Twitter and me

I am new to Twitter. As a relative technophobe it's been a hard adjustment but a fun one. Keeping up with trends and friends and my idols has been enjoyable, but the level of idiocy is breathtaking. Occassionally brilliant, often awful, Twitter is currently under attack by certain sections of the government and the press, here I share a few of my initial impressions.

When I entered the world of Twitter, one of the trends I first came across was #reasonstobeatyourgirlfriend, to which I could only proffer that you had do something between tweeting and masturbating furiously to violent pornography. When I examined some of their profiles, I realised most had probably never had any real contact with a woman. But I was shocked because there were so many women tweeting to condone, not condemn it.

There are, of course, people who claim it’s all a big joke but with the internet there is no context, no intonation, no immediate distinction between a tasteless joke and a serious opinion. There is essentially very little to go on if you don’t know the person. Any comment can be read by any psycho or idiot who takes it as gospel or an excuse. There are currently two young men in prison for four years for attempting to incite a riot that never happened, that is the same ‘standard’ sentence many get for rape with a weapon. A sense of perspective may be in order, but in the climate it was an implausibly stupid thing to do.

Paul Chambers went to prison for a ‘joke’ that was quite clear. Chambers was not inciting people to blow up the airport, nor was it any sort of serious threat. However, it’s about context and in the post-9/11 paranoia still gripping our security forces you can’t even breathe the word ‘bomb’. I wonder whether it would have been the same if domestic violence and racism, rather than terrorism, were the government’s priority. It is understandable that the comment was taken out of context but Nick Griffin posts nothing but vile, idiotic racism and he has got away with it even though this accurately reflects his beliefs. Maybe Nick would want to explain why he gets away with the kind of hate Islamic fundamentalist preachers are rightly prosecuted for.

I have worked in call centres and face-to-face with people and I’ve always felt that the further removed people are from direct, face-to-face communication, the worse they behave. Over the phone people were far more threatening than face-to-face and by email you got all kinds of abuse. The detachment breeds an anger and fearlessness. At the call centre I was routinely told I would be hunted down at home. As stupid and hollow as it may have been, particularly as I had their name and address in front of me, for some people it was too much. To be honest after a year I was ready to get out of there.

Anonymity is also key to this detachment. If you think you can hide, and with the internet you probably can, you are much more likely to say and do things you would never have the gumption to say or do to someone’s face. Twitter is great source of comedy and, as we saw with the riots, of spreading information and good will. It feels like a community when you’re following your idols but as with any community there’s always a minority of idiots trying to wreck the place.

I have seen more direct hate and racism in an hour on Twitter than I witnessed living in Morley for a year, with its BNP councillor. And my girlfriend’s British Indian. I reacted with anger at some people when I first went on there but quickly came to realise how futile that is. They are cowards and often don’t respond with anything other than further invective, if they respond at all.

The same applies for the comments sections on newspaper websites. I am currently picking some of the worst for a new feature on the Daily Organ. I have again been tempted to react and again I give up, unable to change the hateful opinions of people who boast that Bernard Manning is their comedy idol. According to a number of Telegraph readers, one of whom was previously banned for “idolising Anders Breivik and was using a new pseudonym, I am a “PC drone who wants everyone to think and act the same” and a “brain dead socialist” who thinks “the USSR only failed because it was not socialist enough.”

I can assure you none of these things are true, I have embraced multiculturalism unlike the readers of the Telegraph. Thinking in different ways creates new, innovative and rounded solutions. I want debate, not to badger and scare people into my way of thinking, unlike the Mail, Telegraph, Express et al and their readers. My feelings on the USSR certainly do not reflect that theory, in fact it’s fair to say that I have never really developed a full opinion on the matter.

So send me your thoughts before Louise Mensch and co. take my twitter feed off line, you can tweet me at @bombdog2147 or leave a comment at the bottom. And if you see any brilliantly stupid comments on news websites please email the Daily Organ’s editor, it’s the only way we’ll win…

Richard Littlejohn: A Commentary

Richard Littlejohn has written another terrible piece this week on the Mail, I have done a bit of fact-checking and commentary for you all to enjoy...

They are genetically incapable of conceding that their great social experiment lies smouldering in the ruins of burned-out carpet warehouses and looted convenience stores.

Really Richard? The words “genetically incapable” seem a tad offensive even by your own standards. Am I genetic Leftie? Last time I checked the gene for political leaning had not been discovered. And what does that make you? Given that you’re incapable of showing empathy, compassion, balance and restraint? A sociopath…

The police have tried to lie their way out of their initial incompetence, denying that front-line riot cops, who were itching to crack skulls and make arrests, were ordered to stand back and observe criminals torching buildings and looting jewellery shops.

Have they? Tell me the lie, because that sounds a lot like slander to me. And be specific. Maybe the police will show less restraint when they get you. The fact is every member of the “rank and file” opposes the government’s cuts. They didn’t go in because the force is already spread far too thin. They would have got beat and what message does that send?

Sadly, but utterly predictably, the rest of the body politic has sunk to the occasion. As far as they are concerned, it’s back to petty squabbling as usual.

Every report and poll I’ve read suggests Cameron has suffered as a result of this disaster, showing zero leadership, backing down to Milliband’s call for an inquiry and failing to return from his holiday as London burned.

Like so many of our institutions, the police ‘service’ worships at the altar of yuman rites, elf’n’safety and diversity. It’s all about politics. Preventing crime, patrolling the streets and upholding the law is a tertiary consideration.

May I remind you of corruption, Stephen Lawrence and the G20 protests? Also, do you have a spell-checker? It’s F7 on Word…

Dave should summon her to Number 10 and read her palm. ‘Now look here, pet, you’re only Home Secretary because David Davis wandered off the reservation during the last Parliament and we’re short of presentable skirt to put up on Question Time.

‘Frankly, it was a toss-up between you and Caroline Spelman. So do as you’re told or you’ll find yourself promoted to making the tea for Vince Cable. Do I make myself crystal? Steve will show you out.’

If Dave wants to bring in Wyatt Earp, Robocop or Quick Draw McGraw, that’s his call. The Prime Minister has got a difficult enough job fighting a guerilla war against the Guardianistas and the Lib Dems without rebellion in his own ranks.

Nothing but wow!! “Presentable skirt”? I don’t like May, but fucking hell… You misogynistic, patronising idiot.

These are the same papers that defended Cameron’s right to refuse a consultation over phone hacking in the name of police independence! Do you even read your own rags? And is he fighting this war? Doesn’t sound like it to me, in fact the Lib Dems are in his government…

Over the past two decades, the Left has captured the commanding heights of government. They aren’t going to give up their citadels without a fight to the death.

Two decades? Errr… check your facts. Also, nobody, but nobody, would call Labour’s term Left-leaning. Except the Mail and we’ve already seen the mistakes in this garbage…

The BBC continues to refer to the mayhem on our streets as the ‘English Riots’. Since this now seems to be the officially accepted designation, can we expect a box on the next census form to allow us to identify ourselves as ‘English’?

No because it’s a British census you moron… And they’re the English riots because they’re were no riots in Scotland and Wales. Honestly he gets paid handsomely for this, and apparently no one even edits it!

The Riots: A Media Review

The media have fallen over themselves to offer reasons for the riots in the last week, most have been garbage. Here I look over the best and worst of the week’s coverage.

Riots are always a controversial subject for the media, particularly when they involve the vile looting and criminality we have seen this week. Five people are dead as a result and many more have been wounded, so it only seems fitting to begin this article with a look at the two most honest and dignified responses we have seen all week.

Tariq Jahan and Ashraf Haziq would not have been known to many before this awful week, but they are now household names due to the dignity, grace and calm they exhibited whilst idiots, columnists and politicians showed none of these traits. Losing a 21 year old son is never easy, but Tariq Jahan who lost his son, Haroon, as a result of a senseless and evil murder could have justifiably responded with a furious call to arms. Instead Mr Jahan reacted with an awe-inspiring sense of forgiveness and rationale. He was a poised and overwhelming example the looters, papers, broadcasters and politicians failed to follow.

Similarly Ashraf Haziq, a Malaysian student, admitted feeling “sad” for his attackers. He showed a class and compassion Melanie Phillips, Max Hastings and Katherine Birbalsingh have failed to exhibit in their entire lives and careers. As I have said, I do not believe these riots were legitimate protests; they were reckless, criminal riots that exhibited the worst of British culture. However, the writings of the usual right-wing rags show a startling hatred for anyone who is not the product of a middle-class two-parent family. It is worth noting their status as immigrants, for no other reason than their behaviour is more indicative of immigrant conduct than the mass media generally chooses to present on a daily basis.

I will concede my bias. I am from a lower-middle-class background, my dad left when I was fourteen, in the following twelve years I have not seen him once. That is not my fault or responsibility, it was his decision. I will also point out that my mother and brother are teachers, my aunt is a social worker and I have lived and worked (often for the minimum wage) in a number of difficult areas in my adult life, mostly with my British Indian girlfriend (girlfriend, not wife). I have been unemployed for three months now and at various times in the past. This is not a bleeding heart story. I simply feel I am more qualified than most columnists to talk about these issues, but that does not make me right, just more aware of the complex issues they involve than any Express or Mail columnist. (Rant/defence over).

My feelings about Katherine Birbalsingh have been well documented. But her trolling piece of tripe this week was a predictable mix of single-parent family hatred, teacher-blaming and racial insensitivity. In answer to Birbalsingh’s initial question concerning the riots, Mark Duggan was not black, he was mixed race. Secondly why she continues senseless attacks on Anders Breivik’s father is beyond me. She states that:

Jens Breivik, rather than feeling remorse for having failed as a father, was only interested in his own reputation when the appalling Norway killings took place. But when I criticised him, I was shot down by ordinary readers of this blog. How dare I criticise parents when I am not a parent myself! White readers say that they are unable to speak about black absent fathers because they’re white. Fine. But is Jens Breivik black? Yet no one was willing to be critical of his questionable parenting. Parents teach their children the difference between right and wrong. If they are absent, then the child grows up without a moral compass.

No, I and many others criticised you because you do not know the real circumstances of Anders Breivik’s childhood and it is obvious that right-wing ideology, often spouted by papers like the Telegraph which Breivik quoted ad nauseum in his ‘manifesto’, had a far greater effect than his father’s reported absence. Millions of people come from single-parent families and they do not behave like Anders Breivik or the looters we have seen this week. Are you really suggesting people like Barack Obama are simple criminals, a product of a liberalist-led decline in good ol’ fashioned morality? They had worse riots in Victorian England and slavery in nineteenth century America before liberalism you know?! Read a fucking history book…

If you read the Mail this week you’d be forgiven though for thinking liberalism was the great wrecking-ball of our time. Approximately half of its columns included liberalism in the title, blaming it for the end of the family, the ineffectiveness of the Met, crime and Sam Fox’s music career.

Perhaps writers like Birbalsingh, Max Hastings and Melanie Phillips should look at their work as responsible for the stigmatism of the children of one-parent families rather than blindly state that such children are a menacing product of liberalism, unable to learn basic morality if their fathers are not present. Such stigmatism, which I, like many others, suffered at school within systems unable to address the problems it created for me is a product of this vapid, reactionary bullshit.

Melanie Phillips’ attitude consisted of uninformed stupidity and it has already been critiqued brilliantly here. Her basic premise is that liberalism has killed our society and that if we slap our kids about a bit they’ll fall into line. They won’t. Violence begets violence Melanie, it’s a vicious cycle too many kids are hooked into already. Do you honestly think all parents rationalise with their kids? Many of them hit their kids and they simply learn to retaliate with violence, it’s all most of the kids on our streets last week know.

All of which leads me to Richard Littlejohn’s first piece at the start of the week, which still fills me with trepidation and fear. Why? Because it was actually quite good. Ignore some of his misleading detours and for once Littlejohn is reasoned, pro-Eastern European and not blaming Muslims. He saw a “poverty of ambition” rather than financial poverty.

Of course it didn’t last long and normal service was resumed. Having had a thought though, Littlejohn had decided those aforementioned Eastern Europeans were here because of Labour, everything was the fault of liberalism, absent fathers and daytime television. Littlejohn is such a contentious little cunt I will not waste any more time on him. Suffice it to say if you’re of sound mind and you ever want to work yourself into a frenzy, just read this or this.

In other titbits: Peter Oborne articulates Britain’s collective criminality at either end of the scale in the most intelligent way this week, arguing that “that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society”. And vapid, attention-seeking celebrity Russell Brand blamed the riots on… well, vapid, celebrity culture:

Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels.

It’s easy not to like Brand but his and Oborne’s articles were two of the smartest out this week.

On the other end of the spectrum, China’s CCTV bizarrely chose this this as the time to ask whether multiculturalism is in crisis but then promptly failed to back this up in way, shape or misguided form. Similarly Nick Griffin (@nickgriffinmep) apparently broke his television and failed to see any of the white faces amongst the looters, claiming that “Black gangstas” and Islamic men were the “real problem” before bizarrely arguing that multiculturalism “demands child sacrifice”. In between this he suggested that he had predicted all this years ago, without providing any evidence, before asking why no one wanted to interview him. Well I’ve got an answer for you Nick. No one wants to interview you because you’re a sad, little, hateful, boggle-eyed cunt with an imagined sense of influence and intelligence. You have nothing to add but divisiveness and hate and there was already far too much of that about…

The Riots: A Tale of Poverty?

As the riots and flames die down around the country, the causes for such an explosion of violence are being explored. The prevailing theory seems to be that an uneducated, impoverished, disenchanted, criminal minority from single-parent families rose up to show the rest of us what’s what.

First up, let’s be clear, the reports of poverty have been greatly overstated. As we have seen. many of the looters had jobs. Also, in many areas where there is greater and more widespread poverty, little or nothing happened. Most looters were wearing designer clothes and used their BlackBerries and other smartphones to instigate and organise their attacks. On the most part they stole things they would want: televisions, more designer clothes and shoes and phones. They did not, on the whole, steal food or destroy high end items as a protest against feckless consumerism. This was the smash and grab materialism that is the product of the last thirty years of Western politics and culture.

After years of cuts and societal and community disbandment under Thatcher, a new approach and political culture was required. New Labour introduced the minimum wage whilst educational spending rose dramatically, but the culture never changed. People at the top did not and do not have to pay fair and just taxes, simply look at the furores over non-doms and private equity taxation. I am not pretending that this in any way motivated these senseless riots, but as Peter Oborne has poignantly suggested in his Telegraph column “the moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom.” For people like Boris Johnson and David Cameron to criticise looters for their “sense of entitlement” sounds suspiciously like the call a pot might make to a kettle.

People’s anger at MPs expenses, Lord Ashcroft’s, amongst many others, tax evasion and the Etonites they see in government is an impotent rage because most have accepted there is nothing they can do. Political life and influence seems beyond most and even then there is a deep feeling nothing can be done about the media, politicians and corporations most decent people abhor. There is also a sense of fear and loathing of those individuals we have seen rioting and killing innocent citizens attempting to protect their communities.

This and previous governments must be held to account for this feeling. By ignoring legitimate protests against the closures of mines, tuition fees and the Iraq War, they set a depressing tone and showed a startling arrogance that hundreds of thousands of voices could be ignored. The last protest I remember working was against the Poll Tax, but again I am not comparing these legitimate protests with what we have seen this week. I am only suggesting that there is a growing restlessness, malaise and nihilism that affect the whole country, not just looters.

There are no simple answers but at the centre of people’s reaction to these riots has been anger tinged with political apathy and defeatist acceptance. People are gathering to protect and clean up their neighbourhoods, but they are not engaging politically. Indeed Ken Livingstone has been called “politically opportunistic” to suggest cutting teenagers’ sports, school and youth clubs may in some way be aiding the rise of a bored, detached and uncontrollable ‘underclass’.

I do not believe that public spending cuts have contributed in any real way to these riots, but without libraries, clubs and a properly funded and active Social Services, it is inevitable that they will not be a one-off. It will destroy communities, not rebuild them. The Big Society has always been a big con, but we are getting a glimpse at its inevitable, nihilistic conclusion.

There are problems with injustice and inequality, of course there are, but I do not agree that they were the overriding reasons for these riots. People did it because they realised they could quite possibly get away with it. We should be clear that these people are far more privileged than most of the world’s seven billion citizens.

People in Somalia and Burma, for example, would trade everything for the (at least the opportunity for) wealth, freedom and education these rioters have been afforded. We should examine the injustice in our society, but we should not get too involved in believing the people responsible for looting are seriously impoverished. An immigration swap with Somalia may just show some of those rioters a new perspective on their ‘hardships’, for them and us. Ultimately a cultural and political shift is essential or else these riots may become recurrent rather than an repugnant one-off.

A few books for Ed, Dave and Nick

The reading tastes of our political leaders were revealed this week as the country’s top brass went on the holidays. But what should they be reading? John Henley at the Guardian has some ideas but I’ve just finished a literature degree and I’ve got some of my own…

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Because if you haven’t already you really should. This is my favourite novel and the subject of my 12000 word dissertation and is, in my humble opinion, the first true classic of the 21st century. Perhaps it might convince someone, anyone to take the environmental issue seriously and do something, anything to avert the bleak inevitability of McCarthy’s text.

The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

This is more for Nick and a reminder for Ed. “I am invisible because people refuse to see me.” A true masterpiece and, at its core, a reminder of the damage of mobs, segregation and rhetoric, it should be mandatory reading for all new entrants to political life.

The Daily Mail

Because if not how else will they keep up with such luminaries as Richard Littlejohn and Liz Jones and the news that Ed has been cheekily copying Dave by, wait for it, wearing shorts and no socks. The horror!

Paul Muldoon – Selected Poems 1968-1994

As Dave and Ed have shown a penchant for American and Irish writers, a fusion seems the perfect reading material. Acerbic, clever beyond the simple rhymes and language he often employs and full of the “arcane pieces of information” he loves so, Muldoon’s poetry is moving, thought-provoking and comic often all in one go.

Something they read at university

Sometimes looking back, as I’ve just done, is a great way to reminisce about the way things should be. All three might then get together and realise that without phenomenal wealth they would not be where they are today, and that to encourage the fairer society they all profess to advocate they should even out education for all and cut back the ludicrous tuition fee rises we’ve all seen. I can but dream...

And if all that is a little serious, for some black comedy they could read a copy of James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture from 2009 with the benefit of hindsight…

Anyone got any ideas for other political leaders, past or present? Leave me a comment or drop me a tweet…

The Week in News: A Brief Guide

This is my brief look at the week’s news and is a new feature… Enjoy!!

* An economic crisis the like of which the world has not seen for, oh, about three years was averted as the US made its hatred of its nine per cent unemployed and sick citizens official. The prospect of taxing those corporations and individuals who were in no way responsible for a global recession proved too much for the crazed loons on the right, led by the Tea Party and its Republican representatives.

Once again Democrats reacted with disbelief and mild fury but quickly caved in like an older brother who knows no-one’s getting ice cream if he doesn’t give in to his crazed, violent younger sibling. Indeed Democrat Emanuel Cleaver described the deal as "a sugar-coated Satan sandwich" which the Republicans could celebrate.

Just like Clinton before him, Obama is having his hands effectively tied by America’s electoral system that gave him two years to fix eight years of Bush and then promptly rejected his party because a few radio hosts doubted the validity of his birth certificate. It has been a terrifying example of how the world, for now, is led by a minority of frightening eejits.

* In lighter news scientists discovered how the African crested rat uses toxic fur to kill and wound predators. Another poisonous rat who appeared in the news this week was Sunday Mail columnist Liz Jones whose article about the NHS was so hate-filled that even Mail readers were outraged, quickly closing the comments section on the website as Twitter went into meltdown.

If you missed this particular piece of drivel, the long and short of Jones’ complaint was that they would not see her that day as an unregistered patient to administer jabs she needed to report on the famine in Somalia.

The lack of self-awareness exhibited is staggering even by Jones’ ‘high’ standards and raises the fundamental question, why the fuck would any paper, even the Mail, send an egomaniac of such epic proportions to the site of one of the most harrowing famines in years?

As a riposte to Jones’ ‘article’ I called a private doctor’s surgery to enquire about having jabs to go to Somalia. Here is an abridged version of the conversation.

Me: Hi, I’d like to have some jabs so I can go to Somalia.

Receptionist: Okay, are you registered with us?

Me: No.

Receptionist: Okay, well you will need to be to have the jabs.

Me: Why? There are people starving in the world (looks to camera David Brent-style), which I hate.

Receptionist: I understand that but we will need your notes and you will need to make an initial payment to register.

Me: But I don’t have any money as I don’t get paid for my writing. Can’t you do it now, for free? I mean do you want the blood of dead African children on your hands, because that’s what will happen if I don’t get to go and write my insightful and sensitive piece.

Receptionist: Look sir, those are rules of the practice I’m afraid, can’t you use your own NHS doctor?

Me: Are you even listening to me? Didn’t your doctors sign a Hippocratic Oath? Do you want thousands of people to die? I don’t have children…

Receptionist: Sorry what? What’s that got to do with it?

Me: I don’t know, apparently it matters. Anyway FUCK YOU, YOU MURDERING JOBSWORTH. I CAN’T BELIEVE MY PERFECTLY UNREASONABLE REQUESTS AREN’T BEING MET. I’M MORE IMPORTANT THAN ALL THOSE SICK PEOPLE WHO HAVE MADE APPOINTMENTS AND FOLLOWED THE RULES…

(Phone goes dead.)

So Liz, it’s not just NHS staff who are ‘jobsworths’…

* Speaking of the famine, it has received woefully little media coverage this week with the papers instead plumping for pieces about phone-hacking, a royal wedding, the US debt crisis and ,er, Paul Daniels - who was apparently left reeling by a pizza.

The Daily Organ and Independent have presented some excellent pieces in the last week that I highly recommend reading, but the general reticence to talk about the crisis in most of the mainstream press has left me uneasy in the extreme. Apparently if it’s not a whimsical distraction or a ‘domestic’ issue the papers really couldn’t give a fuck.

Perhaps News International should be forced to donate to DEC as much as they paid Glenn Mulcaire and give the same exposure to this story as they do to celebrity ‘news’ as some form of penance. Everyone’s a winner! Or perhaps just a little bit less grubby and stained.

* On a personal note my new deodorant resulted in a number of private investigators approaching me for ‘information’…

Thanks for reading, have a good week!!