Tough love, or how to bring up a child

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It is said that children need tough love to grow up as balanced, disciplined adults.  The love has to be tempered by toughness when it comes to discipline.  And toughness always needs to be tempered by love.  

There ought to be BA’s in Parenting, much more useful than BA’s in Business Studies. Parenting is one of the most difficult undertakings I know. I count myself experienced, but with indifferent grades.

Maybe we can agree that children like to know what the boundaries are, what they are allowed to do and not allowed to do. They also need consistent affection and attention.  As a society we are not very good at this tricky art, made rather more challenging where both parents work outside the home. It is exhausting policing the manners and behaviour of small children and takes infinite patience.

How do you think we are collectively doing?

Referendums – should we ever have them again?

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ComRes interviewed 1,000 UK adults by telephone between the 14th and 17th July 2016 for BBC Radio 5 Live to ask them how they felt about Brexit a month after the referendum. Amongst other findings, 61% of those asked did not think referendums should be used to make major decisions about Britain’s future.

68% of Remain voters, however, in another poll, wanted a new referendum on whatever exit deal the Government negotiates with the EU, and felt that Britain should not leave the Union if the public votes “No”.

I’m not sure where the idea of rule by referendum arose. I was under the delusion that the British political system was a parliamentary one, that is, voters vote for a Member of Parliament, who is thereby deputed to vote in parliamentary session in the national interest. Since there is no written constitution, holding a referendum cannot be called unconstitutional, since the constitution “evolves”. But this “evolution” displaces parliamentary government. Voting by referendum requires voters to have a level of knowledge and sophistication that collectively doesn’t exist. “Education by highly biased media” is actually what happens. Since the Brexit people refused to listen to the warnings of experts in the first EU referendum, but voted-by-feeling, what makes anyone think that they would vote rationally a second time?

I think a second referendum is a bad idea. Much as I am cynical about politics, these politicians are professionals, paid to weigh the (very complicated) facts. Let Parliament debate the EU negotiations and vote on them. Then, if the MPs get it wrong, vote them out of office. That way there is a higher likelihood of at least getting it all partially right.

The justification for raising this point on a blog devoted to interpreting Epicureanism for modern audiences? Simply a matter of peace of mind amid the turmoil, by which I mean nobody has a lot of it and they want it back.

Thought for the day

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“I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

(Tony Schwarz, writer of “The Art of the Deal” that catapulted Trump into the national limelight. The quotation is from an article by Schwarz published in the New Yorker, July 25, 2016) 

The deliberate murder of suspected drug dealers

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More than 100 suspected drug dealers have been killed – either shot dead by police or murdered by unidentified vigilantes – since the election of Rodrigo Duterte as the Philippines’ president. On a recent weekend police officers killed eight known “drugs personalities” in the southern town of Matalam. Duterte was elected in May, having promised during his campaign to kill thousands of drug dealers and other criminals.

In the West we generally believe in the rule of law. If somebody is accused of a crime he is arrested, comes before a magistrate and is tried before a jury of 12 fellow citizens. The jury establishes the guilt, or otherwise, of the accused, and the judge determines the sentence. This has been the system since medieval days and has served us well.

Because of uncontrolled population growth, poverty, corruption, and lack of employment people take to drugs to blot out the misery of their lives. Along with drugs goes massive, uncontrolled, organised crime, especially in countries with weak institutions. I suspect there is a thought in the corner in the collective mind of many that a brief purge of “drug personalities” might prove a salutary lesson that is more effective than relying on a bunch of badly paid, corrupt policemen. But no civilised person can support summary executions.

Wasted food – a scandal in our time

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Americans throw away almost as much food as they eat, inflicting a heavy toll on the environment. Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the US are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or sent to a landfill, because of unrealistic and unyielding cosmetic standards. High-value and nutritious food is being sacrificed to retailers’ demand for unattainable perfection. About 60m tonnes of produce worth about $160bn (£119bn), is wasted by retailers and consumers every year – one third of all foodstuffs.

In addition. down on the farm, scarred vegetables are regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labour involved in harvest, left to rot in a warehouse because of minor blemishes that don’t necessarily affect freshness or quality. When added to the retail waste, it takes the amount of food lost close to half of all produce grown, experts say.

Within the US, discarded food dumps are a rising source of methane, a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And when you add the amazing fact that 30 million Americans supplement their inadequate incomes with Food Stamps, the whole situation is truly daft.

But not just the US. Globally, about one-third of all food is wasted: 1.6bn tonnes of produce a year, with a value of about $1tn. Food waste accounts for about 8% of global climate pollution. Meanwhile, it is estimated that 5-10% of the world population do not have enough to eat, the United States writ large.

It is not that Governments, and the UN, are unaware of the problem. There is a lot of concern. The plan is to halve avoidable food waste by 2030. But the problem is getting the public, used to beautiful-looking fruit and vegetables, to accept less good looks in return to food that actually tastes of something.