about

so anyway, a few things i noticed in the news.

newspapers tend to get a bit ahead of themselves when it comes to science, but it's hard not to get swept up in the magic. teh Graun reports that the fossils of what might be our first European ancestor have been found. it will probably be some time before we could be sure of that. still, tell me you don't feel a thrill at seeing what may have been the first migrants to a European country who didn't have someone whine about their taking all the jobs.

deny this, you motherfuckers, you feel like crying. it is like watching our world slide into nothing. these pictures are no longer alarm bells; they are our death knell. having spent trillions on a war at least in part over oil, you can't help mourning that we wasted those resources that could have been spent on researching renewables.

it's hard to remember that Robert Mugabe was once in some ways an admirable man. history could have been much kinder to him. now he would be a figure of fun if people were not getting hurt. yet again, Zimbabwe is going to have an election; yet again, it will be rigged. this time though, Mugabe isn't even going to pretend. even Enver Hoxha used to pretend that 99 per cent of Albanians actually had voted for him. it's hilarious to say you are simply not going to let the opposition win. curiously, that's very much what happened in Kenya. i think you could argue that the West's insistence that democracy fundamentally consists of having elections (which it does not), and the Republicans' willingness to flat-out rig them in the US have led to people's simply not considering them anything other than a way to claim a mandate. there's a wide gap, obv., between claiming one and being granted one.

our way of governing ourselves is fucked. the only reason we don't mind it is that we are rich and it doesn't seem to matter to the middle classes how the place is run, so long as the government is not too intrusive. but piece by piece, we slide into oblivion. those comfortable middle-class lives can soon go belly up, and we can find ourselves in the pit we've allowed to be dug for the poor. that pit is very hard to climb out of. when we talk about "opportunity", we mean opportunity for us: for nice, middle-class people who can get a decent education and have tons of openings (when i say "us", i mostly mean "you", because i am a working-class boy made "good").

this is not meaningful. it's just very sad. i normally don't feel much moved by "x killed in street by y" stories, but i was not in the mainstream at this woman's age, so i suppose i was risking this fate too. her mother's statement was very true, yet somehow hollow:

I am convinced Sophie was killed simply because of the way she looked. She did not necessarily conform to the ideals of those who took her life. If we are to make any sense of Sophie's death, perhaps we should see it as an opportunity to examine how all of us, particularly younger people, can become blinkered.

I believe that today, more than ever, we need to show respect, compassion and tolerance for those whose appearance and culture differs from our own.

that's of course true, and it's a brave and decent thing for her to say, but it's not ever going to happen. too many people gain too much from encouraging us to focus on the unimportant differences among us, and lose too much if we start noticing other, much more important differences. goffs are silly, but they are not threatening to us in the way the ultrarich are.

how do we become blinkered? in all sorts of ways. the road to intolerance has lots of byways, and not all are easily blocked. humans are not solitary; we need to belong. i believe that's inherent in us. and needing to belong does mean needing to delineate who else does, and who doesn't. to define ourselves, we need someone to define against.

also, part of belonging for teenage boys is showing bravado. boys are afraid. of everything, but specifically they are scared that they will not be men. it's frightening to have to leave childhood and enter a world that seems quite alien. no mummy to look after you. if you are low-skilled, unlikely to acquire qualifications, i daresay the modern world looks quite forbidding.

the doctor who created the MMR scare/scam is up before the panel, as it were. i think the charge is just the excuse. there's no question for me he should be struck off. he's a quack. he rode a wave of hysteria to fame, preying on desperate people who wanted an explanation for the terrible misfortune of having a damaged child.

hilariously, mrs zen thinks i am autistic. she found something on the web that she thinks sounds like me. of course i'm not, not even close. people with autism are deficient in the ability to use symbols. in severe cases, this means they cannot relate to others because they cannot understand what a relationship is (they cannot abstract what they have into a symbol that they can then manipulate); in milder forms, such as Asperger's, they cannot understand or use figurative language, and cannot interpret or use things such as facial expressions (a facial expression's meaning is not what it is, but what it represents). people with Asperger's often like mechanics, things that fit together in an unambiguous way.

the surge ain't working. dur.

a rising divorce tide threatens 1 in 2 couples. what? this is typical of how the media presents stories. poor married people are victims of a tide of divorces that are sweeping the country. er, no. divorces are the outcomes of people's individual decisions. you don't catch a divorce from your nextdoor neighbour. this same way of looking at the world infects discussions of elections. people talk about voters as though they were a bloc, conspiring together to unseat governments. but they aren't. they are individuals who vote however they vote, for reasons that diverge. for everyone who wants to unseat a pollie because of his policy on the environment, there's another who just doesn't like his haircut. how else would Boris Johnson have a prayer of becoming mayor of London? the guy's a buffoon. he would be disastrous for London by any serious measure, as any rational analysis would lead you to conclude. and Red Ken has been very good for it.

finally, Estelle (who she?) complains that white chicks are hogging all the press and claims that there's some vast racist conspiracy to deny black soul singers the oxygen of publicity. hey, it's our music, claims Estelle. well, Estelle is wrong on many counts, but we could consider just two. first, acts like Duffy and Adele are not making "soul". they are making coffee-table soul, dinner-party soul. it's nothing to do with black music. this type of music has always been fundamentally white. weirdly, this is true even when its practitioners are somewhat black (Sade, Norah Jones). also, Estelle is not making soul either. she is making generic R&B. why doesn't she get the press? well, this is point two. Estelle is totally generic. there is nothing different about her. she's like a thousand other black artists. but Adele and Duffy are different. their music is no better than Estelle's, but it's newish. and they conform to society's notion of goodlooking far more closely than Estelle does. now this is to do with whiteness and blackness, and i'm not endorsing it. but whites far outnumber blacks, and our idea of what's attractive is heavily weighted to the white.

as for the business side of it, wake the fuck up, lady. record companies give people a chance if they are convinced they will make money. if you are different, that's a selling point, and you may well get a second chance. if you are the same kind of thing as other acts, you are interchangeable with them. if you don't make it, maybe they will. it's about the dollar, not your skin colour.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:08 am