Friday 25 March 2016

Baby's First Constituency Labour Party Meeting


I joined the Labour Party back in September, as a lot of people did, when Jeremy Corbyn was elected as its leader.  I wouldn't say I'm particularly socialist in my politics - I lean more towards anarchism, if I'm honest, but I stubbornly resist all ideology to the best of my ability.  There is no political ideology that could ever create a perfect society the size of a modern nation state.  There are too many variables.  Individuals on their own are complex, contradictory entities.  I don't even know what I want, or what is best for me.  Neither do you, I imagine.  Of sexual relationships that even make it as far as marriage, 50% of those end in failure, and those only involve two people.  The children that couples produce as often as not end up dysfunctional, neurotic and ill-equipped for adulthood.  There's no test you have to pass before they let you have children.  Anyone old enough can do it, no questions asked.  It shows.  So the idea that any one person, or political group, could presume to know how to improve the collective lives of millions, is preposterous.  There are no gurus in politics, no saviours.  Just some people who are less corrupted by its insane operations than others.

Anyway, I joined the Labour Party because it was a relief and, I must admit after that extraordinarily cynical paragraph, inspiring, to see it so suddenly and unexpectedly lurch to the left.  (As the leadership election wore on, I started to wish I'd put a hundred quid on Corbyn when the odds had been 100-1 against his victory.  That would have come in handy).  I like Jeremy very much.  I like how he has no time for tabloid media nonsense and did his best not to play their game at all.  I liked how he answers questions by actually answering them.  I like how he says words that actually mean something.  This, really, is a pretty basic requirement for a politician - but we live on a political landscape so warped by idiotic media sensationalism that anyone who acts in public like a human being with a mind of their own cannot help but look like a crackpot.  So anyone who can hold their own, or even retain a modicum of sanity, in that sort of environment automatically has my respect.  I think it's what makes it all the more important to get directly involved in politics yourself, wherever it finds you where you happen to be.  Forget about the media.  Refuse to be mediated.  I happen to be in the centre of Manchester.

I was in total agreement with Corbyn when he said that one reason Labour did not do well at the last election was because they hadn't presented a coherent alternative to the Tories, and I still am.  Instead, all they offered was "austerity lite", nothing really worthy of the party whose purpose had been to be the opposition for the last five years.  The whole point of the opposition is to hold the government to account - to oppose them.  From 2010 to 2015, Labour didn't do a lot more than say to the Conservative government, "hey, now hang on second...  Please don't cut that essential public service.  Oh, alright then.  But please don't cut it quite so much.  Please... OK fine, but don't blame me when disabled people start committing suicide...  Oh alright, alright, you can blame me, but don't do it on the telly.  At least not every day..."  This was not good enough, and apart from the Green Party, nobody else was offering an attractive alternative to the ideologically blinded Conservative regime.  (Sorry, the Lib Dem-Conservative coalition government - and there my analysis of the Liberal Democrat's success ends.  Their approach was more or less the same as Labour's, far as I can tell, but without have the excuse of not actually being in the government to fall back on).  So given that I live in central Manchester, a Labour stronghold if ever there was one, I was confident the Conservatives had no chance of winning a seat whether or not I voted, and so I didn't.  I don't like protest voting: I find it tacky.  I like to be able to vote for something, and in 2015 there was nothing to vote for.  Lucy Powell was duly re-elected to her seat with a healthy 47.7% majority.  Well done me.

Last night I attended my first Constituency Labour Party (CLP) meeting since joining the party six months ago, because I thought it was finally time to do something more than liking facebook posts about Jeremy Corbyn.  Also it costs £23 a year to be a member, so I thought maybe there'd be some free butties.  There weren't - but Lucy MP was there, as were about 40 other members.  Having nothing to compare it to, I'll take the word of the chairwoman who described this as a good turnout.  I managed to get a seat around a the main table with my own microphone, which made me feel more important than I actually was.  I started to wonder whether I'd be called on to make a statement of financial disclosure to the House, or to report back to the committee on my recent fact-finding trip to Uzbekistan.  This, fortunately, did not happen.

The few people I spoke to were pleasant and fairly welcoming, and there was a convivial atmosphere, despite the wood panelling that surrounded us, but the meeting began with the announcement that as so many people had turned up, there wouldn't be time for us all to introduce ourselves.  Or so the smiley chairwoman explained, while introducing herself.  I'd spent the preceding few minutes chatting to the bloke sitting next to me.  I confirmed this was my first CLP meeting and that yes, like him, I'd joined because of Jeremy Corbyn.  He asked if I'd been to any Momentum meetings yet; I said that I hadn't and he took my email address, saying he'd let me know about future ones.  A good start.  It was his first meeting too, but he took copious notes in a scruffy notebook (which came out his pocket attached to several squashed and empty crisp packets) while I sat there with my arms folded.  A wave of cynicism washed over me, as waves of various negative emotions often do.  I tried to look left-wing.

Most of the meeting involved a discussion of education policy and this week's announcement by the government that they are going to turn all schools into academies.  It was agreed unanimously that this was a bad policy and would be a disaster for children and their teachers for lots of reasons.  Apparently there are only two schools left in Manchester that come under Local Authority control; and once the government have their way, there will be none.  The unspoken assumption of the room was that local government control of schools is good, and that market control is bad.  Intuitively, I agree, but had no other evidence on which to base an opinion.  It occurred to me how little I know about how education works, and also how little I care.  Some people who spoke made reference either to teachers they knew personally - more referred to their own children and what sounded like very legitimate worries about their futures under Conservative educational policies.  I was not surprised to learn that, just as in health and social care (the area I do know something about) there have been enormous cuts to funding, and that services have suffered.  Numbers of teaching assistants (an initiative related to the previous Labour government's Surestart programme, which was periodically praised throughout the meeting) are plummeting.  Thousands of teachers are leaving the profession altogether, or looking for work abroad.  Children are being tested far too much under a needlessly complicated and bureaucratic system of examination that nobody understands.  Teachers have no time to use their own initiative or to allow children to explore ideas outside of a prescribed curriculum.  Some schools can not even afford to teach science any more, let alone more peripheral or vocational subjects.  Conservative governments fuck things up.  This much is obvious.

I noticed a number of people at the meeting refer to one another as 'comrade'.  This seemed to make Lucy MP slightly uncomfortable, but she remained diplomatic.  (She is evidently an intelligent and decent person, compassionate and well-informed.  As Shadow Education Secretary, she clearly knows her stuff.  Earlier in this parliament, she voted in favour of bombing Syria, something that had given her a black mark against my her name in my mind.  That sort of thing means less when you're in the same room as the person in question and can see them in three dimensions.  My cynicism subsided somewhat).  Without (m)any words being said, a certain tension could be felt between the 'old' Labour presences, who were gathered closer to where I was sitting, along with the evidently 'new' members, the Corbyn enthusiasts, some of whom I also heard use the word 'comrade' - and the apparently more established members, who it was difficult to picture using words like 'comrade' - and who, in fact, didn't.  There was no animosity, and no disagreement as such, but the tension was there.  It was reassuring to hear Lucy MP say that things had "calmed down" a lot among Labour MPs, most of whom are now much more concerned with "taking the fight" to the government than in ousting "Jeremy" as leader.  In reference to their division on the subject of Europe (something else I know little about) Lucy asserted that "the only party who are divided in Parliament at the moment are the Tories".  (This could easily have been a soundbite she had up her sleeve for the next pointless round of 30-second interviews  she'll be thrown into, but as it came out of her mouth, among friends, it sounded like a simple statement of fact.  This made me smile).  When it came to nominating members to the NEC, I had to ask what this was - apparently it's the people who get to set policy at the Party Conference, but the meaning of the acronym was unknown - so when I got home, I looked it up) my friend to my left with the crisp packets enthusiastically nominated 'Comrade Ken Livingstone' through his microphone.  Comrade Ken received nine votes overall.  Confusingly, the comedian and marathon runner Eddie Izzard won this particular election, with 27 votes.  It wasn't made clear exactly what this means, but I'm happy with the idea of Eddie Izzard making government policy in five years from now.

In summation, an interesting experience.  I kept my mouth shut, as I had only come to learn.  There was an esoteric atmosphere I didn't find entirely comfortable, and my thoughts turned frequently towards the problems with the very idea of party politics.  Somebody asked a question about Europe and what to say to people when they go out campaigning and knocking on doors.  Lucy MP asserted unequivocally that Labour Party policy was for an "in" vote in the referendum this summer.  Not everyone seemed to like this, but that nipped debate in the bud.  I left the meeting ambivalent.  There is an unshakable faith in the need for a Labour government in 2020, which obviously is exactly what you'd expect at a Labour Party meeting - but I couldn't help but feel that despite the shake-up of Corbyn's election this isn't a party ready to think 'outside the box' when it comes to politics.  I'll be staying a member of the Labour Party for now, but won't be giving up my membership of the UK Transhumanist Party any time soon.  Nobody said anything about universal basic income, or the mass unemployment that automation is apparently going to bring.  Climate change wasn't mentioned either.  I suppose this was only one meeting, but this being the Labour Party, everything was still all about 'jobs' and 'work'.  I'm thinking longer term than that.  Bigger picture.  Wider skies.

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Wednesday 23 March 2016

Scraps #2



Yesterday was a good day.  I spent four hours in the library, sold four books on amazon and ate three good meals.  The ingredients for my meals cost me a total of £2.55 (bulked up with a bit of rice).  Scallywag around the supermarket aisles at the right time of day and it's easy to stock up on vegetables and bread and other staples for less than half the price it'd cost you in the peak daytime shopping hours.  Best time where I live is between about 7 and 9pm, when the stuff they have to sell before midnight gets knocked down even more than it already had been.  It's sometimes worth a shot first thing in the morning too, around 6 - 7am.

Income from selling the books was £19.28 - minus postage costs of £9.02 gives £10.26.  Take off the cost of eating and last night I went to bed with another £7.71 in the bank.  This is nice, but not adequate, given that the current cost of living is still about £25 a day.  My last payslip will come through on Friday, two days from now.  It's time to step things up.



Why can't I live like this all the time?  It's the question I keep coming back to.  I want nothing from the world but simply to be in it.  Money and power and influence and sex don't interest me enough.  It's been 10 days now since I finished working and I already feel 10 years younger.  (Well, that isn't quite true, but it sounded good.  I'm trying to be honest on this blog, rather than pretentious, but by nature I'm quite a pretentious person so I won't always succeed).  The circadian rhythms are stabilising.  I sleep when it's dark.  When it gets light, I wake up.  I have breakfast and some coffee and read for an hour or so.  Then I go to the library and write things.  Time is key.  Now that I have time, my book about veganism and transhumanism (working title - "The Vegan Imperative: Animals, Humans and the Future of Life" - see, pretentious, told you) is taking shape faster than I expected.  At this rate I'll have a first draft done by the end of April.

It's like being a student again.  My brain is heating up.  This has its side effects - when I find myself thinking too intensely for too long, I start to obsess again.  Obsess in the clinical sense.  About horrible, horrible things.  Some people are just supposed to suffer, I suppose.  All things being equal, it's worth it.  I love writing.  I love thinking.  Work dulls me, in every sense.  Prozac has done that too, but this is the price you pay.  The will is strong.  The body is stupid.  The brain is a maze.  And amazing.

The potatoes are coming along nicely.  I have a picture of them, but for some reason when you using Manchester Libary's wifi, they won't upload.  So you'll have to wait.  Inexplicably, my internet access disappeared on Monday evening.  There's not even a dial tone.  TalkTalk tell me they're working on it.  I am being patient.  This is fine, as it's another reason to spend time in the library.

Most of my camping equipment should arrive by the end of this week.  Hoping to set off sometime middle of next.


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Monday 21 March 2016

Scraps of a Manifesto



Think about this: For as long as you can remember, there's been a future.  Tomorrow never comes though - until the next day, when it does, and is replaced by itself.  So tomorrow comes all the time: the future never comes.  And it's the future that you really want.  The future is what's worth waiting for. The future isn't always a date known in advance: it's more of a promise.  Something that will definitely happen.  And when it does happen, that will be it.  You will have arrived.  Congratulations and welcome: now your life begins.  You were alive already, but that wasn't "real life" (TM).  This is.  Life begins at 40.  Or is it 50 now?  Is 60 the new 30?  Oh shit, you're dead.

The future is some kind of goal, though not usually a goal you set for yourself.  When you're a child, the goal is "growing up" and becoming an adult.  I never really wanted to be an adult.  Adults drive cars, have mortgages, take out insurance, choose wallpaper, have children, hairstyles, pensions and conservatories.  I never wanted any of these things, and I still haven't had most of them: never driven a car or chosen wallpaper, I rent rather than “own” - whatever that means - insurance is essentially just gambling (and I own nothing so valuable that I couldn't replace it if I had to anyway) and I don’t have any children. This isn’t to say I never will want any of these things; only that they've never been as attractive to me as they seem to be to others.  I'm sure there's nothing unique in feeling like this, but it's a lonely feeling nonetheless.

And loneliness is fine, really.  It isn't something that bothers me.  I'm much more bothered by this thought: "In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again”.  So said William James - back in 1890, anyway, but it's become received wisdom since.  Studies suggest the received wisdom is generally correct.  At the popular level, we're told there are only 16 basic personality types, too.  That's it.  7 billion people; 16 personalities.  (I'm an INTP, in case you were wondering).  It doesn't seem like there's much room for maneuver.  No wonder there's so much money to be made convincing us to "express your individuality" through buying stuff.  Because you're worth it.

Quote-worthy little upstart that he probably was, to Descartes is attributed the line, "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things".  I haven't checked he actually said that (I've been drinking) but I'm sure he once said this:

To-day, then, since I have opportunely freed my mind from all cares (and am happily disturbed by no passions) and since I am in the secure possession of leisure in a peaceable retirement, I will at length apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions. 
Superimpose that over a picture of a fucking waterfall, internet.  It comes from the opening remarks of Descartes' most famous work, his Meditations, from which we also inherit "I think, therefore I am", his most famous (and quotably quotable) quote of all, which of course, like "Beam me up Scotty", "Elementary, my dear Watson" or "Alas poor Yorrick, I knew him well", Captain Kirk, Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet and Monsieur Descartes never exactly said, but never mind about that now.  As I said, I've been drinking.  Point was, according to Descartes - or according to the idea of Descartes - until you can doubt everything, you cannot even begin to know anything.  Obvious to us now, 400 years later, but it's the foundation of the entire scientific method, and will forever live in history for that reason, as one of the most profound and important thoughts any human being has ever had.  Even if he never actually had it.  The idea is there, and that matters more than any person.

So what of persons?  Well for me, I am horrified by the thought of anything about me ever becoming "fixed", of growing up.  It's always been a comforting thought to me that I might be completely wrong about absolutely everything.  Obviously I don't think I'm wrong about anything - nobody does - I just like the thought that I might be.  I appreciate not everyone wants this.  They want the stability - the house and the kids and the car and the job and the stuff.  That's what we're supposed to want but I want the opposite.  The "ludic way of life".

I loved being a child.  All other things being equal, children generally do.  Depression in children is pathological, basically by definition; and even though it's now taken more seriously as a problem than at any time in the past, so common are its symptoms in adults that it's understood as much as a kind of occupational hazard than it is an illness.  Remember that feeling you had as a child, of time stretching on forever?  The summer afternoons that never ended?  Of grown ups being so alien - so tall, so clever, so powerful, so...busy - that the idea of becoming one yourself, one day, was as distant and impossible as September?  Of life being about fun?  I don't want to idealise it - I really don't, I'm just trying to be honest - but when was the last time you really felt like that?  How old we were you?

What went wrong?



The value we place on childhood in our culture is essentially economic, as opposed to what we might call intrinsic or spiritual.  Idealism doesn't have to be naive: I understand that both these ingredients are basic.  I just wonder to what extent we might be getting the proportions wrong.  "Growing up" is hard to quantify, but it's not so vague as to allow for any definition at all.  A "grown up" is not just an adult person, but a certain type of adult person, whose actual age is irrelevant.  Grown ups don't call themselves "grown ups", except when talking about other grown ups to people who haven't grown up yet.  Adults are what children turn into when they grow up, and work out how to make children of their own, who you can teach how to turn themselves into adults, and repeat.

Now that you're an adult, the next goal is getting a job.  Getting a job is very important, perhaps the most important thing you'll ever do.  Just like becoming an adult, you didn't choose the goal as such, but you do get to choose what kind of job you want.  This is nice, because there are a lot of different jobs, just like there are a lot of different adults.  Well, sixteen anyway.  And there are at least sixteen jobs, so choosing one shouldn't be a problem.

What did you want to be when you grew up?  I remember wanting to be an astronaut but I was quite a lazy, chubby kid with asthma and I liked eating crisps.  You don't get to be an astronaut if you like eating crisps. So I am not, and never have been, an astronaut.  It was my dream for a while (not for long in the end, apparently you can't be an astronaut if you've got asthma, either, and there are no crisps in space anyway).  It would have been a good job, but it wasn't to be.  So cutting out a couple of decades, I eventually settled for another job, in a field of work that will probably always exist (health and social care) with a company too busy or  too incompetent or too desperate to realise I was basically just winging it the whole time and didn't really have a clue what I was doing.  That lasted for ten years.  I started to wonder if anyone ever really has a clue what they're doing.  When you're a child, that's really what separates you from the grown ups - grown ups know what they're doing.  And then suddenly, you're the grown up, and you don't know what you're doing.  You'd like to believe you're special (that's what your teenage years were for) except of course you aren't, so you just keep your head down and get on with your work and hope that everybody else is too caught up in hiding that they don't know what they're doing either that they won't notice that you don't know what you're doing and oh god nobody knows what they're doing, and then you retire.  And then you expire.

You don't choose to die, just like you didn't choose to be born, but it happens anyway.  In a manner of speaking, and notwithstanding the chance of accident or misfortune, you get to choose how and when you die - if by "choose" you understand the cumulative effect of the various choices you make and their effect on your health, which even if optimal, are eventually nullified by the aging process itself.  In between being born and becoming dead, you do get some choices.  Do you build a career or start a family?  You can of course choose both.  When you have a career and children, the goal is helping them to grow up, to build careers and families of their own. To do this, you accumulate money (ideally, if your career is a successful one, at a faster and faster rate, in return for less and less of what can fairly be described as “work”).  When you’re too old and weak to accumulate any more money directly, you use the money you have left for yourself, to spend on the things you need to stay alive, through your own efforts, and should the need arise, to spend on the services provided by other, younger people helping you to stay alive. You start to wonder if maybe the whole thing is a scam.  "There must be more to life than this..."  But you don't think about it.  Or put another way, you never stop thinking about it.

So your life is divided into three stages: preparing to work, working, and suffering the consequences of work.  (We might call this the cultural imperative, to distinguish it from the biological imperative, which follows an analogous three-stage pattern - be a child, become an adult who makes more children, and live long enough to ensure that they live long enough to have children of their own.  The law of threes: the responsibility lasts three generations.  Stick around any longer than that, and you become either a curiosity or a nuisance).  Not all of work's effects on you are negative of course - and if you're lucky, perhaps your work has some positive, permanent effect on others - but at some point you have to stop doing it, either because you're too worn out to do it any more, or because a younger, more malleable version of you has arrived to replace you.  So you you retire, your economic and biological purpose served.

And then, as discussed, you die. To your friends and offspring, you might become another angel in heaven, or another star in the sky. They might say you live on in their memories, but they know this is only a metaphor.  Humans don't literally live in other humans' memories: they literally live in human bodies.  When your body dies, your heart stops beating and brain activity ceases. Your lose consciousness.  Your body cools and starts to decompose. After a few other bureaucratic formalities and some kind of ceremony, those you leave behind set what's left of you on fire, and you become ashes; or they bury you in the ground, and you become mush: and that, my friends, is that.  Maybe you survive all of this somehow, in some other form, somewhere else, but it's hard to tell.  Maybe you don't.  You do, however, and most assuredly, become dust (or mush).  In dust (or mush) we trust.

It's very, very easy to ignore this.  Perhaps all the pomposity of adulthood - driving licences, career development plans, cosmetic dentistry, taking your blood pressure medication, choosing wallpaper again and carpets again and a phone upgrade again and a foreign holiday again - all of it - is about doing very little else.  An attempt to impose permanence on the impermanent.  Building an edifice so ornate it obscures how plain the truth really is.


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Sunday 20 March 2016

Sole Mates


Take a look at my new boots:




I think you'll agree that these boots were made for walking.  They arrived yesterday.  In this picture they're under the table with my feet, legs and trousers in the reading room in Manchester Central Library, which is circular and warm and has free wifi.

I bought them on ebay (which assures me the boots are vegan, though they don't smell like it) for £9.95 (free postage).  What's good about that is that I raised £9.95 from using Slidejoy, an android app that gives you a bit of money for unlocking your phone.  Considering that's something you do 85 times a day anyway, on average, why not pick up some pennies at the same time?  Naturally, you have to sell your soul a bit - the money comes from advertising, so every time you unlock your phone, you have to swipe though an advert - but never mind about that.  Or you could just sell your phone, but never mind about that just now.  I'm locked into my contract for the next 12 months and still haven't found a way out.  So might as well make some money back.  Slidejoy pay through paypal on the first of each month, and I've managed to accumulate about $5 a month from this.  Enough to pay for a pair of boots, an essential ingredient of my upcoming camping trip.






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Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Thursday 17 March 2016

Why don't we live in Utopia? (and other stupid questions)


Why isn't life wonderful?  Some lives are wonderful but chances are, yours isn't.  Mine isn't.  Granted, it's not the life of a Syrian refugee (and there are 9 million of those) or an Indian or West African slave (30 million) or Chinese peasant (about 482 million).  It easily could have been any of those lives.  Pick a human being at random, and there's about a 50-50 chance s/he lives in poverty (defined as living on less than US$2.50 a day) and about a 1 in 7 chance s/he lives in extreme poverty (less than US$1.25 a day).  The skyrocketing number of humans competing to consume the resources of a planet no larger than it was back when there were only a few million of us, are demanding a even more intangible number of other individual animals be to sacrificed so that we can eat their bodies, in the hope of thereby strengthening and extending the lifespans of our own.  These animals spend their entire lives in conditions unimaginable even to most of the humans living in extreme poverty, only to be murdered at an age far sooner than they would have otherwise have died.  Without getting too metaphysical here, I suppose I could just easily have been one of those animals.  So yeah, my life isn't so bad.  Statistically speaking, the chances of living a life at anything close to the level of luxury I've enjoyed so far are astronomically tiny.  So chin up, you grumpy bastard.

Now there's a few directions I might go with this information.  One is no direction at all, which is essentially what I've done so far.  I've been aware of facts like these just listed for most of my life but my actual, practical response to the information has amounted to little more than a shrug.  The state of the world is unsatisfactory but I, a part of the world, haven't done anything about it.  This is unsatisfactory too.

Another direction is to point out that without the kind of agriculture and technology we've developed in the past few hundred years, most of us wouldn't even exist at all, and those of us who did would still be living the kind of miserable lives the agricultural and industrial revolutions worked so hard to transcend.  Life is terrible for many of us now, but it could have been even worse for all of us.  Progress is slow, and Utopia is still only a dream.  We just need more time to make the dream real.

A third direction is to follow the mindset the kind of response that paragraphs like my opening one here are usually designed to evoke.  The human race hasn't been so much a victim of its own success as the engineer of its own destruction.  Nothing good can come from continued population growth, environmental exploitation, or accelerating technology.  Back to the trees.  Some argue that global environmental catastrophe is now inevitable anyway - at the very least, it's hit or miss whether our species survives this century - so even the hippy or feminist or luddite or neo-shamanic dream of low-impact communal living in harmony with nature and polyamorous love with each other - or whatever - still only a few generations old (which as ideas go, is not very old at all) is already dead.  So out of the trees, and back to the oceans.  Or out of the oceans, and back into stardust.  Back into nothing.

This is Dan Bilzerian, American venture capitalist, "king of Instagram" and general enthusiast of all the traditional symbols of tacky hyper-masculinity: in particular, guns, cars and nearly-naked, subservient women.

According to celebritynetworth.com, he has amassed his fortune of around $150 million mostly from winning poker tournaments.  This is not a closely-guarded secret: Dan regularly shares pictures of his money with his 16 million instagram followers, along with pictures of his guns, of his private jet, of himself with his private jet, himself with lots of women, himself with lots of women and his guns, himself with lots and lots of women, himself with lots and lots of women on his private jet, himself with lots and lots and lots of women, himself with a frankly impractical number of women, and his cat.  There is also at least one picture of his cat with a gun, possibly on his private jet, albeit sans lots and lots of women.  Who are presumably off camera with Dan.  Playing with his, um, gun.  You can see where this is going.

You probably know what I'm going to ask now, too.  "But is Dan Bilzerian happy?"  Well...yes.  Of course he bloody is.  Or he certainly looks happy - which in an age where the celebrity has replaced the genius, sexiness has replaced beauty and the selfie is more closely scrutinised than the autobiography - amounts to the same thing.  "Everything that was once lived has receded into a representation", wrote Guy Debord - a representation he called "the spectacle...[which is] not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images...where the liar has lied to himself".  The image is the reality, the medium is the message.  The Matrix is everywhere; and if, indeed, the universe is nothing but a video game, then Dan Bilzerian has the cheat codes.  As anyone who's ever played a video game with the cheat codes activated can tell you, it very quickly stops being fun.  No risk, no game.  No joy.  And what is life without joy?  As Baudrillard put it:
"We dream of passing through ourselves and finding ourselves in the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and talking...Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its charm will be lost".
So far, so standardly postmodern.  What's next?  Well, the current buzzword in the pop-political sphere is inequality.  "The 1%", wherever and whoever they might be but who are most assuredly the baddies, reportedly own 50% of all of "the wealth" (which I think refers to the money) in the world.  While this is mathematically true, and symptomatic of a whole range of cultural and spiritual diseases, the neo-socialist political narratives that have arisen to articulate, ad nauseum, nothing more substantial than the toddler's whine of "it's not fair!" don't really seem to touch the issue at all.  And of course, in the age of gesture politics, hashtag activism, meme fights and the shoegazing "SJW" phenomenon, what time or space is there for anything else?

It's not fair.  Some people have more money than I do.  Therefore I want more money.  Libertarians and capitalists want everyone to be rich.  Socialists and liberals want nobody to be poor.  Perhaps someday these two ideologies will finally balance each other out - short term, I have some hope in the concept of "universal basic income", which seems to be gaining momentum - but longer term, until we as a culture really start to question the concept of money itself, I don't see any real progress being made.

I don't know yet if it is stupid to ask these questions.  I don't think it is, but perhaps I'm not intelligent enough to articulate them properly.  Could we create a society without money?  Would that society be better than what we have now?  Does wealth cause poverty?  Does money create scarcity?  Do we all deserve more, or should we all strive to have less?  I'm an individual, but these are questions the individual can't answer alone.  But what is stopping us from making the world a better place?  What is stopping me?  Why don't we live in Utopia?  Money has to have something to do with it; if for no other reason than the time we all spend accumulating it eats away at the time that might well be better spent improving the world, rather than simply our own silly little lives.  (Are you happy?  Are you fulfilled?  So what if you are?  Most other people aren't). So all that stands in our way is...us.  Why are we standing in our own way?  Something is wrong.



Related posts

Imagining No Possessions
A Brief Rant on the Nature of Things
Paying Not to Die
Plastic Free Market Forces
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Saturday 12 March 2016

High Lands

I've decided to spend some time in the wild.  It seems like the right thing to do.  Inverness is the end of the line, so far as trains go.  From there it's a three-hour bus ride to Ullapool, and then, definitively you're into the Highlands.  This is where the road ends.


Thursday 10 March 2016

First Shoots

Learning by doing, that's the thing. Behold the first shoots of my indoor potato plants:






I'm using stackable plastic boxes so I can have a kind of drainage system that doesn't make any unnecessary mess or dampness, and so I can easily move the plants if needs be.  At the moment they're just in the corner of the kitchen area , between the washing machine and the window - a nice warm spot that's starting to get some sunlight.  The top box has holes in the bottom to allow the water to drain into the box below, which can then be emptied as needs be.

The trick apparently is to add soil on to the shoots as they grow, until your container is filled.  Hence the space left for this to top up with soil as the plants grow. 

A little inspiration:



A couple of useful links:

Let's all do this.



Related posts

Potatoes, Onions and a Good Luck Charm
Summer Harvest, and Beyond
A Potato's Progress

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Tuesday 8 March 2016

Scraps



One week remains until I stop working.  I have lost all motivation to even pretend I care about my job or that it is any way worth doing.  I'll have more to say on this subject retrospectively.  Suffice to say that from next week, things really get going and I'll have much more to blog about the practicalities of my new life.  For now...

Here's what seven homemade vegan 'ready meals' looks like.  Boiled rice, mixed beans, kale.  Simple, tasty enough and very cheap.  ALDI rice and tinned beans, and some left over kale I'd cooked a while back and frozen in portions for, well, something like this.  If you don't mind eating the same thing every day for a week (and I don't really) then do something like this.  Couple of quid, seven meals.  Microwave as required.


If you're viewing this site through a facebook browser or in the mobile version, you won't have noticed that I've been slowly adding internet things to the sidebar as I come across them.  I've started dividing this up into sections to make it more wieldy, so please enjoy a selection of YouTube channels, blogs, subreddits and links relating to sustainable living, veganism, philosophy, science, transhumanism, environmentalism, anti-work and other related matters.

One channel I've been enjoying this evening is DIY Harbour Kris Harbour, which has an encouraging series of videos showing the building of an offgrid roundhouse.  He makes it look easier than I thought that sort of thing would be.  I know absolutely nothing on the subject in any practical terms, so it's nice to see someone just having a go of it.  Future reference.

Today my tenancy renewal form came through, accompanied by the announcement that rent would be going up from £650 to £675 a month.  Lovely stuff.  The offer was to sign up for another twelve months, but I've asked for just six instead.  This is apparently acceptable.  Realistically I don't think I'm going to be able to afford more than that.

Book sales are going well.  Made another £80 in the past week from selling off books that for the most part I've been able to find in digital format.  These have been added to my google drive library.  Please let me know if you'd like access.  Lots of good stuff.  I can't believe bookzz.org exists, but it does.  Ha ha.

Reddit is a very useful source of ideas.  I'm keeping track of the subreddits relevant to my interests via this multi.  Tentatively exploring the tacky world of "online income", which is, needless to say, teeming with scams.  But who knows, maybe there are some nuggets among the shit; and I have received a cheque from Inbox Pounds, who pay you for clicking meaningless links and taking meaningless surveys, if you like that sort of thing.  £23 I wouldn't have otherwise, which I suppose isn't bad for a couple of minutes of soul-selling a day.  Sometime sacrifices have to be made.

Email received in response to a query I sent to Ryhdall Hall, a Christian community in the Lake District who accept long term residential volunteers that they "pay" in room and board.  However, they do ask for 37 hours work a week as well as time spent at "a daily devotional time and weekly Bible study and social get together."  It's still an option, even if not an ideal one.  Might have to zip it a little to get through the Bible study though.

Found a campsite I'd like to spent some time in during April - the Clachtholl Beach Campsite - way up north in the Highlands.  Tropical Scottish beaches.  Application form received.  It looks wild and remote enough for some proper peace and quiet, but not so distant that I might accidentally die, or something.  I may need to buy a tent.  Here is a blog by a student who lives in a tent.  It's just the sort of thing people do these days.




Related posts

Scraps #2
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Pseudo-Spirituality the Meaning of Words



If you're a Facebook user, and you are, at some point today you'll have seen an inspirational "quote" in your feed.  I put the word "quote" in, um, quotes because I'm referring, of course, to things that aren't really quotes at all.  Things like this:

You know what I'm talking about.  They're everywhere.  The three examples above come from the first page of a google image search for "inspirational quotes". Their defining characteristics are as follows:

1.  Words superimposed over a picture, usually of a sunset, landscape, or other generically serene image.

2.  They convey a positive, pithy or inspirational message, that usually appeals in some way to your sense of individuality and uniqueness.

3.  They are not, or not necessarily, quotations of anything anybody noteworthy has actually said.


You will notice that the first and third examples above do not even attribute their words to a source.  They aren't even quotes at all.  They are just words.  Pretty pictures with pretty words written on them.  The second example attributes the statement of simple astronomical fact, "every morning is a chance at a new day" to one Marjorie Hinckley.  Who was/is Marjorie Hinckley?  Well, without any further context, we can only assume that this is the late Sister Marjorie Pay Hinckley, wife of the (also late) Gordon B. Hinckley, the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka the Mormons) from 1995 - 2008.  The Mormon Church is a pseudo-Christian cult known for its "restorationist" brand of conservative American protestantism, derived from "the Book of Mormon - Another Testament of Jesus Christ", the work of precocious 19th-century rural sex-pest Joseph Smith, who claimed to have translated said book from gold tablets (which nobody else ever saw) written in "reformed Egyptian" (a language that doesn't exist) by Moroni (a non-existent angel and  last survivor of an (also non-existent) Israelite tribe exiled in upstate New York) and buried in a mountain for the attention of the aforementioned Master Smith several centuries later, in order that he might have some pretext on which to hang his pseudo-religious justification for having sex with as many women as he wanted to whenever he felt like for the rest of his life.  Remember in the Bible when God said "my ways are not your ways"?  This is probably what he meant.

What has this got to do with anything?  Well, nothing.  Except to say what any moderately well-educated person already knows: always check your sources.  Marjorie Hinckley, for all I know, could have been the most insightful, wise, eloquent and quotable human being who has ever lived - notwithstanding the fact that until I started writing this blog post, I had never once heard of her; and now that I have, all I know about her is that she once may have said in public that every morning is a chance at a new day.  Which isn't even factually correct, is it Marjorie?  Every morning isn't a chance at a new day: every morning is a new day.  That's more or less what the word "morning" means.  Mornings are what happens at the beginning of every day.  There has never been a morning that was not immediately followed by a new day, Marjorie.  Also, you spent your life married to a man who led a church that teaches that Native Americans are descendants of ancient Israelites cursed with "a dark skin" to make them less attractive, which suggests at the very least a temporary lapse in the use of your critical faculties.  What your thoughts on astronomy and/or semantics are doing in my facebook feed I'm really not sure.

What I am sure about is that there's absolutely nothing genuinely inspiring about these, or any other "quotes" of the sort that are now as ubiquitious on social media as they are meaningless.  None of this would matter one bit, I hasten to add, if it didn't appear that so many otherwise apparently intelligent and spiritually insightful people didn't take them all so seriously.  I find this disgusting.  I find it disgusting because it's yet another example of a kind of fetishistic consumerist aesthetic that's geared towards diluting genuine, subversive, radical, spiritual thought down into a reservoir of meaningless bullshit.  People really are looking for depth and meaning in their lives.  We're all desperate for such things.  But for every Terence McKenna, there are a hundred Deepak Chaporas.  For every David Abram or Carl Jung, a hundred thousand David Ickes, Zecharia Sitchins or (to namecheck Facebook darling, "inspirational" "quote" factory and shitpeddler extraordinaire) a Jordan David Pearce.   While it might seem that these people are encouraging a growth in spirituality, offering profound insights and presenting radical alternatives into the nature of our spiritually vacuous culture, they are doing nothing of the kind.  It's even worse than that, in fact: they're perpetuating the feeling of liberation at the expense of actually being liberated.  Inspiration is not a feeling at all: it's an action.  If words don't move you to do something, to really question anything, to genuinely challenge yourself, then they are as purposeful as the picture they're written on: pretty, yes, but nothing more than simply...there.  And if they need a pretty picture and a well-designed font to convey something of value, then you have to ask if they have anything of value to convey.  "Stars can't shine without darkness"?  Well they can actually.  The sun is a star, and that only shines in the day time, when it isn't dark.  It also shines at night, too, when viewed from elsewhere in the galaxy.  Because, once again, it's a fucking star.  Stars can't shine without hydrogen.   "The only person you should try to be better than, is the person you were yesterday".  Really?  That's going to be difficult, considering you are the person you were yesterday.  How about trying to be a better person than Jeremy Hunt?  That's also an option.

Behind these words is nothing at all: no source to check the quote against, because nothing and no-one is being quoted.  Nothing is even being said at all.  But it's being said so loudly, so repetitively, so unceasingly, that it's started to sound like something.





Related posts

Thoughts from an empty room
Scraps of a Manifesto

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Tuesday 1 March 2016

The Cost of Living: February 2016



One month has now passed.  I am halfway through my notice period for my job.  So far, I have made no attempt to find another job.  "Have you found another job?" is the question I've been asked the most when people find out I'm leaving this one.  My answer is often met with surprise.  Some people don't say anything, they just look at me.  I quite like that.  Some ask what I'm going to be doing next.  I don't always feel like talking about it, so I say that I don't know, which is of course true.  Sometimes I lie.  I have some idea what I want to do, but it remains vague.

Numbers are not vague, and numbers don't lie.  So as I said I was going to do, I've been keeping track of all my expenses day through the month on a spreadsheet.  I fucking love spreadsheets.  Really I do.  Here are the results:

OUTGOINGS
Rent: £650.00
Mobile and phone/broadband: £91.09
Prescription: £16.40
Food: £29.75
Other: £190.95
Total outgoings = £978.19

INCOME
Income from work: £1515.88
Other: £433.43
Total income = £1949.31

FEBRUARY BALANCE = £971.12

So that means I'm in the black this month.  I'm making a profit, which is of course the very meaning of life.  But I'm still working, which is the one thing I don't want to be doing.  "Other" income, above, refers to things I've sold on amazon and ebay.  If I hadn't been working, I would have made only £433.43, which is £544.76 less what it cost to exist this month.  This means that if I want to live without working at all, my current way of life is not sustainable.  I knew that already, obviously, but putting a number on it helps put that fact in perspective.


"Other" outgoings include one-off payments for non-essential things, luxuries, and unforeseen costs.  £190.95 seems like too much.  £52.97 of this is for postage costs from books I've sold on amazon, however.  Since spending that contributed towards the £433.43 I made from selling things I can think of that as an overhead, and therefore not really a luxury as such.  If I take this off the £190.95, that leaves £137.98 spent on non-essentials.  That still seems like a lot.  They include dinner out with friends, the occasional drink, and various subscriptions.  Most of those subscriptions were, believe it or not, for things from amazon, largely edible.  I'd started subscribing to seaweed snacks, and to walnuts.  Healthy and delicious but not really essential, and probably better sourced elsewhere.  I still have a kilogram of walnuts in the freezer. I've eaten all the seaweed.  The subscriptions have now been cancelled.  On this basis, I think I can set £68 as my allowance for non-essentials next month - i.e. approximately half what I spent this month.  We'll see how that goes.





Rent, phone/internet bills and prescription costs are the three things I definitely can't avoid.  Without my medication, breathing becomes harder (I have asthma) and so does having a functional brain (I have OCD).  I think that breathing and thinking are both important things in life.  So is internet access, and I still need to get around finding a cheaper deal for my home broadband.  I pay for a free phone calls and "unlimited" broadband deal, that I'm sure I don't really need.  I certainly never use my landline.  Who does?

Two weeks of actual work remain.  My notice runs out on the 27th of March, but with annual leave left to use before then, I don't think I'm going to have to go in to work at all after the 13th.  That's when the real "work" begins.





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