You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2008.
Top managers / directors in the rail industry just go from company to company or to government department. Central trains (National Express Group) Director is now the Director of London Midland (Go Via), previously coming from Scot Rail (was National Express, then First Group). First Great Western’s (First Group) Director was ex South West Trains (Stagecoach), and the Director of Cross Country (Arriva) was an ex Director or Manager at Anglia (GB Railways).
Guess the arms trade isn’t the only industry with a revolving door between the private sector and public regulators. How utterly fucking depressing.
Richard Bowker, the chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority, who during his time as a senior director at Virgin was responsible for commissioning the Voyagers. Mr Bowker has the power to strip Mr Garnett’s company of its franchise which comes up for renewal in April next year
So given that a former virgin executive makes the decision as to whether to strip Virgin of the rail franchise, does anyone think it’s going to happen? Yet another example of the never-ending stupidity that is actually existing privatization.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20040112/ai_n9686062
Openly gay US bishop Gene Robinson was forced to halt a sermon at a west London church after being heckled.
As Bishop Robinson began his sermon a member of the congregation repeatedly called him a “heretic” and said “repent, repent, repent”.
The following e-mail has been quarantined at the Haringey Council e-mail gateway: - This is because the message contained a word(s), attachments or content that the system deemed inappropriate for transmission from the Haringey Council e-mail system.
I just recieved this is my inbox. The offending phrase? I can only presume it’s because I’d referred to my dissertation as “this fucking thing”. Hence the necessity that it be “quarantined” lest Haringey Council’s staff have their minds corrupted by my egregious profanity.
Changd frigin plan again… PIX mayb CENTERTAINMEN DRINK defo.. Bt not get lyk last nyt.. Ma m8 woz telin me al the daft thingz i did =( CRINGE!!
so0o0o0o0o0 sick =(.. N as got a bangin ed ache.. I AM NEVER DRINKIN AGAIN LOL =P
For ages now, random teenagers have been turning up on my facebook list without me having invited them and with, apparently, no way of getting them off my list. Consequently when I log into facebook in the morning I have to read shit like the above because it finds pride of place in my status updates display. Does it make me an intolerant bastard that it actively irritates me to even see the above? It makes me want to throw a grammar textbook at the person in question. Of course I actually did that myself – although I think it was a Religious Studies textbook – to someone who pissed me off when I was 17 , cut their head open a bit badly and would have got in some serious trouble if it wasn’t for the fact that parents of said irritant were pissed off that the school took him to a walk in medical centre rather than to hospital. Quite how this served to deflect their blame from me to the school I still, to this day, do not understand. Still it probably suggests that I shouldn’t throw text books at people but I really fucking want to fix it so I don’t have to look at this when I login to check my messages.
I just had a very strange dream about arguing with a taxi driver. He’d repeatedly failed to follow the instructions I’d given him and racked up a £9 fair for a journey that should have only cost a few quid. At the end I tried to offer him half but he refused this and offered lots of excuses while refusing to admit I had a legitimate grievance. How odd. A psychoanalytic hypothesis: my plans feel frustrated by ultimately rather banal forces that I’m unable to hold to rational account? Now I find myself wondering what those forces are and therein lies the problem with pop-psychology. Or at least with my habitual use of it. Though if it’s a choice between no explanation of weird dreams and too much (speculative) explanation than I’d certainly opt for the latter. It seems the most obvious thing in the world of me that it’s better to have too much of something than too little. Now I find myself thinking about a brie pizza I had in Paris two years ago. I wonder if I can unpack that chain of thought?
When psychoanalysis frees a patient from the tyranny of his inner compulsions, it gives him a power to choose that is not otherwise his [...] yet without a parallel range of god-terms from which choices may be derived and ordered, choice itself may become a matter of indifference or man will become a glutton, choosing everything. There is no more feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility.
So writes Philip Reiff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic as part of his account of how the therapeutic ethos comes to serve as the dominant moral framework within contemporary society. The question of how psychoanalysis comes to have the influence it does – particularly as to the causal question of whether psychoanalytic theories are taken up in a vulgar form in the popular understanding, or whether such theories represent a particularly articulate attempt to come to terms with modern secular life – is an interesting one but it’s an issue for another (longer) post. The reason I’ve posted the above passage is that it summarises rather eloquently, albeit in the irritatingly grandiloquent language of a 60s cultural critic, what’s arguably the basic premise of my PHD: the affirmation of our absolute freedom to choose is inimical to our deriving meaning and purpose from the choices we make with that freedom. An outlook that celebrates absolute freedom of choice can ultimately only sustain the value of choice itself and to choose is, in itself, meaningless. What determines the meaning our choices hold for us is the wider framework of values, ideas and understandings that shapes the very way we comprehend our choices. These are what Charles Taylor calls horizons of significance and they are largely external to any individual human life.
The affirmation of our absolute freedom to choose seeks to secure the means by which we might choose while leaving our ends off stage. The ends of our choices, as a category rather than in terms of any particular choice we might make, cannot ultimately be themselves the product of human choice. Somewhere there is a point at which we’re moved to choose because of something that extends beyond choice itself. If the only answer we can give to the question “why do you choose x?” is “because I want x” then, I’d argue, our choice of x is devoid of meaning. At this point one might offer a naturalistic explanation i.e. that our desire for x can be explained by offering a causal account of our psychological development. Yet this just leaves us with the fact of our desire and a commitment* to the sheer contingency of this fact. For most things this is absolutely fine. Yet the fact of our experiencing significance as a whole, that some of our choices are meaningless whereas others are deeply meaningful, cannot itself be contingent. The content of those experiences, the particular significances certain choices hold for us, is susceptible to the sort of reductive explanations just discussed but the fact of significance itself is not. The fact of our having desires about desires, our enmeshment in a framework of meaning and significance that extends beyond the vagaries of momentary inclination, is necessary for us to experience any meaning and purpose at all.
Why, to use Reiff’s phrase, would we take our subsequent choices seriously when they have no value beyond that of choice itself? The fact we do experience meaning and significance, that we do take some of our choices very seriously, necessarily entails that the choices we make are framed by a wider sense of the significance those choices hold for us. Yet the therapeutic ethos denies this dimension of moral experience through (a) its ethical affirmation of the right to choose as the only value (b) its causal claims about the choices we make. These wider structures of significance and meaning are a necessary feature of human agency but the therapeutic ethos dissolves our understanding of those domains. Our lives are still shaped by these structures but we increasingly lose the ability to understanding and talk articulately about them. In the individuals life this diminishes our moral experience and in society’s life this restricts political possibility, simply because it’s increasingly difficult to engage in political projects when (a) the language of morality is impoverished (b) the collective values on which such projects are predicated are increasingly understood as aggregates of arbitrary individual value judgements.
*Because that’s what it is. There’s no value-neutral theorising that can be done about these sorts of matters. We can’t seperate ourselves and our own lives from the conclusions we draw about the nature of human existence more generally.
