Yes, but if you stayed ask yourself then how different things would be… Patricia McKenna and the Green Par July 21, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics, The Left.16 comments
One of the tropes of Guardian political sketch writer, Simon Hoggarts is to invert the meaning of a sentence uttered by a politician. Here is an example…
Charles Kennedy made another resounding speech to the Lib Dem conference yesterday. He’s always popping up, resoundingly, perhaps just to remind us that he is still leader and has plenty of resonant things to say.
Yesterday he declared: “We go nowhere if we opt to stand still. Standing still is not an option for me, and I don’t think it is an option for you.”
When I hear resounding stuff like this I mentally reverse it, since it’s a good rule that if the opposite of something is absurd it wasn’t worth saying in the first place. Thus: “Fellow Liberals, it is time to stand still and let the world push past us!
“Ahead lie the challenges of change – great challenges – but none so great that they cannot be ignored. We must not be afraid to rebuff opportunity.
“Siren voices tell us that we should look forward to the future. But we cannot know what the future will bring. Looking to the future is as pointless as basing our policies on tarot cards.
“There are tough choices ahead, and we must look for the easy answers…”
My reverie ended, but Mr Kennedy was still being resonant. “I am not afraid of debate. I invite debate!” (“Frankly, open discussion scares me witless, and I beg you not to rock the boat with your candid opinions!”)
“We have got to be bold. We must be prepared to take risks!” he told them. (“We must proceed cautiously, and tiptoe away from anything that might cause trouble.”)
We could do something similar, I think, with the latest offering of “Former Green Party MEP Patricia McKenna” (TM) on the support of the Green Party for Lisbon II. She argues that…
…the party’s support for the Lisbon Treaty will give the No campaign more credibility.
Now. Suppose for the sake of argument that that one vote had gone the other way. A Green Party member who had intended to vote Yes went down with a food bug, was blocked in traffic on the M50 or whatever. Is it really credible that Patricia McKenna would have said…
… the party’s lack of support for the Lisbon Treaty will give the No campaign less credibility.
And of course, being an intelligent person, she would say no such thing.
Ms McKenna said the support “and backtrack on its long standing campaign for a more democratic EU” would be “more of a hindrance than a help” to the Yes side. “The voters would currently not buy a used car from the Green Party let alone a rejected treaty,” she said.
Well. Yes and no. There’s no doubt a considerable number of people still turned out to vote for the GP candidate at the European elections.
And I think that a GP spokesperson had at least half a point when s/he noted:
“Patricia McKenna left the Green Party some time ago. When she made that decision she lost the right to criticise the internal debates and procedures of an organisation to which she no longer belongs. Perhaps it is time for her to move on and concentrate on her own career,” she said.
But let me reiterate the point I made at the weekend. If she had stayed, well, then… the Green Party would not as an entity be supporting Lisbon II. Does that matter? Not as much as she appears to think it does – either way. But, again, more perhaps than it might seem to on initial consideration.
Some other thoughts. What a small party this turns out to be. Granted their entire membership wasn’t in that room? But even so. Democratic Left was by contrast a giant at over 1,000 members. The Workers’ Party a behemoth at 2,500 or more. And those of you who are members of other somewhat smaller left formations across this land might reasonably consider that increasing to the size of the GP is not really that big an ask.
It’s fascinating the more I think about it that the figures in the GP haven’t shifted substantially since Lisbon I. Again, this was a pool of hardcore euro-scepticism for much of the life of the party, but… even so, if the argument is that the current economic crisis has changed everything and utterly then one might expect to see the figures nudge upwards, and perhaps more than slightly.
I have no idea whether this inertia will translate more widely amongst the electorate. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Lisbon II remained a much closer contest than some have been arguing. McCarthy can’t have helped there.
Still, further thoughts. The Irish Times editorial following the vote argued that:
The Green Party, in its political evolution, is slowly coming to realise that it is best placed to influence policy matters on the issues that concerns it – climate change and environmental conditions – in government. It has come to recognise that the Lisbon Treaty, which increases the European Union’s capacity to handle these issues at international level, provides the best means of implementing those policies.
I wonder. We’ve seen other coalition governments where the smaller party had a much more ‘global’ view of matters and used its influence and strength to push for measures across a range of areas. Granted, as was pointed out to me, in the case of the Progressive Democrats with Fianna Fáil one could argue that this was in ideological terms pushing an open door. And yet, numbers conveyed authority. And the numbers, as we saw with the Progressive Democrats weren’t high.
Actually, this is intriguing as regards government formation in the future, because the minimal ambitions of the GP seem in a way to offer the prospect that coalitions in the future will see much less give and take than was seen in the past. If a party can be boxed off in a specific area that is supposedly its core concern allowing the larger partner to get on with the main business of the day this surely will undercut the appeal of such coalitions. But that is, perhaps, to underestimate the appetite to govern whatever about the policies being pursued.
And, I’m not entirely unaware of the idea that political stability is in and of itself often a good thing in difficult times. That too is a thought that, I’d suspect, figures highly on the part of some in the GP.
Incidentally, perhaps this is a trifle, but it’s simply not accurate as the Irish Times states that.. ‘The party’s decision puts it in line with all other Green parties in Europe on support for the treaty’.
Even the Green Party itself wasn’t quite as conclusive…
For the first time Irish Greens “will campaign in favour of a European treaty, and will join the vast majority of our sister Green parties across Europe in promoting a positive view of EU membership,” said Deirdre de Burca, an Irish government spokeswoman on European Affairs.
It would be interesting to do a survey of the dissenters, would it not?
The Left Archive: “What Happened on the Twelfth?”, Workers Association, 1975, (British and Irish Communist Organisation). July 20, 2009
Posted by irishonlineleftarchive in British and Irish Communist Organisation (BICO), Irish Left Online Document Archive.7 comments
A bit of an oddity this, but worth posting up for the month that is in it. Here is the Workers’ Association (or another branch, so to speak, of the British and Irish Communist Organisation) presenting its analysis of religion as an aspect of the conflict in Ireland in order to contextualise the UWC Strike, of which it states… “…the Strike has shown once and for all that there is no need for that kind of behaviour and that the community is sufficiently well organised, determined and united to resist any attempts to push it around; and that it can do that without indulging in a bloodbath, or mindlessly submitting to a Hitler-type ‘leader’..
In a most interesting analysis of religion on the island and in the process of ruminating about the Glorious Revolution it manages to take a side-swipe at both the Provisional IRA (“… [their] activity resembles the temper tantrum of a child that can’t get away with what it wants”) and the Official IRA (which it describes their ‘notion that the Shankill Rd Protestants are going to ‘rediscover’ their Gaelic heritage and join the struggle against ‘British Imperialism’… as ‘fantasy’).
What is very striking is the sense of aversion to a ‘Catholic Ireland’…which it states ‘because [it] had so little conscious political, economic, religious or intellectual history that the Church was able to get such a grip’.
A couple of interesting asides about the ‘new free state’… ‘which came into existence in 1922…[when Britain] drew up a democratic and secular constitution for it… the result was a democratic republic [!] with a powerful Church working to develop among the people a mentality appropriate to the middle ages (even Connolly, who is held up as the very embodiment of progressive socialism, idealised pre-medieval Gaelic Ireland)’. One suspects Eric Hobsbawm might have something to say about that analysis.BICO 12th
Moon: Some astonishing facts July 20, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Moon, Science.7 comments
WILLIAM REVILLE, Irish Times
Moon Facts: National Geographic News
• How did the moon form? According to the “giant impact” theory, the young Earth had no moon. At some point in Earth’s early history, a rogue planet, larger than Mars, struck the Earth in a great, glancing blow. Instantly, most of the rogue body and a sizable chunk of Earth were vaporized. The cloud rose to above 13,700 miles (22,000 kilometers) altitude, where it condensed into innumerable solid particles that orbited the Earth as they aggregated into ever larger moonlets, which eventually combined to form the moon.
• By measuring the ages of lunar rocks, we know that the moon is about 4.6 billion years old, or about the same age as Earth.
WILLIAM REVILLE, Irish Times
The moon is slowly moving away from Earth. The current distance between the Earth and the moon is 384,000km but it was closer in the past. The moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth at a rate of 4cm per year.
Daytime temperatures on the surface of the moon are about 130 degrees and night time lows reach about minus 110 degrees.
The mass of the moon is about one 80th of the Earth’s mass. Since the force of gravity at the surface of the object is proportional to the object’s mass and size, the force of gravity on the surface of the moon is only one sixth the force on the surface of the Earth. Your weight is the force that gravity exerts on your mass. Your mass remains the same whether you stand on Earth or on the moon, but if you weigh 60kg on Earth, you will weigh only 10kg on the moon. Alan Sheppard hit a golf ball on the moon in 1971 and drove it 400 yards using a makeshift six-iron and encumbered by a heavy space suit.
The gravity on the moon isn’t strong enough to hold an atmosphere and the Moon’s atmosphere is very tenuous and insignificant compared to Earth’s. The sky always looks dark from the moon because there is no atmosphere to scatter light. Also, the moon is always silent as sound-waves travel through air.
Moon Facts: National Geographic News
• The distance between the Earth and its moon averages about 238,900 miles (384,000 kilometers). The diameter of the moon is 2,160 miles (3,476 kilometers). The moon’s mass—the amount of material that makes up the moon—is about one-eightieth of the Earth’s mass.
• Because the force of gravity at the surface of an object is the result of the object’s mass and size, the surface gravity of the moon is only one-sixth that of the Earth. The force gravity exerts on a person determines the person’s weight. Even though your mass would be the same on Earth and the moon, if you weigh 132 pounds (60 kilograms) on Earth, you would weight about 22 pounds (10 kilograms) on the moon.
WILLIAM REVILLE, Irish Times
The moon takes the same time to orbit the Earth as it takes to rotate once on its own axis (27.3 days, approximately). This synchronisation causes the moon to always show the same face to the Earth. In other words, one hemisphere of the moon always faces Earth and the other (the “dark side of the moon”) always faces away.
Moon Facts: National Geographic News
• The rotation of the moon—the time it takes to spin once around on its own axis—takes the same amount of time as the moon takes to complete one orbit of the Earth, about 27.3 days. This means the moon’s rotation is synchronized in a way that causes the moon to show the same face to the Earth at all times. One hemisphere always faces us, while the other always faces away. The lunar far side (aka the dark side) has been photographed only from spacecraft.
WILLIAM REVILLE, Irish Times
We see the moon because it reflects light from the sun. The moon shape we see changes in a repeating cycle because the amount of the moon that is illuminated varies depending on its position relative to the Earth and the sun. We see a full moon when the moon is directly in front of us and the sun is directly behind us, illuminating a full hemisphere of the moon.
Moon Facts: National Geographic News
• The shape of the moon appears to change in a repeating cycle when viewed from the Earth because the amount of illuminated moon we see varies, depending on the moon’s position in relation to the Earth and the sun. We see the full moon when the sun is directly behind us, illuminating a full hemisphere of the moon when it is directly in front of us. The new moon, when the moon is darkened, occurs when the moon is almost directly between Earth and the sun—the sun’s light illuminates only the far side of the moon (the side we can’t see from Earth).
WILLIAM REVILLE, Irish Times
We see no moon when it is directly between the Earth and the sun – the sun now illuminates only the side of the moon we cannot see from Earth. Paradoxically, we call no moon the “new” moon.
The moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth is the main cause of ocean tides rising and falling. The Earth’s oceans display two bulges of water: one where the oceans face the moon and the pull is strongest; and the other where the oceans face away from the moon and the pull is weakest. Both bulges represent high tides.
Moon Facts: National Geographic News
• The moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth is the main cause of the rise and fall of ocean tides. The moon’s gravitational pull causes two bulges of water on the Earth’s oceans—one where ocean waters face the moon and the pull is strongest and one where ocean waters face away from the moon and the pull is weakest. Both bulges cause high tides. These are high tides. As the Earth rotates, the bulges move around it, one always facing the moon, the other directly opposite. The combined forces of gravity, the Earth’s rotation, and other factors usually cause two high tides and two low tides each day.
WILLIAM REVILLE, Irish Times
The moon is the only extraterrestrial object to have been visited by humans. The Soviet Union made the early running in modern investigations of the moon. Luna 2 was the first artificial object to impact the lunar surface in 1959. Luna 3 sent back pictures of the moon in 1959. Luna 9 was the first spacecraft to soft land on the moon in 1966. The first human to walk on the moon was Neil Armstrong on July 21st, 1969, on the Apollo 11 mission. Only 12 people have ever stepped onto the surface of the moon.
# The first space craft to send back pictures from the moon was Luna 3 (built by the Soviet Union) in October 1959.
Or…
The moon is the only extraterrestrial object to have been visited by humans. American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first. They landed on the moon on July 20, 1969.
WILLIAM REVILLE, Irish Times
We have all amused children by pointing out the “man in the moon”, but there really is a man on the moon since 1999 – or at least his ashes are there. Dr Eugene Shoemaker, a geologist, educated the Apollo astronauts about craters.
One of his dreams was to fly a space mission but he never made it because of medical problems. After he died, his ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft, which was crash-landed in a moon crater on July 31st, 1999.
The official purpose of the mission was to discover if there was water on the moon, but it also fulfilled Dr Shoemaker’s dream.
We all know there was a man on the moon, but did you know that there is one who stayed there? Dr. Eugene Shoemaker, a Geological Surveyor, who educated the Apollo mission astronauts about craters, never made it into space himself, but it had always been one of his dreams. He was rejected as an astronaut because of medical problems. After he died, his ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft on January 6, 1999, which was crashed into a crater on the moon on July 31, 1999. The mission was to discover if there was water on the moon at the time, but it also served to fulfill Dr Shoemaker’s last wish.
Amazing stuff. Really. Amazing.
Moon: It’s scary out there July 19, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, Moon, Science Fiction, Television Shows, Uncategorized.12 comments
Well, as noted by Craig, this looks at least a little bit impressive.
I’ve got to admit I’m a sucker for anything with model work instead of CGI. I’ll watch old episodes of Space:1999 or UFO to see the vehicles the future was meant to bring us. That it didn’t remains something of a disappointment. So the sight of those faux-2001 styled moon rovers, all chunky angles, strong sans serif typefaces on interiors and exteriors is a joy. This is the future as conceived in 1970 or so and carried through to films like Silent Running.
Or indeed Space:1999.
I’ve already mentioned how, as a kid, I was fascinated by this book. which also had something of that. And the model work was a large part of it. Anderson, Derek Meddings and others through their creations seemed to open a door to the future. This was what it would be like. The very weight of those models seemed to give them a three dimensional aspect, a reality as it were, that computer generated imagery couldn’t. The sheen of CGI, while often in its own terms fascinating, just isn’t quite there. Even now.
Now granted, some of this presented a very pristine vision of the future. But that of Anderson wasn’t, or at least wasn’t entirely. The vehicles in UFO could be grubby, their sides scored by rocket exhausts and such like.
That thought in mind I was looking up some of that on YouTube recently and came across both the UFO opening credits and the end titles.
Here’s the opening credits, all 1970s poppy excess as if it were the Avengers.
And here, by way of contrast, are the end titles.
There’s something undeniably eerie about the way the camera pulls back from the Earth with that score, by Barry Gray, in the background. It’s sort of the flip side of 2001. Whatever is out there may not be pleasant at all.
As a commenter said on YouTube:
What a contrast with the jolly and forthright “Lets go get ‘em!” opening theme. When I was a kid watching this show the end theme seemed to say “we don’t stand a chance gainst the aliens”.
We don’t stand a chance. Yep.
An oddity though. Is that the Moon behind the Earth, and if so then what precisely is that planet or moon that the camera finally reveals?
History Ireland issue on 1969 July 19, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics, Northern Ireland, The Left.23 comments
A brief mention of the new issue of History Ireland which deals directly with 1969 under the title “1969: the North erupts”. Brian Hanley who has contributed a piece on the Cedar Lounge Revolution earlier this year introduces the issue which I suspect will be of interest to everyone who visits here and particularly those interested in the Left Archive.
A few quotes from the magazine:
How the crisis unfolded 1969
Towards the end of 1968 Northern Ireland seemed to have pulled back from the brink. In response to pressure from the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and from the Labour government in Westminster, and in spite of opposition from within his own cabinet, Prime Minister Terence O’Neill announced a reform package. Buoyed up by the positive response to his ‘Ulster at the crossroads’ speech of 9 December, he sacked his hard-line home affairs minister, William Craig, two days later. But within days of the New Year, the Belfast to Derry People’s Democracy march, and the violent loyalist response to it (particularly at Burntollet), had polarised opinion even more sharply. Gordon Gillespie takes the story up to the British general election of June 1970.
Getting their retaliation in first: 1969 and the re-emergence of paramilitary loyalism
Ian S. Wood outlines how a reconstituted Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) re-emerged in Northern Ireland well ahead of August 1969 and played a key role in the events of that year.
‘I Ran Away’? The IRA and 1969
Was the IRA really as weak and inactive in the North in August 1969 as many accounts have later claimed? Brian Hanley looks at the evidence.
Jack Lynch and the defence of democracy in Ireland, August 1969-June 1970
Dermot Keogh assesses the performance of Taoiseach Jack Lynch in response to the August 1969 crisis.
‘No longer stand[ing idly] by’? Irish army contingency plans, 1969–70
What if the British army hadn’t intervened in Derry on 14 August 1969 and the B-Specials had inflicted a critical level of civilian casualties? And if Jack Lynch had ordered Irish troops to go in, how prepared were they? Edward Longwill assesses the evidence.
New light on the arms crisis
When opposition leader Liam Cosgrave informed Taoiseach Jack Lynch on 5 May 1970 of efforts by two of his ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, and others to import arms, Lynch claimed that he had only gotten wind of the plot weeks previously; others have suggested that he knew for months. But what if someone had put the information into the public domain much earlier? Rumours about guns and where they came from were rife in the autumn of 1969. Most of this was merely pub talk, but John Devine, public relations officer (PRO) of the Irish Labour Party, was concerned enough to find out for himself. Niamh Puirséil looks at the report he drew up in October 1969.
Thompson submachine-gun
This summer will see the release of a remake of Public Enemy, starring Johnny Depp as the charismatic bank robber John Dillinger, who will always be associated with the Thompson submachine-gun, immortalised in countless other gangster movies. Lar Joye outlines the less well-known story of the Thompson in Ireland, including in Belfast in August 1969.
‘One remarkable fact’: why most of Belfast remained at peace
The images that have come to dominate our understanding of August 1969 in Belfast are those of families and neighbours hurriedly gathering together their life’s possessions as they abandoned their homes; burnt-out houses; street rioting and violence; and a variety of hastily constructed barricades. But, as Liam Kelly explains, there was another side to the story.
Peace walls: ‘a temporary measure’
Jonathon Byrne traces the evolution of the most enduring architectural legacy of the Troubles.
‘Fidel Castro in a miniskirt’: Bernadette Devlin’s first US tour
Without a passport or a plan, Bernadette Devlin arrived to a press conference at New York’s Kennedy Airport straight from the ‘Battle of the Bogside’ in August 1969 with the goal of raising $1 million in aid for its victims. Tara Keenan-Thompson takes up the story.
‘The blind leading the blind’? London’s response to the 1969 crisis
In April 1969 Denis Healey told the British cabinet that they knew little about Northern Ireland, and that if they got more deeply involved they would be ‘the blind leading the blind’. But how ignorant can British politicians really have been, asks Paul Bew?
It’s an high-powered array of historians and historical research. My copy hasn’t arrived yet, but once it does I’ll give a few thoughts of my own on individual articles.
Just to note that while the CLR proper may be a bit quieter during August the Left Archive will have almost exclusively August 1969 related material each week which we hope will be of interest.
Yes, well… There’s a surprise. The Green Party backs Lisbon II. July 19, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.10 comments
You’ve got to wonder at the strategic savvy of some of the Green Party dissidents, because as I raised previously, had they stayed within the party they could potentially have prevented the bare majority vote for backing Lisbon. Just one or two. That’s all it would have taken and that would have taken the Green Party officially off the board as an entity. Of course, as with last time individual Green Party members – and politicians – would have had the right to campaign for Lisbon II. But… the almost seamless political continuity on the pro-Lisbon side in terms of parties represented in the Dáil (and with the obvious exception of SF) would have been interrupted and in a rather embarrassing fashion given the position of the GP in government.
So yes. I do wonder about the strategic savvy.
Now, personally this is okay news. I’m most likely still going to vote Yes although the McCarthy Report is trying me sorely. Sorely enough for my choice no longer to be a near-foregone conclusion. But the almost complete uniformity of opinion doesn’t, oddly, add to my liking for the measure.
Still, I think this is interesting not merely as regards the Green Party but far from conclusive proof that the vote will be pro-Lisbon II. Either way it would be useful to have some indication as to what way the wind is blowing through some other polling data (and yes, to date the polls have indicated a decisive shift to the pro-Lisbon camp, but who knows how the events of the past week or two have affected that).
That said I think the government parties, and indeed almost all the opposition, should be rather careful from here on out. The publishing of the McCarthy Report at this point in time may have seemed like a coup, in terms of not having to deal with the direct fall-out in the Dáil. But, as soon as the Dáil returns that debate will be held and all those tricky little proposals in it will have had the rest of the Summer to ferment to a mix we can simply not predict the power of. It may be nothing, flat and lifeless, or it may be quite something packing a punch. We’ll see. But. No room for complacency there.
And note that the farmers protests are already up and running…
And it’s hard to take much comfort from the following:
Questioned about the Programme for Government negotiations, Mr Gormley said while delegates had not laid down “red-lines” on particular issues, “there were concerns expressed about a number of areas”.
I wouldn’t question the sincerity of his stance, merely the efficacy given the overall performance to date.
In particular, the Greens will demand that a Climate Change Bill is passed by the Oireachtas by the end of the year, which could have major impacts on everything from transport to housing policies.
I’ve said it before. That may be the central pillar of their programme and the ultimate justification of their participation in government. Neither of those is a small thing, but the world might just be passing them by on the issue. As ever, it’s the economy.
Oh yeah, and one further chance for mischief presents itself to the GP…
Meanwhile, it emerged that the result of negotiations on the Programme for Government deal with Fianna Fáil will have to be put to another delegate conference in October – and, again, it will require a two-thirds majority to pass.
I’m not betting they’ll vote it down.
Moon: Fiction July 18, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, Moon.4 comments
Okay, for the week that’s in it I’ll offer up a rag bag of Moon related material. And to start things off, here’s a link to a short story.
I’m a sort of fan of British SF writer Stephen Baxter. Never quite got his far future stuff, bar the Destiny’s Children Trilogy (or is it a quadrilogy given an extra volume of short stories). But I’m very partial to his alternate NASA Trilogy as exemplified in Voyage, a book whose plot directly links into where NASA could have gone during and after the Moon landings. One aspect of that that has always remained with me was the concept of Moonlab, an orbiting station not dissimilar to Skylab which would be positioned around the Moon as a sort of waystation. It was vaguely proposed, but clearly not implemented during the Apollo and post-Apollo programme.
Here on the rather fine Infinity Plus SF, Fantasy and Horror website, sadly defunct in terms of publishing any new material but still available to browse, is a short story from Baxter which neatly encapsulates his ability to marry hard SF with something quite a bit more exotic. One could kindly say that he’s not so great on characterisation (indeed for those of you who recall my post from last Summer dealing with his novel Flood, here’s a good discussion on UK SF magazine website, Torque Control, on just that aspect of that book by other contemporary SF writers). I’m particularly taken by his description of a British spaceship… but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
In a way one of the most curious aspects of SF in the late 1960s and after is the way that it almost deliberately appeared to avert its eyes from the nuts and bolts of the space programme. Instead, and this is far from a criticism, large tranches of it dealt with emotion and psychology. Granted this also came on foot of considerable cultural ferment across many areas other than technology – so perhaps it was inevitable that there would be considerable change in direction in SF. But yet it still seems strange that the sort of approach that Baxter, and others, took was eschewed for so long. And I’m not talking so much about the sort of privatised spaceflight novels that we saw in the 70s, 80s and 90s, but a concentration on what NASA actually did, or where it could have gone, or what might otherwise have happened. To put it another way a fiction grounded in the reality but linking into parallel possibilities. Perhaps the reality of the programme was in and of itself too great and it required time to pass again for the achievements typified by the moon landings to once more gain a lustre that somehow their actuality lost during that period.
Central to this is a sort of pessimism that runs through all his work, and is quite typical of a certain strand of British SF, a sense that we really are just passing through in a universe that is utterly indifferent to us and that we either rework ourselves to it or we – as a species – vanish. Gloomy, realistic, humbling, you decide.
Anyhow, here it is...
This weekend I’ll be mostly listening to… Poison Idea July 18, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, This Weekend I'll Mostly Be Listening to....add a comment
Ah, Poison Idea. I’ve never been a huge fan of 1980s US hardcore. There are the obvious exceptions, Husker Du, the Adolescents (worthy of a post all their own now I think of it), some Cro-Mags, Bad Brains, a bit of Black Flag and so on, but generally it didn’t float my boat. Take the Dead Kennedy’s. There was always something a little false about them for my taste. Fast, which generally was good, but…too discordant. And although I’m a big fan of 1970s punk it always seemed to me that somehow the baby was thrown out with the bathwater when it crossed over to the US (or is that re-crossed if we argue that the US influence from the MC5 and the Ramones was central, as one suspects it was, in defining the sound of the Sex Pistols et al). So it’s odd that I’d much like Poison Idea, although listening to them I tend to hear more metal than punk in their sound.
I must have heard Feel The Darkness first in 1991. I know I had someone else’s tape of it in the early 1990s (I inherited a bunch of cassettes of said hardcore which I assiduously listened to over a couple of years) and it’s stayed with me since. The standout track was the title song but there are many more on here. Despite their USP of their physical size it always struck me there were much more to them.
And they moved pretty rapidly, well, for guys their size, from the almost ludicrously fast workouts of their early albums to a more considered sound as they matured. I should mention the names of the band members…guitarist Pig Champion, drummer Thee Slayer hippy and second guitarist Aldine Strichnine… although who knows, that latter might be genuine.
Political? Well, really not, other than the politics that develop on that interface between adolescence and the police.
As bands go they were quite a sight. An imposing sight. And very very disciplined, as was demonstrated at a gig they did in Whelans back in the mid-2000s. Actually, that was entertaining not merely for the band but also for a small knot of Dublin punks of the generation just ahead of mine who saw it as their honour bound duty to start a fight with the lead singer. I’m all for nostalgia, but not so much with a bunch of guys in their mid-40s attempting to recreate that very special atmosphere of the 100 Club.
They won’t be back, at least not in that line-up. Pig Champion died in 2006 and although some of the members have reformed periodically under the name it wouldn’t be the same.
Kurt Cobain liked ‘em, Turbonegro covered them, and robbed some of their riffs, Napalm Death did likewise… and here’s the music.
Feel the Darkness… love that bassline. And the organ sound. And the …er…singing.
Here’s a live version…
and this the album version…
Just to get away
Taken by Surprise – a not quite live version…
Area man proclaims the Good News… or… The First Letter of John (the Waters) to the Irish… July 17, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Media and Journalism, Religion.5 comments
I tend to read the media in bits and pieces these days, other than hard news. So opinion pieces often get left ’til later. And what’s this I read from last Friday’s Irish Times but the most fascinating piece from the Blessed John Waters. For under the heading “Core truth of encyclical gets ‘lost in translation’” one will discover that…
IN RECENT days I have read a number of reports about the third encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, all of which treated the pope as they would a philosopher, or political leader, who had delivered a warning to society about the need to mend itself. Inevitably, perhaps, reports of the encyclical’s contents tended to suggest the pope had “attacked” this or that – materialism, capitalism, ideology. Nowhere in the reportage I encountered did the meaning of the title, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), come across.
Okay, not quite clear about his drift…
One problem is that the entity at the heart of the pope’s reflections is not treated as a rational phenomenon in our culture. It is all but impossible, therefore, for anything relating to Christianity to be accurately communicated because the language required to do so has been shunted into a siding. To write or talk about what the pope has actually written, and in a manner faithful to his intentions, is necessarily to invoke a language which immediately signals itself as the language of irrationality and superstition. And anyway, our societies do not recognise anything as true except what is politically and “scientifically” arrived at.
Right so, that’s a little clearer. Waters is arguing that there is a ‘truth’ beyond the scientific (not entirely certain about his ‘political truth’ point…). Well, that’s hardly a novel proposition, although whether it’s accurate is a different matter.
In this culture, the story of Christ may to a degree be respected as vaguely historical, but is regarded somewhat differently to “factual” history. Journalistically, Christ is treated with a mix of scepticism and pluralism-inspired “tolerance”.
Reports concerning Christianity therefore almost always implicitly separate questions of the content of Christian culture from its originating phenomenon. No journalist wants to risk isolation or worse by referring in an implicitly affirmative way to beliefs that are, by common consent in modern society, to be “tolerated” at most.
Everything of Christianity is predicated on the idea that Christ, the Son of God, died to save mankind, rose again on the third day, and continues to exist as a presence in earthly reality. If we do not accept this, why bother reporting what the pope says at all? If we report what the pope says and leave out the bits where he refers to this core meaning of Christianity, how can any of it make sense? In this encyclical, the pope demonstrates his extraordinary clarity on a range of counts. He has interesting things to say about markets and how they might be harnessed to a moral energy in the common good. Markets are not intrinsically bad, he says, but can be made so by ideology. He stresses that charity cannot be separated from justice, which it complements and transcends. It is not sufficient to give someone what is “mine” if I have prevented him having what is rightly “his”.
Which is where we hit problems. Firstly the concept of ‘toleration’. This state remains Catholic in culture, but perhaps not entirely so in observance. It’s hard to think of a state, despite the issue of clerical and institutional abuse, where short of the religion being … er… written into the Constitution (and remember theism is written into the Constitution even if specific mention of Catholicism and the other chosen religions has been removed) and erm… implicitly into our legislation… it could be more congenial to Christianity.
Secondly, is Waters seriously suggesting that we can only understand the Pope’s thoughts if we accept the validity of the underlying propositions. The Pope writes from a given position, but it’s far from beyond the wit of humans to be able to analyse without sharing that position. This, after all, is fundamental to the reality of our isolation from each other as thinking beings.
But I think the greater problem is that Waters seems to believe unquestioningly that the Pope is right, that the fundamentals of Christianity are right and that these are self-evident truths. And his question… ‘why bother reporting what the pope says at all?’ is key to this. There are many reasons why one would report the Pope’s words beyond faith in him and the entity he represents. The societal impact of Catholicism in particular and Christianity in general is so great here that it would be somewhat perverse not to do so. And that’s true far beyond these shores. That that impact is diminishing is beside the point. We still live within constructs that were part shaped by the Church – and note that I use the Church because this is a very specific form of Christianity that Waters champions, one that is Roman Catholic.
Anyhow, Waters continues:
Christians have a responsibility to the common good, and in a global society this means the good of all humanity. The Church does not offer technical solutions, but seeks to draw attention to the nature and structure of man, the truth of the human condition.
Actually, I find that proposition fine… at least up to the point where he says…
Development must include spiritual alongside material growth.
Must it? Must it really? But even had he stopped there, or at least expanded on what he means by the term ‘spiritual’ all might be well…
But this being Waters, he won’t or can’t…
You cannot have Christianity without Christ. Christian charity is the face of Christ, the only truth there is. Love is not in our gift but is given when we open to it. There is no love, no hope, without Christ.
It’s actually intriguing the way he states this. The first sentence makes some sense. Although one might quibble that there are parallel paths that need not involved Christ but which would lead to Christian like actions (not true enough one suspects for Waters). The second though…
Does he really believe this? The only truth there is? Does he mean that literally or figuratively, or in the context of being a Christian?
The problem is, to slightly amend what I wrote a couple of sentences back, is that one could envisage theistic modes which would also not involve Christ and yet lead to Christian like approaches to the world.
I should be clear. I have no instinctive dislike of religion. In some ways quite the opposite. It strikes me, though I’m not religious, that on a human level it makes as much sense as a response to the sort of universe we find ourselves in as any other. That said I’m a theist of sorts, a gloomy pessimistic one as it happens. Agnostic mostly, but sometimes and more often than not willing to believe that there is a God although I’m doubtful as to whether God has much interest in us (meanwhile John has strayed directly this week into those waters… so to speak… a bit late for me to deal with them, perhaps another days work).
But that’s grand, easy almost, if one can refer to the concept of a deity as easy. There’s no contradiction for me between a rationalist approach to the universe, and all within it and more or less agnostic theism. For me it’s the fine detail where the problems lie. I find it near intolerable that any serious religious belief would devolve to ‘there is no love, no hope, without…[insert your chosen name]‘. Such partiality flies in the face of the very precepts that Waters supposedly champions and which any reasonable reading of Christianity and what Christ is reported to have said would tend to serve us with (indeed, is it just me or does Waters seem absolutely entranced by the rhetorical pull of the contemporary religious texts he reads as distinct from their meaning? It’s as if because they go on about ‘truth’ they therefore must be ‘true’. Granted, perhaps I just like my Christianity presented more bluntly…) …
But he goes further…
The Christian proposal presents Christ not as a story from history, but a fact of the present moment. He is here, now, and knowledge of this, yes, fact is what frees us to do what is “right”. His presence renders love safe. If we deny Him, all we have is sentiment, sanctimony and self-interest. There is no alternative route to conscience.
This certainty is an unappealing stance, to put it mildly. And the reiteration of the word ‘fact’ for something that cannot be, except in a purely subjective usage of the term, regarded as such is unconvincing. It shifts its meaning to a position unamenable to serious consideration.
Nor does it make any great sense. Does Islam not provide such a route? There are cadres of Revolutionary Guards and also, by contrast, reform clerics who this very day in Iran, should he choose to consult them, will both from their particular viewpoints say otherwise. Buddhism? Mild Anglicanism? Agnostic theism?
And beyond religion, organised and chaotic, aren’t there many who have somehow managed to transcend ‘sanctimony and self-interest’ (and what particularly is the problem with sentiment… Waters himself has made a career based on sentiment, and what is his belief other than sentiment if one examines it purely rationally. That doesn’t invalidate it – well anymore than any of the rest of his belief system, but it doesn’t suggest that he’s finding the best arguments to position his beliefs within)? Indeed realistically given the lack of serious – by which I mean the public hand-wringing stuff this exemplifies – engagement with ‘faith’ by most people, which frankly to me seems a most human and healthy way of dealing with the constraints of this universe, one could argue that such arguably pretentious approaches to religious belief mean that only a tiny minority are ‘truly’ religious.
“A Christianity of charity without truth,” writes the pope, “would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance. In other words, there would no longer be any real place for God in the world.”
It’s great when people present stuff as either/or. Or refuse to acknowledge that ‘truth’, particularly in the context of religion is rather more malleable than they might propose. Or argue that only the most self-serving definition of its meaning has any currency. Or suggest that a spiritual dimension is the only thing that lends any meaning to life. I’m not entirely averse to the spiritual dimension, but to argue that it’s impossible to live without…
There is a danger in digesting the contents of this complex encyclical by the logic of a culture which sees Christ, at best, as a teacher of social philosophy. Just as true Christianity liberates Christ from the sentimentalism and moralism that pursues social control rather than truth, the pope warns that charity not founded in Christ is defined by an “emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content”.
To put this another way: only by venerating the Truth in our culture do we enable true charity to prosper. Without it there is only moral pressure, obligation and guilt. The Holy Father warns: “Without . . . trust and love for what is true, there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power, resulting in social fragmentation, especially in a globalised society at difficult times like the present.” This is a succinct description of our situation.
Er… what situation? But is the argument that without love for what is ‘true’… there ‘is no social conscience’ even vaguely tenable? And he seems to say that only through adherence to the religious ‘truth’ as revealed to/by the Catholic Church can we genuinely be ‘moral’, ‘charitable’, etc, etc.
Unhitched from truth, faith is reduced to ethics, which unravel when disconnected from their source. “Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is,” the pope tells us. The problem is that, in our culture now, this is liable to be heard as an opinion or a warning, rather than a simple statement of fact.
Well, there’s facts and facts. But for Waters there is only clearly only one fact that matters, one truth. That is Christianity – and in particular Catholicism, and implicit in his argument is the concept that it must be central to our societal organisation, for otherwise – to lightly paraphrase his argument – what is the point of such ‘truth’? And here’s the thing. He alone, at least to this point, in the ‘reportage’ is the only one – or so we must assume from his first paragraph – to understand, no, really understand, what the Pope was getting at.
Although sometimes I’m reminded of the old jibe as regards a certain leftist that he wrote as if Lenin were John the Baptist to his Jesus. And so sometimes it seems with Waters and Benedict. There’s Benedict doing the ground breaking stuff, but ultimately it will be Waters who seals the deal, who will finally explain it to the rest of us to his satisfaction (after all, it can’t just be down to a malevolent or disinterested media that Benedict’s thoughts go astray… surely?).
What’s intriguing, to me at least, is that he seems to believe that simply by grounding his proposition in a concept of ‘truth’ that rests on itself, not least because he proposes that such ‘truth’ can only be understood by those who believe in that ‘truth’ for validation, that he therefore shifts his argument beyond criticism.
It’s a remarkably self serving argument.
What I find remarkable about this is not his belief. I have no problem with that at all. What does trouble me is the absolute lack of any perspective, of any sense that none of this is particularly new, that others have taken this path before, that others entirely sincerely and in good faith take other paths, that there are at least equally strong counter-arguments to all his propositions and that the argument he is putting forward is extremely weak in the face of any serious analysis, that he might be writing for an audience which is going to take the word ‘truth’ bandied around as if it is its own self-justification with just a hint of scepticism. And indeed there was a time when a certain John Waters would have done likewise (meanwhile for a sense of how the professionals deal with this go no further than here, where at least some of the essence of Benedict’s thoughts come through… not much more convincing to me, but couched in significantly less florid language).
Still, for all that I guess we can be thankful that at least he’s firmly nailed his colours to the mast.
One could ask though and I think quite reasonably given his thoughts the previous week, just how does queue jumping fit into this?
An Bord Snip… Part 1 July 16, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.55 comments
Can I recommend Progressive Economy and in particular Michael Taft’s fine dissection of what the effects on the economy of these measures would be, and also Paul Sweeney’s thoughts on other impacts. It does make one wonder what the point of the exercise is.
That said, and I’m reading this a chunk at a time, some stuff struck me very forcibly…and it’s off the beaten track. The larger areas will be well, indeed better, covered by others, so here are a few choice cuts, so to speak.
Let’s look at privilege days, the source of so much contention here earlier in the Summer… mention of it comes on page 65 of Vol 2 and only in reference to the Institutes of Technology under the Education area.
Non-academic staff
(i) Terms and conditions
Non-academic staff in the IoT sector generally have more favourable conditions than their civil service counterparts as follows:
• shorter working weeks (as low as 32.5 hours);
• longer annual leave (up to 34 for Assistant Principal equivalent grades);
• with IoT’s closing for longer periods at Christmas and Easter, there are greater numbers of privilege/concession days (as well as entitlements to religious holidays in the case of some staff).
Absorption of concession days into annual leave and harmonisation of annual leave/working week with other areas of the public sector would provide greater productivity within the sector and generate savings. Entitlements to religious holidays are also considered an out-dated concession and should be abolished.
Okay. No serious quibble from me there. But that’s it. No other mention throughout the entirety of the Reports 200 plus pages.
So, what about this? Infrastructure we’re told is key to our economic development… er… no apparently not.
B.1 Reduce expenditure on roads maintenance/improvement
To a significant extent, the need for this expenditure is a function of the large level of capital investment in recent years improving and expanding the national and regional road network, and also the introduction of higher standards of road design and surfacing for road safety purposes. On the other hand, it is reasonable to hold the view that as this extensive capital investment programme has delivered a relatively new stock of roads, lower repairs should result. Accordingly, the Group
recommends a €20m (10%) reduction in expenditure on road maintenance.
Just like that! Now, does this make sense? We have more roads, but they’ll need fewer repairs. It’s a‘reasonable’ view… but what empirical evidence is there for it? They don’t say. They don’t seem to believe they have to.
Or how about?
Other measures
The Group considers that there is potential for savings from new policy directions:
…
• Introduction of road pricing
The Group is mindful that Government policy thus far in respect of road pricing is that it should be seriously considered at some stage but that it is more appropriate to do so once adequate public transport and road upgrades are in place. That said, the Group is strongly of the view that over the course of the next few years significant advances on transport infrastructure will have been made under Transport 21 and therefore it is appropriate now to initiate an examination of how road pricing is to be introduced.
Road pricing can have a dual purpose as a revenue raising and demand management tool and both elements should be exploited. Moreover, the introduction of pricing mechanisms should not be restricted to new infrastructure; rather a full analysis of all existing road routes (including bridges and tunnels) should be undertaken with a view to implementing a comprehensive and integrated nationwide road pricing system. The Group considers that this approach would represent a fundamental structural reform that would (a) provide a significant ongoing source of Exchequer revenues if introduced at a high enough level (b) broaden the revenue base away from the State’s income and enterprise activity and (c) promote more rational economically efficient activity by road users, including promoting the use of public transport where appropriate.
It’s a libertarian wet dream, but wait, why not pay for this out of general taxation. We are not told.
Same with…
Introduce entrance fees at cultural institutions
The Special Group considers that there is scope to raise revenue by charging entrance fees at the various national cultural institutions and the National Gallery. Even entry fees set at low levels would generate useful revenue1. The Group notes that such fees are common in continental Europe.
The Group recommends that the cultural institutions should decide the appropriate level of fees required, the opening hours and the extent of concessions to be granted for free entry. Such concessions might include free entry on particular days of the week
Let’s consider a Green Party area of interest… public transport…
Programme C – Public transport
The Department of Transport’s 2009 current expenditure allocation for Public Transport is €342m, which is primarily spent to support non-commercial bus and rail services. The Special Group is recommending total savings of €68m a year for this Programme.
The Exchequer current allocation to CIÉ for the provision of non-commercial public transport services (PSO payments) has already been reduced in 2009 by €10m (3%). This reduction is on the back of a number of years where the allocation was held level (a reduction in real terms) and also is in addition to the ending of a fuel excise rebate scheme which was worth about €20m annually to CIE. The impact of this can be seen already in the recently announced programme of cost-cutting measures by Dublin Bus and the review of operations, services and routes by Bus Eireann. The Group is of the view that this cost-cutting programme can be more extensive and recommends that over the next three years the company focuses on reducing its annual operation costs of €1bn to allow it to pass on €55m in full year savings to the Exchequer by means of reduced PSO payments.
So, reductions on top of reductions… tell us more.
C.1 Operational efficiencies among CIE companies
The Group is concerned by the overall upward trend in the level of public service payments per passenger journey although it notes that Irish Rail has achieved a small reduction (Irish Rail still has the highest PSO payment per passenger journey of the three CIÉ transport companies). This indicates poor service delivery.
Or perhaps it is indicative of the costs of running public transport, a service that is a necessity above and beyond mere headline costs (and let’s not even talk about how aviation is supported by various tax incentives particularly as regards fuel in order to make it ‘economic’).
Accordingly, the Group recommends a scheme of targeted
reductions to services across all three CIÉ companies, focused in the first instance on off-peak, low patronage services.
As part of this undertaking, the Department of Transport and CIÉ should jointly review the application of PSO payments to low patronage transport routes and explore how such payments can be best targeted/applied to provide the most economical service levels that meet customer needs and demand patterns. For example, lightly used rail lines should be closed and replacement bus services provided. It is more than likely that more regular and reliable bus services could be provided on such corridors at less cost to the Exchequer. Among the most lightly used rail lines that should be examined in this light include:- Limerick Junction to Rosslare
- Limerick to Ballybrophy;
- Manulla Junction to Ballina.
In addition, the Group recommends that there should be no further development of the Western Rail Corridor.
Overall, the Group targets a significant reduction of costs at CIÉ which would lead to savings of €55m in the PSO payment.
Not developing the Western Rail Corridor strikes me as the sort of penny pinching of the worst sort. The implementation of that sort of infrastructural link would in and of itself assist increased development. And further cuts to our already rather skeletal railway system seem to me to be perverse given both the reconsideration of a similar process in the UK and the need to shift from the roads… ah, yes, shifting from roads…
C.2. Cease funding the Rural Transport Programme
Given the availability of private sector bus alternatives, the high level of car ownership and the underutilisation of synergies with other publicly funded local transport services support the view that the level of direct Exchequer assistance can and should be eliminated, particularly in light of
current budgetary circumstances this programme should be ended.
King Car, indeed.
C.3. Discontinue the Green Schools Initiative
The Group is of the view that community-based initiatives such as the Green Schools Initiative (GSI), which aims to facilitate children walking to and from school, are best handled at local level and that such a level of direct Exchequer financial support is unnecessary. There is likely to be a significant overlap in State funding between this and closely related initiatives in other areas (Education, Health, Local Authorities and voluntary schemes).
The State does not need a special Programme of €10m over five years to convince school children and their parents to walk to and from school rather than drive. There must be alternative, cheaper ways to achieve the outcome sought from this initiative, which ultimately relies on community spirit and organisation.
No doubt there must, but the Report doesn’t tell us what they might be. And I wonder, I think the state probably does have to put some of its societal weight behind this initiative.
Anyhow, how to square this:
Speaking this afternoon, UCD economist Dr Colm McCarthy, who produced the report, said he believed the jobs cuts were “feasible” but was not sure how they would be achieved.
“We tried to identify areas where it is possible to reduce numbers,” he said.
…with this?
Dr McCarthy said the reduction in jobs could be achieved without compulsory redundancies, stating that a recruitment embargo, retirements and an existing voluntary redundancy scheme could be used to achieve savings.
I think I tend to the first Dr. McCarthy’s view. I can’t see how certain proposals could be achieved without forced redundacies, particularly in the education (amalgamation of the DIT with the IoTs) and health.
But then I hold no hope that there won’t be considerable impacts on the service given to the public by the implementation of this Report’s recommendations…
Delivering a public service numbers policy
The Government has already factored aggregate full-year savings of €300m into its budgetary arithmetic from the above initiatives. The total surplus staff numbers identified by the Special Group would involve, if fully implemented, payroll savings of up to €700 million in a full year, over and above the €300m annual savings already envisaged (and not taking into account the savings in accrued pension costs). To manage the delivery of these reductions, the Group recommends that a uniform Public Service Numbers Policy should now be put in place and implemented centrally by the Department of Finance. Such a policy should provide for the capping and progressive lowering of numbers in particular Ministerial Vote Groups / sectoral areas, with demanding targets for annual reductions and effective staff redeployment mechanisms to minimise public service impacts. Crucially, staff reductions will need to be matched with re-design and streamlining of organisations, and this will require a proactive approach by public service managers. Many of the proposals in this Report, including the scope for outsourcing of services and processes, will be relevant in this regard.
Great. Just great.
