Archive for the “Thoughts” Category

I sometimes wonder why individuals would seek to lead one or more lives in addition to and mostly seperated from their primary social one. One sees it happen all around ourselves and all the time. It can also be seen illustrated on daily television shows and the mass media. Some are innocuous or pleasant while others seem surprising or even sinister in nature.

Different persons may want to lead multiple separate lives for any of a number of reasons. Some are based in egotism while others are a necessity for continued survival within a highly nosy and very unforgiving society. As they say, one person’s heaven could be another person’s hell, and in the context of a society where the conventional values are agreed upon only by a general majority it is inevitable that some minorities will consequently feel the need to lead multiple lives.

It is actually much more penetrative than one might think. Basically if a person has a secret – any secret – then it is possible that that person may consciously or unconsciously be living a double life of sorts. This includes the classic examples – the individual who has an affair, the homosexual priest, the man who dresses like a woman by night – but it can also extend to less obvious examples. A woman could be a strong negotiator in the public sphere while grappling to come to terms with a terminal ailment behind closed doors. A jolly mild-mannered baker could be a serial killer with blood on his hands. An anointed war veteran could talk tough by day but cry in his sleep. A girl could be truly outgoing and yet curl up with a diary before bed. A factory worker could get lost in a private day dream.

The list goes on and on with the commonality centring around the fact that there are some things that individuals do not feel safe enough to trust with the public sphere. It is likely that the vast majority of those who form the general public, whether or not considering themselves mainstream, hold several aspects of themselves as far out of reach of everybody else as they can reasonably manage, and it is likely that they do so in fear of reprisals. I wouldn’t blame them or yourself for doing so. Many learn to do so from a tender young age when trial and error teaches them that children and adults alike are capable of making a person regret the words that they utter. While on this topic one could also point to this as a reason why so few people are outspoken in the world and why it is only a child who would dare to point and declare that the King wears no clothes within the famous fairytale. I guess it all comes down to keeping life simple and to this end the strategy seems to have served its purpose, in spite of the added difficulty in doing so upon an Island such as ours where everybody seems to know everybody and the vast majority of us are likely related to the 4th degree in some fashion or other.

I would like readers to pause and reflect upon their individual selves. Do you hold part of your life separate from another? Do you hold secrets that you feel are simpler kept than shared? It is fine to do so as many secrets are everyday matters. I hold secrets of my own and the chances are that so do you. Its ultimately a part of what makes ourselves social beings and moreover human.

Not too long ago there existed muted controversy over the pipes that dispel semi-treated human sewage into the sea. As with all such controversies, once the shores were officially declared safe enough for swimming the simmering outrage subsided and today the issue is practically all but forgotten, buried beneath other more contemporary issues. However the pipes continue to spew sewage and while the quality of treatment of the sewage may have improved it remains sewage.

Of course even such treated slurry has its effects upon the environment. Certain kinds of sea vegetation, upon which both desirable and undesirable fish may feed, thrive upon any opportunity for a ‘nutrient-rich’ zone, and certain bays make for perfect examples. The full effects of such artificial enrichment of sectors of sub-aquatic Malta are unlikely to be fully appreciated by the public for many years to come. After all, being a small set of islands we have the blessing of having our poor environmental choices shunted wherever the winds and the waves dictate.

However upon a different level the choice of the Maltese Islands to literally waste tonnes of sewage every day is a choice of incredible stupidity. While a Swiss city with one quarter the population of Malta worries about producing enough cow excrement to generate alternative fuel, we of the Maltese Islands appear to feel that we are wealthy enough to toss our excrement into the sea, not only soiling our chances of using it as an energy source but also soiling the “Sun and Sea” tourism life-line that the Malta Tourism Authority seems stuck on (which is every bit as reductionist in nature as some males’ demeaning perspectives of the female).

In Malta we have a population of 400,000-odd persons. That represents 400,000 individuals each using the sewage system several times a day. We currently throw the vast majority of it all into our seas.

Why do we do it? Biomass is by no means a new energy and has been used successfully in much cooler countries, just as solar panels have and, unlike the use of crops to directly make fuel, this is not nearly so great a threat to world food supplies. Why does the Nationalist government persist in dogging every effort to introduce alternative energy sources? Not only do ministers state that it is more expensive than exponentially pricey fossil-fuels but when a foreign company expresses interest to open an alternative energy laboratory in Malta the initiative goes up in smoke! Also, why is the Nationalist government hedging its bets with a highly expensive form of alternative energy (an offshore wind farm) which I honestly doubt they are capable of maintaining in good repair?

Could it be possible that spending a bomb upon another inadequate white elephant would pave the way to future excuses not to introduce further alternative energy? In other words could it be a case of yielding a foot to save a yard for as far as oil interests are concerned? Is it possible that the oil gurus have dipped their fingers into the pockets of Maltese politicians? Would this have anything at all to do with the redoubled efforts in “oil-exploration”? Sometimes I seriously do wonder whose interests the politicians, the supposed servants (‘not’ masters) of the people, are safeguarding…

As the boats continue to land upon our shores and the tally of individuals illegally entering the country surpasses a thousand-strong, eyes are increasingly cast towards the Nationalist government for some kind of a solution.

On the part of the Maltese authorities we have seen an incredible degree of reticent passivity in terms of the measures that they put into motion in the past half-decade. Even Nautilus has been admitted to ‘not be a solution’ for the Maltese situation. Not only have we seen immigrants’ boats brought to our shores from dozens-to-hundreds of miles away, and immigrants themselves detained for lengthy periods of time, but we have also heard much talk of integrating such immigrants into Maltese society.

As such I feel that it is important to point out the differences that there exist between a legal immigrant and an illegal immigrant, especially as it appears that some do not seem to be sufficiently aware that any appreciable difference exists.

The first difference to make note of, and probably the most crucial, is that it is reasonably possible to regulate and to demographically plan for a sustainable society where legal immigration is concerned while it is not possible to do likewise where illegal immigration is concerned. This may initially seem unimportant but if one were to consider the economic sphere of any given economy is only able to provide a specific standard of living for a specific number of individuals then it stands to reason that any increase or decrease in population will inversely effect the overall average standard of living. Any significant unplanned influx of a net-benefactor population would consequently also vie for the resources of the present economic sphere and therefore result in significant detraction to the existing population in terms of their standard of living. So important is this first difference that all others fall to the levels of trivia.

While there is no hard rule to suggest that an illegal immigrant necessarily fits within the category of net-benefactor, there is no denying that the pool of illegal immigrants within the Maltese Islands do, siphoning tens-to-hundreds of thousands of Euros towards their upkeep. The reverse is more or less true of legal immigrants. True, a legal immigrant could end up on welfare, just as any local individual could, but this is about as significant an exception as a net-contributory illegal immigrant is within their respective contexts.

While it would be politically correct to state that there is no racial connection between legal immigration and illegal immigration, the reality of the situation demands otherwise. African blacks and African Arabs almost exclusively makes up boat immigration while Asians and Eastern-Europeans make up the bulk of individuals who arrive on a valid temporary visa and allow it to expire, remaining here and hence becoming illegal immigrants of a sort about which too little information exists to be certain of. Beyond the racial realities lie geopolitical realities, where disparities within the reality of the grand scheme of things lead to mass illegal migratory trends. One of the factors that cannot be too lightly stated is the fact that freedom of movement is not uniform from around the Mediterranean basin. It is also clear that even if legal avenues were easily accessible from the southern rim, it is highly unlikely that Malta would have approved even 5% of those who arrived via illegal means.

Does this make all the talk of legality and illegality null and void? I would think not. If anything it further highlights that there is a need for inadequacies in present policies to be recognized and for alterations to be made in the name of improving our survival chances through adaptation to our circumstances.

It is that time of year again. When dozens of students look upon their university result report with dilated eyes upon the spot where an ‘F’ or two offensively blotches the computer screen. The rest of the results, even the ‘A’ s seem to shrink in their presence as hope is sapped from within the student’s very core. A few other students look upon a half-dozen failed units with tear-stained cheeks, contemplating their next job application for chambermaid.

An exaggeration, you might say, but results mean a lot within the university grinder, much more so than the academic levels preceding it. For, as is the case with a number of other universities world-wide (to which this contribution applies equally or more so), the regulations pertaining to resits state that, short of absence for a proven health reason or for some other reason arbitrarily decided to be good enough to justify absence, a student resitting several months later would be able to achieve a mark no greater than 45% of the mark, or a ‘D’ grade respectively. This when it is very clear that the paper being sat for is every bit as challenging as the first sitting session.

In other words it does not matter how good a student ultimately is within a given subject unit, if for any reason whatsoever short of the above reasons that student should fail, be excessively late for or even absent for the first sitting, that student would not only deservingly get an ‘F’ for that sitting but would then effectively be asked to swim with a brick chained to his or her ankles, the resit process severely weighted against success at a stage far more delicate than the  first sitting had been.

This is supposedly done to cut down upon abuse of the system. Yes, a student ‘might’ well decide to shun the final examination in order to brush up his or her grades within other study units but then why not implement a system similar to that of the Matriculation certificate? In other words why not charge a fee for every resit examination sat for? In that way the true abusers would pay without scuttling the chances of those genuinely unable to make the grade for whatever reason.

In case readers are wondering why it would be at all important to allow students to gain a fair grade, kindly reflect upon the following. The difference between a ‘C’ and a ‘D’ can make the difference between a distinction and a merit. The difference can also make the difference between being able to progress to the next academic year or repeating the present one… and it can also make the difference between a student remaining within the game and that student failing the course entirely, effectively meaning that several years of that person’s life have effectively gone to waste.

In the run up to the election the Nationalists lambasted the Labour party’s suggestion of a repeater class and yet they persist in failing to realize that they have been presiding over a repeater system for many years now. For how is one to ‘pass’ through one’s resits if the system sets the student at a disadvantage before they have even sat at the table? Just because other places have such a backwards system in place does not necessitate that the university of Malta is justified in persisting in this folly. The student organizations should take note and make their voices heard because this is every bit as serious a situation as any delay in the release of results.

It is not such a difficult issue to decide upon. What I am calling for, and I believe that other students and representatives should be calling for, is the right of a student to be assessed upon the basis of one’s own performance within a resit session and not upon some medieval dumbed-down mockery of a session intended to see if the quality of that student’s writing is sufficient to make a pass. Dolores Cristina please take note. This issue will come back to haunt you if it is not promptly rectified. The election is no longer at stake but the futures of thousands of students are.

Well this is a right mess. The transportation workers have decided to go on strike, possibly inspired somewhat by their counterparts in Europe. Busy roads came to a standstill, the city was besieged and the shopkeepers felt rather lonesome. Tempers flared and acts of aggression, intimidation and vandalism took place in the presence of locals and tourists alike and many opted, voluntarily or otherwise, to remain at home.

I am of two minds about the strike. While on the one hand I despise the fact that the transport workers took their protests to the general public, their peers and also the tourists whom we owe a happy holiday (lest we forget that they actually pay to visit the Islands), and while I do not feel that the liberalization of the hearse sector warranted anything of this sort, I have heard rumours that the Nationalist government had offered promises not to liberalize the transportation sector during the election’s eleventh hour. It seems that the transportation drivers are in possession of a letter signed by Mugliett supporting this claim… and I personally do not take kindly to deceit or broken electoral promises. If this claim is indeed true then it would be more than safe to say that the wrong party is in power today, having won an election upon the wings of deceit and misinformation. If true then Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi should both call an investigation and either relinquish a seat to the Opposition in the spirit of stepping up to the plate of accountability or, if he would like to continue dancing the ballad of unaccountability, call for a vote of confidence.

However… a few comments about the Government’s handling of the protest. I am of the opinion that the daily slash in subsidies was an extremely efficient if slightly heavy-handed approach to seek to end it. The setting up of alternative forms of transportation was also commendable, even if it has hit a number of speed bumps due to resistance. While I also commend the initiative to set up an alternative taxi service for chauffeur-driven vehicles I would suggest that € 15 is a ludicrous price for any but the longest journeys upon the Islands, and is in fact a step backwards.

Lastly I would like to point out the obvious. Any situation where drivers own the vehicles is a situation where drivers likewise have a lot of clout. If one were to remove this privilege then the driver would no longer have the protest dynamic of a small entrepreneur but of a regular employee. Hence it would only be a matter of hiring replacements on a short term basis until resolution.

A spokesperson for the EU border security agency Frontex has stated that Nautilus is not the solution to Malta’s illegal immigration. The general feeling gotten is that it is Libya that is to blame for the failure of Frontex to solve the problem. This spokesperson then went on to compare Nautilus with the sister project Hera in the vicinity of the Canary Islands and how relative success was achieved there thanks in no small part to the cooperative efforts of Senegal and Mauritania.

This may indeed be the case and Libya may very well not be cooperating with Nautilus but there is a fundamental question that nobody in Europe seems to be asking. Why should Libya bear the weight in responsibility for the mass illegal migration from an entire continent? Is this truly a productive or constructive attitude towards solving the problem or is it merely provoking the very same stonewalling that Libya is accused of?

Libya is every bit as much of a victim in this matter as Malta is and likewise has every bit as much of an interest in solving the problem of illegal immigration from their own perspective. Libya unofficially has some control over the flow of illegal migrants from its shores; it is almost unfathomable to imagine it being any other way considering the highly engineered flow of immigrant, waxing and waning to conveniently cater for political events.

However how different is this strategy from the concept of “burden sharing” brought up in the run-up to the previous election? It may sound good on paper and I am pretty sure that Josie Muscat had done his homework on the matter (which compares favourably to the Nationalist’s non-plan of action in both its previous term and its current term in government) but I feel that there remain a number of logical flaws, some of which are pungently, if effectively, highlighted through comparison to Libya’s own brand of “burden sharing”.

Returning to Libya as a topic, let us attempt to identify its relationship to the issue at hand, illegal immigration, and classify it accordingly. Firstly Libya is not a source country but a country of transit, just as some people claim that Malta is. Secondly Libya is criticized for its treatment of African immigrants within its borders – it is not a picture of harmony. Therefore to attempt to ‘solve’ illegal immigration from a purely pan-European perspective would be an exercise in futility as too many essential pieces of the puzzle are disregarded.

We will get absolutely nowhere if we continue regarding our closest southern neighbour with this degree of suspicion and disregard to their own interests. Once we successfully adjust our egotistically-geared nationalistic perspectives to more communitarian-geared nationalistic perspectives, where benefit within a neighbouring nation is deemed a positive not only to that nation but to one’s own nation, especially if prominent in its adjacency, then I feel that we would have taken a second crucial step to solving the illegal immigration issue.

You are yourself every bit as much as I am myself. It seems obvious right? Well it is obvious but within debates both in Malta and World-wide we seem all too often to forget this essential truth. There is no element of choice in being who you are. It is a reflection of the sum of your personal interpretation of your internalized interpretation of your observations of the stimuli that surrounds your life.

Likewise thinking what you think is relatively involuntary and therefore not a choice. This is why many persons experience unpleasant thoughts that they desperately try to push out of their minds while other persons wonder where their previous more pleasant thoughts drifted from.

The way that you express yourself is more down to choice but even so there remains a degree of impulsiveness – of habits that are hard to suppress. In western countries there is the tendency to shake hands upon meeting. In fact I would break this section down into three parts. Firstly, one’s habits, secondly one’s communications, where one converts one’s thoughts into a medium through which those thoughts are successfully conveyed, and thirdly there is the performance, a series of acts that are devoid of the real implications attached to equivalent actions in reality (an example of such would be acting out a stabbing motion upon a stage). Lastly the actions that you perform are primarily down to choice, though the root may be entrenched within that which you think or are, and this completes the hierarchy from the internal to the external.

The reason why I consider this to be important lies within my belief that the legal and political systems within many countries fail to recognize the above in their daily dealings. The result is that the conclusions which are reached are logically incomplete and sometimes even incompatible with society at large.

Example fields where this blind-sightedness strikes include the inequitable treatment of different sexes, races, sexual orientations, marital statuses,political orientations, religions and more, within the context of identical circumstances. Likewise this same blind-sightedness applies to the loading of certain forms of deviance against other forms of deviances.

This aside, if one were to take the adjectives to be, to think, to express and to do, and were to throw each into the context of representing different grades of rights, then one would end up with a very simple, conservative yet liberal and also effective means of evaluating and comparing the conflicting interests that can make up some of the more profound of dilemmas. For example, is it wrong for one human to kill another? Why or why not? Do traditional instructions of indoctrination provide ourselves with a reason better than ‘because it is written in this text’ or ‘because the other person has the right to live’? The later statement is by far more credible a response than any variant of ‘because X says so’ but would we be able to explain this effectively or would we get caught within indefinite loops of ‘because’?

Through the acceptance of a certain hierarchy in the different degrees of rights and the use of such as a logical tool in the quantification and assessment of ethical questions one may find that the result would be a social fabric of greater consistency and with fewer elements of hypocrisy than that which more traditional legal concerns provide.