Hash: Society iMakeContent

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 23:38:15 GMT

Capitalism for beginners: Educational tech toys are high on parents' to buy lists this Christmas, according to Wired's Leander Kahney.

Testing this season's top toys, her two year old particularly liked the Pretend and Learn Shopping Cart:

'Well-made and sturdy, the supermarket trolley comes with a variety of plastic food items -- bananas, packets of cereal -- that can be scanned with a handheld scanner attached to the cart. Pass an item in front of the scanner, and the cart speaks its name and the number of items. Scan the item again, and the cart speaks its color, the food group and its nutritional benefit.

'Aimed at preschoolers, the cart is billed as teaching numbers, counting, quantities and simple food facts. . .

'Lyle preferred the exploratory mode and its free-form play. The game mode, when asked to find certain items, was not altogether successful. Lyle had no trouble finding the first item asked for but lost interest before finding the second one, preferring to scan items at random.' [Wired News].

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 16:20:48 GMT

Ho ho hum: According to a survey published last week, nearly 40% of German children have no idea why Christmas is celebrated.

Reasons given by the children, aged between six and 12, included: 'because it's winter', 'so that the shops can sell more stuff' and 'because that's when Santa Claus died'.

Some 25%, and over a third of those aged between 10 and 12, found it 'utterly tedious that months before Christmas it looks like it's Christmas already.' [n-tv.de]; [via The Aardvark Speaks].

Fri, 29 Nov 2002 12:06:03 GMT

Bye Buy: And they're off. In the US, the day after Thanksgiving traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season. This year, to avoid a double-dip recession, consumers have been told to spend, spend, spend. It's nothing less than their patriotic duty.

Like lemmings with credit cards, let's say a quick prayer before throwing ourselves down those aisles.

Not me.

Today is also Buy Nothing Day. Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day in the UK.

Bah humbug? Only in the minds of the most brainwashed. You don't need to be the Pope to realise that the advertisers and the corporations turn Christmas into a deeply profane celebration.

The original Christmas message had nothing to do with consumerism. There's nothing in the New Testament about colluding in the exploitation of people around the world so your child can have whatever the ad companies are promoting most heavily this year. It says nothing about working overtime to buy more food than your family can possibly eat while millions around the world suffer from malnutrition.

If retailers depend so heavily on Christmas that governments encourage consumption at any cost, there's something deeply wrong with the way the economy is being run.

Buy nothing today and tomorrow.

Even better, make this a Buy Nothing Christmas.

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 12:10:39 GMT

Virtually you: A thinking sim's chance to live life or death again.

Thu, 07 Nov 2002 23:45:55 GMT

What the world thinks: US journalist Mark Hertsgaard asked people around the world what they thought of America:

'I was surprised that people were really able -- and I heard this repeatedly -- to distinguish between America and Americans. There's America in the sense of the official government and the military. That official face of America in the world is not very well liked. And then there's Americans -- the people of the country, the ideals of the country, our popular culture. . .

'They were able to still say, but you know, we love Americans and we love what you stand for. I heard that over and over again from all different walks of life and all different parts of the world.' [Salon].

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:11:44 GMT

The butler didn't do it: Regina v. Burrell is stopped - by the Queen. [Independent].

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 19:35:12 GMT

Heart felt: Kevin Barbieux is a weblogger who happens to be a homeless guy. He sleeps in Nashville's shelters and parks and updates his weblog at the public library. [Salon].

'I've always had a little problem with the cliche, "Bleeding Hearts." I first heard the phrase when I was a kid, and like most kids, I took the phrase literally - and I agreed. Yes, hearts do bleed. They bleed constantly - that's what they're made for. As a matter of fact, hearts bleed so much that blood has to be constantly pumped back into them. And even more importantly, when hearts stop bleeding, they die.' [Homeless Guy].

Fri, 04 Oct 2002 14:15:34 GMT

Waiting in vain: HRH The Queen kicks off her 12-day visit to Canada by telling her loyal Canadian subjects exactly where to go.

Together with 200 journalists, the residents of Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic (pop. 6,000) will watch her unveil the town's first street sign. [Globe and Mail].

Writing in the new issue of Granta, Finton O'Toole compares the Silver Jubilee of 1977 - 'There is no future in England's dreaming' - with the modern jubilee experience:

'HI. WE ARE STANDING AT THE MALL. V. TIRED. NOTHING HAPPENING. IF ANY NEWS TEXT BACK. C U.'

Watching the Golden Jubilee crowds watch themselves on the screens outside Buckingham Palace, he realises that the Queen has become just another living legend, an example of retro chic, a bit player in the pop panoply.

It's the experience of waiting for HRH that's the main event. It lets people catch sight of 'their own forbearance and tolerance, their own cheerful stoicism'. [Granta].

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 23:54:01 GMT

Sweet taste of success: Thanks to campaigning by local people, Hershey Foods won't be sold.

Shirley Reale, a Hershey resident, said: 'All I can say is hooray. The only thing I could see was the deterioration of the town if the company was sold.' [Boston.com]; [iMakeContent].

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 17:28:20 GMT

Off the scale: Increasing levels of childhood obesity may lead to parents outliving their children, said Professor Andrew Prentice at the British Association's Science Festival yesterday. [Independent].

A recent Vatican conference found that about 800 million people around the world are underfed. At the same time, according to the International Obesity Taskforce, about 300 million are fed too much. [CBS].

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 16:05:02 GMT

The sweetest thing: For anyone who thinks that the main effect of neoliberal globalisation occurs far away, in Asia and Africa, and in blue-collar industrial cul-de-sacs, and, whatever, it's just an inevitable part of the development process, here's a salutary lesson.

You might think that democracy means that those with power are compelled by those in power, our political representatives, after due discussion and debate, after hearing all the points of view available, to bow to the people's will. Isn't that the whole point of democracy? With adequate safeguards for minorities, what's good for the majority prevails.

Not in Chocolate Town, USA. The good citizens of Hershey, Philadelphia are firmly against the sale of Hershey's Foods. The US chocolate giant employs about a quarter of them. It created the town. It's been good to them.

But a trust set up by Hershey's founder to benefit the local community, the town's disadvantaged children, couldn't care less what they think. Keen to maximise the value of its portfolio, to do the neolibralism thing, it plans to sell up its majority stock in Hershey's by selling out to the likes of Cadbury Schweppes or Nestle. [Guardian].

Following petitions and demonstrations organised through the Friends of Hershey Foods website, the local community and politicians have succeeded in halting the sale until a court has examined its economic and social impact.

Marge Panettieri, a member of the Friends of Hershey Foods, says that the campaign has been a 'great experience in grassroots democracy'. [Hershey Chronicle].

It's inspiring to see concerned citizens in action on the Friends' bulletin board.

However, the trust, which says that it needs to diversify its stock, is appealing against the injunction. It's likely to win the appeal this Wednesday on the grounds that it's an unfair violation of its right to do business. [Financial Times].

Matthew G Solovey, editor of the Hershey Chronicle, says that promises that Hershey's new owners will continue to put the town first amount to zero.

'Corporate America can't make assurances. They can't promise anything. Executives at corporations want to do one thing: make money. They don't care about the impact on a community - they care about the bottom line. Hey, that's America, and they have the right.

'But the Hershey Trust is not a corporation. It's a trust. It's here to provide. Its members certainly should not be looking at the bottom line, but should be looking at the moral thing to do.' [Hershey Chronicle].

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:38:49 GMT

Left-wing rally: You can chuck out the polenta. And Gordon Brown should think about another tax rise. Nearly 70% of the UK public claims to feel 'working class and proud of it', according to a new Mori poll.

It's a huge change from 1994 when only about 50% of people said the same. The other half echoed Mrs Thatcher's mantra, that they had an inalienable right to 'little cheesy-pineapple ones'.

This change is nowt to do with Tony Blair's ostensible political agenda. It's not that he's proved that there is such a thing as society, succeeded in converting Mrs Thatcher's Essex men and women into social democrats. Quite the opposite. It's more likely to be a reaction against five years of Blair's more extreme free market ideas, his mania for public-private partnerships, his closeness to big business.

Shocking though hardly surprising: Labour can't now take the traditional working class vote for granted. As Mori reports, manual workers and others on low pay no longer seem to have a class identity that binds them to the Labour Party.

'Those who admit they are working class and proud of it are no more likely to vote Labour than those who do not - instead, they are more likely to say they will not vote or to be undecided.' [Mori].

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Richard Skase, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Canterbury Business School, said that Labour shouldn't take the 'new working class' for granted either.

Without secure jobs and under increasing pressure at work, people who used to be described as middle class, technologists, engineers, doctors, teachers, social workers, are now more likely to describe themselves as working class.

'They don't have safe, secure jobs; they don't have safe, secure futures. As a result they're under increasing anxieties, increasing insecurities, pressures to perform and in that sense they feel they're working class. . . And this is the new working class that Labour is at great risk of losing at the next election.' [Today - RealPlayer needed].

Never mind, Tony. You can still count on your business friends. How many votes is that?

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:37:24 GMT

Class conscious: Want to know whether you're a horney-handed child of toil? Take working-class heroine Julie Burchill's test:

Is your job boring?
Is your job vital?
Is your job badly paid?
If you went on strike, would the country eventually come to a stop?

If you answered yes to three of these, congratulations - you're working class! [iMakeContent].

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 17:40:26 GMT

Money talks: The 1.5 million people earning £60,000-plus are 'affluentials', according to Barclays. Their spending power 'gives them enormous power over setting trends and influencing the way we all live'. [Guardian].

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 16:58:54 GMT

Life in America: New analysis of 2000 US census data shows that the gap between rich and poor is accelerating in some areas.

In Rhode Island, 12.9 percent of Newport's families live below the poverty line. The city's income disparity gap has grown by 10 percent since 1990. [AP].

Tue, 25 Jun 2002 12:51:51 GMT

Foot in mouth: Newsnight's Jeremy Vine has an agent who presented himself to the Japanese media in Tokyo with the words: 'I am Alex Armitage, director of the Noel Gay organisation.' He couldn't understand why the room went quiet. A local journalist later told him that it was a mistake in Japan to shout loudly about any organisation called the 'Enola Gay'. [New Statesman].

Thu, 20 Jun 2002 17:48:43 GMT

Daydream nation: Just like Catherine Bennett, I've up to here with bread and circuses. Is that all folks? No, the curtain's just gone up on a summer of fun, fun, fun:

'Although it is not in Blair's power, even as saviour of the world, to increase the frequency of international football tournaments, golden jubilees, or deaths of well-loved monarchs in their 102nd year, that is not to say he cannot find other ways of endearing himself to the populace, as the Caesars once did to the plebs with chariot races and gladiatorial combat, comedies and boxing matches.'

How else to distract us from the lunacies of the state? Bennett quotes from Jérôme Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome: 'By the time of Claudius... "the Roman calendar contained 159 days expressly marked as holidays, of which 93 were devoted to games given at public expense". Romans enjoyed at least one day of holiday for every working day. In return for these favours, the Caesars obtained both the adulation and quiescence of the mob.'

She quotes Sebastian Haffner on Nazi Germany: 'one was permanently occupied and distracted by an unending sequence of celebrations, ceremonies, and national festivities... The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these never-ending events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used to cheering and jubilation, even when there was no visible reason for it... Was it not wonderful to celebrate in the spring sunshine, in squares decked with flags'. [Guardian].

In Brave New World, Huxley projects this never-ending sunshine onto an England of the future. And, blinded by the light, here we are: thank Ford, everybody's happy nowadays. Bah humbug!

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 07:41:33 GMT

Original sin test: Which sin are you? [Kingdom of Lula].

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 22:36:24 GMT

Last among equals: Profiled in the Guardian as part of a week-long investigation into the state of Muslim Britain, Imran Khan, solicitor, argues: 'In the end racism is just another brand of unequal treatment. Inequality in our society is increasing and for those at the bottom things are getting worse. Racism is bred by inequality.

'Look at Oldham for example, a very poor white community turns on an even poorer Asian one over ever scarcer resources. On a global scale, inequality and injustice breed the growing confrontation in the world between the US and its allies and its enemies.

'Many Muslims are among the poorest of the world. It is no wonder that millions consider this discrimination against Muslims. It is a terrible social system that discriminates against the vast billions whose lives are blighted by hard labour and poverty.

'We need a society that is dedicated to equality in every field of life and we need political leaders with the courage to say so. It's a small word, equality, but it is the key to all our futures.' [Guardian].

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 22:35:54 GMT

We are Google: Google currently delivers 3,190,000 entries for 'Islam'; 832,000 entries for 'Judaism'. Which tells us what? More Jews than Muslims use the internet? Jews have a greater interest in comparative religion? 'Man' gets 69,400,000 entries; 'Woman', 22,400,000; 'Mars', 7,700,000; 'Venus', 2,390,000. So? We're living in a feminised world that's desperately searching for a better understanding of what men want? [Smackdown].

Imagine a world in which everybody had access to the internet. The ability to peer into the word rankings of particular communities would give an amazing, dynamic insight into collective thought processes. Reworked continuously, word rankings would mirror our minds, the minds of our neighbours, our enemies.

English and Brazilian word rankings are bound to be quite different from each other. Would subtle changes in Google word rankings precede sporting fixtures? elections? wars? earthquakes. . ?

The zeitgeist according to Google is currently biased towards the West and the US and towards English. But Google's ability for capturing the essence of what's going on can already be seen: the top word for September 2001 was 'Nostradamus'. [Google Zeitgeist].

Want to know if the Brazilians are shaking at the prospect of meeting England in the World Cup? Give it a couple of years. By 2006, the 10 O'Clock News will consist of nothing but analyses of the Google sporting zeitgeist by the BBC's chief Google editor and a professor in Google studies. [First Monday].

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 22:35:13 GMT

In a nutshell: Wacky theories survive and become religions when they contain, beneath the mind control and the imposition of absurd rules, the idea that runs through all enduring institutions of humanity: the ethic of reciprocity. Amen to that. [The golden rule].

Tue, 11 Jun 2002 21:02:42 GMT

Identity crisis: Hanif Kureishi, Karachi, 1985: 'The colonized inevitably aspire to be like their colonizers—you wouldn't catch anyone of my uncle's generation with a joint in their mouth. It was infra dig, for peasants. They shadowed the British, they drank whisky and read The Times; they praised others by calling them 'gentlemen'; and their eyes filled with tears at old Vera Lynn records.

'But the kids discussed yoga, you'd catch them standing on their heads. They even meditated. Though one boy who worked at the airport said it was too much of a Hindu thing for Muslims to be doing; if his parents caught him chanting a mantra he'd get a backhander across the chops. Mostly the kids listened to the Stones, Van Morrison and Bowie as they flew over ruined roads to the beach in bright red and yellow Japanese cars with quadrophonic speakers, past camels and acres of wasteland.'

[...]

'Although Pakistanis still wanted to escape to England, the old men in their clubs and the young eating their hamburgers took great pleasure in England's decline and decay. The great master was fallen. It was seen as strike-bound, drug- ridden, riot-torn, inefficient, disunited, a society which had moved too suddenly from puritanism to hedonism and now loathed itself. And the Karachi wits liked to ask me when I thought the Americans would decide the British were ready for self-government.

'Yet people like Rahman still clung to what they called British ideals, maintaining that it is a society's ideals, its conception of human progress, that define the level of its civilization. They regretted, under the Islamization, the repudiation of the values which they said were the only positive aspect of Britain's legacy to the subcontinent. These were: the idea of secular institutions based on reason, not revelation or scripture; the idea that there were no final solutions to human problems; and the idea that the health and vigour of a society was bound up with its ability to tolerate and express a plurality of views on all issues, and that these views would be welcomed.' [Granta].

Thu, 06 Jun 2002 20:09:43 GMT

A Wi-Fi high: Free wireless internet is the new crack?: 'It seems that moving megabytes on the move is almost mystical, like an out-of- body experience. "Once you are untethered from a wall it becomes like candy; it’s a really insatiable appetite," says Michael Chaplo, the CEO of one Wi-Fi start-up. "You just want it everywhere."' [MSMBC].

Tue, 28 May 2002 09:49:26 GMT

How not to talk: Conversational cheap shots: 'It sounds as if you are saying that torturing children is a good idea. . .' [Vandruff].

Mon, 27 May 2002 18:02:18 GMT

RIP: Stephen Jay Gould on statistics, cancer and death: 'It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.' [Cancerguide].