I refrained from posting anything about the Depp-Heard hearings because I don’t know these people and they don’t impact my life at all.
In the obscene orgy of public cheerleading on social media, it became evident that many people were overly engaged and inappropriately so, treating it like a sports game which required a colosseum audience.
Surface image =/= Reality
It’s clear also in the aftermath that the media itself was also culpable of partisan viewing and foregone conclusions. Amid the many hamfisted attempts to map the peculiarities of this case to ALL women, ALL men, the most salient point, for which I thank both Heard and Depp, was almost totally ignored, which is this:
Hollywood takes desperate narcissists and feeds them vast wealth, public platforms, and stimulants, resulting in lives which while idyllic on the surface prove later to be beyond appalling.
Ordinarily we must wait for such people to be long dead to discover the horror of their existences. We owe Heard and Depp our gratitude for lifting the veil so comprehensively on the truth of their sordid and horrifying marriage.
It’s a foolish person who seeks to draw conclusions from an election where the votes haven’t finished being counted yet. But I am a foolish person, and I want to explain to you, wherever you may be, why a round of elections for a regional parliament in a small European backwater which is likely to result in no one actually wielding power is nevertheless of critical relevance to you.
You almost definitely don’t care about the latest Northern Irish Assembly elections. Why should you? Even about 40% of the people of Northern Ireland couldn’t care less about the latest Northern Irish Assembly elections, according to the turnout. But actually, these elections are supremely relevant to all of us because they are uniquely helpful in explaining why democracy is failing.
Northern Ireland is a small territory in the North Atlantic, of just under 2 million people, bordering the Republic of Ireland and administrated by Britain. The elections there are of parochial interest.
Great Britain, the reluctant ruler of the territory, casts at best a weary side glance towards Northern Irish elections, which tend to have no relevance at all to the island of Britain except about once or twice a century, when suddenly they do so crucially, out of all proportion.
Likewise, for the most part, the politicos of the Republic of Ireland, so insistant on their their shiny hi-tech cosmopolitanism and Europeanness, prefer to function mostly under the self-delusion that the problematic six counties to their north don’t exist. Nevertheless, the shadow of history and what is colloquially known as the ‘national question’ has a habit of flaring up into relevance, not least because in the most recent round of elections, Sinn Féin, a party which espouses the political unification of the island of Ireland, became the single biggest party.
Northern Ireland 2022Republic of Ireland 2020
So if the British tend to ignore Northern Irish elections, and the Irish do likewise, and even nearly half the Northern Irish don’t show any interest, why should you?
Because these elections help to reveal a range of truths about why democracy is failing. Specifically, they show us that:
Democracy is being consumed by identity politics.
Democracy is promoting extremism, and extreme methods for excluding extremists.
Democratic systems are essentially flawed, especially when one attempts to embed fairness into them.
Political parties have natural lifespans, and run based on their positions on the challenges of the past, not the future.
The really important decisions aren’t made democratically anymore.
Let’s go through this point by point. Democracy is being consumed by identity politics. This was always the case in Northern Ireland. It was created by partition a century ago to ensure a majority for the unionist, British-affiliated, largely Protestant community in the north-east of Ireland. By definition therefore, its politics have perennially been about orange and green, the vying of two identity blocs for recognition of their cultural aspirations.
This was not the case in most other places until relatively recently, with the advent of more multicultural societies, of course. But in similarly riven territories, such as Sri Lanka, societies have tended, as occurred in Northern Ireland for three decades, to descend into civil war.
What we’re beginning to see in many democratic nations is the emergence of political identity parties akin to those in Northern Ireland. In Western Europe, these tend to emerge first among indigenes on the right wing, who are ethno-nationalist and resistant to immigration. But not exclusively. There is, for example, an Islamic party in Holland. This tendency is therefore beginning to proliferate.
Likewise, we are seeing the co-option of existing political parties, or rather, their repurposing to become focused on identity politics issues rather than whatever political ideology accompanied their foundation. To this end, we can identify the move towards ethno-nationalism among long-established parties like the UK’s Conservatives or the USA’s Republicans. In response, we can see their main political rivals adopt a rival identity politics, that of an opposing ‘rainbow coalition’. But what Holland demonstrates is that such broad churches of disparate identity politics are likely in the end to splinter into more coherent, more homogeneous forms.
What results is a refutation of game theory approaches to politics. As in Northern Ireland, where unionist farmers along the border or nationalist bureaucrats in Belfast actively vote against their personal best interests and in favour of broader identity issues, we’re seeing people gravitate in many democracies towards voting for political identities which actually function against their own personal interests in many cases.
Democracy is also now promoting extremism, and extreme methods for excluding extremists, I’d argue. It promotes extremism because in a contemporary mediated world where political debate and the public sphere is being reduced to soundbites and tweets, only the loudest and simplest arguments are getting through. Furthermore, more and more of us exist in cultural echo chambers, obtaining our news and information from inside discourses we already entirely concur with. We are rendered impervious to having our minds changed because we don’t encounter alternative perspectives except in terms couched in condemnation.
In reaction to this, political establishments are forced to take more extreme measures to restrict the spread and growth of such extremism. Sometimes this involves co-opting the less extreme aspects and attempting to detoxify them. Other times it involves unstable coalitions of very odd bedfellows coming together to exclude parties perceived as extreme from holding any power. In Ireland, this manifested most recently with a grand coalition of two bitter rivals, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, to exclude Sinn Fein.
We can begin to argue persuasively in many nations therefore that democratic systems appear to be essentially flawed, even or especially when one attempts to embed fairness into them. In Northern Ireland, the Assembly is a kind of regional parliament, overseen by the British government in Westminister, but semi-autonomous in theory. Its creation was underwritten by the Belfast Agreement, in which both unionist and nationalist communities must be represented in government in an enforced power-sharing executive.
In reality, this doesn’t work very well as it creates inbuilt antagonism among people forced to share collective responsibility for political decision-making, and as a result it has collapsed on more than one occasion in the past, and is likely to collapse imminently again despite these most recent elections. So, it’s a unique system and a unique situation, not one easily mapped onto other democratic nations.
However, the strange and unstable coalitions we see democracy throwing up in recent times, often in reaction to identity politics parties, is a very similar situation. Who could have foreseen Cinque Stelle sharing power with Salvini’s Lega in Italy? Or the Republicains and Socialistes in France effectively stepping aside to permit a shiny new centrist party with a relatively untried leader to become president?
Where proportional representational models, especially list models, exist, there is a risk of opening the doors to fringe extremist parties. But in FPTP systems, though this doesn’t occur to the same extent, it prevents it solely because in itself it is less than fully democratic. Tens of thousands of voices of, for example, Green voters in the UK, simply are not represented.
More significantly, we’re beginning to see in many nations that political parties have natural lifespans, and these spans relate to the fact that they all run based on their positions on the challenges of the past, not the future. In the Northern Irish Assembly elections, formerly the biggest two parties, the Ulster Unionists and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, have effectively been consigned to history, despite their estimable political lineages.
Why is this? Partly because they are not extreme parties, but nor are they, like Macron, radical centrist alternatives. (The radical centre in Northern Ireland are the Alliance Party, who just polled an historic high of 13.5% of the vote.) Falling between two stools, their time in the sun appears to have passed, their votes cannibalised by more polarising, more extreme versions of their own politics (Sinn Fein in the case of the SDLP, and the DUP in the case of the Ulster Unionists. In fact, we can already see this even happening to the DUP. Their vote sunk this time around, largely due to leaking votes to an even more extreme unionist alternative.)
The problem for the SDLP and UUP is that they campaign based on their histories, their ability in the past to come together in a functioning power-sharing executive, to represent their communities and their identities in ways which were nuanced, reasonable and accommodating.
But those were challenges of the 1990s in Northern Ireland, as it emerged from a civil war period. The future challenges are the ones which the 1990s parked indefinitely – those of the constitutional position of the territory. Sinn Fein espouse unifying Ireland. By constrast, the DUP vehemently oppose anything they see as undermining the union with Great Britain. To this extent, they are still fighting future challenges.
But in reality, with the partial exception of the Greens, none of the parties in Northern Ireland even have policies on the REAL major challenges likely to face the territory in years to come. And this is also true of most parties in most democracies too.
Which mainstream parties anywhere have policy documents on issues like automation or roboticisation of the workforce? Or on the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence? Or on the dangers of autonomous weapons? We’ve seen parties around the world mostly fail at addressing the recent Covid pandemic. What are their policies should an outbreak of Ebola occur globally, or even just in their nation? We’re seeing most of them fail right now at addressing energy provision and future security. How do they actually intend to transit to a renewable future energy economy?
Actually, what are their policies on the real challenges of the climate crisis? Not just things like recycling, but how to prevent the great die off of our fellow species on Earth, or the likelihood of conflict over water or food resources? The answer is that almost all political parties have little to no coherent positions on such issues. But these kinds of issues are the ones most likely to impact most people over the next few decades.
Finally, we many conclude that all the really important decisions aren’t made democratically anymore. In Northern Ireland this is utterly self-evident, because it is a regional parliament overseen by Westminster. If, as could well happen, this Assembly is unable to form a functioning executive, it will merely revert to the ministers, or to London, to run the place.
But likewise we can see in many democracies that increasingly national parliaments either do not or cannot invoke agency or power over issues of significant national interest. This is partly because of the growth in power of corporations, which often can flex more economic might than those nations.
Even where nations, or supranational blocs like the European Union, do have such might, they appear all but impotent in the face of even exacting reasonable taxes from such corporations. Meanwhile, those corporations fund squadrons of lobbyists in every democratic nation in order to bend parliamentary decisions to their interests and not those of electorates. And that’s before we even address issues like the democratic deficits embedded in so many democratic systems, from the 2 party monopolies in Britain or America, to the technocracy of the EU.
So the latest Northern Irish Assembly elections are simultaneously historical and meaningless, for a number of reasons. We might be inclined to dismiss them because of that. But actually that’s why we should be paying close attention, because they help to reveal the huge systemic flaws in all democracies.
They help explain the rise of ethno-nationalism, the prevalence of unstable and unlikely coalitions, the temporary ‘radical centre’ solutions, the apparent failures of agency, and most of all the utter failure to address the real challenges of the future.
It states: If someone sends you an unsolicited email asking you for money in return for promising to assist your academic career, what they’re offering is unlikely to assist your academic career and may actually hinder it.
But what if they don’t ask for money? Well, then things can get interesting. Let’s take today’s mailbag as an example. Out of the blue, unsolicited and with no previous engagement or interaction, I received an email from a woman called Hiteesha Bachoo, who works for an entity called Lambert Academic Publishers, inviting me to submit an academic monograph to her.
Now, sometimes legitimate academic invitations do occur. Mostly they occur to senior academics who are already very prominent in their fields. They get invited to give keynote lectures at conferences, and to contribute chapters to edited collections of essays, because their very name and presence, not to mention the likely quality of their work, adds kudos and prestige to the whole event or publication.
But it’s possible for little people to get invitations too. If you are one of the few people in a very niche specialism or with very particular interdisciplinary expertise, you might get an invite out of the blue to give a talk or publish in a special edition of a journal, or an edited collection.
Usually these kinds of invitations, to mere academic mortals, come from people who already know you and/or your work. But very rarely a legitimate invitation comes entirely out of the blue. I was once invited by the very prestigious Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin to take part in an event on weird fiction, and was delighted to do so. They flew me over, put me up in a nice hotel for a few days and even paid me. So it can happen. Here’s the proof:
Beardy weirdy me in Berlin a few years back. The beard is gone but the weird remains.
Anyhow, let’s get back to Hiteesha’s email. She gets straight to the point immediately (presumably because she’s got a lot of other emails to send, but also perhaps for another curious reason which we’ll get to later).
Dear Jim Clarke,
publish your own book based on your research titled" “The Lingua Franca of the Hedgerow”: Lapine Linguistics and Invented Languages in Watership Down ". New publications contribute to the development of the academic market.
I am Hiteesha Bachoo and represent Lambert Academic Publishing, one of the biggest academic publisher worldwide.
Your book will be published at no cost, with print-on-demand technology and distributed on Amazon, Morebooks, Hachette, Publishers Graphics etc.
Jim Clarke would you accept to receive more information about publishing your own book?
You might have questions or need details about publishing, so let me know how can I be of help.
Sincerely,
So, she’s not looking for money, or at least not yet. My immediate presumption was that some mention of charges would occur down the line. After all, the usual procedure is that authors approach publishers with book proposals. I know because I’ve written two in the past six months, and I’ve done so multiple times in the past. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen that a publisher might approach an author, but it’s certainly not the usual vector.
So, I did my journalistic due diligence. I googled LAP, and then I googled Hiteesha. Let me summarise what I found. Firstly, NOBODY recommends publishing with Lambert. As this discussion on ResearchGate indicates, they spam an AWFUL LOT of academics, and their book production is low cost, low value and generally considered to severely devalue academic work. Their books rarely if ever get cited either.
In fairness to them though, no one seems to have been asked for money on that thread. Despite that, they and their parent company OmniScriptum Publishing were listed on Beall’s famous list of predatory publishers, but as an imprint of a vanity press rather than out-and-out predators. Eventually I found my way to this article from a decade ago, which includes loads of interesting information and background on Lambert, plus links to half a dozen more articles about Lambert.
Basically, universities, research advisors and higher education research councils on at least four continents have been advising students not go anywhere near Lambert, despite their lack of charging. They WILL publish your book, and they will do so for free. They won’t edit it. They won’t proofread it. They will do absolutely bare minimum design work on it. They won’t promote it in anyway. They’ll simply prep the copy structurally for print-on-demand and then pocket any sales that come in.
Additionally, there is some dispute over whether they even claim copyright, but as that often happens in academia, at least at the journal level, it really wouldn’t surprise me. In effect, you’d be better off self-publishing your work on Kindle or Lulu. At least then you might get some money from sales and you’d retain your copyright. But from an academic perspective? Worse than useless for your career. A waste of your research. A devaluing of your reputation.
I did mention that I also googled my correspondent, Hiteesha, and how her email seemed extremely rushed as if she was very busy. Well, she clearly is. I found her on LinkedIn, where she transpires unsurprisingly not to be an academic at all. She holds a BA in Marketing from the University of Mauritius. Additionally, while she does fess up to working for OmniScriptum as a “Freelance Acquisitions Editor”, her day job is as a management support officer with the Mauritian Independent Police Complaints Commission.
Additionally, she’s currently overtly looking for work, in office management or digital marketing, but she’ll even consider data entry work. The poor woman is basically doing this work as a side hustle. She’s almost definitely paid on commission of the sales of the books she recruits. No wonder she wants another job, and no wonder she spent very little time on my email. She’s clearly got a lot more to send, plus an office to manage in Mauritius in the morning.
How do I know she spent very little time on my email? Primarily because the paper mentioned in it, the one on Lapine linguistics in Watership Down, hasn’t appeared in public in any form yet! It hasn’t been published anywhere because it isn’t finished!
Yes, I did say ‘we’. Because this is CO-AUTHORED research which I am conducting with the estimable linguist Hülya Mısır. Who coincidentally did NOT get spammed by Hiteesha, or anyone else at OmniScriptum. Bit sexist of them if you ask me.
Anyhow, what’s the moral of this strange story? I can think of a few. You should always check and double check any unsolicited academic invitations. The shady corners of the academic publishing industry extend quite a distance back in time and are somewhat persistent. Someone’s making money out of this, and it isn’t the researchers or indeed the poor hustlers working on commission. Oh, and office managers in Mauritius should be paid better, so they don’t have to do this in their spare time.
The media is increasingly giving up all pretence at reportage in relation to the conflict in Ukraine. So immersed in propaganda are we now, that the media are now offering us cathartic dreams to resolve the anxieties they themselves fostered and promoted.
Let’s ignore for the moment the lack of grammatical punctuation and acknowledge that at least the key data is presented in scare quote marks, indicating that this is opinion of some kind and not factual assertion. That doesn’t always happen, so kudos for remembering to do that.
So, whose opinion is this? “Former British officer”, Dr Mike Martin of Kings College London, is who. Dr Martin is a visiting scholar at KCL, which means that he borrows their name in order to publish academically. In return, he provides some PhD supervision for students. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and I’ve done it myself incidentally.
He appears from his KCL profile to be very interested in an evolutionary psychological approach to understanding warfare. It’s a little difficult to gauge his quality as an academic from a paperchase, as he’s not published a lot academically. By far his most impactful work was an oral history of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, where he appears to have done his own tours of duty as a soldier. Some of the other things listed on his Google Scholar page, such as articles on leaf-cutter ants, may not be his at all.
So then I looked at his own website, which seems primarily aimed to promote himself as a public speaker and commentator to the media. There we can see that he’s written two other books as well, one on his interest in evo-psych and war, and the other on an adventure he had crossing the Congo river in a landrover.
A lot of his work looks back to, or builds upon his experience as the British Army’s first ‘cultural understanding officer’ in Helmand. There’s a Sunday Times article about that here. I’m not going to dwell on how poorly the British Army’s cultural understanding went in Helmand.
Nor will I dwell on the many narratives of British and American success in Afghanistan that the media published adoringly. Nor will I dwell on how the minute Western military forces, exhausted by conflict, decided to pull out of Afghanistan, it reverted immediately to the Taliban once more.
I will solely point out that the conflict was a huge waste of resources and lives, and had also been the subject of an enormous and persistently reported lie in the media in the West.
Let’s return to Dr Mike Martin. He is a former British Army reserve officer who, after leaving the army, embarked on an academic career. He’s formulated a theory about war’s evolutionary origins and now researches that at KCL. Good for him. It’s an intriguing question, how hardwired the lust for war is.
What he’s not, is any kind of expert on Russia, Russian history, or Ukrainian history; nor has he any expertise about the Kremlin or Russian politics; nor on Russian military forces, on Ukrainian military capacity, or any on the ground knowledge of the current combat theatre.
So what is this story, this headline? Dr Martin likes to see his name in the media, and it helps promote his own work, so he appears more than happy to speak to the press about issues like this where he has no apparent expert knowledge whatsoever. His opinion, based on zero knowledge and expertise, is then inflated by judicious reference to his academic credentials and military background by the newspaper.
From there, it gets promoted to headline, and suddenly a readership fed on months of existential fear of Putin has hope. The hope of his overthrow. This is wishful thinking, it seems to me. After all, Putin’s popularity has actually risen in Russia since the invasion.
Why then is the Express printing this? Because it’s the narrative they want to promote. It’s the narrative they want their readers to experience. It builds on the existing narrative that they and the rest of the media have been assiduously creating since the start of the conflict.
How does it build on it? Well, having created a monstrous, satanic image of Putin, it is now essential to offer their readership some catharsis – specifically that he can and will be defeated in some kind of moral justice. We’ve seen other iterations of this in the Western media recently, mostly speculating about his health and possible imminent demise.
In reality, there’s nothing there. This is the opinion of one guy who has zero expertise in any relevant topic, inflated into a headline by a newspaper which is cheerleading this war endlessly. I don’t mean to pick on this particular paper, or this particular talking head. I understand their various reasons for doing this. I could have chosen so many others.
This example is merely symptomatic of the sick and sickening media environment we now find ourselves in, one entirely divorced from reality and endlessly blaring in favour of war.
As Orwell once wrote, “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” Too much of our media would drive anyone mad, and indeed already appears to have driven much of the population mad.
For Ireland’s national poetry day, here’s a poem from a couple of years back with a Ukraine theme. It was from that moment in lockdown when everyone was cooing about nature returning. The first three or so stanzas – all of those things did actually happen.
It imagines not only a world without Ukraine but a world without us. And that’s where we’re headed if we can’t find a way to get past war. Not just this one, but all war.
On that cheery note, as promised here are some whales overhead, courtesy of Kiev’s Maxim Garifullin:
Yes, I wrote a poem about Michael Aspel. No, I couldn’t tell you why if I tried. It just came to me.
I also didn’t mean for this to come out as sarky as it did. I never met the guy and he always seemed like a decent spud on the TV. It’s just that everything he did seems such a long time ago now. Probably he feels that more than I do.
Anyhow, it wasn’t personal. As a friend said to me, I could just as easily have used Wogan.
Aspel
Is this how it is, Mr Give us a Clue?
If we manage to make it to eighty-nine,
mostly forgotten, most of the time?
Guest starring on ‘Morecambe and Wise’,
digging drains, selling beds, sent away in the war,
In France, Emmanuel Macron has been re-elected. A nearly 15% swing was not in the end enough to bring Marine Le Pen to power.
In 2017, when the same two candidates faced off, the result was 66.1% to 33.9%. The preliminary results this time make it 58.5% to 41.5%. Macron’s vote is down around 2 million on last time and Le Pen’s up 2.5 million. This marks a slight swing towards Macron in the second round, as opinion polling had the two candidates on around 57.6% to 42.4% just after the first round.
The presidential election, same as the last one.
If we want to consider the trend here, in 2002, when her father Jean-Marie made it to the second round of voting, he received a mere 5.5 million votes, 17.8% of the turnout.
It’s the lowest turnout since 1969, indicating what some call voter apathy but is more probably a distaste for both candidates, especially among the nearly 8 million people who supported the far left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round.
Macron cannot serve three consecutive terms, and his party came into being in part to find a centrist candidate who could defeat Le Pen in 2017. The traditional parties of left and right were decimated at this election, with the Republican candidate coming behind even Zemmour, and the Socialist candidate barely scraping into the top ten.
The one-time heir apparent to Marine, her niece Marion Marechal, left politics in 2017 after a series of disputes with her aunt. Since then she has worked in education, but recently she offered her support to the even more far right candidate Eric Zemmour, who obtained 7% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election.
Macron’s victory tonight therefore belies a further ratcheting of the hypernationalist vote in France, and forebodes some degree of future uncertainty. The election in 2027 is already likely to be extremely interesting. The challenge for the traditional parties is almost existential at this point, but one presumes with their funds and electoral machines they will bounce back. The question is how far how quickly.
En Marche must now find and promote an heir to Macron in a similar timeframe. And the National Rally will have to decide whether two-time loser Marine Le Pen should be backed again, or whether her niece can be lured back into the fold.
Tonight Bayern Munich just won their tenth Bundesliga title in a row. In France, meanwhile, PSG have just won their eighth title in the past ten years. (All data correct as of 23/4/22.)
In Spain, the nation’s most successful club Real Madrid require a mere point from their final five games to secure the La Liga title. In fairness, city rivals Atletico are the current champions, and Barcelona have also won in recent years, though thanks to their financial misdealings they look quite a bit off the pace for the next year or two at least.
Robert Lewandowski listens to the predictable acclaim.
In Italy’s Serie A, there is at least some end of season interest. Internazionale won it last season, preventing Juventus from winning a tenth title in a row. We have to go back to 2001 to find a team which isn’t Juve or one of the two Milan teams as Scudetto winner, Fabio Capello’s Roma with ‘Batigol’ Batistuta up front. As I write this, it’s between the two Milan teams again, with Juve probably out of it. There’s a slight chance that Napoli could sneak through for the first time since Maradona played for them in the 1980s, but it’s unlikely.
In England, Manchester City lie slightly ahead of Liverpool FC currently. No one else can catch them, which is reasonable, as on current form these are probably the two best club teams on the planet. City won three of the last four titles, with the other going to Liverpool.
Prior to that was the absolutely unlikely scenario of Leicester City, who were 5,000/1 longshots with the bookies at the start of the season, picking up their sole title. England has moved on somewhat from the previous two decades which saw a Manchester United/Chelsea duopoly displacing a previous United/Arsenal duopoly. Nevertheless, Leicester notwithstanding, it’s already pretty obvious which two or three teams next year’s winner will come from.
So that’s the ‘big five’ leagues. Let’s look a bit further afield.
In Austria, Red Bull Salzburg are miles in front. Should they win, it will be their ninth title in a row. It will also be their thirteenth title in sixteen years. This, in a league previously dominated by two Vienna teams.
In Portugal, where the same three teams have pretty much always won the league, sure enough Porto are nine points clear of Sporting Lisbon, who are in turn five points clear of city rivals Benfica. Sporting won it last year, the first time in about two decades. It’s recently been passed back and forth between Benfica and Porto. The last time one of these three didn’t win it was Boavista in 2001. Before that, we have to go back to Lisbon’s third team, Belenenses, in 1946.
Portugal’s tripartite dominance is reminiscent of Holland, where Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV tend to share the honours. Ajax are currently miles in front and highly likely to pick up their third title in a row this season, not including one season abandoned to Covid.
Scotland’s duopoly, the Old Firm continue to dominate of course. Celtic FC are leading this year from city rivals Rangers, who prevented Celtic from doing a ten in a row last year. The last time one of those two didn’t win was 1984, when Aberdeen won under a young manager called Alex Ferguson.
In Greece, Olympiacos look safe for a third title in a row. They relinquished the previous two, but prior to that, they won seven in a row.
We need to look to the smaller nations for signs of change. In Norway, where Rosenborg have dominated for decades, latterly both Molde and Bodo/Glimt have come through. As a summer league, they’ve only just kicked off for the season, so it remains to be seen if Rosenborg can continue to be sidelined.
In Poland, there’s looking like a potential shock with a the title now down to a probable three horse race between Rakow, Lech Poznan, and Pogon Szczecin. Legia Warsaw, winners of seven of the last nine titles, are weirdly mid-table this time.
Not all smaller nations are competitive however. In Bulgaria, Ludogorets look odds on to win their eleventh title in a row this season. Former dominant team, CSKA Sofia habitually come second now. What happened in Bulgaria? A pharmaceuticals multi-millionaire bought Ludogorets is what happened. The same thing that has happened everywhere else.
We’re really not in a position anymore to deny the impact of cold hard cash on soccer success. It clearly correlates far too closely. And by too closely, I mean to the extent that so many titles are becoming foregone conclusions, or at best a race between two or three clubs only, even from the start of the season.
Football’s Financial Fair Play system to level playing fields somewhat has proven a total joke, all over Europe, in other words. We have soccer clubs now owned by sovereign funds of various nations of dubious standing in order to ‘sportswash’ their national images. In turn, they manage to distort and dominate entire leagues. In smaller nations, this process is achieved by individual millionaires investing funds in a club in order to purchase success.
FFP hasn’t worked in other words. It only works where it doesn’t apply, such as Ireland, where no sugar daddies have funded any teams. As a result, Ireland remains genuinely an open race for the title. Perhaps Poland might continue to be also.
Would that more fans in more countries got to experience that excitement rather than simply resigning themselves to dreaming of European qualification, or some other replacement dream. Why did we let billionaires and sovereign funds buy our sporting dreams from us?
A young man has stabbed his grandmother to death in England and now faces trial. The trial is to decide whether he committed murder or manslaughter. That he killed her is not in doubt.
According to the Daily Mail, the man’s ‘addiction’ to cannabis – a usage quoted at a mere two joints daily – may be to blame. This is the grounds of his defence case, incidentally.
Buried in the article are further details that the man was also taking prescription medications – specifically Elvanse for Attention Deficit Disorder and Xanax for depression. It is reported that his mood had changed significantly in the months prior to the killing, and that his family had grown concerned about his taking both cannabis and these prescribed medicines.
I don’t wish to prejudice this particular case so instead I will speak generically. Elvanse is an amphetamine stimulant. Xanax is a Benzodiazepine sedative. Anyone taking both is having their moods artificially heightened and lowered simultaneously.
Yes, you read that correctly. One of the side effects of a medication commonly prescribed for depression actually causes further depression. Furthermore, both drugs can cause dependence. That is, it is possible to become addicted to them. By contrast, there is no evidence that it is possible to become physiologically addicted to cannabis, though psychological dependence is widely reported.
In the 1970s, heavy sedatives like Mogadon were commonly prescribed to housewives who experienced depression or anxiety. For many of these women, this was a sentence to decades of zombification, their moods and personalities entirely suppressed under a cosh of sedation.
We now recognise that in many instances, what they were actually suffering from was social isolation, attempting to raise small children alone in dormitory suburbs without sufficient social connections and supports.
I wonder whether there might be similar societally caused reasons underpinning the vast upswing in depression, anxiety disorders and issues like ADHD among the younger generations today?
It may well be that such medications are helpful in some instances. But in many cases, people are prescribed via a ‘throwing darts at the wall’ method, where they are placed on one regimen for six months, and then if it doesn’t work, the dosage is varied or a slightly different medication offered in replacement.
As a result, they can go years without seeing their symptoms alleviate, especially as the periods of tailoring up and down on these drugs can be especially disconcerting and debilitating. Furthermore, as in the instance of the two medications mentioned, dependency issues can develop.
In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that some young people attempt to self-medicate, especially with widely available recreational substances like cannabis. And obviously cannabis is not a good idea for a still-developing young mind, especially since it appears to catalyse the likelihood of schizophrenia and like conditions among those with genetic predispositions.
Furthermore, the THC content of cannabis has been rising for decades. The ditchweed smoked at Woodstock bears almost no resemblance to the high-octane skunk now sold in California, Amsterdam and elsewhere. When the UK newspaper the Independent reported on the dangers of skunk in 2008, reported THC content was up to 14% Nowadays, it can be as high as 25%
I have no easy answers here, but I am beginning to wonder whether future decades will look back on this era and the widespread prescription of amphetamines and barbiturates to young people, including children, with similar horror as we now look back on the decades of mothers lost in a haze of ‘mommy’s little helpers’.
The last two thousand years or so (CE) make up only c. 1% of human history, but around half of all people ever have lived during that period, and one in 12 or 13 of all people ever are currently alive today.
For the record, just before humans began to farm and settle in urban environments, around 9,000 years ago, there were only around 20 million people on the entire planet. That’s the population of Cairo today.
At the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago, there was between 90 and 200 million humans on Earth. In other words, between the population of today’s Congo and today’s Nigeria.
China’s population today is around 1.48 billion. That was the population of the entire planet around 1875 CE.
When I was born, there were fewer than half the number of people alive today. Welcome to infinite growth on a finite planet. We’re getting to the point where the consequences are becoming inescapable.
Sincere regards,
