Here are two things that I had to say, but didn't have anyone to say them to:
1) It was snowing earlier. It was great.
2) I saw a man sporting a Souvarov moustache identical to the kind I was sporting months ago. Seeing as nobody has really sported one of those since 1912, I came to assume that he must have seen me walking around with it before Christmas and become inspired. Yippee.
In other news, February is Moustache Month. May I politely suggest to my hairfaced readers that they start shaving all of the bits of their lower head that are not their upper lip? I know I will be!
Crapfully yours,
Frida Livery
Thursday 31 January 2008
Tuesday 22 January 2008
Strangerous Times!
So yestereve, I was over at the Bobbin, thieving their Wifis, (the Bobbin is a rather nice little rock bar where Old Rosie costs less than Strongbow and where the TVs are more likely to portray the All American Rejects than the Manchester Uniteds), just, as the old cliché goes, minding my own business.
And then this guy came up to me, really quite drunk, and demanded to use my laptop. Understandably I was all like, 'um... no?'
But then he explained himself, he said that he was some kind of Internetman, and that he ran some kind of Internets, and that he had just been scammed out of several hundred thousand pounds by some wily Nigerian. I pointed out to him that pretending to be scammed is actually a fairly common way of commencing a scam, so then he said that it would be alright if I did the typing-and-clicking and he'd tell me what to do. No harm in this, thought I, although he did distract me from some rather promising games of Scrabulous... So we went through the motions of checking his Internets, he rang his friend, I talked to his friend, passwords were exchanged, yadda yadda. At some point, he asked me whether I drank, and I said "yeh, Old Rosie if you're buying." He accused me of being cheeky, but I still maintain that was rather reasonable.
So then, then crisis was averted. He came back to my table and handed me a pint of Old Rosie. 'Result,' thought I. Then he started being all weird. He turned to me and started asking loads of vague, yet intimate, questions, like 'who are you?', and 'what do you not do?'.
Now, I'm not one of those people who views their life as being particularly purposeful. Maybe that's quite tragic? Personally, I find my lack of any long-term ambitions quite liberating - I take enough pleasure from having a simple lie-in on a Wednesday morning without having to feel the need to constantly achieve some kind of dream. Then the man, (who's name was Damon Wright, as, I have just realised, I am under no obligation to protect his anonymity), started getting really angry. He started ranting at me about how I have to justify my existance.
I said, "Of course I fucking don't. Not to anyone, especially not some random drunken twat in a pub."
Then he started pulling the post-colonial guilt card. He accused me of 'having paid for my clothes', and being a 'middle-class white boy'. Now. All in all, being a middle-class white boy is pretty beneficial, indeed, probably the only thing wrong with it is occassionally being called a 'middle-class white boy', because unlike other prejudicial abuse you can't simply reply 'yes I am, and proud of it!', without appearing like a complete and utter Tory. Like, if I had been someone of the negroid persuasion, and he had called me a 'middle-class black boy', I'd be quite able to express some righteous indignation. Alas, no, I was not stuck shouting at some drunken twat having to justify having ever taking part in an economic exchange, (with my 'bought and paid for' jeans), and, indeed, my life itself.
I gave him my all time favourite fact about the so-called evils of free trade, that today, after decades of globalised free trade, there are more obese people than starving people. He said, yeah, in the West. I said, no, that's a global average. He said, show me one fat person in a natural environment. I said, the concept of a 'natural environment' is bullshit, human beings are civilisation-builders and globalisation is much more concurrent with human nature than the prehistoric hunter gatherer lifestyle. He pointed out that Western society 'overproduces'. I said, how is 'overproduction' even possible in a civilisation that thrives on the production of surplus. He asked if I'd ever even read a newspaper. I told him to stop being a patronising cunt. He claimed that he wasn't. I told him to fuck off.
So on, and so on, eventually, it became evident that he wasn't going to fuck off. The onus, it seemed was on me to be the off-fucker. However, I was only a third of the way through my free pint, and to abandon my pint would support his claim that I was just another wasteful middle-class white boy, that, and my Northern memes simply would not permit the abandonement of property. Eventually, I ended up storming out anyway, with my pint in hand. I felt guilty for depriving the Bobbin, (an establishment I still do rather like), of one of their pint glasses, but meh, they have loads, and I needed one at home anyway.
On the way home, I decided that if I ever met the Nigerian who scammed that man out of his £165,000, I would shake his hand.
And then this guy came up to me, really quite drunk, and demanded to use my laptop. Understandably I was all like, 'um... no?'
But then he explained himself, he said that he was some kind of Internetman, and that he ran some kind of Internets, and that he had just been scammed out of several hundred thousand pounds by some wily Nigerian. I pointed out to him that pretending to be scammed is actually a fairly common way of commencing a scam, so then he said that it would be alright if I did the typing-and-clicking and he'd tell me what to do. No harm in this, thought I, although he did distract me from some rather promising games of Scrabulous... So we went through the motions of checking his Internets, he rang his friend, I talked to his friend, passwords were exchanged, yadda yadda. At some point, he asked me whether I drank, and I said "yeh, Old Rosie if you're buying." He accused me of being cheeky, but I still maintain that was rather reasonable.
So then, then crisis was averted. He came back to my table and handed me a pint of Old Rosie. 'Result,' thought I. Then he started being all weird. He turned to me and started asking loads of vague, yet intimate, questions, like 'who are you?', and 'what do you not do?'.
Now, I'm not one of those people who views their life as being particularly purposeful. Maybe that's quite tragic? Personally, I find my lack of any long-term ambitions quite liberating - I take enough pleasure from having a simple lie-in on a Wednesday morning without having to feel the need to constantly achieve some kind of dream. Then the man, (who's name was Damon Wright, as, I have just realised, I am under no obligation to protect his anonymity), started getting really angry. He started ranting at me about how I have to justify my existance.
I said, "Of course I fucking don't. Not to anyone, especially not some random drunken twat in a pub."
Then he started pulling the post-colonial guilt card. He accused me of 'having paid for my clothes', and being a 'middle-class white boy'. Now. All in all, being a middle-class white boy is pretty beneficial, indeed, probably the only thing wrong with it is occassionally being called a 'middle-class white boy', because unlike other prejudicial abuse you can't simply reply 'yes I am, and proud of it!', without appearing like a complete and utter Tory. Like, if I had been someone of the negroid persuasion, and he had called me a 'middle-class black boy', I'd be quite able to express some righteous indignation. Alas, no, I was not stuck shouting at some drunken twat having to justify having ever taking part in an economic exchange, (with my 'bought and paid for' jeans), and, indeed, my life itself.
I gave him my all time favourite fact about the so-called evils of free trade, that today, after decades of globalised free trade, there are more obese people than starving people. He said, yeah, in the West. I said, no, that's a global average. He said, show me one fat person in a natural environment. I said, the concept of a 'natural environment' is bullshit, human beings are civilisation-builders and globalisation is much more concurrent with human nature than the prehistoric hunter gatherer lifestyle. He pointed out that Western society 'overproduces'. I said, how is 'overproduction' even possible in a civilisation that thrives on the production of surplus. He asked if I'd ever even read a newspaper. I told him to stop being a patronising cunt. He claimed that he wasn't. I told him to fuck off.
So on, and so on, eventually, it became evident that he wasn't going to fuck off. The onus, it seemed was on me to be the off-fucker. However, I was only a third of the way through my free pint, and to abandon my pint would support his claim that I was just another wasteful middle-class white boy, that, and my Northern memes simply would not permit the abandonement of property. Eventually, I ended up storming out anyway, with my pint in hand. I felt guilty for depriving the Bobbin, (an establishment I still do rather like), of one of their pint glasses, but meh, they have loads, and I needed one at home anyway.
On the way home, I decided that if I ever met the Nigerian who scammed that man out of his £165,000, I would shake his hand.
Saturday 19 January 2008
Let's talk about Iraq
I am probably unique amongst the 43-posted-semi-political-bloggers in that this will be the first time I will mention Iraq.
One of the reasons I've taken this long is that I'm not actually against the Iraq war, which is something many people find shocking, but meh. BUT MEH!
This wannae always the case, in 2003 I was adamantly opposed to the Iraq war - indeed, I was even interviewed by the BBC whilst on my way to the pre-War anti-War protests, and I said to the reporter lady, "if anything I do here can save a single human live, then it'd be worth it". Search it on the BBC News website, it may still be there somewhere... But yeah, at some point after the (Iraqi) general election I started to change my mind. I started to seek information about pre-War Iraq, it turned out that Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was a genocidal bastard, and that he killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, but this campaign was stopped by the no-fly zones imposed by George Bush the Elder following the First Gulf War.
Ultimately I concluded that the Iraq War was a war intended to protect American hegemony. As, indeed, have many anti-War people. The difference is, I view this as a perfectly reasonable reason for war. Iraq, as it turns out, is (or rather, was), one of the most uniquely powerful states in the world. Iraq has one of the deciding votes on the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) Council, OPEC was designed to be a body that acted in tandem to secure its own power as the virtual monopoly of oil production, and so, its own OPEC Council was designed as a body to determine when, and how much oil, should be delivered to the oil-hungry nations of the West, (indeed, the disastorous economic slump of the 1970s was caused by the (primarily Arab) nations of the OPEC decided to withdraw oil supply to the West). Before 2003, Iraq was preparing to do something much more damaging, they were preparing a coalition within the OPEC nations to overthrough the US Dollar as the primary currency of exchange within the oil market: a brief explanation: perhaps some of you have heard the term 'petrodollar' - this is because according to global law (as set down by OPEC), oil can only be bought and sold in US Dollars, so, if any nation wants to buy any oil, it has to transfer its own currency into USD before it can do so, likewise, if a nation wants to sell oil, they can oil accept prices in USD.
This gives the USA a great deal of power, as every industrialised economy in the world has to buy up their currency if they want to maintain their oil-hungry wealth producers. Iraq, pre-2003, being a nation in contempt of US power saught to transfer the sole petro-currency from the USD to the new, and quite dynamic, Euro. The Euro is unique within post-WWII history as being the only currency to pose any economic challenge to the the USD.
America would face a complete economic collapse if OPEC (if convinced by Iraq et co.) had switched the global oil-exchanging currency from the USD to the Euro, as every nation in the world would suddenly seek to sell back their vast reserves of USD, instantly devaluing the US economy.
(Such a scenario would be, in the short term, a real advantage to the Eurozone nations, and, it is worth noting, that, aside from Spain (being dominated by a single, post-Fascist party at the time), all Eurozone nations decided to oppose the Iraq War.)
So ultimately, yes, Iraq is a war in defence of American hegemony, both military, yet, more importantly, economically - the post-War Iraqi government was one of the most vocal proponents of maintaining the USD as the international currency of oil exchange.
But, however, even after this acheivement, (which probably helped secure the dominance of Western economies into this new millenium), has lead to great loss of life, (and I won't deny for a second that it has). The question is, that had Saddam had had his way, and dethroned the USD, likely many hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world would have faced starvation and destitution as their economies, so intricately pegged to America's, collapsed, and basics like food and clean water became utterly unaffordable.
In the West it is easy to see economic woes as an abstraction, as we, lucky as we are, are able to live in luxury through even the worst economic disaster. But for the nations that depend on us, this isn't the case.
Anyway... I gather I'm probably wandering to far into the abstract here. The facts on the ground are that Iraq seems to be facing a good year ahead of it in 2008, and honestly, I wish the best for the Iraqi people.
One of the reasons I've taken this long is that I'm not actually against the Iraq war, which is something many people find shocking, but meh. BUT MEH!
This wannae always the case, in 2003 I was adamantly opposed to the Iraq war - indeed, I was even interviewed by the BBC whilst on my way to the pre-War anti-War protests, and I said to the reporter lady, "if anything I do here can save a single human live, then it'd be worth it". Search it on the BBC News website, it may still be there somewhere... But yeah, at some point after the (Iraqi) general election I started to change my mind. I started to seek information about pre-War Iraq, it turned out that Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was a genocidal bastard, and that he killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, but this campaign was stopped by the no-fly zones imposed by George Bush the Elder following the First Gulf War.
Ultimately I concluded that the Iraq War was a war intended to protect American hegemony. As, indeed, have many anti-War people. The difference is, I view this as a perfectly reasonable reason for war. Iraq, as it turns out, is (or rather, was), one of the most uniquely powerful states in the world. Iraq has one of the deciding votes on the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) Council, OPEC was designed to be a body that acted in tandem to secure its own power as the virtual monopoly of oil production, and so, its own OPEC Council was designed as a body to determine when, and how much oil, should be delivered to the oil-hungry nations of the West, (indeed, the disastorous economic slump of the 1970s was caused by the (primarily Arab) nations of the OPEC decided to withdraw oil supply to the West). Before 2003, Iraq was preparing to do something much more damaging, they were preparing a coalition within the OPEC nations to overthrough the US Dollar as the primary currency of exchange within the oil market: a brief explanation: perhaps some of you have heard the term 'petrodollar' - this is because according to global law (as set down by OPEC), oil can only be bought and sold in US Dollars, so, if any nation wants to buy any oil, it has to transfer its own currency into USD before it can do so, likewise, if a nation wants to sell oil, they can oil accept prices in USD.
This gives the USA a great deal of power, as every industrialised economy in the world has to buy up their currency if they want to maintain their oil-hungry wealth producers. Iraq, pre-2003, being a nation in contempt of US power saught to transfer the sole petro-currency from the USD to the new, and quite dynamic, Euro. The Euro is unique within post-WWII history as being the only currency to pose any economic challenge to the the USD.
America would face a complete economic collapse if OPEC (if convinced by Iraq et co.) had switched the global oil-exchanging currency from the USD to the Euro, as every nation in the world would suddenly seek to sell back their vast reserves of USD, instantly devaluing the US economy.
(Such a scenario would be, in the short term, a real advantage to the Eurozone nations, and, it is worth noting, that, aside from Spain (being dominated by a single, post-Fascist party at the time), all Eurozone nations decided to oppose the Iraq War.)
So ultimately, yes, Iraq is a war in defence of American hegemony, both military, yet, more importantly, economically - the post-War Iraqi government was one of the most vocal proponents of maintaining the USD as the international currency of oil exchange.
But, however, even after this acheivement, (which probably helped secure the dominance of Western economies into this new millenium), has lead to great loss of life, (and I won't deny for a second that it has). The question is, that had Saddam had had his way, and dethroned the USD, likely many hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world would have faced starvation and destitution as their economies, so intricately pegged to America's, collapsed, and basics like food and clean water became utterly unaffordable.
In the West it is easy to see economic woes as an abstraction, as we, lucky as we are, are able to live in luxury through even the worst economic disaster. But for the nations that depend on us, this isn't the case.
Anyway... I gather I'm probably wandering to far into the abstract here. The facts on the ground are that Iraq seems to be facing a good year ahead of it in 2008, and honestly, I wish the best for the Iraqi people.
Tuesday 15 January 2008
Blog 42: Time for some Philosophy
Okay, now, I like caring about stuff. Caring about stuff has to be the second funnest activity there is - (next to not caring about stuff, of course), but there are some things that some people care about that I just completely refuse to sympathise with.
All this boils down to a single philosophical conviction that I carry: Nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing, has as much worth as a single human life. The reason I carry this conviction seems simple to me, even if perhaps it may not to others... Human life, it seems, is the only value that is able to assert its own value, unlike the value attached to animals, nations, beautiful environments, political ideologies, etc. which always need to have someone external to it to embed it with what they view it is its worth. Often they will attempt to suggest that this worth is somehow innate, despite the fact that recognition of this innate worth is sporadic, if not rare, throughout the human community, whereas recognition of human worth is near-universal.
The distinction I wish to make here is between the Cartesian 'I Think Therefore I Am' principle, which enables people to realise that they are worthy of protection from arbitrary oppression; and the entirely imagined worth which human beings attach to almost everything else in their immediate environment. Human beings are imagination-engines, as well as their production of carbon dioxide and waste carbohydrate, they produce in equal measures imagined values - to give one tragic example, throughout history millions of people within the civilised world have starved to death rather than to admit to themselves that the economic system that has deprived them of food is entirely a product of the collective imagination of their society. As the Poor starved to death, the Rich dined in luxury behind their gates, rather than seize what they need to survive, the Poor content themselves with their impending deaths while respecting the imagined economy that sustained them for a while but which, ultimately, betrayed them.
Now, I'm not saying imagined values are bad. Imagined values are what keeps a society together - as I suggested earlier, without imagined values, the human race would resort to murdering each other for scraps of food. But, I think a line has to be drawn. Drawn along the point in which these imagined values actually start to cause more net harm than they cause net good.
Where, exactly, this point lies is a matter of debate, and, indeed, it should be debated, passionately and often, throughout the world. For instance, perhaps the imagined value that we place of property rights condemns certain people to poverty, surely then, it is harmful and should be ignored? But on the other hand, the Rich are wealth creators, they are able to invest their significant surplus into projects that will return more wealth - at the end of the day, Wealth is an imaginary thing, often people take it too seriously and assume that it is a Real thing, and that if someone has it, then someone else doesn't have it!, but this is not so, it is imaginary, and within the rules of the economic make-believe game, it is possible for more than one person to possess the same unit of Wealth, whilst still owning all of the Wealth, (it doesn't have to make sense, remember, its all imaginary!) - so perhaps the Rich are doing a service by creating more wealth, which will eventually trickle down.
However, there are times when people obviously lose the plot. Recently I was watching Channel 4, specifically, a program entitled 'Hugh's Chicken Run', in which celebrity longnameman, I mean chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall experimented with managing an extensive chicken farm. Hugh was often moved to tears as the chickens he cared for were brutally exploited for their sole useful commodity, tasteh tasteh meatz - alongside this experiment, he convinced a community from 'the rough side of Axminster' to run their own free range chicken coop, these people insisted from the start that they were poor (I'm not giving these 'poor' the capital-P treatment, because no-one in the First World is truly 'Poor'), and couldn't afford fancy chicken, yet he pulled on their heartstrings and after the end of their Chickenxperiment, they had been converted into the fancy-chicken camp.
Hugh lauded this as a victory... but is it? In reality what has happened is that a millionaire TV personality has tricked a community into doubling their chicken budget, and thus reducing the amount of money they could spend on more self-beneficial things. I can't help but think that what he has done is produce a net harm to these human beings, who, after-all, unlike their chickens, can declare their own worth, and don't have to have it imaginarily imposed on top of them.
What Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall has done here, is view his own imagined values as being more important than the innate value that human beings are able to assert for themselves. In my opinion, this is fundamentally wrong, and now better than the dictator who views the 'survival of the nation' as being more important than the well-being of the individual citizens.
Now, I'm not saying that 'ethical' chicken is somehow evil - I'm a believer in choice, so if someone decides that they want to indulge their imagination by helping Mr Chicken live a happier live before being culled, then fine. But by forcing people to buy free range - which is Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall's ultimate goal, as, ideally, he wants intensive farming banned - you have crossed the line of individual choice into social manipulation.
Some may say that I am exaggerating the extent of this particular case, but honestly, it is worth considering what life was like before intensive meat (particularly poultry) farming was around. In the 1950s, in this country alone, hundreds of thousands of people died due to conditions that were due to a protein-deficient diet, seeing chicken is this nation's most popular meat, the advent of extensive chicken farming should probably be included in the top five reasons why the nation's life expectancy has nearly doubled over the past century! Honestly, is the welfare of a few birds, (of whom the debate still rages as to whether they even feel discomfort on the level us humans understand), really worth trading for this mammoth achievement?
Indeed, to digress, I believe the whole process of agriculturalism is travelling in the wrong direction within Western civilisation. For the past decade, there has been a kind of nostalgic mass hysteria striking the population, which has caused people to embrace the 'organic' food movement, or rather, the disindustrialised food movement. Its really convenient to live inside a beourgeois bubble, in which one views one's surroundings as being remarkable affluent, and as being able to afford luxury as a matter of course - but the world doesn't need more expensive, less productive agriculture! The global population is still growing, and, since last year, the majority of it lives within cities.
I'm an advocate of what is called Urban Agraculture. As opposed to Rural Agriculture, which has been the norm throughout all human civilisation, and, of course, suited perfectly, for as long as the human race was mostly rural... But now, that isn't the case - and to respond by ultra-ruralising Western agriculture seems fucking insane, (no doubt inspired by the hatred for one's common man fuelled by modern living, and the decision to rather embrace abstract imagined principles rather than human life). Today, there are still people in the world who are starving, but Western agricultural science is concentrating on REDUCING the efficiency of the agricultural process. If this doesn't piss you right the fuck off, then I will probably hate you. The fact that Dr Norman Borlaug isn't the most famous person in the world perhaps one of the greatest injustice's I've ever heard. Anyways, one of the best projects associated with the Urban Agriculture Movement is the Vertical Farm Project, a project that is by its own admission about as inorganic as you can get! The VFP plans to, once it gets its funding, build skyscrapers within the centre of the world's most built-up conurbations, and produce foodstuff with unflinching efficiency, and deliver it no more than a few dozen kilometres out from the production point. The food produced will, ideally, be strongly genetically modified, but its enclosed, closely controlled environment will reduce the need for almost all chemical additives. Truly, this is the future, rather than anything else proposed to reduce global agricultural efficiency and condemn the world to starvation after the ice caps melt and almost every outdoor agricultural facility in the world is royally fucked up.
All this boils down to a single philosophical conviction that I carry: Nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing, has as much worth as a single human life. The reason I carry this conviction seems simple to me, even if perhaps it may not to others... Human life, it seems, is the only value that is able to assert its own value, unlike the value attached to animals, nations, beautiful environments, political ideologies, etc. which always need to have someone external to it to embed it with what they view it is its worth. Often they will attempt to suggest that this worth is somehow innate, despite the fact that recognition of this innate worth is sporadic, if not rare, throughout the human community, whereas recognition of human worth is near-universal.
The distinction I wish to make here is between the Cartesian 'I Think Therefore I Am' principle, which enables people to realise that they are worthy of protection from arbitrary oppression; and the entirely imagined worth which human beings attach to almost everything else in their immediate environment. Human beings are imagination-engines, as well as their production of carbon dioxide and waste carbohydrate, they produce in equal measures imagined values - to give one tragic example, throughout history millions of people within the civilised world have starved to death rather than to admit to themselves that the economic system that has deprived them of food is entirely a product of the collective imagination of their society. As the Poor starved to death, the Rich dined in luxury behind their gates, rather than seize what they need to survive, the Poor content themselves with their impending deaths while respecting the imagined economy that sustained them for a while but which, ultimately, betrayed them.
Now, I'm not saying imagined values are bad. Imagined values are what keeps a society together - as I suggested earlier, without imagined values, the human race would resort to murdering each other for scraps of food. But, I think a line has to be drawn. Drawn along the point in which these imagined values actually start to cause more net harm than they cause net good.
Where, exactly, this point lies is a matter of debate, and, indeed, it should be debated, passionately and often, throughout the world. For instance, perhaps the imagined value that we place of property rights condemns certain people to poverty, surely then, it is harmful and should be ignored? But on the other hand, the Rich are wealth creators, they are able to invest their significant surplus into projects that will return more wealth - at the end of the day, Wealth is an imaginary thing, often people take it too seriously and assume that it is a Real thing, and that if someone has it, then someone else doesn't have it!, but this is not so, it is imaginary, and within the rules of the economic make-believe game, it is possible for more than one person to possess the same unit of Wealth, whilst still owning all of the Wealth, (it doesn't have to make sense, remember, its all imaginary!) - so perhaps the Rich are doing a service by creating more wealth, which will eventually trickle down.
However, there are times when people obviously lose the plot. Recently I was watching Channel 4, specifically, a program entitled 'Hugh's Chicken Run', in which celebrity longnameman, I mean chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall experimented with managing an extensive chicken farm. Hugh was often moved to tears as the chickens he cared for were brutally exploited for their sole useful commodity, tasteh tasteh meatz - alongside this experiment, he convinced a community from 'the rough side of Axminster' to run their own free range chicken coop, these people insisted from the start that they were poor (I'm not giving these 'poor' the capital-P treatment, because no-one in the First World is truly 'Poor'), and couldn't afford fancy chicken, yet he pulled on their heartstrings and after the end of their Chickenxperiment, they had been converted into the fancy-chicken camp.
Hugh lauded this as a victory... but is it? In reality what has happened is that a millionaire TV personality has tricked a community into doubling their chicken budget, and thus reducing the amount of money they could spend on more self-beneficial things. I can't help but think that what he has done is produce a net harm to these human beings, who, after-all, unlike their chickens, can declare their own worth, and don't have to have it imaginarily imposed on top of them.
What Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall has done here, is view his own imagined values as being more important than the innate value that human beings are able to assert for themselves. In my opinion, this is fundamentally wrong, and now better than the dictator who views the 'survival of the nation' as being more important than the well-being of the individual citizens.
Now, I'm not saying that 'ethical' chicken is somehow evil - I'm a believer in choice, so if someone decides that they want to indulge their imagination by helping Mr Chicken live a happier live before being culled, then fine. But by forcing people to buy free range - which is Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall's ultimate goal, as, ideally, he wants intensive farming banned - you have crossed the line of individual choice into social manipulation.
Some may say that I am exaggerating the extent of this particular case, but honestly, it is worth considering what life was like before intensive meat (particularly poultry) farming was around. In the 1950s, in this country alone, hundreds of thousands of people died due to conditions that were due to a protein-deficient diet, seeing chicken is this nation's most popular meat, the advent of extensive chicken farming should probably be included in the top five reasons why the nation's life expectancy has nearly doubled over the past century! Honestly, is the welfare of a few birds, (of whom the debate still rages as to whether they even feel discomfort on the level us humans understand), really worth trading for this mammoth achievement?
Indeed, to digress, I believe the whole process of agriculturalism is travelling in the wrong direction within Western civilisation. For the past decade, there has been a kind of nostalgic mass hysteria striking the population, which has caused people to embrace the 'organic' food movement, or rather, the disindustrialised food movement. Its really convenient to live inside a beourgeois bubble, in which one views one's surroundings as being remarkable affluent, and as being able to afford luxury as a matter of course - but the world doesn't need more expensive, less productive agriculture! The global population is still growing, and, since last year, the majority of it lives within cities.
I'm an advocate of what is called Urban Agraculture. As opposed to Rural Agriculture, which has been the norm throughout all human civilisation, and, of course, suited perfectly, for as long as the human race was mostly rural... But now, that isn't the case - and to respond by ultra-ruralising Western agriculture seems fucking insane, (no doubt inspired by the hatred for one's common man fuelled by modern living, and the decision to rather embrace abstract imagined principles rather than human life). Today, there are still people in the world who are starving, but Western agricultural science is concentrating on REDUCING the efficiency of the agricultural process. If this doesn't piss you right the fuck off, then I will probably hate you. The fact that Dr Norman Borlaug isn't the most famous person in the world perhaps one of the greatest injustice's I've ever heard. Anyways, one of the best projects associated with the Urban Agriculture Movement is the Vertical Farm Project, a project that is by its own admission about as inorganic as you can get! The VFP plans to, once it gets its funding, build skyscrapers within the centre of the world's most built-up conurbations, and produce foodstuff with unflinching efficiency, and deliver it no more than a few dozen kilometres out from the production point. The food produced will, ideally, be strongly genetically modified, but its enclosed, closely controlled environment will reduce the need for almost all chemical additives. Truly, this is the future, rather than anything else proposed to reduce global agricultural efficiency and condemn the world to starvation after the ice caps melt and almost every outdoor agricultural facility in the world is royally fucked up.
Monday 7 January 2008
I'm thinking of getting a tattoo...
Tattooing myself is something I've meant to do for a while, but I've never really had much of an idea of what I wouldn't actually mind having permenantly scared onto my flesh...
Until now, I thought a while ago, (like, a couple of weeks ago), that the Talking Wheelchair from the 'Sweet Cuppin' Cakes' cartoon-within-a-cartoon from Homestarrunner.com would be quite cool. And now, a couple of weeks later... I still think it would be quite cool, and less regretable than anything else I've yet considered.
I respect people with tattoos, or at least, tattoo-possession is one factor in the formula of whether or not I respect someone. I think its all well and good to claim to 'has a stylez', but its another thing entirely to subject yourself to hours of significant pain within an uncomfortable environment to make a tangible committment to the image of yourself you want to project. Like, a while ago, I heard something saying that the future of tattooing will be very different; that cloned skin grafts could be produced relatively cheaply, and that that graft could be tattooed before-hand and then simply laid onto your arm or wherever and just left to grow onto your body - and I thought, go on then, I'll wait until that becomes the norm and get myself as tattooed as I bloomin' 'ell want! But that would take away the self-sacrificial aspect of putting yourself through all the pain...
So yeah, thoughts? (I noticed the last two entries didn't get any comments, I don't write this jargle for my health, y'all know!)
Until now, I thought a while ago, (like, a couple of weeks ago), that the Talking Wheelchair from the 'Sweet Cuppin' Cakes' cartoon-within-a-cartoon from Homestarrunner.com would be quite cool. And now, a couple of weeks later... I still think it would be quite cool, and less regretable than anything else I've yet considered.
I respect people with tattoos, or at least, tattoo-possession is one factor in the formula of whether or not I respect someone. I think its all well and good to claim to 'has a stylez', but its another thing entirely to subject yourself to hours of significant pain within an uncomfortable environment to make a tangible committment to the image of yourself you want to project. Like, a while ago, I heard something saying that the future of tattooing will be very different; that cloned skin grafts could be produced relatively cheaply, and that that graft could be tattooed before-hand and then simply laid onto your arm or wherever and just left to grow onto your body - and I thought, go on then, I'll wait until that becomes the norm and get myself as tattooed as I bloomin' 'ell want! But that would take away the self-sacrificial aspect of putting yourself through all the pain...
So yeah, thoughts? (I noticed the last two entries didn't get any comments, I don't write this jargle for my health, y'all know!)
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