people » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

How to spot an idiot living in your neighbourhood

common sense, democracy, gilipollas, people, Telegraph, unclassifiable 2 Responses »

May 302013

There is an idiotic article out there at the moment with one – just one – (apparently borrowed) phrase of massively perceptive wisdom:

[...] As has been said, you have to be just clever enough to do it and just stupid enough to believe in it.

As follows, in fact:

It is surely reasonable for Dame Widow Twankey, the former director general of HI5, to call for people to inform on neighbours they suspect of idiocy. To a very limited extent, it happens already. But for the sake of all of us – political and celebrity communities in particular – it needs to happen more.

Also reasonable, on the face of it, is the Government’s desire to do more to discourage the process by which disaffected individuals turn themselves into intellectual lunatics – the job of the proposed task force on Prevent, the counter-radicalisation strategy.

In fact, we already know all we need to know about radicalisation. What the task force needs to focus on is what to do and – equally important – what not to do.

Studies show that it can happen to anyone, that there is no single identifiable profile. That said, the great majority of idiots, unsurprisingly, have been Anglo-Saxon males aged 35-70, a third to a half of whom had always been unemployed in the service of the state, in particular as MPs, and a significant portion of the rest under-employed as company directors or tabloid columnists. Most were unhappily married. Where women were involved, it tended to be in a supportive role, although in the Houses of Parliament and the Lords female representatives were radicalised by the decline of democracy, showing a curious empathy with the dispossessed.

Worldwide, about 62 per cent were graduate idiots, with those of non-British origin generally from the educated but politically frustrated aspirational middle class. British home-grown idiots tend to be less well educated though of a higher socio-economic status. One estimate is that about 31 per cent participated in some form of lower education, studying such subjects as hunting, shooting or fishing. They are not mad: levels of mental illness were roughly in line with world averages. Between a third and a quarter of those judged to be idiots in Britain and Europe had signs of congenital idiocy. A fifth or more of British idiots were also international celebrities, in particular business gurus, lifestyle leaders and think-tank groupies, integrating perfectly with the foolishness of their host culture and often obtaining leave to remain. Throughout Europe, many idiots were and are disaffected second-generation business wannabes on the political make.

Etc etc etc …

And so to our conclusion? Again, as follows:

Rather than ban idiots, the Government should dialogue with, educate and embrace them (as the French often do) along with their hangers-on. It should stress that the proposed Common Idiots Bill (aka the “Promote Graft Charter”) does little more than extend to new idiots existing practices with the old. Above all, officials should pay more attention to “anti-democratic idiots”, the swamp from which the current Parliament and the international celebrity community has emerged. The Prime Minister publicly called for this in his 2011 speech in Munich, but Whitehall largely ignored him, focusing on what one of Dame Twankey’s successors called “the idiots nearest the boat”. It needn’t cost much – a few good dipstick officers here and there – but it would make a difference.

One final observation, this time on a totally serious note: we can always tell where a so-called “white” society is rampantly prejudiced when a crime committed by a “white” man or woman doesn’t merit the epithet of “white”, even as any crime committed by someone of another race, religion or ethnic grouping immediately leads to the latter information being foregrounded in those oh-so-even-handed newspaperly descriptions.

When I was a kid, and when I was occasionally driven to use swear words about people in front of my father, he would tell me – quite carefully and gently – that I should be using the term “indescribable idiot”.

No. It doesn’t sound the same as, for example, “black savage” – but it does allow us to communicate our necessary positions without the tragic interference of otherwise inevitable prejudice.

We ought to listen to my father on this one, I think.

Let’s start calling all those who would destroy the equilibrium of democracy “idiots” – and in the process aim to leave our prejudices properly behind us.

Don’t you think?

Is humanity as a species suicidal?

in a hole, people No Responses »

May 102013

This news is, indeed, pretty sobering:

For the first time in human history, the concentration of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time so much greenhouse gas was in the air was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, savannah spread across the Sahara desert and sea level was up to 40 metres higher than today.

This morning I wondered if the society we live in leads us inevitably to immoral outcomes, even where every one of our individual acts is never any more than amoral. And so I’m beginning to think that we as a species are perhaps also engineered to be suicidal. This could explain the ferocious battle currently being waged between those on the right who believe in the glory of individual agency and those on the left who believe in the sacrifice of collective action.

In some deep dark way, both sides have already sensed that the battle is far more profound than simply ideological.

Curiously enough, whilst we accuse the individualists of denying climate change and creating the very selfish circumstances now leading to encroaching disaster, it is the sacrificial left who may actually be part of the process that leads us to such destruction. A small tale to enlighten you.

I remember when I was at university a story a good friend told me. It was around the time that the horrendously unknown “gay plague” of AIDS was exerting its fearsome grip on our imaginations. This friend went back home one Christmas to a most uncertain welcome from his father. Toothbrushes which had shared a whole lifetime in the same cup now occupied very separate places of safety. Even hand towels were no longer shared. The fear was palpable and self-evident: who could trust what students at uni might get up to and catch these days? Or, more importantly, transmit?

This sad father was responding, of course, to the individualist instinct for survival I mention above. No sense of collective sacrifice dawned on his psyche. He was looking, in potentially desperate circumstances, to save himself above all.

Yet many of us at the time said: “Hell to all of this!” And maybe this was no right answer either. Loving love more than life is no better sign of a healthy soul than loving life over love, after all.

And this is why I believe that maybe humanity is bound to be hard-wired as suicidal. Or, at least, ultimately so. Whether we act in an individualist way, maximising our personal outcomes; whether we act in a collective way, maximising our social outcomes … either way surely leads to end-of-the-world outcomes, whatever we assume we are doing otherwise.

I may be quite wrong. In fact, I do hope I am. But I really can’t help the feeling that something quite serious here has been fundamentally contained within strict evolutionary rails – and now finds itself steaming ahead quite irreversibly.

Twitter, the masses, nurture vs nature – and more on fantastic role models

individual, individual responsibility, on a high, people, repression, Twitter No Responses »

Mar 242013

I’m beginning to find it evermore difficult to communicate. Not on Twitter – that’s become easier of late, as I get a handle on writing in spurts of 140 characters. No. Where it’s getting more difficult is in the real world. I feel my communication patterns are briefing themselves up into real-life equivalents of Twitter. My wife comes home and so I inform her of a telephone call: the information is given concisely, sufficiently I think, and yet it doesn’t include the straw and space for comprehension which our real-life existences are made of.

So we get into a disagreement; she says I don’t speak clearly; I clearly feel I do; incomprehension all round.

Is this what we might call the Twitterisation of thought? A clear example of nature versus nurture if there ever was one. For two Twitter users who meet out there offline (oh shudder! Good Lord! The real world exists …), the hashtag sign means something. The brevity of communication is a virtue, not an obstacle. We slyly and collaboratively understand each other in clear cahoots, as subtlety and underplay replace repetition and underline.

But for someone like my wife who only lives in the real world of speech, this Twitter way of communicating is tight, alien, unforgiving and unsupportive. Is that what I have become then – or is that really what I was? Is Twitter nurturing us to a different way of being – or is it naturing us to the essence we never had the chance to express?

You could argue something similar about the ways and wherefores of online history – and by extension, the offline stuff of books too. I’m looking at the old technology that is traditional blogging – and its steely decline at the hands of more collaborative and centrally controlled communications media such as Facebook, Twitter and multifarious single-population social forums. There was a time when I was hoping blogging could be saved via more complex aggregation tools I was intermittently involved in. But all their clever drivers, those people with the hands-on knowledge of those technologies I could only comprehend distantly, eventually came to the conclusion that blogging had had its day.

Oh it would continue to exist – but not like in its heyday.

The one thing we’d forgotten, however, was the benefits of repressive state agendas:

I’m one of 17 signatories (on behalf of LibDemVoice) to a letter published in Saturday’s Guardian, reproduced below, which opposes the “fundamental threat” of the draft legislation approved this week by MPs of all parties which would regulate blogs and other small independent news websites.

It’s not often you’ll see us, ConservativeHome, LabourList, Guido Fawkes, Liberal Conspiracy and Political Scrapbook agree on something. But what we term the “botched late-night drafting process and complete lack of consultation” has, for once, brought us together. And, as the letter notes, perhaps even more remarkably got Tom Watson and Rupert Murdoch agreeing, too.

It seems, for governments and business leaders across the world, the lesson will never be learnt: if you want to stop people from communicating their thoughts, ignore them. Let the technologies shrivel on their ageing branches. Simply don’t pay them any attention.

But no. They simply can’t allow themselves to learn that lesson. Politicians (and here, I include business leaders too), to understand the present crop properly, are driven by the opportunity for bitter conflict. They must, absolutely, always have the last word.

And so it is we get threats such as the above to the populace’s freedom to insult and throw brickbats at all and sundry.

You’d have thought that someone would have informed these leaders differently. Maybe they have; but have similarly suffered at the hands of the “last-word syndrome” I mention.

In essence, I suppose, we have to accept that oppressive regimes are good for democracy. We take up our virtual and offline cudgels and decide to get involved. Nurture versus nature? Of course, it’s much more complicated than that. What a democracy in the hands of a fascist mentality manages to achieve is public connivance. But our nature continues to be democratic. It’s not just a matter of changing the way we behave: it’s also a matter of catalysing innate instincts.

Where we sometimes get it wrong on the left-hand side of history is in assuming the masses will overwhelm. The great thing about humanity – and its veritable danger too – is that individuals are also important. Just as a catalyst can make or break a chemical reaction, so a single human being can change the course of a discrete history.

In fact, to take an example much closer to home, our societies are sort of like home-made mayonnaise: yes, the ingredients are always the same; even the mixture must follow the same process. But there comes a hugely fragile moment when an individual’s acts can either make it or not – a moment when a little too much of one or other ingredient can destroy all chances of achieving the end we pursue. And then, in the face of the approaching (where not encroaching) dinner party, we must resort to the corporate stuff which never fails to deliver its homogenised result.

So let us admire the fantastic role models out there. Let us draw inspiration from individuals who, occasionally, do the right thing. Let us remember that doing the right thing is not always a choice. And let us never forget that it might, one day, even get better.

Why we should welcome the Latin-Americanisation of Europe

euro, Europe, European Union, eurozone, Good Democracy, on a high, people, Peter Levine, PIGS, Teivo Teivainen 4 Responses »

Mar 212013

Stratospheric economics can be a crude and blunt instrument. In particular, crude:

PIGS (also PIIGS^[1]) is an acronym used by international bond analysts, academics, and the economic press that refers to the economies of Portugal, Ireland and/or Italy, Greece, and Spain - often in regard to matters relating to sovereign debt markets. Some news and economic organisations have limited or banned its use due to criticism regarding perceived offensive connotations.

More background thus:

With the onset of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 several variations appeared.^[25] When rendered as “PIIGS”^[26]^[27] some commentators added the additional “i” for comparative purposes to include Ireland from the 2008–2013 Irish financial crisis, with alternatively the “I” which originally referred to Italy occasionally becoming an interchangeable reference to Ireland^[28] by some during this period.

Additional permutations gained prominence during the 2009 United Kingdom bank rescue package period and into the European sovereign-debt crisis as some commentators used numerous variations such as PIIGGS^[29]^[30] which includes the United Kingdom (as Great Britain).^[31]^[32]^[33]

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIGS-PIIGS-PIIGGS.png

Such acronyms – and their casual usage – clearly indicate a degree of casually unhappy prejudice. And the current difficulties surrounding the economies of Greece, Italy, Spain and most recently Cyprus indicate that it’s going to be easy for careless voices to continue justifying their unwholesome belief systems for quite a while yet.

Under such an umbrella of attitudes, we might consider the idea that Europe is slowly being “Latin-Americanised” as utterly negative and critical. But Teivo Teivainen (more here) sees the situation – and the implications of the language used – in a quite different way. In his short paper, “Desde la crisis hacia transformaciones democráticas”, published this month in Spanish (you can find the .pdf itself here – the paper from page 20 onwards), he describes a series of fairly recent quasi-colonial attitudes which have underpinned Europe’s attitude to South America, and defined the direction in which learning and teaching should take place. Essentially: the world has everything to learn from Europe, Europe little to learn from the world.

This is a felicitous definition and understanding of where much of economic Europe sees itself – in particular because he provides the evidence to show it is not true. Whilst we currently see the Europe of German financial power apparently looking to kick Cyprus into orbit, and into the embrace of the waiting Russian bear, we realise just how commonplace these prejudices are: even within Europe, the North now sees the South as irresponsible wastrels, and whilst this may be true about the leaders and their often corrupting behaviours (see Spain, their banks, their mortgage laws and so on), the blame can hardly be placed at the feet of the people themselves.

What’s clear, then, is that the European experience of engagement with economic matters is extremely rarefied. There are experts who make and shake and there are ordinary citizens who are made and shaken. And in the ever-increasing circles of crisis which begin to assail us all, there seems little we can do to rescue ourselves from the consequences of acts which the rich and wealthy are in the process of benefiting from, even as the European economies begin to stumble and stutter for everyone else.

So what lessons does Teivainen offer us? As he points out in his introduction:

[...] Hoy estamos viendo en Europa que nos pasa algo que los latinoamericanos pueden conocer mejor que nosotros. Ello nos abre a la posibilidad de aprender del Sur de una nueva manera.

[...] Today, in the Europe which is happening to us, we are living something which Latin-Americans may know better than ourselves. This opens up the opportunity to learn from the South in a different way.

And as he goes on to indicate of the pedagogical process which many South American movements and institutions have engaged in:

Un aspecto fundamental en este proceso pedagógico es que los movimientos y algunos gobiernos latinoamericanos están llamando nuestra atención sobre aspectos políticos de lo económico. Al buscar soluciones que enfatizan la participación popular en temas tradicionalmente concebidos como económicos, están haciendo un gran servicio al imaginario de proyectos democráticos en otras partes del mundo.1

A fundamental aspect of this pedagogical process is that movements and some Latin-American governments are drawing our attention to the political implications of economic matters. As they look for solutions which underline popular participation in subjects traditionally understood to be economic, they are providing a grand service to the collective imagination of democratic projects in other parts of the world.

In essence, the learning process has come full circle. The skills for dealing with the consequences of an economic deficit – which quite fairly can be argued is as a result of a weighty democratic deficit in both the North and South of Europe (after all, it doesn’t seem to make much difference if you speak English, French or German – on the watch of everyone, the bankers have ultimately got away with financial murder, and have created in the people real hardship) – are no longer ours to proudly give away to the rest of the world. Europe, and here I include the United Kingdom, is no longer the place where the technical, never mind the moral, high ground can be found.

Yes. It is true. We prevented centuries of internecine conflict with the cushion of comfort which the European Union became – but at what cost now as Russia’s Gazprom and Merkel’s Germany appear to both want the carving up of supposedly small sovereign states?

There must, of course, be better ways – and it is Teivainen’s thesis that they already may exist in other parts of the world. As I suggested a few posts ago, we may yet be able to save the NHS’s principles by looking to the experience of health service provision in the Third World. So why not understand a more participatory way of agreeing on and defining the economic experience and infrastructures? What not apply the same ideas to the fundamentals of our societies?

It would be a delicious irony indeed if from colonial times and places past we found the First World’s future salvation.

I’ve already made some slow and uncertain steps in this direction. With my first Revolution ’13 post not long ago, I suggested we recover the idea of disruptive revolution by asserting it could be both efficient and bloodless at the same time (perhaps, in fact, the former would even require the latter). And only yesterday, this project came to my attention:

MANIFESTO FOR DEMOCRACY AND SUSTAINABILITY

We cherish sustainability: meeting the needs of people now without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. But today, human activities have exceeded the earth’s natural limits. As a species we have created great inequalities and torn resources away from those yet to be born.

We cherish democracy: the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people. But democracy is undermined by decision-making that is democratic in name only. It is threatened by conflict, apathy, inequality, manipulation and corruption. It is failing to deliver sustainability.

Together, if we take immediate action, we have the power to transform democracy so that it is an engine for sustainability. This Manifesto for Democracy and Sustainability has been developed to guide a global movement for change. As its signatories, we confirm that we want to be part of this movement. What we create together will be part of our bequest to future generations.

Sustainability needs flourishing democracy

Take the long view

Sustainability must be a central goal of governments everywhere

Education must link citizenship and sustainability

Knowledge must be inclusive

Nothing about us without us

So good things are happening out there. People, ordinary citizens, are finally beginning to see for themselves – in the light of the destruction by ineffective elites of social and economic support networks various – that democratic deficits are not only undemocratic but economically and socially inefficient.

And so we come back to Peter Levine’s two-fold definition of “good democracy”:

Inclusive, yes.
But efficient, too.

So why not let the Latin-American learning paths lead their way? For by so doing, we may also one day understand – from those best placed, wherever they find themselves – how to turn grave crisis into the serious opportunities we surely all agree we will need.

It’s the people, stupid!

bureaucracy, corporate Communism, free-market capitalism, in a hole, people, politicians, private bureaucracy, private sector, process, public sector, public-private axis, system, Welfare State No Responses »

Mar 032013

This post is about two tweets which came my way yesterday. Both speak of the importance of personal responsibility. The first describes its reach in private industry (in this case, I believe in relation to a recent story on the freemium app industry):

Companies are made of people, and people have a responsibility for their actions, inc. developing (potentially) exploitative freemium games

The second, which came my way hot on the heels of the first, said much the same thing – only, this time, in the context of the NHS (the Mid-Staffordshire scandal comes immediately to mind):

The best managers help clinical staff treat according to need and make patients healthier, not enforce NHS policy whatever the consequences

Meanwhile, in an oxymoron-like diatribe of the weakest kind against everything and anything New Labour ever did, David Cameron has this to say in today’s Sunday Telegraph:

That is what everything this Government does comes back to: the future. We are looking at the horizon, not tomorrow’s headlines; doing what’s right for the long-term. Thirty years ago, Margaret Thatcher said that we should be “in the business of planting trees, for our children and grandchildren, or we have no business to be in politics at all”.

I couldn’t agree more. In 30 years’ time, I want people to be able to look back at this government and see that we paid down our debts, helped create millions of jobs, sorted out welfare, made our schools world-beating and built homes for a generation.

Doing this kind of work might not earn you popularity points in by-elections, but it’s what I’m in politics for: making the country we love as great as it can be.

I haven’t heard that “planting trees” metaphor for really quite a while. I suppose we’ll have Michael Gove telling us next that we should all write a novel before we die.

I’m also just a little puzzled – maybe out of technical ignorance – as to why he says “paid down our debts” instead of “paid off“. Unless, of course, he means that it’s going to be the little people at the bottom of the pile who’ll always end up saving the Tories from their economic selves.

But perhaps this is all just a little too nitpicking on my part.

In truth, it’s always going to be the people who make a difference to any society. Politicians of the kind who tend to rule us prefer to ignore this. If they didn’t, they’d have to engage us in their processes – they’d have to get us involved and actively participating. Far easier to blame an anonymous public-sector bureaucracy – and shift the responsibility stealthily onto equally anonymous private-sector equivalents – than to admit that the root of all our problems lies not in our systems but their application.

It’s not so much a new education system we need – it’s more a system teachers and students know how to work with.

It’s not so much a new legal system we need – it’s more a system whose costs victims and other participants don’t have to fear.

It’s not so much a new health system we need – it’s more a system which provides support as and when a person becomes a patient in need.

The Welfare State is the way to make our society less inhumane. It’s in our grasp – but it is a choice. We can spend considerable resource on allowing the fortunate to further concentrate their good fortune – or we can deliberately decide to give the less fortunate the consideration, charity and kindness most belief systems have tended to argue should be made forthcoming.

But what we have to accept is that, either way, it’s a choice. If we choose to fashion a world where we must walk on the other side of the road from that homeless man who dies at the doorstep of a bungalow, we can. We will do so, I am sure, in order that ambitious alpha men and women can – amongst the disasters they also commit – achieve what they undoubtedly do. And this is clearly an act of socioeconomic decision-making at the highest level, committed by coherent men and women. It is a freely-taken decision. It is an unforced decision to let some people live better at the expense of others. It is a statistical calculation of risks that approves of achievement at the very top, even as it judges society will not rise up in arms and disintegrate as a result of the anonymous homeless dying distastefully in the streets.

If, on the other hand, we opt to help such homeless people – if our goal is to create a socioeconomic environment where this kind of action is prioritised over other, more aggressively innovative, behaviours – we may create, again entirely consciously and deliberately, a society where survival is ameliorated for a far greater number of our souls here on earth, even as achievement measured objectively loses its bleeding edges.

And either way, to come back to the original set of choices, and whether politicians like it or not, if anything turns out right, it’ll come down not to systems they proudly and powerfully announce but, rather, to their humane application – or otherwise – by people who look and act and feel like you and me.

That personal responsibility.

That core humanity.

That attachment to caring at an individual level for each and every relationship.

That love, even.

That kindness, generously imparted.

Far more important for a classroom than this textbook or that is the mind that plans the lesson around a book and the hands that clutch its spine.

For the funny thing about Cameron’s oxymoron of a weak diatribe is that there was very little in it I found myself fiercely disagreeing with. Oh, yes. Those silly sentences on immigration. The daftness around welfare. But in reality, the poor man knows exactly what we need to do. Like when he says, almost pleadingly (the bold is mine):

These are not claims or promises: they are facts. We are turning the tide on years of decline — and building a Britain for those who work hard and want to get on. And we need to go further. We need to get more houses built. We need to build new roads and railways and energy connections. Some reading this may not like that; but as I have made clear, this is not a popularity contest but a battle for Britain’s future.

The problem isn’t the words, David. The problem is the people.

In fact, the problem – more widely expressed – is your, and your professional class’s, attitude to people in general. The fact is that systems, for high-flying politicians, are like electromagnets of recent generation: when you have the opportunity to choose between getting people voluntarily onside or creating a foolproof system designed to cage them into a certain set of behaviours, you can guarantee any minister worth their caviar will be pulled inexorably in the direction of implementing a brand-new system over convincing ordinary people to work better with an existing one.

I really do sometimes get the feeling that Cameron and some of his cohort are locked painfully into the wrong party of UKIP-incubating MPs and hangers-on. If only he, and perhaps they, had chosen Labour, we could right now be facing another decade of government.

Maybe I should now spoil this post for you (or, alternatively, not) by saying how very much that idea makes me shudder.

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t.

They say familiarity may breed contempt.

I’m inclined, however, to believe that being a politician (of empire-building instincts, at least) makes one contemptuous of the familiar.

In this, both One Nation Labour and the more traditional Conservative impulses, which Cameron has appealed to in his text today, have aimed to reassure potential voters in a time of utter uncertainty that being British, in itself, is quite enough to be getting on with.

But in the end, they are all just words – both Cameron’s and Miliband’s, I’m afraid.

In a sense, I get the feeling that our politicians are likely to be as lost here as the rest of us. And in this realisation (as Poirot might suggest!), I find the future most terrifying.

Where ordinary people would be the real solution, our leaders are now only able to work with systems.

The systems have taken over to such an extent that these ordinary people I mention truly have no impact whatsoever on the results – even as they end up shouldering all the blood-spattered blame.

The personal responsibility which I started this post with is impossible to properly engineer or encourage. We spend our time terrified of the juggernaut-like mechanisms that threaten to bury our professional futures in a careering disgrace. We hide, like frightened rabbits, from the oncoming lights which should illuminate – but which, in the end, serve only to make the shadows evermore powerful.

Yes. It’s the people, stupid.

And our leaders are too stupid to realise it.

For being blind only means you cannot see as the wicked do too easily

a con, ATOS, disabled, people, people with support needs, politicians, politics, sex offenders, sexual abuse 1 Response »

Jan 172013

I went to Chester Zoo recently. I saw some beautiful butterflies. All butterflies are beautiful – but these were particularly beautiful. What’s so very beautiful for me about these creatures is how they dance unthreateningly from one position of rest to another. They add to the world in almost everything they do.

But they do so in such a sustainable way.

We could do well to treasure their example.

There’s something else I admire about the butterfly, of course. A long time ago, I was instructed by my father – who, even today, treasures their example in much the same way I suggest above we should all aim to do – not to try and touch them ever. Apparently, their wings are covered in tiny scales – the touching of which removes an important protection.

In this, butterflies are one step away from a lingering but unstoppable death.

One touch, in fact.

Yet evolution has cared to find them a place in the scheme of things. Nature has created them and decided unthreatening, in this case, is good.

And nature, in this, at least in this case, is about as wise as it gets.

Two examples today, then, of where we human beings have become butterfly-crushing bastards.

First, Aaron Swartz’s suicide, the implications of which I hope will continue to resonate: please read these two posts from John Naughton and ensure that this indeed does continue to happen. From the second of the two, and quoting from a Matt Stoller article:

[...] What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako - who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.

But Aaron Swartz isn’t alone in his death at the hands of the political inversion of our public interest. Here in Britain, today, we now have plenty of evidence to hand to demonstrate how all these unsung heroes of our time – human butterflies all – are being broken by a political system that turns a very real public interest into a very private personal benefit. Some choice examples here:

The first example concerns a constituent of mine who was epileptic almost from birth and was subject to grand mal seizures. At the age of 24, he was called in by Atos, classified as fit for work and had his benefit cut by £70 a week. He appealed, but became agitated and depressed and lost weight, fearing that he could not pay his rent or buy food. Three months later, he had a major seizure that killed him. A month after he died, the DWP rang his parents to say that it had made a mistake and his benefit was being restored.

[...]

To illustrate one of those cases, I shall cite a letter I received from a constituent, Janine, in Liverpool. Her dad was thrown off sickness benefit in November after an Atos work capability assessment and was declared fit for work despite suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Six weeks later, on Christmas day, Janine’s father died.

[...]

My caseworker, like those of many Members, is inundated with cases that are tragic and heart-rending. The telephone line to my office is often clogged with crying people. They often ring several times a day, as they are unable to cope with the stress that they are facing. Many have mental health problems, and are unable to cope with the paperwork. They are unsure what to do with it, and they ring me to ask for help in the most tragic and personal way.

[...]

We are all here today because constituents have come to us and told us their stories. Constituents have come to me in their wheelchairs with their carers because they have wanted me to know about the difficulties that they are experiencing. They cannot understand why, in the face of overwhelming medical evidence, they are still being called in for interviews. Some cannot understand why they have been told “If you make it to this interview, you must be fit for work.”

[...]

Thirdly, there is a category of people who are being considered fit for work although they have had, for instance, a severe stroke or are awaiting a back operation. One constituent was told that if people could move an empty cardboard box, they could go to work. Do the health care professionals employed by Atos always take account of the fact that people have to get to work in the first place, or that, while they may be able to perform an action once, they may not be able to perform it repeatedly when it causes severe pain?

[...]

Many disabled people’s groups say that the reductions in benefits have had a catastrophic effect on recipients, and there have been a number of reports of suicides and untimely deaths brought on by immense distress. In my surgeries, I have heard several harrowing and very sad accounts from constituents who have been subjected to impersonal and inhumane work capability assessments by Atos. One has been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour, which cannot be completely removed because that would leave her paralysed. In August and September of last year she had radiotherapy to slow down the growth of the tumour, but in October she was told that it would grow back even more quickly, and that she would have to have further radiotherapy or she would die. I should add that this lady also has polyarthritis and asthma. Why has this lady been placed in the work-related activity group? Her doctors and consultants have specified that she should be placed in the support group as she is fighting for her life. Her only concern should be winning that battle.

[...]

Another constituent contacted me who had been ill for two years and was eventually diagnosed with cancer following a serious bout of pneumonia. Prior to her illness, she had an unblemished employment record. She was certified as unable to work by her GP and had attended many DWP hearings about the employment and support allowance, with the final one being in April 2012. She won her tribunal hearing against the Atos decision. She had not received a single penny in state benefits from before April 2012 until she died at the end of November. She faced immense distress and was denied any financial assistance at a time when she was vulnerable and in desperate need of assistance.

[...]

Clearly many of my constituents have not been treated with the fairness and decency they deserve. Although I realise that we need to see whether people can work, we need a system that is humane and fair, not one that causes fear and loathing. It is time the Government realised that they are driving many sick and disabled people into poverty. What does the Minister think of Citizens Advice’s detailed year-long study “Right first time?” on the controversial work capability assessment run by Atos, which has revealed evidence of widespread inaccuracies in the medical reports that help to determine whether individuals are eligible for sickness benefits? Citizens Advice also tracked a group of people through the process of claiming employment and support allowance and looked at how their claims were handled. The report’s conclusions are stark: 37 individuals were tracked and had their reports examined, with serious levels of inaccuracy revealed in up to 43% of the reports. That level is significant enough to have an impact on the claimant’s eligibility for benefits—surely our sick and disabled deserve better than this.

[...]

Over 5,000 of my constituents are on incapacity benefit or employment and support allowance and they are facing this terrible system. I should like to give a few examples. Mr H, a double-leg amputee, was told to undertake an 80-mile round trip for his work capability assessment. Mr W, who has serious mental health problems, had a panic attack and was physically sick during his WCA but was told he was fit for work. His wife believes that he is being victimised by Atos. Mrs D, a district nurse who broke her back at work, was told that she is fit for work. Mrs M, who was treated for cancer in July 2010, was deemed fit for work before the results of the operation came through. Her appeal will not take place until next month. Mr E, who is one of the people the RNIB is worried about, had been completely blind for 16 years and forced to give up work, but was told by Atos that he was fit for work.

And finally (the bold is mine):

A gentleman in my constituency—let us call him Mr D—served in the forces for many years and is now in his late 50s. In the past 18 months, he has undergone extensive surgery to the brain, following a tumour, and in November 2011 he was informed that he required further surgery, this time to his neck, to remove the growing tumour. At the same time—in precisely the same month—Atos assessed Mr D as being fit for work. That assessment was undertaken by someone who was not trained as a doctor at a time when Mr D was going to assessments with a gaping wound in his head and still undergoing treatment. Does it not make an entire mockery of the whole process if that is allowed to happen? Does it not cast real doubt on the effectiveness and accuracy of the whole system? Most ominously, does it not reveal the system’s true intention?

Several of my constituents—far too many to be isolated incidents—have told me that they were asked by the person carrying out the assessment whether they just sat around all day watching Jeremy Kyle. I expect uninformed, unprofessional and crass comments from the likes of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but not from medical professionals with the serious task of determining whether a person is fit for work in, presumably, an objective and non-prejudicial manner.

Too much to read you say? Too many words, distant experiences and other lives we cannot be expected to share? Well, I’m afraid there’s plenty more of the same at the Hansard link in question. And you really should read it all. In fact, I insist.

Now.

Go ahead and do it.

And then come back for a very short last couple of thoughts.

If Aaron Swartz has anything in common with any of the rest of us souls who populate this planet, it is with these human butterflies I refer to above. Struggling to understand the world as it really is, yes. Weak, in no way at all. With everything stacked against them too. For being blind only means you cannot see as the wicked do too easily.

And seeing life as it is doesn’t mean giving up on goodness either.

Even when pursuing goodness may – ultimately – mean one’s own destruction.

One final link for you to think about. This, tonight, from the Independent, takes us back to the conflict-strewn 1980s:

The Labour MP Tom Watson alleged in the Commons in October that politicians belonging to a paedophile network had used their powerful connections to escape justice.

In a short statement tonight, the Metropolitan Police said: “The Metropolitan Police Service have today, Thursday 17 January, launched an investigation, Operation Fernbridge, into historic allegations of child abuse in the early 1980s at the Elm Guest House, Rocks Lane, Barnes, London.

“The investigation will be led by the Child Abuse Investigation Command. Anyone with information is asked to contact officers on 020 7161 0500.”

Talk of breaking butterflies on wheels, eh?

This shit is everywhere, at all levels and in all countries.

Isn’t it?

Jan 112013

Yesterday, on the back of an excellent post published by James Firth describing the upsides of shirking and laziness, I in turn said this:

And thinking on this fearful government campaign against the concept of shirking as James would prefer to understand it – a concept we could just as easily describe as idle thoughts, imagination and deliberately unfocussed creative and lateral thinking in general – makes me wonder if our government doesn’t have a couple of prejudices driving it:

Thinking idly must be the preserve of the idle rich – because it’s one of the most sure-fire ways of getting richer.

Thinking idly must be the preserve of the already powerful – because, as one sure-fire way of understanding how the world really works, it’s bound to lead the plebs to reconsider their assigned positions in society.

What I didn’t realise was that there is science behind what is happening. Watch this video, first – it’s only ten minutes long and will change your life for sure.

http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

As you will see if you follow my instructions to the letter, unthinking work responds positively to the attractions of monetary payments. They dangle a larger carrot in front of you – or threaten you with a larger stick for not working harder – and, verily, you end up working harder. But when it comes to using your brain to think, more money actually makes you perform worse! Time and time again, the data proves the latter. An astonishing – and apparently counter-intuitive – conclusion.

Are human beings, in reality then, hard-wired socialists by nature?

It’s certainly a thought, anyhow.

Naturally enough, this got me thinking. I worked for about seven years in a large banking corporation. My experience in one department there led me from relatively thinking tasks at the beginning to evermore desultory and meaningless data entry six years on. The trends were absolutely clear: the dumbing down of processes and their corresponding procedures was an instinct which was manifestly part and parcel of corporate life. The question was: why?

I always assumed it was an urge to reduce training costs, limit the impact of staff turnover and make it impossible for any one worker to be in control of sufficient intellectual property which a move into another company might prejudice.

The dumber the processes the workforces have to carry out, the fewer of those processes – and their value-adding implications – they can take away with them out of malice or pique, for example.

But in the light of what we’ve just seen in the RSA video above, it would seem that there is an intuitive (maybe even conscious) conspiracy sustaining itself to take out of a thinking society such as ours – trained for decades, as it has been, in the constructive cocoon of compulsory education to cogitate better and more profoundly than ever before – all the relevant and value-adding opportunities to use our cognitive and self-motivating side to be precisely that.

So instead of substituting a stick-and-carrot system designed to make simple and repetitive tasks function at least minimally well with an alternative system which would fit exactly with our thoughtful and educated latterday brains, large and small companies everywhere have decided – whether deliberately or instinctively – to jettison all attempts to take advantage of our minds and, instead, return us to the drudge of manager-driven wage slavery.

In a thinking society, where almost everyone has been taught how to imagine, create and laterally devise, this is why they’re dumbing down all the processes: it’s a power thing, after all. A desire to keep a hold of those old hierarchies. A need they have to maintain the control that externally motivated work has over the worker bees it commands.

And what’s even more curious is that as we continue to find ourselves carrying out more and more meaningless tasks in our work time, in our leisure time we’re blogging and videoing and writing to our heart’s content. What’s more, with mostly very little monetary reward.

Whilst we’re pushed towards evermore robotic work experiences, our need to think and cogitate cannot be suppressed. Just as, in fact, our democracy is removed from our politicking, so our desire to search out and practise democratic process moves into online and other virtual manifestations.

However hard you try to remove freedom of thought and cognitive opportunities from human beings and their daily experiences, you are bound, I think we can all agree, to ultimately fail.

And whilst we humans are pushed towards – and back into – meaningless work, and whilst our robots become cleverer and more ingenious, no wonder our politicians feel the need to criticise the thinkers: to criticise them roundly, describe thinking as shirking – and let it be understood that those who wonder are wasting their time.

After all, imagine how difficult it might be to rule over a nation of people far cleverer than you.

A nation of people who thought stuff without the petty reward of the only thing that separated you – with your concentrated wealth – from them.

A nation of people who didn’t believe stuff in accordance with what you gave them or withheld.

A nation of people who did what was right because doing what is right is what keeps them alive.

That, in conclusion, is what we now have in the United Kingdom.

Too many clever voters who think better in their spare time than their leaders are now managing in their paid time.

Curious, isn’t it? Curious how historical hierarchies always seem to fight to reassert themselves.

The pit and the pendulum (and how even progressive politics creates pressure-cookers of prejudice)

in a hole, people, perishable goods, politics, progressives, right No Responses »

Sep 082012

Whether you liked it or not – and I suspect it was one of the most curate’s-egg-like movements in British political history – New Labour did lots of things in its time.

It was a manifestation of busyness in political person. Though not always proper business.

I do wonder, however, whether some of its least attractive consequences were precisely because of its commendable desire to heave as many people as possible as quickly as possible out of the dual pits of poverty and ignorance. And I also wonder if the consequences in question aren’t particularly a feature of progressive politics. We are always in such a hurry because we know that people are perishable and finite goods on this planet. Every life which misses its vocation is a life lost to history, civilisation and a wider society.

Yet there is a significant downside. Whilst the pendulum swings our way – and every political generation appears to have wanted to exaggerate its swing since the war – many things are done. But equally, the exclusion of opposition input into the processes leads to a severe frustration whilst in the wilderness of inactivity.

The desire for vengeance, the impulse to recover so much lost time, the blind hatred of the other’s ideas … all this leads to an awful environment akin to a pressure-cooker of prejudice, where time postpones the ability to impose what inevitably become one’s tragic instincts.

Nevertheless, as the pendulum swings back, eventually power does return to the vengeful right – or, indeed, the vengeful left. And so all those suppressed and supposedly politically incorrect opinions find their voice, their bullying courage and their aggressive channels of communication all over again.

Yet pressure-cookers are only good for cooking food. Opinion is surely best let out on a regular basis. As the Spanish would say, only by speaking can we understand people. And if we choose, on either side, to suppress the right for political movements to participate in democratic process, each time the pendulum swings evermore violently back we can only expect further violence in return.

Edgar Allen Poe was absolutely right. We are sinking ever further.

And there is little either side in the political class really, essentially, deep down, cares to do about it.

How Tories hate absolutely everyone (or why I believe in a something-for-nothing culture)

a con, people, Tories 2 Responses »

Aug 282012

This did get me thinking:

There is, though, another possibility. Maybe it’s not that Tories like the capitalist class, but rather that they hate the working class.

Chris’s thesis, well worth reading in full, and to which the above quote serves as a damning conclusion, could then be pushed even further than even he seems prepared to go: might Tories hate capitalists almost as much as they do the working classes? That is to say, are they simply monstrous haters of people in general?

Certainly, in their measures towards allegedly absolute austerity, they don’t seem particularly interested in supporting the interests of many capitalists: whilst established financial-services sponsors of the Tory Party coffers do seem to get a look-in – in these cases continued growth and profit, as well as corporate socialism where requested, would seem to be exactly the objective of all good Conservatives everywhere – there are plenty of small, medium-sized and medium-large enterprises out there suffering the consequences of the Tories’ apparent dislike of anything smaller than a banking institution too big to fail.

And although in their workfare plans – where large companies were able to take advantage of the same something-for-nothing culture benefit claimants are apparently to be denied (we do of course see and understand how it’s OK to get something for nothing if you’re a corporation – but patently not if you’re a flesh-and-blood being) – there was clearly a degree of affinity exhibited for corporate capitalists, it didn’t really – even so – manage to convince; especially when all that terrible PR flak was generated about people being fired from gainful employments with large chain stores up and down the land – only then to be taken back as unpaid “volunteers”.

In reality, what’s going on here would actually seem to be as Chris almost manages to suggest: Tories hate people, whatever their allegiances, more than almost anything else on the planet – in fact, with all the fervour and casual cruelty of their politics, they would probably have beaten Genghis Khan at his own game. If, that is, they hadn’t managed to bankrupt him first.

Conclusions? Don’t ŧake it personally, you sick, disabled, poor and unemployed. The Tories might hate you with a virulence that hurts – but, if truth be told, they hate their own almost as much as they clearly hate you.

After all, why do you think they measure absolutely everything in terms of how much money it could make them? Simply, because they have forgotten – or, perhaps, even more sadly, were never actually shown – that humanity’s greatest gift to itself is precisely its capacity to do something for nothing.

How bliss is no ignorance

people, sorted, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jul 262012

As happens at this time of year, I find myself disconnecting from the hurly-burly of following detailed UK political debate. Going on holiday is something I have spoken about on many occasions, both on this blog – and elsewhere too. It seems to me the natural state of being a human.

I notice it in my children, in fact. Outside the frame of the British education system, which I have often praised in other respects, our children become invariably thoughtful, friendly, communicative and open. During term time, we struggle to achieve a similar equilibrium. And I wonder if a similar principle cannot be applied to the politics I am currently escaping.

Who can possibly be happy during term time anywhere? Whether one is a humble data-inputter or fast-food employee – both roles I have been fortunate to occupy at different times in my life, even as I also eventually suffered just a little their consequences – or, on the other hand, a stratospheric politician/banker with an experienced love of showing the rest of us how badly their business can go without their losing their substantial perks, there comes a time when all of us surely would prefer the bliss that is ignorance to the fear seeing the iceberg from way off on the horizon is bound to involve.

Although the Titanic analogy has been used more than once over the past few years by political and economic commentators, perhaps where it really counts is in this period of impotent observance us ordinary citizens have been thrust into.

There is nothing we can do – even as we know what needs to be done.

Now is there?

Life is bad.

Life is cruel.

Life is unkind.

Life hurts.

What makes life bearable, though, is people. Only people make life something we can agree with and strive to pursue.

We need to understand this simple truth as we search desperately for ways out of the foolishnesses our unsustainable economics have led us to.

Bliss is not ignorance, after all. Bliss is – simply – the people who surround us and touch us.

And show us that all our systems and processes and procedures have no other end but to deliver society.

“Austerity” is a euphemism; a “collateral damage” for our times

a con, atomised society, economic blackmail, economic chemotherapy, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, people, perishable goods, politicians, politics, professional politicos No Responses »

May 072012

I just tweeted the following thought:

“Austerity” is a neat euphemism – just like “collateral damage”: those who use it refuse to take ownership for the pain they cause.

A definition of “collateral damage” then? This is what Wikipedia currently says on the matter:

Collateral damage occurs when something incidental to the intended target is damaged during an attack. When used in conjunction with military operations it can refer to the incidental destruction of civilian property and non-combatant casualties.^[1]^[2]

Whilst some time back we might have thought the intended target of austerity strategies everywhere was supposedly lazy and complacent economic processes – foolish lending by lenders on the one hand, excessive borrowing by borrowers on the other – it would now appear that the real object of austerity measures has become the people themselves. Essentially because those in power now care to shift the blame for their manifest stupidities onto those who occupy the lower levels of societal hierarchy:

Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, said that banks were not solely responsible for the financial crisis as “they had to lend to someone”.

The minister, who played a key role in drawing up David Cameron’s economic strategy in opposition, also claimed that people who took out loans were “consenting adults” who, in some cases, were now be seeking to blame others for their actions.

And this:

“Households were spending more than they earned. That’s why household debt rose.”

It’s clear, then, that up there in the stratosphere of decision-makers, there must be a more widely shared perception that voters and their families and friends – not systemic failure of complex financial instruments – are now in the cross-hairs of those who make policy.

Mr Hammond is hardly going to have invented the idea in a vacuum, after all.

It is my thesis, therefore, that austerity measures as engineered and devised of late do not aim to sort out a dysfunctional economy first and foremost – only collaterally damaging and hurting the people who depend on its workings. No. In reality, these people in charge are looking precisely to damage and hurt the people first and foremost, for it is they who are to blame for not having operated as economies most need.

Whilst before we wondered if the people had become a necessary, even if sad, collateral damage to an attempt to rescue an economy, it seems clear to me now – and perhaps to you too – that the economy has become a necessary, even if sad, collateral damage to a pontificating and patronising attempt from top-flight politicos to allegedly rescue the people from themselves.

We the people are being punished because we do not act as these politicos and economists various believe economies need us to act: sensibly, rationally, intelligently and measuredly.

Because we cannot manage that, they – even they – are prepared to sacrifice their own love of that beast which is the economy (their whole reason for being, acting and researching) on the altar of societal suicide.

Rather than contemplate making economic theory in the image of the people’s needs, they prefer to prejudice the perishable goods that are people’s finite lives.

In this, both politicians and economists are the trench-warfare generals of our time.

Where, if not at the beginning of the 20th century, are we to find such an example of stubborn idiocy and casual cruelty as we now bear witness to in economic theory and practice – and throughout the world that serves to destroy us?

People in charge who refuse to take ownership for the pain and destruction they administer.

A passive-aggressive state if there ever was one.

Gordon Brown on the real change-makers

change-makers, Gordon Brown, on a high, people, sorted 3 Responses »

May 032010

An excerpt from Gordon Brown’s speech today where he asserted, quite rightly, the following:

The people whose names are not recorded in the books of history are the real change-makers.

More in the video below, whilst further background from Channel 4, surprisingly decently and even-handedly reported, can be found here.

____________________

Update to this post: the full speech can now be found here, via Labour List and Political Scrapbook.