Politics 6: Democracy is only the lesser of two evils.

When democracy was a relatively new idea in the 1700's, there were a number of arguments against it. The only one I believe that makes any sense is the most despised one. Giving people what they want is not the same as giving them what they need. Ordinary people were unfit to make decisions of life and death. Old-fashioned elitists were worried that democracy would eventually turn into an absurd popularity contest while no one actually governed, i.e., precisely what's happened. Unfortunately, elitism went hand in hand with racism, sexism and class consciousness in those days, but it isn't the same thing. In fact, there's nothing wrong with an elite based on merit. Anyone can become a member of this group by merely achieving something, thereby proving their fitness to have a greater say in things than ordinary people. That's not the general view, though. 'Elitists' is a swear word these days. It's associated with unearned privileges and contempt for ordinary people. How did that happen? The main reason is the way voters have literally switched sides. When universal suffrage was introduced in the early 20th century, socialist politicians suddenly had more power than at any other point in history. They set about securing more rights for the ordinary people than ever before, despite a financial crisis and a world war, setting the stage for the immense economic growth of the 50's and 60's. Despite their concerns for the common man, these politicians were often hardly common themselves. They fought for social justice on behalf of ordinary people. They succeeded admirably, essentially making themselves obsolete. Their way out of social irrelevancy was broadening their scope. All kinds of other groups needed help as well, and there were plenty of other social ills besides economic ones. These new ideas didn't appeal to their old voters, but attracted new ones, educated upper and middle class voters. On the right, traditional right wing parties seized the advantage and decided to appeal to the working classes. This is now the default setup for many western democracies. Two groups voting for parties that enact policies that disadvantage them, both run by members of the elite, who don't want to be seen as elitist and claim to give people what they ask for, rather than what they need, and actually give them what they want for themselves. Both sides lie and manipulate to maintain their positions, and the public is distracted with fluff and nonsense. The only group with a genuine representation of their opinions in politics, is business.

Politics 4: Watching the news is harmful to your inteligence.

This is what's wrong with the news. It's a formulaic narrative run by a commercial enterprise, which is why it's frequently scary, nonsensical and obsessed with sensationalist topics which have nothing to do with the facts. The facts are the only thing that ought to be important, but nobody wants to read that, that's what Wikipedia is for. But they keep changing these facts, and it's hard to keep track of them. But not that hard. The news makes perfect sense if you know some of the backstory, i.e. everything that's ever happened. It's like a daily list of changes, so it's almost in it's nature not to provide a lot of context and to ignore things that don't fit the stories that already exist. That's why the only important story about the civil war in Sudan for the majority of the conflict was the fact that no one seemed to do anything about it or care very much. This happens to a lot of important things. The news is so ephemeral there's genuinely no telling what's going to happen, or what has actually happened without getting your information from other sources, but less and less people do that. The news, seriously defective as it is, is the main source of current information. It is a playground for the smart manipulative assholes that politicians employ to communicate with the public. The only thing standing in the way of constant 24-hour propaganda from politicians, business and third parties is the people who make the news. But they're under-informed, underfunded and under constant pressure to keep you interested. Is it any wonder you alternate between being bored, frustrated, angry and scared every time you watch it? There's no way to fix it either.

Politics 1: Sociopathy is a political asset.

If only it were this painful for them, too. For me at least, politics are hell to follow and discuss with anyone. What I hate most is the staggering ignorance and stupidity on the side of the politicians, the general public and most so-called intelligent people. Last week's Dutch elections were quite interesting, but the discourse around it was just absurd, as per usual. Hence, a theme week:

Politicians are constantly involved in the pursuit of power, things like principles, ideals and even money are secondary concerns, if at all. The fact that so many of them drop out at some point prior to retirement should be a dead giveaway. What happens to these people after their political careers? Often they end up in powerful positions in public or private life, quite often considerably more powerful than they were. Politics isn't exactly an end goal. It's what you do before you become really powerful. Take this into account and their cynical behaviour becomes remarkably clear. There are some gormless idealists that end up in this industry, but they either don't get very far, or don't last very long. They are just so much grist for the mill of someone else's ambition.

Dutch elections most exciting in years, to no avail.

Surprisingly low turnouts for the 6th election in ten years, the same bizarre swings as protest votes went form the left to new viable options on the right. Controversial politician Geert Wilders has tripled the number of seats and is now the country's third largest, getting most of the votes of the heavily wounded christian democrats, proving that Jesus hates Muslims too, even though they're fellow Semites. There may be a right wing coalition, where it not for the fact that none of the parties in that coalition really want to work together, or have all that much in common. The left has most of the other half of parliament, but is divided into four relative large, and another 5 small parties. Absurd rainbow coalitions aside, some kind of right-left combination is most likely and indeed, most desirable. On the off chance that the right wing coalition does work, we'll be treated to hilarious scandal after scandal, then we'll just have to have another election in six months or so, at which point a left wing government will probably be formed, which might just finish it's fucking term. If some parties don't start fusing together, we'll need a fucking military dictatorship to run the country.

Will.i.am blands it up a notch

Jesus Christ, how bland can one song be? Will.i.am isn't exactly a favorite of mine, it always sounds like he steals 2 or 3 good bits from a good artist, then proceeds to surround it with pure shit. This is one is worse than most, though. There's some lackluster singing over a way too long intro, then a generic poppy ballad verse backing track backs the chorus, then it's back to the intro. I could have made this with Ableton, and I have no musical talent whatsoever. Why the hell would Micheal Jackson have been working with this guy? I genuinely liked Cheryl Cole's last song, because it had a brilliant base line, underneath the requisite diabetic coma of a love song. That video also had something going for it, weird outfits like some low-rent gaga and visual effects that weren't just as boring and confusing as maritime law. The split screens come together, it was all the same space all along? Just buy a fucking computer already, and do something interesting.

Congress is important...

Shockingly, Elmo is the only non-human ever to have given testimony to congress. I imagined there must have been some dogs and horses called before the HUAC in the fifties, but no, it's just Elmo. It baffles me that there's no video for this. But that picture says it all, anyway. Most of my google searches for video led to articles complaining about the marginalised role that congress apparently plays in the governing of the U.S., but none of that seemed particularly shocking, though. The executive branch is pretty much the legislative branch as well? Doesn't that always happen? Whether you form your government based on a majority in the parliament or just elect a leader, there still the issue of some kind of support from the legislature. And most shocking, according to the academic papers, congress issues stupid laws that don't work in the real world, but sound good and then shoot down the executive branch for executing them in a cynical way? Have these guys even heard of politicians before?

Comics briefly relevant...

If you haven't been following Captain America, which I hadn't since the Civil War crossover killed him, you wouldn't know the latest issue was controversial for it's portrayal of tea party protesters, i.e. right-wing nut jobs who have a lot of unfocused anger about there being a black democrat in the white house, etc. and are using imagery from the American Revolution as a symbol to rally behind, presumably unaware of the sexual connotations of 'teabags' these days. The joke wasn't lost on the writer, artist and letterer of the comic, who decided to make a mild meta joke. This infuriated those morons who managed to wrangle an apology out of Joe Quesada, Marvel's awful and widely despised Editor-in-Chief, who also denied responsibility and threw the letterer under the bus. No one seems to care that this is exactly what the Captain America comic should be doing. The 70's and 80's were full of cynical storylines about the Dark Underbelly of The American Dream. The recent Disney takeover of Marvel might have something to do with it, Disney is great at being inoffensive and knows all about being litigious.

Church claims pedophilia is everywhere..

Computer problems over, so back to a regular schedule. Ridiculous attempts at relativity from Rome today. Pedophilia is so rife in the outside world, people shouldn't be surprised that there are so many cases of it in an international organisation like the church. I'd never seen it that way, cardinal in charge of PR. It's almost as if they're doing this on purpose now. What the hell is wrong with an apology? Or massive show trials? Everyone knows it's been going on for years. It's also the most obvious end result of denying people relationships with adults and then putting them in charge of kids. Would you hire a recovering drug addict to be the night watchman in your heroin factory? Who knew billions of years old sex drives would trump a set of contradictory and useless rules? Why can't they just turn over the pedophiles? Society outside the church does harbor less of them, because hen they're caught, they're severely punished. And how could the church possibly be against that?

Give it a stupid name and the kids will love it!

Thank you, kid cudi for those banal words on behalf your corporate sponsor. Whenever I look for a popsong to wax lyrical about these days, I tend to run into this nonsense. Honestly, a service like this would have been awesome 5 years ago, but it's getting kind of ridiculous and weird the way the music industry tries to shove failing legal formats through our throats. I still buy music, probably more than I ever did before, no thanks to record companies though. Why don't they just give in? It's not like the film industry is any better, but these guys in music just seem to be insane about this stuff. Nobody cares about your stupid platform unless you have something more to offer than youtube itself. Many wishes of painful death for the marketing team that came up with the name Vevo. You can't just smack two random syllables together, you morons.

Superior pop songs

There's a dearth of songs like this in the hit parades, in fact, it's more or less what hit parades are for, deliciously sweet, sentimentally encrusted caramel lattices of music covering a gooey center of asinine teenage emotions. It fizzes, pops, it's cracking. It has all the style and chops missing from those dour representations of teenage misery or inexplicably awful rapper bullshit that pervades the rest of the charts. So why is it missing so often? My theory is the total unwillingness of record executives and artists to venture into this area without ironic quotation marks, lest heartbroken teenagers dismiss it as uncool. In the scuffle for some kind of general relatability to the public, mediocrity tends to triumph in the most surprising ways.

Physician, heal thyself

I sympathise with the kid, of course. There are dozens of therapists with all kinds of credentials on T.V., most of whom espouse some form of this theory, or something that makes even less sense. I'm not against the concept of therapy itself, but what happens when people who may well be quite competent in fixing your problems face-to-face need to summarise, condense and make broad generalisations of complicated concepts that may or may not be applicable to your particular circumstances, for television. The only discriminating factor is whether or not the fat lady cries. Ultimately, what your problem, or someone else's is, is far too personal to be applied to a rigid system, which is why most of them are either simplistic or nonsensical. Yes, Dr. Phil is often right, but the problems are usually kind of dumb as well. A chat with a good friend might also convince you to stop letting your kid beat you up. You don't really need to be told on T.V. that that's probably bad parenting.

It could have been good

This hilarious piece of irony is courtesy of youtube of course. Girl Talk is a musician who splices together dozens of songs in to two to three minute compositions to make something new, he has not been sued successfully so far. He features prominently in the documentary Rip: a Remix Manifesto, also on youtube. But the most interesting interview in that documentary is with Clinton's erstwhile 'copyright czar', who claims that the government had 2 plans for the future economic development of the United States: the first option was to throw enormous amounts of money at making the economy green, thus creating an eco-bubble which, after bursting, would leave the United States the greenest country in the world, the second option was to export all manufacturing to the third world and base the economy of future on controlling ideas through the U.S. copyright system, which countries would have to adopt to get the manufacturing contracts. They picked option two, and now that it's failed, option one is the only possible way forward until nanotechnology takes off.

Scientology is not a hollywood player

Ouch. I had the pleasure of seeing the last half hour or so of this extravaganza and didn't even care enough to hate it. It was terrible and no fun whatsoever, but still not nearly as bad as I expected. Maybe I just have a high tolerance for sci-fi, but I can't really see the difference with other bad would-be blockbusters that just don't manage to get from bad to so bad it's good. It's a great target for people who despise scientology, but otherwise it's a a waste of time. Boring and stupid, financed by cultists, but not incompetent enough. The most positive thing to come out of this is the realisation that scientology, or any religion for that matter has no grip on art, no matter how much pull you have in Hollywood. Great news for all aesthetes, we probably won't have to sit through god-awful more L. Ron Hubbard adaptations any time soon.

Don't go in there 4: Ghost in the Machine

You wouldn't think that a place like Hollywood, considering how much technology they need to make a blockbuster, would have such a luddite perspective on these things. But apparently, every type of new technology is going to kill, maim or embarrass you. You can't even make a phone call without them tracking you, except when you're the killer, then you can't be tracked, because of string of nonsense that doesn't even resemble real life problem. Technology can do whatever you want it to do in the movies, and apparently the public want it to make their lives incredibly dangerous and absurd. Or embarrassing. The number of films where a relationship blossoms online belies real world figures, but it does indicate that writers know how to recycle the plot from Cyrano de Bergerac. Here's a great NPR story about the guy who makes the flash graphics for fake hollywood computers.

Don't go in there 3: Magical Ethnicities

As a stereotype, it's not as bad as it could be. It's still horribly annoying, that most one-dimensional ethnic characters end up teaching trite life lessons to white two-dimensional protagonists. The reasoning is as follows: White people aren't spiritual enough, all their logic and common sense gets in the way, why can't they just have faith in the plot, like more primitive people, who believe the writer will fix everything for the happy end, even if it doesn't make sense. This is supposed to be a progressive message. Blind faith is the proper response to a crisis of conscience and any kind of ethnicity lives and breathes this idea because of years of white oppression. Though slavery is hardly dignified for the oppressors, it doesn't automatically turn the slaves and their descendants into morally pure people.

Don't go in there 2: Amor vincit omnia

This clip, from the only feature length romantic comedy parody I know of, illustrates the problem with most of these movies. Most of the behaviour associated with love in the movies are the kind of things that should get you arrested. All kinds of crazy stalker behaviour is fine, people spontaneous and quirky to the point of madness, unbelievably precious and cute and totally unrealistic relationships where no one has any flaws and there's nothing keeping two people apart except some convoluted misunderstanding. Even more horrible, because I'm the target market, are the films where some nebbishy, straight-laced loser learns to love life because he falls in love with a crazy girl. You never seem to call those back in real life, usually because you want to see other, less crazy people. It's a testament to the skill and charisma of most of these actors that you generally feel sympathetic to their plans to ruin a perfectly good existing relationship so they can have a perfectly twee happy ending with the object of their affection.

Singular fun

This singularity idea is gaining ground, but it's a bit optimistic. Everybody who's used technology recently, knows that better technology is no guarantee for better information. Even a computer better than the human brain will face that problem. How to deal with all the nonsense. It's a bit like when they cloned that sheep. It became horribly mundane and absurd quite quickly. What if we make an artificial intelligence and it's crazy or kind of stupid, or just a huge jerk. I don't mean in the sci-fi standby kind of way of a supercomputer running amok, but more in this kind of way:



Here's a terrible vision of future knowledge ghetto's for AI workers, courtesy of economics, science of depressing visions of the future.

I'm not angry, I'm disappointed 6: Legitimate complaints and right wing activism

The left is the center and the right is the new revolution. This is the last point in the documentary, which is full of interesting snippets, but this is the meat. This guy is pretty awesome anyway, but he's also one of the few academics you see popping in lots and lots of political debates, the other obvious one being Dawkins, who's just a shade too zealous to be taken seriously by his opponents. But this point, and the elaboration on Berlusconi are essentially the reason behind the weird right wing revolution that's been growing since the late 70's. The people, individual freedoms, revolution. All these themes are right wing now. Reagan and Thatcher began this thing in the west, the ayatollah in the Iran. The resolute reclamation of rhetoric and narrative from the left. Now, the status quo is heavily under attack again. But the status quo is now the liberal left, and the future is bleak.

I'm not angry, I'm disappointed 5: Neutral zones

Political correctness is the new racism. This joke is right on the nose concerning the problem with political correctness, it's really just as bad to overcompensate. And we're right in the middle of it. Race should for all intents and purposes be over, except it's really not, nor is sexism, homophobia or really any kind of bigotry. And it's not going to go away by pretending there's a neutral way to address the issue, because those just don't last. Remember when it was progressive to call African-Americans negroes? There's no point in trying to forbid people to use any kind of word, the word disappears from polite conversation, but that doesn't mean it's gone. There isn't an easy answer for this, aside from subtly making sure racists or sexists ore otherwise feel like their idiots for thinking these things. The ridiculously heavy-handed measures in place these days are not only condescending, but counterproductive. They only feed into already overripe persecution complexes.

I'm not angry I'm disappointed 4: Living in a mediocre world

The inability of the powers that be not to take themselves seriously has led to, what in my opinion is the most fertile artistic period since the 1960's, that is if you can stand the irony. It's so difficult to be authentic when everything seems so reminiscent of a sitcom. The only defining paradigm is if you mean it seriously. Because if you do, and it's not great, you've failed. In fact it's a lot easier not to take it seriously at all. I think it's one of the main reasons there's so much weird Nerd culture leaking into the main stream these days. It's almost always genre fare, but it's still a hundred times better than a sitcom anyone under forty can see is blatantly manufactured. Technology has a lot to do with it, but it's not everything. It just allowed a certain saturation point to be reached a lot earlier than it would have otherwise. Information itself has become a different animal. At the risk of sounding like a cybergoth, it's like it's becoming self-aware, but thinks everything is either lame or sorta cool because at least it's it's own thing.