The Quiet Road

Well, Bertie’s finally called the election. Speculation in the media began just after Christmas and had reached fever-pitch by Sunday morning when he paid a visit to Áras an Uachtaráin (the residence of the Irish President) in the Phoenix Park. With very little pomp or ceremony, himself and President Mary McAleese signed the document which legally dissolved the current Dáil. Thus did 166 politicians lose their jobs and a three week election campaign which will culminate in a national election on Thursday May 24th got underway.

I’ve never really paid close attention to Irish politics before. Which isn’t very surprising given that I haven’t lived here since I was a child. When I lived in the UK, I paid attention to UK politics… voting for Ken in the London mayoral elections and voting Green once and spoiling my ballot in two nationals. When I was living in the States, I followed the 1998 Congressional elections quite closely despite not having a vote (and enjoyed seeing several states pass medical marijuana propositions). I didn’t engage with Greek politics when I lived there; the fact that I didn’t speak the language was probably the biggest obstacle. But I recall being very impressed by the huge political rallies that still occur, and the willingness of Greeks to express their political will through massive demonstrations that occasionally look like they may involve storming parliament (few things warm the heart like a good storming of parliament). Then again, when I first moved to Greece the country had not long ago spent a spell as a military dictatorship. People who’ve recently seen tanks on the streets tend to be more actively engaged than those who haven’t. It’s just one of those things.

Anyways, the Irish elections promise to be genuinely quite intriguing as the outcome seems up in the air right now (unlike recent elections in the UK, for instance, which were always a foregone conclusion). The electoral system is proportional representation by means of the Single Transferable Vote. And no, I haven’t the faintest idea what that means. Well, I understand the principle. It’s designed to provide a parliament that as far as possible literally represents the voting intentions of the people. So if 10% of the people vote for Party X, roughly 10% of the TDs should be from Party X. Of course, because not every constituency has exactly the same population, you’ll never get a Dáil that perfectly represents the popular vote. Nonetheless, it achieves a far closer mirror of the intentions of the nation than First Past The Post systems (like the UK, where smaller parties can command 5% or 8% of the popular vote and not have any national representation whatsoever).

Of course, STV has plenty of downsides too. It rarely results in an overall majority for one single party. My own personal view is that this is actually a good thing. However, in practical terms, nations that wish to have an active foreign policy (such as the United States, Russia and the UK to name but three) would probably find such a policy difficult to navigate alongside the internal politics of a coalition government. In fact, this constitutes an excellent argument in favour of coalition governments… it makes starting wars a little more difficult.

That said, aggressive foreign policies aren’t the only argument in favour of stable and coherent government. Is it really helpful for the people running your public services to have different ideas about the best way to do it? Large projects can easily get bogged down if there’s not a single clear vision to guide them. On top of that, what do we want our politicians spending their time on…? Working on the best way to run public services, or working on the internal politics of a shaky coalition?

OK, fair enough, maybe public services would work a lot better if our dozy politicians just left them alone and dedicated themselves to spewing meaningless media sound-bites. Still, it’s simplistic to insist that PR systems are automatically “better” just because they closer reflect the popular vote. Indeed, if you’re like me and have serious problems with representative democracy in the first place, then just making it more representative isn’t necessarily making it any better.

See, on balance… I’d estimate that of all the people I’ve encountered in my life, I’d trust less than 50% of them to take care of a pet for a week. So I’m reluctant to live under a government they’ve chosen. Which isn’t to say that people are mad, bad or arseholes in general. Merely that most of us haven’t the faintest idea what’s in our best interest. It’s possible to prove this on an etch-a-sketch. And while I’m willing to re-evaluate this belief based upon any argument you may present, I’ll only consider it when almost 20% of all deaths in this country are no longer directly attributable to cigarette smoking. A fifth of us are committing slow painful suicide while simultaneously enriching those who got us hooked on cancer sticks in the first place. Let’s face it, as a group, we’re not demonstrating an ability to exercise good judgement there.

But whatever. This isn’t a post about my own preferred system of governance (modified anarcho-syndicalism with a dash of green and a generous dollop of whimsy). Just a warning that over the next three weeks I’ll probably write a post or two analysing the approaching election. I’ll do a bit of research on the STV system and explain how it works. I’ll discuss the various parties and what they have to offer (the phrase “rapacious capitalism” may well crop up). And I’ll tell you about the issues that — say the media — people are planning to vote on (the health system apparently tops the agenda). Think of it as a crash-course in Irish politics.

As much for me as you, dear reader.

Right. Well first up I’ve just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Previous upgrades have gone very smoothly, but this one was a bit of a nightmare (there was a brief moment when I thought the database backup hadn’t gone to plan and I’d lost all the comments… quite stressful really). Anyways, I think it’s sorted now, but I’d obviously be grateful if you let me know of any bugs or problems that you notice.

You shouldn’t see any changes on the site (all the interesting stuff is behind the scenes) and my initial impression of the upgrade isn’t all that favourable to be honest… it’s all well and good, more responsive, bits and pieces of AJAX here and there and what have you, but the ‘HTML’ button has disappeared from the rich text editor. This used to allow a separate window to be opened into which you could type raw HTML (paragraph tags and all). They’ve now substituted that for a new “code view” that’s like some bastardised halfway house between rich text editing and HTML. Some tags show up, but others don’t. Very silly and very very annoying. All the same, it would now be a serious pain in the arse to downgrade, so I’ll soldier on for a few days and see if I get used to the new editor. If not, I’ll take on that arse pain as a learning experience.

There also seem to be some quite serious problems with the various pop-ups within the rich text editor (link and image inserts and the like). Leastways in Firefox. So yeah, I’d think long and hard about upgrading past version 2.0.x if I were you. This new 2.1.x malarkey seems like a step backwards to me (the running autosave is the reason I upgraded, and should cut down on posts lost to browser crashes, but I don’t know if it outweighs the problems). But hey, maybe it’ll grow on me.

And now to cast an eye over the headlines…

Blair’s delight

First up is the fascinating news (fascinating if you’re a fricking idiot that is) that “Friends of Prince Harry have denied reports that he will quit the Army if he is not allowed to serve in Iraq.” In fact I only read the story to snigger at the obligatory quote claiming that it’s “important that Harry [is] treated as much as possible like an ordinary soldier”. All the contradictions of royalty rolled into one tiny phrase. He must treated as an ordinary soldier… an ordinary person. But of course, he isn’t. He’s royal. I still find it mind-boggling that any modern nation can tolerate royalty. What a load of bollocks.

But the story contained an unexpected treat. A statement from Tony Blair that paints him as an even more monstrously detached and absurd figure than I’d thought possible. Apparently the lunatic has revealed to journalists that he’d be “delighted” if one of his kids wanted to serve in Iraq. Er… what!? I’m not a parent, but I’m fairly certain that you’d have to be some kind of freak to be “delighted” that a child of yours wanted to significantly increase their risk of having their limbs blown off by a roadside bomb. I can — just about — understand a parent who claims to be “proud” that their child donned a uniform and went to a place where people were willing to kill themselves in order to hurt people wearing that uniform.

But delighted? For feck’s sake, what an idiotic remark!

But did he leave a tip?

Via Gyrus comes the unsettling news that diners in a London restaurant were recently subjected to a display of self-mutilation that indicates either a very serious mental illness or an equally serious dedication to Flanaganesque performance art. I suspect the former.

The poor guy wandered into a Zizzi pizza restaurant, grabbed a knife from the kitchen and proceeded to stab himself repeatedly with it. He also cut off his penis (which surgeons were later unable to reattach).

Now, I’ve been in some very dark places in my life. Which is OK. It makes the brighter places that much better. I can empathise with most self-destructive behaviour because, knowing how dark the world can be, I understand those who seek extreme ways to escape that darkness. My closest friend for many years commit suicide during the 90s and although it was a terrible and traumatic time for all those who knew him, and despite the fact that I was angry with him for a long time afterwards, I nonetheless understood his action even while disagreeing with it.

But to commit a public act of such extreme self-mutilation goes far beyond mere self-hate. It reveals a multi-layered psychosis, producing an act of aggression aimed as much at the involuntary witnesses as at the psychotic himself. It’s a very deliberate act of destruction against The Other. And in this case The Other is everyone. Including The Self. Oppositional dualism has a lot to answer for.

Colony Collapse Disorder and misattributed quotes

Some time ago I read an article on the BBC news website which opens with the statement that “All over America, beekeepers are opening up their hives in preparation for the spring pollination season, only to find that their bees are dead or have disappeared.” Now this phenomenon appears to have crossed the Atlantic and beekeepers in Somerset are worried that it has hit them.

I’ve read several theories as to why this could be happening (from climate change to an as-yet unidentified chemical pollutant to mobile phone masts to GM pollen) but whatever the reason, it’s very very bad news. As every schoolchild is aware, bees are a very important (if not the most important) mechanism for pollinating plants. And not just pretty flowers… our food-crops are largely bee-pollinated. It’s this fact that (via David Byrne) led Einstein to remark…

If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.

It’s certainly a scary thought. But, after a bit of digging, it appears that actually it wasn’t Einstein’s. There’s no record of him saying anything of the sort, and indeed the more I analyse the quote, the less it sounds like Einstein. He often spoke about the apparent unpredictability of complex systems (unpredictable not because of any lack of causality, but because the mechanisms of causality in most complex systems are so many and often so convoluted as to make prediction impossible in practice) and would be unlikely to make such a simplistic series of links as can be found in the second sentence of that quote.

He was also certainly smart enough to know that bees are not the only mechanism of pollination.

But that doesn’t make the massive decrease in the bee population any less worrying. As I mentioned; the vast majority of our food crops are indeed pollinated by bees and anything that significantly reduces their numbers will almost certainly result in a significant reduction in crop yields.

My own theory doesn’t lay the blame on any single factor. It’s my honest belief that human industry is degrading the ability of our planet to sustain life in a myriad of ways. A massive confluence of causes — GM crops, mobile phone masts, climate change and chemical pollutants (plus about a thousand others) — are having unpredictable effects. And I doubt very many of those effects are going to be welcome.

Just over a week ago, fifteen British service personnel were captured by the Iranian navy. Iran claims the British soldiers were half a kilometre inside Iranian territory and — according to the recording function on their GPS navigation — had regularly entered Iranian waters as part of their patrols. The captured soldiers confirm this version of events. Of course, the British response is “you’re fooling nobody, Mahmoud”. The troops were in Iraqi waters, goes the British argument, and are now being fed scripted lines to speak on-camera by the dastardly Iranians!

Clearly there’s only a handful of people who know the truth, and neither you nor I, dear reader, will ever be among them. Long after these troops are released (as certainly they will be) the UK will claim they did nothing wrong and Iran will claim they illegally entered their territory. So that particular fact is unlikely to ever be resolved. Mind you, it’s worth pointing out that as far as Iran is concerned, US/UK troops in Iraqi territory constitute an illegal army of occupation. Nonetheless, the incident has highlighted some intriguing differences in the manner in which Iran has treated these soldiers and how the US/UK coalition treats captured “enemy combatants”.

There are those who will dismiss the comparison. We’re not at war with Iran, they’ll point out, so British troops aren’t “enemy combatants” as far as Iran should be concerned. Which would be a good point if it wasn’t such bullshit. Under Tony Blair, the British military has been transformed into an extension of U.S. foreign policy. And it’s not just any U.S. administration we’re talking about. It’s the regime of George W. Bush; a man who announced that Iran was part of an axis of evil and then bombed the hell out of its neighbours to the east (Afghanistan) and to the west (Iraq). According to one estimate, between 2 and 3 percent of the Iraqi population has died violently since the US/UK launched their invasion.

If China openly announced that it considered the UK to be “evil” and then launched massive bombing campaigns and invasions of France and Ireland, followed up by routine patrols right along the edge of British waters while all the time urging the rest of the world to impose crippling sanctions against Britain as response to their nuclear programme; then I submit to you that any captured Chinese military personnel would be treated as ‘the enemy’.

I also submit to you, based upon the recent track-record of Britain and the United States, that the captured Chinese would receive far worse treatment than the British soldiers have so far received in Iran.

We do not, of course, know how the British personnel have been treated while the cameras have been turned off. We don’t know whether they’ve been stripped naked except for the bags over their heads and then forced to simulate sex with one another. We don’t know whether they’ve had to huddle naked in the corner of a tiny cell while Iranian soldiers held massive snarling dogs just inches away. We don’t know whether they’ve had electric wires held to their genitals or were piled high so that Iranian guards could laugh at them and take souvenir snaps.

Conversely, I suppose you could argue that we only saw the worst of Abu Ghraib. We didn’t see the detainees sitting around in comfy chairs, sharing a cigarette and a joke, before being fed good meals and asked nicely to apologise for whatever wrongs they were accused of. I wonder why.

Iran has thus far resisted the temptation to make the captured soldiers “disappear” into a shadowy system of unofficial prisons and rendition flights. They haven’t dumped them into an illegal and immoral prison camp in Cuba to rot without representation. They haven’t decided to hold them for years without charge.

Incidentally, did anyone else notice this report from a couple of weeks ago… Escape from UK-run prison in Iraq…? There’s a line in the report, about halfway in, that completely overshadows the relatively mundane story in the headline… A security source told the agency that the prisoners had been held without charge for the past two years. It seems that Britain’s reluctance to criticise Guantanamo Bay too loudly is now explained… the British government is running one or more similar institutions itself. And why is it that we only hear about Britain locking people up for years without charge when the prisoners stage an escape?

If Iran treated these prisoners the way Britain and America treat enemy prisoners, we wouldn’t have heard about them once they’d been captured. They’d have disappeared into some anonymous camp to be degraded, terrorised and tortured. Within a couple of years, some of them may have been driven to suicide. An act that the Iranians would describe as “a good PR move“.

Forgive this trivial rant, but I really hate the use of the word “forums” as the plural of forum. I mean, come on folks, “fora” is a great word! Yet you get weird looks for using it, as though celebrating the richness, beauty and plain weirdness of language was something to look down upon. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who strives to preserve anachronism for its own sake, but replacing something pleasing and a little unusual with something dull and familiar seems to me an entirely legitimate thing to oppose (leastways during the replacement process… afterwards what’s the point? You just get the weird looks). There are those, of course, who defend the word “forums” for those very reasons… it’s familiar, it’s easy, it’s uncomplicated, they say.

Bah! May as well be O’Brien extolling the virtues of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

And the principles of Newspeak are one hundred percent applicable in the forums / fora case. By stripping ‘fora’ from our language, we have narrowed, very slightly, the paths tread by our consciousness. Whenever I heard or used the word “fora” it sparked several instantaneous thought-images every single time. The only word like it that we hear from time to time is “flora”. Which, to me anyway, calls to mind the phrase ‘flora and fauna’. On top of that, the slight oddness of the word forces my mind to consider it as a word. I’m immediately thinking about language itself and its lovely quirks. I’m also transported momentarily to Christian Brothers Latin classes and then further back to ancient Rome.

This all happens in an instant of course, and passes as I hear or use the next words. But for that instant there’s a myriad possibilities to be explored and considered. That doesn’t happen when I read or use the word “forums”. I don’t think of flowers, or of the magnificence of language, or of ancient Rome. All of which – of course – is explained at the end of Orwell’s novel…

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted for once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words […] Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

George Orwell – The Principles of Newspeak

All the same, exposure to the internet has dulled my objection to “forums”. Indeed, now I find myself using it. Occasionally with a slight sense of regret… and the regret will itself call to mind an echo of those pleasing thought-images. But usually just as a matter of routine. Those moments of regret will become fewer and eventually disappear altogether. Because once a word like “forums” has become the de facto standard, attempting to resist it by using the now anachronistic “fora” just makes you look a bit of a twit.

So this is not a call for a return of “fora”. Instead it’s a warning, lest this tendency to boil the English language down to some homogeneous convenient mulch continue further. Resist it, dear reader.

No, not a new buddy-cop movie starring Jim Belushi and Chevy Chase. Instead it’s two blog memes. Well, not quite. Well, kind of. They both arrive from Justin over at Chicken Yoghurt who — despite his protestations — appears to enjoy blog memes as much as any 14-year-old Livejournalist. The fact that I’m running with these memes does not, of course, make any similar comment about me.

Honest.

First up, nice chap that he is, Justin has bestowed a ‘thogger‘ upon me. This means — apparently — that I write a “thought-provoking” blog. Which is about as much as any blogger can ask for. I don’t make any such claims about myself (at least not in public), but Justin’s is a consistently excellent political blog that has certainly got me thinking on plenty of occasions. So, given the source, I shall gracefully accept the award. Apparently it now falls upon me to pass on the award, and nominate five blogs that I consider thought-provoking in some way. Chicken Yoghurt’s already got one, so I’ll omit him from my official list.

• Bristling Badger.
• Dreamflesh.
• Biroco Journal.
• Smokewriting.
• David Byrne’s Journal.

If you can’t find something to provoke thought via each of those links, then I humbly suggest that you may well be incapable of it in the first place. Perhaps you’d be better off watching TV.

It was four years ago today…

Justin follows up that list with another (originally kicked off over at Bloggerheads). It is — almost unbelievably — the fourth anniversary of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Actually it’s the fourth anniversary of the eve of war (Jeff Wayne, where are you now?) and Justin was wondering: “what did you post on 20 March, 2003? (Or on as near to the day as possible)… Doesn’t have to be a blog entry; it could easily be in usenet or in a forum.”

Using the Way Back Machine, I discovered that the first entry on my old blog wasn’t until early May 2003, and I can’t seem to get the site to drag up the blog from norlonto.net, where I posted prior to that. But I did discover — on the U-Know! web forum — a post discussing the run up to the Iraq war and why I felt that the Peace Movement in the west was wrong-headed in its approach, though right in its aims.

And I still feel the same. My essential point was that rather than expending time and energy protesting against the war, it would be far more effective to focus that same effort on eliminating the demand for those resources over which wars are fought. I know there are many who believe that the Iraq war was about WMD or humanitarian intervention to bring about regime-change. I believe it was about oil. And it seems clear to me that reducing our demand for oil would consequently reduce the likelihood of us invading oil-rich nations. This would have a greater practical effect than demanding our politicians stop supplying us with the oil we also demand.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s a vivid image and worth repeating… I recall attending the big anti-war demonstration in London during the run up to the invasion. From hundreds of coaches at Hyde Park, I saw many thousands of protesters disembark carrying “No Blood For Oil” banners. As the samba band struggled to be heard over the idling of so many diesel engines I realised that there was a very serious disconnect at work. People clearly believed — as did I — that the war was about oil. Yet they didn’t seem to grasp the fact that Tony Blair and Dubya Bush weren’t going to personally burn all that oil themselves… that our representatives were responding very directly to the demands of their oil-consuming constituents.

Around the same time, myself and Merrick co-wrote an article to express this.

For me, food miles have become the single biggest factor when I do my weekly shop. They over-ride pretty much all other considerations these days. “Nothing from outside Europe” is the basic rule… broken only very rarely for certain tropical fruit. Usually in a fit of “Goddamn it! Mango is my favourite food! We’re all going to die someday and I’m denying myself my favourite food! It’s right there in front of me, for a price I can afford. I’m surrounded by people buying apples flown in from Chile despite the fact that they’re on a shelf next to some Irish ones and I’m denying myself a single mango. I’m a frakking hair-shirted weirdo! That’s it! I’m buying one!”

And yes, I do use that many exclamation marks when I’m thinking about it.

But by and large I spend time making sure that everything I buy is sourced from as close to me as is possible. I vividly recall standing in the supermarket one afternoon and pointing out to the woman next to me that she was buying Chilean apples rather than Irish ones. I’ll never forget the look of contempt I got… “I’ll buy what I want!” she insisted in brittle tones. There’s a part of me convinced that she now goes out of her way to buy food from the furthest flung corners of the earth just to spite me. She had that kind of look in her eyes and a terrible hiss in her voice.

It’s a little disheartening to say the least; the thought that my watchful attitude towards food miles is now merely balancing out the damage done by saying, “Excuse me, but did you realise that by choosing the Irish apples you’d be doing your part to combat Climate Change?” in as friendly a voice as serious ol’ me is capable.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as “Buy homegrown. Save the planet. Everyone lives happily ever after.” Because nothing’s ever that simple. Well, almost nothing. In fact it’s questionable as to whether it’s even possible any more. Can Europe grow enough food to support its population? According to the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), for example, it most certainly can’t. They claim that Western Europe’s arable land is only capable of carrying approximately a third of our current population at “present lifestyle”. This number increases to two thirds if we reduce our levels of consumption to what OPT describes as a “modest lifestyle”.

You can download the Excel Spreadsheet containing detailed global numbers, but for a brief flavour of OPT’s calculations; with zero food imports, the UK has a ‘present lifestyle’ carrying capacity of less than one third its current population. Belgium and Luxembourg; one tenth. France; a half. Germany; a quarter. Holland; one eighth. And so on.

The only Western European nations that come even close to being able to support their own populations at current levels of consumption are Finland, Ireland and Sweden. If you reduce consumption to modest levels, you can add Norway and Denmark to that list. The implications are clear… unless Europe reduces its population significantly, it will need to continue to import large amounts of food from Africa and elsewhere just to prevent starvation (note: this is even if we restrict our consumption to sensible / modest levels).

And that’s not the end of the story either. Hypothetically, what if Western Europe was suddenly capable of supporting the current population? Would we find ourselves in the “Buy homegrown. Save the planet. Everyone lives happily ever after.” situation? Sadly not. As this post over at worldchanging (via Gyrus) makes clear, Western Europe’s voracious appetite has led to a large number of poorer nations retooling their entire economy to function as an extension of European arable land. Huge areas of Kenya, for instance, are devoted to growing salad vegetables for European tables. If that market disappears, it will result in significant problems for Kenyan farmers.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that’s a good enough reason for us to be flying mange-tout and sugar-snap peas up from the equator. Frankly when you realise that amongst the nations bordering Kenya are three (Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia) which suffer regular devastating famines, the fact that Kenya is growing baby corn for our salads instead of regular corn to prevent local starvation becomes rather sinister. We all know the old cliché that famine is not a result of food shortages, but is instead a consequence of inequitable distribution and political corruption. Nonetheless, how many of us are aware of our own culpability in this inequity when we buy Kenyan vegetables?

God bless the market, eh? We in Europe can currently pay more to a Kenyan farmer to airlift fresh salad on to our table than an Ethiopian can pay the same farmer — his or her neighbour — to put staple food items on to theirs. As Tim Worstall (blogging economist) so eloquently put it, “Making money from customers is what businesses do, it is the very reason for their existence.” Market capitalism ensures that agriculture is a business like any other. It does not exist to feed the hungry, it exists to generate profit. Market economists see this as a good thing.

I don’t, needless to say. But as I’ve already illustrated, there is no easy solution here. Europe simply cannot grow enough food to feed itself. We could reduce our consumption significantly and still not have enough land. That said, I would nonetheless urge Kenyan farmers to restructure their economy, accept the pay cut, and start to feed their neighbours. Our inability to feed ourselves is our problem, and leaving hundreds of thousands of nameless black people to starve half a world away is not an ethical solution to that problem*.

For now, I shall continue to support Irish farmers 100% (OK, 99.9%… I’ll still buy the occasional mango). And as transportation fuel becomes less abundant, driving the price of imported food ever upwards, it will become easier to do so. But Europe will soon need to face up to this problem of how we feed our massive population. And between peak oil and climate change, it seems unlikely that using Africa and South America as our personal gardens will be an option for very much longer.