Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

Labour does seem to have a death wish, don't they.

People don't post here because they have 'nothing to say' or 'nobody will read it'. But they do post their nothing-to-says abundantly on Facebook. Still pondering on that one. A fair few people still seem to come by and read stuff and enough people post here that it keeps my interest to come back and look at what may be on my friends' page.

I have said a few times that LJ does seem to stimulate longer, deeper conversation but then ten years ago about half the posts were those quizzes and memes, 'which DC superhero are you', etc. That, too, has gone to Facebook and I don't miss it.

ION, an interesting article here by sashagoblin about the many obstacles and intolerances that bi people face. I'm not one myself, but wearing the tags of a few minorities and having to put up, in a much .. lesser, more minor way, with stereotypes and prior assumptions, made me think. We make sense of the world, amongst other ways, by putting labels on things and putting them in boxes, but those boxes seldom describe the whole reality of what we're dealing with -and we get it wrong. And we still deal with difference in ways that may have been advantageous ten thousand years ago but not in the society in which we live. There is such thing as progress, attitudes to these things have changed so much in my lifetime, but it is so slow and so localised.

I don't listen to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 much these days. I suspect that may be, overall, a good thing, for my stress levels and possibly my blood pressure. I do however listen to their podcasts -then I choose what to listen to. The one exception is when I drive to my school in Watford on Tuesday mornings. Then there is at least one occasion to remind myself why I don't listen to the programme. I had a small sample of that today when James Naughtie was interviewing somebody from the trade unions, asking him (and it wasn't a question at all) whether it was legitimate to stage a strike when only a small percentage of those eligible to vote in the ballot did so, even if a majority of those who voted did in favour of the strike. The union spokesperson replies that the same could be said of the general election, in which the current government got elected by a tiny fraction of those eligible to vote. Ah, that is a very different matter, says Naughtie. Now, is it? If most of those who vote choose not to vote, is it an endorsement or a rejection of whatever platform those who won (and those who lost) were running on? Naughtie was saying in almost as many words that is is a very different situation and the government is legitimate but the union ballots, if they voted for strike, were not. I understand that the general BBC approach to interviewing people in public life is the adversarial, confrontational one in hope of catching them in error, but it does seem to me that it is nearly always tilted towards the right. If this guy had anything more to say, I never knew. The one 'question' that kept being asked to him was this demand to admit the illegitimacy of those strike ballots in which a strike was voted for when it wasn't the majority of all people eligible to vote.

I have many times said I'm happy to pay for the licence fee, better to have the BBC than some Murdoch puppet in charge of the main outlet of news in the country. But I do sometimes wonder. The way the BBC reports (or doesn't report) many issues, from Palestine to Venezuela and many others, doesn't look to me very different to me from the way Fox News would report it. Looking at the same issues reported by, say, Al Jazeera, can open one's eyes to a very different perspective.

Avoiding the Today programme seems to be a good idea overall. One should be aware of what is happening (what you don't know can do you a lot of harm) but maybe not like that and, also, maybe not that early in the day.

I'm one of those foreigners Farage wanted out of here. I haven't got around to getting my British citizenship for the simple reason that for most of my 27 years here I haven't had the thousand pounds plus for the fee and there was little benefit for me in getting a British passport.The only thing I cannot do here is vote in the general election and there would have been at least one occasion in which I would have sorely regretted that vote.

The other side of that is that I live here, I'm not going anywhere (unless the Farages of this world have their way) and I do feel I contribute and receive from this land, hopefully in equal measure. My vote would have made no difference to the result of last night but I do feel I should have 'been there'. Maybe it's time to start saving the pennies for that citizenship application fee.

It was kind of none of my business and I didn't have a position about it but I had been watching the process of the Indy referendum in Scotland with interest. It could have had lots of repercussions down here and in Europe at large (the Catalans, the Basque and a number of other nationalities/national groups subsumed into a larger country were watching what was happening in Scotland very intently).

The vote went for 'No' but it does seem to me that the campaign for independence may end up achieving a lot of what it may have set up to do, in that the politicos in Westminster will have to review how they do things in relation to Scotland and, by the way, the English regions. I've seen comments to the tune that a 'Yes' vote would have established a Tory hegemony in the rest of the UK forever. I'm not so sure about that. It could possibly have helped consolidate the pendulum swinging between two almost indistinguishable parties, because 'them lot couldn't possibly be as bad as the ones now in office..'

In any event, what do I know; I'm a blodi forrener and cannot vote in the general elections. OTOH, I can vote in the Venezuelan elections, which fills me with despair, and in the Italian ones, which leaves me completely baffled.

A reflection by matociquala, the fantastically talented SF writer Elizabeth Bear, after the shootings by that guy who, if he couldn't have the girls, he would just kill them:

http://matociquala.livejournal.com/2224624.html

Makes you think. Makes _me_ think, at any rate. Have I been that low-level predatory male? Not certainly, I hope, in the terms she puts it there, but probably in attitude, when I was young. There may be as much nature as nurture in those attitudes but that cannot be a justification; hey, civilisation should be about becoming better beings and rise above things like base animal urges. It often looks, however, as though civilisation is just a very thin veneer above the monkey, reptile or fish that we may once have been. I do believe in progress and it must be better now than fifty or five hundred or five thousand years ago, but it often looks so very slow.

Ergh. Osborne & IDS have now, ahem, excelled themselves. These people are evil. http://t.co/537bqOmGSr http://t.co/HLv80Pxs2e (Grauniad links)

The whole incredible, sordid, amazing story of the Murdoch newspapers here in the UK keeps getting bigger and wider, like a cancer or an oil slick. It has the fascination of a snake, a car crash, a major disaster taking place in slow motion right in front of our eyes... it is difficult to imagine how it could get worse and yet...

Watching 'Russia Today' on the box and it is as if the old Cold War had never ended. Or perhaps it never did end. A feature on the dire state of the US economy and how debt is out of control and the floor is about to fall under them. Another one about how the Lybian situation is a war by proxy between the USA and China, for control of resources and politics in Africa. Which is not impossible, of course, although when you're used to news supplied by Western outlets, as I have become, it comes across as a bit outlandish. Of course there are two issues here: is it true, or at least feasible? Feasible, yes. On the other hand, is its value mainly as propaganda? Quite likely, in this case. Fascinating (I know, for some it may be as fascinating as watching paint dry).

Watching Gaddafi rambling on on tv. Well, I did for a bit until it got too boring -it was so long and pretty much incomprehensible. And he doesn't seem to realise or understand what is happening around him. I don't know what sort of power and popular base he really may have -probably larger than Mubarak et al and what chances he has but this is probably his last stand.