Over The Counter Culture

Via the IPKat website comes this heartening open letter to Nick Griffin from the Royal British Legion, a charity supporting veterans of Britain’s wars – the defenders of British shores and ideals, a calling the BNP would very much like to believe it also fights for. Just skimming the letter, you can hear the sound of a satisfyingly huge slap ring out across the internet:

09 June 2009

Dear Mr Griffin,

We couldn’t help but notice that there was egg on your face (and on your suit jacket) on the day after you were elected MEP for North West England.

Please don’t leave egg on ours.

You wore a Poppy lapel badge during your news conference to celebrate your election victory. This was in direct contravention of our polite request that you refrain from politicising one of the nation’s most treasured and beloved symbols.

The Poppy is the symbol of sacrifices made by British Armed Forces in conflicts both past and present and it has been paid for with blood and valour. True valour deserves respect regardless of a person’s ethnic origin, and everyone who serves or has served their country deserves nothing less.

The Poppy pin, the Poppy logo, and the paper Poppy worn during Remembrance are the property, trademark and emblem of The Royal British Legion.

For nearly 90 years, The Royal British Legion has pursued a policy of being scrupulously above the party political fray. It is vital that everyone - the media, the public and our beneficiaries - know that we will not allow our independence to be undermined or our reputation impaired by being closely associated with any one political party. This is more important now than ever.

On May 27th, 2009, the National Chairman of The Royal British Legion wrote to you privately requesting that you desist from wearing the Poppy or any other emblem that might be associated with the Legion at any of your public appearances during the European Parliamentary election campaign.

He appealed to your sense of honour. But you have responded by continuing to wear the poppy. So now we’re no longer asking you privately.

Stop it, Mr Griffin. Just stop it.

Regards,

The Royal British Legion

The Royal British Legion is the nation’s leading Armed Forces charity providing care and support to all members of the British Armed Forces past and present and their families. It is also the national Custodian of Remembrance and safeguards the Military Covenant between the nation and its Armed Forces. It is best known for the annual Poppy Appeal and its emblem, the red poppy.

http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/news/general/an-open-letter-to-nick-griffin-chairman-of-the-bnp-and-mep-for-north-west-england

We were surprised to learn, during our month in China, that many bright young things there have a Western name as well as their given Chinese name. They ran the gamut – obvious ones (Zhu Li > Julie), action heroes (Bruce…), to amusingly random (names that would befit a 50’s Holywood starlet, not a trendy Chinese fashionista)!

Companies in Shanghai apparently have boxes on employee paperwork that ask for the ‘English name’ as well as the native name.

Here’s an interesting anecdote (via Freakonomics/New York Times):

Another of Hsu’s friends, who goes by dozens of names depending on the situation, tells him “a name is just a dai hao.”

Dai hao, or label / tag – something most netizens will be familiar with, given the prevalence of internet services requiring a username that (especially since the Web2.0 explosion of social services) becomes a major part of their face when interacting with the other users of the service – e.g. twitter handles, chatroom avatars, etc. The West has always had nicknames between friends – but to be introduced by others using your aliases, aliases that seemingly have parity with your given name – seems odd to me.

It doubt our society – already close to this point – is heading the same wayThere are, apparently, longstanding Chinese history and social dynamics (which I know too little about) are crucial to getting there.

Taking English names also fits with various traditional Chinese naming practices. In the past, children were given “milk names” when they were born, and then public names once they started school. Professionals and scholars used pseudonyms, or hao, that signified membership in an educated class. Confucius, born Kong Qiu, sometimes wrote under his zi, or courtesy name, Zhongni. Even now, Chinese sometimes take new names to mark the start of a new job, entry to graduate school, or a marriage, as my coworkers Alpha and Beta did. They subsequently named their son Gamma. (For the record, Alpha is the male.) (source)

I wonder what the effect is on psychology and commerce, when so little of your identity – even the name your parents gave you – is nailed down. I it empowering, to choose your own name and fully define your identity  (this, in a communist country!). Does it correlate with the abandon with which Chinese teens threw themselves into virtual worlds (see a pic below to see just how big this internet cafe we stumbled upon was – the first of many just like it) and buy virtual goods (a market estimated to be between $1-$2 bn, with some estimates in putting it at $5bn – now taxed at 20% by the Chinese government).

Via TrueSlant/Neuroworld:

You may remember from the other day, the Al Gore’s Giant Fraggin’ Mansion Effect. Or, as it’s alternately known, moral self-regulation.

This is a concept where people who are satisfied that they are “good,” will act bad. People primed to think positive thoughts about themselves will give less to charity; perhaps those pleased with their “green” Earth Day activities won’t feel bad about polluting a couple days later.

As I said before, basically, we’re constantly calculating the trade-off between being able to see ourselves as good people and the cost of engaging in all that non-advantageous goodness.

And, so, here’s a new permutation of this idea: A couple new studies suggests that white people who voted for Barack Obama may be so satisfied with their anti-racist credentials that they… act more racist.

Here’s what may be happening – too many people are weak in the face of peer pressure to give to causes they don’t believe in. Their contribution, in that case, is a bribe/ransom/blackmail payment. They go away from that transaction conflicted and, so goes the theory – less ready to engage and donate more meaningfully to the causes that actually stand a chance of getting under our skin.

Perhaps the government ought to ban street collectors for charities – those well-intentioned maniacs who will bear down on you, handshake extended, even as you desperately (and pathetically) pick up the pace and try to look away – at the nearest shop or at your phone.

This would, in the short term, vastly hurt the many charities that rely on this method of fundraising. But ultimately it would preserve goodwill for the social endeavours sector, and thus be a net benefiter.

With the rise of the internet and the work of good people such as Peter Dietz over at socialactions, niche causes (the Long Tail) are within easy access to all netizens – suggesting that the increased goodwill ought to rapidly spread to the sector in the form of hard-forged engagement with causes for all but the most bastardly amongst us!

From my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, this is how consumerist capitalism really works: it makes us forget our natural adaptations for showing off desirable fitness-related traits.  It deludes us into thinking that artificial products work much better than they really do for showing off these traits.  It confuses us about the traits we are trying to display by harping on vague terms at the wrong levels of description (wealth, status, taste), and by obfuscating the most stable, heritable, and predictive traits discovered by individual differences research.  It hints coyly at the possible status and sexual payoffs for buying and displaying premium products, but refuses to make such claims explicit, lest consumer watchdogs find those claims empirically false, and lest significant others get upset by the personal motives they reveal.  The net result could be called the fundamental consumerist delusion — that other people care more about the artificial products you display through consumerist spending than about the natural traits you display through normal conversation, cooperation, and cuddling.

from: Geoffrey Miller - Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

via: Tyler Cower – Marginal Revolution