Category Archives: Sad

Posts I never made

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There is a useful function called ‘Google Alerts’ whereby Google will email you any new results for a given search.

I used this to set up a number of searches relating to ‘no new wars’ and the centenary of the Great War.

  • 21/12/2014 to 17/06/2021, “11-11-2018”, 1,117 results.  Returned anything that looked like a date of 11th November and 2018.
  • 21/12/2014 to 17/06/2021, “11/11/2018”, 1,113 results.  Returned anything that looked like a date of 11th November and 2018.
  • 09/06/2013 to 20/06/2021, “”Great War” 100 years”, 1,890 results.  Was just about memorials being done up.
  • 31/05/2013 to 20/06/2021, “”Great War” centenary”, 1,371 results.  All sorts of results, very few potentially interesting.
  • 17/06/2013 to 17/06/2021 (just by chance), “”war to end all wars” 100 years”, 1,042 results.  All sorts of results, very few potentially interesting.  Mostly about memorials.
  • 09/06/2013 to 29/05/2021, “”war to end all wars” centenary”, 348 results.  Some of these are very interesting, discussing the rights and wrongs and truths of war.  For about half of those, the article is no longer online.
  • 17/06/2013 to 13/06/2021, “”No New Wars””, 186 results.
  • 17/06/2013 to 21/01/2021, “NoNewWars”, 18 results.
  • “”NoNewWars””, 0 results.

I had been full of good intentions to read and consider each of those results.  Many of them contain multiple results themselves, up to about 6.  So there’s about 10,000 to 15,000 actual links there.  I was being waaaaay too optimistic.

I did glance at those messages, frequently.  Almost all were about heroes, celebrating sacrifice, celebrating the start of the war, how we need to remember what a great thing it was.  So much pro-war, pro-death, pro-suffering in the media.  It is very depressing.

As a consequence, no posts resulted.

But an awful lot of people saw pro-war messages.

 

 

I struggle to understand how criminal damage and attacking people’s history is peace-making

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I struggle to understand how criminal damage and attacking people’s history is peace-making.

I’ve just had a post through on the Networking for Peace mailing list: “Germany : Tear This Down – Eliminate Colonialism Now” which links to a site called TearThisDown.com (active link not provided on purpose). It provides a map of street names, monuments, stations and other public items named after people they disapprove of and demanding ‘TEAR DOWN THIS SHIT‘. They call for such monuments to be damaged, destroyed and have graffiti applied.

They clearly don’t care that people live in the areas where they intend to conduct criminal damage nor about the fear (and additional damage) it will create.

They clearly have not thought about social cohesion and how this kind of hate crime – which is what it is – creates divisions that will last far longer than the short-term fun and publicity they seek. This is not resolving differences, it is creating conflict.

This is a few people wanting to cause social upheaval and using it to raise mobs to go out and cause damage without consideration for knock-on effects and consequences is not making the world a better place. It is teaching people that anti-social behaviour is a good thing and that despising other sections of society and blaming them for acts that happened before they were born is progress.

It is just some people, fuelled by hate, creating power for themselves at the expense of others and getting other people to do their dirty work for them.

It’s just Kristallnacht in reverse.

I fail to see how this is appropriate as a “Networking for Peace” activity.

Ducks, planes, horses, teacups and tanks

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You must have been on a fairground merry-go-round as a child.  Was it a traditional carousel with horses that go up and down as it goes round?  Or a toddlers’ one with teacups?  Maybe it was zoo-themed with lions and zebras and elephants?  Emergency service vehicles such as police cars and fire engines?  Trains are quite common, such as a Thomas the Tank Engine themed ride.

Talking of tanks, how about this?

Image taken from Children in Peace site https://www.childrenofpeace.org.uk/news/

The campaigning body ForcesWatch worries about the militarisation of society in the UK, with lengthy arguments as to why it is not right to encourage guns as playthings.

But even they have not got started on the concept of toddlers in tanks.

UPDATE:

I did email Children of Peace and ask them via their contact form what that image was supposed to be.  I got no response.  Within a few hours they had changed the image on the news page.  I presume they have realised there are links to it and removed it from the media section of their site – hence it appears broken above.  This was the image:

This is the email I sent on 26th Jan 2020, as at 3rd Feb 2020 I have had no reply:

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: A query regarding an image on your site
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2020 17:02:26 +0000
From: Simon Reed
To: contact@childrenofpeace.org.uk

 

Can you tell me what is going on in this picture?

I am referring to the headline photo for the news story “/A new group joins us. The Palestinian group SHAMS joins us as an affiliate./”

It appears to be small children on a merry-go-round of tanks. It looks like one of the most appalling images of child military indoctrination I’ve ever seen.

What is the place and who are the children?

 

The Lancaster Award

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Another disappointment.

I was under the impression one’s level of pass at The Lancaster Award would appear on one’s degree transcript.  What actually happens is that a description of it appears on the diploma supplement and without the grade.

But let us define terms first.

  • Degree certificate – the posh piece of paper one puts in a frame.
  • Degree transcript – the piece of paper provided by the university that says what modules you did and what you got in them, plus anything else the university wants to add.  The thing some employers may ask for if they want to know the details of one’s degree.
  • Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) – the six page long European standard Diploma Supplement which describes the degree in detail and is intended for showing to overseas universities.
  • The Lancaster Award – a university-assessed award for extracurricular activity and can be awarded as Bronze, Silver or Gold.
  • The Digital Skills Certificate – an award the university gives for completing five (or more) e-learning courses.  It goes toward the Lancaster Award.

The Lancaster university web site says the Digital Skills Certificate is mentioned on “the HEAR transcript“.  Between that and what people told me, I thought the Lancaster Award pass level would appear on my degree transcript.  So I worked hard for it and got a Gold Lancaster Award.  But it is not mentioned on the degree transcript.  Instead it got a one line entry on the diploma supplement.  I queried this and got a replacement diploma supplement with a description of the Lancaster Award, but still nothing to say the pass level.  So I queried that and was told they do not put it on the degree transcript and that they do not have the means to put the level of pass on the diploma supplement.

Likewise, the Digital Skills Certificate gets a mention in the diploma supplement but no reference on the degree transcript.

What goes on a degree transcript is up to the university.  They could choose to put the Lancaster Award and Digital Skills Certificate on there.  Putting it on the HEAR diploma supplement is worthless as employers never look at that an academic bodies would not be interested in the extracurricular activity.

It seems such a shame the Lancaster Award does not appear on the transcript, and the level of award does not appear anywhere.

Johnny Mercer MP approves of and promotes killing over values

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Johnny Mercer MP has posted on his Tweet feed:

The application of violence to defeat the enemies of the nation has become worryingly unpopular.  Nothing wrong with fighting (yes killing) for values/what you believe in.

I was under the impression the current War on Terror was specifically trying to stop people doing just that.

And he is concerned that violence is becoming less popular.

To the point where he publicly writes there is nothing wrong with killing people.

What hope is there when people vote for people like him?

Global military spending, 2016 to 2017

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On the Conscience:Taxes for Peace not War home page is a counter showing the global military spending so far this year.  It comes from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) figures.  We use those because they are not particularly controversial; they do not include lots of things a strict pacifist would like to see included.  As I start writing this, the number is based on their 2016 figures and is £509,860,928,935.

Yes, global spending on militarisation (essentially, preparing for killing people), is five hundred thousand million pounds.  A million pounds, spent, half a million times.

For comparison, nobody wants to spend the £11,000m to £23,000m it would take to cure the whole world’s 185m people with Hepatitis C.  But we have spent £509,000m on arms so far this year.

(Hepatitis C treatment is the most expensive medicine in the USA, link.  Details of the cost of curing it, link.)

Anyway, it is time for me to update the web site because military spending figures for 2017 have been released.  And it has gone up by about 1.1%, once inflation has been taken out.  As an absolute sum just the difference is about £47,287m.  Military spending in 2017 represented 2.2% of the global gross domestic product.

(For reference, feeding the world’s starving people would cost £23,000m, £132,000m or somewhere in between.)

So, I have updated the script and now the number, based on the new 2017 figures, is £524,852,595,454 so far this year.
£524,853,983,114
£524,854,467,457
£524,854,865,718
£524,855,841,115
£524,873,308,033…

 

Re: I feel depressed because of war 2

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“I get so sad , and also can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t ignore the fact that they are suffering.“

The solution to feeling sad is action.

“How are you going to stop war in the world?  You can’t it’s impossible.  You can stay as positive as you want its not going to stop war.“

There have been, over the past few centuries, many treaties which have defined and redefined what is and is not permitted in a war.  We’ve moved on a long way from the massive horrific hack-people-to-death battles of the middle ages that in a couple of days could kill a significant percentage of a country’s men.

  • All sorts of tactics and weapons have been banned because of their cruelty or long term effects.
  • Rules have come in about targeting civilians and what is permitted by those in uniform and what is forbidden by those who are not.
  • The law has changed around much of the world regarding conscription; it is no longer legal to force someone to fight and kill others if it is against their conscience to kill.

So, there have been many changes made to violent conflict.

There have also been changes to prevent conflict, such as:

  • The formation of the EU which arose from a treaty designed to prevent another war between France, Italy and German.
  • International courts have been set up on every continent to prosecute those who break these treaties and laws.
  • The League of Nations and then the United Nations were formed to provide somewhere for communication to occur so war can be avoided.

So, there have been changes made to prevent conflict.  These have all happened because people have been active and made them happen.

I don’t think violent conflict will ever be eliminated. But we can continue to prevent it, reduce it, constrain it and clean up after it to minimise its impact.