Hooray! We’re off to the moon. UK scientists are working on the deisgn of a moon lander that would also be used on Mars missions.
It seems to me that if we are to spend billions of pounds on firing rockets into the air, how much better it would be if they flew off to the moon or Mars, in a spirit of discovery and exploration. Instead we develop rockets designed to vapourise hundreds of thousands of people. We are a very silly species.
Of course, supporters of Trident cite the unreliable regimes of North Korea and Iran as proof that we need to maintain a deterrent. But I reckon a trip to the moon would be better than a deterrent – it would be a demoraliser. Can you imagine a bigger “fuck you” to send to Ahmadinejad, than an YouTube message from the moon?
As an incentive, countries that disarm would be offered a seat on the spaceship. The sight of your country’s flag, billowing in the vacuum by means of a support wire. What could bring greater glory to your land and people?
Author: Robert (Page 269 of 328)
Of all the reasons to burn an effigy of Richard Gere, it seems odd that kissing Shilpa Shetty is what finally does for him. A line from The Guardian’s report caught my eye:
Groups of men burned and kicked effigies of the actors in protests across India [my emphasis].
This reminds me of an issue highlighted yesterday over at Pickled Politics, concerning the status of women in Indian society, and the anxiety among traditionalists groups who see the breaching of caste and and community boundaries as a threat to the patriarchical status quo.
Sunny also links to a mea culpa from Shashi Tharoor (former candidate for UN Secretary-General):
… by speaking of the declining preference for the sari amongst today’s young women in terms of a loss for the nation, it placed upon women alone the burden of transmitting our society’s culture to the next generation … And this was unacceptably sexist: after all, my column only called for the sari’s survival, never demanding that Indian men preserve the dhoti or mundu.
I have encountered these double-standards before. While interviewing youths of Asian heritage for the documentary Sex, Lies and Culture, we often reached an impasse in the conversation when it came to the question of whether the same standards of conduct were applicable to both sexes. In one case, a young man actually endorsed the assault he was subjected to by the over-protective brothers of a girl he had been dating, secretly (“well, basically, they threw me down a couple of flights of stairs.”) He said that, had he found out that someone had been dating his sister, then he would probably have reacted in the same way. The overt message was that the men of the family, brothers and fathers, have a right to cast judgement on the behaviour of their sisters and daughters. And yet the demands that mothers place on their son’s behaviour do not carry the same moral weight.
This is not an attitude particular to Asian cultures. Within the UK, I still detect undercurrents of this same attitude. Often, when people hear that my sister has three older brothers, some comment is made about how that must be difficult for potential boyfriends… as if these brothers are some kind of obstacle. As if we have a right to interfere in someone else’s relationship. Clarice at Conceptual Reality detected a similar attitude in Mark Lawson’s recent radio play, Expand This, where a brother cannot tolerate the sexualisation of his (grown up) sister. The ‘ownership’ of women is implicit in wedding ceremonies, where the father (or male head of the family, when the father is absent) is required to ‘give away’ his daughter to some other man. The suggestion of a mother giving away her daughter, or indeed of of a mother giving away her son, is still laughed out of the room.
Finally, this attitude is also implicit in the coverage of Prince William’s break-up with Kate Middleton. The understanding is that, as a member of the Royal family, William has the right to sow his wild oats in any girl who is ‘lucky’ enough to catch his eye. Most insidious is the coverage of a groping he perpetrated in a nightclub, in which William’s Royal status is apparently justifcation for his behaving like a lecherous dickhead. Apparently, for a royal to cop a feel of your breasts is also a stroke of good fortune. Literally.
Even if women have formal political equality, there still exists in society an unspoken, second-order sexism. Yet another reason why there is a place for the ideology of political correctness, which can expose and shame these attitudes. They may be “Just a bit of fun, mate” or “Just a tradition, son”, but they can ultimately cause an erosion of self-confidence, and family conflict.
One feature of the coverage of the crisis in Iraq, is the birth of compound nouns, words that cannot exist without their modifying adjectives. Thus we hear about “The-Holy-City-of-Najaf” and “The-Radical-Shia-Cleric-Moqtadr-Al-Sadr.”
Is ‘radical’ still the word we should use to describe Moqtadr? With all this talk of him representing the majority Shia population, and his control of six Iraqi cabinet ministers, he looks pretty entrenched. By granting him the moniker ‘radical’, the implication is that he is still a fringe figure. This is a distortion of the political situation in Iraq. If the intention is to marginalise him, the tactic is clearly not working.
Another odd aspect of social networking sites, is the lack of control over how you actually do the networking. As soon as anything to do with your real life is represented or linked to online, you surrender full control over that new identity.
On Facebook, for example, you may have chosen a particular profile photograph which conveys a certain image. It a version of yourself, which you choose to present. And it is a version that is totally undermined when, say, your friends and family start tagging photographs of you dressed as a ballerina at a fancy-dress party.
Duncan O’Leary from Demos mused on the implications of this for job-seekers, late last year. He pointed out that an employer can Google all the applicants for a job, unearthing all manner of embarrasment. Think of the 19 year-old Scottish Parliamentary candidate, whose friends posted pictures of him drunk on various websites. In such cases, the Internet is an annoyingly efficient conduit of information over which you have no control, but the cause and effect are both offline occurrences.
But for an increasing number of people, the online community itself becomes part of who they are. Participating on a forum, or writing a blog, is a leisure activity, Something That They Do. With the coming of the Age of the Internet, we herald an era where we can create idealised versions of ourselves, identities that we can slip into, so we may relax and flourish (indeed, one correspondent of mine claims to have three or four different blog identities). But it seems that this is only possible if one makes a clean break with reality, denying all contact with your offline self, your past. Will the fact that I have an eponymous blog cause trouble for me one day?
As soon as aspects your real life are represented online, that carefully crafted New You is undermined. At the very least, deciding what parts of the Old You are represented online, should be a choice for the individual. It should not be the choice of the individual’s girlfriend’s sister’s flatmate, who stole an impromptu snapshot in that bar, that one time.
The issue at stake here is, I think, starkly illustrated by the story of 13 year-old Casey Knibbs, who committed suicide after being bullied online. If the Internet allows you to create and control the spaces you use for recreation and interaction, how on earth did bullies get in there? Or rather, why was he not able to simply disable (or ‘Plonk’) their comments. It is like being bullied by an imagninary friend.
It was the rejuvenation of London in the late seventeenth century, after the Great Fire of ’66, which moulded the character of Westminster, The City, and West End through which I now walk. But to celebrate this mess is not to say that the London of today has become stagnant. The public, authors of the city, find new uses for old spaces.
The skate park underneath the Hayward Gallery has become a much photographed hang-out for youths on two or four wheels. “That fabulous painted cavern” as a friend of mine calls it. In many respects it is just like the other venues along the South Bank, drawing audiences from out of town for a regular showcase of talent, visual and kinetic.