Odds and Ends 4

The civil war in Syria has several particularities in common with the one that ravaged Spain from 1936 to 1939. http://lelezard.blogspot.fr/2013/09/deja-vu.html

And now the situation in Ukraine is beginning to resemble the one faced by Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Hitler sent troops to “protect” a German speaking minority. Hopefully all this is just a coincidence. If not, who will play the part of Poland?

Not so long ago, middle class households managed on one income. The husband earned a salary and the wife took care of the rest. However, the glamour of the professional/executive woman made housework and raising children seem very dull. Women claimed a right to equality, the right to equal opportunity in education and employment. This has been painstakingly obtained, though the balance is still far from equal, and many middle class households now manage on two incomes. The trouble is that one income goes to paying the domestic help needed to replace the house-wife, so that the household’s disposable income has not varied, and may have been reduced by competition from a growing female workforce. On the other hand, the number of salaries producing surplus value and taxes has been multiplied by three. Two working for the price of one seems nonsensical, and equal gender opportunity would be more effectively encouraged by house-husbands.

Machines began as extensions of hands to hit harder, of arms to throw farther and more precisely, and of legs to move more quickly. These machines developed to give almost unlimited power and speed. At the same time the mind was being extended, with words for more meaning and with rimes then writing for more memory. The linkup came when a written program was connected to a mechanical device, a cylinder with holes connected to a piano keyboard. Since then the capacity of machine memory and calculation is almost unlimited in power and speed. The extensions of mind and body are infinite, except for emotions. Meanwhile, half of humanity is still using pre-industrial means of production.

To insure the security of a nation’s citizens, their education, health and old age, as well as a number of other optional services such as roads, drinking water or electricity, a government can finance its spending with either taxes or debts. As it is the same higher income earners who pay taxes or lend, the preference for one or the other depends on a nation’s political equilibrium. A strong government with a wide popular support will prefer taxing wealth. A weak government of oligarchs will choose to borrow. The rich, of course, are always in favour of lending their money at interest.

Those mega pop stars who start young and have teenage followers cannot grow old and should be allowed to retire when their career begins to wane. In their twenties they still have plenty of time to try something else. Sadly, the production machine wants to squeeze the last drop of cash out of them – an idol’s bloated ego could be partly to blame – and they end up in Las Vegas and on X factor.

In 1949 Stephen Spencer had this to say:

“It is obvious that there were elements of mysticism in this faith. I think that this is an attraction of Communism for the intellectual? To believe in political action and economic forces which will release new energies in the world is a release of energy in oneself. […] What power there is in a conscience which reproaches us not only for vices and weaknesses but also for virtues, such as pity for the oppressed, if they happen to be the wrong oppressed, or love for a friend, if he is not a good Party member! A conscience which tells us that by taking up a certain political position today we can attain a massive, granite-like superiority over our own whole past, without being humble or simple or guilty, but simply by virtue of converting the whole of our personality into raw material for the use of the Party machine! […] nearly all human beings have an extremely intermittent grasp on reality. Only a few things, which illustrate their own interests and ideas, are real to them; other things, which are in fact equally real, appear to them as abstractions. Thus, when men have decided to pursue a course of action, everything which serves to support this seems vivid and real; everything which stands against it becomes abstraction. Your friends are allies and therefore real human beings with flesh and blood and sympathies like yourself. Your opponents are just tiresome, unreasonable, unnecessary theses, whose lives are so many false statements which you would like to strike out with a lead bullet as you would put the stroke of a lead pencil through a bungled paragraph.” (1)

Replacing Communism by sharia and Party by al Q. gives a new mask to an old illusion.

1. The god that failed, Bantam Books p. 241, 244, 257