h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Cass,

I am sorry to come over here and bleat, but please could you think about reducing the length of some of your posts a bit

I am sure you have interesting things to say but I am not reading them because it is just too much to get to through and I am giving up on entire threads because I have the lost the will to get through the backlog which is a real shame because as well as missing out on what you have to say I am missing out on everyone elses contributions as well.

I don't think you are doing this intentionally but such long posts as a matter of course is overwhelming and it crowds people out

Also, being brutal honest, I would never pick you up on a point that I agree with or disagree with because I am not going to open myself up for an essay back. I think you might find that more people are going to move around you in conversations rather than try and discuss with you.

Sorry to say all that, I really don't want to make you feel unwelcome on Ask but I do hope we can find some middle ground here

and

all the best Peanut

Peanut

Thankyou for your post.. As I said in my latest post I thought that I would try h2g2 conversations as an experiment as h2g2 members have been encouraged to do-

But as you say it is not really working out for the reasons that you have outlined.

I will return to my former practice of keeping my views to My Space.

Cass

Please don't do that Cass, again, can we work out some middle ground, I would like you to post on Ask

Peanut

Probably not...

If people are put off by those posts they are most unlikely to be interested in my more substantive pieces of writing, and those are my priority.

After your post I wondered whether I might use the conversations merely as topics around which to start up a running commentary as some kind of Journal in My Space...that anyone wishing to 'opt in' could visit.

But I feel that "reactionary thinking"- that is thought that reacts to someone else's idea- inevitably tends to start from a negative positions, which is not always helpful.. Hence people asking me for THE answer to the question that they have chosen to frame, when there may be no answer within the confines where they are trying to find one.

Regards

Cass

Cass, well a probably not, is not a definate no. I think we have a mis-match of expectations here, with a bit of a discussion we could work out where those are, if you'd like to give it a go I think the running commentary is an idea, I would but I am also thinking about some of Pinn's writing for the guide, where a series of writing kept me engaged, steel making, not on my usual radar for reading but turned out gold for me http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A84799985 and links to the side I'm off for a bit the teenagers want my attention, and I am likely just to be frivilous on h2g2 for the next forseeable hours. In the meantime do you feel like letting your hair down on the 'Who is not going to the Manchster meet thread' http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/classic/F19585?thread=8290385&latest=1 out,tries to do that in a beckoning way to match her outfit, without backing into Bea's trestle table of Pringles* Peanut

Peanut

Reflecting on the fact that I tend not to do frivolity, I idly trawled back through My Space and found my first Guide Entry back in September 2008 which was entitled "Humour in Dark Places"..

http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/brunel/A40591433

Cass

Morning Cass



Maybe next time we can tempt you over to the frivolous side, KB's Cossack dancing was legend

In answer to your question is it British prejudice that fails to see the funny side of Germany? I don't think so, agueably we stereotype Germans as humourless, so I suppose that is a prejudice but humour is a most tricky thing, not just from indidvidual to individual, but culturally and linguistically.

Reversing it,I was thinking that the Benny Hill aspect to British humour probably translate well across cultures,anyway on that train of thought I had a google and found this

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/23/germany.features11

Peanut

Benny Hill aspect to British humour *doesn't* translate well, is what I meant to say

Peanut

It is an interesting reflection (I think) on what I have written about French women not embracing some of the aspects of Anglo-Saxon Feminism, that Benny Hill continued to be huge in France long after PC attitudes had banned him from TV screens in the UK.

To French women those beautiful and scantilly dressed actresses in the 'silent movie' type sketches were using their sexual power, for they know that for most people it is hard work to get to look that good- or if you are lucky enough to be BB- to stay looking that good.

I am not sure just how universal his appeal is. France, after all, was 'the place'- along with Italy- where young men on the Grand Tour went to get their sex-education, and some young women too like Anne Boleyn. And French attitudes to sex and sexuality spread into England the UK.

But there may well be various North-South divides. Geographical determinists used to argue that hot weather encouraged sexual activity and the human sex drive. But perhaps it just makes it much easier.

About 40 years ago one of the office staff in our school was telling me about her experiences on the school ski-trip. As a gay divorcee she had met someone she fancied and they had gone back to her room. There they started peeling off the various layers that they had on to keep themselves warm, only to conclude half-way through that they would be better off just going and having another drink.

Cass

Well you have touvhed on a shedload of issues there Cass and I can't do them justice, this is a fly-by comment, I don't think Benny Hill popularity waned because of PC attitudes, just a shift in attitudes in general

Anyway, it would be rude I think to start off a conversation and then just disappear for a while without explaination busy week probably won't be till next Monday

Peanut

I just picked up your Is the Fighting really necessary and negetavity comments in KB's journal, I didn't want to drop an off topic comment in there as he requested that we stay on topic

so, my little thought, I found Occupy to be a positive reaction in the uk, peaceful in intent and trying to engage in postive discussion and looking for positive solutions

as a movement, however, it was/is ineffectual

when and if we have to pick up the half bricks is something Ed and I have touched on before

Peanut

As I probably already wrote on the Occupy thread, it seems to me that there must be quite a few people like our son, who was often down there, who are the children of Sixties people, and have the legacy of a Sixties belief in Love, Peace etc.. And many younger people- in fact since at least the mid-90's have been very much into the music of the Sixties.

The problem ( I felt) with the Sixties is that we were a generation that refused to just accept the world as we were handed it by our parents, or were taught to accept by our teachers. We were a therefore a different kind of "Lost Generation" because the actual "Lost Generation" above us were largely confused and muddled up about what they stood for, because the main stress all their lives had been on the need to be united against.

The problem that I have with brevity comes (no doubt from other things as well) springs from the fact that since about the age of 10 (and I was 68 yesterday) I have been resolved to actually try to understand the world as it is personally, and to find that golden "middle ground" where we can all live together in peace which no-one else really seems to want to find and actualise in the real world through mastering the things that actually shape and govern our world. Economics being high up on that list. Being a Taurus on the cusp of Aries perhaps I have always felt inclined to charge into things and embrace them, not smash them, thus in my last teaching post I gladly took on the challenge of getting into Economics again and teaching it Sixth Formers who got into Oxbridge. But my speciality is Economic History, which I regard as more real and enduring than Economics itself. History deals with Human Reality, not theoretical models.

A former colleague gone on to teach at university level to whom I showed some of my writing in the early eighties told me that I did not need to re-invent the wheel. But in many ways it will take such a re-invention if we are to create a One World situation from all of the fragmented and fissiparous reality that confronts us, and really is in danger of falling apart.

But I have finally worked out where we must look in history for positive solutions, and I believe that I have finally really "cracked it". I am just editing the thing that I have been writing for the last few weeks that I have entitled "Economics as if people really mattered" that- I believe explains exactly where we are, how we got here, and how we move on into a peaceful and better future. And a chance encounter 10 days ago in Tesco gave me great encouagement.

I started chatting to another customer at the pharmacy, and one thing led on to another, as they do with me. He told me that my ideas should be published- and was surprised when I told him about my struggles to get published. It turns out that he is a famous international economist.

Anyway yesterday and today I have been polishing up my "Economics" piece, and have got almost half way through. Then.. who knows..

I have written a covering letter to two of the politicians who have corresponded with me in the past- David Cameron and Chris Huhne.

Regards

Cass

NVDA has a long history so in that sense I do not feel that it was something that the 60's generation really gifted us

Sorry to sound so harsh but I find your comment about being a Lost Generation somewhat insulting, you were (still are) a previlaged generation in so many respects.

I speak from being a teenager when it all went tits up under Thatcher and seeing what my kids will have to contend with now, it is incompariable

I do though sincerely wish you luck with your endevours

I think I might has mis-read what you were saying about being a lost generation and posted a knee jerk reaction

I'm sorry about that

still I feel'confused' isn't the same 'lost' and is not really compariable

Peanut

I do not see what is insulting about the term Lost Generation..

And many of us were not privileged- for (I can only speak I suppose for those who were of my "kind") we were the first and only generation in the history of the world that felt that, wherever we were on Earth, we were brothers and sisters, children of the Ashes, of the Holocaust and Hiroshima and a war that had killed 55 million people- these were the shades that were around my bed in my infancy.

Our fate was to be born into Hell and desolation, and yet- to those who could at least rejoice at the "great leap forward" for humankind -Hiroshima was a light in their Darkness and a way out of their particular Hell. Except that it was not. We were to be that light. We were required to be their Future.. But to us their light was darkness and I lived in the hope that one day I might be glad that I had ever been born.

For the culture that had produced the World Wars had claimed, and been granted, the right to "Win the War the way that he won the peace".. that is by science and technology regimenting everyone and trying to run people's lives, and especially ours, in order to achieve the Utopia that science and technology offered- including especially the Science of Economics that was going to make everything plain sailing "from this moment on".

But at least I suppose we managed to put a stop to that. When I had an article publshed in our London Education Authority magazine c1978 my title was "Partners" for I suggested that it was now possible to envisage education as a partnership between teachers, parents and pupils all working together towards shared goals. I think that the principle-then novel if not revolutionary-would now be taken for granted.. But it was possible by 1978, I asserted, because our generation of young teachers in comprehensive schools had "Humanised" the educational process, a much needed change from what we had experienced.

In 1999 on my birthday, I encountered a fellow old boy from my school who actually (though a few years my senior) remembered my name. Amongst other things he confirmed what I thought that I remembered- that is that my form teacher who publicly humiliated me in the first few weeks at grammar school, had actually been an RAF prisoner of war in the hands of the Gestapo for much of the war..

Actually it is a good story. The old boy had gone to work for the BBC World Service. And one day they wanted someone to interview a German. This old boy had been taught A Level German by that teacher, so he volunteered. Two days running he started his interview, only to have the person being interviewed run out in tears. Third day the head of section saw him. Apparently he was using "Gestapo German" that just stressed out the German guests.

Privileged. I had not really dared to think of my schooldays for decades, and when we said goodbye finally that evening agreeing to meet up for a drink, I walked a few steps and almost collapsed with sobbing at being taken back in my memory to those schooldays.

We never had our drink. Ten days later our Headmistress put his Daily Telegraph obituary on the school notice board, though it was some years before I was told quite openly by his widow, for by then her own counselling had succeeded, that he had committed suicide.

By the time of the Thatcher years people had lost much of the world-consciousness ,and the name Thatcher usually brings lots of irate comment from people about how that era impacted on their "world".

The Cold War that she was vital in bringing to an end was not as real for them as it was for a 17 year old paper-boy looking at newspapers that he was delivering and weighing up the very real possibility that TODAY would be the day that would end for ever all life on Earth.

Cass

Peanut

Lost is quite speciic.. As in being nowhere, having no personal bearings and no idea of which way you should try to head.

The current Western world is lost because Science and Technology just offer as a journey, not a destination: and it is a journey that they want us to pay for because for them the thrill of the journey is everything.. A bit like the Grand Prix drivers who went to Bahrain. The money and 'chicks' is just the trappings. The thrill is getting behind the wheel and racing round a circuit that takes no-one anywhere.

Cass

Cass, I am under no illusion that the everyone in the 60s was priviliged, or liberated, or wore flowers in their hair, just that it was a generation that had many 'privilages' or advantages perhaps that we never did or that were taken away from us

sell off social housing, assess to free university education, full employment and hope and optimism to name a few

I am wary of getting into a who had it toughest competition, so please lets consider this an exchange of experiences

Today I was thinking about my childhood, remembering some the 'not pleasant' defining experiences in my own school life

The first would have been refusing to eat something at lunchtime, I was five, the head teacher, was insistant, I was equally, she slapped my face and picked me and plonked me outside her office for the rest of lunchtime. At the end of it she me back to my lesson and told me that was calling my parents to tell them what a bad girl I was. It was an horrible afternoon, not knowing what my parents would think

They comforted me, unbeknowst to me went ballastic at the slapping, but nevertheless told me to respect my teachers.

This give or take a year or so is 1978

Comprehensive in the 80s, were as 'dehumanising' as schools had ever been, attainment levels were low, as were expections, our own and theirs of us and it was hard and the teachers were as demoralised as teachers are today

Bullying was rife, sexual assault and exploitation (by students) happened, with the former, it was expected part of school life with that children were meant to deal with, the latter, it was an issue that no-one wanted to deal with, teachers turned the other cheek

We smoked in the bogs, watched porn in the common room and could get monged at lunchtime.

Now in our school we did have some good discussions, notably in history and english lessons, bunch of leftie teachers , all off them said that they felt for us, that they felt lucky for the time they had born into and they wouldn't want to be leaving school in our time

So in all honesty I can't say that I feel that my education offered me anything at all, precious few qualifications at the end of it and experiences I would like to forget, but can't

One thing I never lost, love of reading and learning (albeit not so much at school) referance library in town I loved it, who truants to the referance libery, I ask you...

oh and I never ate that bloody potato

and please do excuse my spelling and typos, rubbish education

Peanut

Yes..Things went down very badly in comprehensive schools after the initial idealism. That was why I wrote that article in 1978, and another one that got published that followed it up entitled "Should Education Be Useless".

But the fundamental problem was that the initial "Lost Generation" educated before 1914 had left us with a terrible inheritance, and compared to Lord Ashley whose death was just announced and to the aspirations of self-improvement that just about hung on into my chidhood, so many of my colleagues had no real intention of giving our Inner City pupils the kind of empowering education that I had had-even though I had to struggle hard to glean what was of value out of the efforts to recruit a working class child like me into the new Middle Class bureaucracy. I did believe that there was stuff of value there to be mined.

The Working Class backlash insisted that the way of life that had been forged in the new and rootless, "Wild West" industrial towns - as opposed to old towns where communities had been running their affairs in extra-parliamentary democracy for 800 years or so- Cities where children had worked in mills from the age of 6 or so and had no bcakground education or childhood to pass on, was a "valid culture" for the Twentieth Century and that it was the States duty to provide them with a job that they could do with the educational levels of an 7'8 year old or let them live on the dole. Many of my Socialist colleagues were more interested in preparing pupils for the Class War than for giving them personal empowerment. My Sociology colleague told his A level students that Afro-Caribbeans should be able to take their exams in Jamaicam patois. The Bantu still had a long struggle in South Africa for the right to do away with such Apartheid.

As someone who was a Labour activist of sorts from about the age of 4, however, I can not blame the Conservatives. Conservatives exist to be Conservative. The tragedy of post-war British politics is that the Labour Party really lost touch with what was truly progressive about the British Labour Movement, and during that "Lost Generation" build- up to 1914 bought into the superiority of the German way of doing things like much of Great Britain. In particular in much of England it was German Socialism as in the German Socialist Party that inspired the formation of the Labour Party. In parts of Scotland it was German Communism. Wales tended to go for French Socialism and Syndicalism.

But all of these brought with them the European obsession with the State at the expense of the individual and the much prized and very successful tradition of English Liberalism.

Really quite quickly after the first years of the Attlee Government Labour politics became essentially Conservative- more Conservative than the Tory Party, because really right up to Tony Blair's New Labour the political party was really chained to the Germanic ideas that it had imported in the 1890's, and never really regarded the British working class as a positive asset- merely a charitable challenge in the best Victorian tradition. Tony Benn- towards whom my views have mellowed somewhat in recent years- is the real heart of Labour stooping down from MC security to stand by the Working Classes and salve his Nonconformist conscience.

Cass