This is not a blog post

It is a brief explanation and apology for the absence of any blog posts.  (And also continues from the last words of the last post with another John Lydon reference, if you know your PiL.  Or, if you prefer your references more highbrow, we could say it’s Rene Magritte instead.)

Idiocy in the news

Item one

The Daily Express yesterday informed its readers that there are 2,000,000 people claiming Incapacity Benefit who ought not be receiving it.  The methodology by which they arrive at this outlandish figure seems to be more than a little dubious.

Yet more whingeing

Whaa

This post contains whingeing.  If you don’t like whingeing, you don’t have to read it.  If you do read it, please don’t have a go at me in the comments for whingeing.  Thank you.

A small observation concerning socks

I was looking at socks in my local Morrison’s last night.  Clearly, I usually spend my Saturday evenings sipping champagne at a succession of sophisticated showbiz parties, before inviting selected members of the Sheffield Hallam University Rugby Team back to my luxury riverside penthouse for a few rounds of naked bed-top wrestling.  But champagne and eager, muscular sportsmen can get to be such a drag sometimes, don’t you find?  That’s why I chose to spend last night on my own shuffling round a suburban supermarket and looking at socks instead.  Er…yeah…when I say ‘chose’…

I wanted to be wrong

On 7^th November 2008, in the aftermath of the US presidential elections, I wrote a post that succeeded in making me about as popular as Sarah Palin would have been if she’d showed up at the Chicago victory rally.  The reason for my unpopularity was that I suggested that the New Golden Messiah of American politics, President-Elect (as he was at the time) Obama, might turn out not to be as fantastically wonderful as most people at the time felt he was.  I emphasised my worry that expectations about the soon-to-be-president’s ability to drastically reform and improve everything had surged to unsustainable levels.  I expressed my belief that Obama would make a dedicated, well-intentioned president, and that, by the time he left office, most things would be a little better than they had been when he came into office, but that the widespread belief that everything would be instantly, dramatically transformed was inevitably going to be disappointed.  I voiced concern that the people who had been most caught up in the surge of optimism – the young, the previously disenfranchised – would be the ones most likely to recognise that the president was falling short of the perfection he had encouraged them to expect, and that this would lead to them feeling they had been betrayed, with a consequent surge of cynical detachment from politics that would ultimately damage their long-term interests.

My opinions did not chime with the prevailing view in my little corner of the blogosphere.  I think for many people who read the post (especially those who were younger than me, and had less clear memories of the build up to May 1997), my greatest faux pas was to suggest that we in the UK had seen a similar process with Tony Blair and New Labour.  No-one wanted to believe at the time that Tony Blair – an old, discredited, toxically unpopular politician – could possibly have anything in common with the Saviour-Elect.  Everyone wanted to believe that this time the hype was real, that the old politics was dead, that we were on the verge of a new global reality.  It was wrong, and more than a little mean, for me to come along with my unfounded pessimism and scepticism and spoil the party for everyone else.

I was beginning on one of my periodic meltdowns at the time, as the posts after that one demonstrate, and I didn’t acquit myself well in the comments (to put it mildly…), but I did manage to make one point that was reasonable, and that I felt I could stand by: I hoped that I was wrong, and that the people with greater faith in Obama were proved right.  And I did, I genuinely did.  To quote a not-entirely-irrelevant REM song, I wanted to be wrong.  So, that’s the question for today’s post, written a year after Obama was inaugurated: was I wrong?

These quotations are just brilliant…

… and I am going to make a point of using them every time I come across someone hand-wringing or pearl-clutching about how everything’s going to hell in a handcart, and it’s all the fault of those beastly young people, who don’t know any morals and are just awful, awful people, unlike what it was like back in the day when they knew manners and were respectful to their elders etc, etc.

I’ve acquired these quotes from a comment (4^th down, left at 1402 on 13^th January – I wish Blogger let you link to individual comments) by XiXiDu on a blogpost by Neuroskeptic.  See, I told you he was one of my favourite bloggers…

I am what I am

A little while ago, Neuroskeptic, one of my favourite bloggers, wrote a typically fascinating and well thought out blog post on the issue of national identity.  By way of a gently amusing account of world history over the last 150,000 years, he makes the point that national identity is a fiction.  The post focuses in part on the issue of English identity, which is certainly problematic – supposedly ‘indigenous’ English people (as Nick Griffin would inaccurately call them) are the product of successive waves of invasion, displacement and gradual assimilation occurring over millennia, which means that, at a biological level, it’s impossible to identify an essential (i.e. essence of) ‘Englishness’ which is different from, say, an essential ‘Frenchness’.

This is not to say that national identity doesn’t have some real-world effects, a point Neuroskeptic acknowledges in a comment on the post.  National identity is, for some people, a powerful driver of behaviour, and it can lead some of them into extraordinary actions, such as a willingness to fight to the death in order to maintain a doubly-abstract concept like national honour.  Neuroskeptic argues, if I have understood him correctly, that, for all its real-world effects, this sense of national identity is nothing more than an internal, emotional thing.  There is certainly some truth in this, but alongside an emotional sense of national identity there’s also the concept of cultural affiliation, which Neuroskeptic doesn’t directly address in his post.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Iris

I imagine you will be aware of the sordid sexual, financial and political scandal that has engulfed Councillor Iris Robinson MP, MLA (to give her the titles that go with all three of her political jobs).  If you are unaware, then the basic gist of it is that this married woman of 59 was having sex with the 19 year old son of a friend of the family, whom she had known since he was 9 years old.  So far, so tacky, and one does wonder at what point her interest shifted from quasi-maternal to sexual – apparently she told a political aide that the teenager felt like a son to her, even while she was fucking him, which raises some fairly sordid possibilities.  Anyway, not content with violating her sacred marriage oath, the 7^th and 9^th commandments, and her secular legal duty of faithfulness to her husband (who is, when he’s not trying to come to terms with being cuckolded by a teenager, Northern Ireland’s First Minister), the fundamentalist christian decided to also violate her ethical responsibilities as a Councillor, a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and an MP.

Computer says ‘Feeling much better now, thanks’

Obviously I don’t want to jinx this, and it is still very early days, but the fault seems – seems – to have resolved itself.  What changed?  Well, the only concrete thing is that I installed an update for Firefox.  It’s a little strange to think that this might have been causing the problem, partly because I hadn’t done anything to reconfigure or update Firefox when the problem materialised.  I guess it’s possible that, on one of the many, many, many occasions that Firefox crashed (and goodness me, but that software likes to crash…) it corrupted a file that happened, through sheer good luck, to be replaced in the update process.

This still doesn’t seem to explain why the problem was intermittent, or why some of the faults happened before windows had begun to load, let alone Firefox.  I guess it’s also possible that a small piece of fluff that was occasionally shorting out a circuit pathway somewhere has been dislodged, and that’s what’s made things better.

Anyway, never look a gift-horse in the mouth…