Watching history

I write this less with the aim of communicating anything particularly profound to the small number of readers of this blog, but more with the aim of capturing what I am currently thinking so I can refer back to it at a later time to see if I'm right. Though 'right' is a ridiculously narrow concept for history. Perhaps better to say that it will be interesting and perhaps informative to see how I would change my views with the benefit of hindsight, rather than simply right/wrong. 

Maybe that's the point of all these posts. Something to reflect on later. But read on, anyway. It might be interesting.

I think that the rapid collapse of the Afghan national army, and Government, underlines why Joe Biden was right to withdraw from Afghanistan. In 20 years "the West" had failed to establish a stable Afghan state. So the options were stay in perpetuity, like on the Korean border, or leave.

But Afghanistan is not Korea. Is is not a 'frozen war' but a hot war. 'Allied' soldiers, foreigners, Afghan security forces, Taliban, and civilians, particularly, always, civilians, were dying, and if "we" stayed, those deaths would have escalated on all sides. Nobody can credibly claim that, having failed to defeat the Taliban over two decades, we could defeat them this time. No military strategy for "winning" was presented because none existed.

Staying, at current troop levels, was unsustainable. The Taliban, already buoyed by the release of 5,000 of their members by Trump, were gaining ground daily. A protracted war to push they back could not be fought with the troops we had, and the Afghan army practically useless. There would have had to have been a total repudiation of the Trump deal (disgusting as that deal was) and a massive troop increase. Deaths would have spiralled on all sides. We could presumably, once that initial burst of fighting was over and the Taliban were pushed back, have frozen the conflict with our Western troops and our Afghan allies controlling the urban centres, subject to regular terrorist attack, with the remoter regions handed over to warlords, drug gangs and the Taliban. Women in Kabul would still have been in school, and we could salved our consciences that ever time an allied rocket went astray and killed an innocent, that was a price worth paying, that every solider we sent to die went in a noble cause. It is obvious that the Taliban are total shits, and women will be treated as chattels now that they are in charge, but it is not obvious to me that the balance sheet is worth it. Then again, I'm not a woman. Still, we are very keen to talk about women in schools, and not very keen to talk about all the dead people we had to kill to keep them there, whether or not the particular people who ended up dead were bad or not. How much killing is it worth enduring to keep the schools open?

I do not believe - and this is where I could be most wrong, and in being wrong, the balance changes - that the Taliban regime can endure. But the very presence of allied forces justifies its existence. Afghanistan was in stasis, and is was a ghastly status. Poverty was, under our 'rule' endemic. Corruption was endemic. This was true in 'our' areas as well as areas outside our control. It doesn't logically follow that our withdrawal with reverse this, but the abject failure of our attempts to 'develop' the country undermine the rationale for continued occupation. Nation building had failed. Perhaps, just perhaps, under a ghastly time under the 2nd Taliban regime, something better can emerge. Of course, this is wishful thinking, but no more wishful thinking than believing that further occupation would have led to a stable Afghan state at some indefinable point in the future.

Furthermore, the presence of 'our' troops in Afghanistan was an occupation. Over successive general elections the proportion of the electorate voting has declined to 20%. Hamid Karzai could hardly demand that the Americans leave, given that they turned a blind eye to the electoral fraud that saw him elected in 2009, and Ghani could not feasibly claim to represent the majority of Afghans when such a tiny fraction of them voted for him. There was no meaningful democratic mandate for any Afghan Government from 2009 onwards, and therefore no group represent Afghan's who could ask the Americans to leave or hold them to account. I don't think, by this point, it's in any way possible to know whether Afghans in the country as a whole prefer rule by a Ghani puppet government propped up by Americans or the Taliban, who will offer stability and less corruption, if not democracy or prosperity. This is not, of course, to suggest the Taliban have any mandate other than that of force of arms. But then, by the end, neither did the former Government.

Permanent occupation of a country by an outside force is not -- to put it mildly -- a good state of affairs, though obviously it might be considered the least bad one. 

Of course, the binary surge/leave framing might be an over-simplification. Perhaps a small 'surge' could have kept the Taliban at bay, at least until the winter when the fighting tends to die down. But imagine a situation where the Taliban enter into a Government of 'national unity' with Ashraf Ghani. As soon as Western troop levels dropped, the Taliban would have killed him and taken complete control. Which is why Ashraf Ghani, not an idiot, rejected such a deal. 

We could, of course, have done a deal where we handed the entire country over to the Taliban immediately and spirited Ghani and anyone else who wanted to leave out of the country. The optics of that would have been worse than what we have now, though our withdrawal/surrender might have been more orderly.

In short, of course we could have stayed. But an honest appraisal of staying is one where Afghanistan is under permanent western occupation and in perpetual civil war, unable to go back and unable to move on. I'm not sure it is the role for the USA, the UK, or any other country, to keep the demons at bay in a far off land, particularly when they continue to sell arms to other demons, in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and more, and particularly when poverty cannot be fought in their own countries because there is no 'magic money tree'. To suggest that Afghanistan has to stand or fall on its own feet may feel particularly callous, given the likely killings and oppression the Taliban will probably unleash over the coming months and years, yet in the long run things may improve. "Tell that to the women of Kabul" is a reasonable response, but I guess my counter-offer is that telling the families of soldiers, Western, Afghan and Taliban, that the deaths that would have followed another "surge" were worth it rings equally hollow.

I think history may be kinder to Biden, and much less kind to Obama, than the news today would have you believe.  

Leather

This is not a sporty household. I have been relegated to the kitchen. In days gone by I guess I would have sloped off to the pub, but its wet, and indoors drinking isn't a thing yet. To be honest, watching any kind of sport, worst of all England in a major tournament, is no fun in a pub. I always get there far too late and end up standing by the toilets, craning my neck, trying to see. In the 2018 World Cup the boys and I managed to capture England vs Tunisia in an Italian restaurant, listening in Italian and eating squid.

The build up is inane. "What is captaincy?", the England Captain is asked. "Leadership", he stoically replies. But what else could he have said? Disrespecting or even making light of the England football captaincy is like pissing on the flag.

Still, he'll be done by 33 and retire before 40. I'm somewhat older, and I feel like I'm getting better at what I do. Unlikely I'll ever reach England Captaincy heights but there's something to look forward too. I wonder if David Beckham feels like there is meaning in his life. Wikipedia says he enjoys building lego, which is, I suspect, what I'd do if I was a squillionaire. I'd be llike Will Ferrell in the Lego movie. Ah, one can but dream.

Good job I don't have to retire at 37. DECC would never have had an "Evidence Framework" if I had, and then where would we be? Though I guess there is a parallel with football, in that I've gone from being a team member to a manager. And like football, there's no real correlation. I see myself as more Arsene Wenger than Tony Adams, though my team may disagree.  

Right. It's nearly time for kick-off. I should find a beer and a bottle opener, and sign off. covid, of course, has totally messed with football's circadian rhythm. The world is next year which means we'll barely have time to get over the disappointment of dull failure in this thing before we start the next. Though to be honest, I think K will cope.

 

Not catching up on Line of Duty

So I was planning on writing a sweeping, but depressing, post encompassing the latest volume of the LRB, today's UK elections, my job, the Guardian and how empty the whole damm lot makes me feel inside. But you are spared that for, I remember, I promised to learn the rules of "Race for the Galaxy" before we next meet to play boardgames, and I haven'. So I will. I shall sit here with a pint of East London Brewing "Jamboree" (a more than passable Golden Ale) and learn the rules of "Race for the Galaxy" and my life will be all the better for it.

And you shall be spared my nihilistic drivel.

A death in the family

Waking up this morning to find the radio blurting out depressing dirge, for the second successive day, reminds me that we do not live in a normal country, if such a thing exists at all. Their is something deeply weird about suspending all normal programmes -- and by extension, ordinary life -- to mark the death of a man of whom few Britons would have found good words to say in his lifetime. The BBC, and other media, seem desperate to force on us -- via the act of cancelling not only all the regular radio shows but also the final of Masterchef -- the notion that Royalty is somehow special, rather than a weird historic relic. A hangover which we seem unable to get over.

I mean, if you don't find this weird, consider this. Radio 6 is playing Aphex Twin in the daytime, rather than, say, Royal Blood, because a 99 year-old non-person (in a quasi-literal sense, his existence was to be a non-person, he remarked as much himself) has died. I've actually turned to streaming Body Count over Spotify, not because of the name, but simply because I wanted to listen to something loud with lots of swearing in it. I'm not sure what HRH would have thought about Body Count. I suspect disapproval. Or perhaps something rather stronger than disapproval.

Now is, of course, not the time to question the monarchy. He's barely cold and not yet in his grave. But if not now, when we shut down the country to mark the passing of a person whose job was to produce heirs (success) and then be invisible (failure), then when.

It's just, and I apologise for repeating myself, so deeply, deeply weird. In a few year's time, assuming she doesn't turn out to be immortal, after all, we'll be ruled by Prince Charles. No sane country would chose to be ruled by Prince Charles, and of course, neither will we. He'll be King by default. How is it possible to not even question that inevitability?

An argument, a really, really weak argument against Republicanism is the phrase "President Thatcher" or "President Blair", but it seems to me the best possible argument for Republicanism right now is "President Johnson". If we had a Presidency (of the sort Germany has, rather than the ridiculous sort that America has) presumably Boris Johnson would have aspired to that -- Head of State is what he really wants to be -- rather than the rather mundane, and frankly requires-hard-work-and-diligence role of Prime Minister. Johnson in a role that satisfied his monstrous ego (and I speak as someone with a fairly well developed ego, so I can only sit back and admire as he strides around the country and treats everything and everyone as simply a means to temporarily satisfy his own insatiable desires) without actually requiring him to do anything, particularly to do anything to us, would be the perfect solution. Sadly, we get the worst of both worlds. PM Johnson and His Majesty King Charles III. The way things are going, probably both at the same time.

Incidentally, one has to be consistent in one's views, I feel. So this isn't about Charles himself, though I do appreciate that QEII has done a pretty good job, or had, right up until the point she allowed Johnson and Rees-Mogg to start trampling all over the constitution, at which point obviously she turned out to be less use than a chocolate fireguard, of course. I mean, you can't expect her to do things. The point is not to do things. But I digress. It isn't about personalities. It's weird enough shutting down Radio 6 for an undefined length of side when the Consort dies (and 'Consort' is deeply weird in itself), it's far weirder having strong views about the Royals as people. The whole Harry/Megan thing says much more about the people it brings to a foaming rage on either side, than it does about er. I mean, these are non-entities. Who, seriously, gives a fuck?

But yeah, hopefully she is immortal. Because when she dies and the people of this country wake up and find themselves governed, if only in a loose sense, by Chas, I think they are going to lose their moorings. At that point the weirdness of the whole thing will, I fear, become overwhelming and, I dunno what, but something will happen to the national psyche. 

It's long past time to grow up.

When you've got nothing to say_

Gosh, this is boring isn't it? I mean, today was OK. We jumped in a car for the first time in months, and nipped up to Forty Hall for a bit of not-Hackney. Anything-but-Hackney was going to be a welcome change, to be honest, but the grounds of Forty Hall (the Hall itself is locked down, of course), though technically in London, felt almost like the countryside, and there was plenty of mud to squelch through. Ruddy ducks.

But Forty Hall aside, here we are, rattling around Hackney, occasionally the northern fringes of Tower Hamlets, and on some days -- the rainiest ones -- just the house itself. There is light at the end of the tunnel but it feels like a very long tunnel and despite the massive strokes of good fortune we have as a family, including 2 well-paid jobs you can do from home, and 2 children in a very good, supportive school throughout most of lockdown, it's still very boring. I mean, so boring I can't even be bothered to use synonyms for "boring". It's not even as exciting as dull, is it? Just boring.

Not unreasonably my parents, who are also bored, want to talk more than usual. Which is fine but I've got absolutely nothing to say. Or at least nothing of interest. Work is frantically busy, partly as a result of taking on a huge new area of responsibility with very little counterbalancing loss of responsibility elsewhere, partly because the gain in hours from no commuting doesn't offset the loss of hours of videoconferencing. Anything you could discuss in 5 minutes now takes 30. I have no idea what the psychology of that is, but there you go.

So yeah, I'm very busy at work, and if you want I could give you chapter and verse on the difficulties of re-procuring a particularly large Government contract I'm wrestling with that but it's so boring it makes my own ears bleed so I'm not sure I want to inflict it on vulnerable elderly-types. And yes, the children are fine in school but they never tell me anything about what they are up to, other than it's "fine", so no conversational meat there. Very thin gruel. 

There's a new update of Ubuntu -- Focal Fosca -- available. No, that's not very interesting either.

It's not pubs I miss the most. It's trains and buses and B&Bs and Youth Hostels. We haven't even taken the boys to a Youth Hostel yet, but the fact that we could makes it all less boring. Now we can't. Forget Yorkshire, Suffolk might as well be the Andaman Islands. Poor old Kate can't even go for a swim in the reservoir. For the first time in over a decade we didn't go cottaging in the Autumn and we aren't going anywhere this spring, either, obviously. Cooped.

Right. I have a plan. I'm going to stop complaining and instead work out which of the trousers in this house fits which of the boys, and which fit no one. Basically boy B isn't fat, but he's got huge hips and a Fred Trueman style big arse (and Fred was many things, but unfit was not one of them). This means the the traditional snake-hipped kids trousers, even ones two years 'too big' for him, don't fit all all. You can get over-sized ones, but those are vast around the waist and look ridiculous. I fear the poor chap is just going to have to grow up wearing athleisure (shudder) until he can actually select trousers in specified waist-sizes. Then again, the speed at which he's growing suggests that he'll be able to wear men's trousers in 3 years, so he'll probably survive.#

Trouser trying time.

Milking it

There's disagreement, presumably mainly provoked by diary farmers, around whether or not plant-based milk-substitutes are milk. Interestingly it's Europe, rather than the US, where the diary industry seems to hold sway with respect to plant-based product labelling.

But I digress. How does it taste?

I've been having oat milk in tea for a few years. J has recently taken against cow's milk, though he has nothing against cows. So K decided we should have a taste test. All four of us tested 6 milks*, and the results are as follows

- Soya milk is passable.

- Almond milk is too bitter.

- Rice milk is water with very dilute white paint in it.

- Coconut milk is nice. As everyone knows. One could imagine it working well with cereal.

- Oat milk is the closest of these 6 to dairy milk, and not too bad.

- Cashew milk is disgusting.

Interestingly, when you pour cashew milk down the sink, a thick grey sludge comes out last. Which leads me to think that perhaps cashew milk is made from waste putty.

Right. Enough about milk. Time for the rugby!

* Take that EU Commission!

Will we make it?

Reading the LRB (A review of Lovelock's new book Novacene) I was struck by the phrase "continued human survival". The words of the reviewer, not Lovelock, though Lovelock appears to believe that climate change will lead to human extinction. 

The idea that climate change will lead to human extinction is one that I find quite odd, and suggests a misunderstanding of both humans, and the earth's climate. We aren't going to turn into Venus in the short-term. 'Short-term' in geological time, i.e. a long, long time so far as humans are concerned.

So, the surface of the earth will support the growth of plants. And while there is a lot of sea-level rise bound up in the ice caps, which will melt, perhaps entirely, due to anthropogenic climate change, this melting will happen on fast geological time-scales, but relatively slowly on human timescales. 1000s of years. And while very high levels of sea-level rise are clearly bad for countries with a coastline -- you can look at estimates of what 60m of sea-level rise means, for example -- they aren't going to obliterate the land-surface, Old Testament style. No Ark required.

There will be land. There will be rain. The land surface temperature in much of Eurasia, most of which will still be above sea-level, will support human, plant and animal life. I've no idea if there will be fish, but there will be mung beans. Humans existed in warm, and cold, climates before the industrial revolution, and everything we know about human adaptability tells us they will be able to procreate in the future.  

The interesting questions about climate change are around how many of us will survive, and whether we will kill ourselves entirely through other means (nuclear war, I guess. I don't think all humans are going to kill all other humans using small arms and conventional artillery, though a species that can elect Trump can do anything, I suppose).

The moral question around the former is rather dull, I think. "Should I carry out actions today that will lead to the death of billions in a century or so?", is, morally, a completely uninteresting question. We obscure it by arguments around agency ("Well, everyone else does so my actions won't change anything"), ignorance ("I don't know what to do"), wilful blindness ("The science is uncertain") or just plain denial (of the problem, not the science). Inaction now is particularly morally indefensible, given the ready availability of zero-carbon technologies across electricity, heating and industry. And cost is a nonsense. Everything is unaffordable, until done. Zero-sulphur fuel was considered an unaffordable nonsense only a few decades ago. Wind power is now cheaper than gas power. etc.

So, I think there is nothing interesting to say about the moral question of climate change mitigation. Even questions about "Who should pay?" are not particularly interesting or complex (the burden should obviously fall on those with the highest emissions, with some re-balancing for wealth inequality in society). The moral question about what we should do on adaptation and who should pay for that are, perhaps, far more interesting.

So, skimming over the question of how many humans will survive (which is more accurately described as "how many humans can the planet earth support as the global mean surface temperature rapidly increases, driving rapid changes in weather and climate?" to which the answer is "We don't know, and science is not even close to being able to tell us") we come to the question "Will humanity survive, or kill itself on the grounds that if 80% of us (say) are to go, we might as well take the remaining 20% with us)?"

No answers available. (Well, 2 answers available, "yes" and "no". Take your pick.) I'd just observe that survival is clearly not given. We look, as always, to the Zombie genre -- comics and films -- for answers. And the answers are bleak. In both the films of Romero, and The Walking Dead comics, humans are at least, if not more, a threat to each other than zombies. The insanity -- and inanity -- of the present day anti-mask movement does not suggest that humanity, when truly threatened by rapid climate change impinging upon food production and/or access to potable water, will pull together to survive.

And on that happy note, I shall stop.  

Happy New Year!

So, as we say goodbye to 2021, I think we can all agree that it was an interesting year, for those of us which survived it. I shall not say that "I hope the worst is behind us", as we all said that at the end of 2020, and look how that turned out. Is "pray for swift and silent death" a little too ... pessimistic? It's certainly been a good year for optimists, though I am personally pleased that the Home Secretaries attempts to make "naysaying" and "wokeness" capital crimes was dismissed by the Courts. "More power the Courts!" I say. Quietly. Very quietly, given the neighbours.

The clear Highlight of the year for us was F's offer of a place at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft & Wizardry which we accepted -- rather rashly as it turned out -- without a second though. We probably should have read to Ofsted report. Anyway, to cut a long story short, following the incident with the troll in the girl's toilets, F will not be returning to Hogwart's in the spring term. He feels that he will be far safer, and better supported by the teachers, at Smeltings. For legal reasons I won't say more, except to say that a settlement has been reached. 

He remains penfriends with a number of the children he met in September, so we've kept the owl. Which has also solved the mouse problem in our kitchen.

We finally made progress on getting the house fixed up. We've chosen a delightful hand-made sustainable oak (from the carefully managed Bialowieza forest in Poland) kitchen, with spring loaded doors, each using a different grain on each door to represent the cupboard contents. The changes in diet we've seen in the UK over the last 12 months necessitated some last minute design changes -- the salad section is obviously totally redundant now! -- and we've had to incorporate additional cupboards for stocking-piling tinned 'ham'. Personally I found ripping the existing kitchen out to be cathartic, and also helpful, as by burning the old cupboards we were able to heat out home this winter -- and how many of us can say that!? -- but unfortunately our new kitchen is not yet installed, as it is caught up in the queue for Dover. Latest online updates -- yes! we do get signal from time-to-time!! -- suggest it's reached in the Belgian border, so we hope to have it installed in the spring. (That's Civil Service "in the spring", not actual "spring". i.e. by September).

I'm adjusting to life as a supported of a Championship side very well thank you. I have high hopes for a top six finish for Arsenal this season, though I confess the re-signing of Ozil, followed by his Siberian exile, did rather confuse me. Rumours are that he's busy chopping firewood to keep the boiler running at the Emirates, though I can't see how they are managing to smuggle the logs across the blockade.

Shame about cricket, but at least we have the memories. 

It's been a tiring year, professionally. I wasn't expecting to get involved in vaccine roll-out at the start of the year, but by October, with things as they were, I was happy to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in. I've been spending most evenings at the office -- nothing to do with the shell o the kitchen! K is totally fine and very understanding!!! -- refining the Gantt chart. Obviously the Civil Service Oath of Allegiance and Servitude (which replaced the antiquated and much mocked "Civil Service Code" in February) prevents me from saying too much (though oddly not from driving around the country with my family during the ongoing pandemic -- it is odd that they felt the explicit need to write that in -- as if we could afford the fuel!) but pretty sure we've cracked it now. Granny will be done by the end of January and we'll all be there by the summer. (See above)

K took a career break this year, in order to focus on the things that really matter for us all. Largely food production. Her beautiful turnips are an example to us all.

I think J has enjoyed the year most of all. The shortened school-terms, excellent weather (the spring rainfall led to the best growing season in recent memory around here, though obviously we feel bad for the people of Gloucester and hope that they can find somewhere -- not here!! London is full!!! -- to settle soon) and time spent on the land really chimed with his desire to get away from 'book learning' and get his fingers dirty. Odd, isn't it? A year ago, I had vain hopes that he might make it as a junior solicitor in a small provincial firm, and now look at him! He'll out-earn us all!!

F. now wants to be a lorry driver when he grows up. I'm worried about the hours, but it's better than "wizard" I guess.

I'd love to write more, but the battery is running low, and I can only really charge the thing on a Friday, when my boss takes the afternoon off and I can sneak into her office and plug this in. Electricity theft is frowned upon -- pretty deeply actually -- in the office these days, but everyone does it. Which does seem fair, given the public pay position. Still, the food boxes are very generous and the trip home is reasonably safe so long as you pedal fast and don't stop to help any strangers.

I have to say, I'm really looking forward to 2022. Carrie Symonds is a massive improvement on Starmer, and I think she'll really give Mr Gove a run for his money. (We aren't allowed to talk about the former PM, but I do wonder if they'll ever get to the bottom of it...). There's an awful lot to look forward too, I think! Keep yer chin up, as Gareth Southgate would say. Shame about Gareth...     

Stay well! Don't waste food!! A brighter future awaits!!!

PS - Does anyone know anyone who wants to buy any "Galleons"? We will accept Pounds Sterling only in return.