Notes and Comments: No. 14

NOTES:

Ah, yes the 15 naval and marine personnel. So many pieces I could link to, but I chose this one from the Telegraph blog of Toby Harnden (mostly as it is the one I’m reading as I make this entry) more or less at random. One thing I did notice watching the local BBC news vox pop about whether or not the 15 should ‘sell their stories’ to the tabloids was a fairly distinct split. The younger ones (around the ages of the 15 themselves and up to around 30ish) seemed quite happy for them to sell their stories, whereas those say 40+ (like me) were usually aghast at the idea.

Of course, this was a TV vox pop and so suffers from all the selective biases such things are prone to, but I did think this was indicative of something. People of my generation and older were – of course – bought up in an era when the privations and so forth of WWII were still a strong presence in all our lives. Whereas younger generations have grown up in a much more cynical age, roughly Post-Vietnam [the first ‘media’ war], post-60s, post-modern, post-cynical – if you see what I mean, where things like ‘name, rank and serial number’ have become as quaint as medieval chivalry and ‘selling yourself’ (or your story) is seen as a sensible course of action.

Speaking of postmodernism, a long – but excellent - piece here on the vacuity of it all:

the pervasiveness of postmodern theory is uniquely pernicious in that it has explicitly marginalised expectations of accuracy, coherence and truth in favour of ostentatious political conformity. The basic tools of discernment have thus been dismissed as “Eurocentric”, “patriarchal” or unfairly distributed. Some might call this intellectual vandalism. This is the legacy of postmodern thought, as trafficked by many academics of the left – the ‘freedom’ to blunt the senses and be triumphantly, shamelessly wrong. Provided, of course, everyone is wrong in exactly the same, triumphant, way.

COMMENTS:

The elections that will tell us nothing

My comment:

The solution lies with party funding. As long as the parties can rely on other sources of funding they will not sully themselves with kowtowing to the ordinary punter. The solution, therefore, lies with making the WHOLE of party funding dependent on (capped) membership fees - then the bigger the membership the bigger the party funds and so the parties will HAVE to change to attract more members, and - almost automatically - the more representative they will be and the more people will be inclined to vote for them.

The only difficulty lies in getting the current incumbents to pass a law to this effect, which is a bit like the old turkeys voting for Christmas problem.