Friday, August 26, 2005
Call careers information / have you got yourself an occupation
This one would receive an "A" if the assignment was to throw as much random shit onto a paper as poorly as you can. I've pissed patterns on snow that look more coherent than this.
Friday fun.
1,893,319 stupid kids tried stepping to my iNsAne skills and got 0wned
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Profitless, out of date vignette
Apparently, there was an American election last year. If you're like me you'll have probably backed Kerry, if only for a general pro-Democrat bias. Like me though, you probably had no good answer to the 'who makes a stronger commander in chief?' argument, and blustered the response that Kerry hadn't had much of an opportunity to prove himself on the international front. Like me, you probably said this with a nervous wince akin to the one brought about by watching Sunderland's defence trying out their first game in the premiership after promotion.
Okay, so P.J. O'Rourke is not the most even handed of commentators, and any discussion on the basis of the below is pretty much worthless. But hey!
I've read O'Rourke's Republican Party Reptile recently. His commentary on the 1986 Philippines election, fought between Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino, is pretty heavy.
In it, he lambasts the U.S. Congressional observers' failure to take a stand against Marcos and his 'snap election' strategy.
On Sunday night, two days after the election, thirty of the computer operators from COMELEC [Commission on Elections] walked off the job, protesting that vote figures were being juggled. Aquino supporters and NAMFREL [National Movement for Free Elections] volunteers took the operators, most of them young women, to a church, and hundreds of people formed a protective barrier around them.
Village Voice reporter Joe Conason and I had been tipped off about the walkout, and when we got to the church, we found Bea Zobel, one of Cory Aquino's top aides, in a tizzy. "The women are terrified," she said. "They're scared to go home. They don't know what to do. We don't know what to do." Joe and I suggested that Mrs. Zobel go to the Manila Hotel and bring back some members of the Congressional observer team. She came back with Kerry, who did nothing.
Kerry later said that he didn't talk to the COMELEC employees then because he wasn't allowed to. This is ridiculous. He was ushered into an area that had been cordoned off from the press and the crowd and where the computer operators were sitting. To talk to the women, all he would have had to do was raise his voice. Why he was reluctant, I can't tell you. I can tell you what any red-blooded representative of the U.S. government should have done. He should have shouted, "If you're frightened for your safety, I'll take you to the American embassy, and damn the man who tries to stop me." But all Kerry did was walk around like a male model in a concerned and thoughtful pose.
Like a male model.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking / When I hear the silly things that you say
"Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child"Article 12, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
I like Human Rights, but you can't help wince at that above article when reading Harry Hutton's superb reports on the Festival of Youth and Students in Caracas.
UK public policy would have you believe all youth fall somewhere along the axis between the kids in the 'those who can, teach' adverts and a ravenous horde of binge-drinking, happy-slapping, barbarians. Youth is fetishised and demonised in roughly equal measure.
It is often pointed out, usually be the Mark Thomas school of adolescent leftists, that radical young communists tend to lapse into agnosticism and conservatism when older. This has become a dominant cliché, as if one's natural political condition is a rather austere state socialism, which kids, property prices and gardening shows end up getting in the way of. Rather than it being something most people grow out of.
Indeed, those, 'please become a teacher' adverts are predicated on this dodgy but widely reported idea that 'kids say the most amazingly original things! Free from all the trammels of your square "adult" life, these kids will come up with thought provoking insights that will rock your world!'
No they won't. The young, like the worst adults, are intolerant, they hunt in tribes, persecute their weakest members and say the most predictable things imaginable.
I am not usually a 'big themes' kind of a guy. But one of my underlying tenets is that puritan fundamentalism is one of the most dangerous and potentially destructive forces within any society. This is visible on the left and the right, in all religious faiths and most historical periods. Al-Quaeda (or however you spell it) sympathisers, zionist extremists, the puritans who burnt down theatres in the early seventeenth century. All of them. The problem is blinkered intolerance fuelled by ignorance. The refusual to operate as if you might be wrong.
When the backgrounds of the 7/7 bombers were publicised, there was some surprise at how young they were. As if it would make more sense if British suicide bombers were Grumply Old Men, in extremis. Surely it is more likely that young adults, rootless, desperately grasping for some tradition and identity would be more easily radicalised. And lacking much broader experience, be focused on a narrow intolerant dogma.
I don't mean to do a Norman Tebbit. I don't want to rail against youth, decry it, patronise it and bemoan its culture.I like hip-hop, rock and roll, fizzy pop, self-indulgence and the absence of cynicism. Tracksuits and trainers are more comfortable than shirt and trousers. I would take all these with me to my desert island tomorrow.
I just mean, with all this banter about youth councils, youth panels and parliaments etc, let's think it through a bit, yeah?
You need to practice holding opinions and test them against others - a bit like Pokemon. Your first opinions on anything are likely to be a bit more rubbish than your finished position. On the basics your fine - what do you want in your village? a BMX ramp? Fair enough, let's do it. You're left wing / you're right wing? Good for you, well done. You have thought about industrial economics and decided that the workers need liberating and the undesirable classes need liquidating? Hang on a minute son.
Enjoy your opinions, but you don't have a right to be taken seriously.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
I heard the rainstorms ain't nothing to mess with / But I can't feel a drip on the strip / it's a trip
I was on holiday last week. Feeling more sluggish at work than usual, I was more than ready for ' just a little somethin' to break the monotony' of all my hardcore admin and ennui.
I have been thinking a lot about one of my favourite books recently. And my disgruntled state brought to mind Jerome K Jerome's encounter with a doctor in the first chapter of Three Men in a Boat. Jerome thinks he is suffering from 'every known malady in the pharmacology'. The doctor writes a prescription which he doesn't read.
I'll let the narrator take over,
"I took it [the prescription] to the nearest chemists, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back. He said he didn't keep it.
I said: 'You are a chemist?'
He said: 'I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.'
I read the prescription. It ran:
'1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don't stuff up your head with things you don't understand.'"
So I took a week up north with the girlfriend.
We went to a wedding reception in Birmingham en route. We hit York, staying with Girlfriend's brother.He's ace. I planned to walk the city walls and read a good deal. Instead I sat down a fair bit, drank ale and ate chips. We did the Maize maze. There was also crazy golf. We played. I won. We saw our friend Simon whom I hadn't seen in three years. Of course, he has a blog now. We talked about Iraq. We went to Whitby for a day. I ate cockles and mussels (and more chips) and the girlfriend and I discussed Goths. We went to Buxton for a night to see HMS Pinafore as part of this. It was superb. We had a quick visit to Bakewell, a minor Peak district stroll and headed home.
The north is brilliant. Nice bit of nature, good bit of scoff, fine mix of cafe culture and sentimental Phoenix Nights moments. Actually, they're were several of those. Not least an overheard conversation in a Costcutters, with the opening salvo "I see these Tic-Tacs are back with avengance", and "Arn't they Just?", as the response.
Then I got thinking about all the stuff I don't understand.
"But in spite of all temptations /To belong to other nations /He remains an Englishman!"
How do you assemble a corpus of...whatever that constitutes Englishness? The Peaks were amazing. Yorkshire was amazing. Not least because they were different to where I have lived. (This is not strictly true of course, as York is essentially pretty bits of Bath spliced with Coronation Street.) I guess its the old truism, if you name it you limit it. And if you limit it, you lose it.
But more than this, how do you govern it? For a small island Britain is so sprawling, diverse and so darned complicated.
Someone at Defra once told me that policy is about 95% inefficient in some areas of delivery. The Government wants outcomes, it puts our money into programmes to purchase them. This gets filtered through a myriad regional and local frameworks and initiatives as it moves downstream towards what that money does at the local level. And the desired outcomes can match up with the actual outputs as little as 5% of the time.
I've been reading this Demos report too. It's all about community groups, civil society and active citizenship. It highlights the desire of government to involve citizens in the public realm and the management of public services. It points out that participation should not just be seen as an end it itself because people won't buy it. You need to enliven it, make public participation meaningful then trust people to shape the public sphere themselves. Don't just stand there saying 'become a school governor', put up bare cash to local people and leave them to sort it out.
Both these thoughts have helped flesh out what could be the wonderfully unglamorous future of central government. They could probably keep the Treasury. The centre should keep tabs on transport, health, defence and security. But beyond this what should remain in the hands of central government? Just gather in some tax and farm it out.
Seriously guys, if you could bypass Brent Council and just give me the cash to buy my own sodding wheelie bin, that'd be great.
