Only Connect

“Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” E.M. Forster

Tonio Kröger

Just read an old school report from my VI form German teacher who said I was a bit like Tonio Kröger when I was 17. Tonio who?

Alliston: prosecution of cyclist for furious or wanton driving

In 2016 more than 400 pedestrians were killed on UK roads. One of these casualties, Kim Briggs, died following a collision with a teenaged cyclist, Charlie Alliston, on 12th February 2016. This is a very rare occurrence and has received much publicity. We are inured to the 400 or so pedestrian deaths linked to motorised traffic but not to the vanishingly rare occasions that are linked to bicycles. Alliston has just been convicted of 'furious or wanton driving'. The best blog on the subject is at The Cycling Lawyer: The Alliston trial and here is a link to a good summary in the guardian.

anti-Israel is not anti-Jewish

I'm outraged by Israel's treatment of the people of Gaza and the other Palestinian territories it occupies. I'm almost as vexed by the special status given to Israel by the West, which results from its position as the USA's outpost in western Asia, from which the USA can try to control the region's oil resources for its realpolitik ends.

Shrub End by-election 7 Sep 2017

Shrub End by-election following shock resignation on 14 July by Lib Dem councillor Karen Chaplin (citing family reasons). Tory win - and there were 2 Green gains elsewhere in England.

urban myth of devils interval banned by church

Is it an urban myth that the so-called 'devil's interval' was banned by the Catholic church in the middle ages? (It is also called the diminished fifth tritone and it's the distinctive interval in Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.)

Gerald Priestland The Future of Violence

Comments on Gerald Priestland's The Future of Violence, Hamish Hamilton, 1974.

My main problem with this book is that Priestland does not really consider ‘structural’ violence. He dismisses it as ‘injustice’ that does not count as violence because it is not ‘physical’ (page 10-11). On the contrary, economic and social forces can be just as effective as physical forces in perpetrating violence. This is for at least two reasons. Firstly, economic and social forces can starve people into submission or death just as effectively as physical violence. Secondly, they can be - and often are - backed, beneath a thin veneer of civilisation, by physical violence from the same powers as carry out the structural violence.

There are countless examples of structural violence:

• benefit sanctions and unemployment that starve people into submission;
• the soft cops of social services that remove people’s children (and will call in the police if the parents resist)
• schools that punish pupils in all sorts of ways short of coproral punishment. 

And so on.

Priestland is also mistaken about the role of the media in manufacturing consent. He thinks ‘the media have tried to cultivate sympathy for the Biafrans, the Bengalis, Uganda Asians, gipsies, Ulster Catholics and inner-city coloured people’ (page 12). But contrast this with the history of racism towards foreigners in the British media. In the 1930s there was the hatred towards migrants shown by the Daily Mail when it campaigned against allowing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany into Britain. Most of the media had racist stereotypes of black people in the 1960s and 70s as muggers, druggies and sexual predators. The media today, especially the Daily Mail, are equally vitriolic about Muslims, asylum seekers and EU migrants. The targets may vary, but the racism of the media remains the same. Against that background it is hard to believe that there was a golden age of tolerance to foreigners in 1974 when Priestland wrote ‘The Future of Violence’.