Charity Executives' Pay, £500 Toothbrush, Iran, Pseuds Corner, Social Media
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| Charity William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) Photo Credit: Birmingham Museums Trust [Public Domain] |
...Fewer than a tenth of charities publish the exact salaries of their chief executives in an easily accessible form on their website. Only four in ten give the precise sum in their annual report. The rest publish only salary bands.
...Of the five largest charities, only Oxfam gives the precise salary paid to its chief executive on its website. Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is paid £120,000 a year.
Nuffield Health, the biggest charity listed the total pay of its chief executive, Steve Gray, within an income band of £840,000-£849,000 in its annual report. This included a performance-related bonus of £300,000.
Cancer Research UK ... chief executive Michelle Mitchell ... was paid £244,000 plus benefits worth £11,600.
... Sir Stephen Bubb, director of the Oxford Institute of Charity, said:
"The country's national charities have nothing to hide. They make an enormous contribution to the nation. Their leaders, talented and impressive figures, should be up front in publishing their salaries and explaining the massive impact their charities have."
(Greg Hurst, The Times, 2020)
Are charities just businesses now? It certainly looks that way. Should it be that the more people contribute, the higher the bonus of the chief executive? Can't these people just be paid a salary?
£500 Toothbrush
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| The Young Dentist William Helmsley (1819-1906) The Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] |
...My toothbrush, at least, is in no doubt as to its value. "Almost perfect," it says through its app, awarding me a "session score" of 98 per cent, albeit after a discreet but professional enquiry as to whether it had caused my gums to bleed (it hadn't).
...If £500 feels absurd, it also feels inevitable. Toothbrushes have been engaged in a technological arms race. No longer is a brush on a stick enough. No longer is it enough if that brush is electric. The modern toothbrush must sense if you are pushing too hard, it must dislodge plaque with a sonic blast, it must do complicated things with "micro-bubbles."
...People want it says the marketing material because it, "goes beyond being a new toothbrush - it is an innovative brushing technology with a truly sensorial experience that users will feel, hear and see, transforming the act of brushing teeth from something they have to do into something they actually will want to do".
(Tom Whipple, The Times, 2020)
"...a truly sensorial experience that users will feel, hear and see, transforming the act of brushing teeth from something they have to do into something they actually will want to do." Really? Honestly and truly? £500 - you're having a joke.
Iran
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| Persian Encampment Ovid Curtovich (b. 1855) Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] |
August 19 is not a significant date in the UK calendar, but for many Iranians it marks an unbearable national tragedy - for which the British government has blood on its hands. This date is the anniversary of a 1953 CIA/MI6- led coup that toppled Iran's first democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, a leader who dared to nationalise the lucrative Anglo-Iranian oil industry - which was rebranded, post-coup, as British Petroleum (BP).
The Iranian film-maker Taghi Amirani, who is releasing a documentary on the subject, entitled Coup 53, says:
"Everything stems from that. It shaped the Middle East, it totally destroyed Iran's hope for democracy and we are living with the consequences of that now."
To this day the British Government has officially denied involvement in the coup.
An MI6 agent at the time, Norman Darbyshire, ... confirms involvement in the assassination of Mahmoud Afshartous, Mosaddegh's chief of police, as well as paying a violent rent-a-mob to terrorise the streets of Tehran after a first coup attempt failed and the Americans began to get cold feet.
"The brief was very simple: go out, don't inform the ambassador, use the intelligence service to provide you with any money you might need, and secure the overthrow of Mosaddegh by legal or quasi-legal means."
...That legacy of the 1953 coup continues to shape US foreign policy to this day. For the CIA it became a template for, 'How can we do this in the future.'
On the British side the coup is yet another black mark in our recent history. Iran was never a colony but it was treated like one. As Darbyshire put it:
"The Persians were bitterly resentful of the way they were being treated by the British because the oil company was run by expatriates who called anyone east of Calais a 'wog.' They had the feeling they were being screwed, and rightly so, from 1920 onwards."
Armirani says: "Whenever I show the film, people have come up to me from every country that has ever been meddled with in terms of the overthrow of governments and political interference by Britain and America and they say, 'You have just told my story' and that just makes me cry."
He believes that BP should apologise for what happened in Iran and give back some of the money it got from ruthlessly exploiting the country's resources. Should Britain apologise too?
"This is a historical crime," he replies carefully, "but if the British government owned up to this, it would be a cathartic confession. They should acknowledge their role and unburden themselves from this."
...Amirani now faces the final challenge of distributing the film himself.
"Listen, this is a provocative film made by an Arab film-maker about a very controversial subject, told in a daring way and revealing deep things," he says. "These days it might be too much of a hot potato."
(Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, The Times, 2020)
*The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has for the first time acknowledged he is actively seeking to pay a debt to the Iranian government that could finally help to secure the release of British dual nationals including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Wallace assured lawyers acting for the families that the government was exploring every legal avenue to pay the debt, which for the first time he formally acknowledged the government owes.
...The UK is thought to owe as much as £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979.
An international arbitration in 2008 ruled the UK owed the debt...
(Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 2020)
*One can easily imagine the robed and garlanded figure of Britannia exclaim "Perfidious? Moi?" Call me cynical but I feel that the hoo-ha this week about Boris Johnson's alleged plan to break Britain's EU withdrawal treaty commitments misses the point.
Indignant voices inveigh against trashing our ancient reputation as fair dealers, men of our word, etc. What ancient reputation? We've been renowned through history as " perfidious Albion", a nation ever willing to slither out of its commitments, break our promises and lie when it suits. Ask the Kurds, ask the Cossacks, ask the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia, ask the West Indian sugar producers, remember Suez and watch the brilliant new documentary, Coup 53, about British skulduggery in Iran.
The point, though, is that these betrayals took place when Britain called the shots. We could afford to cheat. The big boys get away with it. The prime minister's colossal error this week is not to act out of character but to act in character when we no longer call the shots.
(Matthew Parris, The Times, 2020)
Pseuds Corner
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| Two Pairs of Complementaries of Equal Amount Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) Photo Credit: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust [CC BY-NC-ND] |
"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalise' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."
(Homi K Bhabha, quoted by Douglas Murray, The Times, 2020)
In 1998 this sentence was awarded second prize by the journal Philosophy and Literature in its "Bad Writing Competition" which "celebrates bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and journals." (Wikipedia)
The winner that year was a sentence written by Professor Judith Butler of Berkeley, the University of California.
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
No doubt about it, Judith Butler was the winner.
*I was in Puglia a few weeks ago, at some restaurant I can't remember the name of, and had a spaghetti vongole which made me cry. I also cried while eating a psychedelic zarzuela de mariscos for the first time in some Ibizan restaurant. I even wept about a beautiful potato once.
(Roisin Murphy, The Guardian, 2020 printed in Private Eye, No 1532)
*Embedding an enhanced flexible multimode academic experience.
Guidance from senior management to Loughborough University staff on their teaching aims.
(Private Eye, No 1532)
Social Media
... Instagram is a weird shrine to people doing the most awful, exposing, embarrassing stuff, by which I mean tedious, self-obsessed, trite, superficial rubbish such as raking through their fridges and filming it, or showing off some free tat a tasteless PR has sent and then actually wearing it, or getting your beta boyfriend to film you jumping off the bottom step of a house you don't even own so you can get the right swing on gopping content for brands you'd never touch if you had a normal life, or a normal brain.
(Camilla Long, The Sunday Times, 2020)
*... I think the fallout of social media and data mining is invisible to most people. The bamboozling is part of it. When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress and said:
"We are in the business of connecting people to people they love," no one called him out to say:
"No Mr Zuckerberg you are in the business of convincing people to give you their personal data and selling it to third parties. You are selling loneliness and outrage and are profiting from the destruction of our system of representative government."
(Jill Lepore, The Observer, 2020)
Facebook users must know about this data mining. It's been written about and reported quite extensively on TV. I think people know about it but choose to ignore it.
*At the beginning of last month, a Facebook software engineer, Ashok Chandwaney, resigned and published a blistering public letter, excoriating the company for its failure to tackle hate.
... Chandwaney believes both internal dissent and external pressure will be needed to bring change inside a company that from personal experience is "not interested" in stamping out hate and incitement to violence on its platforms"... (his) high-profile resignation was just the latest internal attack on Facebook's values and way of doing business in a year of bruising confrontations between staff and management.
There have been walkouts, regular leaks of sensitive internal documentation, and bruising confrontations at staff meetings with chairman and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
... Chandwaney became disillusioned with Facebook after watching a company whose mottoes included "be bold", "move fast" and "build social value" conspicuously fail to apply those values fight against hate, incitement and illegal discrimination on its platforms.
... "A third of the world uses Facebook right now... I'm not sure if we could expect anyone to guarantee that 'we will end hate on the internet'. But I think that Facebook has the ability to make massive strides."
(Emma Graham-Harrison, The Observer, 2020)
*... Come on people. Whether or not we understand those who choose to "live" on social media, however much we scoff at their over-edited, carefully curated existence, Teigen comes from a generation where constant posting - lucrative, self-promotional or otherwise - equals normality. Maybe this partly explains why she posted at such a time.
... Anybody with a problem with Teigen or anybody else posting in the aftermath of a personal tragedy need only look away or scroll past. Or could it be that, just as Teigen is accused of unseemly oversharing, some people's own mob-handed inhumanity is fast becoming out of control.
(Barbara Ellen, The Observer, 2020)
Teigen is a "celebrity" who went on Instagram to tell millions of her followers about the loss of her baby halfway through her pregnancy. She also posted photographs. Apparently, to millions, this is quite normal behaviour.
Many commentators in the media condemned the criticism and abuse she received for what her detractors called "inappropriate" posts and for "nothing being private".
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