L'Escargot

Two videos today, one of which will not see the light of day on here but was left over from yestern.  I'm tempted to post diagrams from it but i won't.  Here's the other one:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/ocTg1 . Suppose i said i was a chess grandmaster and on being asked why, i replied that i owned the most beautiful chess set in the world but it turned out i wasn't actually very good at chess.  That's the kind of thing that's happening now with Margaret Thatcher.  There are plenty of people who could've been Margaret Thatcher, such as Rhodes Boyson and Keith Joseph.  In the same way, i could replace the Queen on that chessboard with a Go piece, but it wouldn't mean i was playing Go - i would still be playing chess.

Politics is not about personality unless it's nothing more than show business, and whereas it has a showbiz feel about it, this is not healthy.  Politics is really about issues.  Therefore, Margaret Thatcher is completely irrelevant.

I'm Christian and probably post-scarcity anarchist.  Had i been born in South India, i would probably have been Hindu and maybe supported the Indian National Congress.  I would still, in a sense, have been the same person.  Just because someone happens to be in the so-called "nasty" party doesn't make them nasty.  It's possible to do good in a multinational, a government department or an anarchist collective, and up to a point, politics and religious belief, and a host of other things, have no bearing on whether one is a nice person.  The "nice" party sent people off to die in a possibly illegal foreign war, did behind the scenes deals with multinationals and stuck the boot in to us home edders.  So why exactly are they not the "nasty" party?  It seems to me they're the party which conned people into believing they were socialist until they got elected and it emerged that they didn't believe in anything at all but just wanted power for the sake of it.

The current attitude to Thatcher strikes me as puerile and reminds me of playground gangs.  It doesn't matter whether you love her or hate her, because she was a mere individual human being, and as such she is, like all of us, politically irrelevant.

I know this is relentless empty pounding, hence the title.  Since this is obviously getting repetitive, tomorrow's video will probably be on the Drake Equation.  It's long struck me as odd that this:

is dignified by such a name because it's so simple and is basically a verbal argument in algebraic form, which in a way would've been a lot better if it had stayed in that form.  I can mention the Rare Earth Hypothesis and the Fermi Paradox, though they may need their own videos.

In the meantime, and appropriately since i found that CEx had reduced the price of 'The Matrix' to ten bob and bought it as a result, i think i may have gone rather seriously down the rabbit hole but i should probably wait until autumn to talk about that.

I also need to get back to herbs at some point.