During 2020, my twelve-year-old Fiat Panda became decrepit and unreliable – bit like myself. My replacement vehicle is a beautifully maintained five-year-old Fiat 500 – which provides an entirely different experience of confidence and viability. I’ve quickly found that having new ‘wheels’ has shifted my outlook – that perhaps the end is not as ‘nigh’ as I thought it was – that perhaps we could now improve the ‘functionality’ of the driver as well.
I have a great wee book called ‘Sod 70!’ by Muir Gray, which explains that decline is not inevitable with old age, if we take care of our fitness and morale; he recommends three actions: a do-able ten minutes-a-day exercise routine focussed on suppleness; three longer sessions each week focussed on stamina; a daily mental work-out. My mental work-out is provided by writing this blog; the garden provides me with longer stamina sessions; but I’ve never been able to summon the motivation for the simple daily exercise regime and I run the risk of losing, not gaining physical functionality.
Bill Shankly, the famous manager of Liverpool FC, said that his ambition was to ‘die healthy’ – i.e. he wanted to be active and independent to the end; me too. If I have any concept of a ‘good death’, it’s to die in my sleep – (not very soon). A palliative care specialist has written that, most people before they die, want the opportunity to talk about “the four last things that matter most: please forgive me; I forgive you; I love you; thank you.”
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Books like The Spirit Level (2009) and Thomas Piketty’s Capital (2014) have carefully explained how, under the present economic system, wealth becomes concentrated to levels incompatible with social justice and ultimately with democracy itself; how inequality is ‘baked into’ capitalism. This Open Democracy article argues that 2021 is humanity’s make-or-break moment on climate breakdown – that it’s time to confront the economic system that is killing the planet. Scotland has dozens of organisations and pundits ‘on the left’, who claim to favour a gentler, post-capitalist economy – but they are incapable of collaboration. My ray of hope is the Wellbeing Economy Alliance who continue to quietly build their network. This is their advert for a Director.
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With almost four people a day dying from drug overdoses, this Times article urges Scotland to decriminalise drugs and dare London to step in; it references Michael Collins, who is central to the decriminalisation of drug possession in Baltimore, USA. The article doesn’t estimate the chances of this happening – but I’ll give you mine; zero.
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This is a four-minute Channel 4 chat between Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Professor Timothy Snyder about the Capitol siege. Snyder seems a reasonable man and gives the most forthright opinion I’ve heard; that the smallish, USA white supremacist far-right are fascists – were empowered by Trump – won’t just disappear. Good sense from Joseph Stiglitz.
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I always check out Simon Kuper’s column in the FT’s Weekend Mag; he lives in Paris and once a month (prior to the pandemic), he’d visit London: “an incomparable one-stop shop for ideas and information”. His column this week discusses what effect Brexit and Covid will have on London’s future as a cosmopolitan ideas’ hub.
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Fascinating piece by Dan Taylor in the Conversation, identifies parallels between present lockdown and an obscure novella by EM Forster – The Machine Stops (1909). Set in an unspecified future – a vast global machine connects everyone and meets all human needs (think emerging internet monopolies). EM Forster’s story is about the getting back to ‘normal’. Taylor ends:” Only us humans, with our messy emotions and complexity, can do that dreaming and that rebuilding together, democratically.”
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Paul Mason, for the Guardian, reviewed both of Thomas Piketty’s major tomes (2014 and 2020). I wonder if Mason still prefers the model of a disruptive uprising/revolution?
“Piketty’s socialism, then, is a socialism without class struggle, or the need for class struggle. As a result, the intellectual and moral rearmament the left must undergo has to arise out of academia, or the world of thinktanks and NGOs. As for ideologies, they are, in Piketty’s historical scheme, almost never busted open from below, but simply destined to lose their coherence from within…One of the most compelling chapters is Piketty’s discussion of the near-universal rise of what he calls the “social state”. The relentless growth in the proportion of national income consumed by the state, spent on universal services, pensions and benefits, he argues, is an irreversible feature of modern capitalism.”
