Category Archives: Opinions and Rants

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What The Liberal Democrats need to do now

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Tim Hall

So the Liberal Democrats, to nobody’s real surprise, did very badly in last week’s local government elections.

Part of it is down to the fact that government parties always do badly in mid-term council elections, and this is a new experience for the Liberal Democrats having not been in government before. It’s unfair on hard-working local councillors who lose seats through no fault of their own, but sadly that’s the way that it is as long as voters are more interested in “Sending a message to Westminster” than they are about electing a local council over local issues.

The Tories did badly as well. Nadine Dorries, recently described as the “Tories’ equivalent of Lembit Öpik”, is taking of leadership challenges, and demanding the return of traditional Tory values of anti-Europeanism and homophobia, oblivious to the fact that the Tories didn’t actually win the last general election, which is precisely why we have a coalition government.

Some sectarian Labour types are gleefully prophesying the end of the Liberal Democrats altogether “So that we can get back to proper two-party politics”. But The Liberal Democrats are not going to disappear any time soon, no matter what the tribalist wing of the Labour party would love to happen. It’s precisely because of their tribalist machine-driven politics that a party like The Liberal Democrats are necessary in the first place

But I do think this may well mark the turning point in the coalition.

The coalition hasn’t worked as well as many people had hoped. LibDem blogger Jonathan Calder, who enthusiastically supported the coalition in the early days rightly says

It was inevitable that the Coalition would run into trouble. One of the constituent parties had long been out of power, had leaders with no experience of government, and hordes of backbenchers and activists with bizarre views and little concept of party discipline.

I’m talking about the Conservatives.

To quote a former US president, “It’s the economy, stupid”. And the Very Big Stupid in question is Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, whose policies have failed in a way just about everybody but himself had predicted. If there is one thing Nadine Dorries is right about, it is that it’s time for him to go.

George Osborne is facing a double-whammy here. Not only is he hopelessly compromised by close association with the Murdoch clan in the still-unfolding scandal which may yet engulf the Prime Minister himself, but he’s proved himself spectacularly incompetent at his job. And the entire country is paying the price.

The way he allowed himself to be “intellectually persuaded” by ideological nonsense about Laffer Curves shows far out of his depth he is. Osborne doesn’t just not know the price of milk, his understanding of economics is reminiscent of the typical 17-year old libertarian troll on the internet. He comes over as a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action; he understands so little he doesn’t realise how little he understands.

At this point, the Liberal Democrats in Parliament have reached the point where they have nothing to lose from rocking the boat. The price of their remaining in government must be the removal of George Osborne as chancellor, and his replacement by someone who is both experienced and a pragmatist rather than an intellectually-challenged ideologue.

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1995 and all that

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Tim Hall

In the wake of the copyright industry’s attempts to play whack-a-mole with Pirate Bay, I keep hearing the line about “destroying a 300 year old market just so the internet can work like it did in 1995″ coming from the usual media industry lobbyists.

I find that a very chilling line.

What these same lobbyists won’t say is just how much of the internet they are willing to destroy in order just in order to protect a specific business model so it can be as highly profitable as it was in 1995. Somehow I think even those of us who would never indulge in wholesale copyright violation are not going to like the answer.

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Anders Breivik and the Anarcho-Fascists

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Tim Hall

The way the Norwegian authorities have given terrorist Anders Breivik a very public trial has generated a lot of controversy. I have read a lot of people arguing that it’s giving him a platform for his poisonous ideas. The counter-argument is that showing him for what he is will serve to discredit everything he stands for.

Breivik may or may not be insane, but it would be far too convenient for some people to dismiss his “Crazy Talk” as the ravings of an isolated madman who’s actions took place in a vacuum. But that doesn’t wash. Too much of what he says had been common currency in far-right circles for years. It’s not just from openly fascist or crypto-fascist fringe groups on the internet either, but, as I’ve previously mentioned, from semi-respectable columnists in large-circulation national newspapers too.

And there are a frighteningly large number of people who think like him. Just look at how they’ve overrun the comment sections of many online articles about the trial.

Like it or not, Anders Breivik’s terrorist atrocity was the 9/11 of the Freepi.

The rightwing press are predictably attempting to scapegoat video games to deflect attention from just how extensively Breivik cited their own columnists. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a comprehensive takedown of their attempt at a distracting moral panic. Meanwhile Breivik’s closer online confederates on both sides of the Atlantic are desperately flailing, citing his copying of Al-Qaeda’s methods in an entirely unconvincing attempt to prove this despicable act of terrorism has nothing to do with them.

This really ought to serve as a wake-up call on the threat posed by the far-right, who have been gaining strength in recent years, especially now we’re in a deep recession. They have an increasing transatlantic dimension, with the openly racist faction of the “Tea Party” forging closer and closer links with various European neo-Fascist groups. A few right-wingers predictably complain that the left are trying to politicise the tragedy. But when faced with a terrorist atrocity that was a clear and deliberate attack on European social democracy, what is anybody supposed to do?

Freepi – coined by Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Making Light to describe the post-9/11 wingnut right.

Anarcho-Fascist – A conflation of “Anarcho-Capitalist” and “Crypto-Fascist” I originally used to describe a particularly loopy blogger and troll a few years back. Today it seems an appropriate descriptor for anyone that runs an Islamophobic hate site with a name like “Atlas Shrugs”.

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When I hear the words “Laffer Curve” I reach for my revolver

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Tim Hall

Warning, this is a political post. If you don’t want to read about politics, click on one of the other subjects on the menu bar…

In the context of what may or may not be in George Osborne’s budget later this week, I’m hearing a lot of mentions of the infamous Laffer Curve.

The Laffer Curve is a somewhat questionable piece of economic thinking which states, in it’s commonly-used form, that if taxation is raised to a level higher than the rich would really like to pay, then overall revenue will fall because the rich then won’t work as hard. Such an idea has obvious appeal to the types that take Ayn Rand seriously – Indeed, I always associate the term with a particularly noxious right-libertarian troll on the Pyramid Online forums a decade or so ago.

Yes, I can appreciate the hypothesis that there is a point of diminishing returns if a taxation rate is ridiculously high. It’s why nobody today is suggesting a return to Denis Healey’s 98% taxes of the 1970s. But the Lafferites go further than that. They give every appearance of insisting on a completely arbitrary figure as the threshold of diminishing returns, and expect you to accept this in the complete absence of any empirical evidence to support it.

Not that the hard right are any bigger fans of evidence-based economics as they are of evidence-based science. You can see this in their climate change denial. And don’t even get me started on young-earth creationism. This is the sort of intellectual company the Laffer Curve keeps. So why should we take it seriously?

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Freedom of Speech?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Tim Hall

There seems to have been an awful lot of outbreaks of really hardcore misogyny in the tech/geek world of late. There have been too many incidents of women in the games scene in particular suffering enormous levels on online abuse by anonymous trolls purely for expressing an opinion not everyone agrees with. Some people have suggested that this sort of behaviour can be found in all walks of life, it does seem to be worse in certain subcultures. Maybe it because the frequently overlapping games and IT worlds tend to attract a disproportionate number of people with very poor social skills?

The latest firestorm concerns a deeply unpleasant individual by the name of Aris Bakhtanians, who justifies some deeply unpleasant and disturbingly creepy behaviour with the following words, here quoted by comic writer and blogger Chris Sims:

Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?

Bakhtanians: You can’t. You can’t because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community

I had never heard of this so-called “fighting games” community before, and if this Aris Bakhtanians is in any way representative of it, it’s not a community which deserves any respect in the wider world. His insincere non-apology doesn’t really change that.

Chris Sims doesn’t mince his words.

“If your community can’t introduce a baseline of respect for another human being without being destroyed, then your community should probably be burned to the ground and have salt spread on the ashes so that it’ll never come back.”

Bakhtanians had ranted about “This is not North Korea” when challenged. It’s exactly the same behaviour you hear from violent knuckle-dragging white nationalists, who claim that they and only they stand between “white culture” and oblivion. For situations where the arrogant, hate-filled jerk tries to play the victim card, China Miéville says it far better than I can.

Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments ‘for free speech’ & ‘against censorship’ or ‘banning’ are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very [expletive deleted] complicated. Cry Free Speech in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about & criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy?

Quite.

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Stop the Stop Internet Piracy Act

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Tim Hall

If you visit Wikipedia today, you will notice the site has “gone dark” in response to the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), two appalling lobbyist-drafted pieces of legislation which the big business part of the entertainment industry is trying to railroad past America’s technologically illiterate legislators. Although SOPA has run into trouble, it’s not completely dead yet, and must be prevented from shambling back in to life.

The big studios and labels love to quote figures stating how much money they’re losing because of copyright violation, and how many jobs are allegedly at stake. Far too often lawmakers and major media outlets will accept these figures at face value and not subject them to any kind of scrutiny. Just how much of their declining profits is to do with “piracy”, and how much is down to them losing market share because the internet has eroded their role as gatekeepers, and allows smaller self-publishing competing content creators to flourish?

As The Electronic Freedom Foundation says, if laws like this are allowed to pass, they will have a severe impact on any sites that rely or allow user-generated content, from Facebook or YouTube down to blogs that allow comments such as this one. Site owners will be forced to police all content, including any external links, with the threat of being shut down if they don’t enforce it zealously enough. The overhead of doing this could well undermine the viability of many high-traffic sites, which perhaps explains why some venture capitalists won’t be funding Internet start-ups if this passes. Remember Fotopic.net? That could be the fate of many of your favourite sites.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of copyright and piracy, this is a badly-drafted law which will do more harm than good.

Despite what professional trolls like Andrew Orlowski would have you believe, this isn’t just a few “geeks” and “freetards” whining about some impractical libertarian utopia. It’s nothing lass than handing over the keys of the entire Internet over to the big studios, major record labels, and big publishers, and giving them more or less unfettered power to shut down anything they don’t like, regardless of whether it infringes copyright or not. The lack of any checks and balances gives enormous scope for abuse, for example, using bogus copyright claims to threaten sites whose real crime is publishing bad reviews.

Before you accuse me of being a “freetard”, no, I don’t believe anyone has a right to consume music and film without any financial compensation – most working musicians I know are aware of how much I spend on your music a year. But this bill goes way, way beyond anything acceptable as a means of enforcing copyright, and could do untold damage to all kinds of legitimate businesses.

And any Americans reading this – Please fix your rotten, corrupt political system, which allows well-funded lobbyists to trample over the rights and freedoms of ordinary people, not just in America, but in the whole of the world.

Posted in Music, Opinions and Rants, Thoughts and Opinions | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Potemkin Suburb of the “53%”.

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Tim Hall

I’m really not sure what to make of these forelock-tugging serfs. Are they inhabitants of some Potemkin suburb? Do they have such a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome they’re incapable of thinking out of the box the wealthy elites have put them in?

Among the smug-looking posts, there’s one woman who lists a load of crappy low-paid freelance jobs, and insists she feels empowered, not exploited. And her entire income depends on the amount the super-rich have left after taxes.  Another claims her poverty is entirely the fault of her own bad decisions, and is all in favour of “free markets not handouts”. Except for handouts to the rich, of course. They don’t count.

I realise of course that the entire site is a probably some sort of Astroturf job, hastily put together by a few frightened right-wingers as a reaction against the increasingly large scale demonstrations in Washington demanding that the rich pay slightly higher taxes and the financial sector needs to be regulated a bit. It actually reads so  clumsily as propaganda that it’s entirely possible that it’s actually a left-wing parody of tea-party types.

Assuming it is for real, it evidently hasn’t occurred to these people that a much larger middle class who earn most of their living providing goods and services to each other will deliver far greater prosperity to a far greater number of people than their limited vision of a small middle class who survive by supplying goods and services to the elites. Certainly I know of few entrepreneurial types whose businesses depend on ordinary working people having the money to spend on the goods and services their businesses provide.

One day, the more extreme versions of supply-side economics these people have been conned into buying will be as discredited as Communism. Sure, it works for the wealthy elites, just as Communism worked for the apparatchiks. Perhaps one day, expressing an admiration for Ayn Rand will kill a career in business or politics as surely as admiring Hitler or Stalin does today.

 

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Alan McGee admits to Trolling

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

A couple of years ago, I blogged about Alan McGee’s notorious column in The Guardian Music Blog, and how it had turned into self-parody.

In this column he claimed that Oasis were the greatest band of all time, Freddy Mercury was really a punk, ELO were better than The Beatles, Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans was an absolute classic, and most notoriously of all, kept bigging up a spectacularly talentless bunch of indie no-marks called The Grants.

The comments sections soon turned into free-fire zones. Once people started recognising the extent that many of his columns were nonsense, he employed a legion of supporters in the comments to back him up. All of whom appeared to sock puppets, alleged to be Paul Brownell, an employee of McGee’s.

Now he admits the entire column was trolling

I’ve done blogs before in the past. One I used to write was for The Guardian and for four years most of the articles, and this is for the record as nobody ever prints this bit in interviews, were complete piss takes of The Guardian readers and journalists. Well, all bar Tim Jonze and Alex Needham.

I claimed to like Phil Collins, Jon Bon Jovi and Foreigner. I actually took it so far they once put me on the phone to interview Jon Bon Jovi and I had to pretend I liked his music.

I actually feel sorry for The Grants. They were just a harmless indie band, never really destined to get beyond the toilet circuit, fronted by a lead singer whose mouth was far bigger than his talent. But the way he hyped them up as the next big thing exposed them to ridicule on a large stage, which I’m not sure they really deserved.

Posted in Music, Opinions and Rants, Thoughts and Opinions | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Trouble at Reading Station

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Tim Hall

I never had this trouble at Bristol a few weeks ago

With today’s glorious summer weather I decided it was an ideal time to document the old GWR station at Reading before the whole lot gets bulldozed to make way for the shiny new station.

When I got there I was told to find the duty manager to seek permission. She then told me I could only photograph the station infrastructure, and could not photograph trains. Given that I’ve taken thousands of photographs at UK and overseas stations over 25 years, and never before have train companies ever tried to stop me taking photographs, I really don’t understand what First Great Western are playing at.

I know some large stations tried to prevent photographers a few years back through a combination post-9/11 paranoia and corporate backside-covering, but changed their tune after the resulting PR backlash.

Has anyone else had problems at Reading or any other FGW stations? Is this a new policy? What exactly is going on? It’s certainly at odds with the official photography policy of Network Rail, who own the station, or the guidelines given by The British Transport Police.

I sent this complaint to First Great Western customer services

I arrived at Reading this morning with the intention of taking photographs of the Reading station prior to redevelopment. On arrival I was advised by the barrier staff to speak to the duty manager.

The duty manager then told me that while I would be permitted to photograph the physical station infrastucture, I would not be permitted to photograph any trains.

I was extremely surprised and very disappointed on being told this, and decided to leave immediately without taking any photographs at all.

Is this a specific local rule affecting Reading, or is there a blanket ban on railway photography across all FGW stations? This is very much at odds with the widely-publicised photography policy of other TOCs such as Virgin Trains. I have certainly taken many photographs of trains at FGW stations (most recently at Bristol Temple Meads a few weeks ago) without being challenged or questioned by platform staff.

I must stress that all FGW staff I encountered were unfailingly polite.

So now, rather than spending this glorious weather outside with my camera, I’m reduced to sitting at home complaining on the Internet. I wonder what sort of response that complaint will get. Given the stories of low staff morale I’m hearing from inside FGW, they seem to be suffering from serious management problems, for which I strongly suspect my troubles are another symptom.

Update

I have now received a rather bland and somewhat patronising reply.

Dear Mr Hall

Thank you for your email of 29 September 2011. I am sorry you could not take the photographs you wished to at Reading station on the same day.

We expect everyone representing our company to be as helpful as possible at all times. We do welcome rail enthusiasts at our stations who want to take photographs for private purposes. There are various guidelines designed to ensure you have a safe and enjoyable experience in the pursuit of your interest. A key priority for us is to ensure the safety of our passengers and staff. However it is the discretion of the Station Manager to set the photography limits at a particular station.

Thank you again for bringing your experience to my attention. I do hope that future journeys with us will be trouble-free.

Yours sincerely
Siddhi Minawala
Customer Services Advisor

I do not really consider this a satisfactory answer, and I’m assuming that Reading station is off-limits for railway photography for the foreseeable future. And I very much doubt that we’ll ever be given a satisfactory reason.

Update No 2

Now get a second reply, which strongly implies that someone in First Great Western has been reading either this blog or the thread I started on RMWeb with well over a hundred replies.

Dear Mr Hall

I am writing to apologise for the problems you had recently at Reading station, when you were not permitted to take photographs of trains. I understand you were unhappy with the last response we sent you on this matter and I am sorry.

We do have to work within certain guidelines when allowing customers to photograph our trains, however this is something we will permit where we can. There is no reason why you were not allowed to do this, and I am really sorry that you were misadvised at the station about only being able to photograph buildings. I have passed this feedback on to my colleagues at Reading, who I am sure will take the necessary action to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

If you wish to take pictures of the trains at Reading, you do need to approach the Station Manager first, who will go over the guidelines with you. We don’t want to stop you from pursuing your hobby and I am sorry that our response has not been particularly helpful.

I hope this now clears things up and that you will accept my apologies for the way this matter has been handled.

Please do feel free to get in touch if I can help with anything else in the future.

Yours sincerely

Jo Coverley
Customer Relations Senior Officer

Posted in Opinions and Rants, Photos, Railways | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

The Al-Queda of the West?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Tim Hall

Apologies to music fans for this political ranting. There will be a review of High Voltage along shortly, a superb weekend, but for me the whole thing took place under the shadow of the terrible events in Norway on Friday.

While on the surface this seems a random and inexplicable event, it’s something many have warned was coming for a long time. The only surprise for me is that it happened in Europe rather than in North America.

Some commentators are still insisting that Anders Brevik was some kind of lone nut who wasn’t part of any wider political movement. They seem to ignore the fact that his rambling “manifesto” isn’t his own words, but is almost entirely cut-and-pasted from a slew of right-wing writers ranging from a number of notorious far-right bloggers to The Daily Mail’s racist columnist Melanie Phillips. This post on the once-infamous Little Green Footballs gives a lot background, and makes it clear why so many people thought Anders Brevik and the anonymous white supremacist blogger “Fjordman” were the same person. Charles Johnson of LGF used to run with that crowd until he realised where it was all heading – so he knows what he’s talking about here.

Since 9/11 we’ve seen a cross-Atlantic alliance of right-libertarians, extreme Christian fundamentalists and white nationalists with an ugly kind of Islamophobia as the ideological glue holding them together. They have become what looks an awful lot like an exact mirror image of Al-Queda, the same abhorrence of the mixing of cultures, and the same violent intolerance to anybody who isn’t exactly like them. And now they have perpetrated something of a 9/11 of their own.

Brevik may be “mad” or “evil”, but his madness has been marinaded for years in a toxic stew of far-right ideas, and at least some of the people whose writings have inspired him now have blood on their hands. Freedom of speech is an essential principle, a cornerstone of a functioning democracy. But those who use their freedom of speech to spread hatred and incite violence need to take responsibility for the consequences when others take their words at face value.

People talk about tolerance, but it has to a two-way street. The vast majority of sects and subcultures are benign and harmless, and deserve tolerance. A small minority are not, and any right to tolerance should instantly stop the moment the bodies start to pile up.

Edit: I had thought of titling this post “The 9/11 of the right”, but thought it too provocative. But I see Charlie Stross has done precisely that:

I’m just horrified by the scale of the event.

This is in Norway, a country of 5 million souls.

92 dead in Norway is … well, multiply by 60 for the equivalent proportion of Americans and you get over 5000 dead. Playing the numbers game with such a horror is distasteful, but it suggests to me that the political impact on Scandinavian and European anti-terror politics in general is going to be non-trivial to say the least.

This is the neo-Nazi 9/11. Breivik had links to the English Defense League and other racist right-wing groups. The folks who police and intel groups all over the west have been treating with kid gloves, compared to the islamicists, due to the explosive and barely-acknowledged fact that there’s wide-scale support for anti-immigrant views all over the west, especially anti-muslim views, and semi-respectable politicians playing these prejudices for personal careerist gain.

It’s a poisoned chalice. And I have no idea what this bodes for the future, other than: nothing good.

And I really can’t disagree with any of that.

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