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Rural voters rule ok

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November 15, 2018

Here comes the rural vote (Photo by Element5 Digital)

Here’s the received wisdom: rural voters are the neglected, the ignored, the forgotten — but in Western democracies, they are fast becoming the kingmakers.

How did this happen?

It seems counterintuitive. Power resides at the centre. Kings, queens, presidents and press barons — they are urban, as are most people in post-industrial states.

Yet, even as the Democrats take the suburbs in the US mid-term elections — for ‘suburbs’ read ‘urban middle class’ — Republican gains in rural states cement their grip on the Senate.

It highlights a US electoral system with built-in rural bias. Democrats won the popular vote in six of the last seven US elections — yet two of those times a Republican took office.

In 1790, when the Senate was conceived, 95% of Americans were rural. Today, around 19% are, yet the Senate was conceived to offer equal representation to all states. The result? A rural vote is now worth much more than an urban one.

Get off my land

The British Brexit referendum also saw a stark split between urban and rural voting. London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff — diverse cities all voting strongly for Remain in an election that saw countryside and small town Britain vote 55% in favour of leaving the EU.

Country people are quick to complain of the too-powerful cities and their liberal elites. Yet recent trends suggest that in fact, the rural vote is dictating the political and perhaps cultural direction to the cities.

Try explaining that to the urban elites in emerging economies.
What is a Nazi war crime?

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November 7, 2018

Crime and punishment (Photo by Filip Zrnzević)

Below are two little stories within the vast panoply of Nazi war crimes from the Second World War that I wanted to share. Nothing arouses our emotion like the Nazis, and the question of who was good and bad, who was a perpetrator and who a victim.

Joachim Lieven

The first is from the late Countess Dönhoff’s account of her childhood in East Prussia before the war — a land she fled forever and which is now Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast. Joachim came to live on her family’s estate as a child, fleeing Stalin’s Russia prior to the war:

“Joachim suffered a particularly tragic fate. When I managed our estates in the Second World War, I was able to persuade the authorities to exempt him from military service because he, as my only male assistant — all my brothers were serving in the war — was indispensable in the administration of the estates. But in the final phases of the war even that argument no longer proved effective, and without being given a hearing he was assigned to a Waffen SS unit, a hard blow for so fervent an anti-Nazi. A letter he wrote in January, 1945, from the Kolmar region was the last word we ever had from him.”

Johann Rehbogen

The second is a 94-year-old defendant who has gone on trial this week at a juvenile court in Münster, Germany, accused of complicity in mass murder due to serving as an SS guard in the war.

It so happens that he worked as a guard in the Stutthof camp, east of modern-day Gdansk in northern Poland — in an area very close to the estate on which Countess Dönhoff grew up.

From the summer of 1944, when Nazi Germany was in retreat, the Stutthoff camp was the scene of the gassing of more than 100 Polish prisoners, at least 77 Soviet POWs and “probably several hundred” Jewish prisoners.

The reason Johann Rehbogen is being tried in a juvenile court is that he was not yet aged 21 when he worked as a guard at the camp, and so still a juvenile in the eyes of the law.

Dortmund prosecutor Andreas Brendel is quoted as saying of the case:

“Germany owes it to the families and victims to prosecute these Nazi crimes even today. That is a legal and moral question.”
A walk in the cemetery

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November 1, 2018

A cemetery on a sunny day (Photo by Simeon Muller)

I took a walk in the cemetery. The air was so clear that it made life undeniable. I stood on an asphalt path, looked at my shoes, inside which were my feet. I examined my legs and my torso. I was alive in a sea of dead. A massacre. Those who hadn’t made it strewn across the ground all around me.

The view to the distant hills is fine, but I’m the only one who can see it. What a view! And in the corner of the cemetery, obscured behind a hedge, I find a children’s cemetery. The hedge creates an awful tenderness, to think that others have tried to shield their little ones from the wider cemetery by a beech hedge, and so from the enormity of what has befallen them.

There is a pitiless howl about a child’s grave. The fluttering butterfly on a string, the toy dinosaur, the flowers. There is nothing left but to walk away.

As I depart the gates, a shock of pigeons break from a tree, scattering into the cool blue air. Then, from the wall, I see a sleek young ginger cat, a pigeon in its jaws that is virtually its size. The pigeon is beating its wings in protest. The cat has it by the throat. It won’t let go. It drops down below the wall with its prey.
Why does America love a jail?

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October 25, 2018

Send that boy to jail! (Photo by Uriel Soberanes)

‘Lock her up, lock her up, lock her up!’

Remember the Trump rally chant? Well, Hillary Clinton isn’t the only American they want in jail. Incarceration is a top US pastime. Why?

STAT ALERT

The figures are genuinely amazing. 2.3 million people – the equivalent of the entire population of Botswana. America’s prison population is larger than any other country in real terms and per capita.

That’s ANY OTHER COUNTRY. Not just where you live, which is probably the UK (4.5 times lower) or maybe Europe or Australia, if my blog is really starting to fly. No, anywhere…

Let’s face it, there are some pretty populous and pretty repressive places out there. But none of them – not China, not Russia, not El Salvador, not Turkmenistan – can touch The Land of the Free. How the hell?

IT GETS CRAZIER

The US government is not to blame. No, the federal government locks up people at a lower rate than France or Italy. It’s the states and local districts.

Individual American states love jailing people. It hasn’t reduced violence or crime rates in America. It costs Americans a lot of money. I’ll leave the ‘Why is America so Violent?’ debate for another day, just soak up this stat:

If US states were independent countries, they would take the Top 20 spots in the league table of prison populations per capita globally.

A full deck. Slam dunk. You can’t get near that.

For more, read this article in The Economist
10 reasons to hug a Riace migrant

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October 16, 2018

Let’s hug it out (Photo by Thiago Barletta)

If you haven’t read this story about the Italian government’s latest “war on the immigration business”, it’s got the full tragi-comedic spectrum.

1 People for terra nullius [just baiting ya, Matteo. But seriously, Italy has a major shortfall in human beings, and the ones it has got aren’t living in places like Riace]

2 Southern Italy is now the Migration Innovation hub of Europe [how refreshing does that sound?]

3 A Tourist Spectacle [look kids, Africans in Italy not selling handbags!]

4 The Gene Pool just got all shook up

5 The possibility of an Eros Ramazzotti-Naija hip-hop mashup a la La Haine

6 Another middle-aged European just got Married [Ed – just how many marriages are of inconvenience?]

7 More Tax Revenue [seriously, look it up]

8 Young Workers [not retirees from Ruislip with dodgy hips]

9 More on the Menu than ham & cheese baguettes at lunchtime [OK, it’s a cheap jab, but Italians can take it, we all know their cuisine is the best in the world!]

10 They lured Matteo Salvini into looking even more preposterous than he already did
Who’s to blame for my troubles?

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October 12, 2018

Why me? (Photo by Sholto Ramsay)

Responsibility in an indifferent universe: it’s been a cause of anguish ever since we became conscious beings. I get that. It’s virtually the reason religion exists.

But that recurring image of the wailing mother in a war zone – the one newsreels show on repeat – is one we all feel sorrow for. Oh course we do. Why? Because she is the victim of random tragedy.

If I shape my world…then what?

But flip things for a second. Don’t we all grow up being told – believing – that the better person I am, the better the world will treat me? Isn’t that hardwired into us? That’s the moral baseline.

If I act in a certain way – positively, assertively, without anger, compassionately, altruistically – that will come back to me in a more content, more fulfilled life, right?

(I suppose one answer is that such actions simply improve your quality of life, barring random tragedy or an act of God, depending on your belief.)

If that is our hardwired positive, what does our subconscious make of tragedy? Does it need meaning too? If it does, what answers are there in the dark recesses of the mind?

It’s your fault

If something bad happens, is it just the tipping point of too many bad thoughts or deeds? And even if there’s no God doing the scolding, do trivial bad or negative actions lead to a situation where more bad can happen to you?

Obviously, these dark recesses are sometimes not so hidden. Remember Glenn Hoddle and his weird hypothesis on people with disabilities? How many of the devoutly religious harbour similar instincts?

For those without the comfort of religion, fully confronting the reality of an indifferent, random universe is still an uneasy place to be. But it’s useful. It might even deepen our compassion.

That’s my thought for the day. What got me started? Charles Foster’s weird and wonderful Being A Beast: An intimate and radical look at nature
You’re the only person reading this

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October 5, 2018

An Autumn forest brimming with SEO

The sun breaks through the leaves. They are full on the trees, creating dappled shapes that shift and heave in the breeze. Small purple-headed thistles sway by the path, but each time I move back under the canopy, the chill in the air prickles my skin. The sun is shining, but it has no strength left. It is a light, clear sunshine, like soft white wine. It won’t last. As I move, nutshells crack beneath my shoes.

What? Are you still reading? You see, I realised that everything you learn about how to write is SEO (search engine optimisation) madness. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is the opposite of keyword density.

That paragraph you read, it doesn’t have a subhead saying:

‘Hey, It’s Autumn. Get Outside’ [well, it does now-ed.]

…and the keyword density for ‘autumn’ is zero.

Every time I write a blog post, I have an army of devices that help me polish the SEO. So you’ll find it and read it. Why do I write? To be read by you.

Gutenberg is dead

You see? That subhead is no good at all. You might be interested in the demise of traditional publishing, but you’re not going to Google ‘Gutenberg’. Better to change that subhead to ‘Traditional publishing is dead’. Be literal.

The problem is you lose so much. ‘Gutenberg is dead’ works fine for your TED talk, because everyone in the audience knows the name Gutenberg refers to the printing press. They might even give you a few wry smiles about the allusion to Nietzsche’s God is dead. Maybe?

It doesn’t matter if they do or not, at least your words have layers.

2D digital

If online is the future of the written word, and SEO is how you get that word seen, what is the future of the written word? Is it a race to the exclamation mark?

This isn’t about being Tolstoy. But it’s about the idea that writing can reveal itself in different ways and at different speeds, depending on when and how you read it.

If I only write in exclamation marks, I keep your attention (because we all apparently have goldfish attention spans now). That makes sense. The internet is a crowded place.

But we’re not goldfish. We’re humans.
You are how you sit

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September 27, 2018

A seat in the desert (Photo by Patrick Schneider)

Just how culturally conditioned are we to sit in a certain way? Western inventions – from the chair and the stool to the sofa and the car seat – have encouraged a certain posture. This posture is reinforced by the sense that it is a civilised position.

What if we’re wrong?

New school movement practitioners like Katy Bowman and Erwan Le Corre have been suggesting that sitting in chairs all our lives isn’t so great for our physical health. The get-off-the-couch concept is as old as the hills, but what if we just got rid of the couch?

The superior squat

So, different ways of sitting are hip (check out Le Corre’s MovNat essential deep squat posture), but I like to take the long view, so here’s one: desert explorer Wilfred Thesiger’s majestic 1959 book Arabian Sands is famous for chronicling his crossing of Arabia’s Empty Quarter.

What it’s less famous for is Thesiger’s recurring observations about his own pain and discomfort at riding a camel for days on end, in stark contrast to the ease of the Bedouin. He could only ride legs astride, while they could ride in a deep squat, then with one leg dangling, then the other, in endless movement.

The morality of chairs

What is even less famous is a cultural insight. Every time they reached a town, Thesiger would be offered a room with a table and chairs. It vexed him, since he wanted to sit on the floor like the Bedouin and despised furnishings. Yet the locals assumed he would want them.

More tellingly, any local Arab who had a certain standing in the community wanted Western furnishing. It was a sign of civilisation and progress. While the Bedouin lived their lives in movement between the ground and two legs, endlessly performing Le Corre’s essential deep squat, the civilised turned their backs on such savagery.

Next time you want to feel subversive in a public space, just perform the deep squat, or perish the thought, even sit on the floor.
Why Putin is Playing Nice

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September 19, 2018

War games (Photo by Jason Leung)

The Syrian Civil War. Pretty clear-cut, right? A brutal dictatorship propped up by Putin’s Russia. Grinding to a conclusion. Nothing to see here.

September 17. Two events: a deal between President Putin of Russia and President Erdogan of Turkey to halt the offensive on the final rebel stronghold of Idlib and the downing of a Russian surveillance plane off the Syrian coast during an Israeli operation against a Syrian air base.

Being friends with Russia

Russia and Assad are like that ????.

An offensive against the last rebel stronghold? Actually, no.

A Russian plane downed during an Israeli air raid. Actually, no.

Imagine how comfy Assad is feeling right now: he’s heard that his offensive to take the last rebel stronghold in Syria isn’t happening. And he’s heard that a Russian plane with 15 servicemen aboard was shot down not by Israeli jets attacking a Syrian air base, but by Syrian antiaircraft fire.

Keeping your friends on their toes

My article for Fair Observer explains just why Putin was happy to cut a deal with Turkey on Idlib.

As for the Israelis: they did fly a mission very close to the flightpath of the Russian plane, they did give less than a minute’s warning to Russia about the operation, and they may well have used the plane as cover against Syrian antiaircraft fire.

But the measured response from Putin reveals everything about the Syrian Civil War. Assad is not an end for Russia, but a means to an end. Russia’s goal is not just to create a staunch ally in Syria, but to create great power leverage in the Middle East.

Friends + guns = leverage. September 17 was about keeping friends.
The new school way to work

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September 11, 2018

A hard day’s work (Photo by Liv Bruce)

This is outlandish. In fact, it’s so crazy you shouldn’t even countenance it. But I’m gonna say it anyway: kids love to help. Kids love to do. Kids love to be part of something bigger, more exciting, more grown up. Kids are really fast learners—faster than adults.

Victorian Values 2.0

What if we turned the notion of work, kids and learning upside down? What if there was no 9 to 5 and no childcare? What if we brought kids back to the workforce?

Rewind a moment. Once, kids grew up working with mum and dad. Not working in a hangar full of other 4-year-olds on hammering a fluffy donkey into a Lego truck.

I don’t mean slave labour. I don’t mean factory/chimney sweep/coal miner. That was the industrial mess that led to school. I mean before all that.

Comanche kids could once ride horses bareback better than most adults alive today. Boys and girls learnt the artisan trades, the crafts, the whatever, of their parents virtually from the time they could stand and talk.

If the factory’s broke [just ask Seth Godin: What is school for?], let’s reimagine the workplace.

That doesn’t mean rewind—it means reimagine. Learn from the past, don’t just recreate it. We don’t all have to try and find a living as horsemen or artisan cobblers (but feel free to try!), but we could rethink what we do and how to do it.

Hands on 3-year-olds

When I picked my kid up from grandma—after an afternoon where daddy had to work, so he had to go somewhere else and be minded—I discovered that he’d been helping grandma set a table for her book club.

Not just any table. It was a Dutch Masters’ still life table. Overflowing grapes, French cheeses, cut glass goblets. Stunning.

Good work! What else could he do?