This tickled my fancy!
Discovered on the wall of a building in Hammersmith – West London.
I hope there is no ‘barrier’ to my entry into Canada!
You are currently browsing articles tagged Modern life.
Tags: England, Modern life
What started out as a single post has now miraculously morphed into a series of four!
This eclectic assemblage of ramblings has thus far encompassed cricket, the demise of socialism and sun-worship.
What can it all mean?
Time to wrap it up…
My theme is – of course – inequality. I have addressed the topic a number of times before (here, here, here and here) and the gentle reader will doubtless have deduced by now that it is a subject that exercises me greatly.
Simply put – excessive and increasing inequality in any society is a bad thing and can only – in the long run – lead to disaster.
The free market is a valuable tool. It generates wealth, encourages competition and promotes progress. It is also – however – a completely amoral device. It is not of itself a good – even though good can come from it. For the benefits that can accrue thereby to be put to good purpose – the advance of society as a whole and the elimination of those evils of deprivation – lack of education – poor living standards – low life expectancy and unfulfilled promise – it is essential that the tool be managed, purposed, regulated and generally focused on the overall good. The market cannot achieve these aims unassisted.
Those who insist on the market being given its head – on its being allowed to exercise untrammeled influence on all areas of society – are in effect proposing an order entirely free from moral compass. This way madness lies. Events demonstrate time and time again that venality and criminality are not confined to the ‘lower orders’. When the powerful succumb to corruption they frequently do so absolutely. Human nature being what it is, the mere accumulation of wealth is no guarantee of altruistic or even acceptable behaviour.
By way of justification of their imperfect belief system those on the right may point to the fact that – in a period in which the rich have become the mega-rich, then the hyper-rich and ultimately the ultra-rich – living standards of those at the bottom of the pile have also risen marginally. It matters not – they protest – that the 1% own an ever increasing percentage of global wealth – just as long as everybody else’s living standards have also crept up.
Well – they are wrong… and it is just not good enough!
History teaches us that the the ultimate outcome of ever increasing inequality is revolution. That the West has not in recent decades experienced a greater degree of rebellious unrest can be attributed to three facts:
- living standards for even the poorest segment are higher than they once were
- in a globalised economy it is considerably more difficult to identify and locate the guilty parties
- many in the West subscribe to the lottery mentality, by which – however long the odds – they still believe that they can hit the ‘wealth’ jackpot and join the 1%
The bad news for the ultra-rich is that it is all just a matter of degree. We don’t yet know where the tipping point will be, but be it will.
And at that point things will turn nasty!
OK – enough of this now…
Tags: inequality, Modern life, Politics
With the despatch of Socialism to the sidelines of history (see my previous post) and the resultant almost inevitable hegemony of the market, one could be forgiven for thinking that – for those with a social conscience – the game was up. Rabid marketeers and their fellow travelers on the right did what all good ideologues do when in a similarly victorious position – they plunged the knife in and twisted the blade!
These people would have us believe that there is no power – no authority – but the market. They are not to be trusted. Any notion that the market represents the ultimate form of democracy just doesn’t stack up. True democracy requires universal suffrage – something that the market can never provide, the rich holding the equivalent of a block vote.
Time for an allegory!
Those who worship the sun (and I refer here not just to those with a vitamin D addiction!) do so because they see the incalescent orb as the source of all life on earth and the origin of all power – which must be honoured accordingly. The Aztecs for example – as is well known – believed that regular human sacrifices were necessary to ensure that the sun repeat its transit of the heavens each new day – turning its face the while beneficently upon the earth.
It must be remembered though that not all that the the brightest star provides is propitious. The sun can burn and otherwise mutilate unprotected flesh – it can scorch the earth – it can bring the drought – can deliquesce the insubstantial. Nor are its favours bestowed equally upon all. This all-powerful sun-god must be appeased – apotheosized. Those who make the biggest sacrifice – or erect the most lavish temple – may expect to reap what they sew as the god smiles upon their endeavors. Those who do not – or cannot – must expect just to burn… burn… burn…
Adherents of Social Darwinism – and those who are in fact so even should they reject the term – have much in common with these heliolatrists. They might protest that their belief in the need for us to earn our rewards – coupled with an avowed espousal of philanthropy – stands them firmly on the moral high ground. Unfortunately – as inequality continues its dizzying increase – the evidence suggests otherwise. Are these high achievers really working harder than ever before, whilst the remainder of us get lazier and lazier? And how much of that hard work actually just goes into the blackmailing of institutions such as the banks to hand over ever larger bonuses?
In fact the fine sentiments of those enthusiasts for market freedom ring as hollow as do those that they despise from the opposite end of the spectrum – from the social engineers. The truth is that human nature makes fools of us all just as soon as ever we try to codify our preferred social science.
There is an alternative…
Time for a different allegory!
Regarding fire-worship Wikipedia informs us thus:
Although the term “fire-worshippers” is primarily associated with Zoroastrians, the idea that Zoroastrians worship fire is originally from anti-Zoroastrian polemic. Instead, fire — even in a Fire temple (the Zoroastrian terms are more prosaic and simply mean “house of fire”) — is considered to be an agent of purity and as a symbol of righteousness and truth. In the present day this is explained to be because fire burns ever-upwards and cannot itself be polluted.
The Zoroastrians’ ‘agent of purity’ is indeed a powerful tool and bestows many benefits on humankind. The Promethean gift is also capable – of course – of bringing calamity but – unlike the sun – can and indeed must be controlled and contained.
Treated with respect fire is thus clearly in the service of man and not the other way around!
Here surely is a better model for the market – a tool for the benefit of all humanity rather than a Mammonian god that must be served.
This is where we now draw the battle lines…
Tags: England, inequality, Modern life, Politics
It would be a brave man – or indeed woman – who would attempt to argue the continued existence of Socialism in any nation state on this delicate blue/green planet.
We can discount – I think – any of those one-party (or one-man!) ‘dictatorships’ that have done their utmost to appropriate the philosophy – or even a pretense of it – just as we can any suggestion of a tenuous link with those well-meaning social democrats, who – when all is said and done – just don’t go for the whole ‘social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy’ thing.
The use of the term itself as an insult by those on the right wing of American politics when referring to anyone marginally to the left of their own position would be laughable – were it not actually somewhat scary. That such occurs is – sadly – all too redolent of the offensively patronising tone taken by the majority of those who practice politics just about anywhere on the globe these days, and helps to explain why they are – in so many parts of the world – held in such low esteem.
No – Socialism is dead! In much the same way that democracy – famously said by Churchill to be “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried” (mind you – he also said “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter”!) – has come to be accepted by the majority of nation states as the fairest form of political organisation, so Capitalism has won the battle against all other forms of economic organisation. Most – even – of those nations that had once believed fervently in what the British Labour Party particularised in the fourth clause of its constitution had – by the end of the last century – reluctantly reached the conclusion that Capitalism in some form – along with its essential tool, the market – was the only game in town.
Was this – as posited by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book – ‘The End of History’?
As it turns out – it was not!
In British politics the decade whose culmination was marked by the fall of the Berlin wall and the vaporescence of Communism also saw the belated realisation by the majority of those on the left of the political spectrum that to remain true to their erstwhile ardently held beliefs was to render them effectively unelectable – quite possible ad infinitum! The fall from power of the rebarbative Margaret Thatcher was – as a result – rapidly followed by an unseemly scramble to appropriate the central tenets of her political philosophy, whilst at the same time abhorring the inevitable outcomes thereof. The centre ground was becoming a particularly crowded space.
What followed over the subsequent decade and a half – culminating in the world’s worst financial crisis for the greater part of a century – has already been widely documented. Those of us in the UK are not alone in the struggle to come to terms with the after-effects thereof and it will take much study and deep thought before a clearer picture of the future landscape will emerge. There is much to be done indeed if the political systems of the rainbow nations are ever to be rehabilitated.
A battle has been lost (or won – depending on your point of view!) – there is still a war to be fought.
And the title of this post? All will become clear…
Tags: England, Modern life, Politics
“No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.”
Henry George
A few years back – in the days when I still regularly turned out for my local village cricket team – I underwent the following experience the which might just stand as an allegory – albeit not a particularly elegant one. I will endeavor not to blind too much with cricketing jargon – though I feel sure that the gentle reader will in any case get the point.
The village team – being composed chiefly of a blend of those of advancing years and those still wet behind the ears – plays only friendly fixtures, with the earnest intention of avoiding the over-competitiveness of league cricket. On occasion the opposition will drop out at a fairly late stage for the usual reasons – can’t raise a team… had a better offer… etc, etc – and the squad finds itself at a loose end on some sunny Sunday. There exists – fortunately – a sort of ‘fixture exchange’ mechanism by which teams that find themselves in such a position can pick up an alternative game at even quite a late stage – with some other club that has been similarly let down.
This had indeed occured on the occasion that is the subject of this parable. We thus found ourselves travelling a considerable distance to a ground with which we were not familiar, to take on a Sunday social side that we did not know.
Following our arrival it became rapidly apparent that the opposing side – although broadly akin to our own – had been augmented for our benefit by a couple of first-team players from the club’s Saturday league side – eager for a bit of practice. These guys were definitely a cut above.
We were put in to bat first and slowly and untidily attempted to accumulate a score. The problem was that we also lost wickets at regular intervals and by the time we were all out after around 30 overs we had amassed (something of an exaggeration in this case!) the pitiful total of 118 runs.
This was clearly not going to be enough, but we took to the field determined that our ragged bowling attack should give as good an account of itself as possible.
In such situations in village cricket the team batting second has a choice. The preferred option is to try to make a game of it – and to keep everybody happy in the process. This is done by promoting some of the lesser players up the batting order, secure in the knowledge that not only will more of those who have turned out get a crack with the bat, but that the match will doubtless still be won comfortably in any case.
In this instance however – and to the obvious displeasure of the remainder of their colleagues – the two league players decided instead that they would open proceedings themselves. In the ensuing carnage they knocked off the 119 runs required to win within 6 overs! This is a rate of nearly 20 runs an over – such as would be considered extraordinary even in the modern professional 20/20 game which trades on just this sort of outrageous pugilism. We spent a highly unpleasant 45 minutes clambering over barbed wire fences, struggling through bramble thickets and braving the nettle beds to retrieve the ball from the adjacent fields whence it had yet again been propelled. All the while our tormentors leant on their bats and engaged in smug conversation.
Consider this…
At the culmination of this abbreviated fixture we drove away sulkily, swearing by all the cricketing gods that we would never again play this bunch of lowlifes, and cursing that we had travelled all this way just to have our day ruined. Nine of the opposition players doubtless huddled irritably in their bar, ruminating on the fact that not only had their day’s enjoyment been hijacked by two of their own, but that there was also now no-one to stand them a round of drinks after the game – as is the custom.
And what of the terrible two? Well – any smug satisfaction that they might have gained from demonstrating their superiority must surely have been tempered by the knowledge that, a) given the difference in ability they had only done what was inevitable anyway, and b) we had not provided a sufficient test to have given them useful practice. Comes to mind the memory of the chess-swot at school who – because no-one else would play him – took to offering me a queen and two rooks start, and then still beating me in five moves!
There is – of course – a moral to this tale. That – however – can wait for another post…
Tags: Cricket, inequality, Modern life
I watched last night on the BBC a deeply affecting documentary film by Helen Langridge entitled ‘Moving Half the Mountain’. At the centre of the film was the story of the building of what became commonly known as the ‘Death Railway’ in Burma during the Second World War.
Those of us who grew up with Alec Guinness in David Lean’s epic “Bridge on the River Kwai” (based on the eponymous French novel by Pierre Boulle) will be broadly familiar with the subject, should this be only because – having been absorbed by the film – we engaged in further research to establish the real truth behind this regrettable chapter in the history of mans’ inhumanity.
It is not – however – the narrative itself that imbues this impressive new documentary with its power to move. That comes – as it so often does – from the testament of those directly involved – from the thoughts and memories of the British and Japanese soldiers that survive still – and who agreed to be interviewed for the film.
The British had been caught up in the cataclysmic events that lead to the disastrous fall of Singapore in February 1942 and were subsequently marched up the Malaysian peninsula and into Burma, where they were ill-used by the Japanese as slave labour to build a railway linking Burma and Thailand. Forced to work in appalling conditions it is believed that a total of some 100,000 men – including more than 6,000 British servicemen – perished in pursuance of this objective.
Of those that survived the ordeal many have never spoken in depth about their experiences – even to their loved ones. That these men have chosen to do so now is a result of most of them being in their 90s, some having even achieved their centenaries. It would be a further tragedy were their testaments to be lost without being heard.
Affecting though they may be – however – their stories are not the most telling element of the film. What really moves is the demeanour of the survivors themselves. Almost to a man they demonstrate a degree of forgiveness, of acknowledgement, of coming to terms with their experience – that is humbling in the extreme. These men had come face to face with the very worst of which mankind is capable, and their survival – and subsequently fulfilled lives – leave us a lesson the we would do well to heed.
In the light of some of the more unpleasantly revisionist thinking that seems to be prevalent in this centenary year of the outbreak of the Great War, I would strongly recommend the viewing of this excellent film to any tempted to make glib judgements as to the expediency of warfare.
Tags: History, Loss, Modern life
“Own only what you can carry with you”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Readers with long memories (and, of course, all who know me personally) will be aware that I carry at all times what is usually described – with more than a whiff of condescension – as a ‘manbag’. The much loved specimen of the genus that is currently my constant (inanimate) companion was purchased in Paris (pretentious – moi?) back in the summer of 2007. Though it has since required the repair that was the subject of this previous post, it really has done very well given the rigours to which it has been subjected.
As detailed in that aforementioned post this invaluable receptacle contains just about everything that I could possibly need to carry with me on a day to day basis – thus ensuring that I avoid the usual bulging pockets, broken gadgets (from having sat carelessly upon something delicate) or indeed that frenzied last minute search for keys, phones, credit cards etc – that seems to accompany some others’ less – um – organised egress into the world of a morning.
I say that the bag holds everything. Actually – that turns out no longer to be true…
Life changes. Things become more complex. I now find myself routinely toting around things that I would not previously have carried. I am sure that I could simplify things – strip them back – but at the moment, given the amount of traveling that I do daily, I would rather feel confident that I have all that I require to hand at all times.
I have for a long time now carried with me everywhere a spiral bound A4 notebook (for Canadians and other North Americans this equates roughly to Letter size). This is an essential for nurturing the creative impulse – for the harnessing of that lightening bolt of inspiration wherever and whenever it might strike (the spiral bound nature of the pad enables one to tear off and dispose of the evidence should one’s notion prove not to have been quite so inspirational after all!).
As of two years ago now I also have with me at all times the trusty Fuji x10, without which I would not be. Taking my first tentative steps into the world of photography has been a literally eye-opening experience – helping me to see this wonderful world in a whole new light.
Age dictates that I must now travel encumbered by a selection of optical devices. If I wear my contact lenses I must needs have with me reading glasses for computer work and for reading, and sunglasses should the weather be fine. If I leave the lenses at home I must carry glasses – reactive or lightweight (or both!) – to enable me to drive safely.
Finally I now also find myself carrying around an iThing of the ‘Pad’ variety. Yes – I know! I have not previously restrained myself from expressing staunchly my views on the evil-empire that is Apple (they are not actually any more evil than the other corporate IT behemoths, of course, merely richer!). The fact is that the School is meandering uncertainly in the direction of adopting a one-to-one tablet policy, and as head honcho in the world of things digital I feel it incumbent upon me to try to keep pace with the bright young things.
All these additional burdens seem now to accompany me everywhere – and I have thus felt it necessary to add to my impedimentiary armoury the new item to which I refered in this recent post – a rather splendid leather messenger bag (which is – in fact – actually a reporter bag – being in orientation portrait rather than landscape).
Either way – should this trend continue I will eventually find myself – like the terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc – carrying my entire estate on my back whenever I venture forth!
Tags: Luggage, Modern life
“The whole digital enchilada – interactive, cable, broadband, 500-channel…”
Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age
One for the nostalgia buffs! I bet that you never thought you’d find yourself face to face with that particular rubric again…
The ever-procacious Urban Dictionary curls its lip at the moniker thus:
“Laughably outdated term for the Internet. Mostly used during the 90s by yuppies who made their own awful-looking web pages.”
…and again:
“A cheesy, ebullient, woefully outdated term from the 90’s, which means ‘Internet’. Coined when all the people were massively wowed by the sheer awesomeness of the Intertubes. Nowadays in disuse unless you use it for comedy.”
Yup – comedy! That’s the effect I was going for… How am I doin’? How ’bout now? etc, etc…
‘Holy moly!’ – you’re thinking – ‘what in the name of Al Gore is he doing raking up this sort of muck in 2014?’
Well – back in the day when it was the Information Superhighway I ordered an upgrade for our broadband connection (yes – the very same that was dead as a dodo for six weeks over Christmas!) to an all-new super-fast fibre (or fiber, as our trans-Atlantic cousins would have it) broadband circuit! And – guess what? It finally came!!!
Ok – I exaggerate the timescale slightly – for effect, you know! But by the time that we actually got to order the thing last October we had already been a target for generic flyers from the mephitic British Telecom – advertising their new fibre service – for at least a couple of years… long before it was actually available anywhere in the surrounding neighbourhood.
When our ISP eventually informed us that fibre was finally available at our local exchange I was, naturally, on the phone immediately – placing an order. The niceties observed, a date was fixed for an engineer to pay us a visit to do the necessary. Splendid!
Except – you’ll be unsurprised to hear – that it didn’t happen. It turned out that though the fibre service had been installed at the exchange it had not actually got as far as the cabinet in the street outside our domicile.
A new date for installation was set… and missed! Then another… and another…
At one point our ISP cruelly raised hopes that something was about to happen by sending us our new high-speed router. When – however – I called excitedly to check, they admitted that they had made a mistake. Bah!
In the end it was five increasingly resigned months before finally – and quite suddenly – an appointment was made and not broken… and we found ourselves on the end of an InterWebNet pipe that is actually fat enough to carry the traffic that the Kickass Canada Girl requires. For now – anyway…
This does all make me realise that we need to start checking now regarding the broadband situation on the Saanich peninsular. Having experienced a whiff of bandwidth freedom I can’t see The Girl settling in future for anything less…
Tags: Broadband, Internet, Modern life
Those who follow these unreliably random postings might just recall an item that appeared back in October last relating to my hitherto unconsidered decision to indulge in the cultivation of a facial inflorescence… To be precise – a beard!
The growth of which was something that I had not previously attempted and at the time of writing I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about being adorned with such an accoutrement. I quite liked the look of the thing – thinking perhaps that it made me look a little distinguished – but I wasn’t at all sure that I felt like a man who should have a beard.
I have clearly had nothing further to convey on the subject since October – a reliable indicator that there has been no change either in my appearance or in my feelings regarding the matter.
Until now…
The growth seemed to suit best when kept reasonably short and tidy and I thus found it necessary to trim it at least once a week. Compared to shaving daily this was like being on holiday and I really rather enjoyed seeing what could be done with it. All went well until last night, when I was the sorry victim of a rare shaving accident – or more properly – a ‘trimming’ accident.
The beard trimmer that I had purchased to control the beast is a reasonably fancy job which has an electronic control by which the closeness of the cut is adjusted.
Yes – you can already see where this is headed!
Somehow – I know not how and – inevitably – without noticing until it was too late – I contrived to alter the cut setting so that the length was reduced from 5mm to 0.5mm! Within seconds I had cut a swathe like a firebreak across one cheek! Even the most cursory inspection revealed the situation to be hopeless. All I could do was to whip the whole thing off and then figure out if I wanted to start over again from scratch.
Doh!
It came as a considerable shock to see my naked face staring back at me from the mirror and I’m not at all sure that I like how I now look without the facial embellishment. Even worse – I am going to have to shave again every day!
Part of me is annoyed that I didn’t get to choose if and when I shaved the thing off; part of me shrugs philosophically and considers that this is what the universe has provided.
Either way it takes some getting used to…
Tags: beard, Modern life
After six weeks – forty two painful days – one thousand and eight excruciating hours – we finally once again have telephone and broadband connections at home. Hoo-bloomin’-ray!
British Telecom (BT) naturally made things difficult to the last. Having informed us – after their previous no-show – that the fault lay without our apartment they subsequently changed their minds and required us to make another appointment. When – following the obligatory week’s delay – an Openreach engineer finally visited us in the flesh he informed us that a test that he had performed outside in his van before ringing the doorbell had demonstrated that the fault was – after all – out in the street. He surmised that the previous engineer assigned to the case had not correctly measured the distance from the cabinet to the break in the cable – hence his mistake and this latest delay.
This engineer was – inevitably – not equipped to fix faults outside the premises, and we had to wait for a further twenty four hours for the situation to be finally resolved.
OK. I will shortly shut up about BT (at least until they try to bill us for the service that we have not had!) but one thing I would say is that I have modified somewhat my views concerning BT’s incompetence. I certainly believe that the maintenance division – Openreach – is deeply flawed in this regard. The first meaningful information we were given was that which the visiting engineer imparted to us – nearly six weeks after the fault was reported. The inescapable subtext of his observations was that Openreach had made no serious attempt to diagnose the problem up to that point! Had they done so the fault would have been fixed in a couple of days. This is just unacceptable.
The Customer Service side of the operation – on the other hand – is clearly broken by design… which is quite simply an insult.
The BT website is explicitly designed to prevent customers from communicating in any meaningful way with real live human beings. Should one contrive – through one’s own extensive efforts – to actually discover a contact phone number, this simply (should one be (un)lucky enough to get through) connects one to BT’s call centre on the Indian subcontinent. The role of the perpetually (and unnervingly) cheerful souls who man this godforsaken outpost of the BT empire is to act as cannon fodder to the angry customer. They can do no more – since they are not equipped so to do. They have no useful information to pass on, and nothing said to them finds it’s way back to the engineers.
Once I had finally made an appointment with the Outreach engineer I was called by no less than four different call centre operatives, each wishing to inform me that an engineer was to visit. Oh really?!
After the engineer had been and gone they called again:
“An engineer will be with you this afternoon.”
“He’s already been.”
“I’ll call back later to update you.”
“No – let me update you!”
…and I filled them in on the nature of the fault. It was clearly the first time that they had heard any of this information.
BT would doubtless try to explain away this sorry excuse for a ‘service’ by pleading the sheer weight of calls with which they have to deal. Well – I have some advice… equip the operatives with useful information to disburse and the customer will not feel the need to keep calling back. I would estimate – from my own experience – that call traffic could be cut by 70-80%! This would also reduce dramatically the amount of time currently given over to listening to the angry diatribes of disillusioned customers.
Right! That’s enough…
Flame off!
Tags: BT, incompetence, Modern life, Openreach
Featured Image
Recent Comments