Dystopian charity work

An anonymous TCW piece gives us a useful reminder of the dystopian bureaucracy genuine charities have to cope with.


Maddening red tape that makes running a charity impossible

OVER the last twenty-odd years I have been chairman of a charity which gives grants to enable children to take part in education either more effectively (by providing aids), or to attend events such as the famous summer-term ‘week away’. Families on low incomes and students with financial difficulties have benefited enormously from what we do. Without our input there are many young people from our locality who would not have had the help that they desperately needed in their ‘learning journey’.

Over the last six months, trying to ‘follow the rules’ to run the charity has become dystopian. I would hazard a guess that there are many other charities who are also finding the whole matter utterly frustrating. Which is being polite. I know of at least two which have encountered exactly the same issues as ourselves, with exactly the same bodies...

Frankly, I’d rather have the cash in a tin under the bed, and hand it out as we see fit, without the crushingly dead hands of the Charity Commission and Barclays being involved, as it seems that through their incompetence they’re conspiring to prevent us doing anything at all.

The whole piece is well worth reading and the comments tell much the same tale.


Kornea112
The whole concept of tax free charities is being destroyed by abuses, corruption and poor government oversight. Many are blatantly abusing rules and interfering in political systems so much so, that they have become destabilizing to western countries. Small helpful charities are going to suffer as they get caught up in the abuse. This has become so bad that banking is going to become the least of your worries.

A right mystery

Storm Henk live Derbyshire updates as roads closed and trains affected by flooding after heavy rain

Among roads affected are Acorn Way in Oakwood between Raynesway and Morley Road, which is closed because of flooding, Markeaton Lane from the A52 Ashbourne Road and Kedleston Road, and the A6 between Ashford in the Water.

It's a right mystery why Ashford in the Water is subject to flooding. Could it be something recent connected with climate change?

The art of keeping fish

On the table stood a glass tank filled with water, and ornamented in the middle by a miniature pyramid of rock-work interlaced with weeds. Snails clung to the sides of the tank; tadpoles and tiny fish swam swiftly in the green water, slippery efts and slimy frogs twined their noiseless way in and out of the weedy rock-work; and on top of the pyramid there sat solitary, cold as the stone, brown as the stone, motionless as the stone, a little bright-eyed toad. The art of keeping fish and reptiles as domestic pets had not at that time been popularized in England; and Magdalen, on entering the room, started back, in irrepressible astonishment and disgust, from the first specimen of an Aquarium that she had ever seen.

Wilkie Collins – No Name (1862)

Many folk of my generation must have kept goldfish in their youth. I’m not sure why, they weren’t at all interesting to watch, going round and round then round and round again. 

It was a little like watching TV with the sound off, people opening their mouths then closing them again.

Clodbergs

They showed some little acumen, but their fundamental error is this — they pride themselves on their intelligence. No man of any real depth ever does such a thing as this. He knows very well that whatever he is, there are half a million more so; that the age of exceptional intellects expired, at least in this country, with Mr. Edmund Burke, and is not likely to rise from the dead. Now we are all pretty much good useful clods on a level: education, like all good husbandry, tends to pulverisation; and if the collective produce is greater, let us be at once thankful and humble.

R. D. Blackmore - Clara Vaughan (1864)


It’s an interesting quote, this one. It suggests that education has a tendency to create a standardised product and does not foster individual intelligence.

Well we knew that but don't do much about it. Even as a casual idea with the inevitable exceptions, it does explain the vast number of educated clods we churn out. They mostly seem to end up in the media or politics which has the advantage of keeping them visible.

Or does it keep them visible? Maybe there is an iceberg effect too. Many more educated clods do seem to lurk beneath the more visible clods of public life. Maybe a clod of them was responsible for the dramatic sinking of the previously unsinkable HS2. 

Clodbergs we could call them.

Well short

Government falls 'well short' of electric car charger target

A Government target for electric car chargers near motorways has been missed, new analysis has revealed.

The Department for Transport (DfT) had set an ambition for there to be at least six rapid or ultra-rapid chargers offering speeds over 50kWh at every motorway service area in England by the end of 2023.


Fine, sack senior people at the Department for Transport.

But that's not how it works. 

Officials are well short of shouldering that kind of responsibility.

Night Words

Yawns, checks the clock… oh, 3:30am so it’s not time to make a cup of tea and why am I trying to remember the name of that guy who is supposed to have said –

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

What was his first name… A, B, C, D, E… E - it was Eric something. Yes that’s it - Eric… A, B, C… it was Eric Hoffer. That’s a good effort at this time of night, but where did it come from?

What’s a good analogy of dredging up memories which stay hidden until some kind of input comes along? Something like the first letter of a name? Memory as a kaleidoscope? No that’s just random, it’s nothing like that.

What is it? 

Dunno... 

...but remembering Eric Hoffer was something…

...at this time of night...

Weak Words

Why do people in responsible positions say things which are plainly misleading, biased or untrue? Why is this not at all uncommon? Suppose we take just one aspect of it - the language of public discourse which has become progressively shrill yet weaker in it the way it fails to map the real world. Language which is supposedly progressive but no longer pragmatic.

In the not so distant past, weakness and ambiguity in social discourse were opposed by educational rigour applied to meaning, grammar and worthwhile subjects for discussion. Today this pragmatic robustness within public debate has been weakened by political fashions.

From some mysterious point, perhaps towards the end of the nineteenth century, robust cultural conventions came to seem too oppressive and discriminatory to be quite the thing in fashionably progressive society. Holes appeared in the language of right and wrong, good and evil, upright and corrupt. The value of pragmatic discrimination quietly slipped away into what was subsequently presented as a grim and prejudiced past. ‘Dickensian’ became a pejorative adjective.

The slowly meandering result is cultural drift towards indulgently weak public discourse. Under the relentless nudge of fashions and ideologies, names are changed, meanings shift, pragmatic moral boundaries weaken, culture softens to a level of incoherence no sane person would have planned.

The softening is powerfully seductive and correction not a trivial matter. The language of pragmatic discrimination has weakened, faded into a history which is no longer understood by those whose job it is to understand. Priggish denunciation of the past undermines any possibility of learning from it. There has been a fundamental cultural erosion which is probably well beyond remedy because we don’t have enough people who still speak the required remedial language.

A stronger, more pragmatic and less political culture would have to be built on the culture we have now. It would have to be built using language more powerfully rational than the language now settled within public discourse.

It is beyond remedy.