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What an unbelieveable pile of crap. How has this story dominated the news for so long? It’s so insignificant as to be a total non-event in my opinion. They had an expense allowance. They had rules. They had an overseight body. They claimed and were told they were within the rules and given the money. Now they’ve got to pay it back because … well, I can only come back to jealousy and envy. They followed the rules, they shouldn’t have to pay it back. If you disagree with the rules, then they should be changed, but people who complied with them should not be forced to pay back what they claimed. It’s a fundamental fule of justice, that changes to the rules should not be retroactive! Not breaking the rules is not grounds for punishment.
Take the case of the guy who’s having to repay £41,000. Now, even if every MP had to repay a similar sum that’s only about £2.7 million. Yes, I say only. The budget of the NHS alone was £90 billion in 2007 and was set to reach £110 billion in two years time. That’s one service the government provides which is over 33 thousand times higher than what would take to give every MP £41,000. And, of course, the £41,000 repay was accumulated over 4 years. So it’s even less siginificant. It would work out to £675,000 a year, or 133 thousand times smaller than the budget of the NHS. It wouldn’t even make a dent in the NHSs £900 million deficit last year.
Lets say the figure for MPs over claiming is actually massive and averages to £15,000 per MP, per year (not the case considering the largest ‘over claim’ is £41,000 over four years, or £10,250 per year). Lets also say we can get every penny of that back at zero cost (impossible) and lets round it up to a nice even £4 million reclaimed. Lets say we then give all of the money reclaimed from the past four years to the education department. The education department gets around £80 billion a year. If we translate that to numbers which can be more easily comprehended, it’s like giving a minimum income worker, pulling in £12,000 a year an extra 60 pence. It’s not going to change anything for that person. They can now afford an extra bar of chocolate. They’ll be thrilled.
Okay, lets say we were even more specific and gave that £4 million to primary schools, which have a budget of £700 million. Now we’re talking! That’s the equivalent to giving our £12,000 a year worker an injection of almost £70! Not life changing, sure, but they’ll be able to buy… well, maybe they’ll be able to replace a broken part on their car which didn’t seem worth it before. Or they might be able to take a loved one out for a nice meal.
Of course, the assumptions made are crazy. There’s no way that reclaiming the money would come without cost. There’s no way that the over claim by MPs is that high. The whole thing is a total non-event. Complete storm in a tea-cup.
Interestingly (or actually not if you’re even slightly clued up on how the media operates) it was actually quite hard to find a web news page that said the £41,000 repay figure even in the same paragraph as the fact it’s spread over four years.
I think the story should have been told as: “Look how many MPs don’t claim nearly any of their allowed expenses! What a bunch of freaks/saints!” (depends on how you want to spin it) Seriously, how many people can honestly say that, if their company was to offer to pay for something that they would say no? How many people, when offered either money for, or money towards their work-related costs say no to that money? I would venture to say very few, and further to venture that the ones who do say no say that because of the difficulty of claiming, not because it’s morally wrong to claim. These MPs claimed when everyone of us would have claimed and we hang them out to dry for it!
Of course, there are those who are arguing that it’s not the money, it’s the principle. These people followed the rules and got money. They were open about what it was being spent on. It’s a fucking disgrace! They should all be strung up and shot! No, wait. Hang on. That actually sounds like reasonable behaviour to me. There’s the guy who had his daughter stay with him. He’s a total fiend of course. We want our MPs to be good family people, but not in a house part paid for by us, goddamnit! We want our MPs to represent us and be normal people and we want them present at Parliament and able to vote on the issues of the day, yet we want to make it so that only the disgustingly wealthy can actually hope to be an MP because we want them to finance their own central London houses!
I’ve heard it suggested that MPs should share bed sits… which is a really wonderful idea. Yes, lets have the leaders of the country hunkering down like crack addicts, four to a room!
I hate the coverage of this story because it is so petty. The premises at work are envy and jealousy. The ones demanding these MPs act like super humans are themselves acting like brats who’ve just been told the kid next door has got a new bike.
It strikes me that this story is being used to try and distract us from the worsening economic situation. For fear that we might notice that the system is seriously broken and we might get it into our precious little heads that maybe it needs changing. Maybe it’s not a good idea to have a system built on growth! Maybe it’s not a good idea to have power and wealth pooled in a very small number of hands. Maybe we should think about doing things differently… no, wait! That guy there claimed expenses he was entitled to, in a way he was supposed to, for things he was allowed! Burn him! Get the mob together and tell them to put down the “We demand change” banners and grab up the pitch forks and flaming torches! It’s witch hunt time!
The name of this blog is inspired by Endgame by Derrick Jensen.
Often the premises of the media are shrouded in secrecy. We have to read between the lines to try to understand where the news writers stand, for example. This leads to the right being able to claim the media is left wing, and the left being able to claim the media is right wing. The obscurity of the premises that the media operates on results in this situation. A given media source will be written by a lot of people and so can easily be accused of a lot of different things. A person levelling such criticism is likely to focus on the aspects which support their case and ignore the aspects which don’t. Were the media to put their premises up front and be honest about them then this couldn’t happen. You could argue that given articles operated within different premises, or that many articles did and thus the media was lying about its premises, but you couldn’t make any claim you wanted to about them.
Because we don’t know their premises we don’t know what questions they are asking. Because we don’t know what questions they are asking we can’t know if the answers given to us within their content are actually of any use or not. The formulation of a question is very, very important, as anyone who has spent time on compiling a good questionnaire will tell you. Ask the wrong question, or even the right question in the wrong way, and you get a useless answer. Assume the answer and ask a question aimed at getting it and you might as well not have wasted your time. However, assuming the answer is what happens every single day in the media. Their premises are assumptions they don’t even admit to themselves. These assumptions lead them to answers which leads them to questions. A meaningless exercise.
The stealthy nature of the media’s premises leads to the general public having no idea that there is even a problem. They don’t understand the importance of questions. They belittle the role of stories and narrative. They fail to realise that every news item they absorb is based on assumptions, assumptions which they probably would agree with without understanding why (simple truth is they’ve absorbed the assumption from so many stories that they see it as ‘just the way things are’ and not as an assumption based on nothing more than other’s having made the same assumption).
This blog isn’t claiming to have the right answers and to have asked the right questions. It is simply an attempt to get people who read it to think in different ways, to ask questions about their assumptions. To motivate people to try to find out more. To compel people to find their own questions, their own answers. To help them to open their eyes to the scary reality of the world they live in and ask why, who, how. To get to the bottom of the mess so they at least understand what they are doing to the planet, to children in developing nations, to mother’s breast milk, to their own bodies. If they achieve that level of understanding and then continue to want to carry on with business as usual then they can (how could I stop them?), at least they’re armed with the understanding of what they are doing. They are informed.
It’s obvious when you hold a petri dish up and smear some bacteria on it that, without intervention, one day the bacteria will run out of resources and die. Our minds can comprehend that, despite the tiny, tiny size of the baceria at work, they will run out of food. We can see the full extent of their food, the resource we have given them to survive on. The Bacteria, we have to assume, is unaware that it is in a little biosphere with enough food to last it X amount of time. Once it starts multiplying it has half-X, a quarter-X, one-eighth-X, etc.
We assumes the bacteria doesn’t understand its situation because we imagine that, given the same set of circumstances, we would be more frugal with the resource, aiming to make it last as long as we possibly can. We assume the bacteria is stupid and we are smart. Indeed, when faced with a size of resource that fits into our field of view we can be very frugal, we can ration for ourselves and decide how much to use on any given day with the end goal of making it last as long as we can. When faced with a resource that doesn’t fit into our field of view we act like the bacteria.
It brings up Richard Heinberg’s question again: Are we smarter than yeast?
When you try and make them face the reality of a infinite growth system on a finite world, most people don’t have the head-space for it. You can try all you like to tell them that inifinity inside something finite doesn’t work. You can use the Kalam Cosmological Argument (intended as a proof of God’s/Allah’s existence, but serviceable), which hinges on Zeno’s Paradox to shoot down the idea of infinity within a finite space. You can pick numbers so astronomically huge and depletion rates so tiny and show them how steady depletion at that rate isn’t sustainable, let alone a growth in depletion rate. They tend not to comprehend. Whether this is a case of it being impossible to tell someone something that the way they lead their lives necessitates being counter to what you’re saying, or it’s a case of the failings of the education system yet again, it’s not important. You often can’t explain this in such a way as it passes the filters in place over most people’s minds. Growth is good. Infinite growth is highly desireable. Recessions are terrible. Ever increasing profits are to be rewarded with praise.
“We are imprisoned by our political Hippocratic oath: we will deliver unto the electorate more goodies than anybody else. Such an oath was only ever achievable by increasing our despoliation of the world’s resources. Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich – which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours.
“Genocide followed. Now there is a case to answer that genocide is once again an apt description of how we are pursuing business as usual, wilfully ignoring the consequences for the poorest people in the world.” – Challen, ‘We must think the unthinkable, and take voters with us,’ The Independent, March 28, 2006.
There are resources which are termed as ‘renewable’. The tag is often used interchangeably with ‘infinite’, but a lot of them aren’t. Trees are often called renewable, but they are certainly not infinite. They are renewable so long as they are used at a rate which they can recover from. Since we are losing over 2% of the forest cover of the planet each year, it’s not extreme to suggest we are using trees at a rate greater than they are replenished. We live in a growth-based system. If we are deforresting at a rate of 2% this year, then next year we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.04%, the year after that we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.08%, 10 years after that we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.54%, in a further 10 years we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 3.09%. That’s with the ’stable’ growth that most governments want of 2% per year.
If you change that to the more optimistic growth desires of large companies, who want to grow as much as possible but we’ll cap it at 5% instead then 20 years after that 2% starting point you’re at 5.05%. Of course, when you’re talking about organisms which need other organisms around to make their next generation then you’re talking about a much more complicated system, but if the rate of tree reproduction could be kept constant while this rising number of tree destruction continues then 20 years after the start of the 5% growth chart you’re left with about half the trees you started with. Small percentages result in a depletion that is horrific.
No one is really willing to accept that they may need to be paid less and less each year, mother culture has promised more and more money each year. No one is really willing to accept that they may need to have fewer and fewer things each year, mother culture has promised more and more things each year. The argument often spewed by those on the other side of the fence is that I just want to make you all live in caves again. That’s not really accurate. I’m saying one day we will probably be living in caves again, maybe not in our life time, but within the life time of our traceable children. I’m suggesting we might want to make that time as far off in the future as we possibly can. I’m suggesting we might want to control the decrease in resource use rather than have it dictated to us by the planet.
I’m only suggesting that people start to ask the questions, start to debate what needs to be debated. I’m also suggesting that a lot of the standard discourse around these issues is fog, smear, smoke blown out by large companies to hide the reality, to cloud judgements.
Where I to tell you a tale of someone being robbed, would you say anything like: “Well, they were asking for it. I mean, look at the house they live in. And why buy a huge TV anyway? A black and white TV would have been just as good and no one would have stolen that. Also, what’s with having glass all over the house? That’s just like asking someone to break it and steal stuff.”
No? Why not? Would you not, instead, say something like: “Robbers are jerks, fuck. I’d hate that to happen to me. I hope they catch whoever did it!”
If I were to tell you a tale about someone being hit by a car that mounted the kerb they were standing on, would you say anything like: “Well, it was their fault, walking along a street like that. They should know better than that really. They should stay away from areas where it might happen, then they’d be safe!”
No? Why not? Would you instead say something like: “Dangerous drivers like that should really be kept off the roads, they’re a total menace!”
Both of the above situations are intended to illustrate two points I want to make about rape. Why are the women held to be responsible for it? There are a large number of occasions where statements like “why was she wearing that?! I mean, come on, that’s almost like asking for it,” are seen as perfectly valid, even though the statistical impact of clothing on rape instances is negligible. There’s no evidence, other than anecdotal, which actually supports the theory that conservative dress actually diminishes the likelihood of being raped.
Also, there’s the fallacy that being in the wrong place is the woman’s fault. They were there and so being raped was the logical outcome. Statements like, “Well, what does she expect, walking down a dark alley alone at night?” are held as valid.
Clothing and location are very low on the order of contributing factors to rape. The biggest contributing factor? Being in any form of a relationship with a man. Never is it suggested that a woman doesn’t see or speak to her father or uncle, for example. Never is it suggested that a woman isn’t left alone with her brothers or any male relative. Yet, compared to clothing and location, these factors are much higher on the deciding factors of rape instances.
What am I getting at? The ‘advice’ isn’t worth the breath/paper/bytes it’s given with. It doesn’t actually address the problem. It doesn’t actually give real advice.
Men rape. Women are raped. The difference there? Men are the active ones, women are the passive ones. Actions or inactions on the part of the women are much less effective than actions or inactions on the part of the man. If we are to stop rapes it’s not the women we need to be telling and lecturing and giving advice to, it’s the men.
Advice we could give men? How about:
- No means no.
- There is no cause/reason/excuse to have sex with a woman who isn’t happy about it. This isn’t limited to situations where they say no. It includes situations where you have any ground to believe that the woman is uncomfortable.
- Not having sex should be your default. If the woman doesn’t seem interested then not having sex is the answer. If the woman seems uncomfortable then not having sex is the answer. Having sex should be an active decision involving both of you.
- It is not unreasonable for you to make sure sexual activities are with the consent of the person you are with. It is not unreasonable for a woman to say yes today, no tomorrow and yes the next day. Yes today does not mean yes at any other time. Yes now does not mean yes in an hour’s time, or the next time that night you have a hard on.
- “Why don’t you come in and have a drink?” does not imply sex. It implies a drink, but doesn’t even guarantee that much.
- An uncomfortable look means no. No means no.
- If she’s unhappy then it’s not a good time to have sex. If she’s drunk it’s not a good time to have sex. If she’s on drugs it’s not a good time to have sex. If she, in any way, seems to not be interested then it’s not a good time to have sex.
- It’s her body. It’s her body. It’s HER body! Not yours.
- She has the right to take back her yes. At any time. At any point. If you don’t listen then it’s rape. You are a rapist if you ignore so much as her negative body language. You can be inside her and she can withdraw her consent. She can take back her yes at any moment and it is your responsibility to listen to that.
Rape comes about because society doesn’t acknowledge a woman’s right to her own body. It doesn’t acknowledge that she can say yes or no at any moment. The biggest instance of this, the most disgusting high profile instance of this attitude that I know of is the case of R v A. The Labour government (they have done some good stuff, but then, you churn out that many laws and some of them have to stick) changed the law on evidence in a rape case so that the woman’s sexual history was inadmissible. The reason being two-fold:
- If a woman said yes yesterday it’s irrelevant to today, she can still say no, the same applies if she said yes to someone, a group of someones, a legion of someones, she can still say no to you.
- Rape cases were invariably turned on their head so the woman had to defend themselves from accusations that they were a slut when that is actually not relevant to her ability to say no.
However, in R v A the House of Lords said that the woman’s sexual history can be relevant to the case, and so ignored the law. They allowed a man to use the fact he’d had a sexual relationship with the woman in the past to be used as a defence. I’ll have to repeat that, they allowed a man to use the fact he’d had a sexual relationship with the woman in the past to be used as a defence. So the fact that she said yes at some point in the past was relevant to her decision today. The House of Lords effectively told all women, “Hey, if you’re think you might not want to have sex with a man, at any point in the future, ever, then you must never say yes. Saying yes at any point will allow him to assume you’re saying yes whenever he wants you. Your consent last week has an impact on our consent today and next month…”
Rape is something that is done to a woman (sometimes a man, mostly a woman). The raped are not responsible for being raped any more than the burgled are responsible for being burgled, the mugged are responsible for being mugged, the defrauded are responsible for being defrauded, etc. Yet the discourse of rape is such that one would be forgiven for believing that it is, or at best that the majority of people believe it is.
The media is, to a large degree, responsible for peddling this delusion. They never question it, only promote it. They could promote the idea that men shouldn’t rape, but instead they promote the idea that women should be responsible for not being raped.
Is a two party system really the way to achieve the best in terms of democracy? When those two parties represent totally different ideologies, and core beliefs I can see it working in a very binary way. Not that it’d be very democratic, just that it would be better than the situation we find ourselves in now, where the only wiggle room between the two parties, the only place to slide a piece of paper and say “verily, these are not the same party” is the colour of the backdrops. Do you like your representative to favour red backdrops or blue backdrops?
Sure, the Conservatives might vote against the government on some issues, but that’s politics. You can’t say “We agree with what this government is doing, it’s all great” because that’s exactly the same as saying “why vote for us, there’s no difference between what we want and what they want”. You have to provide the counter point, the argument, as to why the government is wrong in what they are doing. When pressed on why they were against the government’s plans more often than not the answer is because of minor details in the legislation. While I fully accept that minor details can create big problems and that the details need to be right, the answer which is given isn’t “we disagree with the need for X” it is “we’d do X different in minor ways”. That’s not a choice, especially for people who don’t care for X in the first place.
A two party state is a lack of democracy by virtue of the fact that it only has three choices. i) Pro-government, ii) Pro-opposition, iii) Protest vote. The system favours the government, since many people either believe that it’s better the devil you know or that things aren’t that bad under the current guy. This has given rise to the belief that oppositions don’t win an election, governments lose them.
A while back I heard about the “vote no one, no one would vote for you” campaign and thought it a terrible idea. The main reason I thought it was a bad idea was because abstaining doesn’t make a point. It’s counted as a lazy/apathetic person (recently you could also be accused of happithy, being too happy with the way things are to bother about the elections). This might be the reasoning behind some people not voting, but most people I speak to who don’t vote have reasons along the lines of “they’re all lying scum, why should I vote for any of them?” It’s not that they’re lazy, it’s not that they are apathetic (and it most certainly isn’t because they’re hapathetic), they just don’t see a choice they want to take from the limited stock on offer. They don’t want to vote for a minor party, since the minor party has no chance of securing power and they’re sick of the crap which the main parties are constantly engaged in.
Watching PMQs it’s easy to see why people don’t like politics. It’s all so scripted and fake. The PM has the questions before they’re asked, knows who’s going to make comments against his policy and who will support his policy. He arranges for some little lacky to stand up and ask him a positive question so he can look good and has had his script writers working on his answers to the opposition for as long as they could. Nothing is left to chance. It’s the same as the visits he makes to various places, where he turns up in a throng of people, all Labour activists, all asked to attend and look enthused. Fake.
The media has stopped calling politicians liars where ever they can avoid it. They opt for the word ’spin’ instead. The PM’s Spin Doctors. It’s lies. They’re liars. If you told someone a lie and when they called you on it you said “no, it wasn’t a lie, it was spin” they’d either clock you one or say it was a lie, since that is what spin is.
Why is there the need for spin? Is it because politicians are lying little weasles who wanted power for themselves and never had any intention of using it in a positive way for the community? Is it because 24 hour news coverage means that decisions must be made quickly and decisively in the glare of media attention, then defended whether or not it was the right decision? I think we’re seeing quite a few examples of this in Brown. He takes a few days to make big decisions, which is a really good thing. Big decisions should be taken with care and care requires time. However, Brown gets crucified for it, characterised as indecisive and bumbling by a media who waned the answer to the situation on the day the situation broke. They hate having a story open and running, it needs to be packaged and complete so they can bring in their experts to analyse it and the talking heads to debate if it was right or not. They don’t want to keep reporting the same story day after day since it makes them look bad. They can’t have that so they victimise the PM for taking his time and trying to get it right. I’m not trying to say he does get it right, but taking his time and gathering data is a much better way to get the right answer than to make a snap headline and then try to find out how it will work later.
In a two party state both parties move to cover the centre ground. That doesn’t mean moving to the centre of the political spectrum, but the centre of the general opinion of the country, so the UK’s centre ground is slightly right wing, while the in the US the centre ground is even further right, making their ‘leftist’, ‘liberal’ politicians seem to be the same as our right wing politicians. Parties move to the centre so they have access to the greatest share of votes, because all a politician cares about is being re-elected. Every decision they make which will see the light of day is about securing them another term in office. Many (I’d say every, but how would I prove it?) decisions that wont make the light of day is about self interest.
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill
