Another Monday! Doesn’t time go fast when you are enjoying yourself!
I start not so much with a link as a complaint….
I start not so much with a link as a complaint….
1. I was appalled last night to discover that one of the most popular Romanian television stations – ProTV – had chosen to show us at 10pm last night a gruesome film about a virus wiping out America (the rest of the world isn’t mentioned). The film stars Will Smith as a lone virologist still working in his home lab to find an antidote for testing on the zombies into which humans have (d)evolved.
Totally inappropriate film at this moment - with the only uplifting element being the final scene's arrival at a barricaded (Vermont) border of the vital antidote phial.
Needless to say, I watched it to the bitter end!!
The Politico website tells me
that Holywood has in fact been churning out such films for quite
some time – eg Outbreak (1995); and Contagion (2011). I’ve
only seen one such film – Perfect Sense (2011) - which
had an added poignancy for me, being filmed in Glasgow and starring my
compatriot Ewan McGregor…..
2. It isn’t often
we get freebies but, for the next month, the kind people at the UK Prospect magazine will let us
have free access to the entire 25-year archives of the journal and have selected
a few highlights to whet our appetite.
I have occasionally bought “Prospect” and did include it in the list of journals I devised some three years ago – “rather too smooth” was my terse comment, by which I meant that it was a bit glossy and mainstream for my tastes…
I have occasionally bought “Prospect” and did include it in the list of journals I devised some three years ago – “rather too smooth” was my terse comment, by which I meant that it was a bit glossy and mainstream for my tastes…
But the taste
I’ve had so far may change that view. It’s certainly very fine writing,
starting with a brilliant Ivan Krastev
essay from 2009 which looks back with Krastev’s usual insights at
20 years’ experience of countries like Bulgaria and Czechia; and continues with
an essay from Fukuyama on
Identity
3. A few weeks back, the Guardian started
a very worthwhile initiative on strengthening
its European coverage "This is Europe" which, so far, has given rich pickings
4. I’m always
captivated by intellectual history –
a curious topic I grant you but its attempt to explore how linguistic barriers
allow distinctive ways of thinking and dialogue to develop seems to get to the
heart of understanding a country. I’ve made the point here several times that Perry Anderson is one of
the few people with the linguistic skills to be able to offer comparative
thoughts on the matter in the English language.
An article in the New York Review of
Books alerted me to the Reading the China Dream website which
has been publishing English translations of key articles in a lively dialogue
which the Chinese intelligentsia has been carrying out in recent times eg this one. For more on
this see this post last year about the geography of thinking
5. I listened this
morning to the reassuring tones of Dr John Campbell in his most recent report - although this article indicated the scale of the opportunities which the British government has missed by its dithering.
Faced with all
of this, the stupidity lies in not recognising promptly that we must act, that we
must shut down, that even the most essential individual activity of the market
age, public shopping, has mutated into a crime against society.
Economics is shaping
the crisis. It is the relentless expansion of the Chinese economy and the
resulting mix of modern urban life with traditional food customs that creates
the viral incubators. It is globalised transportation systems that speed up
transmission. It is calculations of cost that define the number of intensive-care beds and the stockpiles of ventilators. It is the
commercial logic of drug development that defines the range of vaccines we have
ready and waiting; obscure coronaviruses don’t get the same attention as
erectile dysfunction.
And once the
virus began to spread, it was the UK’s attachment to business as usual that
induced fatal delay. Shutting down comes at a price. No one wants to do it. But
then it turns out, in the face of the terrifying predictions of sickness and
death, there really is no alternative.
Romania has this week technically been
under
emergency powers…...with the authorities particularly sensitive to the
return of hundreds of thousands of Romanians from work in Italy (officially 1.2 million Romanians were working
there – mainly casual and manual work). Only some 60,000 are officially quarantined since many chose to come via the Ukraine to
conceal their status
On Friday I had a dawdle around the centre of Ploiesti – a city 60 km north of Bucharest which used to be Romania’s centre of oil production and which has been my home for the past 5 weeks.
The pedestrian and car flow were then not significantly
reduced. All shops seemed open - the markets certainly. The only differences in
the last few days are that the supermarket cashiers and shelf-packers are all
wearing masks and gloves and that we wait at the cashdesk a metre and a half apart.
I might say that the supermarkets remain well-stocked - with
no sign of the panic bulk-buying which has disfigured the UK. I visited Lidl
late Saturday afternoon and it was quiet and well-stocked
My chemist does, however. have a limit of 3 customers only
within the shop - with credit card only transactions. For the past few years Romania has had
washable banknotes and I had that morning actually washed all the cash I had (a
lot since for the past month I’ve been in for the long haul).
I'm one of these bolshie types who object strongly to the way
we're being forced into a cashless system......In Romania such a policy, of
course, would require the older generation to die off - which, of course, may
happen faster than we all thought.
6. And I thought this was an important
article to pinpoint the blame we must take for letting human civilisation
encroach on the animal and natural world
Other eye-witness reports from those in lockdown
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/were-clearing-the-decks-a-gp-on-watching-the-coronavirus-pandemic-unfold
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