Orange Light Pollution

Professional Policy Nerd

2011-12-09T15:18:00.001Z

I’ve got some very awesome news to share, I’m going to havea paid job. Not a permanent, paid job but a paid job none the less. I know I’vehad paid jobs before but this is different. This job is paying me to dosomething I’d feel pretty compelled to do even if they weren’t paying me (infact I have been doing for the last few months without being paid). In a fewweeks time I will be employed as a professional policy nerd, well technicallyas the intern for the public issues team but you know half a dozen of one, sixof the other. This is what I want to do with my life. I find the workincredibly interesting and it feels like something I have a genuine flare for.Policy geekery is what I love to do in my spare time and the added bonus of itactually being productive and helping to possibly change things is amazing.I’ve known this was the area that I wanted to work in for quite some time nowbut I’d pretty much thought that it wasn’t actually possible for me to earn aliving doing it and that I wouldn’t quite make it. But now someone’s actuallypaying me to do it, it actually seems possible. It’s not like they hired mebecause I mislead them on my application or anything, they offered me thisafter working with me for months and so they must think I’m good enough to bepaid to do this thing. There’s still a few barriers in my way before I canactually say that this is my career (for one I need to be able convince peopleusing a CV and covering letter that I should be hired) but this is definitely asign that it’s possible. Just it being actually something that might happen isjust really really awesome.

Lost in a virtual world: Taking violence in video games seriously

2011-11-26T09:43:00.001Z

Image by somegeekintn via Flickr

An issue that has often pervaded mainstream discussion ofvideo games is that of violence. Many have complained about the level ofviolence that pervades video games and how that is to its detriment as amedium. Many within the online gaming community have defended the mediumagainst these attacks by arguing that there’s no link between violence andvideo games and violence in real life, or at least no stronger link than existsbetween violence and any other medium. Whilst I’m sympathetic to this defence andknow that the evidence backs this up, it doesn’t address the whole point. Thereis more violence in video games than in other mediums and there has been forsome time. Whilst there is plenty of violence on TV, in books and films thereare huge numbers of them which also do not contain any violence of any sort.These are not just niche non-violent pieces of media but rather a ratio ofpopular books, TV programmes and films are entirely non-violent. This ratio isnot mirrored in video games.

Exactly how pervasive violence is within video games dependson how you define violence. Many people when talking about violence in videogames specify when pushed that they mean realistic or graphic violence. Whentalking about violence in video games they talk about Gears of War, Call ofDuty and Grand Theft Auto. The problem with this definition of violence is thatneither Call of Duty nor GTA are that graphic in their violence. There is a bitof red that flies out when you shoot or hit someone but the detailed effects ofreal life violence are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps what defines this type ofviolence is that you are doing something that looks like violence (shooting,stabbing, punching etc) towards something that looks like a human being. Nowthis seems to explain most cases of where people complain about violence invideo games (although some cases are towards aliens but they can be filed underlooks like a human for now). If we accept this as our definition of badviolence, then it is still much more common in games than in other media. Thistype of violence is found in the vast majority of video game’s best sellingfranchises.

But even then thismisleads people about just how prevalent violence is within video games. I’vehad the discussion about what defines violence on this blog before and pointedout the two viewpoints that either violence has to damage a person to actuallybe violence or it does not. If we accept the wider definition of violence, thata person doesn’t have to be hurt, then violence is far more pervasive in videogames and always has been. If we acceptthat attacking a clearly non-humanoid creature is violence then all of theMario titles (more modern versions have even included a punch button) can beseen as violent as can Pac man, asteroids, space invaders, every fighter pilotsim or shmup (a game based around spaceships shooting other space ships). Withthis understanding of violence then almost 90% of games are based aroundviolence as one of their key mechanics.

The explanation of why this is the case has been looked atin other places and I’ve heard some good theories. The most plausible onestates that violence is common because it’s easy to design. It plays to ourinstincts, provides easy rewards and is simple to depict. For other mediumsviolence can be far more difficult to depict (requiring the hiring of stunt menand fight choreographers or long paragraphs of description) and far more costlyof the creators resources. The demographic that video games are target at alsotends not to be too adverse to violence but it’s hard to rule out that theviolence caused the demographic and not the other way round (pong was played byall ages and was only slightly more male than female). There has recently beena renaissance in non-violent video game sales in the form of dance games andexercise games which are mainly selling to women. This shows that thecorrelation is there between the demographic and violence and also shows thatnon-violent games can make a bucket load of money (meaning that violence isn’tthere purely as a commercial consideration).

So, there’s violence and games and it’s there because it’seasy design, but is that a bad thing? Well I’m inclined to think it might be.Maybe this has something to do with how I was brought up with a complete ban onviolent toys (no swords, no guns). I just don’t think that lots of violence inthe media we consume is a good thing. I generally believe that violence when isdone in the actual world it’s a bad thing and that we should always point it outas such and that therefore normalising violence is a good thing. By havingviolence everywhere we are much less likely to view it as something that is outof place and wrong when we encounter it in everyday life. I also reject theview that humans are just naturally violent and there's no getting away fromthat. So this does make violence in the media bad because it normalisesviolence. To get back to topic, violence in video games is bad because itnormalises violence. When Mario encounters another creature video games havetaught us that the correct response to this is to be violent towards it. Surein games like Mario it’s not graphic or realistic violence but its violence andit does normalise violence as a response. This is why it’s worrying because alarge majority of games have violence as the default response to an encounterwith another creature.

I’m not saying that this normalisation of violence will makepeople who play video games into serial killers or even if a child plays themfrom a very young age will turn into a killer. However there still could benegative effects, like a child seeing their friend punch someone and notthinking that was the wrong thing to do. Media isn’t a massive influence on usand the example of actual people we know is far stronger but it’s still thereas a minor one. That makes it ever so slightly worry that violence and videogames are so strongly connected.

I did not realise how lucky I was

2011-10-16T20:24:00.002+01:00

Only a few months ago, I lived in the same city as my work (Uni counts as work) instead of having to travel on coach, car and train every week. Not only that I lived twenty minutes walk from my work instead of being at best an hour away (even from starting in London). I lived literally thirty seconds walk (if that) away from my girlfriend as opposed to two hours on a train (or briefly for a few days a week 45 minutes on the tube). I had my own personal space which I could leave as messy as I liked without feeling guilty and spent none of the week living out of a rucksack. I ate when I wanted to and didn't have to keep people informed of when I was where. Not that I'm not grateful to relatives which have let me stay. Or that I'm not enjoying my volunteering, it's been really interesting stuff. But this really sucks. I just want a job that pays me so that I can rent somewhere and stay there all week long and hopefully have Cassie in the same place so I don't have spend so much time travelling.

... and that pretty much sums up my life right now, just constantly travelling. I don't like trains, tubes, buses, or coaches any more with no place that is really mine and that I have full control over. What's worse is I'm not sure if this is going to change any time soon.

Lost in a Virtual World: RPG mechanics and inacessibility

2011-10-06T19:49:00.000+01:00

Image via WikipediaThis post could have also been called: If you don't tell me how to do it I can't, why doesn't what I see match what I do?, Why Dragon Age 2 is better than Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect is even better, why all RPG makers need to watch this, or why you should ignore most reviews of RPGs unless you've spent 100+ hours playing them.

Essentially all old school RPGs that I have ever played suffer from the same problem. If you've not played many RPGs already then when you start playing a new RPG you won't know how most of the game mechanics work. I'm playing Dragon Age: Origins through for a second time and I still have no idea how most of the game mechanics work. I haven't skipped a tutorial, I've not ignored any instructions, I've read all the in game text that is supposed to assist me in these things and I still have no idea how many of the game mechanics function. When I say I don't understand how the mechanics work I don't mean that I couldn't program them myself, I mean I don't understand how to use them. I have no idea how to use the tactics menu in any sort of effective way to create decent strategies. I don't know why I'd use points for anything other than constitution and strength (or magic and willpower if I'm a mage) because they give more health and more strength. Playing through as a warrior, I had no idea what any of my skills did (aside from shield bash which I could see hit them with a sheild and stunned them). I can't get very far unless I'm on the easiest difficulty and even then I struggle on occasion. If the game has in anyway tried to teach me how to play it I've missed it completely. The odd thing about it though is almost universally this huge inaccessibility wasn't mentioned in any of the reviews I read and isn't often considered a down side of Dragon Age: Origins in online discussion about the game. This is pretty much true of all other RPGs, they don't teach you how to play them and barely anyone mentions it. I paid for The Witcher and I have no fucking clue what I'm supposed to be doing in that and from what I hear the second one is even worse on that front. I'm assuming that the developers of these games just take it for granted that every single player is well versed in Dungeons and Dragons or spent years playing RPG or MMORPGs and understands all these stats.

Some games like Dragon Age 2 manage to mitigate the fact that they don't teach you how to do half the things in the game by A) Not requiring you to use them to get far into the game and B) offering some visual representation of what things do. I have a rough idea of what most of my Dragon Age 2 skills do because of the animation that accompanies them (e.g. "scythe" involves dashing forward and slashing my weapon through multiple bad guys). In DA: O most skills resulted in fuck all animations and or at best something lit up. Now I'm not necessarily sure if the animations that DA2 shows relate that well do the damage caused by the attack or anything but at least I know that I've done something. In my mind this makes DA2 instantly a thousand times better than DA:O because in the combat I not just guessing wildly wtf I'm actually doing. These visual cues vastly improve the experience but still don't fully explain when is a good time to use these techniques.

Some RPGs make an even greater mistake by giving me a decision that could potentially completely break the game without explaining how I should make that decision. In Fallout and Oblivion you are given the choice of which skills your character specialises in. This is in some ways awesome because it allows you to play through the game in many different ways. But it's not that all choices are even, some are just the wrong choices. Some sets of skills are just stupid to combine together and make a broken character. Others necessitate that you play the game in a certain way which you might enjoy. The problem is that you don't know any of these things when you make the decision at the beginning of the game. This is one of the reasons I've only played an hour or two of Fallout 3 and barely progressed in the story. I created a broken character and so the game just isn't fun.

This isn't a problem that exclusive to western RPGs either. Japanese RPGs suffer from similar problems. Just as I've not got my money's worth from The Witcher, I've only reached one of the early battles of Eternal Sonata before getting completely stuck. Most offer the solution that you can spend hours improving your character so that they are powerful enough that you can play through the game without ever understanding them, or not understanding till 40 hours in.

Not all RPG like games are this inaccessible, some games like the fable or mass effect series are much easier to get into but they have been consistently criticised for stripping the "RPG" out of RPGs. This makes me think that something that is prized by some fans of the genre is it's inaccessibility. But for someone like me who loves many RPGs it completely kills some games for me. I just wish reviews of RPGs would mention their accessibility and tell me if it's a game that I won't be able to get past the first few quests or if it's a game that I will potentially spend 60+ hours on.

There is a person in Somalia crying over an uncollected bin

2011-09-30T12:43:00.003+01:00

This morning the government announced that there would be a £250 million fund for the purpose of funding councils to keep weekly bin collections. Eric Pickles the minister for Local Government said two things in support of this that are so ridiculous that I want to smash my head against the nearest hard surface.

Quote number 1: "For most people, the only visible service that they get from the council is the removal of refuse"
Source :http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2043512/Eric-Pickles-pledges-250m-PAY-councils-dump-fortnightly-bin-collections.html#ixzz1ZQvX8N3g

This one is just patently false. Most people look outside of their window at night time and can see their street at night. I would have said street lighting was the most visible service that people get from their council. Or possibly the recycling collection is just as visible as the normal refuse collection. Or local roads which are not falling apart. Beyond the stupidly false nature of the statement what's even worse is the world view behind it. The idea that what matters is what the government is seen to be doing for everyone rather than what help it gives the few who need it. Bin collection might be one of the things that rich people get from the state and apparently that is what is important to the conservative government.

Quote number 2: :‘It’s a basic human right for every Englishman and woman to be able to put the remnants of their chicken tikka masala in the bin without having to wait two weeks for it to be collected.’

Source: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/866361-weekly-rubbish-collections-out-more-recycling-in#ixzz1ZR09boiR

This one is slightly older but similarly stupid. It seems that a conservative view of human rights includes having your bin collected every week but not housing (see massive housing benefit cuts) or freedom of movement (see cutting mobility component of disability benefits). I know he was partially joking but again it's the thought behind it. That we should prioritise something that people don't actually need but is used by rich people over helping those in need.

Oh and the other policy announcement today, that we should increase the speed limit to 80mph because 75% fewer people die on the roads. Not necessarily a bad idea but using that figure as a argument for it is fucking stupid. It seems to be saying "fewer people are dying on the roads, we should change that".

The Moral decline of the British Elite is bullshit

2011-08-12T12:21:00.003+01:00

A lot has been said in recent months (mainly since the expenses scandal) about the moral decline of the British elite in recent X years (some say since the banking crisis some say the last twenty years). This is utter crap. I'm not saying that there isn't a horrible stench of corruption around elites. I just question the notion that this is in anyway a new thing. Businessman have always been out to maximise their profits at the expense of others. Politicians have been using their power and privilege for their own benefit as long as politicians have existed. The only thing that is new is the amount that we know about this elite bad behaviour and it's current manifestation. I'm not saying that it is inevitable and can't be fixed. But we need to stop looking at the past through rose coloured glasses. If we don't then we may think that a good way forward would be to revert to the past which is just a silly idea.

A post totally unrelated to any current event that is happening now

2011-08-10T10:34:00.003+01:00

This post has absolutely nothing to do with current events in England and is not at all related to the surrounding political debate.

You can explain something without supporting something. When geologists say that the movement of tectonic plates causes earthquakes they are not saying that earthquakes are therefore a good thing. That's a bit facetious so here's a closer example. A person with depression kills themselves, saying that they killed themselves because they were depressed is not saying that it was a good thing that they killed themselves. Just as it wouldn't be saying that suicide is not a bad thing if someone was then to suggest that we should create better medicines for combating depression. If a person kills someone in self defence, it's not saying it was ok for them to kill someone to say the attack they were defending themselves from was wrong. If a person steals bread to feed their family, it's not saying stealing is OK to condemn the poverty that drove them to do it. To claim otherwise is moronic. And you'd think that someone with a degree from Oxford in English, a former president of the Oxford Union and former leader writer for the Times wouldn't be moronic.

This is one of the things that I really hate in political debates. They claim that their opponent is saying something which they knew they aren't saying. In fact they know their not saying that because they just said "I'm not saying x".

OK so that first sentence might have been a little bit of a lie, it's a little bit related.

Lost: Second time through

2011-08-09T21:51:00.002+01:00

Image via WikipediaI was going to write a post on why the Lost finale is really good and why io9 is wrong about the finale but I know it'd just be stupid to write what io9 should have realised watching it. So instead I'll just say a little about watching Lost through a second time and how that lead to me enjoying the finale even more the second time through.

You see Lost is better the second time through. Well Lost is in the most part better the second time through. There are a few episodes in the middle series which hinge on the mysteries but mostly lost is better without thinking about the mysteries distracting you. That might seem a little odd considering how when Lost was on TV everyone was talking about the mysteries and unanswered questions. But watch it through again and you realise that Lost is just a really well written fantasy show, in the same way that BSG is not about mystery and is mainly just a really good Sci fi show. You get absorbed in the mythology in both cases but that's not just about wondering what you don't know it's also just a well built world that sucks you in. Obviously on a second run through you don't care about unanswered questions because you already know exactly which ones will eventually be answered and what those answers are. Instead you watch the characters, how they interact and develop, and the themes and issues the show explores. For example I posted before about the man of faith thing and that's a crucial theme through out lost. The first time through I focused almost entirely on Locke as the man of faith rather than Jack whose journey to believe is one of the central narratives of the series. That's another thing, on the second viewing I actually liked Jack rather than just seeing him as the necessary protagonist to keep the plot moving. He's still not one of my favourite characters but I empathised with him and the resolution of his character at the end really hit a chord with me.

So when watching the finale a second time through is like the whole experience of lost a second time through squashed into an hour and a half. They deal well with the mythology, explore more interesting themes and wrap up the character's you've grown to care about. The fact that not everything is explained doesn't matter one iota, the character's DO have meaningful resolutions (if you're paying attention io9), and the themes that the series has touched on throughout surface again. If you enjoyed Lost the first time through watching on TV I would highly recommend getting the DVDs and watching it through again. Especially season 1 and 6.

A "non-idealogical" policy without proof is not a policy

2011-07-11T15:46:00.004+01:00

If a policy is supposed to be a way of improving services, then surely there should be some evidence before hand that it will improve services. I've not read the new white paper yet but none of the politicians supporting it have even bothered to quote evidence showing that reforms within it will work. A while ago Ben Goldacre made the point that we should really test policy before we put it in place. This so obviously applies to massive sweeping reform proposed in the white paper released today. If it's not just an idealogical policy with the idea state=bad, everything else=good then it should be backed up by evidence that this kind of reform works. But from the evidence I've read (admittedly most of it coming from lefty academic sources) there's no significant evidence of this kind of privatisation improving service provision. So you know maybe we could possibly not try and change how we run the entire country without perhaps running a pilot project or two first?

Temporary relocation

2011-07-06T20:44:00.006+01:00

I'm back in Bristol now for the time being. I'm not really sure how long for it all depends on how applications and things go. Leaving York was sad and I know I'm going to miss it but the whole leaving thing was made slightly odder in that I wasn't really sure where I'm going. It changes the whole leaving thing when you're not going somewhere to settle. In all probability I won't settle in the same place doing the same thing for quite some time, at least a year or so. I really don't want to stay here because I want to forge a life for myself rather than just sitting around. I'm applying for jobs and hoping that I get something whether it's long term or not. In some ways it sucks and I like the security of knowing what I'm doing and where I'm living and having Cassie in the same house as me. But it's not all bad and horrible. There's also a kind of excitement all these jobs I'm applying for sound really cool and I could get the chance to do loads of things which would be really interesting. I was also going quite tired of being at university by the time I left. Something about the lifestyle I just felt myself growing weary of. I want to go out and do stuff and I guess I'll get the opportunity to do that now.

I got a lot of things from my time at York and I hope that the best things I've gotten I can take with me. They gave me lots of opportunities to do cool stuff and the experience I've gotten from them will hopefully help me get a job in an area that I'll enjoy. It's also helped develop me as a person, I feel quite different to how I was when I arrived there. Of course the best thing from my time of York is Cassie and I definitely get to keep her :D. So that's kind of where I am at this point. Who knows how I'll be in 3 months, 6 months, a year or two years time.

What do you do with a B.A. in English,
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge,
Have earned me this useless degree.

I can't pay the bills yet,
'Cause I have no skills yet,
The world is a big scary place.

But somehow I can't shake,
The feeling I might make,
A difference,To the human race.

Rejecting the market and raising values

2011-06-18T13:36:00.002+01:00

So I went to a talk last night by Baroness Kennedy and it was really interesting. She was addressing the question of where our concept of justice has gone. Although she didn’t put it as simply as this she blamed Hayek and his advocate in this country Thatcher and all the leader since which have followed her policies. Hayek’s resentment of the ideas of social justice and focus on the market above all things have contaminated society’s values. We know longer value things like education, justice and equality and view all things through the prism of the market. This combined with globalisation has lead to insecurity and fear. This fear leads to over active politicians trying to quell the public’s fears with policies to set up and defeat false enemies in immigration and crime. I think that’s roughly the essence of what she said and it explored some really important themes and ideas. She believed that it was academics and others responsibility fight this marketisation of values.

One of the things struck me listening to that is that this is something which is also really the churches job. The church should preach about the primacy of values and that we should do things that accord with them rather than merely what is market rational. “But Jesus didn’t say anything about the market” I hear you say. And I think that might almost be the point. The focus in the Gospels is on the values (equality, justice, inclusivity, dignity, and a whole lot more). Jesus deals with markets in showing their unimportance, Give to Ceasar that which belongs to Ceasar, Give to God what belongs to God, money and markets aren’t the important things. Where the market is put in an important place he chucks it out (see traders in temple).

But maybe I’m scripturally wrong on this and maybe I’m missing something. There were a whole load of other things that came up in the talk but I can’t quite pin them down and deal with them neatly just yet.

Almost over

2011-05-19T16:00:00.003+01:00

I've got just one exam left of my degree and that's on Rawls. Whilst on one hand I kind of can't wait to be free from all this revision and stuff on the other hand I'm going to miss spending all my time reading this stuff. Rawls is work is just really interesting and says some really great stuff and starts really interesting arguments with critics.

Essentially Rawls says that you are unreasonable unless you recognise that others are rational and have equally valid points of view and since you cannot rationally convince them of the superiority of your view we must provide them the liberty to pursue theirs. A conservative critic replies that this makes all conservatives unreasonable and therefore has to be wrong. It means that I get to write awesome sentences like this "Even if Rawls's argument considers all conservative perspectives unreasonable it does not thereby invalidate the argument". It just makes me smile, that because of that poor argument I get to put in place an awesome put down. I'll try and make an examples I write in the exam diplomatic in case it's marked by someone not a fan of Rawls or Liberal thought but still it's great to read. Four days left anyway should get back to the revisioning...

Marr was perfectly right

2011-05-01T17:40:00.005+01:00

Image via WikipediaAndrew Marr was completely and utterly justified in getting a super injunction. There was no legitimate reason to broadcast any affair he had with another broadcaster. Exactly the same is true of every footballer and other celebrity who has gotten one to prevent their private lives from becoming public. It's just completely unjustifiable for a newspaper to print the intimate details of a persons life, in doing they are breaking that persons fundamental human rights. Now it might be argued that super injunctions aren't that effective in the multimedia age (I'd heard about the affair before the injunction was broken from the internet) but we shouldn't be saying they are wrong.

The human right to privacy is just as important if not more so than the right to freedom of speech. I'm not crazy or alone in thinking that, it's an opinion shared by two of the most important rights theorists in modern political thought. John Stuart Mill is not simply advocating a right to the freedom of expression in his famous book on Liberty, he is also arguing for a right to privacy. His argument that government should not intervene other than to prevent harm to others is well known but what is less well known is the other half of that argument. He also argues that society should not intervene into individual's private lives unless it will prevent harm to others. It could be argued that a situation like the one with Marr, isn't what Mill is talking about but given Mill's history it probably is precisely what he's talking about. In his own time Mill was involved in a similar sort of scandal. He fell in love with a married woman and was rumoured to have been having an affair with her. Once her husband died, they later got married and wrote On Liberty together (according to Mill's dedication). Whilst there's no historical evidence that they had an affair at the time Mill felt excluded from the whole of society because of these rumours. The point that Mill wanted to make with his dual argument was that an overly prying society can be just as harmful as a censoring government.

John Rawls in his Theory of Justice makes a crucial point that freedom of speech is useless without other freedoms to back it up. In order to utilise our freedom of speech we must have a right to privacy [EDIT: turns out this isn't in the book was just an extension that lecturer suggested was natural] and a right to free association in order for us to formulate our opinions in private, then what we can say is not truly expressing ourselves. Again you might ask how is Marr relevant? Well this is not as straight forwardly within Rawls but I think it's within his thinking. Where the press invade politicians and newscasters private lives they get the power to discredit their opponents. This means that they can undermine their credibility and so when they do speak no one listens. The right to free speech is generally considered to be void if there is violent reprisals if you do say anything and the same should be considered to be the case in the context of invasion of privacy. If someone didn't want him asking difficult personal questions to Jacqui Smith or Nick Clegg (who he was interviewing the week that Guido posted about his affair) then outing his own information is a good way of doing that. I'm not saying that is what happened in this case but it is what could happen in any future case. It's not conspiracy theorist stuff. Chris Huhne becomes a big Lib Dem face in government and within a month he's caught having an affair. He had been having that affair for a while but it was worth reporting when he was worth smearing.

That's the argument for privacy and I think a super-injunction is pretty much the only way of guaranteeing it. Before I wrap up this overly long post I'm just going to quickly address some of the counter arguments. Ian Hislop who was putting in a legal challenge against Marr's super injunction said that it was "pretty rank of him to have an injunction" when asking politicians about failures in their judgement and failures in there private lives. I think he's partly right and partly an arse. It would be hypocritical to delve into all areas of a politicians private life whilst protecting his own. But the solution here isn't to therefore revoke all people's right to privacy. We shouldn't be questioning politicians on their private lives unless they want to talk about it or it's relevant to the role they perform for the public. Whether Gordon Brown was misusing prescription drugs could be relevant, whether William Hague is having an affair is not. This follows on to Guido's own little comment on the mess, that we all like it when the other side slips up but not when it's our own. I think sadly he is entirely right, I get not a small amount of pleasure at finding out that a homophobic republican has been caught soliciting gay sex. But I'm in the wrong then and shame on me for that.

There's another argument that we should know about these things in the case of politicians because it affects whether or not we should vote for them but that's not relevant to the issue in general and I think needs more time and thought to answer.

Death brings new life

2011-04-24T13:53:00.004+01:00

There's one Easter Sermon I really would have like to have heard and that's Cardinal Keith O'Brien's attack on secularism in his Easter message. I don't agree with him (more on that in a minute) but what's more interesting to me is how on earth he managed to get to that from the Easter story. There are bits of the bible that defend tradition and conservatism but the Easter story is not one of them. The Resurrection and Easter is about new beginning and new life. Yes, Jesus was persecuted and killed for his beliefs/actions but that was three days ago, put it in a Good Friday sermon if you must, that's not Easter.

The sermon I heard this morning was appropriately on the theme of new life and new beginnings and included a little bit on political reform. I'd like to stretch that a little bit further and give an idea of how the Easter story can tell us a little bit of how to deal with what Cardinal O'Brien calls "aggressive secularism". The Resurrection says clearly that death is not the end and as Jesus says we can be reborn. Rather than holding onto the current old ways of the church interacting with the public sphere that secularists object to, let them die as they have been doing for decades. Special status for the Church and for believers is the past and it's time the church engages society rather than being asked to be kept holy, contained and separate. Don't say that the equalities law should have little exemptions for the church because we're different, we're special. Let the special place reserved that says "church only" die. But as we know this death is not the end, secularists can't possibly push religion from the public sphere. As long as there are people of faith speaking, motivated by faith and the church speaks in that public sphere as one voice amongst many. The believer is known by the fruits of his actions not by his special legal exemptions. Let there be a new beginning and new life with the church acting as part of society and reforming society rather than asking to be let to do as it will.

Fighting the "screw you, you deserve it" impulse

2011-04-19T21:23:00.003+01:00

There's a part of me that sees the news about polls turning against AV and things "fuck people really are stupid". People have accepted the misleading information and outright lies (AV makes the BNP fucking unelectable). No one cared to think for themselves and do some research on it. Just as an aside I think the Yes2AV campaign has been putting out some stinkers as well and they shouldn't be believed either (there are good arguments YES2AV just have been talking crap instead). This side of me just says "fuck it, people get the politics they deserve". They buy the newspapers that make shit up and hack peoples phones. They complain about politicians treating them like idiots but they express no interest in what politicians are doing most of the time and don't research the issues.

I know for many reasons that this side of me is just stupid and wrong but some days it is so fucking tempting to think like that. And with that poll on the front of the guardian today is one of those days...

I grow weary of your misogynistic bullshit

2011-04-11T18:05:00.002+01:00

Image via WikipediaFor a few years now I've been a regular reader of Kotaku. It's been the site I go to for all of my video game news but today I removed it from my favourites. Although Kotaku has some of the more interesting comment pieces written there about the industry it also has a lot of shit. In the end it wasn't the amount of boring crime stories that only slightly relate to video games that made me leave, it was the boobs. The complete and utter fixation on posting pictures of every single video game character or person who cosplayed as a video game character that left very little to the imagination. I know video games is a very male orientated pass-time and to a certain extent you have to cater to your audience but shit, really that much?

I've now added Joystiq, my second favourite video game news blog, to my favourites because they seem to do this kind of shit less.

Lost in a Virtual World: Mass Effect, biological weapons and genocidal abortions

2011-03-29T11:13:00.003+01:00

Image by gamerscoreblog via Flickr

*Spoilers for Mass Effect 1 and 2*

Background info: Mass Effect is an RPG series set in the far future in a galaxy where there are several different races which have a joint system of overarching governance but still some independence of individual races in their own governments (I'm not sure if the EU or the UN is a better metaphor for the overarching Council). Before the beginning of the games there is a series of large scale wars that threaten to tear the galaxy apart. The first is a war against insect like creatures called the Rachni and in order to defeat them a race called the Krogan were "technologically uplifted" to act as foot soldiers in the war. The thing that makes the Krogan special is that they have an extremely fast breeding cycle and can withstand harsh climates. There home planet is ridiculously hostile with massive predators and also undergoing a nuclear winter so before this uplifiting they weren't experiencing that massive population growth. But after the Rachni wars the Krogan were given Rachni planets to expand onto and there numbers grow massively and they began a policy of territorial expansion taking over neighbouring worlds. This eventually lead to war with the Council races. The Council races looked like they were losing so they developed a biological weapon called the Genophage which reduces the rate of live births to one in a thousand creating massive amounts of still births. The Genophage causes the downfall of the Krogan race but as of the time of the games not it's complete extinction.

The Genophage is probably one of the most interesting parts of the Mass Effect universe and presents a whole load of really interesting moral dilemmas which you encounter through out the games. One of you companions, Wrex, in the first game is a Krogan who is understandably fiercely anti genophage and he presents you with a serious problem when one of the main bad guys claims to have a cure for the Genophage within a base that you are trying to blow up. The game then force you to deal with the question of if you can legitimately ask a person to help fighting against someone that can offer their race a future. The bad guy here is actually only cloning them and then indoctrinating them using mind washing techniques but in this conflict you get to see through Wrex a geniune case against the genophage. Then in the second game one of your companions, Mordin, is a scientist who has helped alter the Genophage to counteract the Krogan's subsquent evolution which has reduced it's affectiveness. Mordin is suffers through a crisis of conscience throughout the second game and you can decide whether you agree that his actions were the right thing to do or a moral abomination.

The great thing about this choice is that it's not forcing you into a false choice between good and obviously evil or even not letting you explore the subtleties of the issue it does just seem to genuinely come down to either the right or thing or a horrific thing. They also present both sides with the two best Characters in the series who in playing a genuinely liked and found to be identifiable with. So it just leaves you with how you should feel about the Genophage. During gameplay I kinda fudged this question because of the mechanics of the game (which I've complained about before) but it still presents an interesting dilemma which I'm still not sure how to answer.

On the one hand you can view it as a choice between unborn lives and current lives. By essentially aborting all but one in a thousand Krogan babies they are saving the lives of all the people that would have died if the war had continued. It's not genocide because it doesn't actually involve killing any person (in the philosophical sense since fully developed Krogan seem to be persons), unless you see abortion as straightforward murder then the Genophage is genocide on a massive scale.

Or you can see it as a question of intervention and responsibility. Only because of the initial intervention and "uplifting" did the Krogan birth rates grow so massively and it could be seen that the genophage is merely returning the Krogan to there former state. But that doesn't really seem like a satisfactory argument. You can't turn back the clock because you started it. It's not legitimate for a father to kill his son because he wouldn't be there without him. On the other hand though there does seem to be something the argument that when you give someone some technology you are partially responsible for how they use it. Whilst the idea of restoring the natural balance does seem appealing I'm not sure it can really work as a justification for such a brutal action.

The last prism to view the Genophage through are the penal ideas of punishment, protection and capacity for change. The Krogans did start the Krogan war and seem to have responsibility for the deaths that followed (though possibly it also lies with the other races due to the "uplifiting"). The Genophage can be viewed like a prison sentence for the entire race to punish them for the wars and to protect the rest of the galaxy from the threat that they pose. Even if this penal narrative works there are still questions. Is it ok to lock up an entire race because being war-like is in their nature, and what happens when you have people that look like exceptions (Wrex, whilst being a warrior through and through wants more for his people)? Do you allow for them to reform over time and if so can then you justify the adapting of the Genophage to keep the numbers down when it is beginning to look like the race is reforming?

As I said it's something I still find difficult because I'm genuinely torn between the first narrative and the last one. It protects the universe and doesn't actually kill anyone but on the other hand can you really justify treating a whole race as one and adopt a massive eugenics policy? I hope they explore this some more in ME3 in November and you know maybe physics the morality game mechanics so I have to struggle with this while playing rather than as an afterthought.

Christian Identity

2011-03-29T11:06:00.003+01:00

The question of what makes a person a Christian or how should we identify someone as a Christian can be a difficult question. It’s not something I particularly like looking at or stating because it can be extremely hurtful. If someone says all Christians believe x and you don’t then you can feel very excluded. People have been defining what it means to be Christian since very earlier Christianity with creeds and defining certain heresies. If you think this or do that then you’re not a Christian. But I’ve always had a distinct trouble with most of these even the very idea of a creed or doctrinal basis. As soon as you start writing this definition of what a person should believe or should be to be a Christian you start getting into real problems. We start trying to use language to describe things that are beyond language’s ability to describe. We try and cast our interpretations of what God is as the exclusive definition.

This topic is particularly bothering me right now because of the census. Whilst there are many problems with how the census is carried out and how it formulates the questions, I think it’s not a terrible idea for us to ask “what is your religion”. I find myself slightly sympathetic to the BHA’s campaign that “if you’re not religious for God’s sake say so”. I really don’t like the idea of being culturally Christian, or Christian by family because it undermines what it means to be a Christian. There should some action (mental or physical) involved with being a Christian not just an automatic entrance on the basis of country or parentage. Church attendance is a crap indicator of if you should consider yourself a Christian or not because there are avowed atheists who turn up at Easter and Christmas but at the same time there are those with strong beliefs who couldn’t find a church that would accept them. If none of these work then we go back to the problem above of saying what we should believe or do in order to say that we are a Christian.

The sermon I heard sunday morning really cleared this up for me (apologises to Brother Joseph if I butcher his message). It was centred around the reading of Jesus and the Samaritan woman and the well. In the reading we don’t actually find out if the Samaritan women comes to believe, the last we hear from her is her telling people to come hear the person that knows all she has ever done and her questioning if he could really be the Messiah. Maybe the reason she doesn’t accept and believe is the same reason I’m having trouble with this issue. We’ve overcomplicated something that can actually be really simple. Jesus doesn’t ask the Samaritan to change her life in order to get the living water or to state emphatically who he is and how all of that works. Jesus just says ask and I would give you living water. So maybe that’s it, that’s what makes us a Christian is just asking. We are a Christian if we want to follow Jesus. You should tick that box if you feel you want to tick that box. But you know it's probably worth thinking about as you do it.

Returning from Retreating

2011-03-28T23:19:00.002+01:00

Image via WikipediaI had an amazing time last week in the Friary in Alnmouth. The people I was there with were awesome and I can't remember a week where I've laughed more. I also got a lot of time in silence and time to think some of which I'm still processing. I didn't get the same spiritual connection as I did in L'arche as I saw the different expressions of spirituality and realised they're not how I see it. I saw many awesome places though like Lindesfarne (where I also bought mede). Before I went I bought notebook to carry around and I wrote some half formed thoughts in it for a couple of days until my pen broke so some of that might get developed into blog posts over the next while. Whilst I was there I read a decent chunk of Tatlow's Story of the SCM (history of the scm till 1933) and got to take it away at the end of the weekend and what it said definitely made me think about some things.

Men of Faith

2011-03-19T22:06:00.006Z

Image via WikipediaMaybe it's the fact that X-men and Lost (thar be spoilers here...) have just been the things I've been watching over the last few days but no one else see the John Locke, Charles Xavier links? I don't just mean bald andImage via Wikipedia associated with wheelchairs. They both play similar roles in their duos. You have Xavier and Magneto. Xavier has a dream and believes that it can happen. Magneto on the other hand doubts that what Xavier believes is even possible. Then you've got John Locke and Jack. Again Locke believes, Jack doubts it's possible. Magneto and Jack have their own as they see it more realistic dreams. But in the end the moral of the story in both X-men and Lost is that the believers are right. They're both really interesting characters. Locke is tormented by his past but finds his purpose on the island and each time he almost gives up the Island reaffirms his purpose. Then when he leaves the Island and nothing can reaffirm his purpose he kills himself. So whilst his faith that there is purpose is a driving force of the show it isn't enough to sustain him. But in killing himself he finishes his purpose is fulfilled and leads to his hopes being achieved. Others follow him at points but he never has a true convert until the very end when Jack believes fully and honours his memory. From the X-men I've seen/read Xavier has converts they believe too and take on his role as leaders in the faith. But he still has the same role to play against Magneto he must show him that there is more to the world than is limited broken view. Admittedly I'm straining the two comparisons but it's just a cool theme in both things. The rivalry between adversaries and competition between two incompatible views of the world. There's definitely more in the Man of Faith concept though and how it plays out in fiction but I might come back to that another day.

My final lecture

2011-03-07T16:40:00.002Z

Image via WikipediaWow I've had my last lecture of my undergraduate degree. It might be my last degree lecture ever... that's kinda what's going through my head. I really enjoyed huge chunks of my degree and would love to learn more and develop my thinking more in some of these areas. But I'm not sure that's a good reason to keep doing it. I could work and save for a masters and I'm pretty sure I'd love it. But I'm not sure how much more I'd get from it than if I spent the time playing video games. Obviously just because I enjoy something doesn't mean I should do it. But on the other hand I don't really know what I'm going to do and something that I'd enjoy sounds really appealing. So lets just see what job I can find myself when I graduate. If I can find something great then maybe I'll wait five years and do another degree through the OU or something.

Busy in a good way

2011-03-02T18:08:00.003Z

I'm getting to the stage in my degree where I'm really really busy. I've got deadlines for procedural work and then I start doing work for the final assessments of my degree. At the same time I've been doing some SCM stuff and some other society stuff on campus. This means that I've got loads of stuff to do. But it's not been getting me stressed on down much because it's all stuff I enjoy doing. The essays I'm writing are both about topics I care about (how geeky is it that I care about the right interpretation of Machiavelli?), the SCM stuff is things that are really important to me. Still it would be nice if I had an extra week or two to spread this stuff out over...

On being Progressive

2011-02-22T11:29:00.005Z

Looking at yesterday's post I notice a glaring omission. The other term which can be used to mean the opposite of conservatism is being progressive. This can mean the opposite of both types of Conservatism and is pretty much the direct opposite. Again it doesn't track the difference between the two types of conservatism and in creates two types of progressivism hence you have conservatives being progressive and even the Progressive Conservative party. It makes analysis no easier than any of the other terms. It's also why Progressive Labour means so very little in that it's not conservative and that's all it says.

But that is in fact my problem with Labour as I talked about yesterday Labour is being too conservative. Rather than just saying don't reform they should be saying what's wrong with there reform AND how to fix it. An opposition has to still try and improve government policy rather than just oppose it. It's politically good because there is nothing that looks better than the other party being forced to adopt a policy you created and you being able to claim credit for it.

The Opposite Of Conservative is...

2011-02-21T12:50:00.005Z

Image via WikipediaI've talked before here about the theory behind conservatism (again note the small c). Now I'm just going to expand upon two parts of the traditionally conservative perspective. One part of conservatism is the idea that a problem is too complicated to be solved by the state or that things are best left as they are and try and change gradually rather than attempting to fix the problem. This is best outlined in theory by Oakshott and his essay 'On Being Conservative'. In practice it is best exemplified by the Government's approach to the Banks, can't be too rough or we'll spook them. Then there is the other part of conservative thinking which is to have a smaller state and lower taxation. Whilst these two parts are intricately linked (obviously if there's things you think the state can't do then you should think we should have a smaller state).

But my problem now is that the alternative polls to these parts of conservatism either don't have names or have names which are never used or used wrongly. The first, obviously wrong, answer is to say that the opposite to both types of conservatism is liberalism. Liberalism is not the opposite at all and is in fact it's own house of idea based solely around ideas of freedom and where the state can legitimately tread. It obviously interplays with conservatism in interesting ways and lots of American conservatism is related to liberalism. If they were really opposite philosophies then the current coalition would be very oddly based.

Another answer would be the opposite in both senses is socialism. This is a closer fit because it can be seen as definitely challenging the second part of conservatism and rejecting part of the first idea. Socialism does seem to say that most things can be sorted out by the state as well. But it's not quite it either because in a country that has socialism, a socialist is going to act very conservatively (see the socialists in France holding on with teeth and claws to their retirement age and other benefits).

Really the opposite to the first kind of conservatism is Rationalism. But as a term it's almost never used to define non-conservative thinking even in theory let alone in practice (what would people think if Miliband re-branded Labour as Rationalist Labour?). It's the idea the politics can be used to radically transform a situation. We can rationally plan out ways of dealing with problems and solve them using government. It's there in Machiavelli's idea that we should beat fortune into submission and it's there in the creation of the NHS.

Why is this important? It's important for my Politics and Philosophy module in articulating the difference between Machiavelli and Guicciardini. But now it's important because there's been a woeful analysis of what the current government is doing and what's wrong with Labour's response. Cameron isn't simply enacting conservative policies of the second sort. There are many things which he is doing like the NHS and welfare reform which is very much not conservative (of the first sort) and is in fact very much rationalist. Labour's response to both has been that of conservatism rather than of rationalism. It may not be always wrong to be conservative in this way but in these cases being conservative is precisely how they are failing. Whilst people don't support The Conservatives' NHS reforms, they're not going to support Labour for simply being conservative. The strength of the third way movement was in being entirely Rationalist without being necessarily socialist. The Labour party shouldn't just be talking about protecting the public sector but also talking about reforming the public sector.

eep that was a bit of a long post and there's more to be said but I still have a cold and my brain can't concentrate much longer and it's been a long day...

Trying a new experience of church

2011-02-13T21:47:00.003Z

Tonight I went to evening prayer at my local church. Much to my shame this is the second time I've tried out another church other than my one just by campus (because I liked it and it was what I needed when I found it). It's also even more to my shame my second non-traditional church service that I've tried outside SCM (the other first in both categories is Transcendence which describes itself quite accurately as "an ancient future mass"). It was really not what I was used to. There was pizza and chocolate first and the seats were all arranged around tables. There was only a small group who attended and they were almost all students and they all knew each other. I'm sure it must be great for people who have been going forever but for me it just felt a bit awkward and scary (but that's just me being me I guess). Rowan and Graham were both there so it wasn't like I knew no one but still the whole arrangement was entirely different and took some adjusting to. But I really liked the discussion they had reflecting on a theme and a bible passage. Even though I wasn't quite in my comfort zone and not the usual church I'm used to I think I should go again next week. I'm not sure if Church should be a comfortable place but that's what it is for me usually. I like the annonminity of sitting in a pew and just joining in the hymns and prayers without having to do anything special which this didn't offer as much.

Anyway don't listen to me I'm absolutely exhausted and barely awake. I woke up way too early this morning worrying about a whole list of things so I really need to sleep now...

I really didn't know I cared so much

2011-02-08T19:50:00.003Z

After an absolutely amazing weekend at SCM conference, I've had a slightly odd two days. Yesterday I got enraged by something that I knew I disagreed with but I had no idea that I cared enough that I would still be simmering about it when I woke up the next morning. Then this evening I found myself defending a character against other people interpretations that again I wouldn't have thought I cared about. The thing that set me off yesterday was a GC email essentially talking about our own efforts to be inclusive and I reacted badly to one element of it. It turns out that's something I really care about, who knew.

Then today at theology talk we were talking about grace. Most of it was me pulling faces as some of the people some how over and over again put the cross at the heart of everything (seriously wtf is up with the obsession some people have with the cross, surely the reconnection's the important bit, but not gonna get into that now) but then we got into discussing the story of the prodigal son. Everyone was talking about the elder son as selfish and self-aggrandising and for some reason I felt really strongly compelled to defend him. Yes, he showed a lack of grace but it doesn't mean that it was out of selfish reason it could be simply that he loved his father and couldn't forgive his brother for the hurt caused even if his father could. And around that we had a really interesting conversation about why we interpret Bible stories in different ways and how we see ourselves and others as the characters within them. Again showing something that I didn't exactly know was there in me.

The Christian Paradigm

2011-02-04T11:20:00.003Z

This afternoon I'm off to Swanick of SCM conference and continuing with the last post I'm reflecting on conferences past. The main idea that has stuck with me from last year wasn't the main point from either of the conference speeches but actually was briefly mentioned in Q and A with Michael Taylor (you hear the two talks and q&A from the conference here). It was the idea that we could see Jesus as a paradigm. I know it's not new seeing Jesus as the perfect example which we should follow. But the idea of Jesus as a paradigm former really stuck with me that Jesus forms practices which we should follow and imitate but is also the guidelines which we should be living in but not something we expect to hit with everything we do. I saw this same idea refracted in one of the workshops I attended dealing with Jesus in the temple as an example for activism which we should try examine and follow.

But now I'm looking forward to the talks and workshops tomorrow as well as hanging out with all the awesome SCMy people. It will also be quite cool to bring some York people to SCM, we've got 4 other students coming as well as me and Rory. I really hope they like it.

Give us something or share it all

2011-01-18T13:54:00.007Z

SCM conference is coming up in a few weeks and reading about it has made me think about previous conferences and topics brought up in it. Specifically the one that jumped into my head, as I listened to Saul Williams worry about messages a father sends to his son, was a workshop on conceptions of masculinity. Which also got me to thinking about L'arche and some of things Jean Vanier was saying. Essentially the workshop at the SCM conference was saying that we need to reject the conception of masculinity being linked with violence and how we bring up our boys with guns and swords. But on the other hand Jean Vanier raised an interesting point. At L'arche they have a man's group, and not a women's group. He talked of how this was created because there was a need for this. According to him it was needed because men couldn't non-destructively release their violence (I'd rather use anger to describe this but it's not quite that) where as women didn't have that problem. The women let out violence with their words.

I think there is a real problem in merely assembling positive images of feminitiy. It's gotten to the stage where things that are associated within the feminist movement with masculine are bad things and feminine are good. Good feminity is in caring and being intuitive and rejecting typical assumptions about it being unfeminine to lead. But what is left with masculinity? There is just the negative of violence and conflict, things that no one wants.

Thinking about what positive traits do we want to be associated with masculinity I tried to think of things that were genuinely masculine and positive. My answer was logic and argument. Men and maths, philosophy and other purely argument based subjects go together. It is something that highly correlates. In fact I've heard feminist critiques of exams for being too masculine in being to logic based rather than allowing a feminine expressive style. How's that for a new masculinity? The people to look up to are your platos, your einsteins or to be more modern your dawkinses (even if there are bits of him I hate), your hawkings.

But I have a good feeling that won't sit will with feminist women. The response would be (quite rightly) "but I'm not illogical, I can argue". Thing is right, fuck that. If setting up that positive imagery of masculinity says that women aren't it or are naturally lacking in it then think about what positive images of femininity do. When you say that it is feminine to be caring, think about what I want to reply, "but I'm caring". Just as many women who do focus on things that are traditionally masculine and act in that way, don't want to be called masculine, I don't want to be called feminine. So either let me have my positive masculinity and embrace that you can be masculine or stop trying to build up positive femininity. Cast femininity and masculinity into the flames and just move the fuck on.

I know this isn't the biggest issue in gender issues and there is a real issue of Women being discriminated against and correcting that. But that doesn't change how it makes me feel about me.

and most of my conversations with men seem to revolve around music
I'm no musician but the pain has been instrumental
my sense finally tune the instruments of - of - of
of being lonely, of being lost, of being loved, of being human
man I could use a metaphor but I can't get beyond this shit
I could use someone to talk to
but most of my conversations with men seem to revolve around music

Lost in a Virtual World: Bioshock 2 and mercy

2011-01-17T16:32:00.004Z

In Bioshock 2 you are presented with a sort of moral choice at the end of each of the levels/areas. You can either kill or save someone who tries to kill you in the first one (who's protecting their area), you can either kill or save someone who tries to kill you and betrayed you previously causing you great suffering and putting you in this giant mess (who's protecting themselves) and you can either kill or save someone who tries to kill you (who's protecting themselves) but has created an advanced directive asking for you to kill them. Killing them is all treated equally in the game despite the differences between them but it's the third one that's interesting for me.

A little bit more background on third choice, he is a scientist who submits to being a test subject for a mutating gene treatment as the treatment begins to have an effect he realises that not only is he losing his mind but he is also becoming morally questionable. So he decides to record a series of videos telling the next sane person to enter a certain area how to kill his mutated self. The mutated self that you encounter is undoubtedly evil. Not in the selfish way in which previous characters had been but also in a weird corporate everything is money kind of way and a haha you're suffering kind of way. But as far as you are aware he's not suffering. When you make the choice the mutated version begs for his life.

When I was playing through the game I saved the first two but killed the third. I'm not sure exactly why I did it, at the time each seemed just the right thing to do. The first two characters that you have an option of saving tell you why they are doing what they are doing. One is trying to do what they believe is best (and that involves you dying) and you really can't fault them for that. The second is just a weak pathetic person who's every action is for his own gain, even when he attacks you it's only because he fears you will try and kill him. Again, I'm not really sure you can fault him for that. In an ideal world he'd be imprisoned for what he did but the game isn't that world and he doesn't deserve death. But the mutated scientist says that you are his property and if you don't do as he says (you don't) then he'll kill you. You can fault him for that. He seems straightforwardly morally bad.

Then there's the issue of his advanced directive. Clearly the man he used to be did not want to become the man that he is there. Isn't there some duty to fulfill his wishes? The creator of a thread on the bioshock forums raises the point that isn't that man is already dead and the only relevant person therefore is the mutated man (incidentally an interesting thread worth reading the first page). But I'm not sure I can buy into this. I feel that we are ourselves essentially even if we change dramatically. I'm not sure that there can be a worse thing than having one's own moral character degraded and be robbed of the choice to be good. His own wish that he die rather than be an evil abomination, I think is something that needs respecting. I'm not really sure that it is more merciful to let him live than to kill him. You might be not allowing him his chance for a potential future redemption but the game strongly hints that he can't be de-mutated.

I also happen to like how the game deals with this as it does all your moral choices. You're in game "daughter" (it's complicated) learns from your choices and her actions at the end of the game reflects that. If you are merciful she is merciful. I'm happy with it saying that the game interprets the killing of the mutated scientist as unmerciful because it could easily seem so to a child (even if she's not supposed to be a child she thinks and acts like one). It's a very subtle moral point so it would be fine anyone seeing it as not merciful.

Let's tax divorce, that'll make better families...

2011-01-09T16:57:00.002Z

It's hard to over estimate just how mind numbingly stupid this is. The fact that anyone actually said this:" A Coalition source said: "The aim would be to be act as a deterrent and help convince parents that splitting up should be an option of last resort when all other avenues had been taken. The whole system needs to be made more family friendly."" just kills my brain. Clearly at the moment people just get divorced because they have nothing to do one Saturday and haven't had sex since Tuesday. You don't need an extra disincentive to add to divorce, the breakdown of your family is a disincentive enough. An added fee will make no difference. Even if a does make a difference what the fuck kind of marriage would that leave intact? "Oh we were going to get a divorce but we'd have to pay a fee to get our child maintenance sorted out so we better not", that sounds like a fucking great marriage. In an abusive marriage? well you better save up a little before trying to divorce your partner.

If the government were keen on being more "pro-family" and to stop more divorces then they're going about it completely the wrong way. The things that correlate most highly with divorce and family breakdown is economic hardship and job loss. Well it's a good thing this "pro family" government isn't putting millions of people out of work...

On asking a middle aged question

2011-01-08T09:17:00.005Z

It's been a while since I've blogged or anything because christmasy fun/ essay evil but about to be heading back to York soon. Anyway I'm in London because last night I travelled up to see Any Questions be recorded. Being the massive politics nerd that I am not only did I travel to see it I also submitted a question. My question was "does the panel think that the "botched" quango reform is symptomatic of a government trying to reform too fast?". My question got selected to be one of the questions that could pick from on air but I was number 8 out of 10 and only 7 questions go used. I was really happy with that though I obviously would have preferred to ask on air and gotten responses but it was still nice to be selected.

When the producer first called out my name I thought she looked a little surprised when I put up my hand. I obviously can't actually read her mind but I'm pretty sure that she was surprised at how young I was. My question was a bit of a middle aged persons kind of question. Anyway after the show my Mum went to complain to the producer about the age and gender make up (all but one were old men). She thought because I was young I should have got to ask my question because their aren't enough young people on radio 4. You see I found this annoying on two fronts, one because I think that at least some part of her thought that my Mum actually wrote the question (whilst physically true since I have shit handwriting) and I wrote it and it's a good question. Two, because it's the question that matters. My question was the kind of question that a middle aged person might write because it's just politics geekery. I agree with my Mum that there aren't enough young people on radio 4 but the only reason I think it's important is because young people do say different things. If the question was worth asking it would be selected for it's own merit. It being said by a young person's voice makes no difference. My question was a middle aged question and if they thought it was good enough it would have been on air but it was just about not.

So that was my moment of almost being on radio 4. Next time I'll try and think of a better question.

It was the Telegraph that were in the wrong

2010-12-23T16:49:00.003Z

It should come as no surprise that I think Vince Cable isn't in the wrong for privately saying to a constituent (these meetings are private and if an MP said outside what a constituent had confided there would be outrage) his opinion on policies, maybe stupid, but not wrong. I believe that the Telegraph in doing this sting is damaging the very nature of representative democracy. That might sound like an over exaggeration but it is really not. Note something, we don't live in a simple democracy, it's a representative democracy. Representative is the key word there. The conservatives government might have forgotten this with there quest for fewer MPs (and therefore more difficulty in representing an MP's constituents) and referenda (we're not a direct democracy so just because a majority think we shouldn't sign a treaty they don't understand doesn't mean we shouldn't sign that treaty). A key part of this is the relationship between an MP and their constituents and the bulk of the actual relating in this relationship happens in constituency surgeries. If an MP can't in full confidence explain their full position to a constituent then it hampers the constituent's ability to respond and inform the MP of what concerns them. But isn't printing the MPs views the best way of fully informing the constituents, the telegraph may reply? No, not if it damages the conversation between MP and constituent which this will surely do.

However that isn't even the line of argument that the Telegraph. They defend their actions on the basis of "collective responsibility". This idea that a cabinet/government should defend their collective line in all situations is acceptable in single party government but ridiculous in coalition. In fact it is this which really threatens representative democracy. The pressure on both parties in the coalition to act as if they love what the coalition does on all things is incredibly damaging. MPs should be telling concerned constituents that they disagree with what the coalition is doing and are within government arguing for the things that they were elected for. They should be acting as the representative of their constituencies wishes in government. Again this is clearly damaged by the Telegraph's actions.

But pssh maybe I'm just too much of a political theorist rather than pragmatist. Here I was thinking that we elected an MP to represent us because that was the best form of government. If we were trying to anything else with government then we have a piss poor system to do it with. Our vote isn't that we want this party to form a coalition and then defend that government. Our vote is us telling an MP we want this (their manifesto plus or minus anything they specifically pledged in the campaign) and get it at all costs. If we can't ask them how they're doing that or actually know if they're doing that then what the fuck are we doing?

PS. This is also kinda why I like AV and STV but think full PR is terrible idea. It also fully connects with why I think an MP's private life has fuck all to do with anything but these are ideas for me to work on another time.

Lost in a Virtual World: How Fable 2 chose my essay

2010-12-21T13:48:00.002Z

Image via WikipediaI'm going to take a short break from my wind waker playing to talk about Fable 2 and the essay I'm writing over Christmas for my course. Warning this post will contain spoilers for the ending of Fable 2. Also it will show that not only am I clearly a video game geek I'm also a philosophy geek.

So in Fable 2 the main villain is building a super powerful magic device and at the end of the game after you get the choice of using this power for one of three things. You can either use it to make yourself incredibly rich (the obviously evil option), you can use it to resurrect the thousands of people that were killed in creating the magical device, or you can use it to resurrect your family who are killed just before the final battle with the main villain. Unreflectively, it would seem that saving the thousands is the only right choice. But as I was playing it I thought that my character really only had one choice that he could make. How could he do anything other than save his wife and son (and his dog)? How could anyone expect him to do anything else? But my intuition was that not only was this the only choice he could make but that he wasn't doing anything morally blameworthy in doing so. This is where the moral philosophy that I've been studying comes in. Taurek, in his famous paper "Should the Numbers Count?", suggests that we all have this intuition. But he also points out that partial concerns can never overturn a moral duty and he therefore concludes that the number of people affected is not a moral concern. I don't think he's right to take his conclusion that far but there is something there. An aggregation based moral theory can't account for this intuition. In the essay I'm writing (or will be when I motivate myself to) I'm going to be examining whether a theory that can capture that intuition (in this case Scanlon's version of contractualism) can still say that sometimes numbers do count and that all other things being equal you can save the two over the one. But so far it's not looking too good.

If it weren't for Fable 2 though my naturally utilitarian intuition would have just rejected Taurek right away. It was only after the seminar on Taurek (which I spent arguing against him) that I remembered playing Fable 2 and how I had seen that final choice that I thought there may be something to it. By developing the character and building his relationships with the world I was able to gain a different moral perspective on a tricky moral issue.

Lost in a Virtual World: The Wind Waker session 2

2010-12-20T18:48:00.002Z

This time I sat and played from the pirate ship, through the forbidden fortress and windfall island up to landing on Dragoon Roost Island. The first section of this bit represents some of what I hate most about the game, broken platforming. You are supposed to be trying to jump from one platform to another but the camera's unwieldy to move and you never know whether you are going to make it to the platform or chandelier that you're trying to jump to. Then there's also the whole nature of the Forbidden Fortress level. After teaching you how to use your basic weapons before you actually get much of a chance to use them. Then there's the annoying but distinctly memorable sneaking bits which are fun up to the point where they become extremely frustrating. But it does mean that when you finally get your sword back you're over joyed. You also learn that you're not going to be rescuing your sister any time soon.

Now for the stuff I love. At the end of that level you get the reveal of Ganon, the evil that you are told destroyed a previous civilisation. But throughout this reveal all you are shown is his cloak and it just uses the music and legend to tell you this, is one bad mofo. After that you meet your talking boat who is another of the games shining personalities just because he's very odd with his loud crazy laugh. But that's like most of the awesomely over the top characters you meet. As you try and find a sail for the boat you realise you don't have quite enough money for it. You can get this cash in a number of ways. I decided to help this crazy over the top school teacher with giant pink hair persuade the small gang of misbehaving schoolboys to stop truanting. The way you persuade this gang (who call themselves the killer bees because, you know bees are awesome) to do as you say is by catching them all in a game of hide a seek. It's just this wonderful childish side quest that fits perfectly with the setting and is treated with appropriate amounts of drama for all involved. And then you buy your sail off this poor eskimo guy who tells you the tale of how his boat and all he owned was destroyed and so he needs your money to start a shop and make a living.

Anyway once you have the sail your let loose on the open seas. The game tells you can go anywhere whilst at the same time only letting you go with the wind. As I travelled even the small distance that I needed to go to get to the next island I met another crazy side character and found an island which I barely remembered from previous playthroughs.

Lost in a Virtual World: The Wind Waker session 1

2010-12-19T13:51:00.006Z

I've booted up the game and played through the first section (about 25 miuntes) and now time to give my thoughts. The game has a beginning which is designed to evoke the nostalgia in me for previous Zelda games. It tells the legend of the hero of time (as played out in The Ocarina of Time, my favourite game in the series). Right away you're brought into the game with a new take on the classic theme. And that brings me to one of the things I love about the game and remembered as soon as I started playing. The music and sound design is just amazing. The first island has this joyful theme which encourages you to explore and muck around. At the same time it's still visually beautiful. There are so many bright colours and all the characters have this awesome cartoonish look to them. This style is best played out in the expressions of Link (the protagonist). Whilst he doesn't talk at all he express a huge amount through the funny things he does with his facial expressions. But whilst expressing lots and making me laugh Link still is to a large extent a blank page for you to project yourself on to. Other characters are introduced in this first segment but none really establish themselves aside from Link and his grandmother. She ultimately is a minor character in the rest of the game but just at the beginning she has two really important encounters with Link. In the first she express her wonder in how much you've grown and in the second her fear as you go off to rescue your just kidnapped sister. In these encounters the game gives itself an emotional base with Link clearly finding it hard to deal with the ceremony involved in his birthday and then with the emotions of leaving his Grandmother and all he knows.

Lost in a Virtual World: The Wind Waker intro

2010-12-19T11:54:00.006Z

Image via WikipediaI've been wanting to spend some more time thinking and writing about games. I keep telling people that games are amazing and they do just as much as film or Books and I listen to all the intellectual video game podcasts but I spend very little time actually going through games saying what I thought about them. Now I've decided that I want to play through a game writing down after each play session what I liked about that bit or what I didn't like. Since I'm home for Christmas and my modern video gaming equipment is up in York I'm going to start with a classic.

I'm starting with the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. It's one of my favourite games of all time and is definitely the game I've beaten the most times. This will be at least my 8th time restarting it but I think I've finished it about 5 times. It's part of a series of the Zelda series which I absolutely love and was at one point in my life such a Zelda nerd that I got involved in Zelda based online role-playing. Whilst not the game I'd usually say was my favourite in the series the wind waker is the game with the best visuals and the best mechanics of the series (I thought that the changes in twilight princess were a step backwards). It's the game that I go back to over and over, my desert island disc of video games. So I thought it'd be a good place to start if I'm going to spend my time analysing a video game.

tldr: Expect extreme video game geekery and pretension in similarly titled posts

What they deserve

2010-12-18T09:55:00.004Z

Please watch the Daily show that aired in the US on 16th December (Friday's one on 4OD). I know I've said this before but Jon Stewart is once again, on a comedy programme, doing the work which most journalist should be doing but don't. He's been arguing for the Nine Eleven first responders bill for months asking why no one is talking about something they should all agree on. This week he brought on Nine Eleven first responders and asked them how they felt. It's something that places like Fox News do quite well sometimes but have just neglected on this issue. Part of a journalists responsibility is to report on things that other people might have missed and to give a voice to the people without a voice. He rightly criticises politicians for not doing what is plainly obvious to all people that they should be doing. I know Stewart likes saying that he's just a comedian but he does far more journalism than lots of actual journalists.

What does this story tell us

2010-12-07T17:53:00.003Z

I read this story about China saying that the world didn't support giving the peace prize to Liu Xiabao.

China can't do Maths or just likes saying the obvious

China says that the vast majority of countries won't turn up. This claim is partially true, Only 84 countries are invited compared with the UN's estimate of 195 countries existing and already it's obvious the majority won't turn up since they weren't invited. Of those invited 44 have said yes, 18 no and 2 have yet to reply. At best this gives China less than a third of all who were invited have refused to come. This also says nothing of the fact that in 2008 10 didn't turn up and that was for a completely uncontroversial choice. China's additional statistic of 100 countries and organisations that are against it, fails to say how many of those are organisations within China or even within the Chinese Government.

Human Rights Abusers stick together

Look at the list of the people not coming: "Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Serbia, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco." It's almost touching to see the solidarity of Human rights abusers across the world pulling together to boycott someone pointing out human rights abuses. Seriously, if you can't rely on your torturing neighbour who can you rely on?

I don't know why this story of Human rights abusers gave me the giggles. Maybe it's just the sheer obvious ridiculousness of the claims by China. Maybe it's just the perfect list of countries which would neatly match anyone who thought for ten minutes about which countries commit human rights abuses. Maybe I'm just so bored of sitting here in the library, who knows?

A Post-Brown re-evaluation

2010-12-03T11:59:00.004Z

Image via WikipediaOne of the interesting things about the Wiki-Leaks reveals from the US is people's opinions of Gordon Brown. The Wiki-leaks have shown that he pissed off Americans by fighting against the extradition of Gary Mckinnon and by fighting for the Tobin tax despite knowing that the US already opposed it. He's also criticised for not keeping to the Whitehall chain of command and emailing people in DFID. While here they're all framed as criticism and pissing off the US, isn't this exactly what you'd want from a politician? Maybe he wasn't the best Prime Minister since it's more of their responsibility to play with the diplomatic niceties and just sit at the top of the chain of command. However, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to think badly of Gordon Brown, we hated Blair for not being lock step with the Americans and being their bitch but did we ever praise Gordon for fighting our corner? We've criticised politicians for sitting in their ivory towers but did we ever praise Gordon for taking an actual interest in policy detail? Rather than taking it as an embarrassed diplomatic snub the next time a Prime Minister can't get time with a US president maybe we should just remember Blair and be happy we aren't seen as the faithful lapdog any more and the reason they don't want us around is their afraid maybe we might ask for something. Gordon Brown may not have been a great leader in the current state of politics (and I know that's all that really matters) but wasn't he the kind of leader you'd want if politics was the kind of place you wished it was?

Maybe I'm taking a kind of rose-tinted view and ignoring the stories of bullying and other crap that revolved around Brown. But on the other hand it does just seem that we progressives in this country didn't give Gordon the backing that he needed when he was in power.

Update: I guess the contrast of annoying the Americans by standing up to them would be the Conservatives sucking up.

Christians in the UK are being discriminated against

2010-12-02T19:21:00.003Z

Christians in the UK are being discriminated against. They've had been prevented from having public expressions of their faith, some have lost their jobs or have been prevented from applying because of who they are and what they believe.

It might sound like I'm agreeing with Christian Concern but actually I think that they're the biggest hypocrites in the world. Christians in the UK are being discriminated against but it's not by the government, it's far worse than that, it's by their own church. The most persecuted Christians in the UK aren't Christian Concern or anyone who wore one of their "Not ashamed" badges. No, the Christians that are routinely discriminated against in the UK are LGBT Christians and even just Female Christians. Anglicans may not want women bishops but there are many churches in the UK that won't even let Women live out their vocation by allowing them to lead any element of church life. I don't even need to start on the myriad of ways that LGBT Christians are discriminated against from marriage to adoption to ordination to just living their lives in faith. So, every time I see someone bitching about taking the Christianity out of Christmas I can't help but think of them bullying their fellow Christians. So, yeah fuck that.

On a semi related note I'm glad to see the statement below from the British Humanist association that instead of just releasing their usually "grr stupid evil discriminating Christians" statement they've actually realised that there's a lot reasonable Christians out there and are talking jointly with Ekklesia.

More student protests

2010-11-24T19:48:00.005Z

Most of what I said from last time still applies. This type of violence is still stupid. What I just wanted to point out was the people that you can see in this video, standing between idiots and a police van are awesome. Also the fact that people are still being Kettled now it's getting fairly late, and they've been there for hours, is stupid. It doesn't matter if they've given them toilets and water. Many of the people there were just exercising their right to peaceful protest and now they've been held against their will for 7 hours according to some.

Movement Review+ aka epistemological pedantry

2010-11-22T16:36:00.005Z

For the last issue of Movement I wrote a review in which I said I had a problem with one of the ideas raised in the book (Symon Hill's No-nonsense guide to religion) because of what I've studied I know that it doesn't quite work like that. Well my thoughts in it have been swishing around since I read it and I knew that it wasn't the place to a majority of the review arguing a philosophical point that most people would find boring. But it's something that I keep returning to and want to at least get my thoughts straight on an interesting idea because it concerns my ideas about realism and religion. I can't seem to find my copy of his book right now so this is just from memory.

Symon in his chapter on religion and truth raises the idea that western society is wrong in it's conception of truth as the same thing as facts. He proposes that we should take seriously the idea that in fact there is truth in experience (and particularly, if I understood his point correctly, in religious experience). Now what he says there has an ambiguity that I had an issue with. He could have been putting forward the view that our realist conception of truth is flawed thinking everything coincides with facts about the world. Instead he could of been putting forward an anti realist view where there is my truth and your truth. If he was saying that then his argument was fractured and I'm not sure how all of it related to that or was a good argument for that. If he was obviously saying that then I think he would also have to have worked harder to justify it and I probably would have just dismissed the whole chapter. However it read like he could have been saying something very interesting if only he'd phrased it slightly differently.

If Symon had instead of using the word truth been using the word knowledge then it would be a really decent chapter and something I'd be really interested in seeing developed more (it's not something I've particularly studied in philosophy). If the critique had been that we mistake knowledge for just being facts then it would fit with an interesting strain of criticism of typical definitions of the term knowledge. The idea of knowledge found through religious experience is an interesting idea and one that fits well with mystic traditions. This wouldn't be denying an absolute sense of truth it would be saying that how we know it comes through many ways not just learning facts. It fits with really interesting criticism of Plato's idea that knowledge is justified truth belief because the justified part seems to rule out most of science (not going into Philosophy of Science here but there's a good deal of argument here) and maybe reliabilism is a better route. I think this is what Symon was trying to say in this chapter but he never made it clear that it was this rather than the anti realism above that he was talking about. It might have been clear to someone who doesn't instantly jump to the difference between truth and knowledge having been lectured about the difference between ontology (existence) and epistemology (knowledge) for a few years. But for me he was mostly using the language of ontology when the language of epistemology was a far more interesting point and what would have made the argument cohere more.

Or at least that's what I felt, anyone else read that chapter and care to comment?

Remembering and challenging

2010-11-14T12:46:00.002Z

I've just come back from church and one of the best sermons I've heard in a long time (Rory will just give an amazing sermon every now and then and it's basically why I've attended Hes church since first year). This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday where we remember all that have died in war so today that's what the service was about. The old testament reading was a really difficult one that makes me wince every time I read it, it was Deuteronomy 20:10ish where it talks about God telling you to kill all the men in every town and take the women for booty and that certain people shouldn't even have that done to them, they should be wiped out completely. And in today's sermon a really powerful idea (at least to me) was raised that this idea that God was on their side wasn't just wrong but that it was blasphemy. What this passage shows is just how easy it is for us to say that God is on our side and the other side is wrong. The New Testament reading was from Matthew and was Jesus saying love your enemies. This is as challenging as it always has been but Rory really put it well into context of the current world. The sermon was challenging for me because I've sometimes advocated that violent intervention can be justified in cases of humanitarian intervention, those special cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing that needs to be stopped. But war also has a huge impact on not only those who fight but their families and their children and their children's children, it tares a whole through life and society.

Anyway those were just a few things that were raised in today's sermon that really made me think. Also note to self: find Walter Wink - Jesus and Nonviolence.

Is property damage violence, and does that matter?

2010-11-11T11:09:00.002Z

First things first, I don't care about definitions of violence and the usage of the term in other languages we're talking in English and so we have to use our own perspective and language. In English violence is directly related to causing damage, by definition. When we talk about property damage it makes perfect sense for us to use the term violent. Sometimes there's ambiguity about the usage of a word in English ("fairness" is a really interesting one) but that doesn't seem to be the case for violence, by and large we all seem to use it in the same way. So when an activist tries to say that property damage isn't violence it seems to intuitively cause us to go "huh?". But there's still a legitimate argument that it should fall under the umbrella of non-violent direct action (or NVDA since I'm lazy). NVDA is an international concept that is about political action which does not directly harm individuals. Property damage can fit within that concept and can be a legitimate protest tool. But what's important is the type of property damage and how it's done.

One type of widely recognised, acceptable use of property damage in NVDA is cutting a fence to enter an area. Another good example of property damage as NVDA is damaging power stations and weapons. So, if I think that these things are morally acceptable, why do I think that what happened yesterday (at the NUS demo which I was too lazy to attend) was wrong? Well there are two reason, one is about how effective it is and the other is about the exact type of property damage yesterday. I don't want to go hugely into the effectiveness question but I do think it undermines public support and makes the fact that fifty thousand turned up yesterday seem less important. My real problem is with the type of property damage and how it was done. Obviously since I wasn't there my perceptions are coloured by the reporting (I was reading the Guardian website as it happened) but to me it seemed to be violence as intimidation. They went into the headquarters of a political party, smashed the windows, chanting "Tory Scum" and then threw a fire extinguisher off the roof at the police below (which could have easily killed one). I may not be the conservative party's biggest fan but I have to say there is something that just gives me slight chills a violent (see earlier paragraph) mob trashing a political parties headquarters. To try and understand why imagine that this had happened anywhere else in the world, or imagine them wearing all black and shouting Communist scum and I'd hope you'd get the picture. The Milbank students aren't the equivalent of tea party activists rebelling against an oppressive regime. They weren't even attacking the government they were attacking a political party and that's an important difference which people protesters should take not of. It wouldn't have been okay if they did the exact the same thing to Vince Cable's department but at least then it would have been action against the government. But still he method's of NVDA used here appeared to be intimidating and agressive in their nature and that's the part that's hard to condone. I can understand and empathise with their anger but that doesn't mean that they should let out their anger in such destructive ways.

Here's a couple of things from twitter I saw yesterday which I think are worth thinking about:

" #demo2010 A student next to me says 'this is scary. But what is happening to our future is scarier.'"

"Property damage is not 'fighting back'. It feels like it is, because you get to hit stuff. But it just makes you a twat. #demo2010"

When campaigning goes too far

2010-11-09T16:22:00.004Z

Image via WikipediaI don't know the full details exactly of the Phil Woolas case but I've got a rough idea from reading news articles about it of what happened and from what I've seen I think the right decision has been made. When a politician lies (and lies viciously at that) about what another candidate believes they cross a line and degrade debate and democracy. Woolas's statement that he fears that this ruling will "chill political speech" is odd because I'm not sure why that's a bad thing as far as slander is concerned. Shit like this is put up with too much in the US and is starting to appear in marginal constituency. If you read the judgement then you can see that it's pretty fair. I think that the decision to remove Labour party backing from him is exactly the right thing to do no matter how upset other MPs are by it.

Whether it is the place of a court to overrule an election by the public is a more interesting question but I still think it is valid. If someone lies about their opponent in order to win political office then they have gained that office by non-valid means and so it is reasonable to call that election void. This wasn't a case about a politician failing to keep promises, that's different and though I might call it lying to present a different policy to the electorate to the one you take in government it is a whole other thing to just simply lie about your opponent. But still it does leave valid questions about where that line is exactly but it seems obvious that Woolas crossed it.

I have the collar. I make the woosh noises.

2010-11-07T10:33:00.006Z

So here's a little Sunday morning pre-church blasphemy that's been going around in my head recently.I don't get what's special about priests, ministers, vicars or whatever your flavour of Christianity likes to call the ordained. I mean I see them as people called to lead, and care for their fellow Christians but I don't get what the ordination process does that gives them special abilities to do certain things within a service*. This kind of topic has been going round my head since a couple of discussions that I've been part of with some of the catholic students, Methodist chaplain and visiting catholic preacher about communion and the important role of the priest in that. Maybe that's just something about how a deficiency in my religious education (in general, not RE at school) but I've never really understood what makes an ordained person special. I don't particularly remember any gospel stuff about saying "okay once you've had this stamp of approval you can take this bit of the service and only when you've had this other bigger stamp can you do the important blessing bits". I get that it's tradition and that's important and we shouldn't just go chucking things away (and Jesus didn't tell us to chuck everything away) but it'd be nice to understand what's supposed to be going on behind it.

*At this point I had to run so as not to miss Church and then had a really interesting sermon on tradition by Rowan (though it was apparently not the one she gave at the other morning service without a baptism).

In a groove

2010-11-05T18:53:00.003Z

I like 3rd year it seems to fit rather well with me. I'm loving my course right now, I find all the stuff I'm studying now really interesting. I like chaplaincy and P & P, I love doing SCM stuff and aside from the fact that I occasionally don't have time to do everything it's going great. Which just makes me feel a little bit grrr about the fact that it's my last year and won't get to keep doing this. Now I've just to find a job that lets me continue what I enjoy about what I do now or find something entirely new that I enjoy... if only that were so easy.

A questioning humble realist faith?

2010-10-27T21:08:00.004+01:00

I was at a talk this evening called "Can you be LGBT and a person of faith". I went along because I'd heard one of the speakers before and wanted to hear people who had really thought about their faith talk. Sarah Jones (the person I had heard before) was excellent again and so were the other two speakers. One was a gay Rabbi and in his talk he focused on realising that the scriptures of his faith (and so to a certain extent mine) were built upon patriarchal structures. Another speaker was a lesbian quaker who talked about the Quaker idea of each persons search for truth needing to be respected. And in the questions section of the talk there two questions which really interested me one was "by questioning holy books are you undermining them". I loved Sarah Jones's response that it is "our holy duty to question, question and question our way to God". Another question asked if by questioning our texts do we not risk making God in our own image? Again Sarah's response was spot on we need to be humble about what we know and focus more on what we don't know and be careful that we don't make god "us with super powers".

Whilst none of this stuff is new to me, I've practically been raised with these ideas, I've recently discovered a certain tension. I spend my day in my course battling against the view that many viewpoints are all equally valid and that truth can be many things. I find anti-realist talk of this sort hollow, empty and unreasonable. Linguistic constructivism and other attempts to find another way of looking at truth just don't sit well with me in any sphere of philosophy. But yet in my faith I'm incredibly open... to being open. Maybe it's because I think that in God we really have the complete unknowable. But at the same time I've got my inner philosophical realist that keeps shouting at me but there's one truth. I know strictly there's no necessary tension in saying that there something we can't know and we should question and be humble about what we know with the idea of realism and that there's definitely a single truth out there. But I still feel this tension there and I'm not sure how to fully resolve it or deal with it. So many people of the "many different viewpoints" thing in religion also spout the anti-realism that so annoys me. At the same time those who seem to be solidly realist close are the ones that like claiming one source of divine knowledge. I don't think I'm philosophically opposed to my religious views (what on earth that would mean?) but I definitely keep poking myself to challenge my language to make sure that it's quite right and that I'm not letting myself slip.

I've got a lot more to say on this and I hope to re-visit it a few more times but I'm just going to sit and ponder this for now.

Does choice hinder where games can go?

2010-10-22T11:16:00.003+01:00

I've complained about the writing in video games before because it's one of the things that holds games back. It's better now than it used to be but it's still not good enough. Some of the better writing in games could be called better than quite a bit of what's on television and better than your standard thriller novels but not on a level with what you'd call well written TV and books. For instance there's nothing in video games that is as well written as The Wire (tv), Homicide (the book) or The Corner (book). But what I'm now wondering is whether it's possible for games to do certain areas well.

Now if you've seen much of David Simon's work and especially if you've read all the way through the corner you will have realised that one of the main themes in them is the lack of choice faced by people in that situation. In the epilogue to the corner he asks if you could really say that in the same situation you would be able to live a different life despite that being all that you know. Now it's obvious that just because that's a narrative theme in Simon's work it doesn't mean that all works dealing with similar subject matter have to have that theme. However there's something nagging at me that perhaps video games which are all about choice can't deal with this kind of subject matter without trivialising it. And this isn't just a problem for any potential game that tries to deal with poverty but many great works of literature, television and the theatre all have a lack of freedom and choice as a central theme (Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, A view from the Bridge just to name the ones I've studied). There have been some attempts to create indie games built around the lack of choice but while some of these are really interesting, I've not seen any that I'd say were great games (as in the playing part of them). It seems to me that the best games use choice and freedom as a central part of them and that's what creates the most memorable game moments. But does that mean that they can't have the same narrative effect as some of these other works because there addition of choice to these types of situation appears to trivialise it?

Well first things first is that you obviously can't just port the situations over directly and create Of Mice and Men: The Game because that would be awful. But they could take a similar situation and still convey a set of helplessness and give the players many options which all lead eventually to the same end. Because this would rob players of there sense of agency it'd face the problem of not feeling like that good a game unless done really well. And on top of this because they'd have to create more possible situations they'd have to write even more narrative. So in order for a game to be as good as Romeo and Juliet and cover a similar subject those creating it would have to write at least 10 different Romeo and Juliets without them diminishing in quality as well as crafting amazing game mechanics which felt like you were doing something (even though you weren't) and don't break the fiction either. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that this kind of think just actually isn't possible. That video games might get better but simply because of the difficulty making them never be able to tell the same kind of narrative about powerlessness with the same quality as books, plays or TV can.

You could say the same thing applies to game about other subjects and other settings but I'm not so sure that's true. Games have in them mechanisms which allow for greater immersion and inherently better story telling because they are games. I only think that you reach impossible levels of difficulty when dealing with areas where the very virtue of games, freedom and choice, is a hindrance rather than a virtue.

The land of bad dreams

2010-10-20T10:25:00.002+01:00

Everyone has those bad dreams where they've forgotten something or their unprepared, and I'm sure lots of people also have the type where lots of people are mean to you for absolutely no reason and just through out the dream you get angrier and angrier until you just go crazy at the end of it. I don't it's weird that I have these dreams, I'm sure their fairly typical (judging from the amount that I see these types of dream in pop culture) but what makes them odd for me is that they almost all have the same setting. In almost all my bad dreams I'm still at Cotham. They aren't always in the school but the people around are usually people who I knew back then. I barely ever have bad dreams about life now. I don't actually know why, it's not like I really hated my time at Cotham, most of the time I quite enjoyed it. Maybe it's the whole being younger and less confident in myself so that's where I go back to. It's not like I think about Cotham and back then much when I'm awake, I don't tend to reminis on it, but sure enough in bad dreams I'm back wearing that shitty old uniform.

Two exams and a working mens club

2010-10-14T21:07:00.002+01:00

So now had both my exams and I'm free at last, no more revision. Just you know normal reading for my normal course which starts next week.. *sigh*. Still at least they are out of the way and done. Also last night was fun and slightly odd. Stacey's boss from work was trying to get as many people as possible to come to this charity thing for Help for Heroes. So all the house went along and it was really fun but it was also very different. It was at a working men's club and we played bingo and did a raffle and had a buffet. It was like how'd you imagine a working men's club to be, full of old people and just like a gigantic old man pub really. Bingo was fun and hilarious how seriously they took it with anyone who talked told off. We clearly weren't the normal people to be there but no one treated us any differently. It was just like quite a awesome old man pub really. And Alpine Larger is cheap which is an annoying thing when you are having an evening between two exams.

A business man wants a free market? Shock horror!

2010-10-12T19:55:00.003+01:00

The university funding review is out and oh look there goes another Liberal Democrat policy. Actual government policy looks less like it may be less bad than the out come of the review with a 7,000 cap far better than removing the cap altogether. If it weren't for that then there would be absolutely no reason that Oxford wouldn't start charging 20,000. It's not like there aren't people willing to pay. The problem with even the government proposed changes is of course it will stop thousands of people from low income families from going to university. If you read the research from the University of Leicester you can see that it doesn't matter about bursaries people from low income are deterred by high fees. Also the middle income people are getting screwed when compared to high income people. There are some good things about the scheme but a graduate tax is a far better solution to the funding problem even if it isn't a short term solution.

Though I never thought that we'd get anything but a free market solution from a business man. Lord Browne, is the ex chief of BP he's bound to come at this from a business perspective. But there are some things which a free market isn't good for and education is definitely one of them.

I hate revision

2010-10-11T20:59:00.000+01:00

Only tomorrow and then two days of exams, then a day in birminghim for SCM meeting with preparing for the meeting on the train... then I'm but still blargh. I hate revision soo much.

I have more time for Tony Blair than I do George Galloway

2010-10-10T16:46:00.002+01:00

Image by World Economic Forum via FlickrI know this is fairly old news by now but something I just wanted to revist was the bile and hate that came out in opposition to Tony Blair with the release of his memoir. The now famous facebook group called him "our generations greatest war criminal". My response to this is something along the lines of "I see your Tony Blair and raise you a Milosevic, an Omar al-Bashir, a Saddam Hussein, and a few Rwanda generals". I still think that Iraq war was wrong and was a travesty but lets get some fucking perspective people. Tony Blair went into Iraq in order to topple a hideous dictator, he didn't do it for his own personal benefit. If you actually think about the question, would Tony Blair be better off if he did not invade Iraq?, the answer is probably yes or at least no difference. He'd still be sitting happily on a pile of money from speaking engagements as all game changing Prime Ministers do (and he would have been considered game changing even without Iraq) and would probably have a higher popularity rating (and maybe higher book sales which he probably wouldn't have had to donate to a soldier's charity) within the population in general. The others I listed killed thousands if not millions for their own personal benefit on campaigns of political, religions and ethnic cleansing. That's what a fucking war crime is (obviously when carried out during a war). It might be the case that road to hell is paved with good intentions but the motorway is definitely paved with greed and hatred.

So whilst at the same time as pouring this hate on Tony Blair (who though he did a bad thing probably had good intentions) the same areas of the left are embracing people who are huge human rights violators. Lets just look at George Galloway and his sucking up to President Ahmajinedad. He's supporting the rigging of an election (odd in it's own way) by someone who actively leads a campaign of hate against homosexual people and endorses the stoning to death of a woman who has committed adultery. Just because you don't want think it's right to wage war on someone doesn't mean you should make happy appearances as propaganda on their TV stations. The enemy of your enemy isn't your friend (especially if you must make someone with noble intention but a ill informed opinion your enemy).

Theory-ladenness in practice

2010-10-09T17:52:00.005+01:00

At the moment I'm studying philosophy of science (exam next week and ugh I hate revision but never mind) and one of the big concepts in that is the idea of theory ladenness. This is the idea that whatever we see is already shaped by our expectations and our theories about the world. We make things fit into our existing preconceptions or ideas without even noticing we're doing it. We remember what conforms and forget what differs. I've got a great example of this from when me and Cassie first arrived in Jordan. From what we'd heard we were expecting sexism, for people to favour men and treat women as second class. So when we arrived we saw a whole lot of things that conformed to this idea, the taxi driver at the airport seemed to blank Cassie and only respond to me, it seemed like the person at the hotel only talked to me and ignored Cassie and the restaurant gave all the food that both of us ordered to me and I had to pass it on to Cassie. So at the end of the first day our preconceptions seem pretty confirmed. But there were it turns out better explanations for all of this which later experience forced us to confront. The next time we went to the same restaurant they gave all the food to Cassie who was sitting closest to the waiter this time and the hotel receptionist over our stay chatted to both us at different times and just liked giving constant eye contact. With later interpretation it was clear that Cassie was ignored by taxi drivers not because she's a woman but because she's quieter than I am (I do a very good "english person abroad who speak none of your language" voice). So yeah, not as sexist as we first thought. There are other things which I perceived as sexist but now I'm not so sure, if I was just missing the relevant information and the same's true of so many other things we saw. It's a bit hard saying much from an outsiders perspective and you will always interpret things first off according to how you think you it will be.

The importance of voice

2010-10-08T20:18:00.002+01:00

Image via WikipediaA while ago I wrote a blog post about Fable 2 did right and Mass Effect 2 did wrong now I'd like to write something about why Mass Effect is so much better. It does have better combat and a much more action packed story but the main difference is one feature. In Mass Effect your character has a voice. It's not even that in fable it's just text based which some RPGs do, in Fable your character does not speak at all. This means in Mass Effect you actually have a character who feels like they are effecting the world because they say they are going to do something or they want and then they act and make it happen. In Fable you are a powerful hero but it just feels like events happen and you kinda go along with it. It's worse than just the awkward breaks when a character is talking to you and they have a completely one sided conversation (this makes some shit dialogue in an otherwise well written game). For a role playing game, you are supposed to have a role that you are playing, you are playing as that character. But with no voice there is no character to identify with just a tool which you use to interact with the game world. It presents the total immersion which other RPGs can bring. Even to a limited extent RPGs without player character voice acting still give you a personality by allowing your character to talk even if you can't hear it. A response to this could be that most communication is non-verbal so why fixate on talking. But you don't control much of that non-verbal communication, you can fart, wink and shake hands but that doesn't convey your characters wishes feelings or anything, it's just a little bit of fun. The Fable series is great and the world they've built is fully of wonderful little touches, it's just such a pity that they decided to put up this wall between you and that world.

I shall become a bat

2010-10-07T21:47:00.004+01:00

Cover of Batman: Year OneI wasn't a comic book geek in the way that I'm a Sci-Fi, anime and video game geek. But recently I've gotten into the whole graphic novel thing. I started with Watchmen and then Scott Pilgrim both of which aren't your standard graphic novel and I read them because I was excited for the films. But this summer I read the big three Frank Miller Batman graphic novels. The first I read was the Dark Knight Returns which depicts Batman coming out of retirement and having to deal with a changed world (and an awesome confrontation with Superman). Then I read the sequel The Dark Knight Strikes again (not anywhere near as good). Finally I read his reboot of Batman Year one. I love the depiction of Batman in all three. He's not a noble super hero in the Dark Knight Returns in as much as he's a sociopath who's addicted to beating up criminals. In Year One his motives are slightly purer but he still is doing it not out of a grand sense of right but out of a strange urge. I'd say it was closer to Dexter (TV series version rather than the book version) than what you'd typically think of as a hero. It's all about childhood trauma warping Bruce Wayne's mind and creating the weird man child that is Batman. I know I heaped praise on the Dark Knight film and it's still one of the better comic book films but it portrayed such a flat boring Bruce Wayne that missed some of his more twisted complex elements. Batman naturally is the grittier super hero than any of the other traditional ones but still has the iconic noble status unlike the trying to be gritty spawn, punisher etc. He's just this interesting character especially when you look at his Michael Jackson esque (in a totally non dirty way) relationship with Robin. The next big Batman graphic novel that I've got to read is the Killing Joke by Alan Moore which apparently is the joker story to read. I'm really enjoying just read the Batman stories but who knows, I might actually add comic book geek to my current list of geekdoms.

Damascus and showers

2010-10-05T21:01:00.003+01:00

Image by stijn via FlickrOne of the weird things about Jordan and Syria was how the random things that were just really poorly designed. A great example of this was the showers in this hotel in Damascus. Both the rooms we stayed in at the hotel had showers that awfully designed. Even though both had square shower areas the shower curtain seemed to randomly cut the room in half running into the sink in one and the toilet in the other. One of the showers had the pipe coming out of the ceiling rather than coming from the wall and was too short to do anything other than point in the most difficult of angles. The other shower had a shower clip which was too small to fit the head of the shower in. It was like whoever made it had no idea what it would be for or thought through the implications of what they were doing. It's not even that difficult and I have no idea why the hotel was built like that.

Damascus itself was an absolutely amazing city. It's what you'd expect from a developing nations capital, gigantic crazy roads and big buildings but right next to that is the still populated old town. The old town is right to have the name old town as it's really like the oldest (continuously) populated city in the world. The mosque there is amazing and ancient, in fact it was a church before it was a mosque and a pagan temple before that. Damascus has also this huge souq (market, pictured) which is packed with people selling lots of things and a surprising amount of skimpy ladies' underwear. On a Friday the souq became eerily quiet in fact most of the streets did with the vast majority of shops closed. I'm sure once upon a time Sunday trading was like this but not any more. Also speaking of inconvenient religious habits, the 5:30 am call to prayer (each of which can be heard everywhere in a city) can fuck right off.

Ed Miliband and Leadership

2010-10-04T22:01:00.004+01:00

I voted for Ed Miliband in the end. It was a hard decision and in the end I voted for him because I agreed with him on policy. Judging by his conference speech (which I finally watched today) he has the similar political views to me. But the reason that I almost voted for his brother was because I'm not sure they'll get him elected. As the Economist points out, this might not be the time for this particular type of politics. However one line in Ed's speech sold me on him as leader: "Politics has to be about leadership or it is about nothing". I fundamentally agree with this. Yes it's also about representation but that's also a lot of bull shit as most people don't know what they want or respond in a focus group to what is in everyone's long term interest (green policy was his example and it's a perfect one). This is actually the central message of one of my favourite shows, The West Wing (or at least that's how I've seen it). Politics is about doing what you think is right and then convincing people to vote for you, not doing what you think will make people vote for you. So whilst it may not be the most popular message for the current political climate, maybe that climate can be changed. Maybe it can't and we just made a huge mistake in electing this leader now but I think it's worth a try.

A small itinerary and Madaba

2010-10-03T17:30:00.005+01:00

Image via WikipediaI figured I wanted to get this down so I didn't forget where I went in what order. It was First two nights in Amman but we found it all a bit to hectic so we went to Madaba for two days going to the dead sea and Mt Nebo while we were there. Then we had another night in Amman before getting on the bus to Damascus. We spent 3 nights in Damascus then 3 in Hama (one more than intended because of illness) then another night in Damascus. Then another in Amman before two in Wadi Musa exploring big and little Petra. Then two more nights in Amman two finish off.

Wow that seems so short when written like that. Damascus in my head felt like we spent more time there than any of the other places but on the other hand I could direct you around a fairly large area of Amman without a map.

But I also really loved Madaba it was just this small town that was just such a nice contrast to the chaos of Amman. Madaba is a "Christian" city so had a slightly different feel as well. When I say Christian I don't mean that everyone there had a Christian faith, I'd have no clue about that, most people there would be considered Christian by family. This means there's more alcohol around (though still not much) and Christian women don't cover their head. That was something I found really weird about Jordan though, having religion seen almost as an ethnicity. This is especially the case since conversion is illegal (away from Islam or between types of Islam). I guess it shows the whole "cultural differences" thing because I can't help but feel it undervalues the faith. Why should someone follow the tenants of something they don't believe in? And why should they be identified upon the basis of those practices? I'd say a Christian is (whoa... I'm getting on some dodgy territory here ) someone who believes and follows at least something Jesus asked them to do. Not someone who is descended from someone who believed in something because if so we'd all be sun worshippers. I suppose I see it as almost anti Christian (and I'd imagine anti Islam which is why it's relevant) that Jesus said it's not about your nationality, you can be a gentile and be a Christian. I don't the details but the Qur'an says that faith should be valued above nationality, but surely what they are doing in Jordan is treating them as the same thing.

But that aside there were some really beautiful sights in my time in Madaba: An amazing Mosaic of the Holy land on the floor of a church. Mt Nebo, where Moses supposedly saw the promised land from (and the view really is amazing) before dying and not reaching it. Also the Dead sea was pretty amazing. It's so floaty that you can't actually swim because your limbs all float on the surface but it doesn't feel overly viscous. But it also is so salty I'd advise against shaving that day... ouch.

If anyone ever plans on going to Jordan I'd advise going to Madaba first as it's actually closer to the airport than Amman (even if it is named on flights as Amman airport) and is a really cool place.

Arrival and overwhelming

2010-10-02T12:40:00.005+01:00

I'm just packing up to go back to York and really should be dismantling the PC now but I first wanted to get started on this blog. So back to the story of my last few weeks:

On arriving at the airport, the first thing I noticed was it was really freaking hot and I was really freaking exhausted. In order to catch the 6:00 am flight I'd had to get a bus from Oxford at 2:00 am which meant pretty much no sleep. So I wasn't in the best place to deal with taxi drivers who of course ripped us off (as seems to be customary with airports). Then when we got into Amman it was just all so much sound and things happening. We went straight to our hostel and crashed for about 3 hours. After the nap I felt much more up for exploring and encountering this busy new city. That evening we went to eat at a small restaurant which the lonely planet recommended and the food was amazing. It was really simple just flat bread, humous, foul and fallafel (fuck if any of that is spelt right) but it just tasted so good and only cost £2. It was probably my favourite place we ate at the whole time and we went back on two other nights. After the meal we went for a walk and had our first experience of genuine Jordanian awesomeness. As we were walking around we met a guy who introduced himself as "'Hamed apart from I don't follow the teachings of the prophet and a no good drunk". 'Hamed was awesome and we had a good 10 minute conversation with him about his views on the world, our lives (he wanted to know which philosophers I studied when I mentioned by degree and suggested some) and what he thought of Jordan. This guy was just great and the perfect way to introduce us to Jordan.

There will be feasting and dancing

2010-10-01T13:08:00.002+01:00

Wow I've had an amazing three weeks since I last posted here. Now that I'm back at safe at home (in Bristol for now then back to York tomorrow) I thought I'd update the blog on my amazing three weeks and reflect on what I saw. I'd also like to try and make myself blog more often and write more each time so I'll probably split this up over several posts over the next week or so.

So first things first, on the Thursday I left I went to see the Mountain Goats in Camden at the koko. They were amazing. In fact they were far better than I had expected. Before seeing them I'd listened to three of their albums and knew one of those almost to a word perfect state but the others I'd not quite gotten in two. I'd consider them a top ten maybe top seven band kind of thing. But live they were just amazing. I only knew four out of the twenty songs they played but loved the rest just as much. They didn't seem to be too concerned about everyone knowing the songs as they played several unreleased tracks and B-sides. The songs I did know, everyone knew and sung along with.

The band had a complete mastery of the gig and seemed completely at ease and made a fairly feel big hall feel like a small intimate gig. The singer (who basically is the mountain goats) made jokes between songs and told us the back story or context to a couple of them. For the chorus of the final song he silenced the whole crowd with a few hand movements and then sang without a microphone leading us all to sing along with the end (to a song I didn't know). It was just awesome. I realised that I'd listend to a tiny amount of their material and as soon as the gig ended I went to the merch stall and bought two more albums. I'd seriously recommend anyone who even slightly likes what they've heard of the mountain goats to take any opportunity they get to go see them.

For these interested the set list was:

1. 1 Samuel 15:23
2. Old College Try
3. Cotton
4. Psalms 40:2
5. Your Belgian Things
6. In The Craters On The Moon
7. Shower
8. Cobscook Bay
9. The Day The Aliens Came
10. Sinaloan Milk Snake Song
11. Deuteronomy 2:10
12. Enoch 18:14
13. Love Love Love
14. Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod
15. Going To Georgia
16. This Year

ENCORE

1. Houseguest
2. No Children

ENCORE

1. Lion's Teeth
2. The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton

ENCORE

1. California Song

Jordanian Goat meetings

2010-09-07T23:48:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow I'm off to Birmingham for a Movement magazine editorial meeting. Then after I get back from that I've got to pack in the evening because the next day I'm headed to London to see the Mountain Goats (awesome band) and then rather than return home I'm off to Oxford for two days before going to Jordan early Sunday morning. This means I've got a million and one things to think about (I'm also trying to write a reflection on prayer which needs to finished before I leave). And it's kinda stopped me from getting properly excited about the awesomeness of seeing a band I like or going travelling again. My mind is just a bit of a mess right now still a little bit in revision and a little all these other things I'm doing. But I hope to go off and see an amazing two countries (going to Syria too!) and will report back on all the things I see.

Should be awesome!

Between Millibands

2010-09-01T09:46:00.003+01:00

Image by Young Fabians via FlickrAs the papers are now being sent out for the Labour Leadership election (mine's not arrived yet) I'm stuck with a difficult choice. How pragmatic should I be? I did the Labour Leadership Vote Match and found that on policy I am closest to Dianne Abbot. But I know that this is a superficial comparison and in actuality I'm closest to the second result Ed Miliband. But at the same time as knowing this I also believe that David Miliband presents a better chance of Labour getting re-elected. That said I don't think that Ed is unelectable nor do I disagree with the vast majority of policy that David backs. I think David Miliband is more progressive than Tony Blair and the traditional New Labour position but I think Ed Miliband is more than David. So where does this leave my vote? I'm not really sure. I'd like Labour to return to power but I also feel that if I don't vote for the most progressive voice than how can I later complain that politics lacks a genuine progressive voice. As I've said before I think both would make great leaders but there is just the fine balance of who would be a better leader. At the moment I'm leaning slightly towards David because I do agree with him and that he would help a progressive shift in politics whilst also being far more capable than his brother at handling TV appearances. But an hour ago I favoured Ed so which way I actually vote is still really up in the air.

Self-Affirming

2010-08-31T15:00:00.002+01:00

You know that feeling that something is going to be incredibly difficult or that you just can't do it? I get that feeling a lot but over time it's gotten less and less. There are still lots of things that I feel I'm useless at and dread doing but it's a shrinking list. I've had a really amazing last few weeks where I've done things that before scared me. Doing work experience with the Joint Public Issues team was something that even though I don't think I let on, was a little bit nervous about but I felt that it worked out really well. I found all the researching tasks things I could do largely without having to ask" how do I do this or that". I even answered the phone and took messages when people were out of the office, something that at one point would have terrified me. Then I had this weekend at Greenbelt with SCM where I managed to do something I've not quite done before. I did the festival in an independent way. I spent some of the festival with Chris and Sarah (who have also been awesome and let me stay in their flat the last few weeks as well as transporting me to greenbelt and lending me a tent), some with a couple of SCMy people and other bits just going to see things on my own. I've never really done that before I've usually done things by either sticking with a group constantly or just going around by myself.

I've managed to by and large organise myself and live fairly independently (admittedly lots of help from Chris and Sarah with feeding me and ironing for me) and it's been great to see that maybe I'm not so hideously under equipped for life.

Pixar: Growing Old But Not Growing Up

2010-08-11T23:24:00.003+01:00

Image by KevinBee via Flickr

This week I watched two Pixar films Toy Story 3 and Up. In Toy Story you've got the character of Andy who is trying to decide what to do with his Toy's as he goes off to College. He's 17 in the story but was 8 back in the original that came out in 1995 (I was like FIVE then!). The character is clearly still attached to his toy's and can't quite shake the part of him that they represent. In Up on the other hand the main character is a old man (which makes the film some awesome) who hasn't ever given up on his childhood dreams and decides to see them through. Both films deal with growing old without actually growing up and though aimed at children still touch a chord with adults.

So why do I think these two characters are great and what do I mean by growing old but not growing up? They've obviously gotten to grips with the world learned to do mature things, learnt the skills they need to be an adult but they've not lost that awesome thing about being a kid. The sense of wonder and the simplest of things. The imagination that not everything is necessarily as boring as it looks at first glance. The idea that something is just awesome because it is. In case you haven't guessed, I identify with this kind of character. I like that my imagination never really died or that I do think things are just awesome (count how often I use the word). I'm not exaggerating a lot of the time when I use that word. I am slightly filled with awe at how cool these things are. Zombies right, they are just awesome. Bears that try and persuade you to make terrible decisions, just unbelievably awesome. Fuck being cynical, some things are just awesome. I know other people are like me but I've seen others who just don't get it. They ask why is a Monkey wearing a top hat and a monocle awesome, and there's no answer to that. They've let that part die and you can't explain it back to life. I hope that never happens to me.

How the election and the coalition has shaped my political alignment

2010-08-10T11:37:00.003+01:00

Image by The Prime Minister's Office via Flickr

At the time leading up to the election I was unsure who I'd vote for and now I'm a member of a political party. I wasn't sure whether to vote for Labour or the Lib Dems and now I'm a Labour party member and would not even give my second preference (should AV be passed) to the Liberal Democrats still lead by Nick Clegg. This change is a response to two things. The cuts which the coalition has put in place are going to hit the poorest and the most vulnerable in our society. I think that beyond merely an economic disagreement and questions about the role and size of government, these cuts are just wrong. Some of the cuts are taking apart benefits for people who cannot work (carers allowance and incapacity benefit) that everyone agrees are the role of government. There are some areas in which I agree with the coalition (prison/sentencing reform being one) but none of them compensate for the immorality (in my view) of some of these cuts. The cuts are being made quicker and deeper than is at all necessary. My opposition to the coalition and the Labour leadership election has made me join the Labour party. Now as I've said opposition to the coalition not just to the Conservative party but also to the Liberal Democrats.

The Liberal Democrats have not just backed these cuts as being part of the coalition but supported them anyway. Nick Clegg lied directly during the election. Lying is a big word and I don't use it lightly. I don't believe that politicians as a whole lie. I HATE the idea that all politicians are liars and you can't believe a word they say. They mislead in order to get elected, yes, they promise more than they can possibly achieve, yes but they don't usually out right lie. In an election usually politicians campaign on the general position they will take if they get into government. The Liberal Democrats campaigned that cutting now would be damaging to the economy and that cutting deeply would be unfair and hurt the poorest and most vulnerable. However since the election Nick Clegg has said (in "The Five Days That Changed Britain") that before the election he changed his mind and never mentioned the people who might vote for him. In the Labour-Lib Dem coalition talks the Liberal Democrats demanded cuts straight away, the opposite of what they campaigned on. In this way they lied. That's why I couldn't give the Liberal Democrats my second preference whilst they are still lead by Nick Clegg.

I said before the elections that I knew that I shared the Labour party's values but wasn't sure if I wanted to vote for the current government. Now I've been following the Labour leadership hustings and what each of the candidates has been saying I'd be happy with any of them as leader and with the direction they would lead the Labour party in. I know that politically I belong with the Labour party and really I feel I was wrong in not doing more to support them during the elections. At the moment I'm unsure which of the two Milibands I'd rather have as leader now that I'm pretty sure I don't want to give my first preference to one of the other candidates.

Character Progression

2010-08-04T16:54:00.003+01:00

When you watch a TV programme for 5 years or so you notice that over that time it's changed.

Image by lyk3_0n3_tym3 via Flickr

If it's anything other than South Park or the Simpson's then the characters will have noticeably aged. Something I've realised over the last couple of months of watching and reading (despite the couple of months time lag between manga and anime) Naruto is how much it's changed and specifically how much the title-character has changed. It's still fairly full of childish humour (the anime especially) but they've also successfully told a story of these characters growing up. They've gotten slightly more mature in the way that you would kind of expect given the events. Whilst Naruto is still full of basic morality and idealism the character has at the same time become more aware of the world that he lives in and his own limitations. From being a very annoying 12 year old he's developed into a 16 year old that isn't as annoying. The interesting thing is despite the two year time jump, I didn't notice it happening and it didn't feel like a sudden change. That's a real achievement to get a character to grow in a realistic way whilst at the same time maintaining their core personality. I know you can't really praise Naruto for the depth of it's story telling or being realistic (it's about magical ninjas) but they've really done the character progression almost perfectly.

Blu-ray software doesn't work

2010-07-21T20:00:00.003+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

After trying to update my software, my graphics drivers and anything else I could think of I tried downloading trial versions of the best blu-ray software and they still couldn't play my watchmen blu-ray. Consider me more than just a little bit pissed off. How hard is it to make software which will just play the fucking movie? Or you know if there's a problem tell me what it is so I can sort it? My disc is clean, with no marks on and has yet to be played, so it's not that. My computer used to play Blu-rays before my upgrade to windows 7 (which may have been what buggered the old software) so there's nothing wrong with the drive. Why oh why can't I just get some software which will you know... work?

Make do and mend

2010-07-20T14:29:00.002+01:00

I hate shopping for clothes. Threadless aside, I hate shopping for clothes. I've never been a person with a particular "fashion sense" and generally I get attached to my clothes once I've bought them or end up hating them and don't like getting new ones for fear that I'll hate them never wear them, or look stupid whilst wearing them. Clothes are also expensive, especially if I want to be ethical with what I buy (which is really fucking hard by the way). I don't like spending money on things I don't particularly want and so most clothes fall into this category. This is just another reason I hate buying clothes. So when I notice something has a hole in it my first response isn't ooh yey I can buy new clothes. I'd much rather be all ethical and good and repair it. But I just spent ten minutes trying and failing to thread a needle and that's before the inevitable failing at actually doing the sewing. Fuck that, I guess I need to buy some new clothes.

I am so young

2010-07-13T09:04:00.002+01:00

I've had a really cool weekend in Yardley Hastings for the SCM GC visioning weekend. Large portions of the weekend was just spent chatting with other GC members and the staff about future of SCM but also just talking about random things. Obviously when chatting with people you get talking about their life experience and all things that shaped them and lead them to the place they are now. Everyone else there had a much bigger dramatic story than I do. They've lived through so much more than I have even though we're roughly the same age. In some ways I'm jealous of some of the stuff other people have done and the wisdom they've gained from it but in others I've realised I'm incredibly lucky. My parents are still together and I have a great relationship with them, none of my friends or siblings have died, I've always been in environments that let me be me and don't try and suppress real parts of me or tell me what I should believe. There's just so much that hasn't happened to me which happens to loads of people and it's left me innocent, young and naive. Whilst I might not like that I lack that wisdom I'm so lucky to be that way.

Anonymity Online

2010-07-09T10:34:00.002+01:00

Certain parts of the internet are going crazy right now about some proposed changes to the World of Warcraft forums which would tie people's accounts with their real names and show that to the whole world. Some people think it's a good idea others think it's a crazy one. There are some good reasons for and against this change and I think that it'd be good just to have a look at some of them. There are important concerns that should be brought up because they something about how we use the internet in general.

Gamer's shouldn't be different

One argument that's used against it is that employers might look up what you've said and judge you negatively based upon it. Or I've even seen this exaggerated to a fear that big brother will be watching you kind of thing. This actually isn't a good reason as far as I'm concerned. Or at least it shouldn't be. Having your online presence linked to your name should mean that you act in the same way as you should when talking to a person in real life. The idea that the internet has a different culture or that gaming has a different culture that isn't acceptable in real life, is exactly what should be changed and what these measures aim to do. People being directly abusive (trolling) isn't something that adult's should do. Slagging distant people off in an kind of "George Bush is an idiot" way is acceptable in real life and should be acceptable online. The difference is a nuance that the internet hasn't learned yet and gamer's definitely haven't learned yet because the internet blurs the distance but it's an important one. There's also a public private distinction on this but I'll get to that later.

Children should be kept safe

This is the big reason why linking online names with real names. Children should both be kept safe from others and themselves. The threat from others is obvious and doesn't really need repeating. The threat from themselves is that adult shouldn't be accountable for what they did as a child. This idea's got a strong basis in law (well there are problems but that's another issue), a criminal record is usually expunged on hitting 18. In the same way people should be allowed to be stupid when they are a teenager or a child on the internet. This shouldn't be a problem with this system since the name attached should be of the account payer which should be the parent but it's just something worth baring in mind.

Social Networking already owns you

If you touched social networking at all in the pre-facebook privacy era then your information is out there already. Even with Facebook your information is already everywhere with loads of people able to access it unless you have few friends and the strongest privacy settings. With just your name people can find you and lots of things about you. Which leads to my next point.

The internet already has too much information

The electoral roll and phone directory is online and this is a scary thing. Anyone who has your name and a rough idea about where you live can in many circumstances find out exactly where you live. This is why giving your name is a bad idea as was shown by what happened with a Blizzard employee. But this isn't just a problem for the internet an anonymity. Anyone who gets your name can find this stuff. It doesn't have to be someone you have met online. If I wanted to I could get this kind of information about people in my seminars, or anyone you've worked with or have the business card of. In the real world people give out their name easily and they can already be stalked. The problem isn't with giving out names it's having a good look at data and privacy laws. It's a bit late already but we could at least stop putting even more of this information out there.

The holiday temptation

2010-07-07T22:14:00.003+01:00

Every Holiday without fail I spend at least a couple of hours researching new gadgets to buy and always the idea of buying a DS. I think I'm actually tipping slightly towards buying one since I am spending ages on trains and it doesn't cost that much (there's a second hand one for 70 at my local shop). But I'm not sure and it always goes back and forth to buy or not to buy, as previous blogs on here will show. This always seems to happen when I have too much time on my hands during the holidays. I won't have that much free time all holiday since I have plans to do volunteering for bit and then travelling to Jordan in September and random trips to Oxford over the Holiday. Not jam packed but still not the big empty summer I've had before.

Positive difference

2010-06-30T23:30:00.003+01:00

The big thing that's been different really this term aside from obviously different modules etc is that I've started going along to the Catholic Student Society (or CASSOC) most weeks. I knew some of the people or at least had met them at Wednesday ecumenical soup but I got to know a few of them a lot better at Easter during the retreat to L'arche. At L'arche I realised that they were really cool people and that it might be worth going along to CASSOC events to see what CASSOC was like. Previously I had been put off my the events (and obviously the name) which all seem squarely aimed at Catholics. After a term of attending I see that I wasn't wrong but that doesn't mean I shouldn't go. It clearly isn't aimed for me,this couldn't be more clear than hearing a canon lawyer give a talk about the Eucharist. He'd converted from Methodism and probably thought there weren't any Methodists in the room when he implied that are communion practice was ridiculous and silly. But I still found the talk really interesting especially the stuff he had to say about ecumenicism, it was an interesting perspective. Then I also enjoyed the pub trip afterwards with all the great people. CASSOC is aimed at it's members and so clearly they're different from me in certain ways. Most have a different not necessarily posher, or conservative just a subtly different background to me and most of the people I've previously known. But that doesn't again mean that they aren't awesome people who I can really enjoy hanging around with and try and learn to see the world in a slightly different way. I'm not saying that difference has not been hurtful at times but it's been a great experience a lot of the time as well. Anyway I realised that going along to CASSOC stuff has made this term a better term for it.

2/3

2010-06-24T22:22:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Today I had my last seminar of the year and so now I've finished two out of my three years at University. That as a thought is fucking terrifying. Where on earth has this year gone? It's been great but wow it's gone fast. I'm in York for another week but I've had to pack all my stuff away since my Dad's picking it up tomorrow morning. It feels weird packing up and leaving, it's got my mind thinking about leaving York finally at the end of next year. Basically my main thought is no. No, I don't want to go. No, I'm not ready to go. No idea where to go next anyway. But that's still a year away and I get to come back again in October. Even SCM stuff I've been doing has been making think about not being a student in the not too distant future. Some of the big changes for SCM I've been planning and want to eventually implement won't happen before I leave which is just weird.

Anyway I've still got some fun stuff this week. Tomorrow is the CASSOC ball, which is going to be all suit and tie (silly Catholics with their tradition and formality) but should be loads of fun with a whole load of awesome people. Then a BBQ on Sunday and an end of term celebration on Wednesday and that's just chaplaincy stuff. There's also a couple of random People and Planet things going on next week as well.

Microsoft is the new Nintendo

2010-06-14T20:02:00.003+01:00

Image by nDevilTV via Flickr

And I sold my Wii. Seriously, why would I buy a "Kinect" other than to not have to use a remote to watch DVD. At their E3 briefing Microsoft announced: a fitness game, a dance game, a wii sports clone, some crappy weird roller coast like game, and a virtual pet. I'd get the wii sports clone if I already had a good reason to buy the Kinect but as it is unless the thing costs less than £20 (it won't) I'm not buying it this year. I know I'm not the audience M$ have in mind that they want the Kinect to connect (see what they did there?) with but and people like me not buying it is a problem for them.

Whilst now every one has a Wii, it didn't start that way. To begin with Wiis were owned just by the crazy early adopting gamers like me. We then showed all our friends, family and whoever would listen about how cool the Wii was, and they then bought one and told their friends. Even though I sold my Wii I showed it to cousins, nephews, aunts and uncles, then some of them went out and bought one. If people like me don't buy kinects who's going to show people what it is and that it actually works?

Still at least they still sell normal games that I can play. Fable looked cool as did Gears, and Reach but eh nothing special really.

It looks different

2010-06-12T16:01:00.002+01:00

I basically had no real excuse for this place looking so horrible and with the new blogger template tools I've made it actually not hurt the eyes so much whilst still keeping my preferred aesthetic. I might get bored and change again but for now slightly neater.

Institutions shape people and can make them better

2010-06-10T22:30:00.005+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

I went to a really good talk this evening by Paul Moore about ethics in Banking and how the culture of the system brought about the banking crisis. And in the discussion afterwards an economics professor was arguing that one of the reasons the FSA didn't intervene earlier was that people wouldn't have stood for it. It would have been seen as government sticking it's nose where it shouldn't and that unlike on the continent (Germany was his example) we are far more consumerist and materialistic and like to buy stuff and get whatever we can. I interuppted him to disagree and in reflection I'm quite surprised that I defended the goodness of the average person (I'm usually rather cynical) and that the reason the FSA couldn't intervene isn't because the public would have a problem but because the press would have a problem. I pointed out that we are the country that allowed rationing for ages and ages and only in very recent years have we become so consumerist, coinciding with a trend in the press. I'm not sure why but I want to say that I believe that we can make things better and that it's not people that have changed and gotten worse but rather the institutions have been shaped to stop us from progressing beyond this point. That means we change the institutions. You can't just say that it wouldn't have happened in Germany, you have to ask what's different about Germany and then try and change to make it like Germany.

I know the philosophers who have exposed this kind of basic idea that people can be good only within societies that have the right institutions. Rousseau is the first that springs to mind who believed that institutions had made us bad in the first place from our good natural savage man and that only through institutions changing again to enable his "social contract" could we become good social man. I don't like Rousseau's political theory at all and believe it to be fundamentally flawed (not least because there never was a good natural savage man) but he was right in raising the importance of institutions. But I think Kant has an even more important idea. Kant was a progressive in the most amazing sense. He believed that the world was getting better and always would get better. That we were reforming to a perfect society where people could actually be morally good. For according to him in order for people to act in a morally good way there must be a rightly organised society (and behind that a just international society). For all the other crap Kant has said I don't think that people should lose site of these two great ideas and ideas that should be central for activists. If we can get the institutions right then people will act better and we shouldn't be pessimistic about that because things will get better.

They're not paranoid if someone's actually out to get them

2010-06-07T13:50:00.002+01:00

I have to apologise for my post about the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. I was at least partially wrong. I thought that they were paranoid thinking that someone would bother character attacking them and twisting their words out of context. Turns out that's pretty much is what happens. The Amnesty activist who was there who he launches a character attack on really doesn't deserve it. I read his blog and he has a kind of Charlie Brooker-esque humour and so rather than being "a disturbing loner" he's actually pretty funny when read in context. In fact his response to that article is one of the funniest things I've read in a while.

But anyway the attack on a random attendee of the debate more than justifies the hostility of the PSC to being filmed. It shows that yeah he did just twist peoples words against them. I agree with most of his description of the debate though especially where he says he was "sarcastic and obtuse" because that's definitely true. If he really was interested in rational debate and trying to find a solution to the problem then he's going about it all the wrong way. Character attacks and being a smug arse have never been the first steps towards agreement and co-operation and I don't think they will be any time soon.

Don't forget that life is really awesome

2010-06-06T16:15:00.002+01:00

I've had just the most amazing week this week. I had an awesome Wednesday night staying in with my house mates eating Mexican food, drinking Margaritas and then watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Then this weekend I've had an amazing weekend with SCM being in York. It felt kinda weird having my SCM world come into my york world but weird in a great way. Also really nice to have an SCM event and not have to sleep on a floor. I've been re-elected for another year on GC and the new GC seem really awesome people and interested in the things I am and I think SCM is going to continue doing amazing things. I got slightly adopted by SCM Southampton for some of the Gathering and although they are a slightly different flavour of SCM (a meat eating flavour) they just the same open awesomeness which make SCM so awesome. Also I've now realised that very few people are around in SCM from when I first started and I'm kinda one of the old people that know about the past and stuff. It's odd but again in an awesome way, some of the faces have changed but it's still the same awesome SCM.

I know I've said awesome a lot and I might be devaluing the word but really these people are just great fun to be around and I just love all doing SCM stuff.

Dianne Abbot should be at least part of the leadership contest

2010-06-04T13:58:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Dianne Abbot should at least be part of the Labour Leadership debate not because she's a woman or because of her ethnicity but because what she has to say is actually interesting. I've just watched her on question time and she was brilliant and unlike lots of politicians she speaks her mind every single week on "This Week" even when it goes against the party line. She offers a strong left wing view challenging the new labour shift to the right and would provide a voice for a huge part of the party. Maybe she wouldn't be the best leader for the party and might be unelectable but her concerns are those of a large part of the left. It just sucks that the rules of the Labour party mean that it will be a closed debate that won't be any where near as exciting as it could have been. It's also the fault of all the Labour MPs who have wasted their nominations on the Milibands who have already qualified. But I would say all this just because I'm a giant "This Week" fan.

Why I'm not a member of the Palestinian solidarity society

2010-06-03T20:17:00.002+01:00

Image by Facing North East via Flickr

The one sentence answer is: Not everything is a big Zionist conspiracy. So this evening I went along to this debate about the water crisis in the west bank between friends of Israel, Palestinian solidarity society and Amnesty. I knew it was going to have lots of impassioned attacks by the PSS and I was mainly going along to hear how the Israeli side was going to be argued. It was quite interesting to hear there side and they had some good points. They're right that a lot of the problems are down to the Palestinian Authority not handling things as efficiently as they could but that doesn't change that Israel is still the largest cause of the water crisis for the West Bank and you'd expecting a developing state to fuck up a fair bit. But anyway back to the point the pro-Palestine side made lots of comments that whilst reflecting there own experience of oppression of the Palestinians seemed to imply that all Israelis were un-caring and just trying to make the situation worse. Then the whole debate fell apart when people noticed that it was being filmed. Every sitting on the pro-Palestinian side (apart from me) objected and demanded that the tape be destroyed and implied that it would be used by several Zionist ultra right organisations against them. It just sounded a little bit nuts to be honest. I really don't like the conspiratorial Israel's out to get us, view expounded by Palestinian supporters. The situation out there is a failure of politics not of Israeli people being cruel and evil. It's almost entirely fear which causes the problems and not hate. Yes there are horrible instances of the Israeli army shooting innocent Palestinians but that's what you get when you give every single 18 yr old a gun and say that they have to defend their country against "them", the enemy. The conflict is caused by a failure of empathy on BOTH sides and as soon as you begin dehumanising the other side then you don't help solve the problem.

Not getting any clearer

2010-06-02T11:21:00.002+01:00

I still don't get the whole essay marks thing. I thought the essay I handed in at the beginning of this term was a really solid essay that had more research going into it then any previous essay I'd done and was full of good examples. Got it back today and got a bottom 2-1 in it. One of the criticisms was that I was over reliant on a few sources. Seriously? On a subject where I had trouble finding stuff but managed to get several sources on a whole range of things I'm told that wasn't enough and I was using them too much. The question of what is relevant, what to leave out and what to put in reared it's head again in the feedback with criticism of things that I clearly knew not being put in the essay. They also seemed to want a more solid conclusion that I gave because I know I had one in there but they don't seem to like it. Thing is this essay had a far more solid conclusion than the one I handed in at Christmas. The criticism of this essay just seems to be little things that I just don't feel deserve getting cut down to a bottom 2-1, just as what was right about my essay in Christmas didn't feel like it deserved a decent first. I don't know if it's just a difference between lecturers in how they mark or one essay really was just that much better than the other but I really can't see it.

Creating more academies is a bad idea

2010-05-28T16:12:00.002+01:00

It's really really simple, stupidly simple if you look at the proposal with any amount of thought. If you say that schools that doing well are going to get 10% more funding that means that funding is going away from other schools that aren't doing well. That means that they will do worse. I hear that the pupil premium will make up for it but unless more money is put into education and the spending increases (which won't happen) then that money will come from somewhere. You can't invent money so these proposals will make some school worse because that's where the money will be coming from. It might make already good school slightly better but it'll hurt schools that actually need the money.

Free Schools are even worse because then you're creating new school and sucking the funding from other schools that already need the money to go to already privileged people. It's just crazy.

Found

2010-05-24T11:28:00.004+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

This post contains no spoilers about the Lost finale, just my reactions to it. I thought it was a brilliant finale. If you were looking for answers to questions about what happened in the past you may be disappointed but if you just care about the characters and what happens to them then it's great. It wasn't about the mythology or the events (but I do have a good idea what happened and anyone who doesn't understand can have it explained easily), it was about the characters. It also had a ton of throw backs to the pilot (which I saw again yesterday) and other episodes. I say this but then again I liked the BSG finale (though Lost was better) and no one else seemed to like that.

This has nothing to do with the Human Rights Act

2010-05-18T21:53:00.002+01:00

Actually nothing at all. Seriously this decision would have to be taken whether or not the HRA exists because we are committed to not sending to people to be tortured in at least 4 different international laws. The HRA does say something on the subject and means it's a British court rather than the European court or one of three UN committees (I can give details if you want). The Human Rights Act changes nothing in this case. But ssh don't tell the BBC or the Tories or anyone who should know so much better.

Month of Photos

2010-05-14T16:25:00.004+01:00

Last month I tried to take a photo a day for the whole month. I failed to do it everyday and lots of the photos are crap but some of them I quite like. So I'm going to be uploading them to my tumblr this week with little bits of explanation if you want to see them. It was an interesting thing to try but was hard to keep up and it showed that I can't motivate very easily.

We are going to miss Gordon Brown

2010-05-11T22:06:00.005+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Although I've criticised Gordon Brown a lot over the last few months, I still do think that he lacked the progressive vision that I want in a leader, he was a great Chancellor and a hard fighting PM. Labour was probably going to go out of power this election, polls predicted whilst Blair was still in place and damn if it hasn't been a close fight. Is there really any Labour leader that could have won that fight? Since the election Gordon Brown has hit all the right notes and done all the right things including a great goodbye speech. We're not going to get a much better heavyweight on the left and we're going to miss him soon enough.

I'm sure he left thinking "fuck that, it's there problem now" and can live the rest of his live in peace and not constantly attacked from all sides.

I didn't vote for this or that

2010-05-11T15:55:00.003+01:00

Something that has come up over and over again in politician's and members of the media's discussion of coalition is what the public voted for. As far as I'm aware there was no box for me to mark that said "Remove Gordon Brown" or even a "The Party with the most seats should govern" the only box I voted in was one that said that I want person X and what they stand for to represent me in parliament. That means they should do all they can to get what they stand for and therefore what I voted for enacted. So each party should do as much as they can to get their agenda through. I didn't cast a vote for "Labour renewing itself in opposition" or "not seeming like bad losers". I voted for someone to represent me in parliament and to get through the policies they promised to the best of their ability. Each party should put all its force into getting their polices through that's what people voted for. And the force they have at their disposable is in proportion to the amount of seats they have. All this other comment is crap and is actually based upon absolutely nothing.

All Christians Should...

2010-05-11T09:23:00.002+01:00

That is a phrase that, the last two times I heard it, made me feel incredibly alienated. Mainly because both times I didn’t do or wasn’t what “All Christians should”. Both times the people who said it were people I’d consider friends or at least people I liked hanging around with. They were making statements which they thought were fairly self-evident and were basic requirements of being a Christian. The statement to them was obvious from Jesus’ teaching or the Bible. But in both cases that’s not the way I’d seen it and them telling me that I wasn’t a proper Christian left me feeling hurt and excluded. I get some people’s feeling that there needs to be a bare minimum that you have to believe or act to be a Christian and for that to actually mean something. Maybe there is a point there and I’d probably allow it for something like Jesus’ two commandments (Love God and Love one another). But every time you put up a wall you are excluding people. My interpretation of Jesus’ radical message is that he was preaching the exact opposite. Jesus preaches a Gospel of radical inclusion talking to anyone who will listen, eating and living with those considered unclean and spreading his faith to people beyond his people. I recently heard a great analogy that the Church can either be a castle walling itself up from everyone else or to be like a seed thrower spreading chucking out seeds in all directions. Every wall we put up we are shutting someone out and hurting that person in doing so. Do we really believe that Jesus would have wanted a church that said no you can’t come in because you believe X or Y? Or should we as Christians instead except other people’s different interpretations of Jesus’ radical message and instead focus on living out God’s love in the world today?

Labour has dramatically improved the country in the last 13 years

2010-05-05T16:33:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Whatever George Monbiot will say about some of Labours worst failings the fact is we as a country are better off than we were 13 years ago. Crime is down, there's a minimum wage, education has improved enormously (think about the investment that went into your local schools in the last 13 years, mine now has none of the same buildings it had previously) and provided for a drastically improved future for young people now and in years to come. They introduced the Human Rights Act, which if anyone read and understood the damn thing would shut up every single person who complains about the UK needing a Bill of Rights, we have one, read it (start on page 3). The Freedom of Information Act which allows people access to the decisions that government make and without it no one would ever have even come close to finding out about a whole range of recent government scandals. The Conservatives opposed many of these things and even seek to repeal the Human Rights Act (though they'll still be accountable through the ECHR but it will be fucking slow and fucking stupid). If you are thinking 13 years in power and that's not very much. Those are just my highlights, the list of what Labour has done for this country would take so long that my fingers would blister before I could finish typing it.

So, fuck you George, I'm not voting Labour out of fear, I'm voting Labour because I've seen that Labour has done some great things and think that they can do more.

Who I'm voting for and Who I think you should vote for

2010-05-02T16:39:00.002+01:00

Image by motti82 via Flickr

I'm voting Labour on Thursday. I've thought about it a lot and I've decided that I still think it's a good idea given the position of my seat and my opinion on the parties. I think that Labour still present a strong progressive force and since my seat in York has been a Labour safe seat since 1992 when it switched from Conservative (admittedly there have been boundary changes), Labour is my best bet.

That's not to say that I don't think you should vote Lib Dem. The interview with Nick Clegg in the Guardian (which has endorsed the Lib Dems!) has sufficiently allayed my fears of a Lib-Con alliance. I now believe that the best outcome of this election would be a strong Lib-Lab coalition of progressive thinking. Gordon Brown has to go, his negative thinking and lack of leadership have prevented a post-Blair revival of progressive politics. Any coalition will most probably not be lead by Gordon Brown even if it is lead by a Labour leader. There are plenty of good leaders in waiting and I'd be more than happy with any of the suggested candidates (well not Ed Balls but no coalition would want him). Look at your constituency and see whether Labour or Lib Dems stand the most chance of winning and vote for them.

Scott Pilgrim 1-5

2010-05-01T15:00:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

After seeing the trailer for the Scott Pilgrim movie about a month ago I decided that rather than waiting to see the movie I'd read the books instead. So since then I've bought and read the first 5 books and annoyed that the 6th and final book doesn't come out until July. Anyway they are all really awesome. In some ways as Cassie has commented several times, the books just don't make sense. The video game like fight sequences or video game logic governing random events might be a little confusing but if you just go with it they are great books. They make me think that may I should actually read more comics, though I have no idea where I'd start.

Taking God out of L'arche

2010-04-25T09:40:00.003+01:00

Since coming back from L'arche on Friday I've chatted to a few people and blogged about the experience but there's been something a little off about how I've been talking about it. I've been tailoring what I've said to who I know is listening or to the style that I normally express myself in. By and large this means talking in a way that is non-Christian friendly. But really L'arche doesn't really make sense to me like that. Part of what was so amazing about L'arche was it's faith. L'arche is the most perfect example I have seen of living out the gospel in daily life. The place matches so well with how I see the teachings of Jesus. Part of what made the experience so wonderful for me was the time spent it prayer, bible study and talking about God. It's not something I do very much in my everyday life and that's something that I think I'm worse off for. I loved living in community with other Christians and just talking about God in normal life.

You see now I've read that I want to go delete it for sounding too overly Christian and slightly fake as a result because I'm just not used to talking about my faith and I guess I should do that more often but you know it feels weird.

Confused, Inspired and Happy

2010-04-24T08:02:00.002+01:00

L'arche was absolutely amazing. Usually in the final session of a weekend or event where we sum up how we felt about the week so far I oversell the impact of a week and bullshit a little about what effect it had on me and what I learned but almost the opposite is true of the end of me week in L'arche. I learned so much and most of it is not in anyway communicable, well at least not yet anyway, and I had a whole load of fun with the really great people who went there with me.

A little background about what L'arche is, it's a Christian community (well there are actually there are lots all over the world but I went to the original one in Trosly just north of Paris) where people with disabilities (learning difficulties, mental health problems) live together with assistants. They pray together, eat together and help each other live their lives. That is no where near a complete description of L'arche or describes just how amazing and loving a place it is. I was there on a retreat so spent the time listening to people talk about their experience, praying, reading the bible and walking about in the woods near by. We had two days listening to the founder of the L'arche community Jean Vanier speaking about what he had learned from the community and his reflections on that in relation to the gospel. He was really inspiring but not just what he was saying but how you could see it being lived out in the people in the community.

But now I'm back in Bristol having to turn myself back to revision but still stuck in that amazing place and all the questions and thoughts that it has stirred in me aren't going to go any time soon. Or at least I hope not.

If I vote here my vote will mean 10 times more

2010-04-09T18:35:00.003+01:00

So I've been doing some reading over the last few days about my seat in York and although it's a new constituency it's reckoned to be a fairly safe labour seat. Bristol on the other hand is thought to be a much more marginal because it could go Lib Dem, Labour or even possibly Tory. The Voter Power index says that my my vote in York is worth 0.063 of a vote compared to Bristol being worth 0.734. Is it silly that I still want to vote in York so that I can actually vote in person rather than use a proxy vote?

Remove four words and you'd have my vote Mr Cameron

2010-04-09T14:03:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Today David Cameron wrote an article for the Guardian today claiming that the Conservatives are the radical party. He claims that the conservatives are much tougher on inequality and would reverse the trend of rising inequality under labour one way of doing this would be by setting up a fair pay commission to make sure no one is paid more than twenty times the wage of the lowest employee in the organisation, in the public sector. There you go that's it remove those last four words and then we'd actually have a policy worth talking about. Pay inequality and the inequality of wealth arising from that isn't caused by the public sector. Lets talk about redistributing the enormous wealth from the financial industries and then we're getting there. At least capping pay for people at the top in all sectors would be a start to ensure a much more fair society. But whilst you are just chipping away at the public sector then it's not so much a fairer society at all. I'm not relying on my prejudices. I can see that the conservative party's policies will not help to shrink the growing inequalities in this country but in fact will cause them to grow further. I agree we need a new approach to politics but this is not it.

Send Marina Hyde back to the G2

2010-04-07T12:47:00.003+01:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Is this really front page news? Apparently since the Guardian put it on the front page this morning. I think the article is supposed to be funny but I really don't see why it's on the front page. Even if it were funny that's not the purpose of the front page, the front page is supposed to be for news. If tourists not knowing what is going on is news then wow the world really is fucked. I was annoyed enough by this previous piece appearing in the proper comment section of the Saturday guardian (yes, I know the Saturday paper s always a bit of a joke but still). At the time I said that it was either the stupidest thing the guardian has ever printed or the most right wing. A slight exaggeration but still even if it is supposed to be slightly silly (as Cassie told me after she read it) it still shouldn't be in the same section as Polly Toynbee who is actually making an intelligent point. If you really have to include Marina Hyde, put her in the G2 or something and maybe suggest that she just writes about celebrities.

What fable did right that Mass Effect did wrong

2010-04-05T22:54:00.003+01:00

I just finished Fable 2's standard story and whilst it was a fairly good game it had some big flaws (I may go into this in another post because at least one of them is interesting). Mass Effect 2 was a far better game, was longer and more enjoyable but there was at least one thing that Fable 2 did right that Mass Effect 2 did wrong. That was choices. Or more precisely "moral choices". In Mass Effect 2 lots of actions you do give you either paragon (good) points or renegade (bad) points and a big sign flashed up saying how many points you got for that action. The amount of good points you get effected how well your character could persuade other characters to do things or bad points could be used to intimidate other characters. These points proved essential to doing lots of story missions if you wanted to keep all characters on side. This meant that if you wanted to do the game well you had to just take one side and keep to it. Fable 2 on the other hand barley gives you any notification of good or bad points, its a small number that is actually pretty much invisible on the non-hd TV I play on whilst back in Bristol. The real way you can tell how you've been is how people react to you, friendly if you are good and scared if you are bad. The points don't really give you any huge in game advantage. The only extra ability you get from them is to express your goodness/badness e.g. my character was good enough to earn the laugh expression. This allowed for me to play less worried about keeping my good stats high doing and could let me just do whatever I wanted and what I felt was right. It felt like a much better system that encouraged me to do get involved more in the role, which is the whole point of a role playing game.

This more subtle touch moral system could also be seen in Fable 2's end of game BIG CHOICE, which there wasn't really as much of in Mass Effect 2 but there were some BIG CHOICEs throught out the game. Mass Effect 2 kept it's two path system even in the big choices. Fable's big choice had a third morally ambiguous choice and it made the question much more meaningful and actually worth thinking about rather than just "pick this for good points". I choose the middle choice and I have no idea whether the game viewed it as a good choice or a bad choice it was just the choice that felt right for my character considering what had happened to him. It made a proper ending for a decent game. Mass Effect 2 lacked this impact in any of its choices and weren't as much choices as they were problems to be solved for an optimal solution.

Cutting waste is a lie

2010-03-29T23:25:00.002+01:00

Any time a politician tells you they are cutting waste, they are lying. I usually don't say that politicians are lying because usually it's not really a lie, more of a bending the truth and I guess that's true in this case because it is waste if you view it as waste. But the real truth is cutting always means you are losing something. It's not the case that one party magically comes to power and sees the other one was doing something with three people that could be done exactly the same with two. David Mitchell explains why in this nice clip. When cuts are made public services suffer. So be very very suspicious over claims that you can find thirty billion in "waste". Admittedly it's not just the Tories who are using the waste talk, Labour will be cutting services whilst raising taxes, but that's probably the responsible thing to do. Offering a tax cut before the election and not outlining exactly how you will pay for it is not.

I missed the actual debate because I was the cinema watching Lourdes (good film btw) and twitter reactions just seem to be Tories saying Osborne did well, Labour people saying Darling and the rest of the left saying they liked Cable. And my internet in Bristol is too slow for clips...

Orange Light Pollution

Professional Policy Nerd

Lost in a virtual world: Taking violence in video games seriously

I did not realise how lucky I was

Lost in a Virtual World: RPG mechanics and inacessibility

There is a person in Somalia crying over an uncollected bin

The Moral decline of the British Elite is bullshit

A post totally unrelated to any current event that is happening now

Lost: Second time through

A "non-idealogical" policy without proof is not a policy

Temporary relocation

Rejecting the market and raising values

Almost over

Marr was perfectly right

Death brings new life

Fighting the "screw you, you deserve it" impulse

I grow weary of your misogynistic bullshit

Lost in a Virtual World: Mass Effect, biological weapons and genocidal abortions

Christian Identity

Returning from Retreating

Men of Faith

My final lecture

Busy in a good way

On being Progressive

The Opposite Of Conservative is...

Trying a new experience of church

I really didn't know I cared so much

The Christian Paradigm

Give us something or share it all

Lost in a Virtual World: Bioshock 2 and mercy

Let's tax divorce, that'll make better families...

On asking a middle aged question

It was the Telegraph that were in the wrong

Lost in a Virtual World: How Fable 2 chose my essay

Lost in a Virtual World: The Wind Waker session 2

Lost in a Virtual World: The Wind Waker session 1

Lost in a Virtual World: The Wind Waker intro

What they deserve

What does this story tell us

A Post-Brown re-evaluation

Christians in the UK are being discriminated against

Related articles

More student protests

Movement Review+ aka epistemological pedantry

Remembering and challenging

Is property damage violence, and does that matter?

Related articles

When campaigning goes too far

I have the collar. I make the woosh noises.

In a groove

A questioning humble realist faith?

Does choice hinder where games can go?

The land of bad dreams

Two exams and a working mens club

A business man wants a free market? Shock horror!

I hate revision

I have more time for Tony Blair than I do George Galloway

Theory-ladenness in practice

The importance of voice

I shall become a bat

Damascus and showers

Ed Miliband and Leadership

Related articles by Zemanta

A small itinerary and Madaba

Arrival and overwhelming

There will be feasting and dancing

ENCORE

ENCORE

ENCORE

Jordanian Goat meetings

Between Millibands

Self-Affirming

Pixar: Growing Old But Not Growing Up

How the election and the coalition has shaped my political alignment

Character Progression

Blu-ray software doesn't work

Make do and mend

I am so young

Anonymity Online

The holiday temptation