Author: neilg63

Categories
All in the Mind

A Very Human Animal

What is in your genes and what is not?

The nature versus nurture debate has long presented us with a false dichotomy as nurture, i.e socio-environmental influences, is very much part of nature. But many commentators have narrowed the definition of nature to refer only to genes, the mere blueprint or genotype that determines our potential subsequent development. To simplify matters, consider a newborn girl. Assuming she does not have pervasive brain damage, her future depends in large part on her upbringing and a multitiude of socio-economic and other circumstantial factors. Whether the girl becomes a university researcher twenty five year later or ends up as a prostitute roaming the streets of a foreign metropolis depends not on her inherent intelligence, but on the opportunities that arise in her life. Yet sadly the great advances in our understanding of human behaviour and intelligence are undermined by an obsession with behavioural or rather psychiatric genetics. Every day the mainstream media entertains us with news of new discoveries linking behaviour and facets of intelligence with genetics. Of course, in true PC form ther suggestion is seldom spun in terms of the genetic causation of intellectual superiority. and thus of ethno-racial superiority, but certainly takes us down that slippery slope. Is your child not doing very well at maths? Don't blame the teacher, TV, computer games or a culture of instant gratification, it is, or so we are led to believe, all down to his or her genes.

An Arithmetic Digression

Mathematical aptitude varies enormously among the general population. Some of us can perform amazing tricks with mental arithmetic. We probably paid attention in primary school maths lessons, learned our times tables and have continued ever since to make numerous conversions and comparisons. If I read the government has spent two billion pounds on something, before I scream what a waste of money, I work out how much that is per affected citizen. Thus if 2 billion were the annual expenditure on NHS-provided dental care for the whole of the UK, that would be fabulous value for money at just around £33 per UK citizen. Two billion is a very large number but divided by sixty million people yields a much smaller number, barely enough to employ a single dental assistant for an hour and without counting the cost of equipment, supplies and administration. Yet apparently some of us fail to reckon in such large numbers. The psychological impact of a Sun headline lamenting a government overspend of 20 million would probably differ little if the quoted figure were 20 billion, as your average casual reader just gauges 'a very large number'. Of course all this pales into insignificance when compared with the national personal debt of over 1 trillion (10 to the power of 12 or over a million millions), but that's whopping £16,600 per citizen or around £36000 per worker (all 28 million of us). Million, billion, trillion or quintillion? Who could care about the additional zeroes? The truth only a minority of us actively apply our minds to these problems on a regular basis, but could if the results justified the mental effort. Much is down to early training, but new skills can be learned with a slightly greater application of one's mind in later life too. If you understood basic concepts early on in life, you'll probably retain a comparative aptitude for number-crunching throughout your adult life. By contrast if you failed to grasp these concepts as a child due to lack of motivation, you might forever claim a natural or possibly inherited deficit in all matters of arithmetic and readily believe that the brains of number-crunching geeks differ fundamentally from yours, wired for managing relationships. Ever heard someone claim "I'm just not very good at languages", which basically means "As I can get by quite well in my own own language, I just couldn't be bothered to learn another. I'd rather apply my mental effort to something more rewarding.".

Precious little evidence reveals any biological basis for dyscalculia or innumeracy, in all but the most extreme cases with obvious intellectual deficits. Indeed numerical skills vary enormously across both cultures and historical epochs. Anglo-Saxon lacks words for number units greater than a thousand. Units greater than that are expressed with Latinate words like million, while Sanscrit-derived languages all have words for a hundred thousand (lakh) and ten million (crore). By contrast many languages of remote ethnic groups isolated from the rest of humanity until recently, lack words for numbers greater than ten or in some cases two or three. The entire Roman Empire was built without place-value notation or the concept of zero. Both modern decimal and binary notation use a place value system, e.g. 100 in decimal represents ten to the power of two, while in binary it represents two to the power of two or four. The ancient Romans used letters to represent the most common decimally rounded numbers and as a result the numeral representing 73 => LXXIII was counterintuitively longer than the letter C representing 100. Yet if we expressed all numbers in binary, few would confuse a personal debt of £100 0000 0000 (1024 GBP) with a corporate debt of 1 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 (1,048,576 GBP). If we were to express the World's human population circa 2000 in binary it would be staggering 1 0110 0101 1010 0000 1011 1100 0000,0000, plenty of room for cultural diversity without adding another zero. My point here is that systems of representation shape the way our brains process complex phenomena. A computer program to represent the geometric movements of a walking human being could in its finest detail contain thousands of instructions, but more commonly this is simplified by calling standardised routines, limiting the same program to less than a hundred lines. However, your average person performs this action apparently without any greater expenditure of valuable intellectual resources.

Culture and Numeracy

Are we to conclude that remote tribes of Papua Guinea with only basic numeration lack the inherent calculation skills that come naturally to ten year old Indonesian money changers, informing tourists in two or more languages of the exchange rate of their chosen currency (Euros, Yen, AUD or USD) in seconds, putting to shame most modern British school kids still struggling with their 7 times table? How do we explain that most British school kids circa 1960 had mastered their 12 times table before the age of ten and would learn to calculate the height of a tree in feet with a yardstick, clinometer and tangent table, while modern teenagers often struggle to accurately calculate how much change they should get from a tenner? Genetics explains very little here, yet arithmetic performance varies considerably. As a case in point, until nine years ago the world of programming remained a mystery to me. I sort of understood the transformation from rudimentary instructions into simple routines, which could then be handled as objects, but I would have struggled to interpret a simple Javascript function. Much that seems obvious to seasoned programmers appears quite daunting to otherwise intelligent newbies. Yet once you've got your head round one C-derived language, you can easily learn another. For me PHP proved a godsend (metaphorically speaking) because it let me experiment with procedural code and simple functions to produce meaningful and rewarding results. In the last three years I've transitioned to object-oriented PHP, Java, C++, Python and C# and am currently learning Ruby. At some stage something clicked. I successfully transferred a set of mathematical and linguistic skills I had developed for other purposes to a new domain. So I didn't learn vectors, matrices and quadratic equations for nothing in my high school years. All this dispells the myth that people are somehow born to excel in a given subject.

What Genetics does determine

We'd be mistaken to conclude genetics has no bearing whatsoever on the formation of our personalities and intellect, just that most of us have tremendous untapped intellectual potential, which will probably never be fully exploited except in the most fortuitous of circumstances. What exactly does a marketing consultant do, that millions of other humble souls cannot? He or she can simply offer experience and more important is well integrated into a network of like-minded professionals. I've personally witnessed project managers for IT companies give their mega-buck clients factually contradictory technical explanations, but embellished with fanciful buzzwords and pushing all the right psychological buttons. They are more concerned with persuasion, spin, public relations and perceived customer satisfaction than providing clients with key information about software development process. I've met a KPMG e-government expert who had no knowledge of HTML tags let alone XML, but could quote the percentage of businesses who use Microsoft Word (â„¢) to justify the premium rate office suite's continued use in the public sector where free alternatives are available. Yet without HTML tags the Web would be little more than a disorganised directory of unlinked files. Next time you buy a washing machine, ask the sales assistant what an electric motor is. Despite considerable dumbing down, I think most store assistants realise a washing machine needs one. Yet consultants, often earning way in excess of £100,000 a year frequently display the most amazing levels of ignorance in the very subjects, on which they are supposed to advise local councils. Why? Because they lack the motivation to learn such trifling details and can attain much better results by remaining faithful to their bosses and focusing on what we tend to call people skills and report writing.

So do we explain that person A became a high-earning consultant, and his sibling, person B, ended up teaching English abroad in second rate language school before retraining as a programmer? Do they have fundamentally different brains or have circumstances just programmed their respective brains to concentrate on different aspects of life? I would suggest that with the exception of individuals born with severe brain damage, our genetic differences determine mainly physical and motor-sensory attributes. While access to sports facilities and training play an important role in deciding who will belong to the next generation of tennis champions, undoubtedly a high proportion of us will never attain such heights of dexterity no matter how hard we try. In cruder terms the World's fastest sprinter can run a thousandth of second faster than the next fastest man and probably within one hundredth of a second of scores of other athletes who have undergone a severe training regime in their physical prime. That the difference in performance among the world's top athletes is so minute belies the conspicuous fact that this more than almost any other pursuit is the most dependent on genes and most prone to subtle genetic variations between different racial groups, e.g. most of the world's top sprinters carry genes from Sub-Saharan Africa, while most of the world's top swimmers are either of European or East Asian descent. Minor adaptations have thus led to huge differences in competitive sports within the same species.

Somatopsychic Affects

Many of use understand the concept of psychosomatics, the way our state of mind affects our bodily functions. If you feel depressed for whatever reason, you may change your eating and self-care patterns gradually losing the will to live or may succumb to the lure of recreational or psychoactive drugs with equally deleterious effects on your longevity. However, less well understood is the concept of somatopsychology, the way your body influences your state of mind and development of your personality. The two obviously interact in a vicious cycle, in which your sadness causes you to neglect care of your body, which changes the way others treat you and may fuel downward spiral of depression. However, we are not all blessed with a photogenic, hypersexy and athletic physique that may compete with today's role models. The media inundates us with images of what we should look like, which features are most treasured. Despite all the empty rhetoric about tolerance and diversity and just being yourself, if you lack the implicit qualities required to compete socially and fail to develop the necessary compensatory skills, life can get very tough. An extremely high percentage of jobs in postmodern postindustrial countries like the UK require either excellent client-facing or teamwork skills. Both require you to act out complex social rituals, heavily reliant on your cultural integration, sense of self and mastery of numerous gestures.

Using Genetics only when it suits an agenda, but downplaying it when it doesn't.

It comes as a perverse irony that today's corporate establishment adapts the genes versus memes debate to suit its own agenda. If it wants to sell mind-altering drugs, then emphasising the role of genes works best, but if it wants to sells cosmetic surgery, for some reason the role of genes is deliberately and counterintuitively downplayed. Otherwise those who need cosmetic surgery most to compete in a society obsessed with superficiality might claim state aid or guaranteed places of work. Thus if you have ugly teeth, acne, a slightly crooked nose, wrinkles, small breasts, a small penis or are going bald, you do not simply exhibit a perfectly natural variation of the human condition, but suffer from a degenerative disease caused in large part by your lifestyle or failure to follow the advice of dentists and social workers. Of course, diet, exercise and basic self-care affect your general appearance and health, but anyone whose travelled to the remotest and financially deprived regions of Africa only to see smiling people with gloriously white teeth should cast some doubt on the theory that bad teeth are caused solely by a lack of oral care. Like it or not, some of us are just blessed with ultra-resilient teeth. Some of us fall victim to tooth decay despite regular brushing and modest consumption of refined sugar, while others can get away with a relatively carefree attitude to dental care and still flaunt white teeth after happily devouring cakes or boozing all night long. As an inherently physical feature it stands to reason that teeth, hair, skin and genital organs are subject to genetic variations, all of which need not matter in a tolerant society that emphasises people's inner beings rather than their exterior manifestation. Maybe we should insist on TV presenters with stained and misaligned teeth, but once a critical mass emulates Hollywood looks, the sheeple will follow suit.

Multiphrenia

Over the last three to four decades our whole sense of self has metamorphosed. Kenneth Gergen theorises that the modernist, rational and firm sense of self has given way to a postmodern multiphrenia, in which we adapt our sense of self to the occasion as we engage with an ever-widening multitude of people in different locales and contexts, something known as social saturation. One markets oneself in the same way as one markets a consumer product.

Look at me! I'm youthful, into fun culture, have shining white teeth and a degree in project management and am fully trained in Microsoft Office TM. I'll impress your clients and bond with my colleagues.

We all love to declare our politically correct devotion to tolerance and diversity. Unfortunately this tolerance does not extend to those whom the system cannot fully exploit, somehow out of sync with the new social hierarchy unable to accept the superiority of the new class of people managers and manipulators.

Categories
All in the Mind

The Hidden Paedo-Scare Agenda

Hardly a day passes in the modern mainstream British media without a peadophilia-themed scandal, whether it be police discovering hundreds or thousands of child porn images on some poor soul's hard drive, a young woman's revelation about her parents' role in childhood sexual abuse, a high-ranking official or celebrity using his (or her) credit card to view child porn, a young female teacher seducing a 13 year old boy, a 13 year old girl, claiming to be 18, being groomed by a 50 year old male, claiming to be just 24. At times the hysteria reaches such extremes that one wonders why we don't just arrest every adult preventively on suspicion of child abuse?

Many others have commented on and indeed satirised the media's preoccuption with rampant paedophilia. It seems literally that one is hiding under every child's bed. Such is the hysteria that anyone ringing alarm bells at the Draconian legislation passed to combat this phenomenon (e-mail snooping, telephone tapping, psychiatric screening and the maintenance of extensive databases with confidential information) is soon accused of downplaying the paedophile threat, tacitly condoning the activities of sex fiends or even conniving with these social outcasts in the abuse of vulnerable minors.

Some of us seem to have short memories. As media stories about sexual abuse in religious and state institutions in 1970s and 80s abound, one wonders why we heard so little about it then. Was it because, as some might rather naively assume, few were prepared to speak out against this social taboo for fear of upsetting respected institutions such as the Church, the Scouts or social services, and only now in more enlightened times can we protect our kids from domestic and institutional sexual abuse. I would be the last one to downplay the effects of any form of physical and/or sexual abuse on children in key stages of their emotional development.

As the long-term effects of sexual abuse are mainly psychological, if we leave aside extreme cases with significant physical harm, early sexualisation promoted by the media and peer pressure tends to create an enviroment in which atomised children can easily make themselves vulnerable to atomised and sexually repressed adults. Indeed the whole notion of sexual repression is yet another misunderstood concept. Most of us maintain a considerable degree of sexual restraint, mediated by societal norms and expectations. We may view a person's sexuality from multiple perspectives. I may appreciate the sexy physique of my teenage daughter or younger half sister, and indirectly consider their suitability as a lucky man's girlfriend or spouse when the time is right. Indeed deep in the subconscience of any heterosexual male is the sexual desirability of any young girl. When you contemplate the beauty of your three year daughter, you consider her potential adult physique. We could think of children as adults in waiting or in the making, rather than mini-adults attempting to emulate the behaviour of their parents and media role models. The current emphasis on genetic psychiatrics leads us the mistaken conclusion that paedophiles (and I take the media's usual modern definition of this word) are somehow a subspecies. We simply need to identify, isolate, rehabilitate and/or chemically castrate them. But as all men are potential rapists, I submit that all sexually interested adults are potential child molesters. There has always been a sexual underclass, those who for physical or psychological reasons find it harder to satisfy their biological needs through consensual relationships with age-appropriate partners. On a personal note I've experienced both periods of frequent intercourse and period of relative abstinence, yet it has never dawned on me to exploit a vulnerable person, always seeking to establish an emotional bond and mutual understanding of the role of sex in the relationship. Certainly I've witnessed rival males, in the crude terminology of sexual competition, score with minimal effort. I've learned to take a philosophical approach, but understand some other males in a sexually obsessed society feel an urge to pursue every possible avenue for sexual fulfilment.

Whatever the media tells you, there are surprisingly few cases of loners lurking behind the bushes by playgrounds waiting for the right moment snatch and rape a child. In the vast majority of cases of childhood sexual abuse, children fall victim to adults who have won their confidence. Indeed in an alarming number of cases they are not fully aware of the consequences of their actions. Such is the hysteria surrounding paedophilia that there have been more cases of teachers falsely accused of sexual abuse than teachers who have actually sexually assualted a child. In the narrowest definition of the term, sexual assault of children by teachers is statistically a very rare occurrence, but age-inappropriate sexual liaison has thanks to early sexualisation become increasingly common. A number of cases have emerged of false accusations lodged against unpopular teachers, especially those that students consider uncool or too strict, while some female teachers have seduced teenage male students. In modern Britain most children over ten are not only aware of the birds and bees, but also of numerous sexual practices (fellatio, cunnilings, anal intercourse etc.) and orientations and with mounting media and peer pressure to go out and score with an alpha male or hot babe. That certainly was not true in the relatively carefree 1960s and 70s. At the tender age of ten I showed zilch interest in porn and on reaching puberty limited myself to private exploration of my sexuality until I met a consenting partner. Although we had some sex education at school, we learned most through gradual discovery of sexuality, mainly from older friends and relatives (ideally cousins and uncles rather than siblings or parents) or perhaps through books available at the local library or in the family bookcase. Around 1978 (at the tender age of 14) I learned an awful lot about sexual positions from the Sunday Times supplement complete with sketches. I can cite a couple of unfortunate experiences, a male seven years my elder, who forcibly penetrated me with my reluctant consent (considering myself at the time bisexual and theoretically open to experimentation) and a one night stand where my female partner was simply too inebriated to reciprocate, an occurrence that, I suppose, is all too common for today's partying youth. Yet despite times of considerable emotional instability, I had a clear view of the bounds of acceptable behaviour, whatever my wildest fantasies might have been. I became aware of non heterosexual orientations mainly through school taunting, a few media allegations about public figures and later involvement with fringe neo-Trotskyite groupings. In all honesty the concept of paedophilia completely escaped my attention before my mid teens and continued to play an exceedingly peripheral role until the great paedo-scare raised its ugly head in the mid 1990s. Did my father secretly abuse in the bath at the age of seven? To the best of recollections, the only fear I had was the prospect of shampoo seeping into my sensitive eyes for sex in any form meant absolutely nothing to me. Shame of the human body and prudishness are learned and thus culturally mediated behaviours for reasons of social control.

To put it bluntly, the paedophile scare is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we obsess about it, the more we warn children of insidious adults harbouring paedophile tendencies, the more it becomes a problem that needs be addressed by all conceivable means. Childhood innocence is a treasured time in our lives when we need not worry the huge emotional wranglings that erotic desire and sexual competition unleash. Why should a seven year old girl, often encouraged by her cool parents, want to dress in a sexy manner? Why can't she just be a cute girl, completely oblivious to her potential eroticising powers? Rather than protect vulnerable children, which thanks to a large increase in the numbers of single parents abound in this country, the paedo scare empowers institutions to regulate family units. Consider the outgoing Home Secretary's latest proposals to combat the paedo danger. Not only will some paedophiles be offered drugs, yet another boon for big pharma and the psychiatric lobby, but a mother will be able to find out if her new partner is in the sex offenders' database. In what kind of society do we need to rely on the police or social services to ascertain the moral integrity of our partners, friends and family? The term police state springs to mind. Just imagine the scenario:

Enquirer: Hello, my name is Freda Blogga, ID card number AB 2334543892 HU. I have a new partner I met at the new casino in Manchester last week. We had such a good time and I'd like him to come and live with me and my 13 year old daughter, but I'd just like to check he's a safe pair of hands. His name is Fred Bloggs, ID card number XY 6789400 HY.

Police helpline assistant: Thank you, madam. I'm just bringing up his data on my computer. Apparently we can identify your new partner, the sixth one you've had in the last 2 years according to our records, as low risk on our standard paedophilia risk assessment criteria. We have no records of any paedophile-related behaviour. Over the last five years he has spent only 4.7% of his online time, as monitored by AOL, accessing adult sites, all of which are certified, 27.6% accessing first-person shooter gaming sites and 54.3% playing poker and backgammon, again as far as we can ascertain all via certified service providers. I can also reveal that in 1999 he received a diagnosis of ADHD, which if unmedicated may statistically represent a risk factor. He seems like a typical fun-loving guy, although he did once visit a conspiracy theory site, a little out of character I suppose.

Moral Hypocrisy

Morality, criminality and illegality have long been nuanced concepts. Illegality clearly refers to infringements of the law as it is applied in your local jurisdiction. Duplicating copyrighted music is technically illegal, but apart from denying musicians and record companies of revenue it hardly infringes anyone's basic human rights. Running a licensed casino in modern Britain is technically legal, but many (myself included) would argue its activities are immoral, a giant scam designed to strip people of their hard-earned income while raising their material and emotional expectations. As discussed elsewhere the higher our hedonistic expectations, the greater the disappointment when we fail to attain them. Criminality may comprise either acts infringing basic human rights or acts defying the law of the land. Thus the legality of bombing civilians in another land is simply a technical issue with little bearing on the act's morality or indeed its criminality if we apply the juridical interpretation of the word.

So where does paedophilia stand in moral stakes? In a society obsessed with virtual murder and revenge killings, the whole theme of the Kill Bill, it appears homocide is a lesser crime than child molestation. Certainly many Sun readers have been conditioned to consider the murder of a convicted paedophile a lesser crime than paedophilia itself. While first person shooter addicts and marketers alike have perfected the argument that no gamers would ever dream of reenacting their fantasies, the same argument does not hold true in establishment circles for occasional viewers of child porn, however defined. Personally I think both extreme child porn (i.e. depicting penetrative intercourse rather than certain body parts or mere poses) and virtual violence (i.e. glorifying and justifying mass murder) affect a person's behaviour, just like any other experience, whether first-hand or simulated, but someone cannot be convicted because of a mere fantasy or obsession until they act on it. The real answer to the moral equalivalency issue all depends on the severity of the acts performed. Does it refer simply to viewing images and fantacising underage sex (or perhaps fantacising oneself engaging in such acts as a child)? Is it confined to cases of overt intimate contact with aroused sexual organs? May it comprise fondling whose sexuality may not be obvious at all to immature and sexually naive children? Unfortunately the witch hunt mentality of the media lets us make few of these distinctions. A person may, in their eyes, either be a sex fiend or not. As a result many parents, teachers, close relatives and family friends now habitually avoid all comforting physical contact with younger children, something hardly anyone in the pre-paedo-scare era associated with sex. Just consider that in much of the world nobody bats eyelid about children sleeping their parents' bed, often into their early teens and in crammed living quarters a logistical as well as emotional necessity. Pre-school children sleeping in the matrimonial bed is the norm not just in Iran or Zambia, but in Italy and Spain. Your average 7 year old feels more secure tucked up in bed hugging mum or dad, than partitioned in a cubicle replete with technological wizardry. Yet surprisingly few young Italian adults take their parents to court over alleged child abuse. In the vast majority of cases it was the child, not the parents, who wanted to snuggle in with Mum and Dad. Then what about having a bath unclothed with your five year son. Again this was pretty normal behaviour until recently. Now the paedophile smear is at the back of every parent's or even every adult's mind. I've noticed some pretty odd behaviour in public toilets, with grown men sneaking into cubicles to avoid the embarrassment of temporarily exposing themselves in the presence of young boys, as if the boys minded, and actually inconveniencing others who might actually need a cubicle to dispose of solid waste. Certainly at the age of seven I was totally unconcerned about older men pulling out their willies to urinate. It was just the norm. To become offensive or abusive, an organ or act has to acquire a sexual value and the victim has to be intimately aware of abuse. Certainly any penetrative or otherwise painful acts could not escape the attention of any young child, however aware he or she might be of sexuality. These acts are indeed an extreme perversion, but most societies have successfully marginalised such activities by channelling sexual expression into meaningful consenting relationship between adults, however defined, all without the help of an all-powerful state overseeing every aspect of personal conduct.

To combat the very real dangers of emotional and physical abuse, we should first address the real causes, social instability and atomisation, rather than spreading fear in an already terrorised populace and turning us all into suspects.

Categories
Computing

Get ready for the Big Corporate Takeover of the Web

The Internet is not going to disappear any time soon, at least short of a nuclear holocaust or a world-wide power outage. Big business has simply invested too much money in it to let that happen. What's at stake is the pioneering concept of a free and open network of hyperlinked resources. Media leviathans may feel threatened by You Tube, but they'll learn to work with it. Although server farms and desktop PCs may still produce an annoying hum, they represent a tiny fraction of global electricity consumption. The dot com boom years let a lucky few exploit new opportunities, but ten years on most large Internet enterprises would not have seen the light of day or night were it not for huge capital investment from the usual suspects. To attract millions of paying visitors to one of over a billion Internet domains, you need to invest heavily in advertising. The other day I caught sight of a huge billboard for www.ask.com. Why bother spending millions on an antiquated poster campaign if people can search the Web for alternatives to Google (the default for Firefox, Safari, Opera and Konqueror users), Yahoo and Microsoft's Windows Live (the default for IE 7 users). Tech-savvy users with a modern browser (i.e. post IE 6 era) can always add a search engine to their search bar. I've added Clusty, Yahoo, Creative Commons, php.net, Wikipedia, Ask Dot Com, Google Maps UK and even Window Live to my Firefox search box. But most Web users just use whatever comes standard just like most users of word processors do not know how to save in a different format (File > Save as in most cases). Unless they see a huge billboard on the way to work or are advised by close friends to try another search, they might never dream of fiddling with their browser's default settings. Anyway I gave ask dot com spin. If you want to search a well known organisation, person or authorised information on a given subject, ask dot com will suit you fine. Your average BBC news fan and Daily Mail reader, accustomed to officially sanctioned truth, will love it. Want to learn about retiring Prime Minister Tony Blair? Let's cut out all the crap from numerous sites exposing the man's sheer hypocrisy and corruption and go straight to 10 Downing Street's site or New Labour's site or maybe a review of a favourable biography on Amazon Dot Com. This is great for your kids' homework too. Their Blair/Brownite teachers will give them full marks. Want to know about the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center? Again the only references to conspiracy theories are ones denouncing or debunking all theories that challenge the orthodox version of events. You certainly don't want your child suggesting in a school essay the physical impossibility of a near perfect vertical collapse of a 400 metre tall skyscraper without a controlled demolition using thermite. What if your child wishes to learn more about human reproduction? Many parents would understandably prefer their inquisitive children not to view certain pornographic sites, which in all honesty, offer little enlightenment on any aspect of sexuality. With ask dot com's filters you can rest assured that should your 5 year old daughter types pussy cat, she will only see listings hits pertaining to friendly furry felines.

In its early years the World Wide Web was mostly used by academia and computer geeks expanding rapidly to IT-literate businesses, but online shopping was confined to a technophile elite until 2002/3. Indeed globally it still is. Now even Sun-readers and Sky-TV addicts do their Tesco shopping online. They don't care about thei socio-environmental impact of Tesco's domination of the grocery trade. It's cool to shop online from the comfort of their sofa and they can have some more quality to time to play with their kids or maybe gamble online or engage in a mindless blether via MSN, preinstalled on their Tesco/PC World/Currys PC or perhaps upgrade their preinstalled edition of Norton AntiVirus (happily using over half of their brand new system's resources and requiring a memory upgrade to 4GB so they can crop that picture of kids on holiday in Ibiza last year). To test the technical competency of modern UK resident, ask if they trust Internet banking or consider IE6 a safe browser as long as they have donated £40 to Symantec. If they believe the hype about the Internet banking revolution, they probably have little understanding of its inner workings. Yes, key-logging software, often installed with the free gizmos (search bars and famncy cursors) you can install only on Windows, can capture confidential data even if your Internet connection is encrypted via SSL. Your only real protection against fraudsters is to set up a firewall, use a sensible non-Microsoft browser, (Firefox,Opera or Safari) and uninstall all crapware and best of all not use MS Windows, but don't expect anyone from corporate estalishment to tell you that. Indeed they'll tell you the opposite, e.g. Channel 4's 40D Player will only work with WIndows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer and basically we don't care a less if you accidentally download viruses if Internet Explorer activates My Web Search Bar. The whole debate about the platform-neutral provision of copyright-protected media using Digital Rights Management is rather tedious, as DRM empowers remote organisations to control content on your hard drive.

Does Internet smut debase women (men and children). Of course is does. Is Internet gambling even more addictive than bricks-and-mortar casinos? Probably. Does prolonged exposure and addiction to violent video games desensitise young minds to the true horrors of warfare? Again the weight of evidence and common sense suggests it does. The sad fact of the matter is that none of these pursuits either require a free and open World Wide Web or started with mass adoption of broadband Internet access. Porn has long used print media and videotapes. Virtual violence evolved mainly with game consoles plugged into TV sets and gambling has always thrived where governments let a few entrepreneural crooks entice the masses with dreams of limitless wealth. The Internet is just another vehicle. Phenemona like spam, viruses, spyware and phising simply destroys people's confidence in the Internet as a medium. What governments and karge organisations fear most is the continued democratisation of the Internet. They lose little sleep over morons who claim to have seen two-headed purple extraterrestrials in their back garden. They worry more about those intent on exposing the sheer hypocrisy an corruption of the ruling elite.

A.N. WIlson of the Daily Mail favourably reviewed Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, bemoaning staff cutbacks at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as a result of the phenomenal expansion of Wikipedia. Not only is Wikipedia much more comprehensive than the Anglosaxon establishment's authorised fount of all knowledge worth knowing, it allows contributions from the general public. In reality numerous contributions on controversial or sensitive topics have already been censored by Wikipedia editors, partly an act of self-censorship to appear credible to the corporate and state elite. What worries large corporations is the wealth of information not yet censored and numerosity of links to unorthodox sources of information. They fear not so much that casual surfers may stumble on more disinformation, which thrives in the mainstream media, but they may find out what their masters are up to, verify facts and challenge their allegiance to the ruling elite.

By equating the massive potential the Internet has for unbridled commercial exploitation, cultural decay and brainwashing with the disinformation of amateurs daring to have their own say, Mr Wilson expects us to trust the likes of the BBC (who have broadcast their fair share of moronic violence) to decide what we may or may not access. They would like to see an unfree Web. Broadly speaking Windows Live, CNN, the BBC, Tesco, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a plethora of censored blogspots and moderated discussion groups (lest someone express a racist opinion of course). The entertainment industry lobby will ensure public access to online casinos and first person shooters. Plenty of eye candy, a wide selection of DRM-ed media and games, but we can kiss goodbye to our freedom of expression. It's your Internet, treat it like your neighbourhood. If you let crooks and gangsters seize control, you'll need heavily armed police and curfews to provide of minimum of security. But if you let a community spirit prosper in the treu spirit of peace and open debate, you might just hold your rulers to account.

My unpublished comment:

While I share Mr Wilson's concern over cultural decay, Internet smut and a growing obsession with virtual violence, I disagree over collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, which, warts and all, remains one of the Internet's greatest achievements. Why should we in a democratic society rely solely on state and corporate entities such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

The aforementioned social trends started long before most of us had an e-mail account, mainly thanks to multi-million dollar blockbusters, MTV and soap operas, produced by media leviathans who now see their grip on the collective psyche challenged by P2P file sharing. The Web has both reflected and accelerated existing trends, but with its increasing commercialisation we see its early democratising aspects drowned in an ocean of flashing ads, scams and disinformation. May I suggest the main concern of the British establishment is not protecting children from porn or violence, but silencing dissent?

Categories
All in the Mind

It’s official, Dissent is a Mental Illness

If you obsess with or consider stalking political celebrities, personally I think your fixations and potential actions are both ill-advised and in all likelihood counterproductive. Politicians not only thrive on publicity, the media would be quick to whip up a frenzy of hysteria should anyone attempt to threaten their life. An assassination attempt represents a huge a public relations coup for an unpopular member of the ruling elite. Admittedly some milder comical forms of stalking such as egg-throwing or carefully engineered stunts may, if reported accurately in the media, raise awareness of a dissident cause. After all to the best of my knowledge no politicians have ever died of custard pies or eggs being splattered all over their tailor-made suits. The trouble is these days politicians are just unthinking celebs, whose very rise to power depends on the approval of media moguls. A protest may be perfectly justified on a moral plane, but Sun readers will either be none the wiser or will be led to consider the protest as the antics of mentally deranged extremists.

Having instilled in the public mind that all sorts of inappropriate or nonconformist behaviours are caused by genetically determined mental disorders, often marketed as differences with benefits as well as downsides, diagnosing dissent as a mental disorder is the next logical step. According to an article, "Blair's secret stalker squad" penned by Jason Lewis, in the left's favourite bete noire, the Daily Mail, the government already employs psychiatrists to identify potential troublemakers. This is no longer wild conspiracy-theory territory, it's reality. However, it is true that psychological profiling can identify those most likely to channel their powers of critical thinking into active opposition to the agenda of the ruling elite. However, they merely identify people whose critical faculties have remained both intact and focussed on the misdemeanours of their own bosses, rather than on their bosses' enemies. A conformist in Stalin-era Russia would be a loyal Communist Party member happily spying on traitors and evil revisionists. The same mindset translated and adapted to the UK in the early 21st century would use her or his soft skills to identify extremists, conspiracy theorists and mavericks who might become enemies, as they see it, of our wondefully tolerant, dynamic and fun-loving democratic civilisation. Progress towards a neoliberal panacea of all-night smokefree raves and wheelchair-friendly casinos, conveniently located next to your local hypermarket, seems on par with the sales drive of your employer in the insurance business.

Notice how the British media have long described the last few remaining critical thinking politicians as mavericks, a term never used for politicians who toe the corporate or party line. Some even wonder why all dissidents are coincidentally mavericks. "Sure", some think, "I agree with much of what George Galloway/Tony Benn/Michael Meacher says, but he's just a maverick". Sooner or later the Guardian or Independent will do the nasty on any articulate person in the public eye who oversteps the margins of permissible dissent. Maybe this is one reason why so many otherwise rational commentators such as George Monbiot go out of the way to distance themselves from conspiracy theorists who fail to believe the official 9/11 story. Now I've met some of the assorted types who regularly attend 9/11 Truth group meetings. These events attract a fair number of individuals who would meet a psychiatrist's criteria for a pervasive personality disorder. Put simply your average happy-go-lucky working person, immersed in pervasive entertainment culture and preoccupied with their career and family (or whatever passes for a family these days), simply doesn't have time to consider the musings of fringe groups. They're more likely to settle for the conclusions of respected left-leaning commentators like George Monbiot, than actually think for themselves. What matters more is the calibre and prestige of opinion leaders. Read the moderated postings in the BBC's Have your Say forum or even musings in the Medialens forum and you'll soon notice the omnipresence of name-dropping and references to authoritative sources such as the BBC itself. Indeed some people in the UK refuse to believe anything until it's on Aunty Beeb (an affectionate, but often satirical nickname for the state broadcasting corporation). The Beeb is, of course, a massive organisation employing thousands of journalists and producers, many keen to investigate all sides of a story. Nonetheless some good stuff does seep through. BBC documentaries have revealed the side effects of antidepressants (Panorama on Seroxat) or in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq BBC 2 aired a documentary highlighting the role that oil plays in US administration's Mideast policy. But these tend to be the exception rather than the rule, and serve to reassure us, or the critically thinking minority among us, that Aunty Beeb remains a bastion of objectivity. This is the same BBC that consistently refers to the United States as a democracy and regularly talks of Anglo-American plans to extend democracy to Iraq, all without addressing the key issue of control of the country's oil.

Apparently some self-righteous left-leaning opinion leaders suffer a similar delusion, basically truth emerges from a consensus of high-profile experts given access to the BBC, CNN and a handful of other media outlets in the Anglosphere.

So who is more deluded? Those who challenge orthodoxy or those who swallow mainstream propaganda hook, line and sinker? In my humble opinion it is plainly naive to base your assessment of reality on the official or counter-current cult status of those advocating a position. Something is not true because MS-NBC has just aired a documentary debunking the controlled demolition theory for the vertical collapse of the World Trade Center, any more than it's true because Loose Change has some convincing video clips and David Ray Griffin seems an honest guy. What matters is evidence. If the evidence in favour of the official theory were so overwhelming, why would they seek to deny public access to so much incriminating evidence? Apart from applying one's understanding of science and politics, how can millions of mortal souls distinguish fact from fiction? While the motives of mainstream propagandists are clear, those of the 9/11 Truth movement are much less so? Some have suggested the whole conspiracy theory cult is a gigantic diversion from the real issues bedevilling humanity, such as resource depletion, nuclear war and climate change. Others view government complicity in acts of sabotage and psychological terrorism as crucial signs of a civilisation on the brink.

This morning (03/06/2007), the Aunty Beeb's news site leads on PM in Waiting Gordon Brown's support for even tougher anti-terrorism legislation, presented at a stage-managed conference in Glasgow with wonderful reassurances about checks and balances to safeguard civil liberties. Let's get this whole terrorism scare-mongering into perspective. The UK's capital attracts billions from global money laundering with sky-rocketing property prices requiring couples to earn jointly 75,000 just to buy a very humble modest 3-bedroom rabbit hutch, overcrowded transport infrastructure grinding to a halt with tube passengers packed like sardines and literally suffocating in each other's sweat and a huge influx of cheap labour and a steady outflow of native Londoners. To me, this would seem a recipe for disaster, easily exploited by gangsters, criminals and even would-be terrorists with an axe to grind against the financial or military elites. Yet unsurprisingly most residents of the sprawling metropolis are too busy competing in the rat race or coping with the sheer humiliation of not living up to the material and aesthetic expectations set by media role models, to even consider fighting the system. If Brown really cared about the safety of ordinary citizens, he might start by bringing in more socio-economic stability and thus defuse a state of of constant tension that his dynamic consumer-led economic model has instilled in us and simultaneously withdraw British forces from foreign ventures. Instead we get more of the same and worse and anyone who disagrees is labelled paranoid. The message is loud and clear. If you suspect the ruling elite may have it in for you, seek therapy, forget about your misgivings and return to your assigned role as a lowly parrot.

Categories
Power Dynamics

The Brown Broadcasting Corporation

Call me a cynic, but the BBC seems to have transitioned magnificently from its role as a covet apologist for the Blair regime to a smooth public relations operation for the emerging Brown leadership. Such a transition requires no change in logo, editorial control or political outlook. Indeed, as the electorate has grown tired of Blair's persistent hectoring and lecturing on subjects about which he is so obvioulsy ill-informed, Gordon Brown will give the New Labour project a whole new lease of life. Some English voters may not like his Scottishness, but that's quite irrelevant as his chancellorship has overseen a continuation of the steady flow of high-paid jobs away from Scotland and Northern England to the South East of England with the near total demise of the country's manufacturing sector and the flight of call centre jobs abroad.

One wonders just how Gordon Brown retained his credentials as a prudent defender of the interests of ordinary working people tied to his Scottish roots in the Lang Toun of Kirkcaldy, an area with considerable social deprivation and paradoxically the UK's highest Ritalin prescription rate (and probably lowest consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables). For his political choices over the last decade as Chancellor of Exchequer have been neither prudent nor in the interests of the traditional working classes Mr Brown claims to represent.

In the UK the best test of your overall class allegiance is not your annual income, your parents' income or even your academic background, but your favourite newspaper, whether print or online. Whether we like or not, there is a class of UK residents who instinctively buy one of the redtop tabloids, the Sun, Star, Mirror and in Scotland the Daily Record (aka the Daily Retard). As more school leavers go to university, you'll even see the shelves of student shops stacked with copies of these Celebrity Gossip comics. Without the blessing of a hanful of media magnates and their appointed editors-in-chief Thatcher would never have won such a resounding victory in 1979, 83 and 87, Kinnock might have won in 1992, but Tony Blair would never have swept to power in 1997 or retained sufficient public confidence despite his repeated warmongering, corruption and toadying to the whims of big business. The usual suspects in Scotland, the Daily Retard and the Scottish Sun, both of which have helped fuel anti-English sentiment in the past, tried their best to avert an SNP victory at the Polls. When New Labour's line manager in Holyrood, Jack McConnell, belittles the SNP's electoral gains, he does so in the full knowledge that without the gutter press the fate of the New Labour Mafia north of the border would be a whole lot worse. In short New Labour's tabloid propagandists appeal to the same tribal gut instincts that lead some to support Rangers or Celtic come what may.

Brown's left wing credentials are largely a figment of the media's and New Labour's spin machine's imagination. This is the same man who has consistently backed every single decision Tony Blair has taken on behalf of his corporate handlers. He had absolutely no qualms about hosting dinners in honour of Alan Greenberg, a person more responsible than almost anyone else for the imposition of neoliberal policies on the Third World leading to the decimation of public services and the selling off of local industries to predatory multinationals, a processs popularised as privatisation or inward investment. The only conceivable concession to those who fear a slide towards British involvement in a future US invasion of Iran seems to be his rhetorical support for a increased role of Parliament in decisions over war and peace. But let us not forget that a majority of New Labour MPs voted to support British participation in the invasion of Iraq, so why shouldn't the same bunch of lemmings fall for humanitarian propaganda that the likes of the Guardian and BBC have already begun to peddle to justify more military intervention in resource-rich regions?

Gordon Brown may give the New Labour project a temporary facelift, but don't be fooled. His prudence is as big a façade as his predecessor's integrity.

Categories
Power Dynamics

New Labour’s Legacy

Results from recent regional and local elections should bring a few cheers to those, like me, who have long distrusted New Labour. While the letters in Tony Blair nearly form an anagram for Tory Plan B (if we replace i with p), David Cameron certainly follows in the deceptive footsteps of our Tone, as the gutter press once affectionately referred to the current prime minister. In Scotland the SNP has done surprisingly well, but thanks to last minute scaremongering by the terrible twins of the Scottish tabloid press, the Daily Record and Scottish Sun (both fervently anti-independence and ultra-Blairite) and possibly a wee bit of election rigging here and there, New Labour have just one fewer MSPs than the minority SNP administration. In Wales Plaid Cymru have made impressive gains outside their traditional heartland, but once again New Labour has hung on with the prospect of a coalition with the LibDems. So basically despite New Labour getting just 27% of the vote nationally, it's business as usual for the Blairite agenda. However, one thing is certain New Labour's lead actor is moving on to pastures new as a keynote speaker on the US conference circuit. More important New Labour under Gordon Gold-dumping Brown may well not win the next election, paving the way for Mr Cameron's entry into the world of international theatrics.

To understand New Labour's legacy we need not look so much at the legislation they did pass, some mildly positive such as devolution for Scotland and Wales or the introduction of the minimum wage and some negative such as greater surveillance of private citizens, but at their role in enabling the underlying socio-economic and governmental trends that have transformed our society. All these trends trace their roots to changes that took place long before Tony Blair had even become leader of the Labour Party, the unrestrained consumerism of the late 1980s, which in turn had been a reaction to the pessimistic realism of the late 70s and early 80s. The early Thatcher government preached "back to the basics" at school, better housekeeping with large reductions in social welfare spending, privatisation and high interest rates forcing thousands of traditional manufacturers into liquidation. For a few short years some on the left saw this as a sign of the final collapse of British capitalism. Gone were the days of jobs for life handed down from father to son, tight-knit communities built around single industrial activities like car manufacturing or coal mining. We saw the birth of a new service-oriented economy centred around the naked accumulation of capital and the shameless promotion of a consumerist lifestyle. Of course, the welfare state of the 60s and 70s did not disappear, it simply adapted to a new era and to meet new challenges. Indeed after the initial Thatcherite shock therapy, the Tory establishment began to sing a more reconciliatory tune. Despite the worst fears of some pundits state education and the beloved National Health Service survived the Thatcher and Major years albeit with a steady drift towards private provision, but few doubted where the Tories' true allegiances lay.

So what are the greatest achievements of Tony Blair's junta:

  • Transfer of interest rate varying powers from a nominally elected Chancellor of the Exchequer to a bunch of unaccountable bankers at the Bank of England. How anyone could spin this as mildly progressive is beyond me, yet Blairites and Brownites alike frequently cite this as the foundation stone of the period of unprecedented consumer growth that followed.
  • Introduction of tuition fees for higher education, while simultaneously encouraging corporate and state entities to require degrees from everyone from hairdressers to environmental safety officers (read refuse disposal workers) and promoting absurd Mickey Mouse degrees.
  • Selling half of the UK gold reserveswhen the yellow metal was at an inflation-adjusted historic low, leading to a temporary boost for the US dollar, weakening the Euro and losing over £2 billion in 5 years .
  • Deregulating TV advertising and allowing the merger of major commercial networks.
  • Granting planning permission to large supermarkets to open more and large superstores, further eroding the dwindling market share of independent family-run stores.
  • Deregulating gambling and booze.
  • Deliberately subverting EU attempts to regulate adult pornography, gambling and violent video gaming, both multi-billion pound industries linked to UK businesses though often officially based abroad.
  • Regulating the culturally ingrained habits of millions of private citizens such as smoking.
  • Increasing surveillance of private citizens.
  • Overseeing a huge rise in the prescription of psychoactive drugs for mood disorders, while co-financing the promotion of new personality disorders.

Austere back-to-basics Thatcherism transitioned seamlessly to Cool Britannia Blairism, a non-entity as Anthony Blair himself has no real convictions other than his career, through the medium of MTV-style culture. Millions had been conditioned to associate homophobic, Tory-voting, church-going besuited businessmen with the old guard, and thus positively welcomed the new guard of casually dressed supercool metrosexual advertising execs. People see these products of the nouveau riche as somehow progressive, reminiscent of rebelliously philanthropic movie stars re-enacting the cultural revolution of the late 60s and early 70s. If there is any remnant correlation between conservative values and tastes and class, then we'll find much more old-fashioned mores among the provincial working classes and lower echelons of the traditional managerial classes, than among the emerging globalised ruling elite, stretching from Glibraltar-based gambling tycoons to CEOs of funky new media companies. The money is in fun culture, not in what we tend, disparagingly, to call Victorian values. Apparently it is easier to manipulate the masses if they are lulled into a false sense of joy and diverted from critical analysis of the doctrinal system. For some progress is measured in terms of the effective presentation of abstract rights and outlawing outmoded nasty habits and pursuits. So if progress means gay marriage, smoke-free pubs and an end to fox hunting, you'll be superficially pleased with New Labour's record. Instead we have dysfunctional family units with kids increasingly isolated, over five million adults on psychoactive drugs with side effects far worse than cigarettes and nearly one billion animals slain every year to meet our voracious demand. In this context New Labour's progressive achievements are very minor indeed and pale in comparison to their services to the US-centred corporate and military establishment, especially their friends at GSK, Tesco, BA Systems and KPMG to name but a few.

Categories
All in the Mind War Crimes

On The Nature of Violence

Consuming re-enactments of violence in various forms has long brought considerable pleasure to large number of people, especially but by no means exclusively, males. Quite clearly many residents of middle class suburbs in towns and cities across the prosperous world are relatively shielded from the real-world physical violence that millions experience on a daily basis in much of the world, but with extraordinary levels of intensity in regions where wars of resistance and internecine conflict rage. David Edwards of Medialens quite correctly contrasted the almost daily massacres in Iraq with the occasional school and office shoot-outs in the US and Europe. 36 dead i the Virgina Tech massacre is a tragedy, sure, but hundreds slain day in day out is an affront against humanity. However, many who have moved from some of the world's worst conflict zones to the obsessively consumerist dystopia of the wider American empire feel ironically under greater threat.

Violence means much more than the simple exertion of physical force with the intent to maim or kill others, it means the exertion of physical, sensory, mental or economic force to deny others of their livelihood, whose definition varies according to cultural expectations. To make a simple example, the only difference between machine-gunning a family of African subsistence farmers and evicting the same family from their land while failing to provide them with alternative means of sustenance is immediacy. In the former scenario they die instantly, in the second they starve slowly. So is society as it has evolved recently in the UK become more or less violent?

Nominally, it may have actually become less violent. Parents seem much less willing to resort to physical force to rein in their offspring, mindful of the consequences if their sheer frustration leads them to overstep the mark. As noted elsewhere crime statistics rely heavily on classification and reporting, but based purely on calls to national helplines there has been a huge rise in parents falling victim to physical abuse by their sons and daughters. The mass media, including the liberal establishment's BBC, also seems preoccupied with the spectre of child abuse, especially when attributable to outmoded institutions such as the Church and where the blame can be placed clearly with sad sexually deprived individuals who unleash their fantasies on the innocent. As usual such a narrow focus misses the details of a much bigger picture. Child abuse is an abstract concept. Certainly extreme deprivation leading to severe malnutrition, life-threatening disease and violence leaving permanent physical and psychological scars affect a person's long-term potential.

However, to the surprise of many wishful thinking do-gooders, back in the 70s school kids often preferred a quick dose of corporal punishment to the prospect of several hours detention or humiliation in front of their parents. This doesn't mean corporal punishment is good, but may often in the real world be viewed as the lesser of two evils. Seriously, how many children ever ended up in hospital as a result of excessive corporal punishment? Now compare this with the number hospitalised as a result of school or street fights. If teenagers are drawn into a subculture of pervasive recreational drugs, having to resort to theft or prostitution to feed their habit, who should we blame? The parents, society or some alleged genetic weakness in the kids themselves? Increasingly social workers and health professionals turn to the third explanation, but often blame controlling or traditionally strict parents. To compete in today's superficial social rat race, parents need to act and look as cool as the media role models their kids aspire to. To win your teenage daughter's trust, you may need to undergo cosmetic surgery or simply let her have her way when friends invite her for a night out on the town. In a community where most children respected their parents and were not under media-induced peer pressure to participate actively in a deceptively named fun culture of all night raves, life was easy for sensible parents whose only wish was to steer their children away from danger. But Blair's Britain is not like that. Open your eyes and ears in any shopping centre, remove yourself temporarily from your early 21st century bubble and you'll soon realise you're surrounded by technicolor, high-fidelity bullies unleashing incessant doses of none-too-subtle psychological torture. “Heh, you, you're not as cool as these dudes!". If you dare to complain about the unbearable rap beat in a clothes store or, as I did once, in a book store, expect to be either ignored or if you insist to receive a mildly reassuring talk from some lowly shop manager about marketing. In any case be in no doubt, that your aversion to a non-stop blur is your problem, not theirs.

Violence may be defined, at least according to the free dictionary bundled with my computer:

  • Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
  • Strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force : the violence of her own feelings.
  • The unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.

Based on the latter two definitions, provocative imagery and noise intimidate as much or even more than physical force. The media like to remind us of the importance of mental health, but fail to examine their own role in adversely destabilising our sense of self. The media frequently practices another intimidatory form of violence, humiliation by association. Over the last week the media has successfully whipped up hysteria against the alleged abductor of a three year old girl on holiday in Portugal with her well-to-do parents. In the recent past we've seen masses of Sun-readers engage in animated protests, sometimes resorting to violence, against real and alleged paedophiles. Thus anyone unknown to the community at large and whose behaviour may at times seem suspect may fall victim to a paedo witch hunt. That's an awful lot of people in our atomised island state, where close-knit communities are largely a distant memory. Only a few months ago the media lynched a lonesome resident of Ipswich falsely accusing him of the murder of five prostitutes and publishing details of his MySpace activities. Should we arrest the remaining millions of alienated adults whose social life has been reduced to virtual tomfoolery. Why not arrest all those idiots on person.com who broadcast masturbation live from their Webcams? All this socially divisive fear-mongering generates intimidatory violence against anyone who fails to meet societal expectations and withdraws into an alienated existence. Violence is anything that harms people mentally or physically. No society is devoid of violence, but where conflict is minimised, so to is violence in all its forms. Otherwise psychological intimidation and alienation can soon manifest themselves physically either through self-harm, drug abuse or direct attacks against the person.

Categories
All in the Mind

In Association with Pfizer

Someone queried the other day whether any evidence linked Stanley Feldman, co-author of Panic Nation, with Spiked Online. A quick Web search reveals a number of his articles and references in the infamous GMO-promoting, pro-Nuclear, pro-Drug and pseudo-libertarian Web site. But then something caught my attention, right on the front page. Spiked Online are running a What Inspired You? event, purportedly to raise awareness of scientific innovators, but conspicuously sponsored by Pfizer, manufacturer of Viagra, Zoloft and numerous other recreational and mind-altering drugs. Some of us may recall that back in the early 1980s Frank Furedi's gang posed on the extreme left in the Revolutionary Communist Party, frequently intervening at public meetings of the somewhat larger neo-Trotskyite group the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), but focusing its recruitment drive on ambitious students. They've certainly taken some controversial stances, often geared to attract dissidents from the thinking left. Around 1987-88 they regrouped around their glossy Living Marxism magazine and simply became the Living Marxism group, later rebranded as LM Mag. However, gradually they abandoned all pretence of Marxism, whatever that meant anyway, and began to hone a line of unbridled human potential whose greatest threat was posed by a culture of fear. They jumped on the bandwaggon of activists and journalists seeking to expose media bias over the 1990s' Balkan civil war and more provocatively challenged the orthodox media's Hutu-bashing analysis of the tragic internecine Rwandan slaughter in 1994. Unlike most peace activists, they concentrated their energies not on opposing war per se, but on attacking certain biases prevalent among the wishful thinking left, e.g. UN and NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia was largely welcomed by left-leaning Guardian columnists and much reasoned opposition to the 1999 aerial bombings of Kosovo and Serbia proper swallowed much of the mainstream propaganda over the inherent evil of Serb nationalists.

Only four years later in early 2003, following military intervention in Afghanistan, millions came out on the streets to voice their opposition to the pending invasion, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was an infinitely greater thug than Slobodan Milosevic. Large sections of the thinking public had at last begun to question the emotional rhetoric over humanitarian intervention. More important, the intervention in Kosovo, sold successfully on humanitarian grounds, far from ushering in a new era of interethnic harmony and an end to ethnic cleansing, had put in power a bunch of xenophobic militants who relied on NATO troops to keep the peace and caused the exodus of tens of thousands more of Kosovans of all ethnic groups a fact the subservient British media failed to hide from the public. While NATO Had spent billions on intervention in the former Yugoslavia, it had turned a blind eye to a civil war in the newly renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo inflicting 3-4 million deaths, in the aftermath of Rwandan democide (okay pedantics here, but to call it a genocide assumes one ethnic group sought the elimination of another, while in reality the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was more of class or caste than ethnicity). Just as the public began to question the benefits of military intervention to tackle conflicts with economic and, dare I say, environmental causes, Frank Furedi's gang seemed more preoccupied with attacking Green Fascists, health fanatics and anyone else who challenges corporate technocracy, but in a deceptively counter-current way. Thus their campaign against smoking bans appeals not only to libertarians and critical thinkers, fed up with the media's obsession with one cause among many of cancer, but also reinforces their key message that technology can always undo the damage caused by other technologies. Worried about lung cancer, well why not wait a while for technocrats to give you a new lung? Worried about the carcinogenic effects of E-numbered food additives, why not wait for the latest and greatest anti-cancer wonder drug? The future is bright, the future is .... shiny happy people consuming pharmaceutical products supported by peer-reviewed research. More disturbingly, based on personal experience in online discussions, ex-RCPers tend to belittle those who cast doubt on technocratic claims (e.g. SSRIs have greater benefits than side effects and safe for long-term use) with accusations like "loser" or words to that effect. In essence, they consider green fascists to have their own agenda, namely to deny the masses of huge technological advances.

Stanley Feldman works at University College London, whose students, a captive audience for big pharma propagandists and mainly from wealthy backgrounds, flock to Planet Organic and tend to avoid most of the junk Mr Feldman claims is relatively harmless. It would seem that the RCP brigade live in a bubble filled with paranoid health freaks, rather than in the much larger British reality where millions of happy shoppers happily fill their supermarket trolleys with TV-advertised junk and visit their GP only to receive a prescription for some of Pfizer's or GSK's most lucrative products. Maybe people are panicking for the right reasons, but thanks to so much corporate disinformation often identify the wrong targets.

Categories
Computing

Implementing an Ajax-like Interface: A Quick How-to

In the Web development world there's been a lot of buzz about an acronym many of us previously associated either with a brand of detergent or a Dutch football team. In a nutshell Asynchronous Javascript And XML means inserting new information into a Web page without reloading the whole page. Traditionally Dynamic HTML would use complex Javascripts to replace parts of a page with data that had already been downloaded or was based on user input. That's fine when managing small amounts of data, but if you needed more records from a large data source you had to make a call to the server and effectively reload the page. One common workaround used frames, but these break the unified concept of a seamlessly integrated Web interface and rely on Javascript to keep the disjointed parts together and prevent casual visitors from viewing only one frame. Whole books have been written on the wonders of Ajax, but given the ongoing state of flux in the evolution of Web browsers and competition from proprietary technologies requiring plug-ins such as Adobe's new Flex framework for Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight, many just think Ajax is more trouble than it's worth.

Surprisingly having read Christian Heilmann's excellent "Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax" it took just a little experimentation to integrate Ajax into this site, so all internal links effectively load within the same page. Consider a 1000 word article or 6000 characters embedded in HTML. This would be unlikely to occupy more than 12KB the equivalent a small compressed jpeg image. By contrast reloading the whole page with linked header graphics, stylesheets and Javascripts may require way over 100Kb and although modern browsers cache such data, they still need to check for changes on every page reload.

The first challenge in deploying Ajax is capturing the correct variant of the XMLHttpRequest object, effectively XMLHttpRequest for Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Opera and even IE7 and ActiveX for IE5.5 and IE6 (although the latter will still work with IE7, but is disabled by default due to ActiveX's inherit vulnerabilities on the Windows platform). Only users of IE Mac 5.2 (not updated since 2001), IE 4 and the old Netscape Navigator are left out, but we have a fallback solution for this dwindling pool of users. The second is to provide valid Web links that Search engines and Ajax-incapable browsers can use.

First the Ajax script:

The first module can be applied to many projects. Basically it takes two parameters the id attribute of target element (in quotes) and the URL of the script you wish to call in the background. This may be any script, static or dynamic supported by your server. It then simply replaces the content of the target element with the content returned by the script.

/* 
Adapted from Christian Heilmann's Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax 
*/
simplexhr = {
doxhr : function( container, url ) {
   if( !document.getElementById || !document.createTextNode) {
      return;
   }
   simplexhr.outputContainer = document.getElementById( container );
   if( !simplexhr.outputContainer ){ return; }
   var request;
   try{
      request = new XMLHttpRequest();
   } catch ( error ) {
      try {
      request = new ActiveXObject( "Microsoft.XMLHTTP" );
      } catch ( error ) {
         return true;
      }
   }
   request.open( 'get', url );
   request.onreadystatechange = function() {
   if( request.readyState == 1 ) {
   simplexhr.outputContainer.innerHTML = '<h3>loading...</h3><hr /><p>Please wait while the server retrieves the requested information.</p>';
   }
   if( request.readyState == 4 ) {
      if ( /200|304/.test( request.status ) ) {
      simplexhr.retrieved(request);
      } else {
      simplexhr.failed(request);
      }
   }
   }
   request.send( null );
   return false;
   },
   
   failed : function( requester ) {
   simplexhr.outputContainer.innerHTML = '<p>Could not retrieve the requested data.</p>';
   return true;
   },
   retrieved : function( requester ) {
   var data = requester.responseText;
   simplexhr.outputContainer.innerHTML = data;
   return false;
   }
}

Strictly speaking we should use DOM scripting for the next bit, but we need workable links within the href attribute and an easily solution we can switch on and off dynamically, e.g. via browser detection to cater for those with non-Ajax-enabled browsers (practically IE5.2 Mac, IE Win < 5 and the old Netscape Navigator < 5. The simplest solution is to call the Ajax function within the onclick attribute. If Javascript is disabled the onclick attribute will be ignored. Moreover, the server can detect problematic browsers and, if the Ajax function is stored as a server-side variable, simply not include it for these browsers. In my PHP script I use a class variable $this->ajaxLink, which is set to ' onclick="ajaxLink();"' for compliant browsers and '' for others (a dwindling minority).

function ajaxLink(el) {
   remSelected();
   if (el.href!='#') {
      var script = el.href;
   }
   else { var script = el.title; }
   el.className='selected';
   var concat='&';
   if (!/?/.test(script)) { concat='?'; }
   script += concat + 'temp=1';
   simplexhr.doxhr('body-text',script);
   window.location='#head';
   return false;
}
function ajaxSearch(type) {
   if (type==2) {
      var f = document.asearch;
   }
   else {
      var f = document.search;
   }
   var w = f.searcht.value;
   var script = 'search.php?temp=1&w=' + escape(w);
   if (type==2) { 
      var sm='all';
      var rb=document.getElementsByName('smode');
      for (var i=0;i

This is called in compliant browsers with the following code:

<a onclick="ajaxLink(this);" href="/article.php?id=4567">Interesting Article</a>

The word this in parentheses refers to the current element and lets us grab and reset its attributes. First we get its href attribute and append the query string '&temp=1' so that the script only returns the article without the header, menu and footer. We also set its class to selected so it can be highlighted appropriately in the menu via the stylesheet. Lastly we set the return value to false.

Removing Inline onclick Event Handlers

We could convert this to a DOM-scripted version by adding a special attribute, ideally by assigning a special value to rel attribute such as "internal" to denote links we wish to load asynchronously in the targeted element.

<a rel="internal" href="/article.php?id=4567">Interesting Article</a>

Next we should replace our $this->ajaxLink (or the equivalent in your server-side language of choice with ' rel="internal' and use this DOM script to rewrite add the onclick event.

function addAjaxLinks() {
   var aTags=document.getElementsByTagName('a');
   for (var i=0;i<aTags.length;i++) {
      var rel=aTags[i].getAttribute('rel');
      if (rel=='internal') {
         aTags[i].onclick=function() {
         ajaxLink(this);
         return false;
      }
   }
}
window.onload=addAjaxLinks();

An additional function handles the search utility and I've yet to implement an Ajax solution for posting messages. Some might argue this solution avoids the X for XML, that would involve slightly more code and only really for long listings rather than simply pulling in data from scripts designed to return HTML.

Lastly the PHP script file would return either just the body text, if Ajax is enabled, or the whole page. Here's my solution:

<?php
include('/inc/blog.inc.php');
// If temp get variable is not set, set to 0
if (!isset($_GET['temp'])) { $_GET['temp']=0; }
// If temp equals 1 set $articleOnly parameter to true and remove
// header, menu and footer from returned script
$articleOnly = intval($_GET['temp'])===1 ? true:false;
// If mode is not set, use 'page' as default
if (!isset($_GET['mode'])) { $_GET['mode']='page'; }
// Cast the id to 0
if (!isset($_GET['id'])) { $_GET['id']=0; }
$_GET['id']=intval($_GET['id']);
// The 'Blog' class  calls all classes required 
// to build the page from a database query.
$page = new Blog($_GET['id'],$_GET['mode'],$articleOnly);
?>
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Scientific Orthodoxy and Scientific Fact

Open letter to George Monbiot

I just read your recent piece (3 May 2007) on Alexander Cockburn's anthropogenic climate change scepticism and his reliance on one scientist. Let me first state that broadly speaking I'm with you on this one. Irrespective of our exact scientific interpretation, it seems obvious that the exponential rise in humanity's overall impact on our planet's delicate environment (consumption and population) has had some effect whose full impact only future generations will experience.

However, your approach equating climate change deniers with 9/11 truthers worries me for several reasons. The only thing the two groups really have in common is that they challenge the received wisdom as popularised by the mainstream liberal media such as the Independent and the BBC. However, let us be in no doubt the former group enjoys large backing from corporate lobbies and pitifully little support from grass roots activists, while the latter group receives only limited funding from a few isolated entrepreneurs, but much more support from a large grassroots movement including many relatives of those murdered in the 9/11 attacks. Indeed it cannot escape my attention that in another recent piece (Guardian, 6 February 2007) on the purported insanity of 9/11 truthers you favourably quoted a Counterpunch investigation to explain how intense heat caused by burning aircraft fuel could have distributed evenly along 400m long piles causing the towers to collapse vertically from the bottom rather than bend and topple at the point of collision. Indeed please just consider the long list of those who doubt the official conspiracy theory (in which Osama Bin Laden ordered 19 mainly Saudi Arabian hijackers to kamikaze passenger jets into strategic buildings of US military and financial power) includes not only David Ray Griffin, who has extensively dissected the official 9/11 report and answered just about every scientific point you have attempted to make, but also Richard Heinberg, author of the Party's Over, Democrat representative Cynthia McKinney, Michael Meacher and Andreas von Bülow, former State Secretary in the German Ministry of Defence. History teaches us that the establishment has never had a monopoly on empirical truth, but your reply to Cockburn's article focuses not on scientific analysis of substantive facts, but on suspect concepts such as “peer-reviewed†research or a scientific consensus. Peer review merely means that research has been reviewed by someone else in a position of trust employed by corporate or state institutions. Peer-reviewed research has been used to support the safety of genetically modified organisms with terminator genes, deny the side effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or claim that new behavioural categories such as ADHD have genetic or polygenic roots (cf. Jay Joseph, the Missing Gene). The overall bias of peer-reviewed research tends to reflect the vested interests and bias of its funders. Currently, biotech and pharmaceutical multinationals represent a huge lobby perfectly prepared to spend billions in funding research and public relations to sustain whatever scientific thesis suits their interests. Pitifully little research money is channelled into investigating the psychosocial causes of childhood behavioural problems or the dangers of genetically modified crops, so dissident researchers are soon lampooned as mavericks or even as conspiracy theorists, whose work has not been peer-reviewed. If you go against the grain in today's world of intermeshed corporate, state and non-governmental entities, your work simply does not get peer-reviewed, little more than an establishment rubber stamp.

Second, we should take a quick look at Alexander Cockburn's motivations. Honestly, I think he's an old-timer who sees progress in terms of extending to millions of the world's poor the same prosperity we take for granted. As a brand of commercialised libertarianism has accompanied this steady rise in material living standards, some mistakenly see progress as evolution towards society in the most enlightened middle-class enclaves of the US and Western Europe. Consider the cultural microcosm of the aspiring intellectual elite who congregate in the Starbucks where I sit at the heart of a larger Borders store. Most would almost definitely consider themselves progressives, yet all are indulging in a form of politically correct consumerism, reassured their coffee, or at least some of it, is fair trade and very aware of most of the issues you raise in your regular Guardian columns. Indeed your books are often on prominent display alongside those of Naomi Klein. They have, if you like, been peer-reviewed or rather vetted as safe for public consumption unlikely to rock any boats.

Science does matter and it is surely too important to leave to a technocratic elite in bed with a historically deceitful corporate establishment.

By all means, polemicise against climate change deniers, but please do so based on science and do not suggest that only an elite in the pay of big business and big government have a monopoly over scientific analysis. Despite all the rhetoric we hear from very mainstream political and business leaders, I do not see any abatement in orthodox economists' addiction to continuous material growth. The government are forging ahead with plans to expand airports and provide more gambling opportunities with an economy based on abstract financial, marketing and personal services nobody really needs. The same ruling elite who preach a "don't worry, be happy and trust us" philosophy, also invest millions in belittling, subverting and as a last resort criminalising dissident intellectuals. Just because some popular conspiracy theories are plainly wacky, does not mean all unorthodox perspectives should be tarnished with the same brush or are even conspiracy theories at all. Let us not forget in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair described the "war for oil" slur as a mere conspiracy theory circulating on the Internet. On 9/11 it is the establishment, not their naysayers, who entertain the public with a grotesque conspiracy theory defying the laws of physics. The establishment can no longer deny the reality of climate change, because you cannot lie very long about medium-term weather forecasts and the human impact on the environment is undeniable to all but the most hardened followers of Frank Füredi's Spiked Online sect (who incidentally agree with you on 9/11, but never mind). As for motivation, while it may seem superficially plausible that US imperialism in the Middle East may have induced a bunch of extremists to perpetrate atrocities against the civilian American population and some have hypothesised that US has been drawn into a war that it cannot win, copious evidence, which you have yourself quoted, shows that US plans to conquer the world's largest source of cheap and easy fossil fuels in the Middle East and Central Asia predates the first (Persian) Gulf War at a time when the US oil imports accounted for less 50% of domestic consumption. Their actions are entirely consistent both with their high-consumption economic model and with the peak oil scenario (which the likes of Alexander Cockburn and Greg Palast also deny). History is replete with examples of governments instigating and perpetrating atrocities against sections of their citizenry to engender a climate of war and hiding this reality from their own population. Without such levels of government deceit the huge crimes against humanity such as Nazi Holocaust or the largely forgotten forced famines in Belgian Congo, Ukraine or British occupied Bengal in 1943-44 would not have happened.

If we accept that Bush and Blair are not motivated by high humanitarian ideals such as spreading democracy and women's rights, defeating tyrants or ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction, then we have to weigh the merits of two explanations for their behaviour: the systematic pursuit of power or inherent contradictions of our current model of development. I submit that the driving force behind the current wave of imperialist conflict is ultimately the latter but inevitably engenders the former with increased levels of ferocity as supply fails to meet the growing demand for limited resources on a finite planet.