Cyclamen
A staggeringly beautiful plant, seen in a Norfolk garden.
Quote of the Day
”During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.”
- James Carville, Bill Clinton’s guru famous for “It’s the economy, stupid” mantra.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Andy Irvine | Never Tire of the Road
Andy’s tribute to Woody Guthrie.
Thanks to Philip King (Whom God Preserve) for reminding me of it.
Long Read of the Day
Gaslighter | Denier
Contrary to its government’s unctuous PR, my native land is the worst-governed country in the EU, if not in all of Europe. It has an administration that has money (in the form of multinational corporation taxes) coming out of its ears, and yet can’t build a children’s hospital in less than six years, never mind the new towns that its growing population desperately needs.
Two courageous Irish public intellectuals are calling out the dysfunctionality of the country’s political elite. One is the Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole. The other is Sinéad O’Sullivan, a systems economist and writer whose Substack is a bracing read.
This new essay of hers is a fabulous indictment of a failed political system. It’s long, but IMO worth it if you’re interested in the UK’s nearest neighbour. This is a woman who takes no prisoners.
You can scream all you want, but nobody is going to hear you.
You can wait forty minutes in the pouring rain for ghost buses that never arrive, only to realize once on board that you can’t pay without a Leap Card (good luck finding one). You can spend two hours in traffic trying to drive three kilometers. Given the public system barely functions, you can pay for private medical care, only to find out that the waiting lists aren’t much better — and that the government is sending patients abroad for treatment. You can struggle to get your children into a school near your home.
You can pay some of the highest energy prices in Europe, and among the highest in the world. You can rent, if you can find anything at all, some of the worst housing stock in Europe: damp, freezing, architecturally bleak apartments for which you will pay a hefty premium. You can watch the grid being swallowed whole by multinational data centers while homes are forgotten about, and watch the costs of accommodating this economic model fall on the undeserving public — while the executives running these schemes from San Francisco are compensated into the billions.
You can waste 37% of Ireland’s water, which leaks away through rotten and broken pipes before it reaches a kitchen sink. You can read about hundreds of thousands of fish dying in Ireland’s polluted waterways and discover that our beaches, too, are unfit for swimming. You can watch hotels close and tourists get priced out, while one of the few indigenous industries capable of supporting local economies is squeezed out of existence.
You can watch your quality of life deteriorate year after year, as everything becomes less affordable and the simplest tasks become more impossible.
And so you keep screaming into the void. But nobody is listening.
Because all you will get back from the government, patiently and even faintly amused, is this:
Don’t we have one of the highest literacy rates in Europe? One of the longest life expectancies? A fiscal surplus the size of a small country’s budget? What exactly are you complaining about, you ungrateful fool?
For years, Irish political gaslighting boiled down to this very simple form:
If the country is doing well on paper, then your experience of living in it must be wrong.
The irony is that many of the supposed successes that politicians, economists and diplomats cite are not even the outcome of decisions made by the politicians who are claiming the credit for them. They are haphazard accidents, macroeconomic conditions and the consequences of policies enacted elsewhere. Yet they are presented as proof that the entire system in Ireland works…
Read on.
My commonplace booklet
My Observer column about AI and universities has generated a good deal of comment. I came across an interesting follow-on from it in a blog post about a novel collaborative research project on the subject. I particularly liked the Research Question they have decided to focus on:
“What do higher education educators, students, and institutional stakeholders observe about the changing role of human teachers, believe human educators distinctively contribute, and envision for the future of human teaching in the age of artificial intelligence?“
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