The crude and vulgar

Posted by on

“The old Republican Establishment cynically has seen advantage in back-rolling and egging-on the Tea Party movement. Its members served as their shock troops in besieging the Obama White House, spearheading the war against Democrats, liberals and whomever dared challenge their plutocratic consolidation. In the process, they became captives to a diabolical force that they cannot control.

“Another reason for the gross irresponsibility of the media, think tanks, et al, is straightforward cowardice. Greed and selfish careerism inevitably lead to cowardice. They are paired traits in the gradual moral debilitation that occurs when society loses the moral gyroscope that calls us to order.

“The tragic reality is that most Americans have lost the aptitude for separating truth from fiction – and the body politic collectivity really does not care as long as the show goes on.” (Salon, March 2016)

“Have you no sense of decency, Sir?” This was Senator McCarthy being called to order by his peers for outrageous bullying and false accusations. That was two generations ago. Now bullying and coarse, vulgar speech are deemed quite alright, and manners, politeness and consideration for other people’s feelings all, apparently, signs of weakness. This, quite as much as rotting infrastructure and huge disparities of wealth are signs of steep decline. As Asante-Muhammad, Director of the Racial Wealth Divide Project at the Corporation for Enterprise Development, comments “The political rising is rooted in the deep-seated white supremacy of this country and a decade of demographic and economic change.” That is no excuse for crude vulgarity.

Brexit

Posted by on

Some time ago I attended a dinner as sat next to one of the founders of UKIP. I asked him what he was going to do once he had got shot of the EU. “Simple, he said, “ we should be trading with the English speaking world.” I pointed out that the US was no longer very interested in the UK; China and South East Asia were the thing. Canada. Same thing. Australia and New Zealand? Even more so. We blew the Commonwealth years ago and it won’t come back. They have moved on. China is sewing up Africa and Central Asia. Japan is getting old and its economy is not that good. Forget Russia, and Latin America has never been much good for us since we built the Argentine railways – we as a nation don’t speak Spanish. I politely inferred that he hadn’t a clue how much the world had changed . We are just a medium sized nation with so-so education and work ethic.

The fact is that, if we want to do business with the EU, our biggest trading partner, we would have to continue abiding by their rules, but without any say in what those rules are. We would, like Norway , still have to pay a huge levy to Brussels. The EU would certainly want to build up Frankfurt to replace the City of London (why not?). Meanwhile, we have abandoned a huge part of our law and substituted EU law. Disentangling all of that would be a huge effort and take years. Lastly, studies by the World Bank and others say that the economic advantages of Brexit to the GNP are minimal – some say positive but tiny, others say negative.

In short, it just isn’t worth the effort and disruption. Don‘t leap off a cliff in the dark unless you are sure there is a mattress to catch your fall beneath you!

Meanwhile, Cameron has done a good job: he’s fixed the problem of EU migrants on the take (no handouts before four years and they have to pay in first); he has made sure that Britain doesn’t have to rescue countries in trouble with the Euro; and the EU has accepted that Further integration and expansion of the EU is stalled.

200m girls subjected to genital mutilation

Posted by on

New figures suggest that the number of women and girls who have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) may be up to 70m higher than estimated last year. A recent Unicef report said that up to 200m procedures have been carried out in 30 countries around the world.

Somalia has the highest rate, with 98 per cent of women experiencing some form of circumcision. Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia accounted for half of the 200m victims worldwide, but it is clear that FGM is a global issue, and not just a problem in Africa.

Of the 200m estimated victims, about 44m were 14 or younger when they underwent the procedure, the majority being circumcised before the age of five. Although the rate at which FGM is carried out has declined significantly in some countries over recent years, population growth means the overall number of victims is still on the rise. FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985, but 20,000 girls under the age of 15 are thought to be at risk of being circumcised, either within the UK or – more commonly – after being taken to their family’s country of origin for the procedure. (Newsweek)

It appears that a total of 2,421 instances alone were reported from April to September last year in the UK alone, and according to Sky News, there still has not been a successful prosecution. This is a barbaric assault on helpless little children, anathema to Epicureans and all civilised people, an age-old, so-called “cultural” matter that is hard to stamp out. I suspect it was dreamt up by pre-historic men with skewed ideas on the rights of women and sexuality. It has no place in any civilised society.

Fighting the climate change deniers

Posted by on

“Global warming is the greatest scam in history.” Denialist headlines like this one litter the internet, confusing the public and frustrating climate scientists. Scientists are fighting back. There is Climate Feedback, an internet tool that lets climate scientists review journalists’ reports on the subject and give each story a credibility score. The system uses a web annotation browser extension called Hypothesis to enable an invited group of climate scientists to comment on words, sentences or data points within media stories. For example, one Forbes article headlined “Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat” has 33 comments from nine scientists who have given it the lowest possible credibility score.

In addition there is email fact-checker LazyTruth and web page annotation tool Truth Goggles Efforts are being made to encourage Google to take these annotations into account when ranking search results so that initiatives like Climate Feedback make more impact. Google itself is testing a model that assesses the trustworthiness of web content, and scientists are launching a Kickstarter campaign next month to recruit more climate scientists to comment on climate change deniers and to develop a system for scoring the overall credibility of a publication’s climate coverage. (Olivia Solon)

Lies travel round the globe while truth is still putting its boots on. Where do the deniers think all the gunk we produce goes? Some of it goes into the oceans, yes, but the rest? Do they think it drifts off to the Moon, or Venus. If you have been alive and awake these last twenty years the change in the climate it obvious, and the muck in the air is equally so. It probably doesn’t help to talk about devious plots, but one has to assume that some of the denial comes out of ignorance and the rest is paid for by interested parties. We ought to erect a memorial to the deniers in granite, listing their names, so that future generations will know who made coping with the climate so hard.