Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

One of Bin Laden's 19 children is said to have sought political asylum at Madrid airport, claiming that he's a pacifist. I guess every family has its white sheep.

I was amused by a report of a UK town council which fines folk for not separating rubbish items properly and then treats the garbage centrally in ways which break their own laws and would justify them fining themselves. This, of course, is inevitable when tax increases are dressed up as green initiatives. It took me back to when my daughter was fined here for parking a car half-on a pavement[sidewalk] that was already 100% blocked by three containers for residents' rubbish. I think the logic was that her car might force pedestrians to walk into the road. Unlike the containers, which automatically levitated when anyone approached.

Regular readers will be aware that, thanks to the vagaries of the Poio summer post, I'm working my way through four issues of Prospect all at the same time. Without apology, here's a fascinating article by the philosopher Edward Skidelsky, in which he lambasts several worthy targets. The header runs Contemporary liberalism's insistence that morality is a mere matter of rights and obligations empties life of its ethical meaning. We need a return to the virture ethics of the pre-moderns, and a renewed conception of the good life.
And this in a left-of-centre publication. Times certainly are a-changeing. We'll soon be permitted to be judgemental again at this rate. Not that I ever stopped being.
If you can't manage the whole thing, here's a few quotes:-
- By enshrining individual choice, liberalism has eroded the public language of morality, leaving nothing but a set of rules for frictionless co-existence.
- The romantic ideal of self-development has collapsed into mere consumerism. Far from rising upwards, we are sinking slowly downwards.
- Words such as "evil", "perverted" and "racist" have lost any exact meaning they once had and now simply serve to coerce and mesmerise.
- We have become a nation of relativists on the one side and ranters on the other.
I guess I must be a ranter . . .

He got there before Zapatero . . .
Scottish banks are the most stable in the world.
Alex Salmond, Leader of the governing Scottish Nationalist Party, January 2008

Galicia

If you've read - for example here, Chapter XXVIII - what George Borrow wrote about Pontevedra-Vigo rivalry 170 years or so ago, it won't come as much of a surprise to hear that the former is strongly averse to the latter becoming the capital of the burgeoning EU region of Galicia and North Portugal. A lost cause, I suspect.

In a village not far from me, 12 of the 14 kids in the local school are the children of Moroccan immigrants. It must be tough for them having one half their lessons is Spanish and the other in Galician, especially as they're confusingly similar languages. But it will give them better employment opportunities, of course, and they will be enriched by the experience. Unless they emerge speaking the mixture of both languages called Castrapo.

One strange outcome of the media campaign to expose just how much local politicos - and TV directors - have spent on their cars is the confirmation that the status saloon in Galicia [and Spain as a whole?] is a big Audi. Not a Merc and not BMW. Doubly odd when you think that an Audi is just a jumped-up Volkswagen. Though a fine car, of course. Why, I used to have one myself . . .

Some genius in traffic planning in Pontevedra thought it would be a good idea to raise the zebra crossings on the city's busiest roads to a height of at least 6 inches [15cm] above the tarmac on either side. In one stretch along the river, there are about ten of these within a kilometre. They allegedly do nothing for pollution prevention - not to mention your car. So I was pleased to read today that the height of at least some of them will be reduced. I wonder if they have elevated crossings in Vilagarcia and whether some of the pedestrian fatalities I mentioned yesterday aren't due to people falling off them.

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