Let the Greens into the Political Mainstream

I've posted once or twice about the Greens in recent months. Full disclosure: I am not a Green party supporter. However, I do believe they offer a better hope for Britain than any of the main three parties or any of the new challengers coming in from the right, such as UKIP.

The Green Party of England and Wales (there is a separate affiliated Scottish party) has an MP, two MEPs and 141 councillors across England and Wales. They polled third in the most recent London mayoral elections. While on the national popular vote they often poll a little lower, they are by representation the fourth largest non-geographical party in the UK and are the only loud voice of progressive politics left in traditional politics.

The Young Greens have opened an e-petition asking for the Greens to have a seat at the table. They want the Green party to be included in future Prime Ministerial debates, and I for one believe this will do real good. Nick Clegg's performance at the first Prime Ministerial brought the Tories towards the centre, and I believe that including the Green's can help pull the narrative of politics back into the world of social justice.

I am not alone in thinking this. Polls suggest that over half of Britons feel much the same way. Show your support for democracy by allowing one of the UK's major parties to enter the political mainstream:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/46764

What is the Party of Social Justice in the UK?

Is it Labour? No. Since Blair, Labour are no longer a real party for labour interests in the UK. They still take donations from the unions, but that doesn't make them "for" labour interests. Or even "for" social justice.

The LibDems? Never were. And that's before they got into bed with the Tories.

Nope. If you want a party which has a commitment to social justice written into its constitution, you need the Green party. So: for social justice, you need to be supporting the party which polled 7th in the popular vote at the last general election - a number skewed rather high as the Greens fields nearly 10 times as many candidates than any of the 8th through 12th largest parties.

This is our representative for social justice in mainstream politics. And people wonder why we young people lose faith in mainstream politics.

Bad Chart Tuesday

Taking a leaf out of SkepChick's Bad Graph Thursday, I'm going to show you a graph. This is not just any graph. This is a graph showing the correlation between attitudes towards sushi, and attitudes towards gay marriage across generations. This is a graph presented without any irony whatsoever, and it proves... something. Thanks, Mother Jones!

In all its glory:

In Which I Wonder What Some Men Think Women Think After They've Been Harassed

I've been wondering about this for a while. What's kicked me off into actually getting off my arse and sitting down to write about it is the Lord Rennard/Lib Dem Cover-Up story (link here to an early story summary if you've missed it).

I don't wonder what men think when they see a story like the Lord Rennard story. I wonder what men think the victims are thinking immediately after the harassment. I know that's like a third-order consciousness or something, but bear with me.

The reason I wonder what some men think goes through a woman's mind after being sexually harassed is this: There are so many men out there who seem to think women view sexual harassment as an opportunity to enact revenge in the medium-to-long-term future. Revenge for what? Whatever the man in question happens to dream up: that's what.

For instance, Michael White, in the Guardian had to wonder why the claims against Lord Rennard are surfacing now. But here's what I don't get: does Mr. White believe that the women involved, who were touched inappropriately, or invited to inappropriate places, or worse; does he really believe that their first thought afterwards was "Hmm. I think I'll hold on to this to save up for a by-election when I can really do some collateral damage"?

This kind of thinking really frustrates me. We saw it in the Julian Assange debacle, where hordes of men decided en masse that the women must have been exaggerating to bring down the Chosen One. And we're seeing it now, where a bunch of self-righteous (mostly) male keepers of truth have all openly wondered why the women are only coming forward now and why there were not more specific allegations made at the time.

I've never been raped, but I have been the victim of a serious incident of sexual harassment from another man - a man older and more senior than myself, in much the same way as Lord Rennard was to these women. I did one thing and one thing only at the time: I fled the fuck away as quickly as I possibly could. It was only later that afternoon that I was able to return and report the offence to someone who could do something about it. I was promised things would be handled and things were quietly swept under the carpet. I don't believe there was any real punishment for the offender involved, although he may have had a quiet talking to, I suppose.

After that, I felt impotent, which I suppose I should feel a sense of irony over. Ultimately the incident wasn't enough to see this man dealt with in any way. And it doesn't feel like there is anything else I can do - all power feels like it has taken away from me. But if in 10 years I see his face in the paper with similar allegations, you can bet your life I'm calling the paper up and adding my experience into the story. Because sometimes that's the only way these people see justice for their behaviour.

My experience is just one person's experience. And it's not even a woman's experience. I'm not going to pretend to truly understand what other people go through when they are raped, abused or harassed. I'm explicitly telling you not to generalise from what I've written and apply it to other people.

Instead, the message needs to be that second-guessing people's motives for publicly coming forward with rape or sexual abuse allegations is damaging to the women coming forward and to all other women who may have to face coming forward with their own story in the future. This creates a culture of hostility towards victims and makes no ones lives any better.

There are many reasons why people don't come forward with accusations of rape or sexual harassment for years at a time, and it is not our place to second-guess those reasons. Our job is to support victims as best we can and try, bit by bit, to change our world into one where sex is consensual and women are treated as equals instead of meat.

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.