Jul. 16th, 2015

danieldwilliam: (machievelli)
My new job has offices across the road from a graveyard. I often take my lunch there, trading the chance to be outside in the sunshine for the slightly meloncholy air of a burial site.

Partly through curiousity and partly to respect the implicit deal between the living and the dead that when you visit a graveyard the living read the stories of the dead I have spent some time each week reading the memorials.

Some speak of happy lives, generations of prosperous Edinburghers living, working and dying and being buried in approximately the right order and increasing intervals, or something about the words speaks of a well lived life filled with love or respect or admiration leading to a sense of lose from those left behind.

Others are sad, sadder, young men and women who died before they had had much chance fully be loved, respected or admired, who died out of turn, buried beneath their parents. There are some dozen or so memorials of Great War soldiers who names are etched above their parents but whose bodies are buried in places like Baupame, Gallipoli, Gaza, Flanders, Yypres or whose bodies are not buried there but are missing, still.

Saddest of all are the small children, young children from long ago, young children from yesterday, who lived a year, a month, a day. All marked with recent flowers. Birthdays still remembered. Even today, childhood is risky business and life is fragile.

And with the sadness comes the fear of looking at the grave of a man of my own age and class, dead before he reached 40.
danieldwilliam: (machievelli)
There's a lot written about American politics. Two issues seem to consume the British commentariate like no other. The state of race relations and gun control. Both issues have had major talking points in recent months and the murders in South Carolina have brought both together.

And it's not that I'm not interested, curious, fascinated. I am It's not that I don't think the issues are important or that the people affected aren't important or deserving of the right answer to their problems. They are. It's not that I don't think there are answers. I certainly do.

But they are also issues, people and political solutions in a foreign country, no more or less important than similar issues in other countries.

Often I think that commentators in the UK are more excited about US race relations or US violent crime than they are about those issues in the UK. Dozens of British citizens have been murdered in a religiously motivated attack using uncontrolled guns in Tunisia and judging by the way my social media accounts are spinning you'd think it hadn't happened.

So, I'm interested and concerned but also trying not to say too much about and I'm looking out for blogs on the experience of Eastern European migrants to the UK, or how UK hindus experience hindu nationalism in India, and also on the subject of Australian boat people, gun control in Russia, land rights for indiginous peoples in South America, the experiences of white Zimbabwians or any of the experiences of not the US.

Just a friendly reminder to myself that the US is not the UK and the US is not the whole of the world.
danieldwilliam: (machievelli)
Two thoughts on US defence policy and spending.

One - the amount of money the USA spends on defence should be viewed through the lens of transfer payments from rich parts of the US to poor parts and from rich US-ians to otherwise unemployed USians.

Two - the amount of money the USA spends on defence should be viewed through the lens of a desire to support basic research and foundational science as well as product development and innovation.

The ability to invade everywhere else in the world at once might just be a side effect of items one and two.
danieldwilliam: (machievelli)
The conversation I am currently not having with several people is about George Osbourne and #IndyRef.

Everytime a No voter I know starts tearing in to the manifest incompetence and evil of Osbourne as Chancellor I have to bite my tongue to avoid saying unhelpful things like "You voted for him to be our Chancellor you idiot!"

Profile

danieldwilliam: (Default)
danieldwilliam

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
11121314151617
18 192021222324
25262728293031

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 24th, 2025 02:08 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios