Bite the Ballot: The Nathan Barley of Political Engagement

In 2005 a sitcom was launched, co-written by Chris Morris of Brass Eye and The Day Today fame.  It focuses on a character, Nathan Barley, who is an incredibly overrated fashion conscious manchild. He only gets attention because he self-promotes through digital channels and is perceived to have the necessary ‘street cool’. The show, it seems, was well before its time as we now have a living, breathing case of life imitating art in the form of ‘Bite the Ballot’.

‘Bite the Ballot’ describes itself as “a not for profit organisation that empowers young people to speak up and act, to make their votes and opinions count.” Further down in its blurb we find something I’m sure was actually lifted from a Nathan Barley script – “Our core values when engaging those furthest away from politics are to be unconventional, inclusive and bold.”

They present themselves as studiously neutral. Which sounds nice given their current big hitting scheme is “Leaders Live”. The idea behind this is that they deliver questions to the main political leaders in the UK ostensibly provided from the general public via social media. In practice, most of the questioning occurs through an audience panel that is supposedly representative of the UK’s “youth”.

And it is the panel where this farce becomes completely unstuck. 

The second episode of “Leaders Live” featured Nigel Farage. The “representative” audience panel picked by supposedly “neutral” Bite the Ballot engaged in a solid hour of abuse, belittling, heckling and verging on violent interrogation of Farage. The role of the chair, Rick Edwards, during this episode appeared to be to primarily emulate Helen Keller as best as he could. 

The apparently in built anti-UKIP panel hostility was obvious to many who were commenting live at the time as well as the majority of the commenters on the archived Youtube video. The belligerence and bias was worse even than the most partisan BBC selected audience for Quisling Time I ever recall seeing. It was more embarrassingly (albeit unintentionally) self-parodying than Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s send up of the latter too.  

One only needs to watch the previous episode, with the Green Party’s Natalie Bennett to see the shocking divergence in the panel’s behaviour towards the two leaders. She was given a relatively easy time on the questions front, only really corned twice (e.g. on the performance of Brighton council) and even then she was treated with good manners and respect throughout. The panel seemed to like what she had to say, but then that’s easy with the Greens because they can promise spending on all and sundry without having to account for it. And of course this particularly appeals to the young and inexperienced who are more likely to opt for idealism and less likely to ask how one earth the Green’s apparently bottomless spending bonanza can be financed. 

A parody of panels

Who was on the panel for the Nigel Farage episode? That’s the million dollar question. It’s also one that ‘Bite the Ballot’ singularly fails to answer. Nowhere on their site or on the youtube channel is a list of the participants, never mind any biographies. This information is just a teensy weensy bit important.

As a result I had to piece together (occasionally making mistakes) who was actually present and their backgrounds. It is, frankly insane, that I had to do this. It is part and parcel of modern broadcasting that viewers are informed as to who is being questioned and who is doing the questioning. Not in this case though. 

So, who took part? Amongst those participating and including almost everyone who actually spoke on the panel I’ve been able to determine the following:

Piers Telemacque (@Pierschickenboy)
A vice-president of the NUS and active anti-UKIP activist.  You can see him here using crayon (how appropriate) to express his hatred of the party. He continues the proud tradition of NUS representatives in being thick and obnoxious. In between his slews of abuse towards Farage he claimed that Farage had worked for “Wall Street”. No, really. I’m sure there’s a bright future ahead for Piers in the greasy poleclimbers club that is the NUS and just like his predecessors will be willing to sell anyone out to get what he wants when he’s sick of being a bag carrier and useful idiot. 

Kenny Imafidon (@KennyImafidon)
Charming chap this one. Even more belligerent than Piers. He’s currently “Special Advisor on Youth Policy”. How did he achieve this august position? That makes for uncomfortable reading. Turns out he used to be a thug in a London gang. Ended up in the dock for murder. He was  however acquitted. Oh, that’s OK then?

Maybe not. It turns out the imprisoned murderer and accessory were actually his friends and part of the same gang. As he himself said, it “could have easily been me”. Oh dear. It is following this that events become truly bizarre. It appears that our establishment inexplicably decided that he needed special treatment,tea and biscuits. This gang-banging thug was elevated by our establishment, with money, education and status poured on him to become effectively an establishment selected “Community Leader / Representative” type. I’ve genuinely never seen anything like it.

Myles Dyer (@MylesDyer)
An employee of the Guardian.

Nothing else really needs to be said.

Mawaan Rizwan (@MawaanR)

A BBC employee. He’s a “comedian” apparently.

Another embarrassing belligerent on the show, this chap being the one who apparently really hates rich people with large houses.

Again, what more need be said. 

Russ Haynes (@monkeywithagunn)
Another “comedian”. This fellow was possibly the most belligerent of the lot and I genuinely thought he was going to get out of his seat to get at Farage at some point. He went heavy on the race card.

Rebecca Brown(?) (@beckie0)
Current/recent university (under)graduate. Massive youtube following – the largest of the lot as far as I can tell. I found a ‘Google hangout’ with some of these people discussing participating in ‘Bite the Ballot’ from 2013 where she made it clear she had not had any interest in politics until recruited by this organisation. She appears to be a relatively harmless youtube narcissist and was one of the politer panel members. 

John (surname?) (@JazzaJohn)
Another youtuber and LGBT campaigner as far as I can tell. Came across perfectly reasonably on the show. 

 Hannah Witton (@hannahwitton)
Another social media narcissist.
Current/recent university (under)graduate

Jamal Edwards (@jamaledwards)
Millionaire rapper. So, yeah, “representative”. Spoke during the Natalie Bennett interview previously but as far as I can recall did not ask a question of Nigel Farage. Which is probably just as well as the remainder of the panel appeared to be going on for a full on ‘soak the rich’ attack and things could have got awkward quite quickly especially if Nigel knew who he was otherwise….
I originally mixed him up with Kenny Imafidon – primarily because information was so thin on the ground about the panel I was resorting to comparing still images after confirming Jamal was on the show. 

Ben Hanlin (@benhanlin)
Magician. Employee of ITV (noteworthy especially in this case as this whole enterprise was arranged with ITV as a partner). 

Tom Harwood (@tomhfh)
Probably the single most neutral representative panel member I’ve been able to identify so far.  Follows the usual Youtube narcissism pattern but has a following comparable to many people I know myself on social media who have just been around for a while. 

Lucy Moon (@meowitslucy)
Another youtuber. Her twitter timeline makes it clear she’s another serial UKIP hater. She’s also noticeably more narcissistic than the others going by the evidence there and she’s only 19 (the majority of others seem to be in their 20s upwards). Not good. She was the most ill-tempered of the female panel members.

There are a handful of others I’ve not had the time to track down yet (so far its 11/15 – though only 14 of those appeared on the episode in question). However, as far as I can tell I have managed to include everyone who asked questions from the panel on the Farage episode.


Where was everyone else?

Where they weren’t diehard lefties and UKIP haters (that covers the people who spent most time heckling, interrupting and abusing) the panel members were major social media narcissists and/or media luvvies. Are these really the people who are most appropriate to be representing the UK’s “youth voice”? If there could even be said to be such a thing? Where were the political right wingers, the young people working in trades, armed forces, front line services? Why do only graduates, youtube personalities and “comedians” get to speak? You know – where’s the missing 50% of British youths who did not go to university and also did not become youtube superstars plucked from obscurity?

How desperately unfunny must the “comedians” on the panel be if all they can do in this situation is effectively act as simple hostile hecklers? Speaking as a fan and regular attendee of the London comedy circuit I can’t imagine any of the performers I’ve seen behaving like this. Even if they were out to undermine Farage they would have prepared some funny zingers rather than behaved like two year olds on the verge of tantrums, violence or both. 

A full third were committed UKIP haters and there are question marks over several of the others. It was a shockingly biased panel and the aggression towards Farage was left completely unchecked. It’s worth noting that all of the ethnic minority panel members who spoke up were persistently interrupting and belligerent. If your goal was to portray the young left-leaning members of the UK’s BME communities as know-nothing, belligerent gobshites then this episode was a major success. GREAT JOB guys!

It would appear to most of those commenting on ‘Bite the Ballot’ youtube videos that, as commenter ‘Venimus Vidimus’ put it, the panel

“were chosen because they're simple minded, desperate to be liked, malleable, sycophantic, photogenic, glib and left-wing (the latter trait being a direct result of the former traits).”

The boss weighs in 

As if it wasn’t already enough of a Nathan Barley episode with the student left drama queens and social media narcissists on the panel, the “Big Boss” of ‘Bite the Ballot’, Michael Sani, has since written about the panel make up. He has in turn delivered the very quintessence of exactly the kind of purified, distilled, thoughtless idiocy that seems the characterise these kind of enterprises and was mercilessly mocked in Nathan Barley. 

It is at this point that the mutual masturbation circle now turns into a full on circular firing squad.

In case they have a sudden injection of sense and delete the piece, I’ll quote you the section I consider most apposite:

“On the first: yep, I agree. At times, even I was calling for Rick to step in to keep control of people’s emotions – but to be fair, it was arguably the hottest debate we’ve ever seen with Nigel. It was refreshing to see people’s emotions on show, especially from this age group. One thing’s for sure – it’s becoming harder and harder to say ‘Young people don’t care’: because last night they proved they do. And now we build upon it, collectively.

Before I go into how, let’s address the idea of our unrepresentative audience. The audience was selected because of the networks they represent – many of whom have thousands of fans, followers and subscribers. You name it – they have them. These debates are pilots. We are trying to find a format where the few can represent the masses, and we are consistently perfecting the model because – like with everything BTB – we are not afraid to try, reflect, then try again. Yes, one member of the audience, Myles, has a day-job with a certain left-leaning print media house, but he didn’t mention that during the event, and more importantly, he brought in the views of his YouTube, Twitter and Facebook subscribers. That has always been the aim.

As for the chap from NUS, yes, it’s disappointing that he’s posted rude, anti-UKIP pictures on his social profile. He was supposed to be in a position of representing a mass of students. The thing is, we all have to work and support one another here. NUS need to be clear on what is – and is not – acceptable for their officers; and from BTB’s side, we need to think about how we brief audiences ahead of these debates so they don’t lose their electricity (and protect us from being picked apart).”

Holy non-sequiturs and complete-lack-of-self-awareness Batman! Would you like a dirty dripping contempt salad and a side order of sneer with your order, sir?

“It was refreshing to see people’s emotions on show”

- Yes, wonderful. Portray the representatives of “the youth” as ignorant brutes determined to get their way through shouting others down, along with a distinct implied violence. And even the boss was calling for the chair, Helen Keller (sorry – Rick Edwards), to notice something was up and step in. But he did nothing of the sort. Why?

“let’s address the idea of our unrepresentative audience”

- The “idea” of an unrepresentative audience. Got that? It’s just an “idea”!

“The audience was selected because of the networks they represent”

- The “networks” many of them represented were followers of a social media narcissist. In case you’re unfamiliar, Michael, with what narcissism entails, the narcissist does not “represent” their following.  They expect to bask in their reflected glory from sycophants. 

“We are trying to find a format where the few can represent the masses, and we are consistently perfecting the model because”

- This is just pure delusional talk. There is no model or format at work here beyond pulling in a social media circle jerk. The folks you picked represent some quite specific cliques and you’re excluding, at a minimum, 50% of the UK’s “youth”.  I fear that by “perfecting it” you mean pull in people who have more followers and shares on social media. I don’t think you understand the meaning of “representation” here, Michael.

“Yes, one member of the audience, Myles, has a day-job with a certain left-leaning print media house, but he didn’t mention that during the event”

- Ooh. A “certain left-leaning print media house”. There’s not even a hint of contrition here is there? I can almost feel “Boss Man” Michael’s sneer in his words. And you also appear to be frighteningly oblivious to the fact, Michael, that it is definitively your responsibility to inform your viewers of such details.

- I think the Guardian’s Myles Dyer has realised there’s trouble ahead as he is currently busy clowndancing in the youtube comments making out that he’s actually a really neutral, reasonable guy. One glance at his twitter timeline during and just after the event though and anyone can see the real picture: One of Myles revelling in so much backslapping over his perceived success in ‘operation get Farage’ that it’s amazing he hasn’t taken time off to see a chiropractor. 

“and more importantly, he brought in the views of his YouTube, Twitter and Facebook subscribers. That has always been the aim.”

- And there you have it. It’s all about the hits…sod accuracy, representation, bias…Never mind the fact that the bulk of followers are likely to subscribe to a similar viewpoint thereby exacerbating the bias even further.

“As for the chap from NUS, yes, it’s disappointing that he’s posted rude, anti-UKIP pictures on his social profile. He was supposed to be in a position of representing a mass of students.”

 - Right. Because you had no idea that this is what he was all about. And the very idea of NUS reps actually representing the mass of students rather than the speech-code obsessed authoritarian harpies? Hoho – pass the smelling salts, please dear!

“NUS need to be clear on what is – and is not – acceptable for their officers;”
 
- Pretty much anything acceptable to the far-left goes at the nutty NUS. Including opposing motions against ISIS initiated by (Muslim) Kurds because of  - er - “Islamophobia”. 

“and from BTB’s side, we need to think about how we brief audiences ahead of these debates so they don’t lose their electricity (and protect us from being picked apart).”

- Translation: we need to ensure our biased selectees know how to obscure their biases from easy discovery!

This all simply beggars belief. “Boss man” had the opportunity to pull back from the precipice. Instead he hits the accelerator pedal and flies straight over the cliff, smashes into the rocks below and bursts into flames.

No acknowledgement of an issue, no contrition and no prospect of rectification at all. The ostensible goal of this “neutral” organisation is to teach and inspire young citizens about politics and voting. If the mission here was to teach young people the lesson that, in UK politics, you can expect to be unashamedly and outrageously deceived right from the very start, then this has been an absolutely stellar success.

The cat is out of the bag now, Michael.

You had a duty of care to inform the audience. You failed spectacularly.  

The most important currency in politics is trust. Once it is gone it can take a generation to win it back. ‘Bite the Ballot’ have demonstrated that they are wilfully biased. Worse, they have clearly expressed that they simply do not care that they have been outed and intend to carry on as before. Notice also the lexical register that Michael Sani uses. It is very childlike, blasé and pompous. It reminds me very much of how Russell Brand happily masturbates his own ignorance and anti-intellectualism in his own inscrutable writing. And this man is the “Big Boss”. God help us.

Tories should be wary

There’s no love lost between myself and the Tories. However in spite of my general dislike of the party and my specific issues with Cameron himself, I do not think he or they deserve to be put through this idiotic farce. Dave is so far the only party leader to have not confirmed a date with ‘Bite the Ballot’. In all seriousness I think, now the outright bias of the show is on full view, that he would be wise to withdraw. 

It is arguable that Cameron could be in for even worse treatment than Farage. Why? Because the visceral hatred of UKIP and Farage from this lot is what I would refer to as “fashionable hate”. It has become a popular past time, to impress your mates and be seen to make the correct noises for herd approval to claim to hate UKIP even if you know little about them and even less about the issues they raise. Yet there is something that is somewhat fleeting here.

The tories on the other hand face what I would call “institutional hate”. Despite not even having been born when Thatcher was still in power, many of this lot seem to uncannily pop out of the womb with a built in hatred of her and need to blame the country’s current ills on a prime minister who has been out of power for decades. You know how it goes. Everything is Fatcher’s fault, innit bruv? You instinctively support manual frackers (miners) but inexplicably hate and fear hydraulic fracturing. The tories were so evil they even caught the Teletubbies going for a poo. They had the Brighton bombing coming. The Falklands was worse than Iraq. And yes, the Belgrano was a fucking cruise liner.

Don’t do it to yourselves. Yes there will be mass hysteria by the self-righteous New Left, but their teeth grinding and childishness will only prove the point.

The children of Orwell and Huxley

One final issue that really bugged me. Because this attempt at imitating Nathan Barley was struggling to be so in touch with the supposed social media zeitgeist, all the panel participants were glued to their spyphones and tablets. The occasional full frontal shot of the panel was actually quite unnerving. When they weren’t send spittle flecked tirades Farage’s way, they were looking down with crooked necks at the miniature portals in their laps.

At any one moment the majority of the audience was simply not paying attention. In human communication terms this is a significant step backwards and not a practice that should be actively encouraged. ‘The Youth’ have become inheritors of the worst of both Orwell’s and Huxley’s fears. Continually policed Newspeak (and, increasingly, prudery too) combined with hypnotising, addictive yet numbing behaviours of performance and approval carried out via devices that are used to spy on us. 

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a social media network’s glow from a backlit display occupying a dulled, distracted, inattentive human face, forever.

Churnalism: DEFRA churn - the Guardian is in the lead!

(UPDATE: 27/11/11 - raw churnalism data available HERE - JSON format, zipped, 448kb)

After the churn analysis of the Environment Agency press releases (please read that article for more details and important caveats if you haven't read one of my churn posts before), I followed up with DEFRA.I will be making the raw data publicly available tomorrow for both the Environment Agency and DEFRA churn analyses.

This time I was able to construct the spiders and process the data faster - I also avoided (most of) the unicode problems that plagued me with the EA data, so this analysis can be considered slightly more accurate and slightly less forgiving of the media organisations (though it still strictly follows the rules I set down previously, such as no editing of the press release to remove extraneous information). Along with inevitable issues with some difficult characters slipping through and no editing of the press releases, it still means the data will naturally favour the media organisations. As I said on previous posts, when I make the raw data publicly available, churn analysis by other people will very likely improve upon my methods and yield results more detrimental for the media.

In any case - onto the results. The summary is presented below (click for full size image):

"Quality" press churn results

Summary of results:

- A total of 386 press releases were analysed, from 13th May 2010 to 24th November 2011. These generated 1959 detectable cases of churn. Again, there is probably a lot of interesting data within the "detectable" category that deserves analysis at a later date. For now it is discarded.

- Out of those, 173 were classified as "significant" and 18 as "major".

- The Guardian was the leader in both categories by a long way - accounting for 19.65% of significant churn and 27.78% of major churn.

- The BBC followed close behind in terms of significant churn with 16.18%, though for major churn was beaten into third place by both the Independent and the Daily Mail with a joint 16.67%.

- The Independent came third in the signifcant churn classification.

- A common factor in the most highly churned articles both in this analysis and the previous two appears to be lack of a named author in most cases (though see one of the exceptions detailed below). This suggests the media organisations are aware that what they are doing is not kosher.

- Continuing a theme from the last two churn analyses, the tabloids consistently embarrass the so called "quality press". This time I pulled out the statistics for the UK's major tabloids for comparison (click for full size image):

Tabloid press churn results

When I first started these analyses I fully expected to see a much higher showing of churn by the tabloids. It is interesting to see the contrast. Also out of the churn analyses done so far, it is consistently the Mirror out of the tabloids that has the highest percentage of churn.

As usual I select a few of the more egregarious cases of churn for your entertainment (and importantly - provide a manual submission to the churnalism database so they can be seen visually):

'Gloucestershire Old Spots pork protected by Europe'
An absolutely cracking BBC 79% cut and paste job on - er - crackling.

'Bonfire of the Quangos'
Remember that list of Quangos that were to go? Completely cut and pasted from a press release. This one is particularly fascinating because in the two worst cases the cut and paste was the list provided in the press release. It actually included several paragraphs laying out a context that was not cut and pasted across. If it had just been the list in the original both would have scored close to 100% pastes.....
The pastes are so large in any case that the churnalism engine falls over when the 'view' button is clicked to see the visualised version. Be warned if you click it, your browser may hang.

'New service for householders to stop unwanted advertising mail'
Absolute carnage on the churning front here with the majority of the main media outlets represented. The Guardian appeared to like this story so much they cut and pasted it twice - and this time each article has a named author. Where the hell was the editor?

The Mystic Met Office - the 'forecasts that are not forecasts'

Autonomous Mind has just published further information on the Met Office story, showing that in internal discussions, the Met Office's 'forecasts that were not forecasts' were nethertheless referred to numerous times as forecasts. As AM puts it, "The Met Office logic is that although it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck it is actually a horse."

There's lots of spin going on here, however there is no avoiding the fact that the 'forecast that was not a forecast' was used by the National Grid to determine their winter preparedness report, as I pointed out on Friday. They apparently didn't even have access to the now notorious "secret" report (the "secret" adjective originating from the BBC's Roger Harrabin).

The Mystic Met Office has now responded to the Register's inquiries on this issue, stating that it "has never suggested that we warned cabinet office of an 'exceptionally cold early winter'." - thus throwing Harrabin immediately under the bus.

Harrabin's response? Now that is another interesting story in and of itself. He claims: "This doesn't match a more conclusive forecast I gleaned from a Met Office contact in December" .

So what is this "more conclusive forecast" and who gave it to you Roger?

I note that he is also not paying attention when he says: 'I note a blog report (which I cannot yet verify) saying that a civil servant commented: "The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing no clear signals for the winter."'

Roger, that "comment" is clearly visible in the FOIA material I received, amongst the email traffic. It's more than just a "comment", it is the government outlining its official position, with which the Met Office appears to agree in its return email.

On that particular point Roger, it leaves a striking odd one out. You.

There's also another deception in play here. Harrabin goes on:

'A spokesman for the Cabinet Office told me they had passed the forecast to key stakeholders ("Government departments, local council as appropriate - we don't have a list").' [My emphasis]

Are we really to believe that the "key stakeholders" didn't include the National Grid? (Not that it would have helped much anyway).

You may be wondering why I highlighted that word. Here's another clue:

Both Autonomous Mind and the Register articles highlight a claim found in the Mail:

"Last night the Met Office confirmed it had passed on the advice, but a spokesman denied that withholding it from the public was motivated by embarrassment.

‘We did brief the Cabinet Office in October on what we believed would be an
exceptionally cold and long winter,’ she said."

Whilst Roger Harrabin is definitely not off the hook - and neither, if the veracity of the Mail's source is to be believed - is the Mystic Met Office, there is another underlying cultural problem:

The use of 'spokespeople'. These are used so often that it now drifts into the background consciousness for most of us, most of the time. Yet it is an extremely insidious propagandistic technique. The use of an anonymous spokesperson gets the organisation, or person, they are representing off the hook. There is no chain of accountability and any statements they make can easily be dismissed in the future.

The fact that both the Met Office and the Cabinet office are deploying spokespeople on this issue concerns me. It means we're not going to get to the actual truth without some serious hard work and implies that someone definitely does have something to hide, even if it is just their own bumbling incompetence.

Whenever this occurs journalists should immediately insist on knowing the identity of the person providing the information. Of course they don't, because they want easy copy, and access to the source of that copy. So it's up to the rest of us to apply the pressure and ask, every single time, who? The reasons why this is such a pressing issue are described eloquently by Heather Brooke in her excellent new book, 'The Silent State':

"Official spokespeople are powerful because they speak for the powerful; anonymity means they can exercise that power without being held individually accountable for it....When a 'spokesman' makes an accusation or spreads a smear, what recourse is there for the target? Anonymising spokespeople suits some journalists because if every source is simply a 'spokesman' or 'official', then it's easy to make up any old quote to suit your story.....As long as secrecy and anonymity reign, public sector bureaucracies will bethe hiding places for the incompetent, lazy and corrupt"

And if that doesn't hammer the point home enough, try this summation from Brooke:

"...we cannot be an informed electorate without access to information and a right to hold officials to account. And if we're not an informed electorate then we cannot call ourselves a democracy." [Emphasis mine]

This use of selective anonymity also has the potential to inflict very real damage beyond just the nature of our democracy:

"...special advisers and spin doctors operate a principle of never admitting a fault. can't we be treated by our leaders as grown-ups? Spin is costly for taxpayers because small problems aren't acknowledged, they are spun into successes or stifled until they reach a magnitude of catastrophic proportion."

And we've just seen this principle in action with regard to the Met Office, the government and the BBC:

Due to yet another year of officially sanctioned lack of preparedness, chaos, suffering and likely unecessary deaths, have occurred. The game of pass the blame parcel will be no comfort to those identified by Anna Raccoon as on the receiving end - "Those pensioners found frozen solid in their front garden, the scenes of half starved refugees huddled against the cold at Heathrow airport, the two kilometre long lines of frozen travellers queuing round the block at St Pancreas Station, the double dip recession caused by the ‘extreme weather’"

All of which no one is willing to take responsibility for as the parties at risk of having to take it are hiding behind 'spokespeople' already. This looks like a tough battle ahead to pin down who is responsible, who is telling us the truth and who is lying.

And its a battle - yet another - only being fought in earnest by the 'fifth estate' of the blogosphere, with little assistance from the 'fourth estate' as they languish in the doldrums of increasing irrelevancy and distant relationship to the truth.

But fight it we will.

Russell Brand: Weapons grade cock-end

Idiocracy: This too could be you.

In a change to my occasional schedule of angry piss-boiling commentary on politics, I wanted to write on something else briefly:

Trial by mob
I tried. I really did. I can't stand a trial by media or public opinion. I detest it. I was horrified to notice that in the wake of the Brand/Ross "scandal" that the BBC's 'Have your say' fell over during the day because of the deluge of the collective brain fart. Everyone had to have a say. I thought the pair of them had been a couple of idiots, however I was perfectly content to leave it at that and keep my opinion to myself. The incident also happened just as the extent of the global financial crisis was being realised. Whilst major dead-tree press articles on the crisis were attracting maybe 100 comments if they were lucky, in some places, 1000+ comments were being left on the Russell/Brand story. I despaired. I really did.

If I was aggrieved at anything, it was the fact that the BBC licence fee, extracted from myself and millions of others under threat of force is used to pay the pair of them - particularly Ross, with his deal of £18 million over three years. I find that simply obscene, yet I don't have a voice with regard to how the money is spent. It's most definitely taxation without representation. However, this was a position I held before they decided to carry out a live prank phone call, and still hold now.

Charlie Brooker made the point recently in his 'Screenwipe' series that a new era of TV-viewer interaction has begun. He calls it the Dawn of the Dumb. It has primarily resulted from 'reality tv' shows, where viewers have a vote. This has been transferred, in the minds of the viewers, to an overall vote on any TV programme or issue. The viewers can, be weight of enough complaints, cause changes to be made. It would be nice to think that this was a democratic achievement, even if it still results in satisfaction of the lowest common denominator. However, in the case of the BBC there are two major problems with this:

i) The opposite isn't true. That is to say, if the number of commendations outweigh the complaints, the complaints still win. We have seen this in the case of Carol Thatcher.

ii) I'm still forced to pay for this farce, simply for the privilege of having a TV set in my front room to watch DVDs on. I avoid TV programming, and the BBC in particular, like it was some horrible infectious syphilitic walking corpse. As one enterprising chap on Babylon 5 said once: "It is a cultural wasteland full of inappropriate metaphors for reality". And that's just the soap operas.

So...this Russell bloke...

I'd caught the odd clip of Brand performing. I saw 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall'. He seemed to be able to entertain competently on and off. The odd comment here and there indicated that he was considered 'edgy' and 'on the pulse'. A friend lent me his [Brand's] autobiography so I put some time aside to read it.

Now, I consider a person's autobiography to be an honest means of appraising a person. It's their own words, not taken out of context by the media, and they have the choice to put their own spin on it. On these grounds I'm willing to come to an opinion on a person, irrespective of what the media says about them.

In case you missed it, I came to the conclusion that this man is and was a weapons grade cock-end. Now to be clear, I don't like to use insults, or expletives too often, unlike some of my swearblogging friends. This isn't because I think there is anything inherently "bad" in use of such language. Far from it. Instead I think it is more powerful if used sparingly, like the occasional bit of violence (which, for all you idealistic do-gooders out there, is sometimes the 'right thing to do'). And in this case, my god, I think the only man to compare him to would be the currently self-destructing Derek Draper. And I've got expletives a plenty for that particular fleischweisen.

Commonalities

What was interesting for me was that, as I first got into his book, I began warming to the man. We appeared to have had a very similar childhood. We're about the same age, had quite a few similar experiences, and even knocked around in the same places. However, as soon as he started describing his crawl into adulthood it appeared we diverged sharply.

This is despite the fact that we still had a lot in common, even in adulthood. He has a terrible weakness for women and sex, despite the fact he is fully capable of seducing many pretty women on a regular basis. I relate directly to that. He also has long hair, likes to dress extravagantly and wear makeup to enhance his looks. Again, all things that I do. He's also not one for not putting up with people telling him what to do.

On the surface you might not see us as too dissimilar. In fact, you might wonder why we are not good drinking pals.

If someone gave a very general outline of his life and activities, and put it alongside mine the difference may not be clear at all. Yet -as the saying goes, the devil is, very literally in the details.

Women

For Russell, women appear to be primarily a self-validation mechanism. They probably are for most men in some respect. The Idiot-lantern constantly tells us that without sexual validation, we're nothing. Right?

As a teenage kid it appears Russell began to learn the art of seduction, picking up that charm, personality and a novel individual appearance (and pathos) can attract sufficient attention to bring women into your orbit. Pretty much the phase I went through too. As he careens into his kidulthood though, Russell begins to attract women through a combination of persistence, bullshit and the fame factor (though the latter was relatively late in coming). I spent my early adulthood doing my best to figure out what I actually wanted (a task that it seems a frightening number of people never actually master).

I don't think Russell figured this one out and women (and inebriation) began to perpetually fill up his ever-increasing self-esteem black hole. He appeared to blame a lot of this on his childhood. Yet the life he describes was no harder than mine, and a damn sight easier than the lives some of my best friends have had. It all comes down to that classic idea that it is how you choose to react to events and circumstances - "Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him".

Russell's is an epic fail on this point. As he became a Kidult he became the master of his own downfall, and this was despite some incredible opportunities coming his way. He simply had to feed the self-esteem monster you see.

So - women and sex. I have tried monogomy a few times. It isn't for me. Instead I have open-relationships with my partners. And they have been, consistently, much more successful, loving and beneficial all round than my monogomous arrangements. I find many people make all sorts of assumptions about this that they simply are not justified, or equipped, to make. It's the kind of relationship that drives The Righteous nuts.

Open relationships force a kind of sincerity and honesty on you and your partners that you simply don't have in monogomy. For one thing, it absolutely forces you to not take the other(s) for granted. They have the option, just like you, to go elsewhere. If you're in sync with one another, they will always come back to you, and you to them. Contrary to many erroneous assumptions, it also brings your standards way up. I look to maximise the amount of mutually enjoyable (emotional as well as sexual) experiences I can have with as many high-quality (confident, intelligent, driven, creative, know what they want are my criteria) women as I can in life. This actually means I say 'no' more often than I say 'yes'.

You see it all comes down to self-esteem. People with low self-esteem cannot understand how such a relationship could ever work. In their heads, some kind of ownership of the 'other' has to take place in order to vouchsafe your fragile ego. I don't know how many times I, or my partner(s) have been lectured on this, that I / we have "never really been in love". Very confident, secure people however, can see how this kind of relationship can work, even if they don't wish to engage in it themselves. It's an excellent litmus test for figuring out people you have just met.

Brand's self-esteem appears to be chronically low. He has fulfilled the role of the spectacular, had his ego massaged by hacks who realised they can play off of his self-destructive ("edgy") tendencies and bully him into incredible acts of stupidity (if you liked 'Jackass', and also winced at the fact people felt these were good things to do to themselves for 'entertainment' (approval), wait till you read this biography). He blames it variously on life-circumstances and his "addictive personality". The cult of celebrity seems to produce a lot of these.

Celebration?

The term 'celebrity' originally referred to people of great skill and talent. You referred, for example to the "celebrated" playright, Shakespeare, or the "celebrated" artist, Michael Angelo. For the most part, this notion of talent appears to have shrunk horrifically to good presentation and blagging skills at best, and willing displays of incohate idiocy at worst. Brand has certainly sucked from both of these teats to build his career and create a bloated "celebrity" construction of "edgy" behaviour.

He has been placed on the throne as one of the many Kings of Idiots. Appropriately channeled through the medium of the almighty One-eyed monster. (Yes, I guess that goes for his penis, not just a synonym for the TV too).

Occasionally Brand drops in a word like 'misogyny' as some way of mild contrition. The fact is though, throughout the book he doesn't actually display one iota of actual, sincere contrition. He reminds me of these colllectivist-anarchists who say how they are "aware" of gender issues, and 'right-on', yet still have severe emotional and sexual issues with women. Poor buggers can't even get out of that one through experience though as the collectivist-anarchists attract a lot of the Righteous. The Original Sin of men will be sure to keep them in place and not allow them to admit that yes, they (like women) actually want to fuck different people, and often. The only thing worse than a right-wing conservative prude is a left-wing version.

I got half way through the book and began hating the man earnestly. I had to push through to the end though, for the same reasons I have to continue following the antics of Labour's Clown Extraordinaire, Derek Draper. The path of self-inflicted destruction is incredible to behold, and a fantastic example unto others. He often tries to spruce up his account with some literary references. He painfully fumbles quite a few of them. And with this dickhead, artistic licence just doesn't cut it as an excuse.

Russell leaves us, after describing his rollercoaster wreck of a life, at the end telling us that he is a changed man after having attended a 'sex-addicts' clinic in the U.S. It's his "addictive" personality again you see. Never mind the fact that 99% of the rest of humanity also has this problem in adulthood - it's called feeling horny you dipshit.

His memory, however, appears to be shorter than that of his adulating fuckwit fanbase - for, after ploughing through to the end, I actually remembered what he actually said in the first chapter. He said, just prior to completing the book he'd just given in again to his weakness for pointless encounters thanks to his wafer-thin willpower (and self-esteem, though he leaves that bit out). He makes a big, almost puritan, deal of the fact that he was also clean of drugs and alcohol. I'd have some sympathy and respect for the man if it weren't for the fact that he was using these as escapes from problems completely of his own making. He doesn't seem to intuit that many people drink or take drugs because they have a lot of problems that are not of their own doing.

Brand is supposed to be one of the country's best. He'd like us to believe he's that uber-confident, together bloke in 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall', perpetually on the up-side of a bi-polar disorder. He's not. Instead he personifies what is broken. No responsibility for anything (it's all paid for chaps!) and the adulation of the inert and the feeble-minded.

Gods help us all.