You cannot create without obsession. Obsession drives ideas or pleasures into clarity and then into action, but it is also is a burden and a watermark. Few can - or want to - make anything without leaving the dirty red smudge of an ego’s seal.
I wonder then if obsession is a curse, a blessing, or a skill?
I will spare you the formality of sketching the well-worn philosophical and logical paths, but I can happily state that freedom does not exist in humanity - we are all bonded to something. Instead there are degrees of ‘freeness’, and most of us in western Europe attempt to attain as high a level of it as we humanly can. Personal freedom is in almost all cases the priority for us; freedom of others usually follows as an idealistic second.
With this in mind, this facebook meme caught my eye a few days ago:
Don’t like gay marriages? Don’t get one.. Don’t like cigarettes? Don’t smoke them.. Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one.. Don’t like sex? Don’t do it.. Don’t like drugs? Don’t take them.. Don’t like porn? Don’t watch it.. Don’t like alcohol? Don’t drink it.. Don’t like guns? Don’t buy one.. Don’t like your rights taken away??? Don’t take away someone else’s. Repost if you agree
On the whole this meme has a pleasant liberal taste but its sugars are a little synthetic and it has some hidden ingredients, like a cheap Easter egg. Here’s my thoughts:
Don’t like gay marriages? Don’t get one
Perfectly fine. What you do behind bedroom doors or in registry offices doesn’t concern me. Maybe some people feel a bit ‘uurgh’ if they see same-sex hand-holding, but the same people tend to be unmoved by pets cleaning their genitals in public.
Don’t like cigarettes? Don’t smoke them
Yeah… not so watertight as smoke has been proved to be illness dressed as pleasure. When you get ill, someone or some entity has to look after you and people are sad when you die young for the sake of some very expensive, highly taxed dried herbs. Plus, this assumes that you smoke alone, in a closed room, because as soon as smoke travels to someone else, the game rules change.
Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one
‘Don’t like abortions’ is not a phrase that plays well in my head - no one LIKES abortions surely - but I concur on this one. It’s a very individual, difficult choice and one I will never have to personally make, so why would I deny it to a woman?
Don’t like sex? Don’t do it
Leave it to the pro’s.
Don’t like drugs? Don’t take them
I’ve tackled this before. To summarize: Homegrown herbs, fine; heroin and crack, not so much. You find crack addicts rarely keep themselves to themselves when they are ‘clucking off their tits’ (desiring teh drugz pleaz).
Don’t like porn? Don’t watch it
Yeah, make some room by the screen for the rest of us… god daaaam…. and don’t you dare say the word ‘objectify’ in any context, it spoils my magic feeling.
Don’t like alcohol? Don’t drink it
I love alcohol sometimes, so it pains me to admit that in a wider context it’s a devilish concoction. Come to Brighton at 1am on a Friday night for the primary evidence.
Don’t like guns? Don’t buy one
The idea that guns only affect those that own them is a little flawed. By little I of course mean ‘bloody massively hugely’.
Don’t like your rights taken away??? Don’t take away someone else’s
As a general rule, this is a good starting point. As a hard-and-fast rule; highly unrealistic.
It is perfectly possible, perhaps even advisable, to make friends with people and not agree with all that they say and think. I have no interest in talking to mirrors all day.
It’s been a while, mainly due to the rigors of trying to make a wage from the creative life, but I stumbled across this video through a friend and thought it would sit well on my blog.
In this clip the famed philosopher and outspoken humanist Bertrand Russell gives two pieces of advice to future humans. Both are important and really quite simple:
- Stick to the facts/evidence
- Embrace love as a kind of wisdom
I of course agree with both, but what really engages me is the friction between these two statements. How compatible are they?
An interesting (if not handsomely formed) post in response to the elimination of Osama Bin Laden. To summarise; Al Qaeda is a starfish, not a spider.
A side point - seeing as the writer in question is a digital guru of the highest order, could he have not rustled a prettier looking blog together?
When dealing with the idea of law, it is essential to step outside your own morality and concede when a person’s choices are enough, and when people need protection from themselves and others.
—-
Terry Pratchett, locked in a firefight on that last front they call Alzheimer’s, is to take part in a documentary on assisted death, traveling alongside someone to the famed Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. His companion for the trip is suffering from the latter stages of incurable Motor Neurone Disease, and will be one of over a hundred UK citizens who have made the journey to end their lives on their own volition with professional assistance.‘A Good Death’ is a term often used, and in the UK it is currently difficult to find, thus the necessity of some to travel, whilst very ill, overseas for a simple service that could be administered in someone’s own home. Morality of course, and a possible legal minefield are the roadblock. Morally, there is a wide spectrum of feeling and some people would never use such a service, but is it fair that law prevents a consented, peaceful and painless end to someone’s final battle? I invite you to form your own answer, but make sure you refer to the opening of this blog before you do so.
I have a confession to make: I think I want to write a novel. A standard middle-class confession but bear with me:
- I am surprisingly confident that I have an excellent and highly original concept. I’ve thought about it a lot and I can see its potential.
- I don’t yet have any characters or story-lines, but I do see possible beginnings for how a story could develop through the concept.
- I am a vastly under-read and under-qualified writer, and I’ve barely written even a short story since school. Instead, I’ve written a lot of pretty average blogs that have been a mixture of bedroom journalism and half-arsed confessional nonsense.
In my dreams, I would plan out the characters and a weaving plot-line, then hand it over to Philip Pullmann (who would luckily fall in love with the idea and completely get it). He would then write it in a luminous and accessible prose and we’d release it as a collaboration. A film and 10 episode award-winning TV dramatization would naturally follow. Unfortunately, this is unlikely.
Why would I want to write a novel at all, when I am not equipped to write one? This train of thought helped establish an obvious but important fact:
—> Stories aren’t just for novels. <—
That doesn’t mean this aforementioned idea wouldn’t work in one, but that the novel format is not the only route to the idea’s expression. It’s only recently dawned on me that a large leather bound book is only one place amongst many to store an story.
Let’s take the songwriting app I am currently producing: it is effectively a chapter from a book about the nature of pop music that I could have written. Instead of writing that book however, I have written a simple creative experience, one that people can explore rather than only absorb. This is something I only realized halfway through the process of creating it, when I was confused about what a non-programmer could offer in terms of app/software development. I now realize that I am, in essence, the writer of the app, and I think it’s important to remember that “writing” and “stories” are not the stuff of words alone.
Perhaps then my idea and other future stories could be best stored in a completely different format? A film or TV show is an obvious choice, but how about:
- a comic
- a videogame
- a piece of software
- a painting
- an art installation
- a website
- a play
When it comes to stories, novels aren’t the only fruit.
With the current climate of stammering monarchs in full season across L.A and the Middle East, the European Court of Justice ruling against gender-based insurance policy made only a small dent in the news feeds of the UK. In a slower news week, I think this would’ve sparked an interesting debate on the meaning of equality, as this is something of a landmark ruling, albeit a quiet one.
Taking insurance is essentially betting against yourself and is perhaps best understood by its use in Blackjack, where you can bet against yourself if the dealer shows an Ace. In life, insurance is taken to avoid being fully exposed to the fallout of possible disaster. Insurance brokers gear these bets so they will, on average, win them time and time again. It’s a curious service, and not one fully aligned with the notion of equality. In a metaphorical world where all have sufficient capital and access to good lawyers, insurance might not exist (except for the betting man or his well-heeled cousin; the stockbroker).
Gender relates to insurance in the same way anything does; it is known to be a factor in an event’s probability. For example, if you are to bet on a randomly chosen man racing a randomly chosen woman over 100 metres, the sensible money will be placed on the man. If you are a car insurance broker, it might be quite critical for your business model to know that a young man is twice as likely to have an accident compared to a young woman.
The ECJ has ruled that gearing insurance premiums based on gender is to be stopped by late-2012, and this is an interesting act in the name of equality. Mainly because it could produce decidedly unbalanced results. For insurance brokers to pursue the same financial results, they will have to raise the current rates of insurance for women, effectively making them pay for the accidents of young men.
It is highly ironic that most modern gender reforms are generally made to enhance female equality, yet this act will charge women more for being undeniably better drivers. I presume the act is designed to eliminate the concept of gender as a discriminating article, but I think denying the differences of the genders is not necessarily the path to a real and useful equality.
Personally, I see this case as a perfect example of the collision between the idea of rights and the idea of truth, and this collision will occur time and time again in relation to equality policy. And if this case reveals any truth, it is that there are few people better placed to accredit the merits and misdemeanors of the genders than insurance brokers.
