Ciarán Ryan notebook

Trevor Beattie on what focus groups lack: “it’s called conviction, passion, creativity, innovation, disrespect for the mundane”

1999

How I learnt to hate the landowner and love the rambler
Independent, The (London), Mar 9, 1999 by David Aaronovitch

“And yet, until 300 years ago our forebears walked more or less wherever they wanted. Paths marked the most convenient ways to travel, not - as today - the only permitted ways. Land ownership conveyed the right to profit from land, not the right to exclude all others from it. And then we allowed all this to disappear, and - for the best part of two centuries - the rights of landowners increased at the expense of all the other subjects of the Crown. Forests were enclosed or destroyed, common land was seized, rights of way were barred and the right to hunt wild animals was aggrandised by the few.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990309/ai_n14210560

Today UK prime minister Gordon Brown called for the release of Zimbabwe’s election results.

President Robert Mugabe called Brown “A little tiny dot on this world” - a put-down calculated to make Brown go red.

Evolutionary theory differs from behaviour genetics:

It’s unwise to deduce ethical premises from biology.

But you cannot understand ethics without looking to biology for explanations.

See:

Maths:
Robert Axelrod
John Maynard Smith
(Game theory illuminates why self-interested individual co-operate)

Evolutionary psychology:
Leda Cosmides (cheating causes)

Edward O’Wilson wrote Sociobiology: The new synthesis
Peter Singer attempted to refute in: The Expanding Circle (1979)

People are co-operative and competitive  - see:

Emile Durkheim’s ’social facts’ -  Customs, institutions, nations etc that are more than the sum of their individual parts.

Smith was suspicious of “the mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind.”

Remember, it’s:

“not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”.

Admass. This is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.

J. B Priestley, Journey Down a Rainbow, Heinemann-Cresset, London, 1955, p. 51.

On War and Society…
“My own personal view, for what it’s worth, is that we must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. …We want a world that offers people not the dubious pleasures of power, but the maximum opportunities for creation. And, even already, in the middle of this war [World War Two], I can see that world shaping itself.
” …Property is that old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things on that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property, instead of thinking of that country as the home of a living society, and considering the welfare of that society, the community itself as the first test.”
(Taken from his weekly wartime broadcast, Postscripts, 1940)

An inspector calls

BBC chief warns of knowledge underclass - 6/4/98

John Birt: “At the heart of the public broadcasting tradition is universality - reaching out to every household in the land - the poor and the prosperous - offering enriching experience and information which extends understanding.”

King leans forward. “I’ll tell you something that’s absolutely astonishing. In China, when Mao died, at his funeral there was a photograph taken of all the bureaucrats in a long, long line. But there were four carefully retouched blanks in the picture - the Gang of Four. Underneath, in the caption to the picture, they laboriously listed everybody, a name and then a comma. When it got to the Gang of Four, there were three x’s, comma, then three x’s comma… Amazing. They wanted you to know that they’d gone, and this was a warning: this is what you’re going to get, if you don’t watch out.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991130/ai_n14270884/pg_2

Arts: Retouched by the hand of God
Independent, The (London), Nov 30, 1999 by Linton Chiswick

also music

http://www.chesternovello.com/default.aspx?TabId=2432&State_3041=2&WorkId_3041=11869

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four

Fact and fantasy would collide. Reagan would famously recount scenes from films he had seen as though they had actually happened.

Reagan’s air of “gentle abstraction” as a child - got him harrassed by local kids

He tried to join the communist party in 1938 - but was turned down for being a “flake”

In his retirement - in decline - he would rake leaves from the pool for hours - not understanding that his secret service men were replenishing the leaves in the pool.

Dutch: A memoir of Ronald Reagan  by Edmund Morris

“He never quite threw off the image of the weakest member of the gang, pushed forward after a nasty killing when the police were on their way”

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”

Mahatma Gandhi

Toxic clothes `killed 250 apartheid opponents’
Independent, The (London), Dec 24, 1999 by Jeremy Laurance Health Editor

AT LEAST 250 opponents of apartheid may have been murdered during the Eighties by agents of the South African regime who laced their clothing with poison, according to the most detailed account yet given of the attempt to assassinate a religious leader.

In what became known as the “case of the poisoned underpants”, two doctors have described how the Reverend Frank Chikane - who now heads the office of President Thabo Mbeki - almost died in 1989 after a special South African military unit slipped a highly toxic substance into his suitcase before he left for a trip to New York.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991224/ai_n14272092

Estimated 1999: 800 tonnes of cannabis are consumed each year by British users.

What affect on country?

Faster: The Acceleration of Just about Everything (Paperback)
by James Gleick (Author)

Type A personalities - press the button in the lift to close the door - placebo?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_A_personality

Charles Dudley Warner, 1884, “The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of freedom”

Plautus: “The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish hours!”

Technology was to provide the fabled leisure society* - but we’ve just had to keep up with the machines. We deal with one item of work faster - but then another arrives faster.

Technology = not more lesiure or productivity - but more hours spent looking busy?

Ankore tribe (Uganda?) - doing nothing is not “wasting time”, but “creating time”. By being alive.

*A kind of leisure society for some? In UK - state benefits? etc?

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See also: The end of time - Julian Barbour

Time does not exist. Everything happens all at once. Parallel worlds etc.

We perceive an overlapping set of instants wrote John Gribbon of Barbour’s theory, which gives us an illusion of time moving.

The film strip! Feck.

How do we enter the next frame? Probability? Genes? Who’s lining up the frames?