Category: Society
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Dear Europe…
That is how a number of letters begin that are published in today’s Guardian. From a range of public figures, they set out what Europe means to them.
I’m a Manxman by birth, but I’ve spent half my life living in the Netherlands. I owe a lot to Europe, just like these letter writers, and it distresses me to realise that many of my fellow Britons are hell-bent intent on closing boundaries, rather than opening them.
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Climate Crisis
I see that the Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world, using “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” instead of “climate change” and “global warming”.
All the political insanity that is currently rampaging through the world at the moment surely pales into insignificance compared to the existential threat that is the ongoing climate crisis? Indeed the latter will only exacerbate the former as time goes on.
A few months back, I read The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells. Yesterday, I read in one sitting, We Are The Weather, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Wallace-Wells is a journalist, Foer a novelist. As you might expect, the books are very different in style, whilst both dealing with the subject of the climate crisis.
Foer’s book is a mixture of styles in itself, ranging from thought-provoking essays, to shocks to the brain from short chapters giving lists of factoids, to a “dispute with the soul” – a dialogue with himself over why it is that we seem unable to deal with the fact of the climate crisis. That’s all of us, whether you accept the science or deny it.
Foer offers a path to help mitigate the extent of the crisis: switch to a plant-based diet from a meat-based one. The link between farming animals and the climate crisis is the backbone of his book, and he makes a persuasive case. Livestock are the leading source of methane emissions, whilst nitrous oxide is emitted by livestock urine, manure, and the fertilisers used for growing crops. Nitrous oxide has significant global warming potential as a greenhouse gas. On a per-molecule basis, considered over a 100-year period, nitrous oxide has 298 times the atmospheric heat-trapping ability of carbon dioxide.
The Netherlands has just woken up to this inconvenient truth about nitrous oxide and other nitrogen compounds. We currently have what is known as the Stikstofcrisis (the nitrogen crisis), which arose this year when permit applications for an estimated 18,000 construction and infrastructure projects were stopped. Too high a concentration of these nitrogen compounds leads to a deterioration of nature and to a loss of biodiversity. A reported 61 percent of the nitrogen compounds produced comes from agriculture, with intensive livestock farming being one of the most important sources. So the farmers are up in arms about this, seeing the government placing the blame for the crisis on their shoulders. There have been protests and demonstrations.
The trouble is, we simply can’t go on as we did before. Things will have to change, but that process will be a painful one, whatever we do.
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China Today, Tomorrow, The World?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Jaron Lanier’s book: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, which is a warning against the rise of surveillance technology and algorithms capable of social manipulation.
In the West, that technology is in the hands of private companies (e.g. Facebook, Google), but in China, it is firmly in the grasp of the State. I hadn’t appreciated just how far this had progressed until I read a recent article in the London Review of Books: Document Number Nine, by John Lanchester. He reviews two books written about how the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) has adopted the internet, AI and surveillance technologies to monitor and control its citizens.
It is the stuff of nightmares.
I’ve just bought one of the books: Kai Strittmatter’s We Have Been Harmonised. The blurb on the back cover says:
This is a journey into a land where Big Brother has acquired a whole new set of toys with which to control and cajole – ‘harmonise’- the masses. It is also a warning against Western complacency. Beijing is already finding eager buyers for its “Operating System for Dictators’- in Africa and Asia, Russia and the Middle East. And with China’s corporate giants – all ultimately under Party control – being offered a place at the heart of Europe’s vital infrastructure, it is time we paid attention.
As Lanchester writes:
Imagine a place in which there’s a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to ‘damaging information’; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA. Strittmatter points out that you don’t need to imagine this place, because it exists: that’s life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs.
Meanwhile, I continue to be astounded at our willingness to trust Facebook. Lanchester again:
Do we want facial recognition technology to be in the hands of the least scrupulous technology giant? If we don’t, we’re too late – it already is. Facebook has changed its terms of service over ‘tagging’ people’s photos a couple of times, from opt-out to opt-in, but the gist is that it is too late: Facebook already owns your ‘faceprint’, the algorithmic representation of your face. How much do we think we can trust them with it?
Not one inch, as far as I’m concerned.
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Who is the Guilty Party Here?
A very perceptive piece by Joris Luyendijk in the Guardian today. His thesis is that
The UK now seems to be the country whose government lies about nonexistent negotiations with the EU while threatening to renege on its outstanding financial obligations – often misrepresented as the “divorce bill”.
and:
The dominant four newspapers in Britain by circulation are the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Sun on Sunday and the Mail on Sunday, with the more measured but equally pro-Brexit Sunday Times coming in fifth. Each of these publications has been brainwashing its readers with fake news about the EU for years – in some cases, decades – while building up pro-Brexit politicians and stoking divisions. Terms such as “betrayal”, “surrender”, “plots by traitors” and “enemies of the people” are on the front pages routinely. The top 10 British papers by paid circulation does not feature any pro-European newspaper, unless you count the Daily Mirror. It does feature Boris Johnson’s mouthpiece, the Daily Telegraph, and the triumphantly nasty Daily Star. It is a depressing tally, scarcely improved by knowing how many people rely on social media for their news.
Depressing is not the half of it. It’s the realisation that my fellow Britons swallow these lies from Boris Johnson, his colleagues and the Tory press, and believe them wholeheartedly. I feel ashamed to be British and fear for the future of the UK. My touchstone is that I also hold Dutch nationality, and hence I am also a citizen of the EU. It is the lifeline to which I can cling. It remains to be seen whether UK citizens will be able to do the same.
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Unfit
Boris Johnson continues to demonstrate why he is totally unfit to be Prime Minister of Britain.
As a friend said: “He’s a completely and utterly self-serving bastard for using her death to promote his political agenda. We have come to expect nothing less from him.”
The real horror was the realisation that he was being cheered on by his Conservative party colleagues. Have they no decency? Well, rhetorical question, I suppose. Clearly they have not.
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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
That’s the title of a book by Jaron Lanier. He poses the question:
How can you remain autonomous in a world where you are under constant surveillance and are constantly prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history, which have no way of making money except by being paid to manipulate your behavior?
He wrote the book during the final months of 2017 – before the explosive events of the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved his thesis that we are the product of platforms such as Facebook and Google – not the customers – and that the real customers include bad actors who certainly do not have your, or society’s, best interests at heart.
As the title suggests, he presents ten (very persuasive) arguments as to why you should stop using these platforms. And as he says:
…being able to quit is a privilege; many genuinely can’t. But if you have the latitude to quit and don’t, you are not supporting the less fortunate; you are only reinforcing the system in which many people are trapped. I am living proof that you can have a public life in media without social media accounts. Those of us with options must explore those options or they will remain only theoretical. Business follows money, so we who have options have power and responsibility.
I have long loathed and detested Facebook, so when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, it provided the impetus to delete my Facebook account, and I’ve never regretted it for an instant. I confess that I still have a WhatsApp account (WhatsApp is owned by Facebook), but this is only because our neighbourhood and community council have group accounts. I would much prefer to stick to SMS, but alas, that ship has sailed.
I read (and have monetary subscriptions to) newspaper websites directly instead of getting news through personalised feeds – Lanier writes that when “Facebook announced that it will deemphasize news in its feed: the journalism world celebrated, for the most part, because now it might become freer to connect to audiences on its own terms”.
I use Pi-hole as our home network-wide Ad blocker, which has the added advantage of preventing Ad services from spying on us.
I avoid using Google services as much as I can (for example I use DuckDuckGo as my search provider, and refuse to use Gmail). Nonetheless, my smartphone runs Android – thanks to Microsoft not having the guts to persevere with Windows Phone, so Google probably know more about me and my habits than I do myself.
Instagram and Twitter have never appealed to me; I have never used them.
Here’s an interview with Lanier on the subject of his book. I heartily recommend that you read Lanier’s book for yourself – it is likely to be an eye-opener. Hopefully it may also help some social media addicts to kick their habit.
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Last Night of the Proms 2019
So, it’s over for another year – we will have to wait until the 17th July 2020 for the next season of the BBC Proms to start.
Meanwhile, I’ll remember the Last Night of the Proms for 2019 (last night…) with joy and affection. Some stunning music: the world premiere of a new piece, Woke, by Daniel Kidane, an arrangement of Laura Mvula’s Sing to the Moon, Elisabeth Maconchy’s Proud Thames, and all the old favourites.
And we all fell instantly in love with the mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton. What a woman, what a voice! And when she produced the Rainbow flag during the second chorus of Rule Britannia and waved it proudly for all the world to see, we were overjoyed…
Of course, the elephant in the room was Brexit, but we all managed to avoid mentioning it, and instead we simply enjoyed the music, waving Union Jacks and European flags together.
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Wise Words and Sad Leaves
Raoni Metuktire, chief of the indigenous Brazilian Kayapó people, has a few words of advice for us. Unfortunately, I doubt that we will listen.
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Homage to Humanity
While I was in Deventer at the book market, I popped into Deventer’s largest bookshop to check out the new book by photographer Jimmy Nelson: Homage to Humanity.
I already have a copy of his previous book Before They Pass Away in the library, which has the same theme: photographs of indigenous peoples and tribal cultures that are in danger of vanishing from the world.
I freely admit to being in somewhat of two minds about the books. The photographs themselves are stunning, but also carefully posed; almost theatrical. A sort of National Geographic crossed with Vogue. And yet, and yet – they are undoubtedly a record of sorts: aspects of human cultures that are undeniably in danger of being swept away.
So I wanted to take a look at the new book to see whether I should stump up the cost of adding it to the library – at €125, it’s not exactly the cost of a paperback…
And, well, I was persuaded. It is a gorgeous book, printed by Rizzoli.
I’ve ordered it via our local village bookshop. Now I’ve got to find space in the bookshelves to put it.
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Mierenneuken writ large
The Dutch have an expression: mierenneuken. Literally, it means “ant-fucking” (the Dutch are nothing if not straightforward). The English translate this as “nitpicking”, that is, the practice of meticulously searching for minor, even trivial errors in detail.
And now, the full weight of the Dutch governmental process has brought into being a ban on the wearing of the burka in public places that seems to me to be the very epitome of fucking ants.
Thankfully, some manifestations of public life in the Netherlands have recognised this law for being what it is, a pernicious waste of time, money and energy over 150 religious women in a population of 17 million.
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An Offensive Clown in a Polka-dot Dress
I’ve never had time for Ann Widdicombe. Her callousness and stupidity have been self-evident for years. Now she has re-invented herself as an MEP. And she’s still spouting stupidity. She and Farage make a pretty pair. They are in Brussels simply to wreck the EU in any way they can, and pocket the pay and pension from the EU whilst doing it. I despair.
Addendum: Marina Hyde sums up the Widdicombe spectacle better than I could. Read and despair.
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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
So Facebook wants us all to use their new cryptocurrency Libra? I loathe and detest Facebook enough already without this being thrust upon us. As Kenan Malik writes: Libra cryptocurrency won’t set us free, it will further enslave us to Facebook. Count me out.
The truly terrifying thing is that apparently:
More than two dozen entities have signed on to be founding members of the Libra organization, including Visa and MasterCard, Uber and Lyft, eBay, and Spotify.
So Visa and Mastercard have already cast their lot with Facebook? We’re doomed.
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The Bigger Picture
Jonathan Cook discusses the the assault by Mark Field on a climate change activist this week, and points out the bigger picture. He states that we are in danger of getting sidetracked. Worth reading.
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All animals are equal…
But clearly, some are still more equal than others…
A walk from the Westerbork Nazi transit camp to Groningen as part of the “Night of the Refugee” fundraising activities has been cancelled after the organisers faced death threats and intimidation.
What really galls is that Thierry Baudet described the sponsored walk as “scandalous”, and Esther Voet, the editor of the Jewish newspaper Nieuw Israelietische Weekblad said it was “Tasteless”.
Perhaps Baudet and Voet should be reminded of the poem written by Martin Niemöller: “First they came…”
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“A Special Place In Hell”
Donald Tusk hits the nail on the head. The Nigel Farages, Jacob Rees-Moggs and Boris Johnsons of this world deserve nothing less. It is they who have betrayed the British people, not the EU.
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“A Terrible Failure of Common Sense”
In recent years, the UK Home Office has increasingly seemed to be driven by checklists, rather than any understanding of the people they are dealing with.
Here’s just the latest example in a very long list: a man, 90 years old, is being told to fly to the US to get a visa so that he can stay in the UK with his wife.
Apparently, a Home Office spokesperson has said:
“All UK visa applications are considered on their individual merits, on the basis of the evidence available and in line with UK immigration rules.”
As a good friend of mine has said on many an occasion: “Just what is wrong with these people?”.
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Half and Half
Someone asked me last night how long I had been living here in the Netherlands, and I replied: “35 years”.
“So, for half your life?” he asked. And up until that moment I had not thought about it, but he’s right: for the first 35 years of my life, I lived in the UK (even though, technically speaking, the country of my birth, the Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency and not part of the UK) and now I’ve been living for 35 years in the Netherlands.
It gave me pause.
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Nine Lessons of Brexit
Ivan Rogers, the former UK ambassador to the EU, delivered a speech this week on the nine lessons of Brexit. The full 10,000+ words transcript is here, but if you prefer a précis, then this will do nicely.
The basic message is that the choice for Brexit and, in particular, the process of Brexit have both been fucking disasters, although Ivan Rogers is too much of a gentleman to use such words. The blame for this trainwreck, he argues, cannot rest on the shoulders of the Brexiters or the Remainers alone – both sides have contributed to the dishonesty and the confusion that today reigns supreme.
One might almost say “A plague on both their houses…”
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Selfie Deaths
Selfie deaths – a report. But I disagree strongly with the conclusion. It would only serve to affect the number of Darwin Award winners in a negative fashion.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 