Politics

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Moving day

July 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

I was half-way up the stairs to our office on Wednesday morning when I remembered it was desk move day. The move was a two-hour operation involving physically moving desks. It was effectively a team-building event, and as always happens, the teamy people took over. I ended up in a fairly prominent position with far more foot traffic than before and far less privacy. Luckily I won’t be in that position very long. I have a cousin in Auckland whose workplace enforces daily desk moves. You’re not allowed to sit at the same workstation two days running. That sounds bloody terrifying.

In last Monday’s English lesson we focused on the letter F, or rather the f sound. I explained, with accompanying words and pictures, that the f sound can be written as f, ff, ph or gh. I think I said that ph is always pronounced f, hoping that he wouldn’t be wandering haphazardly through Clapham any time soon, or getting anything upholstered. That would be quite an upheaval. As for the gh combo, I tried to emphasise that f is far from the only pronunciation, without actually mentioning the numerous (and infamous) other possibilities. I think I failed badly. He first attempted to pronounce laugh something like “large”. When I then said the word correctly, he responded with “laffjjj”, and likewise “coffjjj” for cough. I think I got there in the end. Tomorrow I’ll concentrate on final consonant blends; he has a habit of omitting final sounds in speech. As I was driving home from the lesson, the guy who runs the marimba workshop happened to be giving a radio interview. I had two lessons with him. He was talking about an African instrument called an mbira. I thought it was interesting that we have to say an mbira rather than a mbira.

I haven’t mentioned Brexit for a while. Theresa May will be OK, I hope. She looks a safe pair of hands at least. The other contenders all seemed dangerous in their own ways. Still, May’s appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary is questionable to put it mildly. My biggest concern is a lack of effective opposition to the government. Labour are deeply divided. There is now a gaping hole in British politics which a new positive progressive party (like Podemos in Spain) should be able to fill, but alas the electoral system makes the emergence of a new party extremely difficult. Perhaps the best news for me is that Article 50 is now unlikely to be triggered before Christmas, but I wouldn’t assume anything in the current environment. I was reading an article about the Erasmus scheme, the EU student exchange programme that I took advantage of in 2000-01 when I studied in Lyon. Brexit puts UK access to the scheme in doubt beyond 2017. Yet another opportunity potentially lost.

I don’t want to write about Donald Trump because it’s too depressing and too scary. So much fear and hatred. Fivethirtyeight.com gives Trump a 42% chance of becoming president, and those guys know what they’re talking about. That 42% includes a 6% possibility that Trump wins the presidency despite losing the popular vote. We could be looking at a horrifyingly supercharged version of 2000.

I’ve now booked four of my five trains from the UK to Romania. They will hopefully get me as far as Budapest (quite an adventure in itself), and when I’m there I should be able to get a remarkably inexpensive train to Timișoara.

Life :) - My big plan - Politics

Motivation

June 30, 2016 by 0 Comments

I haven’t felt great the last few days. I’ve had no motivation to cross off any of the items on my overwhelming to-do list. Some of those items involve making decisions, so yeah, forget it.

I go away in under three months. The very thing that makes going to Romania possible – my complete lack of dependent family or dependent anybody – is what makes it so damn hard. I’m on my own here. But last night my carpool mate and I discussed my list over a drink, and what a useful process that was. Getting people to make decisions and draw timelines is precisely his thing. All the high-fiving and sentences ending in ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ would have been annoying if I didn’t know him better, but I’ve now got some plans in place that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for him. We decided that I’ll travel around Romania for a while to begin with instead of settling immediately in one place, except in the unlikely event that I get a job before I go. I’ll get to know the country much better that way, and besides it should be fun.

The Brexit vote and fallout haven’t helped my mood. The vote to leave the EU has caused political turmoil not seen in Britain since the Second World War. It’s fascinating in a way to see it unfold, but it’s also very upsetting. To see Nigel Farage speak with such pomposity and lack of magnanimity in the European parliament was troubling. To deliberately antagonise the people you’ll be brokering an exit deal with, what was he thinking? It’s like he didn’t care about British people other than himself. Millions of good people voted to leave, but the Leave-supporting politicians all seem bad, evil, despicable people. Millions of good people have nobody fighting their corner anymore.

It beggars belief that no coherent plan for “leave” was set out before the referendum. “Leave the European Union”. That was it. So much mayhem could have been alleviated with some planning. The Scotland referendum was a similar story, and I was thankful that on that occasion they voted for the status quo.

Just to rub it in, England exited Euro 2016 at the hands of Iceland, whose population is roughly that of Wellington. I saw the last quarter-hour of England’s embarrassing 2-1 defeat on the TV at work. I mentioned in my last post that English used to have a separate letter for the th sound. Well Icelandic still does, two in fact. They’re called eth (uppercase Ð, lowercase ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ). Eth is used for the voiced th sound, as in this and that, while thorn is used for the unvoiced th sound, as in thick and thin. Icelandic also has an interesting naming system. Supposedly 80% of Icelandic people believe in elves, and roads have been rerouted so as not to disturb their caves. Björk is from Iceland, as are the band Of Monsters and Men.

I’d dread to think where I’d be if my flatmate was still here.

Language learning - Life :) - Politics

In other news…

June 26, 2016 by 0 Comments

Yesterday was a relatively normal Saturday. In the morning I watched my cousin’s youngest boy play football and dropped him off after his four mini-games. “I’m a defender,” he said with pride and excitement just before the games started. He defended resolutely and was awarded joint player of the day for the second week in a row. I had lunch with my cousin, then went for a drink in Petone with probably my best friend, or at least the person I have most in common with here in Wellington. We talked about Brexit, work, the Spanish election (go Podemos!), travel, and more Brexit. Later I saw Independence Day 2 with my friend from the tennis club. The rest of the world doesn’t accept “America saves the world” as it did in 1996, and there was more laughter from the audience than I can ever remember from a non-comedy film.

Today I haven’t been in contact with anybody and I’m fine with that. I’ve got my English teaching tomorrow; it’s time I concentrated on that and my exit plans. Kiwexit? Kexit? Plenty of portmanteaux have been bandied about for the possibility of other countries leaving the EU: Czech-out, Italeave, Finnish and so on. How about, off the top of my head, a Frog-off?

Here’s an article in the Guardian about Ebbw Vale, a Welsh town that once had a thriving steelworks but has in recent times relied on EU money (a lot of it) to stay afloat. It has very little immigration. Ebbw Vale voted decisively (62%) to leave the EU. The number of people who voted against their interests is quite remarkable.

EU-funded road in Wales

The road sign above is interesting to me. The word for Wales in Welsh is Cymru but, like other Welsh words, it undergoes mutation in some circumstances, meaning the initial letter changes depending on (I think) the last letter of the previous word. In some cases Cymru becomes Gymru, and in other cases it turns into the weird-looking (to my eyes) Nghymru. Another example: maes (which means field) turns into faes after certain letters such as n. Apparently Welsh speakers make the mutations when they speak without really thinking about it. This changing of the initial letter is just one reason why using a dictionary in Welsh can be quite challenging. Another is that some digraphs such as ff, th and ng act as single letters. (Imagine for a minute that th, when it makes a single sound, counts as a single letter in English that comes between t and u in the alphabet. This isn’t as silly as it sounds: th was once written as a single very-different-looking letter in English. The word think would then come after time in the dictionary, and athlete would come after attempt. But pothole, which just contains t followed by h and not the th letter (because there’s no th sound), would come before potion, not after it. I’ve lost you now, haven’t I? But these sorts of things crop up all the time when using dictionaries or other alphabetical lists in Welsh.) Welsh is fascinating but I need to be concentrating on Romanian. I also need to be getting into linguistics properly but have no idea how. It’s frustrating as hell.

Life :) - Politics

It’s out!

June 26, 2016 by 0 Comments

It was all going so well on Friday morning. Nigel Farage’s near-concession was splashed all over the front page of the Sun. But then actual results started coming in. Sunderland were 61% out, Newcastle only marginally in. Those two results were much more favourable to Leave than had been predicted. Maybe it was just a North-East thing. But as other declarations dribbled in from different parts of the country that favoured Leave, the writing was on the wall. I’d worked out the night before that for Remain to win they would need to be at about 53% by the time our meeting started because many of the Leave-friendly areas would declare later (the same pattern that you see at a UK general election but less pronounced because people were voting less along party lines). Instead it was almost a dead tie at that point, and I knew it was all over. I felt sick. Some other people at work were following it, but not as closely as me. “Look how close it is! It could go either way! And doesn’t that map look pretty?!” No, there’s only one way this is going now and it looks bloody ugly.

It’s sad for me because I’ve invested a lot of emotional energy into my plan to take control of my life (to use a slogan from the Leave side). It has created so much uncertainty. I’m now glued to Al Jazeera and news websites when I’d much rather be learning Romanian or making travel plans. I’m losing sleep. My take is that the exit process will take two years from when the infamous Article 50 is invoked; the UK will still be part of the EU during that time. So my immediate future should be safe. But I just don’t know for sure.

But it’s also sad for the country that it’s come to this. I perfectly understand the people of Sunderland sticking two fingers up to London and the South-East who have reaped most of the benefits of Britain’s supposedly strong economy. Mines, shipyards, car plants and steelworks have closed down in the last forty years with nothing to replace them except insecure data-entry-type jobs that a bright twelve-year-old could easily do. And with increased automation even those crappy jobs are disappearing. As manufacturing has vanished in Wales, the North-East, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, so have communities. Successive Tory and Labour governments simply haven’t given a toss (and who do you vote for in a FPTP system when the two main parties are basically the same?). The influx of Eastern European immigrants after those countries were admitted to the EU certainly hasn’t helped either, but that’s only one in a very long line of reasons why so many people are struggling. It’s a shame that the EU had to bear the brunt of everyone’s understandable anger, rather than lying domestic politicians.

A lot has been made of the difference in voting patterns between the haves and have-nots, but to my mind it’s been overstated. It’s true that well-off metropolitan types voted to stay and have-almost-nothings in neglected areas voted to leave. But a lot of very well-heeled, often older people in rural areas will have voted out too. I can’t see the stats for Common Lane in Hemingford Abbots (two million quid, anyone?), not far from where I grew up, but I bet they voted out by a good margin. As someone who voted to stay, I see the Common Lane “outers” as my enemies. My dad, who is quite well off himself (but less so than before the pound and stock markets plunged), voted out. But he’s 66 and has very fond memories of Britain before it joined the EU in 1973. I’m pretty sure my brother also voted out. Mum didn’t vote, but she could hardly conceal her glee at the prospect of the EU collapsing.

The Remain side failed to make an emotional case for staying in the EU, and I think that’s where they lost it. The more they talked about economic risks, the more working-class people said “bring it on”, let those obscene edifices poking out of the London skyline burn to the ground, the system isn’t working for me. The new post-Brexit system, whatever form it takes, won’t work for them either unfortunately, I’m sure of that. That’s what makes the outcome so upsetting for me: the Leave voters were sold a complete lie. As for Nigel Farage who called the result a victory “for the ordinary people, for the real people, for the decent people”, seriously man, piss off.

Cambridge, where I was born, voted 74% in; Peterborough were 61% out. A huge difference, just as I predicted. Other liberal, young, affluent university towns like Oxford (70%), Bristol (62%), Exeter (55%), Brighton (69%) and Norwich (56%) all voted in. Mum talked about all those academic areas, implying that people who live in those places don’t know anything about the real world. How did we end up here? Anybody who knows anything about anything, and has studied or writes about the thing they know about, is now seen as some intellectual oddball who is hopelessly out of touch, and therefore can’t be trusted. Thirty years ago TV was full of shows like Tomorrow’s World, Johnny Ball’s Think It Do It, Open University, even Countdown, all stuff that broadened the mind. How times have changed.

Scotland of course voted to remain by a large margin (62%) and I don’t think it’ll be long before they exit the UK via a second referendum. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have imagined that. The events of Thursday night, and those of the preceding weeks, were like a massive earthquake. The rebuild will be long and painful. I can’t thank my mother enough for ensuring that my brother and I had New Zealand citizenship from an early age.

Life :) - My big plan - Politics

Nerve-wracking

June 23, 2016 by 0 Comments

Voting in the EU referendum has begun (well voting in person has; I sent in my postal vote three weeks ago). I don’t know which way it’ll go and I’m extremely nervous. It could affect me and millions of other people profoundly and it’s just so binary. What’s more, I have to attend a meeting between two and four tomorrow afternoon, when over the half the results will come out. If I’m lucky I might be able to follow the headline figures on my phone. It’s times like these I wish I was more normal and only had to worry about the ABs (and if they lost I’d have plenty of mates to commiserate with).

I wish we’d heard more of this kind of rhetoric from the Remain side. It’s a wonderful, rousing speech. More of that and we’d be looking at a crushing win for Remain, but instead…

I got my new passport yesterday, with the words “European Union” on the front.

I told my boss I’m leaving, in the middle of what has been a stressful week for him, not that I’ve never known him to have a non-stressful week. I think he was OK with it.

Life :) - Politics

Sad times

June 19, 2016 by 0 Comments

Jo Cox, the British Labour MP who was shot and stabbed on Thursday, sounded absolutely lovely and full of compassion. It’s so sad that two small children are now without a mother. Her suspected murderer has just appeared in court; he gave his name as “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. He sounds seriously messed up.

The compassion that Jo Cox showed in spades appears to be in increasing short supply in Britain. The picture of the UK that is beamed to me via various news websites (and therefore may not be entirely accurate) does not resemble the tolerant place I was brought up in, and that makes me sad. I’m seeing a lot of anger and resentment and hatred there now, and this EU referendum has given people an outlet for that. I don’t blame them in a way, but the EU is only a small part of the problem. The real problem is that successive governments over the last 35 years haven’t done enough to help poor people and poor communities. Britain’s economy is increasingly concentrated in London and the south-east. That includes St Ives in Cambridgeshire where my parents are staying now. Dad said he’s seen no evidence of the sort of anger I’m talking about, but then he wouldn’t in a town which is only a guided busway ride away from Cambridge, an outward-looking city which is likely to vote Remain by one of the largest percentage margins in the whole of England. If instead he went for a half-hour drive to the Welland Estate in Peterborough, parts of which some buses wouldn’t go through (and maybe still don’t) because it was too dangerous, I’m sure he’d see it. In 2003 I lived and worked in Peterborough, which is in the same county as Cambridge (sort of), but it’s really a world away and I expect it to vote Leave by a hefty margin.

How will Jo Cox’s murder affect the referendum? It sounds crass to even ask, but I think for such a huge decision we have to. Before the event I was picking a fairly comfortable win for Leave by nearly ten points. The more coverage the referendum and the campaigns got, the more it seemed to favour Leave as it became the mainstream option, and I could see that continuing right up until voting day. (This is the opposite of what some commentators were saying, i.e. that more attention would lead to a higher turnout, especially amongst Remain-friendly younger people.) The murder itself might garner some sympathy votes for Remain, but perhaps more importantly there hasn’t been any campaigning for two days and what campaigning is left will probably be more civil than before the shooting. I can see the pendulum swinging back towards Remain but will it be enough to get them over the line? I’m not so sure. And if it is enough but only just, people will say that the murder changed the result. What a terrible mess.

My big plan - Politics

The ins and outs of the EU referendum

June 11, 2016 by 0 Comments

At 1pm today, or 4am in Bucharest, I attempted to listen to the news on Romanian radio. My Romanian just allowed me to discern that one of the items was the hot-off-the-press Brexit poll, giving Leave a ten-point lead. That poll is by a company called ORB, and their methodology leads me to conclude that it’s complete garbage just like their previous polls, some of which gave Remain a whopping lead. (I’d love to see polling banned altogether in the last four weeks before an election or referendum.) But I think there has been a genuine move to the Leave side, and I’d now put Britain’s chances of leaving the EU at 50:50, perhaps even a shade higher. The betting markets still make Remain the favourites by about a 70:30 margin, but I don’t buy that. The high rollers are backing Remain; the mums and dads with a few quid to spare are backing Leave. Many people treat their bets as votes (and likewise their votes as bets) and a clear majority of bets are on Leave. I’d bet on Leave myself, because I think it represents great value, if it wasn’t for all the complications involved in setting up an online account in some non-sterling foreign currency (I say non-sterling because I expect the pound to plummet in the event of a Leave win).

The zeitgeist is very much with Leave, and that’s hard to combat. The scare tactics by the Remain side certainly aren’t cutting through. They needed to frame staying in the EU as something positive to vote for. In fact as I watch from the other side of the world, the level of debate from both sides has been appalling. What’s the plan if the UK stay in? What’s the plan if they/we decide to pull out? Maybe none of that matters. Maybe people aren’t interested in the facts anyway. All I hear about is even more dreadful immigrants if we stay and a third-world economy if we leave.

Dad registered with hours to spare before the original deadline, and he might well vote “out” (he happens to be in the UK so he’ll vote at the local polling station). I suspect my brother will vote “out”. I voted “in”, and I’m not ashamed to say that was largely out of self-interest. [Yikes. Another poll out with a ten-point lead for Leave. Phew, it’s the same one. Please tell me it’s the same one. See, they shouldn’t have polls at all this close to the vote.] This plan of mine isn’t just a plan, it’s a dream. It’s a long time since I had a dream with a realistic chance of becoming reality. If Britain wasn’t in the EU, my dream wouldn’t exist. I readily admit I’m too selfish to vote against my dream. I might still be able to live and work in the EU for some time because the “divorce” is unlikely to be immediate, but I don’t know. Nobody knows.

Another reason to vote “in”, for my mind, is that the “in” people seem nicer. I bet most of the English hooligans in Marseille are voting “out”. The CAPS LOCK “BREXIT!” brigade on online forums are mostly “outers”. The people who didn’t want voting extended after the website crashed (their stupid fault for leaving it till the last minute; sod ’em) were mostly “outers”, which is ironic considering how much they keep banging on about democracy. Most importantly the Conservatives who are likely to take over in the event of Brexit don’t seem particularly warm and fluffy, not even Boris Johnson.

Despite all that, I wonder how I’d vote if I still lived and worked in, say, Peterborough. It’s so long since I lived in the UK that I was only just eligible to vote. It’s six years since I even set foot in the country. If I’d seen the influx of Polish plumbers first-hand, I might well be voting out now.

Romania lost 2-1 to France this morning in the first match of Euro 2016. I was impressed with the number of Romanian fans there. I remember all the hype surrounding Euro ’96 which was played in the UK. It was huge, and all played with the catchy tune in the background that talked about thirty years of hurt (since England won the World Cup). It’s now fifty years. And talking of the nineties, two-hit wonders Ace of Base are playing on Romanian radio.

Politics

Gerrymandering – stop the madness!

March 15, 2016 by 0 Comments

Feeling better about my living situation, because I know it won’t last for ever, has enabled me to think of other things, such as…

Gerrymandering. A lot of people know this word without knowing what it means. It’s a political term for the process of dividing an area (in the US, a state) into districts so as to give one party disproportionate power. Each state in the US is divided into a number of congressional districts, each of which elects one member to the House of Representatives. In the case of North Carolina, which was mentioned on Al Jazeera tonight, prompting me to write this post, there are 13 districts. By law, each district has roughly the same population. In the state of North Carolina as a whole, support is just about evenly split between the Republicans and Democrats. But the Republicans control 10 of the 13 districts! How? Well, because they have control of the state, they get to draw the boundaries between the districts. And that’s how you end up with maps like this. The “before” map is absolutely batshit crazy, right? The aim of the Republicans is to pack lots of Democrat-voting people (in this instance African-American people) into as few districts as possible, conceding those districts by massive margins, while hoovering up all the remaining districts by far smaller margins. So what starts out as 50:50 becomes anything but. The same thing goes on in (most?) other states, such as Illinois, where districts have shapes that are just as absurd. And the Democrats engage in this process too. It’s totally undemocratic, just like so much of America’s “democracy”; power is taken out of the hands of the people and placed in the hands of the few who draw those goddamn maps. It also leads to massive inefficiencies and in some cases (like in North Carolina) expensive lawsuits.

Unlike so much of American politics, where I wouldn’t know where to start trying to sort out, gerrymandering is a problem that I could solve myself. Give me a week and a decent GIS program, and from almost the other side of the world, I could make the US significantly more democratic than it is now. I’d respect geographical features and centres of population, but pay no attention whatsoever to racial or other demographic data: drawing boundaries along racial lines is part of the problem. Of course it would be better if the US could abandon the district system altogether and bring in something like STV (which could even help end the horrible two-party system) but you have to start somewhere.

North Carolina and four other states vote in the presidential primaries in a few hours’ time. Donald Trump might have one hand on the Republican nomination this time tomorrow. Although I think he’s odious, he’s giving the biggest middle finger to the system (even if he has the smallest hands) and when people are so desperate and fed up, that has a definite appeal.