The Pursuit of Privacy

I've recently been frantically deleting old posts, tweets, photos and details of my name from social networking sites, as well as tightening privacy and security settings. I've tried to get rid of anything that can too easily identify me, my interests, or my friends. I have a vague idea that this has been done for reasons of privacy. But, overall, this is a pointless and bad idea for a number of reasons.

Firstly, no one cares about my details. I'm not rich, famous, or successful. If I were planning a career in politics or the like, I could understand why I've done this, but I'm not, so I don't.

Secondly, even if someone did genuinely seek to undermine me or use my past words against me, my precautions would be ineffectual. Basically, I'm not so good at IT that I could truly protect myself from such threats online if they existed.

Thirdly, I've basically committed cultural genocide against myself:

Twitter's probably the most painful example. I've deleted tweets which might be viewed as too inflammatory or foul-mouthed alongside those which might compromise my security. I've gone from about 1,600 tweets to 200, and now they mostly consist of short one-sentence answers to other people's tweets. I'm too vain to let my tweet-count slip to zero, but I'm too paranoid to allow anything interesting to remain.
edit: Fuck it, I'll delete them all, barring the first one, which will show when I joined, and a second explanatory one, explaining the lack of future posts. I'm nothing if not methodical.

On Facebook, I've deleted all old photo albums, even those which appear benign. I'm not sure why; although my friends could access them, my outside privacy settings were secure. Maybe I just don't trust my friends, but then, of course, they'll have other photos of me anyway, and won't always have the same stringent privacy settings that I employ. This goes back to my second reason listed above. Anyway, beyond photos, I've also started going back over all my old statuses and postings, and deleting them, bit by bit. Again, secondary reason, this is pointless because a lot of my filthy incendiary comments are probably on other people's walls, not to mention what I may've said in countless "private message" conversations (which I can only delete from my side).

Anyway, this talk of wall postings, tweets and status updates lead me onto expanding the third reason. I generally put a lot of effort into my updates and tweets. I sometimes looked back on them and smiled, thinking how enormously clever I was. As each was accompanied by a date and a time, they acted as handy reminders of how I might've felt at a certain time, during a certain period of my life. At the very least, they would've been a good archive of some of my more interesting thoughts and ideas.

Maybe I'm actually being vain in thinking this matters at all. Surely the only reason I'd ever truly look back is because I was writing my autobiography, having achieved a great deal in public life? Am I planning to attain a great and notable standing at some point in my life? Not really. So why should it matter if I'm deleting my past?

Perhaps I feel blasé about this whole trauma because I've been reading a lot about Mark Twain recently, who had a healthy disregard for truth and accurate memory ("Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it" etc.). If I ever rise to prominence, I'll take the opportunity to rewrite my life and reinvigorate the past. Who'll contradict me? Mark Zuckerberg? HA! Show me the evidence.


P.S. All this has made me realise the hypocrisy of this public blog. However, barring a few privacy lapses, it's not too personally compromising. It shall remain. But it'll have to get more interesting to soak up the wisdom and wit from the deleted social-networking posts (Ha. Prove they weren't!).

Kaiser Chiefs: A Brief Study of Lyrical Mediocrity.

This study is almost so brief that it may as well be left to the title to say it, but I'll expand a little.

The Kaiser Chiefs, along with The Killers and suchlike, were one of the new indie bands everyone liked when I was about 15. Indie had nothing to make me like it. It was popular and bland, and thus beyond redemption. It stood out in no category. Musically? Below average. Passion? Below average. Lyrics? Below average. And yet I decided I liked the Kaiser Chiefs enough to refrain from turning off their music where possible.

It is possible, if not likely, that I professed to like them purely to increase my credibility should I ever make the dubious claim that I'm a tolerant person with regards to music.

Anyway, they were, for the album I had, mostly harmless. 


And then I heard their single "Ruby". The first two categories remained unchanged, but lyrically, they had gone from "below average" to "psychotically poor". For those who haven't heard this delight, the chorus goes something like:

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby
And do ya, do ya, do ya, do ya
Know what ya doing, doing to me?
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby

Well, they still sold well, so I'm told, so clearly my opinion is less commercially-viable than your average music fan's. But what annoyed me even more than Ruby was a different song I happened to hear, called "The Angry Mob". Why did it annoy me more? Because it crossed over from the vapid and unimportant to the vapid and "political". 

Maybe I'm just a snob. I mean, In and of itself The Angry Mob isn't so vapid (of course, it's not so worthy that it deserves a proper lyrical synopsis here. Suffice to say that it doesn't like Daily Mail readers). It ends with the repeated chanting of: 

We are the angry mob
We read the papers everyday day
We like who like
We hate who we hate
But we're also easily swayed

And, in many ways, this is a fair and accurate summary of the right-wing paper-readers they speak about. So maybe I'm wrong to criticise it. It's bland and inoffensive (and harmless), just like the band itself, you could argue. The problem is that, as recently shown at Glastonbury, many people appear to regard this as the pinnacle of lyrical excellence. Wondering around near the back of The Other Stage, I saw people chanting this with such devotion and such wonderment. There's no way that this is because of its hypnotic music quality. It has none. Perhaps people are simply caught up in the moment of seeing an act they've seen on TV before. However, when criticising the lyrics, I was informed by an intelligent and astute friend, that I was wrong in my choice of target.

Regardless of what people actually thought of the lyrics (and, as indie fans, there's a good chance they weren't thinking at all), the problem is that people will see that this group is popular, hear their lyrics, and place an unnaturally large emphasis on the worth of what the Kaiser Chiefs have to say to them. However, people sometimes forget that indie, as a genre, is devoid of any lasting political significance.

I'm not a snob and I appreciate and empathise with what I assume the Kaiser Chiefs' views are. However, reaching such a wide audience, they have a responsibility - when using political lyrics - to be outstanding, to show real intellectual worth, and make people really think. With such simplistic and monotonous lyrics, they waste this opportunity. They appeal to the lowest-political-common-denominator. With laziness like that, they may as well write papers for the angry mob themselves.

The Faith mentality

Faith is, in my opinion, corrosive, divisive and an enemy of rationality - it profoundly hinders our ability to think critically. It corrupts our morality, devalues the life of the here and now and prevents us from reaching our potential as human beings. And to see the influence of faith at work on the mind of an individual, especially upon someone to whom I am close, makes me not only sad and frustrated, but also furious. I am aware that I will have to provide full justification for these claims, which are guaranteed to provoke anger in any person of faith who reads them, perhaps even some non-theists as well, but having previously been a committed Catholic for eighteen years, I believe I am qualified to have made them.

This first post for me represents the final stage in my de-conversion, although it was watching the programme, 'The Big Questions', on the BBC that led me to finally put my thoughts into words. The programme included various discussions between the guest speakers and audience of Muslim, Christian and Jewish believers, including the ethics of abortion, but it was the debate concerning the final question of contention, 'Does heaven exist that?' that inspired me to write this. The viewers were presented with an Islamic idea of heaven, complete with rivers of wine and the promise of never-ending orgiastic dissipation in the company of women not wearing Burkhas. It just screamed out to the viewer that this particular brand of Valhalla was written by men for men. Next we were presented with a Christian paradise, which we were told was devoid of family members and instead just a one to one with Jesus for the rest of eternity. Over the course of the debate more versions of heaven were proposed by the faithful, all of them based on faith alone, and all just as scornful and dismissive of the other faiths as each other. The irony of this brought me to genuine laughter. The final proposition - that the bigger the leap of faith, the braver the believer, and therefore the more respect due to them - perfectly summed up the irrationality of the faith mentality. I was left wondering how, in the twenty-first century, we were having a debate over something which, to all intents and purposes, stems from a fear of the dark.

This leads me on to what I see as the reason behind the survival of the three monotheistic religions to this day. This infantile fear of the dark, of the unknown, of mortality. Until we can rid ourselves of this childish fear, we will not appreciate how precious our lives in the here and now truly are. This fear induces believers to embrace the servility of faith, we are so terrified that this world is all there is, that we will willingly sacrifice our rationality in favour of blind superstition, and hang on to any promise of immortality, however unfounded. I believe that our ability to think critically is our most valuable quality as humans, and to suspend it in this way denies our potential for developing the independence of the mind. We become sheep, - that is to say we embrace an unthinking mentality. We turn faith into a virtue. Christians are taught that the less questioning they are, the purer their faith. As Jesus purportedly said to 'doubting' Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." In other words, don't question, don't doubt, or, to be more colloquial, "shut up and believe what I tell you, however far-fetched, because otherwise there will be no immortality for you!"

Furthermore, faith encourages believers to be breathtakingly solipsistic and arrogant. They are compelled to believe that in an expanding universe, estimated at being 13 billion years old, in one galaxy out billions, on a 4 billion year old planet, where 99% of all life forms there are now extinct, one species, which has only been around for 100,000 years at most, are the reason behind all this existing. And, as Christopher Hitchens has said, for 97,000 of those years, God was content merely to watch us in all our primitive glory, before finally intervening via a vicious, vicarious blood sacrifice in the Bronze Age Middle East.

This blood sacrifice, the scapegoating of Jesus for our 'sins', is an example of how faith distorts our morality. Who in their right mind would support the torture and crucifixion of an innocent man, to atone for sins we have not just committed already, but are yet to commit. To anyone free of the influence of this doctrine, this is obscene. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, why did he not just forgive our sins, instead of creating this morbid spectacle. But faith blinds followers to the horror of this. After all, why should they be horrified, some willingly eat Christ's body and drink his blood every week. Although naturally the Pope is against children dressing up as Vampires at Halloween.

I'm going to stop here, as I'm probably in danger of having my privilege as a blog contributor withdrawn for being too strident. Yeah, I think I'll just tip toe away...

My Impending Veganism - Yawn

For the second time in my life, I've been converted by a book. Before it was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (yes, I'm one of dem "new" atheists), and now it's a book called Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I first encountered his work by watching Everything is Illuminated, a touching film based on his novel of the same name. On first appearances, he seems a mild-mannered novelist, but once you get into the meat (oh dear) of his book, he writes more like a passionate journalist. It's a readable and eye-opening book.

Just as with my clichéd love affair with The God Delusion, I was a partial-convert before I'd even heard of the book. I was aware of, and partially sympathetic to, the feelings and arguments of vegetarians, and I don't consume dairy, though only for reasons of vanity. But like with Dawkins' book, I hadn't stopped to take my slight discomfiture to its necessary conclusion: using animals for food is not justifiable.

I won't restate any of the facts and experiences recounted in the book, because I don't intend to make this a long polemical post, but I strongly recommend that you read it yourself for the full effect.

Unlike my new-found atheism, I don't really see myself becoming a great proselytiser, aggressively persuading everyone of the narrow validity of my tenets. Maybe I'm just older or more apathetic, but I think it's probably simply that I'm too aware of the awkwardness of accommodating vegans' dietary requirements.

That's a terrible reason, I know, for someone not to stick rigidly to something they believe to be right. I write this post so that, in a few years' time, I can look back and see how inflexible I've become. I doubt I'll look back as a lapsed, full-blown omnivore. I may eat meat and fish when presented with them in a social environment in which it would be rude or inconvenient to decline them, but ethical and environmental considerations leave me with little desire to purchase such items myself.

Apologies for the lack of sarcasm, cynicism or attempts at humour in this post. In retrospect, it is a very dull and boring post.

R0yal W3dding

Has the entire country abandoned its critical faculty over this revolting charade?

I lose some of my right to complain, considering I'll be watching. My excuse, however, is that I'll be playing a relevant drinking game and will be mostly unconscious by the middle of the afternoon.

Anyway... I realise that I'm perhaps more misanthropic than the average citizen, but I struggle to see how can people be so shameless, joyously celebrating a wedding of the ruling elite without irony, without cynicism.

My only hope is that this is a massive media shit-storm, dreamed up in the offices of the Maily Express, and that it bears no relation to the "average" person's interest in the matter. After all, these pages of worthless, aimless hate can rarely be said to actually represent the country at large.

They should have no position of authority or prominence, being that they are parasites on the country. We denigrate benefit scroungers, but not these free-loading inbreds?

Again, I sincerely hope that the media have over-stated the strength of pro-monarchist feeling in this regard.

Aloof

There's a lot of frustration available. Frustration at widespread idiocy and the infantile nature of popular entertainments and my indulgence in the worst offenders. Frustration at a lack of purpose and drive which mars potentially-worthwhile endeavours. Frustration at the unsatisfactory life options available and the wastage of time. Frustration at the passive tone necessitated by my lack of shamelessness. Frustration at the immediate lack of compassion and resulting, comforting, guarded arrogance - warm and safe. A pointless egosurvivalist, living off tins of sausages and beans and sniping fellow survivors. A hermit with a blog and a twitter-feed.

Well, that's your dose of Saturday cryptic pseudo-psych bullshit.

Clubbing. (Or a survey of collective delusion).

Last night I was once again persuaded against my better judgement to engage in that most hallowed of university rituals, the ‘club night’. Now on paper clubbing sounds great; who wouldn’t enjoy getting monstrously drunk with their friends and rocking out to their favourite music? The thing is that the actual experience rarely lives up to those expectations. In my experience at least, the music is almost universally dire. Nights like the acclaimed ‘Fruity’ play to the lowest common denominator and whilst there are always a few good songs thrown in, the DJ seems determined to maintain a low average in quality overall. Despite their virulent protestations, I think everyone in reality feels the same about this. It seems odd to me that friends who are usually known for their taste in avant garde dark metal suddenly seem to know all the words to Justin Bieber’s latest shit on a plate. Or the right mouth shapes anyway. Stylus at Leeds University offers a unique opportunity to survey the behaviour of such doublethinking clubbers, as it has a balcony around the main dancefloor. I challenge you to count the number of people who look like they are genuinely having fun; that is not checking around them constantly to see if they’re being judged/judging others, or adopting a fixed grin whilst vibrating wordlessly to some dire dance track, or simply standing and drinking glumly. The only people who seem to me who actually enjoy themselves are those big same sex groups who are having an evening of ironic frolicking and therefore throwing themselves around with no regard to others, often being glared at by said others for being ‘saddos’ or whatever. I can appreciate that adopting the ‘irony’ approach might actually be pretty fun, but it’s not really a great advert for clubs if they can only be appreciated ironically. Or maybe it is. Maybe nobody actually really enjoys clubbing, except those who possess the insider’s knowledge that the whole phenomenon of clubbing is just one massive joke. Hundreds of thousands of people are nightly engaging in one massive self-parody, and by doing so perpetuating the myth to those not in the know that it’s a legitimate activity. Sometimes I think this can be the only viable explanation.

Even if one discards this theory, irony and self-delusion are nonetheless the predominant abstract nouns present at any given club, except perhaps drunkenness and unsatiated horniness. This is undeniably true. I shall give you a few examples. Last night we went to ‘Wendy House’, a night which advertises itself as ‘Alternative/Goth’ which to my mind suggests a playlist of screaming and blood curdling shredding but which apparently actually includes The Killers and The Human League. (As an addendum, it seems to me that club nights are a bit like political parties. They advertise themselves as being more radical than they actually are, to enthuse the party base and bring out the core vote, but then actually lurch inevitably to the centre in order to please the casual listener/voter. A recent example of this in my life includes a Rock/Indie night at the Faversham which turned out to actually be more Radio 1 dance music, with a token grunge or indie track thrown in every half hour. What I expected at that night was what we actually got at the ‘Goth’ night. Maybe in order to get music that actually appeals to people who only listen to vaguely alternative music you’d have to go to a night that advertised itself as Thrash Metal, or Grindcore. I digress.) To be honest, a night of Killers, HL and The Smashing Pumpkin sounds pretty appealing, so in terms of music it was a good night. Frankly I enjoyed myself. But so much of what I expect of clubs happened that a lot of time I had to stop myself from having a constant smirk on my face. For instance, the spectacle of groups of people spending half the evening taking photos of themselves at clubs is well remarked upon, and I shan’t go into all the hilarities of needing to prove to yourself and everyone else that you’re having a good time here. However, when a nearby acquaintance remarked to a friend of mine “I can’t wait to see these pictures on Facebook” I nearly punched her out of mirth. Why can’t you wait? Is it not enough to be living the experience right now? Are you blind to everyone’s amusing costumes in the here and now, only really realising what they looked like once those people who you actually know are digitised memories on a screen? Has Zuckerberg taken us all for such a ride that we now think our friends don’t actually exist until their image is legally in his ownership? Honestly. I’m surprised she didn’t implode in a scantily-clad mushroom cloud of irony as those few ill-informed words tumbled out of her dribbling drunken gob.

One final point. Something about clubbing seems to enforce the rules of social conformism even more rigidly than usual, which conceptually seems strange, considering the inhibitionless glee with which people down their drinks, and is especially twisted last night, given the philosophy of nonconformism behind much ‘Alternative’ music. Example. I observed several people at various points being berated by their friends for not knowing the words to the songs that everyone was bellowing along to. Such scoldings were generally accompanied by an air of self-annointed superiority; they knew they were in the exclusive club of cooldom and their lyrically deficient friends were not. Frankly this attitude is bullshit, especially when the song in question is Sum 41’s ‘Fat Lip’ whose lyrics include “I’ll never fall in line/become another victim of your conformity”. People are just having fun, if they wanna scream and shout along to a song they love, let them, even if they don’t know the words exactly. As the great Cat Stevens once said: "If you want to sing out, sing out". Who the fuck are you to judge? To be honest, if even that is considered a crime in the supposedly liberationist atmosphere of a clubnight then I don’t see what the point of them is at all.

/rant.

Against Poirot

I'm disgusted by the happy sentimentality of my last post, so I'm going to go back to good old-fashioned hatred.

Poirot is essentially a poor man's Sherlock Holmes. Not literally, of course, since he serves only that peculiar strain of the upper-middle-class who are so utterly detestable and parasitic that you hope they'll all be the culprits. Except that happened once already and then he let them get away with it. It's not an unusual occurrence. In fact, I watched another episode the other day where he let a jewellery thief abscond just because she was charitable enough to show him some brief attention. She even gave him a little peck on his fat, balding head as she was making a getaway. It's good to know that the most cunning criminal can evade the brilliant Hercule Poirot by showing him a bit of leg and slobbering on his face.

And his methods are deplorable. He views himself as a "psychological detective". He laughs at the idea of crawling on his hands and knees to collect clues. Instead, he leans back in his chair, eating buttered goose and psychologically profiling his adversary. No, Poirot. That isn't the mark of a great detective. Take, for example, the unsurpassed Mr Holmes. He went in disguises so brilliant even his dear friend Dr Watson (who, like Scotland Yard's Lestrade, was brazenly stolen and poorly reproduced by the egregious Agatha Christie) couldn't recognise him. He went without sleep and food when he was involved in a case, subjecting himself to horrific physical and mental abuse when he needed to untangle a particularly tricky clue. I doubt Poirot has ever missed a meal in his life, much less suffered serious discomfort for his work. He and his fatuous pop-psychology are not suitable for the role of a detective.

I've almost now exhausted my rage. Yes, this post hasn't been very coherently argued, but my defence for this is that I'm blinded by my anger at the fact that Poirot infects television with his mediocre and half-arsed methods, and lack of detective style.

Less Poirot, more Holmes!

InMe

Dave McPherson, frontman of InMe, one of the most criminally-underrated bands in history, is releasing a long list of signed/personalised memorabilia, gig experiences, and other awesome gifts as part of a pledge drive to raise money for UNICEF and to promote his new solo album. The prices are fantastic too, considering the level of devotion which InMe inspire in their followers. Of the people I know reasonably well, maybe 4 could be considered InMe fans. We're all borderline obsessed. They're addictive. I find myself going a week at a time listening to nothing but InMe because, by comparison, everything else seems crap. The lyrics are beautifully written and sung with haunting vocal hooks, and the guitar work is superb, particularly in the later albums. People don't always like them the first time, but listen twice or thrice, and you're hooked. They don't have a big following, unfortunately, but those people who know them love them.

I guess it's good that their following isn't too big really. It means I can buy a home gig for £500. Now if I only had £500... I can still afford the handwritten lyrics or the signed photos. Maybe the VIP pass for the Brighton gig. Fantastic stuff. I urge everyone to listen and love.

P.S. I'm now tempted to ask my brother to pay for InMe to play at his wedding. His fiancée probably won't mind.

P.P.S. ALMOST FORGOT! Here's the link to the pledge drive where you can buy the stuff:

http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/davemcpherson/pledge

P.P.P.S Here's me with the man himself!
Image removed as part of the privacy drive (26th July 2011)

Exhausting Small Talk

I can't be the only person who finds the task of being civil for more than a few minutes to be exhausting. Smiling, chatting, making eye contact, complimenting, not being confrontational or cynical. These are all difficult tasks, especially when attempted in unison.

I suppose most humans simply follow the path of least resistance in their lives, and a lot of people are lucky enough to find being pleasant and light-hearted to be the easiest - or at least most agreeable - way to approach social occasions. I struggle, because I'm naturally cynical and critical and my face looks grumpy in its natural position. I can muster genuine enthusiasm for close friends and relatives, because they interest me, but for everyone else - casual acquaintances, distant family members, co-workers, etc. - forced-pleasant social interaction is exhausting. I'm not adept at small talk.

Demo Lition and the student protest movement

I cannot help but think that Wednesday marked the start of something. Despite the hilariously poor organisation of Leeds University Union, who seemed to have seriously misjudged the length of the M1, we managed to arrive before the biggest demonstration in a decade had quite finished. Whilst we were initially disappointed to have missed marching down Whitehall with the rest, it was soon apparent that the main events were yet to transpire.

We arrived at Millbank to scenes reminiscent of something you might see at your average festival; thousands shouting and dancing in time to make-shift drums and hastily rigged speakers blaring out dub step, whilst the unmistakable aroma of pot drifted lazily through the air. Despite the media’s characterisation of those who took Millbank, these were not ‘hardened anarchists’, these were excitable and angry attendees of what was turning out to be a massive free rave, in the centre of the government quarter of London. Most hilariously of all, one side of the occupied square was taken up by a massive ‘goldfish bowl’ style Pizza Express, the diners inside doing their best to politely ignore the noise, flares, chanting and squads of riot police that were literally surrounding them on all three sides. If this had indeed been a ‘riot’ as the papers keep odiously describing it, those massive modern windows would have been smashed and the pizzas looted. However, the only aggression was directed specifically against the Tory HQ. Rioters are indiscriminate, out of control with violence. The violence on Wednesday was spontaneous, and perhaps intimidating to some, but it was targeted and it was undertaken only because many felt it was just. I agree with them.

It was an odd position to be in, on Millbank for those tumultuous hours. We were part of a crowd that was clearly much better educated and more thoughtful than the average mob, and it adopted clear delineations of what was acceptable; there was universal cheering when protestors first took the roof and unveiled ‘Cut Fees’ banners, but the mood quickly turned against them when a fire extinguisher was thrown off into the crowd below. Cue immediate boos and chants of ‘stop throwing shit’. People around me expressed genuine fear that a police officer might have gotten hurt; these same protestors had been chanting ‘fuck the police’ only moments before. I don’t think I’ve ever known a crowd which simultaneously understands the dichotomy of the police as symbols of the state monopoly on power (a legitimate target for protestors) and the police as individuals who are ultimately just trying to feed their families, and who are just as affected by Osborne’s spending cuts as anybody else. Remarkable scenes therefore, of students helping injured police officers whilst others continued to throw sticks at the ones still fighting. It struck me that in a way, all of us there were victims of the same process. The police had been let down; there were far too few of them and they had not been adequately prepared by their superiors, many looked genuinely scared. It was a stark contrast to the G20 protests of 2009, where the police had stepped over the line and an innocent man was killed. Now it looked as if the police might suffer fatalities. What the dickhead who threw the fire extinguisher thought that would achieve for the student movement I have no idea.

At the same time, the occupation of Millbank was genuinely thrilling – what did it mean if ordinary kids were able to so easily take over the headquarters of the ruling party of one of the world’s great powers? Imagine the repercussions if this had happened in Burma, or China, or Russia. Can we seriously doubt that the dozens of protestors who made it onto the roof would have found themselves quietly executed?

My personal take on the events is that whilst I’m probably not the type to fight my way past police lines and start vandalising Tory offices myself, I found myself not unsympathetic to those who did. This wasn’t just mindless violence, of the type you see on any given Friday or Saturday night, this was the righteous expression of rage by a demographic that feels utterly betrayed. Who could have imagined this time last year that 50,000 university students would be marching down Whitehall chanting ‘Fuck the Lib Dems’? I imagine the Labour party is beside itself with glee. The occupation of Millbank made the tuition fees issue international news, something which the original NUS plan of a peaceful march of 15,000 would never have achieved.

The demonstration deserves not our contempt, but joy at the apparent re-awakening of student politics. Apathy has reigned for far too long. The left turned in on itself during the Labour years, it seems that there is now a clear-cut enemy once again. Considering the damage the Tories are doing to the lives of millions and to the health of society in general, they can take a few broken windows. If it feels like the 80s again, it’s because it is like the 80s again. The Cameron government are using the deficit as cover to embark on a programme of cuts that Thatcher could only have dreamed of. Long may the cries of “they say cut back, we say fight back” continue.

Choosing Newspapers

I recently ended my turbulent love affair with The Economist after 4 or 5 years. It began with such bliss. A trip to scout out the University of Sussex, an exciting front cover with a picture of a bulldog on it. Its calm, collected, monolithic style which made you think that, if only people did everything as The Economist said it should be done, the world would be perfect.

Later on, I grew to love its quirks, like its obligatory use of the phrase "mildly Islamic" when referring to any accommodating leader in a Muslim-dominated country (notably Erdogan in Turkey), or the way it put a picture of a withered, old woman with a shawl above every article about the Roma or other travelling people.

However, The Economist has no moral dimension. For example, as someone who tends to lean to the left-wing, I find the way it absolves Murdoch's, Bush's, and Berlusconi's more heinous offences by use of such a passive and balanced voice to be deeply unsettling. As Stefan Stern in The Guardian wrote, "its writers rarely see a political or economic problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation." Beyond that, The Economist reveals itself to be limited and distant.

Of course, it might also be argued that my problem with The Economist simply stems from me not being able to cope with its views being more right-wing than mine, and there's probably something in that.

The trouble is that left-wing sources often make me feel uncomfortable for being too left. I have a healthy disregard for the Tories and the right-wing in general, and yet I feel uncomfortable with a column which assumes Tory guilt at every turn. I've been trialling The New Statesman as a replacement for The Economist but it feels to be an easy let-off for the left instead.

I guess the problem is my inherent contrarianism (a word? Probably not). What I really need is a newspaper which criticises everyone all the time, for everything. That would make me a lot happier. Of course, a more conventional solution might be to read lots of different news sources and build an aggregated view based on a careful and reasoned analysis of many different contributors' thoughts and opinions.

The former solution seems easier though...

University: Not a Waste

Back home now.

I'm experiencing that general post-university malaise which occurs when you have to go from living with friends to living with parents because you don't fancy committing yourself to a graduate scheme with a corporate entity, wasting away and generally wishing for an early death.

I learn a disappointingly large number of life lessons from films, and if there's one thing I've learnt from films in this particular regard, it's that everyone's life is essentially dull and pointless, particularly if you work for a heartless business (and they wouldn't remain in business if they weren't largely heartless).

So right now, I'm working on a solution which allows me to keep my dignity and life-satisfaction intact whilst also providing me with enough money to live. It's going to be hugely successful. Ask me how I'm doing in 10 years (Y).

As I finish this post, I realise that I have no idea why I titled it "University: Not a Waste".

That'll be that ol' university-educated mind at work again.

We Don't Hate Enough

Don't worry, this post is going to be very specific and focused, and not at all influence by vague teenage angst and a mild dissatisfaction with the way that the world functions. I'm not a teenager anyhow.

I was talking to a dear friend who asked why, when we routinely criticise "over-paid footballers", we leave over-paid film stars alone. The comparison is both legitimate and apt. Both earn a lot and can give terrible performances, both species contain their share of COMPLETE AND UTTER dickheads (in acting, Mel Gibson/Tom Cruise, mostly), both sometimes receive more than their employers can realistically and sustainably afford to pay them.

And so on, and so forth.

The point being that footballers aren't always "over-paid", because they earn what the market dictates (granted, they do sometimes receive far too much if a club is owned by an oil tycoon with obscene amounts of money and no business model). Similarly, actors aren't always over-paid, even at ($/£?)15m-odd a time, because films starring those big actors generally generate a lot more than they cost.

Now I'm a capitalist at heart, inasmuch as its completely atrocious, but its use of competition does aid us. However, rational arguments are for the weak, and instead of being a heartless old sod myself, I'm going to conclude this piece by criticising Mel Gibson.

He's misogynistic, anti-Semitic and unintelligently foul-mouthed. Also, he's aged badly. How amusing for a man who's traded so regularly off his looks.

Etc.

(Okay, so it lost some of its focus. Fuck off.)

The Inherent Dangers of Social Networking

I've now signed up to twitter. It's like FaceBook's status updates, but more limited. Also, you can find out what famous people have been eating for dinner and laugh at their little in-jokes without really understanding them. It's the second time I've tried twitter, and I'm going to try and stick with it this time. I don't know why. I think it's a form of masochism. Soon I'll be strapped in to more social-networking sites than I can fit across the links section of Google Chrome. I've already got email accounts, network sites, forums and blogs up there, alongside all my news and information sites. I'm going to eventually run out of time in the day to check all these different ventures, and I'll end up not having time for a real job because I'll be too busy trying voyeuristically tracking Stephen Fry's every move. And then there's always the inherent risk that one of those crazy survivalist USA films about the government's unlimited power will turn out to be real, and I'll be cursing the day that I got myself addicted to twitter as the government surround my house and we have an exciting high-octane shoot-out.

I drew a picture to illustrate what this could look like:

Writing things down - as in, using a pen and paper - now has the feel of a bizarre form of resistance. I realise that I should be ashamed of my adherence to such an archaic system of transcribing my thoughts. And, the downside of this ancient system is that rather than everyone instantly finding out how I feel, they'll have to wait 'til I'm dead and my thoughts are published posthumously. And that'll only happen if I get famous somehow and people actually give a crap, which, let's face it, is not the most likely course of my life. So it's really a complete waste. Unlike social-networking. Which is the best use of anyone's time, always.