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December 2nd, 2014: Someone hire me to write a Sherlock Holmes movie; put me in coach I'M READY – Ryan

Let’s start this review by warning you all that major spoilers follow. Then let’s talk about abortion.

If I squint really hard, I can sort of see how someone possessed of a belief in an immortal soul— and further, that it slides down the chute the moment some lucky sperm achieves penetration— might hold an antiabortion stance on the grounds that they’re protecting Sacred Human Life. What I can’t see is how that stance would be in any way compatible with actively denying the means to prevent such life from being jeopardized in the first place. And yet— assuming the stats haven’t changed since I last looked in on them— the majority of those who unironically refer to themselves as “pro-Life” not only oppose abortion, but birth control and sex education as well.

You can’t reasonably describe such a suite of beliefs as “pro Life”. You can’t even reasonably describe them as “anti-abortion”. What they are is anti-sex. These people just don’t want us fucking except under their rules, and if we insist on making our own we should damn well pay the price. We deserve that STD. We should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term, to give up the following two decades of our lives— not because new life is a sacred and joyous thing, but because it is onerous and painful, a penalty for breaking the rules. We should suffer. We should live to regret our wanton animalistic shortsightedness. It is galling to think that we might just skip gaily off into the sunset, postcoitally content, unburdened by the merest shred of guilt. There should be consequences.

Movies like Interstellar serve as an uncomfortable reminder that maybe I have more in common with those assholes than I’d like to admit.

*

In a market owned by genre, where every second movie is crammed to the gills with spaceships and aliens (or, at the very least, plucky young protagonists dishing out Truth to Power), Interstellar aspires to inspire.  It explicitly sets out to follow in the footsteps of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It wants to make you think, and wonder.

It succeeds, too. It makes me wonder how it could fall so far short of a movie made half a century ago.

This is not to say that Interstellar is a bad movie. It actually has significantly more on the ball than your average 21rst-century genre flick (although granted, that’s a much lower bar to clear than the one Kubrick presented). The dust-bowl vistas of a dying Earth evoke the sort of grim desolation we used to get from John Brunner’s environmental dytopias, and— most of the time, anyway—  Interstellar shows a respect for science comparable to that evident in Gravity and 2001.

Admittedly, my delight at seeing space presented as silent has more to do with the way decades of Hollywood crap have hammered down my own expectations than it does with any groundbreaking peaks of verisimilitude; it’s not as though every school kid doesn’t know there’s no sound in a vacuum. On the other hand, the equations Interstellar‘s FX team used to render the lensing effects around Gargantua, the movie’s black hole— equations derived by theoretical physicist-and-science-consultant Kip Thorne— have provided the basis for at least one astrophysics paper here in the real world, an accomplishment that would make Arthur C. Clarke jealous. The hole was carefully parameterized to let our protags do what the plot required without being spaghettified or cooked by radiation. The physics of space travel and Gargantua’s relativistic extremes are, I’m willing to believe, plausibly worked out.  So much of the science seems so much better than we have any right to expect from a big-budget blockbuster aimed at the popcorn set.

Why, then, does the same movie that gets the physics of event horizons right also ask us to believe that icebergs float unsupported in the clouds of alien worlds? How can the same movie that shows such a nuanced grasp of the gravity around black holes serve up such a face-palming portrayal of gravity around planets? And even if we accept the premise of ocean swells the size of the Himalayas (Thorne himself serves up some numbers that I’m sure as shit not going to dispute), wouldn’t such colossal formations be blindingly obvious from orbit? Wouldn’t our heroes have seen them by just looking out the window on the way down?  How dumb do you have to be to let yourself get snuck up on by a mountain range?

Almost as dumb, perhaps, as you’d be to believe that “love” is some kind of mysterious cosmic force transcending time and space, even though you hold a doctorate in biology.

You’re probably already aware of the wails and sighs that arose from that particular gaffe. Personally, I didn’t find it as egregious as I expected—at least Amelia Brand’s inane proclamation was immediately rebutted by Cooper’s itemization of the mundane social-bonding functions for which “love” is a convenient shorthand. It was far from a perfect exchange, but at least the woo did not go unchallenged. What most bothered me about that line— beyond the fact that anyone with any scientific background could deliver it with a straight face— was the fact that it had to be delivered by Anne Hathaway. If we’re going to get all mystic about the Transcendent Power of Lurve, could we a least invert the cliché a bit by using a male as the delivery platform?

The world that contains Interstellar is far more competent than the story it holds. It was built by astrophysicists and engineers, and it is a thing of wonder. The good ship Endurance, for example, oozes verisimilitude right down to the spin rate. Oddly, though, the same movie also shows us a civilization over a century into the future— a whole species luxuriating in the spacious comfort of a myriad O’Neil cylinders orbiting Saturn— in which the medical technology stuck up Murphy Cooper’s nose hasn’t changed its appearance since 2012. (Compare that to 2001, which anticipated flatscreen tech so effectively that it got cited in Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung half a century later.) (Compare it also to Peter Hyam’s inferior sequel 2010, in which Discovery‘s flatscreens somehow devolved back into cathode-ray-tubes during its decade parked over Io.)

Why such simultaneous success and failure of technical extrapolation in the same movie? I can only assume that the Nolans sought out expert help to design their spaceships, but figured their own vision would suffice for the medtech. Unfortunately, their vision isn’t all it could be.

This is the heart of the problem.  Interstellar soars when outsourced; only when the Nolans do something on their own does it suck. The result is a movie in which the natural science of the cosmos is rendered with glorious mind-boggling precision, while the people blundering about within it are morons.  NASA happens to be set up just down the road from the only qualified test pilot on the continent— a guy who’s friends with the Mission Director, for Chrissakes— yet nobody thinks to just knock on his door and ask for a hand. No, they just sit there through years of R&D until cryptic Talfamadorians herd Cooper into their clutches by scribbling messages in the dirt.  Once the mission finally achieves liftoff,  Endurance‘s crew can’t seem to take a dump without explaining to each other what they’re doing and why. (Seriously, dude? You’re a bleeding-edge astronaut on a last-ditch Humanity-saving mission through a wormhole, and you didn’t even know what a wormhole looked like until someone explained it to you while you were both staring at the damn thing through your windshield?)

You could argue that the Nolans don’t regard their characters as morons so much as they regard us that way; some of this might  be no more than clunky infodumping delivered for our benefit.  If so, they apparently think we’re just as dumb about emotional resonance and literary allusion as we are about the technical specs on black holes.  Michael Caine has to hammer home the same damn rage against the dying of the light stanza on three separate occasions, just in case it might slip under our radar.

And yet, Interstellar came so close in some ways.  The sheer milk-out-the-nose absurdity of a project to lift billions of people off-planet turns out to be, after all, just a grand lie to motivate short-sighted human brain stems— until Murphy Cooper figures out how to do it for real after all.  Amelia Brand’s heartbroken, irrational description of love as some kind of transcendent Cosmic Force, invoked in a desperate bid to reunite with her lost lover and instantly shot down by Cooper’s cooler intellect—  until Cooper encounters the truth of those idiot beliefs in the heart of a black hole.  Time and again, Interstellar edges toward the Cold Equations, only to chicken out when the chips are down.

*

But the thing that most bugs me about this movie— the thing that comes closest to offending me, although I can’t summon anywhere near that much intensity— was something I knew going in, because it’s right there in the tag line on every advance promo, every Coming-Soon poster:

The end of the Earth will not be the end of us.

 Or

Mankind was born on earth. It was never meant to die here.

Or

We were not meant to save the Earth.  We were meant to leave it.

Which all comes down to

Let’s trash the place, then skip out and stick everyone else with the bill.

This is where I finally connect with my inner antiabortionist.  Because I, too, think you should pay for your sins. I think that if you break it, you damn well own it; and if your own short-sighted stupidity has killed off your life-support system, it’s only right and proper that that you suffer, that you sink into the quagmire along with the other nine million species your appetites have condemned to extinction. There should be consequences.

And yet, even in the face of Interstellar‘s objectionable political stance— baldly stated, unquestioned, and unapologetic—  I can only bristle, not find fault. Because this is perhaps the one time the Nolan sibs got their characters right.  Shitting all over the living room rug and leaving our roommates to deal with the mess? That’s exactly what we’d do, if we could get away with it.

Besides. When all is said and done, this was still a hell of a lot better than Prometheus.

We will work towards the eventual creation of a new ‘Citizen’s Income’, payable to all irrespective of sex or status… Unpaid work will at last be recognised as valuable. Women caring in the home, for example, will receive an independent income from the state for the first time. The Citizen’s Income will be buttressed by a single benefit for those in need, unifying income support and family credit, with supplements for people with disabilities and for child-care support. These reforms will ensure that every citizen is guaranteed a decent minimum income, whether or not they are in employment.

So what bunch of crazed radicals came up with that policy? Well, it’s from the 1992 Liberal Democrat manifesto.

Yes, Citizen’s Income (also known as Basic Income and many other names) was Liberal Democrat policy for a while, until it got dropped in 1994. Despite some people wondering if it might make a return under a previous leader, it’s remained in the Home for Former Policies ever since.

(If you what to know more, the Basic Income Earth Network and Citizen’s Income Trust are good places to start)

Recently, though, I’ve noticed lots more people talking about the idea, especially in terms of thinking of new ways to run and organise the economy, and the more I read and think about it, the more I think it’s not only a good idea, it’s a great liberal one. What better way to free people from poverty, ignorance and conformity than guaranteeing a basic income for everyone? If you want opportunity for all, why not free them from worrying about how they’re going to meet their basic needs? A fairer society where people have the chance to use their opportunities to develop new ideas can lead to a stronger economy because people had the chance to get on in life rather than being ground down as they sought to simply support themselves.

And I’ve run out of party slogans to use here, but I think you get the point. What we need, though, isn’t just to sit around and agree that it would be a good idea, but work to actually make it happen. I think it needs to be more than something that just floats around in the ‘that would be a good idea’ cloud, but to get it into party policy, let alone getting popular support for it and making it happen, is going to require work to do so.

So, to try and push it forward, I think we need to find a way to get supporters of Basic Income within the Liberal Democrats together and talking about it so we can set out a path to achieving it. I’m open to suggestions on how we go about doing that – email lists, Facebook groups, blogs, forums, Twitter hashtags, posted newsletters, conference meetings and whatever else are all possibilities, depending on interests – but I think the important thing is getting organised and doing it, not waiting around for something to happen.

So, if you’re interested, say so in the comments here, or let me know some other way – there’s links to my varied social media contacts at the side – and we’ll come up with some way of getting us all talking and planning. If there’s enough of us, who knows what we might achieve?

I.

There’s a story about a TV guide that summarized The Wizard of Oz as “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.”

It’s funny because it mistakes a tale of wonder and adventure for a crime spree. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is the opposite; a crime spree that gets mistaken for a tale of wonder and adventure.

On The Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.

But it’s okay, because they are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.

Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends are brought to the brinks of a lot of things, actually. Aside from stealing things and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t, being brought to the brink of things is one of their main pastimes. Enlightenment, revelation, truth, the real meaning of America, the ultimate, the sacred – if it has a brink, they will come to it. Crucially, they never cross that brink or gain any lasting knowledge or satisfaction from the experience. Theirs is a religion whose object of worship is the burst of intense emotion, the sudden drenching of their brain in happy chemicals that come and go without any lasting effect except pages full of the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”.

The high priest of this religion is Kerouac’s friend Dean Moriarty. Kerouac cannot frickin shut up about Dean Moriarty. Obviously he is “holy” and “ecstatic” and “angelic” and “mad” and “visionary”, but for Dean, Kerouac pulls out all the stops. He is “a new kind of American saint”, “a burning shuddering frightful Angel”, with intelligence “formal and shining and complete”.

Who is this superman, this hero?

His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of high school in the afternoon, driving them out to the mountains, making them, and coming back to sleep in any available hotel bathtub in town.

Okay, but you have overwrought religious adjectives to describe all of this, right?

[Dean’s] “criminality” was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming.

I feel like once you steal like a dozen cars in the space of a single book, you lose the right to have the word “criminality” in scare quotes.

But please, tell us more:

[Ed and Dean] had just been laid off from the railroad. Ed had met a girl called Galatea who was living in San Francisco on her savings. These two mindless cads decided to bring the girl along [on one of their seven zillion pointless cross-country trips] and have her foot the bill. Ed cajoled and pleaded; she wouldn’t go unless he married her. In a whirlwind few days Ed Dunkel married Galatea, with Dean rushing around to get the necessary papers, and a few days before Christmas they rolled out of San Francisco at seventy miles per, headed for LA and the snowless southern road. In LA they picked up a sailor in a travel bureau and took him along for fifteen dollars’ worth of gas…All along the way Galatea Dunkel, Ed’s new wife, kept complaining that she was tired and wanted to sleep in a motel. If this kept up they’d spend all her money long before Virginia. Two nights she forced a stop and blew tens on motels. By the time they got to Tucson she was broke. Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the voyage alone, with the sailor, and without a qualm.

All right, Jack, how are you gonna justify this one?

Dean was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.

I too enjoy life. Yet somehow this has never led me to get my friend to marry a woman in order to take her life savings, then leave her stranded in a strange city five hundred miles from home after the money runs out.

Jack Kerouac’s relationship with Dean can best be described as “enabler”. He rarely commits any great misdeeds himself. He’s just along for the ride [usually literally, generally in flagrant contravention of all applicable traffic laws] with Dean, watching him destroy people’s lives, doing nothing about it, and then going into rhapsodies about how free-spirited and unencumbered and holy and mad and visionary it all is.

There’s a weird tension here, because Jack is determined to totally ignore the moral issues. He brings this kind of stuff up only incidentally, as Exhibits A and B to support his case that Dean Moriarty is the freest and most perfect and most wonderful human being on Earth, and sort of moves past it before it becomes awkward. An enthusiastic reader, caught up in the spirit of the book, might easily miss it. The only place it is ever made explicit is page 185, when Galatea (who has since found her way back to San Francisco) confronts Dean about the trail of broken lives he’s left behind him, saying:

You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that, but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time.”

This, 185 pages in, is the first and last time anyone seriously tries to criticize Dean. Dean has stolen about a dozen cars. He has married one woman, had an affair with another, played the two of them off against each other, divorced the first, married the second, deserted the second with a young child whom she has no money to support, gone back to the first, dumped the first again so suddenly she has to become a prostitute to make ends meet. Later he will go back to the second, beat the first so hard that he injures his thumb and has to get it amputed, break into the second’s house with a gun to kill her but change his mind, desert the second again also with a child whom she has no money to support, start dating a third, desert the third also with a child whom she has no money to support, and go back to the second, all while having like twenty or thirty lesser affairs on the side. As quoted above, he dumped poor Galatea in Tucson, and later he will dump Jack in Mexico because Jack has gotten deathly ill and this is cramping his style.

So Galatea’s complaint is not exactly coming out of thin air.

Jack, someone has just accused your man-crush of being selfish and goofing off all the time. Care to defend him with overwrought religious adjectives?

That’s what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF…he was BEAT, the root, the soul of beatific. What was he knowing? He tried all in his power to tell me what he was knowing, and they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and drinking him in as they once tried to do

Right. That’s the problem. People are just jealous, because holy ecstatic angelic Dean Moriarty likes you more than he likes them. Get a life.

II.

But of course getting a life – in the sense of a home, a stable relationship, a steady job, et cetera – is exactly what all the characters in On The Road are desperately trying to avoid.

“Beat” has many meanings, but one of them is supposed to be “beaten down”. The characters consider themselves oppressed, on the receiving end of a system that grinds them up and spits them out. This is productively compared with their total lack of any actual oppression whatsoever.

I don’t know if it’s the time period or merely their personal charm, but Kerouac et al’s ability to do anything (and anyone) and get away with it is astounding. Several of their titular cross-country trips are performed entirely by hitch-hiking, with their drivers often willing to buy them food along the way. Another is performed in some sort of incredibly ritzy Cadillac limo, because a rich man wants his Cadillac transported from Denver to Chicago, Dean volunteers, and the rich man moronically accepts. Dean of course starts driving at 110 mph, gets in an accident, and ends up with the car half destroyed. Once in the city, Dean decides this is a good way to pick up girls, and:

In his mad frenzy Dean backed up smack on hydrants and tittered maniacally. By nine o’ clock the the car was an utter wreck: the brakes weren’t working any more; the fenders were stove in; the rods were rattling. Dean couldn’t stop it at red lights; it kept kicking convulsively over the roadway. It had paid the price of the night. It was a muddy boot and no longer a shiny limousine…’Whee!’ It was now time to return the Cadillac to the owner, who lived out on Lake Shore Drive in a swank apartment with an enormous garage underneath managed by oil-scarred Negroes. The mechanic did not recognize the Cadillac. We handed the papers over. He scratched his head at the sight of it. We had to get out fast. We did. We took a bus back to downtown Chicago and that was that. And we never heard a word from our Chicago baron about the conditio of his car, in spite of the fact that he had our addresses and could have complained.

Even more interesting than their ease of transportation to me was their ease at getting jobs. This is so obvious to them it is left unspoken. Whenever their money runs out, be they in Truckee or Texas or Toledo, they just hop over to the nearest farm or factory or whatever, say “Job, please!” and are earning back their depleted savings in no time. This is really the crux of their way of life. They don’t feel bound to any one place, because traveling isn’t really a risk. Be it for a week or six months, there’s always going to be work waiting for them when they need it. It doesn’t matter that Dean has no college degree, or a criminal history a mile long, or is only going to be in town a couple of weeks. This just seems to be a background assumption. It is most obvious when it is violated; the times it takes an entire week to find a job, and they are complaining bitterly. Or the time the only jobs available are backbreaking farm labor, and so Jack moves on (of course abandoning the girl he is with at the time) to greener pastures that he knows are waiting.

Even more interesting than their ease of employment is their ease with women. This is unintentionally a feminist novel, in that once you read it (at least from a modern perspective) you end up realizing the vast cultural shift that had to (has to?) take place in order to protect women from people like the authors. Poor Galatea Dunkel seems to have been more of the rule than the exception – go find a pretty girl, tell her you love her, deflower her, then steal a car and drive off to do it to someone else, leaving her unmarriageable and maybe with a kid to support. Then the next time you’re back in town, look her up, give her a fake apology in order to calm her down enough for her to be willing to have sex with you again, and repeat the entire process. Here is a typical encounter with a pretty girl:

Not five nights later we went to a party in New York and I saw a girl called Inez and told her I had a friend with me that she ought to meet sometime. I was drunk and told her he was a cowboy. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet a cowboy.”

“Dean?” I yelled across the party. “Come over here, man!” Dean came bashfully over. An hour later, in the drunkenness and chiciness of the party, he was kneeling on the floor with his chin on her belly and telling her and promising her everything ad sweating. She was a big, sexy brunette – as Garcia said, something straight out of Degas, and generally like a beautiful Parisian coquette. In a matter of days they were dickering with Camille in San Francisco by long-distance telephone for the necessary divorce papers so they could get married. Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean’s secnd baby, the result of a few nights’ rapport early in the year. And another matter of months and Inez had a baby. With one illegitimate child on the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones, and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever.

In case you’re wondering, Dean then runs off to Mexico, leaves Inez behind, screws a bunch of Mexican women, and eventually gets back with Camille, who is happy to have him. Seriously, if I had read this book when I was writing Radicalizing The Romanceless, Dean (and his friends) would have been right up there with Henry as Exhibit B. The only punishment he ever gets for his misadventures is hitting one girlfriend in the face so hard that he breaks his own thumb, which gets infected and has to be amputated. Human justice has failed so miserably, one feels, that God has to personally step in.

As bad as the gender stuff is, the race stuff is worse. This is 1950-something, so I’m prepared for a lot of awful stuff regarding race. But this is totally different awful stuff regarding race than I expected. I have never been able to get upset over “exoticization” and “Orientalism” before, but this book reached new lows for me:

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” diillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley…a gang of colored women came by, and one of the young ones detached herself from otherlike elders and came to me fast – “Hello Joe!” and suddenly saw it wasn’t Joe, and ran back blushing. I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.

Negroes are holy and ecstatic. But only in the same way barns and cows are holy and ecstatic. One gets the suspicion that Jack Kerouac is not exactly interacting with any of this stuff, so much as using it as something he can have his overwrought religious feelings about.

The “heroes” of On The Road consider themselves ill-done by and beaten-down. But they are people who can go anywhere they want for free, get a job any time they want, hook up with any girl in the country, and be so clueless about the world that they’re pretty sure being a 1950s black person is a laugh a minute.

On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.

But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.

III.

The viewpoint of a character in a book is not necessarily the viewpoint of its author. One can write about terrible people doing terrible things and not necessarily endorse it. That having been said, it’s very hard to read Jack Kerouac-the-author as differing very much from Jack-Kerouac-the-character in his opinions. He still has a raging man-crush on Dean and thinks that he is some kind of holy madman who can do no wrong.

The nicest thing I can say about On The Road is that perhaps it should be read backwards. It is a paean to a life made without compromise, a life of enjoying the hidden beauty of the world, spent in pursuit of holiness and the exotic. Despite how I probably sound, I really respect the Beat aesthetic of searching for transcendence and finding it everywhere. There’s something to be said for living your life to maximize that kind of thing, especially if everyone else is some kind of boring disspirited factory worker or something. Kerouac wrote around the same time as Sartre; it’s not difficult to imagine him as one of the first people saying you needed to try to find your True Self.

Read backwards, there was a time when to spend your twenties traveling the world and sleeping with strange women and having faux mystical experiences was something new and exciting and dangerous and for all anybody knew maybe it held the secret to immense spiritual growth. But from a modern perspective, if Jack and Dean tried the same thing today, they’d be one of about a billion college students and aimless twenty-somethings with exactly the same idea, posting their photos to Instagram tagged “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t seem like a good stopping-point for a philosophy. It doesn’t even seem like good escapism. I’d be willing to tolerate all the pointless criminality if it spoke to the secret things that I’ve always wanted to do in my hidden heart of hearts, but I’d like to think there’s more there than driving back and forth and going to what seem like kind of lackluster parties.

When I read Marx, I thought that his key mistake was a negative view of utopia. That is, utopia is what happens automatically once you overthrow all of the people and structures who are preventing there from being utopia. Just get rid of the capitalists, and the World-Spirit will take care of the rest. The thought that ordinary, fallible, non-World-Spirit humans will have to build the post-revolution world brick by brick, and there’s no guarantee they will do any better than the pre-revolutionary humans who did the same, never seems to have occurred to him.

Kerouac was a staunch anti-Communist, but his beat philosophy seems to share the same wellspring. Once you get rid of all the shackles of society in your personal life – once you stop caring about all those squares who want you to have families and homes and careers and non-terrible friends – once you become a holy criminal who isn’t bound by the law or other people’s needs – then you’ll end up with some ecstatic visionary true self. Kerouac claimed he was Catholic, that he was in search of the Catholic God, and that he found Him – but all of his descriptions of such tend to be a couple of minutes of rapture upon seeing some especially pretty woman in a nightclub or some especially dingy San Francisco alley, followed by continuing to be a jerk who feels driven to travel across the country approximately seven zillion times for no reason.

Like the early Communists, who were always playing up every new factory that opened as the herald of the new age of plenty, in the beginning it’s easy to tell yourself your revolution is succeeding, that you are right on the brink of the new age. But at last come the Andropovs and Brezhnevs of the soul, the stagnation and despair and the going through the motions.

Kerouac apparently got married and divorced a couple of times, became an alcoholic, had a bit of a breakdown, and drank himself to death at age 49. Moriarty spent a while in prison on sort-of-trumped-up drug charges, went through a nasty divorce with whichever wife hadn’t divorced him already, and died of a likely drug overdose at age 47.

Overall I did not like this book.

If you’re writing about a crime spree you were a part of, you ought to show at least a little self-awareness.

Mysticism continues to be a perfectly valid life choice, but I continue to believe if you want to pursue it you should do it carefully and methodically, for example meditating for an hour a day and then going to regular retreats run by spiritual authorities, rather than the counterculture route of taking lots of drugs and having lots of sex and reading some books on Gnosticism and hoping some kind of enlightenment smashes into you.

Professional writing should be limited to about four overwrought religious adjectives per sentence, possibly by law.

And travel and girls are both fun, but [doctor voice] should be enjoyed responsibly and in moderation.

The "fundamental rule" of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more.

Jackie Chan Blu-ray disc boosts solar panel efficiency by a massive 22%.

So, Lib Dem Voice took the route of the Literary Digest as their survey got the result of the presidential election completely wrong. They predicted that the first round results would be 52% for Daisy Cooper, 30% for Sal Brinton and 18% for Liz Lynne, with the actual result being 47% for Brinton, 27% for Cooper and 26% for Lynne. That’s one candidate given almost double the votes she actually got, while the other two are underestimated by about 50% each. Basically, as a prediction of the result, it’s not much better than a random number generator would have been.

So, we’ll have a quick pause for a ‘told you so‘ because that prediction felt wrong to me for the reasons I set out there – the LDV surveys come from a skewed sample that isn’t a balanced representation of Liberal Democrat members. Yes, I know they like to put various disclaimers on them, but those disclaimers always come after a headline that says ‘Lib Dem members think‘ (or something similar) which means the first impression is that this poll represents all members. Indeed, if you just look at the headline – and that’s all you get on the LDV Twitter feed and on other social media – you don’t get any disclaimers, and just get told ‘what Lib Dem members think’.

Now, we often get the claim that these surveys have shown similar results to other surveys of Lib Dem members undertaken by polling companies, so I went looking for the evidence on that. As far as I can see, this is based on a few questions from a few years ago (and Mark Pack’s FAQ on it that people point to is over two years old too), so hasn’t been done on a significant scale or recently. Pointing out that something was vaguely accurate a few years ago does not magically make it accurate now – especially when there’s a very big piece of evidence (the Presidential survey) that says it’s not.

This matters because the LDV surveys and their results are taken seriously by many people, and they could well be giving a wrong impression about what party members think. As it stands, people are being told that Lib Dem members overwhelmingly continue to support the coalition and think the party is on the right track, but what if they don’t? If the people being surveyed aren’t representative of the wider party membership, why are their views being presented as if they are? The most recent piece of comparable data suggests that using the LDV poll as a guideline to what members think isn’t accurate, and it’ll take a lot more than pointing at something from a few years ago to change my mind.

Probably, yes. Just asking the question, “do I have Asperger’s?” is a strong indicator you’re on the autistic spectrum in our opinion. You’ve obviously done some reading or been talking to people about it already. You’ve probably identified some typical autistic traits in your own behaviour (or you wouldn’t be asking the question). You might have read blog posts and articles by diagnosed aspies, and found yourself saying, “I do that…” or “that’s exactly how I feel,” or “this explains everything.”

You are no doubt asking the “do I have Asperger’s?” question because you need to convince someone that you’re autistic. In that case, self-diagnosis is not enough “proof” for many people or organsiations: government, health services, schools, and many other (but not all) official organisations are unable (or unwilling) to accept you as “autistic”, without a formal diagnosis. Friends and family might have a hard time (and give you a hard time) accepting your self-diagnosis; They don’t believe you are sufficiently qualified to make the judgement (whereas in my opinion, you are the best person to make that judgement); or, you might not accept your own judgement.

There is nothing wrong with wanting, or needing, a formal diagnosis, even if the only person you need to convince is yourself. There are many more articles on this site to help with understanding the process, and deciding if it’s the choice you want to make. I would also encourage you to join one or more online autism-group, talk to other autistic people, and read some more. You might decide you want a formal diagnosis in the end, or you might decide you’re happy with your own assessment. Both are okay.

Having said all this, some autistic people, or parents/carers of autistic people, will reject you if you’re not as “bad” as them/their child, or don’t have a formal diagnosis. So please know, at Life on the Spectrum, closely identifying with other autistic people is enough to count as autistic. You and your self-diagnosis are welcome here.

©Leigh Forbes

Related Content
» It’s Okay to Want a Diagnosis!”
» Think You Might Have Asperger’s?
» Asperger’s in Women
» Symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome (from an aspie perspective)
» The Triad of Impairments
» Diagnosis Stories
» Information about Online Tests
How do I get a diagnosis? (from the UK’s National Autistic Society)
The NHS Constistution (UK)

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I would like to talk about an aspect of creative work (writing, drawing, etc.) that doesn't get enough attention. It's the part about making a living. And in what follows, I am not talking about trying to earn enough to live in a mansion, own a summer home and a yacht, drive a Rolls, etc. I'm talking about living in a decent home with enough to eat and having health insurance and providing for one's family. A few dollars in the bank is also nice. Everyone has unexpected expenses and should have the dollars to coast through life's little emergencies.

We live in a society where if you declare yourself a businessperson, a lot of folks cheer you on as you amass wealth. That's more or less the defining scorecard on whether you're a success and worthy of admiration. When you're supposed to be an artist, it's a little different. An awful lot of folks expect you to create your Art for the sake of Art and nothing more…which might be okay if we lived in a world where food, rent, clothing and even the tools by which you create our Art were free. 'Til then, one must pay one's mortgage and Visa bill. A person may well be a capital-A Artist but first and foremost, he or she is a person with human needs and realities.

It is difficult to judge someone's life from afar. I have found that frequently, the guy you think is loaded is in actually in desperate financial trouble. And very often, people don't think of that at all. (How many of you were surprised to read that Burt Reynolds was broke?)

A few years ago, a Creative Person I know — I won't say if it's a writer or artist or actor or anything — took on a job for which others pilloried him as a sell-out. It was not worthy of him, they said. Not up to his high standards. He lowered himself for the Almighty Buck. It was like Olivier had gone out and dropped his pants in an Adam Sandler movie because someone had waved a big paycheck.

But to those who knew the Creative Person, it wasn't that at all. He hadn't done it because he was greedy. He'd done it because he was trying to save his life. He was in hock to Loan Sharks (in the guise of a perfectly respectable bank) for a large amount and they were talking about taking his home away…taking away everything he had in the world, in fact. He was literally "borrowing" money from friends to buy groceries for himself and his wife and kids.

I put "borrowing" in quotes because they all knew he'd never be able to pay it back. And he was running out of friends who were willing and able to make such "loans."

Needless to say, a Creative Person cannot be very creative in those circumstances. A painter cannot paint when he can't afford paint. A writer cannot write when his electricity is turned off. It's hard to create anything, good or bad, when your stomach is tied in sheep shank knots and you're panicked about the rent that's due in ten days.

Increasingly, I find myself discussing this when I speak to classes of wanna-be actors or writers. There's a certain romance to some about being in the situation where if you don't start getting decent-paying jobs soon, you'll be out in the street. I've also met some who think that putting themselves in that precarious position is a way to guarantee success: "I'll make it because I have to." It's been my observation that that rarely works. It's why there are more people in Los Angeles waiting tables who want to be Professional Actors than Professional Waiters.

What I suggest to them is that they find a steady source of income to tide them over while they wait for their break. Ideally, that might be in a related field — say, writing tech manuals while you wait to sell your screenplay — but that's not always possible. Second best would be something that gave you a steady income but flexible hours. You may have to, in effect, work two jobs at the same time: One to make your weekly nut and one to break into your chosen profession.

An actress I knew was getting small acting roles — a good start on a full-time career but not yet a full-time career. She signed with a "temp" agency to do typing and secretarial work and she did something I thought was smart. She told them to never send her to any job that involved show business. She'd drive to Downey to type mailing labels for a plumbing supply company but she wouldn't go type scripts over at Paramount. She didn't want people in the industry to see her and then think of her as a secretary who was trying to act. Getting "inside" that way might have been a pathway if she'd had no credits but she had enough that when she went in on auditions, they thought of her as an actress, not a secretary.

In my case, I was kinda lucky because I landed writing jobs right out of high school. They weren't necessarily the kind of writing jobs I wanted to make my career but they subsidized me while I got ever closer. When I was trying to break into writing for television, I had a decent income writing comic books and that made it easier to break into TV. When you're financially desperate, you can make some very bad decisions you wouldn't make if you had some cash banked. And a lot of folks just plain aren't inclined to hire you if you appear to be desperate.

But the main thing I want to get back to here is that a Creative Person has a duty to his or her muse and to his or her audience…but there's also a duty to paying down that MasterCard that's charging you 18.99%.

I know one Creative Person who's dealing now with a duty to pay a whopping tax bill to the Internal Revenue. He's doing jobs he might not otherwise do and selling things he might otherwise not sell, and some observers and acquaintances are saying he's greedy, he's a sell-out, he's just out for the Almighty Buck. But that's not what's really going on. What he is is desperate. (But of course, he doesn't want people to know he's desperate. Not only it is humiliating, it's also — see above — a good way to not get hired.)

And I want to also get back to something I said before: Sometimes, people you think are well-off are actually desperate. There are a thousand reasons why it happens but the point is it happens. Don't begrudge them the necessities of life: Home, food, car, health care, etc. Human beings need that and I don't care what anyone says. Actors, writers, artists, directors, producers, editors…they're all human.

Well, maybe not some producers…

I'm fifty. I'm not the same guy I was when I was forty, or thirty, never mind twenty, or ten. I visualize identity not as a solid object but as a wave form travelling along the temporal dimension through a complex emulsion of memories, experiences, and emotions, bounded at front and back by singularities—boundaries beyond which there is no continuity (and almost certainly no persistence of identity). We're all waves travelling through this common soup of human existential phenomena, occasionally refracting through one another and being changed thereby. And as we move, we change. Not only are our physical bodies not made up from the same individual atoms: the bits you could notionally use to describe us change, too. New data is added, old patterns are lost (I have the memory of a goldfish these days).

Beyond the obvious (gross physiological deterioration and pathologies of senescence), what are the psychological symptoms of ageing?

I tend to be somewhat impatient or short-tempered these days. Examples: getting worked up about people obstructing a sidewalk in front of me, or carelessly blowing smoke over their shoulder and into my face, walking while texting ... you know the drill. This I put down largely to the chronic low-grade pain of the middle-aged body: joints that creak and pop, muscles that need an extra stretch, sore feet. Certainly dosing up on an anti-inflammatory like naproxen or diclofenac is mildly helpful: if it wasn't also associated with a slightly elevated risk of sudden cardiac death I'd do it all the time. (I take special pains to be mindful of this tendency when driving, and compensate accordingly: wearing a couple of tons of metal and travelling an order of magnitude faster than on foot raises the potential costs of impatience from trivial to lethal. But then, I probably spend less than a hundred hours driving in any given year. Driving isn't routine any more (although I used to commute around 20,000 miles/year for work, back in the dark ages of the 1980s) so I can usually keep track of it.)

My memory, as previously noted, is a sieve. Partly I find myself living in a cluttered cognitive realm: I have so much context to apply to any new piece of incoming data. If middle-aged people seem slow at times it may not be because they're stupid (although stupidity is a non-ageist affliction) but because they're processing a lot more data than a young mind has on hand to digest. That shop window display? You're not just looking at this seasons clothing fashions, but integrating changes in fashion across multiple decades and recognizing when this stuff was last new. (And if fashion is your thing, you're trying to remember how far back in the wardrobe you hung it last time you wore it, all those years ago.) A side-effect of this: when experiencing something familiar through long repetition you forget it — you don't remember it as a new experience but merely as an instance of a familiar one and (eventually) as nothing at all. (For those of you with a workday routine, this can cut in quite early: how well do you remember your last commute to work? If you do remember it, do you remember it only because it was exceptional—a truck nearly t-boning you, for example?)

An intersecting effect of the aches and pains and the difficulty retrieving information is that you have to focus hard on tasks—it's hard to execute a day with six or seven distinct non-routine activities in it, because that requires planning and planning requires lots of that difficult mental integration. Planning is exhausting. Instead you focus on maintaining routines (get up, brush teeth, take meds, shave, use toilet, make coffee ... check. Go to gym: check. Eat lunch: check. Work at desk: check ...) and scheduling one or two exceptional tasks. Mental checklists help a lot, but you run into the sieve-shaped memory problem again: this is where digital prosthesis (or an overflowing filofax) come in handy.

Your perspective on current events changes. Take the news media. Everything new is old after a time: you see the large-scale similarities across decades even without becoming a student of history. Today's invasion or oil crisis is just like the one before last. Our current political leadership are stuck in the same ideological monkey's-paw trap as their predecessors the last time their party was in power. And so on. So you tend to discount current events and lose interest in the news until something new happens. (If you're wondering why I'm obsessively interested in the Scottish independence thing this year, it's because it's a disruptive event: nothing like it has happened in UK politics for a very long time indeed. It's fresh.)

The same thing happens to one's interest in the current celebrity culture or pop stars. I haven't heard any of Taylor Swift's music. Or Amy Winehouse's. I have no idea about the Kardashians other than that they're famous for being famous. These people are successful players with careers that follow a handful of standard trajectories: well, good luck to them with it. If they make music that speaks to me I'll hear some of it sooner or later and then start exploring their back catalog, but I feel no urge to get sucked in by the hype and excitement right now. Been there, seen it all before. (The last live concert I went to was Nine Inch Nails; the next will probably be Lene Lovich. That should tell you just how non-current I am ...)

Planning takes on a different perspective because your relationship with time frames alters. When you're in your early 20s retirement seems infinitely far away, and the idea of laying plans for a 25 year span is positively surreal. But when you're 50 you've experienced multiple such overlapping periods. You can recognize gross patterns and trends in your life and understand how to set your sights on goals years in the future. My work, these days, often involves planning and executing projects that take months to carry out and must be scheduled years in advance. As an extreme example, I'm midway through a personal project (performing some rather informal A/B testing on two ongoing series of books) that will take 3-5 years to get any useful information out of. So, while short-term task-juggling becomes harder, really long-term project planning gets paradoxically easier.

Interpersonal relationships change in scope, too. Everything is intense and fresh and immediate when you're young. Emotional engagement is high. Emotional engagement doesn't necessarily slacken with age, but the amount of energy we can bring to bear on our relationships diminishes along with our stamina. Watch a pair of 70-80 year olds who've been together for half a century some time. They often appear to ignore each other, because they have such a strong internal model of the other's mind that they can anticipate their partner's words or actions: it's an ignorance derived from deep insight and familiarity, not obliviousness. There's some evidence from cognitive psychology that we use our partners or children or other relatives as external content-addressable memory storage, relying on their shared experience to fill in our patchy recollections: just like google. (Google isn't making our memory obsolete, rather it's plugging into an existing interpersonal human mechanism at a very low level.) At the same time, they may not notice or be able to respond effectively if their partner is undergoing an exceptional crisis such as a stroke or heart attack: the phenomenon is so far out of scope that they don't recognize it as an emergency at first, unless their attention is specifically redirected from their mental map of the other and back to the human territory it represents. Especially as our stamina diminishes with age, until in extreme old age even focusing on our own immediate needs is a challenge.

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So, you've been reading a Charlie Stross blog entry and you're wondering where the zinger is.

Here's the speculation. Let us suppose that in the next couple of decades we develop a cure for the worst problems associated with senescence. We figure out how to reverse the cumulative damage to mitochondrial DNA, to reset the telomere end caps of stem cells without issuing carte blanche to every hopeful cancer in our bodies, to unravel the cumulative damage of prion proteins, to tame the cumulative inflammation that causes atherosclerosis, to fix the underlying mechanism behind metabolic syndrome (the cause of hypertension and type II diabetes).

We now have a generation of 70 year olds who in 20 years time will be physiologically in their 40s, not their 90s. At worst, they're no longer in the steep decline of late old age: at best, they're ageing backwards to their first flush of adult fitness.

You're one of them. You're 25-60 years old now. You're going to be 55-90 years old by then. Unlike today's senior citizens, you don't ache whenever you get out of bed, you're physically fit, you don't have cancer or heart disease or diabetes or Alzheimer's, you aren't deaf or blind or suffering from anosmia or peripheral neuropathy or other sensory impairments, and you're physically able to enjoy your sex life. Big win all round.

But your cognitive functioning is burdened by decades of memories to integrate, canalized by prior experiences, dominated by the complexity of long-term planning at the expense of real-time responsiveness. Every time you look around you are struck by intricate, esoteric cross-references to that which has gone before. Every politician, celebrity, actor, blogger, pop star, author ... you've seen someone like them previously, you know what they're going to say before they open their mouth. Every new policy or strategy has failure modes you recognize: "that won't work" is your usual response to change, not because you're a curmudgeonly pessimist but because you've been there before.

Maybe you're going to make extensive use of lifeloggers or external prosthetic memory assistance devices—think of your own personal google, refreshing your memory whenever you ask the right question—or maybe you're going to float forward in time through a haze of forgetting, deliberately shedding old context to make room for fresh. Some folks try for rolling amnesia with a 40-70 year horizon behind them. You gradually lose contact with such people because they just don't want to know you any more. Others try to hang on to every experience, wallowing in the lush, intricate texture of an extended lifespan until their ability to respond is so impaired that they appear catatonic.

Which are you going to be? And how will you cope with a century of memories contained in the undecaying flesh of indefinitely protracted adulthood?

LEGO's letter to parents: how not to tell fake typography when you don't see it.

You may remember from last time that John Lewis failed to deliver our new dishwasher, didn’t even trouble to tell us that they weren’t coming, and wouldn’t prioritise getting it to us subsequently. Everything that’s happened since has made a bad situation worse. The upshot is that three full weeks after I placed my order, I am sitting at home, unable to go food-shopping, in the pathetic hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll do what we paid them for.

Here’s the timeline:

Friday 7 November: our nine-year-old dishwasher dies.

Saturday 8 November: I order a new one from John Lewis, based on their reputation for competence, professionalism and reliability. Delivery is booked for Thursday 13th.

Thursday 13 November: nothing happens. Absolutely nothing. We stay in all day, and the dishwasher doesn’t arrive. John Lewis don’t phone us. John Lewis don’t email us. I email them to ask what happened.

Friday 14 November: no reply to my email. I phone them. They have no meaningful explanation for why they didn’t deliver: they say the driver couldn’t find the house, but Google Maps takes you to point 40 m from our door. There is no offer to get it to us the next day. The next slot they offer is a week later. I cancel the order.

Later on Friday: I blog and tweet about John Lewis’s failure. Now they contact me: evidently they only care about dumping on customers when the rest of the world hears about it.

Monday 17 November: they offer me a £50 discount if I re-place the order. Stupidly, I do so — I should have gone to a competent supplier instead, but I was seduced by the discount. The new delivery date is Thursday 27th.

Thursday 27 November: we stay in all day. Finally, in the evening, we get a call from the delivery van saying they’re half an hour away from us, and checking on how to find us. Hurrah! We’re on the home stretch!

An hour later: the delivery man calls to say he drove his HGV down a steep narrow lane marked “No HGVs”, got stuck, and burned out his clutch. He is one and a half miles away from our home, but has no way to get the dishwasher to us.

Late that night: the only remotely positive part of this experience: John Lewis called us for the only time. A very helpful woman said she’d do all she could to get a dishwasher to us the very next day, and promised faithfully that they’ll keep us informed.

Friday 28 November: they don’t keep us informed. They don’t phone. They don’t email. They don’t respond to the complaint that I file (not the first time this has happened). We stay in all day. No dishwasher comes.

Later on Friday: Fiona phones them. After the obligatory on-hold time, she’s told that they’re very sorry that they didn’t deliver the dishwasher, but don’t say why not. They explain the reason they’ve not phones is because they thought they’d phoned us but actually hadn’t.

Saturday morning (now): here I am, waiting for the dishwasher that I am 99% certain won’t arrive. Fiona is out at a long-standing appointment. I can’t leave the house to do the shopping, for fear that they will finally turn up, see that there’s no adult at home to sign for the dishwasher, and take it away.

At this point, I can’t make myself believe that it will ever actually arrive.

Put this all together. What we have is a retailer that has repeatedly failed to deliver — they are currently on their fourth attempt, and I have no confidence in it. We have a retailer that has repeatedly failed to communicate with us, including ignoring five of the eight complaints I’ve filed, and not even explaining anything on the occasions we have managed to establish contact. We have a retailer that has repeatedly lied to us, both about when it’s going to deliver and about how it’s going to keep us informed.

In short, it’s pretty hard to see how John Lewis could have performed worse, short of burning our house down.

So I am posting this for two reasons. One is just an outlet for my disappointment and anger. The other, more constructive reason is a warning: don’t use John Lewis. They will let you down, over and over again. Order from someone else. Anyone else. For myself, I certainly won’t be using them again once this sad affair is finally over.

Immediate update

Literally ten minutes after posting this …

Fiona is on the phone right now to them. It turns out they lied again in saying they would deliver it today. It’s not coming today.

The good news is, at least I can go food-shopping.

Fiona is now trying to get them to deliver tomorrow.

Abject failure-to-deliver-count: four fails and counting.

Update 2 (three minutes later)

They hung up on us. They hung up on us. They put Fiona on hold, then hung up on us, in the middle of supposedly trying to arrange a Sunday delivery.

Now what? Should I email them again? Is there any point? Should I hope they’ll phone back? Does that mean I have to stay in and can’t go food-shopping after all?

Should I cancel the order and start all over again with a different supplier? Should I drive into Bristol, physically take a dishwasher from the John Lewis branch, drive it home and try to plumb it in myself? Should I just up on the idea of ever having a functional dishwasher again?

Update 3 (15 minutes later)

From the left-hand-doesn’t-know-what-the-right-hand-is-doing department …

I never did hear back from John Lewis to complete the phone-call that they cut off while we were on hold.

But I did just hear from their driver saying he should be with us by about 12:30. So the evidence, such as it is, suggests that they are delivering today, but that no-one in customer support knows this.

Stand by for further exciting bulletins.

Update 4 (3 hours later)

Well, it’s here — plumbed in and (as far as we can tell) working. So I guess this constitutes some kind of a happy ending. Most of all, I am just relieved that all this is over, and I don’t have to make any further futile attempts at communication with John Lewis.

From a New Statesman interview with the comedian by Rob Pollard:

Jimmy Carr very kindly got me on 8 Out Of 10 Cats once and they were all making fun of Big Brother, and I said something like: "Isn't it funny how this programme and Big Brother are both made by the same company, Endemol". And it was as if Endemol creates a product which it knows is ridiculous and exploitative, but it also creates a programme which satirises it and it makes money out of both of them. 

And the people in the audience, started booing – I don’t know why – and then Jimmy Carr said to me: "I can honestly say of everything that’s ever been said on this programme, that’s the least likely to make the edit." 

I sort of thought it was funny; I wasn't trying to be obstructive. I just thought it was funny how people can sit there and not realise the irony of that.

As part of my long-running scheme to become insanely rich while doing as little work as possible, I had another brilliant idea that will surely make me loads of money if someone else is willing to do all the work and then pay me for the inspiration.

Watching the usual Thursday night flurry of indignant commentary on Twitter’s #bbqt hashtag, it occurred to me that there exists a large group of people (sometimes including me) who appear to only watch some things on TV in order to mock it and argue about it on Twitter. There’s very little ‘hey, this is great, you should turn it on and watch it’ and lots more ‘oh god, this is terrible, they’re all completely wrong.’ This proves that we can have lots of fun socially hate-watching something, while the things we love we prefer to do alone.

That’s all well and good (though a little short of any actual evidence), you say, but how does this revelation lead to your masterplan of getting rich through doing as little work as possible? Yes, certain programmes do have an oddly negative fanbase, but monetising that group to provide me with the many mansions I’m sure I deserve is not a simple prospect, is it? Let’s be honest, whoever is behind Dimblebot isn’t having to sell their mugs and t-shirts through tax havens to protect their millions.

But that’s because they’re thinking too small. What we need is a way to unite all the various hatedoms, to give them one place in which to gather and virtually vent their spleens, to guarantee that at any time of day they can join in an active community of haters who’ll appreciate their wittily crafted quips and bile-laden put downs. What we need, in short, is The Hate Channel.

It’s quite simple. A TV channel that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, offers programming that’s solely designed to aggravate and promote communal snark (use of the official #hatechannel hashtags will be promoted, of course). As it’s a likely to begin life as a lower-tier service, it will have to buy in a lot of pre-hated content, but most people are so happy to have something to virtually shout at that they won’t care that it’s a repeat. (No one ever listens to what Goldstein says in the Two Minute Hate, after all)

I’m envisaging mining the archives for previous seasons of classic reality hatealongs like The Apprentice and Made In Chelsea. For drama, there’d entire decades of terrible stuff that was just unlucky to be shown in an age before Twitter: save yourself from the 879th iteration of your argument about Steven Moffat by joining in the bile-ridden discussion of Bonekickers, Attachments, Bugs and countless others, while classic drama will resurrect the most earnestly wooden and dated Plays For Today and other 70s drama to enable group mockery of outdated social norms. Sport will centre around exclusive rights to complete match broadcasts of the World Cup’s least interesting 0-0 draws, cricket’s dullest draws and a The Complete Commentaries of Clive Tyldesley. News will be easy to cover, with The Best Of Kay Burley at 6pm and 10pm every night (with no repeats guaranteed!), followed by Newsnight’s Most Pointless Moments and repeats of Question Time. Current affairs programming also dominates weekend mornings giving viewers the chance to catch up with Andrew Marr’s Least Penetrating Interviews and Sunday Morning Vaguely Religious Themed Shows’ Least Intelligent Arguments.

As the budget permits, new and original programming will be interspersed into the mix, and I’m sure the daily three-hour broadcast of Richard Littlejohn In Conversation With Katie Hopkins will arouse much righteous indignation, with political balance provided by Owen Jones and Polly Toynbee Explain Why You’re Wrong About Everything. I’m also sure that the very flexible panel show format Extremely Minor Celebrities Saying Something Mildly Controversial will prove a great hit, providing everyone agrees to leave all their restraint behind before watching, but as that seems to be de rigueur for most modern TV commentary, we should be fine.

Once the viewer numbers pick up, we’ll be able to ensure that it remains a constant feed of hate-watching by only allowing adverts that actively encourage angered responses. Christmas advertising will start in January each year, and be accompanied by a stream of cheaply made adverts for companies operating on the very edge of legality and morality, all repeated endlessly with ad breaks chopped into programmes at random. Aspect ratios and picture quality of all programmes will be endlessly tinkered with, just to ensure that every form of internet pedant has something to annoy them, and schedules will be advisory at best, regularly tinkered with to ensure that you never quite get to see what you were expecting.

The Hate Channel – We Hate What You Hate, And We Hate You. It’s the future of television, now make it real and give me my 10%.

I doubt anyone cares but I have pretty much given up the "Bill Cosby could be innocent" disclaimer in talks about this matter. I suspect most of his staunchest defenders have too, in their hearts if not in their discussions. You want to be fair but there comes a point where you can't even make yourself believe you think that's a possibility.

People keep asking me, "Why doesn't he go on Oprah or somewhere and explain his position?" The answer to that probably is that he can't. When you try to think why he doesn't do this or that, you have to remember that he and his advisers are making those decisions with a whole different, larger set of facts than we have. They know what else might come out, which victims may be poised to cause Cosby more trouble, how his closest friends and family members feel about all this, etc. They're probably also trying to keep him out of future legal situations where he might have to give testimony under oath. (See William Jefferson Clinton v. Paula Corbin Jones, 1997)

And people keep asking me, "What, if anything, will be left of his career?" Well, that may depend on what else comes out and what kind of legal problems, if any, he encounters.

Assuming it gets no worse for the man — which, given the way the last week or two has been going for him, is not a great assumption — I think we can say this: Someone will hire him to go on stages and do his routines and someone will pay to see him. Even O.J. Simpson had a certain amount of earning power after he lost the civil suit and before he went to prison for the less-serious crime. So if Cosby does want to continue performing, as he might, he can be playing someplace. But I don't think we're going to see any more Jell-O commercials or honors or talk show appearances or new Cosby Shows, though the reruns will trickle back into view.

Still, I dunno. Who would have thought that Mike Tyson, who did prison time for rape and committed a barbaric act on live TV, would claw his way back to some manner of respectability? He did a one-man show on Broadway to packed houses and he has a cartoon show on Adult Swim. Then again, Tyson did his time and never pretended to be America's Dad and a scolding moralist. A guy who becomes famous for beating people up never really lets anyone down by being violent.

I seem to be in a Silver Lining mood today so I have one for the Cosby matter…

In Miami last weekend, I got to talking with Denis Kitchen about his fine biography (buy it if you haven't yet) of Al Capp. Capp was a scolding moralist and a hero to some before it came out that along with being a great cartoonist, he was an accomplished raper of college girls. Some who want to believe in Cosby's innocence argue that if it was true, he couldn't have gotten away with it as long as he did without it becoming public knowledge. Capp got away with it for a pretty long time and kept it even quieter.

The creator of Li'l Abner finally got busted in 1971. In the years just before that, I was starting to get to know some of his peers, some of the more prominent syndicated cartoonists. I therefore observed a rather amazing transformation. I watched grown men learn that rape is not a funny, colorful prank that goes just one notch past talking a cute woman into bed. I heard a couple of Capp's peers talk about his antics (to them, they were antics) with amusement and even a hint of admiration. These were men between the ages of, say, 50-70, and they just didn't get it. One even said something like, "The girls today, going around dressing like that, they're practically begging for it."

That was before what Capp was doing was reported widely, starting with a scoop in Jack Anderson's newspaper column and a report by one of his aides, Brit Hume. Yes, that Brit Hume. None of those on whom Capp had preyed had pressed charges or insisted on Capp's arrest. They didn't want to get into a "my word against his" battle with a famous man who could afford the best lawyers and most feared a legal system that would in its own way, put them on trial.

But the news stories emboldened one recent victim, Capp was charged and while he got off without jail time, he was humiliated and ruined. And a lot of men — not enough but a lot — figured out that rape wasn't like a great practical joke or a good way to get laid without buying her dinner. Some of them even learned that it wasn't about sex so much as about power, violence, and even pathological hatred. I witnessed this enlightenment on the part of several of Capp's friends and colleagues. The next time I was around some of those gents, it was not, "Hey, did you hear how Capp got a college girl to blow him?" It was, "What a sick, horrible man." Correct. Even the "practically begging for it" guy said that.

Few (if any) of Cosby's current accusers seem to be doing it because they see fame 'n' fortune. That's one reason, along with their number, that they have so much credibility. Some may be doing it because they still need to not feel that bastard got away with it…but I'll bet you they're all thinking others can learn from this. Men can learn that rape is a serious crime…and by the way, so is slipping a drug in someone's drink even if you don't rape them. Women can learn to beware and that even a famous, seemingly-benevolent person can be not so benevolent.

And this kind of thing needs to be reported. Even if you think no one will listen to you, it needs to be reported and those reports need to be investigated, not dismissed because the alleged perpetrator is beloved and/or wealthy. This whole matter with Bill Cosby is so sad and so troubling in so many ways…but if you're searching for some good to come of it, there's this: Some people are learning that it's a crime no less serious than if someone came up behind you with a knife and stabbed you. And somewhere, someone is going to be dissuaded from trying what Cosby did because he'll think, "Geez, even a rich guy like that couldn't get away with it…"

pic.twitter.com/7g0LyKdhLo

— PolPics (@PolPics) November 28, 2014

What current MP Tweeted yesterday

“@FarageNo: @MSmithsonPB @LordAshcroft That's what happens when you don't visit the constituency in 3 months.” #desperatelyseekingNigel

— Laura Sandys (@LauraSandysMP) November 27, 2014

At the PB party a week ago I was somewhat surprised at being told by at least two kippers that it wasn’t entirely certain that Nigel Farage was going to stand in the Thanet South constituency on May 7th. I, and apparently most punters, thought that this was a certainty following his selection that was widely reported in August.

Adding to the mystery was the above Tweet from outgoing CON MP for the seat, Laura Sandys, about the UKIP leader not have being seen there for three months.

Whoever you are at this stage before an election you make sure that you are regularly seen in the constituency that you will soon be fighting.

Indeed back in 2009 Farage himself stepped down as UKIP leader so he could devote himself to winning Buckingham where John Bercow is the sitting MP and where none of the main parties put up candidates.

Apart from two ex-MPs who have defected UKIP has never won a Westminster seat and this needs graft and commitment. The actual choice that people is not like the party list in the Euros but for an individual who will be the area’s representative at Westminster. The ground work has to be done.

If Farage is having second thoughts then yesterday’s Ashcroft poll of Thanet South will add to them. The last thing he can risk is putting himself up for election and then failing.

Meanwhile UKIP’s odds start to move out

Before yesterday's Thanet South poll Ladbrokes http://t.co/ZlibygoyoN had UKIP at 2/5 for the seat. Now that's moved to 4/6

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) November 28, 2014

Mike Smithson

Ranked in top 33 most influential over 50s on Twitter

Follow @MSmithsonPB

Crazymeds.us is an excellent and highly informative site which I will never recommend to my patients.

It’s excellent because it gives mostly accurate and readable descriptions of the costs and benefits of every psychiatric medication. It has a laser-like focus on what patients will actually want to know and was clearly written by someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of every treatment’s strengths and potential pitfalls.

This is important because the standard psychiatric response to someone who wants to know about a medication (when it’s not “shut up and trust me”) is to print out an information sheet from somewhere like drugs.com or webmd.com. These sites at worst just copy paste the FDA drug information sheet, and at best list off side effects in a rote and irrelevant way that only a robot could love.

Here’s an excerpt from drugs.com about the side effects of Prozac:

Get emergency medical help if you have any of these signs of an allergic reaction to fluoxetine: skin rash or hives; difficulty breathing; swelling of your face, lips, tongue, or throat.

Report any new or worsening symptoms to your doctor, such as: mood or behavior changes, anxiety, panic attacks, trouble sleeping, or if you feel impulsive, irritable, agitated, hostile, aggressive, restless, hyperactive (mentally or physically), more depressed, or have thoughts about suicide or hurting yourself.

Call your doctor at once if you have:

– blurred vision, tunnel vision, eye pain or swelling, or seeing halos around lights;

– high levels of serotonin in the body–agitation, hallucinations, fever, fast heart rate, overactive reflexes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of coordination, fainting;

– low levels of sodium in the body–headache, confusion, slurred speech, severe weakness, vomiting, loss of coordination, feeling unsteady;

– severe nervous system reaction–very stiff (rigid) muscles, high fever, sweating, confusion, fast or uneven heartbeats, tremors, feeling like you might pass out; or

– severe skin reaction–fever, sore throat, swelling in your face or tongue, burning in your eyes, skin pain, followed by a red or purple skin rash that spreads (especially in the face or upper body) and causes blistering and peeling.

Common fluoxetine side effects may include:

– sleep problems (insomnia), strange dreams;
– headache, dizziness, vision changes;
– tremors or shaking, feeling anxious or nervous;
– pain, weakness, yawning, tired feeling;
– upset stomach, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea;
– dry mouth, sweating, hot flashes;
– changes in weight or appetite;
– stuffy nose, sinus pain, sore throat, flu symptoms; or
– decreased sex drive, impotence, or difficulty having an orgasm.

This is not a complete list of side effects and others may occur. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

If I ask a patient to read this, one of two things happen. First, they read the first few sentences and are like “Sure, whatever, I’ll read it when I get home” and then throw the paper in the trash can on the way out of the room. Or second, they get to the part where it says “agitation, hallucinations, fever, fast heart rate, overactive reflexes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of coordination, fainting” and they’re like WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO GIVE ME I’M NOT TAKING THIS GARBAGE!

Here’s crazymeds.us on the same topic:

4.1  Typical Side Effects of Prozac (fluoxetine HCl)

The usual for SSRIs – headache, nausea, dry mouth, sweating, sleepiness or insomnia, and diarrhea or constipation, weight gain, loss of libido. Most everything will go away after a week or two, but the weight gain and loss of libido might stick around longer. Or permanently. Although weight gain is a coin toss.

4.2  Not So Common Side Effects of Prozac (fluoxetine HCl)

Rash, ‘flu-like symptoms, anger/rage.

4.3  Prozac (fluoxetine HCl) Freaky Rare Side Effects

Bleeding gums, amnesia, anti-social reaction (oh, come on, like we’re not anti-social already), herpes (again, blaming the med for an STD), excessive hair growth, engorged breasts (a.k.a. porno boobs), involuntary tongue protrusion (according to the PI sheet / PDR one 77-year-old woman stopped sticking her tongue out at everyone after they stopped giving her Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride)).

This is readable, complete without being overwhelming, gives you a good idea how likely everything is, and, dare I say it, funny. It tells you which things to expect, how long to expect them to last, and even mentions that they’re “usual for SSRIs”, which is pretty important for someone using the side effects to decide whether they want to take Prozac vs. another drug.

I also am eternally grateful for them mentioning how some people blame the medication for their STDs – the FDA has this thing where if someone reports something they take it seriously, and it ends up with drug leaflets including anything that’s ever happened to someone while on a drug as a “possible side effect” (“My pet turtle died when I was on Prozac, I demand you warn customers that one side effect of Prozac is ‘increased mortality for associated chelonians’!”) Crazymeds.us calls them out on this.

Everything crazymeds.us does is like this. Well-written, funny, mostly accurate (with the occasional mistake but no more than you’d expect from an individual effort), and precisely targeted to what patients really need to know.

And I still don’t recommend it to my patients, and probably never will. Why not?

Well, for one thing, it’s called crazymeds.us.

Most psychiatric patients have no problem with the word “crazy”. Either they don’t think of themselves as crazy, or they jokingly call themselves crazy and are happy to let other people in on the joke, or they self-identify as crazy as matter-of-factly as they’ll tell you the time of day, or they just don’t care.

But some psychiatric patients care about it a lot. Either they’re moderately neurotic people who are scared that if they accept psychiatric help with their mild depression it puts them in a category of “total lunatic” from which they will never escape, or they’re social justice types who are watching like hawks for any sign that their psychiatrist is a privileged ableist oppressor trying to use slurs to trivialize their concerns and victim-blame them for their problems.

I can usually tell which category a given person is in pretty quickly, but the chance of accidentally slipping up and recommending to someone from the second category a site called crazymeds.us is too horrible to contemplate.

And it’s not just the name. Somebody is going to say that the reference to “porno boobs” is objectifying women or trivializing the problems of people with gynaecomastia. Someone will point out their misuse of the term antisocial and their seemingly flippant dismissal of social phobia. Someone will definitely have something to say about the issues raised by selling crazymeds-brand mugs saying “Medicated For Your Protection”. This isn’t just a couple of slipups here or there. It’s the entire ethos of the site.

Alyssa Vance introduced me to the idea of “negative selection”. It’s when you don’t care how good something is, you just want it to definitely not be bad. For example, when you’re hiring fast food workers, you’re not looking for someone with a Harvard degree in fast foodology who will revolutionize what it means to work at McDonalds for generations to come, you just want someone who you’re really sure isn’t going to show up late or commit any crimes.

Likewise, medicine involves some heavy negative selection. If I become the best, most likeable, most respectful, most intelligent psychiatric resident in the country – well, I’d still get paid exactly as much as I do now. On the other hand, if even one patient lodges a complaint against me – let alone a lawsuit – that’s probably a hospital investigation and a stern talking-to from my boss and his boss and a discussion of why a site called crazymeds.us talking about how psych patients are “Medicated For Your Protection” is Not Appropriate and really you’re a second-year resident shouldn’t you know things like that already maybe you need some Remedial Communication Skills Classes.

Side effects of crazymeds.com may include agitation, aggression, and job loss. I think I can predict pretty well which patients will and won’t appreciate this kind of message, but all I need is one misclassification to get screwed over. So, with apologies to the many patients who could be helped by something like crazymeds.us, I’m giving this particular minefield a wide berth.

Part of me wants to grab whoever made the site and scream at them “WHY? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? YOU COULD HAVE BEEN BY FAR THE BEST PSYCHIATRIC RESOURCE ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET, IMPROVED THE LIVES OF TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE, AND YOU THREW IT ALL AWAY FOR SOME STUPID JOKES.”

But there’s also a part of me that accepts they probably have their reasons. I’m not sure it’s possible to make a site as good as crazymeds.us without it being as offensive as crazymeds.us. Remove every single flippant statement and optimize for complete unobjectionability, and you’re most of the way back to drugs.com. I mean, there are certainly some simple improvements that could be made on drugs.com, and there’s probably a market for a site like that, and maybe that site already exists and I just haven’t found it. But crazymeds is something special. It’s inspiring trust through countersignaling. In a field where almost everyone is a dry, scientific person who won’t give you a straight answer about anything or treat you like a human being, crazymeds’ business strategy is to make it super obvious they’re the exact opposite of that. They’re human, and I think that’s precisely why a demographic who wouldn’t trust anybody else trusts crazymeds.

Athrelon writes about social technology, structures and institutions that allow the maintenance of trust and order with a minimum of fuss. Crazymeds is an item of social technology that draws people who would normally be unwilling to learn about the psychiatric system into an engagement with it and an ability to understand and manage their own care.

Athrelon also writes about the breakdown of social technology in the face of certain modern social norms. And I talk a lot about “political correctness” and so on. And one retort I sometimes get is “political correctness just means being nice and not going around offending people. How could you possibly be against that?” And I have had vague feelings that it probably does something bad and have just mumbled something about how I’d look for an example and let you know when I found one.

Well, this is an example. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who would benefit from crazymeds, or at least from straighter talk than the carefully hedged neutral statements on drugs.com, or at least from a little bit of humor or conversation in a register associated with normal healthy human relationships – but as long as I’m not 100% certain no one will be offended, and as long as that one offended person can cause me more grief than the hundreds of satisfied customers can possibly make up for, I’m going to keep printing drugs.com handouts, and explaining while mentally facepalming that no, the hallucinations and agitations don’t happen to everyone.

On the other hand, you guys have taken much worse from me and I’m still here, so I recommend it to you without hesitation. Obvious caveats (eg don’t do anything without talking to a doctor first) are obvious.

Labour MP Gloria De Piero has a piece on LabourList today where she highlights Lib Dem "hypocrisy" on pay transparency.

She talks about how Jo Swinson has been going around saying that compulsory pay transparency is now Lib Dem policy and how it is necessary to help close the gender pay gap.

But the twist in the tale is that Labour are organising a vote on this issue on 16th December and the Lib Dems are not going to vote for it. Hence all the talk of hypocrisy.

I'm not a Lib Dem any more and I don't blog as often as I used to mainly because I feel so often like I am just repeating myself but I'll have another go.

Gloria, the reason why the Lib Dems cannot vote with you is. Wait for it. Because....

They. Are. In. Coalition.

That means they cannot just go around voting on things that are not agreed government policy. If they were to do that the government would collapse.

Gloria knows this of course. She's just playing political games in the hope of "embarrassing" the Lib Dems.

A couple of years ago Gloria went round the country speaking to people on her "Why do you hate me?" tour, trying to find out why people dislike politicians so much. Well here is a prime example. An MP pretending she does not understand how collective government responsibility works in order to score political points from one of her rivals. I'd say that's a good reason why people hate MPs Gloria.

There is a way to redeem yourself though. If there is another hung parliament after the next election, and if Labour find themselves in coalition with a smaller party, you will need to argue vociferously for that smaller party to be able to vote any way they wish on any issue. And Labour will just have to put up with the consequences of this.

After all, anything else would mean that party being "hypocritical" wouldn't it Gloria?

And we can't have that now can we?

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill was published yesterday, along with a couple of supporting documents, but it is still unclear exactly what data the Home Office is proposing to retain.

There is a need for the government to clarify the language in the bill and supporting documents, because it will be difficult to have a debate about security vs. freedom without this information. (We would really have to assume the worse case option, numbers 2 & 3 below combined) It may also result in legal wrangling if a service provider objects at a later stage to the information they are being asked to collect.

There are three likely interpretations of the bill:

1. They want to keep:
   • account-to-IP address mappings for broadband
   • source IP address and port for NAT on mobile and cloud networks
   • MAC addresses on cloud WiFi networks.

   Although the data does not seem particularly useful and would thus query the price tag, the civil liberties implications seem minor, given that this data may be being kept by the ISPs in many cases already.

2. As (1), but also collecting data such as MAC addresses from end-user equipment where it is operated by an ISP. (E.g. BT Home Hub) This is troubling, as people will not expect that equipment in their own homes would be spying on them.
3. As (1) or (2), but also keeping some element of destination information to allow matching with destination server logs – e.g. destination IP address and port. Although in many cases an IP address/port combination is ambiguous when it comes to what site is being visited that is not always the case. Collecting this data strays into the same territory as with the Communications Data Bill.

It has been suggested that there may be a provision somewhere to also require CSPs (Facebook, Twitter etc) to keep source port information in server logs, which would make the data from (1) more useful if the source and destination is also in the UK.

If they could also publish how many additional RIPA requests they would expect to be able to get a positive result from due to this bill, that would also be useful information.

(It’s also worth reading the Impact Assessment if you are researching all this)

The police are said to be launching an investigation into expenses fraud in the House of Lords a year after the Mirror caught disgraced peer Lord Hanningfield claiming £300 expenses before immediately leaving.

This is a year after the Mirror investigation, but the scandal has been well known years before that. My old organisation Unlock Democracy revealed dozens of questionable cases in 2012, and working peers have reported people clocking in and sodding off for years. It’s almost as if they were somewhat reluctant to investigate for some reason.

Allow me to introduce you to the Earl of Rosslyn, aka Peter Loughborough.

For years, the Earl has worked in the Metropolitan police as the head of royal protection. Unlock Democracy uncovered that he had clocked up over £15,000 in daily allowances in 2011 despite not voting at all or being a member of any committees. In fact, up until that point, he had only voted seven times in the Lords in total, five of which in 2007 when democratic reform of the Lords came up. He was, of course, against.

Between April 2013 and March 2014, he claimed a further £8,700. He still doesn’t sit on any committees, and he has not voted at all since 2007. As a senior policeman, he had a full time job, and it’s genuinely bemusing how he can justify these claims. According to the official register he also claimed “Ministerial and Office Holder Secretarial Expenses” (quantity undetermined), but he holds no ministerial or parliamentary office. If his attendance was as part of his police duties, the cost of him walking for five minutes from Scotland Yard to the Houses of Parliament is already covered by his salary.

According to the Daily Mail, earlier this year he left his police role to become the head of Prince Charles’s household. He has not apparently attended the House of Lords since taking on this role (accurate up to June 2014). Clarence House is, of course, much further to walk to Parliament from than Scotland Yard.

I’m sure it is a complete coincidence that this investigation has only started six months after a potential suspect has left the senior ranks of the Metropolitan Police, and I’m sure they will demonstrate this fact by taking Peter Loughborough in for questioning.

Thursday:


This time last month, we were on our way to New England, setting for “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by (unspeakably racist) HP Lovecraft, wherein it turns out the locals have been (spoilers) interbreeding with immigrants.

This time last week, the locals of Rochester and Strood were cheerily chucking out their incumbent Tory MP and re-electing him as a Kipper. This despite him revealing that his new Party’s policies are entirely as anti-immigrant as we suspected.

This time in July, Ed Milipede was giving one of his relaunch speeches claiming he “didn’t do image”. And on Thursday, he proved it.


Mr Milipede’s preposterously over-the-top faux-outrage firing of Emily Thornberry for her “Image from Rochester” tweet put the (probably tin-foil) cap on the whole ridiculous affair of a by-election win for “A Plague on All Your Houses”.

The tweet itself was a relatively innocuous picture of house decked in flags and white van, with neutral comment. It was only possible to interpret it as a passive-aggressive attack of snobbish contempt because of the febrile atmosphere that economic post-Armageddon has brewed, one to which Labour have contributed more than a little, encouraging the “us v them”, “Westminster bubble”, “plebgate” contempt for all things elected and establishment. As in Scotland, Labour’s taking for granted of the people they are supposed to most represent comes back to haunt them. As they reap so they sow.

Am I snobbish about the man the Sun has dubbed “White Van Dan”?

No.

I’m repulsed by the policies he espouses and profoundly depressed by the ignorance that informs them.

Bash the benefits; block the immigrants; spend more; tax less; and bring back the cane. If these things worked we’d have solved all of society’s problems by now. And why the reactionary paranoia about burning the poppy when no one is even doing it?

But “point and laugh” tactics particularly from a Metropolitan Liberal Elite Minority like me, never mind Ms Thornberry, is not the way to engage with this kind of thinking. In fact, it’s massively counter-productive, lending “Dan” the fake credence of being “against The Man”, when in fact he’s expressing exactly the sort of white cis straight male privileged oppression that generations of genuine outsiders have been struggling to get out from under.

But while Ms Thornberry’s tweet may have been revealing, the response by Labour’s spin team was nothing short of astonishing. The suggestion that the Labour Leader was “more furious than he’d ever been” was beyond ludicrous.

More furious than over phone hacking, Ed? More outraged than by tuition fees? More angry than at the bedroom tax?

The sad thing is he probably was more furious over an incident that did damage to Labour’s image than by any of those things. There’s a reason why Miliband’s leadership is not seen as “genuine”. It’s because it’s not.

Maybe it was a typo: “The Labour leader is more fatuous than he’s ever been”?

And yet, in one way, he was actually right. The sacking of a shadow cabinet member over a photograph was a massive distraction from the appalling reactionary lurch of British politics.

It’s what the Tories used to call a “Double Whammy”, with on the one fluffy foot more ludicrous Security Theatre and on the other more Anti-immigration nonsense.

It is surely a co-incidence that the Metropolitan police are warning commuters to “Run, Hide, and Tell” and trying to convince the City that saw off the Luftwaffe that it’s facing its “worst threat ever” just as the Home Secretary is trying to sex up her TPIMS, exclude British citizens who’ve been to fight in Syria, and raise her Snoopers' Charter from the dead.

Only this week we’ve heard evidence that the Security Services had information on the killers of Lee Rigby and still failed to stop them. It’s no good trying to pin the blame on Facebook; demanding access and retention of even more data only makes a bigger haystack to lose the needles in.

And as for cancelling the passports of British terrorists who’ve gone to fight in Syria and Iraq: washing your hands of a problem is a shockingly weak abrogation of responsibility, not a strong stance against terror.

And the Liberal Democrats’ principled opposition has… melted away.


Meanwhile, the Tories received a well-deserved humiliation for their failure to deliver on an in-so-many-ways stupid pledge to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands.

And yet we hear Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary – surely that’s Michael Howard in drag not Yvette Cooper – saying: “It isn't racist to be worried about immigration or to call for immigration reform,” before announcing more guards on the frontiers.

While her counterpart Rachel Reeves at the Department of Work is saying she will deny benefits to EU migrants.

Only to receive support from Nick Clegg, for goodness’ sake!

It isn’t racist to be worried about immigration… UNLESS YOU GO ON TO BLAME THE IMMIGRANTS!

Please, I urge you, particularly if you happen to be Deputy Prime Minister, go read the inestimable Mr Hickey on why it’s both morally and tactically suicide to follow the other Parties down the road to UKIP-ised xenophobic populism.



People who think that UKIP are popular because of their policies are frankly morons, who make “White Van Dan” look like Aristotle.

UKIP’s popularity is entirely independent of any policy they may have from moment to moment, as amply demonstrated by the way Farage simply re-writes their manifesto every single time he finds himself on a sticky wicket without any apparent impact on people’s opinion or his Party’ poll ratings.

“Privatise the NHS? No, I meant preserve the NHS! Lower business taxes? No, I meant higher business taxes! Transitional arrangements? No, I meant concentration camps…er, is this on the record?”

No one seems to care that he’s winging it, contradicting himself, saying anything he thinks the voters want to hear, because after all he’s Nige, the bloke with the pint, and he’s sticking it to the Westminster elite, isn’ee.

There used to be a sense that the Westminster Parties were there to make things better for people, for you!

Labour would give you better public services; Tories would lower your taxes; Liberals would stand up for your rights and freedoms. What happened to all that?

In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – and it’s well worth a read if you can get over the flagrant fears of miscegenation – the protagonist finds, to his existential horror, that (spoilers) he himself is of “questionable” heritage and is turning into one of the monsters.

Here’s the irony. In Britain we are all immigrants somewhere up our family tree. Unless you’re descended from a Woolly Mammoth! (I’m saying nothing!)

And yet, we have the choice: are we capable of being brave enough not to turn into Monsters?

PS:

For clarity:

“Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils”

is Lovecraft’s description of one of the Deep Ones, and not, as you might think, of Nigel Farage. Who, if anything, is one of the Shallow Ones.

One of the latest things to trend on Twitter is the hashtag #CameronMustGo and the celebrity chef Jack Monroe waded in with a series of tweets, the most notable one of which was “Because he uses stories about his dead son as misty-eyed rhetoric to legitimise selling our NHS to his friends #CameronMustGo”.

Because he uses stories about his dead son as misty-eyed rhetoric to legitimise selling our NHS to his friends: #CameronMustGo

— Jack Monroe (@MsJackMonroe) November 23, 2014

As is usually the case with Twitter, whatever you think of the original tweet the backlash has been far worse, with Ms Monroe reporting death threats, rape threats and, without irony, threats to her son.

The thing is though, she has a point. As far back as March 2012, Alex Andreou wrote a rather famous blog post titled “We Need to Talk About Ivan” which discussed this phenomenon in some detail. At this year’s party conference, David Cameron did it again, saying:

And for me, this is personal. I am someone who has relied on the NHS – whose family knows more than most how important it is…who knows what it’s like to go to hospital night after night with a child in your arms…knowing that when you get there, you have people who will care for that child and love that child like their own. How dare they suggest I would ever put that at risk for other people’s children?

I’m sorry, but arguing that because you had a sick child you should be able to shrug off scrutiny of how you, as Prime Minister, are treating the NHS is pretty repugnant. Calling him out on this is perfectly legitimate and the fact that doing so itself results in a huge storm of controversy, only demonstrates how this is not something David Cameron should be indulging in. I can’t think of any other politician who uses their children in quite this way; it is extraordinary.

What really got my goat last night however was the decision by Dan Hodges to wade into the debate. Mr Hodges has been undergoing a bit of a rehabilitation recently, having rather self consciously transformed himself from Blairite attack dog to tree hugging liberal. But for me, he’ll always be the man behind, to use his exact words “Hodge’s killer baby adverts” during the AV referendum.

If you ever doubted the degree to which this outrage about Jack Monroe’s tweet is manufactured, you only need to look at this picture. So please spare me the high moral tone.

Yesterday saw the publication of the Intelligence and Security Committee report into the events leading up to the murder of Lee Rigby. On reading it, one gets a sense of naivety from the members of the committee on how the Internet works, particularly when it comes to international jurisdictions. (Communications data is p139 onwards)

Notably, the committee seemed surprised that wholly US companies did not consider themselves to be subject to UK laws. To emphasise that, here’s an extract.

242. The UK Government has always asserted that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) has implicit extra-territorial jurisdiction. The problem is that, whereas UK Communications Service Providers (CSPs – Facebook, Twitter and so on) accept that they are legally obliged to provide access to the communications of individuals, most CSPs based outside the UK do not accept that the UK legislation applies to them.

Many in the UK would be shocked if random foreign laws suddenly applied to them, so it’s a little concerning that the Home Office think the reverse might be true.

It continues:

The Home Office has explained the argument the US CSPs have made: “RIPA lacks explicit extraterritorial jurisdiction and cannot be argued to place any obligations onto CSPs based outside of the UK.”

The Home Office explained the particular issue US CSPs have raised, that: “complying with RIPA would leave US companies in breach of US legislation (including the Wiretap Act in relation to lawful interception)”

So the problem is not just that the Home Office believes it can pass UK laws compelling people in foreign countries to hand over data, but that it thinks UK law can compel people to break their own local laws. I usually only see that level of “we’re a world power” arrogance in Americans from particularly red states these days.

Even if we restrict the “our data laws should apply in your country” principle to US-UK relations and ignore countries like China or Russia, it quickly becomes clear that this would cause all sort of problems in areas where we do not agree on policy.

The section of the report that has been most covered is the part that blames an unnamed site, since revealed to be Facebook, for not alerting the security services to an exchange between one of the attackers and an associate. The whole analysis suggests a lack of knowledge of how the internet and social media works:

1. Firstly, there is an assumption without discussion that Facebook has a “moral duty” to search all member communications for suspicious content. This assumption conveniently ignores:
   • That it’s possibly illegal under US Wiretap laws mentioned earlier
   • The huge problems associated with appointing a US company guardian of international morals (I am hoping that the ISC does not expect Facebook to examine content on the basis of the laws of the country the end-users are in, unless it thinks social media sites should be reporting LGBT people to the authorities in countries where that is illegal)
   • The rather robust freedom of speech the US has
2. There is also an assumption that Facebook could have detected the exchange via automation. This is based on the closure of several other accounts for various reasons, some of them unconnected with terrorism even though the account the exchange took place in was not closed. It is not clear if the “automatically” closed accounts were due to a large volume of uncontested end-user complaints, because that sort of quasi-automation of complaints triggering account closures on social media will not help with private chat between individuals. What the US regards as terrorists another state might regard as freedom fighters, which also puts Facebook in a sticky situation deciding who to report.
3. That determining which security service to tell is not easy. If a US citizen is on holiday in the UK and messages suspect content, do you tell the US or UK authorities? The Home Office expressed reluctance in it’s MLAT discussion to go via US authorities, but is it expecting Facebook to report everyone to UK police when it doesn’t have any way of knowing their nationality? The US government may not be too happy about that, given it would mean allowing the UK to spy on US citizens here on holiday or business.
4. That blanket trawls for data can produce quite unjust outcomes, such as the Robin Hood airport case.
5. That the information needs to get to the UK somehow when as noted earlier, this may be illegal under US Wiretap law.
6. And that the UK security services would need to find time to look at a potentially huge amount of data, when the report already highlights the amount of data they have to sift through is more than they can handle

Fortunately, the committee did not entirely side with the Home Office.

The report includes a discussion on existing routes that UK security services can use to obtain data using US laws and the committee quizzed the Home Office on why the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) was insufficient for data collection. The Home Office response included the following:

…the MLAT process would require the release of sensitive data to the US authorities, since “the intelligence case underpinning the warrant application [would have] to be considered by US authorities”. In addition, the US legal process would mean that the Secretary of State’s decision (i.e. the warrant) would be exposed to scrutiny by a US court. This would be at odds with RIPA which prohibits the disclosure of the existence of an interception warrant

The ISC did not have much time for the Home Office’s “we can’t be bothered with any of that due process stuff unless it’s not our process” response and suggested instead that MLAT was probably exactly the route we should be using.

Due to the tone of the report, I took some time to dig into the backgrounds of those MPs and Lords who sit on the committee. Shockingly, it is terribly unrepresentative even by parliamentary standards – five of the nine members are lawyers, one was a civil servant for his entire career and one appears to have never had a non-political job. Of the remaining two, one was a teacher and the other was very briefly an engineer back in the late 1960s/early 1970s before becoming a lecturer. The average age is 65 and none have any IT or Intelligence background that I can see.

This does not seem like an appropriate group of people to be scrutinising intelligence work in an increasingly digital world.

And as a parting note, I shall point out that there is nothing anywhere in the report that suggests increasing UK communication interception laws would have prevented the murder of Lee Rigby.

#834, 4th September 1999

In the 44 Popular years since I last brushed tuxedos with Perez Prado, his reputation among Western listeners has been on an odd, rambling journey. Knocked out of fashion with the rest of the bandleaders when musics that made more efficient use of the studio came along, he languished, his records drifting gently into charity shop and thrift store limbo. There they were embraced by a surprising new audience – the rejectionists and crate-diggers of post-industrial music. Steven Stapleton, of Nurse With Wound, was a vocal appreciator of Prado. Irwin Chusid, curator of outsider music and art, included tracks by him on his compilations of recovered exotica. From there, Prado’s Mambo recordings crossed back into the semi-mainstream, becoming mainstays of the “space age pop” compilations and easy listening club nights that sprung up in the mid-90s. And – inevitably maybe – we end up here: his music sampled, shot full of steroids and then gored by a parping German he-goat.

Whatever suavity and quiet confidence the mambos of the 40s and 50s exuded are of no interest to Lou Bega. If they were a well-tailored linen suit, he is a pair of novelty socks, and “Mambo No.5” in this life is roughly as Cuban as the Rednex were Appalachian. Bega’s retooling of the song is, of course, mightily effective – for all that his career faded away swiftly after this, he had a devilish ear for what would make an office party swing. His “Mambo No.5”, in fact, was recently determined by science to be one of the most catchy songs ever – immediately recognisable. That doesn’t inherently make it good, but it means if you’re willing to embrace that dread spectre the “party spirit” there’s fun to be had. At least there is if you’re happy to get onside with Bega’s incarnation as a sort of mock-Latin Benny Hill, rasping and chuckling his way through his list of ladies, livin’ la vida groper. And plainly, plenty were. Curmudgeons like me could wait a bit longer until someone found a better use for the song’s undeniable bonhomie.

When I went to sleep last night, Ferguson, Missouri was on fire.

The (highly unusual) decision of a grand jury not to bring Officer Darren Wilson up on charges stemming from his killing of a young black man named Michael Brown was, while not unexpected — one could, indeed, infer from its timing as well as the decision to ramp up security to a ridiculous degree before the announcement that the state almost wanted there to be riots — highly unpopular.  Protesters of varying motivations took to the streets all over America, including a brief shutdown of the interstate in my own lily-white home of Seattle.

The killing of a black American by a law enforcement officer is so common as to be, well, tedious.  When Brown was killed, I set about to make a post here on this site cataloguing the number of unarmed black men and women shot, beaten, or otherwise slain by the law just since 2001, and I stopped before I even got to our present decade because the job was simply too extensive to handle.  I began to blur their identities together, these people who had been my countrymen, who were human beings no different from myself except that they had been born with the physical mark of America’s grotesque legacy of racial slavery; they began, in Stalin’s soulless calculus, to become statistics rather than tragedies.  There were just so many of them.  (Luckily, other people have been better suited to the task.)  Just in the days leading up to the announcement, a young boy was shot by Cleveland police for wielding a toy shotgun; he died the day the grand jury’s decision was announced.

Of course, once a social phenomenon, even one as bloody as the routine murder of black citizens — transformed fully now from lynching by citizen vigilantes for nebulous assaults, rapes, and reckless eyeballings to shooting by ‘legitimate’ agents of the law for acting in a menacing fashion — becomes this common, it gains its own script. At first there is the shock and outrage; soon someone will suggest that it is symptomatic of a entrenched and symptomatic racism in American society, for which they will be rewarded by being called ‘race hustlers’ or ‘phony civil rights pimps’.  There will immediately follow a period in which the dead person — the victim of the crime of murder — has their life posthumously upended in the attempt to prove that, as do we all, they bore some moral stain and thus deserved to die, while the shooter — the perpetrator of the crime of murder — is rallied around, given every benefit of the doubt, and often as not, has a huge amount of money raised on their behalf.  Finally, there will be an announcement, preceded by much more slandering of the victim in every possible media outlet and open scorn for those who demand justice for the murder, and usually that announcement is that no measures whatsoever will be taken against the officer who did the killing.

Sometimes there will be a riot.  This will happen, usually, if the killing was especially egregious, or if the response to it, as was the case in Ferguson, was exceptionally contemptuous or incompetent.  (I don’t wish to dwell too much on the specifics of Michael Brown’s case here.  Although it was marked by particularly gross excerpts from the working scripts for such extra-judicial murders — the brutal behavior by militarized police against peaceful protesters, the utter lack of transparency of the investigative process, the attempts to paint the victim as a rampaging monster*, the closing of ranks by law enforcement, the racially charged response in the media, the ludicrously implausible testimony of the accused, and, finally, the decision that the killer will not be punished — to pretend it was unique to Ferguson is to ignore that Michael Brown’s death was unusual only in degree and not at all in kind.)  So there will be those –some, no doubt, outside agitators looking for a fight, but others unquestionably merely frustrated locals infuriated by yet another slap in the face by authority — who spill out into the thoroughfares, scream their rage at a system that reduces them to nothing, hurl invective at the law that abuses them and kills their children, smash windows and take what they want.

Whenever this happens, the scolds come out.  Of course they are largely from the right, people who expect blacks to “act like animals” and express only the mildest surprise when their bigotry appears to be justified; but worse, in a sense, are their allies, people on the left who agree that an injustice has been done but cannot help but fall back into the trap of respectability politics whenever someone does anything but talk.   In particular, the name of Martin Luther King Jr. is invoked to plead with blacks not to tear up their communities; “WWMLKD” becomes the watchword as everyone whose only skin in the game is the kind that comes from wagging their fingers ask everyone else to accept with magnanimity another black man dead on the street and no one held responsible.  This is an odd conjuration just on its face; MLK, whatever else he was, was a man who was constantly hounded, harassed, and abused by the white authorities, and who was ultimately murdered by a white racist.  The subsequent riots over his assassination did much to get the Civil Rights Act passed.  He was also, while certainly a man who advocated for pacifism and lawfulness, for non-violent resistance, for not giving in to hate, a man who understood that, in his words, “a riot is the language of the unheard”.

What does that mean?  There are many voices being raised today in contempt of those who forestall real progress (what progress?, comes the response) by turning a crucial moment for peace and understanding into a violent spree.  There are many more being raised in scorn at those who turn what is alleged to be outrage at racism into a contest to see who can steal the most stuff before the sun rises.  But try to understand:  here are a people who were born oppressed.  They are the literal legacy of a racially selected slave class, and their suffering is something experienced by their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents, going as far back as the first of their (false) name to be forcibly abducted to America.  They do not need to be made to understand racism, for they experience it every day of their lives.  Most of them are poor, and they survive on scraps; the help they receive from the government that tolerated their repression for centuries is meager, forever in danger of being taken away, and at risk of earning them the resentment of people lucky enough not to need it.

All of them, all these people, know the falsehood of assimilation, the big lie of respectability.  They all know men and women of their race and class who studied hard, worked hard, and always strove to keep up with the rules forced on them by their white masters and bosses; some of them escaped their ruined environment and made good, but many died poor with nothing more to show for their attempt to play another man’s game than did the ones who gave themselves over to drink, to drugs, to criminality and despair.  They all know people who have been on the receiving end of a cop’s nightstick, who have had a gun pointed in their face for nothing at all; frequently, those people are themselves.  Most likely all of them have seen a friend or relative sent to prison on dubious charges, or killed for no reason.  For them, the police are antagonists and not protectors; the courts are places of punishment and fear, not justice; the government exists to frustrate them and hold them back, not serve them; and the law is just one more thing they can’t afford to buy.

Every day, they experience some frustration at the hands of America and their fellow Americans that most of us would find intolerable.  Their financial situation is always shaky, their education never enough, their moral character always under suspicion, and their own narratives forever in dispute.  Any encounter with authority can mean their end.  And far too often, they are asked to contend not only with the death of their friends, their family members, their children, but with the presentation of that death as something for which no one will be punished, for which no justice will be done.  How many times can one human being be asked to accept such provocation with no response?  How many buckets of shit can they be forced to eat without spitting back some in the face of the people doing the feeding?

I am still deeply torn about the efficacy of violence; while I think it is an awful thing that very easily spins out of control, I believe there are times where it is the only thing that will force a positive change.  I also don’t believe that it will advance any particular cause to steal shoes and television sets during a riot that started in response to a great injustice; but I also believe that looters understand all too well that for once in their shitty lives, the people in charge are being forced to listen to what they have to say, are being made to pay attention to their frustration and anger.  I also believe that they’re taking advantage of an already bad situation to get something that might otherwise be unobtainable to them on the subsistence wages the bosses pay them, and that if a stolen TV is the price they extract for a lifetime of abuse and disrespect and the lives of their children, the country should count itself very lucky indeed.  If blacks were suddenly to think like whites, and demand the kind of vengeance white Americans demand for the lives of their lost, they would be happy to trade back those looted sneakers for the mounds of dead that would appear.

Until such time as we are prepared to show true justice to our black citizens, and to cease the outrageous provocations that cause them to occasionally erupt in a fully justified rage, we would do well to remember the meaning of the language of the unheard, and to consider it our great good fortune that looting is the worst they do when we insist on pushing them too far.

*:  As if it is acceptable to openly gun down an unarmed man even if he is a criminal.