That's it!

I've had it with Chavez now.

Understanding inequality

I have the sort of mind that likes organisation and categorisation, something that can bring clarity to arguments. This is the strength of a striking, though not original, essay on inequality by Göran Therborn, whose title certainly doesn't undersell its significance, The Killing Fields of Inequality.

His argument is that inequality is not an engine of growth, nor a natural feature of human societies, but a construct that is utterly dysfunctional, "destructive of human lives and of human societies" - "it is something that violates a moral norm of equality among human beings". Yes, ultimately his argument rests on a moral stance and, to my mind, this is welcome. Utility without ethics is the politics of, using Nye Bevan's cruel description of Hugh Gaitskell, the "desiccated calculating machine". Therborn uses a raft of utilitarian arguments, but there is no mistaking that he is writing about the real lives of real people and is angry.

The usefulness of his approach is that he differentiates between a number of arguments that are often conflated and confused. So, for example he deals with the distinction to be made between difference and inequality. The most important is that inequality can be abolished and, of course, the whole thrust of the essay is that it should be.

He divides inequality into three different types - vital inequality of life and health; existential inequality based on discrimination and status; and material inequality of wealth and resources, both in access to opportunities and in rewards. All are the product of clearly defined processes:

Inequality can be produced in four basic ways. First there is distantiation – some people are running ahead and/or others falling behind. Secondly there is the mechanism of exclusion – through which a barrier is erected making it impossible, or at least more difficult, for certain categories of people to access a good life. Thirdly, the institutions of hierarchy mean that societies and organisations are constituted as ladders, with some people perched on top and others below. Finally, there is exploitation, in which the riches of the rich derive from the toil and the subjection of the poor and the disadvantaged.

You can read the full article if you want to see how he elaborates on these themes and on the strategies involved in countering the effects of these processes. I would just like to make a few observations.

Firstly, he is attempting to show that the different types of inequality, such as inequality of opportunity and outcome, are not mutually exclusive phenomena that conflict, but are contingent upon each other and the products of the same processes. Secondly, I would extend that approach to argue that the often assumed choice between equality and liberty is a false one. The liberty of all is predicated on equality, something that was clearer to 19th Century libertarians than it appears to be to some of their 21st Century descendants. And finally, countering the insane rhetoric of the American right about Obama as "a socialist at the head of a gangster regime", he makes a telling point about social democracy:

...the recurrent success of the Nordic welfare states on a world capitalist list (with Finland on rung 6 and oil-rich Norway on 16 among 131 countries) certainly means that generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but as highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives. And the literally lethal effects of inequality make searching for them imperative.

I couldn't agree more.

A responsibility to protect

Andrew Anthony, in a long and, at times, horrifying piece, recounts the experiences of Somaly Lun, a Cambodian survivor of the Khmer Rouge. It is worth reading in full. In particular I was struck by this,

In the midst of this revolutionary dystopia, one of the most difficult ideas for the teenager to accept was the thought that the world had abandoned Cambodia. "I kept thinking all the time, 'Why does no one come and rescue us?' We'd look up in the sky for the sign of a plane. Any little sound of gunfire got us excited – Somebody must have come! But it was just them killing somebody who had escaped, otherwise they wouldn't waste their bullets."

In the end it was the Vietnamese invasion and occupation that stopped the genocide. Tied up in Cold War politics, it was an action supported by many on the left who were to oppose subsequent Western interventions, whilst the Khmer Rouge continued to hold Cambodia's seat in the United Nations. Liberations are messy and imperfect, but after reading Somaly Lun's recollections of seeing her ten-year-old brother burned alive for taking a sweet potato who can doubt their necessity?

Greece leads the world

At least that is what Anthony Barnett and Mary Kaldor think in their gushing panegyric for the latest Papandreou to head the government of Greece. I thought their praise a little overdone until I read this,

We have direct experience of one small part of the learning process that lies behind Papandreou’s strategy. We have worked with many others in the ‘Symi Symposium’ that Papandreou initiated 12 years ago. Named after the Aegean island on which the first seminar was held, these informal workshops began as a joint initiative of the Andreas Papandreou and Olaf Palme institutes, as a way of exchanging views on the future of the left. Every year since then Papandreou has hosted these gatherings on a different Mediterranean island, bringing together leading global academics, activists and policy makers to debate how to achieve a better world.

Ah. I would be falling over myself to please anyone who would whisk me away to a Greek island every year to talk about what I like to talk about.

Cynicism aside, you have to wish success for a country that deserves better than what has been served up by successive governments. Welcome too is any attempt to lift European social democracy out of Third Way capitulation to the powerful, especially in the context of the twin assault of financial and ecological crises. I just wonder about how much we should place our hopes in an enlightened technocratic elite rather than the long hard work of building up social movements.

Freeloading

I have only been to two poetry readings in my life and both were by the same poet. Does this make me a groupie or a stalker even? More hopefully, a comrade and a friend.

The reading at Manchester University was so much grander than the one in Hull. Hull does cosy and bars, Manchester has theatres and plush, quality restaurants. Even without pre-lubrication in historic pubs, George read beautifully the complex beauty of his work. This time he was not alone. I was really taken by the Irish poet Vona Groake who shared the billing. Her latest collection aptly takes its name from the spray thrown up from the prow of a boat. As she read, each phrase was like time-lapse photography, a shimmering droplet rose and was let fall, a pause before the next glistened in view, crystallising thoughts, and then you glance down to the deck and, to your surprise and delight, there is a small pool of water, reflecting all around you.

Then the exquisite led on to the powerful, her translation and interpretation of the 18th Century Irish keen of a woman for her murdered husband, Lament for Art O'Leary. To my shame I had never heard of this before, though it is regarded as a great classic of Irish literature. As a document, it is a voice of an 18th Century woman, heard too seldom, and illustrative of the suppression of the Catholics of Ireland under English rule and the power of petty officials. As a work of art it is a wail of anguish, of anger and of desire - of thwarted passion and revenge. Rhythmically declaimed, it brought tears.

I am getting a taste for this, maybe I will go to more. Though the invitation to the free meal where I can brush against the skirts of fame will not be there and I will have to pay to get in. Now back to reading the lament.

Incomunicado

I am just back from a weekend away where there was no Internet and no signal for a mobile phone, cut off with only with a few friends from the Over the Hill Club (don't ask). The ten mile hikes are now replaced by gentle strolls and the alcohol consumption is down as age creeps up.

This time we were in Staithes, a North Yorkshire coastal village where the Arctic wind from the North Sea seems unrelenting. In November it is bleak with steep hills to climb and beautiful enough in a bleak and hilly way. The village itself is different, claustrophobic, wedged between two cliffs and divided by a ravine. In contrast to the wide sweep of the North York Moors it has the feel of the close fishing communities that lived there. And, since the end of the 19th Century it had played a role in the visual arts, hosting the Staithes Group or Northern Impressionists, the most notable of whom was Laura Knight. Now, inevitably, the village is dominated by holiday lets, though some life remains. It is the story of coastal communities as tourism develops and we rush to the sea for relaxation, which is exactly what I was doing this weekend.

Sanity

The world gone mad one

Fat people are more likely to become criminals, and their very fatness may help shape their criminality. That's the conclusion reached by Professor Gregory N Price in a study called Obesity and Crime: Is There a Relationship? published in the journal Economics Letters.

The world gone mad two

This Friday Sky1 HD and world-renowned psychic medium Derek Acorah will attempt to make contact with Michael Jackson in two special shows, Michael Jackson: The Live Seance and Michael Jackson: The Search For His Spirit.

Prisons and the vote

Norm discusses the disenfranchisement of prisoners and wonders why those who advocate giving inmates the vote seem to rarely put forward a clear case. Leaving aside the notions that prisoners are still human beings and citizens and that there is often an arbitrary division between custodial and non-custodial sentences, I would make two observations in support of the enfranchisement of offenders drawn from my experience working in a lifelong learning department that provided higher education in prisons.

The first is that prisoners are directly and intimately affected by decisions of the state and thus should have a say in their own representation. This is not just as a result of penal policy either.

For example, in 1997 the new Labour government introduced a very welcome funded fee remission scheme for low income students in part-time higher education. The money was managed by the universities' hardship funds and allowed the allocation of fee support to offender learning in prisons. Then, for some unknown reason, the government switched the allocation of funding from universities to local authorities. This created the usual short-term muddle out of a perfectly good system, but it also had another consequence. Prisoners do not have a local authority to apply to for support. Thus a, possibly unintended, effect of the change was the ending of inmates' access to some educational programmes. Prisoners are not a fashionable cause and, crucially, they are not voters. It makes it easy to overlook their needs.

Secondly, and more importantly, there is the issue of prison as something other than a system of retribution. Giving rights to prisoners may have wider social benefits.

Our experience in Hull was that those who were involved in our courses had a far lower rate of re-offending than the national average. Academically, many were amongst our highest achievers, but I think there is more to it than that. One thing that engagement in education did was aid in a process of social re-integration. Social exclusion and political exclusion walk hand-in-hand. The exercise of political rights is one small part of citizenship, of inclusion. It is that very social inclusion that is a key element in preventing recidivism.

These utilitarian points aside, I also liked the impassioned speech given at last year's presentation night by the person who accepted the awards on behalf of our students who were otherwise detained. He said that, "whether we liked it or not, prisoners were part of our community". They are and I see no reason why they should be excluded from the rights and duties of citizenship whilst deprived of their liberty.

Damage

At least the row on the unutterably stupid government decision not to fund institutions for teaching students who are studying for a qualification at an equivalent or lower level (ELQ) to one they hold already is not going away judging by this report (see here, here, here, here, and here for just some of my previous posts on this).

The article is about the absurdity of being unable to retrain if life takes a different path, but the focus is still on taking 'second degrees'. Anyone concerned with lifelong learning would know that the worst damage was done to the university adult education sector as a whole and short courses in particular.

Perversely, the people losing out often had no qualifications at all. The reason is simple. If around 20%-30% of students become unfundable as they have previous qualifications, then programmes and departments are seen as non-viable without them, so they close or downsize, leaving the remaining 70%-80% of students with little or nothing. As Ian Ground wrote, it marks the loss of the great civic mission (pdf) of universities.

Scandal!

A calendar depicting pastoral scenes of Alpine life published to promote the beauties of Switzerland is causing a furore. Upright Swiss citizens have objected to the image conveyed by this typical mountain scene - a charming shepherdess with goats, dressed in suspenders (the shepherdess, not the goats - now that is a thought). You can understand why. The woman is German!

Via

Lard for brains

I now have to admit that obesity does have an adverse effect on my blood pressure. This is nothing to do with my waistline, rather it is the result of reading articles like this by India Knight - a journalist with form.

All the tired old arguments are there, including this spectacular mixture of Madeleine Bunting style emoting with gratuitous abuse.

...overeating isn’t simply a question of being so greedy that you’re compelled to stuff your face all day. It’s to do with emotional states, unhappiness, anxiety and thinking about food as a friend and comforter rather than merely as useful fuel. So I can see, perhaps better than people who’ve only ever been thin, that this issue is about more than just incontinent lard-bucketry (although there’s that, too).

Then we have to endure usual guff about the cost of obesity to the NHS and, rather than face the fact that the greatest avoidable cause of poor health is poverty and thereby argue that it is necessary to end it, it is safer for a well-heeled columnist with a diet book to sell (please don't buy it) to attack fat people for their sins and moan about paying tax to pick up the burden of our gluttony. Oddly, the same sentiment isn't applied to booze.

Yet that was not what really got to me. Instead it was this breathtaking assertion that left me spitting feathers.

Abusing people is wrong, whether they are gay, straight, black, white, young, old or fat. But there’s only one group in that list that can physically do anything about the way they are. If they don’t feel like it, that’s fine — but enough of the whingeing. You gets your trolley and you makes your choice and then, because you’re a grown-up, you live with the consequences.

In other words, just like the women who asked for it because of the way they dress, abuse, prejudice and discrimination against us fatties is perfectly acceptable because it is really all our fault. What did you expect you slothful glutton? Mend your ways if you want to avoid the righteous wrath of the slim.

Anti-fat prejudice is not the worst thing in the world, but school bullies can still make fat kids' lives a misery, teachers and employers can fail to see your qualities and label you, body image can erode self confidence and it would be great not seeing a headline like this in the popular press. It is still the permissible prejudice of our times, increasingly remote from serious studies of physiology and epidemiology, locked into mediaeval concepts of sin and punishment and revelling in the joys of self-righteousness. And it is seriously bad for my health!

Thanks Will - I think

Objet d'art

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

John Keats



It's amazing what you find when you move. This stunning object, beautifully crafted out of plastic with my name misspelt by the engraver on the small metal plaque, was awarded for the great achievement of running the line in the Central Manchester Sunday Football League Cup Final in season 1977/1978. It was presented by a very bored looking Mike Doyle.

The trophy has been languishing for many years in a dusty box in the attic. How could I have lived without it?

Six out of ten

I have just spotted that I am listed here. I may not be a barrel of laughs but I do get 'the "blog most likely to feature random John Cage performances" award'.

Who am I to disappoint my fans?

Managing the mail

One of my more frequent big speeches is about the dire quality of some management and its remoteness from, and ignorance of, the real work that we all have to do. This has been reinforced by a doctrine of managerialism that has de-democratised work, thereby empowering (and enriching) managers and elevating the curious notion that generic management skills are more important than any expertise in the industry or service to be managed. It would seem that appointing the chief executive of the Football Association to run the British postal service was an example of just such folly. I am not surprised that there is now a major industrial dispute and I know where my sympathies lie.

Then I get a short email from Will ordering me to read this from the London Review of Books. It is brilliant. You should all read it too. Here is the voice of reality, a picture of the world that ordinary workers inhabit, it is about day-to-day life experience, something that mangers can seldom even imagine. Though the article highlights something else as well - not ignorance but mendacity.

According to Royal Mail figures published in May, mail volume declined by 5.5 per cent over the preceding 12 months, and is predicted to fall by a further 10 per cent this year ‘due to the recession and the continuing growth of electronic communications such as email’. Every postman knows these figures are false. If the figures are down, how come I can’t get my round done in under four hours any more? How come I can work up to five hours at a stretch without time for a sit-down or a tea break? How come my knees nearly give way with the weight I have to carry? How come something snapped in my back as I was climbing out of the shower, so that I fell to the floor and had to take a week off work?

He provides a simple answer:

Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes. These are a standard size, big enough to carry a few hundred letters. The mail is sorted from these boxes, put into pigeon-holes representing the separate walks, and from there carried over to the frames. This is what is called ‘internal sorting’ and it is the job of the full-timers, who come into work early to do it. In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains, decided on by national agreement between the management and the union. That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150. This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10 per cent reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide.

Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. Our office was one of them. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters, actually carry 267 items of mail. This, then, explains how the Royal Mail can say that the figures are down, although every postman knows that volume is up. The figures are down all right, but only because they have been manipulated.

Who can honestly say that they have never experienced lousy decisions justified by dodgy data? And this can easily be made to happen if the real knowledge of the people who actually do the job, and who are often closer to the customer, is discounted, dismissed and labelled with words such as 'dinosaur' and 'luddite' or with derogatory clichés such as, 'people just don't like change'.

I once worked for a very good manager (there really are some you know). Whenever anything had gone wrong he had a simple maxim; "don't worry, I have friends in low places". It would soon be fixed. He worked on the basis of respect for those who did the job and saw his role as co-ordination not command. It is very simple. Most of the people who work on the front line are not obstacles, they are experts. Their knowledge is far more valuable than the snake oil of management theory. The denigration of the workforce and the elevation of the great talents who brought us the credit crunch into superheroes is one of the more unlikely episodes in a class war, one being waged, increasingly successfully, against workers, rather than by them.

Bad language

According to Peter Mandelson students are now "consumers of the higher education experience".

I despair.

Hate crimes

News from London:

Overweight people in London have launched a campaign to make the capital more fat-friendly.
It comes after one woman was beaten up on a train for being fat.

Now read some of the comments ranging from the abusive, "Why don't fat people simply stop stuffing their pie-holes?"; the unthinking, "I wish the obese would accept that they have a problem and start doing something about it"; to the oh so caring and understanding liberals, who call for "compassion" (I think they're the worst).

It's a classic moral panic. As people become sensitised to the definition of fat people as a 'problem', then us fatties become the target of abuse, resentment, pseudo-psychological diagnoses, ludicrous newspaper columns and, worst of all, condescension.

I am a person of the rotund persuasion. It isn't a problem. People come in various shapes and sizes and it has been the same throughout history. We are different, all of us. We can be healthy, sickly, active, lazy; fat or thin, tall or short, dark or fair. And one day we will all die. It is life, simply that.

Now the attitudes of the playground bully are infecting the panic-struck media and reaching politicians in search of a cause. Let us be. Anti-fat sentiment is pretty trivial. It is a far cry from the murderous brutality of racism, there is no Action T4 seeking out the obese, these permissible prejudices are normally just an irritation and inconvenience. But this rare act of public violence, highlights the damage that can be done when we lose a sense of proportion and relapse from reality into panic. And the result elsewhere is many more victims, treated far worse than us plumps.

Hat tip Kev

Riverdance - the reason

One for Terry methinks.



Thanks to Tim

Common practice

The only other Nobel award to garner any kind of attention after Obama's Peace Prize was the shared prize in economics to Elinor Ostrom. What got the media excited was the fact that she was the first woman to win a Nobel prize in economics, rather than the work that was being rewarded. I was amused to hear her respond to a bizarre and faintly patronising interviewer on BBC Radio 4 with a polite, steely charm.

Her work is an answer to the conclusions drawn by Garrett Hardin in his influential 1968 article The Tragedy of the Commons (reproduced in pdf form here) that,

...the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.

Instead, Ostrom found that the very rational self interest that Hardin felt would lead to the ecological devastation of common property could, and did, result in communal and collective self-regulation and ecological conservation.

Her work is an interesting critique of a spectrum of thought from the Right Libertarian's advocacy of enclosed private property organised through market exchanges to the statist advocacy of wholly collective ownership. Instead, it is perfectly possible, under certain conditions and in conjunction with other models, for ecologically sustainable production to be maintained through communally owned common property.

There are many reasons why I find this attractive, but one is the relationship it has to my own field of adult education. The history of adult education is a fascinating one, it has always been a social movement and a cause, rather than merely a service. It's origins lie in radical movements, working class self-help, Victorian philanthropy and idealists in the universities. Government funding enabled it to grow and flourish in the post-war period. And then it became an expendable luxury. Funding was withdrawn and what remained was directed towards employment skills. The provision that generations had build up was lost. And so, once again, it is reinventing itself through self-organisation and collective action. What this has meant is the loss of a comprehensive and easily accessible system, the gain is in ownership and control. And, perhaps, permanence, as adult education becomes the common property of those who use it.

From Hull to Manchester

I'm here. When I started unpacking I found that I had a football programme from the 1970's autographed by Jimmy Hill. Well I never.

Nearly there

My move from Hull finally takes place on Wednesday. I hate moving. I hoard. I have lived in the same house for more than thirteen years. I haven't thrown anything away for most of that time. I have now; mountains and mountains of stuff. When it is all over I will feel like this.

Banning pleasure

There was a really nice piece on Comment is Free (I don't type that often) about adult education by Sue Blackmore. Her attempt to do a sculpture evening course foundered on the funding regime that required accreditation with a formal syllabus expressed in learning outcomes. Hers is a classic restatement of what many of us have argued, that learning for the sake of it is both fun and useful. She concluded,

The best kind of learning is learning for its own sake – for the intrinsic reward of studying or learning a new skill. And that's all we oldies wanted to do – enjoy learning sculpture for a few weeks.

I like her sentiments, though regular readers of this blog might be surprised by the fact that I don't fully agree with her argument. There is no better or worse kind of learning. People can have mixed motives, instrumental and liberal, and either of them are fine. It depends what the student wants.

The first thing that struck me about her experience is that she was unlucky, her tutor was young. Us old lags know how to work the system to make the course fit the needs of the student, rather than the other way round. However, the mere fact that we need to do so, demonstrates that there is clearly something wrong with what is on offer.

Blackmore picks out a couple of things that irritated her. The first is the use of a syllabus with learning outcomes. Actually, it is important to have a syllabus, it shows that the tutor has thought about what is intended to be taught and has structured it well. A good scheme allows for flexibility and negotiation, the problem is if a syllabus is over-prescriptive. On the other hand, I have always been ambiguous about learning outcomes. In one sense they are positive in that they focus on what the student actually does, not just on what is taught. However, they can also be mechanistic, restrictive, and sometimes stupid and banal. It does depend how they are written. What I do know is that they can form the basis of endless and tedious debates about minutiae when you are trying to get your bloody courses approved. Written well and generically, they can be OK, but they provide ample opportunity for misuse.

The second thing she highlighted is the requirement of accreditation for funding. On this she misses the real issue. I have no problem with accreditation. A non-accredited course would have suited her, but not someone who wished to use their learning in another setting. She wanted to do some sculpture, someone else might have wanted to get into art college. An accredited class could easily allow both. However, this is the big problem. If doing the assessment for the accreditation is mandatory rather than voluntary, if the funding is dependent on the student completing the assessed work, then you start to exclude those who simply want to study for fun. And that process of driving out the non-vocational learner is a by-product of the instrumental neuroses of a government obsessed by dubious notions of the linkages between education and economics.

If a course is non-accredited it excludes people who need and want a qualification, if assessment is compulsory then it excludes those who want to study for the intrinsic pleasure of learning. The conclusion is obvious. The person who best knows what they want from a course is the student. Let them choose rather than force them down a path they do not want to go down and you will have a healthy, mixed group of people who are both having fun and studying seriously. And you know what, they both gain.

Tipping the topper to Will

Hard times

Sometimes it is the way articles are juxtaposed that brings home the injustices of this world. Yesterday, there was this - Emin threatens to quit Britain over tax - another piece of celebrity whining. There you are, famous, successful and wildly rich and what do you do? Count your blessings? Be thankful that you live in a country that gave you the opportunity? No. You moan, grumble, wallow in self pity and feel hard done to.

"This Labour government has had no understanding for the arts," she told the Sunday Times. "At least in France their politicians have always understood the importance of culture and they have traditionally helped out artists with subsidy and some tax advantages."

Bloody hell, she is hardly starving in a garret is she? A few million tucked away and she wants a subsidy and a tax break?

There has been loads of comment on her in the press, little of it sympathetic to her plight, and I wouldn't have posted on the article if this piece had not been sitting next to it.

Benefit support for asylum seekers is to be cut from tomorrow to £5 a day – just over half of what the government says a person needs to live on, according to refugee welfare agencies.

The change means the weekly rate for a single asylum seeker over 25 who is destitute and asks for support will be reduced from £42.16 to £35.13 a week.

Do I need to say more?

A champion day

The Indian summer gave way to an Autumn chill, but it was one of the nicest days out in the Rugby League calendar, what is now called the Co-operative Championship Finals Day, the grand finals for the lower leagues. Three matches for the price of one is a good deal, though beyond the interest or attention span of many fans who just come to see their own club and use the other games to get pissed. Despite the vast amount of drink, it is an amiable, celebratory event and this time they produced dramatic games.

The crowd was up this year, but it wasn't the sell-out event that it was when promotion to Super League was on offer for the winners of the Championship. Mind you, though I still don't like it, there might be something to be said for a lack of automatic promotion this time round. The final between Halifax and Barrow was a compelling, close match. It marked the revival of two grand old clubs. Barrow's victory was impressive, coming the season after they were promoted from league one, and the club are ambitious. Are they ready for Super League though? I have my doubts, not that unreadiness deterred the RFL giving Celtic Crusaders a place last season.

My highlights of the day were: observing the vast capacity for alcohol of the average Halifax fan; seeing two victorious Bramley players, still in their kit, standing outside the stadium entrance having a fag after their victory as smoking is banned inside; and, finally, the barnstorming late try by the magnificently named Oldham forward, Wayne Kerr (what were his parents thinking?).

Sunny days

This seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do to The Sun.

The Labour Party has come over all peevish because Rupert Murdoch's tabloid has decided it isn't going to support Labour any more.

Perhaps a better question to ask is why an ideologically committed right-wing newspaper that worshipped Margaret Thatcher, and which comes from the same stable that gave Fox News to the USA, should find it so comfortable to support the Labour Party in the first place? Shouldn't Labour people should be more troubled by the Sun's backing than its opposition?

Meanwhile, Tories gather round the piano:

Self-indulgence

I was expecting to be sad, I wasn't expecting to be so distressed. Retiring from Hull was always going to be difficult, it was such a big part of my life. I would never have looked for a deal at my age without the changes that are affecting adult education everywhere. And I have to admit that I wept, not just for me or because I was leaving my friends, but for that marvellous, life-enhancing, vitally necessary and shamefully betrayed world of adult education.

Its time will come again and even now it is resurrecting itself through all sorts of self-help and voluntary groups. Something so integral to being human, a human need as well as a human right, will always be a cause to be fought for, politically by egalitarians and radicals, and in ordinary ways by people who simply see it as something that they enjoy and that, in its own way, brings a form of liberation.

I will be grieving for some time, though today I started a new part-time job, ironically in a building that used to be an adult education college, which was also where I started my teaching career some twenty-seven years ago. Full circle.

Ships and rats 2

Tomorrow is the last day before I take early retirement and desert the University of Hull. One more day in full employment, one more day in the company of my many friends in the Centre, one more day in my office - a former bedroom in a converted terrace house, looking out on some parking spaces and the trees that surround us, now filled with bare shelves and empty box files - just one more day.

It will be emotional; adult education is an emotional business, the stuff of dreams and fears, of changing lives. And tomorrow the emotions will be very mixed. I am distraught at leaving, upset that it is necessary, relieved to be starting out again and happily excited by the future.

I tried to find a suitably slick YouTube to mark the occasion, but instead settled on the this, Leaving Teaching, by the late Canadian poet George Johnston. It is beautiful, perceptive, and lyrical. He sees his retirement as a little death, a recognition of the sufficiency of life.

Sod that! Despite the temptation, I shall not "deteriorate amid bucolic dreams". Retiring is not about teaching my heart to die, but to live. Domestic happiness will be the basis for the revival of my restless energy. Life remains to be grabbed and so I will continue teaching part-time, start writing seriously and ignore the inevitable disintegration of age, holding to the conviction that I remain as gorgeous as any gilded youth. And for long spells I will go to Greece, sit under the vine or by the olive wood fire and be gloriously, sensuously alive. I may even continue to blog.

Nothing can break the friendships I made or my huge repect for the people of the City of Hull, some of whom drop by here. Leaving will be hard, arriving will be fun.

(Thanks to Aphroula for the link to the poem)

Rats, ships etc

As the iceberg looms, this says much about the New Labour project:

Lord Mandelson has disclosed that he is ready to accept a job under a future Conservative government.

Oh yes, the 'big tent' with its ideological vacuum is great vehicle for personal ambition. Besides anyone who use a phrase like, "asset base" to describe his work experience should be barred from office on the basis of failing the fit and proper jargon test. Depressing.

Moving

One thing about moving is the way that you revisit your past as part of the process. And as I shift hundreds of books from Hull to Manchester, I see the people and places that are intertwined with them. I remember the houses where I first read them, the people who gave them to me or told me that I must read them. I think back to the times when I was a student and of the groups I have taught. Then there are those I have known who have written some of them, all remembered as I turn the pages and look at the spines before placing them in a cardboard box to be relocated to another set of shelves.

So, together with Norm, I despair of the endless 'death of the book' guff that infects the media. And when he points out that the reason for the persistence of bookshelves is not exhibitionism but utility, I would add that they are also a map of your life. Books are objects of emotional attachment; of love, friendship, interest and irritation - and sometimes guilt - 'I will get around to reading it one day' will probably be my dying words.

Infinity

Thanks to Will

Sometimes ...

...there are moments. I was with friends from work and Dennis. We pretended we were having a meal out for my birthday, but we all knew it was because I am going away. And he had painted me a picture - semi abstract and swirling, snake like. He had named it, "a bookworm". I know what it meant and I know that wherever I am, for the rest of my days, that painting will be there, surrounded by books. A reminder, not just of Dennis, but of the power of adult education; a life saved and a life well lived.

An icy chill

With my retirement and move coming up horrifyingly quickly, I have little time to do anything but to re-post any good things I see. And this is good; a top photographer engages with global warming through dramatic photography of the retreat of glaciers.


Via

An ageing plump

Another year older today so before going out for a birthday meal I though I would post something touching and sentimental. I know Karen will like it.

The struggle continues

From Iran

The unusual thing is that these basijis are now wearing black-cloth masks to hide their identity from passers-by.....previously it was the demonstrators who wore masks but now it is the basijis who are forced to do so - as citizens will beat them up and burn their motorcycles if they catch them alone somewhere."

It's not over, even if it isn't in the headlines.

Catholic tastes

Bits of a dead nun are attracting crowds. Andrew Brown doesn't think this is odd.

If anyone thinks this is strange and medieval, they should perhaps ask themselves what happens when football trophies are put on display today.

I tell you what happens. Fans think, 'oh good, my team won the cup. Hooray'. They don't think, 'I'm cured'. (Mind you, if a Rugby League trophy appeared at Swinton, it would be a bloody miracle).

Amidst the St Thérèse fridge magnets, there are always the hopeful, the tragic and the gullible.

One woman said that she became pregnant, after being told she could not, when she prayed to St Thérèse.

I'm sorry, but I think she must have been doing something else as well.

Come back the Enlightenment, all is forgiven.

Support and supporters

Ben Cohen is quick off the mark with the UN Human Rights Council's report on the Gaza conflict, which was released yesterday, seeing it as a distortion. At 575 pages I certainly haven't read it all and, no doubt, never will.

The report gives the official Israeli army objectives for the operation:

The Operation was limited to what the IDF believed necessary to accomplish its objectives: to stop the bombardment of Israeli civilians by destroying and damaging the mortar and rocket launching apparatus and its supporting infrastructure, and to improve the safety and security of Southern Israel and its residents by reducing the ability of Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza to carry out future attacks. (para 1196)

Much hangs on the interpretation of the term "supporting infrastructure". I would have thought that a military understanding would be in terms of command and control, supply lines and the like. Yet the report states:

It is not far-fetched for the Mission to consider that Israel regards very large sections of the Gazan civilian population as part of the “supporting infrastructure”. (para 1206)

In paragraph 1680 the report goes one stage further and talks about how the "Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole".

The interchangeability of the words "section" and "whole" is an imprecision that is both shoddy and disturbing, and it is this breathtaking exaggeration that Cohen picks up on, saying,

This claim - essentially, that Israel was waging war against every man, woman and child in Gaza - is just astounding.

He then attempts to refute it through an analysis of casualty statistics and quotes Richard Kemp speaking about the attempts made to avoid civilian deaths. But does this miss the point?

To answer the question we have to go back to the term "supporting infrastructure". The report suggests that the Israeli interpretation was that this meant the Hamas movement itself, hardly unreasonable given the nature of an organisation partial to lobbing missiles at civilian populations. In its wake comes more dubious assertions. The report suggests that because Hamas were clear election winners, Israel saw the voters themselves as legitimate targets (para 1206). This is highly problematic, as is the interpretation of the quoted statement by Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Harel that the IDF were hitting Hamas government structures as "the intentional targeting of civilian objects" (para 1208). How far can a belligerent organisation like Hamas really be seen as civilian?

Just when you think that the Mission is clutching at straws, then comes this. The report sees the strategy followed in Gaza as being precisely in line with the so called Dahiya Doctrine, something that in the past has been used as an example of Israel's inherent wickedness by the anti-Zionists, but which has also drawn sharp criticism from the pro-Israeli left. The stated aim of this strategy is not to kill people but destroy their infrastructure. This assertion is supported by some disturbing statements by leading politicians:

On 6 January 2009, during the military operations in Gaza, Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai stated: "It [should be] possible to destroy Gaza, so they will understand not to mess with us”. He added that “it is a great opportunity to demolish thousands of houses of all the terrorists, so they will think twice before they launch rockets”. "I hope the operation will come to an end with great achievements and with the complete destruction of terrorism and Hamas. In my opinion, they should be razed to the ground, so thousands of houses, tunnels and industries will be demolished”. He added that "residents of the South are strengthening us, so the operation will continue until a total destruction of Hamas [is achieved]. (para 1200)

And in paragraph 1201,

On 2 February 2009, after the end of the military operations, Eli Yishai went on: “Even if the rockets fall in an open air or to the sea, we should hit their infrastructure, and destroy 100 homes for every rocket fired.”

It seems that some politicians, at least, if correctly quoted, were not overly fussy about distinguishing between the physical infrastructure of Hamas and the population as a whole. The report continues:

It is in the context of comments such as these that the massive destruction of businesses, agricultural land, chicken farms and residential houses has to be understood. In particular, the Mission notes the large-scale destruction that occurred in the days leading up to the end of the operations. During the withdrawal phase it appears that possibly thousands of homes were destroyed. (para 1203)

If the target was the lives of the civilian population, if it was the war of extermination stubbornly lodged in the imaginations of anti-Israeli propagandists, then it is clear that the casualty statistics are of the utmost relevance; there would have been slaughter on an appalling scale. If the target was civilian infrastructure, then they are less important (except, of course, for the utter misery caused) for understanding the nature of the war. Instead we would need to look at the extent and nature of the damage to Gaza's homes, roads, farms and factories.

From what I have read, the report's language is slippery and the elision between lives, property and civilian infrastructure leaves it open to misuse and misreporting by apologists and accusers alike. What is more, this obstructs a proper analysis of the events and the examination of the appropriateness or otherwise of the assault. The harrowing pictures we saw on our TV screens are lost from view behind the smokescreen of imprecision as the partisans get to work. Whether this was the product of bad drafting or bad faith is something I cannot answer.

Bad arguments

An accusation of bad faith is a neat way of dodging an argument. It claims the moral high ground and avoids saying anything substantive. There was a perfect example today in the obituary of Norman Borlaug, the scientist behind the Green Revolution.

The long-term cost of depending on Borlaug's new varieties, said eminent critics such as ecologist Vandana Shiva in India, was reduced soil fertility, reduced genetic diversity, soil erosion and increased vulnerability to pests. Not only did Borlaug's "high-yielding" seeds demand expensive fertilisers, they also needed more water. Both were in short supply, and the revolution in plant breeding was said to have led to rural impoverishment, increased debt, social inequality and the displacement of vast numbers of peasant farmers.

Borlaug had a robust reply. He acknowledged that his Green revolution had not "transformed the world into Utopia", but added that western environmental lobbyists were often elitists. "They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger," he said. "If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists were trying to deny them these things."

Ah, three sins in one. "Western" - obviously a crime, only partly offset by Shiva actually being Indian. "Elitist" - of course, especially if they are environmentalists and fashionable. Now for the killer - remote from reality, without compassion or experience, unlike him of course.

This neatly sidesteps the main claim of his critics, that the Green Revolution had a devastating impact on the rural poor and the landless in the developing world. Thus, whilst output rose, the technology favoured global commercial monopolies, adversely affected the distribution of wealth, and meant that poverty increased and systemic hunger grew alongside food surpluses. It is a serious criticism rooted in a different model of development economics, the real experiences of rural communities and anger at the dispossession, destitution and starvation of the poor. It is not a spurious indulgence of ignorant hippies.

Borlaug was a serious and important figure and I am not qualified to offer a judgement on the debate. However, I wince at the description of bluster as "robust". (Mind you that was as nothing compared to this mess, with which the Guardian, once again, surpassed itself).

For an overview of Shiva's views, here she is speaking in the United States earlier this year (with the occasional dubious rhetorical flourish of her own). It's worth fifty minutes of your time.

The season's over

Of the many changes Rugby League keeps making, the one they got right was the play off system. Each end of season is now packed with dramatic matches on which the whole year turns. Swinton just managed to sneak into them, then failed heroically in their elimination fixture at Oldham. But what a game! Length of the field tries, dramatic mistakes at crucial times, no little skill and tough, bruising tackling as players gave everything. Both sides had to fight back from deficits and the result was in balance until the final hooter.

Sport can do that sometimes, leave you with a smile on your face, even in defeat, and fill you with admiration for human endeavour and the exercise of skills that you could never hope to possess. It has its own aesthetic. I have booked my Grand Final tickets; one day, perhaps, it will be for Swinton ... well sport is also a vehicle for dreams.

Things you can learn ...

... from the Internet.

In 1936 music hall comedian Hector Thaxter became the first man to say “Arse” on the radio.

Well I never.

Quote of the weekend

From Thomas Keneally

"I like older women, but now they're younger than I am"

I'm getting to know what he means.

Free speech

It was this news that got me to revisit an old draft post that I never got around to finishing. It seems to be time to start thinking about free speech again.

Freedom of speech, thought and conscience is central to a civilised society. If you doubt it, look at any country without it or where it is severely curtailed, where people are murdered for trying to tell the truth, locked up and facing a show trial for reporting the inconvenient resistance of an outraged people, or even worn down with the daily banality of pretence at obeisance to an official truth, as beautifully described by Czeslaw Milosz:

Informing ... is the basis of each man's fear of his fellow-men. Work in an office or factory is hard not only because of the amount of labor required, but even more because of the need to be on guard against omnipresent and vigilant eyes and ears. After work one goes to political meetings or special lectures, thus lengthening a day that is without a moment of relaxation or spontaneity. The people one talks with may seem relaxed and careless, sympathetic and indignant, but if they appear so, it is only to arouse corresponding attitudes and to extract confidences which they can report to their superiors.

So why then are we being so pusillanimous about defending free speech, why are we so feeble in the face of those who would destroy it, why do we accord the same status to lies that we do to truth, why do we invite its enemies on to Question Time?

For me the answer is that the liberalism of our days is not robust, combative, radical; it is complacent, lazy, deluded. It thinks that you can effectively confront fascism with reasoned arguments.

Have these liberals learnt nothing from history? Reasoned debate can only take you so far. And, though they happily quote John Stuart Mill they don't seem to have thought much about what he actually had to say.

Mill's essay On Liberty offers a splendid defence of freedom of thought:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

This is superficially straightforward. One person's right, by definition, imposes a duty on others, and specifically on governments, to respect it. Here the right to free speech imposes a duty not to deny such a right to anyone, whatever their opinion. However, it does not entail a duty to broadcast their views. These two are often confused. Just because you may not criminalise views you despise, it does not mean that you have to put them on your TV screens.

The right to free speech implies a negative duty to refrain from suppression, censorship and prosecution. It is not a positive obligation to promote, facilitate and host opinions that you, or any institution you may be a member of, find obnoxious. And that applies as much to a public body. The law may insist on a party political broadcast, but appearing on a politically based entertainment programme? No, that is not a legal obligation, it is, rather, an editorial choice. And there is a suspicion that audience size may just have been a factor in the decision.

But there is more. Mill provides three main utilitarian justifications for liberty of speech. The first two, that its restriction is an assumption of infallibility on the part of the censor and that the opinion suppressed may, in fact, be true are commonplace. It is his third that I find the most interesting.

Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience

In other words, Mill has a dialectical theory of truth; it emerges, develops and is refined by the conflict of ideas. More than that, without contest, it dies. So what duty does this impose on others? I would argue that it most certainly doesn't insist on quiescence, let alone acceptance, instead it creates a duty to be a partisan on behalf of truth. Freedom of speech is an active and combative concept.

So how is that combat to take place? I am certain that Mill had in mind the civilized contest of the debating chamber and the printing press. These were the instruments of his time. I am equally sure that he was talking about the necessity of contest in doctrine rather than the disputation of clear and incontrovertible empirical fact. However, in his reliance on human reason alone, he is on much weaker ground. Reason founders on the rock of irrational belief and malign ideologies. Truth may win out in the long term, as I think Mill assumed, but in the short term it can be overwhelmed, leaving behind a pile of corpses.

An example. The Civil Rights campaigners of the 60's did not sit with white racists in the TV studios and debate with them until they saw sense. They sat at segregated lunch counters, registered to vote, took to the streets, faced the beatings and the jailings, and risked their lives until they forced the federal government to confront the reality of segregation and take action as consciences stirred. That activism was both an exercise of free speech and of the duty to confront. Out of that struggle came desegregation, if not equality. Engaging with peoples' emotions, their gut instincts, their consciences, is a way of springing their reason into action.

The BNP is searching for legitimacy. It is their tactic, as it was Hitler's during his accession to power (together with control of the streets by force). The act of denying them legitimacy, as in not inviting them to appear as respectable guests of TV programmes, does not infringe their free speech, no one is stopping them printing material, holding meetings on premises where people are prepared to admit them, or removing their sites from the internet. No, it is in itself a symbolic act of free speech. It says that 'your views are not acceptable', 'you may have won seats in elections, but we will only give you the barest minimum that the law insists on', it says to the whole of society, 'they are illegitimate'. It is a militant assertion of common values. It is, once more, the exercise of the duty to contest.

Then again, my attempt to redefine speech as action leads me into pitfalls. How far do we go? Is terrorism free speech? By engaging with emotion do we thereby abandon reason? On closer examination, Mill's principles, too, appear slippery and imprecise. This shows that principle can only take you so far. We cannot escape the need for moral choice, to make a judgement. Such moral judgements may be based on instinctive emotion, a sense of right and wrong, but that too is grounded in real historical experience. And how much experience do we need?

I see us facing a choice between a passive and active liberalism. The one is based on the assumption that reason will prevail, it is urbane and civilised. The other comes from a sense of alarm at the power of an irrational evil that needs to be confronted. It accepts the necessity of free speech but refuses any notion of moral equivalence and equal legitimacy. Its faith in the power of reason is limited. It urges action. And every time I read and re-read Mill, especially in the light of the conflicts of his day, I am convinced that he was an activist.

So, to what Voltaire didn't say, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, we should add "and I take up the duty to confront, condemn, ridicule and, if I choose, ignore or take action against dangerous lies and nonsense. And, what is more, I feel no compunction to help you spread them". It appears the BBC thinks otherwise.

The bridge of thighs

It's a bit like a seance. Now Will doesn't have a blog he is channelling from the other world through those of us still blogging. Paulie picked up these defences of the BBC from him, a consistent theme of his blog.

My tip of the week was certainly dear to my heart:

Could big thighs protect against heart disease?

Stop trying to slim down those thunder thighs – they may be protecting you from major health problems, according to new research. Surprisingly, it found that people with thinner-than-average thighs may have a higher risk of heart problems or an earlier death.

Hmm... this item might be a case for Ben Goldacre.

Climate

It's chucking it down - again. The heating is on - again. At least I don't live on Skye. That would test George's poetic appreciation of rain. Here is my 10-10 pledge. I will cut down my flying; I will fly to Greece once and bloody stay there.

What about work? Why work? (Ta Will)

A Smyrna Air

If she loves me and it is a dream
May I never waken from it.
In the sweetness of the dawn,
I pray, let my soul fly from me.

Reality and unreality

I hate reality TV. It isn't real and is often a vehicle for narcissism or exploitation. What I really dislike though is my vulnerability to being hooked by its voyeuristic addictiveness. So I avoid it normally, but not last night. I watched Benefit Busters, a series on the work of a private training agency. I watched because I thought it would make me angry, something I enjoy in a perverse sort of way, and because it was set in Hull. Hull is an easy pick as it hits so many indicators of deprivation and annoyingly that is all the media ever seem to portray, despite it being a good city and a great place to live.

The programme was a form of poverty tourism of course, though the portrayal of claimants was not unsympathetic. Overall, a couple of things struck me. The first was the utter servility that was required of the unemployed as supplicants for work or benefits, a graphic display of their powerlessness. The second was the corrosive effects of the much vaunted 'flexible workforce', or casualised agency working, all that was available given the recession.

There was one outstanding moment when a young woman described her lack of luck in life and said she wished she had been to university. There it was again, the aspiration that lurks unmet in so many corners of Britain. This is what lifelong learning is for, this is one of the many things adult education should be doing and I have no doubt that universities should be a big part of it, they should be at the heart of their communities.

So what is happening? Funding is in short supply and lifelong learning is contracting. In the meantime fat contracts are being thrown at private training providers, to do what? Well, as I watched the cynical (intelligent, realistic, if ultimately self-destructive) being labelled as 'unmotivated', I thought that the classic comedy, The League of Gentlemen, was pretty close to being reality TV itself.

Paying for part-time

Thanks to Roger, in comments on the post below, for bringing this Policy Exchange report on the funding of part-time learning to my attention. I especially appreciated his caveat, "I normally wouldn't touch anything from David Cameron's allegedly favourite think tank with a very long barge pole".

There is actually a lot of sense in the paper and it graphically demonstrates the utter illogicality of the lower level of support for part-time students, especially as part-time study is often more effective at hitting many of the government's key objectives.

There was one thing that I thought was off beam though when they wrote,

The boom in student applications has been driven in part by major growth in interest from older students, many of whom may have preferred to study part-time alongside a job if only there was proper help available from the Government.

Actually, anecdotal evidence seems suggest that the reason for the growth in applications from mature students is not that they can't get the support to study whilst working but that they have lost their job due to the recession. For some this is a great opportunity to do something different. If work has given you up, then you don't have to take the risk of giving work up to follow your dreams. That is what happened to me. Made redundant in the recession of 1977, I got into university in 1978 thinking that after three years there would be plenty of jobs again. Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979. Ah.

Probably the most eye-catching bit for me was the light the report threw on policy making. It is critical of the new University Challenge initiative and recommends diverting funding from it to support part-time learning. (They would call it University Challenge wouldn't they? Mind you, inevitably, the report is called Educating Rita?)

Sources close to the Government say that University Challenge was a back-of-an-envelope strategy, patched together as a sign that the Government cared about regeneration following the collapse of the much-vaunted super casinos scheme in early 2008. Big universities are often the largest or second largest employer in a city, and thus provide a considerable boost in terms of jobs, revenue, skills and aspirations. If you ignore the fact that a university cannot really be developed for £5 million or £10 million, investing in new higher education institutions seemed an obvious political answer.

Yikes. So learning is an emergency replacement for gambling? And a poorly thought out one at that.

One of the most ghastly clichés that New Labour has been prone to trotting out is the need for "joined up thinking". If you want to see an example of the opposite, something incoherent, contradictory and disjointed, look at Lifelong Learning policy and, whatever the result of the forthcoming general election, I have little hope of anything better for poor old battered and marginalised adult education.

Equality matters

The line being rolled out at the start of the recession was that this time it was different. The middle classes were the ones being hit. It was the South not the North that was suffering. Now the truth is becoming apparent.

Youth unemployment is rocketing in the UK and this excellent post from Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammed about the situation in the United States makes it absolutely clear that recession exacerbates social divisions. It is the weak that suffer most, even to the extent of losing some of the fragile individual gains of the past. And in the USA the big division is race.

Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment—or, we should say, re-impoverishment--of African Americans as a group.

She continues

For African Americans – and to a large extent, Latinos – the recession is over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During the seven-year long black recession, one third of black children lived in poverty and black unemployment—even among college graduates-- consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment. That was the black recession. What’s happening now is a depression.

This is another reminder of how the smug complacency of the boom years not only ignored the instability of the financial instruments on which it rested, but also neglected to address the continuing corrosive effect of economic and social inequality and the impoverishment of those at the bottom, even in times of plenty.

Back

And it is a hard place to leave.

Thought for the day

But the experience of this age has proven that metaphysical quantities do not exist apart from materials, and hence humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal.

Voltarine de Cleyre (1866-1912)

In Defense of Emma Goldman

Eat, drink and be merry

Monday

Parents should not put ham or salami in their children's packed lunches because processed meat increases the risk of developing cancer, experts in the disease are warning ...

"It makes sense for children to adopt a healthy adult eating pattern from the age of five. WCRF advises it is best to avoid it [processed meat] as well as many of the habits we develop as children last into adulthood."

Sunday

Eating disorder charities are reporting a rise in the number of people suffering from a serious psychological condition characterised by an obsession with healthy eating ... orthorexia nervosa

The obsession about which foods are "good" and which are "bad" means orthorexics can end up malnourished. Their dietary restrictions commonly cause sufferers to feel proud of their "virtuous" behaviour even if it means that eating becomes so stressful their personal relationships can come under pressure and they become socially isolated.

From the UN World Food Programme

1.02 billion people do not have enough to eat - more than the populations of USA, Canada and the European Union ... 25,000 people (adults and children) die every day from hunger and related causes ...

And we worry about a bit of salami.

Telling lies

Whilst I was off-line reading my day old copy of the Guardian, the dishonest and blatant lies being told about the NHS by the American right in an attempt to derail Obama's health reforms, produced a combination of outrage and a sense of 'what on earth are they going on about?'. Of course, this farrago of nonsense would not have been complete without the ubiquitous and illiterate use of the adjective 'Orwellian' to attack the plans, when Orwell himself both supported the Labour government and its introduction of universal state health care.

So will they win? Is health care dead? That depends on political will. Some encouragement for Obama comes from Joe Bageant's entertaining and bitterly angry book about redneck society, Deer Hunting with Jesus. Bageant writes about working class life in Winchester, Virginia, a home town he left physically and intellectually. It is a flawed account but doesn't fall into the apologist trap of saying that there might be a rational basis for prejudice. Instead he argues that there is a huge, systemic failure of education that, conveniently for the powerful, weds the working class to doctrines that are tailor made for its vicious exploitation. But even inside the Rapture-ready, Bible-bashing, Republican-voting heartlands, people can spot their real interests.

Bageant interviews Dottie, 59 years old, 300 lbs, started work at 13, married at 15 and now incapable of working, but can still belt out Patsy Kline covers in clubs and bars. He writes,

Although it might seem that my people use the voting booth as an instrument of self-flagellation, the truth is that Dottie would vote for any candidate - black, white, crippled, blind or crazy - who she thought would actually help her. I know because I have asked her if she would vote for a candidate who wanted a national health care program. "Vote for him? I'd go down on him!" Voter approval does not get much stronger than that.

The support is there if Obama has the courage to face down the corporate terrorists and the media poison merchants with their British collaborators. His actions could define his presidency. Though if he wins, I suggest that he gives Dottie a miss.

Restored communications

Contrary to rumours, I have not been set alight, the computer crash took on epic proportions, everything has had to be reinstalled and all files and software have been lost on this machine. And the damn scam of not providing an operating system disc with a Windows computer - unless you buy it separately of course - held things up. It is an old computer though and is about to join me in being pensioned off.

Now it is functioning again and posting will resume, just before I head back to England at the end of the week. In the meantime, I have been having fun discovering the remains of a long dead rat, destroying a wasps' nest, getting rid of cockroaches and other simple country pleasures. I have also been reading good books, eating gorgeous food and, sorry UK readers, basking in beautiful weather. The days have been hot and the nights cool enough to require a jumper as you sit out under a canopy of stars, sipping wine and watching the neighbours' cat climb up the vine and fall off onto the sunshade. Bucolic bliss.

Incommunicado

There will be a hiatus in posting, the Greek computer has died. Repairs may or may not be affected soon. I will have to have a real holiday.

Free Maziar Bahari

My nephew has emailed me about his friend and colleague Maziar Bahari, the Canadian/Iranian journalist and film maker. He is one of around 100 people on trial in Tehran for organising or participating in the demonstrations following the presidential elections. Details can be found here and the online petition is here.

Dancin' in the street

The village doesn't have a plateia so when a summer musical event happens, the band have to set up on the jetty, flanked by a couple of tavernas on one side and an ouzeri on the other. They face the road, which is still open for cars and for people walking up and down, whilst on the other side there are a few rows of chairs for the audience. The village is packed and the atmosphere is noisy, chaotic and fun.

Last night the band played for nearly five hours non-stop until late. The star turn was the skinny pappous, dancing with an Andy Capp style flat cap and a fag hanging out of his mouth.

This rough video gives a feel of the night.