Speaking of the end of the world...

Saw Frankie Boyle the other night in Glasgow doing a preview of his routine for the Edinburgh Festival. Outstanding. Best three quid I've spend in twenty years. On the end of the world:

"So the best tennis player in Britain is Scottish? I'm not up to speed on my Nostradamus but isn't that one of the harbingers of the apocalypse or something?"

Damn straight. If he ever wins Wimbledon - or if we ever have a Pope from Lanarkshire - put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye, for surely this present age and all its things passeth away?

The disadvantages of "climate porn"

From Simon Retallack in CiF:

"Climate change is most commonly constructed through the alarmist repertoire, as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control. It is described, using an inflated or extreme lexicon, a quasi-religious register of death, as being accelerating and irreversible."

I'd like to stake claim to being an early victim of this sort of "climate porn". Despite the demonstrable incompetence of the human race at predicting the future, I remember in the mid-seventies soothsaying was big business. There was two strands to this. On one side stood the optimists who still imagined a Tomorrow's World future where it was assumed that technological change would supply all mankind's needs, regardless of how trivial. On the other side were the environmentalists, who were saying more or less what they are saying now. Which is, basically, "we're all fucked".

Now I was of an impressionable age so I believed all of them - and wasn't old enough to understand that these visions were contradictory. To this day, I'm still a bit pissed-off about it. I want to know from the optimists: where's the jet-pack you assured me I'd be travelling to work on by now? As it is, I'm still crawling along the M8, about to have a "Falling Down" moment any day now. Or maybe even more annoying - where's the CD's that don't jump? Telling us they wouldn't jump because they didn't scratch like vinyl. Liars.

Same with the fluffy harbingers of the apocalypse. I'm not advocating "climate change denial" - I'd just like to make the observation that there are still whales, air to breathe, trees - shit like that. I expected then that all of them would be gone by now.

To project this to the present day would of course be irrational. After all, just because the enviro-prophets were wrong then, this doesn't mean they are wrong now. However, what is more rational, I think, is to consider the possibility that environmentalists tend to prefer the more pessimistic amongst the scientific predictions of climate change because they wish to impress on people the urgency of the problem in order to influence people's patterns of consumption.

I have no doubt this is done for the best motives but in doing so, the original problem identified by Simon Retallack kicks in: it has the opposite effect because the more apocalyptic the environmental predictions are, the less likely people are to see changes in their own behaviour as being worthwhile. Or to put it another way, is there really much point in me re-cycling my (admittedly copious) empty glass bottles if we don't have the United States, Russia, India and China on board with the whole carbon-emissions thing?

I'm probably just rationalising my prejudices - but who doesn't? And there's something else the art of prophecy as practiced today shares with the 1970s. Then as now, people projected into the future in an attempt to answer the question that political circumstances couldn't help presenting to them: what will the world look when the oil runs out?

Against "inner"

I don't mean practical things like the inner-tubes of tyres and stuff or where it has a clearly-identifiable meaning, like Max Weber talking about "inner-worldly asceticism" and things like that.

But there are occasions when the use of the word should definitely trigger "inner" alarm bells.

Like when people go on about "inner-peace". It's perhaps cynicism on my part but in my experience, folks do this as a sort of last resort - after all the more practical and exterior avenues of happiness have been exhausted.

And as for people getting in touch with their "inner-child" - all I can say is that this should surely be banned in enclosed public spaces?

Now we have Blair claiming to have "inner-confidence". I mean, would he care to share what this internal confidence is actually based on? Has he been getting in touch with his "inner-straight guy" again?

There's more here.

After Castro?

John Harris repeats some of the usual bollocks about Cuba:

"One thing should certainly be borne in mind. Cuba may look forlorn, all peeling buildings and pockmarked roads. Its economy may have long since tumbled into creaking anarchy. But unlike the old states of eastern Europe, the revolution has a few genuine jewels to defend: chiefly, its education system, and globally-acclaimed healthcare.

[Cuba has] a health system that emphasizes preventive care, locks doctors into the local populations that they serve, and is built around a simplicity from which the British NHS - particularly in its ever-more fragmented, Blairite incarnation - would do well to learn. The country's health indicators speak volumes: Cuba has an average life expectancy of 77.3 as against the USA's 77.4. The two countries' rates of infant mortality and maternal morbidity are similarly close. Their respective health spends, however, underline the Cuban miracle: in the states, the annual figure is $5711 per head; in Cuba, it's $251."

Most people taking issue with this sort of soft-left support for the decaying Brezhnevian dictatorship in Cuba try to make the case that Cuba's health care system, or its social services in general, are not all they are cracked up to be.

But this misses the point. Health indicators like longevity, infant mortality etc. tend to be more closely related to GDP per capita, rather than health care spending per capita anyway - but what if Cuba's health system is all it's cracked up to be?

Same with education. I don't understand why John Harris suggests Cuba's supposedly good system is "unlike the old states of Eastern Europe", anyway. I was under the impression that they were often rather good, although my impressions admittedly come from a very partial source. My late father, an academic who specialised in Soviet education, and was generally pro-Soviet politically himself, liked to tell the (possibly apocryphal) story about a Russian sailor eliciting gales of laughter from Liverpudlian dockers because he asked them what their favourite Shakespeare play was. He also used to make much the same kinds of points about the Cuban system that the objectively pro-Castro Guardianistas are still making to this day.

Provided you're not a homosexual, a political dissident, or something else the Cuban state finds undesirable, I dare say Cuba - replete with its fabulous education system and its "globally-acclaimed health care" - is a relatively benign dictatorship in which to live, what with the sun, the sea and Ry Cooder popping in occasionally for a wee jam.

But Cuba is a dictatorship nevertheless, and I wish people like John Harris would be honest enough to say they believe this is preferable to a democractic system that could produce a government that might be less disposed to such benevolent gestures like "locking doctors into the communities they serve" and the like. And if they don't, they should stop banging on about the wonderful welfare benefits of despotism - shouldn't they?

Teachers call for parenting lessons?

A report from the Scotsman claims, "Teachers want compulsory lessons to be given to teenagers in school on how to be good parents."

Well, I certainly didn't call for that and I don't know anyone who would. Generally speaking we hate that kind of stuff. Why on earth would anyone think teachers are better placed than anyone else to teach "parenting skills" for goodness sake?

Anyway, turns out it isn't "teachers" at all but the Professional Association of Teachers, a union with about four members who have a no strike policy.

I'll not be joining that. If anyone even suggests I should take a class teaching adolescents how to "parent", I'll be downing pencils and manning the barricades, let me tell you. I didn't go to university to learn how to change goddam nappies. I didn't need to. I mean, it's not exactly rocket science, is it?