|
|
|
May 27th, 2012
09:20 am - Epistle from a thistle
At work we get several newspapers in the staff canteen. All of them were being read the other day except the Telegraph (right wing Tory paper), so I picked that up. The previous day Nick Clegg had been criticised as a communist for saying that working people with good exam grades (like myself) shouldn't be automatically excluded from higher education and the professions. In other words what you might call a centrist Tory perspective. Personally I would criticise him from the left - social mobility is not enough, and the liberal Tory dream of social mobility without respect for other working class people is impossible.
However nowadays even centrist Toryism is called 'Communism' (like Obama is called a Socialist) by that tiny group who actually think they have the world by the balls and can do what they like with us. And the Daily Telegraph had this cartoon.
The cartoon shows a man with a clipboard talking to a gardener. The caption says 'Nick Clegg wants more thistles nettles and dandelions to get into the Chelsea Flower Show.'
That's what they think of us - we are weeds, we are vermin. Letting us into University is like letting thistles into a flower show. And if you think I am overrreacting, think how you would feel if that cartoon referred to black people, or gay people. If it showed the Home Secretary saying 'No wonder there are queues at Heathrow, all these rats pouring off the planes.' Or if it said that gay people sitting in church were like weeds growing in a garden. I would be sickened by that, and I am sickened by this.
And let us not forget, the proposal which is being criticised is to select a few students on the basis of ability, not to open the doors of Oxbridge to people who can't read and write. Every class I have ever been in, I outperformed the middle class public school boys I sat among. Every single exam I took I got the best marks, and yet it is somehow 'communist' even to allow me to be there in the class with them. Why? Why am I a thistle at a flowershow?
PS - Ray of hope. How long before people start to think 'well, if it's communism for me to get an education, let's try that'.
|
May 26th, 2012
08:04 am - Bafta Awards
It's the BAFTA awards tomorrow - the British TV awards for the past year. Below the cut are the main nominations and I have bolded the one I think should win. I am pleased to see a few of my favourite dramas of the past year picked out for award. In particular I am pleased to see The Fades, a small SF show with a small audience, which I thought was underrated last year and has not been renewed by the BBC. Factual, soaps and sitcoms I don't really know anything about.
( Read more... )
|
May 25th, 2012
11:18 am - Carpet Remnant World
Last night H and I went to see Stewart Lee the acerbic comedian in his new(ish) show Carpet Remnant World.
He does a good show. It's a bit less scary than I thought it would be. It's very heavily ironical from the start so there's not ever really any danger that you will take it seriously. The ongoing theme is that he is disappointed in us as an audience, we don't really understand the political and cultural themes behind his jokes, we need to try harder 'I know it's hot, Warwick, but you've got to work harder than this. Some people in the audience are spoiling it for everyone else, and you are ruining it for me. This is the worst, least responsive audience ever. Did you even recognise that was a call-back to the joke I told ten minutes ago, but translated into French? Some people got it. I don't know who you are used to watching. Well, actually I do, and I can see the effects right here, because you are shit. You are a shit audience to be frank. I know some of you are thinking, oh this isn't a comedian, it's just a bad tempered lecture.'
He finished with an extended rant where he said he was packing in his career because of the abuse he gets on Twitter and we have been a bloody awful audience that have finally finished him off, he's almost contemplating suicide, and it finished something like, 'F*** off Coventry, you are load of ungrateful C****'
Of course, reading this without the well judged delivery this might not come across as funny, but it definitely did on the night; it was laugh out loud funny for two hours. He reminded me a bit of Lenny Bruce.
|
May 23rd, 2012
11:55 pm - The glory's in TV right now
GQ Interview with the TV writers Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) and David Milch (Deadwood).
Matthew Weiner: The Twilight Zone! There's nothing that's ever been more counterculture than The Twilight Zone. It was literally saying, every week, America is fucked-up.
GQ: But Rod Serling had the form of science fiction as a kind of Trojan horse—just like tits and violence on The Sopranos, or the genre of the Western, or pretty 1960s clothes...
David Milch: It works, that Trojan horse shit. It really works.
And, so he's not left out, Vince Gilligan on Bryan Cranston: "Bryan isn't afraid to be photographed in his underpants time and time again. That's a pretty good physicalization of his fearlessness."
|
09:57 am - Welfare to Work disasters
Many corrupt business practices begin with people being put in an impossible position, and finding a work-around. I think the 'into employment' firms like A4e began with a legitimate business model. Many people don't know how to do cv's or how to behave at interview, particularly young people who are going into employment of a type that nobody in their family has done before, so they don't know the conventions.
A4e started in Sheffield. My guess is they helped unemployed people in Sheffield to compete effectively against unemployed people in places like Nottingham or Derby for the scarce non-manufacturing jobs which were available in South Yorkshire and the North Midlands. They made a meaningful contribution to the city economy, and it made sense for Sheffield council to pay them well. But notice they did not reduce unemployment in the UK, they just moved it out of Sheffield.
There might be a case to extend A4e's employment services to the whole UK. Doing that would not reduce unemployment, but it would improve and equalise the overall standard of applications, (arguably) thus helping employers to find the best candidates for posts. What it could not do was to reduce national unemployment in the way it reduced unemployment in Sheffield. A4e succeeded in Sheffield by shifting unemployment out of the city to other areas. The greater the region they covered, the lower their return on investment would be. I understand why they extrapolated from success in one city to say 'we can get a million people off the dole' in order to win the national contract, but the business model would not stand a moment's scrutiny. The government and the company executives were blinded by their sincere desire for it a magic solution, but it could never work.
Hence, almost immediately A4e and Working Links (which has a similar approach) had to find ways to make it look like they were getting people into work, at a time when the actual number of jobs was falling. Hence the current disastrous mess in which they find themselves, and the efforts by the Government to cover it up.
|
09:19 am - The Raid - This is new cinema
The Raid is an ultra-violent Indonesian fight film, with subtitles, written and directed by a Welshman - Gareth Evans. There is very little dialogue or characterisation, just relentless fighting on and on through the corridors and atriums of a grimy tenement block in Jakarta. Although it has no supernatural element it has a strange disconnected vibe, like John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, so that it seems like a horror film rather than a cop film. I also think it is a very modern film. This is what I expect films of the 21st century to be like: the future will be more like Indonesia than California.
I think it may be the most violent film I have ever seen. More people are killed in other films - Saving Private Ryan for example - but the deaths in this film are portrayed individually: shoot, stab, chop, twist, on and on for an hour and a half virtually without relief.
( no significant spoilers )
|
May 22nd, 2012
01:27 pm - Some of Your Blood
I have just read the short novel 'Some of Your Blood' by Theodore Sturgeon. It was written in 1961. It is not exactly an SF or fantasy novel. The first half is mostly the journal of a soldier, written in a military mental hospital during World War II. The second half is mostly letters between the doctor treating him and his commanding officer, who have different opinions about whether he is insane.
( 50 year old spoilers )
|
May 21st, 2012
06:58 pm - Hobby
I was at a lake yesterday that was absolutely swarming with literally thousands of swifts and swallows. I suspect that the recent rains have kept the insects out of the air, and they must have been pretty hungry. We also saw a Hobby which is a kind of falcon which specialises in catching swifts and swallows. Stopping by for lunch I suppose.
|
May 20th, 2012
09:39 am - Against Narrative
I enjoyed this paper Against Narrativity by Galen Strawson. Strawson argues that there are two ways of looking at your existence in time, the flow of your life. One is to think of yourself as a connected being, the same person you were 30 years ago and will be in 30 more. Linked to this is the idea of life as a narrative, a coherent story with you as protagonist.
The other idea is that there is no self, but merely (sorry 'merely' has an unwanted value judgement) a series of experiences and processes loosely connected by being within the same material frame - the body. At its extreme - that each moment we are born afresh.
The basic form of Diachronic self-experience is that one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future – something that has relatively long-term diachronic continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life. I take it that many people are naturally Diachronic, and that many who are Diachronic are also Narrative in their outlook on life.
If one is Episodic, by contrast, one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future. One has little or no sense that the self that one is was there in the (further) past and will be there in the future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. Episodics are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms.
In the paper Strawson argues that both ways of being are legitimate. I think there is a tendency in the West, and under Christianity and Islam, to emphasise the narrative of a self which has continuity in time and even goes on to some perpetual continuity outside of time. I am thinking of Aristotle and his idea of eudaemonia - the perfected soul. There was a different tendency in Ancient Greece, for example in Heraclitus, and this was also dominant in ancient India, for example The Diamond Sutra, to argue that connection over time is an illusion and we will live more authentically without imposing conceptual narrative.
What I take from Strawson's paper is to relax about this issue, and to embrace both ways of being. Furthermore I think doing this will enable us to slip more easily between the different ways of thinking about ourselves, and not to beat ourselves up about it. And ultimately I think that is the point of philosophy, to learn that absolutes are actually quite fragile and contingent, and we aren't trapped in any one mode of thought.
|
May 19th, 2012
11:07 am - Facebook: for some time to come
BTW my guess is that Zuckerberg floated Facebook at the time that would make him most money. So he is more or less telling the world 'it's going down now'. Perhaps he expects it to lose value slowly, but he must be expecting it to devalue. Before your property loses value, turn it into cash. In this case, turn just under half of it into cash, while retaining half pour encourager les autres. When his share drops below 50% watch out, it's free-fall.
I think this article in the Guardian by Brent Hoberman (founder of lastminute.com) kind of acknowledges that Facebook is over-valued, but states it in a gentle way.
I had hoped Facebook would resist the temptation that we also felt, to raise the price too much. In our case I'm not sure the added pressure was worth it, and in theirs they really don't need the extra money. I suspect Zuckerberg will feel that pressure, that his world is surreal. But he will be happy that he has been given this chance to continue to change the world – and follow his passion. And that his creation's future is assured for some time to come.
'Some time to come'. Could literally mean anything.
|
|
|
