Category Archives: Personal Stuff

Screwtape casts the Net

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The following email arrived in my Inbox this morning.  I’m not sure what to make of it, but I thought I’d share it hear as it has some rather intriguing ideas in it.

Dear Wormwood,

You must think we senior tempters spend our heads in the burning sand.  Of course we’re aware of the Internet – we’ve had our influence on it from the very beginning.  There was a time when the humans expressed a concern about going to war based purely on the fact that their pathetic attempts to communicate with each other would fail at the dropping of the first hydrogen bomb.  Old Slitgrubber realised that this was a fine opportunity for us to increase despair by prompting them with a means of improving their communications, and hence making them slightly less squeamish about war.  Of course, it wasn’t the war we were interested in – it was the wondrous sense of fear and despair that such things bring about. 

Of course, The Enemy was soon on the case – they are just SO bothersome – and managed to wrench some good out of the Internet, prompting it’s use by ‘normal’ humans who could use it to talk to each other,  do business, send greetings – all sorts of nonsense.  But, our Research Department was always on the case and they very soon realised that the Internet still provides a fine opportunity for soul-hunting.  Indeed, it’s use as a campaigning tool for us has improved with every new generation of software.  By Web 4.0 I’m sure it will be delivering souls by the Gigabyte!

Your proposals are, as always, dear nephew, of mixed value.  Are you sure that some piece of human brain hasn’t got lodged up there with your own?  They range from the blatantly obvious to the abjectly stupid, with fleeting glimpses of items of possible use.  But, we are here to teach and you are here to be taught; I suppose I’d better get on with it.  It’s a big subject; there are many obvious opportunities for temptation out there that can be used in less than obvious ways for our end, but I’ll investigate those at a later date.

Today I’ll give you a technique of achieving a ‘quick hit’ on your candidate, something that’s useful for …ahem….’grabbing low hanging fruit’.  See how I’m getting all the jargon right?  Who says you can’t teach an old devil new tricks?

The Internet annihilates time.  Wormwood, to you and I time is something that we don’t take too much notice of.  For the humans it’s critical – many of them run around claiming they don’t have enough time to do this, that and the other whilst wasting what time they do have on activities that don’t benefit them at all – in fact, in many cases, they don’t even get pleasure from what they spend the time doing!   The Internet has greatly helped us here. Email, Immediate Messaging, Facebook and even Text Messaging has allowed us to short circuit their thinking by convincing them that whatever pops up in their electronic in boxes is actually important, rather than just immediate.

You might be aware of the work of that objectionable human Jung.  Why he couldn’t have just kept spouting the useful materialism of Freud I have no idea, but The Enemy clearly inspired him on more than one occasion and he came up with the following observation – it’s almost as if he was reading the research Department’s report on technological advances and how we can use them:

“[Most advances] are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications, which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before.  Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est – all haste is of the Devil”

Fortunately for us, the humans don’t take too much notice of such comments and we can still con them in to thinking that all these advances give them time.  What they actually do is eat up their time, encourage them to focus on things that are immediate or that give momentary pleasures, encourage them to forget what’s truly important and reply to all these messages quickly and without deep thought – and hopefully in the process cause offence and irritation to the senders of some of the messages by their thoughtless response.  If we’re really lucky we can encourage a good run of selfishness in the souls we’re interested in, encouraging them to forget activities such as prayer and contemplation  – all by the simple expedient of providing a new game to play online.

So, Wormwood – see what you can do with your case in terms of getting them to really take on board as many forms of new technology as possible, and, more importantly, encourage them to take their pleasure in the trivial, accelerate the tempo of their lives so that they don’t know whether they’re coming or going.  And then we can really get to work…

The mail ended here.  I’m going to keep my eye on my inbox to see whether I receive any further missives from Screwtape, who(what??)ever he is.

Administratium – old humour, still depressingly true!

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I found this this evening whilst clearing out some computer files from 1998.

I have no idea where it originated or how it got to me; it’s not original to me, but it’s depressing how little things change.  This was from a time in my life when I found humour in the stupidity of organisations.  I’m not sure whether I still do! 🙂

Administratium

The densest element known to science was recently discovered. Called Administratium, it has no protons or electrons, thus giving it an atomic number of 0. However, it has a neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice-neutrons (meson exchange) and 111 assistant vice-neutrons giving an atomic mass of 312. This nucleus is held together by the exchange between particles of sub-atomic forces called morons, though some workers believe that a newly discovered quark like particle, the ‘inertia’ quark, is also involved.

Due to the lack of electrons, Administratium is chemically inert but possesses the surprising ability to impede all reactions with which it comes in to contact. The tiniest amount of Administratium can reduce reaction rates several thousand fold, resulting in actions that should take a second to complete actually occurring in several days.

Administratium is unstable, with a half life of between one and three years, depending upon the environment in which the element is found. During decay, Administratium undergoes spontaneous changes in which the neutrons, vice-neutrons and assistant vice neutrons simply change places by the exchange of morons, inertia quarks and a further meson-like particle called a Beaurocraton. Some workers note that the number of vice-neutrons and assistant vice-neutrons can increase during this process, and it is believed that the energy for this process is drawn from other materials in the vicinity. Administratium will occasionally decay into Beaurocratium and Tedium.

Administratium is dangerous in any concentration, and care should be taken to remove it from any environment where its stagnating effects would be felt. Although not nowadays used in building structures, it can spontaneously form in new and well appointed buildings, especially in large mult-national corporations, government or quasi-governmental organisations. However, it can exist anywhere where there are more than three layers in any organisational structure, and can be difficult to detect until the toxic effects have reached a fatal level. The cure of Administratium poisoning is the total removal of all of the material from the affected locations; this will allow the reaction rates of affected processes to recover to their normal levels, provided that the exposure has not been to severe. In extreme cases, total the poisoning may be so severe that the exposed environment itself spontaneously decays into Administratium or one of its many sister elements.

The braying voices….

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300px-Medieval_parliament_edwardA little while ago I turned the TV on to get the lunchtime news, and was staggered to find Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) on 3 BBC Channels – BBC News, BBC Parliament and BBC 2 – and also on Sky news.  I took a look at what was going on, and was seriously unimpressed.  There’s a line in an old Billy Bragg song that refers to ‘those braying voices on the right of the House’ and it’s as relevant today as it ever was, with the exception that the braying voices now seem to come from all sides of the House.

It seemed to be less a matter of gaining useful information from the PM and his Ministers and more a sort of political ping-pong – soft shots from his colleagues, attempted bouncers from the Opposition party members.  Just what is the point of this nonsense, and why bother broadcasting it over so many channels?  Even with the two major issues of the day – the results of the Nimrod Accident Enquiry and the latest report in to MP’s Expenses, the whole thing still had the atmosphere of knock about farce.

Once upon a time this weekly political wrestling match might have had relevance – it may still have relevance today if the whole thing weren’t so clearly stage managed and organised to attempt to put the PM in the best light (difficult with the current fellow) and portray the opposition as witless morons (not so difficult with the current lot).  It’s not made any more palatable by the follow up reporting from Sky News, I believe, where as much time was spent on the body language of the Prime Minister than on what he actually said!  It was like watching ‘Lie to Me’ without Tim Roth or a storyline!

For our Parliamentarians, PMQ could be a weekly opportunity to show us how seriously you’re all taking the situation we’re in.  It actually seems to be an opportunity for us to once again question why the Devil we voted you in in the first place.  Folks, I seriously suggest you reverse the televising of Parliament – it really is doing you no good whatsoever.

Real Time Search – how important?

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searchglassWell, both Microsoft and Google have stated that they’re adding the capability to search Twitter feeds in real-time to their search engines.   What does this mean to us mere mortals who tweet and search?

The example that I’ve seen given about the usefulness of Real Time Search (RTS) is to do with skiing – not a topic close to my heart, or one which I know much about.  My knowledge stops at things strapped to your feet and the requirement for snow…  Anyway, the example given is that you Google your favourite ski resort and along side the nromal search results returned by Google, there would also be a number of relevant, recent Tweets, that could, for example, include information about current conditions on the slopes.  The Tweets will appear based on their content or, if the Tweeter has set their account up accordingly, the location from which the Tweet has been made (geocoded Tweet).  On a purely technical basis, this is quite something.  The hamsters powering Google’s server will be running around in their wheels like crazy…

There has been an add in available for a while for Firefox using Greasemonkey that does something similar, and the effect is pretty cool, although I’m yet to be convinced about the value of most Tweets in terms of conveying information meaningful to alot of people, except in a few sets of circumstances. 

As for the importance of this combination of Tweets and Search Engine results, it’s pretty early in the game to tell but I have my own concerns and thoughts on the issue that I’ll share here.  And then in a few months time I can come back and either pat myself on the back or quietly remove this post…

Privacy

A little while ago I published this item – ‘Google and The Dead Past’ in which I commented on the convergence of search technologies – Search Engine, Twitter and Facebook being three data sources – and expressed a fear that we might be moving very slowly towards a form of voluntary surveillance society, where our regular use of Social Networks  would result in much of our lives being available for review on search engines in near real-time if we weren’t careful.  Well, we now have Tweets being folded in to the Search mix; I assume that it won’t belong before Twitpics get included, and then if Facebook open up their API to facilitate searching,  my comments in that article are coming closer to reality!

Of course,  just as with standard Search Engine manegemnt on a website, it is posisble to exclude your tweets form this search.  Google have had a few gremlins with this, but they’re getting there, and it’s likely that, were they ever to join the party, Facebook would do the same thing. Whether people would avail themselves of these tools is another matter.

Relevance

Just how the search engine’s ranking system will be applied to Tweets is an inetersting question.  For example, Google’s Pagerank algorithm relies on many things, including links to a page, links from it, the nature of the links, etc.  as well as content.  This is simply not going to work on Tweets, so it’s safe to assume that some other form of relevance rating will be used.  And Bing will have something totally different – as will any other Search Engine involved in searching Tweets.  I am forced to wonder how relevant the results of Real Time Search will be.  Obviously it will improve with time, but so will the ability of spammers to game the system.

Perspective

Those of us old enough to remember the TV news reports of the Falklands War in 1982 would remember that events could happen in the South Atlantic a good few days before we saw it on the news.  By the time of the First Gulf War, CNN was reporting on events as they happened from it’s own reporters and within hours from the wider military theatre of operations.  By the Second Gulf War, in 2003, there were journalists embedded with infantry units carrying satellite phones and digital cameras and literally reporting on ongoing fire-fights.  It’s been said that the Falklands were reported from the point of view of the Government, the First Gulf War from the point of view of the generals and the Second Gulf War from the perspective of an infantry Platoon leader or tank commander.

The result is that whilst the Platoon Leader point of view gives us immediacy, it allows no time for contemplation of wider issues.  And the immediate perspective of one person in a large news event, for example, can give a very distorted view.  I very much expect that Tweets in search result could easily give rise to ‘firestorms’ of rumour that flare up and then get corrected within minutes.  What impact this will have on news gathering and the general emotional health of people doing searches on new stories – to be seeing a view of the world that is from the bottom up, changing every few minutes, I’m not sure.  Whilst this sort of immediate citizen journalism is great in theory I’m not sure that it’s good in practice;  tweets available to all on a Real Time Search might manipulate the news as much as report it.

So…Real Time Search important?  Conceivably yes – but perhaps in the wrong way.

Springing forward as we fall back – why I like GMT!

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Alarm Clock Face

It’s that day!  The last Sunday in October when ‘the clocks go back’.  For many, the official start of winter rather than the end of British Summer Time (or Daylight Saving Time for non-Brits).  We’ve had the ‘time discussion’ here at Pritchard Towers; that’s when my wife says ‘What time is it’ and I explain that it’s 7am GMT, 8am BST, if it was yesterday it would be 8am right now….

At least the computers sort themselves out these days; I’m old enough to remember when it was necessary to manually change the clock on computers as well as on the range of mechanical and electronic clocks we have.  Actually, today and the Sunday in the spring when the clocks go forward are two of the few days in the calendar that all the clocks in the house stand a chance of being at roughly the same time.  Throughout the rest of the year slippage and stoppage take their toll!

and I’ve maybe come across a new definition of a computer – something smart enough to adjust it’s own time.  I was quite surprised this morning when my Crackberry had adjusted itself….that’s one phone less to change, I guess!

I know that there’s a great deal of pressure these days to standardise on Daylight Saving Time / BST.  I guess that there’s a lot to be said for that – I’m not, however, going to spend any time this morning debating that contentious issue.  Lots of people much more capable than I have, and with greater knowledge of the issues involved, have taxed their little grey cells to no avail.  No, this blog is purely an explanation of why I’m personally rather attached to Greenwich Mean Time.

It all goes back to my childhood – when I was about 9 years old I started getting interested in listening to the radio late at night to hear foreign stations.  I had a rather nice little book – I think it was called the Wireless World Guide To Broadcasting Stations – that listed radio stations on short wave, medium wave and longwave radio.  The ‘far away’ stuff tended to be on short wave, and at that stage I didn’t have a short wave radio.  However, it was possible to hear stations from North America on Medium wave, which was covered by my father’s ‘Ecko’ transistor radio.  It had a little aerial socket and plugging a wire in to it allowed me to hear many more medium wave stations than I would normally…but the laws of physics firmly stated ‘all the far away stuff comes in late at night’.  And so we start getting on to the business with GMT and the lost hour.

As a kid I was a morning person; typically by 1030pm (even on non-school nights) I was falling asleep and ready for bed.   In the summer, 1030pm was 9-30pm GMT, and the generally accepted rules of physics stated that the earliest I could expect to hear a station in North America would be, if I was lucky – 11-30 or midnight GMT.   Now, at a push, by taking a nap I could manage to keep my eyes open until about midnight BST, but it just wasn’t late enough.  I had worked out that the best combination of geography and frequency that would allow me to hear North America as early as possible was a station called CJYQ at Saint John’s,  Newfoundland, and so my Holy Grail of medium wave listening was discovered.

radiodialSo I started eagerly looking forward to the magic day in October when the clocks went back.  The day when 11-30 at night really was 2330 hrs GMT.   The project to hear North America was on!  The radio I was using was a nice enough receiver but the frequency markings were pretty inaccurate.  This was in the days before digital readouts – as you turned the tuning control a rather clever contraption of pulleys, springs and string moved a pointer across a long glass ‘dial’ with wavelength markings on it, which I then converted to frequency.  In order to ‘home in’ on CJYQ it was necessary to find a couple of easily identifiable European stations just above and just below the frequency for CJYQ, as there was no way I could tune the receive to it’s operating frequency directly. 

Once I’d got this done, then it was simply a case of slowly tuning between these two stations until I heard a Candaian accent.  Unfortunately, the emphasis was on slowly tuning, and repeatedly….the signals from North America tended to fade up and down very slowly  and so it was a case of being on frequency when the signal was loud. 

After a couple of weekends of propping my eyes open between 2300 and midnight..and a couple of times until 1am – I have no idea how I managed the latter, as at that time 10 year olds in my house didn’t drink coffee – I managed to get the station.  I was able to listen to it (ear squashed against the loudspeaker as I didn’t have any headphones) for a couple of minutes before it faded off in to the darkness again.  Just to be sure, I listened in again around the half hour and on the hour, hoping for a station identification announcement, and was rewarded by one!

The pleasure from the fleeting reception of that station was repeated on numerous occasions after that first time, with stations from all over the East Coast of North America working their way in to my ‘listening log’ through my adolescence.  And yes, I think all of them were heard in the winter – more a feature, I now know, of radio wave propagation than anything else – but I kept a superstitious belief that it was all due to the clocks going back to GMT.  On many occasions sleep got the better of me; I’d wake up with a loudspeaker-grille pattern on my cheek where I’d dozed off….

And what’s really weird is that even now, when the clocks go back, I start hankering to sit down on a dark night, cup of tea, radio frequency guide and headphones, and listen again for those tiny transatlantic signals.

BNP support increase – why the surprise?

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For anyone who’s been asleep or under a particularly soundproofed rock for the last few weeks, here’s a quick ‘catch up’.  Nick Griffin, leader of the UK’s Far Right British National Party, was invited on to BBC Television’s flagship political debate programme, ‘Question Time’.  This generated a great deal of fuss and bother.  Anti-Fascist groups demonstrated, Griffin himself objected about the format of the show, and it was one of the least edifying sights I’ve seen on TV for some years.   A survey today reveals that after Griffin’s appearance on the show, support for the party has increased.  Peter Hain is saying that this was exactly the sort of thing that led to Nazi Germany…sorry…that was Basil Fawlty…Peter Hain is saying that this was exactly the sort of thing he was afraid of.  And even insiders at the BBC are stating that the way the program was handled was a farce and that Griffin was subjected to ‘attack dogs’.

Woooo…..serious stuff.  Let’s just stop for a moment shall we?  First of all, let’s make it clear to all and sundry that I’m no BNP supporter or fellow traveller.  I say that now because I know from experience on certain Internet Forums any attempt to look at the phenomena that is the BNP or any aspect of multicultural politics in Britain tends to result in you being called a Nazi, racist, sympathiser, etc.  So let’s nail that one first and now discuss the issue like grown-ups. 

In terms of voting intention for an election tomorrow, the proportion who said they’d vote BNP was 3%.  Last month, it was 2%.  So, oodles of free publicity, massive TV coverage, the sort of profile that Griffin might have only gotten by leading a Wetherspoons Putsch and all that happens is an extra 1% of firm vote support.  Pardon me, Peter, if I don’t get too panicky just yet?  Yes, 22% of voters suggested that they might seriously consider voting BNP, but there’s many a slip between poll and ballot box.

What was obvious from the furore surrounding this edition of ‘Question Time’ is that :

  1. A large number of protesters attempted to prevent the leader of a legal UK political party – how represehensible we might find  the opinions of that party is irrelevant – from taking part in a debate on UK television.
  2. Various high ranking political figures appeared to apply pressure to the BBC to not allow the broadcast to take place.
  3. The format of the broadcast DID appear to be different to usual – it had all the hallmarks of a bear baiting session and I venture to suggest that the chairing of the programme could have been better.

The overall result of this has been to allow Griffin to be able to call ‘foul’ and play the ‘Martyr’ card – that well beloved ploy of all political extremists who know that their chances at the ballot box are pretty slim in any other circumstances.  Griffin performed incredibly poorly on QT – despite the possibly loaded deck, which to be honest he and his advisers might have expected – his answers were not brilliant and he made teh error of getting a few cheap shots in at his political opponents.  But, the overall impression that his supporters will take away and propagate through their publicity machine is that ‘We were censored and muzzled by the political establishment, the BBC and the far left’ – the very last impression that this appearance SHOULD have been allowed to give.  The UAF, Government and BBC have managed by their total cack-handed handling of this issue to give the BNP the origin of their very own ‘stab in the back’ myth.

The ‘No Platform’ issue is a well worn one.  Basically, it’s a policy by the left to attempt to remove any possible platform for Far Right parties in the media – or on Internet Forums, discussion groups, public venues, etc.  Short for ‘No platform for Fascists’ it is supposed to starve the Far Right of the ability to publicise themselves and gain recruits.  There’s one problem with this approach – it doesn’t work.  It simply allows the sort of nonsense we’ve encountered over the last week to play out, gaining the Far Right more recruits and support than if they’d been allowed to quietly get on with making total arses of themselves in public.

To me, ‘No platform’ is simply a censorship operation by the Left, in the style that Stalin and Mao would recognise.  Totalitarianism is alive and well on both sides of the political fence.  But it is counter productive and dangerous in a wider sense than that of stifling political debate.  By permitting teh right to say that they are being censored, their words are heard by more and more people.  The British people are not getting more racist; but many are now perceiving that the country is changing it’s cultural make up in a way that doesn’t benefit them:

  1. The Government and main political parties are thought by many people – particularly working class and those in the poorer economic groups – to be totally out of touch with people’s fears and concerns about immigration.  Until very recently it’s been difficult to discuss these issues without being howled down in ‘Islington Circles’ as a racist monster who eats babies for breakfast and kicks small dogs.
  2. People have seen the economy got to hell in a basket, and in many cases are now experiencing real pain.  They also start noticing immigration – note I said NOTICING – for the first time.  Even with no proven factual, causal link between their decrease in standard in living and the number of immigrants that they feel are coming in to the country, they irrationally believe and fear that there IS a causal link.
  3. When the Government produces statistics that disprove any link between immigration and economic well being, or even suggest that there is a positive link, people are not believing it.  This is partially because there are often other reports and statistics that prove the other point of view.  Debating the issue then turns in to a game of ‘URL Tennis’ as participants fling references around like intellectual hand-grenades, attempting to trip up the logic or mathematics in the report and, if that fails, the credentials of the authors.
  4. The Government is seen as being a bunch of lying bastards.  The Government have been seen to lie on numerous issues – the 2003 Iraq War being a biggie, for example.  If they’ll lie to take us to war, folks quite rightly believe they’ll lie on other policies.  And as if by magic…in today’s Daily Mail there is a story of how Jack Straw and Tony Blair  planned to pull an immigration ‘fast one’ on the people of Britain. 
  5. People wonder why the main parties are unwilling to discuss immigration and multiculturalism.  People perceive an ‘elephant in the living room’ event taking place.  The lack of debate or willingness to debate makes people fear the worst.
  6. Media stories and programs bolster peopel’s fear of immigration and multiculturalism, especially in the absence of open, factual debate.  For example, we get the ongoing ‘No Christmas Decorations’ sort of bollocks every year, programs like UK Border Patrol that show the efforts of the UK’s Border Agencies to keep undesirables out, etc.

In other words, there is an overwhelming perception for many people that this country is changing – no, is BEING changed by the Government – to a multicultural wonderland in which the views of the indiginous majority are being ignored.   And the only people who’re paying attention to this is the BNP.  And when these folks feel and fear that the BNP is being censored – and the BNP themselves can point to violent demonstrations to attempt to stop their leader speaking on TV – then people may well start thinking ‘What are these bastards trying to hide from me?‘

So, what’s to be done? 

  1. First of all, there needs to be an open discussion on all aspects of immigration and multicularal policies in the UK.  It needs to be wideranging and it will involve engaging with very unplesant people on all sides of the argument.  there can be no ‘No Platform’ nonsesne.
  2. It must be possible for people to think and say the currently unthinkable in discourse without being howled down.  You don’t destroy ideas by stopping them being expressed.  You destroy them by exposing them to teh light of reasoned and factual analysis. 
  3. Government, opposition and opinion formers MUST realise that they are first of all dealing with perception and belief – in other words, irrational feelings that must be addressed before people can engage in this sort of debate.  This will not be easy but is essential.  The first stage is to simply say to people ‘We appreciate you’re a bit worried; we’re hear to listen.  And then feckin’ LISTEN and don’t hear just what you want to hear.

Put bluntly, we have a fine campaigining season ahead for the bigots, the true racists, the thugs and the idealogues of both political extremes; economic recession, out of touch and dishonest Government, a few instances of corrupt and dishonest politicians stealing public money in their expenses, bankers bonuses getting stupidly high again, increasing unemployment, unpopular wars.

It’s time for Government and the political and media establishments of the UK to do soemthing before it all goes pear shaped.  Censoring and demonstrating is not enough – it’s time to engage and defeat the ideas of extremists of both political colours.

Thanks for reading – go forth and get defeating.

The Duke, The Bankers and let them eat cake..

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There’s a line in Blackadder that sprang to mind today as I read the headlines on the BBC website:

“If a Cannibal opened your head he wouldn’t have enough brain to cover a water biscuit”

The headline was this – “Banker bonuses minute, says duke“, the Duke in question being Andrew, Duke of York.   My immediate comment to Twitter was ‘kind of like the Duke’s brain is minute in the scheme of things’, and certainly on the grounds of this comment at this time, not enough to cover that water biscuit. 

I’m rarely personally abusive about people in the public eye, but this was one of those public utterances that suggests a number of thoughts.

  1. That Andrew is very much the son of the Duke of Edinburgh; such an ability to put one’s foot in one’s mouth must surely be inherited.
  2. That people with a republican sentiment might just have something going for them.
  3. That people in the public eye should employ a good PR person.
  4. And that playboys who wander around the world playing golf for Britain should perhaps belt up about such things.

OK…rant over.  Maybe scope for a ‘Downfall Mashup’ later.  But for now, back on topic.   Let’s look at what Andrew did, in fact, say:

“I don’t want to demonise the banking and financial sector. Bonuses, in the scheme of things, are minute. They are easy to target.  A number will have abused their privilege of a bonus, so get rid of the excesses, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

According to this article, banker’s bonuses for 2009 will be around £6 billions – yes, billions – due to increased bank profits in 2009 to date.  This is up on 2008, when bonuses were a paltry £4 billions.

The word ‘minute’ clearly means different things to people in the commanding heights of the British establishment.  The average income for all households in the UK for 2009 is about £30,000.  That 6 billion could pay the household income for a year for 200,000 households in the UK.  Goldman Sachs have recently said they’re putting aside about 600,000,000 for bonuses for it’s near 30,000 staff.  This will result in average bonuses, assuming everyone got teh same, of £20,000.  Of course, what this really means is that some of the GS people will get humongous bonuses again.   Again, even with that average, ‘minute’ is not a word that I would apply to even a £20,000 bonus, when it’s two-thirds of the average income.

Vince Cable also makes this observation:

“The investment banks more than any other institutions created the culture of excessive leverage, excessive risk and excessive bonuses that led to the downfall of the financial system. Now they are cashing in and the same bonus culture has returned. The result must be that we are being pushed to the edge of another crash.”

Given that he’s been more on the nose than most politicians about recent financial crises, I’m getting worried.

tumbril

Whether Andrew intended his comments to come over as a ‘let them eat cake’ sort of speech is a moot point.  That’s how it does come over.  And I for one am increasingly sick of being told by people at the top of the heap that things are OK, really, and the guys who broke our economy really do deserve these bonuses, and, hey, it’s great to spend all day gadding about…ah, what the Hell.

Andrew – and the rest of you out there with lots of money, safe sinecures and no other worries in the morning than whether to take the Rolls, the Bentley or the Helicopter – think before you speak. 

Think hard, listen to your advisers, look at what is happening in this country.  We’re figuratively dying out here. 

Where are the bloody tumbrils when you need them?

Dubbed Hitler – why is it funny?

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After the last post on here, ‘Gazing in to the abyss’, I concluded that I needed to take off the Old Testament ‘Prophet of Doom’ robes for a little while and take a slightly lighter view of something.  Which is why, at first glance, the title of this piece may raise the odd eyebrow.

Some months ago, a clip from the film ‘Downfall’ appeared online.  The film is about the final days in the Berlin Bunker at the end of World War 2.  The scene features Hitler and his Generals studing a map, discussing a counter-attack that will never come.  Hitler goes off on a serious rant at his military commanders, eventually settling down in to an admission that it’s all over.

 So far, no great bundle of screaming laughs. But the 4 minute piece of video was then dubbed with whole new story lines – ‘Hitler discovers Michael Jackson is dead’, for example (left) is one of the funnier mashups on this theme on the Web.There are lots of others – Hitler finds out Oasis have split, that he’s been thrown off Xbox Live, that twitter is down again, that Liverpool have lost a soccer match. The list goes on.  There’s even one where Hitler rants abouyt being subtitled…

The quality varies – some are just plain nasty, others mildly amusing, some I find laugh out loud funny.What this says about my sense of humour and the sense of humour of the people who put the mashups together is what I want to look at in this post.I guess now would be a good time to put in the usual justification that seems to be required these days….no, I don’t find Hitler amusing per se. No, I’m not a Nazi sympathiser, Yes, I do appreciate that World War 2 was not funny. 

On a more practical basis, if you have even ‘schoolboy German’ the whole illusion is destroyed, so winding the sound down is quite helpful! 

And having got that out of the way…

I guess we’ve always used humour to poke fun at evil. In the 1930s George Orwell (I believe) commented that the goose-step was a ludicrous way to walk, but as the marchers had guns it was best not to laugh too loudly.

 Even during the Second World War, various rude comic songs were sung by the allied soldiers remarking on the rumour about Hitler’s single testicle – although the sentiment was expressed in less polite words – and various satires and comedies emerged from the War taking the mickey from the so-called Master Race – To Be or Not To Be and ‘The Great Dictator’ being the two most famous.  However, it’s worth remembering that both of these films were made before the sheer scale and nature of the atrocities committed by the Nazis became known; after news came out about the Concentration Camps and the extermination policies of the Nazis, it took until Mel Brooks’s ‘The Producers’ in 1968 before it became possible to laugh at the Nazis again.

It’s worth noting that this sort of humour always picks fun at the Nazis, never their actions.  There are invariably some very dark and usually unfunny attempts at humour that pick up on the cruelty of the Nazis, and occasionally even the death camps, but they’re uncommon.

The Downfall Mashups all have one thing in common; they feature Hitler ranting and raving on the behalf of the mashup creator about something that matters to them.  Hitler’s been subverted to any number of things that cause people to ‘lose it’.  Maybe he provides us with that excuse we need to really lose our rag to the degree of what might be called a ‘towering fury’.  I had one of those years ago – it was kicked off by soemthing really stupid and I went ballistic.  About 30 seconds in I KNEW I was in the wrong but what the heck, I was enjoying it so much that I genuinely didn’t want to stop – I knew I was going to have problems looking my colleagues in the eye for days afterwards, but it just felt so worth it.  I literally did feel that I was towering above the situation!

Maybe the Downfall Mashup allows us to project our feelings on to a character well known for his rants – a sort of scapegoat for acting out in public.  We can script our ‘actor’, wind him up and let him go.  We vent our spleen, and as a side benefit reduce one of history’s most evil men to the part of an actor in one of our own rants against society.  I wonder how long it will be before there’s a ‘personally abusive’ version where someone takes it out on a real, named individual that they dislike? 

 Is there a down side to the Downfall Mashup phenomenenon?  I’m not sure – there’s one school of thought that says that this actually humanises Hitler and gives young people today a view of the Fuhrer as a comic spectacle, a foil for our own humour.  This might be so, but the solution there is to ensure that we don’t forget the original evil committed by a bunch of very ordinary men with glasses, bad haircuts and bad breath who were allowed to get to where they did in life because no one stopped them.

 Or, just maybe, no one laughed at them long and hard and sent them off with their tails between their legs before they got the illusion that they were something special.  Who knows.

Gazing in to the abyss

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Looking-Into-The-CraterYesterday’s exploration of  ‘What would George say?’ led me to following up a few points of research and whilst browsing around I came across this quote of Orwell’s:

Here is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted before, but which is worth quoting again:

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself;
and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.

’Too long’, in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning ‘after the dragon is beaten’.

The line that struck a chord with me here, and has done for some years now, is ‘the abyss will gaze in to you’.  My topic for today – have we all spent rather too long staring in to the abyss and what have we bought back with us from there?

I guess a good place to start is with exactly what I mean by ‘the abyss’.  For me it’s that spiritual dark place where your personal and our cultural demons lie.  The trick is that whilst we need to be aware of the fact it’s there, we shouldn’t get ourselves too engrossed in it’s finer geography.   I look at it in the way that CS Lewis spoke of the Devil in ‘The Screwtape Letters’:

‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors.’

Over the years I’ve wandered to the edge of my personal abyss a few times and stepped back.  We all have our personal demons – what matters is whether we give them the freedom to do anything.  Show me somone who claims to have no personal demons and I’ll show you a liar.  And then there are those people whose demons are, shall we say, rather more unpleasant than those that most of us have; the criminal, the depraved, the insane.   The problem that we have today, I believe, is twofold – the abyss is now much wider and deeper than it was even 20 years ago, and it impinges more than ever in to our daily lives.

In 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood asked the question “Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods?’  Back then I think the answer was still ‘yes’, but we didn’t really know what was around the corner. Twenty-five years down the line the abyss comes in to our house courtesy of the Internet.  Without sounding too much like Mary Whitehouse on a Sunday Evening,  the Internet, cinema and TV have increasingly bought the baser instincts of human beings to the forefront of our consideration.  I’m not dumb enough to believe that, in the words of Philip Larkin ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me)‘.  Interest in the more extreme edges of pornography – whether that pornography is the pornography of sex or that of violence – has always been with us and was usually squirrelled away in the far recesses of most people’s minds for a number of reasons:

Society was more ‘up tight’ – certain forms of behaviour or artistic expression were simply regarded as wrong and tended to be either illegalor seriously frowned upon by society.  Sometimes this was right (IMO) and othertimes it was ridiculous.  But there were boundaries set.

  1. There seemed to be less moral relativism – there seemed to be much more of a concensus view in society as to what was ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
  2. Extremely violent pornography of graphical violence was difficult to get hold of.
  3. Anyone who DID have extreme interests was typically on their own; they were in no position to talk about it with friends who might be horrified at their interest.

In these circusmtances, if you went to your abyss, and peered in, and did dwell there a while the risk was pretty minimal for society as a whole.  Your trip was a private one, one not to be shared with anyone.  And for most of us there was the knowldge that certain things were, to put it bluntly, totally wrong.

The Internet has brought a lot of good in to people’s lives, but it has also amplified the potential for people to gaze deeper and for longer in to the abyss.  It’s had two main impacts:

  1. Extreme sexual and violent imagery is available to everyone more easily than ever before in history.
  2. The sheer scope of the Internet means that it’s inevitable that no matter how extreme a person’s ‘interests’ are, it’s almost inevitable that somewhere in the 1.7 billion Internet users there is someone else with the same interests, and a web site delivering up media to accomodate those interests.

The impact of these two facts is that people with particularly unpleasant demons in their abyss now find, to their mind, their beliefs and views  validated by the existence of those websites and users.  This permits these individuals to look in to their personal abyss and see nothing wrong with what they see there, and hence feel encouragement to express their views in to the world.  It’s not trendy to be in favour of censorship, but the validation of perversity that seems to be increasingly common surely cannot be healthy for society as a whole.

The phrase ‘People of the Abyss’ was used by Jack London as the title of a book he wrote in the early 1900s about the poverty of the East End of London;  I believe wholeheartedly that we’re now generating a new breed of people of the abyss – those who’ve started hard and long in to the depths of their abyss, and have bought back their personal demons with them in to the workaday-world.   This new breed of Abyss Dwellers are to be feared and shunned; their moral compass seems to be dictated by ‘it works for me and is no one else’s business what I do’ and they exhibit a lack of respect for the social codes of the society in which they live.

It’s not just extreme sex and violence that is an issue; I’ve just spent some time watching scenes of anti-fascist demonstrators protesting outside the BBC about the appearance of Nick Griffin of the BNP on BBC’s Question Time.  There is soemthing ironic about a group allegedly demonstrating to preserve democracy by attempting to censor a TV programme.  Perhaps these anti-fascists who’ve ‘fought the dragon’ are in danger of becoming that which they fight?  In George Steiner’s novella ‘The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.’ – written in 1981 – a trial in teh South American jungle allows the 90 year old Hitler, who in this novella survived the fall of Berlin, to explain himself.  One comment made is that those who fought agaisnt him have taken on board many of the characteristics of his regime – in other words, by peering in to teh Nazi abyss and fighting the dragon, they’ve fought for too long and brought parts of the abyss back with them, and have now become the dragon which they once fought.  Defending democracy is a delicate balancing act; you should not get so involved in the way of the enemy that you forget that you fight against that you forget the positive characteristics of what you’re fighting for.

In his novella, Steiner has a character say:

“There shall come a man who […] will know the grammar of hell and teach it to others. He will know the sounds of madness and loathing and make them seem music.”

He was, obviously, referring to Hitler in the book but today there are many such people in the public eye and those who we personally may be aware of who might be described in the same way.  Modern people of the abyss who’ve been there and returned with a little more than they bargained for, and who’re determined to further expand their view of the world, and widen the abyss further, expanding the geography of Hell further in to our daily lives.

I’m a Christian – I think that colours my opinions on a number of topics, and makes me address them from a particular moral and ethical standpoint.  Whether you have an religious beliefs or not I’d simply suggest that you at least become aware of the place of the abyss in your own life; what you choose to do with it when you find it’s location is up to you.  Just remember that having gazed a little too long and deep, you may find that even if you leave the abyss, it may not entirely leave you.