William Essex
Shall I tell you a story?
  • Dear Diary
  • About Us
  • Back Stories
  • Read My Shorts?

Populism isn't asking to be defined, thank you.

31/10/2016

0 Comments

 
Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Still some yachts out on moorings, but the dinghy park is filling up with above-my-head hulls laid up for Winter. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism.
     Defined by the first search result as "a belief in the power of regular people, and in their right to have control over their government rather than a small group of political insiders or a wealthy elite". Maybe. Or is it the assertion of that power rather than a belief in its existence? And maybe, given the endless wittering of news journalists and analysts, we should work "a talkative elite" into the mix. There's an all-too-frequently spoken assumption that a second referendum on the EU's membership of the EU would reverse the result of the first, which I doubt. And how does "best of two" work, anyway?
     Even now, there seems to be a not-quite-articulated assumption that "the gentleman [sic] in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves," as the politician Douglas Jay wrote in 1937 (before voting against EU entry in 1975). Thanks, Wikipedia. Except that I don't think that's quite the issue. The term "silent majority" can't mean much nowadays, given how many of us are online, but there does seem to be a divide between the talkative elite and the rest of us.
     The silent majority were once the dead, then Richard Nixon co-opted the phrase to convince himself that while a lot of people were rioting and demonstrating against him, a silent majority were staying at home and agreeing with his conduct of the Vietnam War. These days, maybe there's a meaningful distinction between some kind of a self-defined elite that takes for granted its own correctness - by now, all those Leave-voters must have realised they were wrong and we were right so let's hold a second referendum - and the rest of the "ordinary people" (as BBC reporters describe the crowds at national events) who vote the way they want to vote without reference - or access - to any kind of collectively generated "higher" wisdom.
     Life seems to educate some of us to believe that we can lead the "national conversation" (my turn to co-opt a phrase). We go into politics or the news media; we engage in some other way; we just keep ourselves informed, take an interest, whatever it might be. In doing so, I suspect, we run the risk that the conclusions we draw will turn into assumptions that we apply more widely than they merit. And it's very easy to forget that the status quo is even less of a guide than the past to what will seem normal in the future.
     Ronald Reagan for president? Come off it - he's an actor.
0 Comments

So what do you think?

27/10/2016

0 Comments

 
"Good customer service is really, really important to us," said the recorded woman's voice on the cold call I received just as I was walking back to the car with the parking ticket the other evening. We were going out to eat. Didn't catch the name of the company, although I let the call run for a bit, but I did appreciate the bone-headed irony of talking about customer service via a badly timed, recorded cold call.
     Yesterday night, the dry cleaner emailed to ask how I felt about the experience of dropping off my dry cleaning earlier, and today the company that does my car insurance wants to know what I think of it. Except that it doesn't - it actually wants me to spend ten minutes ticking boxes in a survey run by a third party. If only I was enough of a nerd to call up the company directly and offer my views.
     A phrase I haven't heard for a while is "work to rule". Back in the - seventies, maybe? - it was an industrial-relations thing: you work exactly to the letter of your employment contract. Short of a strike, but making a point by being deliberately inflexible. Perhaps the online-marketing equivalent would be taking everything absolutely literally - rushing into the nearest branch and sharing the excitement with the staff behind the counter, every time an offer arrives.
0 Comments

Follow me?

19/10/2016

0 Comments

 
Just had a notification through. Somebody's started following me on Quora. Don't know what Quora is, but I suppose I'm going to have to find out. Tumblr keeps sending me lists of blogs I'm going to like, and LinkedIn just can't stop offering me a free trial of its paid-for premium service.
     One characteristic of mine that has survived the time-machine jump from chronological 1984 to the current draft is a resistance - can't help it - to this kind of push selling. They're ever so slightly desperate, aren't they? But they live on a kind of conformity as well. Got a text yesterday from the utility company that does my mobile phone. "Hi William," it began, and went on to remind me not to miss a football match.
     If you can't see it, I'm not going to spell it out. Heard a very good talk recently by Douglas Rushkoff, author of 'Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus' and other titles, in which he raised the subject of growth. It is ridiculous, Rushkoff argued, to expect companies endlessly to grow. My example would be Twitter, which is useful to its relatively limited constituency but losing advertisers, backers, et cetera, because its numbers aren't constantly growing.
     Thinking about the talk afterwards, I wondered about a possible analogy. If the present business model of social-media companies is constant growth - thus, desperation to attract late adopters like me as well as to offer treats (football matches) to existing subscribers - then it's unsustainable. One version of history is that President Reagan ramped up defence spending, thus forcing the Soviet Union to follow suit, until the Soviet Union ran out of money and collapsed. If they don't keep on ramping up the numbers, social-media companies...
     Word beginning with C. Should have titled this post "I'll raise you."
0 Comments
    Picture
    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

    Picture
    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

    RSS Feed

    What happens here

    This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

    No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
        Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

    Picture
    There's a page for this [edit: there isn't], but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

    Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.


    There's a picture, it's just loading...
    You found me!
    Welcome. Thank you for coming. But am I the right
    William Essex? Click here
    to meet some more.



    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

    Picture
    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

    All
    Abuse
    Consent
    Media


    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

    Picture
    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


    Picture
    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

    Picture
    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

    Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!

    Archives

    May 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011

    Picture
    Out of print. Sorry.
No animals were harmed in the making of this website. Other websites are available online (and off). All the content here is copyright William Essex, this year, last year, the year before that and, you
guessed it, the year before that, although I don't have the time right now to hunt out that little symbol. This website uses organic ingredients and respects your privacy. Come back some time.