Category Archives: Failure

A lesson in mass extinction: the Liberal Democrats of Brighton & Hove

Posted on 18 July 2012 | 3 Comments

In the past, there were Liberal Democrats in Brighton & Hove! Now this may seem hard to believe but careful digging reveals archeological remains which pretty much proves the case. There are references to them standing candidates in elections and there is the remnants of their website. Its homepage is dominated with a news feed which ended eight months ago and has a link to “Contact your councillor and candidates“, despite the Liberal Democrats having no councillors in Brighton or Hove and apparently only one candidate. There are four pages on the site: ‘Home’, ‘Information’, ‘Events’ and ‘Get Involved’. The Information page is a stripped down duplicate of the Home page, containing only the out of date news feed. The Events page contains no events at at all.

Moribund Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrats Homepage.

Moribund Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrats Homepage. Click to Enlarge.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrats Information page contains no new information.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrats Information page contains no new information. Click to enlarge.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrats advertise no events.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrats advertise no events. Click to enlarge.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrat Contact Details.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrat Contact Details. Click to enlarge.

Brian Stone, the chair of the local party was very ready to answer a telephone call early in the morning. He was so keen to talk at 7:20am that he waited until the end of the call before finding out who he was talking to. He’s new in the job. At that time in the morning, he confused Brighton with Barnet, where he used to live. He joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) on the day it was born in 1981. “Shirley Williams is my heroine“, he told me, “she’s the ultimate political figure.” In 1982 he was elected to Barnet Borough Council and by 1986 two others had joined him there in the Liberal/SDP Alliance.

When asked why there were no Liberal Democrat councillors in Brighton or Hove, Mr Stone’s response had an unexpected candour, “being in coalition with the Tories just wiped us out.” When asked about his local party’s website, he said, “I regard that as the last priority.” When asked about the lack of local events, he said, “watch this space“. When pressed on which space one could watch, he explained that there would be a “review” of the local party’s activities and that we would shortly see some “big changes“, although he refused to hint at what they were. Should we fear a Jurassic Park style experiment, resulting in an entire political species rising from extinction? I don’t know, even I’m too polite to ask a question like that. Even writing this blog post feels like kicking the crippled.

Mr Stone’s last priority ought to be his first. These days a website is the first port of call for anyone interested in anything. Although clearly abandoned, it contains public pages which are not linked to from the rest of the website. Notable amongst these are the pages about local members. Lawrence Eke seems to still think there is a Labour government:

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrat member Lawrence Eke.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrat member Lawrence Eke is the brains behind this website. Click to enlarge.

Mr Stone cannot be criticised for putting a brave face on the disastrous electoral results his party has suffered locally but he is wrong to say that the fault lies with being in bed with the thieving Tory bastards. In 2007 only two Liberal Democrats were elected to Brighton & Hove City Council: Paul Elgood and David Watkins (who quit the party during his term of office and became an independent before losing his seat at the next election). Elgood lost his seat in 2011. Whether he is still active in politics must be doubted because his page on the local party website links to a blog which looks like it has been overrun by a spammer.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrat ex-councillor Paul Elgood.

Brighton & Hove Liberal Democrat ex-councillor Paul Elgood. Click to enlarge.

Paul Elgood's blog promotes casinos, car insurance and ink cartridges.

Paul Elgood’s blog promotes casinos, car insurance and ink cartridges. Click to enlarge.

Billy Tipping’s page says that he left the Labour Party when it lurched to the extreme left and notes that it is now extremely right-wing.

Billy Tipping doesn't like extremism.

Billy Tipping lives on a ball of mud covered with turf. Classic Liberal Democrat. Click to enlarge.

Lisa Taylor seems very angry at the Green Party for refusing to support an environmental policy she wanted adopted, though her page doesn’t actually say what that policy was.

Liberal Democrat Lisa Taylor.

Lisa Taylor is annoyed something but she doesn’t say what?

Steve Laing’s page appears to suggest that the Conservatives still hold power in the city.

Liberal Democrat Steve Laing.

Steve Laing. Click to enlarge.

Becky Taylor’s in the same boat: her page also talks about local politics as if the Tories were still in power.

Becky Taylor, Liberal Democrat candidate for Central Hove.

Becky Taylor, Liberal Democrat candidate for Central Hove. Click to enlarge.

Either there are two Paul Chandlers with the same face in the local LibDems or he’s got two membership numbers. This is his first page. The second one adds nothing.

Paul Chandler. Liberal Democrat.

Paul Chandler, Liberal Democrat candidate for East Brighton. Click to enlarge.

Bruce Neave. Liberal Democrat.

Bruce Neave wants supermarkets banned from Kemptown.

That’s the end of the local membership. It’s obvious that most of the members have left the party because there are missing membership ID numbers from the website. Someone trying to look at these pages might expect to see a 404 – page not found error, with a friendly message to look elsewhere. Instead they get this:

Liberal Democrats cannot code a website.

Liberal Democrats cannot code a website to include a 404 error. Click to enlarge.

Websites which are tweaked regularly often suffer this sort of embarassing presentational problem. This website is not being updated. Therefore, it was never coded properly. That means that there was no-one in the local Liberal Democrats who had a good grasp of web design. Whilst running a major city in the South-East takes a lot more brains than those required to build a website properly, voters do expect a political party to have members with basic skills. The site’s domain name was created only two years before the most recent local elections.

Back to the ‘review’, that should be more fertile ground for discussion. Stone happily declared that it was concerned with “refocusing” the local party, “as it’s said in business“. He seemed very positive about this prospect. “There’s going to be lots of internal work“, he opined. Sounds like code for no public events whatsoever. I asked him about recruitment. He didn’t like the word. The “young people” who had joined recently had, “not been recruited, they had joined on their own initiative“. How many members does his local party have? “I don’t know.  Our national office will not reveal the figures.” How many young people have joined the local party recently? “Three young people have joined in the last two months!” Probably wishing that he hadn’t answered my call so early in the morning, he seemed tired. Suddenly he blurted out that, “the party is very much split between the Orange Book and the Non-Orange Book.” Finally he came to his senses, “Who am I talking to?“

Brighton & Hove was ahead of the political curve when it gave up on the Liberal Democrats. We’ve got a highly educated population, with a vibrant new media and digital economy. We weren’t impressed by a party which couldn’t manage these things properly. Politicians who don’t wake up, eat and breathe online connect with increasingly few people. They become irrelevant to the places where people increasingly hold their political discussions: social networks like Facebook and Twitter, backed up by properly functioning websites. They don’t know who they’re talking to. Neither do we.

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Posted in Brighton, Coding/Development, Failure, Hove, Liberal Traitors, Local Elections, php, Politics, Politics in the Cave, Thieving Tory Bastards, Web Design

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I found a secret diary of stupidity

Posted on 9 July 2012 | Leave a comment

Keeping a private diary has been a time honoured tradition. Despite the obvious risks involved in putting your pen to paper in candid confessional, people have long used it as a method to order their thoughts, to organise their lives and obtain a personal record of events. Without personal diaries to teach us about history our literature would be less the facts and more the make believe. Think Ann Frank, Tony Benn and Robert Scott. Each told their tales without editorial considerations, providing us with raw stories. When people ask me what a blog is, I tell them it’s like a diary, except that it is published on the internet. That usually provokes a look of concern and a mumbled statement about how they wouldn’t share their intimacies with the world.

Atlas Place, Cardiff

Atlas Place, Cardiff

In the mid-1990s I moved into a house in Atlas Place in Cardiff, with an old friend from my sixth form college and his unhinged friend from Cardiff University. Actually they were both deeply antisocial but I didn’t realise it at the time. It was a three bedroom flat, with a tiny kitchen, a toilet and a living room that was far too small for the furniture it contained. We couldn’t get the door open fully and after that we had to climb over the sofa to get into the room. The coffee table took up most of the floorspace, so we had to sit with our feet up on it. As soon as we moved in, we set about the futile task of rearranging the furniture to make better use of the space.

That’s how we discovered a diary hidden by a previous occupant. It was underneath an exceptionally heavy wardrobe. That evening we took turns to read it aloud to each other. It was the diary of young woman, aged 18. Our new flat was the first place that she had lived in after leaving home. Fairly soon after her flatmates and her moved in, about eighteen months before we took up residence, they were going out partying. Back then, Cardiff didn’t offer the most spectacular opportunities for partying. Still, I think she might have chosen her venues more wisely. Mainly they went to pubs near the local barracks. The reason was explicitly explained: there were men there. “Real men”.

The diary entries divided into two categories. In the week, they simply described the tedium of our diarist’s life working as a shop floor assistant. Each one of these entries ended with an increasingly familiar passage about her hatred of her job and desperation to find something more exciting to do. At the weekend, they described going up to the pubs near the barracks, drinking way too much and the shenanigans that followed. It appeared these entries were frequently written up back at home at the end of the night in question; the handwriting had deteriorated considerably. Sometimes, they were obviously written up the next day; the handwriting had improved again but the content was full of self-loathing.

Some entries stick in my mind in particular. In the drunken hand, we heard that she had, “stuck hand down Chris’ trousers“, “slapped the bouncer“, “had sex in [a named lane] with Gary and John” and so on (not all on the same night). In the more legible hand, there were there morning’s dreadful discoveries: “cig burn on head“, “lost my knickers” and “can’t remember new boyfriend’s name“. I confess that we laughed very loudly whilst learning about her stupidity. When she could remember the man’s name, the identity of her lovers changed from week to week.

Towards the end of the diary there came the inevitable entry: “I’M PREGNANT!” Then it stopped for a few days and took our comedy with it. When it restarted, there came the most sober entry of all. She was trying to work out when she got pregnant and, therefore, by whom. She didn’t have much to narrow her search. We looked back over the preceding pages and found that she had left a number of marks by the side of the pages. Some detective work seemed to suggest that these were markers of her period, suggesting that she had been taking the pill. Some of them were crossed through. There were some other squiggles, suggesting that she had made several attempts to complete this exercise. Neither she nor us were able to make much sense of her recent history.

Having been unable to calculate who the father of her unborn child was, she embarked on another plan: “I’m going to work out who is the best bet of the possibles and make a date with him.” There was no more drunken handwriting now. She settled on a short list of three potential candidates and then mused on how to play this dangerous game. Even though they all knew each other, all drank in the same pub and obviously all knew all about her, she decided to tell them each they were the father and see if they were interested in commitment. They were not. Then, at the last moment, one of them came good and offered marriage. By this time, she had met a fellow through her sister, so she turned him down. However, he believed that he was the father and immediately went legal. The stress this placed on her new relationship broke it and the diary ended with her about to move back into her parent’s house, with no job, no relationship and no future.

Sometimes when people write diaries, they include a message at the front offering a reward if it is ever found. There was no such message in this girl’s diary. Probably just as well. She couldn’t have intended to leave it under the wardrobe but sometimes the past is best left behind.

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Posted in Cardiff, Confidentiality, Diaries, Failure, Sex

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Don’t menshn freedom of speech to Louise, she wouldn’t understand it

Posted on 24 June 2012 | 13 Comments

The problem with free speech is that it contains all manner of talk we don’t like. Criticism, careless talk, revelations about the rich and powerful and, yes, obscenities and abuse. Looking at the pre-election graffiti in Pompeii, we learn that this is hardly a new phenomenon. Armilius Celer was bold enough to put his own name to a plea to elect his neighbour Lucius Statius Receptus to a position with judicial power, even though he ended his campaign message with these words:

“May you take sick if you maliciously erase this!”

Whilst most of the graffiti preserved by the sudden interruption to life in Pompeii is about the gladiatorial contests (much as twitter is actually dominated by celebrity tittle-tattle), there is a fair amount of political graffiti. Here’s another:

“The sneak thieves request the election of Vatia as Aedile. The whole company of late drinkers favor Vatia. The whole company of late risers favor Vatia.”

These ancient trolls performed their work at night, often with ladders to get their message into highly visible positions. They were well organised, with workshops for preparatory work and operated in teams, with a ‘whitener’ to clear away existing graffiti, an assistant, a lantern man, a ladder man and the sign writer himself. Their output has revealed much about their society, much of it unpleasant (to modern eyes, at least). Much of it was nasty:

“The finances officer of the emperor Nero says this food is poison”

The problem with free speech is also its greatest strength. It cannot be controlled. The free flow of discourse allows topics to spring up wherever there is something to be discussed and this endless spring often creates new pools of thought. Whereas the Southern Italians of old felt abandoned by their Roman overlords and developed their culture accordingly, today we have the blogosphere, twitter and the like which turn our cultural devils into figures of fun remarkably quickly. This week, a comedian made himself into the joke of the week by being caught avoiding his taxes. A little further back in time, a successful self-promoting Tory Member of Parliament caught the flak in a particularly unpleasant way. Whereas most high profile people subjected to abuse of that nature simply ignore it, Louise Mensch took the opposite approach and called attention to it by declaring many of these nasty messages to be her “favourites” on twitter. Many of us, even her political enemies, were impressed by her clever approach to the problem. She kick started a big discussion about the nature of public discussions.

Unfortunately, it seems that Mensch didn’t just object to the abuse. She also disliked the very nature of free speech. She doesn’t like the way conversations twist and turn and stray “off topic”. She declared that she was going to start a rival service to twitter, called menshn, where people would be obliged to stay “on topic”. This morning, I entered this new forum to check it out. This is what I found.

Firstly, I tried to edit my profile by uploading the same image of me that I use on all social networks etc. Menshn’s bio pic upload was broken, so I’m stuck with the default image. Instead of an anonymous egg like twitter or a greyed out head and shoulders portrait like WordPress, I’ve been obliged to be pictorially represented by this image:

Menshn forces users to use absurd political images instead of their own

Louise Mensch made me look like this

I’m not really sure who this is. Definitely she’s the wrong gender. I’ve been able to download the full sized image because the site isn’t coded very well; it was in a directory which one would normally expect to be off limits to the general public.

I’m happy to show you my profile page because it doesn’t actually contain my data, which isn’t very convenient if you’re thinking about changing it. Here’s the page which doesn’t contain any data:

menshn.com's profile page doesn't show your data

Where’s my data? (Click to enlarge image.)

As if to prove that criticism is acceptable, you can see a trending ‘meshn’ on the right there. Some wag has created an account called, “itsallmimimi” and told #BigLouise exactly what he thinks of her government. I presume it’s a man but who knows – they’ve got another standard issue image to represent them:

A standard issue bio pic from menshn.com

Who is this?

Obviously, I’m not up to speed on the various historical political figures which #BigLouise wants to represent us with. I can’t help thinking that they do reveal something about the site’s Creator, particularly in terms of the order they were chosen in. Taking the order by file name reference, here’s the first one:

menshn's first choice of bio pic - Ronald Reagan

menshn.com’s first choice of bio pic – “rnd_1.jpg”

So much for me. What about the conversation? I thought that I would start off by making a constructive suggestion or two. At this point, I noticed that there are a limited number of topics I was being invited to discuss. The site’s co-founder has made the absurd claim that “Twitter is not organised around topics”. His problem is that the topics on twitter are totally out of control. People can start whatever topics of conversation they want, whenever they want. On this new site, at the moment, debate is only permitted on six topics:

  • US Election
  • Women
  • Tech
  • UK Politics
  • Euro 2012

Having practised as a barrister, I had read the rules. Not that you would have to be a barrister to read them; they’re written in plain English. Here they are (you might want to skip this quote, it’s a bit tedious but it’s here for the record):

  1. The first rule of menshn is you do talk about menshn. Please feel free to invite your friends, spread the word, and post about us on Facebook and Twitter.
  2. menshn is for talking on topic. We’re passionate about politics and we love debate. But if you harass, spam, clog feeds and so forth, we can delete your account without notice. So be like Fonzy and be cool.
  3. menshn is community-led – if another poster is bugging you, you can report a given menshn or mute/block the user by clicking on their profile. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a mute button in real life?
  4. Use of menshn is entirely, and we mean entirely, at your own risk. By registering with us you agree that menshn, and any company or person associated with menshn, is completely and totally not liable for any damage you may incur by using the site directly or indirectly. We are not responsible for links or menshns that users or third parties post; you may see content that offends you; people may be horrible to you, defame you, twist your words, post nasty links or pictures, post malware, damage your computer, pretend you wrote a menshn you didn’t, imitate you, and any other nasty thing we haven’t thought of. You agree to indemnify us for any and all liability and not to sue the menshn, its associated companies, owners, shareholders, or anybody related to menshn, for anything that derives from the site. As we said, we are community-led and you click on links at your own risk.
  5. menshn welcomes you to the site by assigning you 100 random followers from the start in your area of interest, and assigning you to follow 100 accounts – you are free to unfollow any of these users or block any followers you don’t like. The random nature of this means that as we start out, you might not like some of your followers/people you subscribe to. By signing up you agree it’s OK for us to do this and that you take responsibility for pruning your own list. Later versions of menshn will allow you to opt out of this default setting, but we figured it would be good to start talking on topic with an instant community of your own.
  6. We will assign you a random profile picture if you choose not to upload one yourself.
  7. See those “rate” buttons by the menshns? If you like a comment, or think it’s relevant or cool, please rate it. The points go up in real time, at the top of your screen. The top 5% of best-rated menshners are always seen in a community’s stream (although you can block them like anyone else). menshn is designed to reward intelligent chat. You know – we talk on topic.
  8. menshn can use advertising. We can promote links, and assign you followers or subscribe you to accounts, or promote given menshns. You agree to this by signing up. Hey, right now in version 1.0 we have placed the ability to donate straight to the Obama or Romney campaigns in the relevant chat rooms! Get to it, politicos! (If you want to).
  9. menshn is passionate about politics – but future versions of the site will expand our rooms into every topic that has demand for it. World Series? Check? Weddings? Check. Olympics? Check. Please think about topics you’d like to see added.
  10. menshn will grow and change. We can change what menshn does and the service it provides without notification to you or other users. See rule 4. We reckon you’ll figure it out if we do.
  11. menshn is public. People can reprint your menshns or even, (outrageous though this may be), quote direct messages you send to them. Anything you post on the site can be reprinted and you give permission for that to happen. Whether by other users, menshn itself or future partner companies. Also, users themselves, and not menshn or any company or person associated with it, are solely legally responsible for everything they post, including any links or direct messages. If you libel somebody or post malware, or do anything else illegal, and you get taken to court, it’s on you. We will absolutely co-operate with law enforcement. So take responsibility for anything you menshn.
  12. menshn is not forever. Many sites keep your posts indefinitely. On menshn, your menshns age off after one week and are not stored on our servers, except at our sole discretion. Reported or rated menshns, or menshns we are asked to keep by legal authorities or to investigate a complaint, we may keep as long as we choose. However, the standard here is that your menshns will disappear into the ether, and not stick around like Mount Rushmore. You agree to this, and all of the above, by signing up to use menshn. Have fun – talk on topic!

Perhaps I should have read the first rule literally? Striking a somewhat desperate note, it urges you to discuss menshn.com elsewhere. Foolishly, I thought that it would be okay to talk about it inside it. Being something of a pretend techie, I felt obliged to post a variation on the “hello world” message – the traditional geek opening gambit. I wove in a little satire and posted this message on the UK Politics ‘topic’ (that’s a forum to you and me):

“hello small world”

This message did not appear in the topic’s thread when I posted it. It appears on my own page but not in the discussion I tried to join. I tried again. Time to post a helpful suggestion:

“why no mobile version of this site?”

Perhaps this shouldn’t have been posted in the UK Politics forum, sorry ‘topic’. It also didn’t appear. Hours later, neither of these messages have appeared in the place I posted them in. Apparently, these forums are very heavily moderated. Undeterred, I posted another message, this time in the Tech forum, sorry ‘topic’:

“Menshn has far too many bugs to be beta even. Why has it been launched when tech side unfinished?”

Okay, that was a critical message but it definitely fitted in with the declared topic. Guess what? It didn’t make it with the censors’ approval. Lying in bed, I imagined that the service was being overwhelmed by eager Young Conservatives, keen to try their hand at sensible, focussed discussion. I gave it another go:

“menshn has too many bugs to be beta even”

The censors grabbed this one too. Grabbed it and did their dirty work on it. Frustrated with the Stalinist approach to discourse, I returned to the UK Politics forum and attempted to post this message:

“does this service add to british political discussion or just park a small number people in a private room?”

No prizes for guessing what happened to that! Finally, I tried a fairly neutral message. Surely this would get through to publication in the UK Politics ‘topic’?

“unsure of value of discussion on uk politics with so few people involved”

No. Nothing I have posted has appeared in any of the allowed topic chatrooms.

Regular readers will know that I play a lot of chess. These days I am often found relaxing at chess.com; it’s free and you can play people from all around the world, live. Chess.com bans political conversations in its “main hall” chatroom. A couple of years ago some of us had a lot of fun with that. We declared that we would not talk about politics because the situation of the Afghan Potato Farmer was far more interesting. We hinted who might be who, very subtly. The American moderators didn’t grasp the meaning of our prefatory remarks and so, right under their noses, we discussed the war in Afghanistan in detail. Eventually, we were rumbled and I got banned from the site. I created another account, this time adding a hyphen to my name and resumed the serious business of playing chess.

That’s the point that #BigLouise doesn’t get: you’ll get a serious discussion flowing if people have a reason to go to the place where it happens. That’s why so much British cultural life revolves around public houses – there’s a reason to be there. We use twitter because everyone uses it. Ditto with Facebook. Et cetera. What’s the point in joining a social network geared for serious discussion if you have over zealous monitoring and control of what can be said? It simply doesn’t work. As @PaulBernal tweeted this morning, light touch moderation is the only kind that works. You have to let us discuss the non-existent Afghan potato farmers or you won’t get us to talk at all.

meshn.com's topics page, which reveals the small number of active users. (Click to enlarge, oh you know...)

I’d keep quiet about these figures but I’m not #BigLouise

Proof that it doesn’t work is demonstrated by the embarassingly tiny numbers of people who have joined. Despite huge publicity in newspapers and on television, as of the time of writing, there are only 772 chatting on the service. Today is the launch day! More people will read my blog today. Many more. I’m a political nobody compared to #BigLouise. Why has she done this to herself? It’s the greatest exercise in self-humiliation since Nick Clegg threw his pyjamas into David Cameron’s bed.

So what’s the selling point of this new service? Much fuss has been made about the grant of 40 extra characters, compared to twitter’s 140. It doesn’t look like #BigLouise wants her service to be used by revolutionaries caught up in the fervour of the Arab Spring – they won’t be able to resort to SMS to post messages from situations too dangerous to get a laptop out. They probably wouldn’t be able to stay on topic anyway. Whilst we’re on the subject of messaging on the move, there is no mobile app ready to work with the service. Even this blog is optimised for 5,000 different devices but menshn on a mobile? No, forget it. It doesn’t even serve up a mobile version. If you’re on the move, #BigLouise doesn’t want to hear from you and she doesn’t want you to hear from others.

Another obvious difference with twitter is that messages expire after one week. That is bound to keep the conversation in the now. It also frustrates conversation outside the platform to refer to conversation inside it – you can’t link to messages on it. In terms of search engine optimisation, that is a backward approach. It also reveals a complete misunderstanding of everything that’s brilliant about the internet. Facebook suffers from the same problem, of course, but it keeps the boundary around its walled garden fairly low – you can follow inward links if you are a member. #BigLouise wants to keep the conversation all to herself.

With all these conversational hurdles, some carrots have been proffered. There’s a points system, which is a lot like a supermarket loyalty card. It actually describes the points as “rewards”. You get points if someone else rates your messages. You get points for joining a discussion. You get the idea. I’ve got five points for subscribing to a room which I wasn’t allowed to post messages to. Bonkers.

On the plus side, there is some clever word play based on #BigLouise’s name. Users are called “meshners”. Messages are called “meshns”. That’s it. That’s the only thing which made me smile while I was there.

Will I go back? I doubt it. What would be the point? I’m not welcome in the conversation. The whole thing feels like an attempt by someone to rewrite the rules upon which the internet is founded. It’s a real dead zone. I wonder how many people are in there for similar reasons as me? Checking it out on day one and bound to abandon it.

Contrary to what it says in the newpapers which favour #BigLouise, a hacker is someone who takes something which isn’t broke and fixes it. This new service claims to keep trolls and poor conversationalists at bay: that’s its promised fix. Many people deal with them on twitter by having private accounts. Others use the list service. Menshn fails to recognise those tools and instead tries to exclude virtually everyone. It’s a neutered version of social networking. It’s a futile attempt to recreate the power of the internet without any of the strengths that it has given us, as if it’s been designed by some of those people who’d really rather the whole digital age simply went away.

There is perhaps one useful feature of menshn.com – it’s an open prison for Tories. We know they are in there. They can come out and talk to the rest of us but they prefer the safety of their prison walls. However, we can join the inspection committee and go and watch them whenever we want. How long will it be before someone creates a tool to release all the messages in there to the wider world?

Yesterday people were debating how long it would like for #BigLouise’s big project to flop. I gave it three months. Now I think that’s not just generous, it’s positively charitable. It is by far and away the most misconceived website I have ever seen: practically useless, contrary to the spirit of free speech and so heavily guarded that the goal of focused discussion has been caught in the censor’s net.

If anyone manages to link to this post from within menshn.com, I’ll give them a guest post. Meanwhile, the last word on the attempt to stop people freely expressing themselves goes to the unknown nocturnal commentators of Pompeii:

“If upright living is considered any recommendation, Lucretius Fronto is well worthy of the office”

“Chie, I hope your haemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than when they every have before”?

“Claudius’ little girl-friend is working for his election as duovir.”

“Vote for Lucius Popidius Sabinus; his grandmother worked hard for his last election and is pleased with the results.”

“Apollinaris, physician of the Emperor Titus, had a good shit here!”

“I wonder, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins from supporting the stupidities of so many scribblers.”

The walls of our society are not weakened by stupid scribblers. They are built up! Whoever is able to judge what is abuse and what is satire? #BigLouise would take that mantle and wear it down. She doesn’t understand our love of free talk. She doesn’t get it. Were these words scribbled with young romantics in mind or the stuffy political animals which would control our conversation?

“Let him who chastises lovers try to fetter the winds and block the endless flow of water from a spring.”

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Posted in Endlessly Searching, Failure, Hackers, Louise Mensch, menshn.com, meshn.com, Politics, Politics in the Cave, Thieving Tory Bastards

Why an athiest can pray

Posted on 16 January 2012 | 2 Comments

In the late nineties I became frustated with the lack of mountains in the South-East of England. Mountaineering always meant travel, which cost too much, and was dependent on favourable weather conditions at the time chosen for the trip. Mulling over this problem, it occurred to me that I also enjoyed long walks without anybody around and that I had never walked the South Downs Way. In the summer it is festooned with people walking, cycling, picnicking, flying kites et cetera. Far too busy for my liking. Suddenly I realised that in winter it would be suitably desolate for my purpose. That’s why I decided to walk it alone over mid-winter.

I never completed the walk, even though it is only 100 miles from Winchester to Eastbourne. The furthest I ever got was in 2007, when I made it to Lewes. By that time I’d learnt a few lessons on how to walk the South Downs Way (the link is to my photographic journal of that ‘expedition’). Notably, I’d realised that camping out meant carrying loads of kit which slowed me down too much for the eight hours of daylight. In those early years I made plenty of other mistakes. Chief among them was setting off without any form of torch. Each time I left Winchester on 19th December and planned to walk through midwinter, through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and arrive in Eastbourne the day after. Being dependent on daylight at that time of year does not combine well with travelling because you lose 30 minutes at either end of each day whilst breakfasting and breaking or making camp.

My third attempt saw me calling at the houses whose occupants had previously given me water, rather than turn me away and avoiding camp sites which local boy riders used as skid pans for hand brake turns after dark. (Another problem with camping out when night falls quickly is that you can’t see the tyre marks gouged into the muddy earth.) Somewhere west of Old Winchester Hill, a farmer said, “Why do you turn up here on 20th December every year?” It was a good question. My answer was not very appealing; I mumbled something about being unsuccessful. “Good luck this year!” he called out each time I left him. Calling at homes happily decorated in the Christmas tradition in bad weather with darkening skies, alone, wet, cold, hungry and being denied permission to sleep rough in one of their fields proves the lie of the Christmas spirit. Very few people were helpful. All of them looked embarassed, as they turned me away but the doors still slammed hard. With one exception, most of the people that turned me down simply directed me to ask one of their neighbours a convenient distance away! The exceptional person said yes and, after I had pitched my tent, came out with some hot mince pies (which normally I hate but that year were very heaven) and tried to insist that I come indoors to sleep. She pleaded with me and later on, when it was really cold, her husband pleaded too. On that occasion, I felt embarassed turning them down.

I forget how far I got on the third attempt but I do remember that it was an exceptionally wet year. It never really stopped raining. The South Downs can be very hard underfoot in dry weather because the chalk drains so well. In wet weather the various cow herds churn up the deepest mud in their fields, which is usually in some dip or coombe (a Sussex word for a chalkland valley) where the gate is. The gate you have to travel through. Fields ringed with hawthorn except by the gate were a nightmarish quagmire. I kept slipping over, falling into an uncertain sloppy mixture of mud and cow shit. Somewhere along the way I had to ascend a short steep slope which proved nearly impossible. With my heavy pack, the greasy chalk, the mud and 100 feet of incline took two dozen attempts. With no-one there to laugh at me there was no-one to share the joke with. When I eventually got to the top I was absolutely caked in crap, bruised and had insufficient daylight hours left for much more walking, so I just camped at the top. My kitchen was restricted to a spoon and a single billy tin which I ate everything out of: porridge in the morning and vegetarian mince in the evening alike. It didn’t take long for both meals to resemble each other and nothing pleasant.

I can’t claim to have been happy but I was pleased to have got further than on the first two attempts. Walking along like this on my own at midwinter, with a full rucksack, made other people realise that I was walking the whole route. Often they would stop to talk. Consequently I enjoyed briefly intense moments of companionship with people who would probably otherwise have never spoken to me regardless where they met me: many of them were farmers out with their dogs in the early morning.

Somewhere along the Way on my third attempt I chanced upon one such conversation. It was the evening. The sky had not yet darkened but it was low in the sky. As per usual at this time, I was urgently looking for somewhere suitable to bed down. This was always a dilemma because there was a fairly small window to make a sensible decision in. I had long since given up asking for permission only to be refused. Instead, if I saw a likely spot I would keep walking whilst fretting about whether I would have turn back to it. The thought of retracing my steps was too much to cope with emotionally. The stranger struck up the conversation along the usual lines, enquiring whether I was walking the whole South Downs Way? When I replied that I was, he remarked that perhaps I was camping out? On hearing that I was, he directed me over a low hill in front of me and said that about half a mile further than that there was an abandoned house and suggested I camp out in its garden. “You can’t miss it”, he said, “it’s got the tallest pine tree on the Downs in it.”

I thanked him for this information and pressed on. The weather got really bad. By the time I made it to the gate of the abandoned house’s garden, all paranoia about someone knowing where I was camping being a problem had evaporated. All I cared about was getting somewhere I could warm up. The house was boarded up, the garden heavily overgrown but it was miraculously dry underneath the branches of the pine tree. I put my tent up there, right next to the trunk and pulled out my wet sleeping bag. I was using a hollow fibre sleeping bag which would warm up even if wet but it was grim getting into it. Knowing the best way to retain whatever body heat I had left did not assist me through the suffering of undressing completely and getting into the cold, drenched bag. I put my clothes in with me, hoping that my heat would dry them off in the night. I turned on my stove but the firing mechanism packed in. No hot food. Knowing I needed some energy, I ate the vegetarian mix raw. The wind creaked the rusty gate and a loose board high up on the house flapped in the wind. The scene resembled something out of a Hammer House of Horror film.

Shivering, I curled up into a ball inside my sleeping bag and worked at furiously wiggling my toes to keep my circulation going. Not sure this was a good idea. It probably just kept my blood flowing to my cold extremities. At least it gave me something to concentrate on.

Suddenly I had something else to concentrate on. There was a flash and I could hear thunder way off in the West. I counted the seconds. Here I was, directly at the base of a soaking 200 foot pine tree. I had looked higher than the little hill I had just walked over to get to it. Within a few minutes darkness fell and the lightning was getting closer. By 5:00pm the inside of my tent was either pitch dark or brighter than daylight. I could no longer count any time between the flashes and the thunder – they were simultaneous. I wondered about my ability to  break into the house and get a fire going inside it but the thought of failure prevented that idea from being pursued. Without a torch and with the various overgrown ornamental ponds in the garden I did not want to risk climbing out of my sleeping bag, pulling my cold wet clothes back on and attempting to find somewhere else to camp. Besides, any moment now the lightning would strike my personal conductor and it would all be over.

Looking back, I think by this point on my walk I had mild hypothermia and hadn’t been thinking straight for some time. At the time I became convinced that at any moment I would be electrocuted or crushed or both. Unusally, for Southern England, it was a very bad storm. After about hour, my brain grew tired of the constant fear. I gave up. I even began to wish for death. “Let’s get it over and done with”, I thought. Your brain is a clever beast and plays all sorts of tricks on you to keep you going. This was my subconscious brain preventing me from panicking. I lay still and relaxed and waited for the inevitable tragedy which never came. After an hour of the raging wind, lashing rain and constant lightning close at hand I became annoyed at still being alive. Although an athiest, I started shouting at God.

Aping Capaneus, no expletive was too strong for my angry prayer. Like he, I vented my hatred upon His Mercy. Time and again I screamed the challenge to on high. “Go ahead, kill me!” I shouted myself hoarse denying divine justice. Eventually I shouted myself to sleep. The storm did not rest. In those sixteen hours of darkness I dreamt violent and horrific scenes of killing and sacrifice. The constant flashing and noise was playing havoc with my mind. Several times I realised I was awake but was still beset with visions. I slipped in and out of consciousness throughout that long night. By the early morning, the storm had blown itself away and my anger with it. My sleeping bag was still wet but I was warm.

All of us can go beyond what our rational minds can cope with. During these dreadful moments, focusing on some higher power is palliative. Whichever theology you subscribe to or avoid, prayer finds a way to settle the mind when all else is lost. Thus, athiests can pray as fervently as believers although we prefer not to. I’ve often thought of making this confession but have hitherto stopped myself because of the apparent implications on the lack strength of my convictions. Yesterday, I read about another athiest’s prayer, which he uttered in an hour of desperate need. He’s a friend of mine and had got himself into a far worse predicament than I have just described. His account of a week trapped by a lack of equipment on a rocky ledge high in the Alps is amongst the finest first hand survival tales I have ever read. The photographs are chilling. During that awful time he was truly open to himself for the first time about his homosexuality and has been honest about it ever since. Whatever makes you pray, carry the prayer with you afterwards.

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Posted in Athiesm, Expectations, Facing Fear, Failure, Fear, Just Get Over It, Mid Winter, Prayer, Religion, South Downs Way

Prophecies, predictions and gambles for 2012

Posted on 29 December 2011 | 8 Comments

This is the time that everyone makes their predictions for 2012. Keen to go one better, I’m making prophecies instead. Mark my words – the prophesies you are about to read are guaranteed to happen. Kicking off with a fairly obvious one, I prophesise that in 2012 an unremarkable woman whose name begins with the letter K will get knocked up by her high status husband. Despite being really rather plain a combination of the finest fashion advisers, oodles of wealth to fritter away on one modest dress after another and obsequious journalists will contrive to make her the prettiest wife in Christendom. Multitudes of people who really should know better will quit their woes for an afternoon or two and vicariously share her supposed radiance.

Early in the New Year Occupy London will claim that it is in good health despite having lost 99% of its activists. The remainder will divide into two parts upon the promulgated judgment in their eviction case. The bigger part will decide to quit the scene before they are forcibly removed; the smaller part will make the headlines resisting the inevitable clearance of the churchyard, their numbers bolstered by the London Anarchist Federation who haven’t been involved in the protest until that point in time. Both will claim the legacy of the protest but only the latter will be associated with it in the public’s eyes. I prophesis that the great schism will occur within 48 hours of the judgment.

My next prophecy is a bit bolder. There will be a UK general election in 2012. My bet is in March. The thieving Tory bastards have played the Liberals as perfect stooges. Clegg knows he is Cameron’s bitch. That was why his New Year message grovelled and scraped to the right-wing agenda of his mistress. His real message was to Cameron – dumping us Liberal Democrats will look like Cameron would sack the most loyal of servants when opportunity struck. The insinuation being that that we, the public, are the loyal servants. Clegg lives up to his name (for foreign readers: a clegg is a parasitic insect which lives on horse shit) with these remarks. He has been nothing but an irritant to the bigger party who are determined to impose their will on the country and sense that their popularity is rising. Their current 6% lead will not last forever. They must have a plan, surely? The EU veto cast by Cameron was the opening salvo, which the great British public lapped up mainly because they haven’t got a clue about Cameron’s European strategy of sidling up with the neo-nazi groups. British hatred of European politics is born out of a folk memory of being obliged to fight in two world wars started by Germany. That’s as far as the analysis goes. Therefore anyone who says no to anything European plays well with British voters, even if they say yes to the very people who are most likely to start more wars. Forgive me, I digress. The general election will be in either March, April or May. The precise date is outside the range of my prophecies but if I were a betting man, I’d put £100 or more on 22nd March 2012. The thieving Tory bastards will win the election and be returned to government with a modest majority. The blue rinse brigade will be masturbating over Cameron, their poster boy, for the rest of the year. Ed Miliband will resign but even his brother won’t want to run for the job this time around. The Green Party will pick up a second MP, also in Brighton. The Liberals will be almost wiped off the political map, resulting in an old style two party system in Britain. Turnout in this election will be at a record low (which is why Cameron’s crowd will win).

Whereas 2011 was the year of viral protests, 2012 will be the year of viral flash mob riots. In other words, there will be more riots. This time around they will be coordinated better. The street gangs in the UK will get together to pick dates and times. Early signs of this coordination will be a drop in young black men dying of knife wounds. The government will claim that some non-existent policy of theirs should get the credit, although they’ll be sure not to crow about the figures too much. Then crowds of innocent shoppers will suddenly turn into rampaging mobs after a short visit to the M&S changing rooms to get their masks on. Masks will be banned and there’ll be a resurgence in radical street theatre. Old hands like me will be tempted to hit the streets again. Cameron will use the opportunity of the riots to beef up security laws and once again demonstrate his inability to understand what the internet actually is by threatening to close it down. The mere threat will drive many more people into communicating Off The Record through Jabber, which the government apparently can’t listen in on.

The world will step nearer to carbon related catastrophe as its people’s fail to grapple with the problem. In the summer some low lying islands will be wiped off the map. Governments around the world will invest in nuclear rather than properly sustainable energy. Food prices will continue to rise. 2012 will be a watershed year for people growing their own food in the countries which previously bought it from other countries. That might be less of a prophecy and more of a general prediction.

The UK Olympics will take place under the constant threat of bomb attacks. There will be no explosions anywhere near the event but there might be – not a full prophecy this one – some bombs in London at the same time. British people will suddenly show an interest in the sports we do okay at but lose interest in them when the summer draws to an end. By the end of the summer we’ll be livid about the lavish cost of the games – that one is a prophecy.

Also by the end of the summer, the regime in Syria will fall. A Lebanese fellow I got to know at Occupy London explained much of middle-east politics to me. Amongst many fascinating conversations I had with F, where for once I was just listening and being educated, he pointed out that Syria was the one country which the crusaders never attempted to conquer. F said that was because of the Syrians legendary resilience. The people there have obviously found their voice again and, despite not receiving any assistance from any quarter and facing enormous bloodshed, they keep on coming. In September 2012 there will be a full-scale revolution in Syria.

Israel will launch missile strikes on Iran in the late summer with the aim of debilitating its nuclear plants. America will not condemn Israel but will make various noises about Iran getting what it asked for. Obama’s eye is on one date: 6th November 2012, when he is up for election or the boot. I predict that Obama will win the election because the Republicans cannot muster a sufficiently statesman like character as an alternative.

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Posted in 2012, Crime, Failure, Fighting, Flash, Gambles, Green Party, Labour Party, Liberal Traitors, Occupy London, Occupy London Stock Exchange, Occupy Movement, Politics, Politics in the Cave, Predictions, Prophecies, Protests, Riots, Thieving Tory Bastards, UK General Election

The Shackleton Myth and why the English love failure

Posted on 15 February 2011 | 2 Comments

Today was Ernest Shackleton’s birthday in 1874. He is rightly celebrated as being one of the foremost antarctic explorers of the early 20th century. He was a great man; no arguments about that whatsoever. His southern march of 114 miles remains a feat which few, with far more sophisticated equipment, could manage today. I know what I am talking about because I come from a family of arctic explorers. My parents have spent a great deal of time in up in the far north and – warning: plug coming – you can buy a beautiful coffee table book presenting the finest landscape photographs of North-East Greenland.

The story need hardly be rehearsed here but, briefly, it is that following his ship Endurance becoming frozen in an ice floe on 15th January 1915. In late October 1915, the ship surrendered to the pressure and let in water. Shackleton ordered it be abandoned and the men (they were 28 souls) transferred themselves on the ice. For two months the men lived on drifting ice. They hoped to drift to Paulet Island 250 miles away, where a food dump existed. Various attempts were made to march across the broken ice to Paulet Island but none were successful. On 9th April 1916 their ice floe broke up. Shackleton put the men into lifeboats and directed them to the nearest land. Five days later they landed, exhausted, on Elephant Island; their first dry land for 497 days. Elephant Island was inhospitable (the men called it “Hell-of-an-Island”) and far away from shipping lanes. Thus rescue was impossible. Shackleton and five others rowed 800 miles through the worst imaginable seas in an open lifeboat to South Georgia. One storm they survived sank a 500 tonne steamer bound for Argentina! Only four times in this epic journey were they able to take celestial navigation readings. Shackleton left two men behind on the shore and with the other three made a virgin crossing of the mountainous South Georgia to the whaling station at stromness. This took three days. Consequently all the stranded men at Elephant Island were rescued. No doubt about Shackleton was a true badass.

However, he is wrongly applauded for having returned from an expedition with no lives lost. The expedition involved a sister ship, the Aurora, which had been laying down stores for the latter part of the expedition.  They were on the other side of the continent. The Aurora was blown out of its anchorage and drifted out to sea, leaving men stranded at Cape Evans. That party lost three lives, including their captain Aeneas Mackintosh. Perhaps I am being hard on Shackleton, since he wasn’t personally leading those men but they were part of the expedition he led.

Whilst Shackleton acted heroically throughout the expedition itself (even giving his gloves away to someone suffering with frostbite) he is celebrated for leading men into disaster and then rescuing most of them from it. We remember the rescue but not the reasons for it.

English people seem to love this sort thing, witness Dunkirk where ordinary people went to the continental shores and rescued the stragglers of their defeated army. That has been celebrated through the decades since. More recently there was Eddy ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, who came last in the 1988 Winter Olympics Ski Jump. Why do they seem to spend more time dwelling on this sort of thing than on our numerous success stories? I think that the English national pysche has been shaped by the loss of its empire and not yet recovered. They seek success in failure as a consequence. They do not expect to succeed and loathe those outsiders that do. That’s why people hype their national football team when clearly only miracles would allow it to win the world cup in recent times. They hype it up and then can be devastated when it gets kicked out of the tournament. This devastation they feel at home with. (I say ‘they’ because I was raised by a Scottish family, in a Scottish household, albeit in Brighton.)

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Posted in Failure, Myth, Shackleton, The English