Katy pontificating

By Katy Swain, 4 July, 2024

I've long been astonished by a particularly irrational form of loss aversion that I've taken to calling "Zero-sum NIMBYism". Here's how it works:

A lifetime ago, I was living in a little seaside village which had an annual festival day that the local chamber of commerce would put on. Every year, the chamber would arrange to close the main street, invite stallholders, entertainers, and so on, and a lovely time would be had by all. Visitors would come from all over the country (in the off season!), and cars would be parked all along the streets for anywhere up to a kilometre. A day wandering up and down the street in the sunshine, snacking and drinking; what's not to like?

And every year, the owner of the local surf shop, plus one or two similarly entitled misers, would complain bitterly about the cost to the chamber of organising the thing, and the loss of on-street car parking directly outside his shop.

By Katy Swain, 2 July, 2024

The other day I was on the margins of a conversation about "the refugee problem", biting my tongue as one does. (Deep breath: No, it's not the people who are the problem, it's whatever is making refugees of them. You don't solve anything by shoving people into concentration camps or leaving them to perish from drowning or heat exhaustion.)

I was feeling sorry for the couple of Asian people present, but I'm afraid to say also relieved that for once I wasn't the elephant in the room. The conversation then turned to the specific difficulty of assimilating a large number of people from a different culture in a short period of time.

Again: why should this be a problem? Or more pointedly, why is the difficulty situated wholly within the incoming contingent rather than the resident population? Is building walls and turning back boats any sane sort of cure, or just a symptom of another, more serious, problem?

By Katy Swain, 17 May, 2024

I once vaguely knew the headmistress of a local school who, in the midst of a lively scandal over a run of instances of bullying, declared — privately, of course — that it was all poppycock. There was absolutely no bulling at her school. 

The bully never sees themselves as a bully. Nor indeed does their appreciative audience, up to and including, in some cases, the school principal (assuming they are not the individual doing the bullying at the time). 

The bully is doing the Lord's work, putting the aberrant and eccentric on the path to self-improvement. Bullying is rarely premeditated; it's most often purely reflexive. "See something, say something." Also shove something, trip something, punch something in the side of the head, pull something's pants down in the middle of the playground, if necessary.