Category: politics

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

short explanation of this week’s photographs:

oscar wilde said “we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars”, well I live in London where you can’t see the stars so I am looking in the gutter, because its closer and I can see it.

Longer explanation of this week’s photographs:

I am also looking down because right now I can’t face looking up at what is going on around me.

Since this year started I have tried to avoid looking at current affairs as much as is humanely possible as I find it depressing the way the world is turning. I have taken the ‘ostrich’ approach which in modern times means taking the bbc news off my homepage and doing my best to ignore everything else. I am aware this is in sharp contrast to the general swell of activity and politicisation going on around me. Even though many millions around the globe are waking up politically in the wake of Brexit and Trump, getting active, going on marches and trying to push an alternative agenda I can’t quite bring myself to get involved. I commend this protest surge and although it is great to see people waking up, especially in America, I am trying to induce a coma in myself.

To quote another quote: “Scratch beneath the surface of a cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist”.

I have been political all my adult life, and have campaigned and fought for many causes over the years but just as everyone else seem to be galvanising I have essentially opted out. It is incredibly heartening to see so many people getting riled up and wanting to fight this, and I do not want to be discouraging to anyone, I just feel that my personal participation is pointless.

You may possibly have noticed that I have been silent on the entire Trump rollercoaster of hell. This is mainly because there is so much coverage and opinions being relentlessly shoved in our faces I did not feel the need to add to the pile of bile being spewed out at every given turn. I also can’t bear to talk about him or even look at him, hence my attempt to cut myself off from the news because you cannot do the news at the moment without doing Trump . I don’t even want to look at the satirical memes or the satirical sketches. Its too grim to be funny and even if it the content I am watching is mocking him I still have to look at him. His ubiquity is overwhelming & demoralising it itself (not to mention nausea inducing) regardless of what he is doing. Me paying attention or talking about it is not going to get him removed so what’s the point?

I read that any headline with Trump automatically gets 40% more engagement than anything else right now so it obviously pays to have him everywhere but I don’t want to contribute to that coffer. President Clickbait has everyone hanging on his every word, both his lovers and his haters. Do I really need to be involved too just so I can get equally as annoyed and frustrated on a daily basis? I still believe he got so big because we paid attention to him so the only power I have against him is to ignore him and not allow his shite to infiltrate my world. Digital outrage, although a useful way to vent anger will not bring this man down so, again I have to ask myself, why do it?

The other quote lurking in the back of my head as I scan through the feeds is “opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one”. The internet has proved this in spades and it has also proved that no-one really listens to anyone else unless they are already in agreement with what they are saying. When did you ever read a comment on any feed that said “Good point. I never really thought about it like that. I will now adjust my view accordingly”.

What you will instead get is a lot of hostile hatred lashed out by anyone who disagrees with your chosen viewpoint. Apparently it is actually very hard for the brain to take on new information that it is conflicting with its established understanding. The brain is always looking to reinforce what it already knows and will go to great lengths to veto or zone out anything that doesn’t follow its pre-existing slant. So rather than a constructive dialogue it is just an endless stream of monologues, all convinced they are gospel. So the internet is basically like being a in room full of cokeheads – you’re just going to exhaust yourself trying to get your point past an impenetrable forcefield of sanctimonious egotistical I’m right-eousness. Again, do I really need to be there for that?

And due to the algorithm bubble effect of social media it is actually quite unlikely you will even encounter views that are contrary to your own. And this is also why I am keeping schtum. Why preach to the converted? If you are curious to my opinion on certain current and forthcoming matters, please assume the following: I believe in inclusion and fairness. I am against exclusion, persecution and inequality.

Without getting into the murky world of identity politics where everyone is really just fighting their own corner, I do not assign to any one group other than the section of humanity that believes that cooperation rather than competition is the best solution for harmony and survival. For me personally, hate fuelled society dividing warmongering is just not a productive contribution to the continuation of our species. And if we are to survive working together is the only viable solution.  However, if you believe different, I will make no attempt to convince you otherwise because a nature and history have proven that both methods work, just one is less cutthroat & less cuntish than the other.

This might all sound incredibly defeatist but I am choosing to detach myself from what is going on because currently I cannot do anything about it. And I am totally over being outraged by the actions of those in government.  The people who are attracted to power are the people who are the worst candidates to be in power because they actually want it and will do anything to keep it. So why get riled up when they constantly do things that are beneficial to them but contrary to the benefits of the majority of the population? We should expect it, not be horrified. It should be more of a shock when they don’t follow this simple self-serving practice.

So what can we do?  I have just read the incredible heavily prophetic graphic novel V for Vendetta which professes the virtues of anarchy to tear down the powers that be and start again in the hope that what will follow will be better. As V, the anti-hero of the story states: “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so they took our power, by doing nothing we gave it away. With anarchy, from rubble, comes new life, hope re-instated.”

Want to be more pro-active than signing online petitions and liking posts? Want to put your  money where your mouth is? Start a revolution. If you don’t fancy something that radical all we can do is wait for the next elections, which is the only power we have to shift things at all…and basically just strap yourself in, because its going to be a bumpy ride…

I think I just need a break cos all this shit just ain’t going away anytime soon. I think it is also important to understand we always have a choice what we put in our heads. We don’t always have to succumb to the media machine. They want us to keep reading & consuming because of their ad revenue and that’s about it but we don’t have to comply. The human race used to live more parochial lives, more focused on the local and less on the global. Tech changed that but I think its frying our brains. System overload.

Maybe Timothy Leary had it right in the 60s..tune in, turn on, drop out.

Very appealing but times have changed. Maybe it was easier then as they didn’t have the internet in those days. Less bombardment. Easier to switch off.

Probably a more appropriate phrase for this day and age might be…sign in, scroll down, drop phone.

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

And so i bid you all a merry whatever and a happy new year – a lot of people seem to want to see the back of 2016 but I’m not sure why…ok, so it seems the dark forces have taken over the world, racial hatred, xenophobia, inequality, terrorism…all on the rise, innocent lives no longer protected, violence, genocide and murder rife in various hot spots around the planet…I really don’t see what the problem is. This is just the human race doing what it has always done. Don’t forget this is from the species that brought you the holocaust, slavery and the extermination of most of the other species on the planet bar the ones we want to eat – so what’s the surprise here? What are we so horrified about? Its just business as usual. Look back at our history – its always been like this. You can take the human out of the jungle but you can’t take the violent hirarchical ape out of the human. Its just won’t go away.

Although to counteract my own argument (someone’s got to cos its just depressing and this is supposed to be a goodwill xmas message) it feels like we are making no progress as there is so much hideous shit going on but what we have to remember is that it is only being done by a tiny section of any population. The majority of any population are basically non-violent bods who just want to go about their business. I know it doesn’t seem that way if you watch the news but that’s because the moderate masses aren’t in the news. The news is full of violent extremists, both personal and political, and I include world leaders in that group. Its just this tiny demographic creating all the chaos. The rest of us, the moderate masses, don’t really care where you’re from or what you do as long as you don’t fuck with our shit..or anyone else’s for that matter. This is a positive.

Its just a shame our lives have to be dictated by the minority when most people are basically alright. There is a wave of populist racism on the rise seemingly everywhere which isn’t so great as it whips normal folk up into hate-fuelled hot heads but I read recently that this has always happened throughout history in the first five years after a financial crash and generally subsides after 10 so if we are still feeling the effects of 2008 it will be over by  next year. This is also a positive.  Maybe I’m clinging on to hope that things are going to improve and they will and also we must remind ourselves that for most of us, life isn’t riddled with the misery so intertwined in some people’s lives.

So over the festive season, when your relatives are annoying the tits off you and your presents suck, just celebrate that you are with people who aren’t trying to kill you, suppress you, torture you and destroy your way of life. If none of this is happening to you, and you actually have a home and a family who love you (even dysfunctionally) you are winning.  Most of us live in the good part of the jungle and won’t ever have to encounter anything more horrendous than our ical being on the blink but you don’t have to feel guilty…you just have to feel grateful.

See you in 2017 people…lets mebbe try n make it a wee bit  better than this year’s shit show…and if someone could try and clone bowie that would be lovely…

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

easy does it…

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london rally

Throughout the EU referendum campaign Europe was never really presented as something positive. We were only told about the negative impacts of leaving. But in the last 48 hours a spate of racist attacks have happened all over the country and I was at this rally in London tonight and it became clear what Europe stood for. It stands for unity not division. It stands for love not hate. It stands for tolerance not racism. Inclusion not exclusion. It stands for solidarity amongst those who seek to destroy the peace that has been maintained since the last great war. Maybe this is knowledge that comes too late but now at least we know what we are fighting for.

We must not allow racism to become acceptable in this country. We must stop it in its tracks. If you let it in it will take hold of our nation we will see facism rise and racist behaviour become the norm. We cannot stand by and watch this happen. We are now divided as a nation and an ideological war has begun. Those who propagate fear and hatred against those who stand for a united nation for everyone.

Evil happens when good people stand by and do nothing. So if you see or hear any form of racist attack, verbal or physical, you must do everything in your power to stop it. We have to shut them up and shut them down now or suffer the consequences. We must all stand alongside the immigrant populations who live here and make them know they are welcome and that at least 48% of the entire population do not want them to suffer prejudice and we do not want them to go.

We cannot become a haven for the far right to grow. That will only end one way and we cannot let that happen. No-one ever thought it could go back to that and its barely in the history books and its already happening again. The days for political apathy are over. We cannot let our country be hijacked. We cannot become a symbol of intolerance to the world. This cannot be our message. We must let them know that is NOT what we stand for.

I stood out in the rain this evening with everyone else and cries of ‘love not hate’,  ‘EU we love you’ and ‘Fuck you Boris’ made us all feel a little bit better and the horror show shit storm we are now in had a glimmer of light amidst the dark shadowy clouds. This is not over. This is just beginning.

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Here’s my 10 pence worth..(it will take you bout 5 mins to consume but reading this will change your life forever! (my attempt at clickbait featuring wild and provocative claims to hook you in but maybe, just maybe…)

The population of Great Britain will be voting today on the EU referendum. There were a multitude of factors involved in deciding whether we should stay in Europe or not but sadly like most things in modern politics it seems to have boiled largely down to just one thing: immigration and the threat it poses. This fear obviously discounts study after study which shows that EU migrants have had an overwhelmingly positive effect on the British economy and that strained services with waiting lists are much more likely to be a result of austerity budget cuts than an influx of Europeans…but when did facts ever decide political opinion?

A vote to leave feels like the gestural equivalent of Trump’s plan to build a wall to keep  out the Mexicans. The main problem with this approach is that both U.K and U.S populations are already heavily comprised of immigrant populations so if you are saying that you don’t want immigrants coming in to this country you are essentially saying you’d probably rather the ones that are already here weren’t here either. And would the logical conclusion not be that, at some point, if they were successful in their current aims, they would one day want to get rid of the ones that are already reside here too?

Maybe our geographical existence as an island has effectively created a conceptual approach to living which just won’t go away. ( A note to those who think they have any sense of entitlement to this territory: even the Anglo Saxons who are considered the native population weren’t from here – fyi we were all migrants once)

The fact is that the days of isolation are over – we live in a global community, we can’t turn back the clock, the Britain of before no longer exists. And even if we could reclaim that more “purist” society of yesteryear, would a return to it not be a step backwards, a step away from progress? We can’t remove ourselves from this situation in the vain hope that it will improve things for us. How? By sticking our head in the sand and becoming the United Kingdom of Ostriches? Has that ever worked?

We need to all cooperate with each other to solve the problems of the modern world. The refugee situation is not going away and if we think we can just turn our backs on it and hope it improves we are gravely mistaken. It made me utterly ashamed to be British to see that our Mps recently voted against allowing 3,000 refugee children into this country – I mean, how out of whack is our country’s moral compass  that our representatives could ever come to that conclusion? And we think we are the good guys??

And as for a more long term threat, the ravages of climate change which will only intensify will require massive cooperation & unified action to have any hope of dealing with it. Only by seeing that we are all the same and in this together will we find a potential solution. This will, however, require us to move beyond the basic social structures of ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’ that have dominated humanity since the beginning. We are predisposed to fear ‘the other’ and thousands of years of evolution have only made a bit of  a dent in this overly cautious approach to living.

In these sensitive times this is a hard thing to admit, but we are essentially hardwired to be racist. I learnt this in the book ‘The Organised Mind’ (which I have mentioned before and its full of mind blowing insights about how our brains operate) by neuroscientist Daniel J Levetin and scientifically explains why we feel the way we do about people from other backgrounds. He demonstrates that our brains essentially hold “an innate predisposition toward making trait attributes of out-group members which develop into stereotypes which are very difficult to abandon once established”. In short, we are born to be prejudiced.

He goes on to say we tend to be “innately suspicious of outsiders, where an outsider is anyone different from us” and also tend to prefer members of our own group. This is because there is a neurobiological bias in an area of the brain’s prefrontal cortex where neurons are fired up when we think about ourselves and people who are like us. This brain partitioning activates the perception that “we” are better than “they” even when there is no rational basis for it. We have a stubborn tendency to misjudge outsiders and assume that members of our own in-group are complex individuals whilst overestimating the similarities of out-group members.

Also, we have to bear in mind that the integration of different cultures is a  relatively new phenomena for the human race. Several hundred years ago you might meet 200 people over the course of your entire life and they would have all been from the same ethnic background and mostly from your local neighbourhood. Now you will pass 200  people within 2 minutes of walking down Oxford Street. People were naturally weary of strangers back then and a lot of that of mistrust still lingers.

Levetin goes on to say that ‘racism is a form of “negative social judgement that arises from a combination of belief perseverance, out-group bias and categorisation error”. Basically, we judge an entire culture on the actions of a few. This is driven by our over-zealous brains that always choose avoidance over any potential risk in order to maximise our survival chances. Their efforts must be appreciated as they just want to protect us but  is, in fact, the cause of a lot of the hatred and violence in the world.

The analogy he uses is that if we eat a piece of fruit and we can get sick, the brain assumes incorrectly  that all pieces of this particular fruit are bad and to be avoided. This is how we make generalisations about entire classes of people. He demonstrates this even further with the following argument that suggests we can jump to the following false conclusion about an entire population or race or religion based on individuals acts.

1.0) the media report that Mr A did this

1.1) I don’t like the thing he did

1.2) Mr A is from the country of Awfulania

1.3) Therefore, everyone from Awfulania must do this thing that I don’t like.

This is sadly how our brains work and explains an awful lot in terms of people’s entrenched views . We need to accept these biological dispositions in order to understand our own thoughts and behaviours so we can do something about them. Sorry to get quite so sciencey but when there is so much xenophobic hot headed bullshit being hurled around we are in desperate need of some actual facts, driven not, by fear & false assumptions, but by rational thinking and scientific research. We need to counter balance the nonsense and the hate stoking frenzy being fuelled by the media (one perfect case in example of their blatant divisive nature: the mainstream media chose not to cover a demonstration in London by Muslims against terrorism. See here. This might have helped  but better for them for us to be afraid than informed. Why? Simple. Cos fear sells.

The basic truth is this…there are good and bad people in every society on Earth. No exemptions.  There is not a greater proportion in any one group and in any one country. The violent extreme is always a tiny fractious minority amidst the moderate masses, regardless of the politics,race or religion driving that society.  Can’t we just accept this and move on?

Isn’t it time to bypass this neurological dysfunction and as I have stated before, see the overwhelming similarities between humans and not the skin deep differences? I know we have to overcome some heavy duty brain wiring which has been entrenched for millennia but it is do-able as a lot of us have already evolved beyond this perspective. Even though the rise of the far right in Europe is very apparent but to polarise into our respective racial groups is just one approach and a deeply retrograde and destructive one.

The alternative is to group ourselves not by race or religion but by people who want integration and peace as oppose to people who want conflict and isolation. Its still in-groups and out-groups, it just isn’t driven by the colour of your skin or where you came from or what god you worship.

You have until 10pm tonight to vote…

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

said the bed…

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

The boarded up door has spoken…

Me and my camera back in my home town, my capital city, my london

I can’t help but feel  that this entire situation might be dealt with differently if the migrants who are in Calais were a sea of white faces from a European country instead. Would they have been treated the same? It seems doubtful.

I would also question the use of the word ‘migrant’ and its implications. The term would suggest that they are defined by their transitory nature and that they are of a ‘type’. The only thing they have in common is that they are displaced from their country of origin through events beyond their control.

The dictionary defines migrant as “a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions.”

This sounds like they have a choice. They don’t. If they’d had a choice they would have stayed where they were. Would you leave your home with nothing unless you absolutely had to?  They only move from one place to another because no-one wants them. They are not travelling for fun. They’re not inter-railing around Europe. They are looking for a home.

I think by calling them ‘migrants’ it allows us to think of them as permanently in motion and therefore it is easier to move them on. They can just ‘migrate’ somewhere else. The terminology  allows us to absolve ourselves. But this situation will not go away. It will not ‘migrate’. It will just keep coming back.  It will need to be considered with genuine understanding and compassion to find the correct solution. The ‘crisis’ is our lack of empathy. They are not migrants. They are people.

Me and my camera back in my home town, my capital city, my london

David Cameron described the migrants as a “swarm”. This is designed intentionally to dehumanise them. So that their plight does not stir our emotions. But they are not one big problem. They are individuals, each one with their own personal story of human misery. They are not faceless multiples to be dealt with en masse. Each one has a different tale that led them to this horrific situation. Only by seeing each and every one of them as unique will we find the humanity that is necessary to deal with this ‘problem’.

And for the record, it is not our problem. It is theirs. They are the ones without a home, without a country, without anything other than what they could carry with them. They are the ones who left behind loved ones. They are the ones that no-one wants. They are the ones with the problem. The crisis is theirs. Not ours.