The countdown has begun! In a mere 499 days from this posting, the 2012 Olympic Games will be underway. How can I be so accurate I hear you ask. Well yesterday the Countdown Clock was unveiled in Trafalgar Square, and… In this humble blogger’s opinion, the word ‘eyesore’ can be a touch overused, but in my opinion just go nuts with it. Why do all our symbols for the 2012 games look so terrible. I wasn’t too bothered about the official logo until it was pointed out to me (those of an easily offended disposition best look away) that it looks like Lisa Simpson giving head…
Moving on swiftly. Tickets for the games are now on sale with a range of prices for all the family starting at about £20 (I believe certain concessions cost less) up to £2012 (who believes in coincidences?). Of course some of the cheap ones will probably end up in the sand. No not the long jump area, the places where the building haven’t been built yet and there’s still blokes in their high-vis jackets chucking cement into a mixer and whistling at all the female athletes. Though probably not the weightlifters…
Let’s hope that the half a billion pounds expected to be generated by the games can pay off some of this debt the world seems to be in, of course, £500m is barely the tip of the iceberg. As I’ve said before, why not just get the 10 most highly paid footballers to just give away a couple of weeks worth of their salary every other month. World debt, not to mention starvation and poverty, would be abolished within about 4 months. Overpaid sods. we could have slogans and everything:
Okay deep breaths, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I have something to confess avid readers. Today, I bought the Daily Star. I know, I know, but I’m trying to acquaint myself with all forms of -ahem - journalism (I think I made that joke in my Pun in the Sun post… meh). No offence to any die-hard Star readers by the way... how is it in the C2DE social grade?
Who thought that was a good idea?
But enough bullying the lower classes, which technically includes my dad… awkward. After scouring the paper for a story I could laugh at, as is my custom, I finally settled on one featuring TV’s craziest man, Charlie Sheen. Now I wouldn’t normally sink to celebrity based news as I think it’s too easy. But bear in mind. I was reading the Star. Besides, at this point, watching Charlie Sheen’s antics is more like seeing a train falling down a cliff into a patch of landmines and then ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe, unleashing Cthulhu on the world to ravage humankind for all of eternity. You get the drift.
For anyone who either has no idea who Charlie Sheen is, or why he should be in the news. Well it’s relatively complicated but essentially it started a month or two ago when he went a bit crazy in a hotel room with a ‘porn star’ and it’s been a downhill, drug crazed, slope ever since. Most recently with his being sacked from TV show Two and a Half Men, for which he was paid £1.2 m an episode. And they say footballers are overpaid. He has since got a little nuts, done some crazy internet rants, and waved a machete around whilst standing on a rooftop.
The particular aspect of the story that the Star went with was that Hollywood legend, and "Beetle Juice star Alec Baldwin" has told Sheen to “sober up, say sorry and beg for your job back.”
Makes you think doesn’t it? I mean, surely they could have picked something other than ‘Beetle Juice star’ to announce Alec Baldwin. He's been in countless other films and has 10 acting awards. Just a thought.
For those of you wondering how much coke Charlie Sheen took. It was enough to kill Two and a Half Men.
Get out the red flags and throw away all your stuff! Because it’s time to talk about Karl Marx, and communism.
He's got something you don't. A great big bushy beard!
Marx started his academic life brilliantly, initially studying law, he was held up as a model pupil. Until, to the shock of his tutors, he changed to philosophy. And from that, no doubt to the utter horror of his parents, he took up journalism. He’d have caused quite a stir in any press conference no doubt, what with the crazy-rabbi look going on. Indeed, his radical thinking got him kicked out of pretty much any country he tried to live in, until he came to London, the home of free thought.
Marx’s basic principle was that man was a productive animal. He is master of the world because of his use of tools (In a sense, you could say that man has out-evolved evolution).
Marx took a Darwin-like approach to his research, studying every aspect of society in order to try and understand it. He believed that other philosophers made no attempt at real change, they just spent their time sitting in darkened rooms, pontificating all the worthy questions of life.
Indeed his tombstone is inscribed with the words:
“Workers of the world unite”
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point however is to change it.”
Very eloquently written, and ever the pragmatist.
Engles, an associate of Marx who also had a fantastic beard, and helped publish the Communist Manifesto. Said that Marx achieved in his philosophy, a fusion of Hegelian philosophy (dialectics), British empiricism (As of Adam Smith), and French revolutionary politics, especially the socialist side (remember from our romanticism discussion, “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”).
Though he was a self-proclaimed disciple of Hegel, he attacked the mysticism and idealism which clouded much of the man's work. He did not approve of wishy-washy ideas like the Geist, or the spirit of the world. But he did approve of the Dialectic, that opposing points of view could come together and form new (supposedly better) points of view. The dialectic that Marx favoured was based on materialism. No he didn’t spend his time angsting over the latest PlayStation console, or a particular polo shirt that is exactly the same as the one from Peacock’s only this one has a special label which makes it fly or something. No, his materialism was that which is based in the real world. Not the ethereal haze of other philosophers.
In this respect, the main focus of the dialectic was the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The proletariat are the plebeians, the workers, they were the people who had no means of production save for themselves. They are the lowest rung on the ladder, and as such, they have nothing to lose. As Marx said: “they have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
On the other side of the scale, the Bourgeoisie are the people who have property, whether they’re rich aristocrats, or the meanest landlord, they own some form of subsistence. Marx predicted that at some point in the future. There would be a clash between the two parties, resulting in the victory of the proletariat, and the introduction of a socialist system in which production is used for the benefit of society as opposed to the benefit of the market (for an outline of the market system referred to, look at my earlier post on Adam Smith’s Opulence of Nations). This would show all the people that this is to the common good (hello hello, traces of Rousseau’s General Will idea) and the state would be able to disappear. Leaving a society not alienated by the division of labour (another Smith idea) as all activities are considered equal. The rocket scientist is not above the farmer, they are both as important as each other.
“From each according to their ability, to each according to his need”
Of course all of this is brilliant in theory, the USSR took up their own version of it, as did several other countries (everyone knows about the Berlin Wall for example, not to mention Cuba) though none of them got it quite right. It’s probably worth remembering that whilst Marx was dying, he said to his best pupil something along the lines of:
“You were my best pupil, and not even you got what I’d meant.”
That's right avid readers, get out your sandwich boards and take to the streets proclaiming that the end is nigh! Domesday is approaching, and there’s nary a thing you can do to stop it. Unless of course, you don’t live in the UK. A cheeky deception.
For those of you who stick to the opinion that I’ve lost my mind, I’ll remind you that that has nothing to do with what I say… especially when’s I’m being as clever as this. I’ll stop being odd for a moment now and actually make sense of my blathering for you.
The 2011 census is being prepared for distribution on Sunday 27 March, because that’s what people look forward to on a Sunday morning, bureaucracy. It has been a decade since the last census and will no doubt ask the same thrilling questions as usual. How many pairs of underpants do you own? What’s your favourite flavour of fish? I don’t know, something along those lines, I was 10 years old when the last one came out, do you expect me to have paid attention? I’m pretty sure Mona the Vampire would have been more interesting, and that show made me want to put pins in my eyes.
As a side note, whilst doing a little research into the census, I found out that you are able to put your nationality down as Cornish. I’m sorry, what? First they put a monopoly on pasties and then they’re claiming they’re a nation! Why can’t I put down Devonian as my nationality eh? It’s favouritism that’s what. It’s a conspiracy between the surfers and the government. Let’s just make it official and put down a militarised zone all around Cornwall filled with landmines and crimp-on-top pasties. If they want to be their own nation, let’s separate them, right?
Hmm, I’m not quite sure how a blog post about a census, and a bad joke about the first ever census of the country, conducted by William the Bastard in 1085 and called the Domesday Book (and you thought I was being a crazy person talking about the apocalypse), ended up being a rant about Cornwall, if it’s any defence, bear in mind I am from Devon. There has always been a certain… antagonism between our two counties.
Hampshire County Council has decided to begin plans for a broadband project that aims to provide an internet service to all of Hampshire over the next two years.
The County Council plans to use local funding to improve speeds in certain ‘not-spots’, so that they can be considered for a government grant. Which they would not otherwise receive without a minimum broadband speed decided by the Broadband Delivery UK service.
Executive for Economic Development and Rural Affairs, Raymond Ellis, said that these plans would help encourage people to use the internet as a tool to make life easier, allowing them to shop online, and help to improve the economic drive of the area.
Costs for these plans are estimated to reach around 3.7 million pounds.
Seminar time certainly comes about quickly. This time we were discussing Kant and Hegel. And these are my higgledy-piggledy notes.
Immanuel Kant was of the ideological school of thought that believed in (to paraphrase) mind over matter. Many of his writings have an air of romanticism about them, and indeed I got a feeling that there was a definite link to Rousseau’s General Will idea (as mentioned in a previous blog).
Kant is a great believer in a priori knowledge (knowledge that is known without experience), and is vehemently anti-empiricist.
We also discussed perception of the world. This tends to annoy me as I can’t see the point of thinking about it. For anyone who doesn’t know what I mean (probably most of you), a good example is that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it make a sound? The usual argument being that sound is a human concept, and if there are no humans there to hear it then no sounds exists. This kind of talk irritates me because I can’t see the relevance to my life. As far as I’m concerned, when trees fall over, they make noise. It’s wouldn’t matter if there was noone around to hear it because it doesn’t affect people. At least, not until they find their car blocked by a tree lying across the road.
We also touched upon Numenal objects, which are things around us that cannot be seen , but we know they are there. This got George very excited because it meant he could talk about dark matter and other physicsy gobbledegook, but most of it went sailing over my head. Something about string theories…
But I digress. Kant would say that if something is not being perceived, it is still there. But it is constantly changing. At a molecular level he is right, but once again, I don’t see the practicality of thinking like that. It just gets in the way of the important things in life. Like crossword puzzles.
As far as his morals go, he might as well live on a chessboard, they are just black and white. Lies are bad, even for a good cause, because the good cause is in relation to you. Doing your duty is very important (this part got very Nurembergy at this point).
It is interesting to note that in their respective ways, both the Nazis, and the Christians, are followers of Kant’s train of thought. Though obviously, not necessarily with the same results. We’ll see.
Hegel was essentially the same start as Kant. He was a Romantic and he was anti-empiricist. He was not a fan of logic (in the traditional sense), considering it to be metaphysical and therefore of no real use. His theories centred around the idea of absolutes. There is no truth without the whole, and since it is virtually impossible to know everything as it is irredeemably complex, nothing could be considered wholly true. A simplified example of this would be to say: A is the father of B, Kant would reply that we do not sufficiently know A enough to make such a statement. We would need to know all his relations to everything in the universe before we could assess his relationship to B. Not particularly practical in my opinion. Maybe we’ll just give him the benefit of the doubt (I tried to be ironic there, I’m not sure if it worked…).
Something that both Kant and Hegel share is a love of change. And the best way for change to happen (in their opinions) is war. Generally, in war, you have two opposing sides, and whichever side wins, spreads their values to the other side. This allows for greater improvement of said values as there are more people to work on them. War is change, only accelerated.
This also leads to the Geist. It’s not easy to pin down what this means, but Spirit will do. It is the essence of thought at a time. Zeitgeist, for example, meaning in this context the ‘wind of change’ blows across the world carrying ideas (for want of a better word). You could say that the Zeitgeist of the current epoch is revolution. From the student protests in London, to the demonstrations in Libya, Egypt, and Bahrain. They are all linked, with this ‘spirit’ regardless of boundaries. How very deep, I think I fell down a philosophy well. Oh dear.
Thanks for reading my terrible attempt to explain German ideology. Go get yourself something nice.
