"It's Only a Sentence"

So at the moment you don't have to go too far to find some debate or discussion about the Gordon Brown gaffe. Not without merit, of course, and its good to see the notion of British herd mentality somewhat dispelled by the variety of opposing reactions. However, there is one particular reaction that demonstrates the most detestable, absent-minded pseudo-intellectual way of thinking. "It's only a sentence", "people are over reacting" and variations thereupon. This is a stock response that crops up at every major news story. Jordan and Peter divorce; so what? There are more important things happening. This is true, but the problem with this response is that it has become automated at the cost of actual thought. Is what Brown said "only a sentence?" Well of course, at face value. "Arbeit Macht Frei" is only a sentence, yet it evokes half a decade of genocide. "I have a dream" is only (part of) a sentence, yet it fuelled the biggest breakthough for human rights in history. "The force will be with you, always" is only a sentence, yet it gave demi-God status to a man who made three slightly cheesy sci-fi movies. What these airheaded backlashers have apparently completely failed to grasp that it is 'only' a sentence providing you take a totally superficial approach to words, not allowing for any word to resonate beyond its aesthetic impact.
"Bigoted woman" sounds horrible, especially when said about a pensioner who is only bigoted in the eyes of someone who believes expressing a slight concern about immigration is a bigoted view. In any other context, say for example a pub conversation turned heated and one participant branded the other a bigot, which I've seen happen plenty of times, a mass reaction would be an over reaction. But in this context, the key to the outrage being justified is the context of who the words were said by, and what they evoke. With 'only a sentence', Brown has made public what anyone with fully-functioning neural passages has always suspected, that the public face of a politician is not worth the steam off their piss. With 'only a sentence' Gordon Brown has more-or-less confirmed that he thinks anybody with differing opinions to his are bigoted, even his own supporters. In short, that minute or so of dialogue from inside the car has revealed that the current Prime Minster (and it would be arguably naive not to assume this also applies to the potential two) is a complete fraud, who has nothing in common with his public persona and has no faith in the intelligence of his supporters, the people who stuck by a man that nobody voted for and spent his years in power trying to get other people to tidy up the financial mess he helped make before he was in charge. As such, the reaction is more than justified, and not 'another example of the British dwelling on triviality' as somebody put it. If this is what a politician thinks of supporters with a slightly divergent regard for some of his values, what the hell does he think of the people who outright disagree with him? "Dogshit nazis conceived to fuel the coal-heap" is one option. Feel free to suggest others. Its only a sentence, and a sentence is all it takes to turn the world on its head.

The Con Man

Something has just hit me and it has made the world, particularly the political climate, make a little more sense for the time being.

I've been frustrated by the niggling annoyance that Conservative Party leader David Cameron reminds me of someone and I've finally worked it out, its BNP leader Nick Griffin. He has that same flat-toned, grating public school accent and tone of voice, similar eyes and his Hitlerian side-parting wobbles in the same way when he gets enthusiastic about something, bikes or whatever. But he ISN'T a quivering, obese blob.
Then it occured to me, and I can't quite believe it has taken this long, David Cameron IS Nick Griffin, albeit an alternate-reality Nick Griffin, albeit an alternate-reality Nick Griffin where said alternate-reality hasn't quite panned out as desired.
Mr. Griffin, several years in the near-future, has finally resigned himself to the fact that his "purge all the blacks, deny the holocaust, England for the racist" attitude hasn't quite won over as many Britons as he had hoped. So, taking into account that this is a future in which faster-than-light travel has been developed and time travel is a reality, decides to take a trip into the past to change the course of his actions and ensure global domination. Mr. Griffin arrives at Cambridge University in the Eighties, where he gives his young, past self some important advice. His young, past self of course immediately accepts that he is talking to himself from the future, because he isn't exactly prone to believing sensible concepts and himself is the only person he will ever properly relate to who isn't in several pieces in a Russian filing cabinet.
Future Mr. Griffin tells past Mr. Griffin first to change his name, because 'Nick Griffin' just sounds evil. David is a nice name and its befitting a world leader. He then ensures the newly-christened David that it might be a good idea not to let on, in his future political career, that he's a gay-hating racist. Also, if you want people to like you, you should probably stay in shape. No more scrounging the bins round the back of abortion clinics or vet's surgeries. Get yourself to the gym.
Unfortunately, something goes terribly wrong. Authorities find and seize Mr. Griffin's time-travel device, considering it hostile, alien technology and leaving Mr. Griffin stranded in his own past. But making the most out of a bad situation, Mr. Griffin devises a plan. Throughout the ensuing years, and leading gracefully into what we perceive as the present day, Mr. Griffin acts as both a secret advisor to his new, David Cameron shaped self and an unbelievably OTT extremist with absurdly racist views that have no grounding in any functionable democracy, in order to make Cameron look a lot more desirable by comparison. He tells Cameron that the best course of action will be to act like a liberal; this way he may sway some lefties disillusioned by the tory-like running of Blairite New Labour and the horrendous descent of national pride driven by the sad face of policy-less Gordon Brown, while also maintaining the vote of confused Tories who will say "well, he, er, talks a bit like a lefty but he wears a blue tie, so he must still be all for over-taxing the working classes and discouraging immigration, right?". Cameron then gradually potters about TV channels, convincing people he's one of the kids because he sometimes rides a bike and listens to the Killers, and for some unknown reason he wants to hug people that wear hoodies (Despite his quote taken from the Daily Mail: "I wouldn't wear one, fuck that."), gathering support from impressionable non-voters and, in the privacy of his own home, rubbing his hands together with glee as he and his future self see the the sexy advance of world-domination upon the horizon.
Meanwhile, future Nick Griffin hatches a plan to go on Question Time, sit among a panel of very intelligent people, and reiterate to the nation that he is most definitely an idiot, slightly overcompensating said idiocy by implying that he hangs around with KKK members and making fun of another panelist's dead dad. Seeing this, Cameron looks like The Second Coming in comparison.
The 2010 general election looms. Griffin tells Cameron to smear the word 'Change' all over his campaign promotional material, "cos it worked for that black fella in the States". Cameron and Griffin smugly watch (from Cameron's makeup room as he is being applied with a concentration of makeup that makes him look startlingly similar to Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation) as Gordon Brown does little but frown and huff around party political broadcasts and the Lib Dems continue to try and figure out what they actually stand for, while the votes for Cameron flood in.
Then Cameron wins. Britain gets Nick Griffin, but sexier and pretending not to be a right-wing fascist (for now).

Well, Maybe Facebook Mobile is a bit much...

My girlfriend has a friend who has decided to renounce facebook, myspace and the like. While this is, of course, an acceptable course of action in itself (nobody's forcing him), the grounds on which he has decided to do so are a little iffy.

Firstly, this man lives in Australia, and has many friends in the UK. He has cited that the reason he is deleting his facebook page is because he wishes for his life to be more like it was when he was younger, free of the over-reliance on technology; SMS, social networking, internet chat etc.

Again, there is little wrong with strivance to be free of a life laced by the internet, but when friendships so long-distance rely on a quick and convenient means of communication, is disregarding these means the best course of action, short of wishing to live the life of a misanthropic hermit? I'm sure, at 26 years old, these aren't his plans.

But between disgruntled standup comics complaining about it on BBC3's 'Most annoying things' and those people you meet that say things along the lines of 'I don't participate in all that internet bollocks', I am a little perplexed by the apparent prejudice that surrounds social networking sites. What is really wrong with a fast, free and broad way to keep in touch with everyone you know at a few clicks of the mouse? The Internet is the greatest source of knoledge, communication, entertainment, everything. I recall there were similar attitudes toward mobile phones when they started becoming commonplace, but I'm sure there's already a 12 year old blog covering that somewhere. Maybe people that complain about facebook don't even know why they complain, they just feel its somebody's duty to create a backlash against any new technological development. Maybe they took The Terminator too seriously. I wonder if people were uneasy at the invention of the printing press?
Most of the criticisms against it fail to convince. Some argue that facebook shouldn't be a replacement for real, face to face communication. But it isn't- nobody is sitting indoors on a Friday night, pint in hand, talking to their friends on facebook who are doing the same as them. The last time I checked, pubs and restaurants were still pretty packed-out. I use facebook constantly, but I don't see or speak to my friends less. Another criticism that comes from a very close friend (who, by the way, lives in New Zealand and keeps in contact with his UK friends using the Internet...hmmm) is that if you really cared that much about all the people that you add on facebook, then you'd make the effort to phone them or write them a letter. Write them a letter! This just smacks of a silly, roundabout way to go to awkward lengths just to spite a website. What real fundamental differences are there between a piece of paper and a computer screen? They're just two different means to the same ends, and the former costs money and takes longer. I lost touch with a good friend from School because he moved house and I drunkenly lost my phone around the same time. Obviously I couldn't contact him to tell him I wasn't ignoring him, but guess how we finally got back in touch, nigh on 7 years later? Facebook. My friend may have a point regarding the addition of people you otherwise wouldn't give a second thought in the real world, but that's at the behest of the individual. I personally don't add people I never cared for before.

Then, like it or not, the world has gone the facebook way. Refusing to board the bandwagon in this instance is less a statement of noble defiance and more a petty clinging on to the less-enriched aspects of days gone by. What harm does it do to your integrity to have a facebook page? The benefits outweigh the flaws. In the real world, the world that the anti-facebook brigade seem so scared of falling off, whether or not you are a member makes no difference. And to those that wish to hark back to their bygone glory days, it seems to me that the fact isn't considered that in those carefree days you saw your friends and family every day because you had to go to school and you lived at home. That's the difference between childhood and adulthood, and also the reason that fewer children have facebook pages, they don't need them. In most cases, YOU do. Your friends from school, the ones that were so easy to network with socially, have departed for greener pastures, as you grow up the people you love leave your convenient bubble and spread around the world, and facebook should be commended for supplying a means to make the distant ones seem closer, not sneered at as a misguided target for hypocritical technophobia, and it really does baffle me as to why this hasn't occured to, of all people, a man in Australia whose friends live half a planet away.

Or maybe I just didn't take The Terminator seriously enough.