Aridi Writes

Yet again, Christmas is looming ever closer, and I have more axes to grind than I have grindstones…

My issue with X Factor is pretty well documented. I think any exposition on it would bring precious little new to the formula – let’s just reaffirm my position of loathing with the entire affair. And with the pop industry as a whole – mostly because the entire fabricated farce (the industry, not just X Factor) is just sickening if one thinks about it too much. It is just that – an industry, a machine pressing parts and forcing them into boxes.

Speaking of rubbish money-spinning things that piss me off. This year, Christmas itself is one of them. I always knew that there would come a time that I simply couldn’t care less; actually that time was last year, but now it’s taken its sweet time to sink in. It must be some kind of Seasonal Affective Disorder, must be. As the days get shorter and colder, everything seems to turn to shit. And this year, of all years – the Council decide to set up little tinny speakers all the way through town, playing a compilation CD of “Christmas Hits”. £1.99 at your local charity shop or something. Ugh.

Don’t even get me started on the political state of this country. Or the US. Or anywhere else for that matter.

We’re all doomed. And I think I’ve gone past the point that I can stick my head back inside my shell, sing Falalalala and ignore all the stuff that winds me up. Don’t know when I passed it, but it’s long gone.

Happy Hanukkah.

Sorry. Kind of drifting aimlessly right now. Not doing great. Will try and do more with my life. Argh.

I’m watching a video of a member of the NYPD arresting a girl that looks, at most, about 15.

She has red hair under an Invader Zim hat; there’s a small Canadian flag pin on the side of the hat. She’s not struggling or resisting. They’re talking to her as they put her in the cuffs and lead her away.

Her crime is apparently not using the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge correctly. Though really, she’s one of 700 arrests against people determined to occupy Wall Street; essentially it’s clear that the NYPD are simply waiting for excuses, like sticking Al Capone with tax evasion.

They arrested four people two weeks ago for wearing masks. In a piece of legislation 150 years old, it is apparently illegal in NYC to wear a mask if more than two people are gathered together and not at a masquerade party. Good job that law still exists; they wouldn’t have been able to get them off the street otherwise. Right? That was a close one.

The protest isn’t a misguided one. The roots of the world’s current economic problems – however they are being mismanaged across the globe – lay in the inscrutable monolith that we commonly refer to as Wall Street, more a bastion of indecipherable financial dealings than a geographical location. Greed, essentially. The need to make yet more money, and the fragility of a global fiscal system that is based on fear and imaginary numbers. Reaching out to take just a little more from the tree, and falling off the ladder in the process.

I’m unaware if anyone responsible – anyone in that insular, well-shielded community – has actually apologised; let alone been punished, let alone actually paid reparations for their actions. Actions that have cost so many, so much. As best I can tell, we’re experiencing trickle-down hurt; from financial institution to business to employee, from central government to local government to citizen. Reaganomics gone horribly, horribly wrong. Every person on the ladder kicking at the rungs below to get a better foothold, until finally you reach the ones at the bottom.

Funny. There’s a lot more of us at the bottom of this ladder than the top, isn’t there?

I doubt there’s any malice in a lot of the actions taken by our employers. They’re cruel, certainly, but in a very clinical fashion; and it’s certainly nothing personal. In fact it’s the opposite: they have to forget that their employees are actually people, in order to do some of the things they get away with. Because, well, what are we going to do? Get a job somewhere else? Don’t make me laugh.

So the disparity, as I see it…

Ruin millions of lives = No punishment.
Protest the lack of punishment = Arrested, dragged off in cuffs.

However I feel about our current government – and I believe I’ve made that clear on many previous occasions – this isn’t right. No, this can’t be seen to be right. This can’t be accepted as the way things are, let alone the way things should be.

If things are ever going to change…if things are ever going to get better…this madness can’t continue.

Yes, after a long hiatus, Aridi Writes is back!

Expect more content soon!

Christmas is over. With that out of the way and Valentine’s Day being the next marketing spree, I am cast adrift in a void with nothing to rail against aside from the local council’s continued short-sighted budget-making decisions.

And so I wrote something about Crowbar, my Eclipse Phase PC/NPC. PC in Quincey’s game when it happens, NPC in my own game – Aiming To Misbehave.

Here it is.

The Tron soundtrack is amazing. That is all.

(Title pun borrowed from Pat Boden.)

So the great beast that is Christmas is almost passing us by. Only New Year really waits for us, and even that, I’m contemplating passing up.

It’s getting a little bit…much.

Don’t get me wrong. I had a great time last year and the year before; but I wanted to, then. I felt I could, and lo and behold – I did. Like magic. You know. This year, I just haven’t been able to. I mean I’ve had fun. Housewarming at Pat and Emily’s was awesome. I saw my mother Christmas Eve, saw my dad Christmas Day before I spent most of the day with Clan Boden (and had an epic time), and saw my dad again Boxing Day before I ran into Clan Gale’s mad hatter’s tea party. Christmassy stuff has been good. I just…

…maybe I’m just too old for it. Maybe I just can’t care about it any more. All I see are the bad parts of Christmas, which creates an odd mixture of emotions – hatred of my species for spawning it, and a little guilt for bringing down the people that are really into it. I try and keep my mouth shut, I really do.

Everything’s just been so SHIT.

The massive cuts concern me beyond the chance that I may lose my job. My country is steadily being ripped and torn until it only has room for rather wealthy businessmen and heirs to sizeable fortunes. Dad is still so ill, and a hundred other things that I can’t really talk about on a public blog are cutting me deep. I haven’t even had time to want this holiday to happen, let alone actually wanted it.

But hey…I can at least try and be optimistic, so here goes:

I wrote some poetry on my DeviantArt account. It’s like here.

I may get more hours at work out of these cuts. I know, make sense of that.

Some pretty cool things may happen next year.

…I’m not doing too well at this.

The House of Lords has voted 283 to 215 to raise tuition fees in England, some of them as high as £9,000 a year; one can only assume that there is precious little to prevent this becoming law.

In 2010, a large proportion of the Commons – on both sides – were found to have attended University; 95% of Conservatives, 88% of Liberal Democrats and 86% of Labour. Throughout the House, 91% of MPs went to University. It can be assumed that none of those MPs actually had to pay for that education, as until the 1998/1999 academic year, there were no tuition fees. They were brought in by the Labour government, who at the same time stopped maintenance grants and replaced them with student loans.

I can’t lay my hands on any figures for the House of Lords; but I daresay very few peers went to University after the millennium.

I went to college ten years ago. Not University. I actually (luckily) qualified for a small grant to cover my tuition fees, which now no longer exists. Still I had to pay a bevvy of other costs, which – without the student loan – I couldn’t have actually managed. Not without working so many hours that I couldn’t actually study properly.

As I understand it, the argument of making people pay for an education is that they will go into a higher-paying job because of it. So it’s okay to saddle them with debt through the Student Loan Company, assuming that august organisation doesn’t severely hamstring themselves through sheer incompetence; because after the educational side of things is finished, the happy graduate will move on to a large salary, a house in the suburbs and 2.4 children.

It doesn’t really work that way any more. I speak from personal experience, but there’s a couple of year’s worth of headlines and news reports to back up that statement: when you graduate from University, you are about as likely to get a job as anyone else. You just have more debt to repay, and several years devoted to education that hasn’t been used in acquiring a killer CV.

(Get to the point, John. – Inner Ed.)

What Parliament basically wants is to charge us more for something that is worth less than it was back when it was free.

Wait. What?

To put not too fine a point on it; were I to be leaving High School next year – and were I to not be fabulously wealthy – I would have to seriously consider if I was going to University. I somewhat doubt I would. As much as I hate the six words “Due To The Current Economic Climate”, debt without the guarantee of a job is a no-win situation.

No wonder current students – both in University and in High School – are so angry about the raise in tuition fees.

And what a brilliant job is being done to shove that anger under the rug. Kettling is a genius idea. Take all the protesters and cram them into a tiny area, refusing to let any of them leave. Keep them there for an extended period of time, in the cold, and you will have one of two reactions:

1) The protesters will become so disillusioned with the way the protest is handled that they will be dissuaded from attending another. Thus, a lesser turnout in the next demonstration, if there is one at all.

2) The protesters will become panicked or frustrated and try and leave forcibly, or cause damage within the kettle. Thus, any uncomfortable questions that might be asked about the reason the demonstration is taking place at all can be hidden behind the outrage against the violent actions taken by the protesters.

Win-win for the Government and the Met. Murdoch Press prints whatever the Conservatives want people to read, Daily Mail addresses the concerns of bead-clutching middle-England tax avoiders, and young people stare aghast at the state of the world and wonder:

What’s the point?

There is no doubt: University attendance will go down in the next few years. It has to. Due To The Current Economic Climate (ugh I feel dirty just saying it, even ironically), there will be a fall in higher-educated people in this country. The problem? There’s not that many jobs going round anyway. Inflation is ahead of Government predictions. Public spending is being slashed, with a boatload of redundancies forthcoming, that simply don’t have the employment or support infrastructure to keep them afloat.

And when the country emerges from the other side of this double-dip recession? There will be newspaper headlines talking about how few people are attending University, and how England is looking less and less well-educated compared to the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, tax breaks for the wealthy and the Winter Fuel Allowance paid to any pensioner that was in the country for a week of the year – including those that would usually reside in Spain or elsewhere, who don’t even pay tax in this country – lead us to a rather uncomfortable conclusion…

Dispute what put us into this mess however you like. Talk about how it is necessary, how it will save us from the deficit (THE DREADED DEFICIT!) and how it will put England back on its feet.

The fact of the matter is that the young are being made to pay for the mistakes of the middle-aged and the old; and I’m afraid that it won’t be until a significant proportion of the House of Commons has actually had to pay for higher education that Parliament will look back and realise that they are salting the earth behind them.

Julian Assange’s arrest is one of two things: a huge coincidence revealing horrible flaws in the justice system of several different countries, or a blatant attempt at character assassination and silencing an enemy of the State…which likewise reveals horrible flaws in the justice system of several countries.

WikiLeaks stirs up two particular emotions in me. The first – which has a tiny amount of sympathy for the Hawks in the US and everyone else that is baying for the site’s blood – is concerned with handing out certain data that is classified for good reason. This hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not sure it will; it’s a potential future concern, more than an actual current criticism.

The second is a sense of fierce loyalty. Because a lot of the things that get leaked damn well ought to be.

The countries and individuals that have been the site’s most vocal critics are, funnily enough, entities that believe in Democracy. Not democracy; oh no. The capital D is important, because it transcends the bounds of a political system and slides clean into the realms of ideology.

Democracy is built on the notion of people making a choice about those that govern them. It survives as long as those partaking in it – or at least a large enough percentage of those that partake in it – believe that when they go out and vote, they are making an informed and educated decision on who they want ruling them.

(The fact that precious few people actually make any effort to research who they vote for, what their actual policies and voting histories consist of, or even vote based on issues that are important to them rather than the colour of a man’s tie should be disregarded for the moment. We’re working with ideals here, not reality.)

Ergo, in order for a Democracy to actually be democratic, there must be a degree of transparency. People must actually be aware of issues they are voting on. People must know what their governments are up to, what their oppositions are up to, because it is the job of a democratic government to answer to its people – not vice versa.

In absence of any actual transparency forthcoming from the parties involved, transparency is enforced by an outside agency. The press, of course, has been up to this for years – at least, while the red tops aren’t loudly declaring their love for football and their on-off hate campaigns against non-celebrities, and while dishrags like the Daily Mail print stories that simply become more ridiculous by the day. And who would want to live in a country where the news is entirely Government-approved? Whenever you hear the term State-run, you immediately brace for lies.

There’s a problem here, too; Rupert Murdoch. His massive influence in the media – and his unashamed fawning adoration of David Cameron’s cult of personality – can’t help but skew our general media-presented view of world events. In the US, it is worse. Privatised State-run media. We say Fox News and we know it is a joke – but people listen to it because they don’t know better.

Until someone goes the whole hog, and starts whistle-blowing. And they blow that whistle hard.

Wartime abuses. Political machination. Manipulation and alteration of facts and statistics. Dangerous diplomacy practiced in back rooms and across airwaves. Information, actual information, disseminated to those that would read it – facts, with no spin, and no filter. Facts that allow people to make decisions, facts that inform their democratic choices.

Something hit close to the knuckle. Something in the last series of leaks made someone panic; trembling fingers hit buttons that they were hovering over for weeks. Too long had the forces of Transparency advanced into the Opacity heartland. It was time to launch a counter-offensive in the Infowar.

Amazon provided infrastructure for the site; 24 hours after Joe Lieberman (Chief of Homeland Security) contacted the site through his staff, Amazon had refused to do business with WikiLeaks. In a press release, they claimed there to be no political pressure. PayPal likewise ended their relationship with WikiLeaks after the State Department got involved, and once more, the No Political Pressure lie was repeated. Mastercard and Visa followed suit, and Julian Assange’s bank froze his assets after it miraculously discovered discrepancies in their records (it is worthy of note that these discrepancies seem unlikely to have actually occurred, and could be solved with a single phone call and a faxing of documents).

Through ignorance, a people are easily led to believe whatever they are told. Through lack of information, propaganda gains its power. So many evils of the world are enacted because the perpetrators don’t know any better; ignorance is a powerful tool, but also a dangerous one. Easier to let people believe that they are being told everything, while telling them next to nothing. That way they don’t ask any uncomfortable questions, and they certainly don’t take the time to look deeper.

Unfortunately, this kind of scramble to destroy and discredit a means of freeing information – and I can draw uncomfortable comparisons to brutal regimes, such as the Burmese junta, where owning a camera can lead to imprisonment and death – leads some of us…not enough of us, but some of us…to realise what those behind the attacks have in mind.

It’s a simple drive, a simple goal. It is brutal and single-minded, and in context, chills to the bone; because not once has the veracity of anything released in this current front of the InfoWar been challenged. Its release has been criticised, but in terms of accuracy, there has been no question.

The drive is this:

We cannot let the people know what we did.

One has very little idea of what the term “Witch Hunt” means, until they become one of the townspeople of Salem.

I’m not…entirely sure what I can and cannot say – and that’s part of it. Because, you see, if I lived in Oceania and had my words dictated to me by MiniTrue, I would be fine. There’s very firm delineations there. You can’t be confused as to whether or not a specific term, phrase or sentence is considered a Thought Crime. It’s documented and detailed. But the Isle of Wight plays a little bit fast and loose with that idea.

We’ve been provided with scripts. If a member of the public asks, we’re meant to parrot or paraphrase the script, which has been given to us from the Communications department. I suppose it has been designed to either confuse people into ceasing their questioning, or to put such a spin on the figures that any disagreement would be seen as terribly unreasonable. What the script is also designed to do is to present us as a solid, unified front: I am not a library worker, I am a Council Employee, and we are all Council Employees, and thus we are united in form and function like some kind of collective society.

But speaking personally – I can’t help but feel that we simply aren’t.

Specific information on the cuts the Isle of Wight Council is facing has been leaked to VentnorBlog, which has prompted a panic-stricken swarm of communications back and forth. We were asked if we were responsible. I, like everyone else I know, replied honestly: No.

Never have I felt this kind of furious squashing of potential leaks. Reminders of the communication policy were flashed under our noses, relevant sections marked out and highlighted. Anxiety runs high, because there’s now blood in the water. Someone said something we were told we weren’t supposed to. Heads will roll. There’s a heightened sense of the tenuous nature of our current employment – other tiny razors taking shreds off the thin, thin thread of job safety we all hang from.

But when we’re not too busy being scared for our jobs, scared for our future, and scared of divulging secrets…we may think about why they were declared secrets. We may look up from our scripts for long enough to consider the ramifications of revelation – and the reason why they are so serious.

It would be easy for me to post streams of secrets, things I’m not meant to say in line with my employment contract. I won’t do so. There’s blood in the water, as I said. What I will say is this, which I believe is in line with all my contractual obligations, legal, and my entitlement as a private citizen and member of a society that holds freedom of speech in high regard:

It is a control measure. Pure and simple. It is a means by which actions taken can be spun, held in a different light. If statistics and statements can be released in a carefully orchestrated – and of course, meticulously presented to maximise desired response – fashion, then resistance will be minimised. Rogue revelations of information could be taken entirely out of context; or worse, taken in context at face value.

A colleague of mine – I don’t know which one – will pay the price for revealing what we were all told that day. It speaks volumes about the nature of the information we were given, that such measures would be taken to prevent it from being revealed without treatment from the body responsible.

I was asked yesterday what I would do differently. How I would save the library service, how I would save the Council budget. That’s not for me to share. Not to all and sundry. In private discourse, yes; not out here. Not while there is blood in the water.

Not while the only job I have ever really wanted is so insecure that it could be lost, for words.