The Quiet Road

That was a slightly longer holiday than anticipated. Well. No, that’s not true. The actual “holiday” bit was precisely as long as anticipated. And lovely it was too. The three weeks since then, however, haven’t exactly been a holiday.

I’ve had precious little opportunity to spend very long at the computer though. So I suppose from your perspective, dear reader, they may as well have been.

Sorry about that.

As Paul so rightly berates me, “A few days my arse. Does this mean that when you say ‘Peak oil will happen by 2008’ it will actually occur in 2947?” It’s a fair cop. You can all relax really. Claims of an imminent crisis are merely the global equivalent of setting my alarm-clock 10 minutes fast to give me that extra jolt and get me out of bed in the morning.

Sadly though, I read a line from Richard Heinberg recently that probably better sums up the truth… “Peak oil isn’t a hypothesis. It’s an observation. We’re writing history, not predictions. And policies that don’t recognize that are creating a tragedy that our children and grandchildren will pay for.” (cit. “The Day After Peak Oil”).

A few things came to my attention over the past couple of weeks that I consider worthy of remark though. So what better return-from-a-break post than the old-faithful “round-up of interesting links with a paragraph of comment on each”? It’s cheap, easy to deploy and allows for expansion and follow-up posts at a later date (containing a sentence that begins, “As I mentioned earlier this month…”)

The first thing you should probably check out is Merrick’s recent piece on Greenpeace over at Head Heritage. There’s a line in Nietzsche’s Twilight of The Idols that always gets called to my mind when I think about Greenpeace… “Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.” That line encapsulates a major strand of my political thinking, and the truth I believe it expresses explains my tendency towards anarchism.

The things people find in Nietzsche, eh?

Anyways I’ve long mistrusted Greenpeace, and Merrick’s piece explains why my blind prejudice is arguably justified. Not only do members of the Greenpeace Executive Board live on an exclusive diet of whale meat and baby seal eyes, but Greenpeace as an organisation is – bizarrely – directly responsible for 96.4% of all global pollution and deforestation.

OK. That’s not true. But seriously people… we live in a world where flights from London to Dubai cost a tenner but a train from London to West Sussex costs 25 quid… there’s definitely some alternative reality weirdness going on… so who knows what the hell is true anymore? Actually though, ten pound flights to Dubai are entirely predictable. In fact, if ever we need a masthead for our criminal wastefulness then The Independent have provided one. “Mum? When you were flying to Dubai for a tenner, did you know at the time that you were building a world where my daughter wouldn’t have enough to eat? What about you Dad? Did you know?”

Tattoo it on our foreheads kids… I flew to Dubai for a tenner! It’s my fault!

As for why I’ve highlighted the carbon neutrality of the flights, check out Carbon offsets are a fraud over at Bristling Badger.

Fresh off the blog servers this week came some tangentially related Dreamflesh musings on the subject of “reclaimed” land. Muddy water’s taking back the land is a reminder of the absurd egoism of the human race as we talk of “creating bird habitats” as though The Environment is something we can parcel up and allocate. And on that subject, this “flood map” application would really worry me if I were Dutch.

That the sea appears poised to swallow vast tracts of land is perhaps some kind of weirdly appropriate cthuthulesque redressing of balance. Reading a recent George Monbiot article (Mass medication with Omega 3 would wipe out global fish stocks) it struck me that our treatment of life beneath the waves has been unspeakably violent and barbarous. Of course, our treatment of much of life above the waves has been pretty damn unspeakable too. But in the oceans, because the destruction has been hidden from us beneath the surface, we’ve not even had the ineffectual prickings of conscience to hold us back.

Imagine hunting deer by drag-netting forests. Talk about your collateral damage. The fishing industry has visited absolute devastation to 7 tenths of the surface of the planet. True, it’s been done to meet a consumer demand. But if you’re looking to use that as a justification then you’ve come to the wrong blog.

Actually I can’t be quite so blithe about this issue. I was a strict vegetarian for many years, but a couple of years ago – for health reasons – I began eating fish again. It’s a constant battle with my conscience. I do my best to buy organic when I buy farmed, and I try to stick only to packaged fish that bears the MSC seal of approval. Though it annoys the hell out of me that New Zealand hoki gets the “sustainable” thumbs-up when sold in Irish supermarkets. It comes from a sustainable fishery, you see? The fact that it’s then transported to the other side of the planet in a giant fridge is ignored.

Arguably not the most energy-efficient way of feeding the Irish population. As always though, it’s important to give a shout out to Fishonline whenever the fishing industry is mentioned.

So yeah. I’m back. I’ve got a lot of emails to catch up on, and then I’m planning on installing a new hard-drive and reinstalling Windows… but later in the week should see some kind of return to normal blogging, whatever ‘normal’ might mean in that context.

Normal is the watchword, as Ms. Mars would say.

Missing Comments?

Incidentally, during the couple of weeks I was AWOL I received an awful lot of comment spam. It seems some casino spambot has discovered The Quiet Road and made a little nest for itself. Over nine hundred attempted advertisements for online gambling! This didn’t, sadly, discourage my regular visits from the purveyors of cialis and cheap mobile phones. All in all I had almost two thousand pieces of comment spam to delete. It’s vaguely possible that some first-time commenter got deleted in the purge. So if you posted something recently and it’s still awaiting approval, I’m afraid it probably got thrown in the trash by mistake.

Sorry about that. But if you try again, I’m sure you’ll get through.

Wah-hey! I’m back from my unannounced break from blogging — more about which in another post. And just in time to witness the relaunch (in glorious technicolor) of The Sharpener. This is a group blog dedicated to politics and culture with writers from a wide cross-section of the blogging spectrum. There’s a handful from the lunatic fringes to demonstrate inclusiveness… tories, economists, even me. So you never know what you’re going to get.

Hopefully what will unite the contributors will be the quality of writing. Plus integrity, fairness and honesty. There’s a whole lot of approaches to political writing. The worst kind involves deliberate partisan dishonesty; an attempt to hoodwink the reader through the manipulation and selective presentation of facts. The best kind shows the reader a glimpse of the world through the eyes of the writer… it gently takes their hand, points out of the window and calmly says “See? That’s why I feel the way I do.”

Once in a while I like to think I veer towards that “better” end of the scale. George Orwell was a master at it. As is my friend Merrick. Quite a few of the writers over at The Sharpener hit the mark too. So head on over there and bookmark the place. It’ll be good.

This is just a bit of blog administrivia, but one or two of you may find it useful. Justin (over that Chicken Yoghurt) emailed me earlier. He pointed out that since so many of my posts are fairly lengthy, it would be an idea to have a print version of each one.

Apparently there are WordPress plug-ins that will generate a separate version of each page for printing. Rather than go that route, however, I decided instead to finally get round to adding a ‘print’ stylesheet to the site. It’s a more elegant solution, in my view, than having two pages – one for print and one for screen.

The result is that you should now be able to print out each individual article and have it nicely formatted for page as well as screen. I decided to omit the comments from the print-out. Is this the right thing to do, I wonder? Would people prefer to have a print-out of the article plus the comments (given that could run to twice the number of pages)? If anyone feels strongly enough to make the case for including comments in the print-out then I’ll happily put them back in.

Almost anyone with a blog that allows reader comments will be familiar with the problem of ‘Comment Spam’. This is the practice of posting a comment for no other reason than to create one or more links from your website to another one. This is not in the hope that people will follow that link, but rather to help with search-engine placement.

See, search engines rank sites using complex algorithms that take into account numerous factors. One of those factors is the number of other sites that link to them. So a website about basket-weaving, for instance, which has a thousand links to it will – all else being equal – appear higher in Google or MSN searches than one with only a hundred links to it. Given that search engines generate large amounts of traffic, and people tend to click on search results higher up the list, it makes sense from a commercial standpoint to try and maximise the number of incoming links your site has.

Yet another example where commercial interests conflict with ethical ones. Because although it may be a small issue, it is nonetheless a dishonest practice. If the owner of a basket-weaving site spends time adding links to their site on blogs, it creates a false impression of how popular that site is. Again, a relatively minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but one which nonetheless makes the internet as a whole less reliable. A thousand people saying “This site is great” means far more than one person (the site owner) saying it a thousand times. Yet currently search engine technology cannot distinguish between the two, so you may find yourself getting all your basket-weaving tips from a dreadful site run by a dishonest spammer rather than the excellent one that is recommended by lots of people.

As I say; it’s a dishonest, unethical practice carried out by people with no real sense of decency or fair play. Nasty scum basically. The kind of people you’d cross the road to avoid. Unsurprisingly the main purveyors of comment spam are porn sites and online casinos… neither of which I object to on principle, but both of which – in practice – tend to have a significant whiff of exploitation and unpleasantness about them.

Sometimes, however, you get comment spam that is simply perplexing. Recently, for example, I’ve had the same comment posted to every single one of the posts on this blog. It reads: “Great article. I am just sad I dont know how to reply properly, though, since I want to show my appreciation like many other.”

A very nice thing to say. The first time it appeared I approved it for publication. It sounds like someone for whom English is not a first language and who wishes to express their appreciation of your writing, but doesn’t quite have the words (the singular of the word “other” gives away the potential non-native-speaker). Soon afterwards, however, the same comment began to spring up on every blog post (including the ones that are just an image and a link). I realised therefore that it was comment spam and deleted them all.

What is perplexing about it, however, is the fact that the spammer doesn’t include any links in the actual comment, and the web-address they provide (which links from their name – Bonifacious) doesn’t work. Ergussumatrras dot com. There’s nothing there; leastways not yet; so as comment spam it’s a complete waste of time. Not only unethical and dishonest, but utterly incompetent too.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon

A while ago – on my last blog but one – I received a positive comment on one of my posts. It was clear that the commentator had not only read, but actually thought about, the post. I naturally checked out his link and found it led to a blog which he kept regularly updated. I became a reader of his site and he became a semi-regular commentator on mine… always relevant and thoughtful comments. He appeared no different to any other blogger. After a while, his blog became darker and darker. He wrote about his wife leaving him and refusing him access to his kids. He wrote about how this had a knock-on effect on his work and how he was in real danger of losing not only his family, but his job and home too. I became quite concerned for the guy and sent him a couple of emails. I saw undercurrents of suicidal tendencies begin to manifest in his writing, and emailed him again suggesting he contact The Samaritans, or – if he wasn’t willing to do that – then I’d be glad to meet up with him for a chat, if he needed someone to vent at.

I received no response to my emails, and wasn’t willing to discuss this publicly in the comments of his blog… I didn’t know how sensible it would be given his fragile state of mind; it’s very very difficult to predict how someone will interpret a chunk of plain text posted to a public website. In order to deal with serious emotional issues, it’s far better to do it in person.

Then there was a shift in his outlook… he began posting hints that his situation was in danger of driving him to violence. At first I became seriously worried that he might hurt his ex-wife and genuinely considered contacting the police. Then however he started talking about “hitting back at the powerful”. He commented on one of my blog posts – an attack on Tony Blair – stating that someone should “try to get close to Blair and do us all a favour”. Then, on his own blog, he began discussing a plan to sneak into a banquet being held at a London hotel which a number of foreign and UK politicians would attend, and poison the food.

It was only at this point that I smelled a rat. He’d been so smart up until that point… I knew he wasn’t dumb enough to post details of an assassination attempt on a public website. I still believed that this was a poor bloke who’d just gone through a hellish time; lost his family, lost his job, was in danger of missing payments on his mortgage and was genuinely at the end of his tether… the assassination thing was clearly a dark joke from the mind of someone in a dark place. A plea for help… a plea for attention from his ex. It was hard to know, but I felt very bad for the guy.

The day after the banquet had passed off without incident I logged onto his blog. The blog was no longer active. In its place was a large advertisement for the film “The Assassination of Richard Nixon”. The entire thing had been part of a viral marketing campaign to coincide with the UK release of the movie. His apparently genuine messages on my blog and on his own site had merely been lies designed to part people with their money. He had taken advantage of my concern (some would say, my gullibility) and abused my trust for personal profit. What a deeply nasty excuse for a human being. True pondscum.

Yes, the film is fantastic (Sean Penn is an amazing actor). And yes, the campaign was very clever. But you can be clever and still be pondscum. And manipulative advertising for a fantastic film is still manipulative advertising. If I ever met that blogger in a pub I’d spit in his face. Because frankly, that’s what it feels like he did to me.

Just what the world needs right? Another new blog.

But at least in this case, the world isn’t getting another new blogger. I used to blog at cloud23.net, then more recently I had a blogspot blog, and now I’m back at my own domain.

“Numero 57” is a George Orwell reference by the way; “The Quiet Road” is from a Talking Heads song. And although “The Quiet Road” neatly sums up where my head’s at just now, I’m hoping that “Numero 57” doesn’t also become an appropriate choice rather than merely a powerful image.

But what’s “The Quiet Road” going to be about?

Ah, the question on everyone’s lips.

Accepting, of course, that you define “everyone’s lips” as the lips of the three people reading this.

In truth it’s going to be “more of the same”. So all those who are familiar with my previous blogs should feel free to mutter “So it’s just a trumped-up redesign then!” The rest of you should feel free to remain none the wiser.

It’s a cruel world and no mistake.

My recent move from London to Dublin will shift the emphasis of my political writing a little. Though probably not as much as one might expect. From an historical perspective Britain has always punched above its weight politically (so to speak). Clearly the actual power possessed by that small industrial nation has waned considerably since the days of Empire. Nonetheless, much of Britain’s influence still remains.

Part of this can be attributed to its absurdly disproportionate military power for its size. With a tiny handful of exceptions, the British armed forces could effectively reduce any nation to a smouldering pile of rubble should the order be given. And even that tiny handful wouldn’t fare well against the British nuclear submarine fleet.

And part of it can be attributed to the silly idea of having five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Five nations who can veto any decision made, and who – by and large – dictate the terms of any debate on the world stage. Incidentally, it is no surprise that the other four permanent members of the Security Council also have fleets of nuclear-missile-bearing ships patrolling our oceans. Little gangs of genocidal terrorists.

It’s a simple fact that the longer those fleets are out there waiting for the order to murder hundreds of millions of people, the more likely it is that the order will be given (in anger or in error). That the human race sees fit to take such an enormous risk with its future is probably all the evidence that the Climate Change lobby needs to pack up and go home. By backing up political power with the threat of human extinction we have undeniably entered an age of deep nihilism.

Those of us who warn of Peak Oil or Climate Change or Unsustainability just can’t compete with a system threatening to murder us all if it doesn’t get its way.

Which isn’t to say that local Irish politics will be pushed aside by the Big Global Issues. Sometimes the apparently “small” stories can be illustrative of important points. Points that get obscured by the bombastic fog of International Affairs. And let’s not forget that British politics are actually very important here in Ireland. After all, they still occupy a quarter of the country (ooooh… see how I, not so subtly, set out a broadly Republican stance through my use of the word “occupy”? You have to watch out for bias like that in the media. Absolutely scurrilous.)

Interestingly, just as Britain has long puched above its weight, politically speaking; so Ireland has done the same culturally. And for almost exactly the opposite reason. Britain’s political influence was wrought with economic and military dominance. Ireland’s cultural influence was a product of oppression and economic hardship.

Thanks to a millennium of occupation by our nearest neighbour, the Irish gained the dubious gift of having just as much ownership of the global language as the English, or later the Americans. Then a rich literary tradition, geographical proximity to the cultural centre of the world (London), and the economic hardship that created global emigration combined to allow even average Irish writers to gain far wider audiences than the best Belgian or Swiss or Danish ones. It’s no surprise then, that when Joyce or Beckett or Yeats came along, they would shake the world of literature to the core.

Which is not to say that I intend to deliberately shift focus from politics to culture because of my change of city. I shall – as always – merely continue to tackle those things that inspire me to write. Though I do intend to be more disciplined about it, and try to post a bit more regularly.

Well, here’s hoping…