Are "Goodbye" songs romantic?

There are a lot of such songs and they are very popular. Best known is perhaps Harry Belafonte singing "Jamaica Farewell", or Sarah Brightman & Andrea Bocelli singing "Time To Say Goodbye". And Americans will probably know Glenn Campbell singing "Galveston". They are undoubtedly very good and catchy sentimental songs

Video links for those three songs are:

But I can't see that such songs are romantic. They are more foolish than anything else. Truly romantic behaviour would surely be to make good and certain that the lady does NOT slip from your grip. As someone who has been married four times, I think I can say that I practice what I preach. And I still have in my life a lady who looks good with her clothes off. Her conversation is high-level too. Last night her topics included both Spinoza and Chekhov. I am glad to have "caught" her. Farewells are for losers

The best of the well-known romantic songs to my thinking is "My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose" by Robert Burns. A good version sung by Kenneth McKellar here:



There is a "Farewell" element in it but the point of the song is that the singer is coming back, not abandoning the woman.

My favorite romantic song is, perhaps regrettably, in German: "Als geblüht der Kirschenbaum". There is no good version of it online but there is below a rather overacted verson by a very strangely-dressed lady. Her singing is good, however, and its expression tracks the words



It's undoubtedy one of the great love songs of all time. In the song, the lady says she thought her husband looked beautiful when she first met him and also behaved beautifully on their wedding night.

The point of the song in the operetta it comes from is that she has just been informed of apparent infidelity by her husband. She comments that it could not be so -- because she remembers him in their early life as being beautiful in both looks and behaviour. And her faith is of course eventually justified. Operetta has good endings.

Someone should do a singable translation of it. Here are the words with my rough translation:

Als geblueht der Kirschenbaum,
As the cherry tree was blossoming
Ging ich zum Walde wie im Traum;
I walked to the woods as in a dream
An des Brunnens kuehlen Rand,
At the cool edge of the fountain
Wo hell die weisse Birke stand.
Where brightly the white beech stood
An dem blauen Himmelsbogen
Under the blue bow of the sky
Ging der Mond, die Sterne zogen
The moon came out and the stars shone
Einen Reiter hoert' ich jagen
I heard a horseman hunting
Und mein Herz hub an zu schlagen
And my heart gave a leap
Denn er hielt sein Roesslein an
When he reined in his dear horse
Ach ja, er war ein schoener, ein schoener Mann!
Oh yes. He was a beautiful, beautiful man

Still verklang der Hochzeit Pracht
The wedding bells no longer rang
Und von den Bergen stieg die Nacht
And night was climbing up the mountains
Bang trat ich ins Brautgemach
I anxiously entered the bridal chamber
Und leise, leise schlich er nach!
And softly, softly he followed me
Draussen fielen Bluetenflocken
Outside flower petals fell
Drin der Kranz von meinen Locken
Inside the garland from my hair
Heimlich fluestend half der Freier
Softly whispering my suitor helped me
Mir zu loesen Band und Schleier
To take off my ribbons and veil
Sah dabei mich zaertlich an
Looking at me so tenderly
Ach, er war doch ein schoener, schoener Mann!
Oh! He certainly was a beautiful, beautiful man

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America's tech giants are taking a modern-day crash course in India's ancient caste system

There are some real differences underlying caste differences but the use of caste as a barrier to upward mobility is obnoxious

Apple, the world's biggest listed company, updated its general employee conduct policy about two years ago to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste, which it added alongside existing categories such as race, religion, gender, age and ancestry.

The inclusion of the new category, which hasn't been previously reported, goes beyond U.S. discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban casteism.

The update came after the tech sector - which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers - received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California's employment regulator sued Cisco Systems on behalf of a low-caste engineer who accused two higher-caste bosses of blocking his career.

Cisco, which denies wrongdoing, says an internal probe found no evidence of discrimination and that some of the allegations are baseless because caste is not a legally "protected class" in California. This month an appeals panel rejected the networking company's bid to push the case to private arbitration, meaning a public court case could come as early as next year.

The dispute - the first U.S. employment lawsuit about alleged casteism - has forced Big Tech to confront a millennia-old hierarchy where Indians' social position has been based on family lineage, from the top Brahmin "priestly" class to the Dalits, shunned as "untouchables" and consigned to menial labor.

Since the suit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun seeking updated U.S. discrimination legislation - and have also called on tech companies to change their own policies to help fill the void and deter casteism.

Their efforts have produced patchy results, according to a Reuters review of policy across the U.S. industry, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers from India.

"I am not surprised that the policies would be inconsistent because that's almost what you would expect when the law is not clear," said Kevin Brown, a University of South Carolina law professor studying caste issues, citing uncertainty among executives over whether caste would ultimately make it into U.S. statutes.

"I could imagine that parts of ... (an) organization are saying this makes sense, and other parts are saying we don't think taking a stance makes sense."

Apple's main internal policy on workplace conduct, which was seen by Reuters, added reference to caste in the equal employment opportunity and anti-harassment sections after September 2020.

Apple confirmed that it "updated language a couple of years ago to reinforce that we prohibit discrimination or harassment based on caste." It added that training provided to staff also explicitly mentions caste.

"Our teams assess our policies, training, processes and resources on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are comprehensive," it said. "We have a diverse and global team, and are proud that our policies and actions reflect that."

Elsewhere in tech, IBM told Reuters that it added caste, which was already in India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules after the Cisco lawsuit was filed, though it declined to give a specific date or a rationale.

IBM's only training that mentions caste is for managers in India, the company added.

Several companies do not specifically reference caste in their main global policy, including Amazon, Dell, Facebook owner Meta, Microsoft and Google. Reuters reviewed each of the policies, some of which are only published internally to employees.

The companies all told Reuters that they have zero tolerance for caste prejudice and, apart from Meta which did not elaborate, said such bias would fall under existing bans on discrimination by categories such as ancestry and national origin policy.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/companies/caste-in-california-tech-giants-confront-ancient-indian-hierarchy/ar-AA10ENGW

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The British Conservative party has lost its way

Neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss appears to recognise or acknowledge the looming problems Britain faces, both in the short and the long term. Analysts predict that this winter the energy price cap will hit £4,400. For the average household, this will represent 14 per cent of their post-tax income. As an isolated threat, that would mean deep discomfort for many households. Combined with other price rises and increasing interest rates, it will mean destitution. Government will have to act to prevent this, yet everything promised so far is lacklustre.

The grants already in place will cover less than 10 per cent of the cap limit. Abolishing VAT on domestic fuel would knock another 200 quid or so off, while removing the green levy would drop it by £155. It’s piecemeal help in the face of a massive problem and failing to address this now will only mean more hurried help when the bills start dropping on doorsteps.

This might be forgivable if that were the only issue where the candidates seemed oblivious. But everywhere you look, the country faces massive challenges that the governing party has no answer to. Many have written at length about the Tory failure to tackle the housing crisis. I won’t repeat their arguments, save to say that throughout the leadership contest there has been no serious attempt to look at housing. Rishi Sunak has swung behind defending the greenbelt, whilst Liz Truss has prevaricated and developed an obsession with Whitehall’s current ‘Soviet style’ housing targets. But as anyone who has managed key performance indicators will tell you, if there is no target for something, the target is zero.

Beyond this, Britain looks forward to running out of water and electricity. Infrastructure projects that could have alleviated these problems have been bandied around and frustrated for decades, and little can be done to turn this around on short notice. Yet equally, there is limited planning now for the threats in future decades. They say the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the second-best time is today. In Britain, the second-best time to begin is after three preliminary reports, two judicial reviews and a general election. The best time is never.

Even in foreign and military policy, the natural home of the Conservative politician, things look bleak. Whilst the country has performed well in arming Ukraine, its own defence commitments have been mealy mouthed. Promised spending rises have been undermined by inflation and clever accounting, while procurement remains scandalously wasteful – the UK eliminates its own tanks more efficiently than its Javelin missiles deal with Russian ones. In a fit of beautiful bureaucracy, a chunk of our defence spending goes on consultants planning the next round of cuts and another chunk on how to cope with the last ones.

This isn’t, however, meant to be a mere catalogue of the UK’s woes. Instead, these issues are served up to highlight what is arguably the most pervasive and surprising problem the Tory party faces: that it doesn’t care about politics.

That is not to say that the party doesn’t care about winning elections. It remains ruthlessly committed to that and its record is clear. Even after the crashing scandals of the Johnson era, the incoming PM has a fighting chance of securing the next election, leaving the Tories in government for nearly 20 years. The problem is that the party no longer understands why or to what end they wield such power.

Many on the left would be shocked by how apolitical most of the Conservative party is. There is currently no theory in conservative politics. I suspect no more than a handful of Tory MPs have ever read Burke or Hayek, unless they cropped up on a PPE reading list. They will be far more familiar with Isabel Oakeshott than Michael.

Factionalism within the party is driven far more by aesthetics than by ideology. One (former) MP once told me that when he asked his association why they had picked him for a safe seat, he was told ‘It was the lovely way you spoke about your wife at the selection’. Many MPs come to parliament without any real belief other than a view that ‘good things are good, and we should do more of them, and bad things are bad’. I’ve met less than half a dozen mainstream Tories who could be classed as ideologues.

At its best, this makes the party flexible and pragmatic, able to pivot around the issues of the day. At its worst (and it really seems to be falling into the worst now) it becomes listless, incapable and slightly baffled by the power it holds. It’s the cat that has finally caught the laser pointer.

Rather than principles or goals, the Tory party today lives for day-to-day reactions to the things that catch its eye. Most MPs have no understanding of economics, but instead repeat half-remembered maxims about lower taxes (we are, it seems, forever to the right of the Laffer curve), whilst at the same time celebrating the latest boondoggle that happens to land in their constituency. In the same vein, you see the Tory MPs who have started to get their head around the housing crisis call for more housebuilding everywhere except where it threatens some historic carpark or ‘sacred’ waste site on their patch. They will tweet almost back-to-back about the unaffordability of homes and their objection to any new development.

This track record of the current government is testament to this. Despite coming to power with a majority of 80, as close to total control of the British state as you can have, the government has failed to push forward on any of its purported objectives. It is bizarre to see left wing commentators talk of the ‘rise of the far right’ or the democratic backsliding associated with post 2019 Conservatism, when those I know on the right laugh darkly at the impotence of the government.

A government which claimed to be hard-line on immigration did nothing to reduce it. A government that seeks to be tough on crime has seen petty crime become almost legal. A government that complains about ‘woke-culture’ has done nothing at a legislative level to prevent it.

The Tory party is not driven by some grand policy agenda, but simply grasping at shiny objects. It passes repetitive, unnecessary and ultimately inoffensive laws that criminalise things that are already illegal – like dog theft or ­assaults on emergency workers. Or else spends its time complaining that the world, the civil service and the blob is against it. The party once sought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose, now it campaigns and governs in tweets.

Even on its beloved Brexit, the Conservative party tries to stoke an ongoing threat that it might be undone or revoked or strangled at birth rather than engage with the realities of leaving the EU. With the simple in and out completed, there is no clue whether Britain’s future is Singapore on Thames or shoring up the dying embers of Red Wall industries. Instead, it jumps to silly-season headlines on imperial measures and crowns on pint glasses.

There is ultimately an emptiness at the heart of the current Conservative party. Its politics and principles are skin deep and conflicted. It is apparent in almost everything it does, from Remainer Liz Truss becoming the ‘Brexit candidate’ for leadership to the pious Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg defending the serial liar and philanderer Boris Johnson to the hilt, or the Tory MPs who claim to be cost conscious whilst vetoing the cheapest way to repair the Palace of Westminster because they like being surrounded by old oak and stone. Everything is an image; everything is a meme.

There is an almost complete absence of policy innovation. The party grasps around for yesterday’s answers to yesterday’s problems, copying the homework of Thatcher, a leader who has been out of power for 30 years and dead for ten. It’s why the party recycles so much from policy interns and fails to come up with anything equal to the challenges we face. It does not even propose simple answers for complex problems – just no answers beyond the triple lock and ever rising house prices.

It is not that the Conservative party is deliberately and mindfully pursuing ends inimical to British interests. Tory MPs do, mostly, want a prosperous and safe country. They’ve just lost any sense of what that means beyond platitudes, or how to engage with the challenges that stand in our way. The party would rather hide behind the curtain, pulling at levers that aren’t attached to anything.

I’m often amazed at the image the popular left has in this country of a scheming, conniving Conservative party, like the one it alleges is running down the NHS to sell it off to private interests. The reality is far scarier.

In a world where the British economy is stagnating and the population is ageing, there is no way to square the circle without raising taxes or reducing services. The Conservative party is afraid to do either, so lets the problem spiral. Those that do foresee the problems look to the magic cure of ‘efficiency savings’, promised in the same way I promise that next summer I will have a six pack: lacking both a concrete plan to do it, and the discipline to implement it.

Instead, all the party can do is say things that appeal to the voters who keep backing it – generally older, wealthier suburban dwellers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the leadership contest. This weekend, Twitter was ablaze with shock when Rishi Sunak talked about cutting degrees that don’t lead to good jobs. Many on the left took this as an attack on the university sector, or even part of a grand plan to exclude the working classes from the humanities.

In truth, it is neither. It is Sunak appealing to an electorate who came of age when 10 per cent of the population went to university and economic growth carried them to prosperity, who now see their grandchildren laden with debt, unable to buy a home. It’s the ‘common sense’ of the bloke at the end of the Conservative Club bar, nothing more than a trope. It’s not something that will ever seriously happen.

Liz Truss’s plan for every child with three As to be offered an Oxbridge interview is similar politicking. It pays no heed to (i) the burden this places on the university (ii) that for many reasons such a person might not want to go to Oxbridge or (iii) that the highest A-level grade has been A* since 2010. It ignores many of the challenges of widening access, and in particular how universities like LSE, UCL and Imperial, which have fewer admissions resources per student and make more paper-based decisions, can bias against poorer children.

There are of dozens of announcements like these from the candidates – the theme remains the same. Tory MPs and Tory leaders are saying what they think their voters want to hear. But there is no implementation, no plan for adverse consequences, and no underpinning logic or principle. They are throwing bricks through windows with no notes attached.

It is much like those panic filled cockpits. With an impending crisis, Tory leaders have lost sight of what levers they hold and what they can do. They’ve lost sight of the mission they need to fulfil as the altitude warnings flash. The Conservative party has fallen into a fundamental problem – it is unwilling and unable to address the needs of the day.

Many people reading this will disagree about what those solutions might look like. I am, after all, firmly rooted in the right of centre. But when I look at my own (nominal) party, it is hard not to feel disappointed at the lack of any action. From the housing crisis to the stagnating economy, to law and order, to the health service, there are solutions out there – yet the Conservative party has given up on seeking them, seduced instead by the 24 hour news cycle, the focus group and the Twitter grifters. Neither leadership candidate offers much hope. Sunak looks like he will run the country like a private equity project, cutting any expense he can and damn the consequences, whilst Truss will run it like a village fete, with boundless enthusiasm and harking back to the old hits.

Whoever wins in September, the party will be stuck. Even in power it remains incapable of generating and delivering credible policies, incapable of using its resources to tackle the challenges ahead. In an uncertain world it struggles to decide what it wants to do, and struggles to implement the few ideas it has. The party has become a machine for garnering headlines and votes but is now starting to stall. Insulated by a media which also focuses on the day-to-day rigmarole of politics as soap opera, our leaders are missing the signs of short- and long-term crisis which will soon hit. They are failing to adapt, failing to plan. Disaster is coming.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/08/the-crisis-at-the-heart-of-the-conservative-party/

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A confused archbishop

Justin Welby, nominal head of the Anglican communion, is undoubtedly on board with environmentalism. He made this clear in a keynote speech on Sunday at the Lambeth Conference. Unfortunately, if you expected him to put the religious argument for environmentalism at the forefront of his speech, you would be disappointed. His approach was rather different. It was all a matter, he said, of an unjust society and the need to deal with it. The church’s function was, we were told, to ‘seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.’ On the environment this came down, broadly, to differences in wealth and other inequalities. Our current environmental woes are the fault of rich countries, who he said had ‘declared war on God’s creation’ in the past and now continued, while they dumped refuse in the oceans, to tell poor nations not to use carbon generating fuels and discover new paths in order to enable the rich to remain rich. His answer? Recognise a climate emergency and insist on urgent action on it, especially in Britain and the west.

This sounds good, and certainly few disagree that as far as possible we must all do our bit to limit global warming. But if you dig below the surface, any reader, and certainly any worshipper, should perhaps be a little sceptical.

For one thing, Welby is quietly seeking to run together two ideas – a radical egalitarian attack on ‘unjust structures’ and environmental activism – as if they were much the same, and as if promoting the former was the key to the latter. But this is not necessarily so.

Take the implication that climate action is the responsibility of rich countries emitting more than their fair share of pollution with poor ones continuing to emit less. This statement is partly true. But it is a very partial truth. Rich countries are not all at the top of the CO2 league, nor poor countries all at the bottom. In 2019, for example, the UK ranked roughly forty-first in consumption-based emissions per capita: below Botswana, Lithuania, Iran, Slovakia, Russia and Oceania, and above rich France and seriously wealthy Sweden. It is also worth noting that rich countries in general do more by way of legislation and government initiatives effectively to reduce emissions. In the 20 years to 2019 the US, the EU and the UK all appreciably reduced their emissions, while China, India and Brazil increased their emissions and are likely to continue to do so. In this instance, you can have redistribution between rich and poor, or you can have environmental improvement which benefits everyone. It is hard to see how you can have both at the same time.

Secondly, the veiled suggestion that Britain is a rich country and that its people must therefore confess their guilt and put up with a change to their lifestyle runs into a further problem. For all Welby’s demands to dismantle unequal social structures, this is a call for measures that will disproportionately impact the poor. At a pinch the urban middle class can rip out gas boilers and invest in green heating; the church too will no doubt grit its teeth and divert funds that might otherwise have gone to pay for more priests to altering clergy housing (and bishops’ palaces) in good green fashion. But suggest to a person in Dartford, Dudley or Darlington who is at present barely scraping by with difficulty that they must give up a heating system they know and like in favour of storage radiators or temperamental and expensive heat pumps, and you will get a dusty answer. Indeed, it’s hard to think of anything better calculated to repress whatever goodwill the church still retains in less prosperous areas than the kind of posturing we saw at Lambeth.

But all this still leaves out the biggest problem with Welby’s speech. In describing the environmental issue as one of economic and global inequality and the need to intervene for social change, it’s not easy to see anything that is particularly Christian about the Archbishop’s message. Apart from a rather wooden reference to 1 Colossians about Jesus having reconciled himself to ‘all things’, rather than just all people, Welby’s environmentalism could very plausibly have come from a Liberal Democrat politician, or for that matter (especially with the mention of unjust structures) a postmodernist professor.

This point matters. As Edward Norman pointed out in his 1979 Reith lectures on Christianity and the World Order, much to the fury of liberation theologians and other fashionable ecclesiastics, a church turns from arguments based on the kingdom of heaven to those founded on secular political ideas at its peril. If archbishops talk in this way, substantial numbers of their flock, and certainly any potential converts, will undoubtedly begin to wonder whether it’s necessary to bring God into the equation at all. And, in a sense, who can blame them if they do?

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/the-problem-with-justin-welbys-environmentalism/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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