OK, I make no pretenses of knowing what life is all about. But I have spent a enough time on this spinning blue ball to tell you what it is not:
Life is not Cake or Death. (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/12/links-12-13-2020.html#comment-3483027)
There are nuances, shades of gray, degrees of risk, sides of a story, and more than one way to skin a cat.
But try to talk to people about politics, and it always gets resolved to either “Cake or Death”.
Try to talk to a politician about policy, and it always gets resolved to either “Cake or Death”.
Try to talk to a Preacher about religion and our place in the Cosmos, and it always, as sure as Buddha rose on the third day and saw his shadow, gets resolved to either “Cake or Death”.
And God help you if you ever have to talk money with a bean counter, because “Cake or Death” is the motto of every MBA program on the effing earth.
Not following this? Fine, let me ‘splain it. Not every decision can be made so effing lead pipe simple that the only choice is a beacon to the blind, a symphony to the deaf, or hot fiery awful death. There is no intelligence in “Cake or death”. Monkeys could make the call and be a damned sight quicker about it. Offer a spider monkey some delicious bundt cake, and a ball of vipers, and see what happens. That’s right, the cake is gone and the snakes get an aversion complex. Maybe they would like some cake until they get over it?
If I am forced to walk this earth surrounded by only cake picking monkeys, than so be it. Monkeys are fairly entertaining, or at least they are when you tease them. But Noooo! I have to drag this earthly bondage along to God knows what end surrounded by people that claim to be intelligent, and whose only response to a complex issue is to ask “can you give me the Cake or Death version?”
AUUUUGGGGGHHHH!
Hey, I like a rigged game as much as the next guy. You know, “heads I get cake, tails you lose your cake to me”. Go ahead, flip a coin. Be daring. Sport.
I curse the life that is “Cake or Death”, and all that sail in her.
Johnson’s technique for dealing with problems (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/15/boris-johnson-pandemic-britain-christmas-covid) is to let them run out of control, building to a point of sufficient crisis that delay is no longer viable. That way the choice becomes perversely easier because there are fewer options left. Wait long enough and there might be only one.
That is how he has dealt with Brexit. He imagines that brinkmanship is a negotiating strategy to wring concessions out of Brussels, but in reality it is just a way to simplify the decision by eliminating options that needed time to develop. He lets procrastination do the heavy lifting. He can then tell himself (and his audience) that the final outcome, while not perfect, is the best available solution. And maybe it is. But only because it is so late in the day and all the better solutions have long since expired.
It is a chaotic way to run anything: leaving it all to the last minute, relying on a critical mass of external pressure to get motivated. As a way of governing in a pandemic it is disastrous because there is no slack time between deadlines. The moment to make the tough choices is always now. The rate at which good options decay is exponential. The virus thrives on indecision. Johnson’s method is effective for one thing, though: it guarantees a sustained pitch of political drama, with the figure of the prime minister lit centre stage. It forces the nation to hang on his word, waiting for him to act, while the consequences of his inaction play out. That bathes him in an aura of power, but it is not leadership.
Has that line ever worked on anyone?
One of my formative American experiences of guns (https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=118332.msg2595581#msg2595581) involved pumpkins, assorted other unfortunate squash, crayfish, and the backwoods of West Virginia. For some reason I got myself invited to a crawfish boil. I'm not sure why as I like crustaceans about as much as they like me. But hey, there was the promise of beer and when in Virginia with a girl called Mary Lou and she's y'all-ing for the Dixie olympics, you go with the flow because you know where you'd like it to go. Plus she promised to show me where the Waltons lived, which turned out not to be a euphemism.
Anyway, we crossed the state line. Maps were consulted. Further and further we went, trees edging closer to the road. Daylight got more squeezed. It turned out that none of us actually knew the hosts, they were friends of someone's brother's cousin (never to try to unpick these family relationships would be my advice) who had mentioned en passant that the event was happening. So, we were basically gatecrashing a redneck party.
Now you know it's a party when you get to the end of the driveway, or rather rutted track, and there's some balloons or a banner, maybe a sign saying 'crawfish boil this way.' Not in WV, there's a big fella leaning on a pump action. Y'all here for the 'fish? I'm not arguing. Why yes, good sir we are. You ain't from round here? Sarcasm, go stand on the corner and shut the fuck up, the man has a gun.
So, anyway, another ten miles of track lands us on Planet Pick-Up truck. You know how it is when you arrive at a party underdressed. I felt undergunned. A small army would have felt undergunned. Mary Lou? Paul? Not one of us had thought to bring a weapon. These people made it look like the crawfish might be fomenting armed rebellion. They weren't going to go quietly into that oil drum of boiling cajun-spiced water.
So, in short order, beer was consumed. Two hundred and fifty pounds of crawfish met an unseemly demise, of which I ate about one. As my brain started to go sudsy rockabout, the shooting starts. Now all good Americans want to see English people shoot guns. Trust me, like the accent, it holds an ineffable attraction. So I find myself holding a small cannon in one hand and a beer in the other. Mary Lou appears with a borrowed assault rifle, looks my limply clutched handgun up and down, and shakes her head before putting a 7.62 mm round through a pumpkin far enough away to be in the next county. Suddenly, about 200 pair of eyes fall on me. Shoot the pumpkin, English. I don't think this shit ever happened on the Waltons. I don't think Mary Lou is going to offer any favours to a boy who won't kill a pumpkin so I down the beer, slug some bourbon and take aim and – every varmint in the state duck – start massacring trees. Then everyone is shooting. It's like a small war. Someone zooms by me on a quad bike with a machine gun in one hand, splattering veg left right and centre. It's like an organic veg version of Mad Max.
I've no idea how many people died that night. My ears rang for about four days. Mary Lou never looked at me quite the same. I think you shot a squirrel, she said. Collateral damage.
KEEP IT IN YOUR HEAD! (https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/4181005-Whats-the-best-quote-you-have-heard-from-a-parent-in-passing)
We need something that better conveys the import of this ancient maxim. I have just the thing — an illustration from the Roman orator Cicero, sometimes cited as the source of the legal doctrine in question.
Cicero was defending one Bilbo. (No relation to Frodo.) Bilbo was a non-Roman who was accused of having been illegally granted Roman citizenship. The prosecutor argued that treaties with some non-Roman peoples explicitly prohibited them from becoming Roman citizens. The treaty with Bilbo's homeboys had no such clause, but the prosecutor suggested one should be inferred.
Nonsense, said Cicero. "Quod si exceptio facit ne liceat, ubi non sit exceptum..." Oops, I keep forgetting how rusty folks are on subjunctives. Cicero said, if you prohibit something in certain cases, you imply that the rest of the time it’s permitted. To put it another way, the explicit statement of an exception proves that a rule to the contrary prevails otherwise.
You can see where an argument like this would come in handy in traffic court.
Whatever the fiasco, aplomb is unbroken. Mistakes, failures, stupidities and other causes of disaster mysteriously vanish. Disasters are recorded with care and pride and become transmuted into things of beauty. Official histories record every move in monumental and infinite detail but the details serve to obscure.
Barbara Tuchman, on official British accounts of the Second World War in Burma
We simply aren’t equipped for rational debate in the world we’ve created, where information moves so fast, and where our perception is shaped by the platforms we have built to deliver that information. Platforms which are actively manipulating us, polarising us, algorithmically radicalising us.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc — they all know how they are warping our perception, shaping our opinions, setting us against each other with greater and greater intolerance and vitriol. That’s the whole point. They want us engaged. Content like the original thread thrives in this environment, it takes no time at all to engage with it, share it, see that it reinforces your bias, use it as a weapon.
Whereas a lengthy, four-part examination (https://voidifremoved.medium.com/response-to-andrew-carter-re-j-k-rowling-pt-4-c6b194354898) of it is just tilting at windmills.
In 1960s garage rock, (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/210599649.pdf) the fuzz of guitar distortion, raucous experimentation of unencumbered vocal timbres, and a simplicity of fourths-based harmonic construction contributed to a sensibility that musicologist Michael Hicks has dubbed “avant-garage” for its sense of homegrown, communal antagonism. Bob Dylan, drawing upon an emphasis on informality among his folk-revival milieu, blurred the lines between studio construction and performance by including a clumsy, laugh-ridden false start in the album release of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” on Bringing It All Back Home (1965). Later, Dylan’s unfinished musical dawdling was transformed into musical legend through the bootleg circulation (and later commercial release) of his late-1960s basement tapes with the Band.
McCartney (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_Silver_Hammer)'s wife Linda said that he had become interested in avant-garde theatre and had immersed himself in the writings of the experimental French author Alfred Jarry. This influence is reflected in the story and tone of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", and also explains how McCartney came across Jarry's word "pataphysical" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Pataphysics), which occurs in the lyrics. In 1994, McCartney said that the song epitomises the downfalls of life, being "my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does, as I was beginning to find out at that time in my life. I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer. I don't know why it was silver, it just sounded better than Maxwell's hammer."
Robert Graves recounts this story, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory#Robert_Graves'_tale_of_Mallory's_Pipe) at the time famous in climbing circles, about an ascent that Mallory made as a young man in 1908:
My friend George Mallory… once did an inexplicable climb on Snowdon. He had left his pipe on a ledge, half-way down one of the Liwedd precipices, and scrambled back by a short cut to retrieve it, then up again by the same route. No one saw what route he took, but when they came to examine it the next day for official record, they found an overhang nearly all the way. By a rule of the Climbers' Club, climbs are never named in honour of their inventors, but only describe natural features. An exception was made here. The climb was recorded as follows: 'Mallory's Pipe, a variation on route 2; see adjoining map. This climb is totally impossible. It has been performed once, in failing light, by Mr G. H. L. Mallory.'.
Well look at you. So very ravenous, yet well past your expiration date.
- The Dead Don't Die (https://youtu.be/VhiQYuCbDRg)