Sloshed, they worked into the night Saving the Nation


The UK press is once again awash with the latest revelations of the Johnson’s regime’s boozy misconduct and its entitled, unending contempt for the nation. The Prime Minister, his aids, senior civil servants and their minions have persistently flouted the national COVID rules they themselves put in place, most frequently at farewell parties. This was best captured in reports that on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, a Downing Street staffer was dispatched with a suitcase to fetch more booze from the nearby Co-op on The Strand in central London

What everyone is missing is that the real scandal is not the flouting of COVID rules at illicit parties during a pandemic, but that the stand-in PM and his Downing Street staff were running the country pissed. And that also this may not be confined just to times of national emergency, what with the general sense of partying and joie de vivre such disasters tend to raise in decent people. No, as reported in The Guardian, according to a senior Tory who previously worked at Downing Street, “opening a bottle of wine at the desk was not unusual if people were working into the evening, particularly on a Friday.”

It would be interesting to see the statistics on surgeons and aircraft engineers who write reports and recommend measures with a bottle of wine on the desk. The aftermath of such conduct may not be as immediately apparent in governance as with a plane crash or an increase in operating theatre deaths, yet it would be there, perhaps in a recommendation to delay critical lockdowns that, though they lower the death toll, nonetheless make it more difficult to nip to the local booze store.

Bottom-up Party: Popular selection of Policy and Candidates

Noam Chomsky once gave a very good description of how to make sure the politicians we vote in will serve the societal good rather than themselves and powerful interests. Basically, we tell them which policies we want them to stand for. If they agree, we agree to vote for them.

That is somewhat different to what happens now. Currently, political hopefuls from various parties come along and dangle a list of tantalising policies; and then they ask us to vote them in as parliamentary representatives. Not only has the electorate had no say in who this candidate is, having a say in the policies they are standing for is usually extremely difficult if not impossible. Chomsky (and probably others too) proposes that voters should tell candidates that if they fight on the issues that matter to them as electorate, then they’ll vote for them as candidates.

This is a stronger form of democracy than we currently have. Yet there is an even more robust democratic system, the essential details of which are fairly simple.

The People’s Party: how to go about creating one and voting it into government

How does a political party get started?

More or less, a group of individuals get together and draw up a set of policies they call a manifesto. Then they register the party, stump up 500 quid each to put themselves up as candidates in elections, and start canvassing for people who will vote them into parliament and perhaps government.

However, this traditional structure is not a bottom-up party and certainly not a people’s party. A bottom-up people’s party is not built by a handful of individuals but by millions of people, both in terms of the policies and the candidates that will represent those policies. It does not need a select group of individuals to draw up an initial raft of policies, only to create the space in which such policies can be tabled by anyone in the general public and then selected by public polling to form the Manifesto; and second, it requires individuals – again, from the general public – who feel they have the requisite political acumen to bring the policies to fruition. Such people can present themselves as provisional party representatives and future parliamentary candidates, but only on the bases of the policies previously selected by public polling and which now form the Manifesto.

Once a cohort of potential party representatives is formed (say 4 or 5 for each constituency), people can vote to select the actual party representative. By putting themselves for selection as a party representative, candidates also agree to subject themselves to vetting criteria, based on an assessment of both their declared and their proven acumen, competence, experience, qualification and so on.

Once a representative for each constituency is chosen (always on the basis not of their policies but those already selected by public polling), they are now the candidate for future member of parliament in that constituency, and can run as a member of the “People’s Party”, or however it is called, in the next election.

There could be regional tweaks to reflect local issues in various constituencies, but the individual policy details of the manifesto and hence the overall party line is decided by members of the public long before a face is put to those policies in the form of several hundred candidates and a “supreme leader”.

The crucial points are that voters reach mass consensus on the policies first, divorced of any rhetoric and personal consideration related to candidates, and only then is someone considered for selection as a party candidate to represent those policies.

In essence, the “ordinary folk”, who usually are only given the illusion of democracy every four or five years, have the power to elect not only who represents them, but also to select the policies they want to be represented for.

This, arguably, is authentic democracy. Anyone can suggest policy on any area, and the entire process of drawing up a manifesto and selecting the representatives who will bring those policies to fruition (if elected to government) are all chosen by popular vote by anyone of voting age. Moreover, the vetting criteria for choosing party representatives, who are themselves ordinary citizens of any hue, can similarly be selected through a public polling process.

Every stage is therefore democratic and involves the populace, rather than a small group of individuals seeking the support of the populace. Nothing is left to individual design – except perhaps the technical gubbins of some web platform from where all of this can be coordinated. Hardly a political matter.

We might call this party by any number of obvious names: People’s Party, Public Manifesto Party, True Choice Party, and so on.

And there are no party members as such. The party survives only as long as there are people willing to engage in it, vote for it, and also contribute to funding the necessary expenses.

This stands the current political and electoral farce on its head (often a remarkably effective way of getting something previously stubborn to work correctly, such as a tomato sauce bottle). Currently, jovial chancers masquerading as a political party conjure up policies that sound appealing yet which in the end they frequently betray. Popular selection of policies that people want, followed by a marriage of those policies to people who can demonstrate genuine acumen, competence and conscientiousness to bring the policies to fruition is an enormous leap away from the current restricted and frequently corrupt system.

An entire political party, truly of the people, can be put together in this way… I think. It would be populated by ordinary members of the public who are in full control of the policies and the candidates for Parliament. The MPs would be championing the people’s manifesto rather than the people having to settle for a manifesto that often poorly reflects their true needs.

And existing parties?

If we were speaking of an existing party, conversion to such an unarguably democratic system of selecting both policy and representatives by popular vote would be simple. Only a democratic and not a political will would be required for such a change. Perhaps the most likely candidate party in the UK would be the LibDems. Have they the vision?

This brief, inadequate and undoubtedly flawed description of a people’s party is somewhat a sort of Wikiparty (and same here). An idea that has been out in the wild for sometime now. The intention is that it is constructed and run by the electorate.

Wikipedia has as so far shown itself to be a very good repository of general knowledge; not of general knowledge per se, but of the general command of knowledge on nearly every subject as well as of important figures in society. The term for that is encyclopaedic, and from what anyone can guess without large government grants to study it, Wikipedia is every bit as good and as frequently consulted as any of the tightly managed attempts at encyclopaedic knowledge (Britannica, Chambers’, etc,).

Would such a “Wiki” approach to politics, as loosely outlined above, succeed in government? That is the question, though it could be worth a try.

Kier Starmer: Not Simply Stooge But A Damp Squib

We all held our breath and journalists wrote articles about the barrister’s sharp mind and razor reasoning. Here was a fellow who could string a serious question together whilst getting a few laughs at Boris’s expense.

So we all imagined Boris shaking in his boots. And Boris very well probably shook in his boots, as he too likely fell for the bluster just like the rest of us.

And then nothing happened.

Kier certainly came to town hoopin’ an’ a hollerin’, guns-a-blazin’ and set about showing his predecessor Jeremy how a leader of the opposition opposes. Boris was so shagged out after Dominic Cummings won the election for him that Kier managed to get a few jabs in that had us holding our breath. Though this somewhat abated when the pandemic came along and he took the honourable stance of “everyone pulling together” against a common foe, no matter our differences. Yet this vaguely objective, unifying reason for supporting government policy, just like in the good old days of World War II, is beside the point when it comes to Kier. It was not honour or common sense but playing safe that encouraged him to consistently and reliably affirm the government’s Covid response rather than come up with something better himself.

And nothing has continued to happen up until the present. There is no clear policy or direction, plus a humiliating drubbing in the Hartlepool by-election to boot. And even after the so-called victory in Batley and Spen, Kier is merely “looking good in a suit” as Ash Sarkar phrased it in a BBC Radio 4 PM interview.

But we cannot expect any different. The fellow who replaces someone ousted from leadership because he stood for clear and above all decent policies – as did the Devil, aka Jeremy Corbyn – such a fellow is not going to be brimming with principle and conviction. He’s going to play it safe, tow the line, and basically try to keep house for as long as he can in the hope of becoming prime minister out of a Tory balls-up rather than Labour election genius. As Owen Jones opines in the Guardian, “The consensus among Labour MPs is that the principal cause of Starmer’s woes is he lacks a vision”; and that Labour’s right flank “believe he is a dud who will never win an election, and they plan to keep him in post until they can […] ensure one of their own succeeds him before a general election.” 

Labour was so shaken by the successful smearing of Corbyn by the right flank, achieved through the cynical exploitation of legitimate concerns over anti-Semitism, that collectively Labour fell for Kier’s slick-backed quiff and suit with a sigh, in blessed relief to Jeremy’s crinkled, Socialist Worker I-just-got-out-of-bed appearance.

Let’s not mistake. Corbyn is one hell of a bore and short on laughs, yet also a decent fellow maligned – to express it in Marlowesque prose. His policies on nationalising public transport and utilities, funding and revamping the NHS, and taxation to pay for it all rang a bell with a majority of the British public, which should have been a winner for Labour. Yet despite this popular political appeal, his personal image was irreparably damaged by the successful blurring and conflation of allegations of anti-Semitism among some Labour MPs, with Corbyn’s legitimate support for justice on the Palestine issue.

Given the popularity of his policies, it is arguable that his fair stance on Palestine was entirely the cause of Corbyn’s downfall, a suspicion lent credence by the fact that his demonization intensified in the run up to the December 2019 election; to the extent that just before the election, Johnathan Sacks, the UK’s late Chief Rabbi and strong supporter of Israel and apparently also of the occupation (Rabbi Sacks, Why Are You Cheerleading for anti-Palestinian Provocateurs?), publicly called Corbyn an “an anti-Semite” who has backed “racists, terrorists and dealers of hate”.

Yet those who can see the facts and understand the motivations for such a statement by Rabbi Sacks did not fall for it. Even prior to this attack, Jewish Voice for Labour published a letter in the Guardian declaring Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour a crucial ally in the fight against antisemitism, reminding everyone of Corbyn’s credentials in consistently fighting anti-Semitism throughout his political career, in flat contradiction to the spurious allegation that Labour had become institutionally anti-Semitic under Corbyn.

The issue of whether antisemitism existed or even abounded in the Labour Party, as some alleged, is one thing. But given Corbyn’s credentials, it does not, however, take a cynic to suggest that Corbyn was personally vilified by Sacks and others solely for his stance of a fair resolution on Palestine. Corbyn, as many people, is anti-Zionist, making him vulnerable to attempts by Zionists to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, in the service of protecting Israel from criticism, and Sacks tapped into this vein in attacking Corbyn. Again several years prior to Sacks’s vilification of Corbyn, Peter Beinart, writing in Haaretz, felt moved to correct the Rabbi on his conflation. (Why Rabbi Sacks Is Wrong: Palestinians Don’t Have to Be anti-Semites to Be anti-Zionists)

There is, then, reasonable suspicion that Corbyn was ousted and replaced by a chap who could be relied upon not to rock the boat when it came to Palestine. The only problem for wider UK politics is that Kier is failing to rock on any front at all. Starmer is a dud as Jones so aptly puts it. He’s as dud as they come, and the only thing you can do with a dud once you have fired it off, presumably in rehearsal for a big event, is to put in a live round. The question is, who’s it going to be? Unless that is, we get another dud.

If the electorate is not to be left with the current dire choice of a jovially flatulent Boris or a somnolent Kier, we need someone quite, but not exactly, like Jeremy, someone with a decent heart, but a few laughs as well.

Could we perhaps clone Kier, Boris and Jeremy into one, knock ’em dead, keep ’em laughing architect of a truly liberal, social democratic Labour party and society? Kier’s sleek looks crossed with Boris’s jolly what-ho-ness, braced firmly with Jeremy’s heart, principles and vision? None of them is particularly stupid as politicians go, except perhaps Boris, and the cross would have the advantage that Kier’s damp obsequiousness would be balanced by Jeremy’s polite fuck-youness, (this latter trait arguably simultaneously both a strong and a weak point of the crinkly left). As for Boris, he can provide the light entertainment.

The art in cloning a perfect politician intent on a social democratic society lies in knowing how to properly, but politely, package a fuck-you aimed at those who would do anything to prevent such a society. Kier is the ideal wrapper; vacuous, dithering, directionless, happy to be given a pat on the back from those who put him there, ever chirpy and optimistic that better days are coming if he just sits still and sits it out. With a few tweaks to expunge the less desirable yes-sir-three-bags-full-sir traits, a hollowed out Kier could be just the ticket for Corbynite policies of genuine social and economic justice that would bring business to heel, as well as nationalise all the essential services and infrastructure that have proven disastrous in the hands of private interests.

This may be a tall order, as there is a natural constraint on combining decency (Jeremy), redundancy (Kier) and the ability to crack a joke at someone else’s expense (Boris) into the mix of traits required to either obtain power (Jeremy’s failing), or wield it properly and selflessly for the good of all (Boris’s catastrophic failing). It is no coincidence that whilst decent Jeremy was a tad too flat, dodgy Boris is a clown.

It is important at this point to own up to the whole reason for this small note, which is not really to rubbish Kier, poke fun at Boris, and lament the treacherous demise of Jeremy. It is to consider what might bring about a decent society, one that we design for ourselves yet with considerably better results.

Pinning Them Down: Accountability in Government and Corporations

Even after the recent Downing Street Scandals and bean-spilling by Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson remains PM. After multiple allegations of cronyism, lying, dodgy loans and his then fiancé Cary Simons plucking someone from the crosshairs of an enquiry because she was best friends with him, plus a story about her dog taking up the PM’s time, he hangs on. As Hasit Shah at Quartz rightly bemoans, “These days, it’s difficult to [self] sabotage a political career.”

Meantime, though Matt Hancock was the principle target of Cummings’s sniper fire, there is a good chance that he too will wiggle free, at least long enough for him to finish his important task of wrecking the NHS and killing people through practiced incompetence.

And it is not just Boris and Matt, or even just UK MPs and peers. This kind of Teflon politics infects corporations and institutions, extending its ironically non-stick tentacles globally to every country and every government. Politicians and the wealthy may well frequently find themselves confronted with allegations of serious wrong doing, yet in proportionate comparison to the general population it is only rarely, exceedingly rarely, for allegations to stick and a conviction to result, perhaps with a deserved spell of prison time.

How do we explain the disparity, ceteris paribus, between the conversion rate of allegation-to-criminal conviction among the ruling and wealth elite on the one hand, and the conversion rate among the general population on the other? In other words, after accounting for possible factors (for example, political motivation for levelling a false allegation), would we not expect that within any sector of society roughly the same percentage of allegations would result in successful conviction? To maintain otherwise would beg an even bigger question; why are this lot more moral than that lot? A very apt question to ask about ruling and wealth elites, who seem strangely immune to this kind of social accounting.

That could be the subject of fruitful social science research, but we do not need to go that far here.

It is enough to note the utterly obvious: where convictions have resulted it has been when solid evidence was available. This raises another obvious question: is conviction among ruling elites only scarce because solid evidence is scarce, and not because they are somehow more moral? Less given to lying, cheating, fiddling expenses, cronyism and so on. (Which on Plato’s “logic of Cephalus” they should be, since they are supposedly buffered by wealth and privilege from the desperations that might even drive otherwise good, ordinary men to crime. [1])

It is almost certain that this is the case. Had a camera been rolling at the time when Cummings claims Boris said “let the bodies pile up!” the matter would have been open and shut in a jiffy, and Boris either booted out equally as fast, or his position strengthened depending on what the evidence showed. [2]

The problem then is not so much lack of accountability, which is the usual lament. What there is a lack of are records that provide the evidence that underpins accountability. In today’s modern parlance this translates into a lack of surveillance. We speak of cameras, microphones, and hell, even umpire-style observers strategically placed along corridors, and in ministerial and corporate offices as well as Cabinet and boardrooms. Such mechanisms would provide critical data when it came down to one honourable gentleman’s word against another, though the downside is we would be deprived of the theatre witnessed these last few days.

Likely we should install all three, so that if cameras and microphones malfunction or are tampered with we have the human back up; and, vice versa, should the human temporarily stop working or fall asleep we can rely on the tech backup. Naturally, when it comes to genuine matters of security such as a nuclear war for example, the human observers (sitting on comfy chairs during, say, 2 hour shifts, and wearing something like a Black Rod outfit to distinguish them) would be sworn to secrecy… or else. And when we were confronted with the kind of disputes and word jousting we have seen during the spectacular dust-up between Cummings and his former pal and meal-ticket to power, Boris, the umpires would nonchalantly rise and give evidence that would swiftly either condemn or exonerate.

Such care to make sure that everything is not only clear but clearly remembered would pay untold dividends. It would save tax payers huge sums, save lives in some cases, and also free up ministerial energies and focus – the latter already in short supply – for important stuff such as actually fighting a pandemic rather than arguing about it.

Agreeing to tight, blanket surveillance of our beloved rulers would of course be a pre-requisite of running for office, and so no one would be pressured into it. They would acquiesce in the knowledge that it would provide a near failsafe method for nailing down data that could be useful during an enquiry into misconduct that could potentially have disastrous effects. Though a few might still get away, it would not be anywhere near the mass dodging of public scrutiny that we see now.

We should all be in favour of surveillance. It is a very decent and patriotic thing to ascent to. Only so far it is probably the wrong people who have been publicly surveilled: the ordinary folk who at most pick pockets, park in the wrong place, perhaps hit each other over the head on a Saturday night, and OK, occasionally shoot each other.

None of that kind of petty misconduct is going to drastically affect the course of a nation. But Matt Hancock, who single handed may have helped the coronavirus kill 10s of thousands more than it would have done alone, is still in his job even whilst these gruesome allegations hang over him. At the very least he should take a holiday whilst it is being sorted out, since if it is true, he may yet kill 10s of thousands more before we get to the bottom of it.

Lights, action and roll the cameras.

1. “The great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others.” Cephalus, Plato’s Republic.
2. There are countless other scandals that have erupted, even just considering the period in which technology for good surveillance already abounded. From the banal and apparently trivial (e.g., Andrew Mitchell’s Plebgate and Priti Patel bullying civil servants) to the potentially genocidal (Tony Blair’s part in the war on Iraq.) We are probably talking hundreds of instances in which public money and time might have been saved and redirected at issues of substance, to say nothing of lives saved.

Updated 23 August 2021

Critical Theory and the Benefits of Clicking Around

Most everyone who has a PC and uses the internet has clicked around simply for the hell of it. Whilst we might answer that we had nothing better to do, which is a reasonable answer, it is more difficult to answer why we let ourselves do it, especially when we have more useful things to do. And because we usually have more useful things to do, we often end up feeling guilty.

This phenomenon is not limited to clicking around in your computer HD or the internet for no apparent reason, and this brief note might have been more prosaically titled “The Benefits of Fucking Around in General”, as such benefits as I am about to highlight are not limited to computer tech. They extend to all areas of life, from listlessly poking around in cupboards and draws all the way to throwing an ice cube into hot oil to see what happens (not in any way recommended as the scientific benefits and/or entertainment value might be outweighed by serious injury).

What drives such urges is of course idle curiosity, emphasis on the idle. One assumes that idle curiosity differs from curiosity in its pure form (a by now well recognised evolutionary endowment that brings positive benefits) in that it grips us not for any obvious or immediate practical reason, such as wondering whether moving your furniture around might give you more space, but simply for something to do to pass the time. Or perhaps to avoid doing something that requires more effort and appears daunting, otherwise known as procrastinating.

Perhaps the brain needs to maintain some level of activity above keeping us breathing, in order to maintain our readiness for action. So, paradoxically, in order not to itself idle along and risk dulling its capacities or being caught unawares, it instead causes us to idle along doing something… anything. That is, the brain keeps its sentinel and practical capacities honed by keeping us busy.

This may partly explain why there is higher mortality among couch potatoes who passively watch sitcoms than among people who go for long walks and idly marvel and wonder at varieties of trees and wildlife and so on. It’s not just the physical exercise that keeps them trim, in shape, and therefore better prepared for fight or flight – and as a (possible) side consequence, in for a longer live; no, their brains are also kept honed through wonder, awe and delight at Nature. Or something. It is no coincidence that some of the greatest scientific insights and many of the classics among literary works have apparently come after long walks, and, I am arguing here, even procrastination of the type common to those who have cupboards and computers and so on.

What then are the benefits of idle curiosity and procrastination, otherwise termed fucking around?*

There are in fact two benefits as far as my limited scientific research over coffee and an internet connection uncovers. First, there is, possibly, the above mental fitness advantage of keeping us honed and ready to tackle serious problems that might come our way. To get an appreciation of this, picture a couch potato trying to out smart a lion or add up a supermarket receipt on the one hand; and a frequent brisk walker or mountaineer who regularly estimates the local population of eagles or wonders why the sky is blue or how the Sun functions, on the other.

And second, there is the everyday practical and ultimately beneficial effect of discovering something useful or delightful in the recesses of a draw, cupboard, your PC, the Internet or indeed the world. The benefits may come through increased convenience or measurable profit, anything from discovering something that makes a task easier (a particularly well designed soup ladle in a forgotten draw for example, or that your internet plan includes SMS and phone calls when previously you thought it did not), to perhaps a Van Goch (let us dream a little) stashed in the attic, or more realistically, an expensive tool that you needed, regarding which you can now save money.

The point here of course is not all these useful outcomes but the feeling of guilt we experience when idling and the vulnerabilities that come with it. Why, if there are all these munificent benefits to fucking around, do we often feel bad about it?

That will not be discussed here more than to recall the saying that “the devil makes work for idle hands”, thus once again uncovering religion as the culprit, perhaps as tool in the service of the real villains: those who would put others to work for their own gain, for whom idleness is up there alongside fornication and other sins that would otherwise endow the sinner (i.e., the worker) with both liberty and health. (This is my nod, and that’s all for now, towards critical theory).

* The benefits of idle curiosity do not stop at the happenchance discovery of long forgotten possessions in cupboards or useful information on the internet. Perhaps the greatest benefit is accessing new situations and people that we would never entertain if always doing something “purposeful” or prescribed by society.

As the authors of a book on evolutionary critical theory state, it may be that “… through idle curiosity… one may encounter people with different ‘habits of thought’ or find oneself in novel situations.” (Evolutionary Critical Theory and Its Role in Public Affairs
Charles Federick Abel, Arthur Jay Sementell, Routledge, 2004 ). All with the attendant benefits of new “knowledge and coping behaviours”, skills useful in navigating the world and all gained, often quite enjoyably, from fucking around.

Major Hair Loss and General Decline: the Battle Against Aging

The field of Senescence research is alive, well and growing fast. In a nutshell it seeks to understand and counter age-related decline by tackling the processes of aging at the cellular level. Though the science is still someway off from stopping and eventually reversing age-related decline and the many diseases that accompany it, that day is clearly in sight.

One very likely effect of anti-aging therapies would of course be extension in life-span. It is surprising then that many people view the whole endeavour unfavourably, arguing that aging is natural, and to tinker with it would somehow change our natures or make us monsters. Some argue from the perspective that there is a certain grace to growing old… erm… gracefully, whilst at the other extreme there is a sense it is almost blasphemous to think we might be like gods. But most researchers counter these objections by sensibly pointing out that they are not necessarily trying to extend life-span. That indeed, as molecular biologist Judith Campisi at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California puts it, “it’s extending years of healthy life that might be on the horizon”, and not extending absolute years of life.

Principally, researchers are trying to find ways to eliminate degenerative diseases not simply because they kill us before our time, which is just one outcome, but because they also cause great debilitation and reduction of quality in life whilst we are being delivered to death’s door.

Explained like this it does seem to render the objections both mute and perplexing, as is this not what medicine and hospitals are for? They not only nurse us back to health and make us feel better, they do it by treating the diseases that naturally strike us down and may end our life, many if not most of which are age-related.

Perhaps so far the function of medicine has not specifically been to extend our lives beyond their natural span, and was mostly content with alleviating suffering and perhaps helping us reach the natural span seemingly allotted to us. But in a very real sense, we have nonetheless had “anti-aging” therapies for as long as there has been a concept of medicine and treatment. In other words, for millennia. and that should surely count as interfering with nature, as naturally without them in many cases we would die. So if we argue that treatments that go beyond alleviation of suffering and which actually extend our natural span is unwise and interfering with Nature, then why not consider treatments for alleviation as being unwise and interfering in the natural order of things? Why not just accept our lot when we get sick, and happily sail off into the night when our time is up?

A debate on the pros and cons of longevity is fitting matter for cheery discussion over dinner and wine and it will not be discussed here. Except to say that funnily enough, the only time when one is not worried about death is when doing something to hasten it, such as when feasting and merry making.

Shockingly Stupid

Though the research and the future possibility of rejuvenation – already demonstrated in some laboratory animal test subjects – is fascinating, even more fascinating is humanity’s consummate skill in shortening life. Humans seem to bear an overall, breath-taking indifference to the fact that they still kill each other – for land, resources or over various gods – as well as an astonishing inability to do the maths. If you sum the resources expended in fighting over resources, the tally sheet would likely make any accountant dismally shake his head. (Lives of course are expendable and so we won’t let that particular summation further detains us).

The point is, even if the sheet somehow balances out and it makes economic sense to carry out the insanity of burning fossil fuels in military hardware in order to seize control of fossil fuels, for example, overall the world consumes vast resources that could otherwise make life cheerier for all (healthcare, food, wine and long debates over life and death), if not actually delaying the onset of aging by diverting these resources into senescence research. That is, aside from shooting each other, we are also shooting ourselves in the foot, potentates and war mongers included.

To sum it up in a nutshell, senescence research is neither against nature nor is it science fiction. And how fast it develops is not nearly as much a question of science and morality as it is of money and attitude.

So whilst we have scientists trying to make life cheerier and disease free, with the feasible promise of longer lives for those who want it, there are those others, whom by now all sensible people are quite tired of, taking life, whilst throwing money and resources down the drain (witness the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021). Or rather in their pockets, via arms manufacture and defense contracts. Money and resources that could be used to fight Major Hair Loss and General Decline rather than each other.

Updated 22 August 2021

How to Beat Capitalism with its own Carrot

Here I share the raw insight into how carrots make capitalism work and look bad all at the same time.

In a nutshell, the whole edifice of the capitalist system rests on carrots, with all the embarrassing implications this brings with it.

The kernel of insight in this observation – which I have to admit also works as an insult, playful as it is – is that we shouldn’t need to be profit-driven in order to produce marvellous things and contribute to society. That at bottom, we don’t need a big carrot dangled before us to make us do our best and produce good, either for ourselves or society at large. Not in our enlightened age. Yet the unduly high pay of many public sector jobs is often justified with reference to the private sector, arguing that it is the only way to attract talent into the public sphere else it would defect to the private. Company CEOs and bankers on the other hand, feel no such compulsion to justify their worth (in contrast to conservative politicians and civil servants in the public sector), as the world is there to be exploited, and capitalism has instilled in them from birth that it’s OK to be greedy while you are ripping the heart out of society. This was embarrassingly highlighted by Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he claimed greed gave us the Covid vaccine. Or to give it a tone softer than the PM’s admission of greed, the sole and truthful justification for the Capitalist system is profit and personal gain, moderated by a supposed enlightened self-interest that drives industry and the economy, and by which the world goes round… of sorts.

Such a motive however nicely put is not simply mistaken; it is, I argue, also embarrassing.

If the unsustainability not to mention insanity of continued profiteering, also termed “growth”, under capitalism fails to awaken us to the necessity of replacing it, hopefully the image of the capitalist as no more than a donkey pulling a cart as he tries to reach the carrot will; helping open our eyes to exactly who it is we are dealing with. Plainly put, assess, beautiful and strong without doubt, yet pulling us along the road of calamity in the pursuit of what they claim is good for all, which also happens to fit nicely with what they want for themselves. A nice big juicy carrot.

We speak (at a first level) of a handful of banks, multinational corporations and private individuals – Gates, Soros, Musk, Bezos, Buffett, Branson, Murdoch, little Zuckerberg, etc., and also (at the second level) quite a few mules who languish in relative poverty at the multi-million dollar level, those not quite up to the illustrious carrot-reach of the uber-billionaire asses.

So at last, a modern day use for a quote from poor, troubled Nietzsche [1]: Adventavit asinus, pulcher et fortissimus and full of carrots.

All of the above multinational and individual holders of wealth can, perhaps, take note of MacKenzie Scott, to whom Jeff Bezos was once husband. Scott at least recognises that the fortune accumulated by her and Bezos when married effectively represents exploitation and profiting from the inequalities of society. To address this injustice with regard to her share of the accumulated fortune with Bezos (which initially totalled $57 billion at divorce), Scott along with others is “attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.”[2]

We should wait and see what comes of this. But it looks at least to be on the right track for now, and may possibly also be an argument for having women on top.

1. “Here comes a donkey, beautiful and strong”, Fredrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
2. The Guardian, Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gives away $2.7bn to hundreds of charities

Updated 22 August 2021

La Brutta Figura

An Italian institution that is unique among the people of Earth.

Fare una brutta figura – (literally “to make an ugly figure”) is best translated by the English phrase “to cut a bad image” in public, or perhaps being “caught with your pants down“. Every Italian lives in mortal fear of this terrible social stigma, and from childhood they are taught it is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. If you “make” a brutta figura (“hai fatto una brutta figura”) it means that you’ve made a complete ass of yourself in public or among friends, perhaps even among family, and there is usually no way of redeeming yourself save perhaps by a dual to the death.

The spectrum of behaviour and social comportment that can earn you a brutta figura is wide and varied. It includes benign social clangers – such as wearing clashing colours or the wrong shoes – but also more serious lapses such as failing to return a favour or not turning up at someone’s funeral. Or as I once did, serving a sweet prosecco before, rather than after, a meal.

Obviously a variety of faux pas are found and frowned upon in other cultures, but the unique aspect of Italian society is that to get labelled with the graceless epithet of “brutta figura” it requires only one offence. After that, you will have a jolly time trying to shake it off.

However, the real problem with the brutta figura is not that it is, in itself, such a bad thing. One could live with that, especially if you are British (because we are, after all, quite above that sort of thing). No, it is the threat of earning yourself a brutta figura that is the terrible price to pay for being an Italian model citizen. The mere threat of cutting a bad figure has the effect of dumbing you down, of dampening and supressing your otherwise spontaneous and carefree nature, and for anyone who values their individuality greatly, that is indeed a terrible price.

It is this broader, oppressive nature of the phenomenon that makes the brutta figura so insidious to social life in Italy. What is perhaps worst of all in this regard however, is the damage it does to the character of the individual who succumbs to the pressure of the threat. The individual, oppressed by the fear of making una brutta figura, spends most of his life trying to avoid it, and in the process misses out on living his life to the fullest. Instead of living it the way he would have wanted to live it, he ends up living it the way others would appear to want him to live it. Thus, instead of waring your favourite, most comfortable and most loved pair of shoes (simply to go and buy bread), if you want to cut a good figure (even with the baker) you have to wear if not the latest fashion, then at least a pair that looks as if it’s never been worn before!

Of course, again, we have elements of the same phenomenon throughout all other cultures and societies. To an extent, everyone is self-conscious of their public image, and to a degree this is both necessary and good. Otherwise, society would be an awful place to live in indeed. People would behave in any manner that suited them and wear all manner of offensive clothing, such that it would be quite unpleasant to keep their company. But the difference in the case of Italian society is that while these norms are a natural part of the fabric of any society, in Italy the social merit of abiding by them has been exaggerated and blown out of all proportion. This basically means that rather than giving an individual a chance to show themselves as they are (within the bounds of a reasonable social self-awareness) what you see is the rigid stamp of over-the-top social convention. The result is often dull, uninspiring encounters because of the constant fear of saying the “wrong things”, or of behaving the “wrong way”.

Even the manner in which individuals move is carefully choreographed. Again, having social mores is not the problem. The problem arises when flouting them – even innocently – is severely censured out of all proportion to the crime, and further is taken as a definitive judgement on the character of an individual; rather than, say, simply putting it down to their views on the importance of immaculate footwear for all occasions.

The interesting question to ask is why is this the case. Why does the institution of the brutta figura exist in such exaggerated form in Italy, and why does it have such a strong hold, to the point that it is in effect a social sledgehammer?

First, it is important to note that the phenomenon appears to vary depending on geographical location, seemingly much stronger in the provinces and also in the south of the country. Which gives a hint as to why it is more of a stigma in Italy as a whole than in most other cultures. Essentially, Italy is still very much a provincial society even in the cities, with most people still retaining strong links to the countryside. Many city folk own land and property in the many small villages surrounding the urban areas they have migrated to for work, frequently with extended family still living in those villages who they visit often. Though the moral values of country folk tend to be conservative, their everyday comportment is not centred around dressing well or observing refined though morally neutral practices. They are rough and gruff, often unfriendly to outsiders and aside from church and special occasions, unconcerned with appearance. In the city, the attempt to distance oneself from such coarseness shows itself in the buttoned-up approach to public social comportment of the city dweller, only a generation or two away and still probably with strong links to the countryside. Among city dwellers there is an exaggerated emphasis on fine clothes and in particular immaculate shoes, because only peasants would wear anything else. Generally there is a need for the city dwellers to observe protocol on matters that for other cultures would not register on the Richter scale of social gracelessness (eating as you walk along for example, probably something peasants do all the time).

This, of course, is a very loose and unscientific assessment – it does not immediately explain why drinking a cappuccino after midday might draw a raised eyebrow for example – though the analysis does, after a fashion, stand up to personal experience of many foreigners living in Italy.

How to tell if you have “made” a brutta figura, and why Italians love telling you

Unfortunately the only way is from the reaction of others.
If you say or do something that merits a brutta figura, you will soon find out by the way others change their behaviour towards you. In societies where the brutta figura has been tamed, the reaction of others is usually subtle or even absent altogether when one drops a clanger or commits a social howler. Advanced folk, who are above showing others precisely what asses they are, will usually overlook social ineptitude, or simply not bother with those people evermore if they are excessively graceless. But Italians want you to know that you have committed the equivalent of wearing your underpants on the outside, and will go out of their way to bring it to your attention! that is why the bruta figura is alive and thriving in Italy. It is, in a somewhat crude and unsophisticated way, a means of raising oneself higher by discrediting others on matters that are of absolutely no importance.

The comfort one can draw is that only those who themselves suffer from a severe mental poverty would deign to apply such methods of obtaining elevated social status, and that the peasant out in the countryside, though poor and course, shows himself to be richer and more sovereign than his refined urban kin.

As with many other posts on Italy, the author remains in hiding.

Murphy’s Law, Entropy, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Only entropy comes easy – Anton Chekov

In a quaint BBC Radio 4 short, comedian Robin Ince (co-presenter Infinite Monkey Cage) provides an entertaining insight into Murphy’s Law. After a review of Murphy’s Law (and a brief mention of Sod and his law), Ince tells of an equation that purportedly actually computes the probability of something going wrong, which shall not detain us here as it is of no interest.

As a reminder, Murphy’s Law boldly states that: “if something can go wrong, it will.”

There was, however, sadly no mention in the program of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy, which one would think should have something to do with things going “right” or “wrong”. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, and the Second Law states that the overall disorder of a (closed) system, its entropy, will always increase. This is why earphone cables somewhat infuriatingly tangle rather than spontaneously wind themselves neatly in your pocket, and indeed also why cathedrals and mountains are eventually reduced to rubble. We view such events as undesirable, and so attach to them a negative value captured in our notion of “disorder” (tangled cables, or piles of rubble strewn around where formerly there was a cathedral). Ultimately this disorder relates to our notion of things “going wrong” (the cathedral actually collapsing, or the more traumatic event of finding the earphone cable tangled every time).

So on this reasoning, something “going right” usually means – and is another way of saying – “the imposition of order”, which in turn is another way of saying “limiting the number of ways something can be arranged”. Whereas, on the other hand, something going wrong is our failure to limit the number of ways something can be arranged in a manner that suits us. So for example, it’s difficult to keep an earphone cable from knotting itself because there are many more ways to knot it than there are to organise it in a way that (to us) is tidy and ordered. And any one of these different ordered ways of arranging it require some expenditure of energy and, ultimately, costs us effort. Whereas the many disordered ways of arranging the cable (or ways that to us are not useful) require less energy and therefore happen more frequently, and for free.

So, given that an input of energy (or effort) is required to bring about a more ordered state (equivalent to something “going right”), it is therefore more likely that things will remain in, or degrade to, a less ordered state (things “going wrong”). That, in effect, is Murphy’s law.

Just make things even clearer, alternatively and equivalently we could state that given there are many more ways to arrange something in a disordered manner (something going wrong) than there are to arrange it in an ordered manner (it going right), things will on the average be more wrong than right – unless some effort (energy) is expended in making them “right”.*

(It would be a delight if a physicist suffering from a bout of otium and straying on to this page might offer an interpretation of the above.)

As a final observation, Murphy’s Law is one of the few if not the only law that is self-protecting: if something should fail to go wrong, this is not proof that Murphy’s law is wrong, it is in fact proof of the precise opposite: that Murphy’s Law works well, even to the point where the law itself fails to work properly on occasion. This is, of course, paradoxical, but that doesn’t stand in the way of Murphy’s Law.

In other words, Murphy’s law is non-falsifiable and therefore, like Religion, is forever safe from challenge. This is what makes Murphy’s Law a law of human nature and not a law of Nature. And though it is infinitely more entertaining than Religion, it nonetheless stands alongside it, in that its veracity and predictive power are dependent on human value rather than any particular objective fact of reality. As far as objective reality is concerned, nothing ever goes wrong; things just happen and it is us who impose strictures that dictate which ones have gone right and which have gone wrong.

* While it is useful to think of entropy as a measure of disorder, this is not what it is precisely. Entropy is a measure of the number of ways the particles of a system can be arranged (its micro-states), for which value-laden terms such as order and disorder provide no insight. An example of a system is indeed an earphone cable, the particles being those at the quantum level; i.e., the atoms making up the cable. The ultimate system that contains all other sub-systems is of course the Universe, and its entropy is a measure of how all its roughly 10^(80) particles are arranged at a particular instant. Thus, the entropy of the universe a moment ago was less than it is right now, because though we may have possibly imposed order (for example, by confining the number of ways in which an earphone cable can be stored to just one “tidy” way, eliminating all the “untidy” ways), overall the universe has been degraded, because work was required and something – food molecules arranged in a very specific way in an egg, say – had to be scrambled (literally in the egg’s case), so as to provide us with the energy to tidy the cable. This degradation or increase in the number of ways those molecules can be arranged represents an overall increase in universal entropy, given that to produce the egg in the first place the chicken also had to degrade food matter to obtain the energy in which to make the egg, and so on in a chain back to the Big Bang.

The order/disorder definition only makes sense from the perspective of a goal-driven organism. Ordered micro-states (low entropy) are just as likely as disordered micro-states (high entropy) and it is only because we value the ordered states (from preferring a pile of berries in the corner of our cave to having them still on the tree… all the way to tidy kitchens, fridges, and cars and so on, to transporting food from ordered supermarkets rather than having to pick it off trees or run after it), that we consider something as having gone wrong on the occasions we end up with disordered states.

Donald Trump’s Deeds Consistent With Character

[Former acting president] Donald Trump’s abuse of copyrighted music in the face of artists’ repeated protestations seems consistent with the character of someone under allegation of sexual assault and rape: he goes ahead and does it even when you say you don’t want him to.

Though far less serious, using copyrighted material against the express wish of the copyright owner is out of the same stable as grabbing people by their genitals – without their consent. This is not to mention all the other violations he is on record committing or is accused of.

Columnist Aditya Chakrabortty also makes a similar observation on character in a Guardian piece on the sleaze surrounding Boris Johnson, a prime minister no less. Quoting F Scott Fitzgerald, Chakrabortty notes that “actions are character”.