Recent comments on posts in the blog:
Sometimes it looks like things are never random and there is some kind of destiny…
Although I was similarly confused, I think I just might be able to explain the Marxism reference in de Botton’s book. I think he’s referring to Groucho Marx, who said “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”, as de Botton describes in the chapter, with the club being an analogy to the relationship with a person he now finds wants him as a member. (I learnt the Groucho Marx quote by chance via Woody Allen movies). Whether or not de Botton chooses to call this ‘Marxism’ for fun because political-Marxism is such a fundamental topic in literature, or whether he simply adopts it as a way of saying “Groucho-Marxism”, not sure. Probably both.
Tom
:P
The British welfare state is indeed being eroded by the current government, but there is a good chunk of the country that very vocally objects – we’ve just had difficulty getting power since 2010, for a host of reasons. It’s not just some grassroots socialist movement, either. A big chunk of the country really are socialist.
While the changes that have been made to schools are reversible even if the current government cling on next week, this election might be our last chance to save the NHS, because the current government are in the middle of a process that will effectively sell it off. That would be difficult to come back from.
It’s refreshing to see this is so in the UK. Specially as it is talked all around that, since Thatcher, the UK has been slowly dismantling what used to be a firm welfare state — I had the impression that yes, that many institutions still stand, but it’s clearly going the way of the USA. I’m happy to see it’s not. I live in Mexico, a country that had a very long institutions-buildng process, approximately from the end of our revolution (~1920) to 1982. We have then had a series of neoliberal governments, and term after term, the weight of the social goods are clearly diminished; we still have a system much stronger than the USA’s (including a very limited but existing nevertheless public health, a troubled but great educative system including the best universities in the country, water and energy production / distribution, and a very long etcetera), but… It feels it’s all irrevocably going away. But the point you make in a most surprised tone is what I most long to see here: Politicians that live among the people, that are not a breed apart, that are consequent with themselves.
I know DnD a bit, but I always found it very weird and unrealistic. Something like the DOS of the RPG games. When you could instead have a Unix, like RuneQuest.
So I actually think you should take a look at RuneQuest, not only because it presents an extremely coherent rule-system all over (all rules are as general as possible to fit as many situations as possible; and the rules always apply to everything), but also because it supports several magic systems, some of which are extremely elegant.
The current version usually goes by the shortcut “BRP” (supporting several settings including RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, which also used this system since ever) and you can find resources to it on http://basicroleplaying.org/