Just a random assortment of thoughts about last night's Doctor Who. Of course, once my thoughts enter your thoughts, there may be trouble if you have no thoughts of your own. You know, because you haven't watched it. Or you're an idiot.
Sunday, 14 April 2013
A New Ice Age
Just a random assortment of thoughts about last night's Doctor Who. Of course, once my thoughts enter your thoughts, there may be trouble if you have no thoughts of your own. You know, because you haven't watched it. Or you're an idiot.
Friday, 12 April 2013
Friday 40K: Senior Squid
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
The Dawn Of The New Iron Age
After I posted yesterday's comments on the passing of Thatcher, I found the topic still weighed on my mind quite a bit. Once again, not so much the actual event, as the media storm surrounding it. I spent some time on the drive to work this morning pushing things around in my head, but ultimately I think Glenn Greenwald and djw have pretty much nailed what I wanted to say. Even leaving aside the breathtaking hypocrisy on show - there is zero chance, none, that Louise Mensch won't be an intolerable dribbling arse on the day someone she hates dies - the problem with all this ink spilled in condemnation of people spitting on Thatcher's legacy is that it's effectively ring-fencing hagiography and propaganda. As the links above say, there are real-world consequences to the veneration of public figures - if a Roman citizen were transported to contemporary Washington DC, he would quickly conclude that Reagan were a local god - and asking those with philosophical and moral reasons to want to avoid such a occurrence to hold off for few days so the hacks can get a head start isn't something we should feel compelled to agree too.
There is, of course, a difference between criticising Thatcher's legacy and breaking out a hornpipe before her gravestone. Even so, the idea that those celebrating a woman's death should be repeatedly criticised whilst those whitewashing the history of so divisive and destructive a figure be given a pass because we shouldn't speak ill of the dead strikes me as far more insulting than any number of poor-taste jokes.
And as for the idea that we should all be playing nicely in our various sandpits because we should feel bad for Thatcher's family: bullshit. Margaret Thatcher's family have suffered the kind of horrible loss that sooner or later every family feels. That is undeniably real, and horrible. But whilst they suffer following the death of a loved one, they do it from the exceptionally fortunate position of having no kind of problematic financial repercussions to work through, and they do it from the immensely rare position of being surrounded on all sides by media voices telling the world that they're loss is shared by millions around the world, who will be keeping them in their prayers.
When my mother dies, maybe a few hundred people will give a shit. My mother, who has dedicated her life to helping her family and her community, who writes books about the importance of coming together as a town and as a church to help others, will if she's supremely lucky get a couple of lines in our local paper. Many of the people who would be not just bereaved but financially imperilled by the loss of a love one because of Thatcher's actions will get still less than that.
Greenwald quotes David Wearing's satirical comment from yesterday: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. Tasteless." It's not just a nice reversal, it's the very heart of the matter. Hundreds of thousands of people are worse off in this country today as a direct result of Thatcher's policies. Some of them, in fact, will be bereaved right now, as lives lived under the crushing weight of economic ruin and social disinterest wink out like any other light. Today, we're told, is not for those losses. Those losses don't matter. No-one knew who they were. Those are not the families we are to spend the next few days sympathising with.
The idea I shouldn't point this out because a bunch of very well-off people directly benefited by the exact same political moves that laid waste to an entire quadrant of England and God alone knows how much of Scotland might feel bad about it is one of the most offensive ideas I've heard in quite some time. Fuck, as they say, that.
There is, of course, a difference between criticising Thatcher's legacy and breaking out a hornpipe before her gravestone. Even so, the idea that those celebrating a woman's death should be repeatedly criticised whilst those whitewashing the history of so divisive and destructive a figure be given a pass because we shouldn't speak ill of the dead strikes me as far more insulting than any number of poor-taste jokes.
And as for the idea that we should all be playing nicely in our various sandpits because we should feel bad for Thatcher's family: bullshit. Margaret Thatcher's family have suffered the kind of horrible loss that sooner or later every family feels. That is undeniably real, and horrible. But whilst they suffer following the death of a loved one, they do it from the exceptionally fortunate position of having no kind of problematic financial repercussions to work through, and they do it from the immensely rare position of being surrounded on all sides by media voices telling the world that they're loss is shared by millions around the world, who will be keeping them in their prayers.
When my mother dies, maybe a few hundred people will give a shit. My mother, who has dedicated her life to helping her family and her community, who writes books about the importance of coming together as a town and as a church to help others, will if she's supremely lucky get a couple of lines in our local paper. Many of the people who would be not just bereaved but financially imperilled by the loss of a love one because of Thatcher's actions will get still less than that.
Greenwald quotes David Wearing's satirical comment from yesterday: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. Tasteless." It's not just a nice reversal, it's the very heart of the matter. Hundreds of thousands of people are worse off in this country today as a direct result of Thatcher's policies. Some of them, in fact, will be bereaved right now, as lives lived under the crushing weight of economic ruin and social disinterest wink out like any other light. Today, we're told, is not for those losses. Those losses don't matter. No-one knew who they were. Those are not the families we are to spend the next few days sympathising with.
The idea I shouldn't point this out because a bunch of very well-off people directly benefited by the exact same political moves that laid waste to an entire quadrant of England and God alone knows how much of Scotland might feel bad about it is one of the most offensive ideas I've heard in quite some time. Fuck, as they say, that.
Monday, 8 April 2013
The End Of The Iron Age
The death of Margaret Thatcher has divided us all.
There are basically four main camps of reaction; those same four camps that spring up whenever any major political figure passes away. There's the one's who genuinely feel a great person has passed beyond the mortal veil, that someone for whom our country is better off is no longer drawing breath. I have nothing to say about those people other than to note how violently I disagree. The second group are simply noting that they're not particularly affected by the news. That's actually the group I fall into, or at least I would, if the resulting shitstorm hadn't drawn so much of my attention.
The other two groups are those that are actively celebrating the news, and those that are criticising those that are actively celebrating the news. And it's those reactions that I wanted to linger on for a little while. Because there's a world of difference between not liking the idea of celebrating another human beings death, and actually telling the people doing the celebrating that they are bad people for doing it.
In between the autumn of 2002 and the summer of 2003, I did my teacher training in two schools in County Durham whose catchment areas were either exclusively or almost exclusively former mining towns. And it was just heartbreaking. An entire generation of school children just marking time until they could go on the dole like their parents. Hundreds and hundreds of young minds convinced there was nothing for them in this world except to drink and smoke and fuck and collect their benefits until they died of old age or were stabbed to death on the high street. Like any other school, these places had their smarter kids and their less smart kids, the motivated and the unmotivated. Living in those areas wasn't a death sentence, or an inescapable prison, and I'd be doing great damage to suggest otherwise. Some could and did find their ways out. Others could and did stay in these places where they were born and make something of their lives. This was not a Dickens novel, written to prove a point. It was messy reality where hope was something one had to scrabble to find.
The damage done by Thatcher's government in those places is as clear today as it was in 2003, or it was in 1993. I am not immune to the arguments that say Thatcher does not deserve all the blame, but a historical debate on the true complexities of the early '80s political scene is not something I'm angling for here. The point that I am making is that for over twenty years, the worst parts of the worst places in Washington and Spennymoor, or in Willington and Crook, have basically been ignored by the country in general. For almost three decades it must have seemed to them that no-one in the wider UK gave two shits that the Conservative government ripped out their economic innards and left them to bleed to death in the cold.
Now that Thatcher has died, we're suddenly all paying attention again. We've remembered. Those that have spent a generation remembering the effects of Thatcher's government every day - because they are still living through the aftershocks - are now being watched by a thousand thousand hawks ready to criticise the ferocity of their refusal to mourn. I know a lot of those observers have the very best of intentions, and want nothing more than to live in a world where the passing of a senile old woman doesn't cause a spike in the consumption of champagne and Doritos.
But too many of these self-appointed guardians of civility come from outside the working class. Too many come from outside the barren, nicotine-stained North East. Too many of them have only realised that those horrifically damaged by the Thatcher government still exist so that they can lecture them on the finer points of public discussion. Every post by every white middle class guy telling those haunted by Thatcher's legacy that they should be nicer about the chief architect of their economic hellstorm might just as well have written "Christ, are you still here?"
I don't want to be the guy who celebrates the death of another human being. But that's nowhere near as bad as being the guy who tells people who've experienced the sky falling on their communities heads again and again over two dozen years and change that they should be reacting to this news the way I think least gauche.
Because two weeks from now almost everyone will have forgotten about the jokes and cheers that rippled out across the country this day. And I can guarantee you almost everyone will forget about what motivated that reaction faster still.
Except, of course, for the ones that can't.
There are basically four main camps of reaction; those same four camps that spring up whenever any major political figure passes away. There's the one's who genuinely feel a great person has passed beyond the mortal veil, that someone for whom our country is better off is no longer drawing breath. I have nothing to say about those people other than to note how violently I disagree. The second group are simply noting that they're not particularly affected by the news. That's actually the group I fall into, or at least I would, if the resulting shitstorm hadn't drawn so much of my attention.
The other two groups are those that are actively celebrating the news, and those that are criticising those that are actively celebrating the news. And it's those reactions that I wanted to linger on for a little while. Because there's a world of difference between not liking the idea of celebrating another human beings death, and actually telling the people doing the celebrating that they are bad people for doing it.
In between the autumn of 2002 and the summer of 2003, I did my teacher training in two schools in County Durham whose catchment areas were either exclusively or almost exclusively former mining towns. And it was just heartbreaking. An entire generation of school children just marking time until they could go on the dole like their parents. Hundreds and hundreds of young minds convinced there was nothing for them in this world except to drink and smoke and fuck and collect their benefits until they died of old age or were stabbed to death on the high street. Like any other school, these places had their smarter kids and their less smart kids, the motivated and the unmotivated. Living in those areas wasn't a death sentence, or an inescapable prison, and I'd be doing great damage to suggest otherwise. Some could and did find their ways out. Others could and did stay in these places where they were born and make something of their lives. This was not a Dickens novel, written to prove a point. It was messy reality where hope was something one had to scrabble to find.
The damage done by Thatcher's government in those places is as clear today as it was in 2003, or it was in 1993. I am not immune to the arguments that say Thatcher does not deserve all the blame, but a historical debate on the true complexities of the early '80s political scene is not something I'm angling for here. The point that I am making is that for over twenty years, the worst parts of the worst places in Washington and Spennymoor, or in Willington and Crook, have basically been ignored by the country in general. For almost three decades it must have seemed to them that no-one in the wider UK gave two shits that the Conservative government ripped out their economic innards and left them to bleed to death in the cold.
Now that Thatcher has died, we're suddenly all paying attention again. We've remembered. Those that have spent a generation remembering the effects of Thatcher's government every day - because they are still living through the aftershocks - are now being watched by a thousand thousand hawks ready to criticise the ferocity of their refusal to mourn. I know a lot of those observers have the very best of intentions, and want nothing more than to live in a world where the passing of a senile old woman doesn't cause a spike in the consumption of champagne and Doritos.
But too many of these self-appointed guardians of civility come from outside the working class. Too many come from outside the barren, nicotine-stained North East. Too many of them have only realised that those horrifically damaged by the Thatcher government still exist so that they can lecture them on the finer points of public discussion. Every post by every white middle class guy telling those haunted by Thatcher's legacy that they should be nicer about the chief architect of their economic hellstorm might just as well have written "Christ, are you still here?"
I don't want to be the guy who celebrates the death of another human being. But that's nowhere near as bad as being the guy who tells people who've experienced the sky falling on their communities heads again and again over two dozen years and change that they should be reacting to this news the way I think least gauche.
Because two weeks from now almost everyone will have forgotten about the jokes and cheers that rippled out across the country this day. And I can guarantee you almost everyone will forget about what motivated that reaction faster still.
Except, of course, for the ones that can't.
Sunday, 7 April 2013
A Storm Of Selah
Which of course is my way of admitting up front that there's little point in trying to do that. Given the sheer density of and variation in plotlines the show needs to juggle, the pattern it seems to have fallen into was probably inevitable: bring the hammer down in episode 9, spend the season finale shuffling things into place for the next season, then spend the following season's premiere reminding people exactly where that shuffling left everyone. Given that there's not really a great deal to talk about regarding "Valar Dohaeris", any more than "The North Remembers", other than to ask how well it fulfilled its thankless but unavoidable task.
Well, that's not quite true...
(Totes spoils below, obvs.)
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
I Am Not A Bigot
I've been havering for a while about writing this post, because it seems sometimes that there's no-one left in the country willing to have a sensible and serious conversation on the subject of marriage. It's all too easy to point fingers yelling "hatemonger!" the instant a dissenting view is proffered; sitting snugly in one's cocoon of moral righteousness rather than leaning forward to hear the thoughts of the silent majority.
Well, I will be silent no longer. I have consulted my conscience, and I have consulted religious leaders of far greater wisdom and comprehension than you or I, and I have come to an inescapable conclusion: Marmite eaters should not be allowed to get married.
Already I hear the howls of the outraged as they skim those words, preparing to launch screed after badly-composed screed against me in my comments section, demanding I confess to secret yeastophobia, an unreasoning primordial hate clouding my higher brain functions. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have not the slightest problem with those that love Marmite. Some of my best friends love Marmite. I'm certainly not one of those people who objects to seeing Marmite being eaten, even in public, though I think I speak for many that it can creep us out to see it being done, and I don't think we should be judged too harshly for that. After thirty-three years of eating no Marmite, it's hardly a surprise that I react to its nearby consumption with, well, surprise.
Despite this, however, I do not believe that Marmite eating is compatible with the institution of marriage. Partially this is a matter of tradition. Human society, and in particular the mighty civilisations of the west, have gotten on perfectly well without recourse to Marmite for thousands of years. Alexander the Great conquered the known world with nothing smeared on his pitta bread but a light layer of honey. Wellington smashed Napoleon from the face of western Europe, and he managed quite well with his marmalade, thank you very much. For almost nineteen hundred years since the birth of Christ, not one single historical, technological nor sociological accomplishment of note was achieved by a man - or woman - with black yeast derivative smeared across their lips.
It is more than simply a question of tradition, however, for to nod to the practises of our forefathers cannot be enough in itself. It is the very central role marriage plays in society; a role so fundamental and foundational that one could hardly think of a worse candidate for headstrong sociological experimentation. Were I to be married, and whilst sitting with my wonderful spouse munching hot buttered toast learn that the couple next door were tucking into Marmite-violated muffins, how could I enjoy my own breakfast? Marriage is, at heart, about the sharing of one's experiences with one's partner, a promise to live one's life in the heart and soul of another. How can that experience not be lessened by the realisation that the very nature of those experiences has become weakened by alternatives incompatible with our shared activities?
And will not someone, at long last, think of the children? Marmite is still new to the world, still seen as different, as non-standard. In time, like all new ideas, the world will come to tolerate it, even accept it, but that time is not this time. How are children to explain to their friends that their parents voluntarily consume waste products not thought fit for the bottom of a Guinness Extra Cold cask? How will they mask their shame at Sports Day when their beloved father pulls out a black-oozing sandwich and starts munching it during the egg and spoon race? What damage could result when a child reaches puberty and their parents have to admit "We've never actually eaten jam, but we'll do our best to explain a Swiss roll to you"?
If marriage is not to be a place of experimentation, that same truth must hold double for the raising of a family. Particularly when doing so in what still remains, I believe, a strongly Christian country. When Jesus took five loaves and used them to feed the multitude, did he whip out a jar of Marmite and ask for a butter knife? No. No he did not.
At the end of the day, can any argument be more powerful?
Well, I will be silent no longer. I have consulted my conscience, and I have consulted religious leaders of far greater wisdom and comprehension than you or I, and I have come to an inescapable conclusion: Marmite eaters should not be allowed to get married.
Already I hear the howls of the outraged as they skim those words, preparing to launch screed after badly-composed screed against me in my comments section, demanding I confess to secret yeastophobia, an unreasoning primordial hate clouding my higher brain functions. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have not the slightest problem with those that love Marmite. Some of my best friends love Marmite. I'm certainly not one of those people who objects to seeing Marmite being eaten, even in public, though I think I speak for many that it can creep us out to see it being done, and I don't think we should be judged too harshly for that. After thirty-three years of eating no Marmite, it's hardly a surprise that I react to its nearby consumption with, well, surprise.
Despite this, however, I do not believe that Marmite eating is compatible with the institution of marriage. Partially this is a matter of tradition. Human society, and in particular the mighty civilisations of the west, have gotten on perfectly well without recourse to Marmite for thousands of years. Alexander the Great conquered the known world with nothing smeared on his pitta bread but a light layer of honey. Wellington smashed Napoleon from the face of western Europe, and he managed quite well with his marmalade, thank you very much. For almost nineteen hundred years since the birth of Christ, not one single historical, technological nor sociological accomplishment of note was achieved by a man - or woman - with black yeast derivative smeared across their lips.
It is more than simply a question of tradition, however, for to nod to the practises of our forefathers cannot be enough in itself. It is the very central role marriage plays in society; a role so fundamental and foundational that one could hardly think of a worse candidate for headstrong sociological experimentation. Were I to be married, and whilst sitting with my wonderful spouse munching hot buttered toast learn that the couple next door were tucking into Marmite-violated muffins, how could I enjoy my own breakfast? Marriage is, at heart, about the sharing of one's experiences with one's partner, a promise to live one's life in the heart and soul of another. How can that experience not be lessened by the realisation that the very nature of those experiences has become weakened by alternatives incompatible with our shared activities?
And will not someone, at long last, think of the children? Marmite is still new to the world, still seen as different, as non-standard. In time, like all new ideas, the world will come to tolerate it, even accept it, but that time is not this time. How are children to explain to their friends that their parents voluntarily consume waste products not thought fit for the bottom of a Guinness Extra Cold cask? How will they mask their shame at Sports Day when their beloved father pulls out a black-oozing sandwich and starts munching it during the egg and spoon race? What damage could result when a child reaches puberty and their parents have to admit "We've never actually eaten jam, but we'll do our best to explain a Swiss roll to you"?
If marriage is not to be a place of experimentation, that same truth must hold double for the raising of a family. Particularly when doing so in what still remains, I believe, a strongly Christian country. When Jesus took five loaves and used them to feed the multitude, did he whip out a jar of Marmite and ask for a butter knife? No. No he did not.
At the end of the day, can any argument be more powerful?
Tuesday, 2 April 2013
Balon Greyjoy Wasn't Even Born On The Mainland!
I know none of you slept last night out of eagerness to hear my thoughts on the Game of Thrones Season 3 opener, but you'll have to wait a bit for me to write that particular post (short version: best start to a season so far, but no more than solid overall). In the meantime, how about enjoying another one of those fortuitous intersections of my particular obsessions: attack ads villifying various contenders to the Seven Kingdoms.
The demands to see Joffrey Baratheon's birth certificate are probably my favourite part, though there's a couple of other nods to the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections hidden away in there too. Also in there are spoilers for the first two seasons.
The demands to see Joffrey Baratheon's birth certificate are probably my favourite part, though there's a couple of other nods to the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections hidden away in there too. Also in there are spoilers for the first two seasons.
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