Oh fuck you, you simpering, pathetic, overpaid lump of quivering lard. First, Godwin’s Law. Second, if I had any say in the matter, you’d know what persecution really felt like. Third, and you may not have noticed this, but we live in a country where the two most powerful figures in government at the moment were not leader of the party when it was elected and an unelected peer, respectively. And its taken until now for you to care about democracy (not that I believe for a moment you ever did, of course, just highlighting a major problem if we accept this is true)?
Oh man, if it wasn’t distracting attention from the organized looting of the Treasury by the remains of international banking, I’d want the expenses row to go on for forever.
Advice for the delightfully single minded bloggers at Biased BBC: if the best you can do to discredit Professor Nutt is an article from Melanie “MMR vaccine is causing autism, Obama is a secret Marxist, Muslims and Atheists secretly try to control my mind” Phillips, you may want to consider getting your information from somewhere else.
Anywhere else, in fact. Graffiti on bathroom stalls, crazy old homeless guys, séances, David Icke.
Just saying, you know, there is a wee bit of a credibility issue here.
Nothing better sums up what we here at the PFLD are about than skimming the turd-like droppings of the BNP’s online advocates, and then mocking it. Well, maybe a few things do. But this is pretty funny.
The Home of the Green Arrow - New Labour can’t even correctly keep a plan to smear political opponents under wraps, but they can keep secret a plan to enslave the world into their sinister, totalitarian New World Order.
Battle for Britain – Watch as my strategic use of the word “cunt” covers up how the main thrust of my argument has been so utterly undermined.
Cumbrian Patriots – Copeland BNP sets long term plans – should their pub crawls happen on a weekly, or fortnightly basis?
Titus Advxas – Prepare for war against the establishment! Our use of ALL CAPS, facile latin and ill written diatribes about dhimmification will bring New Labour and their sharia courts to their knees!
Common Sense Against Islam – take away the racist aspect of the BNP and I agree with them quite a lot. Like on, um, well, you know…well I’m sure the BNP have some non-racist qualities, and I’m in total agreement with them! Once I find out what they are.
Man of the Woods - Panic! Muslims! In PUBLIC! Being all Muslim and stuff! Dhimmification!
The Sheffield Nationalist – poorly sourced article from the Daily Mail, confirming my prejudices!
Up Pompeii – what do you mean “have I heard of Avicenna”? He was the 20th hijacker in the 9/11 plot, right?
So….no doubt, as some of you noticed, I took an extended leave of absence from the blogosphere.
I wasn’t completely gone. I still stuck around on a couple of forums, showed up in the comments section of one place or another. But yeah…I wasn’t posting here. And with mostly good reason.
The recession hit me pretty hard. Graduating into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression is not, generally speaking, a good move. For most of the period I was off here, I was searching for jobs, and bitching about my lack of success, on a few sites where I was pretty well known, and thus my bitchery wouldn’t be too badly looked upon.
As such, I was not in a good condition for writing, nor general political snarkery. And the welfare system in this country is not exactly wonderful, as you may well know. Due to a fuckup, I had to pay a significant fee to my University, while unemployed, which left me losing money every month. Additionally, the Job Centre was…less than helpful in getting me employment. There wasn’t much they could do, and no doubt there were people who needed help more than me, but still…the training courses in particular were a massive waste of my time.
But, I am once again gainfully employed. And even better, gainfully employed but with time to spare to be an annoyment on the net. So, the PFLD is once again open for business. And making fun of people on the internet, which I like to think of as our primary mission.
I might start blogging here again.
That once again, indescisive me, I have decided to primarily blog at Verwirrung. I’m coming up with some new ideas for the blog there, which will hopefully make it much more active and popular, but even if they do not pan out, I’ll still be dumping my thoughts there every day or two.
I’ll still cross post things here, as well as occasionally dump notes here, so keep an eye out. I just wont be doing it as often.
(Sadly this is not the story of a man with a several hundred year old penis that takes up a large tract of expensive land in Westminster, but it should be)
Britain’s most senior civil servants are to hold formal talks with the Liberal Democrats on their plans for government as Whitehall prepares for a hung parliament in which Nick Clegg could hold the balance of power after the next election.
In a departure from the Lib Dems’ practice at the last election, Clegg has agreed that members of his front bench will meet Whitehall’s permanent secretaries to discuss the party’s manifesto. The decision to hold the meetings, which are also being offered to the Tories, comes as the “golden triangle” at the top of Whitehall makes preparations for an election in which no party gains an overall majority.
Opinion polls indicate that Britain may be heading for a hung parliament, the first since 1974. The failure of David Cameron to secure a decisive breakthrough in the polls after appearing to build up a lead in the summer has convinced senior figures in Whitehall to make coalition plans…
While there are few phrases in the English language more beautiful than “deadlocked Parliament” I see little reason to break out the champagne, even if it were to happen. Common sense dictates the mostly tolerable Lib Dems would be in the “Kingmaker” position of having significant power over government policy and thus introducing a measure of sanity back into the wonderful bubble world of Westminster. However, deep seated and mutual loathing aside, there is no reason why Labour and the Tories could not make their own ad hoc alliances on issues of mutual agreement – such as screwing over the proles, or national (in)security. Precisely the areas those parties are most loathed and destructive, in other words. Since despite their apparent opposition both of these parties have significant overlap in such areas as this, to think that a Hung Parliament would interfere with the downward spiral of the UK political class is wishful thinking at best. The Lib Dems, as always, will be ignored, and a national government of unity will likely emerge, naturally due to the “unique” nature of the economic crisis, either de facto or de jure.
I’d just like to remind everyone the last time we had a national government of unity was under WWII, which gave the government of the day, for all intents and purposes, dictatorial power over the country. At least back then there was, you know, a reason behind its creation, and some limiting factors. Given the economic illiteracy in government, I wouldn’t hope for such a quick and simple solution here.
tl;dr, Lib Dems will get played in any scenario where they are not the second largest party in Parliament, if not largest. Sooner they wise up to that fact, the better.
Gordon Brown has officially jumped the shark.
Saved the world indeed…hell, lets dial back a bit, saved the banking system? Wow, well that’s really brought the economy back on line, hasn’t it? For those of you fortunate enough to be in a fairly urban area, the answer is no, it hasn’t. In fact, the local factory here laid off most of its temporary Christmas staff last week, and I here other companies are close to doing the same. Since this town only has five or six big employers that, until recently, took on lots of workers, this is a huge blow to the local economy.
Of course I know that the banking system was never going to be saved and the bailout is nothing more than cleverly disguised looting. But I would have thought that if the banking system had been saved, at least one effect would be, you know, an improving economy. If anything, these bailouts are making things worse, by rewarding businesses that, in the long run, cannot be saved. We’re just putting off the inevitable, and making sure when a crash does come, there will be no money left to deal with it.
If you are going to insist on fighting each other, could you at least wait a few more hours? Its just I’m going to be off playing some NWN, and quite frankly, I don’t want to miss two nuclear powers scrapping with each other.
Thanks in advance.
Edit: I have realized this is still a disorganized shambles and I am failing to make my point clearly. Look out for edits tomorrow, its too late for that shit here and now.
Still catching up on my reading, I noticed this interesting post* over at Chaos Marxism on marketing and memes. All good stuff, as you would expect. However, the mention of the problems of memes and marketing, in particular the notion of artifice and being a product of late capitalism reminded me of a few phrases in a book on Foucault I have been reading and discussing recently.
In the context of Foucault’s ontological conception of freedom, Pozorov mentions that
this notion of freedom is entirely divorced from any assumption of originary authenticity and the correlate projects of self-discovery or self-actualisation that are central to the epistemic regime of liberal government. As a number of studies have demonstrated, liberal governmental rationality synthesises the mobilisation of human desire for freedom with the specification of its content, so that one is incited to discover and liberate one’s ‘inner self’ through following an externally devised model of e.g. an ‘active citizen’, an ‘enterprising employee’ or a ‘caring mother’
I’ve someone who has often been suspicious of both the ‘lifestyle transgressivism’ of certain artistic and subcultural groups and New Age self-empowerment style programs, but for some reason (probably the fact that I am not especially smart) I never put the two together in this sort of framework. But both have bothered me, the former being pretty much an excuse to channel some contemporary form of discontent into safe consumerism and the second for promoting the sort of mushy headed, obscurantist personalities that have been well discussed by people like Slavoj Žižek.
The question for me is that can identity be overcome, even temporarily, or do we only ever shift between varying memetic networks that always promote one sort of identity or another? While Foucault and Pozorov seem to think that it possible to undertake transitory acts of ‘concrete freedom’ aimed against diagrammatic government I’m not so certain. Its an attractive viewpoint, that much is true. And in the Art of Memetics, for example, Unruh and Wilson mention the concept of phages, a sort of poison meme designed to undermine other memes.
But that seems a very abstract concept and I’m not sure a phage so powerful as to undermine the concept of identity, even temporarily, would either be feasible, nor could it ever spread very far as I’m sure such a phage would have negative effects, at least in the context of our current political culture. At the AoM authors point out, any meme which reduces your chances for survival is going to have problems to spread. Common sense really, but worth pointing out.
But aside from this transgressive act, Foucault mentions another way in which this ‘concrete freedom’ could be approached. By approaching freedom from the definition of the potential to change, from this particular point of view of:
active self-fashioning, ‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which men […] seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’.
can we work that into a memetic framework, ignoring the problems of aesthetic values for now? I think it is possible. I am of course familiar with the concept of paradigm piracy, and think perhaps the systematic version of this may play a role.
To extend the virological metaphor, we can think of ideas and memes like viruses. In fact, it seems that the spread of information and diseases share certain characteristics, so perhaps this isn’t such a large metaphorical leap at all. And how do you gain immunity to diseases? Through vaccination, most frequently weak exposure or exposure to a similar disease which stimulates the immunological system. In terms of memes, I would suggest this does not mean one is less likely to pick up a certain meme (the only method I can envisage for that is locking oneself tightly within a memeplex which distrusts all other memes and also controls what communications one is permitted to be exposed to – such as certain versions of fundamentalist Christianity) but that this memeplex would be easier to’ switch out of’, that one could change identities and outlook.
This isn’t the same as discarding the meme, per se, only relegating or repressing it for a while, as another group of memes take over. Sorry, my head is fuzzy right now, but I think I’m making my point clear.
This fits in with the description of freedom in the AoM as well. To recap, for those who haven’t read the book, Unruh and Wilson discuss the idea of agency. Since humans are a bunch of competing drives, what freedom means, in their worldview, is the ability to move oneself within a network or system. If we consider the world information network as a single system, the ability to move within that, to expose oneself to various memes and be able to repress and switch between an even greater series of memes may well be a conception of freedom that fits into this model.
I don’t know, truth be told. I think I lost the thread of what I was trying to get across a while ago, and went off on some meandering point. But that has always been my style. I suck at giving answers, or even frameworks for potential answers. I am good at raising questions though, and throwing various ideas together to see where they align.
*Quite frankly, when you compare the slipshod, lackadaisical method by which this blog is thrown together compared with something like the Chaos Marxist site, which shows systemic and planned out posts, it is almost shameful by comparison. Posts there are almost always going to be thought provoking, whereas here you suffer under a pot luck approach, depending on many various factors.
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