Author: neilg63

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

Twitter Mob: Don’t Blame the Users

How lobbies have turned consumer groups into victims

Twitter does not exactly lend itself to critical analysis. I doubt many people have changed their minds on anything after reading a mere 140 character tweet. Such short messages tend to reinforce existing prejudices and opinions and often build on concerted advertising and awareness-raising campaigns. You can tweet a link to an article, but usually only those sympathetic to your cause will read it. Twitter also encourages conformity as nobody wants to be unpopular or offend their virtual friends. It's fine to support widely publicised causes, but not to voice views that others may easily misinterpret. When issues are simplified, many will readily interpret any divergence from the mainstream view as an act of tribal betrayal, like a crowd of Glasgow Rangers supporters spotting a loner wearing a Celtic scarf.

As I often take nonconformist stances, I've grown used to the devious tactics employed by seasoned opinion leaders, such as dismissing any embarrassing evidence against their case as mere conspiracy theories. However, another very effective tactic is to champion the rights of consumer groups to consume the very product or service that some dissident suggests may harm them.

By this logic, nobody could have ever exposed the harmful effects of cigarette smoking simply because millions of consumers enjoyed, or rather believed they enjoyed, this product. Smoking relieves stress and helps people befriend other smokers. It often serves as a great socialising tool and an act of defiance against an increasingly invasive nanny state. Indeed there is much evidence suggesting nicotine acts as an antidepressant, which might explain why so many smokers find it so hard to quit. This vice may be a little outmoded today, but fifty years ago non-smokers had to tolerate smokers at work, in their extended family, neighbourhood and in many public spaces like pubs, cafés and public transport. Some would complain, but generally had to keep quiet in many everyday social situations. Indeed some would have to claim to suffer from a special medical condition to persuade a friend to refrain from smoking in their presence. Yet as evidence mounted that smoking has all sorts of nasty side effects, smokers began to quit and non-smokers became much more proactive in reclaiming smoke-free areas. More recently smokers have been turned into outcasts, often having to escape outdoors on cold rainy days to indulge in their filthy habit.

Fast forward to the 21st century and antidepressants are not only a multi-billion pound industry, just as tobacco was, but they are actively endorsed by celebrities and state-sponsored healthcare institutions as the primary treatment for the growing number of people who feel stressed or depressed. Yet as smokers, alcoholics and recreational drug users know, mind-altering chemicals may offer you a temporary escape from your melancholy, but they come at a huge price in terms of long-term ill-health and some rather unpleasant neuro-psychological side effects. This change of public opinion, from the largely psycho-social model of emotional distress to the mainly biological model, is largely the result of a four decade long campaign to associate in the public mind a chemical imbalance with people's nonfunctional states of mind. Human feelings have been medicalised, although there remains scant proof of a link between natural serotonin levels and state of mind. Many substances we ingest can affect our natural mood-regulating compounds (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine). It should come as little surprise that many diagnosed with clinical depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD etc.., have a bad diet and have indulged in booze and other recreational drugs. Often bad lifestyle choices arise from a downward spiral of emotional insecurity and a tendency to seek solace in anything that turns your mind away from the immediate cause of distress. As our expectations for higher material goods and personal achievements grow, so does our sense of inadequacy and isolation, when we fail to reach these goals. We are not all blessed with perfect athletic bodies, excellent hand-eye coordination and extraordinary musical talent. We will not all be premier league footballers, Olympic medalists, world-famous pop singers, TV celebrities or fashion models. Most of us are fairly average with relative strengths and weaknesses, but our current obsession with status symbols turns minor personal deficits into medical conditions that require treatment. How personality traits develop has long eluded neurologists. Why are some people so gregarious with an upbeat and ebullient disposition, while others have a more reclusive, independent and sobre character and tend to reflect on events and observations in greater detail? If worrying about things were so bad, then why would such instincts evolve in the first place? In essence worrying is about caring about yourself and loved ones. If we didn't worry about anything, we would lack motivation to try harder. Most creative types need plenty of time for introspection. As we obsess more with image and social networking, detailed analysis can fall by the wayside. While some may be enhancing their social status through better presentation and socialisation, others prefer to build a better life through hard work and contemplation. However, in the age of industrial automation and outsourcing, many lack the motivation to make or even repair things themselves. In today's perverse world, a non-productive lawyer not only earns more than her cleaner, but also more her car mechanic and all the other manual workers who helped make her lifestyle possible. Yet many higher-earning professionals in the burgeoning hot-air sector succumb to work-related stress and even depression.
There may be a good argument for short-term medication to wean people off junk food and booze or simply to get the out of bed in the morning, but little evidence that the any pre-existing chemical imbalance caused them to make bad lifestyle choices. Millions now believe antidepressants are essential medication for anyone whose relative lack of cheerfulness or bad moods cause others so much distress. We have thus wished away the underlying causes of depression in our incessant drive to promote mandatory bubbliness, i.e. where we all feign happiness through fake smiles and frequent giggles ? Casual observations would suggest offices have been transformed from relatively sombre places of work into comedy workshops. 50 years of TV satire and now endless YouTube gags have had their effect on the collective psyche. Yet, we are not all born actors. If you fail to take part in mandatory amateur theatrics, your jovial teammates will soon write you off as a loner. Whereas 50 years ago a lack of practical skills could prove a handicap in all but the most privileged families, today it is a perceived lack of social skills that sets many at a distinct disadvantage. Social anxiety, here in its literal non-psychiatric sense, is a prime cause of social alienation, leading to a lack of self-worth, a sense of inferiority and inevitably melancholy.

Handing out free antidepressants to address social alienation is like distributing morphine tablets to combat tooth decay. They may temporarily alleviate unpleasant symptoms, but they fail to address the root causes of the problem and may have very nasty adverse effects with prolonged use. Suggesting that opposing state-subsidised mass-medication of unhappiness offends the unhappy is like accusing an opponent of hydraulic fracturing of condemning the elderly to freezing homes in winter (the elderly would be the first to suffer from polluted tap water). These quick fixes are simply not the solution.

For more on this theme may I recommend Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker .

Categories
Power Dynamics

Propaganda Wars

For too long an unholy alliance of North American and European media outlets, principally BBC, CNN, Fox News, but also their French, Spanish, Portuguese and German-language equivalents, ensured coverage of evolving world events reflected the message that NATO, the EU and the leading global corporations wanted us to hear.

Not only do they set the agenda, i.e. decide which news stories are worthy of our attention, they can choose how to present complex regional conflicts, exclude inconvenient voices and promote opinion leaders who support their version of events. Resource wars are portrayed as battles between outmoded dictatorships and enlightened progressives willing to participate in our globalised utopia.

The trouble is their changing stories have failed to convince everyone. Not all Europeans actually believed the Afghan and Iraq wars were really about women's rights or deposing evil dictators. Some politicians publicly disagreed with the US/UK occupation of Iraq, but then still did business with the same multinationals, banks and military alliances that pushed for war in the first place. The sad fact is to keep the illusion of democracy alive, the mass media could only convince the US and UK electorate to vote for parties that supported the war. As it happens opinion polls in the run up to the 2003 invasion show a clear majority of British voters opposed to military action, but this changed as Parliament approved military intervention. France and Germany stayed out, but only a few years later the French happily intervened in Haiti, Libya and Mali.

Now the European Union and NATO have set their eyes on further eastward expansion and have backed a coup in Ukraine, some of us are not quite buying the latest outburst of self-righteous propaganda. Why should we trust the same media pundits who sold us the Iraq occupation to promote freedom and democracy in a country whose tortuous history remains a mystery to outside observers. Why do they loathe Russia, yet fail to criticise Saudi Arabia or China responsible for human rights abuses on an infinitely greater scale? Did any BBC pundit explain how the oil-rich Saudi Arabian regime now has the world's 4th largest military budget (USD 67 billion a year ahead of the UK at 57.9 billion) and is the biggest client of UK-based arms dealer BAE Systems ?

The apparent evilness of Putin's Russia allegedly has something to do with limited free speech and gay rights. But despite a deceptively vast range of media outlets in the West, they all seem to promote the same basic set of ideas, i.e. we need more free trade, more economic growth and more social engineering to uproot us from our traditional mores.

However, the Russian Federation is now reasserting its independence, and learning to play the West's game. They have studied the techniques deployed by the BBC, CNN at al for decades and launched their own channel, Russia Today, to challenge BBC propaganda head-on. So whom should we trust? Neither, but now the BBC / CNN cabal have lost their monopoly on English-language news. On some issues Russia Today seems more balanced, but on the others as biased as the BBC. the global balance of power is clearly shifting away from the North Atlantic to vast expanses of resource rich Siberia and resource-hungry hyperactive China. I will be watching, but will trust no-one.

Categories
Computing

Now for something different: Web Fonts

You may wonder just how I added these custom font types. I'm the last person to believe your choice of font should affect the message you wish to convey. Alas Web designers love custom fonts and often spend countless days wrestling with various technical solutions to reproduce the graphic designer's wishes on all browsers. Back in the day, they had to resort tricky Javascript libraries such as Cufon or, heaven forbid, Flash-based solutions such Sifr. These solutions could actually crash some browsers. Some will even buy special fonts and then waste more hours testing them on different browsers and devices. Luckily with Web fonts those days are over.

As a backend Web developer (I do all that Geeky database and data-mining stuff in my day job), I'd be very pleased if everyone could just make do with Courier, ideally using a text-only browser like the venerable Linx. However, now thanks to openfontlibrary.org, you can easily jazz up your site. All the fonts here are available in font packs to support all modern browsers. If you combine this resource with the free FontPrep application (sadly available only for Mac) or a Web service such as everythingfonts.com or freefontconverter.com , you can even support older versions of IE.

FontPrep and everythingfonts.com will even generation the @font-face CSS for you. Then just reference your new custom font in your stylesheet by applying font-family: MyCustomFont, Helvetica, Ariel, sans-serif; either to the body tag or a specfic region or set of tags. It is that simple.

If you fancy creating your own font, you can download and install the free BirdFont app. This is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. It seems to import best from the newer OTF font types and let you import SVG files for individual glyphs.

I then resorted to a little javascript magic to load a random custom font on each page load. Doesn't change the meaning of anything I write and you can always change it in the accessibility toolbar on the right.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Dictatorship by Consent

Apparently, if we believe many opinion leaders, we fought most recent wars to spread freedom and democracy. Allegedly people across the world admire us because of our deep-rooted civic political culture. Never mind any inconvenient conflicts between personal freedom and true democracy, but what do the international ruling elites and their faithful cheerleaders actually mean by this Hellenic word for people power ?

Do they really want an open debate about issues that affect our daily lives? Are there really prepared to explain the inevitable dilemmas that arise from conflicting popular demands? Do they really understand the enormous sense of alienation and psychological inferiority that mass consumerism and an obsession with presentation and body image has created in so many of us? Given the choice, everyone would want higher wages, better working conditions, more leisure time, more green fields, cleaner water, better transport infrastructure, more affordable heating, larger houses, better healthcare, longer lives, more holidays, more fun, more friends and a higher social status. It hardly matters if we cannot have all these wonderful traits at once. However, if the mainstream media can set the agenda, stage-manage debates and isolate inconvenient critics, they can keep alive the illusion of democracy and free speech.

If we did as big business wants, we'd all halve our salaries, double our work load and triple our spending. If numbers don't add up, we can always ask banks or central government to create more money out of thin air, such is the logic of the debt-fuelled consumption-driven economy. Yet the more we are indebted and the more we rely on international trade, the more we transfer our theoretical sovereignty to unaccountable global entities. It often seems we can only debate how to boost the economy, how to attract more inward investment, how to accommodate more international commuters, how to deal with cross-border crime or how to combat terrorism. We do not debate whether any of these measures are necessary, i.e. do we really need to grow our economy?

As mainstream national political institutions become powerless in the face of tentacular transnational remote organisations, political debate is limited either to trivial parochial matters or is reduced to simple negative campaigning, blaming rivals for the collateral damage of policies that would have been implemented anyway. The recent Labour party political video, devised by the US media guru behind Barrack Obama's electoral victory (David Axelrod), may fool a few young angry voters, who'd like to blame a few convenient scapegoats for their misfortunes, but it is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. It perpetuates the myth that in the early 21st century any difference remains between the mainstream parties on any subject of importance. The video focuses on a few safe and simplistic issues, tuition fees, rising heating costs and bedroom tax. It then blames the old guard of British aristocracy. Just because modern CEOs wear jeans, listen to rock music and no longer have posh Etonian accents, does not make their huge financial superiority any less grotesque. Indeed the gap between rich and poor had been steadily rising for over 30 years. According to the top 10% earned just 7.1 times more than the bottom 10% in 1995, by 2008 this ratio had risen to 10.1 times.

It doesn't take long to disentangle any of these claims and see how Labour offers little alternative to the two other orthodox parties. Take, for example, the much-maligned bedroom tax. It is only an issue because housing has become unaffordable without huge government subsidies. Housing benefit effectively subsidises landlords, so why should hardworking low to middle income tax-payers in areas with lower property prices subsidise special categories of people entitled to housing benefit in wealthier areas? New Labour have become the biggest defender of spiralling housing benefits introduced by Thatcher after her government sold off council houses. Moreover, thanks to a rising population, largely driven by immigration, demand for social housing has never been higher, and thus needs to be rationed. Do New Labour plan to build millions more homes and where ? Will they admit the rather obvious environmental costs of more urban sprawl in Europe's most densely populated region? I doubt it. Indeed their stance against bedroom tax is just an exercise in political point scoring. In 13 years in government they abysmally failed to increase the tax burden on international oligarchs, multinational corporations and banks, as they relied on their presence in the UK to artificially boost the economy.

Not only did New Labour introduce tuition fees in 1997 and increased them to £3000 later in 2006, they promoted a huge expansion in higher education that turned universities into businesses competing not just for corporate sponsorship, but in the lucrative international student market. As a result degrees are not only devalued, but reflect the needs of big business rather than of wider society. With so many other spending obligations and financial constraints, no government can now afford to return to the old grant system, where most students from poorer backgrounds received fully subsidised education, but until the 1980s only 15 to 20% went to university. Yet today only a minority of the nearly 50% of 18 to 21 year olds who now attend university attain degrees of any practical worth with social sciences, law, business administration and creative arts among the most popular subjects. Biology is now dominated by the needs of the burgeoning pharmaceutical, biotech, assisted fertilisation and private healthcare (cosmetic surgery) sectors. Only a fraction of medicine-related degrees produce new doctors, most prepare students for life as a pharmaceutical representative, fertility clinic lab technician or psychiatric nurse. Such professions are in greater demand as a growing proportion of the population is on prescription medication, opts to bypass nature through fertility treatment or succumbs to emotional disturbances that we have relabelled as mental health issues.

Most of us shudder at the thought of opening our electricity or gas bills, largely because back in the 1990s they were, by European standards, incredibly low because most gas still came from the North Sea. Now most gas is imported and energy demand has grown. Logically we need to either increase energy production, with all its potential environmental consequences, import more or consume less. Token gestures like unplugging your TV set at night will make little difference. By offering short-term subsidies for heating, New Labour would promote inefficiency and fail to provide a long term solution, i.e. adapting to a low consumption economy, ensuring people can live healthy lives with less waste. If you naively believe they would just tax a few fat cat energy firm bosses, just consider the real reasons behind the 2003 occupation of Iraq.

In reality although some debate still takes place even on contentious issues such as mass immigration, the hands of local, regional and national governments are tied. All they can do is present a narrow set of options and hope big business will work magic to bridge the growing gap between social and environment sustainability and economic expedience. If people really exercised democratic control, you can bet the ruling elite would change strategy, as they often do. Instead every few years we are just given the opportunity to vote for another set of middle managers. Sometime we elect mavericks, who may rant and rave in parliamentary talking shops, but all along big decisions affecting people's jobs, community, housing, transport etc. are decided in remote boardrooms and think tanks.

Categories
Power Dynamics

The Globalist Mindset

If you love planet earth and the human race, may I humbly suggest corporate globalisation leading to a grotesque misappropriation of resources may not be such a good idea after all. However, some self-proclaimed progressives disagree. They somehow associate the onward march of transnational organisations, the proliferation of branded retail outlets and the relentless expansion of the non-productive hedonism business with a concept they like to call progress. Indeed, even many wishful-thinking greens and socialists have internalised the notion that we, as a species, are all on a one-way journey towards a better tomorrow and we can face all potential challenges through ever greater cooperation. Guiding us are an alliance of transnational organisations, multinational enterprises and virtual social networks integrated seamlessly with the entertainment industry. As soon as people gain access to the World Wide Web from Norway to Chile or Japan to Angola, they tend to join Facebook apparently to stay in touch with a diaspora of friends and family, but also to broaden their mindmap of familiar faces to friends of friends or newly formed virtual communities of special interest groups. Never has the world been more connected and never has travel from one country to another been so easy. Many global optimists already view countries as mere relics of a bygone era of nation states, fallen empires and anachronistic religions. Local languages, dress codes, cuisines and custom blend into a potpourri of flavours and choices available in an apparent free market. Whether a modern world citizen happens to be relaxing by the beach in Goa, visiting museums in New York City or Paris, attending a business conference in Dubai or inspecting a factory in a Chinese megacity, the interconnected global culture never seems far away. The same brands and artefacts of our postmodern decadence and techno-wizardry accompany financial wealth wherever it spreads. While 50 years ago opulence was concentrated in a handful of wealthy countries, extreme decadence has spread worldwide. There are billionaires in countries we once prefixed with the label third-world such as India, Brazil, Indonesia and even Nigeria, and billionaires in the first and second world countries often hail from former colonies of the old imperial powers. Nowhere is the scourge of ostentation as daunting as in the Middle East, the scene of over 80 years of imperialist meddling and destabilisation. Yet without easy access and control of the world's cheapest oil reserves in the Middle East, the global economy would shrink.

Just 20 years after the fall of the former Warsaw Pact, European governments have become little more than county councils negotiating deals with multinationals and harmonising legislation in line with new laws in other countries and with the wishes of international pressure groups. In practice government ministers act merely as middle managers implementing policies decided elsewhere and liaising with local underlings to mitigate adverse effects for social stability. In many ways the history of post-war Europe has been a conflict between rival visions of global harmonisation. As long as the rift between the Stalinist East and Capitalist West remained, leaders paid lip-service to outmoded concepts such as self-determination, national sovereignty and workers' rights. Countries could intervene to protect markets against destabilising global competition thus protecting not only local jobs, but also key skill bases. After the big powers had redrawn boundaries and forced millions to move, enduring extreme hardship and even starvation, from around 1950 to 1990, Europe enjoyed one of its longest periods of peace, social stability and general prosperity. Admittedly large pockets of relative poverty and social exclusion remained, as did authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and until the mid 1970s in Spain, Portugal and Greece. However, the degree of democratic participation and freedom of expression tended to reflect both social and economic realities. Those countries with the highest material living standards and thus best equipped to meet demands for better pay, working conditions and availability of life's pleasures and luxuries, could allow greater debate on economic policies and tolerate much greater dissent. If the business classes can distract the populace with bread and circuses and carefully manage the range of acceptable opinions, dissent can be easily sidelined or channelled into narrow lifestyle issues. Despite longstanding cultural differences, all Western European government pursued essentially social democratic policies. While governments allowed industries to compete, trade, expand and satisfy growing demand for consumer goods, they also invested in technological innovation and infrastructure, expanded welfare provision and protected national markets and workers against unfair competition from low-wage economies.

In the 1980s globalisation entered a new era with the Reaganite and Thatcherite obsession with supply-side economics and outsourcing of manufacturing. Since the fall of the former Warsaw Pact, we have seen the expansion of the European Union from a small set of countries with similar living standards to encompass most of the continent from Ireland to Romania or Finland to Portugal alongside other regional trading pacts from NAFTA, Mercosur to ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). As a result the social democratic dream must either be extended to all and sundry or be gradually dismantled. In the UK we have the paradoxical situation where many descendants of the once proud working classes have become trapped in welfare dependence while low-wage jobs are increasingly the preserve of newcomers. To put things in perspective, despite public concerns about immigration from Commonwealth countries in 1950s to the 1980s, this immigration was always relatively balanced by emigration. Indeed between 1945 and 1995, total immigration to the UK was just under 2 million, a large number but spread over 50 years. Of course, the demographic effects were distorted by varying birth rates. Since 1995 more than net migration has been running at between 100,000 and 250,000 a year and the population has risen from a 58 million in 1991 to 63 million in 2011 despite a below replacement fertility rate among the native population. This means the UK has import raw materials, manufactured goods and food to sustain economic growth. So, as ironical as may seem to many trendy lefties, a higher population and greater economic growth in the UK leads to greater depredation of resources elsewhere. Where people suffer hardships in many apparently developing countries, it is often because foreign multinationals have uprooted them from their ancestral lands to exploit resources required by global markets. Yet corporate globalisation acts as double-edged sword, forcing people to leave their homelands and conveniently shifting the blame to the incompetence or corruptions of local leaders, while simultaneously promoting the very consumption-led economic growth that causes this displacement.

A False Sense of Security

Harold MacMillan, British prime minister in the late 1950s, once claimed "You've never had it so good". In some respects our material wellbeing and life expectancy have continued to improve since. However,what mattered most to those who remembered the humiliation of mass unemployment, soup kitchens, orphanages and real poverty below the breadline, were a secure job, affordable housing and a better future for their children. By the early 1960s most Western Europeans had all three essential components of the good life. With the advent of affordable television sets and growing car ownership, the new norm came to resemble the American Dream. It mattered little that most of the world still lived in a kind of post-colonial semi-feudalism or had to endure the excesses of Maoist or Stalinist authoritarian idealism.

Categories
Power Dynamics

11 million empty homes, in the wrong places

The Guardian newspaper has just revealed to its credulous readers that EU-wide no fewer than 11 million dwellings stand empty. This apparent news has been endlessly recycled by various well-funded lobbies and think-tanks to suggest there is no housing crisis in the regions that have recently attracted most inward migration. Meanwhile to accommodate 4 million new UK residents, the government has relaxed planning laws to allow the building of 3 million new homes, many on prime agricultural land. At the same time it has sanctioned hydraulic fracturing across England, which will pollute the groundwater in much of the remaining farmland. So presumably news of 11 million empty homes could not come at a better time. We may be able to house everyone and keep our farmland to cope with rising global fuel and food prices, or can we ?

The trouble is most of these empty homes are far from where most jobs are. Indeed many millions are the direct result of international commuting as young people vacate their home towns and villages in Eastern and Southern Europe and head to the wealthier climes of Northern Europe and the British Isles. Many millions more are second homes built for ex-pats in Mediterranean or Black Seas tourist resorts. Just 700,000 of these empty homes are in the UK, most of which are in rundown post-industrial wastelands. At the other end of the scale are prime pieces of real estate in overpriced neighbourhoods bought as investment by international gangsters, so just as many London-based workers have to commute several hours a day or make do with substandard accommodation, sumptuous properties lie empty in Hampstead and Mayfair.

However, what would happen if we could force the government to seize these properties and allocate them to those more in need? For starters demand would greatly exceed supply. There are nowhere near 11 million des-res Hampstead villas waiting for minimum wage workers to take up residence, there are at best a few hundred. London-wide there may be several thousands of empty properties, but many would require renovation and would only temporarily ease an artificial housing shortage. I say artificial because without mass migration, there would be enough houses for all without destroying valuable farmland. Forced repossession of empty luxury properties would have one very positive side effect, it would discourage property speculators (mainly foreign) from distorting the London market and thus deflate the economy and diminish the need for so-many temporary service workers. Like it or not, the whole London economy thrives on recycling wealth generated somewhere else, so once again you either support corporate globalisation and live with its many consequences, or you support more viable alternatives, that inevitably means economic shrinkage in overheating economies.

Few seem prepared to admit the obvious. With huge economic imbalances between regions, a growing rich-poor divide, shrinking middle classes and open labour markets, globalisation has succeeded in simultaneously creating chronic overcrowding and unbearable congestion while leaving other areas in a state of abandon and social decline.

In addition the environmental impact of housing depends very much on habitation. Abandoned properties may decay, but they pollute very little. Inhabited properties inevitably consume water, electricity, produce sewage, add to local retail consumption and traffic (especially if their owners insist on driving everywhere). For every inhabited house we need to provide more shops, schools, hospitals and roads.

Europe's empty properties fall into 4 categories:

  1. Too expensive, only suitable for wealthy property investors
  2. Holiday homes by the sea or on the slopes, not suitable for young city workers
  3. In areas of high unemployment and mass emigration
  4. Substandard, in a state of disrepair

Of these only the fourth could be easily repurposed to cope temporarily with Europe's large population movements, but long-term we should look at smarter solutions. Rather than moving to where big business offers more lucrative employment opportunities, how about restructuring the economy so jobs are more evenly spread. It really makes little sense for more Eastern Europeans to abandon underpopulated regions to add to environmental problems in London, Frankfurt or Stockholm.

Categories
Power Dynamics

What’s going on in Ukraine?

All of sudden the world's media turns its attention to the transition of power in one of Europe's most mysterious regions extending from Eastern Poland, Slovakia,Moldova and Romania in the West, Belarus to the north and the Russian Federation to the East.

While the mainstream media in the West lay the blame for the Ukrainian crisis clearly with Viktor Yanukovych's deposed Russophile government and its refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU, others note the role played by the US-based National Endowment for Democracy and myriad NGOs in funding and supporting the opposition Euro-Maidan movement, named after Kiev's eponymous central square. The uprising followed a script familiar to observers of other apparent insurgencies in places as disparate as Syria and Venezuela and come sjust 10 years after the much trumpeted Orange Revolution. The young appear to embrace organisations and policies favoured by an international coalition, while the incumbent administrations are invariably depicted in uncomplimentary anti-democratic terms. It must seem rather odd the National Endowment for Democracy support Islamic fundamentalists in Syria against Assad's current secular government, opponents of economic redistribution and social justice in Venezuela (which remains one of the most unequal countries on the planet) and now xenophobes in Ukraine. However, a little perspective is in order. Ukraine remains of the poorest regions in Europe. At $7600 its 2012 GDP per capita is not only much lower than that in neighbouring Poland ($21,000), but also than Russia's at $17,000.

Since the Kievan Rus fell to the Duchies of Poland and Lithuania around 1400, the Ukraine has only existed as a notional ethnolinguistic region. Although it briefly enjoyed independence in 1920, it has only existed in its current borders since 1954 and as independent state since 1991. For most of its history Western and Central Ukraine formed part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. With the demise of Poland and expansion of Russia, Prussia and Austria in the 19th century, the Ruthenian region was annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while the remainder was incorporated into the Russian Empire. After the First World War, Lviv rejoined Poland as Lwow, while Ruthenia formed the easternmost region of the newly created Czechoslovakia. The remainder of the region became the Ukrainian SSR. Known as Russia's bread basket, the region experienced one of the worst famines of the 20th century known as Holodomor, largely due to forced collectivisation, bad economic management and its inability to deal with extreme weather events. Many Ukrainians blamed the Moscow-based Bolshevik leadership and this played a major role in the subsequent collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with occupying Nazis and their post-WW2 insurgency against Stalinist expansionism.

The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact allowed the Soviet Union to claim Eastern Poland and temporarily expand Ukrainian territory. After its short-lived, but turbulent Nazi occupation from 1941 - 44, Ukraine became a major beneficiary of the Soviet Union's western terroritial gains. It now incorporated Eastern Galicia, east of the Curzon Line, Slovak Ruthenia and parts of Romania. Millions of Poles were forced to move to Poland's new Western Territories. Before the war, Ukrainians accounted for just over a third of the population in Poland's Eastern provinces. Ethnic cleansing began with the infamous Nazi Einsatzgruppen, responsible for rounding up and massacring Jews and and continued with attacks on remaining Poles and other ethnic minorities by the anti-communist Ukrainian Insurgent Army from 1944 to 1952.

Despite these tumultuous events, the Soviet era saw greater integration with the Russian Federation, with many Russians moving to the Ukraine and Ukrainians to Russia proper, in keeping with a general policy of ethnic mingling among the peoples of the USSR. Although Ukrainian enjoyed official recognition, Russian became the dominant language of education and administration. Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, Russian has lost considerable international prestige. Indeed Ukrainian is now the sole official language as a strong statement of cultural independence.

The hastily improvised coalition that has taken power in Kiev seeks, rather unsurprisingly, to join the European Union and, by consequence, NATO. This will very likely force the Ukrainian government to adopt otherwise unpopular economic convergence policies and allow Western European businesses to expand their retail and banking empires, with higher property and retail prices. Inevitably younger Ukrainians will migrate west, exacerbating a brain drain and demographic imbalance in Ukraine, and competing with other Eastern and Southern Europeans in a very precarious job market in wealthier EU countries. This place even greater downward pressure on wages at the bottom end of the salary scale.

Notes:

  1. Kiev is the customary English transliteration of the Russian name for the city, Киев, while some authors prefer Kyiv based on the Ukrainian variant, Київ . While I sympathise with this approach, why do we still refer to the Flemish city of Brugge by its French name of Bruges or insist on translating the names of so many other European cities from Naples to Copenhagen?

Categories
All in the Mind

Huxleyan School Report

This may seem a parody of postmodern social reality and eerily suggestive of a future dystopia, but it is only a slight exaggeration. Schools tend to focus more on mainstream socialisation, engaging with mass-marketed youth culture and pastoral care than with reading, writing, maths and real science.

Self Confidence
Sam's self-esteem has grown throughout the year. His phenomenal X-Box gaming skills have earned him respect from other class members.
Team-bonding Skills
Sam has participated in a number of activity-related team bonding sessions. He especially enjoyed the school's annual virtual first person shooter competition, where he engaged in a marathon Call of Duty: Liberation session as a UN peacekeeper in Paddistan liberating gay teenagers from a repressive regime.
Sexual Awareness
Sam has taken an active interest in the wonderful diversity of sexual orientations and family structures in our local community.
Self-marketing skills
Sam has begun to learn how to market his diverse skills to potential employers
Equality and Diversity
Sam joined the rest of the class in our exploration of the enormous benefits of the recent arrival of so many newcomers in our diverse neighbourhood. Sam also learned how to deal with misguided anti-immigration feelings.
Mathematics
Sam enjoyed a captivating interactive documentary about the history of mathematicians and computer programmers, laying the foundations of modern game development. Sam also learned how to interact with calculators and spreadsheets to solve common mathematical problems without unduly taxing his delicate brain or interfering with his other pursuits.
Language
Sam enjoyed interacting with our state of the art voice recognition software. He can now successfully use this application to tweet his views about the latest first person shooter games. His broad vocabulary has now extended to concepts such as humanitarian intervention and intellectual property.
History
Sam enjoyed several virtual re-enactments of historical events. He learned about many evil regimes of the past and about the wonderful progress towards a better world that we have made recently.
Self-care Skills
Sam has learned about the importance of personal hygiene, sartorial presentation and supermarket shopping. Hopefully, as he approaches his 18th birthday, we can fast-track him on our driving course so can simulate travel on wide open roads and shop independently online.
Project Management Skills
Sam learned how to manage personal and business projects, design cutting-edge PowerPoint presentations and gantt charts using special voice-activated wizards. Sam learned how to delegate difficult tasks, which he may not be able to undertake personally, to human resources. We investigated some common scenarios such as how to find a technician to repair one's washing machine or how to proofread a report with limited manual reading skills.
Sport
Sam is a keen Laser shooter and paintballer.
Technological Innovation and Environmental Sustainability
Sam is very enthusiastic about new technology and hopes to drive a solar-powered Ferrari when passes his test. He also has an extensive collection of game consoles and smartphones.
Social Awareness
Sam took a keen interest in our social inclusion project, in which we showed young people how to claim job seekers' allowance, incapacity benefit, child benefit, working family tax credits and single parents' allowance.
Mental Health Awareness
We have been very impressed by Sam's positive attitude to his ADHD and worked closely with him to ensure he keeps up to date with his medication.
Communication Skills
Sam interacts very well with classmates on a wide range of game-related subjects. He has also participated in a ground-breaking RFID chip implant pilot scheme, so he is regularly in touch with researchers from Neurological Research Trust.
Information Technology
Sam has familiarised himself with the leading brands of proprietary software applications and understood the key importance of copyright protection.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Having your cake and eating it

Imagine you had a choice of three political parties. The welfare party promised better public services, but admitted it may need to increase taxes. The small business party promised lower taxes, but admitted it will need to cut public services. However the magic bullet party promised to slash taxes and boost investment in healthcare, education and transport infrastructure as well as increasing pensions and disability benefits, a sure vote-winner for the economically illiterate. The extra funds would be raised by taxing billionaire bankers and printing money. Of course it wouldn't work, because the billionaire bankers would just hop aboard their yachts and sail to the nearest tax haven, while hyperinflation would devalue the national currency. This logic seems apparent to most reasonable people, but to many economists who believe it does not apply to economic growth. Somehow we can reap all the benefits of greater consumption without worrying about the long-term social and environmental consequences.

More disturbingly, many Greens buy into the growth mantra, especially in regard to welfare provision and open door immigration. Almost instinctively, many left-leaning greens, myself included until recently, tend to blame the grotesque waste of our times on the mega rich. If only a handful of billionaires would do without their private jets and yachts and let the unwashed masses occupy their secluded villas and concrete over their golf courses, we could easily solve all our environmental challenges. For such politically correct greens environmental disasters are not caused by over 1 billion vehicles worldwide that enable their owners to participate in a consumption frenzy or millions of Brits jetting off to Spain's beaches and buying imported goods with borrowed money.

Yet the disproportionate wealth of the banking and business classes depends on an economy hooked on consumptive growth. They thrive on more cars, fridges, cheap holidays in the Sun, booze, cosmetic surgery etc. sold to the masses. In the aftermath of 2001's 9/11 disaster, George W Bush famously urged his fellow Americans to show their patriotism through shopping. In the UK as manufacturing facilities moved abroad, new shopping malls, leisure centres and casinos sprung up everywhere. In the ensuing years both the US and UK governments continued to subsidise mass consumption, underwriting dodgy loans and letting a tarantula-like finance sector lend to low-wage workers and, especially in the UK, to welfare dependents. New Labour's much hailed flagship policy of working family tax credits (alongside others that went to those who didn't work) fuelled the country's biggest shopping spree. Back in my days, in the late 60s and early 70s, many children felt lucky if they received a lego set, an action man or a plastic helicopter. Now, they expact the very latest and greatest games console, a laptop and/or smartphone, yet their parents real earning power has actually declined. This is largely because houses used to be a lot cheaper, electronic gadgets were considered luxuries and most children still lived in traditional families.

Now imagine another choice between three hypothetical political parties. The first party wants more economic growth and an open door immigration policy, while admitting this may lead to greater dependence on imports, a larger population more roads and more building on arable land as well as a potential social conflicts. The second party wants a greener environment and greater social cohesion, while admitting the country's GDP may decline and its international competitivity may suffer. This may sound like a choice between accepting a high-stress job as a stock broker and running a small family farm with a few acres of land. While the stock broker employs a team of underlings to expand his empire, the smallholder painstakingly builds a farm that will feed not just his family, but provide gainful employment and a sense of true purpose for future generations, handing down skills from father to son and mother to daughter. In the short-term and given good economic fortune the stock broker role may well yield much more, but in long term the finance sector is just a giant ponzi scheme with a few lucky winners, but many more losers. The third option, one currently proposed by many on the mainstream left, is to have a greener, happier, more prosperous future with endless opportunities and fun for all simply by rebranding everything we do now as green.

Imagine somehow we can continue to grow both in numbers and in carbon footprint, while miraculously reducing our collective impact on the environment. In this fantasy world, bad diesel-fuelled 4x4s will be replaced not with fewer journeys, bicycle and trains, but with trendy more expensive electric cars. It matters little that such vehicles not only require more resources to manufacture, but rely on electricity generated elsewhere effectively merely displacing pollution. To many on the left, political correctness trumps environmental responsibility. Should all disabled Indians drive specially adapted cars? Maybe that's a big untapped growth market. Suggesting paraplegic Indians make do with mere wheelchairs could lead to accusations of racism and intolerance of the physically disabled. As it happens big business loves green solutions where it sells. Big business does not market gas-guzzlers because they pollute, but because they drive profitable consumption. If they could sell solar-powered helicopters made of recycled paper, they would, but such vehicles are pure fantasy. Likewise if the earth had bountiful supplies of abiotic oil below its crust or wind energy could power millions of irons, washing machines and fridges with minimal investment in wind farms, then why would they be pursuing environmentally risky and expensive strategies like hydraulic fracturing or deep-sea drilling ?

A pragmatist may seek a compromise between a maze of multilane highways and shopping malls and a Quixotic return to an idyllic agrarian age of green fields, windmills, hardworking peasants and horse-drawn carts. However, an unlikely coalition of corporate lobbyists and wishful thinking leftists would like to have their cake and eat it. They want to see our economic numbers continue to grow, but believe technological innovation can lessen our collective impact on our precious environment. So we can allow more people to drive more cars to bigger supermarkets making bigger profits and offering better products, but still have a greener environment. Indeed in such an optimistic scenario greenness just becomes another commodity one can purchase. A two-bedroom flat sandwiched between a motorway and a high-speed railway line is usually much cheaper than a similarly-sized apartment in a quiet suburb overlooking a park. Likewise a few million quid, bucks or Euros can buy you an exclusive villa in verdant surroundings complete with solar panels and its very own wind turbine. The rich love greenery and who can blame them ? As the world become more crowded and climate disruption makes many regions uninhabitable, we can expect unspoilt nature to be a luxury only the hyper-rich can enjoy.

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

Rebel without a cause

Do you like to indulge in drugs and booze ? Surely only boring losers would abstain from the exciting social life facilitated by binge drinking, cocaine parties and ecstasy-enhanced all-night raves. Maybe you like to gamble or play first-person shooters online with your virtual friends and imaginary foes. And what self-respecting young adult would not watch hardcore horror movies and gory action thrillers? You might even enjoy rapid-fire techno music and gangster rap. Could you conceive of a better way to unleash your inner demons than a visit to the nearest laser shooting range or a whole weekend of unadulterated paint-balling? It's hard to deny the growing popularity of these pursuits.

Any discussion of their potential long-term psychological or, indeed, neurological side effects would open another can of worms. Gamers are adamant that their favourite vice has no adverse psychological effects and endlessy recycle the theories of industry-friendly experts. However, many participants still feel they are somehow rebelling against someone or something. At the back of their mind are images of puritanical clerics, admonishing them not to sin against God, their grandparents telling them to turn down that awful noise or some populist politician promising a crackdown on drunken and disorderly behaviour. By conjuring up these effigies of a bygone establishment (against which to rebel), today's hedonists can always cite former opponents of cultural progress such as Mary Whitehouse (mainly concerned with pornography) or the occasional conservative columnist decrying our youth's obsession with these unworthy pursuits.

Oddly these apparently subversive acts of rebellion are a multi-billion business. Booze, gambling and gaming millionaires have friends in very high places. Indeed the UK government not only deregulated gambling, but went as far as granting video game businesses special tax breaks and reaping huge windfall revenue from the licensing of premium adult services on 3G mobile. Advertising for these hedonistic goods is ubiquitous in all media from billboards to the sides of buses, TV ads and, of course, the Internet. Saturday morning shoppers are greeted by sales teams promoting Sky-TV contracts, paint-balling fun sessions and the latest and greatest shoot-em-up games, all with the full blessing of the shopping centre management. Such endless promotion is often punctuated with ads for financial services. A growing number of public places resonate to the deafening blast of loud fast-beat muzak, supposedly to entertain and enliven customers. The entertainment business promotes even technically illegal drugs by glamorising narcotised pop stars and providing venues for mind-numbing sounds, which frankly can only be enjoyed under the influence of MDMA (ecstasy). Away from the remotest rural backwaters, it is practically impossible to avoid advertising for these pursuits. Today abstaining from all such indulgences sets you apart from the rest of the crowd, especially if you're under 40.

In my misspent teenage years I briefly identified with the so-called punk scene, yet another expression of youth culture reflecting the anxieties of the age of consumerism, industrial decline and economic uncertainty but skilfully exploited by big business. I could see plenty wrong with the world around me. Screaming at the top of my voice "God Save the Queen and the Fascist Regime" seemed an apt act of rebellion against the hypocrisy of teachers who would allow little discussion in class or against class mates more interested in football and cars than overthrowing the capitalist establishment. Of course, most Punk music was absolute drivel, barely listenable and anyone paying attention could easily learn how wealthy media executives manipulated the masses, not just to boost their bottom line, but to channel all dissent through safe outlets. All was revealed in the 1979 exposé movie "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" on the Sex Pistols' short-lived stardom.

My father worked for the military-industrial complex and despite all the grandiose talk about freedom and democracy, life seemed pretty monotonous with little room for manoeuvre. One just had to fit in and go with the flow, although compared to the current era a wider of selection of hobbies and special interests were acceptable. If you wanted to collect snails or build rudimentary radio transmitters from electronic kits rather than play football or hang out with the cool kids, that was just fine. In reality the mid 1970s saw, comparatively speaking, the greatest level social equality and general prosperity that had ever existed in Britain and in the pre-PC era there seemed to be much more heated political debate. Revolutionary trotskyists and devout catholics with very traditional views on family and marriage could somehow coexist in peace or antinuclear campaigns as I discovered during my CND days. With no Internet, only very primitive video games and a limited choice of terrestrial TV stations, rebellious teenagers were attracted more to outdoor activities, clubs and protest groups. Yet gangland crime was mainly confined to a few inner city areas, pubs would close at 10:30 and few young adults could afford to frequent nightclubs on a regalar basis. To put things in perspective it was not until the late 1970s that basic video game consoles and video recorders became affordable. If you wanted to unleash your dark side back then, you might consider joining a gang or the army, but most kids just played with Action Men, slingshots and plastic guns, nothing even approaching the hyper-realism of today's games, but at least providing great haptic feedback, i.e. contact with the real physical world. If you chewed the head off your Action Man, you had a headless male doll and could not simply restart the game and parents were back then much less inclined to surrender to infantile pestering for a replacement toy. Your only option was to paintakingly repair it. As detailed by Canadian authors, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their 2004 book the Rebel Sell, the advertising business has simply co-opted all deviant strands of contemporary counter-culture. even if the ideologies, associated rightly or wrongly with past regimes or revolutionary movements, have been re-marketed as mere brands that may appeal to non-conformist individuals seeking to set themselves apart from dominant cultural brands. MacBooks tend to appeal to more creative nonconformist types precisely because they are not a regular laptops preloaded with Microsoft Windows and associated with boring conformist office workers. While digital revolutionaries would run a free and open source Linux distribution, many of us would hardly bat an eyelid at the sight of a jeans clad advertising executive whose top of the range MacBook Pro not only sported an illuminated Apple logo but also a CND peace symbol and a Che Guevara sticker. It would also not surprise us if the very same advertising executive were discussing a comarketing venture between a leading gay bar chain and paintballing events company. It is all just a game.