Layer 252 . . . A Revolution in Publishing, Brown and Bullying, and More Citizen Ethics

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More zeitgeist.

I was talking last week to a friend about self-publishing, and how blogs, or summaries of blogs, could easily and cheaply be made available for downloading and reading on tablet reading machines like the Kindle and the iPad, and would work extremely well if they had embedded in them hyperlinks that could take readers off to websites via wireless links for further and complementary reading material.

Yesterday I came across this article from the New York Review of Books in the Observer:

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future
By Jason Epstein

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683

The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing.

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author.

Titles will also be posted on authors' and publishers' own Web sites and on reliable Web sites of special interest where biographies of Napoleon or manuals of dog training will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately, bypassing traditional formulas. With inventory expense, shipping, and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their otiose infrastructure, will survive and may prosper.

Authors, with the help of agents and business managers, will become their own publishers, retaining all net proceeds from digital as well as traditional sales. With the Espresso Book Machine, enterprising retail booksellers may become publishers themselves, like their eighteenth-century forebears.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/24/espresso-book-machine-launches]

The huge, worldwide market for digital content is not a fantasy. It will be very large, very diverse, and very surprising: its cultural impact cannot be imagined. E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom.

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Another entertaining and very funny column by Charlie Brooker.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/22/charlie-brooker-terry-kay-woods-adultery

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To give this next piece some context, it might be worth remembering the confession that Jonathan Aitken recently made - much to his credit - about his state of mind when he was at the peak of his time in politics, which was also the time of his downfall - "I was puffed up with too much self-centredness, self-importance and pride."

This is clearly an occupational hazard for anyone in government, and anyone who's been through the elite education system which we seem to value so very much.

Gordon Brown hit by fresh bullying allegations

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/21/gordon-brown-fresh-bullying-allegations

The cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, was tonight under pressure to launch a formal investigation into Gordon Brown's treatment of his staff after an anti-bullying helpline revealed it has received several complaints from people working at No 10. It follows publication by the Observer journalist Andrew Rawnsley of hotly- disputed allegations about Brown mistreating staff, including assertions that he swore at staff, grabbed them by lapels and shouted at them.

Lord Mandelson, flatly denied Rawnsley's claims, insisting that Brown was simply "demanding", "emotional, "and had a degree of impatience".

The claim of routine bullying was today backed up a senior former adviser to Brown in No 10, who told the Guardian: "His intense bouts of anger are unremarkable to anyone who has worked closely with him. You just have to put up with this stuff. It is part of the daily experience, almost part of the furniture. He would behave in that way constantly. He suffers from a massive paranoia and an inability to accept blame, yet he runs a blame culture that allows him to blame others.

What we see here is very simple - a man, and a whole circle of people, who are low in emotional, social and spiritual intelligence. Raging egos, puffed up pride, aggression in response to stress, and powermania.

Nothing that a few years of full-time Zen meditation and practice wouldn't sort out, though, under the guideance of a skilled practitioner.

Whereas psychopaths like Blair are too clever and cunning to get caught out being blatantly aggressive and bullying.
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Ethics and Morality

This all feeds very nicely into the intiative called Citizen Ethics that Madeleine Bunting and The Guardian are promoting, and which was launched in The Observer yesterday.

Madeleine's column in the paper yesterday was superb, and has to be read in full -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/21/ethics-failure-market-moral-code

To tackle the last decades' myths, we must dust off the big moral questions

A robust debate on ethics is crucial to the pursuit of a good society in which individuals are more than mere economic units

It's year 10's English class in a ­London comprehensive. Forty kids are debating the purpose of a school. "Teaching social skills," they suggest. Why do you need them? I ask, playing devil's advocate. "To get a job." Is that the only point of having social skills? "Yes, what else is there?" One demurs, hesitant and not entirely sure how to ­express herself. "No, there's more to life than a job. There's happiness. Social skills are needed to make you happy."

It was a fascinating illustration of how deeply the instrumentalist values of the market have penetrated our everyday thinking when kids talk in this way. "Social skills" is the type of phrase management experts dreamed up to put a market value on a set of human characteristics. Cheerful, punctual, able to co-operate, take instructions: these are all marketable skills. But to many of these kids, equipping them for the labour market was the primary purpose of ­education. Any idea of it as enriching and deepening their understanding of what it is to be human and lead meaningful, contented adult lives, had been entirely lost to view.

The central premise of the Citizen Ethics supplement published in this paper at the weekend (the full pamphlet can be downloaded on Comment is free) is that we have lost a way of thinking and talking about some very important things. The preoccupation with market ­efficiency and economic growth has loomed so large that other activities, and other ­values, have been subordinated to its disciplines.

A poll for the World Economic Forum last month found in 10 G20 countries that two-thirds of respondents attributed the credit crunch and its ensuing economic recession to a crisis of ethics and values.

Citizen Ethics was a project to ask nearly four dozen prominent thinkers what this was all about. Did ethics really have a role to play, and had it failed? First, despite plenty of disagreements, on one thing there was a clear consensus: ethics are crucial. They are the underpinning to all political debate; they frame the questions we ask of ourselves and of our political economy and therefore do much to shape the answers we end up with.

They are vital to the civic culture in which both politics and economics are ultimately rooted. So, as Will Hutton will do in his book, Them and Us, out in the autumn, if we really want to understand how some of the incredible myths perpetrated over the last couple of decades have gone unchallenged, we have to go back to some basic arguments of philosophy. What is justice? Who deserves what? What constitutes human flourishing?

Too many of these questions have simply been shelved for too long. Questions of justice and reward were left to the market to resolve; questions of human flourishing were privatised. It was left to everyone to decide their own sequence of pleasurable experiences in life with little acknowledgement of how many of those depend entirely on mutual co-operation.

One explanation for this abandonment of the debate is that we lost a language in which to think and argue about ethics. Perhaps this is partly attributable to the vexed legacy of institutional religion and the long shadow it still casts. The promotion of ethical behaviour has been bound up with particular institutions, and as they decline, it leaves a vacuum of authority. Who dares talk on this subject with confidence? It prompts fear that any such discussions are really a Trojan horse for promoting a religious belief. There's a suspicion that words such as "morality" tip us quickly into the kind of instinctive conviction made infamous by Tony Blair in which sincerity is regarded as an adequate substitute for careful reasoning.

Even the language itself is mired in a history of ­social control; morality and virtue are words that are reluctantly used, since both still convey overtones of intrusive monitoring of (particularly female) sexual behaviour.

Since most of the contributors to this pamphlet express their commitment to ethics without any reference to religious practice, perhaps it is finally possible to move beyond these familiar anxieties and resume a task of ethical reasoning regarded through most of history as essential to being human. This is philosophy as the Greeks understood it – love of the wisdom to lead lives of meaning and fulfilment, not some kind of abstract game with words.

Our aim is to provoke a noisy debate on what kinds of habits and characters we need to run the good society.

To go back to the lovely kids in the classroom, what is the good society we want to inspire them with – beyond their future roles in the economy as workers and consumers? What habits and character can we offer them as ­conducive to deeply rewarding lives? If we don't know plenty of possible answers to that question, it's no ­surprise they don't.

Wonderful stuff, Madeleine.
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Synchronicity and Comedy Corner

There was possibly the best-ever panel for this week's Just A Minute on R4 - Paul Merton, Sue Perkins, Tony Hawks and Graham Norton. This particular comedy show can be quite dull if the panellists aren't extremely sparky, quick-witted and off the wall.

We seem to be in a real golden age of comic talent right now, just as the sixties were a golden age for original musical talent. Programmes like this one show just how naturally funny the performers are, since they have to be very spontaneous and original, without any scripts or planning. Sue Perkins and Paul Merton are phenominally talented, and Messrs Hawks and Norton aren't far behind.

During the programme the subject of Edwin Drood came up - via Paul Merton going into a spiel about Ernie Wise appearing in a West End play based on Dickens' story of Edwin Drood. Immediately before listening I'd been doing today's quick crossword - 17 across: Dickens' unfinished mystery tale (5,5)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qtt8c/Just_a_Minute_Series_56_Episode_8/
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Layer 229 . . . Domestic Violence, Government Nonsense, Born Free, Human Rights, Olympic Stories and Hackney Wick

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Domestic Violence and Education

Our bloody bogus government is at it again. This week's education initiative is to announce that every child in England and Wales is to be taught that domestic violence is not acceptable. What! This is a scheme that a psychopath would dream up . . . for dealing with other psychopaths. And even then it wouldn't work. It wouldn't make a jot of difference.

Even psychopaths KNOW that hurting other people isn't acceptable. Neither is manipulating, threatening or deceiving. However, it doesn't stop them hurting other people, because they have an inability and an unwillingness to empathise with others, and a total lack of concern about anyone except themselves. Besides, many of them actively enjoy hurting other people - especially people who annoy them, or refuse to bow down to their demands, or fight back.

We all KNOW that domestic violence isn't bloody acceptable. We all KNOW that bullying isn't acceptable. Neither is unkindness, or rudeness, or unfairness. KNOWING these things, however, isn't the issue.

The problem is that our school system doesn't even set out to seriously address social, emotional and spiritual intelligence. Teachers are not trained in how to help children develop these key intelligences, though many teachers do their best to persuade children to be kind and thoughtful and reasonable - for instance during token 'circle times' and assemblies slotted in between literacy hours, numeracy hours and PE.

The government's initiative won't do anything to help matters either, and may make things worse if more and more pupils become pissed off with having to sit and listen to platitudes and statements of the bleeding obvious and decide that giving someone a good slap would be an act of rebellion and therefore 'cool' - in the same way that they deliberately go out and use drugs after a tedious session of anti-drugs 'education'.

The government's announcement is pathetic and bogus and totally worthless. As if teachers don't already make clear to kids that ANY kind of violence is unacceptable in a civilised society. The point is, what kind of schooling is required in order that from the very beginning of their time in school children learn not only that violence is unacceptable but also have opportunities every day to develop the skills and attitudes required to become non-violent and emotionally, socially and spiritually intelligent?

Don't bother asking Ed Balls that question. He wouldn't have a clue. And in any case he's far too busy pursuing the only educational agenda that New Labour has ever really had: attainment, attainment, attainment.

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We Are All Born Free

Julian Rhind-Tutt and an all-star cast narrate an animated film about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/video/2008/oct/31/amnesty-human-rights-film

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Olympic Stories – Hackney Wick

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/davehillblog/video/2009/nov/19/2012-olympics-hackney-wick

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Layer 114 Miliband and the School Bully, the Dracula Tendency, Results Factories, and Evil Spawn.

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So our youthful-looking Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has finally had the nerve to say publicly that Bush’s idea of a “War on Ter’r” is a load of nonsense, extremely unhelpful, counterproductive, etc, and he’s pleased that Obama is going to close Guantanamo Bay. It’s a bit like a child who’s heard that the playground bully has been expelled from the school, who then turns round and starts telling everyone he never really liked George and didn’t really want to be his mate and his henchman when he was going round beating everybody up. He knew it was a bad thing to do. In fact he now wants to talk to everybody and be their friend.

Well maybe it’s true that NuLabour hasn’t actually used the phrase “War on Terror” since 2006, as has been reported on TV and in the press, but it’s a bit late in the day to come out and draw attention to the fact that it was an imbecilic concept, and an excuse for bullying on a global scale. And it’s a bit late in the day to start saying we need to have a proper dialogue with those who take issue with the Shock Doctrine, or those who oppose the voodoo economics known as globalisation, those who reject neo-colonialism, etc.

Yes, of course it’s better late than never to make these statements, but Miliband must surely see that he, and NuLabour Mark II, just look stupid and pathetic, like they’re clinging to the coat tails of, and going along with, whoever’s the current big beast in the jungle.

Obama had the courage to say from the very start that the idea of a War on Terror was wrong-headed, and that invading Iraq was just plain wrong, for a variety of reasons. That took real courage and integrity - speaking truth to power, especially when the vast majority of Americans just went along with their government’s propaganda and their thirst for instant revenge for the Twin Towers. Such a pity that the Blair/Brown axis and NuLabour couldn’t manage it.

And neither could Miliband, at the time it was happening. Having been a close aid to Blair in Downing Street for so many years, and obviously politically very ambitious, he calculated that his political career was best served by deferring to his master and keeping schtum. And now he thinks the time is right to admit that it was a stupid concept and a useless policy. After all, George has already come out and said it was a mistake!

He’s been a silly boy, young David.. He was flattered by Blair’s patronage, and the nepotism he enjoyed, as Blair and then Brown gave him one promotion after another and facilitated his meteoric rise within the government. He should have been more patient, had the courage of his convictions, trusted in his innate ability to give him success in his political career in the long run, and he should have shown that he had the integrity and courage to speak truth to power, because now he can never achieve the stature of an Obama. Never, ever.

He ought to have realised that showing your integrity by speaking the truth will always be a requirement for anyone who aspires to be a true statesman, rather than a party apparatchik. He should have understood that in the long run you forfeit the trust and the support of the people if you even once participate as a member of the dominant mob, the gang of the playground bully, and fail to show that your conscience is your sole master.

He was no conscientious objector. He has the blood and the ruined lives of thousands of innocent people on his hands. Probably hundreds of thousands. And there’s no going back from that. He’s probably a very nice man. But he was a political prat.

Only 4 more days to Obama’s inauguration.

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The Dracula Tendency

The Guardian’s science correspondent reports that Victorian novels helped us to evolve into nicer people, according to scientists:

“Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals' hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker's nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.

The effect of such moralistic literature was to uphold and instil a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, the researchers claim in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. "By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling 'free riders' or 'cheaters' and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group," they write.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism

In this context I suppose David Miliband could be seen as a sort of miniature and somewhat youthful Heathcliffe, or even a non-charismatic Mr Darcy - a conflicted character, admired by some, but struggling to cope with both good and bad traits.

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Results Factories

Meanwhile NuLabour’s mismanagement of education grinds remorselessly onward. Polly Curtis, the Guardian’s education editor, reports that schools have been accused of ‘hot housing’ to get results. Tell us something we didn’t already know, dear Polly.

Apparently figures released yesterday reveal a leap in the numbers of pupils who took their exams early in November, thereby allowing a resit for any failures - “a tactic that is being encouraged increasingly across the country by heads desperate to rise in the league tables.”

"Some pupils have taken the same GCSE exam up to three times in the space of a year, the Guardian has learned.

Teachers' leaders have blamed the government's pressure on headteachers to improve results and move up the school league tables for the increased focus on exams that was putting children under stress and detracting from the depth of their learning.

Last year the government announced that any schools where fewer than 30% of pupils achieved at least five good GCSEs - including in English and maths - faced closure unless there were improvements within three years.

Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: "League tables have got all out of proportion and schools will now do all they can to improve their place. Early entry is one way they are doing it. Other ways include focusing on the pupils on the C-D border. We're in danger of producing a set of statistics that no longer accurately reflect pupils' progression but the work the schools can do to improve their scores."

Perry Beeches school in Birmingham has adopted early entry for its entire GCSE group, with nearly all of its pupils sitting their English exams a year early and maths six months early. The pupils were allowed to retake, or sit a harder paper to improve their result.

Liam Nolan, the school's head, said: "We are an exam factory, I have no issue with that. However, this is about the students. They've got to pass these exams to give themselves every opportunity in life."

John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said: "Retakes are bad for kids. There's a poisonous combination of parental pressure and league-table pressure to get as high a score as possible. There are kids who are ready to take their exams early but it should be on the basis of their readiness rather than part of a process to get the results.

"What it does is focus on the examination results rather than the use of English and maths across the curriculum - it's for the sake of the exam itself ... examination result-driven decisions to hot-house kids into taking an exam early are damaging."

A DCSF spokesperson said, “We are not aware of widespread issues with students being unduly pushed to take GCSEs early”.

Well now that you ARE aware of it - what ARE you going to do about it, you bastards?

We know what they’ll do about it. Nothing. They don’t give a shit about the wellbeing of pupils What they’re continuing to do is bully and threaten schools with closure if they don’t meet their government-set targets. So why shouldn’t the schools feel comfortable with being branded as results factories? That’s all they are. At least that headteacher had the integrity to admit it, even if he is a total tosser for engaging with the very idea.

Yesterday Ed Balls repeated what his illustrious macho predecessor Blunkett said all those years ago - poverty is no excuse for failure, and failure to reach the government’s targets will result in the closure of schools and the sacking of their staff. Fucking Stalinist. His lapdog Jim Knight, our schools’ minister, predictably yapped on about “the excuses culture”.

I can’t wait to see these arseholes disappear into well-deserved obscurity. There can’t be any excuses now for failure to promote the real interests and the wellbeing of pupils. Hot housing and a failure to understand how to run a decent education system cannot be excused. They’ve had 11 years to learn from the likes of Finland and Denmark how to promote real education and the professionalism of teachers. They’ve learned nothing at all, the dullards. All we have is more Blunkettism, and Stalinist demands to meet production targets. These people are evil spawn of the devil, and no mistake.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/15/schools-tables-exams
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/15/secondaryschools-schooltables
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/16/ed-balls-academies-exam-results
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More Evil Spawn

Talking of which, we learned yesterday that Israel’s armed forces managed to blow up and destroy the one place in Gaza they really didn’t want to hit - a relief warehouse within the United Nations compound in which there was a huge store of humanitarian supplies - mainly food and medicine. There also happened to be 200 refugees within the compound. An Israeli spokesman admitted this was a mistake, but said something along the lines of, “Oh well, these things happen. Our soldiers are under a lot of pressure, you know.”

Actually, they said it was a “grave mistake”. Pity it’s not their own graves they’re talking about. This is actually the only thing the Israeli hard-liners care about - having to dig the graves of their own soldiers. Nothing else impacts on their attitude or their tactics. The recent attack on Lebanon proved this, when heavy casualties caused by well-armed militias forced their withdrawal.

The United Nations are said to be furious about this latest incident. It’s going to be interesting to see what action they take, because some sort of action is surely now inevitable. They’ve already passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire, and Israel’s taken no notice of it, as we knew would happen. So what happens next?
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