If Not a Jehovah's Witness

Every Thursday, I'm visited by a young Jehovah's Witness. He comes to my door, sometimes alone but often with a sidekick, and we have a chat for half an hour about religion, its truth and its benefits. He's also an ardent Creationist, which I did not realise about Jehovah's Witness. This makes me dubious that he can ever embrace a genuine argument against his position as Creationism is about as solid as a house of cards. Having said that, he's not an idiot by any stretch and his heart is in the right place, if not his head.

Based on the fact that he does seem to be a loving, conscientious individual, I have often wondered how much actual good he would do had he not chosen to follow his ministry. So I asked him where he would be if the church wasn't a part of his life. He's nineteen.

He told me that when he was young, he had often wanted to be a doctor or a physicist. He was particularly passionate about taking up a career in which he could make as much change as possible, where he could help the maximum number of people within his lifetime. 'Then I discovered the Bible,' he said. I'm not paraphrasing, he literally concluded with, 'then I discovered the Bible,' as if this made perfect sense.

He and his family converted to the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses and changed their lives forever. And that's a valid choice - of course it is. I would never force the guy to be a doctor or a scientist. But I found it quite sad to see the vacuum between a man with so much passion (an admittedly a touch of naivety) for making the world better and his choice of realising that passion.

This is a common sleight of hand performed by religion - it can make you believe you're actually achieving something, when in reality you're performing through smoke and mirrors. For example, he often states that he believes the world is in a worst place than ever (something I don't agree with, but let's go with it for now) and there is more unnecessary suffering, greed, etc. than we've ever seen. His solution is to turn to God and hope he'll sort it out. As I've often pointed out, if everyone in the world used this method we would be completely screwed. The only way to bring about improvement is by owning the responsibility for that change as human beings. It's easy to defer to a higher power, but that's completely ineffective is nothing more than illusion.

It would have been nice to have another doctor or scientist in the world with the wide-eyed benevolence of my weekly visitor.

The Hardest Thing About Being a White Man...

...is learning to shut the fuck up.

As a white guy from a rich nation, there's a lot of things I don't have to think about on a daily basis. I don't have to worry about getting catcalled on the street, bring groped or leered at, having my sex life judged or being profiled by my skin colour in job interviews or at security gates. I tend to get listened to quite a lot. Hopefully, people keep listening because I have something vaguely worth listening to, but I have no problem getting people to listen to me, because everyone wants to hear what the white guy has to say.

I've spoken before about recognising the weird subconscious part of me that tries to tell me that women don't know what they're talking about as much as men and there's a lot of societal brainwashing that goes along with that.

When shit happens, in politics, the internet or whatever, I often feel like I have something to say about it. I have thoughts. I has feelingses. You must listen to my thoughts because they are important and I'm totally adding to the discussion, you guys. And, as I said, being a white dude means that people tend to pay attention. But then, we all have thoughts and feelings on these hot button issues, so what makes me so important? Why should people listen to what I have to say?

When it comes to issues of sex, politics, race, religion, gender and a whole bunch of other important crap, I'm probably not the one to be listening to. There are a heckload of qualified, relevant people who can give a much more valuable insight than I ever can. Folk of colour, female folk, transfolk, disabled folk - a lot of people from a variety of marginalised groups. These guys don't get heard because everyone is listening to the white dude, who are so used to having an audience that they never shut up.

It's nice to be listened to. It's really nice. It's validating, affirming, confidence-boosting and generally gives you the fuzzy feelings. So it's hard to stay quiet. It's hard to sit back and let other people talk. But do you want the discussion to be as valuable as it can be, or do you just want to be listened to?

The Power of the Rant

I recently had to consider the nature of the rant. I'd linked to a particularly sharp-toothed attack on the  politically and socially ultra-conservative part of America, framed in a 'North vs South' rhetorical narrative. I was called out for promoting the type of language and rhetoric that leads to denigration of people from the southern states as a whole. While that is a good point, and one I hadn't considered at the time (and I definitely am against attacks on (e.g.)  all Muslims for the position of Muslim extremists), I actually want to focus on the idea of the 'rant' itself as a device.

I actually really like rants. Not to write, or speak - I certainly don't have the raw emotional potency for that - but I really enjoy reading or hearing a wonderfully worded rant. For me, part of it is therapeutic. I'm not one to vent my emotions much, so having someone do it for me really can work a treat.

For a rant to work, it has to be eloquent. A page and a half of "Fffffuuuucccck off and die" won't do it for me, though I know some people enjoy that raw bitterness. Not me: that's not a true rant; that's profanity (which can be fine). I need rants to have a structure, a purpose, a reason, some character and to be convincing. I want to know why you're so angry and I want to be convinced or I'll just call you a raving pisspot, or something. I'm not good with insults.

Goodness gracious, I haven't even defined a rant yet. I assumed you'd all know what I meant, but for the purposes of this blabber: a rant is an argumentative essay, using the rhetoric of anger and/or insult to characterise its prose and make its points. Its tone and hostility may vary, but the idea is the same. It's offensive, in the sense that it's an attacking piece of debate, as opposed to a calm and balanced analysis.

I tend to prefer writing in that balanced, analytical style. I normally have a point to make and a side to take, certainly, but I'm not one to go all out on the offensive. But a rant is a massively powerful tool. For one, they are more interesting to the observer. Someone completely losing their rag over something is very entertaining and often hilarious, even if the subject matter is very serious: and this is, of course, the point. You want to suck people in; you want to persuade people to see your way of thinking by demonstrating the sheer emotional impact this issue has had on you. If something has caused the author to blow their top, then surely it's an issue worthy of your investigation, right?

The Daily Mail knows the power of the rant all too well. Its entire arsenal of columnists are essentially all rant artists, to varying degrees. The Mail (and most other papers, to be fair) use this technique for three main reasons: 1) it makes for an entertaining reading, so people will keep buying the paper; 2) it bolsters the opinions of its audience so it can keep covering topics like, say, immigration, because it's already formed an army of anti-immigrationists; 3) flame-baiting. Flame-baiting is the art of ranting to such a degree that you start sucking in your opposition, who can't help but flock to rubber-neck at the utter car crash of bile and spittle that has ranted across their website. The anti-tabloid folk have cottoned on to this and invented istyosty.com - a proxy server one can use to avoid reading tabloid rants directly and contributing to their hits.

So aware are the Mail aware of the power of a rant, that they recently moved to bully Kevin Arscott into removing a post he made against its editor, Paul Dacre. Mr Ascott, of Angry Mob (which is a lot less angry than the name suggests) was so incensed by the paper's behaviour that he wrote a long (and fairly out of character) rant about how Paul Dacre must die and how we would queue for miles to use his grave as a loo, to put it lightly. The Mail threatened his web hosts and now the article doesn't exist (but you can probably find it. The internet doesn't forget).

With the power of the rant, of course, comes a great responsibility (has a comic book ever again said anything so profound?). The melody of an offensive argument carries like the tune of the pied piper, with followers dancing to the oomph of the emotion, too caught up to stop and ask questions or check for evidence. The wave of support for classic ranters like Melanie Phillips, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, - people who are clearly so far removed from reality that you wonder how they get dressed in the morning - shows how a rant just isn't enough. It's a weapon. Like a gun: when used correctly, anyone can make headway, cause damage and lead armies with it. In a sense, it is neither good not bad outside of any context. But it is dangerous.

That's why I'd say, for goodness sake, if you're going to have a bloody good rant as part of your argument you'd better make sure that you've backed up that rant with facts and evidence. You'd better be sure that you know what you're talking about because you are wielding a powerful and persuasive weapon. And on top of that: be aware of your audience. Websites like Annotated Rant, have excellent, well-cited arguments in a terrifically bitter and furious style. But, my god, they tend to cast their net wide. With Fuck the South, they make very good points about the political problems in the American south, but unless you're aware that they are using the term 'South' as a metaphor, it can cause a lot of problems. You probably wouldn't get rants titled "Fuck Muslims", for example, because you wouldn't want to accidentally incite hatred towards all Muslims from people who don't pick up on your subtlety.

In conclusion: I love to read rants, I think they are a valuable and powerful tool, but when used carelessly they can be dangerous, so take care if you fancy having a public rant.

The word rant has lost all meaning, by the way.

PS: If you want to watch some world-class ranting, search for Matt Dillahunty on youtube. He is monumental at off-the-cuff, brilliantly reasoned takedowns.

Why I Can Stand Jeremy Clarkson

I like Jeremy Clarkson. Sort of.

It's a tricky thing to justify, as he's part of the right-wing hysterical journalists and media types that will bark up any tree that looks remotely like it might be pulped to produce the Guardian. Much like the likes of Littlejohn, Platell, Phillips, Fawkes et al, Clarkson enjoys smugly vomiting out whatever reactionary opinion his pancreas squeezes into his brain. Like the others, he has his pet peeves that he barks on about in an endless cycles (in particular, he hates traffic safety devices and climate change prevention) without ever reviewing evidence contrary to his own immalleable opinion.

But, gosh, I just can't despise him in the way I do the others. I think part of it is that I enjoy Top Gear and don't want to spend the entire time scowling and swearing at "Jezza" the whole hour long. Whenever Clarkson says something stupid or sexist, yes, my wife and I look at each other and shake our heads in disapproval. We're not ignorant of his dickheadedness, not by a long shot. The way he treated Olympic Champion, Amy Williams, was detestable (frankly, she should have slapped him).

But... when mouthing off, I really don't think he takes himself seriously. He operates under the character of 'Jeremy Clarkson, moron' in the same way that Warren Mitchell worked the avatar of 'Alf Garnett, furious bigot'. Whether he uses the character as a comforting shield from which to assert his own opinions, or whether the character's opinions are entirely artificial and used for flamebait - I don't know. Either way, his potency as a force for hypnotising his audience are greatly reduced, compared to someone who takes themselves very seriously, like Bill O'Reilly, who still has a massive following despite twice saying no one knows how the sun goes up and down every day. Clarkson is a clown. He knows he's a clown and he plays up to it. Hopefully the rest of his audience know he's a clown, too.

He delivers his hyperbole with a cheekiness and a swagger deliberately engineered to make his audience chuckle and facepalm and to manufacture a faux-argument between the co-hosts who often call him a 'completely idiot' and a mindless petrol-head. His co-hosts on Top Gear operate similarly, behind the character of grinning-hyperactive-teenager and comely-Warburton-eating-uncle, neither of which you'd trust to even recommend a car to you.

And Clarkson isn't always wrong: he's a big advocate of science and engineering, for example. He once punched Piers Morgan. He's not all bad. Yes, he suffers from the syndrome that a lot of columnist have which I have called I'm-not-an-expert-but-I've-been-spouting-my-opinion-for-so-long-I-must-be-right Syndrome. The name needs work, I'll admit.

A simple Google search for "Jeremy Clarkson column" leads you quickly to this column, which begins:

Call me a spoilsport but I’m glad my dad wasn’t a lesbian

When it comes to sweeping generalisations, I am the daddy. All Germans have no sense of humour, all instruction manuals are pointless, all cruise ships are ghastly, every single American is fat, all golfers are boring and all Peugeots are driven by people you wouldn’t have round for dinner

.

I really don't think he expects anyone to take him seriously. At least I hope he doesn't.

Oh god, what if he does?

Why It's Important to Focus on Hackgate

The 'revelation' of the hacking culture, endemic to the practices of the News of the World has had constant headline attention for a couple of weeks now. I say 'revelation', but in reality, the story has been out for half a decade and only when it was revealed that the NotW included a murdered school girl in their phone book of hackery did the world suddenly wake up and realise something was wrong. Executives across media, police and government are falling like shot pheasants and twitter folk have started betting on what ridiculous new development will be unveiled next.

The reaction of the tabloids has been very interesting to say the least. They gave the whole affair a couple of days standard coverage, in line with the 'ultra-left, agenda-driven' BBC and Guardian, reporting it as a shocking scandal. But then they back-pedalled furiously, realising that the conversation had turned to all media and reformation of press regulation. Suddenly, all newspapers were in the spotlight and their cosy club of self-regulation was under threat. So now we have 'hey - look over there!' headlines asking 'Why are we still talking about the News Int scandal when people are dying/the economy is terrible/bins collections only happen once a fortnight?'. I have heard similar arguments from friends and acquaintances who are more interested in other debates, like rescuing the economy or pulling out of conflict zones.

Firstly, it's important to cover a couple of simple problems with the 'why talk about x, when y is worse?' argument. This is the type of narrow-thinking that got Richard Dawkins in trouble after dismissing western feminine issues because Middle-Eastern women had it so much worse. You can't just ignore a problem, just because there are other, arguably bigger, problems. If there are issues to be faced, face them. Otherwise, we'd have to deal with the problems of the world one-by-one in descending order of seriousness and we'd never get a weekly bin collection!

Furthermore, the economic traumas and the problems in the Middle-East don't always have headline news. Certainly there are serious issues and problems to overcome, but 'We're still in debt, guys' and 'The war's not over yet' don't really make for good headlines and no one wants to watch a live, rolling-news conference of parliament discussing the lack of any further development. The News International scandal is fresh, it's unfolding every day and the key players are being interrogated, arrested and questions right now. It is headline news.

But more importantly, why should we care? If this scandal hadn't broken, the papers would have found something else to put on page 1, right? A quick glance through the archives show they are content to just stick a minor celebrity in the prime position if nothing else is happening.

We should care because the media is the portal between the public and the rest of the world. We, as individuals, cannot investigate every organisation and even we're interested in. We need the media to inform us about what is happening, who is involved and why things are turning the way they are. We rely on them to keep us informed.

And unfortunately, the looking glass of the printed press has for too long been coloured in the biases of the editors; the lens has been shaped to magnify nonsense celebrity news, distort difficult issues like immigration and refract our line of sight from the hard facts. Newspaper readers are not being shown the world as it really is - they are being shown a bloated version of their own biases, cycled through the propaganda wagon, editorialised beyond recognition until everyday, intelligent people see the world as a broken, uber-politically-correct, pedantically-governed teenage wasteland, drowning in immigrants, who steal all our jobs and then try and blow us up. It's not fair on the readers and it's not fair on the country whose government feels the need to pander to these readers.

At last, the media is in the spotlight. After years, decades, of refusing to take a good, hard look at itself for 'dog doesn't eat dog' (Nick Davies, Flat Earth News), finally we are beginning to see the dangers of the current state of our media. We are looking into proper regulation. We are holding them to account. We have a chance to build a new era of better news publication that serves the public as well as its bank balance. We deserve it. And to do it, we cannot take our eye off the ball in this 'hackgate' scandal - we have to keep hammering this point home until something is done.

It is important.