Simple pastimes

They always used to say that every man should have a hobby. You know the sort of thing; collecting model trains, building replica ships out of matchsticks, splitting atoms.

Choices

When you need a little light relief, turn to Simon Jenkins.  In the midst of the most awful guff he always comes out with a gem. In this terrible piece on Libya he pulls out a general principle, an 'iron law' no less:

The iron law of plunging into someone else's civil war is choose the side most likely to win and make sure it does.

So that's what you should do. Franco? A dead cert. Lets get the RAF up there with those Luftwaffe chaps and bomb the crap out of Guernica. Pol Pot? A clear winner - if you need any help spotting those intellectuals to be exterminated, we're your boys.

I don't think so somehow. In any international conflict with global implications (aka "someone else's civil war") the basis of choice is not who is the likely winner, that would usually be the best armed and equipped, it is who you would want to see win. It is a moral and political choice. And in many cases, the side who we would like to see victorious is often the least well equipped. It may well consist of popular, democratic forces lined up against the tanks and troops of a fascistic dictatorship. And that is why intervention is necessary at times, to prevent them being crushed with all the consequences that may result.

The amoral, 'realist' perspective that Jenkins comes out with is actually unreal, detached from a real world where we face the constant necessity of making ethical judgements, taking risks, fulfilling our responsibilities and standing up for our principles.

Hard times

Everyday difficulties in Greece, described here by Angelique Chrisafis.

And it ain't over yet.

Kill or cure

The OECD are confident. But, as Aditya Chakrabortty reports from Greece, others are not so sure:

One senior investment banker is more blunt: "People are scared that the government doesn't know what the fuck it's doing." 

Reading this, together with his other report on a complex loan deal of dubious legality, you have to say that they might have a point.

Greece certainly needs reform, though the real point is which reforms it needs and which it could do without, and it also needs investment. At the moment we are seeing the start of a reform process, linked to austerity packages drawn from the manuals of orthodoxy, being cheered on by international institutions and bright-eyed American trained technocrats. In the meantime sceptical Greek people are conducting a quiet run on the banks and withdrawing cash. We will see who is right.

Phew, what a scorcher

I saw this report yesterday about the excessive heat in Britain (28C - a pleasantly warm late evening here).

Parts of Britain have enjoyed sunshine and scorching heat as temperatures were higher than in Sydney and Rio.

It forgot to mention that in Sydney and Rio it is winter.

Success story

"Thank god for crime; it saved me from a life of boxing". One of my favourite quips though I can't remember the source. It turns round a standard story of a life rescued by sporting excellence. That redemption is precisely what happened to Cec Thompson, the Rugby League international who died recently.

Thompson overcame a difficult upbringing, illiteracy and racism to become only the second black player to play international Rugby League for Great Britain in 1951. (In comparison, it took until 1978 for Viv Anderson to become the first black player to represent England at football, but then Rugby League has a better record in dealing with discrimination than some sports, perhaps because it too was the target of bigotry from the Rugby Union for around a century.)

This would have been a stirring enough story if it had not been for a second redemption, this time it was because of adult education. This from Andy Wilson's obituary:

He had launched a window-cleaning business in and around Workington, and also felt sufficiently confident with reading and writing – developed on coach trips to away games with Hunslet, when he would learn new words from the Reader's Digest – to make a tentative move into journalism. He joined music and operatic societies, and an art club, passed his English O-level after taking night classes in Workington while coaching Barrow, then enrolled at Huddersfield Technical College in 1962.He was then encouraged to apply for a place at Leeds University, and started a course in economics in 1965, at the age of 39.

He ended up as a teacher.

This is another reminder of the power of adult education and its continuing need, even though successive governments seem keen to abandon it.  And for those who think that adult learning should be purely vocational, please note his starting point; music, opera and art. I haven't read it, but I see that his autobiography, Born on the Wrong Side, is still in print. I might just order it now.

Sporting drama

On a dramatic day, the issue of promotion and relegation between Rugby League’s top division, Super League, and its second tier, the Championship, has been decided with only around five games and the play-offs left to go.

The team currently lying third in the Championship will be promoted, though we knew that months ago. The teams lying first and second won’t be eligible for promotion for another three years.

The big shock is that the team lying bottom of Super League will be relegated. The favourites to go down were the team immediately above them. This is because the bottom side were promoted originally for three years so that Super League could have a team in South Wales. They play in North Wales. They did play a season in South Wales, but finished bottom, got small crowds, ran into financial difficulties and had six of their Australian players (yes they were supposed to be old South Wales) deported as they were here illegally. So, the next season they moved to North Wales, did well, got small crowds, ran into financial difficulties and went into administration. This year they have been at the bottom, have small crowds, but the Rugby League wants a team in Wales so they were favourites to stay up.

However, yesterday, they decided to relegate themselves, withdrew their application and declared that they couldn’t run a financially viable Super League club. They didn’t tell the players. Or the fans. Never mind, it means the team above them stay up.

This also means that the club who are currently seventh in the Championship are furious. They think that the next to bottom team in Super League should have been relegated anyway and they should be promoted in their place as they have a nicer ground.

No matches were played today.

I have an idea. Why don’t they relegate the team that finishes bottom of Super League and promote the side that wins the Championship? A bit complicated I know, but it might just catch on.

Brevity on Breivik

I suppose that it was inevitable if that if a mass murderer posts an interminable manifesto on the internet before carrying out his crime it will be mined, equally interminably, by bloggers and columnists to prove that what they have been saying all along was right and that if we had heeded them all would have been fine. They should pause and consider that a melange of commonplace and contradictory ideas prove very little and that those who are attracted to them usually, interminably once more, fill the comments boxes on web sites with tedious scrawl, not Norwegian islands with dead children.

Nobody puts it better than George,

Breivik is one of those semi-intelligent people who are actually more stupid than any genuinely stupid person. Vastly overestimating semi-intelligence is not only stupid but worse. It is blind, arrogant, and always malevolent in effect. There is deadly danger in being obsessed by one's own importance or the importance of one's ideas: the two are almost the same thing. 

Pathological ideas are dangerous, infecting the minds of pathological people they can be murderous, embedded in pathological regimes they can be genocidal. We are kept as safe as we can be by the humility of democracy with its agonised uncertainties. Of that, and that alone, we should be overwhelmingly certain.

The first tomato

It may not be big, but it was pretty tasty and was the first one from the first tomato plants in our first vegetable patch.  Cue the song:

A matter of life and death

It has been a beautiful summer's night. The front was busy with people enjoying simple pleasures and with others working flat out to earn their livings. Yet there has been a cloud of death shrouding today. The horror of events in Norway show that fascism, in whatever manifestation it takes, is still with us, infecting diseased minds. A singer died too, a talent lost, destroyed by the insanity of a celebrity lifestyle offered to the wealthy, often mistaken for hedonism. In the real life outside the bubble, the pain of the parents must be incomprehensible. And how many other talented and delightful people died of their addiction in the gutter, unheralded and unmourned? How many migrants suffocated or drowned in the desperate search for a better life? How many have the Syrian police incarcerated and tortured today? Death is all around us.

So let's celebrate life. That is all around us too. It is in the solidarity being offered the people of Norway, a deeply moral emotional spasm. It is in the support for the oppressed in some, if not all the parts of the world that we would like to see it.

Here in Greece, the nation is breathing a nervous, unconfident sigh of relief after a deal had been reached on its debt, recognising the problem as pan-European and not the result of the sins of the improvident.  I would have been tempted by scepticism if it had not been for this deeply sane post by Aristos Doxiadis. At its heart is a recognition of the primacy and value of the practice of politics:

“Aha”, I hear the other side saying, “but these are extraordinary times, that call for extraordinary leadership. By that standard, they have done a miserable job.”  Well, it depends how much faith one has in benevolent dictators: is the power to commit great resources without negotiations a good thing? How confident can we be that a grand strategic plan decided in early 2010 would have worked well? For every proposal that was mooted, there were counter-arguments of substance, not just of process. Take for example, the idea of a big Marshall plan for Greece: what kind of governance would ensure that the funds would be well used to support sustainable growth, rather than being squandered to rent-seekers? Ditto for a massive recapitalization of all European banks – how would the terms of that distribute costs fairly and ensure competent management from then on (not, presumably by getting corrupt or clueless civil servants to be CEOs).

Further, extraordinary leadership is compatible with democracy only if the majority of the people are affected by extraordinary circumstances; and will therefore consent to extraordinary solutions. This is not the case in the Eurozone. 

Indeed. And if there are failures, then, as he puts it, in a functioning polity "there can always be a new round". Here he resists the siren song of demagogy in favour of the political process, something that seems to be forgotten in the USA. The EU have recognised the need to rescue the insolvent, unlike in America where a profoundly unserious opposition seems to be on the point of propelling the solvent into default. And for what? The very limited liberalism and dark skin of its properly elected president?

Europe has resisted such lunacy and embraced politics, however uncertain its achievements, just as today we mourn the slaughtered victims of anti-politics.

And this raises the problem of our political language, the way we discuss life and death issues, many far more serious than the Eurozone. Take the Middle East for example.  Here is the most marvellous expression of optimism by Gershon Baskin in the Jerusalem Post.

So one thing that gives me hope is the deep belief that this conflict is resolvable; every single issue, to the minutest detail, has solutions based on research, dialogue, precedents and “home-grown” Israeli-Palestinian ingenuity.

What is lacking, and is absolutely essential, is any semblance of trust.

Israelis and Palestinians have definitely earned their mutual distrust.

The most crucial aspects of each of the five Israeli-Palestinian agreements have been breached systemically by both sides. There is no clear “good guy” and “bad guy” when it comes to implementation of signed agreements. And no artificial “confidence- building measures” can replace such earned lack of trust.

Once again, the conclusions of the optimist can only be an expression of a faith in life.

I am not so naïve as to believe I have no mortal enemies, but I don’t allow myself to be constrained by fear, or allow fear to sour into blind hatred.

I believe in the power of people to be good. I believe in the power of compassion, which is much stronger than hatred. And I will always be true to myself and to the belief that making peace is first and foremost a decision – one that we have apparently yet to make.

After the experience of seething, deranged hatred in Norway, the glorification of murder, the pitiless slaughter of ordinary people, here we have again a celebration of life against death.

Yet what of international solidarity?  One thing that strikes me is how the left in the West has embraced the language of the far right in both Israel and Palestine. Both pro-Palestinians and defenders of Israel have seized on this lack of trust with rhetorical gusto. For one side the language is full of a far too ready eagerness, especially given the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe, to paint the Jew as the ultimate villain, complete with absurd analogies, conspiracy theory and the romanticisation of the Palestinian far right as a noble resistance. Sadly, Israel's defenders also use language dripping with negation, seeing Palestinians solely as the ultimate anti-Semites, unable to recognise the bitter experience of occupation, exile and dispossession, desperate to de-legitimise any protest, to deny that there is any partner for peace. Each take up the banner of irridentalist nationalism, which will only bring death in its wake, and feel most righteous in doing so.

But peace demands something else - a deal, politics, life. And the place to find it is in the left, the Palestinian and Israeli left. They are not that far apart, though they certainly have their disagreements.  They do not share these discourses, they abhor them.  Both are seeking the same thing, the building of the trust necessary to do a deal that will allow the national-self determination of both peoples. Yet our leftists seem ignorant of their efforts and scornful of the prospects, preferring the certainties of partisanship.

And to me, this is what being on the left is about. It is about a respect for life. This doesn't mean quiescence, nor the absence of struggle. What it does mean is clear sightedness, to recognise that the defence of people about to be slaughtered by a vile regime is not imperialism, to see that trying to accommodate murderous despots as an 'exit strategy' is an act of cowardice rather than of courage and, at the same time, to realise that the struggle to reach an agreement that transcends conflict is not necessarily a sell-out.

Intoxicatedby the beauty of the Greek star-lit night and by not a little of the cheap draught wine, it is easy to feel the privilege of life. Yet that is what an emancipatory politics is about, life over death. Even though we will all succumb one day, the time that we are granted should be a heaven on earth and not a living hell.

It's back!

Courtesy of Ian Bone, get your revived on-line copy of the News of the World here.

Nausea

Just as the Murdoch press gets so delightfully skewered by the Guardian's superb investigative journalism, we forget it has its own middle-class sewer - yes, the comments pages where the readership can get their rocks off on, ever so understandable, mass murder.  The latest piece masturbates to the memory of Mao with a breathtaking piece of 'yes buttery'.

It is tempting to denounce Mao as a monster, and to dismiss the Maoists of today as no less criminally deluded than Peru's Shining Path guerillas, or the Khmer Rouge. Certainly, the scale of the violence Mao inflicted on China dwarfs all other crimes and disasters committed during the course of nation-building in the last two centuries. But political and economic modernisers elsewhere also exacted a terrible human cost from their allegedly backward peoples.

This is even more irritating as the theme he hangs this on, the crisis of rural communities, is incredibly important. But there are much better guides to it, as there are to Mao.

Summit latest

The secrecy surrounding the latest EU talks has been breached with this exclusive footage of the meeting:



It is too hot to do anything other than shamelessly plagiarise Steve

Straining credulity

The BBC reports that in Austria a pastafarian member of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has won the right to wear a sieve on his head in the photo on his driving licence for religious reasons.

Pastafarians are all atheists.

"Schadenfreudegasm"

The News of the Word scandal explained to Americans.

Hat tip to loads of people

Nationalism or internationalism

I liked this discussion in the Financial Times for two reasons. Firstly, it points out that the current financial crisis is not solely a Greek one, nor is it wholly of Greek making. Secondly, it stresses the need for action and reform at European level, rather than loading austerity packages onto the Greek people in the vain hope that the failed policies of the past will prove to be the successful ones of the present. It argues for internationalism to prevail over narrower national interests within the EU.

This point was made a while ago by Mark Mazower, who also placed the crisis in its historical setting.

The members of today's political class in Europe are Margaret Thatcher's heirs, not George Marshall's. They find it hard to understand that the markets need to be saved from themselves if Europe is to survive in anything resembling its present form. They forget that Germany itself was allowed to cancel its prewar debts in 1953, one of the preconditions for its subsequent boom, and that when others, such as Poland in 1991, were allowed to write down their debts in their turn, they too prospered.

Right now what is needed is long-term political vision and a new willingness to argue for the benefits of continent-wide redistribution. 

Anyone familiar with Mazower's general history of Europe, Dark Continent, will be aware of his contention that fascism was not an aberration in Europe. Authoritarian nationalism is always there to challenge democratic internationalism and the internationalist pulse is weakening. Mazower concludes:

The clock is ticking: in September the next package of aid for Greece will have to be announced. It will be a decisive moment and the outcome will be critical for Greece, and for the union too.

UPDATE
Heading for the inevitable?

A rose by any other name

Harigate is getting much more interesting indeed, in a grimly voyeuristic sort of way.

And another ...

Once again there is news of an impending sad loss. Another University lifelong learning (adult education in plain English) department is scheduled to go. This one is close to my heart too. How careless we have been with the legacy of more than a century of activism to create a more open and inclusive higher education system. In the past few years it has been thrown away, sometimes with a note of regret, but mainly with puzzlement that something so seemingly peripheral to the life of a university actually exists and how such an adornment adds little to the productivity of the diploma factories of modern higher education.

Yet to me these are gems that should be treasured and not deposited in waste bins for disposal. They are places where the dream of equality, the joy of learning, and the escape from the deadening hand of narrow instrumentalism flourished. Many are now no more. It is a loss that some can't comprehend, let alone bother to mourn, a modern tragedy scarcely understood by managements but felt deeply by tutors, students and the communities that loved them. We will miss them when they are gone.

By default

Like Greece, Buenos Aires had swallowed the textbook analysis – backed by the IMF and the consensus of academic economists and domestic politicians – which said its problem was not an overvalued currency and unsustainable debts, but too much public spending.

As the economists Roberto Frenkel and Martin Rapetti put it in a study of the Argentine crisis for the CEPR, the theory was that "fiscal discipline would entail stronger confidence, and consequently the risk premium would fall and bring interest rates down. Therefore, domestic expenditure would recover and push the economy out of the recession. Lower interest rates and an increased GDP would, in turn, re-establish a balanced budget, and thus close a virtuous circle."

It didn't work. In fact, drastic public spending cuts made the downturn worse, while the dollar peg prevented the devaluation that eventually helped Argentina to get back its competitiveness.

Similarly, Athens – locked into the euro – is unable to devalue, or control its own interest rates, and the solution being pressed on Greece by its eurozone neighbours involves privatisation, liberalisation and drastic public spending cuts.

Heather Stewart draws out the comparisons between Argentina and Greece and argues for the default option.

Consumer affairs

Some heartening news for bargain hunters. Reported research shows a tendency to understate the amount of alcohol on the label of a bottle of wine. That is unless you make the mistake of buying low strength wines, then you will be diddled (and not piddled).

"We observe systematic patterns in the errors: a tendency to overstate the alcohol content for wine that has relatively low actual alcohol content and a tendency to understate the alcohol content for wine that has relatively high alcohol content."

I don't have that problem with the batch of wine I bought yesterday, Château Yeorganopolou 2011. It's a cheeky little number, delicate with a hint of peach and a tendency to make one misjudge distances, whose delicate bouquet is prone to inducing big speeches. There is no problem with labelling, there isn't any. There is a bottle though - a glass one too, with a cork - posh you see. Well you would expect that for €3. Very drinkable. Cheers.