The trouble with trolls...

...Is that they're going to destroy themselves and the internet. Attracting the ire of the Daily Mail is never a good idea:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1360788/Tormented-trolling-The-vile-web-craze-taunted-family-bullied-Natasha-suicide.html

As the mainstream becomes ever more aware of trolling, the more intense the backlash. Moral entrepreneurs will be whooping for joy.

In time we may find how we communicate on the web is circumscribed and controlled because some stooped, warped creatures with mother issues can't resist abusing people.

One way of doing this would be to make site owners liable for whatever happens on their sites. If civil and criminal penalties are imposed, then the glorious days of mocking tragedies and harassing bereaved families may soon be a thing of the past. Oh noes...

The Web is a magnificent thing, but it attract turds.

Some good news (for once).

Would it be in bad taste to say this is FABULOUS?

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/18/senate.dadt/index.html?hpt=T2

The military's prohibition of openly gay people serving within its ranks is one step closer to ending, after the Senate voted Saturday to repeal the armed forces' "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Eight Republicans and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut joined the chamber's Democrats to back the legislation, which passed by a 65-31 margin. The bill needed a simple majority -- meaning support from 51 of the Senate's 100 members -- to pass.

"I want to thank all of the gay men and women who are fighting for us today," said Sen. Susan Collins, of Maine, one of several Republicans who voted for the measure. "We honor your service, and now we can do so openly."

Note the Republican support, small as it was, was very significant - as demographic changes undermine the old certainties, it may well be that some GOPers are realising the importance of wooing the gay vote. All those gay/lesbian soldiers, sailors and airmen, it seems, can finally come out of their Log Cabins.

Things fall apart.

An excellent set of images here by sculptor Lori Nix, depicting what happens when humans either disappear (zombies, rapture, daleks, badgerpocalypse etc.) or simply abandon their civilisation. These are actually scale model dioramas, harking back to a time when draughtsmanship was every bit as important to art as theory and concept.

http://www.lorinix.net/the_city/index.html

A particular favourite of mine is the detail rendered on the Galaga arcade machine in one image. The derelict launderette meanwhile seems simply very sad.

We've been here before, of course. There were once huge cities around the Nile and in Mesopotamia. Where did they go? They simply crumbled to dust, leaving behind only the sturdiest of stone monuments to mark their passing.

Musings after the event

To cut a long story short, I've said my bit and left them to it. It's strange how getting caught up in flame wars can fill up so much time, but there are more important things in life.

Perhaps the big fallacy of the web is that it is a means of communication, when really it's more about informing and being informed.

The 'communication' is just a distraction from that, unless you want to know just how ugly people can be and how little they actually have to say.

Cullion: What a tosser.

Dear Mr. Potato Head,

Good to see you've been reading my blog. A shame you're too much of a turd to not use it out of context, but cogent argument was never your strong point.

Never mind. No wonder your mother abandoned you.

EDIT: You can repeat a lie many times, but it doesn't make it true.

Penny Woolcock's On The Streets: Some Thoughts.

Watching this on BBC Four right now. Stark, brilliant, horrifying but humane and heart breakingly honest. Others have already lauded it in more detail, so let me simply recommend this film.

Now some thoughts, through the medium of bulletpoints:

• Divide and conquer works - English homeless people are conning themselves if they think their 'countrymen' despise them any less than the East Europeans they think they're better than.
• Also, well done on getting off the streets later on. But remember you've got advantages a lot of fellow homeless don't have, and sometimes the dice never roll your way.
• We really need to do something about people after they've left the army. Sod your poppies - actually start looking after these poor sods, who were silly or desperate enough to be dutiful servants of a nasty, selfish, hypocritical state.
• Brian Haw, you're a cunt. How dare you treat that wonderful man like that? Your life is a waste - placards, and platitudes and bullshit and hate. You will change nothing. An unarmed prophet. A worthless, nasty little cunt. Actually helping Iraqis isn't half as fun as the purity of opposition, though, is it? As said, you're a cunt.
• You get the horrible feeling that a sizeable swathe of the population would do away with the homeless if they could get away with it. Another sizeable swathe would look the other way.
• Brian Haw, you're still a cunt.
• Dogs are a higher form of life than most humans.

POSTSCRIPT: On Saturday, I bought the last Big Issue off a seller on Charing Cross Road. He was overjoyed, and so grateful. I felt a bit embarrassed but wished him well. Then I went off and spent a small fortune on a play and dinner, like tens of thousands of other people in London, night after night, and without end.

Rat Salad Days - Why The Browne Report Is A Load Of Brown Stuff.

As the findings of the Browne Report sink in (in summary, 'Pay Up or Piss Off'), let’s dwell on the real issues at stake here.

Like the hypocrisy. Some pampered had-it-all boomers love to whine that in their day only the top 5% got into university and the rest got jobs. (Ergo, all the young 'uns today should pay through the nose for what their predecessors got for free.) I feel a strange urge to shout back that this is just another spin on the 'Do As I Say, Not As I Do' argument. And then brick their windows.

Plus it sort of misses the fact that in those days there were other options for post-A Level students. Like lots of jobs that didn't need a degree. You'd be surprised at just how many shit-shovelling, low-level, braindead office, reception and call centre jobs require a BA now. Images of some blessed soul in bellbottoms climbing the ladder to paradise and then kicking it away somehow leap to mind. There was a time when you didn't need a degree to be a nurse, for example. Or, for that matter, a businessman or a bank manager. You just needed a brain, and debt was seen - for some reason - as a Very Bad Thing.

Or how about the doublethink? Many a free market maven (or 'dogmatic arsehole' as I like to call them) scream that students gain the most from their degrees so should pay most of the cost. This sounds like a strong argument until you realise, by definition, that the whole point of education is to benefit the recipient. I may well have greater earning power by having a degree, but I also earn more for being able to add up and read too. By such a standard should we also charge for GCSEs, Primary Schools and Infant Schools? Actually, pretend I didn't say that. It might give them ideas.

Then there's the old chestnut - 'why should the dustman who didn't go to university pay for those that do?' Well, Mr. Dustman will no doubt change his tune pretty damn fast when one of the Dustchildren gets into Leeds Met. Secondly, we already pay for things that do not have a direct benefit for us, but are still for the greater good. Like Mr. Dustman's medical care and pension or his children's benefits if they are unemployed, even if it means not a jot for you if they live or die. You see, that's how society works - we help each other out, even if there isn't a direct payback.

But the argument is flawed in another way too. If degrees really do improve the lives of students* then any (economic) gains are threatened by saddling those same students with crushing debts. Therefore, these people are arguing that students should be benefited by education but only in a way that does not benefit them. That makes sense if you are an idiot.

What doesn't make sense, though, are the social costs. There is the knock-on effect of parents having to divert their finances to helping their kids through the BA/BSc grinder. And then there are those graduates who have to put off buying a house or having children because of the debts they are servicing. This does not bode well for healthy, secure societies. But hey! They get a degree!

Ultimately, it is the lack of honesty that is most galling. What most fees advocates really want is all the (economic) windfalls of a well-educated society, but they sure as hell don't actually want to cough up for it. Hence why sane ideas like a graduate tax were dropped by the Coalition. No one wants to spread the cost even though this would be both more just and sensible. And curiously, very few recipients of free university education seem willing to pay for the benefits their degrees have given them over the years and decades. Nor do they seem to feel any shame for betraying the young in that artful way that horrible old bastards tend to do in this country.

Nor does anyone admit that universities are now just another cog in the economy. Joyless and miserablist as this is, it is also very naive. The skills we all thought the country needed in 1970 or 2008 were quite different from the ones that turned out to be useful. And society needs thinkers as well as doers and office fodder. Adam Smith didn't have an MBA, after all. He was a philosopher.

But what does it say about us? We are willing to condemn future generations to £35k debts, if they’re lucky. And yet we still vote for white elephants like the Olympics, Trident and a bloated NHS bureaucracy. It is a hard-faced penny-pinching age we live in, in part through necessity. But the thing to remember about misers is that in the end they are the living embodiments of false economy.

* Considering that Alan Turing's Maths degree and Sylvia Plath's English MA didn't stop them topping themselves, one must presume this is solely an economic argument.