VIDEO - Plato's [Loyalist] cave, Ctd

"He who does not move does not notice his chains." 

— Rosa Luxemburg

My earlier post in the series with full analysis here.

Young versus old - "The real split in Ukraine" [and Northern Ireland]

I've previously wrote a post, 'The young people will bring change to Iran' where I cited Alec Ross, Senior advisor to Hilary Clinton 2009-2013 who said of young people in Iran and China:

"What is ultimately going to change China, what is ultimately going to change Iran are young people in these countries. There are half a billion people in china who us microblogging sites, 400 million of whom are under 25. That's what's going to change China. That's what's going to change Iran."

Christopher Hitchens spoke of "Iran's baby boomerang" whereby:

"Within the carapace of a theocratic state, an almost completely secular society is being created." Muslim mullahs sowed a baby boom whose children will reap their overthrow.

Christina Lamb explained this phenomenon in the Sunday Times also where trendy restaurants "are packed with young people drinking lattes and smoothies, smoking and texting on their iPhones as they plan their night out."

 

In Ukraine the recent clash has been a generational one. Julia Ioffe (juliaioffe) wrote an article in The New Republic, 'Eastern Ukraine Is Still Fighting Its Past - Life under Stalin's long shadow'.

"The younger a citizen of Donetsk, the more likely she is to view herself as Ukrainian. The older she is, the more likely she is to identify as Russian. And this is the crux of it all: What we are seeing today is the reverberation of what happened more than 20 years ago. This is still the long post-Soviet transition. And this is what it’s like to wander in the desert, waiting for the old generation to die off."

Loyalism's phantom fears, Ctd

Raymond Lavery is a veteran loyalist and activist. He has said that loyalists desperately needed a political education programme to convince younger loyalists that their fears are unfounded. He said:

"What is important here is that this generation not only get a better formal education but they get a political education too, which there is a serious lack of. Sinn Féin are putting into people’s heads that because a flag comes down there is a march towards a united Ireland. 

And here's the really important bit:

"Young and old believe that, even though it is not true."

In full here. Previous post on loyalism's "phantom fears" here. I previously looked at Raymond Lavery's comments here.

Agency and activism - Mary Robinson

Change demands action, agency and activism. It requires the young and free minded to challenge every accepted norm. As Fareed Zakaria said here, there is nothing inevitable about the continuance and rise of liberal democracy. I wrote of Mary Robinson's agency and activism on Eamonnmallie.com here:

"Northern Ireland needs the modern, functioning, internationalist youth to push back against discriminatory holdouts.

We should look to the foresight of Mary Robinson, who in 1967 at the age of 23, used her inaugural address as auditor of the law society in Dublin to speak on law and morality and take on every sacred cow. She took on the authoritarian and repressive influence of the Catholic Church, fighting for contraception, women’s rights, divorce, abortion and gay rights."

History has show that sacred cows make the juiciest burgers. Mary Robinson's first piece of legislation aimed to overturn the ban on the import, distribution and sale of contraceptives. In response to this action condoms were posted through her letterbox and she was denounced from the pulpit by the bishop of Ballina Cathedral. She also worked as a legal advisor for the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform with future Trinity College senator David Norris (my blog post on David Norris here).

As Christopher Hitchens said: "That's one definition of corruption, is indifference." Judge Alan Mahon said the same in the 2010 Tribunal report when he said: "Ignorance and apathy are both corruption catalysts [because] the pathways of corruption are ever changing." As Tom Hayden said: "A silent majority and government by the people is incompatible."

Mick Fealty said here: "If you don't vote that's as good as an approval, albeit a lukewarm one." The same figures for silence, indifference and neutrality on violence and economic vandalism.

Read my blog on Peter Tatchell and on the need to provoke and even offensive here. My blog post on the Heroine of Hackney who spoke out against the rioters in London in 2011 here.

Gillian Tett - If a country wants to improve its education system its population must be hungry for change

Gillian Tett provided an overview of the successful education systems across Finland, Poland and South Korea and drew a few key lessons from this phenomenon. She said:

"It pays to invest in vocational education, alongside academic learning; it makes sense to spend more in poor areas; when the status and training of teachers improve, this has a powerful impact on results; children benefit from being given more freedom to manage their time; and when parents get involved with their children at home, this produces much better results than volunteering for the Parent Teachers Association. “The more time that parents spend volunteering on PTAs, the worse their children perform,” Ripley observed at an event in New York last week."

Here's the key lesson. She continued:

"But perhaps the most important message is the most basic one: if a country wants to improve its educational system in a hurry, its population must be hungry for change. “All the countries which have obtained this [improvement] have faced an economic existential crisis,” Ripley says. “There was a real imperative to change and their people didn’t feel they had a choice"."

In FT in full here.

The Dickensian World of Modern Law Practice

Lawyers aren’t exactly the most tech-minded of people. Tech-averse if you ask me. But in the booming world of social media and e-commerce, can lawyers really continue to ignore the insatiable and irresistible advance of technology?

World History in One Chart

World history in one chart: (via @jimpethokoukis) twitter.com/mattyglesias/s…

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 23, 2013

Above is a tweet from American blogger Matt Ygelias (@mattyglesias) which struck me greatly: it has managed to capture in one image what man has managed to achieve in only a few hundred years.

Ben Bernanke has sketched things out further in a recent address. He said:

Many factors affect the development of the economy, notably among them a nation's economic and political institutions, but over long periods probably the most important factor is the pace of scientific and technological progress. Between the days of the Roman Empire and when the Industrial Revolution took hold in Europe, the standard of living of the average person throughout most of the world changed little from generation to generation. For centuries, many, if not most, people produced much of what they and their families consumed and never traveled far from where they were born. By the mid-1700s, however, growing scientific and technical knowledge was beginning to find commercial uses. Since then, according to standard accounts, the world has experienced at least three major waves of technological innovation and its application.

The first wave drove the growth of the early industrial era, which lasted from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. This period saw the invention of steam engines, cotton-spinning machines, and railroads. These innovations, by introducing mechanization, specialization, and mass production, fundamentally changed how and where goods were produced and, in the process, greatly increased the productivity of workers and reduced the cost of basic consumer goods.

The second extended wave of invention coincided with the modern industrial era, which lasted from the mid-1800s well into the years after World War II. This era featured multiple innovations that radically changed everyday life, such as indoor plumbing, the harnessing of electricity for use in homes and factories, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, powered flight, telephones, radio, television, and many more.

The third era, whose roots go back at least to the 1940s but which began to enter the popular consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, is defined by the information technology (IT) revolution, as well as fields like biotechnology that improvements in computing helped make possible. Of course, the IT revolution is still going on and shaping our world today.

Ben Bernanke on Change

We humans are always all too happy to uphold the status quo. Sure why not? Keeping things as they are can often be in the interest of a great many. For others it just requires too much effort.

For young people in Northern Ireland, where youth unemployment stands at 23.8%, they should be particularly mindful of the need to not settle for conventional thinking; to not accept the status quo.