England's England

Radio Jackie and the anorak pheromones

Radio Jackie is the last truly independent local radio station. It’s based in Tolworth and broadcasting to “South-West London and North Surrey”. ‘Independent’ means it’s not been assimilated into the typical ‘Borg’ (talk to a Startrek enthusiast for an explanation) groups that almost every other ‘local’ radio station has.

It manages to retain its independence because of its pirate heritage. Despite never really experimenting with ground breaking formats but sounding identical to any and all “ILR” stations (as the commercial sector was known) when it was a pirate in the late 70s / early 80s, it somehow became a respected standard for the first generation of land-based pirate radio enthusiasts, so exuded a magnetic charm and appeal that was only detectable by the radio anorak. This anorak pheromone still works today to attract a collection of goodwill and people happy to work for nearly nothing or actually nothing. That keeps the real costs down. Not that that’s a bad thing. This is probably exactly how real community radio should work.

Disappointingly, the output of the now legal Jackie all these decades later still has nothing exciting to offer, but maybe ‘bland’ is what true local radio actual has to be.

A 24 hour news team manage to pump out an hourly bulletin of news nicely oriented to the local area, but it’s all pretty standard reporting and based on an old BBC local radio style from a few decades ago. It has an honesty and a safe believability to it, without sensationalism or attempts at radical presentation with silly music playing in the background or daft echoes on the voice. It’s nice. It’s trustworthy.

Inbetween the news bulletins are the programmes. These consist of a presenter allowed to speak every 10 minutes or so. Most times songs are played in twos, joined together by a female voice saying something with the word Jackie in it. As is usual these days, she sounds as if she recorded her messages whilst straining with constipation on the toilet. When will voice artists stop sounding like this? But, why is she there saying what the presenter could open his/her microphone and say? At least if it was the presenter uttering the liner and nothing more than just the liner between the songs, people would feel he cared and hadn’t popped off to make a coffee. It’s not as if he has anything else to do, like researching the content of his links or something difficult like that.

When it does come to the presenter’s link, yes he has a number of fixed things he has to read each hour, but generally whatever he puts in as an ad lib is tame and gentle and oriented around dedications and saying hi to people who are going to be sent car stickers. It’s important to mention local areas or places or pubs or shops in these links. Then, immediately after this bland link, that’s when the commercials are played. Again, this is a habit I’ve never understood.

I mean, if a person is listening for the wonderful songs that are being played, then they want to hear the songs as near to each other as possible, right? Why would they want to hear great big long gaps, full of bla-di-bla before a song is played? Surely it would make more sense to not run the commercials after a period of presenter woffle? But no, the music enthusiast has to wait.

The same applies to the speech enthusiast. When songs are played one after the other in a block, why is he being kept waiting to hear the talkie bits? This way of treating people seems guaranteed to upset the speech enthusiast and the music enthusiast.

And just what type of music enthusiast is attracted to Radio Jackie? Well, the playlist is heavy with very inoffensive old songs from a variety of different genres, although most were previously released as singles and charted. It’s big though, a bit like the London Eye taking quite a long while to gently rotate round back to the start. Maybe that’s a good thing compared to other stations which seem to have just forty songs going round faster than a 78.

In these days of people tending to have grown up with a particular genre it’s difficult to see who this wide range of styles of mainly oldies music interrupted with inoffensive chatter actually appeals to. Possibly to people who just don’t care passionately about their musical tastes any more. Possibly to people who just want some bit of beige coloured wallpaper they can leave up in the background. Possibly to people who want to drift in and every now and again hear mention of a place they don’t live too far from. Possibly to people who remember the imaginary good old days of wires strung in fields, metal boxes with glowing valves and a cassette machine pumping ‘shows’ into the ether.

Are there really enough of any of these people listening to keep stations like Radio Jackie going? In my heart I hope so, but I feel uneasy because I don’t quite know why I hope so. Is it the anorak pheromones?

Sex on TV

What is wrong with these people who scream and shout about sex on TV or in the cinema? (I mean, in the film you are watching in the cinema, not people just randomly having sex in a cinema!)

I’ve never understood this fear of natural consensual acts that means we are told that sexually related material is some kind of evil to be banned, and yet it’s all perfectly fine to have TV shows with plotlines built around man’s inhumanity to man, often including the relatively unnatural and definitely unconsensual acts such as murder and torture or other forms of cruelty.

I certainly would much rather a child watch an act of love making than a shoot-out to the death, yet the latter infests TV during almost all programmes bar the soaps, without the scary nutters screaming about banning it.

God hating, fearing, avoiding…me?

People ask me why, on balance, I seem to highlight or even write a lot of anti-religion rants.  Am I in fact afraid of a god, or angry with him/her/it?  What terrible experience must I have had to make me this bitter?  Was I yet another abused choir boy from the Catholic Church?

Ok, let’s look at this.  I was actually brought up a freethinker with no god concept figuring in my life.  My parents decided that should I get to an age when I needed to believe in fairies, Father Christmas or a version of a god, then that should occur when I was able to make such a reasoned choice.  If at 13 I had announced I was now a {insert religious grouping here} then my parents would have respected my decision despite disagreeing with it.

So many parents beat their children mentally with all the god-bothering and god-fearing crap, it makes them grow-up accepting that it must be true.  This is similar to sexual abuse.  If sexual abuse is started at an early enough age then a child will just accept it, even enjoy it, and not until they are exposed to other ideas, concepts, philosophies and freedom do they realise that not everybody has their father/mother fiddling around with their genitalia every night.  They realise that what had been a normal enjoyable experience to them had in fact been very wrong.  

On the other hand, a child suffering sexual abuse growing to adulthood with nobody advising them that what is happening to them should not be happening to them, will probably carry-on just accepting that what is happening is the norm.  Children are so trusting and so accepting. 

When an adult abuses a child’s trust by forcing them to believe whichever mumbo jumbo their parents before them indoctrinated them into believing, then we have an extreme mental abuse that needs to be stopped.  Indeed, we have a destructive cycle that needs to be broken.

It is a ‘destructive cycle’ too.  The first ‘destruction’ is rationality, the ability to work things out, to reason and to be self-reliant.  Religion takes that away.  Secondly, god-fearing is normally surrounded by terrible fears and intimidation.  Rituals have to be strictly adhered to in order to ensure subjects self-hypnotise a reinforcement and become sheep-like and all accepting, some of these are natural sexual denials, others include physical abuse like removing parts of the body in order to appease a mad belief.

Religion comes with an irrational feeling of immortality with different places to visit after death instead of everything coming to a mortal end.  Worse than this, religion comes with rivalry.  Many different religions fight for control of their subjects and the conversion of subjects from other religions.  They go to war about this.  Global conflict is based primarily on one religion invading or attacking the controllers of a rival religion.

Now then.  With all this fighting going on, some of us normal folk are picking up flack and shrapnel.  The religious with their controlled and closed minds are holding us as a species back.  Indeed, they sometimes put us normal folk in danger when we become the victims of their bombs and attacks on their rivals.

The only way for humanity to move forward is for us normal folk to try to shake the religiously bigoted into realising that there is no place for them in these freethinking days of equality and brotherhood.  And so that is why I hate the god concept.  If left unchecked it could cause the downfall of the entire human race.  With that as the ultimate price, it’s understandable that I should hate those who wish to keep the god concept festering and alive in the heads of their subjects, and why I do my bit to challenge the blind faith and ignorance that most Middle-Eastern invented religions bring.  Peace and plenty will come once the religions are completely removed from human existence.

Suicide is painless, part two

I recently reproduced a short article by a guy called Jason who wanted the right to a guilt free suicide.  It’s here.  I published his article because I’d just heard that he finally managed to kill himself.  I don’t want to dwell on the details, but he died fairly instantly at his own hand.

I had previously had quite long chats with Jason trying to find for him the reason for living.  I never managed to convince him that what was right for me might be right for him any more than he managed to convince me that his suicide was right for him.

Not being able to ‘give’ him a reason for living always reflected back and troubled me.  I would walk away feeling a sense of failure and extreme frustration.

I’d tried to explain my perspective, which, quite simply is that death is not an option one comes back from.  No matter how much life has been shit or how badly your cards were dealt, or indeed, how extremely lucky, wealthy and happy your time has been, both paths eventually lead to nothingness.  That nothingness is forever.  Unlike the nothingness that sort of lasted forever before I was born, this one doesn’t have a life at the end of it.  Even so, it’s nothing to be scared of really.  Having said that, I really don’t want to die, and the thought of all this ending gives me a little bit of angst and mild panic.  I enjoy being me, good times and bad times, and don’t want to stop being me.  Yes, I’m one of those who’d be quite happy to live forever.  In that respect I envy those who deal with their termination by believing in afterlives or returning as a banana to give them immortality.  I realise they are acting like a child scared of the dark who believes the teddy they are clutching will protect them, and I understand it’s their way of coping with the horror of nothingness forever.  

I know I will eventually stop being me and I can’t live forever, but I don’t feel drawn to flicking the off switch or doing something that flicks the off switch before the very last minute.  I want to live for as long as I can before that switch finally flicks off.

But, hey, as usual I’ve made all of this about me.

For Jason, everything I just expressed was in reverse.  He didn’t have a religious belief to ease the pain of death by pretending there was some ‘continuance’, but he wasn’t ‘enjoying’ being alive and saw no point to it.  He said that it was this that made him feel quite simply he needed to end it all.  Then what depressed him and held him hostage was the guilt trip people would lay on him about ending it all.  He found that very hard to deal with and it added to his depression.

Some might argue that ‘normal’ people don’t want to die, and so therefore Jason had some problem that was making him feel that way.  Indeed, after a suicide attempt, he was forced to discuss his anxiety and depression with doctors who were indicating that his opinion that he wanted to die was purely the result of his depression.  

Whilst I tended to side with this view, I couldn’t argue against the perfect logic he presented about why he should die.  In the back of my mind I wondered if the moaning about the ‘guilt trips’ people were laying on him was a front and really he did want to live.

Well, whether he really did or really didn’t want to live is something that we’ll never know.  He’s gone now. Forever.

Those with religious convictions will say how he is now ‘at peace’ or ‘in a better place’ or all the buzz words and phrases about the immortality they illogically believe in.   For him and for me he is now just nothing.  He has ceased to be.  He has no children so there is now biological continuance.  There’s nothing.

His family want to cremate him but have a plaque in a crematorium dedicated to him.  They, and those who knew him will carry him in their memories.  When we are all no more, then all that will remain for a while will be the plaque.  After a century or so that too will be removed, as they are in order to make room for the next generation of recently deceased, and it will be destroyed.  

Then all that will remain is a historical statistical record of his birth and his death but nobody will know anything of his life, his personality and the human behind the name.

But, I guess that is true of all of us.  

Suicide is painless, part one

I’m re-publishing something previously published elsewhere by a guy called Jason. Please have a read through and try to understand or appreciate what he’s saying, then read Suicide is painless, part two (which will be here tomorrow):

“I am tired of living, so very tired of living. I want to die and for it to end.

“You probably think I’m suffering from something and slowly dying, but that’s not the case. I am 26, reasonably healthy although to hide from the pain of living I do abuse myself with alcohol and the odd spliff or two which is not healthy. I need to spend most of my life off my head in order to deal with all this. Yes, before you ask, I am very depressed.

“I am depressed because I am still here. That’s all. The only thing pissing me off is being alive. Nothing else. They search for environmental causes. There aren’t any apart from being alive.

“I have tried three times to end it all and make it go away but each bloody time I failed. Waking up in hospital is never a good feeling. I let out a huge sigh. My sigh is because I know I’ve got to go through all the questions, the explanations and those looks from the psychological examination. They always want to discuss my feelings. I don’t want to share my feelings. I don’t want any feelings. I want to die.

“I don’t have so much to live for despite them telling me that I do. How dare they tell me I’ve got stuff to live for. I don’t want to live for anything. I don’t want to live. Why won’t they understand that? Their choice for themselves is to live. I don’t tell them to die. My choice is to die. Why do they tell me to live?

“I’ve had the conversation about how I’m being selfish, but how selfish are those who force me to live and try to lay their guilt trips on me? They even say how I go can cause trauma to those who find me or inconvenience to those who are on the train I jump in front of, the road users below the bridge I leap from, the divers having to comb the river I drown in, the… There’s nothing I can do as a process of ending it all that doesn’t inconvenience somebody. What about me? Why doesn’t anybody think about me? Living inconveniences me.

“I can’t afford to escape via a country that cares about people like me and allows me to chose suicide free from guilt. I have to do it right here where I’m trapped.

“There’s no reason to live, and even if there was a reason I don’t care, I don’t want to be part of it. This is about me. It’s about me no longer wanting to be me. What perverse reason have you for torturing me by keeping me alive?”

Severance

A friend of mine recently watched the film Severance and his talking about it reminded me of the time 4 or 5 years ago I went to see it at the cinema.

Whilst watching the somewhat predictable and highly obvious plotline filled slasher-fest at an Iford, Essex (basically an East Londonish area) cinema, I was left confused about how I should react. Not to the film, but to about 4 or 5 gentlemen sitting some rows behind me.

They’d been talking through most of the film, which is the modern way, and included taking and making phone calls, but weren’t bothering me that much.

However, there’s a sequence in the film where what remains of the goodies are being stalked by a mass of the badies. One of the goodies picks up a missile launcher, hoping, as we the audience were also hoping, to fire the missile straight into the crowd of badies destroying the lot. Sure enough the missile initially heads for the badies, but then it veers away and climbs rapidly into the sky and right on up until it blows up a large passenger jet, one assumes, killing hundreds of people. Black humour I think it’s called.

Anyway, this greatly amused the gentlemen some rows behind me, who almost wet themselves with excitement and started cheering on seeing a missile capable of doing such I thing. The conversation in Pashto roughly translated into “We’ve just got to get hold of one of those.” “That would be so brilliant, man.”

So then. Should I be worried that 4 or 5 Pakistani-originating East London based gentlemen are excited by a device that blows planes up and want to get hold of one? Am I over-reacting or is it a sad sign of the times that young Asian gentlemen think blowing up planes is a good thing?

The Cthulhu Cult - wanna join?

Ok. So, err, this guy’s an alternative to some of the more scary and dangerous gods like those of the Middle Eastern originating religious cults like Christianity and Islam, he’s the centre of the Cthulhu Cult.

And now it’s quiz time:

Aha. A religion that makes you have to ‘think’ about things before you decide to join it.  Excellent.

The choices Raoul Moat made for everybody

Choices.  We are all faced with choices that affect our lives or the lives of others.  In an ideal world everything that happened to us would be our own choice.

Sadly, so often it is others that have the power to make choices about us over which we have no control.  Some choose to hurt or destroy us, a choice we certainly would not make for ourselves.

When Raol Moat made the choice to shoot Chris Brown for the first time severely injuring him, the event was Moat’s choice, not Chris’s choice.

When Moat shot him a second time a few moments later, that too was Moat’s choice.  Chris had no choice in the matter, and was powerless to stop him.

When Moat took time to reload his shotgun, Chris also then had no choice when, on his knees, Moat made the choice to deliberately end Chris’s life by finally blowing his head open.

All of these choices were made by Moat. Nobody else made these choices.  Chris most certainly would not have ‘chosen’ to be murdered. 

When Moat then fired through the window at Samantha Stobbart causing her critical chest injuries it was his choice.  It wasn’t Samantha’s choice.  

Moat even said later in an attempt to justify his ‘choice’ of causing her critical chest injuries, that he chose to injure Samantha in a way that would cause her to get compensation and financial stability for her future.  Once again, this was his choice not hers.  He had imposed his choice upon her.

Then Moat chose to find a policeman.  He chose David Rathband.  Once again, as with all Moat’s victims, David had no choice but to go through the horror Moat had chosen for him.  

Moat chose to shoot him in the face.  

Moat watched for a moment as David recoiled in agony as his eyes burst out and splattered over his car, blinding him forever.  Moat then chose to shoot at David again, hitting him in his side.  At no point did David choose for himself that his last ever sight would be Moat’s calm and calculating face starring at him as he took aim in an attempt to kill him.

Moat then chose to spend the next week on the run and evading capture.  Finally he chose to aim a gun at his own neck and shoot himself dead by blowing his own head off.  Nobody else made that choice for Moat.

All the way through this saga, Moat has been in control, making choices for other people about their lives, not letting them make choices for themselves.  

In the end, Moat made his choice to kill himself.  Moat’s final choice was possible the best of his choices, as it then freed other potential victims of his imposed ‘choices’.

Victims usually don’t choose to be victims.  That choice is completely in the hands of those that choose to make them victims.  Nobody chooses to become the victim of attempted murder or actual murder.  That choice is solely in the hands of the murderer.

However, something far more sinister rises from this episode of choices.  

Around 40,000 people then chose to idolise Moat as if he was some form of ‘hero’ via a Facebook fanpage.  Their common theme being to choose to say what a wonderful ‘legend’ this murderer was.

Dozens of people ‘chose’ to lay flowers where the murderer had once lived or where he killed himself.  Many of them chose to leave messages of the style that should be left for a fallen soldier or a hero who’d perhaps perished saving many lives from a burning building.  

These ‘ordinary’ people chose to make Moat their hero of choice. 

They chose a sadistic murderer over the murdered and maimed, who they all but forgot in their outpourings for Moat.

Something somewhere has to be very seriously wrong with these people.  

Society should choose to identify them and check on the safety of the children and ordinary people around them before more Moats start making choices over who around them should live or die, or imposing their ‘choices’ on them in other ways.  

Whatever drove Moat to make his choices over who could live or die will soon be driving these people who now idolise him for his actions.

We must choose to stop them.