It was a make or break decade for mankind when ‘The Pill’ and other such contraceptives became commonly available. Up until that point mankind had reproduced the species because they liked sex. It was no done deal that they would continue to reproduce when they realised how to break the link to pregnancy. I guess it turned out that we had developed a culture of family and love of children which meant that people actually reproduced because they liked not only sex, but children too. I guess it wouldn’t take a lot for that culture to shift and for people to consider children to be a poor life choice, and then we reach the end of our evolutionary path, some other less sentient creature will rise to the top in our absence.

Labour Party Conference ’11 / BAE shedding 3000 defence jobs.

One of the problems with the Labour Party being so closely linked to the trade unions is that a specific trade union needs to stand up for the current workers in a particular trade, and not necessarily the economy as a whole. If i am made redundant (as i was a few years ago) i expect to union leader to be on my side, personally and not the side of the company or the general economy. Whereas, a responsible political party or government has to look at the situation, say at BAE (where 3000 have been made redundant) and think the following – this is a company who employs over 100,000 people in the UK, and contributes tens of millions in tax revenue, that figure is always going to fluctuate up and down depending on how many people want to buy their products. If there is a slowdown in demand they have to be free to readjust the workforce in line with that, up or down. They have to make the best business decisions as they see fit, if they were to decide not to let these 3000 go, perhaps in ten years time all 100,000 would go because the company had made many such bad business decisions. Perhaps they have let too few go, perhaps they should be letting 10,000 go, and if they did that they would be in a position to employ 25,000 more over the next ten years. That’s not a question that a union leader will contemplate.

A trade unions purpose is to defend the current employee, not future potential employees. Thus the Labour Party/Trade Union dichotomy.

My own view was at the time that the demonstrators had walked into a trap. The real argument was about general government cuts, which people wanted to protest, not the specific univerisity fees policy, which was more nuanced and arguably fairer and more egalitarian than the current system. It was an unwinable argument for the protesters and the failure of these protest have blunted the enthusiasm for any protests against ‘real’ cuts. Milliband and Labour can take a lot of the blame . They should have shown good faith and judgement by backing the policy even against public opinion, then they would have been listened too when the real cuts came.

• University fees will not be paid by students.
• They are paid for by well-to-do, relatively successful people in their late 20s and 30s, who have been to Uni and benefited.
• The lower the fees, the more that Mrs Khan who works 40hrs at Tescos ends up paying taxes for Timmy to lark about at Uni.
• Anyone who doesn’t go to Uni because they think they can’t afford it, simply hasn’t understood how it works ! and perhaps doesn’t have the intellect to go anyway

But human rights? idunno, convince me.

What does a human have a ‘right’ to expect from life. I think my answer would be that depends where you live. If you live in a country which has an environment regularly un-conducive to life and well-being then you may well die young of hunger. It means nothing to state a ‘right to work’ in those circumstances, or even a right to life. You NEED to work, you need to attempt to plough the land and raise animals or you and your family will die pretty sharpish. Either that or move to a place with a more conducive environment and/or more developed economy.

Being human is not like being a house cat, its like being a wild cat. The default position is that there is no nice owner who gives us Whiskas when we ask and a few nice toys to play with. By default we need need to work hard to stay alive. Of course im not saying that we should abandon all the advances of western society in the last 500 years. Just stating that any ‘rights’ that we have come from being part of a society, how many rights would I have if i was stranded on a desert island for a year? would it do me any good to stand on the beach, arms folded, demanding my human right to shelter, work and a living wage?

So in a society based on democracy, a citizen’s (human) rights are decided on by the elected delegates of the day. They are not some eternal law handed down from on high. So how can a government ever be found to be violating someone’s human rights?

I heard a serious person say recently that having a broadband connection was a human right. Wise up!

It’s of course easy to say that you are more affected or interested in one death than another, the Sunday Mirror had to make an actual call on which was more important to its readers. Early editions had the Norway story as the front page splash, with a top banner mentioning Winehouse, then interestingly for later editions they flipped it.

The fact is that there IS a hierarchy of affectedness, and it tells us a lot about our selves. We seem uncomfortable about it but it’s this:

#1 Death of young national cultural icon

#2 Death of dozens of europeans in dramatic fashion

The Sunday Mirror knows it and we know it but don’t want to admit it. He’s the kicker, have we all forgotten about the thousands of children currently dying of starvation in Somalia, of the parents killing themselves because they can’t bare to watch their children die?

#3 Death of thousands of Africans

it’s uncomfortable for us to rate these events, but deep down i think we have to admit we don’t have the head space to consider and be affected by every tragic death which occurred yesterday. 156,000 people die in the world every day, 384,000 are born.

If a close family member died yesterday, just one person, not known or loved by anyone but yourself, their death would jump to #1. It’s uncomfortable, but the hierarchy of affectedness is perhaps rational.

Johann Hari

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”

Voltaire

“We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still”

John Stuart Mill

People need kidney transplants

We can get by perfectly well with just one kidney

People should be able to donate a kidney to someone they don’t know, and in return they know that they will go to the top of the list for a transplant if it turns out they ever need one

Personal messages on people’s wall: ‘Hi mike, did you get anywhere with that insurance claim?’

What’s all that about !? if its a personal message send a text or an email, or at least a facebook message. why-oh-why would anyone ask things like this in a public way so that all of Mike’s friends can see it?

Wives, husbands, partners, boyfriends and girlfriend comment etiquette.

This is a big area, and makes me cringe more than most. Personally I think the rule should be that you don’t ‘like’ or comment on a partners comment, photo or link. oh really? you like this link or status update by your boyf, you think its funny? you think he’s brilliant and clever and you want everyone to know you do??

Then there’s the ‘reply’ to a boyf/girf/hubbby/wife comment. The worst case is when its about the kids, discussing how brilliant your little treasure is, and how cute that cute thing he said was. three or four comments back and forth in front of everyone, so all your mutual friends can see.

Don’t get me started on the ‘luv ya babes’ stuff. that’s just criminal, almost deserves defriending.

There is of course the incessant posting of proud kiddy photos.

This is one of the many annoying things that i do way too much. Also, the mobile photo upload of something ‘fun and interesting’ i’m currenting doing. guilty as charged. i can’t help it. Along with the ‘check in’ to show that i have an interesting life. again, guilty as charged. And the ‘funny’ status update. I do too much of that too… and in retrospect, most of the time, less than funny. Then again, in my defence, if no one tried to entertain through status updates it would get very boring very quickly.

It was just around this time when the dust had settled and people had begun to gain just a little bit of perspective regards the biggest human catastrophe the people of the world had ever inflicted on themselves. Around a million British men had died, whole communities ripped from the country. Made worse by the realisation that it was needless, a twist of fate mixed with bad diplomacy, arrogance, badly entangled national treaties mixed with the jingoism and short sightedness of the national press. Most of all, people were starting to realise that it wasn’t just as easy as ‘Germany was to blame’, therefore we should punish them. Germany had been caught up in this European tragedy as much as anyone. This was all as fresh in the mind as ‘Back for good’ is for us today.

The one thing the country had decided was that it was to be the war to end all wars. This was mixed with an inkling of regret and guilt about the treaty of Versailles and and a smidge of respect for how Hitler seemed to be getting the country back on its feet.

Harold Macmillan wrote in his memoirs (yes, i read such crap) that in the 1930s people regarded the new phenomenon of Air War similarly to how we now (in the 60s) regard nuclear war. It was a terror, which would bring war to the home land killing countless women and children. The prime minister in the mid 30s, Baldwin, reflecting on how arial bombing had been used in the spanish civil war lamented that any future wars would simply be about which side could kill the most women and children in their homes, quickest. He wasn’t being melodramatic, he was calling it like he saw it, as he ordered the building of bomber aircraft.

On the eve of war, after Hitler had broken the Munich agreement and entered Prague, Chamberlin asked his generals to estimate how many casualties should be expected on the home front. They told him, 150,000 deaths in the first week.The truth was, terrible as it is, that slightly less than 150,000 people were killed by german bombers over the 6 years of the war. A tragedy but multiples less than was feared. They literally thought that if they couldn’t stop a war happening most of the people in the country would be dead soon, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters. Anything was better than war, Churchill was principled and probably right but he was going to get us all killed, and should quiet down.In to this comes Chamberlains quote, which is used to damn him.

“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing!”

There are two strains of appeasers and they shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. There are the nazi lovers, Mosley and the black shirts, and his sympathisers like Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard, high profile but few in number. Then there are the other sort, who just wished to avoid war, wished to go the extra mile, These people were misguided as it turned out Hitler was, well, Hitler and had to be fought through force of arms but this didn’t necessarily seem to be the case at the time, and 15 years after Cotton Eye’d Joe and Austin Powers, i fear that i would wrongly have been in the appeasement camp.