You Swines.

The recent swine flu hysteria has made me realise something.
For some time now (I would guess several months) I have not watched any news on television, nor listened to the news on the radio and not read any newspapers. This has made me blissfully ignorant of all that’s going on in the world.
I haven’t purposefully shut myself away from the news, it’s just that I never read newspapers (not interested in celebrity gossip), don’t watch TV except for programmes I specifically want to watch, and I have found myself listening less and less to the radio (which is a shame).
So my ignorance to the world was entirely serendipitous.
And then.
I did read a newspaper.
Swine flu. We’re all doomed. We’re all going to die. Again (in the same way we were all going to cark it over bird flu, SARS, mad cow disease, meningitis, AIDS etc).
What a miserable sodding format the media is.
I realised how they hawk anxiety and sensationalism. I suppose we all know that anyway, but when you’ve been away from it for a while and take a look you realise just how insidious it all is. You realise that we don’t ignore the commodity of fear so much as synthesise it, we absorb it into ourselves and ‘learn’ to live with it.
For that reason I have decided to actively avoid ‘news’ from now on. There’s a good few reasons for this. Firstly, there’s no point in worrying about something you can do nothing about. Secondly, the propagation of fear and anxiety is inherently immoral and cruel (I was happy in my ignorance, and the media only brought me down). Thirdly, and this one is closely tied to point #2, it strikes me that this anxiety trade is designed to curtail our freedoms. I’ll expand on that.
It is only natural that when difficulties come our way that we would want to find a way of eliminating those difficulties. And when we are faced with a threat, such as an invisible disease that we as ordinary members of the public can neither see, understand nor do anything about, we have to look to other forces to protect us. We turn to the government, to agencies, to organisations. That is, we give up our independence and accept we are incapable of looking after ourselves and go, like little children, to hide in the skirt folds of our ‘maternal’ protector. The very same protector who has fed us the fear. Whether it’s a disease that will kill us all or mad terrorists trying to blow us all up, you have to wonder who benefits most from spreading this fear.
I’ve never really seen the point of violent revolution. It seldom gets anywhere. Therefore, the only revolution I would advocate is to take control of ourselves by refusing to listen to the news, refusing to read the papers, to think for ourselves, to ignore this trade in fear and anxiety and to get back our freedom.

Keep It Real

I normally blanche a little when those twee 'life-affirming' emails go round. But I got one and in it were some good bits that I thought I'd post. I won't re-paste the whole email, since it was sickeningly mawkish, but these ones I thought were good.

- Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it -

- If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague -

-You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person -

Muse

OK, I'll get the ball rolling with a nice simple question.
If you could have written one song, what would it be?
Me? Well, it's a dice up between 'Losing My Religion' by REM, 'Fake Plastic Trees' by Radiohead or 'That's Entertainment' by The Jam (a band who I otherwise can't abide).
Mmm...on balance I think I'll say 'Fake Plastic Trees'. That song says just about everything I want to say, but says it so much better than I could.
I dare say that tomorrow I'll change my mind and choose something else completely. That's the great thing about music - how it polarises. It's good to either love or hate a song. It's that shit that occupies the middle ground (Coldplay, and that kind of cack) that should be burnt. It's music designed not so much to be enjoyed, but not to offend. And in doing so it offends anyone of taste.
Anyway.
What's yours?

Verbal Diarrhoea

Hello All.
I've just decided to restart a new Blog. I used to have one with Journal Space, but that went all tits-up and I never quite got round to doing another one. But I have now!
This Blog will be very much like my Journal Space blog. That is, it has no real point. It will be comprised of whatever comes to my mind. It will NOT be a journal or diary, and neither will it be a place for friends and family to know what I'm up to. It most certainly will not contain any private information that would allow myself to be identified. And neither will I give the same details about friends and family. Unless the suckers give me permission to.
I'm not interested in those kind of things.
What it will be, is a place where I will post random thoughts and mutterings. Sometimes they will be good old fashioned rants, sometimes thinly-veiled gags, others will be genuine conversation starters, others will be thoughts and feelings. May even do a bit of writing.
But what they will all have in common is that they shouldn't be taken seriously. Seriously, I mean it - don't take them seriously. I am more than willing to play the role of the disgusted Daily Mail reader/ Radio 4 listener if needs be. But that's OK.
Last time I had a Blog I tried to ensure that I did at least one posting a week. More often than not I easily managed that. However, sometimes I didn't and just posted things for the sake of it. I won't be doing that any more. I will only post when I have something to post. But I expect that to be at least one piece a week. And I'd very much like you to leave any comments you want.
Anyway.
Here it is.