They are reduced to playing a game of politics which lacks any substance, with their only reward (apart from those that might come when they have left office) being the dopamine hits that they get as a consequence of the appearance of their being in power.
Sounds like someone I know.
Via Richard Murphy.
Breathing calmed down so went for a short walk to the corner shop with Kid A where he bought a can of baked beans with his own cash.
Then we walked around the long block talking about how those beans are now his beans, what would happen to the beans if I reimbursed him with a bank transfer, what he could do with a bottomless backpack, the striking similarity between the Chinese lion adorning a neighbour’s drive wall and the Chinese lions outside the Chinese restaurant in Spilsby, and how Lime bikes are taking over the world.
Breathless!
A million housewives every day
Pick up a can of beans and say
“What an amazing example of
Synchronisation!”
Or in my case, “£1.59?! What a rip-off!”
Retreated to the relative safety of the bedroom where I’m finding solace with Radiohead and OK Computer on a loop.
An airbag saved my life
BYE BYE BIDEN
Some highlights and thoughts from Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic 📚
Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. (p. 127)
This seems to sum up his career neatly. Far from the popular public image that he has cultivated and that the media have happily gone along with for the most part.
Foreign policy
“I’m not going to start World War Three for you!”
Not Biden, but British army General Mike Jackson refusing to follow Biden’s friend General Wesley Clark’s orders to confront Russia in Kosovo. (p. 172)
The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. It seems that Biden wants to go out with a bang, despite his previous utterances.
”There is no such thing as a winnable nuclear war.” (p. 152)
Biden saying one thing and doing another is characteristic of his entire political career. He’s not unique in that respect, of course, and perhaps he’s actually better at it than most. He did get elected president after all.
Israel
Biden was the ultimate Friend of Israel. He helped provide Israel with huge amounts of US aid money, and Israel lobbyists on his campaign staff returned the favour helping Biden raise huge amounts of money to run his various election campaigns.
Biden spent his entire career giving unqualified support to Israel, and claimed that Americans “couldn’t afford” to criticise Israel in public.
Yugoslavia
Toward the end of Bush’s term, the ex-communist Eastern European country of Yugoslavia began disintegrating in a miasma of nationalism and ethnic and religious sectarianism, forces unleashed by a Western-imposed program of economic “shock therapy” that in essence exported Western neoliberal policies to the once prosperous country, running its living standards into the ground. War soon broke out. (p. 156)
Later, Biden agitated for Clinton’s military intervention in Serbia, which lay the foundations for future “humanitarian” bombing campaigns elsewhere.
If you cared about political survival, it was safer to err on the side of war. (p. 158)
###Iraq
Despite [or because of?] his role in starting the war, Biden was still considered one of the party’s wisest heads on foreign policy. (p. 173)
George W. Bush apparently followed Biden’s instructions on selling the war on Iraq to the American people and the United Nations.
Biden proposed an ethno-nationalist “three state solution” for Iraq similar to Israel’s proposals to came up Arab states into weaker sectarian units.
He proposed to Balkanise Iraq into smaller ethnic and religious sectarian states with limited freedom of movement and borders controlled by foreign troops.
A bit like Gaza and the rest of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territories now.
Flawed as it was, the plan burnished Biden’s credentials as a foreign policy expert. (p. 179)
Iraq duped Biden forcing withdrawal of US troops. In response, ISIS ‘emerged' from an oppressed religious minority.
War on Terror
Biden’s ‘counter-terrorism plus’ policy saw the US bomb seven Muslim countries without declaring war, much like Israel is now doing with more American bombs.
That helped to fuel anti-Americanism and an immigration and prisons crisis.
Instead of providing homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails. (p. 85)
Domestic policy
Race relations
Racist Clinton doubled the American prison population and achieved the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Mostly with black people.
This policy usefully helped to reduce official unemployment figures and paint Clinton’s neoliberalism as an economic miracle.
Another lesson Biden had first wrongly internalised from American apartheid: that people of different backgrounds simply couldn’t live together in harmony. (p. 177)
Instead Biden backed segregation (busing) and individual states' rights over a united federal states of America.
Women’s rights
”I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” (p. 184)
Biden on the Roe v. Wade decision in 1974
Biden’s neoliberalism
Biden presented as a progressive liberal on the side of the working class. But he spent his career siding with Republicans and moving the Democrats ever further to the right.
At one time even a former Klan recruiter thought Biden had gone too far. Another Klan leader praised Biden’s election platform claiming it was as if it had been written by a Klansman.
Supporting spending cuts
Biden said Jimmy Carter was nothing special, and welcomed Reaganomics as a step in the right direction. Although in typical Biden fashion he also claimed Reagan’s first budget would be an economic disaster before voting for it (along with 29 other Democrats).
Reagan’s cuts cost 270,000 jobs and reduced access to financial support for millions of Americans. Rather than reducing the deficit, it increased it, and made the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
Like Thatcher in Britain, Reagan’s greatest achievement was in transforming his opposition into his mirror image. You still get a choice at the polls, but there’s very little, if any, substantive policy difference between the two.
”Biden isn’t a liberal anymore.”
Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, who lost to Biden in the 2012 vice-presidential election, but declared a more important victory.
Biden’s support for tax cuts for the rich wasn’t a one-off. This was a repeated pattern of voting indicating where his true loyalties lay. Indeed, later he proposed his own tax cuts that were more severe than Reagan’s, and “right out of the Tea Party playbook”.
Where once the tyranny of “special interests” meant the control of government by big business and the super-rich, it now referred to the ordinary Americans the New Deal had sought to protect from those same powerful entities. (p. 68)
>”It’s the middle class, stupid.” (p.147)
No longer aligned with the working class, Biden now focused on the middle class, solidly Conservative, tax-and-government fearing supporters of the super-rich.
Much like the South where Biden always pivoted for support of anti-union, pro-slavery and white supremacist votes. Biden could have tried to bring Southern voters to the Democrats, but instead chose to lead the Democrats to align with the politics of the South.
Biden had successfully facilitated the decades-long wholesale robbery of working- class Americans by law enforcement. (p. 91)
Enter Bill Clinton, who with Biden’s full support, carried on Reagan’s economic policies leading to ever more cuts in government spending and hardship for millions more Americans.
Biden again offered trillions of dollars of cuts to retirement funds, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, giving Mitch McConnell everything he asked for.
As president, much of Obama’s job involved cleaning up messes that Biden had helped create. (p. 191)
The major legislative accomplishments that Biden had racked up in prior decades had succeeded because they had been in pursuit of Republican goals. (p. 199)
Biden did what he always did: plead fealty to working class voters in public speeches filled with references to his Scranton roots while privately appealing for the support of big-money interests. (p. 214)
By 2020, Biden had shifted (and shifted the Democrats) so far to the right, he was finally electable and the safest establishment option to defeat Trump as president.
Overcome space and all we have left is here. Overcome time and all we have left is now.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach 📚
JON BATISTE'S TINY DESK CONCERT
Jon Batiste, like Alicia Keys, is a supremely talented musician and performer. This is another must watch Tiny Desk concert from 2019.
This is another video my little kid enjoyed watching, singing along to (before he could talk), and dancing to with his big brother (before falling asleep).
Don’t it make your soul shake?
ALICIA KEYS' TINY DESK CONCERT
If you haven’t seen and listened to Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert (Feb 2020) then I highly recommend that you do, even if - or especially if - you think she’s not your thing.
This is a video my little kid loved to sing along to before falling asleep for a mid-day or afternoon nap.
We all just wanna be shown some love
Always look as far ahead as possible
The more his curiosity took over, the less control he had
PEOPLE DON'T CHANGE
People don’t change, but they can make good decisions.
This is a quote, or the gist of a quote, from an episode of Person of Interest, a TV show I watched avidly for two and a half seasons before rapidly losing interest after the scriptwriters killed off one of the only characters with a fully functioning sense of empathy (who happened to be a black woman) and which therewith descended into a cliched, repetitive, and all-too predictable (yet surprising) slapstick parody of itself.
If I wanted to watch a bunch of psychopaths endlessly escalate a brutal war on humanity I could just look at the news. Americans sure like their guns and shooting people for entertainment. Personally, I prefer a nice cup of tea and a good book, and a bit of peace and quiet.
Anyway, people don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Especially when they have enough guns pointed at their head. That’s the takeaway, or the moral of this story. But they always escape, and then they’re back to making bad decisions all over again, usually involving pointing guns at other people’s heads.
And maybe that’s right. People don’t change. Not until there’s a compelling reason to. We carry on mindlessly making the same old bad decisions over and over again like in Einstein’s theory of insanity, repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome.
It’s a horrible take. But it’s true to some extent. Getting better (it can’t get much worse) can be a bit of a song (and a dance). Recovery is a long and winding road. They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said “No, no, no!” There’s a lot of resistance to change, and even to making good decisions.
But is much of this also a result of the world we live in, and who we are? We live in a world consumed by neoliberal orthodoxy. We are in thrall to the ideas of freedom of the market, the decimation of government and public services, and the freedom of individuals (and individual responsibility, even while what’s left of the state bails out the greed and mistakes of unaccountable banks and corporations).
There’s no such thing as society, Thatcher told us. There is no alternative.
Trump was right, Americans will never vote for a black woman. Hell, they wouldn’t even vote for a warmongering white woman. The white supremacist patriarchy is strong. Yes, they voted for a black man, but he turned out to be the most murderous president in history.
Is there an alternative? There’s always an alternative. It’s just that usually the alternative is more of the same, or worse. Take it or leave it. And even when there is a different option, one which might slightly rein in the excesses of this neoliberal onslaught, it’s demonised as a Stalinist coup that will murder Jews. “Nothing. Has. Changed.” implored Theresa May, quite rightly, as she continued as Prime Minister despite losing her massive parliamentary majority and failing to obtain a mandate to deliver Brexit, or anything other than her own resignation. Calling that election was the most audacious thing she ever did, aside from running through a field of wheat as a child.
Despite the people obviously voting for change, and genuine hope, it was clear that what we really needed instead was a lying, racist killer clown to run the country into the ground.
At least he had a plan. An oven-ready plan to deliver Brexit on a plate just in time for the New Year. It would be served cold, and thoroughly unappetising to everyone, toxic even. But it was the will of the people. It’s what we wanted. We voted for it! We wanted to sever our economic ties to our nearest and biggest trading partner and experience the freedom of going it alone in the big wide world, unleashed!
But that wasn’t enough! The killer clown told too many lies, and hosted too many parties in covid lockdown. He had to go. A tiny minority of elderly rich right wingers then voted for a new leader for us. One who would be more honest, less racist, less murderous, and not as stupid. Liz “Pork Markets” Truss.
Oh, fuck. She might not have been a liar, or a racist, or a murderer, but boy was she stupid. She killed the Queen, trashed the UK economy, and blew up Russia’s Nordstream pipeline, all in less than a month. Talk about a whirlwind. And some bad decisions. She now has a very nice pension. You reap what you sow.
People don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Neoliberalism doesn’t change, and the more that the people are subjected to its bad decisions, its lust for war, for death, for oil, for money, for making the rich richer and the poor poorer, the harder it gets for people to change, and the fewer good decisions are made.
Finally feel like I’m getting my breath back after four days of having trouble breathing in, wheezing and feeling like I’m emphyseming.
WFH SAVED MY LIFE
I’ve worked from home since the end of February 2020. I transferred all my work and systems online to do so, and while I’m still part-time, in practice I’m now available 24/7 for every conceivable administrative emergency (“Hi David. Please order me some large coloured post-it notes and have them delivered to my home tomorrow” or “Hi David. Please bring £200 in cash to my house this morning so I can pay for my lunch meeting today.").
I won’t pretend I’ve always been highly productive, in the office or at home. But I always get everything done that needs to be done, and I’m super-flexible and adaptable. I’ve been asked to do - and done - huge, complex projects at short notice and with short deadlines that are outside of my remit and frankly beyond my skill set, but I’ve done them, learned how to do it on the spot or got help.
I do go into the office for occasional in-person meetings and social gatherings (“xmas lunch” looms) when necessary, and indeed spent a solid three hours working last Thursday with a masked colleague (she had a fever) in a freezing cold office. I’d just recovered from a bad reaction to the covid vaccine. Next day was a write-off. I was exhausted and worried about whether the work we did was really good enough. The day after and since I’ve had a terrible cough and cold, shortness of breath, wheezing. (Since my COPD diagnosis, every rasping breath I take is assessed and rediagnosed by my non-medic wife as requiring medical attention.)
My workplace is bad for my health. Pre-covid I had multiple chest infections that kept me away from work and reduced my productivity to zero for weeks at a time. Since I worked from home, and catching covid aside, I’ve had zero time where I’ve been unable to go to the office for essential work that can only be done there. Even when I’ve had coughs and colds, I’ve felt well enough to do the work that needed to be done. Somehow (until now with this new cough) I don’t seem to get so ill or feel so bad when I’m at home.
Working from home has given me the time and space to transform how I work for the better. I’m better organised, more thoughtful, less rushed and distracted. I can honestly say that I’m now the most productive I’ve ever been thanks to a more comfortable, relaxed and focussed personal work space.
And, yes, being part-time, and flexible, I can take a nap if I need one.
Why should people work at home? https://youtu.be/bQN_Fb03RfE?si=CZoQagrotTA_urw8 The ‘return to work’ now being enforced by many organisations makes no sense for many people, or the planet. It really is time that we have some enlightened managers who did what is best for people and the world, and not what they see as being best for them.
Factional right-wing neoliberal think tank “Labour Together":
The Budget is a Winner with Tories
Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager.
I like some Oasis stuff, the early stuff. I like some woke stuff. This quote and picture are true enough and funny, though.
Labour’s self-imposed, arbitrary and “binding” “fiscal rules” are the same as the Tories' Austerity policies.
Political choices.
The same choices.
So much for change.
Original link to the article from 11 years ago:
I used to be funny.
“Zionism is rooted in trauma and fear. It’s about survival and love for the Jewish people. But like any other ethnic nationalism, Zionism establishes a hierarchy: It’s about prioritizing our safety and well-being, even at the expense of others. It relies on an alternate historical narrative that justifies the occupation and rationalizes the status quo. And it cannot produce a just peace on its own.”
Via Zionism cannot produce a just peace. Only external pressure can end the Israeli apartheid.
WHAT MARXISM TEACHES US
What Marxism teaches us is simply to approach questions of society from a material basis: how does human life persist? Through production of the goods and services needed to live.
How are these things produced under capitalist society? Through exploitation of the labor of the working class, that is, by requiring one class of people to sell their labor as a commodity to another class to produce values.
What is the result of this system? That workers are “alienated” from their labor, meaning from much of their waking life, constantly required to produce more and more with an ever-precarious access to the means of subsistence.
Via Jacobin.
Zack, 35, says: “I got pretty disillusioned after I found myself consistently matching with anti-Zionists, even when I set it to ‘Jewish only’.”
Zack put an Israeli flag emoji on his profile to rectify the situation. “It’s annoying because the more creative personalities I normally go for tend to be more anti-Israel.” Now he’s having fewer awkward conversations about the conflict, but the people he’s matching with are “less interesting”.
Source: Hinge and Tinder are swamped with anti-Zionism, say Jewish singles - The Jewish Chronicle
The agenda now is all-Israeli: There is no one else but us. Only our disasters, our suffering, our sacrifices – and everything else can burn for all we care.
We have become as monsters. Not only in our actions, but above all in our apathy.
WHERE'S DADDY?
We have AI that can decide who is a terrorist and then track their every movement so we can wait until they're home to drop a bomb on their whole family.
But the 3 successive precision air strikes on #WCK aid workers coordinating with and following route instructions from the IDF was just a 'tragic mistake' because it was night time.
Back cover image of the dec 1975 issue of “issues in radical therapy” (via danielle carr on Twitter.)
After more than three weeks of Israel’s “targeted” bombing of Hamas in Gaza, Starmer claims that a ceasefire now “would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capabilities to carry out the sort of attack we saw on October 7.”
Finally got around to watching Our Friends In The North.
‘None of the issues the show mines so brilliantly – from inequality, deindustrialisation and the parlous state of Britain’s housing to homelessness and the corruption of our public officials – have gone away.’
‘…according to research by the London Tenants Federation, we are demolishing more social housing than we are building. Economics makes that inevitable.’
‘All we see is broken homes here and poverty,
‘Corrupt government officials, lies and atrocities,
‘How they talking on what’s threatening the economy,
‘Knocking down communities to re-up on properties.’
Little Simz - Introvert
Dreaming of:
a future in which ordinary people would be valued and able to live happily, safely, cooperatively and with dignity.
Currently reading: The Death of the Left by Simon Winlow 📚
KIDS' STUFF
I have successfully replicated this study at home, and can attest to its reliability and validity.
An ethnographic study in Madrid charted the gradual “take over” by the child (accoutrements like toys, furniture, and special foods, and the removal of “dangerous” or breakable items) of the domicile, leaving less and less “adult” territory (Poveda et al. 2012).'
The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings by David F. Lancy 📚
…trying to capture the essence of your life in a form that can be experienced by another, is one of the most interesting technological challenges in the world.
“Mum, passing me a small parcel wrapped in Xmas paper: ‘I didn’t get you anything for Xmas.’
Me: ‘What’s this then?’
Mum: ‘Oh, just socks.'”
LOUDER THAN WORDS
We are all consciously or unconsciously re-enacting previous unresolved experiences of loss, or absence, of relationships. These disappointments evoke in us resentment and anger, which control us until we can forgive - to see the victim in the perpetrator.
We remain victims all the while we are unable to forgive, and all the while we are unable to let people into our inner worlds of pain - to protect ourselves from breakdown, but also to protect other people from this part of our experience for fear of what it will do to them, and how they will react to us.
Wife: “I don’t like the words. I don’t like the music. You sound like a hooligan. I couldn’t care less about fucking Jimmy Carter.”
Wife says we should have named our cat Bjork.
Because she’s small, cute and makes funny noises.
Any mention of ‘baboon’ always reminds me of Stephen K Amos’s hilarious skit.