A David Cameron Cartoon

A new cartoon about which I can say very little other than: well, I liked it.

I drew it late last night after hearing Cameron's 'terrorist sympathizers' comment. I'm currently trying to write up my thoughts about that, so I'm not going to repeat them here.

It's a grey day. I'm watching some of the debate but trying to work. One of those days when I really wonder why I bother.  Posted the cartoon to Twitter: not a single retweet or like. I don't have a great number of followers so perhaps it's expected. Perhaps I just don't know the public mood. I can only respond to how feel and I feel that Cameron too often thinks and acts without thinking. Perhaps it's just crap.

I don't know...

A Putin Cartoon

Precision-Guided Cynicism

'I'll tell you what,' said the man on the 141, lowering his paper. 'I agree with what that David Cameron's done.'

'What's that?' asked the woman, who was coincidentally also on the 141 but gazing out the window towards Boots.

'He's had them bloody British Isis fighters blown up. Good riddance to 'em!'

'They were going to shoot the Queen,' tutted the woman. 'We can't be having that!'

'Indeed we can't!' I thought to myself from the seat behind.

The man and woman on the 141 were pretty typical of the mood on Britain's buses this Tuesday morning. 'Wham! Bam! ..Thank you Cam' was the exact headline on the day's edition of The Sun. I say 'exact' because I'm less sure about the legitimacy of their punctuation than I am sure about the legitimacy of the drone strikes. If running off to join a theocratic death cult seeking to replace all democracies in the world with a caliphate through forms of barbaric torture, abuse and murder doesn't make you the legitimate target for precision munitions, then I don't know what does. The only mildly questionable part of the action was the targeting of British nationals. Depending on how you spin your logic, this was either an act of national self defence or an example of state sanctioned assassination. A nation meting out justice to its own nationals seems reasonably more acceptable than meting justice out on non-nationals but others might argue the opposite. The difference is a matter for the lawyers to write cheques about. In most people's minds, the Daesh fighters gave the government legitimacy the moment they tried to weaponise their passports.

Yet beyond the general sense of it being a case of 'one of up for the good guys', David Cameron has here set quite the precedent. The UK government now claims the right to kill any person on the planet who threatens our national security. Just so long as they have the approval of a majority of people on the nation's buses, Cameron et al are on firm ground. Indeed, standing at the Despatch Box, Cameron seemed immune to criticism. He repeated a defence that has been used countless times by Prime Ministers before him. 'My first duty as Prime Minister is to keep the British people safe. That is what I'll always do. [...] I'm not prepared to stand here in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on our streets and have to explain to the House why I did not take the chance to prevent it when I could have done'.

Again, there's little to criticise in the specific details. This was a black and white case of the good guys taking out the bad. Yet set this into the broader context and you might begin to feel that the black and whites do occasionally slide into to grey.

What makes me pause to think is the timing of this murky business. These strikes took place on the 21st of August, two weeks before Cameron stood up in the Commons. It felt like such a convenient time to make this announcement. A day before, Cameron had been the subject of widespread condemnation as the British government repeatedly tried to hide behind the curtains as the world looked for somebody to aid the Syrian refugees. A day later, the couple on the 141 bus had forgotten all about the refugees and were full of praise for their Leader. Clever? Convenient? Planned? Is there any coincidence that long-term Cameron friend, Rebekah Brooks, returned to News UK (owners of The Sun) just last week? Is it a case of The Sun what spun it?

Secondly, this announcement comes just days before the Labour leadership election. It's been widely reported that the Conservatives are looking forward to testing the anti-war resolve of Labour's new leader, whichever candidate called Jeremy Corbyn might win. The drone strikes were possibly the first stage in that political war and we can expect to see the distinctions grow finer between waging an air campaign over Syria and fighting a proxy war fought trough drones. Cameron readily talks about 'meticulous planning' and this 'precision airstrike' but, tellingly, he didn't mention 'drone' (the commonplace term) but 'remotely piloted aircraft' which makes it feel so much more conventional. I should also imagine that much of the ordinance dropped from UK aircraft has the word 'precision' stencilled somewhere on their casing. It leaves me to wonder if the remarkable part of this story isn't the precision nature of the weapon but the precision nature of the politics. It wasn't the military operation that was well planned. It was the way the story was deployed at a moment of government crisis. The story left a front page crater a headline wide. The Syrian refugee story never had a chance.

 

Baghdadi Injury Update

An Al-Baghdadi Cartoon

My Cartoon About Mosul Museum

Various Unrelated Thoughts

I wish I didn't have to program, though I know it's entirely my choice. How paradoxical does that sound? It's my choice to do something I wouldn't choose to do. My life has always been like this. No matter what I've accomplished, it's always my computer skills that people want or demand that I use. I wish I could just spend my days writing but there's no money to be had in writing. Not here. Not outside London. Possibly not inside London unless your mother was a columnist and is happy to land you a gig on the nationals. I can't cartoon well enough to earn money that way. So, I'm stuck trying to brush up on the only thing I've ever been slightly good at and for which there might just be a demand, even though deep down I don't actually enjoy doing it.

Or perhaps isn't the right phrase. I do enjoy it but I enjoy it too much. My interest in programming is something I shouldn't feed. It makes me too distance, uncommunicative. It feeds the very part of me I'm sure is completely Asperger's. Sometimes, it's like giving a junkie a needle. Computers are my needle.

Today I spent pulling my hair out in frustration. I'd wanted to write and draw but I forced myself to learn to program in 'Windows Presentation Framework'. To the non-geek, programming is usually done in one of a few languages. The most popular is probably Java but the use of C# (pronounced C sharp) is rising and that's what I use. However, the language is only half of the business of being a programmer. The language you use to code is actually communicating with something bigger and more powerful. I suppose it's a bit like knowing French and being able to order an army around the field. The 'army' I've recently been 'commanding' was called Windows Forms and it was an easy thing to do. I'd say 'Create a window' and it would create a window. I'd say 'When somebody clicks on this button, count the number of beans in this pile' and that's what it would do. It was easy. In its way, it was fun.

I'm still 'speaking' in C# but I'm no longer using Windows Forms which is considered old fashioned. Microsoft want people to use this WCF system and, frankly, it's a royal pain in the arse. Somebody said it doesn't so much have a 'learning curve' as a 'learning cliff'. It's monstrously complicated to do even the simplest things. I finally have a basic program working but took me all day to do something that in Windows Forms (the old technology) would have taken me an hour.

Wish I could just write for a living but doesn't everybody? Everybody believes they can sling verbs and nouns together and produce readable prose. The truth is that so much of the prose I read is written by people with a cloth ear to the nuances, flows, and beauty of the English language. Thank god fewer people can code but, then, even that's not as rare a thing as it once was. I figure there's some guy in India who does everything I do but at a lower price. I'm plagued by that guy in India. The bargain bucket me.

***

I was bought a gift today. I'd been wanting to play Assassin's Creed Unity for a while but I'd dismissed it because I'd read so many bad reviews. No game has received such bad press and has been perceived so poorly. However, it was on sale and I'm lucky enough to have somebody who cares enough about me that she keeps my spirits raised with the occasional game.

Tonight I spent three hours playing the unpatched version and about half an hour on the patched version. I have to say: either patched or unpatched, Assassin's Creed Unity is a stunningly good game. Of course, there are the occasional glitches but, based on my experience of the game, they are so mild as to be completely forgivable. It's not even a matter of praising the glass half full rather than the glass half empty. The game is brimming with moments where I'm sitting there just spellbound. Perhaps it's because I've always loved that period of the late eighteenth century. Revolutionary France fascinates me because it was an expression of those forces I'll be been waffling on about in subsequent paragraphs. I also love Paris, Gothic architecture, the novels of Dumas and anything that involves a sword fight. For me it's the best game I've played in a long time and it just feels like it's opening up into something very special. I have no idea where the criticism has come from. Perhaps people were playing a different game. Makes no sense to me. Ubisoft have just become my favourite developers again.

***

As I settle down for the evening and try to figure out what the hell I'll draw tonight, I notice that ISIS have killed another hostage. Another journalist killed for doing what journalists do. This is an obvious thing to say but I'll say it anyway: ISIS is very different to anything we've seen before. There might have been equally bad pockets of nihilistic ideologies in recent history. My mind goes back to the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. In Africa, we've seen genocide in places like Rwanda. Yet for over half a century, it's the Nazis who have been our measure of the worst forms of human barbarism. That said: the current situation around Syria and Iraq feels so very different. There was always something deeply rational about the Nazi blood cult. It's why it's so often associated with Nietzsche who wrote about the irrationality of compassion. They mechanised killing in a way which, had it been any other discipline, they might have been considered Modernists. ISIS are not Nazis. There is no reason to ISIS. There's a feral cruelty about everything they do, as though some collective adrenal gland has gone bad. In that sense, I tend to think that Boris Johnson was right in what he said today. This isn't just a bad ethos or bad 'thinking'. It's pathology. It's self-abuse. It has the stink of postmodern. It's death for death's sake.

I'm beyond thinking I'll ever understand the Middle East. This last week there's been so much criticism about our government lowering our flag to honour the dead Saudi king. We're rightly appalled at Saudi regime and the brutal punishments they inflict when people try to express their right to free expression. Yet the reality is that none of us would want the lid to come off that tinderbox of tribal rivalries. Was it naive of anybody to believe that by taking down Saddam that democracy would flourish in the region? Freedom in anything is frightening but it takes the truly enlightened to enjoy it. With the freedom to do anything comes the potential of chaos. It's the great paradox, I suppose, that to enjoy freedom you also have to accept a self-imposed restraint. Again (I always make this point), it is the thing Conrad expressed so profoundly in 'Heart of Darkness'. Civilization is founded upon a lie but that lie is crucial is we're to keep our civilization. What ISIS prove is that some societies are not mature enough to deal with freedom. In the place of one brutal dictator, they would put a thousand brutal despots, each interpreting a desert fable as though it were an eternal truth. I don't hold the UK or America apart from that truth. I'm generally a Republican but there's a small part of me that realises that a Monarchy might at least impose a sense of order upon the country. For everything the monarch represents, there's the truth that there's all the things they don't represent which would come to the fore in a Republic. There's also the fact that when you destabilise any system, you should be prepared for the long process of it finding a new balance. Revolutions are not things you'd really wish upon any people.

I always think of it in terms of my gut. I sometimes have a tricky gut. Since I was a child, I've always had problems with some foods. It makes me cautious about what I eat. Friends and family mock me because I always eat the same things but I view my stomach as a system. Disturb its equilibrium and it's a sod to get it balanced again. So much of the world works the same way and the sad reality is that equilibrium is often maintained through hellish forces. ISIS might itself be a hellish force which will produce a new equilibrium. I'm not sure. I just don't know what hellish force can come along and silence them. I'm not even sure we want to know what hellish force could silence them.

The Mob Win Again...

I notice with a very weary sense of its utter predictability that John Grisham has now apologised for his comments about child pornography. It was always bound to happen once his words went viral. To be a public figure in the modern world means holding firm to a moral hegemony, where there can be no nuance to an argument nor any attempt to make an intelligent but difficult point. We in the West might scoff at or feel morally repulsed by the fundamentalist ethos of ISIS but is there really that much of a difference when it comes to holding attitudes that aren't codified by unelected rule makers? As the example of Grisham shows, it is simply naive to assume that we enjoy Free Speech and that there are very few ideas or thoughts that are prohibited by law. There is a more pernicious law out there and it is rarely informed by anything as simple as reason or argument. It is directed by media-savvy pressure groups, screaming firebrands of both the left and the right, as well as ever popular 'wisdom of crowds' expressed through social media.

Judy Finnigan ran against the same problem earlier in the week when she made some comments about a rape case. She had been foolish enough to express an intelligent point of view when it was apparent that she should have expressed that tabloid sensibility whereby every example of rape is described as ABSOLUTELY THE WORST CRIME OF ITS KIND. Every rapist is the worst human being, unless, of course, the crime involved anybody even a millisecond under the age of sixteen, in which case the rapist immediately becomes the worst kind of paedophile and, as we all know, death by slow moving steam roller would be too good for them. At times, it feels like we're living through an extended edition of Brass Eye's Paedogeddon except this version isn't really that funny...

This shift into sensationalism is driven entirely by the media and, occasionally, the politicians who follow after them like cawing seagulls in the wake of the fishing boat spreading rotten chub. The sad story of Brenda Leyland fell quickly from the headlines and I suppose there can be no surprise why no national newspaper has ever made much of those tragic events. Perhaps there's no mileage to be had defending the rights of person who spread vile messages via Twitter. And make no mistake, the messages Brenda Leyland were an example of the ugliness that social media brings out in people and which I've been writing about for a very long time. Yet as a symptom of what was wrong with the individual and what is wrong with our society, both needed to be dealt with by people trained to deal with difficult psychological and social problems. The fact is that Sky News decided to act as the police in naming her as an internet troll and then effectively acted as the judge in her subsequent trial by media. What they did was the lowest form of journalism we've seen on these shores in a long time but nobody seems willing to make that point. Do the newspapers fear it might lead to a new Leveson Inquiry?

The voice of the braying mob is everywhere to be seen around the case of Brenda Leyland. On the afternoon of Brenda Leyland's death, I watch in incredulity as BBC News 24 covered the story by asking how celebrities might be protected from attacks on Twitter. Establishment figures, such as Carole Malone writing in the Mirror, were quite happy to turn the story from one about the media going too far into a story about an individual abusing their freedom of speech.

And as tragic as Brenda Leyland’s death is police and journalists cannot be expected NOT to confront those who have threatened murder or been vicious for fear they might kill themselves.

In response to that, perhaps one need only quote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose article 11 states: "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence". Even Iran has a clause that protects the individual in the face of criminal allegations: "Innocence is to be presumed, and no one is to be held guilty of a charge unless his or her guilt has been established by a competent court". Of course, many would question the competence of Iranian courts but are they really less fair than trial by a television channel or newspaper desperate to sell advertising space by rousing the emotions of the popular mob? When does Brenda Leyland get her day in court? When does a judge get to rule in the case and comment on the actions of Sky News and others who placed a clearly vulnerable individual in an impossible position?

Talking to friends and family over the past year or two, I've often found myself in a difficult position arguing the case for people who I instinctively want to condemn. I hope I'm not the only one who tries to look beyond the individual and look at the system that is testing their guilt. You have to ask yourself: would you trust that system if you were convicted of something for which you were entirely innocent? It's easy to overlook flaws in the system when the system is meting out justice on an internet troll, celebrity groper, rapist, or paedophile. Yet the very same system could equally be used to try a libertarian, a whistle blower,  a person who simply believes in something different to the majority. When Russell Brand is brought up on charges of sedition, perhaps the attitude of the media might change...

True legal argument tends to be extremely dry because it is very much about the nuance. Critics may scoff and point to lawyer's obsession with minutia as a reason why the law too often fails. However, isn't it preferable to the rule of the mob we see played out on our screens? All I would ever hope for is a climate where intelligent people can hold reasoned debates, where people like John Grisham and Judy Finnigan can express their views and that people will listen and think. Forced 'apologies' mean nothing other than they've been cowed by the mob and the mob already holds too much power in our society. ISIS may be a frightening, violent and hateful present but it's a different mob in our looming future that we should perhaps fear the most.