The Further Away

IMG_4808, Sarah Zucca, 2013

Back in 2007 I wrote that Christmas had lost the meaning it once had. Given our earliest Christmases are as children, the meaning it has is invariably material. A decade ago as I was approaching the end of school, receiving lots of presents or even money in lieu was very little to get excited about. Where once there was unwrapping at 5am, I now struggle to get out of bed at 1pm. By the time I got a job and started generating income I could buy all the CDs and DVDs I wanted any time of the year. Asking for them, because you've been asked what you want, reveals a massive void at the core of the materially-orientated 25th. Currency is just being cycled and because requesting an object requires no consideration on the part of the purchaser, the present isn't really personal so much as a financial obligation to avoid being the one taking more than giving. So come the material crisis in my later teenage years, I began to realise the spirit of Christmas was seeing relatives.

Unfortunately, when I wrote up that realisation it was actually the last time my relatives came over from the US in December. For the past two years they've come over in late October for a pre-emptive combination of three birthdays in November, two in December, and Christmas rolled into one. Still, that leaves Christmas itself rather sparse with only my uncle joining us from down South. This compounds the sense of meaninglessness since the 25th is pretty much like any other day except very few people are working. Since I'm working right up to the 24th and back to the coalface three days later for the stint before the New Year holiday, it feels little different from an extra long-weekend. A far cry from the build-up in primary school when in the final few days before finishing up we'd bring in board games and videos to watch. My traditional viewing of the Muppet Christmas Carol is down to that. In fact, that too reveals a change in perspective.

Wake Up Maggie, I Think I've Got Something to Say to You

(C) Agence France-Presse

Originally I was going to write back in April about Margaret Thatcher on account of her recent cessation of life, but the saturation of media coverage covered most of what could be said. I put the post back to November and planned to use some of the non-domestic events of her premiership as jumping off points for some discussion. That schedule slipped as per the pattern of neglecting to write when work is easy, so here I am in the midst of the Christmas workload (you know, that company that even Thatcher wouldn't privatise) writing two posts back to back. Fortuitously (and this is going to sound terrible), Nelson Mandela died last week. Perhaps this is a good time to follow on from my comparison of Zimbabwe and South Africa, Mugabe and Mandela.

The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

The Emperors and Kings Curl in the Autumn as the Burning of Leaves

It's a bit odd, don't you think, that even while freedom and equality are the hallmarks of Western democracy (apparently simultaneously unique to all) that some people are living like royalty? I'm not talking about those financially benefiting from austerity and the ideologically-driven shrinking of the state, I mean royalty with a capital R. Of the nineteen monarchies depicted left in 1908 only eight survive.

The first to go was the Portuguese overthrown in 1910. The Qing Empire (of China) was overthrown in 1912, though Puyi was restored in Japanese Manchukuo from 1934 to 1945. The Russian monarchy was famously overthrown in 1917 which directly inspired events in Germany a year later in November 1918. Austria-Hungary ceased to exist earlier in 1918 and the Hungarian throne was vacant until overthrown in 1944. The Ottoman Sultanate was abolished in 1922. The Hellenic (Greek) monarchy was abolished in 1924, restored in 1935, vacated in 1947 and abolished again in 1967. Serbia had become Yugoslavia in 1918 and the monarchy was exiled in 1941 then formally abolished in 1944. Romania and Bulgaria were overthrown under Soviet hegemony in 1947 and 1946 respectively. The Italian monarchy was abolished in 1946. Japan and Thailand remain, while the Spanish crown was vacated in 1931 and only restored in 1978. The other survivors are stable and quite geographically restricted, almost forming an arc: Britain (minus Ireland, 1921), Belgium (not depicted above, probably because Leopold II wasn't welcome in the club at the time), The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

Sweet Bird of Truth

P52 Verso, Public Domain

This may read as a disjointed rambling piece as it was stitched together from three parts.

You have to beLIEve me!

As an atheist I have to admit to being quite envious of the sense of community I see in churches. One of the reasons I try to go to the local shop as often as possible, while others point out how much I could be saving by visiting the outlets of the megacorps, is to hold even the slightest sensation of community.

The increasingly belligerent tone of the new Dawkinsian atheists has turned me off. I really have no appetite to go round actively (de)-converting people and pulling them from their church for the aforementioned reasons. This raises a genuine problem - essentially the concept of 'the noble lie'. Is it right to use a lie to effect good in the world? That was pretty much the theme at the end of The Dark Knight and the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises concerning the cover-up of the corrupted Harvey Dent's crimes. For the protagonists, it was absolutely necessary to preserve the heroic status of Dent that they had long sought.

Towers in Sand / From Feudal Serf to Spender

EPILOGUE OF A SERIES.

Abstimmung an der Landsgemeinde, Adrian Sulc, 2006

This series of posts started out three years ago with a reprint of a college essay (so more like eight years ago) on the definition of Marxism and the failure of the Soviet Union. At the time I stated that I had loosely considered myself a Trotskyist if only because I understood it in my teens as in opposition to Stalinist totalitarianism, and in exploring the subject across ten thousand words I have found myself reaching back into the nineteenth century roots of socialism. The value of these essays, and this blog, is basically a personal learning tool - in writing this series I have managed to organise my ideas about political theory into something structured that I can recognise myself and refine. Thus, instead of complain about elements of society and politics, I can present my ideas for their own critique. To do so I must first re-summarise the problems with the Bolshevik revolution.

Word Problems, Level 1

Green Eagle, Quinn Dombrowski, 2010

Despite conlanging being a long-lasting hobby of mine that I can't talk to anyone about offline lest I receive a lovely long-sleeved jacket, a post about conlanging hasn't appeared on this blog since 2011. In October that year I presented what little I had to show of the conlang I was working on. Getic (aka Not-Albanian) is an attempt to derive a sister language to Albanian from Proto-Albanian under the pretence that the Dacians were their ancestors and one tribe went South (our world's Albanians) and another remained in the Carpathians (the Getae). The Getae were actually located near the Danube and possibly a Thracian tribe, but ethnicity and identity in the Paleo-Balkans is a hell of a mess - I'm just using the name. What I've been working on the almost two years alone are the sound changes from Proto-Indo-European. In that time I ripped most of it up and reorganised the whole thing at least once in order to get the right output. At first it was difficult given the paucity of information on Proto-Albanian. Before I eventually bought A Concise Historical Grammar of the Albanian Language for £80 I had to painstakingly gleam some fundamentals from the Wikipedia page on Albanian - the fronting of long PIE back vowels and monophthongisation of PIE diphthongs and the incidences of palatalisation before front vowels built up a crude chronology. The juicy stuff in that book was of course unavailable at Google Books, so I put down some real money on this hobby. That allowed me to finally progress onto creating the beginnings of a grammar this summer.

Police and Thieves

GTA San Andreas, promo artwork, 2004

It would be hard not to notice the landing of a new instalment of Grand Theft Auto if only because the media becomes saturated with moral panic articles on each launch. Not that this bothers Rockstar or Take 2 Interactive who make millions either way. As they say, any publicity is good publicity and it all feeds into the hype. However, in this day and age of aggressive promotion of entertainment products in which the first act of the script of an upcoming episode of an animated show is read by the voice artists at Comic-con and blockbuster films have almost year long mysterious viral marketing campaigns to engage fans, sometimes the meal is overcooked (see Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, et al). The first trailer for GTA V was released way back in November 2011 - almost two years before release - and since then we've been drip fed screenshots and cryptic twitter feeds with the expectation that the pressure will have risen so much that people will necessarily cream their pants the moment they so much as touch their copy. It might sound like I'm setting up for a scathing review. That is not the case - let's just not pretend this is the perfect game. Spoilers follow.