politics

Here is roughly my position on what I consider the most important issue, as articulated by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies:

The existence of social evils, that is to say, of social conditions under which many men are suffering, can be comparatively well established. Those who suffer can judge for themselves, and the others can hardly deny that they would not like to change places. It is infinitely more difficult to reason about an ideal society. Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale; whether it be practicable; whether it would result in a real improvement; what kind of suffering it may involve; and what may be the means for its realization. As opposed to this, blueprints for piecemeal engineering are comparatively simple. They are blueprints for single institutions, for health and unemployed insurance, for instance, or arbitration courts, or anti-depression budgeting, or educational reform. If they go wrong, the damage is not very great, and a re-adjustment not very difficult.

 Let's have an argument!

baby animals in danger

If you are wondering what to watch at the moment, and are fond of reality tv and fluffy baby animals, then please consider Planet Earth Live.

It's a really good concept for a wildlife programme: basically following a bunch of imperilled mammal families with adorable but vulnerable offspring around the world for a month and seeing which ones die. The reality twist is that everything is live: if baby macaque Gremlin gets eaten, we'll know about it before she has finished being digested!

They make it even better by anthropomorphising in a heartstring-tugging way that I don't think I've seen before, making the young animals' survival seem to depend on their parents' personalities or which side of the tracks they were born on. While the privileged lion cubs play with each other, we follow hungry Moja and his exiled mum, who have to roam the savanna on their own, scrapping with hyenas for whatever they can get and steer the pride. Meanwhile we hope that Canadian black bear Juliet isn't too inexperienced a mother to keep her cubs safe from the wolves and snow, and fret about bereaved giant otters Sofia and Diablo letting their desire for revenge cloud their judgement. In the ocean, a grey whale and her daughter are trying to reach Alaska through patrols of killer whales, a situation which the presenter plots on a map just like the Battle of Britain. This quote from episode two is typical:

"I guess if you're living on a lake that's jam packed with caimen who want to eat you, you have to grow up pretty fast"

There is plenty that is annoying - Julia Bradbury has the habit of calling children "little ones" (I think this is a contender for the most annoying habit), and Richard Hammond is obviously incredibly irritating - but overall I think it's really well done. It's a new dynamic to me to follow individual animals' everyday lives rather than just seeing a whistlestop tour of the most exciting things a particular species does, a bit like watching the whole match rather than just the highlights.

Also, for Joni Mitchell fans, in episode two you get to look a coyote right in the face in a place that could conceivably be near the road to Baljennie.