isle of avalon

This used to be a placeholder page for isle of avalon, but gradually seems to be accreting real content. This space has now become watchable again. Although perhaps not comfortably... I really need to think about organisation.

Who am I? Well, that's a hard question - let's go for the rather easier target of the names by which I've gone in my passage through the online world. These days, and for the last decade and a half, I have been gwenhwyfaer. Before that, I was lysse - on LWN, I still am. And once upon a very faint and faraway time, I was a desk lisard. In person I go by yet another name, of course, but even that has changed a couple of times, and may well change again. And parts of me have still other names. ...Not that what other people call me has anything remotely to do with who I am, of course; but if you are looking for consistency, you will find it under the funny Welsh-looking name (which was actually pinched from the wondrous Mists of Avalon. Mostly).

If you violently disagree with me on some issue here, and your heart will burn with magnesium fury until you can tell me, in excoriating detail, just how wrong I am... stick it up your arse. For everything else, you can get back to me at riteofreply@this domain; if I like your email, I'll publish it (unless you ask me not to). Or you can leave me a voicemail, at 01274 449543.

On the subject of David Kelly - seventy years?! It seems readily apparent that someone did away with Dr Kelly. Assuming for a second that we don't have a government which essentially conducts revenge murders against those who let the cat out of the bag, there are other possibilities - for example, perhaps David Kelly was, inadvertantly or intentionally, part of a conspiracy to frame the government for his murder, in order to ensure that the full facts relating to the whole damned mess could be presented in open court; or maybe the government is sitting on definitive proof that Kelly was murdered, but to present that evidence would mean exposing the intelligence channels through which it was obtained... and of course there are other possibilities that I haven't considered. And frankly all of them are more likely than the possibility that he cut a hole in his left wrist when he could barely hold a knife with his right, bled almost to death, carefully wiped the knife clean of fingerprints (presumably without disturbing the blood), then with his last breath and about four drops of blood left in his system made his way to a bunch of trees, sat down and took an insufficiently large overdose of a drug that takes a couple of weeks to kill you. Really. I know the electorate is stupid and powerless, but you don't need to rub our noses in it...

They've been trying for years, and they've finally got him? I'm uncomfortable in all kinds of ways about what's happened to Ali Dizaei. Granted, the man doesn't appear to have a terribly winning personality; and sure, abusing the power of arrest is not a good move, even if the person you're arresting has been ragging on you all night and you're thoroughly sick of it. (On the other hand, if that's a crime, we should probably lock up every copper in Britain.) But has he actually done anything that would warrant four years in jail, or has he merely been convicted of being awkward while Asian? I'm not convinced, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this conviction fall to pieces on appeal - or at the very least, the sentence wiped out. I'm inclined to agree with his own assessment of the situation - that after trying every which way they could to find something to pin on him, the Met finally managed to find someone he'd pissed off in a personal capacity to go and provoke a row, in the hope that Dizaei would overstep the line. And as soon as he stuck his toe across it, they shot his leg off. And we all stood back and let it happen... whilst the person who shot Jean-Charles de Menezes seven times in the head still walks free - and let's not mention Blair Peach.

As I've said before, something is very rotten in the Met. For all he was referred to as "a criminal in uniform", I have a nasty feeling they've finally succeeded in getting rid of a persistent thorn in their side, and they haven't done it honestly. There's more to come out about this, if the political will can be found - just as we haven't heard the last of the David Kelly matter. And we should all consider for a moment that just possibly this isn't the kind of country, the kind of democracy, we all imagined it was - things like this can happen, do happen, and have happened here.

I remember my mum referring to this man as a Man of Straw back in 1997, when he was busy making Michael Howard look rational, liberal and straightforward. And now, today, he stands exposed as the basest form of self-serving liars, claiming to have only reluctantly supported a war he disdained, whilst in reality being crucial to its organisation - in a very real sense, the vertex around which the forces of war were gathering. We should have understood this, when he claimed that if he had withdrawn his support, he would have prevented the war. Turns out, that's because he was pretty much behind it happening at all - not just a key player, but the key player.

Never has my mother's judgement been so completely vindicated. (Well, possibly when she looked at two-month-old me and thought "there's something odd about my child", but otherwise...)

Jesus, some of Labour really don't want to win the election, do they? I'm not entirely sure where to start with this particularly pernicious proposal from Jim Murphy - who, incidentally, was the head of NUS when I was a student, and bitterly opposed the replacement of grants with loans... until he joined a government that saw it as expedient, and it became clear that the principles he enunciated at any given time were those most likely to bring favour upon one J. Murphy Esq. - to give those who report "benefits cheats" a share of the money saved (so the odd fiver, then). Now, all Murphy has managed to do is suggest this to Ed Miliband - and I can't see the saner of the Milibrothers reacting with anything other than disgust at such a venal proposal - so it's unlikely this is going to go anywhere; either Murphy has leaked it himself, in order to make himself look more electable (oops!) or one of his team has decided that it's about time this odious little snivel was chased out of even New Labour with hellhounds and pitchforks. But given that even ~~Fascist Loony Central~~ CiF is united in its disgust at such an idea, if anyone thought this kind of thing would do anything for Labour's electoral chances, they are surely living in some weird alternative universe. The universe, come to think of it, where war in Iraq has been proven to be justified, robbing us of our civil rights really does make us safer, PFI makes sound economic sense, and Labour can be a party of the right without alienating its core vote forever... Bye, guys. It would be so lovely to be able to say that the lasting legacy of the three decades of uninterrupted Thatcherism to which this country has been subjected would have finally persuaded the British public that there's nothing wrong with hung parliaments. Let's make it happen!

Alternative vote could be great. But it could be lousy. As I'm sure I've said previously, I'm all in favour of the principle behind alternative vote - the idea that the candidate elected should be favoured by 50% of the votes - and that could be a wonderful thing for democracy. However, it could also be a fairly disastrous thing for the independence and localism of MPs; and which it will be rests on just one implementational detail - whether more than one member may stand for a given party. It would make sense to allow as many candidates to stand as wish to; whilst you don't want two Labour candidates to divide the Labour vote in FPTP, in AV, that wouldn't arise as an issue, as you could group them in a bunch of preferences. And it would allow the different wings of each party to compete for representation (which would, of course, offend the New wing of Labour - but fuck them). In short, it stands a chance of ensuring that the most representative candidate of a region is elected, rather than simply returning a centrally-imposed candidate that voters have to like or lump.

And that, of course, is the nightmare scenario. If I can only choose one candidate from each party, I might as well ignore the candidate's name altogether and just vote for a party. Because every elected MP will be able to claim a spurious "legitimacy" from being the least-loathed candidate, the parties will feel free to solidify an already overly centralised party machinery, ensuring that only those people who toe the party line will ever be elected. Anyone else will have to stand as independent MPs and risk losing a deposit that, in some cases, they can scarcely afford, as well as having to compete with that same party machinery. And whilst it doubtless appeals to Labour to see the Tories locked out of power forever, in a mutual lovefest of Lib-Lab preference, it doesn't actually do democracy any good - although one could argue that Labour have pretty much taken the mainstream-right ground formerly occupied by the Tories, now, so it does make some sense.

On the other hand... at least I will be able to express my preference for a Green MP or an independent anarchist candidate before having to settle for one of the main parties, whichever way it works out.

Of course, everything I wrote below depends on the basic criteria of science being met. Which is why this article worries me somewhat. I wholeheartedly endorse the view of the author - and that of the commenter, Mosher - that if it isn't properly peer-reviewable, it isn't science. My comments below have been based on the fact that science is founded upon review and repeatability; but it's impossible to review something effectively, or to repeat it, when you don't have access to both the data produced or the computational models used to manipulate it. Proprietarism is anathema to science. If you're asking us to take your results, your predictions, on trust - you're no better than a fortune teller or a revivalist preacher.

It's because science is the only possible way to predict the future, Simon. Sure, we might whinge about its ability to make those predictions successfully, and the range over which it makes those predictions is very tightly circumscribed - but never in the history of the human race have we actually had a tool that enables us to predict the future at all. We've had oracles, prophets, mediums and various other charlatans that we've had to take more or less on trust - but science builds the ability to make predictions on stuff everyone can see and do. There's no special ability required to be a scientist - you just have to have a decent brain, a systematic approach, and thorough documentation. That is what makes it so special. If you don't think that's enough reason to treat it as a discipline unique above all others, then it's hard to see what you could want.

Jenkins also raises a question about the rigour of peer review. Well, OK. No process is perfect, especially where politics are involved; and politics are inevitably involved as soon as you get two people disagreeing in the same place. But science has come up with the only practical way of minimising that crap - and yes, it's peer review. You just can't make comparisons with something like journalism, where regulation is occasional, perfunctory and half-hearted. Everything in science - even the smallest, most piddling paper - is regulated to an extent that would cause journalism to collapse! Sure, sometimes that regulation isn't successful, and you have stuff like the MMR paper slipping through. But then the repeatability kicks in - people everywhere start looking to see whether what is reported there is reproducible, and - what do you know, that bit worked! Nobody could reproduce Andrew Wakefield's results, and that's what raised questions about his work in the first place. Did the press report that? Well, a few did - but by then, mass hysteria was underway. Granted, the press went digging into his motivation for publishing dodgy results, and turned up some highly incriminating stuff - but that alone wouldn't have said anything about the truth of his results; and equally well, if his results had been broadly repeatable, that stuff would have bounced off him. And rightly so.

Of course, Jenkins' beef is with the science behind climate change, although he's very careful to make the right "I'm on your side, honest" noises. And let's face it - it's a big scary subject; it's not at all clear that we haven't left it too late to act anyway; tiny countries like Britain can act as much as they like but we're screwed if America, China and India won't join in; even if everyone plays at once, we're all pretty well going to have to turn our whole lives upside down; and science is meeting politics and discovering that whilst scientists take a statement "we need to do X by Y or Z will happen" literally, politics regards it as "if we do enough of X by somewhere in the ballpark of Y to stop the public being scared of Z, we've done our jobs". (Er, no, politicians. You have failed, and betrayed all of us, by attempting to subjugate fact to policy.) He's concerned that scientists are too arrogant, that they're not quite trustworthy enough, that peer review doesn't work and nobody's holding the scientists to account. Well - that's what comes of being an expert. You wouldn't understand that, of course, not actually being an expert on anything, but when someone knows more about something than anyone else, pretty much all anyone else can do is check that their findings can be reproduced and that they've not forged the data. (Granted, that's a serious issue, and scientists have been caught out doing precisely that - but how have they been caught out again? Oh, yes, it's that "peer review" thing about which you have so many reservations.) So whilst we can carp about the politics of the process all we like, we pretty much have to accept, and deal with, the results unless we can prove that they're anomalous or inconsistent. Because they're the only ones on the table. Science isn't politics and it isn't journalism. You can't invalidate the score by attacking the players; and it's silly to prate about the need for an external umpire when the players hold each other to the rules more vigorously than in any other field of human endeavour. So be as sceptical as you please towards the results, if it means you're actually sitting down and checking them (like, for example, Steve McIntyre does) - but if all you're doing is whining about conspiracies, unaccountability, big business getting involved, or whatever the hell the self-proclaimed "sceptics" (who don't seem to grasp the concept of scepticism, or that science is basically founded upon it) are whining about this week, then you have fundamentally failed to understand the process involved, and you should really go and enjoy a nice hearty mug of shut the fuck up. On the other hand, if you can bring a model to the table which explains all the existing data better than the existing ones and predicts that we aren't going to face a climate that goes steadily insane, there are thousands of scientists who would desperately love to buy you a pint!

Er, do you not think that these two things might be a little bit related? That rather than science teachers being bad at their job - an utterly unsubstantiated slur you just throw in there for the hell of it - the reason they're not winning converts is that science is seen as difficult, thankless, and populated by those pariahs of high school life, highly intelligent people? And that money and prestige are being showered on our kids to overcome what is, in reality, a very British anti-intellectualism, which is nowhere more clearly expressed than in a near-total disdain for the practical sciences? Remember the Tefal ads from the '80s, with bespectacled mutants in labcoats with unfeasibly large, bald foreheads? That's scientists, that is - at least to your average 14 year old, unless they've discovered the opposite themselves. And I suspect that there's a component to it. As I mentioned, science is built on scepticism; scientists are naturally freethinking, orthodoxy-challenging individuals, the kids who never grow out of that phase every 5 year old goes through of asking "but WHY?" to everything their parents say. And the English, compulsively authoritarian, naturally subservient to their "betters", culturally driven to identify and isolate those to whom they regard themselves as "betters", do not like freethinkers. At all. A glance at any CiF thread will tell you as much. As a society, England - and by extension, Britain - is anti-intellectual, anti-rational, anti-freethought, anti-libertarian, and frankly just fucking miserable! And the government, and what's left of industry, for all their inadequacies, at least contain a few people who recognise this and wish to try to do something, however misconceived, about it.

Andrew Brown - professional troll? Seriously, the argument in this article would have been torn to pieces on alt.atheism back in the day! There is simply no excuse for claiming that someone who has stated (quite correctly) that religious conviction is not evidence of good character and that treating it as such is discriminatory actually believes that discrimination against the religious would be all fine and dandy. It's not just him - Anne Atkins made the very same point on PM - but it does indicate that what religious convictions can be taken as evidence of is a poor grasp of basic logical reasoning. It would be nice if such a claim were ruled acceptable in a court of law. In fact - yes, the Catholics can have their straight-celibate-men-only priesthood if I can reject religious people for forensic positions. That seems fair to me. Anyone else?

Talk about unintentionally revealing... This gem appeared on CiF today, from a fundamentalist Christian aggrieved at the concept that the Bible might need a slightly more careful reading than exact literalism of the verses that accord with one's own personal bigotries:

Suddenly, I have a great deal more insight into the fundamentalist mindset than I did before. I hadn't realised before that faith was a quid pro quo arrangement; I always assumed that people pursuing salvation were doing so to be better people in this life, where it matters. Now I see - it's not about that at all! It's about the great big shiny golden payoff at the end! ...Oh, boy, are there going to be a lot of disappointed fundies at the gates of heaven! "What do you mean? We obeyed your laws, we took your word literally, we did everything you told us to! Why aren't you letting us in?" And an equally disappointed Jesus, poking his head out and saying "I healed a man on the Sabbath. Didn't that tell you all you needed to know about the relative importance of love and law?"

Meanwhile, if you're so keen on the commandment about homosexuality, you might also want to pay some attention to this one, straight from the horse's mouth: "Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor" (Matt. 19:21, GNB) Until you've done that, you're in no position to pontificate about the rules of righteousness.

Since when did making feeble jokes about "blowing the airport sky high" become a crime? Yeah, you GCHQ fuckers, come and get me. I've got nothing to lose by going all out to make you look even more ridiculous than you manage to yourselves. I'm just not, at this point, sure it's even possible. One of the hallmarks of a proto-dictatorship is that its senses of humour and proportion are surgically removed, after all. And don't even get me started on "we know of no groups planning attacks and no attacks being planned, and that's why we've decided we're less safe than we were last week". Sorry, but this whole fucking country has just gone insane. I know that when I step outside, I'm not going to be blown up by a terrorist. Frankly, the odds are substantially higher that I'm going to be mown down by a speeding ~~pork van~~ police car. Playing the odds, it seems only rational that we should regard the police as a much more immanent threat to national and personal security than any bunch of putative terrorists.

But then, I suppose we have always been at war with ~~Eastasia~~Eurasia. I'd say something about Britain having finally become a police state, too, but remember, this is South Yorkshite. It's been a police state for the last three decades... as a large number of Liverpool fans found out some 21 years ago.

Let's be clear, though. Police states are a threat to the people. And in a democracy, the legitimacy of government stems from the people. If the majority of the population stop playing, the entire mechanism of government becomes illegitimate. (In practical terms, if the number of non-voters in any seat exceeds the number who voted for the winning candidate, that candidate has not been legitimately elected.) And that's the time at which the removal of that mechanism becomes a necessity, and the support and contribution to such a removal becomes a citizen's patriotic duty. Put simply, we're nearing the point where we will need to get rid of the government altogether and hold free and fair elections under a new constitution, written with the protection of individual citizens from overweening state power as its primary objective. And I can barely believe that I'm saying this of the country which, seven decades hence, went to war with fascism, on principle, despite being desperately under-prepared and nearly losing in the first year. How far we have fallen...

Horseshit, Mr Cohen. Horse. Shit. So today's Observer brought us the following:

Ah, the pain of the disillusioned communist... such a total load of wrong-headed crap. But I feel for Cohen, I really do. I mean, history has proven many times over that if you scratch a Trot, you uncover a Tory; most of them have resigned themselves to this and gone on to promote neoconservative and Austrian free-market dogma with exactly the vigour they used to put into extolling the merits of permanent revolution. And yet here's poor little Nicky Cohen, still trying to reconcile today's right wing interventionism with the last remains of the Fourth International.

Because let's get this straight. What keeps us relativists from cheering with delight and approval when the neocons and ex-Trots tromp their Armies of Light and Righteousness all over other people's countries is not some half-arsed notion that only we deserve the good stuff, and the brown-skins should be left to evolve out of their primitivism. Quite the opposite. We are rather too aware of how far we haven't come. Sure, we believe in the superiority of liberal ideals, and we want them for everyone everywhere - but we know one key fact that authoritarians like Cohen will never, ever understand: No man can save another person! Trying to save other countries by invading them and toppling even the crappy, evil infrastructures they have is a bit like trying to help a blind old lady by taking her across the road when she actually wanted to go into the shop she was standing outside. And history demonstrates that it's about as useful. You'd think the "saviours" would have figured that one out by now - but no, they just keep right on Saving countries from Evil in the vain hope that someday it might actually take. Um... yeah. No. It never will. Whether it's engineering a Trotskyist revolution, bankrolling a right wing junta, making financial assistance contingent on massive free market reforms or sending a load of troops into a country to remove its leader on fabricated evidence - IT NEVER EVER WORKS. The only way you can even begin to save someone else is by showing them how you ~~have saved~~ are saving yourself - because if "permanent revolution" means anything, it means that the process is never finished - and being there for them as they begin saving themselves. It doesn't work any other way - not in person, not by nation. And the neocons, the neoliberals, the recovering Trots who think it does - are just deluded, poisonous idiots who will never help anyone, ever, and will never understand why not.

"I'm not a racist, I just don't like multiculturalism"? Well, guess what, sweeties, you can't be one without the other. Even leaving aside those people who claim that they are fine with immigrants, but only if they can't be distinguished as such - so no prejudice there, then? - and focusing on the "people moving to Britain have to assimilate with British culture" crowd... er, no. Because chief amongst the British values you seem so keen to impress on these "foreigners" (as you so often refer to them) is "live and let live". Granted, I know it's more of a cherished ideal than a guiding principle, at least given the amount of shit anyone even slightly outside the norm has to put up with from wandering herds of brats - but there it is. It's a cardinal point of Britishness that unless someone is getting in your face, you leave them the hell alone. Whatever they happen to be doing. Whatever they happen to be wearing. Whatever language they happen to be speaking. If it doesn't hurt you, it's none of your business. If you're just taking offence at the concept, that's your problem, and you need to go away and deal with it on your own.

Just bog-standard British libertarianism. That's all. If you have a problem with multiculturalism, you are being distinctly un-British yourself. And yes, you are being racist - because never have I see anyone whine on about the evils of multiculturalism and the importance of properly assimilating into British life to an American, an Australian, or even a Frenchman, Pole or Czech. No, it seems to be reserved for people with more readily identifiable skin colours. And I'm just sick to death of the pretence. It's cryptofascism, it's an authoritarian insistence on uniformity, it's contrary to the spirit that built this nation, and it's wrong.

Well, isn't Rod Liddle a nasty little shitestain? I don't know what's funnier - that he's been so obviously caught out being a cunt in public, or that he really thinks claiming "a little boy did it and ran away" is going to cut any ice with anyone whatsoever. Obviously, the only reason he should be allowed to edit the Independent is so that he can be remembered as the man who finally drove it into the ground...

Unreconstructed Thatcherites, and damned fools to boot. The Tories' shiny new policy on education - simply put, "we'll make teaching a prestige job! not by paying any more, just by locking out anyone of the wrong class" - is not only so obviously impractical that even their diehard supporters have noticed, but shows them in their truest colours yet. This might end up being their Sheffield moment - the point at which they reminded an electorate that was almost pacified exactly why it had kept the cunts at bay for nigh on a decade and a half. Of course, all it would do is make the teaching profession possibly the most unattractive on offer, at least for anyone who might be thinking of teaching in a state school afterwards - which, of course, lays bare their real objective, which is the wholesale dismantling of the state school system.

So it makes the choice clear. If you want a government which is out of ideas, out of energy and out of leaders, vote Labour. If you want a government which is so enslaved by ideology that it is fully prepared to sacrifice what remains of the country to its own idols, vote Tory. If your feelings run more to "a plague on both your houses", or if you just want a real change, vote Lib Dem - at least we don't know how lousy, corrupt and dishonest they'll be yet; and if they introduce PR^†, it really won't matter.

† As far as PR goes, I'm not so bothered about overall proportionality. What I want is to be able to ensure that my vote is not wasted. That means (a) that I can choose from as many candidates as care to stand, rather than one per party; (b) that I can express an ordered set of preferences, rather than having to choose just one; and (c) that I can choose just one if I feel more comfortable that way. So I'd be quite happy with Alternative Vote, even though it can be less proportional overall than first past the post; on a constituency level, the results are more proportional, and that's what matters. Of course, from Alternative Vote to Single Transferable Vote is simply a matter of merging constituencies; and there's no reason why that would have to be either constant or centrally controlled. Allow constituencies who so choose to pool their MPs; but don't force it upon them. If nobody merges, fair enough; but I expect that what will happen is that the cities will merge, and the rural constituencies will stay single-member.

Hello, Bizarro World. Howard Jacobson says something asinine, and Barbara Ellen writes something intelligent (after far too long a hiatus). I find myself ambivalent about this topsy turvy land - unless this is the world the right way up, and Babs', er, confusion of late has been a marker of an impending, now averted, apocalypse...?

Because terrorists don't kill people, civil liberties do. Howard Jacobson might or might not be a relatively sane person under other circumstances, but in The Independent today he really has put his name above some of the most arrant bollocks I've read for quite some time (and remember, I'm including Chibibabs' oeuvre). Apparently we should all be grateful for the odd frisking from England's finest if it keeps us safe to go about our day to day lives intact and uninterfered with. Spot the contradiction? Yep. It's difficult to contrive a definition of "go about our business unimpeded" which is compatible with having to trip over half a dozen coppers insisting that they have reasonable grounds to call upon section 44 - especially when measured against the comparatively (and absolutely, damn it!) minuscule risk of being blown halfway to kingdom come by someone you previously thought was a fat bloke who still feels the cold in the middle of summer. Perhaps this is Howard Jacobson's point, though - that our business is being frisked by coppers, and any illusions we have about self-determination being in any way important are the silly relics of an obsolete mode of society? Or maybe it's only impedance if the Wrong People™ are doing it?

The very definition of "unedifying": Watching two political parties battling to win an election whilst disclosing as little of the programme they intend to implement afterwards as absolutely necessary.

The secret of business success in the 21st century: Assume that all your customers are drooling morons who really cannot see past the most transparent of wheezes. Look how well it works for Ryanair. I've flown with them once, but never again; should I ever need to fly in the future, I shall masquerade as a cow - I'll get better service.

Oh, no - the indications are not good. I remember reading, not so long ago, that if you want to determine whether or not to hire someone who meets all your other criteria, take them to dinner and watch how they treat the waiter. If they bestow upon him the same warmth and consideration that has impressed you enough to consider them, then they're worth hiring; if they treat him like part of the furniture, or worse, then forget it - they're a user, only interested in charming their way up the ladder. So I was dismayed to read this line, addressed to David Cameron, in Jackie Ashley's article, in which she suggests some New Year's resolutions for political figures of note:

Why am i dismayed? Because for a while I've been trying to work out which of Wavey Dave's two faces is his true one - whether he's an old-school aristo finally emerging from the cloak of monetarism to restore his party to its One Nation, centrist traditions, or whether he's an unreconstructed Thatcherite, putting on a PR face because that's the only way he can win power, but always handy with a wink and a whistle to let the faithful know that whatever he may have to say, he's still one of them.

And now I know. It's the latter. He's just charming the people he has to charm to get his foot in the door - vote Tory this May (for it seems likely) and you invite down upon this country the full thrust of policies Thatcher would never even have dreamed of. Because Cameron doesn't think the little people are worth his while - and we're not talking about a Brown-like "do I shake your hand or not? I know the president of the US just did, and everyone's watching, but I've walked past you four times a day for the last year and never shaken your hand once so I'm not going to because it would just be awkward if I only did it this once, and I wouldn't want to shake anyone's hand four times a day" aspy wibbling^†, either; this is straightforward sociopathy. And as such, touch it with a bargepole at your peril.

† Yes, I am quite convinced that Brown is aspy. Won't make me vote for his party, mind - Labour have strayed from the path of righteousness so far that I can't see how they'll get back there without defenestrating the architects of 1997 - but it does make me more sympathetic to his fumbling attempts to do what he thinks is the right thing, even if he doesn't quite have the social skills to actually pull it off. I've been there. It sucks.

Well, I thought it was a good article. But I guess there's something about the word "Muslim" that sends certain proportions of the CiF culture off in a tailspin of incoherent fulmination... sure, the article might not have been Ms Coren's best (such a high bar, though) but it's far more coherent than pretty much every comment beneath it. Amusingly, most of the ~~idiots~~respondents started throwing around the word "racist". Well, yes, in much the same way that black men calling each other "nigger" is racist - that is, don't be such drivelling fucking morons!!! oh, I'm sorry, that's presumably an expression of prejudice against morons... or it would be, if wilful fuckwittery were an inherent attribute, rather than a vicious habit. Here's a hint, children - just possibly, what Victoria meant was that a cabinet full of Muslim women could scarcely be less vice-laden than one full of old Etonians, when one considers the record of Old Etonians in government... yeah, of course it went over your heads. After all, as you fuckers are so keen to point out, any article that isn't at least implicitly celebrating the inherent - nay, genetic - superiority of wealthy Anglo-Saxon males of good family and public school education is necessarily racist.

Fuck you, I won't ~~tidy my bedroom~~ do what you tell me! RATM won. Haha. :)

I would point out that Babs is an idiot again, but it's becoming redundant. This time, in her zeal to crank out a thousand words for the Obs in between nappy changes, it's evidently passed her by that whatever the suitability of Rage Against the Machine's track for the role assigned to it this Christmas, the band had nothing to do with it. They didn't even know about the campaign, as far as I'm aware, until a bunch of British journalists started pestering them for a soundbite. Still, what does that matter to some fuckwit journo who can fill a few column inches in time for Crimbo? But here's a hint, Babby - you might want to lay off the sarcasm until you've, you know, done some elementary fact checking first. Or you might not give a shit; after all, they still employ you... even as they ditch the magnificent Kathryn Flett. Something's gone badly wrong here. You're not fucking Rusbridger or Mulholland are you, by any chance? Got some deeply incriminating photos of their children? ITWSBT.

Well, our leaders have chosen for us. Evolution it is. Perhaps it was predictable that Copenhagen would come to nothing, considering who was involved, what they faced, and the fact that any agreement would have spelled electoral suicide to those participants who actually have to worry about that kind of thing. Perhaps we all naively hoped that despite that, just for once, in the face of the enormity of the situation before them, our great and good would put petty selfishness aside and actually work for something that serves our whole species well. Perhaps we should be grateful that, at least for now, the trend towards a globalised ~~dictatorship~~ government^† has been arrested - but at what price? The next few decades will see hell on earth, and possibly even a new world war (the inevitable result of a small overprivileged group of people shafting a much larger group of people when nuclear weapons technology is easier to obtain than it ever has been... think about that for a few moments, given that Europe and America just pissed off Asia and Africa in a big way) over precisely this - hmm, that Titor fellow doesn't look quite so off the mark any more, does he? - and once the dust settles, if there are any humans left there will be far fewer of them; and they probably won't look at all kindly upon the notions of cities, governments or wars. For a generation or so, anyway, until the insanity starts again.

Meanwhile, I feel kind of privileged - I can say that when the world ended, I was paying attention. Because the failure of Copenhagen does, to all intents and purposes, signify that the last trump has sounded.

† Incidentally, I'm not saying that AGW is the Trojan horse by which a world dictatorship will be foisted upon us all. That's clearly insanity. I would, however, assert that the only way to get all of humanity pointing in the same direction is by imposing a more or less draconian order upon it - by accepting that the survival of the species overrides everything else, even individual rights, and proceed on that basis - and that the rather stark choice facing humanity is between the individual and the species; we can't preserve both. Call me a nutter if you want, but call me the right kind of nutter! My own take on the choice is that only choosing the individual is even sustainable in the long run; choosing the species might make for an attractive short-term option, or at least one which doesn't result in nine humans in every ten dying - but like it or not, self-awareness is instinctively individual, and we don't do terribly well betting against our instincts. Worse, the kind of structures required to actually achieve that - which will, as I say, be necessarily totalitarian; there's simply no other sensible way to govern a large number of people to the degree required in the presence of absolutely limited resources - will result in stasis... and stasis, from an evolutionary perspective, never lasts. Even if we can feed ourselves almost adequately, some ambitious microbe will come along and obliterate our carefully-maintained stasis... and then we'll be in exactly the same position as if we had chosen the individual anyway. So let's get it over with. Let's accept that the history of the 21st century will be written in blood, and work to ensure that knowledge remains and wisdom results, whilst doing the best we can to avoid being part of the problem. Which means, by and large, disengaging from consumer society as far as possible, and coming up with sane, sustainable alternatives; it means adopting a communitarian lifestyle; and it means accepting that by doing so, you won't save the planet, or even the vast majority of humanity, but you might just stand a chance of being one of the survivors. And that's the important thing right now. The kind of people who need to survive are the kind of people whose footsteps are as light as tumbleweed.

But it is the same thing! Leaving aside the whole "oh-aren't-they-so-evil" feeling everyone has about Nazis (and the whole point, when you actually look at that period of history, is that Nazis weren't uniquely evil; by and large, they were ordinary people doing what they thought was right or required, just like the rest of us - and the fact that we have spent sixty years demonising them should show us all how unprepared we are to face up to the consequences of our own everyday actions), climate change denial is exactly analogous to Holocaust denial. In both cases, the deniers are running up against near-consensus expert opinion, backed by copious quantities of evidence; in both cases they claim some weird kind of victimisation when their basic mistakes are pointed out to them, and carp about suppression of the truth when their debaters give up in frustration at the blatant unreason on offer. In both cases, they are allied, by conviction or convenience, to causes whose survival is directly threatened by the truth of that which they deny. In both cases they cling onto the smallest glimmers of apparent support for their insanity, no matter how twisted, decontextualised, tangential or inconsequential, whilst edging around bloody great big elephants in the room which they can't even bring themselves to acknowledge. And in both cases, not sharing a platform with them isn't about suppressing views we cannot tolerate, lest vast numbers are suddenly converted to their truth; it's about not letting children scamper all over the room when the grown-ups are trying to sort stuff out.

I've bought my copy. Apparently there's a campaign afoot to frustrate that nice Mr Cowell's intention of steering his pet artist this year to a Christmas no.1 by purchasing an official download of Rage Against the Machine's seminal track "Killing in the Name". Possibly, although I can't be sure, to register the protest indicated by the infamous outro. Well... how could I help but participate? Especially when I learned that amazon.co.uk were selling the track for just 29p. So, I bought mine. If it stops Boy McWhothefuck from selling silly numbers of someone else's song, then so much the better... but hey, it's a really wonderful track anyway! Good play, guys. :)

George Monbiot gets it. I can't really add anything to what he wrote - he's put the finger on exactly what humanity, as a whole, is facing. The problem is that in one direction lies years of suffering, pain and death - and in the other direction lies a world government the intrusiveness of which we have never dreamed of. We literally have to choose between our lives and our freedom. Unfortunately, neither side - with the exception of Mr Monbiot - is yet being honest about those choices (and I'm not convinced that he's quite thought it through). The only practical future for humanity, without some kind of global apocalypse, is currently being modelled by China. Those of us who would prefer freedom to life are either going to have to learn, like the Buddhists did before us, that freedom is merely a state of mind - or take the little glass pills and accept that we're obsolete.

Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I think these guys are telling you the truth. Totalitarianism is going to be the only way to cram twelve billion of us onto one little planet. There's simply no room for nonconformists any more.

I'm so glad I'll be dead soon. Whatever's coming, I don't want to have to see it.

Why humanity is doomed, part #37: Just read the comments. And weep for the future of mankind. We need to be doing something. We will continue to think up millions of reasons why we should do nothing, and scream Conspiracy! at everyone who exhorts us to change, until it is far too late to do anything about it. We will lie about the facts; when we can't do that, we will lie about the scientists; when we can no longer do that, we will start killing each other. And by the time the number of humans has fallen to about the level that the world can support^†, the people who tried to get us out of this and the people who never contributed to the problem at all will be dead, and the only people left will be the idiots and psychopaths who are accustomed to their free ride on the back of everyone else whilst believing themselves to be oh, so terribly inventive, productive and deserving. A couple of decades of them eating each other when they can't find anything else to eat, not to mention the consequent epidemic of CJD, should solve the problem of humanity to Gaia's total satisfaction. And the dolphins will sing to each other of the fate of the stupid hairless apes who thought they were gods for another hundred thousand years.

This is the fate we deserve. There is nothing good about humanity, nothing redeeming about our intelligence or our capacity to conceive of ideals we can never live up to. We are racing towards an apocalypse of our own creation, and even as we read the signposts we deny the destination.

† I believe that the world cannot support more than about half a billion or so humans. When I say "support", I don't just mean feed; what we're seeing in the collapse of inner-city society is the psychosocial damage wrought by long-term overcrowding. We're simply not meant to be packed in this tightly; we haven't evolved to cope with it. And if we hadn't also evolved the intelligence to conceive of mass food production strategies, local overpopulation would have ensured we never got to this density. Now, having found a way to conquer it - the first species ever to do so, to our knowledge - we look set to succumb to the effects of global overcrowding. There's no way out of that, except for something cataclysmic to happen that will wipe out 90% of the world's humans. It's coming; after all, we have created the perfect conditions for a highly contagious, instantly fatal virus to thrive and spread without burning itself out. Sooner or later, it will happen. And frankly, it should.

When will these idiots ever learn? Injunctions in the name of suppression just don't work in the presence of a worldwide information system! (Now, I should explain that I don't give a toss about Tiger Woods, what he's been up to, or who took pictures of it. All I care about is that the idea that you can actually suppress information in a country with a working internet connection - like, for example, the UK - by obtaining an injunction against its publication is absurd; all I had to do was Google "tiger woods injunction". And I wouldn't have known or cared if they hadn't brought it. Fuckwits...)

The last line of this article should make everyone extremely uncomfortable. Note the use of the term "post-democratic". Guardian editorials are not noted for their carefree hyperbole, whatever right-wingers says about them - and yet their use of the term, in an age where the only points of distinction between the main political parties are their presentation formats (yes, even the Lib Dems have been dragged into competing on monetarism) and MPs have neutered themselves in exchange for a John Lewis gift set, is ever more apt. This is what happens when democracy has run its course, guys. As ever, Britain is out ahead, doing it first and doing it half-arsed.

Ever wonder why the aspy are so good with computers? I kind of had an idea, but this post by Paul McKenney, ostensibly about why parallel programming is not hard after all, laid it out for me. I found this section, in particular, enlightening - Paul is listing reasons why sequential, not parallel, programming is counter-intuitive, and describes these "insults to intuition":

But of course, these are three assumptions that aspies typically will not make about the world! Anyone with aspy^† children will have myriad tales to relate about their lack of common sense; it's more or less a component of the diagnosis that "theory of mind" is impaired; and obsessive hyper-detailed planning is pretty common too. But more to the point, of course, is that more than these being aspy impairments in themselves, they're also assumption the aspy won't make about the rest of the world. Taking myself as an example - whilst I'm pretty good at figuring out what other people are playing at (but never delude myself that I can know for sure), I tend to explain my own motivations at great length and not presume that people automatically guess them (and then miss key points in the explanation that I thought would just be obvious, but apparently aren't). So, given that the aspy don't make certain assumptions about anyone, and that computers shouldn't have those assumptions made about them, it's hardly surprising that so many aspy programmers abound; our traits are naturally a really good fit.

Which makes it so fucking sickening that there seems to be a concerted effort being made to drive us out of the software development profession. We built it, you bastards, and now you want to give us all the boot for not being team players? I've actually had someone tell me point-blank that they would never hire anyone "like me", and it was obvious that they meant anyone aspy - an assertion that would get them sacked if they said it about a gay person. And I'm afraid I don't have the stomach to take on that kind of mindset, which is why I need to find some other career to pursue (so far, I haven't).

† I had a think about this the other day, as I was reflecting on what a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome actually means. It's not actually a separable condition of its own; that package of traits and tendencies which constitute a syndrome in sufficient concentration runs through my personality like my veins through my body. To say that I have Asperger's Syndrome makes about as much sense as saying that a black man has Negroism, for example; and to call me "an aspie" is about as sensible as calling a woman who prefers same-gender relationships - and that's another rant - "a lesbian". He is black, she is gay, I am aspy - just as he is eloquent, she is brash, I am bookish. They're just attributes, adjectives, isolated motifs in a much bigger picture. Let's not elevate them into nouns, please.

Babswatch latest: statutory rape is "different for boys", and therefore the law should adapt to the classroom. God, this woman really is a complete fucking moron, isn't she? ...I'm not even going to bother linking to it. She writes for the Observer, which apparently didn't quite observe that whilst it was ditching three of its sections it might be advised to ditch this imbecile. I'm all for intelligent contrarian opinions - Nick Cohen springs to mind - but this kind of rank prejudice-airing stupidity has no place in a broadsheet. Get thee to the Sun, Ms Ellen; there at least you'll be on a par with the average readership!

Static vs dynamic? It's not an interesting topic. Yet people are still flogging it to death; the argument has been raging on reddit since the site's inception, and it's been raging for fifty years before that. The sad thing is that people take ridiculous positions over something for which data does exist, and doesn't help. One study sticks in my mind - it showed, fairly dramatically, that the nature of the language chosen was entirely secondary to the length of the feedback loop between coding and running. Now granted, dynamic languages tend to be interpreted, which gives them a head start here, with Lisp probably the best developed of the lot; but lots of work has been done on giving static languages the kind of REPL from which Lisp has always benefited.

And then there's Forth. As far as languages go, it's probably about as static as it's possible to have - not only are the basic operators explicitly typed, but the baseline Forth standard doesn't even include dynamic memory management! and that's to say nothing of the stark minimalism of colorForth - but the fact that its environment has always been completely immersive has given it the kind of leg-up only usually enjoyed by Lisp or Smalltalk - as the history of successful Forth projects, coupled with its traditional usage areas (way back when I'd just escaped uni, I remember seeing an advert for a Forth programmer; it was from the nuclear power authority of the day - so I was too intimidated by the responsibility to apply for it), demonstrates. Which kind of proves the point - if a language that's really not much more than an interactive assembler built its reputation on huge productivity increases, whilst the model of theoretical purity has yet to escape the realm of theory, then surely immediacy is the only thing that matters a damn? Moreover, given that all the data points in the same direction, arguing about anything else is merely a debate of theology?

Anthropogenic climate change? Of course it's real! And a bunch of snarky emails and allusions in code to "tricks" doesn't make it suddenly not real, for all the wise monkeys denying it stick their fingers in their ears and sing "la la la la, we can't hear you!" Trouble is, it doesn't matter a damn... but enough of my pessimism! We can still fix it, of course. All we need to do is act as one, in lockstep, globally, to plot a new, sustainable course for our species.

Jenni Russell is fast becoming my favourite columnist. Well, joint favourite, with Henry Porter. Why? Well - she, like me, has noticed that one of the Miliband brothers is significantly more interesting, more genuine, and better qualified to lead Labour back in the direction it forsook in 1995, than the other. He even looks more honest. (I mean, would you buy a used car from yon pencil-tache?) I've thought this myself for a while, but I was despairing of anyone in the media noticing - but thankfully, Ms Russell was also paying attention. Good!

I'm fine with paying, kitten. I just don't want to pay you. Anne Wollenberg who she? - ED sets filesharers right in today's Guardian. Only... she doesn't, because she makes the mistake of assuming that everyone who has a problem with the IP industry as it stands today also actively ignores the law. Yep, she's made the classic newbie error of demonising her opponents. But then, that probably isn't terribly surprising, given that she's twelve... oh, but bless her little cotton socks for trying! Seriously, not only is her argument crap, but it isn't even original crap. There's probably an irony in there somewhere; I just can't be arsed trying to fish it out.

The observant amongst my reader will have noticed that I've been somewhat belittling to Ms Wollenberg. I urge you, read her article. On its evidence, she really does deserve to be belittled. Despite the use of the term "kitten", I have no problem with women - the problem I have is with idiots, whom I'm afraid deserve to be belittled at every possible opportunity, and in every possible way.

WANTED: Tiny cottage, a good mile or so from anyone else. I have two cats (but probably only for a couple of years - they're quite old), I have to claim LHA (but I haven't missed a day's rent in 15 years), and I can't drive (so it'd be nice if Tesco could deliver). On the other hand, I'm single and likely to remain so, I don't need a whole lot of space (I need about 150ft², but after that the smaller the better), I'm likely to want to stay for a long time, and obviously I won't annoy the neighbours. But I need this. Can anyone help...?

I'll also eagerly consider a job in a remote area which comes with accommodation (eg. lighthouse keeper); I'm a very fast learner, highly conscientious, and psychologically equipped for solitude (indeed, not really psychologically equipped for anything else).

Western capitalist society sells the mirage of individualism, but destroys its foundation. There has never been a society so focused on the belief in the individual as modern Western society. From our founding religion - which preaches that salvation is a private, individual matter, deriving from a personal relationship with a personified deity - to our political hegemony, some bastardised blend of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, we are exhorted constantly to view ourselves as individuals, to regard society as merely something we do to each other, to accept that figments of our collective imagination are more real than the objects we stumble into in the dark. And it's all a myth. We are fools for believing it. They don't want us to be individual! The cornerstone of true individuality is self-reliance - the knowledge that when all else falls away, we can keep ourselves alive by the efforts of our own hands. And nothing is more engineered to obliterate that foundation stone than modern global capitalism. We are trained to consume that which we have not - could not have - produced. We are employed to produce that which we have neither need nor desire to consume - and increasing numbers of us are employed in mere busywork, producing nothing at all; we are paid to be useless in a frantic manner. And we have forgotten what it means to feed ourselves, to clothe ourselves, to shelter ourselves. We have forgotten within a generation what it truly means to be individuals; and with it, we have forgotten how to form ourselves together into communities. We are only capable of accepting the choices offered to us; the foundation of real independence, the ability to refuse all choices and do for ourselves, is lost to us - and if we cannot do for ourselves, there is nothing we can do for one another.

This is the mark of a society in terminal decline. The West will fall, and it will fall soon; it may not notice, as it wraps itself up in ever tighter bonds, seeks to control its own population ever more closely, as in the name of seeking salvation it accelerates its own demise. Just as Rome fell, so will this. And there is nothing we can do to stop it. I give us sixty years.

Chibibabs Ellen's at it again! Apparently the idea that a hospital must be kept scrupulously clean - to a clinical standard - is one that flies straight over her head, in her rush to decry those who take issue with the idea that all nurses must have degree qualifications. Other gems include her assumption that "untrained staff" will do all the menial tasks, like making beds, cleaning, etc. (er, which untrained staff will those be, pet, now all the nurses have to be degree-qualified? do you think that a government dead set on eliminating as much cost is anything is going to go rooting around in its pockets to employ several thousand min-wagers? or are you proposing that this be some kind of welfare, or community service?), her assertion that only the toff brigade could possibly have a problem with the elevation of nursing to a degree-only profession (right, which is why the whole damned panel objected to it on Friday's Any Questions), her confident conflation of degrees with status (yep, just ask the fine arts grad who brought your curry to the door about that... mind you tip her, though), and most of all, her failure to understand that whilst there are many tasks that fall under the mantle of nursing that do require some level of intelligence and a high degree of training, there are also quite a lot which don't - and by insisting on a degree, you essentially exclude many people who would love to do the latter, and could in time be trained to do the former on the job, from the entire profession of nursing because they aren't academically-minded enough, or confident enough about their abilities, or all that excited about the prospect of plunging themselves into �20k of debt in order to enter a profession where they're not likely to make that in their first year.

I used to think that Barbara Ellen was just a little lazy, but otherwise an entertaining read. But this is the third article from her in a row that's been the stupid side of moronic. Ms Ellen, for the love of God, keep your mouth shut about anything important in future! Thank you!

You built your mansions on sand, and now you beg the law to be Cnut. That's pretty much all I have to say to all the industries which have been built upon the concept that reproducing a work of art can be a profitable activity in itself, and are now desperately trying to preserve that state of affairs - even though it has already vanished - with a thicket of new laws and draconian penalties. Guys, it's gone. You built your industry on a temporary accident of artistic history, and now technology has caught up - bridged the chasm, filled in the hole... whatever - the effect, though, is that the cost of perfectly reproducing recordings of performances has been reduced to zero. Which, of course, necessarily spells death to any industry built upon the assumption that its cost is anything else. And I'm sorry, but the belief that you can change one of the basic tenets of free market economics with a bunch of laws is, frankly, as irrational as the belief that Jesus will come down and blow the last trump on the world on the Mayan End of Days.

Now, this is not to say I am fundamentally opposed to the principle on which copyright is based. That principle - that the creator of a work of art has the right to share any profits made from that art - is fundamentally a sound one. And for printed works - the medium which, by and large, gave rise to copyright as it exists today - it even made sense to grant that by granting the artist the right to arbitrarily prohibit distribution. After all, books cost money to reproduce, because there's always a physical item associated with it; but they're cheap and easy to buy, because they're entirely self-contained. When you pay your �7 for a paperback, you get a portable, resilient medium which needs no additional equipment to enjoy. And until very recently indeed, it was a lot cheaper and a lot easier than trying to duplicate a book you like by hand; indeed, despite the growing popularity of ~~overgrown, over-restricted PDAs~~ e-book readers, many people - me included - would still favour a real book. It's more convenient, you can see more of it at once, its reproduction quality is much higher even in the cheapest editions, you don't need a ready supply of batteries, and it doesn't cost �200 just to get started - or another �200 every time you drop the damned thing. The only thing counting against it is the fact that five books takes up five times as much space as one book - and even then, that's countered by the fact that you can keep five books open at once. Which, if you're a student or trying to put together a legal case, helps a hell of a lot with crossreferencing.

So the principle of copyright, created for books, still makes sense for books. And at the time, it made sense to include nothing else - paintings and sculptures were necessarily one-offs, and plays and recitals could not be recorded anyway. But then Mr Edison came along with his wax cylinders, and the gramophone swiftly followed him; and at first, with vinyl being even more of a bugger to reproduce than books, it made sense to apply copyright more or less as was. Things looked sticky when cassettes were introduced, but the fact is that cassettes were never a high fidelity medium; every time you make a copy of a tape, it degrades. Hell, every time you play a tape, it degrades! So at first, yes, it made a lot of sense to take the existing copyright laws and apply them, more or less unchanged, to the burgeoning music industry. As for movies, whilst they were distributable, the average home user couldn't even play them back, let alone copy them easily; they were more or less still in the same category as plays - and whilst VHS allowed for easier copying, the VHS experience remained vastly inferior to the cinema experience, which protected revenues.

When did the world end, then? Basically, when whichever genius at Sony thought "you know, we could probably reproduce music digitally these days with as much convenience as a record"; but I would venture that the precise date on which the fundamental assumptions underlying the media industries collapsed was the day in 1980 on which the Red Book was first published. That document, the standard definition for the physical and digital format of a digital audio compact disc, signalled the instant obsolescence of analogue recording and reproduction technology. Consumers got a better experience - the medium was almost as conveniently sized as a cassette, and would not decompose with age or use; and even the cheapest equipment would provide an acceptable standard - and record companies got a better deal too, as CDs were even cheaper to produce than cassettes or vinyl, yet could be sold at a considerable premium. But - the music was digital; and that meant that it could be reproduced simply by copying a file. Still, in those days the state of the art in home modems was a 300 baud acoustic coupler, at which rate sending the 750MB of a full-length CD would take about a month - even if something could store it at the other end; one could be forgiven for thinking that things could carry on as normal. Unfortunately, they didn't see just how quickly technology would catch up... sure, we had MP3 compression which could squish a song down to a tenth its size with much less quality loss than a cassette, but now we're at the point where even full-sized CDs can be downloaded in - well, it takes me a little over an hour, but my connection's a quarter of the speed of my last connection, and a tenth of what's available in the UK these days.

So now we arrive at today, in a world where even books are being gradually threatened (yes, the technology isn't there yet - how ironic that the last industry to fall to the digital wave is the very oldest of the copyright industries?) and no amount of data can have a price tag attached to its duplication - a world in which publishing has literally no startup cost and no per-item cost at all. Aside from the devastating ramifications that is going to have, in time, for the ability of governments and businesses to operate in secret at all - although already, with groups like Fitwatch and websites like Wikileaks, we're seeing just how much of an effect this might have on these matters; just look at the scramble to Wikileaks every time a newspaper mentions that they can't name a website on which a document to which they can also not refer has been published - what this means is this: The assumption that in order to ensure an artist gets their fair share of any profits made on their work, it is sufficient to permit them to arbitrarily prohibit profits from being made on their work at all, is no longer a valid one. The equivalence between "artists have a right to share the profits made from their work" and "artists have a right to profit from their work", which was only ever circumstantially made in the first place, no longer stands scrutiny at all. The mindset artists have fallen into, that copies of their work have intrinsic value of their own, and they are entitled to see a profit from the very act of copying itself - a mindset which was always immoral - must now change. Because nobody has a right to make money from anything. You have a right to try. Not a right to succeed.

So where do we go from here? Well, first of all, the entertainment industries have to change. There must be no more talk of trying to use the law to hold back the tide of change. If that makes the industry untenable, so be it - it will be neither the first nor the last time an entire industry collapses because a sudden change pulls the rug from beneath it. Musicians will continue to make music, because they can't help it. Some of them will be content - not happy, but content - to subsidise it with their day jobs; others will be able to fund their passion from commissions; still more will stumble upon more sustainable business models, and make a mint from those; a few will drop away from it once they realise that it's no longer their ticket to fame and fortune, and for this we will all be much the better; and the vast majority of musicians, for whom music is a private pleasure and who have never sought to make money from it, will go on pretty much as they always have. The record companies can either change to facilitate this, or die; I'm sorry, but I really don't have a lot of sympathy for professional middlemen. They can survive, too, more or less unchanged, by simply changing their model - if they commission an album from an artist, things will continue much as they always have, except that the artist won't find themselves tied into a record company, and the record company will always own that album outright, just as any other work for hire remains the property of the hirer - in other words, they will not have to relinquish royalties to the artists.

Which leads me to my other suggestion for change. At the moment, royalties are negotiated on a per-contract basis, and represent at most a couple of pence in the pound. This is, of course, nowhere near a "fair share"! And as I've always said, the moral principle underpinning copyright is that a creator is entitled to a share of any money made from the use of their creation. I propose that legislation should be passed to pin that at a fixed share - such that any company may sell any recording by any copyright holder - but for every copy of that recording sold, or used as a medium to sell something, the recording artist will be entitled to a share not less than 25% of the instant sale price. (And if you don't keep records that meticulous, you get to contribute 25% of your turnover to a pool used to fund artists.) For something like advertising - if an advertiser seeks to use a recording to promote a product, the relevant sum will be 25% of the cost to their client of that campaign (with a factor to reflect what proportion of the campaign depends on that advert). There's plenty of scope there for all the legal wrangling that the copyright industries have grown to love so much - for example, who gets what for covers? what about sampling? - but the whole industry would instantly be placed on a much more morally tenable footing, and the right of people to share their music with their friends would be preserved - not just in a space of lackadaisical enforcement, but as a legal right, a guarantee that as long as there is no profit motive involved, mutual action will not be penalised.

But until that day comes, I'm really not interested in hearing artists whining about how P2P needs to be banned so they can make money, and I won't vote for any politician who is prepared to stand in front of their sand-based mansions and command the sea to stay out of their way. I prefer my elected representatives sane and rational. However late it might be to wish for that...

Yes. We do need a change in this country. But the trouble with people who say this and then go on to say "That's why I'll be voting Conservative" is - just how much of a change are you guys expecting to see? Because everything Cameron says points to the blandest of continuity. The most you'll be getting with a Tory victory is a tinker. That's enough about Osborne. - ED

Ever doubt that people are just utter unreconstructed scum unless they really, really put in the effort? Well, read the comments on this article and despair for your species. Because not being a callous, abusive bastard is apparently really difficult - and as a species, we're nothing if not bone idle.

So Julie Bindel wants a national DNA database, does she? Probably not surprising. After all, given her previously and often stated opinions on transsexuals, it'd mean she'd get to keep track of who's a "real" woman and who's "just faking it". Handy for the concentration camp allocation, I guess.

Nonetheless, perhaps we're going at this the wrong way. Rather than storing the DNA from people who have either been acquitted or never faced trial, why not store DNA evidence found at crime scenes, in some easily accessible format, and run any DNA samples you get past that database before chucking them in the bin? The storage requirements will be far lower, the same result would be accomplished (suspects' DNA would still be matched to old crimes of which they were otherwise unsuspected), and there'd be no civil liberty issues with letting the government get their slippery fingers on the intimate details of someone's genetic makeup. But of course, nobody is listening to me, so this idea will never actually come up anywhere else... which is a shame.

Speaking of malign influences, this is just remarkable. Obviously the Sun are manipulating Jacqui Janes for all they're worth. Obviously they're playing a very dangerous game, as it's making Gordon Brown look considerably more personally honourable - even despite characteristics that were already well documented, such as his lack of the personal touch and his inability to admit error - and next to the Currant Bun, even bankers suddenly look like the pictures of moral rectitude. Obviously a lot of people are reconsidering their opinion of a man they'd previously written off, on the grounds that despite failing horribly at it, he is trying to reach out and make the personal touch, for no other reason than he believes he should. But rather less obviously, cui bono? Well - what are the Tories up to today? Oh yes - Cameron is outlining his plans for welfare. Plans that thanks to this furore will go completely undiscussed by everyone - and yet with more claimants than ever before, arguably it's likely to be the most important part of his programme. And suddenly the purpose of the Sun making so much fuss over this is abundantly clear - they really don't want anyone looking closely at the Tories before voting them in, do they?

Well, let's be clear about this. When a paper seeks to have its new best friends elected in on a nod and a wink, without proper scrutiny; when it uses its influence over its readership to further that end; when it is able to manipulate any event it pleases in order to accomplish this - then it is going way beyond the boundaries of free speech; it is abusing its power in order to subvert democracy itself. And that should not go unpunished or uncurtailed.

update: Yep. As predicted, David Cameron's speech on welfare has vanished completely from the front pages. On the other hand, it turns out he didn't actually say anything. He's still doing grand-vision speeches when the country is crying out for solid detail. If he carries on like this, as though his victory is so certain that he doesn't even have to try, he will lose the election - and deservedly so. (Of course, that's what I want - as I've said before, we're in desperate need of a spell of weak government - but I don't think it's what he's after.)

Rupert Murdoch has lost it. Celebrate! The influence of this malign parasite will shortly fade into oblivion; he has, at last, decided to choose wealth over power - and given that he has dedicated his whole life to the pursuit of power even at the expense of his own pocket, he can only be doing this because he thinks he's powerful enough to take Google on and win. He isn't. But by the time he's figured that one out, he will have lost both wealth and influence, burned on the altar of his own hubris. Today is a happy, happy day!

The ooze that eats itself. I've just been reading MediaGuardian, and I can't think of a more applicable description for this whole goddamned society we've constructed for ourselves, where truth is a matter of shared belief, reality is defined by constructs of the imagination, and those of us who seek a connection to the natural, physical, real-real world around us are regarded with something approaching scorn. We try to make bricks of words, but let sand run through our fingers. None of this is real. Western society is a mirage of ideas, imaginings and dreams, a house of Moebius strips. And it is in decline; if I'm really lucky, I'll die before it will. I feel like a Roman in 400 CE.

Less a watchdog, more a neutered poodle: is there anyone who still believes that the Press Complaints Commission is even remotely fit for purpose? Self-regulation of the press isn't working. Hasn't ever worked, as far as I can see. And the only reason it continues is that we no longer have politicians with moral fibre - certainly not enough moral fibre to actually impose proper regulation on the press. Or given recent events in the City, any other industry either... apparently the only things governments will actually permit themselves to govern these days are everyday relationships between individual citizens. So we have a situation where you can be bankrupted for having enough sympathy for your fellow man, especially those fellow men fleeing from not-quite-despotic-enough regimes (like Zimbabwe, Iraq or the Sudan) who have somehow avoiding being thrown into ~~a concentration camp~~ an internment facility, to want to give them jobs and let them earn enough to take care of themselves and their families; but lift �100m from a bank for a dodgy deal, the full effects of which won't even become visible for a decade, and you're suddenly a highly prized captain of industry to be charmed and placated and on no account taxed any more highly than someone on minimum wage.

Actually, the hell with crossings out. The fact that I live in a country which sees fit to send failed asylum seekers to concentration camps makes me physically sick. And very shortly afterwards, explosively angry. V-for-Vendetta angry. Why am I on my own in this? Why is it somehow acceptable for a Labour government to do fascistic things? How can we take their claims to find fascism beyond the pale remotely acceptable when they're pursuing the same damned goals? Resist now. Employ an asylum seeker. Refuse to check any new hire's paperwork. Force them to clog up the courts with people who will take someone's right to work in this country on faith. Any law that runs contrary to the very clear principles of human rights to which this country has signed up, from which no man may be forced to deviate, whether by law or coercion - any such law must be rejected. And may be rejected with impunity. The law effectively prohibiting the employment of anyone who can't prove to absurd degrees of satisfaction that they are entitled to work here - as, frankly, I could not, were I asked to - is one such law. So disobey it, and force the issue.

An unusual misfire from Henry Porter. I wish I could criticise every single point of his errors, but I'm afraid I fell at the first hurdle, when he wantonly confused the European Union with the European Court of Human Rights. Here's a hint, Henry: the two bodies have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, except geographically. You're not the only one to make that mistake, but you are the most surprising; I had thought you better informed. By all means criticise its crucifix ruling as bizarre and apparently counter to the whole purpose of the court - but to assume that because the court and the Union both have "European" in their name, they are somehow administratively or politically connected is a numpty move. And until now, I hadn't figured you for a numpty. Although if you're confused on this point, I guess it might also go a long way to explaining your hitherto barmy antipathy to the Human Rights Act...

Having said which, in protest at the ruling, Berlusconi ally Claudio Scajola said:

Funny. I always thought it was a representation of an execution device. To follow in Bill Hicks' footsteps, but from a less left-pondian historical perspective, it's a bit like trying to claim that the universal symbol for the Royal prerogative and aristocratic government is the executioner's axe. Er... no.

The Territorial Support Group - this decade's Serious Crime Squad? One or two incidents, one or two thugs with a tendency to go out on their own, is probably to be expected in a police unit, given the nature of such things. But when more or less every single member is notching up dozens of complaints, safe in the knowledge that 99.8% of them will go nowhere... that's managerial. That's an organised unit of stormtroopers. That's the harbinger of a police state. It needs disbanding now. Not reorganisation, not restructuring, not a thorough investigation. Rip it up and start again, because it is obviously incompatible with a democratic society - and because where it leads, the entire police force will eventually follow... because they will know they can get away with it.

Damn it. I'm just going to come out and say it. I think we've finally reached the point when even the most liberal, peace-loving fluffies amongst us need to be giving serious consideration to building an underground resistance, in preparation for the day when we need to take back our country by force from a government that no longer regards itself as beholden to those it governs. Maybe we don't need one yet. But the day when we do is coming, and I don't want to be caught short. Frankly, at this rate, I'll survive to see the day when we need a secret railroad to get Muslims out of the country, before the government sticks them into ~~concentration~~internment camps from which they mysteriously evaporate; and to put that into perspective, I believe I will die in 2022.

The government have an issue with home schooling. Surprised? Of course the government - indeed, governments, as a class, but especially governments who fully embrace the concept that the state is the ultimate answer to every social question as this one has - have problems with those people who don't buy into their systems. Hardly surprising - and especially not surprising that they would seek to include them in the witch hunt du jour. It's not just governments, either - any large organisation needs 100% buy-in, and will regard with suspicion, and ultimately seek to expel, anyone who threatens to be the grain of sand between the cogs. Ever wonder why governments are historically so hostile to small business? It's not just that they don't understand the culture; the very idea of someone looking at the commonly accepted alternative and thinking "nah, I can do better than that on my own" demonstrates an independence of thought which, if turned against that government, will swiftly become a threat. It's a timely reminder, though, that the word "totalitarian" doesn't necessarily refer to a government that replicates Stalinism in every detail - all it means is that all power proceeds from, and exists only with the permission of, the state. We're way more than halfway there in this country. Indeed, given the nature of this country's political history, it's probably fair to say that we have never really moved away from it.

Well, now it's time. The government - the very institutions of government - only exist at the sufferance of the people they seek to govern, no matter what history or delusion suggest. If they aren't prepared to accept that, at their core, then they need to be reminded; and if they won't take the reminders, they must be cast out, like the moneylenders from the Temple. Otherwise they will be proven correct in their assumption of absolute power, and we will be their prisoners forever.

They probably think this is progress. I'm less convinced. Today, whilst reading the Grauniad comment pages online, as I like to do (because it might be difficult to tell...), I noticed that the pages now have comments at the bottom of them, despite my having turned off Javascript. Until today, this resulted in no comments and a plaintive plea for me to turn Javascript back on. Which I wouldn't, for two reasons - firstly, they never did work out how to do it without whacking Firefox's CPU consumption up to 100%; secondly, CiFers are - well, I've characterised them below. And I do so try to avoid trolls, morons and hobby-horse jockeys wherever I can. So my feelings about this new development are mixed. I'm really delighted that they've finally caught up with the state of the art some, er, 5 years ago, when people first started to realise that wonderful as it was to have a powerful interpretive language running right inside the browser, the fact that the implementations were apparently written by a particularly crap intern with only a week for debugging made them just a bit less useful than they otherwise might be, and that the wonderful new standards supported by wonderful new browsers aren't quite as wonderful for the rest of the world still running the buggy, insecure, standards-eschewing piece of cowshite that is Internet Exploder 6. I just wish I didn't have to read the first 50 comments, because there's a little cadre of - right-wingers? contrarians? professional trolls? knobheads, anyway - that sit obsessively waiting for new CiF articles to come through so they can get the first ten comments to themselves. Let me read the best 50 comments, or the most recent 50 comments, or no comments at all. Let me set a preference once, and then stick it in a cookie so I don't have to log in to set preferences, because I don't necessarily want to make an account just to only read the articles, without the peanut gallery joining in. Anything but the morons at the top!

Thing about New Atheism - it ain't that new. I went through a bit of a spell of it myself, when I was about 20 and had just hit university. I found alt.atheism, and duly served some time crossing intellectual swords with every theist that came along. And... I got it out of my system. I got over it. I just realised that it was simply blatantly obvious - not even worth talking about, frankly - that as soon as someone starts telling you about their god, you learn an awful lot about what drives them and absolutely bugger all about any deity whatsoever. If there is any higher power, you can only experience it directly - and you are basically incapable of sharing that experience in any satisfactory way, because such experiences necessarily transcend language anyway. Which means that as defined in any kind of consensual manner, the whole concept of "God" is necessarily internally inconsistent, a logical impossibility. So the question is entirely without meaning. Either you've had an experience, and know (either way - I've had my own experiences, and I know in the negative); or you haven't had an experience, and are placing an inordinate amount of faith in someone else's claims of experience - which is silly, and you should stop it. So there. Not interesting. Next question.

Fuck it. Voting them out isn't enough. I want to see some of these ministers in court on charges of treason after the next election. They've done more than enough to warrant it; some of their changes are fundamentally opposed to the core principles established over hundreds of years in this country, and they seem intent on running the country into the ground so that the Tories have nothing but scorched earth to play with. But more importantly, a few well-placed trials will establish, once and for all, the principle that ministers are not above the law, even as they're seeking to make the law - it will reaffirm that our representatives are our servants, not our masters. And pour encourager les autres - future governments might just decide that plugging their ideology or serving the press to the exclusion of the electorate isn't worth the risk of a stay in the Tower once they step down.

Let's put the blame where it belongs. Simon Jenkins quite correctly fingers the tabloids for the current moral cowardice of our politicians. But let's be clear about this. The politicians have handed the press this power on a plate. They could require the same objectivity of all media outlets that they currently require of TV stations, yet instead they seek to go the other way and remove that requirement altogether, paving the way for the same devastation of British broadcasting that Fox News has heralded in America. Why? Why will none of these moral and intellectual pygmies have the courage to simply stand up to Fleet Street and say "Say what you want about us now, but we have a mandate, and if you insist upon behaving like wolves we will muzzle you"? A free press is essential, certainly; and that freedom must include the right to publish a diverse range of opinions. And sure, some of those opinions will not be balanced or objective. But the responsibility of the press is to ensure that the opinions they choose to publish represent an overall balance - and that the arguments they present are of a quality a little above mob bait. And the tabloids - the Sun and the Mail especially - aren't even close to meeting that responsibility. They are abusing their freedom in order to seize power over others. And they should be enjoined. But that requires politicians will the strength of character to do what must be done and to hell with their popularity. And unfortunately, we no longer have politicians with strength of character, as a look across the sorry ranks of the Commons will tell anyone.

Face it, people. Democracy in this country is finished, unless we can somehow reboot the system. This is the truth that everyone knows, yet nobody dares to admit, and far too many turn from and deny. At the very least, we need to replace every single MP; at worst, the people will have to overthrow a government that no longer regards itself as of, by or for them. Let us be clear about this: To cast out a hopelessly corrupt parliament - and by corrupt, I mean no longer determined to put the welfare of the country and their constituents above their own welfare in all considerations, nor even able to distinguish the one from the other - is the ultimate expression of democracy. Perhaps three and a half centuries is just a little too long an interval between revolutions.

A Labour government, planning to take �15 a week out of the poorest hands, just before an election in which they need every single vote they can get to avoid being consigned to political oblivion? Surely they couldn't be so Goddamned stupid...? Yes. Yes, they could. The question of clawing back the excess LHA payments, first raised a good few months ago after someone finally read the budget's small print, is still - unbelievably! - rumbling on; government are making vague hang-on-a-minute noises, but have not actually said what they will do either way. Sarah Teather, of the Lib Dems, is attempting to force the issue - but it seems the government have either learned absolutely nothing from the whole 10p tax band fiasco, or truly don't give a shit about the poorest in society any more. Which kind of makes the Labour name silly, guys. The really sickening thing about it is that the LHA system was introduced as a cost-cutting exercise in itself; the idea was that there would be a hard upper limit to the amount people could claim, which would mean most people would have to find some rent out of their own pockets; but those people who were lucky or enterprising enough to find places to rent for less than that cap would be allowed to keep the difference (so long as it was no more than �15 a week - the average, it turns out, is about �8 a week across the 300,000 currently claiming LHA). The calculation of the cap was tricky in itself; the country is divided into over a hundred "broad rental market areas" or BRMAs, which cover quite wide areas, and the cap is set at the average level in each BRMA. Which leads to considerable distortions; consider a BRMA such as York, where the outrageously high rents in York have pushed up the average to such an extent that so long as one is content to rent in one of the surrounding towns (eg. Selby, Tadcaster, Church Fenton) one can find a rather nice house for a figure that would allow one to hit that �15pw ceiling! Previously housing benefit would cover your whole rent, so long as it had been assessed as "fair" for the much tighter local area; if your rent exceeded the LHA cap, you were better off not changing. Those of us who did swap did so primarily because of the extra money... and now our reward for being financially responsible is going to go away. Thanks a lot, guys. It's nice to know that when the chips are down and the country is going to the wall, you'll piss billions away on recidivistic banks, and then turn around and piss on the very people with whose welfare you profess to be most concerned. And just out of interest, if you believe that it's going to be so easy to take �15 a week away from someone who has already worked it into their weekly budget, perhaps you might care to explain just what we were supposed to do with this money you were giving us. Stuff it in the mattress? Stick it in an ISA? Wipe our arses with it and flush it down the toilet, like you've done with a couple of hundred billion in the last year or so...?

As it happens, this is one which will affect me, as an IB/IS claimant (employment access is kind of limited when you can't cope at all with being around people). When the LHA system came in, I jumped on it, because my rent was almost �11 a week below the limit. (Yeah. I got suckered. I'm not proud. Although I'm fairly sure the thought "I bet this lasts just long enough to tempt everyone into rebooting their claim" crossed my mind at some point, cynic that I am; I just forgot that under New Labour, there's no such thing as "too cynical".) So come next April, my monthly budget is going to have a �45 hole in it. Now, what does the government think I'm going to do here? Do they think I'm going to try and negotiate my rent down at all? Well, just in case they really are that stupid, let me explain. If the LHA excess is clawed back, I will have no incentive whatsoever to live in any house cheaper than the LHA ceiling. Which means that I will be looking somewhere like York, in the much cheaper areas, for the largest, nicest house I can find for the cap... and moving in there as quickly as I can. It'll almost certainly be far larger than I need - it's not hard to find a 3 bedroom house for less than the LHA cap in Selby, say - which means a family will be stuck for the house I'll be living in, but hey! I've got no incentive to live cheaper than that, have I? Or I could try and find a little cottage with an acre of garden, and move there. Whereas, if I could keep the difference, I'd be looking for the cheapest place I could possibly tolerate, which would almost certainly mean somewhere a bit more than �15pw below the ceiling; I'd win by keeping the full �15 a week, and the government would win because they'd be paying out less than the average... which would, in turn, help to keep the average down.

And here's the real irony. As I say, the LHA caps are anchored to the average rents in an area. Well, the effect of everyone rushing to find more expensive housing will be that average rents are raised. Which means that the LHA cap will go up anyway. Which might just mean that the government end up losing rather more than the average �125m a year (ie. absolute fucking peanuts!) that they naively believe they would save initially, in increased rents. In my case, because I'd be trying to find the nicest place I could in a cheap corner of a more expensive BRMA than the one I live in now, all they would have achieved would be to take �10 a week out of my pocket, and put an extra �30 a week into the pocket of my next landlord. Think about that for a second... these are supposedly the financial experts, the people we entrust to do the maths for the whole country - and they can't get past the headline figures to realise that what they propose as a cost saving will end up costing them three times as much - and enriching private capital, to boot. If I were that shit at my job, I'd sack myself... but I'm not, so instead I will have to content myself with writing to my MP, the Chancellor, and the Minister for Work and Pensions. And somehow managing to avoid the words arrant, fucking and simpletons, especially in juxtaposition.

Oh, and one more thing: Don't you dare tell me that you can throw yet another forty billion pounds at the banks, but must desperately claw back 0.32% of that from those who, by definition, cannot be a part of the mortgage problem! DON'T YOU DARE!

"No blacks, no Irish, no dogs", read the signs on lodgings 50 years ago. Of course, such a sign could not be written today. Except... hang on, what do I find on more or less every rental advert I read? "No children, no smokers, no DSS." Plus �a change, plus c'est la m�me chose...

Why do conservatives hate reason? (And yes, I do include New Labour in that, although not as severely; indeed, I'm not above drawing a correlation between their abandonment of scientific evidence and their abandonment of social democracy. But still, to find the real nutjobs and reality-deniers one has to visit the Tory ranks, it must be said.)

Scientific evidence? We don't need no steenkin' scientific evidence! Government appoints independent expert to head advisory committee. Advisory committee reviews available evidence, produces independent recommendations from it - in short, does its job. Government ignores almost every pronouncement of its advisory committee in fear of what its political opponents might say. Head of advisory committee finally has enough, tells government it's being stupid and putting politics ahead of what's best for the country. Government responds by sacking scientist. So much for the value of science in policy. Why don't we just admit that rational thought has no place in politics? Oh, wait - because that would involve also admitting that politics in this country has become a race to the bottom... and Labour has won. (I could also say something about the strange blend of hostility and contempt with which humanities graduates tend to regard scientists, perhaps because scientists can actually prove things - and more importantly, disprove them - whilst the humanities have somehow muddled up "everything is relative" with "nothing is false"... but that might be going too far.)

And to everyone who cheerled for Alan Johnson as the putative saviour of New Labour, and the slayer of Gordon Brown: what do you think of your golden boy's leadership skills now, when the first time they come under any serious test they're found not just wanting, but on permanent vacation? Face it, if this is the quality of the best people your pet project has elevated - pretty consistently, it's worth adding - then doesn't it raise some nasty questions about the nature of the project itself?

I'm not a tolerant person. I don't want to be. I accept a great many things, but tolerance stops short of acceptance; it says "you may share my air, but I'm holding my nose whilst you do". Nonetheless, anyone who thinks that this kind of abuse of any other person, for any reason, is acceptable at all, needs to have every bone in their body broken. And more importantly, to be left in no doubt as to why.

"High Storrs celebrates world status", proclaims the freesheet that just landed on my doormat. Wow. I knew Sheffield was a pretty insular place, but having your village declared a distinct planet...? (Sadly High Storrs is a school, and it's just been declared a World School, and that only by virtue of being the only school in Sheffield to offer the International Baccalaureate alongside the traditional A-levels. Oh well, the headline was worth it.)

Voluntary repatriation is it now, Mr Woolas? Wow, you people just keep moving closer to the BNP in policy every day, don't you? "Don't vote for them! They're real fascists! We're just pretending really hard, and that's (somehow) OK..." Yeah. As I've said before, something really unpleasant is on the move in England (and Wales! don't want to exclude a country with such a strong BNP presence) and I would rather get the fuck out before it takes hold. Scotland is close, and I don't need a passport...

Henry Porter has the indignation covered, which frees me up to ponder the absurdity of banning parents from a common playground. Why not go that one step further and ban children too? After all, they're the real source of all the potential problems that the council is scared of - and let's face it, it would be more honest than this, which will after all accomplish exactly the same end result. Course, it makes building playgrounds slightly pointless, but that's easily solved with a rebranding exercise. Gentle reader, I give you the latest works of public sculpture: Safety in a Dangerous World, #1 and #2.

Simon Jenkins make a good case for vouchers, and quite accurately observes that both main parties are staunchly ignoring the idea (except for Mandelson, apparently) of actually bribing people to buy stuff and thus stimulate our manufacturing sector, which - ultimately - is the only true source of lasting, sustainable wealth creation in any economy. (Seriously, that's just blatantly bloody obvious.) He also makes a pretty good case for its working. But it's perhaps interesting to consider that neither party is particularly interested in manufacturing; and it's a little more subtle, I think, than Jenkins' charge of snobbery. Simply put, the Tories don't like manufacturing because it's full of rebellious workers who tend to club together, form unions, demand rights, and challenge the Tories' God-given right to hold power in perpetuity. That's always been the case, from the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution; but it was Thatcher who managed to actually get rid of most of it. But Labour? You'd think they'd be all about manufacturing... but no. They were, once, when their members and MPs had come directly from the shop floors and the unions; but now their children, who grew up in factory towns, but went to university, saw a better life and swore never to go back, despise their origins. Not only do they fear being labelled "Old Labour" if they support manufacturing, they are actively repulsed by the whole notion of manual work - they see their own ascent, their own abandonment of the muck, grime and hard work of manufacturing, as the path to salvation for the whole working class, and by association they see those who would remain in that world as rejecting betterment - in short, as "no better than they ought to be", and somehow deserving of their fates. So they would prefer to abandon them to those fates, even if it cripples the entire country.

And it will. Already some people who ought to know are voicing the fear that last year's crash was only a foretaste of times to come. Even if it isn't, it's highly unlikely to be the last one that ever happens, nor even the last to involve stupid banking practices. This time round, the banks were "too big to fail", even at the expense of dropping all of us into unpayable debt to save them. The next time this all comes down, the same banks will be too big to save. And if the next time is 2010... well, best brush up on your Marx, because what he predicted seems to be in imminent danger of coming to pass. It just had to arrive on its own, rather than being forced; capitalism must collapse under the weight of its own unsustainability before any alternative can arise, because until it does, it enjoys the insurmountable competitive advantage of, you know, owning everything...

We're sacrificing our future to our own cowardice. Jenni Russell lays out the indictment perfectly; the situation has now developed where pupils wield far more power over teachers than teachers ever could over pupils. Indeed - broadening it out into the prevailing paedophilia witch hunt, where children can hold a dagger over adults far more lethal than anything adults can pose to children - but it's most poisonous in schools, perhaps, because there it damages everyone. Teachers are abandoning the profession en masse in fear, and those who remain dare not take any disciplinary action at all; those pupils who are not disruptive are being cheated of their education, and worse, every day their self-discipline is shown to be worthless; and those pupils who are disruptive are being trained into psychopathy by inaction, unchallenged and uncivilised, and will certainly end their days with blood on their hands and their hands on the bars of their cells. And the rest of us are suffering a plague of children who, never having been loved or disciplined by anyone, anywhere, do utterly disproportionate damage to the world and the people around them in order to leave any mark on the world anywhere, to force someone to acknowledge their existence. Fear being all they have ever known, they mistake it for love and respect, and seek to inculcate it in everyone around them. Everyone here is being cheated of their present and deprived of their future. And it must change - not at the governmental level, either, but at the societal level. Put bluntly, we must accept, and start from the position, that teachers want the best from the children in their care, and would not willingly inflict violence upon their charges. That's the whole point of the selection process. That being established, I suggest that whilst no report should be ignored, unless an incident results in gross physical harm, no action should be taken against any teacher unless and until at least three incidents have been reported within a reasonably short timespan, or five incidents overall. We need to look for patterns, but forgive occasional slips. This zero-tolerance policy we have at the moment will very soon result in a zero-teacher situation... indeed, if one accepts that a teacher who does not wield authority over her class cannot function effectively as a teacher, it arguably already has.

Instalments from Bizarro World, #63: There's an anti-slavery bill up before the Lords today - that kind of qualifies on its own; turns out that whilst slavery has been outlawed since the 19th century, there are no laws prohibiting servitude or indentured labour. The Tories and the Lib Dems want to fix that. Labour - the most legislation-happy government of all time, remember! and the party that presents itself as the defender of the powerless - insists there is no need, that current legislation is perfectly adequate to the task. Even though it's apparently absolutely vital that every parent accepting an exchange student has to undergo the same checks as someone working in a children's home, despite child abuse being pretty thoroughly against the law too.

...Yes. Exactly. We are governed not only by idiots, but by inconsistent idiots.

Sometimes one sentence is grounds for dismissal. In the case of Anton Setchell, attempting to justify the vast police intelligence apparatus which exists to track and pre-criminalise peaceful protesters throughout the UK, it is this one:

On one level, that's a statement of the blatantly obvious. But by this token, the police justify investigating everyone. For anything they take objection to, regardless of whether it constitutes criminal activity or not. And let's be clear, "domestic extremism" is a mythical concept; it has no legal foundation, it does not constitute criminal activity, and in many cases it's not even that extreme. He defines it thusly:

This is the stew from which extremists emerge, Setchell, you fucking moron. Not from ordinary people gathering in a public place to shout their disapproval of the latest piece of greed, irresponsibility, or just straightforward idiocy to emerge from a government, which would be shocking if we hadn't all been utterly desensitised to it. The left have been demolished in this country (and besides, it's hard to organise the working classes if none of them are actually working any more), and with it has gone their dedication to bettering the lot of workers, both collectively with bargaining power and legislative force, and individually with education, community-building, and just the hope that goes along with seeing a large group of people on your side. So we have a lot of ill-educated, isolated, hopeless working class people gathering around any cunt prepared to feed them the right sugar-sprinkled bullshit... hence the rise of the right. Now, OK, Nick Griffin is too damn stupid to be the one to surf this country into fascism on the backs of the workers. But the guy who kicks him out may not be, just as he was considerably brighter and abler than John Tyndall; and really, how is it even going to be possible to oppose the BNP from the position of rampant authoritarianism, repeated demonisation of immigrants on grounds of religion, and inhuman treatment of asylum seekers into which the Labour Party has gradually eased itself? A whole lot of us lefties are looking from the pigs to the men and noticing that there's not a whole lot of difference any more.

Anyone else called Nick Griffin must not be having fun right now. There are some people who just spoil their names for everyone else; Griffin is a fairly common surname, Nicholas a not uncommon forename, and... well, my sympathies lie with anyone who got lumbered with the name and isn't a fascist. It's "Office Space" writ large.

I have to say, I particularly feel for the green anarchist calling himself Nick Griffin. That has to suck - unless he's adopted the name to sow maximal confusion, in which case well played...

The problem I keep having with Linux: Someone does something which, whilst obviously imperfect and problematic, is nevertheless a huge improvement on what's gone before. For example (although it's so far from the only one, it's not true), autoconf - it solves a problem, and solves it reasonably well, but it's virtually unmaintainable. So lots of people get fed up with it, and start thinking "there must be a better way!" And they make one, one which is tailored to their needs and the inadequacies they found in the original system. Trouble is, everyone does that. So there are now fifteen different systems in existence, all "fixing" the problems of autoconf. And any poor schmuck who wants to build software from scratch has to install all fifteen of them. And there's no chance of convergence, because as far as each adopter is concerned, their chosen build system solves exactly the problems they had; moreover, switching was painful enough when they were doing it to gain something - why the hell would they do it just to make everyone else's lives easier? So whilst the developers are much happier, the end user is stuck trying to juggle fifteen different systems, all doing the same thing in slightly, incompatibly different ways. From the end user's perspective, this is not an improvement. So eventually the end user gives up, switches over to a binary-only distribution, offloads the problem onto the distro maintainer, and the whole advantage of open source software gets pissed up the wall of compatibility... and meanwhile, one-person distributions become ever rarer, as trying to keep up with the snarling tangle of dependencies and different systems required to actually get anything built, ever, exceeeds the number of hours available in a week...

I'm generally quite fond of Unix-like systems... but round about five years ago, Linux just seemed to become inhumanly complex - to the point where it was hard enough to keep a current distribution running, let alone try to compile anything with any dependencies at all for a Slackware more than a year old. So much for the much-vaunted backwards compatibility of Free Software... honestly, the only reason I use it at all is its morality! And even that is endangered - how can you truly help out your neighbour if neither you nor they can rebuild the source, even if you can read and understand it?

And thinking about it - why is it that free audio software for Linux seems to need three times the system resources of the equivalent for Windows? Where's the Linux VA softsynth that's as frugal with your CPU (and as lush-sounding) as Synth1 or SQ8L? Where's the Linux tracker to take on Aodix at its own game? Why is aldrin such a goddamn nightmare to build? Oh well - at least we've got samplers covered... but even here, we have the "fifteen different solutions to the same problem" syndrome! It's infuriating, and pointless, and unless you're a developer and only care about the app you're developing it's actively hostile. And that, more than anything, is probably why I've found myself using Windows again for the past year, despite Windows itself being a complete loathsome pain in the arse.

And I'm not even going to start on the subject of softsynths which regard a GUI as an absolutely necessary, essential part of their operation and refuse to run without one, despite starting one up as a separate fucking process... *seethe*

What's the betting that the Tories' proposed replacement for the Human Rights Act will, in its initial form, itself obviously contravene the European Convention of Human Rights...? Which would, of course, render it meaningless, unless those fuckers really are so up their own ideological arses that they'll try to pull us out of the Convention altogether. If we even can withdraw from it, of course; after all, it's ironic (and indicative of the level of thinking they've put into anything, not to mention of the way their party will fall apart like a Chocolate Orange at the first tap on the EU table) that the voices who would most like to see the UK out of the EU are also those most vehemently opposed to the treaty which introduces the necessary right of secession!

Mind, the former Confederacy states can tell us just how much those are worth...

We could kill the BNP for good, really easily. All we have to do is abandon the principle that the vote of the most ignorant gobshite in the pub is worth exactly the same as the vote of someone who's gone out of their way to become properly informed about the true situation in Britain.

I've proposed this before, but it bears repeating. What I'm suggesting is that we build a bank of several thousand multiple-choice questions, factual questions about the state of Britain based on ONS statistics, about the history of the country, and about the parties' manifestos and policies - and a bunch of basic reasoning questions thrown in, just to make sure. We keep the database public, we allow people to test themselves on random questions beforehand, we allow people to flag up what they believe to be incorrect answers and have them checked out by professional assessors, we accept new question submissions (but vet them for neutrality first ) - and on election day, every ballot paper we print off has 5 questions on it, chosen at random from the pool (but at least 1 is guaranteed to be a logic question).

I guarantee that if you do this, the BNP's influence on this country - and probably the tendency of the main parties to relentlessly pursue the idiot vote, too, once they realise it'll work against them - will disappear almost overnight. Yes, idiots who would rather stew in their own ignorance will be disenfranchised. I find that an acceptable trade-off. Universal suffrage has proven itself an unmitigated disaster, precisely because the self-serving, the unthinkingly tribal and the wilfully ignorant get a disproportionate say in affairs.

Oh, horseshite, is it political! If the Tories think that having an expert in the field correct their lies about the Human Rights Act is political, then they must surely also regard correcting the BNP's lies about non-white people as equally political. Yet I'm fairly sure they don't. But to see right-wingers cry "you're being political!" every time someone who knows what they're about tells them that they're fundamentally wrong is just... well, it doesn't exactly go anywhere towards changing my mind about voting for them, let's put it that way. And it inspires no confidence whatsoever in their claims to care about civil liberties when I hear them claiming that the one damned thing Labour got right about civil liberties is a "criminals' charter". Anyone making that claim doesn't fucking understand what human rights are there for, let alone have any moral claim to correct anyone else's perception of them. So fuck off, you bunch of self-serving unreconstructed Thatcherite hamlets! We don't want you, and even if you win absolute power it won't be on your own merits or the strength of your arguments... and you know it, otherwise you wouldn't be trumpeting this reactionary bollocks to try and get your own lunatic fringe out on polling day!

Read this and mourn. I don't know whether we should be mourning the malign effect that one judge can have on the legal atmosphere of an entire country - although I'm not prepared yet to rule out the idea that Justice Eady has decided that the libel law desperately needs to be changed, and is doing everything he can to demonstrate precisely why; on the other hand, ignorant authoritarian power-drunk judges who regard the law as their personal pet are hardly unusual creatures - or the sheer mordant stupidity of Jack Straw's absurd and spineless insistence that absolutely nothing is wrong, and everything will come right if it's just left alone... a piece of conservatism that stands in stark contrast to even his own past micromeddling approach; remember, this is the home secretary who made Michael Howard look stand-offish and mildly liberal. And it really is quite absurd to state your total faith in the system when you are the system. On the other hand, it might have something to do with the fact that Justice Eady is exploiting the intersection of the existing common libel law and the Human Rights Act, which would mean that Mr Straw had to admit to - well, not even a mistake, but the existence of an unforeseen consequence of something which has mostly proven to be a very good thing. (And indeed, would be, if we didn't have the worst libel laws in the world even before that - the rest of Europe isn't having this trouble, after all.) Hmm... in fact, the only reading of this situation that makes any sense whatsoever arises from another observation made of J Eady, that he seems to be attempting - all on his own - to carve out a de facto right of privacy - I submit that rather than doing this, he is effectively using his power to attempt to hold the government to ransom, to force them to implement a privacy law properly. And Jack Straw's otherwise incomprehensible position then becomes the equivalent of reading the press a statement saying "We do not negotiate with terrorists", even whilst you're telling the hostage taker you can get him a plane within the hour if he only lets all his collateral go. It's not pretty, and it's not what government should be about, but at least it isn't pathologically fucking insane.

Actually I think she was shaking off the drips, Mr Brooker, but I can see how one could interpret it as a jig from a horrified distance. Otherwise, absolutely spot on column... as usual.

This bon mot from a ~~fascist cunt~~ BNP supporter in Dagenham, as reported by this site's house newspaper:

Er... hang on... you do know what the B stands for, right...? אױ װײ! they're not exactly chasing the intellectual vote, are they...?

I do wish columnists wouldn't base their whole rant on an elementary error that they reveal in their first paragraph. Case in point: this diatribe from Barbara Ellen (a repeat offender, but given her tone one could be forgiven for thinking she just doesn't have time to keep up with this stuff between child-wrangling) about the wrong-headedness of the Cambridge Primary Review proposing that children should stay at home until they're six... except, of course, that they didn't say that at all. They said that children should not be given formal lessons until they're six, because studies show play-based learning is a lot more effective before then. Which strongly suggests that they want to see schools focus on play-based-learning for the first year of a child's school career, rather than dropping them straight into a curriculum as happens at present. Sounds eminently sensible to me - indeed, it seems to me that trying to socialise kids and teach them at the same time is one of those things that's doomed to failure. First, get them to play nicely together, think of each other as friends. Then start teaching them stuff, and they might just help each other to get the hang of it - rather than feeling as though they have to compete to be the focal point of classes. And maybe, just maybe, tomorrow's kids won't turn out quite as wilfully ignorant or stultifyingly selfish as certain petulant forty-pushing ex-goth Sunday columnists who imagine that only reading other columnists counts as adequate research.

I'd like to say that Jan Moir is a homophobic bitch. I'd even like to complain about her article to the PCC. However, that would require reading it - and since it's in the Daily Heil, I won't do that, on principle. So I'll never know. Apparently she said something loathsome about some guy who's just died, about whom I also know very little, other than that he was in an aggressively cheerful band with other people chosen for their ability to look good on the front of record covers... but she seems to regard his dying as being directly connected with his being gay. I dunno, I thought his dying was directly connected with his being mortal, but hey - maybe the fact that Ms Moir has never tasted another woman's lips will ensure that she lives to see the Second Coming? Perhaps someone could test the theory...? apparently luminous orange is an indigenous skin colour

apparently luminous orange is an indigenous skin colour

Of course, she's since protested her freedom from the curse of homophobia (although for obvious reasons, she hasn't claimed that "some of [her] best friends are ~~fudgepac~~homosexual"). Which, of course, is amply demonstrated by the nine previous articles she has written about famous married heterosexual thirtysomethings dying in "strange, lonely and troubled" ways that look enough like acute heart conditions to confuse coroners... oh, er - hang on. Still, wasn't the response of the twitterati encouraging? If it demonstrates one thing, it's that the Daily Hate is going to have to change its schtick once the septuagenarian homophobes upon which it has founded its readership have popped their clogs - the only young people who will stand for that kind of thing have trouble with the long words in the Daily Star. (Especially, it seems, if they are victims of carotene abuse...)

A plea to those denizens of Mumsnet, or anywhere else for that matter, who allowed the thought "He didn't say which biscuit he preferred, I'm not going to vote for him!" to alight in their minds for any longer than a microsecond: Please, on election day, stay at home. Don't go anywhere near a polling station. If you have a postal vote, throw it away unused. We don't need your sort deciding who gets to exercise the variety of absolute power only granted in England... so please - don't.

And still it lives! Carter-Fuck, fresh from the humiliation described below, have now decided to try and bully Parliament into staying quiet, by claiming that the whole injunction is sub judice. Yes, that's right - even though John Bercow said precisely the opposite when asked about the matter, and even though they have now been reported to the Law Society and Paul Farrelly MP is talking darkly about contempt of parliament. You'd think that they would consider now to be a good time to shut up, keep their heads down, and hope everyone forgets about them for a while, wouldn't you? Nope, apparently not. Seriously - the Law Society needs to grow a pair and strip these cunts of their ability to practise law, pour encourager les autres.

And yet, even when you think you've seen the lowest that a government can go, something comes along that just makes everything so much worse. Invoking Godwin's Law on this one doesn't even do it justice. The theories of race on which the UK Border Agency is seeking to vastly overreach its remit were discredited decades ago. What the hell is happening to Britain? Is this how people in Germany were beginning to feel in 1932?

This is fucking disgusting. It would be appalling and shameful for this to happen in this country at any time. That it is happening under a Labour government is little short of diabolical. These people have no fucking souls, no fucking integrity, and no moral right to stand up and claim to lead us. If the sordid scramble to their lawyers as soon as it looks as though they're going to be held to account for pissing all over the expenses regulations (apparently they are the last people in the country who still believe that the letter of the law can be used to crush its spirit) hadn't demonstrated their mordant sociopathy, this does it to a tee. Either have the bollocks to issue removal orders or grant an amnesty, you cunts! These are real people, people with whom your own citizens have fallen in love and built families, with whose lives you are playing tiddlywinks! ...I dunno. There are just too many things to be angry about, too many examples of people being shat on from great heights by those who preen themselves with pretences of protection. It's too much. I'm burnt out. I want out. This society, this country, it isn't mine any more. I've been sold a pup, and I want out. I'm told Canada is nice; I suspect Sweden is more to my taste, but I'm kind of held back by not speaking Swedish (although granted, most days I don't get to speak English either). It's just... it's bad enough being governed by people who are demonstrably more stupid than I am; but to discover that one's ruling class is not simply the passively evil that one must necessarily be in government, but actively, callously mendacious... I can't bear it. I just can't.

This is the moment I knew the well-worn Gandhi quote had become completely debased: when the Taxpayer Alliance saw fit to apply it to their own battle. Despite having so decisively won 30 years ago that even parties of the centre left have felt unable to argue against their contention. But then, that's entirely typical of the hard right; the more power is handed to them, the harder they play the victim card.

Bye bye, press freedom. It was nice whilst you were here, but now you have left Britain's shores, I hope we're all very happy without you. Well, I hope everyone else is. I won't be, but hey - what can I do?

(On a calmer note - surely the law has obviously been misapplied here, and the appeal courts will make this go away in very short order. After all, if this injunction is allowed to stand, it will compromise Hansard itself, and I can't see anyone standing for that. But it's much more alarming that the injunction could be granted in the first place, as opposed to Carter-Fuck & Partners being told to piss off and stop trying it on, on pain of contempt of court. A law firm with no conscience and a judge with no clue are a dangerous juxtaposition.)

I guess that neatly answers the "what can I do?" question posed above, too... but actually, what's really warmed my chilly bits tonight is the way that everyone, left and right, are all over this at the moment. I think Carter-Fuck might just have gone a little bit too far this time.

I love Velvet Acid Christ's musical output, but hexfix93? Unfortunately, he has a tendency to stand up and make a dick of himself in public. For instance, he mentions in his "review" of the Virus Ti Snow that it sounds amazing... but only through its own DACs; when he outputs audio over USB and through his soundcard, "it sounds just like the crappy plug in synths I hate" as he puts it. Er - sweetie, for the love of your oh so sensitive ears, get a new soundcard! If everything you play through it sounds lame, what's more likely - that no softsynth author can hear properly, or that your soundcard is a bag of bollocks...? Just sayin' - there's a really obvious lowest common denominator here, and you seem to have your arse in your hand trying not to notice it. Apogee make nice ones. Buy one. I'm sure you can afford it.

I really ought to start a section here devoted to malicious compliance. Here's another example - this time Morrisons have taken it upon themselves to expose how silly and onerous current licensing regulations are. Well done, guys. And despite asserting that they should be ashamed of themselves, Greg Mulholland MP should really be ashamed of himself for not laying the blame at the feet of the people who wrote the law, rather than the ones who are merely doing their best to comply with it. (Except - gosh, who would that be? Oh, right, yes - MPs...)

Unfortunately, what they don't mention is that if you make your government sufficiently scared of you, and your government is sufficiently powerful, you have exactly the necessary preconditions for the development of tyranny. After all, a government can hardly stand up to that which it fears - attempting to instil a greater fear is the only recourse left to it. The only realistic option is to evolve a government which has no need to either fear its citizens or be feared by them - and the only approach which enables that is a government which is identical to its populace. Which means, at the very least, direct democracy - but probably anarchism - by which I mean that state of government where, rather than powers being devolved downwards only as far as necessary by a centralised source, powers are delegated upwards by empowered individuals only when it is necessary to make collective decisions.

"Bye, then." The only sensible response to anyone standing up to say that a high tax rate will make them leave the country. Possibly to be followed up by some suggestion that they should mind that doors don't hit their arse on the way out, depending on whether they're quite as obnoxious as Tracey Emin.

60,000 jobs? The Tories say that giving a break to new businesses on employers' NI will create 60,000 jobs. If they truly want to sort out unemployment for good, they'll need to create some four million jobs. As a proportion, sixty thousand is 1.5% - a rounding error. Good God, these people are just worthless! If they're the alternative, we might as well keep the current bunch of idiots and timeservers in power...

How did we come to this? How have we, as a nation, sleepwalked into a state where the only damned thing we get to choose on election day is which party has better PR?

And how, precisely, has "we have a huge budget deficit, so we need to tighten our belts as a nation" come to be synonymous with "we have no money, so we need to screw the people who have least of all so we can keep on cutting our own taxes whilst still meeting our debt obligations"? I'd find the bleating about the need to economise from the peanut gallery sooo much more convincing if I heard a shred of indication that they were prepared to pay a penny or two more income tax from their own wages. You know, after having it cut year on year for three fucking decades.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. The Tories have finally said something about their plans to attack benefits. And - well, unless they're significantly underannouncing so as not to totally alienate centrist voters, all their sound and fury has added up to... more or less exactly what Labour were going to do anyway. They're going to retest everyone on incapacity benefit and move those found fit to work across to JSA? But Labour had already announced a plan to move everyone on IB to the harsh and punitive ESA, starting next year. They expect to reduce the number of claimants by 500,000 (from 2.6m - so under 20%) by applying harsh new tests? That's actually half the 1m reduction Labour were projecting... and indeed it's Labour's figure, presumably the projected number of IB claimants ineligible for ESA. (And whilst they claim that every one of those people will save them �25 a week, the difference between high-rate IB and JSA, as Polly Toynbee points out there aren't even that many people claiming the higher rate of IB!) They want to force claimants to start training schemes and take jobs, on pain of loss of benefits? But the ESA regime - into which all new claimants fall anyway - already does this; unless you're in the support group, back-to-work training is compulsory, and refusing it will result in clearly-defined benefit cuts (to people who, by definition, are not well enough to work... *sigh*). They want to privatise the back-to-work schemes, tying payment to success in creating jobs? Labour have already privatised the schemes, so all the Tories are really announcing here is a renegotiation of the contracts - and one which will, by definition, cost the government more if the contracts are successful.

So basically - move along, nothing to see here; if you're on benefits, it doesn't matter whether you vote Labour or Tory, life will become approximately the same degree of bureaucratic nightmare after 2010. Yet another reason I'll be voting Lib Dem - I don't know exactly what their benefits plans are, but they can't be any harsher than Labour's. We know that now, because the Tories have announced their "we're going to squeeze the very poorest until the pips squeak" plans, and they aren't.

And still nobody, as far as I can see, is prepared to come out and admit the fundamental truth of why there are 2,600,000 people on incapacity benefits at the moment - because modern British society is, frankly, constantly stressful - and anyone whose ability to cope with constant stress is at all compromised simply cannot function. I've mentioned this below... but it turns out nobody's listening (which I kinda knew anyway). But unless that's dealt with, unless we can either get back to a point where people can be given jobs for life or evolve a way of ensuring that people feel secure in the face of not being able to rely on any job lasting more than a couple of years - then any attempts to make the benefits system more punitive are more or less designed to exacerbate the very problem they're supposed to be solving. Unless the grand right-wing scheme (because what this illustrates isn't that the Tories are still centre right after all, but just how far right Labour have lumbered - truth is we have two hard-right parties in this country) is to drive those who can't cope with insecurity to suicide by ensuring that they can't escape from it... is that the point, guys? Because you have to know the Daily Mail would get behind you if you were honest about it.

The ever-reliable Mr Porter does it again, with a timely reminder that as dreadful as Labour have been for civil liberties in this countries, there is no guarantee - not from their statements, and most definitely not from their record - that the Tories would be any better at all. The only party that has made a clear commitment (well, it's a little fuzzy around the edges, but let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good) to liberty remains the Lib Dems. Another reason to vote for them; we need their moderating influence.

And let's be honest - this interference in everyday lives from Labour is an aberration; their superstate efforts have previously been concentrated on economic authoritarianism. Social authoritarianism is new, unwelcome, and actually a right wing tradition, which New Labour adopted as a consequence of turning right. It's as though they retained their conviction that a big state could make everything better, but banished any thought of economic interference from their minds - which, of course, only left them one field to crap all over...

Remember the eminently sensible benefits reforms that Iain Duncan Smith and his thinktank came up with just a couple of months ago? I'm glad. The Tories don't. At the moment I can't tell whether the attack they've launched on welfare claimants is any different from Labour's already-punitive approach, or whether it eclipses even that benchmark of callousness (but their explicit targeting of people who have already been professionally assessed as unfit for work would seem to suggest the latter) - but what I can tell is that the Tories have shown their true colours here. They haven't changed a bit since Thatcher's day - or if they have, they've become steadily more rightwing. Daniel Hannan, the NHS-hater that had senior Tories rushing to condemn him as just some maverick? Nope. He's the future of the party. Most of the new intake of Tory MPs will share his views, by and large. The Nasty Party is not only still around, but even nastier these days, because now it has competition. And it's virtually certain to form the next government, if everyone is to be believed.

So I'm going to make a plea. If you care at all about the future of this country, if you care at all about the plight of those people whom experts have assessed as unable to earn a living themselves, if it strikes you as even a little bit unfair that the Conservative response to the country's being screwed by a bunch of obscenely rich bankers is to penalise the people who had least to do with that during the time they are most in need of that assistance - then for God's sake, vote Lib Dem. We NEED a hung parliament in this country! We cannot let any of our prospective tyrants get their hands on absolute power! Not again. Never again.

Does phase matter? Specifically with reference to the static phase of harmonics which make up waveforms. I did some experiments, prompted by music-dsp, in order to check someone's assertion that it matters a lot - and my conclusion ended up being that it matters a bit if you're using headphones, but not otherwise. Oh well.

Whichever side kills you first, Mr Martin. (It turns out that the kind of people who used to torment the "nerds" - ie. people who weren't ashamed of their intelligence - in high school have never really reconciled themselves to the fact that their victims didn't stay victims; you'd think old wounds would have healed over three decades, but no, Andrew Martin apparently can't deal with the unfairness of those he considered himself better than not actually letting his judgement get in the way of their success. Still, perhaps that's not surprising for someone who has attained the lofty achievement of sports editor for the Guardian. Which, as appointments go, is perhaps one rank up from fine arts correspondent for the Sun...)

Damn it! For years I've refused Payment Protection Insurance at every turn, despite the credit card companies' strenuous efforts to sell it to me at every possible opportunity, on the grounds that it doesn't actually offer anything I'd regard as useful protection. And now it turns out that had I taken them up on it, and not asked too many questions about the details, I could have been exempted from my entire credit card debt! Oh well... Mind, at the moment I don't have any credit card debt, having scrimped and saved to get it paid off as soon as possible after my provider decided to try and double my interest twice in a year (unsuccessfully, both times). I think they thought I was a sitting duck for interest charges on what was a 4-digit balance. Er... nope. But then, clearing off the balance every month is the only sensible way to operate a credit card - and I'd get rid of mine altogether if there were a halfway sane alternative for use online.

And whilst I'm in a prognosticative mood, if we do end up with a hung parliament in 2010 (and I hope we do, because we need one, although I have no great expectation), it will be greeted by a certain newspaper with the headline "It's the Sun wot hung it", despite their announcement today that they're coming out in favour of the Tories again.

If it were finally to emerge that what killed this 14 year old girl was not the vaccine itself, but an air embolism introduced by its injection (combined with what turns out to have been a huge and undetected malignant tumour consuming her heart and lungs), I won't be at all surprised. Of course, it's incredibly rare, and anyone who's given a hundred injections will almost certainly know what they're doing - but even after all that, the chance is minuscule, not nil. Look at it this way - the chances of winning the lottery are some 1 in 14 million, and yet someone still wins most weeks.

This is the kind of thing I'm worried about. The government's belief in its right to interfere in private arrangements based on mutual trust is way beyond what we should find acceptable in a free society. Note that the two people concerned (who are policewomen, so have presumably undergone CRB checks) have not been told to regularise their arrangement - they have been told to terminate it. The abusive nanny strikes again.

Update: As it happens, things have moved on. Vernon Coaker, desperate to paint Ofsted as a bunch of jobsworth bureaucrats applying perfectly sensible rules without any semblance of discrimination or judgement, has ordered a review of the case. Unfortunately, interpreting rules to their letter is not merely the province of automata; it is also a rather nifty form of malicious compliance - do exactly what you're told, exactly as you're told to do it, and you effectively expose just how stupid and ill-thought-out rules can be. I'd be prepared to lay money on this being what Ofsted were doing here. They were given an asinine set of rules to implement, they knew it, and they decided that the best way to prove it was to do exactly as they had been told. Well - mission accomplished, guys! I can't help but think your requirement to fish around in the icky details of amicable agreements will disappear with some new guidance in very short order, and I can only imagine that you'll all be delighted. (Except the jobsworths, of course... but have you ever wondered whether they might not be playing the game too?)

I am autistic; I can speak for myself. Nobody else has the right to speak for me - or for anyone else. Nobody else can. But if I must nominate someone to speak on my behalf, Aspies for Freedom are the people I want doing it. Not the eugenicists, fluffheads and bigots at Autism Speaks.

(I had earlier said "I have autism". But that form of words in itself perpetuates the myth that autism is a condition that can somehow be distilled off and thrown away. It isn't. Being an aspie is a foundation of the person I am, a set of traits which define and reflect a huge chunk of who I am and what it means to be me. It makes as little sense to say that I have autism as it does to say that a woman has femaleness.)

Beautifully, poetically, Michael Holden puts his finger on the problem at the heart of modern public discourse:

Nowhere am I more reminded of this than on listening to debates on Radio 4 where purportedly intelligent people thoughtlessly utter fatuous truisms and parade their prejudices without attempting to engage their brains at all.

Tom who, sorry? Whenever I read attacks like this on Richard Stallman - who, let's face it, has never pretended to be polite or tactful, but has also never compromised or wavered in his beliefs and his manner of expressing them - I'm reminded of this quote from Firefly:

But I am beginning to wonder whether this kind of muck, from some know-nothing journo-wannabe child who has to keep demanding attention to avoid facing the ugly truth of his own irrelevance, is actually a form of hate speech against aspies. (Not to mention this kind of worthless pisstaking from someone who should be old enough to know better.) I'm not saying it should be prosecuted or prevented - free speech good! - but... let's recognise it for what it is. And confusing the passive aggressive nature of de Icaza's response with politeness is just the cherry on top, really.

Although ironically, if you read the original story and its comments, it's clear that Martin Owens doesn't even consider Stallman's opinion of de Icaza to be terribly controversial or surprising (and it's also stated explicitly that it's not related to his opinion of Mono, which has become a handy litmus test for identifying those who bothered to track the quote back to its source... and gosh! the vast majority of commenters haven't. Who'd'a'thought?) - and there's a hint that it's backed up with at least some justification (although sadly, we'll have to wait on a transcript for the anecdote in question). So basically, what we seem to have here is some blowhard trying to make a name for themselves by besmirching someone else's reputation. Yeah... well, I'm sure you'll make a name for yourself, Master Holwerda, but I dare say you won't like that name very much.

I'd take the right's claims of media bias more seriously if they were ever heard to express the opinion that the Daily Mail should tone down their rhetoric and recruit a few ~~more~~ socialists.

Thank you, Jenni Russell! Sometimes it feels as though I'm basically on my own in my concerns. Thanks for reassuring me otherwise...

Sometimes the law finds itself powerless. That's because the law exists as a tool of civilisation; it governs those who accept its protection, whilst those who believe themselves to be outside it not only feel unconstrained by it, but believe themselves to be free to act with impunity against those who are governed by it. It's a problem. Society finds itself at the mercy of the psychopath... especially its more vulnerable members, and especially when the psychopath in questions lives down the street. They abuse the law at will, and yet are the first to cry for its protection when anyone dares to strike back at them...

So here's an idea for a solution. If a person, or a group of people, cannot be effectively contained by the law, they should have the protection of the law withdrawn from them for a fixed period. In other words, anyone may take any action they feel appropriate against them with legal impunity - the law would simply turn a blind eye to such action. Granted, this should be a last resort, only for those people who are persistently problematic - like, for example, the family of jackals who drove Ms Pilkington to despair, and who two years later are still acting with apparent impunity - but since these people have no respect for the law anyway, to have a judge say to them "As of now, I am withdrawing the protection of the law from you for a period of 30 days. During that time, the members of your estate may take any action they deem necessary or appropriate to solve the problem you are causing them, and the law will turn its eye to the wall. If you survive, you may consider the slate to have been wiped clean. If you do not, that is no longer the law's concern."

I don't know whether this is cause or symptom, but I can think of no more vivid illustration of the breakdown of trust between parents and schools. When parents send their child to a school, they expect that school to be primarily concerned with their child's welfare - and would surely expect that this included ensuring that they were given crucial information about what was going on in their child's life. Like, for instance, the fact that their child was tied to the railings and set upon by a pack of hyenas. But no. Apparently the school not only regards it as none of the parents' business, but will sack anyone who follows their conscience and decides otherwise, even if that person has a direct connection to the incident (like seeing it happen and having to mop up the aftermath). And then we have this pearl of wisdom from the head of NAHT:

Right, let's be clear, Mr Fuckwit. If a game gets out of hand, that is a serious case of bullying, as far as the victim is concerned! Take it from one who was there. If you can't see that, then you shouldn't be teaching children, and certainly shouldn't be leading any kind of professional body. Because at the moment, all I can conclude is that it's hardly surprising that bullying in school is rife and severe, when the attitude of the teaching profession is "la la la, everything is lovely, it's just kids being kids" and the instinct of school bodies is to protect themselves first, rather than the children in their care.

Another day, another tax dollar. Or pound, in this case - one every two months, a "broadband tax" which this government, in its infinite ~~wisdom~~ boneheaded fucking stupidity, intends to apply not to people who have broadband (which, you know, the name) but to people who have a fixed phone line. Which will catch little old ladies on BT Basic who are only paying �4.40 a month for their phone (and will represent an 11.4% price hike), but leave anyone with mobile broadband off the hook. Once again, there's the classic signs of this bunch of idiots going "we must do something; this is something" and not even bothering to think things through beforehand; and once again, there's a complete lack of consideration for the very people Labour are supposed to be there to defend.

Honestly, I have no idea how we have managed to end up with a government who are, individually and collectively, so utterly devoid of integrity, intelligence or competence; but it says very bad things about this country as a society. Invade us now, someone. Please...

Free markets? Yep, sure! But you do understand what "remove all state assistance to businesses" means, don't you? For example, the recent legal fiction of limited liability, being one of the more recent struts of capital to have been introduced (only about 150 years ago), must necessarily be one of the first to be abolished? Funny... I've never met a "free market" advocate who was prepared to get behind that. Which is strange, considering that even Murray Rothbard disliked the legal arrangement.

Bluntly, if you don't want to bear the risks of a business in which you wish to invest, then make that business a loan and arrange for profit-linked repayments. If you actually take the step of owning part of a company, of placing your capital directly at its disposal in exchange for a say in its direction, then you have to accept the responsibilities for which you're signing up. That includes the responsibility for meeting the debts that company runs up, and the responsibility for any illegal action in which that company engages. Piercing the corporate veil would, I'd wager, lead to a sharp improvement in boardroom behaviour!

I don't make a habit of agreeing with the Morning Star, despite giving it �15 that I couldn't afford recently, because it tends a bit too much towards the authoritarian end of hardcore socialism; but every so often it hits the nail squarely on the head. Its recent article about the rationale of benefits payments is one such instance. Nice one, guys!

New Labour have betrayed everyone. This article should be more widely read. It exposes just how corrupt Labour's attitude to the least advantaged in society has become - and of course, they can get away with it because nobody will stand up or speak out for those on benefits. No votes in it. But it's the tip of the iceberg; after all, when we look at Labour's record, what we see is over a decade of attacks on civil liberty, presumptions against diversity, the implementation of punitive hard-right policies dressed in fluffy social-worker speak, the pursuit of policies which egregiously favour the better off whilst punishing the poor... There's a word for this. That word is "fascism". Whether they truly understand it or not, New Labour have become a functionally fascist government. Perhaps they should not be blamed for it; after all, fascism is the eventual fate of every democracy - but their betrayal, and their dishonesty in refusing to face up to what they have become, is complete. They deserve to be destroyed as a political force... and then they deserve to be prosecuted for treason.

And the fact of the matter is, with specific regard to incapacity benefits, that what nobody is prepared to acknowledge is that the structure of society itself is making people too ill to function! We are constantly told that lifetime jobs are a thing of the past. We can see that the effect of a meritocracy is to damn the 99% who aren't at the top of their fields. We all understand that nobody dare get sick. Our employment rights have been diluted into worthlessness. The balance of power in the workplace has been not just shifted, but thrown completely over the wall to the employers. Unions have been reduced to little more than glorified social clubs. Workforces are decimated, pay-frozen and deprived of their retirement benefits, whilst boards of directors award themselves double-digit percentage rises every year. The environment for small business is actively hostile, between banks who will not lend, large corporations whose power transcends national governments and who can hold nation states to ransom, and governments who accept the lies of big capital without a murmur. We live in a high stress, high risk, high exploitation, low security, low freedom, low empowerment, low mobility society. And unsurprisingly, a lot of us are not mentally equipped to cope with that; we need guarantees of stability, security and self-determination that big business will never consent to giving up. We need our governments to counterweight capital, not guarantee it. We need to be allowed to trust our neighbours, rather than whipped up into a panic about whether the strange guy three doors down has designs on our chattels or children. If we must have government hovering over us, it needs to be making sure nothing else is dropping bombs on us, not parachuting in every 30 seconds to make sure we're not being naughty. And our needs are not being met. Our nanny state is not only asleep on the job, she's in a paedophile ring and pimping us around to her boyfriends, whilst telling us it's all for our own good and we'll thank her when we've grown up. This is the legacy of thirty years of Thatcherism. That the last twelve have been peddled by the New (Labour) Party, when they were elected on an explicit mandate to do things differently, is a comprehensive betrayal of society itself.

So if you have any shred of hope left that democracy is still worthwhile, or that the country can be turned around, please get out at the next election and vote Lib Dem. You may not agree with their principles, but electoral reform is necessary to stop the last three decades and the destruction they have wrought upon our society from ever happening again. Yes, we'll lose "strong government" - and you know what another word for strong government is? Tyranny. Good riddance.

And if you don't have any faith left in democracy... just remember that the person who leads the revolution is the very last person you want leading the post-revolutionary government; any revolution which isn't aiming only for tabula rasa must be opposed, and any revolutionary who doesn't promise to stand aside the second they overthrow the current system, or doesn't keep that promise, should be put down like a rabid wolf.

What country did I wake up in this morning?! It turns out that you can take every reasonable step to ensure that you are in compliance with a law (hell, you can draft the fucking law!) and yet still be found guilty of, and punished for, breaking it. As far as I can see, that means that New Labour have turned employing a person - especially a person from an ethnic minority - into an unjustifiable risk, because there's simply no practical way to be sure that you're complying with the law. And they've done this as we've come into the worst recession since the 30s. Well done, guys. Hope you lose.

Can someone please explain: Is Jack Schofield pro-Microsoft, or just vehemently, irrationally anti-Linux?

Just happened across an idiot whose argument went something like this: "The official figures for benefit fraud, which are vanishingly low, do not include undetected fraud. Therefore, they are meaningless and cannot be relied upon. Therefore, benefit fraud is rampant." I cannot quite begin to state how ridiculous such an argument is. Here's the thing: If you don't like the evidence for a proposition, produce better evidence. Otherwise, it's the only evidence in town; either you accept it, or you reject it and negate the basis for even having the discussion. If you can't support your claim that the evidence on offer is faulty, then your claim fails.

Take this example. The official figures for benefit fraud are, as I say, vanishingly low. Leaving aside the question of why the government would produce figures that actively undermine their claim to be able to save billions by squeezing out fraud, unless there are other figures of equal or greater credibility showing a substantially higher level of fraud, then those figures are the only evidence on the table. Either you accept them as a starting point, or you have to accept that we simply do not know how much benefit fraud is going on, and a statement such as "benefit fraud is widespread" is as meaningless and unsupportable as a statement that "benefit fraud is almost non-existent". Reject the evidence, and all you have is opinion and anecdote, from which nothing can usefully be derived - and you're also adopting a position which is basically anti-intellectual, anti-rational, and pro-stupidity. There's no other way to put it. Either you accept evidence, or you produce counter-evidence, or you reject reason altogether. And anyone who doesn't accept that should just have the common courtesy to shut the fuck up in public.

It all comes back to the scientific method, which is directly derived from logic and reason. The plain fact is this: no matter how distasteful the results it may turn up, no matter how much it pisses on our little dogma bonfires, rational enquiry is the only way we can collectively know anything. It is the ultimate statement of humility, both individual and collective (which is why religious types who bemoan "the arrogance of science" are always good for a laugh); it accords no privilege, recognises no authority, is blind to passion or prejudice, and states very simply - "we can know only what we can prove". It is the foundation stone of Western civilisation (although ironically, it arguably would not have arisen without the Christian focus upon individual, personal salvation), and the only means by which progress can be, and has been, achieved. We discard it at our peril - and yet it is never popular, always widely condemned, suspected, vilified and rejected, especially by those who would speak admiringly of "common sense". Somehow, the most equalising, inclusive, liberating tool in society's workshop is almost always viewed as elitist, divisive, and constraining by the general public - a view encouraged by authoritarians of all shades, especially the hard right (who prize dogma as an essential organisational tool in society) and the soft left (who can't bear the thought of telling anyone that they're wrong). And now we're at a critical point in society's development; our actions now will have consequences that won't be felt for decades, and we need reason as we never have before. Yet it is reviled as never before.

If we, as a species, do not reorient our public discussions to place rational enquiry at the heart of them; if we continue to despise our only source of true knowledge; if we continue to make vital decisions based upon superstition, prejudice, and wishful thinking - we'll go the way of the Roman Empire. Only this time, there will be no Constantinople.

If you must fumble the spelling of a word, I humbly submit that "retarded" might not be the best word to trip over.

"Oh, fuck off" is a phrase that should be used more often in public discourse, especially in response to someone who left rational debate about three stops back and is now flying their own little kite for the hell of it. If I heard a politician utter those words at a deserved moment, particularly in response to journalists or their opposite numbers, my respect for them would increase inordinately. It would be understood instantly by the public not as "I can't answer you, so I'll attack you instead", but as "You're just beneath my contempt, let alone further discussion".

Well skewered! It's important to remember that the Daily Mail was forthright in its support for fascism in the 1930s. It's equally important to remember that they have maintained essentially the same political position since.

"If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they'll miss lots of special offers." That was part of Tesco's response to the claim that they discriminated against a Jedi on religious grounds by ordering him out of the store when he refused to remove his hood. Now, OK, they didn't seem to be taking the whole thing terribly seriously, which might prove to be a mistake should a court rule that a religion doesn't have to be serious to be treated as a religion (and let's face it, it'd be hard to come to any other conclusion, given the problem of defining "serious" in the face of legitimate religions who claim that their founder came back from the dead 3 days later, or parted a stretch of sea with a stick, or... well, you get the picture) - but this quote leapt out at me. Talk about unintentionally revealing...! This is what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to let supermarkets distract you with lots of shiny, and load up your trolley with it. Tunnel vision, focus, only nipping in for a loaf of bread - these things are sins against capitalism, and must be punished with ostracism and exile. Thanks, Tesco - at least we know where you stand. (Oh - thanks for keeping the plebs out of Sainsbury's, too. That is appreciated.)

If you give your child's friends a lift on a regular basis, the government want you to sign their register. Well, not quite - they want to force you to sign their register, on pain of a �5000 fine. One in four adults, suddenly required to cough up �64 and sign up for ongoing are-you-a-pervert checks for the rest of their lives? And it's worse, even, than that - the government proposes that hearsay will be sufficient to get someone kicked off the register.

Now, many things leap out at me about this. There's the attack on society which would have made Thatcher proud, if she still had her marbles. There's the Stasi-esque state snooping aspect of it. But most of all, there's the presumption that everyone is a potential abuser, as the inestimable Henry Porter notes. Thing is - anyone who's been to university in the last, oh, 40 years or so should really have seen this coming. I remember 16 years ago, in the Student Union meeting at Wadham College, being utterly appalled by the repeated proposition of a motion stating, amongst a few statements of the obvious on how truly nasty rape was by people who had evidently never experienced it themselves, that all men were potential rapists. The motion didn't pass, that time - but the mindset has clearly persisted, expanded, become all-encompassing, and achieved political power. We are governed by a bunch of people who see evil in the eyes of everyone, but have total faith in the purifying power of government.

Let's be clear about something. People who can predict the lottery draw do not show up on TV to demonstrate their miraculous ability in front of everyone. They buy one ticket, collect their millions, and bugger off into the background, never to be seen or heard from again. Indeed, to extrapolate - people who can predict the future at all, in any aspect, with any degree of success or certainty, would have to be mordantly bloody stupid to actually tell anybody.

So I guess this is why the diagnosing psychologist told my father I was "one of the clearest cases [of Asperger's they'd] seen":

Existence exists? Hmm. Right. How about non-existence? Does that also exist? It must do, otherwise the statement "God does not exist" cannot be expressed with any degree of meaning whatsoever. Yet, if "existence exists" is an application of "A = A", then we've just proved that where existence is concerned, A = !A. So, obviously it can't be - but then, if it is merely a statement, then existence is itself a meaningless property, which applies as directly to its complement as to itself. But of course, it isn't. "Existence" is not a single property, but more like a selector in Smalltalk; as a word, it encapsulates hundreds of different (yet related) properties, and the specific property being referred to can only be derived from context. And whilst A = A is quite true for objects - and even individual properties of objects - it is not only not necessarily true, but entirely meaningless, when applied to selectors. But then, that's the trouble with language. It's inherently woolly. Language is merely a map, and as every tracker knows, the map is not the territory; trying to reason with language is like trying to paint with turpentine.

Now, someone - whose name regrettably escapes me, just at the moment - said "If you arrive at a contradiction, check your premises. One of them is wrong." I think we can all see the applicability here. And if you only ever read one philosopher in your life - do your mind a favour, and make it Wittgenstein.

Don't like the layout? Fix it easily! Don't complain to me. I'm one of those people who grew up with monochrome monitors and is just better psychologically adapted to light-on-dark, and since this is my place...

Hurrah! Of course, as you can tell from this page, some of us have abandoned the entire concept of layout as not worth the effort... Hey, when your eyes give up the ghost after half a century of having high-wattage lights shone directly into them from 18" away, your screenreaders will thank me. Of course, now the problem becomes - how do we distinguish tables when they're being used as tables? I humbly suggest the formulation of a standardised set of semantic class tags - so if your table is a real table, you can tag it with class="noreally" or something.

Of course, the basic problem is that HTML itself isn't really fit for purpose. The whole damn web thing is hack upon hack upon hack, whether you're using CSS, Javascript or vanilla HTML; for everything except the simplest of applications, it really sucks. And what are people doing with the web? As far as I can see, they're just talking to each other. Newsgroups have become forums, IRC has become IM has become Twitter, finger has become Facebook. Progress? Not so much; sure, we chew up many more CPU cycles, and everything looks prettier (we'll just ignore Myspace for the purposes of this discussion, shall we...?) - but it's all pretty much the same old shit in a psychedelic new bucket. Innovation? Not yet. Not really. Not like Visicalc or Smalltalk. Indeed, probably about the most innovative technologies to come out of the web era have been the wiki and the search engine, and they go back to the very earliest days of WWW. Since then...? I'm struggling to think of anything that didn't begin its life as an already-proven idea, plus a super-super topping of "... ON THE WEB111". Perhaps there's a reason for this?

Isn't it time that the developer community at large recognised the essential truth that Ted Dzuiba is little more than a talking penis?

Three cheers for Kenny MacAskill! It's good to be able to finally write something positive on here. I'm heartened, not just by the decision he's reached with regard to Mr Megrahi, but by the detailed rationale he laid out in coming to that conclusion. It didn't just give me hope that he'd sat down and properly thought about the issue, in a way that Jack "Michael Howard? That pinko softie?" Straw could never, ever have been accused of; it also made me think that even had I disagreed with his decision, I'd have felt reassured that he'd made it in that manner. So well done, Mr MacAskill - you did your job, and you did it properly, and that's rare enough these days to be worth praising; and if you're typical of the calibre of representative in the SNP, then I wish you the very best in your quest for independence!

Oh, and if anyone has a one-bedroomed dwelling to rent somewhere in Scotland (preferably in a village) that they don't mind letting to a quiet aspie with two cats, please drop me a line...

Predictably, of course, it turns out that I'm more or less alone in feeling that way. In particular, it seems I might be out on my own in thinking that al-Megrahi might not be innocent, yet believing that MacAskill did the right thing. I dunno. It's long been a guiding principle of mine that if you want to be reasonably confident of having done the right thing, pick the thing to do that's going to piss everyone off. It seems I'm not the only one. Those who believe Megrahi is innocent seem to be pissed off that he didn't go further; everyone else is on a warpath saying "he didn't show any compassion!" without registering that the whole point of MacAskill's explanation of his decision was "but we're better than that"; and the Lib Dems are in the extraordinary position of seeking to make political capital out of a decision with which they basically agree, which is just... sad. As far as I can tell, only I and the head of the Church of Scotland think MacAskill did the right thing for the right reasons. Damn shame I'm an atheist, really - seems the Church of Scotland might be my kind of people...

Edward O'Connor. I'm an aspie. I've got a piece of paper saying so. Now, granted you hate aspies, but I'd like to know - what's your medically-sanctioned excuse for being an utter cunt?

Everything that made Britain's name in the world is dead. And nowhere is this more visible than our shameful - nay, despicable - treatment of asylum seekers. People come to our country in fear and desperation, under the misapprehension that it has remained a bastion of liberalism and welcome; as soon as they arrive, they're chucked into concentration camps and given a pittance (�35 a week - apparently �42 a week was just too expensive) to live on. Despite the fact that these are some of the brightest and most motivated individuals from their home countries, we prohibit them from working. And then we turf them back out of the country, no matter what the evidence, because they happen to come from a place we don't want to piss off. There are many things that make me disgusted to be regarded as a British citizen, but this is one of the most acute; so I just want to say, for the record, "Not in my name", and to apologise to every asylum seeker for the treatment this pathetic little island metes out to them, and for our betrayal of our own proud legacy... and all because New Labour dare not be seen anywhere other than way off to the right of the Tories on any issue. (And if anyone were to slap Phil Woolas repeatedly around the head with a swordfish and post a video of it to Youtube, I for one wouldn't be at all surprised.)

This is how I know I am no longer young: Yesterday, someone lent me their phone so that I could take a photo of the skyline of London. I couldn't, for the life of me, work out how to actually trigger the image capture...

There's humanity; there are the dregs of humanity; and then there are CiF commenters. I'm sure that when the Grauniad decided that it'd throw open its website to the general public, some years ago, that they thought it would be excellent and democratising. I wonder whether they realised that before its 5th birthday their commenting community would be so nearly exclusively populated by sixtysomething right-wingers with no sense of humour, no analytical capacity, and an almost autistic penchant for word-for-word repetition that their voice would set the tone, quite obliterating the Grauny's hard-won reputation as a bastion of liberalism and free thought? (There are, of course, some wonderful exceptions - BeautifulBurnout and misfratz, for two. They seem either to be given contributor status almost immediately, or vanish within a couple of months, never to return.) It's got to the point where I installed YesScript for the sole purpose of blocking Javascript at www.guardian.co.uk, simply because the comments don't load if you have JS turned off. (I used to think that was a design flaw, mind. I'm wiser now...)

We could solve an awful lot of the problems in this country by simply denying people who believe immigration is a significant problem the right to vote, on the grounds that they're simply not intelligent enough to evaluate the available evidence. In general, universal suffrage has proven itself to be a lousy idea. There's something offensive to me about equating the vote of someone who goes out of their way to evaluate both their own ideas and those of others critically and with reference to all available evidence with that of someone whose idea of rational argument begins and ends with "everyone knows X". If we want to ensure that democracy works, we need to ensure that the idiots can't be heard. (And by "idiot" I mean someone who glories in their ignorance, not just someone whose processing abilities are limited - we all suffer from that one.)

This is my courtyard. If you happen to recognise it, then please note - it is not a smoking room, a public bar or a taxi rank. Thank you.

I've fixed the old Wired Autism Spectrum Quotient test and have parked it here until the flood of takers eats up all my bandwidth. Mail me for the source (see above).

Some pictures of my music gear. This might turn into a run of reviews at some point soon, both hardware and software.

isleofavalon

come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off

i know in darkness i will find you giving up inside like me