Pejorative

I've previously written in this blog about the disappointment of following your 'heroes' on Twitter. As a result of this, the rationalised list of sports 'personalities' that I follow is effectively reduced to one man: Michael Vaughn. I follow the former England captain mainly because he is unintentionally very funny. For a man approaching 40 who has lived much of his life in the public eye, he is startlingly and endearingly naive. Whilst this usually leads to much thoroughly entertaining tweeting, it is easy to get depressed by humanity if one is to read the responses to many of his tweets. A number of his recent tweets about the England vs India Test series have elicited strings of badly spelled tirades littered with effing, c-bombs and insults about his mother. I realise that this is nothing compared to the sort of unbelievably threatening and sexually violent abuse directed at pretty much any feminist in the public eye, but I would suggest that it comes from a similar place. Based on the thoroughly unscientific evidence of my experience, a little extrapolation and a dash of presumption, I am fairly certain that the vast majority of this abuse comes from men. The modern narrative (and indeed the excuse that many of the perpetrators of the more extreme misogynist abuse) is that in a world where women are beginning to get some equality, men are increasingly unsure of their position and therefore feel the need to lash out agressively. My response to this 'excuse' is the same as my response to anyone who is having a strop because they can't have everything their own way: grow up.  

Of course Michael Vaughn's response to the abusive comments he gets on Twitter seems to be largely to shrug them off, baffled that people from other countries can't take 'a bit of banter'. Unfortunately, it would appear that many of them can't, which is perhaps an indicator of the vast cultural divides still extant between countries that many view to have a shared (if partially imposed) cultural heritage. I am generally not a fan of banter; as far as I can tell it is simply a term used to excuse oneself from causing massive offence by insulting another. In too many instances 'banter' is used to excuse the inexcusable by those who think freedom of speech means freedom to give offence. However, in many contexts, banter could be interpreted as a form of progress in western male social behaviour. If banter allows contentious concepts to be discussed without the risk of actual physical conflict then it may be (partially) viewed as a progressive force. 

Unfortunately for those on a global stage, the mitigating effects of labelling a statement 'banter' are not universal. In many countries, male concepts of 'honour' mean that people will take 'banter' seriously and respond in an extreme and (in the eyes of western observers at least) disproportionate manner. It would be an oversimplification to argue that the countries where men 'can't take a bit of banter' are those where other problematic concepts of masculine honour exist, leading to so-called 'honour' killings and rape, but a correlation could be made. Much of the 'traditional' concepts of male honour are tied up with a man's power over others, much of which manifests as, or is interpreted as sexual power over women. If a man believes in such a 'code' of 'honour' and feels his 'honour' threatened, questioned or undermined, he will respond initially with threats and ultimately with acts of violence. The fact that the violence is likely to be sexual violence if its target is female simply ties in with a logic that equates sexual dominance with honour. 

In this context, anything that bursts the bubble of dangerous hubris that surrounds such logic must be counted as a good thing. Applied and accepted in the spirit it was intended, banter can undermine the dangerous conventions that have established themselves around masculine pride, but it is a blunt instrument. As Michael Vaughn and others have perhaps discovered, it does not magically wipe away all offence, which is most notable when that offence is unpardonable. Indeed, it is what is counted as unpardonable offence that perhaps differs from one country to the next. In the UK, many men will question their friend's sexuality and it will be considered 'just a bit of banter' (I'm not saying it isn't offensive, especially where the inference is that one form of sexuality is inferior), but threatening a woman sexually is not ever considered acceptable, even if someone tries to excuse it as 'banter'. That us not to say that it doesn't happen in the UK, just that it is not considered acceptable by the moral majority. 

The last two sentences were the first written after I became aware of a furore over a selection of offensive texts written by some football person* being incorrectly classified as banter. The list of subjects of those texts (gender, race, sexuality) pretty much read as a definition of what is not allowed to be termed 'banter' in modern British society, yet in some countries would be accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow. 

Reading over everything I have written so far, I realise that I've slightly missed the point. The broader cultural differences that allowed me to notice the different contexts in which 'banter' will or won't be accepted, blinded me to the fact that the perceived acceptability of any 'banter' is entirely contextual. OK, maybe 'blinded me' is a bit much, but I did think that the context was limited to national or cultural boundaries when it is not at all. With banter, the audience is everything: if it is between a few mates (who are all equally misogynist, racist or whatever) then it is banter; if it is between a broader sweep of society then it is more likely to be offensive. In this sense both Michael Vaughn and the Malky Mackay (the football guy) suffer from a similar problem: Vaughn doesn't understand the breadth of his audience, while Mackay never intended his words to reach a wider audience. Obviously I am not drawing direct parallels between the two men; to my knowledge, Vaughn has never said anything that could be construed as racist, sexist or homophobic, and he has (rightly in my opinion) never had cause to apologise for his tweets, but there can be no doubt that there are those who take considerable offence at some of what he writes in jest. However, in both cases, it is 'banter' that reveals the prejudices of the speaker and listener. Whilst Mackay denies his texts were banter, I'm fairly sure their definition only changed after they came into the public domain. If they had stayed private (and assuming they had only been shared with friends with similar prejudices) everyone involved would have viewed them as banter and gone about their lives with their prejudices intact. Of course Mackay argues that he has none of these prejudices, in which case, the defence of 'banter' would have best been held on to. Part of the purpose of banter appears to be to ride the limit of what the other finds acceptable and it is clearly easier to push that limit with a small group of friends one knows well than with a national or global audience. This appears to lead people to say things when they believe they are amongst friends that they would not countenance in public life, it apparently encourages people to make racist, sexist or homophobic remarks simply because they are taboo, but in the process poses the risk of normalising such language. The more we give voice to a concept without being challenged or asked to justify it, the more legitimate it appears to us, especially if we view it as a piece of harmless fun. So if we need to think about our audience before saying something, should we be saying it at all? The defence of banter is no defence. As Michael Vaughn has discovered, even when it is 'harmless banter', someone still finds it offensive. 

* can you tell I'm not really a football person? 

Partition

On the day I started writing this post (it can take me a while) it was reported that Islamic extremists had taken the Iraqi city of Mosul and one of the Republican Party's most senior figures had lost a primary to a TEA Party challenger. In many ways just another day in the 21st century, but I worry what that means: both these events were illustrations of polarisation in societies. The received wisdom is that, tired of the perceived ineffectiveness of moderation, people around the world turn to extremes in the hope of radical change, yet in neither situation is this entirely the case. In Iraq, the Sunni insurgents have found little resistance partly due to the sectarian machinations of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, which have sought to exclude the the Sunni minority from any involvement in government and wider society. As a marginalised and partially vilified population, the Sunni are likely to welcome an armed rebellion that at least recognises their existence. It is likely that a similar sentiment drives many people involved with the TEA Party movement: the idea that their government doesn't represent them and so they need to sweep it away completely. Embarrisngly, in the UK this sentiment has found its focus around a corduroy wearing idiot who presents himself as a man of the people by spending too much time in the pub.  

Regardless of how it manifests itself, the sense of alienation from mainstream politics and the resulting minority factions that are formed are common across the world at the moment. These anti-establishment movements gain significant traction in seemingly short spaces of time, but we have no way of knowing what would happen if they achieve their ends, as none has yet done so. Historically, extremes are either assimilated into the mainstream as politicians address their concerns and/or economic conditions improve, or the situation becomes so intractable that it deteriorates into civil or international war. Of course we take such a suggestion and happily assume it could never happen in the west, but that is historically because a relatively centralised media has ultimately fostered a consensus of compromise. In the internet age, information and potential consensus is disseminated in a much more focused manner, resulting partly in the kind of sentiment we see amongst these minority factions going entirely unquestioned. Indeed in the self-reflective silos of modern social media, the overwhelming impression is one of incomprehension that anyone could not be of the same opinion. When you don't encounter an opposing viewpoint, you become even more convinced of the rationality of your own beliefs. 

The number of 'popular' uprisings in recent times seems to be another symptom of this attitude of self-confirming rectitude. Whilst in cases like the Arab Spring, it is easy to see how the all-enveloping blanket of social media feedback encouraged the protesters to remain strong in the face of the brutal dictatorships that they opposed, the same blanket allows others to believe in the overwhelming popularity of their cause despite evidence to the contrary in the form of democratic elections. Several times recently, groups of people unable to accept the outcome of elections have decided to change that outcome to something more to their liking, either by attempting to redefine their place outside of their current state, or by attempting to overthrow the government. Of course these situations are rarely clear-cut; democratic legitimacy is claimed by both sides in almost all cases and hard to establish in most. Not so, you would hope in the defender of world democracy, and perhaps that (and the memory of the last one) is what stops it descending into civil war. It seems almost ludicrous even mentioning civil war with reference to the modern USA, but then I'm sure that thirty years ago, most Republicans would consider it ludicrous that members of their party would shut down the government over non-negotiable principles, or ditch their party leader because of his record on compromise. The whole ethos of the TEA Party and those like them is that reasoning with those of a different viewpoint is losing. In these new orthodoxies deviation from or dilution of the message is heresy. Unbelievers are branded fanatics and dehumised so that their opinions need not be given any credence. You may think that in many conflict situations it ever was thus, and this is certainly the case (take Israel/Palestine for example), but the rhetoric of uncompromise is much wider than the war zones of the world's intractable conflicts these days. 

I worry that we are genuinely losing the ability to debate with each other; we spend all of our time listening to those who agree with us or shouting to drown out the sound of those who don't. As a species, we have many vast problems to try and overcome - some of which count as existential threats - and we will need to work together to overcome them. Working together requires agreement, which requires compromise, which requires genuine debate based on the understanding that other points of view have validity. The certanties that the World Wide Web allows us to affirm with others of the same opinion are largely illusory and only serve as a barrier to the greater understanding of others that we need if we are to maintain any sort of functioning wider society. If we keep believing we (and solely those who agree with us) have exclusive access to the truth, then we can only look forward to a world defined by conflict, fragmentation and partition. 

Patriotic

I've largely stayed out of debate on the EU lately, as the whole thing is just too depressing to even attempt to engage with. Chief amongst my disappointments is the fact that millions of people are still stupid enough to believe that any one politician is different from the rest simply because he says he is. Didn't we already see the folly of that one with Nick Clegg? Politicians are fundamentally all the same: they are looking for your approval and they will go to pretty much any lengths to get it. Saying that they are not really a politician is clearly just another thing that politicians say; it would only be accurate if they weren't on the TV or radio telling you that you should vote for them. 

My last post was about the hope that we can finally move away from the politics of oversimplified broad agendas of the past and on to voting for issues that we actually care about. I see UKIP as the last gasp of that old fashioned politics: people aren't voting for UKIP because Nigel Farage has presented a series of well reasoned solutions to the myriad issues this country faces, but because he's told them that the source of all their problems is the EU and leaving it will solve all their problems. Somehow he has managed to present this action as policy, which is something that even Alex Salmond has been unable to achieve: not even the most ferverent supporter of Scottish independence believes that that action of leaving the UK will suddenly, magically solve all their country's problems. It is a shame therefore that so many (mainly English people) seem to see Farage's playground politics as some sort of ideology that they can broadly agree with. This is, of course, because it isn't an ideology at all; it is single issue politics disguised as ideology. Hopefully it is just a transitional anomaly caused by the transition from the party-based system to an issues-based representational one, resulting in the worst of both worlds. Voting for UKIP is voting on a single issue that they will have no power to affect, whilst they actually absent themselves from representing you on every other issue that actually might affect you. In many ways, voting for UKIP is equivalent to not voting at all, but then it is likely that a lot of people are voting UKIP as they wouldn't vote at all otherwise, so perhaps they will get the level of representation that they crave. 

This is rapidly turning into the rant that I hoped it wouldn't, so I should probably wrap it up, but before I do, I'd like to quickly look language surrounding this election. For some strange reason, the right-wing press has allocated sole rights to the claim of patriotism to those of the Euroskeptic persuasion. It's as if being patriotic is the same thing as being myopic. I thought being a patriot meant you were willing to go abroad and fight for your country; certainly that's what our grandparents thought. For some reason, the understanding of patriotism has been redefined to mean that you are willng to stay at home and ignore what is happening abroad regardless of the cost to your country of this course of action. As the 70th anniversary of D-Day approaches, I think I'll stick with the old definition of patriotism and engage with Europe in a way that will help my country. 

Potholes

The first episode of a new season of The Reunion on Radio 4 was one of those episodes where, 20 years on you can tell the guests are still not going to agree. Indeed the programme showed that the emotions of those involved in the 1984 miners' strike were still very raw, at least the emotions of those who were emotionally involved in the first place: Ken Clarke did a good job of presenting the cold, 'rational', ideology-dressed-as-economical-necessity of the Thatcher government. This struck me as perhaps the most notable fact of the whole program: that even then the Tories were presenting their ideology as simple economic necessity, unless of course this was Ken Clarke re-casting history to align with contemporary policy. Whether it was conscious or not, this was the point at which Fukuyama's end of history could be seen to have occurred in Britain: the Conservatives won the argument by presenting the arguments of the left as fanatical ideologies that had no practical basis, but rather existed just to oppose progress in a violent and destructive manner. All of the left became the loony left; reason resided with the right. 

I draw attention to this, because I think my generation is fundamentally a post-miners' strike generation and therefore our view of politics is filtered through Fukuyama's post-historical lense. I remember the euphoria in 1997 for those of us who had only known Tory government. We thought Tony Blair had managed to make the left acceptable again, when in fact he had made Labour acceptable again by moving it to the right, to the world of 'rational necessity'. Blair had recognised the power of the image of leftist ideology as irrational and saw no way to counter it other than doing away with leftist ideology almost completely. Perhaps he had seen the way the left in America had been wiped out by the end of history logic of the right and saw the same as inevitable in the UK. This is understandable, as the stigma of unreason is a powerful tool of those who fear ideology: look at the way feminism is consistently and successfully presented as the preserve of unhinged women; the spectre of hysteria still looming large in the language of the patriarchy. The problem with Blair's response is that it is a pre-miners' strike approach to a post-miners' strike situation. 

Many of us who have grown up politically in this era often struggle to fully understand the world that brought such a conflict about. We struggle to comprehend the extraordinary hubris of the left in believing in the ubiquity of the power of mass labour. From our 'enlightened' vantage point, the whole thing seems a little bit simplistic, a binary conflict of black and white viewed from a world where there are so many different shades and colours. Of course we would view it that way, that is how the post-historical viewpoint is supposed to appear: these things are too complex for simple working folk and are best left to the technocrats. This has partially succeeded in turning younger generations off politics, but in many cases they have simply changed their approach away from a traditional party oriented view to a single issue oriented one. This acceptance that the complexity of the world means that voting for the party that best fits your worldview doesn't really work anymore obviously hasn't really permeated our political institutions. Like many outmoded organisations, the politicians at Westminster cling to the status quo tenaciously, hoping that getting their aides to run a Twitter account will suffice in terms of their engagement with the electorate. Meanwhile, as the traditional vote fragments, the likelihood of majority government fades away and MPs have started thinking about how they can keep their seat at Westminster. This is most notable amongst the new Tory cohort, who have repeatedly voted against the government when they thought it was in their own best interest (i.e. they thought they'd get a kicking from their local constituents). This would seem to point to a greater degree of representation and in many ways it does, especially if the MPs take notice of constituents who didn't vote for them as well as those who did. Of course in a world where people no longer vote for parties, any politician would always look to be keeping the largest number of (active) constituents happy. Such a system requires a bit more of voters than simply showing up at a polling station once every five years, but it seems they are willing to engage when a matter concerns them anyway, and often more so than if they were required to get off their arses and actually vote. The potential danger is that politicians will only react to those who shout the loudest, but it ever was thus: politicians currently gear their policies towards older voters who are much more likely to actually vote. The other worry is that politicians become simply the mouthpiece of anyone with an agenda, but at least it would be transparent and anyone with an agenda would need to engage others rather than simply being rich enough to lobby directly. The complexity of the system would lie in establishing a functional executive, as the role could not simply be handed over to the party with the most MPs. In a post party parliament, the current coalition government would appear even more utterly dysfunctional than it currently does, as the executive would have to be chosen by general consensus, based on each candidate's suitability for the post. 

This is clearly a bit of a pipe dream at the moment, but it is not inconceivable. Currently the only thing keeping our major parties from financial ruin is the 'largesse' of a few individual donors, and such power over politics in the hands of a few wealthy individuals or organisations cannot be good for democracy. Therefore the only thing standing between the current situation and my dream of the future is limits on individual party donations, and I mean limits of hundreds rather than thousands of pounds. This would inevitably lead to the collapse of all the major parties, but what is lost if they no longer exist? Traditional party structures appear solely to facilitate the power of minorities and such an illusion of democracy is something that we should be consigning to history and the failures of the twentieth century. 

Hopefully the conceptual problems that my generation have with the miners' strike is the fact that it illustrates the failure of pre 21st century representational democracy, rather than we have all been brainwashed by a 'post-historical' right wing perspective. If we view the miners' strike as the struggle between two executives, neither of whom had the full backing of their constituents for their actions but both of whom used a dysfunctional model of democratic representation to justify their actions, then we understand the democratic ideals which modern communications should allow us to aspire. If we just look at all forms of protest and political conflict as things that only trouble the unsophisticated democracies of the past or other countries, then we completely deserve whatever government we get. 

Present

10 REM --HAPPY BIRTHDAY BASIC!--

20 PRINT "How old is BASIC?"

30 LET N = GETCHAR()

40 IF N <> "" THEN GOTO 70

50 PAUSE 100

60 GOTO 30

70 LET M = GETCHAR()

80 IF M <> "" THEN GOTO 110

90 PAUSE 100

100 GOTO 70

110 LET Z = N + M

120 IF Z = "50" THEN GOTO 150

130 PRINT "Wrong!"

140 GOTO 20

150 PRINT "Correct! Happy Birthday BASIC!"

 

Preparation

"Perhaps the second shot of the energy wars was fired when Scottish and Southern Energy froze their prices for 18 months..." is a sentence that will not grace the pages of history. I'm sure Ed Miliband and the lunks in charge of our major power companies would like to dream that we might all look back on this pathetic mud-slinging exercise as some epic battle, but the truth is that when the shit actually goes down, it will seem like so much window dressing on the Titanic. The undignified scramble by the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition to claim credit for the price freeze rather covered up the details of what this price freeze has cost. In order to maintain their profit margins, SSE are looking for 500 voluntary redundancies and ditching plans to build three offshore wind farms (which increasingly appear to be the only type of wind power the Tories will countenance). Being deeply cynical, I can't help but think that maybe this was the real purpose of the whole exercise. If wholesale energy prices fall over the next 18 months, will SSE keep those jobs or recommit to building the offshore wind farms? I think that both are unlikely, with the latter being extremely unlikely. 

Every time anyone has made a point about the high price of energy in the UK, the 'big six' energy firms bleat on about having to pay green levies, which subsidise making homes more energy efficient and the building of more sources of carbon-free generation. I can understand the energy companies not being keen on the former, as it would reduce their profits, but are they genuinely unhappy about being forced to invest in their own long term future? If this truly is the case, it shows the problem with allowing markets to regulate the energy industry: the interests of the markets are so short-termist that market-driven companies are actually willing to sacrifice their long-term profits for the sake of short-term cost cutting. 

The next intervention in this squabble came from Centrica, who said that the breakup of the big six that they clearly think will follow a competition commission investigation into the energy market will result in the collapse of investment in infrastructure and new generating capacity. They may be right: a larger number of smaller companies may well have to work together to deliver infrastructure and generation improvements that are in their long-term interests and we've already seen what these companies think of long-term interests. Why should they make any long-term investments, when they know any self-respecting government will bail them out in a future where their lack of investment has left the country's energy security in a precarious position. This is where the alleged power of the market is undermined: regardless of whether the consumer has a choice of providers, those providers know they don't have to deliver anything other than the bare minimum and they don't have to invest in infrastructure because if it deteriorates to a point where it actually threatens service delivery, the government will step in to fix the problem. The power companies basically hold the people of this country to ransom, and we have no means of redress. 

One of the reasons the EU hasn't reacted more forcefully in the face of Russian aggression in the Ukraine is that countries like Germany are reliant on Russia to supply a significant portion of their gas. This means that these countries are having their foreign policy dictated to them by their energy supplier. If nothing else is, this should be a clear indication that already energy security is national security. We don't leave the physical defence of our country in the hands of private companies (although I am aware of the amount of industry that is supported by our defence policy), so why would we leave our energy security to private companies whose apathy will soon force them hand it over to the foreign power with the greatest remaining mineral assets?

Any true historical scholar will know that the first shots of the energy wars were fired as long ago as the early part of the twentieth century, but it is perhaps only now that we start to see energy as a weapon of that war as well as it's object. Increasingly, countries like Russia will see their mineral reserves as a tool of hard power to compliment their army, navy and airforce. Our only defence against such aggressors will be to have enough alternative energy sources to render their mineral wealth meaningless. This is a serious enough threat to our national security that I don't see why the ministry of defence shouldn't be running all the power stations in the land. Obviously that is a terrible idea, given the fact that the MOD can't even handle buying weapons competently, but the consequences for our national security and independence are too serious for us to leave this in the hands of short-term profits-obsessed companies. We need a viable national policy on energy security now, and if that means nationalisation (there, I said it), then so be it. I know in a world where the right wing won the argument nationalisation is heresy, but I think it may well be a small price to pay for guaranteeing the future independence of our nation. This is a threat that no market can counter.  We need to stand up to a few company directors now to make sure  we can still stand up to despots in the future. 

Provision

Why do the clocks go forward during the night, why don't they go forward during the day? Is it because our society is still formed around the notion that our productivity is more important than our wellbeing?