Creative Commons licensed image from nrkbeta on flickr
In recent weeks, there has been some fairly solid grassroots inertia gathering behind a campaign against new legislation being proposed by Lord Mandelson, the business secretary. The gist of the legislation is straightforward – it proposes that individuals accused of illegal downloading should, after a certain number of accusations, be disconnected from the Internet.
There are several grounds on which this proposal is mad, bad and downright dangerous. First and foremost, while the details have not been fully nailed down yet, the implication of what has been revealed so far is that users will not be disconnected after being tried for a criminal offence which is proven beyond reasonable doubt – rather, you’ll just need to be accused a certain number of times before it’s decided that you’re definitely guilty and your connection is severed.
This is a brand new step in the abuse of the British legal system by copyright holders. Some of you may recall a series of cases in the past few years where copyright holders employed legal firms with low moral boundaries to send out letters to large numbers of people whom they accused of downloading movies, videogames and so on. (I reported on one of those mass-mailings, which was initiated by game publishers including Atari and Codemasters, for The Times – the story made the front page.)
Those letters were simple legal blackmail. They told the recipients that they had to pay a few hundred pounds, and warned that if they tried to contest this, the legal costs would be much more expensive – so just pay up, and we’ll leave you alone. The reason for this blackmail approach is straightforward – the “evidence” which they had of copyright infringement would probably never have stood up in court. It certainly wouldn’t have stood up in a criminal court, where you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that your accusation is true – and on a good day, it would have fallen flat in a civil court too. (In Britain, civil courts have a less stringent standard of “proof” – you only have to prove that “on the balance of probabilities” something is true, rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”.)
The copyright holders know this. They know that it’s technologically nigh-on impossible to pin an act of downloading to an individual. Simply standing up and saying “I’ve got a Wi-Fi network” means that anyone within 100 yards of your house could have been responsible – even someone who sat on a bench in the park outside with a laptop – and that’s even before the question of things like spoofed IPs and the likes are considered. Unless you basically catch the person red-handed – raiding their home to find the infringing file sat on their hard drive and their bittorrent client merrily seeding it to the world – you basically can’t prove an act of downloading.
The solution the media industries have found is as straightforward as it is morally bankrupt – if you can’t work with the legal system, bypass it. Instead of having to fight things in the courts, and work with awkward concepts like “evidence” and “proof” and “justice”, they have lobbied the government to give them a system whereby they alone will be allowed to act as judge, jury and executioner. No courts, no police – just a few accusations from the likes of Sony, Disney or Activision and job done – off with his modem!
It’s not hard, of course, to see how a system where punishment is based on accusation rather than proof could be open to abuse. Indeed, it’s not so much a system open to abuse, as an abusive system.
Then there’s the question of the punishment itself – the cutting off of Internet access. There’s a generational issue at play here, I fear. Many people in their fifties, sixties or older – Lord Mandelson is 55, by the way – probably don’t see disconnection as much more than a slap on the wrist. These are people who probably don’t often check their own email or read webpages, who don’t manage their bank accounts or mobile phones or tax affairs online, for whom news stories about online shopping or Wikipedia or iPods seem impossibly exotic and futuristic. The Internet is a luxury, its removal no different to taking away a games console or a child’s toy.
That’s not what the Internet is to my generation – by which I mean anyone under 40, realistically speaking. I’m in the first generation to have grown up with the Internet as a constant presence (I’m a little ahead of the vanguard, since an early obsession with computers meant I was using Fidonet at a tender age), but people ten years older than me have used it for all of their working lives.
To many of us, the Internet is a service almost as vital as water, gas or electricity. It’s not only our primary social tool, it’s our first point of contact with the corporate and government services on which we rely. It’s essential for our work lives, for our lives as citizens – for our finances, our taxes, our democratic rights. It’s our touchstone for research, information and news.
This isn’t restricted to a handful of Internet obsessives. Countless people in the United Kingdom – whole swathes of the population – rely on the Internet for some aspect of their employment, even those whose job doesn’t involve computers in any way. They interact with their banks, their electricity, gas and water companies, their local councils, the Inland Revenue and the wider Government almost exclusively online. Their votes in elections are informed by online information, making it a crucial tool for democracy – and their social interactions with friends and acquaintances are often also carried out online.
Cutting that off is the removal of an essential service – the crippling of an individual’s ability to function as a normal member of modern society. This isn’t taking a toy from a naughty child (or at least, a child accused of being naughty by a biased third-party) – it’s a step back to the medieval concept of taking someone’s hand for being accused of stealing. It’ll cripple them, but at least they won’t do it again, eh?
Lord Mandelson doesn’t understand that, and nor do those who have worked with him on this proposal. (The media companies who urged him into this decision do know this, but why let the basic injustice of the punishment get in the way of protecting profits from their failing, outdated business models?) The proposed punishment in no way fits the crime – bear in mind that if you shoplifted a DVD from HMV, you’d get little more than a caution and a telling-off, despite the actual material losses involved in that crime. Download the same film from the Internet, an act which causes no direct material loss to anyone involved, and you could be cut off from the social, government, civic and financial services provided by the Internet. It’s an insane imbalance.
If you’re reading this, the chances are that you understand. You’re an Internet user. You know how vital it is – how damaging it would be to everything from your career to your social life if it was to be turned off on you. And unfortunately, you’re one of the few people who will ever know the extent of these laws, because the mainstream press – largely owned by the same companies which own the media groups lobbying for these laws – is mostly keeping quiet on this.
As such, you have a responsibility to act. That could be as much as writing to your local MP (they get remarkably little mail – and only a very tiny amount of that is lucid, well-argued and intelligent, so every decent letter gets considered fairly seriously, meaning that you can make a difference), or as little as getting involved in the campaign being waged by the fantastic Open Rights Group, or signing the petition organised by 38 Degrees, which is working with the ORG on the campaign.
Whether Labour is on its way out the door or not, this legislation needs to be killed dead in the water – because it’s much harder to repeal old laws than it is to bring in new ones. Be it just another in the litany of bad bills which Labour have run through parliament, or the sting in the tail from a dying government, this would be a basic attack on liberty, freedom of expression and the rights of consumers and citizens. We can’t let it happen.
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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This summer, I'm doing a fairly major clear-out of all the clutter I've accumulated. Before this stuff goes onto eBay (or into the bin, depending on how lazy I feel at the time), I figured I'd offer it to all your lovely LJ people at mates' rates. Comment if you want anything on the list!
If you live in London, or frequent the city, we can meet up and I'll hand stuff to you. Same goes for Ayacon next month - I'll be there, so put dibs on anything you want and I'll bring it. Otherwise, you pay P&P on anything you want, obviously.
I'll do another list in the near future when I have a chance to sort through my DVDs and games. That's a fairly daunting task so I haven't tackled it yet!
Console Hardware PSP Console - original model, perfect working condition, with global charger and 256Mb Memory Stick. £40
(I have the equipment to hack this for you, if that's your sort of thing.) Sony PS3 Sixaxis controller, black - x2 £15 each PC Game Box Sets Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Limited Edition box set. Art book, cloth map, soundtrack CD etc. Game code has been used! Free. Guild Wars: Nightfall collector's edition box. Includes artbook, map, poster, standee, game activation card etc. Unused! Guild Wars: Special Edition. Artbook, soundtrack, unique in-game skills etc. The Art of Guild Wars - full colour artbook. £10 for the whole lot. PS2 Games with custom controllers Guitar Hero & Guitar Hero 2 - PS2 - Guitars and games. Boxed! £10 for both
Ridge Racer Type 4 with Jogcon controller, boxed £15 Game Artbooks / Making-of Books Kingdom Hearts 2: The Complete Guide. Piggyback books. Full of nice KH2 artwork! Free.
1000 Game Heroes - MASSIVE coffee table book, full colour, with artwork and information from 1000 games. £3 Japanese Learning / Reference Books All About Particles; Naoko Chino. Japanese language reference book. Japanese Verbs at a Glance; Naoko Chino. A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns; Naoko Chino. £5 for all three. Manga Fruits Basket - Vols. 1 - 15. £30 Bleach Vols 1 - 8, 11 - 12 (missing 9 & 10 for some reason) £20 Juvenile Orion Vols 1 - 5 £10 Gravitation Vols 1 - 12 complete series £25 Tokyo Babylon - Vols. 1 - 3 £5 Clamp School Detectives 1 - 3 £5 Pita-Ten - Vols 1 - 3 £5 Crest of the Stars - Vols 1 - 3 (complete series) £5 D.N.Angel - Vols 1 - 4 £8 Eerie Queerie - Vols 1 - 4 complete series £8 Hikaru no Go Vols 1 - 5 £10 Candidate for Goddess Vols 1 - 5 £10 XXXHolic Vols 1 - 2 £4 Gundam Seed Vols 1 - 2 £4 .hack Legend of the Twilight Vols 1 - 2 £4 Fullmetal Alchemist Vols 1 - 3 £5
First Volumes: £2 each D-Gray Man #1 Death Note #1 Beck #1 RahXephon #1 Legal Drug #1 Kagerou-Nostalgia #1 Tower of the Future #1 Kill Me, Kiss Me #1 Hana-Kimi #1 Random Volumes: Free to good home! Gunparade March #2 (two copies...) Gunparade March #3 Hellsing #2 Random Nonsense Drinking Chess Set - glass full-size board and 32 shot glasses. £5
(Actually I think I originally inherited this for free from someone, so if whoever that was wants it back, let me know...)
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 - Creative Commons licensed image from akanekal on flickr
We woke up on Monday in a country that was a little less pleasant than it was on Sunday. The election of two BNP MEPs - one in Yorkshire and the Humber, one in the North West constituency - seems to confirm the dire predictions that the scandals dogging parliament would hand a breakthrough to the fascists.
The worst thing about this isn’t the simple fact that Britain will now send two of these vile, racist clowns to the European Parliament in our name. Rather it’s that this victory gives the BNP a platform which they’ve never previously enjoyed. As newly elected MEPs, they cannot legitimately be ignored by the nation’s broadcast media - and despite obvious distaste on the part of the interviewers, they have duly found slots on the week’s news programmes to spew their blatant, if weasel-worded, racist invective.
Worse again, the system of pay and expenses for MEPs essentially means that in the coming four years, the BNP’s operations will be funded to the tune of as much as four million pounds - by the taxpayer. That money is unlikely to temper their message, but it will improve their ability to deliver that message, which is a depressing prospect.
What went wrong? How did Britain, which for all its flaws is genuinely one of the most decent and tolerant nations in Europe, elect a pair of racist, homophobic, misogynistic, white supremacist politicians to the European Parliament? How the hell did it come to pass that this nation marked the 65th anniversary of D-Day - one of the greatest sacrifices made to combat the Nazis - by giving a platform to a new generation of fascists?
There is, at least, a silver lining. The figures speak for themselves; support for the BNP did not actually rise in the districts where their MEPs were elected. In both the North West and Yorkshire/Humber, the BNP vote was actually several thousand votes lower than it was in the last European election five years ago.
The BNP simply picked up these seats by default. With a low turnout, the vote for the Labour party collapsed; the Tory and Lib Dem votes slumped, in numeric terms, although the Tories managed to chart a very small rise in percentage share. The Green party surged, picking up 50% more votes than previously, but they already held a number of seats and it’s very hard to acquire more from that position. The BNP held steady, only slightly down on 2004’s numbers, and with an incredibly low turnout, that was enough.
I can think of no better metaphor than the one Justin at Chicken Yoghurt employed in his post on the subject on Monday morning - “This isn’t about a surge in support for fascists, it’s about a collapse in support for New Labour. The tide went out and exposed the stinking crap beneath the polluted waves.” The crap has always been there, it’s just that Labour’s muddy estuary water covered it up previously. No longer.
If that’s the silver lining, though, the reality is still sobering. Almost a million people cast a ballot for the BNP last Thursday - a million people who, on some level, see the party as acceptable, even as attractive.
I’d argue that the blame for that figure lies squarely at the doors of our major parties - and parts of our media. Britain has no truck with fascism or racism, on the whole - but in the past ten years, New Labour, the Tories and some segments of the media have done nothing but strengthen the BNP, giving credibility to their ridiculous narrative and turning them from a party on the outer fringes of lunatic politics, into a party that wins a million votes in an election.
This has happened because our political leaders, on both sides of the house, are too cowardly to challenge the BNP - or the BNP’s best cheerleaders, the tabloid newspapers who decry them loudly while simultaneously lending weight to all of their misguided, dishonest messages. We have spent ten years with a story running around this country about immigration. The story says that there is a “flood” of immigration to the UK. It says that our borders are open to whoever wants to come in, that bogus asylum seekers are clogging up our ports. Worse, it says that these people are taking jobs from British workers, and that the government discriminates against British citizens by putting immigrants at the top of the queue for housing, social services, healthcare and benefits.
These things are lies. They have been proven, time and again, to be lies. The figures cited by the BNP - and by tabloids like the Daily Mail - for immigration are based on (presumably deliberate) misinterpretations of the statistics, ably assisted by right-wing lobbyists such as MigrationWatch UK. Our borders are not open, nor are they assaulted by bogus asylum seekers. It is harder than it has ever been for a foreign person live and work in the UK, even as a qualified professional - or even as someone with many years of life in this country behind them. Our immigration system is tough as hell, our borders unwelcoming - even to the most genuine of migrants.
This is the reality - but somehow, the government and the opposition parties have allowed the BNP to get away with its lies about immigration. Of course, the BNP isn’t really talking about immigration at all; that’s one of many convenient phrases which the party uses to refer to “non-whites”. Most of the people it takes issue with aren’t actually immigrants, but are the children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants - with as much right to claim the label “British” as anyone else on the island.
Are the party’s million voters, however, racists? Perhaps. There’s certainly a big swathe of people there who fit the stereotype - angry, impotent white men who haven’t gone anywhere in life, who being too cowardly or not able enough to channel that anger into challenging the system choose to lash out at minorities who are, ironically, generally even more disenfranchised than they are. Ethnic minorities. Gays. Women.
I don’t honestly believe that there are a million angry racists swarming out to the polling stations, however. I suspect that much of the BNP’s legitimacy, if not its vote, comes from people who think they have genuine concerns about immigration. Exposed to an ongoing narrative about foreigners coming over here, committing crimes, taking jobs from honest British workers, building mosques to recruit for Terror!, and whatever else is on the front page of the Mail or the Sun this week, why wouldn’t they believe that these things are true - and that our major parties are failing to tackle serious threats to the nation?
Worse, both Labour and the Tories have done nothing but exacerbate this belief. Each has played a dangerous game where they attempt to outdo the other in being horrible to immigrants (and the disabled, and the unemployed). Each time Labour reveals a new way of making it harder for people to stay in the country - regardless of how settled and integrated they may be, or what a huge contribution they may make to the nation, as many recent cases have demonstrated - the Tories have a nastier one. Every word of vile, tabloid-pleasing rhetoric about asylum seekers that spills from a Tory mouth is immediately matched by two from someone on the other side of the House.
We are now, after twelve years of what should have been progressive government, a nation which treats those who come here as our guests as scum. We have built concentration camps to house immigrants as they pass through our increasingly cruel court system - concentration camps to which they are hauled in long trips across the country in the backs of windowless vans, with no consideration for age or illness. We have documented cases of families, of children emerging from these camps malnourished and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Meanwhile, supposedly one of the greatest democracies in the world now routinely sends genuine asylum seekers, fleeing persecution in countries where life is far cheaper than in ours, back to nations where they face torture or death. A young gay man was ordered to be deported back to Iran, which flogs and hangs gay people, with the Home Office’s advice being to keep his sexuality quiet - hardly possible, given that he had just gone through a court appeal process on the very basis of that sexuality. This ruling was quashed after an outcry; others were not. Our craven government sends people to their deaths in violent dictatorships rather than face grumpy tabloid headlines; our vile opposition says this isn’t enough, and wants even tougher rules.
The rhetoric and the reality of this evil system have emerged because Labour and the Conservatives don’t have the balls to fight the fascists on the real issues. Strong government and strong opposition would confront them on matters of genuine principle. Should we welcome asylum seekers fleeing persection? Should people from all around the world who wish to work hard and contribute to our society be allowed into Britain? They should be willing to roll out the facts, to place the isolated statistics used by the BNP or the Daily Mail into context and show the reality of immigration, the pettyness of the so-called “flood”.
They should, in other words, have spent the past decade framing this debate, forcing the fascists to fight on even ground. Instead, the phrasing and form of this whole discussion has been crafted by the BNP and its ilk. Parliament obsesses over the idea of being tough on immigration, instead of robustly responding to the idea that there’s an immigration problem. They talk about addressing the concerns of the BNP voters, rather than addressing the misinformation they have been fed. Rather than creating a new narrative, they seem content to flow with the clever and dishonest narrative of the far right.
My fear, today, isn’t about what the BNP will do with its minimal new-found power. Rather, it’s what the power-hungry, principle-free Labour and Tory parties will do in response - what new, aggressive, inhumane measure they will introduce to try to appeal to the BNP’s electorate, how much more rabble-rousing anti-immigrant rhetoric will now emerge not from Nick Griffin, but from the Home Office and the Shadow Cabinet. The fascists have dragged our democracy down to their level, and that’s more depressing than any BNP electoral victory could be.
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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This is just too delicious (and simultaneously horrifying) not to post. It’s the Daily Star’s front page reporting on the Air France flight which crashed into the Atlantic this week. Let’s consider a couple of things briefly…
Firstly, the “new Bermuda Triangle” isn’t actually near Bermuda, and doesn’t really have a shape given that it’s not actually had any other accidents around it. The Bermuda Triangle was named that becuase it was around Bermuda (duh!) and also because of the huge number of maritime disasters in the region. I like a snappy headline as much as the next man, but this is ridiculous.
But not as ridiculous as… The line above the headline. Go on, you probably missed it first time round. Have a look. Yes, dear reader, “AIR FRANCE JET SWALLOWED BY BLACK HOLE”.
…
I’m not sure I have words for that. Other than “unlikely”.
And that’s ignoring the paper’s decision to pick the single fruitiest picture of the prettiest passenger they could find to illustrate the whole mess. Do you think they considered “LOOK AT THIS DEAD GIRL’S TITS!” as a possible - and more honest - headline, or did they go straight to the black hole theory without passing Go?
(The horrifying part, of course, is that as Anton Vowl rather depressingly points out over at The Enemies of Reason, the same paper will presumably be telling its readers how to vote in the elections tomorrow. Assuming it’s not swallowed by a black hole in the meantime.)
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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I’ve written a pair of retrospective pieces in the past few weeks, tying up two stories which I’ve been covering pretty much since the start of my writing career. I don’t expect that either of these stories is actually dead and buried now, but they certainly seem to have reached conclusions of a sort.
First up, a summary look at the rise and fall (and fall, and fall, and fall…) of Eidos, Britain’s one-time great white hope for games publishing. They were bought by Square Enix last month, finally putting an end to years of speculation as the wheezing corpse of the company limped towards an uncertain end.
Secondly, I couldn’t let Duke Nukem Forever pass into the great beyond without a farewell. As I mention in the article, I started my career with Duke - my very first published page in a national magazine included a news story about two exciting new PC games being announced back to back. They were Duke Nukem Forever, and Daikatana. (I’d like to pretend that I’ve got better at calling ‘em over the years, but I’m not entirely convinced.)
Presently stuck in the middle of SOAS’ end of year exams. When I close my eyes, kanji dance a crazy jig on the back of my eyelids, mocking me by being almost, but not quite, recognisable. Count yourselves lucky - if I didn’t have so much revision to do, I’d definitely be writing a gigantic post about the present expenses scandal.
(Suffice it to say that I respectfully disagree with (the otherwise wonderful) Stephen Fry on this one; for one thing, I think there’s a different morality involved when it’s public money on the table, and that a higher standard of moral behaviour can rightfully be expected from those whom we trust to make the laws that govern our nation. For another thing, while Fry is quite right in calling out the nation’s journalists as a venal and disgusting bunch when it comes to expenses and allowances, I don’t think anyone is proposing to let them run the country. Pigs place their snouts in the trough - that doesn’t mean MPs need to.)
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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You may have caught the controversy over Konami’s new Iraq war game, Six Days in Fallujah, last week. In a nutshell, the Daily Mail decided that this was a horrible insult to everyone who has ever even heard of Iraq, rang up some of the usual suspects and ran a chest-beating “evil game makers make fun of Iraq tragedy raaagh” piece.
I got a chance to write about this for two very different audiences - once for GamesIndustry.biz and Eurogamer.net, and then for The Times on Saturday. I’m pleased with The Times’ coverage - we wanted to present this as a discussion of accuracy and relevance, and challenge the idea that games can’t intelligently address current affairs, which is quite a progressive position for a traditional newspaper.
Also, if you missed it, Episode 9 of Stage Clear went up late last week. Our iTunes feed is still broken (I believe it’ll fix itself next week), so you’ll probably need to download it manually - sorry!
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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I love my city. The breadth and depth of my affection for London has only grown over the years that I have lived here, and friends are often amused by my enthusiastic outbursts about the city or its history. I often succumb to a strange urge to play tour guide, dragging anyone who’ll humour me around areas I find particularly interesting, scenic or historic.
London is my adopted home, the world city I love best and the cornerstone of my identity. I long ago passed, without even noticing, the milestone where I began introducing myself as “a Londoner, originally from Ireland”, as distinct from “an Irishman, living in London”.
Perhaps that’s why, when things go wrong with my city, I feel quite genuinely upset and hurt by them - an unusually emotional response, and one I have to work hard to rationalise. Our failure to tackle gang violence in parts of the city twists like a knife in my guts. I fume as I watch Boris Johnson fiddle while the Tory boroughs who dominate his Mayoralty disassemble the decision making apparatus and power of the Mayor’s office, and scheme to push our transport policy back towards private cars and away from public transport, walking and cycling.
My emotional response reached a peak when the Metropolitan Police shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell tube station in July 2005. The violence of it was even more shocking because it happened right in my neighbourhood. A resident of Vauxhall since I moved to the city, Stockwell is one of my local Northern Line stations. I use it several times a week. I’d probably stood in the very carriage where plain-clothes police, after failing to give a clear warning, fired seven bullets into the head of an uncomprehending, unthreatening civilian.
In the intervening years, the initial gut response has chilled into a more rational, cold anger at the events themselves, at the police culture they represent, and most of all, at the amateurish, blatant cover-up which ensued, and at the establishment which allows that flimsy cover-up to stand.
This week, we’re talking about another death in my city. Ian Tomlinson was a 47 year old man who worked as a newsagent in the City of London. On his way home on the day of the (almost entirely peaceful) G20 protests on April 1st, he died of a heart attack inside a police cordon.
Minutes before his death, Ian Tomlinson - walking home, with his hands in his pockets and his back to the police lines - was clubbed across the back of his knees by a police officer and then pushed to the ground in a completely unprovoked assault. As a friend commented after seeing the video which has been released today by the Guardian newspaper, Tomlinson was pushed so hard that he actually bounced off the ground. A few minutes later, he was dead.
So, what’s the standard procedure here? Well, as Unity points out over at Liberal Conspiracy, the police in Britain have taken to treating criminal assaults which result in death as murder cases - even, in one case, where the heart attack that killed the man happened over 24 hours later.
It will not surprise you, I suspect, to discover that matters are treated rather differently when the assailant is a police officer, as distinct from a member of the criminal peasant underclass that we’re told to live in constant fear of.
Within hours of Ian Tomlinson’s death, the police were denying that he’d had any contact with their officers. Instead, they gave the newspapers a rather different story - one where gallant police officers rushed in to help this man after he suffered a heart attack, but were tragically impeded in their work by vicious rioting crusties and anarchists who pelted them with bricks as they tried to rescue him. The newspapers, having long since discovered that reprinting official statements is much easier than actually doing journalism, and that a story about evil crusty anarchists delights a certain knuckle-dragging section of the audience, reprinted the police line unquestioningly and knocked off down to the pub.
Five years ago, that would have been that. A handful of eyewitnesses would have protested that this simply isn’t what happened, but their comments would have gone unheard outside of Indymedia and a handful of student newspapers. Middle England would have shaken its head at the antics of these terrible dreadlocked crusties, killing that poor man. End of story.
Today, however, we all carry video cameras, and the story is different. We have footage of a police officer viciously assaulting Ian Tomlinson. The police lied about this. We have eyewitness accounts of the “rioters” providing first aid to Tomlinson, and requesting help from the police, along with footage of the crowd standing back, making room and allowing police medics to work on the stricken man. The police lied about this. We have footage of police officers quite distinctly not being pelted with bricks. At one point, a solitary empty water bottle sails towards the officers and bounces harmlessly off body armour. I’ve been hit by more dangerous projectiles in business meetings. The police, once again, lied about this.
They did more than lie, however. They also concealed. The City of London is one of the places with the most surveillance on the face of the planet. In a nation filled with CCTV, the City stands out like a hotspot - there are cameras on every wall and every corner. Footage from those cameras, which would have revealed the lies of the police, was not released. As an interesting parallel, I invite you to consider the fact that on the day when Jean Charles de Menezes died, the CCTV cameras in Stockwell station and on the tube train where he was shot were, apparently, malfunctioning. What unhappy coincidence!
Moreover, they smeared. Remember when the press breathlessly reported that Jean Charles de Menezes was an illegal immigrant? (He wasn’t.) How about the reports that he may have been a drug addict, possibly even involved in the trade? (He wasn’t, on either count.) Both lies have entered the popular perception of de Menezes, muddying the water around the Met’s behaviour and giving knuckle-draggers the opportunity to mutter “bloody got what he had coming to him” around their mouthfuls of cheap lager.
It’s little surprise, then, that in the day following Ian Tomlinson’s death we saw the beginning of allegations that he had attacked the police (he hadn’t), had verbally assaulted them (he hadn’t - not until they smashed him into the pavement, anyway) and even more unpleasant insinuations about his alcohol use (utterly unproven and entirely irrelevant - attacking a completely harmless man with his hands in his pockets who’s had a few beers is no better than attacking the same man when he’s sober).
One wonders what would have happened if the people who filmed the footage hadn’t sent it to a newspaper. What if they had sent it directly to the police, for instance? Would it have been released? Or would the “managed enquiry” presently underway by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, an enquiry whereby police officers themselves investigate their own colleagues (the word “Independent” here is, presumably, intended to be ironic) have reached the most convenient conclusions, sat on the evidence and hoped it would all go away?
There is other footage, too, which is worth looking at from the G20 protests. There is footage (and eyewitness accounts) of a baton charge on protestors who are sitting down on a road, harming no-one. There is footage of a violent police assault on a crowd of protesters, all of whom are holding both hands in the air and chanting “not a riot, not a riot”.
And then there is the iconic footage of the windows of RBS being smashed, a few minutes of footage which is being wheeled out by every right-winger or authoritarian to justify the actions of the police on the day. Yet… Look closer. In this footage, there are no more than half a dozen actual “rioters” - and at least three dozen photographers and cameramen from the press.
Is it entering the realms of conspiracy theory to wonder who told those cameramen to gather at that exact spot? To ponder whose decision it was that RBS, alone out of all of the businesses in that part of the City, should leave its windows unboarded on April 1st? To question why those five or six window-breakers could not be isolated (they’re a long way away from the rest of the crowd already) and rounded up? Instead, the entire crowd was penned in with them, in a process known as “kettling”, and deprived food, water and toilet facilities for several long hours, as well as being assaulted by police if they attempted to leave the cordon.
I have no illusions about the composition of these demonstrations. The only time I have attended them was at some of the early Stop the War demos, and I quickly became disillusioned due to the heavy presence of loudmouthed groups like the various Socialist factions, who seemed determined to dominate proceedings. On the day of the April 1st protests, I showed my support for the demonstrators by, er, going to the giant Westfield shopping centre on the other side of the city with a friend and buying stuff I didn’t need.
But even if I don’t agree with all of the sentiments of those protestors, I believe that they have a fundamental right to be heard. The nation is angry, and rightfully so, and we have a right to take to our streets - OUR streets, note, built and maintained with OUR money, for OUR benefit - and express that anger peacefully. The police, however, have chosen to try to clamp down on and discourage protest - keeping reasonable moderate people away by portraying peaceful protests as “riots”, and when the protesters don’t cooperate and riot as they’re meant to, the police create violent situations for the media to film and broadcast.
More than our right to protest, however, there is another right to consider. We have the right to walk through our streets without being assaulted and killed by the police force that we pay to protect us. We have the right, when a police officer commits a criminal act in broad daylight (or any other kind of light), for that act to be treated with seriousness, not covered up as our supposed protectors close ranks around the culprit. Innocent people should never have to be afraid of the police, and I fear that today, in my city, that assertion is crumbling.
The Metropolitan Police is a part of my city, an intrinsic, vital part of the functioning of this great urban landscape - but as each of these stories emerges, I find myself less and less sure who these people are actually serving. Where does “keeping us safe” end, and “keeping us in line” begin - and when did we cross that line?
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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I’ve been even more sporadic than usual in my updates here of late. I’m blaming my workload; it turns out that doing a university course which everyone and his dog warned me was “really really tough” at the same time as trying to earn a living like a proper person is actually quite hard. Who’d have thought it, eh?
I have, however, been finding time to talk bollocks about videogames once a week, which you’re very welcome to listen to. Episode Six of Stage Clear, featuring a discussion of horror games and a section which co-host Perrin is worried will “get us into trouble” (I’m not sure with whom, exactly, we’ll be in trouble - his mum?), is live on the Stage Clear website (and on iTunes, if you’re that way inclined) right now. (Episode Five, which I never mentioned on this blog, is up there as well. We didn’t just skip that number in case it was unlucky.)
Couple of other quick links - a piece in The Times about why the right games triumphed at this year’s BAFTAs, and an editorial on Eurogamer and GamesIndustry.biz on why it’s fair to point the finger at videogames over childhood obesity (as long as you’re pointing fingers in quite a few other places simultaneously, starting with the parents).
Second term is almost finished, so I get a month of my old life back before the exam term begins. I’ll blog properly once that happens and stop just spamming links to other stuff I’ve been up to, promise.
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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Well, not so much “news” as a collection of links illustrating what I’ve been up to recently.
I never mentioned that Episode 3 of Stage Clear went live last week, marking three whole weeks of actually obeying the schedule we set ourselves. I’m off out to record another this evening, which will bring us to a month. I’m as surprised as you no doubt are (and slightly frightened, if I’m being truthful).
We’ve had great feedback to Stage Clear so far, which is wonderful. To be perfectly truthful, we set out to make a handful of recordings with the assumption that only a couple of our friends would listen, and that they’d get bored after the first few. However, our download figures are significantly better than that, and we’ve had fantastic feedback, which has taken us somewhat by surprise. At this point, we’re thinking about bizarre things like “growing the audience”, but honestly, the only way we’re keen on approaching that is through word of mouth - so if you like the podcast, please do tell all your friends / fake Facebook friends / forum pals / mortal enemies. (Of course, if you don’t like the podcast, you should keep your filthy mouth shut*.)
On a more actually-serious writing front, I’ve been doing bits and pieces for The Times again recently - their games coverage is genuinely going from strength to strength at the moment (no, seriously), with me on the sidelines chipping in context and analysis columns to go alongside some really good feature spreads. Most recently I talked a bit about “How Nintendo took on the world. And won.”, and to go along with the launch of Halo Wars last week, I penned a column “In defence of game sequels”.
Oh, I also got a barrel of good feedback for last week’s Eurogamer / GamesIndustry.biz column, Creative Downturn, so I’m rather chuffed with that too.
I think that’s about the lot. Other than that, I fear that my life has largely been absorbed in a whirlwind of learning kanji and new grammar structures, as my attempts to absorb Japanese at a ridiculous pace continue. You’ve all been spared any further political rants as a result - it’s not that I haven’t been shouting at the television, it’s just that I don’t have time to write it all down right now…
* Or tell us why you don’t like it. We’ll either improve based on your suggestion, or mock you publicly in the next episode, depending on how much we like you.
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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The second episode of what threatens to become a weekly podcast about videogames and arguments is live on Stage Clear. This week, we discuss multiplayer games, argue that due legal process is all “total bollocks” and viciously insult one of our few listeners for daring to disagree with us.
Naturally, Perrin has rendered the whole thing vastly less entertaining than it could have been by leaving out several sections where I was so witty, erudite and intelligent that he feared being overshadowed - but it’s still quite a good listen, I reckon, and it’s definitely a much more professional presentation than our last ‘cast. We’re learning!
(Oh, and we’re on the iTunes store now - search for “Stage Clear” in the podcasts and we’re the first hit you’ll find. Handy if you fancy subscribing through iTunes, which will helpfully download each new episode as it’s posted.)
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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Creative Commons image courtesy of hiddedevries on flickr.
Almost everything I’ve posted here in recent months has been political in nature - perhaps not what the original intent of the blog was, but there’s been far more interesting stuff going on in the political sphere than in the gaming sphere of late.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t lots of interesting stuff happening in the world of videogames. So much so, in fact, that it merits sitting down once a week or so to talk absolute bollocks about it. In plainer terms - I have been dragged, not altogether reluctantly, back into the world of podcasting, courtesy of a little experiment in Internet media which we’re calling Stage Clear.
It’s rather rough and ready, but our first podcast is up for your auditory pleasure. It’s a bit too long (55 minutes or so, being a recap discussion of 2008’s best or most discussed games) and the audio quality isn’t great, but we’ve recorded a second edition today to post sometime next week, and we’re definitely evolving into something quite listenable.
(My co-host in this endeavour, by the way, is Richard Perrin, an occasional games blogger, even more occasional designer of freeware indie adventure games, and very regular drunkard.)
What I’m saying is, if you want to listen to two blokes talking vaguely educated (I do emphasise the “vaguely”) nonsense about videogames, you could do worse than download the first podcast. If you want something a bit more polished, I’ll post again when next week’s edition goes live. I haven’t done any podcast stuff since Eurogamer’s ill-fated efforts in the space ground to a halt a few years ago, so it’s quite fun to be back. A couple more episodes to improve and work on feedback from our listeners (yes, we have listeners!) and it might even be fun to listen to, too!
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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Picture from leafar. on Flickr
When Boris Johnson campaigned to become Mayor of London, a major aspect of his platform was the claim that Ken Livingstone was operating a cliquey, unaccountable and opaque executive - in place of which he, Boris Johnson, would usher in a new era of transparency, openness and honesty.
This week, his most senior advisor on the Olympics - one of the two biggest projects London is undertaking during his tenure, the other being Crossrail - became the centre of attention after substantial financial misconduct in his day job (a senior executive and founder of Carphone Warehouse) came to light. Naturally, both journalists and, frankly, the people of London rather wanted to know what Boris was going to do about the fact that his Olympics advisor had just been kicked out of the City, and whether any action would be taken.
Here’s how Boris responded - transparent, open government in action. “La la la la”? Is this what centuries of development of democratic politics have won us?
Paul Ross, the chap in question, stepped down today. Which makes him, on this matter, a moral cut above Boris Johnson.
(A sidenote. Boris is presently under investigationмебели and may face a standards enquiry into his conduct over the whole Damian Greene affair, which I’ve blogged about before. Boris, you see, is chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, and in that role - which is meant to be non-political - he was informed by the Met’s acting commissioner about the process of the investigation.
Unfortunately for Boris, his loyalty to the Tory party seems to be more important to him than his loyalty to the policing of London, so he reacted by making prejudicial public statements about the ongoing investigation (which he’s not meant to do), phoning up Damian Greene to have a chat with him about the whole thing (which he’s definitely not meant to do), and generally barging through every code of conduct the Mayor is meant to uphold like a bull in a china shop.
He may now face a standards enquiry which may well suspend him from office for some time - but has the power to remove him from his position and ban him from holding any public office for up to five years, should the allegations against him be upheld in full. It seems too much to hope for, but if there were ever an affair in which a politician deserved to be hoist on his own petard, it’s this one - and frankly, if any good at all is to come out of this sorry Damian Greene affair, it should be a clear line in the sand between operational policing and politics.)
Technorati Tags: Boris Johnson, Conservatives, Damian Greene, London, policing, politics, Tories
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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I really, really didn’t want to write anything about this topic, but today’s evening papers carried just enough utterly uninformed crud on the matter to make me annoyed enough to want to get it off my chest. Sorry to those in the line of fire (i.e. anyone still reading, having established that this is another post on politics).
Last week, a Conservative MP was arrested in a fairly heavy-handed manner by the police. He was arrested on suspicion of “conspiracy to cause misconduct in a public office”, a rarely used but relatively sanely worded offence which, in essence, seems designed as a bit of a catch-all with which to charge senior public figures who’ve been arranging to do naughty stuff like giving or accepting bribes. Note that it’s a “conspiracy” offence - a pretty specific term which means that you didn’t actually DO the naughty stuff, but you knowingly aided and abetted.
This chap, one Damian Greene, has suddenly become the heart of a great deal of chest-thumping and furious scribbling by the newspapers and the blogosphere alike. Apparently, his arrest is not only evidence that we live in a police state, it’s also a shocking assault on British democracy and of principles which date back to the very basis of our parliamentary democracy.
Now, let’s be perfectly clear here - our Labour government has absolutely no compunction about assaulting British democracy. Their attacks on the fairness of our judicial system, on the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and on the role of Parliament in decision-making are grevious, well-documented and absolutely appalling. So from the outset, if there were to be an accusation of Labour using the police force for political dirty work… Well, I for one wouldn’t put it past them.
However…
Well, the “however” is a big one. There are two key problems with chest-beating over Damian Greene’s plight. The first is that it illustrates that British people don’t seem to know what a “police state” is, but we can forgive that on the grounds of exaggeration and hyperbole (in return for which, I demand a free pass next time I opine that Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is definitely worse than Hitler).
The second, a bit more worrying perhaps, is that it illustrates an equal lack of understanding regarding their own history and the basis of parliamentary democracy.
Lots of newspapers and commentators have been shouting about Charles I - a particularly nasty and mentally unstable king with a proclivity for the more obscure and esoteric aspects of religion, who managed to precipitate a civil war and get his head chopped off when he attempted to assert the whole “Divine Right of Kings” nonsense and win absolute power back from the increasingly empowered parliament. Charles, you see, was told to bugger off when he tried to force Parliament to give up some of its MPs to his forces. “Aha!”, cry the budding historians in the papers, “This set a precedent of parliamentary privilege, which has just been broken! The end of all things is upon us!”
This proves, if any further proof were required, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Yes, Parliament told Charlie to sling his hook - but in doing so, they did NOT establish parliamentary privilege. In fact, Parliamentary Privilege then wasn’t terribly different to how it looks now - essentially, it guarantees a limited set of rights to MPs in the House, including important ones like freedom of speech… And freedom from arrest. “Oho!”, cry the newfound historical experts! Except that, er, that freedom from arrest doesn’t actually cover criminal matters. Damian Greene was arrested on a criminal matter. Equally, the Palace of Westminster is not, as such soi disant experts seem to believe, a church or cathedral in the 1500s. Criminals and criminal acts are not in some way “safe” within their walls, and police search rights and warrants apply there just as they do in any other office.
No “ancient and undoubted right” of the House of Commons has been breached. In fact, there’s essentially nothing unusual about what just happened - there have been similar cases scattered over the past century, at least half a dozen if not more. Few of them got very much airtime - but then again, few of them happened just when a government that was a dead-set to lose the next election suddenly looks like pulling some kind of strange victory from the jaws of defeat.
The funny thing is, there’s another aspect of Charles I’s unfortunate reign which is much more relevant to what has happened to Damian Greene. It came at the very end of his unpleasant life - when he got his head chopped off. In that action, Britain set a much more important precedent than the one Greene’s supporters claim - the principle that no man, not even the divine king himself, is above the law. The laws of the land apply equally to all, and police investigations must proceed on exactly that principle.
The other thing that the Damian Greene blowhards seem utterly outraged over is the idea that their man was arrested for “exposing” the Government - which is, of course, the duty of the Opposition.
Fine and good. If Damian Greene, or the police, turn around tomorrow and say “here’s the document they arrested me over - it’s information of great public interest which the Home Office tried to suppress for political reasons”, then neither I nor anyone else in the country will consider any further action against him even remotely justified. The man will be owed an apology by the Metropolitan Police, frankly.
To read the papers and the blogs, you’d think that has already happened. But… It hasn’t. In fact, we don’t know WHAT Damian Greene leaked, or tried to “groom” his Home Office source into leaking. Here, the waters are much muddier than the papers and the Conservatives would like us to believe.
The reality is that of the recent Home Office leaks, some are definitely public interest documents - but others are not. Others are personal details of cases the Home Office is working on, which have no right being in the public domain. Others still are more worrying - they’re internal Labour Party political documents, discussing the loyalty or affairs of various members of the party. My understanding is that they’re not really “Home Office” documents - they leaked from within that department, but they’re related to the Labour Party’s internal workings, not to the business of the Home Office itself. Their leaking isn’t in the public interest. It’s pure, brazen, political espionage.
If that’s what Damian Greene was up to, then he wasn’t acting in the public interest. Such actions are considered criminal in any sphere, and most certainly are not covered by parliamentary privilege. If the Met was made aware of solid evidence of that kind of action, then their course of action in this case was absolutely correct. If anything, the fact that our MPs can be investigated on matters like this is proof that our democracy still works, at least in some ways. The only way in which this is a harbinger of the sky falling in is the unfortunate fact that following this outcry, the Met will think twice about investigating political misdeeds in future - removing, with a deep sense of irony, yet another barrier to the abuse of our democracy.
Technorati Tags: Conservatives, Damian Greene, Labour, politics, Tories
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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(Photo by willhowells on flickr)
The overriding problem with British politics in recent years is, in my view, straightforward - with little to choose between the two major parties and a first-past-the-post voting system which excludes everyone else (even the Lib Dems, realistically) from the race, democracy has been looking increasingly pointless with each passing month.
The Tory surge we saw a few months back, where Cameron’s rehabilitated party opened a 30-point lead in the polls, wasn’t really on the back of any crucial difference in policy. Sure, the Tories don’t like ID cards (which is good) and David Davis managed to whip them into opposing 42 day detention before his principled stand in calling a by-election for his seat gave his nervous colleagues a golden opportunity to defenestrate him from the party’s day-to-day running. Both of those things are laudable.
On almost everything else, though, what’s to choose? The Tories are every bit as repugnant as Labour on key issues like immigration, and perhaps even more unpleasant on questions of crime and enforcement. Despite the frequent attacks on “the welfare state” from Conservative supporters, the party itself doesn’t actually have any policies to reduce welfare dependancy that Labour isn’t already implementing (some of them desperately unfair and discriminatory, placing huge, unnecessary burdens on genuinely disabled and ill people).
On privatisation, the Conservatives are as deeply enamoured with PFI and other such dishonest wheezes as Browns’s treasury has ever been. On transport, they’re big fans of private cars, as they’ve always been - proved admirably by Boris Johnson’s recent decisions to halt various public transport, walking and cycling focused projects in London because they would have inconvenienced drivers. (Let’s be realistic - if you’re driving in Zone 1, you deserve to be inconvenienced, preferably by being beaten with sticks until you learn some bloody sense and regard for your fellow man.)
None of this is surprising. After all, both the Tories and Labour are chasing the same dragon - they both want the love and support of Paul Dacre and Rebekah Wade, the editors of the Daily Mail and the Sun respectively. By extension, they’re both seeking the support of Daily Mail & General Trust and News International - the two most powerful and influential media companies in the United Kingdom.
They’re also, coincidentally, the same companies which make tons of money out of screaming about our BROKEN SOCIETY on a daily basis (because “Crime Figures Approach Record Low” or “Number of Child Abuse Cases Actually The Same As It’s Always Been Pretty Much” doesn’t sell many papers). Oh, and they both despise the BBC, because they don’t like having to compete with a publicly funded body that doesn’t have to fill its broadcasts with adverts and appeal to the lowest common denominator in its current affairs reporting.
Anyone notice how those two strands - Broken Britain and Bastard BBC - seem to have dominated both our media discourse and political discourse in recent months? Watching Brown and Cameron alike lapping from Rupert Murdoch’s wrinkly Australian teat is enough to make me feel furious and ashamed, and I’m only an adopted son of this nation. For those of you born here, it should be enough to create a spike in sales of Guy Fawkes masks and dynamite.
However! The past couple of weeks have been fascinating, because there’s suddenly a gulf of policy opening up between Labour and the Conservatives - where previously you’d have had a tough time passing a razorblade between them.
It’s the economy, of course, that’s driving this. Up until now, the Tories haven’t liked talking much about their economic policy. There’s a sneaking suspicion that this is because the shadow treasurer, George Osborne, is actually even more of a repugnant, over-privileged and insolent little oik than Cameron, and much worse at hiding the fact - so the less he says, the better. Certainly, he hasn’t seemed capable of opening his mouth without sticking his (expensively shod) feet straight into it in recent weeks. He’s so bad, in fact, that during the Northern Rock crisis (and ever since) his Lib Dem opposite number, Vince Cable, became the go-to guy for media looking for an opposition statement, completely bypassing the bumbling Tories.
Anyway, they’re still not talking about their economic policy - much. But they’re saying enough for us to understand that little has changed in how the Tories think, no matter how many times they put the word “compassionate” into their speeches and press releases.
The Tory approach to the global recession is this. They will cut taxes for big business. They will cut back on spending - although they won’t say what’ll be affected, it’s safe to say that the NHS, policing and transport will see at least some cutbacks in order to balance the books. Note that in London, Boris Johnson (the country’s most senior elected Tory) has cut back on the Metropolitan Police’s budget, despite running his election campaign partially on a law and order ticket. That move was probably formulated by his advisors from Policy Exchange, a thinktank hugely popular with Conservative Central HQ and whose recommendations are likely to form the heart of any national Conservative administration.
The Labour approach is almost the opposite. They will cut taxes for individuals. They will increase spending - borrowing money in order to implement both tax cuts and major government projects. The idea is that as the private sector declines temporarily, the government can borrow money cheaply and use it to generate work for the economy - big, headline infrastructure projects that will keep money flowing through the economy and unemployment nice and low.
The Tory approach, which owes much to Reagan-era trickle-down economics, is exactly the same kind of attitude they had in the early Eighties, under Thatcher. Then, their approach to inflation and recession was to allow the unemployment numbers to swell - in the process causing untold damage to many British communities, especially in the North of the country, where the social impact of widespread unemployment is still being felt. Next time you hear David Cameron talking about “Broken Britain”, bear in mind who broke the bloody thing in the first place.
Labour’s approach is being derided by the Tories for creating a “tax timebomb”. If you borrow now, they say, you’ll have to pay back later - so we’ll all be taxed more heavily down the line.
Well… Yeah. That much is obvious. But, while I don’t like everything (or, indeed, very much at all) about Brown’s handling of our economy in the past, on this topic - he’s dead right. We’re facing a recession, and in the face of that, the right thing for a government to do is to cushion the blow until such time as things start improving. The Tories’ policies, in contrast, would see the Government crawling back into its shell for the duration, keeping the Treasury’s books balanced at the expense of deepening and lengthening the recession, and causing untold human misery as the unemployment figures soar.
We are a socialist nation, a nation whose heritage from centuries of parliamentary democracy is a state which looks after its people, engages in moderate redistribution and, crucially, puts its citizens ahead of its economy - at least nominally. That’s a reflection of the will of the British people. American-style economic focus, and the recoil they feel from concepts like redistribution or socialism, are alien to these shores.
Yet even in America it’s accepted that big Government spending is going to be needed to keep the hounds from the door during the coming recession - while in Britain, Cameron’s Tories would happily batten down the Treasury’s hatches, say “fuck you” to struggling families and individuals, shrug as the unemployment lines grow, and then look cheerful when the economy booms again and pat themselves on the back for “responsible fiscal policy”. Meanwhile, just like last time, entire familes, estates and towns will never quite recover…
Labour’s alternative is that we’ll pay a little bit more when times are good, in order to prevent things from getting REALLY unpleasant when times are bad. That seems reasonable to me. It’s good enough to make me realise that as much as Labour’s period in government has angered me in many ways, the alternative is (still) much worse.
It seems reasonable to everyone else too, it seems. This week, MORI put the Tories’ lead over Labour at… Three percent. Not enough to put the Tories in government if an election were held tomorrow. With the veneer of party unity sliding from the Conservatives as Osborne proves an increasingly divisive figure, the common belief that David Cameron will be on the steps of No.10 some time in the next couple of years seems to be looking less and less certain.
Technorati Tags: Boris Johnson, Conservatives, Daily Mail, David Cameron, economy, Gordon Brown, immigration, Labour, Lib Dems, Liberal Democrats, London, politics, Rupert Murdoch, The Sun, Tories
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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A quick glance at the weather forecast suggests that it’s about to get cold - really cold. Saturday’s maximum temperature in London is pegged at 2 degrees C. Apologies to any Canadians, Scandinavians and the likes, but here in London, where it’s habitually a few degrees warmer than the fairly balmy south of England (thanks, urban micro-climate) that’s really cold.
It’s fine, though. Like most people in the British Isles, I’m almost ridiculously well-prepared for the kind of arctic conditions that we haven’t really seen on these islands in a couple of decades. Seduced by images of white Christmases and parental recollections of frozen winters, we stock up on gloves, scarves, hats and heavy coats - oblivious to the combined effects of global warming and the Atlantic Gulf Stream current, which conspire to make our winters increasingly mild and our summers increasingly wet.
Somewhere, I have a ridiculously heavy coat which I was given to wear while watching a re-enactment of a WW2 tank battle on a snowfield in Finland in late November a few years ago. I’m holding on to it “just in case”. Just in case what? The Day After Tomorrow was entertaining, granted, but it seems poor justification for wardrobe choices.
I digress. My point was - by our somewhat odd British standards, it’s getting cold, as winter habitually does. Normally, a nice pair of fleece-lined leather gloves form part of my arsenal against the chill - but they’ve got a bit of a downside, in that they make using phones, iPods and even wallets into a right pain in the backside.
This has reached a peak due to a couple of factors. Firstly, I have a nice new wallet with a flap that holds my Oyster card (London’s transport touch-card) on one side, and my SOAS touch-card on the other (yes, I’m a student these days, for those who haven’t heard - first year of a four year Japanese BA at the School of Oriental and African Studies). This is a handy arrangement, but requires a bit more fiddling than just pulling my wallet out and slapping it on the card reader. Secondly, I have an iPhone. Pressing buttons through gloves on an old phone was a pain; using a touchscreen is simply impossible.
Hence, Freehands. These clever little things are designed exactly for this - they’re a nice pair of leather gloves which have fold-back tips on the index fingers and thumbs. Not entirely a new idea, but it’s novel to see the feature on a genuinely nice pair of gloves, and the addition of a pair of magnets on each finger to hold back the flap while you work is very clever indeed. Plus, they’re inexpensive even with the present dismal Sterling / Dollar exchange rate.
I thought the legions of touchscreen-device users on my friends lists might be interested - I’ve ordered up a pair anyway, so I’ll drop a quick post later on to let you know how I get on.
Technorati Tags: freehands, London, gadgets, SOAS, weather
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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Here is a list of People Who Need To Sort Their Lives Out and Get A Facebook Account so that they can be included in Organising Events and Boozes and Stuff:
Failure to comply will result in being sent close-up pictures of the cat's bumhole by MMS every hour, on the hour. That is all.
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Author Michael Crichton died today, aged 66. He had suffered from cancer for a number of years. For those who don’t know of the man, he wrote the novels on which movies like Jurassic Park and Rising Sun were based, and was one of the creators of long-running medical drama ER.
I haven’t felt quite as conflicted over someone’s death for quite a long time.
I absolutely loved Crichton’s early work - I remember having those massive two-books-in-one editions of stuff like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and Rising Sun when I was a teenager, and they were pretty influential on the kind of things I got interested in and started reading science-fact work about. It’s entirely fair to describe Crichton as an inspiration, someone who showed me that a love of science and a love of literature didn’t have to be mutually exclusive - a torch now carried by wonderful authors like Neal Stephenson.
(Lots of his early books were poorly converted into movies, sadly - I think one of my favourites is Congo, which is desperately underrated after being made into an utterly awful movie.)
Then… Well, then it went to shit. The man turned into a massive, epic, neo-con twat, and the quality of his books plummeted at the same time. From being someone who would inspire you to look into a field of science you didn’t know about and broaden your horizons, he turned into someone who was genuinely anti-science - a naysayer and fearmonger who might as well have walked out of the pages of a tabloid newspaper, rather than spinning great fiction from cutting edge research. Next, a thriller about the biotech / genetics industry, was awful. Prey, which dealt with nanotechnology swarms, was passable - and then became awful by the end.
State of Fear was… Well, it was pretty much the end of his career, and for good reason. It was practically the book in which he “came out” as a neo-con - taking an extremely dim view of the science behind global warming, so much so that it made him into a darling of the Global Warming Denial movement in US politics (especially Senator Jim Inhofe, a serial abuser of science and bare-faced liar on the topic of global warming).
It’s not that he took a controversial (and largely unsupported) view of the science, it’s that he took it so damned seriously. He didn’t, in interviews or in the text, present this as being a deliberate provocation to try to stir up debate - he presented it as being God’s own fucking truth, and everyone who disagreed was a brainwashed idiot. Pretty rich for a man essentially promoting a ridiculous conspiracy theory. The end result was a passage in one of his books where he depicted one of his outspoken scientific critics, in extremely thinly veiled terms, as a “child rapist” - one of the most infantile and disgusting things I’ve seen an author do in modern times.
So, mixed feelings. One of my favourite authors as a boy, and one of my most disliked literary figures in later years. Rest in peace, Michael - but part of me is glad he won’t be ruining my memory of his brilliant early books any further, too.
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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Mostly this weekend, I’ll be at the Frightfest film festival in London - a delightful mash-up of upcoming horror, fantasy, sci-fi and gore flicks, spread over four days. I’ll be updating comments on each film to Twitter - you can follow me here at ландшафтmy Twitter pagerent a car bulgaria.
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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Quick personal life update. I just got back earlier this week from Amecon, which was a hugely enjoyable weekend. Anime conventions have transitioned over the years from being the preserve of a small sub-genus of bearded, sandalled science fiction nerds into being a bizarre melting pot of subcultures and groups, a process which I continue to find genuinely fascinating. Granted, they’re unified by the fact that to an outside observer, all of them look like they need to get out a bit more - but the sheer range of different interests and subcultures represented makes the events fascinating all the same.
Ayacon, a convention with which I was involved for many years, is probably going to run next Summer for the first time in three years. I made the announcement of this at Amecon - apparently despite having 14 committee members, none of them can actually speak, so I was chosen to go on stage despite having left the committee a couple of years ago. The last Ayacon, in 2005, remains to my mind pretty much the best attempt at embracing and expanding upon the subcultures and interest groups who have flocked to anime conventions in recent years (Amecon, for all that it’s a great event, has generally stuck to a more traditional line). I don’t know how (or even if) the present organisers plan to continue that evolution, but it’ll be really interesting to watch.
I also took the rather heavy-hearted decision this week to hang up my Paladin’s shield and quit World of Warcraft. The basic, underlying problem here is that the destination - the fabled “end-game” - simply isn’t as much fun as the journey, the narrative driven quest to reach level 70. More specifically, I essentially played from level 1 to 70 as a single-player game - and it was great, probably one of the best singleplayer RPGs I’ve played. At level 70, however, you don’t have any choice but to play with other people, so I joined a couple of guilds - first a relatively hardcore guild who wanted to burn through content and do really well, and second an ostensibly more friendly, unfocused guild.
My problem with “other people” in WoW stems from a basic, horrific failure of social skills and interaction in many of its players. Even those who are friendly and helpful can display shocking social immaturity when push comes to shove. In a virtual world where the consequences of your actions aren’t right in your face, and where authority often rests with the first person to click a button rather than being conferred by effort or merit, people feel free to act in a manner which they’d be terrified to assume in their day to day lives.
For me, the final straw came when a close friend was booted out of our guild for no good reason, other than that he’d rubbed someone up the wrong way. With no willingness to make a sincere apology or change things to prevent something like that happening again, I left - for fairly obvious reasons. Ironically, accusations were thrown pretty swiftly of “taking the game too seriously”; I say ironically, because to me, my placing of my real-life friendship ahead of the game in importance seems to suggest quite the opposite. I don’t care about WoW enough to have it impact on a real-world relationship in that manner, and after a couple of shit guild experiences, it’s become apparent to me that I don’t care about the game’s population enough to bother with it at all.
(Frankly, it was probably in danger of turning me into an anti-social git anyway, although it’s admittedly been bloody nice to have something to distract me from a litany of toothaches and chest infections for the past few weeks.)
All of which leaves me with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, but which more than anything, makes me fascinated to know what research has been done into the difference into how people react to things in a virtual world compared to the real world. I know there was an odd experiment a while back in which someone viewed the world through a screen displaying an image from a camera mounted above and behind their head - effectively giving them a third person perspective on the real world - and it was found that they lost many basic social inhibitions, being more willing to invade people’s personal space, for example.
If such a simple change makes us ruder to one another, it’s no surprise that a consequence-free virtual world changes our interactions in ways that are not entirely positive - although one does wonder whether the next generation, who grow up with virtual worlds as simply another social tool, will end up developing their own social rules that encompass virtual worlds more thoroughly than our own conventions do.
In other news, my dentist did the most painful thing a dentist can possibly do to me today - she gave me an outline of the costs for the rest of my treatment. It’s going to be running close to £5000 by the end of the whole thing; needless to say, I’m not exactly happy, but what can you do?
Technorati Tags: Amecon, anime, Ayacon, dentist, MMORPG, anime conventions, videogames, World of Warcraft
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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Assuming you’re reading this on the blog site itself - rather than on LiveJournal, Facebook, or anywhere else exotic that it’s exported to via RSS - you may have noticed a new link on the right hand side of the page. Rather than updating the main blog every time I write a feature of interest, I’ve started popping a link to the ones that appear online onto a separate page. Thus, if you’re desperately keen to keep up with everything I’m writing (look, I’m not judging, but there are probably better hobbies), you can do so from that page.
This entry is cross-posted from my blog, A New Challenger Appears - you can view it in its original glory (and comment on the original site) by clicking here!
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