Tag: injustice

Subsidised Injustice

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Marcus Rashford is kicking arse again. Well Tory arse. And sort of. They don’t seem to be doing as his star appeal demands which was inevitable, they couldn’t be seen to bow to him or anyone in his position too many times. While that was inevitable, it was also always going to be the case in doing so they would be shamed in the process. It isn’t even him shaming them though, he’s just making a series of valid points, it’s their reaction, they’re shaming themselves.

They’re shaming themselves because they deny children food, they let innocent children go hungry when they spend and waste not just millions but billions of pounds. The money wasted during the pandemic on them being ill prepared and then on them continuing to behave in a manner which could only be described as incompetent. The twelve billion pounds wasted on a failed test and trace system. The contracts given out to friends, associates and Tory donors, many of whom had none or little experience in what they were being paid to do. We could discuss Brexit and the utter bankrupting shambles that it has inevitably shown itself to be. We could discuss the HS2 vanity and cronyism project that does nothing to improve the infrastructure of another failed privatisation experiment. We could go on and on but this isn’t a dissertation, I haven’t enough words.

Rashford is simply stating the obvious and the Tories are doing everything else to themselves. There have been photos going around social media this week of the menu for the restaurant in The House of Commons. Whether this menu is accurate is not important, the truth is that this is a subsidised restaurant, a restaurant taken advantage of by millionaires who happily allow their lunch to be subsidised by the tax payers. This is a link to a website with a long list of the Tory MPs who voted against feeding hungry children. There are three MPs who claimed over eighty thousand pounds in expenses this last year. That is the equivalent of over four people on the minimum wage and doesn’t include the basic eighty-one thousand pound salary MPs are paid. What on earth do they need to claim that much on. Interestingly my local MP The Right Honourable John Lamont claimed seventy-six thousand pounds. He may just be due a letter from one of his constituency. I wonder why he doesn’t feel the need to feed hungry children. Interestingly Jacob Rees Mogg claimed nothing. Doesn’t change anything though, he still thinks kids should go hungry.

They say the existing benefits system is in place to compensate for and cover these costs and to feed the children. That would be fair enough if the current benefits system hadn’t been obliterated in the last ten years of Tory rule, resulting in over four million children finding themselves in poverty. That is between a quarter and a third of all British children which is just remarkable for a country that prides itself on being at the forefront the developed world. You may not see things with your own eyes but the numbers are staggering. It’s not supposed to be this way. Steaks should not be subsidised when young bellies remain empty. They certainly shouldn’t be subsidised for the ones actively keeping those bellies empty. This, this is an injustice and it’s subsidised by us.

Ten Days Free Falling Tree

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

This then is day one of ten without the news. It doesn’t feel a great deal different from yesterday except I missed listening to the two daily Economist podcasts I would usually listen to while driving. Not checking the BBC feels like absolutely zero loss which is quite a pleasant and reassuring feeling and without access to my Facebook wall I am unlikely to come up with any articles from independent or alternate media sources. Life doesn’t feel much different then as I said after one day, but then I wouldn’t expect it to, it’s after five or six days that I’m curious to see the affects.

This is not my first time without any access to the news. There have been plenty of opportunities for me to be ignorant of the worlds ignorance’s when travelling and either being away from the internet or just with better things to do. It is probably important then to get this straight; there are many more important things in life than knowing what is going on in the world, or a version of the world people you don’t know want you to see. When I have been away from the internet for a bit though my first thought is not to check the world or local news but is to find out what the score in the football was. That’s my weakness, everything else is secondary.

These moments of no internet are incredibly rare in modern times. We have access to the internet in ways unthinkable just ten to fifteen years ago. I do remember a time before mobile phones let alone phones with all this infinitely accessible information. I have no idea of the figures and will perhaps expose my ignorance but I imagine the majority of houses in the UK have wifi or at least access to a neighbours. Failing that a trip to McDonalds is the norm for some and even public transport has wifi these days. We’ve come along way from dial-up connections and it taking a minute to download one image.

It is probably a good thing. Long term it is unclear but then what the people of the future think is good will probably be different to what I do now. We apparently have less ability to remember information because we have Google as a surrogate memory bank. Our lack of real face to face connection has been shown to create feelings of loneliness which is surely the opposite of what a world of connectivity is supposed to do. Maybe we need to refine our understanding of the nuances of connection. On the flip side, unless we switch off our devices which can genuinely be really difficult, we are never fully alone and able to relax in our own company. We seem to be in a middle ground that does nobody any favours.

But I started out with discussing taking a break from the constant barrage of news not a one-sided take on the ills of technology. The news then makes us excitable in all the wrong ways and feeds into some primordial survival network going on in our brain. It undoubtedly leads to increases in anxiety and it’s only real benefit seems to be in allowing for a good conversation with someone about, well, the news. Yet being able to share information of massacres, injustices and private and state corruption is invaluable even if it does get drowned out by all the rest of the bullshit. In these ten days though I’ll be fine, as will the world without my observations for I suspect it is true; a falling tree does make a sound in the woods even when nobody is there to hear it.

Mental Self-Preservation In The Internet Age

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

The internet is quite simply the single biggest game changer since the printing press. This is not the first time this opinion has been presented on here and it probably won’t be the last. The internet has allowed us access to such a vast resource of information, one only dreamt of by intellectuals, students and conspiracy theorists fifty years ago, that we have no excuse for being ignorant of anything if we so desire. It is a shame our experiences have been coopted by click-bait, social media and kitten videos, who would have predicted such access to information would have in fact dumbed down society instead of enlightening it. Have our masters and overloads played their cards right when required or have we somehow done this to ourselves? It’s actually not clear, probably as ever a little bit of both. It is undeniable that we have access to information on social media which should bring down governments, and judging by my Facebook wall, the vast majority of people out there believe in the downfall of this corrupt system we live in. It is unfortunate of course that my Facebook wall is probably not representative of society on the whole.

I was reading an article about police in Australia beating up a man with mental health issues on his front lawn. They had been called to his address by his psychiatrist who was worried he might hurt himself. The golden rule in these situations is that the police will end up hurting him far more than he will himself, in America he will likely be shot. Again that may be true or it may not be but it does appear to be pretty commonplace if what I find on social media is anything to go by. Upon finishing the article I realised I was exhausted.

For nearly twenty years now I have been getting worked up about injustice in one form or another. I am instinctively drawn to it and appalled at what I find. For sure judging by what others post I’m barely excitable comparatively but that is probably something that has calmed in recent years from the heady revolutionary days of my youth. Perhaps it is just that after all these years you start to see how getting worked up serves no purpose beyond being emotively exhausting. Saying that there are examples of people making changes but they are not your average outraged person. There gets to a point that unless you’re actually going to do something then there’s no benefit to sitting behind a screen and getting angry, sad and / or excitable. Yet we still do, we keep on coming back to whatever fix it gives us. The buzz at seeing injustice, the feeling of being morally superior to some scumbag in uniform, the adrenal rush as you start fantasising about system change before going back to Netflix and watching Bojack Horseman or Peaky Blinders.

It just can’t be healthy getting worked up and mentally exhausted over things which will exist whether you read that article or not. This isn’t defeatist or fatalist, or at least I hope it isn’t and I’m aware I’ve just created a stick to be bashed with, but it is more a recognition of a certain type of pragmatism which leads hopefully to a little mental self-preservation and also the time and energy for more productive development of both the self and the environment around us. The world needs people to stand up and fight, and the reality is they will regardless, they will go out and make the changes. What it has and what it doesn’t need are people getting themselves outraged by events which have no effect upon them, can do nothing about and / or will happen regardless of what they do, which will most likely be little more than feel anger followed by moral outrage and superiority for the five minutes before they’re distracted by a kitten. Isn’t it wonderful that feeling of superiority, moral or not.