Practice harder

I can't help but come back to the brain training computer games, it's like I'm morbidly fascinated by them. I noticed an advert for one on the tube today that said it would make you "better". It didn't even state what it would make you better at, just generically better. From the looks of things it was a game based around numeracy. Now I'm all for a bit of numeracy, and I'm well aware that it is believed that doing things like Sudoku helps stave off dementia, but I still can't help thinking this is all a bit Michael Gove. In case you're not sure what I mean, I'm referring to the incarnation of Michael Gove where he has been so far allowed to do the most damage to our society: Education Secretary. At that time, his belief was that having absolute answers for everything and making sure that your children give only those answers was the key to making them, well I can't believe he actually thought it would make them more well rounded, I guess he was hoping everyone would be more like him, rather than being turned off education entirely and dropping out of the bottom a system that had utterly failed them. 

Looking at these games though, it is easy to see how Gove thought that he was right to try and reduce the world to simple binaries of right and wrong. We are all happy to accept that our better selves can be achieved through a series of right answers, why not believe the same for our children. At what point will they realise they've been cheated, that knowing the answers will get them nothing if they don't know the right people; that wrote learning was just something to keep them distracted until they were old enough to earn a living for their employers? Maybe they'll never notice. Maybe they'll cling on to the belief that continuing to answer questions will pay off eventually, keeping themselves eternally distracted by continual testing whilst life passes them by. 

Our obsession with making ourselves 'better' through continual testing misses the point. Who wants to lie on their deathbed thinking 'well at least I answered a lot of questions correctly'? What are we actually learning from logic puzzles? It doesn't seem that we are applying any of that learned logic in evaluating their worth. 

Promise

In the most recent election I voted Labour for the first time. There is much to make me believe it is also the last time. I will freely admit that my vote for Labour was tactical, as the thought of another five years of Tory rule was too depressing to contemplate. Of course the reality is even more depressing. I can't imagine I'm the only person who has all but stopped listening to the news because the sound of privileged elites braying about how wrecking what's left of this country's infrastructure, the lives of an entire generation of children and the extistential future of our race is not only sensible but morally right makes me want to break things/scream/cry. Of course in order to make this tragicomedy complete, we must also listen to the official opposition decide that they lost the election because they weren't enough like the party in power and that in order to be an effective opposition, they should just rubber-stamp the policies of a government who only 24%* of the electorate voted for. Following the interim leader's request, my MP abstained from voting against a welfare bill that even Margaret Thatcher might have thought a bit extreme. I voted for my MP expressly to avoid this sort of poor-bashing filth, and whilst I understand that she and her party might not be able to stop it, they could at least represent the people that voted for them by registering their opposition in the traditional manner. 

In the midst of all this, the Labour Party seem genuinely surprised that Jeremy Corbyn is ahead in the polls in the leadership election. I mean it's a massive surprise that the one candidate who appears to be genuinely opposed to the right wing orthodoxy that is poisoning this country is popular with the people who also oppose it. 

I do not deny that the Labour Party has some serious challenges to face up to following its electoral defeat. I accept that it has to overcome the daily barrage of propaganda churned out by a right wing media hegemony, but it what is the point of it doing that by simply giving in? Democracy requires alternatives otherwise it is just a process of rubber-stamping the whims of a dictatorship. At the moment, the Labour Party is failing to meet even the most basic fundamentals of the democratic process: representing your constituents and providing at least one alternative. I voted tactically in May and it turns out that my vote didn't count, not because I didn't vote for the winning candidate or the winning party, but because I voted for a candidate and a party who turn out not to represent me at all. Next time I'll go back to voting for someone who will at least try to represent me. 

*36.9% of 66.1%

Perverse Logic

As it's the holiday season, I can only imagine an entry in a hotel guestbook that goes something like this:

I have had a lovely stay at your hotel. I have spoken to all the guests whilst here, and each and every one of them had something that they too have enjoyed about their stay here. Therefore, might I suggest that you withdraw some of your more popular activities, otherwise everyone paying to stay here will be happy about it. 

Yours hopefully

John Whittingdale

When put in another context the logic that the Secretary of Sate for Culture Media and Sport appears to be applying to the BBC is easily shown for what it is: entirely illogical. If he wants the BBC to act like a commercial company then it has to generate content that maximises viewers/listeners and therefore revenue. If he thinks it should remain a publicly funded broadcaster, then it surely has a duty to provide content to the broadest section of the population that fund it.  

The right wing like to get their way by re-framing the language of the debate so that any argument against their position is made to seem unreasonable. However this does rely on the argument for their position sounding rational. Unfortunately John Whittingdale's hatred of the BBC is irrational and so doesn't really work. 

Playa

I'm not as big a traveller as many in my generation, but I get about probably as much as my conscience/earnings/priorities allow. When I started this post, I was sat on a beach in Playa del Carmen, which it turns out is not my favourite bit of Mexico. Based on my week's worth of knowledge of Mexico, I'd probably say this is my least favourite bit. Not that it isn't lovely: our hotel is beautiful, the weather is amazing, the beach is nice and the sea...well, I'll come back to the sea. 
My problem with Playa del Carmen is that it doesn't feel as Mexican as any other place I've been; it just feels like any North American or European resort town I've ever been to (which to be fair isn't very many*), and I don't just mean in Europe or North America: these places are the same all over the world, in that they are predominantly populated by Europeans** or Americans. The local colour in these places is provided by themed restaurants and local wares customised for the lack of imagination/cultural sensitivity of the buyer (I saw Mayan carved masks with the logos of American baseball teams carved into their foreheads last night). In defence of Playa del Carmen, there are at least restaurants and businesses owned by local people here, and Mexico's laws mean that the resorts can't keep the locals off the beach. I imagine it is a sort of half-way-house between the homogenised banality of Cancun and the rest of the Yucatan peninsular, which is a beautiful, fascinating and exhilarating place. 
However, the main problem that afflicts Playa del Carmen seems to be endemic all along the Rivera Maya from Cancun in the north to Tulum in the south: seaweed. Every beach we have been to has a thick black tide line of mouldering seaweed, and here, as in many other places, much of the sea next to the beach is a dark soup of scratchy seaweed. The owner of the hotel we stayed in in Tulum said that this is a recent phenomenon. The seaweed has always been washed into the warm waters inside the reef that sits a few hundred meters out from the coast, but recent shifts in the ocean currents  due to global warming mean that it is no longer washed out again. The seaweed is here to stay. 

This is a massive problem for this part of Mexico, as almost all of its economy is based on tourism. If the sea isn't good for swimming, the Europeans and North Americans will quickly go elsewhere, leaving resorts and apartment blocks half built: the carrion of a dead industry. I would imagine that even now, the state of Quintana Roo and possibly even the Mexican government are considering ways to combat the seaweed problem without exacerbating the ecological damage already wrought on the world's second largest coral reef. For the time being, some resorts have taken to raking up the seaweed and burying it in holes in the beach, which I can't help but see as a metaphor for the way we all deal with so many of the problems we've caused in the world. So much of the tourist industry causes many of the issues from which it suffers: aeroplane emissions contribute to global warming, overdevelopment wrecks local ecosystems and simply the number of bottles of water one gets through in a country that doesn't have drinking water on tap is a massive waste problem, some of which is likely to come bobbing past you in the sea. Holidays make us massively wasteful, we want convenience and we're willing to pay for it: I am certainly much more likely to buy something that I know I won't reuse or keep whilst on holiday, because well, it's just the once isn't it. There are ways round these the things: our hotel in Playa del Carmen filled a large glass bottle with drinking water from a water cooler each day so there was no waste plastic created; many hotels these days ask if you want your towels washing every day (if not they save water and energy). This is progress, but these are small concessions: not washing a towel or two is not going to stop ocean currents changing. Yet with the economies of scale of such large resorts, these things do eventually add up to a sizeable difference and if we all consider/encourage/make use of them, we could considerably reduce the impact of our holiday. 

Are we going to see our holiday habits changing as the environmental degradation they cause makes the currently desirable destinations increasingly undesirable? Most likely we will just change destination to somewhere as yet untouched or newly tropical. What will that leave for the people of the Mayan Rivera? Will they attempt large scale agriculture, deforesting much larger areas of the peninsular than the relatively small coastal strip of the resorts? Maybe they'll go for large scale livestock farming and really help accelerate the production of greenhouse gasses. Who knows, perhaps a spate of Lido building will save the tourist industry and life can go on as normal, hopefully with more and more hotels and resorts making a greater effort to reduce their environmental impact. Maybe the wonderful people of the Yucatan peninsula will be able to continue to earn a decent living from an increasingly ecologically sustainable industry. Perhaps. But given everyone will still fly to get there I think the likelihood of their environment remaining sustainable for long is pretty slim. Most likely we will all move our problems somewhere else until that too is wrecked. There's no evidence that in our holidaying we will stray far from our everyday habits. We simply magnify the worst ones. 

* my parents were a certain kind of aspiring middle class that meant that I've seen a healthy portion of the world's museums and cathedrals. 
** I'm including white Australians in this particular generalisation, just so we've got all the South East Asian resorts covered too.