Author: neilg63

Categories
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.
Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
All in the Mind

A Curious Exchange on Gambling

I belong to the school of thought that views happiness as a state of emotional equilibrium in which one's desires and material expectations are socially and environmentally sustainable. Should one feel unable to attain the required dose of desires in a highly competitive setting, this can indeed lead to too much misery. The broad theme I'd like to develop is that the mass entertainment industry would be more aptly named the misery industry. One does not need access to official statistics to claim that the gambling, booze and video-gaming industries, all growth sectors under New Labour, are responsible for many severe cases of emotional disturbances, in which short term thrills are soon offset by long term compulsive obsessions, bankruptcy, ill-health (lack of exercise, substance abuse) and depression.

I contacted Dr Mark Griffiths, professor of Gambling Studies at Nottingham Trent University, to enquire about the nature of his research. I had read his name in a letter to the Guardian newspaper (praising government policy) and in much Internet research on the psychological effects of gaming (either gambling or video-gaming, especially of the violent first-person shooter kind). Not surprisingly, though in true academic style erring on the side caution, Dr Griffiths works were nearly always cited by those defending the industry.

On 4/6/06 2:05 pm, "Neil Gardner" <neilgardner63@f2s.com> wrote:

Dear Mr Griffin (horror of horrors I used the wrong name and inadvertently downgraded a professor to a mere esquire),

I am writing a book about the psychosocial causes of the new generation of psychiatric labels, chiefly AS, OCD, ADHD and Tourettes. Although there may be genetic markers for the emergence of the traits associated with these new categories, I would dispute that they are primarily genetic in origin, but may develop as a result of chiefly environmental and some other physiological factors.

Childhood exposure to electronic media has increased dramatically over the last 20 years, broadly speaking the same time-frame in which these new mental disorders have gained prominence in the public psyche. I am not suggesting a direct causal link between ADHD and excessive exposure to TV or violent video games, but the latter certainly affect behaviour with dramatic effects in some vulnerable and emotionally deprived individuals. More important recent economic and technological changes have led to new patterns of socialisation with greater emphasis on presentation or smarminess.

Many contend that the entertainment industry merely responds to public demand, e.g. people like gambling, so business responds by offering gambling opportunities. Call me naive, but within 10 minutes walk of my flat in Cricklewood London are 3 William Hills, 2 Paddy Powers, 1 Gaming Centre and a Bingo Hall. Prominent adverts for gambling sites appear on billboards, buses, high-profile news Websites and in my e-mail inbox. As a Java/PHP programmer and database engineer I have been contacted to work on several gambling web sites, something I have refused. So if addiction to gambling had no environmental causes, then why would advertisers spend literally millions on attracting new gullible punters?

I note on your site:

Some of our research and consultancy is conducted in conjunction with and supported by the gaming industry as well as from academic research grants. We can offer our research services to investigate any of the areas outlined above.

Very few organisations (if any) can offer the depth of psychological knowledge on gaming that we can offer. We can carry out primary and secondary research, provide consultancy expertise, and promote staff development and training through helping staff understand the customer and their working environment and through brand development by raising their awareness regarding social responsibility.

Translated into plain English, this means "We will furnish research to support conclusions that serve the PR interests of the gaming industry" or rather if your gaming magazine/website wants some pseudo-scientific evidence to deny the psychological effects of 9 year-old kids playing Halo 2 on their X-Box 4 hours a day, we'll be happy to comply. The usual techniques deployed are:

  1. Downplay the extent ofthe problem (e.g. only late teens play "Kill Your Neighbour 3")
  2. Identify other causesof the psychological side effects associated with gaming
  3. Stress the positive aspects of gaming.
  4. Stress the choice available to consumers (e.g. X Gaming Company also produces a child-friendly ping pong simulator)
  5. Ridicule all research emphasising the adverse effects of addiction gaming
  6. Deny that it is addictive.
  7. Identify other related pursuits or games which may be addictive or psychologically damaging (e.g. fruit machines or online paedophile imagery, the former caserefers to outdated technology and the latter to a taboo almost universally condemned by public opinion, but if imagery of child sex corrupts, then surely imagery of hedonistic violence would do the same)
  8. Pepper your report withpreviously erudite terms that gaming journalists can quote to arguetheir case e.g. Many first-person shooters have been found to have a 'cathartic' effect on gamers (do a quick Google for the word cathartic and you'll find it re-quoted on thousands on gaming web sites).

I would welcome evidence that British academia is not, as would appear from your Web site, for sale.

Neil Gardner

And here is Prof. Griffith's highly professional reply:

On 5/6/06 08:10 am, Mark Griffiths <Mark.Griffiths@ntu.ac.uk> wrote:

  1. My name is Griffiths not Griffin
  2. I am both a Dr and a Professor and definitely not a Mr
  3. I have spent 20 years researching problem gambling and problem computer game playing and have never downplayed potential problems (see attached CV)
  4. Your interpretation of our unit's work couldn't be more wrong.
  5. Type in my name and addiction to computer games or gambling into Google and you will find 100s of hits
  6. Your e-mail is potentially libelous and I am passing it onto our legal department

Well readers can do the Googling for themselves and then do a little discrete research into their funding. A typical comment by the media-savvy professor is his remarks reported on the BBC Website in the aftermath of a school killing by a Manhunt-obsessed teenager:

"Research has shown those aged eight years or below do in the short-term re-enact or copy what they see on the screen.

"But there's been no longitudinal research following adolescents over a longer period, looking at how gaming violence might affect their behaviour."

This basically admits excessive or under-age gaming may cause some adverse effects, but essentially downplays their gravity and passes the buck over to parents or other potential causes. By using terms "longitudinal research" the professor belittles the fears of millions of readers unaware of what he means exactly. Now consider his piece in the British Medical Journal heralding video-games as a form of anaesthetic to distract children suffering pain. This must be an exceedingly marginal benefit, as other forms of hypnosis could also be used, e.g. imagery of a soccer match would have a similar effect in a football-obsessed child. But it convenienty allows the much-quoted researcher to once again downplay the adverse effects of obsessive video-gaming, noting merely that they are "prevalent among children and adolescents in industrialised countries" but without considering the huge disparities in prevalence within the industrialised world, e.g. Compare the prevalence of video game addiction in the UK or Denmark with that in Italy or Spain.

Indeed the CV Prof. Griffiths kindly sent me says it all:

GRANTS/CONSULTANCIES AWARDED

Dec 97 (BMG)£1500Effects of violent video games
Jan 98 (Interlotto)£5000Social impact of online lotteries
Mar 99 (AELLE)£2500Lottery addiction in Europe
Aug 99 (Action 2000)£500Millennium Bug Apathy
May 02 (British Academy)£5000Online multi-player computer game playing
Oct 02 (British Academy)£5000Computer game playing and time loss
Dec 02 (Intel)£1000Online computer game playing/spatial rotation
Feb 03 (British Academy)£5000Online computer game playing/addiction
Mar 03 (Centre for Ludomania)£1500Technology and gambling
July 03 (British Academy)£5000Aggression in slot machine playing
Oct 03 (RIGT)£45000Psychology of Internet gambling
Dec 03 (Herbert Smith)£1500Internet gambling
Apr 04 (Camelot PLC)£30000International Gaming Research Unit (Core funding)
May 04 (UQAM)$2500Slot machine gambling/Interactive technologies
July 04 (RIGT)£16000Coping skills in problem gamblers
Sept 04 (888.com)£1500Transferable skills in poker
Dec 04 (Paddy Power)£8500Social responsibility in Online Gambling
Jan 05 (Wace Morgan)Gambling addiction (Case study research court reports)
Jan 05 (Claude Hornby Cox)£1500Gambling addiction (Case study research court reports)
June 05 (Norwegian Government)£2000Gambling addiction
Jul 05 (Nat Lott Commission)£10000National adolescent gambling prevalence study
Aug 05 (Ultimate Poker)£3500Online poker identities
Nov 05 (Norwegian Government)£4000Slot machie addiction in Europe
Jan 06 (RIGT)£10000GamAid/GamStop evalution
Jan 06 (ALC)£8000PlaySphere evaluation
Feb 06 (RIGT)£240000Adolescent gambling (with Tacade)

Highlighted are organisations that are either in the gaming industry or spurious regulatory and research institutions funded by the gaming industry (e.g. RIGT, Resposnibility In Gambling Trust). It may seem odd for those of us who live in the real world that Prof. Griffiths should dedicate so much time to investigating the dangers of slot machines, when other more modern technologies pose a much more imminent danger to the psyche of millions of young people today. The very fact that such individuals are heralded as experts should ring alarm bells.

For fear of stating the obvious here is my reply:

On 5/6/06 11:18 pm, "Neil Gardner" <neilgardner63@f2s.com> wrote:

Dear Dr Griffiths,

Thanks you for CV and in particular for the list of grants you have received. I am intrigued as to why you would want to seek libel action against an e-mail? In my experience a person would only seek such action if a) they fear losing credibility (and why would you if are prepared to defend your findings intellectually) b) they are being smeared by the mass media. The second option hardly applies. Why not just let your work stand on its merits and let others investigate the funding and bias of your research?

I clearly believe that certain sections of the entertainment industry are at least in part responsible for a good deal of misery and psychological problems. But I would hardly expect the industry itself to fund research that would severely restrict its operations. What would you say if our opinions on the safety of tobacco were informed by research co-sponsored by tobacco multinationals or if the safety of methylphenidate were evaluated by research funded by GSK? (and I don't even support a smoking ban - as a rule I'd regulate big business rather than private individuals)

(1) My name is Griffiths not Griffin
(2) I am both a Dr and a Professor and definitely not a Mr

Is that of any great importance?

BTW did you write a letter to Guardian a few weeks backs commending the government on its new Gambling Regulation Act with key terms such as "responsible gambling" and stressing new restrictions on fruit machines (which IMHO is an extremely marginal problem)?

You may disagree with my assessments, but please don't libel me. The very action, as any psychologist should know, is a sign of weakness.

Categories
All in the Mind

Who Needs Psychiatry?

Most human beings have undergone moments of emotional disturbance and have at times engaged in unwise and irrational behaviour due to inexperience, extreme stress or intoxication. Our unconscious may have created sensory illusions, echoes of past ordeals. Many of us have felt the need to withdraw, if only temporarily, in a world of our own. A sense of insecurity, guilt or just personal fascination can lead us to obsess with actions, issues or objects. We may even sink into a mire of introspective self-worthlessness, known to others as depression. In some of us these tendencies may prevent us from leading our lives in a way that others may consider normal or functional.

If somebody behaves in a dysfunctionally irrational way, there may be two kinds of explanations. The first, and intuitively most obvious, is that something out there, whether a recent occurrence or a distant childhood memory, has altered his or her state of mind. Alternatively the brain itself could be defective. It's not quite that simple because drugs, medicines and food can change our metabolism and alter our mood. More to the point our brains rewire in response to environmental changes, especially during our formative years, but by and large we may seek either psycho-social (also known as environmental) or neurological causes of our troubles. Neither psychology nor neurology can exist in isolation. The former deals with the software and the latter with the hardware, which unlike computer hardware, may be subject to a process of continuous adaptation known as neuroplasticity.

Some behaviours are not only subjectively dysfunctional or culturally inappropriate, but immoral and dangerous to the rest of the community, e.g. If a person became convinced that all red-haired men were evil and proceeded to murder all such individuals in his neighbourhood, it would be perfectly correct to detain the perpetrator and thus protect the wider community. Psychologists may wonder what traumatic events caused the murderer to commit these heinous acts and neurologists may wonder if his brain had an inherent defect or had been afflicted by a physiological disease.

A short definition of psychiatry would be the study of pathological behavioural patterns or according to the Free Online Dictionary, the branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental and emotional disorders. A psychiatrist treats an aberrant behaviour as a disease. A complex of associated behaviours is then classified as a disorder. A psychiatric diagnosis is thus nothing more than a synopsis, albeit in erudite language, of observed symptoms, indeed the word clinical often preceding labels such as depression means just involving or based on direct observation of the patient. Surprisingly few people labelled with behavioural disorders have had their clinical diagnosis confirmed by PET or fMRI brain scans, but if any abnormalities were detected only an experienced neurologist would be able to make sense of the data. Nobody receives a psychiatric diagnosis based on the results of a brain scan and yet confusingly many victims of traumatic brain injuries and epilepsy manifesting conspicuous deficiencies in parts of the cerebral cortex allegedly responsible for reasoning and socialisation lead very successful lives free of psychotic episodes.

Psychoactive drugs rightly attract a great deal of controversy, but surely if they did help alleviate the worst symptoms of emotional distress and prevent extreme antisocial behaviours, the professional category responsible for their administration would be psycho-pharmacology.

Some see psychiatrists as the last line of defence when other law enforcement and social care professionals cannot deal with extremely abusive, dangerous or self-destructive behaviour. Psychiatry differs from psychology in defining aberrant behavioural patterns as endogenous diseases, which may have environmental triggers but are nonetheless inherent to the affected individual. Many parents and other close relatives go along with the psychiatric model because it absolves them of all responsibility. Schools, social services, police, state and corporate entities all tend towards psychiatric explanations for the same basic reason.

Don't Blame the Parents

This has long been the rallying cry of the burgeoning mental health industry, myriad charities, public and private sector institutions very much in the public limelight. Whenever anti-psychiatry raises its dissenting head, its advocates are vilified and often likened with Robert D Laing, and accused often in highly emotive language, of blaming parents. This misses three essential points:

  • Parents are only part of a child's environment and thus cannot be blamed for numerous other factors such as heightened social competition, mass consumerism, peer pressure, pervasive media etc.
  • Parents may themselves be victims of childhood neglect and adult stress, with a serious sense of inferiority, social alienation or addiction to hedonistic pursuits such as gambling.
  • If we stress the psycho-social causes of personal problems rather than endogenous biological causes, parents, and other close relatives and friends, have a greater role to play in rehabilitation. Many become depressed or experience psychotic episodes precisely because they lack full integration with their family and community. Even where neglectful or abusive parents are a large part of the problem, they may, except in the most extreme cases of abuse, be part of the solution.

So let's abolish psychiatry altogether. In some cases we may find answers in neuroscience, but in most we'd better take a good look at each other and wonder what we as individuals or as a society have done wrong to make an increasing number of us go insane.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Managing Public Opinion

The Strange Case of Twelve Islamophobic Cartoons

Over the last week the publication of a cartoon portraying the prophet Mohamed as a terrorist has dominated the Western European media sparking a phoney debate about freedom of expression from the very people who misled us about the recent invasion of Iraq. On one side we have the ultra-PC brigade preaching the virtues of tolerance and feigning sympathy with the Islamic community. On the other we have a motley crew of Guardian-reading libertarians, a few even prepared to support the publication of the offending cartoon, others just defending the theoretical right to do so. While it may be reasonably argued that propaganda and disinformation can have murderous consequences, static cartoons hardly constitute the main causes of ethno-religious intolerance. Long before the appearance of this sketch Fox News, Sky News, the BBC and CNN had through slightly more subtle means persuaded millions that we face a growing terrorist threat from Islamic extremists. The Danish cartoon, assuming its author hailed from that land, merely caricatured mainstream US and UK propaganda, daring to portray graphically what journalists had refrained from stating explicitly.

As rights cannot exist without responsibilities, freedom of expression cannot thrive without a culture of mutual respect devoid of intimidation and emotional blackmail. It is quite possible to challenge orthodoxy on any subject in a cool, calm and collected way. If we believe either moral or scientific right is on our side, then surely any position is intellectually admissible. Whether sexual orientation is genetically determined is a matter of science. Whether some sexual orientations may be deemed immoral are matters of ethics that tend to evolve gradually and belong to a set of shared values. The trouble is sometimes scientific truth can alter our ethical worldview and our moral outlook can prejudice our interpretation of science. If it could be proven that genes more common in one ethnic group were responsible for antisocial behaviour, racists could cite science to justify discrimination, while others may seize on such data to redefine antisocial behaviour.

Sadly we don't live in a hypothetical Voltairean debating society where all personal perspectives are afforded equal opportunities of expression. Never has so much psychosocial power been vested in so few media organisations, controlled inevitably by a handful of corporate and state entities. They have the power to set the agenda, swing moods and whip up fear, almost unparalleled in history. One can give a totally misleading account of a situation simply by omitting or circumventing a few key facts, e.g. journalists may discuss the Iraqi election results without considering how much, if any, control the winning candidates will have over their country's resources. Broadcasters may also suggest the culpability of a whole ethno-religious group simply by showing scenes of jubilation in the aftermath of a brutal terrorist attack. Pundits may set the limits of permissible debate by misrepresenting unacceptable views and defining them as extremist, fundamentalist, dangerous or hateful.

Thus we are faced with a false debate. Should we support the publication of undeniably offensive picture and denounce Islamic fundamentalists burning the embassies of Scandinavian countries or should we join the chorus of media pundits urging further restrictions on free speech to protect our tolerant multiracial society? British politicians and newspapers can then be portrayed as beacons of common sense and moderation by their refusal to bow to either concocted extreme.

Intellectual freedom has never been the same as abstract freedom of expression. All viable societies have some form of social etiquette. A Finn would do well to cover himself appropriately when bathing at a public pool on holiday in Egypt. Likewise an Egyptian tourist should not complain if confronted with mixed gender nudity in a Finnish sauna. When in Rome... The Danish cartoon may incite little more than a chuckle from a reader sympathetic with the official UK/US line. Most are exposed to countless hours of gore, soft porn and slapstick comedy on TV, most of which is either fallacious or deeply prejudiced. Few British teenagers have seen the offending images, but millions have been exposed to countless hours of gratuitous interactive violence and a constant diet of self-righteous pro-war propaganda. Many may believe US and UK troops represent a force for progress in the Middle East, but prefer not to reconcile their rulers' military strategy with hard economic facts. Overt expressions of hatred usually backfire. They convince nobody, but those who have already been thoroughly brainwashed through years of insidious conditioning. Suppose I wanted to spoil the reputation of a colleague. Merely engaging in childish pranks that others could easily discover would only work in a climate of contempt for the targeted person. A more rational, and dare I say, common approach would be to discretely spread rumours or set a bait for your rival to rise to, while pretending all along to be his friend.

A widespread misconception is that power elites hate specific subsets of the population, whether ethnic groups, religions, classes, genders or followers of alternative lifestyles. In truth their sole concern is the maintenance of power and the stability of the infrastructure that keeps it in place. Historically ruling classes have engendered loyalty through nationalism and religion, affording privileges to sections of the working class whose affiliation suits their medium-term needs best. While many in the armed forces may have been conditioned to believe they are fighting for God, Queen and Country, the real elite owes no allegiance to an omnipresent deity or the citizens of their land and only rely on heads of states as temporary figureheads often representing long-superseded notional entities whose emotive importance lives on in the collective psyche. The emergence of supranationalism, often called globalisation, has changed the rules. While millions of ordinary British citizens perished in the industrial revolution and conquest of new lands, they were nonetheless afforded privileged status over rival ethnicities. As the British population grew rapidly, their rulers could offer them plenty of new terrain to exploit and tap resources from the colonies. Subgroups with an incomplete allegiance to the great imperial project, such as the Irish, were often disadvantaged, but the ruling class merely exploited their subjects as vanguard forces in a long-term project of global domination.

So why should the elite care if we subscribe to traditional Islamic values or the liberal values of 1970s Western Europe? Do they mind if we worship pop idols or Mohamed or if we believe homosexuality is a positively cool genetic trait or a deviant behaviour? The truth is they don't care, but are quite happy to manipulate our strongly held views on these subjects to destabilise society and frighten us into accepting yet more control over our lives. The same forces that have consistently destabilised the Middle East to secure control of oil there, also manipulate our attitude to Islam, by promoting migration and pendantic political correctness, and simultaneously incite anti-Western feeling in much of Islamic world. The dark forces of the military-industrial complex that would dearly like to seize control of Iranian oil and gas reserves before China gets its greedy hands on too much of it must be rejoicing at scenes of enraged Middle Easterners burning the embassies of Scandinavian countries. First it deflects attention from the true centres of imperial power and second it focuses attention on a peripheral issue of purely emotional significance. Would you rather your neighbour make the odd rude joke about your lifestyle or greet you politely every day while plotting to have you evicted, made redundant and tortured?

People throughout the Islamic world have every right to boycott Western good to express their anger about Western imperialism, but why target Danish, Norwegian and French goods? Why not target US and UK banks?

This whole debacle is above all a media event. The original series of a dozen cartoons appeared in September 2005, but the story only exploded onto the international scene in January 2006. Surely some Muslims living in Denmark would have been alerted to its existence, but apparently initial reactions were muted. Just as Jack Straw can claim the moral high ground by voicing his disapproval of the cartoons, other pundits can join the chorus condemning flag-burning Islamic fundamentalists, with apparently nobody caring who controls resources in their countries. Presumably it's okay for London's Metropolitan Police to shoot dead a Brazilian electrician suspected of being an Islamic terrorist. It's fine to detain without evidence British citizens suspected of sympathising with alleged terrorists. It's also perfectly normal to spend hours every day immersed in a virtual world of gun battles. But if one breaks absurd rules of political correctness, whether defined as Islamophobia or homophobia, then one can only expect instant police action and mass demonstrations orchestrated by media barons.

Categories
All in the Mind

Today’s Hate Hour

"Today we're dedicating our hate hour to an evil man, suffering from a chronic psychopathic sexual disorder. He deserves only contempt and should bury himself under the nearest rock. This man was caught viewing paedophiliac images on the Internet. We don't have any evidence linking him to real-life sex crimes, but are in no doubt that anyone casting their malevolent eyes on images deemed paedophiliac will sooner or later commit such a crime. It is imperative that we apply the preventive principle to avert any repetition of the Soham murders. Indeed as a precaution all teachers who have not been certified as "non-paedophliac" should be witch-hunted out of schools."

This is more or less the tone of media coverage over the Paul Reeve case. As soon as the key terms "child pornography" and "Internet" are mentioned in the same breath, we suspend critical analysis. These key words represent the ultimate evil and any measures, however draconian, should be taken to protect our children from sad depressed lonesome weirdoes glaring at pixelated renditions of underage sex. How could anyone sink to such extremes of depravity and how could anyone forgive such perverts? These are questions we are asked to address.

No doubt in the coming weeks Channel 4's hate season will feature a documentary on a purported paedophile gene, causing some chemical imbalance and remedied by a new variant of Risperidone or Zyprexa. Next we'll hear calls for early intervention. I've already seen posters depicting a teenage male baby sitter and a caption suggesting he's a paedophile. Maybe some of your neighbours are closet paedophiles. Go on, spy on your neighbours, you know just in case!

Then the omnipresence of depravity dawned on me. If child pornography is such a unique evil (and definitions please, lest the police sequestrate photographs of my three year-old daughter playing on the beach), then why not arrest the director general of Channel 5? In depressed moments late at night I have occasionally briefly switched over to this channel, now available to most TV sets in the UK. My random sample would indicate a certain obsession with documentaries on the porn industry including footage of a famous North American porn star claimed to be under 16. Next why not arrest the owners of Wanadoo Internet or the predecessors Freeserve? When I had an account with this ISP and was stupid enough to use Outlook Express with inline images enabled (I've since switched to Firefox and Thunderbird on Linux with most spam pre-filtered into my online spam folder), I was deluged with spam. First it was Prozac, then Viagra spelt in numerous creative combinations of comparable characters, then adult sites, farmyard sex and worse, which I personally find exceedingly distasteful. I tried to delete these unwanted HTML-enhanced e-mails, but often images would briefly appear on my screen. These bitmaps are actually stored in your temporary Internet cache, even if you delete them straight away. I used filters and disabled images, but eventually dumped Freeserve, frustrated that some genuine e-mails had been blocked. Many porn sites can be accessed within two clicks from many high-profile news and sports sites. Just click on any link to a gambling site and chances are it will sport a link to an adult site, which in turn will cater for all tastes, mature, hetero, homo, bi, teen and early-teen and not quite teen yet. With all the media outrage over kiddie porn you'd expect the government to clamp down on the porn industry, but that's not quite the case. In 2004 the UK government granted its friends in the entertainment business licences for the provision of adult content, a euphemism for hardcore anal, oral and multiple-orifice frollicking, on 3G phones and terrestrial digital TV.

That child sex abuse can have severe long-term psychological implications is beyond dispute. It seem a bitter irony that the same establishment promotes the bio-genetic model for personality disorders like schizophrenia rather than looking at environmental factors closer to home, despite a wealth of evidence linking child abuse in various guises with psychosis later in life. But there must be a distinction between gaining pleasure from viewing or interacting with virtual reproductions of depravity and committing such acts. I'd argue that exposure to media trivialising or desensitising us to various forms of depravity, be it sexual abuse or physical harm, does make us more likely to commit such acts in real life, but only if we are otherwise psychologically unstable and believe we can get away with it, i.e. there are no counteracting social forces. Thus it is argued that people can play first-person shooters six hours a day, but never dream of killing in real life. This begs the question as to why such games need to feature blood-soaked murder, rather than other pursuits that test your hand-eye co-ordination and strategic skills. If you like target-practice, you need not fantasise targeting a human being, you can play darts instead.

Likewise one can consume large quantities of porn, of dubious taste and realism, perfectly legally. Rape of over 16 year-olds is still, as far as I can tell, a crime in this country. I suppose rape of an under-16 year-old is a more severe crime, but rape of anyone is a crime nonetheless. Besides promoting the notion that anyone not particpating recreational sex at least twice a week is erotically deprived in need of more partners, sex toys or drugs, the media encourages everyone, especially women, to flirt proactively and be obsessed with their body image so they attract the right calibre of partners. So what happens if someone fails in the shagging race and cannot control his libido, but is exposed to perfectly legal media telling him both gang bangs and first-person shooting are positively cool. So if kiddie porn promotes child abuse, then all pornography promotes rape. And if you think all legal pornography portrays acts between consenting adults, think again! Much shows re-enactments of unrequested penetration with the victim first repelling her assailant and then revelling in it.

We are supposed to believe that someone who has not only been cautioned by Police for the crime of viewing a depravity and admitted such a caution to his employers, would overstep the mark by abusing his position as a PE teacher by actually fondling teenage students in a sexual way! Suppose Mr Reeve had been a Manhunt addict instead, would he want to kill his students? I don't think the grotesque violence portrayed in Manhunt would help stabilise any psychological weaknesses he may have had, but 99.9% of teachers would be in no doubt what constitutes immoral behaviour in a changing room and most enlightened enough to realise that nudity is not, per se, sexual. The harsh reality is that it's getting harder to recruit teachers who can deal with the level of intimidation and defiance exhibited by many students in UK secondary schools and teachers are increasingly targets of false accusations. Indeed in some cases the alleged victims, and we're talking about 14 and 15 year-old girls here, have taken the initiative on male teachers on whom they have a crush, encouraged by gossip in girly mags, peer pressure and fantasies of wealthy boyfriends.

Anyway I'm off to the police to hand myself in as a potential serial killer for having endured "The Terminator II" during a long-distance bus journey. I will then ask to be placed on the sex offenders' register for having viewed multiple-orifice copulations in Playboy at the tender age of 14. I haven't raped or killed anyone yet, but you know just in case!