The Hobbit - How To Fuck It Up

Give it a budget of $500million. And make that a central point of your early PR. A big budget can't make a good film, but it can damn sure breaks one (isn't that right Avatar).

I also find it mildly offensive for a film company that was just bailed out with taxpayer money is now crowing about spending half a billion dollars on - of all things - a movie that isn't even cast yet.


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The Truth About Islamic Militants

So some genius in the depths of the Christian USA (Florida to be precise) has come up with the bright idea of having this year's anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks be the first annual 'Burn A Qur'an Day'. In any rational world this would reflect worse on the antagonist than it doesn't on its target, but we all well know that we don't live in a rational world (it's also hard for the Christian Right in America to fall any further in the eyes of the global public anyway).

But it is what Burn A Qur'an Day reveals about Islamic militants that is most interesting. Cast your minds back to earlier this year, when South Park had it's 200th show anniversary. The plot centred in a large part around Muhammad; they wanted to show him, but couldn't so he spent the episode in a bear costume. And people got worked up about it. That's right, Islamic militants got worked up about the idea that Muhammad might be wearing a bear costume and that that bear costume is bring shown on television. In a cartoon. Next episode it is revelaed that it was Santa Claus inside the bear costume, not Muhammad, thus exposing the ridiculousness of the argument against the show.

But the damage had already been done.

A group of rather vocal self christened Islamic militants insinuated that if Comedy Central (the network on which the show airs) showed Muhammad then there would be serious repurcutions. They published addresses of Comedy Central offices, as well as the home addresses of Parker and Stone (South Park's creators), and warned that they could not be held accountable for what might happen.

The stunt worked, they got airtime on all the major news networks, and Comedy Central bowed its head and heavily censored the following episode (it was a 2 parter), to the point where they bleeped every utterance of Muhammad's name (way to stand up for those freedoms you believe in by the way). The bullies won. Again.

Fast forward to now, with Burn A Qur'an Day fast approaching. Where are the voices of dissent? Where are the threats of violence? Where is the publishing of home addresses? Nowhere to be seen. What Burn A Qur'an Day - for all its bigoted ugliness - has done, is expose the true face of Western Islamic militancy.

They're attention seeking media whores. Nothing more.

Burn A Qur'an Day is something - it's safe to say - that is deeply offensive to Muslims and non Muslims alike (hence the pre sure from various religious leaders and the White House to call it off) and something that is far more reactionary and provocative than showing a cartoon of Santa, who's pretending to be Muhammad, in a bear suit. But it is not being jump on by Islamic militants to claim to fight for Allah. Why is that?

Because, quite frankly, there is no news story attached to it. Attacking - verbally or otherwise - the organisers of a small church in Florida would not garner headiness like threatening celebrities and major media networks would. Attacking those participating in the event, an event that most sane people agree is ugly and wrong, will not galvanise public opinion against you, your motives could be understood. And - unlike Liberals - attacking these people involved in Burn. A Qur'an Day would not stop them; they wouldn't back down and they wouldn't give up.

Muslim militants like to fight battles that they know they can win, that will galvanise opinion against them and that will give them a lot of media coverage. Starting a fight with the organisers of Burn A Qur'an would accomplish none of these things.

Media outlets are not really interested in the event. Glenn Beck is holding a mega rally in Alaska on the same day, purported to be the event where Sarah Palin will announce her 2012 presidential bid. Compared to that, a bunch of racist, intolerant Southern Christians are not exactly newsworthy (they're hardly doing anything different than usual).

For the same reason - the fact that they're racist, intolerant, Southern Christians - a fight is unwinnable. The usual suspects of Islamic militancy know that they won't be able to get the organisers and supporters to back down, so it isn't a battle they could crow about winning in the name of Islam; in fact it would only prove that the resolve of the Christians was greater than that of the Muslims, as they refused to back down in the face of threatened violence because of their faith in their God. So our Islamic friends are 0 for 2.

The final point is that it doesn't turn people against them. This is very important. The heart of Islamic Fundamentalism is not about 'winning should for Allah' it's about killing everyone who isn't a believer, and subjugating the survivors to the iron rule of the Islamic caliphate. They are a lot like the Westboro Baptist Church (the God Hates Fags crew) in this respect.

The WBC originally started picketing abortion clinics, but this did not set them out from the crowd. Then they started attacking homosexuals. This was a bit better, but still didn't net them the notoriety they craved. In attacking dead soldiers they were able to galvanise everyone against them. They're finally hated the way they want to be.

Islamic fundamentalists are the same. They need to be hated. They need to be loathed. Attacking something like a mass Qur'an burning is somewhat understandable. Threatening to attack a cartoon show isn't. One will get people on your side, the other won't. And it's the won't that they crave.

The won't gets them more airtime, the won't gets them more angst, the won't confirms that they are the righteous few in their fight against the unbelievers. It's the need to be seen, be hated and be heard. All the time. If you can't get on the air with something, it's not worth the battle. For this reason it proves that the actual cause of these people has nothing to do with their faith. What offends their faith is not what motivates them, it's what offends everyone else and how publicity they can get for it that drives them.

Offend the unbelievers, get the news headlines, win the battles, and when Allah sees the papers, he'll know how good a Muslim you are.





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Religious Hypocrisy

Just a little thought; why is it that the religious and the Conservative always think that the freedoms of society that are offered to them as rights are negotiable when it comes to people that don't think like they do? Go look for consistency in Conservatism or religion.




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The Afghan War Logs

What is so important about the Wikileaks release of the 92'000 classified American documents is the light that they shine on the true nature of the Afghan war. What quickly becomes apparent, even from looking at the brief details, is what a lost cause the Afghan incursion really is. Maybe if War Criminals Bush and Blair hadn't bungled into their illegal war in Iraq, things may have been remained stable. But history is what it is, and Afghanistan is a lost cause.

We see that our 'ally' Pakistan appears to be funding the Taliban, we see that a paranoid US force are resulting to more and more desperate and reckless methods in an effort to fight back.

Is it not yet clear that the war is lost? The media has been dutifully reporting the talking points handed done to it by the military, without question, but it is now unable to ignore the truth of the situation; Afghanistan is a mess.

That is what is so important about this event; the truth is out. Governments can spin, cover up or deny the facts any more. They have to be bought to account and made to answer for them. Do not be fooled by the immediate Pentagon response; revealing that Pakistan is supporting the Taliban or that drone strikes are becoming more frequent endangers no one on the ground. It only damages the military in charge.

What, it could be argued, is damaging is the revelation that US troops have been more or less killing indiscriminately whenever they've felt threatened. This is the same as the attempted cover up of torture. It makes America look bad. If the nations leaders cared at all about the safety of their troops then they wouldn't be in Afghanistan, no what their concerned about is how it makes the, look in the eyes of their own people. It makes them and the American story look like hypocritical crap that it is, and they don't like it.

The question now falls to the media. To what level will they cover it? I have little doubt that the British media will feature it, but to what level will pressure be applied to our leaders? On the other side of the pond, I have much graver doubts. There will be nothing but desperation to silence this issue as quickly and with little fuss as possible.

The fact that the information is now out, uncensored and raw is important. It falls to the media to actually do their job of journalism and make our leaders answer for the raw facts of what is happening. Make them answer for the hundreds of unnecessary deaths that are down to a war of their choosing that cannot be won. And maybe we can also now get someone to seriously address the issue of Pakistan for once.

The genie is out of the bottle and the public knows the truth. Let's see if OUR media will let them put it back in again.


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David Cameron And World War 2

David Cameron, are you fucking kidding me? Britain was a 'junior partner' in WW2 in 1940? Really? Now I'm not crazy for patriotism but fuck you. In 1940 Britain was the only thing between the Nazi's and all of fucking Europe you asshole. In 1940 America, the country whose cock you currently seem so keen to suck, still couldn't decide if it would be worth entering into a war that had nothing to do with them (how times change). In 1940, Churchill and the British populace were living the nation's finest hour. And you have the insane audacity to call our role at that time that of the 'junior partner'?! Unbelievable. If you can say something like that, out of ignorance or on purpose, you are not fit to be Prime Minister.



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Apple's Press Conference

Only Apple could take a problem that has been staggeringly unique to their product and try to shift the blame onto the entire industry. RIM haven't had any reports of signal problem in any of thrill phones, neither have Samsung, HTC, Motorola or Nokia. Even Apple didn't have reports it with the iPhone 3G or 3GS. You can't release 'the best phone ever' and say it's light years ahead of everything else and then whine and bitch and try to blame anything else humanly possible when it comes to light that you knew about the problem, weren't interested in fixing it and it bites you (deservedly) on the ass. Still, at least they've offered free cases, and they gave the correct response (in the end).


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Location:Coventry,United Kingdom

The Tea Party: A European Perspective

The phenomenon that is the Tea Party has swept across America like a bizarre epidemic of all that is internationally fascinating and shocking about the country.

We from across the pond and around the world hear some of the more stunning examples of their influence in political circles. Very few actually know who they are and what their purpose is. And I suppose they have something in common with the Tea Party themselves as a result; because the members of Tea Party don't seem to know either.

We hear talk of 'Taking our country back!' Something that is rarely asked in the American media is 'From what?' What do these people want to take their country back from? 'The socialists!' 'The Liberals!' And so on. Anyone from a European country can tell you though, the current Democratic power base across the country is nowhere near socialist, and barley liberal (indeed, the actual liberals in the House and Senate all seemed to be viewed in the media as some kind of anomaly).

See, the members of the Tea Party, the alleged grass roots of the movement, don't seem to understand many of the subjects that it is they are screaming about. They shout of socialism, fascism, communism, liberalism. We hear charges of the President being a 'fascist communist', the shouters of which seem incapable of understanding the amazing deficit of political intelligence it requires to make that statement.

And that it is where we hit on something is so important about the Tea Party. Possibly the most important thing. So many of its members seem absolutely bereft of the very basics of political though. As highlighted in Chris Matthews' excellent documentary 'The Rise Of The New Right' recently, so many of the members of the Tea Party freely admit to being complete political newcomers. Now, where there is nothing wrong with people who have previously never been involved with politics getting involved - rather it is a good thing - it does become a problem when they revel in their ignorance and have no desire to expand their political knowledge.

This is where the crux of the problem lies with the Tea Party. You have vast swathes of people who have heard so many different things through the news media and who have made no effort to understand what these statements mean. They hear them from various sources, but their method of explanation is not research, it is not reasoned, balanced political debate, it is whatever explains the idea easiest. And, I'm afraid, those ideas are explained easiest by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Fox News.

Glenn, Rush et al. actually have a very different agenda. They are personalities known across the United States, but they are not known for reasoned commentary. They do not explain things, they give their own very partisan opinions on them. They portray themselves as the bastions of freedom, truth and liberty, though they are anything but. Rush and Fox are spokesmen for the extremes of the Conservative movement and Glenn Beck is the most easily manipulated, paranoid, woefully ignorant figure with a messiah complex I have seen in recent years.

They are the spokespeople for this movement, they are the figureheads, and the new uninitiated, who come to the Tea Party with curious ears and unfounded worries lap up the words of Beck, Rush and their ilk without question. They have never been interested in politics, and now they hear easy, clear answers to seemingly complex political issues they think they have found a home. They quickly think themselves experts because they hear so many opinions on so many different subjects that they take as fact.

And thus the machine grows, the distortions permeate. It is accepted without question by people who do not and have not ever strived to grasp the complexities of political discourse. While someone like George Will may not be the most bipartisan member of the political commentary machine, one could not argue that he is not an intelligent man. Far from it. But George Will does not speak to the likes of the Tea Party. He is rarely listened to by them. The answers he has to their questions may be along the lines of what they want to hear, but they are not given in the easily digestible chunks that the likes of Beck may throw out.

Even Republicans are no longer safe. Senator Lyndsey Graham, a longtime bastion of conservative values, has been turned upon by the Tea Party, for he has refused to bow to their demand to simple answers to complex questions. He has refused to toe the line of outright obstructionism. And he has refused to bow to simplistic political solutions to massive problems. Graham in turn, has revelled in turning on them. Indeed, he seems to be enjoying his new found 'maverick' status.

And it has been Graham that has been so keen to point out the question that we asked at the beginning of this article. What do the Tea Party want to take their country back from? We know it is not socialists because there are none - they are imagined. We know it is not communists or liberals. They are not the people in power right now. The people in power are merely seeking to end the corporate lobby's stranglehold on America. It should come as no shock that the Tea Party is funded by so many very rich people with very close ties to the corporate machine.

But do the grassroots members of the Tea Party brigade question this? Do they even acknowledge it? No. They brush it off, as with so many things, as a smear attack by the 'liberal media', a charge that is as ridiculous as it is false. They are told it is a smear attack, usually by the biggest name in news - a conservative news network (so much for liberal media) and they believe it. They do not question it, they do not even attempt to look at it from another angle. They just accept it.

So it becomes clear that the Tea Party doesn't really know what they want to take their country back from. They are being told that it is time to take their country back and they repeat it. No questions, no challenges, just repeat.

And once they have their country back, what do they do with it? The people that control the Tea Party have no further plan other than destroying those who wish to put checks on their interests, influence and power. So the grassroots don't know what it is that they are going to do.

What it seems that they (the grassroots) want to move into is a Christian state, where corporations have unfettered power and no regulation. They want a world without Government intrusion into their lives, where the media is allowed to broadcast only what they agree with and the liberal scum that they believe infect their society are banished. The will not have to put up with a secular agenda, they will not have to put up with a gay agenda, they will not have to put up with a liberal agenda. History can be distorted to fit their patriotic agenda, and the ugly truth of America's history will be whitewashed with a coat several coats of red, white and blue.

So what they seem to be wanting is the very definition of a fascist state. The fascist state that they seem so keen to tell the rest of the world that they are worried they are heading towards.

They just aren't interested in understanding that it I'd their movement that is heading there.



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The Budget - A brief Rant

Okay, less than a day after it was unveiled I'm officially fed up of Labour and others moaning about the budget. When asked whether they want tax increases or spending cuts, people always say spending cuts. When asked what spending on services they want to cut, they say none of them. Osbourne, though he is an evil manchild, produced a tough but fair budget.

People didn't want tax increases, so there weren't any. What appeared instead were big spending cuts and a rise in VAT. People want to reduce the debt and have lower taxes and increased public spending at the same time. As Bill Maher said 'That's like thinking getting a hand job will clean the garage.' Someone had to act like a grownup, and Labour was kicking the ball downfield when they were in power to avoid any unpopularity (though why a bunch of international law breakers, supporters of war crimes and establishers of a modern police state would care about being unpopular I don't know), or risk losing the election. Though I am loathe to admit it, the Tories (and the Liberals) were the grownups we needed. So stop fucking moaning.


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Nintendo's Genius

Watching the E3 media briefings this week, it quickly comes apparent the kind of value that a history of game design has.

Sony, as a power in the video game world is only 15 or so years old. Microsoft is only 10. Nintendo is 25. The grandfather of modern console gaming is proving, in the HD age, why it is setting the agenda, not the power houses.

Nintendo has come a long way. It reinvented the wheel in the '80s with the Nintendo Entertainment System, a newfangled 'console' that was built solely to play games. It gave us Super Mario Brothers, a revelation. It gave us Zelda, the first computer game that actually allowed you to save your progress through the game.

These things were revelatory. It then simply upped the horsepower with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (my first video games console) and produced some of the greatest classics in gaming history - Starfox, Super Metroid, Super Mario World.

But it was then that Sony reared its head and forced Nintendo to adapt. They game up with the first fully 3D game ever created; Super Mario 64, and followed it with games like Goldeneye 007 and Conker's Bad Fur Day, two other games that had a massive impact on the way we play games.

As using a console to play DVDs and act as a media centre became more popular, Nintendo seemed to start slipping behind. They produced the Gamecube to compete with the PS2 and original XBox. They announced that their unnamed followup would not be an HD console. It seemed as if they were losing their way.

No, they were reinventing the wheel again.

The Gamecube gave us the first wireless controller, the Wavebird. It's follow up is a little white box called the Wii.

Enough has been written about the Wii to explain it's revolutionary success. The sales figures speak for themselves (in Japan it outsells the PS3 and XBox 360 6:1). All there is to say that in the purported age of HD, online gaming, the little white box with sticks for controllers, no HDMI and fairly bog standard networking abilities is the market leader.

Which brings us to this week' E3. While Microsoft and Sony are showing off Kinect and Move, their own motion control toys, Nintendo debuted the 3DS. The world's first - and only - fully 3D gaming device (we can also note here that despite having half the horse power of the PSP the original Nintendo DS is the second best selling gaming system of all time, having sold over 129million units).

As Microsoft and Sony are playing catchup (and to be fair to them Microsoft's Kinect is pretty revolutionary) Nintendo is taking strides - once again - into the unknown.

They turned gaming on it's head with the NES, Gameboy and Nintendo 64, and then suffered as they waited for technology to catch up to their next great visions; the DS and Wii. Nintendo's lean years of 1998-2004 were spent biding their time, waiting for the right moment to do what they have always done best: not just lead the market, but invent it.

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BP

I'm hearing a lot about the drama surrounding BP at the moment; how their market value is dropping like a stone and their dividends are getting swept away.

Quite frankly, I don't care.

I cannot understand the obsession in the British media and amongst some of the British political class with defending Britain from what they deem to be obsessive attacks from America. Criticising BP is not anti-British. It's anti-planet destroying corporations. That corporation just happens to be based in the UK.

The people who are saying that Obama's attacks are risking British pensions are, quite frankly, idiots. Would these same people tell off a rape victim because several people happened to have money invested in the rapist?

It is the fault of the pension companies who invested such a massive amount of cash into a single company. If BP collapsed in Enron like circumstances would people be arguing about pensions then? No.

It's an effort to protect arguably one of the biggest British businesses from being regulated and punished by the Obama administration. BP deserves everything it gets. On average, the five other major oil companies average about 5-7 safety violations a year. BP has clocked up over 700. They are in a league of their own. They are environmental criminals and the people in charge deserve to be in prison.

Safety violation after safety violation. Environmental disaster after environmental disaster. And we keep letting them off because they pay a lot of tax. They are the modern East India Trading Company; a modern monolith that thinks it is too big to be stopped.

Pride goeth before a fall. And hopefully BP will fall hard.


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Location:Alwyn Ave,Hounslow,United Kingdom

Let's Try Mobile Blogging

So, I haven't updated this blog in months, mainly because I haven't written anything substantive in over a year, due to the myriad of other things that have been going on in my life over the past twelve months or so.

I'm going to try and re-engage though, and instead of blogging only lengthy articles I'm going to try and make this an expanded version of my Facebook/Twitter feed; in that I shall take that 120 character thought that I'm consigned to on there and expanded on it through here. We can all thank the iPad and iPhone for this.

I doubt these posts will reach anywhere near the length of my previous stuff, but I think it'll be interesting to produce short comments about whatever I feel like, no more than an A4 page or so and see how things go from there.

The revolution was yesterday.


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Location:Alwyn Ave,Hounslow,United Kingdom

Why I Am Supporting The Liberal Democrats

Over the past several weeks and months I have come to regard the British Election of 2010 as one of the most important of our time; certainly the most important that anyone in my generation has ever witnessed or been able to participate in. There are multiple reasons for this; the fact that the thirteen year Government of the Labour party has dramatically reshaped and redefined the social, economic and political landscape of this nation, the fact that the televised debates have done more to usurp the traditional media managed power of Fleet Street, and the fact that for the first time in almost a century, we are seeing a genuine three party race, between Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s incumbent Labour party, David Cameron’s newly invigorated Conservatives, and Nick Clegg’s dark horse Liberal Democrats.

I will be voting for the Liberal Democrats, for a number of reasons. I would like to explain why.

First things first: anyone that knows me knows that I am a passionate and staunch holder, supporter and defender of progressive, left wing, liberal values. It should come as no surprise then that I would choose to vote for a progressive, left wing party. What you may not know was that the first time I was old enough to vote, I voted for William Hague’s Conservatives in the 2001 General Election. I did not vote in the 2005 election. I do not believe in voting for a party because you always have. I think that is foolish and wrong. I believe in voting for who has the best policies.

So, Left Winger, Why Not Labour?

The Labour party, which has traditionally called itself the party of the left and the progressives of Britain will not be getting my vote for a number of reasons. Under Tony Blair, and later Gordon Brown, Labour became New Labour, and shifted dramatically to the right of politics. Out went the left wing values and in came corporatism, big Government, security states and spin.

For all the talk of papers like The Daily Mail and The Times of Labour having eroded the traditional values of Britain, the truth is that Labour have done more to uphold the concerns of the traditional supporters of the right than anyone could have imagined. The Government of Blair, now Brown, is not a progressive party. They have presided over a bloated Government full of corruption, lies, broken promises and pandering to big business. Though they are desperately trying to portray themselves as the party of progressives in order to take the thunder away from the Liberal Democrats, they are anything but that. Having resisted reform and progress (on a Governmental level) for over a decade, they are a party trying to conserve their established grip on power more than anyone else. They have had thirteen years to try and make things better, and while their contributions to a more equal society should no be overlooked, after the last five years of incompetent bumbling, it is time that they were shown the door.

The Labour Government was also the one that took us into the horribly misguided adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars that were stupid and unnecessary. These two wars - one which was bungled from the start and cannot be won, another that was opposed by the vast majority of the British electorate and was sold to Parliament on lies, deception, falsehoods, more deception, more lies and done so with a concerned look and smile on the face of the trickster that sold it - both at the behest of Labour’s masters in the United States, are reasons in themselves why no one should consider voting for the Labour party. The lies of the current Government have caused the deaths of hundreds of British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans. They also broke international treaties and laws and threw over a century of British discipline and law on the battlefield out of the window by overseeing the illegal extradition, interrogation and even torture of foreign nationals deemed to be ‘enemy combatants’, and then trying to lie about it and cover it up. In the interim they may also have murdered Dr David Kelly, but thanks to their draconian security laws and obscene abuses of power, no one that is old enough to vote now will ever know what happened, as the records relating to the case have been sealed for the next 60 years. And all of this, this abandoning of the behavior that made this nation the envy of the world, was done for no good reason. This alone should disqualify anyone involved in that Government from receiving your vote.

Okay, What About The ‘New’ Conservative Party Then?

The support of the Tories for the Iraq war should also disqualify the majority of the Conservative party from receiving your vote, though there are a great number of other reasons why they are not deserving of Government.

I do not hide the fact that I vehemently dislike the nature of conservatism. I think that it holds us back, that it appeals to the base, self preservation nature in all of us, that it is inherently selfish and unconcerned with others. The current iteration of the Conservative party, under the leadership of David Cameron, has done a great many things to appear as if they they have changed from these core sets of beliefs. But they have not. They are the same Conservatives that they always been.

What Cameron proposes to do is take us back to the days of Thatcher. To take us back to the greed fueled days of the 1980s, the decade when the baby boomers oversaw the royal ruining of this country and the global economy. As seen in the last televised leaders debate, David Cameron ceaselessly ignored and dodged questions posed to him regarding his intent to cut the taxes of the richest 3’000 people in this country, his desire to cut public spending immediately and give tax breaks to big business, his intention to put a nonsensical cap on immigration and practically close British borders and his proposed withdrawal from Europe and intent to turn Britain into a semi-isolationist state in Europe. One only needs to look at the frequent trips of the Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne to the private yachts of several billionaires in the Mediterranean, many of whom would directly benefit from an isolationist Britain that favors big business. It doesn’t require much insight to put the pieces together.

Cameron, like the Tory party of old, has no interest in helping or supporting workers or the poor. He would like to break the unions like Thatcher once did, hand the rights and lives of employees over to their profit driven employers, cut tens of thousands of public sector jobs and force everyone to work for a year longer before they get the opportunity to retire. This forced extension of the age of retirement has nothing to do with allowing the elderly to put more money into their pension funds, but rather it’s purported aim is to reduce the national deficit. Though how working for private companies for another year would do that I am not sure.

You only have to look at the current Tory party to see how disingenuous they are about representing everyone and building a fair ‘Big Society’. They intend to keep and expand the surveillance state built by new Labour, but roll back the equal rights of millions of single parents and gay men and women across the country. As the Tories set about giving tax breaks to married couples, the middle finger is raised to those seeking a divorce, those who were never married or those who are gay.

One can also remember that the Tories’ same old virulent homophobia is as strong as ever. Though it is carefully hidden beneath a shiny veneer of tolerance, one only needs to look here (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jan/29/information-beautiful-gay-rights#zoomed-picture) and here (http://mygayvote.co.uk/) to see that this is a lie. Look at the recent scandals that have emerged in the press; Chris Grayling saying bed and breakfasts should be able to discriminate against homosexuals and Conservative MP Philippa Stroud, who founded a church to try and ‘cure’ gay men and women. One can also look at this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBlDfp85gP8) to see how Mr Cameron cannot even get his facts straight about the voting of his own MEPs in their support for the incredibly homophobic laws in Eastern Europe when challenged on it.

The more one scratches beneath the surface, the more one can see that nothing about the Conservative party has changed. They are the same old party they ever were.

So that leaves us with the Liberal Democrats, and why I choose to vote for them.

The Liberal Moment

The Liberal Democrats have long been the party of ‘Well I’d like to vote for them, but there’s no point. They won’t win.’ All that changed on April 15 this year, when Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg stole the first televised debate. My mind had been made up about voting for the Liberal Democrats for several weeks beforhande, but I was ecstatic to see Clegg dominate Cameron and Brown and show why a real progressive voice, free from the need to serve its backscratchers in the media or corporate bankrollers, is so desperately needed in this country. But it is not the performance of Clegg, or the prophetic financial ability of his proposed Chancellor Vince Cable that makes me vote for them. It is their policies.

To start, let’s clear up the most frequently misrepresented of their policies. First we have the immigration amnesty. This is not, as Brown, Cameron and many in the media have tried to spin it, an opening of Britain’s borders giving citizenship to anyone that wants to come in. The proposal is this; a one off, one time offer to illegal immigrants who have lived in this country for ten years or more, that they may take this opportunity to apply for citizenship. If they can prove that they can speak English and contribute to society, they will be granted (subject to a full background check) British citizenship.

This would take immigrants out of the hands of the people that may be hiding them, owning them or bankrolling them, and will allow them to contribute to the society that they have been hiding amongst for the last decade. This, in my opinion, is a far superior solution to Labour’s intention to use yet more surveillance to solve an out of control problem, or the Conservative plan to round up and throw out illegal immigrants and then close the borders. This would allow a Liberal Government to figure out roughly how many immigrants are in this country - illegally - and potentially create several hundred thousand new tax payers.

The second policy that is misrepresented, is the intention to review Trident. Brown, Cameron and the media have repeatedly portrayed this as a Liberal intention to scrap Britain’s nuclear deterrent. That is patently untrue. It is fear mongering. What the Liberal Democrats have proposed is a review of the vastly expensive program, a review that could save billions of pounds and reduce Britain’s over-bloated, Cold War style nuclear armament, in favor of tactical weapons with far more diverse use. Again, this is a smart move. Labour and the Conservatives would not take it because they know it could be spun to make them seem weak on defense. It is not. It will potentially save £100billion. It is smart.

Other policies I support are the reduction of classroom sizes and the additional assistance offered to underprivileged and struggling schoolchildren. I support the fair taxing of banks, the super-rich and large businesses. I support the increased Government regulation of industry. I support the intention to scrap tax on the first £10’000 anyone earns. I support their intention to stand as equals in the special relationship with America and not just roll over to U.S demands. I support their desired integration into Europe. I support their reworking of the prison service by making anyone that would be sentenced to 60 days in prison do community service projects, rather than bloat our already struggling jails. I support the linking of basic state pension and earnings. I support the breaking up of the banks and forcing them to lend again. I support the scrapping of university tuition fees for first time students. I support the scrapping of the £3billion Eurofighter program. I support the cutting of rail fairs. I support the proposal to reform the World Bank and IMF. I support the cancelation of 100% of the debt owed by the world’s poorest countries.

I support all these policies, but most of all I support the intention to reform the voting system. We do not, as the Tories claim, need a reduction in the number of MPs. We need to reform the system. Proportional representation is important. It is needed. Because of the current system, Labour - who almost lost the popular vote in 2005 - gained a sizeable number of seats and increased their power. Because of the current system, the Liberal Democrats may win the popular vote this election, but may only gain several dozen seats. The Conservatives and Labour have no interest in proportional representation, because it would break the stranglehold they both have on the current system. But the current system is unfair and broken. It leads to career politicians, it leads to things like the expenses scandal, it leads to the two party system that the majority of the populace have no faith in. It needs to be overhauled so things are fair.

That, more than anything, is what I believe the Liberal Democrats stand for and are offering. Fairness, and a chance to change the way things are. For too long the electorate has been scared of change, but dissatisfied with the way things are. Now is the chance to change this. Now is the chance to actually do something different. Something that benefits the many, not the few. Now is the time.

I am voting Liberal Democrat. I implore you to do the same.

On The Future Of Cinema

Three people. That’s what really got my juices flowing on this. Three people. Three of the most influential people in the recent history of the medium. In the most recent issue of Empire, pieces of George Lucas, James Cameron and Francis Coppola were featured. Three very different directors, three very different viewpoints. In a nutshell, the three articles encapsulate the crossroads that cinema now finds itself at.

 

In one corner of this triangle, we have George Lucas; the biggest one hit wonder in the history of any artistic medium. A revolutionary, a visionary and a destroyer of the childhoods of many modern day 20-40 year olds with his Star Wars prequel trilogy and his reanimation and subsequent defiling of the ghost of Indiana Jones. Mr Lucas’ take on the future of the medium is quite simple: ‘Within the next ten years, every movie will be a visual effects film.’ Or, if that doesn’t want to make you slap yourself in the face in anger enough, we have; ‘Art is technology. … All artists have bounced against the ceiling of technology.’ We can sum up Mr Lucas’ opinion in a few simple words: ‘Bigger and better technology is the future of cinema.’

 

In another corner of our triangle however, we have Francis Ford Coppola; a man responsible for three of the greatest films ever made (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now), yet a man who, after completing his Vietnam masterpiece, pretty much never ascended to such dizzying heights of greatness ever again. Having not worked in a decade (a gap between 1997’s The Rainmaker and 2007’s Youth Without Youth), Coppola is returning this year with Tetro, a film with a budget of $15million, compared to Lucas’ most recent $185million flop ‘Indiana Jones IV: The Rape Of Your Childhood Memories’, could not be more at odds with his close friend’s view on cinema. ‘That we’re talking about now is the ‘big industry’ film – films that are packaged as a certain idea of action, and in many cases violence or thrills or mystery. These films aren’t expressions of the writer, but a compendium of ideas that could work as a blockbuster hit. That’ not Hollywood – it’s just wherever people want to make a lot of money.’ Indeed, Coppola is not interest in 3D or big budget or big events. He wants to make personal, intimate films about stories and people. He wants to shoot and write them beautifully. Whereas the future is purported to lie in one direction, one of the greatest directors of all time believes his own future, and possibly the appeal of the medium, lies squarely in the past.

 

And in the third corner - or perhaps it might be said – straddling the two above diametrically opposing viewpoints of the San Francisco friends above, is James Cameron. If ever the was a big budget director, Cameron is probably it. His cinematography reads like a litany of some of the greatest celebrated big budget films of all time; The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, True Lies and of course, the highest grossing film in history, Titanic. Cameron is currently working on Avatar, a film that allegedly promises to revolutionise the industry. Cameron firmly believes that 2D is dead, and eventually everything will be made in 3D, and yet in the interview, he has a very telling interesting ‘The key is to be in control of the technology, not let it control you.’ It appears, while Cameron certainly believes that the past is over, and that the future lies in 3D, he, unlike Mr Lucas, does not appear to have any interest in being a slave to it. He does not appear to hold any desire to make every film a technological marvel, rather he prefers to use the technology to accent the film and bring his vision to life, rather than have things in his films revolve around scenes that are there solely to use and show off whatever new gizmo it is he may be using.

 

So between the two polar opposite opinions of the San Francisco friends, there lies the Canadian. And while he leans towards George Lucas’ technological embrace, he holds back and holds firm towards the Coppola camp in that he soley wishes to tell stories. The difference is he fully embraces only the necessary technology to do so; he has no desire to use the tech for the sake of it. That, in my opinion, is the way forward, and that, in my opinion, is the only thing that will keep 3D technology away from being a fad (like it has been so many times in the past). The trick is to allow the technology to enhance your vision, to suck an audience into the believable world that you are surrounding them with.

 

This is where George Lucas has proved himself to be completely missing the point. A point which, in effect, he helped create. What George appears to have taken away from the success of his first three Star Wars films is that it was the technological wizardry that made them a success. He is - seemingly – incapable of understanding that it was the fact that this amazing technology that he pioneered fit like hand in glove in the telling of his epic space opera. It made space battles exciting, took you on a journey you had never experienced before and made you believe wholly in his vision. What he saw happening was people saying ‘Wow I’ve never seen that before! Wow look at that, that’s so cool!’ He didn’t get that the only reason that they’re bowled over is because they’re actually involved in the story. So when he remade the original three in the late ‘90s, and then went on to create the prequel trilogy, he didn’t realise that the simplicity of his initial story, the depth it offered to the viewer from its fairly black and white caricatures was what drew people in. He thought – and still thinks – that it was the whizzes the bangs and the booms that made people love it. What we ended up with was the most mishandled telling of a simple story ever written, albeit one that was technologically a masterpiece.

 

It’s funny to think that the man is so close with Francis Copolla, a man who is resolutely against the technological revolution; an artist who is quite happy to delve into the past in order to carve out his own future. As said, Cameron seems to straddle to two as the sensible influence, yet it remains to be seen whether this new wave of cinema tech will be embraced by audiences. Remember, it was not just whizzes and bangs in Star Wars that made people love it; they had already seen elements like that in other movies for almost a decade prior. It was the stories that the first new wave of tech was grafted onto that helped them be successful, not the tech itself. Up until the late ‘90s it was a tool used to enhance a story. But as it became easier to manipulate, it became something that could supplement, rather than accentuate, the story itself. The result is the wave of films we have seen since around 2002-2003 which have relied so heavily on CGI that their soul has been sucked from the screen (in most cases they didn’t even have a story). It remains to be seen whether there are more exceptional filmmakers like James Cameron out there that understand that cinema has always been about great stories bought to life in a way you could never see in reality or a live setting, rather than being the technological exercise that George Lucas and his techno-ilk wish to doom its future to.

Why Are People Happy To Let Crooks Run Their Own Trial?

There is an ongoing roar at the moment, certainly it exists within the hallowed halls of Fleet Street in our Oh so unbiased news media, but interestingly – for once – it actually seems to be reflected amongst the people that live in this country as well. The matter is that of the expenses of our MPs. On and on and on this debacle has been going, and countless dozens of headlines have cropped up to expose the abuse of the system; the most recent being the revelation that the Labour peer Baroness Uddin claimed £100’000 of expenses on a flat that she never even furnished, that she claimed was her main residence in order to claim almost £30’000 a year in accommodation expenses from the House of Lords. Her actual main residence was actually 4 miles away from Parliament.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong, everyone fiddles their expenses when they can (if they’re lucky enough to be permitted expenses). Everyone, now and again, will happily charge something through their company when it doesn’t really have much business being charged there. I have no real beef with MPs doing that. Is it annoying that they’re doing it with my tax dollars? Yeah, I guess it is. But do I really care? No. Because everyone would do it if they could. (We do, in fact, see another example of the empty hearted ‘moral outrage’ that rattles so frequently through our news media, expressing disbelief and outrages at MPs playing fast and loose with their expenses, despite knowing damn well that they would do the same if they were in such a position (and despite many of them already doing so)).

 

No, what irks me on this issue, what is kind of being skipped over and ignored by the mainstream press, and is thus not being communicated to the (and I use the term loosely as always) ‘great’ British people, is the enquiries that our lame duck Prime Minister is having done into MPs expenses. We are due to see a report into MPs expenses claims and allowances published this summer, and who is writing this report? The Commons Standards Committee. And who makes up this publishing body? Members of Parliament.

 

So yes, MPs are due to be writing a penetrating report critiquing their use and possible abuse of expenses, the conclusion of which could adversely affect their allowances. They’re being asked to regulate themselves. And, in turn, they are going to be given permission to censor themselves. The MPs are going to be allowed to censor ‘sensitive’ information, such as the names of hotels, destinations of taxis, names of shops and any correspondence with parliamentary officials. Basically, all the really important stuff.

 

So let’s look this objectively, what we lowly serfs will be allowed to see, is a claim for, say, £1000. We will be able to see the date of the claim, what was claimed for and the identity of suppliers only for office goods. So, in short, we’re being told that there will be total transparency on this, total accountability, and yet the people that will be compiling this report will be the people that it will affect directly, and then they will be given total free reign to cover up that which they don’t want to be known.

 

Apparently, there have been several MPs on the backbench who were on ‘suicide watch’, recently, because of what might end up being revealed.  There have been rumours floating that a pair of MPs are fearful that their extramarital affairs will be exposed by double claims for their hotel rooms. But, thankfully for them, they will be allowed to cover their oily, duplicitous little backsides, because their friends who are compiling this report will allow them to do so.

 

What is most annoying about this whole debacle is that no one is really that outraged about this. The MPs, while coming under rightful fire for abusing their expenses, are doing every damn thing they can to continue to protect themselves. They have got their hand caught in the cookie jar, and instead of just licking their wounds and taking the punishment they rightly had coming to them, they continue trying to protect themselves and fuck over their employers (US), while at the same time having the nerve to lecture the rest of the country about fiscal and economic responsibility and to lecture bankers that their reckless spending has to stop. Their hypocrisy and two faced double standards shine through again and again and again. And what is most frustrating is that this particular caveat is being overlooked by a lot of people in favour of the more salacious examples of expense abuse. The expense abuse as a headline is all fine and well, but the real news here is that they are getting away with continued abuse of the system. Bankers do not have this luxury, social services do not have this luxury, but no one is calling out the elected Members of the British Parliament on their claiming, nay, snatching of this luxury for themselves. That is what to be outraged about, and that is what the media is sliding away from.

 

We should be, as usual, demanding and expecting better from both our media and our politicians. But, then again, what’s new.

Five Films That Changed My Life

People frequently write about music, songs or albums that changed their life, but having never been into music as heavily as I am into literature and the image, I decided to write about works of cinema that had a profound effect on me.

1. Irreversible - 2002

I first saw Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible in June of 2003. I have only watched it maybe two or three times in the interceding six years. To this day, I still remember how I felt as the early scene in The Rectum nightclub came to an end. I was stunned, gobsmacked and in a state of mild shock. I had never reacted that way to a film – or any art – before. It was a genuine, unfiltered emotion, and – while I can hardly say it’s the greatest film ever made – it drew out of me more than many other films I have seen and loved more since. I realised, watching Irreversible, that art did not have to filter itself. Ever. That, while it was easy to be gratuitous with violence, sex or nudity, to actually make an impact with it was still possible, provided it was treated properly. It is something that I have tried to explore since, and something that will continue to influence my work for a long time to come.

2. The Usual Suspects – 1995

October 2003. I don’t think a film has ever been more important to be creative and artistic development than Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects. It was that twist at the end of the film, that moment when the truth about Keyser Söze is revealed, when my jaw dropped to the floor, I threw up my hands in shock and bowed to the most masterful cinematic sleight of hand I have ever seen. I immediately watched the film again, and perceived a totally different film, specifically the performance of Kevin Spacey. It was this film, and that twist, that made me say ‘I want to write something like that. I want to write something that good.’ I began the very next day, and wrote my first script in a matter of weeks. Was it any good? No, but it was that film that made me, for the first time in my adult life, pick up a pen and apply myself to writing. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was The Usual Suspects that made me want to be a writer.

3. L.I.E – 2001

I can’t remember when exactly I first saw the masterpiece that is L.I.E. It was sometime in 2005 I think. I remember being bowled over by how good it was. How stunning, how moving and how – some might argue – controversial. Portraying a pederast as a sympathetic character was as dangerous yet courageous then as it remains now. It was L.I.E however, though I didn’t realise it at the time, that really shaped the way I think now. It demands that its viewer disconnect themselves from whatever initial emotional response they may have, to look deeper, and look at the other side of the coin, before making up their mind. It is that demand, that requirement of consideration before response, that changed my thinking and the way I expressed myself. I stopped responding to things I read or watched or thought with immediate emotional outbursts and instead began to force myself to consider, understand look at both sides of an argument before placing my feet on any matter. It has made me the writer and thinker I am today, and for better or worse, I am indebted to it.

4. The Aristocrats – 2005

I saw The Aristocrats in late 2006, and I fell in love with it immediately. ‘Exposing’ as it did, some of the giants of American (and international) comedy in a documentary setting, where they were allowed to sit down and talk about their work, their approach to comedy, and what makes a joke work, remains to this day one of the most fascinating things I have ever seen. Listening to the commentary with directors Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza is just as interesting. It really sparked my love with figuring out why things are funny, a subject I don’t really write or talk about that much, but a subject that I find intensely fascinating. It has taught me so much about jokes, words, context, my friends and myself, as I have tried to figure out why some things are funny, and why some things are not. It has led me to understand so much about myself and who and what I am, and understand how humour, and parts of my own reactions to it, work.

5. Baraka – 1992

It was last year that I saw Ron Fricke’s Baraka. I don’t think I have ever been moved so much by a film in my life. It is possibly one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and really led me to reflect on my perception of the world. My thinking had been leaning that way for a long time, but Baraka is what really set a sea change about in me. It has changed parts of my philosophy and my approach to life. I look at the planet in a different way. I have different desires, I view things differently. I feel differently. I have come to view the species differently. Baraka more than any other has effected me on a more personal level than any other film I’ve ever seen, and I still watch it regularly now. It is fascinating, it is moving, it is – for me at least – life changing.

Jade Goody

I don’t have much to say on the subject, I don’t wish death on anyone, and while I have a great many opinions on a great many things that lead up to her death, the death itself can and should, in a sense, only be viewed for what it is – just another person dying of cancer. Don’t romanticise it, just as you don’t care about millions of other people around the world dying for any other reason whatsoever, there’s no reason to care anymore about another pair of young children losing their mother due to unfortunate circumstances. I didn’t see a flood of messages popping up on Facebook for Natasha Richardson, whose young children have been left similarly motherless.

What I find most depressing and disturbing about the whole situation, was how eager people were to view all the gory details. I’m not casting any opinion on a young mother trying to make as much money as she can to pass on to her children before she dies, I have no problem with that. But I found it a little strange how so many people were so eager to lap up every ‘unseen photo’, ‘deathbed interview’ and every other piece of information – medical or otherwise. All the people who had issues with Dr Gunter von Hagens and his Bodyworlds exhibit being morbid and grotesque, seemed to have little issue with watching all the gory details of a woman dying from cancer. All the people who thought that seeing a human being die on TV had no problem following the steady decline of another person through images, interviews and screenshots.

Now we know what happens when a media created entity dies. The popular line going around is ‘She died in the media like she lived in the media.’ But I have to question the eagerness of everyone else to watch that death. We now know how voyeuristic our society has become. We now know that even death, even in the most (allegedly) tastefully done manner, is ripe for being dissected, analysed, chewed over, photographed and turned into little more than tabloid fodder. How far our news media has come.

The Afterlife: A By Product Of Evolution?

Is The Afterlife A Product Of Evolution?
By Miles Weaver

The second interesting conversation I had recently occurred this weekend (somewhere between the hours of 3 and 6a.m. no less), and was again part of a much larger, broader range of topics.

This encounter was something I have briefly touched on before (in the article entitled ‘Death’). my belief that the most basic function of life – all life – is to end. Irrespective of our own human perceptions on the matter - ideas about higher purposes or concepts like peace or love or whatever - we are still just living organisms this planet, ones that share our living space on this green and blue ball of rock with everything else. Our function is simple, breed and die. Spread the genes, give rise to the next generation, then kindly get the hell out of their way. That is the function of all living organisms, to ensure that the species survives and to be sure that the process of life itself continues. It is hardwired, instinctual and completely unwavering. A cold, marching unstoppable machine that drives forwards without any regard to us homo sapiens searching in the dirt for deeper meanings.

Our search for that deeper meaning, I would argue, comes out of a certain conceit that we have as the only species on the planet and the universe (that we know of) that is consciously aware of itself, the privileged few who can gaze out at the stars that have watched over us since the birth of our species and wonder what, where and why they are. Our questioning of why we are here has led to some interesting theories and ideas about our purpose and our mortality. Yet in looking past the cold obviousness of the truth – that we are nothing more than organic life slavishly serving the same purpose as every other organism on the planet – I think that we have tried to elevate our thinking and our species above all other living beings. We see ourselves as something that has evolved to a higher state with a higher purpose, one not bound by the simplistic universal law of ‘Born, breed, be gone’.

Even our most distant history demonstrates this perceptive, from the earliest worshipping of the mysterious and unexplainable forces of nature as conscious entities like ourselves (albeit ones with far more power) our religious perceptions grew and grew, to the extent where we took ourselves out of the circle of global life. This was where we made the distinct definition that we were not like everything else; where we refused to be bound by the instinct that life hardwired into us. The planet’s oldest religion, Hinduism, teaches that when we die, we are reincarnated as another entity in the circle of life. Death is not something to be feared, merely just a transition from one temporary body to another, our soul will maintain itself. We can see a step our clear desire to transcend death, to laugh in the face of the inevitable. While our bodies may die, our souls just slip into a different suit. We are still bound by death, but not longer have any reason to fear it, for it is just a transition.

If we look, however, only a couple of thousand years further on from the genesis of Hinduism, we see that the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks – what many would argue to be the first truly advanced ancient societies – had reached the point where human beings were elevated out of the cycle of mere life and had managed to transcend death altogether. I am referring, of course, to the afterlife. Now, when we die, our souls leave our body and go and party with the Gods for all eternity. Death is not something that affects us, for our consciousness, the think that makes us so very different, so very special, will survive death and be maintain forever.

We here put ourselves as separate, distinct entities. An anomaly to the rest of the planet, one that has no reason to fear death, because for us, it is just the end of the mortal world; there is a whole other plane of existence we have to get to, one where death cannot touch or bother us at all.

I would posit that the concept of the afterlife is a product of the evolution of the thinking of our species. In our effort to escape the confines and diminutive stature of being simple organic life, our religions have all ended up promising some sort of afterlife. Even the eastern religions, which began with Hinduism merely telling us that we were part of an ongoing cycle, have us progressing toward Nirvana, where we can retire our souls from the cycle of existence. In our afterlives, we never really die, we just move onto ‘the next life’ in heaven we get to hang out with God for all eternity, never knowing the fear of death again.

Our initial efforts to separate ourselves from other animals, and also escape the instinctual, constant fear of the finality of death, have resulted in our thinking evolving to a state where we believe wholly and entirely in a another plane of existence waiting for us beyond this one. That a mortal death isn’t really the end of our precious consciousness, our tool that lifts us above our fellow animals, rather that it is only the transition from one point of awareness to the next. It is, in a way, our coping method, an evolutionary by product of our consciousness to try and deal with the finality of death, and remind us that we are different from every other animal on planet earth.

Looking at things clearly though, it is clearly, painfully obvious that there is no evidence whatsoever for an afterlife. Oh sure, we have religious texts, we have beliefs, we have unexplainable things like déjà vu or small Tibetan children answering questions they’d never heard of to prove themselves as the next Dalai Lama, but is there any evidence whatsoever that there is anything at all waiting for us beyond the end of all things? Do not fall back here on your beliefs or your comfort systems, but ask yourself, is there even the remotest hint anywhere in existence that could tell you what happens after you die? The answer is no. We have beliefs, we have faiths, we have feelings and anomalies that are interpreted into giving an indication, and it is not my intention to tell anyone what to believe, but the simple fact is that we have no evidence at all for what happens after you die.

So why did all our beliefs end up promising eternal life after we die? It is easy enough to understand where concepts of God developed from, but where did the notion of the afterlife end up taking such a firm hold? My theory rest above, that it sprung from an early desire to remind ourselves that we were the special ones on this planet, and what could be more special than removing the instinctual fear of death. Over time it grew and grew into what it has come today, where billions of people are convinced, without any evidence to support them, that death is not the end. The afterlife is a by product of our brains evolution. An accidental off shoot of the conceit of intelligence. Now there are some people who are so excited about the next life that they cannot wait for this one to end, and that is sad. For whatever you believe, no matter how firmly believe it, you don’t know what happens at the end. You only know for definite that you’ve got this life, and you should seize the very brief opportunity that it gives you.

Perception Is Reality: God, Destiny & Free Will

I had a pair of very interesting conversations the past two weekends, the first of which I will touch on in this article. It was only a brief part of a conversation that was had, but the topic got me thinking.

One of the biggest problems that I find with God – theologically that is (there are many other issues I have with the notion of a complex universal creator) – is the concept of free will and fate. Logically speaking, the two cannot co-exist, it is impossible. If one is in control of one’s own destiny, there cannot be a set fate, a destiny, awaiting us. If there is a set fate, a fixed end point in our lives, then we cannot have free will, as we are essentially little more than passengers on a ride through existence.

The problem comes with the logic of God. For God to exist as truly omnipotent– which, logically, it must have to be – it must be all knowing. This would lead one to believe that God has a set fate for us, a plan in which he knows every decision we will ever make, every thought we will ever have and every feeling we will ever experience. This is fine, until you call into question the motivations of the deity. The majority of belief systems tell us that God loves us and cares about us, that we, as its creation are something that, at the very least, interests it.

Now, if we take God as being a loving being (again, my interest in this argument is from a theological standpoint, one that deals with the religious depiction of the deity), the issue of a predetermined fate becomes something that raises serious questions. If we do have a preset fate, then God is most definitely a sadist. Why otherwise would a child be born in Africa, spend 2 years of its life barely able to eat with flies nesting in its eyes, knowing nothing but constant struggle, only to die by malnutrition and starvation, having done nothing but essentially suffer for its entire life, if God did not enjoy our misery? Why are things like cancer permitted to exist if God knows everything that can and will happen in a persons life, and can obviously influence the outcome?

No, if fate is something that exists, then God is one of the sickest beings in existence. The sickest in fact, as it is its existence. However, if God truly loves us, refuses to muddy himself in our affairs and permits us true free will, it cannot be an omnipotent being, thus cannot be God. True free will means we make all our own choices, meaning God would only be aware of them once we make them. If such a deity were unable to know what we were going to do, that would render it something considerably less than omnipotent.

So we are presented with a problem. Either God is an absolute bastard – something totally anathema to what all religions tell us – or is unable to know every, and thus, does not exist (it is not a God). The problem is a one that appears to run directly in contradiction with the accepted philosophy of all religions. It, essentially, negates the very idea of God in the first place (looking at it through the prism of God being an entity that actually likes us and this reality).

Prior to last week I had never received an acceptable explanation for this issue. The one I received was surprisingly simple, but once considered actually explains a hell of a lot. Essentially it boiled down to ‘Perception is reality’. The logic was that, while yes it’s true that God has a plan, and does know everything, we as a species are so unaware of it, and so apparently able to agree with free will that we do not really perceive it; it is never apparent. In not being able to perceive it in any way, can it ever really be said that we don’t have free will? As far as we are aware every action leads to another, every reaction to another, and every opinion we think we choose to have is built off of something else we experience. Just because we are unable to perceive these things happening to us, rather than them actually happening doesn’t – to us – make it seem any less like free will.

It has also recently been discovered in the past few years that the brain actually makes decisions before we are consciously aware of them. The subconscious mind reaches choices and what not without our self aware selves realising it. So, essentially, there is already a degree of fate working in our lives, as we don’t consciously make our own decisions.

Through this prism, one can come to the conclusion that God – if it exists – is a benevolent sadist. While there are things, like the African child I mentioned earlier – that seem cruel, working through a religious prism, this child, it should be assumed will be relieved in a rather lengthy afterlife (though that’s a whole other ballpark (especially when one considers the problem of hell, but that is a uniquely Abrahamic concept)) – it seems that the dramas, hardships and traumas of life would be permitted to endure so that, essentially, it broadens and enriches our experience down here in our brief corporeal form. So while we must endure suffering, we do so in a way that contributes greatly to our experience. It’s something that is difficult to endure, as hardship is something we would naturally want to avoid, yet it is important to our development, our interactions and our understanding of the reality we inhabit and we are definitely better off for it.

Whoever said God works in mysterious ways may not have known how right they were.

The ‘N Word’

Six letters, one word. That’s all it is. But, it could be argued, never has any other word in human history been steeped in so much hatred, cruelty, debasement, pain or darkness. For one people it reflects a time in history when they were less than human, valued as only half a human. The word, to this day, is so often used to remind them of that time and that unenviable that they were forced into. For another people, it reflects a time when they reached, as a race, the lowest point of their collective history. For all the wars and genocides they have been involved in, nothing should embarrass and shame the white man today like his involvement in the slave trade.

The word was born out of that horror of a time, when over a hundred million people were kidnapped from their homes and put to work to serve owners. That word to this day is, arguably, the most poisonous word in the English language. That word is ‘nigger’.

The writing of this piece is not intended to be a critique of modern day racism, or of the past history of slavery. It is this writer’s opinion, that every human is entitled to their opinion, racist or not. I will also say that while white people should be aware of the slippery slope that led to the global slave trade, just as they should be aware of the slippery slope that led to the Holocaust, no white man or woman alive today should have to apologise or feel any guilt for what happened in those dark days. No one alive today was around for it, no one alive today was involved in it, and no one alive today owes any debt of apology to anyone for it. Just as the children of Nazis are not responsible for their parents mistakes, the children of slave owners are not responsible for the mistakes their parents/grandparents/great, great, great grandparents made either.

What the writing of this piece is intended to be, is a look at a very common occurrence that sweeps throughout western society today, and that is the use of the word ‘nigger’. My points here should be transferred to any other word of bigotry used to demean a minority, but the N word is by far the most poisonous of any such term out there, and is thus ripe for discussion.

A huge problem that a lot white people seem to have with the word is that they are aware that a significant proportion of the black community use the term frequently and without care for its poisonous meaning or history. A frequently used argument, one that often comes from a perspective of incredulity and misguided ‘reverse racism’ (yes it does exist, but not in this case), is that ‘If black people can use it, why can’t we?’ Or, upon understanding that a lot of black people – right or wrong – say they use the word as a way of reclaiming it and dealing with the brutality of that part of their (even very recent) history, as a way of taking the pain out of the word, white people will say that then they should accept that everyone can thus use it, so that all pain is taken out of it by everyone.

These arguments, sometimes, come from a place of good meaning, but from a fundamental misunderstanding. For a lot of black people around the world, hearing a white mouth say the word ‘nigger’ is a painful experience. Aside from the Jewish people, there is probably no other group of human beings in the world that can understand what it would be like to hear such a term spoken from the mouth of the ancestors that enslaved you. In America, only forty years ago, that term was still frighteningly common, many of the users of which are still alive today. No white man could ever understand that pain, and trying to equate a word like ‘cracker’ or ‘honkey’ is just ignorant. We (by which I mean the vast, vast majority of white people) have never had to deal with real discrimination based on our race or skin colour. We do not understand. But we have an obligation, if we want to get anywhere as a united species, to try to do so.

Now, one can make the argument, for very good reason, that if the N word is so toxic, then black people should not be using it themselves. It was a word used to debase, dehumanise and destroy an entire race of our fellow humans, and black people, just like white, yellow, red or brown people, should not be using the word either. There is a very strong and valid case for this, but one that will essentially and always be trumped by the importance of free speech, and that, in a civilised society, no word, however ugly, should be outlawed, and other person has the right to tell another that they cannot use such a term. (They can say they should not, but not cannot). My personal perspective on this is very strong, for I believe that any words and all words can and should be spoken freely. Will there be consequences? In cases such as the casual tossing around of the N word, then yes. And the speaker must be prepared to face them and answer to those that question them. If you want to use such a term, you’d better have a good reason for doing so. However, we should never forget that these terms that we have loaded with such ammunition are, at the end of the day, just words. We do not get outraged when Richard Pryor referred to black people as ‘niggers’. There’s a two part reason for this; the first is that he is black. Richard Pryor, using the definition, was a ‘nigger’ himself, and we know and understand that he is not being racist in his use of the term. The second part is that, so often, the problem with the use of the word is not, necessarily, the word itself. It is, after all, just a word; a collection of sounds that we associate meaning with. No, the problem is not with the use of the word, but with the context in which it is used. So often it is used in a derogatory manner, so often it betrays the truth that there are more racists out there than people – of every race – would like to admit. So often it angers people because it demonstrates a common ignorance for where such a word came from and what it was created to describe. So often it may anger people because the use of the word demonstrates a lack of care for what they (their race that is) have been through and overcome to get to this still unequal point which they are at today.

But the question, knowing all of this, must be asked: Why would anyone want to use a word so steeped in hatred? White people can complain that they are always seen as racist if they use the word (they’re not (remember; context)) and that it’s not fair that black people can use it and not get the same heat. It should be asked of those complaining people then, why do you want to use that word? What is the need to use it? I am not questioning anyone’s motives or saying that they should or should not use the N word or any other such term; it is a free country and you are free to do so. I am asking the question, however, of why you would want to use such a term?

I used to use it. I did not use it in a derogatory manner, or in a spiteful way. Did I, use it as a punchline in many a joke? Yes. Just as I also used gay people as punchlines in many another. If I find it funny, I find it funny, and I will not apologise for it. But I have thought, been educated about, and analysed my use of that term and many others, and in doing so, I came to understand many of the above points that I made. While I am not saying that I will never use a bigoted term again, far from it, as I believe that no word should ever be made taboo, I understand the importance and power of such terms, and am far more mindful of what it is that I am actually saying, why it is I am saying it and whom I am saying it to.

I believe it is important to think about these points and consider why it is one may choose to use such words. I think it is important to ask oneself why one would desire to use them. I think it is important to truly look at all perspectives of the issue, to consider why some people may hate it and others may have no problem with it, and figure out – for yourself – if you are comfortable with saying words so steeped in bigotry. Do not be so arrogant just to say, as I used to, ‘It is my right to use it just as I can use any other word, and it’s other people’s problems if they don’t like it’ because your arrogance blinds you to the truth of what you are saying. Just as I loathe people that hardly or don’t even know me being shocked that I’m a homosexual because I don’t act like Alan Carr, just as I loathe certain homophobic terms and not others, I have come to understand that there are others in the same position who may loathe some racist terms, may loathe none of them, or may loathe all of them. And it is they that have the right to be outraged about the use such terms, not the speaker, who so often may think they are hard done to if they are chided (at best) for their use of it. All I ask is that you just think about what it is you are saying and what your reasons are for doing so, before you actually go ahead and say it.


‘I said, ‘I ain’t never gonna call another black man ‘nigger’. Y’know because we never was no niggers! That’s a word that’s used to describe our own wretchedness, and we perpetuate it now ‘cause it’s dead; that word is dead. We’re men and women. We come from… We come from the first people on the earth! You know? The first people on the earth were black people. (…) So black people, we’re the first people on the earth to have thought! We was the first ones to say ‘Where the fuck am I? And how do you get to Detroit?’ So you can take it for what it’s worth, I ain’t trying to preach to nobody, I’m just talking about my feelings about it. And I don’t want them hip white people coming to me and calling me no nigger or telling me nigger jokes. I don’t like it. I’m just telling you, it’s uncomfortable to me. I don’t like it when black people say it to me. I really don’t no more. It’s nothing. It don’t mean nothing. So I love y’all, and you take that with you.’
Richard Pryor

Why Is ‘Freedom Of Speech’ Such A Hard Concept For Some People To Understand?

So, the British Government showed what a bunch of giant, brow beaten pussies they are once again, and banned the elected Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering the country to attend a discussion about his anti-Islamic film ‘Fitna’ at the House of Lords.

There are two major threads that tie together in this debate, both of which are becoming an ever increasing threat to our society. The first is the issue of free speech. Whether you like what Mr Wilders has to say or not, whether you agree with his film and his opinion on Islam, censoring his work and banning him from entering the country in order to attend a debate on the issue he is tied so closely to is abhorrent in any society that wishes to call itself free. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, whether you like it or not, if you want to advocate free speech, then you have to take both the rough and the smooth that goes along with it. I.e. just because you are offended by what someone has to say, be it racist, homophobic, insulting, sexist or just downright ugly or insensitive, they have just as much right to say it as you do to call them an idiot. That’s it, case closed. You do not ban words. You do not ban thoughts. You live with it. You try to educate people as to why they shouldn’t hold such viewpoints, but you have no right to stop them from having them and airing them.

The exception comes in the case of inciting violence however. If someone is saying ‘I think all gay people should be killed’ that is fine. Is it an ugly statement? You bet your ass. But do they have a right to say it? You bet your ass. If, however, they say ‘I want you to go and kill all gay people’ they are directly inciting violence. Now, if some idiot takes their words in the wrong way, and goes and kills gay people after hearing ‘I think all gay people should be killed’ then that is not the speaker’s fault. The speaker was voicing an opinion, not giving an order. It is not his fault that someone took his words too far and went and killed gay people, just as it is the responsibility of a celebrity who’s been photographed snorting coke when a fan dies of a drug overdose.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, you can like it or not, but just as you have the right to call someone an idiot for whatever reason you choose, they have just as much of a right to call you an idiot back for whatever reason it is that they choose. Just because we may find their reasons horrific does not mean we have any right to shut them up.


The second point is that, once again, the reason this brew-ha-ha came about was because it had to do with someone offending peoples religion. There seems to be an unpleasant wave of thought in this country that people of faith have a right to be protected from criticism. They don’t. You can believe whatever you want to believe, as can I , and we can both call each other idiots because of it. For some reason however, if you go to a church or a mosque or a synagogue or a temple, people in power are much more likely to try and protect you from that criticism. Uh, why? You believe one thing, I believe another. It drives me up the wall when the religious – Muslims specifically – often demand special privileges in being protected from such criticism. Christians and Jews often have to just bear the brunt of it. In the case of Mr Wilders, it was the peer Lord Ahmed, who said that he would mobilize a protest against the entry of Mr Wilders into Britain. You know what then, Mr Ahmed (your title means nothing to me)? Mobilize. Exercise your right to protest. And let Mr Wilders exercise his right to free speech. It disgusts me that anyone is allowed protection from things because of the crazy screwed up beliefs they may have. Did you see mass homosexual protest when yet another West Indian artist was allowed into the UK to perform a collection of his greatest hits advocating the rape, abuse of and eventual extermination of homosexuals? Hell no.

Now, Mr Wilders is on record saying that he wants to ban the Qur’an, while at the same time blathering on about free speech. A double standard. But a spokesman for the Muslim Council Of Britain called him an ‘open and relentless preacher of hate’ and no one made a point to ask this spokesman where he stood on preachers like Abu Hamza, who was allowed to operate openly and freely for years with funding from and the approval from the MCB while banging on about how great suicide bombings were and how Western values should be destroyed and Islam imposed upon them. Why does no one call out that double standard? Because no one wants to upset a religious person.

I’m sorry, but fuck your beliefs. Just like you don’t give much of a shit about mine, I don’t give a shit about yours. We all share this crazy messed up world together, and whatever you need to believe in to get yourself through another day without killing anyone is fine by me. But don’t pretend that that entitles you to any kind of privilege, just because lots of other people believe the same thing. I’m specifically referring to Muslims here, but I’m also generalising to Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Atheists. Whatever you choose to believe in does not automatically give you protection from criticism.

We are a multicultural, open, free and (allegedly) tolerant society. That means tolerating everyone’s views. It doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but tolerate means that you put up with something, not agreeing with it. Just as conservatives have to tolerate the views of liberals, gays have to tolerate the views of homophobes, ethnic minorities have to tolerate the views of racists, atheists have to put up with the views of the religious, liberals have to put up with the views of conservatives and women have to tolerate the views of sexists. No one is asking you to agree with them, but they are asking you to give to others the same rights of free speech that they afford to you.

Sometimes freedom means putting up with more than you’d like to. It’s not selective based on political correctness, religious beliefs or political views. It means that in a free society, everyone is free, whether you agree with them or not.