Wis[s]e Words – Page 590 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Na het plassen handen wassen

Published on October 17, 2007

Sorry for “cheating”yesterday and only posting a book review; some days blogging just isn’t on the cards. Don’t know what it is, but it might just be the onset of flu season. Fortunately for us, at Making Light Jim MacDonald Who is an EMT in real life has some advice on how to deal with flu, (get your doctor to get you a flu shot if you’re at risk!) including a guide to washing hands:

1) Turn on the water and get it to a temperature you like.
2) Lather up using soap. (Soap does not kill germs in the time that the germs are exposed during hand washing. There’s stuff that grows fine on a bar of soap. The surfactant action of soap helps the running water flush the germs away. That’s how it works. It’s purely mechanical. Antibacterial soap is a waste of time and money, and just helps breed antibiotic-resistant bugs.)
3) Rub your hands vigorously together, paying special attention to the fingernails, getting up onto the wrists, for as long as it takes you to sing one stanza of The Star Spangled Banner or two verses of Little Mattie Groves.
4) Rinse off the soap with the running water.
5) Dry your hands with a paper towel.
6) Use the expended paper towel to turn off the water.

Which is all very well, but does not work so good when the toilets at work do not have paper towels, but one of those cloth towel dispenser thingies with the towel on a loop, so hence you need to use your elbow to turn off the tap. Also, no soap, just some liquid gunk of obscure provenance. Not to mention cow-orkers you hear peeing, you hear flushing, you hear leaving the toilets, but who you not hear washing their hands… For some reason, there a lot of those around in IT.

The Great Hunt – Robert Jordan

Published on October 16, 2007

Cover of The Great Hunt

The Great Hunt
Robert Jordan
707 pages
published in 1991

I said so, didn’t I, that Robert Jordan hooks you into the story? Here I was determined just to reread The eye of the World to mark his passing, so why did I immediately reach for The Great Hunt? Because I wanted to read more of course. It had been almost a decade since the last time I read through the entire series after all. Not to mention that the weather has turned decidedly autumnal, always the best season to read a great epic fantasy series.

Now as I understand it, The Eye of the World was deliberately written as a standalone novel, in case the series didn’t take off. So all the plot threads resolve neatly at the end, and the plot itself is fairly linear and straightforward. From The Great Hunt onwards this is no longer the case. The plotlines start to unravel, with the various main characters going their own ways having their own adventures only to come together at the end and with some plot threads continuing in the next book. Unlike the later books though, where the plot threads multiply unchecked and drag themselves from book to book, here Jordan still has a tight grip on things. It’s just more clear that this is a part of a series.

Everytime I’ve read The Great Hunt I’ve had difficulty in getting started, with the first 100-150 pages or so being just pure torture to get through. Absurd of course; there’s novels that finish in fewer pages, but that’s the way it is with fat fantasies. As for why this is so hard to get started, it’s because the main character behaves like an idiot and the plot seems to crawl at first. Spoilers follow.

Brasyl – Ian McDonald

Published on October 15, 2007

Cover of Brasyl

Brasyl
Ian McDonald
404 pages
published in 2007

Call Ian McDonald the anti-Niven. Whereas Larry Niven has often been accused of writing all his characters as if they belong at an early sixties Californian cocktail party, McDonald’s characters always come across as belonging to the particular ethnic and cultural background they’re said to belong to. This is because McDonald, like the best science fiction writers is genuinely interested in culture as well as science, and genuinely interested in cultures other than his own. He has a knack for painting a picture of a given culture, whether real or invented, through the judicious use of background detail and character interests. So far I’ve not yet read a McDonald novel in which the world he created didn’t convince me. His latest novel, Brasyl, continues that trend. It’s set, of course, in that perpetual country of the future: Brazil.

Comparisons with McDonald’s 2004 novel River of Gods are therefore quickly made, though unjustified. Apart from that both novels take place in countries that are not often used as a setting in science fiction and apart from these settings being an essential part of them, not just an exotic background for some displaced westerners adventure to take place against, the two novels have nothing much in common. Which is just as well.

Kettle Chips succesful in union busting

Published on October 15, 2007

Two weeks ago I blogged about Kettle Chips being unhappy about the threatening unionisation of their workers, to the point of hiring an American unionbusting company. Well, it seems this has paid off, as the Kettle Chips workers voted 2-1 against joining the Unite union:

Workers at Kettle Foods, the upmarket snack maker, have voted against union recognition at its Norwich factory after the company called in US union busters.

Factory and office workers voted 206 to 93 in a ballot, not to join the Unite union. The decision was welcomed yesterday by the company, owned by private equity group, Lion Capital, but it was greeted with dismay by the union and Richard Howitt, the local Labour MEP.

The food firm employed Omega, a subsidiary of US union busters the Burke Group, based in Malibu, California, to dissuade staff from joining the union.

The reporting of the battle in the Guardian led to two campaign groups – Boycott Kettle Crisps for Attacks on Workers, and Boycott Kettle Chips: the anti-union snack – being set up on the internet site Facebook. These have attracted nearly 800 people in Britain, Australia and the US.

The union is blaming the campaign against them for the result, but they’ll have to evaluate their own campaign as well. Why could they not convince these workers to do something that should be so evidently in their self interest? These battles will not go away anytime soon, as more companies will follow the example of Kettle Chips and use unionbusters to make sure their workers don’t organise. The unions better have their tactics ready.

The antiwar movement failed

Published on October 15, 2007

Over at the Socialist Unity blog Andy reviewed the latest Stop the War demo and was less than impressed. this lead to an interesting discussion in the comment thread, though unfortunately centered mostly on tactics rather than strategies, much less on the question I’ve asked there as well: has the antiwar movement failed?

Tactically, if we look at what the antiwar movement has done from September 2001 onwards, it has been impressive: larger and larger demonstrations against the War on Afghanistan and in the runup to the War on Iraq, culminating in the 15 February 2003 demonstrations, with two million in London and tens of millions worldwide marching against the war. Not just demonstrations either: a wide variety of direct action initiatives have been tried by local antiwar groups, ranging the spectrum from letterwriting campaigns to attempts to occupy military bases.

Strategically, the antiwar movement managed to set the debate in a fair few countries, despite the opposition of much of the political and media elites. Even at the height of the warfrenzy, there never was a majority in the UK in favour of war and even in the US the war was never supported by a large majority of the people, if it had a majority at all. The great victory of the antiwar movement was that it managed to put the warmongers on the defensive, by making opposition to the war the default position in the debate, with the supporters of the War on Iraq having to explain themselves. With Afghanistan it was the other way around, but with Iraq the antiwar movement framed the debate.

We must not underestimate this achievement, in a climate in which much of the US electorate at least was whipped into fear by “9/11” and The War Against Terror and despite the US/UK’s media’s tendency to portray protestors as a minority of bearded wierdies. Here in the Netherlands this was the one subject on which the overwhelming majority of people could agree, whether socialists, liberals or conservatives, Pim Fortuyn supporters or not: the war was a bad idea and Holland should stay well out of it.

And yet, Holland didn’t stay out of it, though it did avoid the actual invasion. And neither did the UK, US, Spain, Poland, etc. The antiwar movement did not stop the war, did not stop the occupation, despite two million people marching in London and tens of millions worldwide. In the end it turned out the voters could be ignored, unless you did something really stupid, like pretending an Al Quida attack is the work of ETA say. Bush got his second term, Labour had no problem winning their next election and as far as I know nobody lost their seat for their war support other than Oona King.

So I think it’s fair to say that the antiwar movement did fail, as it did not prevent the war nor raise the (political) cost of the war. Arguably it didn’t even slow down the start of the war. We won the battles, but we lost the war.