Elon Musk – Blood and Porridge

November 5, 2024November 6, 2024

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

One my favourite British science-fiction movies is The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), starring Edward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern, directed by Val Guest and scripted by Guest and Wolf Mankowitz. (The underrated Guest made three other movies, 1955’s The Quatermass Experiment, 1957’s Quatermass II and 1960’s Hell is a City, that I also like a lot.)

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is an apocalyptic tale wherein the USA and the Soviet Union carry out simultaneous nuclear-bomb tests at the earth’s poles and, subsequently, the planet experiences weird meteorological events. Rivers dry up in some places and rain falls in unexpected torrents in others. The general trend, though, is that temperatures rise. The film’s heroes – a pair of London-based journalists – discover that those nuclear tests have disrupted the earth’s nutation, its axis of rotation. Our planet is now spiralling closer and closer to the sun and in a few months’ time will plunge into it.

Yes, the film’s science is wonky. A full-force hurricane has a heat-release every 20 minutes that’s similar to one 10-megaton nuclear bomb going off, so a few such nuclear explosions are nowhere near enough to knock the earth out of its orbit. Also, what’s amusing about the film from a 2024 viewpoint is that its journalist heroes work for the Daily Express – a newspaper now so moon-howlingly rubbish it makes the Daily Mail look comparatively sane and reasonable. Today, while the Thames evaporated, the Express would be denouncing the earth-knocked-out-of-orbit / crashing-into-the-sun scenario as a woke hoax and politically-correct fearmongering.

However, as a dystopian sci-fi movie showing a gradually-unfolding catastrophe through the eyes of some ordinary people who are powerless to do anything about it, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is both affecting and chilling.

The film ends ambiguously. The world’s governments make a last-ditch attempt to reverse the damage, exploding more nuclear bombs in the desperate hope they’ll nudge the earth back into its proper orbit. Meanwhile, in the Daily Express’s offices in now-utterly-sweltering London, we see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared. One bears the headline WORLD SAVED, the other the headline WORLD DOOMED. And we leave the film’s characters there, not knowing their fate.

I’ve been thinking about the ending of The Day the Earth Caught Fire a lot today. November 5^th, 2024, is when Americans go to the polls to elect a new president. That will either be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The latter was once memorably and accurately described by the New Yorker writer Mark Singer as someone whose existence is ‘unmolested by the rumbling of a soul’. A few years ago, less eloquently, I called him ‘that rancid man-slug of evil.’

Trump has been open about what he’ll do to the USA if he’s re-elected president. He’ll transform the world’s most powerful country from a democracy into an authoritarian state, with him as despot-in-chief. Even if the American public are stricken with buyers’ remorse after voting him in, he’ll change the election laws and fiddle the constitution so that they can’t ever get rid of him and his far-right Republican successors (who’ll no doubt be led by the repulsive J.D. Vance). The Trump Reich will be here to stay.

Along the way, he’ll also embolden other fascists in other countries around the world, hand over Ukraine to his buddy, hero and idol Vladimir Putin and allow Putin’s malignant influence to extend right into Europe, make American women second-class citizens with zero control over their bodies, persecute LGBT people and probably erase trans ones, put the lunatic anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of American health policy and appoint Elon Musk as his Joseph Goebbels-style head of propaganda who’ll pump out misinformation and hate on Twitter (or ‘X’ as Musk calls his debased platform these days). Science will be derided, suppressed and defunded. Pig-ignorance will be lauded, promoted and revelled in.

Worst of all, Trump, a climate-change denialist, will add billions of tonnes of US carbon emissions to the earth’s atmosphere, probably thwarting any last chances of humanity doing anything to mitigate the effects of the climate catastrophe. Yes, the earth really will be catching fire, if slightly more slowly than it did in Guest’s movie.

So, world saved or world doomed? We’ll find out a little later this week.

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

November 13, 2023November 15, 2023

Jiggery-wokery

From abc.net.au / © BBC

‘Woke’… What does that word even mean?

Here’s failed US presidential candidate and failed insurrectionist Donald Trump using it to denigrate the American women’s soccer team, who do un-Trumpian things like ‘taking the knee’ during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner. “Woke equals failure!” he barked on TruthSocial, his minor social-media platform, when the team was knocked out of this year’s Women’s Football World Cup.

And here’s John Cleese grumping about the BBC being woke because it banned that episode of Fawlty Towers (1975-79) where the Major uses some unfashionable language to describe the West Indies cricket team. (In fact, the episode was temporarily pulled from the BBC-owned streaming service UKTV, and reviewed, and reinstated with a content warning.) Cleese is so incensed by wokeness that he’s started hosting a TV chat-show in which he fulminates against it. His show is called The Dinosaur Hour (2023) and it’s broadcast on the right-wing, alleged ‘news’ channel GB News. Amusingly, Cleese was peeved to discover that his new employers at GB News had just signed Boris Johnson, whom he considers a ‘serial liar’, to host a show too. Well, John, when you lie down with dogs, expect to get up with fleas. In this case, big, blonde, bloviating, bonking Boris-fleas.

Another household name much concerned about woke behaviour is Elon Musk, who last year purchased Twitter (or X, as he calls it now) and set about purging it of wokeness. He’s certainly done that. He’s also purged the platform of half of its advertising revenue and half of the value of its acquisition price. Musk has described wokeness as a ‘mind-virus’ and ‘communism rebranded’ – and communism, he’ll tell you, is a very bad thing. Though that hasn’t stopped him opening a big Tesla plant in communist China, in Shanghai, and being warmly welcomed every time he visits the country, and declaring that democratic, capitalist Taiwan is actually Chinese property. Musk is also introducing to Twitter a ‘snarky, anti-woke AI chatbot’ called ‘Grok’, which sounds like a character from the sci-fi comic 2000 AD (1977-present).

From britishcomic.fandom.com / © Rebellion Developments

I don’t agree with Musk on much but he’s right to liken wokeness to a virus. Because the moment that people with his right-wing politics come into contact with it, they seem to turn red-eyed, froth at the mouth and gibber insanely, like the infected did in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2003).

© DNA Films / UK Film Council / Fox Searchlight Pictures

But if you need refuge from wokeness, just move to Florida. There, Governor Ron DeSantis has been pushing a ‘Stop-Woke Act’ in the hope that the state will be ‘the place where woke goes to die’. In fact, DeSantis’s Florida is now so anti-woke, and so determinedly opposed to the teaching of wokey things like Critical Race Theory, that its State Board of Education has kids learning in school that slavery was a good thing because it helped the black slaves to develop ‘skills which, in some cases, could be applied for their personal benefit‘. Wow. Who knew?

I’m sure DeSantis’s achievements in Florida are admired by Suella Braverman, the belligerent and self-serving British Conservative politician who was very recently sacked from her position as the UK’s Home Secretary. During her time in office, she slammed the British police force for being too woke. One example was when she claimed to have reprimanded officers in Essex for the woke act of raiding a pub and removing a display of racist golliwogs. (Except that she didn’t – it turned out that Suella had been disingenuous, or stupid, or both, which is perfectly possible in her case.) Suella, or ‘Sewer-ella’ as I like to think of her, also famously condemned a faction she called the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’. Supposedly, these have formed a ‘coalition of chaos’ with the opposition parties and are responsible for all of Britain’s ills. She said this whilst serving in the brief but tumultuous government of Liz Truss. Accusing someone else of being part of a coalition of chaos? That’s a bit rich, given the context.

Elsewhere, the Daily Mail has complained that woke builders are daring to ‘enjoy yoga, muesli, listening to Radio 4 and sharing their feelings’ rather than ‘devouring greasy-spoon breakfasts and discussing sport.’ Xbox games consoles have been accused of being woke for getting updated with an ‘energy saver’ mode to lessen their power consumption – because, as you know, attempting to be more environmentally-friendly just drips with contemptible wokeness. The makers of The Simpsons (1989-present) have been lambasted for being woke, coincidentally by Cleese’s associates at GB News, for no longer having scenes where Homer loses his rag at Bart, picks him up by the throat and strangles him until his eyes bulge and tongue protrudes. Not wanting to strangle children? How hideously woke.

So, what does ‘woke’ actually mean? Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s “an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism and LGBT rights.” Fascinatingly, the phrase ‘stay woke’ goes all the way back to 1938, when it was first heard on a recording of a song called Scottsboro Boys by the legendary blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, aka, Lead Belly.

From wikipedia.org / © William P. Gottlieb Collection

Though how the term ‘woke’ became elastic enough to encompass eating tofu, and builders talking about their feelings, and Xboxes having energy-saving modes, and Homer Simpson not throttling his offspring, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a simpler definition of the term – certainly when you look at the people mentioned above who’ve railed against it, like Trump, Musk, DeSantis, Braverman, the Daily Mail and GB News – might be: ‘Anything that right-wing tossers don’t like.’

Indeed, as somebody who considers himself partly Scottish, I felt a surge of pride a while ago when Gavin McInnes, founder of the neo-fascist American militia the Proud Boys, denounced Scotland as ‘the most woke country in the world.” No wonder Scottish novelist Christopher Brookmyre responded to McInnes’s ravings by saying: “That delighted me…”

Unfortunately, nobody ever lost money by underestimating human beings’ intelligence. There’s clearly political mileage in ranting endlessly about wokeness. Gradually, you brainwash millions of people, mainly older ones who don’t get out much, and sit and watch Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News all day, into believing that dark, malevolent woke forces do indeed lurk in the world, planning to deprive them of their Bibles, guns, gas-guzzling automobiles, Big Macs, racist jokes, un-politically-correct 1970s TV shows, etc. It’s also convenient for the likes of Trump (currently facing 91 felony counts) and Britain’s Conservative government (trying to justify why the country is such a horrible, unhappy mess when they’ve been in charge of it for the past 13 years) to peddle the narrative that the establishment is riddled with hostile woke agents. The civil service, the courts, the police… A giant woke conspiracy is being implemented from society’s corridors of power and it’s trying to discredit them and stymie their every move.

I’m not claiming, by the way, that stupidity is confined to right-wingers. The left is also capable of it. In recent years the American right has infiltrated school-boards and removed books they disapprove of from syllabuses and libraries, books deemed too woke, often written by people of colour or members of the LGBT community, and often featuring characters of colour or LGBT characters. There was even a book suspended in Alabama because officials didn’t like the sound of the author’s name, Marie-Louise Gay. But left-wing educators have done themselves no favours by trying to ban books that offend their sensibilities too.

For example, I lately came across the case of a school board in Washington State pulling Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) off its required reading list for ninth-graders because a group of ‘progressive’ teachers objected to it. Sure, you can argue that To Kill a Mockingbird portrays its black characters with less depth than its white characters and has a ‘white saviour’ narrative that’s offensive to many. But shouldn’t teachers focus on developing their students’ powers of critical thinking, argument and self-expression so that they can articulate why they object to the book? Engaging with – certainly, studying – literature shouldn’t be limited to books you’re personally comfortable with. You should have to experience ones you find discomforting too, whilst developing the ability to formulate logical and coherent responses to them.

I don’t deny there are works that some people will find upsetting because of their beliefs or backgrounds or difficult experiences they’ve had in their lives. And I don’t see anything wrong with books and stories having trigger warnings, which inform readers the content they’re about to immerse themselves in may be uncomfortable or even traumatising. I say that as a writer who’s had trigger warnings attached to his fiction in the past. But banning books altogether? I don’t agree with censorship, unless it’s of something that’s completely off-the-scale in promulgating odious stereotypes and stirring up hatred.

Otherwise, I don’t have much of a problem with wokeness. Especially as it seems to annoy all the right – and I mean ‘right’ – people. So, now, it’s time to sign off and grab some lunch. What will I have…? Why, tofu of course. Up yours, Sewer-ella.

From wikipedia.org / © UK Government Web Archive

July 18, 2023September 11, 2023

The Twittering has gone

From unsplash.com / © Brett Jordan

At the end of last month, the amount of time I spend roaming the Internet was suddenly halved. This was because when I went Twitter-browsing, and tried to look at the Twitter threads of the numerous people, publications and organisations I read regularly, I was greeted by something new – a page inviting me to ‘sign in to Twitter’. At its bottom, the page made the teasing comment: ‘Don’t have an account? Sign up.’

Yes, billionaire Elon Musk, who took over the platform last year in a blaze of publicity, if hardly a blaze of glory, had blocked access to it for non-members. If you want to see what’s on Twitter, you now have to join Twitter. Musk had previously expressed disapproval at AI companies using Twitter’s data to train their models, which this move would put a stop to. But there’s an equally feasible, more desperate explanation for it. Since Musk’s taking of the Twitter helm, it’s been well-documented how the platform has all but gone down the plughole in terms of membership, advertising revenue, technical reliability and overall credibility. Perhaps this blocking represents a last-throw-of-the-dice attempt to encourage a few million people, who’d hitherto enjoyed seeing Twitter without being on Twitter, to come aboard.

Sorry, Elon. Thanks but no thanks. I had fun peering into Twitter in the past, and I no doubt wasted far too much time doing so, but being denied access to it now is not going to turn me into a committed, signed-up Twitterer. Indeed, I avoid social-media membership, not being on Facebook, Instagram or anything similar. Using WhatsApp is about as far as I go. This is partly because I’m a technophobe at heart and have a distrust of shiny new forms of communication pushed upon me by eager super-rich tech-tycoons. I have good reasons for that mistrust. See, for example, the affair of the dodgy British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, which among other things had a helping hand in Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. The firm’s shady activities were helped by a data breach involving the personal details of up to 87 million people, ‘inappropriately’ taken from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.

Also, it’s partly because if I was active on social media, I suspect I’d spend most of my time arguing with idiots and arseholes. And there are a lot of those on Twitter. There always have been, though there seem to be many more now since Musk did away with much of the site’s moderation and declared an ‘anything goes’ policy on ‘freedom of speech’. Well, that’s what he calls ‘freedom of speech’, though most sane people would call it ‘havering and slabbering by far-right-wing turnips’.

I’d always thought Musk was a jerk, but I’d assumed too he possessed some intelligence and business acumen. For one thing, he was a vocal admirer of the works of the late Iain Banks, especially Banks’ science-fiction series of Culture novels, with which he claimed to share a ‘utopian anarchism’. The fact that he read books – unlike Trump, who’s allegedly never read one in his adult life – suggested to me that at least some of his grey matter was working. Although I imagine knowing that Musk, the world’s number-one, right-wing, libertarian, billionaire man-boy, was a fan of his would send poor old Banks twirling in his grave.*

Well, since he took over Twitter, I’ve had to revise my opinion of Musk’s IQ downwards. He’s overseen the platform with the finesse of Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies trying to run the kitchen in a Michelin-starred sashimi restaurant.

His proprietorship began in late October 2022. Before the year was out, he’d shed 50% of Twitter’s employees and reportedly 80% of its contractor workforce, while warning remaining staff to adapt to a ‘hardcore’ working culture of long hours and high pressure. His efforts to charge users for verified accounts were a shambles – as evidenced by a notorious, supposedly-verified ‘Twitter Blue’ account by one George W. Bush who tweeted, “I miss killing Iraqis” The platform swelled with troll accounts because there was neither the manpower left, nor the inclination on Musk’s part, to curb them. And an end-of-the-year poll by Musk inviting Twitter users to vote on whether or not he should stay as its Chief Executive, presumably meant to shore up his position, didn’t go the way he’d intended. 57.5% of respondents told him to quit.

2023 has brought Musk no respite. Only yesterday, the BBC reported that Twitter has lost half its advertising revenue since Musk’s takeover – something he’s admitted himself. Besides not wanting to have their services and products featured next to comments by charmers like Andrew Tate and the Taliban leader Anas Aqqani (who recently praised Twitter for its ‘freedom of speech’, ‘public nature’ and ‘credibility’ – I bet that made Elon feel better), advertisers can’t have been happy at limits imposed earlier this month on the number of tweets users can view per day. The maximum is 1000 for non-verified users, 10,000 for verified ones. This on top of the fact that their adverts aren’t reaching outsiders like me anymore.

Making Musk’s life even harder is sneaky Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision to launch a rival, Twitter-lookalike platform called Threads. This got 30 million sign-ups on the first day of its existence and 100 million within a week. (Having one of Zuckerberg’s Instagram accounts automatically entitles you to a Threads one, so the new platform was bound to start life with impressive membership numbers.) Musk, predictably, was not happy about this. In addition to calling the pasty-faced, blank-eyed Zuckerberg a ‘cuck’, he said he was ready to take him on in both a cage-fight and a penis-measuring contest. Not being a fan of Zuckerberg either (see the aforementioned Cambridge Analytica scandal for one reason), I have to say there hasn’t been a confrontation where I’ve so badly wanted both parties to lose since… Since…. Well, since last month, when Yevgeny Prigozhin squared up to Vladimir Putin.

Incidentally, Musk has a fan-club of ‘edge-lords’, who are predominantly young, male, white and (I’d hazard a guess) virginal, and whose thinking seems to be: “Oooh, I’m really edgy because I’m very right-wing and I say offensive things about women, black people, Muslims, lefties, gays and transpeople on social media! Though always from the safety of my parents’ basement.” These types worship the ground Musk treads upon and, lately, I’ve noticed their comments below online news articles reporting Twitter’s woes. Obviously, they defend their hero to the hilt. They claim he’s engaged in a cunning game of three-dimensional chess. What Musk’s doing, they say, is part of some brilliant strategy that’ll outfox the evil, liberal establishment and result in him and Twitter taking over the world. Though if, say, Bill Gates was responding to queries from journalists by sending them poop emojis, as Musk has been doing for the last four months, I suspect they’d be less inclined to hail that as a sign of genius.

So anyway, that’s Twitter off my radar. It’s a shame, because for many years pre-Musk it’d been a good source of information and entertainment. Occasionally, I’d find stuff on it that was thought-provoking.

For a long period I was obsessed with Scottish and British politics – I’m less so now – and regularly visited the Twitter-threads of a wide range of political pundits, polemicists and bloggers: David Aaronovitch, Derek Bateman, Bella Caledonia, Alastair Campbell, Nick Cohen, Chris Deerin, Ian Dunt, Kenny Farquharson, Flying Rodent, Gerry Hassan, Owen Jones, Pat Kane, Alex Massie, Darren McGarvey, Iain McWhirter, Craig Murray, Laurie Penny, Scot Goes Pop, Wings Over Scotland, Mic Wright… I obviously didn’t agree with all the opinions they expressed, but I felt it important to know what people with different views to mine were thinking. I should add that, for various reasons, I stopped reading some of those folks’ thoughts. Either they became bitter and twisted (McWhirter), or were embroiled in scandal (Cohen), or went howling-at-the-moon mad (Murray, Wings Over Scotland), or simply got too annoying (Deerin, Massie). Or they died, which was sadly the case with Bateman.

Also, as someone who writes a little fiction, I found access to other writers’ Twitter threads invaluable. Writers commonly tweet and retweet names of magazines, anthologies and publishing houses that are looking for new work, and these heads-ups led to me getting a good amount of stuff published. Plus, it was good to know the thoughts of writers who tweeted regularly – not just about writing, but about life generally. These ranged from big names such as Stephen King, William Gibson, Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin to less famous, but equally engaging, ones such as Anne Billson, Simon Bestwick, Charlie Stross and the late Christopher Fowler.

Twitter also alerted me to a few magazines and publishing houses I should stay clear of. Usually, this was because their staff and associated writers turned out to be extreme-right-wing dingbats who tweeted approvingly about the likes of Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, Giorgia Meloni – the only woman worth listening to, apparently – and the bare-chested, horse-riding, bear-wrestling Russian he-man Vladimir Putin. Oh, and they all thought Elon Musk was the bees’ knees. No surprise there.

One thing’s for sure now. I feel as little urge to sign up with Threads as I do with Twitter. One reason is my antipathy towards Zuckerberg. Another reason is that I don’t want to be on a social media platform that shares its name with the most horrifying and apocalyptic film of all time.

* For the record, Banks was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Venice, Paris and the Firth of Forth.