AFK (Or, Our Virtual Grandchildren: Trading First Person Shooters for First World Problems)

I must be getting old - I'm starting to worry about today's youth. Or, more specifically, I'm starting to worry about tomorrow's youth. We live in an age where an increasing number of lives in the developed world are becoming increasingly 'virtual'. Something you've probably seen recently is the Google goggles; Google's visionary "Project Glass" - so called 'augmented reality' specs that serve to integrate IRL with WWW, and thus bring us one step closer to actual 'wetware' and the realisation of a human hive mind (think less Wachowski's "Matrix", and more Haldeman's "Tree" or Bertagna's "Noospace"*). Now, if you're expecting some kind of octogenarian moanrant about how the children are being sullen and spending more time on their phones than at the dinner table then you won't get one from me (the internet is fucking ace), but that's a gateway to the larger concern at hand here.

         

So, the complaint basically goes that people are becoming less adept at interacting with each other because we all communicate electronically now, be it by text message, on facebook or by shrieking abuse at each other on Youtube comments. People don't talk in the queue at the supermarket anymore, we don't chat to the people next to us on the bus - we just sit there in silence listening to wubwub and informing the world through "status updates" about how FML. Ironically, we have even begun to become shit at doing those thing which we introduced to replace face-to-face contact in the first place, such as writing letters and making telephone calls**.

Similarly, more and more people are becoming increasingly immersed in fake worlds. The video games industry is growing incredibly rapidly, and the number - and perhaps more importantly, the demographic variety - of users is fuelling this expansion. Whereas before, interactive electronic escapism was the preserve of an elite few (male, white, socially inept, ages 13-24), it has since become a mainstream industry with serious financial clout, artistic credence and an audience that can no longer be defined simply as those that we (well, you) avoided at high school. Essentially, an exponentially growing number and greater diversity of people can't wait to get away from reality***. 

Now, to qualify this, it should be noted that escapism is nothing new or unusual: people have been finding ways to escape the daily misery of existence - be it films, books, music, hard drugs, fine art or homebrew liquor - for (presumably) as long as people have had access to means of escape. The difference is that, as an escapist medium, video games often strive to emulate reality - and unlike films or books, which can also emulate reality, or drugs and alcohol which enhance/fuck off reality - video games are both interactive and simulative in a way that, say, board games are not. Essentially, we trade one interactive (real) reality for another. Even those games which don't (try to) aesthetically emulate reality - sci-fi or fantasy games such as World of Warcraft and Eve - often emulate it in other ways: you interact with other people, you get "jobs" and do work, make friends and work towards bettering yourself. Indeed, games such as Eve have not uncommonly been described as having a second job, whilst "games" such as Second Life (attempt) to do exactly what they suggest. In these games, we don't follow a written plot, we create our own. The case of 'social networking' is perhaps less extreme if only because it's not really escapism, but what we are doing is still indicative of this trend in that we are blurring the boundaries between what is "real" and what is virtual.  

Now, I must stress - I don't really give a toss about this. In fact, I never cease to be captivated by the converging relationship of society and the internet. I love the medium of electronic communication: I probably wouldn't have survived my teenage angst if it wasn't for MSN messenger, I had my own clan on an MMO browser game and many a seasoned veteran can attest to my fuxxing l33t super skillz at BF2142 and CS:S****, and I'm probably far too proud of the fact that I asked out my first girlfriend by SMS. I love escapism (of pretty much any variety) and I find the internet, both in concept and experience, to be utterly fascinating - a true, functional, international anarchy. However, I'm not utterly dependent on the internet: I have a relatively healthy social life, I enjoy the arts (outwith the net), I don't have Twitter, I don't play WoW for twenty three hours a day and I only write this blog because everyone is stupid, writing is cathartic and I don't want to die from a stress induced tumour. I'm not the only one either: the vast majority of people I know don't live on the internet, they strike a balance between IRL and the web.

The problem, I think, is that more and more people are being born into an age when the internet is totally dominant and all encompassing, and thus don't know anything else. I was ten when my father got the internet in our house - I was fourteen before I really started to see the point of it - so I can pretty clearly remember what life was like before the internet, and when the internet stopped being crap, and when social networking became a thing. But my little brother, who was four when my folks got webbed-up probably can't, and has been actively surfing the net since a younger age. My little sister, who was negative two when we got the internet, even less so. Similarly, I can still remember a time when video games were a totally unconvincing mode of escapism - linear gameplay, mostly shit and unimmersive plots, bad graphics and comparatively little reason to pay them more of our attention than anything else. However, as my little brother and sister have come into the world of interactive escapism, they have come into an ever increasingly advanced medium that sports ever increasingly more engaging plot lines, far less linear gameplay, more believable environments and crucially, the ability to interact with other people in these imitation worlds. So, what then of our children? Of their children? 

And thus, as technology advances and reduces the gap between reality and virtuality, the saturation and social normativity of these mediums increase and future generations will be brought into a world where the material world struggles to compete for attention with the immaterial. Think of it this way: when I was my little sister's age people bought things from shops; you remember those, right? My little sister is growing up in a world where physical businesses (and much of the rest of the physical world) are being superseded by the virtual world; shopping, work, leisure, learning, art, making and breaking friendships, dating, sex, crime and even the wars we fight are being supplanted IRL by their cyber counterparts. This state of being will only be compounded in the future generations who grow up knowing nothing else. 

At this junction one might question what the fucking problem is then, 'cos what I just said sounds great. Like science fiction and shit. Okay, so that's a fair point - this barbeque does taste good - but what I'm concerned about is the moral responsibility of the generations who grow up in this cybereal future. See, the thing is, we (here and now) can still separate the moral prerogatives of real life from the moral free-for-all that is the internet and associated internet related activities. But, in this future that I envision where the virtual world is no longer an inferior alternative to but fully one vital aspect (potentially the predominant one) of human life in the developed world, what will happen to the ability of people to make morally responsible decisions? And if at the moment you are thinking "that's stupid - people can tell the difference between right and wrong between the internet and offline" then what you need to understand is that is your thought process, having graduated from real life to the internet, takes the ethical sensibilities of real life with you. What you need to try and imagine is the moral cognisance of someone who was raised on the internet and is then taking their moral conditioning from the internet to real life. For someone in this future, the internet is as real as reality - and that applies to the act of making moral decisions. There won't always be dry old people with no understanding of what life is really like on the internet around to run the country according to real life; as life and cyberlife converge there will one day be a country that is run by someone who loves lolcats and who helped to close the pool.

Now, what I'm not trying to say is that everyone in the future will automatically be an abusive troll or an idiot who jumps off a bridge because they think they have three lives.What I'm worried about is that everyone in the future will have a compromised ability to make responsible moral decisions in the real world. To use earlier examples, anything not linked up to Haldeman's "Tree" was considered inconvenient whilst anything not a part of Bertagna's "Noospace" was considered irrelevant. See where I'm going here?

Interlude. Now, before continuing, it is perhaps worth considering exactly what kind of society we are talking about here: obviously, if it is a society where the virtual world has become as important to the inhabitants as the real world then it is going to be a developed country (at least by our standards). If in this future poverty in undeveloped countries has been eradicated or if it is still present is an interesting issue - as it presents further issues regarding the moral responsibility of future generations that should be considered, particularly if levelling up on some MMORPG is still more important to them than the plight of those starving. Anyway.   

Continue. Think about it this way: so much of the activity that occurs on the internet and in interactive electronic escapism is essentially without consequence - the relative anonymity afforded by the internet allows one to seek out and do more or less whatever one wants with impunity. There are attempts being made to bring the moral contract of various IPs of the internet in line with that of the respective countries with varying degrees of success (anti-piracy legislation, anti-bullying laws, etc.), but ultimately the moral dictum of the internet remains more or less nothing. Similarly, video games - and most importantly, online multiplayer games - give people godlyke powers both ingame (can see the whole map, can be shot and not die, doesn't ever have to eat, can run up walls, etc., etc.) and metagame (dying doesn't matter, losing all your money doesn't matter, the fate of the country you are in control of doesn't matter, etc., etc.) and the opportunity to use these various divine powers on either virtual representations of people or virtual representations of actual people.

When you give the average person the ability to combine the amorality of internet life with the powers of God, the results are usually less than stellar at building faith in the inherent good of mankind (doesn't matter that you just threw a hooker out of a helicopter that you can fly without years of flight school before crashing into a children's hospital, doesn't matter that you just sold off the basic human rights of your country's citizens in order to buy nuclear weapons with which to commit genocide, etc., etc.). Imagine now combining that kind of moral reasoning with an agent for whom there is no real distinction between this morality and the social morality of the real world...

Obviously, the above examples are extreme and represent situations that are basically unique to video games (the average person, even in the future, will not have access to helicopters, nuclear weapons, fascistic political power, godlyke power or hookers). Moreover, one can assume that the basic laws that maintain social contract will remain in place - so you couldn't just run around the streets machine gunning racial minorities without facing serious legal repercussions. Further to this, I don't want to give the impression that I'm trying to support these rediculous arguments like "there is a direct correlation between violent behaviour and violent video games" - this isn't me trying to say that shooting people on the internet will make more people shoot each other IRL. No, what I'm more concerned about is how this new moral attitude might affect social moral opinion at large - such as decisions involving the economy, the environment, distant others (the case of poverty in other countries, for example), and more terrifyingly, foreign policy and war. 

If the moral conditioning of a society takes place not just in the real world but also in escapist fantasy worlds where one's actions are essentially without consequence, time or place, and where one's actual social interaction is in itself largely cyberreal I would worry then about that society's ability to think consequentially about social morality - that is, I would worry about a society's ability to recognise when the outcome of their actions that would be appropriate on the internet would not be appropriate for real life. Let's take the case of war, as it is arguably the most awful of society's actions.

Even today warfare is becoming more and more virtual. Obviously I'm not going to make some patently false claim like "all soldiers do today is push buttons", but the battlefield of today is increasingly populated by unmanned weapon systems and fire-and-forget missiles, a soldier's battlefield skills and equipment are becoming more and more 'netrocentric' and the nature of warfare is itself shifting slowly from armour group maneuvering, shock and awe, counter terrorism and counter insurgency to firewalls, killware, cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism. The human element of warfare is slowly being replaced by the virtual human presence and the virtual battlefield. If in the future this increasingly virtual activity that nevertheless has very real consequences is combined with the consequenceless attitude of internet behaviour - and the same penchant for simulated violence and aggression that is the internet and its various activities - then one might have a situation in which war literally becomes as consequential as a video game. Sounds like a bit of a clusterfuck, really. 

One might contend here that this doesn't matter: if it is the case that this "internet morality" has become the moral norm in the future then it has become that society's moral reality - hence, for them, these actions would not be wrong. However, with that said, I believe that we have a responsibility to safeguard the development of future generations - and I believe that this responsibility can only be realised by considering the society of the future in the moral context of today. That morality may change as time progresses, but we need a means of relating to the society of the future in order to act out our responsibility to them, and that can only come about if we consider them on the same moral grounds as we consider ourselves.  

So, one obvious caveat here is that this situation is in no way guaranteed - or even likely. But it makes for an interesting - if disturbing - thought experiment, and I would contend that it is important for us to consider the direction in which the continued convergence of society and the internet is taking us because there can be little doubt that it is affecting the way in which we think and the way in which we view and engage with the real world. Perhaps it will be for the better, rather than like this dystopian vision that I've outlined - but regardless I think it's important that we consider current social developments in the context of where they may be leading us: it can be difficult to maintain an outside awareness of the direction of current social development as it is happening, and we cannot consider ourselves exempt from doing so.

Anyway, happy internets!

* From Joe Haldeman's Forever Free (1999) and Julie Bertagna's Exodus (2002).
** How fucking funny would it be if this species, which has survived famine, plague, natural disasters, war and pretty much everything that evolution, God and ourselves can throw at us, became extinct because we all became crap at talking to sexually compatible others? I'd find that funny.

*** As an experienced online gamer, I often wonder how it is that people who are new to the experience cope when they are first exposed to the cesspit of moral decay that is the online gaming community (I was never a noob). Obviously, it's no different than what takes place on a lot of the internet, but online gaming concentrates all of that shit into one competitive, often violent, environment. Anyone who played CS:S after the game's popularity peaked and map modding became really popular will know exactly what I'm talking about. FreddieW beautifully illustrates it thus:    

**** Not actually true. 

Yes, of course, I'm quite profoundly aware of the irony of this being written on the internet. I fucking love irony. If I could spread irony on my toast I'd bathe in it.

Listening to: the DJ Alex S 'My Little Pony' glitch remixes, Van Halen.

But seriously.

A Book Review/Confession of Sin.

As much as the next person, I hate being asked what my "favourite" is. It is a puerile and unhelpful pastime that serves only to highlight ones unfamiliarity with the subject in question. In having "a favourite", we damn with faint praise those we profess to adore whilst calmly dismissing with narrow minded abandon the best efforts of others not as "almost as good" - a worthy of consideration in its own right - but simply as "not good enough". Artistic favouritism is a homophobia of the tastes, an aesthetic racism: "This is my favourite, nothing else is as good as it, because it isn't". I don't have a favourite band. I don't have a favourite film. I don't have a favourite person.

I have a dirty secret: I do have a favourite book.

It started when I was little. I read a lot as a kid (like, a metric shitton), but I found that despite the huge number of books I had (and still have), there were certain books that I read again and again and again - books that I would continually return to and enjoy with the same fresh excitement and glee as the first reading brought about. I came to realise these were my very favourite books. Through repeated readings and a refinement of choice balanced against the new books I read, I managed to narrow the competition for my "favourite" book down to just one or two. At the age of nine, I could (in aid of the fact that I would) tell you that some books were unequivocally the best. Despite growing up (a bit) and studying literature at University, I can still tell you what my favourite books are: The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea and Philip Reeve's colossal, magnificent Hungry Cities Chronicles (the finale of which has not once failed to reduce me to tears).

I list two works here because I have never been able to choose between the two. I tell myself it's because, as an individual book, The Hounds of the Morrigan is a better piece than any of Philip Reeve's books, but that, as a work very much more than the sum of its parts, The Hungry Cities series is in its entirety quite simply better than The Hounds of the Morrigan. What is a more likely explanation is that I read The Hounds when I was about ten, and Mortal Engines when I was like fourteen or fifteen, and that these books meant very different things to very different mes (and continue to do so). I seriously doubt that this will be read by either author, but if they do: thankyou both, in ways that the word thankyou simply fails to convey*.

So, the eagle-eyed among you will notice that both of the above books are children's fiction. In just over a month I will be a twenty two year old student of English literature. I've always been okay with this - I think adult fiction is limited by an expectation that adult fiction must be "adult" in events and themes; there is a degree of pretension towards maturity, both aesthetically and thematically, that prevents adult literature from doing whatever the fuck the author wants it to**. Children's fiction is limited only by the imagination of the author and the leniancy of the publishing company towards sex, guns and popular culture. This has always been my explanation as to why my categorical absolutes in literature have never progressed beyond "young adult". Some novels have come close - Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds is an awesome novel, but falls short in this context as it's basically a children's novel for functioning alcoholics (when I first read it I was an alcoholic, not a child). I loved Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, but I refuse to acknowledge it as "my favourite" because I didn't understand it. Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy gets a nod, because it's probably the scariest book ever written, but suffers in that it's essentially a book for big children. I never seem to be able to finish Catch-22 (even though it's ace) and let's face it, The Lord of the Rings is actually shit, we all just love the films. I really want to like Faulk's Birdsong, but after the great first one hundred or so pages that are full of fuck scenes so bad it would make D.H Laurence cry, it just turns into yet another book about lovers seperated by the First World War. Kafka's The Trial struck a real chord with me but, as might become apparent later on, that's not necessarily a good thing. I think it might be morally wrong to say that Maus by Spiegelman is my favourite book, so I won't. Same for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Essentially though, for the last six to seven years of my life, I have come to accept and to preach that the two best books ever written are two children's novels; The Hounds of the Morrigan and The Hungry Cities Chronicles. Until now***.

First of all, I hate literary critics. My copy of The Hounds of the Morrigan has a Guardian quote on the front: "If you loved Harry Potter, try this book" - a travesty so great that if I ever find out who wrote it, I will ritually crucify them and turn photos of their death into the most inane internet meme conceivable. My new favourite novel suffers a similar fate. Like turd slugs on a stained glass window, the cover of this book has been similarly mollested by the masturbatory witticisms of those who claim to have understood it: "Utterly compelling and always funny", writes Doug Johnstone of the Independent on Sunday. Well, fuck you Doug Johnstone. Fuck you and that shit, holier-than-thou, leftwing-circle-jerk, marathon-session-of-buggery-of-the-soul, dross Sunday publication that qualifies you to rape art. Same-or-similar also to Time Out 'Book of the Week' magazine ("Irresistible"), The Scotsman ("A vital narrative voice, inventive, freewheeling and scabrously funny"), The Financial Times ("Exhilirating... truly potent" - what the fuck does the The Financial Times even have to do with books?) and an extra special fuck you to Alan Warner of The Guardian, whose bullshit waxed criminal in praising the book's collation of killing irony in a review whose failure was to be killingly ironic in its failure to correctly appreciate this book.

It's obvious that I rate this book highly, so why am I so adverse to its receiving praise? Well, quite frankly, all praise falls short of just how good this book actually is. This isn't a book that you like, it's not a book that you get or a book whose beauty you admire. No, nothing so slutty - so common - as its being a good book.This book is not a best seller, nor a prize winner nor a lifetime achievement nor a masterpiece of the medium. No, this book represents the very pinnacle of what literature is capable of accomplishing, it represents the stellar objective of the paradigm, God's own all-she-wrote. This is the Ark of the Covenant of books (the Holy Grail can eat shit). This book is the kind of book that happens once in your lifetime because it is, in fact, a matter of your lifetime: the experience of reading this book is not one of enjoyment or appreciation but of feeling understood. It is a book that understands its reader. This is a book that syncronises so perfectly with your own life, a book that recognises you, a book that identifies you, that educates you about things you already knew about yourself - where every character, every place, every emotion, theme, sentiment, action and word describes you and only you - that you are simultaneously overjoyed and destroyed by the knowledge that you are the only one in the world that knows this book in its knowing you and that you and this book share a relationship that you will never have with anyone else. This book cannot be praised, and neither can it be criticised because to suggest an understanding of it is either to misunderstand it or to appraise the author for something she did not intend to do (for how could they?). To offer your opinion on this book is to offer an opinion on your own existence.

Now, I recognise the cutting hypocrisy of saying this in a written review, but bear with me - I'm working with the very limits of my grasp of language here. Allow me to try and illustrate what I mean with an analogy: I once found myself in a "love triangle" (of the kind the cliche of which stains the very soul) with two people I am very close with (specifically, I was on the "losing" side of the triangle) and one night I found myself having a very fraught conversation with my friend - my "rival" - in this sad affair. I don't know what possessed me to do so but I was feeling pretty vindictive and self-destructive, so I asked my friend "Ok, so why do you love her?". The following conversation went something a little like this:

Friend: "Oh man, don't ask that!"
Me, emboldened by a cocktail of despair and massive idiocy: "No - come on really, why?"
Friend: "..."
Me: (something I still have Vietnam flashbacks about): "I love her because she's just so much fun; I have a lot of fun around her" (which for some reason I thought was a pretty grown up and clever thing to say).
My friend then stopped, looked at me, and responded: "Look, I can't put it into words - it's not something I can really describe - I just do and that's it."
Whoosh.
It was at this moment I realised that what I had said was in fact incredibly lame, and really quite twee and unimpressive. I also realised that my friends answer was, of course, the only possible answer to such a stupid question, and that, even in his retreat from answering the question, I think I understood what he was trying to say. I realised as well  that what I had said sullied and dirtied with its unimportance the beauty and scale of the feeling that my friend was trying to articulate - that in trying to describe it, even positively, I had ruined it.

It is for this same reason that I dislike the attempts at praise on the cover of my new favourite book: these philistines didn't really understand this book - they didn't really appreciate its immaculate perfection, and worse still, they don't understand just what it is to me - what this book means to me. And in praising it, they do it a great disservice - a blasphemy, a heresy; they make it just a little bit worse, a little bit uglier, a little bit less than everything it really is.

So, "what is this magnificent book?", I hear you ask. "What is this Olympian feat of literature? Your new very best book ever written? Who is it by? What is it about? Tell me everything!"

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you because if you have to ask, you are not good enough to read it. If you have to ask what this book is, you will never have it. Sound elitist? Sound snobby? Well good, because this book is elitist.This book is so elitist.

In fact, "Elitist" fails to qualify the exclusivity and grandeur of this book.This book isn't like a fine wine - you don't savour it, mull over it and take notes and make senseless observations about it. It's not even like those wines which are so good, so exclusive, so expensive that you have to be invited to drink them. You don't smell it, delicately taste it and then compare it to other wines, and it doesn't matter what fucking glass you drink it from or which fucking cheese accompanies it - No! This a wine that you just know is the best - the wine that when you first tasted wine you hoped "wine" would taste like - all you understood of the possibilities of wine brought together with all you dreamed wine could be in a transcendent synthesis of  the kind considered to be impossible by the greatest thinkers the world has known - this is your wine, at your moment. For that is what you realise - this is not just a wine, that this is a moment - a concatenation of all possible variables of that instance into the ultimate symbiosis of feeling - the god of the Romantics. This, this is the kind of wine that you glug down and crash through as fast as you can because you have to know more, because you have to finish before the beginning has ended, you have to continue this adventure into your very soul, to continue this perfect interraction of the self and the external - and, as this wine attends to its final journey (for it will never be this wine again!), you proceed knowing that this is it - your final adventure, the point at which you meet God - that you will never again know this wine, at this moment, and you will never again have it so good; that it never gets better than this... for all the while, this wine, this highest of wines, has been continuing its final journey in its intoxication of you, and as you drink of it, it drinks also of you. And when you wake up the next day, with one less shoe and the kind of hangover that divine intervention itself could not prevent and now cannot cure, you understand only too well that this very best of wines is also a poison - a curse. For, whilst the hangover might clear, you are cursed to know that never again will you have that wine, at that moment, and never again will you feel that way - you realise that at that moment when you dropped the empty bottle over someone's garden wall, you would never again find that bottle of wine. My new favorite book is this kind of wine - the highest possible achievement of human experience, but a dangerous one also. For having burned through it in a dionysian orgy of fufilment and desire, I knew upon finishing this book that no matter how I tried to read it again, or any other other book, I would never again be struck by the same perfect instance as I was by this book. Even if I found another book I felt was as good as this one - another bottle of that wine - I would never again experience that perfect, harmonious moment of the aesthetic and emotional satiation of the self.

Maybe this is due to somekind of loss of the childhood innocence that was able to return me to my "favourite" books again and again and again. Or, perhaps it comes down to some kind of maturation of my artistic understanding, the same kind of change of mind (puberty) that stops cardboard boxes from being pirate ships but also stops us from thinking that pushing lego men into the plug sockets is a good idea. However, I find that I can still excitedly return to those books I loved from my childhood - that whatever it was that prevents me from feeling the same way about this book again has not prevented me from feeling the same way about my old favourites. In light of this, I am gripped more by the idea that your very favourite thing is something which happens to you just once in your life which you spend the rest of days trying to find again - the moment of climax during a one night stand with the worlds most attractive person, or the rush of adrenaline from that time you decided to play paintball with real guns - that the experience of your very very favourite is knowing that this is as good as it gets, it will never get better than this.

Perhaps now you are getting some idea of just how good this book is. Perhaps, finally, at last, you are beginning to understand what I am trying to say when I say that this is the very best book ever written. But unfortunately, you are not. What you are reading here is a failure - a mere review, just like those insects that died on the cover of my copy as it came to me. I write this from the standpoint of one who is hollow, empty - from one who has read the greatest book ever and is now desperately trying to remember - to conjur - the experience of absolute perfection. Indeed, this is not even the first time I have written about this book. The night after I finished reading the best book ever written I sat in bed, drunk, alone, suicidally wallowing in a mire of anger, despair and raw, unrequited emotion, and wrote in my head a review for this book that was nearly perfect - a review nearly worthy of this book. Of course, when I woke up the next day, I could not remember what it was that I wanted to write, and so in this piece I have instead tried my very outmost to recount how that review would have looked had I tried to write as it happened****.

So, what now? Some of the more savvy readers may be able to work out what book it was I read from this review, and if they do so, I congratulate them - but I also fear that in doing so, they may have misunderstood me. Some might question whether or not there actually was a book, or if I'm just writing about some hypothetical book in order to wax lyrical a Wittgenstinian philosophy of language. Of course, I don't know if you've understood my review the way I intended it, and neither do you (though this is largely irrelevent), but there is very little I can do about that at this junction, except to hope that you too enjoy reading the very best book ever. I am going to smoke now, because that seems appropriate.


* Pat O'Shea died in 2007. Thank fuck she didn't finish the sequel.
** Of course there are exceptions to this; Terry Pratchet's 'Discworld', Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' spring to mind immediately here. Note how though these are often marketed not just as adult fiction but children's too. I find this telling. Some 'adult' authors do seem to jump this great wall of maturity: Stephen King, Aldous Huxley (perhaps), anyone who writes about Zombies (God bless them, amen).
***Sorry, I hate dramatic stops too - but breaking it up like this means you won't just bang through it. I want you to stop and think carefully about what I say.
**** The plebian explanation: this is not the review of the greastest book in the world, this is just a tribute.


Listening to: All of Bowling for Soup, "Something I can never have" by Nine Inch Nails (on repeat till the bastard ends), Lifter Puller.

Beyond Good and Veil.

For those who care, I apologise for the length of time between this post and the last. Entropy has occured.

Now, as I write, I am currently in essay hell with 7500 words on such varied topics as Nietzsche, Poverty and Woolf due over the next two or so weeks. Because of this, I spend literally every waking moment of my life sitting in the pressure cooker that is the Aberdeen University library, simultaneously juggling such complex and intriguiging thoughts such "What are the implications of Nietzsche's perspectivist priciples and the resultant denial of transcendent truth on morality?" with "WHENWILLITALLEND?!"

This is a stressful atmosphere to be living in day in, day out, so, to try and calm myself down, every morning before I start work I go into Tescos and purchase a salad, some juice, a tasty pastry, and go and sit in the library foyer to read the news and enjoy my balanced meal.

Ah, the news. Natural disasters abound, despotic dictators ahoy!* There is nothing quite like a spot of semi-apocalyptic fuckery to help down my layered Prawn and Pasta Marie Rose. However, despite its important role in my daily life, the desperation of everyday life for poeple in other countries is not something I often feel the need to reflect on because a), other people do it better than I, and b), I like to think people can usually see what's wrong with the picture in the first place. However, today something happened which I felt I had to talk about.

France has banned the public wearing of the niqab. They've been talking about it for ages - and I think we all kinda knew it was eventually going to happen - but they've finally gone and done it. What I find unbelievable is which country we are talking about here. Not some enforced atheist dictatorship where religion is seen as a threat to the state and not some hyper-Christian rightwing republic where Islam is seen as a threat to the children, but France. 

I've been to France. It was nice! And yet, a country whose motto contains the word "liberty" has just made law a state endorsed - enforced - policy that seeks to control what its citizens can wear. What? 

The debate over the Islamic religious garb has been ongoing for some time now and has divided, as you would expect, liberal left and conservative right opinion. What I find interesting is the extent to which it has also caused a further divide within the liberal left, with opinion split between those who advocate principles of religious tolerance, those who see it as a breach of democratic values, those who see it as imposing on female rights and those idiots who just like the idea because it agrees with their holier-than-thou-religion-is-shit Atheist principles.            

I have my own opinion on the matter which is probably apparent enough, but before I share that I have another thought about it that seems to have been, as far as I know, largely overlooked. Everyone seems to have become so caught up in the debate over the rights and wrongs of "radical" secularism vs. religious oppression that nobody seems to really be aware of just how rediculous the whole thing is. Consider the following, taken from the Guardian (Angelique Chrisafis, Page 15, Tuesday 12 April '11):

"Kenza Drider stood defiantly outside Notre Dame, adjusting her niqab to reveal only a glimpse of her eyes. Scores of police with a riot van and several lorries stood by as she and another woman in niqab staged a peaceful protest for the right "to dress as they please"."

Also:

"Halima, a 53-year old mother from Vileneuve-Saint-Georges, who wears a normal headscarf, was detained by police for standing silently with the niqab-wearers at Notre Dame. She said: "This is the first time I've protested over anything"."

What I find most disturbing:

"Women in face veils risk a 150 euro (£132) fine or citizenship lessons"

What exactly are "citizenship lessons"? I can't help but think back to the Soviet Union when people were taken to prison centres to be "re-educated"...

But anyway, let's just try and step back for a minute, let go of all the hysteria, and try and think about this soberly, distantly and neutrally.

People - 53 year old mothers - are risking fines, being arrested and taking part in demonstrations when they have had previously no inclination to do so, whilst the French government are paying what I assume is thousands of euros in French taxpayers money to police these people. Over an item of clothing. I'm the only the only one who things this entire thing is nothing short of mad?

Again, leaving my opinion on the matter out of this as far as possible, I can only sit and look at these reports and think "this is nuts". People are being arrested because of what they are wearing - and for once it's not because they are wearing too little clothes, it's because they are wearing too many. I understand that the niqab has religious significance, and as such we need to concede that it may make people uncomfortable or offend them (though I would contend, that to find the niqab offensive is Islamophobic - we're not talking about a Nazi SS uniform or Ku Klux Klan robe here) but we are still talking about public arrests over an item of clothing. Not only that, but in a country with a population of some 65 million people, fewer than 2 thousand people are estimated to wear the niqab. Consider this: in France, there is massive controversy, demonstrations and arrests resulting in monetary fines and "citizenship lessons" being made over a piece of clothing that fewer than 0.03% of the population wear.

Personally, I find that farcical - bizarre even to a level that might be found in Monty Python or the work of Franz Kafka. It literally astounds me - ignoring the rights and wrongs that may be involved in it - just how stupid the whole thing seems.


Okay, my opinion on the matter, as short as I can make it:

There appears to me to be one main argument for banning the Niqab, that can be broken down further:

1), it is a symbol of female oppression and a sign of religiously imposed reduced female rights

And as a result:

2), It offends people who are opposed to non-equal female rights.
3), It has no place in a secular state that advocates equal rights for all.

Okay, first off, I concede, these are good reasons to want to ban something - under religion, female rights are often massively imposed upon, and moreover, I believe that secularism is a good thing that leads to a more cohesive, liberal and hence fair society. But I think it requires a little more thought than simply to conclude that "it is bad therefore no".

First of all, lets contend with the main point. Now, here's a thing: the Islamic faith does not actually require that women wear the niqab. It may be enforced in a country like, say, Afghanistan - to which end it is a symbol of religiously oppressed women. However, we're not talking about Afghanistan here, we're talking about France. To that end, the niqab is not a symbol of female oppression - quite the opposite - it is a matter of female choice. These people - these fewer than 2000 people - have chosen to wear the niqab. Thus, it seems to me, telling them that they cannot wear it is actually more of an impingement upon their rights than the wearing of the niqab may have been in the first place. Especially when one considers the fact that now in France, Muslim men are more free to practice their religion than women are. How is that not sexist?

Okay, second point, the notion of "offence". Well, here's a thought  that I don't think anyone every bothered to consider: what is to say that Muslim women are not offended by non-religious women walking around in say, next to nothing? and let's face it, with only 2000 people in the niqab, and potentially 64,998,000 other people walking around in something a Muslim woman finds offensive, who is more likely to be offended here? I also refer back to the idea that this actually abuses female rights rather than improving them; surely female rights campaigners should be more offended by the notion that the government is telling a minority of 0.03% what they can and cannot wear than by the fact that these women are making a conscious decision as to what they wish to wear.

And to the third point, the idea of secularism: basically put, secularism is the division of religion and government - more commonly defined as "church and state", as per its Protestant beginnings. This is a good thing - in a liberal, democratic, cohesive, fair and pluralist society, religion - which is necessarily the unfounded belief in grand metaphysicals - should never have any role in the policy of a country's government. Vice versa, in a truly secular country, the government should not be allowed to take control over religious matters. It is through actions like this that despotic, maximalist countries like Afghanistan become a reality. Although done in the name of secularism, the French government, in banning the niqab, has taken state control over a religious matter which is, in fact, exactly what secularism is not. Well done guys.

So, personally, I find the banning of the niqab a repugnangt invasion of female, religious and civil rights - something which absolutely should not ever happen ever in any country at all, let alone a European "secular" democracy like France. In attempting to take a step back and view the whole thing more objectively, I must confess I just find the whole thing really really weird.







*Geeerrrrooooon! that man who slapped  Laurent Gbagbo.

Carnival 2010, or, the story of two lustrums, or, how I stopped caring and learned to tolerate other people.

Ten years is a remarkably short space of time. Allow me to wax numerical:

It represents, in years (if I am not dreadfully wrong, which I am prone to being), approximately 0.00000008% of the estimated age of the known universe since the Big Bang, 0.0000022% of the age of our planet Earth, 1/340000000th of the age of the earliest known evidence of life, 1/6500000th of the period of time since the dinosaurs became extinct, 1/20000th of the timeline of the creature that is homo sapiens,  1/850th of what we have come to know as "humanity", 1/430th of the age of the written word, etc, etc. It is also 1/8th of the average life expectancy for a person living in the "civilised world" (or if you live in Swaziland, it represents more than a quarter of your expected life span).

Essentially, on the grand scheme of things, the passing of ten years is about as significant an event as a fart in space (which is essentially what we are anyway).

Tonight, millions - if not billions (we gotta wait for China to catch up next month) - of humans from all reaches of the great blue space fart Earth will gather together to celebrate (self-intoxicate) the passing of the first 10 years of this brave new millennium. And, in the spirit of our species, what a first decade it's been. In those ten short years we have seen the deciphering of the human genome, the legal acceptance and commercial distribution of abortion pills, the end of supersonic civil aviation, the declassification of Pluto as a planet, the first human heart transplant, the rise of religiously motivated, high tech global terrorism and the subsequent reshaping of the geo-political climate, the mass acknowledgment of the existence and threat of accelerated climate change coupled with an ever increasing social ecological awareness and motivation to take preventative actions, pioneering human stem cell research, the Web 2.0, as many as thirty seven different armed conflicts currently ongoing, of which eleven began in the last ten years, a resurgence of interest in space travel -  by both government agencies and in private commercial ventures, the discovery of the oldest light in the universe, the oldest known planet and the oldest human remains, the rise of China as the dominant economic power on the globe, some truly biblical natural disasters that either prove the existence of a vengeful god, or tell us that science is a dick, the MP3 player, HD and 3D television, a massive world wide economic recession that bankrupts several countries and ruins everything else, the Large Hadron Collider becomes operational and threatens to either destroy the Earth or find out where we all came from (neither happen), Asian Bird flu and Swine flu threaten to destroy the world (neither do), some American states legalise same-sex marriage, whilst others ban it after it had already been legalised (d'oh), the death of Michael Jackson, the death of 570 million other people... And I've barely even scratched the surface here.

I want to take this opportunity, before I go out and drink myself legless, to recommend a number of things that I think may vastly improve the world for the next ten years. I begin:

1. More people (Americans in particular) should watch the film Slap Shot. Starring Paul Newman, this is a truly, deeply funny film that takes that most sacred of American institutions - Sport - and uses it as a vehicle for a wide ranging and satirical critique of social values in Western culture and media, concentrating particularly on the ridiculous nature of a society that rejoices in  the promotion of competitive, organised violence but is ashamed of and considers offensive and inappropriate any open displays of both hetro- and homosexuality. The sad fact is, is that most people who watch that film seriously don't get it. The ESPN even went as far to label it as one of "the top ten sports films of all time", apparently unaware of the fact that Slap Shot is openly and derisively mocking of American sports culture. The publishers of the film immediately and gleefully slapped that ESPN quote all over the front cover of the reissue DVD. If everyone in the world watched Slap Shot and understood the message it conveys, I honestly believe the world would become a better place overnight. It's also a cracking sports film.

2. Less people should drink Apple Sourz. Apple Sourz is the worst alcoholic drink currently available for purchase anywhere in the world, and crossing into the boundaries of the metaphysical, I believe it is also the worst alcoholic drink possible. It is a syrupy green liquid that claims to be "Sweet and Sour", and manages to achieve both, but not in positive manner. It initially hits you as a sickeningly sweet, coma inducing, diabetic asteroid strike of the kind of magnitude likely to make your average nutrition expert involuntarily backflip at the mere mention of it. Shortly after which, just as you have regained control of your limbs, the after taste hits you; a taste so sour that you are immediately aware of every single individual taste bud in your mouth whilst, simultaneously, your gag reflex kicks in and promptly begins the evacuation of everything in your torso above the sphincter. It's a beverage which has apparently completely missed the point of alcoholic drinks, being neither as strong as spirits which exist to drunk make you, and not nearly pleasant enough to pass as a dinner drink. Infact, if one where to draw a graph in which one axis represented strength and the other represented taste, it would not be plottable on this graph as it exists on an alternate plane where numbers cease to mean anything and Apple Sourz becomes possible.

3. (an obvious one this) More people should support amateur and unknown artists and intellectuals (not just small things signed to small labels, I mean really really unknown stuff like this blog. Let's call it Mega-Indie). For Christmas, a close friend of mine gave me a small handwritten book of his own poetry. It was by far and way the best present I received this year - indeed, it was probably the best present I have ever received (Tracy Island maybe just beats it). Poetically, I'm quite a hard person to please. I don't really read an awful lot of poetry, or indeed, get an awful lot of poetry, but this little handwritten book of charm struck a real chord with something deep inside me. Maybe it's because the poetry deals with personal issues of my own that I share with the author and which forms part of the close bond between us, but I really feel it was some of the best poetry I have read in a while. The sad thing for you guys is that it may well never be printed and made available for popular consumption because you all have crap taste (sitting there reading my blog... fuck off and buy some albums by the Mountain Goats, they rock) which means that work by my friend and hundreds of other genuinely talented individuals like him go unloved and unread. Now, you may well be sitting there and thinking "Well, I would fucking read it but where is it?". Good point, sirra. I won't reprint any of it without his permission, but for more on it, here's his blog:

http://afterallitcouldbeworse.blogspot.com/


Maybe if you ask him really really nicely he'll upload some for you. His blog will literally change your life. Everything that comes out of his mouth is amazing, and the shit he writes is off the chain (this being a positive thing).
This one's quite good too:

http://kid-reflux.blogspot.com/

I am well aware of the irony of being an amateur someone promoting amateur things, it being an utterly pointless exercise as no one will ever read this (moreover, I am well aware of the fact that anyone reading this may well have come from either of the two blogs I just advertised, but shut up), however, I consider myself an optimist, and as it's the new year, maybe something new will happen, like I'll become a massive Internet sensation overnight.

It's only a small start, but I think these are manageable tasks set to improve the world. My work for the evening is done. Merry happy new year to everyone, and try not to fuck it up too badly.

Turd in a Foot Bath

And thus, I quietly (and drunkenly) join the legions of creative aspirants, angry-at-dadists and amateur emo-scene bass guitar players whose continued existence appears to revolve solely around whatever joy they derive from clogging the internet with their pseudo-artistic vent and wrong opinions.

I have, until very recently, been somewhat reluctant to do 'this' (where 'this' = poorly presented, barely received, contrite, unwanted and unneeded wankily puked opine, tarted up as poignant 'intellectualism' for the emotional benefit of the common or garden human who has yet to or cannot bear to come to terms with his or her own massive insignificance and the fact that they literally have nothing better to do). I would like to be able to say that this reluctance stems from the belief that anything I could write would be of no use to anyone who might read it, and that those who might value it would never read it. More likely though, it is through fear of the reader being utterly apathetic towards the opinion I didn't have, or that my reader base would inevitably end up consisting entirely of those revolting individuals who drink iced tea, spout utter bollocks from the comfort of their macbook pro and hold 3 different (conflicting) opinions, none of which are their own. However, now, as I find I grow ever more intellectually mature (or as the world grows ever more intellectually immature around me), I am more and more drawn to the idea of raising my voice. A recent conversation with a close friend of mine convinced me that although we cannot, as individuals, hope to change the world, we can and should and must at least attempt to do so. This then will be my cause, or a small part of it.

This then, shall be a blog of corrections which, if implemented, would absolutely improve the world. Unlike other ethically minded blogs, however, this will not be some ditsy, quiche-eating, half arsed affair that reads like a fourteen-year-old's diary. No, this blog is hand cannons at high noon stuff. I'm fond of definite statements: "That film is the best", "You are wrong", "This book is better than that book" etc. One might contend that this is not a good way to hold a view, and indeed, at first notice, it would suggest that I may contradict myself a lot. What you as the reader will come to appreciate is that, no matter how badly I appear to impugn my own prior opinion, everything I write is correct (at time of publication). For many, this will not be a pleasant thing to read (infact, preliminary studies indicate that the act of reading this blog will be almost exactly like lying on broken glass as a lonely and confused teenager masturbates into your ear whilst angrily reciting Plath and weeping over his guilt and disappointment at being born male) but you have my eternal thanks (nominal value 0.0000001p) for faithfully and loyally sticking with it, or to it.

There will also, from time to time, be art. I will never apologise for this.