News Corp: Race to Rock Bottom

When you stop and think about how long News Corp. has been around, their ability to find new ways to sink lower than ever before on a weekly basis is really nothing short of impressive. Competition breeds excellence, I suppose, and with the sheer number of media outlets under the News Corp. umbrella, it should come as no surprise that competition is fierce. I wonder if Grampa Murdoch is offering some kind of incentive to whoever can hit rock bottom first. Perhaps he could take a cue from Hooters, who increased beer sales by offering their staff rewards and prizes in exchange for selling people mind-numbing poisons with the help of a few tits. I assume the skill set is transferable.

This week we were treated to the unappetising spectacle of Rebekah Brooks giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry while seemingly dressed up as a nun. It wasn’t quite obvious whether this was an ill-judged attempt at feigning purity of heart, or just one of those tacky ‘slutty nun’ costumes they sell in joke shops, but the message was the same; someone, somewhere is getting screwed.

“Pray, do tell what you mean by ‘phone-hacking’? We Amish are a simple people.”

Not to be outdone, however, Fox News – basically the Harlem Globetrotters of peddling bullshit – has staked its own claim to the prize. Following recent revelations in the Washington Post that Mitt Romney once led a posse of students to forcibly cut the long, bleach-blonde hair of a classmate they suspected was gay, Fox anchor Sean Hannity has attempted to turn the tables on the Obama camp – which he pulls off with all the poise and agility of an arthritic pensioner attempting to judo throw a van.

In his regular Fox segment, Hannity tried to shift attention to an incident retold in Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father. For context, Obama’s middle-school classmates were teasing him about the girl in the story, Coretta, being his girlfriend, based on the fact that she was the only black girl in their class.

‘I’m not her boyfriend!’ I shouted. I ran up to Coretta and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. ‘Leave me alone!’ I shouted again. And suddenly Coretta was running, faster and faster, until she disappeared from sight.

“We have uncovered somebody who has actually admitted to engaging in real inappropriate behavior as a youth,” Hannity said in his broadcast, before also claiming that Obama’s admission to experimenting with drugs in his youth ”puts Romney and the bully issue to shame.”

In one sense, it’s no surprise that conservatives should jump all over this story, and many others have. But Hannity’s words in particular are quite revealing. Obama, you see, has “actually admitted” to the Coretta incident, whereas of course Mitt Romney has simply refused to deny five independent eye-witness accounts that he led a mob of students to hold down a terrified, screaming classmate while Romney chopped off his hair with a pair of scissors. When asked to confirm or deny that story, Romney simply offered that he can’t remember all of his old high-school ‘pranks’.

“Oh man, this one time we beat up some sissy and left him in a field. You shoulda smelt him when they dug him up. Classic.”

But for Hannity, Obama “actually admitting” to an incident when, blindly lashing out under pressure from racist bullying, he gave a girl a slight shove and then felt so bad about it that he wrote it in his memoir decades later, is not only as bad as Romney’s sadistic, borderline psychotic actions, it’s even worse.

Of course, Hannity doesn’t really believe that. He knows full well what he’s doing when he conflates the two stories. He’s deliberately playing down the seriousness of Romney’s malicious bullying to the level of a harmless prank or ‘just a haircut’. Meanwhile, Obama’s heat-of-the-moment act is milked for all its political worth. As conservative news site Breitbart.com had it in their headline, “Does WaPo know Obama shoved a little girl?” Can’t you just see him now, 50 years old and still knocking pre-schoolers into the dirt, with Joe Biden playing the enraptured Smithers to Obama’s Monty Burns?

“I can’t find my dominoes. Go get me fifty toddlers.”

But there is a second point of interest in Hannity’s comments. It has been echoed by many on the right, and it provides a fascinating insight into the world of the conservative mind. Obama’s admitted adolescent drug use, Hannity tell us, “puts Romney and the bully issue to shame”. Now, I have no trouble accepting that Hannity genuinely believes that one. And isn’t that just appalling?

From where I stand, the only decent argument for granting a government authority over what chemicals its citizens can and can’t put in their own bodies is that drug use can indirectly harm others. Clearly, Hannity disagrees. To him, Obama’s use of drugs, although never causing any harm to anyone except possibly himself, is much worse than deliberately and callously tormenting another human being, subjecting him to ritualistic humiliation and bringing him to tears. So much worse, in fact, that it puts even discussion of that issue to shame.

I’m honestly surprised they still know the meaning of the word.

To AV and AV Not

Today, the polls will be opened on the much-touted AV referendum. I choose my words carefully here, because although the referendum itself was touted, the system it seeks to impose hasn’t been. In fact, the campaigns both for and against the proposition seem to have ground to a halt before they’ve even begun. What debate there has been of the issue has been stunted, poor and empty. Jon Richardson described the debate as “‘Vote YES, people off the TV are going to!’ vs. ‘Vote NO! You’re too thick to understand why.’”

Sadly, he’s right. The pro campaign seems content to stick Eddie Izzard’s face on a poster with ‘fairer votes’ written on it and call it a day. Meanwhile the con campaign has released a string of billboard ads featuring soldiers and sick babies, and crammed with all the subtlety and nuance you’d expect from an 18th century street vendor with the word ‘Marvellous’ in his name.

Apparently, an AV election would cost about £250million that could be better spent taking care of our society’s vulnerable clichés. This sounds like a decent point, until you realise that a) as a percentage of total government spending in the five years between elections, that’s next to nothing, and b) we spend roughly the same amount on First Past the Post elections. Really? Well why didn’t you say so? Cancel all elections, let’s just let these guys run things forever! Forget democracy, we need that money!

Clearly, this is dull, lifeless, thoughtless campaigning of the lowest order on both sides. The interesting thing, though, is that it seems to be deliberate.

A staple of the Lib Dems’ election campaign (in those heady, pre-bootlicking days of “I agree with Nick”), electoral reform was hyped and sold to a public who had waited for two years for a legitimate excuse to jump on the American ‘Hope and Change’ bandwagon, and was part of what made Nick Clegg a minor folk hero last summer. Clegg, so he claimed, was pushing for Proportional Representation. In the post-election negotiations to establish a coalition government, a referendum on AV – which Clegg had previously called a “miserable little compromise” – was eventually forced on a visibly uncomfortable Conservative-led government.

But it may be just as true to say that Clegg and the Lib Dem negotiation team were equally, if less visibly, uncomfortable with the vote themselves. They knew, after all, that they were heading into coalition with a party with which they had vast ideological differences. It’s one thing to hammer out a back-room deal with your opponents (the favourite trick of the politician). It’s entirely another to fight it out publicly, and having the populace vote on who’s right is about as public as a tiff can get. Much has already been made about ‘cracks in the coalition’, and it’s doubtful whether an open cat-fight would help ease tensions.

Here, in a rare example of Nick Clegg catching a political break, his “miserable little compromise” comment comes to his rescue. Since we know he’s not wildly in favour of the system, he can simply bow out of talking about it without too many questions asked, thus avoiding an ugly and public confrontation with his boss. In fact, I suspect Clegg and the Lib Dems only pushed the Tories to call a vote on AV to save face, knowing they would have to renege on many, many other campaign promises. It was a freebie: the Lib Dems look good for pushing for reform, and the Tories are safe in the knowledge that when the vote rolls around, nobody important will campaign for it. Labour and the Tories don’t want it, since it will reduce the stranglehold they have on British politics, and the Lib Dems want it but don’t want to campaign for it because it will push them into a fight with their ‘partners’.

This, for what it’s worth, is precisely why I plan to vote Yes today. So far, the only coherent (not good, just coherent) argument I’ve heard in the entire debate is David Cameron’s claim that, with AV, we could wind up with the third most popular party running the country. But under the current system we can wind up, and in fact have wound up, with a country run according to the second most popular ideology. In the last general election, the majority of people voted for a left- or centre-left-wing party. Yet we have in Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street two men who are slightly to the right of Margaret Thatcher.

The problem, as will be familiar to fans of The Life of Brian, is the perennial problem of splitting the left.

"Are you the Judean People's Front?" "Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea."

By dividing the votes of the left-wing public between two parties, an unpopular right-wing party can sneak in the back door and take the election, not by virtue of being selected by the majority, but simply by being the only major right-wing party. After all, who are the Tories splitting their voters with? The BNP and UKIP? But this is beside the point. It would be just as unfair if it were happening the other way around, if two right wing parties were splitting the majority of the vote and we ended up instead with an unpopular left-wing party running the country.

Ultimately, I’m voting Yes to AV because it gives voters greater expression of their wishes for government, and so is by definition more democratic than a system which does not. A system that tells you to tick a single box and, if that guy doesn’t win, too bad for you. A system that, by design, has kept the same two parties trading places every 15 years or so for the last century, and reduced the only party capable of challenging the established order into snivelling, pathetic underlings. I’m voting Yes for all the reasons that the Tories, and the Lib Dems, and even Labour, don’t want you to.

Super-Scoop

This is something that’s always bugged me. As some of you may know, I’m a pretty big comic book fan. I realise this isn’t a very cool topic, so if you want to just ignore this post, you have my blessing to do so. For those who have agreed to stick it out here with me, I have this question; why are so many superheroes journalists? What is it about journalism that, in comic-book land, attracts the kind of people who like to dress up in themed costumes and beat petty thieves unconscious like a psychotic kid on Hallowe’en?

Pictured: justice.

Superman was a reporter, even though it makes absolutely no sense for him to even consider getting a job. The guy can do anything, including sun-tanning himself back from the dead. But for some reason he really seems to need that staff job at the newspaper, in a newsroom plastered with pictures of himself in superhero mode (what, you think there are more important stories in Metropolis than “Impossible Man Does Literally Everything”?) with nothing to prevent his dozens of co-workers from making the connection but a pair of hipster specs.

Spider-Man is, and always has been, a photojournalist. People might bitch at me that he’s just a freelance photographer, but honestly, when was the last time you saw him shooting for an album cover or a family Christmas card? The only time Peter tried to ply his photography trade somewhere that wasn’t the Daily Bugle was when he took his Spider-Man photos to another newspaper. Right across the street. Seriously.

The Question and Mr A are essentially two versions of the same Steve Ditko character, with slight changes. It makes a bit of sense for the Question to be a crime-fighter, since he’s an investigative journalist trying to expose a mob-boss by day. But Mr A doesn’t even do that – he’s just a regular reporter. He is a journalist, and he puts on a steel mask and beats people up. No connection, no explanation, shop’s closed, fuck off.

Because fuck you, that's why!

I’ve been confused by this for years, and starting a journalism course hasn’t helped in the slightest. Aside from some horribly pretentious ideas about ‘the power to inform’ the only superpowers I’ve ever seen journalists display are the power to inhale coffee, and something similar to Sonic the Hedgehog’s favourite trick – spinning really, really fast.

A Beautiful Mindfuck

There is a concept in the field of mathematics (not the subject itself, but the academic field) called the Erdős number. It was named after the mathematician Paul Erdős, the most prolific mathematician ever – he published at least 1,525 academic papers in his lifetime. He was also a serial collaborator; many of his papers were done with co-authors, and he had a total of 511 direct collaborators.

This is the point – the Erdős number is the collaborative distance between a published author and Erdős. So those 511 collaborators who worked with him directly each have an Erdős number of 1, anyone who collaborated with them but not with Erdős himself has an Erdős number of 2, and so on. If they can’t be linked to Erdős, their number is said to be infinite. Basically, it’s the academic version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (except that it precedes the Kevin Bacon game by about 25 years).

But, brilliantly, some people who have a finite Erdős number also have a finite Bacon number – and if you take those two numbers and add them together, you get the person’s Erdős-Bacon number. I’m not making any of this up.

For instance, did you know that the actress who played Winnie in The Wonder Years (and Trudy in The Pineapple Incident and Third Wheel episodes of How I Met Your Mother) is also a published mathematician? Well, she is. She has an Erdős-Bacon number of 6. So does Natalie Portman, who got her Erdős number from a psychology paper she published for her Harvard degree. Erdős himself has an Erdős-Bacon number of 4.

The world’s lowest Erdős-Bacon number is 3, held by Daniel Kleitman, a professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. Kleitman co-authored a paper with Erdős himself, and appeared as an extra in Good Will Hunting with Minnie Driver, who was in Sleepers with…

Kevin Bacon.

The world is so awesome sometimes.

The Rules of Enragement

I was trawling through the new Explore feature on Tumblr when I came across a post that looked fairly interesting. It was a picture of a page of text that I couldn’t make out because the picture was too small. It had a caption that read;

Having a spirited read-aloud of really just the best book ever written.

So I clicked on the picture to enlarge it, and what was it? It was The Rules. In case you’re not familiar with this shit-pile, it’s what the How I Met Your Mother writers were taking the piss out of when they made up Of Course You’re Still Single – Take a Look at Yourself, You Dumb Slut. A closer inspection of the picture left me with a gag reflex in spasm and these words burned onto my retinas;

When you were dating you did things because you wanted to please him so that he would propose. Now that you have him, you think you don’t have to try that hard.

True, you never have to do The Rules quite as hard as you did in the first three months of the relationship. But that doesn’t mean you can be selfish or inconsiderate or lazy. Remember that if you want a good marriage, The Rules never really end!

It would seem that Rule #1 is to be the kind of airheaded, marriage-obsessed, unicorn-loving, pink-goes-with-everything Stepford Wife that no self-respecting man would ever be caught dead near, much less invite people to witness him declare his love for in a wedding ceremony.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to throw myself out of the window and hope I land on the obnoxious minge who wrote that book, the pathetic drizzling pustule who said it was “really just the best book ever written,” or both.

This is Sarcasm… NOT!

I used to really hate it when people would say “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.” It’s just not. First of all, there’s that thing Anne Robinson does. Secondly, if used properly, sarcasm can be funny, succint and sometimes just about the only way to go.

But honestly, it’s getting really hard to keep defending it when the vast majority of it that I see lately is when it’s used to start some pissy little rant about how horrible your day was, before being abandoned three or four words in. I have no patience for this kind of thing. So for the sake of what can be a genuinely funny comic device, could everyone just please stop doing this:

• “As if I’ve just got a letter from the council about…”
• “I love the way you’ve just been treating me like I don’t…”
• “It’s great how everyone keeps making out that I’m…”

It’s not funny. It’s not cute. It just makes me want to kick you in the teeth.

(Another) One For The Fans

Like a lot of people, I’ve watched the recent spate of Charlie Sheen interviews with a mixture of grudging interest and dim repulsion. The chief draw is, I think, that vaguely masochistic desire we all have to see something truly ugly. In the ongoing saga of Charlie’s ludicrous yet oddly articulate rambling, and the fallout it creates, we’re pretty much spoiled for choice: should we gawk at the sight of Sheen’s drained, skeletal visage from between our fingers, or force ourselves to sit through his cringe-inducing superiority complex? And yet, perhaps unlike most people, I found Sheen’s remarks themselves the least detestable thing about the whole sordid circus.

Nor am I particularly turned off by the internet trend that has arisen, instantly and predictably, to mock the self-aggrandizing jackass. While there is something unsettling in the eagerness of so many people to make fun of an obviously mentally ill man, this is the internet, where dark humour lives. And the thing about dark humour is that the real butt of the joke is the teller. If you were to explain (as anyone with a sense of humour is loath to do) why a dark or edgy joke is funny, you wouldn’t say “because Charlie Sheen isn’t psychologically well,” you would say “because it’s so fucking harsh.” And precisely because the jokes at Sheen’s expense are made in full knowledge that they aren’t nice or fair, they become acceptable: yeah it’s a cheap shot, but they’re only kidding.

No, my ire is reserved for that great moral majority who stood righteously appalled at Sheen’s antics; the ugly lynch mob waiting to burn him at the stake for the crime of not playing along. In the now-infamous ABC interview, there is a brief exchange that has been reposted, reblogged and replayed countless times because it ends in Sheen, understated as ever, announcing that he “exposed people to magic” when he was last on drugs. What has so far been overlooked is that he says this in response to Andrea Canning asking him if he looks back on it with disgust, and that when he replies that he doesn’t, she stares at him in disbelief before blurting out a few admonishments that make it seem that she’s actually angry at him for not hating himself. How dare you be proud of yourself? You’re not allowed. Don’t you realise what an evil little worm you are?

Viewed objectively, of course, Sheen doesn’t need to apologise to anyone simply for taking drugs. If he didn’t hurt anyone (yes, he’s been accused of violence, but that was a different incident altogether) he’s got nothing to be feel sorry for, and it’s not for Canning to try to squeeze some shame or remorse from him. But the fact that she does, and the fact that hardly anyone seems to have noticed that this is a disgusting thing for her to do, speaks to a point I made in my last post; that the public loves to believe that celebrities owe them something, in this case an explanation, a justification, an apology. And shame. Charlie should be ashamed of himself, you see, because even though he didn’t actually harm anyone, he’s let down the fans. And he’s set a bad example… for the children.

The idea behind this sickening display is that celebrities are not just people you would recognise in the street; they are, whether they like it or not, role models for the impressionable youth. Putting aside how condescending this view is to young people themselves, it shows remarkable chutzpah to demand that someone live their life how you want, that they hand over the reins of their very free will, for the possible benefit of some hypothetical person’s hypothetical kids. How dare we be so presumptuous as to think that Charlie Sheen, simply by being on TV, has obligated himself to put what might be of some indirect good for our children ahead of his own happiness?

It works the opposite way, too; both Bob Dylan and Kurt Cobain firmly rejected the idea that they were the voice of their respective generations. Cobain even explicitly stated that he was outraged by the audacity of the claim, and the pressure it aimed to put him under – because one way or another, it still unfairly saddles him with a responsibility that he never asked for. Of course, both were also criticised for corrupting America’s youth, but protested less fiercely. After all, if you’re an anti-establishment rebel, ‘corrupting the youth’ sounds quite cool and impressive. If it was good enough for Socrates…

Meanwhile the majority of celebrities, not wanting to rock the boat, play along with the ridiculous pretence that they are somehow our de facto round-the-clock babysitters. They’ll lend their names to anti-drug charities and appear in anti-drug ad campaigns. Or, more subtly, just keep their own predilection for hookers and speed behind closed doors, where the kiddywinkles will never see it. And it is for precisely this reason that the Charlie Sheens of the business emerge in the first place. Fed up with plastering on the boy-next-door smile and the apple pie innocence, one of them will finally snap, drop the charade and shout “It’s none of your goddamned business if I like drugs and strippers!”

And, of course, it isn’t. Whether we feel sorry for Charlie Sheen or are disgusted by him, find him hilarious or find him depressing, it really is none of our business what he spends his time and money on, as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone. And in trying to make it our business, we don’t bring shame on him, but on ourselves.