News from the cradle of democracy…

 

“I say, I say, I say, what’s that you have there?”

“A Greek urn”

“What’s a Greek urn?”

“Oh, about a hundred quid a day”

If only.

A nice economist came to talk to us the other day about the Euro crisis. Her thesis was that,in essence, the Greek economy produces almost nothing and imports almost everything. Furthermore, there is a conflict between the rich who tend not to pay taxes and the poor who therefore bear the brunt of any fiscal measures required. And the Germans have been bankrolling the whole system for reasons which make good profits for the bankers but little sense to the voters. She was very witty.

Not sure how well this went down in our Athens offices.

She made the point that most people know what needs to be done, but any government that tries to do it is likely to find itself out of office in short order. The technocrats who have been parachuted in to some countries have been doing a pretty good job, but will be turfed out before the job can be completed.

The real problem, in short, is democracy.

I’m not sure I can go along with this. Last time the world economy melted down, the nations of the developed world tended to turn away from democracy. That did not turn out well. And that is why the institutions of Europe are being set up. The challenge is to preserve democracy through the crisis. Even if it means that things need to get much worse before the people can accept what needs to be done.

The Storm Cone
1932

---

THIS is the midnight—let no star
Delude us—dawn is very far.
This is the tempest long foretold—
Slow to make head but sure to hold.

Stand by! The lull ’twixt blast and blast
Signals the storm is near, not past;
And worse than present jeopardy
May our forlorn to-morrow be.

If we have cleared the expectant reef,
Let no man look for his relief.
Only the darkness hides the shape
Of further peril to escape.

It is decreed that we abide
The weight of gale against the tide
And those huge waves the outer main
Sends in to set us back again.

They fall and whelm. We strain to hear
The pulses of her labouring gear,
Till the deep throb beneath us proves,
After each shudder and check, she moves!

She moves, with all save purpose lost,
To make her offing from the coast;
But, till she fetches open sea.
Let no man deem that he is free!

OK: this Google plus redesign thingy

At first I didn't really see the problem: with G+ on my venerable HP1530 screen, you get a bit of whitespace below the "you may know" area, but nothing stupid. (Though chat is HORRIBLE)

But my stream is full of whining, overprivileged technojunkies. Either that or I'm not seeing the whole picture. Which looks sort of OK on a larger monitor, until you scroll down.



Then you see that half of the viewing area has clearly been reserved for... something.

Though I choose to believe that it is already being used for subliminal messages, and that in the Googleplex this referred to, with a sly grin, as the HypnoSpace.

I suspect it's the number of horizontal pixels rather than the orientation. I lose the contacts bar around 1300. Since my monitor is an ancient HP 1530, which is less than that in Landscape, I was not seeing the whole glory of the HypnoSpace.

No doubt one of the reasons I got those headaches last night was that I was subconsciously trying to process truncated subliminal messages.

I have one of those new fangled windows PCs, so I can shrink the window yet further.



The only thing that will save us is that the Google Geeks are incapable of comprehending the concept of a screen more than two years old, so the army of the Brainwashed Chosen will eventually be defeated by a rag tag band of cheapskates people who spend their money on real life.

A man can dream...

Seeing Wrong

I had an interesting conversation with +Xabier Ostale, who was arguing from painful personal experience that all religions are both wrong and evil. Furthermore, that if we do not actively fight them, then we are complicit in their mass crimes against humanity.

My position is markedly different. I see the issue as the ghetto. As soon as we allow ourselves to think of a group as "them" rather than "us", we are at risk. I recommend writing a sentence or two on a particularly gruesome outrage in the first person plural. And then reflecting on how this feels. Why are we shooting rockets at our fellow inhabitants of Israel? How can we tolerate generations of our fellow Israelis living in the squalor of Gaza and the West Bank? How could we bomb a funeral of fellow Irishmen in Omagh? What drove us to blow up a plane-load of innocent civilians over Lockerbie? How could we allow tens of thousands to live and die in misery in the Concentration camps of South Africa in the Boer War? Or millions in the camps of Germany, Poland and the Ukraine later in that woeful, warful century? Or hack our neighbours to death in Rwanda?

Did you try it? How did it feel? Bit of an unreal twinge?

Of course, historically organised religion has often been a major force for setting up ghettos. But this extends to any system of morality and government. (Though some people extend "religion" to include a belief in Democracy, Communism or Capitalism.)

On the other hand, individuals need a strong ethical framework to see when the system is turning toward evil and to resist this. And this framework is transmitted by the very systems which present such a threat. So if you live in Europe or America, even if you are not a practicing Christian, you live in the context of the values transmitted by the Christian Church, and these values equip you to resist its excesses.

Philip Pullman believes that the evils of organised religion outweigh the value of its payload. Rowan Williams, perhaps unsurprisingly, feels otherwise.

Now, here's the mashup.

+Robert Scoble points out that the front line of the tech war for 2011 and the foreseeable future is the battle to capture users' identities so that the internet marketing operations (Google, Salesforce and Facebook - he calls them advertising, but it will be broader than that - this will be about identifying what the market wants as well as facilitating the sale of product) can tailor what each individual sees to what they are most interested in- in the broadest sense. He calls this the Game of all Gameshttp://scobleizer.com/2011/09/11/the-game-of-all-games-content-and-context-why-mark-zuckerberg-marc-benioff-and-larry-page-are-carving-up-the-social-world/ .

So we are all to be lovingly and securely wrapped in an opaque yet invisible bubble woven from our own needs, fears and desires. Let's take care that our new internet overlords are well aware of our need to understand people whose bubbles are very different.

London calling

From Croydon to Clapham and Ealing
The mob has the Capital reeling
As they let down their hair
Twitter lets us all share
The pain that Mubarak is feeling

The Enemy

Today I began putting together some thoughts on The Problem with Communication in my workplace. Looking for a quote to grab the interest of my lucky audience, I Googled a dimly remembered "we have seen the enemy and he is us".

And discovered Pogo. While I head off to Wikipedia to try and catch up with American culture (I seem to be at least sixty years behind: Why Was I Not Told?), I'll leave this amuse bouche for anyone who shares my ignorance:

"There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

Forward!"

That's fighting talk. (Just love those tiny trumpets.)

I am grateful to Marilyn White for her wonderful site, "I Go Pogo",where Google sent me for the quote. And, of course, to the witty, wise and courageous Walt Kelly, the Creator.