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.
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?
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.
You’ve probably seen in the news recently about the Atheist Bus Campaign, a group led by Ariane Sherine and Richard Dawkins who are putting advertisements on the sides of buses and on the tube saying “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. But what no one seems to have noticed yet is that the apparently well-meaning group are attempting to commit a crime against humanity and break international law.
For you see, the Atheist Bus Campaign is attempting to advocate a non-theistic worldview, and by extension, are hoping to erradicate religious belief. You might think this is a noble goal, but the United Nations don’t think so.
In 1951 the UN Convention on Genocide became legally binding and it has remained so ever since. The document outlines the definition of genocide like this:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The Atheist Bus Campaign, by buying advertising space on public transport, is committing acts intended to destroy in whole or in part a religious group: specifically, all religious people. And though Richard Dawkins hasn’t yet taken to roaming the streets of London yet shanking anyone who looks even vaguely pious, these adverts, like all adverts, are an attempt at controlling people’s behaviour – they’re deliberately inflicting on believers conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of religious beliefs.
And this isn’t even considering point (e) – surely by forcing kids to take science lessons and teaching them about reason, logic and evidence basedempiricism kids are being systematically taught not to be theists. Therefore, keeping creationism out of the classroom is essentially a crime against humanity.
Interestingly too, this entanglement with the UN convention on genocide does seem to debunk one of Richard Dawkins’ major arguments that no atrocities have ever been committed in the name of atheism. Unfortunately for Dawkins, it turns out that it is he himself who is committing a crime against humanity in the name of atheism.
Sure, the UN convention on genocide has been criticised by legal scholars and philosophers for concentrating on the outcome rather than the means in defining genocide, but this is an irrelevant point – the law is the law after all.
2009 hasn’t got off to a great start – there’s a great stench of blood on it its hands. People are dying. Not just in Gaza, or in Afghanistan, or even in a way that the media can tenuously link to the credit crunch, but people are dying of the worst thing of all: old age.
All this death is bad news, because it puts Morris Dancing under threat. The Morris Ring, who appear to be essentially the equivalent of FIFA but with added bells and whistles have earned themselves some press this last week by being brutally honest and saying that all of the old Morris dancers are dying off and young people aren’t replacing them because dressing up with ribbons and bells, and spending hours at a time banging sticks together with beardy men in the village hall is seen as “embarrassing”. I can’t possibly imagine why.
Apparently the worry is that in 20 years time, Morris dancing will be “extinct”, and for some reason, this is a bad thing.
“This is a serious situation”, a spokesman said whilst not noticing all of the war and conflict in the world. “Once we’ve lost this part of our culture it will be almost impossible to revive it.”, he continued, inadvertently articulating what I’m hoping for.
I’m sorry for my lack of sympathy towards the Morris dancers plight, but when I see Morris dancers, I tend to thank the corporations for the fruits of globalisation for marginalising British traditions like this. As a young person who grew up in the late 80s and 90s, and indeed this decade to some extent, I’m glad I’ve had a diet of American cultural imperialism rather than the unpleasant choice I assume my dad got, between either dancing with bells and sticks, or around the May Pole.
When I hear the alarm bells jingling and look at the current Morris crisis though, all I see is textbook Darwinian natural selection: by dancing around dressed as mental patients the participants are putting themselves at an evolutionary disadvantage by severely reducing their chances of propagating their genes to a new generation. This has clearly already happened as young people today no longer have the gene that blocks out any sense of shame.
Maybe there is a way out for them though. After all, this is space-year 2009, and we’ve developed all sorts of amazing genetically engineered and mind-altering technologies. Surely there’s some sort of technology we can use to keep the tradition of Morris dancing alive for reasons that may become clear some day? I think I know the solution:
Booze.
If there’s one thing young people love, it’s getting smashed in nightclubs and (here’s the key bit) dancing. All the Morris Ring need to do is have a little rebranding exercise. Take Morris Dancing out of the village fetes and instead host it in inner-city clubs. Replace the bells with glow-sticks and the twee accordion farts with hardcore trance and the orange juice refreshments with a licensed bar, and before you know it young people will flock to it.
Then again, maybe it’s sometimes better to just let some things die?
Remember a few months ago when everyone was horrified by Baby P? Well it turns out that if you’re not an elitist like Barack Obama or the liberal media, Real People are still giving a damn and Baby P, or “P the Baby”, as he has been dubbed, has almost literally become a poster-boy for misdirected political outrage everywhere. Forget all of the babies dying in Gaza or Darfur or the Congo – the only thing that matters is a baby that happened to die in slightly closer proximity to where you probably live.
Lydia Rivlin, a concerned citizen who has presumably only just given up the search for Maddy is going so-far as to stand in a by-election to Haringey council, to represent a ward she doesn’t live in (she actually lives in Tottenham), on the Baby P ticket. No doubt her campaign will go just as well as the seemingly single-issue campaign of Rudy “9/11″ Giuliani.
Apparently she really wants to get rid of the Labour councillors – so she’s decided to do this by standing in the by-election – apparently a Labour safe-seat – to further dilute the anti-Labour vote. An excellent plan.
My favourite thing though is the stunningly poor-taste campaign song. This is real:
I consider myself something of an expert at procrastinating. I’ve somehow developed the ability to put off merely the simplest of things for hours, if not days at a time. Even now, writing this, I’m merely procrastinating and avoiding doing some work towards my International Relations degree, and the reason my column didn’t appear last week was because I put off writing it until this week. Whoops.
I don’t think this is a trait unique to myself though – I think that technology has greatly aided the procrastinator, and with a little bit of training, you can fritter away entire days without doing any activity worthy of even being summarised as a bullet point.
Being someone who pretends to be a writer in addition to being a student, I spend the vast majority of my time in front of my computer, and the great thing about modern computers is just how many programs you can setup to bleep and ping at you to steal your attention away from the blinking cursor on the blank page in front of you where the important work should be. Right now, for instance, I have my e-mails open so every few minutes I get to look away from this page and delete yet another advert for “CHE@P MEDS”. Not only this, but because I’m a young person, and therefore hip and modern, I have a chat program called Twitter popping up constantly with status updates from other people, who invariably explain that they’re also sitting in front of a computer, trying to avoid doing some work.
I’ve recently learnt though of another ultra-effective means of procrastinating. Having recently moved out of my parents house for the first time, I’ve discovered that to maintain a house to a tolerable standard, there are all sorts of little chores and tasks that must be done. Most are pretty menial – washing up, washing clothes, replenishing cupboards with food and the like, but when given the choice between starting on that all important essay or sorting my socks into matching pairs, the latter is a surprisingly attractive prospect.
It’s baffling really – I shouldn’t really mind writing essays, as not only is that what I’ve chosen to spend the next year of my life doing, but the essays are about a subject that I find interesting, as that’s why I chose to study. I think it’s because now the essays have become official and important, this must make writing them boring compared to everything else in the universe. By this logic, rather than choose to study International Relations, I should have chosen to do a degree in home making (I hear the University of Life has a good course), and then due to my natural abilities to procrastinate, I’d be turning out hundreds of wonderful and insightful essays on the topic of International Relations every day.
It wouldn’t surprise me if most people are plagued by this compulsive procrastination disorder. I keep meaning to do the research to prove it, but for some reason I just never get around to doing it.
I went to the London MCM Expo today, which was basically a big gathering of nerds who like sci-fi, animé, comics, and that sort of thing. So I made a stupid video:
London can be a scary place at times. At a gig the other day I got talking to some punk types hanging around outside who within moments of meeting me explained how they were drinking free beer. “How’d you get it for free?”, I perhaps naively asked. “Big pockets”, came the response from a man who would a few minutes later urinate in the street in such a way that it would form a small stream along the street. It seems that in London, maybe not all of the streets are paved with gold – or at least, if they were at one point, a fair chunk of the gold has probably been stolen by now.
Yesterday I had perhaps my first proper encounter with a drug dealer. I mean, obviously a sizeable proportion of the people I went to school with are now inevitably drug dealers, but this was perhaps the first time I’d encountered a drug dealer during trading hours.
I was standing around in Camden (where else?) with my ‘crew’ and we were approached by a drunken looking man with a can of beer, who wobbled up to us and said “Would you like some cocaine?”. It surprised me because rather than do what I’d expect, and refer to the drugs by some sort of nickname, such as ‘Ivory Flakes’, he just said “cocaine”. He could have only been more obvious if he’d said “Hello, would you like some drugs?”
I always assumed drug dealers would be a little more coy. Surely you wouldn’t simply want to announce you’ve got cocaine? If I were a drug dealer, I’d stick to using obscure nicknames, so that only the target market knows what I’m talking about, rather than so any old square, like myself, knows that ILLEGAL DRUGS are what are being discussed. He wasn’t even wearing a long coat with the “merchandise” inside.
I’m sure from the tone of what I’ve written so far, you’ve probably detected that I’m not a big fan of drug dealers. This isn’t because they’re invariably unpleasant and stabtacular, but because they fail to comply with even basic retail practices.
Aside from issues surrounding soliciting business on the streets without a permit and the shirking of obligations under the Sale of Goods Act to provide a receipt for purchases, even more frustratingly drug dealers are seemingly on the side of those awful “Metric Martyrs” types who, Daily Express tucked under their arms, refuse to surrender to the “Brussels beurocrats” by not joining the Englightenment and not going metric. Drugs, as far as I’m aware, are still sold in ounces, which is no longer a valid form of measurement under European law – really if you want to buy an ounce of drugs, you should be asking for 28.35 grams.
If I were a drug dealer, I’d show them how to do it properly.
In these difficult economic times, there is a group of people we need to feel for, as they must be stressed, tired, angry and confused. No, not the millions of home owners or those facing unemployment, or even the millions of people who have a bank account, but the white-collar city workers. A few weeks ago I wrote about offering them hugs, but since then the crisis has had more twists and turns than the average company exec’s tax-exiled accounts, I’ve been thinking about what else we can do to help these bankers and financiers, and then it hit me: why not setup a Fight Club?
Obviously, my first step in looking into this venture was to re-watch the film “Fight Club”, to see what I needed to do to translate it into reality. In the film, a Fight Club is basically a group of men in the cellar of a dodgy bar fighting with each other two at a time… I think there are several things that I will need to take into consideration.
For a start, any real life Fight Club would be a health and safety nightmare and would almost certainly incur the wrath of the Health & Safety Executive. The fighters would have to wear much more protective gear than in the film, and obviously would have to sign a waiver, otherwise the insurance costs will be phenomenal – I imagine pitching “two people having a fistfight” to an insurer would cause them to have a fit. Similarly, I assume that there would be an obligation to have a first aider on hand, given the dangeous nature of the club, which would push up costs. And before any fighting could begin, it would certainly be diligent to give a short health and safety lecture to participants. A bit like Lazer Quest, really.
I think the club also may fall foul of equal opportunities legislation. If the rules from the film are taken as a base, then the “no shirt, no shoes” policy would certainly have to change as otherwise this could conflict with female fighters, who would risk sexual harassment and the like. Luckily two birds could be killed with one stone here, as the amount of safety gear that fighters would be required to wear could act as a “kit” and protection at the same time. Similarly, disability discrimation would be a minefield too – if a wheelchair user was matched up to fight against someone who was able-bodied, it would be an unfair fight, so something would have to be worked out here too.
Moving on to business concerns, obviously the marketing would have to change. “Do not talk about Fight Club” is a very counter-intuitive rule – if the business is to grow then it must grow by word of mouth… perhaps some sort of discount referral system could replace this first and second rule of Fight Club? In terms of expansion, though, the film seemed to have the right idea – a franchise system would allow for fast growth across a wide area. Though one thing the film is less effective at is branding – a coherent brand that can be used across all franchises will create a loyal customer base.
Looking at it all this written above, setting up a fight club does seem like hard work, which surprises me considering that in the film you never see either Edward Norton or Brad Pitt sit down and do a single bit of paperwork – which is something that would have made it much more realistic. I guess the Fight Club will have to remain a figment of my imagination.
London can be a scary place at times. At a gig the other day I got talking to some punk types hanging around outside who within moments of meeting me explained how they were drinking free beer. “How’d you get it for free?”, I perhaps naively asked. “Big pockets”, came the response from a man who would a few minutes later urinate in the street in such a way that it would form a small stream along the street. It seems that in London, maybe not all of the streets are paved with gold – or at least, if they were at one point, a fair chunk of the gold has probably been stolen by now.