Comments Are Not Open On This Thread

Comments are not open on this thread.

I said, comments are not open on this thread.

Honestly, why would I care what you comment on this thread?

Ask yourself, why you care to comment on this thread?

Now listen, hold your index fingers about an inch apart. That's it. Now that's the distance between Sun and Earth. On this scale, the nearest star is four miles away. There are two hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, and we are one of a hundred million galaxies in the known universe. What's more, there may exist so many alternate universes, that when this one dies, it will be as a flake of dead skin falling from the backside of reality.

If the lifetime of creation was boiled down to a year, there wouldn't be a unit of measurement small enough to record you.

So really, why would anyone care to comment on this thread?

When there's a hundred million equally futile things you could be doing instead.

Like, I don't know, tidy up, call your parents, go sailing, have a wank, have a hobby, take a nightclass, take the initiative, get drunk, get a dog: help another human being, completely unrelated to you, for no other reason than because it is in your power to do so.

Or, hey, why not forge something in the smithy of your soul, display it on a public forum, and have it criticised by those who have never created anything of lasting value, but still feel qualified to pass judgement on those who have.

Yup, comments are not open on this thread.

So run along, keep on heading straight for the land of the dead.

But I know you won't pay one blind bit of notice to what I've said.

So comments are not open on this thread.

The Responsible Thing

"The other goat, the scapegoat chosen by lot to be sent away, will be kept alive, standing before the Lord. When it is sent away to Azazel in the wilderness, the people will be purified and made right with the Lord."

                                                    Leviticus 16:10

It seems to me that many of the obstacles we human beings face vis-a-vis work, family, relationships, politics, religion etc., are really the result of our failure to accept responsibility for our own actions. After all, why admit and own your mistakes, experiencing personal growth as a result, when it is much easier to blame your failures on the actions of others? Yet if we never take responsibility for our actions, then there is little, realistically, that we can ever do to affect their consequences for the future. Like the man said, those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed forever to repeat them.

Ironically, this is not entirely our fault, but learned behaviour that we been taught since year dot: Woman brought sin into the world, the Jews killed Jesus, immigrants are stealing your jobs. Society's scapegoats are all around us. Then, society shirks its responsibilities like no-one else. Scapegoats provide an endpoint under which all unpleasant truths can be buried. Drug users causes crime, but few dare ask what causes drug use, because then the answer generally comes back as poverty. Drugs are the individual's problem, but poverty is societal, so society takes drug use as its terminus, rather than be in anyway implicated in the inequalities that its poverty perpetuates.

We each trace our problems back until we find a comforting version of reality and then rest on our laurels. By which I mean that we stagnate. When we nominate something as the avatar of all our personal misfortune, we give that avatar immense power over us. For instance, if you consider certain words or images to be blasphemous or profane, then all that anyone else has to do to exert influence over is you is to use those words or images in your presence. No wonder so many people around the world burn the American flag, when it is the only form of retaliation that they have against the ubiquity of US invasion and airstrikes. Why bother with a Predator drone, when you can wound millions of patriotic Americans with little more high-tech equipment than a 50 cent lighter?

The problem with blaming anything on any class of people (women, men, Jews, Muslims, the poor, the young etc.) is that there will always be more of them than there are of you. It's a simple physics problem: a large mass exerts a greater force upon a smaller object than the smaller object does on the larger, proportional to the difference in their two masses. If you're one person seeing a particular demographic of a million or more as preventing you from finding work, then you're never going to find work. Not because of those million others, but from that single malfunctioning thought in your head that has you beat before you even try.

Even worse is what our prejudices tell others about our inner-lives. Most blame and scapegoating is the externalisation of personal faults. If you want to know about a person's personal fears and anxieties, take a look at what they blame on others. Politicians demonise those on benefits, while crying poor and claiming expenses (politicians should be means tested the same as everyone else). Homophobic men are scared that gay men will objectify them in the same way that they objectify women. The guy that tells you certain ethnicities smell is usually the one who could himself do with forming a closer relationship to soap and water.

Moreover, the scapgoater will always be more afraid of the scapegoat than the scapegoat is of their persecutor. Hence, American cops are more afraid of unarmed black men than the other way around, presumably because African-Americans have been subjected to the worst indignities that white America has to offer for 240 years in a row, and they have endured. Like the homophobic man, the racist is ultimately afraid that they will be in treated in the same way that they have treated their victims. For the same reason, heavily armed Israeli settlers, with the full financial and military backing of the government of the United States of America behind them, lose their minds at the sight of a few Palestinian kids throwing rocks. The downside to loading all of your fears onto the shoulders of others is that you tend to become mortally afraid of them out of all proportion to their actual dangerousness. "When you stare into the abyss," as Nietzsche reminds us, "the abyss also stares into you."

Inversely, lack of personal responsibility also leads people to take credit for things in which they had little or no involvement. Look at the British attitude to the Second World War. To listen to people in this country, you'd think Britain defeated Nazi Germany all on its own. Yet 80% of Hitler's forces were defeated by the Red Army, at the cost of twenty million Russian lives. More Soviet troops died at Stalingrad than Britain and America lost during the entire war combined, and it was still only the second biggest loss of life that the Russians suffered (750,000 at Stalingrad, 850,000 at Leningrad). Most of us alive today would not be here without them.

Indeed, if western society was half as civilised as it likes to think it is, you'd think we'd spend as much time commemorating the lives of people that we have killed as we do our own sacrifices. We hold silent vigils to remember the Somme, D-Day, 9/11, but when do we ever fall silent for the victims of Fallujah, Dresden, or the Irish and Indian famines of the nineteenth century that left millions dead thanks to British governmental indifference? The need to shirk our responsibility leads us to dismiss these fallen as enemies that deserve no respect or remembrance, even when they have become our enemy through no fault of their own. We celebrate Olympic victories, Shakespeare's birth, and great British inventions like the world wide web, but when do we ever bear responsibility for Britain's part in the eradication of the hundred million people that lived in the Americas, before Europeans arrived with their guns and their disease? This is not an attitude worthy of a civilised society. A shirker treats other people as they have treated others. The responsible person treats others as they would like to be treated themselves. This is why I could never believe in the death penalty. Isn't one murderer enough? Why should the rest of us become implicated in the crime?

For Britain, Hitler is the ultimate endpoint to negate all else. Hitler killed eight million people, but he's dead now, so you don't need to worry about people like him anymore. That way you can forget that it took thousands of ordinary people to perpetrate the horrors of the Holocaust (and definitely forget about any assistance the Nazis may have received from the IBM corporation). It allows us to sweep all other colonial atrocities under the tiger skin rug, as well as deferring, indefinitely, any discussion about how Stalin virtually defeated Hitler single-handedly, having already killed twenty million of his own people, and what this tells us about the convenient view of the Second World War as a battle of good versus evil. Hitler is also a convenient endpoint because he is just about the only one of the various genocidal maniacs to besmirch the 20th century that Britain didn't support at any point.

I am bound to say at this point, because there are many sensitive and fragile souls that shatter into a thousand pieces whenever anyone expresses an opinion in any way divergent from their own (see Polyphemus and the Myths of Monomania), that of course I am not belittling anything that happened back then. Both my grandfathers fought with distinction in the war. What I am saying is that they had pretty much wrapped it all up 28 years before I was even born. I therefore find it hard to claim any credit for the result, any more than I can claim to be a Petty Officer, just because my dad served in the navy. These are events that occurred independent of my existence. A football crowd may conceivably alter the course of a football match. Claiming credit for something that you didn't bear witness to, and over which you exerted no influence, is tantamount to theft. Or hypocrisy. Either way, the result is unpleasant.

Which only leaves the individual, struggling to make sense of the world. One way is to make others bear the burden for one's mistakes, which only leads to increased feelings of nausea and impotence. Another approach is to recognise that most of what happens in the human sphere of existence is an admixture of judgement and luck. There is little to be done about bad luck. Ill-judgement, on the other hand, can be mitigated against, but it requires the honest assessment of past liability in order to be successful. The most futile lie is the one that we tell to ourselves. A fault can only be corrected if it has been traced back to its proper source. If the source is misidentified, the item will continue to malfunction.

 

Read→Skip→Jump

There is a meditation technique known as the Reading Skip Jump. In normal meditation, the meditator quietly contemplates the scene before them, a room, a field, the sky, endeavouring to hold the entire scene in their field of vision at once. By meditating on the external, silence descends and an inner peace is attained.

A change comes when one first observes oneself observing. It can be disconcerting to begin with, to hold the scene before you in your perceptual range, including oneself and one's own drifting thoughts, and feel removed from the scene like some form of out of body experience. It takes a little practice, but this view of the world soon becomes comfortable, even comforting. The stillness becomes deeper. The meditator becomes the 'Watcher'.

The Reading Skip Jump takes this technique to its next plateau. The adherent adopts a comfortable position and begins to read from a novel or other descriptive work (there should be no pictures - this is important). In reading, one starts to visualise the scene being described. The skill is then to incorporate the imagery into the general framework experienced in becoming the 'Watcher'. The meditator meditates on the scene before them, whilst also meditating on the narrative in their head. Some practitioners have reported catching glimpses of the action out of the corner of their eye in the real world.

But why, I hear you cry, is it called the Reading Skip Jump? It is said that the true masters of the Reading Skip Jump can flip their perception at the critical juncture, tricking the mind into thinking that the fictional is the actual and the actual, fictional. In doing so, they are propelled, with a skip and a jump, into the fabric of the novel. From there, any number of new adventures are possible. It is at this stage that the 'Watcher' truly becomes the 'Reader'.

I know this trick as the Reverse Read (aka the Read Reverse), but what the hell do I know?

...And Another Thing...

Thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn

Last week Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected leader of the Labour Party. Few in the media rate his chances of winning a general election, which is the sole objective of politics in a system of elective representation. It is also the antithesis of anything approaching actual democracy.

Now, before we go any further, I should declare my allegiances. I am a member of the Green Party. I don't necessarily believe in everything that the Green Party stands for, but I do believe that in a system of elective representation, where the only choice is to which pre-approved candidate you hand over your decision making proxy, the only power that a citizen can reasonably exert is to vote out the current government. And then vote out the government that replaces them. And the one that replaces them. And keep voting them out until we get an administration that we actually like. I vote Green because they are the party at the furthest remove from the mainstream parties (without actually becoming deranged) and so furthest removed from the homogenous Lib-Lab-Con hive-mind. Power corrupts, but Westminster corrupts absolutely. When the Greens get in, I'll probably vote them out too.

I despise the Tories as much as the next person (I grew up with a soul in the 1980s), but I think I despise the Labour Party just that little bit more. Hating a Tory is like hating a shark for doing what is in its nature to do. Under Tony Blair, the Labour Party expended great energy telling the British public how dangerous sharks were, how they needed to be protected from sharks, and then gave the contract for constructing shark defences to a consortium of Great Whites. Hospitals and other Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects signed off under New Labour will end up costing the public purse ten times what would have been spent using only public money. Then, Tony Blair was always a Tory in sheep's clothing. He was so good at being a Tory that one of his dead skin cells became the next Conservative Prime Minster.

What politicians don't seem to have worked out is how angry people are. The governments of the world bailed out the banks involved in the subprime mortgage scandal, failed to bail out any of their victims, and then used the doctrine of Disaster Capitalism (see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine) to asset strip public resources and public finances of anything that is of benefit to the public. People are understandably angry at how even richer the 1% became in making everyone else poorer. When their only form of redress is to occasionally get to vote on something that is ultimately meaningless to them, they are liable to make irrational choices. We saw this in the EU elections of 2009 and 2014, most council elections since the 2008 financial crash, the 2016 EU Referendum and, of course, the election (and re-election) of Jeremy Corbyn to leader of the Labour Party. It's the same reason why Donald Trump is so unaccountably popular, because people are looking for any alternative to the political elites that drove us into this ditch. I suspect that many God-fearing Americans would vote for Lucifer dressed as Rocky Horror's Dr. Frank N. Furter, so long as he wasn't part of the D.C. elite (or a woman, for that matter).

Which brings us back to Jeremy Corbyn. No, he probably can't win a general election, but then Jesus Christ could be leader of the Labour Party at the moment for all the difference it would make. So long as the SNP continue to dominate in Scotland, Labour can't possibly win, because (and here's the thing), England is a Conservative country. Labour may have pockets in London, some strongholds in the north of the country, but the principle colour of England is blue. British media commentators, however, are overwhelmingly on the left, which is what happens when you are successful and well off, and every minute of every day isn't a constant battle to survive. It's easy to be liberal when you don't view every other human being else as a potential rival.

The media also tends to be a self-reflecting surface that can only view the world with reference to its own reflection. Jeremy Corbyn is not a slick media operator like Blair or Cameron and that makes him a bad politician in the eyes of the Westminster media bubble (most of whom have long since succumb to full blown Stockholm Syndrome). I don't really care what Corbyn or any politician has to say. I tend to mute any politician that appears on TV, something I advise everyone to do. It's irrelevant what a politician says, as it's usually empty rhetoric, or a distortion or oversimplification of the truth. By hitting mute, only their body language remains, stripped of any context. Then you get an idea of what the one speaking wants you to think, like being able to filter out a magician's misdirections. A politician should be judged on what they do, not what they say. By this measure, Jeremy Corbyn is doing better than most.

I take my definition of socialism from Bertrand Russell, as modified by George Orwell, as modified by me. Socialism is the belief in three things: freedom of choice, equality of choice, and social justice. If you believe in those three things then you are, I'm sorry to say, a Socialist. At least Jeremy Corbyn is honest about his socialism. I'm still unlikely to vote for him, but less unlikely than any Labour leader in living memory. Which is progress of a kind. I'd have immersed my scrotum in sulphuric acid before I'd have voted for Blair: But then I had Blair pegged as a dangerous narcissist from the moment I became aware of him (and I never get tired of saying, I told you so.)

It is possible to change the world without being in government. If Corbyn's "kinder politics" forces the Tories to adopt more left of centre policies to even give the illusion of possessing some modicum of humanity, then it's a step in the left direction. Where there is little prospect of power, honesty can flow a little more freely. Though the way things have been going of late, the country might yet make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister out of mere spite. Now that would be a change.

Peak-Tech: An Open Letter to Big Tech

Hey Guys (I greet you in your native vernacular),

Do you think we could tone it down on the software updates a little please? I mean, I think we have now passed the point of Peak-Tech, the point at which technology ceased to be a boon to society, and is now increasingly becoming a hindrance. When you can look up a word in a dictionary in a book quicker than it takes for the app version to even load up on your phone, something has gone seriously wrong.

To examine further, let's look at a case study: Apple's iTunes. I imagine each iTunes Team Meeting begins with the Project Leader saying, "Ok Guys, let's go around the table and I want everyone to say one really cool thing about iTunes that we can remove or over-complicate in the next release." I require a music player to do precisely three things:

1. Show me my music;
2. Play me my music; and
3. Occasionally give me access to a store to purchase new music

And that's it. I really don't understand why this requires a new version of iTunes every six weeks or so. I tend to download about one update in four, and even then by accident, because each new version of iTunes only serves to introduce more and more steps to achieving any of three requirements listed above. It also removes half of the albums covers, requiring time and energy to reinstall them all.

Do you think that we could have a version of iTunes designed for people who aren't deranged (also Microsoft, Windows 10, same question)? Or maybe someone at Apple could look up a thing from history called a CD player and take note of its display panel. This is all that 99 out of 100 people need from a music player. Oh, and while you're looking up CD players, you might also want to read up on a thing called the Sega Dreamscape. That's all I can see when I see adverts for the iPhone 7. Even the biggest company in the world is only ever one naff product away from oblivion.

Now Microsoft. You are Big Brother. After all, you have placed screens and cameras in the homes of every middle class family (the Outer Party) in the country and periodically report back to the government (the Inner Party) on your data gathering activities. I imagine even Big Brother had to upgrade his equipment on occasion. Like Microsoft, I bet he performed these upgrades in the early hours. Except that Big Brother was fictional, and therefore competent, and so I bet the people of Oceania never had to re-enter their password when they woke up, or try to find the work that they left open the night before, or spend the best part of two hours trying to find out why no sound is coming out of the jack socket, as I did as a result of the last Windows 'update'.

I also now have to enter my password whenever I want to access my external hard drive, despite not having been asked for a password for the hard drive in four years previously. Honestly Microsoft, if you want to update something, what about Internet Explorer? After all, it's hasn't been the year 1998 for ages, and the only reason that anyone would use Explorer over Chrome or Firefox is because they don't know how to change it (it's like Bing: I have only ever used it to look up Google).

Also, shouldn't someone by now have figured out a way to install updates without the need to restart the system? Maybe if someone in Silicon Valley took a day off from imaging what crazy thing they could be doing and instead spent that time working out what they should be doing for humanity's greater good, we might get some shit done around here. Even the great industrialists of the nineteenth century collaborated in building schools, hospitals, and other great public works. Tech companies seem only to be interested in acquiring other tech companies, and collaborating in the general trend towards hoarding the wealth in ever more tightly controlled circles and viewing the general public as a commodity to be monetised.

Maybe instead of pissing millions away on vanity projects like skydiving attempts, you could, I don't know, provide clean water to an African village, or modernise a Romanian orphanage, or do something to fight the abuse and hatred that women face every day in every part of the world by men who call themselves heterosexuals. Yes, I'm sure you pay lip service to all of these things already. What I'm saying, do it 50 times as much. That's what would be of use to me right now. I certainly need that more than I need iTunes randomly adding albums to my playlist, which seems to be this latest version's trick.

Avast: If I wanted to pay for anti-virus software, it wouldn't be yours. I use you because you are free. End of.

Netflix: Love it, keep doing what you do. If you could make the main screen less busy, that would be of help though. Not everyone's got a high spec laptop. Thanks.

It is said that the Babylonian Empire fell because its bureaucracy became too fat and bloated, and corruption did for it in the end. I think our society will go much the same way, only through software updates. I see an orbital defence system. A large asteroid has been identified as on a collision course with Earth. The co-ordinates are uploaded. The system is ready to fire. And at the critical moment, a message will flash up at NASA headquarters: Please wait while Microsoft installs essential updates.

For want of a sustainable system, the planet was lost.

Many thanks.

Rob Maher.

PS: To whoever is in charge of cash machines in the UK, what is the point of offering the consumer options, if those options are then disregarded? Thanks for that.

The Tower of Babel - Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Polyphemus & the Myths of Monomania

"Every clearing was called a grove, lucus, which meant that it admitted light, lux, like an eye... The heroic sentence, 'Every giant had a grove (lucus)' was originally true, but later it was misunderstood, altered, and corrupted. By the age of Homer, it was falsely interpreted as meaning that every giant had an eye in the middle of his forehead."

                                                                   Giambattista Vico, The New Science

One of the many problems facing humanity today is the prevailing belief in a single, objective reality. That is to say, the belief that one's own ideas and ideals are the only possible reality, and anyone deviating from this subjective ground state is a threat to civilised society. To witness this behaviour in action, simply go to the internet, anywhere there is a comments section, and start reading. Yet like Polyphemus, the Cyclops in Homer's Odyssey, if one views the world only through a single eye, it is all too easy for some other bugger to put it out with a well aimed stick. Monomania will only lead to darkness in the end.

Our monomania is largely the hangover from centuries of State imposed monotheism. Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity in the 4th century in order to do away with elected successors and replace them with his own hereditary heirs. At one point, six men had claimed the right to be crowned Emperor, leading to years of civil war. Constantine emerged as the eventual victor and he set about replacing the various factions aligned around the various gods and religions with a single, all seeing, all powerful, God. One all powerful, all seeing God equals one all powerful, all seeing Emperor with one line of equally omnipotent successors. Constantine himself only converted to Christianity on his deathbed.

The Roman Empire split in two, then fell, but monotheism prevailed. The western half of the Empire became the Roman Catholic Church, the world's first international bank. As well as lending money to half of European royalty, Rome exported the idea that one God equals one Ruler, a model imposed throughout the Middle Ages to horrific effect, especially if you were Jewish, or a woman. In the 20th century, God is replaced by the State itself, so that even atheist Marxists can get in on the act, but this rarely works out as well. God is external, remote, unknowable. Tell someone God is perfect and there is little they can do to confirm or deny it. Tell someone that the State is perfect and all they really have to do is stick their head out of the window for a look see.

From the equality, One God = One Ruler, all else follows. One God equals one ruler and once line of succession, equals one nation, one religion, one race, one gender, one sexuality, one culture, one personality, one trade or profession, one place where you will be born and die. You shall be one thing, and one thing alone. Any deviation from the norm will be severely punished. This form of monomania comes from the belief in a static universe that is immutable and perfect for all time. It is the natural order of things. It is the way things have always been. Thanks to Hubble and Einstein, we ought to know better by now.

The idea that one should be one thing, and one thing alone, is pervasive.  Monomania is really an exercise in dualism and false dichotomy. There is me and mine, and there is everyone else. Everyone else is wrong and must be made to see the error of their ways, or be removed (see years 1914 - 2003 inclusive).

The extension to this is the delusion that "I" represents the archetype example of its demographic group. Again, refer to the internet. The one that bears their nations flag as an avatar is usually the least community minded of all. They promote patriotism, denouncing socialism in the process, failing to appreciate that the one is just a more diffuse form of the other (How can you have a country without first having a community? You commit socialism every time you step out the door.). They say things like, "I'm proud to be British." when what they really mean is, "I'm proud to be me." They equate the quality of being themselves with the quality of being British, disallowing anyone that doesn't think and act the same, disqualifying the rest of Britain in the process. They should revert to using a selfie as an avatar like everyone else. It would be a more honest expression of national identity.

Those on the left are arguably worse. They say things like, "What we've got to realise is that we're all one." Through the filter of monomania, this roughly translates as, "Why can't everyone just be reasonable, like me?" They treat things like unity and equality as absolutes, rather than approximations towards which we crawl, incrementally, with many setbacks along the way. I love liberally minded people (I am one), but too often we complain about the way things should be, rather confronting the way things actually are. It is a yarn spun by politician and preacher alike, about how wonderful Utopia will be when we finally get there with a little self-sacrifice; meantime, Utopia still lies somewhere over the horizon and the ship is springing leaks all over the gaff.

I suggest a modification to this monomania. An inversion, if you like, away from a single, objective reality, towards embracing one's own subjective reality, but seen as one bubble in an infinite foam of possible ideas, ideals, and interests. There are times when it is useful to have a single, objective reality. The fast lane of the motorway, for instance. Objectivity is essential for carrying out scientific research, but even Special Relativity tells us that there are many inertial frames of reference, but that no one frame of reference is more objective than any other. Most of the time, what a person does or does not believe is irrelevant. Everyone operates on varying levels of reality as measured against some agreed social norm, but the measure of where that average is raises over time. It was once acceptable to leave the bodies of executed criminals to rot on public display, for instance. Our idea of what represents acceptable society, or what constitutes acceptable reality, improves with each passing age.

The internet and social media have altered the world out of all recognition. Where once emigrating families would hold mock wakes before departure, because they knew they would never again see those they were leaving behind, today we can chat with people on the other side of the world as a matter of course via Skype. The smart phone in our hand has allowed us to broadcast our thoughts the instant that they occur, whether or not anyone is awake to hear them at the time. The dramatic reduction in the amount of time that a modern human needs to spend securing enough calories to survive means the replacement of such binary choices as friend or foe, food or mate, with more arbitrary decision trees like cats or dogs, City or United, Blur or Oasis, left or right, Leave or Remain, but with the same injection of fear as friend or foe. Which is precisely why you get the internet. A billion limbic systems bashing against each other, each with its own idea of reality and each hostile to any deviation from its self-reflecting state of equilibrium.

Racially we can look at ourselves only one of two ways. Either we are all one race, in that any human can mate with any other human of the opposite sex and produce offspring that is itself capable of producing offspring. Either that, or we take the neurological view that the human brain has become so sophisticated and discerning, immersed in a society now offering so much choice and diversity, that we have each, essentially, become our own unique race. And as technology evolves, and the boundaries widen of what society can provide, and deems acceptable, the process of speciation will only accelerate.

You can demonstrate this to yourself by thinking of a close friend. What's their favourite food? Favourite restaurant? Favourite film? Favourite book? TV show? Artist? Sport? Team? Designer? Label? Car? Colour? Pet? Peeve? It doesn't take many data points to start to show considerable divergence between the choices of close friends, family members, even twins.

The behaviour witnessed hour by hour on the internet is evidence of a prevailing belief that everyone should be one thing and the same. Except that where once everyone was expected to believe in the one, true Christian God, now we are all expected to think that 9/11 was an inside job, or coconut milk is the universal panacea of immortal life, or that this week's female celebrity hate figure is a bitch, cunt, whore for [insert spurious, inadequate, self-pitying reason here].

Some gay people view bisexuals in much the same way as some heterosexuals see the gay community, further evidence of our latent monomania. This is one of the reasons why I think that if we are going to define someone's sexual status, we also need to define their social status. For instance, someone can be heterosexual, but homosocial, in that they spend the majority of their time in groups of their own gender, only seeking out members of the opposite sex for sexual gratification. Sexuality is like skin tone. Monomaniacs over the centuries have tried to reduce humanity to a series of binary moral judgements like, gay and straight, black and white, wrong and right, rather than the 8 billion shades of grey that we truly are. No one is one thing all the time (I am left-handed, but play guitar and use a mouse right-handed). Everyone has off days, and even the most cautious of person will occasionally do something that is unexpected, outside of their comfort zone, even dangerous. To be human is be in a constant state of flux.

We are analogue creatures living in a digital world and we need to learn how to digitise. We've tried the "we're all one" approach time and time again and all it really leads to is Belsen, Siberia, or Guantanamo Bay. The ultimate failure of all monomaniacal ideologies is the failure to realise that there is no one Venn diagram that encompasses all of humanity. We live in a universe that expands and creates. The yearning to fragment and diversify is encoded in our DNA. Constantine embraced Christianity to do away with sectarianism in the Empire, but within a few centuries the sects of Zeus, Mithras, and Apollo had been replaced with the Franciscan, Jesuit, and Benedictine orders of monks. Then, first Martin Luther broke with Rome, then Henry VIII, and sectarianism reasserted itself in Europe with a vengeance. Monomania seeks only to enforce convergence upon a divergent species. It is always doomed to fail.

Individuality is an indication of intellect. They are also proportional. Where one rises, the other is sure to follow. A monomaniacal order allows for little or no social mobility. Apart from anything else, if one outsources the decision making process to an external like God,  Immigrants, or the State, then the power to positively affect one's direction in life is severely impaired. The individual becomes tethered to one station in life. Only by accepting responsibility for one's actions can an honest assessment of one's strengths and shortcomings be performed. Only then can we be sure of our true course. Only then can we break free of our moorings and explore.

It is also incredibly freeing. I am an atheist. Once, I would have described myself as a militant atheist, but not since I started to enjoy floating in my own little bubble of reality. All that I can now say for certain is that God does not exist in my universe, as I have no need of any being more supreme than myself. If I were to find out that there were such things as gods, my only real question would be, "Where do I apply?" However, I can offer no opinion on who does or does not exist in your reality. I have no empirical experience of being you. I am happy to discuss and compare our varying perspectives, but I have no wish to convert you.

Moreover, if our beliefs are so at odds that we can really find no common ground, well, we live in an infinity of cyberspace, where we need never lay sight on each other unless we really want to. There is more than enough room to accommodate the realities of all the world's Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Beliebers, Trekies, Mets Fans, Geordies, Dungeon Masters, Chefs, Vegans, Transsexuals, Pansexuals, Bikers, Ballet Dancers, Belly Dancers, Writers, Actors, Gamers, and a billion other demographics besides. Yes, there are real world problems like climate change to be dealt with, but this is exactly the kind of thing that monomania perpetuates. In the monomaniac's world, there are only two opposing views and they should each be given equal time. In the pan-dimensional order of things, there are 8 billion opposing sides and most of them are firmly for believing in anthropomorphic climate change.

Paganism has returned to the world. Actually, it never really went away, but it's been keeping a low profile for the last thousand years or so, what with all the persecution, ducking stools, and pyres of burning bodies. Today we have the potential to build a world that is a broad, continuous spectrum of happy mediums. There will still be those at the margins that we will have to take care of for their own sakes, or for the sake of others, but this is so much easier to achieve when you view people as a standard distribution of possible personality types, rather than as a flatline.

Obsession and monomania can be a good thing when it's something that one is passionate about for the thing itself. Without obsessives we wouldn't have medicine, technology, transport, or most of the rest of the modern world. Me, I'm in to books: buying books, and reading books, and thinking about books, and talking about books, and rereading books, and writing about books. I like society. Society is a fine thing, and I am happy to contribute to its continued existence. However, what I really want for us to do is to figure this shit out, so that I might finally get around to reading The Count of Monte Cristo. At the moment it seems that my only hope is to follow it on Twitter.

Having opened with Polyphemus, I can only conclude, once again, with words taken from the Cyclops chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses:

But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

The Adventure of Crow Crag: Withnail & I as Homes and Watson

Recently, I sat down to watch a double bill of The Big Lebowski and Withnail & I on my home cinema system (a laptop, plugged into a projector, plugged into a hi-fi system). The connection between the two films might not be immediately apparent. However, as The Big Lebowski is said to be loosely based on Raymond Chandler's novel, The Big Sleep, so Withnail & I can be seen as the misadventures of Sherlock Holmes and John. H Watson.

It should first be said that The Big Lebowski is based on the series of Philip Marlowe novels, rather than any particular book. The only real connection between the plots of The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski is that the Dude and Marlowe are both followed, but for different reasons. The explanation that the "fellow shamus" gives to the Dude is taken from The Little Sister. The sequence where the Dude is drugged, thrown into the road, and ends up in front of the Chief of Police in Malibu is straight out of Farewell My Lovely.

The Big Lebowski also owes more than a little to Dashiell Hammett's novel and film, The Maltese Falcon; but then Chandler used Sam Spade as his model for Philip Marlowe. Both PIs were played to smouldering effect by Humphrey Bogart in the 1940s. As much as the Dude is meant to be the stoner Marlowe, making a number of erroneous deductions during the course of the film, he is as much the stoner Bogart, retaining the same acerbic wit and stubborn refusal to give a straight answer to any question. And you know what they say about not Bogarting that joint.

By the same token, Withnail and I are the drunk Holmes and Watson. There is Withnail, the rude, high-functioning, borderline sociopath, with a love for acting and the overly dramatic. Then there is "I" (Peter: Withnail refers to him as such when they're at Monty's). He is Boswell to Withnail's Johnson, faithfully recording his friend's slow decent into psychosis.

The pair go off into the English countryside, a feature of many a Holmes adventure, especially The Hound of the Baskervilles. At Crow Crag (the cottage in which they stay), the most dangerous beast to affront Withnail & I is the farmer's randy bull. Although, of course, the randy bull foreshadows the appearance of Monty in the night. Like Monty, the bull ignores Withnail, going straight for Peter. With his unwanted amorous attentions, Monty is the real hound here.

With a quick blast of All Along the Watchtower, Withnail & I leave the London of 1969 for a Cumbria that could be 1869 if not for the farmer's tractor. There are rambles out on the moor and encounters with local types in the public house. Like the Dude, Withnail & I make a number of dubious deductions along the way. That Jake is out to get them. That Monty breaking in at night is Jake coming to kill them. The proper way to cook a chicken. Peter's paranoia that Withnail is planning to sell him out to Monty, however, is well founded, leading to a final showdown with the hound in the dead of night. The beast is slain with several shots to the heart, and Withnail & I return to the capital and Camden, just on the other side of Regent's Park from 221B Baker Street.

Now, I'm not for one moment suggesting that Bruce Robinson, in writing Withnail & I, deliberately set out to write a comedy based on the adventures of Holmes and Watson. The high-functioning detective and his faithful companion is a common trope in thriller writing. It has been used time and again by crime writers since the time the Holmes stories were first published. Conan-Doyle modeled Holmes closely on Edgar Allen Poe's detective, Dupin, and his bespoke biographer, who unlike Watson remains nameless. The Dude has Walter, even Sam Spade has Miles Archer, at least until the end of the first act. The only real lone wolf is Philip Marlowe, steadfastly singular and alone, telling it like it is, straight from the horse's mouth, rather than through an intermediary. I think that's the reason why I love Marlowe best of all.

Few films end as poignantly as Withnail & I, with Withnail quoting Hamlet in the rain (Act II, Scene II, 278-292). The poignancy is redoubled if you're familiar with the lines and know that Withnail's rendition is far from perfect. He misses out bits of the speech and muddles others. Withnail has ambitions to play the Dane, but understudying Konstantin is probably a stretch for him at this point.

As Watson leaves 221B Baker Street to marry Mary Morstan at the end of The Sign of Four, so Peter leaves London to play the lead in a play up north. As Withnail stands, misquoting Shakespeare in the rain, you fear for him, because you know he will most likely end up as one of the "wankers on the site" that he derided at the beginning of the film. Much as we enjoy watching his antics, Withnail is not Marlowe: Neither is he Holmes. There will be no be no bee hives, or retirement to the Sussex downs for Withnail. Only oblivion awaits.