What's the least likely place in the world you'd expect to be proselytised to? If you said a forced labour camp in North Korea.... well you're probably right. But for the few that said Osaka, Japan's second biggest city, in the entertainment district of Namba during Golden Week it turns out you're wrong.
A tiny little thing happened earlier this week, came a went in the news quicker than any story I've seen recently but it's one I reckon deserves a bit more analysis. The proposed changes for constituency boundaries were announced. Fun I know! I'll do my best to make this less dry for you but if you want something a bit wetter I recommend stopping now and eating a packet of crackers.
Late post, life happened.......
These riots then, didn't see that one coming. Should've done in hindsight though, we've all been reminded that Britain has an underclass. The good years were paid for on the back of a fractured and poorer working class (among numerous other things) and it's left a lot of people angry, frustrated but most importantly, aimless.
Why then, did this happen? Well it can only be pure speculation at this point, but if you remember those cuts, you know, the most ideological cuts in living memory (for me). Also, lack of trust in and poor communication between the police the communities. Then there's successive governments prioritising the rich over the poor. Those, among other things, all add up to create a generation of disenfranchised, disillusioned people full of discontent.
At this point I'd forgive you if your expectations were set so low, 0.2% growth sounded pretty good. The government seems pretty keen on selling that idea. So I thought I'd pop in a with gentle reminder that it isn't, it's really very very bad; like losing a leg bad. If you net economic growth over the last 9 months it still only comes to 0.2%, if we're a bit fairer and look over the last 12 months it's 0.9%. For the fifth time since coming to power the conservatives have had to revise growth predictions down, at this point it's just sad.
I know what you're thinking, how could we let this happen?! Well naturally there was that whole financial crisis thing leaving our economy in a poor state of affairs, but we were recovering nicely when Labour were kicked out (not that I like Labour, it must be clarified I have equal disdain for all parties). The problem lies in Osbourne's austerity programme, and it should in no way colour your opinion of him in the rest of this piece that I'm about to put an image in your head of Osbourne sitting on a throne of darkened bone, cackling as he destroys our economy.
Nothing like a warm bath after a hard day's work to help you relax (not that I'd know, showers win every time), but now imagine that bath is full of other men (or women if you happened to be born into that gender). Still relaxing? Yes, as it happens.
Back when I was working in the ski resort we all went out for our first day's work, exhausted jet lagged and a little sweaty you'd forgive us for wanting to clean. Communal showers, sure, why not. I mean the showers are all at chests height and you have to sit down on a little plastic stool bit I can handle that. Then you see the other half of the room taken up by a big communal bath (sento). But hey, when in Japan, and it turns out baths are awesome.
How many of you have heard of Orson Scott Card? If not, he's a well known science fiction author best known for 'Ender's Game', an enjoyable read about a kid with tactical genius whom the military grooms to be able to save humanity. Of those who had heard of him, how many knew that when he isn't writing, he likes to hate gays? Not just a little bit, following links from wikipedia you can see he's had some very nasty, very ignorant things to say.
I only learnt this after reading Ender's Game, but it still made feel a bit dirty. What if he'd written bits of that book with his anti-gay agenda in mind? It was the first of many similar decisions I've made, I had to ask myself if I could support and legitimise someone's work if it promoted a hateful agenda, eventually I decided no. By buying and reading the book I'm lending tacit support, a lot of terrible things are done merely because people don't speak out and I couldn't join them.
More specifically when does a protester become a rebel, and why is a rebel not a terrorist? With everything going on in the Middle East I thought I'd take a few moments to have a look at this question, depending on where you are out there you can find all three. Bear in mind, the debate around defining terrorism has, over the centuries, been layered with point upon counter-point so only expect a basic address of the issue here.
So starting with the easy one, the protester. A protester can take part in civil disobedience, an action, for which they anticipate arrest. Symbolic action, which raises awareness but doesn't, by itself, solve anything. Or direct action, directly attempting to solve an issue. Each one of these can be violent, but it's kept limited and would be a stretch to be defined as terrorism. As an example, UK Uncut perform symbolic action by sitting in stores. Whereas an anarchist might throw a rock through the window, criminal but not terrorist. Taking this back to the Middle East and glossing over the role of military, Egypt successfully took down its government largely through symbolic action. In Syria, however, most protesters are taking the same tack but aren't having much luck (again, military).
Literacy is a pretty important concept so I'm told (no one's ever told me that, learnt it by myself!), traditionally defined as the ability to read and write I'm more concerned about its broader ideological context. The idea of proficiency in and knowledge of a system; media, computers, etc. Games equally have concepts, standards and method of their own that appear time and again but, in my opinion, fail to teach them, fail to make literacy easily achievable.
I consider myself video game literate, I can pick up most any game and instantly understand the concepts of its genre, without needing to go through any sort of tutorial on the controls. Much like any one here can just read this article, you learnt that skill years ago. But I also started learning to game on a much simpler systems. A gameboy had 8 buttons, a DS has 12 + a touch screen. A Mega Drive controller had 11 buttons, a PS3 controller has 17, two analog sticks and motion controls. Regardless of what age you are it's a much more difficult hobby to get into now.
I scare easily, a gentle but unexpected breeze generally ends up with a swift change of underwear. But despite that, I want you to know that when say this is the story of the most scared I've been in my life, it is isn't hyperbole. This is the only time in my life I thought death was on the cards, a spectre creeping up on us over hours. This story is that of the fourth day in my bike trip across Japan.
A bit of background for those unaware, I'd been in Japan for four months at this point, most of it working at a ski resort. There, among the many friends I made, I met an Australian named Sam. We decided that after the ski season we'd cycle across Japan, Tokyo to Osaka, unfit and inexperienced as we were. Low on cash we bought as little as we could get away with and set off, just like that. The first two days were pretty easy going, nice weather, flat coastal roads and most importantly, none of the constant muscle pain that would quickly become a feature of the trip.
There's a mindset in government these days, not sure when it started (Blair), but it's serious and potentially damaging. This mindset is leading government to focus purely on the future earning power of students and ignoring the value of learning itself.
Maintenance loan included, I left uni with £19,000 of debt, that's a sizeable figure that's gonna be hanging over my head for a long time to come and despite having a pretty good earning potential it's still not going to make life easy. Under the new system, the same degree would've cost me £37,000. If I was intending to go into research, charity or any number of things without much money in them I'd had to have thought twice for sure.
The current strain of thought is that since students earn, on average, more money. It's OK to ask for lots of money off them. Only, what about all those students who wish to become researchers, academicians, historians, art critics. All valuable to society, all being priced out. If we all went to uni to be bankers, society would lose out. So if the average student earns more money than most of us, the ones that don't are suddenly becoming worthless to the government. But when those who wish to do valuable, low earning work stop going to uni a far higher price is going to be paid.
Really, it's only a small number of students who are motivated purely by money. More important to many of us is learning purely for its own sake, spending those years having a great time and working towards a job we actually want to do (delete as appropriate). So there's two ways to go from here, if thing's stay as they are expect student numbers to drop (either way since the government can't afford current student numbers at £9k/year), this will hit those 'less valuable' jobs and degrees hardest. Or, we see a change in student culture to become more money obsessed, future careers become too important and all that wonderful self discovery and occasional lunacy of university is lost.
Before I tie this up, a quick compare and contrast. America has had huge fees for uni for ages and it vaguely works, so maybe it can work out for us. A number of key differences stand out for me though, in America it's been like that since the beginning, there was no big change, the whole system has evolved to take into account a range of options and choices. Specifically there's a huge range of prices for quality of uni s, but almost everywhere in the UK wants to charge the full £9k, very little choice if you feel you can't afford it. There's also a sophisticated system of scholarships, bursaries and donations that allow less fortunate students to go to a uni fitting of their desires and abilities (mostly, it's hardly perfect). These system are far less evolved in the UK and only able to help a much smaller number of students. I would also add that in America, for better or worse, these things arise because it's left to the free market. In the UK we seem to be getting the worst of both worlds, a government that is getting heavily involved while seeming to want the market to sort things out.
And there we have it, the commercialisation of degrees, serving only to bring us down in the long run. The time of free education may be long dead, but fees this high are damaging us in numerous other ways. A different solution need to be found and the government needs to re-evaluate its position, this focus solely on how much we're all worth in monetary terms ignores how much good we do in societal terms.
