One of the phrases that irritates me intensely is when people say:
"Work to live", don't "live to work".
Or variants (e.g. I work to live, not the other way around). I see these quite a lot on "professional" people's dating profiles.
To me, this is incredibly infused with class privilege. The person using the phrase typically does not mean, "Work to live", but rather, "Work to have a good time when not working." The implication is always, 'I work so that I can earn enough money to afford my fun lifestyle". Because to them, "living" is not the simple act of continuing as a conscious entity in the world, but instead "having a lifestyle".
There are people in this world who really do work to live. They work because it is the only way to keep from starving to death. The only way to keep from being evicted from their homes and freezing to death in the streets. The only way keep the figurative wolves at bay. More to the point, there are people in this part of the world - what we call the "developed world" - and people in this country, the UK, who are in this state.
To me, "Work to live" sounds like, "Work to do your best to stay alive for another day/week/month". "Work to live" does not sound like fun, or a sign of a balanced, liberated lifestyle. It sounds like Hell, and it sounds like a version of Hell that is real life for too many people in this world.
I currently don't have a job. I would like one, and I would like one that gives me enough disposable income after paying for the essentials of life that I can enjoy the "life" that those "professionals" mean when they talk about "working to live". But a far more realistic situation is that, if I got a job, it would be minimum wage or thereabouts, and that in order to keep from starving and being evicted, I would have to work long hours. The only positives would be that (a) I was no longer completely at the mercy of the UK Government, and (b) it is easier to get a job once you already have one. But even though I spent most of my waking hours staying alive or doing work, I would not be "living to work" - work would not be the centre of or the reason for my life, it would just be a necessary thing to prevent myself from dying. I would work all those long hours, in a job I probably hated, just to have one more day on this planet, in the hope that somehow the next day would be better than those before it. Lots of people live such an existence already.
So, no, Mr or Ms professional person, you do not "work to live". You "work to fund the funtimes".
Today was the annual August Bank Holiday fayre in town and I always go along to pick up some second-hand books, possibly a gadget or two, and some bric-a-brac. This year, with my project of exploring whether there's an ethical form of PUA that will work for me with my feminist views and my more relationship-oriented sexuality, I reasoned that it was probably one of the most likely events and locations where I might be able to try out my "day game".
I set myself the target of talking to 5 women during the 90-120 minutes I was likely to spend there, and of course I never reached that target. I am starting to wonder if my town is bereft of single women - I know there must be a few (some of them are on match.com, and log in fairly frequently (or at least, that was the case the last time I was checking that site frequently myself), but it seems almost every woman I see out and about either has a man in close company, or else is trailed by a bunch of their kids. That's proof only of her having had sex at some point in the past, but given social constructions of family, it implies that there's a higher probability that she has a partner who contributed genetic material to the process. Yes, single mothers do exist, and Britain has quite a high proportion of them relative to other countries, but I kind of feel the last thing a single mum needs is another big kid to look after (not that I see myself that way, but anyway).
Okay, pointless whining done!
Here's the good bit: I may not have made 5 approaches, but I did at least make one, and it went well. I feel like I am gradually getting more of a portfolio of positive experiences built up, because when I actually manage an approach it seems to go pleasantly and not OMG crash-and-burn horrible.
Situation: I've already just about spent up, but returning from seeing the ice cream van queue stretching out into infinity (only a slight exaggeration!) and thinking about heading home, I walk back past the second-hand book stand on my way to the exit. There, I espy a gorgeous woman, she's reading the back cover of a battered copy of "Gone With The Wind", and holding in her other hand a copy of something by Hemingway (I couldn't see the title).
It's like a gift - the approach line is perfect and blazingly obvious to me. Bold as brass, I walk up on the opposite side of the rack, just as she puts GWTW back down, I pipe up, "A taste for the classics, I see? Hemingway and 'Gone With The Wind!'"
She smiles. She replies, and we talk about books and what we like, how much time to read we get. She picks up a handful of the old Penguin books, back when they just had coloured bands to denote the genre, and we talk about how cool those simple, plain covers were. She's grabbed some Sherlock Holmes and an Agatha Christie, so we talk about that, and I mention i've read all the Holmes and now am collecting Christie (all true). We chat a bit more, then she says, "I think I will get these."
So I reply, "So, you're not going to let me have the Agatha Christie, then?" Effectively, this was a test of her willingness to let me take charge, and signalling what is sometimes called "surgency" or "assertiveness", which is supposed to be an attractive quality, according to regular PUA. I have a conscience, though, so when she surrenders the book in question, I smiled and said I hadn't any money left in my wallet to buy it, she should keep it after all. She said, "If you change your mind, you know where to come!" - which now I think of it feels like it might have been a subtle "Indicator of Interest". However, if so, it was too subtle for me to feel at all confident about that, and if it was I totally missed it at the time.
I never quite figured out how to work my own "Statement of Intent"** into it (on the way home, I pondered whether mentioning that I view intelligence and being well-read as sexy would have been a good way to go) and the conversation shortly afterwards came to a natural close instead.
For all I know, she's right now blogging about the weird fatso who talked to her about books and acted strange about Agatha Christie, but from where I am now, I chalk this up as a really big step in the right direction, another positive experience to reinforce the idea that I can actually do this and can talk to women out of the blue.
It also reveals again that approach anxiety is not the problem, the problem is just having some lines to say that will get things started (usually, I feel like I need an opening line and a follower, and then I can probably wing it from there). My brain just goes too slowly in general to cope.
Here's what seems to happen:
Trundling along by myself
See attractive woman who isn't showing any evidence of being attached
Brain changes gear to "pick-up mode"
Okay, what can I say?
No, not that - that would just sound creepy
Nor that - that just sounds waaaay too cheesy
That sounds good, okay let's go for it
...
Oh, she's already gone :-(
I don't know if canned openers can possibly be the answer (see above, "that just sounds cheesy" thought process) but I definitely need some way of getting to the "that sounds good" stage a great deal faster than I do at the moment. Part of this is also trying to visualise what happens next. I feel, it's no good having a great opener, if when you do get a positive response, your next line is, "Ummm... errrr... Thank you for talking to me!" So I often feel like I need to visualise her response and how I deal with that response, before I'm ready to go for it. Like I said, I feel like I can improvise once I've got the opening exchanges and have a feel for how things are going. It worked pretty well today, after all. It's just giving myself enough material to work from to understand the territory, means I need something to get me that far.
** SOI, or Statement of Intent, is the PUA term for the point at which you make it clear either by explicit statement or by implication, that your intention is to chat up the woman you're talking to and/or get her into bed with you.
At the Guardian website, David Mitchell has stuck his oar in over the statement by Madame Tussauds concerning visitors' "interaction" with the Hitler waxwork, namely, posing next to it with Nazi salutes.
Ignoring Mitchell's "grammar-police" approach to the language of the statement (which I find amusing given the main theme of his argument), we get to the following passage:
An Israeli couple visiting the attraction ... were horrified both by the fact that there was a likeness of Hitler at all and that people were posing next to it doing fascist gestures.
...
They wrote in their complaint: "We are the grandchildren of concentration camp survivors – the very people that Hitler tried to kill." Of course I can understand why they might consider tourists frolicking with his likeness to be a display of inappropriate levity. But their complaint went further than that, claiming that the Nazi gestures and crying of "Heil Hitler!" were "an unequivocal demonstration of antisemitism and bigotry".
I just don't think that's true. The couple actually photographed two young tourists heil-Hitlering next to the waxwork and one of them is doing the moustache with her other hand. I'm pretty sure that neo-Nazis don't do the moustache. They certainly didn't do the moustache at the Nuremberg rallies. What those kids in the picture are doing, I'm willing to bet, is taking the piss out of Hitler.
And right there, you see that we are having the "what you are" conversation instead of the "what you did" conversation.
Mr Mitchell's approach to the situation is to argue:
I was disappointed that Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, did not. He said: "I'm appalled at Madame Tussauds' insensitive comments defending such activity, as surely they have a responsibility to ensure visitors behave appropriately and respectfully at their museum."
Respectfully of what? Hitler? Does he think the girl shouldn't have done the moustache? Or does he think Madame Tussauds should ban a specific arm gesture when people are standing next to the Hitler waxwork? Or ban it in general so they can't do it next to Margaret Thatcher, Sting or Timmy Mallett either?
...
When you ban something like this, you only dignify it with significance. You spoil the harmless piss-takers' harmless fun and you justify fascists in their feelings of oppression. You take a stupid gesture out of the realm of mockery and you give it illicit cachet. Whereas, in general, freedom engenders freedom. If you let people do what they like, human decency usually prevails. Anyone doing a Nazi salute and saying "Heil Hitler" for reasons other than a joke is unlikely to garner sympathy. There are always evil, oppressive forces at work on any society but they'll be found wanting in guile if they come at us goose-stepping and shouting "Sieg Heil!" for a second time. The only thing that could make that seem attractive or worth following, even to an idiot, is if it were banned.
Perhaps Mr Mitchell thinks that visitors to Madame Tussauds, by opting to visit such a place, have given up their right to receive respect from those around them? That seems to be the thrust of remarks such as one I snipped earlier:
("attraction" is the word people use, right? Rather than "museum" or "racket". "Attraction" as in: "I really can't understand the…")
The respect that people might be requested to show is not towards the figures represented in effigy at places such as Madame Tussauds, but rather to the living, breathing, thinking and feeling people who are also visiting those places at the same time.
I am sure that we can agree that performing a "comedy Hitler-impersonation" inside, or just outside, a synagogue would probably mark one out as a bit of an arsehole, and no amount of pleading that, "I'm taking the piss out of Hitler, I'm not hating Jews!" would wash away the arseholishness of the behaviour. I think we can probably agree that goose-stepping down the high street with "the finger-moustache" and the salute and shouting "Heil!" in a ridiculous squawk - while obviously intended as a joke - would also be in pretty poor taste, and might very well cause a lot of complaints, and could conceivably (though not necessarily veyr likely) result in being arrested for disturbing the peace. (Bear in mind, also, that the most likely people to do this are privileged White men who have somewhat overindulged of alcoholic beverages!)
Given these points, we can perhaps observe that public spaces in general are possibly not the best place for ridiculing Hitler and the Nazis, because of the high probability of offending someone who doesn't get the joke.
Mr Mitchell notes that:
Many second world war veterans were accustomed to joking about Hitler. Spike Milligan and his contemporaries founded a comic tradition of making fun of the Nazis which has given us Peter Sellers's performance in Dr Strangelove, "The Germans" episode of Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, 'Allo 'Allo!, endless YouTube resubtitlings of Downfall and Prince Harry's party gear.
But (with the exception of Prince Harry's costume, which we may recall also caused a huge furore for similar reasons to those in this case) all these are examples of comedy in a specifically humorous context - things that are framed as comedy (they are given a "comedy box", like the "fantasy box" I discussed in respect of ethical porn content) The same is not true of the synagogue, the high street, or even Madame Tussauds.
Yes, it is important to use the power of ridicule, and to keep in mind that Hitler was (in Mr Mitchell's words), "a posturing little prick" and a "risible little twerp". Again, I agree with Mr Mitchell that:
It's perfectly possible – and important to our understanding of the human condition – to find that amusing, to laugh at the goose-stepping, the shouting and the pomposity, while simultaneously holding in our heads the tragic murderous consequences of Nazi power. That's what makes the joke bite and also what reminds us that the massive disaster was human.
It is possible to do that with some distance and some immunity from the problem. But we cannot expect - or demand - that other people should also "get the joke", when it's about bad shit that happened to them, or to people close to them. That means that there are places where it is appropriate to focus on the ridicule, and there are other places where it is appropriate to focus on the "tragic murderous consequences".
The gestures of the visitors posing with the Hitler waxwork were not meant in an anti-Semitic way, but nevertheless, they were anti-Semitic, because they dismissed the emotional suffering that they could cause in the here and now to people who had a close relationship with the events that the gestures were intended to ridicule. This also reveals the bigotry that exists in hidden form in society. Again, the gestures weren't meant in a bigoted way, but they still communicated bigotry. The problem is not with the people, but with the gestures themselves and the fact that they were in that space.
This should not be a "what you are" debate, but a "what you did" debate, just like the hypothetical scenarios I described above.
There is also the separate debate over freedom of speech, and my comment policy tells you how I feel about that. My policy is to say, "You ave the right to offend me, and I have the right to state unequivocally that I think your exercising that right makes you a complete arsehole and a risible little twerp". Madame Tussauds won't restrict the right to cause offence, and good on them for sticking by that policy. But we have to recognise that in doing so, we must also respond approvingly of anyone stating, "that behaviour is arseholish." I think Madame Tussauds can add to their "encouragement" of people to interact with the waxworks, a reminder to be sensitive of others' feelings, without restricting free speech.
I just finished watching on television the first ever BBC Comedy Prom (available on iPlayer for UK readers at least), which had Tim Minchin as MC and occasional performer. There were some terrific turns by the various artists and I spent most of it in tears of laughter.
Perhaps predictably (it seems to be his biggest hit), Mr Minchin finished with "Not Perfect":
(This isn't the video of the Comedy Prom performance, but that one doesn't seem to be available yet)
This song doesn't make me laugh, and the laughs maybe grate a bit. Because this song can me cry with sadness - when I heard it with a beautiful orchestral backing, as at the Prom performance, I was in floods of tears. I have, of course, heard the song before. There is, I suspect, a reason why at the last filk convention I went to, I think I heard about half a dozen versions of it, albeit some with parody lyrics. But this time, maybe because of the context, maybe because of the arrangement with the orchestra, or maybe because of something else in my brain or my life at the moment, this one hit me hard.
For me, the lyrics hit right where I am most vulnerable, expressing things about both my depression and my recovery from/coping with it. This passage, of course, is real toughie, as regular readers will understand from my issuesgrowing up with a BDSM sexuality:
This is my brain, and I live in it
...
It's tucked away behind my eyes
Where all my screwed up thoughts can hide
Cos God forbid I hurt somebody
There's a lot of moments like that in the song: moments that somehow strike right at the torments that my mind conjures from my life so far.
Listening to it, I was practically breaking down tonight, and I know at least one friend who will read this as indicating I should still be on medication. I reject that, I feel that it would hurt me more if I didn't feel these things, it would feel like I was disconnected from my life (and, let's face it, that's a lot of what depression feels like!) I may be broken, but don't you dare to fix me!
Because, guess what? This is my brain, and it's fine. It's where I spend the vast majority of my time**. It's not perfect, but it's mine. And I'm slowly getting the hang of how to work it, so just because I have the occasional breakdown like this song causes, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me, even if I am broken.
To prove how funny how the show was, here's Mr Minchin's performance of "F Sharp" from the Prom concert:
** When I did counselling skills in 6th Form, in my final assessment the tutor suggested to me, "Get out of your mind and into your senses". Still working on how to do that!
I have been thinking for a while about the concept of oral tradition and the way that this ties in with folk music and with cultural identity. With my last post also talking about tradition and culture, now seemed like a good time to try to sum up the musings I have made so far.
Oral tradition refers to song, story and knowledge that is passed on without the use of written forms (for example, music that is learned by ear instead of by reading music notation). Before most people could read or write (and before music notation had been devised) oral tradition was the only way that information could be transmitted. In some cultures, it was a specialised role of certain people to memorise and perform the information (e.g. bards).
The questions in my mind were these:
In today's "information age", where not only written, but digital sound, images and video can be transmitted at ease, is there any meaningful definition for oral tradition, and if so, what is it?
How can one tell whether or not a particular song, story or piece of information has become part of the oral tradition of a culture, and is it possible for that to happen nowadays?
Oral tradition is clearly a part of the theory of memes, and was once the primary mode of transmission of memes both within a community and between communities.
Of course, "meme" is a common term in bloggery, and can be used to refer to little quizzes and games that get passed around the internet, as well as popular tweets or images that are frequently reposted around blogs and services like tumblr and twitter. But I think that it is fair to say that retweeting someone is not the same as participating in oral tradition in any way. A tweet, or a blog image, or a youtube video, is reproduced without any involvement of the person, and there is no oral transmission involved at all.
Some things do exist that originated in the information age and that at least occasionally result in oral transmission: these are urban legends. Some of these, at least, do seem to cross generations, as well as being told primarily in an oral way - campfire horror stories are another such thing (and it seems as though often those overlap quite a lot in terms of thematic content with urban legends). But, given that these often move into recorded media and back again (for instance, the movie franchise of "Urban Legend" recorded and developed a horror story based on urban legends coming true; undoubtedly some people who saw the movie learned at least one legend they hadn't heard before) how much can we say of such stories can be attributed to oral tradition, and how much to written or recorded media? Does the distinction matter?
Setting aside what might be called "traditional" ideas about oral tradition (such as the sociologists' emphasis), what criteria can we identify that might help us pinpoint a useful way of looking at oral tradition?
Taking the biological analogy by which Richard Dawkins developed the theory of memes, it might be suggested that, just as a successful organism is one that produces grandchildren, so a successful meme is one that produces a third generation - that is, it is one that not only is heard, but then is repeated to a third party independently.
That term, "generation", also appears in the definition of oral tradition cited above, although there not talking about an information reproduction generation, but of a biological reproduction generation. However, it seems tricky for me to understand what distinguishes sociologically one generation from the next. I think about the defining moments of my lifetime, as I see them, and a lot of them are meaningless to people just ten years younger than me. Some of them would be fairly peripheral to people just five years younger than me. Likewise, someone five or ten years older than me would probably have quite clear childhood memories of something like the 1984 Miners' Strike, which to me is a peripheral memory from personal experience and only known from others' later testimony. When one is growing up, a person just a year or two older can seem to be in a completely different social class.
So, I want to say that oral tradition should use information reproduction as the basis, although temporal sustainability should also be a factor.
So my first criterion for oral tradition is simply that a song, story or piece of information should tend to be re-transmitted by the hearer, just like any other meme: it has to have produced at least one further transmission.
How long should the timeframe be? A good test of sustainability is that re-transmission tends to happen if the information is still felt to be relevant and therefore worthy of passing on. When technological changes were relatively slow, information that was relevant in one century might still be relevant in the next, for many reasons, so several biological generations might be needed to see if something will persist in oral tradition. Nowadays, it seems as though technological advances come every 5 years or so, and the social playing field seems to shift accordingly. The life of an oral tradition meme might therefore be measured in much shorter terms, and in terms of generational elements might be tested over a decade or two instead of a century or two.
This song was written for the first Gulf War. It seems that it remains as relevant now, some 20 years later (see some of the images in the video for evidence of that!). Youtube has performances by other artists, although I saw no evidence for it producing a third generation:
There is a hint of another criterion that I feel must be included, in my earlier remark about retweeting and reblogging stuff. I noted then that these did not seem like "oral tradition" in any worthwhile sense, because there is no involvement of the person in it - there is no oral transmission involved.
It seems to me to be an inherent part of oral tradition that it has some personal involvement with the information to be transmitted, that it should require that a person taking part in oral tradition should also have learnt the information and internalised it to some extent. It is not sufficient that zie should have liked it enough to copy-paste it into a new tweet or blog post. Zie should have made it a part of hirself. When we are talking about song or story, that invariably means learning it to the point of being able to present one's own performance of the story or song.
So, I want to put as my third criterion for oral tradition, that the means of producing a third generation should be by a new, personalised, performance of the original material. For instance, if someone heard my version of Talis Kimberley's "Ladybird Year" and was moved to learn the song themselves, then that would mean the song had produced a third generation.
I have always felt that it would be the proudest moment of my life if someone sang one of my songs to me, when I knew that they had never heard my original version. That would mean that someone else had liked it enough to learn it, and then sing it to this person who was now singing it back to me, because that person liked the someone's version enough to want to learn my song.
So, the criteria I want to use are as follows:
An oral tradition element must be able to produce memetic grandchildren
It must be able to do so even after social changes seem to have altered the scene since its original transmission
Transmission must be personalised, and effectively retain an oral element from the transmitter
In the modern age, as you may already have spotted from my referencing a youtube video of mine as a possible step in an oral tradition lineage, I feel that an oral performance can be in the form of performing into a recording device. While my recording will persist, and could (of course) be looked up by any later generation in that lineage, the idea in my mind is that such recordings now represent just another way of transmitting an oral performance from one person to another. As long as a person heard and learned the song not from the original source, but from the second generation source, then their new performance represents a third generation. Songs reach wider audiences through these technological means, yes, but equally the means of reproduction (i.e. the human mind and its attraction to and use for the song) remains the same, and the personal involvement in the tradition remains the same.
What if someone hears my version of Ladybird Year, and then decides they want to learn it based on my performance, but before learning it decides to look up the original? Arguably, the songs memetic information has already produced the grandchild based on my performance, and the new performer's research does not change the fact that hir mind is the third generation of the meme. But for oral tradition, the new performer is now going to produce a performance that is a descendant of the original performance, and not necessarily of mine. My inclination is to say that either interpretation is valid, depending on what angle seems important to you.
Some might object that oral tradition elements do not have author credits, but these days it is possible to find out who wrote what song, and go straight to the original source. But to that, I would say that all songs must originally have had an author. The songs, stories and so on will change and evolve over time, perhaps, but someone originally came up with it. That we now know who originally wrote something does not mean that the song loses its oral tradition status - suppose I found some scrap of ancient parchment that identified the original author of some song attributed to "trad." Would we then feel that that song, which survived generation after generation of oral transmission, would then not be part of oral tradition? The key element of oral tradition is not whether or not some written record exists somewhere (otherwise, the Victorian era collectors would have put an end to oral tradition way back then!) but rather how the ideas are communicated and transmitted from one mind to the next. Is it by some written record, or is it by a live, oral, performance (whether face-to-face or via youtube or some other digitally recorded means)?
With these thoughts, I seem to have answered both questions that I posed at the start: both, "How can you tell if something has entered the oral tradition?" and, "What meaningful definition can be found for oral tradition in the information age?"
Here is an example of a recorded media that nevertheless has entered the oral tradition, by my definition:
I first heard (the chorus to) the Queen song "Bicycle Race" when I was 5 or 6, in the school playground. "I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike/ I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like!" was a perfect theme to capture the minds of young people - it was a meme well-adapted to that environment. I heard it from my peers at that age. The song was written and released before I was born. I don't know where my peers heard the song, but either way, I must have represented at least the third generation from the original recording and I reproduced the meme (that is, I sang those words many times myself). Therefore, by my definition, the song had at that point become part of the oral tradition. It had also, self-evidently, crossed generations (although it's hard to see what social changes could render the bicycle bits irrelevant, as far as my generation were concerned the verses such as "I don't want to be a candidate/ for Vietnam or Watergate" referenced things that were deep in the past already).
Clearly, I am at odds with traditional views of oral tradition. This is because I feel that those views are conservative, and they also seem to me to stand as a way to other indigenous culture and to divorce modern populations from their roots and traditions. By making "oral tradition" something that could only happen in the past, it makes it harder for people now to feel involved in the tradition or to add to the recognised history of their people - to feel as though it is living now, and something that belongs to them as much as it did to their forebears. I think that stuff that is created now can be seen to enter oral tradition, and moreover, can be seen by its creators to enter oral tradition. Oral tradition is a way for a people now to lay claim to their heritage outside of the commodified cultural structures of global capital, and that necessarily means allowing people to shape and own their heritage by adding to it as well as preserving it. (That's why this post is tagged as "radicalised democrat", btw.)
I say that things like youtube actually aid in the development of new oral tradition, and that people who resist it in the name of "copyright protection" are fighting a losing battle against human nature and human will for social engagement with one another. The parodies and posts of such material are ways for people to reclaim cultural relevance for themselves.
A week ago, Renee @ Womanist Musings posted a few remarks in order to share with us this video of a Papua New Guinea folk song group singing about the threat to their culture from the White Man, and particularly, of the roles that were played by the 1930s missionaries, and modern capitalist tourism, in changing and eroding their culture.
At the time, I had a sense that the sentiments felt familiar - that they were things I had felt about the culture of England.
While obviously, in recent years folk music has not been threatened by the Church, that has not always been the case. The history of folk and sacred music in Western Europe has been an uneasy one as the two eventually became intermingled despite the authorities' efforts to keep them apart. In Britain, the same musicians who would play the dance tunes on a Saturday night would, on Sunday morning, be providing the backing for the singing of hymns and psalms at the church services. Elsewhere, composers hired to write sacred music would embed in the harmonies of their songs to God, the melodies of popular drinking songs. Eventually, the two would influence each other, but initially, the folk songs of England, just like the Papua New Guinea log drums, were seen as the work of Satan. But I'm getting away from my point.
Show of Hands, a folk-rock duo whose politics seem to straddle the Conservatism of rural England with the radicalism of anti-capitalism (also based on rural ideals), wrote the following song about the loss of English traditional music and culture to (especially USAian) capitalism and homogenisation of popular music:
(It is perhaps telling that a lot of the commenters at YouTube think it's about immigrants destroying our culture - because it couldn't be about White people destroying an indigenous culture, could it?) (Apparently, Show of Hands were angry in 2009 when the BNP used the song on a collection of British folk music - article here)
The parts that got me particularly about that song were these stanzas:
After the speeches, when the cake's been cut
The disco's over and the bar is shut
At christening, birthday, wedding or wake
What can we sing 'til the morning breaks
...
And a minister said his vision of hell
Is three folk singers in a pub near Wales
Well, I've got a vision of urban sprawl
There's pubs where no-one ever sings at all
Now, I come from a family that, on my mother's side especially, has a strong sense of musical tradition. For us, there is always singing "'til the morning breaks" of songs old, new, English, American and whatever else. We have a good collection of traditional or indigenous English or British songs that we can sing. This is part of the tradition for me from when I was growing up, along with seeing rapper and longsword dancing (rapper here not referring to musicians, but to the tool used in the North East mining communities), Morris and folk dance.
It's quite a while ago now that the Irish, hosting the Eurovision Song Contest for the umpteenth time, put on a demonstration, in the break between the song performances and collecting the results of the voting, that was derived from Irish traditional dance. The show became an instant hit, and was expanded into a full show in its own right that toured Britain and I think even went to the States.
But Morris dance is seen as a joke by much of England, and it seems unthinkable that a show based on these traditional forms could achieve the popularity that Riverdance did.
The Copper Family Singers (who are from the same part of England as where I live now, more-or-less) come as close as we have today to the traditional sound of England:
When was the last time you heard English singers in a capella harmony, whether original or traditional song?
Another good example is this one, a song that I first heard from my mother:
(Included to stay faithful to my Yorkshire roots! Kate Rusby is awesome anyway.)
***
Now, in England we had the great Victorian and Edwardian philanthropists like Vaughn Williams and Cecil Sharp who saw the decline of traditional English music and song over 100 years ago now, but these tended to be shocked by the filthy content of some of them, and sometimes rendered the lyrics unrecognisable in an effort to make them acceptable to the delicate ears of the "respectable" classes.
The English Folk Dance and Song Society these days works hard to preserve the cultural heritage of our traditional art forms. And yet, very little that is truly a part of our heritage remains a part of common experience - as Show of Hands lamented in their song. The EFDSS is surely better funded than the Papua New Guinea performers with whom I started this rant/musing/ramble/whatever you want to call it. The EFDSS website, linked above, shows the organisation that that money can bring. For that reason, I would not say that the situation of English tradition is the same as that of the people of Papua New Guinea, whatever resonance I feel between them. However, the forces of global capital, and its representation of music as commodity rather than community, are just as threatening and seemingly as close to victory whether it is over the culture of the English folks or the Papua New Guinea folks.
There is still hope. While ten years ago, a government minister opined that folk singers in a bar would be Hell itself, so many times if I've gone into a bar with my guitar, I have been asked to sing. I have sung songs from popular songs like Wonderwall or I Will Survive, to more folk-y fare such as The Water Is Wide or Only Remembered. It seems as though there is still a small space for traditional song and for community music, in this land.
And I, like my (mother's) family before me, will recall and carry on singing the songs that have been handed down to us.
Well, it's been pretty lean for me. I just can't get past the "overthinking" thing that my brain does with everything (I reject the assumption that I see from most PUA/SC advisors that the only possible reason for it is fear).
Case in point: today at the supermarket I saw a very attractive woman, and there were several things I noticed that I could use to make the start of a conversation. The standard PUA advice seems to be, "Just go for it and say any one of them." My brain doesn't do that. It doesn't seem to know how to. I do not have it in me to "just say anything", I have to say something. Which means I need something to say, which means I need to know which something I am going to say. Seriously, if I were to approach someone and was expected to say anything when I got to them, the most likely thing to be said is a blank "Errrrrrrrm...[lasts about five seconds!] oh, yes! I know! Hi, I'm [birth name]!" If you say "go up to someone and say your name", then the "Hi! I'm [birth name]!" comes at the beginning, but you still get the blank-faced 5-second, "erm". Not helpful.
So, it took me a few seconds to sort out what thing I wanted to use as my opening remark. By which time, the woman in question had moved on around the store, and the relevance of all the options I had, had disappeared. I didn't see her again until I saw her at the front of a check-out queue and I was at the back of a different queue. Ho hum.
However, I did (I think) manage inadvertently to flirt with the checkout woman when it came to my turn to pay for the goods I wished to buy. I say "inadvertently", because it really does not strike me as being appropriate to hit on someone who is working, and who has to be nice to you as part of their job - it can put that person in a very tricky and uncomfortable position.
This accidental "flirtation" took the form of a brief exchange talking about my change. My goods cost £9.01, and I had a £10 note. Did I have the extra penny, she asked? So I explained about my money pot that receives all my coppers and small silver (5p pieces, and the occasional 10p), and apologised for not being able to help. Turns out, she does the same thing, which was nice. "So, no small change when I get to the till. But the upside is, I get more change to put in the pot!" She laughed in a way that I definitely associate with a successful connection/flirtation. In another setting, without the barrier of the checkout and the fact that she's working and has to be nice, I would have taken that as the cue to go for the full chat-up. So, coming away, I was a bit puzzled but felt as though somehow I had "inadvertently" managed to "flirt", even though that had not been my intention.
Those pick-up dudes mentioned above would say, "Ah, because you knew you weren't going for the pick-up with this checkout woman, you didn't have The Fear, so you were confident and that made the interaction easier".
Bollocks.
At the checkout, we already had a pretext for talking (I'm buying stuff from the shop she works for, she needs to get my money and give me change). It turned out that I was fed a line for which I had a natural follower that did not require much thought, because there was only one follower that was true (for me) - the story about my money pot at home. By the time I had used that, my basic light-hearted approach had time to marshal the other stuff in my brain and I was, at that point, ready for having an actual conversation. That there was only time for one more exchange (and that the circumstances prevented me going for a pick-up anyway) does not change that.
I know what fear of approaching feels like it and, while it is still there, it is not the cause of what's going on for me. I have already made the decision to override it, and have in the past done so with ease. What I need is a streamlined decision-making process for what to say when I do approach.
Not only do I love the humour of presenters Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, but it is about one of my favourite activities - baking! Each programme talks about the history of the dishes that are the topic of competition for that week, and the judges (expert bakers) give the talented amateur competitors advice that can be helpful to average bakers like Yours Truly.
In the competition this season, we have a stay-at-home dad, an ex-rugby player (she played for the Welsh women's side). More generally, the 12 competitors appear to be evenly balanced for gender.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer came back that BDSM is still discriminated against in UK law.
The question, however, is an interesting one. It specifically related to a court case in Bradford in which a midwife challenged her dismissal for wearing a silver "slave" collar as being unlawful, as it was an expression of personal philosophical belief. The article's writer was called on as an expert witness to discuss what the significance of a slave collar is in BDSM.
I am not convinced that even a lifestyle, 24/7, D/s or M/s relationship is on a par with any religious belief. I am reminded of the episode of The West Wing in which Josh goes up against the Trekker in the staff pool, and debates with her the rights and wrongs of wearing a Starfleet uniform to work at the White House. But it is at least as much a belief as the significance of a wedding ring. It is also the case that "belief" in this context has a particular kind of meaning within the law that is slightly different from the common understanding.
I am ambivalent about protecting certain philosophical beliefs over others, and at the same time troubled by the implications of some possible applications: for example, a neo-Nazi skinhead and a Hindu both wish to wear a right-hooked cross (swastika) to work - is one protected and the other not? We can argue that the neo-Nazi's beliefs are political rather than philosophical, and perhaps work should not be a place where political views are advocated - but then, what would happen to trades unions, which are inherently political in nature (when they actually work to protect their members, anyway)? And anyway, beliefs that are surely political (such as "the higher purpose of public broadcasting" - it's difficult to see that as anything but political), have already been admitted as protected under the relevant laws.
Here's the main body of what I wrote in comments at the Guardian article (I had a go at some annoying commenters as well, hut that's not so relevant to my basic argument):
The case as put by the sacked employee is that the employer disregarded other types of jewellery being worn, but picked on this type of jewellery as needing to be banned. We are told that the judge accepted that BDSM relationships have most of the qualities needed to identify a belief in the sense of the regulations covering this type of case. The point that seemed to have been at issue was just whether it is, "consistent with modern values".
I think I am right (it's been a while since I read the relevant texts) in saying that for this, we can go right back to Socrates and points he made when arguing against Athenian democracy, and then respond in the way the Athenians did: when I go to the doctor, I will be told what to do with myself. I may be given a prescription and given instructions on how and when to take the medication. This is in order for me to gain some benefit (incidentally, these days it is advised for certain types of people to wear silver bracelets to signify that they suffer from allergies, so that could be directly relevant!) I recognise that the doctor is better-placed to give me that benefit than I am by my own efforts (this was more-or-less the argument Plato placed in Socrates' mouth for accepting the rule of philosopher-kings). The argument that the Athenian democrats made back to Socrates is what distinguishes BDSM "slavehood" from actual slavery: "If I do not like my doctor's advice, I can go to a different doctor, or I can just ignore it". Likewise, a BDSM submissive can at any time withdraw from the relationship, or explain clearly and openly why something is beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable within a relationship.
The songwriter Brian Bedford put it, "If you give your love its freedom, it may stay a while; if it leaves you, it was never yours to own". The "ownership" within BDSM is entirely like this, and even though it may mimic captivity (and through that, give a feeling of comfort and security), on another level it is entirely free, no matter how much control is surrendered within it. A BDSM "slave" is only a slave for as long as zie wishes to be, and therefore could be argued to be not a slave at all.
Just as, these days, it is legally relatively easy to get out of an unhappy marriage (although sometimes spouse-abusers work hard to prevent it, and can make it very hard to achieve). The analogy of the BDSM collar with the wedding ring has already been mentioned, and it is a good one in many ways. Both are a personal affirmation of the importance of a specific other person in their lives, and a constant reminder of the commitment to that person that the wearer has made (as a BDSM Dominant myself, I sometimes wonder what I should wear to show my commitment to a submissive partner, should we decide to go that far).
In general, I think that a collar might be a different type of jewellery, and might conceivably present a different H&S challenge from crucifix pendants, charms, and more common religious/belief symbols that are worn (that would be for other people to determine yes or no). If she were wearing a pendant showing the BDSM triskelion symbol, and that were to be identified as unacceptable, when other symbols of a similar type but showing more traditional images, then I would believe that that did amount to clear discrimination, given that the judge accepted that a BDSM relationship constitutes a belief under the terms of the regulations.
***
I ran out of space in the comments box there. Here's my conclusion, that I left out:
I don't know whether BDSM should count as a belief or not. I do think that, unless the dresscode is applied equally to all types of jewellery (or else, there's a clear health&safety reason why it should be different) then it doesn't matter why someone is wearing it, they should be allowed to do so, regardless of what it is. Of course, I think that hate speech (such as the skinhead wearing a swastika) is a problem, and the current regulations require that a belief that is protected should be one that does, "not conflict with the fundamental rights of others." Neo-Nazism, I hope we can agree, tends to conflict with others' fundamental rights!
Last Saturday, I paid a visit to my GP. The reason for the visit was an unusual lump that I had detected on my anus, and I wanted confirmation of what said lump was. Chances were, it was piles. But, specks of blood on the loo paper are a thing one should generally get checked out, and weird lumps likewise.
The thing is, having detected the lump, my natural reaction (which may not be natural for most people, but it is for me) was to try to get a look at it. Not having the flexibility of a politician (who seem to be able usually to get their heads up their arses, no problem), this was going to require the application of Technology. Namely, my digital camera. (No, I am not going to share the resulting picture!)
So, now I had something visual, that I could use to compare with things online. I types a description of what I could see into google images, and looked for something that matched. It came up with a few options, the most common of which was piles, naturally. But one page said that something that looks like piles might be genital warts. And the picture it showed looked sort of like the picture on my camera.
And then, on Wednesday, I noticed three little lumps on my penis!!!
And on Friday, I noticed some odd white flecks around my lips, of two different kinds, which I vaguely pondered might be oral thrush or something.
So, I went to the GP with these symptoms, having half-convinced myself that somehow, despite not having sexual contact with another person for just about 10 months, I had managed to contract and develop symptoms of, a wide range of STIs.
Of course, my fears were unfounded (as this post's title may have already given away). I did have piles, specifically a singular pile, with a long name that started with the word "external". A digital rectal examination produced the result "nothing abnormal detected" (the doc stuck his finger up my arse and couldn't find anything wrong with me). The lumps on my knob were definitely NOT warts (the GP was very clear on that) but instead were "penile flaccid cysts", and could safely be ignored. The first kind of odd flecks were, apparently, nothing, and careful examination inside my gob produced the verdict that there was nothing wrong with me there either.
As it happens, I am pretty sure I do have a cold sore (that was the second type of odd fleck). Google is my friend (although not always very helpful for a hypochondriac!), and revealed that anxiety and stress can prompt an attack if one is already infected (as explained in that link), and given the imaginary illnesses I had conjured for myself during the week, it's fair to say I had worked myself into quite a stressed and anxious state. (So there's at least one STI that may not be imaginary here.) I also discovered that it is believed around 80% of US adults carry the herpes simplex virus that causes cold sores, and depending on which source, 60% or 70% of British adults do (the above link says 70%). As it happens, I believe I know how I first got infected, and it was a non-consensual kiss by a woman I barely knew, a few years ago - I got symptoms for the first time a few days after that, I believe, and wondered at the time whether I had caught a cold sore, but it didn't match anything I had seen in sex ed classes.
And that, finally, brings me to the point of this post!
You see, all the things I worried about last week, I did not have any clear idea of what to look for. And the reason for this is, I think, something to do with sex education and its aims. I think it is something that can be done by both safer-sex approaches and abstinence-only approaches.
You see, when either of these approaches teaches about STIs, there does seem to be a tendency to want to use fear to prompt action. Whether it's the abstinence-only "Don't have sex!", or the safer-sex, "Don't have sex without a condom!" the method is quite similar. The subtext is, "Because if you do, you could end up like THIS!!!" (drama button) I recall it from when I was at school (about 15 years ago now), and it was also prevalent in the Sex Education Show's episode talking about STIs.
And of course, it's tempting to believe that that's more effective if you show the most advanced, hideous, out-of-control examples of an illness that you can (my other doubts about that approach are explained in my "Sex Education Show" post linked above). AIDS is pretty bad as it is, so they don't need to take quite the same approach with that ("It's gonna KILL YOU!" seems to do the job with that quite well, although I am not sure how effective current treatments are at delaying that outcome or preventing it).
The problem with that is that, if something does go wrong, you don't really know what to look for to know whether you should be worried or not, until it gets bad enough to look like those photos.
That's how it's taken me so long to figure out that I had probably contracted the herpes simplex virus - the pictures of cold sores that were shown were like nightmares, and nothing at all like what I had. Most of the time if I had an attack, I just got the start-up tingling and nothing else, even, and didn't know that it might be a cold sore. I stumbled across the information (see the link earlier) last weekend when I was clicking links related to my other worries. So then I went looking for images of cold sores, and finally found something that looked like what I had experienced a few times before during periods of high stress, and not like a hideous pox that invaded your entire face (I exaggerate the worse pictures, of the type they showed in sex ed classes - but not by that much!). Of course, some of them looked a lot like ordinary zits (and to be honest, my worst attacks I assumed I had just got a zit on the edge of my lip!) It's only the other symptoms that make me think I probably have it (and the fact that 60 or 70 percent of people do, so on balance of probabilities I would be more likely than not to have it).
And the same goes for the things I imagined I had but didn't have, like genital warts. I really didn't know what to look for to know one way or the other whether the things I had spotted on my body were benign, or non-infectious, or absolutely hideous diseases in the early stages, because the only images I had seen of such things were the nightmarish scenarios that I assume were the worst possible outcomes of being infected. So I was left with wondering if maybe the flaccid cysts were the "early stages" of something far worse? That the GP was able to be so definite about them makes me feel like there's probably features of genital warts that are very different from the features of my tiny little cysts.
So, I think that the objective of teaching people, "Make sure you use barriers/contraception", while certainly that's a very important lesson to impart, kind of leaves the second row of defence - early detection and treatment - very ill-prepared. Some STIs, of course, don't have effective treatments available, but a lot of them do. And early detection is still important to help prevent the infection being passed on to others, even when there isn't a way to treat it.
So, in conclusion, sex education would help young people (and people who will grow up not to be young!) better, I think, if the early warning signs were made the focus, instead of the "shock, horror!" approach of "This could happen to you!" Sure, you want people to know why STIs are very bad things to catch, but more importantly, you want them to know as soon as possible that they have.
I haven't got much further with my investigation, but I did come up with one result that I thought was rather pleasing and elegant.
I mentioned last time that I was interested in figuring out how many games similar to rock-paper-scissors you could find within the structure of a larger game.
Some definitions:
A tournament is "a directed graph (digraph) obtained by assigning a direction for each edge in an undirected complete graph. That is, it is a directed graph in which every pair of vertices is connected by a single directed edge."
In my last post I used the term "fair" to describe a tournament in which every player beats and is beaten by an equal number of opponents.
RPS-n is therefore defined as the fair tournament with n participants. In my last post, I defined RPS-n as being of level L, where L=(n-1)/2. The number L is often more useful than n, as we shall see.
In the section on transitivity at the wikipedia link, a tournament in which every participant is beats at least k opponents is called k-paradoxical (translating the mathematical notation in the wikipedia page, for all ways of choosing k players in the tournament, there exists another player who beats all of them). RPS-n is 1-paradoxical because every player is beaten by at least 1 other player. However, it is possible to see that we can choose two or more players who are not both beaten by another player (for example, if I choose Spock and lizard in RPS-5, then neither rock, paper nor scissors can beat both of them).
The first thing I wanted to do was to see if I could figure out how many distinct Hamiltonian cycles there are in RPS-n. In my last post, I showed that there are exactly 2 such cycles in RPS-5. I think I've counted exactly 17 in RS-7, but that number looks weird (I am intrigued by the idea of creating a musical piece using all 17 cycles, since the diatonic scale has 7 distinct notes in it - if it sounds good, I'll probably make an mp3 of it and post it somewhere). I have not yet managed to find a general answer, however, and am currently out of ideas of how to do so.
What I have achieved so far is to work out how to calculate the number of games equivalent to RPS-3 (that is, to rock-paper-scissors) there are in RPS-n, or more accurately, the fair tournament of level L.
This involves choosing three players from n, and there are ((n-2)(n-1)n)/6 ways of doing that. However, most of those choices will not be valid because they are transitive. To find out how many ways of picking three non-transitive elements from RPS-n there are, we need to go back to the possible choices that can be made, and that means we need to use the level, L, of the game.
Define P(r) as the player that defeats P(r+1), P(r+2), ... , P(r+L) ; where the number in brackets has modulus n (that is, it behaves like a clock with n numbers on the face).
To start with, we can only choose from the first L players to start. This is because the (L+1)th player has to choose from players who can only beat the first L players - that is, they can only produce duplicates of cycles that start on the first L players. We can see this because P(L+1) can beat only up to P(2L+1), but 2L+1 = n so that means that P can only beat P(n) (which is equivalent to P(0) ), who in turn can only beat P(1) up to P(L).
So, we have L options for our start point. We then have L options for our second choice (in the level 2 game (rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock), we can choose to start at A or B. If we start at A, then we can choose B or C, and if we start at B then we can choose D or E). However, our options for choosing the third member of the set in order that it be non-transitive, are reduced.
With the definition of P(r) above, we can see that effectively, for each start point we want to choose three positive integers a, b, c (all of which are less than or equal to L) such that a+b+c = 2L+1. Now we can see that if a=1, then b+c=2L meaning b=c=L. In general, it resolves to choosing two items out of L, which is the same as the Lth triangular number.
It is not enough to say that there are L times the Lth triangular number ways of choosing an RPS-3 game from an RPS-n game. Some of the games will be duplicates of one another, and we have to take those away.
For P(1), there are no duplicates. For P(2), the only duplicate is where (a,b,c) = (L,L,1). This is because P(1) is included in the cycle by virtue of the fact that it is one step behind P(2), and since we have already accounted for all the cycles that include P(1) then it must be a duplicate of one of those cycles.
In general, for P(r), then we must discount all (a,b,c) where c is less than r.
For each value of c less than r, the number of duplicates is given by the cth triangular number (we can see this, because the puzzle is similar to the puzzle already solved, but counting backwards around the circle instead of forwards). But we have to add up all the duplicates from all of the different values of r. That means that the total number of duplicates is the sum of all the triangular numbers up to the (r-1)th triangular number (because the maximum value of c is r-1).
The sum of the triangular numbers up to a number n is called the nth tetrahedral number, and has formula (n(n+1)(n+2))/6.
This means that the total number of RPS-3 games to be found in RPS-n is given by L multiplied by the Lth triangular number, and then minus the (L-1)th tetrahedral number. That produces a formula as follows:
(2(L^3)+3(L^2)+L)/6
(2 times L cubed, plus 3 times L squared, plus L, and all divided by 6)
And that concludes the work I have done so far on RPS-n this week!
***
My suspicion is that for the number of distinct RPS games of level K to be found in the RPS tournament of level L (K less than L), then the formula will include the (K+2)th dimension of triangular numbers, where triangular numbers are the 2nd dimension, tetrahedral numbers are the 3rd, the 4th would be the sum of tetrahedral numbers up to n, and so on - however, I am a long way from even attempting a proof of that! For future reference, a formula for the nth k-dimensional triangular number is given on a page from the University of Toronto Mathematics Network - hopefully I can use that to show how it works for RPS-n games.
Tonight, it appears that rioting has spread to other major cities in the UK, and to be honest I do not have a whole lot to say about the situation. I do not really know what is going on, despite paying attention to the news. I know that the police shot a man dead, and that according to the latest release from the IPCC, he had an illegal firearm but never fired it. I know that there was a peaceful protest, and I know that there followed rioting, and there followed looting.
Other people have commented in more detail, for example at Feministe here and here, and at The F-Word Blog.
I don't want to get into what is happening and the politics or criminality argument very much, because I really don't know for sure what the reality is for the people involved or on the sidelines, or just hunkering down and hoping it doesn't affect them too much.
I did have some stray thoughts that I noticed or that made connections for me.
The first is that I just watched Newsnight on BBC2, and eventually turned it off because I got too angry with Michael Gove (the Tory Secretary of State for Education), who was making classic straw person fallacy arguments, basically suggesting that anyone who implied there was a link between the violence and government policy was suggesting that there was somehow a rational link between anger at a particular, specific, policy, and the decision to torch a particular building. My answer would have been, had I the opportunity to make it (none of the people who had the opportunity did make it) the following:
It is not a rational, reasoned response, but it is a consequence. People respond and react to the economic and material conditions of their lives, and sometimes where those conditions are bad, and visibly far worse than the conditions of others' lives, and they perceive someone to be responsible for that, then they respond emotionally and angrily. Where government policies have a direct impact on the material and economic facts of people's lives, then yes, there may very well be a causal link between your government's policies and the fact that angry people are setting fire to buildings in the capital. It's not a rational argument by them against the policy, it is an emotive reaction to the effects of the policy.
Now, I say that nobody made that case but this is not precisely true. Earlier in the programme, the presenter hosted a debate between two young Londoners from the communities affected, and two White people (Michael Gove and a woman whose name I missed, who said she works with victim support groups). I wasn't paying proper attention through the programme, so I missed the young people's names and which description of personal circumstances went with which person; all I know is that one was obviously Black and the other I read as White, but could have been mixed-race of some description. Of those four people, the young people were the ones who made the intelligent, reasoned, structured arguments. They were dismissed by the White presenter and White establishment figures, and assumed to be ignorant (it seemed to me especially so the young Black man) based mainly on the fact that their accents matched that of poor London and therefore (presumed to be) uneducated, ignorant London - even though I know at least one of them was described as attending University.
Even the presenter did this. The young Black man at one point quoted Martin Luther King's statement that, "A riot is the language of the unheard," and the presenter immediately asked, "Are you comparing the rioters to Martin Luther King?" The only reason to do that is to portray the original speaker as ignorant because any fule kno that MLK was a pacifist, right? These two young men explained their beliefs clearly and intelligently, but were spoken over and ignored by the people who thought themselves better - in effect, reproducing the point of MLK's statement that the young man quoted, because these young men were there as representatives of the communities that erupted into violence, and as they went unheard, so do the communities, and the people who are perhaps less articulate than those people in the TV studio seek to be heard in other ways. Perhaps. As I said, I don't know the reality of what's going on, but that theory was exemplified by what I saw on my television.
I also saw the White woman they had in the studio, and in a "vox pops" piece they had another White woman describing the rioters as "feral", "vile" and similar terms. I felt like asking that vox pops woman, "Do you think they know you hate them that much? Do you think that they felt as though you felt that way about them before they started rioting?"
The White establishment woman in the TV studio also asked, when footage of a hooded youth interviewed earlier was shown in the studio, "If he's got something to say, why is he hiding his face, he should come here and talk with us instead!" Which, of course, is the voice of Privilege speaking.
Anyway, that was just some angry thoughts that I had while half-listening to the Newsnight report.
One other connection crossed my mind, thinking about how riots start, and how a peaceful protest got taken by unconnected people and turned into the rest of it.
I recalled a programme called How Violent Are You? (link is to my review of the programme) that talked about some of the brain chemistry of violence. It's associated with dopamine, which is also related to sex and the high of taking drugs. There is also the impetus of a crowd, and humans being social animals are driven by crowd behaviour more often than we sometimes recognise (the inverse, of course, is the Bystander Effect in which the more people around there are, the less likely it is that someone will make the first move and break with the crowd passivity to help a person in trouble, or even to avoid a danger such as smoke pouring into a room).
I don't know the causes, so this is just speculation, but I imagine that it is not directly the death of Mark Duggan that caused the anger that led to the initial rioting. What I imagine is that people felt as though Duggan was representative of them, that it could have been their chest that caught the bullet, and that maybe next time it will be. Having a concrete example of the fear that people felt, some of them started to express that fear as anger and violence. Regardless of how that step actually got taken, or what the feelings and reasons really were, it is not hard to see how rioting can snowball and go far beyond any kind of targeted political violence if you think about the body and brain and how we are wired for this fight-or-flight cascade effect. Once the violence starts the body and brain gear themselves up to fight to the finish, to be ever more ready and "up for it". Violence feels good, once you get into that state - it's an end in itself because of the dopamine and adrenaline and endorphins and what-have-you. The bigger the enemy, the bigger the buzz (especially if it feels like you actually beat them!), and what bigger enemy is there than the State, the Police, Society? I've not been directly involved in political violence (I was at Mayday 2000, but the area I was in was peaceful), however, I have experienced being violent.
Looting happens for two reasons - one is, the fear that you could lose everything, therefore you need to grab as much as you can to try to prevent that from happening (also seen in panic-buying situations). The other is what seemed to be the case this time, judging by the reports on the news: some opportunistic people see the breakdown of law and order and seek to cash in while the police are distracted elsewhere. There are reports of criminal gangs now organising looting expeditions into the riot-stricken areas to take advantage of the fight-or-flight response of others.
Of course, that makes it easy for the politicians whose policies may well (or may not, but I doubt it) be the root cause of the initial violence, to portray both the political and the opportunistic rioters as being purely criminal, and nothing to do with them.
The last thought (and again, this was echoed by the young men in the TV studio, who talked about how the looting is part and parcel of a culture of greed) is that on the news after all the stuff about the rioting, they casually mentioned that some stupid figure of value had been knocked off the stock exchanges today (I know I heard the words "trillion dollars" mentioned, I don't remember how many trillion dollars it was!) And yet, the criminals are the ones smashing a few shop windows and grabbing a bit for themselves, not the arseholes sitting in the FTSE or NYSE, the Dow Jones or the what-have-you. As I watched that part of the news, i was reminded of one of the most awesome Celtic rock bands I ever saw, which was Lenahan. I thought, in particular, of one of their original songs - Hooligans In Suits:
They buy expensive gadgets & they buy expensive clothes,
And some of them buy quite expensive powders for their nose.
They take expensive holidays from their expensive lives,
And they share expensive flats because they can't afford a wife.
Hooligans in Suits - Hooligans in Suits
And gold's the only colour that
They ever will salute
They keep a civil tongue upon
Their supervisor's boots
But oh, to hear the language
When they're Hooligans in Suits.
This is a thing that has been bugging me for a while, the often-used phrase "friends with benefits", which is used to discuss people who are not "dating" or in "a relationship", but who have sex with one another as an on-going thing.
I much prefer the term "fuck-buddies", because at least that gets to the nub of what's going on - we're buddies, and we fuck one another! However, the impression I get is that the two terms have different connotations, such that "fuck-buddies" are people who may be friends, but their primary mode of interaction is sexual; "friends with benefits" being friends who occasionally shag one another. That's not how I prefer to use the term fuck-buddies, but it's the impression I get from seeing it used elsewhere.
One thing that I find uncomfortable about the term "friends with benefits" is hinted at in that preference for the straight-forwardness of "fuck-buddies". Fuck-buddies is honest. "Friends with benefits" hides its true intentions behind this word, "benefits". And that is the point, it seems. So often when I have seen this phrase used (not every time, and I couldn't even swear that it's the majority of times, but enough for the association to be strongly formed in my mind), it has referred not to an ongoing, stable, situation, but to one person wanting to override the boundaries of the other. Friend 'A' thinks friend 'B' is sexually attractive and would be a good lay, so friend A introduces this phrase, "friends with benefits" as a means to open up friend B to the notion of fucking together. The phrase, and the usage that seems to be common, seems to function precisely as a way to circumvent proper negotiation of a shift in the relationship from a friendship to a sexual relationship. And, it speaks of "getting" something from the other. Needless to say, the vast majority of the aggressors in these depictions or usages that I have encountered, are male-identified persons, wanting to get sex from female-identified folks. I would find the phrase just as disturbing used in the opposite context. Even when it's not used in that way within the relationship, the tendency for outsiders to ask with a "knowing", lascivious wink (either literal or implied in the tone of voice), "Is that 'friends with benefits'?" implying "Phwoar! Have you found a way to persuade her to shag you yet?" tells me that the concept is filled with the patriarchal notion of sex as something women control and men want to get from them, by fair means or foul. Sometimes, "benefits" in this sense is explicitly made synonymous with "sexual rights" (as in "friend with benefits" means "I have 'privileges' this friend", meaning, "(I believe) I have the right to have sex with this friend if I want to.")
How much of this is mainstream media usage rather than r/l usage, I don't know - the phrase seems to be much more common in MSM than in my social circles (which, let's face it, aren't that big due to my introversion). So let's leave that discomfort to one side, and say that there is a role for a term that refers to friends who are comfortable with a stable relationship situation that allows them to get nekkid together and shag when the need and desire for them both to do so should arise, but whose friendship is not built upon this sexual element (that is, that the term "fuck-buddies" cannot be used for that sort of situation but only for friendships that are primarily about satisfying sexual urges).
Given those conditions - namely, a need for a term, and that the term does not refer to coercive or boundary-violating moves - I would still dislike the term "friends with benefits", and the astute reader will already have worked out why from the title of this post.
Any friendship, I believe, brings benefits into my life just through knowing and having a positive relationship with a person - a relationship that, on the whole, makes it worth my while spending time and energy on their company instead of sat here at home alone with only my keyboard and computer screen for company (and remember, from where I am, being an introvert, being alone with my computer is not that bad!)
Friends, in general, have benefits. Of course, I do not mean material benefits. I don't even mean in the sense of social benefits such as reputation, "cred", "connections" and the like (the sorts of things that sometimes get called 'social capital"). I mean the emotional benefits and social benefits that come from sharing good times, and from supporting people through bad times. There is a definite extra boost from doing something to help another, if you know that person and can see the ongoing effects of that good deed, over and above the knowledge of having done good that you get from donating to charity so that some stranger in a far off foreign land will maybe live a happier and longer life (even though often, arguably, that help is more effective than the help given to a friend). With a true friend, there is also the material benefit of knowing that they will help you out in the same way - not as a quid pro quo, but for the same positive feeling of accomplishment and fellowship that you feel when you help them. Friends laugh together, or make each other laugh, they share stories, offer advice to each other, share the good times, commiserate and cuddle during the bad times, help one another out, celebrate each other's successes and feel a warm glow from witnessing them, and so on.
The benefits of being friends, therefore, are immense and hugely satisfying. More satisfying, at least in my opinion, than a good shagging every so often (however much that may satisfy the biological urges - "scratch an itch", as the saying goes).
So how come the only "benefits" that are worth mentioning, or making special mention of, are sexual favours? Why is the rest of it considered not to be benefits of friendship, such that the only friends who come with benefits are the ones who'll let you fuck them? Do you think that it is too literal-minded of me to suggest that "friends with benefits" means that all other friends are "friends without benefits"?
I wouldn't be super-pleased with the phrase "friends with bonuses" or "friends with add-ons", because that still portrays sex as primarily a commodity to be traded, and when it isn't traded, it's a gift rather than a shared experience (sure, I have no problem with people who choose to sell sexual services, but I'm not comfortable with that as a model for all sexuality!) However, those terms would at least be closer to expressing that, in modern society, friendships are viewed as non-sexual, so there is something "extra" added to the relationship if sex is involved.
I like fuck-buddies because it is stated clearly in relationship-terms only: "fuck" = "the relationship involves sex" and "buddies" = "the relationship is based on friendship rather than romantic love". None of this farting about with ambiguous terms that could mean anything ("friends with benefits" could even mean "someone I know who's on welfare/JSA/income support/etc", and the suggestions I made above also don't tell you what is really being added on, or what the "bonuses" are - again, that could be a mate who received an extra pay-out from work for a holiday or a job well done!) Hey, if you need a "clean" term that won't offend the broadcast censors, the Simpsons gets by having Marge and Homer going upstairs for "snuggles", so why not "snuggle-buddies", "snuggle-mates" or similar?
Ever since I learned of the "rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock" extension to the classic nontransitive game "rock-paper-scissors" (created by Sam Kass and Karen Bryla), I have pondered from time to time the properties of these games, and more particularly, the general properties of arbitrarily large games of a similar nature. Defining a game as level n if it has 2n+1 choices ("weapons"), we can call rock-paper-scissors a "level 1 game" and rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock a "level 2 game".
A map is a level 'n' game if each "weapon" must beat and be beaten by the same number of opposing weapons (for example, in rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock, every weapon is beaten by 2, and beats 2, of the other weapons). This makes it "fair", in that no one weapon choice has an advantage over the others.
A further property of the directed graph (digraph) as constructed, is that any three neighbouring weapons on the outside ring form a map that is equivalent to the original rock-paper-scissors map. Thus, the game "rock-lizard-Spock" is the same as rock-paper-scissors. Rock-scissors-lizard, however, is not, since rock beats both lizard and scissors. This proves that it is not the case that all level 1 subsets of the level 2 game are level 1 games. The property of neighbouring subsets being lower-level games is elegant, but not necessary in terms of arranging the digraph (that a level 2 game produces subsets that are level 1 games, it turns out, is guaranteed).
My next question was whether it was possible to construct an arbitrarily large level 'n' game that retained these properties with respect to lower level games. Leaving aside the designations of the weapons for the moment, and instead labelling them A, B, C, ... etc, then the next thing is to try to construct a level 3 game (that is, one with 7 weapons, [A, B, C, D ,E, F, G]). To retain the elegant graph structure, it was easy enough to observe that one way this can be achieved is to take the relationships of A with respect to B, C, D, and E in the level 2 game, and ascribe those relationships to F as well (that is, if A beats B, then F also beats B, and so on). Then, take the relationships of B with respect to C, D and E and ascribe those relationships to G (so, if B beats C then G also beats C, and so on). That leaves four relationships undefined, which are A to F, A to G, B to G and F to G. A fair game can be constructed by arbitrarily deciding whether A beats F or G and matching accordingly. To retain the property admired earlier, however, we want the [C, D, E, F, G] level 2 game to be the same as the [A, B, C, D, E] level 2 game. That means that letting F stand in relation to G in the same way that D stands in relation to E will enable us to fill in the rest of the graph according to the requirements of a fair game, and this produces the quality we wanted.
It is possible to produce the level 2 graph from the level 1 graph in a similar way (that is, with A = scissors, B = paper and C = rock, then to produce lizard (D), lizard, like scissors, must beat paper and lose to rock. Spock (E) can be produced by copying the relationship of paper to rock (i.e. Spock beats rock). This leaves the question of Spock's relationship to scissors, paper and lizard, and lizard's relationship to scissors. After these relationships have been copied, paper now beats rock but loses to lizard and scissors. That means paper has to beat Spock. Because we want the game rock-lizard-Spock to be the same as rock-paper-scissors, lizard must stand in relation to Spock as paper stands in relation to rock, so lizard loses to Spock. From that decision, the requirement of fairness allows us to finish the rest of the graph.
And the same method can be generalised for any level n game, the level n+1 game can be constructed using a similar method.
Using this method, the level 3 game can be constructed, and the two new items are as follows:
F: beats paper, lizard and G. Loses to scissors, rock and Spock.
G: beats scissors, rock and Spock. Loses to paper, lizard and G.
Readers are invited to try to come up with names, symbols/gestures, and explanations for the relationships, for these two new weapons!
[ETA: It turns out that this stuff has been done before, but I always thought it would have been - here's a game called RPS-25 (which corresponds in my terminology to "level 12", and that page has a link to a whopping RPS-101 (level-50!). Without seeing a chart like the one below, I couldn't follow it closely enough to say if it's the same as what my method would produce.]
I am not sure how motivated I am to follow this up, but there are lots of questions that have piqued my curiosity about these types of graphs/games now. For instance, in the proof below, I mentioned that a level 2 game must have 2 5-step non-transitive cycles in the map. I had a go at working out the same question for level 3 with respect to 7-step non-transitive cycles, but my scribbling was a bit untidy and I may have miscounted (I think it came to 21). I am curious as to the relationship between the size (level) of the game and the number of such cycles there are in it, and also the ratio between the number of level 1 games versus the number of sets of 3 weapons that are not level 1 games. (In the level 2 game, the numbers are equal, but does that hold for all levels?)
Thinking about this stuff takes me back to 'A' Level maths classes, and the coursework requirements. Happy memories!
***
To prove that a level 2 game necessarily produces smaller level 1 games within it, I constructed the initial non-transitive sequence of five weapons, A beats B, B beats C, C beats D, D beats E, E beats A:
(+1 means the letter on the left beats the letter across the top; -1 means the letter on the left loses to the letter across the top)
This leaves, for each weapon, two undefined relationships. For the digraph to be a game in the sense used above (that is, "fair"), it is clear that for each weapon, these two relationships must be opposite to one another: it beats one of them, and is beaten by the other. That gives only two choices for weapon A - either it beats weapon C or it beats weapon D. If A beats C, then for the game to be fair, C must beat E, and we already know that E beats A. If A beats D, then we already know that D beats E, and that E beats A.
By constructing a tree to show the conditions and possible paths, I was able to demonstrate that for any level 2 game, there must be 2 non-transitive cycles that involve all the weapons within the game (on the rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock graph, you can see the second cycle by tracing the 5-pointed star in the middle of the diagram, e.g. lizard, paper, Spock, rock, scissors and back to lizard).
About a week ago, Nathan @ 21st Century Relationships wrote about the unrealistic checklists that a lot of people on the dating scene or dating websites seem to carry around with them (he calls it "the Assembly Line of Hot", but really it's not so much assembly-line as tailor-made to order, surely?).
Nathan notes that having standards is important, but there comes a point where the standards become impossible to achieve, and really, it's a wishlist rather than "these are the things I need". "Would be nice" takes the place of "must-have". I thought that it might be an idea to sit down and think about what my "deal-breakers" and "must-haves" are on the one hand, and the "would be nice" and "dislikes/slight turn-offs".
Long-time readers will know of my previous post about my standards versus PUA/HJNTIY standards, and also the follow-up "things that annoy me on dating profiles". This is not the same as those, although obviously drawing on some of the same material!
It turns out that there are more "deal-breakers" than "must-haves", and I could only decide on a small number of "dislikes" and "would be nice". No appearance criteria, because although it's not entirely unimportant, there just isn't any way to be specific about what I like or don't like in a person's looks, that you can call it a criterion as such. I also left out kink-related criteria because from a vanilla dating site and/or first (couple of) dates, that's unlikely to be something I could test!
So anyway, my criteria, from worst (deal-breakers) to best (must-haves):
Deal Breakers:
Smoking
Embracing of/accepting of homophobia/transphobia
Ditto, racism
Right-wing politics (i.e. allowing private business to screw everyone else, and doing nothing to help the victims)
Jealous/controlling (i.e. expecting a veto over how I spend time with female friends)
Fatphobia (although, let's be fair, the fact that I am fat would probably make it a deal-breaker for her, too!)
Judging prospects/ambition/worth by financial measures.
Hypocrisy/double-standards in criteria (especially if it's "men are this, women are that" type stuff)
Favourite activity appears to be getting drunk with friends (i.e. photo is drunk-looking partier and favourite hobby is "going out with mates" or similar)
Dislikes/turn-offs:
Always travelling (i.e. a long list of places they've been, and a longer list of places they want to go - just settle down, already!)
Seems too busy to fit a relationship into their over-packed life (travelling is kind of a special case of this)
Pandering to heteronormative stereotypes of male desires/interests (e.g. "I totes know the offside rule, so you don't need to explain it to me, aren't I attractive for that reason?!" - see also double-standards point in "deal-breakers")
Puts herself down, e.g. on appearance/intellect
Would be nice/definite attractors:
At least a little bit nerd/geek/dork oriented (like me!)
Musical/creative
Can follow my train of thought (i.e. has a certain level of education/knowledge background and therefore knows some of my references)
Light-hearted/easy-going (can get me to chill if I get too serious/overthink-y)
Must-haves:
Feminist (even if it's of the "I'm not a feminist, but..." variety, or just being open to the ideas of feminism)
Sex-positive
Open-minded
Pays as much attention to me as I do to her
... A pulse (no zombies or sex robots, please!)
Acceptance of my non-gender-conformity, and more generally of others' non-conformity, is a strong theme in the "deal-breakers" and "must-haves". "Feminist" is also a test for genuine independence and ability to communicate her desires clearly - both of which are very important to me. The jealousy/controlling deal-breaker would never have occurred to me to include until I started using OkCupid and discovered how many women think that seeing an ex who's a friend, or spending the night with a female friend, is a problem for them. Trust, and recognising that my friends are important (and not rivals!), are pretty key. I view judging anyone by the size of their wallet/paycheque as being intolerably shallow. As for drinking, it's okay to get drunk every so often, but for me, I want to be with someone who has fun when they're sober, also.
Most of the things in "would be nice" are about ease of communication, while most of the "turn-off/dislike" entries can be described as "things that make me feel uncomfortable". For example, the "travel" urge makes me feel like she won't be satisfied with my more stay-at-home Cancerian instinct (does that make me "clingy"? Probably, but I try not to make it a problem for others that I am). Being too busy obviously carries the risk that I'll feel like I don't get back the attention I put in (see the "must haves" list!). Heteronormative stereotypes make me feel like I will be asked to be something I'm not (i.e. a "real man") and forced into that social straitjacket of performative masculinity, so I cannot relax and be myself. Putting herself down makes me feel uncomfortable because I feel like (a) I have to be the strong one and (b) it's a criticism of me for "settling" for her (it sort of says that I have poor judgement if a woman I'm attracted to is unattractive, no?)
