Movember

What a load of crap that they chose moustaches and November to promote men's health. Immediately, more than half of the population (women and children) can't take part! And what has a moustache got to do with health? Either you grow a moustache or you don't care about men's health, is that it?

Surely January would have been the best month to pick. Then you can call it Manuary. Once again, the clue's in the name - except this time, it's more obvious what the point is, and there's no gimmick that makes half of the population feel excluded from supporting and the other half egoistic with their "look at me, I'm a man, feel sorry for me because I'm part of a group who has health problems" fashion statement.

And after all that, did you learn anything about men's health in November? I know I didn't. Apart from the mental disability which is the craving for gimmicks, attention and childish pseudo-caring. But then, that affects the entire population.

Finally this year, I wish a Merry Arbitrary Mythological Event Taken from the Ancient Cultures and Cannibalised into Religion and a Happy New Arbitrary Point in the Solar Cycle to all of my one reader.

Anti-naturism

Naturism is one of the last bastions of humanity. It is one of the few links we have left with our species being and with the rest of actual reality. Yet there are opponents of it everywhere – skeptics, cynics, abusers – without as well as within. Of even greater concern is, very few people seem to know what it is.

So let's have a look. Naturism is an attraction to nature. Naturists – true naturists – treat this as the primary draw, and react accordingly. Everything else is secondary. Naturist venues are for those who like to be close to nature, to provide a refuge from the invented reality of their normal daily live. It is an expression of spirituality.

Anyone who is sane and not psychopathic is a naturist, whether they know if or not. If you actually enjoy living an entire life working in a job that is meaningless to the improvement of humanity, living in a box made of bricks, living in an overpopulated city consisting of wasteful technologies and laws that benefit those who don't deserve those benefits, where the food is increasingly fake and the products you buy (and the accompanying adverts) are designed to have you believe they have your best interests in mind, and you never want anything else, seek urgent psychiatric help before it's too late: You've become a fake, soulless, zombified slab of cells who has forgotten what it is to be human (assuming that you knew in the first place). Living in an artificially-constructed world might seem convenient, but in the long-run, anything that distracts us from our true nature, from our identity with our genetics and natural surroundings, can only be damaging, to the individual as well as to humankind as a whole.

Before reading this article, what you were probably thinking of when you saw the word "naturism" was nudism. Nudists are people who like to be naked for its own sake, whose specific attraction is to be naked, without any other reason. If you associated nudism with seediness and perversion, then you might be right. That is something else entirely. 

You do see naturists who choose not to wear clothes, but that is a consequence of being closer to nature, which is part of something greater. If you were to visit a naturist camp – one that really is a naturist camp (as opposed merely to one that calls itself one), filled with people who are naturists (as opposed merely to people who call themselves naturists), you will find that some will be wearing clothes, and some not. On a cold day, common sense would kick in and everyone would be clothed appropriately. In fact, it is a bit perverse that we have the terms "naturist beach" or "naturist camp": In an enlightened society, these places should just be called beaches and camps, and the minority that are not would be "non-naturist beach" and "non-naturist camp". But as usual, the fake world that we inhabit is reinvented in yet another way to suit a minority at the huge expense of the majority.

It is unfortunate that I have had to concentrate on the clothing aspect of all this, because that really is an insignificant side-issue for naturists. In fact, when compared to the idea of naturism as a whole, it is almost irrelevant. It is like saying that the Earth consists of fig trees. Of course it does, but what sort comment is that? What the hell have fig trees got to do with what Earth is, if you're talking about Earth as a whole? If fig trees didn't exist, the Earth would still go on being the Earth. The specific (and sometimes sole) association with nudism is an unfortunate consequence of ignorance and misinformation, quite obviously perpetuated by a carefully-biased educational system (see later) and the media.

All of this in turn is, no doubt, a consequence of a deliberate, coordinated attempt to lure people into a world where they are less naturally comfortable. People who are out of their comfort zone - which we all are - are more vulnerable. Faced with an unfamiliar, unnatural, materialistic world that goes against our evolutionary instinct and perceptions, vulnerable people are more likely to take refuge in fake substitutes for what they have lost. And that makes a small amount of people lots of money, which is what matters more than anything else, more so even than the well-being of humanity. And so, instead of taking a walk in the woods, they buy a computer game that immerses them in a fake world, or pay for the gym and use a treadmill. Instead of growing vegetables in the garden, or in pots – say, potatoes and spinach, which are extremely easy and low-maintenance – they go to the supermarket and buy it.

The beauty (or rather, the ugliness) of it is that people have been educated in such a way that they are not even aware of their discomfort or vulnerability. If you have never truly experienced naturism – a close, spiritual bond with nature – how would you know otherwise? Just to be doubly-sure that we don't smell a rat, we're given "urban spaces," greens and parks. "If you want nature, we've given it to you, it's right there in the middle of the city!" A seemingly-perfect response. But this is merely pseudo-nature, an unconvincing replica on a smaller scale. What is a piece of grass, or a square of trees in the middle of a morass of concrete structures, compared to a forest in its natural setting and views of rolling hills going off into the distance?

Unfortunately, naturism has been hijacked so much that it is not a good idea to go to a naturist club or camp in the UK. They are infested with fakers who call themselves naturists, but who are just nudists, mainly dirty old men who are there for the cheap thrill of being naked and seeing others naked. Other, more enlightened countries, such as Germany, are going the same way.

So next time you consider naturism, consider it in the manner in which it is truly intended, rather than how you have been indoctrinated to see it. The truth is obvious: Like anything else, all you have to do is to forget what you have been told, think about it, consider the evidence - say what you see - and work out what makes most sense. If nudism is naturism, why are there two terms? What should the word "naturism" mean, given that it has the word "nature" hard-coded into it? Why isn't spirituality on the curriculum alongside science and religion?

And, why has naturism taken such a nose-dive into the seedy, shallow waters inhabited by the sexually-repressed? Are there any true naturists left, apart from campers, ramblers, back-packers and hikers?

With special thanks to K. Robert Lomas for his thoughts and comparisons between naturism in the UK and Germany over the last decade.

Court Costs

At the time of writing, the British government is mulling whether to make drastic cuts to legal aid. If implemented, those who can't afford legal fees would be forced to use, as their legal counsel, the lowest bidder.

Here are three legal evils.

1. Arguing the truth costs a hell of a lot of money. Incredibly, people are allowed to make huge wodges of cash out of people's right to live a fair life. (It's important to note that, if you think the fees are unreasonable, you can contest them. Remember: we live in an instane, money-orientated world, where not only does justice literally come at a price, but the cost of it can also be negotiated in the same way as other commodities, say, a used car. Consult the Citizens' Advice Bureau for more information.)
2. Legal representatives are not there specifically to tell the truth. The truth is impartial; instead, their job is to point-score to your advantage by any means available to them. The most convincing case wins, and that's what matters. And the loser pays more costs, whether or not they were right, moral or truthful.
3. Generally, the more you pay, the more effective your legal representative will be at arguing your case. So the more money you have, the more legal power you are likely to have.

The dilemma is that by providing legal aid, you're burdening The Public with  a huge expense. By removing legal aid, you're implicitly helping those with more money, which of course is just slightly  unfair.

All pretty basic stuff that you probably know or worked out already. But there would appear to be one gleamingly-obvious conclusion, that I for one have never heard spoken:

Abolish legal representatives. Just get rid of them. They're worse than not being needed: They're an impediment to justice, and an unnecessary drain on resources.

Removing legal advisors and representatives solves all of the above problems (except that you would still have to pay court costs). There would be no solicitors, lawyers or barristers to pay. No-one would be there to try to convince a jury using arguments that may or may not be truthful. No one party would have an advantage simply due to the amount of credit in their bank account.

The drawback, you might think, is that without legal representatives, there is no-one trained to argue for each of the parties. But you're wrong. There is: The judge. All the judge needs to know are the facts relevant to the case. He can do this by speaking to the litigants. The main skill he needs is to ask all the relevant questions to get a full appraisal of the situation, and to learn the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Where proving the truth is impossible, the jury is there to weigh up the evidence.

Some questions might arise in your mind. What if the judge is biased or inexperienced? Well, then the case would suffer in the same way as if there were legal representatives present. What if one of the litigants is more eloquent than the other, and thus more convincing? Well, this is an irrelevant question, and if it entered your head, then you don't understand what I've written above. The judge is there to ask those questions necessary to learn the truth, and nothing else. Eloquence is irrelevant: If you know you're in the right, then you'll easily mention the facts relevant to it.

By removing legal representatives, you remove any bias, faff, stress and unnecessary cost that is the scourge of the current legal system, and you focus on the truth. So... what's the problem? And why do we have these glorified, self-important middle-men who are scrounging good money from an irrelevant trade?

Google Glass

Google will soon be rolling out its new invention: Google Glass, a recording device you wear on your face. It promises endless fun filming random people in public as they try in vain to have a quiet time in the cafe or around town in the shops. And then storing it on a huge public Google server somewhere for everyone to see. Forever.

Google isn't exactly praised for its moral stance on privacy, preferring its own definition of consent which essentially says, "by not complaining, you've implicitly said it's OK". Which makes the process of 'opting out' quite difficult and long-winded in the world of 10 years' time, when everyone you meet has one of the things. It makes an interesting Orwellian twist: "Google Glass - everyone is watching you."

Fortunately, I see a solution and a lucrative opportunity for a T-shirt slogan:

"By filming me with your Google Glasses, you are giving me your consent for me to jab you in the stomach."

 or how about this:

 "I don't want my every move recorded. Don't be a Google Glasshole.

 I wonder where the first cafe in the UK will be that has a sign in the window:

"No Dogs, Hoodies or Google Glasses"

Plain Cigarette Packaging

The government has 'only just' realised that attractive cigarette packaging has the effect of making people buy more cigarettes, and that, conversely, plain packaging will cause people to buy less. (It makes you wonder why, before their 'realisation', the government thought companies used attractive packaging. Did they not think to ask? Or were they persuaded by cigarette companies not to ask? More on that later.)

Says this Guardian article:

"We are going to follow what they have done in Australia. The evidence suggests it is going to deter young smokers. There is going to be legislation," said a senior Whitehall source said.

So, they've finally owned up to knowing what has been public and obvious knowledge since the invention of adverts. My guess is that the reason for their reluctance in this "realisation" is the obvious ultimate conclusion: for-profit advertising should be banned.

We all know that the sole purpose of advertising is to get you to buy something. In entering the product market, companies may be trying to sell their products, but they've already succeeded in selling their souls: They are devoted to pushing their wares as effectively as possible, using whatever means they can get away with (legally and otherwise). Hence supermarkets and their cheap "don't ask, don't tell" meat that turns out to contain horsemeat (now with added harmful chemicals), banks who ruin the economy through lucrative and highly-risky scheming, and huge companies that consistently fall foul of monopoly and anti-trust laws.

As humans are the ultimate customers, so of course it is essential to get into their minds. On the face of it, this is innocent enough: Get to know what they want, make it, and sell it to them. They call it "demand" - although this is a marketing PR word designed to make us believe that we're in control, when in fact it's the other way around. And this brings me to the hidden aspect of getting into customers' minds: The psychology war.

There are many reasons why it really is a war. The word "competition" is too simplistic, too ambiguous. It's really a series of ongoing battles, ostensibly primarily with competitors. Selling products has to be agressive and ruthless: After all, that is the nature of commerce. He who dares wins. Smaller companies get annexed or assimilated into bigger, more powerful ones. Corporate spies are used on rivals. And of course, there is the invasive propaganda - or "advertising," as their PR departments misleadingly and passively call it.

I'm sure that even the supposedly-pristine Messrs. Branson and Dyson can't have got where they are now using entirely moral means: The market is finite, and so any advantage one company has is necessarily to the disadvantage of another. The survival of the fittest process ensures that the most agressive and ruthless succeed, and that the others are weeded out. And since failure means corporate death, companies are forced to do what they can, using the mantra "if we don't do it, someone else will," which surely is about as justifiable as "I was only following orders."

One psychological aspect here, in outwitting the competitors through domination, is outwitting the customers through PR. And that means paying for positive attention in the press (usually advertising, but also behind-the-scenes deals amongst themselves), avoiding being sued by competitors and avoiding being fined by the state. (The key word here, of course, is avoidance, which is of no consequence to morality.) This way, they aim to provide you with a smiling face and pleasant demeanour at the neoproverbial till, while garotting everything that's sacred under the neoproverbial counter.

So for one, advertising is a psychological war between corporations, as they struggle to get the upper hand and avoid collateral (financial and reputational) damage. For another, it is a war for control of your mind. And this is where advertising as we know it lies. This war is between their advertising agency and you. The grand prize is your brain, which determines whether you go out and buy that product (if they win), or whether you see reason and decide that you don't need it (if you win). You, as a human customer, are at your most vulnerable (and most likely to lose the battle) if the product is related to a vice, obsession or disorder that you are prone to.

The obvious ones are cigarettes, alcohol, gambling and junk food, but the vast majority of products are related to vices, obsessions or disorders. Do you really need that antibacterial hand-wash? Are you sure you haven't just got an obsessive-compulsive disorder compelling you to go over the top with cleanliness? Do you really think that that porn, or buying those expensive branded clothes on the internet, or that computer game, is an effective substitute for actually going out and interacting people in the outside world? Have you actually done any research into whether you really need the vitamins in those tablets, and that they contain all the ones you need in the right quantities?

You might say that you are an innocent victim, that you trusted the sellers' claims. But both you and I know that that's crap. What you actually mean, is that you're too lazy to use your eyes to see. You deliberately took the adverts and the packaging at face value, knowing it was all crap, pathetically letting yourself be seduced by it. You wanted to reserve the "but they told me that it was OK" trump card for when it all goes pear-shaped. They know this, and that's why they do it. If you are clever enough to know better, you're aiding the enemy by causing them to do it more. Guess what: You deserve to have lung cancer from smoking, to feel sick from knowing that you've been eating tainted horse-meat, to be lonely having been so obsessed with porn and games that you've missed out on having human relationships. You utter moron.

Humans are habitual, and routine can be a good thing. A routine can lead to an efficient and effective pattern of useful activities. A routine, however, can also become a disorder either when it becomes unnecessary, or when it becomes unnecessarily acute. An unnecessary routine might be instinctively going to the supermarket, when the local market has fresher and cheaper produce, or regularly buying far more food than you'll ever use and then throwing it away. An unnecessarily acute routine might be smoking 30 cigarettes a day, or playing a computer game or watching porn for many hours on end. Some of these examples might be surprising to you in that they're disorders. But think about it: They really are. Call them socially-accepted stealth disorders, if you will. What is most surprising is not only that they will invariably have been instigated by corporate advertisers, but that people have just sleep-walked into it. Advertisers use people's useful, genetic traits against them, creating, inventing and exacerbating disorders for their own financial gain. How is that not at best sick and psychotic, at worst pure evil? And yet The Public in all its genius glory has consciously allowed it.

Advertising works by having an arbitrary appeal. They need to stick in our heads, and so they use colourful graphics, clever plays on words, humour and easily-remembered slogans. They also use repetition. Learning is done by repetition, of course, and they know this. Repeating something often enough can make a person believe in it, even if that person simultaneously knows it to be a lie. (This is known as cognitive dissonance.)  It's even been used in wartime to turn enemy combatants into traitors. And so their brands are everywhere, on every billboard, in the media, in the shops, in your mind.

All of these psychological tricks are powerful and irresistable and, thus, extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. At the same time, advertising (using these tricks) is the most effective means of companies achieving both goals of PR and customer mind-control. Its goal is not just to convince you to buy, it's to require you to buy. The tricks in use are so sophisticated that you barely have a choice to abstain. And you are pulled in a million directions, following contrictary "buy this" instructions from competing products, your mind becomes worn down, more unstable and more vulnerable, and the effect gets worse. No wonder OCD is so prevalent.

As we've seen, companies can and will do all they can to make money, and for that reason they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves or conduct themselves in a moral way. And this is particularly the case with advertising, whether it's in the media, on product packaging, or in the way they lobby governments and worm their way into influencial regulating bodies and the legal profession. Now that the government has recognised that cigarette packaging (and, by logical extension, all advertising) causes people to buy cigarettes (or any other product), it would be idiotic to focus on cigarette branding and nothing else. Why not do the right thing, and put a morally-dead aspect of society out of its (and everyone else's) misery? After all, you can't fight a disease by innoculating the population of just one area. It has to be done all at once, or it's useless. It'll just bounce back or mutate, appearing again in a new and stronger guise.

The path to freedom is enlightenment. If you've learned something from the above, and you didn't feel patronised, then great - You are my main intended audience. Act on it. Remember it. Change yourself for the better.

If you did feel patronised, but (as is likely) you've not acted on what you claim to have known all along, then you're one of the morons I was talking about earlier. You're orders of magnitude worse off than the group described above, despite what you must think of yourself.

For the remaining 1% of the population not covered above: Congratulations. You're certainly better off than I'll ever be.

Measures to put More Women in Things

Am I the only one who sees how insanely wrong it is, when a high-ranking pulic figure suggests that measures be put in place to give women preference in things?

In a sane world, as you and I both know, you'd have a system where everyone has an equal chance at applying for and getting positions of such importance as matches their capabilities. The best situation would be that everyone is educated to see beyond arbitrary differences and, thus, their own biases. This means a better education system. Even if you can't have that (and, for some reason, it seems we can't), you can at least have a system whereby the personal details of the applicant are hidden (except for, say, their criminal record). The interviews could be conducted in writing (electronic messaging?), with no face-to-face interview until the end-stage "will you fit in to the team?" informal chat.

The leader of Welsh political party Plaid Cymru has (at least, according to BBC News - I couldn't find it in the Times or Guardian) said that legislation might be needed to get more women elected. Did you guess that the leader of Plaid Cymru was a woman? Good guess.

The article alleges that she said:

measures to select female candidates in her own party "are not always at their strongest".

Sorry, isn't this piece of convoluted politico-babble the same as implying that her party members are sexist (despite them voting her in to the top position)? Isn't this a serious allegation, for which either they should be taken to court, or she should be sued for splashing about unfounded, slanderous accusations? That's like me calling you a paedophile, based on only seeing you with loads of crying children and no other adults. Surely, in order to say such a thing, she'd have to show hard evidence that there's an unfair bias: For all she knows, it might simply be the case that men are generally better at the job than women. (Judging by her rantings, she's not doing anything to help her case.) Otherwise, surely it's best to stop spouting bigoted cliches, apologise and give up her important post, for which she has failed to act in a responsible, professional manner.

This paragraph is hilarious, albeit in a depressing way:

She said: "Within Plaid Cymru, we have a strong internal democracy which reflects how much we rely on the party membership as a grassroots body.

And, of course, a strong democracy can be strengthened... by forcing a biased selection criterion towards a specific arbitrary group. Yep, sounds like democracy to me alright

I suppose there is another way of looking at it: She heads a party that supposedly represents the interests and views of the public. Given how incredibly moronic The Public is, perhaps you could say she's doing her job superbly. Additionally, in a way, I'd agree with her saying that measures to select female candidates are not always at their strongest: By the looks of it, she's one too many for a start.

Why focus on just women? There are many minorities - African truck drivers, for example. Why not have a law giving them preference? What about black people in general? The inhabitants of Saffron Waldon? And I don't see many transvestites in parliament. What about them? Sounds like someone's willingly ignoring inconvenient truths.

This article is equally dubious. It's about supposed male bias in choosing acceptable subjects for Wikipedia articles. The example given is that one about Kate Middleton's wedding dress was largely rejected by editors, while some articles about obscure distributions of the Linux operating system were given the go-ahead. It fails to note that Kate Middleton's wedding dress really is a nonsense thing to have an article about, while obscure Linux distributions are very useful for those people who need to know. It's also interesting to note the implication that computer-related subjects are male subjects. By implying that women are not interested in Linux distributions and the like, they're effectively admitting that women are not interested in computing. So what's all this crap about "there aren't enough women in computing"? I would say that that's a compelling reason not to waste time and money on trying to crowbar them into something they don't want to do.

To single out a group of people for its own sake, while ignoring the others whose plight might be just as bad, is at best unfair and at worst dangerously bigoted and gratuitously hateful. Unfortunately, they're allowed to get away with this by women (who of course have a vested, and therefore equally bigoted interest) and by men unnecessarily nervous about the shames of the past in a similar way that the Germans are of the Nazis. And for this reason, such women (and also men, less directly, by aiding such travesties through inaction) are amongst the worst offenders, as I've discussed before. But in the same way that the Germans have changed greatly, and so they don't deserve to be bullied for it, the male-sexism of the past doesn't imply that female-sexism of the present should get its turn.

As a good friend said, a false attempt to force something is an abuse. The crime is also calling it the truth.