Say whatever you like about democracy, but it’s still the best system that man, or woman has managed to think up of so far for delegating power and structuring his, or her society. Democracy is so great that this will be the third time in two years that the people of the U.K will have been asked to go to the polls and enjoy the thrill of democracy, proving that you can never have too much of a good thing
If last year’s E.U referendum is anything to go by then anything is possible in the forthcoming election. When Theresa May called for a snap election, ignoring the Fixed-term Parliaments Act that her own party brought into effect just 6 years prior, the polls gave her Conservative party a 22 point lead. Now that she’s been out meeting the public she’s been able to reduce that lead to single figures. YouGov’s latest poll has the Tory lead at just four points over Labour, as at 5 June. It’s been a somewhat fragmented election campaign owing to a handful of murderous bastards perpetrating acts of extreme violence in the name of a morally bankrupt ideology. If these maniacs hadn’t forced suspensions to the campaigning, it’s reasonable to assume that the more the public would have seen of Theresa May the more appealing Jeremy Corbyn would have become and maybe the Labour party would even be ahead in the polls.
The parallels between Theresa May and Hilary Clinton are obvious. It’s like watching two people in quicksand, the more they struggle the more they get consumed. The more they talk the better their opponent seems to do. In the near future, if anyone has any sense, political candidates will just say nothing throughout their campaigns, a strategy adopted by Blackadder when he put forward Baldrick to run in a by-election:
So with Theresa May projecting all the charm of toxic waste seeping into an orphanage, this raises Jeremy Corbyn’s profile, without him actually having to do anything. When Corbyn does speak, he sounds like a 1970’s politics student who only got as far as reading Marx’s Das Kapital. I’ve got nothing wrong with Marxism per se, it’s just that I’m not sure how viable it is to the complex economies that we have today. Corbyn is also very open minded towards the ideology of terrorists, I have a hard time validating this stance towards terrorism in light of recent events. But whatever Corbyn might think or say is of little consequence, Corbyn’s most electable quality is that he’s not Theresa May.
Essentially, on Thursday the people of the United Kingdom have to chose between Jeremy Corbyn, a man who looks like he would be more comfortable pottering around an allotment, or Theresa May, a woman who we can’t trust to sit the right way round on a toilet.
A friend of mine made the following analogy of this Thursday’s election:
… so we are faced with a choice that is similar to being asked to move a dog turd. You can either pick it up with your bare hands and take to the bin, or pick it up with your bare hands and put it in your pocket.
Crude as though the dog turd analogy might be, I consider it to be fairly accurate one. The British electorate is once again being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils:
There can be little doubt that this general election pits two of the blandest party leaders against one another, offering the electorate a choice of either grey or beige. But, if our democracy can be so easily reduced to turd analogies and choosing between two evils, then I’m left to wonder if the terrorists haven’t already won.
While we should consider elections to be meaningful and terrorism to be a very real
EPeter Sallis, star of Last of the Summer Wine and voice of Wallace from Nick Park’s Oscar winning Wallace and Gomit, died June 2, 2017.
threat, I was saddened to hear of the death of Peter Sallis. Sallis starred in the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine for 37 years, and provided the voice of Wallace in the multi award winning Wallace and Gromit animations. As a child I spent many a Sunday having tea and sandwiches, whilst watching Last of the Summer Wine, which was essentially three old men wandering aimlessly around the verdant Yorkshire Dales accompanied by a hauntingly beautiful theme tune. Now that’s something a jihadist will never understand. In fact that’s what I recommend for radicalised extremists, they should be forced to watch all 37 years of Last of the Summer Wine, can there be a surer way of curing a person of homicidal ambitions?
Probably as good a reason as any that you’ll find for voting Labour.
I’ve written a blog now for maybe a couple of years.
Much of what I choose to write about is irreverent, and never meant to be taken seriously.
This week I was going to continue with my rants on the apparent rise of fascism across Europe and the United States. Then the British Prime Minister, Theresa (I haven’t got a mandate) May – a woman who has only won the right to represent her constituency of 74,000 people, but has found herself leading the 64 million people of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland through the countries most delicate period of time since the end of World War II – announces a “snap” election.
I was going to write about this, this “snap” election. Something that a piece of legislation passed in 2011 called “The Fixed Terms Parliament Act” was supposed to have brought an end to. But no, the woman with no mandate to even lead the U.K in the first place was now defecating over the final shreds of our democratic dignity. I was incensed, and this was to be my theme.
But, it was then I had an epiphany. It was as if the sky was torn asunder and a heavenly light, shone down on me. And the almighty asked me a question “what right do you have to spread your ill informed, personal opinions using technology that can reach almost anyone on the planet, I mean who the fuck do you think you are, some kind of god or something?”
In less biblical terms what happened was, I lost my internet connection for 12 hours and was hit by the realization that I was free from its limitless bullshit. The seemingly infinite and boundless “reckonings” of half brained people passing on their opinions of the things that they rarely half understand.
What Happens When Advanced Technology for Communication is Supported by Stone Age Reasoning?
An apocalyptic explosion of bullshit. When mankind’s understandable passion to protect their unalienable right to the freedom of expression, is combined with the kind of rapid improvements in the technology of communication that we have seen over the past 20 years, this facilitates, an apocalyptic explosion of bullshit. Or, what I’m choosing to call the information, communication, technology paradox.
As our capability to communicate has risen to the levels of what only a generation ago the authors of science fiction could only have dreamt about, the information that the masses have to communicate using this technology, is founded upon the same logical principles of thought as those people who lived during the dark ages. And I don’t wish to come across as being rude, but the majority of us have about the same degree of scientific understanding as a person that lived in the dark ages. Yes many of us know the term DNA, I’d even be brave enough to suggest that over half of us can spell DNA, but few of us actually understand it. The gulf between knowledge and understanding has never been greater, as is our lack of awareness of this gulf. I’ll prove through the use of theoretical anecdote.
Imagine you are transported in space and time to Mainz, Germany and the year 1439. You are standing in a room with Johannes Guttenberg and his workers, who over a great deal of time, have painstakingly developed the concept of, movable type. They have empowered themselves to reproduce the written word at a speed, and in volumes, that were hitherto unthinkable. This was a time when the only book that existed was essentially the Bible, and its reproduction was overseen by being copied out, by hand, by very dull, antisocial men, living in monasteries. But, here was Guttenberg, with the power to spread new ideas, and there’s you standing there, nearly 600 years from the future stood next to him. Aside from adopting the mantle of some type of Nostradamus figure using your knowledge of future events, what knowledge would you encourage Guttenberg to disseminate? Could you contribute to stopping the spread of diseases like the plague? Could you introduce them to, and provide them with electricity? Could you improve on the abacus that was still being used, or Blaise Pascal’s adding machine that wouldn’t be invented for another 150 years? You could describe television and radio, but how many of you could describe the design and engineering necessary in order to make one? You could describe what a far simpler device like a calculator looks like and does, but again few of us could make one. You could describe an electric torch, but again, how many of us understand it well enough to actually tell someone how to make one? In all eventuality few of us would be able to engineer a simple toothbrush that resembles anything similar to what a toothbrush looks like today.
My point is simple; while we are surrounded today, by what is a wealth of technology that allows us to do things that a person 600 years ago would be more likely to assume came from another planet, than resulting from the processes of rigorous scientific reasoning and refined techniques of engineering, that allowed the development of such technology. While this technology has been made for the use of almost anybody with opposable thumbs, it doesn’t acvtually make us any smarter. We can all use a television, a smartphone, a computer and a calculator, but I would hazard a guess that less than 1% of us have anything more than a very rudimentary understanding of how any of this technology actually works. Just because we have calculators to help us do sums faster doesn’t necessarily make all of us better mathematicians than the man using the abacus. For some of us the calculator is a tool that we learn to master and that allows us to do very advanced mathematical calculations. Calculations that are used in architecture and engineering, these are examples of when a tool like a calculator or a computer can further our understanding, but it is only a very small minority of people that actually utilize modern technology as a means to develop more advanced technology. For the vast majority of us technology is synonymous with communication, and what we communicate are ideas that are scarcely more evolved or complex than were entertained by the minds of the average inhabitant during the dark ages.
Quantum physicist Richard Feynman, considered by most as only second to Albert Einstein, and considered by a few as superior, tells us the difference between knowing the names things and understanding the nature of things. Go on you can do it, it’s only 2 minutes long, and it involves moving pictures and sounds.
The year of the invention of the Guttenberg press, is probably the invention that draws the most parallels to the internet. In my earlier, theoretical anecdote, I tried to argue the point that very few of us actually understand much that we could have persuaded it was worthwhile for Guttenberg to consider printing. Indeed much of the printing done by Guttenberg’s presses was just to reproduce more and more copies of the Bible. It must be said however that it Guttenberg’s printing press facilitated the Bible to be translated out of Latin, thus replacing it as the Lingua Franca, and enabled the development of the vernacular of the European Languages we know today. And here we see a parallel, hasn’t the Internet done a similar thing for language with its use of emoticons, emojis, netlingo and chat acronyms.
The Internet can’t Create Knowledge, Communication Leads to the Decay of Knowledge
The internet can’t create information, it can’t create knowledge. Two scientists sharing ideas and data do use the Internet to create new findings and formulate new hypotheses, but this constitutes such an infinitesimally small amount of the actual communication that takes place over the Internet; the majority is half brained idiots treating us to “what they reckon”.
In essence the Internet is being predominantly used as a machine that enables us to play the classic children’s party game “Chinese Whispers”, on a global level. Does this mean the game should no longer be called Chinese whispers? Or, does it covertly tell us about the Chinese aim for global domination? Why not write to me and tell me what you reckon?
The internet draws us all together so closely, it’s probable that it reduces Milgram’s hypothesis of the 7 degrees of separation down to 4 or 5. In today’s game of Chinese whispers, when the child passes on the half understood, garbled reckoning they received from their friend, who they themselves only half understood the message that they received, a process that we could trace back ad nauseum, but I’m sure you get the point. Inevitably the further down the line you are of this convoluted, twisted chain, of what people reckon means that you’re the recipient of a piece of information, that’s of about as much use as an electric cucumber toothbrush.
But the problem gets compounded further. This misinformation is no longer timidly whispered into the ear of the person next in line. If it’s true, that in space nobody hears you scream, on the internet nobody hears you whisper, instead half understood, distorted reckonings are relayed from one friend/acquaintance to another, constantly being molded to fit the reckonings of the new disseminator, and spread around the globe at nigh on the speed of light, or at the very least to their 5,000 or so Facebook friends. You can’t play Chinese whispers on the internet. On the internet nobody hears your whispers, on the internet there are no whispers, just whirlpools and maelstroms of misinformation and a digital universe comprised nearly 100% pure, bullshit reckonings.
I used to believe that the internet marked the democratization of information. Today I’m left feeling like I must have been somewhat of a naive twat. How completely ignorant I was to have worn the rose tinted spectacles through which I first viewed the technological marvel of the Internet. you see there’s nothing wrong with the Internet itself. As a tool it retains the enormous potential to educate and inform almost every single person on the planet. So how can I claim there is a paradox and that it is actually contributing to the dumbing down of the majority of us?
Simple, any tool is only as good as the person that operates it, and the majority of mankind are just utter ass hats, that believe, just because we can use hi-tech equipment that we ourselves must be more advanced. Well here’s a clip of monkeys using an iPad, there’s a load more on YouTube, this is by no means a one off:
What should have become quite apparent from this short video is that whilst monkeys are an intelligent primate, the fact that they can use an iPad should confirm that using this advanced technology doesn’t require a highly developed mind. Indeed, the technology of today is designed to be as intuitive to use as possible, hence we see a monkey using it.
There may be no greater evidence that supports the intuitive ease with which we can use this most advanced technology than the fact that a method of schooling called Waldorf Schools, is the education of choice for the children of employees in the Silicon Valley. What makes Waldorf education unique, is that it deprives its students the use of all forms of technology, no tablets, mobile phones, computers or calculators are allowed. They claim “it’s out with technology and in with imagination”. As mantras go I found this to be quite underwhelming, unimaginative, and well, frankly shit. But, there can be no greater endorsement of this anti technological form of education, than the fact that it’s highly endorsed by those who are at the cutting edge of developing such technology.
The very nature of a paradox tends to make them a bitter pill to swallow. Paradoxes tend to have a habit of promising us one thing while in actual fact leaving us with something totally unexpected, and usually unpleasant. The information, communication, technology paradox might just be the paradox that will go onto destroy the hubris of mankind. This is a significant statement that deserves to be thoroughly explained, but if I CBB G2G & FAP @ JAV pron.
To me the damage that the Internet is doing to the knowledge and understanding of the average person is ineffable, so I’ll leave you with my favourite ever video on YouTube, 4 dwarfs racing a camel, which to some extent proves my point better than I ever could:
Some quotes from history that might have foreshadowed our slough of despond:
“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” Thomas Jefferson
“I know one thing; that I know nothing” – Sometimes referred to as the Socratic paradox
Barry Trotter slowly extricated himself from out of the deep shag rug in front of the fire. He adjusted his glasses and wiped them clean. A couple of metres away, by the light of the fire, Barry could make out the form of Professor Bumsosore, it was made more difficult as the professor’s robes were pulled up over his head, but Barry could identify him easily enough by his fully exposed wand.
Ever since Barry’s scar had started to itch, Professor Bumsosore had insisted that Barry attend private, late night tuition in the professor’s own chambers. Barry’s scar was not ordinary, for that matter Barry was not an ordinary boy.
When Barry was a baby an evil wizard by the name of BaronVon Nastybastard hunted down Barry’s parents and killed them. When Baron Von Nastybastard tried to kill Barry his curse bounced off him and hit Von Nastybastard flush in the crotch, leaving Barry with a distinctive scar on his forehead, and Baron Von Nastybastard with an ineffective set of testicles. Most people ignored Barry’s scar out of courtesy, but it was plain for all to see, the rendering of a child’s simple stylized drawing of a cock, and a pair of balls.
‘Oh dear me! Is that the time? That took longer than I expected. Run along now Barry, back to the tower.’ Said the Professor straightening himself out. Barry always found himself to be rather poorly coordinated after these sessions, with his arms and legs feeling heavy. His head felt cloudy, the last thing he could remember was the professor holding the hem of his wizard’s robes up to Barry’s mouth and telling him to breathe deeply, and secure his mind against Von Nastybastards evil penetrations.
With his arms and legs feeling leaden, Barry found it an arduous to climb up the stairs to the Frygindor common room, but he was looking forward to seeing his two best friends Dom Beasley and Cordelia Puckle.
Harry and Dom had been friends from their very first day at school and Dom’s lack of self esteem helped to add to Barry’s already inflated opinion of himself. Dom had low self esteem for a reason, because he was a mindlessly uncoordinated dick, and there was nothing Barry liked doing more than to watch Dom balls up performing mundane, everyday chores.
‘Hello Barry! How was the professor this evening?’ Asked Cordelia as she looked over the top of the book she was reading. Whenever Cordelia spoke to Barry he would start to feel a little funny, and the other night he had dreamed of her sat astride his Nimbus 2000, riding it recklessly around the Quidditch pitch.
‘Hi Cordelia, you haven’t seen Dom anywhere have you?’ Asked Barry.
‘He’s up in your room, studying, or so he says. He does seem to be studying so much recently, but his grades never get any better. Strange.’
‘Well you know what they say, you can’t polish a turd. I better go up and see him. Goodnight Cordelia.’
Cordelia did not respond, her attention being engrossed in the book she was reading for potions homework. Barry climbed the stairs up to the room he shared with Dom and two other Frygindor boys, an Irish boy Paddy O’Furniture and Nevile Stretchedanus. As Barry approached the door to their room, he was surprised by how quiet it was. He opened the door and Dom quickly pulled up the bed sheets sending the latest issue of ‘Witches, Bitches and Wizard’s Wives’ catapulting across the room. Spread across the front cover, Barry recognized the provocatively posed figure of Fanny Fellatio, a witch that had been involved in a scandal at Pigshingles just last. Papers reported that Fanny had performed lewd acts with a slaughter of leprechauns. It had brought a great deal of shame to the school, fortunately Professor Bumsosore had arrived at the scene first, and prevented the leprechauns from initiating some tag team action. Fanny and the Leprechauns (which coincidentally went on to become a hit porn movie) were immediately expelled.
‘Working hard again Dom?’ Asked Barry sarcastically.
‘What do you think it is she sees in leprechauns?’ Wondered Dom. Barry looked at the hapless Dom. ‘Just get over her will you! You’ve missed your chance, I mean she was hardly being subtle when she when she asked you if she could polish your wand. And to think you actually passed her your wand and a duster.’
Dom jumped out of from beneath the sheets still displaying evidence of being partly aroused. He walked round the bed and picked up ‘Witches and Bitches’, and showed Barry a tasteful picture, in which Miss Fellatio was trying her hardest to make a vegetable disappear without the use of magic.
‘I don’t know what you still see in her Dom. You have nothing in common, and what would your mum say?’
‘But I know where to hide the cucumber now, it would be different, I could be the wizard she wants me to be.’
It was painful to see such a dullard hurting himself owing to his inability to grasp reality. Barry was about to say something when the picture of Fanny Fellatio caught his eye and his scar started to throb. Barry winced, but not through pain.
‘Barry what’s happening?’
‘I don’t know Dom, it’s my scar it feels funny.’
Dom looked at Barry with his permanent vapid expression, meanwhile the scar continued to throb and throb,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
The Examined Life 