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…

Ok, so I’m not afraid to admit it, this has me confused.  Ever since boxing day, my computer seems to have developed an annoyingly-hard-to-pin-down fault (or, possibly, series of faults).

Sometimes, it boots perfectly.  Other times, it seems to get through the POST ok (well, there are no beep codes, which could mean either that the POST completes successfully or that it doesn’t start – the former is most likely), but the hard drive fails to power up.  On yet other occasions, I hear the hard drive power up, but either the video drivers don’t start or the graphics chip isn’t working, and the machine fails to boot.  Most frequently, the POST is completed successfully, the hard drive powers up, the video drivers/ graphic chip works fine, and the machine gets as far as the first few seconds of launching windows before hanging with no disc access.  There is no apparent pattern to when each error occurs, although hanging part-way into launching windows is by far the most frequent error.  When my computer does boot, there are no apparent problems (or, to be strictly accurate, no new problems).

Launching in safe mode with a boot log, it appears that the windows boot process hangs, when it does, after launching atisgkaf.sys.  I’ll be honest, up until the development of this problem, I had lived my life in total ignorance of atisgkaf.sys, and I was perfectly happy with that state of affairs.  I assume it’s a video driver of some sort, but I wouldn’t be at all confident of that – I’m basing my assumption on nothing more than knowing that my PC uses an ati chipset for video.

Googling the filename brings up mainly forum posts, mainly with people saying ‘Wah!  My computer won’t boot, it hangs on atisgkaf.sys’.  There seem to be a whole range of different contexts in which the problem has arisen – so many, in fact, that I’m fairly strongly inclined to think that they’re not describing a single problem, but a whole range of problems, all of which just happen to occur at a similar point in the boot process.  The people who have resolved their various issues seem to have followed Generic IT Solution #2: “Format & Reinstall Windows”.  (Generic IT Solution #1 is, of course, “Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again?”…)  With my own intermittent fault I’ve noticed that, when my PC boots successfully, atisgkaf.sys is the last thing displayed before the most basic version of the GUI is launched (i.e., the point at which the mouse cursor appears), which means that my problem is very possibly not with the file specifically, but with something else that happens between the launch of that and starting the GUI.

In terms of working around my problems, sometimes triggering a soft reboot by pressing the reset key works like a charm.  Other times, pressing the reset key achieves nothing.  At yet other times, the reset key triggers a reboot, but the machine hangs at any of the stages mentioned above.  Powering the machine off and on sometimes results in a normal boot, and sometimes one that hangs at any of the stages mentioned above.  In both cases, there doesn’t seem to be any pattern as to when it will work and when it won’t.  Thus far, the option that seems to work most consistently is:

1. powering the machine off;
2. taking the cover off;
3. prodding vaguely at the power and data connections to the hard drive;
4. powering the machine on with the cover still off.  (Seriously, if I replace the cover before powering up, the ‘fix’ fails to work.)

All I have really been able to deduce from this is that (like its owner…) my computer apparently enjoys being stripped naked and prodded.  Certainly it doesn’t work consistently enough for me to be convinced that I’m doing anything that actually fixes the fault.

Something else I’ve noticed is that the problem is far more likely to occur if the computer’s been off for a time.  If I reboot after I’ve been using it for a while, or I shut it down for only a few minutes before restarting, it almost always boots straight through.  If it’s been off for a few hours, it won’t usually work until I’ve taken the side panel off and prodded it.  I’ll be honest, this is probably the thing that has me most confused.  It’s almost as though, like an old car, it’s more likely to start reliably if the engine is warm.  I presume it must be a coincidence.

Anyway, the real crux of the matter is that I can’t really work out what the problem is, and that makes it almost impossible to come up with a solution.  If my PC was consistently hanging when it was booting into windows, I’d assume my installation had become corrupted somehow, and I’d set about repairing or replacing it.  If I was consistently hearing the hard drive power up but nothing was being displayed on the screen, I’d assume the onboard graphics chip had blown, and I’d set about trying to find the ancient PCI graphics card I should still have in a cupboard somewhere, and seeing if I could coax that into working.  If the hard drive was consistently failing to power up, I’d assume the problem lay either with the power supply to the hard drive, or the hard drive itself, and I’d hope like hell it was the former, because, if it wasn’t, I’d have just lost an awful lot of pornography and TV invaluable personal data.  As it is, I feel like I’m groping round pretty much in the dark.

Some of the issues seem like hardware problems to me – the intermittent failure to power up the hard drive, and the intermittent graphics failure at boot.  Given that there seem to be two separate faults, and they’re both intermittent, my best guess would be that this was a power supply issue, or a problem with the motherboard’s power management.  But, if this is a hardware issue, I can’t really understand why the problems only ever crop up during the very early stages of the boot.  I would expect (possibly wrongly…) hardware problems this fundamental to manifest at other points in the boot process, or even while the machine was running, but, so far, they haven’t.

On the other hand, I don’t see how it can be a software issue, although there are some aspects – repeatedly hanging at the same point while launching windows – that seem like they might be the result of a corrupted driver or something similar.  There are really two major objections that I can see to the idea that this might be a software problem.  First of all, I don’t see that a software fault can be intermittent – either a file is corrupted (in which case, presumably, it would fail to do its job every time) or it’s intact (in which case I would have thought that it would work every time).  Secondly, some of the errors are occurring so early in the boot process – even before the BIOS is loaded, in the case of the failure to power-up the hard drive – that it’s hard to imagine that a software error or corruption can be at fault.  There’s a possibility, of course, that I have more than one fault, and it’s just a coincidence that they’ve cropped up at the same time.

Anyway, I shall keep puzzling away at this, well out of my depth as I undoubtedly am.  (Feel free to leave comments laughing at any particularly crashing misassumptions or mistakes I’ve made, btw…)  Also, if I should happen to abruptly disappear in the next little while, you’ll know why.  If I’m right, and this (or some of this) does suggest a developing hardware fault, then I might be away for a while, depending on how expensive the components I’ll need to replace are.  If it is a motherboard fault, then that will mean a new processor too – they don’t make motherboards slow enough to handle my processor anymore – and, probably, a new case, as the SFF system I have at the moment won’t take a standard-sized motherboard.  All of those things together might turn out to be rather expensive, and so might translate into a bit of a delay before I’ll be able to get back online.

Alternatively, of course, it may turn out to be nothing.

[For people inclined to argue we aren’t about to enter a new decade, please see part one.  Thank you.]

On a personal level, this past decade hasn’t been that great.  At the start of it, I was well-supplied with older relatives – I had one great-grandparent, one grandparent, and both parents.  At the close of it, I have none of the above.  This happens to us all in time, of course, but to lose them all by the age of 34 is a little unusual, I think.  Ten years ago I also had a demanding job I was conspicuously good at, a mortgage, and a boyfriend.  As of now I have no job, a housing association flat paid for by the taxpayer, and more gigabytes of pornography than I care to admit to.  Most of these changes can be traced back to the resurgence of my mentalism, which had been mainly in abeyance for the ten years prior to that.  Although, to be fair, my being a loony was only one additional pressure on a relationship that would probably have come to a natural end anyway.

On the plus side, I don’t have a mortgage anymore.  Seriously, home ownership is for mugs.  It’s just like renting a flat, except with lots of added OMG, what do I do if the windows fall out!? stress, and vastly expensive running costs.  Of course, I might feel differently about renting if I had a private landlord.

Anyway, the point of this post isn’t (for once) self-indulgent misery-wallowing.  Instead, I want to write about what strike me as some of the big changes in the wider world over the last decade.  Or, at least, that was the original plan, but it’s since dawned on me that doing this in anything like a complete way is totally impractical, and the resulting post would be almost as dull to write as it would be to read.  So, instead, I’ve decided to concentrate on just one of the topics I had in mind.  Hopefully it should be reasonably interesting in its own right, and should widen out to include some slightly broader issues.  The topic I’ve chosen to focus on is one that is close to my heart for reasons that will be fairly obvious, but is also, I genuinely believe, one of the major stories of the past decade in the UK, involving significant shifts in both legislation and social attitudes.

In 2000, the ban on gay people serving in the military was lifted.  In that same year, the age of consent for gay and straight people was equalised at 16.  Section 28, which, among other things, had described homosexual relationships as ‘pretended’, was repealed in 2000 in Scotland, and 2003 in England & Wales.  In 2002, the requirement that prospective adoptive parents were married was dropped, making it possible for same-sex couples to adopt.  The Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003 outlawed discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation at work.  Also in 2003, hostility on the basis of sexual orientation was made an aggravating feature to be considered in sentencing for criminal offences in England & Wales.  In 2004, the legal definition of sexual offences was comprehensively overhauled, as a result of which all distinctions between same-sex and opposite-sex sexual conduct were abolished.  This ended the 37-year-old requirement that male homosexual acts, unlike heterosexual and lesbian acts, take place ‘in private’, and between no more than two people.  Also in 2004, the Civil Partnership Act provided for legally recognised domestic partnerships between same-sex couples that carried identical rights and responsibilities to civil marriages.  In 2007, the Sexual Orientation Regulations made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in the provision of goods and services.  Finally, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, signed into law in 2008, contained provisions enabling same-sex partners to be legally recognised as the parents of a child conceived by means of IVF or artificial insemination from the moment of birth, and to be named as such on the birth certificate.  These provisions will not be fully in force until 6^th April 2010, but once they are, they will remove the need for one partner to legally adopt the child.

This is really a staggering amount of change to take place in a little over ten years, as becomes especially obvious when it’s put in context.  It had taken 27 years of almost continual campaigning for the first liberalisation of laws relating to homosexuality to come to fruition, when the age of consent for male gay sex was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1994.  Even then, that long-delayed and very minor change had taken place in the midst of widespread and outspoken hostility to homosexuality in parliament, in the media, and amongst the general public.  By contrast, although the first few reforms of the current decade were enacted against a backdrop of very considerable opposition – the equalisation of the age of consent was an especially painful process – most recent reforms have been supported across most of the political spectrum, as well as by the majority of the public.

In many ways, that change in public attitudes has been more remarkable than the legal changes, and it’s perhaps especially apparent to old duffers like me.  When I came out in the early 90s I was in my late teens, and that counted as relatively young.  In fact, amongst my gay friends who are my own age or older, I can only think of one person who came out when he was younger.  It was typical, even for people like me who had been certain of their sexual self-identity for years (I stopped pretending to myself sometime around the age of 14 or 15), to keep schtum for quite a considerable period of time.  These days, that period of self-imposed silence is likely to be a lot shorter, and 18 would count as relatively old, I think – it’s not at all unusual, at least in larger urban schools, for people to come out before they’ve sat their GCSEs, let alone their A levels.

Even though plenty of people come out later (and, of course, coming out isn’t a race, it’s something everyone should do at their own pace, and at a time they choose), it’s getting pretty unusual to find gay people who live their lives completely closeted.  When I used to drink in the ‘gay pub’ (i.e. the pub that didn’t actively object to gay people going there) in the small town I took my degree in, most of the clientele weren’t out, and some of them used to be pretty hostile to those of us who were, criticising us for being too ‘blatant’ and for ‘flaunting’ ourselves.  That would probably be pretty unusual these days.  I think to a very large extent this has been a self-sustaining process.  As more gay people came out, more straight people got to know people who were gay, and realised  they weren’t as scary/ different/ threatening as they’d always thought they were.  That had the effect of reducing the amount of homophobia in society, which made it easier to come out, which in turn meant that more straight people got to know gay people – and so on.  It’s a fairly rare example of a virtuous circle, which always make a nice change to the far more common vicious ones.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened – although it must be later than 2005, given one of the TV shows involved – but I can even remember a point at which I realised the virtuous circle had reached something of a tipping point (he said, badly mixing his metaphors).  I was looking at the TV listings for a Saturday night, and I realised that BBC1’s line-up for the early evening included two programmes presented by Graham Norton, and one by Julian Clary.  I know some people have argued that Graham Norton is in the tradition of non-threatening ‘light entertainment’ poofs like Larry Grayson, and there’s some truth to that, but there are important differences.  Firstly, Norton is out, and has been since the very start of his career.  Secondly, and unlike people like Grayson and John Inman, he doesn’t have a carefully desexualised image.  In fact, on his various chat-shows, and especially in his autobiography, he’s been entirely upfront about having a fairly busy sex life.  Then there’s Julian Clary.  A few years earlier, he’d been judged to make a joke so shocking and revolting that most people assumed he would never work on TV again, let alone be invited to host a live pre-watershed show like the national lottery.

What really struck me as significant, though, was another show that was on that evening – Dr Who.  Not that many years before, the BBC wouldn’t have dared put an out gay writer with Russell T Davies’ track-record – Queer As Folk – in charge of a ‘family’ show.  The risk of the public outcry would have been too great.  It had only been a short time earlier that the tabloid ‘discovery’ that Tinky Winky, the Teletubby who carried a handbag, was played by a man, and the related accusation that this was a deliberate attempt by the BBC to Make Our Children Gay, had preoccupied the country for weeks, with most people seemingly reaching the conclusion that this was Unnatural, and A Bad Thing.  By the time Dr Who came around, not only could the show include an openly bisexual character, he could comment that both his female and male lovers had ‘an excellent bottom’.  The episode that contained the comment did receive several complaints from parents concerned about the effect it had on their children – but this was because they felt other parts of the episode had been too frightening.  For someone like me, who had been knocking around for a while, the level of public acceptance this implied was genuinely surprising.

None of this is to say that the battle has been completely won, of course.  Sections of the print media still feel able to attack gay people with impunity (though there are signs that even this may be changing).  Rates of homophobic violence are showing an alarming increase, not all of which can be explained by the increased willingness of victims to come forward.  There’s also something of a backlash against the extent of social change, although my feeling is that this has more to do with people who have always held homophobic opinions feeling more confident in expressing them than a shift from gay-positive to gay-negative views among the population as a whole.  Speaking personally, as well, I would argue that the battle for same-sex marriage hasn’t been fully won, given the high profile difference in the name given to legally-recognised gay and straight relationships.  Notwithstanding this, there’s no question that most of the things gay rights activists wanted to see accomplished at the start of the decade have been achieved, and in a surprisingly short timeframe.

When the obituary of the current government comes to be written, much of the focus will, quite rightly, be on foreign affairs and the economy, and the verdict will, I suspect, not be positive.  Speaking personally, I would also find plenty to criticise in the government’s social record, where several of its policies – on education, on the economy, on crime – have combined to strengthen and exacerbate social divisions.  But another part of the story will be their record on gay rights, and their rather-less-impressive-but-still-moving-vaguely-in-the-right-direction record on rights for trans people.

Truth be told, they probably had mixed motives for pursuing this sort of change.  I’m certainly not blind to the fact that pressing ahead with reforms of this type was a way of demonstrating their ‘radical’ agenda and their commitment to ‘fairness’ in a way that wouldn’t disrupt the financial comfort of well-to-do middle-class voters.  Nonetheless, the willingness of the party to expend substantial political capital on the issue – after the bruising battle over the age of consent, it would have been very easy for the government to push all future reforms firmly onto the back burner – is certainly noteworthy.  In the final analysis, and even if you are opposed to the reforms, and the increasing social tolerance that has gone hand-in-hand with them, I think they have to be counted as one of the defining features of the decade.

—

And on that note, I’ll wish you a happy new year, and a happy new decade.  Take care, all.

Apologies for the long gap without posts.  I’m hoping I might manage to cobble together some mildly interesting thoughts about the years 2000-2009 at some point.  If I do, these will form part two of this post.  But for now what I want to write about is the resurgence in people bleating about the last year of the decade being 2010, and so the new decade not starting until Jan 1^st 2011.  The last time these people were making such a nuisance of themselves was when they were seeing it as their mission to spoil millennium eve for everyone.

I realise I’m usually as much (more?) of an insufferable pedant than the next person, and so you might expect me to be amongst the ranks of people who say ‘There was no year zero!  After 365 days Jesus had his first birthday, but a few days later the calendar rolled over to year two.  This is because the moment when Jesus drew his first shuddering breath marked the start of 1AD (the first ‘year of our lord’), not 0AD, which is a logically impossible concept.’  I’m not among these people, and for one very good reason:

It’s all made up.

Obviously, so far as I’m concerned, the whole christ story is made up, but even if you’re a dedicated and passionate believer, the specific details of the dates are definitely made up.  For a start, Jesus wasn’t born in December.  We celebrate it at this time of year because those canny early christians recognised they were never going to overcome the desire to celebrate the winter solstice, and so rather than trying to suppress the festival, they co-opted it.  Almost certainly, Jesus wasn’t born (if he ever was) in year one, either.  Using astronomical (the ‘star’ followed by the wise men) and historical (the census ordered by Caesar Augustus) data, most people speculate about a date some point between 7 and 4 years prior to the year we regard as year one, though they’re always scrupulously careful to hedge their bets.

The real clincher, though, is that, for the first half a millennia or so, no-one was counting.  Most people assume, I think, that the small, dedicated band of Jesus’ followers kept note of when he was born, and that gradually their sense of how long it had been seeped out into the wider consciousness, eventually becoming the key marker in the calendar system.  That’s not what happened.

For hundreds of years, no-one had any sense of, or interest in, when Jesus was born (even now, as I understand it, christians are exhorted to regard his birth as an always-contemporary event, not a historical fact relegated to the past).  Then, abruptly, a monk called Dionysius Exiguus decided that the year in which he was writing was Year 525.  No-one knows why he decided this, but so far as anyone can tell it was entirely arbitrary.  Or, to put it more directly, he made it up.  Next time you find yourself stuck in a conversation with a boring person who insists on telling you that there was no year zero, be sure to respond by telling them that, so far as we can ever know, there was no year 333 (or 327, or 08, or…well, you get the picture) either, and when are they are going to figure that into their calculations?

As the year numbers are based on an entirely random and arbitrary assertion, there’s simply no point in pedantic precision.  In fact, it’s actively misleading, since the spurious precision suggests that the dating system is based on something concrete and absolute when it isn’t.  Equally, since the numbering system is entirely arbitrary, there’s no ‘right time’ to celebrate the end of a decade (or a century, or a millennium).  It’s no more ‘right’ to celebrate it on the 31^st December 2010 than it is the 31^st December 2009, or, for that matter, the 12^th August 2015.  None of those dates has any authentic connection to the supposed birth of Jesus.  Given that, it seems to make perfect sense to select as key points for celebration those occasions at which the passage of time is made more than usually obvious by a significant change in the numbers on the calendar.

This is, of course, what everyone does anyway.  Ten years ago, when the Queen found herself as virtually the only person in the Millennium Dome who got the hand movements to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ right,* she wasn’t marking anything that had a connection to the birth of an ancient subject of the Roman empire, she was marking the point at which there was a significant change in the numbers on the calendar.  When people lift up their glasses and drink to the new decade in a few days time, they’ll be doing exactly the same thing.

* – If any of the development team for MS Word ever happen to read this post (which was initially written on your software), I wonder if you’d be able to answer this question: why does the word in the Scots language ‘auld’ form part of the standard British English dictionary, but not the Scots words ‘lang’, and ‘syne’?  It strikes me that the title of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ must be the most famous phrase in the Scots language, so I’m intrigued by the logic that would include just one of the words and not the others.

I can’t find it now to link to, I’m afraid, but I was reading an ‘Oh, brave new world’ style article on techy matters somewhere, and it raised this as a plausible scenario likely to develop in the next couple of years.  I was slightly surprised to realise, as I read, that the author of the article thought it would be a really positive development that would be welcomed by everyone.

Basically, as you’re walking around, your mobile would be sent details about businesses in the immediate area that had paid to be registered, and your phone would then ‘push’ whatever information the business wanted at you.  So if you were walking past HMV, your phone might attract your attention in order to tell you that HMV currently have a three-for-two offer on DVDs, for example.  Or, if you were walking past a Starbucks your phone might make you look at it in order to see a message asking you if you fancied a coffee.

I’ll be honest, this idea strikes me as being horrendous.  Partly horrendous just in terms of sheer information overload – if you’re walking down the average high-street your phone is going to be continuously clamouring at you.  But it’s also the fact that the information is going to be ‘pushed’.  It’s one thing to have the information available.  The ability to be able to search for, say, the nearest pub that serves food when you’re in an unfamiliar town is one of the things I think would be most useful about a modern phone (I say think would be because I’ve never had a phone capable of anything more than calls and texts).  I also don’t object hugely to the idea of there being advertising involved, so that if I search for a bookshop, Smith’s might pay to tell me about a special offer in the hopes that I’ll visit them rather than Waterstone’s.  No, what I really object to is that the phone – and, by extension, the shops I’m walking past – will all but force me to look at the information they want me to.

It strikes me that, if it comes to fruition, this would be like a real-world version of the ‘targeted’ adverts you already get on the web, where advertisers get to talk to people who are most likely to be interested in what they have to say.  I can understand why they might see this as a very efficient use of their advertising budgets.  I can also see why businesses are very excited by the prospect of being able to communicate with someone when they’re directly outside, and so are less likely to forget about the contents of the advert than if they read it in the paper on the bus in.  And I can see why – given it’s increasingly the norm for people to skip or ignore adverts wherever they come across them – advertisers are very keen on the idea of adverts that you pretty much can’t ignore.  What I’m struggling to understand is why mobile users would welcome the development.  If I’m honest I can’t for the life of me think why anyone would think it’s a good idea.

Still, it occurs to me that I seem to be something of an oddity when it comes to technology, and so it would perhaps be a mistake to generalise from my own feelings.  For example, I like the technology I own to be passive – I like it to do what I want, when I want – but the majority of people seem very comfortable with their technology being more active, and making decisions on their behalf, and bringing things to their attention.  Then, too, I seem to be more susceptible to feelings of information overload than other people.  I think that’s partly because I don’t really have the ability to consign things to the background without thinking about them, and find it very hard to dismiss things that are clamouring for my attention. Finally, there’s the fact that, while I really like living in the internet age (and there are few things that make me happier than that there’s a smallish black box in the corner of my living room that I can turn on and it will give me access to pretty much anything I could ever want or need), I don’t particularly like the always-connected world.  I stopped carrying my mobile with me everywhere I went about 5 years ago and I can honestly say I’ve never minded being out of touch with the world for a few minutes or hours or days.  I’m well aware, though, that what I found to be a relief would be a genuinely unpleasant – even upsetting – experience for some people.

So that’s why – in excitingly interactive mode – I’ve decided to throw this over to you in the form of my second-ever poll.  What do you reckon about companies using your phone to tell you where you might like to go, and what you might like to buy?  Is it a useful way of finding out about things you might not otherwise know about?  An unwarranted intrusion of The Man into your personal space?  Or something you’re not really bothered about either way?  Vote now…

(…if you want to, that is.  I wouldn’t want you to feel that I was pushing anything on you…)

]]> http://aethelreadtheunread.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/do-you-actually-want-this/feed/ 11 aethelreadtheunread http://aethelreadtheunread.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/two-recommendations/ http://aethelreadtheunread.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/two-recommendations/#comments Sat, 12 Dec 2009 12:37:32 +0000 aethelreadtheunread http://aethelreadtheunread.wordpress.com/?p=1094 ]]>

Yes, I’m still alive.  Whoo-hoo/ Ah crap*

[* - delete as applicable]

I have encountered two things on the web that I thought might interest you.

Firstly, and most importantly, Kapitano, a person who says many interesting things on his blog, and also says many interesting things in the comments here, has uploaded a song he has written, performed and produced.  It’s called ‘Cost of Living (Atlas Unplugged)’, and you can find it here, although if you’re as myopic as I am it might take you a certain amount of failing to see things that are right in front of your nose in order to find the little clicky arrow thing.  You can also, if are inclined to do such things (and why wouldn’t you be?), go here and vote for it.

The song is, in a word, fantastic.  It’s in the synth/electronic genre, which, as you know, I’m a fan of (although not by any means exclusively – I’ll need to start wittering on about my love for bands with loud guitars soon or you’ll end up thinking of me as a one-trick music-listening pony).  Stylistically, it put me a little in mind of Kraftwerk in one of their catchier and poppier moments, although with richer instrumentation.  (But bear in mind that I don’t actually know all that many synth artists, so there may be better sounds-a-bit-like comparisons.)  Anyway, the song is fantastic, and I am profoundly jealous of Kapitano’s ability to create something that sounds so good.  Go and listen to it immediately, and prepare to join me in my jealous admiration.

Secondly, this article (actually the text of a speech) by Arianna Huffington (founder of the Huffington Post) is equally fantastic.  It’s called ‘Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, and the Desperate Need for Better Journalism’, and it’s one of those things you read where you find yourself not just agreeing with every word, but thinking ‘Yes, that’s just what I’ve always thought but haven’t been able to put into words!’  It’s in part a riposte to Rupert Murdoch’s increasingly hysterical attacks on the internet (he’s just woken up, you see, to the fact that his wealth is based on a dying business model, and so he sees the solution as shouting at the internet until it goes away).  It says every word that needs to be said on the stupidity inherent in the ‘Whaa! Google is a thief!’ rhetoric, and it’s funny, and clever, and (the thing that Murdoch will really hate) points out the obvious hypocrisy in the News International position.

As a brief taster:

I was recently on a panel in Monaco with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer. He decided to play a confusing metaphor game by comparing news content to beer. “If it’s your business decision to offer beer cans for free, fine,” he said. “But don’t take our beer and offer it for free.”

This struck me as a really bizarre metaphor. Information is hardly the same thing as a product that can only be consumed once by a single person. If you consume a news story, you might be one of millions. If you consume a beer, no one else can consume it.

So it’s a false metaphor. And if you start from a false premise, you will inevitably be led to a false conclusion. Or, to put it another way, if you chug-a-lug too many of old media’s metaphoric beers, you will end up staggering down the street of illogical thinking and banging into the lamp post of wrong revenue models.

—

In Aethelread’s-a-great-big-loony news, I have written a post about the stuff that is going on with me, and am currently debating whether I want to post it or not.  So it might go up quite soon, or in a while, or not at all.  Probably best not to hold your breath, though.

Thanks for the messages of support, both the ones left here, and the ones emailed.  Sorry for not replying.  It’s been (and still is) – well, you know.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note, and against all the odds, this has been making me feel almost festive:

Released 14.12.09

(And this is a clickable link to the you tube thingy that should be embedded above, on the basis that I’ve probably fucked up the embedding somehow.)

I had to walk away.  I’ve just had to.  Somewhere between reading the accounts of abuse that were making me feel like someone was twisting my guts up in a knot, and knowing that every comment I made would be jumped on, and twisted, and misconstrued and misrepresented as though the only thing that mattered was winning a fucking pointless blog argument and the lives and the people destroyed by all this fucking complacency and self-serving look-the-other-way, I’m-alright-jack bullshit was just a minor incidental detail.

I’ve had to walk away.  I’ve just had to.  I can’t do it.  I can’t control the feelings, I can’t keep a lid on the desperation that wells up inside me when I read about this kind of casual, calculated, it’ll-never-come-back-on-me-so-who-gives-a-shit cruelty by the strong towards the weak.  I feel the same when I read about elderly people being abused in care homes, or kids being abused by teachers or priests.  How does anyone not feel it, this awful, desperate desperation on behalf of these people, the weakest of the weak who can have their lives destroyed by the tiniest little flick of cruelty while the person who inflicts it forgets it 2 seconds later, and the people who watch it worry about their careers, and themselves, and every fucking thing except the people who have no hope except that someone will notice and help.

I sit in front of my computer nd trying to drag my thoughts together long enough to say what I want, to think and think and think knowing that every word I type will be taken apart and picked over by people who aren’t interested in hearing what I say, buit only in trying to find the flaw, the unconsidered little detail that they can worry away at and make seem worse and worse and fucking worse and all so they can ignore what I’m trying to say and what they know damn well im trying to say by=u theu won’t just fucking listen  I can’t do this.  I can’t do this.  I can’t do it.  I couldn’t do it, I knew I couldn’t do it, but the part of me that knew is should keep quiet, and not get involved and just sit it out got dragged in because because because the whole fucking system is sick.  It’s not sick because there are bad people in it, but because the good people in it don’t hold back the bad.  It’s sick because the people who can help won’t help, not because they’re bad, but because they’re tired and worn down, and intimidated, and just to crawl home t the forget the patients who are lying in the dark lost and alone and and wiating for the next little flick of unregarded cruelty, the next little humililiation that will be piled on top of them

The system is sick, the world is sick, any world that can have this fucking shit i nit is sick, and it needs to change.  It needs to change.  I can see thast it needs to change but I cant fucking change it do it I cant do it I cant do it  I cant icanbt I acnt l8i9ke some fucking preiceless prima donna  and the people that get left in the shit by everyone else get left in the shit by me as well

You’re not going to fucking get me  Ill fight you and fight you and fight you and you won’t get fucking anywhere near me.  I amy not be able to defend anyone else but I can defend myself and this I s the last fucking warning so back off and leave me alone or youll fuckinbg get whatc you fucking deserve

I am really bothered by this discussion over on Mental Nurse.  To summarise, a number of patients are setting out an appalling catalogue of abuse at the hands of the mental health system, principally in the UK, but also in Ireland and elsewhere.  This is truly horrifying stuff – up to and including rape, in one example, but all of it is sickening.  That is bothering in and of itself, of course, but what is really bothering me are the responses of the few healthcare professionals who are contributing to the debate.

(And, goodness me, but isn’t it noticeable how disengaged from the debate the MN regulars have been?  You can’t move for comments from them when they’re arguing about nursing becoming an all-graduate profession (something that will make slightly less than fuck-all difference to patients), but when it comes to a discussion of what ought to be the single most pressing issue any of them will ever encounter in their entire professional lives – the systematic abuse of the people they are theoretically meant to care for – suddenly there’s all sorts of other things they have to worry about instead.  That’s a very revealing set of priorities, I think.)

What’s really struck me is that none of the nurses (and allied professionals) have expressed outrage at what they’ve read.  (They have expressed a vague, hand-waving ‘concern’ or ‘disappointment’ instead.)  I don’t know if this is because they are familiar with this kind of abuse in their own working lives and so don’t find it shocking, or because the abuse is being described by patients who they are used to dismissing because, you know, they’re mentals…

Either way round, that’s already a fairly major problem right there – that the natural, human response of ‘Oh my god, this is awful.  Just reading about it makes me feel sick to my stomach.  What can I do to stop this happening?’ has been noticeable by its absence.  I would guess that’s what anyone except a mental health professional would think when they read about this kind of thing.  It’s not what the MH professionals contributing to the Mental Nurse thread think.  Instead, we’ve had a whole bunch of: ‘well, people burn out, what can you do?’; ‘there are faults in the system that make people behave in this way’; ‘sometimes things get really stressful’; ‘I’m a nurse and, I can tell you, some patients have been really nasty to me’; and so on, and so on.  Faced with this appalling testimony of abuse, this has been, collectively, their response: we need to think about the issues that cause these problems and see what we can do to address them…

Bullshit.

Last month, Amanda Cheadle was banned from keeping animals for life.  She had committed acts of cruelty against dogs, including shutting a number of new-born puppies in a suitcase and leaving them to die in the cupboard under the stairs.  It was a fairly high profile case – ITN included it in their evening news bulletin, for example.  As it happens, and even despite the terrible things she did, I have quite a lot of sympathy for Ms Cheadle.  She had been sectioned around the time that the offences took place, and it seems fairly likely to me that she was overwhelmed by the situation with the dogs, and shut them away because she couldn’t cope.  I can also understand why the experience of being sectioned might have made her very reluctant to ask official bodies like the RSPCA for help.

But none of this sympathy prevents me from thinking that the court was absolutely right to hand down a lifetime ban on keeping animals.  Of course it’s entirely right to try and understand what causes someone to act abusively, and even, in some cases, to empathise with what they have endured – but it’s a secondary concern.  The primary concern has to be getting the abuser out of the situation in which they can perpetrate abuse.  At one level it doesn’t matter if an abuser is perpetrating abuse because they’re unwell, or under stress, or are a victim themselves, or lack the empathy to understand that what they’re doing is wrong, or are just wantonly cruel – what matters, in the first analysis, is making sure they stop.  This is a principle I think all of us would accept when it comes to dogs, so why is it one that MH professionals seem unwilling to accept when it comes to MH patients?

It’s obvious what’s required: a two-speed approach.  First and foremost, zero tolerance for the abuse of patients – automatic de-registration for a single instance of abuse (whatever ‘circumstantial defences’ the abuser is able to put forward); also, de-registration for fellow-professionals who knowingly fail to report abusers.  This is not, primarily, a matter of punishment, it’s a question of getting abusers out of the situation in which they can perpetrate abuse – in fact, there might need to be a separate, criminal process to look at punitive measures against the worst offenders.  Secondly, there needs to be a long, hard look at what factors may be causing MH professionals to perpetrate abuse in the first place, and then a properly funded effort to address them.  Are there problems with working conditions?  Staff shortages?  Is there a lack of practical and psychological support for people struggling with an exceptionally demanding job?  A management culture that tolerates (or even encourages) abusive behaviour so long as performance indicators are met?

All of this secondary stuff is hugely important – but it comes second for all that.  The first priority has to be to stop the abuse.  Sectioned mental patients (or those involuntarily ‘voluntary’ patients who know damn well they’ll be sectioned if they express a desire to leave the ward) have been reduced to the status of children, with the nurses who ‘look after’ them exalted to the position of ‘adults’.  Patients are presumed not to know what’s in their own best interests.  They are at the mercy, 24/7, of the ‘adults’ who have quasi-parental authority over them.  If they’re the victims of abuse, their only hope for redress, or just simply having the abuse stopped, is trying to convince another ‘adult’ about the reality of what’s happening to them – but, as the personal accounts on the Mental Nurse thread make plain, far too often the ‘adults’ will just close ranks and punish the ‘child’ for daring to speak out.

There is, quite rightly, an absolute outcry any time an actual child is found to be a victim of the emotional, physical or sexual cruelty of an adult who is supposed to be caring for them.  It’s a matter of grave injustice that there isn’t a similar outcry every time one of the adults infantilised by an Act of Parliament is abused in this way.  But what really bothers me, and what has been so eloquently revealed by the selective silences and weasel-words of the professional contributors on Mental Nurse, is that the people who have the authority, in their day-to-day working lives, to stop the abuse don’t see it that way.

Their response isn’t to condemn the abuse and ask themselves what they, personally, can do to prevent it, but to explain what causes it to happen.  Their instinct isn’t to try and defend the victims of the abuse, but to justify the actions of the abusers.  The old cry of ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ isn’t usually helpful.  But it is hard to see how people with instincts like these can ever be part of the solution to so horrific a problem.

—

Sorry for the lack of posts recently – I haven’t been feeling too good.

Not-feeling-to-good is also the explanation for why, for the first time ever, I’ve closed this post to comments from the get-go.  I just don’t have the energy to cope with getting into a discussion, or a debate, or an argument, or a fight.  Sorry.

In light of the recent Queen’s-speech-related twitchings of the corpse of our present government, I’ve been inspired to write a post about the forthcoming general election, and politics in general.  No, wait, come back!

Ok, so the first thing to say to those few of you who are persisting with reading this is that the Conservatives do still have a mountain to climb.  That maybe sounds like an odd thing to say, when a poll this week has found that they are on 42%, with Labour polling 29%.  The reason the mountain exists is that, as things stand, Labour has a huge parliamentary majority.  Comparing the 2005 election with the 2010 one, it would take a 7.1% swing to the Conservatives for them to have a parliamentary majority of one.  A swing of 5.5% would make them the largest party in a hung parliament (and therefore, presumably, David Cameron the leader of a minority or coalition government), while a swing of 7.5% would give them a workable majority of 48.  This week’s poll, when compared with the results of the election in 2005, suggests an 8% swing to the Conservatives.  But all of these figures need to be put in context.

This table has been created by me, using data about election results from Wikipedia (here onwards), and a formula for calculating swing from here.

* – In the February 1974 election, both Labour and the Conservatives lost votes to Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberal party.

First of all, we can see that, in all the elections from 1945 onwards, there have only been swings of more than 7.1% (the swing the Conservatives need if they are to get a majority of one) on two occasions – once in 1945 (which is usually regarded as an anomaly, because there hadn’t been a general election since 1935), and again in 1997.  The second point to note here is that both of these swings have been in favour of the Labour party.  The highest swing the Conservatives managed to achieve over the 60 years and 17 elections between 1945 and 2005 was 5.35%, in 1951.  In other words, if the Conservatives were to match their best ever performance in terms of swing, that would probably still not be enough for them to form the next government.

Another piece of information contained in the table is perhaps also worth noting.  Margaret Thatcher’s sweep to victory in 1979, against the backdrop of the Winter of Discontent – with its unburied corpses, and electricity rationing, and mountains of uncollected refuse rotting in the streets – was the result of a swing of 5.2%.  It seems to me that this suggests two related things.  Firstly, it is perhaps something of a warning to the Conservatives not to rely on dissatisfaction with Labour alone to win them the election – is it really likely that the winter of 2009 will be as bad as the winter of 1978?  Secondly, it also suggests that, even if public dissatisfaction with Labour were to reach the same pitch as it did in the late 70s, this wouldn’t, on its own, be enough to secure a Conservative victory in 2010.  This is a point I will be returning to later in this post.

Of course, it’s probably a mistake to rely too heavily on historical data, especially at the moment.  Everyone always thinks they are living though extraordinary times, and it’s only the more sober assessment of hindsight that can establish whether that’s true or not, but it does seem to me that the next election will be fought in fairly exceptional circumstances, for a number of reasons.  Most significant amongst these is that it will take place against the backdrop of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  To be honest, the effect of this is a little hard to judge, I think.  On the one hand, it seems likely that the electorate will want to punish the party responsible for the mess.  On the other hand, economic crises tend to cause a shift to the left.  This is what happened in both the UK and USA in the 1930s, and it’s already happened in America this time round.  In the UK (well, OK, England – things are more complicated elsewhere), the ‘natural’ opposition to Labour, the Conservatives, are, of course, a party of the centre-right, which raises a question as to how inclined non-aligned floating voters may be to vote for them.

In many ways, the obvious result of this would be a significant shift to the Liberal Democrats – or at least it would be, if it weren’t for the fact that their leader, Nick Clegg, has taken the baffling decision to move them from the slightly-to-the-left-of-Labour stance that gave them an unprecedented 68 MPs at the 2005 election.  In fact, they’ve shifted so significantly to the right that they now seem more enthusiastic about spending cuts than the Conservatives do.  It seems more than a little perverse that, at a time when Conservatives feel they are members of a newly resurgent party and millions of disillusioned Labour voters are looking for a sympathetic new home, the Lib Dems have decided to try and recruit Conservatives instead of Labourites.  I certainly find it hard to believe that it will be an especially successful tactic.

While Nick Clegg’s decision is the most extraordinary, the Conservatives also seem to have made some slightly odd choices.  Up until the credit crunch, it seemed as though David Cameron had a fairly clear strategy to present the Conservatives as a radically different organisation to the party that had been in power in the 80s and 90s, one that was as ‘nice’ as Labour, but more efficient in the way it would administer government.  In fact, he seemed to be deliberately picking fights with his grassroots supporters on issues like tax cuts to try and emphasise to the general public how radical his change of direction was.  Since the credit crunch and its aftermath, that approach seems to have been entirely abandoned, even though it was what first began to rebuild public support for the Conservatives.  To some extent, of course, the change in emphasis results from the fact that they are now, understandably, waging an all-out war on the issue of the government’s financial incompetence, but this seems to be part of a wider change.  Specifically, the Conservatives seem to have fallen publicly in love with the idea of austerity, not just as a necessary response to lean economic circumstances, but as a virtue to be celebrated.  It seems to me this may be an error.

There’s no doubt that ideas of government-imposed austerity play well with old-style Conservatives, who like to imagine that anyone who finds themselves in economic difficulties must have been irresponsible, and therefore deserves  punishment.  There’s also no doubt that a lot of people in the UK, whatever their political leanings, react with great pleasure at the thought of austerity being imposed on someone else, whether that’s bankers, or MPs, or single parents, or whoever.  Despite this, there’s a risk with becoming too much associated with austerity, which is that, while people rather like the idea of it being imposed somewhere else, they’re usually less keen when it comes to having it imposed on themselves.  There’s still plenty of time between now and the next election, of course, but I think the Conservatives need to come up with a more appealing message by then – certainly I think it’s quite hard to imagine ditherers putting a cross next to the Conservative candidate if what’s uppermost in their minds is that this is the party that wants to keep taxes high, drastically cut back on spending, and make them work longer before they can retire.  ‘Responsibility’ and ‘austerity’ are all very well, but they’re not usually crowd-pleasers.

It certainly seems to me that there are a few signs that things may not be entirely rosy for the Conservatives.  In all the consternation over the success of the BNP in the European elections, one thing a lot of people overlooked is that the Conservatives got only slightly more of the share of the vote in 2009 than they did in 2004, and received the backing of little more than a quarter of those who voted.  This is, on the face of it, quite a surprise.  We had a government embroiled in an unpopular war, responsible for an appalling economic collapse, and staggering on an almost daily basis from one self-created crisis to the next.  Really, if the main opposition party can’t improve their share of the vote at a time like this, when can they?  Certainly, it is hard to imagine how much more unwillingly helpful Labour could be to the Conservative cause.  Of course, there are other issues to consider.

For a start, and for all they only secured 28.6% of the vote, the Conservatives nonetheless won the election, and by a fairly broad margin (the second-placed party, UKIP, got 17.2%).  Then again, Europe is the single most divisive issue for the Conservative party, and in an election focussing specifically on Europe, it’s possible that the more eurosceptic of party supporters might choose to vote for UKIP, but return to the Conservative fold in a UK election.  (The problem with this line of argument is that disgruntled Labourites are also more likely to vote against their party in a Euro election, but revert back in a general.)  Another point to consider is that the Euro elections were fought in the immediate aftermath of the expenses scandal, and the Conservatives were as badly damaged by that as Labour were.  I think most people would probably agree that, since the scandal broke, David Cameron has done substantially better at rebuilding his and his party’s image than Gordon Brown has.

That said, it still seems to me that there is a general perception around at the moment that the Conservatives don’t really have to do anything because the 2010 election is already won.  As I’ve already pointed out, there are two potential problems with this argument.  Firstly, the last time we were crawling towards the fag-end of a desperately unpopular Labour government, in 1979, the public dissatisfaction with Labour was enough to produce a strong swing to the Conservatives – but the size of the swing wouldn’t be enough to put them in government this time around.  Secondly, the evidence from the European elections suggests that, while people are unquestionably frustrated with Labour, they don’t seem to be switching en masse to the Conservatives.

Mid-term elections of whatever type – local, European, by-elections – tend to be treated as a referendum on the government.  In general elections, on the other hand, people are more likely to vote positively; that is, for a party they like, not against a party they dislike.  In other words, for a party to do well in a general election, it’s generally thought that they need to have policies of their own that attract the electorate, instead of relying on the unpopularity of their rivals.  Certainly, in the run-up to 1997, Labour made a conscious effort to set out their own ideas, rather than relying on the unpopularity of the Conservatives to win them the election, as they had pretty much done in 1992.  I’m not sure that the Conservatives have yet achieved the same thing this time around.  So far, they’ve been very effective in getting across the message that Labour have failed, but they seem to have been less successful in getting across how they will manage to succeed.

Two final points before I stop lecturing you and go away.  (Sorry, I can’t help myself – I’m a politics geek.)

Firstly, if you are a Labour supporter, I think you should be hoping for them to lose.  I know that seems backwards, but the thing is, there’s no way they’ll win a 5^th general election.  If they lose now, there is a chance that the Conservative majority will be narrow enough that future elections will still be up for grabs.  On the other hand, if they win in 2010, Labour will be absolute electoral poison by the time of the next election, and will lose it at least as badly as the Conservatives lost in 1997.  If Labour were to win in 2010, it would pretty much guarantee that a lengthy period of Conservative supermajority would follow.  No, if you’re a Labour supporter, you ought to be hoping they lose – just not too badly.

Secondly, I ought to finish this post by telling you what I think – which is that we urgently need electoral reform.  This version of political life in Britain – where support reliably and predictably seesaws between a massively powerful Conservative government and a massively powerful Labour government – is a fantasy that bears no relation to anything that’s real.  By 2010, it will be 40 years since a government last secured the support of more than 44% of those who chose to vote – neither Margaret Thatcher nor Tony Blair ever won an election outright, despite both of them being in a position to impose their will on the country.  For more than half a lifetime, the electorate have consistently voted for consensus-driven coalition government, but have been met with two lengthy periods of parliamentary dictatorship instead.  This is really a shocking thing.  There have been many controversial and far-reaching policies introduced in that time – the annihilation of much of the UK’s industrial capability (and with it, the destruction of the social fabric of large parts of the country), the privatisation of British Rail, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the massive expansion of state surveillance of law-abiding citizens – and all of them have been imposed without the consent of the people.  This can’t be allowed to continue, not if we want to call ourselves a democracy.

Yes, of course, electoral reform would produce some effects I wouldn’t be thrilled by – Nick Griffin would almost certainly become an MP, for example – but the fact that we might disapprove of the way some people use their votes isn’t a valid argument for restricting democracy.  (And, in any case, the far-right would remain a tiny minority, and would be balanced-out by new MPs coming from the left – or at least they would, if the left-wingers ever managed to stop arguing among themselves long enough to fight an election campaign…)  It’s the wholesale abrogation of meaningful democracy that lies behind the disengagement from politics that every politician claims to deplore.  Electoral reform isn’t an optional extra, a might-be-nice-one-day cherry on the top of everything else, it’s the necessary first step to building effective politics.  Fundamentally, we have no right to use the word ‘democracy’ to describe our system of government, not when it works in such a way that the leader of the largest political minority gets to rule like they secured a landslide majority.