A Immigration Argument

I have a friend on Facebook (yep, that again) with whom I sometimes have political disagreements. I consider him a nice guy if misguided, and I'm sure he thinks the same about me. This friend recently posted a quotation which brought on a discussion completely outside the realms of comment boxes so, eventually, I promised to answer in the form of a blog post. Here it is.


The Statement
The statement my friend posted was this:

Current immigration levels combined with the birth rates of Third World
immigrants already resident in Britain mean that we have about 20 years to avoid
being completely colonised

Interesting isn't it?
My first reaction was, obviously, "Rubbish!" because it was clearly some right-wing media-fed scaremongering, but he assured me it was true. He stated that it was a quote from a government foreign affairs advisor. Now, why I should actually believe such a person isn't entirely clear - he's obviously playing to the crowd like anyone else trying to keep his job. What is this guy's personal political stance and how does it colour his statements?


The statement does have a certain, seemingly deliberate, impact. That's what annoyed me in the first place and that psychological manipulation is something I'd like to look at first.
To me the whole sentence is a huge flashing Fnord (if you don't know what a Fnord is, please look here). Let's look at it in more detail:


1. "Current immigration levels". What exactly are the current immigration levels. I don't know, but I'm going to look them up later. Do you know? The average Daily Mail reader would immediately say "Too bloody high, mate!" This phrase immediately connects on a subconscious level us to the assumption that immigration levels are high, whether they are or not.


2. "birth rates". This phrase is exactly the same as the last one. It assumes that birth rates, just like immigration levels are high. Are they?


3. "birth rates of Third World immigrants" What do you think of when you hear the term , "Third World"? That's right Africa and Asia. Or if you're a BNP supporter, "Niggers and pakis. And, oh my god! the bastards are breeding!" This phrase quite deliberately conjures up images of millions of brown children with funny accents demanding to be fed by the state - as my friend put it, "Where are the jobs & houses coming from? And where is the extra money to pay for social services, NHS & pensions?" That's exactly the expected reaction, but is it even a valid question?

4. "we have about 20 years". Armageddon is coming folks! All such phrases which give a limited time-frame well within a human lifespan have the immediate effect of causing slight panic in the reader. It's a very commonly used brainwashing method. People who panic aren't thinking straight.


5. "to avoid being completely colonised". What the hell does that mean? This phrase is the most deliberately emotive, and completely irrational of the whole bunch. It rips into our deepest, darkest fears of being totally ruled over by a foreign country who, at this very moment, is breeding itself into power through sheer fecundity.
According to the dictionary on my lap, to colonise means to found a colony and a colony is simply a group of people who all live together according to their own rules (like a farmstead, say, or the Amish in America). We've been "colonised", by those terms, for thousands of years. In other words, that phrase is totally meaningless where the argument for or against immigration is concerned.


It's interesting that I've found five Fnords. I wonder if Eris is having a little laugh at our expense. I also wonder if it's relevant that the word "colonise" begins with "colon"!


Truth?
Okay, the statement may be a massive giggling Fnord, but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't still true. There are two basic questions to answer, plus one from the following FB discussion which probably ought to be addressed.
The two questions are: "What is the immigration rate?" and "What is the population growth rate?". If we can answer these two basic questions we should be able to tell if were likely to be "completely colonised" by anybody.


The Immigration Rate
Britain's immigration rate actually is quite high in comparison to other countries and according to most of what I've read we'll be heading for a population of about 70 million within 25 years - if rates remain at present levels.
But will they? According to a recent BBC news report immigration has slowed and during 2008 "The numbers of people arriving minus those leaving actually fell by 44%". Immigration levels are very difficult to predict and tend to come in waves. Present levels are very unlikely to continue because levels change all the time, at the last count they appeared to be falling.
To state that we WILL have specifically higher population because of immigration is impossible.
Here's a quote from Tim Finch, another government advisor:

It is now declining sharply - almost certainly because of a combination of the economic downturn, the short term nature of much migration from new EU
countries, and the impact of stronger controls put in place by the government.
There has been a lot of irresponsible scaremongering about immigration in recent years which was based on the false assumption that high migration was inevitable for years to come.

The Birth Rate
The British birth rate is indeed rising, and faster than immigration. We have just passed 61 million people, but just like immigration, birth rates come in waves. We are currently going through a boom period with 790,000 babies born in the UK last year. Roughly a quarter of those were born to mothers from other countries. A quarter that is - not a takeover, just a quarter. A significant number of these babies were born to Polish mothers - not just Third World mothers.
So, of the rising population 75% has nothing whatsoever to do with immigrants. It's different when you look at it that way, isn't it?
We had massive booms in birth rates in 1947, 1962, and 1993 with either slumps or steady settling in between. We must account for an aging population as well. We aren't living any longer as a species, but a lot more of us are reaching the upper limits of old age than previously. The current population of over-85's stands at more than 1.3 million. That's likely to rise too. There's the answer: kill your granny!

The Countryside
One very valid point was a query about what will happen to our countryside with an increasing population. The increasing population being placed squarely on the shoulders of immigrants doesn't actually work in this case though - it's another of those assumptions we tend to make.
We are losing countryside rapidly and have been for quite some time, but is this the fault of immigration?
Well, no! Immigrants tend to live in whatever they can get. The vast majority of immigrants live in areas of extremely high population, in poor housing close to or even within cities. Most of them haven't acquired the almost uniquely British idea of moving out to the suburbs, or better yet a place in the country. The destruction of the British countryside is not happening, and has never happened, to house immigrants - it happens purely because of our own selfish, short-sighted, acquisitive greed. Why do you think that Wimpey is such a huge company?
This is something you'll see regularly after the building of a housing estate outside a village. Regardless of the protests it immediately fills up with upper-middle class families who'll commute to work, for a better place in the countryside which they've just helped to destroy.

Finally
. . . because I'm getting tired now!
Right at the end of this piece I'm going to put a list of all the immigrants into Britain. See if you know anyone (including yourself) who isn't on that list somehow. We're all descended from immigrants in Britain, even Nick Griffin. A society is made of its people and this society's people are all immigrants. We won't lose our cultural heritage by allowing immigration because our cultural heritage has migrated with us and been adapted by and to where we live. Even the country's national religion is a foreign import.

Personally I prefer the philosophy of the No Borders movement, but perhaps that's a blog for another time. Meanwhile I'd like to ask a moral question - not answer it, just ask:

If someone sees a way of improving the lives of himself and his family
without knowingly causing harm to anyone else, does anyone have the right to
stop him?

Love and freedom,
Seán

Picts, Celts, more Celts, Romans, Afro-Roman Legionaries, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Danes, Normans, Jews, Huguenots, North African slaves, Indians, Chinese, Irish, Bengali Lascars, Polish, Italians, West Indians, Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Ugandan Asians, Australians, New Zealanders, white South Africans, Americans, South Asians.
We're all foreigners sooner or later!

In Praise of Poly

That's poly- as in -amory, rather than Polly as in parrot!

Last time on here I promised a consideration of polyamory as a concept, so here it is. Before starting I think it probably best to put my own position forward - I consider myself a polyamorous person in a monogamous relationship. Happily so, too. I'm not looking for a lover or anything (it'd be nice to have the energy!)
On the other hand I do want to see if I can shed a positive light on polyamory as a viable lifestyle choice for many people. Not for everybody by any means, but probably for a lot more than there are now.

History

Polyamory simply means, in its mixed-up Greek/Latin way, "many loves". By dictionary definition, a polyamorous person finds that they have the ability to love more than one person in an intimate and sexual way. I'm going to question why it needs to be sexual later, but for now I'm going to look at the historical and cultural precedents for polyamory.

The next word in our new poly- collection is polygamy, closely followed by polygyny and polyandry.
Polygamy means a marriage between one person and several spouses, although it's often confused with polygyny, which means a man having more than one wife. Polyandry is the gender-opposite: one woman, several husbands.
In our nuclear-family, montheistic and monolithic western culture we are conditioned towards monogamous and possessive relationships, but this hasn't always been the case and in many cultures polygamy is accepted as normal.

Sadly polygyny is often the result of a male-dominated, competitive and possessive culture. It is, therefore, the most common form of polygamy. Where women are seen as property and second-place citizens, it is not unusual for a rich man to show his status by "owning" several wives in the same way that he owns several cars or houses. This was the case in China until about a century ago, and is still the case in certain middle-eastern countries.
Having said that, in cultures where men would often go out to fight and die in battles, many women would be left widowed or remain a spinster indefinitely. In such a culture an unmarried woman would have no security, or in extreme cases any life of her own at all. Polgyny made sense, then, for a culture with few men and many women.
Many people also consider Mormons polygynous too, which is true up to a point. In most western countries it's illegal anyway and even then not all Mormon men can have more than one wife. The founder, Joseph Smith had several wives who also had other husbands themselves, which seems more fair to me.

Polyandry is rather rarer but still exists, most famously in Tibet. This is usually a form of fraternal polyandry, where a woman marries a whole stack of brothers, although not always. Polyandry makes a certain amount of genetic sense in harsh lands like Tibet, where resources are scarce (a man with eight wives can have eight children a year, a woman with eight husbands can only have one) and a child has a greater chance of survival with little or no competition and two or more dads bringing in food.
Even though Hindus do not generally practise polyandry there is a precedent in the Mahabharata where Draupadi becomes the wife to all five Pandava brothers.

Here and Now

Those examples are very much distant from our normal lives. In the western world monogamous relationships between a man and a woman are considered the norm. This has been borne out recently by the bizarre Proposition 8 ruling in California and the Christmas speech by "His Holiness" the Pope.
Yet, at the same time, old patterns are being broken down. In the space of my own lifetime (and I'm not especially old) the UK has gone from homosexuality being illegal to allowing same-sex marriages. Yes, I know they're really civil-partnerships, but they've been accepted as marriages regardless of the technicality of the law.
Standard monogamy is also breaking down as can be seen by hugely increasing instances of adultery and divorce in the last 30 years or so. Many people worry that such is a sign of the breakdown of society. I see it as a good sign. It's dreadful for those individuals going through it (been there, done that, still have the t-shirt!), but so is surgery!
Just as an example, I used to have a neighbour who was a very old widow. This was 15 years ago and she was pushing eighty then. She had spent more than forty years married to the same man and yet the only good thing she could say about him was, "Well, at least 'e never 'it me!"
If someone can explain to me why that was a good life, I'm listening!

The dissolution of highly defined marital patterns also means an increase of tolerance for and experimentation in "alternative" lifestyles. I see it as the caterpillar's physical breakdown and rebuilding as a butterfly. At the moment we're in the chrysalis, but eventually we will become transformed and be able to emerge.

Modern Polyamory

The wonderful thing about modern polyamory is that it is ultimately indefinable. There are so many forms that the term itself almost becomes a nonsense. There are, for instance, open marriages where two partners take lovers; triple or other number partnerships which are entirely exclusive and closed; amorphous communal group marriages where people come and go as they please. The variations are endless and, wonderfully, also don't define themselves in terms of simple gender. The two things they do have in common, and which define the relationships entirely, are honesty and love.

I don't consider swingers to be polyamorous. That's not to say that swinging is a "bad" thing, simply that casual sex does not require love. It's lustful rather than amorous. Again, there's nothing wrong with that, it simply doesn't work within even this loose definition. Adultery, also doesn't fit, because it is, by nature sneaky and dishonest.
"Friend sex" does fit, as an extension of the definition of love. Loving one's friends can be extended into physical expression. I may write about the joys and pitfalls of friend sex at some future juncture, the point now is that it involves love

In the same way as sex need not involve love, love (and intimate partnerships) need not involve sex. There are rare couples (and I understand that my adoptive grandparents were of this nature) who love each other and marry, and stay married until death, yet never have sex. Who's going to say they're not really married? Not me!
To the polyamorous monogamist like me, love does not divide, it multiplies. I can love my wife with every fibre of my being and still love my friends almost as much. I can be totally turned by my wife but still fancy most of my friends and cuddle them all. Most people probably feel the same, even if they don't admit it.

Aye, but here's the rub!

Polyamory isn't for everybody, but then again, neither is monogamy. That's the whole point. Ideally we should have no alternative lifestyles, because there should be no norm from which to deviate. It's going to take some doing, though. (We need to stop bombing each other first, I think.)
There's also the fact of individual social conditioning. I flatter myself that I'm an enlightened and relatively free individual who can see the fnords and thinks before he reacts, but at the same time I have been brought up in a society which expects me to be possessive and insecure. I try not to be, but mud like that sticks. I've got the greatest admiration for those who have enough confidence to be open about their own forms of polyamory in the face of a disapproving public.
I suppose the test would come if my belovèd chose to take a lover. I wouldn't dream of trying to stop her, her will is equal to mine, but I wonder if I could cope emotionally. Am I mature, free and secure enough, or do I still harbour the demons of possessiveness and jealousy?

The polyamory movement has taught me another new word as well - compersion. Frankly, I had to look it up, but I'm glad I did. It's a beautiful concept.
Compersion is the state of happiness in knowing that someone you love is happy in loving someone else too. It's not voyeurism or cuckolding, because it's not necessarily sexual and they are exclusively sexual practises. It's love that goes entirely beyond expected confines.
What would a society be like if, instead of its marital ethics being based on ownership and exclusivity, it was based on compersion?

That would be truly enlightened.

Love,
Seán

Buy Nothing!

Today I'm using the blog to promote something which I think is worthwhile and important - Buy Nothing Day, which is this coming Saturday (29th November - Happy Birthday, Pixie!)

But before that, have a look at this video:
(Hope this works, I've never posted a video before)



Better yet, don't just watch it, steal it from me and spread it around. It's from a website called Bonfire of the Brands. Go check them out. I found it on The Idler, check that out too!

I'm not going to plug Buy Nothing Day for it's anti-capitalist, anti-work ethic. Nor am I looking at it from the environmental perspective. Other people have already done that far better than me. There's a list of them on the right under the heading Kick-Arse Politics.

What I'm proposing is that we use Buy Nothing Day as a way of proving to ourselves and the world of high-brand media marketing that we can and will take control of our own lives.

Advertising

I've nothing against advertising as a thing in itself. In order to get your message across you've got to tell people about it. There are even ads on this blog, and I wouldn't dream of suggesting that anyone abuse the system by clicking them on and then off again! But we are surrounded by it and saturated by it and we barely ever realise just how much we are being controlled.

I understand that it's fairly normal for marketing to be taught as a subject in American schools. I'm impressed, if it's true, and I would like to suggest that we all make a study of marketing and branding techniques. (In fact, I'm using one right now by emboldening the words, Buy Nothing Day every time they appear.)
Why? - So we can become good marketers? No! - So we can defend ourselves against them.

Here are some examples:

Catch 'em young: A recent study in Chicago showed that pre-school children believed things tasted better when they came wrapped in the McDonalds label. That's anything at all - carrots, milk, apples, anything. That's pre-schoolers, 3-5 year olds. That's the power of branding!

Repetition: the vast majority of advertising works on the simple process of repetition. If you tell someone something often enough, they will believe you!

Make it emotive: Nike don't sell shoes, they don't even sell sports shoes. They sell dreams! Watch a Nike ad someday (if you don't feel too dirty). They won't tell you how good their shoes are, how long they will last or the wonderful stuff of which they are made. They show you what you dream of being - a sporting hero. Buy Nike shoes and YOU will score that goal, live in that house, drive that car, shag that appalling mindless bimbo with the bleached hair and tits like halves of grapefruits.

Space creation: Supermarkets are full of psychological tricks and controls. The newest in my local one is a Christmas Santa-and-his-Elves floor painting. It's bright, cartoonish and kids want to play on it for hours. Funnily enough it's right down the aisle of Christmas chocolates.

Smells: Supermarkets do this as well. Bread is a real biggie. Who doesn't love the smell of newly-baked bread? And doesn't it set off your saliva glands and make you feel hungry. Oh to hell with it, let's get an extra loaf. In fact I feel really good now, let's splurge on something else!

AAARGH!

I could go on with this for an awful lot longer - there are psychological tricks around every corner in every shopping centre, every time you turn on the telly, listen to the radio or look at Yahoo/Google/MySpace/Blogger. Please feel free to seek them out. We could create a new hobby - fnord spotting.

The question I'm asking is this: When we go out into the civilised world to buy (say) apples, whose will are we doing? Are we buying them because we want to or because the marketer says we should? And if we do how do we know our choice of apples is our choice?

How much more does this question apply to a pair of Ugg boots, an iPod, or a Renault Laguna?


Buy Nothing!

Buy Nothing Day is a way of - at least temporarily - taking control of our lives and our rampant bloody consumerism. My dad honestly believes that we buy ten times more stuff than we did when he was 25 (about 40 years ago). He may be right.

I read a lovely saying the other day;
The only things which like permanent growth are corporations, goverments and tumours. Damn right!

Our consumerism went too far 50 years ago and it's still getting worse, primarily because we're being influenced by very clever, very evil people who want us to buy stuff. Buying stuff we don't want or need is good for the economy.

Fuck the economy.

Consumerism is directly responsible for all of the environmental disasters we're going through right now. It is destructive to the planet and, worse, destructive to the human soul.

Do your will. Not mine, not the government's, and certainly not McDonalds'!
Just make sure it really is yours, and I'll try to do the same.

Love,
Seán

Music and Mediocrity

After suggestions from some friends on Farcebook I'm going to write about touch at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, here's a rant while I'm taking time to think about it.

I feel I should apologise first. I've got a touch of 'flu, I'm feeling bloody awful and consequently somewhat grouchy and my chavette neighbour annoyed me this morning with her "musical taste".

Music
I love music. Even before I learned how to play myself (which wasn't until I was well past 30) I was incredibly sensitive to music. Music could raise me to heights almost as exalted as those brought by religion, love and sex.
A particular rendition of Nessun Dorma (from Puccini's Turandot, an otherwise dull opera) once reduced me to a quivering wreck. I'm not exaggerating here: I was shaking all over, covered in cold sweat, crying, unable to breathe and my heart-rate had almost doubled. I thought I was going to die there and then!

It's not just Classical either. In fact I listen to a relatively small amount of Classical music
Here are a few examples to explain my meaning:
When I hear The Sisters of Mercy play Alice, I find it difficult not to dance. Kate Bush's Breathing makes me horny (which I'm sure it isn't supposed to do!) as does Leather by Tori Amos. Sing by the Dresden Dolls makes me exultant for the future of the human race but Tomorrow Belongs to Me from the musical, Cabaret makes me want to hide behind the sofa and try not to wee myself.

I'm sure you get the picture. But there's music and there's music.
This morning my neighbour put some music on. It was what is now called R&B. It sounded EXACTLY the same as every other song labelled R&B. Not similar, exactly the same. It was as if someone had created a worksheet entitled, "This is How you Create an R&B Hit" and followed it to the letter, ticking every box on the way. Sara suggested you can get instructions like you could for a Mills & Boon novel.
Actually, I find the term R&B offensive for this type of music. In the 60's Rhythm and Blues musicians included such radical world leaders as the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, nowadays it's TLC and R Kelly.
I'd recommend listening to Destiny's Child singing Say My Name (if you can stand it) immediately followed by Janis Joplin singing Piece of my Heart to understand how much the genre has changed.

Mediocrity
I'm picking on modern R&B because it was what my neighbour played, but it's not the disease - just a symptom.
I'm probably coming across by now as some sour middle-aged git who thinks that all music created after 1987 is crap compared to the real stuff from my youth and, if I'm brutally honest, there's a temptation to think like that. Thinking a little more deeply though, shows it to be untrue.
When I was 15 the fashionable and popular music (ie. the stuff that sold) was made by Lionel Richie and Sheena Easton, the stuff I liked was by David Bowie and Japan. What's the difference?

The difference is that the music which sold best was the music which was meant to sell best. Punk and independent labels began because major label executives would not take on artists who couldn't guarantee a specific amount of sales. They knew what would appeal to the mass of the population. It had to be ordinary, bland, homogenized and, above-all, profitable.
It's always been like this since the invention of recorded music, because music is a profitable business. It actually became a virtue in the 80's to provide bland-but-saleable pop aimed to make money and the Hit Factory of Stock, Aitken and Waterman were experts. They gave us Kylie, Rick Astley and Sonia (the bastards!)

There will always be interesting and experimental music made by people who care about music and there will always be bland cash-cows for those using music for making a fast buck. What bothers me is that they do it really, really well. They've realised an unpleasant secret - people are predictable, thoughtless and mentally lazy. People are crap!

Crap!
It's a conclusion I came to quite some time ago. Most people are crap! It's actually quite an upsetting thought for me and it's taken some getting used to because I genuinely believe that the Human Being is one step below a God and capable of reaching two steps higher:

What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and movement how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel. I apprehension, how like a God!
(Apologies for any misquotes - I wrote that from memory)

Yet, when I look out of my window I'm not looking at potential gods. Mostly I'm looking at barely alive, transparent zombies without thought, or depth. Without even the realization that they are alive. They wear uniforms so that they don't appear different, they watch the same television programmes and listen to the same bland, ordinary and shallow music because they have made themselves incapable of depth, thought or the realization of being truly alive.
AND - those who create this music, this television, these newspapers, bloody well love it that way!

Social Control (again!)
We live in a society which relies on conformity, which even categorizes non-conformist behaviour so it can be controlled. Human blandness, laziness and lack-of-thought are essential to the system in which we live. It's all about money and the ability to make it by predicting the behaviour of human beings.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Perhaps it's just an impotent rant because I'm feeling rough. Perhaps Lyall Watson was right when he theorised that the human race produces only 5% of special people, and the rest are destined to be ordinary, but I'm damned if I want to believe it.

Dear Reader, YOU ARE A FUCKING GOD! At least in potential!
Don't let them tell you any different.

Love,
Seán

Scary Sexuality?

I'm afraid things have been a little busy here at Dionysian Towers, so please accept my heartfelt apologies for this little hiatus. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I've worked out what normal actually is.
Some of my more eagle-eyed friends may have also noticed that this blog now has an "adult" setting. Basically this is because I don't want Google to wag its virtual finger in my direction when I post nude pictures or, as I'm about to do now, write about SEX!

YES! I SAID SEX!
Really, I mean sexuality rather than actual sex. Sex is a lot more fun to do than to write about. Sexuality, on the other hand, should be thought, spoken and written about as often as possible.

The inspiration for this came from my number-one son who, upon hearing that I could sew better than my wife, said, "How gay are you?". Okay, he was just making a joke but there's a very obvious implication there - that sewing is "gay". I recently found out that my late uncle's father worked as a jobbing tailor in the East End of London in the 1930's. He was a happily married, respectable Jewish man and any unlikely questions about his sexuality would hardly have had anything to do with his ability to sew.

We are coming back here to a particular bugbear of mine, the categorisation of human beings. Stereotypes make us less than what we really are - human.

Gay?
We tend to define a person by their sexuality. In truth we define people in many ways, one of the biggest being by their job, but sexuality is seen as a somehow important one. There are precedents, of course, which allow for certain positive generalisations: the lumping of people into "gay" and "straight" gave the world an identifiable group who managed to successfully campaign for the legalisation of homosexual sex. How much, though, of this definition can be said to be true?

I have a friend - let's call him P - who is definitely and obviously GAY (the capital letters are deliberate). He comes across as thoroughly camp - he works as a hairdresser, has perfect nails and calls everybody "darling". He even used to do a drag act many years ago. His boyfriend (and also his ex-) is quite definitely not obviously gay. You would have to ask if you saw them together.

The question is, therefore, how can we define any person as gay in any other way than by the fact that their preferred sexual pleasures are taken with someone of the same gender? There's no correlation to lifestyle apart from sexuality. If P slept with a woman, would that make him a better or worse hairdresser? Would another gay friend, S, be a better or worse prison guard if he was straight? Indeed, can he sew?

Straight?
At a recent Pagan camp a talk was to be given by Mr RH. My friend T asked his girlfriend who this was because he couldn't remember. She described RH thusly: "You know. The one you fancy!"
The thing is, T is "straight". As far as I know he has only ever has had sexual relations with women. But does it make him a better or worse driver, electrician, boyfriend because he considers another man as good-looking and charismatic? Interestingly, RH is generally rather popular with women, but very masculine men seem to hate him on sight!

Some people have described me as bisexual because I consider myself open-minded. I'm affectionate with my close friends regardless of gender and choose not to use a sexual label for myself ("Human, Pagan, Seán. Those are all the categories I need, thanks!"). Yet, I am very obviously happily married to a woman - and we have three children. What, then, would be the difference should I indulge in a bisexual act? Would my vegetables grow any faster? Could I play my flute any better? I doubt it.

I also have two female friends who are both very happily in heterosexual relationships. They don't normally find other women attractive - although they appreciate good looks when they see them just like anybody else. Yet they are strongly attracted to each other, especially when alcohol has knocked a few barriers out of the way. Does this make them lesbians? It might, but who cares? Does it make them better or worse parents?

Queer?
Human sexuality is as rich, diverse and complex as any other human trait - there is no such thing as normal with which to compare. Homo-, hetero-, bi-, are all labels for acts, not people. Some people love the opposite gender, others their own. Some people love being tied up and whipped, some people love multiple partners, some people love enormously fat people. It's even possible for one's tastes to change over the years. In the end we're all queer, because there are none of us who are normal. Is it scary to be queer?

What is scary is the deliberate definition of "normal" into a very strict and limited group of behaviours. The monotheistic religions are particularly responsible for this as a form of social control. Sadly, they have given us groups who believe that they can "cure" homosexuality. Don't believe me? Read this.
In certain cultures different types of sexuality have been considered "normal", consider Classical Greece as a pretty obvious example.

Being Different is Necessary!
The human race evolves not just physically, but also culturally. Sexuality is one of our strongest driving forces after the needs for food, shelter and the security of the tribe. A friend of mine (who may write about this himself yet) considers homo- and other non-breeding sexualities as natural results of over-population. I think they are natural results of our tendencies towards civilisation and social interaction. The Shaman/Witchdoctor/Priest of the tribe is the strange one, and quite rightly so.
There's a rather wonderful book by Stan Gooch called The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals. Yes - I too thought it would be hilarious, but it's actually pretty good. Here's what he says about homosexuality:

. . the priesthood has always been a refuge for types of homosexual and lesbian, as also for other kinds of sexual "deviance" - ie. sexual, presexual, or asexual behaviours whose aim is not the production of children. . . the homosexual/lesbian and androgynous human being has made a significant contribution to the evolution of religion. . .

I would suggest that non-breeding sexualities - which would normally die out as a behaviour pattern amongst most evolving creatures - are necessary to the evolution of both the individual human and human culture as a whole. Therefore (assuming the rule of An it harm none. . .) they should be encouraged. Those who stand for "normality" and simple categorisation are actually standing against the natural evolution of the human race. From this point of view, we need more queers!

Can we be define sewing as "gay" then? I suppose it depends whose trousers they are!

Love (in all its forms),
Seán

An Odd Thought.

Just a thought, bit of a radar blip.

Yesterday was Fathers' Day.
I don't believe in Fathers' Day. It's a con to make money for the card and present manufacturers. Remember the Simpsons? -

"No, no, no. It's got to be something warm and fuzzy, like Love Day only not so lame" . . .

"Happy Love Day everybody!"

That's how I see Fathers' Day.

So yesterday I gave my Dad a card I bought for him. He doesn't really believe in Fathers' Day either.
My kids gave me cards they'd made and some vegan chocolate, which I accepted and enjoyed.

So
On a scale of 1 - 10, just precisely how brainwashed, controlled and thoroughly duped am I?
Happy Love Day everybody!

Love (and a deeply exasperated sigh),
Seán

Surveillance Culture

I've recently read an interesting article by Nick Rosen about ways to attempt to live "off the grid" or, in other words, how to to avoid being spied on in everything we do.

Here's the link to said article:

Living Off The Grid

Who's Watching You?
It would appear that we Brits are the most paranoid, surveillance-obsessed people in Europe. As well as the fact that we can all be traced every time we use the internet (like I'm doing now, and so are you!) or use our mobile phones (which are GPS trackers), we have more CCTV cameras on our streets than any other country excepting the U.S.A.

Here's a nice quote:

Four years ago there were an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras – the exact figure is unknown as there is no central registration system – but there are probably nearer 6 million cameras now. There are up to ten on every bus and dozens at every station, so avoid London Transport if you want to evade the cameras. Most CCTV runs from speed cameras, which are less prevalent in the countryside. Maps of them are available on car websites

Note that figure: 6 million cameras. That's roughly one camera for every ten people in the country. That's a lot of cameras, and yet so many of us want to get on telly - including me!

There's also a total lack of legal registration dealing with these cameras except one simple rule - the height. You can put up a camera and legally point it just about anywhere you like as long as it's 8 feet or more above the ground so nobody can bang their head on it.
The way we pay our bills is recorded and so is the stuff we buy with our debit cards, our credit cards, our store loyalty cards. Such figures, particularly the ones from store loyalty cards are sold to marketers in order to sell us more stuff. Social networking sites are notorious for doing this sort of thing. Facebook has by far the worst reputation.

• Suggestions in order to live off the grid include:
  
  Wearing brimmed hats in public (because cameras are above head height)
  Tinting your car windows
  Using an infra-red light to illuminate your registration plate at night
  Swap store loyalty cards with friends
  Swap cards for cash
  Use the Freecycle Networks
  Email via companies that send messages through a "data cloud" (such as Xerobank)
  Living in such a way that the use of public utilities is minimized or removed altogether, such as buying a houseboat.

These are pretty good ideas when you find a lack of privacy a problem. My problem is whether or not all these security measures fulfill their specified purpose which is to protect us all from crime.

Let's have a look and see what we can find
In an article published here the police admit that CCTV has had almost no effect on street crime.

Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe

According to this really useful website the country with the least public surveillance in Europe is Greece. Greece has annually about 31 assaults per 10,000 people, we have 745! Similarly the UK gets about 157 robberies per 10,000 people, Greece has about 8. Even with mucked-about and massaged figures the discrepancy is obvious.

What To Do?
Frankly all this extra security is proving pretty pointless, but because people are paranoid and (despite the evidence) think more laws and security measures mean less crime it isn't going to go away. So what can we do about it?

One way is to attempt to live off the grid, which is difficult but possibly not such a bad idea. There is an alternative, though, inspired by those wonderful people, M@ and holly from HUMANWINE in their song Big Brother. The chorus, very simply put goes:

Big brother is watching. Let him watch!

I've forgotten where the reference is but there's some more inspiration from one of my favourite American heroes, Justin Boland (see the links to Brainsturbator, Skilluminati and Hump Jones). The point he's made goes something like this: If we are under constant surveillance which we cannot but accept then we need to turn that to our own advantage. Our lives are no longer private because we are being watched and the way to take control of that is to make one's life a performance.
We could try to escape our spy-on-you culture but we're fighting a losing battle, so instead (as in Tai Chi and Akido) we use the enemy's strength against him. We make the surveillance cameras see what we want them to by performing for them. This has it's occult element also in being an exercise in consistent self-awareness.

In other words AN IT HARM NONE DO WHAT YOU WILL. Do what you believe is absolutely the right thing to do, because to do otherwise would be to become less that yourself, and if the cameras are watching - let 'em.

What more can we do other than our true will, regardless of who's watching? The question now (with the greatest sympathy for those who live under totalitarian regimes like China and the US) is are we brave enough?

Love,
Seán

The Honesty of Children

Bikeface!
During the summer I attended a Green Party Rally in Manchester. As I was representing cyclists and cycling and there was a nice lady there who did face-painting, I got her to paint a bicycle on my face. It all seemed pretty logical to me!

The rally itself was a bit of a washout. It heaved down and we all got very, very wet. Afterwards, I pedalled my weary, dripping way home via a supermarket for some wine and nibbles to warm up the evening of an otherwise disappointing day. The thing is, I hadn't removed the picture of a bike from my face.

The reactions were fascinating, and all exactly the same - except for one. Everybody looked at me with surprise, and then attempted to appear as if they hadn't looked at all - all within a split second. The body language of a person desperately attempting to be nonchalant while trying to look at something unusual is just this side of hilarious.

So, who was the one exception?
He was a little boy of about 5 years old. He stared straight at me whilst swinging on his mum's arm and said in a loud, clear voice, "That man's got a bike on his face!", to which I replied (smiling whilst his parents suffered mild heart attacks and made frantic attempts to shut him up), "That's right. I have!"

Pink!
My beloved and better half has recently dyed her hair. It's pink. Not pink bits amongst the blonde. Not a subtle shade of pinkish tinge. Bright pink. All of it.
It really suits her. It brings out the blue of her eyes like some kind of lantern. She looks great.

Other people seem to think a little differently, though. She went to Asda yesterday (for my American friends, that's the UK branch of Walmart, more or less) and had much the same reaction that I had with the bikeface - a whole bunch of people deliberately and obviously not looking.
Except for (yep, you guessed it) a child. In this case it was a little girl of about three years old who shouted "Mum, Mum. That lady's got pink hair!"

Any other reactions to her hair have been as positive as the little girl's, but only from friends and family. Never from strangers, who pretend they don't notice.

The Question
Now, I fully understand why a child can (and often will) say and do things that an adult won't. It's called socialization. It's the same training that teaches us from an early age not to shout "Fire!" in a crowded cinema or pinch traffic wardens' bottoms, and for the most part it's quite a useful thing.
Without a basic level of socialization the normal day-to-day interactivities of people wouldn't work. We couldn't, for instance, get a bus to work and expect the driver to take us there. We're socialized to expect that the bus will go to the place that's shown on the front, and the driver is socialized to do what he's agreed to do - ie. drive the bus from point A to point B, picking passengers up on the way.
The question is now whether socialization is entirely good and if it isn't, is it possible to separate the good bits from the bad and retrain ourselves.

Honest children
The children who shouted out were only saying what their parents were thinking, and what they shouted contained no sense of judgement, simply an expression of surprise at something unusual. This was entirely harmless and perfectly acceptable from a child, but not, apparently from the child's parents. I'm reminded of things said by people who suffer some sort of facial disfigurement. Adults try to ignore it, young children ask about it in simple, honest and non-judgemental ways. Unfortunately they get told off for that, possibly because they're doing what the parents want to but can't.

So what are we, as adults, afraid of? Is it possibly the fear of causing offence? In my own example this doesn't seem to work. I'm not a scary-looking person (I don't look like Mr. macho-hard-case, is what I mean), so there's unlikely to be a fear of violence. Questions such as "Why have you got a bike painted on your face?" are likely to elicit a sensible response such as "Oh, I've just come from a Green Party rally". Even the act of shushing the child seemed to be an act of fear of some kind.

Fear of difference
I've always been a bit different from a normal person. Mostly this has been in attitude and interests - I like art but I don't like sport, for example - but as I got older this came out in my appearance. The only strangers to comment (with a few notable exceptions) were confrontational. In other words, they were reacting to something unusual with violence and, as any good Buddhist knows, violence is a direct descendant of fear. Sadly this is a worldwide problem - think of the recent death of young Sophie Lancaster from Bacup, who was killed for wearing heavy eyeliner.

Obviously the "people" who killed Sophie weren't the thoughtful types. If they (and others like them who do and have done similar things) actually bothered to think, they wouldn't have done it. Instead they reacted to a stimulus, much like one of Pavlov's dogs. The stimulus was: here is something different and the response was fear followed by violence. This doesn't excuse them their actions because they are - at least nominally - human and therefore capable of choice in their actions.

Instead, though, they followed a stimulus-response pattern. I used to think that such patterns were genetically coded (like the coding that makes a white blood cell attack any foreign body), but the example of the honest and non-judgemental children proves that theory wrong. Fear of difference is a result of socialization. In other words we are taught to be afraid of what we don't understand, to see it as a threat and reject it, often violently. This isn't genetic, it's societal. Rather than some form of survival strategy, fear of difference has appeared as a form of social control via socialization.

Mutation
I once read a piece by a sociologist (if you know who this was, please tell me!) who said "Nature loves variety, sadly society hates it".
Mutation, change, experimentation and difference are the ways of nature. These are the mechanisms of evolution and without them we wouldn't have the staggering diversity of life that covers this incredible planet, even in places where we think it shouldn't be able to. As a Pagan and Taoist it is my job to accept, understand and follow the ways of nature. To do otherwise would be to hold back the natural evolution of the human race.

Fear of difference is one of the forms of socialization we could do without, but it's deeply entrenched. Can it be separated and done away with? Well, I'm trying to "Embrace the Mutation" (J.K. Potter), and I hope that the more people that do will eventually reach a kind of critical level and cause some perceptual change in society as a whole.

It may take small children to teach us how to do that.

Love,
Seán