Brexit and the Rise of Poor Loser Syndrome

It's interesting to think about the reasons for the rise in "Poor Loser Syndrome which has been so clearly manifest since Friday morning's announcement that a majority of British voters had chosen to leave the European Union. 

I can't help thinking about the different ways in popular culture that winning and losing is currently framed. In some sports, especially those with a large TV audience, the concept of losing (especially a cup final or league title) has become massively inflated - both in emotional and financial terms.

If we were to view videos of the final minutes of FA cup finals from the 1950s to the present day, I suspect that, along with the improved production qualities, we would also see an increase in the severity of emotion expressed by losing teams.

The media have played a part in encouraging this mindset of over-reaction (since it has a popular entertainment value). as has the presence of big money into some sports, which has the capacity to induce strange and unseemly behaviour in otherwise stable and moderate people.

This drift towards the "awful-isation of losing" can also be seen in popular television game shows such as Million Pound Drop, where the failure to win large sums of money is framed - for entertainment purposes - as an unmitigated disaster.

Behind these trends is a growing idolatrous attitude towards money and power. The rise of grievance politics, in which the perceived failure of the individual to achieve personal political self-actualisation is presented as the lowest form of human oppression, adds to the toxic mix.

It seems rather prosaic, but perhaps a simple but significant contribution that many people could make to what Thomas Aquinas described as The Common Good is to simply express publicly the dignified habit of losing well.

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John Hutton, Russian Gas, Georgia and Wiikileaks

Image via Wikipedia

Confidential US State Department cable 08LONDON2384 , published by Wikileaks, contains the following quote relating to the Russian invasion of Georgia's Abkhazia region in August 2008. 

At a meeting in September 2008 between US Deputy Secretary of Energy Jeffery Kupfer and the then British Business Secretary John Hutton, discussion turned to Russia's growing dominance of the European gas market. The discussion is summarised as follows:

Hutton stated that the EU is never going to speak with one voice on

energy security, pointing out that each country has dealt with supply

issues independently. He pointed to the growing European dependence on

Russian gas, and the fact that much of Gazprom's board was former

Federal Security Service (FSB). These factors, Hutton said,

contributed to the EU's feeble response to the Russian invasion of Georgia.

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Another Reason to Dispair at the EU

This from the EU-funded Samuri surveillance system - whose aim is to create the "next generation" of CCTV:

Existing systems focus on analysing recorded video. SAMURAI is to develop a real-time adaptive behaviour profiling and abnormality detection system for alarm event alert and prediction.

We aim to develop an abnormal detection system based on a heterogeneous sensor network consisting of both fix-positioned CCTV cameras and mobile wearable cameras with audio and positioning sensors.

These networked heterogeneous sensors will function cooperatively to provide enhanced situation awareness.

I notice that the ever-reliable and ethically impeccable BAA are major players in this monstrous supra-government-funded initiatve, which WE DON'T NEED.

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