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On Nick Clegg and how the term “dickless” now has an Avatar

Hello there, it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. This rings particularly true in that weird disturbing, infinitely despicable world of politics, which appears to have replaced cockfighting as the national sport of the aristocratic elite. I can picture the lobby group offices as being in strange warehouses, illegal gambling dens in the Cotswolds betting on just which policy will screw the working class over the most. And then maybe a bet for which single politician is the most hated person in the country.

I suspect Nick Clegg would be close to the top of the list.

Before I get to the point where I claim that Nick Clegg is to politics what “We Built this City” by Starship was to music, I think a little bit of history needs to be put in order, both of Mr Clegg and myself.

I myself come from a working class family in the northwest of England, pretty steadfast labour voters for the most part, me and my brother sharing someone lefter wing views than the most but still for the most part supported that Labour, while under it's Nu-Labour guise that meant it had to be Tory and capitalist baiting, at least seemed to give a shit about the people of which it has been voted to govern. Then scandal after scandal and disaster after disaster rocked Labour and it's unfortunate dour leader, Gordon Brown, who seemed to have little going for him up against Tony Blair replicant David Cameron. Cameron's early pitches for the Tory party, telling them “Don't go blue, go green!” and making every single simpering pathetic possible attempt to prove his hipster liberal principles. I mean, kids you gotta vote for someone who listens to The Killers and Radiohead! But this boneheaded attempt to appeal to a set of voters who have ingrained memories of their parent's struggles with Mrs Thatcher didn't just consist of Desert Island Discs and impossibly bad slogans, oh no! His policies consisted of just two for the first 3 years he spent as leader of the conservative party; Hug a Hoody and ride a bicycle into work (Limo escort behind optional).

It's the wonderful irony that gets me.

Anyway, the British public seemed to be forced to make a choice between an increasingly compromised Gordon Brown, who was blamed for every single misfortune befalling the country, some being very much his fault (“Oh, the economy is sinking, I blame the previous chance- oh wait, that was me...”) while others, like the floods and the expenses scandal (which in fairness affected all two and a half major parties at the time) really were stuff he didn't really have a hope in hell of doing anything about; or David Cameron, a genetically formulated politician who often seemed more reptilian than man and has to be taught what human feelings, emotions and values are.

I'd personally sack the incompetent dolt hired to teach him those things.

This was the way of the world until late 2009, when a new saviour swept the lands in the eerily similar shape of fresh faced Nick Clegg, a kind of new liberal democrat, trying to sweep away the vaguely old dour aged image of the party, and this was for me a little bit of an alarm bell. You see, I'm a fan of that old Lib Dem view of politics, and was a huge fan of Charles Kennedy in particular, a great political mind ruined by his own very public weakness. He was succeeded by Menezes Campbell, touchingly nicknamed “Ming Campbell” by journalists whose jokes were somehow older than Ming himself, who seemed to consider the building of the Pyramids to be a recent memory. After he left to fight Flash Gordon, Nick Clegg stepped up to the podium, and brought with him a mix of that wonderful Lib Dem idealism and values as well as a pragmatic gift of gab that was enough to make a lot of people seriously consider him as having the potential to actually win an election, helped a lot by a lot of very crowd pleasing decisions, such as vows to improve the NHS, a promise to not increase the tuition fees, which he famously (well, infamously now) posed with while on the campaign trail, and a general view that he was a new face that understood and connected with the people as opposed to the dinosaur and the reptile. Things were so hot for Nick that in live debates the main way that the other two parties scored points was to say “I agree with Nick”

Still leaves a sore spot for a lot of you doesn't it?

So many people fell for this hook, line and sinker, almost including me. That by the way isn't some kind of “I told you so” on the majority of the British population; I don't think too many people really saw what he did coming, but I do fear that I must have had an omen in that polling booth, my pen hovering ominously over the Liberal Democrats box, before I quickly took it away and voted for the Green Party. An omen that, some how, in some way he wasn't quite on the level. Regardless of my actual vote for the most part I believed in the hype, mostly because I wanted to believe. I wanted for Nick Clegg to swoop in and save Britain from itself, and I thought the curious ending to the 2010 general election (where no party got enough of an overall majority to actually win) which led to the first coalition government in the history of Great Britain. Alright, so it was with the Tories, but we all thought it would eliminate the nutters on both sides; the Tory racist/sexist/homophobic bigwigs wouldn't get a word in edgeways, and Lib Dem policy would be refined to be less idealistic but more possible, and so the potential for change was there.

We all probably know what happened in the next year and a half. Everything got so much worse so quickly. The Tories very quickly shed their skin of humanity in scenes reminiscent of the show V, while Nick Clegg very blatently, very clearly and very pathetically whimpered and backpedaled and simpered and cowardly broke his promises on education, in a similar way to how Cameron betrayed his promises about the NHS. The heroic, brave Lib Dem Nick Clegg became Cameron's poodle, a little pet that's carried around sometimes as an odd curiosity to rich Tory aristocrats, and basically pulled the Lib Dem party down with it. For a year and a half the so called “ConDem” coalition was really the Conservatives dominating while all the Lib Dems could do was lie back and think of England. All that hug a hoodie nonsense went out the window in the summer, as Cameron essentially called the underclass a cancer on society, a philosophy which has been echoed in his constant attempts to rid the country of mythical “Benefit scroungers” who must be stopped by ruining everyone else's lives.

All the while Clegg has done nothing.

After a year of this, there are louder and louder rumblings of rebellion in the Liberal Democrat ranks, and honestly who can blame them? The people at top, mostly Clegg himself but some of the upper Lib Dem brass, is dragging the party through the mud and basically ensure that there is no possible way the Lib Dems will ever get into power again.

All because Clegg was willing to sacrifice everything, especially his balls to get even the slightest whiff of power.

Even if he had to become a dickless yesman to do it.

Lazy Day?

Hello there, sorry this update is going to be very rushed and not particularly interesting, since I've not really got that much to talk about. The news is abuzz with Georgie Porgie cutting the tax rate and the NHS slicing bill coming to the wire, along with the fierce manhunt for the iPhone destroying menace that is Russell Brand, but I decided to take a little break from being a bastard in order to relax and take stock.

On the grand scale of things, past a bit of emotional crap I've muddled through, consistently going between poor and literally penniless, hating everything to do with politics, advertising and the general hyper-conservative nature of society, and wanting to rip the throat out of pretty much every sexist prick in the south of North America, life's not all that bad.

I've got a roof over my head, the emotional crap has got to the point where I'm not exactly depressed at any specific thing anymore, I've enough food to eat most days, people seem to inexplicibly like me for whatever reason, and the ludicrous lawmakers in the States are a massive rampaging raging ocean apart from my world.

So yeah, lazy relaxed day. Sorry guys, I'm not mad at anything in particular. As a way of making amends, have a picture of a sleepy cat in a hammock:

Stay Safe and hug it out guys.

Huggy Dave

The Metafrustration: Blogging about not thinking of anything to blog about

Hello there. When I started writing the blog again, I committed myself to a schedule to wit I would write a blog post every other day, and make sure I had a good split between discussing contemporary news, writing reviews on music and views on writing and philosophy and stuff. I guess this counts as stuff but I do apologise for the complete lack of anything resembling fascinating discourse or argument in the next thousand words or so.

In life, things tend to appear in cycles. As we move between boom and bust in the financial front, most things around us tend to move in similar cycles. We move from slickly produced committee-created music in favour of wonderfully earnest “real” “alternative” music. We stop stuffing our minds with popcorn films and watch more frugal artistic fare. Clothing styles change with the tide. To a degree these are financial based: Who would fund overpriced crap in a recession for instance? And as for music, why do people want to hear about people bragging about being so mind bogglingly rich it causes most people to transcend sanity. In the past it's how art and life interlinked: Art fit the needs and attitudes of the people and to a degree vice versa...

The new millennium may have changed that a little bit.

Maybe this is just me looking back, but with the evolution of the internet going far beyond anyone's expectations and its simple far-reaching nature meaning that uprising and protest and world change is increasingly returning to the hands of the people. People in large numbers can incite change, for good or bad. But what has been lost in the midst of riots and uprisings and despots being upturned is the other massive revolution of the internet brought by its sheer scale and vastness; the fact that there is room for all voices to be heard on it in some form. Hell, the very fact you're reading these words proves it, and the media has fought like Canute telling the tide to go back is the fragmentation of the audience. In the past, music tastes being cyclical made sense; you heard music in record shops and on the radio, and so when audiences got bored and turned off, something else would take its place to begin the other step of the cycle. People picked up their guitars, then put them down when they got sick of the earnestness. I use music as an example primarily because the difference between the two cycles is so readily apparent; on one end you have digitised slickly produced music with relatively simple messages appealing to an audience that likes the way the hegemony is treating them, and when people get sick of that, the underground rises; the music of the people gets its time in the spotlight to shine. With the internet, everyone has the chance of getting the best of all worlds; commercialised music thrives but at the same time the individual taste of a lot of underground subcultures gets their chance to be catered for, and it's hard for a usually very single minded set of old industries to get their head around, over 20 years after the internet started to thrive in earnest, they still don't.

What does this have to do with anything, let alone the frustration of creating a blog post?

My point is the internet is everything and nothing in the world and in terms of media and communication has an appeal for all niches. If you want to write tiny messages about your day, you have Twitter and Facebook to suit you. I've heard various stories over the years in typically graceful moderate language of how the internet is ruining language, industry, music, film, literature and pretty much anything else. The arguments typically being given from old industries and folks who are not entirely well versed on the Internet’s great power for communication, and would rather see the locking down and ruination of it than allow the world to change around them. Either the internet will change society to fit, or as many enterprising individuals and small groups have realised, ways to make money on the internet will be found and really the only thing at risk from the internet as it is are the huge monoliths who crow about it.

It's such a shame they seem to be the lawmakers now...

The Death Throes of Game: Or Why Monopolies are the ruination of an industry in the long run

Hello there, sorry for the haphazardness of this one. My original idea turned out to be a bit trickier to write about than I had expected, so I've spent the weekend looking for something to write about that might have enough interest and worth to the internet to really consider discussing. It's a relatively slow news day and I've not got any relevant topics to really discuss.

Then of course I read the news about how Game Group Ltd's has had 95% of its stock value completely wiped out, primarily because of how damaging the fact it will not be stocking some of the biggest selling games of this year, including Mass Effect III, Street Fighter X Tekken and Mario Party 9. Because of the largely confidential nature of business and finance, I will try to avoid going the straightforward route and calling Game allergic to money. Because some facts need to be made clear before we lunge at Game with the sporks and runcible spoons.

First of all, their argument is that negotiations with EA have soured due to “unreasonable credit negotiations” which in layman's terms means EA was trying to flog them wholesale for a price they'd never be able to profit on. I've heard in the ballpark of £40 or £45 for Mass Effect III but I'm not entirely sure whether that means for the vanilla version or for the limited N7 Edition. In any case, it would have led to Game ending up in an even tighter pinch than they already were last year, already being tightly pincered in between online suppliers (who can sell them cheaper due to not having to pay for shops etc) and supermarkers (who have such massive profit margins they can get away with selling them for chicken feed as loss leaders to get people into the shops) so they declined, pissing off EA who refused to supply any of EA's March releases (which included Max Payne 3 and Mass Effect III), so that wiped 20% off their stock value; this was followed by Nintendo refusing to stock Mario Party 9 for similar reasons and later Capcom joined the group.

Now, for non-gamers, this is like a music store pissing off Warner, EMI and Sony music in one go, or a book shop pissing off Penguin, Routledge and Scholastic. It's not inherently fatal, but your profitability is going to suffer invariably, not just in terms of losing a vast swathe of very lucrative sales; even if the companies were going to force the games to be loss leaders, the amount of merchandise, strategy guides and whatever else would help to balance the gap. In fact, Game has worked hard to modify their business model in favour of enhancing the profitability of a single purchase (also known as the Bobby Kotick business model after he had the gall to boast that he'd turned a single $40 purchase into a $200 one) and so while still feeling the pinch, the company might still get through with various rethinks. Instead, it made the choice to annoy one of its main suppliers and is paying through the nose for it: their stocks have nosedived, the company's a pariah to the gaming community (who never liked the way it treated them as idiots to begin with) and without the latest stock of games chances are they'll easily lose the casual market they tried so desperately to court. More importantly it'll shatter the myth that just because you have a monopoly you're here to stay.

The Game we know and loathe formed from the purchase by Electronics Boutique (the name licensed from the American company EB Games) buying out its competitor at the time (the Game that wasn't actually that bad if you got to know it). This led to a monolithic Game store that pretty much had two or three stores in every town you could think of. The purchase of various overseas game retailers also helped balloon the relatively small fish's ego and led to a business model that essentially consisted of buying out any potential competitors, leaving only the small independents left. With the purchase of Gamestation before it could really get going, it looked like nothing could stop Game from buying out any other potential national competitors. With a bigger company came bigger hubris, and it seemed for a long time that nothing could go wrong with the company. Until of course a lot of competitors snuck around it, and Game with it's antiquated business model and predatory tactics, couldn't adapt when the tide turns.

The real tragedy of course (along with the poor employees losing their jobs) is the loss of the dedicated games shop you could walk in and have a discussion about games with. Online stores won't quite have that and I somehow doubt you'd be able to talk games with too many of the staff at Tesco unless you know them out of hours. Hopefully the lessons learned from this and the countless other casualties of old guard corporations; a company can go from perfectly healthy to on the brink of collapse on the basis on one critically bad decision.

Stay safe and hug it out!

Huggy Dave

The Undaunted front of Online Activism, or One does not Simply Overthrow Dictators with Retweets.

Hello there loyal reader (I think there is one). I've been struggling over the last couple of days to think of a particularly striking topic to discuss; there were a few interesting things happening in student politics but by the time most people read it the LUSU elections will be a rather distant memory in the minds of people who found their friend's names first, people who had stupid slogans second and RON third. There's a few things I intend to review, including some albums for RocSoc (for some reason they saw the first three and wanted me to write more).

Sometimes, things get too big to ignore though...

At the start of this month, a documentary video on Youtube entitled “Kony 2012” went viral in a big way, and chances are anyone who's viewing this probably already knows about it. For those who don't, I will do my utmost to condense 25 years of the most tumultuous period in Uganda's recent history and try to hopefully demonstrate a point.

Joseph Kony is the leader of a violently evangelical Christian guerilla group (to use the politically neutral term) called the Lord's Resistance Army, who allegedly come from Kony being told by God to spread the Ten Commandments (Kony's own interpretation of them) through Africa. He forces children into slavery either as soldiers or as sex slaves. The accounts about their activities towards their own people or the people of Central Africa don't get much better, involving tales of torture, rape, mutilation, assorted butchery among many other things. It's stuff that I personally don't want to get into and has been repeated by various sources. Essentially he's a bloodthirsty tyrannical African warlord; one of many combatants in one of the most unstable parts of the world, in Uganda, in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Invisible Children are a charity whose primary aim is to stop Kony, and have made a multitude of films attempting to showcase the atrocities Kony (usually pictured attempting to impersonate Carl “Apollo Creed” Weathers in Predator) has done, Kony 2012, being the most recent of these videos. The video is very much propaganda in nature, as you sort of expect, and is 30 minutes long, a long time for anything to go viral, which makes me suspect most people who spread the campaign haven't watched it. The video's aim and purpose is noble enough; stop Kony. It's intended method for this is to take advantage of the nature of social media and it's ability to allow free thought and expression to be spread across the world, which forms the backbone of rebelling against opression. All well and rosy, although it's idea of social media as an unstoppable force for good and wonderment in the world is something that is open to debate. The video's tone is very similar to 80s fundraising campaigns such as Hands across America or Live Aid, where it seemed that greed was so good the only way to get people to do anything was to fellate their ego, which smacks to me of White Man's Burden.

The basic idea of Kony 2012 is that people will spread it around to everyone they know and buy wristbands and posters from the Invisible Children folks, so that on April 20^th, everyone will 'Cover the Night' and make sure that the collective voice is heard so that the people who can do something about it will do. The charity seems to be at least implicitly encouraging militaristic action targeting America in particular as a country that should be doing something about it. Currently Obama has sent about 100 tactical specialists (essentially soldiers there to help the Ugandan army out in terms of strategy) to Uganda to help, for the record, but Invisible Children is suggesting some kind of joint-operation between at least Uganda and the United States. The fact that the primary focus is on the United States to instigate change in the region again reminds me uncomfortably of White Man's Burden and undermines efforts by the Ugandan forces to arrest Kony. Speaking of Uganda, there is no mentioning of Uganda's somewhat spotty human rights record, nor of the instability of the region, which could get more than a little worse if people just blunder in. Invisible Children for the record responded, mainly by saying that they simplified the entire thing to make it “easy to understand.” All fine and dandy, except that by simplifying the debate, you've completely changed it. Those complications are the backbone, along without wanting to look like neocolonialists. There is simplification and there is changing facts to suit an argument. The latter has no place in rational discourse, and really is the problem with using social media in campaigns: It becomes an increasingly nonsensical game of Chinese Whispers which eventually gets split down two very extreme camps; extreme supporters who call the others child murdering bastards, and the other side who claim that anyone who supports the campaign are vaguely racist sheep.

All this makes me look like a cynical asshole I'm sure, but raising awareness is far from a bad thing, that aspect of the campaign I don't mind at all. Getting and encouraging people to think of the world beyond their front door is always encouraging. I don't know, if you want to raise awareness, be sure that you're not blindfolding them to the full truth at the same time.

Stay safe, and hug it out (Hey, if everyone did that we wouldn't have this problem to begin with )

HuggyDave

International Woman's Day - Celebration or Denigration?

Hello there. Today is International Woman's Day, and is a day of awareness, celebration and increasingly scepticism. All of which are pretty healthy ways to mark such a day, and really I think the serious debate surrounding International Woman's Day (and International Man's day, I know there's one of those too) and what purpose they serve in an ever more cosmopolitan world, whether it is a justifiable celebration of voice unsung because they're not old, white men, or whether it is marginalising female voices, casting them aside to be remembered on one day and forgotten the rest, remaining separate from world history.

I'm aware of what people may be thinking by even mentioning this debate – I'm some kind of horrible sexist (or man haters, both the more extreme misandric parts of feminism and the ludicrous misogynists seem to agree to hate the actual debate) who wants to take away from a day celebrating unsung voices, or minority voices or whatever term they choose to use this week. The issue I have is not with addressing voices that are not usually heard and issues not usually thought about, but the fact that they are marginalised voices and ghettoised leads to a lot of problems in itself.

Several years ago, I did an essay on the representation of women in video games, both in terms of female game design staff and in game characters, and it was a hotbed of marginalised voices and a lack of expression which has only gotten worse in the last 5 years, where female voices were increasingly excluded, and then marginalised and belittled when they do appear. Outside of RPGs, Fighting games and the increasingly nebulous concept of 'Casual' games, female characters and voices seldom appear, and are typically tokenised when they are. People are increasingly concerned with blockbuster films failing the Bechdel Test (http://bechdeltest.com/), however I struggle to think of any major video game released since around 2008 which would pass it apart from maybe Heavy Rain. My point being that this shows a tokenisation around female characters which undermines and silences female voices while at the same time crying that “there are women in this, why are you complaining?”

My solution isn't really existent at the moment, maybe stop talking about it, as Morgan Freeman suggested about Black History month and concern ourselves less about what is different and separate about us and more about what is the same. What are your thoughts? We've got comment boxes below every post so I suppose we really should use them.

Stay safe and hug it out

HuggyDave

When Life gives you lemons, blog about them

Hey there, all you zero readers. It's been a while since I've posted, and a lot has happened in my strange little life, which sadly put my blog on the back burner, limited to the reviews I've done for RocSoc, which I thought after no longer being on the exec I probably wouldn't be doing again. Well, I've had surprisingly good feedback (by that I mean one of the exec asked me to do some more), so I will attempt to make that a regular thing . The idea is that I will post something every other day , and once a week post something more substantial like a review, or some kind of extended blog post. We shall see, for the most part I'll be playing things relatively fast and loose until people start messaging angry things demanding content, so there we are.

Stay safe, and always hug it out,

HuggyDave