Author: neilg63

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All in the Mind

Conspiracy Theory Slur

  1. act of working in secret to obtain some goal, usually understood with negative connotations.
  2. Conspiracy (crime) and conspiracy (civil), an agreement between two or more persons to break the law at some time in the future
  3. Conspiracy (political), a plot to overthrow a government or other powers
  4. Conspiracy theory, attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance

Many defenders of orthodoxy can simply shrug off all challenges to their sacrosanct worldview by dismissing them as conspiracy theories or urban myths. Recently a flurry of books have appeared to debunk conspiracy theories in totem by painting both empirically researched critiques of mainstream thinking and conjectural fantasies with the same brush, thus equating the belief that reptilian blood rules the world peddled by David Icke with those who doubt the safety of vaccines or are unconvinced of the purported benefits of adding fluoride to the water supply. They're all labelled quacks or extremists in contrast with establishment pundits who are inevitably portrayed as beacons of sound mindedness and moderation. Thus if you doubt the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center could collapse vertically without a controlled demolition, you may soon be cast in the same light as xenophobic deniers of the Nazi holocaust or quaint nonbelievers in the success of the Apollo mission for the human exploration of the Moon. Facts simply don't matter, only an official seal of approval in the form of peer-reviewed research. On this basis we should conclude that David Kelly committed suicide because a BBC play and Lord Hutton's inquiry claimed he did.

If we take the term literally, then deniers of conspiracies would have to explain millions of murderous crimes stealthily committed by small cliques well-connected with a local power base and hidden from the general population throughout history. In this regard the Nazi holocaust was a conspiracy, because only a small elite of the general German population were aware of the full scale and systematicity of the slaughter. Although most had been exposed to vehement antisemitic propaganda, few knew in any detail what was going on in the concentration camps, thus requiring a conspiracy of silence by the perpetrators and their collaborators.

In a TV debate with handpicked opponents of the imminent invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair denied his support for the US-led occupation had anything to do with oil by simply writing it off as an Internet conspiracy theory. His actual words were "You read all sorts of conpiracy theories in the Internet, but if we wanted Iraq's oil, we could just strike a deal with Saddam". It didn't dawn on the erstwhile lawyer that he had used the word conspiracy completely out of context. How could the well-known existence of billions of barrels of crude oil under Iraq's sands, the US's voracious demand for fossil fuels and the very public connections of leading US politicians and government advisors with the oil industry be construed as a secret plot? The Iraq/Oil connection is not a conspiracy theory, but an economic theory, which theoretically could be wrong, but few pro-war activists choose to counter this theory on an economic basis preferring instead to appeal to our emotions by raising the spectre of genocidal dictators. Compare and contrast this with the notion that Osama Bin Laden had conspired with 19 hijackers of mainly Saudi Arabian descent to fly four planes into strategic symbols of US financial and military might. If true, that would be one hell of a conspiracy theory.

Moral Panics

In mid 2006 British bookstores began prominently displaying Panic Nation: Unpicking the Myths We're Told About Food and Health by Stanley A. Feldman and Vincent Marks as featured on the Richard and Judy show with rave reviews in the Daily Telegraph. If one agreed with the ill-documented conclusions and recommendations, then we should trust the food scientists of our beloved supermarket chains and pharmaceutical multinationals to deliver safe and healthy food and despise the green fascists who frequent health food stores and avoid all things unnatural. They claim fruits are bad (well too much may be, but that's hardly an issue in modern Britain) and the tooth-rotting effects of refined sugar can be offset by adding fluoride not to tooth paste, but to the water supply, a practice discredited outside the UK, Ireland US, India and a handful of other countries. A few valid points about obsession with salt and sugar levels (some salt and some sugar are not bad for us if part of a balanced diet) are counterbalanced by vitriolic attacks on all critics of technocratic food and drug production. A little research reveals that co-author Stanley Feldman regularly contributes to Spiked Online, the latest reincarnation of Frank Füredi's erstwhile Revolutionary Communist Party, a cult that once posed on the far left but now wines and dines with its corporate friends in the media and biotech industry. More at Source Watch and Evolution of (British) RCP. Indeed the last chapter on the MMR Autism link is penned by one Michael Fitzpatrick. He may be correct in disputing the MMR triple vaccine/autism link (except for the possible side effects of mercury, which has long been added to vaccines in the form of thimerasol), but it is not the absence of a hard empirical link that motivates extreme technocrats. They seize any opportunity to promote mass medication as a solution to our problems and in this respect go on the offensive against any scare stories that may hinder their vision of the future. They delight in pointing out when the naysayers get it wrong.

Human Nature

History is rife with conspiracies, but owing to their secretive nature most theories relating to their veracity are likely to prove either misleading or off track. The suggestion that prosperous capitalist countries that call themselves liberal democracies are in fact run by a cabal of multinational corporations and bankers can be supported with much hard evidence, but when we make claims about their ethno-religious composition or their power to programme our minds, we are said to enter conspiracy theory territory because we are allegedly motivated by paranoia or deep-seated prejudices. However, unlike the corporate and state media dissident thinkers cannot desensitise the masses to their bias. A perspective only carries the status of conspiracy theory when an enforcer or gatekeeper within the establishment has labelled it thus, but clearly many such labelled theories are so absurd as to insult the intelligence of any but the most gullible people.

Disinformation Overload

Our minds are deluged day in day out with fictitious conpiracies in high-profile movies and TV series (the X Files or the Matrix come to mind). No wonder so many US citizens believe all flying objects that they cannot immediately identify must hail from an extraterrestrial civilisation that has travelled thousands of lightyears to reach a suburban housing development somewhere in Alabama. If we are constantly mesmerised with so much utter nonsense, we will find it hard to sort the wheat from the chaff and have to rely on media-appointed experts to advise us which bits are true. To many aficionados of conspiracy movies and virtual reality games, Loose Change, a documentary on the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, available on YouTube may seem temporarily compelling, but their brains are programmed to view this alternate reality as mere fantasy, unworthy of further investigation. Ruling classes have always sought to manipulate information and discredit critical thinkers. In the early 21st century they have just refined the art of psychoanalysis. If they can't respond to dissident accusations, they indulge in a little behind the scenes character assassination. What kind of person would believe that CIA would engage in psyops (psychological operations) to prepare public opinion for policies they would otherwise not support? The truth is in so many news events it is almost impossible to verify more than the undeniable physical evidence beamed onto our screens. Maybe rather than confidently asserting that MI5 carried out the 7th July 2005 bombings in London, without any immediate supporting evidence, we should do a little psychoanalysis ourselves with a clear focus on the establishment's behaviour. Sure, they'd prefer everyone to return World of Warcraft fantasies and debate whether a UFO landed in Roswell, New Mexico. As a rule a good understanding of economics, hard environmental reality and human nature should help us explain most events, but only the extremely naive would swallow all information diseminated from the mainstream uncritically.

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All in the Mind

The Awareness Raising Scam

On the surface there seems nothing wrong with bringing people's attention to the plight of other human beings. As a concept awareness raising began life in political activism, but was soon embraced by the advertising industry. It does not take a huge leap of faith to conclude that National Smile Week, as delightful and charming as we may find smiles, was sponsored by the British Dental Association and not by an independent group of well-intentioned philanthropists. When the instigators of various awareness raising campaigns are funded either directly or indirectly by large vested corporate or state interests, we should at the very least question their motives.

One may reasonably argue that citizens of affluent countries are relatively unaware of the misery that millions of the world's poor endure every day. Likewise millions of keen motorists are not fully aware of the consequences of rapidly diminishing supplies of cheap oil. However, when these poignant issues become ineluctable realities with global poverty descending on the doorsteps of plush suburban neighbourhoods and the world's greediest superpower at war over oil, the power elites milk public interest to further their own agendas. Thus rock idols are hired to promote phoney debt relief plans and temporarily boost the profile of ambitious politicians. Oil multinationals claim to be Beyond Petroleum, while government seeks to sway public opinion in favour of nuclear power maintaining that our consumerist lifestyle should remain non-negotiable.

However, it is the burgeoning the mental health sector that has best fine-tuned the art of awareness raising, appealing to the emotions of the wishful-thinking Guardian or Independent-reading middle classes. All too often we witness concerted information campaigns for the latest mental health label accompanied by documentaries and reports in the mainstream media, prominently displayed books attributed to victims, relatives, activists or psychiatrists. While previously we had just considered depression as intense sadness and mania as a set of psychotic behaviours induced by life's misfortunes and intoxication, we suppress the conventional wisdom of 1960s and 70s and begin to deploy the newfangled terminology of the psychiatric establishment. When media-savvy experts urge us to show greater tolerance towards sufferers of manic depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, Tourettes or Asperger's syndrome, they redefine our attitudes to groups of human beings whose behaviours, in all but the most extreme cases, fit neatly into a multidimensional maze of personality types. Rather than reduce the stigma that most mental health patients receive, awareness raising leads the public subconsciously to consider its purported beneficiaries as unfortunate misfits against whom society must be protected. It only takes one BBC documentary about a paedophile with Asperger's Syndrome to spread distrust in the wider TV-addicted atomised community, now desensitised to the civil rights implications of pre-school screening, psychoactive medication and the relentless extension of the concepts of learning disabilities and personality disorders. It may be fine for a select group of celebrity sufferers of mental illnesses to publicise their trials and tribulations, but the masses of psychiatrically labelled people out there have to cope with the unspoken distrust and condescending attitudes of anyone aware of their new classification.

In some ways we may view mental health awareness raising as a form of authorised bullying. Feelings that may manifest themselves to an undiagnosed person as emotional distress and social alienation, are attributed not to society, but to endogenous disorders, thereby relieving their tormentors of any guilt other than their lack of awareness of the psychiatric conditions of their classmates, neighbours or colleagues. Numerous campaigns build on the theme of "The Same but Different". While wishful-thinking support workers may genuinely believe such sloganising promotes inclusiveness, the public mainly receives the different bit of the message.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Misery Industry

In the run-up to New labour's historic 1997 electoral victory, thespian extraordinaire Tony Blair launched his rallying soundbite "education, education, education". Any brief exposure to modern teaching techniques as they have continued to evolve since would reveal the necessity to revise that slogan to "edutainment, edutainment, edutainment" .

Outside the bustling edutainment sector with semi-privatised unis offering students free I-pods and advertising the prospects of vibrant night life and casual sexual encounters, the biggest boom sector under New Labour calls itself the entertainment industry. The figures are quite staggering, but hard to quantify. The components of the entertainment sector span multiple traditional categories such as alcoholic beverages, electronic media (movies and games), retail, catering, gambling, sports and leisure, covering anything from a ten-pin bowling alley to a nighclub, a TV broadcaster to an electronics retailer, a Laser Quest virtual shooting centre to theatres now frequented only by the more educated chattering classes. According to Prospects, the official guide to post-graduate employment ( Prospects: Sport and leisure ), 13.5% of the UK work force are employed in the leisure industry accounting for 10% of the economy, excluding the mass media, an additional 0.6%, and entertainment-oriented retail sales. Now just consider that much of the remaining population work in other branches of the non-essential service sector, whether in administration, finance or advertising.

British students have long had a reputation for drinking, but I seem to recall back in the 1980s not many could afford indulge in nights out on the town more than once a week unless they had another source of income. Social life would revolve around the student bar and many would spend most evenings in swatting over their course work. Fast forward to the 21st century and student life has morphed into a non-stop partying session. Every lunchtime by the entrance of an image-obsessed Leeds Metropolitan University students earn a little extra cash to promote local night clubs, often performing stunts reminiscent of yesteryear's protesters. Even among teaching staff Curtis White's Middle Mind, the deluge of junk information that overwhelms what little remains of our independent imagination, dominates discourse. Hollywood movies, game consoles, commercial Websites, moronic TV, multi-millionnaire celebrities, consumer goods and the occasional pub crawl, interpolated only by the news agenda set by large corporations. Not surprisingly the aforementioned edutainmental establishment offers a BA Hospitality Business with Club & Casino Management . It's probably only a matter of time before they add Brothel Management to their repertoire. Welcome to Air Strip One anno 2006, where spending countless hours immersed in realistic simulations of death and destruction is apparently considered normal, indeed so normal that anyone who dares to question the morality of this pervasive pursuit awaits social exclusion, except in the safe confines of like-minded non-gamers. So they want to censor violent content from Youtube, but have they considered pulling all first-person shooter games from stores frequented by millions of young chiidren, often strategically located at kid height? No, it seems the only depravity they want to censor is that disseminated by ordinary folk, while respected corporate and state institutions fill our minds daily with the most abject technicolour vileness.

Regulating the Poor and Deregulating the Rich

If one trend were to summarise the Blair agenda, it is this. Give big business carte blanche to hook millions on their mind-altering pursuits and carcinogenic products, while imposing ever-greater restrictions on the freedom of private citizens, for their own benefit naturally.

Tobacco shares are probably not a very good buy just now as smoking has just been banned in all public buildings in Scotland and this ban looks set to extend to England next year. Revenue in public houses may decline at least in the short term in some deprived areas, but all is not bleak on the entertainment front. Apparently GSK and Aventis stand to profit enormously from the growing rate of prescription for their anti-depressants, if you're an investor follow my advice, sell tobacco shares and buy pharmaceuticals. Other opportunities loom on the horizon with considerable growth in the gambling sector, which will in turn fuel sales of both alcoholic beverages, party drugs and antidepressants. Prospects look good for the burgeoning debt relief and cash conversion business.

It may seem odd to some that the same government responsible for restricting the freedom to smoke in the name of public health, has extended pub opening hours, deregulated gambling, let the NHS dispense ever growing numbers of SSRI's (Prozac-like antidepressants) and Ritalin and oversee an explosion in the use of ecstasy in discos, night clubs and raves.

Evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease is quite compelling, but clearly it is not the only factor determining good health and longevity. Indeed some of the countries with the highest smoking rates such as Japan, Spain, France and Greece also have some of the highest life expectancies. May this have something to do with diet and lifestyle? So if you smoke 20 a day and eat junk food, it's kicking the latter habit that will statistically contribute more to lengthening your lifespan.

The whole point is it's none of the government's business to dictate such lifestyle choices, as long as citizens are well informed, are not under social or commercial pressure to adopt high risk habits and are protected against predatory and deceptive business practices.

However, the prevailing trend is to deregulate big business letting it make new inroads into the addiction sector, leading in years to come to a growing incidence of psychological problems. The same government that highlights the dangers of smoking, despite still getting huge revenues from the sale of tobacco, cohorts with its corporate friends in downplaying the adverse effects of of gambling, SSRIs, carginogenic food additives (i.e. aspartame contained in most deceptively labelled sugarfree or "no added sugar" drinks) and violent video games, all multibillion pound industries and an integral part of many young people's lives.

Consider the aspartame controversy and bear with me before you see the parallels with the tobacco controversy of the mid 20th century and its wider implications for manufacturing and controlling pleasure. There are broadly speaking three perspectives on the dangers of this pervasive sweetener. The industry has long claimed its safety is backed by research and may only pose a risk for minority groups such as phenylketonuriacs (PKU sufferers). Many aware of the alleged dangers, but regular consumers of products containing the substance, simply view it as a potential risk that may only affect them at extraordinarily high levels of consumption. They see millions consuming aspartame-containing products with no immediate side effects and even minor one benefit, aspartame does not rot your teeth as much as sugar (but other ingredients in fizzy drinks still do). Third a small minority avoid all foods likely to contain the substance because copiuous research suggests that the substance is a carcinogen even at normal levels of consumption (e.g. 3-4 aspartame-sweetened drinks and a packet of aspartame-sweetened chewing gum a day). Now if the third group were just a bunch of ill-informed conspiracy-theorists and aspartame were truly safe, you'd expect the industry to proudly and unashamedly advertise the fact. Coke Zero would be rebranded Coke Extra, now with aspartame instead of tooth-rotting sugar, Tookthkind Ribena (which incidentally still contributes to tooth decay even without added sugar) would inform parents in large print Now with added aspartame for your child's benefit. Instead we are entertained with misleading labels such as sugarfree (i.e. always contains aspartame) and no added sugar (probably contains aspartame), while the corporate health media do a little aspartame promotion by simply warning of the dangers of excessive sugar consumption, usually without distinguishing different forms of sugar (glucose, sucrose, lactose and fructose) or the fact that our body needs some sugar, a fact testified by the presence of lactose in maternal milk and fructose-containing berries in the paleolithic diet of our forebears (though later we acquired a much a sweeter tooth). Now cast your mind back to the 1940s when copious evidence available then not only linked tobacco with lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases, but proved its addictiveness. It took the tobacco industry 50 years to admit the health hazards of their lucrative products. Of course, in the meantime not all regular smokers dropped dead instantly and, ironically, mean life expectancy continued to rise. Many lived into their 70s, 80s or 90s despite their tobacco vice, while others who died early of lung cancer or heart failure had their illnesses attributed to other causes. Indeed smoking among the working classes only gained its quasi-universality in the aftermath of the 1914-18 Great War with millions returning from the trenches as nicotine addicts. Now what if, as some research would suggest, aspartame at normal rates of consumption is as carcinogenic as smoking 20 cigarettes a day? If that turns out to be the case, industry and government standards authorities would have misled the next generation by getting them hooked young with their sugarfree diet-conscious drinks, specifically targeted at kids. Since the introduction of aspartame into the food supply in the mid 1980s the incidence of diabetes and childhood obesity has skyrocketed and, ironically, per capita sugar consumption has declined. Yes the biggest rise in longevity occurred in the 1960s and 70s when over half the adult population smoked and almost everyone took sugar with their tea or coffee, but most had at least one square meal a day served at home on the dining room table rather than microwaved and consumed on the sofa before a 40" plasma screen. If aspartame has no other side effects, it makes otherwise boring food much sweeter and yummier, acting alongside MSG (monosodium glutamate) as a major appetite enhancer and encouraging a predilection for hyper-sweetened foods. If you're worried about sugared tea or coffee rotting your teeth, simply get used to taking these beverages unsweetened! If your waistline concerns you, why not just cut down on cakes and dairy products. But in a society that buys into the myth of a free lunch, we believe we can indulge without consequences and technology will always come to the rescue.

What's wrong with having fun?

Ask a stupid question and you'll get a stupid answer. We all aspire to enjoying life, but a better question would be: Why do we need such high doses of frivolous amusement to stay emotionally afloat?. If commercialised leisure centres, home cinemas and a never-ending drone of fast-beat dance music in stores and bars made us so happy, why are so many of prone to depression? Now imagine looking forward to a quiet walk in the park with a half hour break to read an enthralling novel only to find a bunch of twenty-somethings holding a daytime rave completely oblivious to your desire for tranquility? It soon becomes clear that the ecstatic joy of the few leads to the misery of the many, either because they cannot emulate the sexually appealing and self-confident charm of successful revellers or because they feel undermined or threatened by their mindless hedonism. How many of us have been to discos, nightclubs or on pub crawls, only to return with a huge hole in our bank balance and a hangover, in the vane hope that the disinhibition and stupor that booze and loud music invoke will revolutionise our social life, help us meet a dream partner or at least lead to a desperate one night stand? If you thought everyone else out there was having a whale of a time in the brave new world of post-industrial pleasure, think again. Most are at home glued to the TV, bidding on ebay, immersed in a virtual word of fantasy battles or maybe amusing themselves with titbits from www.youtube.com. We are presented with a dazzling spectacle, whose primary purpose is to distract us from leading fruitful and rewarding lives, the only source of long term happiness for those of us unlucky enough not to win the lottery. Once distracted, our animalistic behaviour can be monitored and and our lives more pervasively controlled. For if adults can be mesmerised into behaving like spoilt children on steroids, some will inevitably overstep the mark and require 24/7 surveillance, enabling the corporate and state establishment to clamp down on its real enemies, sober critical thinkers.

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All in the Mind

Shameless Celebrity Promotion of Personality Disorders

Letter to the Independent (on Sunday)

Judging from the Independent on Sunday's feature on Stephen Fry's high-profile outing as a bipolar-defined person, we can look forward to a new season of personality disorder awareness raising. If we believe the hype, until the mid 1990s human beings labelled with the new generation of behavioural disorders lived in the dark ages condemned to a life deprived of media-filtered awareness of their plight, a burgeoning support and counselling sector and a new range of wonder-drugs, without which, we are led to believe, affected subjects would commit either suicide or heinous antisocial crimes.

Over the last 15 years we have witnessed a gradual extension and proliferation of the traditional set of psychiatric disorders, often blurring distinctions with learning disabilities as in the case of autism, to encompass a growing proportion of the population. These range from ADHD kids weaned on Ritalin, Tourettes, Asperger's, obsessive compulsives, manic depressives, bipolar-disordered to schizophrenics, a surprisingly high percentage of whose psychotic episodes were triggered by recreational drugs.

Yet all the symptoms associated with these personality syndromes exist to varying degrees in the general undiagnosed population. If you have never felt depressed, heard inner voices, harboured paranoid thoughts, felt alienated, been obsessed with a special interest or had an annoying habit, you have probably led a very pampered and sheltered existence. The awareness raising industry may define these symptoms as pathological, but they are often a natural reaction to myriad personal injustices in a climate of heightened interpersonal competition and insatiable material expectations and hedonism. Obsessive societies tend to create obsessed citizens. When will we start treating each other as individual members of a community, each with our relative strengths and weaknesses, and stop categorising those of us who for a complex set of environmental and biological reasons are deemed misfits? When will we refocus our attention on identifying the real causes of personal woes, nearly always psycho-social, and stem this dangerous drift towards genetic fundamentalism. Neuroscience is very much in its infancy, but has already revealed the immense plasticity and thus adaptability of the orbito-frontal cortex of the human brain in reaction to real life events. 5 to 10 percent of the population is not subhuman and cross-cultural comparisons show huge variations in the definition and treatment of those of us who experience emotional disturbances. If Mr Fry wants a label, let it be Stephen Fry Syndrome.

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Computing

Where OpenOffice could do better

Some may argue that you cannot fault the quality or features of free software, so if MS Office still offers a few bells and whistles that are a tad more polished than their OOo counterparts, a potential user need simply decide if these refinements are worth £200+. Yet OOo Writer has emerged not only as the main competitor to MS Word, but as a serious challenge to the domination of one software giant, 40% of whose revenue stem from business's addiction to its ubiquitous Office Suite. In many respects OOo Writer is more powerful than MS Word with full support for master documents and structural markup, enabling encyclopaedia-length tomes with thousands of pages to be fully indexed. What a shame that just a few extra refinements stand in the way of making OOo a true MS Office replacement for professional writers working with others locked into the MS Office paradigm. Yes one can use a good text editor and layout engine such as VI and TeX, but in the real world you need to return an edited MS Word document in exactly the same format complete with comments. I hope in the near future wider adoption of ODF and further development of online writing tools such as Writely will make MS Word a thing of the past, but for the time being any alternatives must enable seamless collaboration with users of existing de facto standards.

  • User-friendly comment-editing facility so writers collaborating on a project can easily add explanations for amendments and view comments inserted by others. Currently text entered in the notes dialogue box will not word-wrap, so lines longer than 60 or characters must be horizontally scrolled.
  • Tabbed interface: This has now become standard in the new generation of web browsers and could easily be implemented to emphasise the tight integration between components of the open office suite and discourage users from quitting the whole application just to close one document and open another.
  • Faster start-up: This has admittedly improved with version 2.0.3., but even with preloaders Open Office still lacks the virtual instant access that the MS Office suite provides.
  • Dashed and dotted table cell and frame borders. Why has this option been omitted? Currently the only way to achieve this effect is to manually add dashed borders from the Draw menu.
  • Simple command to cycle through upper case first (or Title in case), all upper case and all lower case, a handy features when editing documents with incorrect or inconsistent capitalisation.
  • Full support for SVG imports. With its growing use in Wikipedia and support integrated into Firefox 1.5+, SVG is fast becoming the standard vector graphics exchange format. Additionally SVG should be used for all clipart and custom widgets. The custom bullets, icons and borders supplied with the OOo are really quite naff and pixelate if enlarged.
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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Two add Two equals Five because Four is a Racist Number

Racism, or more correctly in most cases xenophobia, is matter of ethics. It seems fair to conclude that racism has no place in any caring society because nobody benefits from being victims of prejudice based on arbitrary ethnic distinctions. In the real world prejudice is a natural by-product of extreme variations in wealth, rampant materialism, heightened social competition and growing duplicity (namely the contrast between our anti-racist rhetoric and selfish behaviour). I doubt the Hotel Ritz has a specific policy to bar natives of Mozambique, but few Mozambicans could afford to stay there just one night if they saved up for a whole year. It's a club that cunningly excludes anyone who can't pay, but is probably surprisingly tolerant of any billionaires with genetic traits that may otherwise be subject to prejudice.

By comparison environmental sustainability is a matter of scientific inquiry. Naturally as our appraisal of the facts is imperfect, we may reach different conclusions. Supposing someone stated that "Britain's long term carrying capacity probably ranges between 20 and 40 million, because blacks are ill-adapted to our culture". The conclusion may be correct, but is not supported by the premise. The stated rationale is of course inconsequential to the matter at hand, makes an extreme generalisation, assumes the superiority of our culture and is as such patently racist. The country's carrying capacity is an equation of total human impact (population times per capita consumption), available resources and efficiency. As available resources can be temporarily boosted by plundering resources from other regions and the sustainability of new technology is open to debate about its side effects, different interpretations of the same empirical data may lead to different conclusions, but ideally not biased by emotions.

Now let's suppose I called a plumber to investigate a leak with water dripping down slowing through a tiny crack in the bathroom ceiling after a week of subzero temperatures. I may feel better if he informed that by simply filling the crack I could stop the leak. If, however, the leak came from a burst pipe and as soon as I turned on a tap downstairs water would come gushing down flooding the whole house, I should like to know. It may cost me £200 to employ the plumber to replace the burst pipe now, but that's still cheaper than several thousand pounds to repair any damage that may result from a flood. So an honest and dependable assessment would be in my best interests, however much I hate rip-off plumbers.

In the recent debate in the UK media over immigration and the fact the kingdom's population has just topped sixty million, liberal pundits have accused proponents of tougher immigration controls of racism, while the gutter press has highlighted the criminality of some sections of the immigrant community. So by this logic whether or not this archipelago can support a population of 60 million and continue to run such a huge trade deficit in food, raw materials and manufactured goods boils down to mere taste. Liberals are supposed to be supercool and tolerant of all things groovy, so we just need more immigrants enriching our diversified multicultural melting pot, while reactionaries selfishly hate all newcomers. Some are at least consistent in slamming the green movement altogether. Spiked Online, formerly LM Mag, has long advocated material and demographic growth as the only means to progress. In a 2005 Channel Four series on the immigration debate, one of Spiked Online's regular columnists, Kenan Malik, showed picturesque scenes of vast expanses of rural East Anglia to substantiate the claim that Britain could support millions more human beings. Viewers were not asked to consider how many hectares of farmland, woodland, raw material extraction (mining, oil drilling etc.), industrial estates and how many cubic metres of potable water each resident needs. The UK can only survive with its current population and level of consumption because we import most of what we consume and export a good deal of the pollution generated by our lifestyle. This is only feasible if other regions produce huge surpluses and are willing to buy services from us. The harsh reality is that the island's medium term prosperity is tied inextricably to global trade and, more specifically, international finance. Should the US economy collapse and with it leading multinationals responsible directly or indirectly for hundreds of thousands of the country's best paid jobs resulting in a crash of the housing market and mass unemployment, how could we afford to source the relatively cheap imports we now take for granted? Spanish tomatoes seem a better deal because fossil fuels make it relatively inexpensive to ship tonnes of refrigerated fruit and veg thousands of miles and store them for several months. With fossil fuel prices destined to rise as the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) decreases, we may soon have to relocalise our economy, using up every acre of available farmland. If predictions of dwindling per capita energy resources owing to the recently named phenomenon of peak oil prove unfounded and we have a bright future with nuclear energy and/or abiotic oil, then these assumptions had better be based on hard science rather than wishful thinking. However, wars of conquest in the Middle East and the behaviour of the world's superpowers (US and China) reveal growing competition over access to vital energy resources. The sum of two and two is easy to verify. Claiming it were five, would in effect redefine the meaning of five unless we were to conclude that 2+2 = 2+3. Likewise, the arguments of many neo-liberal apologists for global hegemony do not differ much. A scientifically flawed statement is wrong whatever the ethical rationale. They appeal to our emotional empathy with the plight of the poor to support the introduction of more cheap labour into a country with an artificially inflated economy.

"Britain's carrying capacity is much bigger than the current population because to suggest otherwise would be racist".

Again the premise does not substantiate the claim. If we are genuinely motivated by altruism, we might consider how best to help people in the regions of greatest emigration. However, even a cursory analysis of migratory flows would reveal a very different picture than just a continuous stream of new immigrants to wealthy countries. As cheap labour flows into the country, chiefly to help big business, more and more well-to-do native Brits buy property abroad, so Spanish, Cypriot and Bulgarian coastal resorts are filling up with ex-pats as Poles and Lithuanians flock to London, leaving whole communities in Eastern Europe deprived of their younger population and acting effectively as a brain drain. As a result the economies of many Eastern European communities begin to depend on income earned abroad leading natives to abandon agriculture and seek employment with export-oriented businesses reliant on global trade, locking them into a global system dependent on cheap fuel and technology controlled by a handful of transnational corporations.

Rather than foster a climate of reciprocal respect and tolerance, these trends further disempower local communities and generate growing distrust towards outsiders. Ironically the ruling elites play a shrewd game of sewing the seeds of xenophobia by shipping cheap labour to regions with higher incomes and suppressing dissent within native working classes through the imposition of political correctness. Fifteen years ago in the grim years of Thatcher's rule, many unemployed blamed the government or big business for their plight, but fast forward to 2006 and many unemployed are persuaded they have a mental illness or lack key skills that many new migrants have.

In all fairness it is xenophobic to demand more than the average global living standard. So if the world can only support 650 millions personal motor vehicles, we'd better raise our person-to-car ratio to 10:1 rather than the current 2:1. If current technology and energy resources can only supply each global citizen with 1600 kg of oil per year (based on 2001 figures), then the UK should cut its 4000 kg per capita to 40% of its present level, indeed to reduce our dependence of fossil fuels we'd need even greater reductions, unless we seriously believe that all 6.5 billion global citizens can sustainably consume as much as Western Europeans do.

Revised statement: "The UK's high-consumption lifestyle is xenophobic because it affords us with a bigger slice of the global cake than our proportion of the global population warrants".

Now that begins to make sense. Of course one could state "The UK can support a much greater population because genetically modified food, nuclear energy and outsourcing of all industry to Mars will significantly boost our planet's carrying capacity" which would make sense if the rationale were scientifically feasible. Likewise one could assert that "2 + 2 = 5 if the value of the number two increments by one after the plus sign". It's the same fuzzy logic.

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All in the Mind

You’re just an Individual

Whether you read psychiatric literature, social work reports or listen to the speeches of leading politicians, you'll find ordinary citizens increasingly referred to not as women, men, people, human beings or citizens but as individuals. Whether you lead an atypical lifestyle, are considered to suffer from a disorder or disease, are addicted to an obsessive behaviour or harbour subversive opinions, someone somewhere will probably refer to you as an individual with some label or other. A quick Web search for "individual with" (in inverted commas to narrow the search to that exact string) returns a plethora of references to disabled or psychiatrically labelled subjects. But the application is gradually spreading to encompass a wider cross-section of misfits, miscreants and deliquents, even blurring essential distinctions between the groups. A misfit is someone who simply finds it hard to assimilate into mainstream society for whatever reason. A geek fascinated by outmoded programming languages and oblivious to dressing norms may be a misfit in a fashion-crazed culture. A miscreant fails to believe the official doctrine, someone who fails to believe in the veracity of the latest terrorist scare is a miscreant setting her or himself against the dominant media outlets. A deliquent deliberately behaves in a socially irresponsible and potentially destructive way or may be so engrossed in the pursuit of pleasure that she or he is simply unaware of the social consequences of her or his actions, e.g. An alcoholic gambler may soon become a deliquent forced into crime through mounting debt and a risky lifestyle. Yet to statisticians all these categories just comprise individual specimens of humanity in need of classification.

New Labour enforcers seem to have four responses to well-argued condemnations of the government's actions. They may define the opinion holder as an extremist aligned with authoritarian regimes or fundamentalist religious sects. They may write off the view as a mere conspiracy theory. They may call into question the challenger's appraisal of the facts appealing to their residual party loyalty. However, when none of these options appears expedient, a classic tactic is simply to acknowledge awareness of the individual's personal beliefs. So if Tony Blair claims that the failure of the British foreign secretary to vote for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon following over 1000 civilian deaths is "the right thing to do to secure peace in the Middle East", we are supposed to believe he is privy to information to substantiate this claim. Yet if an opponent exposes the sheer hypocrisy of Blair's position in siding with aggressors, their views are dismissed as the personal opinions of individuals. Likewise if a woman becomes addicted to Internet gambling, her psychological dependence on this pastime and the resulting bankruptcy are considered personal problems of an individual with an obsessive compulsive disorder. Those responsible for deregulating and promoting the activity are just politicians and entreprenuers responding to public demand.

Most words have their uses, but the gradual semantic shift of this adjective and noun reflects a trend to alter language in order to blur distinctions and substitute implicit meanings. In NewSpeak an individual is a subject of investigation, while a man or woman are persons in their own right.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Globalitis: Why Economic Migration is not always Good News

This Wednesday's Independent (UK edition, 26/07/06) ran a front page story spilling over to page two under the heading "Outstanding: Official Verdict on school that shows the success of immigration". It featured a fabulous inner London primary school with twenty six pupils and twenty six languages, all apparently excelling academically and growing up bilingual in a dynamic multicultural setting of tolerance and mutual understanding. With pictures of such charming and talented children, how could anyone fail to realise the huge benefits of immigration, wondered the opinionated journalists? The article did not consider the metropolis's looming water, refuse management and housing crises, nor the fact that few Londoners are directly involved in the harvesting or production of the products they consume. On the same day the editorial page bemoaned the adverse effects on the developing world of a probable collapse of talks on global free trade. The conclusions the Independent wants us to reach are:

  1. immigration is always good and environmentally sustainable;
  2. free trade benefits the poor.

The two are, of course, inextricably linked because contrary to popular mythology it is largely economics that drives both immigration and political repression. People move to more prosperous regions to improve their professional and financial prospects within the prevailing economic reality. As the ruling classes can only maintain a semblance of democracy when they can successfully lure the masses with a share of their wealth, relative economic deprivation with extremes of wealth and poverty provides a ripe climate for state repression of unwanted or vulnerable sections of populace. In the absence of immigration controls any global model of development with extreme variations in earning potential, career opportunities for the university educated, provision of key social services and relative security will lead to massive flows of human beings from the least desirable regions towards lands with greener pastures. In theory this should have a balancing effect, but many argue that new immigration drives economic growth, e.g. A person migrating from a low consumption region to high consumption region would tend to increase aggregate global consumption. In a world comprising largely self-sufficient regions most migration will tend to flow within each region without new wars of conquest and colonisation. Current migration is fuelled largely by the dynamics of a global trading system that has its roots in 18th and 19th century colonial mercantilism. However, in the long term the world is bound by the same laws of thermodynamics or limits to growth. Historically such movements have tended to occur much more gradually and with a much smaller human population. Never has the UK been so dependent on global trade and what is left of the country's manufacturing and farming sectors are predominantly outside the South East of England. The capital's economy revolves around banking, media, advertising, property, education and administration as well as a booming catering and leisure industry to accommodate the desires of service workers. We could simplify these categories into finance and propaganda. Everything is imported, even much of the city's water arrives from France in plastic bottles. Why should China continue to ship its wares to London? What services does it get in exchange? Londoners design a few adverts and Chinese workers deliver the goods! So in what kind of world do we move talented young people from one country which still has much more fertile land per capita than the UK to one of Europe's most overcrowded conurbations? If we believe the Independent, the UK has a chronic skills shortage and an ageing population requiring affordable carers. Might this be because cultural trends here induce natives to opt for media studies, business administration, psychology and graphic design at uni rather than acquire hard skills such as plumbing, mechanical engineering, etc.? As for the elderly, why can we not take care of our own within the family? We all know the answer, because family units have broken down and many potential carers are too busy earning a living in the service sector to serve their creators.

If immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent and Middle East had affected British culture, one might naively have expected a resurgence in close-knit extended family values. Instead the native population has witnessed a rapid rise in the proportion of single-parent households. The cultural impact of the post-WW2 immigrant communities has mainly manifested itself in culinary contributions and music, but as a rule the more a community has assimilated into mainstream English, Scottish or Welsh society, the more its youth has been immersed in fun culture. It should hardly surprise us that so many programmers hail from the UK's Asian communities that shielded them to some extent from cultural decadence so they could acquire the core logical mathematical skills they need to excel in domains that many other British kids find dly uncool. What about catering staff? Well you'd think home-grown students would want to earn a few pennies? In sector after sector we've witnessed the outsourcing of jobs and, especially in the South East of England, the importation of new cheaper human resources, while millions of natives are either unemployed or on incapacity benefits as a result of spuriously defined mental health problems. When will we realise that we need cleaners, cooks, bus drivers, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, farm labourers much more than It consultants or marketing executives. We might need programmers and sociologists, but not more professionals who push an essentially corporate agenda.

Cultural Imperialism

Sustainable immigration can benefit the host nation in innumerable ways enriching local culture and bringing in new skill sets. This works well in a climate of mutual respect and a relative equality of opportunities for all. Countries as diverse as Australia, Brazil and Canada have literally been built by successive waves of immigrants, but sooner or later we encounter the environmental equivalent of the law of diminishing returns. Most societies have one dominant culture to which other subcultures must adapt.

Curiously, immigrant communities in the UK since the end of World War Two have by and large brought with them traditional extended family values and hailed from close-knit communities. Many liberals see it as their mission to convert stalwart ethnic minorities to the new mantra of sexual liberation, women's rights, smaller family units and the commercial fun culture that tends to accompany these trends. Don't get me wrong a healthy society includes all its citizens in the decision-making process and does not discriminate against people for exhibiting natural non-abusive variants of human sexuality, but it is debatable whether recent trends have actually empowered women or have just created new categories of human beings. Why should one society have it right and another wrong? Surely customs and ethics evolve gradually as a result of generations of experience. One may view rights in individualised terms, e.g. gay rights, or one may view a society as a cohesive entity, e.g. Considering how the rights of one category affect the rights of another. More communal societies tend to take a holistic approach rather than affording abstract rights to minorities.

While the immigrant communities have contributed to cuisine and music, they have abjectly failed to stem the tide towards hedonism and dysfunctional family units. As greater integration leads minorities to assimilate the dominant culture, the net effect of migration is the erosion of the cultural heritage of migrants. However, for many observers the new dominant culture shares few traits with traditional English customs and values. The Welsh and Scots have long had a stronger sense of identity, but everywhere local culture is dumbed down to supporting the national football team, boozing and frequenting the same set of chain stores. Tesco, Weatherspoons, B&Q, Next, Game, William Hill and The Sun reflect dominant culture more accurately than tea and scones, a Sunday roast with beef and Yorkshire pudding, corner grocery stores, morris dancing, cricket, golf or quaint garden parties with cucumber sandwiches. With few exceptions what remains of native island culture has been commercialised or consigned to occasional appearances in annual festitivities. The same is happening to more recent cultural imports. Oddly as some Londoners grumble about the English language proficiency of some Poles, one by-product of the recent wave of Eastern European immigration to England will be to consolidate the dominant role of the English language within European commerce.

Supply and Demand

If we conclude that immigration is environmentally unsustainable and socially destabilising, we can act either on the supply or demand side. I find it totally selfish to advocate immigration controls in order to preserve our standard of living, for our wealth has been gained by plundering resources elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of Poles did not descend on the UK because they like the climate or appreciate any aspects of traditional island culture, but because a booming London-centred service sector, totally subservient to transnational corps, took advantage of one of Europe's most cost-efficient labour markets, all eager to learn English. If immigration served to provide a safe haven for the victims of state repression and extreme poverty, then the UK Government should open the floodgates to hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians and Africans, but few could afford the plane ticket. More important much deprivation abroad is a direct result of the UK and US's economic and military policies and the export of an unsustainable economic model of continuous material growth.

Immigration controls act solely on the supply side. As long as the demand is there, prospective immigrants will claim a denial of human rights if they cannot move to meet this demand and take their slice of seemingly large prosperity cake. I'd favour what we might term as demand-side environmental re stabilisation by powering down booming economies in high-consumption areas and creating more demand for jobs in regions of net emigration. This can only be made to work if each region produces as much as is practically possible locally. As fossil fuels become scarcer and dearer, we will need to re localise our economies. The alternative may well be internecine warfare as the delicate harmony among ethnic communities falls apart. I certainly don't want to see more Draconian legislation or the resurgence of racism, but if we fail to tackle very real problems we might end up with an even more authoritarian regime manipulating conflicts of short-term interests within rival sections of the poor.

Categories
Computing

What is Open Source and why should you care?

Operating systems and productivity software are very much here with us to stay. The millions of person hours invested in the development of the powerful programmes many of us use every day will serve hundreds of millions of users for generations to come. Only five years ago a typical desktop system may have cost as much as £1000, so possibly investing £200 in software may have seemed, relatively speaking, a small price to pay for professionals relying on mission-critical applications. However, when hardware prices plummet as low as £200 for a basic system and software becomes as ubiquitous as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, drawing and photo editing applications, it becomes harder to justify such price markups and with the expansion of the Internet practically impossible to safeguard proprietary source code. Sooner or later someone will find a way of pirating pervasive productivity applications. However, a huge lobby of software multinationals, principally Microsoft, but also Apple, Adobe and to a lesser extent Oracle and Sun Microsystems, has vociferously promoted the concept of intellectual property, e.g. if you write a book in Microsoft Word, Microsoft owns the copyright for the format in which you saved it. Some may argue the last three companies may have belatedly embraced open source out of sheer opportunism to beat one well-known leviathan.

As millions of users simply take the omnipresence of leading proprietary packages for granted, many myths about Open Source software abound.

  1. Open source is bad for software developers: Open source software is not necessarily free, but its source code and file formats are made publicly available so that other programmers can improve on and interoperate with the application. Usually you pay for support, but may download the software for free.
  2. Pirated software is against the law: Open source is 100% legal, unless you infringe the terms of the licence (GPL = General Public Licence or GNU GPL), which usually means reselling the software. Do not confuse legal open-source software with pirated closed source programs. To some extent the major players tolerate some degree of pirating in order to get the public hooked on their proprietary formats and reap huge rewards from commercial users legally obliged to have licensed software. Open-source simply has different kind of licence.
  3. Open source is a bug-ridden and virus-prone: Very few viruses have ever originated from open source programs. Viruses tend to come as e-mail attachments or are planted on your computer via decptively marketed malware such as Winfixer. The leading open-source projects Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice, The GIMP and Clam Anti-Virus (all available for Windows and Linux) will not leave you with an unworkable machine. Compare and contrast this reality with numerous trojan horse programs that install themselves due to inherent weaknesses in leading proprietary applications.
  4. My employer won't allow it: IT departments that restrict use and installation of open source software may offer excellent excuses for doing so, but ultimately they serve the interests of large multinationals who make a fortune out of their quasi-monopolies. Why should tax-payers subsidise Microsoft so that social workers and teachers can use Microsoft Office instead of a perfectly functional and user-friendly, but much cheaper, alternative like OpenOffice?

Now let's tackle the issue from a different perspective. Do we pay the Prussian inventors of the printing press copyright or licensing fees over six hundred years after their revolutionary innovation? Of course we don't, but we still use technology that has been gradually adapted by different engineers in different places over the centuries. If I use a Hewlett Packard Laserjet printer to reproduce my scripts on paper, HP involvement begins and ends in the transfer of information from an electronic to a paper format. If the HP printer breaks down, I could just buy a different make of printer to do the same job. If I wish to reproduce the same text as HTML, PDF or Microsoft Word 97/2000 (soon to be superseded incidentally), I should surely be able to choose to use the most convenient and cost-effective tool and should not have to buy constant software upgrades to interoperate with others who use these formats. HTML has always been an open standard. I may handcode it in any rudimentary text editor or use a wide array of free open-source programmes to generate HTML for me. Like Postscript, PDF started life as a proprietary industry standard, but Adobe has since open-sourced it. Linux and Mac systems will let you output any text or graphical output as PDF. If I want polished professional output I may choose to invest in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign, or I may go with Corel Draw or Xara Xtreme. Even OpenOffice Draw will output perfectly adequate PDF. So why do I need to donate some of my hard-earned cash to one multinational just to ensure complete compabitility with the latest incarnation of its flagship office suite whose admittedly pervasive formats have no inherent benefits over open-source alternatives?

The OpenDocument Format is the result of collaboration between major players in the software and information business. Its committee includes not just IBM, Sun, Corel and Oracle, but Microsoft too. The specifications of the human-readable XML-based standard are in the public domain. Anyone may implement and support it. Some analysts claim that the principles behind ODF are fine, but in the real world ODF will suffer the fate of Esperanto faced with competition from English. ODF resembles (but predates) Microsoft's new Open-XML (note the confusing name) much more closely than the old Word 97/200/2003 format, but it is this latter standard to which the business world is addicted. This offers advocates of open standards a huge window of opportunity.

Format Lock-in

At times it seems that those who would stand to benefit most from open source software are those who are least aware or worst-informed about it. Many professional writers have used freely downloadable OpenOffice Writer for 600+ page books, replete with a table of contents, footnotes, indices, bibliography and neatly formatted to pre-press standards. Many successfully collaborate with other writers using rival proprietary software such as, err, Microsoft Word. Yet your run-of-the-mill desktop user with much more modest needs feels obliged to purchase the latter application, allegedly to ensure compatibility with documents that others may send. In a rational world lightweight users of word processors would be content with an application bundled with their pre-installed operating system, which ideally should not exceed 10% of the outlay for a new computer. Conversely, someone who writes for a living might actually splash out to acquire the best tools of the trade (there are other heavyweight proprietary tools such as Corel Word Perfect and Adobe Framemaker). When people are forced to buy a proprietary package just to import files created by others or fear that migrating to an alternative package would lead to extra costs in training and user familiarisation, we call this vendor lock-in. Indeed some public sector organisations sign contracts giving them discounts on proprietary software, which already have highly inflated prices, in exchange for a commitment to use this software exclusively for a set period. This is in effect a huge public rip-off.

Open standards, freely usable by any user or vendor.

Proprietary Multi-Vendor Multi-Platform Standards, effectively open-source but with licensing limitations

  • Rich Text Format (.rtf) (MS)
  • Mp3 audio
  • Mpeg 2 and 4 video
  • .wav audio file format (MS)
  • .avi video file format (MS)
  • GIF (theoretically still owned by Compuserve)

Common Proprietary Formats

  • MS Word (widely supported by rivals but with varying degrees of fidelity in the finer aspects of presentational formatting. This format is, however, soon to be superseded by an XML format very similar to OpenDocument.)
  • MS Excel
  • MS Power Point
  • MS Publisher (not supported by major rival products)
  • MS Access
  • Oracle
  • MS SQL Server (sometimes confusingly abbreviated to SQL)
  • MS Windows Media Video
  • Real Media Video
  • Apple QuickTime Video
  • Adobe Photoshop .psd
  • Adobe Illustrator .ai and .eps
  • Adobe Flash (vector graphics, interactive animation)
  • Adobe Shockwave (interactive gaming and e-learning)
  • MS ASP.NET server-side programming with C# or Visual Basic
  • MS IIS with Windows Server 2003

OpenOffice, currently version 2.0.3, offers excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats, but omits support for the MS Publisher format. People use this substandard application (OpenOffice Draw is simply a superior product) because it is bundled with MS Office and widely used in public services. Once familiar with its interface and having mastered a few tricks to get it to yield the desired results, many users are loathe to switch to something else. This means effectively that professional printers need a copy of this program though they'd never dream of using it themselves. Many interopability issues could be solved if in their infinite wisdom Microsoft endowed this program with an integrated PDF export feature (standard on all rival applications such as the freely downloadable Scribus). So rather than waiting for the Redmond Giant to embrace open standards, we should switch to alternatives that do. You should value your Word documents not for their proprietary binary format, but for their actual contents, so opening the same files in OpenOffice and saving them in the OpenDocument Format or PDF will not change your creation, but merely free you of reliance on one software vendor.

Nobody should be compelled to purchase a program or even download a trial copy just to view a file that could easily be reproduced in an open format. Consider HTML. The W3C may regulate it and browser vendors amy implement support for it in slightly different ways, but nobody owns the standard. If I feel a proprietary HTML editor is signifcantly better than an open-source alternative, then I might invest in it, but there are plenty of open-source HTML editors such NVU which will work fine for most users. If you only edit a few holiday snaps, then The GIMP or Google's Picassa will do fine. If you have more sophisticated requirements, then you might just go for Adobe Photoshop, Xara Extreme (now available for Linux too) or PaintShop Pro.

Open Source Alternatives

Microsoft Word
OpenOffice Writer, KWord, AbiWord
Microsoft Excel
OpenOffice Calc, Gnumeric, KSpread
Microsoft Access
OpenOffice Base / MySQL / PostgreSQL
Microsoft Power Point
OpenOffice Impress
Micosoft Visio
OpenOffice Draw, Dia
Micosoft Publisher, Corel Draw
Scribus, OpenOffice Draw. Both excellent alternatives. Draw integrates nicely with OpenOffice, while Scribus provides features that rival Corel Draw and even Adobe InDesign. Sadly neither imports your Old publisher files.
Adobe Framemaker
OpenOffice Writer (yep, it's that powerful)
Adobe Photoshop / Corel Paintshop Pro
The GIMP, Xara Extreme
MSN Messenger / Yahoo Messenger
GAIM
Internet Explorer
Firefox / Sea Monkey / Opera
Outlook Express
Mozilla Thunderbird
Full MS Outlook with scheduler
Gnome/Novell Evolution (fully compatible with MS Outlook Exchange Server) or Thunderbird with Mozilla Sunbird (fine for small offices)
MS Front Page / Adobe Dreamweaver
NVU (all platforms) / Blue Fish, Quanta (Linux only)
Adobe Flash MX Development Application
No real competition for advanced stuff, but try Flash4Linux and OpenOffice Impress will export slide shows to Flash.
Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, Corel Draw
Inkscape, excellent SVG and PDF support but not quite as refined as industry-leading proprietary alternatives
Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier
Some good projects such as Kino are promising, but as yet if you want professional video editing software, you still need to go proprietary.
Categories
Computing

Why are you using still using Microsoft Internet Explorer?

Screenshot of IE6 after Youtube withdrew support for it.

You may just be wondering why it matters. Microsoft have their operating systems on over 90% of the world's desktops and these just happen to ship with IE as the default browser. Not only that some sites use code specifically designed for Microsoft technologies like Active-X, so why not just take it easy and reap the benefits of interoperability that stem from the dominant browser? Why not just leave Firefox to the geeks and besides "If the guys at Mozilla want to compete they might consider embracing Microsoft-compliant code".

First let's get a few facts straight.

  1. Firefox is simply better: Gecko-based browsers are way ahead of IE6 in their support for XHTML and cascading style sheets. IE7 may have copied tabbed browsing from Opera and Firefox but it hasn't fully embraced CSS 2.0.
  2. Firefox is almost infinitely extensible and customisable: Besides RSS feeds, multiple search bars, multi-coloured tabs with progress bars, image zooms, Wysiwyg HTML editors, you can even have a full integrated FTP client, automate the download of whole sites for offline reading, hundreds of themes or skins to choose from and more.
  3. Firefox blocks unwanted popups: by default Firefox only allows user-activated pop-up windows.
  4. Firefox does not let in viruses: As the browser shields itself from the operating system and does not use Active-X, you can only install viruses if you run a file that has permission to execute on your computer. This is primarily a problem with Windows, but user stupidity can wreak havoc on any system.
  5. Firefox lets you resize all text: Many Websites use absolute font sizes that IE will not resize without additional software. In Firefox just press Ctrl/Cmd with + or – to increase or decrease font size.
  6. Keep everything in one window: With the Tab Mix Plus extension you can easily force all external links to open in a new tab within the same window with tabs spanning multiple rows if necessary. Next time you restart your browser, it will restore your previous browsing session for you.
  7. What about e-mail integration: If you want an integrated mail client to replace Thunderbird (open-source alternative to MS Outlook), you can always install Sea Monkey with an advanced HTML editor and IRC chat client.
  8. Microsoft uses older technology: Only sites still using Active-X (which Microsoft is phasing out in IE7 and Windows Vista incidentally) and non-compliant J-Script as opposed to standard Javascript become unworkable in Firefox. There are no special tricks that can only be achieved in IE, only bad coding is responsible. The most notorious sites that caused problems with Firefox last year included http://www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk and http://www.odeon.co.uk . Both have now been upgraded. At one stage users of Yahoo's Web-mail service could not add rich-text formatting to their emails in Firefox. No longer, Yahoo has made its services Firefox-compatible. As many web designers know, with more sites now relying on style sheets for layout and ditching old in-line markup, you're more likely to encounter quirks in IE than Firefox. Consider this site, the Tux penguin below the menu has a transparent background in Firefox and Safari, but a appears on a white rectangle in IE.
  9. Firefox is free and open source: Anyone can download, install and redistribute it. Not only that the source code is publicly available.

So if you still think Firefox is just for Microsoft-bashing nerds, why on earth would the Redmond Giant want to turn its next version of Internet Explorer into Firefox Light with a legacy Microsoft quirks compatibility mode?

Download, install and try it! If you don't still like it and prefer IE, Safari or Konqueror, simply reset your preferred browser as default. But if you like surfing as much as I do, the only real competition is Opera.

What about Netscape?

Well, it's still around, but in 1999 AOL bought it and shortly after discontinued independent development of the old 4+ code base, promoting its own branded version of Internet Explorer instead. Back then IE had better support for W3C standards, as Netscape included a number of non-standard enhancements such as layer instead of div tags. User numbers dropped rapidly to under 3% until 2000 when Netscape 6.0 appeared with a beta Gecko engine at a time with few CSS-layout sites. Version 7 saw some improvements, but in an era of almost complete IE domination. The latest offering outsourced to Mercurial Communications but distributed by AOL combines Firefox's Gecko engine and IE's Trident engine with a few bells and whistles that you could add to Firefox simply by installing extensions. Moreover, Netscape 8 is only available for Windows XP. Current figures show Firefox with over 10% of browser usage and considerably more in continental Europe with Netscape still under 1% and both Opera and Safari gaining niches between 1% and 3%. However, as of this writing Firefox tends to appeal to heavy users and web developers (just consider the way the Web Developer's tool bar lets you deconstruct and analyse a Web site), so fewer than 10% of computer users have adopted an alternative to IE. Remember the web is yours and not the sole domain of one multinational corporation.