What has been the role of religion in international relations?
January 22nd, 2009 at 02:53

So lately I’ve waded in on some serious politics. It’s a bit of a gamble, really – there’s some actual risk involved in writing about things sincerely, rather than just a load of silly bollocks like I usually do. Unlike writing drivel, there’s a tangible risk that I could be held to account or that I could be proven wrong – something which, as every pundit knows, is a fate worse than death.

However, I have got some self confidence in what I’m saying. International Relations is What I Do. It is My Thing. I’ve got a degree that proves it, so I like to think that I know what I’m talking about. So I’m going to take a bit of a gamble – after receving some encouragement from Duncan, who has done the same, I’m going to put my head above the parapet and put my undergraduate dissertation online for all to see.

My dissertation was on the role of religion in international relations – which as far as I’m aware is a surprisingly unexplored topic. It explores the philosophical and historical roles of religion and then looks at some modern examples. And then I conclude that religion is a crock of shit.

Your mileage may vary. I got a 2:1 for it if that counts for anything. It’s basically me trying to be like a less educated Richard Dawkins.

Think it sounds interesting? Click here to have a look.

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Israel, Gaza, the state and why the SWP are being silly
January 21st, 2009 at 01:56

A common belief these days is that the days of student political activism are over. Students these days are too concerned about clubbing and, er, exams, right?

This was certainly my impression until this morning, anyway, when I found out that my university’s  Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have taken some direct action and have started a sit-in in one of the main lecture theatres in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.

I think it’s supposed to be a clever mirror of what Israel are doing to the Palestinians. They even have a secret entrance for smuggling supplies, though rather than a tunnel, it’s a fire escape, and I’m assuming that the protesters are not shooting at university staff and using civilians as human shields.

Though I’m certainly no fan of the war in Gaza, I’m struggling to get behind the sit-in because I struggle to see how it will actually be effective.

“Mr Olmert, President Obama is on the phone and wants to speak to you”

“Tell him I’ll call back later – I’m having second thoughts about this military action because a fringe political group in a moderately well known London University have suggested that we stop!”

As I’ve previously outlined, I’m horrendously uncomfortable with the left cosying up to Hamas, and find it bewildering that any rational person can take one side or the other in this conflict. If the SWP were campaigning for “PEACE” or “HUMAN RIGHTS IN GENERAL”, I could totally get on board with their message, but by taking sides they’re being completely irrational, and are demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how the international system actually works.

I’ve heard people label Israel a “terrorist state” today, and claim that Israel shouldn’t actually exist. Whilst the former is a great attention grabbing headline, the latter actually positions someone with that opinion as more extreme than Hamas.

Israel is not a “terrorist state”, whatever that means. Like it or not, but from Israel’s perspective, the action it is taking in Gaza is completely rational and highlights a fascinating international relations paradigm – that of the role of ethics. The one goal of a state is to survive and maintain its national security and defend its interests. Look at what’s going on from Israel’s perspective – their security is being threatened by Hamas firing rockets at them, so to protect their state, they feel obliged to respond.

Of course, as has been depressingly demonstrated, this has led to stacks of awful human rights abuses, blowing up schools and killing people – all sorts of nasty shit. But unfortunately this doesn’t matter – ethics in international relations are a relatively new invention and hotly debated by IR scholars – but in the end don’t really enter into calculations of national security. (I could write thousands of words on this to justify this point, but I won’t bore you.)

Why is the state so important? Because it gives legitimacy. If a group, be it an ethnic group, a national group or whatever have a state – a homeland – they get all of the trappings that come with such an honour: recognition, legitimacy, and most importantly, it makes it essentially illegal for other states to meddle in the affairs of the group under established international law dating back the 17th century and the peace at Westphalia. Its one of the reasons the Jews were given a homeland after that whole “centuries of persecution culminating in the holocaust” thing. It’s why persecuted groups in other countries are so keen to get a state of their own – groups like the Kurds, the Chechens… and the Palestinians. So Israel’s desire to hang on to its statehood is entirely reasonable – they just happen to be wankers about it.

It’s international law which leads me to conclude that people who suggest Israel should cease to exist are idiots. Not because I’ve any great desire to fulfill prophecy and have a Jewish homeland that Christ can return to like it says in revelations, but because to condemn the existence of Israel is to basically condemn the existence of every single other country.

To cut a long story short, there is no written book of international law – there is no great overseeing arbiter of the international system who governs relations – international law is predicated entirely on a set of norms and precedents, and to try and justify the existence of a state is stupid. States an inherrently silly construct – but we’ve decided that’s how best to organise the international system, so we’re stuck with them. If the “logic” that Israel shouldn’t be allowed to exist because it’s only a relatively new creation, then really we may as well be arguing that the whole Meditteranean basin and most of Europe is ceded back to Rome, as it used to be part of the Roman Empire.

The international system works on the basis of “Look who’s here… now get over it”, and these are the circumstances in which settlements should be negotiated. The only real difference between the establishment of America and the establishment of Israel is that we probably have video footage of the latter.

Basically my reaction to people vehemently taking either side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is, to borrow Ben Goldacre’s catchphrase, “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”.

Things I might expand on in the future/if challenged

• Human rights in the context of the international system
• The legitimacy of the state in a post-globalisation world
• Why I’m writing about moderately academic topics on my silly blog rather than in essays for university

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First degree murder?
October 13th, 2008 at 15:21

As la revolucion continues unabated, it’s making me wonder if this crisis is worse for me than I originally thought. My first degree was a degree in International Relations & Globalisation, and I’m somewhat concerned that it’s going to become meaningless because of this global financial crisis.

Back in those heady days of earlier this year, I was taught about Held and McGrew’s various characterisations of globalisation as a process. To cut a long story short, there are basically three schools of globalisation – the hyperglobalists, who reckon globalisation is in full effect, the world will never be the same again the very notion of the nation-state is laughable, and at the very least deserves sneering at, and there’s the transformationalists who believe that globalisation is an ongoing process – and there was a third school, the sceptics, who were could be characterised as having their heads in the sand, still believing in the nation state as an international actor and the like – basically they thought globalisation was a load of rubbish.

It was this last school of thought that I had the most contempt for, to the point where I really struggled to write about it – it felt so self-evidently ridiculous to posit that globalisation hasn’t changed anything that I just wanted to submit photos of me belming and point and my face as a critique of the sceptic position.

The trouble is, that with the on-going financial crisis, I’m starting to wonder if the sceptics sort of had a point, maybe. Banks are being nationalised, the international financial system is slowly creaking to a halt as states work to impose more regulation and it can only be a matter of time before barriers are raised back up and the post-1929 protectionist mantra becomes fashionable again. More importantly, it might take meaning from part of my degree.

You see, I’ve got something of a vested interest in globalisation being an actual thing.  If they decide globalisation doesn’t exist, then my first degree may as well have been BA (Hons) International Relations & Homeopathy. This is probably why I’m so concerned about global financial meltdown.

I’m worried too that it might not end here. What if this collapse causes the entire international system to break down? What if tough economic times and the pursuit of resources causes war and strife? What if we end up destroying each other in a nuclear holocaust and go back to living in caves and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Then there won’t be any International Relations for me to be moderately insightful about. Meaning that theology students may have more credibility that I do, as we gaze up at the sky and wonder what that big ball that it hurts to look at is.

So please, international banking system, please don’t collapse… For my sake!

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Natural theology is bollocks, naturally
October 6th, 2008 at 00:26

If Rage Against the Machine have taught me anything, it is that it’s moderately important to “know your enemy”, in order for you to know who you’re raging against. Which is why last week I went to the chapel, which was basically a mini-church in my uni. Stained-glass windows, candles, the works. I wasn’t there for a church service or to actively rage against it, but for a lecture on ‘natural theology’, by Alister McGrath, the former Oxford professor who wrote ‘The Dawkins Delusion‘, who now, inexplicably, is a respected professor at my university.

Now, I got used to my friends making fun of my old undergraduate university, and claiming that it’s a Mickey Mouse university, because it’s a former-polytechnic, but I’m starting to wonder if in fact the university I’m at now is more like Acme Looneyversity. Not only does it have a Chapel as one of it’s central features, but it has an entire theology department – which is at least a magnitude less-valid a subject than, say, fashion design, which my old uni was one of the leading places for.

So I decided to go along to this public lecture Alister McGrath was hosting in the Chapel, in order to challenge my opinions. I’d only be a good disciple of Dawkins, and advocate of reason and evidence, if my scientific worldview could stand up to the challenge.

As luck would have it, rather than have an epiphany and have to repent on slagging off religion a lot, it turns out that my opinions are still correct and accurate. It turns out ‘natural theology’ is bollocks. And I don’t mean that in an anti-intellectual way, and I really don’t intend to write-off an entire branch of academia, but assuming that the lecture I saw was representative of the subject at large, it really doesn’t seem like it should be allowed to be something a serious place of learning should allow to go on.

Natural theology is presented as pretty much an alternative to the scientific method. The idea is that rather than us drawing conclusions about the nature of existence based on the shared experience of verifiable, observable evidence, is that you fill in the blanks yourself (usually with “God did it”) then look for something to support it. In other words, basically doing exactly what the creationists do. McGrath said that he tried to present in as theologically-neutral terms as possible, but this was undermined slightly that the lecture was being held in a fucking chapel.

Apparently taking the “Christian perspective” can help “understand” things. A couple of direct quotes from the slides were: “Capacity of nature to point to the kingdom [of God] when it is rightly interpreted” (my emphasis) and “nature has to be seen in a certain way if it is to be properly understood”… is pretty much the antithesis of what academia is all about. You’re supposed to study things first, then use what you’ve learnt to figure out what’s going on – not the other way around. I admit, things being the other way around would be useful for me though – I wouldn’t have to read some books before writing the 15,000 word dissertation I’ve got to do this year.

To give an example of the “natural theology” approach, it was presented as the bastard-child of the arts and the sciences (a bit like geography if geographers drew maps before checking them against the shape of the land). One peace of “evidence” was talking about the nature of beauty, and an excerpt from a poem about how nice some hills looked or something was shown as if to say “pretty nice hills… you’d need God or you can’t appreciate them”. No time was given to any alternative explanations for the nature of beauty, of course, such as how a human perception of beauty correlates with what someone who is healthy looks like, and that can be explained in terms of natural selection.

What was truly startling though was that once you strip away the already slim on the ground substance, you’re left with literally nothing – I honestly came away from the 90 minute lecture having felt that I learned nothing. It was all very poetic and wordy, and so on, but it was more akin to listening to some nerds who like Lord of the Rings discuss their own fan-fiction continuity ideas rather than anything more academic.

I bet it’s quite easy to do for a job though as there’s no real studying involved.

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Socialist Networking
September 25th, 2008 at 15:05

Yesterday whilst walking through my university I spotted a poster up from the Socialist Workers Party. Usually I’d just ignore them as fringe crackpots, as the closest thing to an imminent revolution that I could see was someone approaching the nearby revolving doors. But something caught my eye: the speaker. It was billed as a talk by Mark Thomas – and that set off a “London celebrity alert” in my head. He’s one of my favourite comedians, so I had a dilemma.

I wanted to see a celebrity, one who I’ve in fact paid to see before (I realise this is a capitalist concept), but to do so, I had to risk encountering the finest nutters my university has to offer. In the end, I decided to go for it – though made a point of turning up only a couple of minutes before the meeting started, so as not to get cornered by some socialists – who in my experience, are not familiar with the concept of shutting up, and seem to go on at great length.

Standing outside the basement lecture theatre, there were a few other people standing around outside, and none of them were overtly wearing Che Guevera t-shirts and the like, so I decided to check I was in the right place. “This is the Mark Thomas thing, right?” – it was. But as the queue wasn’t huge and there was no sign of a familiar celebrity face, I decided to throw caution into the wind , asking “This is the celebrity comedian Mark Thomas, right?”. The guy I was talking to, who happened to be the socialist leader, looked at me and said “er…”, before the man in the queue behind me introduced himself as Mark Thomas.

Gah. Gutted. There can’t really be too left-wing personalities named Mark Thomas, could there? Socialists are practically non-existant these days – I’m sure Richard Dawkins would question whether they actually still exist, due to the lack of evidence. I had to console myself that at least there weren’t two men named Mark and Thomas speaking. That would have been even more embarassing.

You can imagine what went through my mind here, after I screamed “Nooooo!” inside my head. Here I was having to make a joke of mistaken identities, hide my disappointment and pretend to be interested on the socialist perspective on the world economy, which is what the talk was about. Both Mark and I put on a brave face as he pretended to not be offended and I pretended to not be there merely at the promise of celebrity. I believe only asterixes and capital letters can truly accurately illustrate the atmosphere in the corridor: *AWKWARD*.

It turned out that this Mark Thomas owns a socialist bookshop near the British Museum. I assume it doesn’t make much money – not because profit is a capitalist concept, though, but because I can’t imagine who’d want to read obscure Marxist literature.

So out of politeness, I ended up sitting in on an SWP society meeting. As you might have expected, they had a rather interesting take on the credit crunch, with at least one member of the audience suggesting that the crunch was a deliberate move by the powers that control the earth to gain control of the banks – that the deregulation of the banking sector in the late 80s was part of a plan to make the banks fail twenty years later so that they could be nationalised and power concentrated in the hands of the few. It was at points like this that it felt like it was one illuminati-namedrop away from being in a 9/11 truthers meeting.

At the end of the meeting I ran away, quickly.

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Graduation
July 17th, 2008 at 18:56

I had my graduation ceremony yesterday, which was rather exciting. I got to dress up like an old-timey teacher, sit in a big hall, and listen to a long list of names being read out. My only regret is that I didn’t encounter any Victorian school-kids to boss about whilst I was dressed for it.

Here’s a picture of me looking pretty chuffed at the fact that I’m demonstrably more intelligent than vast swathes of the uninformed masses:

Presumably now I can win arguments using the trump card “Hey, look at this certificate? You see those words? They mean I’m better than you!”, even if its in an area well outside my expertise. Just like how my hero, Richard Dawkins, does.

There ceremony was fun – one thing I’d completely forgotten to consider was the fact it was going to be somewhat ceremonial – so not only was I dressed up, but all of the heads of various departments went up on stage dressed as if we were about to put together a fellowship to return the Ring to Mordor, rather than dish out some degree certificates. The head of the politics department was up there dressed in robes coloured like that of West Ham.

At the start they gave an honourary degree to the bloke who wrote Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières. The university’s vice-chancellor gave a ten-minute long biography of the man, before he himself gave a speech accepting the award. Unfortunately, this set my expectations a little high.

“I can’t wait for my speech”, I thought – though in the event, all I got to do was walk across the stage, literally doff my hat at the university’s chancellor, and then shake hands with the vice-chancellor at the other side.

So it was a little anti-climatic, maybe. It was worth turning up though, as I got a degree out of it.

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Results Day: The Movie!
July 3rd, 2008 at 00:48

I’ve had a rollercoaster of a couple of days, to say the least. I’m going to explain it in such a way that I’ll drip-feed you the information selectively, to heighten the dramatic tension and make it a better story. Though to be fair if you’ve been keeping up with the annoying Twitter feed to the left, you probably know the story already.

To give you some backstory, a few weeks ago I received a conditional offer from a Top University (I’m not going to name it because this is the internet, and the internet is full of nutters), for a Masters course – to get on the course, I needed to get not only at least a 2:1, but at least 67% to get on the course. A tough thing to do.

It didn’t help that I received the conditional offer a couple of days after my last exam, and with about six weeks to go until results day – so basically my fate was already sealed, and there was no way I could work harder to get it. I felt like Vernon Kay, in that even if I were to cure cancer or stop global warming, there was nothing I could to stop people thinking I’m a gurning twat with an irritating face.

Leading up to results day, it had been a close approximation of a hell where the eternal torture is unbearably tedious – I wasn’t working or doing anything productive, meaning I had little else to do than wait for the results and work my way through five King of the Hill box sets (this latter act in itself unfortunately culminated in me pissing off a genuine American by asking her if she stands in the alley drinking and saying “yerp” and “that boy ain’t right”). What made this more unfortunate was that because I’d finished uni, the stock-joke was that when asked when I was free to do whatever, I was able to reply that I’m free for the rest of my life.

What I needed was direction and purpose.

So yesterday was results day – my university puts all of the results online at the same time (resulting in the obligatory annual self-induced denial of service attack). Barely being able to sleep the night before, I logged on, whilst praying. I’m not a religious man, but so desperate was I to do well that I’d taken Pascal’s wager in order to cancel out the fact that I’d walked under a ladder and a black cat had crossed my path the night before whilst I was walking through a graveyard (true story).

I saw my grade. I’d got a 2:1 – excellent – but, and it was a big but… I’d only got 66%. That’s right, 1% less than what I needed. Its times like that you wish you’d not forgotten to hand in that bibliography, or, y’know, worked 1% harder.

The results went live online at 9:30am. At 9:31am I was on the phone to the admissions administrator for the Masters course. Balls, it was the answerphone. So I typed up a polite begging e-mail, and then rang up again for good measure. “I just got your messages”, said the woman on the other end of the phone, who sounded a bit annoyed that I was bombarding her with communications. She told me that she’d send my application for “review”, and would hear back “in the next couple of days”. There was still hope, but I was feeling pessimistic.

I was like, totally melancholly – I was pleased on one hand that I’m not technically a graduate (and can presumably sign letters “James O’Malley, BA (Hons)”), but then frustrated that my future membership of the liberal academic elite was shakier than Christopher Hitchen’s membership of the same club.

What amplified this was something horrible. Due to a quirk in timing, I’d been invited to an open day at the Masters university, for post-grad applicants, that took place today. As they were still reviewing my applicationtion, I had no idea whether I deserved to be there or not – I didn’t know whether to go just in case they let me in, or not go because technically I failed to meet the criteria they were looking for.

My mum is something of a pushy mum – though not the sort who lives out her dreams through her kids. Her male kids anyway. Which I guess is why I was never forced to join a choir or whatever it is my mum dreamed of doing. But anyway, she insisted that I go today on the basis that if they’re reviewing me, I need to create a good impression, and turning up is a pretty good indication that I’m enthusiastic.

I didn’t want to do this though – what if I didn’t get in, but had already had a look around at how wonderful and brilliant it is? It’d be like waving a delicious fish in front of a cat, and then taking the fish away, and then kicking the cat in the face.

So I woke up this morning with a sense of dread – a feeling that I was about to do something unpleasant. And not the sort of unpleasant thing you can get over, like standing on a dog poo, but something psychologically unpleasant, that would torture me for years to come as I lament my failure to enter into the upper-echelons of academia.

Just before leaving for the open day that I didn’t know whether I deserved to be at, I gave them a quick ring just to check what was happening with the review – if they’d already rejected me then it wasn’t worth me going at all. The woman on the other end of the phone sounded annoyed – probably because I’d rang up again – “I’ve just e-mailed you… you’re in”, she snapped.

I literally punched the air. Multiple times. I can’t really put into words how delighted I was, but basically, I was pretty fucking happy about it. And then the delightful pay-off was that I got to look around my new university only a couple of hours later.

And fucking hell, it’s a bit posh compared to my old uni. Walking through the entrance, the first thing I saw were three blue plaques on one wall – I think that’s more blue plaques than there are in this entire county.

The uni buildings, fitting in with the rest of central London, were of the old-timey variety, with all of the imperial opulence of Whitehall, making for an interesting contrast with my old uni’s flat-pack modernity. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking my old uni on its content (it was decent), but architecturally, my new uni wins hands down.

I mean, just look at the library:

Christ on a bike. Bit much, isn’t it? Not even The British Library looks that important.

The best bit was quite possibly the Student Union bar. Not only did it have a pool table and an itBox, and not only was it not a nightclub, but the view was phenomenal. In that it is positioned on the bend in the river so you can look in one direction and see Tower Bridge, and look in the other and see Parliament and the London Eye and all that. I’m wondering what would be more appropriate in there: drinking or presenting local news?

The only slightly dodgy bit was that, inexplicably, on the tour of the campus, just like every other tour in London, there was an irritating American asking tonnes of stupid questions. But this was only a minor annoyance.

I think I’m going to like it here.

(Oh, and on the way home, I stumbled upon a man giving a lecture at the station about the High Speed 1 railway line… things like this are why I love London. It was almost as good as bumping into some ska.)

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Over and done for
May 22nd, 2008 at 22:48

Today was quite a significant day. I had my last ever exam and have now finished university – which means that now, instead of being able to blame my laziness on being a student, I’m now technically unemployed. I might go and sign on tomorrow.

Because I’ve not been organised enough to line up a job or a masters course yet, this means that I’ve got quite a lot of free time all of a sudden. So if anyone wants to go to the pub or something and needs to know when I’m free: I’ve got nothing on for the rest of my life.

As someone who is now technically unemployed, I guess I should start acting like it. I should probably grow a beard, and start going to the pub during the day regularly. So, er, not much change from the usual then. I guess I just need to do a bit more wandering around the town centre without purpose, and appearing vaguely threatening to people who have purpose in their lives – but I’ll be able to walk much slower when doing this, as I’ll have nowhere to be.

Seriously though, its actually a bit weird to comprehend – as we’re approaching the summer it just feels as though another summer holidays is approaching – but as it turns out, I’ve got nowhere to go in October. Now I know how Lou Bega felt in September 1999.

I got a weird feeling as I left the exam hall today though. Not just the usual feeling of a great weight being lifted off of my shoulders, but suddenly I felt this great contempt for students. Mooching off of the state, spending the tax money that non-students like me work hard for. They’ve never done a hard day’s work in their lives – unlike the working people!

It was enough to make me sick. And enough to make me really want to get on to a Masters course somewhere so I can be a student for a bit longer.

(Hey, if you’re an important person reading, why not pay me some money to do (non-weird) stuff for you? If you’re a post-grad admissions tutor, why not e-mail me and beg me to apply to your university? james (at) jamesomalley.co.uk)

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Shilling for the uni
March 14th, 2008 at 00:14

As I’m a high-flying successful celebrity, I’ve been asked to contribute to a new journal that’ll be given to prospective students at my university, to try to encourage them to choose my uni over other (better) universities. I was asked to write about my experiences on the course and how it has led to my involvement in wider politics and so on. And because I’m running a bit thin on the ground for content at the moment, (“Alistair Darling looks like a badger” has been done by everyone), I thought I’d share it with you. Because the weak gags are worth repeating, obviously.

I’ve been studying International Relations and Globalisation for three years now, but I’ve kept it a big secret. It’s not because I’m ashamed that I’ve chosen an arts degree over something weighty and scientific, like physics or homeopathy, but because I’ve discovered that the second the phrase “international relations and globalisation” is mentioned to an outsider, it’s met with a blank stare and a look of bewilderment. Nobody really knows what Globalisation is – not even the academics, who seem to spend half their lives arguing over what it is.

So I’ve been telling people that I’m studying “politics”. Which it sort of true, but is also a horrible lie. In other words, the course is setting me up perfectly for a career in politics.

The course is excellent, as if you’re the sort of political junkie who stays up late to watch election results programmes or can name more members of the shadow cabinet than you can professional football players, then “revision” is your normal behaviour anyway. Even if you’re not as phenomenally boring as I am, you’ll still think it’s excellent. Why? Because International Relations is about tackling issues.

The questions debated in seminars are not abstract mathematical problems or reading too much into the alliteration Shakespeare used – students of international relations are tasked with solving real political dilemmas. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the legality of the Iraq war, the role of multi-national companies in the international system – in the last three years I’ve been discussing them all, presumably because the politicians have got so fed up and frustrated with everyone in the middle east fighting, they’ve delegated it down to undergraduates for them to fix for them.

The other great thing about the course is that it empowers you to participate in the greater political debate in a way that you actually feel like what you’re saying matters. When you express your political opinions, people will actually be under the impression that you know what you’re talking about, whether you actually are or not. I’ve been writing about politics on the internet for a couple of years now, and according to one poll, have the 251st best political blog in the UK – just one spot below the disgraced Jeffrey Archer, of all people. It turns out that lots of influential people have read my blog, and so I may have ever-so-slightly, indirectly influenced major policy decisions… which is a scary thought.

So come and study International Relations and you could maybe one day be as rich and successful as I wish I was!

I’m not sure I’m selling the course quite as well as they’d like.

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Needless controversy Israeli great
January 17th, 2008 at 19:26

I decided to liven up university today by being a bit controversial. Following a lecture on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I’ve spent the day being a bit of a militant Zionist – not a popular position to take in a university with a large population of Muslims, socialists, and assorted left-wing types. (We only have about five Jewish people).

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually strongly support Israel, or the Palestinians… or anyone really. My actual opinion on the conflict is that it is a “lot of faff” and they should all just “get a grip” (you can quote me on that). But I decided to stick up for Israel because they were the underdogs.

So this ended up with me being in a lift on the way to a following seminar that also contained a number of my fellow classmates – including a girl who’s both a committed socialist and Egyptian. So what do I say?

“I think Israel deserve the Golan Heights, given all of the crap they’ve had to put up with”

You could almost see the steam coming out of her ears.

I, of course, followed this up in the actual seminar by antagonising the situation further.

I like to think that trolling real life is a step up from trolling the internet.

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