Six more days until I can legally threaten the President's life! Whoever he is!

Disclaimer: This is not a threat on the President's life. I do not wish to kill the President, I do not wish anyone else to kill the President, I do not wish him to die in any way. I would quite like it if the current President weren't the President in six more days, but that, as far as I know, is not illegal.

What I mean is, in six days (well, five and a half) I will be stepping off the plane into a country that is not, as yet, under the jurisdiction of US law, though we do do things like support their President's re-election campaign and hand over servers to the FBI. But I digress. As well as having the legal right to issue threats which I have no intention of issuing and do not sympathise with in any way, I will also have the right to:

• obtain disposable lighters with a flint that lasts more than five bloody seconds;
• pay vastly inflated sums for mediocre drinks in suburban chain pubs;
• work for whichever company I want without losing my right of residence;
• get paid about half as much;
• buy takeaway curries;
• not buy proper Mexican food;
• own a decent mobile phone that actually gets bars outside of major urban areas;
• be deprived of broadband on the whim of fucking British Telecom;
• have at least some TV that doesn't make me want to spork my eyes out coming over the airwaves;
• have the same old shite on cable or satellite, only less of it and more expensive;

but the major benefit is

• Radio 4

and I'm not joking. If only John Peel were still alive, he'd be up there too. Dammit.

To tell the truth, I'm just ever so slightly tense. You know, just a teeny tiny bit. I'm quite glad I took a week off to do a couple of days of packing because I'm really not getting much of it done. I woke up this morning at 7am to the usual crash-tinkle-we're-unloading-or-loading-stuff sounds outside my window and groaned “ohhh GODDDDD I CAN'T COPE WITH THIS”. I was asleep by 11pm yesterday night so I wasn't exactly sleep-deprived, but it's just getting harder and harder to handle being awake.

Still, in six days time, whatever happens (apart from me going absolutely batshit and not getting on the plane) it'll be over, and I'll be able to say things which I have no intention of saying and fervently hope will never happen.

I don't usually do the “blog obituary” thing when someone famous dies, I don't really see the point, but, you know, John Peel.

If you tell kids in the future that once upon a time there were DJs who really cared about music rather than the sound of their own voices, did their best to encourage it and champion it, actually apologised for talking over intros, DJs who gave an answer to millions of teenagers listening to chart music and thinking “is this all there is?”… well, they'll roll their eyes and tell the nurse to up your medication. But they do exist, and now there's one fewer, and the ChrisMoylesification of Radio 1 is one step further along. And there'll be no more Home Truths, either.

Rather than go all nostalgic about the man – okay, listen to Teenage Kicks if you feel like it, it's a cracking song – I think it would be more in the spirit of what he stood for to go out, find a bunch of new music that you would never have listened to (Soulseek, Epitonic, go through the second-hand CD racks, whatever) and listen to it. In fact, if I can I'd like to start a John Peel Meme.

1. Get at least five songs that you've never heard before;
2. listen to them;
3. write about them in your blog, and link people to them if possible.

I'm off to do that now.

Edit: I think it should be a rule that at least one of them is under 30 seconds and/or some sort of unlistenable noisecore, people shouting Japanese over jackhammers, or similar.

Okay, I'm compiling a page of idiots who seem to think I am Charlie Brooker.

It's here. Apparently, I know nothing about America, nothing. Only two so far but I'm hoping for a lot more.

N.B. Just in case, I have written in a 60-second flood control on the mail form. While I'd not done this before, it took ten minutes. PHP is great.

I didn't go to the Kerry/Clinton rally today – I needed a ticket, and my printer doesn't work – but I've just been watching Clinton on TV and hell, the man's lost weight. He's almost unrecognisable. You'd think it was an imposter.

Bush/Cheney 1, Kerry/Edwards 3. Kerry has a 25% lead over Bush! (Edit: er, that should be “a 50% lead”, I think FOX News spiked my copy.) Well, it's as likely to be accurate as any other poll, isn't it?

Incidentally, what is it with the thing about advertising which university you went to on your licence plate or back windscreen? Under what traffic circumstances would I ever care? If you pull out in front of me suddenly, we collide, and I stalk out of my car with a heart full of murder and a hand full of steel, is the idea that I will see that we both went to Temple University and say “oh, sorry man, didn't realise, let's just forget it okay?”

Blink and you would have missed it. In Saturday's Guardian, Charlie Brooker (created the fabulous tvgohome.com some time ago, produces a few TV shows, writes TV reviews) wrote about Bush's debate in a fairly full-on manner. Nothing you've probably not read already, but he's got a good turn of phrase:

Quite frankly, the man's either wired or mad. If it's the former, he should be flung out of office: tarred, feathered and kicked in the nuts. And if it's the latter, his behaviour goes beyond strange, and heads toward terrifying. He looks like he's listening to something we can't hear. He blinks, he mumbles, he lets a sentence trail off, starts a new one, then reverts back to whatever he was saying in the first place. Each time he recalls a statistic (either from memory or the voice in his head), he flashes us a dumb little smile, like a toddler proudly showing off its first bowel movement. Forgive me for employing the language of the playground, but the man's a tool…

…Throughout the debate, John Kerry, for his part, looks and sounds a bit like a haunted tree. But at least he's not a lying, sniggering, drink-driving, selfish, reckless, ignorant, dangerous, backward, drooling, twitching, blinking, mouse-faced little cheat.

But it was this bit that apparently got up the noses of the Freepers:

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr – where are you now that we need you?

No! He's threatening the President with assassination! And thus begins another of the usual “astroturf” mass email campaigns, the perpetrators of which I'm sure 90% are quite happy with jokes about killing politicians as long as their name is Clinton, and would be appalled to see Ann Coulter's drivel pulled from national newspapers as a result of an email campaign by British lefties.

What did the Guardian do in response to this flood of e-whinging? They pulled the piece. I'm speechless. Well, not quite. Two immediate reactions were:

1. Spineless cowardly toads, giving in to a bunch of smirking arrogant hypocritical censorious partisan gits who aren't even in the same country and don't buy the paper;

2. You're making a rod for your own back here. This will happen again and again now. This is what they do. They won't stop. The Guardian, along with the BBC, is a hate figure for the US rightist wingnut brigade, and this will be treated as a victory.

» Continue reading “Charlie Brooker and Guardian cowardice”

I mentioned the feed for my del.icio.us links (deliciousfridge) but I didn't mention the one for my Flickr photos, which is, as you might guess, flickrfridge.

Seriously, if you like my LJ, you should add these; they're all informed by the same strange brain. If you're not an LJ user, there are RSS subscription links to the right.

I've been attempting to moderate various forums this evening in a not entirely sober state, and while I do not feel I've done anything untoward, there's a big bleeding piece of missing skin on on of my knuckles which I cannot place.

If anyone remembers being punched by me, please let me know. Otherwise I will assume everything went ahead peacefully.

I think some new words, or better-publicised old words, are needed for things that aren't technically lies but perform the same function as them. (I think you can probably guess the people I'm thinking about now, but it's a common tactic and instances will be occurring more and more.)

For reference, a lie is a deliberate falsehood, saying something that you know or believe not to be true.

The first situation is reckless disregard for the truth, when you make an assertion that you claim is based on evidence that a moment's thought would show to be inconclusive. Perhaps there is no evidence at all. While such statements can be lies, nobody can prove that you thought it wasn't true but said it anyway, you may just have been “deceived by inaccurate intelligence” which is convenient for your apologists, and indeed you may not have thought it wasn't true – you may simply not have cared. If I assert that there are green pigs living under Buckingham Palace, I have no evidence for this, but if I have no opinion as to the truth value of the statement I cannot be said to have lied. Thus Bush may well not have been technically lying about WMDs if he really didn't care whether they were there or not. (He has, however, told some flat-out lies about having found them.)

The second situation is impressionistic insinuation, where you repeatedly say things that associate two ideas impressionistically but not explicitly. This works well in the mass media because people don't pay a lot of attention. As I've said before, the news washes over viewers like the tide over shellfish, with occasional pieces of flotsam being picked up and digested. Make sure those are the right words in the right place and you can get people to unconsciously believe they are connected, true or simply important. If you confront them with the evidence or lack of they will often say “hey, you're right, why did I ever think that?” but how often does that happen? If you can release enough stories about possible WMD finds, you know the retractions will be smaller and the impression will, overall, be on your side. See: CNN et al over the Iraq invasion.

I'd rather not concentrate too much on WMDs because, again as I've said before, I think the issue is a red herring – their mere presence would not have justified an invasion in any case. There are plenty of other examples; for instance, Hussein's non-existent close ties to al Qaeda, a belief in which has been generated by the same combination of assertions and retracted or irrelevant evidence.

This sort of thing is the New Lying and I think needs its own word. However I'm having a bit of neological trouble here in making something out of terms like “disinformation”, “insinuation” and “mislead”. It might be better to fall back on more traditional terms, such as “bullshit”.

» Continue reading “New words needed”

Any LJ users who were subscribed to happylinklog can now read my new del.icio.us link log as deliciousfridge. (The RSS feed itself is on the home page sidebar – the button that says “XML DELICIOUS”.) I'm not using the Blogger Happy Link Log any more because del.icio.us gives you the option to tag your entries. Pretty much the same content as before though.