Lacking that conversational skill

Just came back from the library returning a book and while I was their I saw a housemate from last year who I was pretty cool and I got on fairly well with. Anyway there was the standard kind of how's life conversation and it's one that I always suck at. My answer is almost without fail "good" which is just the shittest answer in the world. Following questions get a yes, no, a bit and good. I can do long conversation but to such bleh questions as how's X or Y I'm really awful at stretching it and saying something interesting or just say something. This wouldn't be as bad a thing if other people didn't take it as a reflection on them or what you think of them. Seeing someone who you once had decent conversations with and then have a shit conversation makes them believe that you don't give a shit about them (even if I do ask questions about their life and am actually interested in the answers). Maybe I'm over emphasizing this but it definitely does make people not just think I'm a boring person (which to be fair I am) but that I don't like them or something and as such not willing to tell them about my life or can't be bothered to. It's really not that, it's just that my mind goes blank when asked such huge open questions and I'm awful and finding something to say to them.

Here Comes the Sun

I've had The Beatles:Rock Band for about a week now and played most of the tracks and I really like it. Before I got it I wasn't that familiar with that much Beatles stuff and it's made me listen to them more than I would have. I've grown to really like a couple of the songs and am occasionally listening to the albums on my ipod. It's fun, it's Rock Ban you know, the same old game play with a couple of small additions. The really big shiny thing about is just the graphics. The game has half the songs as played Live in one of the Beatles famous gigs and the other are kind "dreamscapes" where the content is linked to the songs kind of like an in game music video. The live songs have the Beatles in amazing quality graphics and the lighting is great. The Dreamscapes are even better. Once you've seen the Beatles just singing in the studio and then suddenly being in Walrus costumes you really can't go back to the old Rock Band graphics. The whole experience is just perfectly made and shows what can be done with the whole rhythm game platform. It makes other Rock Band seem just so blah visually. Any future Rock Band game probably won't have the same detail and work put into each song making the visuals fit. Rock Band 3 probably won't have it but they might do another specialized version for a band with similar effort put in, but sadly it probably won't be for any band I'm a huge fan of. Still if the next *insert band here*: Rock Band is as good with a fairly decent Band I'll definitely be buying it.

IT'S ALIVE

Finally the new and much more shiny SCM website is live and can be found at movement.org.uk and have a look at the blog and the new forum. It may not quite work with Ie that well but still, It's LIVE. Now that it's actually live I can start pestering people about being bloggers without having to be so vague and wishy washy about when I'd actually need them to start. But really what it needs is people to come read, comment and discuss make the whole thing live. So come look point say "ooooh" and "aaah" at the shiny web design, if you find any faults tell me and I'll try and have someone look at it. Expect more things to happen, including a new email newsletter and other wonderful things.

But there is a downside of course I now should probably write my first SCM blog post and have to think of what to say...

A Wavey new World

I got my invitation to test out Google wave this morning, it's shiny and awesome but not much use to me right now whilst still in early preview and while I have no contacts on it. If you've never heard of Google wave it's basically email + instant messaging + a whole load of gadgets. See video below:

If anyone wants an invite I've got 8 to give out so just ask.

Is there a fictional character named Kant?

This term and next term one of my modules is a history of political thought. However pretty much all the great thinkers I'm studying is a character in Lost, well apart from Hobbes, who has an awesome fictional incarnation anyway. After finishing Hobbes, I've started studying Locke and next is Rousseau and then Hume. The last thinker I've got to study is Kant though and I've yet to see a character called Kant. Maybe it will be the name of one of the new people on the island? Anyway It makes my lectures far more interesting when talking about the relationship between Hobbes and Locke when I think of a tiger and a bald guy rather than two dudes in olde timey clothes.

Hobbes probably was not a closet athiest

Why on earth does everyone who wasn't a fan of the church at their time get assumed to be a closet atheist? I'm just gonna focus on Hobbes because he's who I'm studying right now but I've heard this said of pretty much any non-conformist Christian thinker who wasn't a monk. Anyway a little background on Hobbes, he writes a political theory that works completely without God and writes a theology which pretty much removes any mystic element from Christianity and question the trinity. At the time people called him a heretic and an atheist and burned his books and so on. This has lead many people (my seminar group included) to conclude that he probably was an atheist. The main problem with this argument as my seminar tutor put it is "for someone who gets called an atheist he does write an awful lot about God". A response to this is that these were included to make his theory more palatable at the time and so that he wouldn't be criticized for not factoring in God. But this seems to be kind of skimming over the actual text. Literally half the book (two of the four parts are entirely about it, the other two contain several references to God) is about how politics relates with God. And the theology which is in the Book definitely didn't make the book go down better at the time and his trashing of the trinity probably got him into the most trouble of all.

Rather than Hobbes being a closet atheist who was pretending to believe because atheists were persecuted and that if he was around now he would be an atheist; wouldn't it be simpler if Hobbes meant what he said and held liberal non-conformist religious beliefs and that if he were around now he would still say something similar? If he was only pretending to believe in order to avoid condemnation wouldn't he have done a better job of it and not said such controversial theological statements? Why is it that people are accepting that he meant what he said with his political belief but not with his religious belief?

Am I just not up to it?

I had my second Introduction to Applied Human Rights lecture today. It was really interesting and all stuff that I've studied briefly before, looking at international intervention into Genocide or Mass Human rights violations. Thing is, for this course 10% of the mark is for contribution to the discussion. Yet there aren't any seminars. It's all in this "any thoughts" bit at the end for the last 30-45 minutes or just for random questions through out the lecture. I dunno why but I just find it really hard to thing of anything to say in this kind of situation. One person will make a good point and before I can think of anything to say about it there's the next person saying there thing, and then the next, and when I do think of something someone else will say it first. I just can't seem to deal with this whole 20+ people discussion thing, especially when we're still all sat like it's a lecture. I can take notes but that's about it. It's not like I don't do all the reading because the reading list for these things are tiny and I'm doing a fair bit on top of that. Argh I just don't know how to be better at this...

I'm also reading Hobbes at the moment for my other module, and whilst I understand the ideas as presented to me in the lectures and secondary sources pretty much instantly it takes me ages to get them from the original text. I'm moving at a snail pace through Leviathan 10-20 pages a day (usually about 2 hours work at least just reading leviathan). And reading Hobbes for a long time just makes my brain feel dead and my eyes tired.

So anyway I'm just feeling pretty stupid and lazy right now.

The failed immigration debate

I was watching Question Time this morning and saw Nick Griffin get the kicking he completely deserved. His complaint that it was a lynch mob has some justification but is similar to a scrawny 15 year old calling four heavyweight champion boxers twats and then complaining when he gets the shit kicked out of him. However there were two moments where he didn't seem either crazy or retarded, one was the Jan Moir article where he just said that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead and you can't exactly go wrong with that, the other was when the other parties were talking immigration. Despite making an excellent case for multicultural Britain through out the program suddenly when immigration policy was brought up most of the panelists stopped arguing for it. Jack Straw didn't really say anything much for future immigration, talked about our history of immigration and just said how asylums number were decreasing; Chris Huhne was pathetic and said ooh there are too many european immigrants and we shouldn't have opened our border completely; and Baroness Warsi talked of a cap and better border controls.

As much as I think the BNP's view on immigration is racist and disgusting at least it's coherent and they explain why they want it (protecting the indigenous population is of course retarded but hey it's a reason). What you need to counter with is why the borders should be kept open. What politicians need to say why immigrations is a good thing not just in the past but in the future. The Lib Dem and Tory immigration policy seemed to just be saying "oh we'll keep it as small as we possibly can". The Tory cap idea is the most ludicrous part of this whole debate and is completely dehumanizing to immigrants and asylum seekers. That once a certain amount of people have come in we're then full up and no matter what how mad the need for asylum of the next person to try and come in they can't. I just feel that the whole thing could have dealt with a little bit of "immigrants are people too" more than just that one comment from the audience member. Immigration does have a positive effect on our society. Whilst there are some groups that do not have an positive economic effect they are people fleeing from places where they have reason to fear for their lives and livelihoods and deserve somewhere to stay and have peace and security. That side of the immigration debate needs to be argued and it needs to be argued loudly.

Twitting the news

I was completely disgusted by the recent article in the Daily Mail about Stephen Gately's death. I think Charlie Brooker hit the nail on the head in asking what basis other than pure bigotry Jan Moir can question what caused his death. She seems to imply that living in a same sex relationship can some how cause an early death because of some sort of lifestyle involved in that. It's fucking ridiculous and it's even more fucking ridiculous that she can claim "In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones" is just insulting readers inteligence. Read the article for yourself see what you think.

But aside from whether or not what she wrote is bigoted and vile, her claim that the campaign that has arisen in response to her article is heavily orchestrated is to misunderstand social networks. The way that people found out about her article (and were consequently repulsed by it) was after Twitter celebrities like Derren Brown and Stephen Fry saw it commented on it and showed it to there followers. Unless she's claiming that either of these two have some reason why they should orchestrate a campaign against then she really doesn't have a leg to stand on. People were linked to the article and were then disgusted by it, complained about it and told more people about it. This is far less orchestrated than things like Sachs gate because people have actually read her article not just others reactions to it. Due to the huge response on Twitter companies such as M&S removed there advertising and an almost record breaking amount of complaints filed with the Press complaints commission (people should note though that the commission's code of practice committee is chaired by the Daily Mail's editor).

This isn't the first time this week where twitter has played a major part in a new story. After an injunction was filed against the guardian newspaper preventing it from reporting a question asked in parliament. After a major political blog published the question and a link to the report that was trying to be suppressed it became a trending topic on twitter with thousands of people every hour not only reading about it but actively telling more people. This was one of the reasons that the injunction was later dropped against the guardian because the question and indeed the report was already widely in public circulation and stopping the guardian from printing it would be pointless.

Whilst it may not be what Twitter is used for most of the time it some times can have a major positive effect on organizing campaigns to fight things that otherwise may not be picked up.

Resume life

Within the next half hour I'm going to be leaving Bristol and heading up to York, back to university, back to my real life. I can't say exactly why but for some reason this makes me nervous. I guess it could be because all summer has been easy, just sitting around, very few challenges of any sort. Back at York I've got to go back to trying to make new friends, be social, join societies, do things and get higher marks in a course that whilst I find it interesting and enjoy studying I also find it extremely difficult to do well in. I guess I'm nervous that I'll fail at some of these things but you know it how goes, if you don't try, you don't know and now I've got to go back up there and try again. Time for life with all it's difficulties to resume after the long pause that was this summer.