Six degrees of caring: Can we have a caring capitalism?

Maybe it’s far-fetched to believe we can be connected to everyone in the world by six people, but there may be method in the madness.

It could well have been the hand of destiny that had me sitting on a houseboat with a friend watching Law Abiding Citizen.

Without ruining the plot I will simply say they Gerard Butler decides to take the law into his own hands over the murder of his wife and daughter. This stems from the decision of the district attorney to give the killer a plea bargain, on the face of it to help with another case, but in actuality it is to keep his prosecution rate high.

The film highlights that the justice system in the US has little regard for the people involved. It is an assembly line, with judges sitting over hundreds of cases a week, lawyers representing multiple individuals as both defendants and plaintiffs, and barristers using their theatrical oration skills to help both help the innocent and guilty alike.

The reason the film struck a chord with is that the justice system is an arena where there is a growing disconnection with the people that they are meant to protect and serve.

On one level there has to be. In order that everyone should get a fair trial, lawyers and barristers have to put aside their own prejudices, and represent their client to the best of their abilities.

However, the initial disconnection that allows these individuals to do their jobs effectively can sometimes turn into a deeper a disconnection. This may not stop them performing the the service required of them, but it takes away the essence of the service. In this case, although the judge and DA convict the murderer, the plea bargain means that it is questionable whether justice has actually been satisfied.

This disconnection manifests itself in the shift from clients to statistics. The DA in LAC doesn’t see the people involved in the case as humans, but as statistics he can manipulate to make himself look better. But it is not just in the legal system that this disconnection is apparent.

Managers that fire hundreds of people in efficacy savings are trained to not see them as men and women, but faulty parts of a machine. The head of Ofqual, at the centre of the current GCSE debacle, must have tried very hard to believe that in moving the grade scale she was not ruining the futures of thousands of children, but simply balancing the books.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe many professionals are good people and don’t see their staff or clients as numbers on a spreadsheet. But, the system is geared so that the movers and the shakers above the glass ceiling can disconnect from the people they are meant to support and not treat them as people. Or at least when it suits them.

We are all guilty of it. That annoying customer who walks in and kicks up a fuss. That person on the phone trying to sell you insurance. That homeless person asking you for money. Our society has developed to the point where we can comfortably dehumanise the people who we don’t like or don’t want to interact with. It is only more apparent in the upper echelons of power because their actions effect more people.

But every time you send someone to Coventry, or whisper behind someone’s back, or tell a homeless beggar to “f*** off,” you are dealing with a person, who has people they care about and hopefully people who care about them.

The theory of sis degrees of separate implies that we are all connected to everyone on the planet through six people. Unlikely as it is, we should not dismiss the theory out of hand.

We all have our circle of friends and our circle of family. They all have their own circles and as you pan out from individual to individual is it so hard to recognise that we are all connected by interlocking circles? You may not like some of the people in your circle, but to not like someone implies that you care about them in some way – you care that their opinions differ from yours, or you care how their actions impinge on yours.

It would be a tall order to care about everyone in the world. But we can choose who to make statistics out of and who to respect. We have the choice, and the more people we turn into stats the further away from compassionate capitalism we get.

As Andreas Whittam Smith observes today, part of the problem with the banks at the moment is that they regard their customers as people to sell to, not people to serve. It is this attitude that has led to people becoming stats, and our capitalist model being on the verge of meltdown. It is an US and THEM attitude that favours the individual at the expense of others.

In order to do business with each other on a level playing field we first have to live on one. Not in terms of all having the same wealth or social status, but in terms of giving each other same respect. We have to stop hero worshipping celebrities with no talents, start respecting people with disabilities who go through more strife on a daily basis than some people live through in a lifetime.

Respect should not depend on your age, how intelligent you are, or how talented you are, or how much of something you have. It stems from what you do with those things, and as soon as we realise this we will be able to call ourselves a developed, nay, an enlightened society.

Doctors shouldn’t have to worry about being derogatory, they should tell people the truth

Doctors have been told that telling obese patients they are fat could be construed as derogatory

 

In Britain we have a long accepted tendency to beat-about-the-bush. It maybe why people from other countries can sometimes seem abrupt and forthright in their manner of talking, accustomed as we are to people not saying exactly what they mean.

Now it has been suggested by Nice (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) that to tell patients that they are clinically obese could be considered derogatory. Hmmm…

Admittedly, to say to someone “You’re to fat, fatty-fatty fatso” is very derogatory. But to tell a patient, “You’re obese, meaning you’re so fat you’re putting your health at risk,” is not. It is medical advice.

A derogatory statement is one that belittles or disparages the subject. But doctors and medical professionals are not telling fat people they are obese because they want to be derisive. They are also not telling thin people they are fat, so it isn’t like they are trying to be hurtful. They are literally telling obese people they are obese.

The manner in which a statement becomes derogatory is reliant on the manner in which it is said. If I tell my parents they are “old biddies” for instance it is not derisive, it is playful. If I tell a lady-friend who asks that her ass looks huge in those jeans, it isn’t derisive, it’s an opinion. On the other hand, if I went up to a stranger and said they looked fat, it is derisive, because I don’t know them and it was said in a manner that could cause offence.

If doctors went about telling patients with lung cancer that they “might want to stop smoking because of the health risks involved,” it doesn’t provide much help the patient. Instead of telling patients they are morbidly obese, and telling them they should think about eating less because being heavy is bad for their health, doctors would not be informing them that they have a serious health problem.

Do we want to live in a world where doctors don’t tell us we’re ill, but suggest lifestyle choices we might want to make?

As a smoker, if a doctor told me I had lung cancer I would know it was at partially my fault. Ok doc, point taken, I will stop smoking and make some changes to my lifestyle.

If we muddy the waters over these issues, no one will solve their problems, because most problems can only be solved by taking responsibility for their causes. A fat person told they should eat better is less likely to change their habits than one who is told that they are so fat they will die if they don’t change their habits. A similar story could be said with smokers.

It is only the urgency and immediacy of the problem that will get many people to change long-ingrained habits. You don’t get lung cancer from one cigarette, and likewise you don’t get fat from a Big Mac. It is generally overindulgence of both these habits that leads to illness, and if doctors don’t highlight to overindulgers that they aren’t just making bad lifestyle choices ,but are in fact seriously ill, then they will have no impetus to change their ways.

I’m am not saying, and let me be clear about this, that we should go around telling fat people they’re fat, and smokers they’re unhealthy. Deep down inside they probably know this. But in the fields of medicine, psychology, dentistry, etc. professionals should have the freedom to tell their patients the unvarnished truth.

In fact, I would go so far as to say it is their duty to tell people the truth under these conditions.

 

 

 

 

The lost generation: why Britain’s young people have no hope of a bright future

It is a frustrating time to be a young Brit today. But the mounting frustration I feel, being lucky enough to have a job and working towards a career, must be exponentially worse for those without work, without money and losing hope.

It wasn’t always like this, or so I’m told. But the halcyon days of old are no longer. The youth of today are screwed.

The first problem is education. Degrees have become a penny a dozen, not in financial terms, but in aspirational terms. If every job needs a degree then the majority of young people have to go into debt simply to have any hope of getting a job.

A huge number of young people now have degrees, but if everyone has a degree then it isn’t an advantage, it is simply a debt. If no one had a degree then the job market would be exactly the same. We have massively devalued our education system. This is because of market forces in the education system.

The next problem is the housing market. My mum bought her first house for £15,000 back in the 80s. She tells me that although her salary has trebled, her flat is now worth almost £300,000.

How on earth are young people meant to get a mortgage? When my mum was earning 10k a year her mortgage was a year-and-halfs wages. If you wanted a mortgage on her house while earning £20,000 it would pan out at 20 years wages. Young people are being denied mortgages, their right to property trodden on by market forces.

The people being given mortgages are the property owners. This means that as they expend their property empires, they force myriad young people into permanently renting, costing them hundreds of thousands of pounds, yet leaving them nothing to show for it.

Another problem employment. Where are the jobs that school children were so earnestly promised by schoolteachers when they graduated? Neither here nor there. This is of course, due to market forces.

There are now over a million young people unemployed, with no hope of owning property because they can’t get a career in order to get the money to invest in a house.

The economic situation has instilled such fears in employers that even if there was a 99% chance that taking on more staff would be profitable, they won’t. The big business owners have gone for damage limitation, which in real English, means reducing their costs to keep their profits.

But, young people of Britain, don’t dispair, because it is not your fault. In fact it isn’t your government’s fault, nor your parent’s fault. It’s the economy stupid.

It is in fact the wool being pulled over our eyes. Austerity has failed this country, it has put us into another recession, left millions unemployed, ruined the moral of millions more, destroyed the hopes and aspirations of the next generation of this country.

We are told that market forces i.e. the recession, is responsible for this. But the market was created by us, and why would the chancellor pronounce an annual budget if we couldn’t have effect it?

We do have an impact on it, but that is directed away from the young people, the needy and the disabled.

Yet we do nothing. We barely even vote anymore. This has led to some of the disparity that exists in our country because politics is all about voters. The majority of home owners vote, whereas a majority of renters don’t. Work it out, political parties hoping to be in government preach to the home owners and the business owners, the people who vote. It may have started as a trickle, but as politicians started to care less about young people, they stopped voting, so the government cared less, and fewer young people voted. And on it went ad infinitum until we get what we have today, a government that protects the vested interests of the rich because the young poor don’t vote.

It is not just the economy, it is our fault too. Pensioners still receive their free bus passes and tv licences because they are the highest voting demographic. Big businesses receive better deals and billionaire CEOs get lower tax rates, because they not only vote, but fund political campaigns.

Our politicians see young people as hoodies, rioters and lazy. Until now we have been too scared to be or do anything different. If we have jobs we want to keep them, and if we don’t we still have this hope, drilled into us at a young age, that our lives will be like our parent’s.

This is a myth. We won’t have state pensions, many of us won’t have jobs. As pensionable ages get higher this will stop new, younger workers entering the system and it will get worse and worse. There is no growth strategy (except if you count helping businesses and millionaires grow their own profits), no safety net and as I see it the only hope is to make our voices heard.

We have been institutionalised to believe that the system will look after us. It worked for our parents, our parent’s parents and their parents before them. It won’t work for us. If we go on hoping that getting our grades will get us a job which will get us a mortgage we are letting ourselves be cheated by a system representing the few.

I am not saying that young are the only demographic to suffer, god knows what’s being inflicted on the old, disabled and public sector is inhumane to say the least. But it is the young people who have to stand up for themselves, ourselves, if anything is going to change.

We must make our jobs, we must make our money and we must make our hope.

Pornogrpahy addiction: It’s bad for our children, but it’s only the icing on the cake after TV and films

Singers in tiny skirts, hot pants and stockings can be just as explicit as what porn stars wear

 

Normally it is a subject that I shy away from giving an explicit opinion on, so to speak, but the time has come.

The Daily Mail has launched an appeal to get Internet Service Providers (ISP) to clamp down of pornographic sites because a recent cross party parliamentary report suggests one in three ten-year-old children has looked at explicit images online and that four out of five 16-year-old boys regularly look at porn.

I admit that by the time I was 16 a lot of my friends at school, myself included, would regularly access internet porn. We thought it was perfectly normal, although it depends what the report means by regularly, because we had to wait for the parents to go out so we could use the desk top computer. We also had to cope with dial-up internet. Now that everyone has laptops and household broadband it must be so much easier for children and youngsters to look at porn in the comfort of their bedrooms, and judging from the recent case study it can have terrible consequences.

According to The Daily Mail last week, there are numerous young men who are now unable to normal relationships with woman. Some are even on the sex offenders list for crimes varying from looking at child pornography to sexual assault. I have admit that to someone who regards pornography as an everyday thing, it is harrowing to read how it effects some people.

Now the Mail is putting pressure on ISPs to switch the way the filter content from an opt-out to an opt-in. This would mean that the default position is that parents would have to switch on pornographic content, rather than having to switch it off as they do nowadays.

The sexualisation of our country has been a long time in the making. Gradually our attitudes towards sex have relaxed, in terms of acceptance on homosexuality it can only be a good thing. But there are a variety of ways it has had a detrimental effect on children.

Is pornography much worse than what children are able to see on TV?

 

I remember two 13-year-old girls at my school were told to tone-down their dance routine for our annual talents how. They had choreographed a Christina Aguilera song, using a chair as a prop, and one of the teachers put her foot down as it was far too elicit for two minors to perform in front of the entire school.

It is through music and film that our attitudes to sex have gradually eroded, although nowadays singers gyrating about in very little clothing has become so normal that we don’t really notice it. But the results have been young girls dressed up like porn stars on their way to youth nights, young girls dancing like strippers, and young boys looking for ever more raunchy and explicit material as sex gets thrown in their faces from an ever younger age.

Do we simply lay blame for this degradation at the feet of the ISPs? We could no doubt blame MTV, or the BBC as well. How about we blame the Sun for its Page 3 images, or the Sport for having naked women on almost every page? I was reading FHM from aged 13 or 14, and no shop would ask for ID. It contained not only pages and pages of women in their scanties, but also articles about sex, be it real life confessions, technique pieces or how to pull girls. Let’s blame magazines for the current state of affairs…

There’s a really sad truth in this tale. It is the same truth that lies in the tale of our country’s education sector – the majority of blame rests with the parents.

Sorry parents, but in all honesty, the main guardian of your children’s moral upbringing is you. Although it is a teacher’s job to educate your children, it is your job to support that education, making sure they go to school, that they read books and do their homework, and that they take it seriously, because if you don’t take their education seriously then they never will.

It is the same with what they watch on the Internet. You can bury your head in the sand, or you can pay £25 to get porn filter installed, or you can make your children use a desk top computer instead of allowing them to look at what they want in their bedrooms.

Although our government wants to take responsibility for both our children’s education and what they look at online, they are not responsible. Our government constantly blaming teachers and meddling with education has left it in the sorry state it is in today. Now it is ok for parents to blame the teachers too, instead of supporting them. If we do the same with what we look at online then it will be another burden of responsibility we renounce.

So let the ISPs do what they will, the Beeb and newspapers do. How about, for a bit of a novelty, we stop letting children do as they will, and take responsibility. If your child is addicted to porn, unlike drugs where they can go down the park and do them out of your site, it is because you, as a parent, have given access to it online.

I wish the Daily Mail would do a campaign to make parents take some responsibility rather than trying to play the blame game to sell a few papers.

Philosophy matters, that’s why it’s important

My first moral philosophy tutorial was one of the most humbling experiences of my young life. I knew, or at least thought, that I had some well thought out liberal opinions and was ready to fight for moderation and understanding against bigotry and hatred. But it only took about ten minutes (if that) for my tutor to demonstrate that my views on everything from abortion to euthanasia were simply the echoes of my mother’s. As I said, humbling.

We all do it I imagine, echo the opinions of our elders and betters. Whether you’re a vociferous Guardian reader, or a Daily Mail sensationalist, whether it is mum or dad’s opinion or your older sibling’s. Philosophy taught me my first lesson: question the basis of your own opinions before you parade them out as doctrine.

That was why I was so pleased to see Russ Thorne’s piece defending philosophy degrees in the Independent. Finally some appreciation for the discipline that I love and respect so highly, after years of getting a hard time.

When admitting they study philosophy, the first question asked is usually: so what are you going to do with that then? An innocent enough question that hides undertones of condescension. It implies that studying philosophy can lead to nothing useful in or of itself.

I had idea what I wanted to do with philosophy, I just enjoyed it. The reading was (usually) very engaging, the debates in class went from heated to mind boggling, and the essays were a challenge. But the question continued bugged me.

Those lucky enough to study vocational disciplines, or with a career mind already, seem to think they have the right to give the humble philosophy student a hard time. They accuse you of just spending your time thinking, or of doing nothing useful. They are just as happy to parade their opinions out over a pint or a coffee.

However, the majority of opinions that are spouted about everything from the environment to politics haven’t been explored in any detail and are therefore mostly platitudes, rehashing what has been told to them by parents, lecturers or the newspapers.

This is why one of the most important lessons of philosophy is not to take those platitudes as fact. That is why philosophy is important.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes philosophising as walking in the hills. Anyone can leave the village in the valley and take a little sojourn through the hills of thought. There are a lot of well walked paths up there, that philosophers of bygone days have tread, and their students and acolytes have traversed after them, winding into the mountains of thought.

The valley is an analogy for our family, our culture and our society. It represents the preconceived opinions of the day, the platitudes. One who lives in the valley will take red as blue and blue as red if everyone tells them so. It is easy to live within the valley and not stray outside because everyone agrees with you.

Discussions over coffee or a glass of wine represent the walks in the foothills. You can follow Plato’s path, or Marx’s, arguing over the merits of their journeys and what the discovered. This is as far as many of us go.

But day-trippers should stop and look up. For above the well worn paths in the foothills, there are the mountains, which have only a few paths through them, for not many have ventured beyond the foothills.

This was why philosophy was so humbling as both a subject and a discipline. To further Pirsig’s analogy, the foothills that have been so well trampled can be understood as other subjects, chemistry, physics, psychology. Before these subjects existed there was only the questions: what is the world made of? How does the universe work? What makes human-beings tic? The ancient philosophers would have seen the foothills as mountains, there were no paths there, and it would have been both scary and novel to escape the valley of society and tread new paths. But after years of people following the routes, the questions have been replaced by answers, which are claimed by other disciplines. What matter is made of is answered by chemistry, what forces control the universe is the domain of physics, and explaining what makes humans do what they do is psychology.

It is testament to the wanderings of the greatest minds in history that we have these answers, but the cost has been the question. I think every question is philosophical, and from this it would imply that philosophy is the art of questioning. While the answers are now left to the various disciplines spawned from philosophical enquiry, the soul of the questioner is the soul of the philosopher, and this is why philosophy remains important.

To not ask questions because you assume you know the answer is at best ignorant and at worst arrogant. A lot of people in the valley take their opinions for granted, because they like them. If I had an unwanted pregnancy I’d want to abort it, so I am pro-abortion. But the philosopher explores their own opinions, and those of others, like Socrates, to find the justification that doesn’t rest on the comfort those opinions provide.

We are lucky to live in a culture where we have so many answers, but we should not let this make us complacent. If we do, like in the US, we get creationists, who take comfort in their opinions, yet make no effort to delve into the absurdity that the world was created only 9,000 years ago. We need questioners, to keep ideas fresh and stop them stagnating, and that means we continue to need philosophy.

And, as I learned long ago, philosophy teaches you to be humble before both your own and the opinions of others.

Vivienne Westwood’s comments beggar belief

Courtesy of The Independent Blogs.

Westwood hit out at the UK public during London Fashion Week, calling them badly dressed.

It seems rather unfair of Vivienne Westwood to hit out at the UK populace, saying that we have never dressed as badly as we do today. While, admittedly, I am no fashion guru, and agree that there is a certain similarity between the discordant fashions of the day, it seems fair to argue that we’ve actually never had it so good.

The septuagenarian said, “In history, people dressed much better than we do today. If you saw Queen Elizabeth it would be amazing, she came from another planet.”

But Queen Elizabeth had the finest dress-makers and tailors in the country. She would have had her choice of the finest materials, the softest silks – the shiniest satins and the most voluminous velvets known to man. With all the money in the world, looking good is easy.

What Westwood forgets is that for the Queen to have all these accoutrements the majority of her people lived in poverty. Again, we have one of the elite forgetting that the 99 per cent don’t have Mary Poppins handbags or bottomless wallets.

Most of Queen Elizabeth’s subjects would have worn pretty shoddy clothes by comparison with today: picture hessian sacks, with rope tied round the middle, or Baldrick from Blackadder. For the designer to accuse the majority of the country as being conformist, while harking back to an age where variety was for a privileged few literally beggars belief.

You only have to take a short walk down any high street to witness the menagerie of prancing peacocks that make up the diverse crazes of the British public today. There has never been so much variety in fashion.

When you strip away the feathers, and get down to the real velour, we are privy to the fact that fashion is intimately linked with money. The poor spend a huge amount of their income trying to look like their celebrity icons. It is easy to forget that these false gods have it easy style-wise. They have millions of pounds to spend on brand-clothing, and if they don’t like any of those brands, they can make their own. They can hire make-up artists, style gurus, hairdressers; a veritable army of servants to help them look good.

The regular hoi polloi have to assemble their ensemble as best they can from Primark, discount stores and the sales. Yet the fashion elite have the nerve to say: “People have never looked so ugly as they do today.”

What a corker Viv.

Now, this might not be completely fair. Vivienne Westwood has always been on the cutting edge of fashion. An industry legend, even. Yet coming out of her latest show during London Fashion Week the age-old phrase, ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ could easily spring to mind.

So, before harking back to a bygone era, maybe you should appreciate that you’ve never had it so good? At the tender age of 70, Dame Westwood should count her lucky stars that we are in an age where people  can indulge in myriad fashions and trends that were once the province of a select few.

So before you go knocking the regular Joes out on the high street, please spare a thought to those on squeezed incomes, worried about unemployment and job cuts, stuck on the dole, or in debt. It may not be as bad as the days of serfdom, but buying the latest fashions is still a luxury that only the rich can consistently afford.

I will eagerly await Vivienne Westwood’s hessian range for the squeezed middle, complete with dung-ball accessories, modelled by Tony Robinson in next year’s London Fashion Week.

Cait Reilly’s heart’s in the right place, but maybe her head isn’t?

Anti-worfare protests have appeared all over the UK, but is this part of a something-for-nothing culture?

My dad always had a saying: “If you’re young and a socialist your heart’s in the right place, but if you’re old and still a socialist, you’re head’s in the wrong place.”

When I was young I used to thin this was a simple platitude. I would bring it out at the pub every now and again as an adage, or prove a point, usually getting an appreciative chortle from the crowd.

In it’s most basic context it says that the young, free of any great burdens, are free to pursue ideological concepts. They can moan about the status quo, and rile against the establishment because they have no vested interest in it yet.

Once you hit a certain age you notice that we all need money to live and do the things that we enjoy. The older you get the more money becomes the necessity needed to allow those dependent on you to live and do the things they enjoy. Hence, poor Karl Marx spent most of his life in poverty.

I was a naive teenager once. I don’t say this condescendingly, or patronisingly, I say it with a certain degree of melancholia. While studying philosophy I envisaged a country where communism might work. I agreed with Marx’s idea that capitalism, embodied by private property, separates labour, capital and land, degrading the worker to a commodity to be bought and sold.

But poor Cait Reilly takes the biscuit. Her heart is in the right place as she rails ‘forced labour’, these poor graduates and unemployed people who have to do a few hours a week at Poundland. Marx would be pleased at her stand. But to anyone who has worked at places like Poundland, her stance is naïve, insulting and arrogant.

I may sound very Daily Mail here, but I didn’t languish on benefits waiting for an employer to hire me. I got myself a job that was flexible enough that allowed me to earn enough to take a week off here and there to do what I needed to do.

Benefits are for people who cannot find work. They are not a grant for students who think that after their degree they can sit around being paid by the state to volunteer. If you want a specific job, then yeah, you may have to do voluntary work, but a mature adult works to fund their placements.

At present I study two days a week on my NCTJ. I then work four days a week from either 11 or 12:30 until 9pm in a call centre, so that I can afford my rent, pay my bills and buy food.

But I go through this six days a week rigamarole so that every month I can do a week at a local newspaper. This is the pièce de résistance of my time, where I do the work that I want to do, where I use my philosophy degree, and get a stab at proving myself to editors and staff there that I may be a good employee one day.

So I have very little sympathy with someone who sits at home on the dole (sorry jobseeker’s), paying no rent or bills, and enjoying an perpetual work placement in a museum.

I have stacked shelves, waited tables, folded clothes, swept floors, emptied bins and cold-called hundreds, if not thousands of people. I have also chased shoplifters, been verbally abused (both in person and over the phone) and treated like a slave by employers. And you know what, the only ‘value’ this was to me was that I got paid and I’d eat!

It is insulting that there is such expectation out there, that I don’t need to take any job, because the state will provide for me. It is insulting to everyone who has ever had to take any job because they have mouths to feed. It is insulting to those who have had to do voluntary work in their spare time, giving up much of their social life because of the time they’ve missed work. And it isn’t just insulting to all the people who didn’t either go to university, or get the opportunity to do so, it is arrogant to be so presumptive about your qualities. Get the job, then be smug.

And although I have very strong opinions against Workfare, I do not think it breaches a human right to say you have been on benefits for six months, how about doing a bit of work to earn that?

Yes, there should be a less draconian way of getting able-bodied graduates and the long-term unemployed work experience. Yes, it is almost slave labour, and Marx would turn in his grave at the thought of it. But, guess what, in the real world you have to do things you don’t want to. I work with a considerable number of people who have lost good, well-paid jobs due to the recession. Do they sit about on benefits? Like hell, they have responsibilities. I have colleagues on my course who are having to do their work experience during their holidays because they have jobs and responsibilities.

And to cap it all off she seems to want to claim more money off the government by taking them to court? After living on benefits for over six months, she now wants to take more tax-payers funding as compensation? Is she using her jobseeker’s to pay for her lawyer? Or is it a ‘no win, no fee’ claim?

Is sacrificing democracy for the markets worth the cost?

We were told the other day at work that it is against health and safety to bring a cup of tea upstairs from the kitchen to the call centre. This is because we could spill it on the stairs (or ourselves), and cause someone to slip. Fair enough, I’m not here to argue against that, but would it be an arrestable offence to take a cup of tea upstairs?

I somehow doubt it.

So I was a little shocked with how innocuous the news was that the Occupy Wall Street camp in New York had been evicted. When peaceful protests are being clamped down on by governments I’d think it would get more coverage.

In less than three hours the camp had been dismantled and cleaned and over 200 people arrested. It was explained that the plans had been drawn up a few weeks ago, but it was only yesterday that Mayor, Michael Bloomberg decided that the presence of the protesters was offensive enough for him to give the go-ahead for their removal.

It seems like Bloomberg has cited public health and safety concerns as the reason that people were evicted, but is it now an arrestable offence to breach health and safety?

As OLSX is threatened eviction, the bankers they campaign against are put in charge in Europe

Like my cup of tea at work, which I continue to take upstairs because I feel that not having a cup of tea at my desk breaches my natural rights, it seems like the rights of protesters are being trampled as equally in the West as they were before the Arab Spring in the East.

Is it behind a wall of health and safety procedures that democracy dies? Is the right to peaceful protest is only available when it’s convenient or if it doesn’t go on too long?

And yesterday the City of London Corporation has re-launched its bid to remove the protesters from outside St Paul’s. Now the protesters are determined to have another go, but with the camps being raided and dismantled across the globe by somewhat surly councillors and politicians, I have my doubts about their likelihood to succeed in achieving anything.

The message from the top, or The US Supreme Court at least, is that our inalienable right to peaceful protest only goes so far as our leaders are willing to let it. This defeats the purpose if our leaders are the ones being complained about. We can protest the war in Iraq, the cuts to tuition fees, anything we like, as long as we are prepared to be clamped down on by the police, or watch our next generation be kettled, or move when the police tell us to.

Last week, the students held another demo against fees, and from the pictures it basically looked like a giant police training exercise in kettling people. The crowd was surrounded by officers, and not allowed to deviate from the path. Any attempt to meet up with other blocks of resistance was nipped in the bud.

Am I the only one who is scared?

And not just because the ruling elite are showing that their silk gloves are actually steel gauntlets, but because the gradual integration of our ruling elite, the media, and the financial sector.

We now have bankers in charge of Italy and Greece, in the shape of Messrs Monti and Papademos. Surely the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 showed the inability of the financial sector to look out for any interests other than their own? If not, then maybe the outrage at stricter ring-fencing, or just generally their refusal to make any changes to the system that has made a few billions.

The only thing which used to allow me to sleep easy at night is the distinction between the groups that control our world – the financial sector, the politicians, the media, and religion.

Many could claim that the influence of religion is negligible, but what religion and the media both do is perpetuate the myths our society lives by. Our politicians control the legislation our lives are limited by, and the financial sector moves the money our lives rely on. Separate and monitored, we have nothing to fear, but nowadays politicians are unafraid to be religious, or in bed with the media, the protests are being condemned by priests, and financial leaders are now being begged by the markets they control to take charge of governments.

It should worry everyone that market driven leaders are ending up on our political shelves. We have the right to vote our leaders in – even if as pointed out by Archie Bland in the I Paper: “There is nothing to stop total idiots trying to be leader of the free world.” We did not vote for technocrats, and neither did the Italians and Greeks. Although they say it is in everyone’s best interests, it is in the interests of the markets first and foremost that they have taken charge, and these are what they will protect.

I can only see it as a conflict of interests if in any democratic country the needs of the few are subservient to the needs of the many. But this is what is happening. Our Government is determined to keep the markets happy and Europe is begging technocrats to take charge, effectively breaking the democratic process. It may not be the end of the world now, but it sets a scary precedent. And, even if they sort it out, how do we know that power will filter back down?

We should all be afraid, not just youths, students, trade unionists, protesters, communists and anarchists. As I wrote a few weeks ago, it is the quiet acquiescence of the many that allows a minority of partisans, with sycophantic or selfish interests, to take control. We all have our heads so buried in the sand that we can’t see that the foundations of democracy, our most sacred ideology, are being undermined for the needs of capitalism. Surely it should be the other way round.

 

 

People Power only begins with peaceful protests

Lord Kitchener asked the British public to unite, so now do OLSX

 I raise money for a homeless charity at the minute. It’s not glamorous, but I’d say that I am proud of the fact that for now, the fruits of my labour don’t line some fat cats wallet. So, instead of camping outside St Paul’s, I can go to work, knowing in my heart of hearts that I am helping some of the 99 per cent.

Unfortunately, the other reason I’m not down on the picket lines is that it is unlikely to ever influence the government to change anything. It seems like even the most famous peaceful protesters, Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jnr, were assassinated before any kind of long-lasting change was implemented.

An assassination can be a rallying cry to the half-hearted, the meek, and the ignorant. When a death is witnessed and felt by enough people, the shared grief and the anger boil over. It can be a call to arms or simply the straw that broke the poor camel’s back.

It can also be a call for unity like the day Diana died, or 9/11. The world in their shared grief and fear forget their woes and sat glued to the TV watching the news as it came in. The old and young, the rich and poor, the one per cent and the 99 per cent, people of all races, were brought together into a united whole, together in their grief. When a whole people, a whole country, or even the whole world comes together under emotions so strong it boggles the mind the sheer power that collective could have.

It was Marianne Williamson in Return to Love: Reflections on a Course in Miracles, who said it best:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond imagination. It is our light more than our darkness which scares us. We ask ourselves – who are we to be brilliant, beautiful, talented, and fabulous. But honestly, who are you to not be so?”

And who are we not to be so? We have groups of the Occupy the London Stock Exchange in cities throughout our country. The National Association of Head Teachers has for the first time in over 100 years voted to strike, the other unions are rallying as well. The students have twice been out in force and even the uneducated have tried to make their voices heard in this Summer’s riots.

But, it is not enough. Because there are still so many out there who feel inadequate, who are too scared to be powerful beyond imagination.

It is easy to get scared, the world can be terrifying. But in the end it is unsatisfying and hollow, and results in a gradual degradation of the soul. The democratic capitalism we live under, is run by politicians, the markets, civil servants, and diffused through to us by the media, advertising and marketing. It is the people at the top of these trades that want us to feel awful, ugly, untalented and squalid, because they want us to feel brilliant, beautiful, talented and fabulous on their terms, using their products and in a way that perpetuates all the power in their hands. It is about control, and it is so easy to buy into it that we can all be forgiven for doing so.

Their path to beauty, talent, splendour and brilliance is easy to follow. You jump on a career ladder and get a salary. You start to forget how you could be brilliant et al without these things. Suddenly you have a mortgage and a family, a financial and social debt that will never be lifted. By this time you are quite old, and set in your ways, and to imagine the world any differently is scary indeed.

This is why it is only the young, the students, and the unions, as well as a limited number of idealists are the only ones who still believe that a world without the one versus the 99 per cent is less scary than this one. A small group that feel that they have so little to lose that anything will be better than what we have already.

But this leaves a majority who cling on to what they have, proud that they have touched brilliance and talent et al through following the crowd. They have buried their heads in the sand because a change in the fundamental order of things is too scary to behold. ‘Imagine all the things we could lose,’ they think, and to protect what they hold dear, they condemn those who fight for change.

This has turned illiterate children into vandals and thugs, students into anarchists, and unionists into communists. It helps protect the illusory world, because even though it isn’t perfect, it is safe and secure. We have worked so hard to reach the levels of achievement that our leaders and idols have told us to emulate that to try and find those things within ourselves is too hard 

But, with the financial crisis this could change. Maybe it will be the spark that wakes up a nation. When people see their children being kettled by police, or their savings disappear, or their pensions taken, maybe they will realise, like the young and the idealistic, that things aren’t, and never have been, as good as our politicians and co. have painted them.

If we are going to find our light, and our brilliance, we must shrug off the conceptions of these ideas that are forced on us, and accept the ideas of these things we have of our own. Only then will we be able to stand together, humble and proud, yet united. Our media fed ideas of beauty and talent have done nothing to nurture either of these things, but only to make us arrogant, divided and suspicious of each other. So we must shrug off the yoke of the one per cent, and the cronies and sycophants who are their priests, and create something better or at least fairer.

This would, unfortunately, require a lot more than a student protest or a union strike. It would require the biggest mass walkout ever seen, across not just the public, but the private sector too.

It isn’t just for us, for we are too far gone to touch it, only to create it. It is for the future, and the children who will remember us not as the people who accepted greed, hoping we could one day be greedy, but renounced it, so that they could enjoy equality.

Rhetoric: proper debating or unhealthy arguing?

Ever fallen victim to Godwin’s Law, also known as the Rule of Nazi Analogies? I have, and it wasn’t very pleasant. Firstly, I was embarrassed, because I’d used the Nazi’s, or Hitler (I don’t remember which) as a comparison, which is extremely lazy. Secondly, it made me bit miffed to have my point shut down by a debating rule. Childish I know, but we all secretly want to throw a temper tantrum at times don’t we?

Anyways, tantrums and feet stamping aside, on reflection, I was a bit disturbed by this run in with Godwin, however trivial.

I realised that GL is just one of many ways to shut down an argument without actually refuting someone’s point. If you go to the Fallacy Files you can research exactly how many logic tricks there are to beat someone in a debate.

We all know that an argument has premises that lead to a conclusion. In its most basic form, modus ponens, it is:

If a then b (if the leaves are golden (a) it’s autumn (b))

It’s a, (the leaves are golden)

Therefore it’s b too (it must be autumn).

(You could argue with this example but I made it up looking out the window and I am not going to find another one, and the fallacious nature of my example shouldn’t retract from my point).

But in an argument you also have two other aspects, which regularly get ignored: The conclusion and the truth.

This is why another example of modus ponens is logically true, but it has no point and can’t be true:

If the sky is pink, I’m a pink elephant. The sky is pink, so therefore I’m a pink elephant.

The argument is valid, but what point does it prove? We can use any number of premises to argue our point, so just because our premises are incorrect, shouldn’t invalidate my point, it just invalidates the way I made the point. And, however logically valid it is, it cannot be said to be true. It seems so basic, but it is often forgotten.

Politicians, businessmen, people at the pub, hoboes in fact, can make a valid argument, but it doesn’t mean that it’s true.

I might have approached this indirectly, but here’s what I mean. Two anti-abortionist could disagree on why they are against terminating a pregnancy, even if they agree with the point in question, abortion should be illegal. To put across this point they can take any of innumerable premises and conclusions. One might think abortions should be illegal because they cost the NHS too much money. The other might feel that the foetus is a human being as soon as the sperm and egg meet. But our first antagonist could think that the foetus is not a person until the baby is born.

The fact is, you could tear apart either of these fictitious debater’s arguments, yet their point could remain valid. Abortion could be totally immoral for all I know. Just pointing out that their argument is a fallacy doesn’t escape the point of the matter, or the truth.

This is why winning a debate is the wrong approach to arguing. When you win a debate, you miss the point, which should be to find the truth. If you disprove someone’s argument, you haven’t disproved the truth – because by definition the truth is the truth and cannot be false (there’s some logic for you). What debate should lead to is a balanced answer, based on the truth, not a winner and a loser.

And the reason, oh very patient reader, that I was disturbed by my encounter with Mr Godwin’s Law, was because shutting down a debate, or winning a debate I should say, applies to all our political lives.

Politicians are the most talented rhetoricians I’ve ever heard. They are very skilled at tearing apart each other’s arguments and winning debates. But, because they have policies and agendas, they are not winning arguments for the sake of finding the truth.

The truth is that the UK is in a very sad place just now and a lot of people are feeling the heat (or the cold if energy prices are anything to go by). Our government should be interested in lessening our burdens and protecting our economy, yet they squabble like school children. By having a process of debate and law enactment based on winning and losing, I wonder if any of their policies actually are ‘truly’ best for our country.

I don’t like using ‘what is best’, but it’s, ironically, the best term I’ve got. There is a range of measures which would be best for our country, but because politicians think so much about re-election, they want to do what pleases their voters or campaign funders.

This was put excellently by Christina Patterson in the I Paper. “Most people in this country support capital punishment. Most people like the idea that teenagers caught up in mass hysteria should have their lives wrecked. Most people even seem to think that people who earn six times as much as they do shouldn’t pay a higher rate of tax. They believe these things because their parents, and the newspapers, and even sometimes because their politicians tell them they should.”

I was the same. I went into my first philosophy tutorial full of opinions that I quickly realised were echoes my mother’s. It happens, but as Christine notes, “we can change our minds”.

We need politicians who are willing to give up everything for the truth, and the truth is constituents don’t know what is good for them, they just know what they want. And politicians sway the masses with promises of what they want (like the Lib Dem promise to freeze tuition fees, nice as an idea, impossible in practice), and behave like experts when they’re not.

As one very wise commentator stated, rhetoric “is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies” and that it “creates belief about the just and unjust, but gives no instruction about them.”

He adds, “The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who do know.”

My commentator is Plato, writing over 2,000 years ago in the Gorgias. But he’s still right. Our business leaders, media moguls, bankers and even people on the streets, are not experts outside their fields. We all know a little this and a little that, but when we stand united, we know a lot about a great many things. Rhetoric in government and business ignores the truth for the sake of comfort and the status quo, to please shareholders or voters.

Politics has lost the truth, the media and banks have lost the truth, and our country has lost the truth. That’s why, over the last few years we’ve endured expense scandals, banks crashing, phone hacking and riots. What we need is to take stock and realise that we can’t live in a country where we’re all trying to survive individually because competition and consumption is finite. We need to live somewhere where cooperation is offered, compromise is welcome and compassion isn’t a lefty ideal. I know which state of affairs would make me happier.