The Phrase, "Tie a Knot"

Wrong. You can't tie a knot. It's impossible.

If it's not tied yet, there's no knot to tie. You have tie something, and in so doing create the knot. The knot is the end product of having tied something. By the time you've got the knot, it's already been tied. You can't tie it again - that would involve trying to make a knot out of a knot.

The phrase "getting tied up in knots" makes sense, though. It also might be relevant to you right now.

Graffitti

Note to fellow pedants: I know "graffiti" is plural. But since the word "graffito" is never used in everyday English, perhaps the former should be adopted as if it's the singular, as I do in this blog entry. I still can't make myself think the same about the word 'data', though.

Graffiti, as the dictionary definition goes, is the act by tosspots of scrawling deranged signatures incessantly on public buildings and walls, thereby making the lives of others misery and turning nice spaces into unpleasant ones. There are no exceptions; graffiti is a Bad Thing. It has an effect on entire communities, spreading disrespect and lowering people's values and therefore attitudes towards their surroundings. It breeds the same lowlife state of mind as that needed to daub the graffiti in the first place. It therefore spreads like a cancer.

Everyone knows graffiti is bad, right? So why is the work of Banksy both praised and described as "graffiti"? Talk about making mixed messages. Associating Banksy with graffiti glorifies it, making a mockery of the obvious truth that graffiti is a scourge. You've made the word "graffiti" cool! Whose side are you on by doing that? What positive contribution are YOU making?
 
Using the term "graffiti artist" makes it worse: Now you're associating tosspots who scrawl crude messages with artistry. That demeans what art is about. Art is beautiful. Even the best graffiti, which may well have artistic merit when abstracted from the circumstances of its existence, goes against that. How can you call something art if its very nature is destructive? There's no place for any art that does that. Art has to be creative and purposeful for positive reasons. There is no positivity in graffiti.

The clear conclusion is that Banksy is not a graffiti artist, nor is he a graffiti-ist in general. God knows what he might be called. He is an artist, and he has turned what formerly was graffiti into an art that is now not. We need a new name for his art form - or just call it a subtype of mural. I suppose that's all it is, really.

Graffiti walls, where councils deliberately construct walls for grafitti-ists to dawb what they want, is generally a good idea. At least then it isn't destroying something designed for a different purpose, and it can be removed afterwards. Or, if it's good, keep it there as a work of art. Then, unwittingly, the grafitti-ists have been encouraged to become artists: They are being trained to express themselves positively, and to take their need for scrawling shite in a different direction. At least, we can hope.

Here's an idea for getting rid of graffiti: Don't paint over it. It just creates a fresh canvas. What's the point? You know what's coming next: More graffiti over the top. I have something much more effective, as well as being cheaper:

1. If there's just one scrawl, paint the words "is gay" underneath it.
2. If there's a collection of scrawls, paint the words, "The following people would like to declare their homosexuality:" above them.

Guess what happens next?

First: Laughing-stock. No-one who is the sort of person who dawbs graffiti would want to be associated with being gay. Even if they don't care, their "this is my stamp on my area" authority-type dawb is turned into something that can't be taken seriously. It takes the sting out of the tail.

Second: A desperate attempt by the offenders to find and paint over it all. Now you've got the graffiti-ist painting over their own scrawls on your behalf!

Third: Knowledge of what will happen if they do it again.

A note about those of you who are inevitably thinking, "if there was more for young people to do, then graffiti would be less of a problem." Well, yes, I suppose you're correct. But that doesn't excuse their actions, just like with any other criminal acts: It just makes them unfairly-treated, underprivileged victims of discrimination -- who are also tosspots who make the lives of others misery.

Reaction towards Weinstein et al

Before we start, I should perhaps state two things.

1. The obvious. Forcing yourself onto someone else, or abusing power, is wrong. We all know that. This article will not be condoning such behaviour; it simply examines the reaction of the public, media and film industry towards it all.
2. At the time this article was written, no accusation in what I will call the "Weinstein wave" (including US and UK incidences) of sexual allegations has yet gone to court. Louis CK has only just admitted his part in it. This article will still be relevant after it's all been cleared up in the courts, regardless of whether they were found innocent or guilty, although some of it may obviously be out of date.

Now then, to my point. My understanding was that, in civilised countries, people were innocent until proven guilty. There is no half way on that: Either you think the principle right, or you think it's always wrong, and it applies to everyone equally. The general consensus throughout history is that this principle is the right way to go, and I presume it's safe to say most people overwhelmingly adhere to it.

I can understand why certain US and UK TV programmes, and Hollywood films, are being withdrawn in light of accusations against the likes of Ed Westwick, Louis CK, Kevin Spacey et al: People would feel uneasy watching them under the circumstances, and they're unlikely either to be popular or to make the distributors popular.

The news media, on the other hand, have done much to make it look as if these people are guilty, and there's no excuse. As far as I can see, they've crossed way beyond the line of journalism (to report the facts as they honestly see them in an undetached way).

Let's ignore the fact that merely naming someone implicated in something condemns them straight away in the public eye, whether innocent or guilty. Just consider these sorts of recent headlines, which are created by news outlets and which seem to imply guilt from the outset:

• I woke up with Kevin Spacey lying on me
• To Kevin Spacey: Shame on you for what you did to my son
• Kevin Spacey groped me
• Kevin Spacey 'cuddles and massages' model half his age in LA park in newly-uncovered photos
• Harvey Weinstein timeline: How the scandal unfolded

People scan headlines. They haven't got time to read entire articles. What impression would you get from the ones above? News vendors know the likely reaction, and that surely makes it character assassination at best. Why not at least use the word "allegedly" once in a while?

Another thing to note is the use of the word "scandal" in the last news link above. A scandal is a discreditable action, offence, etc. The obvious question is - what scandal are they referring to? No discreditable action, offence, etc. has been proven yet. Is that not a slanderous statement? Or indeed a scandalous one?

Even then, the way the stories are presented, and told from one side of the story, does little in my mind to make it feel like actual news is being reported. Instead, it feels like a titillating entertainment article written at someone else's expense (who may or may not be guilty). Is that fair? Or even legal?

Let's move on to the Louis CK case. His statement, in which he admits the five allegations, makes a good point. From his explanation, I do not believe Louis CK is an intrinsically-bad person. Instead, he let his weakness get the better of him. The weakness, as he points out in a round-about way, is that his hormones kicked in, he spotted an opportunity to gain advantage over a situation in which he could get sexual gratification, and he succumbed to it. They did not complain at the time, and so he perhaps (again at the time) thought of it merely as harmless fun. Testosterone is a powerful force. Similar might be integral to the other cases, although they appear to be more serious in nature, and perhaps there were additional sinister things that came into play.

That's not to say the actions of these men were right, of course. It's merely to try to explain WHY it happened, which I would argue is one of the most positive, important things that can come out of these allegations. And I think most men would be capable of doing the same in the same situation. You might think, "OK, Alan, so you'd do the same?" My answer, which would be the same for other men, would be that there's no way of knowing unless we're in the same situation. I think it's safe to say that men cannot be trusted from the outset in that situation to do the right thing, without a strong system of regulation, openness and mutual self-checking. Being men, we have a strong enough sexuality that it may sometimes not be possible to resist and express sexuality in these ways.

I don't think it's fair to say men are the only humans that can't be trusted to avoid abusing power, given the opportunity. I think women are just as bad. It's just that women don't express sexuality in the same way, not because they are somehow better or more grown-up than men, but because either they are less sexual or their sexuality is expressed differently.

Ignoring sexuality for a moment, women have slipped under the radar so far because there have been far fewer acts of power abuse reported from them, but that may simply be because far more men have the power. It's an unfair test, and an abuse of statistics. From what I have seen, women just as ably abuse positions of power. I know male managers in companies can be just as bad, but I have rarely known a female manager not to be overbearing, difficult and spiteful. I have also rarely talked to anyone (male or female) who has experienced the contrary. It seems to me, in a very generalised sense, that women can't handle power, while men are too dominated by testosterones to be trusted with it.

Clearly, we know very little about the nature of human sexuality in men and women, and the huge differences between them. As I've said, testosterone is a powerful force. It's understandably misunderstood by women, who possess nowhere near the same levels. What isn't so acceptable is that men don't speak up about something that is a natural part of them, and that women seem to choose to look down on men (ego) for it, rather than seeing that it's something beyond their comprehension (humility).

So what is to be done about all this? Understanding is the key to solving these problems and making the world safer and better for everyone. Understanding the nature of sexuality, and particularly the potency of testosterone, is essential for both men and women.

Otherwise, if children can't be trusted to look after their toys, the best thing to do is to take them away. It's part punishment, part rational act to avoid the inevitable tears. "Adults" are just children who have been told they've grown up. The more power they're given -- and the more they think they can get away with -- the more they revert to a selfish, child-like state. So the solutions seem to be:

1. Regulate, police and monitor what people in power can do
2. Limit the amount of power any one person can have
3. Find a superior, moral (but not equally power-crazed) alien race to take over the job of regulating humans.

Personally, I for one would embrace our alien overlords. In the meantime, let's hope we don't continue to keep quiet about addressing the subject for fear of being labelled scandalously by the media. By that, I don't just mean victims speaking out when abuse occurs. I also mean addressing why it occurs, in a mature, non-knee-jerk, unbiased and measured way. Understanding is the key, and the only way to resolve problems. Now is not the time for female chauvinism to flourish.

People who refuse to say "Lake Windermere"

Lake Windermere is one of the most peaceful, scenic and relaxing places I have ever been to. It even (finally) gained Unesco World Heritage status recently. The only thing that spoils it, is the people there who insist on saying, "It isn't 'Lake Windermere'. It's just 'Windermere.' The 'mere' bit means 'lake', so you don't say it."

Wrong. That's not how English works.

Windermere is also a town resides near the lake. You can call it "Windermere Town" if you like. For some reason, no-one minds you doing that.

"Mere" is an Old English word meaning "lake". The Old English equivalent of "town" is tun (from which we get the -ton suffix in place-names such as Longton, Boston and Ashton). So using the inane pseudo-logic of people who insist on dropping the "lake" bit when referring to Lake Windermere, you would have to call the town Winderton. But you don't, because that would be stupid. Embellishing the name with a description like "lake", or "town", or "bus service" helps distinguish things with the same name. Anyone with a basic grasp of English or even just common sense can tell you that.

And what of Pendle Hill, one of which is in Lancashire? "Pen" and "-dle" both originate from words meaning "hill", so literally it means "hill of the hill hill". So do we 'correct' the situation and start calling it Pen? Or perhaps just Hill? No, because Pendle is the name of the area, and Pendle Hill is a hill in that area. That's how place-names work. There are many other examples.

Lakes across the world follow the same pattern, which just shows up the madness even more. In Scotland, you have Loch Lomond and Loch Ness. In England, you have Haweswater Reservoir and Chew Valley Lake. Further afield we have Lake Ontario and Bear Lake in the US, and Reindeer Lake in Canada. I'm sure they were named that way because it made sense.

It's always interesting to note the psychology of people, and a prime target group is those who live in a particular area and insist on some oddity, such as pronouncing their place-names in a weird way. "No, it isn't that, it's this". Some of the time, this is useful: Getting things right avoids ambiguities and complexities in communication that cause avoidable misunderstanding. A while back, I was called a "grammar Nazi" for pointing out that someone meant "e.g.", although they had said "i.e.". But this wasn't me being a stickler for the sake of it. He was giving an example of something, not describing the only possibility. The two words have very different meanings, and consequently, the reasult was that various people thought he was saying something different. However, in the case of place-names, it seems that people who believe they own them change them just to appear to be different.

Humans like to belong to clubs, whether it's societies, sports, guilds, mobs, whatever. While for a few this is all about a feeling of belonging, or dedicating themselves to something they believe in, the underlying reason is usually one of ego: "I'm better than you". And changing something arbitrarily, so that you can put yourself in a position to correct others, is one (childish and pathetic) way of putting on a display to this effect.

But in the end, it's just a meaningless pretence. You'd have thought the inhabitants would be content enough to live near such an idillic spot. The same goes for Buttermere and Grasmere. (The towns, that is, not the lakes. If only there were some way of distinguishing the two, so that you know what I'm talking about...) As far as I can tell, all these arbitrary rule-breakers are in Cumbria... perhaps the area just attracts that type of mentality?

Go ahead, call it "Lake Windermere" next time you're there. Annoy the locals. They deserve no less.

The Bourne Overdose

A bit offbeat for this blog, but for those who're fed up of all the crap about the new Bourne film, here are some of my ideas for future ones...

Bourne Free
Jason Bourne is on a mission to emancipate the baboons from the tyranical keepers at Bristol Zoo, but ends up spending most of the film running from the lions.

Bourne out of Wedlock
Jason Bourne gets chased around the globe by the Pope and His reverent but deadly papal minions to atone for a parental misdimeanour.

Bourne to Party
Jason Bourne runs against Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership contest and battles the remaining candidates, while the evil Theresa May sets her sights on destroying the Labour Manifesto in her next parliamentary speech once and for all.

The Use of "It" Before "It" is Defined

It's so annoying.

You know what "it" is. That was an exception. There was no need for me to define "it". If there was, I just did - and it's in the blog post title - albeit in a slightly metaphysical way. All clear? Good.

It's everywhere. Mere mortals have more of an excuse: After all, it's our prerogative to use informal language, and (so long as it isn't confusing English) can justifiably be claimed as valid English. But professionals - those who write legal documents, formal notices, instruction manuals, etc - should know better. After all, it's their job to know how to use standard English.

My bugbear here is sentences like this:

"It is important that you check your teeth regularly."

"It is advised that you read the instructions before installing this application."

"It is recommended that you consult a doctor before taking this medicine."

The first thing you should be asking yourself, after getting as far as "it is", is... what is? "It" hasn't been defined yet. So saying "it" is meaningless. What is important? What is advised? What is recommended? You haven't explained what it is yet! For gods' sakes, speak English!

Of course, "it" is defined further on in the sentence. But that means you have to read the entire sentence, then go back and read it again. Or you could read the sentence back to front, which contradicts everything you know about how English should work.

Using "it" before "it" is defined mightn't seem a big deal. However, it ("it" here being 'using "it" before "it" is defined') is important. First, people reading a document, etc. may not understand colloquialisms - which it is, even though you may not think so. Second, it's an unprofessional use of grammar, which undermines your confidence in the people who are writing this supposedly-trustworthy source of 'truth'. And third... well, it's just annoying to old people like me who prefer the olden days, ok?

My favourite example of the lingual travesty is this, noticed after running a software installer:

"One of your product's dependencies is old. It is recommended to update it."

Wait, they're saying that the product's dependency should update itself? In that case, why bother telling me about it? And what's with this "it is recommended to" nonsense? Surely "it is recommended for an update" is marginally more intelligible.

Use of "it" before "it" is defined is a tell-tale that the sentence can be made easier and simpler. Let's go through the above examples and define "it" up-front:

"Checking your teeth regularly is important."

"Reading the instructions before installing this application is advised."

"Consulting a doctor before taking this medicine is recommended."

 "One of your product's dependencies is old. Updating it is recommended."

You'll notice that none of these sentences is more difficult to read than the originals. In fact, hopefully quite the opposite, because it progresses in the right order, and each sentence is naturally shorter. That's because we've used simple English grammar, rather than some form of degenerate pig-English.

However, even these sentence constructions are suspicious. That's because there is also a sinister side. The original and amended sentences avoid mentioning who the authority is that says something is important, advised or recommended. That's because such sentences are often designed to avoid responsibility. Ultimately, the sentences should be as follows:

"We say it's important that you check your teeth regularly."

"We advise that you read the instructions before installing this application."

"We recommend that you consult a doctor before taking this medicine."

"One of your product's dependencies is old. We recommend that you update it."

I'm not sure why they would want to avoid this style. Do they think it too confrontational? Are they afraid of responsibility, or blame? If so, I'd suggest they consider that an ambiguously-apportioned sentence is at best cowardly, and at worst trying to get people to do something but weaseling out of the consequences if they've given you crap advice.

So beware the '"it" before "it" is defined' sentences: The people who use them are hiding behind their insidious words. It's up to you to be wary of the advice that they're suspiciously reticent to give. (Or should that be "The advice that they're suspiciously reticent to give should make you wary"...)

While we're at 'it', an addendum: If your delivery company says your parcel will arrive "between 14:30 - 15:30", ask them: "between 14:30 - 15:30 and when? Or do you mean between 14:30 and 15:30?"

People who Hate High Service Charges

People. They're lazy, idiotic, or both. They don't generally change their provider when it comes to phones, broadband, banks or amenities. The services providers know this, and exploit it. They dare to charge you eye-watering fees. And you bend down and take it, being bereft of the willpower required to stand straight, pull your trousers up, and walk away.

A proportion of the resulting immense profits that they make goes on subsidising offers, which serve to entice people into the web of self-imposed doom. You know the score. The first year is ridiculously cheap. Thereon, the fake, happy, caring persona melts away and you're whacked with high fees.

I'm one of the tiny proportion of people who change provider every year. It's a bit of effort, I'll admit, but compared to the alternative of effectively donating my earnings to large corporations, it's something I don't regret. Yet here's the crunch: If everyone did the same as me, profits would be tighter. Consequently, those corporations wouldn't ably afford to subsidise their enticing offers. Nor would they have an incentive to: If people weren't likely to be loyal, then where's the point? They'll only leave after the first year anyway.

So long live you gullible morons, and long live you shameless companies with your deceptive schemes. If it weren't for your symbiotic relationship, I wouldn't get the great prices each year that I succeed in getting.

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.

The Song, "I Wanna Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd

A thought occurred to me earlier. Remember the 1991 song "I Wanna Sex You Up"? It was a big hit. I remember at the time thinking that it was a nonsense phrase presumably invented to avoid censorship of the obvious sexual connotations. The song has been in mind since the story emerged of the "sexed-up" Iraq dossier, which disturbingly is already ten years ago. That's the only other time I've heard the word-coupling, and can't help wondering whether "upsex" is a verb.

Anyway, in the case of the dossier, it makes sense - it just sounds right, somehow - certainly more right than the song title which should simply read either "I wanna make you horny" or "I wanna have sex with you". The dossier was said to be sexed up because the intelligence in it was augmented in order to make the proposition of an Iraqi invasion more attractive and convincing.

Let's apply this back to the 1991 song. It turns out, what sounds like a crude song about someone who's horny is nothing of the sort! But unfortunately the mercy is a small one: If the dossier is anything to go by, the song turns out to be about wanting to make someone more attractive and convincing. This inevitably suggests that the recipient of the ballad is unattractive and not to be taken seriously.

So much for love being in the air.

Attitudes to Terrorism

On a weekend late last year, I went into Cardiff to do some shopping. On the end of the high street stood two armed police. I know they were armed because they had their rifles on display. Lots of people were looking at them, some seemed in disbelief and some seemed anxious. There was a football match on later, and that's apparently the only excuse they needed. If you want trouble, the worst thing you can do is provoke it. Violent people are provoked by intimidation and the thought of violence. What were they thinking?

Guns on display unnecessarily. Bag searches. Security cameras. Notices on streets, threatening you of consequences to actions that you wouldn't have thought of had the notices not educated you. It all serves to put innocent people on edge, creating paranoia and panic. At best, all of these things make the perpetrators accessories to terrorism. At worst, it makes them terrorists themselves, regardless of whether their aim is to subdue or to provoke, and regardless of whether they had foreseen the consequences of their actions.

If this is seen by nation states as the way forward to tackle terrorism, the terrorists have won. This approach is an obscure form of "if you can't beat them, join them:" This argument is that people need to be terrorised in order to protect them from terrorists. Such steps are necessarily at the sake of civil freedom and liberty. Even accepting the not-quite-paradoxical argument that you need to control people to give them freedom, using terrorist tactics (intentional or not) cannot be the answer. (Or if it is the answer, the very concept of society (and social freedom) is fatally flawed and should be abolished, which admittedly would remove terrorists' main target.)

So what is the right course of action? Anyone sane would have to agree that something needs to be done to curtail the influence of bad people, such as terrorists. The answer simple. I'll split it into two parts.

First, let people know how ridiculously unlikely it is that they will be affected by terrorism. (That is, at least by terrorists; governments are much more of a nuisance in this department.) There are more pressing, more prevalent things to worry about, such as dangerous driving, disease and the increasing prevalence of supermarkets and mindless TV, and the effect on women of and women's magazines. There are more likely things to get you killed, and even they are very low risk: You just have to be careful.

Terrorism isn't any worse now than it used to be. In fact, the situation has improved. Governments spend more money averting it. People are more vigilant. In the last few decades, many prominent terrorist groups - the IRA and al Qaeda and ETA are three obvious examples - have been subdued or eradicated completely. People always point to the Twin Towers. But that was a one-off - and it happened in another country, a long way away! Why are we associating it with our country, for gods' sakes? Numerous mass shootings occur over there as well. Why aren't we equally worried about that? Why one specific thing but not the others? It isn't rational.

Second, terrorism is here to stay. There will always be terrorists, and sometimes, on rare occasion, they'll do something bad. So get people to accept terrorism as a fact of life - the inevitability that it is - rather than making them worry about it. Whereas caution is a positive thing, worry gets us nowhere, except depressed, and it drags people, and society, down. People stop trusting each other, they become more suspicious, they stop communicating, and this makes a bad situation worse. It leads to misunderstanding and eventually hatred. In other words, people stop functioning like the social animals that humans naturally are.

Terrorism occurs, bombs explode, people die. It sounds flippant, but I know and agree it's a huge tragedy, and such things are the necessary price of a free society. So when on the extremely rare occasion terrorist events happen, we should mourn, move on and get on with it. The situation can be controlled more appropriately (and equally well) if governments take greater steps to improve the secret services, so that they can do their job without sacrificing free society and meddling with the average person's life. And I see very little of that happening. Instead, they've taken the easy option and decided to treat everyone as a potential killer.

If people accept rather than worry about the unlikely doings of terrorists beforehand, if they're correctly mentally prepared about something over which they can't do much about anyway, then there can't be terror. Terrorists, as a consequence, can't win. In a country where the phrase, "keep calm and carry on" is once again an ubiquitous cliché, why has no-one actually realised what it means?

"Independent" Think-tanks

There is no such thing as an "independent" think-tank. Or at least, if there is, think-tanks' use of the word is misleading, because it relates to independence from particular group-types (such as political organisations), and not independence from all with an axe to grind. They can't be fully-independent: most are privately funded. Why would companies fund a think-tank that doesn't produce results that benefit them? Conversely, how would a think-tank function if it was completely impartial and thus received no funding?

Take Civitas as an example. It recently made the news for releasing research that showed longer prison sentences were a good thing.

My guess is that most of the companies funding their Civitas think-tank (the funders' names, suspiciously, do not have to be made publicly available) are... those that stand to make money out of running prison services. Longer prison sentences means that more prisons (and thus money) will inevitably be needed. Just fancy that!

My guess is also that other (really-independent) researchers have found longer prison sentences have the opposite effect, and that Civitas has chosen the group most likely to represent the findings that benefits it. In fact, I've found a good example here.

I did some research into Civitas, suspicious as to why news articles seem to be so keen to associate the spin agency – er, think-tank – with the word "independent." Do a search for that word on this page. It turns out that the oft-used phrase "independent think-tank Civitas", comes from... Civitas press releases! So when it comes to corporate news, the agencies get it from the mouth of the company they're reporting on. (Incredibly, although The Guardian succumbed to using the corporate brainwashing word "independent," BBC News didn't.) And it's so good to see that Civitas are impartial enough not to promote itself in a good light by flooding news articles with the word "independent." Do call me a cynic. Or a realist.

Imagine how many other articles you're reading that are dictated directly by corporations, and how many you should be reading but aren't because they portray corporations in a negative light. Do you trust your beloved news source now? Do you think you're getting the news, the whole news and nothing but the news?

Tweeting

Can you transform yourself spontaneously into a member of the bird family? No? Then you can't tweet.

It sounds so crap. "I'm tweeting," "I've just tweeted." Sounds like a euphemism for breaking wind discretely. Or an involuntary tic.

We don't tweet. We compose text messages. Whether on your phone, or in an e-mail, on this blog or on an arbitrary bulletin board such as Twitter, Facebook or the millions of others that are less cool. They're nothing special, they're just different ways of composing text messages. We've been doing it since the '80s.

Twitter is just a mediocre site that does the same as many other sites. Despite this, it's not only transformed into the bulletin board of choice, but the marketers managed to invent a word specific to their site that has entered common language. Even the media use it. "If you want to know more, follow our tweets." No thanks, and if you want to know my opinion, you sound as if you need to see a doctor about that irritable bowel syndrome. They're just Doctor Evils, saying "look, we're hip, we're with it." It's all just a load of crap designed to sell an idea, and they've fallen for a cheap fad for the sake of publicity.

"Tweeting" is a way of making something mundane sound new and better than the rest, just like marketing does with all other products and services. But it isn't new, and it isn't better. Forget about the preconceptions you've been fed, and just think about what it is. It even has a severe restriction on the number of characters you can type in per message, which in fact makes it worse than some of the others. "Don’t let the small size fool you", Twitter's about page tells you. "You can share a lot with a little space." Well yes, you can, but you can share even more with a better bulletin board with fewer restrictions. And even the word "tweet" means to write a text message on Twitter. Not any of the other sites, just Twitter. If it's not Twitter, you're not tweeting. Don't you see what they're doing? Don't you see?

In short (but using more than 140 characters - just because I can, as I'm not using Twitter), it's nothing more than a tragic marketing trumph. Every sucker has been pulled in, lured by the prestige of "tweeting" and the cool, shallow connotations that it provides.

The idiot public is suckered into it just so that can say they've "tweeted", which is somehow a good thing, and the media is suckered into latching on to something trendy for their own pretentious reasons. You know all those pathetic adverts that you've watched on TV and thought, "who on Earth is gullible and moronic enough to be taken in by that shite and buy the product?" Well, if you use Twitter, that person is the likes of you.

Let me market a slogan of my own: "Don't be a twat, stop using Twitter."

Present Tense in News Reports

There's a clue in the name, and it's only a one-word name: 'News' is a collection of reported events that, although new (hence "old news" makes as much sense as "new olds"), have already occurred. Even news reported in breaking events has already occurred; the rest is speculation and thus not (yet) news.

So why do the news media insist on using present tense in their reports? Here's an example from your favourite news source and mine, BBC News (although you can readily find your own examples from other sources). "Biker Jorge Martinez Boero dies on Dakar Rally first day", it claims. Oh, really? How often does he die? Or is it a fictitious plot, and BBC News is reading from a manuscript? (BBC News is not known for the high quality of its reporting: In the same article, at the time of writing, the opening sentence says, "Argentine motorcyclist Jorge Martinez Boero had (sic) died in an accident". Presumably, they think he's now recovering from the ordeal.)

Perhaps it's done to exaggerate the currentness of the events and the report: "We're so reactive to events that we're reporting it as it unfolds." Except that they're not: Rather than being there before the event occurs, to "catch" it as it happens (because they can't be everywhere), they're largely told the details by Reuters and other agencies.

In a sick world, run by groups of people who no doubt manipulate and fabricate a lot of the news stories for their own gain (and I don't necessarily mean governments, or even journalists), "fictitious plot", which I jokingly mentioned in paragraph two, is hardly out of the realms of possibility. To make things worse, they also suspiciously call news articles "stories". Is this a deliberate sick joke on the rest of us, or is it blatant, blasé honesty?

Respect for Life

People often put down the crazy Catholic notion (such that it is) that sex is wrong if you try to prohibit the production of a child. Catholics consider this notion part of the idea of the "sanctity of life." This is yet another example of a religion inventing a word (here, "sanctity," or "holy," and "sacred") then attaching an arbitrary meaning and importance to it, and not explaining the meaning or importance. To paraphrase Mr. Prosser, on why sanctity is so important: "it's sanctity. You've got to have sanctity."

The other, supposedly more sane element of society has its own problems. "Respect for life" is translated as meaning "the right to life." This means that anyone has the right to continue living. However, in most of Europe, this is taken to mean that people must continue living, by whatever means necessary. This even supercedes the individuals' right to die. In what way is this respectful to the living, when it takes away a fundamental decision that they may want to take? It effectively condones torture.

The main point of what I want to say here, is that the solution of many of the problems is to redefine "respect for life" to something more basic and sound:

Respect for the quality of life.

This embodies the general well-being of each individual that all worthy causes should teach in their moral stories, and it includes enshrining the right to live without coercion.

One of the best ways to improve quality of life is to vet embrios before or shortly after they are born. If the defects are too major, and the would-be person (or the parents, or anyone else) would likely suffer more than enjoy life as a consequence of their being born, then they should not be allowed to continue living.

Not only is this in the best interest of the would-be person, but also of the state, which has to spend fewer millions on the drugs, treatments, equipment and staff necessary to help them continue their existence, and by extension all the state's subjects, who pay taxes to fund it.

Embrio vetting would also improve the devastating impact of overpopulation that the world is currently suffering from, thanks to the sort of people who ignorantly or selfishly (to paraphrase George Carlin) shit out yet another worthless baby. After all, the more people there are in the world, the less each person is "worth": Beyond a certain point, people effectively cease to be individuals. But after the overpopulation tipping-point, they're full-fledged burdens. They get in the way of everything, they form ever more groups and create ever more divisions, they become more emotionally and respectfully isolated from the other groups, conflict inevitably occurs, and eventually people don't want what is good for all, they want what is good for them or their individual group, at whatever cost this might bring to other individuals or groups. And that's where we are in the world today. Exactly where is the global, or even national, respect for life now?

Even better, the the parents should be screened in order to determine whether they should be allowed to have children in the first place. That way, this whole sorry mess can be avoided before it begins. As I've said previously, remove people's right to bear children, and let them apply. Those who can prove that they can afford to keep a child and care for it adequately, those who are not likely to give the child a life of physical or mental agony through genetic defects, those who can show that they have a good case to have a child other than "we want one," should be allowed. Otherwise, it's child cruelty, and therefore a crime against humanity.

Unfortunately, as soon as I started mentioning genetics, you probably jumped straight to Hitler and his use of eugenics, as you were programmed to. Here's fallacy number one:

Since Hitler was evil, and Hitler advocated eugenics, eugenics is evil.

Hitler must have polished his shoes at some point, and he was also vegetarian. Are shoe-polishing and vegetarianism evil? There's some logical jiggery-pokery going on here. Go and read something unbiased about eugenics, which examines what it is, but doesn't include how it's been used in the past, and doesn't play the Hitler card. Because chances are, you don't currently know what it really is.

Here's fallacy number two:

Allowing people to judge who lives and doesn't is a slippery slope and open to abuse.

Yep, it's sensitive in nature, and everything sensitive can be abused if adequate checks and measures aren't in place. So let's put them in place: Decisions like this can be made fairly enough by a panel of respected, independent, expert advisers, in the same way that judges shape laws and preside over trials. And if you're not even happy that that would be fair, then there's no pleasing you. Humans are hardly perfect. You may as well say that granting someone a fair legal trial is impossible. And then we're at an impasse. So what do we do then? Exterminate all of humanity because they may make a wrong decision that unduly affects someone's life?

It's an emotionally-touchy subject, of course, and that means it's easier to sway people's opinions one way or the other. After an association with Hitler, people are given the excuse to shy away from what is quite an obvious force that could be used for good, simply because a bad guy used it for evil. Atomic bombs were invented and used for evil, does that mean atomic power is evil? No. Of course not. It has sound practical implications that provide a variety of benefits, such as electricity. So if you have strong feelings one way or another about what I've said so far, then you would definitely not make a good judge: We need people who examine the facts objectively and come to a rational conclusion.

Nor is the "discrimination is bad" argument worth pursuing. Discrimination in favour of the greater good is objectively the right thing to do. People discriminate all the time: let's say you give money to a charity to cure muscular distrophy. You're then depriving the other charities, such as cancer, poverty and the homeless. Does that make you a complete bastard? No: You made a decision, and the "fair" decision not to give any money out at all would be worse. Giving your money equally is impossible, because there are too many causes. And in any case, "equal" would be subjective - there are too many variables, and some causes should in "fairness" be given more than others.

Hopefully, by now, I've deconstructed your misconceptions enough at least for you to consider that eugenics can be used for good. I know the denial of a life sounds not to be a very nice thing: That person might have grown up to be brilliant and contributed hugely to humanity and people's lives. But if, on average, such as person is unlikely (which, let's face it, it is), then it's not cruel to deny that chance - rather the opposite, because of the probabilities. In any case, you're not denying any person a right, because the person didn't exist in the first place. No-one suffered, because no-one was there to begin with.

So let's reconsider what the right to life really is, use genetic screening for the greater good, and remove the automatic right for people to have children. It's scary, but all radical changes are scary. Unfortunately, some are necessary.

Guarantees

You might think that I'm going to harp on about the problems people have with claiming on them, and that they're not worth the paper they're written on. Well no. In fact, I think they're worth quite a lot.

Guarantees are a clear, un-fakable expression of how much trust manufacturers place in their own workmanship. So the length of a guarantee is a good indicator of the quality of the product.

Then something odd comes to light: How short guarantees are. I've rarely seen a guarantee for a major, pricey product that spans more than five years. So that means most products are only expected to remain intact for a short period of time. Why aren't people extremely angry at this, and why are they not boycotting products? If I buy a vacuum cleaner, or a TV, or a washing machine, I would expect it to last for at least ten years. "Will probably last beyond the guarantee" isn't good enough.

If a long-term product that costs a lot of money is guaranteed to last for fewer than ten years, then I don't consider it a purchase: I consider it a rental.

A purchase is something that should be considered final. Nothing lasts forever, of course, I recognise that. The thing is, the focus should be on the product being built in a decent way, built to last. Less time wasted by things going wrong and less stuff going into landfill. If a product that you'd expect to be qualitative comes with a five-year guarantee, then that's definitely not built to last. It's the manufacturer's way of saying, "we can only risk giving you the assurance that the product will work for five years. After that, god knows. The chances of you possibly needing to buy a new one after five years are so great that we can't afford to cover you beyond that." Quite incredible.

To pick on a random, expensive, common household appliance, let's look at a washing machine. At the time of writing, this one from Hoover is the cheapest one in their range available at Argos. It's just under £270, and it comes with a five-year guarantee for parts (only one year for labour!) This effectively means that you're renting it. It works out at £54 per year. Yes, your washing machine alone is expected to cost £54 per year, for life. Imagine how many other espensive appliances you have, with even more restrictive guarantees (if any) than that.

We need the Minimum Quality of Goods Act, in which specific minimum guarantees must be offered for specific products. That way, companies will be forced to manufacture goods to a better quality so that they don't get stung by masses of claims. As a benchmark, 10 years is a good minimum figure: Even then, your washing machine is costing £27 per year (plus labour costs, if it breaks down). Any less than 10 years should be considered rental by law, and the companies should be forced to advertise the products clearly as "for rental" rather than "for sale."

There is, of course, the old argument that the lower classes go for cheaper products that they can more likely afford. However, if you define "cheaper" in terms of the cost per year (i.e. the total cost of the product divided by number of years guaranteed), "cheaper" products become pretty damned expensive. If they have any guarantee at all, they're likely to be very short and very limited, and the products are much more likely to break down (a probability that would bias the rental cost even more).

Who specifically goes out wanting a washing-machine that will only last for five years? The only people I can think of are dodgy landlords who want to blame the occupants when something breaks down, rather than bear the cost themselves, and I don't really think they have a particularly good case.


So next time you go into Dixons, and a poster proudly states, "Guaranteed for 5 Years!", kindly flag down an attendant and make a statement of your own.
---
[Edit: 18.12.11] By astonishing coincidence, I just watched one of David Mitchell's very good rants about precisely the same subject. (WARNING: There'll probably be an advert inflicted on you at the start.) He takes a different slant on the idea, to my relief (as he got there first).

The Libyan I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-a-War

Imagine you're in charge of Libya. Some other countries start an unnounced attack aimed at "the regime". (This, they say, doesn't constitute a declaration of war, just a few bombs here and there accompanied by an occupation. What's a bomb or two amongst friends?)

It's quite obvious that they're trying to target you personally: regardless of their rhetoric that they "don't target individuals", those bombs have an uncanny habit of completely decimating places you happen to have been soon beforehand. You shore up your family in what you presume is a safe haven for their own protection, only for the Americans to bomb it. (Again, suspiciously, you happened to have been there shortly beforehand - you're paranoid at this point that you always seem to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.) You then find that your son (and three of your grandsons, if you believe BBC News) were killed in the blast. Your son just came back from University, and your grandsons never did anything to anyone either. That's OK, they say: indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians in collateral damage is fine, even when the high risks of this were known beforehand. Just as long as individuals aren't targeted, that's what matters.

By this time, your subjects are understandably a bit peeved about the unprovoked attacks, and start campaigning against the invading countries. Some of the wilder bunches of people start attacking what you hope are impartial outsiders - diplomatic missions and aid workers. You can't really do much about this, because you're too busy trying to defend against wave after wave of attacks. Incredibly - and it would be a hilarious farce if not for the present situation - the countries demand that you defend their people, while they continue to bomb the hell out of you.

If you were a Libyan, wouldn't you be a little pissed off by all this, and justifiably so? And why haven't such obvious points been made by the media or the interviewers? Surely journalism should be truth-seeking, hence impartial, hence seeing a situation from all perspectives. And if we can't live by our own values, how can we have the audacity to force them (with utmost violence, in this case) onto someone else? Could it be that all these questions (and the corresponding answers) are being hushed up, for fear of upsetting the propaganda machine?

My (and hopefully your) thoughts are with Gadaffi's family at the moment, who have suffered huge losses at the bloody hands of insurgents that are supposedly on my side, your side, and the side of justice and the truth. Let's hope it's all just a sick joke; the alternative is worse.

- - -

Speaking of the propaganda machine - the world is now safer and better without Osama, says President Obama (well, at least according to the BBC - as you know my favourite news source).

Hang on, let's rewind a bit. Al Qaeda is a well-organised, well-run, talented military group. This is no doubt because they have received training from groups like the Taleban, who in turn (I have to say allegedly) received the best training that various Western Secret Services had to offer. (This seems suspiciously to be missing from the Taleban wikipedia page. You can't have your people having too much access to the truth, can you? How can you brainwash them into supporting you then? And of course I'm not suggesting the article has been sanitised by the American and British governments. Oh no. As we all know, government is of, for and by the people.)

Given the above points, bin Laden would undoubtedly have trained up a next-in-line to take over immediately in the case of his death. So the situation has actually got worse, not "safer and better," because one man, revered by al Qaeda, has been killed by their enemy (increasing their resolve), and an equally-good leader has taken over. Here are some obvious War Office preliminaries:

1. Don't train up "terrorist" groups in the first place
   
2. Don't give the proverbial vicious dog a bloody nose. The nose will heal quickly, and it'll just enrage the dog even more

As these two fundamental points are obvious, so the various Western governments involved, which are supposedly on the side of the righteous, must know them all too well. Yet they choose (blatantly, in this case) to ignore them. They must have done this on purpose, which means that they actually wanted the dog to become more vicious, making the world more dangerous, causing a greater climate of fear. Cue George Orwell...

The Orange Prize for Fiction

What a load of crap. The prize, the sentiment, all of it.

The immediate thing to note is its title, which is as accurate as the American 'World Series'. The prize isn't for "fiction" at all. It's more specific than that. It's for women fiction-writers. That's right - not fiction-writers as a whole, but ones written by a group chosen arbitrarily at best (chauvinistically at worst). It's as if they withheld the "for women" bit to avoid people trivialising the prize - which would surely allude to a guilty self-consciousness of the award's trivial, pretentious and ultimately meaningless nature.

And as the prize's title might subtly suggest, it's is biased against men. Not only this - it's also biased against women; the worst of both worlds (despite, ironically, treating both sexes equally, in a way).

Kindly allow me to explain by starting with a question: Why should there be a literary prize specifically for women, particularly when there is no equivalent one for men? One way of looking at it is this:

Of course, in phsyical events such as the Olympics, there are separate competitions for men and women. This makes sense - the most physically-adept men are stronger than the most physically-adept women. This is biological.

But literature is (primarily) a mental endeavour and ability, and there are unisex prizes and women's prizes for fiction. I cannot find an equivalent men's prize. By singling out women in this way, everyone responsible for and supportive of the award is therefore stating that women's fiction isn't good enough to compete directly with men's fiction. This argument would be consistent with the fact that an overwhelming number of prizes for literature - open to both men and women - are won by men. One might argue that more literature is written by men, so proportionally the prizes might average out between the sexes. But I have seen no evidence of this. The reason why most published literature is by men might simply be because men's literature is indeed better than women's - and, given the evidence (as opposed to emotive viewpoints, which are irrelevant), that is most likely.

But there is a second way of looking at it. Consider this telling quote from Wikipedia:

The prize was established to recognise the contributions of female writers who Mosse believed were often overlooked in other major literary awards, and in reaction to the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Man Booker Prize.

Oh, what a surprise, "Mosse" is a woman. I am not being chauvinist for thinking that, being a woman, she would be seeking more power to women, because there is a rationale to my belief - it is simply the way of the world. (I've covered this in more detail previously. For example, see So-called Feminism.) Anyway, the second point, made clear here, is the idea that the Man Booker Prize is unfairly biased towards men - that is, simply because they are men. Who is she to make such an erroneous accusation? How dare she, and why has she not been put in her place for such a travesty of free speech?

Women like this might be chauvinist, but why assume that everyone is capable of the same evil? To tar others with their own brush? Particularly established, respected judges of established, respected awards, who are passionate experts in the subject matter beyond who might or might not have written what. Perhaps it's the EastEnders effect. One reason why people watch it is because the characters are so bitchy that it makes them feel better about their own menial lives. For similar reasons, female chauvinists would try to demonise men so as not to seem so bad by comparison. That seems to be the going trend for the 'Modern Feminist.'

So if women are "often overlooked," then where's the evidence? Why can't it simply be that the judges genuinely thought, in their wisdom and experience on the subject, that the authors they chose - who happened to be men - were simply better authors?

It seems to me that the very existence of the award is unnecessary, gratuitous, sick, ignorant, female-chauvinist and counter-productive to society, and that the assertions that it makes are defamatory. It is tragic that these glaring blotches of diseased puke on our supposedly-advanced societal canvas are deliberately overlooked, and for what - for the sake of political correctness and the fashionable fad mistakenly known as 'feminism.' The disparity it creates goes against what we have to hope is the core feminist agenda, namely, equality. Or is it alleging that feminism is merely a misguided, uninformed, romantic and fantastical ideal? Surely not...

- - - - -

[27.09.10]

Over June and July, I was fortunate enough to engage in a series of debates and discussions surround what I've written above. My main contact was Lisa Gee, who runs the Prize's Web site. My main questions to Lisa, and her answers, were as follows:

1. Why are the titles for "Prize for Fiction" and the "Award for New Writers" misleading in their focus, rather than stating explicitly, "for women"?
   
   There are no prizes (to our knowledge) that include their eligibility criteria in their titles. The Orange Prize for Fiction and Award for New Writers conform to one of the norms for literary Prize titles: ie - include the name of the sponsor and give a ballpark idea of the prize's remit.
   
   
2. What evidence is there that women have been "passed over" for illigitimate reasons, rather than for ligitimate ones?
   
   The founders of the Prize did lots of research into how prizes were awarded and who they were awarded to in the process of setting up the Prize. Much of this information can be found in the article – http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue4/features_2.php – and video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHelFLucl9Y.
   
   
3. How does a women-only prize help promote the highest standards of fiction literature, given that literature is not gender-specific?
   
   The research conducted by the Prize has demonstrated that although writing isn't gender-specific, reading choices are informed by the gender of the reader - at least they are when the reader is male. While women and girls read work by both men and women, men and boys tend to read only writing by other men; this is why, for instance, JK Rowling's publisher encouraged her to write as JK rather than Joanne Rowling.
   
   And the Orange Prize brings great books by women from all round the world to the attention of both male and female readers, promoting fiction of the highest standard.
   
   
4. How can segregating female fiction-writers from male fiction-writers give the former the confidence to compete in the same arena as the latter?
   
   Celebrating writing by women - which is what both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the award for New Writers do - is not the same as segregating female writers from male writers . Every Prize has eligibility criteria: the Man Booker excludes writers from America, (amongst other places); the Somerset Maugham Award excludes writers over the age of 35; the McKitterick Prize excludes writers under the age of 40.
   
   The Orange Prize is awarded for a novel, written in English by a woman and published in the UK. It is not an isolated, isolating entity, but one amongst a constellation of literary prizes, all of which celebrate different aspects of writing, different writers from different parts of the world. Which is as it should be.
   

To be fair, my questions were pretty demanding difficult to answer, - mostly because the Prize is on the losing side due to its fundamentally- and fatally-flawed logic. (I will explain why later.) In light of this, Lisa did a good job of defending the Prize, and went so far as to convince me that she, the panel and the founders are not the spiteful, man-hating female chauvinists that might appear to be apparent.

She was also honest enough to admit that some of my points had merit and have been argued successfully by both men and women over the last 15 years of the Prize's existence. (Quite how she can give the Prize her full confidence in light of this, however, is beyond me.) As a consequence of our exchanges, a few changes were also made to the site's Q&A sections to make the answers more clear and less evasive.

However, there are one or two of Lisa's answers that are questionable, and a few points I made that have not been answered. For example, the "lots of research" mentioned as a reply to Question 2 is not available. Unless they produced a comprehensive paper on the subject compiled by the world's most forefront minds on the subjects of humanity, and unless they themselves are masters of the subjects of human psychology (and - dare I say it - sociology), which is doubtful, then I don't consider this 'research' to have much credence. Additionally, regarding Question 4, the fact that there are multiple segregations doesn't automatically justify any of them. I don't consider the question to be answered. "Because everyone else does it" is not, to me, a valid answer.

The last point I'd like to make is perhaps the most profound. It exposes the fundamental flaw of the Prize, and suggests a solution that would be much worthier than either the Orange Prize or any other Prize for Fiction, as they stand at the moment. It is for this reason most unfortunate that it was never replied to by anyone related to the Orange Prize.

If supposedly-unisex prizes such as the Booker prize are (whether intentionally or not) male-orientated, then surely the goal should be to correct this unfair advantage within that prize, rather than create a new prize to counteract it. The Prize is only adding to the problem by compounding it with more arbitrarily-segregated (and thus meaningless) entry criteria.

Here is my suggestion:

1. The judging rules should be sufficiently strict and pre-defined that the possibility of unfair bias is minimised. (Frankly, I am amazed in the "professional" world of prize-giving that this isn't in place already. Must I spell out all the obvious necessities for them?)
   
2. The exact reasons for the nominations should be recorded and traceable, so that they can be checked independently for signs of unfair bias.
3. The shortlist manuscripts should be presented to a panel of judges who have no knowledge of the works' authors or content.
4. The manuscripts should only contain the text of the work, and no details that might give away the gender of the author (or any other biases that are irrelevant to the quality of the works).
5. The judges should be locked in separate hotel rooms, with no access to the outside world (e.g. internet), until they have made their nominations. This would cut out the possibility for the judges conducting research that may instil unfair bias in their judgements.

There. Problem solved. Surely. Unfortunately, of course, there would be people out of a job - albeit people with a limited view of the big wide world that they're trying to navigate (badly). But that's for the best, surely: Bring someone in to do the job who's worthy. Someone who doesn't care about arbitrary groupings, who is more interested in the worth of literature in itself. Only then can we have prizes that are founded on good reasoning, and thus worth winning. It that really too much to ask?