Moral Relativism
September 29th, 2006 at 01:06

I’m a big fan of moral relativism. Not to the extent where I’d make a point of going to a Catholic chuch on a Sunday morning wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “Moral Relativism FTW”- I don’t think I’ve been that enthusiastic about anything since… ever, but I like moral relativism to the extent where I can get on my high horse about it and (metaphorically) trot about a bit feeling important. I would like that t-shirt, though.

To explain: Moral relativism is the belief that morals are not fixed. Basically, sure the Bible said you shouldn’t covet your neighbour 2000 years ago, but things are different now, get over it! The church is very absolutist when it comes to morals- because their book said that gays are rubbish thousands of years ago, absolute morals would suggest that gays are always rubbish. A moral relativist like myself reckon that there’s no universal standards, and that morals are related to the social and cultural circumstances in which they exist. It isn’t an entirely religious thing. In other words: even if gays were rubbish 2000 years ago, they’re alright now. Same for women. And black people.

If you’re familiar with Cascading Style Sheets, this should be incredibly easy to understand.

The thing is, this has me worried, and I’m beginning to question my own beliefs. Am I really morally relativist? Do I not just believe what I believe because of the cultural and social circumstances that surround my life, in quite an absolute way? If I were around in 1910, would I have been sending telegrams to everyone explaining how I think that women deserve the vote, but also saying that legalising homosexuality physically sickens me? This is why I imagine old people are all racist, homophobes (and why massive over-generalisations are always accurate). When I’m old, will I be appauled that so called liberals will be campaigning to allow people to marry horses? Will I be exclaiming that political correctness has gone mad without a hint of irony?

No doubt the future argument about horse marriage will be about how horses can’t consent to marriage, so it can’t possibly be legalised- and this is something I tend to agree with. But am I thinking backwards? In 1967 when homosexuality was legalised, were people claiming that it “wasn’t natural”? Like how I’d claim that marrying a horse isn’t natural? Am I a bigot waiting to happen? Is it it nieve of me to subconciously assume we’ve reached socio-cultural nirvana, where everyone who is equal is equal, and that morals need not change much further?

Worse still, is accepting the doctrine of moral relativism inherently justifying all of the awful shit that happend in the past: slavery and the oppression of women and so on? Surely the social and cultural circumstances that were around in the 18th century meant that slavery was not only alright, but an excellent thing?

Oh, I feel so conflicted. I think marrying a parrot would be alright though: at least they can answer back.

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Writer’s Block
September 28th, 2006 at 14:54

Well, it’s only taken about eighteen months, but I’m finally writing about the one other thing that’ll change me from the well-spoken, self-aware blogger to the text speaking blogger who only blogs two-line entries about how they had a gr8 time with their m8s last night, without elaborating on what actually happend. So here it goes:

soz 4 not updatin much ive bin workin lotz n goin out drinkin itz gr8 LOL

I’ve been desperately looking for things to write about- the trouble is that for the last month, I’ve been following the same daily routine of slacking/working/slacking- there’s been no unusual quirks to my day that I can write about because its different. I haven’t met any interesting characters like John, and perhaps slightly more disturbingly, I think I’ve become slightly more normal.

In days of old, I would have perhaps devoted an entire blog entry to the other day, when whilst driving to work, a man shouted at me from a van in the lane next to me, asking for directions. Or perhaps I could have told you readers about how when I was leaving the pub with Michael the other day, a slightly intoxicated man shouted “High five”, and how I high-fived him. But alas, I don’t seem to visibly panic about things like that anymore.

I can’t even talk about work. You’d think working in a government office would be ripe with hilarious anecdotes- unfortunately, my colleagues are all nice, normal people, and the work itself is so insufferably tedious that I don’t have stories about any David Brent-like characters. It doesn’t help that I’ve signed the official secrets act, meaning I can’t tell you about all of the exciting adventures that I’ve been on. I think blogging is the only reason I’d ever vaguely want a customer-facing job (like Tillmonkeying), because there’s more scope for yet another hundred “stupid customer” posts.

I suppose I could talk about the news, or something. Everyone loves an armchair politician.

I’ve been trying my best to follow the coverage of the party conferences, however tedious they may be, but I’ve got nothing interesting to say about them. I mean, I’m sure Nick Robinson knows a bit more than I do on the subject matter. I’m sure I’ll be able to write something about the Conservative conference (next week?), as I find it easier to write about things I dislike.

The only thing that I have noticed about the Party Conference season is the Daily Politics’ Little Andrew and Little Jenny - who are sort of the boring version of Little Ant & Dec. They’re two kids who the BBC have lined up to ask politicians questions as a gimmicky little feature. Presumably the benefit is that it is (in theory) easier for kids to act all innocent and ask “Do you have blood on your hands, Mr Blair?”, without the BBC having to worry about their reporters being kept out of the loop in the future for asking any real questions. Unfortunately, when the kids did meet Blair, they were starstruck, and the telly just showed them acting excited and waving signed photos (seriously), like they’d just met a massive celebrity. Way to retain your journalistic integrity, kids!

Anyway, what other news is there to talk about? Richard Hammond? What else can I say apart from “If only it were Clarkson”? Thailand? Done that. Bulgaria and Romania in the EU? Coming over here, taking our low-skilled and low-paid jobs that we don’t want anyway! Political Correctness Gone Mad! You couldn’t make it up!

Oh, well, I’m sure I’ll have something insightful to say soon - I go back to Uni on Monday, so I’ll be able to tell you all about “bog washing” the freshers and stealing their lunch money. The best bit is that before I wrote this post, I googled bloggers writers block, and it suggested that if you have writers block, then you should write about writers block. So really this whole blog entry has been a disgusting ploy and a huge joke on you readers. Owned, I suppose.

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Robot Wars
September 28th, 2006 at 01:14

One of my work colleagues told me today that I remind him of someone who has been on Robot Wars. There’s not really an interesting story attached to this- he just explained that he thinks this based on the way I dress and the way I act.

I just hope that he wasn’t talking about George Francis. Yeah, the one who you couldn’t tell if he was a lady or a boy.

And this inadvertently becomes yet another blog entry that will undoubtably attract Saudis looking for ‘lady boys’. Sigh.

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Brown Vs Blair
September 24th, 2006 at 01:37

Something struck me today as I read that Gordan Brown will devolve power over the NHS to a board of directors, if when he becomes PM.

No, it wasn’t the desk that struck me as I fell unconcious due to the overwhelming tediousness of the story! I was reminded of how Brown gave power over interest rates to the Bank of England in 1997. Its almost as if Brown doesn’t want the power he’s given. Put this into the context of Brown and Blair hating each other, and I’ve just created a clever solution that will unite the party’s two major warring factions, and make everyone friends again…

Make Brown the PM, but devolve power to Blair. Brownites will be happy as their man is PM, and Blairites will be happy that their man is still important and making most of the decisions about running the country. Everyone wins (apart from the militant left of the party, and Mandelson, who everyone will still hate as he’s the sort of universal figure of hate).
Lets face it, judging by the current trends (two devolutions in nine years, at a push), I would imagine that by 2050, the whole mechanism of government will be little more than a series of motivational but ultimately pointless job titles given to people to motivate them. Like “Team Leader”.
And isn’t that the best way to govern? Take power away from the politicans who don’t know what they’re doing and put it in the hands of experts in their field, who know how to get best results? Sure, they’ll be unaccountable quangos that will essentially transform a relatively vibrant democracy into little more than a puppet government doing whatever a few powerful individuals say, but we’ll have ace hospitals and a no doubt excellent road network for our flying cars that we’ll no-doubt have in 50 years time.

Bonus paragraph! Keywords for the mainstream media trying to find blogs to discover the political zeitgeist of the moment: Labour conference, Tony Blair, Gordan Brown, public service reform, lady boys, Richard Hammond crash video, pictures of horses.

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Hinduism
September 23rd, 2006 at 02:13

Bit of a long shot here considering that my readership consists primarily of Crystal Walrein and Saudis searching for ‘lady boys’, but do I have any Hindu readers?

I ask because at work today I was talking to one of my colleagues who is a Hindu, and being the awkward bastard that I am, I decided to ask her some questions about Hinduism- as obviously, she knows everything about a 900-million strong religion (one of you must read my blog, surely?) with many denominations and variants.

The trouble is that I’m completely and utterly ignorant when it comes to most religions- I know the gist of Christianity, obviously, and know a bit about Islam thanks to the ludicrous “post-9/11″ and “post 7/7″ media coverage about how (shock, horror) not-insane and normal Muslims are, yet I’ve never really had any run-ins with Hinduism. I know a lot about atheism, but that’s because the ‘holy scriptures’ are so short they can be written on a post-it note.

So rather than wallow in my ignorance, I decided to be proactive and try to learn more by asking Hemal antagonistic questions.

First I raised the issue of creationism. I have absolutely no idea what the Hindu story of creation is, but thanks to the internet, I’m now upto a key-stage 2 understanding! I like how the story is pretty abstract- I’m assuming that most Hindus don’t take it literally. From the way the page is written, it seems to me that it leaves it pretty ambiguous too- excellent. This practically tallies with evolution.

Reincarnation is an interesting topic- me being me, of course, and seemingly unable to keep myself from attempting to lodge my foot as firmly into my mouth as possible, I asked what would happen in the following scenario:

Someone’s having a heart transplant- whilst the heart is being transplanted, they’re technically dead for a few minutes, before being woken up with the electric shock machine (you can tell I’m not a doctor)… surely, this person’s soul would move on and be reincarnated at the point of death… if this is the case, then what would happen to the horse that has just been born with the soul of the dead guy, if the dead guy is bought back to life?

Similarly, at what point does a soul enter the new living thing… when it iss conceieved, or when it is born? If that is the case, are aborted babies people?

Yeah, I’m awkward. Hemel exclaimed “I never thought of this!”, when I suggested this, which made me feel a bit awful. I don’t really want to be responsible for her questioning her entire religion and that falling into mental disarray when these logical inconsistencies are exposed.

She suggested that reincarnation isn’t instantaneously, but there’s a waiting period - presumably to make sure that the person is one-hundred-percent dead. I’m guessing this is left a bit ambiguous, like the creation thing, so it can be a sort of get-out clause.

Following this, I did start the sentence “What about Frankenstein…?”, but luckily someone else came over to talk about actual work before Hemel had a chance to compute this, and whilst I realised what I was saying.

Don’t get me wrong- I wasn’t actively trying to dismantle her religion, and I qualified almost everything I said with political correctness and pre-apologising for any offense caused. I guess karma will get me if I have put my foot in it.

So is there anyone reading who knows about this sort of thing? I’m genuinely fascinated by it. Similarly, do I have any readers from any religions that I know nothing about? Sikhs? Mormons? Buddhists? I’d love to have a chat. And y’know, try and prove your religion wrong albiet in a relatively polite way.

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My Desk
September 21st, 2006 at 14:26

At work, as I work in the evenings, I have to ‘hotdesk’. If the term is new to you: 1994 Management School called! Basically because computer networks exist, employees can work on their work from any computer terminal- often on a nationwide scale. This means that all of the desks look the same and are not full of personalised crap that you’d imagine would grow around someone’s work area. This means that you don’t get people printing out Dilbert and pinning it to their divider to show how quirky and wacky they are. In theory.

On my desk there is a photograph of a woman, her husband and her daughter in front of the Christmas tree, as well as a properly framed picture of the woman’s daughter. It’s annoying though, because it shows that the desk isn’t mine.

When I’m slaving away being the pen-pushing beaurocrat that I am, slowly losing the will to live, thinking that slashing my wrists would end the tedium right now, I can’t look up and see a photo of my family and think “I’m doing it for them“.

They’re not my family. The daughter looks nothing like me, and I’m not married to a 40 year old man. And even if I was, I wouldn’t be doing it for them, I’d be doing it to get more money to pump into pub quiz machines (I’m thinking of setting up a direct debit with itBox) and buy CDs with.

I keep talking to one of my co-workers about bringing in a picture of a dog to put next to the happy family- possibly Lassie. The theory is that the person who works on my desk during the day won’t want to move it, as afterall, its my dog, and the reason why I keep working- as far as they know at least.

Believe me, when your job is processing tax returns, ideas like that are exciting.

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Coup d’Star
September 20th, 2006 at 15:12

So, there’s been some Major Shit going down in Thailand (aswell as Sergeant Shit, Lt. Corporal Shit and so on). This literally shocked me when I logged on to the BBC News website at about midnight last night after having been out and cut off from the news since 3, to see the most unexpected headline since “Celebrity Love Island gets a second series”, “Military Coup in Thailand”!

It was even more alarming than when I switched on TV this morning and cried “Holy Shit! Interest rates are on hold!”.

I was under the impression that Thailand was a relatively “alright” country- the sort where I wouldn’t mind going on holiday, because it would be unlikely that the secret police would kill me for saying something vaguely political whilst inside their borders. Clearly I was wrong: the first thing the coup leaders did was cut off BBC World and CNN, and then broadcast “patriotic songs” on all TV channels. That’s like saying “We’re the baddies, and that’s obvious because we’re trying to hide this from you by cutting off the independent media“. In song.

I like coups though- they make exciting viewing, and are exciting to read about in books. And so I present to you my top 5 coup d’etats of all time… you could say that they’re Coup d’Stars!

5) Thailand 2006

New Entry! A bloodless coup, very cunningly done. Wait until the PM is out of the country then send in the tanks? Classic Heseltine. This would be a textbook example, although I think it would be interesting to see if the country now descends into either Burma style human rights abuses and pissing everyone off, or Maldives style “we’re a horrible dictatorship, but we’re cool with tourists so are alright”.

4) Venezeula 2002

It was a failed coup, so doesn’t rank very highly. Incredibly exciting pictures were taken inside the Presidential Palace whilst this happend over a few days, before Hugo Chavez was bought back to power.

3) America 2000

Obvious studenty Michael Moore politics entry. Bush seizing power in a bloodless coup by rigging an election. Clever, but he didn’t get away with it that well if people like me know about it.

2) USSR 1991

Another failed coup- jolly exciting though. Follows the classic “trap the head of state whilst he’s on holiday in the Crimea, then send in the tanks”. What makes this rank so highly is that it happend in what was at the time the second most powerful country in the world, and that Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank and said a figurative “fuck you” to the hardline nuts driving them.

1) Iraq 1958

This is how a coup should be done. Send in the tanks, confront the king, then execute him. Overthrow the monarchy, and become a corrupt republic instead. Display the bodies in public and piss off the country’s former allies. Lovely.

Do any of you readers have a favourite coup? I find its a good talking point in social situations.

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No Fun in Fundamentalism
September 16th, 2006 at 18:57

I’ve just got around to watching the last part of The Fundamentalists on Channel 4, that was on last Saturday (presented by Mark Dowd), and my god, some of the people on there certainly put the mental into Fundamentalism.

In the documentary, Dowd goes around the world and harassing religion nutters of all faiths, and then puts them on telly so that viewers like me can go “Christ, these people are insane!”, and then feel smug that my belief tag-team of science and rational thought is more correct than the people on screen, who are atleast ten metric Littlejohns more mad.

I think where fundies are going wrong is that they’re not looking at the full picture and sort of missing the point. To put this into a cake based analogy: yeah, eggs, butter and flour are alright on their own, but they’re much better if you were to apply hundreds of degrees of heat for a few minutes. Yeah, I’m essentially advocating that religious fundamentalists be burnt at the stake. Then iced.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t all arguing over a fantasy in the first place. Its all well and good having the Christians scream, “You’re wrong, because this book says this“, and then for the Muslims to shout back, “Yeah, well this book says that, and your mum sucks”. If History is anything to go by, the Christians will then respond with “your dad sucks”. Figuratively, I mean.

On a completely unrelated note, I was having an argument with someone the other day about whether Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter was more historically accurate.

Stupid Fundamentalists. Why can’t they just give up on their faith and live with the same apathy and disdain towards life as the rest of us?

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More funny refers
September 15th, 2006 at 00:22

You might know that I religiously check my blog traffic statistics. I do it because I’m self obsessed- if I can figure out what people like then I’ll get more hits, boosting my ego-mania to Morrissey style levels. That’s why this blog is slowly turning into to a web 2.0 video sharing website full of dodgy mobile phone videos of gigs and American teenages miming to songs on webcam.

My hit counter allows me to discover where you, yes you, are coming from- I’ve got a regular reader at the BBC, and someone in the NHS- by this rate I should have most of the consonants by Christmas. I seem to be in the top MSN search results for “haircuts“- but this isn’t the strangest phenomenon that I’ve noticed.

For some reason, I seem to be getting a lot of hits from the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East in general for “lady boy”- presumably for this monstrosity. A lot of these are from image searches too. Oo-er.

Another hit that I’ve receieved recently has been someone in Saudi Arabia searching for “getting drunk”- presumably wanting to find out what they’re missing out on. And as the most perfectly average individual, I think my blog is the perfect place to explain one of the strangest aspects of western society and social conventions.

Someone at the Ministry of Defence has been looking for “pictures of Fun House with Pat Sharp“. Good to know you’re protecting the country during every working minute.

And finally, “Leicester Mercury Bastards“, was searched for by someone working for Northcliffe Newspapers, owners of… The Leicester Mercury. I don’t know about them being bastards, but they are cheapskates when it comes to building- rather than build some entirely new premises, they’ve just glued some shiny black panels on to the side of their existing building. Looks nice though.

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9/11 Conspiracy
September 11th, 2006 at 15:22

Because today is September 11th, the 5th anniversary of the most media-savvy terrorist attack in history, I’m doing the most tasteful thing possible and watching CNN’s live coverage from 5 years ago, as it happend, in real time. (Its streaming on the website).
Aside from the nice graphics (no ticker, interesting ‘live’ tab on inset live shots), the one thing that’s really surprised me is how plausable it makes the conspiracy theories seem. Sort of.

After the second plane hit, CNN had a man on the phone saying that it looked like a missile had hit the second World Trade Center. Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, this was seconds after the rest of the world had watched a Boeing 767 smash into the building. The CNN presenter seemed to be playing it safe though- even after both towers were on fire for two seperate reasons he was going on about how there could be “navigational faults”.
When news of the Pentagon broke, there was no talk of a plane for a good ten minutes at least- it was all talk of a “large fire”. Oo-er. Even twenty minutes after its talk of “a plane or a helicopter”. I think this obviously proves that George Bush himself was directing in missiles via remote control.
And interestingly, first mention of Bin Laden at 9:55am… just over an hour after the first plane hit. That’s suspiciously quick!

The best bit is that I know when the exciting bits are going to happen, so I don’t have to remain constantly glued to the screen. I think terrorists in the future should issue press releases in advance with the timeline on, so that viewers can get on with other things too.

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