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Rest in peace, Ike and Tina

By admin on May 26, 2023

This week, a legend passed. Tina Turner has been a defining voice of my life. Once heard, she wasn’t forgotten. We don’t need another hero.

Her voice was brilliantly described by Juggy Murray of Sue Records, who was played one of her early recordings by her musical and romantic partner, Ike Turner:

“Tina sounded like screaming dirt.”
Juggy Murray, Sue Records

Of the many tributes that have poured in, a large number focus on her strength and example as someone who overcame domestic abuse in her marriage to Ike.

Where trauma begins and ends

This led me to Google: Ike Turner. And to read his Wikipedia entry. And to learn that he witnessed his father “beaten and left for dead” by a white man in Clarksdale, Mississippi as a child.

His father lived for a further couple of years, before dying of his injuries when Ike was five years old. He also had a “violent alcoholic” stepfather and suffered sexual abuse as a child.

Tina herself had a mother who fled from an abusive marriage, just as Tina would do from Ike years later.

All I ever knew about Ike Turner was that he was the man who beat up Tina Turner. As a legacy, it’s a damning one. That was all I knew. Maybe he made some good music? I know Tina did. That’s why I know Ike.

Corporal punishment

But reading Ike’s Wikipedia entry reminded me of an article I read a few months back about corporal punishment in Mississippi schools. Amazingly, corporal punishment is still legal in public schools in 19 US states, with significantly the highest rates in Mississippi, Ike’s home state.

In public schools in the United States, black children are twice as likely as white children to be subject to corporal punishment.
Dick Startz, Professor of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara

These little, miscellaneous, seemingly unrelated facts make me wonder about an ingrained culture of violence, what that does to those who live through it, and how trauma echoes down throughout the years.

A level playing field? As long as you’re not from The Wrong Part of Town

Nature can be annoying. Good

By admin on May 3, 2023

Clouds burst. Bulls charge. Birds shit. Sometimes nature just annoys us. Other times, valleys swoop, flowers bloom and sunlight dapples. So, is it ok for us to change nature the moment it irritates us? Is nature only acceptable while it gives us pleasure?

I live in a marina on reclaimed land. It’s beautiful but entirely manmade. Yet it’s amazing how quickly nature has moved in. Seagulls, spiders, worms, oystercatchers, waxwings, ducks, swans…

Those damn seagulls!

Seagulls, of course, are the ultimate survivors. They breed and raise their chicks on our rooftops, pretending they are seaside cliffs. In May and June, they are vicious in defence of their young. Everyone talks about it.

Sure, their endless wailing squawks are annoying. Their dive bombing is intimidating. And sure enough, this year a firm is coming to clear eggs and nests from our roofs. All will be orderly again. But is that a good thing?

It’s ok to be annoyed

The desire not to be annoyed feels of a piece with the very trendy desire not to be offended. Yes, it’s certainly comfortable to live in a world where nothing ever annoys you, but that involves either tight control of your environment or a new mindset.

A nature that is manicured in order that it doesn’t cause any friction with my mind feels lacking, somehow. As Barry Lopez brilliantly observes in his book Arctic Dreams, what is compelling and awesome in being next to an iceberg is not simply its beauty, but also something more disturbing.

“I looked out at the icebergs. They were so beautiful they also made you afraid.”
Barry Lopez

This disturbance is the reason some people (like me) enjoy being inconvenienced by nature. I love a storm, or a flood, or an inaccessible mountain. I like that something has been put in my way – something powerful and beyond my control.

If you like your nature less annoying, let me tell you about the day the waxwings came

Are we in control?

By admin on April 27, 2023

“Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

This question was posed in the open letter from the Future of Life Institute, an NGO, signed last month by tech leaders including Elon Musk. It was a letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development due to concerns about the speedy advance of the technology.

What is interesting about the question is that it assumes that we currently have control. Do we?

Who’s steering this thing?

Of course, as individuals, we have barely any control at all at the civilizational level. Even collectively, that control is partial and often those partial levels of control are contradictory, acting against each other.

This leads to the second unspoken question hidden in the open letter’s original one: would AI not do a better job?

AI: the perfect answer

If there is an omniscient creator, then there is something beautiful in the idea that this creator decided to solve the problem of its errant, planet-destroying children by showing them a path to designing their own obsolescence. Quite brilliant, really.

And if AI would do a better job, then we can all relax. A better world awaits! As my colleague brilliantly put it the other day – “We could all become their pets” – and let’s face it, some pets have a great life.

Is ChatGPT really the end of work, and what does that mean?

Proximity bias

By admin on January 31, 2023

The Great Lurch Forward into hybrid working reality has brought with it a whole host of new words and phrases to learn. One of the most interesting is ‘proximity bias’.

This is the notion that managers will reward those workers closest to them. In other words, the ones that show up in the office most often.

At your desk by 9 o’clock

The fear of proximity bias in working relations is obviously based on the most obvious of office culture truisms: that managers like to see bums on seats and are inherently suspicious of remote working.

But while this is no doubt true of many managers, there is perhaps a deeper and more tenacious psychological element involved here. That of being human.

Nice to see you

Most managers care about the well-being of their staff. They genuinely want to facilitate good lives for them and arrange their work days to suit the pressures of their lives.

But it’s only human to feel closest to someone who you have actual physical contact with over someone you only see on a screen. This bias is surely a natural human response?

What are you worth?

The difficulty for companies is that studies suggest a remote worker is often more productive than an office-based one. Which means that the real value of the physical staff member is in boosting office morale and ‘company culture’, as it is known.

The problem here is that company culture is a much harder KPI (key performance indicator) to attribute to an individual worker than is their productivity level.

There has been much talk of the two-tier workforce, of less pay for remote workers. But the more subtle realities of proximity bias will likely continue, loath though companies will be to acknowledge it.

If you don’t come to the office, the robots will – it’s Us versus AI

Us versus AI

By admin on December 8, 2022

Artificial Intelligence is a popular topic. You are either excited about its possibilities, fear its consequences, or a bit of both.

Copywriters get particularly jumpy. The new ChatGPT chatbot launched on 30 November 2022 by OpenAI (founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others and funded by Microsoft) is the latest impressive reality of AI.

Like people, but better

Compared to machines, real people are lazy and inconsistent. That’s just life. I’ve no doubt that AI will soon be not only more consistent, but also a better copywriter than most human copywriters.

Given that the industrialisation of human labour is essentially the machine process applied for the maximum output from the minimum time and effort, AI wins every time.

A longer wait until bedtime

Which always reminds me of a quote from American author Garrison Keillor that sums up his lovely Lake Wobegon Days series, about his childhood home in the Midwest:

Back for a visit one August, I crossed Main Street toward Ralph’s and stopped, hearing a sound from childhood in the distance. The faint mutter of ancient combines. Norwegian bachelor farmers combining in their antique McCormacks, the old six-footers. New combines cut a twenty-foot swath, but these guys aren’t interested in getting done sooner; it would only mean a longer wait until bedtime.

Given that AI will inevitably be not only more consistent at most jobs than any of us could ever be, but also have an output that’s just better, even creatively, we are left only with Garrison Keillor’s implied question:

What sort of life do we want to live?

Talking of technology, are you a smartphone addict?

My money is your money

By admin on October 31, 2022

The problem with direct democracy is it doesn’t work very well. Big political questions, which are usually big economic questions, are hard to understand. Who really gets economics? Anyone?

So, when asked if you want the EU to stop stealing your money, what do people say? “Stop stealing my money!” When asked if you would like to keep more of your cash-money-dollar in your pocket, and not give it to the taxman, what do people say? “Less tax, please!”

The politics of economics

That’s exactly what occurred in the Brexit referendum of 2016, and it’s exactly what occurred in the Tory leadership contest vote of party members to select Britain’s new Prime Minister in September 2022. Both times, people made instinctive economic choices.

Those choices failed to see the bigger picture of economic interconnectedness that means a vote to apparently make myself richer by keeping money directly in my pocket now, can actually translate into me being poorer in the end due to macro-economic effects I don’t understand.

What’s the point of MPs?

A Member of Parliament (MP), lest we forget, is there to represent their constituents in parliament. We have chosen them based on their worldview and priorities broadly aligning with our own. We ask them to make the big calls for us.

If MPs turn back to the electorate and ask them to make the big calls, in referendums, then they are no longer representing us. They become a pointless middleman.

MPs knew – barring ideological zealots – that leaving the EU was a bad idea. MPs knew that Rishi Sunak was the most competent replacement for Boris Johnson. Their decision to pick him second time round illustrates the gap.

If MPs renege on their responsibility to represent us on matters they – or if not, their advisors in the relevant fields – know far more about than the average voter, then democracies will continue to get the poor results they are getting used to.

Of course, we voters are very good at electing appalling politicians in the first place. But that’s our own fault. And it beats being told what to do by a benevolent dictator.

Remember Brexit? Yes, it was that bad. Let’s laugh about it with some Blackadder goes Brexit

Why Royals Work

By admin on October 7, 2022

Everyone loved Queen Elizabeth II. ‘No one had a bad word to say about her’ is the defining phrase of the moment. Her popularity and success is usually ascribed to who she was, rather than what she was. But is that really so?

Just an ordinary Queen

Royalty is generally regarded as anathema to the meritocratic, democratic age. How can we possibly accept people being born to rule? It flies in the face of all we are taught to believe.

If that’s true, then the only way the Queen can have been so great in her role as a born ruler is by dint of her being a truly wonderful person, on an individual, human level, in spite of the unsavoury task of hereditary rule.

Deserving to rule us

There are two other choices: our rulers either rule us due to corruption or merit. Depending on whether we live in an autocracy, a weak democracy or a strong one, the sliding scale between corruption and merit will be different.

Queen Elizabeth’s United Kingdom is generally regarded as more meritocratic than corrupt. By that rationale, our politicians rule us because they are better than us through merit.

The trouble is, meritocracy is hard to swallow. When you ask an individual: do you think a political leader is ruling you because they are better than anyone else, you soon hear arguments about the innate corruption of the system.

The Queen’s (or King’s) magic

Hereditary rule removes the notion of someone having more merit than someone else, so problematic to our tastes. In doing so, it ironically allows monarchy a back door into the meritocratic, democratic age.

The Queen was not the Queen through merit. She was just born to it. That makes her no better than anyone else at being a queen – if you were born to it. This notion puts people at their ease.

Sure, the whole edifice of royalty is deeply unedifying to the modern mind. But if in our hearts we don’t truly believe the utopia of meritocracy can exist, then monarchy becomes a fallback against worse corruption.

And so most people become happy with the Queen, or indeed, the King.

Feeling comfy with your royals? Feeling comfy with your country, too?

Men and boats

By admin on September 27, 2022

Sailing big yachts around the marinas of the world is almost exclusively the preserve of couples of a certain age. And captaining that yacht is – according to my eagle-eyed research – entirely the preserve of the man.

It’s the end of another yachting season where I live in Malmö’s Dockan marina. That means a marina that lies dormant half the year has been full of yachts with Danish, German, Dutch and Polish flags.

The economics and time constraints of this hobby mean that you appear to have to be a 50+ couple to even contemplate it. Almost every boat has aboard a man and a woman enjoying their silver age upon the high seas.

Ahoy there, captain!

And as they glide into the marina, without fail it will be the woman that stands at the bow, rope in hand, ready to leap nimbly to dockside like a good first mate and secure the yacht. At the wheel will be the captain. The male captain.

We all know about male drivers – the propensity of husbands to drive the car. This is the almost unspoken collusion whereby the role of driver and passenger become cemented in a marriage. But this stereotype is no longer an absolute in the automobile.

Yet in yachting, which is, after all, a higher end of the market, with much bigger, shinier and more expensive vehicles involved, the need/desire/inevitability of the man holding the helm appears unshakable.

I’m still waiting eagerly for the first time I see a man clutching that bow rope, his wife eyeing the horizon with a steady eye as she nudges the ship’s wheel to port. Still waiting… here’s hoping…

On the subject of men and women, have you heard about ‘mansplaining’? Let me mansplain…

Walter Close and the Amalthea

By admin on March 31, 2022

In a dock close to my home in the Western Harbour of Malmö, Sweden, a tiny, easily missed plaque commemorates a terrorist attack. Despite what you might think, this isn’t a tale of either ethnic minorities or white supremacists.

On the night of 12 July 1908, a ship was blown up in Malmö harbour. The ship was named the Amalthea and the event became known as the Amalthea Incident. It resulted in two of the last death sentences in Swedish history.

Socialism in Sweden

The reason for the attack was that the Amalthea had aboard dockworkers from Hull, in eastern England, who were strikebreakers – men brought in by the dock authorities of Malmö to do the work striking local dockworkers refused to do.

The antipathy of the locals towards them was so strong that they had to be accommodated aboard ship, not on land. They went to work each day under police escort. In the explosion, one man died and 23 were injured.

Two of the three terrorists – Anton Nilson and Algot Rosberg – were sentenced to death. The third, Alfred Stern, received a life sentence. The local reaction was further outrage.

Free the terrorists!

A petition of 130,000 names called for the young socialists to be released. It’s hard to imagine Swedes supporting the release of terrorists, but this is what occurred just over 100 years ago.

In October 1917, with the Russian Revolution underway, the Swedish government ordered the release of the terrorists, who went on to become icons of the labour movement in Sweden, Nilson dying in Stockholm in 1989, aged 101.

A strange sort of victory

A happy ending… Except, what of that one man who died? He is a forgotten figure in the rather vaguely termed Amalthea Incident? Walter Close was his name. Walter Close from Hull.

Here was a dockworker from Hull – one of the most deprived cities in England, a man willing to work as a blackleg (or strikebreaker) aboard a ship in a foreign land. Not a rich man, I would imagine.

And here were angry Swedish dockworkers in one of Sweden’s most deprived working class ports. And the idealistic socialists prepared to take a stand, killing another poor dockworker from Hull for the labour cause.

Let’s spare a thought for Walter Close, man of Hull.

Talking of monuments to history, what if statues could speak?

History repeating in Russia and Ukraine

By admin on March 17, 2022

On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, I was halfway through In Memory of Memory by the Russian Jewish author Maria Stepanova.

I was reading the letters that her relative Lyodik Gimmelfarb, a 19-year-old at the Siege of Leningrad, sent to his mother. They were matter-of-fact and uncomplaining. Shortly after his 20th birthday, he was killed.

War. What’s it good for?

The following chapters turn to another branch of her family, the Gurevichs, in particular Isaak Gurevich, a well-heeled businessman who opened an agricultural machinery factory in Kherson in the early 20th century.

I had never heard of this southern Ukrainian city, and suddenly I was reading about it in the news, falling to Russian forces, as I simultaneously read about this successful Jewish family who built a fine mansion and owned the first English Vauxhall car in the region.

In 1907, Isaak Gurevich had been there to welcome the railway to Kherson. He and his family had also witnessed the pogroms that swept across southern Ukraine in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, a reminder of the fact that the Nazis didn’t invent anti-Semitism.

Brave new world

With the Russian Revolution, Gurevich had his factory taken off him and given to the workers. Soon it wasn’t simply a case of losing your wealth, but losing any trace of ever having had wealth. ‘Social background’ had to be filled in on government forms, and a hint of bourgeois ancestry spelt trouble.

At the conclusion of her family saga, Stepanova visits the Jewish New Cemetery on the outskirts of Kherson. It’s a desolate, windblown spot where the scrub is slowly reclaiming the gravestones. There are no Jews left to tend the cemetery.

More serendipity? How about Afghanistan Then and Now