Nosemonkey's EUtopia

In search of a European identity

August 15, 2006
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

Prescott: idiot

Has John Prescott got a clue? Criticising the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition for, erm, doing his job and criticising the government? When his criticisms are effectively more like “I’d probably do it ever so slightly differently” than “you’re a bunch of incompetent idiots”? Did he actually listen to what David Cameron said – or is he just trying to remind us all that it’s him, not John Reid, who’s supposedly running the country in Blair’s absence?Either way, until the current “biggest crisis since Hitler(TM)” reaches such an extent that Labour offer to form a power-sharing coalition or National Government with the Tories and Lib Dems, as happened during the First and Second World Wars and Great Depression, they can shut the hell up when they come in for criticism, ta very much. Until the crisis reaches the extent that they’re prepared to give up a bit of party political control for the national good, they haven’t got any grounds to complain whatsoever.

August 14, 2006
by Nosemonkey
2 Comments

Booze

Erm:

“Mr Rafiq, of the Sufi Muslim Council, which is among several new Muslim groups to emerge in the past year, said: ‘The first thing that we need to do as a community is admit there is a problem.”‘It is like being an alcoholic – we need to stand up and say these things and have an open and honest debate.'”

How would he know what it’s like to be an alcoholic? I thought Muslims don’t drink?

/childish and probably dangerously close to bigoted reactions to yet more silly terror-related news

August 12, 2006
by Nosemonkey
2 Comments

Sensible terrorists

Psycho terrorists acting sensibly? What the hell is the world coming to? The best possible move Hezbollah can make – publicly accept the UN ceasefire plan so that Israel looks unreasonable. And then when rockets continue to be fired south across the border and Israel responds in kind, it can all be blamed on a few bad apples and Israel slagged off even more. Top bit of PR, nutty Islamic killer dudes!

August 12, 2006
by Nosemonkey
Comments Off on Threats and blogs

Threats and blogs

Good point, well made:

“If the threat level can only be raised after a plot has been foiled, just what are they meant to warn us about?”

And the general point responded to likewise.

In utterly unrelated news, Sunny has a good piece over at Comment is Free expanding on ideas I pondered in that Press Gazette piece on blogs vs. columnists – so, why do newspapers hate us bloggers? (He’s even managed to attract some intelligent comments amongst the usual maniacs of CiF…)

August 10, 2006
by Nosemonkey
52 Comments

Oh, come on…

Yesterday: Major terrorism policy announcement by Home Secretary John Reid

Today: A ‘plot to blow up planes’ is apparently foiled, and Heathrow airport shut down.

And my first reaction? Utter disbelief and a sigh of resignation.

They’ve simply cried wolf too many times before – until I see the smoke I won’t believe them, and even then I’ll have my suspicions. Remember the tanks at Heathrow just before the Iraq war?

Update: For the record, I reckon this plot probably was real – but my first reaction was still “that’s bollocks”. Desensitising people to this extent through the constant “oooh! Be scared!” announcements is utterly counterproductive.

It does, however, mean that I can carry on with my life utterly unphased by the fact that lots of people want to blow me to shit.

More coherent thoughts: We used to be told that we will not give in to terrorism. We used to be told that we will not change our way of life in the face of this new threat. Now we are told that we MUST change our way of life.

The threat of terrorism is very, very real – you’d have to be a fool to deny it. But the clue is in the name – the point of terrorism is to cause terror.

The terrorists themselves have been remarkably inefficient at scaring the bejeezus out of us, which is their prime modus operandi. They have successfully struck in the West remarkably few times – 9/11, Madrid, 7/7. With the exception of 9/11, the death toll caused by these psychotic maniacs has been, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant, and even the property damage and disruption caused has been relatively minimal.

Instead, it has been our own governments who are terrifying the populace with their constant warnings and announcements of foiled plots; it is our own governments who are causing disruption through airport and railway closures.

Terrorism thrives on the oxygen of publicity. “Martyrs” look forward to being remembered and noticed. So why do we constantly do their PR work for them? Why do our governments keep using their publicity machines to propagate the terror that the terrorists want to cause?

Yes, we obviously need to act quickly and effectively to prevent more attacks. I don’t want our governments to sit back and do nothing to prove the point, and I’d far rather we have a few more Forest Gate raids, non-existent Ricin plots “uncovered”, and a few more people arrested for allegedly trying to buy radioactive substances that don’t even exist than see one single other person killed for the twisted beliefs of a tiny, rabid minority. But I do dispute the effectiveness and sense of the current tactics, which appear to be little more than to ensure that we all have a good scare every few months, supposedly to keep us on our toes.

One thing I do agree with Home Secretary John Reid about is that we can’t afford to get complacent. But the more often you get scared, the less impact those scares start to have, and complacency begins to set in.

August 6, 2006
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Blogs, ID Cards

Somewhat busy…

Neeka has a roundup of Ukraine news responses in the wake of President Yuschenko teaming up with ex-President Yanukovych (the guy who supposedly poisoned him). Surely the Orange Revolution is dead? Is this simply yet another temporary alliance, a last-minute cop-out, or another sign of Yuschenko’s slow fall from power?

It’s not just Ukraine, though. The rest of eastern Europe’s also decidedly unstable. So where’s the next Vaclav Havel, and what’s he going to write about?

Talking of writing, more on blogging as a waste of time from the Economist.

Oh, and as much as I’m getting bored by the civil liberties thing, this can’t be ignored (even if the story is a load of rubbish, as I suspect):

“Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.”

Meanwhile, over in the Times, another ID story that might explain the Brown one, if true:

“Tony Blair�s identity card scheme could make up to �11 billion in �profits� for the government by imposing a range of additional charges on the public, a confidential Home Office memo claims.”

Then again, if Blair’s staying for at least another year, as the Sunday Telegraph claims, maybe Gordon won’t be held responsible when it’s too late to backtrack on the bloody things…

And now off to Fruitstock to listen to a load of bands I’ve never heard of and probably get pickpocketed… If you want more linky goodness to keep yourself occupied, check out the latest Britblog Roundup.

August 2, 2006
by Nosemonkey
2 Comments

Amateur Hour

The New Yorker – Amateur Hour:

“To live up to its billing, Internet journalism has to meet high standards both conceptually and practically: the medium has to be revolutionary, and the journalism has to be good. The quality of Internet journalism is bound to improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying.”

Interesting article with good points well made – more on this particular subject from me in a few days, most likely… Busy as hell…

August 1, 2006
by Nosemonkey
10 Comments

Terror threat tackiness

Yes, it’s an obvious thing to slag off, but still, this new public terror threat nonsense is simply so predictably alarmist it’s going to be delightfully easy to ignore. (Which is why, as one of those tediously obsessive bloggers you’ve all read so much about in the Guardian and Independent, I’m not going to.)

Still, launching the thing on “severe”? That’s so predictable it actually almost surprised me for a moment.

We’ve also got the new website intelligence.gov.uk (contradiction in terms, surely?), which seems to be the modern equivalent of those Second World War “that shifty-looking chap in the raincoat and trilby could be AN EEEEVIL NAZI SPY” posters, with helpful, all-excusing advice like

“Public vigilance is always important regardless of the current national threat level, but it is especially important given the current national threat.”

There’s also the moderate entertainment of wondering what happened to the missing “the” in the sentence on the welcome page:

“From here you will be able to get an overview of the provision of intelligence in support of Government…”

Still, as “we’re all going to die” sites go, it’s got nothing on MI5, which somehow has an even slicker-looking website than its fictional TV counterparts.

First, check out the logo of the main page – a spy agency logo designed by a 14 year old with an illegal copy of Photoshop and an evidently under-developed interest in onanism that has given him far too much time on his hands:

But it’s on the THE THREATS page that the real “BE SCARED LIKE THERE ARE TERRORIST ZOMBIE WAREWOLVES CHARGING AT YOU ON GIANT RADIOACTIVE SPIDER-DEMONS” nonsense begins to appear.

First up, the (utterly non-political for an independent agency, obviously, with its prominent placement and bright Labour-red backing) quote:

“The [security] threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before – Prime Minister, Tony Blair”

But that’s not the worst of it. Check out the new headline logo for the “THE THREATS” subpage:

All that’s missing is a bunch of exclamation marks to further underline the THREAT and pictures of screaming women clutching dead babies to their emaciated, fallout-addled chests.

The biohazard symbol, the indeterminate semi-phallic objects (that may or may not be missiles packed with DEADLY TERRORIST TOXINS that will be flying towards us with only 45 minutes’ warning), not to mention the – really rather brave, if you think about it – link to their dinky little page on weapons of mass destruction. (Remember them? Bless…)

But how silly of me! These new threat levels are meant to enable us, the public, to make informed decisions about how to lead our lives in the light of an eeeevil new menace. They are designed to reassure us that the all-knowing powers that watch over us are in control and doing their best to assure our safety. They aren’t designed to scare the bejeezus out of us at all!

Nope, no alarmism in launching terror threats, let alone so soon after the anniversary of the 7/7 attacks – that’s why MI5 picked such a tranquil image of the wreckage of the World Trade Centre to promote the sodding things on their utterly bizarre website:

Nice one, spooks – really sensitive and not at all designed to elicit an emotional response that you can manipulate to justify yet further erosions of civil rights in pursuit of the phantom menace. (No, not the crap Star Wars prequel.

It’s a shame that we’ve had so many scare stories now that I – like most people, I imagine – am now utterly desensitised. Hell – a rucksack-wearing Osama bin Laden himself could run up to me on the tube muttering twisted prayers, rubbing himself with nuclear waste, snorting ricin, and fumbling desperately for the big button marked “BANG” on his “Made in Palestine” bomb belt, and I’d simply ignore the bugger and go back to my book.

We’re all threated out. The war on terror is boring. Get a new act, already. Your predecessors could get away with dining out on “eeevil Communists” for such a long time because that was the age before the internet and the iPod. Attention spans were longer. Terrorism is, like, soooo 2001. And hell, that’s so long ago that Hear’Say were number one and chavs were still called kevs or neds or scallies or pikeys.

What was I saying again? Meh…

See? You’re boring us with all this terrorism nonsense. It’s summer, you’re politicians. You shouldn’t be working at scaring the populace, you should be on a four month holiday in the Seychelles or waltzing round Los Angeles or something.

Christ, HOW long until the next general election? I don’t want to get rid of Labour because of their policies any more, simply because they’re so damn boring.

Come on, people, launch a war on tedium and give us something to get excited about for a change – give up on these incessant streams of unoriginal and entirely ignorable PR stunts and give us something inpirational for a change. Don’t make me turn this blog into a cute kittens and “w0t i d1d 2d4y w1t ma fr3nz” fest out of sheer desperation, please?

July 29, 2006
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

Blogs and newspapers

That McKeating is rather good on newspaper columnists, blogs and the like. I may expound on this myself at some point, beyond my mere interjections in the comments there.From what I can tell, we’re beginning to see a new phase emerge in the media’s response to blogs. From “hey, cool – blogs prove that EVERYONE wants to be a journalist, and therefore we’re skill”, they’re beginning to realise that us bloggers could be a threat. Not to newspapers or TV news, obviously, but to the vastly overpaid opinion-mongering columnists, who rake in £100k+ per annum while the lowly staff journalists who do all the legwork of bringing us actual NEWS are lucky to hit the national average wage, despite infinitely longer hours and far high stress. Bloggers will never be able to do the latter better than the proper media (although there’s no reason why an online-only newspaper couldn’t work, given enough funding in the set-up phases) – but opinions are ten a penny, and there are already hundreds of bloggers out there who I’d far rather read than a Polly Toynbee or a Simon Jenkins.

July 28, 2006
by Nosemonkey
6 Comments

Subsidy abuse

The Department for the Environment, Foor and Rural Affairs (Defra) under Margaret Beckett – now off fixing the Middle East as Condoleeza Rice’s bitch Britain’s Foreign Secretary – has repeatedly cocked up farm subsidy payments through an ongoing mismanagement that could yet bugger up the struggling agricultural sector even more than did the same department’s balls-ups over BSE, Foot and Mouth and Bovine TB.

Which makes me wonder how Britain has managed to get away with just �2.39 million in EU-imposed agricultural penalties – none for mismanagement or poor payment systems – when Greece has been told to pay back �6.46 million for “various weaknesses in the system for management”, Ireland �0.17 million for “administrative deficiencies” and Spain �4.99 million for “non-respect of payment deadlines”. This all part of the European Commission’s attempt to reclaim subsidy money via a system of penalties for dodginess – 7 out of 25 EU member states being penalised.

The country with the largest penalties? Let’s think – which country is likely to have abused the farm subsidy system the most? Which country can possibly be responsible for more than half of the �161.9 million the Commission is claiming in penalties?

Yep, step forward France! �87.97 million in total, of which �77.13 million is for giving subsidies out for “ineligible land”. Yep, France has been claiming farming subsides for non-arable land.

This is where we’ve been going wrong – don’t stick to the letter of EU law, hustle. Work it. Let’s learn from our cousins over the water, and start scamming. Let’s claim farm subsidies for Hyde Park. Hell – let’s claim them for the Bluewater Shopping Centre’s car park…

Of course, the only trouble is that as long as Defra’s in charge of managing the things, they’ll end up stuck in some kind of managerial limbo, only to emerge in some dim and distant future where all livestock and crops have died of bureaucratic oversight and mankind has devolved even further into some kind of feral rodent hybrid, subsisting purely on alcopops and knife fights, and incapable of movement without the aid of an undersized BMX powered solely by envy and rage.