It's Jordan's Fault. Probably.

 In a recent Independent piece on online bullying, the mighty Graham Linehan pointed out that celebrities, by their very existence, are treated without empathy, and that the public views them as a commodity.
 He has a point, but the example he uses is a little too simple - he points out the unpleasant way Tom Daley was treated by that kid whose parents were brother and sister [probably.]
 Tom Daley isn't the reason celebrities don't get treated like real people; everyone who wasn't fisted by a succession of stepfathers* knows that Daley is a young, blameless swimmer. At the very least, he has a role that we can define.
 What Linehan touches on, but fails to explore, is why we as a public are used to seeing celebrities as objects.
 The truth, I suspect, is that a small minority have damned the entire celebrity culture.
 Once upon a time, in the days of yore, when instead of the internet we communicated mostly by pigeons and shouting, people were famous for a reason. Usually just the one reason, too. James Dean was famous for acting, and never once threatened to launch a second career recording awful music and yelling at interviewers like a douche. So if you didn't like Dean, you just didn't see his films. Easy.
 Then, at some arbitrary point, people started getting famous for far less.
 The quickest way to do this - to achieve fame for nothing - was soon discovered to be "owning a pair of tits" and, crucially, "showing them to everybody."
 With the rise of the glamour models - almost all of whom, crucially, were demonstrably not very bright - something snapped in people.
 Frustration, bitterness, hatred, and all the other things the Emperor would have approved of in "Return of the Jedi" began to simmer.
 Largely, the issue was one of jealousy. Intelligent, hard working people began to realise they would never succeed in life to the same degree as, say, Jordan (estimated net worth right now: £45 million. Demonstrable accomplishments: None.)
 As soon as people began prostituting themselves for money and fame, society began losing respect for anyone who was well known. It's hard not to be bitter and angry when you work 45 hours a week and will still never have the standard of living afforded to Jedward, or the cast of Jersey Shore.
 These people, to be clear, have forfeited their right to sympathy. If you want to appear in public and act like a talentless, braindead whore, you have no right to complain about the ire you draw. You may not even be acting. You may genuinely think it's alright to be thick, useless and unproductive. Which it is. What's not alright is when you think that being thick, useless and unproductive shouldn't be a barrier to immense wealth and adulation, because that's going to piss off a lot of people, and you'll only have yourself to blame.
 Unfortunately, the "useless/talentless celeb" thing has gone on so long that it has spilled over into the realms of the usefully famous, so that people feel free to treat creative, hard working celebrities with the same scorn that one would justifiably pour on Simon Cowell.
 We're so irked, as a society, at seeing people who contribute nothing at all to the world make their fortunes, that we also begin to suspect, usually wrongly, that all well-known people are useless and that we could do better.
 With this mindset constantly simmering, it doesn't take much to cause it to boil over.
 The author of the above piece that quoted Graham Linehan started her article with a run-on, grammatically ruinous sentence, made several punctuation errors (one of which made it very confusing as to when she was quoting and when she wasn't) and is also the victim of online bullying. A lot of these bullies, I would hazard a guess, are infuriated by the errors in her writing and feel the urge to abuse her because of them.
 Is this fair? Shit no. The woman in question is a campaigner for disabled rights and a carer for two disabled children. Just because I make fewer typos than her doesn't mean I'm a better person, because I doubt I could do what she does - I doubt I'd have the balls to even try. So whilst I have no problem referring to Big Brother contestants as a group of people who should, collectively, have been blowjobs, and who should be smothered to prevent the drain on public oxygen, I wouldn't dream of attacking or harassing an author who champions the rights of the less fortunate, even though I find it frustrating that she finds work in many prestigious publications despite a shaky grasp of sentence structure.
 Am I a better writer than her? Demonstrably, yes. Does this mean I should hate and bully her? Of course not. She's contributing far more to society than I ever have, and likely more than any of the people who harangue her over the internet.
 From what I can see, years of pointless, talentless, soulless cunts being paraded in front of us (often by a media filled with, and run by, pointless, talentless, soulless, manipulative cunts) and portrayed as somehow worthwhile has left us with the erroneous belief that nobody in the public eye is a worthwhile human being, and that all famous people are deserving of abuse.
 People aren't fair game to attack if their earnest efforts - whatever you may think of them - bring them to the attention of society at large.
 They're only fair game, in my opinion, if they put no effort in at all and still demand to be rich and famous. Those people should be chased through the streets with pitchforks.
 And until the price of pitchforks in this economy drops a little, save your anger for the people who deserve it.

*One assumes.

Don't Trust Anyone Over Seventy.

 We live, as the news keeps informing us, in an aging society.
 Advances in medicine and the declining birth rate mean that society is tipping, as a whole, towards the older end of the spectrum.
 There are obvious examples - nobody went to see that action movie that Taylor Lautner made, but everyone went to The Expendables 2 - but creeping in amongst it is the insidious, sycophantic and worrying idea that the people we grew up watching and listening to are infallible.
 Take Clint Eastwood.
 Everyone loves Clint. He's reached a level somewhere far beyond "icon." Even my children will probably understand what a great symbol of outlaw masculinity Clint Eastwood was, in the same way that I understand the concept of "John Wayne" as an archetype, despite being born the best part of a decade after his death.
 Clint Eastwood is one of the few people left alive who is genuinely deserving of the term "legend." But that doesn't mean we should all nod along when he spends ten minutes lecturing an empty chair.
 Clint has, at worst, turned senile, based on that evidence. At best, he's become the sort of closed-minded ideologue who will support a candidate who is on record as saying that his favourite books are the Bible and Battlefield Earth.
 So, it's official. After a stellar career, we should stop listening to Clint Eastwood.
 Simillarly, after nearly a decade of stealing other peoples' material without any sign of remorse, Bob Dylan came out fighting this week to complain that plagiarism should be okay because it's traditional.
 This is the same Bob Dylan, incidentally, who once claimed - not without grounds - that he was solely responsible for the end of derivative, Tin Pan Alley songwriting.
 Now he's bitching when people call him out for stealing material, something he did as early as 2001's "Love and Theft" album, which at least managed some charm, and then shamelessly on albums like 2006's "Modern Times."
 So what's the answer?
 Maybe it's inevitable. My cousin and I were discussing the Clint Eastwood incident the other day and worried that it'll happen to all action heroes soon; you won't be able to move for senile former ass-kickers doing something weird. We'll all nod and smile and pretend that it's normal that Clint is down at MFI, having a conversation with an empty kitchen set, or that Kurt Russell has been scavenging at the bins again.
 Or, we could act realistically, and understand that upholding the ideas of our cultural forbears is not usually a good idea.
 Chuck Norris is seventy two - yes, really - and recently said that if the democrats win the upcoming election, it will lead to a thousand years of darkness.
 I don't care how much you like Chuck Norris or where you stand on the political spectrum: If you have a brain in your head, you know that those are the ramblings of a crazy, paranoid old man.
 I'm not saying that all old people are nuts - there are plenty of older people that I have immense respect for - but let's be honest: Agreeing with someone because they were cool forty years ago is never going to be the road to progress.
 Rock Hudson was seen as a very cool guy in his day, but was so ashamed of his homosexuality that he didn't bring it up until it killed him. The same can be said, more tellingly, for Freddie Mercury, a man who would only have been sixty-six today, far younger than someone like Ian McKellen, who is openly gay and, crucially, seems to have all his mental faculties intact. These days, Freddie's attitude would have been seen as embarrassing, no matter how much he is venerated as a musician.
 We need to stop worshiping people for being famous and, more importantly, we REALLY need to stop giving weight to peoples' opinions just because they've been famous for a long time.

It's Either Wanking or Genocide.

 

 On a clear day, in bright conditions, even without my glasses, I can usually read a street sign comfortably from about thirty feet. It's impressive, because it means that despite my best efforts, I didn't somehow wank myself blind by the age of fifteen.

 I don’t think anyone needs to be told how horny teenagers are. It’s a force of nature. Kids are given huge doses of hormones and new, exciting body parts, and they want to try them out so badly it drives them a little bit crazy.

 You can’t blame them; coming out the other side of puberty with a new body and having nobody to grind it against is like being given a top of the line Ferrari (or in my case a 1982 Lada Riva) and then not being given the keys. Or more accurately, finding out the keys are in the pants of a species that will never, ever let you have them.

 So teenagers masturbate a lot. We all know that; it’s what keeps the profits over at Kleenex looking so healthy. Teenagers jerk off with a ferocity and determination not normally seen this side of Ray Mears trying to get a fire lit, and that’s fine.

 My only real objection is that these days, porn is too easy to get hold of. My generation had to work so damn hard to see porn.
 I was one of the lucky ones who had a cable TV box in my bedroom, so every night at midnight, when the porn channels did a ten-minute-teaser, I actually got to see it.
 Hell, I used to tape it. On VHS, because I'm a hundred fucking years old and that's what we did back then, when we weren't drying our clothes on the mangle or chasing a hoop down a dirt road with a stick.
 Having a grainy VHS of erotic advert montages meant you had to hide the tape, too.
 All porn was hidden in those days. Some of the luckier guys had older brothers who might have some actual, not-taped-off-the-TV porn somewhere, but it was always a gamble stealing it, even if you could find it.
 These days, all kids have computers and it's all freely available. Those of us who remember a time before the internet are left feeling like aged hunter-gatherers, baffled by the invention of farming. We used to have to go out and run miles with spears and bows and bring down our food, and now the food is just there, in the homes? Seems like cheating.
  Still, old-school porn taught valuable lessons. It taught you how to do important things that are necessary in life, like using a VHS recorder, hiding illegal items and lying to authority figures. It was a rite of passage that is really being denied to the younger generations.
 Maybe not for much longer, however, as there has been a move in recent weeks, complete with petitions, to force all internet service providers to block porn completely. You would only be able to see it by ticking the “I am a pervert” box on your internet contract.
 This, the thought police have decided, will prevent underage people from seeing anything rude.
  My initial reaction was incredulity - well, actually, my initial reaction was to save all my porn to disc in case this campaign ever gains any traction, but my first emotional reaction was incredulity. This is never going to work, as a plan. Fourteen year olds know way more about computers than adults, as a rule. They’ll figure out some sort of devious, back-door way to make computers show them deviants’ back doorways in no time flat.
 Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to do without porn, and that’s not on, because we all watch it.
 Everyone does. It’s an open secret. Even if you only watch once every six months, you’ve looked at porn. I know you have. I have cameras in your house.
 …Alright, I don’t, but those of you who aren’t now frantically ripping off your wallpaper in a paranoid search will probably agree that most people like to watch other people fuck each other once in a while, and that’s normal.
 The ones who are abnormal are the ones who are so preoccupied with other peoples’ sex lives that they want to enforce draconian laws on us, but I’ve written about them before.
 The rest of us – teenagers especially – need a release of some kind. It’s only masturbation that stops most kids from shooting their classmates. I’m completely sure that last year’s riots would have fizzled out in minutes if the government had just spent an hour broadcasting porn on the TV, because everyone would have been too distracted to go looting.
 Onanism, I'm saying right now, is a force for good in the world, because it stops everyone going mental.
 Self abuse saves lives.
 Y'know who never sneaks away for a quick fifty off the wrist? Everyone in Al Qaeda. There's a connection, there, and we ignore it at our peril.
 Granted, the uptight and morally outraged claim that readily available porn is a danger to children, but that’s ridiculous because, before sexual maturity, kids have no interest at all in porn. They couldn’t care less. Even if they stumbled across it, they’d probably click away because it holds no fascination for them, unless it’s in a “where do babies come from?” way, in which case for god’s sake make sure you’ve had The Talk with them before they stumble onto RedTube, or they’ll end up thinking all babies come from determined looking German men doing unspeakable things to 35-year-old “schoolgirls.”
 All in all, though, porn is no threat to kids. The young ones don’t want to watch it, and the hormonal ones will get hold of it some way, so you might as well accept it. Kids are better off locked in a room wanking than out on the streets happy slapping, mugging old ladies, or playing shitty music on their phones and forcing me to murder them as a result.
 All the dreary busybodies are doing is trying to accomplish the impossible and stop teenagers playing with themselves. By trying to stop porn, they come off as a flaccid Canute, trying in vain to hold back the nubile, fleshy, lubricated, grunting, writhing, spreadeagled, moaning, bucking tide.
 …Excuse me...

Relax. It's Just a Game.

 Things in the states, you might notice, are getting increasingly electioney.

 Likeable but disappointing Al Green impersonator Barack Obama is being pitted against right-wing religious nutjob and glove-named fascist Mitt Romney.

 Clearly, if you’re in favour of Obama, you’re a pussy and a communist and probably too busy burning the American flag at a Taliban sponsored gay wedding to even read this.

 Romney supporters, meanwhile, can only read this after dark, as they must sleep during daylight hours before they descend, nightly, upon the neighbourhoods of the poor to drink their blood for sustenance and force them to have babies they don’t want.

 It really is a bunch of horseshit.

 What’s worrying, when you look at American politics, isn’t the hopelessly divided nature of the playing field, but the fact that the divide is achieved, widened, and reinforced through such childish means.

 Somehow, politics in the states has turned into professional wrestling, with each side seeing their opponents as pantomime evildoers to be booed and heckled and, if possible, hit with chairs while the referee isn’t looking.

 In reality, I don’t think 99% of people anywhere in the world could have views as far-out as either party is caricatured as having. Most people, if asked honestly, would admit to having a mixture of views. I’m pro-choice and pro-death penalty; I’m in favour of subsidised healthcare for the poor, but as fearful of society becoming a forcibly levelled, “Harrison Bergeron” hellhole as it’s possible to get.

 So it’s fair to say that personally, I’d be in the “Other” column in most surveys. I’m sure you would, too.

 Somehow, everyone forgets this when it comes to American party politics and goes clownshit insane, joining in a vitriolic orgy of stereotyping and hatred.

 And it’s all for nothing, because elections don’t really solve jack shit in the modern world.

 Call me cynical by all means, but the person elected to run a country has no say in the big issues, unless their financial backers okay it first.

 Take a clear-cut example like Al Gore. Good old Al, he’s an upstanding environmental hero, determined to save every one of us, like a flabby, power-point wielding Flash Gordon. Everyone knows Al Gore and the environment are BFFs, and it’s commendable.

 Al Gore is always trying to do something about climate change, and has been on that mission ever since the late seventies. The only time he didn’t really try to do much about the whole global warming/apocalypse thing was during that eight year period when he was the second most powerful man in the world.

 Why? ‘Cause there’s no money in doing the right thing or acting on your principles. Parties have been bought and paid for for decades, and businesses don’t want to cut emissions, so that’s not going to happen. Al Gore is anything but a lone example, I just picked him because he’s the least objectionable person to spring to mind.

 Huge corporations are funding politics, and they’re going to get what they want because of it, regardless of what anyone else says. The sad thing is that whilst they pit political puppets against each other to get everyone good and riled up about issues like church and state, nobody is paying any attention to the separation of state and industry.

 Until powerful, multinational corporations stop buying election campaigns, there’s no real point in voting for anyone, from what I can see. It’s all a sham, propped up with caricature and dogma.

 But, again: I’m cynical.