You’d think being a scholar of international relations, or at least someone who would be if I got round to writing the essays that I need to, I’d have something useful, or at least vaguely insightful to say about the situation in Gaza at the moment. Unfortunately, you’ve over-estimated me again. There’s nothing that I can say that hasn’t been said before, and all analysis basically boils down to the fact that both sides should stop acting like twats.
Obviously the conflict has a history as tedious as it is long and would be pointless to explain here. This latest tiresome incident looks like it’s part of the standard cycle of “things are okay for a bit, then someone goes and fucks it up and we’re back to square one again”. Hamas should probably have realised they were doing something wrong when even Fatah seemingly sided with Israel and said they shouldn’t have been firing rockets about. They should also have realised they were doing something wrong when they started firing rockets about.
Similarly, Israel should have realised they were doing something wrong when they tried to fight an unconventional force with a regularly old conventional force. Killing a few hundred people isn’t exactly a great strategy for winning hearts and minds. But this is all pretty obvious stuff.
What makes it irritating, when viewed from my ivory tower is how completely expectedly, the comically black and white perspectives are that the commentators are viewing the conflict from. My reaction, being a big fan of human rights and the left and peace and all that should be that Israel are the bad guys in all of this – they’ve been oppressing the Palestinians and killing civilians for ages, but then I find myself thinking “maybe the Israelis do have a valid point?”
This isn’t to say I in any way support their “war” on Hamas (and we all know that that James O’Malley’s support is second only to that of the United States), but I can sort of see where they’re coming from. It isn’t just the uncomfortable feeling that comes with seeing people set their Facebook statuses to “solidarity with the Hamas resistance”, but if you look at it from the Israeli perspective, you can at least understand why they’re doing it – Hamas have been firing rockets at their people for the last month, which is obviously going to piss them off.
(Really Hamas and the Israeli right should form a coalition or alliance – they both seem to do better when tensions are heightened, so it’s win-win for them really. Sure, it might be lose-lose for the people who die, but that’s just less bodies to support their rival parties.)
The only thing that makes the current situation different from business as usual in the region is that aside from shitting on any progress towards peace (that’s technical international relations jargon), is the scale of the response.
I can’t help but wonder if the cause of all of this is democracy. Hamas, the democratically elected leaders of the Palestinian territories* are firing rockets at Israel, and the massive military response may have more than a little to do with the Israeli elections in February, and the Israeli public seem to love sticking it to the Palestinians. I’m pretty sure last time round just as things were looking up for the peace process, the Israeli public went and scuppered it by electing the far-right Likud and Ariel Sharon – a man better known for his girly name than his diplomacy skills.
(*I’m sure someone can corrrect me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick – was Gaza involved in that election? And that war wth Fatah probably impacted it a bit.)
I imagine having rockets fired at you is quite an emotive issue for the electorate. Though a well thought out but boring diplomatic effort could work, if the Israeli public are anything like the British public, they won’t care or at least won’t have the patience – and the government need tangible results within four years or so otherwise they’ll look like failures. All the Israeli government are doing by launching this war are pandering to the Israeli equivalent of the membership of the “HANG THE PARENTS OF BABY P” Facebook group.
Is this yet another reason why democracy doesn’t work? I’m not well informed enough to really commentate (didn’t stop me trying though), but it’s certainly a bit bleak, really. Both sides can make valid points, but both sides are being dicks about it.
I like to think of myself intellectually as a sort of ancient-greek scholarly type – learned and wise and interested in all facets of knowledge. What this basically means is that I think I know a little about a lot, am easily distracted from what I should be studying and spend my days lying around in my pyjamas pontificating on the internet.
The ancients had it easy, really. Sure, they didn’t have modern conveniences like BBC Four and Wikipedia, but they could get away with knowing pretty much fuck all and still call themselves educated, because the collective body of human thought was much smaller than it is now.
These days though, we have much more knowledge than any one man can handle – there’s some sort of statistic that says something like there being more books published now every year than the number of books published ever before something like 1900 (though the value of modern books isn’t considered – it’s fairly probably that Thomas Paine’s Booky-wook is more important than Russell Brand’s). This statistic in itself is another piece of knowledge – and evidently something else that I don’t actually know.
What’s got me started on this is that I’ve stumbled upon the conclusion that there’s simply too much information for me to consume and I can’t cope with it. And I don’t like this feeling at all, because it gives me a massive sense of intellectual jealousy and hatred towards people who are better than me. Though I’m very much a fan of the pursuit of knowledge, nothing annoys me more than smart kids – the sort who took their exams a year early and later turn up as contestants on University Challenge. Watching University Challenge, before the private-school educated, received-pronunciation using, prefect-used-to-being wanker has even explained what they’re reading at Oxbridge, I will irrationally hate them. How can anyone retain such huge quantities of knowledge and consume it at such an unbelievable rate?
Angry tangents aside though, the point I intended to make in the first paragraph is that I simply don’t know how to go about consuming all of the media I’d like to – I’m not sure whether or not it’s a time management issue or a trying to learn too much stuff issue, but in an ideal world, I’d like to read simultaneously:
All unread items in Google Reader
The Economist every week
The Guardian at least a few times a week
A non-fiction book
Some sort of great work of literature
Oh, and all of that academic reading I should be doing
Unfortunately in the annoyingly tangible real world, in actual fact I tend to manage:
Some of my Google Reader items
…and that’s about it. So I guess this post is something of a cry for help – albeit a mostly unimportant cry based on a fabricated dilemma. I’m pretty much complaining that kicking myself in the face is not only difficult for a non-Russian gymnast like myself, but it really hurts too.
C’mon readers, throw me a bone. Tell me how to manage my reading.
Recently a lot of things that we got bored with years ago have made big come backs. For instance, bewildering Take That exist and are popular again, and Wispa bars were brought back thanks to a grass-roots campaign and the astroturf planted by some advertising agencies on Facebook. Similarly, as a consequence of the Iraq war getting a bit boring, the war in Afghanistan is getting a lot of face time with the general public once again.
I’m not complaining about this though – for my money, Afghanistan is a much more interesting war. Not only is it an even murkier mess of international law grey areas, but the task is much more challenging: imposing a 20th century construct (democracy and the state) on a lawless 12th century system in a 21st century globalised world.
The baddies are much more complex and interesting too. Whereas in Iraq, the insurgents have been essentially just wankers with bombs, in Afghanistan the resurgent Taliban have managed to seize control of vast areas and have arguably constructed a rudimentary alternative system of government. Ordinary people there are paying tax to the Taliban and going to them to settle land disputes and so on, because they’re providing stability that the approximately 4 NATO troops in the country can’t.
So it’s no surprise that the good guys are having such a hard time sorting things out over there – after all, they can’t even find the Taliban’s leadership. What I think is interesting though is who can find the Taliban leadership.
Not a day goes by without a newspaper, news programme or whatever having a “special report” from Afghanistan – just in the last week I’ve read special reports in the Guardian and saw one on Channel 4 news and I was surprised at just how much access journalists get to the bad guys. The Guardian had their guy interviewing a regional Taliban commander, even staying with them whilst they were fighting the Americans at one point, and Channel 4 news had an interview with some hostage takers whilst the hostage was there.
Meanwhile the army are standing miles away, scratching their heads wondering where Bin Laden and Mullah Omar have got to.
So isn’t it obvious what we need to do to beat the Taliban? Send in the journalists. We need our Louis Therouxs, our Jon Ronsons, our Morgan Spurlocks, hell, even our Michael Palins into Helmand province to find the Taliban. If we get desperate, even Judith Chalmers would do. If they just act all normal like, setup interviews as usual, the bad guys will trot out the usual patter about the Taliban providing security and having to fight Jihad because it’s what all of the cool kids do, the journos will get their gripping interview and then on the way out, all they’ll have to have a word with the local NATO base to tell them where to look, and boom (literally) – problem solved. Given the frequency in which special reports appear from Afghanistan appear, I would confidently estimate that the war in Afghanistan would be over by the end of 2009.
C’mon Louis, your country needs your faux-naivety.
Living in London has changed me, and I’m not sure I like what I’m turning into – because I seem to be turning into Nathan Barley – Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris’s parody of London media twats. I think today was a good example of why.
I left the house today dressed in my trendy new London gear. As I’ve previously described on this blog, I’m now a regular user of a Trilby, and a few weeks ago got a new coat that makes me look vaguely smart, but trendy-smart, like they wear in This is England. (I am slightly concerned that my fashion sense also implies that I’m a horrible racist).
Where was I heading? To trendy Shoreditch, of course. Shoreditch is basically like Camden Town* if it were on an independent label, and is populated almost exclusively by young professionals and shops that don’t display any products, and in which you have to ring a bell to enter.
After this with a couple of hours to kill I went and sat in a Pret with free wifi and used my trendy white laptop and read the Guardian. Just like everyone else in there. The only thing that showed me up as a media-industry fraud aside from my lack of meeja columnist job was that rather than use a Macbook I was using an Eee PC.
It was what happened later though that really made today Barley-esque. Inexplicably, some sort of PR firm have offered to lend me a new INQ1 mobile phone for a month – a device not until the Wasp T12. The only difference is that instead of having an extra-large 5-key, it has some Facebook and Skype integration.
So I went to the office to pick it up and I was stunned at just how much like Barley it was. Obviously it was a trendy modern new-media office. There were trendy sheer brick walls and it was converted from what looks like a former industrial space, and the office was almost completely empty, save for a few computers (probably Macs) – there was even a trendy kitchen area, and not a tie in sight.
Being a PR firm, they don’t make tangible things for people to buy, like bricks or hammers, or other things paraphernalia people in the north use, they’re people who care about brand image and social-media and buzzwords and things. And for some reason, they must have thought that I’d be the perfect vehicle in which to get in with the target market of young, urbane, affluent professionals. I tried my best to bluff being urbane, affluent and professional.
I couldn’t work out when I got there whether or not they were licking their lips at the number of demographic boxes that I ticked or were disappointed that underneath my trendy coat I still wear a five year old blue fleece rather than some sort of “ironic” Mr-T t-shirt.
I asked them “Why me?”, and it turns out it has something to do with me being moderately prolific on Twitter and Facebook and the like, and surprisingly, not because I used to write about phones and stuff for Tech Digest. They even said they weren’t targeting geeks and techies with this phone. I kept my mouth firmly shut.
The upshot of all of this is that now we have proof that I’m some sort of zeitgeist defining cultural leader. And a bit like the Canyonero episode of The Simpsons where Krusty briefly stops selling out before selling out again, I totally sold out and took the phone for a month. I’ll probably do some sort of review at the end of it as it’d be polite to do so.
Earlier this week an NHS doctor was convicted of planning the failed terrorist attacks on London and Glasgow Airport last year. It’s a good job really that Bilal Abdulla went to medical school instead of terrorist school, otherwise he might have been less stunningly inept at carrying out a terrorist attack and made a bomb that actually works.
There is a problem now though. This news has made it clear that the network of terrorists is a much bigger than this one guy – and its probable that a few of them are better at being terrorists than a man who’s first brilliant plan involved finding a parking space in London, and who’s second brilliant plan was basically “set yourself on fire”.
It has now emerged that the network of alleged terrorists in this country is massive. They have vast terrorist bases in all of the big cities and a lot of towns too, hundreds of thousands of complicit members and supporters across the country. They even have training camps at some of the major universities.
They (literally) have us by the balls – as well as most other body parts. It is time that the British people declared war on the regime that are harbouring the terrorists. The NHS.
Critics of the War on Terror aren’t surprised at this latest turn of events though. Just like how the Americans had been funding the Mujahideen, the organisation that trained Osama Bin Laden, throughout the 1980s, the British government are thought to have been funding the NHS with substantial sums of money for decades.
The British Government aren’t just complicit – they’re actively aiding the NHS, with rumours of involvement by the highest echelons of government. Former Prime Minister, Clement Atlee is said to be one of the founding members of the terrorist organisation, and Health Secretary Alan Johnson is said to hold regular meetings with top-level members.
Human rights groups and the media may have been outraged in the past when it was reported that the American Air Force had bombed hospitals in Afghanistan and Iraq – maybe it wasn’t just because there was a nice, easy, big red cross to aim towards, but because they already knew what we’re only just finding out?
The scary thing is that these terrorists seem to be winning the war for hearts and minds. One of the fiendish terrorist ruses that terrorists are using to bankroll their explosive exploits is by helping the sick and wounded… For free. They’re preying on the minds of the weak and weary – those who are most susceptible to terrorist inoculation.
NHS employees are probably working in hospitals right now concocting medicines, playing with nature by fixing broken bones and giving people life-saving drugs. They’re literally trying to change our way of life.
It is our patriotic duty to remain vigilant, alert, and most of all, in good health. We can’t afford to get sick and give the NHS a chance to get to us.
(Yeah, this has been adapted from an earlier blog entry.)
A few weeks ago I was joking with my trendy new London friends, Eve and Hel, about wanting to go to a rap battle after watching a few on YouTube. For the uninitiated, a rap battle is when two rappers get up on stage and slag each other off whilst “freestyling”. I never actually expected to end up going to a rap battle, but then that’s what happens when you live in a city which has everything.
So we decided to go to The Jump Off, at The Astoria, which is a monthly festival of hip-hoppery, which pleasingly, is almost exactly how you would imagine it to be, as it turns out that every hip-hop stereotype is true.
What made this all the more interesting is that immediately prior to going here, we attended a Skeptics in the Pub debate on UFOs with psychologist Chris French from Goldsmiths Uni and UFO crackpot Nick Pope. It was very much the antithesis of hip-hop: you’d need a collective noun for Guardian readers to describe the demographics there. This was actually superb – both French and Pope swapped sides and argued using each others arguments, just for the intellectual challenge. The best bit though, was that it provided an interesting contrast.
We weren’t really sure what to expect at the Jump Off, because to be honest, we’re all a bit middle class (Hel especially – she went to grammar school). This is something of a disadvantage in the hip-hop scene because if you don’t have an unpleasant back-story you’re not considered to have much credibility. We did plan to hip-hop up our appearances a bit – the others bought baseball caps and so on, but we didn’t care wear them in the end. We did try to modify our personalities slightly though – for example, Hel had to change her intonation when mentioning her Estate, to being merely ‘the estate’, and I if asked, planned to respond that my degree is from the “University of Life” (it was a BA (dishons) Stabbin’ with Beatboxin’).
We joined the queue for the Astoria and within seconds, a man said to us “Want some weed?”, so we immediately knew this could get interesting. This was only confirmed whem the man on the door asked us what gig we were here for, as we clearly didn’t look like the hip-hop demographic.
Walking through the door frame, I was subject to a rather ominous frisking. Though having your bag searched is quite a regular occurence at London gig venues, usually it’s just a case of the bouncers taking a half-hearted glance at your bag and saying “that’s fine”, though in this case, my arms and legs were thoroughly patted-down and I had to turn out all of my pockets. This certainly exacerbated any anxiety I had about getting murdered.
What struck me on entering the venue was not, thankfully, a knife or some stray bullets, but just how out of place we looked. Not because we were three white people at a gig for a genre with a predominantly black fanbase, but because everyone else looked like they knew about hip-hop and rap and stuff – they all decorated themselves with chains and knives and sportswear. My hip-hop knowledge extends as far as The Beastie Boys and Flobots. Also, I probably have more hair than every other man who was in that room put together.
Interestingly, they were filming it all for YouTube and presumably the telly at some point – so look forward to seeing my face looking slightly bewildered in the background of some promotional material soon!
The bill was an interesting one – it seemed to cover all of the hip-hop bases. We got there a little late, so the first act that we saw was comedian Toju, who was apparently on the dire Balls of Steel, who was described on the poster as being a “militant black guy” – so as you might imagine, his set had some uncomfortable moments for the three people with probably the pastiest skin there, as I’m sure we all collectively prayed “please don’t pick on me”. Thankfully, he wasn’t that sort of comedian, but did enter the stage saying “all the black people in the audience say ‘yeah’” to a humungous cheer, followed by “all of the white people in the audience say ‘yeah’” which led to a few weak grunts from around the room. The rest of his set was jokes and an awful lot of libel about various hip-hop celebrities which I’m sure would be excellent if you understood the references and didn’t just listen to ska.
Afterwards, and in-between acts, a DJ played some tunes (laid down some beats?), in which most of the songs sampled sound effects of gunshots. They songs also sounded more-or-less the same. Unlike ska. Ahem.
Next up was what could best be described as a Whores Fashion Show. Presumably at the behest of one of the corporate sponsors, the apparent finalists for “Miss Hip-Hop” paraded around the stage for a few minutes in what could best be described as clothing designed by the colourblind. In a few cases, it appeared that they’d forgotten to finish getting fully dressed before entering the stage – I assume it was because of time pressure, as the event was running slightly behind the published schedule.
There were also some men on stage (I don’t think there was a corresponding “Mr Hip-Hop” competition), who didn’t seem to know much about fashion either. A lot of the costumes consisted of a hoodie and trousers with the same pattern on. I’m dimly aware that it’s embarassing for women if two women show up for something wearing the same dress, and I experience similar anxiety if I see people wearing the same t-shirt (complete with witty slogan/logo/etc) as me – so I’d assume turning up wearing the same patterned trousers and hoodie are the ultimate embarassment. Not that they seemed too bothered.
The next segment was called “Got Talent”, in which members of the audience demonstrated their hip-hop skill to the audience in a bid to win fifty quid. This was pretty entertaining. There was a mixture of beatboxing, rapping (both with a beat and acapella) and normal singing. Like with any talent contest, the calibre of the talent was varied, and the audience were encouraged to cheer or boo the contestants. Whilst it was harrowing and a little heartbreaking to see people get shot down and their dreams smashed in front of their eyes by a few hundred people booing, this was offset slightly by hearing people in the audience “brap” the rubbish performers. I first learnt this from my mate Dan:”brapping” is when you make a gun shape with your fingers and shout “brap, brap” – it’s gunfire, you see. Way to dispell the stereotypes, hip-hoppers.
My favourite thing about this segment was that most of the contestants were the sort of people I’d cross the road to avoid walking past, and that all of the rappers had given themselves rap names. One contestant, who called himself ‘Stabs’ (no, really), was surprisingly threatening in a Wolf-from-Gladiators sort of way, getting moody when he was knocked out of the competition. As it turned out, most of the raps people did were about how difficult it is living in South London. I’m glad I live north of the river.
In the end the winner though, was a singer who we speculate won only because he was singing in a very heartfelt way about his mother. How much he liked her, I mean, rather than implying that she was a prostitute that he would like to shoot.
After the talent segment, it finally reached the point in the evening we’d all been waiting for – the rap battle. It was a special ‘grudge rematch’ between Micky Negro and Arkaic – who had duelled previously. It was phenomenal.
Obviously, all previously held values we had about racism, sexism and homophobia being bad had to be suspended – not an easy task when you’re there with two fairly militant feminists, but it was an incredible sight to see. Arkaic got served. And it totally made the whole evening worthwhile. The audience were really into it to, reacting to every rhyme with great enthusiasm. The freestyling was genuinely impressive too – the rappers reacted to what was going on around them and to what their opponent was saying. There was, of course, a lot of lazy rhymes calling their opponent “gay” or “whack” but there were also a lot of clever ones too.
I think the battle could have gone either way until Arkaic, a white guy, made the mistake of bringing racial matters to the forum. When he claimed that Micky Negro had a face that looked like it had been “hit by a frying pan” because he was black, he seemed to lose the audience’s sympathy, leading to Micky Negro’s final knock-out line of “This is like Barack Obama versus John McCain”, at which point the audience went wild, leading to a crescendo in which the DJ weighed in with some dramatic scratching, even though he still had time on the clock – it was clear who the winner was going to be.
Content, we left soon after this, not bothering to stay for the final “pillow fight” segment, which surprisingly, was literally just a pillow fight – there wasn’t a hidden hip-hop meaning, such as ‘pillow’ being slang for ‘gun’ or something. It was just people fighting with pillows, which seems a bit tame, really.
It was all pretty incredible really – the sort of thing that we all agreed was well worth going to, but that we should never go to again.
Living in London has changed me quite significantly. Three months ago, I was a terrible wimp, nervous about walking around late at night in Leicester – by contrast, I now don’t think anything of catching the night bus home in the early hours from Stabbington to Murderville via Kill[&]Burn. In fact, I’ve learnt to just sit back as an observer and almost enjoy watching potentially deadly situations unfold in front of me. So I’m basically just like the international community with Zimbabwe.
On the night bus home the other week, for instance, the bus was trundling along through Soho, and it was about the time when people get kicked out of clubs, so there were plenty of drunks. One group of drunk girls tried to board the bus but the driver, quite rightly, was not having any of it, as one of them didn’t have a ticket. This led to an interesting stand-off where the girls screamed “You’re legally entitled to take her home”, with the stress on “entitled”, as if this clever piece of legalese was a loophole that allowed for free bus journeys. In retaliation, the driver simply switched off the engine.
Wisely, I decided not to wade in and point out that the phrase they were looking for was “legally obliged”, and that the driver is not legally obliged in any way. Other passengers didn’t feel the same way as me though. One passenger emerged from the top deck – an old man of about 60, who had the Churchill-dog-esque partially melted face look about him, decided to try and broker some peace.
“You’re being disruptive and abusive”, he told the drunk girls with the natural air of authority that older people tend to have, before undermining himself slightly by adding “…now fuck off“.
