2015 has been eventful, and for my brief review of the year I am going to focus on what I think are the moments of most enduring significance. These will tend to be scientific and technological developments whose implications I expect to be more far reaching that political ephemera.
The year included events that made us reflect on what it meant to be human. On 10 September the discovery of an extinct species of homonin was announced. Homo naledi remains had been found at a cave in South Africa. It would seem the individuals had been left in a chamber in a cave system that was difficult to access and was probably only used for ritual purposes. Although they were between 2 and 3 million years old, it seems likely they had been left there during the performance of a funeral ceremony. The species shared with us our modern human awareness of our own mortality.
But although it was not met with perhaps the loudest fanfare, I believe the single most important event in 2015 related, not to our origin as a species, but to our destiny. At the beginning of December, as I have discussed elsewhere, there was a joint meeting of the American and Chinese academies of science to discuss a moratorium on editing human germ line genes. The technology that makes us able to transcend natural selection and vault the generations over which it operates presents opportunities to cure otherwise incurable conditions. However, the attendant risks are existential, as it is possible now to completely rewrite in a single generation what it is that determines who we are at a genetic level.
Other developments have far reaching consequences about our destiny as a species. The New Horizons space probe reached Pluto in July, completing the preliminary phase of our exploration of the Solar System. Back on Earth, the economics of space flight look likely to be revolutionised by advances in reusable launch systems. The Blue Origin New Shepard and SpaceX Falcon 9 systems both successfully landed their primary stages after use, bringing us closer to an era in which an entire launch system is routinely used over and over, simply being refuelled between launches.
This brings me to the title of this article. I have discussed elsewhere the economic and social developments that are required if we are to progress beyond a mere "campfire" economy foraging for energy in an unplanned and unsustainable manner towards one whose sustainable energy consumption merits description in terms of the Kardashev scale. This is becoming increasingly urgent as we consider the impact of anthropogenic climate change, as was discussed at the historic COP21 meeting in Paris in December.
A Kardashev Type I civilisation would use launch vehicles that were recycled and whose fuel was synthesised using highly efficient renewable energy resources. These could be of the sort discussed above or possibly a space elevator to geosynchronous orbit. This suggests to me a number that can be defined to characterise in more detail the sort of Kardashev Type I civilisation the Earth can sustain.
How long would it take for solar irradiation of a square metre of the Earth to generate the energy needed to put one kilogram in geosynchronous orbit?
By my (very rough) reckoning, about 14 hours. The Earth offers a Kardashev Type I civilisation an intrinsic launch countdown of 14 hours per kilogram per square metre.
Thursday, 31 December 2015
Thursday, 24 December 2015
Psychopath recites seasonal platitudes
David Cameron, in his 2015 Christmas message, says "As a Christian country, we must remember what [Christ's] birth represents: peace, mercy, goodwill and, above all, hope"
"Christian"; "Peace"; "Mercy"; "Goodwill"; "Hope".
At first glance it seems surreal that an individual who is a war-monger abroad, who is content to allow food banks to replace benefits at home,
who is presiding over the slow voluntary holocaust of the disabled as cuts drive them to despair and suicide, for whom the very act of government itself is merely the administration of our transition from a nation of citizens to an accounting unit of abject corporate chattels, should utter these words.
Is it a joke?
Or does he really not actually understand the meaning of words. Is his disconnection from reality so complete he finds their semantic content as slippery as an eel that eludes his grasp.
Why does it seem to us that he deploys words such as "peace" and "hope" in a way that is not just inaccurate or insincere - as politicians often are - but in a way that is somehow unnerving?
It is the sincerity of the psychopath that unnerves us. He means what he says to the extent possible for someone who doesn't know what the words he says mean. We are receiving lectures on colour from the colour blind.
As ever, there is some sort of psychopathic algebra of language at work here. Words do not carry meaning for David in the same way they do for you or me. They are like cards in a game, with symbols written on them that have no intrinsic meaning, but which must be shuffled and dealt according to some arbitrary rules in order for him to succeed.
That is why the word "peace" is offered here when "war" was played so successfully a few weeks ago. All that matters to the psychopath is the cards on the table now, and these make "peace" part of a winning hand on this occasion.
The psychopath has no ideology, which makes being a "Christian" when required all the more easy. "Mercy", "goodwill" and "hope"? We are all just beads on an abacus that David's handlers in the City toy with as they calculate our futures.
There is a Christmas message David could have given that rings true.
But condemning the massacre of innocents in Syria? Advocating the expulsion of money lenders from the Square Mile? Finding somewhere to stay for homeless people in the middle of winter when there is no room at the inn? Gathering kings from distant lands to commit themselves to a message of peace?
These are ideas that convey a contemporary relevance only accessible to those who know what the original words meant in the first place.
"Christian"; "Peace"; "Mercy"; "Goodwill"; "Hope".
At first glance it seems surreal that an individual who is a war-monger abroad, who is content to allow food banks to replace benefits at home,
who is presiding over the slow voluntary holocaust of the disabled as cuts drive them to despair and suicide, for whom the very act of government itself is merely the administration of our transition from a nation of citizens to an accounting unit of abject corporate chattels, should utter these words.
Is it a joke?
Or does he really not actually understand the meaning of words. Is his disconnection from reality so complete he finds their semantic content as slippery as an eel that eludes his grasp.
Why does it seem to us that he deploys words such as "peace" and "hope" in a way that is not just inaccurate or insincere - as politicians often are - but in a way that is somehow unnerving?
It is the sincerity of the psychopath that unnerves us. He means what he says to the extent possible for someone who doesn't know what the words he says mean. We are receiving lectures on colour from the colour blind.
As ever, there is some sort of psychopathic algebra of language at work here. Words do not carry meaning for David in the same way they do for you or me. They are like cards in a game, with symbols written on them that have no intrinsic meaning, but which must be shuffled and dealt according to some arbitrary rules in order for him to succeed.
That is why the word "peace" is offered here when "war" was played so successfully a few weeks ago. All that matters to the psychopath is the cards on the table now, and these make "peace" part of a winning hand on this occasion.
The psychopath has no ideology, which makes being a "Christian" when required all the more easy. "Mercy", "goodwill" and "hope"? We are all just beads on an abacus that David's handlers in the City toy with as they calculate our futures.
There is a Christmas message David could have given that rings true.
But condemning the massacre of innocents in Syria? Advocating the expulsion of money lenders from the Square Mile? Finding somewhere to stay for homeless people in the middle of winter when there is no room at the inn? Gathering kings from distant lands to commit themselves to a message of peace?
These are ideas that convey a contemporary relevance only accessible to those who know what the original words meant in the first place.
Wednesday, 23 December 2015
Monday, 21 December 2015
Bothering the neighbours
That's a large Dalwhinnie in the glass ... and it's half part eleven at night ...
James Gregory
"Let in the sun's rays by a small hole to a darkened house, and at the hole place a feather (the more delicate and white the better for this purpose), and it shall direct to a white wall or paper opposite to it a number of small circles and ovals (if I mistake them not) whereof one is somewhat white (to wit, the middle which is opposite the Sun) and all the rest severally coloured. I would gladly hear Mr. Newton's thoughts of it"
Thus James Gregory, the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, described in the 1670s his observations of the world's first diffraction grating, a seagull feather he had collected while walking in the streets of St Andrews. Significantly, his closing reference to Isaac Newton is typical of his desire to avoid priority disputes. This caused a reluctance to publish that has since amounted to an abdication of his proper place in history as one of the most gifted scientific minds these islands have produced.
Diffraction is a fundamental physical phenomenon, the reason sound travels round corners and the reason the sky is blue. While Gregory was discovering the diffraction grating and the way it splits white light into its component colours, Newton was famously splitting white light using a prism, that is, using refraction, like a rainbow. We take this result for granted now, but at the time it was highly contentious. Yet Gregory's investigation of diffraction is not the principal achievement upon which his renown depends.
James Gregory was born in the manse of Drumoak near Aberdeen in 1638. His mother taught him mathematics until he was 13 when his father died and his brother David took over his education. Eventually he studied at Marischal College in Aberdeen. On moving to London to pursue the manufacture of the reflecting telescope he had invented (the Gregorian telescope) he formed a lasting friendship with John Collins, the librarian of the Royal Society. It is through his correspondence with Collins that we are made aware of his many achievements.
Then he moved on to Flanders, Paris, Rome and eventually Padua, where he distinguished himself in mathematics, pioneering the field we would now designate analysis. On his return to London he was elected to the Royal Society and it was probably the president of the Royal Society, Robert Moray, himself a graduate of St Andrews, who prevailed upon Charles II to create, in 1668, the chair of Regius professor of mathematics at that university in order to obtain a position for Gregory that would induce him to remain in the country.
Some of Gregory's most astounding achievements were in the realm of mathematics, many of which were decades, if not centuries, ahead of their time. He speculated about the existence of what are now known as transcendental numbers. These are numbers that cannot be expressed as a solution of any equation that can be written down completely. It occurred to Gregory, correctly, that pi, the ratio of the circumference of a cirle to its diameter, is just such a number.
He obtained the important mathematical result known as Taylor's Theorem 40 years before Brook Taylor to whom it is conventionally attributed. The result was written by him on the back of a letter he had received from an Edinburgh bookseller (which is held in the library of the University of St Andrews) before he wrote to John Collins to inform him. He independently derived the Binomial Theorem. He was the first to prove the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Indeed, had he published his results then, he would surely have been acknowledged to rank with Newton, Leibniz and Fermat among the discoverers of the Calculus.
His achievements extended to astronomy, and he was the first to set up a meridian, using records of simultaneous observations of the phases of the Moon in St Andrews and Paris to calculate the difference in longitude. Had he been able to persist in his efforts, we would reckon Universal Time relative to the meridian he set up at St Andrews rather than the one subsequently set up at Greenwich.
He was also the first to make a realistic estimate of the distance to the stars. Working from the assumption that the sun was a relatively typical star, he worked out how far away other stars would have to be to have their observed brightness (magnitude). This is the first practical application of the Cosmological Principle, the idea that our place in the Universe is not special or remarkable in comparison to other places (formally, that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic).
He was also the first to make a realistic estimate of the distance to the stars. Working from the assumption that the sun was a relatively typical star, he worked out how far away other stars would have to be to have their observed brightness (magnitude). This is the first practical application of the Cosmological Principle, the idea that our place in the Universe is not special or remarkable in comparison to other places (formally, that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic).
Sadly his time in St Andrews did not end happily. A general prejudice against mathematics that prevailed among the professors of law, divinity, rhetoric, and the other more established subjects studied at that time, caused funds and eventually students to be withheld from him, and he was forced to leave to take the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University. One night in Edinburgh in 1675 Gregory had been observing the moons of Jupiter with four students, naturally using a telescope of his own design, since as a youth he had invented the first practical reflecting telescope. On his way home afterwards he suffered a stroke and went blind. Three days later he died. He was 36.
One is inclined once more to draw comparison with Newton, who had not published the results for which he is most celebrated when he was of a similar age. Had Gregory survived it is tempting to speculate that a colleague concerned for his posterity would have persuaded him to make a wider public aware of his findings - as Edmund Halley did for Newton - and that Gregory's posthumous reputation would therefore have enjoyed a prominence commensurate with his achievements and talent.
An interesting footnote might be to observe that Gregorian telescopes remained standard astronomical apparatus for the following century and a half. Indeed, when in the 1760s the size of the Solar System was measured for the first time by timing the passage of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun from different latitudes, it was done using Gregorian telescopes. This method of determining the size of the Solar System is commonly attributed to Edmund Halley, who made many of the relevant calculations. However, Halley had read about the method in one of the few published works of Gregory, the Optica Promata. Nearly 100 years after his death Gregory's central role remained unacknowledged, an oversight we can now thankfully remedy.
Thursday, 17 December 2015
We are watching
It's simple.
If Labour want to recover in Scotland so badly, all they have to do is just stop being such utterly unprincipled opportunistic hypocrites.
The Forth Road Bridge. Tory anti-union legislation. The list goes on: every consequence of Labour complacency in office; every Tory affront that emerges from the very institution Labour campaigned shoulder-to-shoulder with the Tories to preserve. All become merely opportunities for Labour to bleat "SNP Baaad".
It remains transparent that all they care about is their own hegemony. The only consideration that motivates them to contribute to Scottish politics is still just their thwarted sense of entitlement.
They must show some humility, break the habit of their arrogance, admit they were wrong about the referendum, and begin the long rebuilding process with the aim of eventually offering the electorate a realistic option in an Independent Scotland.
The alternative is oblivion.
No-one is pretending the SNP are perfect. But one thing the referendum achieved irreversibly was to decouple Scottish Independence as an idea from the contingencies of a particular party's political fortunes. It is no longer the case that you can undermine the credibility of Independence by questioning the competence of the SNP. And for this reason, Scottish Independence is now inevitable, irrespective of which party forms the Scottish Government.
So I hope you will bear with me if, as Hilary Benn might say, I "direct my closing remarks" to Labour in Scotland.
You could be part of this picture. Your efforts in opposition could be constructive and a positive advert for future efforts as a government.
But instead we sit here watching you defending Westminster as it ties the Scottish Government's hands, then attacking the Scottish Government as it struggles to fight back against its onslaughts as a result.
And there is only one thing worse than a bully, and that's the coward that mocks the bully's victims.
We are watching and we don't forget.
If Labour want to recover in Scotland so badly, all they have to do is just stop being such utterly unprincipled opportunistic hypocrites.
The Forth Road Bridge. Tory anti-union legislation. The list goes on: every consequence of Labour complacency in office; every Tory affront that emerges from the very institution Labour campaigned shoulder-to-shoulder with the Tories to preserve. All become merely opportunities for Labour to bleat "SNP Baaad".
It remains transparent that all they care about is their own hegemony. The only consideration that motivates them to contribute to Scottish politics is still just their thwarted sense of entitlement.
They must show some humility, break the habit of their arrogance, admit they were wrong about the referendum, and begin the long rebuilding process with the aim of eventually offering the electorate a realistic option in an Independent Scotland.
The alternative is oblivion.
No-one is pretending the SNP are perfect. But one thing the referendum achieved irreversibly was to decouple Scottish Independence as an idea from the contingencies of a particular party's political fortunes. It is no longer the case that you can undermine the credibility of Independence by questioning the competence of the SNP. And for this reason, Scottish Independence is now inevitable, irrespective of which party forms the Scottish Government.
So I hope you will bear with me if, as Hilary Benn might say, I "direct my closing remarks" to Labour in Scotland.
You could be part of this picture. Your efforts in opposition could be constructive and a positive advert for future efforts as a government.
But instead we sit here watching you defending Westminster as it ties the Scottish Government's hands, then attacking the Scottish Government as it struggles to fight back against its onslaughts as a result.
And there is only one thing worse than a bully, and that's the coward that mocks the bully's victims.
We are watching and we don't forget.
Monday, 14 December 2015
Towards a Kardashev Type I civilisation
The recent achievements in Paris, where global agreement has been reached to work to limit climate change, creates a context in which to think about how our energy usage as a civilisation can progress in general. We are establishing a basis on which responsible energy usage can increase while irresponsible energy usage will decline. This has been necessitated by the impact our energy usage has for the planet we all share.
As we think about energy usage on a planetary scale it is reasonable to relate the situation we have reached historically to the Kardashev scale. This was devised by Soviet astronomer Nicolai Kardashev in 1964 and categorises civilisations according to their energy consumption. A Type I civilisation consumes all energy resources available on its planet, Type II societies harvest all the energy from a star, Type III from a galaxy, and so on.
This has been reformulated as a logarithmic scale by Carl Sagan to provide intermediate values. For example, humanity currently sits somewhere above 0.7 on this scale. As we consider our energy consumption in terms of global stewardship it is natural to reflect on what is required for us to progress towards Kardashev Type 1. How will the way we think about ourselves and the resources we use have to change in order to achieve that without destroying ourselves and the planet in the process.
Our civilisation until now has been what might be characterised as a "camp-fire" civilisation: to keep things going, just send someone out to get some more firewood. But as we have advanced from somewhere close to Type 0 towards Type 1 we find we are running out of forest. Today we don't just mean trees currently growing, of course, we mean all the trees that have ever grown, then been subsumed beneath strata of rock and transformed into coal. As it attempts to short-circuit the carbon cycle by digging up energy stored in fossil fuels, the camp-fire economy treats energy as though it were material, as though it was firewood.
But as we progress towards Kardashev Type I, we find we are moving towards a global "circular" economy. What does this mean? All materials will be re-usable and will be circulated through sustainable cycles of economic activity - production, distribution, consumption - using renewable energy to fulfil the necessary power requirements. Recycling will be powered by renewables. We won't be bringing significantly more material into circulation, and the energy we consume will be used to maintain the circulation of the material we already use sustainably in these cycles of economic activity. This resembles the natural cycles of energy and bio-matter of which we are part, and indeed "bio-mimicry" is an important part of circular economics.
There are some consequences to becoming a circular economy. Under these circumstances models of economic growth cannot be based on conventional ideas relating to the reproduction and accumulation of more "stuff". This would entail unsustainable extraction of raw materials from finite and depleted reserves and/or interruption of sustainable cycles to amass "wealth". Manufacturing (although the term "manufacturing" is no longer entirely apposite) will be refocussed on automated processes of recovery of material already in circulation and its reapplication to its original or alternative purposes.
This will mean costs will be increasingly represented by the energy these processes require, as the costs associated with the extraction of raw materials are eliminated and only the costs of transporting and manipulating materials already in circulation are accrued. The energy for this transportation, aggregation, manipulation and distribution of materials will be provided from renewable resources that have no fuel costs.
Since the materials used to construct renewable energy infrastructure are subject to the same considerations, the contributions to the cost of energy associated with the infrastructure for generating renewable energy itself will decline. Eventually all costs associated with this as with any other infrastructure, other than fuel costs, will be eliminated, and as there are no fuel costs, conventional notions of added value will no longer apply.
Currently renewable energy has introduced disruptive feedback into energy costs which drive the relative cost of renewable energy down compared to conventional dispatchable methods. The variability and intermittency of renewable resources with no fuel costs must be accommodated by conventional supplies connected to the same transmission network in a way that has adverse economic consequences for conventional supplies and ultimately makes renewables more economically attractive in the short term. We are already seeing this reflected in the cost of energy, with onshore wind outperforming other sources in many parts of the world. Indeed, irrespective of idealogical considerations about the environment, this economic process will drive us towards sustainability and "save the day".
In addition, we will see that existing infrastructure for conventional resources will still be utilised in the interim. Renewable energy will increasingly be used to synthesise hydrocarbons that can be exploited using existing networks, and will be stored in forms that can be more easily dispatched.
Circular economics takes the absence of fuel costs associated with renewable energy and provides a mechanism whereby this ultimately eliminates the cost of energy entirely. Then the economy becomes its own raw material, circulated indefinitely through cycles of production, distribution, and consumption at no cost, because the wind, rain and sun are free.
It is possible that conflict will arise less often as we move from a camp-fire economy to a circular economy. There will no longer be any need to compete over resources which are stranded or neglected as obsolete or too costly. Wars are fought over low value commodities that are available on tap, in order to secure access to the tap. Renewables take away the tap.
Effectively human economic activity becomes just one more natural cycle driven by the sun, with the exception that it is subject to direct immediate conscious human technological innovation and guidance rather than the laborious iteration and refinement of more or less successful natural phenotypes over multiple generations of hyper-aggressive optimisation. It is this distinction that allows us to characterise human activity as a civilisation mediated by culture, rather than an organism mediated by nature. This is why we are talking about economics rather than biology.
If we still desire economic models that require growth, in order to stimulate (increasingly obsolete) motives of profit and the perception of personal gain during a transitional period, these will have to rely on value added in ways that do not involve open-ended reproduction and distribution of material artefacts that can be accumulated.
As a result of these considerations "stuff" no longer equals "wealth". When the generation of what we consider to be "wealth" degrades the very systems that allowed us accumulate "stuff" in the first place, adjustments are inevitable and we lurch from one crisis to the next. In the only kind of economics that has any realistic longevity on this planet of limited material resources, and unlimited renewable energy to manipulate them with, we need to reconsider entirely what it is that makes us rich and what it is to which we should aspire. Wealth will become more experiential, more related to one's education, creativity, and human interactions, and will not be governed by any sort of accountancy as its abundance can only be limited by our intellectual, artistic and ethical ambitions. No material costs or limitations arise in the creation, reproduction, distribution and consumption of our intellectual, artistic and ethical assets.
The situation described above is similar to the scenario discussed in Marx's "fragment on machines" which has been referred to in descriptions of the disruptive influence of information technology. In this case, the ability to reproduce information - to copy data - at negligible cost, undermines normal capitalist ideas of the addition of value to the point that a new paradigm is required. What I would contend is that, as we move towards the kind of circular economy necessary to be a Kardashev Type 1 civilisation, the same process is being witnessed in relation to energy as is seen in relation to information.
Ultimately, in a post-scarcity society at ease with rather than impoverished by a leisure facilitated through technologies that are as much art as science, where everything is worth nothing according to conventional ideas of value, wealth is time.
Time well spent.
As we think about energy usage on a planetary scale it is reasonable to relate the situation we have reached historically to the Kardashev scale. This was devised by Soviet astronomer Nicolai Kardashev in 1964 and categorises civilisations according to their energy consumption. A Type I civilisation consumes all energy resources available on its planet, Type II societies harvest all the energy from a star, Type III from a galaxy, and so on.
This has been reformulated as a logarithmic scale by Carl Sagan to provide intermediate values. For example, humanity currently sits somewhere above 0.7 on this scale. As we consider our energy consumption in terms of global stewardship it is natural to reflect on what is required for us to progress towards Kardashev Type 1. How will the way we think about ourselves and the resources we use have to change in order to achieve that without destroying ourselves and the planet in the process.
Our civilisation until now has been what might be characterised as a "camp-fire" civilisation: to keep things going, just send someone out to get some more firewood. But as we have advanced from somewhere close to Type 0 towards Type 1 we find we are running out of forest. Today we don't just mean trees currently growing, of course, we mean all the trees that have ever grown, then been subsumed beneath strata of rock and transformed into coal. As it attempts to short-circuit the carbon cycle by digging up energy stored in fossil fuels, the camp-fire economy treats energy as though it were material, as though it was firewood.
But as we progress towards Kardashev Type I, we find we are moving towards a global "circular" economy. What does this mean? All materials will be re-usable and will be circulated through sustainable cycles of economic activity - production, distribution, consumption - using renewable energy to fulfil the necessary power requirements. Recycling will be powered by renewables. We won't be bringing significantly more material into circulation, and the energy we consume will be used to maintain the circulation of the material we already use sustainably in these cycles of economic activity. This resembles the natural cycles of energy and bio-matter of which we are part, and indeed "bio-mimicry" is an important part of circular economics.
There are some consequences to becoming a circular economy. Under these circumstances models of economic growth cannot be based on conventional ideas relating to the reproduction and accumulation of more "stuff". This would entail unsustainable extraction of raw materials from finite and depleted reserves and/or interruption of sustainable cycles to amass "wealth". Manufacturing (although the term "manufacturing" is no longer entirely apposite) will be refocussed on automated processes of recovery of material already in circulation and its reapplication to its original or alternative purposes.
This will mean costs will be increasingly represented by the energy these processes require, as the costs associated with the extraction of raw materials are eliminated and only the costs of transporting and manipulating materials already in circulation are accrued. The energy for this transportation, aggregation, manipulation and distribution of materials will be provided from renewable resources that have no fuel costs.
Since the materials used to construct renewable energy infrastructure are subject to the same considerations, the contributions to the cost of energy associated with the infrastructure for generating renewable energy itself will decline. Eventually all costs associated with this as with any other infrastructure, other than fuel costs, will be eliminated, and as there are no fuel costs, conventional notions of added value will no longer apply.
Currently renewable energy has introduced disruptive feedback into energy costs which drive the relative cost of renewable energy down compared to conventional dispatchable methods. The variability and intermittency of renewable resources with no fuel costs must be accommodated by conventional supplies connected to the same transmission network in a way that has adverse economic consequences for conventional supplies and ultimately makes renewables more economically attractive in the short term. We are already seeing this reflected in the cost of energy, with onshore wind outperforming other sources in many parts of the world. Indeed, irrespective of idealogical considerations about the environment, this economic process will drive us towards sustainability and "save the day".
In addition, we will see that existing infrastructure for conventional resources will still be utilised in the interim. Renewable energy will increasingly be used to synthesise hydrocarbons that can be exploited using existing networks, and will be stored in forms that can be more easily dispatched.
Circular economics takes the absence of fuel costs associated with renewable energy and provides a mechanism whereby this ultimately eliminates the cost of energy entirely. Then the economy becomes its own raw material, circulated indefinitely through cycles of production, distribution, and consumption at no cost, because the wind, rain and sun are free.
It is possible that conflict will arise less often as we move from a camp-fire economy to a circular economy. There will no longer be any need to compete over resources which are stranded or neglected as obsolete or too costly. Wars are fought over low value commodities that are available on tap, in order to secure access to the tap. Renewables take away the tap.
Effectively human economic activity becomes just one more natural cycle driven by the sun, with the exception that it is subject to direct immediate conscious human technological innovation and guidance rather than the laborious iteration and refinement of more or less successful natural phenotypes over multiple generations of hyper-aggressive optimisation. It is this distinction that allows us to characterise human activity as a civilisation mediated by culture, rather than an organism mediated by nature. This is why we are talking about economics rather than biology.
If we still desire economic models that require growth, in order to stimulate (increasingly obsolete) motives of profit and the perception of personal gain during a transitional period, these will have to rely on value added in ways that do not involve open-ended reproduction and distribution of material artefacts that can be accumulated.
As a result of these considerations "stuff" no longer equals "wealth". When the generation of what we consider to be "wealth" degrades the very systems that allowed us accumulate "stuff" in the first place, adjustments are inevitable and we lurch from one crisis to the next. In the only kind of economics that has any realistic longevity on this planet of limited material resources, and unlimited renewable energy to manipulate them with, we need to reconsider entirely what it is that makes us rich and what it is to which we should aspire. Wealth will become more experiential, more related to one's education, creativity, and human interactions, and will not be governed by any sort of accountancy as its abundance can only be limited by our intellectual, artistic and ethical ambitions. No material costs or limitations arise in the creation, reproduction, distribution and consumption of our intellectual, artistic and ethical assets.
The situation described above is similar to the scenario discussed in Marx's "fragment on machines" which has been referred to in descriptions of the disruptive influence of information technology. In this case, the ability to reproduce information - to copy data - at negligible cost, undermines normal capitalist ideas of the addition of value to the point that a new paradigm is required. What I would contend is that, as we move towards the kind of circular economy necessary to be a Kardashev Type 1 civilisation, the same process is being witnessed in relation to energy as is seen in relation to information.
Ultimately, in a post-scarcity society at ease with rather than impoverished by a leisure facilitated through technologies that are as much art as science, where everything is worth nothing according to conventional ideas of value, wealth is time.
Time well spent.
Tuesday, 8 December 2015
Elevator pitch
Donald Trump's recent remarks about Muslims have only one possible explanation. He is actually an extraterrestrial terraforming device.
There is a race of aliens seeking refuge as a result of polluting their own home planet and rendering it uninhabitable. Unfortunately the sort of habitat they seek is one we would recognise as an irradiated wasteland.
Donald Trump is a device like that guy out of the first Men in Black with the little alien guy inside his head. Folding back Trump's toupee reveals an access hatch to the command and control centre where a miniature alien operates him.
His objective is to get Trump elected as the most rapid way of precipitating a full thermonuclear exchange between everyone with any missiles to launch. This will then terraform the planet and render it suitable for the aliens while simultaneously eliminating the pesky natives.
However, the aliens have not reckoned with humans' own ability to cock things up. They are concerned that a British jet over Syria will accidentally shoot down a Russian jet bombing FSA forces allied to the British who have taken ground from the Syrian army whom the British accidentally bombed while trying to hit ISIS targets. Nuclear conflict will then ensue fully 11 months earlier than the planned alien invasion date, set for a fortnight after the US Presidential election, and before they have finished marshalling their forces on the dark side of the moon.
An epic espionage struggle then unfolds as impossibly good looking agents with scant regard for human life embark upon clandestine efforts to control access to classified blueprints for game-changing secret weapons.
But our only hope is that the aliens are confronted by the *other* aliens already terraforming the Earth. These other aliens are from a world whose runaway greenhouse effect has abated and they have been cultivating human civilisation in secret for thousands of years in order to recreate the conditions they crave here on Earth. The two extraterrestrial societies face each other in the ultimate showdown and an epic space battle decides the victor. Meanwhile Tom Hanks eludes capture by secret societies on Earth while showing an attractive French woman how a description of the aliens' role in manipulating human history has been hidden in plain sight in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci.
However both alien species are thwarted by time travelling dinosaurs. A team of crack velociraptor scientists from the Cretaceous period create an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair of quantum entangled sub-atomic particles. They conceal one inside the remains of one of their dead colleagues which they then dump in a tar pit. Using this to teleport through time rather than space they jump forward to the moment their colleagues fossilised remains are discovered by humans in the early 21st century, along with fleets of advanced weaponry voice-actuated by their distinct velociraptor bark, familiar to anyone who has ever watched a Jurassic Park movie.
These tech-savvy dinosaurs are then embroiled in an epic war with the aliens for mastery of Earth.
Have I just inadvertently re-invented scientology?
There is a race of aliens seeking refuge as a result of polluting their own home planet and rendering it uninhabitable. Unfortunately the sort of habitat they seek is one we would recognise as an irradiated wasteland.
Donald Trump is a device like that guy out of the first Men in Black with the little alien guy inside his head. Folding back Trump's toupee reveals an access hatch to the command and control centre where a miniature alien operates him.
His objective is to get Trump elected as the most rapid way of precipitating a full thermonuclear exchange between everyone with any missiles to launch. This will then terraform the planet and render it suitable for the aliens while simultaneously eliminating the pesky natives.
However, the aliens have not reckoned with humans' own ability to cock things up. They are concerned that a British jet over Syria will accidentally shoot down a Russian jet bombing FSA forces allied to the British who have taken ground from the Syrian army whom the British accidentally bombed while trying to hit ISIS targets. Nuclear conflict will then ensue fully 11 months earlier than the planned alien invasion date, set for a fortnight after the US Presidential election, and before they have finished marshalling their forces on the dark side of the moon.
An epic espionage struggle then unfolds as impossibly good looking agents with scant regard for human life embark upon clandestine efforts to control access to classified blueprints for game-changing secret weapons.
But our only hope is that the aliens are confronted by the *other* aliens already terraforming the Earth. These other aliens are from a world whose runaway greenhouse effect has abated and they have been cultivating human civilisation in secret for thousands of years in order to recreate the conditions they crave here on Earth. The two extraterrestrial societies face each other in the ultimate showdown and an epic space battle decides the victor. Meanwhile Tom Hanks eludes capture by secret societies on Earth while showing an attractive French woman how a description of the aliens' role in manipulating human history has been hidden in plain sight in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci.
However both alien species are thwarted by time travelling dinosaurs. A team of crack velociraptor scientists from the Cretaceous period create an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair of quantum entangled sub-atomic particles. They conceal one inside the remains of one of their dead colleagues which they then dump in a tar pit. Using this to teleport through time rather than space they jump forward to the moment their colleagues fossilised remains are discovered by humans in the early 21st century, along with fleets of advanced weaponry voice-actuated by their distinct velociraptor bark, familiar to anyone who has ever watched a Jurassic Park movie.
These tech-savvy dinosaurs are then embroiled in an epic war with the aliens for mastery of Earth.
Have I just inadvertently re-invented scientology?
Mojo Rising!
War is bad.
Sorry if that seems simple. Three monosyllabic words that every child in Syria understands perfectly from first hand experience. War is bad.
So when George Osborne describes the bombing of Syria as meaning Britain has "got its mojo back" I am struggling to comprehend what the fuck he means!
The tories have imbued language with a disturbing plasticity, as governments often do, an Orwellian ability to make some verbal signifier adhere to a semantic value previously considered antithetical to its original meaning. We are all familiar with various examples of slippery newspeak emanating from Whitehall.
However, I wonder if this is the most slimy, stomach turning example of tory newspeak I have yet to encounter. I feel physically violated by Osborne's use of the term "mojo". I feel soiled with a filth I cannot wash off. I feel the world has been diminished, that we have now irretrievably lost something beautiful and valuable since Osborne commandeered that wonderfully vague linguistic vehicle, the word "mojo", and shat all over it. We can't listen to Jim Morrison sing L.A. Woman now without a preliminary act of mental hygiene. If words are linguistic vehicles I feel like a taxi driver that now has to clean all the piss and shit and vomit of a busy Saturday night off the seats before I can use this specific word again. I feel that particularly acutely given the name of my blog! I should sue him.
At least the word "cunt" has yet to fall foul of tory government redefinition. At least the word "cunt" has yet to be subsumed in the toxic ooze of newspeak that now seems to seep from every tory pore. At least I can call George Orborne a "cunt" without fear of ambiguity or contradiction. He's a cunt. Three more monosyllabic words that we all understand.
It is the wonderfully visceral, nebulous content of the word "mojo" that makes his use of it so insidious and offensive. It is not a well-defined, precise technical term one calmly deploys in committee meetings such as the one Osborne was attending. It is about direct experience rather than circumspect calculations and assessments of different sets of circumstances.
Did the 26 civilians that were killed in NATO air strikes recently directly experience Britain's mojo, George? I know last week Hilary Benn argued persuasively (if the applause is any indication) that these deaths, while unfortunate, are acceptable, because we didn't do it deliberately (another individual for whom the epithet "cunt" is now most apt, I would contend). But by invoking the black magic of "mojo" are you now saying these deaths actually satisfy some sort of sick appetite for blood we have, which we can now, finally, admit to, now that we have given up the pretence of believing war is bad and finally found our mojo?!
It is such a stupid remark I am reminded of that classic scene (is there any other kind) from Father Ted, where Ted, holding a toy cow, explains to Dougal "this cow is small, those cows are far away". Except in this instance we are not talking about cows, George. We are talking about children, far away in Syria, who are now directly experiencing what you think the word "mojo" means.
You stupid cunt.
Sorry if that seems simple. Three monosyllabic words that every child in Syria understands perfectly from first hand experience. War is bad.
So when George Osborne describes the bombing of Syria as meaning Britain has "got its mojo back" I am struggling to comprehend what the fuck he means!
The tories have imbued language with a disturbing plasticity, as governments often do, an Orwellian ability to make some verbal signifier adhere to a semantic value previously considered antithetical to its original meaning. We are all familiar with various examples of slippery newspeak emanating from Whitehall.
However, I wonder if this is the most slimy, stomach turning example of tory newspeak I have yet to encounter. I feel physically violated by Osborne's use of the term "mojo". I feel soiled with a filth I cannot wash off. I feel the world has been diminished, that we have now irretrievably lost something beautiful and valuable since Osborne commandeered that wonderfully vague linguistic vehicle, the word "mojo", and shat all over it. We can't listen to Jim Morrison sing L.A. Woman now without a preliminary act of mental hygiene. If words are linguistic vehicles I feel like a taxi driver that now has to clean all the piss and shit and vomit of a busy Saturday night off the seats before I can use this specific word again. I feel that particularly acutely given the name of my blog! I should sue him.
At least the word "cunt" has yet to fall foul of tory government redefinition. At least the word "cunt" has yet to be subsumed in the toxic ooze of newspeak that now seems to seep from every tory pore. At least I can call George Orborne a "cunt" without fear of ambiguity or contradiction. He's a cunt. Three more monosyllabic words that we all understand.
It is the wonderfully visceral, nebulous content of the word "mojo" that makes his use of it so insidious and offensive. It is not a well-defined, precise technical term one calmly deploys in committee meetings such as the one Osborne was attending. It is about direct experience rather than circumspect calculations and assessments of different sets of circumstances.
Did the 26 civilians that were killed in NATO air strikes recently directly experience Britain's mojo, George? I know last week Hilary Benn argued persuasively (if the applause is any indication) that these deaths, while unfortunate, are acceptable, because we didn't do it deliberately (another individual for whom the epithet "cunt" is now most apt, I would contend). But by invoking the black magic of "mojo" are you now saying these deaths actually satisfy some sort of sick appetite for blood we have, which we can now, finally, admit to, now that we have given up the pretence of believing war is bad and finally found our mojo?!
It is such a stupid remark I am reminded of that classic scene (is there any other kind) from Father Ted, where Ted, holding a toy cow, explains to Dougal "this cow is small, those cows are far away". Except in this instance we are not talking about cows, George. We are talking about children, far away in Syria, who are now directly experiencing what you think the word "mojo" means.
You stupid cunt.
Monday, 7 December 2015
A "bridge too far" too far ...
When reading Brian Monteith's truly bizarre article in the Scotsman today "Is Forth fiasco bridge too far for SNP?" I was reminded of Betteridge's law, which states "any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
As Betteridge points out, "the reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."
Andrew Marr points out in his book My Trade "a headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic."
Engineers found in the eighties and early nineties that the design life of the bridge, as based on traffic levels predicted around the time when it was designed, built and opened in 1964, needed to be revised. On the basis of the observed, much higher traffic levels that developed subsequently they revised this down and indicated a replacement would be required by 1992.
As it says here, "within a couple of decades the bridge was struggling to cope. As the number vehicles on the roads soared delays and closures on the bridge grew. By the early 1990s the Scottish Office decided that a new bridge was needed. Six consultants were hired to investigate the best routes and designs and consider the possibility of a tunnel under the Forth. In 1992 they produced a report titled Setting Forth which argued for a bridge on the Beamer Rock route to the west of the Forth Road Bridge [...]
"At which point the idea ran into a blizzard of objection from environmentalists and opposition politicians. Alistair Darling [my emphasis], then Labour MP for Edinburgh Central, accused the government of ‘squandering’ taxpayers’ money on the report and declared that 95% of the Scottish population ‘would say no to that act of monumental stupidity’, i.e a new bridge. He was joined by Sir Menzies Campbell who urged the Scottish Office to drop ‘this ludicrous project’.
"But Ian Lang [...] concluded: ‘It is the Government’s intention to take forward the proposal…’ But the government never did. For reasons that are still not at all clear, the project was dropped."
The real task a good journalist should apply themselves to here is to find out what on earth happened in the nineties that resulted in the project being dropped, not to try and use everything as a pretext for an "SNP Bad" story, no matter how ridiculous.
Brian Monteith, to be fair, seems unique among inveterate unionist critics of the present SNP administration and all they stand for, in that, almost alone among them, he has not in the past indulged in the opportunistic nat-bashing that has led to many recent blushes and much embarassment of late among politicians and commentators who chastised the government for commissioning the Queensferry Crossing, the new bridge that will replace the Forth Road Bridge and which now can't be completed a day too soon.
Perhaps that is why Brian is the one to run this truly surreal "SNP Bad" story, whose emergence is entirely predictable and whose appearance has presumably been delayed while the unionist camp have scurried about trying to find someone whose arrant hypocrisy on the subject would not be too immediately, blatantly, hysterically obvious.
As Betteridge points out, "the reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."
Andrew Marr points out in his book My Trade "a headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic."
Engineers found in the eighties and early nineties that the design life of the bridge, as based on traffic levels predicted around the time when it was designed, built and opened in 1964, needed to be revised. On the basis of the observed, much higher traffic levels that developed subsequently they revised this down and indicated a replacement would be required by 1992.
As it says here, "within a couple of decades the bridge was struggling to cope. As the number vehicles on the roads soared delays and closures on the bridge grew. By the early 1990s the Scottish Office decided that a new bridge was needed. Six consultants were hired to investigate the best routes and designs and consider the possibility of a tunnel under the Forth. In 1992 they produced a report titled Setting Forth which argued for a bridge on the Beamer Rock route to the west of the Forth Road Bridge [...]
"At which point the idea ran into a blizzard of objection from environmentalists and opposition politicians. Alistair Darling [my emphasis], then Labour MP for Edinburgh Central, accused the government of ‘squandering’ taxpayers’ money on the report and declared that 95% of the Scottish population ‘would say no to that act of monumental stupidity’, i.e a new bridge. He was joined by Sir Menzies Campbell who urged the Scottish Office to drop ‘this ludicrous project’.
"But Ian Lang [...] concluded: ‘It is the Government’s intention to take forward the proposal…’ But the government never did. For reasons that are still not at all clear, the project was dropped."
The real task a good journalist should apply themselves to here is to find out what on earth happened in the nineties that resulted in the project being dropped, not to try and use everything as a pretext for an "SNP Bad" story, no matter how ridiculous.
Brian Monteith, to be fair, seems unique among inveterate unionist critics of the present SNP administration and all they stand for, in that, almost alone among them, he has not in the past indulged in the opportunistic nat-bashing that has led to many recent blushes and much embarassment of late among politicians and commentators who chastised the government for commissioning the Queensferry Crossing, the new bridge that will replace the Forth Road Bridge and which now can't be completed a day too soon.
Perhaps that is why Brian is the one to run this truly surreal "SNP Bad" story, whose emergence is entirely predictable and whose appearance has presumably been delayed while the unionist camp have scurried about trying to find someone whose arrant hypocrisy on the subject would not be too immediately, blatantly, hysterically obvious.
Friday, 4 December 2015
The Conspiracy Theory of Everything
I should state from the outset I am not actually promoting any of the conspiracy theories I discuss below.
I find conspiracy theories interesting as an artefact of human culture, revealing people's anxieties and their inventiveness at assimilating them into a compelling narrative. Sometimes they can be frustrating when the standards of evidence-based reasoning I normally look for are set aside. Perhaps I have a love/hate relationship with conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theorists are highly motivated to research facts and figures that might otherwise escape my attention. My knowledge of the Knights Templar and of the flight paths of Little Black Helicopters has been immeasurably enriched by the efforts of conspiracy theorists. Various fascinating historical events that would otherwise lie inert and unconnected are brought to my attention by conspiracy theorists because of the beguiling kaleidoscopic combinations that can be created. The rollercoaster ride is only spoiled by the moment when a statement that is not entirely supported by the facts is presented and an appeal to credence is made on the basis that "what else could explain [observation X]?" and with a bump I am back on the ground.
Conspiracy theories tend to have in common a reliance on the principle that something is proven if no alternative explanation has been offered. The abandonment of logical validity at this point frustrates me, but the ride has usually been exciting up to that point.
I dislike conspiracy theories that rely mainly on a sense of superficial plausibility, often supported by nothing more than an inferiority complex, that leads to a rejection of something for which there is ample evidence on the grounds that "they would say that". The evidence of course remains unexamined by them in any real detail as that would risk spoiling the spurious sense of emotional fulfilment that comes from believing some authority figure has been outwitted and we have seen through their lies. Lunar conspiracy theories tend to fall into this category.
The lunacy of lunar conspiracy theories has been adequately debunked elsewhere. Another conspiracy theory that really "boils my piss" at the moment is the chemtrail/geoengineering story currently doing the rounds. This is a relatively young conspiracy theory and so it is still burdened with more immediately obvious nonsense than is usually the case with mature and well-refined conspiracy theories that have evolved through natural selection to discard assertions that don't stand up to the most cursory scrutiny. Give it a few years, then come back to me about it.
One thing to say in praise of conspiracy theorists is that they are amateurs, in the best sense of the word. They are not motivated by mere compliance with professional standards in pursuit of a pay check. They are motivated by something more fundamental, often involving a strand of altruism. And, to be fair, sometimes, just sometimes, they get it right. For example, false flag attacks are a staple of conspiracy theories. Most of these are nonsense, but history does show that sometimes false flag attacks do indeed occur. The problem with conspiracy theorists is they often don't recognise the need to be as suspicious of any conclusions you jump to youself as you are of any potentially misleading statements you are being asked to believe by others.
The pinnacle of conspiracy theories is of course, the meta-theory, which explains that the very existence of conspiracy theories is itself a conspiracy. For example, it is asserted that the term "conspiracy theory" itself was devised by the CIA in order to create a conceptual template for discrediting leaks and speculations about various covert activities. Henceforth these could all be dismissed as just "conspiracy theories".
I like to develop my own meta-conspiracies about conspiracy theories I don't like. So, for example, conventional lunar conspiracies have been developed to distract from what's really going on - the real lunar conspiracy is not that we didn't go to the Moon, but that we went their earlier and/or more often than is publicly admitted, secretly developing NSA listening posts on the Sea of Tranquillity without congressional oversight, or launch sites for terrible weapons, or neutral zones to meet with representatives of extraterrestrial societies. After all, it now costs less to send a man to the Moon and return him safely to earth than it cost to make the movie Titanic (see, that would be an example of the kind of interesting factoid in which conspiracy theories abound).
And chemtrails? That is actually misinformation propagated virally by fossil fuel interests to persuade us "the government" or "new world order" is artificially creating the conditions we recognise as climate change, thereby letting those who actually profit from the pollution that is really causing it off the hook.
But I am going to be a bit more ambitious in my final conspiracy theory. I am going to place a bit more emphasis on the theory and less on the conspiracy, and present for your delectation and amazement one that describes the origin of the universe in suitably melodramatic terms. I am going to offer a conspiracy theory equivalent of the Theory of Everything that is sometimes suggested as a legitimate objective of theoretical physics (I don't believe it is a legitimate objective, but that's another story)
"The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to utilize [...] It was first proposed in 1964 by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev." Initially there were three Kardashev Types, I, II and III, corresponding roughly to consumption, by a civilisation, of all the energy resources available from a planet, a star and a galaxy respectively. The scale was redefined quantitatively on the basis of a logarithm of energy consumption by Carl Sagan and others, according to which human civilisation is currently about Type 0.724.
The scale was then extended in a way that took us into metaphysical terrain. Type IV would apply to beings would could manipulate and exploit the entire universe. We have to wonder if God has a Kardashev Type of IV, or whether the power to actively define what the universe actually is extends to a fifth type.
Imagine, if you will, beings whose technology allows them to master the material world over all length scales, from the sub-atomic Planck length to the entire universe. How could this be achieved? Perhaps they can extract energy from quantum vacuum fluctuations by coupling to these probabalistic phenomena in some way. What if there was a malfunction and this process ran out of control? The ensuing chain reaction would result in the destruction of the entire universe, with the explosion corresponding to the Big Bang we infer from our own astronomical observations.
The universe is a consequence of an industrial accident experienced by a Kardashev Type IV civilisation prior to and resulting in the Big Bang.
What other explanation is there?
I find conspiracy theories interesting as an artefact of human culture, revealing people's anxieties and their inventiveness at assimilating them into a compelling narrative. Sometimes they can be frustrating when the standards of evidence-based reasoning I normally look for are set aside. Perhaps I have a love/hate relationship with conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theorists are highly motivated to research facts and figures that might otherwise escape my attention. My knowledge of the Knights Templar and of the flight paths of Little Black Helicopters has been immeasurably enriched by the efforts of conspiracy theorists. Various fascinating historical events that would otherwise lie inert and unconnected are brought to my attention by conspiracy theorists because of the beguiling kaleidoscopic combinations that can be created. The rollercoaster ride is only spoiled by the moment when a statement that is not entirely supported by the facts is presented and an appeal to credence is made on the basis that "what else could explain [observation X]?" and with a bump I am back on the ground.
Conspiracy theories tend to have in common a reliance on the principle that something is proven if no alternative explanation has been offered. The abandonment of logical validity at this point frustrates me, but the ride has usually been exciting up to that point.
I dislike conspiracy theories that rely mainly on a sense of superficial plausibility, often supported by nothing more than an inferiority complex, that leads to a rejection of something for which there is ample evidence on the grounds that "they would say that". The evidence of course remains unexamined by them in any real detail as that would risk spoiling the spurious sense of emotional fulfilment that comes from believing some authority figure has been outwitted and we have seen through their lies. Lunar conspiracy theories tend to fall into this category.
The lunacy of lunar conspiracy theories has been adequately debunked elsewhere. Another conspiracy theory that really "boils my piss" at the moment is the chemtrail/geoengineering story currently doing the rounds. This is a relatively young conspiracy theory and so it is still burdened with more immediately obvious nonsense than is usually the case with mature and well-refined conspiracy theories that have evolved through natural selection to discard assertions that don't stand up to the most cursory scrutiny. Give it a few years, then come back to me about it.
One thing to say in praise of conspiracy theorists is that they are amateurs, in the best sense of the word. They are not motivated by mere compliance with professional standards in pursuit of a pay check. They are motivated by something more fundamental, often involving a strand of altruism. And, to be fair, sometimes, just sometimes, they get it right. For example, false flag attacks are a staple of conspiracy theories. Most of these are nonsense, but history does show that sometimes false flag attacks do indeed occur. The problem with conspiracy theorists is they often don't recognise the need to be as suspicious of any conclusions you jump to youself as you are of any potentially misleading statements you are being asked to believe by others.
The pinnacle of conspiracy theories is of course, the meta-theory, which explains that the very existence of conspiracy theories is itself a conspiracy. For example, it is asserted that the term "conspiracy theory" itself was devised by the CIA in order to create a conceptual template for discrediting leaks and speculations about various covert activities. Henceforth these could all be dismissed as just "conspiracy theories".
I like to develop my own meta-conspiracies about conspiracy theories I don't like. So, for example, conventional lunar conspiracies have been developed to distract from what's really going on - the real lunar conspiracy is not that we didn't go to the Moon, but that we went their earlier and/or more often than is publicly admitted, secretly developing NSA listening posts on the Sea of Tranquillity without congressional oversight, or launch sites for terrible weapons, or neutral zones to meet with representatives of extraterrestrial societies. After all, it now costs less to send a man to the Moon and return him safely to earth than it cost to make the movie Titanic (see, that would be an example of the kind of interesting factoid in which conspiracy theories abound).
And chemtrails? That is actually misinformation propagated virally by fossil fuel interests to persuade us "the government" or "new world order" is artificially creating the conditions we recognise as climate change, thereby letting those who actually profit from the pollution that is really causing it off the hook.
But I am going to be a bit more ambitious in my final conspiracy theory. I am going to place a bit more emphasis on the theory and less on the conspiracy, and present for your delectation and amazement one that describes the origin of the universe in suitably melodramatic terms. I am going to offer a conspiracy theory equivalent of the Theory of Everything that is sometimes suggested as a legitimate objective of theoretical physics (I don't believe it is a legitimate objective, but that's another story)
"The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to utilize [...] It was first proposed in 1964 by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev." Initially there were three Kardashev Types, I, II and III, corresponding roughly to consumption, by a civilisation, of all the energy resources available from a planet, a star and a galaxy respectively. The scale was redefined quantitatively on the basis of a logarithm of energy consumption by Carl Sagan and others, according to which human civilisation is currently about Type 0.724.
The scale was then extended in a way that took us into metaphysical terrain. Type IV would apply to beings would could manipulate and exploit the entire universe. We have to wonder if God has a Kardashev Type of IV, or whether the power to actively define what the universe actually is extends to a fifth type.
Imagine, if you will, beings whose technology allows them to master the material world over all length scales, from the sub-atomic Planck length to the entire universe. How could this be achieved? Perhaps they can extract energy from quantum vacuum fluctuations by coupling to these probabalistic phenomena in some way. What if there was a malfunction and this process ran out of control? The ensuing chain reaction would result in the destruction of the entire universe, with the explosion corresponding to the Big Bang we infer from our own astronomical observations.
The universe is a consequence of an industrial accident experienced by a Kardashev Type IV civilisation prior to and resulting in the Big Bang.
What other explanation is there?
Hilary Benn's Speech: a Review
A highly derivative call to arms, "Hilary Benn's Speech" works at a visceral level but ultimately fails to deliver any real substance.
Hilary Benn's speech advocating a policy of bombing Syria was premièred on Wednesday night at the Palace of Westminster in London.
It was definitely a noteworthy performance, but perhaps not in the way intended or imagined. It was certainly typical of the genre - the eve of war call to arms - but this is mainly because of the errors of fact and logic with which it is strewn as it makes its emotional plea, and there is little in this speech to raise it above a host of other examples of which it is highly derivative.
The main fallacy, implicit throughout this and most other examples of the genre, indeed a defining feature of this kind of speech, is the assertion that because a course of action is required, the proposed course of action must be adopted. However the conclusion that we should bomb Syria does not logically follow from the premise that something should be done about ISIS. Other responses are possible and potentially preferable. In general, no specific course of action is entailed by the basic existence of a problem, and the most advisable course of action can only be identified by considering much more information about the complex set of circumstances in which the problem arises. As is typical of this kind of speech, this was largely ignored in favour of appeals to an emotional response.
There was a particularly uncomfortable moment in the speech when Hilary addressed the unavoidable issue of civilian casualties. There was some disingenuous hand-wringing before the topic was unconvincingly dismissed on the grounds that any deaths we cause by bombing would be accidental, in contrast to those caused by our enemy, which would be deliberate. The implication being attempted was that this somehow renders the deaths we might inadvertently cause acceptable.
However, as the outcome of the appeal in the case of Oscar Pistorius recently demonstrated, intention to kill implies murder irrespective of whom you intend to kill. In this regard Oscar Pistorius and Hilary Benn have in common the delusion that killing someone by accident exculpates you of their death. To be clear, the death itself does not occur by accident. Irrespective of whom the bomb falls on, the act of dropping it remains deliberate.
Various other factual and logical blunders also marred the otherwise well-delivered speech. For example, we are under no obligation to join a bombing campaign simply because others are engaged in it and have asked us to join. Mention of "playing our full part" makes unfounded assumptions about what our part is, prematurely anticipating the outcome of the debate and begging the question.
But perhaps the most glaring factual blunder is one of basic arithmetic. At one point Hilary claimed urgent action was needed to prevent the number of fighters available to potential allies being further reduced by ISIS, and that we should therefore not wait for a ceasefire between the other belligerents. However much greater loss of life has occurred as a result of conflict between the other belligerents, with the vast majority of civilian casualities being caused by Syrian government forces. Therefore the arithmetic actually favours a ceasefire between potential allies as a better way to reduce their attrition. This was a rather clumsy attempt by Benn to divert attention from the uncertainty that exists regarding the number fighters available to potential allies on the ground in the first place, with various numbers being bandied about.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this speech was in fact what passed unspoken in the background. The viewer was riveted by the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn sitting behind the speaker, his face betraying little emotion, while his colleague performed the rhetorical equivalent of dousing him in petrol and setting him on fire for the entertainment of their political opponents sitting on the benches opposite. Indeed, after the applause for the speech had subsided, Michael Fallon wasted no time capitalising on this by goading Jeremy Corbyn about his position on the bombing campaign in Iraq, which was in fact not up for discussion and was merely an opportunity to "put the boot in".
And when considering a broader, historic context, I have this image in my head of the scene from The Empire Strikes Back where Darth Vader says "I am your father" and Luke screams "Noooo", except with Tony Benn substituted for Darth Vader and Hilary Benn substituted for Luke.
In common with other examples of this kind of speech, the enemy's atrocities were listed to create a need for emotional release in the audience. The need was ramped up towards the end of the speech by allusions to former conflicts and enemies. When the release was provided by a rousing advocacy of the proposed course action at the conclusion of the speech it prompted applause and cheering, all the more remarkable for being in a venue in which, as the Speaker had previously pointed out in the context of Mhairi Black's maiden speech, such behaviour is prohibited, by custom if not statute.
However, the achievement of emotional release is not sufficient to make the case, which the speech failed to do on grounds of logic and fact. This reviewer feels able to award this performance only 2 out of 5.
The speech is now on general release around the country and will be repeated ad nauseam on all mainstream media channels for the duration of the war.
Hilary Benn's speech advocating a policy of bombing Syria was premièred on Wednesday night at the Palace of Westminster in London.
It was definitely a noteworthy performance, but perhaps not in the way intended or imagined. It was certainly typical of the genre - the eve of war call to arms - but this is mainly because of the errors of fact and logic with which it is strewn as it makes its emotional plea, and there is little in this speech to raise it above a host of other examples of which it is highly derivative.
The main fallacy, implicit throughout this and most other examples of the genre, indeed a defining feature of this kind of speech, is the assertion that because a course of action is required, the proposed course of action must be adopted. However the conclusion that we should bomb Syria does not logically follow from the premise that something should be done about ISIS. Other responses are possible and potentially preferable. In general, no specific course of action is entailed by the basic existence of a problem, and the most advisable course of action can only be identified by considering much more information about the complex set of circumstances in which the problem arises. As is typical of this kind of speech, this was largely ignored in favour of appeals to an emotional response.
There was a particularly uncomfortable moment in the speech when Hilary addressed the unavoidable issue of civilian casualties. There was some disingenuous hand-wringing before the topic was unconvincingly dismissed on the grounds that any deaths we cause by bombing would be accidental, in contrast to those caused by our enemy, which would be deliberate. The implication being attempted was that this somehow renders the deaths we might inadvertently cause acceptable.
However, as the outcome of the appeal in the case of Oscar Pistorius recently demonstrated, intention to kill implies murder irrespective of whom you intend to kill. In this regard Oscar Pistorius and Hilary Benn have in common the delusion that killing someone by accident exculpates you of their death. To be clear, the death itself does not occur by accident. Irrespective of whom the bomb falls on, the act of dropping it remains deliberate.
Various other factual and logical blunders also marred the otherwise well-delivered speech. For example, we are under no obligation to join a bombing campaign simply because others are engaged in it and have asked us to join. Mention of "playing our full part" makes unfounded assumptions about what our part is, prematurely anticipating the outcome of the debate and begging the question.
But perhaps the most glaring factual blunder is one of basic arithmetic. At one point Hilary claimed urgent action was needed to prevent the number of fighters available to potential allies being further reduced by ISIS, and that we should therefore not wait for a ceasefire between the other belligerents. However much greater loss of life has occurred as a result of conflict between the other belligerents, with the vast majority of civilian casualities being caused by Syrian government forces. Therefore the arithmetic actually favours a ceasefire between potential allies as a better way to reduce their attrition. This was a rather clumsy attempt by Benn to divert attention from the uncertainty that exists regarding the number fighters available to potential allies on the ground in the first place, with various numbers being bandied about.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this speech was in fact what passed unspoken in the background. The viewer was riveted by the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn sitting behind the speaker, his face betraying little emotion, while his colleague performed the rhetorical equivalent of dousing him in petrol and setting him on fire for the entertainment of their political opponents sitting on the benches opposite. Indeed, after the applause for the speech had subsided, Michael Fallon wasted no time capitalising on this by goading Jeremy Corbyn about his position on the bombing campaign in Iraq, which was in fact not up for discussion and was merely an opportunity to "put the boot in".
And when considering a broader, historic context, I have this image in my head of the scene from The Empire Strikes Back where Darth Vader says "I am your father" and Luke screams "Noooo", except with Tony Benn substituted for Darth Vader and Hilary Benn substituted for Luke.
In common with other examples of this kind of speech, the enemy's atrocities were listed to create a need for emotional release in the audience. The need was ramped up towards the end of the speech by allusions to former conflicts and enemies. When the release was provided by a rousing advocacy of the proposed course action at the conclusion of the speech it prompted applause and cheering, all the more remarkable for being in a venue in which, as the Speaker had previously pointed out in the context of Mhairi Black's maiden speech, such behaviour is prohibited, by custom if not statute.
However, the achievement of emotional release is not sufficient to make the case, which the speech failed to do on grounds of logic and fact. This reviewer feels able to award this performance only 2 out of 5.
The speech is now on general release around the country and will be repeated ad nauseam on all mainstream media channels for the duration of the war.
Thursday, 3 December 2015
Hilary Benn's arguments for war
Based on my paraphrase of his recent speech, Hilary Benn's arguments for war are as follows (with opposing arguments in brackets).
We should bomb now because:
We should bomb now because:
- The enemy could attack us
- Others are already bombing Syria and have asked us to join them
- The UN wants us to bomb Syria
- We are already bombing Iraq and the enemy does not distinguish between Syria and Iraq
- Local commanders say bombing is effective
- Civilian casualties caused by us are accidental and therefore acceptable in comparison to deliberate atrocities by the enemy
- The enemy will reduce the number of its potential Syrian opponents if we wait for a united opposition to emerge in Syria
- We can't afford to wait to make a decision that may not get any easier
- We have a history of helping other countries
- The enemy hates us
- The enemy's beliefs are completely contrary to our beliefs
Hilary Benn's great war speech: a paraphrase
Please could the PM say sorry for bullying my friend Jezza. People disagree, but that's OK. Well done to those that made interesting speeches about it, by the way.
The issue looks complex but it's actually simple. Some people are dropping bombs on some other, bad people. Should we join in? The things they did in Paris could have happened to you, after all.
We are already bombing Iraq, so we should bomb Syria too. We have already discussed this and agreed we should anyway, and the UN say we are allowed to because there are bad people in Syria too. In fact, the UN say we should. We invented the UN, by the way, we know all about the UN, and if they say we should, we should. Anyway, people in Iraq and thereabouts want us to, and lots of other people are doing it.
Yes, the fighting in Syria should stop. People are already talking about this, and about who should be in charge afterwards. This is important because it will help beat the bad guys in the long run and those migrants will go away at last.
Let me remind you, the bad guys do exceptionally bad things, and some day they might do them to us. Should we really do nothing about it? Are you saying we should just leave it up to those other people already dropping bombs? What will they think if we don't join in? They want us to join in. We're already doing it in Iraq. Some people say there's no point, but the good guys say it seems to have worked in Iraq. I know it's a shame when we kill the wrong people by mistake, but the bad guys do that deliberately.
Now some people say we don't know how many good guys there are in Syria and that the good guys are already busy with other bad guys, but if we don't drop bombs on our bad guys they'll kill more of the good guys and then there will be even less, so we shouldn't wait until the good guys aren't busy with the other bad guys any more. This doesn't mean we don't also ask people not to help the bad guys or don't also help the good guys ourselves now and afterwards, by the way.
Some people who say we shouldn't drop bombs do have a point, and it is a difficult decision, but we have to deal with this now and there is never going to be a good time for this sort of thing anyway. The good guys in Iraq have pointed out how helpful bombing is there and that the bad guys don't care about the difference between Syria and Iraq.
I am going to finish by talking to Jezza's mates. You know we have never not helped someone just because they're from another country. And the bad guys in Syria think they're better than us, and what makes them bad is actually the opposite of what makes us good. You can't ignore this kind of bad guy, you have to deal with them, and we have done so before, so we should again.
Specifically, by dropping bombs like the PM says.
The issue looks complex but it's actually simple. Some people are dropping bombs on some other, bad people. Should we join in? The things they did in Paris could have happened to you, after all.
We are already bombing Iraq, so we should bomb Syria too. We have already discussed this and agreed we should anyway, and the UN say we are allowed to because there are bad people in Syria too. In fact, the UN say we should. We invented the UN, by the way, we know all about the UN, and if they say we should, we should. Anyway, people in Iraq and thereabouts want us to, and lots of other people are doing it.
Yes, the fighting in Syria should stop. People are already talking about this, and about who should be in charge afterwards. This is important because it will help beat the bad guys in the long run and those migrants will go away at last.
Let me remind you, the bad guys do exceptionally bad things, and some day they might do them to us. Should we really do nothing about it? Are you saying we should just leave it up to those other people already dropping bombs? What will they think if we don't join in? They want us to join in. We're already doing it in Iraq. Some people say there's no point, but the good guys say it seems to have worked in Iraq. I know it's a shame when we kill the wrong people by mistake, but the bad guys do that deliberately.
Now some people say we don't know how many good guys there are in Syria and that the good guys are already busy with other bad guys, but if we don't drop bombs on our bad guys they'll kill more of the good guys and then there will be even less, so we shouldn't wait until the good guys aren't busy with the other bad guys any more. This doesn't mean we don't also ask people not to help the bad guys or don't also help the good guys ourselves now and afterwards, by the way.
Some people who say we shouldn't drop bombs do have a point, and it is a difficult decision, but we have to deal with this now and there is never going to be a good time for this sort of thing anyway. The good guys in Iraq have pointed out how helpful bombing is there and that the bad guys don't care about the difference between Syria and Iraq.
I am going to finish by talking to Jezza's mates. You know we have never not helped someone just because they're from another country. And the bad guys in Syria think they're better than us, and what makes them bad is actually the opposite of what makes us good. You can't ignore this kind of bad guy, you have to deal with them, and we have done so before, so we should again.
Specifically, by dropping bombs like the PM says.
Friday, 27 November 2015
How many more children must die?
It was reported the other day that French planes had bombed a school in Mosul in northern Iraq and that 28 children died.
Across the region, from Syria and Iraq to Gaza and Lebanon, children who survive, and have survived, the decades of chaos visited upon them, live through a childhood blighted by fear, pain, trauma, loss and grief until it is no longer childhood at all, and have done so for a generation.
Interrogations of captured ISIS fighters by the Iraqi army and researchers into the resolution of intractable conflicts have found one thing they all have in common. They had no childhood or adolescence, at least not in the way we understand it, not as a stable, developmentally productive period of life, and they are, in one form or another, in mourning for its loss.
In 1996, Madaleine Albright (the USA's ambassador to the UN at the time - she became US Secretary of State the following year) was interviewed about the "excess deaths" arising as a result of UN sanctions of Iraq. "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" she was asked, and Albright, finding herself cornered, replied "we think the price is worth it."
But clearly 500,000 children was not enough after all. As the example I listed at the beginning shows, we require at least 28 more.
The answer to the question that forms the title of this article is, of course, no more children must die.
As we drop bombs in our futile macho gestures against ISIS, we are dropping bombs on an organisation that is supported by Turkey. They do this because they want to topple Assad, and because ISIS fight against the Kurds, thereby destabilising the domestic Turkish left wing platform in which Kurdish organisations participate.
They are supported by Saudi Arabia, because they fight against Shi'ite "apostates" and "Safawis" like Iran. They are supported by Israel because they fight against Hezbollah and seem to be happy to let Israel retain the Golan Heights with its recently discovered oil reserves.
And ISIS are of course supported by everyone who likes the idea of buying oil at $25 a barrel and doesn't care where it comes from, and by various commercial entities with interests in particular oil and gas pipeline routes.
ISIS are in financial crisis. They have run out of banks to rob. Their tax base is being eroded as refugees flee the country (indeed every hysterical response in the West about refugees is used as domestic propaganda by ISIS to persuade people to stay). The infrastructure that supports their oil exports is being degraded and they are finding it difficult to recruit engineers and skilled personnel to operate what remains. They rely more than ever on the support of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, indeed they would not continue to exist without it.
ISIS clearly represent an epochal evil. However, there are no "good guys versus bad guys" here. The cycle of violence has persisted so long it has led us to a situation where we are no longer fighting our enemy any more, we are fighting our enemy's enemy's enemy, and every enemy has at some point been an ally, and every ally has at some point been guilty of the very violations of human rights and dignities we use as a pretext for punishing our enemies. Once war starts the logic that gave it birth mutates with every grievance and atrocity until the only remaining legitimate war aim is its end.
But Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel are our allies. It would be nice to think we could influence them in some way that does not involve killing children.
To make a table or chair fall over, we could remove the various legs that support it, or we could bomb the house it's in. Only one of these involves killing children. Only one of these is guaranteed to work. And not the same one.
Across the region, from Syria and Iraq to Gaza and Lebanon, children who survive, and have survived, the decades of chaos visited upon them, live through a childhood blighted by fear, pain, trauma, loss and grief until it is no longer childhood at all, and have done so for a generation.
Interrogations of captured ISIS fighters by the Iraqi army and researchers into the resolution of intractable conflicts have found one thing they all have in common. They had no childhood or adolescence, at least not in the way we understand it, not as a stable, developmentally productive period of life, and they are, in one form or another, in mourning for its loss.
In 1996, Madaleine Albright (the USA's ambassador to the UN at the time - she became US Secretary of State the following year) was interviewed about the "excess deaths" arising as a result of UN sanctions of Iraq. "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" she was asked, and Albright, finding herself cornered, replied "we think the price is worth it."
But clearly 500,000 children was not enough after all. As the example I listed at the beginning shows, we require at least 28 more.
The answer to the question that forms the title of this article is, of course, no more children must die.
As we drop bombs in our futile macho gestures against ISIS, we are dropping bombs on an organisation that is supported by Turkey. They do this because they want to topple Assad, and because ISIS fight against the Kurds, thereby destabilising the domestic Turkish left wing platform in which Kurdish organisations participate.
They are supported by Saudi Arabia, because they fight against Shi'ite "apostates" and "Safawis" like Iran. They are supported by Israel because they fight against Hezbollah and seem to be happy to let Israel retain the Golan Heights with its recently discovered oil reserves.
And ISIS are of course supported by everyone who likes the idea of buying oil at $25 a barrel and doesn't care where it comes from, and by various commercial entities with interests in particular oil and gas pipeline routes.
ISIS are in financial crisis. They have run out of banks to rob. Their tax base is being eroded as refugees flee the country (indeed every hysterical response in the West about refugees is used as domestic propaganda by ISIS to persuade people to stay). The infrastructure that supports their oil exports is being degraded and they are finding it difficult to recruit engineers and skilled personnel to operate what remains. They rely more than ever on the support of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, indeed they would not continue to exist without it.
ISIS clearly represent an epochal evil. However, there are no "good guys versus bad guys" here. The cycle of violence has persisted so long it has led us to a situation where we are no longer fighting our enemy any more, we are fighting our enemy's enemy's enemy, and every enemy has at some point been an ally, and every ally has at some point been guilty of the very violations of human rights and dignities we use as a pretext for punishing our enemies. Once war starts the logic that gave it birth mutates with every grievance and atrocity until the only remaining legitimate war aim is its end.
But Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel are our allies. It would be nice to think we could influence them in some way that does not involve killing children.
To make a table or chair fall over, we could remove the various legs that support it, or we could bomb the house it's in. Only one of these involves killing children. Only one of these is guaranteed to work. And not the same one.
Monday, 23 November 2015
The song of the arms dealers
We stuffed our coffers fast and full while workers filled their coffins,
We piled our profits rafter-high and left them just one option:
to take a single shilling and to make their children orphans,
and gave to them thanks of a grateful nation.
Year after year, war after war, we sold the guns they'd need.
We sold the bombs and kept no scores, whatever made them bleed.
He sold them his, I sold them mine, we'd toast how well we'd done,
and gave to them thanks of a grateful nation.
No mustard gas in St Tropez, no mistral at Verdun,
no justice bought for any price while we controlled the coin,
and French and German coughed their last while we were having fun,
and giving them thanks of a grateful nation.
It wasn't champagne in our glass, it wasn't crystal chiming,
it wasn't fine wine that we drank while dancing and fine-dining,
but workers blood in workers skulls, while workers did the dying,
and got from us thanks of a grateful nation.
And you sleep soundly in your bed. You do not drown in mud
beneath a flare and flack filled sky amid the screams and thuds.
You do not really wonder why. You do not ask. Instead
you give to them thanks of a grateful nation.
We piled our profits rafter-high and left them just one option:
to take a single shilling and to make their children orphans,
and gave to them thanks of a grateful nation.
Year after year, war after war, we sold the guns they'd need.
We sold the bombs and kept no scores, whatever made them bleed.
He sold them his, I sold them mine, we'd toast how well we'd done,
and gave to them thanks of a grateful nation.
No mustard gas in St Tropez, no mistral at Verdun,
no justice bought for any price while we controlled the coin,
and French and German coughed their last while we were having fun,
and giving them thanks of a grateful nation.
It wasn't champagne in our glass, it wasn't crystal chiming,
it wasn't fine wine that we drank while dancing and fine-dining,
but workers blood in workers skulls, while workers did the dying,
and got from us thanks of a grateful nation.
And you sleep soundly in your bed. You do not drown in mud
beneath a flare and flack filled sky amid the screams and thuds.
You do not really wonder why. You do not ask. Instead
you give to them thanks of a grateful nation.
Wednesday, 11 November 2015
Remembrance
When we remember the fallen today, remember all of them.
Not just the ones our governments bring to our attention.
Don't let the dead be a matter of convenience to the living as they justify and pursue policies that betray a failure to learn anything at all from the past. Commemoration must not be allowed to be merely expedient. It must be the grossest of inconveniences.
Remember them all, friends and foes, foreign and domestic, military and civilian, known and unknown. Remember the victims of our own aggression, innumerable nameless millions lost to history whose very existence is reduced to a matter of speculation by our genocides and war crimes.
Remember the heroes and the villains. Remember the deserters shot at dawn. Remember those crushed in insurrection against the world we have made over their unmarked graves. Remember the reviled.
Remember them all and take no comfort in your commemoration.
Not just the ones our governments bring to our attention.
Don't let the dead be a matter of convenience to the living as they justify and pursue policies that betray a failure to learn anything at all from the past. Commemoration must not be allowed to be merely expedient. It must be the grossest of inconveniences.
Remember them all, friends and foes, foreign and domestic, military and civilian, known and unknown. Remember the victims of our own aggression, innumerable nameless millions lost to history whose very existence is reduced to a matter of speculation by our genocides and war crimes.
Remember the heroes and the villains. Remember the deserters shot at dawn. Remember those crushed in insurrection against the world we have made over their unmarked graves. Remember the reviled.
Remember them all and take no comfort in your commemoration.
Love Song
In love we contain
each other's secret name,
names we didn't even know we had,
and with kisses we steal from each other
the breath we need to say them
like they were the first words spoken:
Love
created the world
because it wanted something to love
and love hid itself inside us
to see its beloved through its own eyes,
our eyes,
but from us it learned to forget:
the sin we call knowledge, the emptiness
we invent all the colours and all the shapes
to disguise; we forgot our own divinity
and thought ourselves mere creatures,
prowling, alone, lost, afraid, fighting, dying,
but sometimes,
even when we can't find it in ourselves,
sometimes we see our divinity briefly glimmer
and elude our second glance,
hidden in someone else,
somewhere almost
but, as we eventually find out,
after all the quests and reversals of fortune,
all the half-remembered myths
through which we heroically drag ourselves
from ritual to history,
after all the murdered gods and sacrificed children,
and elaborations of atrocity and annihilation,
and after that infinite chasm of time that elapses
between first seeing you and first touching you
almost, but, I promise, not quite impossible to reach,
and we discover love again, and for all time,
and recreate the world anew,
safe from every cataclysm.
We all contain
each other's secret name,
and steal the breath we need
to speak it with a kiss,
and when we repeat it aloud
we discover they sound the same
and in each others arms
beside the river of time
we sing our names together again
and again
and again.
each other's secret name,
names we didn't even know we had,
and with kisses we steal from each other
the breath we need to say them
like they were the first words spoken:
Love
created the world
because it wanted something to love
and love hid itself inside us
to see its beloved through its own eyes,
our eyes,
but from us it learned to forget:
the sin we call knowledge, the emptiness
we invent all the colours and all the shapes
to disguise; we forgot our own divinity
and thought ourselves mere creatures,
prowling, alone, lost, afraid, fighting, dying,
but sometimes,
even when we can't find it in ourselves,
sometimes we see our divinity briefly glimmer
and elude our second glance,
hidden in someone else,
somewhere almost
but, as we eventually find out,
after all the quests and reversals of fortune,
all the half-remembered myths
through which we heroically drag ourselves
from ritual to history,
after all the murdered gods and sacrificed children,
and elaborations of atrocity and annihilation,
and after that infinite chasm of time that elapses
between first seeing you and first touching you
almost, but, I promise, not quite impossible to reach,
and we discover love again, and for all time,
and recreate the world anew,
safe from every cataclysm.
We all contain
each other's secret name,
and steal the breath we need
to speak it with a kiss,
and when we repeat it aloud
we discover they sound the same
and in each others arms
beside the river of time
we sing our names together again
and again
and again.
Monday, 9 November 2015
Do you suffer from TDS?
TLA Dissonance Syndrome (TDS) affects people of all ages in all walks of life, where their job requires them to know the meaning of various three letter abbreviations (or TLAs) but where there are identical TLAs with different meanings. Often context does not even allow them to differentiate between TLAs, leading to elevated levels of stress, producing harmful toxins, dizziness, nausea and irritability.
My name's Peter Clive, and I work in the wind power industry. I find context can often be helpful when dealing with TLAs. It is usually clear, for example, when EDF means Électricité de France (a utility with a large renewable energy portfolio) and where it means Erbium Doped Fibre (a key component in some laser based remote sensing systems for measuring wind conditions).
But sometimes context doesn't help. I can find myself wondering if PPA is used to refer to a Power Performance Assessment (which tells me how efficient a wind turbine is) or a Power Purchase Agreement (which tells me how much I can sell the electricity it generates for). I find myself experiencing increasing levels of TDS related anxiety as I struggle to discern if NWP is used to mean Numerical Weather Prediction or Normal Wind Profile.
Critically, even those engaged in the study and mitigation of TDS are forced to endure the most hideous TDS related injuries, as wikipedia's disambiguation page for TDS itself shows. And studies have yet to determine the relationship between Three Letter Acronym Dissonance Syndrome and Three Letter Abbreviation Dissonance Syndrome - whether they are related but distinct disorders, or the same thing. The data simply is not yet available.
Please help us raise awareness of this debilitating condition, and hopefully we can get legislation passed to ensure that clear and unambiguous TLAs are adopted across the various industries that rely heavily on their use. Please help curtail the unregulated use of ambiguous TLAs and provide some relief to the country's estimated 7.5 million suffers of TDS.
Don't suffer in silence from TDS.
My name's Peter Clive, and I work in the wind power industry. I find context can often be helpful when dealing with TLAs. It is usually clear, for example, when EDF means Électricité de France (a utility with a large renewable energy portfolio) and where it means Erbium Doped Fibre (a key component in some laser based remote sensing systems for measuring wind conditions).
But sometimes context doesn't help. I can find myself wondering if PPA is used to refer to a Power Performance Assessment (which tells me how efficient a wind turbine is) or a Power Purchase Agreement (which tells me how much I can sell the electricity it generates for). I find myself experiencing increasing levels of TDS related anxiety as I struggle to discern if NWP is used to mean Numerical Weather Prediction or Normal Wind Profile.
Critically, even those engaged in the study and mitigation of TDS are forced to endure the most hideous TDS related injuries, as wikipedia's disambiguation page for TDS itself shows. And studies have yet to determine the relationship between Three Letter Acronym Dissonance Syndrome and Three Letter Abbreviation Dissonance Syndrome - whether they are related but distinct disorders, or the same thing. The data simply is not yet available.
Please help us raise awareness of this debilitating condition, and hopefully we can get legislation passed to ensure that clear and unambiguous TLAs are adopted across the various industries that rely heavily on their use. Please help curtail the unregulated use of ambiguous TLAs and provide some relief to the country's estimated 7.5 million suffers of TDS.
Don't suffer in silence from TDS.
Friday, 6 November 2015
We are all Echidna's children now
In Greek mythology Echidna was half woman, half snake. She lived in a cave and, with Typhon, youngest son of Gaia, had many children, the most fearsome monsters of Greek mythology: the many headed dog Cerberus; the Chimera; the Sphinx; the Hydra; the Gorgons; the Harpies ...
CRISPR technology has been developed that allows us to edit genes in situ. The reality of this may not be quite like the title sequence of an X-Man movie, but the consequences are much more far reaching, as has been discussed here. Please read the article, then continue.
Radioactive spiders are no longer required if you want to become Spiderman. You can now customise your own mutant X gene. Come down to the superpower boutique and get fitted out with some enhancements.
Natural selection is side-tracked. Sexual reproduction is redundant. We shall discover the ultimate freedom, the ultimate illusory consumer choice, when we as adults can choose as our parents some random individuals from magazines found on the table in the waiting room of the clinic we attend for our gene therapy, with their glossy airbrushed celebrities finally vindicated and made vivid and real by our imitation of them in the flesh.
Nature and Nurture yield at last to Culture. We are at last outcomes of our own artifice.
And who will save us when it all goes horribly wrong? Where are our original selves going to be backed up? Indeed, what frame of reference remains when all that made us human is swept aside?
How do we revert to our original genetic code after we have given a new one a test drive and have had enough? Or maybe we won't want to: the modification may also alter our attitudes, and once you become the "new you" you are incapable of wanting to change back.
The article I alluded to above is correct. It is impossible to overstate the significance of CRISPR technology. Doudna and her colleagues are ushering us over a threshold greater than anything Copernicus dreamt of, greater than the advent of metallurgy, greater than language and tools. This is more important than having opposable thumbs, because this allows us to choose whether or not to have opposable thumbs.
Imagine a world where no-one inherits their grandfather's eyes. They choose their eyes from a catalogue as adults. The colour of the eyes and the number of them. Imagine a world where you can fly. Imagine a world in which you can inflict the most nightmarish mutations on someone, where you can rewrite someone and delete the original.
Imagine a world where rationality disintegrates and mythology becomes literally true. Imagine a world where we are all Echidna's children.
People have worried about the singularity and the idea of downloading their consciousness into a machine. People have anxiety about a trans-human condition enabled by information technology. Maybe now that day can't come soon enough! Maybe disembodied electric consciousness is preferable to genetic soup.
Radioactive spiders are no longer required if you want to become Spiderman. You can now customise your own mutant X gene. Come down to the superpower boutique and get fitted out with some enhancements.
Natural selection is side-tracked. Sexual reproduction is redundant. We shall discover the ultimate freedom, the ultimate illusory consumer choice, when we as adults can choose as our parents some random individuals from magazines found on the table in the waiting room of the clinic we attend for our gene therapy, with their glossy airbrushed celebrities finally vindicated and made vivid and real by our imitation of them in the flesh.
Nature and Nurture yield at last to Culture. We are at last outcomes of our own artifice.
And who will save us when it all goes horribly wrong? Where are our original selves going to be backed up? Indeed, what frame of reference remains when all that made us human is swept aside?
How do we revert to our original genetic code after we have given a new one a test drive and have had enough? Or maybe we won't want to: the modification may also alter our attitudes, and once you become the "new you" you are incapable of wanting to change back.
The article I alluded to above is correct. It is impossible to overstate the significance of CRISPR technology. Doudna and her colleagues are ushering us over a threshold greater than anything Copernicus dreamt of, greater than the advent of metallurgy, greater than language and tools. This is more important than having opposable thumbs, because this allows us to choose whether or not to have opposable thumbs.
Imagine a world where no-one inherits their grandfather's eyes. They choose their eyes from a catalogue as adults. The colour of the eyes and the number of them. Imagine a world where you can fly. Imagine a world in which you can inflict the most nightmarish mutations on someone, where you can rewrite someone and delete the original.
Imagine a world where rationality disintegrates and mythology becomes literally true. Imagine a world where we are all Echidna's children.
People have worried about the singularity and the idea of downloading their consciousness into a machine. People have anxiety about a trans-human condition enabled by information technology. Maybe now that day can't come soon enough! Maybe disembodied electric consciousness is preferable to genetic soup.
Thursday, 5 November 2015
Science is "Natural Democracy"
I see there is another one of the periodic spates of climate change denial going on, with a rash of shares of a widely discredited Daily Mail article from 2012, and various incoherent chemtrail rants that are logically lazy to the point of being comatose being posted in social media.
It's really not difficult, guys. Science isn't some cult with a restricted membership of initiates. Science isn't about secrets and conspiracies. Science is not a racket or a private members club. Everything you need to know is freely and widely available. Everyone is a scientist if they simply apply a little bit of critical thinking and make a little bit of effort appraising evidence and inferring its logical consequences.
Is that really too much to ask?
People used to refer to science as "natural philosophy" to distinguish it from various moral and metaphysical speculations and indicate its reliance on hard experimental evidence taken from "nature". But in this day and age science and technology is so crucial to all of our activities and all of the decisions we have to make as consumers and citizens, that I would like to propose a new term. Science is "natural democracy". Democracy is not possible in a technologically enabled society when its citizens do not habitually think in a scientific manner. They are prey to spurious unexamined authority and buffeted by fallacious reasoning into random, often damaging decisions and outcomes.
You don't have to know everything in the science books to avoid being taken for a fool by the various interest groups that seek your approval for whatever course of action they propose or oppose. The science books are constantly being re-written, after all, as new things are found out. And it is important to note that the process of revision does not invalidate science - it is precisely the point! Scientific knowledge is provisional because science embraces human fallibility and rejects illusions of certainty.
What you do need to avoid being taken for a fool is an ability to think in the way the people who work out where the books need to be rewritten think. And that way of thinking requires no special qualification, no diploma, no years of study, no knowledge base. It can be described in one word: human.
It's really not difficult, guys. Science isn't some cult with a restricted membership of initiates. Science isn't about secrets and conspiracies. Science is not a racket or a private members club. Everything you need to know is freely and widely available. Everyone is a scientist if they simply apply a little bit of critical thinking and make a little bit of effort appraising evidence and inferring its logical consequences.
Is that really too much to ask?
People used to refer to science as "natural philosophy" to distinguish it from various moral and metaphysical speculations and indicate its reliance on hard experimental evidence taken from "nature". But in this day and age science and technology is so crucial to all of our activities and all of the decisions we have to make as consumers and citizens, that I would like to propose a new term. Science is "natural democracy". Democracy is not possible in a technologically enabled society when its citizens do not habitually think in a scientific manner. They are prey to spurious unexamined authority and buffeted by fallacious reasoning into random, often damaging decisions and outcomes.
You don't have to know everything in the science books to avoid being taken for a fool by the various interest groups that seek your approval for whatever course of action they propose or oppose. The science books are constantly being re-written, after all, as new things are found out. And it is important to note that the process of revision does not invalidate science - it is precisely the point! Scientific knowledge is provisional because science embraces human fallibility and rejects illusions of certainty.
What you do need to avoid being taken for a fool is an ability to think in the way the people who work out where the books need to be rewritten think. And that way of thinking requires no special qualification, no diploma, no years of study, no knowledge base. It can be described in one word: human.
Monday, 2 November 2015
We should welcome Labour opposition to Trident renewal
The decision by Labour in Scotland to oppose Trident renewal must be welcomed.
The urge in some quarters to score petty party political points must be resisted. We must seek new opportunities for constructive cross-party engagement in pursuit of progress where there is common ground. This common ground now appears to extend to the issue of Trident renewal. No-one "owns" opposition to Trident. We must now secure the passage of a cross-party motion at Holyrood opposing Trident renewal in advance of the SNP's opposition day debate at Westminster on the subject on the 24th.
Every reason our opponents gave to vote No during the referendum campaign represents an issue on which we require people to change their minds. When they do we should congratulate them for being open to persuasion, rather than ridicule them for contradicting themselves. An independent Scotland will only be achieved through mature inclusive politics that involves people who are able to disagree with each other. No-one knows everything, but everyone knows something, and you can never predict what you can learn from someone else.
And if Labour are not ultimately able to deliver it only further substantiates the instrumentality of Independence.
The urge in some quarters to score petty party political points must be resisted. We must seek new opportunities for constructive cross-party engagement in pursuit of progress where there is common ground. This common ground now appears to extend to the issue of Trident renewal. No-one "owns" opposition to Trident. We must now secure the passage of a cross-party motion at Holyrood opposing Trident renewal in advance of the SNP's opposition day debate at Westminster on the subject on the 24th.
Every reason our opponents gave to vote No during the referendum campaign represents an issue on which we require people to change their minds. When they do we should congratulate them for being open to persuasion, rather than ridicule them for contradicting themselves. An independent Scotland will only be achieved through mature inclusive politics that involves people who are able to disagree with each other. No-one knows everything, but everyone knows something, and you can never predict what you can learn from someone else.
And if Labour are not ultimately able to deliver it only further substantiates the instrumentality of Independence.
Friday, 2 October 2015
The logic of war
War requires
However, the related economic activities may be undertaken anywhere.
Therefore we should
- Access to weapons and the funds to purchase them, and
- A profit motive that relates to an activity that remains profitable even in the event of conflict.
- Access or afford weapons anymore, or
- Profit from any possible outcome achievable by violence.
However, the related economic activities may be undertaken anywhere.
Therefore we should
- Criminalise the arms trade and enforce its prohibition by sequestering moneys made selling arms, and
- Encourage economic activity that would be disrupted by war in preference to "conflict-neutral" economies based on activities that are not critically disrupted by war.
- Develop infrastructure for adding value to basic resources locally, to avoid conflict over access to resources and encourage trade reliant on high value goods and services that would be disrupted by war instead;
- Modify demand for conflict-neutral resources globally to encourage activities reliant on local conflict-neutral resources whose availability is secure, for example, development of renewables in preference to hydrocarbons with regards to energy demand;
- Always remember the most precious resources are human resources, and the most sustainable economies are founded on this understanding.
- Abhor violence and prohibit the means to prosecute war, and
- Trade goods and services produced locally by skilled labour rather than compete over access to raw materials on behalf of remote and anonymous interests.
Tuesday, 29 September 2015
The first draft of Jeremy Corbyn's remarks on the subject of Scotland in his address to the Labour Party Conference 2015
"Comrades
"The people have spoken. I have been elected with an unprecedented mandate to bring change to our party and to our country. Today offers us an historic opportunity to set aside the past and debate the new course that will lead us to a brighter future.
"I stand before you on this podium having been propelled here by the votes of 251,417 members, supporters and affiliates. But let us not forget another people have spoken. The people of Scotland have rejected us.
"It would be easy for me to stand here and patronise the Scots for the supreme folly of abandoning our party. It would be easy for me to castigate the SNP administration in Edinburgh with a series of casual and cynical inaccuracies and misrepresentations. It would be easy for me to cast them in a variety of villainous roles, caricatures that originate only in our own imagination. I am confident I would reap the applause of those whose tribal animosities are confirmed by my doing so.
"But we have an historic opportunity for change. We have a window of opportunity. We must seize that opportunity, take our chances, before that window closes once more for a generation. We must open up to those who now sit to the left of us on the green benches, and who have occupied a position to the left of us ideologically for some time now.
"We must be humble. If we want to lead in Scotland, we must learn to follow. Mobilisation of a formidable grass roots movement in England gives us no right to usurp the movement that already exists in Scotland. We must kick the habit of complacency and condescension and entitlement for which we have been punished repeatedly at the ballot box in Scotland.
"Keir Hardie did not found this party only for it to be used by the British State to manage communities ravaged by inter-generational post-imperial decline with empty rhetoric and broken promises. But in Scotland that is what we have become. We offer beads and blankets to the natives while feathering our own nests.
"Keir Hardie spoke of 'Home Rule' for Scotland, yet we took that phrase and twisted and perverted it to form the basis of the 'Vow' with which we conned the people of Scotland into thinking a No vote was a vote for change in the Independence referendum last year. We must offer our confession in all humility, we must admit to ourselves and to the people of Scotland that we stood on the wrong side during that campaign, and in doing so revealed what we have been doing for generations: the dirty work of the British State.
"So let there be no talk of 'winning back' Scotland, as though it were a possession of which we have been temporarily deprived. Let there be no talk of voters 'coming home' to Labour, as though they were errant children unable to decide things for themselves. If we want to move on from the disasters that have befallen us in Scotland we must first acknowledge and take responsibility for those faults that led to them.
"We do not own the opposition benches. I cannot rely on the mandate given to me by the voters while ignoring the mandate given to those with whom we share those benches. Let us not act as though we hold a monopoly on ideas, as though we are the doorman at the 'anti-austerity' club, as though we have unique and privileged access to some oracle that describes how to achieve social justice. Where we find common cause let us make concerted effort. Let us not quibble over credentials then fail to act. Let us oppose, not abstain.
"Let us rid this land of the obscenity of Trident. Let us topple the grotesque totems and confound the deceitful shibboleths of the warmongers. Let us turn away the arms dealers from our shores and welcome the refugees that flee their guns.
"I will work with, not against, the SNP, who provide the 56 members with whom we share the green benches, to achieve this. And I recognise the sovereign right of the people of Scotland who elected them to decide for themselves their best form of government."
(History records that this first draft was discarded and in the final draft the leader's position reverted to the one adopted by previous leaders with respect to the question of what to do about Scotland)
"The people have spoken. I have been elected with an unprecedented mandate to bring change to our party and to our country. Today offers us an historic opportunity to set aside the past and debate the new course that will lead us to a brighter future.
"I stand before you on this podium having been propelled here by the votes of 251,417 members, supporters and affiliates. But let us not forget another people have spoken. The people of Scotland have rejected us.
"It would be easy for me to stand here and patronise the Scots for the supreme folly of abandoning our party. It would be easy for me to castigate the SNP administration in Edinburgh with a series of casual and cynical inaccuracies and misrepresentations. It would be easy for me to cast them in a variety of villainous roles, caricatures that originate only in our own imagination. I am confident I would reap the applause of those whose tribal animosities are confirmed by my doing so.
"But we have an historic opportunity for change. We have a window of opportunity. We must seize that opportunity, take our chances, before that window closes once more for a generation. We must open up to those who now sit to the left of us on the green benches, and who have occupied a position to the left of us ideologically for some time now.
"We must be humble. If we want to lead in Scotland, we must learn to follow. Mobilisation of a formidable grass roots movement in England gives us no right to usurp the movement that already exists in Scotland. We must kick the habit of complacency and condescension and entitlement for which we have been punished repeatedly at the ballot box in Scotland.
"Keir Hardie did not found this party only for it to be used by the British State to manage communities ravaged by inter-generational post-imperial decline with empty rhetoric and broken promises. But in Scotland that is what we have become. We offer beads and blankets to the natives while feathering our own nests.
"Keir Hardie spoke of 'Home Rule' for Scotland, yet we took that phrase and twisted and perverted it to form the basis of the 'Vow' with which we conned the people of Scotland into thinking a No vote was a vote for change in the Independence referendum last year. We must offer our confession in all humility, we must admit to ourselves and to the people of Scotland that we stood on the wrong side during that campaign, and in doing so revealed what we have been doing for generations: the dirty work of the British State.
"So let there be no talk of 'winning back' Scotland, as though it were a possession of which we have been temporarily deprived. Let there be no talk of voters 'coming home' to Labour, as though they were errant children unable to decide things for themselves. If we want to move on from the disasters that have befallen us in Scotland we must first acknowledge and take responsibility for those faults that led to them.
"We do not own the opposition benches. I cannot rely on the mandate given to me by the voters while ignoring the mandate given to those with whom we share those benches. Let us not act as though we hold a monopoly on ideas, as though we are the doorman at the 'anti-austerity' club, as though we have unique and privileged access to some oracle that describes how to achieve social justice. Where we find common cause let us make concerted effort. Let us not quibble over credentials then fail to act. Let us oppose, not abstain.
"Let us rid this land of the obscenity of Trident. Let us topple the grotesque totems and confound the deceitful shibboleths of the warmongers. Let us turn away the arms dealers from our shores and welcome the refugees that flee their guns.
"I will work with, not against, the SNP, who provide the 56 members with whom we share the green benches, to achieve this. And I recognise the sovereign right of the people of Scotland who elected them to decide for themselves their best form of government."
(History records that this first draft was discarded and in the final draft the leader's position reverted to the one adopted by previous leaders with respect to the question of what to do about Scotland)
Thursday, 24 September 2015
Do you speak Mitchell?
Here is David Mitchell's considered critique of Gaelic road signs ...
Whereas this is an American girl's request that we all speak Americanish ...
(Update, 2023-07-18: I see that video is no longer available. Here's another: link)
Whereas this is an American girl's request that we all speak Americanish ...
(Update, 2023-07-18: I see that video is no longer available. Here's another: link)
It's difficult to tell them apart, isn't it? I mean, they are essentially making the same point, aren't they?
Mitchell. Noun. That sense of disappointment and sadness you feel when you realise a person you used to admire and think was really cool and clever and funny is actually just a twat.
Language attrition is a very well studied topic. "UNESCO operates with four levels of language endangerment beyond 'safe' (not endangered), based on intergenerational transfer: 'vulnerable' (not spoken by children outside the home), 'definitely endangered' (children not speaking), 'severely endangered' (only spoken by the oldest generations), and 'critically endangered' (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers)."
It took me literally two seconds to find that out using Google and Wikipedia. So contrary to Mitchell's dire prognostications, Gaelic is not even vulnerable, let alone on its last legs limping towards death (my own children speak Gaelic "outside the home").
Mitchell's feigned concern about the status of Gaelic tells us much more about his own fantasies of English language supremacy and his own lazy assumptions than it tells us anything about the health of Gaelic. He claims Gaelic is, to all intents and purposes, dead, only because it would suit him if it was dead. Either that or he is inexplicably unfamiliar with the workings of the internet.
He requires the insight displayed by the characters in a classic Mitchell and Webb sketch who asked themselves "are we the bad guys?"
This whole thing bothers me because the man is not an idiot, the evidence presented here notwithstanding. When he talks, people listen, so when he talks rubbish, he must be contradicted.
Mitchell. Noun. That sense of disappointment and sadness you feel when you realise a person you used to admire and think was really cool and clever and funny is actually just a twat.
Language attrition is a very well studied topic. "UNESCO operates with four levels of language endangerment beyond 'safe' (not endangered), based on intergenerational transfer: 'vulnerable' (not spoken by children outside the home), 'definitely endangered' (children not speaking), 'severely endangered' (only spoken by the oldest generations), and 'critically endangered' (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers)."
It took me literally two seconds to find that out using Google and Wikipedia. So contrary to Mitchell's dire prognostications, Gaelic is not even vulnerable, let alone on its last legs limping towards death (my own children speak Gaelic "outside the home").
Mitchell's feigned concern about the status of Gaelic tells us much more about his own fantasies of English language supremacy and his own lazy assumptions than it tells us anything about the health of Gaelic. He claims Gaelic is, to all intents and purposes, dead, only because it would suit him if it was dead. Either that or he is inexplicably unfamiliar with the workings of the internet.
He requires the insight displayed by the characters in a classic Mitchell and Webb sketch who asked themselves "are we the bad guys?"
This whole thing bothers me because the man is not an idiot, the evidence presented here notwithstanding. When he talks, people listen, so when he talks rubbish, he must be contradicted.
Wednesday, 16 September 2015
The Prodigal Party
We have heard a lot of left-wing critics of Scottish Independence talk about workers' solidarity. How often have we heard how much the workers of Leith have in common with the workers of Liverpool. As if somehow the British State is the unavoidable intermediary in all fellow-feeling.
But let's be clear: the status quo has proven itself a better instrument for resisting progress than achieving it.
Let's not kid ourselves on that those who would deny us self-determination do so in the interest of the Brotherhood of Man.
Let's not kid ourselves on that those who oppose our Independence offer as an alternative some benevolent world order.
They offer a state that institutionalises injustice. They offer a jingoistic vaudeville nationalism that belittles and degrades us and limits the way we respond to events to the basest instincts and knee-jerks, all the while complaining vehemently about "nationalism". The concept of a country they offer does not liberate us wholesale. It enslaves us piecemeal. Then it pits us against each other.
They advocate the obscene paradox of a national interest that is served by arms sales and is threatened by refugees who flee those self-same arms.
The Independence we seek turns that on its head! The Independence we seek is the Independence we need to take the world in our embrace and act on the basis of that which unites all people. We want a country that turns away the arms dealers and embraces the refugees created by their profiteering, not one that criminalises refugees and provides guns to their persecutors.
Independence doesn't stop us acting in solidarity with workers in the rest of the UK. However, the UK does prevent us acting in solidarity with people around the world. The workers of Leith do not want to limit their sympathy to the workers of Liverpool.
So when these left-wing critics re-iterate their tropes and totems and shibboleths it is not because they sincerely believe them. We have seen their policies governed by convenience rather than principle all too often. It is because they want us to remain distracted and beguiled by the punch and judy show they are part of.
The Labour Party in Scotland does not exist to promote workers' rights. It ceased to do that decades ago. The Labour Party has been tolerated by the British State as a form of crowd control. It has traditionally dominated local authorities where the British State has required local management of inter-generational post-imperial decline, with all the lip service and necessary illusions that requires.
But when a new idea is articulated, based on an optimistic inclusive vision of the future, one that does not require us to martyr ourselves as victims of historic forces they claim to oppose, they are first to deride it, and reveal themselves to be an integral part of the problem whose solution they present themselves to be.
And now they find themselves staring into the abyss, because circumstances finally force them to confront their historic hypocrisy. The only way back from the brink is a full and frank confession.
They have to admit that the Yes Movement was right.
They have to admit that they were on the wrong side during the referendum campaign.
Agreeing with its objectives but then claiming to offer the only way of delivering them is now such a threadbare deception as to be beneath ridicule and contempt. Every scared and starving Syrian child camped outside our gates provides an obscene and blatant counterexample to their lies. Every scrap of anti-union legislation passed at Westminster demonstrates their impotence.
But if they could only, for one instant, demonstrate genuine humility, and confess their errors, would we not slay the fatted calf and welcome them home ...
But let's be clear: the status quo has proven itself a better instrument for resisting progress than achieving it.
Let's not kid ourselves on that those who would deny us self-determination do so in the interest of the Brotherhood of Man.
Let's not kid ourselves on that those who oppose our Independence offer as an alternative some benevolent world order.
They offer a state that institutionalises injustice. They offer a jingoistic vaudeville nationalism that belittles and degrades us and limits the way we respond to events to the basest instincts and knee-jerks, all the while complaining vehemently about "nationalism". The concept of a country they offer does not liberate us wholesale. It enslaves us piecemeal. Then it pits us against each other.
They advocate the obscene paradox of a national interest that is served by arms sales and is threatened by refugees who flee those self-same arms.
The Independence we seek turns that on its head! The Independence we seek is the Independence we need to take the world in our embrace and act on the basis of that which unites all people. We want a country that turns away the arms dealers and embraces the refugees created by their profiteering, not one that criminalises refugees and provides guns to their persecutors.
Independence doesn't stop us acting in solidarity with workers in the rest of the UK. However, the UK does prevent us acting in solidarity with people around the world. The workers of Leith do not want to limit their sympathy to the workers of Liverpool.
So when these left-wing critics re-iterate their tropes and totems and shibboleths it is not because they sincerely believe them. We have seen their policies governed by convenience rather than principle all too often. It is because they want us to remain distracted and beguiled by the punch and judy show they are part of.
The Labour Party in Scotland does not exist to promote workers' rights. It ceased to do that decades ago. The Labour Party has been tolerated by the British State as a form of crowd control. It has traditionally dominated local authorities where the British State has required local management of inter-generational post-imperial decline, with all the lip service and necessary illusions that requires.
But when a new idea is articulated, based on an optimistic inclusive vision of the future, one that does not require us to martyr ourselves as victims of historic forces they claim to oppose, they are first to deride it, and reveal themselves to be an integral part of the problem whose solution they present themselves to be.
And now they find themselves staring into the abyss, because circumstances finally force them to confront their historic hypocrisy. The only way back from the brink is a full and frank confession.
They have to admit that the Yes Movement was right.
They have to admit that they were on the wrong side during the referendum campaign.
Agreeing with its objectives but then claiming to offer the only way of delivering them is now such a threadbare deception as to be beneath ridicule and contempt. Every scared and starving Syrian child camped outside our gates provides an obscene and blatant counterexample to their lies. Every scrap of anti-union legislation passed at Westminster demonstrates their impotence.
But if they could only, for one instant, demonstrate genuine humility, and confess their errors, would we not slay the fatted calf and welcome them home ...
Tuesday, 15 September 2015
Monday, 14 September 2015
Big hearts versus small minds
 |
| 'It's "you're", Michael' ... returning the favour of his condescension |
The Scottish Labour Pouters (users of the hashtag #SNPOut) jubilantly declare that Corbyn outflanks the SNP on the left. Not because the Pouters are particularly pro-left, of course, but just because they hate the SNP.
Before the odds shortened on Corbyn they were among the loudest in writing him off in their cynical but ultimately wrong-footed manouevring. They celebrate his victory only because of their thwarted tribalistic sense of entitlement that is affronted by the SNP in office. They find themselves celebrating the election of a leader who has more in common with their enemies than with them. It is a ridiculous and pathetic spectacle, behaviour bereft even of sufficient intelligence to merit being called hypocrisy.
They fail to see that the SNP has not been outflanked by Corbyn's victory. Rather, it is their own opportunistic neo-liberal pro-austerity "consensus" that is now completely encircled by both the Scottish pro-indy left and the a rUK indy-agnostic left. They can unite in opposition to this inhumane global dogma without needing to agree about a union of the kingdoms.
As one common voice is raised against Trident, against austerity, against illegal military adventures, and in support of refugees, and green energy, and social justice, all the lies and false dichotomies will be overthrown. The failure of the rejected Labour establishment and their media henchmen to appreciate this demonstrates just how completely out-of-touch they are.
And as the supporters of Scottish Independence find common cause with the Corbynistas in the name of universal values of peace and justice it is clear that the Yes Movement was never about imposing borders, but always about transcending them, was never about independence from people, but from the governments that abuse the consent lent to them by the people, was never about shutting ourselves off, but about reaching out with an embrace that extends as far as the world's teeming refugee camps.
The Independence we seek is a Universal Independence from heartless, inhumane governance whose impacts are felt from the foodbanks of Yoker to food distribution centres of Yarmouk, an Independence that allows us to reclaim Scotland from UK governments that uses the apparatus of states and borders to deny universal human rights of refugees, an Independence we can share with the world, that unlocks our most generous and compassionate instincts.
And so the Yes Movement was always informed by a greatness of heart that can never be understood by the small minds of its opponents, who mistakenly, bizarrely even, believe they have secured some advantage in the election of a leader who opposes the policies they have spent their political careers advocating.
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