farming in yorkshire

Down on the farm:
Amanda Owen - The Yorkshire Shepherdess from Wolfsong Media on Vimeo.
Channel 5 - Our Yorkshire Farm | Channel 5 | Facebook

This is her website:
Amanda Owen, Yorkshire Shepherdess - Farmer, Writer, Photographer

And here's a piece from a couple of years ago:
Amanda Owen, Yorkshire shepherdess: ‘I like to give birth alone, like a ewe’ | Life and style | The Guardian

Here she is down on the farm:

Yorkshire Shepherdess

On Your Farm

Hill farmer, mother to nine children and best-selling author. Ruth Sanderson joins Amanda Owen for a rare moment of relative peace and quiet on her farm. Amanda farms at Ravenseat, at the head of Swaledale in Yorkshire, with her husband Clive. She shows Ruth around her farm, pointing out nesting curlews and wild flowers, and describes how her love of the landscape has inspired her writing. On a summer morning in the sunshine Ravenseat looks like paradise, but Amanda tells Ruth that it's a very different place feeding the sheep in the wintertime.

BBC Radio 4 - On Your Farm, Yorkshire Shepherdess

See also:
Jay Doubleyou: climate change: the role of livestock and agriculture.......... or: "can steak save the planet?"
.
.
.

self-satirising advertising

Normally, advertisers don't like too much honesty:
Lucky Strike - YouTube
Jay Doubleyou: the men who made us spend: part two

Now, corporations are selling their stuff with a little more honesty:
How Self-Deprecating Advertising Creates More Meaningful Consumer-Brand Connections - TINT Blog

Satire could be used - but that's normally about attack:
Jay Doubleyou: part of a political cartoonist's job is to cause offence

This piece of satire did not seem to harm Ikea, however:
Fight Club Ikea Catalogue Scene — Critical Commons
Jay Doubleyou: fight club: how many film genres in one film?
Jay Doubleyou: fight club and anti-consumerism

Nor the Victoria & Albert Museum:


“An Ace Caff with Quite a Nice Museum Attached” (Saatchi & Saatchi, on the V&A) | CzechingIn



All right, the mirror's seen better days but the currant buns are very tasty | Arden, Paul | V&A Search the Collections

Here are a lot of examples:
Advertising / Self Deprecation - TV Tropes

And one for Apollo 11:
10 Famous Funny Commercials - YouTube

With more here:
Skoda - Repositioning Ad - YouTube
Aussie Beer Commercial - Best Ad Ever - YouTube
Carling Black Label "Dambusters" - YouTube
15 Funniest Commercials of All Time - YouTube
.
.
.

part of a political cartoonist's job is to cause offence

What's this about?



Jason Chatfield on Twitter: "Cartoonist Michael DeAdder was just fired from the newspaper for this cartoon.… "

Here is comment from “The Best Cartoon Website around the Globe”:

Canadian cartoonist Michael de Adder has had his freelance contract with a publishing company cancelled due, he believes, to his depiction of Donald Trump attempting to “play through” on a golf course despite the drowned bodies of migrants Oscar Alberto Martinez and Angie Valeria lying in his path. The company, Brunswick News Inc, deny the sacking was in any way connected to the Trump cartoon, and I have no evidence to suggest otherwise. Yet there is certainly a wider narrative, and seemingly a growing trend, for cartoonists losing their jobs – or worse – for the crime of having caused offence.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a cartoonist has been warned off drawing something that his editor thinks might displease “The Donald”. In this country, politicians – if they were smart – used to ask to buy the original of any particularly hurtful cartoon, thus both drawing the sting and irritating the cartoonist immensely. This seems to have become rarer in recent years, though whether that says more about modern cartoons or modern politicians I’ll let you decide.

Autocratic regimes are an altogether different kettle of fascists. David Low’s wartime cartoons earned him a place on the Nazis’ “death list”.

Michael de Adder losing his job! - Irancartoon




David Low (cartoonist) - Wikipedia
10 Anti-Nazi David Low Cartoons | History Hit

On the other hand, 'satire' is not about defending the powerful or attacking the weak:

Part of a political cartoonist's job is to cause offence

Cartoonists like me work at the margins of what is acceptable: a cartoon needs to unsettle and discomfort the reader a little if it is to penetrate its target

Dave Brown @davebrowntoons
Tuesday 2 July 2019

Recently there have been a number of cases where a defence of satire has been used to excuse racist or misogynist remarks, whereas I believe a good creed for the satirist is that they should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”.

Cartoonist Michael de Adder lost work after drawing an offensive image of Donald Trump – but that’s his job | The Independent

Here is the Independent newspaper's cartoonist again - where he defends a cartoon from another paper, which some found offensive:

Offended by the Daily Mail's cartoon of refugees and rats? Fine – but you don’t have a right to censor it | The Independent

This Daily Mail Anti-Refugee Cartoon Is Straight Out Of Nazi Germany | HuffPost

Here's another cartoonist from last year - which shows cartoons as satire:

Political cartoonists are divided: Is it ok to ditch their paper and go digital?
Satire - from The i Newspaper online | inews.co.uk

For more examples:

Jay Doubleyou: a history of dissent and satire

With a couple of videos here:

Jay Doubleyou: fight club and anti-consumerism
Jay Doubleyou: foucault's discipline and punish made easier
Jay Doubleyou: what is a 'native speaker' of english? the issue of race...

.
.
.

how to learn a language from 'superlinguists'

We can learn a lot about learning languages from people who have learnt a lot of languages:
Jay Doubleyou: how to learn 30 languages
Jay Doubleyou: 10 tips and tricks to pick up any language

We call these people 'polyglots':
Jay Doubleyou: polyglots
Jay Doubleyou: what can hyperpolyglots - people who can speak dozens of languages - teach the rest of us?

And a new BBC series on these people shows that we can learn something from them:

How to learn a language

The DocumentaryThe Superlinguists

 Episode 2 of 4

Simon Calder asks how to go about acquiring a new tongue. He gets tips from those who know - innovative teachers and polyglots. 

The answers are surprising. At school, it is repetitive drills, shouted out loud by the whole class, that seem to lodge the grammar and pronunciation in the pupils’ brains. 

But if you are an adult learning by yourself, then, on the contrary, don’t stress about grammar and pronunciation, there are better, and more fun things to focus on. 

Simon has a go at learning Slovenian, can he order coffee and cake after just one lesson?

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Superlinguists, How to learn a language

Here is Simon Calder writing in the Independent:
How learning languages can enrich the way we travel | The Independent
Why learning another language is more valuable than ever | The Independent

Finally, Peter Trudgill writes for the New European:
Peter Trudgill | Topic | The New European
.
.
.

brexit as a teabag

There are lots of jokes about Brexit about:
30 of the funniest jokes and memes about Brexit | indy100
Here are the jokes other Europeans are making about the UK over Brexit | Euronews
Top 10 Brexit Deal Jokes | United States of Europe - YouTube

This is a good one:
WATCH: Boris Johnson's priceless reaction as the EU deliver a reality check on Theresa May's Brexit deal | JOE is the voice of Irish people at home and abroad

Bu this is the best one:



(1) James Acaster on Brexit - Tea bag analogy - YouTube
.
.
.

brexit, fantasy and boris

Brexit has a lot to do with a very few people making a lot of money:
Jay Doubleyou: brexit: experts, elites and hedgefund managers

It is all about creating a fantasy land:




SHOCK as Telegraph endorses its own columnist Boris Johnson for Tory leader

And that fantasy land would be Little England only:
Poll: Leave voters want Brexit even if it breaks up UK - The Scotsman

Minus other bits of the UK:
What unites Johnson and Hunt in Northern Ireland? An inability to pretend they care | Séamas O’Reilly | Opinion | The Guardian

Unless you believe in unicorns:


EU Law Analysis: The Day the Unicorns Cried: the deal on phase 1 of the Brexit talks
Boris Johnson's Brexit plan for businesses dismissed by head of WTO | The Independent
(1) Brexit and unicorns - France24 - YouTube
People's Vote UK - Brexit unicorns | Facebook
The Magical Thinking Around Brexit | The New Yorker

It is of course a fantasy:
Brexit and Conservative nationalism: fantasy collides with reality next October — MercoPress
I'm a civil servant – and we can't make Boris Johnson's no-deal fantasy into reality | Anonymous | Opinion | The Guardian
The latest Brexit fantasy is the most absurd of all | Financial Times
Boris Johnson on Brexit in 6 quotes | Financial Times
Brexit and the schoolboy fantasy that we can rule the world without really trying | Prospect Magazine
Philip Hammond lays into Boris Johnson’s Brexit ‘fantasy world’ | The Times

Here is an excellent piece in the New Yorker:

June 24, 2019 Issue

The Empty Promise of Boris Johnson

The man expected to be Britain’s next Prime Minister makes people in power, including himself, appear ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean he’d dream of handing power to anybody else.

By Sam Knight
June 13, 2019



Johnson, an immediately recognizable figure in English culture, combines self-belief with self-sabotage.Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

In the spring of 1989, the Daily Telegraph sent Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to Brussels to cover what was then the European Economic Community. Johnson, who was twenty-four, knew the city well. His father, Stanley, had been one of the first British bureaucrats appointed to work at the European Commission after the United Kingdom joined the bloc, in 1973. Johnson, his parents, and his three younger siblings moved to Belgium when he was nine years old, joining a sleepy community of expats. Johnson was a clever boy. He learned to speak French without an accent.

When Johnson returned, his father invited an experienced Brussels correspondent, Geoff Meade, to lunch at the family’s large house near Waterloo. Meade and his wife, Sandra, were having drinks when a taxi pulled up. “We hadn’t been led to expect anyone else so it was a surprise to see this outstandingly blond chap jump out in the loudest pair of Bermuda shorts possible. I’ll never forget it,” Meade recounted in “Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition,” Sonia Purnell’s haunting biography, from 2011, of the man expected to be Britain’s next Prime Minister. “But it became clear over lunch that I had been invited there as the established hand to meet and help Boris.”

Purnell served as Johnson’s deputy in the Telegraph’s Brussels bureau, and her portrait of the politician as a young reporter makes an indelible impression. At first, Johnson was lost. He had been fired from his first job in journalism, at the Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II’s relations with a boy, which he had attributed to his godfather, an Oxford don. Johnson was disorganized and had few reporting skills. But he had a knack for comedy and a genius for spotting a counter-narrative. In a collection of his journalism, “Lend Me Your Ears” (2003), Johnson describes a free-market approach to trying out opinions: “There will always be someone ready to buck the conventional wisdom, ready to buy when the market is low.” Johnson realized that conventional British reporting on the procedures of the E.E.C. (which was renamed the European Union in 1993) was reverential, accurate, and dull. He went the other way.

Six months after he arrived in Brussels, Johnson began to churn out sly, exaggerated stories that cast the European project as bureaucratically insane. Snails were to be designated as fish, he wrote. Berlaymont, the European Commission’s headquarters, was to be blown up. Condom sizes were to be standardized. “The E.C. has dismissed Italian plans for a maximum condom width of fifty-four millimetres,” Johnson reported in the Telegraph on May 8, 1991. “M Willy Helin, spokesman for the commission’s industrial standards division, said: ‘This is a very serious business.’ ”

Johnson’s stories caused a sensation. His British rivals were ordered to find and replicate them, which they failed to do, because there was rarely anything there. He was a figure, almost, of self-parody. He drove a battered red sports car. His clothes had holes in them. He turned up late at press conferences and spoke deliberately bad French. European officials had no idea what to do with him. “We answer his attacks,” one said. “But the problem is that our answers are not funny.” On one occasion, as Johnson made yet another grand, dishevelled appearance at a news briefing, a French reporter asked, “Qui est ce monstre?” Johnson rapidly became a darling of the Conservative Party’s Euroskeptic right, and a favorite of Margaret Thatcher’s. “Everything I wrote from Brussels I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England,” Johnson told the BBC’s “Desert Island Discs,” in 2005. “It really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.”

It is hard not to discern a psychological motive in Johnson’s assault on the E.U. machine. As his siblings have pointed out, Brussels had been a deeply unhappy place for him as a child. The Johnsons had lived in a big house in the suburbs, next to a forest. According to Purnell, Rachel Johnson, Boris’s younger sister and also a prominent journalist, has compared life at the time to “The Ice Storm,” the Rick Moody novel about a disintegrating family. “There was the same bleakness, the disconnection,” she has said. Stanley had affairs, and the marriage slowly fell apart. When Johnson was ten, his mother, Charlotte, suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized for nine months. Boris and Rachel were sent to boarding school. When Johnson came back to Brussels, he had a wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, whom he had met at Oxford. The couple lived in an unprepossessing apartment above a dentist named Goris. Johnson disappeared into his work at the Telegraph. “I used to get the paper—yesterday’s news—and there’s his byline in fucking Zagreb,” Mostyn-Owen later recalled. “You get past caring and you start drinking malt whisky.” Mostyn-Owen feared that she would crack up, as Johnson’s mother had. (The couple divorced in 1992; Johnson married his second wife, Marina Wheeler, whom he had known as a child in Brussels, twelve days later.) In the Telegraph’s offices, which overlooked an elegant square, Johnson would lock his door and shout obscenities to himself, while he worked himself up to write each story. “This bizarre ritual, to those who witnessed it, was an insight into the torrent of focus and drive that lies beneath Boris’s affable exterior,” Purnell writes.

In 1994, Johnson was recalled to become the Telegraph’s chief political columnist. He was a newspaper star. But his reporting was no longer credible. “He was by then a caricature, and he had to go,” James Landale, then a reporter at the Times of London, who is now the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, told Purnell. To mark Johnson’s departure from Brussels, Landale wrote a poem, based on Hilaire Belloc’s “Matilda,” in which “Boris told such dreadful lies / It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.” When Johnson returned to London, he confessed to an editorial writer at the Telegraph that he had no political opinions. “You must have some,” the colleague reassured him. “Well, I’m against Europe and against capital punishment,” Johnson said. “I’m sure you’ll make something out of that,” came the reply.

To the British public, Johnson is an immediately recognizable figure in the culture. He is Bertie Wooster. His hair is a mess. He falls into ponds. You can find yourself feeling sympathetic toward him, because of an intimation of vulnerability and a sense that he is fundamentally unserious. “Boris has the capacity to lose his way in a sentence, like a child in a nativity play. You want him to succeed, and when he does you share in his triumph,” Michael Gove, Johnson’s old friend from Oxford, fellow-Brexiteer, and political rival, has said. In “Boris: The Adventures of Boris Johnson,” Andrew Gimson, a former colleague of Johnson’s, describes his ability—which is almost unique among contemporary British politicians—to cheer people up. “While many politicians have the urge to perfect society, Boris believes in the imperfectability of mankind, and especially of himself,” Gimson writes. (The biography was published in 2006 and updated in 2016.) “He does not seek to attain impossibly high standards, nor does he impose them on others.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Johnson is not as English as he seems. He was born in New York. His electric-blond hair is an inheritance from his great-grandfather Ali Kemal, an outspoken journalist from northwest Turkey, who served as Interior Minister in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. In 1909, Kemal’s first wife, Winifred Johnson, died in childbirth in England, leaving two children to be raised by her mother. Johnson’s grandfather Osman, who was known as Wilfred, left school at thirteen and went to seek his fortune as a farmer in Egypt. During the Second World War, Wilfred flew for the Royal Air Force. According to family lore, he crashed a plane while trying to do a trick for his wife, a minor European aristocrat named Irène Williams, who was watching from the ground. Wilfred was badly hurt. “This was later spoken of by the family as a great joke,” Gimson writes. (Stanley Johnson clarified that his father crashed after an engine on the aircraft fell off and that Wilfred received a medal for skillful flying and avoiding casualties.)

Boris Johnson’s upbringing was privileged but contingent. Stanley moved jobs. His mother was fragile. It was important to win but vulgar to prepare. Performing plays at Eton, Johnson delighted the other boys by forgetting his lines. Once, when playing Shakespeare’s Richard III, he pasted pages of the script to pillars in the school’s cloisters and spent the performance running between them. He was slapdash and constantly late, and awaited a great future. “I think he honestly believes it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else,” Johnson’s housemaster, Martin Hammond, wrote in the spring of 1982, when Johnson was seventeen. Despite his fecklessness, Johnson expected to be made the Captain of School, the head of the scholars’ house at Eton, and duly was. He looked the part. He sang the hymns. “In an odd way, he likes an ordered world, not a random world,” Hammond told Gimson. “Boris was not a rebel at all. He was a fully signed up member of the tribe.”

It was the same at Oxford, where Johnson joined the Bullingdon Club, the university’s most exclusive all-male dining club, and sought the presidency of the Oxford Union, its debating society. Johnson was brilliant on his feet. Anything could be played for laughs. Johnson became the union president by pretending to support the Social Democratic Party, which was fashionable at the time, and switching to the Conservatives when he got the job. Frank Luntz, an American pollster, was a contemporary, and he warned Johnson not to do it. “This is a very small country and it’s not right,” Luntz said. “It will come back to haunt you.” But it didn’t, because—who cares? In 1988, Johnson contributed a chapter on student politics to “The Oxford Myth,” a book of essays edited by his sister, in which he emphasized the importance of cultivating adoring followers. “The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge,” Johnson wrote. In 2003, as an actual politician, Johnson disavowed this insight into his behavior as a young man: “I think my essay remains the locus classicus of the English genre of bogus self-deprecation.”

This is the Johnsonian way. The lies, the performative phrases, the layers of persona—they accrete, one on top of another, flecked here and there with Latin, until everyone has forgotten what the big deal was. In Brussels, Johnson confined himself to dodgy journalism. When he returned to London, he brought the same approach to jobs, extramarital affairs, and political stances. In 1999, Johnson became the editor of The Spectator, a witty, right-wing magazine that is traditionally close to the Conservative Party. The magazine was owned by the news magnate Conrad Black, who would call Johnson and ask him how it was going. Johnson would say that he was trying to turn the magazine into a cookie. “ ‘An opening of solid meal followed suddenly and dramatically by a chocolate taste explosion,’ ” Black recounted to Gimson. “It’s all rubbish, but it’s imaginative.”

In 2001, at the age of thirty-six, Johnson was elected a Member of Parliament for Henley, a safe Conservative seat in Oxfordshire. When he came under pressure to resign from The Spectator, because of the conflict of interest, he demurred, and coined what has become his best-known political aphorism: “I want to have my cake and eat it.” Johnson hates choosing between things, even right and wrong. In 2003, Lynn Barber, of the Observer, asked Johnson what principles he would be prepared to resign over. “I’m a bit of an optimist so it doesn’t tend to occur to me to resign,” he replied. “I tend to think of a way of Sellotaping everything together and quietly finding a way through, if I can.”

This quality makes for a radically self-dramatizing conception of politics. The public good does not fascinate Johnson. His heroes are Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, two other former journalists and somewhat errant outsiders, who became Conservative Prime Ministers. “I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole,” Disraeli said, on reaching Downing Street. Johnson, likewise, imagines politics as a necessarily upward ascent, a winner-take-all spectacle in which his participation is not questioned. In his “Desert Island Discs” interview, Johnson was asked about his ambition by Sue Lawley, the host. “My silicon chip, my ambition silicon chip, has been programmed to try and scrabble my way up this cursus honorum, this ladder of things. . . . I think British society is designed like that.”

The chase is everything. In 1987, when Johnson married Mostyn-Owen, who was generally considered the most beautiful woman at Oxford, he had to borrow a friend’s dress pants and cufflinks for the church service, and lost his wedding ring at the reception. (Stanley never wore one.) During his speech, Johnson misquoted P. G. Wodehouse and was heckled by a guest who had arrived by helicopter. “Good chap,” Johnson hollered back. “Give the man a coconut.” Mostyn-Owen later described her wedding as “the end of the relationship instead of the beginning.”

In 2008, Johnson became mayor of London, after fighting a disciplined campaign against Ken Livingstone, the Labour incumbent. Johnson had barely any policies and virtually no staff. “Boris is a curious guy,” Nick Boles, a former Conservative M.P., who advised Johnson at the time, has said. “There are no Johnsonites.” When the brand is a personality, it is hard to play a supporting role. In his first months in office, Johnson was drawn to the idea of being a “chairman mayor,” with a deputy who would actually do the job, and he appointed Tim Parker, a business-turnaround specialist, to run the show. (Johnson kept his weekly column at the Telegraph, for which he was paid two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year.) But the experiment failed after a few months. Johnson ran City Hall much as he ran The Spectator—in a chaotic, idiosyncratic fashion, in which things sort of, well, just happened. “Boris is surrounded by people who are seeking to advance their own careers rather than his vision but he doesn’t seem to mind and we’re not clear what his vision is anyway,” one official told Purnell.

To Johnson’s credit, nothing went disastrously wrong during his eight years as mayor. In August, 2011, when the city erupted in a long weekend of rioting over a police killing in North London, he was on a family vacation in Canada, and took three days to return. But when he was criticized by a crowd in Clapham, where shops had been looted, he salvaged the situation by grabbing a broom, as if to join the cleanup effort. The boos turned to applause. Compared with Livingstone, however, Johnson left scarcely a mark on the city. Livingstone, who was London’s first elected mayor, introduced the congestion charge and the Oyster card (for using the Underground), added six thousand police officers, and won government funding for Crossrail, an eighteen-billion-pound Underground line that will open in 2021. Johnson’s legacy is a handful of toys: the city’s popular bike scheme, which was conceived before he took office; a cable car over the Thames; the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a tower/sculpture/slide in the Olympic park, in east London; and retro, double-decker buses that are unbearably hot in the summer. He is drawn to fantastical objects rather than to practicable policies. For years, as mayor, Johnson dreamed of a new airport in the marshes of the Thames, “Boris Island.” Since Brexit, he likes to talk about building a twenty-two-mile bridge over the English Channel to France.

The abiding image of Johnson as mayor comes from the 2012 Olympic Games, which were awarded during Livingstone’s tenure. As he rode a zip line into Victoria Park, as a promotional stunt, he gradually slowed to a halt. He remained stuck there, carrying two small Union Jack flags. The mishap did not harm him in the least. In “Political Sport and the Sport of Politics: A Psycho-Cultural Study of Play, the Antics of Boris Johnson and the London 2012 Olympic Games,” from 2014, Candida Yates, a professor of culture and communication at Bournemouth University, identifies Johnson as a politician who often seems to subvert the existing order but whose persona—quintessentially English, amateur and clownlike—serves only to reinforce it. “Johnson’s political identity is slippery,” Yates writes. He makes people in power, including himself, appear ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean he would dream of handing power to anybody else. He is a fully signed-up member of the tribe. Among British voters, Yates argues, Johnson’s gift is “to associate himself with the fantasy of ‘home’ as being located within an earlier, less complicated and secure pre-globalised age of flag-waving street parties, community sport and class difference.”

Brexit is the ultimate fantasy of home. On February 21, 2016, Johnson announced that he would be arguing for Britain to leave the European Union. At the time—four months before the referendum—the Brexit campaign still didn’t have a unified, formal organization and was badly outgunned by “Stronger In,” the government-backed Remain campaign. According to “All Out War,” the first part of Tim Shipman’s breathless, comprehensive, multivolume account of British politics since 2016, Johnson drafted three opinion articles—two for leaving, one for staying—in order to make up his mind. His first draft contained six hundred words about traffic regulations. A few hours before he declared his decision, he texted David Cameron, the Prime Minister, who had been two years below him at Eton. Paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling, Johnson predicted that “Brexit will be crushed like the toad beneath the harrow.” Dozens of reporters had gathered outside his house. “After thirty years of writing about this . . . I have a chance actually to do something,” Johnson told the scrum. “I will be advocating vote leave—or whatever the team is called, I understand there are many of them—because I want a better deal for the people of this country.” He described his chaotic announcement later as “an imperial goatfuck.”

At first, Johnson promised that he would not take a high-profile role in the Brexit campaign—or criticize Conservatives who were backing Remain—but that pledge lasted only a few days. The referendum debate was made for him. It pitched the government, which was boring, cautious, and cognizant of the flaws in Britain’s relationship with the E.U., against the Brexiteers, whose very name carried a whiff of japes and derring-do. While Cameron and his loyal ministers presented fact sheets warning of the economic and political risks of Brexit, Johnson and the gang toured the country in a bright-red bus, waving asparagus (to promote British farming) and promising to return three hundred and fifty million pounds a week to the National Health Service, which was a lie.

Like the E.E.C. officials in Brussels twenty-five years earlier, the Remain campaign found Johnson impossible to counter. “Boris Johnson is Mr Teflon,” a staffer wrote in a memo, about a month before the vote. “Almost all respondents find him funny and entertaining; some take him seriously, some don’t; but all of them discount his blunders and gaffs with ‘but that’s Boris.’ He’s seen as quite fake, but cleverly so.”

The jolly feel around Johnson enables him to air sinister ideas and dodge the consequences. When Barack Obama told reporters that Brexit would hurt the U.K.’s trading prospects, Johnson wrote a column referring to “the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” (Johnson has also written of “crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” with their “watermelon smiles,” in Africa, and described Muslim women wearing niqabs as “letter boxes.”) At a climactic TV debate between Leave and Remain figures, on the last day of the campaign, Johnson adopted a line—previously used by Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party and now the Brexit Party leader—describing the day of the referendum as Britain’s independence day, a nationalist slogan that brought the house down.

On the morning of June 24, 2016, after the result had become clear, Cameron resigned. Johnson and Gove, the two most high-profile Conservative Brexiteers, appeared at a news conference, looking terrified. Johnson was expected to be installed in Downing Street within weeks. But, not for the first time, when he was confronted with something that he desperately wanted, Johnson lost focus. The day after the most momentous event in British politics for several decades, Johnson went to the countryside to play cricket with the ninth Earl of Spencer. The next day, he hosted a barbecue.

Johnson and Gove paired up to form what was known, very briefly, as the “Dream Team,” to lead a new, pro-Brexit government. The pact lasted six days. The afternoon before Johnson was due to launch his campaign to become Prime Minister, he still hadn’t written a speech. Boles, the M.P. who had advised Johnson when he became mayor in 2008, remembers finding him surrounded by a few lines jotted on scraps of paper. “Johnson was proud of his writing skills, his way with words,” Shipman writes. “And in his hour of maximum exposure they appeared to be failing him.” Johnson told Boles, “I’ve got nothing.” Gove ran to become Prime Minister himself. Johnson withdrew from the contest before it began.

The implosion of the Dream Team opened the way for Theresa May to become Prime Minister. To Johnson’s great surprise—and to everybody else’s—May chose him as her Foreign Secretary. (“What next, Dracula as health minister?” a spokesman for Germany’s Social Democratic Party asked.) At the age of fifty-two, Johnson was appointed to one of Britain’s great offices of state. Given the chance to frame a credible narrative for leaving the E.U., and to influence and improve Britain’s relationships with its neighbors in Europe and around the world, Johnson did none of those things. It is true that he was impeded by May’s close control of Brexit from Downing Street. It is also true that Johnson’s sole contribution to the conversation about the difficult trade-offs involved in Britain’s most important political challenge since the Second World War has been a reheating of his two-decade-old adage: “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”

Johnson’s spell as Foreign Secretary was punctuated by moments of idiocy. In January, 2017, inside the Shwedagon Pagoda, a Buddhist shrine in Myanmar, a microphone picked up his muttered recital of a colonial-era poem (Kipling again), before the British Ambassador stopped him. That November, Johnson said that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman imprisoned in Tehran since 2016 on spying charges, had been teaching journalism in the country, when her family insists that she was merely on vacation. Johnson’s mistake was seized on by Iranian officials; Zaghari-Ratcliffe is still in prison.

“Inside the Foreign Office,” a BBC documentary series that premièred last November, captured Johnson as a distracted, agenda-free buffoon. “We got the nice one, rather than extraordinary rendition,” Johnson says, as he and his team board a British government jet bound for Portugal. “Why are they trying to shaft us?” he asks of the French, during the Brexit negotiations. “Do they want more money?” In July, 2018, after May revealed the shape of her planned compromise with the E.U., Johnson left the government. The Brexit dream, he wrote in his resignation letter, “is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt.”

Last month, Johnson was the first candidate to enter the race to succeed May. Whoever replaces her as the Conservative Party leader will automatically become Prime Minister. As of this writing, there are ten Tory M.P.s in the contest. Their fellow-M.P.s will choose the final two, who will then seek the votes of the hundred and sixty thousand mainly white, mainly older, fervently pro-Brexit Conservative members around the country. Johnson, who has promised to take Britain out of the E.U. on October 31st this year, with or without a deal, is the overwhelming favorite. He has had a haircut and is in modest, on-script campaigning mode. Of course, he could still fail to become Prime Minister. His self-belief is matched only by his capacity for self-sabotage. Until this moment, Johnson’s life and career have been a kind of monument to wishful thinking—of ridiculous expectations shockingly fulfilled. Brexit is much the same. “I’ve got nothing,” Johnson said. Britain is about to find out what nothing means. ♦

This article has been updated to include Stanley Johnson’s account of a plane crash involving his father, Wilfred Johnson.This article appears in the print edition of the June 24, 2019, issue, with the headline “I’ve Got Nothing.”

Sam Knight is a staff writer at The New Yorker based in London.Read more »
The Empty Promise of Boris Johnson | The New Yorker
.
.
.

making a list of life's pleasures

A Radio 4 Programme looks at "The Pleasures of Brecht":

A celebration of the simple joys of life, and the story of Brecht’s much-loved poem that described them.

In 1954, poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht was the leader of his own theatre company and an international literary star. But his relationship with the East German communist party was growing increasingly strained, with projects derailed and poems censored. It was a time of disappointment, as he began to see the gap between the hopes that kept him alive throughout the years of war and exile, and the reality of life in the GDR.

Out of this context came a simple poem, Vergnügungen, a list of pleasures, which moves from “the first look out of the window in the morning” via showering, swimming, the dog, dialectics and “comfortable shoes” to “being friendly”, a phrase that for Brecht signified a utopian ideal.

The poem is a statement of the delights of the everyday, but it also looks out into the world beyond the private sphere.

Writer and ecologist Joanna Macy, philosopher Christopher Hamilton, pleasure activist Adrienne Maree Brown and German scholar Karen Leeder reflect on what Brecht’s list of simple pleasures can tell us about our own time.

Music composed and performed by Phil Smith.
Piano pieces recorded on location at Brecht's house in Buckow, Germany

BBC Radio 4 - The Pleasures of Brecht

“Pleasures
First look from morning's window
The rediscovered book
Fascinated faces
Snow, the change of the seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Showering, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Comprehension
New music
Writing, planting
Traveling
Singing
Being friendly”

― Bertolt Brecht

Here are a few more - to help inspire your own list-making:
making a list of life's pleasures - Google Search
.
.
.

how language shapes the way we think

A very interesting TED Talk:

There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."

Lera Boroditsky: How language shapes the way we think | TED Talk

Some languages have a 'gender problem':
Grammatical gender - Wikipedia
Should Language Be More Gender-Neutral?
How to Tackle Gender Issues in Your Target Language - Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips
Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters) | Psychology Today UK
How the world's languages handle thorny gender issues
Can #MeToo Fix Spain’s Language Problem? - The Atlantic
El problema and la solución, a masculine/feminine problem | Language Institute Regina Coeli

Languages are dying out:
The Endangered Language Fund - Home
national geographic endangered languages - YouTube
.
.
.

the future of work: “capitalism will abolish laundry day” >>> or: “fully automated luxury communism”

There is a lot of fear about ‘the robots taking over’...

Here's a video of the future from Shanghai:
Futures Forum: Automation and the future of work > How secure are East Devon’s new warehousing jobs?

And here's a TED Talk from Silicon Valley:
Jay Doubleyou: pointless work, artificial intelligence and the universal basic income

There is also a lot of, justified, concern about how we are going to take care of our ageing population:
Futures Forum: “Without any plan to tackle the financial crisis in the social care system, it’s hard to see how the vision in this 10 year NHS plan can be achieved.”

And a week ago saw the younger generations show very justified concern about the most pressing issue of our time:
Another student climate change protest in Exeter is happening today
@fridaysforfutu6
@ExeterXRYouth

Maybe this is a way out:
Futures Forum: The future of work: “Capitalism will abolish laundry day” >>> or: “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”

Here’s an interview just out:



Aaron Bastani interview: Robots are going to take your job – and that’s a good thing

Here are a couple of reviews - positive and negative:
Opinion | The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. - The New York Times
The folly of 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' | Acton Institute
Fully Automated Luxury Communism: book review | openDemocracy
Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani – a manifesto for the future | Books | The Guardian

Although maybe China is not the best model:
Jay Doubleyou: foucault's discipline and punish made easier
.
.
.

teaching philosophy in the language classroom

Bringing philosophy into the English language classroom makes very good sense:
Jay Doubleyou: complexity
Jay Doubleyou: socratic method
Jay Doubleyou: socratic method pt 2
Jay Doubleyou: questioning and problem-solving
Jay Doubleyou: english for academic purposes: critical thinking
Jay Doubleyou: the trivium method of critical thinking and creative problem solving

We can learn a lot with philosophy:
Jay Doubleyou: the philosophy foundation
Jay Doubleyou: philosophy in the classroom

Steve Hoggins is doing interesting things:
Why I became a philosophy teacher: to get children thinking about the big ideas in life | Teacher Network | The Guardian

And here he is again:

IMPROVING ENGLISH THROUGH TEACHING PHILOSOPHY - A CASE STUDY

Posted by Steve Hoggins on 11th December 2017  

Part of a series of stories that highlight the impact The Philosopsophy Foundation has according to the latest Social Impact Report

Steven Campbell-Harris is a Philosophy Foundation specialist working a number of schools in London. He tells us about how the story-telling and philosophy sessions helped both the class and the class teacher. Here's Steven blog:

"I worked for a term with a year 5 class doing the If Odyssey project. It is based on Peter Worley's bookof the same name which breaks Homer's epic in to 14 sessions of story-telling and philosophy, for children. I used a lot of different techniques like response detector and mini-debates to develop discussions in the classroom. Over the course of the term the teacher said that the children: 

• made regular connections in English classes to the Odyssey stories (this is just like in the Cyclops story...) 
• were more willing to pursue different points of view 
• dialogued with each other more 

The Philosophy Foundation - Improving English through teaching philosophy - A case Study

And here's Peter Worley:
The Philosophy Foundation - Peter Worley | A philosophical enquiry strategy for up-against-it secondary school teachers




(1) 40 Lessons to Get Children Thinking: Philosophical Thought Adventures Across the Curriculum - YouTube

This is especially for children:
Philosophy for Children - Wikipedia

But we can also do it with language learners of all ages:
Waxing philosophical in English class with 'Thinking Experiments' | The Japan Times
The Philosophy Foundation - Improving English through teaching philosophy - A case Study
.
.
.

emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI), emotional leadership (EL), emotional quotient (EQ) and emotional intelligence quotient (EIQ), is the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one's goal(s).^[1][2]

Although the term first appeared in a 1964 paper by Michael Beldoch, it gained popularity in the 1995 book by that title, written by author and science journalist Daniel Goleman.^[3] Since this time, EI, and Goleman's 1995 analysis, have been criticized within the scientific community,^[4] despite prolific reports of its usefulness in the popular press.^[5][6][7][8]

Emotional intelligence - Wikipedia

A keen practitioner - and someone who developed these ideas some 25 years ago - is Daniel Goleman:
Emotional Intelligence (Goleman) - Learning Theories
Emotional Intelligence - Daniel Goleman

Here's an animation:



(1) Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman ► Animated Book Summary - YouTube

These skills can be used in the workplace:



(1) Crucial Competence: Emotional and Social Intelligence in Leadership - YouTube

It's not easy:



(1) "How We've Been Misled by 'Emotional Intelligence'" | Kris Girrell | TEDxNatick - YouTube

Perhaps we should finish with Pixar:



(1) Inside Out: Emotional Theory Comes Alive - YouTube

But not everyone thinks it's a great idea:
What’s Wrong with Emotional Intelligence

What Emotional Intelligence Is and Is Not | Psychology Today

The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence - The Atlantic

It's Time to Stop Talking About EQ, Because It Doesn't Actually Exist | Inc.com

Daniel Goleman Defends Emotional Intelligence

Is the Theory of Emotional Intelligence a Scam?

02/27/2017 12:50 pm ET Updated Feb 27, 2017

What is more beneficial in life; a high EQ or IQ? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Jordan B Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, clinical psychologist, on Quora:

There is no such thing as an Emotional Intelligence Quotient. Let me repeat that: “There is no such thing as an EQ.“ The idea was popularized by a journalist, Daniel Goleman, not a psychologist. You can’t just invent a trait. You have to define it and measure it and distinguish it from other traits and use it to predict the important ways that people vary.

EQ is not a psychometrically valid concept. Insofar as it is anything (which it isn’t), it’s the Big Five trait agreeableness, although this depends, as it shouldn’t, on which EQ measure is being used (they should all measure the same thing). Agreeable people are compassionate and polite, but they can also be pushovers. Disagreeable people, on average (if they aren’t too disagreeable) make better managers, because they are straightforward, don’t avoid conflict and cannot be easily manipulated.

Let me say it again: There is no such thing as an EQ. Scientifically, it’s a fraudulent concept, a fad, a convenient bandwagon, a corporate marketing scheme. (Here’s an early critique by Davies, M., Stankov, L. and Roberts, D. Emotional intelligence: in search of an elusive construct. Here’s a conclusion reached by Harms and Crede, in an excellent article — comprehensive and well thought-through (2010):

“Our searches of the literature revealed only six articles in which the authors either explicitly examined the incremental validity of EI scores over measures of both cognitive ability and Big Five personality traits in predicting either academic or work performance, or presented data in a manner that allowed examination of this issue. Not one of these six articles (Barchard,2003; Newsome, Day, & Catano, 2000;O’Connor & Little, 2003; Rode, Arthaud-Day, Mooney, Near, & Baldwin, 2008;Rode et al., 2007; Rossen & Kranzler,2009) showed a significant contribution for EI in the prediction of performance after controlling for both cognitive ability and the Big Five... For correlations involving the overall EI construct, EI explained almost no incremental variance in performance ([change in prediction] = .00. Findings were identical when considering only cases involving an ability-based measure of IE....”

Remaining Issues in Emotional Intelligence Research: Construct Overlap, Method Artifacts, and Lack of Incremental Validity

Harms and Crede also commented:

“...proofs of validity [for EI] seem to come from measuring constructs that have existed for a long time and are simply being relabeled and recategorized. For example, one of the proposed measures of ESC, the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (Mikolajczak, Luminet, Leroy, & Roy,2007), makes use of measures of assertiveness, social competence, self-confidence, stress management, and impulsivity among other things. Most, if not all, of these constructs, are firmly embedded in and well-accounted for by well-designed measures of personality traits such as the Hogan Personality Inventory (Hogan & Hogan, 1992)and the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (Tellegen & Waller, 2008). The substantial relationships observed between these ESC and trait-based EI measures, and personality inventories bear this out. It, therefore, appears that the predictive validity of ESC or EI measures may be accounted for in large part by the degree to which they assess sub-facets of higher-order traits relevant to the outcomes being predicted. For example, Cherniss (2010) relates that two studies of self-discipline showed them to be significant predictors of academic performance and then criticizes Landy (2005) for not taking them into account in a review of studies of ‘‘social intelligence.’’ Given that self-control (or impulse control)is widely regarded as a major sub-facet of conscientiousness (Roberts, Chernyshenko,Stark, & Goldberg, 2005) and that numerous studies have linked Conscientiousness with academic performance, that there is a relationship between a facet of Conscientiousness, and academic performance is hardly news.”

IQ is a different story. It is the most well-validated concept in the social sciences, bar none. It is an excellent predictor of academic performance, creativity, ability to abstract, processing speed, learning ability and general life success.

Other traits are essential to overall success, including conscientiousness, which is an excellent predictor of grades, managerial and administrative ability, and life outcomes, on the more conservative side.

It should also be noted that IQ is five or more times as powerful a predictor as even good personality trait predictors such as conscientiousness. The true relationship between grades, for example, and IQ might be as high as r = .50 or even .60 (accounting for 25-36% of the variance in grades). Conscientiousness, however, probably tops out at around r = .30, and is more typically reported as r = .25 (say, 5 to 9% of the variance in grades). There is nothing that will provide you with a bigger advantage in life than a high IQ. Nothing.

In fact, if you could choose to be born at the 95th percentile for wealth, or the 95th percentile for IQ, you would be more successful at age forty as a consequence of the latter choice.

It might be objected that we cannot measure traits such as conscientiousness as well as we measure IQ, as we primarily rely on self or other reports for the former. But no one has solved this problem. There are no “ability” tests for conscientiousness. I am speaking as someone who has tried to produce such tests for ten years, and failed (despite trying dozens of good ideas, with top students working on the problem). IQ is king. This is why academic psychologists almost never measure it. If you measure it along with your putatively “new” measure, IQ will kill your ambitions. For the career minded, this is a no-go zone. So people prefer to talk about multiple bits of intelligence and EQ and all these things that do not exist.

There is also no such thing as “grit,” despite what Angela Duckworth says. Grit is conscientiousness, plain and straightforward (although probably more the industrious side than the orderly side). All Duckworth and her compatriots did was fail to notice that they had re-invented a very well documented phenomena, that already had a name (and, when they did notice it, failed to produce the appropriate mea culpas. Not one of psychology’s brighter moments). A physicist who “re-discovered” iron and named it melignite, or something equivalent would be immediately revealed as ignorant or manipulative (or, more likely, as ignorant and manipulative), and then taunted out of the field. Duckworth? She received a MacArthur Genius grant for her trouble. That’s all as reprehensible as the self-esteem craze (self-esteem, by the way, is essentially .65 Big Five trait neuroticism (low) and .35 extraversion (high), with some accurate self-assessment of general life competence thrown in, for those who are a bit more self-aware). See: Self-Liking and Self-Competence Separate Self-Evaluation From Self-Deception: Associations With Personality, Ability, and Achievement.

In case I haven’t made myself clear: there is no such thing as EQ, grit or self-esteem.

It’s crooked psychology. Reminiscent of all the recent upheaval in the social psychology subfield: Final Report: Stapel Affair Points to Bigger Problems in Social Psychology.

This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Is the Theory of Emotional Intelligence a Scam? | HuffPost
.
.
.