technological super-weapons, which are a trap for an author who does not fully comprehend the fruits of his own research. The author, wisely, approached this novel with the premise that a grenade in a modest apartment is dramatic enough.

Although this is an action thriller and the pace rarely slackens, there are layers and twists to the plot and it is a battle of minds as well as muscle. The international politics are more convincing than before (especially as this review was written the day after what the press are already calling “the Black Sea Incident”) and Russian intelligence officers are portrayed as sufficiently intelligent to hatch plots which pay off even if the heroine does her best to thwart them. And that brings us to Sophie Racine, the best thing about this book. The late, great Leslie Thomas once introduced one of his female characters with the line “you should have seen her throw a grenade” and the ability to use a grenade wisely is what sets a truly charismatic female action heroine apart from the AR-toting also-rans.

The supporting cast is mainly a British SIS officer and former SAS trooper who supplies the heroine, not with muscle (which would be superfluous) but restraint and the occasional less-violent solution, such as asking nicely. This, too, represents an improvement on the author’s previous work. At the time of the Yugoslav Civil War, when Western peacekeepers went in, it was pointed out that the hallmark of the SAS was actually subtlety and if what you wanted was an enemy base utterly pulverised, you sent in any line infantry regiment of the British Army.

Traitors by Alex Shaw is published by HQ on the 23^rd of July 2021

Institutional Incomprehension: How Modern Education Fails at the Margins

 Relevant Quotes:

Education, Education, Education! 

(Tony Blair)

 

Educational achievement is THE route to better jobs. 

(Practically everyone who tries to sell modern education to the marginalised.)

Now brothers are kindred but hard times betray,

and so we stumbled on the old changing way.

We never agreed to divide our tin,

and when you're out of love with your brother, 

your hard times begin.

(Richard Thompson, "The Old Changing Way" (song lyric))

What this is all about:

This morning, the UK Parliament's Education Select Committee published a report blaming the term "white privilege" for the undeniable fact that poorer white pupils do relatively badly in British schools. It is also apparent from their figures that Afro-Caribbean pupils also do quite badly compared to British Asian pupils or British African pupils. The committee is basically saying that poor educational achievement is not really a colour issue, but perhaps something less superficial. Most of the reaction to this report has, of course, been entirely woke superficial Tory-bashing. But that's not to say that the committee have really thought long enough or deeply enough to have the real answers.

The Harsh Truth:

The BBC report on the Parliamentary report makes it painfully obvious that low educational achievement by poor white (and almost certainly also Afro-Caribbean) pupils and students is caused by an instinctive rejection of the sales message of modern education encapsulated by the first two quotes, above. Even the BBC is unable to comprehend exactly why this is so, but in comprehending at least that it is so, they are somewhat ahead of the politicians.

Modern Education is being sold to us on an entirely materialistic basis, aimed solely at our self-interest and our self-gratification. Even if people aspire to be educated so as to join some caring or public-spirited profession, the necessary qualifications are sold to us on the basis that the will "allow you to fulfill your dream." You are not even allowed to do good to others without a broad streak of self-interest. And the reason Modern Education is sold to us on this basis is quite simply that it has nothing else to offer. Nothing is allowed to be objectively good or bad, so Modern Education cannot be sold on the basis that it is good in and of itself. Classical Education could be and was sold on the basis that it was good in and of itself, but whether it really was is perhaps a matter for debate and it's not the point which needs to be grasped here: the materialistic self-interest sales-pitch for Modern Education is not selling to the marginalised and we need to understand why it is being rejected. And this bring us to the third quote, above.

If you have grown up in serious disadvantage or oppression, and even more so if your family has had to live with disadvantage and oppression for generations, that third quote is a statement of your deepest knowledge: your primary survival instinct. "If you're out of love with your brother, your hard times begin." Some people in disadvantaged communities may reject this ethic and join criminal gangs in consequence. These are not the survivors: they are the ones that kill others; the ones who get killed. You survive oppression by sticking with those close to you and those like you, you survive by brotherly love. And if you are doing that, then a Blairite sales pitch for higher education that seems to be telling you to break free of those around you and leave them behind, sounds unwise if not wholly evil. (And so does the Marxist message that you can break free of oppression by turning the tables and becoming the oppressor. A boot on the other foot is still a boot in someone's face.)

The marginalised are not rejecting education because they are misinformed, deranged, deluded, dull, ignorant or stupid, but because the fact that they have virtually nothing of material value enables them to make non-materialistic judgements. "I'll stick with my mates." or "my Dad or Uncle will get me a job" or even "I don't really want to be quite like that Tony Blair." 

Learning used to be something of intangible and almost unlimited worth and during and after the Reformation it was highly prized by the poor: it was often literally true that a ploughboy would know more about the Bible than a Bishop. Education should be something of unlimited worth! But in the past few generations the intelligentsia, whose crass stupidity made George Orwell despair of them, have reduced education to nothing more than a tool for climbing the greasy pole.

Education needs to get back to being the kind of learning that has value irrespective of any self-interest or immediate material outcome.

Like rooks and ravens, human beings are born to learn, all their days. We do not learn solely to get a better job and have a career, but to make a better job of our whole lives and not just at our place of employment. By learning we enjoy what's around us more because we understand what's happening: if it is good we can take quiet pleasure in that and if it is not good, we can change it. We learn to make better decisions, we learn to take better care of others. We even learn just for the sake of learning. We learn to recognise when we are being helped and when we are being bullied and manipulated. We learn to do justice as well as to seek justice for ourselves. And all of this learning is inconvenient to those who would manipulate us. But if we can achieve an education system that genuinely prizes learning for its own sake, there is hope for us. We can exchange manipulation for free and steady progress towards what is objectively good. And if we persist for long enough, fewer and fewer people will be marginalised: learning will be accepted because it will be seen to be good.

Book Review of Girls Who Lie by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (Translated by Victoria Crib.)

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Absorbing Icelandic Murder Mystery

This a competently-written novel made accessible for the English reader by a translator whose first language appears to be English English rather than “American” or “International” English. This is actually done so well that the author appears to have an English voice, which is obviously not the reality. It is nice to be flattered, though, and this is not going to happen with a novel written in any EU-member language anytime soon.

The plot concerns single mothers and how different their place in society can be, dependent on small differences of privilege and, to be honest, luck. (A few decades ago, many Icelandic men earned a dangerous living at sea and single mothers were not unusual. The same would have been true in much of coastal Britain, too, a generation or two earlier. “Old fashioned” prejudices against single mothers may, in fact, be 19^th or 20^th century innovations depending on how far North you are.)

The heroine, Elma, a small town female police detective, has to navigate a lot of assumptions, many of them false, and omissions (because it took several months for her missing person case to become a murder case) to get anywhere near the truth. The reader, too, is led into false assumptions to teach them a lesson. There is tension and excitement as the novel approaches what seems to be a traditional Icelandic happy ending, which allows life to go on without the exact truth becoming generally known or “justice” really being done.

Girls Who Lie by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir is published in the UK by Michael Joseph 2021.

Book Review of If You Were There by Francisco Garcia

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This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via NetGalley.co.uk

 

This book tells the story of a personal journey whilst exploring the viewpoints and experiences of those the author meets along the way. This includes those left behind by someone who went missing, just as the author’s father left him behind; professionals and volunteers dealing with the missing from various different directions and even one person who intentionally went missing and was found “safe and well”. There are important issues with even that outcome, because the mentality of going intentionally missing isn’t always far from that of suicide and this is why there’s a need for the police and other agencies to tread more carefully than most people realise. People going missing through an accident, such as falling in a canal and not being found for some time is dealt with and at least this kind of disappearance is amenable to energy being put into safety measures to prevent accidents near deep water in cities. There is no other side of the coin with stopping someone from drowning, as there is with finding and bringing back someone whose circumstances drove them to flee. Cases of people who have gone missing almost certainly as a result of a criminal act are mentioned, but the author does not get to grips with this and it’s hard to see how he could, because victims of kidnap and murder cannot speak and the perpetrators will very probably utter only lies.

The decision the author finally takes when he travels to his father’s home city in Spain would be surprising for anyone who hasn’t read the book through to that point, and the book appears to have been mostly written as the author went along with his search so readers see the decision as it happens. But the thoroughness of this book in the way it identifies and deals with as many relevant issues as it can, allows the reader to fully understand the decision when it comes. It’s a useful book for people to read, because none of us will have any advance warning if someone we know chooses to go missing. There are avoidable mistakes which tend to be made in such situations and it’s no good trying to learn how to react while it’s all happening. More than a hundred thousand people go missing in Britain every year and everyone has some responsibility to develop an understanding of the issues.

I haven’t encountered a lot of other non-fiction on this particular theme, but Abbie Greaves’ novel “The Ends of the Earth” has a similar conclusion.

If You Were There by Francisco Garcia was published by Mudlark on the 13^th of May 2021

AI and the Economics of Tyranny

 

Background

Today is the thirty-second anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre and also the day on which a panel chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC starts to hear evidence, in London, of alleged genocide by the Chinese Communist Party against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, not that essentially the same thing hasn't also happened in Tibet and Inner Mongolia. A vote in the UK Parliament has already defined what's going on as genocide, but assorted nit-pickers and hair-splitters claim that "only a court can make such a determination" whilst simultaneously doing everything in their power to stop the matter coming before such a court.

Looking Beyond the Obvious for a Change

It really should have been obvious well before June the fourth, nineteen eighty-nine that "mainland" China was a totalitarian state whose rulers would use any force (or falsehood) necessary to maintain and increase their power. And since that date no honest person has been able to deny it. Yet for those thirty-two years Western, especially American, high-technology, businesses have fought and won political battles with their own governments, shareholders and sceptical opposition politicians to continually pour money and intellectual property into Communist mainland China. As soon as one asks "why", loud but unthinking voices respond by saying "it's a huge market, dummy!" which is the equivalent of the people who air their great wisdom by saying that conflict in the Middle East, or the Falklands, is "all about oil". It isn't: strategic battles over the Middle East predate the industrial exploitation of oil reserves by many centuries. The Middle East is strategically important because it's in the middle.

China is a "huge market" that constantly attracts investment of money, intellectual property (not even counting that which it steals), effort and attention from the West, without allowing any non-Chinese, non-communist entity to benefit in any significant way. Most of the "consumers" in the Chinese market have no disposable income at all by any standard that applies in Taiwan or Malaysia for example: what they eat each evening is what they earned that day. That still leaves a few hundred million middle-class consumers with a disposable income of a sort, but they are subject to tight social control by the Chinese Communist Party and if the CCP tells them to boycott a given company or country's products, they do so within hours. Every factory or laboratory in China built with Western money and know-how cedes control of both to the CCP at the outset and forever. The Chinese market is one where inwards investment has been proven over decades to never really pay dividends to the investor -and still the inwards investment keeps coming! There must be more to it than a fool's gold-rush driven by the greed of key individuals for the same thing to keep happening for so long. Einstein defined madness as repeating the same action over and over again and expecting something different to happen. If it's madness, it must be multi-generational. Or there must be some factor other than the shareholder's best interests at work here. If the West's business leaders are true capitalists, then furthering interests other than those of the shareholder is idolatry. So, if they are not mad, what's their idol?

Artificial Intelligence

In engineering terms "Artificial Intelligence" is very different from "Automation" but the latter comes close to being an economic model for the former. The remaining difference is that while automation replaces labour, most profitably skilled or semi-skilled labour, whilst creating a potentially-powerful class of persons capable of managing the technology (what C.S. Lewis called "the conditioners"), AI replaces the conditioners themselves and puts power either into the hands of a much smaller cadre of human rulers, or into its own hands. Now, C.S. Lewis was trying to make a point about the importance of objective reality standing apart from the political issue of tyranny, hence his use of a very neutral word, "conditioners," for the governing class in a largely-automated world. But in any situation where ethnic minorities are being subject to genocide at the same time that the ethnic majority are subject to such tight social control that most members of the ethnic majority have no choice about anything and own nothing, not even their own vital organs, then words like "tyranny" have to enter the conversation because it's not possible to describe the situation without them.

This article was sparked by a chance remark, this week, from one of the author's engineering colleagues. He had been engaged in a discussion with an American friend, about the fact that up to about nineteen-seventy, improvements in wages in America had tracked improvements in productivity, but since that date wages have fallen further and further behind. The friend held that this was because "different types of capital were being invested" (this may be a way of saying "it's the damned liberals/neo-cons") but my colleague was adamant that, having worked in factory automation ever since nineteen seventy and in several parts of the world, it was automation replacing mere mechanisation that had broken the link between improved productivity and improved wages. (Automation only replaces skilled labour if you have skilled labour in the first place. This places skilled Western economies at a disadvantage because they have to maintain living standards for the skilled, especially if they have a vote.) 

 

The American friend wasn't going to accept a non-American observation, of course, so they agreed to differ. But my colleague kept on thinking and he started to read around the issue, and especially reading about whether Artificial Intelligence was doing the same sort of thing, economically, as automation. And what he found was, that in America it wasn't. The improvement in American productivity due to AI is quite modest, just a few percent, and it's nothing like enough to justify all the hype. Especially when compared to alternative (and cheaper) ways of improving productivity, such as genuinely-improving education for as much of the population as possible, with an emphasis on nurturing free and creative thought.

The impact of automation and more especially AI on the Communist Chinese economy was much more profound: AI has improved productivity in China by more than fifty percent. It is the main driver of productivity. Because it is "replacing" something that has never really existed there in the first place, there are fewer economic or social costs involved in using AI to the full. And a tyranny will tend to perceive the "social costs" of AI as benefits, because those social costs weaken the power of the entire population save for a tiny elite cadre much too small to be called a social class.

There are other considerations, too: a heavily AI-based economic model is the only kind that can tolerate anything like a Chinese Communist-style education system which trains workers to think little and remember less whilst conditioning the middle classes to instinctively keep even their innermost thoughts within "patriotic" bounds which get narrower every year. All the economic alternatives to AI require free and creative thought to be liberally scattered at random throughout the masses in order to work sustainably. AI wasn't available in time to save the USSR,  so it choked and died. But because a tyranny like the CCP cannot tolerate anything happening at random and it cannot tolerate free and creative thought at all, an AI-based economic model is the only kind which offers a tyranny indefinite sustainability

The American and other big-tech companies and oligarchs haven't just invested time, money and intellectual property in AI: they have made a massive emotional investment in AI too. For most of the key players, AI being seen as a boon to mankind is the only thing which allows them any self-esteem. Placed on top of the more tangible investments they have made, that emotional investment draws them towards the only system willing to revolve around AI and make their work significant. And that system to which they are being drawn, is tyranny. The people behind AI need it to be needed and it's tyranny that needs it most. Because tyranny has no purpose other than to sustain itself and therefore it has to try and exist forever.  AI is tyranny's only chance.

Where to Buy Print Copies of The Author's Books

The Lord of Billionaires' Row

The paperback edition is only available from Amazon. These are links direct to the paperback product page on:

amazon.com

amazon.co.uk

amazon.jp

amazon.ca

The author selected the option for the paperback to be available in every Amazon marketplace where this is possible. Hopefully, the e-books and paperback editions are now linked in all those marketplaces, so looking at the Kindle E-book product page will show you the paperback as well, if it's currently available from that part of the Amazon Empire. See below.

The base price (less P&P) is £12.95 or the local equivalent. There is no VAT on print books in the United Kingdom. Not sure about the EU.

There is now an Australian-printed paperback available. Because of higher printing costs in Australia, this has been locally priced at AUS$24, which works out at AUS$26.40 on the 3rd of June 2021. This price does not include delivery, which may be free to Amazon Prime customers.

E-book editions in various formats are also available from both Amazon and Smashwords.

The Farshoreman

This is now available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B47FLBDS

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B47FLBDS

or search Kindle books in other domains for:

The Farshoreman by Matthew K. Spencer

You will see both the Kindle E-book and Paperback versions if both are available in your Amazon domain, but in some places the paperback is not available for what are apparently environmental reasons.

Where to buy "The Lord of Billionaires' Row"

Smashwords E-book in multiple formats:

Available from this link, base price is $2.10 (library price $1). This edition is available in MOBI, EPUB, PDF and other formats and has in-text navigation features in order to support readers without the menu-driven navigation features of a Kindle.

This edition is also available from most Smashwords affiliates. Search for:

The Lord of Billionaires' Row by Matthew K. Spencer

NB: readers planning to read the book on a Linux PC with Libre Office, for example, will do better to buy the .pdf version rather than the .epub version, because Libre Office may treat every chapter of the .epub as a separate document and send you back to the table of contents to read each one separately. This does not happen with Adobe Digital Editions on a Windows or Mac platform, but in general the .pdf format is recommended for reasonably modern PCs. For geriatric PCs and CPM machines etc. a plaintext .txt version is available.

The online reader version is fine, as long as you can get online when you want to read! If you want something to read during connection outages, choose one of the downloadable files.

 

Amazon MOBI-format E-Book:

This edition does not have the in-text navigation features and is formatted according to Amazon, rather than Smashwords, guidelines. It supports menu-driven navigation as is normal for Kindles. Base price is £1.70, see links or your local Amazon domain for price in your currency and with/without VAT as appropriate to your location.

Available from amazon.co.uk via this link.

                        amazon.com via this link.

                        amazon.co.jp via this link

                        amazon.ca via this link

                        amazon.com.au via this link

                        amazon.in via this link

                        amazon.de via this link

                        amazon.fr via this link

                        amazon.es via this link

                        amazon.it via this link

                        amazon.nl via this link

                        amazon.com.br via this link

                        amazon.com.mx via this link

Amazon Paperback:

Paperback (138,000 words, 375 pages) with a base price of £12.25, plus delivery (which may depend on what else you order). There is no VAT on books in the United Kingdom.

Because the paperback might be purchased by or for readers who cannot cope with a Kindle or other e-reader, the 12-point typeface was chosen for reading comfort and one of the proof copies was read by a 96-year-old who didn't complain, much.

The Kindle E-book and Paperback editions are now linked in all Amazon marketplaces where the Paperback is available, so choose a Kindle E-book link, above, and you should also be able to choose the paperback from the same page. The exception, as of July 2020 seems to be the Netherlands. 

 New: Australian-printed Amazon paperback now available!