Chances are

The problem with reading anyone's blog is that you always have to start at the end, reading their life backwards. It's like watching a murder-mystery: you know how it ends but you think to yourself: how did it all begin...
A life is understood backwards, but lived forwards.
---Kierkegaard

Columbo would always know who did it and why they did it; the end was always a foregone conclusion; the only remaining mystery is how we slip up...

Ubo would say: I wish, just once, Columbo would fall flat on his face. Life without any chances is plain dull. Echoing the Allama, he would add: the problem of this world is that it is limited; the problem of the next is that it doesn't have limits.

The "about me" page on blogs always has this hideous section "industry". What a joke! Capitalism at its best! Yes, the teaching industry...the leisure industry...what Adorno called 'organized freedom'. That, along with "astrological sign" is supposed to say something about you! Repeat after me: I am not a number, I am not..

Is it true that modern freedoms are morphing into obsessive compulsion disorders, behaviours that one can only liken to addictions: food, drink, drugs, gambling? The desire to introduce 'risk' and chance back into life is all the more acutely felt as our lives become more predictable. Modern man is caught between a blind mechanism and blind chance.


From today's paper, Tim Adams writing in The Observer, 7 th January:

Whether they won or lost, however, the men remained almost entirely expressionless, as if fascinated by the mechanism itself.

Gloria Steinem once observed that 'women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage'

Some world-class cynicism:
"It is government-wide policy, and that includes HMT [Her Majesty's Treasury], that Britain should become a world leader in the field of online gambling, in order to provide our citizens with the opportunity to gambling [sic] in a safe, well-regulated environment." [Richard Cabon, Government Minister]

Traditional opposition to gambling, which brought about the 1906 act that sought to ban off-course betting, based its argument not on the fact that it was addictive behaviour but that it fostered a damaging belief in the randomness of reward. Winnings had no relation to effort or worth. Gambling undermined the bond between hard work, thrift and prosperity; it generated a pathology of inequality.

If there was one dominant theme of the Nineties, it was that money could arrive with no warning, apparently at random, in the form of share windfalls, or to fat cats, or property speculators, or footballers, or employees of Goldman Sachs. This combined with plummeting faith in politicians and institutions helped to create a sense that wealth and power were distributed almost by chance.