People often appeal to the government to ban things. Or change things.

It comes from a fundamental misunderstanding. The government are not your friend. It doesn't have morals, or care about them.

Historically enough people became free enough to find their own way out from under the thumb of the establishment and create what we now call a modern economy. Countries where your rights are arbitrary are always last on the list, where arbitrary power can take the thing you want to make or build away from you, always lag behind everywhere else.

If you start banning things then you make it harder to do something useful. You make it ok to imprison people because you don't agree with them.

Problem is, who is making the noise? Who is being difficult? People like you? People like me?

Who do you think they will shut up first because they want a quiet life? The offensive racists or the people who chase after them?

When they come they come for you, when they ban they ban you. This is a lesson from Hitler's Germany that needs to be remembered more often.

Fear

My old friend

Protect me from harm

Bar me from better

My lodestone

The delicious frisson of doubt

Those old foundering shoals imagined

Are deep water

Relax

Old friend

Put on your warm coat

Sit by the fire

There now: old friend, my dear

Let's make better

Together

Small things every day

I walked through Liverpool one in the sunshine, passing the stairs at the edge of Chavasse park. The light catching tiny pinpoints in the brick.

I played a mental game that said I was dead and looked outward to see nothing would change.

An ice cream, I wanted to wander along by the line of fountains but they were too wet

Some loon stuck his head wet to cool down

An Italian couple discussing something sitting outside in the hotel's piazza

White wine in the blazing sun on the slate tables

Dancing with my flake, slurping the 99

Bright blue sky cut by slate grey

We cross the wide road

Pass the red ship, once caught in dreams of radio

I looked up, sun in my eyes at the brown cube

My destination

Dust swirling

Nothing changed

These atoms

     make solar wind

     combine somehow to make an eye blink

     join in endless dance

These atoms

    want

    love

Underneath

    delicate tracery

    painting on water

    with blood and hope

A dangerous rearrangement of carbon

    beauty

    atoms flex

    fat universe consumed

So dance

   it stops

   not

The groove rises

   closes over

   like wave

   dust sparkles, skittering across

The atoms

   want not

Cynics are cynics because they still care. Apathy is a far more dangerous - apathy means people can get away with anything.

I just had an online discussion about who to vote for, because I'm really struggling. 

Tories

We have the old Tories - who lied to me back in the 1980's. I like their rhetoric, it's hard to argue with wanting to create a society with a proper safety net that encourages the able bodied to work. But their deeds were kick the poor because they can't complain. My grandfather was a civil servant back in the 1930's. He was a good Catholic and had 8 kids, the Tory government of the time cut his wages. Does this sound familiar? I couldn't vote for this and it's what they did as soon as they were elected.

(New) Labour

We have new Labour - but they seem to have dropped the new recently. Under Blair they went to war, when a very large majority of the electorate didn't think it was a good idea. We're still trying to sort out that mess but now the politicians want to run away from it and they stick their hands in the pockets and say it wasn't me. It was you, the political class, who went adventuring - it wasn't the rest of us, who have to pay for it - sometimes with our lives. The political class went and fought that war without the agreement of the population, and now they wonder why we don't vote. It was a slap in the face and proof that whatever passes for democracy in the UK is severely limited. In my tweet I called them the new liars.

One of the other things that frankly terrifies me is their fear of dissent from whatever is the liberal consensus du jour. They passed a lot of laws about hate speech and so on, trying to say that the state should be able to control what people say. This authoritarian streak, that starts from the premise that most of the electorate are children who need to be told what to think by an educated minority, has resulted in the biggest attack on our rights as subjects of her madj since the 1940's. Most of these laws aren't used much, but they're on the statute books now and they'll use them to shut people like me up. UKIP, for example, are trying to get their opponents locked up for calling them fascists by using these laws. Thanks, new Labour, for giving these buffoons a fig leaf to criminalise their opponents.

In the 1940's we were at war and under martial law. Not so much now.

We also had a period of economic growth that was truly amazing (and unsustainable, but never mind that now) and for once the government didn't have to borrow as much. They could have invested in our worn out infrastructure, and in things we desperately need like social housing. They're nominally socialist and are supposed to care about these kinds of things. But instead the revenues were used to grow the civil service and create non productive jobs. The first thing the Tories did was cut these jobs, if the money had been invested instead of whirled around the economy like some Ponzi scheme it might have actually made a sustainable long term difference when the music stopped. Instead it stopped, the children went looking for their musical chairs, and there were none. Sigh. The cynic in me also says that if you have one of these jobs you're more likely to vote Labour - and, of course, throwing money around to grow the civil service and create pseudo productive jobs is much easier than creating ones that have some long term value.

I think their leader Milliband is another managerial clone who will lean wherever the wind blows, just like Blair and Brown before him. I wish he had some principles I could actually see. I don't care about policies - they're always bullshit and depend on whatever situation people have when they arrive in office. But I really don't want another load of caring cuts.

Liberal Democrats

Then we have the Liberal Democrats. Who helped the Tories form the coalition government despite not (in theory) being particularly close ideological bedfellows. They made some promises about not upping (in fact abolishing?) student fees, introducing a fairer voting system and so on. Not kept any of these promises, but have kept the Tories in power. I think they're gonna take a real beating in the elections - and they deserve it. They also have their nanny state authoritarian streak too. They hadn't had a sniff of power in nearly 100 years, so I suppose I can't blame them for being spineless opportunists. 

Here's to the next 100 years, eh, Mr Clegg?

UKIP

The only other semi mainstream party is UKIP - who are dangerous ideologues with a populist agenda that resonates with a lot of fear and ignorance. Some people call them fascists, but they aren't, they are in fact incoherent. Which is what makes them so dangerous because they can be everything to everybody. I doubt they would use gas chambers on people they don't like because they haven't the wit to put the money in the meter.

People are scared and need to blame somebody. That's where UKIP come in. If you don't vote then they might win seats. That's where apathy gets you, ruled by a parliament of racist jingoistic weathercocks. So you have to vote against even if you don't know what for.

The greens

I find the middle class anti-technology thing frankly terrifying. We need more and better technology, not some faux Arts degree technophobe utopia where some tiny rump of humanity gets force fed cardboard and kelp products. The scary malthusian subtext is that they think there are too many people on the planet. Therefore, there needs to be less. Doesn't this worry you? Unless you're the one making the decisions of course. This sentiment is the dangerous one, the one you could call fascist if you were of a mind to do so, not some wooly headed chauvinists.

I don't disagree with not wanting waste. I do disagree with only using sticks instead of carrots to make things change for the better. I disagree very strongly with the anti human and ignorant anti-technology sentiments.  

You wanna go live in a freezing cold teepee and watch your kids die of pneumonia off you go. Don't drag me along.

The economy

The banks should have been allowed to fail. At the moment they can make each way bets and if it doesn't work we have to bail them out. WHY? Because they have money and can buy political influence. I've been very critical of Gordon Brown, but in fact he was dancing to the same tune as all of the other European chancellors - let's keep this Ponzi scheme running for as long as we can. If he'd tried to stop it he would have been replaced with someone else who did toe the line.  I still think he could have done something with the surplus he had other than buy unsustainable jobs.

We also don't need all of the cuts that have been happening - it's ideology not economics. Economics is 90% nonsense anyway, none of the predictions economists make come true because their models don't work. Yet we still let them make policy. 

Elections

All three main parties in the UK lost the election. All of them. Instead of seeing this as a wakeup call and maybe trying to start a national debate about the political process, perhaps starting with warmonger Blair being able to ignore our wishes and moving on from there, we've ended up with an unelected government of Tory millionaires who know nothing about how 99% of us live our lives.

But I cling to my cynicism, and I will vote - apathy is far too dangerous. 

I remember watching this when I was very young in the 1960's. I've always been interested in the fantastic, in science fiction, and the Daleks aren't that frightening, Cybermen are much more so, because they were people.

When the BBC reinvented the franchise a while back with Christopher Ecclestone I was a bit cynical about it but enjoyed the first series.

I started to have a problem with it; as soon as the Doctor appeared everything was always sorted out. My vague memories of the original were that he often had to solve problems and, even though we all knew it would be ok after 60 minutes, sometimes looked to be actually in trouble.

Then the David Tenant doctor "just happened" to be able to regrow an arm. It was unlikely, even for something that's just made up, a kid's story. Also, given how many years the series has run, we should have known this already and had an aha!, we know he's ok moment.

Then I got bored. The Doctor always knows more than we do. It doesn't matter what the hell happens, he will lay his hands on the problem and it magics away. Sometimes it's a bit sad or things are irrecoverable, but usually we don't know and can't see the answer.

Basically the Doctor is some kind of secular Jesus. People get picked by some arbitrary method and he redeems them some of the time, or he ignores them and they are in some kind of torment. We don't even have the detective story conceit of knowing but not understanding most of the things that Sherlock later assembles into a coherent explanation, it's just a boring magic show where whatever happens will always turn out right because the Doctor will huff and puff it away.

This irritates me - it's part of our culture of learned helplessness. I know it's only bad TV, but asking yourself questions that revolve around are you pathetic enough to be rescued by some external agency is beyond useless. It's normalising victim culture. We live in times when everyone thinks the world is coming to an end next week, and this is pandering to the divine interventionists. But there is nobody to rescue us; we will have to work it out for ourselves, humans trying to live their lives against the howling, uncaring void and stick to their principles while they do it. Divine agency also means you can be a complete monster but it's ok, because you can be forgiven. Your victims are in a better place, like the vomit inducing ending to the Star Wars series. Please, stop it. Redemptive violence isn't. Honesty and simple love, putting aside hatred, listening to your so-called enemy and engaging human to human, is a much harder path for adults.

I don't want to be picked, I don't want to be redeemed by any kind of Jesus. The prospect doesn't excite me even slightly, I don't want to watch it. I can't be bothered watching TV that ends on the same plot point: we need a hurdlegy spludger! Ah! Didn't you know you can make one from cheese and a sonic screwdriver as long as it's Tuesday? Then the rest of the show is a search for cheese that the baddies have hidden and waiting until Tuesday while they try and catch you. Please, all that writing talent, can't you do something interesting with it? Also, the SF is long gone, it's now a family-safe horror/magic show, full of invented gotchas and unlikely nonsense, a bit like the unlamented Charmed, yawn.

So, sorry, I don't care about the 50th anniversary, I think it's been turned into yet another boring safe money machine by the BBC. I'd rather read a book or watch Battlestar Galactica - it touches on some difficult adult themes and has a fantastic cast. It's also proper SF, not a magic show, despite its mystical bits.

I keep seeing twitter campaigns about things like the Sun newspapers Page 3 girls. Young women show their breasts for money. It's a long tradition in the UK and harmless. I don't buy the paper and couldn't care less about it. Other papers have plenty of nearly naked celebs with their boobs falling out of their websites and papers, there's even a whole subculture about which actress got drunk and "accidentally" let photographers take pictures of her knickerless nether regions getting into or out of cars - and that appears in all of the papers. Is this worse? Or is it no surprise that women have genitalia?

Now we have a change.org petition against it at a time when research has shown that women in the UK earn on average £5000 less than men.

But of course, in our isolated society, where everybody is supposed to shift for themselves, that's tough shit. It's easier to get indignant about some prurient nonsense than the real wrongs, because the real wrongs are much harder to work on. Like changing sexist language stops discrimination, in which case why is there this income gap? It's window dressing, liberals love banning things because they think it makes a difference - no it doesn't, it just means things have been banned. It means that speech is even more restricted, and grown up, difficult discussions about things that may offend people become even harder.

It's easy to get het up about breasts in a "family newspaper", and easy to campaign about it. If I was going to spend energy women's issues, which I see to be far more about class than gender, I'd be shouting about the child poverty implied by that TUC report. If some young women make a few quid out of being ogled by idiots - so what? I don't care about the breasts - I'm an adult. When my kids were small I was more worried about them seeing violence on the news than nudity - we're not Victorians and we shouldn't be scared of sex or sexuality.

Let's stop being so prudish about people's bodies, we all have them, it's no big deal.  We all probably saw breasts some time when we were too small to care about ogling them - so what? If one paper shows the nearly topless celeb with an inch of cotton hiding her nipples and another doesn't, does it send a different message, if there is a message? Are we supposed to insist everyone wears a burkah? Are you serious?

On my last day of fifty-threedom I drove 200 miles to Gateshead.

I was supposed to be staying at a place called the Bewick Hotel, but when I arrived I was informed that the owners and retired and their son wanted to turn the hotel over to executive lets - which meant I had nowhere to stay. They'd booked me into another bed and breakfast around the corner, which was OK after I changed rooms to be away from the noise of the TV. I was pretty stressed.

I wandered up the road to a very nice Indian restaurant and had a tasty meal and a couple of bottles of cider. I then wandered back down the hill and bumped into two young men, one accosted me. They weren't violent or anything, in fact they had name badges on saying they were members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (I think the Mormons - God knows).

I told them I was a Buddhist (true) and wasn't interested.

He then said what don't you like about us?

I couldn't stop laughing and just left them to it. I could have said:

• Racism. If I remember right black people were only allowed to join in the last 20 years or so. I have a clear memory from the 1970's when a mate's house was invaded by them and he asked us round to argue the point (but it might have been the Jehovah's Witnesses). The guy we were talking to equated black skin with the mark of Cain. Oh, fuck off.
• Arrogance. They are remarrying thousands of people whose marriage records were dug out of English churches, for some ideological reason around making sure these people, who knew and cared nothing of them, might be saved.
• They self-identify as Christians, which I think means they have the whole self-destructive crap around sin and being forgiven by a god that doesn't care.
• They are elitist, only a certain number may be saved, they also call earlier leaders saints, which is crap.
• The founder of their weird sect was a convicted confidence trickster and managed to convince a load of people that he had been given some extra books for the bible and they needed to give him their money.
• I just finished reading snakes in suits. The book describes psychopathy at some length, when I think about it this founder actually has a lot of the hallmarks, including the fraudster and multiple sexual partners.

But of course, this would have offended him even more than my laughter. Sometimes you sit in a place where what you believe is so alien that the person you are talking to will never understand it without days of explanation. Buddhists see sin, for example, as doing things that harm your own karma - not bad things that need to be forgiven. It's a completely different approach.

The god types need to be chosen (like a king chose courtiers) and forgiven (like they don't have to take responsibility) - I actually find this pretty revolting, but can't see the point in arguing. Choosing also implies that some people will get left behind. In Buddhism we have the Bodhisattva, people who have chosen not to go to full enlightenment but stay behind to help the rest of us. No-one is left behind, the very idea is an anathema. When Lord Buddha himself became enlightened he could have not said anything, he also chose to help us. I am so grateful to him.

And forgiveness, of course, starts with that face you see in the mirror every morning.

I felt the need for a different place to blog, away from francisfish.com. The stuff there is fairly serious but I now shy away from poetry and speculative writing. I'm sure that people will be able to find this site if they look for it, I'll certainly link to it, but not from my main consultancy site. 

So here is where you will find the madness and nutty stuff.