Womanspreading

There's all this talk about 'manspreading' ... It would be hypocritical of me to pretend I don't occasionally witness it, but I'm positive I encounter what I call 'womanspreading' much more often. You know what I mean: a female occupies one seat with her buttocks, one to her side with her handbag, often the one to her other side with another bag, crosses her legs so that the upper one almost touches the opposite seat, and when you want to pass through the aisle, effectively blocked in this way, she gives you a hateful look saying 'How dare you inconvenience me?'

And don't even start me on 'womansplaining' about how lacking all men are in the emotional department ...

The futility of environmentalism

Unsurprisingly, COP26 didn't deliver what could really save this planet. Unsurprisingly, because those who have the power to make the necessary changes are not actually willing to do so. They do not truly believe the necessity is there. In the words of Greta Thunberg, they still believe in the fantasy of "eternal growth on a finite planet". And they will continue to do so until it's too late.

Not that they are alone. We are, almost all of us, culprits. Humankind as a whole behaves like me - a patient diagnosed with cancer who nevertheless can't make himself stop smoking. We take some token steps to salve our consciences, but instead of making changes that would actually save us we live in the hope that progress in science and technology will eventually solve the problem for us.

Only it won't, for two complementary reasons: there are more and more of us, and each individual expects his or her standard of life to at least remain the same, preferably to go on improving. Thus lately Thunberg; but as early as 1969 Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five:

The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000.
"I suppose they will all want dignity," I said.
"I suppose," said O'Hare.

And of course, our perception of what is necessary for our dignity gradually rises. For the half century since Vonnegut published his book, world's population went on rising, our lives went on growing more comfortable, and environment went on deteriorating.

To sum up, unless we stop breeding like vermin, and accept that our individual standards of living have to be rather drastically lowered, we'll keep driving down the road to perdition. Human mentality being what it is, I can't see us making these changes. We'll just continue living in our cloud cuckoo land until we get past the point of no return.

Unless we're already past it.

Various retirement ages?

An interesting idea by somebody using the nick 'makem' appeared as a comment under an article about a proposal not to raise the state pension age as currently intended: "It should be worked out by job type. Somebody working in an office / shop indoor type job will live longer than somebody working on building site or other manual outdoor job. Also they reckon that working nightshift takes about 5 years off life expectancy."

It would certainly be fairer. On the other hand, I suspect it would be impracticable. For one thing, to make it really fair you would also have to differentiate between grafters and skivers, and how on earth would you achieve that? For another, it would probably lead to more everlasting haggling about which jobs deserve what pension age.

And then, you'd never know beforehand when will you become entitled. Because of course lots of people change the kind of job they do during their working lives, some of them quite frequently, and so their pension age would change all the time as well. Yes, these days it should be easy creating software for making swift adjustments. But would people like never knowing when they can retire until actually able to do so?

Le wokisme

Je suis britannique, mais dans cette matière, je suis d'accord avec les français. La voie, c'est le daltonisme, pas le wokisme. On n'atteindra jamais l'égalité si l'on souligne des différences entre des races (des sexes, des sexualité et ainsi de suite). On juste fortifie la méfiance mutuelle.

Terry Pratchett: Snuff

'My mum always told me money can’t buy you happiness, sir.’

Yes, Vimes thought, so did my ma, but she was glad enough when I gave her my first wages, because it meant we could have a meal with meat in it, even if we didn’t know what kind of meat it was. That’s happiness, isn’t it? Blimey, the lies we tell ourselves …

(Feeney Upshot & Sam Vimes, p 117)

It is refreshing to read a favourite author of yours attacking a cliché which has a grain of truth in it but has by constant repetition been turned into something very remote from it. Because of course there are some sorts of happiness no amount of money can buy, like true friendship or having good luck, but there are likewise many sorts of happiness that you absolutely can buy for money, from good food and drink to a comfortable home to a pleasant trip or book and so on and so forth ...

 

Rangers v Slavia

I wasn't there, so I can't know what really happened. Still, there are questions ...

Slavia's Kúdela claims he swore at Rangers' Kamara at the heat of the moment, but nothing racist. Sure, and he covered his mouth like a wee kid behind a teacher's back just out of force of habit. A very mature and trustworthy guy, apparently?

While Kamara was so shocked by the insult that those reports about the pervasiveness of racism in Britain must be exaggerated. Or maybe it's convenient to be shocked when your team is losing a home match while playing so gentlemanly they get two red cards?

And then there's the attack in the tunnel, according to Slavia 'brutal', despite having no obvious effect upon Kúdela's ability to go on training and playing; nevertheless showing that Kamara must have grotesquely misheard the old adage about sticks and stones.

Grotesquely? Well, after all it's just showbiz, innit?

There was something civilised about slowing down

This is a quotation from James Robertson's book 365: Stories (specifically, the story Only Disconnect). In it, a woman gets rid of her TV, computer, mobile and so forth, later on explaining to her daughter that she wanted human contact rather than 'connectivity' via gadgets.

Now if I got rid of my laptop I'd just lose the human contact I get through it and gain none instead. But I think I understand her all the same. The point isn't that a talk over a cuppa or a pint is in itself better than one on Skype, a letter written with a pen better in itself than an email and so on. The difference is about making time for that talk, and ensuring that it isn't constantly disrupted by calls, texts, mails, 'notifications' and all that coming form divers sources and directions.

Oh for those halcyon days when the average pub didn't even have a radio, when at most you would read a newspaper until you were joined by your friends ... People tend to talk approvingly about multitasking, but fairly often it is initially a cause of, later an excuse for, a minute attention span.

On cultural traditions

When a character in Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time sees an Igor for the first time, he's naturally somewhat taken aback by all those scars and stitches, but reassured by somebody else telling him this was a 'cultural' thing.

‘Cultural, is it?’ Dr Hopkins looked relieved. He was a man who tried to see the best in everybody, but the city had got rather complicated since he was a boy, with dwarfs and trolls and golems and even zombies. He wasn’t sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was ‘cultural’, apparently, and you couldn’t object to that, so he didn’t. ‘Cultural’ sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren’t really there.

Now this is beautifully ambivalent. You can interpret it as 'people often see problems in other cultures where there are none and need to be shown they are just prejudiced'. And you can interpret it as 'the easiest way of dealing with a problem is pretending it doesn't exist'. Knowing Pratchett's style I tend towards the latter interpretation: an ironic take on those who could accept even human sacrifice if they were told it was an inseparable part of a particular culture's tradition.

Advices and Queries - 7

"Are you open to new light, from whatever source it may come? Do you approach new ideas with discernment?"

At first sight this may seem self-contradictory, but it isn't: hard as it may be, it is possible to approach new ideas without prejudice, even when they come from what we consider an unreliable source, while giving due consideration even to those coming from a reliable one before accepting them.

Advices and Queries - 5

"While respecting the experiences and opinion of others, do not be afraid to say what you have found and what you value. Appreciate that doubt and questioning can also lead to spiritual growth and to a greater awareness of the Light that is in us all."

 

I suppose this may refer, partly at least, to what Quakers call 'ministry', but it can be understood more broadly: as an advice to strive for balance between paying proper attention to what others are saying, respecting their right for a point of view different from ours, even pondering whether that point of view may not have aspects to accept as our own; and between having our own point of view, based on experience and consideration, one which we are ready to defend before other people, and would only give up or change with a very, very good reason to do so.

Religiousness as a form of immaturity

I don't mean this condescendingly. But it occurred to me the other day that one of the reasons why people believe in a god is a certain reluctance to accept that childhood is over. When you are a child, it seems that your parents are omnipotent and however much you mess up, in the end they can mend the shambles, they can - and will - get you out of any problem you might have stumbled into. As you grow up, you gradually realise this is not true. But you are reluctant to admit that some mistakes are final, even fatal, that you can't rely on ultimately getting justice, and so on, up to and including the horror that in the end you will inevitably die. So to keep sane you replace your no longer tenable belief in all-powerful, all-healing parents with a belief in an all-powerful, all-healing god.

Overly active editors

I perceive editorship as a very responsible job. But it does annoy me when an editor, no doubt with the best of intentions, believes that he can present the author to the reader better than the author himself did.

I'm not talking about such obvious examples as The Picture of Dorian Gray. There, at least, the editor could argue that without his deletions both Oscar Wilde and himself might have ended up in gaol (although even so it would have been decent to consult the changes with the author, instead of simply making them).

There are less conspicuous, but no less irritating approaches. I've recently read What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton. In my opinion one of his best non-fiction books, but unfortunately the edition I downloaded was an American one - with American spellings. Seeing things like color in a text by Chesterton seemed as inappropriate as colour would be in a text by Mark Twain. Why on earth 'translate English into English'? Did the editor think his audience was stupid enough to mistake the original spellings for typographical errors and blame the publisher for sloppy work?

This particular case is the more ridiculous as, for instance, they kept the expression public school, with the meaning it has in England. Not that I would have it otherwise. Ian Rankin complained in one interview that when his books were published in the US, his Scottish hero, while remaining in Edinburgh, didn't talk about a car's boot, but about its trunk and so on. I get the shivers when I imagine Trainspotting still happening in Leith, but 'translated' into Cockney, lest Londoners found it hard to understand.

Not that today's British editors are guiltless. Take the 21st-century edition of The History of Mr. Polly I bought to replace the one I had given to a friend. In an introductory note the editor admits he made changes like omitting the full stop after titles (so Mr. Polly himself becomes Mr Polly), reducing hyphenation (for instance today for to-day), and so on, the idea being 'to make the text more accessible to the reader'. I find it hard to imagine a reader who can enjoy this particular kind of old tale, yet prefers replacing the endearing quaintness of the old orthography with something 'more accessible'.

In short, I dread the day when Alan Breck asks David Balfour 'And hey, dude, am I not a cool fighter?'

Yoshirō Mori

Alors, le président du comité d'organisation des Jeux olympiques a dû démissioner. Peut-être adéquatement. Il a dit que des femmes en gestion sont plus compétitives et plus loquace que des hommes. Bien sûr, c'est absolument vrai, mais est-ce poli de le dire tout haut ?

Advices and Queries

I've read again after some time Jim Pym's Listening to the Light, which includes in its appendix Advices and Queries (the latest, 1994 revision by the British Yearly Meeting), the "potted guidebook to the Quaker Life" as he describes it.

These 42 paragraphs are not categorical commandments to follow unquestioningly ("for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life"), but short statements and rhetorical questions meant to make those concerned ponder whether their behaviour is really consistent with the Quaker philosophy and way of life.

Naturally, Quakers being an offshoot of Christianity, their God is sometimes invoked in a way as irritatingly servile as in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Nevertheless, there is a lot or really good passages and I'll try to gradually write a bit more about some of these in the coming weeks.

Rich entrepreneurs entering politics

Amongst the many things G. K. Chesterton criticised about contemporary England in his What's Wrong with the World (1910) was the notion that a politician should be rich to be incorruptible. He wrote, "Our national claim to political incorruptibility is [...] based on the theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to financial trickery. [...] The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket."

In other countries I've noticed this concept too, albeit not necessarily with people born filthy rich, but likewise with people who became so. Every few years or so somebody enters politics with the professed goal of eliminating corruption, claiming that he can be trusted to be impervious to its lure because he's already made his pile. And one hears prospective voters parroting the mantra: "I tell you man, [unlike the rest of them] he's so rich already he doesn't need any more".

I don't say there are none who mean it. But I can't recollect a single case of somebody who, when considering what good to do for his fellow mortals with his wealth, chose politics, rather than donating to a charity, building a school or a museum, funding some medical research, or doing another such thing in which the above-mentioned temptation was scarcely present. And I wonder why those prospective voters forget the old proverb, "the more you get, the more you want".

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

ALL THE OTHER children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding Relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like Father who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him getting fat, or Mrs Peters who wears a beige-coloured hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we’re getting off the bus and they shout, ‘Special Needs! Special Needs!’ But I don’t take any notice because I don’t listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones.

(Christopher John Francis Boone (narrator), p 43)

 

This is exactly why I tend to mentally wince when I hear people (who often don't even belong to the particular targeted minority) claim that such-and-such word should never be said, because it's offensive, as it were, by definition. I have friends who use words like faggot or poofter and it's all right because they don't mean it nastily; there are many more people who would never dream of using these expressions, yet are latent homophobes for all that. (Some of them are not even latent, except perhaps to themselves.)

I remember a real-life example similar to the one in the quote: years ago, where I lived the word 'Gipsy' was a perfectly neutral expression; if one wanted to be offensive, there were many other words to choose from. But as the majority population on the whole hated the Gipsies and only talked about them disparagingly, some activists (many of them 'white') decided that 'Gipsy' was an offensive word in itself and decent folk must use 'Roma' instead. The result? Ten years later most people said 'Roma' ... and most said it with a sneer and as much, if not more, hate.

 

 

Ben Coates: Why the Dutch Are Different

The problem was, in my opinion, exacerbated by the tone-deafness of a political class who lived in areas with few ethnic minorities, with immigrants more likely to give them a good price for retiling the bathroom than to take their job.

This is indeed a major part of the problem. The Western middle classes are so much more 'enlightened' about immigration not because they are more ethical than the Western working classes, but simply because they perceive immigrants as a personal convenience, rather than as a personal threat.

English cringe

Much was written about the Scottish cringe, the inferiority complex of some Scots, feeling that they should 'better themselves' by becoming 'more English'. The English cringe is something different. It is the reversal of the centuries-old habit of most of the world (except the Scots and the Welsh) to say 'English'' when meaning 'British'. Today some Englishmen, afraid of being politically incorrect, do the opposite: they say 'British' instead of 'English'. Which is just as ridiculous.

A case in point is Ben Coates' book Why the Dutch are Different. At one moment he states, "In Britain, patriotism is sadly rather tainted by association with a kind of small-mindedness and xenophobia. Symbols such as flags have been appropriated by far-right groups, so someone wearing a T-shirt with the flag of St George on it is likely to be sneered at and dismissed as a racist or a hooligan. Anyone who declares their love of their country too vigorously runs the risk of being branded a narrow-minded Little Englander, or worse."

He says "in Britain", but then actually talks about England. The flag of St George is the English, not the British flag, and the Scottish Saltire, far from having been appropriated by the far right, is ubiquitous throughout the country. Similarly, a Scot overdoing his love for his country may be called a lot of things, but certainly not a Little Englander.

Similarly, I've read a book called Medieval Britain: A Very Short Introduction, which was well-written enough, but actually dealt with medieval England. Scotland and Wales were only mentioned in the context of English efforts to colonise them; in fact, more space was given to Ireland and France.

I could go on with examples like these ad nauseam. What is it that makes some people unable to simply express themselves truthfully, and instead of saying something wrong say something just as wrong, but wrong in the opposite way?

J. M. Barrie: Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy)

"Children are gay and innocent and heartless."

People often have the tendency to talk about little children as 'innocent', meaning 'not as yet  corrupted by adult vices'. That's a misunderstanding. The average adult is miles less selfish, inconsiderate, even cruel, than a little child. The 'innocence' consists in the child's not having as yet learned not only the vices, but neither the virtues of adulthood.

Nothing truly Scandinavian?

The problem with the recently pulled SAS advert was ... that there were too many problems with it.

It pretended to challenge some myths, but did so by buttressing others (like the 'democracy' of classical Greece, which was only economically viable thanks to slave labour).

It implied that a nation can claim something as truly 'its' only if it wasn't a development of something else from elsewhere (as if baseball couldn't be 'truly American' if it developed from English rounders).

It implied that something can't originate in more than one place independently (there is no evidence that vertical European windmills developed from horizontal Iranian ones).

But the main problem was that it didn't really say "for many things we think of as Scandinavian we are, partially at least, indebted to other nations". It said "some nations are inventive, but all we can do is steal ideas and then pretend they were ours".