Tony Blair (looking old) was with Andrew Marr on Sunday – vigorously punting the ‘Covid Passport’ idea; my instinct is strongly against anything that ‘disconnects’ people. Democracy doesn’t require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share enough of a common life. Rich and poor are increasingly separated by the imposition of ‘paywalls’. A Covid passport would further disrupt life in common.
They say it would be temporary, but it could be a backdoor for National Identity Cards. I am now a dependent on our Welfare State (pension, healthcare etc). I’d like our future State to have an enhanced role – so, of course, I accept the need for a robust database of citizens; my problem is that its concentrated power would be dangerous. The capitalism which governs our world allows individuals to become so wealthy that some are more powerful than elected governments. Politicians come and go – but these guys are beyond democracy. Until we get the giant tech companies into safe harness – I think we should be careful about further centralising confidential, state-held data.
Browsers record our search patterns, supermarkets what we eat, Amazon our everything; I quickly click ‘accept all cookies’ without much understanding. I am aware that my privacy and independence are being eroded, but is it for the common good – or simply enhancing unelected power? The G7 agreement on a minimum tax for multi-nationals was definite progress this week; the evasion strategies of the super-rich will reveal much.
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Gary Lineker has tweeted, “ If you boo England players for taking the knee, you’re part of the reason the players are taking the knee”. On Sunday, the level of booing before England’s game against Romania took me by surprise – and suggest that this is a more profound issue, that goes beyond football. Many of us in Scotland do not realise how much UKIP populism has redrawn the political map of the UK. It is significant that Boris Johnson chose his language carefully to avoid alienating this jeering brand of nationalism. Simon Kelner in Tuesday’s ‘i’ writes: “ I’m not saying you are racist if you boo the taking of the knee – but it’s a good start”.
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Our football team’s performance against Luxembourg was ‘underwhelming’ – and I was determined not to get into Tartan Army mode; but I can’t help it. The Scottish public and media’s anticipation of the Euros has re-awakened something very deep—so now it’s “Yes Sir I Can Boogie”…Oh dear – here we go again.
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“A condition of playing in our tournament is that you agree to subject yourself to the humiliation of media interrogation – no matter how inept”. This is their implicit contract. I had never heard of Naomi Osaka – but now she’s my hero; at last someone has pushed back against the bullying of tournament sponsors and media interviews which make us cringe. Jonathan Liew in the Guardian comments.
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Isle Martin, situated at the mouth of Loch Broom near Ullapool, is uninhabited; the community trust, which owns it, recently advertised for a temporary resident caretaker/housekeeper – a voluntary post – and has been swamped by over 400 expressions of interest. This response doesn’t surprise me and certainly cheers me. The Press and Journal’s take.
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I always assumed that my ‘consciousness’ was deliberate and ‘willed’; but this Conversation piece suggests that it results from brain activity which is automatic, like breathing and digestion. The implications of this are so dramatic that I’m still resisting. What would it do to our understanding of free will – to future study of psychology?
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In his latest ‘Briefing’, Angus Hardie of the Scottish Community Alliance, tries to unravel the ‘scattering’ of Third Sector support among various Scottish Govt portfolios.
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Joseph Campbell liked to remind us of our evolutionary origins– this is from ‘The Way of the Animal Powers’.
‘Neither in body nor mind do we inhabit the world of those hunting races of Paleolithic millennia, to whose lives and life ways we nevertheless owe the very forms of our bodies and structures of our minds. Memories of their animal envoys still must sleep, somehow, within us: for they wake a little and stir when we venture into wilderness. They wake in terror to thunder. And again they wake, with a sense of recognition, when we enter any one of those great painted caves. Whatever the inward darkness may have been to which the shamans of those caves descended in their trances, the same must lie within ourselves, nightly visited in sleep’
