Fifty Shades of Rage

Kris King

First published as a series of blog articles at:

http://www.rantinaminor.co.uk/

Rant In A-Minor

Loud, rude words about religion (and other annoyances)

Published by Distant Angel 2012

Plymouth, Devon, United Kingdom.

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2010 – 2012 Distant Angel

Cover design by Kris King.

"Rage Guy" variation, based on the 4chan original, by unknown.

Kris King has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

The right of Kris King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

1. Vote Linda Gilroy: Spineless and Clueless

2. Why I think NatWest are an incompetent/malicious [delete as applicable] bunch of wankers

3. Children of the Scorn

4. My atheism

5. Fool, Britannia

6. Death of a heretic

7. Not collecting stamps

8. A Manifesto In A-Minor

9. Whoops, apocalypse!

10. Praying away the straight

11. Measles, McCarthy, and Reason

12. Prince Asperger

13. Sarah Palin's Vagina

14. Dear Mr. Murdoch

15. D.R.S

16. Jesus S(l)aves

17. When a plan comes together

18. Too orangey for crows

19. Persecution, Christian-style

20. Women: Know Your Limits!

21. Trans-mission

22. Keep calm, and carry on

23. Radio 4 Radicals

24. * Terms and conditions apply

25. Baby, I was bored this way

26. 404 Mage Not Found

27. Goodbye, Mr. Fish

28. The Dad Confusion

29. Acts of Sod

30. Rock me, sexy Jesus

31. About a boy

32. The Fairy Fella's Master-Stroke

33. Sittin' on offence

34. Bring It

35. Rant-a Claus

36. New Year's Peeve

37. Nation's Healthcare Sodomised

38. Sign Here

39. New Model No. 15

40. Goddidit

41. Into Whine

42. Stupid Cult

43. Dead Jew On A Stick

44. Science, bitches: it works

45. You label me, I libel you

46. Here comes the pride

47. Off with his head

48. London Calling

49. The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth

50. Nonce Upon A Time

Vote Linda Gilroy: Spineless and Clueless

April 18th 2010

[The following is re-posted here from my old, now defunct, MySpace blog, and is primarily for the benefit of a local, Labour-supporting Twitter follower that I had for a few short hours before I criticised her local candidate of choice. As I said at the time, I'm not saying these things to be mean, believe me! I merely wanted to show how my experience of meeting Mrs Gilroy was very different from yours!]

When the Digital Economy Bill became an Act last week (after the briefest of discussions, and with a large majority of MPs not even turning up to vote), I felt compelled to email my MP, Linda Gilroy (Lab – Plymouth Sutton & Devonport) to make known my disgust that she had voted for such a draconian, undemocratic, and flawed piece of legislation.

The following day I got a response, inviting me to an open meeting with her to “discuss my concerns” at the T&GWU building on Bretonside (an ironic choice of venue, when you think about – the union was supposedly about protecting those who make things from being exploited by those who make profit off their efforts). It was a little disappointing that I was one of only 8 people who came, but that was nothing compared to the disappointment I felt that, once again, another politician had absolutely lived down to the expectations I have of them. 50 minutes of waffle, excuse-making, and otherwise avoiding the serious issues that we were trying to raise.

For those not familiar with the bill, here's basically what it proposes. It allows copyright holders to report you to your ISP if they believe you to be illegally sharing their property (songs, movies etc.) Upon receipt of these complaints, ISPs are obliged to send you written warnings, and subsequently limit your speed/capacity, prevent/limit access to certain sites, or suspend your service for continued infringement (if they refuse, your ISP risks a £250,000 fine). It also allows UK courts to block access to sites that are seen to facilitate copyright infringement.

The biggest flaw in all this is that infringements can only be identified by IP address, not the individual responsible. If you have a home network, you'll share the same address and, if one of the kids has been downloading illegal music, everyone in the house would be punished by the suspension of service. Similarly, for the relatively techno-unaware, an unsecured home wi-fi network can be hijacked by a total stranger in the street outside and you'll never know what they downloaded until your ISP throws you off the net.

The next problem is that anyone sufficiently tech-savvy can get around these problems, either by encrypting all internet traffic to and from their PC, or by going via a proxy server or VPN. Ultimately, it will be the tech-naive and largely innocent internet users who will be victimised (remember how the RIAA started prosecuting 7 year olds and grannies because they couldn't find anyone else?)

But one of the most troubling aspects is how this Act undermines and reverses some basic human rights. The ability to communicate freely, and to be secure in one's “possessions and papers”, the right to privacy, is eviscerated by this bill, with your ISP being legally required to spy on your internet traffic on behalf of the record industry. This is a massive invasion of privacy that, were it applied to the postal system (with the Royal Mail opening every jiffy bag in Britain to ensure you're not posting mix tapes), there would be an unholy outrage of Daily Mail proportions.

If that's not enough, it also reverses the presumption of guilt. No longer are you innocent until proven guilty. Under this Act, the copyright holder is not required to provide evidence that you've downloaded their property illegally, and they won't suffer any penalty for making unfounded or false infringement claims. If you wish to challenge any penalty handed down against you, there is an appeals process – in other words, they can cut off your internet connection, but you can have it back again once you've proven your innocence.

This is a MASSIVE breach of our fundamental human right that the burden of proof must always be on the accuser; it is they who must make their case, not us. And to make matters worse, all of this power is being handed over to the record industry, a monolithic dinosaur facing extinction due to its refusal to adapt their age-old business model to the new economy. Because, when all is said and done, that's what this is really about …

The biggest cheerleader for this Act is Peter Mandelson, and we should think absolutely nothing of the fact that, on August 7th last year, he was apparently a dinner guest of billionaire record mogul (and co-founder of Dreamworks), David Geffen, and members of the Rothschild banking dynasty at the family's holiday villa in Corfu. Despite his insistence that internet piracy was never discussed, it would be naive of us to assume that this bill wasn't, in its inception, already pre-loaded with interests that weren't ours.

For 70 years, the record industry has had a stranglehold on the channels of distribution; if you're a musician and you want people to hear your music, you've got to sign a record deal with them (a deal which invariably involves giving away all your publishing rights, so you don't even control the songs you create anyway). The internet has spelled the end of this, allowing everyone to become their own distributors, and the industry hates it.

They hate that they've been cut out of the loop entirely; they're an unnecessary middle-man that parasitically feeds off the profits of the creative people who actually do the work. They can see the meteor that heralds their destruction hurtling towards them, and they're scared. This Act is the result of an industry in panic – so desperate to hang on to their monopoly and their outdated business model that gives them control over the music world that they've thrown their toys out of the pram and gone running to the government begging for protection.

Sure, there are people downloading illegally, but it's no better or worse than the days of warnings like, “Home Taping Is Killing Music”. It wasn't, and it didn't, just as digital piracy isn't doing it today. The music industry itself is killing music, with its cookie-cutter, manufactured, X-Factor puppet acts dominating at the expense of genuine talent and diversity. If we're honest, it's independent music that's being killed, and it's the corporates begging for this bill to protect them that are killing it.

Suppose, for example, that the music that I and my band-mates create generated a high level of interest, enough to attract the attention of a record company who thinks we sound like one of their artists (or, at least, we have a similar audience and are therefore a threat to their artist). A couple of false copyright infringement claims could have us closed down and off the net.

This Act gives the power to record companies to bury their independent competition through false infringement claims, if they so choose. How does this protect an artist's rights? The answer is that it doesn't, and anyone who has given this bill more than a brief flick-through can tell you that … it's about protecting the profits of an industry that is dying through its own myopia, and its own stubborn refusal to change.

And so we come to Linda Gilroy, a politician who has never voted against the party because, as she tells it, this gives her a better position when needing to lean on the party to get things done for her constituents (the idea being, I guess, that she builds up some party-loyalty capital which she can later spend). She admitted that she never voted against the party even when she disagreed with it … refusing to “rock the boat” because, she said, it makes it harder for her to get things done.

[Re-post update: as of August 2006 she had, in fact, according to Wikipedia, voted against the party 7 times out of 2,300. This means she votes with the party on approximately 99.7% of all issues – a ludicrously high figure; no one agrees with someone on 99.7% of anything].

She also admitted that she voted for the Act knowing that enough time hadn't been devoted to it, that it was considered by many to be flawed, and those with the technical know-how were very much against it. Her reasoning was that the bill was “good on the whole” … it's a bloody good job she doesn't build submarines. “Yes, it's got a couple of giant holes in it, but on the whole it's a good submarine”. As one of the eight gathered today pointed out, the only thing worse than no law is a bad one.

Linda Gilroy is, therefore, a spineless party loyalist with no principles of her own. Rather than standing up for what she believes in, and challenging the party when she disagrees with it, she gladly bends over, grabs her ankles, and does whatever she's told to do. She may think this gives her latitude to get things done by having her loyalty rewarded, but the truth is she's only going to get done what the party was going to do anyway. All that makes her is the bully's oik, always obeying in the hope that the bully will do her a favour occasionally and deck a few people on her list, when really she should be using her proximity and access to the bully to stand up to him.

She says she's been listening to independent musicians and creatives in the area prior to this bill going through, but which ones? And how ill-informed are they about the ramifications of this bill? And besides, if she's going to vote the party line anyway, why waste people's time by engaging with them? If they disagree with the party line, it's not going to affect your vote, is it Linda?

We never got much of an opportunity to point out all the things wrong with this bill, because Linda Gilroy was filling as much time as she could with waffle about how there's only so much parliamentary time to debate a bill, etc. But surely, that's the point of government? You debate, and then you pass bills you've debated on. If there hasn't been enough scrutiny or debate, you keep going until the bugs have been ironed out. I work in the IT industry, and have done for most of my life … if I had the same casual attitude towards testing the software I write as MPs seemingly do for scrutinising the bills they so willingly pass in to law, I'd have been fired years ago.

In addition to working in IT by day, by night I create music, video, websites, and generally indulge myself in similar such creative passions. I am one of the many people who can see this bill from all sides because I stand, as we all do, to suffer at its hands. I'm not advocating piracy, and this is not an attempt to justify illegal downloading because, in the unlikely event that anyone were to take an interest in my creative efforts, I stand to be just as much at risk from copyright infringement affecting my livelihood as anyone else.

You will never truly stop illegal activity, and historically technology has always failed in this regard (only education can do the trick here). But treating everyone like criminals, and giving the power to the one industry who has most to gain from restricting the individual's access to websites and material they don't like, is only going to make the problem worse.

And Linda Gilroy is part of that problem … spineless and clueless, a political coward with no principles of her own.

Why I think NatWest are an incompetent/malicious [delete as applicable] bunch of wankers

May 19th 2010

[The following is a copy of the letter posted to my bank today].

Dear Bankers (is that the right word?)

I've been a customer of NatWest since January 1996 and, although for much of the time I've been moderately satisfied with your services, I have recently been provided with an experience that I can only describe as “retarded incompetence, bordering on criminal indifference”. Allow me to set the scene.

It was late March of this year (around the 25th in fact), and while casually hurling darts at a picture of former RBS chief executive Fred Goodwin, I noticed that my pay date in April fell on a date that meant my regular monthly charges (account fee and overdraft interest) would be taken before I was paid, likely resulting in an over-limit charge and whatever other “fees” you insist are necessary (despite their being a category of extortion that would give loan-sharks a moral crisis). I therefore contacted my branch by phone requesting my charges for April (due around the 23rd) be moved to May 1st, thereby ensuring I would have been paid and wouldn't incur any fees. I was told this was “no problem” and that it had “been done”.

Cut to April 22nd when, much to my complete lack of surprise (you are, after all, a bank, and recent economic events have shown that finances aren't your speciality), my monthly charges were taken at a time when I had less than £2 in my account. With the usual “bend over, peasant!” charges now guaranteed at the end of May, I visited my branch at the first available opportunity in an attempt to both have the charges reversed, and to establish exactly what level of spastic crapwittedness was required to have failed so totally in carrying out such a laughably simple request.

Although my heady optimism punished me greatly when I was unable to fulfil the first part of my goal (you are, after all, a bank, and the idea of refunds is as alien to you as the metaphysical concept of shame), I was rewarded handsomely when it came to the second part, politely informed, as I was, by an artificially sympathetic employee that, since the charges come out x days after my statement date, I needed to have requested the change before that date. “When was my statement date?” I enquired. “April 5th” came the reply, with not a hint of realisation as to what that little factlet implied. You see, it seems I had foolishly assumed that changing one date in a single database field on my account details was an activity whose duration could be measured in seconds, as opposed to the 11 ARSING DAYS it took you to, not actually succeed, but completely FAIL in carrying out that request. If that wasn't bad enough, whoever told me on the phone that it had “been done” was therefore lying.

Not that I'm surprised, as I said. You are a bank, after all, and being somewhat loose with the definition of “truth” is part of what you do (“no really it does cost £40 to process you having gone 30p over your limit”). I can only imagine, therefore, that if this wasn't a deliberate attempt to extract an extra charge or two out of me then it must have resulted from you being in the same vegetative coma you were in when you failed to see the economic collapse coming. Incidentally, while we're on the subject, how come, with my limited knowledge of global finance, I was able to tell a home-hunting friend in 2005 not to buy yet as the US sub-prime market would collapse within 2-3 years, taking the UK housing market, and ultimately the world economy, with it … and yet none of you saw it coming?

Anyway, returning to the point … this, sadly, wasn't the end of the matter. I was also told by the poor sod you employ to look the perennially skint in the eye every day and tell them that they the bank doesn't really give a shit about them (only their money, when they have it) that, because my statement date hadn't actually been changed at all, I was now too late to avoid my May charges from being taken 2 days before I get paid!

This meant that the first monthly charge to come out of my account on the day that I had originally requested would be on July 1st. THREE FUCKING MONTHS from when I initially requested it!!. My first thought upon realising this was to wonder whether you should dispense with the pens on chains and instead provide your customers with a bottle of personal lubricant to ease the pain of the rough shafting they're going to get every time they come in for a visit.

So, to summarise … thanks to your utter cretinous incompetence/malicious indifference [delete as applicable], I have incurred, and will incur again, a set of charges that, due to my tight financial status, will continue to roll from month to month for the foreseeable future, depriving me of already scarce funds on which to live, and keeping me your impoverished little bitch for a while longer. Thanks a lot. Tell me again why it is that the general public has such a seemingly inexhaustible supply of vitriol towards banks right now. Could it be because you come across like an indifferent, callous, insensitive, treacherous, heartless, and disingenuous ice-cold shower of utter bastards?

And that's that … or at least, it would be if I were to end the story here. I have, however, absolutely no intention of letting you off the hook on this one.

You have 14 days from the date of this letter to carry out the following:

1. IMMEDIATELY change my statement date so that charges are taken no earlier than the 1st, and no later than the 5th of each month AS I HAD ORIGINALLY REQUESTED.

2. Remove the charge that was applied on or about the 22nd of April and credit my account appropriately, on the grounds that it was incurred because of YOUR failure to carry out a simple customer request; a request, incidentally, that one of your phone drones assured me had “been done” AND was made with a more than reasonable amount of time for you to carry it out. Seriously, you received a multi-billion pound taxpayer bailout of your worthless arses in less time (and do remember that, as a taxpayer, I own 27% of you).

3. Put a stop to any charge that is due to occur at the end of May. Again, this is because the charges will be YOUR fault, having resulted directly from your having taken money I didn't have on April 22nd, thereby incurring yet more charges.

4. Contact me by phone at the number provided to inform me that the above has been done, and with a copy sent out in writing to the above address (don't forget to include your grovelling apology in both).

If you cannot, or will not, comply with the above (more than reasonable) requests, or if I see a single charge (other than the monthly fee and interest) appear in my account during the next 14 days, I shall be forwarding a copy of this letter on to the FSA, and any other relevant regulatory body with a move to making a serious complaint against Nat West. Given a close friend was able to have his statement/charging date changed within 24 hours of his requesting it, you have absolutely no excuses for your utter failure to do the same (his bank was the Halifax, by the way).

As soon as my financial obligations to the Nat West are finished (mercifully, this will be within the next six months), I shall be moving my custom away from you entirely, and encouraging everyone I know to the do same. Oh, and I shall also be posting a copy of this letter on my blog so that others my benefit from the wholly unnecessary, and completely sodding annoying, experience you've put me through (if this matter is not resolved to my satisfaction, I shall also likely forward the letter on to one or two suitable media outlets – they're always up for a good “bank screws customer” story).

Yours, with not-even-thinly-disguised contempt

Kris King

P.S: I wrote this letter while supervising my pet rats during their daily period of roaming freely about the room. Were it not for the lack of suitable gloves, I would have included in this letter some of the “comments” they left on the floor as I typed. Although lacking in manners, you can't fault their impeccable criticism.

[As a postscript to this story, their eventual response was to refund the charges and, because they found my letter “offensive and disgusting”, to declare that the bank/customer relationship had broken down and that I should take my business elsewherev … which I did … gladly].

Children of the Scorn

September 24th 2010

Sorry folks, I'm on one today … bear with me, this might get bumpy …

Before we start, however, I want to make it very clear that I do NOT hate children. I love my nephew and all the other kids in my family (and those of close friends). On the whole, I think children are fantastic – as a concept. Unfortunately, the reality is different, and what makes it so are the parents of children. That's right; I fucking hate parents.

Now, before the parents in my family and circle of friends start hitting the “Comment” link with unbridled rage in their tired eyes, I'd like to stress that I don't mean all parents, by any means. Mine have always been pretty cool, as are those of my other half and close friends, and those lunatics that make up the rest of my family.

The parents I'm talking about are the ones who just don't get it …

Parents who think performing a basic biological function of existence makes you special; it doesn't

Every living creature on this earth has been quite capable of reproduction for the last couple of billion years, and that includes Ebola. That's right, a virus can do what you do. It doesn't make you special, get over yourselves … seriously. Do you know what makes a parent special? Raising a good kid; raising someone to give a fuck about the planet and the people in it, and not strut about the place like the world owes them a decent life; someone who sees the value in life, the merits in being responsible for one's actions, the joy in learning all you can while you're here, and the ability to find love and beauty wherever it may exist.

Parents who think their kids are special; they're not

I'm sure they're pretty special to YOU, but beyond your family and circle of friends, no one gives a fuck. They might as well not exist. This might sound bleak but, in the grand scheme of things, in the infinite vastness of unending universal time, NONE of us are special. Our lives, our endeavours, and all that we are, ultimately amounts to nothing, and the only meaning our lives have are whatever we ascribe to them. Do you know what makes a kid special? Being someone who thinks for themselves, questions everything, and holds an undying curiosity for understanding the universe they live in; someone who remains free of prejudice and intolerance, and sees other people, regardless of age, race, colour, gender, sexuality, or belief, as an opportunity to expand their knowledge and appreciation of the diversity of life within our own species.

Parents who think they have some skill or superiority over the rest of us by virtue of having had children; you don't

I'm sure you think you've done something clever, something that's beyond the wit of all bar the supremely gifted but, in truth, all you have is the additional experience of having to look after and nurture a being that can't look after itself. Carers of the extensively disabled will have such experience; people who look after large numbers of animals will be very similar (the only difference is that most children become less dependent over time). “You don't have kids, do you?” is one of the most obnoxious phrases parents use, and is always employed to terminate a debate in favour of the parent who has exhausted their seemingly limitless supply of unreasonable arguments. Stop using your children as a trump card to cover your ignorance, your intellectual dishonesty, and your monstrously fallacious arguments. Grow up, and quit using your kids as a way to make yourself feel better than the rest of us, because you're not, and the only way in which you're likely to be superior is in your ignorance of contraception.

Parents who think they can have as many kids as they want; they can't.

I know you don't know this, but the impact of having a child is not entirely localised to you and your immediate family; it's global. Thousands of acres of land are required to grow the food they will consume in their lifetime, not to mention the tons of waste and pollution they will leave behind. Make no mistake, having a child is the single worst thing the average person can do to the environment. It doesn't matter how much I throw in a landfill, how many air miles I rack up, or how many electrical appliances I leave on unnecessarily, it will never match the massive amount of damage YOU will do by having a child. Yes, children ARE essential to the survival of the species, but you need to remember that this isn't 1850; the chances of your kids surviving long enough to reproduce is nigh on 100%, so you don't need eight of them as insurance against continuing the line. Statistically, you only need 1.1 children to maintain zero population growth and, by the time I'm 50, the world population will have doubled since my birth. If you have more than 2 kids, you are directly contributing to the increasing uninhabitability of this planet (sorry Mum, I know that means you too).

Parents who think that “I love children” is enough to justify having them, or that it's all that's required to be a parent; it isn't

There are serial killers and mass murderers who loved their kids, it doesn't automatically make you a good parent (nothing does). Of course being loved is vital to the emotional development of a child, but it's not the only aspect of their upbringing that needs serious attention; they need intellectual, creative and social stimulation, moral guidance, encouragement, and a thousand other things that are as equally important as a good cuddle or two. There are many parents out there who love their children dearly but, for whatever reason, are utterly incapable of looking after them (particularly those parents who are little more than children themselves).

Parents who think that anyone but them has any responsibility for their child; they don't

TV, movies, books, music, the Internet … there's not an area of popular culture that isn't a target for whiny parents who think that it's up to everyone else to raise their child. If you don't want your kid to hear bad words on TV or in music, or see nudity and violence in movies and video games, or there's a book you think they shouldn't read or website they shouldn't visit, it's up to you to stop them. If you can't, then you suck as a parent. Same goes for parents who sue junk food restaurants for making their kids fat … they're ONLY THERE BECAUSE YOU TOOK THEM, MOTHERFUCKER. Everything is being dumbed-down, scaled back, diluted, and otherwise ruined because whinging fucking parents can't look after their own damn kids. The rest of us should not have to have our freedoms limited or removed because of your total fucking laziness to raise your kids yourselves.

This might all sound like unfettered bitching from someone who will probably “never know the joy of having kids” but if you think that even for a second you've entirely missed the point. Kids are great … it's the parents that are the fucking arseholes. Children are whatever you make them; if a child grows up bigoted and intolerant, that's because of you. If they grow up too coddled to ever cope with the realities of life then that's your fault.

We know that you love your kids, we know you care about them … I'm just saying they're overrated, and that's your fault; you've made them (as George Carlin put it) into little “cult objects” to be treasured, protected, idolised and worshipped. Get a grip and treat children as they really are … empty shells, waiting to be filled with knowledge and love; beings with infinite potential, just as long as you inspire it in them; they're the ones who have to clean up our mess, the biggest of which is the mess we created by having so many of them in the first place.

My atheism

October 6th 2010

I'm not sure when I became an atheist; in a way, I guess I always have been. Sure, there have been times when I dipped my toe in the waters of faith, but I always felt rather hollow, usually to the point of dishonesty, when I did. I didn't really, deep-down believe what I was trying to persuade myself I believed and, on the very few occasions in my life that I actually prayed, I felt like a complete fraud; wishing out loud to a being I didn't believe existed for shortcuts to problems I was either unable, or too lazy, to solve myself.

Actually, now that I think about it, I do know when I became an atheist … like everyone else in the world, I was born one. A baby has no more knowledge of the concept of a god than it does of the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider, and to label a child as having a particular religious belief is ludicrous – you might as well label them a Marxist; they don't understand these ideas and so can't possibly have any kind of opinion on them.

I'll always be thankful that my parents never imposed such ideas or beliefs upon me; in our house, god was less of a spiritual or metaphysical concept than it was a somewhat loud announcement that a hammer had interfaced sharply with a thumb, and the only time we'd ever see the inside of a church was for weddings, christenings, and anything else that was deemed necessary to placate certain older members of the family. Even then, I don't think they saw it as anything more than observing particular traditions. My family were largely agnostic, often bordering on apatheistic; we didn't know and, quite frankly, we didn't much care.

I suppose what I'm really trying to understand is when I became aware that I lacked a god belief. There have been a few moments in my life where the hypocrisy, arrogance, or plain-old silliness of religious faith was somewhat exposed to me – the most notable happened when I was at St. Richard De Wych, a Church of England middle-school in Droitwich, Worcestershire. I was 11 years old and a burgeoning geek, with a reading age a good 5 years ahead of where it should be. A family-friend, having noted my nerdish, intellectual leanings from a young age, would regularly lend me books I otherwise wouldn't have come across. I read “The Lord of The Rings” at the age of 10, and had fallen completely in love with “The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy” a little while before.

At this point, I had been reading another borrowed gem, “The Omen”, and, having finished it, passed it on to my best friend at the time. Unfortunately for him, he was caught with it in Mr. Lawrence's R.E class; unfortunately for me (at least in the short term), he very bravely named me as the real owner of the book when it was confiscated (thanks, Mat). So, there we were, the whole of my year, all sat in assembly when Mr. Lawrence comes marching out of his classroom right over to where I was sitting. Hurling the book into my lap he uttered words I would never forget; “I don't want to see this satanic filth in my school again, you little anti-christ“.

At first I was embarrassed for myself, singled-out and bollocked in front of the rest of my year. As time passed, I instead became somewhat embarrassed for Mr. Lawrence. To me, it was just a book, a story, a fiction, and it had upset him for reasons that it would take me a while to understand. By then, however, the damage had been done, and my already tenuous relationship with the notion of belief was forever changed. It seemed to me that belief was something for the insecure, the fearful, and the ignorant, and this endures in me to this day. I don't mean to suggest that those who believe in a supernatural creator are nervous, cowardly idiots … well, alright, some of them are … what I'm saying is that I don't know any believers whose faith, insofar as it endures beyond childhood indoctrination, cannot be attributed to at least one of those criteria.

The insecure worry over where and how they fit in; what is my place in the world? What is my purpose, my meaning? Why am I here, what's it all about? Such questions frequently lead to the hypothesising of some grand purpose to existence, an overarching scheme or meaning, and this inevitably leads to the idea that something, or someone, must be both the architect of this end-goal and the ultimate arbiter of whether or not you achieved it. Problem: “I can't imagine that my life has no inherent meaning”. Solution: god.

The fearful worry about good and evil; is there justice in the world? Will bad deeds be punished and good ones rewarded? How can we be sure that the guilty never get away with their crimes? Such questions often lead to ideas about an all-seeing judge who keeps an ever-watchful eye on the wicked and will make them answer for their transgressions. Problem: “I can't believe that there are people who might never have to pay for the crimes they've committed”. Solution: god.

The fearful also worry, perhaps more than anything, about death; what happens when I die? Is it the end? Does everything I am simply cease to be? No one wants to imagine that, one day, every one of their biological functions will come to an end and that everything that makes them who they are is gone. Never again will they laugh, cry, love, hate, or hold even a single conscious thought, and the only thing that will remain of them are memories in those they leave behind. Such concerns regularly lead to the notion of a life beyond this one where we continue into eternity. Problem: “I am totally, utterly, shit-scared of dying”. Solution: god.

The ignorant worry about how things work; where did the universe come from? Where is it going? Is there anything outside it? Before it? After it? They have many questions that don't have answers, but see their lack of knowledge as some kind of weakness. They see “I don't know” as an answer to be ashamed of, rather than one that has been responsible for driving human progress and discovery more than anything else in history. It doesn't matter if they have the right answer, just as long as they have an answer. Such thoughts frequently lead to an all-encompassing, cop-out panacea; a response to every unexplained phenomena and unanswered question as a way of avoiding having to admit that there's something they just don't know. Problem: “I have no clue how stuff works”. Solution: god.

I'm not saying that because I'm an atheist I'm not, nor have I ever been, insecure, fearful, or ignorant … I make no bones about the fact that I'm often troubled by my place in life, I'm really not up for dying any time soon, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that I have absolutely no knowledge about whatsoever. The difference is that I'm comfortable with that … I'm comfortable with life having no inherent meaning, because then it can be whatever I want it to be – life's purpose is to live, and its meaning is whatever we ascribe to it; it is the sum of our experiences, and of those with whom we choose to share our time along the way.

I'm comfortable, albeit reluctantly, with the idea that, one day, I am going to die. If our existence is eternal, our existence is meaningless; what are our achievements worth if we have forever to achieve them. Life, and all that we do with it, is more valuable precisely because it's finite … an eternity of consciousness would be the most unbearable torture a sentient being could ever endure (I don't really trust anyone who wants to live forever, because they clearly haven't thought it through). I want to live a good amount of time, having done a bunch of things that I want to do, and exit my body with a final conscious thought; “That was cool, but I'm ready for bed now”.

I'm comfortable admitting that there are loads of things I don't know. Without the willingness to concede our ignorance, there would never have been the desire to find the real answers. Instead of discovering bacteria and being driven to develop the means to fight it, we would all still be dying in our 30s under the mistaken idea that demons were responsible. Were it not for those who can say, “I do not understand this, but I'd like to”, we would still be cowering before every eclipse and sacrificing small mammals for the safe return of our life-giving sun.

When all is said and done, a painful truth is far better than a comfortable lie. Yes, we're all going to die; yes, we don't know how shit works; yes, there are criminals who get away with it, and life only has meaning if we give it one. The inability to face up to these facts doesn't dissolve our insecurities, our fears, or our ignorance; it reinforces them, with blind faith acting as an Elastoplast to our problems. To quote the good Dr. Gregory House, “Religion is not the opium of the people; it is the placebo of the people”.

I don't proclaim myself better than a believer for embracing reason and critical thinking (although perhaps maybe I should) … I just wish they had the courage to face their insecurities, their fears, and their ignorance, let go of the security blanket, and see reality as it truly is.

Fool, Britannia

May 2nd 2011

So, did you go? Did you see it? Wasn't it amazing?! Such a grand and special occasion; a celebration to bring everyone together; black, white, rich, poor, we were all, for a brief moment, joined in patriotic and emotional unity as the whole world shared the most important day in the ever unfolding drama of the greatest love story of our time. The ceremony, the dress, the spectacle, the beauty … the bullshit …

If you enjoyed the royal wedding, and you're not an 8-year old girl with a pink dress and a fairytale princess fixation, you are categorically and unequivocally wrong. Children are more than entitled to find great joy in the idea that a storybook is coming to life right before their eyes, and that they are lucky enough to be around to delight in those final few pages before the “Happy Ever After” … but once you've emerged from under the protective veil of youthful innocence, you don't get to stand in zombified reverence before the TV with a flag in your hand and lump in your throat without rightfully being described as a credulous, simpering fucktard.

For too long, monarchies around the world (but especially here in the UK) have been treated with such criminally undeserved levels of respect and adoration that the average union jack-clad idiot in the street is so blinded by the pageantry and tradition that they can't see the awful truth staring them in the face. Centuries of bowing and scraping and kneeling and fawning have prevented them from realising that these people have absolutely no fucking right whatsoever to be where they are today.

Ask a monarchist, in all seriousness, why we have a royal family in Britain and I guarantee you will get every justification under the sun as to why we should keep them (invariably this will include mentions of both tradition and tourism). But, at no point will their rambling attempt at constructing a valid, or even logical, argument ever actually succeed because, ultimately, there is an explanation but it's one they can't possibly defend. The only reason we have a royal family is because their ancestors pointed sharp objects at our ancestors and said that they were in charge now and, if they didn't like it, they could all have their heads cut off. Oh, and everyone would have to pay taxes to keep them in the manner to which they were accustomed.

Take even the briefest look at the history of the monarchies of any nation and you will find a succession of people who simply declared themselves in charge and backed it up with a combination of bullshit claims of an alleged “divine right”, and the threat of torture or murder for anyone who objected. Our own royal family, for example, are descended from a largely unpleasant dynasty of German robber barons (which has always made me wonder how the ardent royalists who are also supporters of the England football team avoid crippling cognitive dissonance whilst hurling abuse at the Germans in international matches). For many centuries, we have acquiesced to the tyranny of a wealthy, well-armed minority, and we've learned to keep our mouths shut while we toiled in their fields, paid their taxes, and passively accepted the lowly place in life they marked out for us.

While I am happy to concede the point any monarchists reading will be desperate to make that “things aren't really like that any more” (in that beheadings for seditious speech are a rarity these days), it would require a somewhat charming, yet dangerous, level of naivety to write the royal family off as a twee, harmless anachronism (you know, the kind of thing that's nice to have around to placate both the elderly and the manufacturers of mugs, tea towels, and limited edition celebration biscuit assortments). These people are not just obscenely wealthy, they have an immense amount of power and influence over our lives, whether they wield it as frequently as their ancestors or not, and it's made so much worse by the fact that none of it is based on merit; they're entirely born to it.

You could argue there's nothing wrong with that because it's tradition … but then so was incest, jailing children, and murdering foxes for sport (all, as it turns out, popular activities with monarchies past). Just because something endures through the ages and remains popular it doesn't mean it's worthy. I mean, how many crap ideas have stood the test of time precisely because gullible dickheads keep perpetuating them? (astrology, religion, The X-Factor, pick your favourite). The point is that traditions are ever-changing; new ones are formed, and old ones are lost – some are simply forgotten, others are abandoned for a reason. When your doctor tells you that the stomach pains you've been having for the last 20 years are caused by a gastrointestinal parasite, you don't say that you want to keep it because your daily, hour-long session on the bog every morning has become something of a tradition (and yes, the parasite metaphor is entirely deliberate).

Some often argue that the royals bring in a lot of tourists, but that's probably the flimsiest justification of them all. People don't spend their hard-earned cash to come to Britain just because we've got some over-priced, inbred, borderline-retarded family living here … if that was true, surely Wayne Rooney and his kin would be an adequate replacement. Tourists don't get to meet the royals, or even so much as get a glimpse of them unless they've organised their holiday around a dreary public appearance, like Princess Anne opening the new toilet block at a dreadfully grey high-school in Worcestershire. Visitors come here every year for the same reason they go anywhere else; it's the buildings they want to see. They want to walk around these people's houses and see where they live(d); they want to see the treasures they accumulated through centuries of imperialistic theft, and they want to see the galleries filled with portraits of their ancestors.

And, after that, they'll go to the London Dungeon, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, the theatres of the West End, and any one of the thousands of other places (and that's just in London) that owe fuck all to royalty. Are there really people who would stop coming to Wales to hike the mountains of Snowdonia if we didn't have a Queen? Is there a contingent of monarchy-loving foreigners who would refuse to ride on Nemesis at Alton Towers if we put Charles and Camilla in a home. And if there were, would we really want tourist money from people that fucking mental? Have a look at what the top holiday destinations in the world are for any given year and ask yourself how many of them have monarchies. The tourism argument is bullshit, and we all know it – it's just a way of deflecting from the issue of how these people are living off of our money.

Think of how much that wedding cost. Think of the cost of shutting down London for a day to make it happen. Consider how much was spent on the security, the thousands of extra police on the streets, armed response units, and helicopter surveillance covering every rooftop for miles. Think of how much good that money could have done if it had been spent on something other than a lavish, gaudy, disgustingly ostentatious display of how these people are so staggeringly fucking wealthy that they are able to marshal together all of that just so that one of their over-privileged cunt children can sign a single legal document in front of the nation he's going to inherit from ancestors who stole it in the first place. Think of how much that wedding cost and remember that we are footing the bill … that's right, we're all paying for it, and we didn't even get invited.

But, never mind, eh? We shouldn't grumble, I guess, because we all got a free day off work! Isn't that fantastic? A free day off work! Except that it wasn't free because, sooner or later, we're going to end up, somehow, paying for that too. Most businesses will have had to continue paying their employees despite losing a day's trade, and those that did stay open will have had to pay their staff extra for working a bank holiday. If you think that your employer isn't going to find some way of recouping that lost day from you then either you've got a decent employer or you're a bigger moron than I give you credit for. And besides, isn't our country in a massive recession? Don't we need business to be booming right now, not taking a fucking day off? The whole thing only makes sense when you see a free day off and a royal wedding for exactly what it is; a distraction. A bribe.

“Look chaps, what are going to do? The peasants got upset with us because we crashed the economy when we let our banking chums lend money to people who couldn't afford it. Then, they got really annoyed when we gave all their money to the banks who promptly awarded themselves massive bonuses, and now they're seriously pissed that there's no jobs, no public services, and we're still spending a fortune getting our war on in the Middle East. We are royally fucked! Wait a moment … royalty?! Quick, someone call Buck House and tell William to hitch the bitch!”

And before you take umbrage with my use of the word “bitch” in that hypothetical conversation there and start waxing lyrical about how she's “a really sweet girl from humble beginnings”, don't bother … she may very well be a lovely person, but I've had enough of the disingenuous horse-shit trotted out by our lazy media about how she's a “commoner”, so you can fuck right off. This is not a blissful union between two disparate worlds, as apologists would have us believe, far from it. Okay, so the Middletons aren't exactly the proper blue-blood, horsey, hyphenated surname types the royals usually marry, but commoners? Bollocks. If your parents run their own business, and it's successful enough to put you through a half-decent private school and pay for your university education, one of the words that you are NOT allowed to have on the list of adjectives with which you can honestly describe yourself is “commoner”.

Fortunately, it seems, that I'm not alone in my abject scorn for this grotesquely awful event; with each successive royal wedding that has taken place during my lifetime, not to mention the ever-increasing irrelevance of this genetic and social cul-de-sac of an extended family, I've seen a marked increase in the level of apathy and contempt the people of this country have for such an objectionable bunch of parasitic cunts. And if you have a problem with my having used that word for a second time, then kindly tell me what word you would use to describe a family who regularly hosts enormous banquets for kings, presidents, and ambassadors of despicable nations who torture and murder their subjects, or think nothing of punishing homosexuals with the death penalty?

Celebrate if you wish; wave your flag, doff your cap, bow, show reverence and respect, and defend them to your very last breath. These people don't really give a fuck about you, and all the pusillanimous, simpering, nauseating subservience you show them only betrays your own best interests and that of the country. We don't need them … we're better, as a people, without them and, whatever reasons you think there are for keeping these bastards around, you're wrong.

Stop fooling yourselves …

Death of a heretic

May 7th 2011

One day, in the (hopefully) far distant future, my heart will issue its last, vital beat, my lungs will resign from their tediously repetitive job of inflating and deflating to provide me with oxygen, and, in quick succession, every organ, system, and function within my body will shut down, never to be restarted. The deafening noise of the trillions of explosions in my brain will go quiet, and the light that lives just behind my tired eyes will go out for the last time. There will be no one home. Every biological function that I had enjoyed without ever having paid them much thought will have come to their natural ends, and I will be dead.

No longer will I be able to bask in the privilege of another conscious thought as my mind, and the brain it calls home, succumb to the ravages of decay that eventually plague every organism the moment it stops fighting. The cosmologically insignificant period of time I had previously occupied will be over, and I will be unceremoniously returned to my pre-birth state of complete and total non-existence. I will have absolutely no awareness of anything; not the gradual dissolution of the star stuff of which I'm made, not the feelings of those I leave behind, not even the fact that I have ceased to exist.

It's often said that the hardest thing for any human being to ever have to face is the crushing inevitability of their own mortality. No-one wants to imagine that all of this has to end at some point; no-one wants to contemplate a time when they won't be here any more. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that the worst aspect of being an animal that was fortunate enough to have evolved such a consciousness is that, by definition, we are cursed to worry endlessly about what happens when it finally stops working. To counter this deeply-embedded fear of the greatest of unknowns, we developed both the biggest, and the most harmful, distraction technique a species could ever foist upon itself … we simply pretend that it isn't going to happen.

The notion of an afterlife has, since time immemorial, been a source of comfort and hope for billions of people around the world. The idea that there is nothing to fear from death because, although it spells the end of the physical, there is a far greater, non-corporeal world beyond this to look forward to. A world where there is no pain, no anguish, and no end – we will be the infinitely blessed recipients of an eternity of consciousness, an endless existence of love, of laughter, and of joy that will never be cut short by the cruel, cold, indiscriminate hand of death.

And it will be the most excruciating, abominable, interminable suffering a sentient being could ever be subjected to …

Like everyone else, my thoughts will occasionally turn to the subject of death, particularly my own, and that's entirely to be expected – it's natural. I am, after all, a living being who would ideally like to stay that way for a good long while. It's perfectly normal that I worry about how I'm going to die, and whether or not it's going to hurt. Will I go quickly and quietly, or will it be protracted and painful? Will there be people around me when it happens, or will I be alone? These thoughts are not just mine, they are common to us all, regardless of whether or not you believe in an afterlife.

As an atheist, I don't … for me, death is the end, and as such I often worry that there will come a time when I will no longer exist. This concern isn't really present in a believer but then, by contrast, I don't worry about whether my eternity is going to be spent in blissful paradise or screaming agony. You see, it's not enough for a believer to invest in the idea of a life after death, they have to separate them out into two; one for the good people, and one for the bad (naturally, the believer is convinced they're going to the good one). They can't stomach the idea that an eternity of unbridled joy might also be available to the annoying neighbour who shot their cat up the arse with an air rifle; they can't handle the thought that life might not actually be completely fair, so they invent two post-death theme parks you can visit: Cloud Land and Torture World.

If you've ever wanted an example of how faith is inherently divisive, this is a particularly good one. The “us and them” mentality is laid bare for all to see here, with every believer absolutely certain that they're going to be riding the Bliss Flume in Cloud Land while everyone else gets sent hurtling down the Flaming Sulphur Rapids in Torture World. They, after all, have chosen to believe in the right version of the aprés-vie experience, unlike those idiots who believe the wrong one or, in my case, don't believe in one at all. This complacency is an inevitable by-product of the process of layering delusion on top of delusion in a desperate attempt to shield themselves from the harsh reality that they're little more than fashionably-dressed bags of meat with an unavoidable expiry date. It's like forming a cocoon around yourself made from a thousand sheets of bubble-wrap to ward against sharp and pointy things from piercing your fragile body; you'll be convinced of your total safety right up until the moment you suffocate to death.

Having long ago given up on applying this tiny child's Elastoplast to the gushing, fountain-like wound of my own finiteness, I've had to embrace, albeit with great difficulty, the thought that this really is it. This life is all that there is and, one day, I am going to die, whether I like it or not. To discard the comfortable delusion of an afterlife, and to acknowledge the eventual end of one's own weird, complicated, and surprisingly short little life, I think, is possibly one of the most terrifyingly challenging things you can ever do. I'll even go one further and suggest that it makes you an immeasurably better person as a result …

For a start, a non-believer will value life, all life, more than his faith-head friends. It makes sense – if our true destiny is an eternal existence that begins once this one is over, then this life is just a trivial blip, a hollow and meaningless exercise in passing the time that serves only to act as a preamble to existence proper. Our physical lives, and everything we do with them, are utterly cheapened to the point of worthlessness when stood next to the grand infinity of the perceived world beyond. To an atheist, life is more precious, more glorious, and more worthy of respect and protection entirely because it is limited in its span.

The idea of an afterlife diminishes everything we do here on earth. The achievements we rack up in our 70 or so years are meaningless when you consider we've got an eternity on the way. Many believers question atheists as to how they can possibly live their lives knowing that there's nothing at the end of it. How can we get up in the morning? Isn't our godless existence completely meaningless when there's no heaven to work towards or hell to avoid? No, it is precisely the opposite. Every achievement is ours, and not something we have to share the credit for with the invisible sky wizard. Every day is a blessing because it is one of a precious few. Every deed has greater worth because we're not doing it to curry favour with a deity who insists on keeping score. The love and compassion we share with others is infinitely more valuable because it's something that comes directly from within us and requires no celestial third-party to inspire it.

When we die, all that remains of us are memories in those we leave behind. Our fond remembrances of those who are no longer with us are the most precious things we possess because they are but tiny fragments of evidence that those people were even here. On the cosmic time-scale, our existence ultimately amounts to nothing and the only way this can ever change is for us to leave our mark; do something that tells the universe, “I was here”. Immortality comes only through the persistence of memory throughout the ages, and when we take false comfort from imagining that our departed loved ones are waiting for us in another life, we're so busy looking forward to seeing them again that we forget almost everything about their lives that meant anything enough worth preserving.

For better or worse, Adolf Hitler will likely be remembered for many centuries, maybe even millennia, after you and I are forgotten simply because we all continue to propagate the memories of his life's deeds. You, me, and even Hitler, are only able to determine how (or even whether) we achieve immortality through our ability to decide how we act in this life. Your every deed will influence how you are remembered when you are gone, and the impact you have on those around you will dictate whether your memory will endure, for better or worse. Religions argue that one should lead a good life in order to achieve blissful immortality, and on this we can agree. Where we depart in our opinions is that they see this eternity as literal, having clearly never considered how unrelentingly torturous a consciousness without the promise of death would truly be.

So, when I finally go the way of Python's parrot, what then? Well, frankly, in terms of the physical, I don't care – burn me, bury me, dump me in the canal, or keep my corpse around for scientific or sexual experimentation, I don't care. I won't be in a position to complain, so why on earth should I worry? What I do worry about is how I will be remembered; will I have had a sufficiently positive impact on those around me to be worth preserving as a memory? All I know is that this is the only chance I will ever have to make a mark … it is the only life I have in which I can do something, and be someone, worth remembering.

Call me a heretic if you like, but this life is the only one that matters because it's the only one we have and we're supposed to live it. We're not here to spend it grovelling for admission to Cloud Land, or apologising to some supposed omnipotent tyrant for being broken because, if we do, we will have wasted every precious second … get off your knees and start living …

Not collecting stamps

May 14th 2011

Last Sunday, barely 10 minutes after I'd managed to drag myself out of bed, I got a phone call from my sister, Tam. Normally, this appalling crime warrants a stream of profanity-laden verbal abuse, but as she'd only called to let me know that Richard Dawkins was on BBC1's “Big Questions” programme, and that the topic was whether the bible was still relevant, I was quite content to drop all charges. My abject lack of tolerance for religious nonsense, and my appreciation for the works of Richard Dawkins, are two things (among many) that I share with my sister, so I was grateful for the heads up. However, since I had still to fully peel open my eyelids and let in more than just a thin sliver of daylight, I promised I'd watch it later.

“Big Questions” is your basic debate programme that, while it would like to be taken as seriously as something like “Question Time”, it never will because it suffers, firstly, from airing on a Sunday morning to an audience that don't want anything too challenging and, secondly, from the fact that it is hosted by Nicky Campbell. I've nothing against Nicky Campbell per se; he's a competent enough presenter when it comes to lightweight stuff, it's just that he has all the gravitas of a trainee estate agent and so, by extension, the show ends up less authoritative and impactful as a result. By the time I came to watch the show, I was at work and so had to settle with just listening to the audio instead so, I cranked up the volume and opened up my PDF copy of “The I-Spy Book Of Logical Fallacies” by Ray Comfort (featuring a special introduction by Ray's own special-needs celebrity spokesmuppet, and partner in disingenuous twaddlemongering, Kirk Cameron). Actually, I'm kidding, Ray Comfort couldn't write such a book because the universe would suffer a catastrophic irony collapse and fold in on itself.

Within about five minutes, I was forced to cast aside the “I-Spy” book having quickly lost count of both the number of different fallacies committed, and the number of occurrences of each. Add to that a good, healthy wedge of circular reasoning, and I found myself in the familiar position of sympathising with Professor Dawkins and the frustration he must inevitably feel when taking part in these discussions. So often in situations like these there are moments when he looks deeply aggrieved, and I really can't blame him; the exercise in complete intellectual surrender that is religious belief can sometimes feel like the most atrocious kind of insult, and I don't imagine it's made any easier by the fact that, given his education, his public profile, and the generally accepted norms of politeness and social decency, he is frequently compelled to sit there and listen to apologists spouting ignorant bullshit when he looks like he'd far rather smack them in the mouth and go home.

Fortunately, Dawkins is (as far as I know) above such aggressive retorts, and quite rightly so; as one of the most well-known and outspoken atheists in the world right now, he might do the movement considerable harm if he ended up in a televised fist-fight (although you have to admit that it would be bloody funny to hear those beautifully refined, clipped professorial tones calling out the Archbishop of Canterbury with the phrase, “Come on then, you fucking toilet!”). It got me thinking about Dawkins' position as the “Atheist Pope” (as he is sometimes rather ludicrously referred to in the media) and how he, or indeed anyone of a sufficiently high profile within the godless community, is so frequently used as an incredibly weak plank in the apologists' tired old non-argument about atheism being a religion.

I'm sure it's something that's been addressed many times already, and by many different people (most of whom are way better at getting to the point than I), but every time I hear the cringe-making, vapid awfulness of the phrase, “it takes more faith to be an atheist”, I just want to crawl through my monitor, shimmy down the broadband cable Andy Dufresne style, and beat the theist responsible about the face with a dictionary. The trouble is that I don't think it'll make the slightest difference because, most of the time, the purveyor of such stupidity will be someone who is either wilfully ignorant or completely dishonest. That, however, has never dissuaded me from striving to disabuse theists of this notion by continually undermining their arguments with such pesky things as facts and logic.

“Atheist” simply means “without gods”; if you don't believe in a god of any kind, you're an atheist – end of. It's not, as some theists try to paint it, a “belief in no god” because it's not a belief at all; it is the absence of a belief (in this case, the specific belief that a god, or gods, exist). Not only is it not a belief, but it's not even a “faith-based position” (as has often been claimed) because it is the categorical rejection of a faith-based position; a theist claims that a god, or gods, exist – an atheist simply rejects that claim. Anything else that might get thrown into the argument is completely irrelevant; if you don't believe in a god, you're an atheist. It's that straightforward.

As you can see, dismissing atheism as a belief is laughably easy; dismissing the idea of it being a religion is, well … actually that's a pretty easy thing to do too. First, we need to reach some kind of agreement on the definition of “religion” before we can say whether atheism is one (clue: it isn't). Opinions vary on this point, so I'll start with the definition of religion as found at Dictionary.com:

1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.

3. the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.

So, let's put this bollocks to rest one step at a time, shall we?

a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe …

Atheism says nothing at all about the universe or, in fact, anything other than that one doesn't believe in a god. Big Bang theory, however, does, and so too does creation hypothesis (I refuse to call it a theory on the grounds that it isn't one), but neither of these have anything to do with atheism. Sure an atheist is more likely to agree with big bang theory because it is backed by an enormous weight of supporting evidence, but it's not mandatory. On this point, atheism is not a religion.

especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies

The definition of “god” varies wildly, depending on who you ask. It is, however, fair to say that, any “superhuman agency or agencies” capable of creating the entire sod-mothering universe and everything in it would absolutely fulfil any criteria anyone might have for the definition of a god. Given that atheism is entirely about the lack of a god belief and nothing else, this is a no-brainer; on this point, atheism is not a religion.

usually involving devotional and ritual observances

Ramadan, passover, lent, easter, christmas, yom kippur, hanukah, the list of religious ritual observances is huge. Now, go and find me a single atheistic ritual observance – I'll wait. Actually, bugger it, I won't wait because I can save you the trouble by telling you that you won't find a single one. An individual atheist may observe certain rites and rituals, but there's nothing that we all follow because atheism doesn't dictate such things to us. It doesn't dictate anything. On this point, atheism is not a religion.

and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs

Human morality, ultimately, doesn't come from any doctrine of faith. It may be codified by it (the most obvious example being the ten commandments of the old testament), but to imply the teachings of a given religion are, in any way, the source of morality is completely idiotic. By that logic, no-one had any idea that adultery, theft, or murder were bad things until the bible told them so and that, by removing such teachings from their lives, atheists are utterly devoid of any moral compass. What horse-shit! Skipping over the fact that non-believers represent less than 1% of the US prison population (and what that says about the morality of the faithful), we can go straight to the demonstrable fact that our morals come from our being a social species that depends on one another. It's in our mutual interest to get along and not act like dicks towards everyone else because your ability to survive in a world that has rejected you for behaving like a complete tool will be severely compromised. Atheism dictates no moral code and, on this point, it is absolutely not a religion.

a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects

Have you ever tried to get a bunch of atheists to agree on something? There's a reason it is often referred to as “like herding cats”. When you don't subscribe to any kind of dogma, you are far more dependent on your own thoughts, ideas or opinions, and not those of others – atheism really doesn't lend itself to any kind of religious-style group-think. Since the third definition from Dictionary.com above is merely an extension of the second, we can rule that out here too. On these points, again, atheism is not a religion.

And that's it! Well, almost. Since I'm in a generous mood, and because I'd like the theists reading to think they could still actually win this argument (false hope makes them happy, after all), I'll also throw in the following common aspects of religion, not mentioned in any of the definitions above.

1. built around a central figure

2. a recognised central text

3. notions of, and emphasis on, the profane and the sacred

So, last chance, theists. Place your bets (unless you're a muslim, obviously) …

built around a central figure

I've been accused by friends of often hanging on the words of Richard Dawkins (the initial inspiration for this rant), and pretty much defending anything he ever says, but that really isn't true. I've pointed out a number of times, for example, that I don't agree with his use of the phrase “poisonous religious nonsense”, because that's like saying the same thing three times. I've also pointed out that I don't agree with Christopher Hitchens' stance on the Iraq War, just like I've highlighted areas of disagreement that I have with Sam Harris, or Daniel Dennet, or anyone else for that matter. As I've mentioned, Dawkins has often been referred to as the “Atheist Pope”, but to suggest like this that he is the central figure of atheism is patently absurd. He is simply probably the most well-known high-profile proponent of atheism, of which there are many (I've already mentioned three others), and he is not liked by everyone – do a Google search and I guarantee you'll find plenty of atheists who hate Dawkins, or Hitchens, or anyone else the religious have tried to claim is our “leader”. Atheists may agree with many different people, but they don't line up behind anyone in the same, lemming-like fashion as practised by the religious. On this point, atheism is not a religion.

a recognised central text

To be honest, this is pretty much the same argument as above. “The God Delusion”, “God Is Not Great”, “The End Of Faith” … which of these is our central text? Or is it one of the many thousands of other books written by atheists over the centuries? What about the works of Thomas Paine? The written works of the contemporary, or “new” atheists (many of us despise that term, but that's a rant for another day) have as many supporters as detractors, so tell us, believers, which is the “atheist bible”? The truth is, there isn't one, and you're all just desperate bell-ends for even going down that road … on this point, atheism is not a religion.

notions of, and emphasis on, the profane and the sacred

I refer you to the argument above on the idea of a moral code. Atheism dictates nothing, let alone definitions on what is considered profane or sacred. This is entirely down to the individual, just as it is with a moral code and, like morality, religions merely codified these ideas. Yes, they added a few of their own, such as declaring their respective figures and symbols sacred (or any criticism of them profane), but that was just somewhat akin to a corporation doing what it could to protect its trademarks. What is profane or sacred to you will undoubtedly not be for everyone. On this point, atheism is not a religion.

So, there you have it … I'm not sure who coined the following phrase (I'd love to know), but I've always thought it hit the nail right on the head. I leave you with it now to act as another nail, this time, hopefully, in the coffin of this total non-argument.

If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair colour, and not collecting stamps is a hobby

I warmly thank you all for bearing with me while I told you all about this fascinating pastime …

A Manifesto In A-Minor

May 21st 2011

About two weeks ago I found myself on the receiving end of a minor ticking off from my mum over having used the c-word in a Facebook status update. Ignoring the obvious fact that I'm 37 years old and, if I want to swear, then I bollocking well arsing will, I think I acquitted myself fairly well. I entirely agreed that it is a deeply offensive word to many people (to some, the most offensive) but, ultimately, it is still just a word and, as such, its ability to cause harm or offence rests entirely with how, and by whom, it is used … rather like the bar of soap my mum threatened to wash my mouth out with – it's just a tool, and it can be used for good or evil.

I made the point that, while my updates on Twitter and Facebook may imply otherwise, I was fully aware that swearing is subject to the law of diminishing returns; the more you use it, the less impact and value it has. I've always tried to use language to underscore or support a point, or to create very sharp emphasis; it's also useful for provoking a particular emotional response (whether it's to make someone laugh or to shock them). Regardless of the reasons, I did concede that the immediacy of Facebook and Twitter, and the various limits they impose on message size, can severely blunt the wit, and I had noticeably fallen victim to this; simply calling someone a wanker was often the only option left when one is prevented from writing a long, clever exploration as to exactly why they are one.

Some time later, I was in the office kitchen talking about this to Aerynne, our Kylie-obsessed support diva and card-carrying member of the Wonder Woman fan club. She suggested that I could address this problem by writing a “Statement of Kris-ness” consisting of some of my core ranty principles condensed to handy, bite-sized chunks – a choice collection of statements which best represent me and my opinions, presumably to act as some kind of primer (or warning, if truth be told) for those who have not yet had the privilege of getting to know me. While I liked the idea, I wasn't entirely keen on the name – it sounds a bit too much like “christmas” and, to be fair, I'm not exactly the most festive or jolly of people.

As I started writing it quickly became obvious what the name of this should really be as, in a somewhat small and trivial way, I was creating a manifesto; a statement outlining the fundamental guiding principles of “The Rant Party”. We will probably never be elected – not least because ranting doesn't go over too well in civilised political debate (that and we're a party of one) – but, good people [cue inspiring music], I say to you now that that should never stop us from trying to bring change, and with it hope, to the disillusioned, the disenfranchised, and all of the other people who could be described using words beginning with “dis”.

So, it is with great pride, and an entirely misplaced sense of self-importance, I present to you, “A Manifesto In A-Minor” (for megaphone and soapbox).

There is almost certainly no god and no supernatural

For thousands of years, people have tried, and failed, to demonstrate the existence of god, or any other supernatural entity or phenomenon. Not one single piece of evidence has ever been found that conclusively proves or even, to be fair, heavily supports, any such claims, and almost every argument ever made for these phenomena has been ruthlessly picked apart and left to die after utterly failing to stand up to any kind of proper scrutiny.

Just because it is unexplained, it does not mean it is unexplainable

The religious, and proponents of other types of supernatural woo-woo, frequently seize upon admissions by science that it doesn't know the answer to something as an opportunity to either promote their pet hypotheses (despite invariably being less plausible and less supported by evidence), or to declare by fiat that it is forever beyond our ability to understand. You know, like eclipses were a couple of thousand years ago? There is nothing that cannot, eventually, be explained to a reasonable degree through the application of the scientific method and the accumulation of evidence.

Disbelief is the default position

If you think that one should believe a claim until it is proven false, I invite you to hold unquestioning faith in the cosmic purple hippo that lives in my flat. He can't be seen, heard, touched, or in any way observed or demonstrated to actually exist, but your own logic compels you to believe in the hippo until someone can comprehensively refute my claim. Seriously, don't be silly; believing until it is proven unjustified is insane.

Belief in something for which there is no evidence is NOT a virtue

How is it that when a man believes in god, miracles, resurrection, and an eternal afterlife, it is seen as a virtue, yet, when a man believes that space bats have planted mind-controlling brain worms in his skull it is seen as a mental illness? What's the difference? Both beliefs are equally without foundation, and the only word that should really be used to described either man is not virtuous, but credulous.

It's up to you to prove your claim to me – it's not my job to disprove it to you

The burden of proof lies with the one making the claim, so I don't want to hear any of this “prove god doesn't exist” shit. You're the one claiming that a god exists – I'm simply telling you that, if you want us to believe you, or even take you seriously, it's up to you to convince us. It is not a case that the accused will go to jail unless his defence proves his innocence; it is that he will go free unless a prosecutor can prove his guilt because the claim, and the burden of proof, rests with them.

Evidence: bring some with your claim, or fuck off

Unless you're prepared to back it up with actual, testable, repeatable, falsifiable evidence, you have no right whatsoever to expect me to believe anything you tell me. Even if I've known you forever and trust you implicitly, the best you can reasonably expect is that I am more likely to believe you based on my experience of what I know about you, and how reliable I consider you to be. Oh, and personal testimony or anecdotes are NOT evidence, because they're subjective, unreliable, and heavily prone to bias.

Except when used in a scientific context, those who talk about “energy” can be ignored, and their opinions on almost everything dismissed

Unless you understand the meaning and correct usage of scientific words and phrases then you need to stop using them, especially as part of dishonest attempts to legitimise your favourite brand of nonsense by making it sound scientific. “Positive energy”, “quantum healing”? What the fuck are you talking about? Oh, and you can stop using them as synonyms for whatever thing you believe in as well. Saying that “god is energy” is as vapid as it is wrong.

People who rail against science should be forced to live like those who existed before the development of the scientific method

No one is saying that science is perfect, or that it always gets it right, but you must remember that, when it does fail, it'll almost always be the scientist, not the science, that's at fault. The method itself is pretty sound and, over the last 900 years, has proven to be the most reliable way of determining fact from fiction that we've ever devised. Without it, your estimated life-span would be a THIRD of what it is now, so remember that the next time you slag off science for contradicting your beliefs.

What consenting adults do in private is none of your fucking business

Yeah, here's how the world works, okay? We are all perfectly within our rights to do whatever the fuck we want. As long as our actions do not cause harm to, or impinge upon the personal freedoms of, another human being, you don't have any right to prevent us from smoking, drinking, reading, snorting, swallowing, watching, injecting, fucking, writing whatever, whenever, wherever, with whoever. So your all-loving hypocrite god hates gays? So what? We don't care because no-one is being harmed, and we don't recognise his, or your, authority.

You have ONE religious right; to believe freely, without fear of discrimination

You don't have the right to tell us how to lead our lives, who we can marry, what someone can and can't do with their body, what we can read, write, say, or even think. You don't have the right to bully others and then hide behind your faith pleading discrimination when someone calls you on your bullshit. You don't get to fleece the credulous, abuse the vulnerable, or give false hope to the desperate and then claim some special “get out of jail” privilege when we start demanding answers. You don't have the right to threaten us with eternal torture for not being part of your club. You don't have the right to impede and debase the scientific enterprise because it's creating fewer and fewer places for your invisible man to hide in.

Well, that was the first performance of “A Manifesto In A-Minor” … I hope it was okay, although I expect it will be updated, revised, and re-arranged many times before we finally end up with a definitive symphony of reason. Either that, or it'll just get louder until people have no choice but to listen …

Whoops, apocalypse!

May 27th 2011

If I had to be honest I should probably say that I wasn't the least bit disappointed when I woke up last Sunday morning to find that the rapture Harold Camping had promised, nay guaranteed, hadn't actually materialised. It's not because I felt a sense of relief that his prediction of impending armageddon turned out to be total bollocks, and I know that I really should have been annoyed at the failure of the world's supply of gullible nitwits to mysteriously disappear while I slept (in much the same way their critical thinking skills had vanished the moment each of them they joined that ridiculous club). The truth is, however, that I wasn't disappointed because I was too busy trying to decide whether to laugh or cry.

Prophecies foretelling the end of the world have always struck me as being both funny and tragic in equal measure. For a start, none of them ever really address the issue of what, specifically, they mean by “world”; it's such a broad term that it's virtually meaningless when you use it in this way, I mean, what is actually coming to an end here. They never say and, when you're dealing with something as important sounding as “the end of the world”, you'd think these prognosticating dickheads would bother to at least get the details right.

Is it that the planet is going to be hit by an earth-smashing, extinction-flavoured comet, or will it simply explode when it can no longer deal with the shame of being the primary residence of the jaunty-haired, talent-dodging, song-murdering, oxygen thieves known only as Jedward? (their secondary residence, by the way, is the alternate dimension in which, according to rumour, they actually matter to someone). Or is it that society, or civilisation, is about to be ruthlessly terminated by some unspecified means? And, if so, whose society or civilisation exactly?

The christian concept of “rapture” is rare in that does at least provide some details, but that doesn't change the fact that the idea of prophecy is, on the whole, pretty bloody stupid. Most are set far enough into the future to ensure that the prophet responsible will be too dead to get called out when it is eventually discovered that he was talking shite, and many prophecies are frequently reinterpreted after the fact in a desperate attempt on the part of those who championed them to make it look like they were fulfilled. Look at the fantastic leaps of pure arse-backwards reasoning and lingual gymnastics that fans of Nostrodamus will engage in just to be able to claim that the demented French twat predicted 9/11 (it's always interesting to note how these smug arseholes are never there with printouts of his “spookily accurate” predictions before the event; you know, when it could actually have done some good).

And that's kind of the point, isn't it? If it's true that hindsight is 20/20 then foresight must, therefore, be as blind as a fucking bat, which would certainly explain the paucity of actual detail in your average work-a-day prophecy. The rapture, as I've already mentioned, however, is a slightly different beast. It tells us that the faithful will be called up to heaven, leaving the rest of us to spend our remaining days on a planet that's crumbling like a cake made entirely out of sand and religious promises before we're all completely swallowed up in the ultimate supernatural boss fight.

This blood-soaked tale of the apocalypse would be bad enough, but the whole thing is made a good deal worse by the fact that so many people believe it, and they do so purely on the word of the most insanely violent and psychedelically mental book of the bible. That many christians actually look forward to the rapture, and derive great joy from the knowledge that they'll be taken up (of course they will, they're special!) while all the apostates and other varieties of heathen will be suffering eternal torment simply shows just how grotesque religious faith can be, and how ordinary, decent people can be driven to believe such disgustingly inhumane ideas by those with a vested interest in scaring the living hell into people.

To say that these “prophets of doom” are full of shit would be generous; delusional, monstrous, opportunistic frauds would be a much better description and, yes, I'm including this week's favourite soul-soliciting, money-grubbing, douchebag of a con-man Harold Camping in that too. It's no coincidence that proclamations such as these are almost always made by people who stand to gain directly (often financially) from the subsequent reaction – just look at what happens when someone like Camping announces the rapture; church attendances go up, the collection plates get heavier, and the donations to pay for billboards and adverts to warn the faithful flood in.

It's on this point that the veneer of funny starts to wear a little thin, but I shall return to that in a moment as there are still one or two nuggets of rapture-related comedy gold left. It's hilarious, for example, to watch the furious back-pedalling of idiots like Camping when they're called upon to actually answer for the fact that their claims fell apart quicker than a flat-pack wardrobe with a missing screw (apparently it was an “invisible” rapture and we have, in fact, been judged, but we won't know what's happening until the rapture proper on October 21st … this technically makes Harold Camping the first person ever to turn the extinction of all life on planet earth into the theological equivalent of “The X-Factor” results show).

The funniest part of this whole non-catastrophe is to see christians mocking Camping for his predictions without any sense of irony or self-awareness whatsoever. “Ah”, they say, “but the bible says that only god will know when the rapture is coming”. So fucking what? You still believe in the exact same stupid, disgusting nonsense, you arsehole, it's just that the zombie understudy that is Harold Camping went and stuck an actual bloody date on it. You still all believe that you're so fucking awesome for choosing the right faith (when most of you are only christian because you were born white and in the western hemisphere) and that, when you croak, you're going to a magical happy land while the rest of us get tortured forever. Your beliefs are arrogant, selfish, discriminatory, ego-centric, inherently violent, and almost certainly wrong because the evidence that supports them is rather like the brain in Paris Hilton's head; it simply isn't there.

As I alluded to earlier, this ability to believe without question has a dark side that events such as those of this past week are very good at bringing to the fore. Like a raving nutter with a blunderbuss taking pot shots at a hot air balloon, blind faith and devotion can often leave you clinging to the inside of a basket, screaming in terror as that which had previously held you aloft and supported you on your journey suddenly drops out from beneath your feet and you plummet towards the ground with predictably tragic consequences.

For example, there's Robert Fitzpatrick, who spent $140,000 of his life savings to pay for rapture advertisements. Then, there's Lyn Benedetto who tried to kill her children so that they wouldn't have to suffer through the tribulation. And finally, there was the man who committed suicide by crucifying himself in an abandoned quarry. These are just three of a seemingly endless supply of increasingly horrible incidents that demonstrate just how religion causes people to disconnect from their critical thinking faculties, and subsequently disengage from reality. You can talk all you want about the good that religious belief can often do, but you cannot ignore the fact that, christianity, like many religions (particular the monotheisms), is a death cult.

Everything about it revolves around death, pain, and suffering to the point where it actually celebrates these things (it positively revels in them in some cases). To a christian, the festival of Easter is about the death of their cult leader – naturally, they claim it's about his resurrection and ascendency to heaven but, let's be honest here, you can't have someone return to life if they haven't first been brutally killed to bits. You need go no further than the crucifixion of Jesus to highlight just how obsessed christianity is with the notion of death. The primary symbol chosen to represent their faith is that of a dead Jew hanging from the tree he'd been viciously nailed to – how fucking sick is that? These people actually regard what must be the most famous murder-suicide in history as the single noblest gesture anyone has ever made (despite the fact that you can only forgive someone of sins they committed against you, not others, and it's hardly a sacrifice to get yourself killed if you're the physical incarnation of a god and know you'll be resurrected anyway).

Faith like this drives all of its adherents towards death with a sense of purpose that is as perverse as it is worrying. they're taught to believe from a young age that our lives don't truly begin until after we're dead, and that everything we do here on earth should be about working towards securing our places in the hereafter. Their holy book is replete with stories involving murder, genocide, rape, torture, and a plethora of other atrocities that are so often described as good or just or noble, simply because their sky pixie commanded or endorsed them. If the christian bible is in any way accurate in its depiction of their god, then their god is a fucking sociopath. What does that say about the christians who worship him?

The rapture is probably the biggest sultana in this death cult fruit-cake, and a perfect example of the point I'm trying to make. The faithful are taught to believe beyond any doubt that this is the single greatest thing that can ever happen to them – the ultimate goal in the life of any christian is, in essence, to die so that they can go and meet Jesus. So how is it that, whenever we hear news stories about a group of people who are utterly devoted to a charismatic cult figure and are ready, and willing, to die in his name, for his honour, and at his command in order that they might achieve the immortality he has promised them, they only ever feature groups like Heaven's Gate, the Branch Davidians, or even Al-Qaeda?

When May 21st came and went, many christians were apparently baffled that they were still here; so secure were they in their belief that, one day, they would be ferried up to heaven as their recycled Hebrew soap-opera had always promised, and that Saturday was that day because a radio preacher had said so, they simply couldn't comprehend how it could possibly be wrong. It's such a shame because there's really no need for any of it and, if you are one of those perplexed and anxious Jesus-folk, I can help you … it's really simple … all you have to do is kill your god.

Dictionary.com describes “rapture” as:

ecstatic joy or delight; joyful ecstasy.

I can think of no greater joy than the feeling of having pulled yourself out from under the tyranny of a god that wants you dead. There is no ecstasy quite like the one we can all experience when we are able to think freely, and to live without the fear or confusion that comes with a nonsensical belief in the supposed “virtue” of living to die. And surely there can be no higher reward, no greater delight, than to actually spend your life living …

I'll tell you what … my rapture is SO much better than yours …

Praying away the straight

June 4th 2011

Given the crazy, topsy-turvy kind of world we seem to be living in these days it's hardly surprising that it sometimes feels like it's impossible to get through a whole month, often barely even a week, without hearing yet another story about how the rights of religious people are being trampled (usually by some politically-correct do-gooder with an agenda). From adoption agencies to bed and breakfasts, the religious in general, and christians in particular, are being persecuted for their beliefs; in some instances, they are even legally prevented from exercising some of the fundamental tenets of their faith. Oh, sorry, actually, what I meant to say was that pious, sanctimonious arseholes are bitching like little girls about being told that they need to quit being intolerant, homophobic pricks.

You see, my dear delusional faith-heads, I don't know whether you were aware of this, but the rest of the world came to a consensus long ago that the racists, sexists, and homophobes (a large quantity of whom you can find in your special club) were, in fact, the bad guys. Did you know that? Did you miss that meeting? I only ask because the way you've been behaving for the last millennium or two seems to suggest that you did or, at least, you were there but you simply don't give a flying fuck about anyone but yourselves and your psychotic bully of an imaginary friend. If that's the case, allow me to fill you in on what you missed (and if you still don't get it, allow me simply to fill you in).

Before I go any further with this, though, it's only right that I should fully declare my interests up front; I am a 37-year old bisexual man who has never seen gender as being any kind of an issue when it comes to my relationships. I like who I like, and I love who I love, regardless of what shape their bits are. For a good number of years now I have been living with my boyfriend, Raven, who, to make life all-the-more interesting (and complicated – go figure) suffers from Gender Dysphoria. In layman's terms, Raven is transgender, FTM (female-to-male), as it happens. I don't go out of my way to talk about my personal life so, while none of this is any kind of secret (especially to family and close friends), it might not be common knowledge to colleagues and acquaintances. It's not intentional, it just never came up naturally in conversation!

As far as I can recall, I've never really been on the receiving end of any bigotry or bullying that was centred around my sexuality (and, to the best of my knowledge, neither has Raven), but that's not to say I've lived a charmed existence; I used to get the shit kicked out of me with monotonous regularity when I was at school, but that was largely because I was our year's resident brain-box and designated specky twat (in 1983, reading books and owning a computer were considered reasonable grounds for bestowing a frequent pummelling on someone). Not having ever experienced homophobia directly is a fact I attribute to growing up with fairly liberal-minded, tolerant parents in tandem with my development at a young age of the exceedingly cunning survival technique of not actually telling anyone that I liked boys as well as girls. It's not that I was ashamed of my sexuality, it was more that it was almost irrelevant – it didn't matter; as far as I was concerned, if I brought a boy home one day, we could discuss it then.

In terms of my exposure to homophobia, I've only ever really had it in a kind of indirect way through comments made about others over the years by my dad. Although he's mostly a tolerant and laid back sort of guy, he always seemed to have, lurking just under the surface, a general distrust and distaste for the gay community. At no point have I ever ascribed this to malice or hatred (he's certainly not about to go out and join the Westboro Baptist Church), but to the fact that he grew up in different circumstances and in a different generation. He has often said over the years that he has tried to get rid of his prejudices and, for the most part, he has succeeded – he still has a little way to go, to be fair, I mean he has yet to work out that Jim Davidson is a vile little scumball who oozes misogynistic and homophobic bigotry from every pore (in addition to being arse-wipingly unfunny), and he still needs to expunge the words “shirt-lifter” and “woofter” from his conversational vocabulary, but he's not a bad guy by any means … he's just a little antiquated.

When it comes to homosexuality, and the attitudes of people towards it, nothing, however, fosters a greater sense of ignorance, hatred, and rabid, venom-spewing intolerance than religion. Nothing inspires such disgusting levels of bullying and violence towards the gay community than the supposed love, peace, and togetherness you find being preached by the holy men of the major faiths. If you're lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, you will invariably find that those who are most responsible for you having been victimised, singled-out, or oppressed at any time in your life will likely have come cloaked in hypocrisy and carrying a bible. I'm not saying that the faithless can't be nasty little bigots, of course they can, it's just far less common because they, after all, don't have some bronze-age story book to drive them or a god to hide behind.

Religion's big problem with “the gay” seems rooted in the fact that religion is, and always has been, seriously obsessed with sex. Look at how many of a given faith's tenets focus on sex, reproductive rights, and what you can and can't do with your body (especially the bits that wobble). The purpose of power is to maintain that power and, possibly, achieve greater power; religion follows this model in that its primary goal is to perpetuate itself – religion makes money, shit-loads of money, and it has power, metric fuck-tons of power, and it got to where it is today by selling people the promise of a product it can't ever deliver. If the faithful ever figure out that they're paying for false hope and bullshit, the game is up and religions would be screwed.

So, the obvious solution is to stop people ever asking the questions that could lead them down that path. If you take away the desire, the actual will to learn more, a person's curiosity will be dead long before it can ever be satisfied, and the best time to make this happen is when that person is young. Remember the Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”? Religion spends a huge amount of its energy focusing on children because their minds are vulnerable to suggestion and easily swayed by authority – if you can strip them of their reasoning ability early, you've got them for life. This is, in effect, chapter 2 of “Fusing My Religion: How To Build And Grow Your Very Own Cult!” (with a foreword by L. Ron Hubbard), so let's go back to chapter 1, the obsession with sex, and the urge to control it.

For any business whose survival is built around forging, and maintaining, long-term customer relationships, the most annoying problem is that its customers have a tendency, eventually, to die. To prevent your customer base from dwindling over time to zero, you need to at least replace every one you lose and, as the tobacco and faith industries will tell you, the young are where it's at. It's also where religion has it's greatest advantage over other businesses, because it has the freedom to tell people how to live their lives and, astonishingly, people actually listen and obey. You want more young customers to replace your dying older ones? Simple, get more young people by telling your flock to “go forth and multiply”, and back it up with a few bits of scripture … do you see where this is going?

If a religion controls reproduction and sex amongst the faithful, it exerts an incredible and direct influence over its present and future customers and, more importantly, the continuing revenue-stream they represent. It's purely a numbers game, and the religion with the most adherents wins; if you can out-breed the faith next door, it doesn't matter how good their sales pitch is, or how much eternity of good stuff they promise you, they're going to have their arses handed to them. Former leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, was once quoted as saying that his greatest weapon was the womb of the Arab woman; the Quiverfull movement is a branch of christianity that essentially preaches the notion that women exist purely for procreation (their most well-known proponents, the Duggar family, have 19 children and counting).

More babies equals more followers, so religions will throw out contraception, abortion, and the idea of sex for anything other than producing more Jesus-spawn. Even though they could conceivably (no pun intended) result in more children, pre-marital and extra-marital sex are off the table because these happen outside of “holy matrimony”, i.e., outside of a god-sanctioned framework and, therefore, outside the sphere of influence of the church. Right from day one, religion has dictated the motive, means, and method for sex amongst its members (again, no pun intended), and nowhere is this more obvious than how it treats women and their role in life; they're for breeding, pure and simple, and they have no sexual or reproductive rights whatsoever. It's not your body, sweetheart, it belongs to your man, so shut up, lie down, obey your god, and let your man use you in the name of Jesus.

Homosexuality is the biggest fly in religion's baby ointment, because it usually doesn't result in any children, and that's why so many faiths have such a massive problem with it. There have always been other considerations, other reasons why people have a problem with homosexuality, but these have generally been individual or cultural. To some people it's just plain icky, but that doesn't mean fuck all apart from the fact that you're straight. If you're biologically hard-wired to like members of the opposite sex, you're bound to find the idea of same-sex relationships a bit icky! Similarly, some cultures are a-ok with the gay, and others not so much, but this has varied wildly throughout history. Isaac Newton, for example, was far more worried about being exposed as an alchemist than he was of people discovering he was seeing a nice Italian gentleman. Fifty years ago, it would have been the other way around.

When faith gets its hate on for something, it gets it on big-style, and it gets it on old-school, and there are some horrifying examples of the religious persecution of homosexuals. There are more than 70 countries where same-sex activity is illegal; in 7 of them the death penalty may be applied, and I'll guarantee you that in pretty much every one of those 70 countries that the law has both a religious underpinning, and a religious agenda that prevents it from being repealed. This, by itself, should be enough, but it doesn't just end with how a country treats homosexuals – in many developed, Western nations, where same-sex activity is both legal and supported (to an extent) with certain rights under the law, there are still plenty of cases of members of the LGBT community being attacked or bullied for being who they are. While the tragic case of Matthew Shepard, who was robbed, beaten, tortured and left to die, was not specifically religiously motivated one cannot ignore the part that religion likely played in helping to define his murderers' attitudes and opinions of gays.

The biggest problem religion faces with homosexuality these days is when it happens to one of their own. As the world becomes more accepting of the gay lifestyle, and coming out is far less likely to end one's career or destroy one's family, LGBT theists are finding it easier than before to speak out because they no longer have to deal with society as a whole, rather just the small segment of it that represents their sky-fairy worship club of choice. For the club, this is a massive pain in the arse; “how can it be that this person who we all thought was good and right with god has turned out to be a fag or a dyke?” After they've gone through the usual rigmarole of blaming culture and a society drenched in violence and porn (by the way, please donate to help us fight this evil!) they're still left with the problem of having a parishioner around who likes life to be pink and rainbows.

It was then they struck upon the idea of conversion therapy. That's right, you can pray the gay away and be the red-blooded, baby-wanting, god-loving straight man or woman the lord wants you to be (and will torture you forever if you don't). I'd heard of this particular brand of abuse some time ago, but it was Patrick Strudwick's recent article in The Guardian that inspired this week's post. Strudwick went undercover to expose psychiatrists and other therapists who offer conversion services and claim that homosexuality can be “cured” as if it were some kind of disease of the mind (this in spite of the fact it was long ago removed from the DSM as being any kind of psychiatric disorder). And what was the exact nature of these kinds of therapy? Yup, you're way ahead of me, they were very much religiously-based.

With the exception of people like Patrick Strudwick or Ted Cox (whose “My Journey Into Manhood: Undercover at a Gay Conversion Camp” is very much worth reading), everyone who goes in for these therapies is doing so as an obvious victim of abuse, but not of the kind that Strudwick's therapist tried to imply. The abuse here is that of having grown up in a faith that hammered into someone from a young age the idea that homosexuality is wrong, that it is unnatural, and it is evil. At some point in their crucial, formative years these poor sods are not only having to discover themselves and their sexuality, but they're suddenly confronted with a dilemma and are forced to choose between who they truly are as a person, and who their faith tells them they should be. Sadly, faith tends to win out in the short term and, since you can't ultimately hide from who you are, this problem never goes away.

This is why, in a way, I kind of feel sorry for Ted Haggard. Yes it was funny for a while to see such a pious, bible-thumping hypocrite get exposed, but in the end it's quite hard to hate the man because, to a certain extent, it's not his fault; this is how he was raised. Haggard would have had it drilled in to him (oo-er, steady!) his whole life that being gay was an abominable sin to such a degree that he would have come to believe it enough to preach the same appalling message from his own pulpit. The terrible dichotomy of who you are versus who your god says you should be is what would have driven Haggard to a gay prostitute and a meth habit. Even the implosion of the world around him when he was exposed wasn't enough to shake his faith; it's grip is still so tight that he ended up in conversion therapy, after which his wife proudly announced that he was “completely heterosexual”.

This is the icing on the cake when it comes to religion's disgusting attitude towards alternative sexualities. It hates people for what they are, makes them feel ashamed, dirty, wrong, unnatural, and then has the audacity to say that it can change them into better people; “you can be more like us, right, godly, holy, and straight!”. If you play along, you sacrifice the quintessential aspect of who you are as a loving being for the illusion of love offered by a corporation that needs you to produce the next generation of its customers. If you refuse and stick resolutely to being true to yourself, you're an outcast, you're sick, and they will do everything in their power to hurt you; they'll fight changes in the law to stop you getting married, or adopting children, or even exercising your love for another human being.

To every person who has ever individually, or as part of a wider group, especially a religion, oppressed anyone over their sexuality I say simply this: how fucking dare you? Who the fuck do you think you are treating people like this? Who the fuck are you to tell people who they can and can't love? How dare you tell any consenting adult, who harms no-one by his or her actions, that they can't be in love with someone because they're the same gender? How dare you wield your power and influence to change laws in order that you might further restrict the rights and freedoms of people just because you don't like who they fuck? How dare you tell anyone that they are sinful, unnatural, wicked, and wrong? Who the fuck are you to threaten someone with eternal torture for daring to love another human being? What, or who, gives you the fucking right to tell… ah, yes, of course.

That's right, it's not you doing this, it's god. It's not you that thinks faggots, dykes, queers and trannies are sick and evil, no, not at all … it's that almighty nothing you worship that hates us, and you're just obeying his will, like the sycophantic, toadying little bitches you are. Yeah? Well, I've got news for you Jesus-sucking, holy spirit-swallowing, god-fuckers – it's not us who are sick and wrong, it's you. It's your petty, disgusting prejudices that make you treat the rest of us like shit and, because you know, deep-down, in the depths of your shrivelled, black little fucking hearts that you're wrong, you turn to the invisible man you invented to justify and reinforce your nasty, perverted hatred.

Admit it; you're wrong, and you know you are. Admit that you don't have a leg to stand on in this argument. Admit that you don't have any evidence that your god even exists, let alone that he takes an interest in what any of us do with our genitals or who we let play with them …

Stop hiding behind your bibles and your qu'rans, you fucking cowards. Stop telling other people who they can fuck and, instead, do the rest of us a favour and go fuck yourselves …

Measles, McCarthy, and Reason

June 11th 2011

Every one of us has, at some point in our lives, met someone truly deserving of the label, “gobshite”; someone who, rather like a geography teacher, could speak at great length about nothing in particular. The kind of person who could bang on for hours, like a carpenter with OCD, and never say anything worth listening to. For the most part, we simply tolerate their seemingly limitless capacity for verbal diarrhoea and see it as little more than a minor annoyance – the kind of grating personality trait that we all have and others learn to work around. Occasionally, however, we'd meet a prolific purveyor of bovine faeces that cannot be ignored because they've strayed far beyond the realms of the irritatingly harmless and into the territory of the positively lethal; someone who can talk themselves, and those around them, into deep trouble with consummate ease. The kind of person to whom you find yourself saying “seriously, dude, you need to shut the fuck up” far too often. If you want a classic example of the “dangerous gobshite”, look no further than Jenny McCarthy.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Miss McCarthy, she is a former Playboy Playmate, author, former girlfriend of Jim Carrey, and a multi-Razzie award winning actress in such culturally significant works as “Scream 3” and “The Stupids”. She is also a two-times recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine and, as such, has written books promulgating lies about the supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism in children, as well as appearing on talk shows to promulgate lies about the supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism in children (it should also be noted that she used the talk shows as a platform to promote her books which, as I've said, promulgate lies about the supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism in children).

While I'm happy to admit that I may have made up the thing about the Nobel Prize, I do so while stressing that the rest of what I said was true; Jenny McCarthy is a fountain of misinformation and outright lies regarding the supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism in children. My lie about the Nobel Prize was a way of highlighting the difference between an untruth that, in reality, harms no-one, and the kind of falsehoods that Jenny McCarthy insists on perpetuating, i.e., those that are not only harmful, but potentially deadly. That, and I figured that my talking complete bullshit with absolutely nothing to base it on would help the former Playboy epidemiologist feel like she was in good company.

Insofar as the link between the MMR vaccine and autism goes, there is no debate. There never was. Andrew Wakefield's research, which was responsible for sparking this cluster-fuck back when it was first published in The Lancet in 1998, was seen, even at the time, by many professionals to be deeply flawed. A study group of just 12 children should, by itself, be enough to dismiss the findings (given that the sample size is far too small to be considered relevant) but, when you factor in that medical concerns regarding the vaccine were raised before the children were given it, and most of the test group weren't even autistic anyway, you realise that the whole thing should have been treated with the laughable contempt it deserves instead of being allowed to get this far.

That it did actually manage to get this far can be blamed, firstly, on the fact that Wakefield diddled the data to fit the conclusion he had already decided he wanted. An investigation by Brian Deer showed that there was an obvious financial agenda at work, and that Wakefield and his colleagues happily cast proper procedure and demonstrable facts to the wind in the pursuit of Nobel Prize fame and fortune. Next up on the wheel of blame are the media who, when given a story that has the extremely emotive combination of children and illness, coupled with the ability to point a finger at an obvious villain (in this case evil scientists who want to damage your children for drug company profits), will take whatever flimsy non-facts they have and run with them until their feet bleed. It doesn't matter that the data is bullshit because, well, this is all about sick kiddies, damn it!

As soon as this kind of juggernaut has been set in motion, the panic escalates to a point where it becomes almost unstoppable, and the small amount of time Wakefield had bought by presenting baseless findings with a thin veneer of credibility meant that, once the real professionals came out and start declaring it bollocks, sufficient outrage had been built up to ensure that they looked defensive, and that there just might be a tiny grain of truth to the implication that doctors were putting profit before public health. No matter how much evidence could be gathered to refute the claims, the damage had been done and parents all over the world began waiting anxiously for the first close-to-home report that confirmed their deepest fears. Sadly, for a credulous, pop culture-obsessed population, a celebrity anecdote would do the trick just as well.

Although surgeon general McCarthy isn't particularly well known here in the UK, she has helped maintain the momentum of Wakefield and the media's speeding truck-load of horse manure through her position as the designated figurehead (and empty head) of the gloriously self-righteous, “Won't someone please think of the children!”, anti-vaccination movement in the US. This group of grossly ill-informed, crusading jackasses seem to be blissfully unaware that they will likely kill, or at least cause massive harm to, the very children they claim to be protecting by way of their totally wrong-headed and insanely paedocidial campaign of misinformation. And, while the most respected neurologist from “Santa Baby 2: Christmas Maybe” is, as I said, less well-known in the UK, the exposure she has brought to the anti-vaccination lobby in the US has certainly benefited their partners in medical idiocy on this side of the pond.

I've used the word “lies” to describe the misinformation propagated by McCarthy (emeritus professor of genetics on the set of “John Tucker Must Die”) and the other fucktards in the anti-vaxx brigade, and I do so with very good reason; they are completely lacking in any kind of supporting evidence. Autism, along with many other associated disorders on the spectrum (such as Aspergers Syndrome), occurs overwhelmingly in boys; around 80% of autistics are male, indicating that it has an undeniable underlying genetic cause (current evidence points to a fault in the X-chromosome). You could pump your kid full of every vaccine or drug on earth, line the walls of their nursery with complex maths problems, and sit them down in front of “Rain Man” on an endless loop from the very second they emerge from the womb, and you still won't trigger autism, no matter what these morons claim.

In addition, Dr. Tits McGee contends that autism can be cured, which is like saying that you can cure someone of being black, and that the best method for doing this is chelation therapy. This process is rather like chemotherapy in that it involves stuffing the patient full of nasty poisonous shit and hoping that it kills the problem before it kills the patient (with chelation it's a case of hedging your bets on the treatment doing its thing before the patient has a stroke or a heart attack). McCarthy claimed this was able to cure her son, but experts apparently noted that he was probably suffering from Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in children which is often misdiagnosed as autism. By the way, if you have a problem with my referring to Jenny McCarthy as “Tits McGee”, remember that her field of special expertise is not medicine but exposing herself for money. Just saying.

The tragic upshot of this constant stream of so-called celebrities proffering medical advice when they are criminally unqualified to do so, is that the children of parents who follow it (when they really ought to know better) are at a considerably increased risk of contracting life-threatening diseases that their unprepared immune systems will be unable to fight off. The BBC recently reported that the Health Protection Agency in the UK is pleading with people to vaccinate their children against measles after seeing an alarming ten-fold spike in the number of reported cases of the potentially fatal viral illness. Other nations too are facing a similar problem, with France, Belgium, Germany, and a number of Scandinavian countries all reporting large increases in cases of measles infection.

For the first few years of their lives children rely on herd immunity to protect them against illnesses that they are too young to be vaccinated against. This is somewhat analogous to putting a baby in the middle of a large crowd of people to protect them from the murderous advances of an axe-wielding maniac. The child couldn't possibly defend itself against a Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger on their own, so the crowd acts as a buffer to prevent the danger from getting too close. If you start reducing the size of the crowd, the threat increases dramatically as safety becomes dangerously compromised. Roughly 95% of a community needs to be inoculated in order for herd immunity to work successfully – at present, we're around 92-93%. If, as a parent, you decide not to immunise your kid, remember that it's not just them you're putting at risk – you're endangering everyone.

Save The Children announced this week that the lives of four million children could be saved if only governments would do more to help vaccination programmes, as well as educating people in some of the poorer nations as to why they need to cast off their suspicions about “western medicine” in order that they might save the lives of their children. But what about educating people here in the west? What's our excuse for ignorance and suspicion? For some, it's the ludicrous belief that the big pharmaceutical companies are engaged in a conspiracy to sell vaccines we don't need in order to stupefy our children and boost profits. While I won't deny that these corporations are, like all others, in the business of making money, they wouldn't be in such a business for very long if the products they were selling simply didn't work.

Science hinges entirely on its ability to get results; if something doesn't work then it's worthless and, over the last three centuries, vaccines have demonstrated time and time again that they work (and they have mountains of evidence to prove it). Think of all the diseases, once considered fatal, that have been rendered virtually harmless or, in some cases, wiped out altogether; smallpox, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis, when did you, as presumably someone who lives in the developed world, last know of anyone who even contracted one of these diseases, let alone died from one? Nowadays you would have to look to your grandparents, or even your great-grandparents, to find stories of people with polio (for example), and you have vaccines, and the scientists who worked tirelessly to develop them, to thank for that.

No endeavour is entirely without risk, and it would be dishonest of me to suggest that vaccines don't come with possible side-effects. But, when the chances of having your child die from an easily preventable illness can be as low as one in twenty, compared to something in the region of one in several hundred million for a fatal, vaccine-related side-effect, the choice is blindingly obvious; give your kid the fucking shot. “B..b..but it causes autism!” NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T! The weight of scientific evidence is absolutely against you on this, and I don't give a rat's bollock what Jenny McCarthy says about it either. When you start rejecting medical advice from people who have spent decades specialising in their particular field and instead take it from a self-important, deluded stripper who once fucked Ace Ventura, you should not be allowed to make medical decisions on behalf of a child.

I sometimes wonder whether a lot of the hostility that some parents of autistic children seem to harbour towards medical science in general, and vaccines in particular, stems from a deeply selfish urge to blame someone for the fact that their kid didn't turn out the way they wanted. When someone tells you that you're never going to have the kind of emotional connection with your child that all other parents have with theirs, your first response could very well be to think only of yourself; how it's not fair on you, how you will have to work really hard to look after them, how you have been robbed of that bond … someone must be blamed, and someone must pay!

If you've ever been in that position, all I can say is get over yourselves, you selfish pricks. Yeah, it might be tough on you, but it's even tougher on the kid because he has to deal with your bullshit in addition to his own problems. Not only that, but he'll probably have to cope with you refusing to protect him against potentially lethal diseases because you're too busy blaming some completely unconnected vaccine to give a fuck about his health and well-being.

Pull your head out of your arse, and start looking after your child. Stop looking at your autistic kid as a mistake or as something to find a scapegoat for, and instead try to engage your sense of joy and wonder at having a child who will never have to learn how to lie about liking that horrible sweater they got for christmas, or how to nod and smile politely when trapped in social situations with someone who won't stop talking crap.

Oh, and speaking of which, Jenny McCarthy – seriously, you need to shut the fuck up, you dangerous gobshite …

Prince Asperger

June 25th 2011

A couple of weeks ago, Raves, myself, and our good friend Matt (aka, “The Fury”) were in the kitchen making some kind of an attempt at dinner (I don't remember what, exactly, but it was probably a curry) when we found ourselves casually exploring how different the game “Prince of Persia” (the 2008 version for the PS3) would be if the main character had, like Raves, been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. Aside from the obvious exceptions of the Prince intently focusing on light seed collection, exploring every last crevice of the map, and being much more like a sarcastic teenager with an attitude problem (instead of just talking like one), we concluded the differences probably wouldn't be all that great. When Raves referred to this alternate vision of the game as “Prince Asperger” he didn't realise he'd given me both the title and topic for my next blog post; to be fair, it's about time I addressed this subject because, if I'm honest, Raves often drives me absolutely fucking mental.

If you've never met, lived with, or had to otherwise deal with an “aspie” (as Raves, and other sufferers, sometimes refer to themselves), let me try to give you an idea of what it's like. Imagine a teenage boy, let's say about 15 years old. Now, before you imagine anything else you need to stop imagining that – seriously, pack it in or you'll end up on a register! Instead of mentally flirting with an electronic ankle-tag, imagine this teenager is fairly typical for his age; stroppy, inflexible, socially inappropriate, and largely oblivious to the problems of others, while at the same time being an intelligent, “visual” thinker who, curiously, craves routine, and can sometimes be filled with enough Sylvia Plath and Joy Division (to quote Jeremy Hardy) to make Hamlet look like a whinging sod. If you're a parent you'll probably know exactly what this teenager is like because you'll have had one of your own, but there's one final thing I need you to imagine … that the little bastard never grows up.

In my experience, Asperger Syndrome is not as easy to spot as other autism spectrum disorders, largely because sufferers are not as prone to being so withdrawn around other people as an autistic would. They may seem awkward or uncomfortable in social situations but AS sufferers can, for the most part, approach other people just like anyone else, although this is not true for everyone (Raves, for example, exhibits a common AS trait of mostly only talking to people he likes and remaining relatively mute around those he doesn't know). The perceived lack of this particular barrier can result in someone with AS appearing, at least to most people, as being fairly neurotypical and free from any obvious psycho-social hindrances; that it is, of course, until they open their mouths to speak.

Anyone who has ever been involved in a conversation with someone suffering from AS will tell you that it's more of a monologue than a conversation; sometimes, it borders on a being rally (only without the slightly unsettling feeling that you'll one day be seeing it in old, grainy, black and white footage on the History Channel). Since AS sufferers have fairly narrow fields of interest within which they almost exclusively and repetitively operate, this means that, should you find yourself in a conversation with an aspie about his favourite subject, activity, hobby or interest, strap in and brace yourself because it could be a very long and bumpy ride. The condition positively redefines the word “verbose” and you need to have a certain level of patience to get through it intact (especially when getting up to go to the toilet may often be misconstrued by the aspie as an attempt to flee).

Probably the most well-known aspect of AS is one it has in common with other autism spectrum disorders, notably that sufferers have immense difficulty showing empathy, dealing with social or emotional cues, and non-verbal communication in general. To the unaware, aspies risk coming across like insensitive, uncaring dicks with no regard whatsoever for the feelings of others, and this can so often contribute to the failure of many sufferers to establish durable friendships. It's not easy knowing that your innate awkwardness makes it hard to make friends, and your neurological compulsion to seem like a rude and unsympathetic arsehole makes it even harder to keep them. I can, for example, count on the fingers of one hand the number of friends (not including family) that Raves can claim to have, and it's not a case of not wanting friends – it's just so damnably difficult when you have a condition that leaves you socially dysfunctional.

To give you some idea of how difficult it can get, Raves even once had trouble writing an email to a member of his family. He spent hours agonising about it before typing the first words (and days thinking about it before he got to the agonising stage of the process). Only once I had actually gone to bed, leaving him alone with the laptop, was he able to finish writing the email without feeling like I was exerting this unintentional pressure to get something done that the rest of us find so easy. He has often expressed the desire to reconnect with friends from his past that he has lost touch with and, to that end, I set him up on Facebook and asked one or two people I know (of whom he is aware and shares a number of common interests) to friend him – that way I could gently help him cope with the social world a bit more by using a social networking tool to act as a kind of firewall for reality. That was several months ago, and I've yet to get him to feel comfortable enough with even logging on.

I have to admit, to my shame, that my ignorance of Asperger Syndrome, and my subsequent inability to identify many of the things Raves says and does as being a product of his condition rather than a true reflection of his emotional opinion or feelings on something, has resulted in a lot of arguments. I have, for most of my life, been something of a borderline-OCD case, an overtly logical and often pragmatic person, as well as, if I'm brutally honest, someone who's fundamentally a bit shit at dealing with the emotional stuff. I'm also prone to taking often trivial things (that aren't very personal) very personally, especially, rather oddly, criticism that isn't really criticism. In effect, while I correctly understand the difference between “imply” and “infer”, I often, to my and others' detriment, end up inferring something that someone else didn't imply.

With the above combination of potentially antagonistic traits reading more like the ingredients list for a psychological incendiary device, it probably won't surprise you to learn that a small bit of innocent miscommunication (usually over something mind-fuckingly trivial) is all it takes to find that half of our evening has disappeared and we're now shouting, swearing and crying at each other from opposite ends of the house. Much like a chimp with a Rubik's Cube, we would be scrabbling desperately in vain to remember the correct combination of emotional moves we need to make in order to get all the colours back where they should be, without ever truly understanding each move or why it's important. Is it any wonder that I ended up in counselling?

“Hold on a minute!”, you may exclaim (or at least you would if you were still reading and not just scrolling down for the final paragraph out of politeness), “shouldn't that be we ended up in counselling?” No. You see, while Raves is about to begin counselling to help him cope with the social anxieties and stresses associated with his condition, if anyone needs to learn to deal with their emotions, it ain't him – it's me. Raves has a legitimate, medically-diagnosed reason for behaving like an emotional spastic – I don't. In truth, I'm just fucking rubbish at being a proper human being half the time. So it was me, not Raves, who needed to learn to stop being a complete knob end because, at the end of the day, I'm supposed to be the adult in this situation.

It's my job to go out every day to work. It's my job to do whatever needs to be done to keep a roof over his head until, if ever, he's in a position, psychologically, to cope with the day-to-day world of work and dealing with other people. It's my job to help him organise his life and manage the endless stream of appointments and paperwork that are needed to keep his world ticking over. It's my job to help him get to the doctors, the hospital, or the counsellor (although I couldn't do any of that without the awesome help of his parents – thank you both, so much). It's my job to be on top form all the time and to be the grown up, whether I want to or not … and it's so fucking hard.

So often it can feel like being a single parent learning to look after a child you feel you can't cope with; a child that frustrates the living hell out of you because they're 29 years old and you can't understand why they aren't more like you. I can't deny losing my patience sometimes whenever Raves proved incapable of doing things that seem so simple and natural to everyone else, just as I can't deny how frustrated it makes me, and how bad I feel with myself, for making demands of someone that their condition renders impossible to fulfil. I've lost count of the number of times that I found myself thinking, “fuck this shit, I can't do this any more” and wondering whether there's a hedge on Dartmoor I could go live in for a while. But, in the end, I always know that I'm being unfair … it's not fair on Raves, and it's not fair on us that I should ever want to give up so easily like that.

It is, however, fair to say that things have gotten better (to a greater or lesser extent); it's now possible, for example, to get Raves out of the house for doctor's appointments, or to go shopping etc. without him vomiting for an hour beforehand. It's also possible for him to be able to talk relatively freely with the staff at the various pet places we go to for aquarium and other important, fish or rat-related supplies. And, answering the phone during the day (when I'm at work and the caller could be some official-sounding person asking why my last credit card payment was late) no longer results in his desire to hide the phone in the fridge so that the ringing stops and the person at the other end can't get in. He has even expressed an interest in returning to college which, given our financial situation, may not be possible right now but it is, at least, a desire he wouldn't have had 3 years ago.

The hard fact is that, no matter how much we achieve, there will always be more to do, and there will only be so far we can get … AS is not something you cure; you can only learn to manage it. So, that's what we do, every day. Yes, it frustrates me. Yes, it drives me up the fucking wall and back down again. Yes, I sometimes want to stick my head through the window and hope the rest of me follows shortly afterwards. But, no-one ever said it would be easy … and if they did, they were wrong, and I would have been a complete fool for believing them. So why would anyone put themselves through this shit if they didn't have to? Why would anyone voluntarily remain in a situation that feels like their life, and any plans they might have had, are constantly being thwarted by a nerve-shredding, hair-tearing source of perpetual stress?

Isn't it obvious? You do this for someone because you love them. Why else would you? You do it because you care about someone, because you can't function properly unless you know they're okay, and because you need something in your life to remind you that your problems aren't everything. I love Raves – and that's why I do it. I've never fully believed in the idea of love at first sight, or that there's one perfect person out there for you – sure, I may have dallied with the notion when I was younger and more naive – but you learn through bitter experience that the highly romanticised, chocolate box, chick flick idea of love is, not to put too fine a point on it, total bollocks. It's a lie we've all been quite willingly sold because it makes us feel fuzzy and warm inside.

The truth is, love doesn't work like that. It grows … it builds over time as you find yourself developing a connection with someone, and is further strengthened by the experiences you share together. You might have had that bolt of lightning moment where you instantly fall in love with someone and want to be with them forever, and I wouldn't dream of pissing on that … but you do know that it isn't normal, right? For everyone else, it usually starts from nothing, and often comes from an entirely unpredictable place, and when you least expect it. When Raves first heard Tim Minchin's song, “You Grew On Me” (in which the three words that follow are “like a tumour”), he asked if I felt that about him; if you know the song, you'll know that answering “yes” is actually a good thing.

But it's not just all about love, because it's also about being challenged. If life is too easy, what's the point? You need something to keep you occupied, a puzzle to solve, a mountain to climb, a “Britain's Got Talent” producer to strangle and, for me, Raves is that challenge. He keeps me on my toes while making sure my toes, like the rest of my feet, stay very firmly on the ground. He stops me from acting like a self-pitying twat when things go wrong in my life by reminding me that, somehow, we can always figure a way to sort things out. And, if being challenged isn't enough to keep me sane, he can at least find a way to bring the fun, and that's even better.

When I left home to go to university (nearly 20 years ago, now), I was a much more ardent and avid gamer than I have been in the years since. I spent so much time using computers for work and for personal creative projects, I almost kind of forgot that they had another usage. That's all changed over the last few years, with Raves practically manacling me to the PS3; I've played my way through the first two “Silent Hill” games, and am currently playing the third; I spent over 200 hours on “Fallout 3”, and am just starting out on “Fallout: New Vegas”; I recently completed “Prince of Persia”, just in time for Raves to get me utterly hooked on “Minecraft”. In the last week alone I've clocked up nearly 30 hours on the damn thing to the point where my wrist is fucking killing me from all that mouse-clicking (if ever there was a game for aspies, “Minecraft” is it).

Raves may very well send me utterly bonkers one day but, in the meantime, I get to look after someone I love and spend a good many hours feeling like I too am 15 again; playing games, watching some awesome movies, and eating crisps while the world goes on around us. Yes, it's just a temporary escape, a way for me to unwind after a long day, but it helps balance life out and makes the tough times a lot easier to cope with.

Historically, the one thing every king wanted was a prince. Well, I am a King (yes, okay, it's just my surname – shut up and go with it) and I'm happy to say that I've got myself a difficult, yet never boring, prince who keeps my life interesting. Even more so now that we're building an epic castle in “Minecraft” …

Sarah Palin's Vagina

July 2nd 2011

Recently, the American right-wing (and by that I mostly mean Fox News) went and got its knickers in a massive twist over comments made by an aide to Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister. The comments related specifically to a request made by Sarah Palin for a meeting with Thatcher, whom Palin had previously cited as a role-model, during the former Alaskan governor's forthcoming visit to the UK. The response itself, an emphatic “no”, was not the problem; it was more that the aide called Palin “bat-shit insane” that so enraged the Republitards (yes, I know, the aide actually said she was “nuts”, but he was just being polite). What baffles me most is not the reaction to any of this (it's pretty par for the course, really), but the fact that no-one ever mentions how the only reason Sarah Palin is where she is today, the only reason any of us have ever even heard of her, is because of her vagina.

Cast your minds back to 2008, and those heady, care-free days where the prospect of soon not having to live in a world with George W. Gump at the controls gave you a warm feeling inside. Having stolen the two previous elections (mainly by getting their friends to count the votes) there was still a creeping fear that the Republicans were going to cheat once again and have us all drowning in the shit of another Middle East war of imperialism and resource theft before the new Oilman In Chief had the time to finish his morning bowl of Shreddies on inauguration day. But, this time, there was something different, something new … there was, for the first time in a quite a long while, hope.

I don't mean “hope” in the sense that politicians understand and misuse it; that particularly trite, campaign slogan form of language abuse that hides how the candidate just wants to get elected to a cushy job, one that comes with shit-loads of power and all the money they can eat, by selling the electorate an ocean liner full of bullshit and pretending that they represent any kind of challenge to the status quo. No, I mean that there was a vague, almost misguided, sense that things could possibly be different because, this time, in addition to the usual shower of ageing, white, wealthy right-wing douchebags, there was a woman AND a black guy in the race! “This is getting mildly interesting”, we all thought, and we were right to.

If we were honest with ourselves we didn't really imagine that either of them could actually win and, in the case of Frau Blücher Hillary Clinton, we hoped to hell she didn't; no one needs that sour fucking witch in charge of a stapler, let alone a nation. We were under no illusions that America was probably going to do its usual thing of voting for someone who repeatedly rapes them in the face, but is able to get away with it because America can only ever see the Stars and Stripes underpants worn by their abuser so they're too busy saluting and crying with national pride to realise they're being raped in the face. We thought they were going to go for someone like Rudy Giuliani, the eminently crooked “hero” of 9/11 who heroically became a hero by doing his job of heroically telling people to do things they were already doing, like the god-damned heroism-drenched, heroic god-damned hero he heroically was.

Even when Obama won the Democratic nomination we still believed the GOP were going to take the White House again, whether they diddled the votes or not. After all, they'd picked John McCain, a white guy (which always helps), and he was a genuine bona-fide Vietnam veteran (although they sensibly glossed over his habit of crashing planes and having been tortured to the point where he's now, apparently, completely barking mad). There was no way the young black guy who had only been married once, had never shot at anyone, and didn't say “God Bless America” all that often, was going to win. For a start, this was America, damn it, and it's called the White House for a reason! It was looking, for most of us, like there weren't going to be any real surprises left in this particular election campaign. And bugger us all if we weren't completely wrong …

The announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate in the 2008 campaign has to be one of the most calculated, cynical, manipulative, and thoroughly insulting moves in modern politics. It doesn't matter what the campaign, or their supporters, trot out as the reason for Palin's selection … you know, and I know, what really motivated their decision on this one; her vagina. With Obama on the Democratic ticket, all the women who were going to vote for Hillary (both of them) were left with an open decision on who to vote for. Since women apparently don't have any political principles or opinions of their own and merely vote for whoever likes make-up, babies, and has the same shaped genitals as they do, the Republicans figured they could hoover up the votes of these dear, sweet, silly girls by showing them that, “Look, we've got a lady on our team!”

As if that weren't enough, Sarah Palin is a white lady, and that meant the GOP could clean up on votes from all those people whose bits are different to Palin's because, in the Republican mind, no man could call himself a true American if he ever actually voted for a darkie! That's just not right! After all, Jesus was white and spoke English, and if those are good enough qualities for a saviour then they're more than good enough for an elected representative! Republicans, and their Conservative counterparts here in the UK, have always had an extraordinarily patronising view of the people they ostensibly represent; to them, we are children, and mentally sub-normal children at that. They can do pretty much whatever they like, regardless of how it affects us, and they certainly don't have to explain themselves to us because they're the adults – they'll do their adult thing, and help out their adult friends who own businesses, and the rest of us can sit in the corner, be quiet, and enjoy the distracting toys they throw our way occasionally to keep us busy.

Never is this more obvious than during election campaigns, as everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator and we're deluged by grossly condescending attempts to win our favour. It's like parents who each have different ideas about where the family should go on holiday – both will stoop to great depths, offering all sorts of incentives and bribes when making their case, anything to get you to go with their destination of choice. Palin is a classic example of the political dirty trick, the willingness to make appeals to people's baser instincts just to score their approval and get them on side. Not only that, but having a woman around helps a centuries old institution counter claims of misogyny by claiming to be “progressive”, despite remaining a luscious, bubbling spring of rampant homophobia and racism.

If you ignore the fact that she owns a couple of boobs, Sarah Palin represents business as usual for the Republicans. She's white, pro-gun, pro-life, pro-military, pro-Jesus, and anti-gay and, when it comes to politics, that is all that matters – that's what makes someone an American, son! If you consider the fact that she owns a couple of boobs, then the GOP have got one hell of a sales pitch going for them! Who better to appeal to the hearts, minds and erect penises of the average Republican male? “Hey, boys, check out our candidate! She loves guns, babies, war, and God, hates fags, and SHE HAS TITTIES!” That Palin was a candidate for vice president meant that these deep political thinkers (or rednecks, as they're known) could at least rest easy knowing that there was still a man running the show (and a man who left his crippled wife for a beer heiress at that). It's just that, with Palin as VP, the patriotic penis pullers could finally show their true love for their country by having such red, white and blue masturbation fodder gently stroking the levers of power.

By now I'd ordinarily be expecting to have to counter accusations that it's not the choosing of Sarah Palin that's appallingly cynical, it's my assertion that she was only chosen because she's a woman, and that I'm deliberately ignoring her obvious qualifications for the job as part of some patriarchal agenda to run her down and keep women in their place. Fortunately, I will never need to defend myself against such a charge, not least because I simply don't think that way, but largely because it's Sarah fucking Palin, and we all know that there has never been anyone less qualified for the job of vice president. Not even Dan Quayle. Even on his dumbest of days, Dan Quayle could only dream of plumbing the depths of drooling fucking idiocy that Sarah Palin has to stand on a very tall ladder to reach. I don't think I've seen anyone in politics who can match her for being so stultifyingly ill-informed and generally pig-ignorant.

I remember her inability to say whether she followed the Bush doctrine (of pre-emptive war) because she didn't even know what it was. I remember how she thought that Russia being just a few miles across the sea from Alaska, and how Vladimir Putin would have to fly over her state to get to America, that somehow gave her foreign policy experience. I think back on how she said Obama's health care bill will result in “death panels” where your grandmother will be denied treatment because she's too old and too expensive, despite the fact that this is exactly how it is now, only it's the insurance companies who are telling granny to fuck off and die (that and Palin admits to having shuffled her family in to Canada to enjoy their free healthcare in the past).

Giggling begins to envelope me when I think of how she created a fake Facebook account so that she could big herself up by posting glowingly positive comments on her own real account. I laugh out loud when I recall how her supporters described her as a “beauty queen” (when she wasn't), and how her pageant career is not really any kind of achievement when you consider that there are more people in my neighbourhood than there are in most of Alaska. Physically splitting my sides in hysterics becomes a dangerous possibility when I remind myself of how Palin described Margaret Thatcher as one of her heroes (presumably because, like Palin, she's white, female, completely mental, and would damage the nation irreparably if she got anywhere near to being in charge of it – the only difference is Thatcher has dementia; Palin is just like that normally). Is it any wonder that, with Palin being such a gift to comedians, they play the hallelujah chorus on Radio 4's “The News Quiz” whenever she's mentioned?

Would that it were possible that Palin was only a harmless idiot, I don't think anyone would have much of problem with her; we'd just happily sit back and enjoy the show. The trouble is, we've been here before … when Credulous George was running for president many people were thinking, “he's a simpleton, this could be good for a few laughs”. Bitter experience taught us that when you've got a moron in charge, it's to keep you from focusing on the real evil shit being done by those around him. “Don't worry about the collapsing economy, terror attacks, or endless wars – look, he mangled a sentence again! Isn't he funny?” Idiots, by and large, are harmless – idiots in power, however, are fucking lethal. We need only recall the shooting incident in Arizona, and the shockingly insensitive way Palin dealt with the fallout; the “blood libel” comment, attacking the left for politicising the issue (which was actually what she was doing), and the inability to accept that publishing a map showing the locations of your political opponents with cross-hairs as markers might just inspire the kind of tragedy seen in Tuscon (especially since one of the cross-hairs was for congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head during the incident).

This is what Palin can manage when she's not the president. If she were ever to get near the Oval Office, things will almost certainly get a thousand times worse than they ever did under Bush Jr. As the darling of the Tea Party movement, a group of reactionary nut-bags who actually have the gall to compare their particular brand of fervent, nationalistic stupidity to the Boston revolutionaries who protested unfair taxes by the British, Palin would undoubtedly drag America back in to the dark ages, with the religious right laughing all the way. They'll push ever harder to get rid of abortion, gay rights, and the freedom to believe in anything other than Jesus, and instead introduce a creeping theocracy, hell-bent on quieting the dissenting voices, and continuing wars against anyone who doesn't believe in the same stupid shit that they do.

And you'll have Sarah Palin's vagina to blame for it all …

Dear Mr. Murdoch

July 9th 2011

For the past few days, the news here in our rain-soaked island paradise has been dominated by one, particularly large, story. It's not a new story, in fact it's been around for a little while, but this week it managed to achieve a certain measure of grotesque commonality with the funeral-bound corpse of King Henry VIII. I'm thinking specifically of how, as we were all basking happily in yet another warm and sunny day, possibly commenting to one another about what a lovely day it was, it unpredictably, and unceremoniously, exploded, leaving everyone feeling very, very sick. It's a story that we can't even refer to as “the elephant in the room” any more because it's now “the enormous pile of elephant shit in the room” (the elephant having fled the scene in order to calm down, re-group, and work out who best to blame for the massive, festering pile of crap it left behind).

I'm talking, of course, about the News Of The World phone-hacking scandal, a story which would have required very high levels of commitment to remaining woefully ignorant for you to have missed (on the Ignorance Scale of 1 to “Sarah Palin” you'd have to be somewhere around “Peter Andre”). Given the thoroughly appalling nature of this story, the scope of it, and the possible impact it could have on the relationship between the media and, well, frankly pretty much everyone, it was a foregone conclusion as to what the subject of my post was going to be this week. If you live outside the UK, or under a veil of societal indifference and self-absorption, I suggest you check out the BBC's Q&A on the story to get more of an idea of what's been going on with this twisted and, as of this week, sickening tale.

When it was revealed that the newspaper had not only hacked the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler, but had actually deleted voicemail messages to free up room for them to monitor new ones (potentially destroying evidence in the process, hampering the investigation, and giving false hope to Milly's family), and all this at a time when she was still known as “missing teenager Milly Dowler”, the shit well and truly hit the fan. In the days that followed it emerged that the parents of murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, the families of victims of the 7/7 bombings, and even bereaved families of military servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were being contacted by police as to the likelihood that their phones had been hacked too.

NotW advertisers started pulling their accounts under massive pressure from the public; calls for News International CEO, and former NotW editor, Rebekah Brooks to resign were intensifying, as were the calls for prime minister David Cameron to answer questions regarding his relationship with the Murdoch empire in general, and Brooks in particular (he is close friends with the latter, and employed former NotW editor Andy Coulson as his communications director); demands for a full, public, judicial inquiry into the scandal were coming so thick and fast that they were impossible to ignore. With rumours circulating that Coulson was going to be arrested, News International decided that they had no other choice but to shut down the newspaper. Wait, what? No, I mean it, seriously … what the fuck?

Closing down a 168-year old newspaper, resulting in the loss of 200 jobs, rather than firing Brooks and anyone else who might have actually been involved in either the phone-hacking or paying of police, seems, on the face of it, to make absolutely no sense whatsoever. It'd be like closing down an entire school because the headmaster got caught wanking in the bushes outside some random stranger's house and, as the children wander the streets looking for a new school, the headmaster carries on in his new role as education secretary. The thing is that it does make sense, if you start thinking like Rupert Murdoch (don't do it for too long, though, you'll want to kill yourself); this is an incredibly cold, cynical, and calculated business decision – the only kind the Dirty Digger understands.

First off, you can bet your life that the NotW will be swiftly reborn, most likely as “The Sunday Sun” (which it virtually was already anyway), and it'll just be a case of “same shit, different underpants”. Murdoch is obviously hoping here that people's outrage at the recent scandal (not to mention all the previous ones), and any memories of the odious, wretched foulness the paper embodied will vanish into the ether along with the name. Secondly, the title had become fatally toxic to advertisers in a very short period of time, and there was little chance of salvaging it without making some huge, expensive, and incredibly difficult changes (notably “cleaning house”, starting with Brooks). Third, shutting it down so suddenly like this puts everyone on the back foot, and gives News International enough time to get in there with a shit-load of industrial shredders and start Enron-ing the place before the rozzers can get too close [with glorious serendipity, this story emerged a few hours after I wrote this line – Kris] … I guarantee you there is so much more dirt yet to be unearthed.

For a start, there's the relationship between Andy Coulson and David Cameron. In his press conference yesterday, Cameron managed to throw Coulson under the bus while at the same time saying that he took full responsibility for hiring him as his communications director (despite having been warned by everyone, including Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and former deputy PM John Prescott, that it was a very bad idea). Cameron, like many people who find themselves thrashing about in a cess pit they helped to dig, clearly believes that saying “I take full responsibility” is enough to bring the matter to a swift end – he obviously doesn't realise that it means you take ownership of a problem and make it your job to resolve it. So what are you going to do about it, Dave? Considering he admitted to never having asked Coulson, even when he resigned, about payments to the police, I'm expecting every paint warehouse in Western Europe to shortly receive massive orders for white-wash in the run up to this inquiry.

Then, there's Rebekah Brooks (also known in some circles as “The Wicked Witch of Wapping”). As editor of the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain (one which has, over the years, specialised in prurient exposés of every filthy little detail of the private lives of the great and the good), the question arises … what does she know? What hold does she have over Murdoch that he'd be willing to dump an entire fucking newspaper, and all of its staff, before he'd even think about firing her? It's also well known that she has a close relationship with the prime minister (David Cameron and his wife regularly dine with Brooks and her husband, for example) … so what has she got on him? We know that MP Chris Bryant was outed as gay by the newspaper in what was clearly an act of revenge for Bryant having stood up to the NotW and led the initial charge against them for phone-hacking. It's clear that Brooks is not only party to an awful lot of private information about a lot of important people, but that she is also a deeply vindictive and nasty little sod.

It's obvious that what we're dealing with here is a watershed moment in the history of media in this country, especially in terms of the relationship between press and government. Rupert Murdoch has often been seen as a king-maker in British politics, with every prime minister for the last 30 years having the full weight of the Murdoch press behind them prior to their election, and anyone who stands up to him likely to find themselves marginalised into obscurity. When you have such a big share of the media cake, you can dictate the opinions of a hell of a lot of people – many millions every day get all of their knowledge about the world, and the events that shape it, via Murdoch's newspapers and TV outlets. Even if he was entirely benign, it's inherently undemocratic, not to mention dangerous, for any one person to have that much influence over individual, and collective, opinions.

In 1992, he helped swing the general election for John Major and the Conservatives with a relentless bashing of Neil Kinnock and the Labour party; the famous front cover of The Sun, “If Kinnock wins, will the last person out of Britain please turn off the lights”, and his support in general had, of course, absolutely nothing to do with Kinnock's desire to dismantle Murdoch's monopoly. The switch of allegiance to Labour in 1997 stunned many who thought Murdoch was a die-hard conservative, forgetting that Rupert's ultimate loyalty is to himself, and he will ally with whoever is going to further his agenda and get him what he wants. Tony Blair famously had a close relationship with Murdoch and, as the icon of New Labour, was ultimately more Tory than the Tories were anyway (only without the baggage of sleaze at that point). The failure to get a decisive victory for his boy Cameron (who promised he would de-fang Ofcom and start dismantling the BBC in exchange for Murdoch's support) in the 2010 election was due to Murdoch's having long ago made the mistake of writing off the Lib Dems as ever being remotely capable of throwing a spanner in the works.

Given the colourful history of the Murdoch press, it's probably fair to say that Brooks is very much made in his image, and maybe that's the point? Is she being protected because she's the star pupil? For many, she represents a reassuring continuity of the old Murdoch journalistic (I use that word wrongly) traditions of sensationalism over content, and using the bullshit “public interest” canard to justify every seedy practise they employ for sniffing around people's arseholes in the hope that a fresh, steaming story might be squeezed out of them. Her NotW campaign to “name and shame” paedophiles, for example, was classic Murdoch; take an emotive issue and use it to whip the nation into a frenzy, consequences be damned. It doesn't matter that some of the information they printed was wrong, and innocent people were attacked as a result; it doesn't matter that publishing the whereabouts of sex offenders will result in baying mobs driving them underground so they eventually pop back up in towns where people don't know they're a paedo. But, at least your kids are safe now, and at least the NotW sold a shit load of papers in the process, eh?

It wouldn't be unreasonable (in fact it would be a gross understatement) to say, without hyperbole, that Rupert Murdoch, and by extension the media empire he has built, has done more damage to the once noble profession of print and broadcast journalism than anyone in history. The media is supposed to act as a watchdog for the public; they're supposed to report the news, keep us informed, and hold a watchful eye over our institutions, our corporations, and, in fact, our whole establishment to make sure that they behave themselves and that they are held to account. The trouble is that Murdoch doesn't want any of that, it doesn't interest him. He doesn't want to watch the establishment; he wants to be the establishment – for a start, there's a fuck-load more power and money in it.

So, rather than a fourth estate that lets us know whether or not the rich and powerful are up to no good, we get the systematic destruction of journalism, the debasing of standards, and the near annihilation of reasoned debate and public discourse. We get a press that panders to the worst aspects of our society and culture, feeding our fears and our bigotry to create an “us and them” mentality that divides us, rather than bringing us together. It's all false dichotomies, black and white, good and evil, “with us or against us”, because it's so much easier to manage – there's no room for grey area, no scope for nuance or ambiguity because the press cannot allow their position to ever be questioned. A lazy press presents opinion, rather than facts, because opinion can't be proved wrong but, in order to stand up, it must deal in absolutes; it has to be “this is right” or “that is wrong”, or the show's over – relativism introduces doubt that can undermine the foundation upon which the argument is built, fatally wounding the fake moral crusades these media outlets often embark upon.

The “campaigns” that many newspapers engage in might seem to the average reader to be public-spirited altruism but are, in reality, universally driven by self-interest and profit. An overwhelming section of the mainstream media (particularly the shit-streaked corner of the section that Murdoch inhabits) long ago dropped actual journalism because it was time-consuming and expensive; far better to pretend to be a public watchdog than actually going to the effort of being one. People choose a newspaper because they feel it speaks to them, represents them, and is ultimately on their side – what better way for a paper to do that than by being a crusader for their morals? “Sponging immigrants are coming to take your jobs (but don't worry 'cause we're on to them!)” is more likely to sell a newspaper than, “Actually, there are complex political, cultural, and socio-economic reasons for migration, and we need to look at it carefully rather than resort to knee-jerk xenophobia”.

So instead of actually having to debate, or even, God-forbid, think about a complex issue, we settle for accepting that it's all as simple as the press paint it and allow them to set the agenda. We settle for the scaremongering, hypocrisy and outright lies that have helped shape our opinions on unions, immigrants, public servants, people on benefits, political protesters, and all manner of other groups who don't fit in with their anachronistic view of the world. We allow them to engender mistrust and hatred toward foreigners, gays, and people of colour, fostering tension and paranoia when they should be helping us to understand them better so that we might forge meaningful enduring relationships with our fellow human beings. They debase our lives, insult our intelligence, and dehumanise each and every one of us in the pursuit of profit and control, and they do so without shame or remorse.

Murdoch is not alone in all of this, but he has set the gutter-level standard to which so many other media outlets desire to stoop in the hope of achieving the same degree of success. The Sun, for example, has always been about tits and football, nothing more, and therefore it merely exploits the baser instincts of its core demographic – but where The Sun goes, papers like The Daily Star follow (including, it seems, into phone-hacking, with the offices of the Star having now been raided by police). In the US, the disgusting black hole of intellectual, moral, and cultural bankruptcy that is Fox News has set a tone of news reporting that can, at best, be described as screamingly right-wing, fervently nationalistic, and bordering on fascistic propaganda, but it's a tone that other networks have desperately tried to imitate in a headlong chase for ratings at the expense of quality, decency, and even basic humanity. I mean, who else but News International would ever hire such repulsively vile individuals as Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, or even, hell's teeth, Glenn Beck?

For all its faults, I shall remain ever proud of the BBC. It is both respected, and envied, the world over for the quality of its TV and radio output, not to mention that its news outlets (whether it's the BBC News website, the News 24 and BBC World TV channels, or its radio news) are regarded as the gold standard for impartiality and trustworthiness (thoroughly remarkable for a state-owned public broadcaster). Murdoch has long hated the BBC for many reasons, most notably because it represents a part of the British establishment that he seeks to replace, but also because he knows he'll never come within a million miles of matching the quality of its output, or the respect that it enjoys across the globe. The biggest thorn in his side, however, has got to be the fact that he can't own it and, therefore, he must do whatever he feels is necessary to destroy it.

So what now? Well, we need to keep the pressure on anyone and everyone who has the power to bring about massive change in the way our media is run. We need to keep the heat on Ofcom, the regulator who will decide whether News International are “fit and proper” people to hold a broadcast licence – culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has already demonstrated himself to be yet another coward before the might of Murdoch by approving his bid to own the 61% of BSkyB, the UK's largest commercial broadcaster, that he doesn't already possess. All cynicism aside, the closure of the NotW is starting to seem like part of deliberate ploy to smooth things over as regards the hacking scandal in order to help push the BSkyB deal through (especially as it's now coming out that the closure may have been planned before this week's revelations broke).

We need to call to account every MP who has ever had close relationships with media barons like Murdoch; it's dangerous for politicians to be that in-bed with a media who can influence so many people throughout the world. We need to, as John Finnemore suggested in his brilliant piece on The Now Show yesterday, not lose our focus, because this is a rare opportunity to make some serious changes to the way our press is run. We need to remind people that it's not just the NotW, or even News International, that have been conducting themselves in this way – page 9 of the Information Commissioner's Office report shows that the biggest offender is, in fact, the Daily Mail (self-righteous, moralising pricks behaving like immoral scum – go fucking figure).

Most importantly, we need to remember our role in all this. We need to stop reading their shit, for a start, and demand proper journalism. We need to stop supporting people who advertise with these fuckers; the internet campaign to flood the NotW advertisers with questions asking whether they were going to continue buying ad space in such a deplorable publication had a devastating effect – all but four pulled-out before the closure was announced). We need to encourage people like Hugh Grant – yes, Hugh fucking Grant – whose piece in the New Statesmen (in which he turned undercover investigator and secretly recorded an ex-NotW journalist admitting to all manner of phone-hackery shenanigans), and his cracking appearance on Question Time (where he proved to be the most well-informed and level-headed member of the panel) showed that if the dude from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” can make important changes, any one of us can bring wrongdoing to light and expose the guilty for what they are.

The title of this post comes from a song by former Queen drummer, Roger Taylor:

Dear Mr. Murdoch, what have you done?

With your News Of The Screws, and your soaraway Sun?

You've sharpened our hatred, and blunted our minds

We're drowning in nipples, and bingo and sex crimes

It's time to reverse the damage … it's time to sharpen our minds, blunt our hatred, and remind Mr. Murdoch that we choose our leaders, we set the agenda, and we won't have anyone telling us what to think – least of all a power-mad purveyor of divisive, racist, homophobic, sexist, criminal shit-rags that treat us like morons … remind him by holding his feet to fire, and don't ever let go …

It's time for the bubble of this king-maker's bloated, funeral-bound corpse to burst …

D.R.S

July 16th 2011

I was a little more than a quarter of the way into writing this week's post this morning when I received a somewhat confused call from my sister, Tam. Apparently, my mum was in a panic over having missed a couple of calls from my nan and, since the calls had come immediately after one another to both her mobile and landline, and because she was having trouble getting hold of my nan to find out what was going on, my mum was now desperately ringing round to find out if anyone else had heard from her and, if so, what it was about. Moments later my phone rang again and, with the caller ID telling me that it was my mum, I instinctively knew what she was going to tell me … my grandad had passed away in his sleep early this morning. Given the enormous influence he'd had on me growing up, I'd like, if you don't mind, to dispense with my usual weekly bitch-fest and instead talk about my grandfather, Derek Raymond Sankey.

Born on December 14th 1929, my grandad was faced with the far from trivial inconvenience that World War II had broken out just two months before his tenth birthday. Even though England's need was at its greatest, the small matter of him still being able to count his age without taking his socks off meant that he was considered a less than ideal candidate for helping to fight the Nazis. When he was of a more suitable age, however, he joined the Royal Navy, and it was this that cemented, in my mind, a lifelong association with the sea. For as far back as I can remember, my grandad had a passion for things nautical; knick-knacks around the home would had a naval theme; many of the paintings that adorned the walls were of ships, often frigates or destroyers engaged in battle; even his clothes sometimes reflected this love for the ocean (although obviously we're talking “respectable blazer” here, not “North Sea Trawlerman”).

While I was never struck with the same desire to lead any sort of life on the ocean wave, my grandad's passion did rub-off on me to an extent. I share his love for Devon, the Westcountry in general, and, despite its many, many faults, Plymouth in particular. I always enjoyed the childhood holidays I spent with my grandparents, my mum, and my sister, Sam, in the log cabins of Church Wood, near Wembury, despite the daily panic attack I would suffer from seeing that a spider had crept into my bedroom. I always loved the walks we took along HMS Cambridge, and hearing the cracking sound of guns firing as naval trainees took pot-shots at The Mewstone. I remember with fondness the boat trips he would take us on around the dockyards of Devonport to see the massive warships towering over the tiny tour boat we occupied. To this day, I have an acrylic painting on canvas of a cliff edge overlooking the ocean that we did together when I was barely 5 years old. It may have been my hand holding the brushes, but it was his hand on mine that was doing all the work … and it was my name he insisted on putting in the bottom right corner.

It's probably fair to say that my grandad must share some of the credit with my parents for helping to inspire and feed the deep creative streak in me. While I may have inherited my dad's propensity for writing endless quantities of gibberish, it was my grandad's habit of never being completely satisfied with indulging in just one constructive endeavour at any given time that has probably had the greatest influence on me in terms of the little projects that I like to give myself. He was always making things; he built a doll house for my sister that had proper lighting, powered by a battery in the attic; he made a garage for me that had a car wash, petrol pumps, and a second-level car park for all my Dinky metal toy cars; he loved photography, and once built a dark-room in his house so that he could not only fully indulge in his hobby without limitation, but also so he could run it as a small business for a while. In later years he created wooden toys to sell at craft fairs (one such toy, a train, still sits in the surgery of my GP, for whose son it was made) and, when his hands were no longer nimble enough for woodwork, he took to creating hand-made greeting cards instead.

It's impossible for me to look at my own interests – making websites, composing music, creating videos, and writing all manner of nonsense – and not see the effect that he has had on me. When I was around 10 or so, my grandparents bought a grocer's shop in Malvern, Worcestershire (it was actually probably more akin to a general convenience store given that there was all manner of tinned, packet, chilled, fresh, and frozen goods in addition to the usual fruit and veg). Since there was always plenty to do, my mum would haul my sisters and I on a 14-mile train journey every Saturday so that she could help out in the shop. We never minded, of course, as we got to see our grandparents (who we loved dearly), and the fact that they owned a video-recorder (at a time when they were still quite expensive), and that my grandad taped practically every movie ever shown on TV, was more than enough persuasion to keep us coming back every week. It's also what probably fuelled my love for film, and is almost certainly the reason that I would spend nearly every penny I earned delivering newspapers as a teenager buying movies to watch on the Ferguson Videostar we were eventually able to afford.

When we weren't watching our way through my grandad's own personal branch of Blockbuster, we were thumbing our way through his own private Waterstone's. My grandad had so many books that held our attention time and time again (ones about Egyptology and the Titanic being particular favourites). On the occasions when we didn't fancy reading, we would always play in the garden at the back of the house/shop, or the cool cellar underneath it (anywhere that has a large quantity of sweets and crisps was bound to be of great interest to us). With the variety of food-stuffs available in the shop, my grandad was able to introduce us to things which remain firm favourites to this day; ham off-the-bone, mature cheddar and, in the case of my sister, 12-year old port (introducing us to alcohol at a young, although not inappropriately young, age was my grandad's way of helping us to see it as normal and develop a sensible attitude towards it – it worked very well).

My grandad's influence on my life wasn't just limited to my childhood. When I sat my A-levels prior to going to university, I had already decided where I wanted to go; Plymouth might not have been the best place in the world to study computing, but it was a place I loved and knew well, they had a course I could do and, more importantly, they were happy to offer me a place despite my grades being not terribly brilliant. But, best of all, since they'd moved there some years before, I would get to live with my grandparents for a while … instead of being shot head first from my comfortable home into the terrifying independence of living on my own, I was able to take this half-way step that made the transition between dependent child and responsible adult so much easier. And, since they'd already done the whole “raising kids” thing with my mum and her siblings, there was nothing I could do that they wouldn't have dealt with before.

I had a wonderful time living with my grandparents for the first couple of years of my student-life; I remember how, every day, I would be back from university just in time for “Countdown”. I remember how I'd sit down with my grandparents and a cuppa, and my grandad and I would try to see what words we could come up with for each round. I remember how my grandad started liking the movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and how he lovingly referred to him as Arnold Sweaty Knickers. I remember how, with my nan's established history of getting restless and feeling the urge to up-sticks and move every 7 or 8 years, my grandad came to me one day and asked that, if my nan raised the subject of how she was thinking about moving away from Plymouth, could I try and talk her out of it? I remember how, if my grandparents ever went away for the weekend, usually to visit relatives up-country, my grandad would always first ask if I could look after his cat, Arthur, then he would jokingly ask I not have too many orgies while they away :)

I remember so many things about my grandad because he was such important part of my life. In terms of religious beliefs, my grandparents are spiritualists – I never confessed my atheism to them, just as I never did for anyone, because I didn't really need to – my family always knew me to be a deeply sceptical and curious child, always asking questions and “thinking” about things. I could never bring myself to criticise my grandparents beliefs, partly because they never made any big deal out of it (it's just what they were), but mostly because I knew that, in their case, they were almost entirely benign. Their beliefs never really informed their decisions that much – everything they chose to do they would have done anyway simply because they were both practical people. But, as an atheist, I can't share their faith that there is a life beyond this one because I know it to be completely irrational; for me immortality is achieved through the persistence of memory, and that's why, despite having lost someone I truly loved and consider myself privileged to have known, this sad day has still been able to bring a smile to my face – every time I remember anything to do with my grandad.

If there were ever a purpose to our lives, I think it is simply to be someone worth remembering. To live a life, and to have had enjoyed and created experiences, that people would want to recount with fondness to others. I hope that my grandad, who was never afraid to express his pride for me in the things I've done, would himself take great pride in knowing that, in my eyes, he has more than fulfilled this immensely noble purpose. I will always remember my grandad, and I will take great joy in recounting my time with him to others, as I do now, because to leave behind a good story, and a smile on the faces of the people that knew us, is the true measure of whether our lives were well spent. I will remember everything, for better or worse, because, in the end, the one thing we all want is the knowledge that we mattered to someone.

I will remember the “naughty box” – the storage compartment in a sofa they had when I was about 3 that he would always jokingly pretend was for putting naughty children in. I will remember the three different jars of hundreds-and-thousands (sprinkles) that they kept in their kitchen for when we had ice cream – one multi-coloured, one strawberry and chocolate, and one chocolate – we knew them as “These, Those, and Thems”. I will remember how my sister, Sam, got the scar she now has on her forehead when she ran out of the garden, into the alley way, and head first into the wheelbarrow my grandad was pushing back to the garden. I will remember how, when we had christmas one year at my grandparents house, my grandad had bought a couple of extra little presents to give us on Boxing Day because, “Santa comes to our house twice” :) I remember my grandad's dark room and the time he let me develop pictures with him.

I will remember his 8mm cine camera and the films he made, films I now possess and am desperate to get converted to DVD, featuring my sister and I playing in their garden at about the age of 4, my auntie Marie's fifth birthday party, and time spent in and around Plymouth while the Theatre Royal was under construction. I will remember the shop, D & M Grocers, and the church opposite where my auntie Marie married. I will remember my grandad's wine cellar and how, without pretension, he had a genuine appreciation for the grape; I remember the day, a few years back, when my grandad discovered I had a similar affinity for a good scotch – he gave me a couple of miniatures that he'd had for some time, one of which was approaching 30 years old and got me dizzy from the vapour of it alone – I made sure to thank him for it after it had finished plunging me into a beautifully smooth-tasting coma.

I will remember the green Austin Princess he drove us down to Church Wood in. I will remember being in the back seat of the Fiat 125 he had bought for my nan while giving her driving lessons (she was in her 40s at the time). I will remember with immense fondness the cream coloured Jaguar XJ6 he owned for a time, how it was the nicest car I'd ever been in, and how my sister would unfailingly get horrendously car-sick every time we went out in it. I will remember when my grandad was a company accountant for Nathan's Furniture, who made fairly high-end dining tables, chairs etc., and how we got to go to the big company christmas party one year – somewhere there's a picture of a mildly-bemused, four year old me and the Santa who was giving out presents to the children of all the employees. I will remember the photographs he would take; my sister and I feeding birds at the Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust; the one of me as a baby, grinning like a lunatic and clutching a tube of Smarties, that he had blown up on canvas and framed.

I will remember my grandad as someone who never wanted to be any bother or fuss to anyone; as long as he could indulge in his passions, live a comfortable existence, and not put anyone out while doing so, he was happy. I will remember him as someone who was as capable as anyone of profound emotional depth – the poetry that he has written, about love, life, and even individual members of his family, and has been sending to my sister, Sam, since she married in 2005. I will remember him as someone I was always glad to see and spend time with because I knew that I would always learn something new, whether it was some interesting fact or a useful skill (what limited DIY ability I have I entirely credit to him). He was a teacher, and a friend, and I will always be glad to have known him …

And, more importantly, I will always remember my grandad …

Jesus S(l)aves

July 23rd 2011

A few months ago, I made a list of ideas for subjects that I wanted to cover in future posts and, this week, an old playground song that had become inexplicably stuck in my head reminded me of one of them. The song (well, verse) consists of the following sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic”:

Jesus is the goalie of our local football team

Jesus is the goalie of our local football team

Jesus is the goalie of our local football team

Jesus saves! Jesus saves! Jesus saves!

While the joke works much better if you imagine the last line is accompanied by hands being thrust in the air, to the left then right (as if catching an imaginary football), the point is that it put me in mind of one of the ideas on my list; specifically that Jesus, rather than saving people, in fact makes them prisoners.

Now, when I say “Jesus”, I don't mean to suggest that everyone's favourite bearded, long-haired, hippie philosopher from the Middle East is entirely alone when it comes to the matter of enslaving the hearts and minds of his adoring fans. Every major religious figure, from Muhammad to L. Ron Hubbard, has proven inordinately successful at imprisoning each individual believer in an abusive, co-dependent relationship while, at the same time, skilfully manipulating the faithful into convincing themselves that some form of metaphysical redemption lies exclusively within this erstwhile jailer. Despite their confinement, they cannot be disabused of the demonstrably false idea that this supposed “saviour” is their only hope for achieving the spiritual, emotional, or psychological rescue they so desperately seek.

To be fair, though, it's not these icons of faith our attention should be focusing on but the respective religions to which they belong, and those working within them, for gleefully exploiting the massive clout these mythical figures possess in order to frighten and guilt people into joining their club – and joining the club is just the beginning. Once you're all signed up, uncomfortably seated and nervously waiting for a good, hard saving, they start to really crank up the “shame” and “spook” knobs so that the aforementioned hippie suddenly turns into a thoroughly nasty prick promising, as he does, to love you always, but if you so much as fart on his day off then he'll smash your face into the side of a tree forever. Again, it's not actually Jesus doing this (given the complete lack of contemporaneous, extra-biblical references to verify against, he almost certainly never existed), it's his representatives; his PR department.

The idea of the institution, or its designated figurehead, as a singular source of redemption is intrinsic to virtually every religion and cult throughout history. Inculcating the children of your existing members is all well and good as a means to securing the next generation of followers, but it's pointless if you haven't managed to get that first generation of followers to begin with; also, you're bound to lose a few adherents along the way, either to death or desertion, and getting children on-board is a bit of a long-term thing, so it never hurts to have a backup plan. Persuading people that they are worthless, disgusting pieces of sin-soaked trash leading futile, meaningless lives, and whose only means of turning things around is to give themselves over completely to a long-dead, morally-questionable cult-leader is, as far as backup plans go, an astonishingly bloody effective one.

Systematically dismantling the will of an individual in order to re-shape it to a preferred model is something every religion and cult does, to some extent, as it helps create in the individual a deep and lasting dependence on the faith to get them through their lives. If you take christianity as an example (it is, after all, the religion I'm most familiar with) you can see that they're already balls-deep in this practice right out of the gate with the story of Adam and Eve which, and you have to give them credit for this, manages to not only set the stage for the spiritual enslavement of its adherents, but also succeeds in creating a two-tiered system of slavery with the very deliberate positioning of women as untrustworthy, corruptible, inferior beings who owe their very existence to both god and, crucially, man.

Adam is, in no uncertain terms, a slave to god; after all, the beardy sky-gnome created him and is not shy about reminding him (and eventually, the rest of us) of that fact, not to mention of how it's probably best if you don't fuck with him if you know what's good for you. Eve, on the other hand, has to obey both the invisible sprite who does Brian Blessed impressions and Adam because, if it wasn't for the fact that he'd gotten lonely and offered up his rib, she wouldn't even exist. That's right ladies, as far as this story is concerned, you're only here because man was completely fucking bored and he wanted something to play with (or perhaps, more crassly, he wanted someone to play with it). Oh, and it goes without saying that the bible was written by men who had nothing to gain whatsoever from putting themselves at the top of the tree of all life on earth. No agenda there then, clearly …

But, don't worry, because it gets so much worse. In a thinly-disguised attempt to paint all women as cock-obsessed whores, Eve is tempted by a snake (yes, go on, think about it) to eat from the tree of knowledge – she then, in turn, tempts Adam and they discover their nakedness; god then shows up, gets pissed at the two of them for defying him, and promptly throws them out of the garden of Eden. To add insult to injury, they're no longer immortal, they don't get manna from heaven, and Eve has to deal with the fun of bearing children. From this one story we have man becoming a slave to work (god tells Adam he has to toil the fields), to the ticking clock of life (expelled from the garden we're no longer eternal), and to god himself (don't piss him off because, well, look what happened when these two dickheads tried it). Women, incidentally, are also now slaves to childbirth, menstruation, and man himself because, here's the kicker, it's all Eve's fault. Do you see what they did there? It's both genius, and grotesquely inhuman.

If Eve hadn't been such a cock-hungry slut (oh come on, see through the metaphor, seriously), both of them would be living forever in paradise, never having to work or, in Eve's case, endure the agony of bleeding every month or squeezing a bowling ball through something the size of a small lemon. It's a disgustingly brilliant way of enslaving women to men by making everything their fault for leading man astray with their sinful lust. It teaches man that he needs to keep his woman under control because she cannot be trusted, and that his downfall came because his progenitor took his eye of the ball and stupidly allowed himself to be persuaded by some tart's patently dumb idea of ignoring the boomy-voiced bloke upstairs. It teaches us, with the whole tree thing, that we should avoid knowledge at our peril; there are clearly things that god does not want us to know, and it's far better to remain a slave to ignorance.

It teaches the appalling and morally bankrupt idea that we must all somehow pay for the sins of our forebears who, through their mistakes, became the architects of our misery (it turns out that the reason we have to work for a living, and will eventually die, is because some bitch ate an apple, apparently). It teaches us that we are born broken, and we need to give ourselves over completely to the (allegedly) perfect being who broke us in the first place by exercising the human characteristics he gave us. He created the conditions, the system, the very mechanism of our own enslavement to him by endowing us with the free will and curiosity required to fall right into the trap that he himself created. The cheeky fucker even has the front to blame us for ending up at the bottom of the pit that he dug! It's like the worst form of entrapment, only in this case our jailer is forever demanding we apologise for being susceptible to gravity (which he invented).

There are few things more revolting and dehumanising than teaching someone from a young age that they were, through no fault of their own, born wrong, and that they must be repaired before they can be considered a proper person. The idea that we can be punished for the actions of some ancient ancestors (who, let's face it, didn't even exist) is vile, as is the notion that the creator of this gross miscarriage of natural justice threatens us with eternal torture for simply being exactly the way he created us. What kind of parent would shackle a child to this rotten ideology from the moment they emerge from the womb? Who would ever raise their kid to believe that they need to spend their one and only life bowing and fawning before a being they haven't seen, and will never see, lest they burn forever? Who would fill a young mind with the idea that salvation lies only with the malicious bastard who threw you overboard to begin with?

And while we're on the subject, salvation from what exactly? The best I can work out from their foggy book is that they believe we need to be saved from ourselves, from our own human propensity for sin. Well, excuse me, but didn't the almighty tyrant in the sky make us like this? If he didn't want us doing a nice bit of sin every now and then, why did he even allow us to have that choice? “He gave us free will”, the apologists answer wrongly, “and it's up to us as to how we exercise that – it's our choice as to whether we obey or defy god”. Bollocks! If that's true then it's still his fault because he gave us the means to choose and then condemns us for choosing (in his eyes) incorrectly. And, by the way, giving us a choice between “his way or the highway” isn't a choice but a total lack of options – if we have to use our free will to do as he says or suffer for eternity, then it's not free will but merely the illusion of it. Matt Dillahunty of The Atheist Experience has a great analogy for this, and that's of a mob boss demanding money with menaces – sure you can choose not to pay for his protection, but you'll probably end up with a couple of broken legs.

Sin is at the heart of the religious idea of salvation, and their definition of it is, to be fair, a gigantic steaming pile of crap, because it's only ever really about self-interest. It's all about protecting those in authority, particularly religious authority, and ensuring that their hegemony is never challenged. That's why, in most faiths, especially the monotheisms, failure to believe is considered the worst sin imaginable – they must assert their absolute position by saying, “we are unquestionably right, and not believing that we're right is a ticket to Torture World” … if they don't, the game's up. With a few exceptions (notably those actions that we all, independently of faith, consider to be morally iffy), the behaviours that religions generally regard as “sins” are those that have the greatest capacity for helping to emancipate oneself from the chains of faith.

Think about it – religion needs to keep you on a tight leash in order for it to survive, and it can't have you doing anything that takes you, or anyone else, away from the almighty prison warder on high. Not believing in god, or believing in another god entirely, cannot ever be tolerated because it's one less bum on the pew this sunday; apostasy, heresy, and blasphemy all exemplify a distancing between the individual and the church and, god damn it, the pastor cannot keep his fridge full of Bollinger without your help! Sexual promiscuity, fornication, abortion, contraception (in some cases) or, heaven forbid, homosexuality, must be opposed and stopped at all costs because they're far less likely to produce the next generation of gullible christ-tards whose sole responsibility is to ensure that the pastor's kids can still have Bollinger in their fridge when they follow in their hypocrite's footsteps.

Religious salvation is a con – there's no other way to describe it because, in reality, the only saving anyone would actually require is from the religion itself. Blind belief in the unproven, evidence-bereft assertions made by the varying faiths, their “holy” men and books, is nothing more than wilful, voluntary enslavement of your heart and mind to someone who will demean and dehumanise you for their own self-interest. Religions don't free anyone, they imprison them in cages of delusion and ignorance, shutting down the critical thinking faculties nature has allowed us to develop over the multi-billion year evolution of life on our planet. They close off all avenues of enquiry and instead replace them with revealed “truths” that are anything but. We are not permitted to question our spiritual masters, for they know best; we are not permitted to criticise our masters, no matter what they do, for they are always right; we are not permitted to disobey our masters, for the rules they lay down, regardless of how we may suffer as a result of them, are for our own good.

Christians who refer to themselves as “born again”, always amuse me; first of all, I was under the distinct impression that I was born right the first time (how pitiful that these people have such a poor opinion of themselves that they need to restart their lives from scratch), and second, given the complete lack of any kind of uterus or birth canal in the body of Jesus (through whom they claim to be reborn), the poor fella is going to end up with a nasty stomach ache for nine months, followed by an unholy stinging pain in the arse. Fatuous bum jokes aside, I find it sad that so many people are in possession of such low self-esteem that they feel they have to seek help from the very source of their insecurities and fears, like a battered wife turning to her abusive husband for medicinal aid because the bruises he cruelly delivered are making her face hurt.

Never forget that it was the religion you seek comfort from that made you feel worthless in the first place; it was that wretched book and its champions that told you you were a bad person, that you were no-good scum, and that you needed to be saved from your own ineptitude at being a decent human being; it was faith that said you were a rotten, stinking sinner, depraved and undeserving of the gift of life that their god bestowed upon you; it was their preachers and their Jesus that rounded you up, herded you into their clubhouse, and made you get down on your knees and beg for forgiveness for simply being human. Don't listen to them – they don't care about you – you're just animals to them, pack mules, work horses, and you're here to carry their shit for them and grovel on all fours for having the audacity to be yourself.

Throw off the chains of faith, and you can be free … free at last …

When a plan comes together

August 7th 2011

So what have you been up to this weekend? A spot of gardening? Went clubbing? Visiting relatives, perhaps? If you're anything like me you've probably tried to do as little as possible, maybe even going so far as to achieving absolutely nothing at all. Well, if that's the case, and you happened to be in Houston, Texas yesterday, there was something that might well have appealed to you (assuming, of course, that you're up for achieving fuck all in a really big and pointless way). Around 30,000 people gathered at Reliant Stadium for a massive prayer rally, the sole purpose of which seems to be to beg, en masse, their invisible sky-gnome to wave his cosmic beard and magic away the myriad problems that the state, and indeed the nation, are unable to solve by themselves. Or, to put it less euphemistically, the problems that they're too lazy, cowardly, or just too plain fucking stupid, to do anything about.

“The Response: A Call to Prayer For a Nation in Crisis” was the brainchild of Texas governor Rick Perry and, although he hasn't announced anything yet, the fact that he's a southern, bible-frotting Republican points toward a strong probability that he'll one day make a run for the presidency. Even if we ignore for a moment the idea that this rally seems to blur the line of church-state separation to the point of near invisibility, it surely has to be obvious to people other than myself that an enormous “please help us!” cry to the heavens like this constitutes the biggest, most criminally misguided waste of time and human effort since “Live Earth”? How fucked does the situation have to be for thousands of people to throw their hands up in the air and say, “We quit!”? Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether it's the insurmountable scale of the problem, or the perceived powerlessness of the individual to solve it, an appeal to prayer equates to only one thing; surrender.

However you look at it, getting down on your knees, clasping your hands, and attempting to telepathically communicate with a long-dead Palestinian Jew (or, preferably, the dead-beat, absent one of his two dads who had him murdered to prove a stupid bloody point to himself) in the hope that said Hebrew zombie can sort some shit out for you, surely epitomises the complete abrogation of personal responsibility, as well as being an insufferably deplorable form of intellectual treachery towards one's own species? Are your problems really so utterly beyond your wits to solve that you have to delegate them to some sort of celestial secretary to do the work for you? What of the people around you, your friends and family? Are they so weak and feeble in your eyes that your metaphysical P.A gets the phone call before they do? You really don't think much of yourself, or your fellow humans, do you?

Or perhaps it's because you're a lazy bastard who's dug himself right into a world-hole of trouble and now can't be bothered to sort out the mess he created? “Ah fuck it”, you think to yourself, “let god sort it out for me, that's what he's there for”. It could certainly be said that one of the problems that Rick Perry had initially declared the rally was meant to help solve, that of the state's crippling financial situation, was a problem he, as state governor, played the largest part in helping to bring about in the first place … and now the cheeky sod is calling on the almighty to bail him out? If your elected representative tells you, “Yeah, I've, erm, kind of spunked the contents of the public purse up a tree – can you all come pray with me to get it back?” and your response is to join him rather than kicking the living shit out of the useless treasury-pisser, there is something VERY wrong with you.

It might seem harsh of me to say so but, in my opinion, regardless of your reasons, the fact that you pray at all means there is something wrong with you and, for the most part, it's that you're not just content with wasting your time whispering to yourself rather than genuinely achieving something, but that you actually feel positively virtuous for having done so. Putting aside the arguments that it denotes a person is either too cowardly or lazy to take control of their own life, or that they have such a poor opinion of themselves (instilled, no doubt, by a faith that teaches them to feel worthless) that they're rendered impotent in the face of real-life issues, there's the unavoidable mountain of elephants in the cosmic room spelling out the incontrovertible truth that prayer simply doesn't work. “Nothing fails like prayer”, is not just a cute retort, but a demonstrable one too.

There has not been, in all of recorded history, a single event that can in any way be shown to have been as a result of prayer. Nothing attests to its religiously-claimed efficacy, there's not one scrap of supporting evidence. Not one. Yet, if you were to believe the claims made by those of the cloud-fairy persuasion, prayer is more reliable than a German car, the Japanese rail network, and a thunderstorm during British barbecue-season combined. So many good, lovely old christian grannies have been cured of cancer solely through the prayers of their loved ones, yet the equally devout amputee next door remains unblessed as his body fails to regrow a new limb. Is it because he isn't faithful enough? Is it, as the disgusting internet christian VenomFangX has it, that amputees don't deserve their limbs? Or is it that prayers are only answered for things that medical science can actually achieve, or for the kind of spontaneous remission that medical knowledge is well aware of?

Many studies have been conducted into the effectiveness of prayer, the largest of which was a controlled, multi-million dollar, double-blind experiment carried out by Harvard Medical School on post-op heart surgery patients. The results were pretty much as you'd expect, in that whether a patient was being prayed for or not had almost no statistically significant bearing on their recovery. I say “almost” because, in a surprise twist that must have really annoyed the piss out of the various christian groups who were hoping that their hated enemy science was about to finally validate their beliefs, those patients who were aware that they were being prayed for actually did worse (presumably because they figured their situation was dire enough to warrant prayer, and that affected their recovery). Naturally, christians did try to spin this rather damning report by claiming it in fact proved the exact opposite of its conclusion.

Engaging in such a demonstrably worthless activity with great fervour renders prayer very similar to masturbation; whatever your motivation, the only thing you'll ultimately get out of either is a few, brief seconds of feeling good about yourself. Additionally, as far as I, and I'm sure many others, are concerned, both are things that I'd rather you did in private and not try to force the rest of us to join in, watch, or listen to. Like any other aspect of faith, prayer is inherently narcissistic because it's all about the individual; it's all about you, it's all about what you want, what makes you feel special (we're back to wanking again, aren't we?) Even when you pray for someone else, it's still all about you because, should your prayer be answered, it's a sign that your god favours you. After all, he wouldn't have granted your wish if he didn't like you, would he? You must be really doing well!

In this way, prayer is about seeking affirmation for one's life and deeds. We all want to know whether or not we're doing the right thing, whether our lives are on the right path, and to have the all-powerful and all-loving master of the universe bestowing his blessings upon you, and fulfilling even the smallest of your wishes, is going to give you, as a believer, at least the illusion that your deeds are righteous, and your life is good. As with drugs and alcohol (yes, okay, and wanking – god you people are obsessed!), prayer can become dangerously addictive simply by virtue of appearing to work, and there's no doubt that the most pious, religious dickhole with a beatific smile is someone who prays every day for something really simple, and then feels like god's pet monkey when their prayer is answered and they're able to find their car keys.

But what happens when they don't get what they want? What does it mean when prayers are not answered? Well, the response to that has always been that it's because it was not their god's will – it was not part of his “plan”. To avoid facing the reality that reality is, in fact, largely unpredictable and frequently random, theists invented this idea that their imaginary friend had planned out everything – not just for them, but for everyone and everything. Nothing happens that isn't according to their god's will; he knows everything that has ever happened, or will ever happen, because he planned it. Sadly, this backs the theist into a massive logical corner that is impossible for them to get out of, partly because the qualities of omnipotence and omniscience that they've assigned to their god are mutually exclusive, but mainly because it makes every single one of their prayers utterly futile.

If god's plan doesn't include whatever it was they were praying for, then their prayer is rather wasted because they're not going to get what they want anyway. If their wish does form part of the divine plan, the prayer is equally unnecessary because they were going to get their way all along. This assumes, of course, that the plan wouldn't ever change, but to assume otherwise would un-stitch the fabric of god until it completely unravels. If the plan can be changed, omniscience is out the window because god didn't see it coming (if he did, it would be in the plan); if he did see it coming, then bang goes omnipotence because he clearly knew that he would grant your wish and change the plan and, therefore, is largely a slave to his own designs. And besides, have you considered what kind of fucked up plan this unholy incompetent has got running here? It's seriously messed up …

Christopher Hitchens beautifully demolished the idea of a listening, moral, and loving god who answers prayers in a debate by raising the question of Elisabeth Fritzl, and how she must have spent almost every waking moment of her 24 years of imprisonment, torture, and rape, praying to god and getting nothing but cold indifference in return. To suggest that this god has a plan is to suggest that Fritzl's two-and-a-half decades of hell were absolutely a part of it. Ask yourself what kind of ultimate aim the plan must have in order that this sick, demented, fucked up god can possibly justify putting someone through such torment while ignoring her screams and her pleas the whole time it was taking place. If you believe in god, and you believe he answers prayers, you cannot simply sweep this one under the theological carpet.

If you eliminate the idea of a god from the universe, you eliminate with it the idea that everything shitty that ever happens to anyone is deserved, or even necessary. You eliminate the idea of a cruel, heartless being watching over us with absolute indifference, and instead see every bad thing that happens as just some fucking bad thing that happens. No plan to it, no grand design of which your misery forms an integral part, it's just some fucking bad thing that happened and that's that. And, without some kind of supernatural superintendent, we have no one to turn in times of trouble but each other. That's right, in times of great need, we have only the near 7 billion other members of our own species to call on – and I can't think of anything more inspiring than all the things we've done by way of trying to solve our problems for ourselves.

Humanism is an infinitely more noble view of the world than theism, because it places our belief squarely in us; we believe in ourselves, and in our ability to get shit done without feeling the need to constantly appeal to some external entity like drooling, helpless little children. It teaches us that our greatest achievements have come from working together to figure things out, rather than always tugging at the big guy's trouser leg to ask yet another bloody question that begins with the word “why?” As Phil Plait, creator of the “Bad Astronomy” blog, put it in a speech he gave at TAM 8, “teach a man to reason, and he'll think for a lifetime”. There can be no greater example of the power of humanism, no better representation of what we, as a species, are capable of when we get off our knees are start thinking together instead of praying together, than science.

Carl Sagan described it as a “collaborative enterprise, spanning the generations”; certain motivational-poster style images have a more pointed take on it – “Science, bitches: it works”. However you like to think of it, the scientific enterprise truly is the greatest thing our species has ever achieved, and we did it all through working together, solving puzzles, figuring things out. We didn't get the answers via a booming voice from the sky or a smouldering hedgerow. We didn't build the civilisation we have by following the ramblings of some ancient priest. Show me one disease we've managed to eradicate by praying it away? Name me one satellite that was put into orbit by engineers who did so by simply referring to scripture. Give me one example of a technical advancement that has ever been made by men in white coats sitting down to read the gospels of the bible?

Just look at where you are right now; the internet – a world-wide network of interconnected computers, billions of people, in every country, in every last little corner of our world, sharing information, ideas, and culture, communicating with one another, building relationships, fostering understanding, and shining light into dark corners. This is what happens when humans get together and come up with a plan. And it's a real plan, born of real ideas and hard work instead of incessant pleading and whining. It's a plan that is a direct product of the effort that was put into it, and was not contingent on the unknowable whims of some overseer. We wanted something, and we got it – not because we prayed for it, but because we worked for it, and because we planned for it.

And I love it when a plan comes together …

Too orangey for crows

August 13th 2011

When I was young, maybe about 5 or 6 years old, my mum was always telling me not to put so much orange squash in my glass before filling it with water. In a time when actual proper orange juice was still considered something of a luxury, putting in a bit more squash than I should have would give it a decent, fuller, more orangey taste – it was like giving myself a treat! Mum would always tell us that “too much is bad for you”, which, of course, is true, but it masked her real feelings that using more meant that it would run out sooner and she'd have to buy another bottle. Like many children, this would have been my introduction to the concept of dilution; the idea that the more you water something down, the weaker it gets, and it seemed so obvious to me that a large amount of something should overwhelm a small amount of something else. So how is it that the only people in history, it seems, who never grasped this concept were the proponents of homeopathy?

In order that my American friends can get through this post without thinking I used to fashion drinks out of what appears, on the face of it, to be unprocessed pumpkin and butternut soup, I suggest they follow this link first to check out what most British people mean when they talk about “squash” (or cordial). Done that? Excellent, we may continue on our journey. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the pseudo-scientific “alternative medicine” that is homeopathy (and when I say “alternative medicine” I obviously mean “alternative TO medicine”), allow me to explain why this potentially life-threatening fake science could do with a good, sturdy kick in the balls that sends it (and the associated body of bogus, self-styled medical “experts” who peddle it to the credulous) forever back to the la-la land of magic potions and fairy dust where it belongs.

The basic concepts that underpin homeopathy were developed by Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, in the late 18th century and they are, without question, absolute shite. The first is the “law of similars”, often referred to by the expression “let like be cured by like”, and while the notion that what causes certain symptoms may be cured by something that causes the same symptoms seems reasonable, this feeling generally only lasts for about a quarter of a second in the mind of most rational human beings before it is immediately replaced by the sense that anyone who could fall for it is a bit dim. The idea that homeopathic remedies are only ever purchased by highly suggestible, overly trusting types, is reinforced when you realise that the “law of similars” (not actually a law, merely an unproven assertion by Hahnemann) means the most common homeopathic sleep remedy contains that well-known relaxant: caffeine.

“But, surely like does cure like? When you're vaccinated they give you a dead version of the thing they're trying to inoculate you against, don't they?” No they don't, and anyway the point of vaccinations is not to really necessarily cure you but to give your immune system an introduction to something unpleasant so that it knows what it looks like, and can remember to kick it's nasty little arse the next time it sees it. Besides, if it were a “dead” version of what you're already suffering from, it's not going to help much is it? Giving your body a shot of something that is already rampaging through your system like a 4 year old tearing through Toys-R-Us (other toy-based chain stores are available) after drinking an entire bucket of Sunny Delight (other nuclear-orange “drinks” are available), would be like giving a man on fire a bag of ashes so that he can recognise fire next time (other, better analogies are available).

It is with homeopathy's second basic principle where things start to get interesting (and by “interesting” I mean “hugely bloody absurd”). It is known as the “law of infinitesimals”, and states, in essence, that the active ingredient in a remedy becomes more potent with repeated, successive dilution. Feel free to read that sentence again and recall your own experiences with orange squash as you do. Homeopathic remedies are created by taking the supposedly curative component and diluting it by a factor of 100 (C) in water. Then, they take a sample of that dilution and dilute it, again by a factor of 100. And then again, and again, and so on until whatever recommended dilution factor is reached. Hahnemann suggested 30C (i.e. dilution by 10 to the 60th power); if you can't comprehend how big that it is, don't worry – it's unimaginable to most people. Suffice to say that 6C gives you one part active ingredient to a trillion parts water.

The average person is, much to the delight of pseudo-science proponents, religious institutions, and all other varieties of snake-oil purveyor, fairly ignorant of many of the common principles of physics. As such, most will not be aware that their particular delusion of choice is thoroughly undermined by these principles to the point of completely negating the concepts upon which their favourite form of fluffy twaddle is built. For instance, in the case of homeopathy, the greatest enemy is a thing called the Avogadro constant; in its simplest terms, and without trying to befuddle the man in the street, it states the largest quantity of a substance one can dilute another into before there is ostensibly none of the diluted substance left. Homeopathic remedies of 12C or greater exceed this limit, meaning that, by definition, not one single molecule of the active ingredient remains; in essence, a bottle of a 12C (or higher) dilution homeopathic “medicine” is simply a bottle of water. Nothing more.

Even without this fundamental scientific principle, it should be obvious to anyone that diluting a substance makes it weaker, to the point where the entire idea of homeopathy can be comprehensively debunked by a 6 year old with a glass, a supply of water, and a bottle of Kia Ora (other brands of soft drink with somewhat dodgily racist 1980's advertising are available). How gullible, or wilfully ignorant, do you have to be to rationalise away your common sense in order to believe that adding millions of metric fuck-tons more water (on some scales, quite literally) to a substance makes it more powerful? It'd be like believing that a cute kitten, perilously surrounded by a pack of rottweilers, may very well be in mortal danger, but if you were to put it in the middle of a Wembley Stadium full of rottweilers then it would suddenly harness its inner-kitty ninja skills enough to be able to take them all on, leaving them for dead with nary a ruffle in its own fur.

Naturally, because of the increasingly upward trend for scientific literacy in almost every corner of the globe (except America, apparently, where only 4 in 10 people believe in evolution, and alleged “journalists” like Bill O'Reilly are unable to even explain either the cause of ocean tides or the existence of the moon), modern homeopaths have had to come up with a justification for the insanely stupid dilution = potency argument that will keep their supporters from fleeing to an actual doctor, with actual qualifications, and actual, provably efficacious treatments. Their explanation for how it works is so far beyond ludicrous that any reasonably intelligent person would be forced to respond simply, “Holy jumping Jesus H fucking Christ on a pogo stick, do you actually believe that? Do you want to buy a bridge?” Homeopaths believe, are you ready for this, that water has memory.

I'll give you a minute or two for that staggeringly inane idea to sink in before I continue ripping this bullshit apart. Homeopathic practitioners contend that the original active ingredient leaves a “vibration”, or “memory” of itself in the water, and it's by this mechanism that the remedy functions. Let's ignore the fact that the smallest unit of memory, a neuron, is a single cell that contains many thousands of times more molecules than the single molecule of water homeopaths claim is capable of holding the memory of a long-lost bit of good stuff that happened to live near it for a while. Let's ignore the fact that such a claim, along with the other retarded statements made by homeopathy in order to crowbar itself into the rational universe and out of the impossibly nonsensical realm in which it resides, would utterly defy many of the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry which have, for hundreds of years, demonstrated their veracity time and time again.

Let's ignore the fact that homeopathy is completely unsupported by an insurmountable body of scientific evidence. Not one single study, in over 200 years, has demonstrated homeopathy to be anything other than pseudo-scientific quackery. Not one proponent of this horse-shit has been able to show its efficacy beyond that of the placebo effect. “Well, it works for me!”, they exclaim smugly. Excellent, good for you! All you've done there is proven the need for double-blind trials and peer-review in medical testing, you fucking idiot. Just because you feel better for having done something, it doesn't mean that something was what made you feel better. You feel better precisely because you believe that you should; that's the placebo effect, a natural bias that the scientific method does its best to eliminate. Hugging a cancer patient will make them feel better, but it doesn't mean that a simple embrace is able to destroy tumours.

It doesn't matter if homeopathic remedies make thousands of people feel better; as the saying goes, “the plural of ‘anecdote' is not ‘data'”. Most remedies are taken by people for conditions which get better on their own anyway (coughs, colds, flu etc.) and, for those that don't, there's a good deal of weight behind the idea that positive thought is of notable benefit to recovery from physical problems. If you're filling your mind with great big fistfuls of stress and misery over your present illness, it's not got enough energy to devote to doing much about healing it, really, has it? But that doesn't mean that convincing yourself some dressed-up, over-priced placebo is the answer, because it's not. It's not doing anything to fix the problem at all, it's merely tricking you into thinking that it is …

Sure, you might get lucky and find that the one iota of positive thought it inspired in you is enough to help your body fight off your cold a fraction sooner than it otherwise would have, but in all other instances it's doing fuck all to help. Worryingly, it's often doing a good deal of harm, in some cases to a fatal degree, as people abandon proven, evidence-based medicine for these supposed “alternative” solutions. More often than not, the reasons for this tends to be ideological, as misguided nitwits go for the “natural” option over the “evil drugs pushed by big pharmaceutical companies” under the mistaken belief that, just because a large company makes tremendous profits from the products they've spent millions on during research and development, that somehow nullifies the efficacy of a drug that has been rigorously tested through years of processes that involve constant application of the scientific method.

Fortunately, it seems, a large number of people are waking up to the truth about the effectiveness of so-called “alternative” treatments like homeopathy, particularly the NHS who, for some completely unknown reason, had previously been spending over £4m a year on homeopathic medicine, including funds for four homeopathic hospitals in London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Thankfully, this borderline criminal waste of public money on unproven, useless nonsense, rather than demonstrably worthwhile treatments, is not likely to last much longer, leaving the more ill-informed members of the general public no choice but to burn their own money on such crap instead. And that's exactly how it should be … if you're ignorant, wilfully or otherwise, of how medicine works, then perhaps you should, you know, leave such decisions to the professionals.

Ultimately, though, the choice is yours. If you're the kind of person who prefers to accept the unproven assertions of the dangerously unqualified sorts who like to pretend they're doctors, then homeopathy is for you (other, actual medicines are available).

Persecution, Christian-style

August 20th 2011

You've probably never heard of the West Memphis Three, but you should have. If, like me, you've often been made to feel like an outsider, or you grew up with the sense that you never quite fit in amongst those around you, then you need to hear their story. Perhaps you believe, as I do, that religion is an inherently divisive and destructive influence on the lives of ordinarily good and decent people; a virulent form of infection that has the capacity to poison everyone and everything it comes in to contact with (and has a proven track record for doing just that)? If so, you should learn all you can about the West Memphis Three because they, more than almost anyone else in the developed, supposedly civilised, world in recent memory, can tell you exactly how it feels to be the victims of a religious witch-hunt. This is persecution, christian-style.

In May 1993, three young boys, Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers, were found murdered in the woods of Robin Hood Hills in West Memphis, Arkansas. Their bodies were discovered naked and hog-tied, and one (Byers) had mutilation to the genitals. Sexual assault was suspected, but disputed. Three teenagers were arrested, and later convicted for their murder. Damien Echols (18) was given the death penalty, while Jessie Misskelley Jr. (17) and Jason Baldwin (16) were sentenced to life imprisonment. While none of the three could be said to be perfect (they each had a misdemeanour or two to their names), there didn't seem to be much about them that pointed towards multiple murder. Except there was, because this was Arkansas; the fact that Jason had a Metallica T-shirt, and Echols wore black, read Aleister Crowley, and was called Damien, was considered more than sufficient to convict them.

The WM3 were tried, convicted and, in Echols case, put on death row, based entirely on what has been referred to as “satanic panic”. There was never any physical evidence against them whatsoever, and the investigation itself was considered something of a cluster-fuck from day one; the police didn't call the coroner for hours, the bodies of the victims were moved from the water before examination, police records were a mess, physical evidence was stored in paper bags from a supermarket, and Echols' polygraph test examiner kept no written record of the test (despite claiming it indicated “deception”). Misskelley, who had an IQ of 72, was interrogated for 12 hours alone, with only 46 minutes actually recorded – if that sounds like the police coerced and intimidated the Forrest Gump of the group in order to scare him sufficiently shitless into giving them a confession, that's because that's exactly what they did. Misskelley quickly recanted his confession.

Strangely, it wasn't really that that had sealed the three's fate (although it did help considerably). What really hammered the final nail in was when the prosecution brought an “occult expert” (whose qualifications came from a diploma mill) to testify that the crime, apparently, bore “the hallmarks of a satanic ritual”. When you're living in Bible Thump, USA, you need only mention the name of satan, or even just drop heavily implied references to the biblical mischief-maker, and everything becomes white noise. People won't hear you, no matter how many facts you present; logic cannot penetrate the wall of religious outrage that gets built up, and no reason can be allowed to sustain. When a town is faced with a deeply emotive issue like, say, having a couple of murdered kids on their hands, the police are under intense pressure to resolve it quickly; and when that town is awash with the devout and faithful, it's not conducive to a long and happy existence spent in blissful freedom to be the local weird kid.

It might sound like I'm simply jumping to the defence of fellow members of the black fingernails, long-haired, metal-loving fraternity, so I urge you to watch “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” and “Paradise Lost 2: Revelations“, two documentaries that were made about the case by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. The film-makers had unprecedented access, and both movies feature interviews with everyone concerned right from the beginning (shortly after the arrests of the three teens). I will warn you, however, they're not light-hearted, easy-going, Saturday night fare. The first documentary, for example, opens with graphic footage of the crime scene and, over the course of two-and-a-half hours, it will make you feel outraged and appalled in ways that not even the Daily Mail can comprehend. It's not just because of the horrific nature of the crime, but also the fact that you can see the most awful miscarriage of justice unfolding right before your eyes.

You might feel that describing this case as being one of religious persecution is something of an exaggeration, but you should remember that there really was absolutely no physical evidence linking these three to the crime. All anyone had to go on was the way they looked, the clothes they wore, the books they read, and the music they listened to. When I first heard about this story in 1996 (shortly before “Paradise Lost” came out, although I didn't get to see it until some years later), it was like a punch in the gut. Here were three guys who were my age (actually I'm about a year old than Echols), and who shared my taste in music and clothes, and they were potentially going to be murdered by the state on the blatantly flimsy pretext that a community of devout christians believed them guilty of satanic, ritualistic murder on no evidence whatsoever. In my mind, the only fundamental difference between myself and these three was the town I grew up in.

Rightly or wrongly, it all felt rather personal to me. I never had a particularly good opinion of religion, and this case didn't help; I'd even go so far as to say that it constitutes one of the central pillars supporting my opinion that faith is, by its very nature, designed to divide people, rather than unite them. When it comes to worshipping a particular invisible man, you are either “one of us” or you are “one of them”; it's straightforward, black and white, up and down, “you're either with us or against us” (where have we heard that before?), and god help you, literally god help you, if you're against us. Naturally the religious claim that they are, contrary to my assertion, a true force for unity – or, at least, they would be if everyone agreed with them and joined their club (they're very much “my way or the highway” in their approach – it explains their complete intractability on everything).

Once you have decided to build your world view around the logical fallacy of a false dichotomy, you're left with the uncomfortable decision of what to do with all the people who disagree with you. Ideally, they should be on your side, because you're clearly right about everything (you know, all that god, origin of the universe, and absolute morality stuff) and there's no harm in having a few extra bums on pews and coins in the collection plates, now is there? Sadly, we don't live in an ideal world, so some of those “others” just aren't interested, can't be persuaded, won't be converted. Options are limited; ignoring them is out of the question because, well, “they're not with us so they're clearly against us”, meaning that the only choice left is to wage war on them – oppress them, persecute them, subdue them, bully them, intimidate them, marginalise them, whatever it takes … believe, or die.

Religious persecution is as old as religion itself (actually, they're twins, and religion was born first by around 12 minutes), and has been responsible for an incalculable quantity of suffering throughout the course of human history. From the obvious and huge things like the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition (which, apparently, nobody expects), to the less obvious and small things like christian protesters' intimidation of vulnerable women outside abortion clinics, religious zealots have, for several millennia, considered themselves the envoys of truth, the arbiters of morality, and the defenders of all that is good and righteous; just because they believe a shouty man in the sky has, through the medium of a fantasy novel written by poorly-educated, bronze-age goat molesters, been telling them how to live their lives for the last few thousand years, they feel that somehow gives them the right to tell the rest of us what to do.

In its time, religion has been inordinately successful, and amazingly efficient, in carrying out its deeply-solemn mission to pick on pretty much everyone it doesn't like. If, as a believer, there's anyone smaller than you, more vulnerable than you, or just plain disagrees with your beliefs, the chances are that you, or your faith, have oppressed them in some way (often violently, even fatally). Religion persecutes women (more on which in next week's post but, as Christopher Hitchens put it, “that's half the planet right there”), people of colour, the unmarried, members of other faiths, teachers, foreigners, non-believers, scientists, and gays (whom it wrongly describes as “unnatural” – custom-built mega-churches and the printing press are unnatural – sharks, botulinum toxin, human excrement, and death, on the other hand, are all 100% naturally-occuring phenomena, hand-made by the lord godling Jebus H. Crispy Bacon himself).

How have they been able to get away with it for so long? Simple: they've got all the money and power, and they've used it to insulate themselves against attack, or even criticism. How many times do you hear the religious bleating about how their rights are being taken away? How often do you hear them claiming that they're being victimised and oppressed? Can you believe the sheer front of these hypocritical bastards? I don't give a fuck who you are, but when you've got the lion's share of all the wealth and influence in this world, and you spend and exercise it trying to rob other people of their basic human rights, you don't get to claim victim status (and especially not when someone's telling you to stop being a bullying wanker). For too long now religion has abused the weak while simultaneously positioning itself beyond receiving any sort of criticism for it. “How dare you tell me I can't bully brown people! Their very existence is against my beliefs, and you're taking away my freedom of religion! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!”

In the western developed nations (although I'm thinking largely of the United States), things have had to change over the last few hundred years or so. By the time the age of enlightenment was in full swing in the 18th century it was no longer really possible to nail someone to a tree claiming they had the devil in them and expect that you'd be able to get away with it (although in the American south in the 1960s it was possible to hang blacks from trees with absolute righteousness and get away with it, but that was more to do with KKK-infested police forces turning a blind eye). Ever since that time, religious persecution has had to get much more subtle and insidious, especially during the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st as religions became a fiercely potent force in modern politics (particularly in America).

By allying themselves with certain parties, political doctrines, or even individual candidates, religions could mobilise the huge support of their congregation in order to achieve the changes they wanted to see. They could, through their support and donations, get laws modified in their favour; preachers have, over the last 30 or so years, have been able to get their flock to vote for a candidate beneficial to their faith organisation by convincing them that they were, not just a person of god, but actually god's choice. Conversely, candidates with great ambitions of going far, maybe even all the way to the top, would frequently associate themselves very openly with the man upstairs and his self-styled representatives down here. The Republicans are absolute masters at this, with barely a single candidate in decades who didn't have his or her tongue lodged deeply in the arsehole of the religious right.

So, since the 1950s we've witnessed the ever-increasing pace of the stampede of religious moralism in which anything they didn't like was branded demonic, satanic, anti-christian or, in a desperate attempt to conflate faith and flag, anti-American. The idea that “them communists are all atheists!” (when they weren't) pushed church and state ever closer with the introduction of “In God We Trust” on money and “One Nation Under God” in the pledge, and marked the real dawn of the oft-repeated lie that America “is a christian nation”. Now that the ball of religious influence on politics was rolling, the destruction of freedom of thought and expression could follow right behind it. Books, music, movies, television, any area of life or culture that didn't specifically relate to the church, anything that wasn't about neutering one's intellectual curiosity and instead praising the unholy nothingness in their deluded minds, was in the firing line.

Don't like a book? Call it obscene and anti-god or, better still, get it banned, jail the author, and bankrupt the publisher. Don't like rock and roll music? Say it's satanic and destroying the nation's children, protest the concerts, run the band out of town, and intimidate promoters so they'll be too afraid to ever book the band again. And what of the kids who like this stuff? Well, they're clearly smitten with the devil – Satan has obviously got a choke-hold on them, and there's no hope of salvation. Unless, of course, they can be made to like christian rock, without doubt the lamest, most cynical cultural hypocrisy ever committed by the church – fortunately, only the poor sods who already believed in god fell for that shit (the same goes for christian metal and, holy suffering fuck, christian rap – if you don't believe how bad it can get, check out the infamous “Christian Side Hug“; apparently believers can't enjoy a simple, innocent embrace without getting a stiffy – perverts).

And so we return to the West Memphis Three; the local “weird kids” who read the books, wore the clothes, and listened to the music that religion didn't like, and religion persecuted them right into prison for 18 years for it. For nearly two decades, Damien Echols faced the very real possibility that each year could be his last, with the constant threat of a lethal injection looming over him, and he did so with the full knowledge that it was satanic panic, religious hysteria and intolerance that put him in that position. There's a good reason that, contrary to the claims of apologists, the legal systems of most nations are not built around religious doctrine, nor their laws based on holy scripture. They, like our religious commandments, are based on the morality we derive from our being an interdependent social species. To base our law on a doctrine of faith would be to live in a theocracy – a government of, by, and for a religion and its followers, where persecution and injustice would become endemic.

For now, though, this story does at least have a happy ending. Yesterday, as a result of a rather complex, and obscure, form of legal plea, the WM3 were released as free men after 18 long years in jail. With DNA evidence that was never available at the time of the original trial, the three were facing a probable re-trail in December anyway, so this deal smacks of a legal system trying desperately to avoid the possibility that their incompetence, and their persecution of these three men in lieu of any evidence against them, would result in an aquittal that could put varying congressional or senatorial ambitions in jeopardy. Prosecutor Scott Ellington's comment that it would have been, “practically impossible to put on a proper case against [the] defendants” is the closest you're going to get to an admission that they had absolutely fucking nothing on these guys.

All that remains now is for the three to enjoy their freedom, live their lives, and do what they can to clear their names once and for all. To show that religious persecution can not only be overcome, but that it should never have to be tolerated in the first place …

Welcome home guys …

Women: Know Your Limits!

August 28th 2011

I was inspired this week by a post from Xanthe Wyse on her God Confusion blog (you should definitely head over there and say “hi” – tell her I sent you, and don't forget to come back! Hello? Oh … okay, fine, be like that). In “Good Christian Wife” Xanthe talked about a subject that's been on my “To Rant About” list for some time; religion's attitude toward women. If you happen to be a woman (it's okay, I don't mind, I hear it's quite acceptable these days), then I'd like to ask a question of you for which I've never received a satisfactory answer. How could any woman, regardless of background, ethnicity, or education level, belong to any of the major faiths and still maintain a molecule of self-respect? Why would you ever refer to, or even think of, yourself as being a christian or muslim, for example, when it's quite apparent from the research I've done that your religion HATES you?

In previous posts I've calmly, and with great restraint (yeah, right), explored how religion seems to enjoy picking on certain groups of people for whom they apparently hold an irrational, and especially nasty, kind of grudge; gays, atheists, gay atheists, followers of other faiths, gay followers of other faiths, and gays called Faith who follow atheists. Religion loves turning the hate all the way up to 11 for pretty much anyone who isn't straight and doesn't loudly, and regularly, profess an eternal love for the invisible man they choose to kneel before in the hope that he will “enter them” (isn't it odd that they can hold such aspirations, express them in those terms and yet still have a problem with “the gay”?). But, the one group of people for whom the major religions tend to reserve their most potent venom, the one they really have it in for and have expended the greatest energy in oppressing them into submission, are women.

The big faiths, particularly the Abrahamic ones, have been proudly wearing their sexist attitudes since day one, and they've done so without any guilt or apology. Right from chapter 1 (paragraph 26), they had god creating man first (we'll ignore, as the religious do, the obvious contradictions in the story of creation where this order differs); the first woman, on the other hand, was usually brought into existence as some kind of afterthought, and often at the behest of the first man who was merely appealing to the creator to give him something to lust after before his urges drove him towards one of the animals he was supposed to be naming. Incidentally, since we've so far discovered approximately 8.7 million different species of animal, and current estimates suggest there's at least a similar amount left to be found, shouldn't god have warned Adam that he was going to be far too busy for the foreseeable few thousand years to have time to chase girls?

Having introduced the mother of mankind (cost to man: one rib), the authors of the old testament then proceeded to write her as being far more trouble than she was worth, to the point where it's almost as though they're conducting a thorough character assassination of the whole of womankind. According to the story (or “stitch-up”, as it should perhaps be referred to), Eve is responsible for the complete downfall of man (via the curious medium of fruit theft), our expulsion from paradise and the subsequent need to work for a living, the demotion of humans to the status of mere mortals, and the bestowing of the pain of menstruation and childbirth upon all women in perpetuity. Talk about pointing the finger, and talk about a massive over-reaction from the man upstairs who delivered Adam a cosmic-sized version of the veiled threat, “you need to put your missus on a lead, mate”.

To further compound this tale's burdening of all females with such a stupendous quantity of metaphysical guilt, we have the unavoidable fact that the “man upstairs” is absolutely the man upstairs; there can be no bigger clue as to which gender has decided it's in charge down here when the all-powerful law-giver of the universe is referred to almost exclusively with male pronouns (again, I'm ignoring the occasional contradictions that, in this case, involve plurals). As you read further through the books of the bible (particularly the old testament, although the new is not all that much better), you realise that the whole, disgusting tome is shot-through with an industrial-strength sexism that would inspire even Richard Littlejohn to become a radical feminist. Actually, I take that back; Littlejohn wouldn't touch the bible – in fact he'd probably call Jesus a liberal, unemployed, foreign do-gooder.

If you want some evidence as to just how badly religion regards women (rather than just taking my vociferous ranting as gospel, no matter how exactly spot-on I may be), have a look at this small selection of choice bits from the bible. While you do that, I have a simple question for you to ponder – what is the name of Lot's wife?

Genesis 3:12-13, 16-17

Adam blames his other-half for the apple debacle (a nobility which sets the example for most of the biblical men that follow), and god punishes womankind with subjection to man (who is punished for stupidly having listened to his wife).

Genesis 7:2, Exodus 20:17, 21:17, Jeremiah 6:12

In the bible, females are the property of males (not just humans, but animals too), so much so that a father can even sell his daughter and receive money from a man who entices his unmarried virgin daughter into sex.

Genesis 19:5-8, 30-38

Rather than hand over his male dinner guests to a rapey mob, Lot instead offers up his two virgin daughters in the hope that they might suffice – because that would be better, obviously (only the bible could have a comparative rape scale). Later, the daughters get all sexual assaulty with their dad.

Genesis 16:1-4, 25:21-26, 29:31, Judges 13:2-3, Luke 1:7

It's only ever women in the bible who are described as barren (clearly all biblical men are packing a veritable ocean of tadpoles in their trousers).

Genesis 38:24, Exodus 34:16, Leviticus 21:7, 21:19, Deuteronomy 23:17-18, Psalms 106:29-30, Proverbs 6:24-26, 23:27-28, Isaiah 57:3, Jeremiah 3:2-3, 13:26-27, Ezekiel 16:15-17, 16:30, 23:1-49, 23:7-8, 23:11, 23:17-19, 23:30-33, Hosea 1:2-3, 2:2-5, 4:10, 4:13, 5:4, Amos 7:17, Revelation 17:1-5

It's only ever women in the bible who are described as whores (biblical men obviously don't really want, or even like, sex – they just do it out of some kind of duty).

Exodus 22:18

This verse stating that one shall “not suffer a witch to live” has been used to justify the murder of thousands of innocent women.

Leviticus 12:1-5, 12:2, 12:4-5, 12:7-8, 15:19-30, 15:33, 18:19, Deuteronomy 24:1-4, 2 Samuel 11:2-5, Job 14:4

Women are unclean, dirty, sinful.

Deuteronomy 22:13-21, 22:23-24

If a man decides that he hates his wife, he can claim she wasn't a virgin when they married and, unless her father can prove that she was, she is to be stoned to death. This fate is also reserved for any betrothed virgin who doesn't cry out loud enough when raped.

There are many, many more passages like those above but I thought that these few were more than enough to get my point across. And, to be perfectly honest, I've got far better things to do this bank holiday weekend than extracting every last piece of woman-hating prose from this prime example of weapons-grade misogyny. I haven't even begun to contemplate how much extra time I would need to do the same for the qu'ran.

From this one would, quite rightly, conclude that the bible (and, similarly, the holy books of Islam and other religions) sees women as property, the enslaved possessions of man, sub-human, often even inferior and of less worth than animals; it considers them filthy, degraded whores, whose purpose is, if not to produce the children who will follow in their father's footsteps as emissaries of the divine, to be debauched, deceitful, distrustful cauldrons of sin that corrupt and lead men away from their holy duties to serve, worship, dominate, and murder in the name of their lord. For centuries, the laws of many nations had been written by, and in favour of, the church, and you can see how many of these reflect religious attitudes towards women. Marriage laws always favoured men, and the prohibition of abortion and contraception both show a deep desire to control the female half of the species through the restriction, or even, complete denial, of their reproductive rights.

As always, theists will defend, or at least try to dismiss, all of this as being anachronistic – that, while it might have been appropriate for the time (it was once appropriate to sell your daughter?), it doesn't really apply in the modern age. Again, we have the old-fashioned selective morality that theists love so much here, since they don't explain by what criteria they judge certain biblical passages to be “no longer applicable” (here's a clue – if the passage supports a pre-existing belief that was arrived at independently of scripture, it's applicable). Alternatively, they may try to brush these things aside by saying that it was the author putting in his opinion, and not that of god, which then creates an instant and epic fail for biblical inerrancy. Or, they may simply say a true believer wouldn't believe such things, without realising that everyone has a different opinion of what a true believer is.

But, let's suppose for a moment that the believers are telling the truth when they say that the religious no longer hold such attitudes, that they're more tolerant and more respectful toward women than their desert-dwelling counterparts. This would mean that women are no longer treated as second-class citizens by their faith, no longer abused, oppressed, or enslaved to a patriarchy with spurious and unverifiable claims of a divine mandate. I think we all know this is bullshit, and it doesn't just apply to the most obvious perpetrator of crimes against women, Islam; Christianity is equally as guilty, it's just that, as the world has grown more secular, it's had to learn to be far more subtle. It is often said, for instance, that the religious right in America would love to take the country back to the 1950s, and there's a very good reason for that; the decade that followed the 50s challenged the established order like nothing that had come before.

Through a series of cultural revolutions, the 1960s irrevocably changed everything that the white, western religious hierarchies had known for over 1500 years. The development of the contraceptive pill truly emancipated women, allowing them, for the first time ever, to set the sexual agenda and reclaim a fundamental reproductive right. Additionally, abortion was becoming a realistic possibility, with the 1967 Abortion Law in the UK (although America would have to wait until 1973, the 60s saw a progressive increase in the number of procedures performed as it became more acceptable). And, while they are both subjects for another time, the civil rights movement of the 1960s saw both people of colour, and those of alternative sexualities, make enormous, orthodoxy-threatening cracks in the centuries old belief that white was right and straight was great.

All of these changes were driven by secular principles – not religious ones; it was, and still is, the religious right that resist these upheavals most fervently because they have the most to lose. Whenever, and wherever, a campaign to secure equal rights for any group of people emerges, you can bet your life that those who pop up to oppose it will do so on religious grounds. We constantly hear of how the traditional family is being “eroded”, that people aren't getting married any more and, for those that are, the “sanctity” of their union is somehow “under threat” from the fact that a couple of guys three streets away that they've never met want to get married. As a result, we get retarded organisations like the American Family Association (AFA) and the National Organisation for Marriage (NOM) lobbying to keep gays out of sight and women in the home (where they belong, apparently).

We also get the planet-fuckingly irresponsible Quiverfull movement who believe that a woman's singular role is to treat her uterus like a clown-car by trying to squeeze out as many little soldiers for Jesus as possible; such groups are only possible because of the effective indoctrination techniques religion employs in order to convince women (mostly) that treating one's reproductive system like a factory-line is in some way laudable. We get catholics who have similarly large families due to the prohibition on birth control, again seeing women as little more than dedicated baby-ovens for the lord. Catholics also, somewhat perversely, have a massive thing for venerating a woman, Mary (the Jewish girl with the amazingly gullible husband who believed her when she said god knocked her up), yet utterly deny the right of women to be ordained as priests (recently they even despicably compared it to child abuse).

The religious insistence that a woman's position is that of a lower order has given us the grossly backward opinions promoted by appalling bigots like Pat Robertson, who famously said, “Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period“. We get young girls growing up in christian households having the idea of subservience to, and dependence on, a man, through the supposed “holy” idea of matrimony, drilled into them as a virtue from an early age; as a result, we get generations of women who have no real sense of self outside that of their life with their earthly “lord” and the heavenly one who allegedly appointed him as her superior. We get people, both religious and secular, who defend women that claim to choose such positions, without explaining how a perceived lack of options can ever be considered a choice.

When the culture in which you were raised is stacked very much against you, it's impossible to divorce yourself from it sufficiently to make an informed decision regarding that culture. Would, for example, a woman in Tehran who was raised in an entirely secular environment ever wear a burka as a symbol of cultural pride? I find it highly unlikely – it takes some pretty serious religious indoctrination to instil the delusion that one is doing it out of choice. If religions were to stop promulgating deeply sexist ideas regarding a woman's place in the world, we wouldn't have books that teach someone how to be a “good christian wife”; there are simply no secular equivalents – seriously, try finding a book that promotes female marital subservience written by an atheist. While you're at it, why not try the extreme end of the scale and find a predominantly non-religious country that stones women to death for adultery?

In response to the question of solving the problem of world poverty, Christopher Hitchens answered that the religious emancipation of women would be the most effective way of achieving that aim, and I can't agree with him more. How many fewer children would be born if women weren't compelled, or even forced, by their faith to have so many? How much less of a strain would there be on the countries of the world to feed, clothe, and house their citizens if the dominant religion's arcane ideas about contraception didn't mean there would be more of them to begin with? There's only so many people our planet has resources for; there's only so much that can go round … someone, somewhere will be going without … that's the definition of poverty and, when there's no more to go around, you have to make it go around fewer people. When women are truly free to decide whether they bring life into this already crowded world, they will have the power to eliminate poverty in a single generation.

Oh, did you figure out the name of Lot's wife?. That's right … she didn't have one. She wasn't considered important enough to deserve a name; and, by being known only as someone's wife, she has nothing of her own which a man had not given her. Religion teaches women that they don't own anything, not even their bodies, their hearts, or their minds, and I call bullshit.

Your body, your heart, your mind … YOUR RULES

Trans-mission

September 3rd 2011

This blogging lark can be a bit frustrating sometimes. There you are thinking you've got the week's topic sorted and the post itself well under way (alright, 1/6th under way) when, suddenly, almost out of nowhere, something comes along that throws a massive spanner in the works and everything changes. One minute your article was one thing, the next you find you have to begin the slow, difficult process of turning it into something else entirely. Since there are no wrongly imprisoned teens to write about, and most of my relatives are thankfully of good health, what could it be this time? Well, it was Fox News psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow's article on Chaz Bono, son of Cher (and Sonny), and his upcoming appearance on “Dancing With The Stars”. I won't dignify the article with a link, so please take my word for it when I tell you, in no uncertain terms, that Dr. Keith Ablow is an ignorant, hate-mongering, transphobic shit-bag.

Again, this is one of those cases where, in the interests of full disclosure, it's only fair of me to make absolutely clear that I'm not entirely unbiased when it comes to this particular subject. I have two transgender people in my life; my wonderful partner, Raven who, like Chaz Bono, is a trans-man (i.e. female to male, or FTM), and my good friend Aerynne who is a trans-woman (i.e. male to female, or MTF). I have been a close observer from day one of what life is like for someone with gender dysphoria; I've seen how someone can be unwilling to look in the mirror because they know that, whenever they do, all they will see is something that looks, and feels, fundamentally wrong; I've seen how someone can be terrified of how they think the world sees them, what they think of them, and ends up borderline agoraphobic because they feel the world won't see a particular gender at all and judge them to be a freak of nature.

I've seen the hoops that someone with gender dysphoria has to jump through in order simply to be recognised. Over the last 6 or 7 years I've been to countless appointments and assessments, dealt with hundreds of bits of paperwork and referrals, made seemingly never-ending train journeys to specialised clinics and hospitals hundreds of miles away (and burned much of my holiday time, and what little money I have, each year in the process). I spend more time on the phone in an average month than a 14-year old with a texting addiction does in a year, and I have had to familiarise myself with the acts of law pertaining to gender identity in order to get vaguely, threateningly litigious on the arses of institutions that have been unable, or frankly unwilling, to update personal records despite being presented with legal documents that would not so much stand up in court as pogo stick out of it and stomp it flat.

Whenever I've had to explain gender dysphoria to someone, I've often described it as though the brain were wired to a gender that is different to the body it's being carried around in. I was both surprised, and rather smugly pleased, to discover that I was more on the money than I thought – recent research into brain structures of transgendered people somewhat supports the idea. There are numerous scientific explanations as to the potential causes of gender dysphoria, including neurological structure and function, genetics, hormone exposure, etc., but it is generally classified as a medical disorder, and not necessarily a mental illness (many authorities, including the NHS, do not classify it as such, although, because of the impact it can have on mental health, it is often dealt with as a mental health issue).

Dr. Keith Ablow's article belies an understanding of this condition that is both way below that of a complete, drooling spanner like myself (whose only medical training is how to unwrap an Elastoplast), and is infested with seething bigotry to such an extent that one would be tempted to put money on him being the first recipient of the inaugural “Jerry Fallwell Memorial Intolerant Prick Of The Year Award”. To be honest, I'm amazed that a psychiatrist working for Fox News is even able to spare the time to write articles like this; I'd have thought that, when you've got people like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck (who, between them, cover borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders at the very least) as colleagues, you'd have enough to deal with on a day to day basis to keep you busy until your retirement (and probably beyond – there's certainly enough source material to work with to get a writing career and several conferences a year out of it).

As is so often the case when someone exposes their intolerance, they do so by trying to mask it as having some kind of altruistic purpose. In Ablow's case, it's about protecting children – specifically, it's about protecting children from catching “teh trans” by encouraging their parents to not let them watch “Dancing With The Stars”, where they will be confronted with the stark, and shocking, reality that people like Chaz Bono actually exist. Rather than allow children to be introduced to the idea that our species is infinitely more diverse and interesting than many of us can imagine, Ablow instead labels the whole thing “toxic” and a “tragic celebration of transgender surgery”. He seems to hold the grossly distorted belief that seeing a TV show where Len Goodman awards a 7 to a dancing trans-man before an applauding audience might somehow encourage the young girls of America to hack off their own tits and fashion a fake penis for themselves because their inability to properly connect with girls at school must mean they're really a boy underneath.

In Dr. Ablow's article (or, as we should probably more accurately refer to it, his “transphobic rant dressed up as a public service announcement”) he suggests vulnerable children, who may be in the process of establishing their own gender and sexual identity, don't need the “mainstreaming” (as he puts it) of someone who themselves has an issue with identity because that would present the transgender journey as a “smart or heroic one to take”. Yes, in Ablow's world, not only are kids completely fucking stupid and will look at a tranny on TV and say, “I want to do that”, but the medical profession would clearly open the door for them and wave them through without an assessment or anything. Not only that, but Ablow seems to think that being transgender is, like avian flu, measles, and “teh ghey”, somehow contagious.

Not content with the idea that a child would wish to bring down a tidal wave of bigotry upon themselves on a mere whim by choosing to be transgender (as if such a thing were possible), Ablow demonstrates an unbelievable lack of sensitivity and respect by repeatedly referring to Chaz Bono using female pronouns. But surely the most obnoxious aspect to this whole disgusting tirade is when he compares sufferers of gender dysphoria to someone who would have their limbs removed under the belief that they were born to be an amputee. Only the most sad and pathetic creature ever to drag itself from the very bottom of a festering scum swamp of dishonesty and intolerance could contemplate making such an analogy, which is constructed entirely to shock and appall. Only someone with a complete disregard for medical fact and human decency could try to draw a comparison which denigrates both conditions.

He describes the position of “Dancing With The Stars” as being that, “Chaz Bono's chemically and surgically altered appearance is a blessing to us all”. No it isn't, you moronic fucking imbecile – the NBC show's position is nothing more than the fact that it's a dancing show with some stars in it, and Chaz Bono is one of the contestants this year! Chaz Bono's appearance absolutely is a blessing, but to Chaz Bono who, having long ago had to come to terms with being born into the “wrong” body, has then had to go through a painful and arduous process to, as my friend Aerynne describes it, “correct a rather large birth defect”. As for the notion of it being comparable to the “triumphs achieved by the heroes of the Civil Rights movement”, Ablow is, once again, dead wrong because the transgender community is today having to wage the exact same battle against intolerant dickholes like Ablow that women, people of colour, and homosexuals had to fight in decades past.

I would like to make it clear that I do not, in any way, wish to portray Dr. Ablow as some kind of bigoted opportunist who's trying to take advantage of the media exposure Chaz Bono's appearance on “Dancing With The Stars” will inevitably bring in order to advance his distorted ideas about the transgendered and raise his profile. Not at all … he manages that quite well on his own:

Make no mistake: I would have gone to the ends of the earth to help Chaz Bono if she had come to me for help

What, by disrespectfully refusing to use the correct pronouns?

I would have treated her with dignity …

You've demonstrated in your article what you think dignity means.

… and summoned every ounce of my intellect …

Wow, both ounces!

… and empathy …

You'd have to find some first, you douchebag.

… to explore her psyche with her

In other words you'd have told him to pull himself together and blamed it all on some TV show he saw when he was a kid.

I would have pried loose every family secret hidden by the Bonos

And, presumably, exploited them for massive profit in the form of books and talk show appearances?

I would have enlisted the help of every expert I know—some of the world's best—at everything from endocrinology to hypnosis

You'd have sought help from people who persuade latent show-offs to pretend they're chickens on stage?

I would have teamed up with a spiritual counselor, if that seemed indicated

In other words you would have to tried to Jesus the tranny out of him.

And if all that failed …

Why on earth would it? I mean, you clearly would have tried really hard not to approach the problem from a medical point of view.

… and if Chaz Bono wanted either to kill herself or to undergo gender reassignment surgery, I would have taken that journey with her

Wait, what. Are you saying you'd make a suicide pact with Chaz Bono. I know you work for Fox News and everything, but you're not completely beyond rescue.

Somehow, with enormous compassion and love and God's help, we would get through it

Dude, calling someone “toxic” is not exactly indicative of compassion and, if there is a god, then it was he who made Chaz Bono transgender in the first place, you fucktard.

But I would feel no triumph in it, no sense of any heroic overcoming obstacles and righting the flesh in accordance with the soul. I would feel pathos. I would feel the limits of my attempts to truly heal Chaz Bono, and I would wish her well with a life that had veered, seemingly unavoidably, into a very dark place

And yet, strangely, he didn't, as you opine, come to you for help or ask your opinion? Could it be because the transgendered don't want some wingnut like you trying to psyche them out of who they are and then pity them if it works?

I'm going to take heat for saying all this, by the way

Yes, and with bloody good reasons.

I would rather be the one shouting “The Emperor has no clothes!” than one of the happy-go-lucky villagers applauding the tragic parade

Actually, Dr. Asshole, you're the one shouting “the emperor is wearing the wrong clothes – cover your child's eyes lest they be irreparably damaged!”

So, here it is. One psychiatrist's prescription, sure to cost me a lot of hate mail, but reward me with the certainty that I am stating what I believe to be true and that I am doing my job: If you care about your kids, don't let them watch “Dancing with the Stars” starring Chaz Bono.

So, there it is, the appeal to both emotion and your own authority as a means to engender the same bigotry in others that you are wracked with yourself.

There are many reasons to not watch “Dancing With The Stars”, chief among them being that it is a truly awful bastard offspring of the wonderful original “Strictly Come Dancing”. The former is dripping with artifice, and has taken all the class, elegance, and sophistication out of the latter, leaving it as not so much a celebration of the art of dance as a special olympics for C-listers desperate to prove that they've got at least one marketable entertainment skill. Don't believe me? Just check out this sublime and exquisite charleston by Chris Hollins and Ola Jordan, the 2009 series winners, and remember that, prior to this, Hollins was the sports presenter on BBC Breakfast. When you've done with that, go and have a look at some of the other stunning dances from other performers on “Strictly”.

There, in fact, used to be a time when I thought dance was the lowest form of communication; that was long before I actually sat and watched “Strictly Come Dancing”, but not after I had remembered the existence of mime. As soon as I had seen, The Boy With Tape On His Face, even mime had to be significantly upgraded, and I've since begun the search for a new lowest form of communication. Maybe it's TV psychiatry, self-help books, and the kind of self-aggrandising, attention-seeking bullshit peddled by shit-bags like Dr. Keith Ablow?

Keep calm, and carry on

September 10th 2011

It was a foregone conclusion as to what subject my post was going to be dealing with this week. In the run up to the tenth anniversary of the September 11th 2001 attacks on the USA, internet forums and social media sites are positively alive with the rising tensions, and flaring emotions, of lively, and often heated, discussion. Everyone has an opinion and, given the nature of these events, there was no way I could let this week pass without expressing mine. I wouldn't, in my darkest, most troubling dreams, ever imagine telling America that it should “get over” the events of 9/11, as some heartless bastards out there have done – 3,000 people were murdered that day, and it's grossly inappropriate to suggest one should simply act like they'd just been dumped. That said, I do, however, believe firmly that America needs to get past 9/11. It needs, for at least its own sake, to significantly recalibrate its sense of proportion.

For ten years now we've been told again and again that we live in a “post-9/11” world, a phrase which, as well as being the most overused of the century so far, is also the most redundant (we live in a “post-ice age” and “post-last Thursday” world too, but no-one feels the need to go on about it). Most disturbingly, however, it is a phrase that has been insidiously used to silence criticism and justify many things that would otherwise be unjustifiable (I'm thinking specifically of an insane American foreign policy, the repercussions of which will likely be felt for many decades to come). On top of this, we've also been told repeatedly that “the game has changed”, and that we need to get used to living by a different set of rules – I wasn't aware we were even playing a game, let alone which game it was. Regardless, it's all complete horse-shit anyway.

Since 9/11, America has been very much stuck in a mindset where there is only good or evil, right or wrong, heroes or villains, and it's ideas like these and phrases like those above, and the disingenuous be-suited toss-pieces who peddle them, that are largely responsible. When George W. Bush stated in his all-too depressingly clueless way, “you're either with us or against us”, he was committing a terrible malfeasance against the American public by reinforcing the false perception held by many that we live in a simplistic, black and white world. In this instance, a clear line was being drawn with the terrorists as perpetrators on one side, and Americans as victims on the other and, while no-one would really argue that these labels were being fairly applied there, things are never as straightforward as they seem. There is always a certain amount of grey (or gray, if you like that sort of thing).

Due to a succession of incredibly dodgy foreign policy decisions (many of which carry a distinctively rank “corporate interest” aroma), America has for over a century been very busy fucking with other people's countries; economically, politically, or militarily. The US has more than 600 military bases, in over 40 countries around the world, something which is bound to annoy a fair few people. Like the neighbourhood kid that everyone euphemistically refers to as being “a bit slow” because he never quite learned why it was such a bad idea to keep kicking that throbbing wasp's nest in the garden, there's only so long America can keep pissing off other nations before one of them decides to respond with a vicious retaliatory sting. That's not to say they deserved what happened – no one in their right mind would contemplate such an appalling suggestion – it's more that there are inevitable consequences to one's actions and it's not always those directly responsible that pay the price.

Being the victim, however, is something America probably does better than almost anyone. They have a fine history of it, dating back to around 1620 and the beginning of the biggest naughty fib the US has ever tricked itself into believing; namely, that the pilgrims left England because of religious persecution. The truth, again, is not so simple as it was somewhat more a case that they wanted to turn England into a puritan nation, and England was having none of it. In what has to be the most substantial teenage hissy fit ever, the pilgrims skulked off to America saying, “fine, I'll get my own place where I can have my own rules!” Since then, Americans have been world champions at claiming victim status – just look at the consummate ease with which personal responsibility is jettisoned on the average talk show or celebrity interview.

“I'm an alcoholic! I've got a disease! I'm a victim!” Fuck you, you prick – cancer is a disease – you're just a selfish, drunken arsehole who wants sympathy for the shitty decisions you've made. I'm not saying this is exclusive to Americans, of course it isn't, but they are masters at it, and they're really good at taking it far beyond the individual. Based on the reaction to 9/11 and, again, I'm not saying it wasn't justified because it was – people were murdered, and you are absolutely right to stake your claim to being the victim in this – you get the sense that America felt no-one had ever been a victim of anything before. It was as if terrorism didn't exist until it happened to them. It was as if this was the most important thing that ever happened to anyone, and no one had ever been hurt like they were hurt.

And, before you start leaping up and down, I am not in any way trying to diminish or disrespect the 3,000 lives lost, or the entirely appropriate feeling of having been brutally wounded as a nation, I'm just saying that you need to put it in perspective. You need, as I said, to repair your seemingly malfunctioning sense of proportion and stop seeing things as simple black or white because it will, I promise, help make America and the world a far better place to be. It's important to remember the event, it's important to remember the tragic loss of innocent life, but it's also important to remember not to let this event continue to define you in the way you have allowed it to over the past ten years. Yes, you were the victims of a terrorist attack – but you need to stop thinking of yourselves in that way.

I've not known much tragedy in my life and, in that respect, I consider myself incredibly fortunate. But, there are a few people among those I've called friends who have experienced real horror, and two in particular spring to mind. Without divulging details (it's neither my place, nor my right), I shall say simply that, while both have suffered appallingly, they could not be more different. One has refused to allow the traumatic events that have befallen them to define them in any way, instead choosing life and being a happy, well-adjusted individual as a consequence. The other, by contrast, has rooted themselves, and everything they do, firmly in their dark past – as a result, they drift from bad decision to bad decision, unable to see themselves as anything other than a victim, blaming everyone but themselves for the things that happen to them, and being miserable to the point of self-destruction.

Despite the way it often disappoints, or just plain frustrates the living crap out of me, I have always held a special place in my heart for America – they, after all, went to the fucking moon (and that counts for a lot in my book). Everything I say here, and everything I've ever said about the US, I do so out of fondness, and out of a lasting hope that it can, one day, live up to its original promise. Given that, America, I'm talking to you … you need to stop acting like a victim right now. You need to stop lashing out at people you think have wronged you and take the high ground. You need to use tragedies like this as a foundation on which to build a better nation; an industrious, tolerant, and determined nation. You need to tell the world that, if they hurt you, you're going to get up, dust yourselves off, and carry on as you were, only with a greater sense of resolve and purpose.

Look at the stark difference between the way America reacts to tragedy, and the way Britain does. In America, the world stopped, and everything came to halt – the country shut down, socially, emotionally, and psychologically. In Britain, everyone just looked at their watches and wondered how long it was going to be before the mess was cleaned up because their Tube train was “already running 20 minutes late as it is!” That's not to say that one should compare the events of 7/7 and 9/11, the scales are utterly different for a start … but the British reaction to 7/7 is the same as it's been to every attack we've endured over hundreds of years; once the initial horror has passed and the wounds have been dressed, we get up and carry on. I've never been patriotic at all, but I do love how the old World War II motto “Keep Calm and Carry On” has found its way back to public consciousness (and on to mugs and T-shirts).

I'm not trying to say we're better than you for the way we cope with tragedy, not at all, but you need to remember that you're not the only country on earth – there are nearly 7 billion of us, and you are but a fraction of that number. You need to remember that you are not the only people to know tragedy; during the blitz in World War 2, Britain lost more than 3,000 people every two weeks – that's two 9/11s every month. You need to remember that this was not the most important thing ever to happen to you (or the world), and neither was it the worst; you have endured far greater tragedy, and achieved things far more deserving of your historical focus and attention. You need to remember all lives lost unnecessarily, not just those killed by hateful ideologies. Since 1960, more Americans have died due to fatal nut allergies, lightning strikes, or head-on collisions with deer, than have been killed in terrorist attacks, and I don't see Fox News getting boners over the War On Bambi, the War On Weather, or the War On Salted Snack Treats.

You need to remember that every time someone invokes and plays on the tragedy of that day they're doing you a massive disservice, like the “helpful friend” who is constantly discouraging a rape victim from leading a normal life by reminding them that the last time they went out they got raped. You need to remember that going “full retribution” on the perceived perpetrators exacerbates the problem as more innocents get caught in the crossfire. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq are as much victims of these disgusting purveyors of misery as you were (although Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11) and having made them collateral victims of your retaliation you succeed only in continuing the endless cycle of violence. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other proponents of oppression and fear, could be brought to justice by a sustained police investigation; you don't need some “crusade”, as George W. Bush insanely described it (and without any historical irony whatsoever).

And, while we're on the subject, you need to remember the religious aspect to these events. Sure there are complex, geopolitical factors involved in the attacks on 9/11, and religion alone cannot shoulder the blame, but you cannot ignore the divisive, hateful dogmatic ideas that lie beneath such tragedies. More importantly, you need to remember that by turning up the righteous, christian anger, as such a large contingent of the American population has done (driven, of course, by the religious right), you simply fall victim to the same mentality that inspired these horrific events in the first place. Yes, this act was carried out by muslims – but it was not carried out by Islam itself, and people forget that many innocent muslims also died that day (many among the first responders, in fact) alongside all the christians, jews, hindus, atheists, etc.

Religion creates worlds built around false dichotomies; everything is black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, “us and them” – never mind that things can't always be expressed in such simple terms. You can't afford to see everything as a clear-cut case of “evil muslims” and “good christians”, because history will hand the contradictory evidence to you along with your arse. The crusades, the holocaust, Irish terrorism, the inquisition, and 9/11, all have religious motivations behind them, and only two of those feature a headlining appearance by Islam. You need to stop this bullshit outrage over the “Ground Zero Mosque”, as if Islam were cementing its victory by planting a flag and rubbing your face in it; the community centre, as it should rightfully be called, can no more be referred to as a mosque than the nearest hospital can be called a church simply by virtue of the fact that it's got a chapel in it.

You need to stop religious zealots from trying to hijack this anniversary as they lobby hard to get the WTC “Girder Cross” made a key part of the 9/11 memorial. First of all, this attack was not on christians, or even Americans really, but humans, and if you want a cross then you should allow equally-sized, and prominently-placed, symbols of other faiths (and no faith) to go right alongside it. Second, it isn't even symbolic of anything – two intersecting pieces of metal occur all the time in structural engineering, there's nothing special about it. And third, wasn't the act of hijacking by religiously-inspired ideologies what created this horrific day in the first place? Oh, and since we're talking about hateful ideologies, you need to get Rep. Sally Kern (R-tard) to shut the fuck up. As I've pointed out, peanuts are more dangerous than terrorism, and she's just a disgusting bigot (how does she think gays are more dangerous, by the way? “Suicide bumming”?)

We need to start living in a “post post-9/11” world, where these events are our platform for launching a drive towards living in a more tolerant world, rather than allowing it to be a giant millstone around our necks, dragging us down to the level of violent, hateful savages. We need to stop bigoted zealots from dividing us and demanding that we show respect for faiths who squabble and murder while the rest of us try to live our lives. We need to put an end to the vicious wars that were started in direct response to 9/11 and have, ultimately, killed over 500 times the number of people as lost their lives in the attacks. We need to remember that for every life we take, every right we trample, and every individual we oppress in the name of 9/11, we are showing the most heinous disrespect for those who died that day – we are sullying their memories by reflectively inflicting their fate on to others.

Never forget the events of that day. Never forget the innocent lives lost. Never forget that, yeah you've had better days, but you've had worse ones too. Never forget that others have had it, and continue to have it, so very much worse than you. Never forget that you, and we, often have a hand in hurting others the same way. Never forget the hateful dogmas of religion and politics that create such tragedies, and the vile degenerates who exploit them. Never forget that we are humans, and we are better than this.

But, most of all, never forget the lessons of history … and never forget to learn from them, and move on.

Radio 4 Radicals

September 18th 2011

The bizarre thing I've discovered about getting older, at least for me, is not that I find myself worrying about nature's great, big, ticking, death-shaped clock of impending mortality cessation; nor is it that I'm concerned with checking off the list of things one is supposed to be in possession of at this point (wife, kids, mortgage, dog, massive sense of futile despair at one's interminable existence etc.) It's more that I've come to feel like I've sort of always been this “age”, as if my personality were a suit that was at least 14 sizes too large and was just waiting for me to grow in to it. The suit might have had one or two minor alterations over the years, nothing drastic, but it otherwise remains pretty much exactly the same. As your tastes, opinions, and beliefs begin to coalesce in your twenties and thirties, you develop a far clearer understanding of who you are, what kind of suit you're wearing, and what radio station you should be listening to.

For a short while I had this rough theory that one could gauge how old a person was from learning which one of the national BBC radio stations they preferred (I had specifically chosen to ignore people who tuned in to national commercial stations on the grounds that their age was a moot point seeing as how they were already brain-dead). Based on my theory, Radio 1 was for the under twenties, Radio 2 for the late twenties to early thirties, Radio 3 was for anyone over 55, Radio 4 catered to the mid-thirties to early forties, Radio 5 Live was for the mid-forties to early fifties, and Radio 6 Music for the early to mid-twenties. As anyone vaguely familiar with the eccentricities of the human race will tell you, things are never that simple, and so my theory had to undergo significant revision in order to include not just age but socio-economic and cultural background, political affiliation, and general education level.

Armed with these additional criteria, I now had Radio 1 as appealing exclusively to people who don't like music (and for whom it is mere wallpaper or background noise – a soundtrack to their tawdry, futile existences); Radio 2, on the other hand, was for those people who do like music, but only as it was 20 years ago. Radio 3 was for people who love classical (and don't have the slightest sense of humour about it), Radio 4 was for people who were interested in things like culture and the world beyond their doorstep but, if they were honest, didn't really go to either much. Radio 5 Live was for people who don't actually read the Daily Mail, but who absolutely think and hold opinions like they do, and Radio 6 Music was for people who like music made by proper musicians who were generally too busy being proper musicians to bother the charts. So how does my own station of choice fit in with my theory? I'm glad you asked …

I was only 3 years old in the jubilee year of 1977, so getting into punk at that time wasn't really an option – that would have to wait until much later when I was at least old enough to not only understand the social and political issues that underpinned most punk songs, but to have also spent a good portion of my youth developing a proper sense of outrage and a punky sneer (I still haven't got that last part quite right yet – it looks more like I've been asked by my dentist to show him which tooth hurts right at the moment I'm about to sneeze). Fortunately, when it came to brewing up a simmering cauldron of repressed yet unfocused outrage, however, growing up working class in Britain in the 1980s would more than do the trick. To have spent my first decade and a bit in a time of record unemployment, strikes, riots, and deprivation at one end, while at the other there were people with stock portfolios, “mobile telephones”, and lifestyles built around obscenely conspicuous consumption, was to have spent a youth becoming highly politically aware.

This is not to say that I was shaped entirely by having been brought up in an era of “Mrs. Thatch” and seemingly endless power cuts (yeah, seriously, WTF? Every drawer in our house was filled with candles and matches, and we had several paraffin heaters dotted about the place, one of which cost me a Lego spaceship I'd made, returning, as I did, to find a melted puddle of futuristic-looking, translucent plastic on top of the heater that was now dripping slowly down the sides). I also don't want to give the false impression that we were this dirt-poor family living squalid lives in a filthy home without two molecules of hope to rub together; we were, generally, okay in the grand scheme of things – sure, we lived in a council house on a council estate in a particularly uninspiring town built as an overspill for Birmingham and, yes, we experienced hardship – at the age of seven I learned what bailiffs were and why the front room was now empty – but we had a roof over our heads, and we didn't have to dodge flying molotov cocktails on the way to school.

Like a good number of people of my generation, my awareness of the world, and the political and cultural events that defined it, was significantly influenced not by the news, but by television programmes like “Spitting Image”. For those who don't know, “Spittum Iddidge” (as my baby sister then referred to it) was a weekly satirical sketch show involving latex puppets of well-known celebrities and politicians of the day that didn't so much hold up a mirror to life in Thatcher's Britain as it instead painted a grotesque, yet disturbingly accurate, caricature of it. Of course, nowadays, the situation is entirely reversed, with reality being played out on TV while monstrously distorted puppets run the country or pass themselves off as our celebrities. The satire of “Spitting Image” helped me, and many other kids, understand complex issues by putting names (and funny voices) to the grey suits and equally grey faces we saw on the news every day.

This confluence of the absurdity of real-world events and comedy in the form of satire has been an ever-present factor in my life, and has heavily influenced the way I see the world. I grew up in the middle of the alternative comedy boom of the early 1980s, where long-standing ideas of what constituted “funny” such as gentle character comedy, pleasantly banal sitcoms, or the misogynistic, racist, homophobia of working men's club comedians, were being forced kicking and screaming in to the dustbin of history. In its place we were given comedy that was politically aware, relevant, and with the potential to affect real change by encouraging its audiences to think for once. But, more importantly, it was comedy that was inclusive because, instead of making women, gays, and minorities the targets of the jokes, they made them part of the jokes. This is what was ultimately referred to as “political correctness”.

Over the years there has been a tidal wave of bullshit about how, “political correctness has gone mad”; this has mainly been from twats like Richard Littlejohn (who pretty much owns the phrase), Daily Mail readers, and any of the contingent of right-wing, bigoted dickholes who would dearly love to return to a time when Jim Davidson could do his despicably racist “Chalky White” character, and “paki”, “coon”, and “chink” were considered perfectly acceptable words to use in family sitcoms. A time when, as comedian Stewart Lee pointed out, the Conservative party could campaign in local elections with the slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour”. Political correctness (or PC) was about simply showing respect to people, not laying down a whole bunch of namby-pamby rules about how you couldn't ever talk about “poofs” or “darkies”. PC promoted nothing more than the idea that it was possible to get on with life as one had always done but without demeaning others in the process.

The idea that one could criticise, mock, or even parody someone whilst still showing sufficient respect had a huge impact on me, although I was never really consciously aware of it at the time, or that it was helping to dictate the way I saw the world. That it was feasible to completely take something apart while operating within certain, eminently reasonable restrictions that would otherwise have made it seem impossible, has had a demonstrably profound effect on my cultural, social, and political outlook. I learned that it was possible to make jokes about anyone, regardless of how “sensitive” a target they might ordinarily have seemed to be, without degrading them, or condescending to them either. I learned that one could work within the confines of a system and still fundamentally change it without destroying the framework that held it together. And it was a good thing, really, because I'm completely crap at making petrol bombs.

As much as I might like to kid myself, I could never have been the true punky rebel or the marching revolutionary; I was simply not built, physically or psychologically, to lead the masses to Downing Street and storm number 10 demanding change, and I'm woefully far from being charismatic enough. To tell the truth, I don't think I would have really liked it all that much if I was. Sure, I may feel the urge to scream “Smash the system!” whenever I hear news about banker's bonuses, but the more pragmatic part of me is saying, “No, don't smash the system – dismantle it, one piece at a time; that way we can see where it's broken and put it back together again more quickly and efficiently!” It's not nearly as romantic as we're led to believe the life of a revolutionary is, and it certainly isn't likely to inspire generations of protesting students to wear my face (or such a rambling slogan) on a T-shirt, but it is, in my mind, a more effective and elegant solution to a problem than setting it on fire.

So it is that I find myself falling into a class of people that can best describe themselves, to paraphrase Mark Thomas, as “snotty, obstinate letter-writers”. The Channel 4 series, “The Mark Thomas [Comedy] Product”, taught me that one could be an activist without wearing a beret; one could get involved by writing letters or making phone calls that applied the right kind of pressure in the right places without the need for putting a brick through the window of my local branch of McDonald's (although I can see how that would be extremely pleasurable and hard to resist). It taught me that you don't have to march on parliament in order to protest against an injustice, you simple had to raise your voice and make yourself heard. And while I never had the opportunity to join in on the “Mass Lone Demonstrations”, I felt that applying for permission to demonstrate against the need to apply for permission to demonstrate, beautifully reinforced the idea that one could affect change within a system by using the system against itself.

In addition, it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that the vital components of our infrastructure could be used to challenge that which established them in the first place, and people could be mobilised into action by the very tools that would normally be used to perpetuate one's apathy and ignorance. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have proved to be incredibly useful weapons in the activist's arsenal, allowing campaigns, protests, and other forms of direct action to be organised like never before. Whilst advertisers with the News of the World would almost certainly have pulled out anyway as the hacking scandal grew larger, a coordinated Twitter campaign encouraging people to bombard the respective companies with questions over their increasingly untenable positions accelerated the process in a way that would not have been possible 5 years ago.

Online surveys, petitions, social media campaigns, blogs, and the ability to contact elected representatives directly, and en masse, have all allowed us to subject the mechanisms that comprise the system to a greater level of scrutiny, as well as giving us the means to put significant pressure on the caretakers of these numerous mechanisms to ensure that they keep them running smoothly, or are compelled to take the necessary action to repair or replace them when they break down. While you'll usually see people from every conceivable walk of life getting involved in this kind of activism, it's almost always the geeks, the pedants, the IT nerds, and the endless variety of passionate obsessives who seem to be leading the charge, as well as making up the overwhelming majority of the people involved. Every one of the eight people who met with our local MP to discuss the lamentable Digital Economy Act, myself included, more than fulfilled the above criteria.

When I got involved in the local campaign to encourage a “yes” vote on the Alternative Voting system earlier this year, I found myself in similar, and indeed familiar, company, not least because one of the group was a good friend that I'd known (and worked with) for some time. Simon, like myself, is a geek and a passionate obsessive, especially when it comes to things like politics and the environment; we share similar work backgrounds (we, in fact, met at one job, and then re-met again some years later at another), as well as having similar tastes in both television and radio comedy. “Ah, radio!”, you may exclaim (or you may not). “Comedy!”, you may cry (but you almost certainly won't). “You mentioned both of these things earlier! Are you now going to skilfully tie all of this together in order to both bring it to a satisfying conclusion and justify our having wasted our time on your turgid little site?” Indeed I am … well, apart from the second one.

If there was ever a place for geeks, pedants, and obsessives who harbour repressed revolutionary tendencies or fantasies that their passions could one day change the world (even if it's just one person at a time), it's BBC Radio 4. If, like me, you've grown up on a steady diet of political satire, current affairs, and alternative comedy then a station that not only plays host to “The Manifesto” (with Mark Thomas), “The News Quiz”, and “The Now Show”, but has also provided a home for both Mark Steel and Jeremy Hardy for the last 20 years, is almost certainly a place where you will feel a warm, comfortable glow, rather like the one coming off the screen of the laptop you're currently using to write the third angry email to your MP since this morning. If you've often felt that one of the most effective, and irretrievably British, ways of getting your point across is to write a snotty, obstinate letter, then the BBC's spoken word and comedy station will be right up your street.

On the eve of the general election last year, Simon and I got together at my place, not to watch the results come in, but to enjoy a few cans of Guinness and a movie we both have a great love for, “V For Vendetta”. As pedantic, geekish, letter-writing, repressed revolutionaries with a taste for satirical comedy, the final scene of that movie really is like porn to us; to see the destruction of such a familiar landmark, and with it the notion of a corrupt and unjust system brought down from within, represents a latent urge within us both to grow beards and ride a motorbike across Bolivia. But we know, deep down, watching the simulated explosion of our government's most recognisable office complex is as close as we're ever going to get, because the whole Che Guavara thing really isn't us, and never will be – we're not built for it.

We're not latin revolutionaries; we're Radio 4 radicals …

* Terms and conditions apply

September 25th 2011

On Wednesday night, the state of Georgia committed murder in front of millions of witnesses. As if that weren't terrible enough in and of itself, it was made all the more shocking by the fact that there's every possibility that the victim was entirely innocent. In its usual, myopic pursuit to dispense “justice”, the United States executed Troy Davis for the killing of police officer Mark McPhail, despite the failure to recover a murder weapon, the recanted testimonies of witnesses (some of which made allegations of police coercion), and no other real, tangible physical evidence linking Davis to the crime. In the end, though, it doesn't really matter whether Davis was guilty or not; he was still a victim of state-sanctioned execution in what we're frequently told is a civilised country, and the decision to end his life, as well as a good deal of the support for doing so, came from people for whom “thou shalt not kill” is supposed to be immutable.

The idea that some of the loudest trumpets in the brass section of the “Yay For The Death Penalty!” parade marching band are being blown by supposedly moral, religious people, shouldn't really surprise you in the slightest (unless of course this is your first visit to our planet). After all, it has been known for quite some time that there has been a distinct correlation between being religious and being a teensy-weensy bit of a hypocrite. I mean, if I were to tell you, for example, that all five members of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles that decided Troy Davis' fate were christians, I don't imagine for an instant that you'd be all that shocked to hear it. Despite how much they may claim otherwise, despite how often they may talk about the “sanctity of life”, despite how they are forever trying to impress upon us the importance of their books' commandments that say how killing is wrong, the religious have always carried with them the kind of vicious, sickening blood-lust that only a good killing can satisfy.

Taking the subject of the death penalty as an example, look at the near-pornographic obsession many christians have with the crucifixion (especially that reactionary drunken bigot Mel Gibson). Ignore for a moment the fundamental issue of how, without the death penalty, at least, there wouldn't be much of a christian faith to speak of (there would certainly be no easter and no hot cross buns), and instead ask yourself how it was that the romans having put their saviour to grim use as a kind of interactive, bi-directional road-sign didn't actually inspire them to adopt a firmly anti-death penalty stance? If anything, they've largely come out in favour of killing people at the behest of the so-called justice system. Look at the support for the death penalty among christians and you'll see it's only really the more liberal sects and the catholics that tend to be against it; the fundies and the evangelicals (that is, the “fire and brimstone” wing of the Jebus Party) are largely all in favour.

The first question one has to ask is how a group of people, especially one that is so consistently fond of claiming that they have been endowed by their creator (in conjunction with their astutely recognising his existence and buying his book – available in the fiction section of your local bookstore), with a keen sense of right and wrong could ever possibly support the notion of killing anyone, regardless of the reasons? And how come the more liberal churches and the catholics are against it? Well, the catholics have never come across as being anywhere near as big on Jesus as they seem to be on Mary – most of their attention is focused on young virgins after all – and, with the whole “every sperm is sacred” attitude towards life being precious, they probably (quite wisely) don't want to be seen as hypocrites by supporting the death penalty (they've got enough hypocrisy on their plate as it is). As for how all of the other sects (except the more liberal) can be in favour, well that's easy; theistic morality is utter fucking bullshit.

If you've ever wondered why there appears to be a correlation between both liberalism, secularism, and an opposition to the death penalty, and conservatism, theism, and a support for the death penalty, there is your answer. If you're wondering how I can simply bundle liberalism with secularism and conservatism with theism, as if to suggest there's some kind of relationship between them (or at least a casual affair), then you should probably get out more. Or maybe read more. Actually, yeah, that's it, you should read more – everyone should read more. Conservatism and theism are natural bed-fellows as they're both fairly dogmatic, black or white, “thou shalt/shalt not”; similarly, liberalism and secularism go together because they're both pragmatic, shades of grey, “thou shalt maybe – it depends”. Either way, the point is that theistic morality, which, by definition tends to be objective and absolute, appears, on the face of it, to be an almost entirely bankrupt concept. Scratch the surface, however, and you'll find that, underneath, it's actually a completely bankrupt concept.

The idea that there's some kind of objective morality, a fixed, inflexible code by which everyone can live and everything can be judged and measured is misguided at best, plain silly on average, and total bollocks at worst. Life just isn't that simple, there are too many factors to consider, too many variables sticking their noses in and confusing the issue (as those presumptuous, nosey variables are want to do). Nothing is ever so black and white that one can confidently say there is a hard and fast rule for dealing with it; there's always scope for disagreement, there's always wiggle room. To suggest otherwise is to imply that there is an area on which we can all agree, a concept which anyone with even the smallest, passing familiarity with human idiosyncrasies will tell you is monstrously ill-informed. It also implies that there must be some kind of arbiter of these rules, an external and independent adjudicator who defines and enforces them in addition to determining whether or not they have been adhered to. Yep, it's that god bloke again.

Theists are forever using their supposed morality as a stick with which to beat not just non-believers but each other too. How often do we hear the followers of one faith lambasting followers of another for their alleged moral lapses? How often do believers condemn homosexuality as abhorrent whilst simultaneously justifying suicide bombing? How often do they deplore suicide bombing whilst supporting the death penalty? One of the most common criticisms levelled at atheists by those of the imaginary friend persuasion is that, without some sort of cosmic headmaster keeping one eye on us and the other on his cane so he can whip it out quickly to thwack us on the arse when we misbehave, we can't possibly have any kind of moral code by which to live. As if the propensity for treating one another with decency and respect is strictly the preserve of people who fear getting the shit kicked out of them at some later date and in some unspecified realm?

Secular morality is, by definition, far more moral because it requires no threat/reward system to keep us in line. Non-believers who choose not to get all rapey or stabby on their next-door neighbours do so not because they fear a one-way ticket to Torture World but because we humans are a social species that is almost entirely dependent on one another in order to survive. We don't treat our fellow human beings like shit because, for the most part, we don't want to be shunned by, or separated from, the very people we rely on to grow the food we eat, generate the power we need to heat and light our homes, process our waste, keep our transport systems running, and generally ensure that we can comfortably go about our daily lives unhindered. We all form a vital part of a complex society that requires us to be good to each other lest it utterly and irrevocably fall to pieces like a psychic who's been presented with the undeniable evidence that they're a total fraud.

Ask a theist what they would do if they knew for certain that there was no god; ask them what effect it would have on their moral outlook if they knew that there was no omniscient super-being taking notes and preparing a case against them for when they eventually turn their toes up and stand before the celestial equivalent of Judge Judy. I've actually spoken to some theists who have admitted, quite freely, that they'd just go wild; stealing, raping, killing, they would do whatever the hell they wanted because, well, who's going to stop them? It's quite understandable that one could make the mistake of thinking that there are no words, in any human language, to adequately describe this immensely fucked-up sort of mentality, but in actual fact there are … how about “sociopath”? I'll tell you now, in no uncertain terms, that I will put my trust more readily in moral decisions made by a non-believer than I ever would those of someone who says they behave because god is watching them.

I'm sure that, at some point in your life, you've met someone who seemed to only ever do good things because there was a hint that they might get something out of it. Like all those disingenuous arseholes who buy lottery tickets because the money is “going to good causes”, as if the fact that their meagre, heartfelt donation of a whole £1 gets them a distant chance of winning £10 million has no bearing whatsoever on their decision to be charitable in this singularly oblique way. Do you remember thinking how they seemed like a bit of a prick whose self-interests were being masked by their gossamer-thin cover of fake altruism? Well, just scale that up a bit and you have a fairly good understanding of what people mean when they describe their laudable deed as “the christian thing to do”. No it isn't, you anus, it's the human thing to do, and some of us are perfectly able to show compassion and decency without needing to be bribed with the promise of a VIP eternity-pass to Cloud Land.

The aspect of theistic morality most apposite to the discussion at hand here is that of how they will twist and distort it to fit their pre-existing world view. A rigid code of ethics suddenly becomes eminently malleable in the hands of those who refuse to admit that the rules they so espouse are often either a mask to hide their agendas, or the means by which they choose to advance them. Look at the hoops they will jump through in order to justify holding positions that run contrary to the morals by which they claim to live. The “selective morality” (a polite euphemism for “rampant hypocrisy”) as practised by most believers is riddled with excuses, cop-outs, and a million and one other varieties of “yeah, but …” and “well, except where …” attempts to circumvent the rules that they themselves created and, ironically, find impossible to work to.

Given this you could understand why, to many of us, the ten commandments of the old testament could conceivably read something a bit like that home and contents insurance policy document you've got stuffed down in the darkest recesses of a file box somewhere (probably under the stairs next to the gas meter). The morals they supposedly teach have been updated with so many sub-clauses and exceptions that the authors (and others in the organisation) can drive a truck through the middle of it and absolve themselves of any responsibility or duty whatsoever. Seriously, have a look at the ten commandments for yourself; as you go down the list, put an asterisk next to each one and write a few footnotes, some small-print that specifically lists all the exceptions you can think of for that particular rule. Oh, alright then, I'll do it for you … honestly, you people – where would you be with me to guide you, eh? Oh yeah, church :)

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

* Except the almighty dollar, obviously. We've got to keep that money coming in so we can spread the word of Jebus!

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, … Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:

* Except all the statues of the virgin mary that we make and sell, and all the Jesus tea-towels, T-shirts, mugs, and all the other tacky crap upon which we graven the occasional image or two. And, obviously, we shouldn't count the statues, carvings, stained-glass windows, or other representations of the messiah that we kneel before and bow down to every week.

Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

* Except when we hit our thumbs with a hammer, or lose our car keys. Or when we claim to speak on his behalf, obviously – we have to be able to make shit up and say it's what god wants, and we definitely have to be able to threaten other people in his name.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

* Of course this doesn't apply to the people who work at the petrol stations we visit on the way to church to fill up our cars, nor the waitresses at the restaurants we have lunch at afterwards. Or the police, fire-fighters, the coastguard, the army, navy, all the armed forces, doctors, nurses, all the staff at hospitals, prison warders, people who work at power stations, the gas company, and everyone who works hard every sunday to keep people safe and alive, and to ensure the continuing integrity of our country's infrastructure.

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

* Unless they do something that annoys the piss out of you, wherein all bets are off.

Thou shalt not kill.

* Except for muslims, jews, blacks, prisoners, atheists, homosexuals, transgender people, asians, arabs, and anyone else who either has an entirely different imaginary friend to us, or our book says god doesn't like very much.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

* Unless you can get away with it or, if you do get caught, you can deny that doing it with a man makes you gay, you weren't taking those drugs (you just wanted to get rid of them), and you can use the whole thing to your advantage by saying you were lead astray by satan before publicly shedding crocodile tears at how you've sinned against your lord and you beg for forgiveness.

Thou shalt not steal.

* Naturally this excludes taking money from the gullible in exchange for a bogus, or even non-existent, product, because that isn't stealing. And selling “miracle water” is not at all like extracting money by dishonest means. And taking all that valuable time from people's incredibly short lives by insisting they spend it praying and kneeling and bowing and going to a building once a week to do it all in front of other people doesn't count either. And nor does all the tax my church doesn't pay.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

* Except when your neighbour is a muslim, a jew, black, a prisoner, an atheist, a homosexual, a transgender person, asian, an arab, a scientific rationalist, or anyone else who either has an entirely different imaginary friend to us, or our book says god doesn't like very much. In which case, you can make up anything you like against them and lie your arse off for Jesus.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife,… nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

* Are you serious? If your neighbour has a 42” plasma TV to watch the god channel on, you need to get a 60” plasma to watch it on! If you've got money and possessions it's because god has rewarded you for your piety and hard work. You covet whatever the hell you want!

So, what is my point in all this? Well, it's that the people who made the decision to end the life of Troy Davis did so believing themselves to be moral beings. They believed they were righteous in killing another human being because they have justice on their side. And, when we say “justice”, obviously we mean “god”, because no definition of “justice” can include murdering someone. It doesn't matter what their crime was; one cannot claim justice has been served if the guilty has no capacity for acknowledging and recognising their crime, or no hope for making amends. Granted, one cannot truly atone for taking a life; one can only carry the full awareness of what they've done and be tormented by it for the rest of their lives – if you put them to death you spare them that torment. Once someone is dead, they're fucking dead; they have no ability to come to terms with what they've done, and no hope of ever serving as an example to others. And don't give me the bullshit deterrent argument – that the murder and violent crime rate is higher in countries and states with the death penalty blows it right out of the water.

Ultimately, Troy Davis was killed by a bunch of excuse-making, hand-wringing hypocrites who see murder as negotiable; the kind of people who hold up some dusty-book's bronze-age morality to excuse their actions and absolve themselves of any responsibility for them. The kind of people whose hypocrisy allows them to punish people for an abominable crime by committing the same abominable crime against the perpetrator, all the while justifying their actions with “yeah, but, justice”. It's all cosmic small-print designed to give themselves the ultimate get-out clause, and side-step the rules they insist everyone else live by.

It's just another form of “insurance claim will not be honoured if …”, “at participating restaurants only”, “offer not valid in …”

Baby, I was bored this way

October 2nd 2011

Ah, there's no better way to enjoy the beauty and essential poetry of the English countryside than by indulging in the old-school romance of a journey by train. Unless you go by car, of course, because then you can not only set off whenever you like, stop for a rest whenever you like, or purchase food from vendors that don't have a loan-shark's attitude towards pricing, but you can go right up to the countryside and touch it in its green and pleasant, cow-poo scented face. And, obviously, when I say “old-school romance” what I actually mean is “21st century exercise in psychological torture”, most train services these days tending to deliver an experience that fits somewhere nicely in between vacation and suicide. Yes, as you can probably guess, I've written this from one of First Great Western's finest examples of an extortionately priced mobile cattle shed with windows … and it depresses the living shit out of me.

While it's not the purpose of the actual journey that depresses me, it certainly doesn't help; thanks to the NHS being strangely oblivious to a thing called the “internet” in general, and that “Skype” doodah the kids are always talking about in particular, I am compelled, several times a year, to stuff a bunch of things into a backpack or three and accompany my boyfriend on yet another adventure to London village (approximate distance 250 miles) so that he can have a 45 minute chat with the Gender Identity Clinic about how he's feeling, how things are going and, more importantly, how they're not bloody going because we have to spend a sizeable chunk of the laughably small amount of spare cash we have these days in order to make a 500 mile round trip (and an overnight hotel stay) for something that could be achieved, thanks to the aid of modern technology, without even having to get out of bed or put some pants on.

No, it's largely the journey itself that so digs into the back of my skull with a spoon and fucks a large hole in whatever bit of the brain is responsible for storing my will to live, forcing it to leak out slowly over the course of four interminable hours. The pain begins, subtly at first, but quickly growing in eye-watering intensity, rather like when your partner carelessly side-swipes you in the testicles with their knee during sex such that you end up in hospital with a chronic case of ball-ache and unstoppably giggly mates. It might seem, at first, like all is going swimmingly, as you book your train tickets via The Trainline website; that is until you remember that their current television advert involves having employed 80's talent-vacuum and Hawaiian-shirt wearing music-free zone Black Lace to cover “Do The Conga”, their lamentable ode to vomit-inducingly uncomfortable family parties (in which someone always gets felt up by Uncle Terry). And it only get worse from there …

Once you've finally found that there are, in fact, a few trains running somewhere in the general neighbourhood of being almost convenient to you (and by “neighbourhood” I mean of course “on the other side of town by the big gasometer and the alley where that old bloke from number 35 flashed a group of schoolgirls”), you can then proceed to the payment stage where the pain, and the analogy of having been whacked in the knackers mid-coitus, really begins to kick in. Unless it's around 3 years or so before you actually want to travel, and you've elected to journey at a time of day that even bats couldn't be bothered to show up for because there's no one around to scare the crap out of, you will be presented with a list of prices that make you wonder whether the website has suffered some sort of identity crisis and now thinks it's living in one of those South American dictatorships where the currency crashed in the 1970s and every number subsequently developed an insatiable passion for putting lots of zeros just before the decimal point.

Having reported the brutal rape of your bank account to the local authorities, you try to comfort yourself with the idea that at least the actual journey couldn't possibly provoke nearly the same level of anguish, nor feel anything remotely like the bout of economic fisting you've just endured. Like forgiving your partner after finding them in bed with a goat for the eleventh time, you naively try to convince yourself that “this time it'll be different” despite knowing, deep down, that you're going to be greeted by the sound of bleating when you come home from work one day in the not too distant future. Arriving at the station to find that the least expensive part of the whole operation, the TVs showing the arrivals and departures, has gone tits-up in such a way that some poor hapless bastard is forced to manually update a small whiteboard every few minutes, doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. Having to carry all your shit down two flights of stairs, through a long corridor, and back up two flights of stairs to the furthest platform from the foyer only adds to the increasing sense of repressed murderousness.

As the train arrives (late), the futile despondency gives way in a heartbeat and everything suddenly turns into a game of, “How much physical injury am I going to have to suffer at the hands of cack-brained incompetents who insist on swinging three people's worth of bags, suitcases, and children around their necks”. Level one involves getting on the train behind one of these fucktards, waiting while they fanny about aimlessly in the doorway, and trying desperately to resist the urge to shove the feckless shit-box under the train. Level two, also a test of patience, requires you to wait patiently in a gangway not much wider than the space between the sheets in 2-ply bog roll while said fucktard struggles to remember which seat they had been allocated; “Was it this one? I'm not sure, let me get my reservation card from the bottom of my most inaccessible suitcase, it'll only take an hour, you don't mind, do you?” Points are awarded for the number of seconds that you can bear to let elapse without taking your own ticket and using the edge of the cardboard to paper-cut the cock-muncher into the nearest casualty department.

Once you've found your seat (which will invariably not be facing the motion sickness-reducing direction of travel you requested when booking), you will discover that the phrase “leg room” could hardly have been less appropriate. In fact, the phrase positively invites with open arms and an industrial-sized bottle of lubricant a lawsuit for brazen dishonesty, the room not actually being suitable for human legs or, indeed, anything larger than the blood-desiccating space bacteria from “The Andromeda Strain” (this comparison is doubly appropriate when you consider that, after four hours on a train, your insides feel like all your arteries have been filled with sand and at some point you appear to have been robbed of most of your vital life signs). Ultimately, however, what you attempt to do with your legs doesn't matter because they will be competing with your back, neck, arms, and arse for the title of “Most Agonisingly Uncomfortable Body Part”.

In a desperate attempt to make the best of an unbearable situation, you decide to put the fold-down table on the back of the seat in front of you to its intended purpose and break out the laptop. Only you can't. It's not that the table is too small (it is, but you can just about get a laptop on it if you don't mind holding everything else you own between your legs); it's that, at some point in the last year or two, the train companies decided to take advantage of the few square inches of seat back that weren't doing anything by welding a screen to it on which you can (for a fee) watch movies, read news, and enjoy TV programmes from BBC iPlayer that you've already paid for through your licence fee; a screen which, yes, you can turn off, but every time the train stops (at a station or, for no apparent reason, behind a hedge overlooking a scrapyard), it comes back on again as soon the train pulls away; a screen which, because of its placement, makes putting your laptop screen up at any kind of useful viewable angle utterly fucking impossible.

Thank you very bollocking much, First Great Western and Volo-TV; thank you for ensuring that, if I want to use my laptop on your train, I have to situate it with barely a quarter of an inch resting on the table while the keyboard is busily attempting to slice me in half at the waist like a big “Prince Of Persia” type saw blade trap. Thank you for making it all but impossible to get a seat with a proper table unless I'm prepared to go back in time and make my booking shortly before Richard Trevithick announced the invention of the steam engine, and then blow every single employee of the rail network upon my return to the present. Thank you for giving me a plug socket to power my laptop, but no viable way of using the bastard thing without having to first extract it from my lower intestine every time I wish to breathe out. And god forbid the fact that you're sealed in a metal box with no openable windows for the entire morning should make you feel nauseatingly clammy and in need of a drink; you've got nowhere to put the sodding thing any more because there's a laptop occupying the only available flat surface.

So, after constructing a 4-foot long drinking straw by splicing together other drinking straws and placing them in the can of cola that you're now clutching between your feet (and almost passing out every time you try to take a sip because of the sheer effort required to coax a small amount of fluid up to your mouth in abject defiance of Sir Isaac Newton's pesky laws), you settle in as best you can and try to write this week's ranty, witty post for your shouty, funny, and insufficiently adored (or at the very least rarely visited) blog. Five minutes later and the realisation suddenly hits you that the second cup of tea you had before leaving the house was probably a bit of a mistake, especially since it was now waving its arms and legs about to alert you to the fact that it and the three cans of cola you also threw down your neck are leaving your system very soon whether you like it or not. Short of weeing in the aisles as some kind of misguided protest against the cost of rail travel, you have little other choice but visit the toilet.

If you've never had the opportunity to make use of the on-board facilities of your average British train, my advice is don't. The experience will be as difficult to remove from your long-term memory as it is to remove the piss-soaked piles of tissue that have literally adhered themselves to the floor. Thanks to a strict policy of seemingly only ever cleaning the toilets whenever the entire carriage goes in for its ten-year service, most of them are permanently imbued with an aroma that can at best be described as like a collision between an NCP car park stairwell and a warehouse-sized lump of abject misery. The previous occupant, whoever they may be, appears to have made it through to whatever age they are totally unaware of how a flush mechanism works, and the water that emerges from the sink tap is at that sickeningly lukewarm temperature that high-school biology experiments regularly demonstrate to be the most conducive for growing E.coli bacteria in. As for the hand towel, well, all I can say is that the colour of the towel makes it looks like it should be in the toilet rather than being nailed to the wall opposite it.

Having escaped the fully self-contained monument to insanely bio-hazardous waste, all that remains is to while away the rest of your journey without feeling the urge to open a major artery or two (yours or someone else's, it matters not at this point). Sadly, the presence of other human beings on the train will test your ability to resist that temptation to the fucking limit. It's not enough that “Parent of the Year” candidates are holding a “Total Indifference To My Screaming, Shitting, Passenger-Bothering Offspring” competition at the other end of the carriage, nor is it enough that some people are still utterly incapable of holding a mobile phone conversation at volumes other than that which prompt noise abatement orders to be issued on behalf of the nearest airport; no, you've also got to deal with the inconsiderate fountain of solipsism sitting across the aisle from you refusing to acknowledge that their headphones are designed for use in both ears, rather than as a means of broadcasting Catatonia's “Road Rage”, twice, to the entire fucking world (don't get me wrong, I love the quirky Welsh pop-rockers, but I want the decision to listen to them to be mine, not some random dickhole with a courtesy-bypass).

And while I'm on the subject, there's another thing that really gets on my tits … ah … crap, I just realised that this is starting to sound like a special “public transport” edition of “Grumpy Old Men”. Time to balance out the righteous bitching with a good dose of positivity, I reckon, before wrapping it all up neatly like I usually do. So, the rail network is an overpriced mess of a service that really ought to be so much better than it is, but what's the alternative? Well, certainly not the bus and coach services offered by National Express or Megabus; if you think the train is bad, try spending 40% more time to make the same journey, in a much smaller space, with fewer (or no) facilities, and with a far greater likelihood that deep-vein thrombosis will explode its way out of every last one of your extremities, including your thumbs, mere moments before the bus breaks down or goes tumbling over an embankment and into a canal.

So what about the car? Nope, that's not an alternative either, I'm afraid. Call me Mr. Lefty Eco McGreen Tree-Hugger if you like, but burning through ever greater quantities of a finite resource, pumping yet more unbreathable shit into the air, and spending billions of taxpayers money in order to make it easier for more people to keep doing both of those things (even if this requires an economy-draining, population-exterminating war or two) is a moronically stupid solution to any problem, let alone this one. Our road network is fine, it's just that there's too many self-righteous nobbers with an unshiftable sense of entitlement on it. A car is a luxury, and should be regarded as such, rather than being seen as the default answer to every single transport question that many people feel it to be; it should be something special, something that gets used to make journeys that are not viable by any other method. No longer does anyone “get the car out for a Sunday drive” because they're already getting the car out every five minutes to drive to the shops at their end of their own streets.

“Okay then, smart-arse, you reckon you've got all the answers … so what actually IS the alternative?” Well how about we make public transport, you know, better? While the experience of using the rail network in this country is, as I said, much like being thumped in the happy-sacks for the amount of pain it causes, and, I admit, it could be so much worse than I describe, but it could be so much better too. It can be efficient and on time; it can be convenient and good value for money; it can be a comfortable, clean, and pleasant environment that doesn't make you want leap out of the window into the nearest dump tank of disinfectant and comfy chairs. Both Germany and Japan can manage to run such a rail network, why can't we? (especially since we invented the bloody train in the first place). No matter how much Londoners may complain about it, the Underground is as close to a well-run rail system as we're probably going to get; it's fantastic, and should at least generate a small amount of pride (not too much though, as there's still plenty of room for improvement).

Public transport can be awesome, if only the effort is made and the funds made available; it is more than possible for it to be both reliable and massively economically, and environmentally, preferable to using a car; and it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that the public transport system of any nation, not just this one, can be good enough to encourage people to leave their cars at home and only use them for special journeys, or for a Sunday drive to the beach, or into the countryside or something …

Just so long as they leave the green and pleasant cow-poo where it is …

404 Mage Not Found

October 9th 2011

My first thought upon hearing of the death of Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs this week was not that the world had lost an inspirational thinker and visionary who fundamentally changed our relationship with technology (that thought was in there – it just wasn't my first); I didn't even leap, as I ordinarily would, straight to the cynical and anti-corporate, “Oh no, who's going to come up with ideas for what Chinese children should build next?” (although that thought was in there too). No, my first thought was, given Jobs' extraordinarily high-profile as CEO of the biggest tech company on earth, how long would it be before the Westboro Baptist Church crawled out of the festering gutter they lurk in to announce they were going to protest his funeral? As it turned out, “less than a day” was the answer and, when their infamous tweet came rather ironically via an iPhone, prompting a torrent of amused derision, I started to wonder why theists ever bother to go anywhere near the internet when they so regularly, and completely, get their arses handed to them every time they do.

Obviously, I'm not talking about people who happen to have a belief in god and have bought a laptop in order to buy tea towels of the virgin mary, or coffee mugs with “Fill me up … WITH GOD's LOVE!”, as gifts to put under their pagan, forbidden by the bible, trees at christmas. I'm referring to those who clearly mark out a place for themselves on the internet as theists or proponents of other forms of superstition and woo; the muslim bloggers, the christian vloggers, the psychic frauds, and the reiki-loving joggers (I'll be honest right now and say that I'm probably not going to necessarily deal with the last two of those specifically in this post, but the temptation of a Dr. Seuss-esque rhyme like that was too great to ignore, so please forgive my tiny little deception – normal, truthful vociferousness will be resumed as soon as possible). Regardless of how they present themselves, and what particular kind of shop they set up on the world wide web, they invariably find that it was nothing quite like the easy-pickings they imagined.

For a large number of theists, especially those with a fondness for preaching, the internet must have seemed like a gift from above; suddenly, instead of trying to convince the handful of trusting nitwits they knew personally, and who already agreed with everything they said anyway, the cost of a cheap PC and a monthly phone bill could buy them the most enormous audience – hundreds of millions of fresh minds in twinkling, shiny heads, all waiting to be emptied of every last drop of reason in order that a large quantity of mental faeces could be pumped straight in to their brains through the intertubes. As a platform for proselytizing, the world wide web must seem rather like a chance to play Wembley Stadium would to a band that's more used to performing Daniel O'Donnell covers in a local community centre (invariably to an appreciative audience of deaf pensioners who were grateful just to be out of the house). It doesn't matter that they'd be lowest on a bill that features the biggest rock bands on the planet, they're going to do it … and they're going to fail.

The insurmountable problem faced by anyone wishing to preach dogma on the internet is that it represents probably the most open form of communication ever devised by our species; a free forum for questions and discussion (something which is hugely incompatible with religion). It is, as has been expressed elsewhere, a “marketplace of ideas” where any and all opinions or points of view can be expressed without hindrance. Unlike mainstream media, there are no real gatekeepers to getting “on the air” with the internet; radio, TV, print, the traditional forms of publishing all subject the contributor to a vetting process before they'll let them utter a single word – not so with the web; anyone with a few coins in their pocket can be their own publisher or broadcaster and espouse ideas, no matter how trivial, profound, insane, offensive, or just plain silly, to a world hungry for information. The only caveat here is that as the size of the audience increases so too does the number of potential critics.

It's like the world's biggest peer-review system; ideas are thrown in to the arena where they are scrutinised, analysed, and generally taken apart in much the same way as the inhabitants of the lion enclosure at London Zoo would take apart a large steak. The process is completely merciless, and this is as it should be because the point is to put every idea under the microscope and subject it to the most intense scrutiny; if it survives, then it has merit – it has worth. If it falls apart under examination, it is abandoned and left to rot where it lies bleeding. It might seem harsh, but this is the only reliable way we've found over the centuries to weed out bad ideas, and our entire civilisation is borne of a scientific method which utterly depends on it. It's not enough to simply say that you've got an idea, you have to show it, you have to prove it, and you have to give everyone else the opportunity to prove you wrong.

As you can imagine, religion doesn't work very well within this particular format – in truth, it doesn't work at all because it simply cannot stand up to that kind of scrutiny. Faith depends on unprovable, unsupported assertions; revealed “truths” for which there can be no questions and no doubt – you just have to accept that they're true because an authority claims that they are. Now, in church, you can get away with this because you're dealing with a much smaller audience who have come willingly to the arena because they already agree with every idea being expressed; this is so not true of the internet. Spend more than five minutes on any internet forum and you'll see that people disagree on pretty much everything, and the only thing they seem to have in common is that they can recognise, and will gleefully shoot down, a crap idea the moment they see it – returning to the Wembley Stadium analogy, if you were to turn up to play granny music at a rock festival then you're going to get bottled off half-way through your first song.

All of this is something that YouTube vlogger Thunderf00t expressed far better than I in his excellent video, “The Internet: Where Religions Come To Die” (apologies if, in covering some of the same ground, I've expressed it in similar ways). If you aren't familiar with Thunderf00t, and in particular his series “Why Do People Laugh At Creationists?“, you should check out his channel immediately. He's a top bloke, switched on, and demolishes the arguments of theists (one of whom we will get on to in a moment) in the same way that a toddler demolishes a boiled egg and toasty soldiers; in a matter of moments, and without even trying. Just as the internet in general, and YouTube in particular, plays host to intelligent communicators like Thunderf00t, it is also the home of some of the most delusional, frothing-at-the-mouth shite-hawks and purveyors of cerebral (and, in some cases, moral) bankruptcy you'll ever have the misfortune of scraping off of the underside of your shoes.

The first that springs to mind is NephilimFree, aka Evan Philips; a YouTube user who looks rather like a cross between an over-zealous radio ham who refuses to acknowledge that the technology has been superseded, and a creepy uncle who's always trying to ply his young niece with alcohol at family parties before becoming strangely absent from any such future gatherings having been fitted with an ankle tag by the local authorities and legally restrained from coming within 500-yards of school playgrounds. Completely lacking in scientific training (although, having seen his videos, one might reasonably suggest he lacks even the most basic scientific education and simply throws out whatever clever-sounding nonsense he mined from other ignorant creationists), he is not only a fundamentalist, a young earth creationist, and a believer in end-times prophecy, but he's also a geocentrist (believing, as he does, that the earth is the centre of the universe).

Given the remarkable ease with which these ideas can be debunked, it's no surprise that Philips gets pasted in any discussion he has engaged in, although you'd never get that idea if you only listened to his side. He has thrown down a number of debate challenges to sceptics (the best example being that with DonExodus2), with every intention of using it solely as an opportunity to declare his superiority over atheist “cowards” by insisting on so many unreasonable conditions to the debate that any rational-thinking person would refuse to participate. Like many religious apologists, he is incapable of tolerating opinions that differ from his and, in addition to issuing impossible demands for debates, he would regularly block those who disagreed with him from commenting on his channel and, in some cases, he even sent legal threats to users who posted videos that criticised him. It appears, however, that Philips is no longer making videos because, it is rumoured, his disabled room-mate (off of whose benefits he appeared to be sponging) has finally given him the elbow.

ShockOfGod, aka Rich Garcia, another YouTuber, and associate of Philips (insofar as he was asked by NephilimFree to moderate his debate with DonExodus2), is an arrogant, cocky, pseudo-macho prick who seems unable to make videos “debunking atheism” unless he happens to be doing it while riding around on his motorbike in a desperate and obvious attempt to impress upon everyone how much of god-damned MAN he is (as opposed to a tiny, infinitesimal penis who can't string a sentence together unless he's got a high-powered machine throbbing directly underneath his arsehole). Having expressed a desire to be the next Rush Limbaugh, he also runs an internet radio show from his website (although I would have thought that piling on a few hundred pounds, developing an Oxycontin habit, and gassing out his few remaining brain cells by sucking on an exhaust pipe would achieve the same result). Like Philips, he's also a proponent of some deeply ludicrous, and easily-refuted, ideas.

He believes, for example, that evolution is a lie, America is a christian country (and the founders all believers instead of deists), christianity is the greatest force for freedom in the world (including the idea that it ended slavery and emancipated women), and that the bible is the infallible word of god (although it's not clear whether he believes, like NephilimFree, that the water from the great flood had erupted through the earth's crust due to pressure, launched into space, froze solid, and then impacted with the moon, causing its craters – this is known on YouTube as the “Lunar Bukkake Theory”). He is also an atrocious bigot who despises homosexuals and believes he has the absolute right to beat the shit out of any man who dared to come on to him (don't hold your breath, “Shock” – most of us prefer a REAL man, not a ball-less child). He was also banned from YouTube initially for having created a fake mirror page to steal user's passwords in a phishing attempt.

Famously, Garcia has only one argument, and it's not even an argument; it's a vacuous and nonsensical statement that he plasters on his website, as well as calling in to atheist shows to repeat over and over so that no-one can even get a word in to point out what a fatuous, steaming pile of donkey droppings it really is. He claims that no atheist can answer the question, “what proof or evidence do you have that atheism is true and correct?” In fairness he is technically correct in saying we can't answer that question, but that's only because it's not actually a question, Garcia, you fucking spastic! Not only that, but it is logically bollocks and shows a complete disregard for where the burden of proof lies in any given argument, and total ignorance of what atheism actually is. The thing is, though, there is a response to this supposed argument but, like so many theists, Garcia is too busy going “la la la can't hear you la la la god rules” with his fingers in his ears to ever hear it.

Leaving both of these muppets flailing around in the muck of the internet's “intellectual midgets” compost heap, hogging the spotlight, and surely the undeniable king of the dirt-pile, is VenomFangX, also known as Shawn Karon. The colourful history of PCS, the “Poster-boy for Creationist Stupidity” (as Thunderf00t dubbed him), is far too dense to go into in any great detail here, so I would highly recommend you watch The Peach's excellent Youtubementary, “A Boy Named Shawn“. Whereas many internet apologists have a narcissistic streak that drives them time and time again towards an arena where they're given a thorough intellectual bum-raping, Karon is driven by what can only be described as borderline sociopathy. Featuring, as he does, very heavily in Thunderf00t's video series on creationists, he demonstrates not just a complete absence of original thought (most of his videos involve him parroting, almost verbatim, the work of convicted fraudster and holder of fake academic credentials, Kent Hovind), but also a propensity to lie, cheat, commit perjury, steal, abuse the law, and regard the whole of humanity as a vile, filthy abomination that deserves every evil that can possibly befall it (he once genuinely asked, “what was really so bad about the holocaust?”).

Immoral and unethical, Karon is a rich kid from Ontario who put out videos begging for money to help with his online “ministry” as well as stealing money from a charity he promised he would be forwarding donations on to. And when I say “rich kid”, I'm not just exaggerating for effect, or expressing some kind of latent jealousy toward anyone with a few more quid in their pockets than me – one of his videos shows the home he shared with his parents as being nothing short of palatial. He has suggested that the biblical attitude towards rape is appropriate for today and that a rapist should be compelled by law to marry his victim. He also believes that god doesn't heal amputees because they don't deserve their limbs. Like NephilimFree and ShockOfGod, he is a fundamentalist christian, deeply anti-science, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, and believes that most, if not all, of the bible should be taken literally (subject to massive amounts of “interpretation” in order to get around the contradictions, obviously).

Karon is also a fervent proponent of censorship, blocking or deleting comments that disagree with, contradict, or criticise him, even going so far as to delete his own videos after repeated smack-downs by atheists (and, in some cases, christians) made keeping them utterly untenable. He has even gone so far as to issue a large number of false DMCA take-down requests, committing perjury in the process, against videos that, he claims, were in breach of his copyright but that had merely included clips of his videos in order to criticise him (permitted under fair use). Foolishly of all, he once attempted to have YouTube lawyer Dprjones falsely arrested for paedophilia. This, along with his increasingly unhinged videos (especially his terrifyingly disturbed outing as Heath Ledger's incarnation of The Joker), provoked a number of users to intervene and, with the help of Karon's parents, got his website shut down, his YouTube channel closed, and made sure he would get the psychological help he clearly needed. Sadly, however, it didn't last, and Shawn is back, still barking, and still getting his arse kicked.

So why, if the internet is such poison to dogmatic ideologies like religious faith, do people like Philips, Garcia, and Karon persist in spite of all reason? Why do they continue to live in such an enormous state of denial? Why do they keep repeating arguments that have been so thoroughly trashed in the arena before hundreds of millions of people? Is it because they are so fervent in their beliefs, so secure in their faith, that they simply will not rest until the world hears their important message? In a way, yes, but that's a tiny consideration compared to what really motivates them – attention. Many of the more devoted religious apologists (especially those above) desperately crave the kind of ceaseless attention that a worldwide, always-on medium can bring, to the point where even an armchair psychiatrist like myself (qualifications from Comfy Chair and a Nice Cup Of Tea University) would start to think there's more than a little Narcissistic Personality Disorder about them.

They have a constant need for praise and attention, believing themselves to be special, and that they deserve to be treated as such. They carry a sense of entitlement, consider themselves unique, and that they should only associate with people who hold a similar status. They can't tolerate criticism, dissent, or anything that could potentially suggest that they might be wrong about something. They are always right, and when the world says otherwise they will flirt with the paranoid notion of a conspiracy against them. Power and success are high on their list of priorities, they fantasise about it, they yearn for it, and often have an inflated sense of their own abilities as though they had somehow already achieved it; anyone who disagrees is considered to be simply envious of their achievements. They will also generally display a fundamental lack of empathy for others.

If you're a religious apologist, and the above sounds anything like yourself (although I sincerely doubt that you'd ever admit it), it's fair to say that you need help rather than a YouTube or Blogger account. If it doesn't sound like you, but you're still a religious apologist, let Evan, Rich, and Shawn serve as a reminder to the fact that the you're not going to find your sky wizard on the internet, nor are you likely to find an enormous audience of people willing to hang on your every word and follow you as you preach about your invisible friend. What you will find, however, are people who will challenge you, and your ideas; they will dissect and dismantle your opinions, your whole world view, and they will only stop once it falls to pieces in their hands, or if it can prove itself resilient to intense examination. It is crucial to our survival as a species that we root out the bad ideas and preserve only the good.

And, let's face it, religion is a fucking rubbish idea …

Goodbye, Mr. Fish

October 13th 2011

A while ago, purely for the purposes of my own private amusement, I wrote a song about the company I work for, and some of the eclectic folk I share an office with. I say “song”, it was more a selection of English words, arranged badly into sentences, and desperately in need of a better author who could put them to good use. The song itself was pretty lame, and the idea as a whole was even lamer, so for that reason alone it will probably never see the light of day. That said, however, there are a few lines from it that I would like to share (albeit reluctantly) with you, along with some far more appropriate and better arranged words, in memory of Mr. Nicholas Fish; a colleague we were shocked to learn on Monday morning had passed away over the weekend at the terribly young age of 45.

Mr. Fish, a man in glasses,

Has a love for styles and classes,

But his passion sometimes can go overboard.

He has the funniest of sneezes,

Which have never failed to please us,

And, to show our gratitude, we all applaud.

I don't think that it would be an exaggeration for me to say that I consider myself rather fortunate to have worked with someone like Nic for the last eight and a half years. Admittedly we didn't exactly hang out together much outside of work (to be fair, I never really do that much with anyone), but we did share the same bit of carpet and some airspace with one another for 7.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the best part of a decade. While many people came and went over the years, some more memorable than others, Nic endured with boundless patience and fidelity; a stalwart of the company since before I started, he hardly ever missed a day to illness, he was dedicated and loyal, the closest thing the company had to a much-adored family dog. Granted there would be the occasional, accidental poo on the floor, but we're none of us perfect.

There were times, for example, when Nic's grasp of Coldfusion or Javascript would desert him, in one instance to the point where I jokingly suggested the instigation of a “Code Offender's Register” for people who committed egregious crimes against computer programming. There, too, were times when his desire to keep things organised would result in him tidying a website's code into malfunction, breaking it completely whilst ensuring that at least the rest of us could easily find our way around the neatly arranged piles of smouldering rubble that used to be a working “Contact Us” form. All of this is perfectly understandable, however, because none of these things were really Nic's area of special expertise and, while he didn't always pull a 5-star result out of every such task, he was never afraid to have a bloody good go and, for that, you had to give him 5 stars for effort.

Where Nic's mad skills truly lay were in HTML and CSS; with a quiet determination, a little bit of time, and a suitable quantity of coffee in his black “Mac User” mug, he could make a site look spot-on perfect in every browser – even the ones that only four people in the whole world are still using. If there was a quirk, oddity, glitch, or bug in a modern web browser that Nic hadn't seen before, he would generally find a way around it; if he couldn't, it was likely that no-one else had managed to find a way around it either because there wasn't one. Although I would often tease Nic that, as a programmer, I would “do all the words” and he would “draw the pretty pictures”, it was always delivered with an appreciative fondness for someone who regularly solved, with tremendous ease, annoying little problems that would have me tearing my hair out and contemplating extreme criminal damage against my keyboard for the better half of a day.

Perhaps it was the frequently finicky nature of this aspect of web development that so appealed to Nic, possessing, as he did, a pedantic streak that was as wide as the M5 and equally as likely to cause interminable frustration. Nic had a talent for winding people up, myself included, in the most endearing of ways with his insistence on getting things right. There was never any malice, nor intent to annoy, just a fervent belief that one should pay attention to the tiny details that others might consider trivial because, in the end, the small things do matter. Many's the time when I, and others (especially support diva Aerynne and, before her, John Leal), would find ourselves flirting dangerously with the possibility of an all-out pitched battle with Nic over HTML standards, accessibility, and whether or not a specific browser's implementation of some minor CSS attribute warranted our hating it as much as we did.

A similar need for the possible intervention of the United Nations could be achieved by decorating Nic's monitor with tinsel in the run-up to christmas. It wasn't so much that he hated christmas, not at all, although he did take to wearing his near-legendary “Bah Humbug!” hat at the office party every year with possibly a bit too much enthusiasm. It seemed more that he objected to the feeling of enforced jollity (whether real or imagined) and the sense that if he wasn't conforming to someone else's idea of fun then whatever he was having couldn't legitimately be called “fun”. It didn't matter that whatever everyone else was doing wasn't entirely up his street, Nic could still take a certain amount of joy in sitting back with a beer and watching the festivities. He didn't feel like he had to join in to enjoy himself – in some ways it seemed as if that would make it much harder – instead he was often content to simply soak up the atmosphere with a pint and a gentle smile.

This is not to say that Nic couldn't be the centre of attention every once in a while; in what I can only describe as a perversely joyous quirk of fate, this ordinarily quiet man was blessed with the most wonderfully gregarious and fabulously entertaining sneezes I think any of us have ever heard. Every so often, the relative quiet of the office would be completely demolished by a noise that sounded as if the actor playing the villain in a martial arts movie had come in unannounced to practice his “Hai-ya!” fight yelps. Bordering on the surreal, and beautifully juxtaposed against Nic's understated and whisper-soft nature, the office would frequently burst into a round of applause, the volume and enthusiasm of which was always commensurate with how impressive the sneeze was. At first this response seemed to wind him up a little, but he quickly warmed to the idea that something that was so intrinsically him, and over which he had no control, regularly brought joy to an entire room full of people.

Most of us only ever really knew of Nic that which we saw day-to-day in the office; he was a devoted fan of neo-prog rock outfit Marillion, a lover of everything Apple (he tolerated Microsoft in the same way one puts up with Jeremy Clarkson; for the most part, you try to ignore them and hope they go away), and his ability to always be the first person in the kitchen whenever a large quantity of cakes, doughnuts, or other variety of chocolate treat, had been brought in for someone's birthday never failed to amaze (nor too did his habit of always returning for seconds). Some of us, on the other hand, knew Nic as a great listener; whether it was making a cuppa first thing after getting in to the office, or drunkenly trying to make oneself heard above the din at the christmas party, he always seemed to have time to offer a friendly ear while you rant and rave about any of life's piffling little annoyances.

On a number of occasions, when weather permitted, Nic and I would find ourselves choosing to walk the 3+ miles from the office into town instead of catching the bus, each chatting away about anything and everything. One such leisurely stroll homeward was on the last Friday of the month – pay day – a fact that occurred to us both almost simultaneously as we approached the Golden Hind pub, just off the Manadon Roundabout. With no pressing need to be anywhere else we decided to stop in for a quick pint which, as is so often the case, ended up being three pints and a relaxed, enjoyable natter between friends over the varying shades of fun and madness that coloured our respective lives. I remember how, in another similar conversation, Nic confided to me in a “don't tell anyone – okay, you can tell [star of support, training, and company phone system] Marie” sort of way that he had become a father – and I remember feeling both honoured, and a little surprised, that he trusted me enough to make me the first person at work to know.

In the few years since then, we've had countless other conversations, including those where we learned how we both have people close to us with Aspergers Syndrome (a conversation sparked by Nic proudly showing off the mug that had been made for him), AND we both have loved ones for whom gluten is an Achilles heel (Nic recommended “The Cake Hole” for gluten-free fair, and I put him on to the work of Mrs Crimble in return). There is, however, one conversation that I shall never forget … not because it was especially funny, or sad; profound, or trivial; revealing, or guarded. It was something that, in retrospect, might ordinarily cause one to feel a slight foreshadowing chill down the spine, but I don't really see it that way. Given my reasonably limited knowledge of Nic as a person it's possible that I'm completely wrong but, to me, it always seemed more like he was saying, “here is something about me that I can't change, so I'm not going to worry about it – instead, I'm going to live and enjoy my life, and just carry on being me”.

It was about 5 years ago, give or take, and a few of us from work were on a night out (the occasion of which, if there was one, escapes me). We were, by this point, in the James Street Vaults; a decent, quirky little pub at the back of Plymouth University and, whilst I have no recollection of how the conversation got there, I do remember that Marie and myself were sat listening with wide-eyed interest as Nic told us about his heart. I remember how, warily, but with an irrepressible curiosity, Marie took Nic up on the offer to put her hand to the side of his rib-cage to feel his heartbeat. I found it quite endearing that Nic, with a somewhat perverse pleasure and a knowing smile, was able to legitimately say that his “heart was in the wrong place”. I also loved the contrast of how, while this was literally true, figuratively speaking nothing could have been further from the truth.

When everyone was requested to gather for a “company briefing” on Monday morning, my mind start reeling at the possibilities as to what an early morning, unscheduled impromptu meeting could be about. None of the thoughts that had occurred to me came within a million miles of the truth of why we were all assembled … over the years I've found that I'm becoming increasingly more difficult to shock, but this well and truly hit me for six. I couldn't process it – I still can't, to an extent – and it almost didn't make any difference to know for a fact that I wasn't alone. I am still half-expecting an eccentric-looking man in a 1960's police box to turn up at reception and tell us all that some alien race had been royally buggering with reality and that he was trying to get everything back the way it should be as soon possible.

It didn't matter that Nic could be, as Aerynne described in her Facebook update on Monday, “occasionally infuriating, curmudgeonly, pedantic” because he was also, she continued, “one of the kindest gentlest people I've ever met”. I don't think there's a single person here, among those with whom he worked, or anywhere else in the world, who could possibly disagree … for Clair and everyone in Nic's family, as well as his closest friends, they have, this week, lost a friend, a brother, a son, a husband, and a father – I know that I speak on behalf of everyone when I say that our love and deepest sympathies are with you all because, for the rest of us, we've lost a genuine, decent, honest, kind, and thoroughly lovely guy – the sort that the world could do with a lot more of, and is a poorer place for having lost.

The title of this post is, as you may already be aware, a mildly clumsy allusion to the 1939 Robert Donat film, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (as well as being a rather obvious and silly joke built on the substituting of “fish” for “chips”). There were two reasons why I thought it an appropriate title for a post about Nic; firstly, I think he would have quite liked it and, secondly, in writing this I realised that Nic had much in common with those classic era films for which he held a great love (chief among them being the Ealing comedies of the forties and fifties, and those of Alistair Sim in particular). They were quiet, gentle, warm-hearted, and impossible to imagine that they could ever cause offence to anyone … and for those lucky enough to have known them, and will always care to remember, they do so with a great sense of appreciation and fondness, and an indelible smile.

Goodbye, Mr. Fish … it was a pleasure to have met you …

The Dad Confusion

October 22nd 2011

Before you get the wrong idea I should probably point out that the title of this post in no way refers to doubts that anyone may have in regards to my parentage (since there aren't any); neither does it refer to anyone else's, so there is no need to go calling “The Jeremy Kyle Show” asking for a DNA test, lie detector results, or a quick go on their “loud obnoxious dickhead” manufacturing plant. The title is, in fact, nothing more than yet another in a continuing series of weak puns, this time conjured up to reference Richard Dawkins' book, “The God Delusion”, and the relationship my father, who this week celebrates his 65th birthday, has with it. Given that, this post is therefore mostly aimed at, and dedicated to, my dad, a man who is probably far from alone in wishing that Dawkins' most controversial work had, like his latest book, featured a larger number of illustrations and a smaller number of large words.

It was in late 2006 that my dad and I first talked about “The God Delusion”, and its author, in a phone conversation that, as is so often the case, descends into the murky subjects of either religion or politics. He was talking about how “this guy's gonna get himself killed” because of some of the things he had been saying about the various faiths and, for some reason which is still unknown to me, I remember my mind going completely blank. I knew well who Richard Dawkins was, and I was all too aware of the book, yet my brain had momentarily decided to fuck off to the pub for a while and it had taken all of the useful knowledge with it. “Who's this now?” I asked. “Richard Dawkins”, he replied, and it still didn't register. It wasn't until our subsequent conversation a week or two later that I was able to say, “Oh that Richard Dawkins!” While I still don't understand why I had initially drawn a mental blank, I have since had stern words with my brain about how it should always take me with it on any future jaunts to the local cerebral tavern.

Naturally, when my birthday rolled around in early 2007, it was with great delight that I opened the present from my dad to find a shiny new, hardback copy of “The God Delusion” peering out at me from underneath the equally shiny paper. Inside the front cover he had written, as he usually does, “To Kris, from Dad & Liz”, only this time he had included his favourite line from what he had read of the book so far; “Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about”. Having myself now read through it a number of times, I have to say that I struggle to find a line I favour more – it neatly encapsulates much of my (and my dad's) attitude towards faith and how, for many hundreds of years, those of us not living under the spell of religion were often made to feel like it was something we should feel guilty about – as if we were in the wrong and that, whenever the question of faith came up, we were somehow obligated to prefix the answer, “I'm an atheist”, with a humble “sorry” and a reluctant comma.

Although there are many areas on which we disagree, religion is the one subject where you will find my dad and I are almost always completely in-sync with one another. He has often said that there are three things he doesn't believe in; ghosts, god, and the monarchy (I reckon my dad's list used to contain five things, rather than three, and that he was forced to ditch “work-related stress” when he actually started suffering from it, and disbelief in “the idea that gay people aren't scary or potentially threatening” had to go pretty much the instant his eldest, smartest, and arguably handsomest, atheist-blogging child announced that he liked guys as well as girls). Since these are disbeliefs that my dad and I share, we have a significantly reduced scope for disagreement and conversations about the metaphysical, therefore, would usually involve telling one another about some ghastly religion-related thing we've read or heard about, followed by a few minutes of mild ranting (often involving the all-too casual use of words like “wankers” or “twats”).

The only area of disagreement that has emerged at any point over the years (at least, as far as I can recall), has been as a result of my dad's experience with reading “The God Delusion”. As with Dawkins' fellow horseman Christopher Hitchens' book, “God Is Not Great”, my dad has said that he found himself having to read it with a dictionary close to hand, stopping every few pages to look up words that he wasn't particularly familiar with. Even when the words themselves didn't pose a significant problem, the ideas expressed in the book sometimes did; there were a few occasions when my dad talked of how he felt that getting his head around some of them was rather like trying to push treacle uphill with a feather. “If only”, he suggested, “Dawkins produced a more readable version of the book”; something that the average “idiot like me” (his words, not mine) could understand , he'd reach a far broader audience (or, as he succinctly put it, “make a shitload more money”).

Now, I don't want you to get the wrong idea about my dad; none of this is meant, in any way, to suggest that he is at all unintelligent, illiterate, uneducated, or, as we say in our family, thicker than a cement and pig shit sandwich (for some reason it's also on the coat of arms). It's true that he didn't get to go to university, but then neither did all but three members of my family (including myself, and I only just scraped a degree out of it). It's true also that, in his youth, he joined the army at a time when it was considered the default option for anyone who failed their Woolworth's exam; and it's best if we avoid completely any discussion on what kind of lead paint drinking IQ is required for a 21 year old in 1967 to want to spend their time stationed in the middle east whilst everyone else was growing their hair long and screwing their way through an acid-induced haze. My dad may occasionally find himself lagging a little behind a world that's always moving forward, but he is by no means an idiot (he was smart enough to co-create me, after all).

I think part of the problem is that, while my dad is a keen reader, he was never really exposed to the kind of reading material that gets hurled at you when you go through higher education. The distinct learning curve you get put on as a child is further extended as you are given progressively more complex works to wrap your brain around, something you ordinarily wouldn't experience outside of academia (that is unless you take it upon yourself to always keep pushing your reading skills once you leave school). Most people, my dad included, will usually find a “level” of reading they are comfortable with and stick with it – if they come across anything more challenging, it's likely to end up unfinished and gathering dust; conversely, books that don't stretch your mind too much are likely to be well read, and often re-read. This explains why Stephen Hawking's “A Brief History Of Time” may have sold millions but no-one can describe its contents to you, whereas Dan Brown's “The Da Vinci Code” could be fully explained on a fag packet by anyone in possession of a biro.

I'm not suggesting that I'm somehow better for having gone through university and advanced my reading skills to the point where “A Brief History Of Time” becomes a casual, straightforward read, because it isn't; it's bloody hard to get through, and nearly fucking impossible to comprehend for anyone who isn't Professor Brian Cox. All I'm saying is that perhaps the only difference between myself and my dad when it comes to reading something like “The God Delusion” is that I was forced to take that challenge by virtue of having gone through further education. I had to forge the necessary discipline that would allow me to understand more complex ideas by, in a roundabout sort of way, making sure I had a dictionary to hand so that I could look up words I wasn't particularly familiar with. This is what the whole process of learning is all about, and it's the root of probably the only disagreement my dad and I have when it comes to things like this.

To me, you shouldn't have to have a “simplified” version of Dawkins' book, or any other for that matter. Education is about raising people up, not dumbing materials down. If you don't understand something, you should have to go and look it up, either in a dictionary, or in an encyclopaedia, or online. When you choose to condescend down to someone's current level of understanding, rather than advancing it, you begin a process of intellectual retardation; you extinguish the fires of curiosity by replacing a desire to know how something works with a childish, fluffy pseudo-answer that gives them the illusion of understanding while imparting no real information whatsoever. If this sounds vaguely familiar to some of you, it should, because this is essentially what religion does; rather than giving you an actual answer that enhances your knowledge of the world around you, it gives you a box of nothing with “Answer” written on it instead. No one ever said learning was easy … it's understandable why so many people are content to simply not bother.

And, again, I'm not trying to imply that my dad is some kind of educational retard who'd rather play “Who can eat the most mud?” than dissect and debate the works of Noam Chomsky (who, incidentally, really fucking does need to learn to write something readable). It's more that my dad, and many many others, were never really taught or encouraged by the education system to get into the habit of always pushing yourself further. For most of us, it was always, “read this, memorise it, write it back out again in your exams”; there was never sufficient emphasis on getting children to explore knowledge, to go to the library, to adventure down other avenues of enquiry and discover something new. Once you get into that mindset, it's incredibly hard to break out, either because it's too much effort or because you've got more important things to worry about – in my dad's case it was earning a living and looking after two screaming children who stomp sugar into the carpet for a laugh.

This is why, in a perverse reversal of roles, I've so often felt the urge to help push my dad in certain intellectual directions; if he ever showed interest in some area that I was knowledgeable about, I would do my best to explain and expand on what he knew, hopefully in such a way that he could relate to it without feeling like he was being patronised by his poncey-arsed, university-bothering, degree-educated son, or wondering whether I was two derisory snorts away from saying, “Damn it all, father, you are such an ignorant oaf, sometimes!” While I still maintain that one should never be compelled to water down ideas such that they can be understood by those who don't constantly bury themselves in dense theological tomes that could be usefully employed to act as substitutes for breeze-blocks, I do concede that there is perhaps some considerable merit to the notion of presenting them in a way that makes them more palatable to the average reader.

It is, I feel, more than possible to write in such way that someone can easily get back on that upward learning curve without having to compress it to the point of total flat-line. It is perfectly conceivable that one could write a book that deals with the ideas expressed in works like “The God Delusion” that is neither mustily-scented, tweed-wearing Oxford professor theology, nor Sky Sports, pissed pub atheism (although I should point out that when I use words like “musty” or “tweedy”, I'm not explicitly referring to Richard Dawkins; I'm sure he smells lovely, and I know I've seen a video of him wearing a Hawaiian shirt). I'm fairly confident that there is a way to write a book about heavy subjects like religion without dumbing down, condescending, or generally making the reader feel like a bit of a tit. If that is the case, then maybe that's what I should be doing?

I have often thought about writing a book or two, but I've never really been able to bring together enough of the many disparate ideas I've had in order to produce anything more coherent or substantial than a weekly 2,500 word rant. More importantly, I could never come to a firm decision as to who I would be writing it for; at whom would I be aiming this epic work? Since I started this blog I have naturally fantasised about getting an out-of-the-blue letter from some enormous publisher or other asking, “Could you do that blog thing of yours for a few hundred pages?” and offering me a massive advance as an incentive. While the buzz-killing realist in me knows deep down that that's not going to happen, it doesn't stop me seeing the idea as being a very attractive one, despite the fact that the rising tide of secularism means I'd be up against every atheist with a half-decent idea, a copy of WordPress, and the ability to create PDF files.

This desire has never gone away, if anything it's gotten stronger, and I'm wondering whether it's because I've come to the realisation over the past few months that both the idea for a book, and the potential target audience for it, have been staring me in the face for years. As well as being a keen reader, my dad has, like me, been something of a writer for as long as I can remember. When we were kids, he wrote many bedtime stories for my sister and I; some were about shady smugglers and buried treasure, others tell of a demented teddy bear called Boffles who comes alive with all the other toys when children are out of the room (this was a good 15 years before anyone had even thought of Woody and Buzz Lightyear). Since Peter Jackson unleashed his epic “Lord Of The Rings” movie trilogy, my dad and I have been collaborating, on and off, on a exposé, fan-fiction parody of Tolkien's classic work in which we reveal that the professor got the idea from ancient, historical figures (and events) that would have made hugely inappropriate reading material for almost everyone.

While we will, some day, get around to finishing our Tolkien epic (especially if I have anything to do with it), I do find myself thinking whether I have been writing all these blog posts as some kind of subconscious preparation for a book on religion aimed squarely at my dad. “Rant In A-Minor: Why Religion Needs To Shut Up And Bugger Off” (obviously that's just a working title) would be specifically intended to introduce ideas like Pascal's Wager (and other logical fallacies), the problem of evil, and why children should be taught all about The Hitch-Slap from their first day in kindergarten, to the kind of person who drives a truck for living, but is able to do so without needing to keep a copy of The Sun on the dashboard, silhouettes of naked women on the mud-flaps, or have his arse hanging out of the window like a gibbon with an HGV licence.

If I do ever decide to write a few hundred rambling, ranting pages on religion into a book of some kind (and, bizarrely, a few mad visitors to this blog have seriously suggested it), then it makes perfect sense that I should be writing it for my dad; after all, he used to write for me (and my sister) and it's surely, therefore, only right that I should one day return the favour? And, seeing as how it's his birthday, what better present could I give than to dedicate to him a hypothetical book that I may or may not write at some point in the future? Yes, okay, a Morgan Aero 8 would be a better present, but I don't have £70,000. And, yes, tickets to the Speedway Grand Prix would be a better present, but I can't afford that either! Yes, alright, a DVD of Ronnie Barker's greatest “raised eyebrow” moments would be better, why don't you shut up and let me figure it out? Whose dad is he anyway, mine or yours? Yeah, exactly!

Happy birthday, dad … I'll try and have the book ready for next weekend :)

Acts of Sod

October 31st 2011

We have a thing in Britain called Sod's Law; it's a simple axiom that states, “anything that can go wrong, will”, and is often exemplified by the frustrating way that dropped toast always lands butter side down. Some people know it as Murphy's Law, particularly outside the UK where the word “sod” is not as commonly used; regardless of how you refer to it, it's still a good way of describing those situations where you can't for the life of you shake the feeling that the universe is royally taking the piss out of you. I got a little taste of that this week when I was rudely awoken on Monday morning as the torrential rain we were enjoying stubbornly refused to stay out of my bedroom. Sadly, while I was out, first at work then at a friend's funeral, the situation worsened, and I returned home to find a small paddling pool with a headboard where I normally keep my bed. On the plus side, I am at least able to claim for the damage on my insurance by taking advantage of a clause which points the finger of blame squarely at a non-existent sky pixie.

I've always been bothered by the phrase “act of god”, primarily because it only ever seems to be used to describe bad things – it doesn't matter whether it's a leaky roof that wakes me up with a nice, cold, stream of dirty water on my feet, or the most horrendous of tragedies that result in death and destruction on an incalculable scale. I'm so often left wondering where this lovely, cuddly god the theists keep telling us about might be hiding, or how it is that the only “acts” he ever seems to engage in end up with a lot of miserable, hurt, or even dead, people? It's the use of the word “act” which emphasises how the celestial mischief-maker plays an active role in these events; I mean, it's not as if they're described as “absences of god”, as though they occurred simply because his back was turned for five minutes (likely he was busy curing the bunions of some random granny, helping a screeching, entitled fame-whore teenager to win “Britain's Got Dickheads”, or securing the victory touchdown of an educationally sub-normal football player).

When one of your principle character traits is omnipresence, the notion of you being absent at any point is completely off the table (this is one of the many logical contradictions that theists have foolishly created for themselves – consider, for example, the claim that hell is separation from god). As such, these are, by definition, acts, carried out intentionally by an all-powerful being who, his followers assure us, is also all-loving (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary). To many practitioners of the monotheistic faiths, the cruel extinguishing of countless innocent lives is a conscious decision by a perfect, holy, and eternal father that must never be questioned, and a glorious demonstration of his infinite love and compassion. Or it might not be … it depends on who you ask because, for some people, that's not the god they worship – something, or someone, else must be to blame (theists never blame their deity for anything – credit, yes, but never blame).

As the world has become increasingly more humanised by secular morality, the god of the old testament has undergone a substantial image shift; long gone are the days when he could murder a whole shit-load of people's first-born sons and still maintain either our respect, or the pretence of being a decent guy. Over the centuries people have somewhat soured on the idea that omni-benevolence and “drowning thousands of children with a tsunami” could ever go hand in hand, so now you'll find people often like to point the finger at their religion's favourite scapegoat – the horny-bonced, goat-trousered devil himself. Rather than having to imagine that your god could be a negligent, or murderous, sack of festering pig shit, it's a lot easier to just pretend that he has a nemesis out there undoing all of his good work, leading mankind astray, and throwing the occasional tornado at trailer parks full of devout, yet unfortunate, christians who can't quite rationalise the situation.

Unfortunately, however, the devil idea digs both the theist's logic, and their claims regarding the goodness of the character of their god, even deeper into the hole it was intended to pull them out of. For a start, it begs the question of how anything could possibly oppose the will of an omniscient and omnipotent god. Unless there exists something, or someone, equal, or greater, in its power to such a deity (and we are told repeatedly by theists that this is not the case), how could his work possibly be in any kind of jeopardy whatsoever? Even if the devil's ability to cause havoc was not limited to that which god was prepared to tolerate, and even if the devil were not a creation of god (as a former angel, according to christian theology, he most definitely is), you have to ask what kind of loving being would put up with that shit, even for a microsecond? If all the horror inflicted upon human beings could reasonably said to be the fault of one evil-minded little wank-bag with a chip on his shoulder, why would any god keep the annoying little fucker around?

More to the point, why would he even create this situation in the first place by not only failing to get rid of Lucifer, but inventing an entire infernal realm of torment for the uppity, coup-staging harp-monkey to be in charge of? The fact is, he wouldn't, not unless he was either so incompetent that he started taking lessons in celestial management from Enron, or he was as equally malevolent as the very demon he ostensibly created. So, if the devil is not responsible for all the bad that happens, then who is? Who shoulders the blame for all the floods, earthquakes, disease pandemics, or the fact that the creator of “Two And A Half Man” wasn't swiftly executed by a hit-squad the moment he submitted his pitch to CBS? (honestly, America, that's your biggest show? Do you see why the rest of the world thinks you're retarded?) Well, according to large numbers of theists (especially the more fundamental), we do … apparently, all these things are our fault.

This attempt by theists to slalom culpability down the sloped shoulders of their god so that, somehow, we are held responsible for things we cannot possibly control can, at best, be described as a treacherous, craven debasement of the human species. It could also be, more than fairly, referred to as yet another conscious effort by the guardians of religious faith to systematically dismantle the self-worth of the individual so that they become helpless cripples to the thorn-entwined crutch offered by the church (for a fee, sorry, donation, of course). It seems that it's not enough that the secular morality that emerged from our being an inter-dependent social species has rightly determined that we are responsible for the consequences of our actions – no, religion insists that we also carry the can for the geological and environmental whims of the man upstairs; a hurricane is not a natural phenomenon to these people – it's punishment for our sins.

The concept of sin is an inherently meaningless one because what it essentially describes is a crime against a non-existent entity. A crime is, after all, fairly cut and dry in its meaning in that it refers to a legally prohibited act that is considered to cause, in some way, damage or injury to an individual or the state; sin, on the other hand, only really has religious connotations – it is the breaking of a divine law and, since there's no evidence for any aspect of the divine, the crime is entirely victimless. But that one small, gaping, logical chasm in the argument doesn't stop the religious from beating people they don't like over the head with the sin stick, blaming them for anything and everything they can think of as a means to marginalise, dominate, or oppress them (while simultaneously, and dishonestly, claiming to “love” them). The current sin-du-jour for the ranting religious bigot about town is, of course, homosexuality.

Fred Phelps, and the unfortunate products of the genetic and intellectual dead-end that is his family, are the founding (and, I believe, only) members of the Westboro Baptist Church; a congregation of ultra-fundamentalist zealots based in Topeka, Kansas, who believe that homosexuality is such an abomination against god that he visits all manner of disaster and atrocity upon the sinners – not homosexuals themselves, no, that would actually make sense – the targets of god's retribution are those who tolerate homosexuality; the people who are content simply to let what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms remain private. Basically, everyone who isn't in the Westboro Baptist Church … which is pretty much everyone. they're “fag enablers”, apparently, and their refusal to drive gays into the nearest ocean or, at the very least, condemn them for their wicked lifestyle, is, according to the WBC, more than sufficient justification for being the recipients of divine punishment.

At least, that's what they claim they believe – the reality is a bit muddier. The WBC are actually a family of lawyers, who may or may not believe the hate they spew (it's almost irrelevant), and their modus operandi is to be as tasteless and offensive as possible (usually this involves protesting the funerals of soldiers and shouting about how the deceased was killed because he was “defending a country that supports the fag lifestyle”) in the hope that they can provoke others into either a physical retaliation, or to in some way restrict their first amendment right to free speech; if they succeed, out come the lawsuits and the WBC can keep themselves in bread and bigotry for another year. Whenever there's a high-profile death, or a natural disaster, the WBC will be there, like the attention-whores they are, spouting their intolerant bullshit, like the christian bigots they are, and baiting everyone into earning a lawsuit by taking a pop at them, like the scum-sucking lawyers they are.

From a similar school of homophobic thought there is also Keith from Minnesota, a foul-hearted anti-gay bully whose abusive rhetoric not so much borders on “the lady doth protest too much”, but pretty much moves right in with it and starts sharing a room, a bed, and a bottle of lubricant so large that it's normally only available to zoos who need a bit of extra help when one of their elephants is experiencing a difficult birth. Keith is also known as @GodsWordIsLaw on Twitter, although this could change at any moment as his seemingly endless tirades of homophobic, anti-secular, and anti-liberal abuse have resulted in a number of users reporting him for violations of the social network site's terms of service. The same is true of his blogs; the “Anti-Sodomite Association” ended up becoming the “Anti-Sodomy Association” (a move likely prompted by Keith having his arse handed to him in the comments – the new ASA site bans all commenting) and the, as yet unlaunched, “Pink Swastika” (presumably named after a ludicrous book that promoted the completely discredited theory that most high-ranking Nazis, including Adolf Hitler himself, were gay).

Keith, like the WBC (among whom Keith might as well count himself a member given that he's exactly like them apart from being too lazy to join them in their disgusting funeral protests), engages in the kind of abusive fearmongering that patently hopes to scare most decent Americans in to hating gays as much as he does by convincing them of the demonstrable falsehood that god is punishing them for not going on enough homo-bashing rampages. For a god so frequently described as “all-loving”, the idea that he could punish anyone for the crimes of another makes him quite a despicable monster; that his worshippers don't seem to have a problem with this is an even more disturbing proposition. Imagine telling someone that their son was killed in Iraq because neither he, nor you, did enough to persecute two complete strangers of the same gender for daring to express consenting adult love for one another. I find it appalling that I, and others, could have a tsunami in the far east heaped on my shoulders because some bigot thinks that every time I fuck my boyfriend, god kills an Asian.

And, not to ask the bleeding obvious question, but, isn't everything ultimately an act of god? If, as theists tell us, their god is omniscient and omnipotent (despite, as I and many others have pointed out before, these two concepts being logically incompatible with one another), then he not only knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will ever happen, but he has the absolute power to change anything and everything. Nothing can, therefore, oppose his will, nothing can happen without him allowing it to; every genocide, earthquake, storm, flood, rape, murder, hurricane, and tsunami is his will – he wants it to happen, and so it does. And if, by some cosmically perverse logic, this god character is doing all of these things as punishment for the transgressions of a sinful few, then those sins too are as commanded by god as the consequences. Nothing can possibly happen in contravention of the will of anyone with infinite knowledge and power.

This insurmountable contradiction is at the very heart of the idea that this god has a divine plan; every moment in the life of every living creature, every single event in the history of the universe, from its beginning right through to its eventual end, has allegedly been mapped out in advance by this pre-cognitive supernatural caretaker. Right from the dawn of time (if such a thing were conceivable, or even possible) he has known that a child will be born who is destined to be crushed to death beneath a hundred tons of concrete, torn loose from a road bridge in an earthquake – and he chooses to do nothing; likewise he knows full well that another child will grow up to show love for someone of the same sex, as dictated by his or her unconquerable biological nature, and that they will spend an eternity in perpetual agony for this “sin”. That any creature can not only be the architect of such an abominable blueprint, but actually inspire devotion and praise, is truly, unconscionably wicked and sinful.

I'm sure there will be theists out there making the “free will” argument, with absolutely no concept of how it logic-rapes an idea that has already had all of the logic well and truly raped out of it. I'm sure there will also be those who contend that their god is more of an overseer who doesn't determine the outcome of everything right down to the quantum level, but they're just ultimately making the same flawed argument. Besides, if that were an even faintly plausible notion, we'd have to have a long and turgid discussion as to the precise extent to which god micromanages the universe; exactly what constitutes an “act of god”? Where do you draw the line, and how do we, as corporeal beings, make such an assessment? Is there a bit in the bible or the qu'ran which says, “any earthquake less than 5.0 on the Richter scale can be chalked up to plate tectonics, but over that and it's because god is pissed at something” (keep looking, it must be there).

The comedian Bill Bailey once asked the same question in a routine about car insurance. In requesting the salesman to clarify what the policy meant by, “acts of god”, he was told that rain was considered to be one, but this just prompted the response, “well, how much rain?” Since there was no clear delineation, he questioned at what point did precipitation stop being a natural phenomenon and suddenly “take on the mantle of the apocalyptic, water-based punishment of the lord?” It is a more than reasonable question that has failed to produce an even slightly reasonable answer, but it brings me back to the event that kicked off this post in the first place; the rain that decided it wanted to live indoors for a change (and, more specifically, the rain that wanted to live in my flat). To an insurance company it may be considered an act of god, but that's just their way of addressing the legal problem of unassignable blame.

When it comes down to it, “act of nature”, would be a far more preferable term in an increasingly secular age; “act of god” is simply an anachronism, the relic of a time when people were immeasurably more ignorant of the mechanics of the natural world than they are now. These things aren't acts of god, they're simple artefacts that provide evidential support for the idea that “shit happens”; no god, no grand design, no punishment for sin, just examples of Sod's Law in action …

Sodding rain …

Rock me, sexy Jesus

November 7th 2011

Before you get the wrong idea about me, I'm not planning to use this post as a forum for expressing some kind of deep and abiding physical attraction towards christianity's premier long-haired hippy prophet. Although the messiah is, according to some, a very naughty boy (and, under normal circumstances, I would be inclined to question therefore whether I should get to know him better), neither the more plausibly accurate, “Osama Bin Laden in his student days” image of Jesus, nor the white, WASP-ish, lightly-bearded pretty-boy that most christians falsely imagine him to look like, could ever be really described as being “my type”. No, this week's post was inspired by a casual tweet from @Rati0nality that got me thinking about religion and popular culture; specifically, I was given cause to consider the idea, accepted almost universally as true, that “christian music is shit”.

So that there's no further potential for misunderstanding I would like to point out that I'm not going to go on a fevered rant about musicians who just happen to be christians; there are many contemporary mainstream artists who believe in god, just as there have always been believers working in all forms of art throughout history. In fact, some of the greatest contributions to the arts have been made by theists (Leonardo Da Vinci's “The Last Supper” is undeniably a gob-smacking piece of work), and I'm not one to throw out the baby with the ecclesiastical bath water. Johnny Cash, supremely cool, christian; Weird Al Yankovic, funny as fuck, christian; Billy Ray Cyrus … moving on (yes, he is a christian, but since his music fucking sucks, he co-created Miley, and is more directly responsible for popularising line-dancing in the UK than almost anyone, I will say only that he desperately needs to be nailed face down to a table and have cowboy hats and mullet wigs inserted repeatedly, and violently, into his rectum).

The point I'm trying to make is that I'm not here to take apart musicians, writers, actors, or other artists who simply happen to hold a belief in god, if only because, for the most part, they don't necessarily allow their faith to directly inform, or at the very least compromise, their creative output. Even Johnny Cash, whose music is replete with affirmations of his faith and references to god and the bible, never let any of that really get in the way of the music itself. This, I think is the hallmark of a great artist; art should exist entirely for its own sake and, even though it should also always have something to say, the crucial integrity of a piece of art lies solely in the ability of its creator to skilfully get their message across without in any way spoiling the essential aesthetic beauty of the work itself. This most certainly cannot be said for the proponents of what we comically refer to as christian “music”.

Taking one particular musical genre as an example, a simple search for “worst rock band in the world” will very often yield thousands of results that include top ten lists, forum posts, blog comments, and all manner of other individual opinions that frequently cite Creed as the band that most people want to see brutally sliced into two-inch chunks by a complex, death-bringing booby trap that has been formed out of a large number of extremely taut guitar strings (and, therefore, bears an uncanny resemblance to the one in the opening scene of the movie “Cube”). Although both the band, and their legions of easily pleased fans, have denied repeatedly that Creed are a christian rock band, I'm going to ignore that on the grounds that they're completely full of shit and the evidence is most definitely stacked against them. That and I was forced, against my will, to see them live at “Big Day Out” at the Milton Keynes Bowl in 1999 so, as far as I'm concerned, they've fucking got it coming.

Creed have always tried to distance themselves from the “christian rock” label; they defend their use of religious imagery as metaphor, or symbolism, and singer Scott Stapp describes his lyrics as “spiritual” rather than religious. Both of these sound suspiciously like they trying to cop out, particularly the latter; “spiritual” is how you'll often find someone describing themselves when they don't like the label “religious”, and yet believe in exactly the same kind of fluffy-headed, evidence-free, nonsense (only usually with more crystals and less Jesus). “Symbolism” and “metaphor”, too, are words that can be distorted to fit whatever purpose you wish – want to make a video where you stand on a mountain, arms cruciform like you've been nailed to a tree, but don't like being referred to as having a christ complex? Simples, claim that it's “symbolic” or “a metaphor” and leave it at that … say no more.

When individual members of a band identify as christian (while claiming the band is not), and the first three albums specifically centre around themes of christianity, and faith in general, it doesn't matter that they're not signed to a christian music label; it smacks more of a band that knows there's christian music on one side, mainstream on the other, and ne'er the twain shall meet, but are naively, perhaps even arrogantly, convinced that they're the ones to break the mould – they will be the ones to defy all odds and become the first christian band to get taken seriously by the mainstream. The trouble is that, when your lead singer spends most of his time doing piss-poor impressions of Eddie Vedder combined with a macho-cock attitude, messianic pretensions, and endless dead-Jew-on-a-stick poses, you've pretty much spunked any chance of being taken seriously before you even get to the chorus of “With Arms Wide Open”.

Part of the problem with christian music is that any act choosing specifically to identify themselves as belonging to a religious musical genre has completely ham-strung itself before even picking up an instrument. Whether it be christian rock, christian country, or even, for fuck's sake, christian metal or christian hip-hop, the emphasis is always on the “christian” part of it, usually to the detriment of everything else. Unlike other genres, it's not about the music, it's about the message, and therein lies the problem. Most artists tend to cover a range of subjects, things that interest them, excite them, scare them … they try to explore all of the wondrous and varied aspects of the human condition. The same cannot be said for acts that operate within the christian musical genres, whose only message seems to be “Jesus is brilliant” (and I maintain there's maybe one or two songs in that concept at best).

This is why a “christian” rock band would be in exactly the same boat as a “socialist” folk trio, for example; when you've only got one subject to cover, as dictated by the label a band identifies itself with, ideas run dry in a matter of minutes, and there's very little you can do about it without compromising the message. Since these genres, by definition, require the message to trump all, it is the music that is ultimately compromised instead, resulting in something that is little more than proselytizing with a chord progression. One could even say the same of a large number of commercial, mainstream acts, especially those that are the eventual products of reality TV shows and Simon “I Rape Music For Profit” Cowell. The art has been subverted to fulfil a pre-chosen agenda (whether it's preaching an ideology or simply trying to make shit-loads of cash at the expense of gullible, starry-eyed teenagers), rather than representing any kind of meaningful creative expression.

Another problem, and one that constitutes an insurmountable paradox for Team Jesus, is that rock, as we all know, is “the devil's music”. So how does that work, then? Rock has always been about rebellion, against the mainstream, against conformity, and against the establishment – religion is anathema to these ideals, and for christians to use rock music to advance their dogma is to completely misunderstand that the medium is intrinsically incompatible with the message, resulting in work that is always nauseatingly false and insincere. It's like when politicians in Britain, particularly Tories, say that their favourite bands are punk acts like The Clash – no, they're fucking not, you're not allowed to like The Clash because they, and their punk contemporaries, hold ideologies that are diametrically opposed to yours, and you are part of an establishment that tried to crush them and their kind back in the day in order to prevent their message being heard. Christians don't fucking belong in rock, just like conservatives don't belong in a mosh pit.

The hypocrisy of a religion making use of an art form, or other significant artefact of popular culture, that they had previously spent decades condemning, highlights the boundless tenacity of faith when it comes to injecting itself into all areas of the human experience. Historically, religions have always tried, at first, to attack anything and everything that disagrees with them (be it an individual or an idea); once they've grown tired of the protesting and the oppressing and the constant banging on about how whatever it is “corrupts our youth” or “erodes our values”, they gracefully admit defeat and retire to a safe distance to lick their wounds … only joking, what actually happens is, once they finally realise that their bullshit will no longer fly with the rest of us, they change tactics and adopt the “if you can't beat them, replace them” approach.

I do love it when, around this time of year, the christians start bleating about how there's a “war on christmas”, and how we've all “forgotten the true meaning” of it; instead of seeing it as a time to worship a long-dead zombie bastard who was the product of angel rape, we're busy trying not to offend muslims and gays and womens, and doing all that politically correct shit like banning people from celebrating Jesus' birthday in case hindus are upset by it. It doesn't matter to these self-righteous little arse trumpets that christianity usurped existing pagan, norse, roman, and other winter solstice and spring festivals in order to completely supplant them. Still, at least their self-pitying cries of religious persecution provide a good amount of festive, irony-fuelled mirth for the rest of us while we're stuffing our faces with food, or opening presents as we sit around our pagan trees.

As they have with holidays, christians have attempted to insert themselves into the existing culture as a means of superimposing their faith over it, suffocating the life right out of it until all that is left is their culture. Christian music is just yet another example of that, but it is far from the only one; movies, TV, video games, cartoons, comics, there is no area of contemporary popular culture that religion won't infiltrate in order to propagate their ideas, especially if the largest consumers of the media in question are children. Pop music, rock, metal, and hip-hop may be targets for the christian invasion because of their appeal to teens and young adults (their last real chance to indoctrinate the poor buggers before they safely escape into free-thinking adulthood) but, since their primary goal is to own the hearts and minds of children, the kids sadly have to have their media of choice completely drowned in a tidal wave of lame religious shittery as well.

Since the dawn of the home computing and video games console eras religion has been lurking creepily in the background, desperately trying to keep pace with the fastest changing medium in modern history. As with anything that has so utterly captured both the imaginations, and the short attention spans, of children the world over, religion has tried to kill it whilst simultaneously taking full advantage of the captive audience it offers … and the lucrative revenue stream they can tap from the pocket money children so readily spend on games. “Super Noah's Ark 3D” was a blatant rip-off of “Wolfenstein 3D” that saw the player as Noah hurling fruit at hundreds of sheep; it wasn't just an appallingly bad game, it was bloody awful theology. “Bible Adventures”, by the same company (Wisdom Tree), is even worse; a trinity (pun intended) of astonishingly bad games that would make you want to gouge out your eyes, hack off your hands, and then try to end your miserable existence by unplugging the console (with your feet) and perform cunnilingus on the wall socket.

If you think that's bad, you should see what christianity has done to comic books. That's right … christian comic books. Sure, it's inevitable that there was going to be a few old-school sorts; classic, simple comics, with basic hand-drawn art, depicting well-known bible stories like the Great Flood (always with Noah's Ark, but shamefully missing the millions of corpses that must be floating around it, banging into the side and providing the two vultures on board with some much needed dinner). But, as audience tastes change and grow ever more sophisticated, and as other cultures start to exert an influence on the medium, religion naturally has to do what it can to grab a piece of the action. Therefore, the existence of graphic novels like “Manga Messiah” and “Manga Bible” shouldn't surprise you any more than the idea that, as far as the reviews suggest, these titles are never bought by their intended audience – only by sanctimonious relatives who force them upon the unsuspecting and impressionable children in their lives.

Naturally, of course, there are always christian movies and TV programmes aimed squarely at the young. A few friends and I caught one of them some years ago, in the early hours of a drunken saturday morning while flipping through the higher channel numbers; it consisted of some creepy looking puppets, and even creepier looking adults, talking about the importance of always obeying your parents, no matter what, because they know best. I can't stress how deeply unsettling it was to hear so much emphasis being placed on teaching the young viewers to blindly, and unquestioningly, follow their parents' will … and I can't exaggerate how quickly the jaw-dropping experience sobered me up. For years we knew the show simply as “Puppets For Christ”, and I have never been able to ascertain exactly what it was really called. All I know is that it scared the living shit out of me that such shameless religious brainwashing was going on right in front of me.

So, with such a determined attempt by religion to crowbar itself into the minds of the young through the medium of dismal music, atrocious games, tenth-rate comic books, and grotesquely manipulative TV shows, how do free-thinking, secular, and atheist parents fight back? How do they counter the onslaught of religious culture sodomy so that their kids don't get sucked in to a black hole of irretrievably shitty, faith-based entertainment? Well, don't panic because it's really easy … for a start, this stuff is so fucking bad that it actually acts as a warning about itself – most teenagers who haven't already been indoctrinated into a religion since birth wouldn't be caught dead listening to a christian rap record, and not just because it's christian – this one, for example, encourages kids to give “side hugs” so as to avoid the temptation of sin (only christians are so sex obsessed that they can't hug normally without feeling the need to gut-fuck their own grandma).

The best course of action is, obviously, to introduce your kids to the good stuff from an early age; good music, great books, proper comics, real art, awesome games, killer movies, and TV that would make you turn down the offer of an invite to the biggest drug-fuelled orgy Amsterdam has ever hosted just to stay in and watch it when it airs rather than TiVo-ing it for later. Nothing is better at fending off an attempt to fill your child's head with inanities like the Jonas Brothers than reinforcing it from the inside with the complete works of Freddie fucking Mercury.

And before you ask about tickets to the Amsterdam orgy, I'm afraid they've sold out … you'll have to settle for a side hug instead.

About a boy

November 20th 2011

Having spent last weekend gallivanting around that London, determined to put in whatever effort was required to enjoy, at all costs, the one big treat I had afforded myself this year (namely seeing the awesome Within Temptation at the Brixton Academy with my fellow radio 4 radical, Simon), I returned to a rather hectic week of work, domestic chores, and an attempt to rectify the recent sexual laziness that has managed to creep in between my boyfriend and I by trying to have it every day (and in every logistically feasible way) this week. Okay, you probably didn't want to know that, and I apologise for the mental bleach you'll now require to help rinse any unseemly images out of your head, but I was trying to find the most efficient way I could of bringing together the subjects of “fun”, “hard work”, and “my boyfriend” in the opening paragraph of this, a post for my Raven in celebration of his 30th birthday. Now, be good, click the “Read More” link, and I promise I'll try to keep any talk of leather and buggery to a minimum.

Raven and I have been together for over 5 years now, although given the incredibly non-linear nature of our relationship and how we ultimately ended up together, one could justifiably say that it's actually more like 8 years. I shan't go into details, not least because it's more convoluted than the menu screens on a Virgin TiVo box, but largely because it's impossible to recount the story without going into private, intimate details that would require your purchasing a quantity of mind-bleach so large it would leave you bereft of most of your neurological faculties (to the point where all you could reasonably do is drool like a Fox News viewer when confronted with the instructions for opening a door). Regardless of exactly when “you” and “me” officially became “us”, it has been not only the most frustrating, infuriating, and stressful relationship I've ever had, but also the most fun, rewarding, enjoyable, and fulfilling by every conceivable measure.

For those of you who haven't read any of my earlier posts (if you are one of those people, shame on you!), I talked previously of how Raven suffers from Aspergers Syndrome. If you don't know what that is, try to think of it as like a mild form of autism in which the social inappropriateness or dysfunction of a teenager lasts forever, and the incessant focus on limited fields of acute interest, the verbosity of language, and the concentration of intelligence that gets put into personal projects, are all the sorts of things which may result in the building of an internet or two. Due to the way his condition robs him of the ability to correctly process non-verbal cues, Raven is, and in many ways always will be when it comes to his emotional senses, a 15-year old boy (this is often how I see him in my head too, but not like that … well, alright, occasionally like that, but not in a bad way – okay, yes, alright, occasionally in a bad way … look, you do know I'm joking, right? Anyway, I haven't mentioned leather or buggery yet, so you can all calm down).

Learning to cope with, and understand, the general idiosyncrasies and day to day issues that Aspergers presents is one of the many things that my life with Raves has taught me, and for that I can only express my absolute gratitude. For example, while there has been nearly two hours worth of random, tangential conversation between myself and Raves since writing the previous paragraph and this one, I don't begrudge the interruption all that much. Even though, under normal circumstances, it would invariably seem to many like it was a frustrating, yet unintentional, attempt to derail a person's train of thought and distract them from the task at hand, I don't really mind because it regularly inspires a multitude of other avenues of potential thought exploration that I might not ordinarily have considered. More importantly, it allows me to develop both tolerance and compassion for those facets of another's personality that they cannot do anything to sublimate, as well as giving me the chance to write 175 words about nothing in particular.

The number of wildly differing creative projects that Raves has embarked upon since I've known him is often quite overwhelming – he throws out ideas like sparks off a catherine wheel, and I frequently find myself struggling to keep up. What makes the constant stopping and starting, or the endless shifting from one project to another, so enjoyable (rather than provoking a desire to scream, “stick to one thing and bloody finish it!”) is how there will usually be a technical aspect to it that wanders some way outside of Raves' area of expertise and strides confidently into mine. Whether it's building websites, editing video, making music, or writing oodles of code in order to achieve a particular milestone within a project, he always finds some way, no matter how small, to include me in his interests. Likewise, I try where I can to get him involved in the things that I do by opening up any and all possible areas where he can make a contribution that will engage him, either intellectually or artistically.

One such project involves taking a slight diversion in order to explain it, if you'll indulge me (actually, you don't have a choice – it's my blog and I can do what I bloody well like). Raves has always loved animals; it doesn't matter which animals, really, he is able to find something lovable or cool about pretty much any creature – except wasps, obviously (they are, we both maintain, complete bastards). For as long as I can remember he has harboured the desire to keep a pet tarantula, but it's a wish that has never been granted because I am horribly arachnophobic and have always rejected the idea flat-out (his parents were never terribly keen either). As a concession, however, I reluctantly agreed to his second choice of instead purchasing a few rats. I wasn't reluctant because I was afraid of them, or anything like that – it's more that I was suspicious of them, wary of the reputation they had for being vicious little disease bags. I need not have worried.

It's been a shade under four years since Raves first brought that cage and its occupants into my life, and in less than an eighth of that time I went from being moderately distrustful of the tiny monsters, and observing them from a safe distance, to a proud rat fancier (stop thinking that, you pervert – it's the proper term for it). However strange it may be to you, it's stranger still to me that I fell hopelessly in love with creatures that have such a universally poor, yet utterly undeserved, reputation. I've seen in them personalities that are far more distinct than any dog or cat I've known (if I'm honest, they've got more unique character than some people I've met), and their intelligence, their ability to learn, continues to impress me every day. Ours will happily sit on your shoulder while you do the washing up, and they've learned to recognise the sound of a packet (ostensibly containing treats) being opened from across the room (seriously, if one of us opens a bag of M&Ms, you will quickly see ten adorable faces staring in our direction).

Despite the short lives of rats (around 2 years, more if you're lucky), and the inevitable heartache that one has to go through on an all-too regular basis (I honestly never imagined that I would one day be bawling my eyes out, almost to the point of wailing, whilst cradling a dead rat in my arms), I wouldn't change it for anything, and I will never be able to thank Raves enough for the immeasurable happiness that he, and they, have brought to my tiny world. If nothing else, the sheer entertainment value alone is more than worth the grief of losing one of our scuttling, furry little friends (honestly, you have never giggled so much like a twat in your whole life until you've sat on the sofa, wondered for a moment why your plate has one less slice of toast on it than it did a minute ago, only to turn round and see a rat, proudly bounding across the windowsill with the entire slice of hot, golden, buttered scrumptiousness in its mouth).

It was our love of these achingly cute little creatures that inspired the creation of a website (still being worked on after a couple of years of gradual development) devoted to the squeaking darlings we share our lives with. Yes, it might seem a bit twee and silly, but I just wanted to put up a few pages, with pictures and videos of our rats, for no other reason than to give them the same opportunity that we humans have; to plant a flag in the universe and say, “I was here”. In the grand scheme of things, our pets mean sod all to anyone but us and it just felt like a nice way of giving them a little bit of life beyond the short ones they have, and introducing them to other people so that they can make them go “awwwww!” and giggle like twats too. As soon as we get a few spare moments, and I can divert Raves' stroboscopic attention from his current distraction for long enough, we'll get around to finishing it.

As if dragging me in to help with his various and ever-changing projects (while simultaneously helping me embark on a course of self-improvement and be less of an uncaring, insensitive git) wasn't enough, Raves frequently challenges my ability, often to the point of teeth-shattering frustration, to argue about the very things I talk about on this blog. Although by no means religious, he does find “militant” atheism to be as equally annoying as fundamentalist faith and, having claimed to have seen a ghost, believing aliens a more probable explanation for some complex crop circles, and making some concessions towards the idea of there being legitimate psychics, there is plenty for us to argue about … and we do. I won't deny how having had to argue against logic backed by Aspergers makes me want to strangle myself unconscious just to get out of the argument, however, I will say that I am grateful that at least my darling boy never makes the debate too easy for me!

Insofar as our “discussions” have often become “arguments” (or, if we're honest, “pitched battles”) we're no different to anyone else. The same could be said of our having sought counselling for one or two of our issues (in my case it's for stress/anger management; for Raves it's to help overcome some of the social anxieties and fears associated with Aspergers), and how it has helped us have fewer, and less shouty-nasty, arguments. Where we do probably differ from the norm is that these are not our only regular run-ins with mental health professionals. As I've mentioned in previous posts, Raven is transgender, so we spend an inordinate amount of time going backwards and forwards to London for appointments, chasing people on the phone, writing letters, visiting his GP, chasing people on the phone, ploughing through paperwork, and chasing people on the phone. To say that I was an expert on Gender Dysphoria would be an exaggeration; to say that I've learned a shit-load about it over the years would not.

This has had probably a far greater, and more positive, impact on me, on my emotional and psychological development as a human being, than almost anything else I can think of. Over the years Raves' condition has forced me to do everything that I can to be a better person, to learn how to help bear the weight of his problems in addition to my own, and to understand and appreciate what it means to be born into the wrong body. I am hugely proud of the fact that he has chosen me to be the one to help him deal with the every day stress of his hating what he sees in the mirror, and the drama of the emotional turbulence that it often brings. I feel honoured that he looks to me to put my arms around him when he's feeling low and give him the best reassurance I can that everything is going to be okay, and I consider it a great privilege to be able to tell him that, no matter how much of a “freak” he may sometimes believe himself to be, he will always be something uniquely special in my life, and I will always love him no matter what.

I've said sometimes in the past that nature seems to have had it in for Raves; in addition to suffering from both Aspergers and Gender Dysphoria, he has had to cope with being asthmatic, gluten intolerant, and seemingly born with eyes that are little bit too big for the sockets they're sitting in (as a result, he is prone to headaches and migraines – and the sinusitis he's also been lumbered with doesn't help much either). In reality, though, both Raves and I know full well that there are people out there with far greater mountains to climb, to the extent that it would be both more accurate and fair to say that nature has only really thrown a handful of persistently annoying roadworks into the middle of his mortal motorway. Yes, these obstacles may repeatedly thwart his attempts at making a smooth journey of his life, but at least he is moving forward, slowly but surely, and with no uncompleted bridges to leap the bus over (take that Dennis Hopper!).

So, on the occasion of his birthday, what I can I tell you about my boy that you don't already know? Well, firstly, he wasn't all that keen on being 30 this year (there was a certain amount of stress to be had when he hit 27, the infamous age at which a few of his heroes met their untimely end) – for someone with such a significant majority of his life still to come he certainly does worry way too much about growing old (this is probably more to do with a fear not of death but of looking less gorgeous as time marches on). He has an infectiously dark laugh that veers sharply between a hearty rumble and a terrifying cackle, and wouldn't sound out of place emanating from the larynx of a supervillain's most evil henchmen. He's an avid gamer with a passion for survival horror, graphic violence, and intelligent, absorbing story (“Silent Hill” and “Forbidden Siren” being huge favourites).

He has an abiding love of Japan and its culture, particularly anime (it was he who introduced me to “Akira”, “Spirited Away”, and “Full Metal Alchemist”), Dir En Grey, and most of the horror movies to emerge from the country in the last three decades (he, in fact, has an serious appreciation for Asian horror in general, believing, quite reasonably, that it is substantially more original and effective in scaring the crap out of people than anything Hollywood has done in a very long time). Without Raves, I would probably have never seen “Ghost House”, “R-Point”, and the sublime “Welcome To Dongmakgol”, and for those alone he gets a lifetime of grateful hugs. It is my intention that, as soon as I am financially able (and as soon as he can mentally cope with the idea of full body scanners at the airport), to take him on his first ever foreign holiday to Tokyo.

All of these things play a big part in his creative endeavours, providing a seemingly never-ending source of inspiration. He is a fairly talented artist, regardless of whether he is working with graphic pens or a graphic tablet. He has quickly picked up Photoshop, Cararra, Poser, Daz 3D, Premiere, and used them to create some seriously striking imagery. He is also a writer, having completed the first novel in a trilogy, gotten half-way through the second, and laid out plans for the third, not to mention a plethora of short stories, poems, and songs (he's reasonably good at playing bass, drums, and knows his way around Fruity Loops fairly well). In fact, if I were to ask him what I could say of him that I hadn't already (and, since he just asked me when I was going to be finished with this thing so that we can get on with the rest of the evening, I told him this was exactly the question I was rhetorically asking), he would, and did, respond, “that I'm smarter than you“.

I could tell you a million other things about Raves but, to be honest, there's only two things that you really need to know: that it's his birthday, and that I absolutely love him to pieces. Happy birthday, boy … I hope that I can make it, and you, as happy as you make me.

And, see? I didn't mention leather or buggery at all! What am I giving him for his birthday. Ahem … ;)

The Fairy Fella's Master-Stroke

November 28th 2011

This week, on a couple of occasions, I found myself locked in a bathroom, crying like a girl who had just seen her favourite dolly viciously decapitated by the razor-sharp jaws of the family dog. I make no apologies for that, just as I make none for the fact that I shall again be talking a little about myself in this post (it is after all, the subject I know best). What prompted these highly-emotional sabbaticals to the nearest toilet was the fact that, on Thursday, it had been twenty years since Freddie Mercury, one of my all-time heroes, had been lost to AIDS. So, in honour of this anniversary, and its patron, this week's post will have a bit of everything; some ranting, some religion, a little bit of love and joy, obviously some music, drama, and celebration of life, and perhaps a tiny hint of self-analysis. Oh, and I'm afraid to say there'll be a bit of Ben Elton as well … sorry.

Queen have been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. I've tried a number of times to work out exactly when it was I first heard a Queen song (and which one it might have been), but the truth is I'm not entirely sure. The closest I can get is in being able to recall the first time I was consciously aware of the group and their music, but even that is a little hazy. Sometime in 1981, my dad and his new wife (my parents having split up the year before) bought for me a shiny new 7” vinyl copy of the single “Flash” (with “Football Fight” on the B-side; remember them?). I don't recall the occasion, or if even if there was one – the date, written on the label underneath, “To Kris, from Daddy and Liz”, was the 11th of July and, therefore, a good five or so months away from both my birthday and christmas. In all probability it was simply that I'd heard it on the radio and had been pestering the living shit out of my entire family until someone got it for me.

With our parents divorcing in 1980, my sister and I would spend every other christmas with my Dad and Liz, and it was during one such festive stay at my dad's house (I believe it was 1981, but I'm not 100% sure) that I would be introduced to Queen properly. Like me, my dad has always had some nerdy, creative project to occupy him, and will frequently go that little bit further with such things than most people. His weekly shopping list, for example, is printed from his computer, and sorted by the order in which those items will be encountered as one journeys through the supermarket. With a couple of Liz's relatives also gracing the christmas table that year, my dad decided to up the ante and give the usual excitement of board games and dinner-related stomach cramps a much-needed boost by devising a christmas quiz. He had spent literally weeks putting it together, having manually produced multiple copies of question sheets on his typewriter.

One round involved a mix tape he'd done that included brief snippets of various songs, and we had to write down both the song and the artist who recorded it. My sister and I didn't recognise half of them, so we wrote down either a bunch of random nonsense, or whatever lyrics we could recognise in the hope we'd get lucky and stumble across the song title. One of these was, “Is this the real life?” – we had no idea who it was by. When my dad revealed the answers to the quiz (during which, I'm sure, he felt moderately pleased with himself for every family member his questions outwitted), I was surprised to learn that the song was, in fact, by Queen, the band who did that ace Flash Gordon song I liked. Curious, I asked my dad if I could hear the rest of it, and he happily obliged. Over the course of six minutes, my tiny, seven-year old mind was well and truly blown. It was the loudest, most insanely awesome thing I had ever heard in my life – I felt like I'd just had a thousand people singing right in my face, and making guitar noises that could shatter a cathedral from the other side of town … and I fucking loved it.

From that moment, I was a Queen fan for life; I bought every album, every single, and every poster I could find to cover the walls of my room – if I couldn't find a poster I'd instead pin up pictures that I'd cut out of every magazine or newspaper I could get my hands on. I became hopelessly addicted to the sound of Freddie Mercury's voice, tearing through notes I never knew existed. I watched every video, and every live performance, transfixed by the legendary front-man's ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand with his peacock-like strutting. I fell totally in love with the noises coming out of Brian May's guitar, amazed that it was even possible to create anything so rich in tone, so layered, so complex and emotive. I learned every word, listened for every nuance; I found myself captivated by John Deacon's intricate bass runs, and I was compelled, almost against my will, to air-drum Roger Taylor's thunderous examples of driving rhythm. I was hooked, I was devoted, I was in love, and that was without even knowing much about the lives of the individual band members themselves.

It was obvious to me, even from a young age, that Freddie was not like other guys – in all fairness, even Helen Keller could have figured that out – his sexuality was never a mystery to me, even if, at the time, my own was. I knew that he had a girlfriend, Mary Austin, but I also knew that that didn't really mean all that much. Even though it was no longer entirely necessary by the 1980's for gay men to hide their true selves behind a heterosexual mask (although such façades are still quite prevalent today, especially with men whose fame or career is felt, in some way, to be contingent on appearing to be the world's biggest fanny hounds), sexuality is never black and white. Ultimately, I never concerned myself very much with whether Freddie was gay, straight, or bisexual, because all that mattered to me was his music; who he fucked wasn't particularly important. What was, however, was that it wasn't all that important to anyone else either.

As I became more aware of my own sexuality, and how it had suddenly forced me to deal with all the doubts, insecurities, and fears that are intrinsic to such discoveries, I began to see Freddie Mercury as more than just an outrageous, energetic ball of barely contained lust with a moustache and a killer voice; with my family, friends, and most of the civilised world being Queen fans at that point (and certainly more so after Live Aid), I started, subconsciously, to see Freddie as a kind of psychological “shield” that I could hide behind. I didn't realise it until many years later, but the way I approached my bisexuality (which could, as I've mentioned before, be best summed up with the phrase, “we'll have the discussion when I bring a guy home”) had been to figure that if they could look past it with Freddie, enough to love his music and have it never be an issue, then they've got no reason why they couldn't do the same with me. It was as though I had unwittingly set a “hypocrite trap” for someone to fall in to (thankfully, it was a trap that was never sprung).

This is not to say that I compare myself to Freddie Mercury in anyway, far from it. It was actually Brian May that I found myself having more in common with (I was particularly obsessed with the universe and all things space-related when I was a kid – still am). In a fit of late teenage lameness, I chose to grow my hair long, knowing that it got curly after an inch or so, in a brief, but deeply misguided, attempt to ape my favourite guitarist's infamous barnet. Fortunately, I very quickly realised that the corkscrew perm look doesn't really work on anyone (Brian only just about gets away with it because it's his natural hair and he has no choice), and it certainly wasn't going to look right on a gimpy, specky twat like me. Not only that, but my natural curl would have required significant chemical assistance in order to get anywhere close, and I wasn't willing to take it that far. Dismissing suggestions that I was going for the Brian-look to impress a girl at school (I wasn't – it was more effort than I was prepared to put in, to be honest), I settled for simply growing my hair long.

Another thing I did in my rather feeble, and retrospectively embarrassing, attempts to advance my May-ness was that I took to wearing waistcoats (or “vest” if you're American) during my university years, after having worn one with my smart shirt and tie to Droitwich High School's first sixth-form leaver's prom (a curious evening which featured, firstly, my friend Dean lying across three chairs, chewing tinsel, and quoting Hannibal Lecter, and secondly a rather unexpected visit from the local plod when a couple of students figured the best place to smoke weed was in the toilets, rather than in the many, discreet wooded areas outside the school). It did take a good few years for me to figure out that wearing a shirt and waistcoat every day looks a bit wanky (especially when going to the shops), and that Brian May only got away with it because, whenever I saw him wearing one, it was because he was being interviewed; not buying tea bags. Also, the Queen guitarist was never seen wearing a Taz waistcoat … ever.

Possibly the biggest impact that Queen had on my life, at least in terms that were visible, measurable, and nothing to do with my sexuality or dress-sense, was that they were directly responsible for my meeting my first love. In January 1995, I was subscribed to a Queen email list – if you're too young to remember what these are, forgive me while I go cry in the toilet again for a few hours. Out of the blue, I received a reply to an email of mine from a young American woman, Shannon; it wasn't the subject of the email (I'll be buggered if I can remember what that was, by the way) that she was replying to, but my signature, which contained a few lines from “Touch The Sky”, my favourite track off Roger Taylor's “Happiness?” album. Within a week or two, we were emailing each other every day; by March, we were “together” (insofar as we were still 3,500 miles apart); and by September, we were unofficially engaged. It wasn't until May the following year that I could afford to fly out to the States so that we could actually meet each other for the first time.

During a relationship that lasted six years, we spent a grand total of around six weeks together; some of that time was spent here in the UK and, naturally, I made sure to take Shannon to London so that we could visit Garden Lodge, Freddie's home in Kensington. Scrawled upon every inch of the outer wall were hundreds, maybe thousands, of messages for Freddie, left by fans from all over the world; given how the former resident of this beautiful Georgian house had unknowingly been instrumental in the two of us having met and fallen in love, we felt it more than appropriate to leave our own words of gratitude on the wall. Although our relationship ended more than ten years ago now, Shannon and I are still in touch, and we're still friends, a fact I like to think has more than a little to do with our shared, enduring love for the music and members of the band that brought us together in the first place. I was even able to recently introduce her to Muse through their stunningly Queen-like track, “United States Of Eurasia” (this was much to the chagrin of her husband, apparently, who had been trying to get her to listen to Muse for ages).

I first saw Garden Lodge when the news reported Freddie's death on the morning of November 25th 1991. he'd died the night before, they said, bronchial pneumonia brought on by AIDS – fans had already started gathering at his home, leaving floral tributes and messages of condolence. I remember my mum waking me, earlier than usual, to tell me the news; between that moment and when I had to leave for school, I spent every second I could glued to the TV. I was 17, and I was gobsmacked; my first “hero” was dead. I made myself a promise that, whenever I had the chance to be in London, I would go, and I would always take the opportunity to go and pay my respects at Garden Lodge. And I've kept that promise, as best I can – I've been many times now, and I will continue to go as I often as I am able. It seems only right to acknowledge someone who has had a positive impact on my life and I'm lucky that my regular trips with Raven mean that I am barely a mile or two from Kensington several times a year.

I'm sure that I was not the only one who felt a sense of nervous anticipation for the final Queen album, “Made In Heaven”, in 1995. The thought of hearing new Queen stuff was always exciting, but this time it was to be coloured by the knowledge that it would likely be the last new material we would ever get to hear from Freddie (barring whatever scraps remained in the archives). It did not disappoint, just as it did not fail to leave some of us emotionally drained simply from having listened to it. “A Winter's Tale” (apparently the last song Freddie wrote) could not have done more to impart a beautiful, bitter-sweet magic to christmas of that year; and the dark, brooding sweep of “Mother Love” puts a necessarily cold shiver in your spine when you realise these soaring vocals are the last Mercury recorded (while frail, thin, barely able to stand on his own, and knocking back vodka just to get through the recordings). When Brian sings the final verse, it rips your heart in half, knowing that it's because Freddie was never well enough to return to finish the song.

Some people thought the title of the album, “Made In Heaven”, was a little bit cheesy, and that's fair in a way, but not really worth making a deal out of because it's also the name of a track that had been originally recorded for Freddie's solo album, “Mr. Bad Guy”, some years before. I don't recall anyone trying to make anything of whatever religious associations that such a title might have – someone probably did, maybe a fundamentalist who objected to the idea of “a ho-mo-sexyoo-al talkin' 'bout Gahhd”, I just didn't hear about it. I never really got a grip on what Mercury's religious beliefs might have been – I know that he and his family were practising Zoroastrians in his youth, and he made many mentions of things religious throughout his songs (“Jesus” and “All God's People” are probably the most full-on), but I've not yet been able to come up with anything less vague than “non-specific (mono?)theist”. In the end though, it didn't matter to me, because Freddie never made it the focus of his music; it was only and always about the music.

So with three members of Queen having made an individual impact on my life, what of the fourth member, John Deacon? After the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in April 1992, and the “Made In Heaven” album in 1995, John pretty much retired, preferring instead to stay out of anything to do with Queen any more. These days I respect John more than I do Brian and Roger, simply for knowing that it was the end of the story, and all that remained for them to do was to close the book. While I have enjoyed the solo work of both Brian and Roger (the former is the only member of Queen I've ever managed to see live in concert), I have found that their behaviour regarding Queen as an entity in the last 15 years has only stoked my ire. I would even go as far as to say that they have, to some extent, been gently pissing away the legacy that the four of them had spent more than 20 years of hard work building.

Within a week of Freddie's death, Roger and Brian appeared on the TV-AM sofa, talking about how they could “never replace Freddie”, and that it would be wrong to try. So what the fuck is this “Queen + Paul Rodgers” shit? Or, worse still, “Queen + Five”? I have no problem with the surviving members of the band collaborating with whomever they want, but what thought processes led to them thinking they should call themselves Queen? Only half of the band is present and, even if it were three quarters (as was the case with the single “No One But You”), it's still not Queen and should not be referred to as such. Queen were a band whose sound, look, and style was absolutely the product of the four musicians in it; each was quintessential to what the band represented, and the absence of one member was to render the whole deficient. Without Freddie, it's not Queen, just as it would not be without Brian, Roger, or John. To refer to any project as such without all four members present is to insult that for which it has always stood.

I listened to “The Cosmos Rocks”, by “Queen + Paul Rodgers”, and felt nothing but a sense of hollow betrayal; if it weren't bad enough that the album sounded like the desperate gasp of musicians eager to capture that which never really existed in the first place, they had the cheek to brand it with the “Queen” stamp, as if somehow legitimising it, as if all four members of the band, regardless of whether they still draw breath or have an active involvement, had given it their approval in a way they would their own great works of the past. The album was, and is, a fucking awful piece of crap, a disrespectful artefact of legacy vandalism. Had the band referred to themselves with any other name, I doubt whether I would feel as upset by it … but they did, and I cannot forgive them for that; I love the solo work of both Brian and Roger, pre and post Mercury's death, but were they to have labelled it “Queen”, I would have been equally as appalled as I was by this album (and the tour that accompanied it).

But what was even worse was “We Will Rock You”, the West End musical built around Queen's back catalogue, and with a story by hypocrite success-whore Ben Elton. Surely there can be no greater waste of some of the most enduring rock songs of all time than to stitch them together as part of a ludicrous, abomination of a story that would prompt even L. Ron Hubbard to refer to it as culturally bankrupt and completely fucking retarded? Jukebox musicals like this, in which some lazy fuck takes a bunch of songs with which people are already familiar, crowbars in a feeble story to justify charging the public £50 to listen to pale imitations of a band's “Greatest Hits” compilation album (and then having the audacity to call it “theatre”), represent the epitome of cynical, duplicitous hoodwinking of an audience into looking the other way while both their pockets, and their memories of great music, are being shamefully picked by those who were responsible for helping to create that great music to begin with.

I can't speak as to whether or not “Freddie would have loved it”, because I did not know him; I can only speak for myself, so that is what I do … who am I but the grateful recipient of music that has enriched my life? Who am I but someone who simply wishes to protect that which he was given, 20 years of wonderful music, from harm? Maybe I'm romanticising my relationship with the band a little, but I'm not the only one to have so much invested in them – they are part of my childhood, my teenage years, and my adult life … it's perfectly natural to want the book to be closed before someone starts adding unnecessary chapters that serve only to damage, rather than enhance, the story. In an interview in 1979, while touring in Japan, Roger Taylor said that, “we don't want to become old, rich, and useless”; in all honesty, I'd have preferred that they had done.

At the end of the day, I don't know what Freddie would have thought of any of this – I only know what I, and others, thought of Freddie. His master-plan of forging Queen into a three-pronged, simultaneous assault on the world of glam, prog, and classic rock, paid off in spades, and I'll always be grateful that I was at least around to enjoy the ride while it lasted.

Thank you all, but most especially Freddie … you have no idea the effect you've had on my life, how you helped colour my view of the world … and, as long as the CDs hold out, I'll do my best to make sure the “four old ladies” will keep rocking away.

Sittin' on offence

December 5th 2011

Over the last day or so I've been engaged in a scientific argument (of sorts) on Twitter with a user by the name of @Adam4004. While I would love to make the infuriating futility of the false equivocations, straw-man arguments, and dishonest logic of his claims the basis of this week's post, it will have to wait for another time. As is so often the case there will always be certain other events occurring in the world that prompt those of us with a predilection for passionate ranting to jettison our current plans and instead focus on the hot potato that has suddenly landed in our laps. This week, that potato is the idea of offence; I don't mean the wooden thing that separates your garden from next door, that's a fence – I mean the idea of causing offence, or of being offended, and what prompted me to talk about it this week was the fact that, yet again, Jeremy Clarkson has said something amazingly fucking stupid.

If you're not familiar with this story, the Top Gear presenter had made comments on BBC's “The One Show” in which he'd said that the striking public sectors workers, who were demanding nothing more from the government than a fair pension for a lifetime of (often thankless) public service, should be executed in front of their families. Naturally this created a furore, with Clarkson (imagine the following said in his voice) becoming one of Twitter's highest trending topics … in the world (sorry – I couldn't resist it) … and thousands of people, who somehow managed to scrape together what few IQ points they possessed AND stop frothing at the mouth long enough to speak into their telephone machines without pouring bucket-loads of Daily Mail-branded bile and spit into the mouthpiece, complained to the BBC about the tragic dickhole's arse-brained comments and demanded that “Jezza” (as he is known affectionately by twats) be sacked.

Now, I'm not about to defend Clarkson's comments; they were tasteless and needlessly inflammatory, as it is with pretty much everything that vomits forth from his fetid word-hole. He doesn't really believe most of the patently retarded things he says … he's just making “jokes” that he knows will offend or upset people purely as a means to get attention. He is, for want of a better expression, a troll (actually, there are plenty of better expressions, but none really work as verbs in the next part of the sentence), and he's been trolling the general public through his newspaper columns, books, videos, and TV shows for more than twenty years (see, I told you, “he's been bell-ending the general public” wouldn't really have worked – actually, thinking about it, it kind of does). The man isn't an idiot, by any means – I think he knows exactly what he's doing because he seems to have made a £1m per year career out of it. He is unequivocally, however, a moronic little bell-end.

Like every troll, Clarkson is after a particular reaction – a response that lets him know that he remains as successful as ever in pissing off the those people who have never really liked him, while simultaneously eliciting “Clarkson you legend!” and “Jezza for PM!” type responses from the motor-mouthed, swarfega-brained petrol-heads who have made him a multi-millionaire by buying his “driving lots of fast cars really fast” videos to wank over, and his “why can't we kill hippies and what is the point of the environment?” books in order that someone else can read them to them. In this respect he's like Marilyn Manson (only less attractive); find the one thing you can do that annoys your detractors as much as it pleases your fans – then keep doing it. Our reaction here shouldn't be to demand his sacking, because, like Manson, as long as he keeps his fans happy he will always survive such setbacks. Instead we should simply respond by saying “he's a knob” and move on. As the expression, oft-repeated in many a forum, goes, “don't feed the trolls!”

The point I'm getting at here is that Clarkson (and Manson – actually, “Jeremy Manson” and “Marilyn Clarkson” are perfectly interchangeable since they have matching numbers of syllables – must remember that for later, it could be important) has a particular modus operandi, and that is to take the opportunity to offend people whenever and wherever it may arise. It may not be a conscious decision (although in many instances it undoubtedly is), but the willingness to intentionally cause offence is surely influenced by having become aware at some point that the ability to do so represents the possession of a certain measure of power. Knowing that one can provoke storms of outrage and rabid ire in others with just the right combination of words is rather like knowing that your child abhors sprouts with such vehemence that they will throw an epic fit if you so much as suggest there are some in the house; in both cases you have a useful weapon to employ against them and, more crucially, it's one that they themselves foolishly handed to you along with a comprehensive instruction manual in four different languages.

You see, what many of those who so readily profess to being offended by something are almost entirely unaware of is that being offended is a choice. We choose to be incensed when Clarkson refers to a car being a bit “ginger beer” (rhyming slang), or when he describes the daily activities of truck drivers as including the murder of prostitutes; we choose to be outraged when Sinead O'Connor rips up a picture of Pope John Paul II on television; we choose to be disgusted by the “Brass Eye” special in which Chris Morris satirises the way the media sensationalises the subject of paedophilia. To be offended by any of these things is to decide that you simply don't like them, or that you don't agree with them, both of which are conscious decisions – there is something about them that you have wilfully objected to when you could have just as easily concurred with the sentiment expressed.

In effect, being offended by something is a form of self-pitying whining. It's saying that your delicate sensibilities were in some way harmed by hearing or seeing something that you don't happen to like, and that you shouldn't have to put up with it. It's both childish and arrogant to assert that you are somehow above having to be exposed to things you don't agree with, that you should be in some way protected from ideas that you find personally objectionable. To do so is to make demands of everyone else that they voluntarily censor all of their opinions lest they upset you, or to insist that your feelings absolutely trump the right of another to speak freely. It's nothing more than casting yourself in the role of a feeble, pathetic baby who needs to be wrapped in cotton wool and cuddled, coddled, and cooed at every turn so you never have to bash your fists against the high-chair and wail, “Wah, wah, wah! What about me?!” No matter what form the offence may ultimately take, you do not have the right to not be offended.

Don't get me wrong, you totally have the right to be offended; you are absolutely entitled to be upset, angry, hurt, pissed off, or thoroughly fucking annoyed at whatever someone else might say to you. It would be more than reasonable for you to be utterly disgusted, appalled, sickened, enraged, or forehead vein-poppingly incensed by something you see or hear on TV, on the radio, in print, or on the internet. You just don't have the right to tell anyone, “you can't say that!” because they do – you are not so special that you should be protected in that way. I have as much right to offend you, with the things that I say or the things that I do, as you have to be offended by them. Of course, if we're in your home then you have the perfect right to demand that I do not say or do anything to offend you – I am, after all, a guest – and if I can't accede to that demand then I should not expect to stay … your house, your rules.

The rest of the world, though, is not your house … it is ours, it belongs to all of us, and so it is our rules by which we must abide. In a society built by an interdependent species, run for the benefit of all, the rules must be designed to limit the capacity of a given action to cause harm by reducing first the number of individuals that can be damaged by that action. This is why we have laws against murder, rape, assault, and theft, because to permit such behaviour is to put every last one of us in danger; telling a morbidly obese man that he should be dissuaded from going swimming because Greenpeace might mistake him for an orca whale and try to drag him back out to sea, providing it is not part of an active campaign of verbal abuse and bullying, is likely to result only in hurt feelings and a bruised sense of self-esteem, and is the kind of offence that doesn't warrant a parliamentary debate to introduce laws prohibiting the saying of “not very nice things”.

Regardless of how uncomfortable it may be that someone is able to say obscenely hurtful or insensitive things with relative impunity, it is one of the most important, nay fundamental, keystones in a truly free society. When one starts imposing restrictions on speech, you begin placing ever more massive weights around the neck of democracy. The freedom to criticise, to air grievances, to draw attention to injustice, to mock, to speak out against tyranny, to express one's thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and to know simply that your voice can always be heard, is a freedom whose absence or suffocation would surely result in the eventual death of liberty in toto? You may not like it, but the right to speak freely, even if it is to say something offensive, is so vital to our basic freedom that it cannot ever be compromised solely to protect an individual from criticism, or from being made to feel like they're not the centre of the universe like mummy and daddy always said they were.

As I said, the freedom to offend does not translate into the freedom to bully, and that's why we have laws to punish anyone found guilty of such behaviour. Some may ask where the line is drawn between the two, and I would reply that if you even need to ask that question then you've got bigger problems to worry about – the overwhelming majority of reasonable people can tell the difference. Even some of the more common flavours of bigotry and intolerance, particularly racism, homophobia, or sexism, do exist in forms that don't constitute bullying – in most cases, they manifest as little more than just an offensive opinion (for example, “French people are smelly”) which only ever really harms the idiot who holds it (advertising, as it does, to the world at large that this idiot is an idiot). When this opinion is employed as a stick with which to beat the target of the offence, however, that is when it becomes bullying.

The right to hold, and to express, an offensive opinion can actually have a positive effect on people (although not always the one intended by those with the offensive opinion). For a start, the fact that groups like the English Defence League (EDL) and the British National Party (BNP) are subject to the same guarantees of freedom of speech as the rest of us has resulted in a unity amongst the population of this country not seen since thousands gathered to hurl abuse and burgers at David Blaine as he dangled in a plastic box above the Thames. Had there been a law banning offensive speech, we would never have been treated to the sheer joy of seeing just how unbelievably fucking stupid both the EDL and the BNP truly are, and their racist, homophobic bigotry may very well have gone unchallenged, or even unnoticed until it had become too acceptable to shift without a considerable fight.

As BNP leader Nick Griffin's appearance on BBC's “Question Time” showed, the best way to expose the festering, rancid, shit-for-brains opinions of xenophobic, hate-filled turds like Griffin, his party, or the EDL, is to simply let them speak … they'll quickly find a way to let the world know what a bunch of jelly-headed fucknuts they are. Honestly, the BNP leader shot himself in the foot so often on “Question Time” it was amazing he was able to stand afterwards, let alone haul his bloated, pie-stuffed carcass out of television centre and into the nearest taxi (it was probably a black cab as well, which must have pissed off the racist spunk-bubble something rotten). As for the EDL, well, you only had to see this infamous clip of what has to be the most incoherent, brain-dead, phallectomy patient ever to stand in front of a TV camera. Seriously, if there were lorry drivers rocking up in France, filling their trucks with illegal immigrants and dumping them on this guy's doorstep, I'd gladly pay their fuel costs.

Speech, at the end of the day, is free for everyone, or it is free for no-one. If you want to be able to express your views, you've got to afford the same right to dickwards like the BNP, the EDL, or even Al-Qaeda, the Westboro Baptist Church and, yes, even Jeremy Clarkson. Only when it can be demonstrably proven to directly cause harm should free speech have to take a time-out while other legal considerations come in to play. The age-old notion that freedom of speech does not extend to yelling “fire!” in a crowded theatre is still relevant today, as it will be always; similarly, we have laws against incitement to riot, violence, or racial hatred because almost no-one would argue that the right to actively goad people into committing a crime should be counted as “protected” speech. We even have a law prohibiting incitement to religious hatred which, seems sound in principle, but falls completely fucking flat when you realise that the holy books of the big three faiths contain so many examples of inciting hatred towards other religions that one would have to jail every priest in the country.

Barely a day goes by without some self-righteous scum-bucket (usually the Daily Mail, but the Murdoch papers often hypocritically chime in too) goes on a vicious tirade against the BBC and their perceived, yet patently non-existent, effort to abandon decent standards in favour of becoming a 24 hour, multi-channel monument to offending the morality of everything we British hold dear. Putting aside the fact that the sources of these accusations are usually about as concerned with morality as a smack-addicted paedophile with a terminal illness and nothing left to lose who has mysteriously, yet fortuitously, found himself locked in an opium factory with a bus-load of school children, it completely ignores the fact that, a) it simply isn't true, and b) they're a public service broadcaster whose remit is to produce programming for everyone and, given that offence is entirely subjective (what you find offensive is not necessarily offensive to me) then, by definition, you are simply not going to like everything you see or hear.

To these people I have only one thing to say; change the fucking channel. I used to get amazingly wound up when my dad (many years ago) used to complain about the crap that he was being forced to watch on TV. Thank fuck he came to his senses and changed his attitude because I don't know how I, as an adult, would be able to stop myself from screaming “NO-ONE'S MAKING YOU WATCH ANYTHING!!!” so loudly in his face that his ear drums would burst. Seriously, people, stop fucking whining and change the bastard channel! No one is forcing you to watch shit you don't want to watch. No one is holding a gun to your head. Get off your lazy, bitching, self-righteous arses and turn the fucking thing off if you're that put out by it. Stop writing that letter or email complaining to the BBC, you twats, we know you can't write, you're not fooling anyone … change the fucking channel.

“B..B..But I pay for the BBC! I shouldn't have to pay to be offended!” Yes, that's right, well done, you do pay for the BBC … and so do I, and I have to pay for all the moronic shit that you watch that I can't fucking stand. I have to pay for “Tonight's The Night” with John Barrowman; I have to pay to have programmes I want to watch shelved because the fucking football went into extra time; I have to pay for another series of “Come Fly With Me”; but worst of all I have to pay for Chris fucking Moyles. The difference between you and me is that I understand that that's how it works; there will be stuff on that you love and I hate – there will be programmes that, were I you, I would describe myself as being “offended” by them. But I'm not you because whenever I see something I don't like, I change the channel … I don't throw my toys out of the pram and demand that it be cancelled and insist that everyone involved get the sack. Why? Because I'm not a whiny prick with a grossly-inflated sense of entitlement, that's why.

Jeremy Clarkson was, and is, a total dickhead. He was a dickhead before his comments this week, he was a dickhead after them, and he will likely remain a dickhead for the rest of his life. Nothing has changed. His career has been like watching a mid-life crisis in slow-motion (sometimes I can't help but wonder if he emerged from the womb middle-aged and wearing a pair of string-back driving gloves). But if he wants to be a pathetic, middle-aged, speed-obsessed, reactionary dickhead who says offensive things to get a laugh, without actually bullying anyone in the process, I for one am not going to stop him or complain like a little fucking baby to the BBC about it … I'm just going to change the channel …

Maybe you should grow up and do the same?

Bring It

December 13th 2011

So, as I was saying last week before I became hopelessly sidetracked into ranting about Jeremy Clarkson (it's easily done, I know, what with him being in possession of a face that would look infinitely better if a fist was ploughing through it faster than a Bugatti Veyron with a rocket up its arse), I have recently been involved in a Twitter-based scientific argument with a user by the name of @Adam4004. His name, which consists of a reference to both the bible's first man and the year (BCE) literalists claim is when the earth was created, was my first clue to his being a young earth creationist (or “moron” for short). The second was that he offered not a single scrap of evidence for any of his frequently asinine claims, choosing instead simply to assert the truth of his statements whilst ignoring all requests to provide references and citations for the many studies and peer-reviewed papers that undoubtedly support them. The reason we had to go through such a frustrating dance is that evidence to a theist is like a backbone to Nick Clegg; they can't show any, because they ain't got any.

If I'm being completely honest, I'd have to say that I may have lost the argument on a technicality, insofar as I surrendered the high ground by calling him a “fucking idiot”. As you all know, the rules of a proper, reasoned debate (such as they are) essentially state that, regardless of whether or not you're 100% right in everything you say (I wasn't, incidentally, but I wasn't that far off), resorting to ad hominem attacks is pretty much an instant fail because you're criticising the claimant rather than the claim itself. While I wholeheartedly agree with this rule (theists are forever breaking it by trying to dismiss evolution on the nonsensical grounds that Darwin was a Nazi, or something like that), I would question whether it actually applies in this instance. Specifically, I was, in fact, attacking his claim; I just happened to follow it with a comma and the words, “you fucking idiot” – does that make it an ad hominem? And, even if it does, that doesn't in any way alter the fact that he was, to be fair, a fucking idiot.

One other aspect of the argument about which I should be absolutely open (if only because you could examine my Twitter timeline and find out for yourselves anyway) is that at no point did I offer any links, citations, or references in support of my refutations of his argument. Again, I would ordinarily agree that one should always be prepared to supply the evidence necessary to back up one's claims (this post, this blog, and my entire position as a sceptic all hinge on this notion) but, in fairness once again, it wasn't my burden; they were his claims, and it is therefore not for me to provide the evidence that refutes them but for him to provide evidence that supports them. Scepticism by definition is the rejection of claims on the basis of insufficient evidence having been provided by the claimant. It's not making claims to the contrary (although it can be) … it is simply saying, “prove it”.

I have said before that one of my principles is, “evidence: bring some with your claim or fuck off” and, while it may be phrased in a particularly blunt or aggressive-sounding way, it is probably one of the single most reasonable demands that anyone could ever make, and we dismiss it at our peril. Insisting that someone provide, at the very least, the teeniest, tiniest justification for the claims they make (although hopefully they will offer so much more than that) has been essential, not just for the development of our species, but for its continuing survival. How many more lives would have been lost, or significantly shortened, had we simply continued to believe the assertions of apothecaries and surgeons of the past rather than subject them to the rigour of scientific testing? What would our current life expectancy be if we hadn't asked for actual proof that, for example, using red lead as a food colouring was, you know, safe?

Without the demand for evidence, you and I almost certainly wouldn't be here. The progress made by science, particularly in the field of medicine, has only been possible thanks to the scientific method's absolute insistence that, if you come up with an idea, you had damned well better be prepared to back that shit up when someone calls you out. It's not enough to say, “Trust me, it works!”, especially when it comes to something like medicine where individual lives, or even the health of an entire nation, could hang on your theory; you can't expect people to simply believe you when you announce that you have come up with a method for treating cancer which involves carefully swallowing an entire grand piano once a fortnight (to be taken instead of meals, and washed down with a bucket of hot beef lard). Had it not been for the constant demands of science that theories prove themselves, both with supporting evidence, and self-correcting mechanisms like the peer-review process (where bad ideas go to die), our ancestors would likely have not survived long enough to reproduce.

This is the major stumbling block encountered by theists and proponents of the supernatural, and it's one that invariably sends them flying arse over tit, flailing like a toddler who's desperately trying to get its head through a sweater with an impossibly small neck-hole. No matter how strong the argument, or how passionately it is expressed, and regardless of the absolute conviction of the person making it, the request for evidence will always trip up those who don't have it, just as it did with @Adam4004 (sadly, on top of not being able to carry out the primary request of bringing evidence, he either couldn't, or wouldn't, carry out the secondary request of fucking off instead). When the facts aren't on your side, you have no choice but to make appeals to authority, emotion, and special pleading when presenting your case; the encyclopaedia of logical fallacies suddenly becomes your best friend and play-book, and you will run through every last fallacy in it just to avoid offering anything tangible.

A big part of the problem is that many people don't understand what actually constitutes valid evidence, and a sizeable number of those who do will be willing to dishonestly modify the definition or feign complete ignorance of it if they think it'll let them get away with brushing aside any questions or criticisms as they push their side of the debate. Theists are probably more guilty of this than almost anyone, frequently choosing, in defence of their god, to redefine evidence to the extent that warm, fuzzy feelings about how there must be a god because they can't explain how clouds work somehow now counts as cast-iron, undeniable proof that a sky-based Dumbledore-alike is responsible for the invention of everything. Whether this rewriting of the rules is unconscious ignorance, or wilful dishonesty, a theist's approach to evidence is usually to load it into a catapult made of out bibles, and use the big, rubber band (constructed from the finest, flexible morality) to launch it at full speed over the nearest rainbow before adopting faux-innocence and asking, “what evidence?”

For something to qualify as evidence it must first be objective, that is it must be totally independent of the observer. It must be possible for anyone to be able to examine whatever is, to measure it, to test it, and for it to be the same for everyone; opinions, emotions, and beliefs are all worthless in this regard, being utterly subjective and, therefore, beyond quantifying in a sense that can be in any way meaningful to anyone but the person who holds them. Last week I talked about the idea of offence, and how what is offensive to you may not be offensive to someone else – the same applies here; you might be of the opinion that a god exists, you might feel that his presence is undeniable, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us feel the same way. Even if we did, it still wouldn't matter because our feelings and opinions are no indicator of reality as it is outside of our tiny human heads; they are merely our perception of it, and perception is entirely subjective.

It is amazing how many supporters of the “magic man done it with magic” theory of existence subscribe to the notion that a god must exist because billions of people throughout history have believed in one, as if the difference between objective and subjective comes down solely to the numbers involved. If this were even remotely true, it would mean that the opinion of more than 15 million people on Twitter that Justin Bieber is somehow NOT an irritating, pube-dodging, vapid, talent-eschewing waste of DNA is, by sheer virtue of how many people hold this view, an objective fact, when independent scientific experiments carried out in my flat conclusively show that that is exactly what Justin Bieber is. Yes, I'm being facetious and sarcastic, and my anti-Bieber agenda is on display yet again, but I'm doing it to make the important point that beliefs, opinions, and emotions are not evidence because they cannot, by definition, be true for everyone, and neither can they be publicly measured or verified.

The “argumentum ad populum” is one of the more common logical fallacies to be committed by those attempting to present evidence, and is sometimes expressed using the phrase, “the plural of ‘anecdote' is not ‘data'”. Personal testimony and anecdotes are also often employed as the basis for an appeal to authority (the idea that, “so-and-so said it, therefore it must be true”), and this is unquestionably the theist's all-time favourite fallacy; they defer to the authority of the bible so often that it starts to sound like that annoying kid at school who begins every sentence with the words “Yeah, well, my dad says …” as a way of declaring by fiat that he is always right about everything ever, and that your point of view is stupid and wrong because you don't know who your dad is, and anyway your mum was seen wandering around the town centre in her bra and flowery pants. Appeals to authority are, for the most part, kind of childish when you think about it …

In spite of all this, there is a place for introducing authority into an argument; when supporting evidence has been presented it is often quite acceptable to offer the source of the evidence as an appropriate reinforcement of its veracity (assuming, of course, the source has relevance to the evidence). At the weekend I was fortunate enough to see the Uncaged Monkeys live at the Plymouth Pavillions; an evening of extreme nerdiness, science plus comedy, featuring Robin Ince, Professor Brian Cox, Simon Singh, Dr. Ben Goldacre, and the awesome and wonderful Tim Minchin. Heading home, my friend Matt (who had bought the ticket for me as an early christmas present) said that his approach to some of the “heavier” aspects that went over his head was to simply just accept it; since Brian Cox had absolutely established his credentials when it came to particle physics, he was happy to recognise him as an authority on the subject and take whatever he said as a given.

There is a million miles of difference between accepting the word of the world's foremost keyboard-playing, sky-pointing, Mancunian particle physicist when it comes to dealing with quantum mechanics, and taking as gospel (pun intended) the claims of a book, cobbled together by multiple authors (many of whom history has verified as having social or political agendas), translated, mistranslated, edited, interpreted, re-edited, translated again, misinterpreted, and dishonestly misrepresented when it comes to any of the claims that it has ever made. Brian Cox has proven himself within his chosen field (he also uses the field to stand in and point at the sky a lot); the bible has proven fuck all but its cheerleaders' ability to perform the most extraordinary logical gymnastics in a desperate effort to spin the words of desert-dwelling ignorants so that allegory and fable could be falsely presented as scientific or historical fact.

Theistic claims have never been able to present anything that can truly be considered evidence because everything offered thus far has always fallen short when it comes to the three most important qualities a claim must possess in order that it can produce viable evidence. Firstly, it must be testable; we've dealt with this already, but it's worth reiterating – opinions, emotions, or beliefs don't count because they cannot be tested. Seriously, how do you quantify anything as nebulous as “happiness” in a way that is meaningful for everyone? Even if you could observe and measure brain activity insofar as it pertains to varying emotional states (and we can), how do you correlate that precisely with how a person feels? How do you rate feelings? How do you measure happiness? Whether you like it or not (and, believe me, theists don't like it), feelings, beliefs, and opinions cannot be quantified and so cannot therefore be proven wrong, which brings us to the next quality a claim needs to have: falsifiability.

When a scientist develops a theory to explain observed phenomena, they set about testing it through experimentation and analysis in an attempt not to validate the theory, but to falsify it; to prove it wrong. The reason for this is because it's far easier to prove your theory is correct – you simply ignore everything that has the potential to refute it (this is called confirmation bias, and is another crime against reason favoured strongly by theists; if it disagrees with you, get rid of it). Scientific theories intrinsically lay out the conditions for which they are satisfied, and so the object is to modify every variable, tweak every setting, and test it again and again until you find a scenario where the conditions fail. A person's beliefs or feelings cannot ever be shown to be wrong, just as they cannot ever be shown to be right either; they're not quantifiable, they cannot be represented on a discrete scale of 1 to 10, positive or negative, black and white, right or wrong.

Crucially, because the feelings and beliefs of an individual are, by their very nature, that of an individual, they are entirely subjective and beyond the final pre-requisite quality for viable claims, repeatability. Many's the theist whose belief is founded solely on having a religious “experience”; sometimes this will be a claim to have witnessed a miracle, but usually it is, again, a feeling, deep-down, profound, something that they suddenly felt one day, a sense that the “love of god had entered them” (filthy bitches, honestly!), or perhaps that they were spiritually overwhelmed with emotion at the inherent beauty of whatever supernatural force they believe is responsible for everything. I'm sure this is all very lovely for the person concerned, but it's worthless to the rest of us because we cannot possibly hope to reliably recreate these experiences for ourselves. Evidence needs to be tested repeatedly to ensure that the application of a given theory yields the same result every time in accordance with its predictions.

Miracles are, by definition, something of a rarity, otherwise they wouldn't be miracles. Not only that but, since they also involve the suspension of fundamental laws of the universe, there's absolutely no way we can possibly “induce” a miracle into happening in order that it can be tested as evidence for whatever claim has been made for it. It's all very well saying your grandma's cancer was cured by praying to a god who then performed a miracle to remove it, but we can't repeat that (at least not without shuffling a few thousand grannies on a conveyor belt through the core of a nuclear reactor and then praying en masse for god to save them – even then you'll find that pretty much every last granny will die without so much as a whisper from the almighty). As for profound religious “feelings”, they're even less replicable than nuking a few old ladies – besides, I get overwhelmed with emotion every time Sam picks up Frodo and carries him up Mount Doom, and the only thing that is evidence of is me being a big soppy git.

My argument with @Adam4004 was not the first run in I, or anyone else, has ever had with a theist who made spurious claims to have tangible evidence and then singularly failed to provide any, and it certainly won't be the last. While, as I said, it was not my burden to prove him wrong (but his burden to prove himself right), I could easily have supplied him with links to the necessary refutations of his arguments, but why bother? His was a view so entrenched that he either wouldn't read them, wouldn't understand them, or would simply dismiss them in a display of petulant confirmation bias. And besides, since when has it been my job to fill in the massive, gaping chasms left in someone's education by a religion desperate to prevent its adherents from learning? Sure, I will do my best to explain to you exactly why I think you're wrong, but never forget you have a role in this too: to meet me halfway. The trouble is, I'm afraid, that one ultimately cannot reason with those who refuse to see reason …

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to carry on trying regardless. Why? Probably because I'm a stubborn bastard with an unshakable desire to have things fixed that I perceive to be broken, and there's a lot to fix when it comes to people's attitude towards evidence; specifically, when you say you have evidence, don't start offering logical fallacies, excuses, arguments that have already been refuted or debunked, or warm feelings before sitting back smugly as if that counts for anything. It doesn't, and it will explain why no-one feels compelled to take your claims at all seriously.

At the end of the day, if you've got evidence, bring it …

Rant-a Claus

December 27th 2011

It would be very easy for me to talk this week about the death of Christopher Hitchens, and for that reason I'm not going to; everyone else will have said it far better than I and, besides, I'm sure he would have interjected at some point to ask for both an end to the fawning tributes, and as to whether someone could furnish him with directions to the bar. I could talk about how the morning after Hitchen's passing would also have been the 50th birthday of the late Mr. Bill Hicks, in whose honour this site is named, and how he, like Hitchens, has had a profound influence both on the way I see the world, and how I choose to write about it. But again, many others will have beaten me to the punch, and I don't like being repetitive (or repetitive). Therefore, rather than spending 3,000 words getting all sombre over the two fine names from my heroes list who sadly don't get to survive this season, I shall instead attempt to give you a more positive and upbeat christmas post that will hopefully provide some useful advice on how you yourselves can survive this traditionally stressful and treacherous holiday.

I will warn you, however, that this is not going to be the bog-standard, run-of-the-mill “Christmas Survival Guide” that gets trotted out every year by lazy fuck writers at magazines, newspapers, and the shitty sunday supplements; neither is it going to have much in common with the vapid, patently over-cheery festive features one usually sees throughout the last quarter of the year on ghastly shows like “Loose Women” or “This Morning” (to be fair, though, if you're watching ITV you deserve to suffer the crushing banality it regularly brings). No, this is going to be a unique and special sort of guide because it's my way of helping you (that is the collective “you” as well as the individual “you”) to avoid all the things that could result in me, or anyone else of a similar, easily-frustrated persuasion, wanting to extricate your eyeballs with a couple of corn-cob holders before inserting them violently into your bottom with the aid of a camping mallet.

While I appreciate that it is, at least for this year, too late now for you to take heed of the message this post contains, it would still do you well to remember it for next year because it contains the kind of good, helpful advice that never ceases to be relevant. Like remembering to look both ways before crossing the road, or not smearing your naked body in fish-paste and climbing into the shark tank at the National Marine Aquarium, what follows is the the kind of wisdom that will serve you well for many a year and, hopefully, in time, bring a much better quality of christmas to everyone – well, except for Simon Cowell, obviously, who really needs to just fuck right off out of everyone's christmases and stop acting like he has an inalienable right to expect us to make his latest warbling meat bag's single number 1 every year. And, since we're on the subject …

Get some new christmas songs

The creators of the “Now That's What I Call Music!” series need to die, and they cannot, in my view, do it soon or violently enough. Having inflicted thrice-annual compilation CDs (not including the end of year compilation CD which is basically a compilation of the compilations released that year) on us for an arse-munchingly horrible 29 years is, surely, enough to warrant paying to have someone skull-fuck them in the ears using a dildo wrapped in barbed-wire and hypodermic needles filled with Louis Walsh's own piss (an act to be referred in years to come as, “Now That's What I Call Poetic Justice!”) … but when you add to that the fact that they have been re-releasing their christmas compilation every fucking year since 1985 with barely a single change in the tracklisting, it becomes a cast-iron case for the death penalty. Being one of the most “popular” (or, at least, heavily advertised) compilations going, this means that the fucking thing has almost certainly been bought by every spud-brained wank-tard responsible for purchasing the festive compilation CD to play in their shop each year. I have, because of this, actually been able to accurately predict, on numerous occasions, the next track to be played in stores while christmas shopping – that's not healthy.

While the “Now!” producers must accept the blame for showing no originality and maximum cynicism when it comes to shoving a christmas compilation up the collective, bent-over arses of the British public every year, one does have to take a long, hard look at the material they've got to work with. If we were completely honest we would be forced to admit that christmas songs are, almost without exception, utter shit. Trite, cliched, desperately cloying, sickly sentimental, mawkish, usually vapid, and artistically bankrupt in a way that most TV commercials would consider to be too crass and commercialised. Even the ones that aren't and are, instead, just a fun, knees-up celebration of family, friends, and frivolity, have grown painfully tired with having been incessantly repeated for the last four decades. I'm even bored with Slade's “Merry Xmas Everybody” (the song that was number 1 when I was born) having heard it in every shop, on every radio station, and on every bloody TV programme shown in December since 1973.

We need some new christmas songs, and I'm not talking about the vomit-inducing shite that most bands chuck out at some point during their pointless careers; the ballad with a few jingle bells attached that would make the woman it refers to not want to leave the protagonist at christmas (as she always seems to be doing in those songs) without having first inserted a few dozen razor blades into his larynx so the drippy fuck couldn't ever sing again. We need christmas songs that make you glad to be with those you love and appreciate what they mean to you, and songs that get you fired up for the day, for opening presents, and dancing like a pissed lunatic. If you want examples, check out the classic Phil Spector stuff, “White Wine In The Sun” by Tim Minchin, and “The Fairytale Of New York” by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. I swear, if anyone puts on “Last Christmas” by Wham, “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney, or “Do They Know It's Christmas” by Band Aid, then I'm going to head down to the sea-front with a sack full of puppies and a brick.

Get some new christmas TV shows / movies / adverts

Every year we are treated to a festive cavalcade of entertainment in the form of christmas movies, christmas specials of TV shows, and adverts that exhort us to part with our money, either by plucking our heart-strings or by showing us how our holiday could be awesome and fun, just like these ordinary, normal, not-at-all am-dram rejects and D-list celebrities, if only we bought our entire christmas food intake from a supermarket that deals exclusively with frozen food (mmm, from the freezer to the table via the oven – what culinary heights you inspire us to, Iceland, thank you). The omni-directional shit-cannon that is christmas television, for example, usually represents a combined entertainment output of approximately 4 nanokays (a “kay” being the maximum number of seconds that can elapse while watching a smug, pudgy-faced comedian whose entire career is built on remembering things from his childhood, and asking if you remember them too, without wanting to stuff the walking pie-factory into an industrial mincer).

As soon as the last week or so of December rolls around, every sitcom, drama, comedy, reality show, soap, current affairs programme, magazine show, chat show, talk show, and continuity announcement gets a fucking “christmas special”; and they are, with very few exceptions, lazy, hastily-written, poorly-executed feeble concessions to the tawdry and desperate need of the networks to fill time without spending any money. Is this really the best we can do? How is it possible that “Father Ted” has produced probably one of the best christmas specials ever and that there really hasn't been anything to top it in the fifteen years since it was first aired – seriously, try and think of a better festive edition of a show that's been produced since – “The Office” (UK) was certainly satisfying, but it didn't have the sheer, feel-good, joyous christmas lunacy of “A Christmassy Ted”.

When it comes to christmas movies, things are only slightly better (insofar as the word “better” has any real meaning in this comparison). Almost every christmas movie for decades has followed the same basic formula; either it's a grumpy bastard turns nice at christmas (i.e., a rip-off of “A Christmas Carol”), a neglectful/absent husband or father (it's almost always a guy) learns to reconnect with his family, or it's the movie that actually could be set at any time of the year and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference because christmas had simply been forcibly rammed into the film's script-hole at the demands of a studio with nothing on its release schedule for the holiday season. In truth, some of the best christmas movies ever are ones in which christmas is merely an easily-replaced plot device (“Die Hard” and “Gremlins”, for example), or those that have ripped off Dickens (“Scrooged” and “Muppets' Christmas Carol”); what sets them apart from the other shite shovelled into cinemas every year is that human beings made those movies, not marketing departments with boxes to tick.

Shut the fuck up about how organised you are

I'm normally an incredibly organised person; because of a mild list-making obsession I have never, in my life, gone away on holiday, for a weekend, or to some far-off appointment, and forgotten anything. Seriously; I have never forgotten to do, take, or otherwise prepare a single thing when going away. Christmas, on the other hand, is a completely different bucket of holly-decked lard. Because my pay date varies slightly from month to month, because I'm perennially skint throughout most of the year (making saving virtually impossible), and because I never know whether I'm going to get a bonus until I actually get it, I can never really plan anything for christmas until about the last week before it happens. I can't buy anything, presents, food, anything until, at best, 10 days before, because I never know whether we'll have the money for it all. Until I'm able to save anything during the year, this won't change, and I'll be forced to see updates on Facebook from friends who are smugly announcing they've finished wrapping everything by December 3rd.

If you don't like the idea of seeing whether christmas tree baubles could be strung together and used as anal love-beads, fucking pack it in! We're not impressed – we find you smug and irritating. The worst criminals, however, have to be the people who have been buying presents throughout the year – the creepy weirdos who, while out shopping in mid-June will grab something off the shelf and say, “oh, that'll be perfect for so-and-so for christmas!”, skilfully ignoring the fact that, by definition, it'll be something they really don't want because, if it was, they would buy it for themselves in the six whole months they've got before christmas actually arrives. I don't care that you've got every present bought, wrapped, and waiting with ill-deserved self-satisfaction under the tree for three whole weeks before it gets opened – that doesn't make you a superhero, that makes you a lunatic and an oddball. Normal people like to be mildly stressed by time constraints at christmas, whether they know it or not, because it forces them to be spontaneous and original with ideas. If you get a 3-pack of handkerchiefs, a complete guide to the history of creosote, or a selection of Chaucerian poetry fridge magnets for christmas, I'll bet you any money they were bought in mid-summer.

Oh, and the one group of people who really need to grow up and stop trying to impress us all are the yuletide Delias-in-waiting; the festive foodies who've been rehearsing christmas lunch since April the year before and have decided that they're going to have the whole family round and, using only one oven (with two barely adjustable shelves) and a gas hob with 3 working burners, is going to cook up a full christmas dinner for thirteen people, two of whom are vegetarian, one vegan, and one who's just a fussy little cunt who doesn't like anything except spaghetti shapes and mini-sausages on toast. Stop turning yourself into martyrs to aneurysm research and calm the fuck down. It's not necessary to get that stressed – everyone hates the big family meals anyway because it's time spent away from playing with their cool christmas shit. Do what we did; roast chicken, mash, red onion gravy, stuffing balls, and Yorkshire pudding, for just three people, all from scratch, and consumed with great joy at 11:15pm. No heart attack, no rushing around, no fuss.

Stop talking about the “real” meaning of christmas

Okay, now, in all fairness, you knew that I would have to bring religion into this at some point and subsequently ruin the christmas cheer I had thus far managed to build up with my veiled threats and unfettered whinging. There is little more tedious that one could encounter at this time of year than the self-righteous, sanctimonious, god-frotting dick-bag who tries to bring the festive mood of everyone down by introducing the subject of the “real” meaning of christmas (as if we were having some kind of make-believe fantasy holiday until they chipped in). It's not just because you know that all this Jesus-talk mellows out the delightful buzz brought on by a fat roast dinner, a handful of mince pies, christmas pudding, crisps, chocolate, some great prezzies, and half a bottle of scotch; if anything it's because Jesus, as my fellow nothing-worshippers will tell you (and as many christians seem to be blissfully ignorant or in denial over), has pretty much fuck all to do with christmas.

I'm not going to go off on a long and winding moan about where christmas really comes from – do your own research – but, as a quick summary: virtually every aspect of this holiday that christians think belongs to them has actually come from traditions dating back thousands of years before the supposed birth of their favourite sandal-wearing redeemer (and from such diverse groups of people as the Norse, the Romans, the Pagans, and the Persians). I just think it's sad that some people can be surrounded by friends and family, celebrating togetherness, eating good food, enjoying a drink, giving gifts, and just generally revelling in the fact that you've all made through it another year, and that you probably have each other to thank for it (either through their love and support or, as is more likely, staying the fuck out of your way), and all they can think about is the birth of some long-dead Palestinian they have never met, and are never going to. Shut up and celebrate your family, for fuck's sake.

Stop complaining about the “commercialisation” of christmas

This is one for people who have never really paused for a moment to think about the holiday they're celebrating and what it really means. While it may have begun in many cultures as a way to mark the passing of the old year and the dawn of the new, and that whole symbolism malarkey of the death and rebirth of life, it was also a time to enjoy the fruits of a year's work. The wine and beer that had been brewing would be ready for consumption, the cattle one had been raising were ready for slaughtering (that and it made sense to feast on them rather than feeding them through a winter they might not survive anyway), and there were traditions of gift-giving for a good five thousand years before anyone had even heard of the middle-eastern carpenter's son. The whole point was to revel in the spoils of one's achievements thus far, to celebrate twelve months' worth of endeavour by sharing it with the people close to you who helped made it possible. It is, fundamentally, a commercial holiday.

In times past we would have raised the cattle, grown the food, brewed the drink, and made the gifts ourselves; these days, while we may instead take the money we have earned during the year and spend it on festivities, the principle remains the same. We take a break from our daily toil, have a massive blow out on food and booze, and we treat ourselves and others through the giving of shiny prezzies. As individuals, it is possibly our greatest contribution to the economy of our respective countries, helping to give it one last shot in the arm before everyone takes some well-deserved time off. Don't talk to me about tradition and how the commercialisation of the holiday is ruining it; traditions are ever-changing and evolving, as they should be, and the idea of christmas as a commercial holiday is a tradition older than most religious ones. Just think about the kind of holiday you would have if you removed all commercial aspects from it; no presents, a regular meal (the kind you have every day), no tree (unless one grows wild in your garden every year), no fancy decorations, and no cards.

Finally …

Enjoy yourselves. Slap anyone who talks about how there's a “war on christmas”; no there isn't – if there is, it's those very fuckers trying to tell you someone wants to take the holiday away from you who are engaged in it (by telling people that someone is trying to take christmas away from them you are, ironically, taking them away from christmas – morons). Have fun. Get drunk. Stuff yourself with food. Play with your prezzies. Chill out. Give hugs to your friends and family. Treasure the time off work. Celebrate whatever you want to celebrate (just don't be a dick about it).

Look forward to the New Year and the future, whatever it may bring. Oh, and speaking of which …

New Year's Peeve

December 31st 2011

I hope you've all managed to make a suitable recovery from the, no doubt, riotous fun you've been having over the past week? So, did you all enjoy your last christmas ever? I trust that you had a wonderful, gut-busting lunch or two, a stack of great presents, a few hefty drinks, and … what? Yes, I did say it was your “last christmas ever”, why? Didn't you know? According to a Mayan prophecy, and a worryingly large number of panicky, gullible idiots who foolishly believe in prophecies (despite their persistent failure over the millennia to actually come true), the world is going to end on December 21st 2012. They don't say how, just that it's “going to end” – a tad vague for something so important, don't you think? But, anyway, yeah, that was it, your last christmas, your last full year, and this will be your last New Year's Eve ever, so it might be worth making it one for whatever history books will remain after next year. Or, you know, you could just enjoy yourself knowing that it's all bollocks.

For those that don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about, I'll keep this as simple as possible; I've already covered the whole non-subject of rapture/armageddon/apocalypse prophecy before, so there's no point in my going into any great detail again. Basically, 21st December 2012 is when the calendar created by the Mayans (a civilisation who lived in South America between around 2000BCE and approximately 1400CE) runs out and, according to them, all manner of bad shit will happen when it does. That's it. Seriously, there really isn't much more to it than that. It'd be like the mud-drenched ignorants of the dark ages getting into a massive panic over what happens when we get to the end of the year 999, because no-one had even for an instant contemplated the possibility of simply adding another digit. Actually, isn't that kind of what happened? A bunch of backward-thinking, intellectually-stunted shit-shovellers threw a major wobbler at the thought that the world was going to end on some numerically inevitable date?

It was as if their arbitrary method of marking time which began, curiously enough, when they first had the idea for it and ended only when they couldn't count any higher, had some kind of direct and fundamental connection to the universe such that it would bring about the end of everything when time reached the point where their ability to express themselves mathematically failed. Since what usually prompts the inception of most calendars is an event considered, by those concerned, to be of profound significance, the perceived end of such systems of chronology is seen as equally important, but in the opposite direction. So, as the hands of time approach some otherwise meaningless milestone that has been assigned a deeper purpose by someone who cannot justify it at all (but it's okay, because “this ancient book explains everything”), what happens? A bunch of backward-thinking, intellectually-stunted shit-shovellers throw a major wobbler at the thought that the world is going to end on some numerically inevitable date.

Now, I'm not talking exclusively about the Mayans or the dark age peasants of “Three-Digit AD” here; cast your minds back a decade or so and you'll realise that this is exactly what happened in the run up to the year 2000. An accidental, worldwide conglomeration of uninformed, delusional fucktards started wailing at anyone who would listen that the sky was falling, and I'm not just referring to the infamous and terrifyingly unproblematic “Y2K Bug”. Throughout 1999, untold numbers of people entered a siege mentality and started hoarding food, water, weapons, and all variety of supplies for the armageddon they felt was coming, independent of whether or not their insurance company's computer could understand the difference between one century and the next. “It's the year 2000! It must mean something! Look at it! Look at what a big, round, important-sounding even number it is! Jesus has to be coming back this year, he just has to! All the prophecies about his return have been right so far, haven't they?”

Putting aside the insane beliefs of the religious that it had been two whole millennia since a Palestinian jew, of whose life there had been no extra-biblical documentation whatsoever, had been born; ignoring for a moment the fact that our calendars had changed a number of times since his apparent demise and that the 2000 year figure was therefore inaccurate; and discounting completely the bible's claim that said zombie would return within the lifetime of his contemporaries, the idea that one single date was anything more than a perfectly normal, run-of-the-mill occurrence within the context of a simple system of chronological labelling, is patently absurd. For a start, it's not as if all the calendars, watches, video recorders, computers, or anything else with a facility for timekeeping, were somehow wired to the world's largest supply of explosives, rigged to detonate at midnight on January 1st, let alone that there was some manner of supernatural alarm clock set to awake a sleeping, apocalypse-happy deity.

Despite what bigoted homophobe and top trending Twitter twat @GodsWordIsLaw says, the world is not going to end on New Year's Eve, just as it didn't end when every other twaddle-flinging attention-whore throughout history said it would either. The planet, along with pretty much every inhabitant who fails to succumb to inevitable mortality at the expected rate, will still be here on both January 1st and December 22nd. There is no need to worry, no need to panic, we are all as safe as it is possible to be (except Keith, obviously, who is actually a little bit safer than the rest of us being, as he is, I believe, securely tucked up in a homo-proof blanket right against the far back wall of his closet along the border with Narnia – don't worry, he's got food, water, and a few pictures of Ricky Gervais to masturbate over, he'll be fine – just leave the door ajar so he can yell abuse about “the sodomites trying to give us all AIDS” or something).

This is not to say that some people won't experience what they feel to be the end of their world come the New Year. It is, apparently, a time when relationships have a statistically higher probability of coming to a premature, often acrimonious, end. We've all had a friend who spent an epoch or two on the phone bawling their eyes out about how their significant other “dumped me on New Year's Eve, the bastard/bitch, how could he/she?!” I don't know whether there is any truth to it being more likely you'll get dumped on New Year's Eve (I'd have said the odds are about 1 in 365), but it's entirely plausible. It is, after all, a night when a lot more alcohol is consumed, people are in a more celebratory mood, inhibitions are, well, non-existent, and the possibility for horseplay with someone who isn't your other half is therefore greatly increased. There are probably also a few people out there, douchebags I think they're called, who figure that once midnight ticks over their indiscretions are in another year and ultimately don't count.

I've never actually been dumped at New Year, although I did get a phone call at 5am on December 31st from an anxious fiancée who wanted to inform me (presumably before I heard it from someone else) that she'd rather unfairly had more sex in the previous 12 months than I had. Strangely, however, it wasn't this revelation that most pissed me off at the time (that would kick in later), neither was it the fact that this was 1999 and, as such, I was receiving the news of this adultery on the last day of the millennium (as you can guess, I didn't consider that terribly significant). No, what fucked me right off more than anything was that she was calling me at 5am, a time when most normal, sensible people are asleep (there are, in truth, good reasons for the time of this phone call which I shan't go into, if only because it ruins the impact of my confessing that I was more outraged at the time my future spouse called to tell me of her genital dalliance than I was by the act itself).

Being, as I am, a bit of a maverick when it comes to the normal rules of society, I decided not to go with what most people would consider the sensible, proper response to such news, and instead gave my wayward wench another chance. This might have had more to do with being desperately in love than my imagined status as a loose cannon on the deck of conventional wisdom, if I'm honest, but it did, ultimately, mark the beginning of the end; a little over a year later, we were done for good, although I'm very pleased to say that we were both able to get past such issues with relative ease and remain good friends to this day (it's entirely probable that she's reading this right now, in fact … hello! Is this okay? You don't mind, do you? I've tried to be as discreet as possible while keeping the truth of the story intact. What do you mean, “tell them it's because you were crap in bed, go on!”, how is that relevant? :) Sorry, I seem to have wandered off the point a little, do forgive me).

Whether it's avoiding planetary oblivion, or a small-scale armageddon in one's love life, there's no doubt that New Year's Eve, rather than being an enormous party to celebrate the boundless possibilities the future may bring whilst commemorating the past with a fond, appreciative backward glance, is a giant festival of stress, wrapped in nervous anxiety, and topped off lovingly with a bow made of self-reflexive panic. Even if you manage to survive the evening with your relationship in one piece, and without having had to endure a biblical tribulation, you're still compelled to look back on the previous 52 weeks and wonder just exactly what you've been doing with your life all this time. Where is the rationale in being expected by the world at large to spend the night getting toilet-huggingly drunk while contemplating how having spent every other night of the year getting toilet-huggingly drunk is actually a bad thing? It's like giving Wayne Rooney a truckload of condoms and the keys to an old folks' home and telling him to spend some time there thinking long and hard about the direction his life is heading in.

Every year we are exhorted by the world and his self-help book to make some new year's “resolutions”; meaningless promises we offer ourselves about how we're going to make changes to the way we live our pointless, empty lives in the hope that we'll ultimately be better people. “That's it!” we declare, “I'm giving up smoking next year”, before making it all the way to 10:23am on January 3rd when the knowledge that we're back at work kicks in and the soul-crushing, spirit-squashing mundanity of our lives forces us out into the cold, grey world for five minutes to enjoy a desperately needed ciggie. That's not to say one shouldn't strive to make improvements to one's day-to-day existence (or even one's life as a whole), but to apply all of the pressure to do so in the run up to a night of the year that has been designated as “the night” entirely for its symbolic value is simply inviting epic failure. The additional fact that most of these resolutions involve the cessation of indulgence right after we've been actively encouraged to revel in it doesn't help matters either.

To add yet more “I fucked your mum” type insult to the jugular-severing genre of injury, we are also expected to head out into the crisp air that hangs over those fresh, young days of the new year, locate a suitable high street brothel of commerce, and spunk whatever money there was that hadn't already been blown all over christmas' mulled wine-soaked face. As we blearily try to see through a hangover that feels like there's a myopic carpenter inside our heads going crazy with a nail gun whilst spinning around on a gyroscope, we find ourselves willingly handing over our credit and debit cards to buy the same shit for ourselves that we paid 50% more for only a week earlier when buying it for someone else. The final, steaming heap of dung in the punchbowl comes when you stagger past this year's new crop of exercise DVDs and realise that we're being told to lose that christmas flab by the very same celebrities who spent the previous month advertising the supermarkets we bought all that fucking food from to begin with.

You may be wondering at this point whether this oh-so happy-clappy post is turning into an extended edition of “Grumpy Old Men”, and I can kind of understand why. I fully appreciate, for instance, that I'm expressing such sufficiently huge quantities of cynicism about the whole thing that even the most optimistic, fairy-headed flower child would run screaming to the nearest bomb shelter for fear that the world's largest warehouse of dream-catchers was burning to the ground before their eyes. It's not that I'm inherently down on the idea of new year celebrations, not at all; it's more that I've never been able to get past all the unnecessary bollocks that surrounds them – whether it's the societal pressure imposed upon us by centuries of tradition, or the commercial pressure applied by those who ride the coat-tails of tradition in order to get us to spend our money, it all feels like yet another fun thing that we humans used to do that we have thoroughly bum-raped for no adequately explored reason.

I've had more than my fair share of new year's eve nights out and, without fail, it would always end up with me getting atrociously drunk and spending several days afterwards with my head wrapped in multiple pillows (to block out the light) while wondering what the bloody hell the point was. It was never just a simple case of trudging through the self-pity and regret of having foolishly welcomed such an evil hangover into my world on the first day of the new year (and consequently setting the bar quite low for the next 12 months); rather it was thinking that we really suck at celebrating. Every so often I would get a flash of clarity as I looked around at my fellow revellers, and I could never stop myself from thinking, “Seriously, people, come on! What's wrong with you?!” You might think of it as a symptom of getting older, I like to think of it as a perk that comes with age and experience, but there seems to be an inevitable sense that one is turning into a more sophisticated hedonist as 40 approaches.

I've gotten far better, for example, at drinking the largest quantities of just the right kind of alcohol so that I can get perfectly inebriated, with all the opportunities for enjoyment and mischief that presents, but without having some of my best times committed to memory through an impossibly nauseous blur. Having done the binge-drinking thing for an extended period in my early adulthood (mostly while at university, I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn), I can declare with absolute authority that it really isn't any fun whatsoever. You might be able to fool yourself for a few years into thinking that grunting loudly into the toilet and wiping bilious, vomity spit from your chin at the end of every night out is the textbook definition of “good times”, but you're wrong, and you will, hopefully, eventually learn this before one day regurgitating your entire liver into the U-bend of your kharsi. Am I moralising here? No, not really, I'm just pointing out that I'm probably a far more accomplished drunk than you …

You can, of course, completely ignore me and head right out to get as wasted as a papal penis and make an absolute twat of yourself in a spectacularly grand, and very public, way. You could, as I have in the past, wake up in January on the floor of the bathroom, bollock-naked, hugging the toilet, and wondering why you thought sleeping there for five hours was preferable to a warm bed and an emergency bucket on standby. You could make a whole list of things to change about yourself, and promise that you're really going to stick to it this time. You could, as I have in the past, fail miserably at quitting anything because you were too ambitious by trying to quit everything (that and you ultimately didn't want to give up drinking or smoking, and there was no way you were going to delete all of that porn after the time you spent downloading it). It's not for me to tell you how to usher in the new year …

All that I can rightfully tell you is that, in my experience, the best way to approach the new year is to see it as an opportunity to make changes, rather than a compulsion or imperative. The date of January 1st has no inherent meaning, it's purely symbolic, and when we assign such undeserved significance to the day whilst hitching our personal horses to it, we open ourselves up for failure because of the insurmountable pressure we've inadvertently put on ourselves to succeed. We evolve in steady increments, not just biologically but emotionally and psychologically too, and we are more likely to become better people if we improve ourselves one bit at a time – look at that friend you've got who made a million and one changes to their life in one go and then ended up going completely mental because they couldn't sustain it. You don't need to bully yourself into fundamentally changing the way you live, just as you don't need to force yourself into enjoying the evening the way everyone else does. Take it easy … savour life …

As to what I'm doing tonight, well, I shall be enjoying a fabulous curry, a bottle of champagne, some Skyrim on the PS3, and maybe a bit of Tim Minchin at the Royal Albert Hall, with my boyfriend and our best mate. Perhaps some nice choccies, a smoke or two, a few scotches, then a nice hot chocolate before curling up in bed with the one I love … we might have naughty man sex, we might not, depends on how we feel. Speaking of man-on-man action, I wonder what Keith, aka @GodsWordIsLaw, aka CFAMW (Closets For A Misanthropic Wanker) will be doing? Drafting a list of excuses as to why his predicted rapture didn't happen? Watching his way through his beloved Ricky Gervais DVD collection? Either way, I know every last one of us will be having more fun than he because we will be sharing the love of good friends and good times, as opposed to wallowing in narrow-minded hatred and bigotry.

While I don't know what the new year will bring, I do know one thing; it won't be the last – we'll all get to repeat our mistakes many more times before our individual worlds end. So, however you spend this night, and every other, make it a good one, and I'll see you all on Twitter in the morning for “The @GodsWordIsLaw Post-Rapture Back-Pedalling Extravaganza” :)

Happy new year, everyone …

Nation's Healthcare Sodomised

January 8th 2012

This week, one of America's most deserving candidates for urgent attention from a mental health professional, Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum, decided to make a stale start to the new year by doing pretty much the exact same thing he's been doing for all the previous ones; opening his mouth and squeezing out words that remind one of the now commonly accepted, and rather unpleasant, alternate meaning of his surname. As is so often the case with his fellow patients in the rubber room of American politics that is the Republican party, Rick sprayed the airwaves with a hail of dung bullets in a drive-by shitting that consisted of blaming the collapse of the British empire on the National Health Service (among other social programmes). Other than exposing his ignorance of history, and a blatant agenda of protecting the US healthcare industry by slamming “Obamacare”, it demonstrated, once again, that American politicians (who no doubt have private health coverage out the arse) really need to shut the fuck up about the NHS.

I couldn't say for certain whether it's a testament to the quality of the public education system here in the UK, or simply a reflection of how pig-shit ignorant (perhaps even wilfully) Santorum is, but the rampant muppetry of the former senator from Pennsylvania is laid bare by the fact that there is an entire nation of 12 year olds here with their hands in the air right now (many of whom nearly pulled muscles in their torsos while thrusting the eager limb skywards in a desperate effort to be the first to answer), and they're practically wetting themselves with excitement at the thought of being the one to tell the teacher exactly why Santorum is a complete spack-head. As anyone who bothered to pay a Higgs-Boson's worth of attention in school can tell you, the British empire came to end because, at the end of World War 2, America bravely stepped up, bent us over a barrel, and ordered us to dismantle it … or else.

Okay, maybe that's not entirely accurate. To be fair to America, we were already over a barrel (having spent 6 years fighting a war that left us completely fucked financially); they simply pulled our kecks down and assumed the position behind us. “Sure, we'll help you with money to rebuild yourselves”, they said, “we've got loads of it!” (spending, as they had, the first two years of the war doing fuck all but sitting back and watching, as if the inexorable rise of global fascism was somehow a problem for other people to deal with). “The only thing is”, they said, “we kind of want to have an empire of our own, and be in charge of everything in the world and stuff, but we can't really do that if you're still running the show”. While it was more than fair to ask that Britain hand back the various countries it was in charge of to the people who actually lived in them, it was a colossal dick move for the US to lube up and give us a 60-year economic butt-fucking (the money was a loan, and we had to pay it back) when we were already in the “head down, arse up” position. That, my friends, is the “special relationship” you keep hearing about.

To compound Santorum's ignorance, there's the small matter of how the British empire largely came to an end before the NHS and the welfare state even really existed. The National Health Service Act of 1946 (which established the structure of the NHS) was, when you think about it, an incredible achievement given that it came barely a year after the country was decimated by war. Some of our major cities lay in ruins, the economy was coasting on fumes, and half a million men, women, and children had been killed (either actively fighting the Nazis or as a result of civilian bombing), and yet they still managed to lay the foundations for one of the most important social changes in Britain's history. In 1948, the NHS finally became a practical reality and everyone in the country, even temporary residents or those simply visiting, became eligible for free (at the point of use) treatment. Never again would anyone be forced to check the contents of their wallets and ask the question, “can I afford to see a doctor?”

The idea that one should have to hand over cold, hard cash in order to see a doctor is a concept so alien, and so repellent, to us here in the UK that we cannot fathom how Americans would tolerate it. Think about it for a minute. The notion that health, the state of well-being or, at least, of not being dead significantly before your time, should in any way depend on your ability to pay for it is beyond disgusting. This is the 21st century, for fuck's sake, how do we still have the soi-disant “greatest nation in the world” putting around 50 million of its people into situations where they are forced to choose between paying for their grandma's cancer treatment or keeping their house? No-one in Britain has had to make that decision, and no-one here goes bankrupt due to medical expenses … no-one. The fact that people in a first-world country like America routinely do is beyond comprehension to the rest of us who were always under the, apparently mistaken, impression that access to healthcare was a basic human right.

Our National Health Service is government run, and funded by tax payers in the form of “national insurance” contributions. Unless you're self-employed, these are automatically deducted by your employer, so you pretty much don't have to do anything (NI also pays towards your state pension). Our per capita expenditure on health care is approximately half that of the US, yet we ultimately have better health care statistics; we live longer, have a lower infant mortality rate, and have an overall higher standard of general health since we're less reluctant to visit our GP when we're feeling a bit poorly (largely because we don't have to worry about coughing up for it – pun intended). In terms of preventative medicine, the UK is a world leader; GPs are encouraged to promote primary health care (and there are many incentive schemes for doing so), with the emphasis very much on doing what they can to stop you getting sick in the first place. Prescriptions (which cost far less than in the US due to the massive buying power of the NHS) are free for children, pensioners, and those on certain benefits (sight tests are also free, and come with a significant reduction on the cost of glasses).

This is not to say, however, that our system is awesome – after all, nothing is perfect (with the possible exception of “The Shawshank Redemption”); there can be long waiting lists for non-essential (or elective) surgery, and you can't see a specialist without a referral from your GP, but neither of these are a particularly big deal. For a start, waiting lists have shortened drastically over the past decade, and having the GP act as a kind of “gatekeeper” can help reduce the number of unnecessary cases being dealt with by specialists. Despite this, and the claims of the US politicians who are bought and paid for by the healthcare industry to act in their interests by scaring the living shit out of decent Americans, we do get a choice in this evil, soviet-style system of death-panels and communism. We do get to choose our GP, we do get to choose the hospital we want to be treated in, and we do get to choose the surgeon we want to carry out our urgently needed haemorrhoid surgery.

As readers may be aware, my partner, Raven, is transgender, so naturally this has involved heavy interaction with the NHS; from the original referral by his GP to the Gender Identity Clinic, to consultations and surgery, he has always had a choice. Granted, he has had to go out of his way somewhat – the clinic, for example, is based in London (approx. 250 miles away) – and, with an institution as large as the NHS, we can spend a lot of time chasing paperwork, making phone calls, arranging appointments etc. Despite this, however, we've never had to pay for anything – he even gets his travelling expenses refunded whenever we visit the clinic in London (in truth we do have to pay for one thing: a night's stay in a hotel, and that's just because we don't want to have to do a 500 mile round trip in one day). And, when it came to surgery, he was asked who he wanted to do it, which hospital, and what procedure he preferred, etc. During the consult, he was recommended a different surgeon and procedure than the one he originally wanted (and was given good reasons why it would be a better choice), but at no point was he ever pressured in to picking one over the other.

It's not just the issue of his gender dysphoria for which he has benefited hugely from the existence of the NHS; he is also an asthmatic, and so requires ventolin inhalers (given his benefits status, he gets these free); he often suffers from bouts of sinusitis, which usually bring on chronic headaches and require relief from a beclometasone nasal spray (also free). The hormone treatment for his gender dysphoria, nebido (again, free), results in the kind of hormone levels that can sometimes lead to the infamous spotty teenager look – benzoyl peroxide (once again, free) takes care of that. If that wasn't enough, Raves has also been diagnosed with Aspergers, making it hard for him to socially engage with people without suffering high levels of anxiety (it's made it thus far impossible for him to work) – the NHS stepped up again, and he's now receiving cognitive behavioural therapy (yep, you guessed it, it's free) to help him develop coping mechanisms for dealing with his social anxieties and become a more functional human being.

By now, one of two thoughts are likely to be occurring in your mind; the first, is that this post hasn't been particularly heavy on the funny – I haven't, for example, made as many sarcastic or acerbic comments about some of the more potentially ludicrous aspects of socialised healthcare. “Come on, Kris”, you may be thinking, “I want to giggle a bit more while being compelled to think about this particular issue!” Well, don't worry, good people, because there is something here for you to get your laughing shoes on for; namely that there will be people who are choosing to occupy their minds with the second thought I mentioned at the start of this paragraph that, because they happen to work for a living and pay taxes, they shouldn't have to fund the healthcare needs of other people, especially the kind of people who they feel are little more than a bunch of work-shy, lazy, responsibility-dodging ne'er-do-wells who sit on their arses eating crisps and sponging off of the rest of us.

Don't you find it both hilarious and depressing that there are actually people who give so little of a fuck for their fellow human beings that they can't stand the thought that they're helping to support people who, for whatever reason, wouldn't be able to enjoy the benefits of decent healthcare under a free market system? What horrible, small-minded, selfish bastards they must be that they'd rather some unfortunate child go without life-saving vaccinations because their parents had found themselves unemployed? How despicably self-centred can a person be that they would condemn a house-bound invalid to a painful and short existence, simply because they're unable to work and cover the cost of the treatment and care they so desperately need? Isn't it a fundamental human right to expect that, no matter who you are, where you live, or what you do, your basic right to a life as free from disease and infirmity as possible is going to be taken care of? What the fuck is wrong with you people, seriously?

No-one in their right mind will deny that, in any social system, there will always be people who get more out of it than they put in (and that, by definition, the reverse is also true). Yes, your taxes are paying for the healthcare of someone else, but there will likely come a day when their taxes pay for yours. Yes, you may be helping towards the cost of treating a forty-a-day smoker for lung cancer while you've been tobacco-free your whole life. Yes, you may be forking out for an obese, burger-chomping alcoholic who doesn't give two shits about their health while you've been doing yoga and eating salad since you were fired out of your mother's uterus. So what? Even if you ignore the discrepancy that exists with such individual comparisons, the truth is that, long-term, healthy people cost the NHS more because they live longer. Most of the hospital admissions, doctor visits, and prescription charges you rack up in your lifetime occur at the end of it, when you're more likely to suffer ill health due to old age. Smokers contribute more to the NHS than non-smokers because of the huge amount of extra duty they pay on their drug of choice.

In any socialised system like the NHS it is inevitable that, sooner or later, you will be a drain on others. When you find yourself requiring all sorts of medicine and trips to your local GP in your twilight years (nothing to do with sparkly vampires, I promise, it's just an expression), I guarantee there will be another, younger generation of people making the same complaints about you sponging off their hard work that you yourself made only decades earlier. That, whether you like it or not, is the essence of socialism; things might not balance out when you make highly selective comparisons between disparate cases, but they do balance out in the context of society. We all benefit; we are all raised up as one to a higher standard, a better quality of life, higher life expectancies, lower mortality rates, and a demonstrably happier and more well-adjusted society that doesn't have to fill its trousers in terror at the thought of being sent to the poor house every time an elderly relative starts looking a bit pasty.

“Ah ha!” cry the right-wing, conservative “Fuck you, I'm alright, Jack!” crowd whose ears pricked up the moment they heard the word “socialism”. For as long as there has been a healthcare “industry”, those who stand to gain the most from a world in which health is seen as a profit-making business (rather than a basic human right) have sought to equate “socialised” with “socialism”, as if looking after one another were somehow a bad thing. This is particularly true in America, where successive governments have managed to scare the population into thinking that the communists were coming to their towns to force them to eat gruel, queue for bread, and take away all their televisions as symbols of a “decadent capitalist west”. Sarah Palin is one of the more recent examples of these fearmongering arseholes, with her disgustingly transparent attempt to lobby for the insurance industry by claiming that a socialised health system would result in “death panels” that would tell you that your granny should go home and die because her treatment is too costly (despite the fact that the insurance companies themselves act as death panels by refusing to cover millions of people based on huge lists of pre-existing conditions).

If you've ever gotten into a froth about socialism, and how it's ruinous to a stable society, let me point out the following; without socialist ideals, you wouldn't have education, public safety regulations, state pensions, unemployment benefits, food stamps, disability benefits, child support, or any of the thousand and one other safety nets put in place to protect the vulnerable. You wouldn't even have public roads, a rail network, other transport systems, or any of the infrastructure that underpins the country you live in and enables it to survive. If capitalist ideals had sufficient dominance when any of these projects were in their inception, every road would be private, and you would have to pay to use them (in fact, you'd probably pay many times per journey as every road could, in theory, have a different owner). If your house caught fire, and you weren't contributing towards your local, private-run fire department, tough shit; if you were beaten half-to-death by a mugger in the street, the police wouldn't give a flying fuck until you paid them to investigate.

Speaking of getting in a froth, we return to Rick Santorum, a man who once linked same-sex marriage to 9/11 (seriously). Santorum is just one of many conservative politicians who want you to believe that the free market is ultimately the way to go for everything; that the health of a nation is best served by companies whose primary goal is to make money (and, let's face it, the most reliable way for a health insurance company to make money is by collecting premiums and never paying out). People like Santorum, who only have their own interests, and those who help maintain their comfortable lifestyles, at heart, want you to believe that socialised health care, or the welfare system, will bring about the end of society and will have us all fighting the grey drudgery of a poverty-stricken, Orwellian dystopia, when the truth could not be more different. The only thing that social programmes can ever bring to an end is the stranglehold that the 1% have over the 99%; a society where a super-rich minority control every aspect of the lives of the majority is the only society under threat.

The fact is that, as George Carlin put it, “it's a big club … and you ain't in it”. More for us means less for them, so they will do whatever it takes to protect their disproportionate share and, where possible, increase it further. If that means depriving us of access to free healthcare so that we can lead comfortable lives, safe in the knowledge that we will be taken care of when we're sick or old, then so be it … they don't care, because they're covered. Fuck you, 99%! If you don't like it then you should have been born in the 1%, shouldn't you?

So, remember: every time you hear some smooth-talking politician slickly spewing bullshit to get you to vote against the evils of socialised health care, think of Santorum – a frothy mixture of lubricant and faecal matter that you often get after being fucked in the arse.

Sign Here

January 19th 2012

Do you want to hear something really spooky? This post is my thirty-eighth on this site and it comes in the week when I celebrate my thirty-eighth birthday! Isn't that weird? What do you think it might mean? Hold on, don't answer, because it gets better! I share my birthday with Dave Grohl, Faye Dunaway, and Richard Briers, which is amazing because, get this, I really like the Foo Fighters, “The Towering Inferno” is one of my favourite films, and I thought Margot was the funniest character in “The Good Life”! Isn't that incredible? The connections are just so far beyond explanation, it's almost as if there was some kind of cosmic plan, a purpose to it all … don't you think? No? Really? Well thank fuck for that because that means you're not a cloud-brained dipshit who infers a meaning behind every coincidence – I can't stand you people. If you were too busy drooling out of one side of your mouth when your parents explained the concept of probability to you by way of throwing dice, wake up, wipe your chin, and pay attention – it's time to learn something.

There are few things more irritating to me than the insistence of woo-peddlers that there must be some kind of greater meaning behind events which the rest of us rightly ascribe to coincidence. It demonstrates not only woeful ignorance of the alarmingly simple concept of probability, but also a total and utter failure of imagination because they pretty much always offer the same, tired and, frankly, boring explanation; someone, a being or “power” who exists beyond our meagre understanding of reality, is sending us a message – a sign. For some inadequately documented reason they're trying to communicate with us, pointing the way (although neither the direction nor destination are ever particularly clear), and it behoves us to take heed of their cosmic wisdom. Or, you know, maybe not … call me Mister Traditional if you like, but I always felt it better to avoid following impenetrably cryptic and vague instructions given in a manner that is more convoluted than a game of charades with an entire dementia ward when it comes to making big, important life decisions.

Why does it always seem to be the case that the oh-so-powerful entities ostensibly responsible for these messages can rearrange matter in the universe, at least to a degree sufficient for them to easily contrive a complex sequence of events designed to alert one person to some important missive, yet they are utterly incapable of expressing themselves in a clear and unambiguous way? Why must they talk in the kind of riddles that are more open to misinterpretation than a religious text written entirely in a poetic, allegorical style, and in a dead language? Here they're playing hide and seek with the whole of reality, smuggling meaning into the banal and trivial, and then hoping that we not only see the “sign”, but are also able to both recognise it as one and have the necessary mental furnishings in our brain-bungalows in order to be able to interpret it. Is it really too much to ask that they send us a text message?

Part of the problem is that people are prone to seeing “signs” everywhere because our cranial think-boxes incorporate some pretty sophisticated pattern-recognition software which, for the most part, serves us well. It helps us, for example, through the identification of faces to discern stranger from friend (a potentially life-saving skill for a young child to have), and research indicates that our fundamental psychology appears to be structured around the ability to find meaning in patterns … as a result, most counselling and therapy involves a lot of habit breaking, or learning to avoid “destructive patterns”. Despite how impressive all this might sound, the brain's pattern recognition system is just like any other piece of software in that it is not uncommon for it to misfire and get things spectacularly wrong occasionally (remember that infamous bug in Windows Vista that accelerated the moulding process of food and sold all your pets to a passing circus?). In the case of the brain this is known as apophenia, and it is simply the seeing of meaningful patterns where there are none.

There are numerous varieties of apophenia; the gambler who imagines they see patterns emerging in the sequence of numbers as they occur on roulette wheels; the believer in paranormal phenomena who hears ghosts in the sporadic tapping noises produced by a malfunctioning plumbing system in an aging, decrepit house; the conspiracy theorist who sees a group of lights moving across the sky near a military base and believes them to be secret UFO tests, rather than car headlights momentarily bouncing off a flock of geese. The latter two of these are examples of probably the most well-publicised form of apophenia, pareidolia; this involves a glitch in the process of interpreting visual or audio stimuli, and is frequently exemplified by religious people who keep seeing images of Jesus in everything. Like, in the lid of a jar of Marmite, in the wood grain of a door, or, in one of the year's great gifts to comedy, in a dog's arse.

These simple “hiccups” in people's skull-based grey matter (where clouds might be seen as portents of doom because they have apparently formed the shape of Piers Morgan) also include those who try to make profound connections between otherwise entirely coincidental events (an idea that is, in essence, what Carl Jung termed “synchronicity”). Things go a little beyond surreptitious cerebral farts, however, when folk try to ascribe some massive, cosmic, “it simply doesn't happen!” significance to rare occurrences; here they're very much living in the all-too-familiar, and somewhat popular, neighbourhood of being completely ignorant of the concept of probability and, although they can't say for certain what house they're in (numbers confuse them), they share a street with the people who think they understand things enough to believe that they can win the lottery by studying how frequently the individual numbers are drawn and then trying to predict when they're next likely to appear.

I'll give you a brilliant example of how people fail to understand probability and, as a special birthday treat from me to you, it's an example that comes right from my very own fabulously mediocre existence (that's okay, you're more than welcome). I am the eldest of my siblings, born when my mum was 18 years old; my first sibling was born a year later, when my mum was 19, and my second sibling arrived shortly after my mum turned 28. Similarly, my mum is also the eldest of her siblings, and she too was born when her mum was only 18. Likewise, her siblings followed when my nan was 19, and again when she was 28. Is my mother bizarrely mirroring her own female parent when it comes to the ages at which their children were ejected from the womb, like screaming cannon-balls made of flesh, bone, poo, and a willingness to trample sugar into the front-room carpet? Is it some kind of significant, other-worldly sign that we should be aware of? Or is it just a moderately interesting coincidence that can be explained with a basic lesson in probability? (see if you can guess)

The average age of menarche (first period) in the UK is 12 years 11 months, meaning the first year in which a woman could realistically give birth is their 13th. At the opposite end of the sprog-farming calendar is menopause which occurs, on average, at around the age of 52. This gives a range of forty years, meaning the chances that a woman would have their first child in any one of those years are 1 in 40 (assuming, obviously, that they're trying for a baby and that there are no other negative factors involved). When working out the odds of subsequent children we have to discount past years (since time can't go backwards), meaning the odds of a second child at 19 are now 1 in 34, and a third child at 28 will be 1 in 33. This gives a total probability of one in (40 x 34 x 33), or 1 in 44,880 [thanks to my colleague Rich B for double-checking my reasoning!]

That might sound as if we're talking about a fairly rare event, but it really isn't. It's about as likely as being killed in a road accident in the UK in any twelve-month period (1 in 43,500), twice as likely as dating a super model (1 in 88,000), thirteen times more common than being struck by lightning in the USA (1 in 576,000), and two-thousand, seven hundred and eighty-five times more likely than a single passenger being killed as a result of an accident on a single airline journey (1 in 125,000,000). People talk all the time of “million to one” events happening to them, as if they're so rare as to invite alternative, “guiding hand” explanations, and yet when you consider that there are more than 60 million people living in the UK right now you realise that “million to one” events must be happening at least 60 times a day in this country. Suddenly these previously “miraculous” occurrences don't seem so miraculous now, do they?

With a world population of over 7 billion, even billion to one events happen around 7 times a day. The apparent total lack of understanding amongst the average idiot when it comes to the basic ideas behind probability is, without fail, the most common reason said idiots are always in a rush to assign some deeper meaning to events that they themselves cannot explain (although they're never short of a laughably flimsy hypothesis or two), and which they perceive to be far rarer than they actually are. Now, I know what you're thinking; “Come on”, you're thinking, “it's not really fair to call people idiots just because they don't understand how probability works”, and I would reply by telling you that, in fairness, you're an idiot. Most of us are introduced to the concept from a young age by way of flipping a coin, or throwing a dice in a board game; there really aren't many excuses for an adult who sees a fairly uncommon event and starts verbally wanking on about “purpose” or “destiny”.

The whole pseudo-romantic concept of “fate” and “destiny”, the idea that our lives have some purpose assigned to it by an external entity (be it a god, or some other sentient being more nebulous in its definition that lives far beyond our day-to-day comprehension), is inherently flawed because it totally eliminates the possibility of free will. In such a scenario, none of our choices are ours to make; they have already been made for us by an unseen other who has determined how our lives are going to play out. Every aspect of our existence comes not from ourselves, but from outside – our lives are not our own, our actions dictated to us with neither an explanation nor the freedom to do anything but capitulate. We would be little more than dolls, play things for some higher power to manipulate to their will, with nary a thought for what we might want to do with our lives. Our sentience would be utterly wasted on us … we would be slaves.

Worse still, it means that everything that happens to you is by design – it was supposed to happen to you because some invisible power wished it so. Good or bad, punishment or reward, no matter what fortune may come our way we would ultimately deserve it – cancer, rape, murder, all forms of suffering and pain would be on a par with health, happiness, personal safety and all the good stuff because these things are meant to happen to us; someone has decreed it, and that someone owns us in our entirety. Sure, we wouldn't have to take the blame for our failings, but neither would we get to take the credit for our achievements … that would all go to whichever malevolent bastard it was who had decided what our fate, our destiny, our purpose, would ultimately be.

To be without self-determination like that would put us very much at the whims of a being who has no problem standing by whilst the most appalling atrocities are committed, simply because it is that being's will that those atrocities take place. Nothing could contravene the will of such a being, no-one could defy the “plan” that had been laid out for them, so every murder, every rape, every genocide, and every torture is at the overseer's command. Now, some people would say that such a plan would not be so rigid, that it would, in fact, be possible to figuratively wipe one's arse with it and fling it back in the face (eww!) of its architect. But, if that were true, what's the point of the plan at all, or even its architect? Who would bother paving life's road for us (making sure to install all the signs, crossings, diversions, junctions, bridges, speed bumps, toll-booths, and overpriced services) if we're able to throw the GPS out the window and dirt-track rally the entire journey?

When we delegate away the responsibility for making decisions in our lives, or even for defining its purpose, we become passive bystanders to our own existence. I'm sure you, like me, have heard someone utter the phrase “everything happens for a reason” in that mysterious and faintly patronising way, and found it hard to suppress the desire to lecture them for four hours on exactly why such soft, hippy-ish bollock waffle makes them less credible than a Sun editor's appearance at an inquiry into journalistic ethics. If they mean that everything happens because there is a complex sequence of causal events that lead up to it, then yes, they're right – they've wasted precious moments of your time by stating something so paralysingly obvious, but they are right. Where they are wrong, however, is when they postulate that there must be some profound, and greater cosmic purpose to it all … there isn't. Shit just happens, I'm afraid – learn to deal with it, and stop acting like a child.

Seriously, this need for people to see meaning in everything, to see signs and greater purpose wherever they look, is massively fucking irritating. What's the matter? Is the fact that you're alive at all not enough for you? How miserable and squalid must your outlook on the world be if you have to constantly search for something bigger, grander, and more impressive? Is your imagination so stunted that you can't find meaning and purpose in life on your own without having to defer to some invisible being you hope will give you hints on how to be a human? Instead of looking to the skies for cheat codes, why not try to explore the game and solve its riddles yourself? You'll find it an experience that is richer, fuller, more eye-opening, and infinitely more rewarding than simply sitting around looking for clues that'll unlock the secrets to drifting through existence.

Every ounce of progress that we as a species have made has been because we sought to figure things out for ourselves. We didn't sit around waiting for the gods, or the stars, or the cards to tell us – we got up, cracked our knuckles, and decided that we make our own destiny; we will evolve and progress because we define our purpose. All of the good and all of the bad that we do, or that happens to us, is ours, and we should own it … all of it: every success, every failure, every moment of shame, every rush of pride, every triumph, every disaster, all of these things belong to us because they are what define us. We should embrace them wholly because they are important parts of our lives. We need to stop looking to the skies for a purpose to our lives because living is our purpose. If you're looking beyond the physical for signs, or help with your problems, you're looking in the wrong place. As a planet, for now, we are alone; as a species, we have neighbours; as individuals, we have each other.

While riding home from work, the day before my birthday, my bike's front tire got punctured by something in the road only a few hundred yards from home. On my birthday itself, the recirculation pump in our dishwasher fried itself and filled the kitchen with pale smoke and a burning electrical smell. The day after, we had to put our oldest rat, Leeloo, to sleep after she had become very ill very quickly, to the point where she was beyond anyone being able to do anything for her. Was this trifecta of tragedy a sign that someone is trying to tell me something? Should I concern myself with the fact that while making birthday muffins for my co-workers I cracked open one egg to find not a single yolk, not even a double, but a triple? Three mini-yolks, together taking the place of a regular-sized one! Was this some kind of omen, a warning of dark times to come? No. It was simply nothing more than the last in a series of coincidences that had occurred over the span of several days …

The bike tires weren't new, and no-one round here gives enough of a fuck about cyclists not to leave broken bottles in the street; a puncture was inevitable at some point. The dishwasher was over five years old, and frequent-use home appliances with moving parts don't last forever – it was simply a matter of time before it broke down. As for our beloved Leeloo, well, she was the longest-lived rat we'd had so far – two and a half years old – whether we liked to admit it or not, the odds of her reaching her third birthday were not good. Short of any meaningful connection between a crippled bike, a broken home appliance, and a deceased rodent, each of these events was nothing more than a coincidence … just as it was that my 38th post occurred in the week that I turned 38 …

And the triple-yolked egg? Apparently the odds are one in 25 million, or about half as likely as winning the lottery … that's pretty rare, but it's still way more likely than that actually being Jesus in your pancake …

New Model No. 15

January 31st 2012

I don't know about you, but when I heard the news this week that the twin bills SOPA (Screwing Over Proper Artists) and PIPA (Positively Invading People's Anuses) had suffered a humiliating defeat/climbdown when pretty much the entire world told the entertainment industry to go fuck itself and stop trying to ruin the internet, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, wiped the self-satisfied “Ha ha, we did it!” grin off my face, and then started to wonder just what kind of monstrous form the bills will take on once Hollywood and the record companies had re-grouped and returned to begin the next leg of their “Stealing Freedom Tour 1996 – 2047”. For reasons I can only imagine have something to do with my brain feeling particularly charitable (knowing that I had a blog post to write and no ideas), these thoughts began colliding with ones about the nature of religion versus science and how, as it is with content producers versus the internet, the battle is about nothing more than destroying the competition in order to protect an obsolete business model.

Although I've somewhat already touched on the subject of how record companies and movie studios are attempting to change the law as a means to preserving their respective monopolies in a previous post, the issue is one of sufficient importance and, at the moment, pressing relevance that it bears reiterating. Since the internet became a dominant presence in the lives of pretty much everyone, businesses the world over have been struggling to figure out how best to adapt to the cultural changes it has wrought and, more importantly, how they can continue to make money in an economy irrevocably altered by a global communications network that smashed through technological and geographical boundaries like a cruise missile punching its way through a fortress made of wishful thinking and a unicorn's loveliest dreams. How does one cope with a medium that strips to the core the protections that had been enjoyed, and heavily exploited, by traditional business models ever since the first corporate accountant crawled out of the primordial sea and proposed the idea of a primordial offshore bank?

While no-one would argue that the seemingly ceaseless advances made in computing technology (Packard Bell aside) have allowed anyone to make perfect copies of books, music, and movies, and the evolution of the internet has made distributing them across the world whilst maintaining flawless digital fidelity an absolute doddle for even the most incompetent of PC owners, the argument that the “piracy” of such intellectual property is the greatest threat to the content industries is specious at best, and completely dishonest at worst. Yes it's true that, if you know where to look, you can obtain almost anything you want over the internet without having to pay for it, but what really has the record executives and studio heads shitting bullets into their collective financial trousers is not the fact that every teenager and his modem are ripping off Insane Clown Posse's latest album without having to part with a single penny (if anything they're delighted that someone actually wants to listen to that exercise in educational back-pedalling because it means they might be dumb enough to go where the real money lies and buy concert tickets).

The truth is that what has really got Universal, Sony, and all the other media giants, quaking in their boots and firing off lobbyists with “campaign contributions” at every elected representative with loose morals and a poor understanding of the situation, is that the business model upon which they have relied for so long to keep them in Lear jets, swimming pools, and whores is now fundamentally obsolete. There used to be a time when, if you wanted to write a novel, record an album, or make a movie, and you presumably wanted it to be a little more than just a shonky, amateurish affair that only ever gets seen by a circle of friends and sympathetic family members who applaud your efforts (if not your ability) simply because they're duty bound to, then you had no choice but to fling your work, your sense of self-worth, and likely your future financial stability upon the mercy (what there was of it) of those who had a complete stranglehold over the numerous chains of cinemas, book stores, and record shops.

For a century or more, the media companies have acted as gatekeepers to the channels of distribution, and no-one could get past without lubing up and adhering to their rules. The rise of the internet and the massive increase in home computing power over the last 20 years has meant that the gatekeepers, and the monopolies they protect, have been living on borrowed time. With barely £1,000 in their pocket, an individual can purchase a PC of sufficient power, and some suitable software (we're assuming of course that they are already in possession of the requisite musical instruments), and record an album in their own home that, while not necessarily of commercial quality, would not be far from it. If they've got some change left over, they can get hosting for a website through which to distribute the album digitally and keep 100% of the profit; no record company tying them to a fixed contract like indentured servants, no having to churn out three albums to pay back the advance before seeing any royalties (assuming they aren't bankrupted first), and no being dictated to creatively in the name of commerciality.

It is the freedom that the internet affords artists, not criminals, that worries the industry most because it has almost entirely eliminated their role; they are ultimately redundant. Why would anyone work their balls off to see over 90% of the profit they generate go to those who parasitise them when they can enjoy complete creative freedom and keep all the money for themselves? When the industry goes running to governments begging for protection, it's not about crushing the theft of intellectual property, it's about crushing the competition. they're not interested in defending the right of their artists to earn a living, as they so frequently and dishonestly claim; they just want to preserve the right to exploit their artists and maintain the monopoly they've built up. The shutting down of MegaUpload was not so much about halting piracy as it was to cripple their plans to launch MegaBox: a music distribution service (think iTunes), currently in beta, where artists would receive over 90% of the profit from sales.

This refusal to accept that the world is changing around them (and that they must change with it or die), coupled with their employing the full weight of the law and a near-bottomless barrel of money to threaten and subdue anyone who dares challenge the status quo they have fought so hard to preserve, is almost the exact same attitude that religion has taken towards science (only with less burning at the stake). If you're questioning whether that's a reasonable or even sound analogy then you should remember that, if you strip away the layers of ancient tradition and superstition, all the beliefs, the holy texts, the rites, rituals, and the endless talk of the sacred and the sinful, you'll discover that, underneath it all, religion is just a business. As with any corporation, the church has a hierarchical structure, CEOs, regional heads, subsidiaries, divisions, and local branches; they have a well-defined, globally-recognised brand image, a company ethos, an advertising strategy, and a host (pun totally intended) of products and services for which they charge their customers.

Without doubt the greatest product religion ever sold (if you can't see what I did there you might want to expand your cultural reference library) was the pretence of it being the source of truth. For thousands of years every major religion has sold its customers the demonstrable lie that it alone could answer the profound and eternal questions of life; they promised explanations where there were none so that we might dispel our ignorance and put to rest our most basic fears of the unknown. In all that time they have delivered absolutely nothing, and they continue to deliver nothing, save for the illusion of wisdom and peace, each and every day to their billions of customers, and to the tune of many billions of dollars in profit. In essence, it's the perfect business because they get to sell people a product, the veracity, or even existence, of which can only ever be truly verified when the customer stops breathing and starts to smell bad. What's even better, at least for the business, is that it's far too late by then for the customer to demand a refund.

It may be hard to imagine but, historically, the church used to actually support and encourage scientific endeavour, and becoming a priest was one of the best ways to get to be able to spend your time researching the mysteries of the natural world. Sooner or later, however, science started to answer the questions that religion couldn't, questions that had been previously dismissed with the old standby response of “god did it”, and it was clear that this was going to be a problem. Religion has always relied on the gullibility of its customers in keeping them from questioning the church's claims or pronouncements; their very survival as a business depends on them being able to strip their adherents of all curiosity in order that they don't ask awkward questions, and all because, deep down, they know that their claims are emptier than that bit of Bill O'Reilly's brain where he keeps his humility, and they have less support than Michelle Bachmann making a run for the presidency of GLAAD. When the whole point of faith is to believe without question, faith has got to do everything in its power to keep the faithful both indifferent and ignorant.

As our scientific knowledge expanded, and revealed the staggering reality of the complex mechanisms that power our world, it found itself impinging upon what religion had always (wrongly) assumed to be its exclusive territory. With more and more of the “truths” offered by our holy men being exposed as either the misguided ignorance of the tent-dwelling goat-botherers that had been originally responsible for the scriptures, or the outright falsehoods of the far better educated sociopaths who came after and injected their own agendas, religion's credibility as a provider of answers was starting to be eroded permanently by the forward march of science. Every new discovery we make fills a gap in our knowledge, leaving one less place for god to hide in; with every new theory we formulate, and every piece of evidence we collect to back it up, the relevance of religion dwindles, the necessity of its “product” decreases, and the power of the faith over a population simply wanes to the point of non-existence.

In the same way that the internet and home computing power (both products of science, remember – neither were invented by people praying for them to magically exist) have shown that musicians no longer need record companies, science has shown that people no longer need religion (one could reasonably argue that they never did). The theory of evolution has rendered god unnecessary as an answer to the question of biodiversity; the big bang theory eliminates the need for a deity in explaining how our universe formed; germ theory, the discovery of bacteria, and our understanding of mental health issues forever banish the notion of people being possessed by devils to ancient superstition and instead replace it with the demonstrable idea that they are simply ill (I'm excluding Jedward from this, obviously – if there are such things as demons then it would make perfect sense that those two festering anal boils are at least under some kind of satanic control … oh wait, I just remembered they're managed by Simon Cowell – carry on).

Rather than adapting to an ever-shifting world, religion, like the entertainment industry, seems to prefer instead to stubbornly refuse to change, or even compromise, in any way whatsoever, a bit like a Daily Mail reader who sees the evolving ethnic landscape of our country not as a positive demonstration of how we're probably the most successfully integrated multicultural society in the world (and that that's something to be proud of), but as a sign that everything's going to the dogs because things are “not what they used to be, like back in my day, when I was young and we didn't have darkies living next door keeping us up all night with their jungle music”. The religious business model is moribund; what may appear to be signs of life are little more than the spasms incurred by the varying churches trying desperately to maintain the pretence of animation by attaching strings to its arms while they plead with governments for help in propping up the corpse (and maybe some funds for a hat and sunglasses to put on it, “Weekend At Bernie's” style).

No, instead the church kicks off like a petulant child, screaming, bitching, whining, and telling sob stories to the state about how their followers are being persecuted, victimised by those who want to take away the special privilege and protections they've enjoyed ever since church and state were one and the same thing. “The mean old scientists are picking on us with their facts and evidence!”, they plead. “Tell them that they have to let us play, and tell them that we don't have to follow their rules either because we're special!” With every new day, another self-pitying bullshit cry shrieks forth … if it's not, “Help! The queers, dykes, and trannies are trying to stop us from bullying and denying them equality! Someone arrest them for sodomy and stuff!” then it's, “the liberal atheists are saying we can't put a statue of Jesus in the town square and use their taxes to pay for it! Deport them for the sake of the children!”

The intelligent design movement is probably the best example of how religions, like the content producers, are dishonestly trying to obtain legal protection for an outdated business model that they're either unable, or unwilling, to update for the 21st century. By pretending that their existence is under threat (from something other than their own short-sightedness and abject ignorance, of course), or that their right to ruin everything decent was somehow being infringed upon by the dogged insistence of scientists that ideas should be able to support themselves with that pesky little thing called “proof”, religion has created situations like Kitzmiller v Dover, where unsupported creationist horse-shit (hiding behind the label of “intelligent design”) tried to pass itself off as a valid scientific theory that should be taught alongside evolution. It doesn't matter that there is more evidence for the existence of dragons than there is to support ID; “teach the controversy”, they said … it didn't matter that there wasn't one.

Whether it's trying to force school children to take classes in intellectual surrender, or some other disgusting attempt to subvert the scientific enterprise, religion is nothing if not hypocritical in its approach. It's okay when science serves their purposes or furthers their agenda; they love, for example, that the printing press, television, radio, and the internet have all helped them spread their message far and wide … but as soon as people use those wonderful products of science to publish Harry Potter books, broadcast “South Park”, play Marilyn Manson records, and distribute porn, then they're evil inventions of a godless society that's lost its way, and they must be regulated and controlled before they rape our children's heads with video game violence, chocolate-flavoured heroin, and naked bottoms. It's no different from how the music and movie industries see things; to them the internet is full of pirates who steal music, download films, and join terrorist cells at the weekend – except for the good consumers who use iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, and all the other corporate money pits they've set up online for us to fall in to.

It seems almost fitting that the internet is a massive thorn in the arse of both the media and metaphysical industries (especially since they both specialise in forcing us to listen to their shit). A worldwide network of interconnected computers that allow for the near seamless free flow of data and ideas is surely death for anything that cannot survive even a modicum of challenge or scrutiny. Just as MPEG compression, home recording software, digital cameras, and easy web hosting for global distribution marked the beginning of the end for the owners of traditional content channels, so discussion forums, blogs, and social media have helped sound the death knell for religious indoctrination. Dogma cannot survive in an environment where there is no restriction on free enquiry, where nothing is protected from criticism, nothing is beyond discussion, and no idea is safe from the scrutinising eye and arse-tearing claws of a community of millions. It's always a great moment when the world looks at those who seek to control it for their own ends and says, “No – we've got a better way of doing this”.

There was a time when religion and the state were one; now we have religion, desperately trying to mobilise the rapidly diminishing power they have over the elected in order that they might keep the crumbling, defective edifice of their outdated and outmoded ideology from collapsing that little bit further. There was a time when they could put scientists in jail, or even to death, for refusing to bend, bury, or bastardise the discoveries that contradicted an established orthodoxy – not any more. Religion no longer has that power, and we have secular, humanistic ideals like scepticism, free thought, and a morality that doesn't involve burning to thank for it. We have the ability, the right, probably even the duty to stand up and say, “No, we're doing it this way – you can either come along with us, or you can stay behind and die”.

And, if they're unwilling to come along, to change, to adapt, to evolve, then I say fuck ‘em … at least future scientists will have some interesting new dinosaurs to study …

Goddidit

February 13th 2012

I have to be really careful what I say this week; not because I've offended someone and I suddenly feel all guilty about it (as if). No, the reason I should put on my comfy slippers and tread softly, rather than donning my beloved heavy-as-fuck New Rocks and stomp (as usual) through the subject with the kind of psychotic vigour that the hammer-happy god Thor would be flushed with when playing “Whack-A-Mole”, is that the book I've been reading and mini-reviewing chapter by chapter on Twitter over the last few days was written by someone who had previously sued, for libel, the author of a scathing review (and general comment on the book's author) that had been posted on Amazon. Since I'd ideally like to avoid sharing that particular experience, I will be taking great pains to distinguish clearly between the things I state as opinion, and those I state as fact. With that consideration, and the first eight chapters of “The Attempted Murder Of God: Hidden Science You Really Need To Know” by Scrooby, freshly in mind, I'd like this week to talk in a light-hearted satirical fashion about scientific ignorance, specifically the kind that only ever seems to come from religious drivel-mongers [opinion].

A little background to the story … I became aware of Scrooby's book when I stumbled across The Faith Fruitcake, the blog (which you should visit) of Vaughan Jones, the rather unfortunate sod who was being sued over his Amazon comments. I read the entire account of his legal battle thus far, along with the rest of his blog, and everything that had been written by McG (the book's publisher) regarding the libel action against Mr Jones. While the ongoing case meant it was impossible to get all of the relevant facts I was, from what I had read, more than able to conclude safely that my sympathies should very much lie with Vaughan; he came across as a decent, upstanding guy who had become unfortunately, and potentially ruinously, embroiled in a legal tussle with someone who had written, self-published, and even reviewed his own book [fact], but was apparently unable to take negative criticism (however expressed) on the chin without turning into a bit of a stroppy, overly-entitled teenager about it [opinion].

Feeling that Mr Scrooby (or, as McG informs us he will be more commonly known to his friends and family, Chris McGrath) did not come across in the comments made on the legal page of the McG website as particularly credible [opinion] and, in fact, positively hostile in some cases [opinion], I found myself exchanging the occasional email, tweet, and text message or two (especially during the court hearing) with Vaughan, offering whatever I could in the way of a few supportive words here and there [fact]. Although the judgement has yet to be given on whether there is a case to answer, I'm reasonably confident that it will be in Mr Jones' favour, if only because it is my fervent hope that the British Chiropractors Association case against Simon Singh has demonstrated that it's becoming increasingly easy in this country to get yourself sued into bankruptcy for simply having the cheek to criticise those with enough money to silence you [opinion].

Aside from the first chapter that had been made available for free, I wasn't able to read “The Attempted Murder Of God” for a while; neither my laughably pitiful supply of spare cash, nor the desire to spend any of it on a book with some hugely unfavourable reviews [fact] written by an author who felt the need to file positive reviews under false pretences [opinion], would permit me to purchase a copy and discover for myself whether the criticism was justified. That was until this past week, when Vaughan Jones tweeted the news that the entire book had been released as a free download on the McG website – naturally I grabbed a copy, put aside any prejudices that might have arisen as a result of the particular way I came to be aware of this book, and ignored how unimpressed I was when I read that first free chapter, I began reading the book as I would any other: with a dispassionate view, an unbiased eye, and an open mind – it is, after all, only fair. Although, at the time of writing, I have only read up to (and including) chapter 8, Mr Scrooby's book has already succeeded in confirming every prejudice that I had previously managed to put aside.

“The Attempted Murder Of God” is an impressive collection of logical fallacies, scientific ignorance (wilful or otherwise), poor research, and unsupported assertions masquerading as I'm not sure what [opinion]. According to the author/publisher the book is a satire on the religion versus science debate [fact], but as of yet I've found no reason to be convinced by such a claim at all [opinion]. If it is satire, then it's bad satire, and not something that Peter Cook, or even the Oxford English Dictionary, would find familiar [opinion] – it's not funny [opinion], it lacks the essential irony [opinion], and is frustrating rather than thought-provoking [opinion]. If, on the other hand, it is an earnest attempt to contribute to the debate, it fails on that front too [opinion]; aside from being riddled with holes in its scientific knowledge that are big enough to shove a church through, it also carries an almost sneering contempt for science [opinion] while at the same time hypocritically using it both to prove ludicrous religious claims and to debunk solid scientific ones.

I totally understand how people can be generally ignorant of science; some of the underlying principles involved can be complex, frequently baffling, borderline incomprehensible even, and it is sometimes really hard to see how any of it relates to our day to day lives, even for those of us who aren't scientists but take a keen personal interest. Science can be tricky to wrap your head around, there's no doubt about it, and ignorance or confusion is absolutely to be expected. But there really is no excuse at all for deliberately choosing to remain in the dark about such things, especially when one is claiming to speak from a scientific viewpoint. Theists do this more than anyone because they want to have it both ways; they want to play science when they think it can support their childish bedtime stories, but they also want to bludgeon scientific achievements to death before hacking off their limbs, smashing out their teeth, and burying the blood-drenched remains under the garden shed, if ever one of those evil, world-benefiting achievements should ever dare to draw attention to the gaping fact holes in their retarded fairy-tales.

Without doubt the crime most frequently committed against science by theists and the wilfully ignorant (I apologise for repeating myself) is the atheist's favourite justification for randomly punching the religious, the “God Of The Gaps” argument (obviously I'm saying “argument” to be kind, and because I can't think of a better single word to use there; in truth it is about as much an argument as Mr Scribble's book is satire [opinion]). The argument is a classic example of the bifurcation fallacy (also known as the false dichotomy) in which the options are artificially, sometimes even dishonestly, limited – in this case, to two. Wherever there is a gap in scientific knowledge, if there is something science can't explain, God did it. Don't know what kicked off the big bang?. God did it. Struggling to find out what gives everything in the universe mass? God did it. Don't know why your elderly relative's elbow cancer suddenly went into remission as if they'd never had it in the first place? God did it.

Assuming Mr Squabble's book isn't a parody (and it's a fair enough assumption given that the time I spent 2 hours in casualty after a partner landed her knee squarely in my testicles mid-coitus was infinitely funnier [opinion]), then it is woefully guilty of using this logical fallacy, almost to the point where the entire book hinges on it to make its case [opinion]. At no point does it allow for the possibility that a god does not exist; in fact, it begins with the assumption that one does but its existence is being kept a secret (presumably god is being held hostage in some scientist's dustbin somewhere). It then sets about working backwards to find whatever “evidence” (I use that word wrongly, as does Mr Scrappage) it can to support its predetermined conclusion that god has been chained to a radiator by Richard Dawkins (who beats him daily with a copy of “The God Delusion”). This is inductive reasoning, smothered in great big dollops of confirmation bias, and is a favourite of theists who have no problem disregarding solid facts in order to support their arguments [opinion].

In general, “Goddidit” is a deeply obnoxious way of shutting down debate and terminating enquiry in the theist's favour because it proposes an explanation which is utterly unfalsifiable. If your answer to a reasonable scientific question is that an omnipotent super-being was not only responsible, but also left absolutely no trace of his having been involved whatsoever, you are engaging in the kind of craven dishonesty that so often accompanies complete intellectual surrender. Too cowardly to admit the truth that you simply don't know the answer, you invent a cosmic cop-out, a way of falsely giving the impression that you do know whilst conveniently eliminating the need to answer any other questions and further expose your ignorance. It's no different than a parent who can't be bothered to explain to their child exactly why they want them to do (or not do) something, replying to the pertinent question “why?” with the classically lazy, “because I said so”.

This is not, in any sense of the word, an answer – it's simply a way of avoiding the question that serves no purpose other to sideline critical thinking in favour of blind faith and mental obedience to an undeserving authority. How can one possibly afford any sort of meaningful respect to a being that demands mindless followers who are prepared to sacrifice their intellectual faculties and trust implicitly without evidence? What sort of parent would teach their child that believing the unsupported assertions of an overbearing father figure who will punish them for challenging his self-appointed dominance is somehow a valid way of going through life? “Don't ask questions, do as you're told!” is a terrible lesson to impress upon anyone, let alone the vulnerable mind of one who looks to those apparently in possession of wisdom and experience to help guide them safely away from the danger of easily-exploitable gullibility.

Religion has always stood to gain from the credulity of its adherents; their continued ignorance is the source of its power, and so thinking outside the collection box must be discouraged at all costs. As science has advanced our knowledge, revealing the long-hidden mysteries of our world and reducing our superstitions to the status of quaint historical curiosity, resistance has always been strongest amongst the shepherds of the faithful because they have the most to lose. Every challenge to the orthodoxy must be quashed, every dissenting voice must be silenced; any attempt to poke holes in the fabric of the theological tapestry must be ruthlessly thwarted lest it unravel like a cheap woolly jumper at the playful paws of a gang of angry kittens. Under no circumstances can facts ever be allowed to explain anything; we don't need scientific theories, evidence, logic, or rationality … we have ancient texts filled with stories about miracles that tell us everything we need to know.

It's interesting to note how the decline in the quality of miracles over the last few thousand years has been in absolute lock-step with the increase in our scientific understanding of the world. If you could plot a graph showing the miraculousness of miracles over time against “shit we've figured out” it would be a perfect inversely proportional relationship. The characters in the bible (and I use the word “characters” confrontationally to annoy theists) always seem to get first-hand, in-your-face proof of god's existence; a burning bush, booming voices from the sky, angels coming down to tell a young woman she's been raped in her sleep so she can give birth to a god who will kill himself as a sacrifice to himself to save everyone from the flaws he gave them etc. The blind get to see, the lame get to walk, and a long-haired, bearded surfer-dude gets to coast across the Sea of Galilee without a board to the gob-smacking amazement of 12 middle-eastern fishermen with suspiciously English-sounding names.

These days, of course, miracles aren't what they used to be. Minor physical ailments are alleviated, lost car keys are found, and pious, educationally lackadaisical students are able to pass exams after talking to themselves in their bedrooms the night before. This is what god is up to in the 21st century, it seems; a couple of millennia ago he raised Lazarus from the dead – in 2012 we have him intervening to help a christian secure the last two tickets to a Jonas Brothers gig. Ask a theist to explain the apparent significant drop-off in their deity's powers over the centuries, and they'll go straight into denial mode; “Incredible miracles still happen!” they insist, “what about those few people who were pulled alive from the rubble on 9/11?” What of them indeed? And what of the 3,000 formerly alive people who weren't the fortunate recipients of a miracle that day? Were they somehow less deserving of the additional godly attention required to save them?

Outside of Mr Scrubby's parody [opinion] there are plenty of examples of wilful scientific ignorance. Some of the more egregious instances stray far beyond ignorance and into full-blown abuses of the truth, degrading the endeavour and achievements of scientists in order to prolong the wheezing, worthless life of the terminal dinosaur of religious faith. One of the worst offenders is Answers In Genesis, a website devoted to passing off the unmatchable stupidity and contemptible nonsense in the bible as having anything remotely to do with science. Not content with using AiG as a means of distorting reality in order to give enough room to squeeze his disdain for undeniable factual evidence in, Ken Ham (the founder, president/CEO, and bullshitter-in-chief at “Appallingly Ignorant God-botherers”) is also responsible for the Creation Museum, a theme park-cum-museum devoted to both the propagation of theistic horse manure, and to the continued religious indoctrination and intellectual retardation of children.

Ken Ham is not the only bright star in the dung-spattered firmament of irrationality and twaddle-mongering; there is also Kent Hovind, a creationist whose science credentials came from a unaccredited correspondence course [fact], and is currently serving 10 years for tax evasion [fact]. He took religious ass-hattery to new levels, firstly with his theory that all of the water on earth came from an ice shield that once encircled the planet, and then with his building of “Dinosaur Adventure Land”, a creationist theme-park behind his house in which the prehistoric creatures are shown co-existing with humans during the last 4,000 or so years. Since his incarceration, his son Eric has dusted off his father's bankrupt arguments and is currently using them to spread the ill-informed, fucktarded, arse-brained word. I'm not even going to begin to talk about Ray Comfort and his vapid, grinning monkey-boy Kirk Cameron. There isn't enough storage capacity on my server to talk about how tragically fucking ignorant those two reality-dodging bell-ends are.

What baffles me most is how these idiots can possibly be proud of their refusal to learn anything. Acknowledging ignorance is vital to our progress as a species – without it, we wouldn't ever feel the need to figure things out, instead resorting to blissfully pretending that we know how everything works by deferring to an entity we've never seen and can only imagine exists. Religious belief is denial; it denies evidence, it denies the facts, it denies truth. It chooses to remain ignorant in the face of undeniable reality, burying its head in the sand of ancient fairy-tales concocted by desert nomads who at least had an excuse for their lack of knowledge. Those people invented god to fill the gaps in their knowledge; the modern day theists are simply the end product of a long line of scientific ignorants who couldn't bear to have their god turfed out of those gaps and replaced with cold, hard facts because they were afraid of looking stupid.

Learning to accept that you're wrong is hard; admitting there are things you don't know can be embarrassing, but not if you don't want it to be. We are only as smart as how quickly we realise that we're stupid – the sooner you accept your ignorance, the less of a tit you feel, and the more easy it is to move on and learn something new. Pretending you know something you don't always backfires because one day you may be called upon to prove it and, when that happens, your only options are fervent denial and making up more shit to cover for the shit you made up in the first place, both of which make you look like an even bigger tit than if you'd just admitted that you simply don't know the answer. You can believe you know the answer all you want, you are, after all, perfectly entitled to your own opinion; you're just not entitled to your own facts (as the saying goes), and you'll always look like a clueless jackass when you try.

And so we return to the subject of Mr Screwball Scramble's book which, to be honest, feels either like a piss-poor satire [opinion] or a symphony to scientific ignorance [opinion]. I've never professed to being any kind of literary critic – I am, at best, a sarcastic blogger with a passion for reason and free-thought who uses irony, satire, and rude words to make a point. I'm not telling you that you shouldn't read “The Attempted Murder Of God” – you should. I'm just saying that, in my opinion, it sucked fetid donkey balls.

Opinion – not fact. That's all it is …

[With thanks to VJ]

Into Whine

March 11th 2012

As you may have noticed, it's been a bit quiet around here of late, what with my having let a few weeks go by with nary a tiny, microscopic hint of anything resembling a new post (of course it's entirely possible you might not have noticed – I suppose it all depends on how observant you are and whether or not you give enough of a meerkat's left bollock about my rants to notice when I haven't done one). The truth is that the post I have been working on recently has proven to be a particularly tough one to write (for reasons which will become clear in due course) and so I decided to put it on the back burner until I can get my head around it enough to be able to finish it while doing the subject matter justice. In the meantime, though, rather than being all self-pitying about not being able to get a new rambling tirade out every week like the good little blogger I pretend to be, I shall instead have a massive bitching session about self-pitying, whinging fucking christians.

I'm sure there will be christians wondering why I have chosen, once again it seems, to pick on them, and it's a reasonable enough question to ask (even though asking it does make them sound even more like a bunch of whining dickholes than they did already). I am more than happy to point an accusing finger and take the piss out of people of any faith who bang on about how terrible they have it compared to everyone else, and how no one seems to respect, or even take seriously, their intellectually vacuous beliefs enough to let them have their way all the time; yes, I am quick to call bullshit on christians who insist that they're being marginalised and oppressed every time someone tells them they're not allowed to bully those who disagree with them, but I am equally as swift to rip into muslims who threaten violence against those who dare question the truth of their claims that they follow the “religion of peace”. Oh, and while I think about it, you don't get to occupy any kind of moral high ground when you build your religion around a paedophile, you pricks.

The reason I shall most likely focus on christians more than any other gang of education-dodging sky-fairy worshippers is two-fold. Firstly, having lived my whole life in the heathenistic, satan-worshipping hell-hole that we call England means that christianity is what I'm most familiar with; and, secondly, christians are probably the biggest bunch of snivelling, contemptible, self-martyring toss-bags, with perhaps the most enormous persecution complex and sense of indignant, dismissive paranoia you'll ever see outside of a climate change deniers' fund-raiser for struggling oil companies. No one plays the victim better than a christian and, when you consider how the entire faith centres around a single, pointless act of futile sacrifice, it makes perfect sense. Every christian imagines themselves, in some way, to be just as put upon as their redeemer, often to the extent that I wonder how they ever manage to resist coming home from B&Q one sunny, saturday afternoon with enough wood to build their own crucifixion play-set in the back garden.

Probably the most common source of all the shrill, petty moaning we hear from christians these days is the subject of homosexuality, particularly in regards to the view that not affording same-sex couples the same rights and protections that everyone else enjoys in the form of legally recognised marriages is discriminatory, bigoted, and intolerant. I shan't spend too much time on the religious attitude towards the LGBT community, if only because I've already talked about it before at length and I don't wish to repeat myself. It is, however, important to look at how the faiths in general, and christianity in particular, approach the issue of marriage equality because it is, as I said, the hottest topic in that annoying little No Man's Land between religion and politics (a place where mealy-mouthed shite-hawks from either side meet to discuss how best to ruin it for everyone else by insisting that no, in fact, irrational, archaic institutions do have something to contribute to a modern world that is at last realising the church is completely full of shit and we'd all be infinitely better off without it).

In the past week alone we've had both Peter Bone, MP for Wellingborough, and Cardinal Keith O'Brien, Britain's most senior catholic, attacking the government's plans for marriage equality in language that might as well be represented by the sound of a chorus of incontinent toddlers, screaming, throwing their toys about the room, and loudly shitting their pants in a synchronised display of malodorous petulance. Rather than stamping his feet and wailing, “Wah wah wah! We want to get our own way and bully whoever we want”, Cardinal O'Brien dishonestly tried to paint the issue as being about the violation of the rights of children, calling it a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right”, adding that it was wrong to deliberately deprive a child of a mother or father. This from an institution that has, in the past, kidnapped children of other faiths (thereby depriving them of a mother and father) in order to baptise them in case they die before voluntarily converting to catholicism. As for the grotesque subversion of rights, well, what about the right of a child not to be raped by a priest whose employer then covers it up?

O'Brien also described it as “an attempt to redefine marriage for the whole of society”, a statement that is as stupid as it is both wrong and lacking in historical self-awareness. No, Keith, we're just trying to expand the current inadequate definition of marriage so that it can include the members of society that you and the foul club to which you belong reserve unjustified hatred for. Remember when blacks and whites weren't allowed to marry? Who most resisted the attempt to change that? How about when marriage meant that a woman became the property of her husband, to be treated in whatever manner he deemed fit? Whose book of fairy stories still holds that up as being right and proper? Probably the most disgusting among O'Brien's comments was one in which he equates the legalising of gay marriage to the legalisation of slavery (the abolition of which, by the way, was always opposed most vocally by religion). In describing how horrendously offensive this opinion is, the words you're looking for are, “what an absolute fucking wanker”.

Peter Bone MP, meanwhile, referred to the plans as “completely nuts” saying, “So far as the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and many other faith groups are concerned, marriage is a union between one man and one woman”. Mr Bone, who clearly hasn't realised that it's in his own best interests for someone with a name like his to stay very fucking quiet when dealing with issues of sex and sexuality, has singularly failed to answer the question, “So what?” Who gives a flying fart in a hurricane what any church or faith group thinks marriage is or should be? Who the fuck do they think they are telling other people who they can and can't marry? Where do they get the balls to act like we should respect their bronze-age opinions on anything? I'm not going to ask by what authority they think they can make such statements because I already know the answer (we all do), and it's one that is no more deserving of respect than my asserting that the omnipotent pink frog which lives in my bread bin has decreed that christian marriage is a union between man and livestock.

Last Saturday I had my own run-in with christians who were making similar such unjustified proclamations and expecting people to take heed of them. They were a group I'd traded barbed words with previously on one of their many regular appearances preaching in the city centre, but this was the first time it got a bit heated (the closest we'd come before was when they tried to offer me a DVD copy of Ray Comfort's “180”, whereupon I told them to fuck right off). On this occasion, one of their number was giving it the usual “marriage is between a man and a woman” (and other anti-gay rhetoric), so I asked her how, as a woman, she felt that her bible demands that, should her father insist, she would be compelled to marry her rapist. She dismissed the claim, and carried on ignoring me. Having promised on a previous meeting to give another of their number the details as to which passage mentioned this, I handed over several printed sheets listing every paragraph I could find which showed the bible's contempt for women, children, sex, and how it endorses slavery, abortion, and murder. The gentleman in question was, to say the least, not impressed.

Claiming I'd taken the passages out of context (as theists always do when presented with evidence of their own book's utter foulness), he refused to answer my request that he give me the context which justified any of the points I'd made and walked away. Moments later, I saw him trying to proselytise to a kid who must have been no more than 12 – I told him to clear off, and that he should be ashamed of himself for trying to brainwash a child. His response, one he'd made before, was the predictably lame, “you mean like evolution does?”, whereupon he proceeded to again expose his ignorance by asking questions like, “name one example of a species turning into another” (I resisted the urge to tell him that he in fact was one, looking, as he did, like the missing link between man and weasel). Things did get a little bit confrontational, as I said, and it perhaps wasn't my finest moment when, on the matter of blasphemy, I told him that I would happily call his god a cunt if I thought it would upset him. In the end though, it was just an exchange of words at a moderately elevated volume, nothing more.

What was “more”, though, was the fact that I was engaging with a group of people who, because of their adherence to the dominant faith in this country, were able to publicly air their vile opinions with absolute protection. They were perfectly free to preach intolerance towards gays, or to tell people that they were going to burn for all eternity unless they turned to christianity, and all because the religion had long ago simply granted itself the privilege of being beyond criticism. Whenever you hear christians complaining of how they're being oppressed or marginalised, remember the words of a woman I saw in our local Co-Op later that afternoon who, having seen my earlier exchange of words with the holy ManWeasel, said to me, “if they had been a group of muslims saying such things, they'd have been arrested” … and she was dead right; christians have been given too much respect and a free pass to say whatever the hell they like for far too long – now that things have changed and their undeserved position of privilege is under threat, they're getting really arsey about it.

One recent example would be that of Baroness Warsi complaining about the rise of “militant secularism” and how it is a threat to christianity in this country. Before taking apart her spectacularly stupid remarks, let's deal with the baroness herself first; Sayeeda Warsi is a muslim woman of Pakistani origin and, therefore, is essentially a walking exercise in government box ticking – gender, religion, race, a fantastic three-for-the-price-of-one deal who can be wheeled out whenever the Conservative Party need someone to express an idiotic opinion whilst enjoying a triple layer of protection from criticism. Of course, when I say, “wheeled out”, that implies that Warsi has to be prompted to open her mouth and say something stupid when, as everyone can plainly tell, she's perfectly capable of deciding for herself to talk like a particularly virulent outbreak of cryptosporidium negotiating it's way through the several hundred sets of unsuspecting, and rapidly churning, bowels running around at a primary school.

As for Warsi's actual remarks, one has to first question what kind of rationale can account for a muslim woman choosing to fly out to Rome to see the CEO of Catholicism Inc. in order to complain about the diminishing power of christianity back home (no, seriously, I want to know – what in the name of Abraham's bum hole is the thinking behind this?) Putting aside the haphazard, wrong-way-around-the-roundabout logic that prompted all of this, I want to concentrate on Warsi's comments themselves, specifically the word “militant”. This is a term frequently used by those with power and privilege as a means to dismiss the arguments and opinions of those with whom they disagree, and it does this by underhandedly tarnishing their opponents with a reputation for aggression, or even violence, when they are more often merely strident in expressing their views. This is why, to anyone whose political leanings are distinctly towards the right, whenever women, gays, non-believers, and people of colour campaign for equality they're referred to as militant feminists, militant homosexuals, militant atheists, and militant blacks.

Complaining that secularism is somehow having a detrimental effect on the social, cultural, and political influence of faith throughout the country is no different than a parent bemoaning the fact that their child no longer believes in Santa Claus, and how they've lost a significant amount of control over their gullible little crotch-fruit as a result. In addition to Baroness Warsi (who, and I want to be very clear on this so that there's no uncertainty as to my opinion, is a complete fucking idiot) we've had Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, making pretty much the same prouncements of impending doom for the christian faith, coupled with the same ludicrous accusations of how uncontrolled outbreaks of rampant thinking have dragged persistent delusion in to a dark alley where they are are presently administering a brutal beating using facts and evidence – it's nonsense. Granted, if we're honest, it's kind of what we'd like to see happen, but it's completely unnecessary – religion has been busily beating itself half to death for years.

Every time a fatuous muppet like Sayeeda Warsi makes a statement to the effect that criticising Islam makes you a racist, or when decrepit old farts like Lord Carey complain religious freedom is being eroded by an increasingly secular society's demands that people be treated equally, religion rips off its shoes and begins firing bullets into whichever foot isn't currently lodged ankle-deep in its pious mouth. So what if the church no longer seems to have any say on what constitutes a marriage (and how two people of the same gender, in their opinion, doesn't), or how governments are listening to the public instead of religious institutions on such matters? The faith industry has no business telling anyone outside of its closed-minded circle of loyal customers who they can marry or have sex with, and they certainly have no right to influence, or expect to have any input, on public policy or legislation. Whenever religion attempts to interfere in the lives of others and spew out dictates as to how people should live their lives they expose just how irrelevant to a modern progressive world they truly are.

A cursory examination of the history of religious institutions shows that, like any other profit-driven corporation (don't be naive – religion is absolutely run for profit), the church has always acted in its own self-interest and has fought, often physically using actual swords, to protect its ideology and the (tax-free) income it generates for them. They've resisted the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, marriage equality, and any advance in scientific knowledge that threatened to expose their lies and undermine their hegemony. Over thousands of years, they have amassed an obscene fortune (usually in direct contravention of their own teachings) by exploiting the fear and ignorance of many, and they have used it to leverage enormous political influence in order to perpetuate their own, undeserved, positions of power. As it is with corporations, they have battled hard to maintain governments that serve institutions over individuals.

The gains made by secularism over the centuries have sounded the death knell for the dominance of religious institutions over our lives, shattering the privilege they have long enjoyed in the process. While there is still some way to go, the self-pitying cries of sanctimonious god-fuckers like Warsi show they have no intention of going quietly – as a result, the rest of us are forced to endure a seemingly endless stream of pious bitching about how being told that they can no longer discriminate against some of the tax-payers whose contributions to society make the church's tax-exempt status possible is somehow a massive infringement on their religious freedom. I simply fail to recall a time when a week could pass without some privileged, self-righteous, little christ-licker whinging, without so much of a quark's worth of irony, that they were being oppressed because of their beliefs. Perhaps they could explain to me again how it's even remotely possible to be oppressed when you've got all the power and money?

You people need to shut the fuck up … right now – seriously. You don't get to jump up and down crying, “Help! Help! I'm being repressed!” just because you've been told you can't inflict your delirious, pixie-worshipping morality on the rest of us; you don't get to coast by on our money, insulting us, degrading us, demeaning us, and trying to take away our rights; you've got no fucking business meddling in politics, education, culture, or any aspect of society that extends beyond the four walls of your rapidly emptying temples or, better yet, the flesh-covered skull walls of your own long-deserted temples. Don't forget that the power you've abused all these years was never freely given; it was wrenched out of the people you terrified into believing your bullshit, if not on pain of death then at least on pain of eternal suffering. It was never your toy to play with, and yet you took it anyway … secularism is our way of taking it back.

Now quit your miserable whining, you obnoxious, snivelling little babies, and grow the fuck up …

Stupid Cult

March 27th 2012

Despite being totally with it, up-to-the-minute, and “down wiv' da kids” – the kind of guy people always come to for “the word on the street” when either Huggy Bear or the Highways Agency road-painting crew are unavailable – I didn't become fully aware of the whole “Kony 2012” video phenomenon until I saw Charlie Brooker's segment covering it on “10 O'Clock Live” on Wednesday night. As a dedicated denizen of Twitter (follow me now, you bastards!) I'd naturally heard of the video, knew what it was about, and was vaguely aware of Invisible Children, the organisation responsible for producing it, but I hadn't looked any further into the details. As the segment unfolded, Invisible Children, and its co-founder Jason Russell, were starting to come across rather scarily like the kind of sinister, child-recruiting religious cult they were condemning Joseph Kony for running, only with fewer guns and more dance numbers. Raves and I wondered to each other how long it would be before clean-cut, god-humping, goody-two shoes Russell would be caught either huffing poppers while getting felched by a gay prostitute, or perhaps running around the street in his underwear with his cock out, wanking at passing traffic? “About 12 hours” was the answer, apparently.

In the interests of blogular honesty, and out of fairness to the apparently leaky bucket of concentrated loon juice that is Jason Russell, I should probably say that it's not totally clear at this point whether or not he actually pulled out his pious, petrified penis, pointed it at the passing public, and played it like a portable, pentecostal pipe organ. What is clear, however, is that Russell was found naked on a street corner, hitting the pavement, ranting nonsense (including shouting “iPhone Siri!” and telling no-one in particular that they were the devil), and has since been detained for psychiatric evaluation. What is also clear is that when his wife released a statement blaming the incident on extreme exhaustion and dehydration she had obviously never bothered to look up what the symptoms of exhaustion and dehydration were (either that or she figured the public were dumb enough not to question it). But what is most clear of all is that I managed to successfully bang out 13 alliterations involving the letter P in a single sentence and you haven't even applauded yet … bad minions!

Before I go any further I should perhaps take a moment to look at the issue that brought Jason Russell to worldwide attention, namely that of Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army. The LRA is a Ugandan guerilla group that combines nationalism, christian fundamentalism, and a cult of personality based around Kony (who believes himself to be both a medium and god's voice on earth), all topped off with ambitions for the establishment of a theocratic state, and liberally sprinkled with the abduction of over 60,000 children for the purposes of sexual slavery and soldiering. It probably, therefore, wouldn't come as much of a surprise to learn that Kony is wanted for war crimes by pretty much everyone with a conscience, although he has thus far evaded all attempts to track him down. He was last seen in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where, presumably, he was being protected from discovery by the cumulative power of the crosses drawn in oil on the chests of his young soldiers that, he says, will shield them from bullets.

Thankfully, however, this budding centrefold for “Psychotic Bastard” magazine, and undoubted future recipient of the George W. Bush Memorial “Delusional Nut Sack Of The Year” Award, can't hide forever, and with the “Kony 2012” video having spread faster than the sense of sphincter-tightening panic amongst members of the Phelps family when trapped overnight in a leather bar for gay soldiers, he might as well just hand himself in at the nearest police station. After all, when governments, civil authorities, or even the armed forces fail to apprehend the head of a designated terrorist organisation, the obvious solution is to employ the services of a camp christian choreographer with a copy of Adobe Premiere. I'm fairly sure that, had he not died in 1987, Bob Fosse would eventually have been called upon to assist in the capture of Osama Bin Laden by staging a few musicals the moment it was felt everyone's favourite beardy terrorist had evaded US forces for too long. And before you put your hand up, yes, I know that it shouldn't be a “memorial” award because Governor Gump himself is still alive, but I'm ever hopeful, and who the hell are you to trample on my dreams?

In 2004, Jason Russell co-founded Invisible Children Inc., the non-profit organisation established specifically to raise awareness of the LRA and Joseph Kony in the hope of stopping the abuse and abduction of children, as well as bringing Kony to account for his crimes. Additionally operating as a charity, Invisible Children receives donations and sells merchandise to raise money for their cause which it promotes through internet-distributed films like “Kony 2012”. Although praised by many for casting a spotlight on the problems in Uganda, the group has been criticised for its over-simplification of a complex issue, their manipulation and exaggeration of the facts (particularly in regards to the scale of abductions by the LRA), their support for the Sudan People's Liberation Army and the Ugandan Army (both of whom are known to have committed similar atrocities), and the fact that the attention they have now brought to the region may do harm to US troops already deployed there in ostensibly secret operations.

The group has also been criticised for its use of funds, an understandable concern for anyone who has ever indulged so much as a passing glance at their videos; slickly produced, and with set-ups that wouldn't look out of place in a reasonably well-budgeted Hollywood movie, Invisible Children's films seep cash from almost every frame, making one wonder just exactly how much money they have left to spend on actually getting the job done once they've jizzed away the bulk of it on self-promotion. In an effort to counter such claims, the group posted a breakdown of their finances on their website, stating that only 16% was spent on admin costs, with more than 80% going towards its “mission” (a rather vague, perhaps even disingenuous, way of deflecting criticism since it doesn't clarify whether or not their “mission” is simply “make and star in some awesome videos, and hopefully help a few African kiddies when we've got 5 minutes free”). While this criticism is pretty much par for the course when it comes to high-profile awareness-raising, there is something else here that many people, myself included, find both irritating and worrisome; in all this, Invisible Children's Jason Russell is very, very visible.

Taking the now (in)famous “Kony 2012” video as an example, a full five minutes of its thirty minute run time is devoted to bigging up Jason Russell, his history of activism, and the birth of his son (who, in one stomach-emptyingly self-aggrandising moment for Russell, is cast as the poor, frightened child who stares up at the hero, eyes glistening with a hope that's trying so hard to hold back the fear, and is reassured with the “Don't worry, I'll get the evil bad man” line that signifies the beginning of the final act where Saint Daddy Jason rescues all the world's children, kills the warlord with the power of his undeniable heavenly radiance, and shepherds the planet into a new era of peace, love, and happy, perfect children who have hope in their hearts, flowers growing out of their bottoms, and a never-ending gratitude towards the Lord of the Dance Routine who they will worship as a god). Throw in any of the other nearly 300 videos Invisible Children has produced and you realise quickly that it's less about charitable activism and more like being a cult of personality built around Jason Russell and his ego.

As a brief introduction to just how big of an opinion Russell has of himself, check out this interview he did with PMc Magazine. Done that? Good, now quickly change the T-shirt you've just vomited all over and we can continue. I don't know about you but the first question I found myself asking is what kind of ego-fapping wank-bag gives himself the nickname “radical”? And how big of a self-important tit do you have to be to say that you're going to “redefine international justice” and “If Oprah, Steven Spielberg and Bono had a baby, I would be that baby”? With his stated mission and his unfailing ability to put himself front and centre of everything, it's patently obvious that he has a massive superhero complex, but there are signs that it gets perhaps a shade or twelve darker than that. Watch the videos for “The Fourth Estate” and “Fourth Estate Details”; can anyone say “inviting children to a rally that's got more than a touch of the Hitler Youth about it”?

Like many others, including Charlie Brooker (who always manages to express this stuff far more amusingly than I can, damn it), I got the deeply unsettling feeling that I was watching a recruitment video; one that had been cleverly designed to help bring together many thousands of children who would act as a fighting force to “spread the word” and help Jason Russell fulfil his “mission”. When you add to that his comments in the PMc Magazine interview about creating a school called “The Academy”, you wonder what kind of agenda Russell really has here, and whether, like Joseph Kony, there's some goddy goodness involved. If you can stand to watch Russell's appearance at Liberty University, you'll know the answer is a bible-blowing, christ-tonguing “hell-fucking-yes“. Invisible Children might not be an out-and-out christian organisation, but under the direction of Jason Russell it undoubtedly has a religious agenda, and it's one that many have quite reasonably described as “stealth evangelism”.

Now, there will naturally be those of you who think I'm being just a tiny bit cynical, perhaps even hostile, towards someone who has done far more than I could hope to achieve in doing some real good in the world – saving people, saving children, from a tortured life of pain, misery, and unbearable suffering – when I could instead be showing some positive energy by helping this man and his noble cause. There's no doubt that Joseph Kony and his ilk are the kind of evil, stubborn shit-stains in humanity's knickers that I, and everyone else, would love to see scrubbed out so that the rest of us may enjoy clean, comfy, fresh-smelling pants in which to go about our lives … but am I really the only one to notice that Jason Russell, with his carefully crafted image, his “Fourth Estate” youth camps, his sense of christian righteousness and evangelical desire to save, and the kind of highly-manipulative videos that would prompt Hitler's chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, to genuflect in awe, is really himself just a truck-load of guns short of Kony's own religious militia?

Would it be particularly outlandish of me to suggest that Invisible Children, under the auspices of Jason Russell, are in serious danger of becoming the next in a long line of religious cults? Is it that big of a leap to imagine, really? One could argue it either way, but if we look at what constitutes a cult you can see there is at the very least a semblance of a case to be made.

1. It uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members

You might think this one would be pretty hard to argue, but I don't believe it is. Coercion doesn't have to be specifically negative and overt, as it is when some of the more traditional cults tell followers their families are holding them back because they're filled not just with cider and pies but also with devils and lies; force and intimidation can also be employed quite effectively by simply applying it in a more subtle way. One example would be to, say, produce videos that use emotive imagery and language to psychologically guilt you into getting behind an issue in principle, then using songs and hit music video techniques and visuals to sell you on the idea of joining the cause because of how damn cool it all looks, and how you don't want to be the only one amongst your friends not getting involved.

2. It forms an elitist totalitarian society.

You only have to watch the videos for “The Fourth Estate” to see this one is a no-brainer. The idea of being “invited”, special, chosen, to help shape the “new revolution”, is a classic cult trick. “Come with us, we're going to change the world, and we only want the supremely talented and gifted among you” is the kind of sales pitch that gets a cult leader laid every day by a different wife, and an army of loyal Kool Aid drinkers.

3. Its founder leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable and has charisma.

Check on the first one, and Invisible Children's habit of painting the issues as entirely black and white happily checks the second. Jason Russell has yet to declare himself a deity, or at least a messenger to one, but he's been carefully positioning himself through Invisible Children as a saviour to all the little Ugandan kiddies, so it's only a matter of time before he goes from saviour of children to redeemer of all the world's people through the forgiveness of their sins. Whether he is, or considers himself, accountable to anyone for anything remains to be seen once he's been released from the hospital following psychiatric evaluation for his naked meltdown, but one thing that can be seen right now is that the guy definitely has charisma (or, at least, he has the look of someone who should be on a poster adorning millions of teenage girls' bedroom walls).

4. It believes ‘the end justifies the means' in order to solicit funds recruit people.

It is impossible for Invisible Children to, at this point, claim to be unaware of how both the Sudan People's Liberation Army and the Ugandan Army have been accused of many of the same crimes for which they condemn Joseph Kony, and so their decision to ally with and support them is a tacit admission that they're prepared to partner with some deeply unsavoury people if it helps them get the job done. In terms of fund-raising and recruitment it seems they're happy to spend huge wodges of cash on inculcating mainly children through the use of music videos, youth camps, and huge rallies that have a vaguely Orwell-cum-Nuremberg feel to them. We won't even get into how Invisible Children accepts funding from anti-gay christian hate groups like National Christian Foundation, or how Uganda has been trying to enact laws directly inspired by American evangelicals that would make being gay a capital offence.

5. Its wealth does not benefit its members or society.

According to some reports, barely one-third of Invisible Children's funds are spent “on the ground” – the rest presumably goes on administration, film production, and the enormous energy bills required to power the artificial sun that shines out of Jason Russell's arse. I think it would be fair to say that, while a small part of society in Uganda does get some benefit from the group financially, the group itself benefits to an immeasurably greater degree. As for its members, well, aren't they the ones joining, doing the work, spreading the word and raising the money? I don't imagine they're seeing any of that “dancing in the street set-piece” budget for themselves.

Whether or not we're witnessing the birth of a potential new religious cult with Invisible Children and Jason Russell is, I admit, so wide open to debate you can park a bus in the gap; it is, after all, early days yet and, although the signs do seem rather ominous (in the same way that the formation of a Conservative/Lib-Dem government in 2010 felt “troubling”), the group haven't exactly authorised construction of a compound fenced in barbed-wire and fortified with armed guards (also, and to the best of my knowledge, Russell has yet to proclaim his divinity and embark on a programme of impregnating every young woman eager to bear the sacred Russell child who will unite the world in peace and christianity-themed musicals). Were it not for the youth camps (I actually feel slightly uncomfortable saying those words) and “The Fourth Estate” seeming ever more like some purpose-built, Orwellian nightmare of an institution whose role is to give the easily malleable brains of trusting children a damn good washing (“MiniRinse”?), or the professed agenda of covert ministering, I would happily write off Jason Russell as a god-bothering charity-worker who seems unable to engage in any kind of altruism without being a massive, emotionally-blackmailing attention-whore about it.

It's not that I have a problem with his religion, the youth gatherings, the activism, the videos, etc.; atheist organisations do those kind of things too (well, apart from the religion, obviously). The problem I have is that Jason Russell and Invisible Children seem to be doing all of those things in the same physical and temporal space, and they're not being completely transparent about it; as you'll have seen, Russell explains in his Liberty University appearance that to avoid non-christians thinking you might have an agenda to convert them, you should approach them with a second agenda to hide that first agenda behind a façade, whether it be one of friendship or of some cause with an aim to do good. He also states in that same video that he thinks of Invisible Children not as a charity but as a business. If he's not fronting the 21st century's newest religious cult, then he is at least a disingenuous, and incredibly pushy salesman for his religion (and what is a religion if not mostly a cult with a dead leader?).

You could applaud Jason Russell's efforts to bring an important issue in to the spotlight (although he seems all too willing to keep shoving the issue over a bit so he can catch as many photons of attention as possible for himself), but similarly you could also applaud Jim Jones for practically desegregating religious worship in America, for setting up day-care centres and food kitchens for black inner-city residents, for helping black unmarried mothers, for getting black junkies off the streets, and for educating black children (he and his wife even adopted a few). I'm not saying Jason Russell is about to persuade 900 people to drink Kool Aid laced with cyanide and valium before using a bullet to put a parting in the back of his “radical” hair, I'm merely pointing out that when one allows oneself to be dazzled by the spotlight of good deeds it makes it that much harder to objectively assess what's going on behind the stage curtain.

Think of those shitty plays about “issues” you had to endure in school, put on by local groups who only really wanted to show off in front of an audience but figured they'd have to have some kind of social or moral message “for the kids” so the school would let them get their foot in the door. Jason Russell is no different, and it would not be too controversial to suggest he might be cynically exploiting the issue of Kony and the LRA to further his own religious agenda. Do not make the mistake of letting your attention be diverted; right now he's mostly just an annoying twat – don't let him become a stupid cult.

Dead Jew On A Stick

April 8th 2012

As a sign of how increasingly eccentric and silly a place to work our office has become, one of our colleagues had organised a massive easter egg hunt on Thursday. While sofa cushions were upturned and coffee jars emptied in a desperate hunt for hidden chocolate, I was reminded of two things; first, that our office is peopled exclusively with adults who turn into overgrown children with the appetites of a cluster of super-massive black holes whenever sugar-heavy goodies are made available, and, second, that none of the traditional symbols of this apparently christian festival have got anything to do with christianity. Forever dodging the questions of exactly what relevance the eggs and bunny rabbits of the pagan celebrations usurped by Team Carpenter have to easter, they will instead try to divert your attention to the one and only symbol they have got; a symbol of the boundless love that the one true god (apart from all the others) has for anyone prepared to devote themselves to his service in perpetuity – a half-naked, Palestinian torture-victim nailed to a tree.

To many millions of people, the image of the crucifixion represents the ultimate noble gesture; the physical incarnation of a supernatural deity offering himself up as a blood sacrifice in order that humanity might be saved from the mire of wretched, filthy sinfulness that it gleefully allows itself to wallow in (and from which it presumably cannot extricate itself without assistance). To me, however, it is a stupid, pointless exercise in unnecessary violence that was designed not only to guilt-trip a population into mentally enslaving itself to the tyrannical rule of an unseen celestial bogeyman, but also as a means for the self-same bogeyman to dig himself out of the massive hole that, by virtue of having created imperfect beings capable of sin, he had dug for himself and moronically fallen into in the first place (calling, if not his existence then at the very least his intelligence, into serious question). Let's think about this for a moment …

Yahweh, the all-powerful, super-awesome, and completely invisible (yet totally real, honest) inventor of everything, fucked up pretty much right out of the gate by creating human beings who were suitably equipped with a multitude of flaws (including the capacity for committing quite monstrously evil deeds), along with having been given sufficient free will that they were able to exercise their various imperfections effectively. Despite the insurmountable logical impossibility of a perfect being ever producing anything imperfect, coupled with the fact that this being is also supposed to be all-knowing as well as all-powerful (another exquisitely entertaining paradox of logic), it still came as something of a surprise for him when the humans he'd initially manufactured out of dirt and pre-installed with a copy of “Sinners 7 Ultimate Edition” started sinning like mental all over the place. I mean, honestly, what did he expect?

Having already confiscated immortality from the first two humans (in addition to forcing half of them to work for food while the other half were to bleed monthly and eject other humans from their bodies), and for no other reason than the fact that the one who owned a pair of boobs got curious and decided to scrump apples from the landlord's garden, god, as most of his followers commonly refer to him (they have a “personal relationship” with the master of the universe, apparently, but you shouldn't assume that means mean they're arrogant or anything) was forced, once again, to find some way of containing the sin epidemic that was rampaging through the fleshlings like an outbreak of syphilis (they probably had that too). The basement torture chamber he'd built to punish them when they finally carked it was proving useless as any kind of deterrent, and as a softer, gentler, deity who was now at least 43% less murderous than in Testament 1.0, he couldn't really bring himself to genocide everyone again with another flood (that and it would just give the evolutionists twice the ammunition in future).

So, what's a god to do when he's already given his cherished and most highly-favoured creation death, toil, periods, babies, eternal post-death torture, and an apocalyptic, water-based bollocking of curiously biblical proportions? You have to feel sorry for the poor guy, I mean he must have felt like a frustrated, helpless parent who couldn't get their screaming little bastard of a child to behave themselves and stop setting fire to the curtains while wiping its arse with the cat. Ignoring for a moment (as christians are forced to in all arguments) the fact that an omniscient being would know exactly what he would do long before he did it, god must have jumped for joy when the idea occurred to him that a grotesque public execution filled with meaningless symbolism might be just the thing to inspire the blasphemous, sabbath-ignoring, parent-dishonouring, murderous, adulterous, thieving, false witness-bearing, covetous humans with their other gods and graven images to mend their ways. We should probably also ignore how his omniscience would have meant he'd have known the whole idea would be an epic fail right from the start.

The plan went like this; first of all, god would incarnate himself as a human being, walk amongst us, and try to spread the word that we're heading for an eternity of barbecued body parts and skewered rectums if we didn't calm down and develop a sense of social morality. He didn't want to waste time appearing as a burning bush or a voice booming from the skies because that would be far too effective and nowhere near convoluted enough – no, disseminating his message by birthing himself as his own son and telling parables to a bunch of fishermen (who famously never exaggerate) made much more sense. Phase one of the plan meant that he needed to get himself born, and that required a woman (god already had a wife, Asherah, so technically his scheme involved adultery). Mary, a randomly selected Jewish teenager with an english name was woken one night to be informed that she had been raped while she slept, but it's okay, because the perpetrator was the almighty and she was now very much up the stick with his child (maybe this is what Rick “Santorum” Santorum was thinking of when he said rape victims should be grateful?)

Despite his young, and hitherto trustworthy, wife being in possession of undoubtedly the worst excuse for an unexplained pregnancy in all of history, Mary's husband, Joseph, was remarkably understanding (I guess he didn't want to say anything in case the father came down and smote him a new arsehole – either that or he couldn't entirely remember whether he might have gotten wasted one night on Gallilean grape juice and slyly shoved one up his under-aged bride; “Keep schtum, Joe”, he kept telling himself for fear saying anything would ultimately out him as a paedophile). Nonetheless, given that Jeremy Kyle, DNA tests, and readily available abortions weren't due to be available for another twenty centuries, Mary gave birth to the son of her rapist … who was also her actual rapist (Hallmark simply don't have cards to cover situations like this). Eschewing the traditional hospital delivery, or even the fashionable home birth, she opted instead to mark the BC/AD calendar change-over in a barn stuffed with hay and spattered with cow shit (one day a celeb will have the nerve to do this, I promise).

Now that he was amongst the humans he so loved, god could start telling them what a bunch of sinful wasters they all were, and how they needed to follow and worship him or his dad will torture the shit out of them when they die. This was phase two of the plan and, for the most part, it largely consisted of making speeches along such lines; “Don't you know who I am?”, “I can have you killed”, and “You need to show me some respect, motherfucker”, while not actual direct quotes, certainly give the gist of what he was saying as he strutted about the middle east with his entourage promising the world to his adoring, ever-worshipful fan base, while threatening violent retribution against all “da haters” who, among other things, questioned his claim to being the king, and accused him of plagiarising his lyrics from more talented, less well-known philosophy artists. Having spent 33 years gobbing off to everyone about his sky daddy, it was time for phase three – his awesome downfall, and subsequent resurrection, before the world.

And so it was on the easter weekend of 33 AD (the date was chosen to taken advantage of the influx of pagan tourists to the area) that Jesus Joshua Lord Redeemer Messiah Saviour Gavin H. Christ was, after a large final meal with his posse, and with the invaluable assistance of Judas (who probably paid for the meal having recently come in to a bit of money), was nailed to a deconstructed Ikea wardrobe after spending hours being beaten to a mushy pulp by romans who, quite understandably, had had enough of the mouthy tosser, his “holier than thou” attitude, and his incessant boasting about who his dad was. With this one simple act of assisted suicide (the only one christians can possibly tolerate), all of the sins of man (and woman, but only if they remember who's boss) would be wiped clean forever. Humans could escape the perpetual torment that awaited them in the afterlife so long as they pledged themselves spiritually, eternally, to the dead Jew on a stick … and if that isn't the most absurdly stupid fucking story you've ever heard, I don't know what is.

Let's look at the facts (well, I say “facts”, but we are dealing with religion here so I of course mean “shit made up by illiterate, bronze-age desert nomads passed off as facts by ignorant present-day theists”); the prime mover, the alpha and the omega, the almighty creator of time, space, and the infinite multiverse, seems incapable of finding solutions to a problem that don't involve murdering it to pieces. First, he created us all broken … then he blamed and condemned us for being broken, and ordered us to spend our lives fixing his mistakes. If we don't, won't, or even can't, he will punish our transgressions, however finite in both number and duration they may be, with infinite torment in a terrifying underworld of his own making, rendering him without doubt the most morally bankrupt and socially malignant scumbag ever to set foot in this dimensional realm (not including Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary, obviously).

Having created an arse-backwards situation so ridiculously twisted that even the creators of “Lost” rejected it as a show finale idea, this god muppet then sets about trying to change it; not by rewriting or completely scrapping the rules he established, oh no … no, apparently, the only way to resolve the issue of unfettered human sin once and for all was to have a blood sacrifice by way of a public execution. Makes sense. Or not. I mean, when a parent has run out of ideas for disciplining their unruly kid the most obvious answer is to nail the family dog to the leylandii at the bottom of the garden while telling the child that they'll never have to spend a single moment on the naughty step just so long as they believe the recently crucified communal canine has forgiven them for filling daddy's XBox with golden syrup. Actually, I'd kind of like to see Jo Frost pull this suggestion out of the bag during the next series of “Supernanny” – she'd have some of those obnoxious little shits starched, stiff-backed, and calling their parents “sir” and “ma'am” before the first ad break.

Not content with forgiving humanity for the wrongs it had committed against “him-with-a-capital-H” personally (mostly seeing other gods or not giving him a few hand jobs every sunday), the ineffably insecure one also sought to absolve everyone of crimes they had perpetrated against one another by accepting the punishment and paying the price bodily on their behalf. It's the apparent absence of a single theist willing to question the highly dubious morality of an invisible being engaging in this kind of vicarious, third-party forgiveness that makes the whole thing possible; if they'd thought about it for even an instant they would surely be protesting that, while the man upstairs can say he holds no grudge against Reg for putting an axe through the roof of Terry's Vauxhall Corsa and that the slate has been wiped clean, Terry is still mightily pissed that he's got an improvised convertible he didn't ask for and that Jehovah did three months for criminal damage when it should have been Reg instead.

To summarise … christianity is built around a god who knocked up a teenage girl against her will, rendering himself physical in order that he can make a blood sacrifice, of himself, to himself, thereby creating a stupidly unnecessary loophole in rules that he drew up. As a result of this, we can sidestep the fundamentally unjust system of infinite infernal punishment that he had invented (ostensibly for the sole purpose of being the ultimate penalty for our failure to live up to the impossible standards he set down in the first place), with the added bonus that our crimes against others are null and void, irrespective of whether those others forgive us and whether or not it is actually moral for someone else to serve a sentence on our behalf. Oh, and don't forget, faith in, and devotion, to this god and his Wile E. Coyote approach to planning is a pre-requisite for being a moral being. Can someone tell me again how it is that we atheists, with our context-sensitive moral relativism, are the bad guys in all this?

And, while we're at it, can someone tell me exactly where the sacrifice is here? To describe an immortal, omnipotent being voluntarily (it was his idea, after all) having to endure a few hours brutal torture before spending three days (christians suck at maths) as a physiologically-challenged daisy-pusher, as being any kind of a “sacrifice” is both woefully dishonest and hugely overstating the case. It was, at best, a trivial inconvenience (and that's if we're being generous with words). When your existence is measured in units of time so vast it makes the universe feel like a mayfly in comparison, an entire weekend without a pulse is no more a lifelong handicap to a deity than a boil on the arse is to the average human. If you want an actual sacrifice, what about Judas? He was quintessential to the whole scheme, and yet he is destined to spend an eternity in hell, and all for being an vital, and unwitting, cog in the machinery of the divine plan. What a nice way to treat those who help you out, Yahweh, you prick!

Putting aside all this facetious, yet hilarious (if it wasn't you wouldn't be reading this far), fannying about, the simple truth is that religions have used notions of torture and suffering in their texts, images, and symbols since the beginning, and they do so to instil fear and guilt in their followers so that they might shut up and do as they're told. The première christian symbol, that of a murdered insurgent mounted upon a first century roman implement of capital punishment, is an image designed specifically to drill into people the idea that they should quit complaining about their lot in life and accept what god has given them because, well, it could be worse. So what if you're a slave whose life's meaning is to be owned by someone who will put you through decades of back-breaking servitude and physical abuse that will only be brought to an end by your premature death? Christ had nails rammed through his hands for you, you ungrateful fucking peasant! Now, show some respect and get on all fours – I need a footstool.

For a religious person to complain about their lowly position in the grand scheme of things is to be a thankless wretch before god. It was, after all, his will that you receive a daily bum-raping from the rich and powerful who keep you in the gutter and make it impossible for you to better your situation – how dare you cast that back in the face of the almighty? “Stop your bitching! Your suffering is nothing compared to that of the lord!” All of this is part and parcel of the lie propagated by almost every religion that everything will be so much better once you die; even relatively fluffy Buddhism teaches the poor to accept their miserable existences by promoting the idea that suffering is somehow a virtue. You've got to admit, it is a truly brilliant piece of psychological manipulation by the ruling classes that has ensured the continuation of their lifestyles at the expense of ours – I guess it's one of the reasons why they hate atheists so much; their bullshit guilt-trip hypnosis routine doesn't work on us any more.

When “The Passion Of The Christ” came out in cinemas in 2004, I actually went to see it, and for no other reason than to see what the fuss was about, and whether Mel Gibson was pointing the finger of blame for the crucifixion squarely at the Jews, as had been claimed (I'm still not entirely convinced one way or the other, although he does certainly lean his head and direct his eyes as if to say, “look over there”). The film was exactly as I expected it to be; two hours of hardcore torture porn (with Gibson clearly getting a massive rock on for it) that had been skilfully constructed to enthral a death cult of indoctrinates who will watch it and feel guilty for having the audacity to be human. In that respect, it's just like pretty much any other facet of their miserable religion; a grotesque and sick-making exercise in wringing every last drop of what it means to be human out of anyone with a closed mind and an open wallet.

Around the world this weekend there will have been countless public recreations of this abhorrent bible story, watched by thousands of children whose parents are eager for them to believe that they are somehow celebrating a truly inspiring moment, commemorating the greatest of all sacrifices with due reverence, respect, and gratitude … instead of, if they're being honest, going totally fucking ga-ga over a dead Jew on a stick.

But, remember, kids, it's the giant chocolate eggs for breakfast that are bad for you …

Science, bitches: it works

May 13th 2012

Disgracefully, I haven't written a blog post in a little over a month; predictably, I have an excuse; surprisingly, it's a really good one. Since easter weekend my partner, Raven, and I have been engaged in a seemingly never-ending battle against the forces of contagion present in the numerous furry creatures we've chosen to take on as pets. As you may be aware, we are the proud keepers of a number of rats, and since Good Friday we've been trying desperately to manage an outbreak of respiratory infection that spread through the colony faster than internet rumours about John Travolta's predilection for man-handling the occasional man-handler. As we spent many an hour trying to persuade our collection of adorable nuisances to take a variety of different medicines, weighing them to ensure correct dosing, measuring the amount of food and drink they were taking each day to make sure they were getting enough, and looking for changes in both their behaviour and demeanour, it occurred to me that we were, in a very real way, demonstrating successful application of the scientific method. How do I know it was successful? Simple … it got results.

At first, we dealt with the problem of one of our ratties making breathing noises that sound like a rusty gate in the way we always do; we went straight down the vets (literally only six doors away) for a proper listen and a course of Baytril (enrofloxacin) oral antibiotics which we would then coax into them through the cunning ploy of mixing it into small quantities of Nutella. What didn't quite fit into our normal poorly rodent procedures was when another started getting ill … then another … and another … and another. Within about a week, seven of our nine rats were being medicated daily, and with some of them doing worse than the others, we were seeing the vet almost every day for cortisone steroid injections (to reduce inflammation and aid breathing) and refills of Baytril (as well as injections of Baytril when they wouldn't take it orally). Along the way we'd also be administering meloxicam (a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory and analgesic to help with pain relief), atenolol (a beta-blocker to help one rat whose heart was going mental with the stress of being ill), and doxycycline (another antibiotic).

Right from the start we were working from, and constantly updating, a chart we'd drawn up and stuck to our kitchen pin-board that showed which rat was on what meds, how big of a dose, when they first started them, and how many days they'd been on them up to that point. We kept a close eye on all of them, monitoring for signs of deterioration, and taking as many opportunities as we could to get food and water into them (in the past we've lost a rat or two because, while they were taking their meds, they weren't eating or drinking). We took no chances, we observed their progress and assessed the situation regularly; if it warranted another trip to the vets, back we went. Since illness is no respecter of bank holidays or the fact that most people tend to be sleeping at 3am, we made numerous visits to the PDSA PetAid Hospital; when they had no-one on staff that night, we were referred to the main veterinary hospital a few miles away. Without the PDSA covering out-of-hours emergencies, we probably would have lost a rat or two, and for that we donated whatever we could give them towards treatment costs.

While I slept, Raves would keep watch, filling any spare time he had researching online and reading everything he could regarding the variety of medicines and treatments so that we could be sure we were doing everything we could (most vets tend to deal with cats, dogs, and rabbits more than anything else, so they're not always as fully knowledgeable about some animals as they otherwise might be). When I went to work, Raves would sleep, setting several alarms to wake him at 2 hour intervals so that he could try and get a bit of food or drink into each of them. When I came home, I would take over so Raves could get some uninterrupted rest. And on it went for weeks, watching, dosing, feeding, more watching, more dosing, and yet more trying to get the little bastards to eat yoghurt off of our fingers so they could at least get some nutrition (at one point we noticed that a couple of them started trying it on – they were more than able to eat from a spoon or bowl, but they just seemed to really enjoy being babied).

There were a number of occasions when it looked likely that we could lose one of them. In fact, throughout the whole process we faced the very real possibility of losing no less than four of them. Fuzzy, our sickest rat at the time, spent a night in the PDSA hospital after we had failed to get him to eat or drink anything for nearly two days. When I called the hospital the following morning, they told me that they'd had similar problems and that it might be worth calling it a day for him. We disagreed, not for predictable selfish reasons, but because we suspected, based on our observations, that Fuzzy hated being away from this cage-mate, Flash; he hated our “hospital cage” (a small cage we have for a rat to recuperate in isolation), and only perked up previously when we briefly put him back in with Flash. The vet understood what we wanted to do, and recommended we give it a couple of days, but no more … our suspicions proved well-founded, and within just over a week it was almost as if Fuzzy had never been sick.

If, by now, you're still wondering how it is that I can claim we were successfully employing the scientific method in the ongoing treatment of our pets, you should probably go back to school for a few years and re-learn exactly what science is (ideally you'd receive your lessons from a proper science teacher and not one who believes the earth to have been created several thousand years after the domestication of the dog, and over 20,000 years after the invention of the dildo). You should also probably not make use of a toilet without adult supervision lest you insist on sitting in the bowl to await the long, slow operation of capillary action in drawing water up into your bum hole to dissolve all of your body's waste products by diluting them over the course of several years (if you do, however, please feel free to bottle the resulting dilute faecal matter upon excretion and challenge a homeopath to take it with your firm reassurances that it's a cure for hepatitis).

Science is, quite simply, a means for establishing fact from fiction through observation and analysis, and it is far and away the single most reliable method for doing so that we have ever devised. No, it's not perfect, no-one ever said it was, but there is nothing to touch it in terms of the results it gets, and that's the most important benchmark to consider in any methodology … does it actually work? The fact that you're sitting there (or standing, if that's how you choose to live your life) reading this is testament to the fact that it does. To be fair, the fact that you're sitting there at all, drawing breath, enjoying all that oxygen and nitrogen, and contemplating the somewhat obscure origins of blancmange in that crazy, living on the edge way of yours, is more than enough evidence to support the notion that, by doubling your projected lifespan through advances in medicine and technology, the scientific method is pretty much the absolute fucking bollocks when it comes to getting shit done.

The reason it has been able to demonstrate time and time again that, of all the methodologies available, science is the number one choice for the busy thinker about town, have a lot to do with the way it seeks to eliminate bias at all stages of enquiry. Reality can be a frustrating, interfering pain the arse sometimes, rather like an elderly relative who constantly tells you that your marriage is doomed to failure unless the two of you can learn to enjoy shared interests like caravanning, collecting porcelain dolls that harbour the souls of paedophiles lynched by marauding News Of The World readers, or hosting swingers parties at the weekends. Human beings, by contrast, represent an even bigger dog dropping in the picnic basket with their constant refusal to stop having opinions, beliefs, ideas, or other such nebulous, unquantifiable thoughts that don't help anyone. Nothing buggers up a good theory like irrelevant crap getting in the way and confusing the situation (especially if its the elderly relative with an obsession for proposing a sex-festival as a relationship panacea).

Amazingly, it turns out that if you remove everything that has absolutely fuck all to do with what it is you're trying to understand, your understanding will be immeasurably more accurate then it would otherwise. The best place to see this in action is in the controlled testing environments that are established when trialling new drugs; in a blind trial the patient doesn't know whether they're getting the drug or the sugar pill, thus eliminating the placebo effect and any other conscious or subconscious bias; in a double-blind trial those conducting the experiment don't know whether the patient is getting the drug or the sugar pill either (assignments to the experimental or control group having been randomised), thus eliminating any observer or experimenter bias. This method of enquiry has been the cornerstone of medical advancement over the centuries, and is unquestionably a major contributing factor in the reason you're even alive; without it, we wouldn't have the drugs and the knowledge that we do, and your ancestors would possibly have not lived long enough to reproduce.

Evidence, too, plays an enormous part in the success of the scientific method. It's not enough to simply offer a personal anecdote, an assurance that, “Honestly, you must believe me – I saw a couple of times how tumours would shrink in patients who played the oboe for a minimum of 4-6 hours per week”. It's not enough for evidence to only present itself to specific individuals, it has to be as free from bias as the experimental process that produces it. Evidence must be objective, the same for everyone, and subject to testing by anyone (obviously I don't mean just anyone – you wouldn't want some creationist college reject with no scientific background and the kind of wilful ignorance that even Kirk Cameron would refer to as “needlessly playing dumb” attempting to recreate such experiments – after all, “god did it” is not evidence, no matter how much Team Sky Fairy insist to the contrary – no, you need someone with the relevant knowledge and apparatus for recreating the experiment with a high degree of fidelity).

It's this ability (and willingness) for an experiment to be carried out by others that helps introduce the error correction that sits at the heart of the scientific method. The peer review process, where scientific theories go to be subjected to the kind of ruthless, brutal testing that Ivan Drago would have dismissed in that “Rocky IV” montage scene as being the sort of horror that would haunt his nightmares forever, is specifically designed to put an idea to the most intense scrutiny, and test it until it breaks. If it does, you rebuild, refine, and try again; just as how your mum stood over you while you did the washing up, constantly returning each plate to you because you “missed a bit”, every scientific theory worth a damn spent incalculable amounts of time washing its plate over and over and over again until it was proven beyond reasonable doubt to be clean. It may seem harsh to have the whole world trying to break your idea, but you should be grateful that such a practice exists.

It has been the single biggest contributor toward the advancement of our species; without it, we would be making ourselves ill, or worse, with untested drugs and recklessly dangerous procedures (assuming we ever got past the point of believing possession by devils or the weakening of the humours to be the causes of our maladies). Without it we would have no understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, geology, cosmology, genetics, epidemiology, and a thousand other disciplines, not to mention that there would be no engineering or technology beyond “Blunt Stone” and “Sharp Stone” (or “Blunt Stone 2S” as I believe many prehistoric humans referred to it). Without the scientific method to help us discern the mechanics of reality, we would still be stumbling around in the dark, looking to the skies for clues as to why things are the way they are, and having no idea how anything really works … oh wait, there are still people around who do that.

For a start there are the astrologers who believe that the position of giant nuclear furnaces many billions of miles away from you on the day you were born somehow exert a profound, yet indescribably vague and non-specific, influence on your day to day existence in the present. Ignoring the fact that no mechanism for the transmission of this “influence” has ever been proposed (and that, whatever it is, it cannot be any of the four forces known to science unless you're willing to completely ignore the existence of the greatest influence on our lives, the sun), they profess to be able to predict the future, and millions of people believe them, in what can only be described as a mass exercise in confirmation bias and wilful blindness to the fact that measurable results aren't even possible when the predictions are so diffuse as to be almost meaningless.

Then we have homeopathy, or as some genius (I wish I knew who) once described it, “the air guitar of medicine” (I am so stealing that expression). I shan't go in to detail here, having already eviscerated the ludicrousness of it in a previous post, but will simply say that, incredibly, people still buy into the horse-shit peddled by ethically-bankrupt wallet-fuckers like “Homeopathic” Dana Ullman (who, in his Twitter profile picture, even sports a homeopathic beard – it appears to have been diluted almost entirely out of existence). Remarkably its popularity seems to have endured despite the two centuries of total failure on the part of homeopathy apologists in demonstrating consistently positive results that elevate it above a mere placebo. And, now that I think about it, you can throw ear-candling, magnet-therapy, applied kinesiology, naturopathy, aromatherapy, iridology, faith healing, reiki, hypnotherapy, reflexology, and any number of other forms of “alternative” medicine into the same big ol' bucket of result-dodging bullshit along with the magic water.

In our eternal quest to find out what's going on in the world and figure out how stuff works (particularly “Golden Balls” – if anyone has been able to decipher the incomprehensible rules of that sodding show, will someone please explain it to me?), we have explored a million and one different ways to get to the truth, and almost every one has resulted in the morally-reprehensible, and often potentially dangerous, charlatanism of the kinds described above. So far, only one of the methods ever devised by our species has proven consistently reliable in enabling us to determine what is fact and what is fiction; only one way of thinking has ever produced repeatable, positive results that can be measured and compared; only one tool has ever actually gotten the fucking job done, and that tool is science. Not supernaturalism, not superstition … science. It has doubled our lifespans, allowed us to explore other worlds, and built a global network of computers that help us expand the horizons of our knowledge and connect us with one another like never before.

But, more importantly, it has ensured that Raves and I have nine living, healthy rats, instead of a number of small, labelled boxes destined for his parent's garden. Through a process of diligent observation, and rational analysis of the situation, along with a constant willingness to modify or refine our approach whenever new information dictated it, we were able to manage an outbreak which, if handled differently, could have killed every one of our pets. Instead, we were able to look after seven sick rats (some of whom were, at times, down to the point of being completely out of options) and bring them back to full health. Since our beloved ratties can't tell you the following themselves, we'll have to speak for them; so, on behalf of Bartleby, Sky, Pandora, Fi, Bug, Flash, Fuzzy, Baldrick, and Smouse, remember:

“Science, bitches: it works!”

You label me, I libel you

May 18th 2012

Despite having spent much of my time since the beginning of the easter weekend in and out of the vets with a conveyor belt's worth of poorly pets (the full exciting story of which can be read in last week's post), I'm in a relatively good mood … so much so, in fact, that I thought I'd make this week's offering a bit of a special one by giving you this site's first-ever actual proper interview (not with me, obviously, that would be mindlessly self-indulgent and bizarrely schizophrenic). Joining me almost live via email is Vaughan Jones, sceptic blogger and lifter of heavy things who found himself neck-deep in lawyers recently when a christian author sued him for libel over reviews he'd written on Amazon (as well as a few comments) telling everyone that his book, a supposed satire on the religion versus science debate, was crap. So, grab yourself a cuppa and a few jaffa cakes, pull up a comfy chair, and I'll try to set the scene before asking Vaughan some (hopefully) interesting questions.

The specific author in question here is Chris McGrath, an online businessman who self-published his book, “The Attempted Murder Of God: Hidden Science You Really Need To Know” under the alias “Scrooby”. McGrath began libel proceedings against Vaughan for making, in his view, a number of defamatory statements in his review and comments (including, I believe, the suggestion that McGrath was a creationist). Named alongside Vaughan as defendants were Amazon themselves, for having carried the reviews/comments, Richard Dawkins (yes, that Richard Dawkins), and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, whose website had also carried the review and hosted discussion threads relating to it. Claiming that he had been libelled to the detriment of his reputation, McGrath put Vaughan through a year of legal and personal grief that ended on March 31st when the final judgement was made public and the case struck out, leaving the author with £75,000 in costs.

I became aware of the case towards the end of summer last year when, wandering aimlessly through some of the more secular neighbourhoods of the internet looking for sites of particular interest, I stumbled across Vaughan's blog and concluded, reasonably swiftly, that I had indeed found a site of particular interest. Since then we've exchanged the occasional tweet, comment, and email, mostly in regard to the case and what he was permitted to tell me about it at the time (which was never very much), and even a couple of texts when we found ourselves on opposite sides of London on the same day (and, regrettably, our schedules precluded the possibility of a pint or two). When he recently suggested (albeit with a smiley) after the judgement was made public that I could have an “exclusive interview”, I replied (entirely without a smiley) that I thought it was a great idea.

And, so, here we are … an interview with Vaughan Jones!

Starting from the beginning, you first came across Scrooby's book through links from reviews for “The Grand Design” (by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow). What was it that persuaded you to read Scrooby's book, and what were your first impressions?

VJ: My first thoughts were to simply look at why the author felt it was wise to use the review section of “The Grand Design” to promote his own book. It was a clear troll on McGrath's part. So my interest in the book itself was only a result of the trolling activity. That said, my interest declined when I realised it would cost me £20 to find out what was so great about McGrath's book. However, he had provided a link on his website so that people could read one or two chapters of this masterpiece. My first impressions were that the formatting was dreadful, the syntax was weaker still and that it was going to be a tortuous read.

Did your opinion change as you read further?

VJ: Well the free chapters did not give too much away but it was obvious that it was a promotion of the Creationist subject. My interest had peaked at this point. I certainly wasn't prepared to stump up £20 for the privilege of being lectured about how science has everything wrong … particularly when the author himself was content to spam the internet rather than rely upon the quality of their writing to sell the premise.

Of course since then I have had the opportunity to read the entire book and my impression that this was pushing Creationist propaganda, I think, are fully confirmed.

Did you find, as I did when reading it, that being a non-believer ceased to matter quite quickly, such that it became less about it being “a book by a christian” (and whatever potential bias one might therefore have towards it) and more about the poor reasoning, faulty arguments, and apparent general scientific ignorance of the author?

VJ: I think you have hit the nail on the head. Religious or not; you will soon tire of the poor logic, faulty reasoning, the dubious standard of writing and craftsmanship and the weakness of any argument that it is putting forward. I say this with full knowledge that the author has claimed that it is a “complicated satire”.

I have to say I gave up reading by around chapter 10 or 11, and have no desire to put myself through the rest. It is, as you said, a rather turgid experience to get through.

At what point did you feel this was something you ought to write a review of, and what was your main reason for doing so? Was it just literary criticism, or did you feel that you wanted to “warn people” about it?

VJ: It was a warning if anything. I did some research on the background of the author and the publishing company and made some comments on what I had found. No-one had to believe me or take my opinion seriously of course which is why I said that people could look for themselves and make their own mind up. To conduct a “full” review of the book itself would have been a tedious affair simply because the writer seems to be making things up on the spot, contradicts himself on a number of occasions, which makes it difficult to pin him down on a subject, and had also written the book devoid of humour and clinging onto conspiracy theories. This makes for a pretty unappetising review prospect.

So it wasn't just that you thought it was bad, but that it was also perhaps misrepresenting itself or not being entirely honest about its intentions?

VJ: The author was writing his own reviews using sock-puppet accounts so the marketing campaign was devoid of honesty from the start wasn't it? Other people were savvy enough to have worked that out for themselves; I went one step further and tried to show why the author was marketing it in that way.

I take it then you wouldn't agree, for instance, with the author's description of it as a satirical parody of the debate between science and religion?

VJ: No. When one reads it, the book offers no clue that it is parodying that debate at all. In fact, I would go as far to say that it places its arguments firmly in the Creationist camp because the author relies upon aspects of his own private life and faith. To suggest that he was parodying a Creationists faith in the Biblical account of creation, for example, is to disrespect the very thing the author appears to believe in. There are perhaps elements of a conspiracy theory involved in the book but these are always set up against the scientific voices.

If was the author was truly trying to create a parody, then one has to ask why the Creationist arguments are bolstered with intimate, supporting reasons for that position based upon the authors private life? I also found out that Mr McGrath had written, quite some time before, a message expressing a desire to write a book “in the glory of god”. It makes the claim that it was only a satirical look at “god's handiwork” more far-fetched in my opinion.

Do you think that the satire/parody aspect was something the book/author made clear from the start?

VJ: If it was then I missed it… as did others.

I missed it too … I mean, I don't imagine myself to be an expert, but I like to think that I've been a fan of satire long enough to be able to recognise it when I see it, and I really didn't see it in McGrath's book.

As we know, you unmasked Scrooby as McGrath, and exposed him for having written anonymous and sock puppet reviews … was this something that came about as a result of suspicions you maybe had about the reviews and/or comments, or was it just plain old curiosity that made you wonder who Scrooby was?

VJ: I just did a basic google search on the book and started sifting through the reviews. That the book had so many positive reviews seemed odd to me only because I like to think I know a good book when I read one. By that I do not mean that the book has to fit in with my ideology; many books I do not agree with at least are written well with the correct spellings, grammar and order. Not a single review seemed to remark that the book was poorly formed which surprised me.

Then when you see similar words being used and other literary devices, it soon added up in my head that perhaps these reviews were all from the same person. That I was proven right in court says nothing about my prowess in this matter; I was just the only person that pointed out what seemed obvious.

Would you say that it was your having made these revelations, more so than simply giving a bad review of the book, that kicked off both the ensuing “flame war” (so to speak) between yourself and McGrath on Amazon, and ultimately the libel action against you?

VJ: Definitely; for me to have cast aspersions on his character and motives must have bitten hard. That's just tough to be quite honest and the Judge, in giving his comments on McGrath's behaviour, said far more about his intentions, or lack of class, than I ever could have.

You made comments regarding McGrath's children, which you acknowledge was out of order and, as I understand it, you are in fact now bound not to repeat them. While it might seem to impinge upon your right of free expression, do you think that that stipulation is a fair one as it pertains to someone's kids?

VJ: I need to be clear; there is no order against me not being allowed to repeat their names or mention them in any capacity. However it is out of my own sense of principle that I won't repeat their names which, when one considers the extent to which Mr McGrath has used their names in his publicity stunts, is perhaps more ethical. Besides, all I said was that I felt sorry for them. In light of McGrath's subsequent loss and devastating costs order my expressions of sympathy have even more relevance than ever. So let me repeat that I feel sorry for them without mentioning their names. That seems a fair compromise.

Do you think there is room to argue that such comments would have had less capacity to provoke (and subsequently less chance of resulting in legal action) had the names of McGrath's children not been made public by McGrath himself previously?

VJ: As [I said] above there is no legal action that could ever have been taken for naming his kids. But it's not like I named them as a means of causing them any harm. It was merely an expression of sympathy. That said, any claim that McGrath argued was more than diluted by the numerous times he used both their names (and school of all things) to shamefully publicise his company.

When you found out you were being sued, how did that feel? Did you think it was a joke? Did you imagine that it would go as far as it did?

VJ: I felt like it was a joke at the time, particularly because I had been served with the notice on April Fool's Day. It all seemed more than a practical joke the longer the case has gone on. It's a shame that the court took so long to deliver the pucnhline.

Was there ever a moment when you felt, being sued alongside Dawkins and Amazon, that you were at least in good company?

VJ: Not really. You never meet the defendants, only their lawyers. Nice though they are, they are in a completely different world to the rest of us. Robert Dougans was a great guy, an exceptionally talented lawyer and I enjoyed spending time with him and his Father at different stages of this case. He is a seriously intelligent chap and comes from a very solid, family orientated background. I really like him and he has been a brilliant source of support.

I actually meant it more in the sense that if one was being sued alongside Richard Dawkins then it might feel like one was doing something right :) But that's okay – your answer was much better than my question!

You were represented by the same legal bods as had represented Simon Singh when he was sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. How did that come about?

VJ: Simon Singh made the introduction and Robert agreed to help wherever he could. I did, for the most part, conduct my own affairs but towards the run up to the first hearings in November Robert increasingly lent his support to such an extent that he agreed to represent me. He even found a pro bono barrister by the name of Jonathan Price who is another intelligent guy who is great to speak to.

How were they to work with?

VJ: Well Robert is a genius. I'm sure that there is nothing he doesn't know about libel law and I can see him becoming the leading defamation lawyer in the country. He is extremely knowledgeable about history which, aligned with my own degree, has led to some very funny observations and comments from time to time that only those really into their history would get. His knowledge of military euphemisms is alarmingly good too. Jonathan was methodical and precise in everything he does. He is very cool and I'm sure he has a very long and fruitful career ahead of him.

Were they also representing the other defendants?

VJ: Robert was defending Richard Dawkins and the Foundation too. Jonathan was only representing me under Robert's instruction.

In terms of your defence it seems clear that the lawyers and yourself would aim to have the whole case thrown out, but was there much discussion between you as to what the best approach might be? Was it, for instance, focused largely on how each individual claim could be struck out, or was your attention centred mainly on the abuse of process aspect?

VJ: I left the law to the lawyers to be quite honest. I understand more about defamation law than the average person on the street now but there are levels of details which were, sometimes, best not knowing. So much can be left to interpretation. The best angle for attack was, quite simply, McGrath's overall claim which was a complete pile of nonsense. I literally cannot explain how poorly it was all put together. The best thing to do was to rip apart the pleadings and reduce the meanings to a level which meant that the case was not worth pursuing financially. In the end this proved the correct strategy for me.

How was your general mood throughout? I certainly imagine there would have been good days and bad days – any that particularly stand out for you?

VJ: I do suffer from clinical depression which I used to bring into check with medication but, more recently, I focus my efforts on lifting heavy weights which is better for me.

It must have had a pretty hefty effect on day-to-day life for both you and your family …

VJ: My wife saw the back of my head quite frequently owing to the location of the computer in the living room. All in all it was one long, stressful time and one I do not want to repeat or wish upon anyone else. My children always had the best of my time but I probably saw little of my wife in the evenings if I am honest. She deserves a medal for putting up with it.

You had a two-day appearance at the RCJ last November in which you, naturally, made the case for having the action against you struck out. How did it feel knowing that, if things didn't go well, it would merely be the start of an even longer, more stressful, and potentially ruinous process, rather than the end of one?

VJ: It simply wasn't in my thought process really. If I had imagined this going on, akin to the Simon Singh case or that of Hardeep Singh, or the Osler/Gray/Hilton shambles, I probably would have not made it into court that day. However, I had a pretty clear conviction that the claim was a load of junk and that the courts would see through it.

I'm assuming this would have been the first time you'd have seen McGrath in person? What did you make of him? How did he come across?

VJ: My opinion is that he is a little strange. His persona in person, however, is nothing like in print. He is the archetypical keyboard warrior; quite happy to make all sorts of allegations in print but won't repeat them in person. Other people had the displeasure of speaking with him at various times and were equally unimpressed.

Did you exchange any words, or was a sensible distance maintained?

VJ: I said nothing in November; there was no need because nothing had been agreed by the courts and I didn't want to prejudice the case. When we all found out the result in December, I still said nothing but came under fire from McGrath in a calculated attack on my character. Again, I maintained a sensible distance keeping a moral high ground that had clearly escaped McGrath in his desperation. At the end of the hearing I said a couple of things to him as me and my wife walked down the corridor. He wouldn't even look at us; that said all I needed to know.

At the end of those two days, how did you think it had gone? Did you feel you'd done enough to secure a strike out?

VJ: The Judge wasn't giving much away really. But towards the end of the hearing some things seemed to click into place, particularly when the Judge was becoming quite critical of McGrath using fake accounts to attack me on Amazon. From that point onwards I knew that a balance had been struck somewhere.

How about the lawyers?

VJ: They were “hopeful”. That's about as a good as it gets from a lawyer, believe me.

The final judgement was made public at the end of March this year, but you actually got the draft judgement in December. Putting aside any minor differences that there might have between them, how did it feel to know that the outcome was almost entirely positive?

VJ: I wasn't happy with some things in the Judgement but, overall, it was positive. I did feel very happy of course but also frustrated because I had to spend a long time keeping quiet.

That must have been difficult, not being able to say anything, although I imagine it made for a much more enjoyable christmas with the family knowing the case was getting thrown out?

VJ: Very much so; it made things a little easier around the home knowing I would be able to spend the time with the family rather than chewing over the various diatribes we had received in the run up to the hearing.

Since receiving the draft judgement, when McGrath knew that the case was going to be struck out, he seemed to engage in what can only be described as a bitter smear campaign against you, labelling you as not only a fascist and a BNP supporter, but a holocaust denier. What did you think when you read the tweets and comments he was making about you?

VJ: Disgusted but I wasn't surprised. What else could he do? It's all very ironic that he preaches on about reputation being important and how crucial it is to keep to the moral high ground but then decides to set up websites and accounts all focused on destroying me with half-baked theories.

Did it help knowing that only McGrath himself seemed to believe what he was saying about you, and that everyone else had rightly dismissed it as little more than a seemingly spiteful exercise in quote-mining?

VJ: It did the more that people wrote to be offering their support. I think McGrath probably lost a lot of sympathy over what he did.

Would you say, given his actions, that he was seeming less like someone who genuinely wanted to protect “family, name and reputation” from defamatory comments, and more like someone who was massively lashing out?

VJ: I think so. That was the impression that others had formed too. Now people know the result, the more it smacks of sour grapes.

Do you think that McGrath has made things much worse for himself than they needed to be? Even Judge Moloney suggested that his behaviour would make it difficult for him to convince a jury if it went to trial.

VJ: Well McGrath seemed to be able to get away with murder in both writing and in the courtroom; the stuff he has written on websites is not even a quarter of what he sent to the courts. Perhaps one day it would be quite amusing to post some of the things he wrote to show just how unhinged his campaign sometimes was?

It would certainly make for interesting reading, as well as being a suitably cautionary epilogue to the story. I think I read somewhere, perhaps you can confirm and maybe elaborate, that he'd asked for £1 million from Amazon to, essentially, “go away”?

VJ: I recall that, somewhere, he wrote that he felt he his case was worth at least a million because he kept referencing payouts that other libel “victims” had received. When it transpired that he wanted more than that from a single defendant, I think I was more than amused.

Does that make you question whether the whole process was ever about principles? That, instead of being about defamation or damage to an individual's reputation or business, it was more like a case of a hugely bruised ego wanting some recompense?

VJ: It was perhaps a little about reputation but more about the money in the cold light of day. The guy has SERIOUS financial problems, make no mistake. His legal bill seemed to suggest that he had spent over 8 hours per day on this case for over a year. Well, that's not going to sort out the mortgage problems is it?

So, now that you've got final judgement, what's next? We know McGrath has been hit with £75,000 in costs and 3 months to pay it, but that he also had until April 30th to challenge the ban on an appeal (which he said he will because he wants to proceed to full trial).

VJ: I believe he has filed an appeal.

Assuming he got the permission to appeal and it actually went to full trial, what do you think his chances are? (I know the judge has said such an action would basically be a waste of time given what it would cost compared to how much he could expect in damages).

VJ: Not really concerned right now because the case is over for me. He not only needs permission to appeal, he needs to actually win it. I have no part in that process, I believe, until the case is “reopened”. I think he is wasting his time though but, then, I would wouldn't I?

Your case has found itself becoming part of the argument behind the growing campaign for libel reform in the UK. With the laws seeming heavily stacked against defendants, would you say that, in spite of all the grief you've had to go through with this case, it's possible that at least some good could come out of it?

VJ: Well the libel laws were used to help me win. What I do think is that the process is too long. Even the decision to be given out took over 4 months. That's a serious chunk of time in what is a very short life. I'm pleased to have met so many cool people though.

How important would you say libel reform is right now, especially as far as social media is concerned, and has your case changed your opinion or merely galvanised it?

VJ: I wasn't even aware of it until I was sued. I like to think I have played a part in raising awareness and I hope to be a part of it in the future.

Do you think your case is going to have an impact on other bloggers like yourself who are increasingly finding themselves on the receiving end of pernicious libel laws that can be wielded to silence legitimate criticism? I'm thinking, for instance, of Dan Buzzard, an Australian sceptic who is being sued by a homeopath.

VJ: Well I hope to be able to offer these people some support in the same way I have been supported by people like Hardeep Singh. I think my case clarifies a few matters here and there but I think that there is a long way to go until we get to the bottom of what articles have been pulled because of the threat of libel; there is often a public interest which supersedes the right to privacy and/or people saying damaging things.

I like the idea of a free and open media with responsibility; I do not see how take down notices provide the vindication of character that people seek when issuing libel claims. If someone lies about another person in print and is forced to write a retraction, this is far more damaging to the writer than the libelled.

And, while not libel-specific but still a matter of free-speech, we now have three people charged over things they've said on Twitter.

VJ: Which is ridiculous really.; there are certain laws in this country, which I have blogged about, which offer a strange balance against protest and humour. It is a shocking state of affairs and far worse than we can imagine. It will only get worse before it gets better. The harsh thing is, if you want to protest against those laws the authorities can lock you up using them. It's all very Orwellian.

It goes without saying that having the support of your family and friends would have been crucial to getting through all this with your sanity intact, but how important has it been to have had the encouragement of people like Hardeep Singh, or even total strangers who tweet you or comment on your blog? Does it reassure you to know that there's a supportive community of sceptics who realise that it could just have easily been them in your position?

VJ: Well I want to thank every single person who has sent me messages, donated to my legal fund and helped me spread the word about my case. I cannot say how much their support has meant to me. Hardeep Singh has been brilliant… he is a great guy who I can call a friend.

Every blogger who has written about the case has raised my profile and that of Libel Reform in ways which are far reaching. My thanks to those who have taken the time out of writing about other issues to focus on mine. Big thanks to James O'Malley too of the Pod Delusion, John Gray who bought me a meal on the night of the final hearing and who is also someone I can call a friend.

Thanks to you too for all of your hard work behind the scenes. I hope to be able to repay you one day.

Most of all a big thank you to my family and my two best friends, Neil Porter and Trevor Gill; without them, I would not have been able to find the humour in the entire situation. The two best guys a fella could ask for… so funny and satirical. Unlike… ;)

I particularly enjoyed Unity's recent post on the Ministry of Truth blog which, aside from making a minor point about your opinions at the time having possibly been a little naïve, thoroughly discredit McGrath's accusations as being a blatant attempt to smear you. Are you tempted to sue McGrath in a reciprocal libel action for those accusations, or do you think it would be a waste of time (or worse, seen as vindictive)?

VJ: Er… no comment on potential legal pleadings haha.

Naïve is an interesting phrase because it supposes that I was not, or am not, aware of the risk that far right groups pose. What I did do is apply a traditional military tactic of risk analysis and utilised my experience studying History and Politics and formed my own opinion about the threat of the BNP and EDL in this country. I stand by what I said; they represent people who legally vote for them and therefore are allowed a platform. Democracy in this country does not work by banning organisations or people who we dislike. I also said that there is no chance in hell that they would be a force in this country and I have been proven right based on their recent results. I also said, at the time, that they represented people with legitimate views; views which the mainstream parties now accept. Again, I was proven right. Perhaps a career in political commentary awaits?

But look, I write a LOT more on the AKP in Turkey and no-one is accusing me of being a Muslim fundamentalist so I think McGrath has a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics works. That much has been evident to me in his character assassination.

I do not need to respond to McGrath's wild accusations, I'm very comfortable with where my political allegiances are.

A question from a colleague (thanks Dave!), has it put you off reviewing other books, or made you more wary in general of what you say on the internet in future? (his original, less-serious question was initially, “How many hours per day do you spend laughing at what a massive plonker McGrath has been?”)

VJ: I'll review them if I feel it is necessary. I much prefer doing other things. People need to realise that this was a short, 3 day conversation outing an author who was using unethical publicity tactics to promote a crap book. It's not a career for me. It was just a random event in my life which culminated in something which permeated my reality.

I'll be more careful in the future when writing but I won't change dramatically. How could I? McGrath would have won then.

In response to his real question, probably more hours than is healthy.

If there was anything that you could say to McGrath and know that he'd listen, what would it be?

VJ: I feel sorry for your kids.

Get your shit in order and reprioritise your life; you spend far too much time dreaming instead of thinking about what will actually put food on your family's table.

Go on a writing course.

Take criticism and abuse the same way as normal people can.

Accept that you are not special, the same as everyone else.

Thanks for the journey. I enjoyed the opportunity to be an example and show how people stand up to bullies.

I want to thank Vaughan Jones for sparing the time to answer my (now that I stand back and look at it all) rather substantial bunch of questions, and wish him and his family all the best for, what must surely be, a massively less stressful year ahead …

Here comes the pride

June 17th 2012

Once again I am compelled to begin my post with an apology for the complete lack of any kind of ranty, word-based intellectual comestibles over the last few weeks. I'm afraid things have been stupidly busy around here again, with a large proportion of my time spent building a website for my dad and his recently published book (go there now and buy it, particularly if you like wizards, quests, and magic, and especially if you have kids). With all the running around (well, sitting down, if I'm honest) trying to organise things – server upgrades, domain registration, installing software – getting everything set up, and making absolutely sure that the whole thing was perfect and ready in time for an immovable, near-future release date, it sometimes felt like I was involved in planning a bloody wedding. And, do you know, that gloriously ham-fisted and clunky attempt at a segue leads me very shoddily on to what it was I wanted to talk about this week? The ongoing and now, thanks to certain presidents, very high-profile worldwide campaign for LGBT marriage equality.

So as not to be too hard on myself for that dodgy effort to marry (pun intended) the seemingly disparate subjects of my dad's website (go there, go there now) and marriage equality, I should stress that I'd actually had this subject in mind for a post since a great friend and colleague of mine, the erstwhile Mrs Cwosby (formerly Miss Wendle – I shan't explain), had a fantastic bash at the National Marine Aquarium a few weeks ago in celebration of her recent wedding. Having taken place in the same week that President Barack Obama announced his tacit support for marriage equality, it seemed as if this serendipitous union (obvious and inevitable connotations intended) of headline news and events on my social calendar was announcing to me, via a nicely printed invitation with pictures of rings, roses, and an insistence on RSVP-ing ASAP or GTFO, what my next post should be about. You see, although Raves and I have no immediate plans to go trotting across life's imposing moors together on the matrimony pony, the world would still not be keen on the idea if we did.

Despite living in the super-modern and fabulously progressive twenty-first century, there are still ridiculous inequalities that have yet to be addressed, be they economic, social, or cultural. For most of us enjoying a nominally comfortable existence in the comparative utopia that is the western hemisphere in 2012, the form of disparity we are most likely to see between people is in the way they are treated by others. For those of us who fall under the pink and rainbow speckled banner of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, for example, we are compelled to go about our daily lives with the knowledge that, because we weren't oh-so-fortunate enough to have been born in to the right bodies, and with the desire to only ever rub our rude bits against and inside someone with the complementary wobbly parts (like sexual Velcro), a large number of those people who do feel, therefore, that the relationships we forge with others don't deserve the same level of recognition or protection – as if they're invalid, unnatural, or just plain “wrong”.

To say that two people should not be allowed to marry because of the way their relationship is judged by others to be bogus is nothing more than offensively arrogant, self-righteous bullshit, and is exactly the kind of sanctimonious, posturing wankery one comes to expect from religion. Yes, scratch the surface of any opposing attitude towards LGBT rights and you will invariably find a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who bases their objections on some ancient text inspired by a tyrannical god, or the pious and venom-spitting pronouncements of the smug, beatific hypocrites who claim to speak on his behalf. I'm not saying that there aren't non-religious people who are anti-gay and will campaign against equal rights for LGBT folk, but they're exceedingly few and far between. If you fancy a challenge, try to find a non-biblical argument against marriage equality (or homosexuality in general) that doesn't, when you start taking it apart, ultimately devolve into making appeals to some ostensibly sentient, intelligent entity – even if it's just “nature”.

“But homosexuality is unnatural”, sayeth many intolerant arse-mongers without the slightest hint of intelligence or basic human decency. Unnatural, you say? You mean like how The Twitter you're using to espouse your spiteful idiocy is unnatural? Or like how the house you live in and the car you drive are unnatural? What about the incubator your dangerously premature baby relied on for those first days of its fragile life? Is that natural? Did the hospital find it growing in a forest somewhere? And what is natural anyway? Well, shit, for a start; shit is natural. So is death. Pain is natural too. Do you know what else is natural? The parasitic wasp that feasts on caterpillars and eats them from the inside out, keeping them alive and in agony for as long as possible so that the growing wasp can enjoy fresh meat. Want to know another naturally occurring phenomenon? Homosexuality. It has been observed in over 450 different species in the animal kingdom (and, conversely, as the saying goes, homophobia has only been observed in one).

If your argument against homosexuality, and by extension equal marriage, hinges on whether or not it's natural (it is), you have no argument. So what next? How about the fact that such relationships don't produce children? Fantastic, well, that invalidates the marriages of straight couples who are voluntarily childless, infertile, or simply too old to have children, as well as straight single parents who have been widowed or deserted by their spouse. It also insults those straight people who manage to raise children perfectly well without feeling the need to get married, not to mention the tiny little issue of how there are plenty of LGBT relationships that result in children through IVF, adoption, or surrogacy. Obviously, this issue of children is yet another rotten plank in the argument of anti-equality knobbers who believe that children would somehow be turned gay by the influence of their gay parents, in much the same way that hanging around Gérard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Béart for long enough will turn you French (strangely, though, growing up with homophobic parents will often result in equally bigoted offspring).

Having dispensed with such a ridiculously silly idea (particularly when, by extension, it dictates that straight parents will only ever produce straight children), we move on to one so monumentally stupid that it would take a city planner handing over all architectural and engineering decisions to a four-year old whose greatest wish is to build a skyscraper entirely out of blancmange in order to look rational by comparison. This is the tragically bonkers idea that marriage equality would be a slippery slope towards legalising both paedophilia and the right of people to marry their pets or items of furniture. Because, in the festering, diseased mind of an anti-gay bigot, where brain matter has seemingly been replaced with the contents of a family-sized tin of Spam, children, dogs, horses, even four-wheeled hostess trollies (either in beech or with brushed-steel effect finish) all have the same legal standing, mental capacity, and rational ability to sign a contract. What must it be like to live in such a person's world, constantly regarding the occupants of their front-room aquarium with suspicion because of the ever-present threat those philanderous cardinal tetras must pose to the sanctity of their marriage?

Just as a fish's lustful thoughts for your spouse will have them plotting to seduce your better half while you're at work, thus destroying your lifelong commitment to one another, so to will the demands for equality under the law from homosexuals end up causing irreparable damage to the integrity of your marriage … or not, as anyone with two neurons to rub together will tell you. Once all of the other piss-poor, ill-conceived, jelly-brained arguments have been exhausted by apologists for discrimination and bullying, this is where they frequently end up; baseless pleading that marriage has some kind of special, other-worldly preciousness to it that, while it can't ever be quantified or explained, it will definitely go away if you let the botty-botherers, gender-benders, and women in comfortable shoes try to share in it. It's like how you can be struck dumb with the astonishing beauty of a sunset one minute, then in the next feel like you're watching a giant, disgusting orange sore that oozes infected, foul-smelling pus all over the horizon as soon as you discover that a gay likes it.

By suggesting that the sanctity, or value, of existing marriages can in any way be harmed, not just by LGBT people, but by anyone outside of the individuals that comprise them, is to declare all matrimonial relationships more fragile than a dandelion in a hurricane. To imagine that two random strangers, who may live on the opposite end of the entire fucking planet, could have a fatally detrimental impact upon your marriage is to concede that there is absolutely no value whatsoever to your relationship. “We've been together for forty amazing years, had three beautiful children, and seven grandchildren. But a couple of gay guys 200 miles away in Kidderminster have gotten married – it's all over, honey, pack your fucking bags and get out – we're done”. If your relationship can be tarnished into worthlessness by the unrelated actions of people you will never meet in your lifetime, what kind of bitter divorce row are you going to end up in when one of you farts in bed or leaves a buttery knife in the jar of marmalade?

The value of a marriage is embodied solely within those who compose its structure and, as such, it can never be harmed by external forces; if it fails, it only ever does so from the inside out. I don't recall the parade of straight couples marching their way into news rooms and government offices the world over to complain at how Kim Kardashian's 72-day marriage (or, before that, Brittany Spears' 55-hour drunken vow-spree) was causing demonstrable harm to their wedded bliss. Similarly, I'm unable to find the merest trace of any of the campaign groups who formed to lobby governments in order that they might prevent Zsa Zsa Gabor from walking up the aisle for the ninth time. As I said, marriages can only be destroyed from within and, at the end of the day, the only threat posed to them by the gay community exercising its right to marry is when the marriage in question is of the lavender variety where one of the participants is secretly gay (makes you wonder whether there's an ulterior motive for the vociferousness of their protestations).

Whenever you hear someone talking about the sanctity of marriage, you can bet your arse, and the arse of almost anyone with an arse, that religious belief is likely the predominant influence behind the opinion being expressed. For centuries, religion has tried desperately to convince people that not only have they got something to say on the subject of marriage but that they are the sole arbiters of its very definition. “Marriage is between one man and one woman”, they insist, “the bible says so!” Of course such asinine proclamations require that great pains are taken to ignore how the bible also says that a marriage is between a woman and her rapist (at the insistence of her father and for financial remuneration), between a man and his concubines, between a man and many women (who he owns as property), or between a woman and her deceased husband's brother – naturally the woman doesn't get a say in any of these scenarios being, as she is, the inferior product of the rib-funded desires of a bored and horny animal-namer.

Religion must also, in these arguments, completely gloss over the fact that marriage, and the concept of bonding ceremonies and rituals of union, pre-date any of the religions we have today by around 15,000 years (maybe more). They don't own the definition any more than they were responsible for its creation in the first place, and to complain about it changing betrays not just a pious arrogance but also complete blindness to their own history. Many christian sects, for instance, used to consider marriage a massive sin, believing instead that chastity was the only way one could gain admission to the Cloud Land Après-Vie party; only when they realised a few centuries ago that there was some serious coin to be made by charging the gullible peasants to have their unions blessed by the man upstairs did they do a complete volte-face and jump aboard the bliss bus, giving weddings a churchly thumbs up. In nearly all things religion fails to set the standard or lead the march, instead choosing to follow behind secularism like a grubby, ambulance-chasing lawyer trying to figure out how best to exploit the situation for its own ends.

When it comes to complaining about the “redefinition” of marriage, the one faith that needs to keep its fucking mouth shut is the Church of England. So short its memory that, while bitching recently about the erosion of “traditional” marriage over the government's plans to bring about equality for the LGBT community, they conveniently forgot (as they always do) that the establishment of their entire institution was predicated on granting the divorce of one man. In 1534, King Henry VIII (the fat one who burst) severed all ties with the catholic church, told the pope where he could stick his infallibility, and established the state church so that he could ditch his wife and marry again without the clergy constantly telling him he was going to hell for it. Five hundred years later and we've got the self-same moral brigands daring to position themselves as the defenders of “traditional” marriage while using their considerable influence to deprive others of their rights. Can you say “sanctimonious scumbags”, kids? I thought you could …

And, while we're at it, what's all this “traditional” marriage shit? Whose tradition, and from when? Traditions change all the time, just like the definitions of marriage (60 years ago, it was between a man and woman of the same colour; 150 years before that it was between a man and a woman's family, with whom there was a financial arrangement). There was a time in some cultures when incest was a tradition, you don't see them rallying around to protect that, do you? It's not as if the foundations of society will be irrevocably altered and we won't be able to adapt to such earth-shattering changes, I mean we're coping pretty well with women voters, modern medicine, space travel, and free education, aren't we? And, speaking of education, it's not as if children will be forced by their teachers to learn all the gruesome details about gay sex any more than they're required to be taught about every last intimate aspect of the exact same acts being performed by straight people (really, how many kids are instructed in the finer points of man-on-woman rim jobs, anal sex, and bukkake parties?)

When President Obama made his announcement a few weeks ago, the right-wing went into absolute meltdown. In an instant, every TV screen, radio station, newspaper, and website was full-to-bursting with rampant bigots engaged in futile attempts to justify their disgustingly intolerant positions. Bloviating, drug-addicted, gut bucket and professional douchebag Rush Limbaugh began spewing the usual anti-gay “war on marriage” rhetoric while skating gleefully over the fact that he'd not long ago persuaded the famously un-straight Elton John to perform at the radio host's fourth wedding. The foaming mouths of Fox News pundits, and other conservative and/or christian shit shovellers predicted that the black community would drop Obama in a heartbeat, and his failure to secure re-election in November was all but guaranteed. It must have come as a shock to them when a Washington Post / ABC News poll found that more than half of Americans supported same-sex marriage, including 59% of blacks (the subsequent announcement by the NAACP of their support proved another significant nail in the coffin of their argument).

If the patently absurd claims of the right (particularly the seething cauldron of self-righteous bigotry that is the National Organisation for Marriage), that they were all about protecting the institution of marriage, they would be campaigning with every breath for the illegalisation of divorce before they even thought about tackling the issue of same-sex marriage. If it was about ensuring children had a mother and a father then they would be instead lobbying to have the children of the recently widowed and the single put in to the care of the state. The truth, sadly, is that these people don't care about marriage, let alone children; their only real interest lies in enshrining their bigotry into law, and further cementing their positions of undeserved privilege by asserting what little influence they still possess in forcing everyone else to live life by their rules (this is especially true of the church). Marriage is a right, and people don't vote for rights … that's why they're rights.

Marriage is an agreement between two people to confer and delegate certain rights and protections upon one another that are recognised and supported under the law … that's it. Anything else that a marriage might be is down to the individuals concerned, and we have no right to force our criteria for getting married upon anyone. So long as no-one comes to harm in the process, it's none of our fucking business why people get married, or what they do with (or to) each other once they have. If people want to marry for convenience, sex, citizenship, money, power, fame, privilege, companionship, or simply out of a dread fear of dying alone, who the fuck are we to tell them they can't? Why should love be the only valid reason? Love takes a near-infinite variety of forms … so should marriage … just because two people's idea of love is not yours does not give you the right to stop them from having that recognised.

And before you dismiss this as yet another example of a liberal trying to promote the “gay agenda”, I should point out that there's no such thing … unless, that is, that you count going to work, eating crisps, watching “Horrible Histories”, feeding the pets, and hoping one day to be treated equally.

Off with his head

July 23rd 2012

This week's post has probably the most potential of anything I've ever written to cause the greatest level of discomfort and embarrassment – not just for me, but for nearly a full half of the entire human race. It's a subject that can hardly even be mentioned without all those who happen to be both in earshot, and in possession of the requisite dangly bits, want to cross their legs while enduring a sustained moment of pained wincing at the very thought of it. As a member of the aforementioned group, I find it especially hard to raise this subject, and not just for the reasons of physical awkwardness thus far stated; my innate stiff Englishness and general inability to be cock-sure and confident when addressing such issues means I am largely incapable of standing tremendously proud when I say, in the words of Kryten, the service mechanoid from “Red Dwarf” who temporarily becomes human and consequently has many questions about his new body, “I want to talk to you about my penis”.

For those of you who have actually managed to click the “Read More” link and are even now reading this second paragraph, I would sincerely like to salute either your trust in me that I wasn't really going to spend any part of a blog post talking about my genitals or, in the absence of such trust, your unparalleled bravery in being prepared to face whatever willy-flavoured words and sentences I could possibly throw at you over the next sixteen paragraphs. There is a third option, naturally, and that's that you were genuinely interested in hearing me talk at length about the contents of my underpants, however I find this not just statistically unlikely but also slightly disturbing … and, curiously, rather flattering – call me. Of course, in all seriousness, I'm not really going to discuss in any great detail the various aspects of my trouser-based entertainment system, at least not directly; what I actually wanted to look at, because it's something that's come up again recently, is the subject of circumcision.

In June, a regional court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that the circumcision of boys for religious reasons constituted bodily harm, and was a violation of the child's right to “physical integrity”. Naturally, Germany's jewish and muslim communities, as well as those around the world who heard the news, went proper, banana-scented apeshit. This, they told us in their usual calm and measured tone (the one they frequently use to inform us that entire nations will crumble into pink, sparkly dust if we don't let them continue with their centuries old traditions of hating gays), was an infringement of their religious freedom and that the ruling was “outrageous”, “insensitive”, “inadmissible”, and all manner of other, carefully selected words that they had specifically chosen to, once again, cast themselves as the unfortunate victims of secular encroachment on their ancient traditions, rather than as the contemptuous apologists for, and practitioners of, a disgusting and barbarous form of child abuse that they actually are.

The idea that “religious freedom” could ever include the right of parents to sanction the mutilation of their child's genitalia for entirely spurious reasons is sickening, and so too is the response from a Russian rabbi in Berlin who, when asked to comment on the German ban, said it was “perhaps the most serious attack on Jewish life in Europe since the Holocaust”, a claim that is as intellectually vapid as it is obscenely disrespectful to the millions slaughtered in concentration camps during the Second World War. Circumcision is a way of forever branding someone as belonging to a particular faith by making it impossible for them to truly escape having been marked (the procedure is irreversible), and it is done at a time in their lives when they are too young to be able to refuse precisely for that reason. Let's be honest, if jewish boys weren't circumcised until their bar mitzvah ceremonies at the age of thirteen, there'd be a holy shit-ton more jewish boys keeping their fleshy polo necks after having told the mohel to stick that todger-trimmer up his arse.

A ban on the performing of unnecessary, potentially dangerous, surgery on someone without their informed consent is not, in any sense, a restriction on religious freedom; if anything it's an expansion of it as it allows a child raised in the jewish or islamic faiths the opportunity to withdraw completely from the religion of their parents, just as the followers of other faiths who don't hack pieces off of their children are able to do, should they ever wish to make that choice. I described the religious reasons for assaulting a child in this way as “spurious”, and with good cause; they're entirely bogus, illegitimate, invalid – I couldn't give a flying fuck in a hurricane that this is something you've been doing for a couple of thousand years, you don't get to mutilate some kid's toilet technology and avoid the rule of law by saying it's what your god wants. To paraphrase Matt Dillahunty's beautifully concise expression, “My right to swing my arms ends at your nose”, your religious freedom ends where my bedroom equipment begins; I won't let you sacrifice dick flesh to your god and call it “tradition” when the rozzers come calling.

Ultimately, though, all this talk of religious freedom is irrelevant; it's just a smokescreen that clouds the real issue and enables the knob-chopping god-squads to set the agenda by defining the argument in their terms (namely that they're the target of anti-theistic oppression as opposed to being little more than a gang of psychopathic, pious wang-manglers). What we're talking about here is the wilful, unnecessary, permanent physical modification of another human being against their will – it should be a no-brainer. You may take umbrage at my, arguably emotive, use of the word “mutilate” in the previous paragraph, but you would be entirely wrong to do so; to mutilate is to “inflict a violent disfiguring injury on” – irrevocably changing the physical form of someone's plonker with the aid of a sharp knife definitely counts as violent and disfiguring, and the fact that demonstrable, needless harm is caused absolutely qualifies as an injury.

“Wait a minute!” you interject, and rather rudely I might add. “What do you mean by ‘unnecessary'? I thought there were good reasons for circumcising someone?” Well, there are reasons, yes, but many would quibble with the use of the word “good”; certainly there are valid medical justifications for dispensing with a person's foreskin – there are, for instance, a number of conditions for which circumcision is considered a reasonable solution (if not actually a preferred one), and some for which it is required. Absent any of these scenarios, the so-called “reasons” for performing such a procedure become merely “excuses”; pitiful attempts by guilt-ridden parents for wantonly depriving their child of an important part of their anatomy at a time when they're unable to defend themselves against the advances of a man in scrubs with an ultra-shiny, medical-grade bolt-cutter, and a gleam in his eye that hints at an unquenchable passion for rearranging other people's basement furniture.

So, if none of the legitimate medical situations apply, and the parents aren't resorting to the bogus religious excuses, what are they actually thinking is the reason they're surgically interfering with the helmet of their child's tiny fireman? Even amongst the non-religious, particularly in countries like the United States of America, tradition and culture are still often given as the most common excuses for getting a doctor to tamper with their kid's junk. As has been expressed before, the idea that one would do anything simply because it's what everyone did before you, especially when you restrict it to your own particularly narrow field of social, geographical, or ancestral vision, is probably one of the more logically feeble methods for justifying immoral, unethical, or outright stupid behaviour. Think about it; “we're going to slice a small piece off our baby's pee pistol so that he can be like all the other men in his family” – doesn't that sound like something you'd hear in a documentary about dodgy cults?

This leads me neatly on to another reason I've heard bandied around for lunging murderously with a pair of scissors at a boy's wedding tackle, and it's a view which, to my shame, I once defended in the past (fortunately, I very quickly realised my error and subsequently re-adjusted my patently dickheaded opinion). It can be best exemplified with the phrase, “Well, his father is circumcised, and we didn't want him to grow up with awkward questions and a possible stigma about why his winky looks different to his daddy's”. This is, in many ways, possibly worse than trying to defend the practice from a standpoint of religious tradition; in order to spare the parents a few brief moments of embarrassment in having to explain father-son phallic discrepancies, and because they can't be fucking bothered to address the issue with the child honestly and give them the necessary reassurance that, no matter what, every little boy is different in that department, no two are completely alike, they'd rather tear off the tip of his tent peg and forever alter the future sex lives of both him and any partners he might one day have.

I can only apologise for having briefly supported this point of view; it is an opinion that, along with the notion that a circumcised pleasure probe is more aesthetically pleasing, is merely a grotesque attempt at championing a barbaric practice for entirely cosmetic reasons, something that, were we to be talking instead about performing these alterations on female girls of the lady woman gender, we'd be quite rightly nailed upside-down to the nearest tree by our ball-bags for even contemplating the idea (seriously, why not suggest fitting your new-born baby girl with silicone tit implants for cosmetic, or even religious, reasons and see how far you get with your love-spuds still in the same place you left them this morning?) It doesn't matter that your kid's royal sceptre looks different to his dad's – you're going to have to explain the hair thing anyway – grow up and stop taking out your insecurities on your child by butchering his pocket rocket.

Before we move all the way away from the subject of differences pertaining to gender, I should just quickly dip my toe in the dangerous quicksand of female circumcision. It's a subject that rightly provokes a sense of utter revulsion in pretty much everyone, yet the same cannot be said when it comes to the male version of the procedure. Why? Are the two not exactly the same? “Ah, but with women they take the whole clitoris, whereas guys only lose a bit of useless skin off the end”, comes the reply from people who need their bottoms sewn up to prevent them from saying anything so fucking stupid ever again. This is not Top Trumps, you repugnant, festering anus; it doesn't matter a single, deep-fried duck bollock whether you're taking the entire cardboard box or just the lid flaps, you're still carving up someone's family jewels for no fucking reason. Male or female, it doesn't matter, if you can defend circumcision for one gender then you damned-well better be prepared to defend it for both because there's no difference.

It's almost as if we're supposed to “man up” and take it – as if it's no big deal – hence the common, and ignorant, dismissal of how the foreskin is “useless”. It contains a greater density of nerve endings than any other part of the penis (and is therefore an important part of the sexual experience), is home to specialised cells found nowhere else, and provides a considerable amount of protection from infection and harm. It is fused to the main body of the penis in such a way that removing it involves shoving a blunt object down there to separate the two. For the guys reading who are now feeling a little bit light-headed at the thought of that last part, feel free to pause for a moment to regain your composure before continuing (maybe have a drink of water or something). Regardless, we are often told that it's all okay and, in fact, we actually shouldn't complain at all really because, I bet you didn't know this, but, there are a great number of medical benefits to being circumcised. Is that so?

Yes it is. Well, it sort of is … a bit … actually, it kind of isn't, really. The supposed health benefits claimed by those in favour of circumcision, primarily the suggested reduction in both urinary tract infections and HIV contamination, as well as (according to some) a generally better standard of cleanliness for the old chap, have largely been disproved or, at the very least, have been shown to be too insignificant to risk the potential complications that can arise from the procedure. A marginally lower chance of developing an infection that makes you feel like you're pissing battery acid for a few weeks is hardly worth the risk of bleeding to death or dying after inadvertently contracting herpes. As for the HIV and hygiene arguments, well, wearing condoms, having a wash occasionally, and not dipping your button mushroom in a bucket of chlamydia every morning before rinsing it off with a generous splash of liquid clap will achieve the exact same health benefits, and all without having to surrender an inch off the end of poor Mr. Toad.

The potential loss of life, blood, sensation, or a normal sex life as a result of circumcision are the sweet royal icing on the cake of the argument against it. To perform, for non-medical reasons, an entirely unnecessary surgical procedure on a child that is unable to give informed consent and will, despite whatever promised health benefits may or may not materialise, be irreversibly physically mutilated against its will, is unethical, immoral, and a gross dereliction of the duty of care by both the child's parents, and the surgeon responsible. There really is no argument here – if you support the non-therapeutic circumcision of minors, you're advocating for child abuse. But, then, what kind of position am I to say all this? I'm just some grumpy atheist looking to bash religion again, right? Maybe I had my dinky de-cloaked as a child in some Abrahamic faith ritual that I'm deeply bitter and resentful about?

I am both sorry, and extremely pleased, to be able to disappoint you with the admission that I was, in fact, circumcised at the age of 13; it was for entirely medical reasons, and I have no bad feelings about having undergone the procedure whatsoever. I was fully informed by my GP of what the operation involved, what to expect during recovery, the potential risks (and the likelihood of them occurring), and what I could expect afterwards. At no point was I forced by anyone into making the decision to go through with it – I always had the choice, and it was always my choice to say yes or no. Was I nervous? Absolutely, but it wasn't really the thought of going in to hospital for an operation that scared me; it was more that I feared losing the fantastic new functionality that I'd discovered only the year before :) If anything, I was quite looking forward to the prospect of getting out of doing P.E at school for at least six weeks (although I didn't fancy telling everyone else in my year exactly why).

Fortunately, I didn't need to worry; my best friend very helpfully filled in pretty much the entire school, earning me the nickname “Snippy” for a while (I hated it at the time, but I have to give credit to whoever came up with it – it's quite a good nickname). I never really experienced any kind of stigma for being different; there was at least one other boy in the year who'd had it done as a child, and we were all going through puberty at that time anyway – picking on someone for anything relating to the contents of their running shorts would be like putting a couple of bullets in each foot, and we knew it (the opportunity to be ridiculed for some aspect of our physical development was, after all, going to visit each and every one of us at some point). The only things I could happily have lived without are the weeks spent peeing through a scab, and the hugely misjudged play fight with my sister that resulted in a dislodged scab and bloody pyjamas (please don't think too hard about that bit unless you're sitting down and with oxygen on standby).

To be completely honest (although this may qualify as being a bit too honest) I actually prefer things since the operation. In my opinion, it looks nicer, and doesn't really feel any different than it did before (any issues I might have with its function are down to nothing more than being an over-excitable pervert); if I had the choice, I'd rather those partners I may have who possess outies instead of innies were also similarly riding with the hood down (so to speak). I'd never demand it of anyone, nor would I force it upon anyone … it's their appendage, so it's their choice – just as it was mine. If you're the parent of a child who fulfils the necessary criteria for this particular form of elective mutilation, I can say only this; leave it alone. Keep your hands off your kid's penis – it's not yours, it's his, and you should let him decide for himself what he wants to do with it.

Just politely advise him to keep it away from priests (whether they have scalpels in their hands or not) …

London Calling

August 11th 2012

Sport and I have never really seen eye to eye. In fact, we've never even really seen eye to navel, what with my general interest in athletic endeavour being somewhere in the neighbourhood of my enthusiasm for the idea of working deep in the very bowels of the Greater London sewer system; other people can do it if they want, but please don't try to include me or engage me, don't bring your passion for either into my house, and for fuck's sake stop going on about it because I really couldn't care less. For me, the seven year march of the London (copyright LOCOG) 2012 (copyright LOCOG) Olympics (copyright LOCOG) represented nothing more than a £10 billion sports day we couldn't afford and that was being run for the sole benefit of the corporate sponsors and all the fitness nazis and sports bores who get off on physical displays of repetitive tedium. So, when I sat down to watch the opening ceremony I did so fully expecting to have my abiding cynicism cemented by a cringe-making, cack-handed farce that presented Britain as a nation of deluded spanners. I certainly wasn't expecting to be proved wrong on an absurdly epic scale.

For a brief while it seemed as if my prediction that it was all going to be bollocks was holding firm; Benedict Cumberbatch's opening ode to London felt a little contrived, a bit too much like someone had said, “we need to start by bigging up the host city, only really classy like – ‘fro in a bit of poetry or summat, and get that bloke who played Sherlock, he's dun theatre”; the lone child singing “Jerusalem”, a song I've always hated, seemed too obvious; the green and pleasant land, while impressive enough in a “Ooh, it's Hobbiton!” sort of way, made me feel like it was going to be the beginning of a long parade of clichéd images of Britain as seen through the eyes of other countries (inevitably culminating with a scene of tea drinkers in bowler hats and mini-skirts dancing to the Beatles down a replica of Carnaby Street, with red double-decker buses full of Cockney chimney sweeps driving past, and hundreds of people saying “cheerio old chap!” as Big Ben is driven around in a Mini by the Queen, and red telephone boxes are filled with Benny Hill lookalikes chasing girls in their underwear).

Things weren't helped when Kenneth Branagh showed up as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the whole Shire suddenly went all Isengard on us. “Very impressive”, I thought, but wuh? “I know it's the industrial revolution, but does it really need to have Brunel-like factory owners in hats dancing and miming actions of people digging and working?” It seemed a bit like we were being made to watch one of those TV programmes made for schools about history, and industry, and the exploitation and oppression of t'workforce like (try to imagine that in a Yorkshire accent), only with a vastly improved budget and the maximum number of drummers permitted by law. “Yes, we invented the industrialised world”, I found myself saying, “but we might want to change tack before someone asks about the slave wages, poor living conditions, and drastically reduced lifespans from deadly work environments suffered by all those who toiled to make it possible”. The rising chimneys, I must admit, were pretty cool, as was the forge where hundreds of workers seemed to fashion molten metal into giant Olympic rings that rose up and exploded into rivers of sparks.

As the pandemonium of the revolution drew to a close I felt a rising nausea in my stomach as we were treated to a film of Daniel Craig, heralding the start of what I was sure to be the appalling cringe-fest I'd feared the evening would be as James Bond inevitably did something hilarious involving a lookalike of the Queen who would only even be seen out of focus, in the distance, or from behi…holy fucking shit, it's the fucking Queen! Jesus Christ's bollocks in a blender, I'm watching James cocking Bond walking stride for stride through the halls of Buckingham Palace with the corgi-loving, motherfucking Queen of fucking England! When the inevitable moment came, as the helicopter hovered over the stadium before launching a stunt Queen and Bond out of the door in matching union flag parachutes, even this normally staunch anti-monarchist was starting to enjoy the fact that at least the old bird has a sense of humour and that half the world will either be pissing itself laughing or scratching its collective head at this point.

More head scratching was surely to come, but so too was a dawning realisation for me that I was watching something genuinely brilliant. As the enormous tribute to the NHS (involving hundreds of real nurses who volunteered to take part) unfolded, cannily making use of the link between Great Ormond Street Hospital and “Peter Pan” author J.M Barrie to segue into a dazzling collage of children's literary figures in a nightmarish dream sequence (including Mary Poppins, Voldemort, the Queen of Hearts, and a Child Catcher who looked suspiciously like Noel Fielding on roller skates), it occurred to me that Danny Boyle was, whether he intended to or not, using the £27 million given to him by the government to produce a spectacular opening ceremony, simultaneously delivering a not terribly subtle “fuck you” to that very same government, along with the class of wealthy, land-owning ruiners of all things good from which they mostly sprang. As I say, I don't know whether or not it was a deliberate act on Boyle's part, but it was certainly there for all to see.

The last time London had hosted the games was in 1948 (and this is my 48th post – is that spooky or what?), the same year that the NHS was born; this alone would probably be enough justification for most artistic directors to at least include it, but the fact that 2012 saw the passing of the Health and Social Care Reform Bill, an act of parliament which essentially gives the government license to smash the NHS up into pieces and sell it off bit by bit to private investment, the entire segment could easily be seen as Boyle's way of saying, “this is something utterly worthwhile, and of which we should be justly proud, that we need to defend with our last breath”. Thinking back to the first act and its portrayal of the industrial revolution, I wondered whether there wasn't also a quiet nod there to how, while the achievements of that time are something we should be proud of, there was a price to be paid for it, both individually and as a nation – battles had to be fought and won, and we should never forget what we've had to go through to get to where we are today.

This was reflected, I think, in the closing moments of the main part of the ceremony where tribute was paid to those we've lost, in particular the lives of the fifty-two people that were brought to a premature end in the bombings of 7th July 2005 (less than 24 hours after it was announced that London had won the Olympic bid). This sort of “in memoriam” happens all the time in America (where it is almost impossible to get through any awards show or ceremony of some kind without a mawkish, slightly cloying tribute to the dead), but it's not something we British do very often. When we do, however, we do it well and with an appropriate sense of quiet dignity; the segment was understated, restrained, and moving, a perfect and natural contrast to the bombast of the first act. The fact that NBC, not content with airing the opening ceremony delayed by four fucking hours simply to hit prime time and maximise ad revenue, chose to cut this segment in favour of Michael Phelps being interviewed by Ryan Seacrest (a man who, in my opinion, needs a red hot poker inserted into his anus to assist in searching the dark, fetid corners of his shit box in order to locate whatever talent he feels he must be in possession of). If you've ever asked the question, “why do people hate America?” right there is an answer.

After the nurses had finished delivering a giant baby (and before the aforementioned tribute that would lead into the interminable parade of athletes), the London Symphony Orchestra, ably assisted by Rowan Atkinson in proto-Bean mode, set about honouring Britain's contribution to cinema, whilst thoroughly taking the piss out of it in the process. This seemed to me to be a fantastic example of the British sense of humour; even when we're in the global spotlight, standing before the world to announce who we are as a people, what we believe, what we think and feel, and what we represent, we simply can't help pass up the opportunity to rip the living piss out of something (usually ourselves). I've always thought (he says trying as hard as he can to be unbiased) that Britain has the best sense of humour on earth; it's the reason that, while bands are always trying to “crack” America, comedians the world over flock to the UK to make their name. When David Blaine spent forty-four days without food in a perspex box above the Thames, some genius used a remote-controlled model helicopter to fly a burger around the box to wind him up – that is the British sense of humour, and it was fucking brilliant.

As the final act of the main part of the opening ceremony demonstrated, it wasn't just one of our most cherished comedians making a complete tit of himself that we wanted to share with you; Britain has been responsible for some of the greatest musicians and most celebrated TV programmes ever created, and these formed the backdrop to a love story conducted through the medium of social networking. The fact that, despite having included so many unique, original, and hugely influential artists from over the years, there was an enormous list of suggestions by the viewing public as to artists they felt should have been featured only goes to show how richly diverse British art, life, and culture truly is, something which was mirrored in the multicultural society portrayed by the assembled cast of “Frankie and June Say Thanks Tim” (as the act was titled) . It didn't matter that this was a fair and accurate depiction of Britain's ethnic make-up; some folk very much lost their shit over this, but none more so than Aidan Burley (MP for Cannock Chase).

Describing it as both the “most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen” and “leftie multi-cultural crap” on his Twitter feed, Burley (who had once attended a stag party in Nazi uniform and toasted the Nazi regime, along with also having been caught texting and dozing off during a talk by a holocaust survivor at Auschwitz) went from obscurity to persona non-grata in less than 300 characters – even prime minister David Cameron was to later refer to him as a “twat” (albeit in an oblique way). When it wasn't Burley, it was right-wing journalists who whinged about the tribute to the NHS (yeah, free healthcare for all – it's not as if that's praise-worthy, or anything) and described the whole event as Marxist propaganda. I'm sure somewhere there will even have been one particularly bitter hack who, upon the appearance of Tim Berners-Lee (the British inventor of the world-wide web) and his tweeted declaration through the illuminated seats of the stadium that, “This Is For Everyone”, probably ran screaming out of the house, still clutching his half-written letter to the Daily Mail, and began tearing through the streets yelling “Agh! The communists are coming! The communists are coming!!”

It could be reasoned that what ultimately banished my cynicism about the opening ceremony was that I was being shown a Britain that I recognised and could relate to. I have never in my life felt particularly patriotic, I think it's a narcissistic, self-deluding emotion in which one perceives their home nation to be superior simply by virtue of having been born there, and I can genuinely feel the cracking of my entire body as it collapses inwards to form the grotesquely contorted shape of the yet-to-be-invented “Rubik's Cringe” whenever people express national pride (especially when they try to be as gung-ho and red, white, and blue about their country as the Americans – stop that, all of you, you sound fucking ridiculous). But, I have to confess, that there are times when I do feel an imperceptibly tiny twinge of pride by association at what some of the other residents of this quirky little isle have achieved. It feels quite nice to be able to say that I'm from the same small island as Tim Berners-Lee, Newton, Darwin, Brunel, Thomas Paine, Alan Turing … kind of like wearing an “I'm with genius” T-shirt.

Despite having been lifted out of my despondent apathy by the opening ceremony, I still can't bring myself round to enjoying the sport of it; it is, after all, sport, and my relationship with it hasn't really changed enough to want to actually watch it. About the only thing I enjoyed at school was hockey (this being the UK meant it was played on concrete playgrounds that had been liberally sprinkled with sufficient grit to scrape your legs to shit on and massive cracks to twist your ankles in), and that's mostly due to the fact that I was quite good at it and was allowed to carry a stick with which I could inflict knee-based violence upon any fucker who came near me. I used to like cross-country running too, but that was mostly due to Mat Recardo and I having struck a deal with our P.E teacher (namely that he let us run the cross-country course each week instead of playing rugby, a sport we both hated and sucked at – amazingly, he saw how this was a win for all concerned and agreed). Even so, I still can't feel positive about the games as a whole because it really is an overpriced sports day that will lose us a lot of money (it always does).

What I do feel positive about, however, is the effect that both the games and the opening ceremony will hopefully have on our attitude towards our national culture. As I said, what banished my doubts about the ceremony was that it showed me a Britain that I knew, one that I lived in and saw every day, rather than the one dreamed up in the minds of those whose privileged positions utterly disconnect them from the reality of living in this country. To see athletes like Mo Farrah and Jessica Ennis winning gold medals last week was satisfying not just because the British had won something, but because it was a massive “fuck you” to obnoxious twats like the BNP, the EDL, and the Daily Mail, the latter of which hastily re-wrote, then withdrew, an article from their website which noted, in reference to the “Frankie and June” segment of the opening ceremony, the impossibility of finding an educated white middle-aged woman happily married to a black man. You know … like Jessica Ennis' parents.

I take a certain perverse pleasure in the cognitive dissonance that must have raged through the empty minds and purple faces of right-wing fuck-nuggets when Mohamed Farrah, a Somali-born muslim immigrant and British citizen, was to be seen proudly draped in the union flag and clutching the gold medal he'd just won for a country that, if the average racist dick-splash were given half a chance, they'd gleefully kick him out of. One of my absolute favourite tweets was from last saturday night when Britain scooped an astonishing six gold medals (three of them in the space of an hour); @PrimlyStable wrote “One black champion, one white champion, one mixed-race champion. THIS IS BRITAIN, 2012. Fuck you, EDL”. I couldn't agree more. I hoped every last bigoted shit-bag in the country was choking on their own apoplectic rage that night, just as I hoped to see the dream of @OliverCooper realised in which an image of Mo Farrah wrapped in the flag was pasted on every billboard in the country just to shove it down the EDL and BNP's throats.

When I look at the opening ceremony (and the games themselves) I can see without doubt that this is the Britain inhabited by you and me, not the wealthy, white, inheritors of a faded empire – an imperialistic anachronism of dubious glories that's being lived in by the government, the monarchy, and the right-wing, flag-waving cock-wallets who insult every one of us whenever they open the sluice gates in their faces and a torrent of sewage floods out. This Britain is vibrant, pulsating with life, bursting with colour, it has energy, variety, and it has heart. It is a Britain that is richer because of its differences, not in spite of them; I have always felt that we should be far more proud of the fact that we are, without doubt, the most successfully integrated multicultural society in the world. Nowhere else will you find such a gloriously diverse ethnic and cultural mix working with such co-operation and cohesion, not even in America (sorry guys, it's true – you might have a black president but you still have far greater socio-economic inequalities along lines of race and ethnicity that most western nations).

Britain is a better place than it otherwise would be because we open ourselves up, not shut ourselves away, and so much of what we've done we have shared freely and with great pride; Tim Berners-Lee invented the world-wide web and just gave it away – he could have patented his creation and made enough money to employ Bill Gates as his “groom of the stool” (look it up), but he didn't because he just wanted to make it easier for people to share stuff over the internet. We birthed the industrial revolution and then practically handed it over to the rest of the world saying, “there you go, see what you can do with it”. We gave everyone The Beatles, The Who, and The Rolling Stones; then, when we had a few decades spare, we gave them Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, The Sex Pistols, Queen, The Cure, Elton John, The Clash, The Jam, Radiohead, Dizzee Rascal, Pink Floyd, The Prodigy, New Order, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Joy Division, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, George Michael, and countless acts besides.

Kenneth Branagh opened his role as Brunel by quoting Caliban from “The Tempest” (act 3, scene 2); “Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises”. I can think of nothing finer to describe how a nation that positively fizzes with a million different kinds of energy, the sights and the sounds, is something to be celebrated, not feared (unless you're Saudi Arabia or Iran, in which case, due to the ceremony being carried live on TV, you will have accidentally broadcast the first lesbian kiss ever in your respective countries – never mind, eh?) We should be proud of all this, far prouder than we are, and we should welcome the never-ending change with open arms and embrace the infinite bounty of difference we enjoy, because, as we were quite rightly told, and as the 205 copper petals of the stunningly beautiful Olympic cauldron came together to represent the competing nations, “this is for everyone”.

The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth

September 29th 2012

Recently, whilst casually sliding through the list of potential choices for sonic accompaniment to my morning trek to work using the touch screen of my other half's MP3 player (he was asleep, he didn't miss it), I overheard a conversation from the back of the bus that actually put a spring in my step for the rest of the day. One of the normally self-absorbed and entitled little private school shits that I found myself daily sharing public transport with was thoroughly pwning one of her colleagues who, in spite of what must have been a not insubstantial educational investment by her parents, had expounded the idea that science was stupid and pointless. The devastating blow, delivered effortlessly by her contemporary, was the unassailable point that science was entirely responsible for eradicating the diseases that made her existence even possible. Just as I had done earlier in the month when reacquainted with moments in the life of one of my heroes, Neil Armstrong, I felt a twinge of pride at the thought that, as with almost every aspect of the modern world, a geek was responsible for the progress.

It goes without saying (an expression which almost universally precedes the moment when someone actually says it anyway, so let's go with that) that I will obviously be somewhat biased in my assessment of the contributions made by geeks to our civilisation; being a lifelong egg-head myself, with nerd credentials absolutely intact (at the age of 8, in absence of a real computer, I made a pretend one to play with by drawing a keyboard on a piece of an old cardboard box, and fashioned a monitor, complete with drawn-on buttons, using the underside of an upturned tomato crate), I will inevitably have a natural and automatic tendency to, quite rightly, big up the achievements of my fellow spods. However, before we can dial-up our modems, launch Netscape Navigator, and log on to Excite to go looking for my bias, it is first necessary to establish whether my fashioning information technology items out of discarded food containers from my grandparents shop is the kind of behaviour that constitutes geekhood as I had claimed. I mean, what is a geek anyway?

Well, first off let me tell you what a geek isn't. A geek isn't someone who owns a computer – thirty years ago it was, but not any more, not since every spack-hammer and the miserable teenage flesh-bags they jizzed into existence bought themselves each laptops and no headphones in order that they might share their love of “Family Guy” with an entire train carriage. Being able to boot-up a PC and connect to the internet so that you can locate a suitable repository of dwarf porn to fap away your sunday afternoon while your other half resists the temptation to shove your uncommunicative, text-obsessed kids in the duck pond on their walk around the park does not make you the kind of brainbox you used to beat up at school for merely owning a computer. You're not even a geek if your entire career revolves around a computer – you can be a network engineer, web developer, digital artist, or programmer, and still not be a geek for precisely the same reasons that a garage mechanic is not a car nerd. It's just your job – it's what you do for money.

Douglas Adams said that a computer nerd (for the purposes of this post we'll take it as given that these words are synonymous) was someone who would use a computer just to use a computer, and I think this neatly summarises the distinction. To a geek, computers are not simply utensils, like a spoon or a cheese grater or a stainless steel melon-baller with a rubber-grip handle; they're not just something functional – they're objects of desire. It doesn't matter what it is, smartphones, tablets, computers, it doesn't even have to be a piece of consumer electronics; what's important is that it's never simply a working relationship (not even the kind with an occasional drunken fondle in the stationary cupboard at christmas), it's an infatuation – a “borderline obsessive to the point of stalking” love affair that will very often transcend every human relationship a geek could conceivably engage in over the course of their life.

A geek isn't someone who bought the blu-ray box set of the extended editions of “The Lord Of The Rings” to play on their shiny 42” HD TV; they're someone who bought the theatrical releases individually, then the extended editions, then the double-disc release with both versions and another 2 hours of behind the scenes footage on each. Then they bought the blu-ray box set (on pre-order the minute the release date was announced). They can tell you how Arwen was used to replace Glorfindel, why the scouring of the Shire and Tom Bombadil were left out, they know the date of Frodo's birthday (and the fact he shares it with Bilbo), and they can tell you of the importance to Tolkien of the tale of Beren and Luthien. They can tell you who the Argonath represent, and how they're related to Aragorn; they can describe to you the exact layout of every level of the city of Minas Tirith down to the last cubby hole, and they can do all this with a great sense of pride, despite the ultimate pointlessness of being in possession of such (largely) trivial knowledge.

While it is perfectly possible for someone to geek out over almost anything, it is fair to say that the overwhelming majority of nerdish leanings tend to list in the direction of science and technology – this is most obvious with things like computing, sci-fi, engineering, electronics, etc. but it also happily encapsulates fantasy novels, comic books, and other more seemingly esoteric fair. After all, when it comes to “sword and sorcery”, what is a sword but a piece of technology? Think of how many geeks who fall in love with fantasy end up getting into massive arguments with people over the minutiae of specific weaponry, which races used it, what combat situations it was best in, how would one best equip an army with it … however you slice it (pun intended), it's about technology. And as for the sorcery part, well, what is magic if not applied science but with the equations and peer-review process left out? How often do we see wizards poring over dusty, faded scrolls filled with ancient knowledge to find the right spell, or mixing ingredients to make potions?

The top-shelf spaz-mag genre which has inspired and encouraged my own personal nerdgasms has always, as I'm sure you've already surmised, been the one dedicated to the subject of computing; ever since I've owned a computer I've been almost hell-bent on using them for any and every possible purpose, whether it was appropriate or not (I even met a future ex-fiancée using one, and this was back when there was barely an internet and those of us using it were treated with a great deal of suspicion by the general public). Since the age of ten I have crowbarred my computer into almost every task for which it was remotely possible that a role could be found for it, including maintaining a spreadsheet of the weights of our pet rats (complete with line graph showing changes over time) so that we could not only know exactly which ones should be getting fewer spoonfuls of Onken Bio-Pot cherry yoghurt, but also so that we had the cold, hard numbers to show them if they ever complained about the celery platter they'd been given whilst insisting that they were simply “big boned”.

Despite the, occasionally violent, insistence of the varying genius minds responsible for creative childhood nicknames like “boffin”, “brainbox”, and “professor”, I was never really the full-on science nerd they imagined me to be. It's true enough that computing is not just a fine example of science in action but also, undoubtedly, an entire branch of science all by itself, but I'm sure it was the nitty-gritty, test tubes and Bunsen burners end of the spectrum that they were thinking of specifically, and that was never entirely my thing. I loved chemistry, biology, and physics, sure (I took the latter to exam level and did ok), but I always felt more like a cheerleader for science, rather than one of the team and, like your traditional cheerleaders, I loved the game, understood the rules, and could explain them reasonably well to anyone, but I would always recommend you speak to the players if you want to know all the crucial details. Also, I'm quite good with a set of pom-poms and will happily sleep with the team if it allows me to bask in their reflected glory (although this might just be my thinking about “The Lovely” Professor Brian Cox here).

Since the whole “jocks” and “nerds” thing doesn't really exist in Britain (it's largely just “swotty kids” and “everyone else”, and those who knew me growing up would undoubtedly attest to my belonging to the “swotty kids” camp rather than “everyone else”), and given everything that you've learned about me over the last few hundred words, it's fair to say that my initial claims to nerd-dom are very much supported by the available evidence (as is right and proper), and I say all of this with no small measure of pride. I have, in my formative years, been forced to run the gauntlet … or, at the very least, I've been forced to run like buggery from a gathering of the estate's finest paint-drinking, knuckle-dragging div-tards who, upon seeing a kid with glasses and an IQ that, unlike theirs, didn't put him on the same intellectual footing as a lobotomised gibbon, decided that the most appropriate course of action was to conduct their own scientific experiment into the elasticity of collisions between a child's stomach and several fists.

As I said, I wear my geek badge with pride, unlike a work colleague who refuses to ever acknowledge her nerdish attributes, instead choosing to defend herself with the fact that she's Indonesian (as if this somehow invalidates the argument). Sorry, Dee, it's got nothing to do with your place of birth – stereotyping a nation, even if it is your own, as a bunch of gadget-obsessed tech-nerds is not only a way of deflecting from the truth of the fact that you're a geek who clearly grew up surrounded by other geeks, but it's also a little bit dodgy in a “pandering to a slightly racist view of Asians” sort of way. In any case, you should, like me (and many millions of others), stand up and be proud of your spoddy credentials, declare them openly, and pledge your love and support for your fellow geeks. We should none of us ever feel ashamed to put on our glasses, don our anoraks, grab our copies of “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (2nd Edition) Player's Guide” and hold them aloft as a symbol of our unity in our obsessions. Why? Because, as I said right at the beginning, geeks pretty much built the world the rest of you live in.

That's right, every scientist you've ever heard of, and the countless others that you haven't, was a geek. Every disease you've been spared, every form of transport you've ridden, every life-saving invention that protected your safety, every house you've lived in, every meal you've eaten, every conversation you have ever had with someone who wasn't in the room, every modern convenience, every crucial necessity … for all of these things, and many thousands more like them, you owe your thanks to a nerd. In every nook, in every corner, in every conceivable facet of the industrialised world, somewhere, a geek has been driving the progress; somewhere behind every invention, every breakthrough, every quantum leap in human endeavour and the expansion of knowledge, there has been a (usually) solitary geek, eschewing social interaction until they can just get this thing they're working on finished, honestly, I'm nearly there, sweetheart, I promise I'll be along soon, I mean, I know I said that before, but it's only taken me twenty years of unwavering focus and devotion to the task at hand, a few more minutes won't hurt. Where's everybody gone?

Take, for instance, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web (let's be clear, he didn't invent the internet – he came up with the hypertext protocol that took what was, at the time, little more than a network of interconnected hard-drives comprising untold millions of files and gave it a usable front end that transformed the way we live, work, communicate, and trade; that “http://” at the beginning of web addresses? You have Tim to thank for that). In his youth Tim Berners-Lee was a trainspotter, and learned all about electronics by dicking around with a model railway set. For those of you outside the UK who might not understand the implications of what I've just said, I should point out that if you ask someone here what the archetypal geek hobby was, trainspotting would almost always be right at the top of the list, and with bloody good reason; who else but a borderline obsessive, OCD-stricken über-nerd would spend hours sat at a train station (or railway sidings in the middle of nowhere), clutching a notepad and decked out in the traditional trainspotter uniform of an orange kagoul, writing down the stock numbers of trains as they go past?

Then there was Sir Isaac Newton. Most people know him as “the guy wot invented gravity”, and if you are one of those people then I strongly urge you to wipe the drool from your chin, put down your copies of Richard Littlejohn's latest volume of pissed, pub-rant racism, and go back to school before you need someone to tie your shoelaces again. In addition to formulating the theory of gravitation, the laws of motion, and laying the groundwork for classical mechanics and optics, Newton invented calculus – most of us would shit a brick just trying to learn it, he fucking invented it before the age of 27. Not only that, but he had already, by that time, demonstrated that ordinary white light was composed of a spectrum of colours; at an age when most of us would still be struggling to drag ourselves out of bed, shake off a monstrous hangover, and rock up at work by 9am to do a day's graft, Newton was battling counterfeiters, trying to find hidden codes and meaning in the bible, and uncovering fundamental truths about the workings of the universe.

And what about Charles Darwin? Okay, I'll answer that for you because any theists reading might be answering, “Yeah, he's a stinking pagan atheist who created that disgusting satanic theory of EVILution which is, like, totally wrong and everything, despite what the overwhelming mountain of evidence proves”. Darwin's geekiness, like his theory, is beyond debate, in fact his most famous work came about as a result of his obsessing over the differences he observed between species, particularly pigeons. In order that his ideas on natural selection might be taken seriously (even botanist Joseph Hooker, a close friend, said that “no one has the right to examine the origin of species who has not minutely described many”), he set about becoming an expert on barnacles. He spent eight years, cataloguing over a thousand different species (hundreds of which were not from his voyage but sent to him by mail from all over the world) until he was, unquestionably, the world authority on barnacles. There's not a geek alive who hasn't had an insane passion for collecting and cataloguing some thing or another.

At the end of the day, however, the one person who best represents the point I'm trying to make is Nikola Tesla. If you haven't seen The Oatmeal's comic for Tesla, you should go there right now; I find it impossible to agree more with their contention that he was the greatest geek who ever lived and, after reading more about his life and work, I'm reasonably confident you'd share that opinion too. Tesla invented the AC electrical system that has powered your life, and the lives of everyone on this planet, for nearly a century; he built the first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, discovered both the promise and the pitfalls of X-rays before anyone else, and his ideas made possible the work of Marconi, the invention of radar, and the transistor (without which you wouldn't be reading this and the modern world simply wouldn't be the way it is now). That he actively avoided dating and forming relationships in order to concentrate on his work should tell you how big of a geek this astonishing man was.

It's difficult to overstate just how much geeks have contributed towards the world we all occupy today. The case for geek pride couldn't be stronger when we have such a rich history of extraordinary people shaping our lives throughout the centuries, and when, still today, the planet is replete with nerds of every persuasion flying the flag and taking us all ever further into the unknown to reveal the wonders that await us. 2012 has been a fantastic year for those of us who sit at our computers, spodding out over things that most normal people think are “alright, I suppose, but could really do with some football, explosions, or tits on them if they want to appeal to a wider audience”. What with the discovery of the Higgs-Boson (to a 99.996% probability) by the teams of particle smashers at CERN, the confirmation (also to a 99.996% probability) of the existence of the dark energy responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe, and the landing of a complete science lab in the shape of the Curiosity rover on Mars, it's been wall-to-wall nerdgasms for the last 12 months.

At the beginning of this post I made reference to Neil Armstrong, a man who will eternally be a hero to me, and it's not simply because he was the first person from our planet to set foot on another world (someone had to be). It was because he was so completely modest about his monumental achievement, and never allowed his true self to be swallowed up by the hype and glamour, seemingly never buying into the media bullshit that had sprung up around him. In a rare public appearance in 2000, he said, “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer”; there is my hero. You may be the sort of person who picked on the geeky kids at school, teased the swots and the brainboxes, and stole the lunchboxes of the class nerd, I don't know … if that was you, just remember this: not only did we build, and continue to shape, the world you live in, but we went to the moon, motherfuckers.

The truth is that we have already inherited this world – it's ours; we just let you live here. We gave you cars to drive, and medicines to keep you healthy; we gave you the internet for porn, and smartphones to keep your inane chatter from disrupting our work. Now, be good and let us get on with it …

To my fellow geeks I say this; stand up, wear your obsessions with pride, put a copy of “Revenge Of The Nerds” in the DVD player and crank up the volume. We've got a planet to save and a universe to explore …

Nonce Upon A Time

October 31st 2012

Before I get too caught up in the excitement at having finally reached my 50th rant, I should let you know that this could, in all probability, be my last ever blog post. Don't worry, I'm not doing that narcissistic, “Oh, woe is me! I can't take this harsh, abusive, blogging world any more, I'm leaving!” bullshit; such pitiful attention-whoring, the desperate expectation that my army of drooling, lead-paint drinking followers will validate my existence and wank my ego by imploring, “Come back, please! We can't hold a coherent thought without your constant wisdom!” No, the fact is that this trivial milestone rant says one or two things that might result in my getting killed to pieces, ironically by the religion of peace, for offending their not-at-all insecure faith, blaspheming against their religion, and insulting their prophet by referring to Muhammad, entirely accurately (at least, according to their own holy texts), as a kiddie-fiddling, molestation-happy, child-rapist.

Now, at this point it would not surprise me to learn that a fair number of you might be gibbering “he is so fucking dead!” to yourselves over and over as you frantically log in to Facebook with the express purpose of unliking the site, replacing your profile picture with one of you wearing a Chris De Burgh mask, and changing your current location to “Living with Salman Rushdie”. It's okay, I'm not disappointed – I understand fully; Islam has cultivated a reputation over the years for being somewhat reactionary when it comes to criticism (bear with me, I'm going for an “Understatement of the Century” award), such that anyone seen to be “having a go” is often considered to be kicking a hornet's nest whilst wearing a pair of pesticide-coated, steel toe-cap boots that have the words “all hornets are gay” embossed into the soles. Incidentally, if you're one of the small minority of people who saw the title of this post and thought I might be talking about Jimmy Savile, I can only say that no way am I touching that subject with a fifty-foot pole; I'm not that fucking mental.

While I've always been happy to mock, criticise, or otherwise take the piss out of religion, the beliefs, and those who believe them, I don't actually set out to insult people or cause offence. I may be sarcastic and confrontational, and I may ridicule cherished ideas that people have considered an essential part of themselves since the day they were born, but I don't go out of my way to be a dick about it (well, not at first, anyway). When I label the Islamic prophet Muhammad a paedophile, I do so not because of some deliberate, spiteful, troll-like attempt to provoke outrage in the faithful (although that wouldn't be hard), but because that's exactly what holy Islamic texts say he is. According to the Sahih Al-Bukhari Hadith 8.3310, 7.64, and 7.65, Aisha, wife of the prophet and narrator of these passages, was married to “Allah's Apostle” at six years of age, and consummated the marriage three years later when she was nine. No matter how you attempt to rationalise your way out of it, this makes Muhammad a bush-dodger. End of.

These passages, along with 7.88 which was narrated by Ursa and also documents Aisha's age of marriage and consummation at six and nine respectively, form part of a hadith that many muslim scholars dismiss as being one of the “weaker” hadiths, a claim that is no different from the one you frequently hear from christians when attempting to dismiss any particularly foul biblical dictat that, “You're supposed to interpret that passage, not take it literally” (numerous other variations exist, including, “That doesn't apply any more”). In any case, muslims will jump through a significant number of hoops in order to not actually outright condemn paedophilia, simply because to do so would mean dismissing not only those parts of the qu'ran that support it but also every moral teaching of the prophet – and given that he's the supposed emissary of the divine that would mean pretty much throwing out the whole of Islam. It's kind of like how christians cannot truly accept the fact of evolution because it renders the creation story impossible and eliminates original sin (taking the entire purpose of Jesus' existence with it).

Since arguing over the validity of claims that Muhammad was a bunty-man is an exercise only marginally less futile, and significantly less interesting, than debating the colour of a leprechaun's bollock fur, I would much prefer to leave the specific question itself and instead look at the broader issue it represents; blasphemy. To even suggest that Islam's favourite beard-wearer might have been a shrub rocketeer will result in, if not an actual stern murdering to the body and/or neighbourhood, a set of perforated ear drums and a severe case of “whinging fucking bastard” fatigue when they start spazzing on about you have committed a blasphemy against them. “You have insulted our prophet!” they opine. “How dare you offend our religion! Our faith! All the things we hold sacred!” Oh do fuck off, seriously … you miserable, self-pitying, little babies. I mean, really, how old are you? Do you have any idea how you sound to other people? “Mummy, mummy! The man said something bad about someone I've never met but I like and isn't me!”

Blasphemy is most often thought of as being some kind of offence against the sacred; cursing out a god, insulting faith, the profaning of deeply held ideological beliefs, all of which are wholly victimless crimes (much like smacking Piers Morgan repeatedly in the mouth with a hot anvil covered in bees). I mean, yes, okay, someone's feelings might be sent a little wobbly whenever their personal, spiritual convictions are having the holy piss ripped out of them by gobby heathens like myself but, ultimately, no one gets hurt. All things considered, blasphemy is nothing more than the screeching noise that deeply insecure people make when someone poses a challenge to their world-view; a lamentable and pathetic form of self-pitying outrage at having been compelled to hear something they don't like. In that respect, it's exactly like the Daily Mail (only with fewer attempts to blame plummeting house prices or the failure to cure cancer on illegal immigrants).

The annoying truth is that blasphemy, like the notions of ecclesiastic infallibility and the heavy-handed threat of receiving a severely burned and pitchfork-skewered bottom for doing bad things (one of which, ironically, involves putting things in people's bottoms), is a self-defence mechanism invented by religion to avoid ever having to be called to account for anything. Look at the first four of the ten commandments of the old testament; they're all about fending off scrutiny, criticism, or questioning. What purpose could this possibly serve other than that of maintaining power or exerting control? These are rules invented by those in charge, and for the express purpose of making damn sure it stays that way by suppressing your freedom of expression; telling you what you can and can't say, who you can and cannot criticise. It places them behind a wall of morality-resistant Popemobile plexiglass through which no responsibility for their actions can ever penetrate.

If history has taught us anything, other than that under no circumstances should anyone ever take Madonna seriously (it just encourages the self-deluding arse banjo), it's that when anyone is placed beyond scrutiny they will, without fail, sink inexorably into corruption. There can be no more horrifying a contemporary example of the human devastation that unaccountable power can wreak than the child rape scandal that's been engulfing the catholic church for the last few decades. They have moved accused priests to new locations, silenced victims through harassment and fear, bound everyone involved to secrecy, resisted all efforts to involve the civil authorities, denied culpability, pledged to investigate entirely behind closed doors, and even flat-out blamed the victim – all of which have been done to protect the church, and all have been achieved from the privileged position of having hell with which to threaten those who dare oppose, question, or condemn them.

The demonstrable truth is that the current pope, Benedict XVI (the child rape apologist formerly known as cardinal Joseph Ratzinger), was, in his pre-pontiff role as prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, aware of the many allegations catholic priests around the world were facing and, in fact, issued the dictat that they were to be dealt with in absolute secrecy, authorised the relocation of an unknown number of abusers, and placed great emphasis on the need to shield the church at all costs. Despite this, I will get my bollocks chewed all the way off by catholics, and even other christians, if I were to refer to his arseholiness as “that utter scum-fuck bastard”, “Father Dick-Bag”, “Cardinal Cunt-Box”, or even the shockingly mild, “a reprehensible criminal who should be rotting in jail for being the head of an organisation that has perpetrated, and sought to conceal, disgusting crimes against humanity”. I've actually seen people declare as blasphemous and disrespectful of religious faith the attempts of social justice groups to have senior members of the church, including Ratzinger, arrested and questioned by police.

In what variety of fucked up world are we expected, no, compelled to give a free pass to someone against whom there is substantial evidence detailing active attempts to cover up and facilitate the continuation of child rape? What kind of bleach-flavoured toothpaste sort of universe are we living in where a shitty, badly-made movie can, using only an even more shitty and badly-made trailer on YouTube, provoke violent riots and indiscriminate murder by those who feel disproportionately aggrieved at the petty slight against their beliefs, and instead of asking what the cocking hell we're going to do about religious zealotry we end up discussing the idea of introducing an international law against blasphemy? Seriously, planet earth, what the shitting fuck?! Did I miss a meeting? Did I forget about the referendum where everyone voted for the right to criticise kiddie-fucking, suicide-bombing, and other, similar expressions of faith-scented outrage to be placed much lower down the list of priorities than the need to protect the delicate sensibilities of people who believe in fucking fairies? Can I demand a recount?

You already know the kind of world we're living in, I'm sure (if you don't then you should probably take an occasional trip through that magic portal in the side of your house that leads to a place where the scenery changes and the temperature drops – “outside” it's called). Our world is one where religion has demanded respect it doesn't deserve and, through centuries of threats (be they of violence or damnation), guilt, and coercion, they have forced it out of us against our will. It's a world where, even now in an enlightened 21st century filled with iPads, takeaway curry, and skydiving space-men, refusal to give respect to these organised crime syndicates posing as forces for good will, in some corners of the globe, result in the loss of your personal freedom or, in some extreme cases, the freedom of your brain to send messages to the rest of the body without being impeded by the giant, breezy gap where your neck used to be. If you have to kill people to defend an idea, it's a shit idea.

Thankfully, calls for international laws prohibiting blasphemy, or the insulting or causing of offence to a religion, were shot down faster than a scientific hypothesis proposed by Eric Hovind. Islamic nations, led by Pakistan and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), pushed the UN to debate the merits of laws criminalising religious defamation, and not for the first time; the OIC has been pushing for these laws every year since 1999 without success. This time they were opportunistically exploiting the feeling surrounding the infamous YouTube video in a move that felt like a cynical protection racket. “Look at what's happening here! Violence, destruction, riots, murder, and all because of some offensive video. You know, if you would only enact laws that stop people from saying nasty things about our faith then this kind of tragedy could be avoided!” Imagine if, when you unwittingly showed up the bully in class for being thicker than creationist cement, he beat you senseless and then defended himself before the headmaster by saying that, if you hadn't been smarter than him, this never would have happened.

In August, three members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were convicted of hooliganism and sentenced to two years imprisonment for staging a performance (which they released as a video entitled, “Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!”) in a Moscow cathedral some months earlier. The group stated it was a protest against the Orthodox church's support for president Vladimir Putin; the church would later call on the government to criminalise blasphemy, and said, “We have no future if we allow mockery in front of great shrines, and if some see such mockery as a sort of bravery, an expression of political protest, an acceptable action or a harmless joke”. Prosecutors at the trial said the band were trying to “incite religious hatred”, and the judge commented that their protest showed a “complete lack of respect for believers”. Although the judgement had a political dimension (in that Putin really doesn't like being criticised), it offers another worrying example of the immense danger posed by unquestionable authority.

There was widespread condemnation of Russia's handling of the case; having hit the band with sentences more commonly given to those who feel “conflict resolution” involves smashing a whiskey bottle right across some poor bastard's face, two years was seen by almost everyone to be grossly disproportionate (the worst they should have gotten was a £50 fine for disturbing the peace). Depressingly, lessons have yet to be learned; Adam Darski, front man for Polish heavy metal band Behemoth, is currently facing two years in jail for blasphemy after tearing up a bible on stage in 2007 and calling the catholic church “a criminal sect”. While I find ripping up (or, in the case of redneck moron preacher Terry Jones, burning) someone's holy book to be a pretty childish act that seldom represents little more than a deliberate, and cheap attempt to provoke a negative reaction, I don't believe that it's something a person should go to jail for. It's just a fucking book, after all; you don't see furious teenage girls with appallingly bad taste in reading material threatening stabby retribution against those who destroy copies of “Twilight”. Oh, wait, yes you do … well, that is the kind of mentality we're talking about here.

These days, sadly, you don't even have to insult or criticise a religion to incur its wrath; you just have to disagree with them. In America, christians have vandalised billboards paid for by secular groups that serve simply to reach out to closet atheists and reassure them that they're not alone. How pathetically insecure do you have to be to feel the slightest bit threatened by the idea that there are people in the world who think differently than you? Sadly, Malala Yousafzai knows all too well the answer to that question; as an education and women's rights activist living in Pakistan, she was shot in the head on October 9th in an assassination attempt by the Taliban (who had earlier banned girls from attending school). Malala is fifteen years old. While many muslims have condemned the Taliban's actions they have also, with no sense of irony whatsoever, called upon everyone to pray for her recovery to the same Allah her erstwhile murderers claim to be operating on behalf of. That and 50 Islamic clerics have issued a fatwa against her attackers … these people really don't fucking get it, do they?

Malala Yousafzai meanwhile continues to recover in hospital, showing more courage and fortitude in promising to go right back out there and carry on with her efforts than that of all the EDL spunkwits who bemoaned her being airlifted to a hospital in the UK as yet another foreigner sponging off us will ever manage to muster in their pitiful lives combined. Support for Malala has come from all quarters, although I would urge Madonna to please pack it in; stripping down to a thong to reveal you've got “Malala” written above your arse is really not helping – you might as well put up posters in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province featuring Paris Hilton with a cock in her mouth alongside the caption, “Education For Girls Now!” Mixed, confusing messages, Madge – please go back to pretending every idea you've ever had is an original one that you haven't nicked from lesser known artists with more talent, you rancid culture thief.

I don't go out of my way to offend or insult people's beliefs … but I absolutely claim the right to. It is my innate human right to criticise, to mock, and to ridicule; to question, to scrutinise, and to hold to responsible. In fact, it is not only my right, but my duty; as long as we allow ourselves to be dictated to by a minority of those in power as to what we can say, who we can criticise, then we can never truly call ourselves free. You do not have the right to live in a world where you are protected from criticism; you don't get to declare that you are immune from scrutiny, that your actions cannot ever be questioned, or that you will never be held responsible for anything by anyone. I don't care who you are, or what you believe – if you want to continue to share this world with the rest of us then you can either stand up and take a bollocking, or you can fuck off. If you were even remotely secure in your faith, you'd be more than happy to put your beliefs under the microscope.

So, to bring this, my 50th rant, to some kind of neat and tidy end, I shall say simply this: fuck your beliefs; fuck your faith, fuck your prophets, fuck your gods and your goddesses, fuck your holy books, fuck your rites and rituals, fuck your piety, fuck your church, and fuck all of your lying, ignorant, kiddie-fucking priests … as long as your religion does nothing to deserve my respect, I will continue to disrespect it; as long as it thinks it has the right to silence me, I will continue to speak out; as long is it clings to ridiculous beliefs, I will continue to ridicule them; as long as it affords itself the courtesy of a privileged position beyond our scrutiny, I shall continue to afford it no courtesy; and as long as it continues to justify atrocities against men, women, and children, against thought, against reason, against logic, and against human dignity, I will continue to hold it in the utmost contempt … you're not special, you're not protected, you're not immune …

This milestone does not, in any sense, spell the end of my ranting … merely the beginning …

Thank you for being with me thus far …