Martin Meenagh blog

Thanks to the House of Lords (and a nasty internecine coalition spat), different-sized constituencies for the House of Commons have been preserved from abolition this afternoon. The Conservative plan, launched because they currently suffer from a slight disadvantage in the system known by the official name of 'Toxic unelectability', was to abolish some fifty seats and replace the remaining ones with standardised, supermarket-style voting areas. This folly repeats the worst instincts of a certain sort of Tory rationaliser, previously reflected in the disastrous abolition and reorganisation of historic counties and shires in the 1970s by Edward Heath's administration. Current boundaries, which are not perfect, allow more weight for urban areas, but compensate by making rural areas a bit bigger, resulting in minor differences which do not even begin to compare to the differences between, say, Wyoming and Delaware. This is good. This is a very old country, in which local atta...

DJ Rodgers : Sunset Prayer The overwhelming bulk of human history has been characterised by a kind of weird tribalism and the sort of complications which arise from, well, whatever you want to call it--human imperfection or primate heritage. We fight, we steal, we lust, we love, and we seem destined to think of some point in the past as better. I should bear that in mind in my gloomier moments. Lately, I've been reading a lot about the Kondratiev wave , which, despite the silly name, is not anything like the Elliot Wave of blessed memory. It's a generational theory of social and economic activity lauded by but separate from Schumpeter and the Austrian school. It contends, essentially, that our history is cyclical, and that waves of civic-minded people alternate with individualists, conservatives, and adapters as we progressively learn, forget, and relearn the lessons of our grandparents. Unlike Nietzsche's hopeless theory of eternal recurrence, the K-wave allows fo...

For some reason--and I will never say this often--Gerald Manley Hopkins seems to speak to blogworld today The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; The times are winter, watch, a world undone: They waste, they wither worse; they as they run Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress. And I not help. Nor word now of success: All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one— Work which to see scarce so much as begun Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness. Or what is else? There is your world within. There rid the dragons, root out there the sin. Your will is law in that small commonweal...

It's an interesting feature of modernity that cultural violence seems to be the strongest indicator of future war. From Nazis burning books, to the Taliban blowing up stone Buddhas, one only has to look at intolerance in explosive, passive form, to imagine the bombs and fires dropping elsewhere later. I remember feeling the same as I read the stories of Islamists despoiling the tombs of Mali, though as my one demented reader knows I've thought for some time that North Africa, particularly in a bad food year, is probably the best strategic ground on which Al-Q's Maghreb franchises might challenge the West. There's also not that much Marxist about a cultural materialism which suggests that securing Europe's energy supplies now is better than doing so later. Hospitals and libraries are terribly difficult to run on solar power and waste, after all. People fight over resources because they won't trade, and trade failures are regime failures. There's one as...

Down amongst the tech bloggers, where I occasionally go as a medieval peasant might have gone to hear disputes he didn't understand but liked the look of, there is discontent. As Kate Mackenzie notes, there is something about Apple which disturbs the universe. Otherwise rational people look to its problems, and not the solutions; to its losses, and not to its growing market share, to its dominance and not its innovation. Then they go spare. By contrast, people ignore the way that China, and Amazon--we should really talk of large companies in the same breath as states, now--have 'forked' android, whereas others have institutionalised it as a cheap, low-marginal-revenue choice. People don't see that the nexus and kindle compete with each other on slightly different terms, but that neither threaten the apple-surface battle above them, which apple has probably already won. They just don't want to admit to the continuing reign of the Steve Jobs Legacy Band. I can't...

Nicholas Carr, in his generally applauded book The Shallows , which is about what the internet does to the brain, suggests that modern electronic life is in some ways making people stupid. The immediate hit of facebook, for instance, the know-it-all satisfaction of wikipedia, and the appeal to narcissi of blogging, added to the technology of electronic discussion, tends to undermine proper critical inquiry and long, difficult deep thought. I think that that approach is to rationalise economic reality and to displace it onto intellectual life so as to make normal the ways that the new global middle class want to think, since they always think to feel comfortable and confuse the two. Frankly, I'm not having it. My experience of blogging has been anything but stupid--silly, yes, but stupid, no. Ideas which surfaced in blogland, or even on this blog, years ago, are now mainstream. The freedom of cyberspace allowed the prediction of a stagflationary recession, global cooling, ...