Iraq: nightmare worsens / Viva la resistance! / On service / Barflies

No cycling this morning: instead I will take metro to Itäkeskus and participate in Attac-workshop (or just listen to the lecture and leave, most likely). I have other tasks to see to: flight tickets to Boston and Brazil, wireless CF-card to my Zaurus and visiting Akateeminen, of course.

Iraq: nightmare worsens

The article The week Iraq's dream of peace fell apart draws a very grim picture about the situation: at least 300 died during the last 7 days (guess who, but also a few Americans (sad): so far 52 American casualties this month), desperation is exploding, suicide attack all the more common, foreigners cannot anymore venture out of their fortresses. And still the money allocated for water, electricity etc has been reallocated to oil infrastructure and "security". And attack by both sides continue... Really depressing and deteriorating so fast: I am afraid of more desperate action by both sides.

Viva la resistance!

I went to listen to the Attac workshop. I shied way from the real workshop part and just listened a few lectures.

• First, Heikki Patomäki told what Attac is all about etc. Not so interesting, I knew all this before and if you do not, just read the newest Hiekanjyvät, the Attac-magazine, if you can get hold of it somewhere.
• Second, Ville-Veikko Hirvelä talked at length about the silent (muzzled) majority of the world: how their voice is not heard in big WTO-conference; how it cannot be heard, since we (inhabitants of the minority world) do not know their cultures and cannot thus figure out what they are saying (Wittgenstein would says that we do not play the same language games) etc. I did not really catch the point any further than this.
• Third, Folke Sundman talked about the initiative Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy initiated (or participated) by foreign ministers of Finland and Tanzania (Tuomioja and Kikwete). Nothing much interesting in the talked, but the Helsinki Process seems to be important one and may raise awareness among the political elite (Wallgren considered this important and a sign that the Finnish politician, together with their Nordic colleagues are trying to keep the Nordic civil society, development support, conscience etc alive. This may well be true. Patomäki was a bit more cynical: in his view the process will not reach anything interesting since it works using consensus and contains some representatives from British Petroleum: a classical veto-problem). Anyway, getting to know the Helsinki Process might not be such a bad idea.
• Fourth, Sari Varpama talked about Citizen's Global Platform. I did not follow this talk so much for some reason, not because a woman was talking. She talked a lot about a meeting which took place in Tanzania sometime ago and which was important in that it gave a possibility to the local NGOs to meet the foreign minister (ministry?) for the first time.
• Fifth, Thomas Wallgren wanted to point out something small, but went on speaking (well and interestingly) for quite a while. Referring to Hannah Arendt he made distinction between the amount and quality of power. Most NGOs (also Attac) are, according to Wallgren, concentrating too much on redistributing the existing amount of power, on giving a small portion to the majority world people. This is important, but not sufficient, partly because it will fail: those having the power will not give it up easily, if at all. Therefore, it is important to also consider the quality of power. By this Wallgren seems to mean creating new power-structures by which we can then change the world (e.g. consider the difference between attempting (by European NGOs for example) to renew the rules and practices of WTO to attempting to destroy the whole WTO as the not-fixable source of the problem (by India NGOs). This is a good point in general too, I think. Maybe I should read Arendt. In short, Wallgren claim that we should not be satisfied with new distribution of power in a zero-sum game. Instead, we must create new forms and sources of power. Well put!
  • Wallgren also proposed a way to get the voices of the majority world heard in Finnish politics: whenever the Finnish Parliament is about to decide on some security/trade/human rights issue, gather a global set of commentators (e.g. from India, Brazil, Pakistan), get their comments, document and publish them. This sounds interesting and Wallgren promised to elaborate it in some forthcoming article/book.
• Sixth, Juha Siltala talked about his current worries, which were quite closely related to his new book. See earlier discussion in this blog for some background information. He wanted to get history back to the people from the companies (or big players). I was left to wonder this: when has there been time, when the people has been decisive force in the history. Is it not so that kings, feudal lords, etc have always rules. As Siltala is a historian, I think he knows what he is talking about, but I just could not follow. It happens. Siltala made some good remarks. He said that the so called inflexibilities in the work market are there for a purpose: they bring predictability to the human life, which is, of course, a good thing considering e.g. raising children (or paying the mortgage...). He also pointed out that having an own flat is a traditional way of gaining some independence from the market forces: the less one has to pay regularly, the less one has to work just for getting money.
  • There was some lively discussion after Siltala´ talk about the state of work environment in the universities. It seems that universities have taken the quality issues both too seriously and naively. Highly educated creative persons have to use lot of their time to development discussions, reporting, filling in forms etc. Patomäki told that their are some dissidents in the academia, but they are a bit not so brave. At this point the discussion started to get a bit too personal, too much complaining about the particular problems everyone has had and has.
  • Siltala was referring to books by John Gray ("The false dawn"), Thrurow ("Fortune favors the bold"), Ehrenreich ("Nickeled and dimed") several times. They are good books and most of us should read them (instead of Reading this blog too, or then not).
  • I came to think my rather old personal survival strategy in the current working life. I consider myself a mercenary, who sells his skills to the warlord who has a cause worth most fighting for. And who pays a decent pay (if all other things are equal). This attitude helps. No unnecessary loyalty, not binding commitments on either side of the contract. Consider this and you feel free!
• There were some old friends present: Lassi, Jaana. I did not have too much time to talk with them - and I was a bit depressed by the whole meeting: great talks, but them some so low level addresses. I just cannot stand that and this is why I do not (cannot) participate in NGO-work anymore. It is a pity and I may have to get rid of this attitude.
• Strange thing. When I was younger and still participated in many NGOs, I tend to remember that in all meeting there were many young persons. Today, I still was much younger than the average person in the meeting. The question is: is this really true (that there are not so many young persons anymore) or is it so that I did not see the older persons, when I was myself young (yes, I remember seeing so many young, beautiful girls back then. Was I so perplexed by their presence back then, and why am I not anymore? What is this all about? Does this explain my not wanting to participate anymore?)

On service

The service in MrTravel was as good as always. They maneged to find flight Helsinki -i New York - Sao Paolo - New York - Helsinki for less than 1000 euros. This was something for which I am glad to pay something extra, since trying to arrange the same thing by myself using the web-services would have been too much for me. The service in Verkkokauppa.com was non-existent. Maybe not having any service is a way to keeps prices down (or profits up), but it is really irritating. I did not get the wireless CF-card I went there to buy. In China, I got used to good, even too good, pushy, service. I am glad to pay some extra for service, but it seems that in many place even paying does not help. For example, in Picnic cafeteria, I had clean the table before I could fit my cup of coffee on it: they just did not have enough personnel to take care of the cafe. Too bad. Is this the future? No service, do it yourself. Boring, no style!

Fortunately, in Cafe Aalto they still serve the coffee to the table. I had a cup of coffee there with Aaro and Johanna. I also bought some guidebooks to Brazil.

Barflies

I went for a short (just 5 hours) bar crawl with Petri G and Pekka S around cheap places in Kallio. Our route today was: Heinähattu (excellent music, but a crazy girl from the bank), Mambo (young, funny clientele with strange gifts), Exodus (we were so old...), Roskapankki (they cheat with 0.4 liter pints). And then we were quite ready to go home, at last. I heard some rumors, but I am not suicidal enough to write them here....

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs from September to October 2004".