Posterous theme by Cory Watilo as adapted by Jamie Graham

Politicising poppies

written on Saturday 5 November 2011 and filed under [poppies] [remembrance day]

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My father was possibly the world's most conformist man, except in one regard. Despite being a non-commissioned officer of the Royal Air Force, he wouldn't wear a poppy in November.

His reason was that, at the time, the black stud in the centre of the poppies said "Haig Fund" on them and my dad, rightly in my option, felt that Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE, ADC was a mass murderer. My father couldn't bring himself to wear something that celebrated the ultimate donkey who led the lions of 1914-1918 to their deaths. He still donated to the fund itself - the good works the Royal British Legion does are amazing - but he refused to advertise the Butcher of the Somme. Nobody ever questioned this - it was his right to take a stand on something he believed in strongly and nobody in the armed services would argue with that - the services are there, the men died, to protect our right to take a stand on something we believe in strongly.

Flash forward now to the early 21st century. Something has changed. It appears that the poppy is no longer voluntary. This has been coming on for a long time; it started over a decade ago when the popular press, always eager to grasp at a stick to beat the BBC with, started watching BBC programmes very very carefully in the first two weeks of November, looking for instances of people not wearing one and then lambasting the corporation for not being patriotic or for having too many "hard left" people on screen (as if the Right had a monopoly on patriotism, and as if the poppy was anything to do with patriotism at all). The BBC responded in the hamfisted way the BBC responds to irrational criticism. Pre-recorded programmes that might be shown in early November suddenly had presenters wearing poppies, even if the piece was filmed in July. The date that newsreaders began to wear poppies on the BBC got earlier and earlier, with presenters now often sporting one from mid-October onwards. Accidental lapses were hurriedly concealed by the BBC, with Diane Abbott MP even managing to magically grow a poppy during a hurried cutaway whilst sitting on the This Week sofa. It didn't matter - the tabs still beat the BBC for it.

This type of nonsense has led to the poppy, a symbol of the futility of war, a reminder that twice in the last century the entire world went to war and millions upon millions of people died, to now become a political symbol with so much being read into it that it is losing the true meaning: we remember the dead of the past lest we repeat such pointless slaughter again in the future. We're already not very good at that part as it is, as we wind down from being involved in one morally dubious civil war, one strategically impossible civil war and one immoral and illegal war of our own making that has left a civil war behind it.

The politicising of the poppy allowed the attention-seeking representative of nobody except himself Emdadur Choudhury to attempt to make himself into a martyr last Remembrance Day by burning some publicly, getting arrested for breach of the peace and ending up in front of the beak and getting a £50 fine. This was pointless behaviour by both sides - Choudhury for being an idiot and the law for being an ass.

Then, this week, three teenagers in Northern Ireland recorded themselves fucking about in a park, like bored, stupid teenagers do, including them setting fire to a poppy. They posted a picture on a social networking site, as teenagers do, but this picture got seen by an adult with nothing better to do than trawl social networking sites looking for pictures of teenagers fucking about; he called the police. That's where it should have ended. But the police arrested the boys - there must be very little for police to do in Northern Ireland so this was some excitement for them - and they found themselves up in front of another beak in another show of idiot-meets-ass.

Earlier this week saw another storm, when an old article by Laurie Penny was republished by the Stop The War Coalition and was picked up by social media, given a 140 character spin that didn't reflect the words actually written and brought damnation and hellfire down on the columnist. All she was doing was noting that the poppy is so easily misused and that there's an irony in plain sight ever time we see a politician piously wearing a poppy: all of our prime ministers since 1979 have involved us in other peoples' wars, usually to little effect (the exception being John Major, who went out of his way to avoid us being involved in several wars where our presence as part of the UN would've been legal, morally right and above all useful in stopping bloodshed). Laurie Penny had the joy of being attacked by all sides, in the name of patriotism, for simply writing about poppies making her feel uncomfortable. That's not good; it also tells you something when you see just how loudly the howls came from Liberal Democrat bloggers - what fascinating changes power has wrought.

I'm not a very conformist person, quite the opposite to my father. But I do wear a poppy (in the week before Remembrance Day, not for the now-mandatory month). I have friends who wear white poppies as a symbol of pacifism, which they're entitled to do. It wouldn't suit me - it seems just as pious as Tony Blair wearing his red poppy along with his "solemn" face - but I'm not keen to force my standards on to anybody else. I also know people who don't wear one at all, and I never care about that either. It's a personal choice whether you give money to the British Legion and it's another personal choice whether you wear a poppy to show that you've done so (that's how they began, as a form of "flag day" pin so that the fundraisers would know you'd donated and wouldn't press you again).

The pressure from the media, from the easily-outraged blogosphere and from the "patriotic" right to wear a poppy is counterproductive, however. The more you force people to conform to anything, the more you push people into standing up against you. Making the poppy seem mandatory will just lead to more people who previously wore one (and, more importantly, previously gave to the Legion) stepping back because of the coercion and thus less people wearing one.

The wearing, or not wearing, of any symbol is voluntary and must remain so. Of course there will always be social pressure to conform to what it seems the majority want. But forcing people to conform by shouting them down or dragging them in front of a magistrate is a very Bad Thing, not least because it sullies the memory of those who died to give us the freedom of to choose not to conform by fighting against regimes that killed millions in the name of conformity.

As fresh as the moment iPhoto went "pop"

written on Friday 28 October 2011 and filed under [apple] [disaster] [mac] [photographs]

A lesson in backing-up data was almost taught to me today.

Yeah yeah, I've got Time Machine on my Mac, but that doesn't mean that my 4000-odd photographs are as nearly well preserved as they would be if I had, say, 40 photograph albums lined up on my shelves. Which I don't.

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Some are "backed-up" to Flickr, but if ever Yahoo! decided to capriciously close Flickr -- and Yahoo! has form when it comes to capriciously closing useful services with millions of users -- I'd have no indexed back-ups at all.

When I got my big Mac (I'd previously had a Mac mini and an old Mac something-or-other in a big purple case off of eBay) I switched from having a separate-but-in-the-same-case hard drive with all my photos on that I'd had in my old PC to having them on the seemingly-infinite single hard drive in my Mac. I also gave up the manually-organised-by-folder workflow I'd been running and dumped them all into iPhoto, turning them into Events and Albums -- not the same thing and not particularly well organised. That was 3000 photographs ago, so it's too late now to start properly organising them. It'd take forever.

Today, I wanted a new background for my Twitter feed, so I opened iPhoto. It announced that it had found "discrepancies" in the library. Would I like to rebuild said library? Of course I would. So it did. iPhoto opened and then, 20 seconds later with no further input, crashed.

So I opened it again. Same again - down to the crash. This time, the crash broke other things, like Software Update and Preview, in a way that Cannot Happen On A Mac. A restart, made difficult by the Mac insisting that it couldn't possibly restart because I'd left an unnamed programme somewhere running that I had to track down without help, didn't cure this.

Then I found something interesting. The new OSX Lion App Store isn't integrated with Software Update. If stuff you bought through the Store needs an update, you have to manually open the App Store, check and download it. iPhoto 9.2 had an update to 9.2.1 pending. So I downloaded it. It didn't help.

Next I fell back on Google and found plenty of threads about iPhoto crashing. All said it was because I had a 3ivx codec somewhere. But Spotlight, the useless Apple built-in search thing, said I didn't. Also, Spotlight has never ever been willing to show me anything in a hidden or system folder anyway, including showing me any hidden or system folders. Further search revealed that Lion now hides several system folders that you used to be able to see. To make them show, you have to go into Terminal and type  chflags nohidden ~/Library/ 

Now, that's not very Mac-like. I own a Mac so I don't have to do such horrors. Still, I did that, manually looked for 3ivx and found nothing. Still, I had built up an amazing number of codecs, so I took the opportunity of installing Perian and deleting the old codecs - Perian should do all that for me instead and I'm surprised I didn't have it already.

iPhoto was still crashing on opening, so I opened the "details" section of the "report this to Apple" dialogue. Fun thing: it appears that the old options of Don't Send to Apple, Do Send and Quit, Do Send and Relaunch had become Do Send and Quit and Do Send and Relaunch. Tut tut. I copied the line that looked most likely to be the problem - Crashed Thread 0 - and Googled it. Plenty more options, all suggesting I download 9.2.1 (check) and delete 3ivx (check). A result much further down Google suggested pressing alt+cmd while clicking iPhoto's icon and getting a nice developer-y menu. I did. It had the option "Rebuild iPhone Library Database from automatic backup". I clicked.

This took forever. But it worked. Or all the steps above worked, plus this one. I'll never know. Still: phew! But what this shock has shown me is that I'm a crappy back-up artist. I really need to do something beyond Time Machine and Flickr to back up 4000+ irreplacable photographs. But what? A further external drive doesn't save the photos from a fire (but then neither does 40 photo albums on a shelf) and would need to be manually managed by me -- something I'm craptacular at doing. Online storage with Flickr takes time and bandwidth and money and is subject to Yahoo!'s whims. Other online storage options seem a bit fly-by-night (Dropbox) or tacked-on-afterthought (Picassa).

So I guess the ultimate way I'm going to learn from all of this is... to cross my fingers tighter while continuing to trust that my Mac will keep working properly. Awful, isn't it?

Corrections and clarifications

written on Tuesday 18 October 2011 and filed under [daily mail] [so-called satire]

The average issue of the Daily Mail contains around 80,000 words - the equivalent of Mein Kampf - most of which are made up on the day under tremendous pressure of having Paul Dacre standing over us and swearing. Huge efforts are made to ensure our journalism meets the lowest possible standards but it is inevitable that we get caught out. This column provides an opportunity to correct those errors silently and without back links.

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In a series of articles in the 1930s, we may have inadvertently given the impression that we were a pro-Nazi newspaper. We now accept that this impression has tarnished our image for years and have endeavoured to be a bit quieter about our support ever since.

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In an article last week, we inadvertently gave the impression that women are thinking, feeling beings who deserve equality and should not be prejudged. We apologise for this article and will redress the balance in future.

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On several inside pages yesterday, we printed up-skirt shots of famous women getting in to, or out of, various vehicles. No correction here, we're just drawing it to your attention, male, middle-class, sex-starved masturbators.

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On our front page tomorrow, we will tell a whopping lie in large type with a denial of the whole story in paragraph nineteen on page 24. We apologise for not apologising for this.

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In a front page article last week, complete with screaming headline, we said that every non-middle-class person claiming benefits for their dying child was doing so falsely and being given a free BMW, a holiday for six in Bermuda and a speedboat. We're now apologising for this in tiny print on page 2.

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On page 7 of Femail yesterday, we printed an article about how loathsome fat women are and implored you to put down that cake, lardarse. On page 8 of Femail yesterday, we printed an article about how loathsome thin women are and implored you to pick up a cake, stick insect. We apologise for the confusion this may have caused.

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We have frequently printed articles by Liz Jones. We apologise for the error.

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The story on page 3 yesterday headlined "NOW LESBIANS GET 'RIGHT' TO MURDER OUR CHILDREN" occurred only in the head of the journalist concerned.

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