18th March 2011, 01:12 PM
I think we had all better read BAJR's quote again
To quote Sun Tse
[SIZE=3]So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
What is being proposed is largely, I feel, a better understanding and collective agreement about what we are, what our cause is and why we think archaeology to be important - but do we actually know what our 'enemy' thinks? Do we really know what it is that we are fighting against? Do we know who we are fighting against, even? Let me cut and paste something from a recent comments section related to the MoL cuts. The person was vehemently in favour of the cuts, purely because, as you will read, they see public-funded posts as being not of value. Nothing to do with archaeology, history, museology, I would guess, but a simple, straight-forward ideological view-point that requires less state, less public-funded posts, more value for each pound spent. The subject matter and any value placed upon it by its supporters and adherents is irrelevant. Here is the paste...
[/SIZE]"The reason I ask is that these 2 people have cost the proper taxpayer real money and a lot of it. If we take into account their gold-plated final salary pension schemes, the employer's other costs, their salary and bonuses etc then we could be looking at over ?50,000 a year to employer each of these "irreplaceable" curators. So over the last 10 years they have cost the taxpayer ?1,000,000 in taxes to employ.
What I want to know is what have we got for our money? A heart bypass in the NHS could be done for ?2,500 so in those terms they have cost us 400 heart bypass operations over that time and continue to cost us 40 heart bypass operations each year.
So what have they done that matches this in terms of value? Where are their outputs? And I am not talking about little-read musty research aimed at other like-minded people or pottering around and counting lumps of broken pottery.
I am amazed at how far removed people like you and these curators are removed from the real world. Nobody owes them a living and if you open your eyes there are hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs across the UK and not all of them are public sector leeches like these two.
I tend to think that if people cannot demonstrate outputs that exceed the value of their costs then they are not justifying their existence. It is about time curators and others like them stopped living in the past and recognised that the world has changed."
Do you recognise the language? Straight out of Eric Pickles little blue book on how to shrink the state, reduce valueless front line services and axe non-jobs. I am sorry to put such a downer on all this but, like it or not, we are firmly in the position of opposition for many years to come - but we are not alone in opposition. We need to fight this ideology, build with partners to create a new future once this current lot have done their worse. We need to ally ourselves with anyone who is asking 'what exactly are the benefits of a strong economy (when it arrives) to our quality of life in the UK and Europe?. We need to get the Sustainable Development agenda back on track and to the fore.
Could go on but need to keep the head clear and blood pressure down for meetings this afternoon
To quote Sun Tse
[SIZE=3]So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
What is being proposed is largely, I feel, a better understanding and collective agreement about what we are, what our cause is and why we think archaeology to be important - but do we actually know what our 'enemy' thinks? Do we really know what it is that we are fighting against? Do we know who we are fighting against, even? Let me cut and paste something from a recent comments section related to the MoL cuts. The person was vehemently in favour of the cuts, purely because, as you will read, they see public-funded posts as being not of value. Nothing to do with archaeology, history, museology, I would guess, but a simple, straight-forward ideological view-point that requires less state, less public-funded posts, more value for each pound spent. The subject matter and any value placed upon it by its supporters and adherents is irrelevant. Here is the paste...
[/SIZE]"The reason I ask is that these 2 people have cost the proper taxpayer real money and a lot of it. If we take into account their gold-plated final salary pension schemes, the employer's other costs, their salary and bonuses etc then we could be looking at over ?50,000 a year to employer each of these "irreplaceable" curators. So over the last 10 years they have cost the taxpayer ?1,000,000 in taxes to employ.
What I want to know is what have we got for our money? A heart bypass in the NHS could be done for ?2,500 so in those terms they have cost us 400 heart bypass operations over that time and continue to cost us 40 heart bypass operations each year.
So what have they done that matches this in terms of value? Where are their outputs? And I am not talking about little-read musty research aimed at other like-minded people or pottering around and counting lumps of broken pottery.
I am amazed at how far removed people like you and these curators are removed from the real world. Nobody owes them a living and if you open your eyes there are hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs across the UK and not all of them are public sector leeches like these two.
I tend to think that if people cannot demonstrate outputs that exceed the value of their costs then they are not justifying their existence. It is about time curators and others like them stopped living in the past and recognised that the world has changed."
Do you recognise the language? Straight out of Eric Pickles little blue book on how to shrink the state, reduce valueless front line services and axe non-jobs. I am sorry to put such a downer on all this but, like it or not, we are firmly in the position of opposition for many years to come - but we are not alone in opposition. We need to fight this ideology, build with partners to create a new future once this current lot have done their worse. We need to ally ourselves with anyone who is asking 'what exactly are the benefits of a strong economy (when it arrives) to our quality of life in the UK and Europe?. We need to get the Sustainable Development agenda back on track and to the fore.
Could go on but need to keep the head clear and blood pressure down for meetings this afternoon