Darren McGarvey's Class Wars

One of the best documentaries I've seen in the last few years. In these four hour-long episodes, Mr McGarvey explores how important social class is in today's Scotland, examining the topic from a lot of various angles (from accent to postcode lottery, from crime to sport, from grouse shooting to zero-hour contracts ... whatever aspect you can think of, he probably looks at it) and talking about it with many people directly involved, whether professionally or by a particular personal experience.

His conclusion is depressing: however changed in shape (with landed gentry superseded by financiers and so on), class distinctions are as real today, and social mobility as pathetic, as they were one or two hundred years ago. (Which makes his personal, likewise documented, struggle with his own identity of a former working-class rapper, who based his career on being vocal against social inequality and the middle class, but who now finds he's turned middle-class himself, all the more difficult.)

New city status candidates

There are eight Scottish contenders for officially becoming a city during next year's celebrations of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee; the expectation is that one will succeed. In my opinion, St Andrews deserves it most, although from a purely personal point of view I would be just as happy to see Dumfries or Oban win. Not that I suppose the latest to have a snowball's chance in hell; but what's beyond me is the candidature of South Ayrshire. How can you call a whole area a 'city', unless it's a more or less completely urban one like Glasgow or Dundee? The way people are debasing language is getting worse every year ... (Incidentally from the complete UK leet I also wish success to Colchester.)

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.

HyperNormalisation

A film lasting almost three hours - throughout which I was unable to make out what the author [Mr Adam Curtis, as I then found out] wanted to say, except perhaps that he knew and/or cared nothing about history prior to his adolescence. It begins with the idea that plutocracy was more or less invented in 1975 New York, and it gets no better: apparently, doublethink in the USSR only developed in the 1980s and so on. At times it almost looked as if the film-maker believed that mankind waited for him to be born before politicians began to lie, media began to distort facts for propagandist purposes et cetera. Towards the end I actually began to wonder whether I wasn't watching something put together by a talented 13-year-old, still only discovering the basics of how this world turns round.

There are some faint hints the film was meant to say that politicians find the real world too complex and create a simplified picture of it. But then if that was true, surely the author wouldn't do the very same thing by presenting a world which is all about the US, the Arab countries* and Russia, and competely ignoring China?

 

* But not Afghanistan, which is ignored as well, it seems that after the 9/11 Americans went straight after Saddam Hussein without being bothered with Osama bin Laden.

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".

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.

What lockdown?

I can understand that for most people something quite out of the ordinary is happening, but as for myself ...

Yes, where I live now I have to wear a face mask in public; to wait for my vernal haircut; to hope clothes shops will reopen before I run out of something through wear and tear; and I can't take my Kindle and go for a few pints in a pub. But otherwise ...

I go to work as usual - we factory menials can't work from home. I keep my distance from my workmates - as I had before. Save for food shops I go basically nowhere else - but then I hardly had for a few years. With the exception of the pub - but there isn't that much difference between reading a book in a cosy pub and doing it in a cosy bedsit. (The pub can be more pleasant, but it isn't always so; and the bedsit is always cheaper.)

In a sense I pity the others, because I know too well how unfulfilling this way of living is. In a sense I just shrug their frustration off thinking "welcome to my life" ...

Free EU movement

I don't gloat, after all I was only a very mild supporter of Brexit. But I find it ironic that after all the warnings about British economy's collapsing without free movement with the EU, European economies in general are now in danger of collapsing thanks partly to the very free movement across the member states' borders.

Derek Mackay

The more I read about the case of the recent Scottish finance secretary, the more bemused I was. I can understand that these days, a minister can't show an unrequited infatuation and get away with it. But many talked of Mr Mackay almost as of a child molester, while the worst that was reported was that he kept sending a 16-year-old frequent social media messages, including one in which he called him 'cute'.

I mean, come on. An ordinary teenager unable to block on social media somebody whose messages he doesn't like receiving is a bit hard to imagine. Not to mention that we're talking about somebody who according to (not only) the SNP is old and mature enough to take part in a general election.

And then, presumably the youngster was indeed cute in the older man's eyes. So what? Next you'll be telling me that my not daring to even offer a handshake to somebody introduced to me if he's the least bit attractive isn't a result of having been growing up in a puritanical environment, but a desirable grown-up behaviour.

Mr Mackay is obviously no philosopher and nobody will order him to drink hemlock, but the accusations that he was 'grooming' the young guy do sound like a faint echo of the accusation that Socrates had been 'corrupting the youth'.

Brexit is here

For some time it looked as though the extensions might go on until the whole idea was scuppered, but in the end we got there. As a mild supporter*, who thought that on balance it would probably be better for the UK to get out, but who didn't lose any sleep over it, I'm glad the day has come, but I was actually asleep, rather than celebrating, at the moment it happened. (And anyway, we are still only into the transitory period.)


* if I later turned into a somewhat stronger one, it was just a reaction to the condescension and fearmongering on the other side of the debate; basically they were saying "this would be a complete catastrophe, but we the sages will save you nincompoops from your own folly"

'It's okay to be white'

John Swinney has reportedly said that stickers with this slogan, which appeared in Perth, were "atrocious" and had "no place in Perth or any other part of our country".

The way I see it, this is an atrocious and racist approach. Unless of course he would say the same thing if they read "It's okay to be black" or the like.

Oh, it's quite possible that the slogan has been appropriated by neo-Nazis. And? Would you say that praising socialism is "atrocious" because the term was appropriated by both the КПСС and the NSDAP?


(originally posted on WordPress)

GE '19

So it seems that after all I will live long enough to see Brexit actually happen. The unpleasant side effect is, of course, that we’re burdened with Tory rule for at least another five years. Well, rien n’est parfait, as the French say. Apparently the English electorate saw finishing the EU business as the primary topic of the election.

As for Labour, I guess that Corbyn’s problem wasn’t his stance on Brexit, but his seeming inability to decide what his stance really was. As for the SNP, their success showed yet again that the kingdom remains divided, whatever its name; just look at the maps. And as for the Lib Dems, including their leader herself, they probably fell victim to their own arrogance.

(originally posted on WordPress)

Two Unions

This post is of course long overdue; by this time hardly anybody argues about Brexit anymore, ordinary people just yell “Bring it on now!” and “Cancel it altogether!”, while politicians are unabashedly using any methods they can find for their own particular goals.

But while we still had a argument, as opposed to a shouting match, I found out that, while myself favouring Scotland out of the EU and out of the UK, I could understand better those who wanted Scotland in the UK and the UK in the EU than those who wanted it to stay in (whichever) one of these Unions but leave the other.

Because it seemed to me that the vast majority of people in these latter two groups were always waxing lyrical about the advantages of local government, when talking about the Union they didn’t like, and presaging economical doom and glory if leaving the Union they liked.

Many years ago I was present at a business meeting when at one point one negotiator accused his opponent, “But half an hour ago you were using the very opposite argument!” Upon which the latter, quite cooly and with just the ghost of a smile, retorted, “Sure, because it was convenient for me.” Immediately the atmosphere changed from tense to relaxed.

Trouble is, back then we weren’t discussing anything that would have any direct personal impact on any of us, so he could admit this use of double standards. After all, we were not presenting ourselves as paragons of wisdom and virtue either.

 

 (originally posted on Tumblr)

Alone in an echo chamber

They tell you, to quote for instance Lexico (formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online), that an echo chamber is an ” environment in which a person encounters only beliefs or opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered”.

What they don’t tell you is that, contrariwise, if perchance you do have a particular opinion which differs from that of the other ‘members’ of the echo chamber, you only encounter views which don’t coincide with your own.

So that I’m following all these people who, like me, lean politically towards centre-left, are comparatively well educated, support gay equality, are anxious about climate change and so on and so on … and there doesn’t seem to be a single one who would, like me, support Brexit, and I only see it criticised.

Funny, in a way.


(originally posted probably on WordPress or maybe on Tumblr)

23/7/19

Boris Johnson may have won the leadership-cum-premiership contest, but it was Duncan Scott who Britain could be most proud of yesterday.


(originally posted on Tumblr)