In the wake of Ireland's ignominious exit from the Rugby World Cup, I considered crafting a lengthy post arguing that coach Eddie O'Sullivan is merely a very high-profile example of an Irish professional (a category encompassing lawyers, medics, politicians, business leaders, and educators) involved in an organisation that is "world-class" only in the sense of how well it pays its senior figures. O'Sullivan's misfortune, if that is appropriate description of the fate of someone who still looks on course to pocket at least 450,000 euro a year for the next four years (or the equivalent in a lump sum payoff), is that in sport the gap between hype and reality is eventually (and brutally) exposed.

However, you might be glad to hear, I don't have the time or the inclination to marshall the hyperlinks that would buttress my sour thesis. Anyway, I'm keeping my polemical powder dry for a post later this week on Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I decided to pick up after a review in the Irish Times both intrigued and irritated me (which, I suppose, are both things a good review should do.) More to come. . .

In the meantime, have you seen this brilliantly undiplomatic New Yorker cover?

This week Google's share price hit a record high this week, reaching $584.39 a pop (according to this impartial source), giving the "do no evil" outfit a market capitalization of 182.41 billion, roughly 9 times that of General Motors.

The thing is, along with Google, the site I probably most visit is Wikipedia, the exemplar of Web 2.0 that I still think is wonderful despite the tedious sniping. Moreover, Wikipedia's not-for-profit status places it in an antipodal position to Google, which is relentlessly tagging with ads every conceivable byte of content. (And Wikipedia's potential market value must run into the hundreds of millions in an environment in which YouTube was bought for $1.65 billion.)

Now, assuming the following question should be considered in the light of being remembered by posterity--money not being important in the afterlife/black void awaiting all carbon-based lifeforms--which site would you most like to have founded?

Another tech-related blip-thought: would paid-content on the web have been accepted if the U.S. had television licences?

Promised views on The Shock Doctrine later this week, honestly.

To start on a superficial note: Naomi Klein, scourge of corporations and hollow brand iconography, is well-served by the publishing behemoth (Pearson PLC, as embodied by Penguin Books) charged with distributing her latest treatise, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Coming in a shade of yellow typically associated with radioactive and biological hazard signs, the book's phosphorescent cover arrests the eyeballs of both prospective buyers and--perhaps equally important--like-minded strangers sharing the same commuter train or coffee shop as the reader. Against the lurid cover, the black lettering of the title has an austere cast, suggesting the contents within are likely to yield unpalatable truths that must nevertheless be choked down.

And the book does, in its 460+ page survey of free marketeers' exploits across the globe over the past 30 or so years, present some pretty dismaying information. Beginning with the first "experiment" in implementing the laissez-faire doctrine of Milton Friedman in Pinochet's Chile, Klein presents an exhaustive (and occasionally exhaustingly repetitious) analysis of how right-wing ideologues have exploited (and later engineered) crises to impose radical policies that would have no hope of being implemented had not democratic checks and balances been suspended or violently overridden.

Klein's thesis is, pace Friedman and his "Chicago Boys", there is no natural harmony between free markets and a free society. In fact, there is an inherently violent disjunction between the two: the theories of Milton Friedman (who, you might gather by now, is a sort of monetarist Sauron looming over this book) presage a society in which a select band of "winners" can amass immense fortunes while the great bulk of society--the "losers"--can basically go boil their heads. Countering this few-against-the-many economic landscape (with a touch of trickle-down to ameliorate the lives of sommeliers, landscape gardeners, and chauffeurs) are the egalitarian tendencies associated with one-person-one-vote democracy. As it's unlikely the masses will voluntarily vote for their immiseration, Friedman's theories can be implemented only when most people have no say in the matter--or are too afraid or stunned to raised their voices.

And this is where the "shock" of Klein's title comes in. TBC...

(Continued from Tuesday.) Klein adopts the age-old yet fashionable metaphor of the "body politic" to demonstrate parallels between electric shock treatment administered to individual "patients" (and, later, torture victims) and the "shock therapy" acolytes of Friedman diagnosed as a remedy for ailing societies. Commencing to build on this slightly over-extended analogy, Klein points to how CIA-funded experiments conducted by Donal Ewen Cameron at McGill University, Montreal, inspired interrogation techniques that would later be codified in the intelligence agency's "KuBark" document.

Cameron appeared to treat patients under his care like rhesus monkeys, subjecting them to electroconvulsive treatments at frequencies far in excess of standard practice. Cameron's aim was, apparently, to "depattern" his patients so that their minds would become tabulae rasae, wiped clean and ready to accept whatever the doctor (and society) wished to inscribe.

Applied in the only marginally less darker realm of the interrogation room, Cameron's techniques were used to create pliable detainees who would submit to their captors' requests for information with calvish obedience.

Klein moves from the micro- to the macro- level by claiming that events such as Pinochet's coup on 11 September 1973 and the "Shock and Awe" campaign against Iraq mirror the techniques of the torture chamber. Electrodes are attached to the most sensitive parts of the body politic as tanks roll down the street, explosions illuminate through the city's skyline, and neighbours vanish into thin air.

In such a way entire countries are "depatterned", rendered docile enough to accept free market medicine.

Except when they aren't. The Shock Doctrine eats its metaphorical cake and has it by quoting the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual to the effect that brutality can have the unintended consequence of breeding defiance. So "Shock and Awe" can produce a Chilean revolution, but it can also lead to Iraq.

(In addition, Klein's contention that the Falklands War produced a Pinochet-style crisis that allowed the Thatcher government to win an election seems to place rather too much emphasis on that bloody spat in the South Atlantic. Sure, bashing the "Argies" helped secure Maggie's crushing 1983 election victory but having Michael Foot as the leader of the Labour Party probably helped her a good deal more.)

And just as Klein unearths numerous examples that demonstrate the phony connection between democracy and laissez-faire capitalism, a similar debunking of cause-and-effect can be prompted by considering how even greater "shocks" than the ones chronicled in this book ushered in economic systems that were anathema to those educated at the "Chicago school."

As Tony Judt described in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, the Europe that emerged from World War II had been radically and brutally "simplified" with ethnic minorities purged, borders redrawn by armies, and politics shaped by the garrisons from the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States. The peoples blinking in the cold light of peace--"troglodytes" as the anonymous author of A Woman in Berlin described the survivors emerging from the bomb shelters--would have placidly followed anyone who promised bread and soup.

A Real Shock: Berlin Skyline 1946

Following the trauma of war, the economic model that became the successful paradigm for most of Western Europe (Ireland, for example, remained mired in stagnation) was the social market economy. This is because it seemed to work: the combatants' wartime economies were already essentially socialised and the Keynesian approach of pump-priming was perfectly suited to nations that needed massive investment to rebuild their capital stock. In addition, strong trade unions, who demanded (and were granted) high wages, were tolerated as their members help form the backbone of an emerging mass consumer society.

Up until the oil shocks of the 1970s, the "social market" model (which even the United States had in a more limited form) appeared to be the only game in town.

But when the instability and crises arose in the 1970s, policymakers in several countries turned to Friedman's model simply because the old ways no longer seemed as effective as before. For example, increased expenditure now seemed to fuel inflation without lifting employment. In addition, Klein's presentation of "developmentalism" as a success story in South America's southern cone that was destroyed by crisis-lead free-market ukases ignores the fact that Argentina's best days, for example, probably came to an end as early as the 1950s, when a self-sufficient Europe no longer required the county's agricultural exports. Unsurprisingly, when crises of the 1970s and 1980s unfolded the juntas and political elites decided the new treatment must be better than the regimen that had apparently sparked the emergency in the first place.

It is testament to the stimulating, far-reaching nature of The Shock Doctrine that it compels the reader to argue with it, to shout back such counterexamples. Although the book draws very heavily on secondary sources, Klein is astute in the material she chooses to mine, plucking damning quotations from gung-ho reformers whose commitment to abstract notions of efficiency and performance leave no room for unquantifiable sentiment. For example, one vulture encountered at a trade show called "ReBuilding Iraq 2" chillingly asserts "The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground."

Finally, this important book will gain a readership because it adroitly taps into a growing uneasiness over the price being paid by the many for the comfort of the few: That ineffable sense of guilt that arises when watching some natural disaster besetting non-white people on your new Plasma screen.

In Benjamin Kunkel's 2005 novel Indecision, a character speculates about a magical fruit: after you taste it, whenever you put your hand on a product or commodity, how that item was grown or manufactured becomes instantly transparent. The effect, the character muses, would be like the static shock from a door handle.

In a world lacking such an enlightening substance, reports from writers such as Klein are the next best thing. The shock delivered is invigorating.

During my extensive discussion of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, I mentioned how the author envisioned a new super-elite emerging from the wreckage of consensus capitalism. In such a scenario, "trickle-down" economics, first touted during the Reagan administration, amounts to creating a new servant class, scrabbling for the crumbs that fall from the top table. If the new professions--springing up to transform the more absurd velleities of the rich into a steady paycheque--profiled in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine are anything to go buy, there is already a thriving shoal of remoras attached to the sharks of Wall Street:

For example, meet Dr Jana Klauer, an "Off-the-Menu Nutritionist":

“For my patients with heavy entertaining schedules, I go over the menus of restaurants they’re expected to attend, say, in the upcoming week and tell them what to order,” says Klauer, also known as the Park Avenue Nutritionist. “That way, there’s no guesswork. Before they even step foot inside a restaurant, they know what they’re going to eat.” Most easily adaptable menu: “Primola’s Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. I recommend a crudités plate at the beginning of the meal, instead of a bread basket; chicken parmigiana, without breading or frying; or the grilled fish.” Most challenging restaurant: “French restaurants can be tricky.” One — “I won’t say its name” — poaches its fish in goose fat. Some of her clients: Chefs, ladies who lunch and executives from Dubai.

Amid the coverage of Anne Enright's Man Booker Prize win for The Gathering (which I might get around to reading), it has been mentioned that this is the second time the prize has been awarded to an Irish woman, the first being Iris Murdoch in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea.

An illuminating article by Murdoch biographer Peter J Conradi that appeared in The Guardian in 2001 revealed that the Dublin-born author held staunch--to say the least--opinions about the country with which she unflaggingly identified herself, even in the wintry depths of Alzheimer's:

In October 1979, in her journal, she noted approvingly a letter from the writer Honor Tracy, who, though Catholic, wrote: "It is the Stone Age ferocity of the native Irish Catholics in the north which bring these atrocious deeds about... The amount of sheer humbug is breath-taking, and when you think what it has lost in lives and cripplings and blindings. But you know all this." Murdoch was able henceforth wildly to lose her temper about Ireland. After they had argued about Ireland in 1983, she wrote to one old friend, the philosopher Mary Midgley, to defend Paisley, who, said Murdoch, "sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists. That he is emotional and angry is not surprising, after 12-15 years of murderous IRA activity. All this business is deep in my soul I'm afraid." She now evinced the laager-mentality of the Ulster Protestant who, she felt, had no hinterland, unlike Northern Irish Catholics. No occasion is recorded on which she allowed that the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland had, in 1968, distinct and legitimate grievances.

Ireland became "unthinkable". It was certainly unwriteable. She tried in early drafts of The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) to confront within it an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant, but the story took off in a different direction. Labour policy on Northern Ireland was a leading cause in her voting Tory in the 1980s. In 1982 she remarked, "It's a terrible thing to be Irish." In The Sea, The Sea (1978) the Northern Irish character Peregrine Arbelow, before his death at the hands of an unidentified sniper, says that "being Irish is so 'awful' that even being Scottish is better".

The cinematic highlight of the year for me occurred last Saturday evening, when I finally got around to watching The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's superb portrayal of a Stasi agent who, for reasons that are never really made wholly clear, risks everything to save some people from a system which he had hitherto ruthlessly served. When (spoiler alert) at the end of the film Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe, whose remarkable performance is glazed with the added poignancy stemming the actor's recent death) opens a copy of Georg Dreyman's Sonata for a Good Man and reads "To HGW XX/7, with gratitude," my eyesight went sort of funny, momentarily doubling the image of this Good Man telling the bookshop assistant, "Es ist für mich”—“It’s for me.”

Those who have seen the picture will know what I mean.

I'll share my views of Anne Enright's Booker-prizewinning The Gathering later this week

Headline from the Torygraph: "BBC's Jonathan Ross is sleazy, smug and crass."

Valiantly overcoming a cold virus that seems to turned half the city's populace into snivelling wrecks, I dragged my diseased carcass (perhaps the prose style of my current livre de chevet, The Gathering, is getting to me) into the city centre yesterday to see the indomitable Seymour Hersh hold forth at the Amnesty International Lecture. The Irish Times diplomatically described Hersh's address as "wide-ranging", although I would have been more inclined to describe it as an enjoyable exercise in free association, as Hersh not only leaped from one from anecdote to next but frequently leaped back again. However, the message could not have been clearer: the numbers who have suffered already is shaming, but the black legacy of the Iraq misadventure, for both the benighted country itself and the United States, will blight the lives of many generations. (And that's before cheerfully contemplating what the Pentagon might have up its sleeve for Iran).

The only aspect that marred the event was that whiff of condescension towards those crazy Yanks that seem to be sine qua non of these events. At one point, the moderator Olivia O'Leary, employing that cultured faux-naĩf tone that has served her so well in her career, asked Hersh why did the Americans not treat the people they depend on for oil with more ... understanding?

As if the enlightened motorists of Ireland, with their copies of Edward Said's Orientalism on the passenger seats beside them, turn the key of SUVs fuelled by pixie-dust.

By the way, RTE has made the complete lecture available as a webcast.