When I was last in Havana back at the start of 2015 the prices of state-owned hotels already seemed to be rising in anticipation of the coming onslaught of greenback-waving rubberneckers.
I ended up staying a couple of nights at a somewhat frayed little establishment in Vedado that caters for local and second tier international business guests.
The other day I speculatively checked the place's website and discovered that one night will now set one back 250 euros, close to a 300% increase since February last year.
Now this is pricey indeed for a hotel where running water appears to be something of a rarity.
The price hike seems to be quite widespread. And it is a great shame, because the grand old hotels of Havana — the Inglaterra, the Nacional, the Raquel, the Florida et al. — have been quite an experience during their underclocked three star communist epilogue.
A little pricey, but no so much to deter the ageing French socialistes and rugged Russian middle orders — and, in the snow-laden months, the Canucks — who contributed so much to the city's atmosphere since the wall came down and Cuba itself almost collapsed shortly afterwards.
Out of sheer greed the regime is quite possibly going to deplete this tried and tested source of demand in favour of a newer, richer influx who, once the thrill of the gawp has gone, may not find the place quite to their exacting standards. And their very presence will have spoiled much of what made this crumbly old city so appealing.
UPDATE: Soon, they'll be chanting 'y'all have a nice day now...'. Grim.
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Half Full / Half Empty
I suppose that on most days my outlook bears some resemblance to the existential status of one notoriously superpositional kitty.
To wit, until someone opens my box, metaphorically speaking, I am never quite sure if my glass is half full or half empty.
It's as if I cannot decide which elcadejo I habitually inhabit: the nice one which follows people home to make sure they get back safely, or the sociopathic w%&?er.
Anyway, I did one of these tests of FB today, presumably in my unboxed state, and have ended up feeling just a tad dull...
To wit, until someone opens my box, metaphorically speaking, I am never quite sure if my glass is half full or half empty.
It's as if I cannot decide which elcadejo I habitually inhabit: the nice one which follows people home to make sure they get back safely, or the sociopathic w%&?er.
Anyway, I did one of these tests of FB today, presumably in my unboxed state, and have ended up feeling just a tad dull...
Tom Hiddleston
Practically the perfect choice to play your bog standard slippery outsider, yet also irreducibly posh.
Together these traits make him both so right and yet so wrong for two of his most notable recent roles: Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager and Dr Laing in High Rise.
American casting directors might be forgiven for an imperfect grasp of our class system, but these two productions were properly British, so the selection of leading man had to have been made on the grounds that his dazzling interloper charm outweighed his less appropriate aura of upper-crustiness...
Together these traits make him both so right and yet so wrong for two of his most notable recent roles: Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager and Dr Laing in High Rise.
American casting directors might be forgiven for an imperfect grasp of our class system, but these two productions were properly British, so the selection of leading man had to have been made on the grounds that his dazzling interloper charm outweighed his less appropriate aura of upper-crustiness...
Sunday, July 17, 2016
In the wake of modernity...
The War on Terror has never more clearly been a war on the mentalities that modernity wishes to leave behind.
The trouble is that modernity, in the form of globalisation, is spawning ever more of these mentalities behind it - often in a particularly malignant hybrid form - even as it surges on.
Anyone who thinks that modernity with smoother edges will somehow solve this problem is clearly delusional.
The trouble is that modernity, in the form of globalisation, is spawning ever more of these mentalities behind it - often in a particularly malignant hybrid form - even as it surges on.
Anyone who thinks that modernity with smoother edges will somehow solve this problem is clearly delusional.
Friday, July 15, 2016
Location, location...
Been racking my brains all morning to come up with an equivalent combination of public space and public event in Europe which would have lent itself to this kind of atrocity....and I can't. The Americans are going completely hysterical, but how many of their major cities celebrate July 4 on a street like this?
However primitive the methodology might appear, somebody picked this location and thought the desired carnage through very thoroughly.
Importantly, it would have been fairly easy to prevent too. How did the lorry breach whatever barrier had been put up to divert vehicular traffic from the Promenade?
However primitive the methodology might appear, somebody picked this location and thought the desired carnage through very thoroughly.
Importantly, it would have been fairly easy to prevent too. How did the lorry breach whatever barrier had been put up to divert vehicular traffic from the Promenade?
Been there...
There is nothing wrong at all with focusing on an issue that matters to you.
Yet I am surely not alone in having noticed that many of the people that get the hump when some idiot screeches ¨all lives matter!¨ are the same ones who themselves express outrage when Facebook permits users to shade their profile picture with one particular flag and not the flag of say, every other country that recently experienced a terror attack.
I'm against this sort of ill-conceived relativism wherever it occurs, but having said that, I did notice that American politicians were not quite falling over themselves to declare a state of war after the recent attack in Baghdad. Maybe in that instance the belicose urge was offset by voices whispering ¨been there, done that¨.
Yet I am surely not alone in having noticed that many of the people that get the hump when some idiot screeches ¨all lives matter!¨ are the same ones who themselves express outrage when Facebook permits users to shade their profile picture with one particular flag and not the flag of say, every other country that recently experienced a terror attack.
I'm against this sort of ill-conceived relativism wherever it occurs, but having said that, I did notice that American politicians were not quite falling over themselves to declare a state of war after the recent attack in Baghdad. Maybe in that instance the belicose urge was offset by voices whispering ¨been there, done that¨.
La Antigua's mendicants by - furry - proxy
I have a bookmarks folder on my Macbook entitled ANIMAL PARASITES.
Within are the URLs of the - so far - 27 entities operating in and around LAG with a Facebook page promoting activities such as the rescue, adoption, curing, nourishing and neutering of animals, principally cats and dogs.
27. I very much doubt there are a similar number of local projects with a more humanistic remit. I also doubt whether the majority are formally registered as charities or NGOs; but the urgent plea for donations is common to all.
Residents of this city will be well aware of the deadbeats who dress up as bomberos (firemen-paramedics) and stand on street corners or even wander around the outer neighbourhoods with their collection boxes, but in some ways this burgeoning animal welfare scam is the bigger one.
Now the parasites have acquired some barnacles of their own: scroungers that post pictures of supposedly needy creatures to the Facebook pages of the established organisations, usually accompanied by text written in ersatz uneducated Spanish (see example below).
A little bit of legwork has revealed that many of these emanate from aliases belonging to a small group of individuals who, in their non-pseudonym profiles, look anything but like the sort of person who would spell 'apoyo' as 'apollo' or 'concentrado' as 'consentrado'. etc.
There are of course many street dogs and street cats in Guatemala that could benefit from a more conscientious culture. But 'charitable' activity on this scale and on this one issue is deeply suspicious.
It used to be that the archetypal talentless foreigner washed up in LAG would open a bar or restaurant. Now bogus NGOs seem to be the preferred way of living off other people's generosity, with the animal welfare / social media combination in particular seen as the ideal way to manipulate an income here.
In a number of cases they have co-opted an avaricious local vet into their scheme. Together they clean up with the medicines and minor operations involved in the adoption process in much the same way that restaurants do with their wine lists.
One of the most visible of these organisations is run by a couple that had to flee the US and were then turfed out of Belize because its male component had been convicted for grooming a minor (exposed on US TV) and banned from using the Internet.
As with many others, animals without apparent owners have become the substrate for a life in exile.
Some of the second-tier mendicants by proxy appear to be keeping a substantial pack of malnourished animals in a state of utter squalor while they cynically appeal for outside assistance. In the UK these people would already have been investigated by the RSPCA.
Some of the second-tier mendicants by proxy appear to be keeping a substantial pack of malnourished animals in a state of utter squalor while they cynically appeal for outside assistance. In the UK these people would already have been investigated by the RSPCA.
Yet consider this: 85% of the world's 1bn dogs are 'village dogs': canines that scavenge a life, often very successfully, from within human communities in the developing world. The notion that each and every one of these is in urgent need of adoption into a caring, affluent domestic environment is both spurious and vaguely hegemonic.
Saturday, July 09, 2016
Tuesday, July 05, 2016
So, this is where we find ourselves...
Populism triumphs by telling barefaced lies to large sections of the population that have become vulnerable to such mendacity through bitter disenchantment with existing social and political power arrangements.
In the past couple of decades it has become the scourge of the developing world, particularly Latin America, where it undermines or infiltrates traditional two party arrangements based on class identity, borrowing from the rhetoric of both and adding its own nationalistic hyperbole that resonates within communities disconcerted by globalised neoliberalism.
Now it has taken hold in the so-called rich world, thanks in no small part to the burgeoning wealth disparities within it worthy of the under-developed rich-poor world.
The ideological extremists of the last century taught us that it was ultimately handier to tell big lies than little ones. Crucially however, they then acted as if they had come to believe many of their own audacious whoppers.
Not so with the modern demagogic populists. Whether or not Trump's primary audience believes that there will soon be a big wall along the border paid for by Mexico, it is almost painfully obvious that HE does not believe it. Ditto Boris Johnson and the £350m that was going to be redirected to the NHS after Brexit.
Populism has been most successful — and ultimately calamitous — in countries where the movement has been fronted by charismatic manipulators capable of transcending the political system which brought them to power. (Such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.)
In Britain however, having engineered a political and constitutional crisis of historical magnitude, the populists have apparently lacked the courage of their lack of conviction; Boris in particular, looking, as one wit put it, like the dog that caught the car.
Meanwhile, the two main traditional parties have the appearance of rusty old hulks torpedoed beneath the water line. Both also seem far more concerned about patching themselves up than imaginatively engaging with the crisis unleashed by the cynical — or some would say purist — populist insurgents on their back-benches.
It would appear that the current Conservative government will survive in some sort of reconfigured form, at least in the short term. Decisive leadership, of the sort the country now needs, is unlikely to result from this process.
Indeed, murmering platitudes about 'the will of the people' it seems likely that our current political leadership-without-leaders will, out of a misplaced British sense of civic duty and a polite unwillingness to offend, proceed to consummate the catastrophe initiated by those irresponsible elements within who decided not to face up to the consequences of their words and actions.
It is highly likely that when we take into consideration both the younger demographic that didn't come out to vote in such large numbers and the growing number of people who are coming to realise just how badly they have been scammed (or at least abandonned by their scammers), 'the will of the people' is a dynamic phenomenon and there may well already be a small, underlying majority in favour of remaining in the EU, at least in terms of current opinion in a very fluid situation.
Whatever happens now will set a dangerous precedent for our political system and leave roughly half the population with a sense of having been cheated by democracy. There is no hiding how damaging and dangerous this will be and how it will probably take at least a generation to fix, if at all.
Dominic Lawson wrote in the Sunday Times this week that any failure to 'respect' the democratic will of the people, as expressed by the June 23rd plebiscite, would result in 'tanks on the streets'. Welcome to Venezuela.
Those, like Lawson, with a long-term commitment to the abstract notion of Brexit before all the lies were deployed to bring it about, are showing signs of nervousness that only the irrevocable invocation of Article 50 will now dispel.
They will have intuited that the ground is already shifting again, that the leaders of their movement are already dispersing, and that the bulk of Leave voters are just too old to come out and defy the (almost certainly metaphorical) tanks.
If the Conservative government is likely to press on with the task of sailing into the storm out of fear of on-board mutiny should their new captain even suggest hauling the sails down, Parliament as a whole would probably favour turning around.
Knowing that you will inevitably piss off half the country, it makes sense from a pragmatic perspective to elect piss off the half that is older, more used to being disappointed and losing momentum fast.
Yet there's also a set of more high-minded arguments for disregarding the referendum result. Firstly, the moral one. Election fraud is usually taken to mean fiddly diddly at the polling station, but in this instance the chicanery and swindle took place at the level of the hustings and the basic propositions presented to the electorate.
Secondly the constitutional and ideological objections. The referendum was called for highly expedient reasons which immediately posed an existential threat to the world's oldest parliamentary democracy.
Some have tried to dress it up rather insincerely as a triumph of popular democracy, but these sort of consultations are actually a travesty of our age-old democratic process, as they expose us all to the dishonesty of demagogues.
And, as I noted in a post earlier in the week, our parliamentary system has evolved to allow us to transcend our localised viewpoints — to be more than the sum or our parts — whereas these referenda pander to the sort of partial perspectives that the populists feed off.
Anything other than prevarication is however unlikely in the short to medium term unless a return to normal service can be signalled via the calling of a general election.
In the meantime, Britain may itself become a mere sideshow in the hollowing out of western discourse: the emergence of the kind of 'donut politics' that results when the centre collapses as voters are drawn to the extremes.
Across the pond Trump started with Mexicans, moved on to Muslims and now has Jews in his sights. The Brexit result suggests that nobody can afford to be complacent now about his chances of victory in November. (Anyone who wants to know what Trump really thinks about the uneducated proletariat should watch Anthony Baxter's 2011 documentary You've Been Trumped, which tracks the Donald's campaign to displace the 'horrible' plebs presenting a potential eye-sore around the fringes of his elite golf resort near Aberdeen.)
As well as giving a sense of renewed empowerment to our native xenophobes, the Brexit referendum result may further encourage insurgent politicians across the continent, which could mean that our own modest efforts to shore things up over the next couple of years are rendered irrelevant.
The next big test would seem to be the French election in 2017. Spain's most recent stab at resolving its own political crisis — a repeated general election which took place in the immediate aftermath of our referendum — did seem to offer some cause for optimism as the populists failed to surge as expected. Perhaps the UK is already functioning, as Charlie Brooker puts it, as the world's leading cautionary tale.
Nevertheless, populist engagement with ignorance and jingoism is a dynamic, catalytic process, creating ever greater shallowness and moronic disregard for facts wherever it operates.
The more reticent, reasonable politicians of the centre have been written off as compromised and corrupt and the lessons of the last century — the very rationale for open-minded, middle-of-the-road policies and complex, transnational institutions like the EU — are rapidly being forgotten.
That said, the hole in the middle of our donut may be as much opportunity as threat, and law-makers around the developed world urgently need to explore the potential for creating a new kind of knowledge-informed politics before things destabilise further.
In the past couple of decades it has become the scourge of the developing world, particularly Latin America, where it undermines or infiltrates traditional two party arrangements based on class identity, borrowing from the rhetoric of both and adding its own nationalistic hyperbole that resonates within communities disconcerted by globalised neoliberalism.
Now it has taken hold in the so-called rich world, thanks in no small part to the burgeoning wealth disparities within it worthy of the under-developed rich-poor world.
The ideological extremists of the last century taught us that it was ultimately handier to tell big lies than little ones. Crucially however, they then acted as if they had come to believe many of their own audacious whoppers.
Not so with the modern demagogic populists. Whether or not Trump's primary audience believes that there will soon be a big wall along the border paid for by Mexico, it is almost painfully obvious that HE does not believe it. Ditto Boris Johnson and the £350m that was going to be redirected to the NHS after Brexit.
Populism has been most successful — and ultimately calamitous — in countries where the movement has been fronted by charismatic manipulators capable of transcending the political system which brought them to power. (Such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.)
In Britain however, having engineered a political and constitutional crisis of historical magnitude, the populists have apparently lacked the courage of their lack of conviction; Boris in particular, looking, as one wit put it, like the dog that caught the car.
Meanwhile, the two main traditional parties have the appearance of rusty old hulks torpedoed beneath the water line. Both also seem far more concerned about patching themselves up than imaginatively engaging with the crisis unleashed by the cynical — or some would say purist — populist insurgents on their back-benches.
It would appear that the current Conservative government will survive in some sort of reconfigured form, at least in the short term. Decisive leadership, of the sort the country now needs, is unlikely to result from this process.
Indeed, murmering platitudes about 'the will of the people' it seems likely that our current political leadership-without-leaders will, out of a misplaced British sense of civic duty and a polite unwillingness to offend, proceed to consummate the catastrophe initiated by those irresponsible elements within who decided not to face up to the consequences of their words and actions.
It is highly likely that when we take into consideration both the younger demographic that didn't come out to vote in such large numbers and the growing number of people who are coming to realise just how badly they have been scammed (or at least abandonned by their scammers), 'the will of the people' is a dynamic phenomenon and there may well already be a small, underlying majority in favour of remaining in the EU, at least in terms of current opinion in a very fluid situation.
Whatever happens now will set a dangerous precedent for our political system and leave roughly half the population with a sense of having been cheated by democracy. There is no hiding how damaging and dangerous this will be and how it will probably take at least a generation to fix, if at all.
Dominic Lawson wrote in the Sunday Times this week that any failure to 'respect' the democratic will of the people, as expressed by the June 23rd plebiscite, would result in 'tanks on the streets'. Welcome to Venezuela.
Those, like Lawson, with a long-term commitment to the abstract notion of Brexit before all the lies were deployed to bring it about, are showing signs of nervousness that only the irrevocable invocation of Article 50 will now dispel.
They will have intuited that the ground is already shifting again, that the leaders of their movement are already dispersing, and that the bulk of Leave voters are just too old to come out and defy the (almost certainly metaphorical) tanks.
If the Conservative government is likely to press on with the task of sailing into the storm out of fear of on-board mutiny should their new captain even suggest hauling the sails down, Parliament as a whole would probably favour turning around.
Knowing that you will inevitably piss off half the country, it makes sense from a pragmatic perspective to elect piss off the half that is older, more used to being disappointed and losing momentum fast.
Yet there's also a set of more high-minded arguments for disregarding the referendum result. Firstly, the moral one. Election fraud is usually taken to mean fiddly diddly at the polling station, but in this instance the chicanery and swindle took place at the level of the hustings and the basic propositions presented to the electorate.
Secondly the constitutional and ideological objections. The referendum was called for highly expedient reasons which immediately posed an existential threat to the world's oldest parliamentary democracy.
Some have tried to dress it up rather insincerely as a triumph of popular democracy, but these sort of consultations are actually a travesty of our age-old democratic process, as they expose us all to the dishonesty of demagogues.
And, as I noted in a post earlier in the week, our parliamentary system has evolved to allow us to transcend our localised viewpoints — to be more than the sum or our parts — whereas these referenda pander to the sort of partial perspectives that the populists feed off.
Anything other than prevarication is however unlikely in the short to medium term unless a return to normal service can be signalled via the calling of a general election.
In the meantime, Britain may itself become a mere sideshow in the hollowing out of western discourse: the emergence of the kind of 'donut politics' that results when the centre collapses as voters are drawn to the extremes.
Across the pond Trump started with Mexicans, moved on to Muslims and now has Jews in his sights. The Brexit result suggests that nobody can afford to be complacent now about his chances of victory in November. (Anyone who wants to know what Trump really thinks about the uneducated proletariat should watch Anthony Baxter's 2011 documentary You've Been Trumped, which tracks the Donald's campaign to displace the 'horrible' plebs presenting a potential eye-sore around the fringes of his elite golf resort near Aberdeen.)
As well as giving a sense of renewed empowerment to our native xenophobes, the Brexit referendum result may further encourage insurgent politicians across the continent, which could mean that our own modest efforts to shore things up over the next couple of years are rendered irrelevant.
The next big test would seem to be the French election in 2017. Spain's most recent stab at resolving its own political crisis — a repeated general election which took place in the immediate aftermath of our referendum — did seem to offer some cause for optimism as the populists failed to surge as expected. Perhaps the UK is already functioning, as Charlie Brooker puts it, as the world's leading cautionary tale.
Nevertheless, populist engagement with ignorance and jingoism is a dynamic, catalytic process, creating ever greater shallowness and moronic disregard for facts wherever it operates.
The more reticent, reasonable politicians of the centre have been written off as compromised and corrupt and the lessons of the last century — the very rationale for open-minded, middle-of-the-road policies and complex, transnational institutions like the EU — are rapidly being forgotten.
That said, the hole in the middle of our donut may be as much opportunity as threat, and law-makers around the developed world urgently need to explore the potential for creating a new kind of knowledge-informed politics before things destabilise further.
Monday, July 04, 2016
Guatemala: The Ground Rules (1)
Do something once and you will be expected to do it a second time.
Do it a second time and it will be a lifelong obligation.
Do it a second time and it will be a lifelong obligation.
Friday, July 01, 2016
Flight to the far edges...
There is a flight from the centre towards the far left and the far right.
Those involved in the flight to the left - Sanders and Corbyn supporters say - have to be aware that an equal and opposite movement to reactionary extremism is happening at the same time.
And that the two phenomena may not be disconnected. History certainly seems to suggest otherwise.
They can look back at the Spanish Civil War and think 'ooh I would have supported the Republic', but what they should be thinking is that the Spanish Civil War was something worth preventing at all costs.
Another example of the wood and trees bias problem flagged up below.
We need to temper our ideas and resulting actions with a sense of context.
Those involved in the flight to the left - Sanders and Corbyn supporters say - have to be aware that an equal and opposite movement to reactionary extremism is happening at the same time.
And that the two phenomena may not be disconnected. History certainly seems to suggest otherwise.
They can look back at the Spanish Civil War and think 'ooh I would have supported the Republic', but what they should be thinking is that the Spanish Civil War was something worth preventing at all costs.
Another example of the wood and trees bias problem flagged up below.
We need to temper our ideas and resulting actions with a sense of context.
The most annoying of all cognitive biases...
In the course of the past week I may have referred to people who voted LEAVE on at least one occasion as ‘ignorant and stupid’. While some undoubtedly are, many surely are not.
The real problem is that many of them belong to the group of people who at almost every stage of my adult life - academic, professional and social - have made me want to shuffle off into a corner and spontaneously combust.
This is that group of people who are unable to see the wood from the trees. (Though sometimes its the trees from the wood!)
For many this does seem to result from some innate cognitive bias.
Some of these people will however be considered otherwise smart and cultured in many of the contexts in which they operate.
The majority within the group as a whole may suffer the condition only occasionally, and then as result of some sort of situational stimulus or distorted perspective.
And this is essentially the problem with trusting a referendum to resolve really vital issues like our membership of the EU. The very nature of the format is sure to produce a sort of compound of limited, localised perspectives, not entirely unlike that of the famous fable of the blind men and the elephant.
Parliamentary democracy is not there to act as some sort of sinister system of control, constantly thwarting our democratic urges, it is there to help our society transcend our individual limitations, to be something more than the sum of our parts.
The real problem is that many of them belong to the group of people who at almost every stage of my adult life - academic, professional and social - have made me want to shuffle off into a corner and spontaneously combust.
This is that group of people who are unable to see the wood from the trees. (Though sometimes its the trees from the wood!)
For many this does seem to result from some innate cognitive bias.
Some of these people will however be considered otherwise smart and cultured in many of the contexts in which they operate.
The majority within the group as a whole may suffer the condition only occasionally, and then as result of some sort of situational stimulus or distorted perspective.
And this is essentially the problem with trusting a referendum to resolve really vital issues like our membership of the EU. The very nature of the format is sure to produce a sort of compound of limited, localised perspectives, not entirely unlike that of the famous fable of the blind men and the elephant.
Parliamentary democracy is not there to act as some sort of sinister system of control, constantly thwarting our democratic urges, it is there to help our society transcend our individual limitations, to be something more than the sum of our parts.
Idioms
In abandoning his plan to restore surplus by 2020, the Chancellor George Osborne said today that...
'We will fix the roof when the sun is shining.'
How very un-Chapin of him.
The equivalent saying here would be something along the lines of...
'We'll cross that bridge when there's a flash flood and maybe the bridge isn't even there any more.'
'We will fix the roof when the sun is shining.'
How very un-Chapin of him.
The equivalent saying here would be something along the lines of...
'We'll cross that bridge when there's a flash flood and maybe the bridge isn't even there any more.'
Conspiracies
There are two kinds of conspiracy. Firstly, those which are underpinned by an element of truth and secondly, those which can only either be spot on or spot off.
So when Icke and his like say the EU is a faceless bureaucracy serving the interests of big business, they are tapping into the first kind. When they suggest that Hillary Clinton is a flesh-eating lizard in a rubber mask, or that Neocons brought down the twin towers, they are tapping into the second.
Further examples of the first kind...
The latter category of conspiracy is undoubtedly becoming more prevalent in contemporary discourse, perhaps because the purveyors of paranoia have seen how the impersonal forces of globalisation have left more and more people feeling disempowered, and thus susceptible.
Even those who have specialised in Type II conspiracies - like David Icke - have widened their repertoire to include more of the Type I narratives.
So, where does the whole 'Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable' conspiracy fit into this? First kind or second kind?
Like chemtrails or 'the Mexicans are about to attack', it looks like a binary at first glance. However...
So when Icke and his like say the EU is a faceless bureaucracy serving the interests of big business, they are tapping into the first kind. When they suggest that Hillary Clinton is a flesh-eating lizard in a rubber mask, or that Neocons brought down the twin towers, they are tapping into the second.
Further examples of the first kind...
- The internet is a playground for pervs and paedophiles
- Islam is a dangerous religion
- White working class people are missing out on housing and other social services due to uncontrolled immigration
- Michael Gove is a flesh-eating lizard (Boom tish!)
The latter category of conspiracy is undoubtedly becoming more prevalent in contemporary discourse, perhaps because the purveyors of paranoia have seen how the impersonal forces of globalisation have left more and more people feeling disempowered, and thus susceptible.
Even those who have specialised in Type II conspiracies - like David Icke - have widened their repertoire to include more of the Type I narratives.
So, where does the whole 'Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable' conspiracy fit into this? First kind or second kind?
Like chemtrails or 'the Mexicans are about to attack', it looks like a binary at first glance. However...
On it
Cats are surely the living embodiment of nature and its fundamental processes. Whenever something changes in their environment, whenever a new niche appears, however small, they are totally on it within minutes...
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Ensaladas de Huevones
My latest auxilliary blog project.
A one stop portal for sightings from across Central America of some of the most pathetic efforts ever made at garnishing a dish.
A one stop portal for sightings from across Central America of some of the most pathetic efforts ever made at garnishing a dish.
Telling it as it is...
Modern democratic politics is about managing the gap between the way things are and the way things out to be. This is why one should always raise an eyebrow or two at any so-called politician self-identifying as one of those that 'tells it as it is'. Either they are missing the point, or they are being dangerously disingenuous.
I am a migrant...
Nigel Farage has managed to persuade millions of Britons to loathe legal immigration in much the same way that millions of Americans appear to loathe illegal immigration. This is a not inconsiderable political achievement.
He has accomplished this by deploying many of the techniques the Donald as been practicing on his own willing dupes across the pond; interweaving forebodings of supplantation, sexual violence, terror and more into a compound sense of all-round unease with otherness.
I too am a migrant — an exile if you must — living largely at the discretion of my host nation.
I reside in a city that benefits enormously on many levels from the sort of constant internal migration of which I have been but one exemplar. Its economy swells, and yet, as it swells, it is undoubtedly also distorted in ways that surely must disconcert and occasionally anger the deeper-rooted local residents.
There is an oddly visible and vocal group within the immigrant population here — I’m not even sure that the term sub-group is appropriate — consisting of fugitives, fraudsters, kiddyfiddlers, crazies, debauchees, deluded egotists, exploiters and spongers.
On any given day perhaps the least sordid of them are busy posting pictures on Facebook of malnourished and mangy pooches in the hope that some compassionate soul will send them money to subsidise their sojourn in Central America.
Nobody ever claimed that every single peripatetic person, anywhere around the globe, is a living breathing avatar of positive economic and social energy.
It is possible to have a measured, adult conversation about these issues.
But this is not the conversation that the likes of Nigel Farage or Donald Trump want us to have.
He has accomplished this by deploying many of the techniques the Donald as been practicing on his own willing dupes across the pond; interweaving forebodings of supplantation, sexual violence, terror and more into a compound sense of all-round unease with otherness.
I too am a migrant — an exile if you must — living largely at the discretion of my host nation.
I reside in a city that benefits enormously on many levels from the sort of constant internal migration of which I have been but one exemplar. Its economy swells, and yet, as it swells, it is undoubtedly also distorted in ways that surely must disconcert and occasionally anger the deeper-rooted local residents.
There is an oddly visible and vocal group within the immigrant population here — I’m not even sure that the term sub-group is appropriate — consisting of fugitives, fraudsters, kiddyfiddlers, crazies, debauchees, deluded egotists, exploiters and spongers.
On any given day perhaps the least sordid of them are busy posting pictures on Facebook of malnourished and mangy pooches in the hope that some compassionate soul will send them money to subsidise their sojourn in Central America.
Nobody ever claimed that every single peripatetic person, anywhere around the globe, is a living breathing avatar of positive economic and social energy.
It is possible to have a measured, adult conversation about these issues.
But this is not the conversation that the likes of Nigel Farage or Donald Trump want us to have.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
BoJo Jnr
One of the many painful ironies of all this is that Boris Johnson has at least one child that was born a Belgian citizen.
I don't know how this panned out in the end, but back in the early 90s when he was the Spectator's corerspondent in Brussels, submitting regular pieces of anti-EU invective, his wife became pregnant.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives under Major had passed a new immigration law designed to stem migration from the Indian subcontinent.
The gyst of this w that people whose parents were not UK-born could not expect any offspring born outside the country to have automatic UK citizenship.
The four grandparents of Boris's sprog, though UK citizens, were born outside the UK.
There was quite a lot of schadenfreude about this at the time.
I don't know how this panned out in the end, but back in the early 90s when he was the Spectator's corerspondent in Brussels, submitting regular pieces of anti-EU invective, his wife became pregnant.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives under Major had passed a new immigration law designed to stem migration from the Indian subcontinent.
The gyst of this w that people whose parents were not UK-born could not expect any offspring born outside the country to have automatic UK citizenship.
The four grandparents of Boris's sprog, though UK citizens, were born outside the UK.
There was quite a lot of schadenfreude about this at the time.
Monday, June 27, 2016
The Pie Chart Conundrum
The industry where I used to work became replete with right brain-dominant people pretending to be left brain-dominant.
One of the most obvious symptoms of this was the use of pie charts to illustrate states of affairs that should not logically be illustrated this way.
The EU referendum last Thursday, and the shocking result we woke up to on Friday, is a classic example of this sort of basic analytical misconception. Call it the revenge of PowerPoint on political common sense.
Let's start by pointing out that voting for whether to LEAVE or REMAIN in the EU is not the same sort of binary choice as that which will face Americans in November: Trump or Clinton.
This is because both candidates will present well-defined and media-scrutinised plans to the US electorate, and a pie chart showing which proportion of the popular vote eventually goes to each candidate would make perfect sense, even though the result is finally decided by the electoral college.
In the case of the recent referendum however, the British people were instead being asked to decide between THIS THING and NOT THIS THING, or between a well-defined set of rights and restrictions and something else which the Brexiters chose to leave as ill-defined as possible.
Additionally, one of the options involved the possibility of voluntarily renouncing the EU citizenship that Article 28 of the Lisbon Treaty had given us, with the implication that if this was chosen by the majority, everyone else would have it forcibly taken away.
Cameron speaks of the ‘will’ of the people, but ever since philosophers started debating freedom they have understood the basic distinction between freely choosing to do something and having to do it under duress.
I now face the prospect of losing my EU citizenship rights AGAINST my will when, like most ex-pats, I had no say in the referendum.
From a legal standpoint this is completely different to signing them away. (e.g. The fact that 52% choose to jump inside a lake of molten lava does not give the state the right to toss the remaining 48% in.)
This significant legal and moral imbalance would occur the moment Article 50 is triggered and must surely be one reason the Brexiters are reluctant to do so in a hurry.
In all of this Scotland is a bit of a distraction. Their government appears to be saying that their own local pie chart (65% Remain / 35% Leave) has moral force over the national one, but in fact the 48% that voted to stay in overall can deploy exactly the same moral argument, and have the greater numbers transcending existing geopolitical boundaries.
It’s not the stupid answer that was given but the stupid question that was asked that we should be recriminating over.
Make no mistake, this is largely David Cameron’s fault and his rather smug, hand-washing approach now is especially galling.
He had some form on this, by asking a similarly dumb question of the Scots in 2014 and actually most Brits outside of Scotland, left or right-brained, seemed to at least vaguely intuit the pie chart conundrum back then.
The two options were however much better defined for our northern neighbours, and citizens of the rump UK were apparently not going to lose anything quite so tangible other than the abstract concept of union and the sense of being diminished as a nation.
In the end the uncertainty over the currency swung it for Remain. In this campaign the Britain Stronger In camp lacked a comparable lever. They should therefore have made much clearer the notion of concrete loss.
One of the most obvious symptoms of this was the use of pie charts to illustrate states of affairs that should not logically be illustrated this way.
The EU referendum last Thursday, and the shocking result we woke up to on Friday, is a classic example of this sort of basic analytical misconception. Call it the revenge of PowerPoint on political common sense.
Let's start by pointing out that voting for whether to LEAVE or REMAIN in the EU is not the same sort of binary choice as that which will face Americans in November: Trump or Clinton.
This is because both candidates will present well-defined and media-scrutinised plans to the US electorate, and a pie chart showing which proportion of the popular vote eventually goes to each candidate would make perfect sense, even though the result is finally decided by the electoral college.
In the case of the recent referendum however, the British people were instead being asked to decide between THIS THING and NOT THIS THING, or between a well-defined set of rights and restrictions and something else which the Brexiters chose to leave as ill-defined as possible.
Additionally, one of the options involved the possibility of voluntarily renouncing the EU citizenship that Article 28 of the Lisbon Treaty had given us, with the implication that if this was chosen by the majority, everyone else would have it forcibly taken away.
Cameron speaks of the ‘will’ of the people, but ever since philosophers started debating freedom they have understood the basic distinction between freely choosing to do something and having to do it under duress.
I now face the prospect of losing my EU citizenship rights AGAINST my will when, like most ex-pats, I had no say in the referendum.
From a legal standpoint this is completely different to signing them away. (e.g. The fact that 52% choose to jump inside a lake of molten lava does not give the state the right to toss the remaining 48% in.)
This significant legal and moral imbalance would occur the moment Article 50 is triggered and must surely be one reason the Brexiters are reluctant to do so in a hurry.
In all of this Scotland is a bit of a distraction. Their government appears to be saying that their own local pie chart (65% Remain / 35% Leave) has moral force over the national one, but in fact the 48% that voted to stay in overall can deploy exactly the same moral argument, and have the greater numbers transcending existing geopolitical boundaries.
It’s not the stupid answer that was given but the stupid question that was asked that we should be recriminating over.
Make no mistake, this is largely David Cameron’s fault and his rather smug, hand-washing approach now is especially galling.
He had some form on this, by asking a similarly dumb question of the Scots in 2014 and actually most Brits outside of Scotland, left or right-brained, seemed to at least vaguely intuit the pie chart conundrum back then.
The two options were however much better defined for our northern neighbours, and citizens of the rump UK were apparently not going to lose anything quite so tangible other than the abstract concept of union and the sense of being diminished as a nation.
In the end the uncertainty over the currency swung it for Remain. In this campaign the Britain Stronger In camp lacked a comparable lever. They should therefore have made much clearer the notion of concrete loss.
In simple terms...
We invented parliamentary democracy and never has the need been greater for us to show the world how it can and must operate.
The urgency is compounded by the fact that populist movements which function as if their politicians were delegates not representatives are springing up everywhere and the technocratic un-charisma of the EU confuses people into thinking that British political values are somehow best served by Brexit.
And the immediate problem is that parliament not only needs to act, it needs to articulate why it is acting in a way that the divided nation can digest. A lack of obvious leadership is very much part of this crisis.
The urgency is compounded by the fact that populist movements which function as if their politicians were delegates not representatives are springing up everywhere and the technocratic un-charisma of the EU confuses people into thinking that British political values are somehow best served by Brexit.
And the immediate problem is that parliament not only needs to act, it needs to articulate why it is acting in a way that the divided nation can digest. A lack of obvious leadership is very much part of this crisis.
The 'Bad Friday' Agreement?
As I understand it, the Good Friday Agreement stipulated that there would be no border between the Republic and the Province and that even those who were deeply opposed to the concept of a united Ireland could apply to the government south of the border for a passport - as they are now doing so in droves.
What if a similar agreement was set up between EU-independent UK and a UK-independent Scotland?
We could call it the Bad Friday agreement in honour of how many of us felt on the 24th.
What if a similar agreement was set up between EU-independent UK and a UK-independent Scotland?
We could call it the Bad Friday agreement in honour of how many of us felt on the 24th.
Against our will
If, instead of a referendum, the government had put up a suitably idiot-proof website inviting anyone who wished to give up their EU citizenship to use an online form to do so, how many of the dimwits who voted Leave on the 23rd would have taken them up on the offer?
The two answers on last week’s referendum voting slip - Leave and Remain - were surely qualitatively different from a legal perspective.
One involved the possibility of voluntarily surrendering one’s citizenship, the other involved the possibility of having it taken away AGAINST one’s will, in effect by force. (Something for which there are few precedents.)
The 'will' of the people on each side of this debate was never going to be something you could express as two portions of a pie-chart.
The Scots clearly get this, as do many ex-pats who were not even given the chance to participate in this farcical plebiscite.
The Scottish government considers that the Remain majority north of the border gives their argument particular moral force, but in fact every member of the 48% minority has it as well, and they also have a strength in numbers beyond existing geopolitical boundaries.
The two answers on last week’s referendum voting slip - Leave and Remain - were surely qualitatively different from a legal perspective.
One involved the possibility of voluntarily surrendering one’s citizenship, the other involved the possibility of having it taken away AGAINST one’s will, in effect by force. (Something for which there are few precedents.)
The 'will' of the people on each side of this debate was never going to be something you could express as two portions of a pie-chart.
The Scots clearly get this, as do many ex-pats who were not even given the chance to participate in this farcical plebiscite.
The Scottish government considers that the Remain majority north of the border gives their argument particular moral force, but in fact every member of the 48% minority has it as well, and they also have a strength in numbers beyond existing geopolitical boundaries.
Angry minority
The other obvious difference between the 52% and the 48% is that many of the latter are now angrier (and getting steadily more so) about being dragged out of the EU than many of the 52% ever were about being part of it before the referendum was called. The political ramifications of this are significant. It does not take an angry majority of 50.1% to upset an entire political system.
Friends, Britons Countrymen...
BoJo is not quite the man of principle that Shakespeare made Marcus Junius Brutus out to be, but he was similarly drawn into an existing conspiracy to give it wider appeal and a modicum of intellectual respectability.
Brutus failed to capitalise on what he saw a necessary act of political carnage, and Boris may now be on a similar trajectory.
Perhaps what the UK now needs is its own Marcus Antonius to show up at the funeral of Britiain's economic future and remind everyone there that we did once consider it valuable, and that those who did it in should be driven out forthwith.
Brutus failed to capitalise on what he saw a necessary act of political carnage, and Boris may now be on a similar trajectory.
Perhaps what the UK now needs is its own Marcus Antonius to show up at the funeral of Britiain's economic future and remind everyone there that we did once consider it valuable, and that those who did it in should be driven out forthwith.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
When inaction is the gutsy option...
Any national leader worth the name (and who has read his or her Machiavelli) will know that Parliament can and should find a way to ignore the result of this referendum, because most of the Brexiters are too old to come out on the street and protest.
Dead cat bounce...
Or perhaps all we've done is have a sneak peek inside the box, and will now shut the lid in the hope that the wave function will somehow un-collapse?
Sorry Nigel...
It now appears that Thursday's referendum wasn't about EU membership after all. More than 14m people scratched a mark on a piece of paper in a historical bit of direct democracy that was actually about...
1) An unofficial Tory party leadership contest
2) An unofficial independence referendum for provincial England (and the place next door with Gareth Bale and lots of sheep)
3) A protest against government cuts
4) Er...Muslims.
So we don't need to trigger Article 50 at all, because it's surely not relevant to any of the above.
(PS: I forgot to mention the NHS. Somehow it's ALWAYS about the bloody NHS.)
1) An unofficial Tory party leadership contest
2) An unofficial independence referendum for provincial England (and the place next door with Gareth Bale and lots of sheep)
3) A protest against government cuts
4) Er...Muslims.
So we don't need to trigger Article 50 at all, because it's surely not relevant to any of the above.
(PS: I forgot to mention the NHS. Somehow it's ALWAYS about the bloody NHS.)
The Brexiters
One can look at the age profile of LEAVE voters optimistically, but mortality won't solve this problem any time soon.
There's a demographic within our society that the system doesn't really need, and it should be basically self-sustaining for a while yet.
And they are quite probably going to be harder to re-integrate than those marginalised children of immigrants who run off to join ISIS, and possibly also bigger threat to our political culture in the long run.
How did we get here?
When industrialisation first started delivering the good and the bad things we habitually associate it with, the ignorant were not such a headache. Peasants could be converted into factory workers; some even provided with a basic education and formed into the newspaper-reading sort.
Pan out a bit and one could see that the system depended on slavery and colonial exploitation, but this was less visible to the workers beavering away within the nation state and they felt proud of their role in it. When the empire came to and end, they helped create a new kind of state which they could be even prouder of, because it promised to care for them.
These days our increasingly globalised version of capitalism is coming to depend primarily - in the developed world at least - on a base of what a friend of mine likes to call 'knowledge workers'. It no longer has the same economic incentive to care for the relatively uneducated.
This is not a society in which the knowledge-challenged will ever be able to feel comfortable. Most of the jobs they used to do are being outsourced abroad or in-sourced to rapidly incoming foreigners...some of which are not even ignorant, just highly motivated. Capital and commodities now move freely and humanity wants to as well.
Yesterday's vote just invalidated the deal Cameron did with his European peers on free movement within the EU. Renegotiating our relationship with the single market could take several years and in the meantime an immigration free-for-all is likely as the LEAVE campaign(s) made, albeit vague, commitments to preserve the status of the UK's EU residents before the drawbridge is finally pulled up. And a collapsed Pound makes our island additionally attractive to Johnny Foreigner in all his most bargain basement manifestations. Not quite what the (comparatively) ignorant were voting for.
Many clearly hanker nostalgically after the moment around the middle of the last century when their collective sense of pride and involvement was at its apogee: when darker people knew their place, even if they had been granted indepedence and a new role in the Commonwealth. They'd surely love to turn the clock back. But our societies march on, albeit with them very much on board still as a dangerous, potential pathogen.
England and Wales in particular, minus perhaps London which may eventually break away, look set to become a sort of offshore floating sanctuary for the white van clan.
The Labour Party in Britain has been trying to compassion them into submission - If only we can show we still care, they won't smash the whole place up out of frustration.
But take a look what's happening across the Atlantic where the compassion approach ran out of steam a generation or so ago.
The Right's approach had been to take this manipulable mass at face value and co-opt them into a political culture which barefacedly involved selling turkeys on the idea that, to borrow from Monty Python, it's Christmas every day in heaven.
But suddently Christmas wasn't so great and the sudden fissures in this cosy arrangement were exploited by populists - those who would make the heavenly Christmas great again, for turkeys.
The ignorant have twigged that the Right considers them their perennial dupes, but still appear to find this preferable to the attitude of many of those courting them on the Left who can barely disguise the multiple ways that they find the modern proletariat depressingly repulsive.
This is in part because, from the perspective of leftist intellectual nostalgia, this current demographic is no match for the generation that they seem to model themselves on. Those that built the NHS are disappearing fast and being steadily replaced by those that just moan and gripe about it. (Those that won the World Cup in '66...)
And for every person who has genuinely experienced hardship as a result of undefunded and over-demanded services there are surely several who just adopt the rhetoric that is presented to them in the media-sphere to mask their own xenophobia and all round annoyance with the direction the new world order is taking.
Most seem to long for a time and a place that they never experienced directly, when those born into lower cultural conditions strove, often successfully, to transcend these native limitations and remake the world according to a positive set of open-minded and collective values.
It might not have really ever existed outside of some sort of class memory, and at this moment in history seems beyond the capabilities of closed-minded low-brows to re-constitute.
There's a demographic within our society that the system doesn't really need, and it should be basically self-sustaining for a while yet.
And they are quite probably going to be harder to re-integrate than those marginalised children of immigrants who run off to join ISIS, and possibly also bigger threat to our political culture in the long run.
How did we get here?
When industrialisation first started delivering the good and the bad things we habitually associate it with, the ignorant were not such a headache. Peasants could be converted into factory workers; some even provided with a basic education and formed into the newspaper-reading sort.
Pan out a bit and one could see that the system depended on slavery and colonial exploitation, but this was less visible to the workers beavering away within the nation state and they felt proud of their role in it. When the empire came to and end, they helped create a new kind of state which they could be even prouder of, because it promised to care for them.
These days our increasingly globalised version of capitalism is coming to depend primarily - in the developed world at least - on a base of what a friend of mine likes to call 'knowledge workers'. It no longer has the same economic incentive to care for the relatively uneducated.
This is not a society in which the knowledge-challenged will ever be able to feel comfortable. Most of the jobs they used to do are being outsourced abroad or in-sourced to rapidly incoming foreigners...some of which are not even ignorant, just highly motivated. Capital and commodities now move freely and humanity wants to as well.
Yesterday's vote just invalidated the deal Cameron did with his European peers on free movement within the EU. Renegotiating our relationship with the single market could take several years and in the meantime an immigration free-for-all is likely as the LEAVE campaign(s) made, albeit vague, commitments to preserve the status of the UK's EU residents before the drawbridge is finally pulled up. And a collapsed Pound makes our island additionally attractive to Johnny Foreigner in all his most bargain basement manifestations. Not quite what the (comparatively) ignorant were voting for.
Many clearly hanker nostalgically after the moment around the middle of the last century when their collective sense of pride and involvement was at its apogee: when darker people knew their place, even if they had been granted indepedence and a new role in the Commonwealth. They'd surely love to turn the clock back. But our societies march on, albeit with them very much on board still as a dangerous, potential pathogen.
England and Wales in particular, minus perhaps London which may eventually break away, look set to become a sort of offshore floating sanctuary for the white van clan.
The Labour Party in Britain has been trying to compassion them into submission - If only we can show we still care, they won't smash the whole place up out of frustration.
But take a look what's happening across the Atlantic where the compassion approach ran out of steam a generation or so ago.
The Right's approach had been to take this manipulable mass at face value and co-opt them into a political culture which barefacedly involved selling turkeys on the idea that, to borrow from Monty Python, it's Christmas every day in heaven.
But suddently Christmas wasn't so great and the sudden fissures in this cosy arrangement were exploited by populists - those who would make the heavenly Christmas great again, for turkeys.
The ignorant have twigged that the Right considers them their perennial dupes, but still appear to find this preferable to the attitude of many of those courting them on the Left who can barely disguise the multiple ways that they find the modern proletariat depressingly repulsive.
This is in part because, from the perspective of leftist intellectual nostalgia, this current demographic is no match for the generation that they seem to model themselves on. Those that built the NHS are disappearing fast and being steadily replaced by those that just moan and gripe about it. (Those that won the World Cup in '66...)
And for every person who has genuinely experienced hardship as a result of undefunded and over-demanded services there are surely several who just adopt the rhetoric that is presented to them in the media-sphere to mask their own xenophobia and all round annoyance with the direction the new world order is taking.
Most seem to long for a time and a place that they never experienced directly, when those born into lower cultural conditions strove, often successfully, to transcend these native limitations and remake the world according to a positive set of open-minded and collective values.
It might not have really ever existed outside of some sort of class memory, and at this moment in history seems beyond the capabilities of closed-minded low-brows to re-constitute.
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Winsome / Losesome
Thanks to the tireless work of cross channel cameramen not only do we have a sense of which European nations have the most winsome female fans, we can also appreciate which ones have brought the greatest number of male fans unable to grasp the difference between the lens that is capturing them and the screen where their image appears...
A free pass in the blame game...
Let's face it, rarely do British politicians have such a clearcut opportuity for dodging responsibility for a recession as this Brexit now presents them with.
Boris even (sort of) apologised in advance for the coming downturn, but must have sensed too that a sizeable part of the blame could eventually be shifted onto white van man...and the heat thus taken off the bankers, hedge fund managers, property speculators and the rest of the usual suspects.
Better still if the economic pain can be blamed on a further contraction in the Eurozone, as most Brexiters won't immediately twig that that would be their fault too.
While there may be a practical argument for a government by leading independence-fantasists after Article 50 is invoked, the Tories could further benefit from this unique hand-washing opportunity by electing someone like Theresa May as their new leader...
The developing YOUR fault, not our fault positioning should be fun to follow...
Outcomes
Ignorance and stupidity are not simply the cause of bad political outcomes, they are part of them - this is a dynamic, self-reinforcing process.
Wednesday, June 08, 2016
Brexit
Could it happen? It’s a bit like asking if the Donald might be America’s next President. Logic, common sense, human decency etc. surely dictate that it it couldn’t, and shouldn’t, but at this particular moment in the history of western capitalism, it just might.
The polls currently suggest a three point lead for the LEAVErs. It’s not clear how seriously these should be taken three weeks before the referendum.
It is clear however that voting intentions are starkly split along generational lines. The young tend to want to remain and the ageing and aged, by and large, want out.
There’s no sign as yet that the population as a whole is as engaged as Scotland was. Whichever campaign is better at tempering voter apathy will have a serious advantage.
What will probably happen is that many will enjoy the thrill of change for change’s sake right up to the final days, when fear of it will abruptly kick back in and the status quo will seemingly survive, almost miraculously; by 52%-48% in all probability.
The professional chatterers need a drama, preferably a very tense one, and so one can expect that the polls funded by major media players will point to a knife-edge conclusion right up to the 23rd. The financial markets will lurch this way and that as the journos gleefully pull their strings.
From a speculative investor’s perspective there are probably more gains and losses to be made this month either side of the referendum than at any other stage of 2016. Consequently much of the relevant ‘news’ output at this time will be informed by reprehensibly cynical motives.
My own generation could be said to sit roughly on the dividing line here (when not actually on the fence!). We can see how things are going and it is frankly very hard to keep one’s glass half full. What we once imagined the EU might become has been subverted by the technocratic, democracy-diminishing ‘new world order’ and when we talk of reforming it from within, we surely know that this is probably little short of a pious platitude. But the young at least have that (occasionally) adorable illusion that they have it in their power to make the world a better place.
Listening to my old friends talking about London, about what it appears to have become and is becoming ever more so with each passing day, I can sympathise with their frustration and sense of alienation from a city they once believed their own. The UK's capital has become the ultimate playground of the globalised world, and whether you are a Russian oligarch, a Bulgarian barista or a Middle Eastern refugee, you will feel the gravitational pull of the great people magnet. Longer term inmates feel that the migrants, rich and poor, come to chew the place up, spit it out and then move on somewhere else.
I get to go back once or twice a year and each time feel more and more like a rather detached tourist, though there are still some startling interludes when I am thrilled and repelled in equal measure.
I’m not sure how I’d feel about living there now. The recent passing of my mother has further amplified the sense of disconnection. Out in the country the enfeebled fantasy of ‘middle England’ is easier to hold up, and it is of course in these greener patches that UKIP finds many of its recruits.
Only yesterday I was talking to my father about the state of Marks & Spencer as a business - for generations perhaps the most iconic retail presence on the British high street. Their clothing range, that for so long offered unique value to consumers based on low rents and quality local manufacturers, cannot now compete with businesses like Primark which are grounded in far flung sweatshops.
Capitalism is engaged in a relentless process of globalisation and the middle orders of the G7 nation states are being severely squeezed. Elsewhere, relatively-excluded humanity sees commodities moving almost without friction across borders and wants to do the same. For billions of people, national frontiers look like a flimsy story told to gullible children. The internet, free markets, freedumb in general, have all disintermediated so many walled gardens within our societies, why not the very walls around them?
Trump and Sanders are both tapping into our collective discombobulation at this state of affairs. I think the populist position that it is somehow reversible, is probably a lie, or at least a very shaky hypothesis. The Donald and several key members of the LEAVE campaign in Britain are using barely-condonable, xenophobic discourse to draw people into their proposition and (probably futile) policy response.
Much has been made this week of Nigel Farage’s remarks that staying in the EU will increase the number of attacks on women. It’s as if he and others on his wavelength are suggesting that continental Europe is basically a lost cause and has already in effect been overrun by the fuzzy-wuzzies, so all we can now do is pull up the drawbridge. Before Farage had to insinuate that Bulgarians and Romanians were not quite like us, but the recent, alarming surge in migration from the further fringes has allowed him to be bolder in his rhetoric. Many will surely go in to vote thoroughly confused about the issues of inter-EU mobility and that of the ‘swarm’ from the likes of Syria and Iraq.
The left shows scorn and dismay, but there are some painful truths being touched upon here that they don’t want to face. Take for example the recent mass abuse of women in Cologne by gangs of reportedly North African/middle-eastern migrants and the systematic abuse of young white teenage girls in Yorkshire by men of predominantly Pakistani origin.
The Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek compares these events to the 'Great Cat Massacre’ in 18th century France, in which a substantial group of apprentices suddenly rose up and killed all the kitties belonging to their masters. It is said they did this as a form of carnivalesque rejection of dominant bourgeois values: they lived alongside, almost within affluent French society and yet felt excluded, somehow lesser than those treasured felines.
So when the liberal-left suggests that the molesters of Cologne are simply ignorant of how seriously we take our values and need to be — gently — educated about women’s rights and so on, Žižek thinks they have misunderstood the situation completely. The abusers know very well what our values are and they have periodically clubbed together to show their contempt for them in a very deliberate and systematic way, such that the message could not be any clearer. Yet they are like the apprentices. Once the orgiastic carnival of frustration and repressed envy peters out, they may not have given up entirely on the hope of being masters tand living by the mainstream values themselves one day.
Anyway, only yesterday I saw Stephen Hawking making the point that time travel backwards is much less likely than time travel in a future-bound direction. So, in spite of all this — and in spite of trying to stay true to my own pessimistic outlook — I can see no circumstances in which an attempt to go backwards is going to work out better than confronting what the future holds and trying to deal with it using the largest collaborative groups at our disposal.
Thursday, June 02, 2016
Trump's need to find out what is going on...
If religions are, as Slavoj Žižek suggests, subjectifications of human predicaments, then just about any could serve as a medium for the expression cruelty based on repressed envy, violent nihilism and all round self-righteous vengefulness.
In this respect there is surely nothing special about Islam. Yet while it is certainly possible to make use of Christianity as the basis of a wholesale rejection of modernity (viz all the Mennonites in these parts), it would also be fair to say that in general this is one branch of monotheism that has made a series of accommodations with modernity over quite an extended period and that makes it a nichier option for this sort of lifestyle / all round bolshy attitude. Indeed, from the perspective of someone who thinks of their outlook as primarily non-western, Christianity can easily appear to be complicit with western mores and the global capitalist system as a whole.
And while it is certainly possible to characterise Christianity as, in some senses still an ‘eastern’ religion and Islam as in some senses, right from the outset, a ‘western’ one, the opposite is the more straightforward mainstream approach to this.
This is why someone living inside the west, yet experiencing this at least partially as an outsider, Islam is the more likely supernatural justification for the sort of love-hate relationship with modern emancipatory values that occasionally verges into violent rejection.
But religion is really just the medium here. The underlying cause is the modern western system and the way it fails to be properly inclusive.
So Trump’s plan, based on further explicit exclusion, would really represent a codification of the problem, and not anything resembling a solution.
In this respect there is surely nothing special about Islam. Yet while it is certainly possible to make use of Christianity as the basis of a wholesale rejection of modernity (viz all the Mennonites in these parts), it would also be fair to say that in general this is one branch of monotheism that has made a series of accommodations with modernity over quite an extended period and that makes it a nichier option for this sort of lifestyle / all round bolshy attitude. Indeed, from the perspective of someone who thinks of their outlook as primarily non-western, Christianity can easily appear to be complicit with western mores and the global capitalist system as a whole.
And while it is certainly possible to characterise Christianity as, in some senses still an ‘eastern’ religion and Islam as in some senses, right from the outset, a ‘western’ one, the opposite is the more straightforward mainstream approach to this.
This is why someone living inside the west, yet experiencing this at least partially as an outsider, Islam is the more likely supernatural justification for the sort of love-hate relationship with modern emancipatory values that occasionally verges into violent rejection.
But religion is really just the medium here. The underlying cause is the modern western system and the way it fails to be properly inclusive.
So Trump’s plan, based on further explicit exclusion, would really represent a codification of the problem, and not anything resembling a solution.
Saturday, May 21, 2016
The Outsider Proxy
Outsiders play the role of handy, yet misleading surrogates for the most divisive contentions between insiders. What we like or dislike about outsiders is usually a safe indicator of what we like or dislike about ourselves.
In Norway, Anders Breivik appeared to get this, for instead of targeting the intruders, he targeted those who be believed would show them favour.
A significant threat to our globalised capitalist societies today comes less from the way human beings are attempting to roam as freely as commodities, and more from our collective response to this phenomenon.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Canis Familiaris
There are around 1 billion dogs in the world and roughly 85% of these are street or 'village' dogs. According to new scientific research by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, those belonging to this latter class of canines are remarkably similar in shape and size the world over, and natural selection has turned them into near perfect scavengers whose proper niche is living alongside humans, not with them as pets.
Yet one of the first things you see when you live in the developing world is the obsession many ex-pats from wealthier countries themselves develop about converting these street dogs into their 'forever friends'.
There can be no doubt that many of these individuals are genuine animal lovers and I sympathise with their motives on many levels, but I can also detect yet another symptom of prevaling gringo attitudes which I find more than a little galling: the old white man’s burden of importing and imposing civilised standards on the manifest chaos of incomplete modernity.
Some of these self-styled rescuers come across as borderline misanthropes who appear to prioritise assistance for furries because the human realities of this land actually repel them. (At the next level up from cats and dogs one finds indigenous children — a demographic which attracts truly disproportionate levels of gringo goodwill in Guatemala, compared to say, their parents, or indeed the dirt poor non-indigenes of the plains.)
Just the other day I was reading with great amusement an exchange on a local ex-pat forum about a street dog adopted by a hostel in Antigua. (Viz pic below.)
The establishment had picked up the dog, dubbed her Manchita, vaccinated and spayed her and she now lives inside the hostel — which crucially keeps its doors open 7am to 10pm, so Manchita continues to wander out to explore nearby streets.
As a result, she keeps getting re-rescued by those who can't quite grasp that a dog might want to live a bit more like a cat. Manchita even has a collar, but that doesn’t seem to interrupt the cycle.
Some of the comments suggest acerbically that not only is Manchita in urgent need of re-education, so too are her new owners.
Mochi is the only one of our dogs that ever lived on the streets, and we can honestly say that it was she who adopted us, for Mochi began following us every evening and gradually shouldered her way into our house.
Unlike the other three she has retained the basic instincts of the highly-adapted scrounger. Some of her best tricks, like securely holding down plates (or indeed more complicated receptacles) while she eats from them, have since been picked up by our other two bitches. She has also held onto the slightly more irksome accomplishment of digging trenches to lie in when she gets a bit overheated, and thankfully Cherry and Yuki are still behind the curve on this. It’s hard for us to know if she grew up feral or spent her formative years as a house dog, but we are inclined to the latter view.
She used to have a beau called Trompas. Trompas had owners, but was left outside most of the time and assumed the role of guardian of our avenue, a position that comes with both rights and duties.
Most of the residents fed Trompas and many felt a great affection for him. When his owners moved to another area, he escaped and returned within days. Later on, an abortive attempt to formally ‘foster’ him by a third party resulted in his disappearance and presumed demise.
Since then there have been several incumbents in the role that Trompas carried out to such great effect. The last two have had distinct fates: one was shot dead by the bored security guard of a local gated community, the other was adopted after a successful Facebook appeal. The vacancy never lasts long. It’s as if there’s an understudy waiting in the wings.
Yet one of the first things you see when you live in the developing world is the obsession many ex-pats from wealthier countries themselves develop about converting these street dogs into their 'forever friends'.
There can be no doubt that many of these individuals are genuine animal lovers and I sympathise with their motives on many levels, but I can also detect yet another symptom of prevaling gringo attitudes which I find more than a little galling: the old white man’s burden of importing and imposing civilised standards on the manifest chaos of incomplete modernity.
Some of these self-styled rescuers come across as borderline misanthropes who appear to prioritise assistance for furries because the human realities of this land actually repel them. (At the next level up from cats and dogs one finds indigenous children — a demographic which attracts truly disproportionate levels of gringo goodwill in Guatemala, compared to say, their parents, or indeed the dirt poor non-indigenes of the plains.)
Just the other day I was reading with great amusement an exchange on a local ex-pat forum about a street dog adopted by a hostel in Antigua. (Viz pic below.)
The establishment had picked up the dog, dubbed her Manchita, vaccinated and spayed her and she now lives inside the hostel — which crucially keeps its doors open 7am to 10pm, so Manchita continues to wander out to explore nearby streets.
As a result, she keeps getting re-rescued by those who can't quite grasp that a dog might want to live a bit more like a cat. Manchita even has a collar, but that doesn’t seem to interrupt the cycle.
Some of the comments suggest acerbically that not only is Manchita in urgent need of re-education, so too are her new owners.
Mochi is the only one of our dogs that ever lived on the streets, and we can honestly say that it was she who adopted us, for Mochi began following us every evening and gradually shouldered her way into our house.
Unlike the other three she has retained the basic instincts of the highly-adapted scrounger. Some of her best tricks, like securely holding down plates (or indeed more complicated receptacles) while she eats from them, have since been picked up by our other two bitches. She has also held onto the slightly more irksome accomplishment of digging trenches to lie in when she gets a bit overheated, and thankfully Cherry and Yuki are still behind the curve on this. It’s hard for us to know if she grew up feral or spent her formative years as a house dog, but we are inclined to the latter view.
She used to have a beau called Trompas. Trompas had owners, but was left outside most of the time and assumed the role of guardian of our avenue, a position that comes with both rights and duties.
Most of the residents fed Trompas and many felt a great affection for him. When his owners moved to another area, he escaped and returned within days. Later on, an abortive attempt to formally ‘foster’ him by a third party resulted in his disappearance and presumed demise.
Since then there have been several incumbents in the role that Trompas carried out to such great effect. The last two have had distinct fates: one was shot dead by the bored security guard of a local gated community, the other was adopted after a successful Facebook appeal. The vacancy never lasts long. It’s as if there’s an understudy waiting in the wings.
Thursday, April 07, 2016
Moribund
The Panama Papers have uncorked the geyser of middle class indignation.
For much of its modern history Capitalism delivered prosperity and development and the only people getting a really raw deal were the workers. And, as a rule, the middle classes affected not to notice too much.
There was a transition phase in the late twentieth century when even the proletariat seemed to be getting some of the benefits. Times were good.
There had always been a super-rich elite driving the process, but until recently at least, the middle classes have been very much along for the ride.
But then as the last century drew to a close the world's economy globalised rapidly, largely in response to technological change, and the middle classes have suddenly found themselves in the same boat as the hoi polloi.
There are calls for local, national solutions to this problem. Some of these are well-meaning and some of these are...well, from Donald Trump.
But this is a global problem - just like climate change - and local solutions simply won't cut it.
The ethical critique as currently presented by the floundering bourgoisie is hypocritical at best.
And it fails to recognise that just because the free of mind and free of wealth are oozing apart from the traditional nation state, does not mean these leaks can easily be caulked by legislation from within these moribund structures.
Friday, April 01, 2016
Utopian project
It was a little depressing to witness Niall Ferguson opinionating on the Syraqistan again in the Sunday Times this week - 'it takes a network to defeat a network'.
Not quite as depressing as when politicians tag the space as 'evil' - eschatological narrative ahoy! - but this notion that it's really only a technical problem that clever people could solve given half the chance, is in many ways just as absurd.
That he concluded with the suggestion that EU might be an appropriate network with which to counter the Islamic state only brought us closer to the real crux of the problem.
ISIS is the stand-out utopian project in the world today. As such it has the power to enthuse - and confuse - individuals who feel disconnected from the national identities into which they were born. The EU on the other hand...
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