Category: All in the Mind

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All in the Mind Computing

Twitter Mob: Don’t Blame the Users

How lobbies have turned consumer groups into victims

Twitter does not exactly lend itself to critical analysis. I doubt many people have changed their minds on anything after reading a mere 140 character tweet. Such short messages tend to reinforce existing prejudices and opinions and often build on concerted advertising and awareness-raising campaigns. You can tweet a link to an article, but usually only those sympathetic to your cause will read it. Twitter also encourages conformity as nobody wants to be unpopular or offend their virtual friends. It's fine to support widely publicised causes, but not to voice views that others may easily misinterpret. When issues are simplified, many will readily interpret any divergence from the mainstream view as an act of tribal betrayal, like a crowd of Glasgow Rangers supporters spotting a loner wearing a Celtic scarf.

As I often take nonconformist stances, I've grown used to the devious tactics employed by seasoned opinion leaders, such as dismissing any embarrassing evidence against their case as mere conspiracy theories. However, another very effective tactic is to champion the rights of consumer groups to consume the very product or service that some dissident suggests may harm them.

By this logic, nobody could have ever exposed the harmful effects of cigarette smoking simply because millions of consumers enjoyed, or rather believed they enjoyed, this product. Smoking relieves stress and helps people befriend other smokers. It often serves as a great socialising tool and an act of defiance against an increasingly invasive nanny state. Indeed there is much evidence suggesting nicotine acts as an antidepressant, which might explain why so many smokers find it so hard to quit. This vice may be a little outmoded today, but fifty years ago non-smokers had to tolerate smokers at work, in their extended family, neighbourhood and in many public spaces like pubs, cafés and public transport. Some would complain, but generally had to keep quiet in many everyday social situations. Indeed some would have to claim to suffer from a special medical condition to persuade a friend to refrain from smoking in their presence. Yet as evidence mounted that smoking has all sorts of nasty side effects, smokers began to quit and non-smokers became much more proactive in reclaiming smoke-free areas. More recently smokers have been turned into outcasts, often having to escape outdoors on cold rainy days to indulge in their filthy habit.

Fast forward to the 21st century and antidepressants are not only a multi-billion pound industry, just as tobacco was, but they are actively endorsed by celebrities and state-sponsored healthcare institutions as the primary treatment for the growing number of people who feel stressed or depressed. Yet as smokers, alcoholics and recreational drug users know, mind-altering chemicals may offer you a temporary escape from your melancholy, but they come at a huge price in terms of long-term ill-health and some rather unpleasant neuro-psychological side effects. This change of public opinion, from the largely psycho-social model of emotional distress to the mainly biological model, is largely the result of a four decade long campaign to associate in the public mind a chemical imbalance with people's nonfunctional states of mind. Human feelings have been medicalised, although there remains scant proof of a link between natural serotonin levels and state of mind. Many substances we ingest can affect our natural mood-regulating compounds (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine). It should come as little surprise that many diagnosed with clinical depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD etc.., have a bad diet and have indulged in booze and other recreational drugs. Often bad lifestyle choices arise from a downward spiral of emotional insecurity and a tendency to seek solace in anything that turns your mind away from the immediate cause of distress. As our expectations for higher material goods and personal achievements grow, so does our sense of inadequacy and isolation, when we fail to reach these goals. We are not all blessed with perfect athletic bodies, excellent hand-eye coordination and extraordinary musical talent. We will not all be premier league footballers, Olympic medalists, world-famous pop singers, TV celebrities or fashion models. Most of us are fairly average with relative strengths and weaknesses, but our current obsession with status symbols turns minor personal deficits into medical conditions that require treatment. How personality traits develop has long eluded neurologists. Why are some people so gregarious with an upbeat and ebullient disposition, while others have a more reclusive, independent and sobre character and tend to reflect on events and observations in greater detail? If worrying about things were so bad, then why would such instincts evolve in the first place? In essence worrying is about caring about yourself and loved ones. If we didn't worry about anything, we would lack motivation to try harder. Most creative types need plenty of time for introspection. As we obsess more with image and social networking, detailed analysis can fall by the wayside. While some may be enhancing their social status through better presentation and socialisation, others prefer to build a better life through hard work and contemplation. However, in the age of industrial automation and outsourcing, many lack the motivation to make or even repair things themselves. In today's perverse world, a non-productive lawyer not only earns more than her cleaner, but also more her car mechanic and all the other manual workers who helped make her lifestyle possible. Yet many higher-earning professionals in the burgeoning hot-air sector succumb to work-related stress and even depression.
There may be a good argument for short-term medication to wean people off junk food and booze or simply to get the out of bed in the morning, but little evidence that the any pre-existing chemical imbalance caused them to make bad lifestyle choices. Millions now believe antidepressants are essential medication for anyone whose relative lack of cheerfulness or bad moods cause others so much distress. We have thus wished away the underlying causes of depression in our incessant drive to promote mandatory bubbliness, i.e. where we all feign happiness through fake smiles and frequent giggles ? Casual observations would suggest offices have been transformed from relatively sombre places of work into comedy workshops. 50 years of TV satire and now endless YouTube gags have had their effect on the collective psyche. Yet, we are not all born actors. If you fail to take part in mandatory amateur theatrics, your jovial teammates will soon write you off as a loner. Whereas 50 years ago a lack of practical skills could prove a handicap in all but the most privileged families, today it is a perceived lack of social skills that sets many at a distinct disadvantage. Social anxiety, here in its literal non-psychiatric sense, is a prime cause of social alienation, leading to a lack of self-worth, a sense of inferiority and inevitably melancholy.

Handing out free antidepressants to address social alienation is like distributing morphine tablets to combat tooth decay. They may temporarily alleviate unpleasant symptoms, but they fail to address the root causes of the problem and may have very nasty adverse effects with prolonged use. Suggesting that opposing state-subsidised mass-medication of unhappiness offends the unhappy is like accusing an opponent of hydraulic fracturing of condemning the elderly to freezing homes in winter (the elderly would be the first to suffer from polluted tap water). These quick fixes are simply not the solution.

For more on this theme may I recommend Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker .

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Dictatorship by Consent

Apparently, if we believe many opinion leaders, we fought most recent wars to spread freedom and democracy. Allegedly people across the world admire us because of our deep-rooted civic political culture. Never mind any inconvenient conflicts between personal freedom and true democracy, but what do the international ruling elites and their faithful cheerleaders actually mean by this Hellenic word for people power ?

Do they really want an open debate about issues that affect our daily lives? Are there really prepared to explain the inevitable dilemmas that arise from conflicting popular demands? Do they really understand the enormous sense of alienation and psychological inferiority that mass consumerism and an obsession with presentation and body image has created in so many of us? Given the choice, everyone would want higher wages, better working conditions, more leisure time, more green fields, cleaner water, better transport infrastructure, more affordable heating, larger houses, better healthcare, longer lives, more holidays, more fun, more friends and a higher social status. It hardly matters if we cannot have all these wonderful traits at once. However, if the mainstream media can set the agenda, stage-manage debates and isolate inconvenient critics, they can keep alive the illusion of democracy and free speech.

If we did as big business wants, we'd all halve our salaries, double our work load and triple our spending. If numbers don't add up, we can always ask banks or central government to create more money out of thin air, such is the logic of the debt-fuelled consumption-driven economy. Yet the more we are indebted and the more we rely on international trade, the more we transfer our theoretical sovereignty to unaccountable global entities. It often seems we can only debate how to boost the economy, how to attract more inward investment, how to accommodate more international commuters, how to deal with cross-border crime or how to combat terrorism. We do not debate whether any of these measures are necessary, i.e. do we really need to grow our economy?

As mainstream national political institutions become powerless in the face of tentacular transnational remote organisations, political debate is limited either to trivial parochial matters or is reduced to simple negative campaigning, blaming rivals for the collateral damage of policies that would have been implemented anyway. The recent Labour party political video, devised by the US media guru behind Barrack Obama's electoral victory (David Axelrod), may fool a few young angry voters, who'd like to blame a few convenient scapegoats for their misfortunes, but it is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. It perpetuates the myth that in the early 21st century any difference remains between the mainstream parties on any subject of importance. The video focuses on a few safe and simplistic issues, tuition fees, rising heating costs and bedroom tax. It then blames the old guard of British aristocracy. Just because modern CEOs wear jeans, listen to rock music and no longer have posh Etonian accents, does not make their huge financial superiority any less grotesque. Indeed the gap between rich and poor had been steadily rising for over 30 years. According to the top 10% earned just 7.1 times more than the bottom 10% in 1995, by 2008 this ratio had risen to 10.1 times.

It doesn't take long to disentangle any of these claims and see how Labour offers little alternative to the two other orthodox parties. Take, for example, the much-maligned bedroom tax. It is only an issue because housing has become unaffordable without huge government subsidies. Housing benefit effectively subsidises landlords, so why should hardworking low to middle income tax-payers in areas with lower property prices subsidise special categories of people entitled to housing benefit in wealthier areas? New Labour have become the biggest defender of spiralling housing benefits introduced by Thatcher after her government sold off council houses. Moreover, thanks to a rising population, largely driven by immigration, demand for social housing has never been higher, and thus needs to be rationed. Do New Labour plan to build millions more homes and where ? Will they admit the rather obvious environmental costs of more urban sprawl in Europe's most densely populated region? I doubt it. Indeed their stance against bedroom tax is just an exercise in political point scoring. In 13 years in government they abysmally failed to increase the tax burden on international oligarchs, multinational corporations and banks, as they relied on their presence in the UK to artificially boost the economy.

Not only did New Labour introduce tuition fees in 1997 and increased them to £3000 later in 2006, they promoted a huge expansion in higher education that turned universities into businesses competing not just for corporate sponsorship, but in the lucrative international student market. As a result degrees are not only devalued, but reflect the needs of big business rather than of wider society. With so many other spending obligations and financial constraints, no government can now afford to return to the old grant system, where most students from poorer backgrounds received fully subsidised education, but until the 1980s only 15 to 20% went to university. Yet today only a minority of the nearly 50% of 18 to 21 year olds who now attend university attain degrees of any practical worth with social sciences, law, business administration and creative arts among the most popular subjects. Biology is now dominated by the needs of the burgeoning pharmaceutical, biotech, assisted fertilisation and private healthcare (cosmetic surgery) sectors. Only a fraction of medicine-related degrees produce new doctors, most prepare students for life as a pharmaceutical representative, fertility clinic lab technician or psychiatric nurse. Such professions are in greater demand as a growing proportion of the population is on prescription medication, opts to bypass nature through fertility treatment or succumbs to emotional disturbances that we have relabelled as mental health issues.

Most of us shudder at the thought of opening our electricity or gas bills, largely because back in the 1990s they were, by European standards, incredibly low because most gas still came from the North Sea. Now most gas is imported and energy demand has grown. Logically we need to either increase energy production, with all its potential environmental consequences, import more or consume less. Token gestures like unplugging your TV set at night will make little difference. By offering short-term subsidies for heating, New Labour would promote inefficiency and fail to provide a long term solution, i.e. adapting to a low consumption economy, ensuring people can live healthy lives with less waste. If you naively believe they would just tax a few fat cat energy firm bosses, just consider the real reasons behind the 2003 occupation of Iraq.

In reality although some debate still takes place even on contentious issues such as mass immigration, the hands of local, regional and national governments are tied. All they can do is present a narrow set of options and hope big business will work magic to bridge the growing gap between social and environment sustainability and economic expedience. If people really exercised democratic control, you can bet the ruling elite would change strategy, as they often do. Instead every few years we are just given the opportunity to vote for another set of middle managers. Sometime we elect mavericks, who may rant and rave in parliamentary talking shops, but all along big decisions affecting people's jobs, community, housing, transport etc. are decided in remote boardrooms and think tanks.

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All in the Mind

Huxleyan School Report

This may seem a parody of postmodern social reality and eerily suggestive of a future dystopia, but it is only a slight exaggeration. Schools tend to focus more on mainstream socialisation, engaging with mass-marketed youth culture and pastoral care than with reading, writing, maths and real science.

Self Confidence
Sam's self-esteem has grown throughout the year. His phenomenal X-Box gaming skills have earned him respect from other class members.
Team-bonding Skills
Sam has participated in a number of activity-related team bonding sessions. He especially enjoyed the school's annual virtual first person shooter competition, where he engaged in a marathon Call of Duty: Liberation session as a UN peacekeeper in Paddistan liberating gay teenagers from a repressive regime.
Sexual Awareness
Sam has taken an active interest in the wonderful diversity of sexual orientations and family structures in our local community.
Self-marketing skills
Sam has begun to learn how to market his diverse skills to potential employers
Equality and Diversity
Sam joined the rest of the class in our exploration of the enormous benefits of the recent arrival of so many newcomers in our diverse neighbourhood. Sam also learned how to deal with misguided anti-immigration feelings.
Mathematics
Sam enjoyed a captivating interactive documentary about the history of mathematicians and computer programmers, laying the foundations of modern game development. Sam also learned how to interact with calculators and spreadsheets to solve common mathematical problems without unduly taxing his delicate brain or interfering with his other pursuits.
Language
Sam enjoyed interacting with our state of the art voice recognition software. He can now successfully use this application to tweet his views about the latest first person shooter games. His broad vocabulary has now extended to concepts such as humanitarian intervention and intellectual property.
History
Sam enjoyed several virtual re-enactments of historical events. He learned about many evil regimes of the past and about the wonderful progress towards a better world that we have made recently.
Self-care Skills
Sam has learned about the importance of personal hygiene, sartorial presentation and supermarket shopping. Hopefully, as he approaches his 18th birthday, we can fast-track him on our driving course so can simulate travel on wide open roads and shop independently online.
Project Management Skills
Sam learned how to manage personal and business projects, design cutting-edge PowerPoint presentations and gantt charts using special voice-activated wizards. Sam learned how to delegate difficult tasks, which he may not be able to undertake personally, to human resources. We investigated some common scenarios such as how to find a technician to repair one's washing machine or how to proofread a report with limited manual reading skills.
Sport
Sam is a keen Laser shooter and paintballer.
Technological Innovation and Environmental Sustainability
Sam is very enthusiastic about new technology and hopes to drive a solar-powered Ferrari when passes his test. He also has an extensive collection of game consoles and smartphones.
Social Awareness
Sam took a keen interest in our social inclusion project, in which we showed young people how to claim job seekers' allowance, incapacity benefit, child benefit, working family tax credits and single parents' allowance.
Mental Health Awareness
We have been very impressed by Sam's positive attitude to his ADHD and worked closely with him to ensure he keeps up to date with his medication.
Communication Skills
Sam interacts very well with classmates on a wide range of game-related subjects. He has also participated in a ground-breaking RFID chip implant pilot scheme, so he is regularly in touch with researchers from Neurological Research Trust.
Information Technology
Sam has familiarised himself with the leading brands of proprietary software applications and understood the key importance of copyright protection.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Double Ungood: Brave New World Film

Things might not have panned out quite how George Orwell predicted in his infamous dystopian novel, 1984. In many ways rather than progress towards austere authoritarianism, modelled on Stalin's Soviet Union, penalising expressions of excessive joy, the latest phase of corporate globalisation has seen the spread of mass consumerism and commercialised hedonism as tools of social engineering. It is much easier to control an atomised populace mesmerised and distracted by mass entertainment, online games and trivial pursuits, than a disgruntled collective of workers frightened into submission. Overtly negative language instils fear and apprehension and can only influence people if counterbalanced by a deluge of positive messages about life and the organisations the establishment would like us to cherish. However, Orwell did foresee the gradual adaptation of language to change the way people think, or more accurately suppress certain thoughts altogether.

In Orwell's 1984 the government set about to phase out negative words. In a transitionary period, a simple negative prefix un could be used, hence ungood for bad. Thanks to positive psychology, so popular with corporate management, and neurolinguist programming (NLP), we can observe the ame trends today. A negative is now often the absence of a positive or replaced by deceptively neutral but prescriptive adjectives, e.g. a behaviour may be described not as wrong, bad, immoral, evil, indecent or selfish, but simply as inappropriate, i.e. possibly appropriate in an officially approved outlet for our frustrations, but not in the referenced context.

Indeed the worst abstract noun today is negativity itself. Any language or behaviour that meets this definition is simply deemed out of bounds, not acceptable, incompatible with our enlightened, tolerant and diverse brave new world. It provides the ultimate pretext for silencing dissent. Public organisations claiming to be open and democratic, often define all unpalatable opinions as "negative".

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ek5vse2_Aq0

Brave New World movie from 1980

In his 1931 novel, Aldous Huxley presciently anticipated many modern trends. Note how negative thoughts were reserved for outcasts known as savages, those who lived outside modern society and didn't take soma (chill pill, antidepressant) or participate in conditioning sessions. Critical thinkers were treated for deviance or banished to remote islands and any defiant behaviour was treated, as it is increasingly today, as a sign of psychiatric malfunction. View the film above and you will see what I mean.

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All in the Mind Computing

All true conservatives are green

I sometimes enjoy Peter Hitchens‚ antidote to mainstream trendy Neo-Liberal thinking, but fear he is on some subjects in bad company and a tad ill-informed. No rational person could deny volumes of hard evidence showing the exponential rise in humanity's collective impact on our planet's delicate ecosystem, both in terms of our numbers (rising from just 750 million at the start of the industrial revolution to 7 billion now) and our per capita consumption. Our population will probably peak in the next 10 to 30 years, but at the expense of adopting modern high-consumption lifestyles. And now 2500 million Chinese and Indians are preparing to join the mass consumer frenzy, resources that previously seemed almost unlimited, are nearing depletion.

The fact that scientific forecasts have so often proven wrong should lead us to take a more rather than a less cautious, and thus conservative, approach to future development. Climatologists know full well our climate is subject to multiple natural and, dare I say, anthropogenic factors, but man's impact on our environment has reached unprecedented levels. But climate change is just one of many potential side effects of our rapid overdevelopment. James Lovelock has merely conceded that some of the more alarmist forecasts made 20 years ago have not been supported by subsequent observations. So what! They were just forecasts. Meanwhile, other forecasts, such as available oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, have also turned out to be gross exaggerations. That's why Brazilian geologists are busy surveying fossil fuel deposits 2 miles below the surface of Mid Atlantic Ocean, the Chinese are sealing deals with Nigerian businessmen and Western Oil companies see Libya as a mere gateway to oil in Chad and Darfur, despite the huge costs of building pipelines and other infrastructure.

Wishful thinking cornucopians would like to see the current era of cheap mass motoring for all continue without drastic consequences and place blind faith in scientists to find to magic techno-fixes. Climate change denial, so popular in Neo-Conservative circles, has little to do with any understanding of the actual climate (which may get warmer, colder, wetter or drier in different parts of the globe) and everything to do with the same culture of entitlement Mr Hitchens so rightly denounces in his columns. Claiming to have a god-given right to drive your car to a suburban shopping mall, funded by your non-productive marketing job, is just the same as claiming a right to welfare handouts to subsidise your hedonistic idleness. If we are to tackle our very real environmental challenges and avoid unprecedented loss of life resulting from a grotesque overconsumption, we need to power down.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Two billion quid Stasi

We seem to have only superficial cuts in the huge state and corporate bureaucracy monitoring every aspect of our lives. If we needed any proof the current ConDem alliance is mere continuation of the same big business party previously marketed as New Labour, we now have it. No sooner were plans for a hi-tech identity card ditched and believers in mandatory RFID chips dismissed as conspiracy theorists, as the government plans to let GCHQ intercept our e-mails, browsing history and log into our social networking accounts server-side, for our own benefit of course. Surprisingly rather than rise to the technical challenge, some the biggest players in information technology have decried the proposals as not only intrusive and open to abuse, but expensive and unworkable.

Whenever your browser, mail client or any other TCP/IP application requests a resource from your Internet service provider or mobile phone company, the fact is logged. There is no need for surveillance software to run on your device. The problem is the sheer volume of traffic makes it very hard to make any sense of activity and what constitutes a request? Most high traffic news sites are saturated with advertising and tracking services. To post comments you are invited to log on via your Facebook, Yahoo, Google or Hotmail accounts, so in practice way over 90% of traffic can monitored via a handful of social networks, search engines and email services. I'm beginning to think maybe Richard Stallman was right after all:

As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.

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All in the Mind

How to argue with awkward purveyors of home truths

Here are just a few strategies you can adopt when confronted with troublesome individuals who insist on expressing politically incorrect opinions that cannot be refuted by facts alone.

  1. Suggest any inconvenient belief is just "their opinion" and by implication at odds with "received opinion" as endorsed by mainstream experts or opinion leaders. Decent people merely choose among a narrow array of officially certified opinions, e.g. phoney debates between mainstream political parties.
  2. Suggest you have your own preferred sources of information or have just read a report indicating otherwise. Of course, your awkward adversary also has access to these sources because they are broadcast and published so widely or even given away for free on the way to work.
  3. If your opponent suggests that the globalisation of labour markets may not be such a good idea for medium to long term socio-environmental stability, do not hesitate to call her, or him a racist. No doubt only racist‚ Australian Aborigines opposed European colonisation and only racist Black Africans opposed French and British imperialism. And what about all those xenophobic Chinese who fought the British imposition of free trade in the opium market and isolationist Bengalis who opposed cheap British textile imports in the 18th and 19th centuries?
  4. Suggest your adversary's views are mere conspiracy theories, e.g. Aren't you verging on conspiracy theory territory there? Of course, conspiracies never happen because all public and private institutions are totally upfront about their true motives. MPs never lie, at least in the United Kingdom and big businesses are philanthropic organisations. Pigs also fly.
  5. Contact a psychiatrist to help your friend overcome her or his belief issues.
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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Hedonism Ablaze

What a coincidence! Just days after the US administration agreed to raise their country's debt ceiling and let the global consumption party go on for a few more months or maybe years, In London marauding mobs run riot, loot retail outlets and set commercial and residential buildings on fire. Reportedly it all started in Tottenham Hale, North East, on Saturday evening when demonstration against the police shooting of a minicab driver and alleged drug dealer, Mark Duggan, descended into violence, just four miles from my bedsit. Eye witness accounts and video footage clearly show that police lost control and were unable to contain the ensuing disorders. Some observers have dwelled on the conflicting evidence behind the initial incident, whose background builds on longstanding mistrust between the police and local communities. In 1985 a notorious riot on the Broadwater Farm Estate after Cynthia Jarrett, an African Caribbean woman, died during a police search of her home, later saw a Policeman, PC Keith Blakelock killed. Early reports indicated just another example of police brutality against an innocent man. It now looks much more like another case of police incompetence, as both bullets fired were police-issue, but the 29 year-old victim and father of four was undoubtedly involved with narco-trafficking Star Gang. That may not have justified his death, but like many other lads from sink estates in a city with over 50 billionaires he opted to service the service sector by not only facilitating the distribution of drugs, but living by the law of the gun.

The saddest part of all the destruction that has followed is that many young people in towns and cities across the UK see little future other than to party and re-enact some gangland fantasy. The more talented youths may aspire to becoming pop musicians, actors, dee-jays or film producers. A few entrepreneurs may open hairdressers, pubs, nightclubs, restaurants and gyms,. And a few conscientious individuals may be drawn to the caring surveillance professions such as social workers, police and learning support assistants, but many just choose to live on benefits. The purpose of life in London has now become simply having fun or rather exploiting other people's desire to indulge in frivolous entertainment. The city has long been a parasite on the world stage, importing huge quantities of additional goods through the proceeds of a global casino.

As riots spread to other London boroughs on Sunday and Monday, a pattern began to emerge. Thousands of hyperactive youths, a small but sizable minority in a city with over 8 million inhabitants, enjoyed re-ennacting the kind of wanton mayhem they had previously seen on TV and simulated on game consoles. Rather than protesting against the evil capitalist system that enslaves them they could not wait to get their hands on the latest electronic gadgets. Admittedly some food outlets were trashed too, many fast food eateries, but these were no food riots. Britain's generous social security system ensures nobody goes hungry unless they choose to squander their benefits on booze, drugs and gambling. Indeed the scenes of ransacked shopping districts reveal another grim reality. Most shops sell non-essential merchandise. One happy looter posted a picture of his bounty on Twitter, a vast collection of video games and other gadgetry. Was this some kind of statement against the UK/US invasion of Iraq, a sign of solidarity with starving Somalis or attempt to redistribute wealth from the rich to poor? The looter may have feigned his opposition to the excesses of British imperialism or pretended to care about malnourished Africans or the urban poor in a grotesquely overpriced city. But no, he just wanted some instant gratification.

As more reports come in, the choice of looting targets seems to reflect the spirit of our times, to name but a few "The Sony Distribution Centre" in a large warehouse filled mainly with DVDs and game consoles in Enfield and the Party Superstore in Clapham. The big babies are throwing their toys out of their hyper-consumptive prams.

In reply to a New Labourite:

I wonder if New Labour's supporters will ever question the wisdom of economists whose advice has bankrupted the US and European economies in the name of growth? While New Labourites may distance themselves from the current ConDem coalition, they actively supported the previous administration with almost identical policies and equally subservient to the unaccountable multinational organisations who really run the country.

Recent debt-fuelled economic "growth" in the UK has mainly relied on banking and frivolous media services, aided only in part by North Sea Oil (the UK as a whole is now a net importer of oil and gas). Once demand for these non-essential services crumbles, as it surely will, Britain will have to start living within its own means. However, after 30 years of unashamedly pro-globalist policies (by which I mean reliance on global trade), a huge public and private debt and a large section of the working age population on benefits, the country will be ill-equipped to weather any storms. In a historical context globalism is but the last stage of imperialism, so let's call it global imperialism.

Circular Arguments over Immigration:

While mass immigration may create new jobs by boosting demand, that's an entirely circular argument, e.g. before the 2004 influx of Eastern Europeans there were 600,000 unfilled vacancies, 4 years later the UK still had the same number of unfilled vacancies, but a million more residents boosting the country's reliance on imports. The UK's population has not grown at such a fast rate since the end of WW2. During the 1970s and 80s more people left the UK than entered. Indeed we've witnessed a steady brain drain of talented Brits to the US and Australia and from countries like Nigeria, India and now Poland to the UK. We have a shortage of surgeons because many of the best UK born surgeons work in private hospitals abroad. The oft-repeated claim that "the economy benefits from immigration", means big business gets a short-term boost in profitability due to the influx of enthusiastic workers and total demand rises, but what is good for the economy in the short term is not necessarily good for society in the long term. These arguments made sense in countries like Australia, the US, Canada or Argentina. Indeed for some time now, UK economic growth has been consumption-driven. This logic fails to take account of rather obvious socio-envionmental factors. Southern England is now the most densely populated region of Europe and Londoners would starve within a week in the absence of food imports. Who said we need to boost aggregate consumption? We should be doing exactly the opposite. If you believe infinite economic growth is possible, then surely you'd have to believe in infinite energy and dismiss man-made climate change as a green plot to depopulate the earth (as some pro-growthists do), but you don't because it would be politically incorrect.

As we hit limits to growth, the consequences of a recent consumption frenzy growth will significantly reduce the earth's carrying capacity (i.e. more consumption per capita => fewer people). Yet new Labour's policies actively encourage procreation through Europe's most generous child benefits leading to a benefits-driven baby boom and these babies become young adults wanting to emulate Jeremy Clarkson because that's the consumer culture your friends in big business keep marketing. This observation may horrify you, I hear you murmuring "racist" or maybe sexist, but the facts on the ground are pretty undeniable, so don't shoot the messenger. We should not subsidise irresponsible procreation, because it will inevitably lead to more social problems further down the line. You know that. I know that, so stop pretending otherwise.

Waves of Migration and Social Breakdown

Advocates of mass immigration had claimed before 2003 we needed an influx of highly skilled Eastern Europeans because native Brits lacked these skills, although as you no doubt remember the Home Office estimated only 5000 to 13000 Eastern Europeans would move to the UK in the first year after their countries joined the EU,. The classic example was the Polish plumber. First why did British-born young adults not aspire to these jobs? Second how does simply importing skilled and semi-skiled workers form abroad address a skills shortage among the home-bred population? It doesn't. More important a large proportion of this new unemployable underclass in the London area are themselves descendants of immigrants from the 1950s and 60s, whose parents and grandparents had filled a skills gap. So many conflicts we see now are between different waves of immigrants, something that can only get worse in the event of economic meltdown. However, in the 1960s unemployment in the UK was negligible, two-parent families still very much the norm and housewives valued members of society. Fast forward 40 years and most of the manufacturing and skilled manual jobs that made the British working class proud have been outsourced or assigned to new communities. Whether you like it or not, only a small minority of people will ever excel in the kind of cerebral jobs created by a knowledge economy. I know from personal experience that while millions of people are proficient in the use of software applications, only a few have the mental discipline required to write programs. Hence there are more IT recruiters (talking the talk) than programmers (walking the walk). Back in 1997 your friend, Tony Blair, boasted about how Britain led the world in IT. I presume that's why so few young adults from the XBox generation can write more than a few lines of client-side Javascript code. Much of the rest of the knowledge economy revolves around marketing goods we don't really need and promoting various social agendas (hence growth in the charity sector), which in turn serve to create new markets.

Do you seriously think British born young adults cannot learn plumbing, bricklaying or farming? Their forebears did. Why did they become de-skilled? And if there was such an urgent need for friendly smiling retail and catering staff, why could big business not tap into the large pool of British unemployed, many of whose parents were immigrants themselves? Why had they become so demotivated and unwilling to get out of the bed in the morning? You may blame Thatcher, who oversaw a tremendous rise in benefits dependency, but Tony Blair followed in her footsteps albeit with different rhetoric.

"Tariq Jahan had lost his 21-year-old son Haroon, murdered in the Winson Green area of Birmingham by thugs who drove at him in their car in what appears to have been a racist attack. No one could be more aware of the simmering racial tensions between Asians in his neighbourhood and those of Caribbean ancestry".

So why should we tolerate further erosions of civil liberties turning us all into suspects to deal with the side effects of over-development and its recent manifestations as unbridled consumerism, narcissism and media trivialisation of violence. Yet as a result of these policies we will soon be cajoled into accepting even more authoritarianism

Attacking our Communities?

Globalist policies destroyed these communities. A community requires shared values, customs and social cohesion that cannot be built if its composition keeps changing. Ordinary people cannot afford to live in London except if the government, read taxpayers, subsidises rents. Indeed among the main beneficiaries of New Labour's welfare and immigration policies have been landlords, who in many cases can charge what they like because the Department of Word and Pensions will pick up the bill. As a result we have mind-boggling cases (that I have witnessed personally) of families subsidised to the tune of £3000-4000 a month? Let's do some maths. A typical semi in London is around £320,000 ... that means a couple needs to earn £80,000 per annum to get a mortgage, while real average salaries are closer to £30,000. Indeed in Scotland, I knew many on 15/16 K per annum as late as 2009. In case you haven't noticed there has been a whole scale exodus from vast swathes of London. Deny it if you will, but normal working people cannot afford to live here, unless like me they can tolerate a single room. So we have the chattering classes on 100K+ a year, wealthy advertising and media executives, and then street after street of houses converted into flats and rented to a motley crew of migrant workers, home-grown benefits scroungers and miscellaneous gangsters. What a wonderful community!

Categories
All in the Mind

Why Procreate?

While some of us may seem very self-absorbed thanks to generations of social atomisation and disconnection from our palaeolithic roots, most of us are wired to adore new life. All but the most callous of us have a soft spot for babies or at least are wise and socially responsible enough to give them special dispensation as future citizens for the survival of our community and ultimately of our species, but the world hardly lacks young people and hundreds of millions roam the streets destitute or laze at home with few employment prospects, largely because we have become entirely reliant on big business and big government. Now some want to depend on big biotech (an offshoot of big pharma) to let them procreate when they discover they can't have babies naturally. Based on a narrow interpretation of human rights, this sounds fine. Why should we all not be entitled to have children of our own and why should we restrict such rights to fertile young heterosexual couples?

Historically only the fittest survived. We gave each new member of our community a chance, but when disease or other calamities struck, we just accepted our fate and wished others would survive in their memory. As a result for millennia the global population grew only very gradually with plenty of regional fluctuations, periods of relative prosperity and growth followed by periods of disease, famine and warfare. Pre-agrarian communities needed large areas of bountiful terrain, usually in coastal areas or near rivers, and had to keep their numbers in check. While many hunter-gatherer communities survived into the modern area, with some remote tribes surviving into the 20th century, they were in a matter of generations either outnumbered or assimilated into agrarian societies, who developed the technology to cultivate crops, rear livestock, irrigate and, more important, store surpluses for later re-use. This enabled the specialisation of labour and the growth of non-productive administrative class, making us increasingly interdependent. While in feudal times many still had direct contact with the means of food production, most had to hand over a large proportion of their yield in return for a plot of land. With the advent of the industrial revolution, we could no longer simply draw on nature's bounty, but had to compete for control over storable and stealable resources produced by others by selling our labour. In the post-modern era we sell not so much our labour, as ourselves, for money that we can exchange for the material goods we either need or simply desire. Now, children have become not just another great marketing opportunity for our growth-obsessed business leaders, but also a commodity in and of themselves.

Recent reports in the mainstream media have lamented the refusal of some NHS trusts to provide IVF. Let us set the record straight. In-vitro fertilisation is a relatively new technology, unavailable to previous generations, and not only is it extremely expensive, it is statistically more likely to lead to premature births, birth defects and multiple births at a time when we are struggling to feed the world's 6.9 billion human beings. I know, for some socially responsible women, it must be distressing to see other socially irresponsible women produce offspring with great ease with little thought as to how they will provide for them. However, a little intellectual honesty would be welcome. Infertility has become an issue because many women postpone motherhood to pursue their career or because they wish to start a new family with their new partner. Some men also want to spread their genes with their new partner. With so many children born to parents unable to care for them, why can't infertile couples adopt?

Let's briefly consider the huge changes in family life and social welfare over the last century. Once considered a safety net enabling the downtrodden to find their feet again and ensuring all children had a fair start in life, the UK's benefits system has encouraged the breakup of families through generous handouts to single parents and teenage mothers, attracted widespread abuse of incapacity allowances and created a general culture of entitlement among the descendants of the country's once proud working class. Official unemployment figures mask the reality that over 5 million more people of working age are not in employment, education or training and neither are they full time housewives, so effectively true unemployment stands at 7.5 million. Technological advances have not only reduced infant mortality, but also automated many tedious domestic chores and manual jobs that occupy vast swatches of working classes. Housewives were not unemployed, but a crucial part of a family team, replaced now by myriad teachers, social workers, child psychologists and carers. Neither were chimney sweeps or cobblers useless, they performed essential duties, now often assigned to recent immigrants. The drive to get women into work has led millions to swap the tyranny of housework for the tyranny of low-paid office, retail and care work. Only a privileged minority of women pursue genuinely rewarding and intellectually stimulating careers, most make do with dead-end jobs in supermarkets or care homes, often juggling paid employment with their parental duties. As a result instead women have traded economic dependence on their husbands for subjugation to state handouts or large corporations. Back in the 70s and 80s many hoped to see a new era of leisure with the average working week reduced to 30 or maybe just 20 hours and extended maternal and paternal leave. However, 30 years of neoliberal policies, heightened competition in the labour market and rampant consumerism, mean without benefits and on typical salaries, both parents have to work 40 hours a week, often with long commutes of 2-3 hours a day, or rely on state handouts. The largest portion of a typical family's expenses go on mortgages or rent and since 1997 house prices in the South East of England have tripled, way in excess of the official retail inflation rate. To qualify for the latter a parent has to claim to have no other source of income (e.g. a spouse's salary). The biggest scam of all is housing benefit, effectively subsidising ripoff landlords and enabling the workshy to afford accommodation in areas of London. Hence the birth rate in the UK is highest in three groups:

  1. Ethnic minorities with a religious and/or cultural commitment to large families, willing to work harder, proactively seek all welfare benefits and sacrifice luxuries for the proliferation of their community.
  2. Workless underclasses who see children as a means of obtaining benefits.
  3. Upper middle classes who can easily survive on one salary and/or employ a childminder.

In the middle are the masses of honest hardworking adults on modest salaries, who simply cannot afford to have more than 1 or 2 children, unless they split up and have children with their new partners, hence the growing demand for IVF. Many educated adults delay having children until they have established a stable relationship and pursued a career, by which time one may have become infertile, but rather than adopt one of the millions of unwanted children born to mothers unable to provide the love and attention all children need, they succumb to biological emotions to further their own kind. Thus IVF is often marketed as means of boosting a woman's self-esteem. The availability of IVF creates an emotional need that could otherwise be met by adopting, fostering or simply looking after nieces, nephews or neighbours' children, but in an increasingly atomised and fearful society we dare not trust anyone else with our children. Indeed the authorities don't trust us to raise children unless we collaborate with a whole bunch of busy-body supervisors (community nurses, social workers, teachers) etc.. Being able to bring up your children as you see fit has now become a luxury reserved for the wealthy and residents of isolated rural communities, for only these groups can afford options such as private education, homeschooling or have access to small rural schools. Everyone else's children are sent to mainstream schools, exposed to thousands of hours of media promoting high-consumption fun culture and, should their behaviour or attitude raise suspicion, referred to child psychiatrists (often mistakenly renamed psychologists) and labelled with ADHD, OCD, depression or autism spectrum disorders or simply given anti-social behaviour orders. In short even if you do have biological children, they are not really yours as the corporate establishment through its media and education systems guides their development. Recently primary school teachers have become concerned that children start school without being toilet-trained first ( see Head Threatens to Ban Pupils Who Are Not Potty-Trained). Some parents responded by claiming toilet training was the responsibility of social care workers. Why have children at all if all you can do is let the state and big business bring them up? If you want loving offspring who respect you and may care for you when you grow old, you need to spread your love and values, not your genes.

Categories
All in the Mind

On The Laws of Probability

Every day we experience hundreds of near misses, accidents waiting to happen unless we take the right precautions and pay constant attention to all potential dangers. Yet the human brain can only actively focus on one event at a time, switching our attention to monitor the progress of other concomitant events. Some of us can switch between events better than others, but then some key tasks require much more intense concentration. The slightest momentary distraction can have unplanned consequences, like forgetting to close upstairs windows before leaving the house, leaving a frying pan on a stove unattended or as happened to me the other failing to check my rucksack still lay neatly between my feet in a crowded pub in central London during a recent Drupal meetup. Not only was my rucksack discretely lifted, but it contained my trusty laptop and my passport, renewed only last October. CCTV footage was unavailable as cameras had been turned off the previous day, Easter Monday. As I don't own a car or a house, this was pretty much my most valuable possession, without which I can't work as a Web software developer. Little did the thief know how important this object was to me personally and while others can tactfully express their commiseration, the pain remains. I had to bite the bullet, metaphorically speaking, and enact plan B. Get a new laptop and restore it from scratch. Luckily Apple's OS X's Time Machine came to the rescue. I was minded to buy a cheaper alternative, but to get up and running and avoid missing another day's work, I had to choose the more expensive route using funds I had set aside for something else. I hope someday soon, we can do all our work from a tablet with mission-critical data backed up remotely as envisaged by Google's up and coming Chrome OS, but alas network coverage cannot be guaranteed. On many other occasions, I had left my laptop temporarily vulnerable to smart thieves, in offices and even in bars while someone else kept a watchful eye, yet it had never happened. I had assumed among colleagues and friends, I would be safe. The conclusion is simple. If something can go wrong in theory, sooner or later it will go wrong. That's the lesson Japanese nuclear engineers had to learn in Fukushima. The chances of getting my MacBook back are exceedingly remote. Lies, damned lies and crime statistics. While the occurrence of burglaries has decreased mainly due to better surveillance technology, thieves have simply adopted new techniques. Smartphones and laptops are easy to carry away and sell. Many thefts simply go unreported, because victims know there is little the police can do. How can anyone seriously believe the oft-repeated claims about declining crime rates? In just 5 years in London, I've witnessed one murder and two burglaries first-hand.