Peter Hegner Bonfils skriver på sin blog på Modkraft:
Århus har gennem de sidste 100 år først og fremmest været en socialdemokratisk by; en by hvor den politiske spillebane VAR socialdemokratiet.
Så når en socialdemokratisk formand og statsminister bliver spillet ud af den bane af titusinder af fremmødte århusianere, så er det en begivenhed, der meget vel kan gå over i historien og blive et sindbillede på socialdemokratiets kollaps og tab af magt.
Rolf Dobelli skriver i The Guardian om, hvordan nyhedsformidling er en slags kognitionenens fast food, der fylder dig med en lind strøm af trivielle kendsgerninger og sidste-minuts-opdateringer, der stjæler din opmærksomhed, forhindrer dig i at se det store billede og forvirrer mere end godt er.
Jeg har ikke selv set TV-avis i årevis og åbner meget sjældent en avis, så selv om man altid kan diskutere det enkelte argument, har han nogle særdeles vigtige pointer:
News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we’d expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That’s not the case.
News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.
News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, “The market moved because of X” or “the company went bankrupt because of Y” is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of “explaining” the world.
News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory’s capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.
Link: News is bad for you – and giving it up will make you happier
Gymnasieskolernes lærerforening har i dag denne kommentar til Bjarne Corydons retorik i skolekonflikten i en annonce, der bringes i diverse dagblade.
Adventures and Japes har et langt og som sædvanlig fremragende indlæg om, hvorfor skolelockouten er et overgreb og et brud på samfundets spilleregler:
There is a social contract here and it is being broken. I pay taxes so that they can send the kids to school. Instead, they are with grandma and hanging around shopping centres. The government is pocketing the millions meant for our salaries and spending it on.. what? Our union support payments are taxed as if they were an income *and* we have to pay them back. So, the government gets to keep half our “wages” when we don’t even. The government gets to skip out on paying a month’s salary with no accountability but still gets the same in taxes from us. You see this in dodgy dictatorships, not Scandy socialist paradises.
I am also angry because of the lack of fair play. The model of negotiations is that if both parties cannot reach a compromise, then a lockout hurts both parties until negotiations re-start. The KL is not being hurt by this. They are about the only party to this mess that is not being injured by the lockout. I am furious that they were able to threaten a lockout on day one, I am angry they had nothing in the way of compromise, it is outrageous that the politicians claim THIS is the Danish Model and refuse to consider re-starting negotiations.
The incompetence is also horrifying. Apparently, every time the teacher union man, Bondo, says “Oh for heaven’s sake, just do a political intervention already, stop the lockout out!” it pushes the political intervention back two days, so the precious Danish Model is not called into question. The politicians did not expect this much popular support, they thought people would turn against ‘lazy, spoiled teachers’ in much greater numbers. The politicians thought they could starve the unions out in two weeks, they have money for a month. The politicians thought they could run things like this and no one would notice the loss of a system that Danish people value. The politicians are possibly going to wait until after May Day (a celebration of the labour movement), before they do an intervention because they do not want to look like hypocrites as they praise the Danish Model.
I am angry that there is now no political movement in Denmark that supports me. There are the blue who hate me because I am unashamedly foreign and the red who mistreat me because they don’t think they can afford me. I expect the blue team will win next election and where does that leave people like me?
But most of my outrage is for the students. They deserve better than this. Some countries have longer holidays but the trade off is longer school days or there are activity camps. Having an indefinite time off of school means you cannot use the time for good. I don’t know how many of my readers have taught children with special needs or unsupportive families? After the summer holidays, you have to teach them things you already taught them. You need to make sure they can still read. You need to lay the ground rules again. It takes about a month to get up and going again. Those students will be especially ill-served by this government. And then there are disabled children who really need routine and certainty. Facing them with “I don’t know when school will start again,” is cruelty. And then there are students in their final year who have been preparing for exams. The government solution is “Well, we’ll just give you your average grade.” Why not do that every year then, if the exams are not important?
All the students of Denmark are being held hostage by incompetent politicians.
Som sædvanlig: Læs endelig det hele
Jeg var i dag nede forbi Aarhus Hovedbibliotek og fik lige et billede af Ubuntu Danmarks stand, hvor de gør opmærksom på, hvad man kan med Ubuntu – dette er timet med, at biblioteket pr. 1. april 2013 er gået over til Ubuntu på de fleste af deres publikums-PC’er.
Det er et godt initiativ, som man kun kan håbe på, at flere biblioteker og andre institutioner rundt om i landet vil efterligne.
Bemærk: Den artikel, der ligger til almindelig uddeling yders til højre er Ole Wolfs blogindlæg Linux er også bedst for almindelige brugere, som vi også tidligere har linket til her på siden.
Mere info hos European Citizens’ Initiative for an Unconditional Basic Income.
Adventures and Japes har svaret:
Main Characters:-
- Antorini (Christine Antorini) Curly haired extra from Borgen. Antorini is the Education Minister of Denmark, also in the Social Democratic party. Teaching experience: none.
- Bondo (Anders Bondo Christensen): Harry Potter: the elbow patch years. Bondo represents the Danish Teacher’s Union. Teaching experience: lots.
- Corydon (Bjarne Corydon): A shaven headed extra from Breaking Bad. Corydon is the Finance Minister of Denmark. He is from the Social Democratic party (‘Moderaterne’ on Borgen, ‘Labour’ in the UK). He has a tumblr dedicated to him looking sceptical. Teaching experience: none.
- Ziegler (Michael Ziegler) Leader of the “Borough Council Union”, a nationwide group representing the interests of the borough councils in Denmark. Teaching experience: none.
Minor Characters
- Jelved (Marianne Jelved): Member of the Radikale Venstre party. Used to be a teacher. Is married to a teacher. Looks a bit like Sandi Toksvig’s aunt. I have met her. She has observed two of my lessons. She is okay by me. And for a politician she does not say a lot. Teaching experience: lots.
- Vestager (Margrethe Vestager): Leader of the Radikale Venstre party (think Old Labour/Liberal mashup) and Minister for Economics. Teaching experience: none.
Chorus
- The children: Attend schools in Denmark
- The parents: Send their children to schools in Denmark
- The teachers: Work at schools in Denmark
- The taxpayers: Live in Denmark and pay for this show
Hr. Kommentar skriver:
Arbejdsløshed i sig selv er ikke et kæmpe problem. Det er godt for miljøet, og det giver folk mulighed for at opdage det vidunderlige i at have tid, men ingen penge, i stedet for at have penge og ingen tid.
Det er en gigantisk socialiseringsmaskine, men det er ikke nogen særligt spændende mennesker, der kommer ud af maskinen. Det holder også uligheden nede, men det er fordi man har besluttet, at arbejde er den primære mekanisme for fordeling af velstanden – det kunne ændres.
Men det er et problem, hvis samfundets værdier drejer sig omkring det at arbejde. Når der ikke er arbejde nok til alle, og dem uden arbejde får at vide, at det er fordi de er dovne og selviske, så er det meget skidt for dem, der ikke kan få arbejde.
Så knep jer, der skælder ud på arbejdsløse, mens I får folk fyret i massevis. Knep jer i røvhullet med en rusten morgenstjerne, for I er ondskabsfulde, ækle mennesker, der ikke fortjener bedre.
Jeg kunne vist ikke have sagt det bedre selv. Hvad er det nu, der er galt med slagordet “arbejde gør fri”?
Hvis du undrer dig over, hvor DA og regeringen med flere gerne vil hen, når de taler om at “forbedre konkurrenceevnen” og skære i arbejdsløshedsforsikringen:
Inside Amazon’s flagship factory in Rugeley, Staffordshire, a new way of working is evolving. There is a strong topnote of distrust, evinced by the full-body scanners that workers have to pass, every time they leave, to prove they haven’t stolen anything. The profound insecurity built into the employment model is dressed up as discipline – which is to say, Amazon expects huge seasonal fluctuations in the number of people it needs, yet likes to mask their dismissals behind a misdeameanour, so a lot of people get axed for crimes like being ill. There’s a lifesized blonde lady made of cardboard at the entrance, with a think bubble coming out of her head that says, “This is the best job I’ve ever had!” If that detail alone is enough to make your blood run cold, marry it to the testimony of the chairman of nearby Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club: “The feedback we’re getting is that it’s like being in a slave camp.”
Of all the details revealed by the Financial Times, the one that sank my spirits was the electronic tagging – workers have a handheld device directing them to goods. But these devices also measure their productivity in real time. If they lag behind, the machine bugs them. They are issued with constant warnings not to talk to one another or tarry for any reason. A lot of people find it quite stressful. Call them crazy.
Ja, Amazon.
Tesco, en af verdens største supermarkedskæder, kan også godt:
Meanwhile, in Tesco’s Donabate distribution centre in Dublin, workers wearing these tags are awarded percentages for their speediness (100% if they perform a task in the time estimated, 200% if they’re twice as fast, and so on), but claim they are docked if they take a loo break; afterwards, they find they have to work much faster – to get back up to their 100%. To put it in context, workers routinely scoring 110% are reported to be sweating quite hard for most of the day. So making up your targets is no walk in the park.
Så hvis du undrer dig over, hvorfor dagpengene partout skal forringes, de sociale ydelser skæres og mindstelønnen skæres ned, så er svaret her: De skal sættes ned og helst afskaffes, for at folk kan blive desperate – for at du kan blive desperat - efter at få lov til at tage sådan et job til 80 kroner i timen. Det er dét, som regeringen og DA mener, når de taler om “konkurrenceevne” og “de lande, vi normalt sammenligner os med”.
Link: When did being lowly paid become a criminal offence?
Ordet fanger er en fremragende dokumentarfilm om den retorik og det skred i menneskesyn, der i årene 2001-2011 førte Danmark helt ud til kanten. Se den før din nabo.
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