Quentin Crisp > Recent Status Updates

Chapter 4 concentrates on the adverse effect AI is having on healthcare and education. "... AI in healthcare won't broaden access. What it will do is worsen the working conditions of nurses and other health care providers, while widening the gulf between those who can get quality health care ... and the rest of us ..." Also mentioned in this chapter is the case of "Pierre" who was talked into suicide by a chatbot.

This paints quite a picture of rapacity, irresponsibility and exasperating human stupidity. The title of the book is not inappropriate given what it reports.

"... on Thanksgiving Day 2022, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the availability of Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' mode. Hours later, it was involved in an eight-car pile-up on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge." Etc. From page 16.

"Identity group favouritism is an essential tool for anyone who wants to achieve hegemony in the [Labour] party; it is an essential weapon in the armoury but also an attractive one because it allows factions to hide attempts to defeat their rivals behind a veil of equality and social justice."

Continues to be densely and carefully argued, with plenty of supporting evidence.

Very interesting section around here on the concept of 'existential defeat', particularly in relation to the white working class in Britain.

"For some time now, the problem has no longer resided in a political line or programme: it is a problem of life itself." In other words, it doesn't matter now 'who you vote for'. The post-totalitarian system controls all specific political programmes. "Thus defending the aims of life, defending humanity [against the post-totalitarian system] is ... a more realistic approach ..."

So far, informative and carefully argued.

Page 39: "Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line *denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety*."

This is altogether too relevant to our current times. I am sure there are countless people in the UK already who think (or pretend) they are defending human rights or serving the public when what they are actually doing is, enforcing, to use Havel's term, the "post-totalitarian system": "... it is precisely the diktat of the empty phrase that summons to power people who use empty phrases ..."

Actually on page xv, but the normalisation of internet formatting won't allow for that truth.

I first read this in the late eighties, as many I knew at the time did. The prose so far is more evocative than I remember it.

"... it is perhaps unsurprising to find evidence of a sharp decline of public trust in media, including the BBC. While in 2003 81% of British people said they 'trusted BBC news journalists to tell the truth,' since then this figure has collapsed to 60% in 2010 and a record low of 44% in 2019, by which time only 8% trusted BBC journalists 'a great deal'. This is clearly problematic for the BBC." One would hope so.

P.117: "While the new elite routinely see their values and voice reflected back at them, from the BBC homepage through to museums, bestseller lists, advertisements, television dramas, politics and more, traditionalists routinely struggle to recognize their world view at all. ..."

"When Neil Kinnock led Labour into battle against Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, there had been sixty-four Labour MPs who had previously held working-class jobs. When Tony Blair won his second landslide, in 2001, the number had fallen to forty-nine. ... And when Keir Starmer replaced [Jeremy Corbyn], promising to repair the Labour Party's relationship with the Red Wall, there were only seven."

"As academic Francis Fukuyama points out, to say a country is welcoming of others may well be true, but it cannot be the basis of an entire national identity . . ." (from page 84).

We've got to the part where time speeds up -- vividly described, if just a little laboured. It seems a terrible shame that he died so young at Ypres. Curious, I've done some casual research. The internet tells me he wrote a poem called 'Amanda Panda'. Can this be true?

It's strange reading this after some decades. I liked the scene-setting, until the discovery of the manuscript, began to feel the 'unholy swine invasion' part absurd and overwrought, but have, but page 98, found myself gripped again by what is undoubtedly a very strange story, built on very odd conceptions.

We often hear that in politics, the right has won the economic argument and the left the cultural argument. It's interesting to read a summary of how that happened concretely in the case of Britain, with the economic liberalism of Thatcher being adopted by Blair's New Labour, and the social policies of New Labour being adopted by the Conservatives since (despite deceptive signalling on the part of the Conservatives).