Is Adam Hart-Davis a Tory?
August 23rd, 2008 at 00:06

I’m not one to moan, but I think I’d be fairly justified in saying that I’ve had a pretty bad week. Right now, for instance, I should be rocking out to Rage Against the Machine at Reading, but my tickets never materialised, and for the past few days I’ve had a bloody awful stomach bug, which meant I’ve spent a couple of days in agony as my stomach decided to make the metaphorical “pain in the arse” debacle that was my Reading tickets fuck-up almost literal (it was more of a horrible pain in the stomach).

But now to top things off, for reasons I forget, I’ve discovered that one of my favourite celebrities, Adam Hart-Davis, is related to one of my least favourite people: David Cameron. Yeah, I needed to take a moment to let that sink in too. It turns out that, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia anyway, that they’re second cousins once-removed.

This has somewhat tainted my preconceptions about how cool AHD is. I’d previously assumed that when he went into the polling booth, Adam (we’re on first name terms despite having never met) would obviously vote for the greater good, and do his democratic duty of voting for whoever keeps the Tories out. But now I know this new information, what’s to say his tribal loyalties don’t kick in? It’s pretty natural to vote for friends and family in things where voting is involved - it’s pretty much the done thing. Does this mean that AHD is voting for the Tories?

It would all make a depressing amount of sense: they both went to Eton and both have “riding bikes” as a sort-of quirky, eccentric trait. And Cameron used to be a director at Carlton Communications, one of the constituent companies that made up ITV… who later commissioned AHD’s (inexplicably excellent for ITV) How London Was Built.

I can only hope that AHD and David Cameron aren’t the best of friends. Perhaps AHD could be like the embarassing cousin? At family functions whenever Adam arrives, Dave winces and thinks “Oh god, not him again… what’s he wearing this time? Who thought the bright yellow shirt and shorts were a good idea? I hope he doesn’t show me up by enthusising about his love of science and history…”

C’mon Adam, betray your genetic make-up and don’t be a Tory, please! Ask your partner (leading psychologist and pioneer of memetics, Susan Blackmore) if she can introduce you to altruistic memes like social conscience and helping the poor!

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An uninformed treatise on Georgia, the international system and international relations generally, that will probably come back to haunt me when I’m older and wiser.
August 12th, 2008 at 01:56

I’ve studied international relations for three years now and have taken an active interest in world affairs for much longer, yet despite having an honours degree in the subject I still, frustratingly, am not really any closer to having any answers about how to sort the various international messes out. This isn’t a slight against my old university - it was excellent, and I can now explain the problems much better than I once could - but the world’s problems are so bloody complex that international relations cannot be mathematically modelled and experiments cannot be carried out to find solution - the carefully nuanced diplomacy that acts as the razor-thin wedge between a pragmatic peace and everything kicking off is more like an ultra-pretentious dance. Outside observers will be baffled and apathetic, asking “what’s the point?” and write-off the politicians, yet for the performers, every spin, kick or slow-motion movement is totally vital to the greater meaning of the performance.

Basically this is just a long winded excuse for being rubbish at international relations. But it’s not like the people who do it professionally are any better.

Take the Georgia “crisis”, for example - which is actually a war, even if the media doesn’t want to call it that yet. Tanks? Check. Incursions on to foreign soil? Check. Opposing armies shooting at each other? Check. I haven’t a clue how to fix it - but I can tell you the problems it has caused.

If anything, this (yet again) exposes the inadequacies with the international system. Back in the 17th century, the chaps around the table at Westphalia probably thought they were being pretty smart coming up with the concept of a sovereign nation-states as discrete territorial units - unfortunately this has become The Done Thing, which means that, in theory at least, all of the minorities or regions after some independence are essentially fucked by international law to the point where you get absurdities like Taiwan not being a real country and having to fudge its way into international things (”Chinese Taipei”) or entire regions of the world in a weird status-quo because the other countries can’t really be seen to be supporting them for fear of pissing off their “rightful owners”. If only Northern Cyprus, or Somaliland, or South Ossetia were as lucky internationally as Kosovo.

This especially doesn’t seem fair for South Ossetia, who seem pretty keen on being a part of Russia, or presumably united with North Ossetia in one way or another. The west have been pretty quick to condemn Russia for their ridiculously disproportionate response and moan on about Georgia’s sovereignty and that… they didn’t seem quite so concerned about Serbia’s sovereignty when they were busy recognising Kosovo. Don’t get me wrong - Russia are massive hypocrites too when they talk about South Ossetia’s rights to self-determination, as I’m sure the people of nearby Grozny would want to point out.

And that’s the overall problem with the international system - it’s horrendously unfair. As any realist will tell you, there’s no real international laws, it’s just the big guys calling the shots. They might play fair if you’re lucky, but chances are they’ll only do it when it’s convinient for them (cf: America ignoring the UN over Iraq, then getting pissy with Zimbabwe and threatening to get a UN RESOLUTION over it - no wonder Mugabe presumably laughed it off and went back to organising gangs to kill opposition supporters).

This setup works when you’ve got a unipolar setup - like the 90s with America basically in charge of the world. It’s by no-means fair, but then international relations never is, but it’s stable because no one has the power to stand up to them. They might fuck a few people over but they’ll generally keep the peace. A bi-polar system like we had in the Cold War is pretty good too as they kept each other in check with the whole Mutually Assured Destruction thing. What’s scary is that it looks as though we’re entering another period of a multi-polar balance of power with the great powers being America, China and Russia (or Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, if you will). This isn’t particularly stable, as 1914 and 1939 grainily illustrated. With more than two powers the balance of power may end up somewhat asymmetrical (Oceania and Eastasia have always been at war with Eurasia), and if backed into a corner in a war sparked off by a small international event - say, the assassination of an Arch-Duke or a power wading into conflict over a breakaway region in the Caucasus region - it can’t be long until someone starts chucking the bigger guns around?

Whilst I paint a pretty nightmarish picture of the imminent apocalypse due to the international community’s inability to adapt to modernity, I would like to think that if any of my former lecturers, or indeed anyone who knows what they’re talking about, are reading they’ll think that what I’m suggesting is laughably implausible because I haven’t factored in the one thing that can save us. And it ain’t a pretty solution. Money could hold the answer to this. More capitalism could be the thing that pacifies the international system. Sure, some sort of revolutionary socialist utopia could probably solve a lot of problems, but let’s be realistic - what’s more likely to happen? Unlike a science experiment, we can’t run a test, and we’re active participants in a constantly changing international environment - in the absence of the interactions of some sort of personal God who happens to be big on Marx, we can’t reform the system from the top-down, so capitalism is the, er, best option.

Though capitalism does make wage-slaves of millions of people in the developing world, keeping them oppressed and unable to participate in the political process, thus maintaining the status quo and allowing for us in the west to become slaves ourselves to consumerism and thus distracted from politicial participation ourselves, it does have one thing going for it. It maintains a degree of stability in the international system.

The term “complex independence” was coined (by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye if you’re looking for someone to blame) to describe circumstances in which states maintaining an economic interest in each other creates a mutual desire to cooperate rather than blow each other up. To take a ludicrously extrapollated example, America would never attack Britain, even if Gordon Brown punched Laura Bush in the mouth and kicked Barney, the Presidential dog, around the face, because America has far too much money tied up in Britain, so it’d essentially be attacking it’s own interests.

Back in the real world for a moment, this makes the apparent response to what’s going on in Georgia all the more bizarre. Obviously no one in the west is talking about military action, as that could be the kiss of death for the existence of biological life on this planet, but someone has suggested (yeah, I do my research thoroughly), that delaying Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation could be a good idea.

Though the WTO isn’t be any stretch of the imagination a force for good in the world, what with the raping of the third world, and the hilariously inbalanced voting system of voting power being weighted based on the size of the memberstate’s economy, surely getting Russia in on the machine that powers the wheels of global capitalism can only help pacify it?

One of the (alleged) reasons for Russia’s continued military action in Georgia is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that apparently pumps 1m barrels a day - about 1/90 of world output - which was specifically designed to not go into Russian territory, meaning the Russian’s don’t get a cut. Similarly, a lot of this “resurgent Russia” talk is centred around Russia’s new importance for supplying Europe and others with energy? If energy wars are going to be the geopolitical flashpoints of the future then surely you want these guys on the inside and negotiating, not left alone outside getting pissed off about it?

(Another option would be to do the decent thing and go green and work on renewable energy, but obviously some sabre-rattling and tough words are much easier.)

It’s utterly bizarre really that “sanctions” in both the metaphorical sense of delayed entry to the WTO and literal sense like pre-2003 Iraq (etc) are touted as a viable tool in international relations as they never work. Putting them on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Cuba… basically the ‘axis of evil’ to name only a few, has only isolated them more - if we’d worked to bring them into the international economic system where they could have been economically active like how, say, Taiwan and Indonesia were transformed in the mid-20th century, or how China is being transformed right now. I really can’t see how working to piss off Russia even more is going to help at all.

A pleasant side-effect of all of the globalisation that I’m rather inexplicably advocating is that it erodes the power of the nationstates - the ones with the weapons - and in one sense makes the economic system fairer as countries compete more fairly - look at Lenovo and Tata from China and India respectively as successful multinationals that are helping gradually shift the power away from America. If Russia were in on the west’s evil system of exploiting the poor in pursuit of nice consumer goods, they might be less inclined to attack the west’s interests.

And yes, the cruel irony of this change in the international system (which to a large extent has already happened) is that we do end up with some sort of horrendous, unaccountable, amoral, profit driven, worker-exploiting corporatocracy, which itself would be a problem at least as massive as one where the nationstates are in charge.

Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t very good at solutions, but was pretty good at describing the problems?

(End note: No, I’ve no idea what my political opinions/leanings are anymore either. I thought I was some sort of liberal idealist, but what I’ve just written may beg to differ. And would you like to see more incoherent treatise on international relations? Or should I stick to going for the lols? Let me know in the comments, like?)

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You gotta fight for your right to Taipei
August 4th, 2008 at 23:58

Surprisingly, I’m actually quite looking forward to the Olympics. Not for the reasons that the Chinese hosts are hoping though - I’m looking forward to what will hopefully be an unrelenting fortnight of protests.

Everyone knows that the Chinese government could be described as a “nasty piece of work”. They’ve got heaps of human rights issues and the like that could easily compete with the nastiest international villains like Robert Mugabe, or Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. When the International Criminal Court accused the latter of committing genocide rather than deny it or perhaps even laugh it off, as you might expect, really endeared himself by threatening “more violence and blood”. I mention this not because China are key players in propping up these awful regimes, but because it shows how sneaky they are in comparison to these amateurs.

We don’t see politicians moaning about China so much because China use their massive power to deflect criticism: if western politicians slag off China too much, they might cut off our supplies of cheap iPods and Happy Meal toys… and obviously that would be a clear sign we’re only a few steps away from Armageddon.

The Olympics are so important to the Chinese government because it’s a big platform for them to project their “we’re nice guys really” image - though their gamble is that they won’t be able to crush any protests quite so easily if every TV camera in the world is pointing at them. It’s not 1989 anymore so it won’t just be Kate Adie filming it - any “uprising” would be caught by every mobile phone in the area and be on the internet in minutes.

This is obviously problematic for the Chinese government but they’re trying their best to manage the problem. They’ve set up special “protesting zones” in parks a long way from the stadium, but you have to wonder whether this will be enough. They can’t exactly send the tanks rolling into the stadium if any athletes unravel a Tibetan flag on the podium á la the famous Black Power salute. I think there’s only one thing they can really do if they want to crush dissent: Make protesting an Olympic sport.

Making protesting a sport will turn it from a serious form of political participation and into a silly game. It’ll make protesting funny and trivial - on par with say, dressage, or horse dancing, which inexplicably qualifies as an Olympic sport. Protesting would become a farce if after the protestors have made their point a series of strict judges grade them on their performance, docking marks for say, lack of style or being too disorganised. Also, I don’t know about you, but every time I hear celebrities wade in on political issues, be they actors, musicians or athletes, I roll my eyes and switch off assuming they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. Making athletes out of the protestors would render their opinions worthless.

The Chinese themselves could probably rack up a few gold medals in the protesting events - those Tibetan dissidents could play for China – they seem to know a thing or two about smashing windows and stuff.

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Literally the most pedantic post ever.
May 18th, 2008 at 14:35

I’ve got a confession to make, everyone. I think that I’m a Grammar Nazi. Don’t worry, that’s not too much like a real Nazi – if you’ve ever been on the internet, chances are you’ve met a Grammar Nazi. Grammar Nazis are those people on message boards and chat rooms who will complain and discredit you based on whether or not everything is spelt correctly and is grammar perfect, rather than the actual calibre of your argument. I only realised that I was a grammar Nazi when I realised that I was judging people on this criteria.

There are certain grammatical traits that, almost as a reflex action, will suddenly make me switch from a point of respecting someone to actively reviling them.

If you were to misuse the word “random”, my respect for you would drop so rapidly that you could admit to being a card-carrying supporter of Robert Kilroy-Silk and I wouldn’t think any less of you – because it wouldn’t be possible to go any lower. What bothers me is that people – lets be honest here, exclusively teenagers – tend to use the word to describe exclusively non-random things. Run a Google search for “it was totally random” to see what I mean. I think perhaps the only sentence in which the word “random” can be legitimately applied, given the causal nature of events, would be “My random number generator generated me some numbers… they were totally random!” – But for some reason, you never hear teenagers talk about their random number generators.

Talking of “strategy” in situations when there is no “strategy” involved bothers me too – Deal or No Deal being the worst offender as contestants’ talk of their strategy at picking boxes at random (maybe this is the only other acceptable usage of the word ‘random’?). I struggle to watch sport on television for similar reasons, because whenever they interview football players and talk of strategy, as when they say “we’re going to try and get in early and put some goals away and outflank the other team”, or whatever, all I hear is them saying “We’re going to try and score more goals than the opposing team”. This isn’t so much a “strategy” as it is “explaining the rules”.

Its things like this that make me literally fume with anger. Well not ‘literally’ fume- as that’s my third point. I really hate it when people misuse “literally”. This is most toxic when its misused in conjunction with a figure of speech – for example, “I’ve literally just let the cat out of the bag”, would cause me to ask why you were keeping a cat in a bag in the first place.

The horrible and unfortunate thing about misusing “literally” is that I do it – it started when I began deliberately misusing it in conversations for “irony”, but because I’ve done it so often its worked its way into my every day vocabulary – I literally cannot help myself.

Ten points to anyone who picks grammatical errors that I gone done in this post.

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The Sound of Dumbs
May 3rd, 2008 at 16:35

What the fuck, London? Literally, what the fuck? You’ve changed - you used to be cool and likeable, but now you’ve turned into a wanker.

My friend Barney texted me earlier with one last hope - he suggested that this is merely like the penultimate episode of Doctor Who series 3. The Master may have been elected, but in a year’s time, after the Master has enslaved humanity, Ken will come back and defeat the Master by destroying Boris’s paradox machine, that means he can be both Tory and likeable.

I wish Russell T Davies could come along and wave a magic deus-ex-machina screwdriver and make Boris go away.

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IMMIGRANTS ARE GOING TO KILL YOU IMMINENTLY
April 17th, 2008 at 16:34

I did a double-take as I spotted the front page of the Daily Express at the station today.  “IMMIGRANTS BRING MORE CRIME” it bellowed, in its usual damning fashion. What was so surprising about this is that literally just yesterday, the Guardian were reporting that the “Migrant crime wave [is] a myth“.

What makes it even more astounding is that both newspapers are drawing their totally opposite headlines from the same report. Its the most blatant example of pandering to your target audience since Mitt Romney.

The most remarkable thing though, is that they’re both right. Well, sort of anyway.

In actual fact, apparently the recent wave of immigration has caused no change in the actual crime rate. What the Express are getting so indignant about is that because the crime rate has remained the same, but there are more people, there are more crimes. In other words “A HIGHER NUMBER OF PEOPLE YIELDS A HIGHER NUMBER OF CRIMES, SHOCK”. Which is a bit like being outraged at the fact that there’s more murders here than there are in, say, Slovenia, a country full of those awful murderous foreigners, which has only 3% of our population.

I’m slightly perplexed as to why “no change in crime rate” is even news. And I’m surprised the Express are so outraged - after all, they’re always moaning about immigrants coming over here, and taking from us, now they’re finally giving us “MORE” of something and they’re angry. Immigrants can’t win.

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Who let the dogmatists out?
April 8th, 2008 at 00:50

“The earth is spherical”

“What?! That’s clearly not true! There’s just a big scientific conspiracy by the liberal left to give the scientists jobs! Anyone who talks about the shape of earth should give a balanced view and give equal time to the flat earth society!”

I hate it when science is politicised. This might surprise you, as I love needlessly politicising everything else: films, TV shows, abstract concepts, politics, I’ll find a political angle on them all. But I think that the politicians should stay the fuck away from science.

Case in point: dangerously credulous Tory blogger Iain Dale keeps posting tenuous stories about how climate change totally isn’t happening. Y’know, despite all of the stacks of evidence and the overwhelming scientific consensus saying that it is.

What bothers me about it that its a purely dogmatic thing: Tory Iain presumably is under the impression that because he’s a Tory, he hates taxes, and therefore, if there’s green taxes to try and manipulate the market away from fossil fuels and carbon emissions, its a bad thing, because taxes are bad full stop, and therefore, any crackpot claiming that climate change isn’t occurring is proof that it’s a New Labour nanny-state socialist money-grabbing exercise to increase state control of the economy.

Its the same with the new laughing-stock of a film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about how how evolution by natural selection is a conspiracy orchestrated by “Big Science” and their Nazi agenda- the latter part of the title being a subtitle, not instructions to the cinema about who to turn away.

Obviously the thought process is even more clearly dogmatic here: “Our book says God created the Universe, therefore, despite stacks of evidence, evolution is totally untrue”.

I think it’s pretty clear that I disagree with them.

“But they just want a balanced view!”, defenders cry. That’s sounds fair, doesn’t it? Freedom of speech and all that? “If we don’t have freedom of speech then its Nazi Germany!”

Unfortunately for the global warming deniers and the creationists, science is not democratic, you cretins. Everyone could think something and it’d still be wrong, because science needs evidence. It’d be madness to suggest that (Godwin alert!) Holocaust Deniers should be allowed to give a “balanced view” of the Holocaust, because there’s stacks of evidence contrary to their ludicrous opinions.

And yeah, I know I’m not a scientist, but I do appreciate and understand the value of evidence - obviously if the scientific consensus on an issue were to shift, it’d be because some new evidence came to light. If the scientists launched a new satellite that scanned the earth’s interior and determined the earth had a honeycomb centre, and there was observations to back this up which falsified previous theories, then I’d be willing to believe the scientists.

So, please, politicians and dogmatists, please can you stay the fuck away from science, for the good of humanity?

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Cohesive Policy Action!
April 6th, 2008 at 01:01

Gun crime is out of control! Gun deaths are up! Loads of young people are being killed in gun violence! So, what can we do?!

Er, why not give them weapons training in school.

Er, what the fuck? Talk about mixed messages. I take it the plan is that if the kids are going to form armed gangs, they may as well make sure they’re an accurate shot, so there’s less collateral damage? Or is this about protecting the weak kids? If they can’t stand up to gun-wielding bullies… then why not arm the weak kids? To paraphrase Peep Show, a gun is basically a short-cut to self-defence.

According to the linked article:

The government-commissioned review of civil and military relations, led by Quentin Davies, the Labour MP, was ‘alarmed’ at the number of schoolchildren who had no idea of military life.

Because obviously its important to know what its like being part of a fascist system of not questioning authority, blindly following commands that are barked at you, and becoming part of a faceless militia who all act, look and think the same way. Oh, and learn how great it is to kill people.

I’m sure increasing the access young people have to guns is going to massively reduce the amount of gun deaths involving young people too.

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Decathalon and on and on…
April 4th, 2008 at 15:54

The building work is presumably almost done, the teams have been decided, the torch has started its world tour, all around the world the festivities have began, and the only thing that the organisers of the Beijing Olympics seem to have forgotten about are the main events.

The excitement and hype will increases exponentially as we approach August, when finally a starting pistol will be fired, and then some men will run across the stadium for ten seconds, then everyone will shrug their shoulders and wonder what all of the fuss is about.

Lets face it - the Olympics are going to be bitterly disappointing because at the core of the whole thing is sports. Has anyone actually looked at the utter dross that’s going to displace worthy Adam Hart-Davis programmes from the daytime TV schedules in August? Dressage? Handball? Canoeing? Jesus.

It doesn’t help that sports-people are invariably such monumental dullards with all the charisma of an angry bear. I’m pretty sure that Sports Personality of the Year could be won by a pile of gravel, if gravel were capable of demonstrating an arbitrary selection of skills slightly faster than other people.

Its all going to turn out to be a futile exercise anyway - the games are going to be marred by protests and the Chinese crushing them, as that’s one thing they would win the gold medal in - and besides, by supporting the Beijing games, we’re essentially helping a regime who has a hand in Genocide in Dafur, and helps out bastards in Burma, and isn’t exactly squeaky-clean itself. In fact, I’m going to boycott the games by not watching any sport for the duration of the games. And maybe afterwards too. I may keep this boycott up indefinitely, in fact - unless the England football team reach the finals of a major international football competition and I feel an obligation to keep up with the Zeitgeist… but its not like that’s going to happen any time soon.

Rejected titles for this entry:

1. Bollympics
2. Olympic Torch-ure
3. Ping-pong Inanity

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Twitter on T-Mobile UK
April 4th, 2008 at 15:53

I knew this graphic would come in useful. I’ve discovered yet more problems with T-Mobile. So as you might have noticed by my swish, new, popular sidebar on the left, I’ve got quite into Twittering. The thing that makes it excellent is that you can update your Twitter via text-message, by texting what looks like a UK Number - it starts +44 and isn’t a premium rate short-code or anything like that.

But paranoid that I am, I thought I’d just ring up T-Mobile customer services and double check that I’m not being charged a billion pounds a text. I read out the Twitter number to the man on the phone, who informed me that “+44″ is the code for “A country called U.K”. It turns out that I’m being charged 17p a time for a text… outside of my contract.

Apparently the number is in Guernsey, which despite looking just like a normal number, makes it totally different.

So I’m posting this more as a public service announcement, and in the hope that if I slag off T-Mobile on the internet they might try and win me back by giving me free stuff.

T-Mobile users, for fucks sake, don’t text Twitter!

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