Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Page 172 of 328

Crowdsourcing Clegg Commentary

21 September 2010 / / 3 Comments

One perk of working for English PEN at the Free Word Centre is the annual festival, which includes the welcoming of a poet-in-residence.  Last year we had Ray Antrobus and Joshua Idehen dropping the rhymes. This year Kate Fox has been reciting poems to us at our desks.  Under the alternym Kate Fox News, she quickly writes and publishes poems about current affairs, such as the Pope’s visit and the party conferences.
Kate recited for us an experimental poem she wrote yesterday entitled “Nick Clegg’s Conference Speech Remixed“.  She has spliced some of Clegg’s soundbites together with realtime Twitter commentary.

Just imagine how different our country will be.
Not exactly a vision thing
Stick with us
It wasn’t a bad speech
Stick with us
Looks all so sincere
Stick with us
We’re stuck with U

I like this format.  For one, it includes a random, crowd-sourced element.  It is surprising how often the act of yeilding some control of your content to The Cloud or The Rabble yeilds something true and pleasing – Cybraphon and FOUND are the arch mongers of this type of art.  I also like the juxtaposition of the primary source material – the speech – with the commentary.  A poem that could not have been created before social media tools became ubiquitous.

"Psychosis" as a term of abuse

20 September 2010 / / 9 Comments

On Twitter, I have been discussing the use of mental health terms in political speech with the journalist Beatrice Bray.  In recent weeks, Guardian cartoonists Martin Rowson and Steve Bell have both used the term ‘psychotic’ to describe political figures in negative terms.  Beatrice says this is wrong and that is marginalises people who are actually clinically diagnosed with psychosis.
On the one hand, I think this is a case of ‘useful’ political correctness.  First, I’ve said before that a respect for names and labels, of people, groups or cities, is one of my tenets of useful and persusive speech.  Free speech campaigners always reserve the right to offend… but when we do, we are usually referring to the right to offend the people we are talking about!  What Beatrice is complaining of in this case, is that other people – those with an actual mental illness – are the ones being hurt in the cross-fire.  And I have sympathy with her contention that the ‘hurt’ caused is a very real social marginalisation, rather than just ‘hurt feelings’.
On the other hand, I cannot shake a feeling at the back of my mind, a sense that Rowson and Bell and others who use mental health terminology, are in fact using the words as metaphors.
Often, the term employed as a metaphor is not always used properly.  ‘Spastic‘ was often used to convey mental deficiencies when in fact it refers medically to a motor/physical illness; and schizophrenia means delusional and disorganised, not split-personality.
However, I think Rowson and Bell are at least getting their metaphors straight.  They seek to describe the Conservatives’ policies as being dangerously out-of-touch with reality.  They reach into our vocabularies for a word that describes such trait… and often, the word ‘psychotic’ fits the bill.  We all know that David Cameron does not actually have a clinical mental illness… but the term seems the perfect metaphor for his political tactics (as least to a liberal lefty).
So, while many will consider the word extreme, they nevertheless know that it is an accurate metaphor for the concepts under discussion.  Does that necessarily translate into harm against people with a clinical psychosis?  Thoughts and opinions welcomed.

Who Can Reclaim Derogratory Words?

17 September 2010 / / 2 Comments

The PCC have upheld the complaint made by TV presenter Clare Balding against the Sunday Times.  In July, the critic AA Gill called her a “dyke on a bike”, which the PCC agreed was a form of discrimination.

In addition, the newspaper drew attention to two organisations called Dykes on Bikes (an American lesbian motorcycling movement; and a UK-based cycling movement) whose members had reclaimed the word “dyke” as an empowering, not offensive, term. It argued that an individual’s sexuality should not give them an “all-encompassing protected status”. …
In this case, the Commission considered that the use of the word “dyke” in the article – whether or not it was intended to be humorous – was a pejorative synonym relating to the complainant’s sexuality. The context was not that the reviewer was seeking positively to “reclaim” the term, but rather to use it to refer to the complainant’s sexuality in a demeaning and gratuitous way.

This reminds me of an interesting video blog I watched recently by Jay Smooth of the Ill Doctrine. In it, he makes the pithy point that, in general, “if you are not the original subject of an insult, you can’t be the one to reclaim it.”  This seems a sensible rule of thumb to me.

This reclaiming of offensive words relates to david Foster Wallace’s discussions around dialect.  He pointed out that words in opne dialect – for example, ‘Nigga’ in Black Urban English – is very different from using the ‘N-word’ in other contexts.  This should be the put-down to idiots like AA Gill who are deliberately offensive and then try and cover their tracks by wailing “but other people use it!”

Qu’ran burning and America's moral plummet

9 September 2010 / / 0 Comments

Just as I was mulling the idea of writing a blog-post on Liberal Conspriacy about the stupid Koran-burning event planned at a church in Florida, Dave Osler gazumps me with a lucid take.  As a campaigner for PEN, the idea of book-burning presents a particular conundrum: The aborrence of the act, versus the right to free expression.  I think Dave’s final paragraph nails the argument:

But Dove World Outreach Centre do not exercise state power. For much the same reasons as al Muhajiroon should not be banned from demonstrating at the funeral processions of squaddies and the English Defence League should not be banned from the streets of British cities, the lesser evil is to tolerate its cretinous intolerance.

Earlier, Dave dismisses Heinrich Heine’s quote (“wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings”) as being a soundbite.  I would not be so glib.  Reading the hysterical comments over the so-called ‘Ground-Zero Mosque’ from prominent and elected US politicians, I fear some particularly nasty events may unfold later this year.
The rise of fascism and other dictatorships is often cited as an excuse to regulate free speech.  “If only we could have stopped Hitler giving speeches” goes the argument, “we would have prevented Nazism.”  That is one way of looking at it, but such an approach is unsophisticated and leads to a fascism of its own.  The proper response, when rabble-rousing turns to vitriol turns to hate-speech turns to incitement… is counter-speech.  If demagogues threaten division and hatred, then others in power need to refute them as forcefully as possible. Democracy’s core values, as embodied in our concept of human rights, are always under attack.  It is when ‘cretinous intolerance’ is are inadequately defended that the moral fall begins.
Regarding the Cordoba Initiative controversy, those who should be standing up to the bigotry are often staying silent, or worse, pandering to the mob.  For example, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, in a close re-election battle with a Palin-style politican in Arizona, chose to pander.  President Obama’s response, while initially strong, was blunted by clarifications and spin.  Only Michael Bloomberg, major of New York, has taken a stand on principle.  The different responses of these three men to this moral challenge is clearly indicative of their very different electorates,  The dark side of democracy threatens the light.

Disconnect

8 September 2010 / / 0 Comments

This week I’ve read a couple of articles that discuss the ennui of the Internet age.  The first is a Salon profile of the hip New York writer Tao Lin, which features an excerpt from his book Shoplifting from American Apparel:

Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen … About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful.

Daniel Roberts discusses Lin’s style of prose:

[The] term, “depression,” is a bit too clinical in this context. Where Lin is coming from, and what his readers share, is a sense of loneliness. The malaise is not specific to New York, of course, but it is typical of a certain ilk of detached 20-somethings across the country.
The loneliness could be attributed to the Internet. Lin and his literary peers spend hours and hours online, and although doing so fosters a sense of connectedness, it is equally isolating. No matter how many fans or fellow writers Lin “meets” online, at the end of the day it’s still him, sitting at his laptop alone. Any moments of delight or engagement that the Internet prompts are separated by longer stretches of boredom, as implied by the title of a short story by Brandon Scott Gorrell, a member of Lin’s online literary gang. The story is called “Minimizing and Maximizing Mozilla Firefox Repeatedly.”

Meanwhile, the New York Review of Books blog discusses China’s One Child policy, and the detached scions it has produced:

The more he spoke, the more anguished he sounded about losing his son in other ways, too. Even as a youngster the boy would stay in his room glued to his computer avoiding human contact, rarely going out with his few friends. Other Chinese parents I spoke with said similar things about their children, complaining about their remoteness, their social isolation, and their obsession with technology. They seem an alien race of free-floating individuals.

Night lights Kyoto

Night lights Kyoto by my friend strangerpixel, whose images you should really check out on Flickr by clicking the image

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Robert Sharp

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑