Wonders of Nature (Worm Sex, Slug Sex)

From Engels On The Family:

"If strict monogamy is the height of virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself."

(In your stomach I presume).

Amazingly beautiful grossness:

I'm Not Your Customer

I find the training of staff to refer to the users of public and government services as 'customers' increasingly disconcerting. It happened to me most recently at the job centre when, trying to explain that it would have been useful for someone to tell me that I had to file my reimbursement claims before travel when informing me of the scheme, I was curtly told that "the onus is on the customer to find out." In what sense am I a customer of the job centre? If so then they are certainly failing in their 'customer service' (which presumably is the idea in at least some of these cases; 'we treat and value people as though they had money to spend with us' etc.) by apparently not providing any. If I was a real customer, then I would have the choice to take my 'business' elsewhere, but I don't. I have no choice but to deal with these petty bureaucrat assholes. They don't respect us precisely because for this dependence.

A job that I applied for recently (and didn't get) with a company with a large proportion of government welfare-to-work scheme contracts also referred to those that they helped into work as their 'customers'.* Well yes, these companies do receive disgracefully large sums of money from the government for placing these people in jobs. But the 'customers' themselves aren't paying. They are not choosing to enter into any economic contracts. Tagging people under the label of 'customers' places them involuntarily into an economy of exchange and in doing so undermines the seeming human motivation within the role of the advisor of helping people out.

The same goes for the supporters of charities. We do not buy your services. A charitable donation is precisely that. "Q: If I sponsor a child, what will I get in return?" asks an ActionAid ad. Is this really a question that needs to be asked? Are people really only buying bi-annual letters and a sense of their own morality? Conversely I seem to remember being instructed once in one of my waitressing jobs always to refer to customers as 'clients' as this term seems to make more discrete the cash-for-services implication (which is of course exactly what dining out in a restaurant is). I suppose that the seeping of business-speak into every aspect of our lives is just symptomatic of the commercialisation of everything in general. But I can't help but feel that this use of 'customer' is not so innocuous as to be just a reflection a business-based society: it is prescriptive; it alters the way in which we relate to one another, specifically it determines the nature of our human relations as one of economic exchange and in doing so subtly precludes our ability and desire to just to help one another out. Which perhaps goes some way in explaining the unhelpfulness of the job centre staff?

* An article on indymedia a couple of days ago revealing the Christian foundations and ethos of one such organisation (at least not a private company this time) 'Working Links' (from whom I also got rejected) opened my eyes to the ideologies behind these schemes. I realise now that going on about an understanding of social barriers and holistic approaches in my cover letters wasn't going to get me any interviews. According to an advertisement on Reed, welfare-to-work is one of the fastest growing sectors of graduate employment. It seems to me that money would be far better spent training those employed by the government to actually help people who want it into work that has some meaning for them and that they might stick to rather than bullying them into the first minimum wage job that comes along, instead of handing out lucrative contracts to private businesses.

Dubious Science

The front page of The Independent today reports the outrage at Nobel (although its controversial) scientist James Watson's outrageously racist assertions that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites. And that (I'm paraphrasing) our social policies are all erroneously constructed and bound to fall short in their non-reflection of this fact. Its always a bit shocking when an academic of respected standing comes out with this sort of thing. Although its not entirely rare. I remember similar outrage at my uni last year when a member of the psychology dept (Dr. Philippe Rushton) came out with some similiar crap on gender - he was already well known in the controversial scientific studies stakes for having reached the same conclusions as Watson via psychological methods... something about it being a trade-off between brain size and penis size. Watson's new outburst comes not to announce the results of any fresh scientific evidence but rather the release of his new book. In which, as quoted in the Independent, he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically." Leaving aside the complex problematics of the term 'intellectual capacities', and the problems of drawing such implications from whether or not there is 'firm reason to anticipate' anything, yes of course there is biological difference between races of people that evolved apart. Strikes me though that all the responses which try to rubbish the possibility of scientifically 'proven' racial difference in such areas miss the key point - which is that, on Watson's own terms, this is totally irrelevant. If we are talking on a social level then we are talking about human beings in social terms - as members of society, as citizens. This is the framework within which the term 'intellectual capacities' gains its meaning. To talk about genetic difference of races in such terms has no valuable meaning - that concerns human beings as a species, as animals. If we are to credit human beings with human intelligence - with the ability to exist as part of a society, with the power of choice - then we are no longer talking of humans in animal terms. They are two incommensurate perspectives. Only by considering human beings from the first perspective can you have compassion, morality etc. etc. ... can you draw conclusions about the structure of society. Probably all best just ignored I think. Although I imagine that with regard to his imminent UK lecture tour the opposite will now be true.

Suits & Sweets

This weekend I went to two job fairs in London - one for the charity and not-for-profit sector and the other one for graduates. Neither of them were particularly useful - the charity one had a bunch of organisations that I’d love to work for but who wouldn’t have me for my lack of experience and the grad one had a bunch of companies that would have tried to lure me into their offices with a trail of free sweets if they could have done so but all of whom there’s no way in hell I’d ever dream of pledging my services (and probably my soul) to. It struck me as a pretty sorry state of affairs that as a graduate you have to fight hard against the current not to just be channelled into dedicating yourself to the forces of evil for the indefinite future. Which likely means being unemployed. Surely certain organisations are kicking themselves in the foot by letting all the smartest/most skilled of the new generations go to work for the corporations that they are constantly pitting themselves against? For example, I attended the London demo in solidarity with the Burmese protests last weekend. Probably about half of the placards being waved about had Amnesty’s sign on them, a lot of them were protesting the continued presence of foreign business in Burma, especially Total Oil. Jobs with Amnesty are nigh on impossible for anyone of my lowly unworldly graduate stature. There were several global oil companies at the grad fair. It took several minutes of listening to one grey-faced, grey-suited twenty-something rep whose stall was declaring amazing travel opportunities before I managed to ascertain what it was that the company actually did - working with the governments (or dictatorships) of politically and economically unstable countries to promote them as attractive investment opportunities to foreign business. I politely expressed my disinterest and went to find some free humbugs to quell my rage. Something’s very skewed here. And I still have no job.