"Tread More Lightly On Your Lives"

 That was back in November of 2022. Actually it's 'irreplaceable' isn't it? 

 And apologies, this will be a quite long, largely unillustrated, and not very happy post madly stuffed with microlinks, but if you click on only one of those links this last day of Pride, please let it be THIS. Thank you. I always liked you. 

 Okay. Probably the biggest, if not the only, historical development I've derived any genuine joy and hope from this century is the shedding of my own trans-skepticism as friend after friend of mine found the answer to who they were and came out as trans and non-binary. In the growing light of their revelation the world seemed to me, in this one sense at least, to become better, and richer, and more user-friendly and less exploitative. Then the party I voted into office turned that light out because they thought it's the Government who should decide what human beings are and not human beings. I've heard no one this year wish each other a Happy Pride. So no, I can't say I've grown any fonder of Sir Keir Starmer since I posted the picture above. 

 But now Labour is finally finding a replacement, and perhaps the knots in my brain will loosen. However, as the man himself said: 

"while this is an important moment it is not one for celebration. It is one for reflection. On how a party that has always prided itself on its anti-racism, its commitment to equality, its belief in a better, fairer Britain could have fallen so far as to betray its own principles, as well as the principles of the country. This is also a moment to apologise once again. To all those who were hurt, to all those who were let down, to all those driven out of our party, who no longer felt it was their home, who suffered the most appalling abuse. Today, on behalf of the entire Labour Party, I say: sorry."

 Now obviously that wasn't Starmer's resignation speech. That was the speech he gave in February 2023 after the Equalities and Human Rights Commission said they would no longer be monitoring the Labour Party for anti-semitism – the speech from which the quote "If you don’t like the changes we have made, I say the door is open and you can leave" has so often been taken out of context, that context being it was an untreated stream of white crud. Because, two years later, this same Equalities and Human Rights Commission's devastatingly under-researched guidance on who should be allowed into what toilet prompted some of these trans friends to seek out, in the words of one, "a plan and a passport" as the UK plummeted to 44th place out of 49 European countries in its recognition of trans people’s gender identity. In plain sight and to the accompaniment of countless unmarginalised commentators who genuinely don't seem to know what the word "trans" even means, the British Government became more vocally hostile to the gender non-conforming than I can remember in my lifetime, contributing oceans of piss to a rising tide of trillionaire-sponsored abject cruelty with the openly transphobic trustee of Sex Matters becoming the Prime Minister's director of communications (before resigning over Mandelson)...

 

Oh yes, Mandelson

 

... and, at the very opening of this Pride Month, Wes Streeting's replacement as Health Secretary going on the Today programme to pronounce that a trans woman is a man in a dress, an interview I have literally woken up thinking about most days since. (His exact words were in fact "I wouldn't say trans women are women", but what are they then, fucking UFOs?) 

 

 

Sorry, wrong picture

 And obviously – actually I'll take that "obviously" back, because so many seem to miss it – Starmer-mandated cruelty wasn't just reserved for the trans. Look at Woolwich Crown Court: With plans still in place to speed up "access to justice" by ending a person's right to trial by jury, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson recently set a couple of unorthodox precedents, firstly by intitiating a prosecution for contempt of court against defense lawyer (and veteran of inquiries into Grenfell, Hillsborough, and the murder of Stephen Lawrence) Rajiv Menon for daring to remind a jury that they were allowed to vote with their conscience, and secondly, by sentencing the four Palestine Action activists left to defend themselves to a total of twenty-five years in prison for a crime they'd neither been charged with, tried for, nor found guilty of. What all four had been charged with was "criminal damage", specifically: taking a sledgehammer to Elbit Sytems UK "products" intended to be tested on Palestinians before being marketed globally as "battle-proven". (Who knows what "products"? Helmets probably.) What they were jailed for however was terrorism, with the backing of a Court of Appeal who had, in deference to the Government, reversed the High Court's overturning of Palestine Action's proscription.

 But that's a tangent really, as is Starmer's appointment of the guy who used to run the UK's most notorious monopsony as a new monopolies regulator, as is the constant downplaying of Russian interference even when it's arson attacks against Starmer's own property, as is anything Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood does, or anything I was ever planning to write about Morgan McSweeney, the not nearly famous enough Liberal-hating, Socialist-hating, Gary-Lineker-hating former Chief of Staff who put Starmer into power with undisclosed donations to Labour Together and a campaign of surveillance against journalists. I'm just getting all these brain-shredding grievances down here now because I don't ever want to write about Keir Starmer again.

 But no, they're all tangents, because the only thing compelling me to write any of this at all was there was meant to be a mass lobby of MPs to reject the EHRC's "bathroom ban" last Friday, but it had to be cancelled because of the heat and so I was hoping we could all write to our MP instead (particularly if any of you live in Makerfield) and here's that link again please. I also hope whoever takes over as Prime Minister has a plan for the heat, and the hatred, and the battle-proving, and I hope it's more than just letting it play itself out or whatever.

 Finally, since I hope never to write about Starmer again, I'll use this post to share his very last interview before resigning, given at the G7 summit. Chris Spargo is a fairly new YouTuber to the scene, whose other videos include "Why is this bin everywhere in the UK?", "Do you really need to preheat the oven?", and "I just want to show you some weird stones". I love Chris Spargo. And Callum, Emma, Sib, Griffyn, Harry, Amanda, Ashley, Billie, Sarah, Alastair, Maya, Pippa, Jack, Jas, Jordan, Jay, Es, Ozzy, Miranda, Mamoru, Oli, I love you too. Happy Pride x

 

Exciting Resignation Blog Placeholder: Topless Politics Revisited

I'm afraid you will have to read the link in full to understand this. I should get photoshop again.

 

 Okay. Good. 

 The hopeless, teeth-grinding paralysis logged in my last post has lifted a little today. 

 And with genuine love and respect for all who, by contrast, find themselves disquieted by Keir Starmer's resignation, I do intend to pay my proper goodbyes to that feeble, purge-sanctioning pepperpot soon. But for now I just want to share this Unattended Article from nineteen years ago! I'd thought it prudent to start backing up the blog because who knows what's going to happen to the internet now it's literally being run by Nazis – sorry, "hard power" enthusiasts – and in doing so... well firstly, bloody hell if I say so myself, but this was a great read in its early days before I started just sharing stuff... and secondly, and more pertinently, having grown to believe my anxieties about the normalisation of the Far Right had only begun in 2008, with the shamelessly guff-spraying double whammy of Sarah Palin as Republican candidate for Vice President and an openly Islamophobic Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, I was genuinely taken aback to find in August 2007, when this blog had just begun and Gordon Brown just become Prime Minister: 

I've noticed a number of angry twenty-year-olds at work, angry and hopeless, robbed of any ideology. And it occurred to me of course, any fellow thirty-somethings, that these people have lived HALF THEIR LIVES under the present government… so no wonder they're so scared and racist. It was alright for us because we knew the Tories were baddies when they talked about "Preserving the British Way of Life"… We grew up with images of gorgons smeared in blood and cash and war… But "kids today", they've heard that same poppycock from the good guys. Thatcher's not the baddie anymore, it's something called the New World Order, and expect to hear immigration mentioned a lot...

Big Spoon

artwork by Jon Stubbington

 

 Of course, I'm biased. But I think my mate Matthew Woodcock (Monster Hunters co-creator, "Roy Steel", and former Tweed Avenger of Mitre Square before the London Dungeons started giving us all scripts) has produced a genuine podcast Masterpiece in The Divide. Without giving too much away – and there is SO MUCH to give away – his new, twelve-part Cold War beast, is John Le Carré meets Philip K. Dick, with new episodes out every Friday, atmosphere you could cut with a piano wire, and me popping up all over the show as louche para-intelligence panjandrum Charles "A bastard for a boss can be quite the motivator" Spooner. Everyone involved has done incredible work on it so I won't mention any of them because I want you to stop reading this immediately and start catching up with it NOW: Here, look what a lovely length the episodes are...

 

 Power through the first four if you can for a NEXT LEVEL TWIST, and then bask in the even-nexter levelness of episode five...

  

 And then enjoy the wait. Cool some water, maybe, invite some friends round whatever you cooled that water with and talk and about it while you wait. Like! Subscribe! Sorry, I'm excited. I honestly reckon you'll be hooked though, I'm really proud to be involved, I've just shed a week-long fever, and you know how long it normally takes me to plug stuff. Here's another Grand Panjandrum...

 

 

 

 Fireworks and dogs. A different time. 

Sometimes this blog will just be Daniel Hodges.

 

 It's important to me to keep this blog from becoming just another reaction to the big thing, a somewhere else from stuff. But I acknowledged Trump when he won back in 2016, so I'll allow him another mention here. Daniel Hodges' reaction to the presidential pardons of insurrectionists who tried to gouge out his eyes is the kind of cold, heartfelt reality check his country needs as many of and as soon as it can get, and unlike the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde's sermon to Trump upon his inauguration (reaction shit posted below) – which I'm guessing most readers will have already seen – it's an address explicitly directed to "everyone watching", so I'm happy to boost those numbers. 

 

 Another great reminder of how much power we do and don't have right now is a fleeting story I saw on instagram, which said – perhaps in reaction to the breadth of the brim on Melania's hat – "If you've kissed a loved one on the cheek today, remember, you're more powerful than the president." 

 We have more resources for reaching out to and checking upon each other than have ever existed before. Let's use them. I hope you're all doing tremendously.

Meeting Your Heroes

The way to the bottom of my heart might be windy... prononunced wine-dy (I wish there were a way to disambiguate that as I've mentioned before)... but it's down there somewhere, and from that bottom I heartily recommend making one's friends one's heroes. 

 Look how many turned up to the show on Saturday night (Tickets here!) Some I hadn't seen offline since before the pandemic. Some I'd seen out Ripper Walking in the Summer. Two are getting married. One's just been confirmed as the new voice of Wallace. One's working on the fourth and final series of The Monster Hunters. One's going to be working at Heathrow Airport on Christmas Eve as a mime. One really liked Del Toro's "Pinocchio", and thought I would too – Sorry, Kevin. So I haven't witten more about that copy of the Daily Mail from 1946, Sorry. But of course you don't just stave off the darkness of this season by putting lights up, you also get busy reuniting.

 (I will let you read that story a little closer though, in case yesterday's image was too small. It's stunning to see how little time following the end of the actual Second World War it took some papers to see things from the fascists' point of view again... Also, an odd choice of defense of tactic from Goring on the right there...)

Placeholding Shreds of Tom Driberg

 Fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to explain further why, but for now here's a picture of Tom Driberg. I don't expect you to know who he is. I didn't until just now. Initially a member of the British Communist Party, and openly gay when it was incredibly illegal, Driberg became Chairman of the Labour Party in 1958, but there's a lot more to know about him than even that. Here's a brief extract from the wikipedia entry where I found his picture:

One of Driberg's elaborate hoaxes was a concert called "Homage to Beethoven", which featured megaphones, typewriters and a flushing lavatory. Newspaper accounts of this event raised the interest of the occultist Aleister Crowley.

 But that's not why I was resarching Tom Driberg either. I was researching him because his was the name which turned up when I searched "MP Driberg 1946," which I did after reading this point of order recorded in Hansard on the thirteenth of March 1946...

FASCIST ACTIVITIES (ALBERT HALL MEETING)

HC Deb 13 March 1946 vol 420 cc1113-4 1113

The following Question stood upon the Order Paper in the name of Mr. Driberg:

137. To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he is aware that a public demonstration is to be held at the Albert Hall, on Wednesday, 13th March, by a body known as the Britons' Vigilantes Action League; and if, in view of the fact that much of the propaganda of this League is identical with that of our enemies in the late war and of the consequent likelihood that a breach of the peace will be provoked, he will prevent this demonstration from taking place. 

 

Mrs. Braddock

On a point of Order, Mr. Speaker. In view of the urgency and the possible far-reaching effect of any reply which may be given, can we have an oral answer to Question No. 137?

 

Mr. Speaker 

No, I can see no need and this is not a matter for me to decide.

 

Mr. Driberg 

Further to that point of Order, Mr. Speaker. Should I be in Order in raising on the Miscellaneous Financial Provisions Bill this afternoon the question of this Fascist demonstration?

Mr. Speaker  

That is a matter for the Chairman of the Committee. It has nothing to do with me.

Mr. Driberg  

May I, in view of the urgency of this matter, ask your leave, Mr. Speaker, to move the Adjournment of the House on a definite matter of urgent public importance—that is, the revival of Fascism in this country and the public demonstration by Fascists which is due to take place at the Albert Hall tonight?

Mr. Speaker  

That is hypothetical, and I cannot accept it.

Back to Women's Garments (Down pointing)

Forward to PERSIA (RUSSIAN TROOPS)

 ... And that's what turned up when I searched "the Briton's Vigilantes Action League," which I did because they're mentioned on the front page of the Daily Mail from the sixteenth of March 1946, in a story entitled "Police crushed by Communist demonstrators," and I know about that because it's currently a prop in Love Goddess.

 

 I never really think about 1946. As I say, hopefully more to follow. Click to enlarge.

Sure, I'm still on twitter.

 When I first returned to this blog* after Boris Johnson's 2019 election victory I thought I'd just remain on twitter to post links and provide a little daily – but potentially always topical – keening over our exit from the EU inspired by Megan Anram's daily "Today was the day Donald trump finally became president" posts. Initially, I thought spending less time on everyone's favourite hellsite was simply for my own good, but when I watched Lindsay Ellis' video about her own cancelling last April I realised maybe the problem wasn't just me, but twitter's own business model, which now required the active promotion of upsetting content in order to keep our attention. Capitalism depended on growth, and twitter had grown as big as it was going to get. So I pinned this to my profile:

 

 Yes, stay cool. Because Fascism Thrives On Division. 

 Then, just over a week ago, Elon Musk finally bought the site or app or whatever it is for forty-four billion dollars.

 

 

 And immediately sacked its content moderators – one week before the American midterm elections, and exactly one day before a terrorist attack on a migrant processing centre in Dover followed by our reappointed Home Secetary's warning of an "invasion" of the south coast by refugees – and I was initially nonplussed by commentators passing the popcorn and using phrases like "it's going to be a wild ride." I mean, I get it. I write, and sentences must be finished, and lot of this blog is just me sharing stuff I find ineresting and then realising I should probably provide some kind of commentary, and "it's going to be a wild ride" is a handy sign off. But it still seemed a weird way to describe the rise of Fascism.  

 

 My sister's a meme!

 

 But maybe that wasn't what was being described. Maybe those commentators anticipating twitter's downfall were looking forward to the fall of the rise of Fascism, certainly something I'd like to live long enough to see... That's maybe not entirely true. What I mean is, given that I have to keep on living, I would very much like the fall of the rise of Fascism to happen at some point during that. 

 Has the word Fascism gone a bit weird on me now? Maybe.

 Anyway, here's some chat.
 

 And I was talking to my uncle Gordie last week, and learning how well his children's generation have been rallying around each other, and how much help is now provided – ar at least seen to be needed – which wasn't when I was their age, and I have to remember that I'm living to see other, far better things also on the rise. 

 

 

* Here's how this post originally began: 

 

 When I first started

 Okay actually, before I continue I'm going to let you a little into how tediously I go about writing these posts: I've just started writing this, about four minutes ago, three of which have been spent arriving at the word "tediously" which I might still change, and it would normally now be about an hour before I looked back over all this and finally noticed how... again, I'm going to spend a while now trying to find a synonym for "bad"... let's just stick with "bad" then... how bad those opening four words are, only as it happens this time I noticed almost immediately. "When I first started"? Surely that's a... I'll look this up... tautology? Doesn't starting mean doing something for the first time anyway? And yet it sounds okay to my ear when I say it out loud. Maybe I just like the sound of my voice too much. "When I first started..."

 Okay.

 When I first started returning to this blog to post daily

 Oh bloody hell....

 "First started returning"? That sounds terrible. What can that mean? But no, back in December of 2019 I returned to the blog after a bit of an absence and I started posting daily, which I hadn't done before, and then there was a break in early 2021, and now I'm blogging daily again. Hence "first", hence "returning"... Yeah that"started" is redundant.

 When I first returned to this blog to post daily... I've honestly forgotten now what I was going to say.

Untitled ContraPoints Share

  

"who'll have you."

 

 

 I have so many takeaways from this video – I always have takeaways from Natalie Wynn's work, they're more like solo shows than youtube videos, a full evening's watch requiring a wind-down – but trying to express those takeways in neat little titles, like most bigotry is actually backlash, or projection isn't empathy, won't do this fantastic piece justice, because the reason ContraPoints' pieces are so long is Wynn refuses to pretend anything is simple, or anyone an abstract. Also she likes to bathe in milk and take cocktail breaks, but that's all part of the care package. Backlash is always making a push for respectability, in the guise of "debate", but the idea that liberation must be earnt by argument, rather than simply granted, is surely one of the crappiest our culture has clung to. Argument's not how you understand something, understanding requires love and study. Not that love and understanding need go hand in hand; if you don't understand something, just send love on ahead. But Wynn – both a trans woman, and the receiver of sustained abuse from trans twitter herself – tries harder than most to understand, and she does it with love and opulence.

  

"When you dehumanise the villains, you become unable... to recognise... the villain... within...

How is she though? She needs a hot toddy is what she needs." 

 

 P.S. You might want to help out with this.

"Not as far as I am aware, at this moment in time."

Napier Barracks, Folkestone (source)

 

 "I apologise for the delay. In this. But we wanted to make sure. There have been pockets of disorder outside and I wanted to make sure that it was clear and safe for you all to leave the building. Okay? So I apologise for the delay. We will start very shortly. The officers are getting ready to let you go. If when you leave the building, you go to your left, that will be the safest exit. Okay? So thank you very much for your patience -" 

 "Is there a kettle?"

 "No, we're letting you go."

 "Excuse me. Sorry. Are there any evidence gatherers based around the corner?"

 "I haven't seen any outside."

 "Or is there any intention of perhaps holding people just to confirm identities?"

 "Er."

 "Or anything like that?"

 "Not as far as I am aware, at this moment in time."

 "Okay. I think that's my–"

 "So it's not an absolute."

 "I think– If you could find that and confirm it– Because it would make a big difference to some of the people–"

 "I'll go outside and let you know. The problem is that there's other people got control outside, and I'm the messenger."

 "I understand–"

 "So I'm trying really hard to expedite this, and get everyone outside, because I know people got homes to go to."

 "Can you review– Are you able to answer questions about the situation as people leave?"

 "Right. As people leave, they're going to be asked to go left. They're just going into– into a safe environment, cos there's a lot– There's some disorder down there–"

 "Yeah, I heard."

 "And there's some disorder down that end. So we're trying to keep it sterile, so people are safe, so they can get away to the tube stations."

 "Okay. Are they being pushed in a certain area?"

 "Who?"

 "If people leave–" 

 "If people leave, they'll be directed towards the safest–"
(A second officer: "To Green Park.") 

 "Towards Green park." 

 "Okay, so they won't be stopped on the way and–" 

 "Well hopefully they're not going to be. Hopefully, they're not going to get stopped, because that's why it's taken so long. To make sure everyone's got the right message."

 

 This transcript's been in my drafts for years. 

 It's an exchange, from a decade ago, between a police officer at the doors of Fortnum & Mason and a guy inside who wanted to leave. But they weren't being let go, it transpired, and there was indeed a kettle outside. I assume the guy asking was a protestor with UK Uncut, although there were many inside who weren't – my friend Boz, for example. As I wrote here: "Boz was there recording sound for an afternoon play for Radio 4. He was first held outside the jail, in the rain, for ten hours, because the 24 hours you're allowed to detain someone for only officially starts once they're inside. He was then put in a cell, and asked every 45 minutes if he needed anything. He would ask for a glass of water, but was never brought one. This carried on throughout the night, at regular 45 minute intervals, them asking if he wanted anything, him asking for a glass of water, meaning he was never allowed to sleep." The draft in which I'd put this transcript was headed:

 "Fascism in England Will Always Take The Form of Missed Communication."

 I wasn't sure what I wanted to say beyond that.

 But I think it's still a fair lookout, and that – I suppose this is the point I really wanted to make – those currently expressing online how baffled they are by this government's "incompetence" might want to reconsider what it thinks its job is. I made this transcription long before Boris Johnson – an anthropomorphisation of missed communication – became Prime Minister of course, but maybe he isn't being swayed by libertarians so much, as simply using their arguments to reframe his actions. And I'm not just suggesting a policy of "herd immunity" is fascism, necessarily, nor the crowding of refugees at the height of a pandemic into an army barracks slated for demolition. But maybe the word "malice" is appropriate. And malice isn't incompetence either. I think it's still a fair lookout.

         

Tomorrow: Probably more cartoons.

Today I'd Like to Remoan About Hostile Environments

 Hi. Twitter Simon here, beginning to wonder if the fall in (aways mild) abuse I receive when sticking my nose in might have anything to do with the new profile picture. I'd love it if people thought I was actually a lawyer from. Who wouldn't love being mistaken for a lawyer?

 NO FURTHER QUESTIONS etc. But why was this headlining my twitter side-bar last night? What even is "Nine News"? Ever since I read, a couple of months ago, that a Trump mega-donor had bought a "sizable stake" in the site, I've become very threat-level-whoah-now about what the site promotes. So, when I returned from last night's quiet walk to see #londonriots trending, I checked the hashtag, and indeed most tweets accompanying it were also wondering why it was trending, as there hadn't been any riots. I did also see footage of the anger in Whitehall. Sure. But I'd witnessed that before, any weekend over the last two years in which I'd been down to do a bus tour, and the Brexiters had had one of their "marches" – not marches so much, as a crowding into the Wetherspoons as early as possible to drink and drink and wander around with a flag and hurl abuse at buskers, looking for fun, or a fight, or a fun fight – and I would stand there, hoping that London might be a cure for this, and that these racists – I saw their banners and I saw their caps, these were racists – would see how alone they were. 

 But anyway, yes, I saw last night on twitter yesterday's outnumbering of the police outside Downing Street, and I saw some commentators express "boggled minds" that this "brutality" was in response to a shooting on another continent, and I tappity-tapped, in my little lawyer's wig, a reminder to those commentators just what Downing Street had been up to for the past four-years-plus: the Windrush scandal, the "Go Home" vans, "pickaninny smiles", "letterboxes", and the much discussed "hostile environment", and I hoped – again, hoped – that these protests might illuminate what that blithely bandied-about phrase "hostile environment" actually meant, and how instantly intolerable everyone should find it. Here's another hostility:

 

 "Ending freedom of movement". And a Union Jack.  

  As I wrote on Monday (okay, Tuesday morning) us pinky grey men never really have to think about "freedom of movement". I suspect this tweet knew exacty what it was doing though. Division aways benefits the Right, which might be why so much government messaging seems purposefully designed to ruffle liberal feathers, but while I still believe Fascism Thrives On Division, and while I still suspect the PM – and definitely POTUS – would rather see a civil war than their own resignation (for the same reason Hans Gruber blew up the Nakaomi Tower), I'm also very happy to see pressure applied, proper pressure, because no police officer was charged with anything relating to the killing of George Floyd until people marched. 

 Also, I'm not sure what we're seeing here is Division. I hope. After the December election, I decided to turn this blog into a Politics/Anxiety tag-free zone, because the increasing shittiess of all things seemed such a given, I wanted to spare anyone who came here any more of it. Also, I still had plans for a series of Time Spanner in which an avatar of the demiurge – President Guff Goofy – declared a zombie apocalypse, saying "you know who the zombies are", and I was saving up my politial anxiety for that. But that was six months ago, and now there feels something like a tugging at the monolith, slow work, but potentially effective, an awakening of care, which I find invigorating, and it needs to be kept up. So, I remain a remoaner. 

 I looked up what I'd been doing during the last #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2015. I'd voted for Corbyn. Again, I'd been hoping for an awakening of care, but we know how that turned out – care became discredited, and those who'd spent their entire political lives attempting to orchestrate a more just environment became associated with bullying and intolerance. So this probably does have to be led from the bottom. And, while I have Santa's knee, I'd also quite like a government intent on kerbing the manipulation of democracy through online misinformation, rather than one led by gamers seeking to become a world leaders in it. That seems another fair demand. 

 And finally, here is my favourite twitter interaction for a while. Elizabeth Jackson's not cowed by a wig. It's important to remember this is also an option.

Good News Update on the State of the Entire World

 It's fixed! It really seems to have been fixed! That's right, I can post links to the blog on facebook and instagram again! Cheese and crackers, what a relief, not just because it means I can now hobby along as before, but because - Well, how often does one get good news? Specifically, get told you can no longer do what you're doing, but then that it's actually alright? Without a fight? Within an evening? This is that. Touch wood. I'm still waiting for the second shoe to drop of course, but the daily making of something potentially pleasant is the only activism I trust myself with right now (F.T.O.D.)* and the immediate return of this freedom to share it, by a business ostensibly established to facilitate exactly that, colours everything. Unreserved thanks therefore to everyone who got in touch with the powers that might be to make this happen, and to the powers as well, and GO, OLD TIMEY INTERNET! (Is immediately banned again for pants.)

Image from "A Message From Mars" 1913
* Fascism Thrives On Division, don'cha know.

Care and Attention, Atom by Atom - two predictions from 2009 and a motto.

 When I started this blog back in 2007, this was probably the mental image I had of myself: Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem - a twenty-first century Hunter S. Thompson, keeping painstaking track of the traffic below, blowing knee-caps off a worsening world with his cyber truths - but while the world seems to have kept its side of the bargain, I turn out to have kept my head down a lot more than I anticipated, because what I hadn't predicted is that of course everyone else would have the same idea, and there simply aren't enough perches for the lot of us. Even if there were, we're not stuck in the traffic - as the saying goes - we are the traffic.

 Transmetropolitan was a utopia of sorts, ultimately*. For example, because I'd grown up so simplistically dismissive of Star Trek, Spider's world was my first encounter with the idea of a "maker" - a machine that could produce anything from nothing, including copies of itself - and  therefore my first introduction to the idea of a world without scarcity. A future of abundance. This was also the subject of a superb radio one-off made by James Burke back in December 2017, which I've been meaning to write about for two Decembers, and which you can still listen to here. Burke is an extraordinary speaker. He presented the moon landings on British television in 1969, back when the BBC were choosing Arts graduates to present science shows and Science graduates to present the arts, and his show "Connections", made fifty years ago now, did an extraordinary job of predicting the future whilst also offering a revolutionary idea of the past (for example, it wasn't the invention of printing press that revolutionised literacy, Burke argues, but the invention of disposable linen underwear, whose recycling could finally facilitate the mass production of paper!) He has form, in other words, but his predictions from 2017 are pretty similar to those made fifty-four minutes into this lecture from 2009, which Joel Morris, Jason Hazeley and I were lucky enough to hear an unforgettable version of at the Royal Society in 2012, all of us agreeing it was one of the best live gigs any of us had attended:

 I wonder, though, if Burke's changed any of his predictions in the past two years. Because the one thing he didn't account for, I think, is the one human need no amount of technology can be guaranteed to assuage: attention. In Burke's world of abundance, where no one is now required to interact with each other, no one does. But people do seem to need attention, even more so since the internet has given us such a dangerously unweildy tool for attempting to command it. Which brings me to my second prediction from 2009: an article written by David Mitchell calling into serious question Gordon Brown's assertion that online commenting was "democratising". In it David quotes a superb idea from a mutual friend of ours, Jon Dryden Taylor:

 He wants people to post, as a comment, on as many opinion-garnering web pages as possible, as often as they can be bothered, the phrase: "It just goes to show you can't be too careful!" It's perfect; it seems lighthearted without being a joke. It's vaguely pertinent to almost any subject without meaning a thing. It's the ideal oil for the internet's troubled waters.

 Jon's management of online traffic has always been exemplorary. He hardly ever blogs for example, but when he does, my God it's unmissable (there's a link on the right, under "where I get my ideas from"). And I think he's right, as well. This decade has gone to show you can't be too careful, which is something to carry into the new year, along with all the plans we'll make about how to cope with having everything we've always wanted.

*The letters page of Transmetropolitan was responsible for one of my favourite all-time quotes too: "No, you're only entitled to an informed opinion". Good times. People don't like being told off. Fascism thrives on division. Happy Twenty-twenty! X

F.T.O.D. (my rubbish Thank You note)

 

 From 2015 (trigger-warning: Mogg)

 Well, we saw.

 Again.

 This election should never have been agreed to while so many of its participants were under investigation, but it was agreed to, and the self-styled "Grand Wizards" now have their majority. To everyone who campaigned against them: thank you from the bottom of my heart. But if it's any consolation, I don't think the Wizards won because they named themselves after the KKK, I think they won because most people are scared of free broadband. Honestly. And they won because their campaign was the issuing of a simple three word sentence followed by an unprecendented fucking off, while the opposition's campaign insisted on being a narrative centred around its most obviously off-putting not-fucking-off-er.

 As the exit poll came in last night, I was talking with my mate Tom about performing in front of crowds without a demographic, and he noted that, yes, people are superb when they're paying attention. Jeremy Corbyn however was an attention repellant. Every wonderful, brilliant, compassionate canvasser for Labour knew that his name was a handicap, they heard it again and again, and reported back, but the man himself never seemed to care... And, wait, I love.... I love... that he addressed how abominable things are for so many... that he noticed, as just one example, postal workers are now penalised for standing still, nobody else was talking about that! But... as I also noted when I first voted for him in 2015, he does love telling people off, and people really do not like being told off, and while I'm repeating myself, he was also... is also... a terrible, terrible boss. If only his claque (a clique that claps, true word) could have brought itself to get behind that motto of the London Olympics: "This is for everyone." But no, it had to make gospel the caveat "Not the few", and whether that qualification was simply tone-deaf or pitch-perfect dog-whistle, it was never going to win an election, ever. You cannot spearhead a popular compassionate campaign with threats. Momentum also enjoyed telling the electorate off of course: austerity was Tony Blair's fault now (just as the Tories had argued) - why would you vote for Tony Blair, you stupid idiots who voted Labour into office three times in a row! So I hope Momentum get in the fridge too. I am excited by that prospect.

 Similarly exciting is the fact that both main parties promised an end to austerity... although voting for a lie doesn't make it true, so who knows what will happen next? We have our Nixon now (not our Trump, that's potentially Rees-Mogg), and Johnson is absolutely incompetent enough to let this country slip into civil war, but I've no idea who he'll have around him with this majority, maybe this larger pool will provide a greater chance of non-maniacs in office, a group less Steve-Bannon-y. And even if it doesn't, there is still the law. And there are still lawyers. Things change, is what I'm saying... although that's easy to forget while watching yet another Labour leader take to the podium and, just as Miliband and Brown did before him, blame the fucking media. Well no, hon, you chose to post that appalling Celebrities Read Mean Tweets video when you're not really a celebrity and those weren't really mean tweets, and you can't really read. You chose to make this election about you, when so many feel threatened by you, not just because of shitty political coverage, but because of literal threats continually being issued by your defenders, upsetting the work of the thousands who played nice.  

 Here's why I'm writing though. It's not because I have anything new to say (hence all the links). I just think that now that the campaign is over - and I count myself so lucky not to be terrified, so it's easy for me to say this - we might stop filling our feeds with nightmare worst-case scenarios, just for now. Nobody in the history of talking ever "won" an "argument" anyway*, and twitter's not a hole in the ground to scream into. It is the exact opposite of a hole in the ground, in fact; it's possibly part of the problem, so we should probably stop feeding it. We can't hate the electorate. Fascism Thrives On Division. People are simply scared of free broadband, that's all. And they don't like being told off.

 And thank you again to those who played nice. You make me happy, you give me hope. And when Corbyn goes, oh my goodness, the hope then...

 What she said. Again.

* Update: This was not a reference to Corbyn's  "We won the argument". That was published the following day.

There are more things in Heaven and Ufton Nervet...

"Populism can survive only amid polarization... Don't feed polarization, disarm it."   This guy

Well this is pretty disarming. Disarming and utterly brilliant.

I found it searching for "Time Spanner" on youtube. As a city boy I'm not entirely sure I get all the references. Is it a Brexit thing? Who cares? I assume the name Time Spanners is a brilliant act of reappropriation though, rather than a terrible mistake. So yeah, two pretty unrelated links... I just thought, parenthetically, it's worth bearing in mind that fascism probably does thrive on polarization, and that there's little more polarizing than a referendum. I'm not saying any of this was planned, but maybe let's not have any more, and - note to self - no matter how hard things get, let's do everything we can to stop that inner census asking of every new face we see: "How did they vote?" because it only helps the heavies. "Oyez. Bad dog."

Topless Politics. man stuff.

What do I want and why do I want it? When does hope become greed? Just generally. Is it a sign of aging? That's something I considered up in Edinburgh. "Never trust anyone over thirty" said Charlton Heston to a monkey before galloping off to meet his destiny topless with a rifle and a mute brunette. And yes that's all very well for 1968, but - Actually it was odd because if you turned over from "Planet of the Apes" on Bank Holiday Monday to Channel 5 there he was in again in "Ben Hur", nine years younger, but standing in exactly the same loincloth, tan and beard. I mean literally. (He wasn't standing in a beard, alright, although that might look good. I'll make that.)

Anyway yes that's all very well for 1968, but I've noticed a number of angry twenty-year-olds at work, angry and hopeless, robbed of any ideology. And it occurred to me of course, any fellow thirty-somethings, that these people have lived HALF THEIR LIVES under the present government… so no wonder they're so scared and racist. It was alright for us because we knew the Tories were baddies when they talked about "Preserving the British Way of Life"… We grew up with images of gorgons smeared in blood and cash and war… But "kids today", they've heard that same poppycock from the good guys. Thatcher's not the baddie anymore, it's something called the New World Order, and expect to hear immigration mentioned a lot. That's all I'm saying. I should formulate that argument a bit more. Don't worry, I won't. That's the other thing I'm saying. And "Don't trust anyone under thirty" is probably where I was headed, but I doubt I'll arrive.

One of the angriest of these twenty-somethings is "ricky", whose friend request I have just accepted on myspace. I thought about it. His mood is ":Angry" and his page is papered with images of 9/11. He writes a lot about the New World Order and posts about ten bulletins a day, but in the end I thought… yeah, alright, this IS the internet, and he hasn't mentioned the Protocols of the Elders of Zion once, and there definitely IS a Bilderberg Group (although I keep confusing them with the Wooster Group) and he might be what Ken Campbell calls "a seeker".
 
And he is.
But he's not wearing a shirt. And he's posing outside his bathroom. With his arms raised.

So interesting and valuable as many of your conspiracy posts are, Ricky, put a shirt on and bring your arms down because you look like a scary madman. And maybe a bit more hair?

By the way, dear readers, you do realize that extremely significant and sublime things might be happening in my life and I'm just not recording them, don't you. You do realize that. Here's Charlton Heston standing in a beard (signed):

Spurious Temporal Generalisation (dark note sandwich)

Now I was promised a future that was down and dirty full of, yes, weird new crime but also gaudy animal excess and a lowered everything age.

So what's happened?
Why are they talking about raising the drinking age, say?
Who do they think that's going to calm down?
What happened to our pre-packed longpig sandwiches and mescaline patches?
Someone recently posted on their profile the simple question "What in the name of God is going on?" and I posted back "The fifties" because that has been my consolation. It's what I said to Ms. Meikle back in the caravan when she expressed a global hopelessness: that for all the paranoia and the bangs and the juvenile delinquency and the dead-eyed certainty of a culture telling us how badly our lives were being led, that this was just a bad decade and a smarter sixties future was just around the corner full of excellent music and second-hand clothes and popular art that made no sense and kids expressing their discontent with society through slapstick and dirty comics. "This is just the fifties," that's what I kept telling myself. "History's a cycle. I can't wait for the sixties."
But, Ms. Meikle, if you're reading this: Dudo, I doubt. There is another possibility that seems increasingly likely to me every time I step out of work and see the news-stands and a surrendered public... that history in fact is like a pellet in a game of pong, not a cycle... that we're going the other way, and that what in fact lies just over the horizon is not another 1960s, but another 1940s. And not a cool Lauren Bacall 1940s either, with lots of great roles for women and smoking in the library but, you know... 1948... Strength through Joy... Lights out.

But on a lighter note: I came home from work to find that Morgan had left us a big black bin-liner full of pain au chocolat.

And on a darker note: