John Mortell’s blog

Gavin has a pretty strongly-worded post over on Public Inquiry and his blog. It’s pretty strong stuff and I encourage you to read it all but I’m just going to put the end here and it really covers one of the main reasons I just don’t care about politics in Ireland anymore and am more than seriously considering leaving a.s.a.p:

As a nation state, we are a failure. As a democracy, we have failed. As a country we are bankrupt, both morally and financially. We are the emerging market, banana republic of the European Union. Our political system is broken. It is beyond redemption.

Some will reply that I am a socialist, or other such attacks. I am actually right of centre economically, I just recognise what is standing in front of me for what it is. An almost incalculable political and financial mess – generations are being saddled with the debts of the oligarchs, and the taxpayer is being lied to by its own government.

The only hope is this: That the people, in whose hands all power rests, will realise the appalling vista of a broken Ireland – a country in need of radical political reform – and demand that it is changed.

If it is not, everything that has happened, will continue to happen, and we, the citizens, will continue to pay the price.

And not to be too pessimistic, but how likely is it that change such as the type Gavin asks demands of us is likely? For myself, in most elections where I have been eligible to vote I have found myself deciding by first eliminating people I cannot/will not vote for and then deciding who is the best of what’s left. In a country where the two biggest parties in Fianna Fail(ure) and Fine Gael are the same party effectively, which hardly a brain cell between them and with the third party of Labour being ineffective at best, where is the hope for this change?

At least Italy had its ‘Tangentopoli’ moment where the worst of a beyond redemption political class was thrown out, but is such a thing even possible in Ireland? Even looking at Italy today, despite a near-dictatorship at the top and half the country seemingly run by the Mafia, it seems that Italians have a media asking questions and a Judiciary that at least tries to do its job. Will Ireland ever even get to that lofty basic standard? Personally, I no longer believe so, but I hope that I am wrong.

Reading Scottish Science Fiction writer Ken MacLeod’s blog I came across this passage that I thought was quite insightful:

For me, a highlight of a very engaging and informative weekend was a talk by Prof Colin McInnes, DSc FRAes FInstP FRSE FREng, titled ‘Random Thoughts of a Techno-Utopist Running Dog’. The usual conception of sustainability, Prof McInnes argued, was a dangerous idea. Technological stagnation only means slower resource depletion. We need continuous technological progress to make new resources available. The idea that we should use less energy is outrageously inhumane and regressive. Most of humanity gets its energy from burning wood and dung. We need a vast increase in energy production. That means nuclear power, including new kinds of nuclear plant such as the Thorium Energy Amplifier. Nuclear waste is just inadequately burned nuclear fuel. We need to find ways of burning it all. Most reycling schemes are feel-good rather than do-good, condemning us to pre-industrial, manual rooting about in rubbish. We need plasma torches and mass spectrometers to really recover all the useful stuff in our waste. ‘Humanity is the singularity. We are self-replicating smart matter.’ To campaign against cheap flights to Prague while jetting across the world for eco-holidays in the Galapagos is naked class warfare. With synthetic genomics we can have carbon-neutral aviation even cheaper than today’s travel.

While the end of the post goes a bit into slightly interesting, if perhaps very far off thinking, the two points I have in bold are pretty insightful and point to something that has always bugged me about ‘green’ thought. Namely that, for most green thinkers, the simple reality that their desire to ‘reset’ the clock back to some ‘better’ time is completely at odds with the reality that most human beings want their lives to become easier, not harder. Given this, surely green thinkers should adopt to the idea that things like carbon taxes and other such regressive ideas are just not going to happen and instead move their focus towards either tax-breaks and grants for technology and ideas that may make a difference rather than trying to get people to change quite entrenched behaviour?

While watching the Blair Witch Project and just reading about it after, I heard about this film. As both wikipedia and IMBD notes, the film got some attention following the release of ‘Blair Witch’ owing to the somewhat similar manner and ‘documentary’ filming.

Thought it is fairly short and actually quite enjoyable, there is a very good reason why this movie remains much-less well known than Blair Witch. I’m going to give a few ‘spoilers’ in this so just beware.

Though for most of the film, the information being presented as though it was a real documentary, for some bizarre reason in the last 15 minutes, the movie jumps into third-person omnipresent camera which is both incredibly jarring and completely removes you from the film. In fact, when you’re watching it, if the movie changed around a few small things and finished at around 1.10, or added a completely different ending, it is quite possible that this film would be seen as an enjoyable ‘alternative’ to the Blair Witch. What’s incredibly annoying is that nobody thought to say it to the filmmakers that the ending was just silly. Especially as, if they simply explained the reappearance of the extra film in another way and never were able to reconstruct that final frame, while possibly adding another 10 minutes to unnerve you, the whole thing would be a much better contender for being the best ‘real’ horror documentary out there.

Instead though, you get something that’s an enjoyable, if perhaps somewhat wasteful way of spending a hungover bank holiday Monday..