The Riots : On why they happened and how society must change

Last week the urban centres of Britain were hit by a series of riots which shocked Britain and the world. They spread rapidly when a peaceful protest at the death of Mark Duggan under debated circumstances at the hands of armed Police went awry after members of the crowd turned violent. The riots spread rapidly throughout London and then England leaving 5 dead and resulted in much damage of property. The course of the riots has been covered comprehensively so I’m not going to repeat what you should know, apart from to state that the authorities and the public all seem to have been take by surprise at how widespread the looting was and the speed at which It spread.

People were shocked that in relatively quiet suburban towns (such as my home town, Orpington) that had no conceivable connection to the initial riots in Tottenham, the young suddenly ran riot attacking local retail centres for games consoles and trainers. Many did not even bother to cover their faces and filmed their escapades which were then uploaded on Youtube. The fear of anything as trivial as consequences or the Police was completely gone; they were out for themselves and revelled in it, as if suddenly liberated from an ancient tyrant. It seemed as if the myriad unspoken rules and laws that we all live by to avoid a collapse into anarchy had been unanimously and spontaneously rejected by a large section of the increasingly disenfranchised and disillusioned youth. Why did this happen? Why did they reject our values and our society in such a brazen manner?

Firstly we must understand that all societal values are created constructs. Accepted modes of behaviour, both personal and cultural are taught to us from birth by the actions of those around us and we are expected to adopt them. Traditionally these included concern for the welfare of others, national pride, respect of proper authority, the concept of public service and a belief in something greater than ourselves, such as God or perhaps Empire. However in the past 50 years these old values have gradually slipped as we have become more selfish and less concerned about the society around us. It is not natural of human nature to respect authority or to believe in something greater; however we came to adopt these values through the conformity of those around us or through the stigmatization of those who do not conform, coupled with a carrot and stick coercion. ‘It is good to be the same as everyone else’ might as well be society’s motto.


We were all supposed to be equal parts of the same society pulling together for the greater good of our shared society, underneath the watching eye of our benevolent leaders, such as in Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’. Hobbes believed that the best form of society was one where the monarchy provided for its subjects and its subjects were free to go about their day-to-day lives without interaction with the government. Substitute the Monarch for whatever elected leader we happen to choose and we have the foundation of Liberal Democracy.


We are free to pursue our lives to whatever ends we wish which we do mainly for our own selfish ends, and taken to its logical conclusion it has created a society of self serving automatons who live in an endless loop of work and consumerism for the benefit of only themselves. This has led to the gradual erosion of the old values (civic duty, respect of authority etc) which was the glue of society. These values have been eroded due to the adoption in the past 50 years of what is known as ‘Negative Liberty’. This concept was best explained by Isaiah Berlin, a hugely influential political theorist and philosopher, in his essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ where he set out the 2 notions of liberty, ‘Positive Liberty’ and ‘Negative Liberty’. Berlin defined negative liberty, as the term "liberty" was used by Thomas Hobbes, as the absence of coercion whilst ‘Positive Liberty’ was to have the opportunity to fulfill ones potential within society. One of the key tenants of positive liberty was that the individual should have the ability to participate in the government. However examples of positive liberty throughout history showed that it led towards tyranny. Using the example of the French Revolution he showed how the revolutionaries wished to overthrow the Monarchical system which was seen as unjust, to create a new equal society. However this ended in the Reign of Terror and the new order was just as barbaric and murderous as the one who preceded it. The same followed with the Bolshevik Revolution and many other revolutions around the world. They all started with the dream of a free society and ended up corrupt, murderous and authoritarian. One of the reasons behind this was the assumption of the leaders of the revolutions that they knew what was best for the common man and that they would if necessary force the people to be free. The values of positive liberty too easily could justify and legitimise oppression.


Because of this threat of tyranny Berlin decided that negative liberty was the safer of the two, saying that  ‘But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them’ . It is clear that he believed that coercion, even for an apparent benefit, would eventually lead to a reduction of freedom and tyranny. Berlin was an influential thinker at the heart of the British establishment, working for the British embassies in Washington, DC, and Moscow in the 1940’s and the  Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford from 1957 – 67. He was eventually knighted and received the Order of merit. His theories were hugely influential and were seized upon and promoted by the neo-conservatives in the US and their counterparts in the UK Conservative party (Under Thatcher) and in New Labour (under Blair). They believed that creating a society where we were free to live as we chose would guarantee stability. The consequence of this is a freedom that entirely lacks any meaning. And as mentioned earlier has created a society of competitive, self serving individuals stuck in an endless loop of consumerism and work for an end we will never feel satisfied with and never feel we’ve attained.


In an average day we will be bombarded with numerous adverts and examples of ostentatious wealth which we are persuaded will bring meaning and happiness to our life. We are told that to not own the latest technology or fad will mean we are somehow not enjoying life as much as we should or as much as those who own the desired item. As our need to gain a slice of the wealth we see all around us increases, our ability to actually attain it has dropped. We have become silent and dull worker drones, slaving away in our identikit pods at a job without any meaning or emotional connection for us, lacking in any sense of satisfaction or fulfillment, simply so we can afford to take part in the greater cause of the consumer.  During the last decade the gap between the rich and poor has increased and shows no sign of abating, yet we are still being told that to consume and attain riches is the only path to happiness. So a sense of entitlement naturally sets in. Now a flat screen TV has changed from being something that you can buy if you have worked hard enough to afford it, to being something that you deserve simply for existing.


With the function of Government now simply to ensure our freedom to do as we choose, rather than to radically change society for the better, they have become relegated in our eyes to a series of faceless middle managers who simply provide us with endless meaningless statistics and charts which show how their performance is being marked. Goals and targets are set and manipulated so they always show some sort of improvement, even though the experience of the general public might seem very different. Crime may be shown to drop and hospital waiting times improved yet the public’s perception is that they feel more afraid and that the hospitals are dirty and uncaring. With constant targets to achieve working in a public body is no longer about public service, but of score keeping and goal achievement. This creates a distrust and sense of suspicion between the public and public bodies and the Government who become perceived as distant and uncaring bureaucrats who do nothing to try and improve the life of the common man. Over time our perception of them as such becomes accepted as truth and a permanent part of the common narrative of our current society.


This sense of entitlement born out of our cultures essential emptiness, coupled with the erosion of the old stabilising values of community and respect for authority brought about by the selfishness of negative liberty, has created a perfect storm of an disenfranchised underclass who care nothing for authority and have been practically brainwashed that they need to possess the items which our society claim bring you meaning and happiness. We are reaping the consequences of the policies of negative liberty in a life with no meaning and our only opiate is the bitter pill of consumerism.


To leave this condition we are currently in we must have more than simply the freedom to do as we choose under a series of caretaker Governments. It is not enough to simply vote and say we are free, for that is not freedom in any true sense. When we are stuck in these self perpetuating loops of work and consumerism than we are as enslaved and helpless as we would be under many ancient tyrannies. It creates a death of the mind and of ideas, a stifling corporate world of no meaning, where you can live a life of so little consequence that it truly does not matter any more if we live or die. We are interchangeable robots acting under market forces we do not understand.


We should strive to attain a form of Positive liberty centered on the autonomy of the individual where the government should aim actively to create the conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient, yet in a way which benefits the local community or wider society, so that we feel we are doing good through our actions and works, rather than simply creating wealth for ourselves or others. There should be no greater ideal pushed forward by the Government, this would remove the threat of tyranny, of people being coerced into conforming for ‘their own good’, and enable people to find their own meaning and happiness within an increasingly confused world. There can be no set model of happiness, a person’s happiness is as individual as their experience of life itself, but without a drastic change in society and recognising the failures of negative liberty, we are doomed to follow the current path of entitlement, emptiness, selfishness and consumerism.  


Many of these ideas and others are discussed in the excellent Adam Curtis documentary series The Trap: Episode 3:  'We Will Force You To Be Free' which i highly reccomend and is available free on the internet

I really hate picking a title...

Television can do so much to instruct and inform the mind. From groundbreaking series such as ‘The Ascent of Man’, to David Attenborough’s exhaustive and beautiful ‘Life’ Series it has helped us to make sense of the world around us and our place within it. This noble tradition continues with ITV’s ongoing exercise in its articulate and philosophically inclined debate show, ‘The Jeremy Kyle’ show. Here the foremost issues of our time are discussed in somber tones as that paragon of reasoned debate, the afore-named ‘Jeremy Kyle’, gently guides his carefully selected guests through such moral quandary’s as whether Lisa is a slag and if Damian is the father except he said that he never done her except that one time but he was drunk so she can’t be knocked up with his kid because of gravity and stuff.

Debate as noble as in the days of the Roman Republic

Yesterday’s episode was a sterling example. Here a young man, called Dave or James or something…was involved in a bit of a romantic dilemma. He was an interesting young man; his main pre-occupation seemed to be cultivating the exciting variety of skin diseases which lived upon his face in some sort of greasy utopia. He had grown, perhaps in an attempt to soak up some of the grease, one of those bumfluff moustaches on his lip which just looked like a misplaced shadow and would have made him look like a stereotypical paedophile if it wasn’t for his obvious youth. I grew one of those myself when I was younger, and remember the pride I felt at this sign of my growing physical maturity. Of course I looked ridiculous; no amount of mousy facial hair can hide your all powerful combo of acne, greasy skin and soft, childlike features, but at the time you feel like you’ve passed some sort of milestone, and you are now entering into the realms of adulthood, never to return. Though your notions of adulthood then are of drinking in pubs and vague but excitable notions of sex, rather than the crushing tedium of adult life with it’s bills and taxes and everyone wearing fucking suits and talking about their bullshit job and that Linda in accounts, and everything is suddenly serious and if it’s not serious it’s safe and if it’s safe you can bet your arse it’s boring. Anyway enough of that, let’s push those distressing thoughts to one side, or even better, push them deep down into our gut to bubble and fester until middle age, and carry on shall we?

So it turned out this child, who was so slimy it seemed he’d only just be born, was a bit of an unlikely lothario.

No woman can resist

Now the question has often occurred to me, as I walk around Britain’s hallowed streets and I spy some young mother pushing a pram, her belly fat and distended and her face screwed up like she was sucking a lemon soaked in piss, I wonder who is fucking all these people? Well now I know and the truth dear reader, did not set me free, but made me realise we are on course for some sort of HG Wells ‘The Time Machine’ scenario, which is doubly annoying because it means the future is plagiarised, and badly so.

Anyhow, this man-slug had managed to fuck some child girl called Jade, who had then got pregnant and had a child, who was probably his. This Jade had then become a lesbian and was now engaged to another girl…also called Jade. The man-child had also screwed with the other Jade, probably because of his love of continuity, making the entire love triangle rather laughable. Two rubbish lesbians and a human drip tray.

This is the image i got when i searched for '2 rubbish Lesbians and a human drip tray'

To avoid confusion (and increase the surrealistic feel) they were referred to as Jade 1 and Jade 2, which I quite enjoyed because in the dystopian future we’re inevitably heading towards we’ll all be identified by a number. It seemed that our Jade’s were raising the child themselves, and didn’t want slugboys assistance in little baby Darcy’s (yes Darcy…for fucks sake) future.

What is it with people and naming their kids? If you call your child Jade you just know she’ll grow up wearing tracksuit bottoms that say ‘juicy’ on her arse, she’ll have a gut and a piercing in her cheek which will just look like a shining, silver spot. She’ll drink industrial strength cider and puke over herself so often that her stomach acid will burn off her tits.  God that sounds vicious, where did that come from? Do I really harbour such a malicious intent towards these people? Probably not, I’m a pretty Zen person nowadays, but there are many sides to us all. It’s not just me and the Steppenwolf is it? That would be terribly limiting.

However this little tangent about names has got me thinking. To say that we are the victims of our names, that they will somehow have an influence over our future life and development is obviously ridiculous. However the following conclusions are irrefutable and utterly true.

Connor – If you call your child Connor, one day I will be in a pub and I shall move my elbow slightly as I gesticulate and it will nudge darling Connors drink and he will gently turn me round and smash his glass into my face. As I collapse on the floor blinded by my own blood and the fleshy remains of my face he will stand on my larynx and slowly choke me to death, probably whilst reciting Adam Sandler quotes. So if you call your child Connor I shall have to pour petrol into his pram and drop in a match in self defense.

Chantelle/Crystal etc – She’ll become a stripper, end of.

George – He’ll have red cheeks and make ‘harrumphing’ noises a lot. He’ll repeat opinions he read in the Daily Mail and mistake them for his own original thought. He’ll be the very representation of what is ‘proper’ and ‘decent’, but in some secluded part of his soul he wished he danced in drag on the tables of a premier gay club. One day he’ll say something interesting but nobody was there to hear it.

Paris - I have met several men and women who have claimed to be called Paris. The only thing they had in common was that they wished they had been called Paris, rather than Sarah and David etc. An entire life spent playing catch up for something they believed they were missing

Mary – A good name to call your child if you wish no one to ever notice her

Darcy – By fuck you better have good genes, because to call a child Darcy and for them to come out as anything but a new standard in beauty and class is a cruel burden they will always bear.

Gary – Fuck off Gary

I just had to scroll up to see what I’d started writing about. I better wrap it up a bit, start, middle and end and all that. Anyhow Jade 1 stormed off back to the hotel after Jeremy Kyle got in her face and began calling her a vicious little shit or something. Ah fuck it; I’m kind of bored about writing about this program. I just went to make a cup of tea and I got the last tea bag so I’m currently on a minor winning high. Now I’m waiting for it to cool which is my favourite part, the expectation of the tea is a lovely feeling.

For fucks sake! My goddamned spellcheck keeps defaulting to US English rather than UK…it’s driving me nuts.  I keep looking up and finding that ‘U’s have been magiced out of words and ‘S’s have been replaced with ‘Z’s. You are trying my patience America, I hold you all collectively responsible for this. Ah that’ll do…I can’t bothered to write anymore so I’m going to peg on a piece I did on facebook ages ago and didn’t post because I thought it was balls.

I was thinking recently about Facebook. Here are my thoughts. I have a few hundred friends on facebook but obviously most of them aren’t real friends, they’re acquaintances or colleagues or people in whose orbit I briefly floated before drifting off in search of some other emotional and social kick, but were added or added me out of a vague curiosity or some dull urge to formalise the connection. I don’t know, I have people try and add me whom I’ve never met, what they hope to gain out of E-friendship I don’t know. We never exchange messages or anything or take the virtual friendship any further than pressing the ‘accept’ button on the friendship request. It would be like them inviting me to a party and then pointedly ignoring me but without the advantage of me getting drunk and then demanding to be noticed

'Demanding' to be noticed

Anyway it doesn’t matter, that was all just facebook related fluff to pad out this piece and blah, blah, blah. Christ, writing about Facebook is so redundant it’s almost painful. You all know what it is and I know all you cool kids like to flap your stupid little fish mouths about how lame it is but hell, we all use it. Anyway I was thinking about my friends list, and realised that most of my friends, with few exceptions, are within a couple of years of my age. This of course makes sense, most of the people I meet in pubs and at parties and through friends of friends are generally speaking of a similar age, even the colleagues I’ve met and befriended are usually of a similar age because these are the people we expect we’d share interests or view points with. As I age with decreasing grace I’ll probably continue to add people who are of an equivalent age and so on and so forth until computers are redundant and facebook is beamed directly into the backwards engineered alien technology implants that will be hammered into our brains on-mass as soon as the future is at the ‘All in one Black Jumpsuits’ stage.

Typical Husband and Wife of the future

And eventually my friends will start dying off. One by one hereditary illnesses, accidents, murders and monkey attacks will start to kill them off until my Facebook page is more of a memorial for a generation of background extra’s and also-rans. Perhaps there’ll be a new app which will send me minute by minute updates on my friends impending kidney failure or they’ll collate all of their profile pictures over the years so with one fun click I can watch them age and wither and decline. And slowly but surely the status updates which are so important into making it seem like a fun and lively social place will start to disappear and I’ll be left with an empty news feed apart from the occasional sad updates of the final stages of people’s Leprosy or the mad mutterings of the last few survivors, ridden with dementia and suspicious that the nurses in the Nursing home are stealing their socks. And if by some fateful chance I am the last one left I will log on and see an empty page, its silence a reminder of the passing of my generation. Maybe I’ll try and type one last status with my arthritic fingers, something to sum up my life and the time I lived in, but that’ll be a near impossibility, so maybe I’ll just do a smiley face, log off and quietly piss myself for the 12^th time that day.

Anger and Toasters

Anger is a funny old thing. It springs up from nowhere and can practically incapacitate you what with all the nostril flaring and muscle clenching it encourages you to do. Anger intoxicates the mind in that brief moment as much as any drug and can for some minutes leave you feeling as a supercharged beast, all red of tooth and claw and ready to turn your anger into hate and to spill that venom upon the poor soul on which you vent.



And inspired this 'comedy' film



 I once read a philosophical essay called ‘On The Pleasure of Hating’ (William Hazlitt, c1826, http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/Hating.htm ) which argued that hate was the purest of all emotions and that in fact without it, we would stagnate without it to rouse up our passions and force us on to the acts and deeds which have arguably shaped mankind and civilisation.

‘Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.’

I don’t necessarily buy into this. The unfettered acts of good throughout the ages have probably done as much to influence the path of man, and have certainly and repeatedly inspired the hearts of many, to lead them to emulate and imitate the saints of the past, both secular and religious, but equally so have acts of hate and cruelty. It has often been commentated that much evil has been blindly done in the name of good, but that is as much shaped by us looking back at the past with a hypocritical and superior eye and judging them by our own morals and social norms. That’s fine though, in a hundred years our own soiled offspring will denounce us as barbarians and savages for the way we discriminate and abuse and we will just be another barbarous age they feel grateful no longer exists in their time.

However as the essay comments upon, even in times where we see ourselves as good and kind, liberal and informed, we still need these public totems on which to thrust our hate upon. Bin Laden and the ever shifting, practically irrelevant Al-Qaeda network, is an obvious example of one. In the past decade we have been bombarded with images, articles and stories about the atrocities of these men and their organisation, and many sane people now believe there is a risk of their overwhelmingly white, Christian/secular and generally non-Muslim country turning into a nightmare Caliphate with televised beheadings and mandatory beards. I get a sneaking suspicion that some of the more right wing of our country wouldn’t disapprove of the beheadings too much, what with their love of ‘justice’, and personally I like the beards, we’d look like a nation of 70’s rock stars.

‘How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon! Had they done us any harm of late? No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loth were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other! …Even when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities) no longer allows us to carry our vindictive and head strong humours into effect, we try to revive them in description, and keep up the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in imagination. We burn Guy Fawx in effigy, and the hooting and buffeting and maltreating that poor tattered figure of rags and straw makes a festival in every village in England once a year’

We’ve always needed these figures of public hate because they unite us much more than anything else, and the state has always been willing to provide them and encourage that hate. They will happily provide the seeds of this hate because what sustains power is public unity.  We are more defined by what we hate than what we love. Whatever you love someone else will hate and they will just as likely hate you as well for the love you bare. A joint love of something might briefly connect you but you will feel more connected and united by a shared hatred of something. A good example are public protests, whether it be at Cuts, reform, corruption, taxes, the G8 or any number of things, hundreds of thousands of people from many diverse groups often with differing long term agendas are united to rage against that one thing that unites them, the object of their hate. The West encouraged us to hate the communists, and now the fundamentalists and the terrorists, whilst in other parts of the world they are encouraged to hate the West, the ‘Great Satan’ and the ‘Imperialist Crusaders’. It all amounts to the same thing, unity, fear, hate and control.

George Orwell commented on it well in ‘1984’, where support for the perpetual war is mobilised during the ‘Hate Week’ and when the alliance between Oceania and Eastasia changes to an alliance with Eurasia, with Eastasia now as the hated enemy. When in mid-sentence an orator changes the name of the enemy from "Eurasia" to "Eastasia", the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters (supporting Eastasia) are displayed and they tear them down with howls of anger. That always chilled me, and though you wouldn’t think such a thing was possible, I wouldn’t be surprised if the population of North Korea would react in a similar way.

Ahh, but why all this talk of hate and anger? I am not especially angry today, in fact I’m not at all, and I would say that currently I have never felt more love in my life, which in itself will arouse the hate of others. I am for the most part a calm and peaceful person I think, but I had an encounter with rage recently which surprised me, both in its power and in it’s relative ridiculousness.

I was making toast one lazy Saturday morning. I was hungover and shuffling about in a vague manner and was generally in a pleasant, but sleepy mood. I put the bread in the toaster and then set about eating peanut butter from the jar with a knife, because even if I’m making food I have to be eating something at the same time. The toast was done and the little thingy popped up. Like an expert I quickly extracted the first slice of toast, not even taking the time to marvel at my agile dexterity and flawless toast control skills. I went for the second slice confidently, some would say too confidently, and tried to pull it out. It stayed put. The slice of bread was too big and once hardened by the toasting process wouldn’t shift out of the toaster. I wasn’t worried; I’m a pro and have dealt with this before. I tried to pull the toast out again, at a slightly different angle, but little chunks of it came off in my hand. Panic seized my brain like a questing zombie and I grabbed a knife, trying to do the old stabby, shifty technique to ease it out. It began to break up more and with a sudden surge of rage I picked it up and banged the goddamn thing upside down on the kitchen counter, only to watch in horror as dust and small chunks of toast dropped mockingly out in front of me. A flood of hate and rage poured through me, adrenaline pumped, my muscles tensed, my blood pressure rose and my brain joyfully released a bag of chemicals into my bloodstream. A flurry of fucks poured out of my mouth and I desperately looked around the kitchen for something to destroy.



As illustrated

  As I stood there, primed and ready to go to war, my girlfriend came into the kitchen looking curious at the swearing and general bashing sounds that were involved in breakfast preperation and with soothing words calmed me down. I quickly got over it and we made some more toast and nobody had to die so it’s a pretty happy ending. What surprised me so much though was the power of the emotions that surged through me over an utterly unimportant act and how quickly they turned me into a briefly irrational and raging man. I rarely get angry, even when there is good cause, and the strength of the emotions that appeared suddenly frightened me somewhat. Why did the anger appear so pointlessly? Even if I’d hulked out and crushed the toaster the result would have been a broken toaster and mild electrocution and neither of those help me much.

I have rarely had fights, not since I was a schoolboy have I engaged in scrappy and highly erotic grappling with other men, but I have had several altercations where it looked like it would happen. When this has happened and I’ve been staring the real threat of physical violence in the face, did i gain the same level of highly powered, adrenalized alertness and intensity as I did with my old nemesis, the toaster?

Fuck you, seriously i will hunt down your family for generations

No, I tended to feel a colder level of anger coupled with the real fear that someone’s massive fist might soon be crushing my lovely face into a bloody pulp. I gained none of the feelings which I did that Saturday morning, is it possible I am more insulted by a toaster’s poor design than I am by actual insults? At a time where it could have actually been of benefit to feel like that I get nothing, but when there is no danger I’m ready to roll. Perhaps it is some sort of self-preservation technique, and my brain denies me that feeling because it’s a pussy and it desperately wants to extricate itself from the situation rather than Alpha-maleing itself into a punch fest which will damage my selfish brains precious casing.

So what have I learnt? I hate toasters and i'm probably a pussy? Nice one brain

It's classic passive/aggressive, I want to act aggressively when I’m threatened but my base fear of harm holds me back. But when it’s an inanimate object I’ve free reign to let all that repressed, middle class rage out. I guess from now if I’m in a dangerous situation I must simply imagine I am surrounded by a horde of angry toasters and let the rage pour out. There is little research that describes how a man feels having bread stuffed into his mouth during a fight, but I imagine surprise would be at the forefront

No one wants this to happen to them



Brain Felch - From High Fives to Libya

Tired as I am of thinking of amusing and engaging introductions in an attempt to hold your flittering, insect like attention span for a few minutes, I am instead simply going to write and see what spills out. As I walked to work this morning I was thinking vaguely of conflict, or more accurately, conflict resolution. Not on a grand, international scale mind. Sure, if I turned my mind to it I could think of a solution to most world conflicts, but given my attention span (worse even than yours) and general blasé attitude it would probably end up as poorly received as some of histories other ‘solutions’. However conflict resolution on an individual scale is much more achievable thanks to my unique and highly effective new system.

Picture the scene. You’re hanging out at your local pub or identi-kit wanker bar, and, whilst illustrating some hilarious story to your dead eyed friends flail your arms moronically and knock the pint over of some mono-browed, assembly line thug. He instantly swings a punch with his massive, gnarly fist and your brain quickly sends signals to your bladder that it better start pissing your pants as this is your only defence against such terrifying, proletariat aggression. Being the sort of person who reads blogs you have no chance of fighting back and there is no time for reasoning, negotiation or hoping he gets sickened by the sight of your piss covered skinny jeans. What you should do is thrust your hand towards to his, not as a fist, but countered as a high five. His hand will instinctively uncurl from a fist of hate into a palm of party and as you high five, funk music will appear from nowhere and you will start fist bumping and back slapping like brothers. As you moonwalk towards the bar and buy eachother drinks you will be laughing hysterically and whooping wildly, some fighter jets will probably fly overhead streaming brightly coloured smoke and ticker tape will fall magically from the sky. You’ll become the best of friends and go through various hardships and adventures which just strengthen the bond between you. Loyal, sturdy, unbroken, together through life you stand. With tears in your eyes you ask him to be your best man at your forthcoming wedding and he humbly accepts. Then as the day arrives, you stand at the alter, he’s by your side and with a smile hands you the ring and then you smash a chair round his head and stamp on his windpipe because that dude was going to hit you over a spilled pint! What a fucking arsehole

Even Hitler used the high five tactic

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog for the very good reason that I couldn’t be fucked, but in that time a lot has happened. Earthquakes are trendy again, tsunami’s are even trendier (I was into them when they weren’t cool), every Godzilla joke ever made has been given a dusting of and the Arab world has finally decided to rid themselves of corrupt, mainly Western backed dictatorships for what will probably turn out to be new, corrupt, non-Western backed dictatorships. I would be delighted to be proved wrong, but hell, it took us hundreds of years of judicial process and constant reform to get a relatively non-corrupt, Democratic system which we still bitch and moan about all the time, and we expect these guys to get one overnight? But hell, who knows what will happen. Maybe it will all end with a happy ending and drinking lemonade in the park? The Revolution in Egypt was relatively peaceful (thanks to a ‘hand’s off’ approach on behalf of their military) and showed tremendous restraint, it was civically minded and communal and the imagined threat of the Muslim Brotherhood barging in with their 3 step guide for a new caliphate (one of the reasons that Mubarak was backed by the West) has turned out so far to be so much hot air. With luck their elections (planned within the next 6 months) will be peaceful and it can be held up as a template for revolutionary transition in the region.

Unfortunately with the choice between the Egyptian route of reform or the Gaddafi route (there’s 100 ways to spell his surname, I like this one), many countries have chosen the Gaddafi route, which means AK47’s at the ready to gun down all those threatening women and children who dare to want to live under something other than a constant State of Emergency. Thanks to the absurd disparity between Western military might and the Middle East’s it seems that Gaddafi is done for and I’m pretty delighted. The man is a deluded psychotic and I couldn’t care less if he hangs from the lampposts of Tripoli, he’s the perfect example of when a joke stops being funny.

We were all happy to laugh at him with his crazy speeches at the UN, his army of all-female bodyguards dubbed ‘the Amazon’s’ and his attempts to convert specially selected Italian women to Islam through a rambling speech and handing out special Koran’s. He travels the world in his Bedouin tent and has a face so surgically altered he could be Michael Jackson with Elephantitus. He was the clown of the world, until the clown decided  to do some hilarious and entertaining murdering. He still gave his award winning, rambling speeches, blaming the revolution on pill popping, boozed up Al-Qaeda members (those guys get the blame for everything), but we couldn’t laugh as much now as he was actively murdering people in a very visible way.

|Pictured: Sane, rational, leadership

People wouldn’t love Adam Dickface Sandler as much if he murdered people, or maybe they would as Adam Dickface Sandler fans are fuckbrained little idiots, laughing moronically at everything and anything the little grotbag does. I like that in many of his films he has himself playing some type of lothario figure. Got a real firm grasp on reality there eh Adam? Oh look, Rob Schneider’s popped up again, that’s a shock. And hey, he’s playing a racist stereotype, that’s goddamned edgy. I wish I had the time to violently assault all of his fans throughout the world but I just don’t, and they’d probably just counter with a high five anyway

But why intervene in Libya and not the Yemen or Bahrain? Well to be blunt those countries leaderships are Western allies, and important ones regionally, and to threaten military action against an ally, even one which acts brutally, simply isn’t how the game is played. Is the Libyan intervention about Oil? Though the Western business world had re-entered Libya after sanctions ended in 2005, business with Gaddafi’s regime had been characteristically erratic, and the Libyan government had a long record of using their vast oil fields as a powerful negotiation chip. This article written by people more intelligent than myself explains well http://lawandsecurity.foreignpolicyblogs.com/ . So a big fat maybe is about as much as I’m willing to stake right now.

I did start writing a bit here about Adam Dickface Sandler killing Tigers and rubbing them on his genitals, but it wasn’t working and I love Tigers too much to dirty them by association.



My search for 'Tiger mauling Adam Sandler' pictures was disappointing



Nothing more self righteous than my own indignation

Like most reasonable people I glide around through life in a bubble of sweet serenity, exuding an air of calm and tranquillity and bestowing good wishes and grace upon my beloved brothers and sisters of Earth. At least that is till some stupid pigfucking human dares to stumble clumsily into my bubble and shatters it with their arrows of hate. So today I am going to discuss some of the things which people do which drive me to an apocalyptic rage and will probably shorten my life by 40 years due to a massive brain embolism

So here's the scenario. Due to some bizarre alignment of the planets I've been working away hard for once like an industrious little fucker. I send off an email with my beloved spreadsheet attached, full of complex equations and made up statistics and a few minutes later get a reply, 'thks'. That seemingly random collection of letters is their expression of gratitude for my hours of painstaking and deeply incompetent work. That is the least amount of thanks they could give, I'd rather they said nothing. How lazy can you be, how ungrateful and complacent can you have got, when you can't be fucked to stick an extra vowel and a consonant to make an actual word and thank your fellow man, rather than send him what is at best a noise. Why do they do this? To save time? To save wear and tear on the 'A' key? Maybe you get more letters the more grateful they are? You wouldn't do this in a face to face conversation, if you did people would think you were a bit special needs and you'd be chased back to your retard cage by men with pitchforks, or at best returned to the travelling circus from which it would be assumed you'd escaped.

Or maybe reality TV

 Not everything that enrages me is a deliberate act of provocation, many are indirect and seemingly illogical. I'm on a train travelling from one boring destination to another, safely ensconced in my own private fantasy world and humming the train song (Hmmm,mmm,hmmm,mmm,hmmm) when I realise I'm approaching my destination. I get up and stand by the door behind a businessman who has his serious face on and stares directly in front of himself with an intensity which curdles milk and miscarries babies.

The train arrives and the door makes that 'ping!' noises and the door open button lights up and nothing happens. He just stands there and for all I know would continue to stand there if I hadn't pushed the button myself like some sort of mythological hero. His duty is clear, as the man nearest the door he should open it, but no, not for him. His sense of entitlement is so huge that doors simply magically open for him and to make matters worse I have helped perpetuate this arrogant assumption by opening the door for him! It's too much to bare, so to even things out I push him under the train as it pulls out of the station, but still it rankles.

Coffee. Coffee is a fine thing. It wakes me up and makes me jerk and twitch in an endearing way and without it I'd probably never shit again. When combined with my intake of cigarettes it helps age my skin so I can rehearse being in my 40's and it also helped contribute towards a fairly ok South Park character 'Tweek' and an excellent episode (the one with the underpants Gnomes, man that was good, funny little chaps). So I have no problem with coffee, it's cheap and hot and wet like a Filipino whore and it gives me a lot of pleasure (unlike a Filipino whore). My problem with coffee starts off when you visit a coffee chain like Starbucks or Costa in an attempt to gain a little pick me up and it's too early for hard liquor (it's never too early, I'm just supposing). The problems start immediatelyy as you enter the door and you are assailed by the impossibly smug middle class jazz vibe they seem to channel. The clientele are the type of turtleneck wearing, goatee sporting hate sponges that you imagine only appear in satirical cartoons or in the depths of your most boring nightmares but are actually walking the street fucking everwhere!

My beard is ironic and my baldness post-modern

Life is full of surprises and one of them is that people are every bit as pathetic and douchelike as television exaggeratingly depicts us for comic effect. We really are that fucking annoying. It's like hipsters, parodied and widely derided for their ironic beards and constant wearing of those fucking scarf things, like a silken fart draped round their puny, chicken like necks. Everybody hates them because they're so fucking lame, not as they suppose because they're blowing our minds with the skinniness of their jeans or the blackness of the glasses

Or the shortness of their short shorts

Yet these people exist in droves and walk about flouting their dickheadness in public. When really, through fire and steel, blood and thunder, they should have been chased to the very fringe of civilisation and forced to reside in the very heart of heart of darkness itself, clawing at their own faces with their splintered nails and chewing on the  tongues of their no longer ironic friends. Tortured by demons both imagined and real they collapse into a living human mulch of flesh and bone and are eaten alive by fire ants.

The fuck...was i talking about coffee? Yeah, so back to the point after my usual diversion into genocide, i'll get onto my main point regarding the coffee thing. So you choke your way past the dickheads, past the unnecessarily placed sacks of coffee beans on the floor (why?) and try and ignore the laid back songstress on the radio and eventually order a coffee. This is where the real problems start. Say you want a medium coffee, and this is what you politely ask for. Well medium doesn't exist in the world of Starbucks, no, these smug wankers want to introduce an air of mock European sophistication whether you're in a bustling metropolis or in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, so they then condescendingly reply back 'Do you mean a Grande?'. A Grande? Holy shit, that sounds huge, it sounds like the biggest thing on earth, i want a goddamned medium. Even if you ask for a small coffee you get a 'tall'. What the fuck is wrong with these peoples size perception? I guess the next time i get my dick out i'll describe it as a 'tall' but they''ll probably miss the point, kids don't care about coffee. And so on it goes, the biggest one is a 'Venti' which probably contains more fat and caffeine then the women's toilets at weight watchers.

Anyway, so you want a coffee with milk and maybe sugar if you're a barbarian. They'll look at you as if you asked for the milk straight from their tits. As if your humble coffee isn't worthy of their monumental coffee making powers. 'What the fuck is this?' they seem to say, 'I can't make a picture of a leaf in the foam on top of this coffee. I can't even put a shit tonne of ice in it. You disgust me''.



I'm like fucking Michelangelo



Because people don't go here for coffee anymore, at least not coffee in a recognisable form. They want it covered with whipped cream and cinnamon, with chocolate sprinkles and syrup. With peppermint and gingerbread and nut and soy milk (the fuck is that?). These people don't want coffee. They don't want something to warm them up and give them a lift. They don't want a coffee, they want a cake. They want something that you have to eat with a fucking spoon, something so crammed with artery clogging fat that they might as well just neck shot after shot of lard with a coffee bean in the middle. Nothing is simple any more, everything has to be special, to be a treat. We're such pathetic little consumers that we need everything to be some type of reward, something that makes us feel that we're getting a little extra. Everything is an event, so lets have a fucking ticker tape parade for our shitty little lives and feel special together.

Anyway that's enough for now, i could have gone on about more stuff which annoys me (The spelling of the month 'February', crisps, 'Nu-rave' music etc) but really you could just replace the word 'coffee' with any of those of your choosing and you'd get the idea.

My Thoughts on Christmas

So another Christmas period has slunk off leaving our wallets empty and stomachs soft and bloated, our livers screaming and our brains fried from the constant tinny jingling of christmas muzak which stores seem obsessed on playing, presumably to drive us into some sort of seasonal madness which will result on us buying useless christmas crap. It seems to work, at no other time of the year do I eat figs or dates but at Christmas the house is stuffed with the bloody things. They do help me shit though which is vital. Why do stores play this interminable dirge though? I guess I can understand (in a bitter, hate filled way) why a Toy shop or a shopping centre might play Christmas music. They need people to feel christmassy to help drive sales, and maybe a few overheard bars of 'White Christmas' would spark some brain cells and bring back a childhood memory of innocent Christmas joy, and spur you on to buy your beloved little ratbaby child the 'Awesome-o-matic Death Warrior 3000 now with real projectile blood spurting'. However I've been in hardware stores which seem to delight in playing christmas music, and they should never play anything that obnoxious and ear grating when someone is considering buying an Axe or a woodchipper.

An Ax-cellent gift!...Yeah, i'm good

I'm not one of those miserablist fucks who seem to gain a self satisfied pleasure by boasting about how much they hate Christmas. These are the worst types of people and are probably the same ones who feel superior by saying that The Beatles are 'overrated' and think they're ever so clever by referring to people as 'sheeple', the tiny minded little pigfuckers that they are. However nor am I someone who dances around merrily, waving mistletoe in their hands and bursting into song every few minutes and who laughs and claps when that goddamn Coke christmas advert comes on. 'Now it's Christmas' they'll laughingly proclaim, until I smash a Pepsi bottle into their face. No it's not you drooling epitome of consumer culture. Stop being attracted to the shiny lights of marketing you pathetic demographic, I hope your teeth rot and you choke on them. God I despise the Lowest Common Denominator, even more so when I see reflections of myself in it. There's nothing worse than seeing hints of your own, miserable inferiority. Anyway, I digress…I do enjoy Christmas, but mainly just the actual day. Gifts around the tree, food and drink and pulling crackers, it's a nice day and I feel happy at the end of it. All of the huge, pressure filled build up though, that's too much for me.

Christmas in an office environment is always a strange experience. Offices are weird enough as it is, as I've mentioned in several, annoyingly similar blog posts in the past, but at Christmas it goes into overdrive. The office is soon bedecked by bedraggled looking christmas decorations, dragged out of storage in the basement where the mice have been having festive themed shits for the past 11 months. Tinsel covers my desk 'wall', lights drape across the window and streamers hang from the ceiling, where they inevitably fall down twice a day and suddenly make everything look bleak and unloved. Just before Christmas a row of desks decided to hold a little in office 'party'. They brought in those sausage rolls that are filled with pasty, tasteless reformed meat and rusk, and there was cake and doughnuts and christmas music (Oh joy!) and all the usual crap.They all put on cheerful christmas hats and reindeer antlers and had a merry little lunch break. Of course afterwards they went back to work, but they kept wearing their cheerful christmas hats and reindeer antlers because, oh gosh, it's Christmas. I have nothing against that, I've been known to enjoy a novelty hat, but it's still strangely disturbing to see a middle aged man wearing flashing reindeer antlers as he screams profanity down the phone at some hapless colleague who hasn't filed a report. It's like a Ray Winstone Christmas, before he turned into the cuddly type he is now.

Eat your fucking sprouts

If you walk around any major shopping centre (or mall if you insist on being American) at Christmas and it will usually have, pride of place in the centre, some sort of 'Santa's Grotto', where rosy cheeked children are ushered breathlessly inside to meet with a kindly and twinkly eyed Father Christmas, who with a loving hug and a good natured chuckle will ask about the child's Christmas wishes and make vague but well meaning promises, and usher the child out with a photograph and a small present. The magic and sense of wonder will fill the child with a real sense of the uniqueness of the occasion and no doubt they will sleep well that night. Of course, as ever, the reality is a horrible mockery of what should be a special occasion. The winter wonderland that has been set up in whatever gum strewn spare space they have usually looks like a nightmarish acid trip populated with bastardised rip offs from the Chucky films. As you approach the grotto (often made out like some snow strewn cottage) you'll see an army of dead eyed animatronic elves, listlessly repeating the same jerking motions back and forth, with no discernible aim. As if cursed by a terrible God they stand frozen to the spot, slowly waving their arms in an attempt to gain your attention, and they would no doubt be screaming if their tongues hadn't been ripped out by vengeful harpies. A few of them are inevitably broken and can only be assumed by the terror filled child to be dead, worked to an early grave by the terrible master that lies within. The child then waits in a queue, all the time watching nervously the nearest elf for signs of life, when suddenly some spotty and bored teenager, also done out like an elf but inexplicably twice the size of the robot ones, looms out and ushers them inside the doom cottage of snow. When inside though surely all will be well, with the kind and all loving embrace of Father Christmas.

Come and give Santa a hugsy

But it's not like that anymore. Thanks to everyone assuming that everyone else is some greasy faced paedophile and that they cannot wait to fuck their ugly little children, there is no reassuring sitting on the lap anymore, lest a thousand questing penises thrust up. The child is simply presented to the man (or 16 year old boy who pulled the short straw as is often the case) who mutters a ho, ho, ho, chucks them a badly wrapped toy of miserable cheapness and has a quick photograph taken (whilst maintaining a non-child touching distance) of the no doubt screaming child, by another teenage elf who then kicks them out to keep the money making procession continuing. The entire thing is a cheap and shitty farce and probably raises all sorts of questions as to why the fake bearded figure they peered at through the gloom seems so different to the magical, laughing and flying Father Christmas they know and love so dearly from terrible american films.

Still lying to and deceiving children is probably one of the few sick pleasures parents get from Christmas what with the inter-family fights, money burning and awkward confessions about what really happened on that camping trip with Uncle so many years ago.

Anyway, i hope you all had a nice Christmas

The more it snows, tiddly pom

As the more observant amongst you may have noticed it's been snowing a tad bit recently, in fact it's been snowing so much that the country has descended into chaos, with hordes of cannibalistic nomads roaming the artic blasted tundra to harvest the soft fleshed survivors for their blubber farms. The ground is choked with the frozen corpses of the weak and the poor and the air is filled with terror filled rumours of wolf skin wearing marauders from the Northern lands descending upon us, their battles axes wet with blood as they ride their Death Bears into battle.

This is our reality

Of course only part of this is true. The majority of people make it into work (if they bother going) with some minor annoyances (like delayed trains and icy roads) but really this isn't much of an event, not really a story, it's all terribly mundane and normal. But as I sit in my office and I prick up my handsome ears to the words of my colleagues you'd imagine some once in a lifetime disaster had occurred. I repeatedly hear them talk in hushed tones about how it took them 5 minutes to de-ice their car and at how they had to wear 2, yes 2, jumpers to stay warm. Stories which could have been summed up with, 'The train was cancelled so I got a bus which is why I'm 20 minutes late', turn into half hour epics with witless asides about their boots and a man who kept sneezing, which is regaled to a starry eyed crowd who listen, only as they are chomping at the bit to give their own counter story which is quickly embellished with additional boring facts in the endless struggle to out-do eachother, 'That's nothing, I fell over twice and walked 2 miles in the snow and saw a frozen lake and cars skidding'. It ends up as an awful version of 'The Four Yorkshireman' sketch with all the wit, delivery and timing taken out and replaced with a steadily growing urge to kill them and then yourself, possibly with an icicle for poetic reasons.


Of course some people do have genuinely exciting stories about surviving the horrific onslaught of crystallised water, sent by a vengeful and humourless God. I for one hiked 20 miles through an ice storm, my hands slowly freezing around the whale bone handles of my ice picks, my skin burning with an intense fire at the white world that surrounded me. Then suddenly out of the corner of my eye I spot teeth and claws. It was a Polar bear, 25 feet tall, it's face reddened with the blood of many orphaned children, it's claws tangled in the flesh of many Nuns. But I slayed the fearful beast with my bare (geddit!) hands and surfed his body across the ice realms to freedom and victory and office work! I also slaughtered some Eskimos and punched a wolf

I'll do anything to survive