Musics I done

Sunday, October 09, 2016

referendum 2

The tories who have ended up in charge are interpreting the 'exit' vote as a 'hard brexit', although they have nothing to base this on. Given that the vote was not a big lead - and only half the country voted - it seems opportunistic to only listen to the most hardline europhobes.
Given our complete lack of leverage, a hard brexit seems like maybe the only option, because Europe keep saying to us things like 'you can't have access to the free market and not have freedom of movement' which ends up with us cutting off our nose to spite our face, throwing our toys out of the pram, and ultimate crashing the country. Of course, a ruined economy would only increase the government's push for continuing austerity - they're running out of fictional reasons to prolong it, so they need to manufacture some more bad times for us. And of course when I say 'austerity', i mean 'transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich'.

It would only be in the character of our democracy (such that it is) to have another referendum, this time with more options:
HARD BREXIT
MEDIUM BREXIT
SOFT BREXIT
ACTUALLY WE DON'T WANT A BREXIT AT ALL

the 52% - surely diminished, now that the obvious lies of the exit leaders have been exposed - will be split between three options, and the reamins side will win, and we can all get on with our lives without deliberately taking our country back into some sort of alternate reality where the winter of discontent never ended.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

War bastard

We went to a story telling festival in Martineau gardens today. The final story was a Levantine folk tale about people are afraid of the truth but love stories, so every story should contain some truth.

Jeremy Corbyn is the weary truth-teller the media have ignored. I don't know if I blame him for being ignorable, or the monolithic media - who have learned that all attention is good attention and so the best way to damn a labour leader is to silence them. Plus, how vile his party were towards him destabilised the whole party.

He is a leader who was supposed to have unified his party as pro-European. Europe is usually the downfall of the tories, the issue that exposes how fragmented and infighty they are. Labour officially declared as 'remain', and yet allowed individuals to argue the other way, apparently without looking turbulent. But then, labour didn't look anything throughout the campaign. Sitting back and letting the tories tear themselves apart looks like it could have been quite a good strategy. Unfortunately, the result is that the bullshitters won, virtually unopposed.

The emergence of the scatter-shot-bullshit politician, in the age of big data, is an absurdity that should not stand. Fact-checking organisations, Programmes like 'more or less', shouldn't be fringe news, they should be mandatory. Corbyn took his authority from an educated position, compared with anti-intellectual tories, who dismiss racism and innuendo as 'the rough and tumble of politics'. He spoke honestly, and when he countered the bullshit coming from Cameron, was ignored with attacks on his appearance.

The victory of 'leave' shows us people listen to strong stories. Corbyn's absence from headlines shows us the truth is not enough. We need a labour leader with not just the truth of the sold-out generation, but the anger of them too.

The working class of this country have been abuse and neglected by their governments, then set loose on a bystander, like a tortured dog attacking the first thing in sight rather than the person who has been twisting it for years. 

I think we need a labour leader with the outrage to make the headlines but the academic clout to back it up. We need John Hurt as the War Doctor; not the one we got in the 50th anniversary special, who actually was a bit of a Corbyn, but the one we were promised: a soldier who had the bravery to do what it takes against an abominable foe. We have to face the fact that Blair is the only labour leader to have won an election in - what is it now - 40 years..? We need a war bastard. Can Corbyn be that war bastard? 

But I don't think it'll make any difference. In the fight for votes, the tories and the anti-labour papers will still rubbish whatever labour says, regardless of the truth. They can make a story of any strength they like, because they are not bound by the truth. Do we just have to wait until Rupert Murdoch dies?



Sunday, April 24, 2016

experiment in creating a bandcamp playlist with html








It's great how the bandcamp system works, interacting between tracks and even between pages, however it doesn't seem to flow through between these individual tracks. What's more, creating this flow-through page took too many clicks to add each track and I long for a quick and easy bandcamp playlister.

There would be complications with releases that request you purchase after a couple of listens, but actually, that's less of a problem and more of a great thing, if you're listening to a playlist too much you probably should open your wallet and buy those tracks.