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.

On The Charlie Hebdo Massacre

It's going to be a day of multiple sadness but the foremost sadness is already the loss of life at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. It's too early to construct a well thought out commentary about what's happened this morning and is still continuing as I write this at 1pm. As I sit here, Sky News are showing video footage of two armed terrorists killing a policeman on a deserted Paris street. They also report that the magazine's editor and lead cartoonist might be dead along with nine others.

My perspective is that of somebody who lives for cartoons and satire and my immediate response is to say that I hope the French government does everything it can to ensure that the magazine continues and continues to do what it's been doing. Satire is the ultimate expression of our freedom and Charlie Hebdo was the most liberated voice we had. This morning's attack on their offices and staff was an attempt to censor all of us who believe in a free press and the right for enlightened people to live their lives without fearing the slobbering dog-eyed enforcers of a medieval morality.

However, I'm not sure that point of view is either reasonable, rational, or popular. Around the TV this morning, my family had varying points of view but a common theme was that the magazine had made itself a target. I was the only person who tried to make the case for the magazine's defiance.

'But would you be brave enough to draw a cartoon if you knew your life was in danger?'

It was a good question but, perhaps, a question for another day. Today I know there were people who were brave enough to draw and publish those cartoons and it unfortunately looks like they've paid the ultimate price. Questions must now be asked. If they were such an obvious target, then why wasn't more done to protect them?

The problem is that satire has to be an ugly business. For satire to function well, it must be at the apex of bad taste and taboo. The very best satirists will always make enemies, even among the people meant to protect them. Politicians might not like to admit so much but it's the satirists who keep them honest. It is the satirists who keep us all honest.

So it's too easy to simply say: they shouldn't have published those cartoons. Everybody who writes a gag, from the highest paid TV comedian, to those of us who pen lousy gags on Twitter or through a blog, do so because we have certain freedoms. Those freedoms exist because previous generations fought for our freedom to think, say, or draw whatever we wish. The moment we accept the first taboo, we begin to accept them all.

None of us live outside the context of history and history has, for a very long time, been a struggle for the rights of the individual against the forces of oppression. It was the very cornerstone of the French Revolution, so perhaps it's not surprising that the fight continues in the country that gave the world the modern conception of liberty.

Today we mourn the loss of life at Charlie Hebdo. Tomorrow we should remind the world that Charlie Hebdo is an ideal that we'll never relinquish.

Do Non-Smokers Really Play The World’s Smallest Violin?

A comment on the blog last night left me thinking. Not all of them do but this was a good comment and began with a quote from my previous post.

"And I’m tired of being forced to breathe in second-hand smoke,’ I said"

It appears you're happy to drive past, and close, to hundreds of cars pumping out carcinogenic fumes, however, the smell of a single burning leaf is enough to near kill you!

*plays worlds tiniest violin*

It’s a good reply but doesn’t apply to me or to what I’d written. The comment presupposed a few things about me that aren’t actually true. For example, as a small town cyclist, I don’t come into contact with hundreds of cars. Mainly out of cowardice, I generally avoid traffic by taking empty residential streets, paths through parkland, a road through a largely quiet industrial estate, and I very rarely spend any time sitting in traffic smelling engine fumes. The second mistake is to assume that my objection to cigarettes is based on their perceived harm. It’s not. I object to having smoke blown in my face because I find that the fetid hot breath of wizened nicotine addicts sickens me to my stomach. My argument would be the same if I was forced to smell raw effluent or the rotting carcass of a feral dog left tied to the bike stands.

Despite my primary objections to the comment, at the heart of the argument there was still a good point that needed exploring. Why should cyclists have a problem with smokers given the pollution they’re exposed to in the average cycle journey?

That question intrigued me, though I knew immediately that my reply would take me into morally dark waters. Having an opinion about smoking is like holding a position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. There is no position from which you won’t annoy somebody and possibly need a deep bunker.

Yet I’ve never seen myself as a real anti-smoker. I don’t agree with pressure groups that turn these issues into territorial disputes so badge wearers can shake their fists at the rival camp. I like to think I’d defend people’s right to do whatever they want with their bodies, their lives, and their actions. My only restriction is that those choices can’t intrude on the rights of others to do what they want with their bodies, lives and actions.

Naturally, this tolerant approach leads me into some problematic areas, such as my belief that it’s wrong to outlaw any form of speech. Censorship of thoughts, however repellent, merely pushes people with extremist sentiments into the shadows where they eventually do more harm. Let the hate-filled bigots stand in the open where they can be addressed through rational argument, humiliated through ridicule, and revealed for the true louses these people are. Political Correctness, though noble in its aim, merely turns bigots into quiet hypocrites. Silencing people doesn’t make them change their attitudes but it can harden a prejudice into hatred.

I’m not denying that this liberal attitude doesn’t sometimes leave me gritting my teeth when I find myself defending the rights of people I find deeply repellent. Yet it also allows me to retain a defence for satire. Freedom of expression means that I also reserve the right to argue that the choices people make are dumb and where appropriate, mock them savagely for that, as I too can be mocked for the dumb choices I make and opinions I express.

So, although I’m not a smoker, I wouldn’t ban tobacco, as I wouldn’t ban alcohol or even drugs (again, this slides into difficult areas but I’d like to think that arguments against those perils outweigh any argument in their favour). It comes down to a matter of personal choice provided the context allows those individual choices to be made whilst not impacting on the identical rights of others.

Smokers rightly defend their activity by saying they have made a choice as individuals and the rest of us have no right to curtail their activities. And they are absolutely right. Yet the problem that smokers repeatedly fail to acknowledge is that this individual freedom/personal choice argument also works the other way around.

Again, my own objection towards smoking has nothing to do with the harm it might cause. If smoking were good for you, my argument would be exactly the same and it’s this: I have made a choice not to smell something I find repellent. Smokers believe that they’re victimised because they smoke. That’s wrong. They are only victimised when they take away other people’s right to choose and force them to share the consequences of their personal choice. It’s this that lies at the heart of the great Steve Martin joke that has one person ask ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ and the other reply ‘No but do you mind if I fart?’

Would smokers complain if a large section of the public, gifted with highly pungent arseholes, spent large portions of their day stinking out the entrances to every mainline station, bus stop, or, in the case of my post yesterday, supermarket? What about people who might enjoy standing in a bus queue making a high pitched whining noise? What about people who might have a passion for hosepipes or water guns? What if every time we walked through town we were suddenly doused with harmless water? What if it was tear gas? What if it was raw sewage?

My examples are ridiculous but no more ridiculous, to my mind, than people burning dried leaves and blowing the smoke into another person’s face. And this brings me to the difference between cyclists exposed to smokers and cyclists exposed to pollution: there is no difference except you don’t choose to be a cyclist so you can expose yourself to car emissions in the same way that you don’t choose to be a non-smoker in order to expose yourself to smoke. We can, however, we can do something about the former in the short term, whilst working to solve the problem of the latter.

And we definitely have the right to do something. It’s true that I could endure them like I’ve endured them for years. Perhaps I’m even making a big thing out of a very petty quibble. But don’t I have as much right to choose to avoid the stench of cigarettes as those people have the right to feed their craving? I’m not saying that I’m any better or worse than they are. I’m just saying that I’m different and I would expect others to respect my choice.

The world’s smallest violin? It’s only small if you perceive it as small.