Where Worlds Collide

Warning. This is a rant. If you’re here for the prog-rock reviews, move along, there’s nothing to see.

I never thought I’d start thinking like a republican (in the British sense, not the American or Irish sense!), but I wish the royal couple would just elope to Greta Green, and save the rest of us some hassle!

When Princess Diana died vast swathes of the country wore their emotional incontinence on their sleeves, indulging in recreational grief over someone they never met. It left the other half of the country wondering if they were last sane person left in Britain. The way I felt browbeaten into compulsory mass weeping left me profoundly alienated, at least until I realised many others felt the same way. It did make me realise that the monarchy no longer represents the whole nation any more in any meaningful way.

The only people who care about the royal family now are tabloid-readers who see them as the ultimate reality TV soap opera, and a few old-school high Tories. And since I’m neither of those things, I’m beginning to object to being asked to pay for it all as a taxpayer, especially in these times of austerity and spending cuts.

But there’s a simple solution. If the royal’s fans are those who worship at the altar of celebrity, let the High Priest of celebrity culture pay for the bloody thing. I’m sure Simon Cowell can afford it

For the past eight years Fred Clark’s blog Slacktivist has been essential reading if you want to know what’s wrong with the world view of large parts of the religious right. He blogs a lot about the excesses of rightwing fundamentalism from an evangelical Christian perspective. Among other things he’s been dissecting the appalling but hugely popular “Left Behind” series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, pointing out not only how bad they are theologically, but why the utterly fail as literature. A constant theme is how a mindset based on fear and anger is completely at odds with what the central message of Christianity is supposed to be.

And he’s on form today:

Your aunt, unfortunately, didn’t mention either your name or hers when she drunk-dialed me Thursday to let me know I was at the top of the list of Bad People she’s praying against due to my supposedly contributing to your doubts about the inerrancy and infallibility of the footnotes in the Scofield Reference Bible.

Your aunt was too intoxicated — three sheets to the wind on self-righteous indignation — for me to make a great deal of sense of your situation or hers. She is, I think, your father’s sister, and she used to live in California, but now has an area code that Google tells me is in the really lovely part of Washington State. She seems to really enjoy telling people that if they believe in evolution then they don’t believe in the Bible. And by “the Bible” she’s apparently referring to some set of scriptures that includes the Complete Works of Hal Lindsey.

Read the whole thing.

Welcome to the election which everyone lost. The voters have returned with a verdict of “none of the above”.

• Labour have done as badly as they did in 1983, so they’re kidding themselves to say it’s anything other than a massive defeat. No way can Gordon Brown expect to stay in office.
• The Tories have also lost. They were up against the most unpopular prime minister people can remember, in the middle of a recession, and 37% of the popular vote is the best they can manage. The verdict of the British people on them was “we don’t trust you guys with a majority, so we’re not going to give you one”.
• The Liberal Democrats never expecting to form a majority government, but their goal was to get a big enough wedge of MPs to be able to form a majority with either of the other two parties. That hasn’t happened, which is why they have also lost.

So now we’re in the post-election period while the parties investigate coalitions, and try to make deals. Commentators from countries with proportional voting (i.e. most countries) are bemused that so many people in Britain find this strange. We seem to have three options:

• A coalition (or some agreement short of a coalition) between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. While the parties are right to enter discussions, I doubt that they’ll be able to hammer out a deal that both parties will be able to accept. The ‘Orange Book’ faction of the Liberals and David Cameron’s moderates may have something in common, but there are a sizeable section of both parties who’d consider such a deal to be anathema.
• A minority Tory government, perhaps doing ad-hoc deals to get certain legislation through. At the moment I think this is most likely option, although it’s likely to end in a second election within a year.
• A Lib/Lab coalition. Sadly I think this is a non-starter; the numbers simply do not add up. They’ll be well short of a working majority, and nobody really wants to cut shady pork-barrel deals with the Scottish Nationalists or Democratic Unionists.
• A grand coalition of all three parties as government of national unity, with David Cameron as Prime Minister. Possibly the least likely of all, and only justified if the problems with the economy are really as serious as some of the more apocalyptic commentators are suggesting.

Whatever happens next, we’re going to be living in interesting times. There’s been a lot of talk about electoral reform during and after this election. Whether or not parties can work together successfully when no one party has a majority will be one test of whether or not both the British people and their politicians can deal with the results of an electoral system which would never give an overwhelming majority to a single party.

So the government has railroaded through the deeply-flawed Digital Economy Bill in the dying days of a Parliament with completely inadequate discussion or consultation. It’s being sold as an urgently-needed measure to tackle widespread internet piracy, but I see it as a massive power-grab by old-media giants who want to destroy those parts of the Internet they don’t like.

Nobody apart from the major media cartels and a bunch of corrupt and/or technically-illiterate politicans are actually in favour of this thing as it stands. Even the strongly anti-filesharing Featured Artists Coalition opposes the bill.

I have always maintained that the major labels overstate the losses caused by file-sharing for largely self-serving reasons, and their real agenda has always been about maintaining market share. There are still people who claim that every illicit download represents a lost sale, which is so transparently ridiculous that they deserve to be slapped repeatedly with the proverbial Very Large Haddock until they see sense. They ignore the multiple studies concluding that file-sharers actually spend more money on music and other media than average, and frequently use file-sharing to guide their legitimate purchases.

Even if you believe illicit filesharing is a terrible thing, the whole collective punishment aspect sticks in the throat. This bill targets households, not individuals. I know I’m going to risk Godwin’s law saying this, but from occupied France in World War Two downwards, collective punishment has always been the last resort of the authoritarian thug with no moral authority. So we will see parents losing internet access due to the actitivies of their teenage children, or similar things in shared houses. That lodger you kicked out last month because he didn’t pay the rent? Turns out he’s cost you your internet as well. And that’s before we get into how cafes and libraries providing free wi-fi are now going to be expected to police their customer’s activity. No, small businesses are certainly not exempt, and many people are predicting a sharp decline in free wi-fi facilities.

Then there’s the whole ‘guilty unless proved innocent’ thing. How are they going to determine what’s a legal and what’s an illegal download? What guarantees are there that whatever data-mining or traffic analysis they propose to use isn’t going to generate significant numbers of false positives? What happens if you listen to an Internet radio station or download free songs from a band’s own website, and those sites don’t appear in some major-label approved whitelist? I’ve asked the bill’s apologists about this, and all I get is bland assurances that “it’s only going to be used against a hard core of persistant file sharers”. But there is nothing in the bill that states this.

The bits in the bill about site blocking are just as bad - again the wording is so vague that it can end up being used against virtually anything that the big media companies don’t like - much like Britains hopelessly broken libel laws.

But perhaps the most toxic thing about the entire bill is the way it undermines public support for the notion that creative artists deserve to be paid for their efforts. From the sleazy way it emerged from a meeting between the unelected twice-sacked-for-corruption Peter Mandelson and label boss David Geffen while being wined and dined on Philip Rothschild’s yacht in the Med, to the cynical way the government rammed it through Parliament without proper discussion, the whole thing has the effect of making file-sharing look like a righteous act of civil disobedience. And that will persist even if the DEB fails.

There’s still an outside chance that the House of Lords will see sense and kick the bill out, but I wouldn’t bet on it. In the meantime, if your MP voted in favour of this travesty, be sure not to vote for them in the election.

As many people know by now, fundie TV evangelist Pat Robertson has claimed that the terrible earthquake in Haiti is their own fault. All because they allegedly made a pact with The Devil 200 years ago.

The “pact with the devil” is a reference to the Voodoun [1] ceremony at Bois Caïman in 1791 which is widely accepted as the starting point of the Haitian revolution.

He’s got past form as a disaster ghoul; Hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for New Orlean’s Mardi Gras, and of course 9/11 was punishment for American not being a totalitarian theocracy that persecutes those icky gays and pagans. It shouldn’t need to be said that Robertson’s beliefs are far removed from orthodox Christianity. It’s a sort of syncretism of bronze-age Judaism (his Bible stops at the book of Judges) and the Manichean heresy. But you can’t dismiss Pat Robertson as a fringe figure with no influence, like the infamous Fred Phelps. He’s still a major player in America’s conservative movement.

It’s time for all Christians, especially those who self-identify as conservatives, not just to distance themselves from individual statements of his, but to publically disown him, and condemn him in the most robust and undiplomatic language possible. He’s the west’s answer to The Taliban.

[1] As you ought to know, Haitian Voodoun is really syncretism of tradition west African religion with bits of Roman Catholicism - any associations with devil worship[2] comes from a combination of fundies believing all other religions are ‘of the devil’ and watching too many bad B-movie horror films. Yes, as the Wikipedia article says, there are corrupt practitioners, but their method of operation seems remarkably similar to those of TV preachers like Pat Robertson.

[2] Satanism is basically Ayn Rand’s sociopathic Objectivism with a parody of Roman Catholic ritual sellotaped onto the front for flavouring. It’s really all about teenage rebellion and really bad taste in music. [3]

[3] OK, so this post has managed to insult fundies, Randroids, Satanists and Venom fans. I’d probably better stop here.

Put next to a young boy
In a knee-deep trench
Whose hand even trembles
When he keeps it clenched
We attack tomorrow
In dawn’s early light
And as this sinks in
I’m so scared
I can’t wait for it and tonight
To be over

- Twelfth Night: Sequences

Welcome to Hell
Welcome to Hell on Earth
No need for sin
No sign of Man’s rebirth

- Magenta: The Ballad of Samuel Layne

Gather round reluctant marksmen
One of them to take his life
With a smile he gives them pardon
Leaves the dark and takes the light

They dispatch their precious cargo
Knock him back right off his feet
And they pray may no one follow
Better still to face the beast

When the field has become a garden
And the wall has stood the test
Children play and the dogs run barking
Who would think or who would guess

- Magnum: Les Morts Dansants.

Twitter has hit the headlines twice this week, and the collective power of Twitter uses has delivered decisive smackdowns to two very different forces of evil.

The first was delivered to sleazy oil company Trafigura, accused of the illegal fly-tipping of toxic waste in The Ivory Coast, suspected of causing more than a dozen deaths and making tens of thousands ill, then spending vast sums on expensive lawyers to try and cover the whole thing up. What bought matters to a head was when their bullying lawyers got an injunction preventing The Guardian from reporting on questions being asked in The House of Commons about the matter. This alarming comment appeared on The Guardian’s website.

“The commons order paper contained a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found”.

Since the commons order paper was available online on the official Parliament website, it didn’t take long for a few bloggers work out what this question was. Then it started spreading across Twitter. By Tuesday morning, “Trafigura” was the top trending topic, and far more people knew about the true nature of this rather unpleasant company that would ever have do so had their lawyers not tried to gag the press. The term for this is “Epic Fail”

If the first Twitter storm was about freedom of the press, the next one was about responsibility of the press. On Friday, a toxic little squit of a Daily Mail journalist wrote an disgustingly bigotted article about the death of Boyzone singer Steven Gately, on the eve of his funeral. Within hours, Twitter went nuclear again. “Jan Moir” and “Daily Mail” became top trending topics. Major advertisers including Marks and Spencer started withdrawing advertising from The Daily Mail in response.

A few hours later the hack gave a mealy-mouthed non-apology which claimed she’d been subject to an orchestrated campaign, and that her vile article “was not intended to cause offence”. This stupid woman was clearly so wrapped up in her little Daily Mail bigot-bubble that it didn’t occur to her than this was a spontaneous reaction by tens of thousands of ordinary people who were simply disgusted at what they read.

While we’ve seen two examples in the past week of the collective power of Twitter users for good, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the same thing gets used for evil.

By the way, I’m Kalyr on Twitter. You can probably find a few of my contributions to both of those smackdowns.

I’ve previously described America’s “Conservative Movement” as the bastard offspring of Cyrus Schofield and Ayn Rand; The religious right in particular has basically become a mix of small-town prejudice and political ideology that has little or nothing to do with the Gospels. It’s nothing more than a rather totalitarian political ideology with a few bits of Christian language and imagery glued on for flavour.

I suppose The Conservative Bible Project is the logical end-point of this. It’s a project to ‘re-translate’ The Bible to remove centuries of ‘liberal bias’. For example, it gives these goals.

Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning.
Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

Now, I know this reads like a parody, but reliable sources say this is for real. There is no response to things like this other than mockery.

Some excellent commentary on this from Slacktivist, a blogger I’ve reading for several years, who always has something to say about the idiocies of the religious right.

Plenty of other recent posts of his are well worth reading - especially the one on the significance of the Book of Jonah, which explains why the fundamentalists go on about the whale, and ignore the rest of the story, and the reason Vampires hate crosses.

Where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here, where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here, where do we go from here?

They boarded up the synagogues, Uzis on a street corner
You can’t take a photograph of Uzis on a street corner
The DJ resigned today they wouldn’t let him have his say
Surface scratched where the needles play, Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here

Terror in Rue de St. Denis, murder on the periphery
Someone else in someone else’s pocket
Christ knows I don’t know how to stop it
Poppies at the cenotaph, the cynics can’t afford to laugh
I heard in on the telegraph there’s Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

The more I see, the more I hear, the more I find fewer answers
I close my mind, I shout it out but you know it’s getting harder
To calm down, to reason out, to come to terms with what it’s all about
I’m uptight, can’t sleep at night, I can’t pretend everything’s all right
My ideals, my sanity, they seem to be deserting me
But to stand up and fight I know we have six million reasons

They’re burning down the synagogues, Uzis on a street corner
The heralds of the holocaust, Uzis on a street corner
The silence never louder than now, how quickly we forgot our vows
This resurrection we can’t allow, Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

We buy fresh bagels from the corner store
Where swastikas are spat from aerosols
I sit in the bar sipping iced White Russian
Trying to score but nobody’s pushing
And everyone looks at everyone’s faces
Searching for signs and praying for traces of a conscience in residence
Are we sitting on a barbed wire fence
Racing the clouds home, racing the clouds home

We place our faith in human rights
In the paper wars that tie the red tape tight
I know that I would rather be out of this conspiracy
In the gulags and internment camps frozen faces in nameless ranks
I know that they would rather be standing here besides me
Racing the clouds home, racing the clouds home

You can shut your eyes, you can hide it away it’s gonna come back another day
Racing the clouds home, are we racing the clouds home
Racing the clouds home

- Marillion, White Russian © EMI Music Publishing, quoted in full with permission

65 years ago was the D-Day landings.

65 years later, 943598 British voters chose to insult the memories of those who gave their lives on that day by voting for a party who represent exactly the same values as the enemy they died fighting.

Some people claim it’s just a protest vote; a way to say ‘up yours’ to the political establishment in response to the scandals about MPs expenses. How many of these voters have actually stopped to think what they’re endorsing?

I count many of black, Jewish, gay and transgendered people amongst my friends and acquaintances. This vile party is fundamentally opposed to their very existence; they want to herd them all into concentration camps. They’ll deny it in public, of course, but they’ll be lying. You have to be pretty stupid not to see these neo-Nazis for what they are. It’s the non-white, non-straight, non-Anglo-Saxon British citizens that a BNP vote really says ‘up yours’ to.

And their use of British WW2 imagery, when their leaders idolise Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, really sticks in my throat.

Very sad news from Cardiff.

To all customers, promoters, fans, bands and supporters of The Point Cardiff Bay

It is with deep regret that we announce the closure of the venue today. On 27th February 2009 the Director of the Point Cardiff Bay Limited signed the appropriate notices to call a meeting of creditors pursuant to S98 Insolvency Act 1986.

A number of factors have contributed to this situation. Many of you will be aware that during 2008 we began receiving noise complaints from one or two neighbours that had moved into the new apartments that have been built next to the venue. After some difficult negotiations with the Cardiff City Council we undertook a huge amount of work to soundproof the venue in an attempt to secure its future. While that has largely been successful, the burden of the debt that we took on, together with greater restrictions in our banking facilities and more difficult trading conditions in the last few months, as well as the loss of revenue whilst the refurbishment works were undertaken, has meant we are unable to meet our current liabilities and have been left with no option but to seek voluntary liquidation.

Many people have put their heart and soul in turning the Point into the magical venue that it is and we have received huge and loyal support over the years from fans and bands alike. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for that support. It is a very sad day for us and for the live music scene in Cardiff.

If you have bought tickets for shows in advance, we must advise you to seek compensation from your credit card company. If you are a supplier to the Point, there will be further news about a creditors meeting in due course.

This venue seems to fallen victim to a nasty combination of the credit crunch, the preceding property bubble, and some Cardiff council politics that have a whiff of corruption about them.

The venue had existed for years in what had been a run-down commercial district of the city. Then during the property boom the area got yuppified as property developers started converting empty buildings into luxury flats. Then the new neighbours started complaining about the noise. From a business that had been operating in the area long before those occupants moved in.

I haven’t heard any valid explanation as to why the venue itself had to bear the full costs of soundproofing work, rather than the property developers who made this soundproofing necessary in the first place, and presumably walked away with fat profits. Thinks like that do make me wonder if backhanders to council members might have been made (with the legally required “allegedlys”, of course).

Sadly, all too often the bastards win. Cardiff loses a superb music venue, while a bunch of pretentious yuppies get to enjoy their negative equity.