Local Elections
April 18th, 2007 at 00:01

There’s some local elections coming up soon, and I feel that I should try and use my influence as a columnist to try and persuade you to vote the way I want you to. The trouble is that, despite being a student of politics, I don’t really have any well defined political opinions… or at least ones that tally ideologically.

I’m basically a hypocrite. I’d vote in favour of lefty ideas, like taxing the rich to help the poor, and I think I’m pretty socially liberal, but at the same time, I’m doing rather well out of the status quo. I’m a vaguely middle-class, heterosexual, white male, so nobody bothers to discriminate me because it’s people in my demographic who rule the world.

I think I tend to define the few coherent political opinions I do have not by things that I like, but rather things that I dislike. This is problematic if I want to try and influence the vote, and I can theoretically do this, as I’m a newspaper columnist. The trouble is that there are press rules that mean that whilst you can encourage people to vote for a particular party, you can’t encourage people to not vote for someone.

Aside from obviously discouraging people to vote for the Conservatives, I’d also like to discourage people from voting for the BNP (I really hate Parisian banks) or similar far right parties. It goes without saying that I find what they have to say abhorrent, but it does make me wonder what use the BNP having council seats will do? The mainstream parties are always saying “Ooh, the BNP might win council seats!”, but what use are they to them?

If the BNP are elected to local councils, is the agenda at the meetings going to be:

1. Improve rubbish collection
2. Build a skateboard park for local youths to sit on and smoke
3. Have all immigrants, foreigners and anyone with a suntan shot?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the BNP having council seats is a good idea, far from it, but I didn’t think the, er, foreigners policy was in the domain of the local councils.

Maybe if the BNP are elected to councils near the coast they’ll be loads of roads built that head directly into the sea?

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Facebook
April 16th, 2007 at 02:02

I’ve got an embarrassing confession to make. For the past few months I’ve been using the social networking website Facebook. Why is this embarrassing? It’s basically a slightly classier version of MySpace- so it’s like a murderer admitting he stabbed the victim in the front instead of the back: marginally more honourable but equally horrific.

My justification for using it is that its useful for keeping in touch with old friends, as well as what is generally going on at university – usefully it splits the membership into individual university “networks”, meaning that normal morons can’t see what I’m up to, and it hopefully provides a sort of cretin-filter that prevents the great-unwashed who are too stupid to go to university from accessing it.

I don’t like using it, because I mean, why on earth would anyone want access to a list of my favourite bands or TV programmes? What possible use does anyone have for this information? When is there ever going to be a medical emergency when I’m lying unconscious and the paramedic says “Does anyone know what James’ favourite book is? Find out! Hurry! This is a life or death situation! Reading passages from Richard Littlejohn’s Essex Girl Jokebook is just sending him into a deeper coma… we need a more accurate book type match!“

It concerns me that I’m getting really into it too- I’ve uploaded a couple of photo albums, presumably to subconsciously boast about what an excellent social life I have. I’m finding myself checking back multiple times per day to get the latest news on what my friends are doing: “Oh my god! Heggs is eating a grapefruit!“

One of the worst things about Facebook is that allows me to see who my university peers are and mercilessly judge them based entirely what they’ve written on the internet, without having to go through the effort of awkwardly making conversation with them. Facebook has over 3000 people from my university registered on it, and at risk of making a gross over-generalisation and sounding sickeningly self-righteous, without exception they all appear to be morons. I don’t know if this is an accurate reflection of them, of course. I imagine I come across as a right self-important twat if judged exclusively on how I described myself. Or, er, this rather angry blog entry.

It’s just that the vast majority of users on there seem so far removed from who I am. If you look at the “activities” or “interests” on anyone’s profile, and the list invariably consists exclusively of “drinking” and “clubbing”. Maybe “sleeping”. Are these people’s vacuous lives so devoid of anything more noteworthy? You see on the lists of recent activity every few days yet more photos of pissed students in nightclubs are posted as if the photos are radically different from the last time they all got drunk.

It doesn’t help that despite being students, and by extension the assumed learned people of society, students seem to insist on typing exclusively in lower case, using text slang and so on. I know its clichéd to moan about this, but it really irritates me- when reading it I imagine it being said in the voice of an idiot child. I imagine if we all used Cyrillic keyboards with a backward-R key then the writings of students would be near indistinguishable from that of a five year old because of all the backwards letters and illegibility.

I’m always vaguely amused as well as intensely depressed when in the “favourite quotes” section of someone’s profile, rather than being something witty, clever, or amusing or whatever, it’s something like “ur a twat!!!!” attributed to another pointless moron.

Have I missed something? Have I completely got the wrong end of the stick with regard to university? Where are the people who don’t define the quality of an evening by the number of shots they had? Where are the people who will appreciate the learning experience rather than see it as something to do whilst the clubs are closed? Seriously, it’d be useful to know.

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Gridlock
April 15th, 2007 at 20:52

• Why does communications technology get worse with time?
• Why aren’t two phone networks interoperable for an arbitrary reason? Normal motorway users can’t talk to people on the “fast lane” because they are “different classes”- this phrase is meaningless.
• Why must there be more than three people in a car to conserve fuel when the very same cars have “self-replenishing fuel”.
• Why, despite being set in the year 5,000,000,053 (!) has technology not improved much? Sure, they have flying cars, but the buildings are still made from bricks, and the old women have glasses… have they not heard of laser eye surgery?
• Cat/human cross-breeding?

I don’t mind pseudo-scientific explanations or even the characters simply talking shit, as long as it makes logical sense and is internally coherent in the universe in which the series exists.

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Zoo Video
April 14th, 2007 at 12:29

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Pictures from the Zoo
April 14th, 2007 at 02:00

I went to the zoo today with JD and Sarah. If there’s one thing the internet needs more of, it’s photos of animals. Here are some photos that we took:

A penguin doing what penguins do best (ie: bugger all)

A massive sea lion.

Peter Stringfellow meets Planet of the Apes.

JD and Sarah, pointing at a Crane. They say that Cranes are great!

A battery camel, that is used for storing water. It’s head is stuck between the bars so that it doesn’t move.

An otter stands up. Soon they’ll have opposable thumbs.

A capibara, which is basically just a massive guinea pig.

Sarah incorrectly demonstrating the Nazi salute to some nonplussed llama.

JD trying on Sarah’s sunglasses, going for the Dennis Taylor look.

Sarah and a meerkat. I like how I framed this photo.

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Column – 13/04/07
April 14th, 2007 at 00:08

Read it online: here. Or read the original version, complete with typos and swears: here.

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Navy Media Row
April 11th, 2007 at 14:26

I’m disgusted that some of the soldiers who were captured by the Iranians have been selling their stories. They’re a bunch of fucking sell outs.

I thought they didn’t sign up because of the money. I thought they signed up because they’re passionate about killing civilians and orchestrating misdirected foreign policy goals, but no, at the first sign of an offer they’ve gone and sold out and are now merely lap dogs to the man.

Presumably next time they’re taken hostage they’ll be even more commercial than before, forgetting their roots and merely producing tired and formulaic videos featuring the same old maps and confession letters.

What happened to you guys? You used to be cool.

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Top 3: Economists
April 10th, 2007 at 23:58

I’m trying to start a running joke, and I’m only having limited success. Whenever someone mentions a well known person to me, I’ll rank them in a list of my favourite members of their occupation. For example, when discussing the new £20 note, I’ll tell people that Adam Smith is my third favourite economist, implying that I have really specific ranked lists of favourites for a number of things.

Here’s the thing: I would genuinely like to have ranked lists of my favourite things. In fact, lists of favourites are my second most desired metaphysical possession (after charisma and before modesty).

So to try and make it a reality, here’s a list of my three favourite economists:

JAMES O’MALLEY’S TOP THREE ECONOMISTS

3) Adam Smith

How can you not like a man who has has a sort of reverse invisibility cloak and can instead see invisible things. He spotted some invisible hands meddling with the market, and then wrote about them so that we mere mortals can too detect market forces. He’s basically like Isaac Newton if he were hit on the head by some bullion instead of an apple and didn’t turn into a religious nutter later in his life.

He wins bonus points for being a bit of an all-rounder and appealing to all sides of the political spectrum: He theorised division of labour, and thus mass production ages before Henry Ford, setting us comfortable westerners up for an easy life. Excellent. He was, however, in favour of progressive taxation and (figuratively) taxing the shit out of the rich, which is also excellent. Adam Smith is a top bloke. I’d invite him to my birthday party.

2) John Maynard Keynes

Keynes is so good, there’s a school of economic thought named after him: Keynesian Economics. He was a big fan of state intervention in the economy to keep things afloat, and his ideas kept the world going after World War II. Unfortunately, things fucked up for his ideas when there was an oil crisis in the 70s and Nixon de-linked the Dollar from the gold standard, which caused the entire world system to unravel… but lets not mention that. Keynes was dead by then anyway, so it’s not like he ever knew anyway.

1) John Kenneth Galbraith

I don’t actually know that much about ‘JKG’, but what I do know is that he’s the most quotable man on earth, and after all, the quotability of a person is a much better judge of them than their body of work and character. Here’s some things he’s said according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia:

• “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
• “It is a well known and very important fact that America’s founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.”
• “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
• (On being asked what it is like having reached the age of 90) “Better than the alternative.”
• “Under Capitalism, man exploits man, under Communism, exactly the opposite” (Wikipedia reckons this is falsely attributed to him, but I disagree as BBC News says otherwise.)

Next time: My Top 3 Civil Engineers. (Look forward to it).

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Election 92
April 9th, 2007 at 18:21

So, how have you spent your Easter Monday? I’ve spent mine watching Election 92 on BBC Parliament. No, really.

Excellently, the BBC are showing the whole thing, because it’s 15 years to do the day since it happened. There’s about thirteen hours of programming over all.

I was too young to appreciate the election first time around, so a lot of it is new to me. I’m really hoping that the Tories don’t win – all of the exit polls are looking pretty good, with (pre-evil) Labour predicted to win. I actually punched the air when Chris Patten lost his seat.

The Monster Raving Looney party seemed to have fielded a lot of candidates in 1992 – its hilarious to see a line of nervous looking candidates standing behind the returning officer wondering if they’ve wasted the last few years of their lives, only to be standing next to a twat dressed as a clown. It’s even funnier when the twat gets more votes than The Natural Law Party or other serious minority parties.

It’s really interesting to see all of the celebrities and how young they look – David Dimbleby has a full head of hair, and Peter Scissons is capable of successfully constructing a sentence on live television. Some of the MPs look much younger and fresher too: Robin Cook is alive, for example.

I’ve actually made a game out of it, called “dead or disgraced?”, where I’ll apply my skills of retrospective judgement on the politician being interviewed on screen. Jeffrey Archer has already been on as a guest, as has David Mellor and his unusual face, although I’ve not seen anything of Neil Hamilton yet. The body count, by comparison, currently stands at just Cook and John Smith.

It’s also interesting to see tonnes of people who weren’t as famous then as they are now. Oliver Letwin not getting elected was a magnificent moment, and seeing a young Tony Blair argue with a (relatively) young Ken Livingstone on live telly is a debate you’re never going to directly see these days.

The world’s nerdiest paragraph: I’m also enjoying the graphics- they’re pretty slick by 1992 standards, with whooshy transitions and all sorts. And Peter Snow’s Swingometer is an actual physical entity rather than just a graphic, and they appear to have invented real time 3D graphics prior to 1992, which surprised me slightly.

Happy Easter everyone!

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Ban Religion Now
April 9th, 2007 at 01:31

I’ve recently finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and as a result, I’ve unquestionably accepted everything that it has said and become a militant atheist.

The God Delusion was something of a revelation to me. It’s provided me with a framework for belief and morals- if there were a Richard Dawkins fan club that I could attend, say, every Sunday, and celebrate his creation with other Dawkins fans, it would be most excellent.

After reading the book, I think it’s made me slightly more hostile towards people with different beliefs to my own- I have nothing but contempt for people who don’t believe the word of Richard Dawkins, or the unbelievers, as you could call them.

One of Dawkins’ main criticisms of religion (aside from “religion is rubbish and wrong”) is that kids are raised into being religious zealots, giving them no choice in what to belief- and Dicky Dawkins moans that he thinks labelling a child “a Christian child” or “a Muslim child” is as absurd as labelling them “a Conservative Child” or “a Labour child”. I quite agree, and this is why I think they should ban religion for under 18s.

Think about it – a child raised free from corrupting influences, and then they can make an informed decision about whether to believe fairy tales or rational thought as a responsible adult.

As well as the positive societal implications, the amusing side effect to this would be religion bizarrely becoming something that is cool in the eyes of young people. Everyone knows that smoking makes you look really cool and wins you loads of friends- this is especially true if you’re not old enough to buy cigarettes. Presumably if religion were also outlawed for kids, there’d be choirboys at the back of the school field catching a quick prayer before the teachers see, and on their way home they’d be getting the tallest member of their gang to put on a deep voice and try and buy a Bible from behind the counter in Waterstones.

Thinking about it, why don’t they just ban religion entirely? Sure, this might be a little bit draconian, but it would be for the greater good – think about all of the old churches that could be converted into trendy apartments or redeveloped by ageing middle class couples with too much disposable income and a desire to appear on Grand Designs. Any churches that did want to carry on would have to go underground, and it’d be a bit like prohibition in America in the early 20th century, with churches living in the basements of buildings, with a secret knock, passwords in order to gain entry, and singing gangster children.

And isn’t massive societal upheaval worth it if it means we can spread the word of Dawkins?

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