‘Here Comes Every Body’ by Clay Shirky. Social networks starting to affect all society now. BBC World Service on bio-fuel, and food-adulteration by criminals. Ecology Party (later Green Party) postured as sunshine out of God’s asshole around 1970. Different dirge, but same attitude, nowadays. Ball-points versus Biros in the 1950s. Can you BELIEVE it happened?
07h08-BST Tuesday 22 April 2008-CE
The library phoned me and I picked up the copy of ‘Here Comes Every Body’ by Clay Shirky. He is completely readable. I wish my stuff flowed in the way of a proper writer. I will discuss the content of the book, later, but here is a quotation:
“The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything [such as social networks] that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.”
BBC World Service is doing a piece on world food shortage. The report is about, in particular, the criminal involvement in dishing out the same sort of adulterated food that used to be a factor amongst poor people in UK. Then the Co-op was formed and suddenly sugar had no sand; flour had no chalk. Bio-fuel as a cause of grain shortage (remember much condemned grain mountains, and then paying farmers for land left fallow?) also discussed.
I say again: it is the very Green-fascists who, around 1970, would glibly, carelessly, advocate things such as bio-fuel as if the Ecology Party (later Green Party) was the sole repository of knowledge and righteousness, who now scream equally vociferously with virulent hatred against bio-fuel; this time, they happen, by pure chance, to be correct.
Pens-versus-Biros was a big issue in school in the 1950s when I was a teenager. We were forced to use the stupid poncey inkwells, and wooden pens with a nib inserted in the end, and get ink all over the fingers and the work. We WERE allowed to BUY our own fountain pen (I could afford the half-a-crown one (2 shillings and sixpence) which was barely better than the cheap school one.
What was THAT all about? What was the point of THAT? The story was that handwriting was so much more elegant and stylish if one used a proper pen. So what? I deny that writing needs to be art!
There must be ex-teachers in their 80s and 90s still alive who will say that allowing school students to use Biros (ball point pens, Bics) was the beginning of the end of standards. They themselves would have scoffed at a previous generation who insisted that: no, it was that dreadful ragtime music or Latin’s being no longer compulsory.
FIN 07h47
