Today in the Youtubes: Flanders and Swann

Too cool to blog

A recent Pew study proves how fucking awesome I am.

"While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults".

The number of young people keeping blogs has fallen 14% since 2006, and the number of twentysomethings blogging has fallen 9%. Only the over-30s are writing more online.

Nicolas Carr's reaction has given me a number of excellent ideas for my future blogging: "When I blog these days, I feel like I should be sitting in a rocking chair, wearing a highly absorptive undergarment, and writing posts debunking some overhyped new bunion treatment (iPads?)".

It also seems that 'blogger' has become a term of abuse. A quick glance over Urban Dictionary (as good a barometer of young-people attitudes as any other) isn't encouraging. Among accurate, objective definitions of 'blogger' are some real gems. My favourites:

"Term used to describe anyone with enough time or narcissism to document every tedious bit of minutia filling their uneventful lives. Possibly the most annoying thing about bloggers is the sense of self-importance they get after even the most modest of publicity. Sometimes it takes as little as a referral on a more popular blogger's website to set the lesser blogger's ego into orbit. "

"An internet diary writer. Or more accurately, a whinging, wining, insecure, sympathy-craving, self-indulgent, self-important, over-privileged 'feeling: meh' scum of the internet/universe."

"A person with a laptop, an ax to grind, and their virginity [Stephen Colbert]".

As someone who's been following (mostly left-wing) political blogs religiously for several years now, I literally had no idea. I thought this blog would make me fairly in-touch with modern yoof culture; now, like my defiant lack of a Facebook profile, it will have to define me as an angry old man in a young-person's body. Lovely.

Today in the Youtubes: Obama sings Replay

Keynesianism and the Letterbox

One day of unpaid labour, and I am now quite the expert on letterboxes. My mother runs a day-nursery, and having ordered the leaflets I had to spend the best part of three hours dropping several hundred through the unsuspecting doors of middle class people. I've dubbed this horrible practice 'flyer-tipping', as it should probably be criminal. In my defence, I didn't drop a leaflet through doors with 'no free stuff' signs, we're several children below profit and I vas only folloving orders.

All I can say after this is that I seriously do not envy postmen. And the reason has mostly to do with the stupid fucking letterboxes that most people attach to their stupid fucking front doors.

The majority are quite agreeable, just a little piece of metal on a hinge that you pop open and drop whatever you need through. I have no problem with these. But then you get the letterbox that seems to have been weighted, so you nearly break your wrist trying to get the thing open with your one available hand. Then there's the letterbox so small you could barely fit a postage stamp through, requiring much faffing about folding the leaflet up so you can deposit the thing. There's the sideways letterbox, which is just unnecessary. You can also get the letterbox that is blocked by a big piece of netting that the stupid owners have draped behind the door, meaning it goes in only half way and needs to be pushed further, often getting stuck. (Home owners with this set-up are disproportionately dog-owners, making the process of pushing your hand through the letter box needlessly stressful). There's the letterbox that is located at the foot of the door, as if gravity can't be trusted to bring the post down onto the doormat and so must be placed there. This requires bending down, which doesn't bear thinking about.

But all these, dear reader, are tolerable, at least when compared with the dreaded 'brush seal draught excluder'. (Click here to see a twat installing one of these evil little bastards specifically to ruin my day). The brush seal draught excluder is a horrible little device designed, oddly enough, to exclude draughts. This is a letterbox with heavy brushes on the inside through which the mail needs to be pushed. They might as well attach barbed wire. A leaflet cannot be simply dropped through this thing, and needs to be pushed all the way through. But when you remove your hand the tops of your fingers scrape along the inside of the letterbox, which really, really hurts. Thus to push a leaflet though one of these things you need, in theory, to wrap it around your hand and slide the thing in. It never works like that. I had lost the top layer of the back of my hand by the end of the day, and all so these people could save a fraction of a penny every year in retained heat.

Why do we find it acceptable as a society to put our valiant postmen, takeaway owners and

entrepreneurial nursery-owner's sons through all this? I'm honestly appalled that postmen have never taken industrial action over this issue. So I am now proposing a simple solution to this menace: nothing less than the full standardisation of all letterboxes in the country.

This will have numerous benefits. First, the postman will have a much easier job, and will immediately feel his quality of life increase a hundredfold. (At least until building is finished, in the mean time delivering letters might be tricky). Secondly, this will give much needed labour to our numerous unemployed. There's actually good economic sense behind this plan, as these are jobs which, by their nature, cannot be outsourced abroad. Doors in London can only be changed in London by inhabitants of London, not from a call centre in New Delhi (though they're probably working on that). Thus there will be few withdrawals from the economy, and the tax-payer will get greater value for money. And as the worse off will be getting into this work, the multiplier effect will be much greater, as the poorer you are the greater your marginal propensity to consume i.e. they're more likely to spend the money they're paid, which in turn creates more jobs.

But what about the draughts?!

What about them? The amount of heat you lose from having the regular kind of letterbox is probably proportional to the amount of blood you lose from a pin-prick. If the same workers who fix your door also insulate your attic, that will more than offset the heat you'll lose from the letterbox. Ultimately this standardisation of letterboxes should be only one form of nationwide house renovation to provide jobs and help us towards a green economy.

But the Englishman's house is his castle, and what's left of our national identity may be deeply offended by the state meddling in the British home. 'My house is my house, the government has no right to tell me what letterbox to have'. Really? You didn't even care about the thing till now. You'll still get your letters, the postman will have an easier time of it and maybe somebody will get back into work. Stop complaining you petty, middle-England, NIMBYist, Daily Mail reading prick.

There is a nation out there of quietly suffering posties and eighteen year old boys with sore knuckles. It is our job to ease their pain.

The New Secularism and the Politics of Condescension

This is a piece I wrote a while ago for The Third Estate.

It’s really unsurprising that the figures of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett should rise to such prominence now. The secular society and its values of free expression and scientific advance have for several years now been under attack from many different places and with tenacity we may have thought we’d left behind. The first thing to say is just how lucky I think we are that amid the thousands of books published every year on ‘spirituality’, faith healing, prayer, creationism and getting to know Jesus just that bit better, four managed to get through and make God-botherers everywhere squirm.

Books such as ‘The God Delusion’ and ‘God is not Great’ have provided intellectual succour for thousands, and sharpened the arguments of many atheists out there to a fine point. People like Hitchens and Dawkins demolish any case for God into opaque nothingness, in public and through incredibly readable prose, to a very large audience.

And who can deny that we desperately need a viable secularist movement in this country? We still have an established church, a Head of State who’s also the ‘Defender of the Faith’ and an ever-expanding system of faith schools. A public pronouncement from a Bishop makes it into the papers most days and every hospital ethics panel will have a representative of the great Sky-Daddy.

A quick glance across the pond is hardly encouraging. Not one presidential candidate admitted to having no faith (as many of the evidently do not), and several conservative candidates openly denied that evolution is scientific fact. Faith votes remain the backbone of any campaign for office and religiously inspired nonsense such as ‘abstinence only sex-education’ receives public money.

Meanwhile the Middle East collapses one suicide bomber at a time.

All of this needs a muscular intellectual response, and the ‘new Atheists’ do this beautifully.

But up with this I will not put:

My objection isn’t that I disagree with the sentiment (and I’ll ignore the rather obvious similarity with the kind of nutter shouting ‘The end is nigh!’ in a busy town centre). The point is that facile stunts like this are presented as radical, almost subversive statements of non-belief in a world saturated with religious superstition.

But they may as well have stayed at home. According to an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in 2006, 62% of people believed that morality can be accounted for with reference to human nature, not God, and furthermore that 62% again felt that science is the best way to gain knowledge of the universe. 7 out of 10 people declared themselves Christian in the last census, but with church attendance at 7% this seems more to do with received cultural identity and sort of-Christianity than actual faith.

A similar campaign in the United States, with buses simply claiming ‘You don’t have to believe in God to be good’ was shut down after complaints that it was ‘offensive’. (An equally valid case could be made for shutting it down for stating the fucking obvious).

The radical sticks their neck out when speaking their mind. Dawkins risks precisely nothing when he goes off on one, and is far more likely to make a great deal of money. He hasn’t put ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ on a bendy bus; instead we get the most insipid kind of hollowed out philosophy (and with a ‘probably’ thrown in as well) passed off as an act of subversion. I have yet to meet an atheist who was seriously troubled by any ‘Jesus Saves’ sign, and I doubt a serious Christian or Muslim will cast off their faith due to this.

The leaders of the campaign would answer that the purpose isn’t to convert anyone, but to appeal to those sort-of-Christians in the middle, the ‘floating faithful’, if you will. These are the people who tick the Christian box and then don’t go to church, and they need to know that non-belief is just groovy. So, all that publicity, money, promotion and anger to appeal to the constituency who, by definition, don’t like to think about these things.

But suppose I’m completely wrong, and all these people are moved to radically reconsider their entire outlook on the world by a passing sign on a bus. What massive victory will we win for the forces of reason and non-belief?: we’ll have more people who think there’s probably no God, who will then stop worrying about it and live their lives. How radical. We won’t have gained new recruits for a movement for a secular society; the answer to this campaign will never be ‘Oh right, there probably isn’t a God, now what can we do about these faith schools?’ No program has even been suggested.

A campaign with any substantial message – especially one running in America – could appeal to a largely alienated, exploited conservative base to not put themselves in boxes and be dragged around against their own interests by politicians. (People such as David Kuo and the brilliant left wing journalist Thomas Frank, do just this. Noam Chomsky has also had some brilliant things to say about the left’s failure to reach out to the people in ‘flyover country’ so consistently shafted by the governments they elect). But the Dawkins faction has a far more enjoyable time thinking that the country is just awash with stupid religious people who need condescending messages shoved in their faces.

As to the problems of the Muslim world, a bus campaign in London will do little. Now to say the same on buses in Riyadh ; that I would admire.

I was in the audience at the recent televised debate between Hitchens and Stephen Fry and Anne Widdecombe and a Catholic Bishop whose name escapes me. (As with all these debates, it can be viewed on Youtube, here). 2,000-odd people filed into the Methodist Hall in Westminster to the sound of strategically placed church bells from Westminster Abbey to attend a debate on the motion ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world’. But as the speakers made their cases I noticed something I thought I wouldn’t. That was that every brave statement of principle made by Hitchens and Fry would receive a great thunderous round of applause, compared to pathetic smatterings for Widdecombe’s squeaky bullshit. At the start of the evening 678 people voted for the motion that the Church was a force for good, with 1,102 opposing it; by the end of the night about 400 had changed sides against the Catholic Church.

No doubt many of the Catholics who turned up were shocked by some of the information about the Church’s wrongdoings obviously denied them by their Priests, but it was odd to see how, on this occasion at least, the anti-God squad was better organised than the might of the Catholic Church.

***

Two years ago the ‘Freedom From Religion Foundation’, a Humanist/Atheist group, put up an anti-religion sign near a nativity scene in the State Capitol building in Olympia , Washington , USA . The sign read:

‘At this season of THE WINTER SOLSTICE may reason prevail.

The are no gods. no devils. no angels. no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world.

Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds’

I won’t need to tell you what’s wrong with a practical prayer to reason itself. (And the same group has paid for ‘Praise Darwin’ billboards in the American South).

Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher who now runs the organisation, said it was important for atheists to see their viewpoints validated and accepted alongside all the others. All I can say is that if having your viewpoints validated means hollering your non-beliefs at people, then I don’t want my viewpoints validated or accepted; I’m much happier in a quiet, and obviously superior, minority.

Today in the Youtubes: Johann Hari at the Progressive London conference.

I was in the audience here, and Johann gave a fantastic speech (below). And I had a lovely chat with Frances O'Grady from the TUC afterwards. Good stuff.

My David Cameron poster