We're just no better

No, I wouldn’t steal a car. No, I guess I wouldn’t steal a handbag. No, I don’t think I’d steal a television or a DVD. I wonder where you’re goin- Ah! I see. Well, when I answered your original formulation of the questions, Mr. Piracy Man, I wasn’t really aware that you were going to be drawing a heinously false analogy. In order to make the argument follow you have to make me accept that stealing a car, handbag, television or physical DVD is just the same as downloading a film; which it isn’t. Here’s how to improve your argument:

You wouldn’t steal a car, assuming that that car in question was a replica of a car that someone had bought legally. They had built that replica (somehow) using their own equipment, copying the original car. Now apply that to handbag, DVD etc. If you answer “no” to all these questions now, then quit downloading Marley & Me (the dog dies by the way, but not before you realise that Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston are so rubbish at acting that they can be upstaged by a fucking dog) and continue with your life, safe in the knowledge that downloading is, by your own standard, a crime.

But what if you were to say ‘yes’? If your friend had built a replica of a car and put up a sign saying ‘PLEASE TAKE THIS CAR’ then most people probably would take it and this clearly wouldn’t be termed as stealing.

Is that different? The only conceivable difference is that you may not know the person whom you are downloading and this is different to them being your friend. However, we’re only six degrees of separation from anyone in the world, and I can maintain a relationship with friends of friends. Not only this, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which frankly makes me a lot of friends (including some enemies). So it’s conceivable that anyone in internet land could be termed by friend

But this is beside the point.

The point is go outside.

Mark Twain: The Misanthropic Years pt.3

Okay, you'll have to bear with me on this final quote, which is how The Mysterious Stranger ends. It's a bit long, but rewarding, if you're a fan of grim, misanthropic speeches, as I am. "Satan", once again, is the speaker, delivering Twain's own damming verdict on religion, and perhaps also showing his ideas on the general futility and bleakness of life.

Life itself is only a vision, a dream... Nothing exists; all is a dream. God - man - the world - the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars - a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space - and you!

Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honourably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities! 

The book then ends with the protagonist reflecting on this: "He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realised, that all that he had said was true."

Mark Twain: The Misanthropic Years pt.2

A couple of quotes from "Satan" in The Mysterious Stranger, which (put criminally simplistically - I'm tired) show Twain's dissatisfaction with the human race, among other things:

For a million year the [human] race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense - to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshipped by you with your mouth, while in your heart - if you have one - you despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilisations have been built.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbour, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbour's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. 

Mark Twain: The Misanthropic Years

From Twain's unfinished The Mysterious Stranger, published posthumously:

Every man is a suffering-machine and a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department the other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a pain - maybe a dozen. In most cases the man's life is about equally divided between happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness predominates - always; never the other. Sometimes a man's make and disposition are such that his misery-machine is able to do nearly all the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of what happiness is. Everything he touches, everything he does, brings a misfortune upon him. You have seen such people? To that kind of a person life is not an advantage, is it? It is only a disaster. Sometimes for an hour's happiness a man's machinery makes him pay years of misery.

So says "Satan", anyway.

Student Elections and Lessons for Tories.

In perhaps the most meaningless, tedious and underwhelming process ever conceived, student "officers" have been elected to various posts at the University, where they will perhaps decide crucial policy, will possibly represent the Union, and will probably just give inarticulate comments to the meaningless, tedious and underwhelming student press whenever a similarly dry student issue makes the front page.

Aside from the obvious advantage of culling a significant number of the bloated student population, as scores of young adults find themselves unable to expose themselves to further campaigning leap to their death from the top of the library, what is the point of this process? Well, disillusioned voter, let me enlighten you:

The answer is, of course, that they provide a lesson for nationwide political processes. Instead of spending millions on "genocidal ghoul" photoshop fiascos, power hungry megalomaniacal politicians should create little cardboard-and-sellotape signs saying "Brown: poo" and "Clegg: more strong than egg", and other signs of the same intellectual calibre as university students. I don't simply say this because of the potential goldmine of negative advertising (I reckon Lab/LibDems could rhyme "Cameron" with "moron"), but because these awful, inadequate signs which would make a drunk, illiterate hobo blush, are patently the future of politics, both at the student and national level. They provide the personal touch, they show that election nominees aren't any better than "real" people (quite the opposite, in fact), and they are useful in justifying the average (non)voter's (ir?)rational hatred of politics and politicians.

The risk is that these signs will have the same effect on national politics as they do on student politics: no one will give a solitary shit what the outcome is, and all the candidates will fade into a pointless, grey blur. But that would surely be an improvement on the current state of affairs, no?

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p.s. I'm allowed to be critical, because I voted. I may have had little idea who each of the candidates were, and I may have simply voted for them based on their hair and the literary coherence of their campaigns, but I still fulfilled my democratic duty.