The Weekly Distillation No.45
Cancel Culture; Whisky; Demarche; Euros; Ardrossan; Battlefields; Tax; Dyslexia
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Welcome to The Weekly Distillation. This is a newsletter that seeks to distill the noise and help you be informed, provoked to think, and inspired to create as you lead in life and in your organisation.
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People once said…….
"We strongly support the work being done to update international tax rules. We hope countries continue to work together to ensure a balanced and durable agreement will be finalised soon," - Alphabet (Google’s owner) spokesman Jose Castaneda
#Ardrossan
“By 2014, mortar teams in Aleppo could use their iPad or smartphone’s GPS (which told them their mortar’s precise location) along with its compass app to determine the azimuth for a given target, then refer to firing tables downloaded over an internet browser, or use a ballistic computing app (also on the phone) to determine the correct elevation and propellant charge for a particular range. They could then set that elevation using the smartphone’s inclinometer and fire their first ranging shot. A remote observer - on the scene, or more likely, located elsewhere but in contact via phone or secure messaging app with someone able to see the target - would place a pin in Google Earth to mark the fall of shot. This pin could be made to appear on the version of Google Earth running on the mortar team’s smartphone, and they could immediately launch multiple rounds to destroy the target after just one ranging round. For comparison, this fire control system lets nonstate armed groups attain a level of precision equal to, or better than, what most state-based military forces can achieve.” - David Kilcullen, author of The Dragons & The Snakes: How The Rest Learned To Fight The West
Skim it in a minute
This is amazing - law enforcement agencies tricked organised crime into accepting devices pre-loaded with apps that gave the good guys the insights into the comms. And the bad guys go and share the devices through their network. (Excuse the good guys / bad guys simplistic language - it seems apt here though)
The G7 nations agreed a global floor of 15% as a corporation tax rate. However, it seems likely that it won’t make much difference in reality. Tax structuring is the most intellectually fascinating part of finance - morally questionable but problem solving on steroids. It makes nice headlines but there are some very clever people who work in this space whose entire job is to concoct solutions you wouldn’t even dream of in 1000 years to get around these rules.
This excellent article caught my eye this week - Karis Gill, founder of the amazing Social Stories Hampers social enterprise, wrote about how people with Dyslexia can be better supported by the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
A Deep Dive into Cancel Culture
I was on a call with someone today when they used the phrase “wokery”, which was a new one to me. I assume this came into the same bracket as the historic use of “Popery”, back in the days when it was fashionable to be sectarian in Scotland [Editor: Pot Pouri?] Popery is, rightly, not a word that you will hear used often and in most of my circles, anti-Catholic bias has gone.
Let’s jump from the Pope to the Queen. (Not so unusual a jump if you know your Jacobite and Hanoverian history)
This week graduate students at Magdalen College at Oxford University elected to remove a photograph of Her Majesty the Queen. I’m definitely not a royalist, I think the Royal Family are a nice tourist attraction but beyond that probably don’t serve a major purpose in a modern democracy. However, I was curious about the rationale for removing the Queen, who it’s genuinely hard to dislike and has been a faithful and humble leader of the monarchy for decades.
The minutes of the meeting recognised that “for some students, depictions of the monarch and the British monarchy represent recent colonial history”. And therefore the Queen was gone. (Under-reported is that an earlier group of students of the same college had acquired the photo of the Queen and hung it up).
I was involved in student politics back in the 1990s and we got involved in some absolute nonsense debates, thinking that gesture politics made a difference. Our biggest problem was getting a quorate meeting and we even planned to free beer to boost the numbers.
The broader point that hit the headlines this week was whether this was another example of Cancel Culture that continues to sweep the West. The UK Education Secretary certainly thought so.
What is cancel culture?
“the practice of withdrawing support for (or canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive”
Morning Consult definition July 2020.
The essence of cancel culture has been amplified by social media - it is easily to highlight, vilify and mobilise a crowd against a specific target. As we saw in many incidents during the Trump administration, this can often turn out to be nothing more than a vigilante mob moving to a false conclusion. If I disagree with someone’s views, should I have the right to call for them to be refused a public platform, whether or not it’s an event, a book, a TV interview, a social media timeline or a product? When does free speech get impinged? And does removing a picture of the Queen hanging in a common room even meet the definition of cancel culture?
Is cancel culture always a bad thing?
As with most debates these days, “cancel culture” is a phrase that gets used by the right against the left, and “giving voices to the voiceless” and “removing signs of oppression” gets used by the left against the right. Words like “oppression” lead into the debates on critical theories but we’ll save that for another day.
If there’s a platform being used for promoting illegal acts, a future violent attack or promoting active exploitation of vulnerable people, does this deserve the right to free speech? Shouldn’t it be cancelled? Does ISIS deserve a social media account to actively call for the beheading of “infidels”?
When cancel culture leads to totalitarianism
Arguably the Nazis were performing an extreme “cancel culture” with the Holocaust. Eradicating signs, practices, books, movies, buildings and even the Jewish people as they went, in the most horrific attempt to eradicate the culture and existence of the Jews.
The Taliban were offended by the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. So they blew them up.
ISIS was offended by the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the best-preserved ruins at the Syrian site of Palmyra and so destroyed it by blowing it up. They also blew up the Temple of Baal, and shrines of Muslims and Christians in Iraq amongst many other cultural artefacts.
In the 18th century, the British Government wished to stamp down on the authority of the Highland Clans and the Jacobite leanings and so banned the playing of the bagpipes (with very few exceptions), the wearing of the kilt and the speaking of Gaelic.
Abolition and Proscription of the Highland Dress 19 George II, Chap. 39, Sec. 17, 1746:
That from and after the first day of August, One thousand, seven hundred and forty-six, no man or boy within that part of Britain called Scotland, other than such as shall be employed as Officers and Soldiers in His Majesty's Forces, shall, on any pretext whatever, wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland clothes (that is to say) the Plaid, Philabeg, or little Kilt, Trowse, Shoulder-belts, or any part whatever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland Garb; and that no tartan or party-coloured plaid of stuff shall be used for Great Coats or upper coats, and if any such person shall presume after the said first day of August, to wear or put on the aforesaid garment or any part of them, every such person so offending ... For the first offence, shall be liable to be imprisoned for 6 months, and on the second offence, to be transported to any of His Majesty's plantations beyond the seas, there to remain for the space of seven years.
It’s a massive step from removing a picture of the Queen, to blowing up a historic building, or committing a holocaust. And it would be wrong to say they are the same. However, when we can’t have a society that allows for comment, debate and offence, we are heading away from a democratic state.
When we cancel ourselves
I found myself recently removing a wooden model of Tintin from a bookcase that pops up in the corner of my Zoom screen. Tintin is a comic character that people of a certain age grew up reading. Created by Belgian Hergé, there are a series of simple and engaging stories - however, the earlier comics were very influenced by Belgian colonial history in the Congo and general colonialist attitudes. So am I sharing that model as a reminder of great stories, or am I potentially providing offence to people that I talk to in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania? I chose to remove it from the screen to not cause offence, although I suspect I was over-thinking it.
I have a photo in a cupboard of my great grandfather, who I never met. He’s seemingly in a coffee plantation he owned in Mysore, India. There are several Indian children and workers in the picture. I’d love to know the history - was he a good employer? Did he use child labour? Did he provide dignity and quality in the face of a highly unjust caste based system of rights? Did he care for the locals, or treat them as less than human (like the Dalits are often perceived now). Am I right to share the photo as a fascinating part of my family’s history, or does it reinforce a period when our family was earning unfairly through exploiting the British’s military and economic strength as it controlled India?
When it’s not always black and white
I have good friends who are very anti-Israel in the Israel/Palestine debate in the West. They make some good arguments. I can understand, although I don’t condone, the thinking behind the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) that targets Israel. However, whilst I believe in their right to free speech, I also struggle with the simplicity of “we’re oppressed, you need to give up your power to us” arguments. The below quote made me smile - apply boycotts, but only when it doesn’t inconvenience us too much.
“Intel, the US chip manufacturer, has invested billions in the Israeli economy, making it deeply complicit in funding Israeli impunity. However, Intel is not currently a worldwide BDS target because of its near monopoly status in its sector, making a consumer boycott of the company hard to succeed at present.” - from the BDS website
What about the English cricket team this week? Two players accused of making racist or sexist comments many years ago - and forced to step down from playing for their National team (for now) whilst an investigation is undertaken? Even the PM queried the logic and ESPN kicked in too. Personally I prefer baseball to cricket and would happily cancel cricket generally.
Is it ok to give a platform to someone who is anti-vaccine, or believes in the lab leaks (oops, sorry I forgot that has gone from a crazy theory of conspiracists to a widely accepted theory in about 4 weeks), or who believes that climate change is a nonsense, or aliens are real, or that Brexit was a good idea?
Is it ever ok to remove the word “mother” and replace it with “parent who gives birth”? Err, no.
Is it ok to tweet that “that sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity”?
A friend of mine won a legal case for a church who had an event cancelled because the council of our city believed the speaker’s views were offensive. Was this right? The courts had the council apologise.
What about educational courses that fail to teach children about “Scotland’s colonial history”? Should they be cancelled? I have no problem with my children learning about the bad AND the good of the British empire - but when it’s a one-side repainting, isn’t this just a simplistic move in the direction of hiding the truth and akin to the old days of Soviet style schooling?
I remember the days when Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein and “ex” commander in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, was only able to appear on British TV if an actor dubbed his voice. I think Mrs Thatcher seemed to believe that this would lead to less support for him. If anything, it was so unusual it gave him more attention. But should he have been given a platform at all?
Cancel culture is a more nuanced debate than it is made out to be. The British oppressed people around the world through its empire (hello America) but also did much good. The Queen is a symbol of the royal family which led at a time of the oppression - but also is the sort of leader that should be an example to every child in the country. The curse of liberalism, whether of the right (social liberty & autonomous individuals free to choose their social beliefs) or the left (free markets and autonomous purchasing units) is that we no longer have widely held shared norms - and so what is acceptable and what is unacceptable is constantly up for debate.
How to respond to cancel culture constructively
There are four questions that can be quite helpful in this debate - what is good (or right), what is wrong (or bad), what is confused and what is missing.
If it is good, we should encourage it, promote it, celebrate it.
If it is bad, we should oppose it, criticise it, boycott it
If it is confused, bring clarity
If it is missing, create it
So in the case of Tintin - they are great stories and I’d like my boys to read them. They contain racist parts and views that I want my boys to grow up being aware of and understanding that is wrong. The views of Belgian’s to empire and the Congo and how that impacted the author are confusing to me and needs learning and clarity. The part that is missing is a foundation created from the proceeds of Tintin books to invest in education for children in the Congo. A simplistic example of how to apply these.
Should the students have removed the picture of the Queen? I think it was a ridiculous gesture that is probably hypocritical to many other similar steps they take every day (do they refuse to sing the UK’s national anthem, or use UK £ that includes a picture of the Queen on the coins?). (I’m about to get very hypocritical and remove any reference to England in my house during the Euros)Are there good debates to have on the good and bad of the British empire? Absolutely. Let’s have those and stop faffing around with gesture politics, whether that’s at work, in school, in the public square or in our courts.
Think deeper.
What I am reading
Not written by pop artist Michael Jackson, this excellent introduction to many classic whiskys, was written by the highly regarded Michael Jackson (1942-2007). With a great introduction to the history of the component parts of whisky (on the geology section, it flagged that Scotland was once part of the N America continent and broke off, colliding with England at around where the Romans went on to build Hadrian’s Wall….surely not?) and the definitions of the various types of whisky, it’s a good introduction to the drink.
However, it’s an even better book for looking at ratings and descriptions for many classics. If you’re a whisky drinker, grab this - it’s 6 years out of date so it misses many of the newer distilleries, or brand extensions, but there’s enough in there to keep you going for many years. I’ve been drinking a 10 year old Ardbeg this week with my father-in-law - which in the book received a decent 87/100 score for its nose of “sweet, with soft peat, carbolic soap and smoked fish”. What a description.
It’s probably worth a disclaimer that none of my sponsors see any of the content before it goes out - any errors, offence caused or pathetic arguments are my fault and mine alone. One of my colleagues recently pointed out that my writing recently has been quite serious. It was a fair critique and I’ll endeavour to return to a more light-hearted topic in the near future. If you have any great suggestions (they proposed meme stocks) then let me know in the comments or DM me on LinkedIn. Thanks for reading.