The other day I mentioned a little project I’ve been quietly working on, that of turning some of the ‘thoughts’ of ‘Steve Freedom’ (aka local BNP Councillor, Simon Smith) into a few usable campaign materials for, well, anyone campaigning against the BNP in their local area.

I think we all know the score, here. Under Nick Griffin, the BNP are doing everything possible to conceal their real views and opinions from public sight and present a wholly false image of themselves as a party who’ve left behind their racist/anti-semitic/generally fascist roots. The value in my work, earlier this year, in tying a local BNP councillor back to his psudonym, ‘Steve Freedom’, on the Stormfront forums, lies in capturing the views of a BNP member as expressed while they were off their guard and posting in a ’sympathatic’ environment - one in which they felt able to drop their public face and say what they really think.

As is my usual modus operandi, some of the images I’m putting together for these resources may offend a few people along the way - which is good, because if you’re not offended by the BNP and their values then there’s something seriously wrong - and I make no apology at all for any offence caused. All I ask is that you look at the images (when released) in context and consider the message they convey.

And if you are offended, don’t moan at me. I’m only interpreting (visually) what Simon Smith had to say, and if you don’t like that then don’t vote BNP.

So, as a little bit of teaser, I’ve posted a preview image of one of the posters that will be included in the pack (below) for you perusal and general edification - enjoy.

Oh, and feel free to use the image if you like as long as you accept two simple conditions. First, keep the image in context, please - use it in its entirety or not at all - and second, a link back to this post would be nice if you can manage it.

Like many other bloggers, I’ll be taking some time to do real world things over the next few days (mainly ‘Dad things’), so bloggage will be touch lighten than usual.

I’ll also be using the holiday period to finish off a couple of projects I’ve had in the pipeline for a while, one of which is particularly relevant to this week’s Guardian ‘expose’ of the BNP, which was fairly interesting but, for those us veterans of anti-racist activism, fell largely into the category of ‘tell us something we don’t already know’.

As some may recall, one of my more popular posts this year, took a little trip into the tiny mind of a local BNP councillor, as revealed by his comments on the Stormfront forums, and over the last few weeks I’ve be quietly working away to turn some of that material into a general ‘resource pack’ of posters, flyers and leaflets, which I plan to make available via MoT to anyone, of any political party, who wants to use them in campaigning against the racist scumbags.

The pack should be ready early in the new year, and will include some ready to use materials and others formatted to enable campaign groups and political parties/associations to add their own branding. Some of the material is also going to be pretty hard-hitting, as befits source material like ‘These are some comparisons that came to mind between Jesus Christ and Adolph Hitler:”

And with that, I’ll bid you adieu for a day or two. Have a good one.

Stephen Hawking’s foreword to a ‘A Brief History of Time’ contains a brief but quite illuminating note on the attitude of the publishing industry towards ‘popular’ science books, one in which he relates how he was advised by the editor assigned to his book that each mathematical equation he incorporated into the text would cut his ‘audience’ (and his sales) by half.

In the end, Hawking made do with only one equation, Einstein’s famous mass-energy equation E=MC², and the book went on to become an international best-seller. Quite how many people actually read the book, finished it, and understood its content is unknown (I did, but then I started the book from the position having a pretty good grounding in physics, anyway, so I’m probably not that representative of the book’s total audience), but one suspects that figure to be far less that the book’s sales as, even when presented in a simplified form and stripped of its complex mathematical abstractions, cosmology is still a tricky subject to grasp well and one that requires a considerable amount of imagination.

It’s been noted before that there are a few bloggers out there who’re prone to the occasional sense of humour failure (read the last paragraph), not least Tom Hamilton, who should perhaps give being a little less sensible a try from time to time.

Tom seems to be a bit of a snit over my recent snark at Jonathan Derbyshire for taking a horribly pretentious and desperately over-intellectualised shot at Richard Dawkins and his current best-seller, ‘The God Delusion‘. Do go and read Tom’s comments, please. They’re well worth reading as an object lesson in the dangers of taking yourself far too seriously.

Tom’s complaint, such as it is, seems to be that I didn’t put forward a ‘good argument’ in response to Derbyshire’s comments on Dawkin’s book and resorted instead to taking the piss in this passage:

Dawkins’ arguments in the ‘God Delusion’ may well be philosophically unsatisfying, but then he is writing for an audience, some of whom may well own precisely two books - The Bible and (if they have children) The Children’s Illustrated Bible.

Either way, they’re unlikely give a toss about whether Dawkin’s ignores “the Wittgensteinian dilemmas” in his book, largely because many of them have never even heard of Wittgenstein, save for a few fans of Monty Python who may know that he played in midfield for the German Philosopher’s XI behind a front two of Heidegger and Nietzche.

And there’s no denying that I did, indeed, take the piss - but that doesn’t mean either that there isn’t a good underlying argument in there. In fact there are several ‘good arguments’ in there if you take the time to look for them.

Whatever else might be said of the The God Delusion, the simple fact remains that Dawkins, in writing that book, was writing for a popular audience. Many in that audience will have only the vaguest of notions as to who Wittgenstein was and what he might have been about (aside from man-marking Plotinus) and most of those are unlikely to give a shit about him or his work anyway - a good test of that argument, if it could be contrived, would be to put a Wikipedia search box at the end of Derbyshire’s article and see just how many of those stumbling across his remarks wound up having to look him (Wittgenstein) up just to figure out exactly what Derbyshire was maundering on about.

It’s not necessarily the case that Dawkins’ audience for the God Delusion are incapable of understanding Wittgenstein, although I’d venture that many would find his work, like that of most philosophers, to be overly abstract, obtuse and pretty intractable - and the same could be said for most philosophers and philosopical works. It’s rather more the case that a large proportion of that audience simply don’t see the relevance of Wittgenstein (and his arguments) to the overall pattern of their daily lives, lives in which they get on perfectly well without him, while Dawkins, in writing for popular audience, is attempting to attain precisely that level of relevance in order to reach his audience.

Its a matter of simple practicalities: Joe Public no more ponders on the “grammatical differences between the use of religious language and ordinary language” while watching Songs of Praise than Wayne Rooney takes a quick mental run through Newton’s laws of motion and gravity before stepping up to take a free kick. That’s the real world.

Derbyshire’s arguments, as with most of the response to Dawkins’ book from within religious/academic circles, derive from a standard tactic that one might happily characterise as the ‘Muggeridge Defence’ in which any popular/populist assault on the status and privileges of orthodox religion is immediately attacked for its alleged lack of intellectual rigour and its ‘misunderstanding’ of the nature of religion by, in the case of the Anglican Church, a roving coterie of tame Oxbridge-educated Christian intellectuals - or, in the case of the Catholic Church, they just field the Jesuits.

Whichever strand of Christianity you happen to be dealing with, the objective, in all cases, is broadly the same - to drag the debate up into the rariefied atmosphere of academia to a point where the majority of the audience collapse due to oxygen starvation and drop out of the discussion. This isn’t about debating the arguments that Dawkins actually has with orthdox religion - I’ve no doubt as an academic he’s more than capable of holding his own in such an environment - but about deliberately and conciously pulling the debate into areas of intellectual abstration that exclude the majority of its potential and, as Dawkins would argue, necessary audience.

This is why much of theologically-driven assault on The God Delusion has concentrated on his characterisation of religion as being ‘childish’. As an obvious ’straw man’, its an easy line of attack for Christian intellectuals and professional theologians because, at an academic level, discussions of theology, philosophy and metaphysics are anything but childish or simplistic. But that ignores the reality of exoteric religion and the manner in which the Church excludes the vast majority of its adherents from such arguments and ’sells’ its worldview to its own popular audience in terms of blind faith and an often rigid adherence to the belief in the literal truth of the contents of the Bible, a view of religion that is not only childish but deeply and deliberately infantilising. Dawkins may be making use of a straw man in his arguments, but its one that was originally constructed, stitched together and well-stuffed by exoteric religion, and all of its own volition and contrivence.

Therein lies the central hypocrisy of the religious ‘fight-back’ against Dawkins and his arguments in The God Delusion - they attack Dawkins for peddling gross oversimplifications and for a lack of intellectual rigour while knowing full well that the brand of religion that their own faith purveys from the pulpit every Sunday morning is no less a gross oversimplification and no less lacking in genuine intellectual content and argument than anything that Dawkins may be pitching to his audience - unless, of course, I’ve got that wrong and I missed the episode of Highway in which Harry Seacombe debated Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

That’s what’s really pissing off the Church establishment here. In pitching The God Delusion to a popular audience, Dawkins is doing no more than playing Christianity at its own game. His arguments against religion (and for atheism) may be a little simplistic in places and they may well be presented with the kind of polemical fury more usually associated with sermons from an evangelical pulpit, but his arguments are pitched to a mass popular audience and presented in the language of ‘ordinary’ people, crossing the long established (and heavily protected) demarcation line into territory that the Church has long considered it own priivileged and exclusive preserve.

Just as Hawking’s publisher understood that liberally sprinkling the text of ‘A Brief History of Time’ with the complex mathematics of cosmology would kill the book’s mass market potential, so we can be sure that Dawkins and his publisher would have understood that detailed discussions of Wittgensteinian dilemmas would have had the same effect on The God Delusion - and we can also be sure that that’s also well understood by those currently attacking Dawkins’ work for its philosophical ‘limitations’, hence the amount of general whinging that the book’s spawned amongst the denizons of Christian academia and the Church establishment, who’s real issue with Dawkins is that he is successfully reaching out to a mass audience with a line of argument they’d much prefer to see safely confined to academic journals or the kind of book that cost £50 from the Oxford University Press and reach a total audience of 150 academics, all of whom know the arguments forwards, backwards and sideways already. Anywherre, so long at its keep well away from Joe Public, who might read it and then start asking a few awkward questions about the (unmerited) privileged position and status afforded to religion in wider public life.

The choice of ‘Pseud’s Corner’ for the title of my original snark at Jonathan Derbyshire was not a reflection on his intellectual abilities but on the general hypocrisy of his strand of critique - ‘pseud’ in this case refers specifically to the affection of intellectual superiority and unmerited assumption of the cerebral ‘high ground’ by those (in general) who know full well that Christianity is no less assiduous in, or averse to, ‘dumbing down’ its own message for public consumption and to reach a mass audience than Dawkins has been in publishing his own arguments. It is, unequivocally, a false position and one founded on a deep-seated and conscious hypocrisy, one practiced (and near-perfected) by exoteric religion over the course of many centuries.

Where Dawkin’s differs from the Church establishment, however, is in his intent.

Dawkin’s may have simplified his arguments to reach a mass audience but, as a scientist, one can be sure that his intention, hope and, indeed, desire for The God Delusion is to spark off and encourage intellectual inquiry amongst its readership; to raise doubts, spawn questions and challenge his readers to seek their own answers and fill in the gaps in his own arguments (as presented) by their own efforts. By contrast, in all but the case of the would-be Christian intellectual, who can be safely sequestered away from a mass audience within the Church heirarchy or the rarefied confines of academia - but for the occasional ‘Bishop of Durham’-style escapee who succeeds in blabbing something embarrassing within the media’s earshot - the primary objective of the exoteric religion is to suppress intellectual inquiry and enforce a conformity of faith and belief on its followers, from which it derives its temporal authority, its privileges, status and its considerable wealth. Don’t just take my word for it, ask Gallileo.

Be all that as it may, by far most amusing aspect of Tom’s post is that, having criticised my own comments about Derbyshire’s post, the style and tone of which were obviously intended to be facetious, not only does he fail to recognise that that post did actually make a serious point about the style adopted by Dawkins in The God Delusion, but his own counter-argument consists largely of a stream of piss-poor Ad-hominem remarks none of which have any particular relevance to the point I was actually, if sarcastically. making.

Unity’s response is to say, “Look! He said ‘Wittgenstein’! What a pseud!” Worse, it’s to say, “Look! Stupid people don’t know who Wittgenstein is!” Even worse, it’s to accuse other people of stupidity while putting an apostrophe in the word “Dawkin’s”.

I mean, for fucks sake, if you’re reduced to putting up counter arguments based on typos then not only do you not have a good argument to advance, but you really don’t have an argument at all.

To conclude his remarks. Tom lays the following charge:

This is an argument which begins by refusing to engage with the substantive content of someone else’s position, and ends by appealing to the ignorance of people who you think are stupider than you. I can’t think of many things more worthy of Pseuds Corner than that.

Which simply drives home the point that I was making - that a significant majority of Dawkin’s critics are, themselves, ‘refusing to engage’ with the ’substantive content’ of his position, as laid out in The God Delusion, by refusing to acknowledge the Church’s own conscious (and longstanding) manipulation of public ‘ignorance’ to suit its own ends and avoiding, like the plague, any possibility of being drawn into debating Dawkins’ arguments at a level that is accessible to a mass audience, other than on those occasions where they choose, instead, to whine incessantly about the lack of public ‘respect’ (by which they really mean ‘deference’) afforded to religious belief. Like those who wave Wittgenstein in the public’s face as a counter argument to Dawkin’s thesis on religion and atheism, Tom is, here, responding to the points he wishes I’d made and not those that I actually posted.
In fact, its rather more than that because exoteric religion not only manipulates public ignorance, it deliberately fosters and encourages it for its own benefit - religion is nothing without its legion of complient followers, and anything that cuts into that cosy little arrangement, like a mass-market atheistic polemic that tops the best-sellers list, really pisses on their over-privileged chips.

My own comments were not an ‘appeal to ignorance’, as Tom is trying to suggest, but an attack on elitism and the hypocrisy of those who couch their critique of Dawkins in terms of intellectual abstractions while knowing full well that their own faith not only makes extensive use of the same ‘methods’ adopted by Dawkins to promote his own ideas, but actually invented them.

The last word, on this, I’ll leave to H L Mencken:

“I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking”

Yep. I can certainly go for that…

Haven’t done a decent fisk for a while, but then I spotted Marcel Berlins reworking a few tired old arguments and decided that this is too good an chance to get my eye back in to be passing it up…

Over to you, Marcel.

Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” awards were started in 1927, since when there have been some pretty dodgy winners, Hitler among them.

Actually, Marcel, I wouldn’t say that Hitler was a ‘dodgy’ winner of Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ award. A dodgy character, certainly, but then Times’ criteria (which you acknowledge later) is the person who, in their opinion, “most affected the news and our lives, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse”. Hitler definitely falls into the ‘for worse’ category but as he picked up his ‘award’ in 1938, a year in which he did rather dominate the international stage/news agenda.

Leaving aside the little matter of Godwin’s Law for a moment, I get the impression that Marcel really doesn’t like this year’s winner and has got it into his head that bringing up dear old Adolf might just be a subtle way of trashing Time’s choice right from the off.

Isn’t that just a tad intellectually dishonest?

They clearly should not be taken too seriously, other than as a subject of mild end-of-the-year controversy. The 2006 winner, though, has troubled me for reasons that go well beyond mere dissatisfaction with the verdict. The winner was “You” - that is, us - and to make sure we got the message, when we look at Time we see ourselves in a mirror embedded in the cover. Actually, the You is not quite all of us, merely those of us who have contributed to the growth of the internet and all it contains - for instance blogging and participating in YouTube, MySpace or other “user-generated” sites.

Ah, now I see the problem. Time have only gone and given the award to a bunch of plebs. Incidentally, aside from knocking out a few articles for CiF, just how much has Marcel actually contributed to the growth of the internet and is that really sufficient for him to justifiably include himself in ‘us’?

Perhaps he could chuck a link in to his YouTube video collection or MySpace site in the next article? No? Don’t think so? Now you do surprise me…

A spokesman for Time admitted that, had they chosen a single person who “most affected the news and our lives, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse”, it would have been President Ahmadinejad of Iran. But a lot of people would have been upset at that decision, so they plumped for the feel-good group, You.

Can’t say I’m a big fan of President Ahmadinejad, personally, but then as with Hitler he does seem to fit pretty well into Time’s criteria and he wouldn’t be the first controversial figure to be chosen. Aside from Adolf, ‘Uncle’ Joe Stalin picked up the award twice (the first time in 1939, a year in which his personal ‘highlights’ were the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invading Finland), as did Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 .

Time did tone it down a bit after Khomeini as it stirred up enough of a row to cost them a few subscriptions - although just to prove that you really can’t please everyone, they also got a fair old hammering for choosing Rudolf Giuliani in 2001, against a body of opinion that held that a strict application of their criteria should have resulted in the award going to Osama Bin Laden.

Again, the relevance of Time’s number two choice is a bit unclear, unless, like the opening reference to Hitler, its just another cheap shot at Time.

Time’s editor, Richard Stengel, commented: “You, not us, are transforming the information age.” That was a profoundly depressing statement, as was the fuller citation explaining the reasoning: “For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game …”

Profoundly depressing statement? Ooh, I wonder what’s coming next? Could it be yet another journalistic bout of whinging about us nassssty little bloggerses?

I think it just might…

The misguided and misleading use of the term democracy in this context, and the manifestly incorrect claim that You have conquered the professionals, are bad enough. But my main objection is wider. The Time award and the reasons for it promote what I believe to be one of the most pernicious and disturbing philosophies of our age, extolling the cult of what is often patronisingly referred to as the “ordinary” person.

Well, okay. Maybe talk of a ‘digital democracy’ is stretching the point a little too far - the Internet is rather more a Hayekian self-organising system, so some sort of variation on the general theme of catallaxy might have been a touch more appropriate. Nevertheless the general tone here does seem to be more or less along the lines of ‘Why the fuck have they given the award to a bunch of fucking plebs?’.

I emphasise immediately that if I use the word “ordinary”, it is in quotation marks - it is not to suggest inferiority or any comparison with an elite of extraordinary people. The philosophy I object to, which the internet’s information explosion has fostered, is that the “ordinary” person is as - no, even more - important to the dissemination of knowledge, information and opinion as the expert or the professional.

Ah, now. But here’s the rub. You see a lot of us ‘ordinary people’ out here blogging away on the internet are, to varying degrees, both experts and professionals in our own personal field. For the most part that field doesn’t happen to be journalism, but that doesn’t make us any less expert or professional that someone like, say, Marcel Berlins.

You see, it’s becoming more and more apparent as blogging develops that what’s really getting to piss off the professional commentariat is the fact that quite a few bloggers are actually experts and professionals, and worse still they’re experts and professionals in fields that journalists insist on commenting on even though, much of the time, they haven’t got the first fucking clue what they’re on about - isn’t that right, Polly?
Leaving the ‘hard news’ journos to one side and out of this more or less completely (as that’s a very different discipline) a fair proportion of those writing regular columns for newspapers do seem to spend much of their time writing about things that they are singularly unqualified to talk about. Check out Mad Mel Phillip’s site and take a look at her articles about MMR and autism, every single one of which is a complete load of half-witted, uninformed and ill-educated bollocks. You couldn’t find anyone less qualified to talk about the alleged (but completely unfounded) ‘link’ between MMR and autism if you borrowed one of Sting’s Amazonian mates, the one’s with the CD embedded in the their lower lip. And yet on the strength of being a journalist (allegedly), she appears to think that she’s eminently qualified to comment on the subject, even if everything she’s written about it is complete and utter crap.

Back in the days when the dead tree press really was king, columnists could pretty much get away with that kind of thing without too much fear of getting ‘called’ on it - after all the only public reply/rebuttal they ever got was through letters to the editor, which can always be chosen selectively and very carefully ‘blue-pencilled’ so as not to cause too much embarrassment if a columnist got their facts/opinions completely wrong.

Courtesy of the internet, things are now very different, Feedback (and blowback) is almost immediate and there’s no kindly sub-editor to get in the way and shield hapless columnists from the slings and arrows of outrageous sweary bloggers.

That’s what blogging does that so completely winds-up some hacks, it completely fucks with their self-assumed status as an ‘authority’ on whatever it is that they happen to be writing about at a particular time by confronting them with ‘ordinary people’ whose skills, background and experience make them far more of a legitimate authority than some journalists could ever hope to aspire to.

Little wonder, then, that they’re always fucking whinging about us.

It manifests itself in various ways, here and elsewhere. South Korea has a news website, OhMyNews, that uses “citizen journalists” to provide most of its material. It has some 40,000 non-professional contributors; they are, of course, untested and unvetted, their submissions unchecked, their motives unknown. The reader of the website can have no idea about the accuracy of the information on it; yet it is one of the main sources of news for South Koreans.

Yadda, yadda. yadda. Here comes the speech about journalistic standards and ethics yet again…

No. Sorry. Tell a lie, Marcel’s held back at the last minute and decided not to bore us shitless with all that after all.

Because, or course, journalists never, ever get stories completely wrong, do they? They don’t behave unethically or illegally, and they certainly don’t fabricate stories out of nothing.

Citizen journalism, such as it is, works pretty well for two main reasons.

First, it tends to pick up on news stories, and particularly local ones, that just don’t get picked up at all by mainstream newspapers and media outlets. Sites like ‘OhMyNews‘ (it’s usual to include a link when referring to a website, Marcel, as a matter of courtesy) might aggregate together a lot of stories from a lot of different sources but much of the content is highly localised and fills various niches in the ‘market’ for news that the mainstream press tend to ignore.

The second reason it works is due to the immediacy with which readers are able to respond to and comment on news stories  posted on these sites. Post something that is factually incorrect or obviously biased, and it won’t be long before someone shows up to point out your failings. Stories are discussed, debated and dissected, errors and biases noted and pointed out and, if the blogger in question is at all mindful of ‘netiquette’ and the widely accepted standards on online ethics, mistakes are corrected (and properly acknowledged) an art that seems lost on even the most august of news sources - and if not, there’s usually always someone around to provide an alternative ‘take’ on the story.

Whoops - that’s a bit more self-organisation going on there, isn’t it.

Nor can entrants into the social network sites for the young, such as MySpace, have any real idea of the genuineness, truthfulness or hidden motives of their fellow joiners; and it is impossible for the web’s operators to monitor who registers. Not surprisingly, meetings engineered over the internet have caused anguish and tragedy as well as happy associations.

Oh puh-leeze. Even by the piss-poor standards of some of the earlier comments in this article, dragging Hitler and Ahmedinajad in proceedings, this is an ill-concealed low-blow. Yes, Marcels, we know all about things like ‘grooming’ etc. but just because a minority abuse and misuse the medium it doesn’t follow that the medium is all bad or without value.

Then there is the proliferation of - though they don’t yet call them that yet - “citizen reviewers”. Hardly a newspaper here (this one included) is free from readers’ opinions on the holidays they have taken, restaurants they have dined at, films they have seen and so on; it seems that no cultural or leisure activity escapes being assessed by “ordinary” people.

A few months ago the usually reliable Routier Guide to good, honest, affordable English eateries folded. People were no longer buying such guides, we were told. Instead, they searched for places to eat on various websites carrying accounts by people who had chosen to make public their dining experiences. A favourable opinion on a website by, say, a DS of Bristol (who may well be, a recent survey revealed, the chef using a pseudonym) takes precedence over a balanced review of a meal by a trained, independent inspector.

Two points to make here. While it probably is a shame that the Routier Guide has folded (can’t say I ever looked at one, so its difficult to judge) at least some, if not most of the fault for that lies with its own failure to adapt to the changing nature of the market - with more and more people using the internet to scout out their eateries, the question has to be asked as to exactly what, if anything, the published of this guide did to respond to those changes.

In any case, the mere fact that a paper-based guide compiled by ‘trained, independent assessors’ has been pushed out existence by online consumer review sites doesn’t, on its own, prove that consumers have developed a preference for the inexpert opinions of ordinary folk at the expense of genuine expertise. A major part of the attraction of online ‘consumer’ sites is their immediacy - if you suddenly and spontaneously decide that you’d like to eat out one evening, even the best written and most expert guide book is only going to be of use if you actually own a copy, and you can’t seriously think that people really end up thinking, ‘Mmm. I fancy eating out, tonight… must pop out to a book shop and get a decent guide’. Whereas, of course, if you do spontaneously decide to eat out, it takes a matter of minutes to find a consumer site on the internet, get a list of nearby restaurants and get a few opinions as to what the eatery may be like.

Speed, convenience and accessibility are at least as important as expertise in such situations - perhaps more important as the demise of the Routier Guide seems ot suggest.

How long can it be before professional critics and reviewers - people who know what they are talking about, who perhaps have had years of experience in their field - are jettisoned in favour of “ordinary” people’s views? After all, the expert costs money; the amateurs come free. Why do we need our own film/restaurant/book reviewers when hundreds of cinemagoers/diners/readers are only too anxious to tell us what they think?

Who knows? To be honest, if an ‘expert’ is good enough (i.e. genuinely an expert) then there should always be a market for their expertise - the two different strands of reviewing are not, as I see it, mutually exclusive. They provide very different things such that one, at the very least, supplements the other, if not complements it.

But Time’s assertion that those working for nothing are “beating the pros at their own game” is nonsense. They are providing a different service, an opinion based not on expertise and experience, but on their less tutored feelings. I am not saying that the amateur’s view is less legitimate than the professional’s; but it should not be given some sort of mystical prominence.

Except that its not ‘nonsense’ - bloggers very often do beat ‘the pros’ at their own game, but it all depends on who the blogger is, who the ‘pro’ is and what the ‘game’ is. If anything, blogging, in particular, actually puts a premium on expertise when it comes to certain types of journalism and journalists, especially those who specialise in review, criticism and commentary. Where once, journalists could blithely step right out of their fields of expertise and talks utter bollocks with little or no fear of censure, these days they stray from the path of their own ability at their own peril - just ask Polly Toynbee.

No, don’t ask her. Just say the words ‘Tim Worstall‘ and it she starts to twitch or develop a nervous tic then you’ll know I’m right.

That’s the part of this equation that some journalists get - mainly those that have thier own blogs rather that one provided for them by a media organisation - and some don’t. Many of the ‘ordinary people’ out here are anything but ordinary, they have skills, knowledge and expertise in their particular field to a level that many journalists could barely dream of aspiring to let alone attain.

Journalists who play to their real strengths and demonstrate genuine expertise have little or nothing to fear from bloggers and the whole ‘information revolution’ - if anything, their interaction with blogs and bloggers is likely only to enhance their reputation as their work garners approving ‘reviews’ from bloggers who are, likewise, acknowledged amongst their own online communities as possessing considerable expertise - its only those hacks who think they can still get away with ‘mugging it’ on the premise that their audience is too dumb to spot their own lack of ability and/or efforts to research their work that have anything genuinely to fear.

Looking at the information revolution as a whole, the greater participation by You has been a benefit. But the movement is losing its sense of proportion. It has become too successful, too cocky. The role played by those who possess special talents, skills, knowledge, training and creativity should not be undermined by the desire to include the remainder.

There my be the old bout of unseemly hubris floating around, although no more, I’d argue, that one would find on a daily basis in most tabloid newspapers, and I have to agree that ‘the role played by those who possess special talents, skills, knowledge, training and creativity should not be undermined’… not only by the ‘desire to include the remainder’ but also by the arrogance of professional journalists who seem all too ready and willing to forget just how many of us bloggers also possess our own special talents, skills, knowledge, training and creativity.

This, from Pickled Politics, is well worth a read, just for the glorious run of pisstakes of Oliver Kamm that I appear to have accidentally set off in the comments.

Is the book any good? Buggered if I know, but according to the shill on Amazon, the Times seem to like it.

What I really would like to know, though, is why the fuck he sold his custom ‘Superyob’ guitar to that twat out of Adam and the Ants?

As a mountaineer knows, the problem with working in a rarified atmosphere is that you tend to end up being laid low with oxygen starvation.

Here’s Jonathan Derbyshire on the limits of necessary disrespect…

Dawkins’ attempt to explain away centuries of religious belief by comparing it with childish credulity, for instance, is deeply unsatisfactory. And if this kind of genetic explanation is laughably weak, Dawkins’ grasp of the phenomenology of religious belief is non-existent. Here Wood turns to Wittgenstein, who insisted that there are “grammatical differences between the use of religious language and ordinary language” (this is Wood’s gloss on some of the things Wittgenstein says in the notes collected as Culture and Value). Wittgenstein’s claim (anticipated by Kierkegaard and, interestingly enough, Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ) is that religious language is not referential (it’s not about some substantive reality) but modal – in other words, that it gives expression to a “form of life” or way of being in the world.

And his conclusion:

But despite the fact that some of Wittgenstein’s acolytes have wrongly supposed that the master’s doctrines relieved them of the need to justify belief in God, Wood is right to suggest that the “jauntily unphilosophical way in which most popular atheistic writing simply ignores the Wittgensteinian dilemmas is disappointing, and explains why its explanations of the sources of religious belief are so jejune.”

This is George… say hi!

Now, George is a born-again Christian of the variety that tends to consider The Bible to express the literal truth and despite doing fairly well for himself, he’s also not really renowned for being, shall we say, the sharpest tool in the box.

So, despite being fairly atypical in many ways, in some respects he is very typical of your average to below-average follower of an exoteric religion.

Richard Dawkins is a man who provoke a modicum of controversy with his views and the manner in which he expresses them. To some, he is not to their personal taste. Some find him a little too agressively polemical in his approach and some think him rather boorish.

One of Dawkins’ day jobs is that of holding the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University - note the operative words in that statement, ‘public understanding‘. His job is to talk to the public. That’s his primary audience.

So let’s imagine, for the moment, that you were having a conversation with George, a man whose understanding is very public, and you said to, quite casually:

“What relevance do you think Wittgenstein has to the public discourse on atheism and religion?’

Do you think George will reply?

A) Well, I think the jauntily unphilosophical way in which most popular atheistic writing simply ignores the Wittgensteinian dilemmas is disappointing, or

B) Wittgenstein? Mmm. Is that anywhere near Berlin? I think I went to a Bierkeller there once, while visiting that nice Mrs Merkel?

Dawkins’ arguments in the ‘God Delusion’ may well be philosophically unsatisfying, but then he is writing for an audience, some of whom may well own precisely two books - The Bible and (if they have children) The Children’s Illustrated Bible.

Either way, they’re unlikely give a toss about whether Dawkin’s ignores “the Wittgensteinian dilemmas” in his book, largely because many of them have never even heard of Wittgenstein, save for a few fans of Monty Python who may know that he played in midfield for the German Philosopher’s XI behind a front two of Heidegger and Nietzche.

I think the discontinuity here is, therefore, just that bit obvious.

UPDATE: Vistors arriving here by way of Tom Hamilton’s ‘defence’ of Joanthan Derbyshire’s comments, to which this post relates, might like to read this, which rather put matters in their proper context.

Polly Pot (sans vegetables on this occasion) appears to be having multiple orgasms over David Milliband’s half-arsed proposals for personal carbon quotas…

But Miliband’s electric radicalism comes in his plan for personal carbon allowances. Here is where social justice meets green politics for the first time. Give every citizen the same quota of energy and let them buy and sell it on the open market. The half of the population who don’t fly will make money from selling their quota to the half who do. Drive a gas-guzzling 4×4 and you will have to buy a quota from the third of the population with no access to a car. Who could complain about such transparent fairness? It is relatively easy to do: swiping a quota card to pay gas and electricity bills or buying petrol is a simpler transaction than Tesco’s complex information on their loyalty card. In wartime, ration books were produced quickly for all, covering almost everything bought and sold, involving every little corner shop. (Could paper ration books be easier than trying to computerise it all?) Why is this a quintessentially Labour policy that the Tories would never copy? Because it in effect redistributes money from the rich to the poor, from the frequent flyers to never-flyers, with a parallel currency. 

And the usual ’suspects’ - Tim Worstall, Devil’s Kitchen and Factchecking Pollyanna - are rapidly on the case, of course.

Me? I’ve got the odd question or two to ask as well?

Given that a sizeable old proportion of those who would be left with saleable carbon rations under this hare-brained scheme are those who are elderly (and receiving a state pension), on welfare benefits, or on low incomes (and receiving tax credits) and also the kind of people who don’t have a bank account, or have only a basic one, don’t use credit cards, maybe only use a debit card to get cash out of a ‘hole-in-the-wall’, and pay for the gas and electricity using a token meter, perhaps Polly might venture a few answers to the following practical questions.

Where are these people going to go to sell the spare ‘carbon credits’? Not the Post Office, certainly - not after yesterday.
Who will operate and regulate the market?

Will there be commission to be paid on the sale of these credits, and if so, by whom - they buyer, the seller or both? After all, won’t the traders in the market (i.e. the middle men) be expecting to make a little profit themselves?
Will the income from the sale of these credits affect the seller’s entitlement to the benefits they receive?

Will the proceeds of selling carbon credits be classed as taxable income?

(If I got those last two questions right, then I should see the magic words ‘marginal tax rates’ pop up in the comments at some point)

Isn’t this all just another example of a piece of over-complex, unworkable middle-class twattery, that sounds wonderful if you live in Islington but will mean fuck all to anyone living on  a council estate in Gateshead and, like the fuck-ups over tax credits, simply add to the general misery of people who’re already struggling to make ends meet?

Is there not something just plain demeaning about the very idea of issuing people with fucking paper ration books?

Has your column disappeared so far up its own arse that you can now easily give your own kidneys a bit of nibble without stretching?

And have you just not thought this through, as usual?

I guess the title’s a bit of a giveaway that this post is about Christmas and, this being me, you’re already expecting another solid entry for the weekly swearblogger’s round up…

…and I have to say that when I do get into this properly, you won’t be disappointed.

But to start with I should say that there are a few good things about Christmas.

The distinct absence of work for a few days is always welcome. And so is the fact that, just this once in the year, the main Terrestrial TV companies actually bother to spend some fucking money on programming for a change - well apart from ITV, who look to have just given up on that (spending money on programming) altogether.

My six year old daughter’s still young enough to be suckered by the old ‘Santa routine’ and still finds the whole business of opening presents, playing with the packaging for several hours and then stuffing herself with chocolate until she pukes to be a complete blast, which is kinda a fun (yeah, alright - big softy with the kids, I know).

And, after many years of careful relative training, I’ll be getting my usual welcome supply of book tokens, which, this year, may well necessitate the purchase of yet another set of bookshelves - or as my partner usually manages to say, ‘I don’t know why you don’t just move into the fucking British Library’.
So it’s not all bad, but it is a time of year that does come with rather more than its fair share of irritants, some of which will be getting both barrels in a moment

Mmm. Where to start? How about with a perennial favorite…

‘Away in a Manger’.

Yeah, that’s right, the Christmas carol, ‘Away in a Manger’ - I hate it. In fact, I loathe it with a passion you cannot possibly comprehend.

The vast majority of Christmas carols. so far as I can see, are benign enough. By and large they serve no useful purpose, unless you find some amusement in the sight of a Sally Army band freezing their tits off outside the local shopping centre (I do) or consider that the Midnight carol services run by many churches provide a valuable social service in taking most of the drunks off the streets for long enough to let you get to bed and get some kip before the bastards come rolling past your house for their nightly departure ritual;

‘You’re my mate, you arrrrrr. I fucking love you, mate…’.

But Away in a fucking Manger? That’s different. That has a purpose, one that makes it the Christmas carol from hell.

Away in a Manger is nothing more nor less that the sadistic infant school teacher’s revenge on the world for having to put up with your bratty fucking kids for the rest of the year. It is the first, and only, Christmas carol taught to four and five years olds in infact school, and why? Because those sadistic bastard teachers know full well that having taught the lisping little arseholes the fucking song, they will go into the world and sing the fucking thing in their dull little monotone voices in any venue, at any time, and at every possible fucking opportunity.

Go shopping in the two weeks before Christmas and in every single fucking shop you go into, you’ll find some winsome little munchkin singing away at the top of the voice:

‘Away in a Manger, No-ooo crib for a bed, the lickle lord Je-thath lay down hith thweet head…’

Stop. Just stop it. Just fuck off will you… Arrrghhhhhhh!

Every fucking shop. Every single one of them has its own diminuitive singing toss-pot to go with the piped fucking musak version of ‘Will you Stop the Cavalry’. Well, no. Don’t stop the fucking cavalry. Not until they’ve done something useful and trampled the fucking warbling dwarf under their hooves. Then they can stop.

What else is there? Oh yes. ‘It’s a time for giving…’ - the next fucking chugger who pushes a plastic ‘tin’ in my face and says that to me while I’m out shopping is going to need an emergency collectiontinectomy to remove the fucking thing from their colon.

It may well be a time for giving, but I’ve already fucking given. I’ve two kids of my own to bleed my bank account dry at this time of the year without worrying about whether little ‘Joshua’ and ‘Jeremiah’ in Malawi will be getting christmas presents this year - and in case, from their photographs, they look like they’d much prefer to be getting a few decent fucking meals down them rather than getting a shitty plastic Power Rangers doll of Christmas day. Why not just sell the little fuckers to Madonna, she’s loaded.
Look, I have this simple arrangement going with charities already. I work for them, and they give me money - why the fuck am I then going to give it back, you twat? Just fucking think about it for once.

A couple of years back my one-time employer decided to try and intrude on the usual office festivities - which consisted of getting pissed, picking a workmate’s name at random out of a hat and buying them the most bizarre piece of tat you could find for a fiver, and trying to win the office competititon for finding the most phallic arrangement of a candle and two baubles on a Christmas card - with the suggestion that we skip the crappy present gag and put the cash towards buying some poor unfortunate a fucking goat instead.

Being a touch unsure of how well this might work out, I asked a friend, who works for an overseas aid charity (aka Trailfinders for students) about the logistics of this kind of deal, and got the reply;

‘You’d be better off currying the goat before you send it - at least they’ll get a meal out out of it. Fucking things cost more to feed than the recipient’s family and the cheese tastes like shit’.

So just remember, at Christmas, give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for night; set him on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

Still, if you are the kind who does do charity a christmas, then our man in the kebab shop has just the thing for you.

I hereby announce the launch of the Eugenides Christmas Appeal 2006. Bids in the comments, please, for a quite awesome prize - the exclusive services of Mr Eugenides for an entire evening. One lucky winner will be able to watch me drink heavily all day (alcohol not included in price of bid), eat a kebab, lecture you on the evils of socialism, and then have an invited friend or family member called a “cunt” in all manner of daring and humorous ways until I fall asleep on your sofa.

Much better than the annual Blue Peter car boot sale, I’m sure you’ll agree.

What else? Ah, yes. Channel 4’s ‘Alternative Christmas’ message - this year its a woman wearing a niqab.

Look, guys, I hate to say this, but I can hear the barrel being scraped from here. The first year you did it, with Quentin Crisp, yeah I could see the point, ‘hey’s let’s get a real queen’ and all that but I do think this gig is getting just that bit tired and old hat now.

Look, fuck Channel 4. Leave the BBC on, cut two eye holes in a big plastic bag and put it over the telly when the Queen comes on. It’ll give the same effect and make about as much sense - and you won’t be risking accidentally running on into the fucking Snowman afterwards, which is always a bonus.

Fuck it, I’m getting bored with this - that’ll do for now. Now where’s that picture of George Osborne and the goat - I wonder if I dare…

To save disappointment, if you’ve found your way here via a seach engine and you’re looking for photographs, then sorry you’re going to be bitterly disappointed - try somewhere else.

This is just one of those tales that catches the eye as you’re mooching round the net for no better reason than its a bit odd, quirky and takes you into the dark underbelly of teh interweb.

In certain circles, so it would appear, there is nothing quite so prized as what is called, colloquially, the ‘celebrity oops’ photograph, this being a paparazzi photograph of a famous individual (usually, but not always, female) that catches them in a state of temporary sartorial embarassment of the kind that leaves them with rather more of their body on display than they might ordinarily wish to expose.

Now there are, so I have come to understand, many different kinds of ‘oops’ photographs, ranging from the fairly tame ‘next time to remember to use titty tape’ shots to the ever popular ‘long lens while sunbathing topless/nude shots’ to what I understand to be the creme de la creme of ‘oops’, the ‘upskirt’.

The latter, which appears to be a speciality of some paparazzi photographers, entails the photographer lurking around outside the favoured haunts of female celebrities awaiting the arrival, by car, of a famous ‘face’ in the hope that the near impossibility of making a dignified exit from a car while wearing a short skirt will provide the photographer with their much-in-demand reward, and and image of said celebrity’s skimpies. And on rare but highly sought after occasions, the photographer may even attain the holy grail of ‘oops’ photography, the ‘the silly cow’s only gone ‘commando’ as well’ shot - the most recent entrant to this latter club being Britney Spears, who celebrated her recent seperation from the idiotically named ‘K-Fed’ by going out on the town and flashing her muff to the assembled paparazzi sufficiently often for one brave soul to cry out, ‘for fuck’s sake, Britney, put it away’.

Not unsurprisingly, a whole internet culture has grown up around the ‘oops’ phenomenon.

Specialist websites offer whole collections of ‘oops’ photographs for the enjoyment of connoisseurs of the artform. There is a thriving cottage industry in fake ‘oops’ photographs, in which images of celebrities are combined, with varying degrees of success, with those of ‘glamour models’ and porn stars to achieve the desired effect of an image that appears to show the celebrity in a state of undress (and often more), an industy that has kept the Sunday Sport in front-page headlines on many a slow porn day with fake tales of celebrities being ’shocked’ by an iffy photograph; the ’shock’ being (allegedly) that the photo is a fake.

Most interesting of all, however, is the debates these images spawn, in which afficiandos of the ‘oops’ hotly debate the day’s latest haul of images in order to sift the real from the fake on blogs, in forums and on Usenet newsgroups. The obsessive attention to detail one sees in such debates is simply remarkable. Intricate discussions about lighting, shadows, skin tones, body shape and the relative size of particular parts of the body when compared to verified images of the real thing, whether clothed or undressed are a marvel to behold. Whole debates break out and rage for hours, days even, over whether a particular image actually contains a tantalising flash of nipple, or just a bit of an odd shadow. Some even scour the interweb for the original images that have been used to doctor and otherwise mundane photo into a convincing looking oops and return in triumph, greedliy clutching their prize, like a proud Inuit hunter returning home to his family with a dead seal pup after a hard day at the local ice floe.

The authenticity, or otherwise, of a particular image is debated with a passion, ferocity and even wit found nowhere else on teh interweb - during the recent battle of ‘Is that really Brintey’s muff’ the victor emerged triumphant after silencing his doubters with the now legendary put down:

“Of course it’s fucking kosher. Since when did Photoshop start doing filters for generating muff stubble and caesarian scars?”

Which brings me to the strange tale of Lindsay Lohan’s magically appearing knickers.

You see in the world of the celebrity ‘oops’ the universally accepted purpose of Photoshop is, and one might well guess, as a means of creating fake images which display rather, and sometimes significantly, more the celebrity intended or may even wish to reveal to her adoring public - the exceptions being Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton, who never get to feature in fake ‘oops’ shots these days because everyone’s already seen their cervix so many times over that they’re all bored with it - Yes, its sad to say, but Pammy’s pussy is completely passé.

There was, however, a rather curious incident recently that involved the fragrant (as in peat, woodsmoke and malt) Ms Lohan who, while ‘going commando’ on a boat trip, succeeded in providing a lucky photographer with the much prized muff shot, an image that, as one might guess, very rapidly found its way on teh interweb and into the hands of our fearless ‘oops’ afficianados for the delight and delectation. And as far as anyone could tell, all was well with the world. They had, on their hands, a verified sighting - and anything they might have had on their hands is too gruesome to speculate about here - and they were happy.

Until, that is, a couple of days later, when another version of this same image suddenly appeared; one replete with the more usual modesty preserving undergarments. The oops community were aghast - had they been fooled, they who pride themselves on their nose for the difference between a fake and the real deal? And so the detective work started in earnest, images were assessed, analysed (remember to check the spelling there - don’t want to give the wrong impression), and poured over (and probably pawed over as well, but that’s another story). The debate rages, tempers frayed and many a harsh word was spoken.

And yet they remained perplexed. One of the images had to be a fake, but which one? Both looked plausible and neither showed any obvious signs of tampering. What a to-do?

And then, as miraculously as it all began, the mystery was solved (and without any meddling kids - or kiddie meddling for that matter, this is not that kind of story) after one canny soul did what any good investigator would, he followed the money (shot) and tracked down the photographer who took the original image, receiving the very confirmation he sought. Yes, the photographer did have the original photograph and yes, he could confirm without any shadow of a doubt that Ms Lohan was, indeed, pictured as everyone had first thought, with her muff flapping gently, but most definitely exposed, in the cool summer breeze.

And so passes into internet folklore, the tale of the first and, thus far, only occasion upon which a celebrity image has been doctored to conceal, and not reveal, the embarassment of an actress.

There is but one mystery that still remains. Who was the gentle person who, being so concerned for Ms Lohan’s modesty, sought to throw our hardy oops veterans off the scent? Was it perhaps Ms Lohan’s agent or management? Or was is merely an adoring fan? Or was someone seeking to fool our heroes for altogether more nefarious reasons of their own, as yet unrevealed? (Unlike Ms Lohan).
Perhaps we’ll never know, but we can be sure of one thing, while this was no Watergate, there was, most assuredly, a cover-up.

Very good piece by Political Penguin on a pretty crappy piece of reporting by the BBC.

More than £100m of public money is spent on translation services in the UK, the BBC has learned.

Local authorities spend £25m, NHS trusts £55m and the courts £31m on interpreting languages.

Refuse collection guidelines and one-to-one smoking sessions are among the services which have incurred costs because translations were provided. 

Hang on a second… refuse collection guidelines and one-to-one smoking sessions?

So we’re not just talking about translation services (i.e. the written word) we’re also including intepretation services (i.e. the spoken word) in this £100+ million. Sorry but that’s two different things requiring two different approaches, and while we’re being a touch pedantic, does this figure apply only to translation/interpretation in foreign languages, or is the money spent on British Sign Language interpretation included in this figure as well, as that’s also a very different matter from either of the first two?

Let’s just run through this…

BSL? There is no argument - this is about equality/disability so spend the money and quit whining about the cost.

Interpretation services - well even if you think that in an ideal world that everyone should learn English, in reality some migrants don’t or don’t learn enough to express themselves clearly and if that puts them is situation where they really do need access to an interpreter - say a visit to a GP or hospital, etc - then you just have to swallow the cost. Sorry, but an interpreter works out a damn siight cheaper than a misdiagnosis and a malpractice suit.

Translation services - now here’s where things are a little different.

First, if you think you’re improving communication with minority communities by providing printed translations then very often your barking up the wrong tree, and badly.

It’s not true of all minority communities, but amongst those I know best (South Asian) the issue you’re up against, more often than not, is not language but literacy.

It does depend on which community you’re dealing with and where exactly they’re from on the subcontinent, but by and large, and especially in India, education still tends to be bilingual - people learn to read and write in both their ‘native’ language, be that Panjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujerati, etc. and in English, largely because English is still very much the core language of the Indian Civil Service. Matters are made a bit more complicated by the subcontinent’s many regional languages and dialects, some of which lack a written form, such as Mirpuri and Syhleti, but as general rule of thumb, if communication is your goal, then you should ask first whether the community you’re dealing with is generally literate, before worrying to much about languages and, in a lot of cases, would be better off using audio -visual recordings of spoken language to get your point across.

Translated materials are also too often produced for tokenistic reasons (to be ‘inclusive’) and an infuriatingly tokenistic fashion. I’ve lost count of the number of Local Government reports I’ve seen and been sent in which what one receives is a 100+ page report (all in English) with a one page ‘executive summary’ stuck at the front in half a dozen different languages - and all to supposedly be ‘inclusive’ or ’serve the needs of the community’. Sorry, fuck off. If a community needs such a report in its own language, its needs the whole fucking report not just a one page summary stuck at the front like a spare fucking dinner.

This is not difficult - if you’re going to provide translations, then at least have the fucking courtesy to do the job properly and not fuck about with summaries and then think you’ve done a good job of being inclusive - you haven’t, you’ve just been a twat.

Look, I’ve no problem whatsoever with the public sector providing printed materials in translation, provided its done properly and its understood why its being done.

There are very good reasons for providing translations, which may be to facilitate better communication - if you’re dealing with a community that is literate - or to show respect for a community’s culture and traditions (of which language is a significant part) or even just to provide a genuine choice. Some people may well be bilingual but prefer their reading material in their native language because that’s just what they prefer, and that’s also fine by me.

But it has to admitted that the public sector does unnecessarily piss inordinate amounts of money down the drain each year on translations that are, at best, useless and at worst, just produced in downright tokenistic and insulting manner, and it does so because it fails to do the one thing that businesses - who don’t, as rule, like to piss money away - do as a matter, almost, of routine…

…market research.

As usual, this is not fucking rocket science, in fact I can provide a simple three-step plan to not wasting money on worthless translations and getting the best from your available resources.
Step 1. Understand who you are trying to communicate with.

Step 2. Understand what you are trying to communicate and for what purpose.

Step 3. Go to your target audience, talk to them, tell them what you’re trying to achieve and ask them what will work best for them - after all, it’s their language and their community, so they’re going to know what they need a hell of a lot better that you are.

You see. Fucking simple. And all it takes is a little thought, a little planning and a bit of basic courtesy.

All a bit to easy for bureaucrats, then.