800 waiting to commit suicide, Labour hits the skids and the future of Comparative Studies was never so bright

Yes. I know. Reminds me of Comparative Studies at uni. Especially that analysis of the Sun newspaper we did which deconstructed the pictures on page 3 and that small news item on the right. You know the one. The story which invariably went along the lines of "Dirty habit shock as bishop caught with cassock down!".

So it is that the Observer presents us with two entirely unrelated stories this morning that nevertheless feed off each other in an entirely unhappy manner. First, Alan Johnson vigorously massaging expectations as Labour hits the skids:

Alan Johnson, the cabinet minister widely tipped as a successor to Gordon Brown, prepared Labour for disaster at the polls as he predicted it would suffer the worst local and European election results in its history.

In a candid admission last night, the health secretary said he expected all three mainstream parties to do "badly" in Thursday's polls. But he believed that Labour would be hit hardest by the overwhelming tide of public anger over the MPs' expenses scandal. Raising his profile as a future leadership contender, he told the Observer: "If you are asking me for an honest assessment about whether recent events will have an effect, they are bound to, because we are the brand leader, we are the party of government and it will have more of an effect on us than the other parties."

More here.

Meanwhile, the waiting-list of those with terminal illnesses who are looking for an alternative to waiting it out just gets longer and longer. If Alan Johnson is the page 3 girl, this report is the bishop:

Record numbers of Britons who are suffering from terminal illnesses are queueing up for assisted suicide at the controversial Swiss clinic Dignitas, the Observer can reveal.

Almost 800 have taken the first step to taking their lives by becoming members of Dignitas, and 34 men and women, who feel their suffering has become unbearable, are ready to travel to Zurich and take a lethal drug overdose.

The tenfold increase in the number of Britons who have joined Dignitas since 2002 will raise questions about the law that bans assisted suicide in Britain.

More here.

Make of it what you will. Being a member of any political party must be a miserable place to be at the moment but being a member of the Labour Party is masochism of the highest order.

Dave asked us to fuck New Labour last night.

Maybe its critics are right. Maybe the banking crisis and the hidebound traditions which have led to the scandal of MPs' expenses are two sides of the same coin. I am certainly aware of glass ceilings in the company I work for beyond which not only do certain types of people never progress but also certain behaviours never appear. Open and honest communication is reserved for the ordinary workers. Meanwhile, top management play games with everyone's futures and get us into the kind of mess we now find ourselves all suffering from.

David Cameron may win the next general election but he will fail Britain as a nation, because he truly proposes nothing new. If New Labour has looked after its own over the past decade, it's clear the Tories have no intention of playing - in any way - a different game. The only things that will ever change are the constituencies of voters in question, the captive audiences that leaders psychologically stroke, the sponsors, the hangers-on, the lobbyists, the guilty or embarrassing parties who must be hidden, the spin doctors and the marketing analysts. But the structures of communication, integration and dialogue will continue to maintain the same hierarchies.

That is why Cameron will never be capable of changing anything.

He is part of the problem, not the solution.

As Dave (Semple) might've said, if he wasn't so explicit and given to Anglo-Saxon epithets: "A plague on all your houses!"

Have to agree ...

Would never use the same language, but have to agree with the sentiment. The video which provokes such reactions below.

How Cameron's right choose to get it so wrong

This from the Guardian today is a terrifying foretaste of how the prospect of landslide victories at general elections lead political leaders-in-waiting to contemplate playing with fire. If we fear the BNP at home, how much more so should we fear the politics of Poland abroad. Especially when Cameron decides it's time to unleash the far right's most unpleasant side:

[...] The parties most likely to join such a grouping are a motley collection of populists, nationalists and social authoritarians: not the sort of friends a leader trying to project a modern and tolerant image should want to be seen with in public. There is certainly nothing compassionate about the conservatism of Poland’s stridently homophobic Law and Justice Party, for example. Nor is tolerance a strong point for the xenophobic Danish People’s Party or Italy’s Northern League, whose leader once referred to Africans as “bingo-bongos”. Allies like these would put Cameron only a goose step or two away from the extreme right.

Why open source is important (or free as in liberty)

An indication of how important open source is today can be found here. Via Mr Penguin's Twitter feed.

I'd also be inclined to add OpenOffice.org to the list. I had to design a newsletter the other day and it is truly a dream of a word-processing tool. Images dragged and dropped and stuck exactly where you wanted them to. A brilliant piece of software. And it's free - both as in beer as well as in liberty.

Eco as in economic as well as eco as in habitat

Tom has some interesting musings on New Direction today. I tried to post a response but was unable to do so as I am not a member of the blog. So I'm posting my comment below:

Acorns versus oaks here - though, even so, I think we're looking for a piece of political genetic engineering. It may be useful to examine the right's experience with British blogging and apply some of the lessons learned, but we don't want to grow up into replicas of the right. We don't want to become the oaks they are. We need to be a bit more proactive and differentiating - yes, use the right's tools where appropriate but to an entirely different purpose. We are not here to deconstruct those who would deconstruct the existing establishment but - rather - reconstruct an alternative ecosystem which serves people instead of uses them.

I mean eco as in economic as well as eco as in habitat.

I also feel that LabourList's original remit - contribute to winning a fourth term - was far too ambitious. To build an alternative blogosphere takes time - there are no short cuts; as, indeed, events have demonstrated. We have to play to our strengths, not wrap ourselves up in the weaknesses of our opponents. Democratic socialism, for me, involves using the strength of the collective to defend the individual. Our online presence should reflect this. We should, like the best bits of the European Union, come together out of choice and be able to maintain our vigorous differences, both visual as well as dialectic. That's why I think we still need a souped-up Bloggers4Labour portal which pulls together existing blogs and serves to celebrate their differences and exchanges in one user-friendly place.

The right's presence on the Internet is a paradigm of the melting-pot that is the United States of America. The left's presence on the Internet should be a celebration of cultural interplay that - in the future - must be the United States of Europe. We do not aim to eliminate difference through economic empire but celebrate and promote it to maintain our social and cultural DNA. Our future security as a race depends on us maintaining that stock of DNA.

As democratic socialists, we should realise this and operate accordingly.

The whys and wherefores behind the expenses palaver

Anne Applebaum has a useful take on the expenses palaver. Writing in the Washington Post today, she says:

Both have their origins in the 1980s, when a combination of Thatcherite reforms, the adoption of English as the universal business language, and geography -- Britain is in a time zone about halfway between New York and Tokyo -- made London the financial capital of Europe. Throughout the decade, everyone in Parliament watched their friends from college get not just rich but very, very rich, while their own salaries remained stagnant. As a result, British MPs came down with a bad case of what columnist David Brooks has called "Status- Income Disequilibrium," a disease whose sufferers hold badly paying but prestigious jobs, positions that require them to "lunch on an expense account at The Palm, but dine at home on macaroni" -- (or, in British terms, "go home every night to beans on toast").

It does however get even worse for the MPs (though perhaps their poorer voters might disagree on this one):

The problem worsened as the importance of Parliament declined. With the rise of 24-hour television, the importance of substantive debate declined, too. MPs were not only relatively poor but also relatively insignificant. They earned less, and they mattered less, not merely less than bankers but less than journalists and less than their political predecessors. This parliamentary crisis of confidence seemed to climax in the "cash-for-questions" scandal in 1994, when a few conservative MPs were shown to have taken money -- in cash, in brown paper bags -- from businessmen who wanted them to make official inquiries on their behalf.

The full article from Applebaum can be found here.

Pfizer and the unemployed

I wasn't exactly sure how to headline this one. "Free Viagra" was the first phrase that came to mind, but I wondered whether it might not lead me to raising the wrong sort expectations with the wrong sort of audience. Anyhow, the story comes from New Scientist and more can be found here.

And, yes, there's more to this than ... um ... meets the eye.

I did say ...

Open source warfare hits the headlines. It was an idle thought I had the other day when reviewing an article about Fogbank in the Weekly Standard. Apparently, not that idle. It makes international terrorism even more horrifying - and judicious (though perhaps not judicial) control of the Internet even more necessary. More here.

It's also absolutely depressing to think that in the future wars will be conducted in the following way: rich nations and their bots will limit their human injuries as they commit - with a probably expanding impunity and growing lack of public distaste - greater and more destructive acts of violence against their poorer and still human cousins in other less-developed countries.

If "developed" is the right term here.

Via Mr. Penguin's Twitter feed.
____________________

Further reading: an interview with the author of "Wired for War"

AV Plus

I thought it was a new strain of swine flu for a second. Sounds like a halfway house that could appeal to sufficient people to make its implementation feasible enough in the very short space of time the British body politic currently seems to have left - left, that is, before a total breakdown in its functioning overtakes it. More here and below.



Meanwhile, Johnson's original article in the Times today can be found here.

Beware the private sillinesses of an eccentric cross-section of unrepresentative parliamentarians

Alan Johnson suggests we need to overhaul the engine. It's the wrong metaphor. It's the whole transport system that needs to be reconceptualised. Ed Miliband says some useful things along these lines and even David Cameron makes a suggestion in favour of a rejuvenated Parliament - although I do wonder if it wouldn't lead to a curiously elected replica of the current House of Lords in that conscience and personal idiosyncracy would take the place of a true representation of the people. We don't need party political poodles but neither do we need to go to the other extreme of contemplating a chamber full of the private sillinesses of an eccentric cross-section of unrepresentative parliamentarians.

What we do need is for our politicians to pay attention to each other. Both PR and Cameron's suggestion aimed at unleashing the lapdogs from their masters are children of the same instinct.

I am beginning to feel more hopeful. Just one warning. As I suggested on Saturday, do not attempt to divert attention from our current structural woes by trying to focus the voting public on new policy initiatives. This is not a time for policy but for the painful long-haul that should lead to the reconstruction of fundamental foundations.

More here.

Until every single vote counts

Sunny pushes the right buttons in Liberal Conspiracy. I suggest something else: massive abstention from any election which does not already use some form of PR should now be our goal.

More here.

Deconstructing politics (II) (the orphanage) (or every single vote counts)

More evidence that the objective is not so much individual politicians themselves - even though individual politicians are the object of our ire - but, rather, the very political system itself, as Ukip is now the whipping boy and the fate of our now orphaned citizens' votes lies very much in the balance.

Who'd want to vote at all - ever?

Give me just one very good reason why I should care to take part.

No. The BNP don't appear to be on the radar. On the other hand, as has already been commented over the past couple of days, maybe people are too ashamed to admit that they will vote for them when questioned thus in the opinion polls.

Even so, the BNP is not a good enough reason. There are more things at stake than simply keeping out the racists.

More things at stake than simply keeping out the bad guys.

To be honest, until our votes do count in every election held on this sceptred isle, I have decided not to vote any more in those elections where they do not. I will vote in the European elections because the system cares to reflect the true range of public opinion. I won't vote at the next general election because my vote, along with those of millions of others, is simply being number-crunched by the political strategists to ensure they can concentrate their efforts on the very few thousands of voters who always tip the terrifying balance so dreadfully sharply in what is now clearly an entirely bankrupt system of navel-gazers.

Yes. I - also - do feel orphaned. I - also - do feel the whole country has become one massive orphanage. I have no history, no parentage, no sense of continuity. All I have is a great and overwhelming sadness, a feeling of loss - a feeling of disillusionment. I don't want to destroy. I don't want to bring down. I want to build and create. I want to fix a world which - first and foremost - should be a tool at our service. But - also - a place we respectfully inhabit.

Until every single vote counts, until every single political strategist is stretched to concentrate his or her efforts on the entire voting public ... well, our country will not be healed, our political system will not work, our politicians will not be liked and our media barons will continue to wreak havoc on an awfully imperfect set of institutions which has shown itself incapable of self-renewal.

I am sad to say that the media barons have done the right thing. War was the only alternative. And the blood will continue to be shed.

Until, that is, every single vote counts.

Deconstructing politics

The intermediary is revealed. This is clearly a war. And this is why I am uncomfortable with all that is going on. Politics is a substitute for war. Not a poor substitute, but a brave and necessary one. When newspapers and media barons make huge amounts of money out of supposedly setting democracy to rights, something is wrong. Politics then becomes a tool in the hands of the warlike, instead of a way of avoiding bloodshed.

Democratic socialism should not play the game of war. It should be a perfect example of construction in action. News that in Salford voter turnout slumped to 18 percent the other day or that more than a quarter of all voters has already decided to turn away from the major parties in the European elections in June confirms our worst - some would say our best - fears.

More than anything else, I fear a vacuum. I fear a political and constitutional system which doesn't fit the needs of the country. I fear a political establishment which ends up too slow to change. I fear war.

If voters want coalitions after the event instead of before, then we need proportional representation and we need it fast. The (still) major parties need to understand the way political life has been moving over the past ten years, as Labour's coalition has never been very real - more an imposition by the fragilely powerful over the disgruntled and politically ineffective than any true coalition of common interests - and as the Tory Party has deconstructed itself from both within and without, in the face of unproductive contradictions.

Let us not deconstruct politics at the hands of an ex-soldier to then only choose to waste the opportunities created. As a body politic, as a nation, we need new structures before we need new policies.

We do not need the distractions that new policies would provide.

We need clear markers in the sand.

We need new foundations.

We need a representation which fairly and accurately represents. We need proportional representation now.

http://post.cwu.org/notforsale

So maybe I shouldn't remove politics entirely from the equation - but you'll excuse me for thinking that the single issue stuff is currently far more attractive. Another deserving cause here. The arguments behind it are convincing, believe me.

How mockingbirds tell human friends from foe

A skill we need right now. How to tell friends from foe - but without mocking anyone. More from New Scientist here.

In the meantime, I'm afraid I have nothing useful to add to the maelstrom of opinion, fact and fiction that is swirling around me.

I'll be taking a short break from blogging on political matters. Maybe a short break from politics.

Maybe - even - a short break from living in this country.

How solar energy is almost everything we do

A brilliant essay on solar energy and how our accounting methods severely underestimate its current - not to say future - importance:

Then there is the question of heating houses. Every time the sun shines on the surface of a house and especially when it shines through a window there is "solar heating" to some extent. How do we measure this? How do we account for this in our discussions of energy use? According to the NSF/NASA Energy Panel of 1972 the percentage of thermal energy for buildings supplied by the sun was too small to be measureable. But is that accurate? Shouldn't we recalculate the energy consumption of every building assuming it were kept in the shade all day and then attribute the difference between this amount and its actual consumption to solar energy? In most cases this would result in an enormous difference. Almost every building is solar heated to some extent. I would guess the average shaded fuel consumption to be at least 15% higher, and then of course our next concern in heating the building is what keeps the earth as warm as it is? What supplies the United States with the necessary energy to maintain an average temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit as it spins in empty space at absolute zero? This is a heating contract no oil company would be quick to try and fill.

Far more brilliance here. Via O'Reilly's Twitter feed here.

A tapestry of thought

Snowflake5 on Labourhome.org suggests:

We can never go back to Old Labour circa 1983, because no one votes for them in sufficient numbers and we'd be permanently in opposition. But perhaps we could revive some earlier models of Labourism that have been lost? For instance the co-op movement was a strong thread in the Labour party at the start of the 20th century. Should we seek to revive that? Given that recent experience shows that co-ops (whether the Co-op bank or John Lewis) are more stable businesses than publicly listed companies, should we offer special tax-breaks to businesses that set themselves up as co-ops?

A tremendous space has opened up and we should be thinking about how to exploit it instead of simply wringing our hands at current circumstances.

More here. Meanwhile, Dave and Paul are currently debating how to retake the Labour Party from the left.

My own emotional relationship with the Party has been clearly stated on a number of occasions. I believe its strengths lie in its ability to demonstrate a historical diversity of approaches, which include the entirely scientific and broach the religious; this very diversity explains why it has never entirely lost traction and purpose, even in its direst moments - why, indeed, it has always been in possession of sufficient intellectual DNA to overcome complete annihilation.

This, until today - perhaps.

Perhaps we are now approaching that moment. Yet those who would feast on such an event should not hurry it along blithely, in the hope that the resulting vacuum may lead to a succession of circumstances that favour their positions.

Destruction of institutions that people have held dear for so many years causes mental distress of untold consequences.

Human beings need a continuity of sorts, especially as their material certainties collapse through entirely no fault of their own. If anything is worth fighting for, it is the umbrella of diversity that democracy ought to contemplate. Thus it is that I feel a victory of the workers can only be supportable if it aims to include us all. For what do we do with those it might not include? Bury them away in dark pits of insufferable and vengeful pain in the hope that the pendulum will not return? Treat them as if we might treat the homeless who must not appear on our streets? Hide them away as we pretend they no longer exist?

We reap what we sow.

What we fail to sew, we allow to unravel.

The steps we next take will define the rest of the 21st century. So do we intend to define political debate in terms of violence and crushing opposition or in terms of revealing a whole new landscape of common interest where a new human being can create and discuss instead of destroy?

The violence of Marxist practice is crucially flawed because it takes a cogent and scientific analysis and posits a practical application which aims to inflame and break apart.

Emotions are only good when they are allowed to bring us together.

As a party of hapless souls, we need our emotional ties more than ever. I agree with you all. We need to regain the Labour Party. But the Labour Party we need to regain is the one that aims to create a tapestry of thought, where threads of brilliance intertwine and serve to make us all stronger in the face of those who would obviate the need for a grander social intercourse.

Fix It Again, Tony

Fiat aims for rebirth as the rest of the industry crashes around it. I saw "Angels and Demons" last night. Italy is a fascinating country of astonishing contrasts. Can they engineer recovery where the Anglo-Saxon spirit has basically, essentially, thrown in the towel?

18,000 job losses do, however, make one shudder. Nearby Vauxhall's is just one of the factories we should fear - and fight - for.

It'll be an interesting ride, at the very least. More here, from the Washington Post today.

It begins ... (II)

Dave argues that it begins here. Meanwhile the Observer reports thus:

A poll published today on the website PoliticsHome.com, and previewed exclusively by the Observer, shows that the scandal has driven more than a quarter of voters to change the party they support. The main beneficiary is Ukip, followed by the British National Party and the Greens.

More here on how the political map is changing as big donors turn their backs on Brown's Labour Party.

You can keep on going whilst no one dares - or cares - to stand up to you; or, simply, painfully, sadly, whilst no one is capable of recognising when all is lost. But you cannot keep on going when you are unable to pay the bills. As always in this venal world, money finishes off leaders - bankrupts them both intellectually and literally - where their own parties will often fail to. It reminds me all a little of the Balkan conflict. The European Union failed to oust Milosevic by itself. The cavalry - once more - is the capitalism that is captained by those forces which truly run the world's economy. In the meantime, the heart is being ripped out of democracy in Britain as behaviours which mirror a wider sleaze are being used to destroy a truly relevant attempt to deal with an awful recession in an alternative and intelligent manner.

Brown is a terrible reflection of all that is both good and bad in modern British politics. True policy instincts coupled with an inability to communicate effectively.

British politics is the icing on the cake. For underneath, there is no cake at all and the sugar that is left is driving us madly hyper.

Why PR? History versus hysteria (and how to retire gracefully from the hunting-ground)

An interesting thesis here on the subject of why the first-past-the-post voting system may have fomented the expenses scandal:

I had a thought when I was walking the dog yesterday. Could our First Past the Post electoral system have contributed to the scandal of MPs expenses?

My reasoning was that in our system, there are a lot of safe seats. In a typical General Election maybe a hundred or so change hands between the parties. In a landslide this can go up but you still have maybe 2/3rds of MPs who have very little to worry about in terms of the chances of them losing their seat. I then wondered if there was any sort of correlation between how safe a seat is and the likelihood of its MP having been involved in this expenses scandal.

More here.

It's clear we need more action on this matter - as opposed to the instincts for distraction politicians from all parties tend to acquire so easily on such occasions. Broad sweeps of the constitutional brush would allow Brown to leave behind him a legacy of radical democratic refurbishment that - from a historical perspective even if not from the hysterical positions currently gaining ground - might then permit him to retire gracefully from the political killing-ground his Britain has become.

As a final observation, it's curious how a nation which voted to ban fox-hunting so energetically slips back into bear-baiting when the slightest opportunity arises.

Sad, too.

We might get a general election after all ...

... only in awful and destructive dribs and drabs.

After reading this report from the Guardian today, I really do wonder if we're not in the middle of a democratic earthquake of absolutely astonishing and unpredictable proportions. Thus it is that MPs begin to consider resigning before ending up running the miserable gauntlet of being pushed - absolutely natural that under the circumstances they should not want the cavalry (or, indeed, the calvary) of public disgust every time they do their weekly shop; this thought from Morley runs as follows:

Morley, the former minister suspended from the parliamentary Labour party on Thursday, said he might quit as the MP for Scunthorpe over the issue. He said: "What matters to me is the view of my local people and my local party. I need to talk this through with them."

Just imagine if all MPs who feel they may be deselected at the next election decide en masse to resign beforehand. This would result in absolute havoc and open the door to no end of splinter parties receiving votes on the back of what has been a systemic abuse of the public purse. Even if the BNP and UKIP didn't actually get in anywhere, their share of the vote would almost certainly rise.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories but I do believe in diverse and loose interest groups that act in consonance even when there is no demonstrable planning or coordination behind them. The schools of fish philosophy of political behaviours, if you like. If we look at the planet as a closed system, last year was the year big money showed how irresponsible it manages not its affairs but ours. (I say our affairs not its, because as far as I can see, big money still has the money to ride out the perfect storm with ease.) It was also the year big money was let off the hook - possibly unavoidably so, even if - for the rest of us - painfully so. This year, however, will be written into the history books as the year big money got its own back on the governments and systems which dared - had the temerity - to try and put it in its place.

Conspiracy theory? No. I don't even suggest that this is overt or apparent to the protagonists who lead what is happening. I simply suggest, as a psychological undercurrent of subconscious bent, that this - in reality - is what is taking place. As I said the other day, this is not going to be a battle between Tories and Labour but between those on both sides who want British society still to mean something after the tides of destructive banking subside (more here) and those who, psychopathically, still believe in the opportunity this current nightmare offers to make money on the backs of human suffering. This is why, in such a fragile and unstable set of political circumstances as today's, we must search out our comrades-in-arms on all parts of the political spectrum. We must use the blogosphere to reach out and spin common threads of agreement in the face of such powerful forces of disintegration.

Watch the splendid video from www.nothingbritish.com below and see the next elections not now as an internecine squabble between political leaders who know only to take advantage of each other's weaknesses but, rather, a high-minded and honourable battle to recover a lost high ground the country desperately needs.

We need our politicians as never before.

We need to publicly agree on the kind of society we want to share.

Maybe money doesn't like money being spent on the poor

Brown a good leader or a bad leader? Indubitably, he's bad. But what about Brown's policies? How do they stack up? And who do they worry most?

Now there's quite a different matter. I wonder if this expenses leak - the timing I mean - doesn't have something rather more to do with defining the future political landscape of the United Kingdom than it does with simply selling more papers. If I were Rupert Murdoch and company (the money people I mean; the men and women who aim to run the world in the face of the few recalcitrant governments that may remain), I would ask myself: how could this benefit me?

As follows, perhaps:

• Immediate gain: I don't like the European Union - so let's shaft imminent progressive regroupings and splinter the Union with fascist horror stories. That is to say, get everyone so fed up of politics that turnout drops to a minimum and thus we let in that nightmare of a British National Party - and, of course, their equivalents across the continent
  
• Medium-term gain: I don't like immigration all that much (so the BNP doesn't actually seem all that bad), except, that is, for myself and my toys (my beloved capital and all its many virtues) - so let's get the majority parties so terrified of losing out to the BNP (which doesn't actually seem all that bad) that they veer rightwards in practically everything they do and think for quite a few years to come
  
• Long-term gain: rid Britain of Gordon Brown and anything that ever smacks of the helping state again

For Gordon Brown is the wrong man implementing precisely the right policies. I remember Thatcher. I came out of university in the middle of those years. I know what the wrong policies feel like.

I left Britain to escape them.

I should've stayed and fought, I suppose.

Maybe the truth behind all this curiously beneficial timing is simply that money doesn't like money being spent on the poor. This is a battle not between Tories and Labour but between the constituency of excessive concentrations of wealth that New Labour always refused to face up to and the natural instinct that good men and women demonstrate to help those who need help when most they are in need.

In a sense, where we make our strategic error is in associating so firmly the Tories with those concentrations of wealth. So many natural Tory voters do not approve of letting the country run to rack and ruin. They would not want our schools and hospitals to fall apart again.

Thus it is that the constituency of excessive concentrations of wealth - which none of us can ever realistically aspire to - will always circumvent the true course of democracy and will always manage, through the deadweight of money, to achieve its own ends despite the ballot box. They do not only want to shift Labour rightward. They want to shift everyone rightward. And they are prepared to play with the fire of fascism to achieve their aims.

But that doesn't mean we must give in.

So what can we do?

Change the man ... yes, of course - maybe we must; but, whatever we do, let's keep the policies.

That's it, in fact. Gordon Brown must go but his policies must remain, as an honourable legacy of all that is fine and honest and upstanding in politics.

As an honourable legacy of all that we must aspire to.

Of all that is right.

And what's right today - quite curiously, indeed - is that we must sacrifice a leader not to force a change of policies but rather to save a raft of ideas and ways of doing from the dustbin of history that the truly wealthy would have us inhabit.

www.thestraightchoice.org

Another website to ponder - this time, via Tim O'Reilly's Twitter feed, we've got a potentially fascinating example of crowdsourcing in The Straight Choice website.

http://post.cwu.org/thisworks

If you love your Post Office, give it some TLC by going to the above website (for ease of use, click here).

I've already sent the bad guys my email in protest. Do us all a favour - and do the same. (Thanks to Tom for the link.)

Meanwhile, Alan Whitehead's attending a rally on the same subject this Saturday. If you can, go along and give the Royal Mail your support.

Feel that perhaps we don't need public monopolies? Well, try out this private one for size and tell me if it feels any better. As the BBC points out in its background reporting to the case:

Past experience suggests it is quite easy to impose a fine and ban very specific behaviour. but hard to force companies to fundamentally alter how they operate.

More here.

How to cut down on oil consumption, obesity and carbon emissions at one fell stroke

It's true. It's possible. It's here if we want it.



Via Tweet4Labour's Twitter feed.

Kind of puts the choice agenda of recent times out to intellectual grass.

For there are, of course, far more choices to be evaluated and made than simply the individual ones described which lead to urban, and corporal, sprawl.

How Mozilla's Prism splits the Internet to bring us ever closer

Three useful links to find out more about this new Mozilla project. Latest announcement here, first announcement here. Whilst the new Prism website can be found here.

Via Mr. Penguin's Twitter feed.

Dull bank and the virtues of safe profits

If banking is exciting, it's wrong. This wonderfully focussed piece of wisdom encapsulates entirely what has gone wrong with the West's banking system worldwide. Banks should not be driven by sales people. Banks should be driven by propriety and an easily understandable perception of security which anyone can explain to anyone:

It’s unlikely that any group of professionals is happier to highlight the dullness of their work than small-town bankers.

At a recent conference held here by the Indiana Bankers Association, attendees said it over and over: our business is plodding and boring and we would not have it any other way.

“Banking should not be exciting,” said Clay W. Ewing, president of retail financial services at German American Bancorp, a community bank in Jasper. “If banking gets exciting, there is something wrong with it.”

It is an ethos squarely at odds with the risk-addicted style of megabanks, like Citigroup and Bank of America, that trafficked in the subprime mortgages and complex financial products that helped drive the country into the grimmest recession in decades.

But to the deep chagrin of Mr. Ewing and others at the conference, the public, politicians and the media have made little distinction between the stress-tested behemoths and the 7,630 community banks across the country — the vast majority of which have watched the crisis like bystanders at a 10-car pileup.

More here.

Fogbank and the virtues of open source warfare

This is a fascinating story of "lost knowledge" as nuclear warhead technologies go walkabout:

Knowledge can be lost. Sometimes this is perfectly reasonable: No one knows how to kill and skin a mastodon anymore, for obvious reasons. And cultures frequently lose knowledge as they evolve past it--you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who could write a computer program on punch-cards today. But there is something worrisome about misplacing knowledge that is only a generation or two old. And this happens more often than you might think.

"You know the old saying about 'If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we cure cancer, have world peace, whatever?' " muses Rand Simberg, a former Rockwell manager and now an aerospace consultant. "Space enthusiasts say, 'If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put a man on the moon?' "

One more convincing reason, perhaps, for society to share as much of what it knows with as many people as possible.

But open source warfare? A curious idea if there ever was one. Just think how quickly the science of warfare could develop if the principles of the open source software movement could be applied to its advancement.

If, that is, advancement is the word we should rightly use here.

A useful idea

This should've been implemented in Blair's first government.

Too late now.

But, even so, still a useful idea.

Mind over (other) matters

A useful and supportive post from Alastair Campbell's blog today. Check out his vlog too. This is good and constructive stuff. I entirely agree with the argument that a nervous breakdown can - in retrospect - be a positive experience. If not positive ... well, then at least productive.

But pity those who have to witness it.

I posted the following on Campbell's website this evening, and reproduce it here, as, for the second time in as many months, the site didn't accept my comment! My response ran as follows:

The best thing about what you're doing with Mind is that it tells the world out there that people who have suffered from mental ill health have no automatic sell-by dates - with intelligent and professional guidance and help (not always easy to come by unfortunately), they can return to being productive, useful and beloved members of society again.

Widening the parameters of the debate a little, I do so wish we could banish the term "disabled people" from our vocabulary. People with a chronic illness are "people with support needs" - that is to say, people first, needs second. The term "disabled people" does nothing to positively mould an often unknowing public's perception of what it is to have to engage with the challenges of living under the shadow of a permanent or semi-permanent illness or condition.

That's why if I were Prime Minister for one day, the first thing I'd do is rewrite the language of disability legislation.

Thanks for continuing to speak out anyhow.

A tale of too many cities

I'm not usually reduced to base insults but this report from the Guardian makes me - at the very least - want to weep. A measured assessment of how this all evolved:

Sir Alistair Graham, a former chairman of the committee on standards in public life, dropped after criticising senior Labour figures, said the culture of abuse had evolved slowly.

"For a long time, there was a strong sense of grievance about backbench MPs' pay being too low, and therefore a culture slowly developed of saying, 'Well, if we can't give you the pay, then we'll do what we can to give you a generous expense system', " he argues in an article published on the Observer website. "There is a complicit cross-party approach where everyone has agreed it is too difficult to do anything about pay, and instead they have concentrated on improving the allowances."

Officials colluded, too, he said, with an attitude that "MPs were 'proper ladies and gentlemen' whose word you should not question".

More here.

I do wonder if this isn't also part of some rather shady plan to ambush any serious chances of progressive representation at the next European elections. Europe will almost certainly be hobbled now by splinter groups of all sorts and kinds - the most disreputable, the most unpleasant, the most primitive of all instincts.

The future of the European Union looks distinctly off-colour.

The interests of big capital are served once again as timing is all in this game.

A segregating disintegration

John Naughton raises the spectre of the Weimar Republic. At some time, perhaps, in the near future. So how about last Friday?

More signs that light-touch regulation has lit the touchpaper of social disintegration. My goodness, don't the clever bods of securitisation have an awful awful lot to answer for.

Whilst even the Mail can't help reporting its awfulness as the BBC gets on the bandwagon of foolish even-handedness.

(My thanks to Brian for these last two links.)

When Kameron, not Cinnock, chose to throw it all away (and Brown was not grey enough to win)

Were the seeds of all that is coming to pass sown in the way that Labour won power in 1997? The nature of the New Labour project, the not-so-hidden hopes that Conservatism could be wiped from the face of the British political planet as the triangulation of Blair and family squeezed it out of the frame, the desire for the Tory Party to implode on its own contradictions - all of this smacks of exactly the same triumphalism that Cameron is now most worryingly exhibiting - without, indeed, a care in the world - to a wider populace quite at large.

If his timing hadn't been otherwise, if he'd waited till the last moment to speak of a glorious victory, we might now be on the eve of an election day where Kameron, not Cinnock, threw it all away in a coffin-nailing burst of misplaced anticipation.

The Sun, of course, is not on hand to crystallise the moment. And Brown would never perhaps be grey enough to win where John Major verily succeeded. Perhaps we suspect Brown of far deeper currents which if only he were given the opportunity would serve to lead him to a style and form of governance we could only regret at our leisure.

Or maybe I'm entirely wrong. I see I am being manipulated just as easily as the next. My previous post on Statebook.org.uk was impulsed by a Guardian Twitter feed today but the site itself has a perfectly blogged history of at least a month - if not more. Just check out Google, if you don't believe me.

I feel quite foolish.

Maybe the art of blogging lies in not suspecting or - even - caring about the massaging of the masses and their supposedly spontaneous messages of individual wisdom.

Maybe the problem is that even the mainstream media is learning how to control the numbers that define us so completely.

Politics must not be about landslides which lead to dictatorial top-down hierarchical revolutions; revolutions that - in the end - serve only to revolve doors like so many consumers of popcorn.

If revolution is ever to serve a purpose, it is to create a better world for us all. No revolution will ever be sustainable if it replaces one ruling class with another.

Ever.

Just think about it.

And ponder all our fragile futures.

Statebook.org.uk and Citizen (Jack) Smith

Ever seen that TV series "Numbers"? You know the one - where number-crunching mathematicians allow the heroes to access remotely engendered psychological profiles.

More reliable than in-depth interviews between real people, this would appear to be how the future will end up defining us - and, indeed, governing us.

Further information on this subject today as Statebook.org.uk launches. See what information the government can currently collate about you as we get to know better the ins and outs of Citizen (Jack) Smith.
____________________

Further reading: background to the Statebook.org.uk project

This is funny ...

... and it does make up for an awful political landscape on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Unintended consequences

Plenty of them about. A few examples here.

An Olympic Village for our ever-necessary MPs

It is, of course, destroying political discourse. Politics is rotting from within. Suggestions are many - here and here for starters - whilst others have different instincts which, although admirable, are hardly going to help matters. It's clear which direction the tide is going - clear what is happening, clear where it will all end up.

This is clearly the beginning of the end of the current regime.

Rumours of a Cruddas-Purnell dream ticket (more here) may simply serve to distract - but they certainly make one think that a future with different people at the helm can be no bleaker than now.

My opinion? I agree with the comment on Labourhome this weekend:

Until [MPs] can live like normal human beings, how can we expect them to govern like normal human beings?

But I would be more inclined to cocoon them from the unpleasantries of an ordinary existence in the interest of allowing them to concentrate on the unpleasantries of a wider experience.

They should be allowed to dedicate themselves to serving us rather than collecting the receipts for the next expenses claim. What am I suggesting? An Olympic Village complex for MPs, their families and their support staff. A new House of Commons even.

(Perhaps, even, once the London Olympics themselves are over, use the real Olympic Village and its resources for our future political castes and their ever-necessary hangers-on.)

We want to attract and hold onto those politicians who don't want to be hidebound by tradition. The ones who do actually want to change things for the better.

Cross-party. Cross-political borders.

The problem is systemic. The system is circumscribed by unproductive tradition. If it's time to sort out the abuse of expenses, it's time to sort out the abuse of time, physical space and the chance to think freely on new horizons that speak to us of the 21st century - instead, that is, of the hidebound 18th and 19th.

In times of economic crisis, such a project could be located in a part of London crying out for regeneration. We could effect a bit of useful social engineering on a stratum of society which desperately needs it. We could take away the nasty stuff of business life from the remit of servants of the state and provide everyone with standardised services no newspaper or citizen could fairly complain about.

So why not?

Why not treat MPs' expenses as a symptom of a wider malaise? Why not be honest? Why not aim to solve and resolve instead of destroy an honourable pursuit we all need to function properly and usefully?

As I have said before and will say again, politics is the only alternative to all-out war we have ever been able to productively invent.

And we need it to remain at the heart of all we do.

And the heart of all we do must remain at the heart of all that our society is.

The Houses of Parliament as a building has become a metaphor for the institution itself. A museum of dusty tradition pinned down like bugs on ancient blotting-paper.

We need a new mindscape. And in order to promote such a mindscape, we need a new landscape.

Get real, people, and begin to inhabit the century we find ourselves in!

Why the GDP is no longer a fair reflection of the dark matter the economy now produces

Money is and always has been the great leveller, the great definer. All our statistics, as well as most of our modern political thoughts and actions, crunch numbers that relate to pecuniary wealth. Yet recently we had the example of a website which served to destroy the business model of one of the most powerful corporations in the world. Microsoft's Encarta finally threw in the towel in the face of Wikipedia's voluntary crowdsourcing. And this is something we should ignore at our peril. I cover the latter in a short post on Zebra Red today:

The power that Web2Web publishing is exerting is turning everything upside down - business models, communication channels, human relationships in general ...; this is, in fact, the virtualisation of humanity as technology and the real world begin to intertwine in ways we would never have imagined. Now free time becomes work time, as those of us who wouldn't have dreamed of it a short while ago suddenly find ourselves working for ourselves on a multitude of different projects. Most will never see the popular light of day, that is true - but all have a direct lineage to that inventor's shed at the bottom of the garden.

And out of that inventor's shed come wonderfully brave new worlds.

And this is work that is generally unpaid - but work nevertheless.

Yet how is all this work being measured? Who is measuring it? Where is it getting added up?

Out of the leisure time of part-time editors an empire of free information has been created - for those selfsame editors, as well as anyone else, to access at very little cost - and this, to all intents and purposes, or, at least, in the traditional economy, is another reason to doubt the strength of our economic policy. For we traditionally measure the strength of our wealth creation in terms of how much money is generated, not how much money is saved. In the new world of web user-consumers, however, what we do professionally, what generates money, what governments and think tanks and political parties are used to measuring, may very well end up being dwarfed by what we do when in our web user-consumer mode - what we do outside of traditional paid work, what we do to save the totality of a society the cost of accessing products and services.

In such a gearshift of a change, traditional methods of calculating how well we are doing as an economic powerhouse fall remarkably short of being at all useful. They miss out on what we might term the dark matter of modern economic production. Where the objective is to invest only one's time, not one's capital, with the sole objective of turning the lights out instead of keeping them burning, GDPs are miserable quantifiers of what is being produced.

And what is being produced is entirely due to labour.

And what is losing out, what is suffering as a consequence, what is floundering to create business models that serve to operate with any guarantees, is precisely that area of business we all considered unassailable in its slippery perpetuity, its remorseless ability to reinvent - that is to say, that area of business we know so familiarly as capital.

Capital can only survive when the objective is to generate more money. Capital is not suited to worlds where people freely give up their leisure time to make products and services in exchange for practically free products and services that others in their leisure time have also created. The power of these worlds lies in the fact that absolute sufficiency, not bald and spurious differentiation, is the name of the game. And when a product or service is sufficiently good, free and continues to be of utility, it will continue to exist and be supported by those who show an interest in using it.

Such products or services are not just cheaper, they're also better. Their makers become passionate about them as boring paid day jobs are leavened with the engagement of community-engendered evening interactions. Such makers become passionate about their software sons and daughters in a way that ordinary day jobs never manage to make them feel - unless there is an overbearing superstructure of corporate brainwashing which, in any case, they pretty soon end up seeing through.

The GDP no longer satisfactorily measures what our latterday economy is producing. We are getting more for less, and will continue to do so in the future, not primarily because the Chinese are forced to work harder for less than we would ever care to but rather because we have discovered that there is a different relationship outside capitalism - indeed, a different relationship outside Marxism - between worker and worked on, between paid time and leisure time.

Who would ever have thought it? Who would ever have believed that the real revolution of the 21st century lies in our unpaid time and what we do with it? We have truly raised the barricades and have brought corporations to a standstill by simply using our brains in the kinds of extra-curricular moments that previous centuries led us only to sink down and drop through the sheer physical exhaustion of being a weary manual worker.

Those of us who no longer occupy such roles can now - if we so choose - reengineer a whole way of doing things by placing the emphasis on saving rather than generating; by placing the emphasis on unpaid work in exchange for products, services and social involvement rather than paid work in exchange for money, status and career progression.

But until our lords and masters realise how much is going on outside their limited horizons, we will simply not have a fair reflection of everything we are managing - as a nation, people and society - to achieve in this new economy.

And it won't matter who's in government.

As this tendency progresses, so the opportunities to tax and spend centrally will decline.

More and more relationships will become horizontal rather than vertical.

More and more interactions will obviate the need for money.

Capital's ability to intervene and generate more capital will shrink.

Labour's ability to save money and take over from capital will increase.

And then, perhaps, the revolution will finally be consummated.

Funny old world. Funny how a new century and its part-time tools can turn a dialectic entirely upside down.

Am I right? Maybe not. But if I am ...

From amoral to apolitical as we scrutinise those on the edge of power

Excellent point made here on why the press should also scrutinise those on the edge of power. (Came my way via the HouseOfTwitsLab Twitter feed.)

It does, of course, beg the question what the press should actually be for. In a new blog-driven ecosystem where the geek generation of free software is smack at the centre of all that we do, the mainstream press cannot avoid being affected by such a world and its mores.

Scrutiny can only increase.

Not sure whether this is good or bad - it is often much easier and more satisfying to bring down than construct - but it is surely inevitable.

Will this make us more apolitical as prior sexual revolutions have made us more amoral? I wonder.

WageConcern.com: "I'm wage-concerned. Are you?"

There was a time when that cuddly tree of Tory revisionism made some of us wonder if Cameron was going to be clever enough to pull the rug well and truly from under our feet by aiming only to dismantle the bad. There was a time when I thought perhaps his new Conservatives would be politically generous enough (or perhaps I should say politically wily enough, in a one-nation way) to preserve all of the achievements of the last ten years; would attempt, perhaps for the first time in British political history, to build on solid foundations instead of turning them vengefully back into sand.

The latest developments on the National Minimum Wage clearly indicate how building on the past is not a part of the new Conservative agenda. Our damn-fool voting system, which requires political parties to acquire hubris-generating landslides, will bedevil us once again, as once again history will repeat itself and power will cause those at the top to overreach themselves.

In the meantime, it falls to ourselves to attempt to salvage the best of the last decade. A website and initiative to support without doubt can be found here. It's called WageConcern.com.

I'm wage-concerned. Are you? Sign the petition here. See the video below.

A tool to beat the Tories with is far too unambitious a goal

I picked this up from Paul Burgin's site tonight, who in turn got it from Iain Dale. It follows on from yesterday's article in LabourList.org which I linked to previously and which basically sets out the need - without going into too much detail - for a different kind of LabourList.org. As I'm pretty sure most of us would agree, this should include:

• an editor who serves to drive the project - but refuses to push a detailed personal agenda and doesn't confuse personal notoriety with the need for the site to be visible
• an editorial team which aims to underline the strengths of the Labour Party via its editorial policy - through a clear recognition and acceptance of the Party's plurality; I'm not sure that I entirely agree with the closing comments of yesterday's article when it talks about using the site as a tool to fight the Tories - the game should be much longer than that and should far more importantly include an ongoing desire to effect a true renewal of the internal workings of the Party in order to re-engage those who would be supporters
  
• an absolutely clear comments policy - something as rigorous as Liberal Conspiracy might be useful; but please, let's have a nameless admin team intervening rather than allowing the task to fall to one individual who in turn will undoubtedly fall into the temptation of making a name for him- or herself. When was the last time you saw the name of the editor on a book? Editors should be everywhere, of course; but invisibly so
  

I also idly thought of the following:

• software code is constitution - what a website allows you to do is law; we should remember this. We should start by defining what we want our constitution to be before we start putting the technology together in a haphazard way
  
• the article LabourList.org published yesterday suggested we did not divide ourselves up into different camps (Compass, Fabians and so forth) - I suggest we do: let me explain. Whilst I was blogging on Members Net, the Labour Party's intranet, different bloggers took on different roles. For a while, Dave played Marxist devil's advocate; Matthew blazed a trail of populism and got literally hundreds of comments; I tried to bridge differences and popularise Party thought, as well as keep the show on the road (though, as here, very rarely got any feedback). In this sense, the community functioned as different types of bloggers complemented each other - and from that experience perhaps we should learn. On the new LabourList.org, perhaps those who would choose to blog should be encouraged to work under a number of labels - but not at all political; rather, functional and descriptive: conflictive blogger, conciliatory blogger, dialectic blogger, theoretical blogger and so forth. We could even ensure that those who wished to blog be required to make a minimum number of comments per week on other people's blogs. If this did not happen, the blog would automatically drop off the system (or vice versa - those who wished to comment would need to post a minimum number of blogs if they wished to keep their right to post)
  
• thirdly, over on Zebra Red, a repository of ideas I've just started up to help develop a progressive publishing and distribution model, I've made a couple of suggestions about my ideal progressive blogging site - comments would be welcome: the post and idea I'm really interested in working on can be found here; a subsidiary one about where the money'll lie in the future can be found here, whilst ProIssues.com already seems to want to do some of what I'm suggesting and can be found here

Finally, a couple of thoughts on second waves. They say in Spanish that "segundas partes nunca fueron buenas", but I'm not so sure. This article from New Scientist today on the far more virulent strain of swine flu that the autumn will surely bring us has made me think again. We can - of course - always be more effective second time around. But we can only manage to be so by stepping back from our technology and remembering that automation never resolves a bad process - it only serves to make it a hundred times worse. If our ability to communicate effectively as a political party is not working as well as it should do in the real world, we cannot Elastoplast it into effectiveness by computerising its innards in the virtual. Computerisation should always come afterwards. Analysis and resolution of existing problems should come first.

So what we need first is true dialogue to reconstruct a brilliant idea which almost disintegrated into a dangerous short cut through the alley where no one should ever go. Only when we have properly sorted out our manual processes can we usefully proceed to their constructive magnification through technology.

Please let us remember this as we progress to the next stage.

And if LabourList.org is to play a useful part in the regeneration of the Labour Party, let it serve to be a metaphor for all that should differentiate Labour from the rest of the British political scene. No. A tool to beat the Tories with is far too unambitious a goal. We should be aiming to reconstruct and bring together all the progressive strands of British thought and put in place structures that will permanently renew them.

An ongoing progressive community of the thoughtful. That is what should define our aspirations and our goals.

Blogging and the gulag ... (II)

But this time, it's more like being washed up on a desert island with no interesting companions on the horizon. LabourList becomes LabourLost in this interesting article all about the future of the Labour-minded website.

Just one tiny observation - and it's really not meant to injure. When it talks about the site being accessible, the writers of the article should really try surfing with their mobiles just to see what a mess it really is. Whilst a simple Apture link tells you who's logged on and when - instead of providing you with the content itself.

Small things but surely indicative of non-compliance with some standards or other.

Blogging and the gulag ...

This, from Wired today, makes interesting reading.

Musings on violence (a summary)

Just to round up where we are at on this subject if you've come late to the debating chamber. My last three posts have, in some way or another, been on the subject of violence in political discourse. You can find them here, here and here. Paul provoked my most recent thoughts in his usefully wide-ranging and erudite discussion here, as he picked up on some phrases I haplessly strung together a while back, and Dave has spoken most interestingly of both electoral meltdown and violence here and here. Finally, Elizabeth made a comment on my first post which made me reflect on my own instinctive and out-of-hand rejection of violence. You can find her thoughtful observations here.

Musings on violence (a continuation) (III)

A different kind of violence here. The kind the right would wish, cleansingly, to unleash here in Britain. As the solvent 75-year-old gentleman contemplates having to pay off the college kid's credit card debt, the world is indeed unfair; back to front.

This is when the economic fix we looked to in a noble desire to solve our presents has served only to bring about a cruel legalism of structures which hardly suits our future needs.

This is when the law most obviously serves the interests of those who manage money.

This is a kind of violence - after all. The kind the law contemplates, in fact, as justifiable.

Musings on violence (a continuation) (II)

This is a kind of violence too. But I ask myself: is it the result of violence or is it a manner of applying it?

Death throes are awful things to contemplate.

I remember two things about death. Firstly, kissing the familiar forehead of my grandmother when it was no longer warm; yes, that moment when it suddenly became hard and quite unyielding.

Like unavoidable political decline, in fact. A hardness. An irremediable sorrow.

Secondly, watching my mother-in-law die in ignorance, as her family kept the truth of her brain cancer from her.

That took around six months.

That drove me slowly towards my own breakdown.

It was a remorseless recognition of how small and irrelevant our pain is to the wider scheme of things that is this planet and its many orbits.

So are these death throes like the first case or the second?

Oh, I am so proud to be a member of the Labour Party. Its peoples are so rich in experience and wonder; the vast majority so poor in virulence and bile. If only they could organise as well as they could want to do right. What makes them so good, so different from members of every other party, is their desire to do right even as they recognise how impossible this task may be.

Labour is a matter of love; of birth and renewal too - a paradigm of pain in a curious world where the freedom to exert injustice can only be fought by the desire to do good.

A political party with a conscience? Yes, indeed. And if Labour's conscience is currently pulling it apart brick by mortal brick, Tory psychopathy - that desire which money provokes in the best-intentioned of minds - will win over the selfish instincts we all hold dear in times of crisis.

No solutions.

Just dry-eyed tears.

We cannot even weep any more, when we grieve.

Musings on violence (a continuation)

Paul has a fascinating post on violence and its use over at the Bickerstaffe Record today.

I strongly recommend its reading.

I first came across it on my mobile this morning using Opera Mini, so his stats will have registered at least one reader from Norway.

I've got into the daily habit of using my mobile during my lunch breaks in order to keep up with emails, tweets and bloggers I find interesting, where work-related restrictions on Internet usage make this impossible. Opera Mini is a great way of making a prehistoric phone useful for Internet access.

Anyhow, you can find my response to his considered piece of writing below:

Lovely post, Paul. Though I don't know what I'm doing in such august company.

Violence and how we use it is a broader concept than the kicking stuff which causes bruises, blood and occasionally death. Politics is the only alternative we have to all-out warfare, I freely admit it; we should be eternally grateful for politics and politicians. My beloved Balkans fell apart precisely because the politicians failed to do what they should've done. The problem is when politicians resort to verbal violence - often of a highly figurative nature - to achieve their aims. When we begin to get metaphorical blood on the debating chamber, the kind of blood that poisons public discourse, we begin to lose our intellectual compasses.

I truly shrink from accepting that the first person to suggest a "how we should do something next" idea has the right to almost inevitably end up planting their political flag on it, so that agreement and development of that idea, when first sustained by an opposite number, becomes impossible if your tribe is still to trust where you're coming from. These awful exhibitions of ownership and property in relation to ideas lead to as much violence - both mental and physical - as perhaps almost any other aspect of latter-day communication.

I strongly believe that if we wish to avoid the route of violence as a final solution to the widest extent possible, we have to learn to triangulate other ways (where not third ways) sustainably. Even where we run the risk of Clintonising our way out of useful ideology; a risk we must, of course, do everything to keep at bay, for being in possession of such an ideology, any ideology constructed in good faith and with good reason, would otherwise serve to vaccinate us against and make us immune to far more disagreeable alternatives (I'm thinking fundamentally of the neo-cons during Bush's reign and what I imagine will overwhelm us under Cameron, if push comes to shove and the nightmare begins).

What I think I find truly resistible is the discarding of a strategy - in this case, that of violent direct action - simply because it's impractical, because it doesn't produce the right results, because it's counter-productive. This is the result of a moderate dose of cowardice, I feel. This argument allows those who don't really believe in violence or (as you quite rightly point out) its uncontrollable consequences - but understand that to say so out loud would perhaps alienate influential (even if minority) groups of supporters - to quite easily shirk their intellectual responsibilities.

Yes. Of course. In the case of extreme situations such as Hitler's Germany, good people were left with no alternative. But we did wait until there was no alternative. In the case of Iraq, some people (that is to say, many ordinary people; good people too - not just the politicians who were selling a hidden agenda) wanted quite eagerly, for some reason, to believe that history was repeating itself.

Violence always requires its justification before it can act - however spurious that justification and act may be. And collectively, in the case of Iraq, we allowed that justification to gather force.

Meanwhile, ultimately, violence and its use are always a sign of a breakdown of process, a breakdown of dialogue - that is to say, sustainable dialogue.

A vocal and physically imperative marching-through-the-streets may be a worthy and adequate tool at a given moment in time, and if it degenerates into violence an example of a certain kind of dialogue indeed of a mighty and historical nature - but it is a symptom of a wider failure, never a victory for (that is to say, on behalf of) our mostly community-orientated yearnings - both collective and socialist, as well as essentially individual - for a true and peer-sourced communication of equals.

I still feel we can - with the right marshalling of resources, with an appropriate understanding of the redundancy of forces and spaces in the world we inhabit - learn how to eke out the kind of communities we'd like to live in ... whoever is in charge and at the top.

We really don't need destruction as a prerequisite to construction.

We do however need reconstruction.

The NHS leaflet on swine flu

Hosted by the BBC, you can find a short .pdf file from the NHS here.

A thought for the pigs ...

From Reuters today, this on the quandary the pigs find themselves in. I have heard the PC brigade want to call the flu "new flu" - a rebranding exercise taking a leaf out of recent Labour history perhaps.

Anyhow. Animals suffer too - and they don't have the benefit of Tamiflu.

Obama a cross between Clinton and Bush?

A cross to bear, perhaps. This, from the New York Times a couple of days ago:

In terms of leadership style, Mr. Obama at times has seemed like a cross between his two most recent predecessors — intellectually curious, philosophically flexible and eager for input like Bill Clinton, while disciplined, willing to delegate and comfortable with bold decisions like George W. Bush.

Unlike Mr. Bush, who preferred that his memos be kept to two pages, Mr. Obama has not trusted instinct during the auto-industry crisis so much as conduct a law school-style review of his options. Unlike Mr. Clinton, who was famous for making phone calls late at night without his aides knowing, Mr. Obama generally did not reach out independently to auto executives, union leaders or Congressional allies.

Yet in his first three months, he has struggled to avoid the isolation that has beset so many predecessors. Upon taking office, Mr. Obama set up a group of outside economic advisers to provide him an array of opinions. “He doesn’t want to get insulated,” said one member, Richard L. Trumka, the secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

More here.

"Joseph Stalin without the bloodshed"

Who are we talking about? Here's a clue. It's one of many generously turned phrases which the innocent mouths and gently gnashing teeth of the commentators who work for our beloved and balanced Fox News have bestowed upon the planet.

100 days of savage distortion, actually.

Truly has to be seen to be believed.

I still don't believe it.