Ken Ham, Once Again Missing the Point

Oh, Ken Ham. Your writing is so often mental, so often self-aggrandising, always devoid of reason. I follow your blog, but not for the photos of you standing next to random evangelical pastors. No, I follow your blog for posts like this.

For the posts where you get so close to understanding the truth, before your cognitive dissonance valve unblocks and you go back into denial-shutdown mode. The opening sentence:

It is interesting to note how secularists continue to modify their ideas about supposed biological evolution when they find new information.

Welcome, Mr. Ham, to the fascinating world of science. The world where we learn new things all the time, and don't assume that the stuff we read in a book a long while ago will necessarily always be true for ever more. How's the Bible working out for you?

Misogyny and the Gym

Some of my friends may know that I'm a regular gym-goer. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I don't like it so much, but generally I hate not going to the gym more than going. This isn't the forum to talk about why I go; instead I want to talk about the culture at gyms themselves.

Mostly, the atmosphere at the gyms I've attended is kind of okay. But then I'm a reasonably-in-shape male, so presumably all the total dickheads out there see me as one of their own. Which is a good thing, I guess.

But on the occasions I see someone who doesn't fit into their stereotype of a gym person (i.e. not male), the seething among the olympic lifters begins. I want to make clear that it's not a majority of people who act like awful fucks, but there's definitely more than in the outside world (and if I did a scientific study, I'm pretty sure the difference would be statistically significant).

Just yesterday for example, I was in the middle of a... No, wait, k'know what? I'm going to write this blog post in the voice of a fitness blogger. I'll start again. Oh, and imagine I'm speaking like Johnnie Vaughan would if he took a cocktail of anabolic steroids.

SO, yesterday is was hitting the weights HARD. And I mean HARD. I was fucking beasting my way through a SERIOUSLY hardcore set when some other dude heads on over my way and asks if the Smith machine is free. This rookie wanted to bench on a Smith machine - hitting big numbers on a machine like this won't end up getting you that ROCK-HARD body you always wanted, as you won't get it with a restricted ROM.

He's asking me this shit in the middle of a CRAZY fucking set. I mean, I am in the ZONE. And the worst thing was, he has to walk past this CHICK to come and ask me. Good for her that she's working out and getting herself TOGETHER - the real men out there won't TAKE a girl in unless she's got TIGHT abs and great ti-

Yeah, I can't carry on doing this. It's giving me a headache. I'm going back to my normal voice - if you haven't heard it, it's smooth, sultry, and slightly annoying after the first few sentences.

Basically I was in the middle of something, and a guy asked whether a specific piece of equipment was free. Which is kind of annoying, but kind of understandable. Unless there's someone standing right next to me (and nearer him), not wearing headphones, and taking a rest between sets. Then, surely, it's worth asking the other person.

Why didn't he? Personally, I think it's because she was a woman, and he didn't think she belonged. Why do I think that? First, he was wearing a T-shirt which read "Read this while I stare at your tits", second he decided not to ask her in the first place, and third, he ignored her when she answered his question anyway. He just pretended she was invisible and inaudible and waited for me to answer instead.

I know it sounds a bit petty, but this everyday misogyny can so easily fade into the background unless someone comments. There's just this general vibe I get from some people at the gym that it's a guy's space, which men graciously allow women to use sometimes. From men telling women to stop using equipment so they can, to the arse-staring and creepshots whenever a woman walks past in stretchy workout gear.

My least favourite event was a woman walking into the free-weights area (that most manly of places) and look around for a second. She could have been looking for anything: a free bench, the dumbbell rack, a squat rack, anything at all. But no, one guy realised she must be completely lost. Why would a girl want to work out with free weights, he wondered to himself. What came out his mouth was: "The cross-trainers are on the other side of the gym, love".

That's a gym I never went back to.

I remember some guys complaining in a changing rooms about women's-only branches of Fitness First which have opened around London. Where are the men's-only gyms? These morons asked that question over and over, while I shook my head silently knowing the real answer: they're fucking everywhere.

Feminists: Debasing Marriage Since Never

I caught this blog post through a long chain of bigots, and people reporting on bigots. What begins as a discussing on Isaac Newton's brilliant invention of the milled edge coin quickly descends into a poorly structured metaphor about how feminists are destroying marriage.

How? You may ask. Our intrepid reporter explains:

Men looking to marry face the same kind of dilemma ancient merchants used to face.  Feminists and their enablers have slowly shaved off the value of marriage for men.  Marriage for men no longer means: 

• Being the legally and socially recognized head of the household.

• An expectation of regular sex.

• Legal rights to children.

• Lifetime commitment.

Well, if this is the destruction of marriage, count me in. Being in a somewhat equal relationship (sometime we watch TV I don't like, sometimes I pretend to be an aeroplane in public just to be annoying, I'm pretty sure the power roughly balances out).

And he hits all the standard dick-swinging woman-hating lonely-old-man tropes. Mischaracterisation of abuse as female histrionics:

 Oh, and we also have some new laws which assume you are an abuser if your wife decides she needs some drama or extra leverage against you. 

Then there's the attempt to paint all women as serial sluts:

It took her so long to find you that you can’t reasonably expect her chastity to be perfectly in tact.  I mean, it’s mostly there, but it suffered a ding or two.  Her virginity was gone to her first boyfriend, but don’t worry it was very romantic and she still has fond memories of that special time.  Not too long after that those jerks at the frat house did a number on her pride, but you can’t hold that against her.   

There are more, I'm sure. But I have a headache and want to sit in the corner.

A Tale of Two Letters

Since I've been walking to walk for the last month, I've unsurprisingly stopped reading the Evening Standard. And a good thing that is too, being as it is the printed minutes of Boris Johnson's campaign headquarters. But on Monday I did pick up a copy - a shitty journey back from Guildford left me feeling like catching the fastest tube back home rather than bothering to walk.

A couple of "opinions" on the letters page caught my eye. Why am I only writing about these now? Only the voices in my head know why. And they won't tell me.

Here they are [emphasis mine]:

Light entertainment at the BBC in the Eighties was a very different place from today - with a culture centred on the bar, full of characters and an almost anarchic sense of fun, with the producers themselves often larking about. 

I recall the rumours about Savile but they also flew around about lots of other people, including BBC executives. Isn't there the risk of everyone with an axe to grind now jumping on the bandwagon? A well-known actor threw a bacon roll at me once: should I launch into print and say in hindsight it was an assault? And how can George Entwistle, a director-general who has been in post five minutes, chair an enquiry on the issue?

The BBC has been showing us how Britain fed itself during the war. I can only assume this is government propaganda bracing us for the shortage of land caused by its reckless immigration policy.

I play a game called "Two a Day" with the Metro and the Standard. Every single day there are two letters (or texts) which are so far to the right they're off the lunatic fringe. And Monday was no exception. But it was special in how hard these two people had to work to get their absurd ideas out.

Jeanette Eccles from N7 had to compare child molestation to having a bacon sandwich thrown at her in order to dismiss the possibility of investigating the Saville affair. And Vanessa of no permanent address had to spend the last few years ignoring the fact that net immigration is negative (that is: more people are leaving than coming in) just in order to hold on to her opinion for this long. Then she had to come up with one of the most awesome non sequiturs I've seen in the Standard since they had Theresa May write an opinion piece about terrorists.

Congratulations Jeanette and Vanessa. Your prize for today's piece of gibbering, frothy-mouthed hatred is my ire. Go wallow in it.

British Transport Police miss the point

This BBC article is currently kicking around in the 'Most Read' section of the website. I, for one, fully support these little acts of resistance: they're witty, non-violent and hopefully make people think. All the things low-level subversion should be.

They are also marrying my two somewhat-contradictory thoughts on the Tube: Love public transport, can't stand TfL and how they manage the Tube. They're like any good parody: they mock their subject matter while making their affections for it clear.

Take the following examples:

 

"No eye contact. Penalty £200."
"We apologise for any incontinence caused during these engineering works."
"Peak hours may necessitate you let other people sit on your lap."

But, as always, the plod miss the point. And the fun:

BTP said graffiti was "unwanted vandalism that causes criminal damage" and "will not be tolerated".
"It is a blight on our society and becomes an eyesore for many residents who overlook the railway," a BTP spokesman added.

Wait, what? Putting stickers inside tube carriages and tube stations "becomes an eyesore for many residents who overlook the railway". It's almost like there is another kind of graffiti which basically everyone agrees should stop: spray paint on buildings by railways. If the police pretend all graffiti is the specific kind of graffiti it's easy to oppose then, why, they don't need to think about criminality with any kind of nuance or critical thinking at all.

Graffiti: bad. Always. Even if it's not an eyesore for anyone who overlooks a railway.

My Snidey Sense is Tingling

I follow a couple of fitness bloggers. Mostly because it's easy to injure yourself doing any resistance training with bad form, and regular videos on good form stop me getting in to bad habits. But, as is always the case with fitness, what few useful (and true) pieces of information come my way  are almost universally drowned out by mountains of utter bull.

I'd thought I'd finally found a set of blogs which don't get into too much of the bullshit, after hours of shit-sifting. Then I was pointed to StrongLifts, and in particular, one of their reviews of a fitness books. The link was titled: The Fitness Holy Grail. I was getting some serious bullshit vibes off of this. You might even say I smelled bullshit. And I was right. The entire review is covered in lines like "Outlaw Bodybuilder From New Jersey Reveals Amazing Secret Diet That Replaces Steroids And Forces Your Fat To Melt Like Butter In A Microwave!" and "most people - even the "experts" - will tell you it's impossible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time unless you're born with superhuman genetics..."

It has everything, all of the pseudoscience alarm bells: promising impossible change, representing the discoverer as a regular guy, denigrating the "experts". God, those experts, eh? What do they know?

But my favourite line is this:

Here's how: few guys know this but muscle size is directly related to strength gains. This is not only a scientific fact, but also an anecdotal one: 7x Mr Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger could Deadlift 710lb. Well, the fastest way humanly possible to gain rock-hard muscle is using my StrongLifts 5x5 program.

That's some rock-hard scientific understanding he's got going on there.

Crazy People Think Black People Can Get Away with Murder

Ah, Right Wing Watch. The staff there have the unenviable job of tracking everything that the crazy wingnut far-right of America say or do. Mostly so that there's a record of every incitement to violence, or mental conspiracy theory, or boycott, or outright racism.

Falling into the last of those categories is Brian Tashman's post Horowitz: Obama 'Would Never Be President if He Weren't Black'. Yes, there are the obvious statements of unremitting hatred, the lies and the conspiracies in there - go read for yourself - but one comment of Horowitz's did catch my eye [emphasis mine]:

Cornel West is just symbolic of the corruption of our culture and not unlike Obama who would never be president if he weren’t black, no white person with his resume and his thoughts and curious background and radicalism would ever have been nominated, let alone elected president if he weren’t black. So Cornel West is an empty suit who has twenty honorary degrees and he’s taught at all these prestigious universities but is basically an airhead, most people who’ve seen him on TV they’ve noticed. Part of the racism of our society is if you’re black you can get away with murder.

If you were looking for an explanation for why he hasn't been indicted yet over those drone strikes in Pakistan...

My Favourite Ever Word Salad

One of my favourite unintentionally hilarious websites is Biased BBC: a bilious, self-important ball of super-far-right hatred, all aimed at Auntie Beeb. The belief of the Biased BBC community is that the BBC has some sort of intrinsic preference for some (i.e. left-wing) political opinions over others. A bias, if you will.

And they see their bias everywhere. In particular, they see it in the BBC's supposed love of Muslims. Y'see, it turns out all Muslims are barbaric, murderous savages. Any that aren't are easily explained away: they couldn't possibly really be Muslims, because the Qu'ran is barbaric, murderous and savage. And so peaceful Muslims aren't really following the Qu'ran, etc etc. A shame he doesn't have a similar epiphany about monogamous Christians. How many wives did Abraham have again? One? or much much more than one?

But the BBC, who love Muslims oh so very much, reveal this bias by not mentioning how awful Muslims are in every other article. For example - the BBC have mentioned that JK Rowling, one of the most successful British children's writers of all time has her first adult book out. "WHY AREN'T THE BBC TALKING MORE ABOUT THE MUSLIMS?", Biased BBC asks.

But my favouritest ever article is this article, titled The Egg Headed Vanguard. If you can work out what they mean, translate into English in the comments:

The BBC?…..‘good examples of moderate, liberal devotion to the idea of a polite, eggheaded vanguard, without whom the proles get distracted, confused, besieged, and eventually succumb to the terminal disease of false consciousness.
The problem is that the contemporary Left has been used to the idea of itself as a paid bureaucracy as the measure of the success of class struggle.
You actually believe that someone like you [intellectual liberal/socialist] is better able to grasp the “objectivity of a social reality” than are poor workers, because your privilege, your education, has better equipped you to see the world as it really is, without the ornamentation of language, without the bias of place or time–absent the subaltern subject position they suffer from. You’ve been able to rise above ideological distortion.
Notice what you have made of yourself: God. Your perspective is from nowhere. In the name of those poor workers, you have turned yourself into the God who will judge them for their sins against the “objectivity of a social reality,” the sins that usually congregate under the heading of false consciousness.'

They're quoting from some equally mental, equally unreadable screed from elsewhere on the internet, but Biased BBC seem to think this is wisdom so great it needs no further explanation.

If you have an RSS aggregator, follow this site. There a good 15 minutes of giggling every day to be had.

Abortion and Disability

(h/t @stfumisogynists)

The Telegraph today published a letter from anti-choice groups which argued that in the wake of the Paralympics, abortion laws should be tightened and the freedom of people to decide the fates of their own bodies reduced.

Putting aside the allegation (which I haven't personally checked) that not a single signatory to the letter was from an actual, y'know, group representing disabled people, it seems pretty clear that the religious are happy to shoe-horn anything into their rhetorics if they think it will advance their cause.

But pro-choicers, such as myself, need to be careful on this topic ourselves. Talking about this issue can very easily fall onto the question over whether people should or should not get abortions, rather than whether they can or cannot. Anybody saying that living with a disabled child is too stressful for parents (and hence that pregnant women should abort foetuses which would be) is just as bigoted as denying abortion rights to women on the grounds of your own low redefinition of life.

s. e. Smith, a month ago, hit this on the head - far better than I ever could. It's so easy not to be a total arsehole. Living with the crazy idea that other people are actually fucking people, rather than pawns in your own political narrative, is one that comes so easily when you actually give it a try.

The question is not whether people should abort a foetus which presents symptoms of future disability, but whether people have the right to choose to abort, for their own reasons, or not abort, equally for their own reasons. Take it away s. e. Smith:

In a world where people, yes, celebrate and honour disability, our lives would be valuable and we would  be considered on equal footing as nondisabled people. And in that world, people wouldn’t talk about disability in terms like ‘suffering’ and say that parents have a moral obligation to abort to ‘avoid inflicting suffering.’ They’d say that all parents have the right to make decisions about what happens inside their own bodies, on the basis of as much information as possible, and those decisions are private and not subject to public discussion and judgment.

Nailing "Dependency Culture"

The refrain we hear from Tories, and conservatives in general, is that welfare creates dependency. That once we start giving people jobless benefits, or disability benefits, the population becomes a bunch of layabout scroungers with no drive to improve their lot or become productive.

Mitt Romney revealed just how deep this opinion runs among the super-rich, and the more measured rhetoric we normally see is how this package of hatred for the poor is sold to us. In the wake of the Mitt Romney scandal, conservative columnist for the NYT nails exactly why we should write off this narrative of a dependency culture:

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

We are no more than the sum of the opportunities we are offered, and are able to take up. Offering opportunities for success doesn't guarantee success in later life, but denying real opportunities definitely guarantees failure.

Ken Ham, so near and yet so so so far

Ken Ham sometimes manages to cut so close to the truth it almost hurts. Today is one of those days. If you haven't heard of Ken, he's the homophobic, woman-hating and, oh, yeah, young-earth creationist head of Answers in Genesis ministries. AiG are, for want of a better word, the leading young-earth creationist group - their Creation Museum (presumably) has visitors, and their website looks like a mongrel cross between Scientific American and Watchtower, the Jehovah's Witness periodical. The Ark Park, a proposed Kentucky amusement park which will combine all the fun of an inundation-themed day out with a hefty dose of biblical literalism, is going to be built just as soon as they can find enough morons to fund the thing. Or, failing that, Republicans.

So, it's not really possible for a person to be more openly wrong about the origins of the earth and life on it. Evolution? Didn't happen, too difficult. Earth more then 7,000 years old? A scientific conspiracy to destroy faith in the bible. Dinosaurs? Lived in the garden of Eden.

But there is one fact on which he and I agree. His ideas about the Bible make more sense than liberal Christians'. Don't get me wrong, wooly-minded accommodationist Episcopalians are my natural political ally within that wide, wide range of beliefs that is Christianity. But I can't help feeling that ken Ham has a point when it comes to reading the Bible:

In the sermon, the pastor challenges the accepted definition of inerrancy, claiming that the Bible has no original autographs.

There is no such thing as an original autograph of the Scripture, and to claim such a manuscript is the basis for the inerrancy is intellectually dishonest.

While it is true that we do not possess the original manuscripts today, Kremer is arguing that they never existed. He even goes so far as to claim that “the Bible is not a history book,” “the Bible is not a philosophy book,” and “the Bible is not a science book.” With all those caveats, what exactly can we trust in the Bible? More importantly, how can we trust all that it has to say about Jesus Christ? Well, that’s an exception, says Pastor Kremer.

When you come to talking about the character of God, the Bible is indeed inerrant. When you’re talking about the revelation of God in Christ, we can trust that information with perfect confidence.

My question to Dr. Kremer is this—“Who decided you can trust this section but not the rest? On what basis did you determine this? Or is it just your fallible human opinion?”

And here it is: a legitimate question. The Bible is a book filled with disgusting morality, with obvious scientific inaccuracies and with the odd bit of good stuff. How can we honestly reject the shit stuff while accepting the good stuff on the strength of the Bible alone? We can't. To effectively decide what is and is not moral in the Bible, we need another source of information. We need something else to tell us what is good and what is not. And since godless bastards like me have a perfectly good moral compass (gays: great, women: great, people of colour: great, everybody else: also great), I might go so far as to suggest that Biblical accommodationists are imprinting their own morals upon the Bible and claiming their ideas are divinely inspired.

At least old Kenny is honest, and submits all of his judgement to some random book plucked out of history rather than just the bits he happens to agree with. After all:

After all, if we take secularist Richard Dawkins’s views of evolution and millions of years to the Bible, why not take his views that reject the Resurrection and Virgin Birth and reinterpret the Bible too?

Quite.

Either the Bible is inerrant truth, or it isn't. If it is, then there should be no real evidence against its account of history. If it is, then every tenet of the Bible must surely fall under scrutiny. That's not to say that every passage is wrong, just that we should no longer consider any of it 'sacred' and beyond real criticism.

Ken Ham is so close to the truth - if we reject literalism, we have so many good reasons to reject the whole thing. He just fails to reject literalism.

Open Letter to Barclay's

Hi Barclay's,

I know this is going to sound petty. I know that you've probably had tons of letters about the LIBOR scandal, and your PR team are trying to find a way to minimise the damage from that little snafu. And if I'm honest, I know this is petty too. I know there's all the problems with the rape culture in Western society. I know there are people homeless because banks like yourselves collateralised debt to obscure how risky your investments really were. And yes, I am aware that Zach from One Direction has quit Twitter and there are now hundreds of young teenagers weeping softly into their pillow just like I did when PJ and Duncan left Byker Grove.

But this issue has been sticking in my craw for too many years to remain silent. No longer will I allow this to silently continue without opposition: Why are you incentivising people to unnecessarily use up paper? Why, when the rest of the world is try to reduce their environmental footprint, are you encouraging people to waste resources?

Let me make my complaint clear. Actually, let me compare you with a competitor. I bank with the Cooperative. When I happen to pass through Narnia, where my nearest branch is located, I can withdraw money from a Coop cash machine.

Would I like an advice slip with my cash? "We take environment seriously" says the machine, "are you sure you need a receipt?" If I were to select yes (I never do), I'm confident the machine might get a bit annoyed at me. "Really?" I expect it to ask, "You had a receipt yesterday. Do you really want to have a hand in destroying the world?"

No, ATM, I'm sorry, I don't, but I need to know my balance. "Well excuuuuse me," replies the ATM, rolling its eyes, "I guess you were too stupid to see the 'Check Balance' button when you withdrew your cash. Maybe, once you know how much money you have, you'd like to murder a badger. Or cause an oil spill by encouraging poor safety regulation. YOU BASTARD! THE DEATH OF THE ENVIRONMENT IS ON YOUR HEAD! Have you seen the competitive interest rates on a Coop Savings Account?"

The point is that the Coop really want you to use their online banking system. And really don't want you to waste paper.  As you may be able to guess, anonymous Barclay's employee, I'm about to launch a comparison bomb at you.

Yesterday, like a selection of previous days in the last four years, I withdrew cash from a Barclay's ATM (sorry, Hole in the Wall™). I would have used a Coop, but this was London so I was about 10 miles away from the nearest branch. I withdrew the big-spending £20 I needed without issue, but before I could receive my money I was asked the following question:

"Would you like an advice slip? Check the reverse to see if you've won a pair of Premier League tickets!"

I get it. You sponsored a bunch of overpaid borderline psychopaths to run around doing not very much at all. Presumably the execs missed the obvious irony in that gesture as they took their 7-figure bonuses. And now you have more Premier League tickets than you know what to do with. Bravo for giving them away.

But surely there must be a way to do that without getting football fans to use up otherwise unnecessary receipt paper. I know there are only so many executive days out you guys can take off before the economy gets ignored so hard it actually starts to improve, but why not do an independent goal of the month competition online, with real prizes like match of the day used to?

Hell, why not donate them to the hard working volunteers who try desperately hard to keep our kids playing sport instead of playing truant? Or throw them off of a balcony over Oxford Street and enjoy the spectacle of the proletariat duking it out over yourhand outs. Maybe that one's more up your street.

But please. Please, please, please stop wasting paper like you don't give a fuck. And while you're at it, if you wouldn't mind not fucking the public for the financial gain of just a few, even just for a month or two, I think we'd all appreciate it.

Yours sincerely,

Tim Ballantine

PS. I think there's a joke about a Coop ATM and a Barclay's ATM (sorry, Hole in the Wall™) walking down the street. Maybe the Barclay's ATM (excuse me, Hole in the Wall™) litters and then the Coop ATM goes mental and murders the Barclay's ATM (ugh, did it again, should be Hole in the Wall™) with a rusty switchblade.

I don't know, maybe you guys can be funnier with it than me. After all it was your ex-CEO who said that the banks should stop apologising for the crisis after conspicuously never apologising in the first place; presumably you guys already understand humour.

Why does the Left like to fight itself so much?

@JonnieMarbles discussed this point on Twitter recently, and got me thinking. I've been thinking about it because the Jubilee stewards issue and many of the recent articles about rape culture make me turn-green-and-break-expensive-equipment angry. And I had to meet up with the girlfriend's family this weekend so I was on best-behaviour notice.

[Tl;dr: The conclusion is just after the bold header lower down if you want to skip to the end]

So I've been thinking about this question mostly to stay sane, and to an extent it worked. I've just started reading Carne Ross' The Leaderless Revolution which was published late last year and is hopefully a sign that mainstream thinkers and politicians are beginning to understand the power of Occupy-style liberal socialist movements. Which is a good thing.

But part of Carne's thesis is that people need to come together en masse for change to happen, and while we're seeing convincing signs that this kind of bottom-up revolution is beginning to happen (Occupy, the Arab Spring, and UK Uncut spring to mind in an instant), the Left remains fragmented, beset by internecine bickering and infighting. Why, when the right wing seem to vote as a bloc on almost every issue in the US, does the left not unite to fight against bigotry and hate? Why, when civil liberties for all seem so obvious a cause to all of us, are there still people on the left wing arguing that fighting for rights for women, gay people and minorities isn't worth our time?

My early answer was that people dislike hypocrisy more than the things they oppose ideologically. That sentence might not sound like it makes a lot of sense on the first reading so let me try another way: I have a much bigger problem with a man who claims to fight for the people, who promises to give the downtrodden hope, and who wins a Nobel peace prize going on to send drones out to kill innocent Pakistani civilians than I would if a foreign policy hawk spent 3 years banging on about terrorism before doing the same.

In both cases, the action is identical - innocent people will die for no more reason than a far away country convinced itself it was under threat. But in the former case, you can throw in a personal betrayal as well: we believed in the first guy, however briefly.

And to an extent this is a very human thing. We have heuristics for evaluating ideas and people, and things that affect us often seem more important than things which are far away. It's why the chickenhawks can sleep at night - they don't notice the children dying on the other side of the world, but they no how terrified they feel every time they go to an airport and see somebody who might be an Arab.

So it's possible this is the reason. We are self-policing, hounding out people who betray our principles whilst attempting to win our loyalty and keeping everybody on the straight and narrow through a sort of crowdsourced 'DCI Internet'. And it sounds plausible, but here's two reasons why it probably isn't true:

1. It makes us all look good, which is a bit self-serving
2. I thought of it

The third reason is again to do with heuristics in our decision making. Kahnemann work on discovering that there are essentially two kinds of thought processes comes in to play here: Type I is quick, but relies on signals and heuristics, Type II can think more rationally but takes more time. And these two sides find communicating very difficult.

It's why test audiences don't improve bad films. Audiences use Type I thinking to decide they don't like a film, but use Type II thinking to answer the question "What was wrong with it?" The answer they give ("The story was overwrought", "It was too gory", "Clive Owen was in it") will be rational, will make sense, and will even be true but deep down won't be the real answer.

Johnnie's answer was less kind to us lefties, but strikes me harder as closer to the truth. We are tribal. We label ourselves and fight with a real sense of in-group loyalty and out-group hostility. Look at what happened in the atheist community after Sam Harris turned out to be a racist cock (google Pharyngula Sam Harris and read some comments at mild criticism of Harris if you want to get an idea of what I'm talking about).

It's easy to give our team a name, dislike any other group with a slightly differing outlook on how to fight for better rights for all and assume that they're not following the One Right Way(TM) for the movement as a whole. The Socialist Activist Manifesto is a good example of this. It's like they decided that anyone who has fun and is a socialist isn't doing it right:

We cannot realize a socialist society with moral and intellectual weakness; we must be consistent and steadfast.
We cannot realize a socialist society with time-wasting and partying; we must always be serious and dedicated.
We cannot realize a socialist society with romantic ideals and sentiments; we must be practical, pragmatic, and deliberate.

That's tribalism, pure and simple - "if you're not one of us, you're one of them" rings from every single line of their insufferably pompous manifesto. This as a reason for infighting feels like it is why, and while I'm not normally one to follow gut feelings, here it's appropriate: only my Type I thought process can really work like other people's Type I processes.

So maybe Jonnie's right. In fact, he probably is right. Maybe I'm right. It's likely that both things contribute. But I have a final question:

Why does it matter if we fight?

We're not on a simple linear left-right scale. Left- and Right-wing are simple labels when mainstream politics has essentially a two party dichotomy but it in no way means that we, the people, need to separate into two diametrically opposed voting blocs like foxes and rabbits.

Why are we not asking why there is such a dearth of free thrinking on the right that we're still hearing the same refrain for lower taxes from a united voice? Why is everybody dumbly towing the line considered a strength? It may get things done, but it's a weaker movement for it, more open to extremism fostered on a majority by a vocal minority (abortion rights, anyone?).

On 'the Left' we represent a cacaphony of different voices, each pushing for their own struggle. Yes, it means some people will think that they have the Most Important Idea Ever(TM) and that there's a conspiracy to keep it down by all the people who are banging on about other stuff all the time. But it also means that the traditionally voiceless can get themselves heard. And that we raise issues long before 'the Right' ever could.

If anyone wants to disagree with that, I'm well up for hearing it. And I love irony.

Sunny on Englishness

@sunny_hundal likes Englishness. In fact, he's liked it ever since Ed Miliband decided to do a speech about it. But the important thing about this article is that his ideas are better than both the right-wing (Englishness is racist for them, boo) and the left-wing (who are just pooh-poohing anything which sounds nationalist).

I always thought patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels.

How to Write a Jubilee Article

Warning: This post is not for people with dependency management issues. If you didn't understand the Matrix, you won't like this article. If you did understand the Matrix, it's likely that you still won't like this article.

So, the struggling journo thinks to himself, I should write an article about the Jubilee. Lots of people seemed to take it pretty seriously, and every journalist seems to have an opinion. But I also want to make sure I get a staff position somewhere - maybe the Telegraph or somewhere like that. I'd really love to write something that's both original (so I can look clever and witty to the Mail) and conformist (so I don't look like one of them crazy Queen-hatin' liberals).

If only, he thinks, I had access to this article, which completely details everything I need to write a serious piece about the Jubilee without saying anything stupid.

How to Write a Jubilee Article

The Headline: A headline is all important for an article about the Jubilee. Remember that this is a feature as it's been nearly a week since the weekend itself, so you'll need to pose your headline as a question to make it look like your analysis goes deeper than simply gushing about the benefits of long-term inbreeding. A few hints to get you started:

• Throwing in a reference to mainstream politics is always good:
• How Does the Queen's Legacy Contract with the Transience of Modern Politics?
• Are the People Ready to use the Queen as an Example of how to Live in Modern Britain?
• Remember you never need to address the question itself, this is only here suck people in to your article and make them assume you've thought very deeply about the questions of monarchy itself.
• Don't ask the question in a way that could conceivably be answered with a No:
• In Today's Society, does the Jubilee Highlight the Queen's Continuing Relevance? - this is out, as it'll let the bastard lefties in to the comment section to ruin the image of conformity and destroy a budding journalistic career. And you wouldn't want that.

To begin the article itself, remember that the Jubilee is not about you - it's about the Queen, so be sure to shoehorn in your personal feelings about the Queen into the first paragraph, so everyone knows how much this article is about her. If you have one, tell an anecdote about meeting her once when you went on a school trip or something. If you've never done so, imagine what meeting her would be like and write that down. People love to read what other people think meeting the Queen might be like. It's gold.

Move on to describe the boat show - as the main 'attraction' of the whole thing you should spend some time doing this, with at least one paragraph on each of

• What the Queen was wearing. Her personality is less important than the talents of her wardrobe staff. Remember she's a figurehead of imperialism, not a real human being with any feelings. If there's a political twist to the exact shade of pastel she's wearing, throw that in there for good measure.
• Comment on her bravery for spending all day in the rain. Because she's in her 80's, and standing in the rain is tough at that age when all you have is millions of pounds and the best medical staff money can buy. Extra points for then explaining that the unemployed scroungers forced to sleep under London Bridge  for no money should take a lesson in fortitude from their reigning monarch.
• Describe how awesome you thought the boats were. Cold hard numbers are good - how many boats, how long did it take, if you laid them end to end how many times would they go to the moon and back. Add in numbers for crowds too - it's only a guess anyway, so add on a few zeroes if you fancy. Lying means you love the Queen the most.
• Adjectives that may assist
• Resplendent
• Moving
• Stalwart
• Beloved
• Joyous
• Regal
• Astonishing
• Erstwhile (if you fancy something a little different)

Briefly mention the concert - people usually derided as chavs in the sorts of newspaper you want to work for can suddenly become national treasures by singing out of key for Queen'n'Country. Be sure to mention their working class background, to show that even celebrities from very poor backgrounds will sing at a concert on the Mall on National Television. Leave implied that the real reason they're doing it is because everyone loves the Queen so much

The latter half of the article should be a brief story of her reign. Mention how she ascended the throne, and then run through a list of things that have happened since then, to show just how darned awesome she is. Don't compare how the 30 year reign of Mubarak was considered a disgusting exercise in despotism - people don't like to think we have double standards in the UK. A list of events that may help:

• Katrina and the Waves won EuroVision
• Rationing ended
• Thatcher systematically destroyed the labour movement in Britain
• Liberty X had four (count 'em) top 5 hits
• The sun rose and fell 22,030 times
• Tim Ballantine was born, 3rd December 1987
• Tim Ballantine had 24 birthdays

Add others as necessary.

Finally, avoid quoting your own article. It generally makes one look pretentious. And avoid the pronoun 'I'. One would not be amused to see the queen say it, and she would not want to hear it from you. And one wouldn't want that.

BBC News' Rose-Tinted Glasses

BBC News website has run a hauntingly saccharine look at what life was like in 1952, the year the Queen was crowned. It's called You in '52. It covers thing like how you may have dressed (if you were rich), the music you might listen to (were you able to afford a wireless), and the food you would eat (assuming you had the wealth or connections to avoid the still-in-place wartime rations).

Aah, you may say, a return to the life of those days would be nice. Don't you wish for the family values? The happy children playing in the street? The gay men imprisoned and chemically castrated for their "perversion"? The black people racially abused and still treated as second-class citizens? The women treated as unpaid house-staff, unable to work for themselves with any measure of economic freedom once married? Or the unmarried women, derided as unlovable spinsters? No? Okay, then.

Examiners ask Stupid Question in GCSEs

But politicians fail to understand why.

The Telegraph article Pupils asked 'why do some people hate Jews?' in GCSE exam highlights a huge mistake on the part of AQA. Asking such a politically, racially and religulously charged question of a fair few thousand 16 year olds is clearly in poor taste. It's in poor taste for many reasons, not least of which at least a few of the kids answering the question will already hate Jews themselves and might unsurprisingly give some pretty hateful answers.

An answer along the lines of "Because they run a secret cabal which rules the Earth on behalf of their shape-changing alien lizard overlords" is not especially enlightened, but is pretty damned enlightening for anyone who might read it. Additionally, there is a fair amount of scope for people who would feel pretty offended to have to explain, however briefly why some people hate one another for no good reason. For some, it's okay, and for others not so much.

So the really dumb part is not necessarily the question (which I'll get to later), but the fact that 16 year olds are being essentially forced to answer it. If you're going to require participation in an exam, probably the best thing to do is to leave questions which remain highly charged in the world of today out of it.

But, predictably, Michael Gove and I don't see eye-to-eye:

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, branded the move “insensitive”.

He told The Jewish Chronicle: “To suggest that anti-Semitism can ever be explained, rather than condemned, is insensitive and, frankly, bizarre. AQA needs to explain how and why this question was included in an exam paper.”

"Insensitive" is indeed the word that describes the actions of AQA, but our agreement stops there. In fact Michael Gove's second paragraph is kind of inexplicable. The only way I can make any sense of it is to assume that he can't tell the difference between the words "explain" and "justify". For example, the text of the exam question is:

Explain, briefly, why some people are prejudiced against Jews.

When what I think Michael Gove read was:

Justify, briefly, why some people are prejudiced against Jews.

Now, the difference between these two is crucial. The former is asking for the real reasons why people think something which is very very bad to think. The second is asking people to support the prejudice itself. Michael Gove's statement applies well to the latter question, but not so much to the former. Both questions, as I've already said, are not really appropriate for an exam question, but his statement is not just wrong when it comes to this discussion among adults, it's blatantly counter-productive.

For example, were I a world-reknowned social and political scientist (I am not), and I wrote a paper with the following abstract (I have not), I would be perfectly justified in suggesting that anti-Semitism can be explained: 

An explanation into the motivations of anti-Semitic belief. The following paper, using interviews and polling data from the US population, investigates the fundamental vehicles for the inheritance of anti-Semitic beliefs. In modern society, open anti-Semitism justifiably has pariah status, and yet many continue to openly profess such beliefs. This paper concludes that a combinations of religious belief and political motivaton of group leaders often act as catalysts for such beliefs, and that other group members undergo conformative biases in order to fit in with their group. Once such a belief is expressed openly, the very nature of the belief encourages its holders to retreat to enclaves of anti-Semitic communities, causing groups to become even more closely knit and exacerbating the in-group/out-group hostilities which often arise.

The paper further concludes that greater integration, particularly during primary and secondary levels of schooling would act as a powerful factor in reducing the incidence of such beliefs as they cross such in-group/out-group lines and allow children the capability to see people from different backgrounds.

The point is that explaining a belief is a good thing, even if the belief itself is unjustifiable - understanding why people become anti-Semitic would help us learn how to improve things. We can hope people with stupid beliefs change, but the only thing each of us truly have the power to control is our own actions, and searching for explanations for why other people behave abominably informs us on the best steps we can personally take to reduce such behaviour.

Compare and contrast, for example, the reactions to the London riots last year. Gove, and the rest of the Tories, were quick to dismiss all who took part as part of a feral criminal underclass who can't be saved. Anyone who suggested that we investigate why they did it was met with scorn: "How dare you suggest it is our fault?" they would scoff.

Of course it's not our fault, responsibility for criminal behaviour lies with the criminal behaver. But once again: we are not trying to justify the actions of the rioters, only explain them. The riots began for a reason, and all governments have the power to do is change the way the government itself behaves. So the only questions we can ask following the riots is what the government can do differently to prevent more riots, and we can only do that by understanding why it happened in the first place.

Moron Criticises UKUncut for not being Labour Shill

In yet another example of keyboard warriors on the left criticising people who actually act, Sunny Hundal is criticising UKUncut's street party protest on Saturday. I'm aware of the irony of me, a man who doesn't go to anywhere near enough protests or actions, writing a blog post criticising a Labour activist for criticising UKUncut. I'm aware of that. But I have the good graces not to criticise the people who are actually fucking doing shit.

Sunny's taken time out of his Labour "activism" - stuff like making Cameron memes out of silly photos - to criticise a group of people who are exploring the Coalition's broad sense of agreement on the necessity of the cuts.

Liberal Conspiracy as a blog pisses me off already. It refactors left-of-centre politics as Labour politics, when in reality, left-of-centre politics almost by definition needs to be non-partisan. After all what mainstream party can legitimately claim to support the real liberal left wing? Not Labour, they spent the last 13 years finishing off what Thatcher started. Not the LibDems, they're worse than the fucking Tories right now. The Greens? Maybe, but they remain a single issue party who happen to be in the right on the majority of issues, so I guess that for now they fail to meet the "mainstream" bit of the criteria.

And Sunny epitomises this. It's important to Labour to attack the Tories, as they know the LibDem's support has evaporated, and their support will mostly switch to Labour. What they now need is to hit the Tories hard to ensure they have a shot at regaining power in 2015. So, were UKUncut a Labour Party movement, then criticism like

I think the street party was nevertheless counter-productive in its tactics.
By that I’m not referring to the claim it brought out sympathy for Nick Clegg. I just think it makes more sense to target Conservatives than Libdems on this issue.

Did it? The LibDems are just as culpable as the Tories. Again, Labour have been trying to act like the Tories are the Agents of Evil Incarnate (imagine that in the voice of the Mysterons), while the LibDems are the unwitting dupes pootling along without realising what the Evil Tories are doing. But it just isn't true - while the LibDems are socially liberal, they remain fiscally conservative, and the Coalition agreement was built on the common ground the two parties shared over the needs for a smaller government.

Does that mean we shouldn't attack the LibDems? An argument could plausibly be made that since the LibDem voter base already support the cuts, we should instead be going after the big kahunas. In fact, Sunny attempts to do so:

But the main problem is that the Libdems are fairly supportive of the welfare cuts. Broadly their constituency doesn’t rate welfare as a key priority and there are other issues Libdem voters find more pressing. Nick Clegg will focus on social issues such as gay marriage, financial benefits such as raising the tax threshold, civil liberties and the environment to rally his base.
Welfare cuts won’t come into the Libdem equation, mostly because a majority of voters believe that some benefits cuts are needed. The leadership is too cowardly to pick a fight there and saving its political capital for other fights.

But what are the UKUncut protests trying to achieve? Is it to convince people who want cuts that they are wrong? Well, partly. But mostly it's to do what all protests attempt to do: to show that there are a large group of people in opposition to the policy. It's meant to showcase how many people are being harmed by these swingeing cuts which hurt the voiceless the most. It's meant to demonstrate to the political class the mass public support that already exists for a change in Coalition welfare policy.

Does Sunny criticise the Syrian protestors because Assad's base won't change their minds and it's not in Assad's interest to do so? I have no idea, but I'm sure most people certainly wouldn't. Instead, we see it as indicative of how the Syrian people feel about their leader: fucking angry and expecting change.

And, quite frankly, the LibDems are more likely to realize that message than the Tories. The LibDems are okay with the cuts. The Tories are positively salivating over the idea of the poor starving to death.

The Conservative Party's Double Standards

So, JH is in trouble. First off, no one's quite sure whether JH stands for Jeremy Hunt or Adam Smith. But second, and more importantly, he's had a bit of a problem keeping his thoughts to himself rather than, say, putting them into a text-based and easily recordable format, and then sending them to the Prime Minister. In case you live on the plant Zarg (read: outside of the UK) and haven't seen the text, it reads as follows:

He doesn't think he will get a fair hearing from Ofcom. I am privately concerned about this because News Corp are very litigious and we could end up in the wrong place in terms of media policy. Essentially what James Murdoch wants to do is to repeat what his father did with the move to Wapping and create the world's first multiplatform media operator available from paper to web to TV to iPhone to iPad.
Isn't this what all media companies have to do ultimately? And if so we must be very careful that any attempt to block it is done on genuine plurality grounds and not as a result of lobbying by competitors.
The UK has the chance to lead the way... but if we block it our media sector will suffer for years. In the end I am sure sensible controls can be put into any merger to ensure there is plurality but I think it would be totally wrong to cave into the Mark Thompson/Channel 4/Guardian line that this represents a substantial change of control given that we all know Sky is controlled by News Corp now anyway.

So, very pro-Murdoch. The problem is that ol' JH is supposed to be an impartial arbiter on the issue of Murdoch's takeover of BSkyB. Which, clearly, he isn't.

To be honest, I don't really care that he made up his mind about Murdoch before the takeover process began. I urge you to name one person who DOESN'T have a strong opinion on the liver-spotted media mogul who looks about 10 minutes away from having the skin on his face fall off and reveal the alien bone structure underneath.

But where I have a problem is in the Tories' reaction to the whole shebang. In particular, when I compare and contrast with the reaction to Vince Cable's "war with Murdoch" statement:

1. Man reveals he is anti-Murdoch. "How dare such a biased person be in charge of a massive takeover aimed at wiping out media diversity in this nation!" Etc, etc.
2. Man reveal he is pro-Murdoch. "Jeremy has followed all processes to the letter and listened fully to independent advice as per the process he has beeen told to follow."

Did VC follow all process? I don't know, the Tories certainly didn't give a damn whether he did or didn't. The real reason they were up in arms was that a business man with lots of money might not get what he wants. And the real reason they're more pragmatic about bias this time is that they now know he will.

IDS's Twisted Priorities

Ian "Dunkin'" Smith has made page 40 of today's Evening Standard with the news that he is trying desperately to save a greyhound racing track which is going to be shut down to make way for flats. In fact, not just any flats: a housing scheme on behalf of the council. True social housing it ain't, but it's much needed homes in the London area. Why, you might ask, is he supporting this?

He has written to Boris Johnson urging him to use mayoral powers to throw out a housing scheme on the grounds that the stadium and its famous neon sign are a vital part of the nation’s cultural fabric.“The track is listed not only due to the nature of its architecture but also due to its use and the importance of this both locally and more widely,” argued the MP and former Conservative leader. “Perhaps most importantly, the vast majority of my constituents and local residents are passionately opposed to the scheme and want to see the return of greyhound racing.”

Oh, okay, that seems pretty well thought out and reasonable. Wait, WHAT? This is the man who said people in Merthyr should catch a bus to Cardiff to find work, when there were already 9 unemployed for every job in Cardiff at the time. The man who more recently pledged to take £10billion of people's disability benefits.

It's nice to see what Irritable Bowel Syndrome thinks are important in today's society: disabled people being able to afford the cost of living? Fuck 'em. Overbred, exploited greyhounds being forced to run around a track for a baying crowd of bloodthirsty idiots hoping desperately for a return to the days of bear-baiting? Priceless national treasure.

Youth Unemployment and the Bloody Media

I've been planning a post for while concerning how irritating much of the mainstream media is on the subject of Youth Unemployment (imagine there's a lot of reverb when I say those words, Mysterons-style). The condescending tone and vague sound of surprise from puffed-up journalists, a large portion of whom will have been privately educated (the successful ones, at least, as I am reliably informed by Owen Jones).

However, I haven't managed to find a suitably pithy and witty response to such arse-water, and the topic is swiftly forgotten as my mind becomes enraged by some other piece of absolute bull within a few minutes.

But I need try no longer! For the awesome and far-funnier-than-me-by-half Vagenda have beaten me to it. And as a person who didn't fall into unemployment following graduation, all I can offer is solidarity as opposed to the Vagenda's genuine empathy.

I was one of the lucky ones, and I'm not so arrogant as to think it was my genius which got me my graduate position, and that anyone who failed to graduate into a job must by definition be an overindulged moron who's long-term suffering is merely the price we must pay in a society where intellectual superhumans like myself can reign supreme. I definitely don't think that.

The Olympics Think I am Unemployed

Or so rich that I have my own butler. Actually, on second thought, that's more likely. Since the roads are only going to be used by 'VIPs' anyway during the Olympics, and mostly the only people who actually got tickets are the ones who avoided the lottery altogether and instead got the London Olympic Committee to simply give them all the tickets they want via the company they happen to be a director of.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Olympics. Obviously I oppose the Sound Cannons, the Surface to Air missiles, the freebies for the rich, the special roads that the poor aren't allowed to use, and the fact that we (read: the Coalition) are spending ridiculous sums of money on a two week long party for Visa directors while simulaneously fucking the poor, the old, women, workers, the disabled, anybody earning less than £45,000 a year, families, young children, small business owners, the sick and anyone who wants to make life better for others.

At the same time, I know I'm just going to enjoy every moment of the sport. I'm fully prepared - holiday booked for the entire period, all important engagements cancelled, cupboard stocked with Doritos, and all my comfortable tracksuit bottoms washed and ready to go.

I fully expect to be well-versed, by the end of it all, in the ins and outs of Algerian judo, in Usain Bolt's favourite pair of shoes, and in the environmental ramifications of competitive skeet shooting. I expect at least once to burst into tears seeing a plucky underdog, from some tiny country, wearing a burlap sack, win a gold medal against all the odds in his/her nation's home sport (I don't know what yet, maybe Klondike, we'll see).

So after all the cognitive dissonance, detailed above, which was necessary to get me actually fucking excited about this Olympics; and after all the elation I felt at winning some tickets (2 tickets to see two games of the qualifying rounds for the basketball, thanks for asking), it somewhat irked me to receive the following email from London Ticketing:

Dear Tim,

Your London 2012 tickets

The Olympic Games are just around the corner, and soon you will be holding your Olympic tickets in your hand.

Tickets will start to be delivered from late May with deliveries continuing into July. This email tells you everything you need to know about how to make sure you get your tickets safely.

Your tickets will be sent using Royal Mail‘s Tracked® delivery service. You will receive a notification by email and/or SMS (if you have provided your mobile number) from Royal Mail on the day your tickets are due to be delivered.

Someone will need to be there to sign for your tickets. If nobody is there, Royal Mail will leave a 'Something for you’ card. You will also be notified of the delivery attempt by email and/or SMS. Your ticket package will be returned to your local Royal Mail delivery office and held securely for 18 days.

You can visit the office to collect your package, or contact Royal Mail to arrange a redelivery to the same address. In the event you don’t collect your package, Royal Mail will send you a reminder notification by email and/or SMS before it is returned to London 2012.

If you have changed address since 6 February 2012 or have any further queries regarding ticket delivery, please visit the FAQ section on the London 2012 ticketing website.

[Emphasis mine]. Note the three sections I felt important enough to highlight.

Tickets will start to be delivered from late May with deliveries continuing into July

Okay, not so bad, essentially a 2 month window for my tickets to arrive in. There's a lot of tickets to send out, and it's a big logistical challenge.

You will receive a notification by email... from Royal Mail on the day your tickets are due to be delivered.

Again, how very nice of them to tell me, at least that way when I get home from work I'll know to expect them - I wouldn't want them to go missing, after all.

Someone will need to be there to sign for your tickets.

Wait, WHAT? So someone needs to be at home on the day my tickets arrive, a day which I won't know about until ON THAT DAY ITSELF. So I may need to spend a day at home waiting for a delivery on any day between late May and "into July", but have absolutely no idea which one. What to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games think I am? Rich enough to afford a dogsbody?


Bloody Nora, I thought the crackdown of freedom of speech through suppression of protests was bad, but this really takes the biscuit.

__________________________________

Addendum to above post:

I apologise to all unemployed people for the title, now that I think about it. We all have much better things to do than sit around waiting for tickets for two months, and given the number of hoops people who are unemployed have to go through to receive even the pittance that prevents them from starving while searching for work, it's kinda thoughtless to assume they have it easier than I do.

So, sorry to you all.

Good Marketing, Weird Product

When I got home this morning, it turned out the steps to my flat had all clubbed together and bought me a gift. At least, that's my understanding, as I can't imagine someone delivering this door to door:

Normally, I ignore these circulars. They're annoying, they're intrusive, and I live in a block so we always get 4 of each one that arrives. This one, however, piqued my interest. First, a quick look at the back tells me this is a company called Shaftesbury's.

Nope. I've never heard of them either.

Also, it's very very pretty. A quick check of the Dulux paint range tells me the colour on the graphic is called Lindi's Pass, and very nice it is too. These guys didn't just grab some two-bit takeaway menu designer to do this, no sir.

But it's also wonderfully enigmatic. I "know I want them...", do I? What are "them"? There are plenty of things on this earth which I know desperately that I want, and am a mere 30% offer away from purchasing. I'm ultimately as suggestible to advertising as the next person, despite my wishes otherwise, and there are plenty of things that I believe I could buy to make me smarter, more attractive, or to get rid of the shooting pains in spine every time I try to turn my head.

And maybe Shaftesbury's has the answer to at least one of these problems. So I open the leaflet (printed on very nice 400gsm card, btw), to be greeted with the following:

Ah, wrapped inside my enigma is a mystery! Like Russian politics in the 80's. What are they selling? Bedroom sets? Red throws? Sunlight? And in a further nod to quality, this leaflet is a concertina. Real pages! In a leaflet.

Important: I'm going to rip into this a little bit, but I much prefer this to fucking takeaway menus. I'm not the target group for this circular, and this marketing is good enough that Shaftesbury's will probably see more business as a result, and all power to them.

Shutters! The thing which has been missing from my life? Presumably (given that they sell shutter), Shaftesbury's is full of people who really really love shutters. Maybe their view of how the world works has been distorted by being around blinds for so long. They're looking at the world through rose-tinted shutters, if you like.

But I really don't give a fuck about blinds or shutters. I already have some on my windows and I still look like Quasimodo's evil twin so they haven't made me any more attractive. I suppose there are people out there who are waiting for their opportunity to by some beautiful, practical, interior shutters, but I'm not one of them.

My favourite section is near the end, where they feel it's important to remind that the offer is indeed "genuine", as if anyone outside of politics or supermarket marketing departments would spend this much money on lying to their base. 

Also a favourite, not easy to read on this picture is the sentence: "Shutters have spread virally." Have they now? Because I thought the word virally had two meanings: passing through the internet as an essentially memetic version of a real virus, or a REAL VIRUS. And I don't recall any videos called "Cute baby shutter! Falling asleep!!!!" on Youtube with 8,325,673 hits and hundreds of racist comments. Nor am I sitting in fear of the latest shutter outbreak and the zombie apocalypse which will inevitably follow.

Are wealthy MPs at a disadvantage?

No.

This post from Left Foot Forward puts forward the idea that a study shows that voters find excessive riches distasteful. And then tries to spin it into a narrative of the rich being discriminated against in parliament.

I was just thinking that we don't have enough millionaires in Parliament. Maybe we should try to shut the poor out of politics to even the balance? Throw in a few unpaid internships to make sure that only the rich can afford to join the legislative class. We're overwhelmed by the poor in politics and I, for one, want to see an end to it. What happened to the days when our aristocracy had a divine right to treat us how they pleased? I'm pretty sure we were all happier then.

AN END! To the poor and the middle-class in politics! This is our mantra! Who wants elections these days anyway? What an absurdly excessive spending of public funds, when we could be passing on the savings as tax breaks to fracking companies.

Or maybe they should all just fuck right off. Left Foot Forward is supposed to be a blog of the left. The mainstream left make me sick.

My Politics are Obvious

But then, so are Osbourne's:

Watch "Don't Stop Me Now" on YouTube

I don't normally share these sorts of links, but I'm getting thoroughly bored of the Tory claim that they're cutting because we have to do something about the deficit.

If that's the case, why are they continuing to cut when we know that this system ISN'T REDUCING THE DEFICIT.

In other news, caps lock is fun.

Bias, and Truth

The cornerstone of journalism, or so I am reliably informed, is non-bias. The aim is for journalists to impart the facts without passing on their own preconceptions. And a laudable goal it is too, but for one thing: it's utterly, totally and in all other ways impossible.

The Evening Standard, which essentially  has complete access to all commuters in London, as been accused at times of being pro-Conservative. "No!" say its detractors, "a free paper should be non-biased." They continue: "these unelected journalists are influencing the direction London by pushing their favourite candidates at the expense of his rivals."

Of course, this is all completely true. The ES has done nothing but praise BoJo's re-election campaign, recast Ken's campaign in a negative light, and has consistently only mentioned third-party candidates when they feel it will split the liberal vote. I can't be bothered to track down links for these because this article isn't about the ES - it's about bias.

This concept of non-bias hasn't removed bias from the news - just ask the BBC, the Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the New York Times, Fox News, Sky News, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, The Sun, the Mail , the Express, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Mail, the Boston Globe & Mail, the Mail, the Mail and the Mail. Or one of the other news outlets I haven't bothered to mention.

The truth is, the emphasis on non-bias has done only two thing: groups have gotten better at hiding their bias, and groups have instead resorted to "he said, she said" journalism - the seeing both side argument. And I'm sick of it. Much as I dislike the Mail's and Fox News' message (hate everyone who isn't like you, marriage is between one man and one woman, etc), I kind of admire their honesty - they are both open and unashamed about their bias.

Okay, if it wasn't for the veneer of non-bias in the UK, then perhaps the politics here would be as horribly partisan as it is in the US. I can imagine a far worse divide tan the Times and the Guardian. But it's the left who are more into self-policing their bias than the right - the Guardian is a left-wing paper, but it's as left as the mainstream newspaper press gets in a country where the right has the Mail, the Express and the Telegraph.

Bias exists. Can we all just get over it and bring it out into the open? Then people can at least be prepared for the bigotry that's about to hit them whenever they pick up the Sun.

Sometimes there are no words to express my rage

We (I, you, your friends - everyone but the super rich) pay these people actual money:

http://www.totalpolitics.com/blog/314662/mps-plea-to-overturn-and39god-can-healand39-ad-ban.thtml

Sexism in Adverts

Well done to the man who put this together. I've been planning on talking about adverts again when my rage about the real world dies down a bit, but at least this is something which is just as successful at making my teeth clench as institutionalised racism or mainstream left-wing politics.

If any of you didn't think we're boxed into gender roles from day one, try the advert mashup game, then quietly weep to yourself.

The Trayvon Martin Shooting

Being here in the UK, some of you may have missed the Trayvon Martin furore. This would be because there's been essentially zero coverage of the whole thing. You'd be shocked at the date that the actual shooting occurred (26th of February) given that only now are we hearing about it.

Others have explained far better than I the facts of the case (here's a good starting point), but I wish to begin with a brief talk of the UK media's reaction.

None of the mainstream UK media covered the case until mass protests began.
The first BBC News TV article, as far as I can tell, was on the day of the protests. First, that proves that protests do work, and that protests have value beyond making lots of noise. I didn't see a newspaper article on the subject until the day after. Granted, I only read the Guardian, the Times and the free commuter papers, but surely at least one of these would cover it...

Every article is repeating the lie that Zimmerman was a neighbourhood watch volunteer.
Read James Fenton's article, the relevant BBC article on the subject. The truth is that Zimmerman wasn't a member of any neighbourhood watch scheme - he was a self-appointed neighbourhood watch volunteer. And he's made massive numbers of calls to 911 pointing out suspicious (i.e. black) characters. He was also carrying a weapon, which he's not supposed to do if he's in the neighbourhood watch, and he followed the guy. That's not just something neighbourhood watch officers aren't supposed to do, it's the thing he was explicitly told not to do by the 911 operator.

Zimmerman's actions have been condemned by the National Sheriffs' Association which sponsors the US's nationwide neighbourhood watch programme, a crime prevention scheme that allows local volunteers to patrol the streets. 

It said it had no record that the community involved was registered with the NSA programme, calling Zimmerman a "self-appointed neighbourhood watchman". 

“The alleged participant ignored everything the Neighborhood Watch Program stands for and it resulted in a young man losing his life. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of Trayvon Martin during this terrible time,” said Aaron D Kennard, the NSA's executive director.

Bastard.


The far-right wing seem to think Obama's involvement made this falsely about race.
This is an America article which the far-right blogosphere in the UK is currently circulating. There's a couple of things in here which are just wrong, and I found it pretty instructional to understand them - it helps me understand the mindset of the far right a little better.

A Hispanic man shoots a black kid where no one knows the exact circumstances in which the shooting occurred and where we are likely never to know what happened. Instead of waiting for the facts, narratives have replaced truth and we have a full blown racial incident when it isn't even clear that race was a factor.

Again - this kid was armed and ready. With a bag of skittles and a drink. He was 17. He was alone. He was followed by a man with a track record of making 911 calls to police of other suspicious (once again, i.e. black) characters.

He was followed by a man who was carrying a 9mm handgun (or as I call it, a "magic death button"), and shot dead. He put up the hood of his hoodie because he was scared he was being stalked. We have that from a tape of him with his girlfriend.

How will he look if it comes out that the shooter was justified in defending himself?

We know better - besides, what could he possibly be defending himself from - are the red ones in a Skittles packet particularly dangerous? Obama has weighed in because of the massive outcry that justice has not been done. Nobody has even tried. Obama came down on the correct side, because a man has shot an unarmed child, and has not even been investigated by the police. This is sick. This is exactly the institutionalised racism that we in the UK think has gone away now we've convicted Stephen Lawrence's killers.

It has not.

Politically-aligned blogging

I've recently unsubscribed from Progress, whose tagline is "News and debate from the progressive community". A quick perusal of their website will prove that's not the case - in fact, the first sentence you read will explain that Progress is a new Labour pressure group with a logo disturbingly similar to the current designs of the Democrat/Republican mascot animals (a donkey and elephant respectively - we know who won that PR battle).

That wasn't enough to put me off. I read vile bigot Guido Fawkes and viler bigot David Vance of Biased BBC, and I'm still subscribed to their sites. Their blogs, despite being devoid of anything approaching a redeeming feature still elements which I, as a genuine progressive, actually want to read.

These two bloggers, in their dismissal of anyone trying to help others, have a deep-seated distrust of the left. They spend huge amounts of time looking for every failure the left ever makes. And that's good. Without vile bigots watching our every mood, we'd still be believing that Labour are fighting in our best interests. We'd still be under that horrible misapprehension of having a political party that actually serves our interest.

Progress is different. Have a read through their last 5 posts. I guarantee you'll find:

• A labour councillor explaining how a Tory policy will mildly harm people within their constituency
• A prominent Labour MP with a 4000 essay on their latest policy which will almost certainly never make it into law
• A vague attempt to discredit the coalition as infighting instead of trying to stop their genuinely damaging policies
• An appeal to give to a person's pet charity, with the vague implication that only those with the guts to be out and out Labour supporters are generous enough to truly care about others

The issue here is not necessarily the motivation - Tory policies are causing real and measurable harm to a massive majority of people, and people should be given to charities. But the posts are essentially a mouthpiece for the Labour top- and mid-level leadership to have a mouthpiece, to provide the false impression of grassroots support.

Truth be told, Labour aren't the party of Labour any more. Their constitution no longer covers it, and they haven't fought for it for far too long. Even their rhetoric is anti-Labour, despite a massive portion of their funding from a traditional relationship with the unions. But every article is told within Labour's own image of itself - as a party in opposition it sees itself as the voice of the people, standing up bravely against the combined forces of the coalition as they try to destroy Britain as we know it.

But they're not. While the real progressives fight for our rights, and people like me sit at home and type, the Labour party fight every movement until they succeed before co-opting the movement's rhetoric as their own. For all that the Conservatives are bastards and the Lib Dems shills, the Labour party have become the worst kind of class warmongers, smiling about equality while supporting the 1% every step of the way before claiming every minor civil rights victory as their own.

Football, Racism and Tragedy

The tragedy of Fabrice Muamba, which is now thankfully turning out to be far less of a tragedy that it could have been, has brought some fantastic aspects of football, and sport in general into light. I know a lot of people who dislike sport, "on principle", and it kind of makes me sad to know that it takes an in-game heart attack for the great parts of sport to appear in the professional version of the most popular game in the world.

1. Sport brings people together.
   It kind of goes without saying, at least within teams. A team of players come together to perform their best and push themselves to their limits. But it also brings spectators together: anyone who's ever stood in the stands will know how that works.
   But sport does more than that. At the amateur level, it's a fantastic way of meeting people, of staying fit, keeping healthy, and of developing a better appreciation of other people. Sport is inherently non-partisan, there's no choice who might be in your league, and for most amateur players it's in your best interests to get on with your team mates and opponents alike.
2. Sport is a true meritocracy.
   This isn't always true. At a coaching level the old tropes about institutionalised racism still abound, and of the major sports only American football has done something about it, with brilliant and beautiful consequences. But players earn their salary by performing, not by the colour of their skin. And that's good.
   Fabrice Muamba is a perfect case in point. He entered the country at eleven without speaking a word of English, and was a hero at Bolton long before his name became synonymous with Saturday's incident. He's only ever played for English national sides, having identified as English since the day he arrived here. He represents everything immigration is supposed to be about - cultures coming together and melding into one, until the only national distinction is geographical, not cultural.
3. Sport draws out the best in people.
   One need only look at the #prayformuamba hash tag to see people, often traditionally rivals, come together. The message is clear: the man, a life, a livelihood, is more important than the game. It's an admirable message, and one I can only wholeheartedly support. It is this humility that allows sport to be so great, a combination of high drama, and the knowledge that the result is less important than the game itself.

But for each of these highs, the Muamba case reminds me of all of the things we still need to do. All of the improvements we still need to make. All of the ways in which my lofted ideals fall short in reality:

1. Sport pulls people apart.
   How, in sport, can there still be Old Firm hatred in the city of Glasgow? Rivalry is fantastic, and caring about the result is great, but violence? I have seen internet commenters saying the most hateful things, simply because the topic in question concerns a rival club. I'm a Liverpool fan, and when they aren't playing us, I back Everton: they're a great side with a manager who ensures they always punch above their weight.
2. Sport is not a meritocracy.
   Name one openly gay footballer. I'll give you a moment.
   
   Okay, time's up. Anton Hysen. Heard of him? Probably not, he's in the fourth division of Swedish professional football. He is the only openly gay footballer in professional football. And there's no reason why he should be the only one beyond an institutionalised and, frankly, medieval homophobia which still holds the game in thrall. We still have a long way to go.
   Outside of football, the very papers who are celebrating Muamba (rightly) as a beacon of British pride, would be treating him as the worst kind of scum. After all, he arrived in England aged 11 with no English whatsoever. The Mail, the Express, the Sun; all of these would be livid at the idea he were even able to enter the country had he not developed a talent worth tens of thousands of pounds a week.
3. Sport draws out the worst in people
   Luis Suarez, John Terry, Salman Butt, to name a few. Institutionalised hatred: see points 1 and 2 above.

The goal is there, we just have to reach it. I look forward to a day when sport can be competitive without being damaging, and passionate without being hateful.