Oi

Argh.

Life takes its route, through sexual desire, into the tunnel of early middle age, where you worry about a combination of your body and your performance: in point of actual fact, you are neither a pornstar with a ten inch cock of almost infinite variety and adaptability, nor a non-wannabe train-spotter with a semi-hibernating cock of uncertain provenance and even less certain occupation (to the extent that even a putative mother in law might worry about the general occupation of your membrum virilis). In short - you are just a guy, just a guy.

You are the service module of any Apollo mission: you do what you can but you are never going to be the star.

Trees are cut down, hurricanes never come again and the modern world fades into oblivion; you and your friends vaguely recall a female prime minister and lots of strikes; you don't in fact recall a time when accepting a job was not your decision but the union in charge's call. You don't recall there being no point in holding savings of any kind. You remember the smiles but you didn't see the cynicism in them. You don't recall the violence of the picket lines that you did see on TV, even though you were a kid. You remember the sparkly, glittery music and television, the over-emphasised desire to escape at every single point. You really do not remember the concrete blocks from motorway bridges; the spittle; the dodgy deals; the illegality that seemed normal because there was no law that could contain this new age with its conflict between the two sides of the same belief: Self.

What is self?


the....

going to school, in the cold and the fog and the mist, just like going anywhere anywhen on this island.

Shiver: down the path to the bogs, the dirty concrete, the other person there - he was the boy who you never understood. There he was, trousers round his ankles; even then, at the age of seven, you knew that was not how males went for a piss. Went for a piss/ a slash/ a jimmy riddle/ a wee/ to see a man about a dog/ to strain the greens.

Went for a Martin. A Martin Amis.

Fuck me I think I have missed a trick in the last four years. Blogging has truly passed me by. What do you write? how do you write it? Who do you write it for?

Do you need pictures?

Do you need porn?

La Puissance C'est Tout

As our civilisation collapses, with the inevitability of a 2+ solar mass star-type into its 1974 degeneracy limit, so we have idiot-savants queuing up to display their ability to take us fools into the abyss. Of course, they've been doing it for a while now but as they look more and more likely to lose their jobs in the reactive and productive recession, like a high mass giant puffing off its useless and pointless additional mass: they see their livelihoods dying and are trying to hold on for dear life - or in our case, dear death.

For, dear reader, let us not stint in our critique of leaders, managers and those "with responsibility". Let us not be fooled by the biting, savage crocodile tears, when their awesome burdens cause them to fire everyone else for their own errors: let us not be tricked by their aura of sadness, when it is their desire, fundamentally to tell other people to follow their own ideas that is to blame. These parasites, these viruses, which feed off the ability of others to work, the fundamental goodness and trustfulness of others; they slime their way into the consciousness and infect a healthy mind with their own neuroses. Do this, do that, believe me, follow me, I am right, you are fired. I felt nothing until I got the pleasure of giving orders. This is why in my private life I keep dogs. They live and they obey. They obey.

Let us not pretend we need these people: they led the C20 into unmitigated, unprecedented disaster. Let us, instead, cast them off, humiliate them, refuse - if necessary lose our jobs - let us stand up and say "fuck off": let us go, and walk away, and find some other poor pathetic animal to make them feel better.

Let us believe nothing of their credentials. This week, those with credentials killed four people for no reason. Those with credentials, entirely made up bits of paper which say nothing about life at all, kill and maim through their own selfishness. I talk not of real people like doctors, but of made up professionals, whose vocation has existed since the dawn of time and has worked roughly the same since then.

Someone waves their paper at you - wipe your arse with it. It doesn't matter how long it took them to earn it, or how much wasted energy it took. Wipe your fetid, sweaty arse on it. And smell your finger.

Why are we a nation of managerial parasites? Why do we all aim for it? Why do we, apart from paying the bills, because there are thousands of ways of doing this, want it? Why do we want to tell other people what to do for a living?

Really, why?



ps 1974 degeneracy pressure reached at the point where inflation exceeds growth by n%, where n= productivity over debt.

Like A Train Passing In The Distance

Is how my blogging is currently being received by all people; I don't really mind that, as I blog for entirely narcissistic reasons, as I've said in blogposts passim. I couldn't care less whether my readers hold my political views or not, so long as they read mine, and for a few seconds are here, subsumed in my will for however long it takes. I've no stomach for the modern violent assertions of the primacy of ideology, or the selective use of "evidence", such as small scale studies by one's ideological allies, that somehow get, unchallenged, to be part of legislation; or the equally selective rejection and adoption of emotive arguments (I trust I will never again hear a progressive complain about private education, given how much emphasis they put last week on "Parents would do anything for their children" as a justification for creating spare part humans). Incidentally, I really am going to need that liver, so if anyone would like to create a liver-embryo could they please do it within the next 10 years?

I am, as I have said many times before, a tenth rate mind. It is the best and brightest of our apolitical world who are the most aggressive, the most dishonest, the most ideologically driven.

Yes I *am* an ideologue, but I am also an idiot. So it has little bearing on life what I think. Our greatest minds do not want more civility or self-control. They want less. They really do want more destruction and more division, especially within that bastard grouping, the family. The most intelligent people in our society envisage a technological version of slavering over hacked out thighs of mutton in freezing caves, with mouths dripping with blood. They like it. They want savagery and selfishness. They want us to love power and to understand victimhood as a political entity, not a physical state. Meanwhile the physical state of the individual is increasingly limited, satiated as it is by the endless, state approved orgasms; of speech, thought, movement and association the state has little to say beyond "prove who you are and that you have done nothing wrong". Gargling with ecstasy, and its withheldness, its escapology, its temporality, I find I have nothing to say on those matters. There isn't enough time. Only time for glorious oblivion and its means.

For only now does an individual really become part of the collective: when it really needs it to survive, or to do what it has been told is necessary to survive. Create such a condition and you create the means to ultimate and permanent power. Hold the individual in a state of permanent desire and you control them, perfectly. In the past this was understood well, in relation to hunger. Our governments now know that they cannot control access to air, water and food; so the next most powerful drive is that towards orgasm. Let it flourish, bring it forth wherever it may be thought of; let it hold and move people away from any notion of control. For the less they control, the better for us.

Hence a C21 tyranny would make sexual liberation its first port of call, and would not, as Orwell would have us believe, suppress these desires in the hope of somehow sublimating them.

Because, literally, no-one will give a toss when they are aware that the rulers want them to engage, wherever and however possible, in one of the few genuinely animalistic drives we have.

Then, of course, we will come running to the benevolent state for abortion, treatment, whatever. It will keep us needing them.

Not that I'm bitter or anything..

I Don't Want To Stay Here On My Own

It might be nice sometimes, but other times it is dark, cold and there is noone to love; it bleeds concern and sucks adoration through a straw. This time is an illusion which entices you into living; at other times you know, for certain, that life means nothing but a progress towards soil, even a race. You know that your greatest end is as part of a beautiful tree, even though you know that this is environmentally unfriendly. But if you let yourself stay, and rot, you will be such a tiny part of so many lovely plants: your brain might even be part of the trunk of a giant oak, surveying the degredation year by year. How magnificent - for one's body and self to become part of a more permanent England than even New Labour had in mind when they set about fucking it up as the home of racists and fuckwits, the worst of all places - where they came from.

I like the idea that I'll become a leaf and that I'll blow underneath a car, the car of a twat teenager spouting all the fuckwittery of his own day, as I always wished I could do of mine but never believed any of it. How we claim the satisfaction of desire as the end of ethics, how we sweep, always sweep, we love to sweep.

What an awful instrument, the brush. It simply hides, in the soft summer breezes, in the winter we hide from, in the end of days. When we end, when the clouds rise up on all sides from the tumult on the horizon, and the heat, and the oak leaves dissipate into nowhere, then we will love winter and all its hatreds, until we feel it stronger than before, and darker, darker.

Our best and brightest are the most determined that we hide in the blazes of desire and strength. That we destroy what we think is weak. It has to go.

Fever breathe your love on me.

I am happy to be a tenth rate mind, at least I think there might have been something to live for apart from strength and sexuality. I can accept being an idiot if it means thinking there might have at one time been more to life than I can see now.

Tenth rate music and tenth rate alcohol will do for my inspirations. And this is why I carry on. For the best is the most brutal and I really, really do not want to know.

The Movement of History

I make no excuses for projecting my own thoughts onto the world in this post. I have little else to go on, for am I no real historian nor thinker.

We live in a constantly changing world, or so we are told, and it becomes part of our day to day survival to cope with that change: we need to change our ways of living, speaking and thinking to ensure we are not separated from the community, although the community itself is increasingly vague to us. We know some people, sure, but few of us could honestly say we share the views and assumptions of the people in either our real, physical locality or our internet habitat: however much we leave approving comments on blogs we like there will always be the divergence of views caused by thought, independence and history.

For such a changing world the movement of time seems to be remarkably solid. I mean that very quickly the past, or other ways of living, begin to seem unlikely, even impossible; from tiny things like the changing coin to the vast sand-shifting of ethics. Our experience, though varied, seems to be immersed. It did not take long of governance by New Labour for a Tory government to seem almost unthinkable, and for the long years of Tory dominance of politics to seem less than a memory. In many places, with silent pits, the memories would be strong: I mean culturally, even philosophically: in the years 1999-2004 (roughly) I think, the assumptions, arguments, practicalities of Conservative government were so alien to the commentariat and swathes of the public (including, to be fair, myself) as to be meaningless, irrelevant, unexisting.

I don't know if this is making sense but the point I am making is that I think the changing world, in certain ways, makes us unable to remember. It keeps us mired in the present, and thinking of the future (at the moment), with particular regard to global warming, in a kind of fearful fascination. I would have thought we would remember more sharply things being different because it wasn't that long ago: but this is partly what is driving us to worship youth: it is not just beauty, or sexuality, or ability, but the fact that it is, at any given moment, youth which is best attuned to the state of the world at that point, best able to cope, completely unconcerned by trying to adapt. Youth fits, it works. The rest of us find it harder because we are (to greater or lesser degrees) different from the world we live in.

So the study of modern history assumes a keener aspect, and becomes more popular because it is history, it is the story of real or nearly real people in a world we can see has changed. Other types of history (say, medieval) are about other worlds, and so don't interest us so much. Modern history is about our world. The nazification of the school history syllabus and of the bookshelves is a testament to the fact that we are still trying to understand our cultural origins in that time. We see our society as evolving from that, rather than before - take the notion and enacting of human rights, though it may have its origins in the Enlightenment or French Revolution, the key document of our time is the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I think there is also a powerful part of our culture that still cannot understand how it all happened and why it all happened.

I've written on this idea before of course - that the twentieth century is not quite over, and that, possibly, we are suffering some kind of extended anxiety problems caused by 45 years of living under 4 minutes' notice of destruction (ok it was a bit longer than that until the early sixties). But that isn't entirely what i mean here. I mean a culture (though it is so mixed now as to make even the singular noun questionable) which has come into existence only five minutes ago, furnished with a history that it does not remember, but it does remember being at one point in time and at that nexus emerging into something resembling life. From there it has turned, shifted, slid, slanted and cracked so that we just do not, really, remember what it was like.

I don't mind if you think this is a lot of contradictory, muddled cobblers. It is a kind of live-thinking exercise, no pre thought has gone into this post at all except a vague sense that i'd like to put finger to keyboard. If you like it, great. If you don't, also great.

Two Bright Guys

This is why the blogosphere is ace.

Not Saussure responds to Matt M on the subject of Richard Dawkins. Intelligent people, with different views, cogently argued.

Why can't the non-blogosphere be more like this?

Thogging

I've just discovered that Notsaussure has nominated me as a thinking blogger, or thogger. I am deeply honoured and flattered. If I do make anyone think it is a miracle as I rarely do any thinking myself; something I tried to point out at Ian's place but just sounded angry (which I wasn't). I am, as I've said before, impressionistic and instinctive. I know some bloggers think this is the worst side of the blogosphere, but for me it makes a terrific mix of daily reading to be able to digest policy or analysis posts, and then to switch to more emotive or feeling-based posts. As most important issues are decided for most people (I think - hoho) on a sort of mixture of logic and a kind of unreason based on tradition, instinct, a "feel" for what is right, or custom (or lack of), that seems to me fair enough in terms of trying to learn from the blogosphere itself.

So....trying to avoid people I know have already been nominated, 5 thoggers for me:

Matt Murrell. He doesn't write too much, or using too hard words. But he very often has real nuggets of insight and good ideas.

Deogolwolf. I get tied in knots with the philosophy, especially if "cirdan" is commenting, but it's great nonetheless.

Welshcakes Limoncello. Bear with me on this. This is a really good example of a different kind of thought-provoking...lifestyle, culture, creativity...and it's written in a very approachable style.

Trixy. She's developing into a really fine policy poster, who mixes a very high level of detail with outrage and a bit of swearing.

Notsaussure. This is not nepotism. You cannot fault his legal knowledge and his willingness to go into detail whereas I'd rather be at the pub but really need to know some of this stuff (even if the bits where he praises Lord Falconer grate with me!)

apologies to anyone who's already been nominated, and to those who find this kind of crap the blogosphere at its disappearing up its own jacksie worst. I kind of agree, but on the other hand some blogs deserve promotion and deserve, erm, thought.

EastEnders and Moral Justice

One thing that the curse of postmodernism and the Age of Irony doesn't seem to have battered into total submission is our sense, innate or cultural, of moral justice. Generally, though it may be thrilling occasionally to see a villain prosper, we prefer to see good win over evil and people who act well to succeed. EastEnders has subverted this on many occasions, which is, oddly enough - for me, at least - why it keeps its position among the soaps despite its ridiculous storylines. It exerts a sort of gruesome fascination with its relentless close ups of human misery and gives us a vicarious suffering, one we can switch off. In today's combined edition of the previous week's episodes, we saw Kevin (Phil Daniels) be attacked and abused by his own daughter - for the crime of bringing her up with love and respect, but without telling her he was not in fact her father. She ended the episode by storming out, inviting him to "do what you've always wanted to and push off". With his life in tatters he drives away in the dark. This is why EastEnders leaves me feeling dirty and uncomfortable: a good man, acting out of love, duty and care, brings another man's children up without their mother, comes to see himself as their father, is torn - as you might expect- between self-fulfilment and duty and finding the synthesis of the two his real destiny. His reward, to be rejected by the adult child in a fit of hysteria. I don't know what it's like to be adopted or discover you aren't who you thought you are - but I do know good men when I see them (even if they're not real) and there is so much evil in the real world that it leaves me deeply dissatisfied to see them destroyed on television or in books. It is, no doubt, occasionally what happens: but it is wrong and disturbing. A man is destroyed and we just turn over to watch something else, caring only while we see his face. I'm not using this to make an argument that EastEnders is great literature, just to point out the pervasiveness of evil, the swathe of nihilism that surrounds us, and our moral balances which may have different weights on them but can be held steady.

Atlas Shrugged

I know this will cost me any leftish readers I still have but so what. I'm re-reading this for the third time and I love it. Yes - the villains all have "empty" faces and "lifeless" eyes, and the heroes are all supermen and women whose achievements are probably physically impossible, but I like it because I am a bit of a geek, and I find endless descriptions of railways comforting, and I like it because I agree with its basic tenet that a man without a purpose is a moral evil. I don't agree that no-one should respond any to non-selfish ideal or should work for the good of others, though I understand where Rand is coming from (even if I can't see a society that would function on those lines - Rand doesn't really draw one, as Galt's Gulch is not a real community in any sense). It does make me think (naturally) of myself, and of the need to get out, get working, achieve things, build things, create things, be happy and be satisfied in the sense of achievement - that my tribute to the wonder of existence is to contribute to the store of resources that the world has, and thereby to leave some kind of order as a defence, however temporary, against the entropy. That does affect me, and make me think: not only do you have to create your own meaning, but your own purpose, and stick to it, create real things with it (and as such, the heavy industry of the novel is a metaphor for tangible things generally). I wonder if Rand was, in part, writing mysticism without knowing it.

An interesting side issue, like a small plate of onion rings to the pizza of the novel, is that some of her heroes are scions of great dynasties (except, I think, Hank Rearden). There is, somewhere, a half hearted defence of the principle of heredity, as a set of values an individual has to prove themselves worthy of, but it still strikes me as odd that Dagny Taggart and Franscisco D'Anconia haven't created everything for themselves: they've been gifted a lot of what they have (talent, especially). If Rand wants us to grasp the greatest good as the creation by an individual of meaning and of material, then it is almost self-defeating to concentrate on people of such abilities and fortune. Or it's a two fingers to the critics, given that she knew what they would say (they pretty much appear in the novel anyway, as Bertram Scudder and various others).

Is a small blog an achievement, or a distraction? What is great work? Oh God, I'm sounding like Jim Taggart.