Royal Mail Privatisation
February 25th, 2009 at 01:09

The left are divided! So what else is new?!

This time there’s apparently 120 Labour MPs ready to rebel over the part privatisation of the Post Office. I think it’s about time – in fact, I think that it doesn’t go far enough: we need to shut down the Royal Mail entirely.

For too long, the meddling nanny-state has had a near-monopoly on delivering letters. Why doesn’t the state trust us to travel and take written communications and parcels to people ourselves? Why must the Post Office provide a service to take my letters to whoever I want them delivered too when I am capable myself of driving the letters to their destinations myself?

What makes me even more is the government’s sick profiteering. Stamps are merely a stealth tax imposed on us by literal paper-pushing bureaucrats.

And don’t get me started on the speed camera-like ruse of legally imposing occasions like Christmas, where it is almost obligatory to send greetings cards and line the pockets of the Hallmark-industrial-complex.

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Valentines Day goes ‘red’
February 15th, 2009 at 02:04

Today was Valentine’s Day. You might have noticed the extra-affection couples were showing for each other in public just to make sure that everyone is totally sure that they’re totally in love with each other.

Don’t take this commentary as some sort of bitter snipe – I too was acting affectionately in the public to the person I love the most in the world. I spent the day wandering around central London loudly remarking to strangers on my own brilliant wit and dashing good looks.

What makes writing about Valentines day particularly difficult is that as far as I can tell, it’s very ease to lapse into being tedious. For single people like myself, it’d be easy to come across sounding bitter and twisted, and people in relationships would struggle to write about it without sounding smug. Worse still, there’s the inevitable risk of expressing some really boring opinions:

“Valentines day is so commercial… it’s just an excuse for the shops to sell greetings cards and tat, blah blah blah”.

Slow down a moment Bill Hicks, you’re blowing my mind with your insight.

The unfortunate thing about having such a boring opinion is that it is invariably correct. Relationships – as after all, this is what the whole thing is about – are an inherently capitalist construct. The fierce competition for finding a romantic partner – the private partnerships that are formed, and the falling interest rate when the relationship stagnates… sound familiar?

And this is setting aside the systematic inequalities that the free market for relationships brings about. Ugly and unpleasant people are put at an automatic disadvantage by the circumstances of their birth. Which goes against the socialist mantra that everyone is born equal. Just as those from poor backgrounds are denied access to the best schools, the best universities and the top jobs, ugly people are denied access to the most attractive of romantic partners. Obviously there are going to be some outliers – self-made millionaires and the fact that John Prescott has managed to have two affairs and a wife – but these are the exceptions and not the rule.

Having identified this problem, we must find a solution that will make things fairer. We need to re-distribute love from each according to his ability to each according to his need.

If I were a good socialist, I’d no doubt advocate some sort of revolution in the structure of human society, with the state intervening and allocating people romantic partners – appointing Cilla Black as the Nanny in the nanny state or something. As I’m a bad socialist, and the product of Blair’s Britain however, I’ve got a much more modest proposal – a third way - that can be implemented through incremental changes within the established framework of interpersonal relationships. We only need to change one day out of the whole year.

I’m down on one knee and proposing that we inject some emotional socialism into February 14th. We change it from a day where couples consolidate their affections for each other (the only “trickle-down” effects of this arrangement are going to be unpleasant) into a day where couples have to cheer up their single friends. It’d be dead easy – Valentines day is already pretty red as it is, so wouldn’t need too many alterations, and we can know that people will take to this new arrangement because if you were to ask any hardcore Marxist today what it was like working on a collectivised farm in the Soviet Union, they’ll tell you it was a paradise on earth – a strongly romanticised memory and a completely irrational assertion… just what is needed in any relationship.

I don’t think this new plan can fail. Just like socialism, this will definitely work.

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London Twestival (#ldntwestival)
February 14th, 2009 at 01:34

Last night I went to the London Twestival – if you’re unfamiliar with it, it was basically a big party for people who work on and around the “Silicon Roundabout” and Nathan Barleys like myself to network, or in my case, come tantalisingly close from crossing the line of “stalking via twitter” into “stalking in real life”.

Of course, it was all an incestuous gathering of meeja types, PRs and techies, but it was all for charity, so everyone went home being able to live with themselves and sleep at night. And I had a great time.

All of the Twitter folks from the trendy start-ups were there, and there was even some old-media representation in the form of Rory Cellan-Jones, or Ruskin147 as we know him, from the BBC. I didn’t dare say hello though as I through a process of osmosis-like learning from the Twitter feed, I know about him to an almost stalker-like level. I know that he lives in… Ealing? I know he has a dog and a son who got into Oxford, I know he gets up early and goes for a run every morning, and I know his wife recently became a Dame. It’s almost like I’ve been going through his vitual bins.

I did however, talk to loads of excellent people, and saw many more whose “names” I knew according to the sticker they were wearing with their name on, but couldn’t place.

I had a chat with Gareth Mitchell from the BBC’s Digital Planet, and ridiculously, he recognised my face from my Twitter avatar. I said hello to the man doing all of the hard work on the Atheist Bus Campaign, who has been Twittering in the first-person as a personified bus for the past few weeks. Shell_uk was in a similar boat to me not knowing anyone there, as so to speak. Brilliantly, I got the chance to say hello to Annie Mole, who’s blog about the London Underground I’ve been reading for years – she was close to James Cridland, who I didn’t manage to pluck up the courage to speak to. I bumped into ParkyLondon, who produces a superb podcast for London nerds like myself, and just as I was leaving I traded business cards with Richjm.

Well, I say “traded business cards”. Frustratingly, the new business cards that I’ve ordered from ultra-trendy Shoreditch start-up Moo.com hadn’t arrived in time, meaning I had to resort to the “analogue business card”: my Twitter name scrawled on to a notepad I carry around for blog ideas (I genuinely do this). This slightly undermined the savvy-London-Hoxtonite-professional image I was trying to cultivate for myself.

One thing that was quite exciting was that it levelled the playing field a little and I was mingling with some stunningly important people in the industry. I got talking to a man who explained that his “job” was starting start-ups, and he’d started maybe 20 companies in his career, including things that I will have heard of – though he was hesitant to name them to someone like me. In retrospect I maybe should have asked him for some venture capital (or “VC” in industry-speak) for one of the most bizarre outcomes of the night: I seem to have accidentally founded a new .com start-up with Dave Hodgkinson, who ten minutes after mentioning an idea had already bought the domain name. It’s definitely a fast-moving industry. Whatever industry this is.

That was a problem I did encounter – I wanted people to take me seriously, and ideally, offer me money, a writing job and use of the company boat. So when asked what I did, or what my industry was, I made a point of emphasising that I was a post-graduate student – a metric cut above those tawdry undergraduates, before following up by claiming that I also “like to think of myself as a satirist”. This was secret code for “No one actually pays me to be a satirist but I’d like them to”. Even if they question my credentials I’ve got that plausible deniability – the “satire industry” doesn’t exist in any tangible way and there’s no satirists trade union, even though “we” do spend a lot time labouring in a pit of irony.

It was really excellent though – and to top things off, I discovered this afternoon that I’d won a years subscription to Spinvox in the raffle, thanks to @whatleydude.

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Scientific study PROVES MMR sceptics are dicks
February 10th, 2009 at 17:06

The excellent Ben Goldacre (who bought me a drink a few weeks ago – but this is far from the main reason why he is excellent), who writes the Guardian’s Bad Science column is in a spot of bother because of his tireless efforts to raise awareness that people who perpetuate the “MMR causes autism!” myth are crackers. LBC, the radio station that calls itself “London’s Big Conversation” have kicked up a fuss because he posted an audio clip of one of their presenters talking rubbish about MMR, to illustrate how hideous the programme was. Apparently London’s Big Conversation stops as soon as they start looking stupid.

LBC aren’t moaning about him disputing what the DJ, Jeni Barnett, was saying on the radio – chances are they know that she’s an idiot, but they’ve clearly been trying to cover their tracks and hide the fact such rubbish was actually broadcast. So they’ve threatened to sue Ben for “copyright infringement”.

Arguments about fair use, whistleblowing or public interest aside, I think LBC totally have a point there – if Ben Goldacre hadn’t put the recording on in the internet, I would have definitely bought a CD compilation of LBC’s Greatest MMR hits.

You’d think they’d be happy about having listeners redistribute material there’s never going to be any residual revenue on to boost awareness of the station – all of the TV news channels don’t complain about clips appearing on YouTube for much the same reason. So Ben’s had to remove the clip – but now it’s available all over the internet, including on Wikileaks.

As you probably know, this whole MMR causing autism myth started when a hilariously flawed and consistently debunked study by Andrew Wakefield was published in the Lancet – and more importantly, was picked up by the Daily Mail and Melanie Phillips began the uninformed scaremongering. And then the cases of mumps rocketed.

I’ve actually been looking into Wakefield’s methodology, and have conducted a study myself using it. And the results are quite amazing: it turns out that being a fan of Andrew Wakefield makes you a dick. I’ve even got a graph that proves it:

The results are pretty conclusive  – the trend is very clear. The bigger fan of Wakefield you are, the more of a dick you are. Now, I know there may be “MMR sceptics” reading who might dispute this – you might argue that correlation does not prove causation, or perhaps allege that my research was completely fabricated or not conducted properly. If that’s the case, I ask you: why are you holding me to a higher standard than Andrew Wakefield?

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Red Coats and orange boiler suits
February 7th, 2009 at 03:09

Like most people, I was pretty pleased when President Obama in one of his first acts as President, announced that he was going to shut down Guantanamo Bay, the Cuban peninsula resort of choice for suspected terrorists and “enemy combatants” since 2001. This move has been welcomed since Guantanamo was becoming a bit too commercial, with some travellers apparently now preferring lesser well known “black sites” in Eastern Europe, in Poland and Romania.

Obama said that he’ll shut down the camp “within one year”, and this is an important caveat because he needs a year to figure out what to do with the people inside. Unsurprisingly due to this he has been dropping massive hints at the likes of Britain and Germany to take a few of them off his hands.

As a leading participant in the whole ‘War on Terror’ scheme, I think it’s Britain’s international duty to take on our fair share of detainees. Unfortunately though this will only shift the burden on to us: where are we going to put them? We need our own Guantanamo Bay to deal with these people. And I think I know just the place.

If you look at the criteria for a prison in which to illegally hold people for years without charge, then you’ll need to find somewhere a bit out of the way, away from civilisation, and somewhere fairly unpleasant, perhaps somewhere that’s a bit of an international pariah and a no-mans land – these are dangerous terrorists after all. We’d need to find somewhere which has accommodation just about meets the Geneva convention criteria. So isn’t it obvious?

We turn Butlins Skegness into Guantanamo Bay.

The camp site is almost ready as it is. All we’d have to do is give the Red Coats brown shirts and they’d be set for almost all of the activities carried out at Guantanamo. There’s a swimming pool for waterboarding – and a water slide to act as a reward for good intelligence. And as for the widely known practice of using western music to disorient suspects, then Butlins is already set up for this – every night the Butlins cabaret belts out some extraordinary renditions of the most intolerable pop classics.

I’m sure with capacity like this we could even take on and house suspected terrorists from other countries in exchange for a weekly rent.

And most amazingly? There’s actually already a precedent for this. A few years ago the Irish government turned a former Butlins site into a detention centre for a group of foreigners some people will happily conflate with terrorists: asylum seekers.

The only drawback is that sending suspected terrorists to Butlins wouldn’t exactly downplay any accusations of torture.

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There’s no such thing as (civil) society
February 7th, 2009 at 01:11

Facebook has long been a depressing experience if you’re moderately misanthropic. Wherever you are on the site, you know you’re only a few clicks away from the most hideous of groups. You’ve probably seen on your news feed occasionally people you may have once respected, or people you haven’t spoken to since school joining groups called things like “Why do immigrants have more rights than me?” or “English and proud” or whatever.

I think though I’ve found a new contender for the most depressing group yet: “I Steal Signs and Other Random Crap When Im drunk!“.

As you might imagine, it’s full of arseholes boasting about the horrendous things they’ve done when drunk. Here are some samples:

“me n a mate stole a couple of kids bikes n rode them bout half a mile home. they were in the living room the next day n we used them to get round the flat:) lmao”

A man boasting about stealing from children.

“i once stole a tug of war winners sheild out of a pub when i was steamin lol”

This goes a bit beyond the student staple of stealing pint glasses. Though I don’t even find that tolerable.

“last time me and my mates went out we managed to remove a car exhaust from a ford mundano,

none of us own a ford tho, lol.”

Horrifying.

“I steel things when im Pissed, sober or fucked out my nut on weed!!!!!! LOL !!!!!!!!!!”

So he’s a thief, alloy and a wanker 100% of the time then.

“me and my mate “found ” a zimmer frame while at a funeral, police came to the wake and took it off us!!!”

I wonder if this is actually some sort of in-joke?

“the most ramdon thing i have stoling was half a wall”

I don’t really understand this one.

“hey on my hen night my mate stole a cone his name is colin he even came 2 wedding with us then he came 2 the lakes with us”

Sounds like a classy wedding. You can’t see the cone in her profile picture, which is one of her wedding photos.

“I have a great selection of shot glasses and those orange warning lights that workmen always have at the side of the road. I am also the proud owner of some BMW hub caps!!”

It’s actually fairly interesting to try and consider where these people draw the line between “fair game” (cones?) and “actually bad theft”. I mean, hubcaps? Jesus.

“when living in bumfuck nowhere we actually just destroy stuff with our vehicles. like drive over people lawns, ram dumpsters, and every now and then the occaisional house gets hit because of drunken foolery…at least its all meant to be good old hazardous fun right?”

I mean, what the fuck?

More Facebleak:

• Status messages that are almost as irritating as when someone syncs their Twitter up with it
• Facebook groups about tramps are almost as cliched as groups parodying other Facebook groups
• A comparison of top books at two universities that is almost as depressing as the intellectual snobbery and hypocrisy on show

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More reasons to love London (and Twitter)
February 4th, 2009 at 23:26

One of the best things about living in London is that there’s so much going on in almost every sense of the phrase, and thanks to a superb public transport network, you can string together different activities to have the most eclectic of adventures. For example, on the same day you may find yourself at a talk in a pub on UFOs and then less than half an hour later be watching a rap battle. Or you might spend the day at some fairly academic science lectures putting faces to authors of books you’ve read, and then spend the evening watching punk poets in a squat surrounded by people flouting  the smoking ban and all sorts of other European laws covering health and safety.

It’s even more exciting if the activities are fairly impromptu and unplanned. The other week I visited the Imperial War Museum with @katyhaughey (this was pre-meditated), and later on found a cinema showing the George Bush biopic ‘W’ for dirt cheap, starting just 15 minutes after we walked past. A couple of months ago now after a day at uni, my friend Eve and I ended up going to see the Dark Knight at the IMAX for FREE because we happened to be walking past and some people were (inexplicably) trying to give away their tickets). If I were a less rational man I might claim that mystical forces were at play. Though then again, if I were a less rational man I might also claim the Holocaust didn’t happen, so it’s probably good that I’m not.

The reason I tell you all of this is not just to provide some “SEO” for my blog, but because something similar has happened again this evening. Whilst in a fairly mundane seminar at uni today, I noticed that celebrity comedian Chris Addison had twittered that he was doing a gig at the British Library at half six. It was about half five at the time. I messaged him asking for details and he explained that his fellow comedians Rory Bremner, Paul Sinha and Andy Zaltzman were going to be there too.

So I hopped on a tube to Kings Cross as quickly as I could, got to the British Library and learnt that it was an event called “Political Animal“, part of the civil liberties exhibition they’ve got on at the moment, and that tickets were still available and only a fiver. And then I spent the evening unexpectedly enjoying some brilliant political comedy – all thanks to Twitter and living in City of Dreams.

Excellent.

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Former Hitler Youth member stays on the far right
February 1st, 2009 at 16:12

A few days ago I wrote about how the Pope had let a Holocaust denier back into the Catholic church, seemingly on the grounds that “he’s not a woman or a gay, so he’s probably pretty cool”. It turns out that since there has been a twist in the story.

No, it hasn’t turned out that the Holocaust didn’t happen after all, but that it looks as though the re-communication of the Holocaust denier might have been part of a ploy by the Vatican to make promoting Fr Gerhard Maria Wagner to assistant bishop of Linz look less horrendous by comparison. Linz was, of course, Hitler’s home town.

But who is Fr Wagner? Here’s his back-story as reported by BBC News:

Fr Wagner is also notorious for his extreme views – he has accused the popular Harry Potter novels of spreading Satanism, and described Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for the sinners of New Orleans.

He wrote in a parish newsletter that the death and destruction caused by the hurricane in New Orleans was divine retribution for the city’s tolerance of homosexuals and permissive sexual attitudes.

The future bishop said he was glad that Katrina destroyed not only nightclubs and brothels in New Orleans, but also five of the city’s abortion clinics.

What makes this interesting is that whilst God destroyed five abortion clinics with Katrina, he also destroyed SIX churches.

I think Fr Wagner might be worshiping the wrong God…

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