However there is a force loose in the world which seems determined to undermine this calm and pleasant activity and turn our kitchens into a chaotic whirlpool of over-boiling pots and burning pans. This insidious agent of disorder is the phenomenon of parallel cooking propagated mostly by authors of the world’s cook books and the scores of celebrity chef shows which seek to convince us that a kitchen should be a highly pressured environment.

You see when I cook I like to prepare all the ingredients and arrange them into groups in the order in which I am going to use them and add to the pot. If there are any mixtures or components which need to be used with haste or at a specific time during the cooking process I will have these prepared also and ready to go when required.

Now it would be nice if when I opened one of my recipe books the descriptive passages that go along with each recipe laid out the preparation and cooking in such a clean logical order. But alas this seems to never be the case. My recipe books are littered with fuzzy minded parallelism which seems purposely designed to confuse and confound. Things such as:

Now while the pot is simmering for the next five minutes prepare the breadcrumb mixture

Now what’s so wrong with this? I’ll tell you what’s wrong, instead of leisurely making your breadcrumb mixture and perhaps daydreaming or writing your next blog entry in your head, you’re thrust head first into a stressful race against time to get those breadcrumbs ready before the contents of the pot start to burn and the whole meal is ruined not to mention your precious moments of relaxation.

This sad state of affairs results in me having to read through every recipe in advance and mentally reorder it so I can cook in a manner conducive to my own peace and well being. While this is a workable situation it is less than desirable and so today I’m inaugurating the Single Threaded Cooking Defence League so you can join with me and strike a blow against those who would disquiet the mind and have us stir a pot with one hand while chopping with the other.

Stay Linear! Stay Relaxed! Your Food Deserves it!

I wanted to say it was plain criminal and how any bail outs should actually be given to the people who pay taxes and are and will be getting turfed out of their homes due to mortgage debt.

But why bother when congress woman Marcy Kaptur says it much better:

And here she is last week pointing out the that the very people who for years have complained about goverment regulation are the very ones who “come home to mama” when it all falls apart.

This activity of course is mirrored across the globe with Northern Rock and HBOS in the UK, and house prices just about everywhere going south while fuel and and food continues to climb skyward (the current downward blip in oil prices is just that a blip).

Now I know many will put this down as your standard periodic depression our economic system is prone too, but something makes feel me that this one is going to be a bit special, a bit more epic if you will. The words that have been springing into my dreams this week are: Systemic Collapse! I think we are finally seeing what happens when our philosophy of continuous growth and rampant individualism hits up against the harsh realities of a finite resource base.

Now I’m not going to try and back up my feeling on this as I’m not an economic analyst, these are just my personal musings, based perhaps erroneously on my teenage marxist reading list and what I see happening around me, and I have have to admit I have adopted from years of reading science fiction a predilection towards scenarios featuring the end of the world and social upheaval.

Its this predilection though which has lead me to follow with skeptical interest a lot of the work published concerning the Mayan calendar. Wait! don’t stop reading yet, I’m not a total loo-laa (just a partial one ). Now it so happens that one of the most recent interpretations of the Mayan Calendar by Carl Johan Calleman published in the late nineties I think, views the calendar as a system of delineating the evolution of consciousness starting way back at the big bang right up to 2012 (or 2011 technically according to Calleman) with the rate of acceleration increasing as we approach the end of the calendar.

Now there’s lots of other complexities of the interpretation but the one I want to highlight is the system of breaking up each increasingly smaller segment of time into days and nights each with specific qualities and attributes. Now it turns out that the period of time from November 18th 2007 to November 12th 2008 is the Fifth night of the current time period and as such is associated with Tezcatlipoca, the god of darkness. It is said to be a period of destruction where the dominant energy of the time period comes tumbling down making way in the sixth day for the seeds of the next time periods dominant energy to sprout. Now it was posited by many (prior to the last year) that in the context of the current time period this dominant energy refers to our economic/social system.

So I find it more than interesting that all the economic events I outlined above have occurred in this very time period. Perhaps the Mayans (or Calleman) were right? Okay so I was lying, I am a total loo-laa and perhaps so were the Mayans. But the thing I like to remind myself of is that its most likely that Mayans did not have the viewpoint of material realism that comes so easily to us. Perhaps they were more monistic idealists who believed that consciousness not matter was the primary stuff of existence and that this physical world was merely a collective hallucination, a conjuration of the collective and individual consciousness. Perhaps from this viewpoint the ideas of prophecy and of our physical world being a constructed acceleration chamber for the growth of our consciousness might seem a bit more tenable.

Anyway that’s my crazy wacko thought for the day and who knows, maybe if a few more key banks collapse and the US government continues to panic and attempt to “undertake the direction of production” and systemic collapse becomes a reality I might start to believe it myself

The first thing I have to say is that it’s not an activity I can easily recommend. I had no other option really and while I love cycling and wish I lived in a world where urban bicycle commuting was a safe option I have to conclude that by and large it isn’t. I say this not because of the volume of the traffic on Irish roads (that actually makes it safer due to the slowdown it causes) but because of the mindset and general aggression of motorists towards cyclists.

You Are A Child

The first thing to realize is that in the eyes of most motorists the commuting cyclist has no right to be on the road, the motorists are serious adults trying to get to work and you the cyclist are just some eejit kid indulging himself and getting in their way. I say this because I’ve had motorists clearly younger than me talk down to me as if I was ten year old out playing rather than a working father going to his job.

Learning To Love Motorists

At first this kind of stuff used to make me angry, but I quickly became resilient (except for the water pistol incident where I blew a gasket, chased after the car which got stuck in traffic, ripped the super soaker from their hands which were sticking out the front window, soaked them and then f#@ked their toy into the bushes before speeding off  to leave them in a traffic jam). Having a zen-like sense of calm is important when cycling in traffic otherwise you’ll be dead pretty quickly. One thing that will help you attain this is the knowledge that in return for the abuse heaped upon you, you will probably get home faster than most of the motorists sitting in traffic around you. On my route I regularly sped ahead or at least kept pace with certain cars all the way across the city during rush hour.

Mind The Gap

I thought about listing a load of tips for how to cycle in traffic but rather than that I recommend  reading The Art of Cycling, it’s all you need to know.  The best thing I took from this was having gap awareness. Basically when you’re weaving through traffic and waiting at exits you occasionally see openings which your first instinct is to go for. However you can guarantee if you’ve seen a space then so have several other beady eyed drivers with their foot on the acceleration ready to zoom into that gap. So the rule of thumb is  to cede all open territory to the motorists, you might be legally-speaking a vehicle but they’re in metal boxes that can squish you. The only other rule I cling to is do not go on roundabouts unless you want to die, instead get off and cross further down as a pedestrian which at least will give you a 50% per cent chance of surviving.

My Trusty Steeds

Of course you couldn’t cycle without a bike and this is something you should put some thought into. My first purchase was the cheapest ‘oul mountain bike I could find. This is fine if all you want to do is knock around at the weekend but for serious commuting it will take a lot of pounding. Within three months I had a busted bottom bracket, the plastic pedals had snapped and I went through a huge amount of brake pads and the rear wheel developed a wobble and buckled. I was continually getting this bike fixed which was good in that I learned lots about bicycle repair, but it was a pain in the ass in that I had to keep swapping my 35 minute bike trip for a 2 hour 2 leg bus trip. I eventually named it Sir Breaksalot.

I deduced that what I needed was not only a better bike but two bikes, one to have as spare when the other was down and out. So keeping Sir Breaksalot as a spare I shelled out the bones of a grand on a top notch bike I dubbed Lord Flashheart due to its dashing good looks. So basically what it had was 27 gears ( the extra few actually do make quite a difference) a comfier saddle, metal peddles, a bottom bracket that can last several years, strong long lasting wheels that are quick release to speed up the inevitable roadside puncture repair and my favourite feature of all, hydraulic disc brakes. I’ve had these brakes nearly a year now and I haven’t had to replace anything and they still work as super responsively as the day they I got them.

The other main thing I became aware of though is that I think the rules of the road are lacking some specific rules for motorists concerning cyclists as follows:

When I set out to have a baby I had no idea that there was an international conspiracy of parents who are all sworn to uphold the terrible secrets of parenthood. Once sworn in we are duty bound to pretend that all is rosy, make a few anecdotes about lack of sleep and say how wonderful our children are lest we put the continued viability of the human race in jeopardy by telling the awful truth.

I have however decided to break this silence and I think the best way to do it is to tell my own tale. Unlike the few vacuous books concerning fatherhood in bookshops (there’s usually about two stuck in the back somewhere amidst the 50,000 books on motherhood) I want to try and detail the internal processes that went on in my mind as fatherhood unfolded rather than just recount some tale like a story told down the pub couched in football analogies and bravado. This is what the few books I read attempted to do and they were useless to me especially given that I know nothing about football and comparing things to the offside rule just bewildered me even further.

So to kick off (damn thats a football reference isn’t it) I thought I ‘d go right back to the beginning ….

The Pregnancy: Boot Camp With Showers and Holidays

Pregnancy is a breeze! For men that is I should clarify. You will undergo some minor troubles responding to your partners strange mood swings and emotions, and having your sleep broken towards the end due to bathroom trips but all of this is merely the gentlest of introductory training for what is to come, you should embrace it and enjoy it. The only psychological problems you may have during pregnancy is the odd bit of worry about being a good father. I can attest that you’ll be fine and all your worries will disappear once you’re in the job along with most of your other higher order cognitive abilities.

What will make any problem in pregnancy very easy to deal with is this: You will have slept, and you have all your free time available to help and pamper your partner and make her feel better and yourself feel like a good partner. This is something you will sorely miss in the long dark nights and sleep-deprived days of despair that are to come, treasure it while you can. As an added bonus during the pregnancy phase you can also have showers and wash your hair whenever you want and go to the toilet without bringing your offspring with you, what luxury!

The Birth and The Death

Birth we are told is a miraculous experience and we are also told it is hard. Hard for women that is. What we are not told is that birth is severely traumatic for men as well, and that we have no hormones with which to dull the memory. You won’t just be sitting in the pub waiting for the baby to arrive, this is the 21st century and if you’ve bought into all that hippie shit like I have you’ll have OD’ed on active birthing classes, breathing exercises and anatomically sensible delivery positions. You’ll be going into that hospital geared for war to do battle with the forces of medical orthodoxy who only want to truss up and drug your partner and put her on the assembly line of nameless breeding stock. You’ll be consulting your flow charts ready to challenge any non necessary medical intervention with righteous anger.

In general you’ll be behaving like a big hairy stupid man who needs to fight something or obsess with detail to offset your discomfort at the fact that the woman you love is about to undergo a potentially hugely traumatic event and you can do nothing to stop it, you can not save her, you can not make it better. This is much more painful that it sounds, especially if you have control issues.

The only thing you can do is be there with her, use all the hippie shit you learned to get her through it and politely work with the midwives when they stray off your birth plan and or have to call for backup because they don’t know how to deliver a baby whose mother isn’t on her back.

You can do all this but the worst thing is that all the while your partner will be in pain and at times she will doubt herself and want drugs and you’ll have to say no because you agreed to beforehand and this will make you feel like a medieval torturer, not only will you witness your wifes pain but you will feel responsible for it, so if you thought you had mental problems beforehand, you better get ready for the shed load of subconscious guilt that comes from staring into the whites of her pleading eyes and being a tough bastard.

Thankfully though the night will pass and dawn will greet you with the single most miraculous thing you will ever see; the eyes of a new being seconds old staring deeply into yours and the knowledge that you are all they have, that they are totally dependent on you. That terrifyingly wonderful moment will last forever and become the fulcrum around which your lifes memories rotate.

However once the intensity passes and tiredness crashes down around you, you will be shuffled around zombie-like spending time with your partner and baby until at some point you will be be separated from them for the first time since the birth.

In my case I was ejected from the hospital by a security guard (don’t ask) due to some kind of hospital policy concerning husbands being present in the ward at lunch.

I wandered out to Merrion square and sat on a park bench and rang my sister and cried, whether it was happiness or sadness I can’t tell, I think it was just mental exhaustion. Then I sat there a while longer staring blankly at the trees and I felt very very very very strange and removed from myself, a feeling I’ve had only a few times in my life when I’ve had someone die on me.

I would later come to realize of course that this was the moment I began to die. You see thats not something they tell you about when you plan on having a baby, that in giving birth you have to kill yourself. Now you might be wondering what am I on about amn’t I still alive? Well yes I am, but I’m not the person that went into that hospital that night, I’m a successor entity who just happens to occupy the same body and has inherited the memories of the person formerly known as me. That person is now dead, he still makes the occasional comeback from the grave and makes a fool of himself but I got my revenant suppression incantations down pat now and I can exorcise him pretty quickly, which is just as well as he’s better off dead. I’ll explain this later, but first on with the show …

Week One: Its like Vietnam except without the guns or Viet Cong or the army and stuff

The first week is madness, in hindsight, its not thats it difficult, all it is really is changing nappies and minding a baby, stuff that you’ll do in your sleep (literally) a few weeks down the line. What marks it out is that its all so new and scary and you won’t sleep as your child has no circadian rhythms yet. I can’t really explain this week properly except to say its possibly one of the hardest weeks of your life.

From here on in things get weird. You won’t get that raw visceral madness of the birth and first week, instead you’ll start to get the hang of your new duties and life will start to slip into routine, and in the absence of raw pain you’ll begin to process it all and start to suffer.

You Selfish Bastard

You see I went into parenthood with an awareness that it would be hard work but I was thinking of it in terms of tasks and a new set of duties and responsibilities I would have to take on board. I reckoned a bit of hard work never harmed anyone, right? What I was not entirely prepared for was the psychological challenges that would push me to the edge of insanity and fundamentally alter who I am in a drastic and painful way.

You see I have come to realize that I was fundamentally a selfish being. I don’t mean this in a negative way or that I was one of those immature assholes you meet occasionally, in fact by those standards I think I was quite emotionally intelligent even if I say so myself. What I mean is that I believed I was entitled to certain things such as time to myself, peace and quiet, time to read a book, time to meditate each day, the ability to watch an entire episode of Battlestar Galactica without interruption. You get the gist, basically I believed I deserved these many small things, I was literally “self”-ish in that I believed my “self” had importance and was entitled to its own life and luxuries.

Now you might say there’s nothing wrong with an outlook like this but as a parent it will bring you nothing but misery because your self will rarely get the things it believes it deserves, and when on those occasions it does get a treat it will be taken with annoyance at the delay. Its much better you see to kill the self and its needs, and when you get a moments peace to read or meditate or watch Battlestar Galactica its a not just a bonus its a celebration.

And so I allowed my self to die and allowed a father to be born, I had to accept that in becoming a father I had taken a vocation and its was one of service that placed my own desires very low on the scale. Its taken me a year to finally get my self to die or or at least be put in some sort of zombie-like abeyance until some future date when it might be safe to let it loose. Of course your “self’ will not go down without a fight and trying to at first recognize the problem, think about it, and then take action all while undergoing the immense psychological torture of prolonged sleep deprivation while holding down a day job and looking after a baby and partner will put you through the wringer. Your emotions will be all over the place and at times you’ll feel like someone has replaced your brain with that of a maudlin’ teenage girl, you’ll whine and moan and wonder “why me” like a spoiled little child and you’ll hate yourself for it.

You might think you won’t be able to commit this voluntary suicide but you will because you’ll find you have a new internal drive fueled by your bond to your child. People make out that bonding with your children is a good thing. It certainly does have it pleasures but rarely mentioned is how out of control it makes you feel. Having somebody that can bend you to their will and bypass all your rational faculties just by looking at you is deeply unsettling and will be yet another wild emotion to add to the drama queen pageant going on in your head.

The other hard thing about killing your self is giving up on all the subtle things you didn’t even realize were part of your self constructed identity, part of the story you told yourself about who you were. For my part I learned that I had partially built myself myself on several things, my perceived intelligence, my reliability, and my ability to read. So going to work after several months of not having more than two hours of continuous sleep and realizing that I was now stupid was a deep blow, dealing with the fact that I could barely remember how to open an editor never mind write any code, and that I had difficulty understanding the post it notes I left for myself the day before so I could work out what I was supposed to do that day was very hard to come to terms with. As was letting people down and missing deadlines as I was forced to delete every other responsibility I had in my life outside of work and my family. Most hard to deal with for me though was the realization that I could no longer read, even when I got the time I would stare vacantly at a page and reread the same sentence over and over again struggling to understand it until my eyes closed with tiredness. In the first six months I didn’t read one book, since then I’ve manged four books by sneaking off for breaks during work and reading in the toilet while pretending I’m in the lab. This has been a killer for me as reading has been a cornerstone of my life and my primary interface with the world since as far as I can remember, even as a child I remember being overjoyed when I was prescribed reading glasses.

Losing all these things was painful but necessary and now that “me the father” is mostly in control you might think I would be happy, that having reached a state where on most days I can do my duties without much qualms or drama that I would be on a high. Well the answer is no because you see you kind of have to give up happiness too. Why? because if you hang out for happiness the days when you don’t get it which are innumerable will be unbearable. Instead you can get something much better … contentment. Let me clarify, for me happiness is a high, an elevated state of emotions. I spent much of my pre-baby days seeking happiness and it was great. if I was bored I would read, goto the movies, go out socializing, go to an activist meeting of some sort etc and I would happy. My happiness required continual maintenance and if it was neglected I would be sad. The things in my life which brought me little happiness I would seek to escape from, be that a job or a relationship. My happiness was consumptive and had to be fed.

As a father I have had little time to feed my happiness and so I’ve given up looking for it and I’ve settled for contentment and discovered it is so much better. Contentment for me is the zero point on the emotional scale and it takes no energy to stay there, all you have to do is just accept things the way they are and do your work and you’ll find the suffering ends when you just accept the pain. If your looking for happiness and your child cries you’ll wish you were somewhere else and you and your child will suffer. But if you give up on the pursuit of happiness you can just be right there in the moment with your child and feel her pain or discomfort as well as your own and be content.

Now I’m not content everyday but I’m getting there and life is so much brighter when you just accept things.

Your troubles are nothing, you are nothing

I thought I’d leave this till the end. No doubt several women have been reading this article and have been thinking: “you whiny moany bastard, you don’t know how lucky you have it”. Well sorry to disappoint you but I’m afraid I do and that is the single worst thing about fatherhood. I can guarantee you that no matter how hard done by you may think you are as a father, it is nothing compared to what your partner will undergo. Becoming a mother is so ludicrously hard I think its safe to rank anyone who volunteers for it as clinically insane (but hey at least they have hormones at birth and in their breast milk to keep them loved up, we men don’t get any drugs ). Being constantly aware of this inequity of pain means being constantly aware that your own pain is inconsequential and unworthy of mention and so you have to live with it yourself with no support from anyone, put a brave face on it and help your partner while inside parts of you are ripping each other to shreds.

But of course while this is the practical course of action I do like to remind people dismissive of fathers issues that all suffering is relative and not correlated to the amount of pain received. For example a brat teenager on MTV’s My Sweet 16 may suffer more when she gets the wrong luxury car than a child soldier in Africa who has seen his 20th comrade die and become inured to the loss. You cannot really measure or compare suffering as its an internal process and deeply personal, so to dismiss anyones suffering even a moany father or brat teenager on MTV is to display a gross misunderstanding of the human condition in which all suffering is equal (but perhaps not as deserving of immediate attention).

So Would I Do It Again

Well I would go through anything for my daughter, but thats because I know and love her now. If I’d known beforehand I would run away screaming and at the moment wild horses couldn’t bring me to have another baby but somehow I think I know I’ll eventually want to have one to give my little girl a brother or sister, but for now I’m living in denial.

If you think some of the outcome of my tale sounds a like a good character building experience and worth undergoing, I’d like to highly recommend you get some therapy, or go become a monk as it’ll probably be just as good but without the mess and the minimum 20 years of servitude

Tips

So how would I recommend a potential father prepare. Well aside from the fact that you can’t here’s some ideas:

• Don’t focus all your energies on the birth, try to read up on baby stuff and what to do afterwards or you’ll find your self trying to wash a baby while reading a manual.
• Become accustomed with consciously controlling a mild form of schizophrenia, it’ll help you no end, I’ll be forever grateful for those teenage years I spent practicing chaos techniques for temporarily switching belief systems.
• Practice meditation, you’ll find the ability to observe how fucked up you are essential to getting over yourself and being a good father.
• Spend some quality time with your partner beforehand. It’ll’ be a nice memory for both of you to hold onto.
• Prepare for your death, take a holiday, indulge yourself and say your last goodbyes.
• Finally when you do get your first few days off alone from parenting, be prepared for a real live mental breakdown involving memory loss, too many blue drinks, late nights staring into the abyss and images of a fruitbowl burnt into the tissue of your brain (don’t ask, I can barely remember myself).

So thats been my fatherhood year one experience, should you be on the same path I hope yours goes just as well and remember year two is much easier, relatively speaking

I’ve been to lots of SF conventions before, but this holiday was a first on two counts. It was my first time attending a really big convention outside of Ireland, and my first time attending a convention with a child in tow.

First off on our trip was Orbital 2008, this year’s Eastercon the UK national SF convention and it was brilliant. Huge amounts of people, panels that went on from morning into the wee hours the next day in some cases, and a really great atmosphere. What was also great is that I found it to be very child friendly when I wasn’t really expecting it to be. My little toddler had a great time just doing laps of the hotel and exploring its labyrinthine corridors and function rooms. She loved being around so many people and spent most of her time showing off when she wasn’t learning to climb over some new piece of hotel furniture. Overall I think her spatial abilities shot up as a result, as we were no sooner home than she found two ways to get around our stair gate, one by sneaking through the gaps in the banisters and the other by using a frontal assault mounted on her rocking horse which she moved stealthily into position like some medieval siege technician. There were also so many other fans with kids there, most of us up at the 6.30 breakfast serving, and everyone else was very friendly and welcoming of children. There was also a creche and some very creative kids events although our little one was bit young for most of these but in a few years I could see her having a whale of a time.

The great thing about bringing kids to a convention is myself and the other half both got to give each other time off to attend panels or just sit in the bar and read or chat to friends while not being very far way from the little one if she needed us, it was a great setup.

The next convention we went to was a bit different and that was PCON in Dublin. Now don’t get me wrong the convention was great but it wasn’t very child friendly. To be honest I didn’t expect it to be and I’m not saying it should be and we were probably a bit spoiled after how large and great Orbital was. I suppose it comes down to scale really, when you have a large venue with so many people there’s bound to be other kids and lots of room for them to play. But when you have a smaller amount of people in such a poky venue it was never really going to work out with kids too well. As well as that there was relatively speaking a larger contingent of younger people at the con who understandably don’t really get kids, which resulted in some scowls and grimaces when I brought our toddler on some exploration trips through the venue. That said we had a great time at PCON and it was very well put together, but my advice to people with kids is to stick to the larger cons and you’ll have an easier time of it.

Of course coming back from cons always results in some post con blues so we remedied that by signing up for LX 2009, next year’s Eastercon. After signing up for that I saw the hotel booking forms were available and went to fill them out and unfortunately found out that there is limited room in the main hotel already. I hope we can get a place, as if we have to stay in the overflow hotels we’ll probably have to cancel as its too much trouble with a small child, I never would have guessed this would have been a problem a year in advance. The main advantage of going to a con with kids is that you can just nip back to your room to change nappies or for naps or just for some time out, and if you had to run outside in the cold and possible rain to another hotel it would take the ease out of the holiday. So here’s hoping we can get a room, if not I’ll make sure we’re signed up for Odyssey 2010 in plenty of time.

For those who don’t know, Ron Paul is a Republican candidate running for the 2008 presidential elections. However he’s not the usual “I want to murder innocent foreigners to line my pockets and I hate fags” type of Republican. In fact he’s actually a “Libertarian” (using the grossly inaccurate American capitalist application of the word rather than the more accurate left wing application commonly used in Europe) who seems only to be in the Republican party because he believes there’s no way to achieve anything significant in American politics if you’re outside the two main parties.

He also different to most politicians at that level because I reckon he is actually principled and is not in it just for the power. He believes in something and wants to get people’s support so he can achieve it and he won’t dilute his beliefs just to win votes.

In line with “Libertarian” thinking he’s against America’s continual belligerent interfering with the rest of the world and isn’t afraid to say so and spell out what America has been doing to other countries.

All sounds good right? So what are my issues with him then?

Freedom Should be Banned (the word that is)

Well it all comes down to this notion of freedom. It’s a great word, and seems to go down really well in America. All you have to say is “freedom.. democracy.. the constitution.. founding fathers” and before you know it you’ll have everyone in your hand waving flags and swelling with American pride. Bush does this all the time talking about freedom and democracy and now Ron Paul is getting in on the act.

Now people of course know that Bush’s notion of freedom is bullshit and actually just translates to mass murder and more cash for his buddies. Despite this people still seem willing to just go along with Ron Paul’s notion of freedom without much more analysis than they did the last time someone said it.

If they did they’d soon find out that for the vast majority of people Ron Paul’s “Libertarian” notion of freedom is a very limited form of freedom indeed. You see if you just talk about freedom in the general sense you’re not getting at what’s important. Everyone with political beliefs of any worth (in my opinion) is in favour of maximising individual liberties, but everyone also draws the line somewhere. For instance most people, even “Libertarians”, would agree that we couldn’t allow the freedom to kill people because that would negate other people’s freedom, or as the old adage goes “your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose”.

So essentially no sane person is in favour of absolute individual freedom and most would agree that where two people’s freedoms come into conflict, a compromise has to be reached to maintain order. So, what becomes important in distinguishing your political beliefs is stating where you believe the limit of an individual’s freedoms lie and who or what form of social organisation is responsible for setting those limits and making judgements when they come into conflict.

The only place where you would have to harp on about being a libertarian would be some kind autocratic state where a presumption that individual liberty was held to be a good thing by most could not be assumed. But in America and most western “democracies” despite their flaws most people believe in the individual’s right to liberty, and so describing yourself as a libertarian and harping on about freedom in a generic sense is pretty worthless in terms of conveying your political stance. Whats more it allows you to appeal to and win over people’s emotions without explaining or exposing to them some of the meatier aspects of your politics which they may or may not agree with. This might be a good tactic electorally but it is not what I would consider entirely honest or principled.

So why am I making such a big issue of this? Well you see if “Libertarians” spelled out the freedoms and the limits to those freedoms they are in favour of it might become much more evident that most “Libertarians” believe in a great big stonking limit on freedom, which in my view would make any society in which “libertarian” ideals were fully implemented actually more akin to an authoritarian society. That limit on freedom is the notion of Property!

Proudhon had It Right

So how is property a limit on freedom? Most “Libertarians” tend to hold the notion of property and the freedom to acquire it in high regard so how can property itself limit freedom? Well to address that we have to delve into the “Libertarian” notion of “freedom” :

their concept of freedom is limited to the idea of “freedom from.” For them, freedom means simply freedom from the “initiation of force,” or the “non-aggression against anyone’s person and property.” The notion that real freedom must combine both freedom “to” and freedom “from” is missing in their ideology, as is the social context of the so-called freedom they defend.

What does this mean? it means that “Libertarians” are prone to concentrate their thought on removing things that hamper their freedoms like big government, taxes etc and give little thought to putting in place things that will give people freedoms, like the freedom to not worry about dying because you can’t afford health insurance or the freedom to be guaranteed an education, or the freedom to not starve if you’re put out of work.

Why do they they think of freedom in these terms? Well as mentioned above they lack the “social context”. Yeah sure we all want to be free but we have to aware that we live in an interdependent web of life and our freedoms must always be limited by the needs of others to have freedom too. Our own right to the pursuit of happiness cannot trample on the rights of others. Sometimes we lack this awareness of the social context because of the complexity of the system in which we live and and indirect nature of our transactions which hide the essential fact that every time you get more than you put in someone else gets less, everytime you make a profit it’s off someone else’s back, every time you acquire excess property you steal it from someone else.

Property is often regarded by “Libertarians” and indeed by mainstream society in general as some kind of real tangible thing rather than the social fiction that it is. The fact that one owns something means nothing in physical reality, it only exists as a abstract construct in our mind. It is a notion that was created and as such can be abolished if we see fit.

For example to say I own a field means nothing if I’m not in that field or currently using it, the notion that I own it is purely conceptual. Property only comes into being when we take something and fence it off either physically or through threat of force. This act of creating property, of fencing off what was held communally, is in effect an act of theft, as we are stealing it from the commons, hence as Proudhon said “property is theft“.

Now some “Libertarians” will respond to this notion and say they acknowledge that property is just an abstract concept but that it is still valid as people have the freedom to enter into contracts with each other. Well even ignoring the fact that no one can really own the property the contract may concern as it was stolen originally, there is the fact that the laws of property apply to millions of people who never entered into a contract to abide by it. For example my daughter was born into a house which is owned by a landlord, she has no freedom to use the house in which she lives, to paint her nursery walls or build a tree house, instead that freedom belongs to a landlord who lives far away, who has no use for this house and in fact has another house of his own.

The notion of property sounds good on a small scale, in that a person has a right to their home and their personal belongings and the tools of their trade, but when scaled up it ends up meaning that some have the right to acquire far more than they could ever actually need while many don’t even own their own home or belongings. Those who have more can unilaterally use their resources to effect the lives of the many who have less without any democratic process.

If you’re wondering what the alternative is and you’re thinking that the only one is some kind of soviet style collectivisation and you have your arguments ready about how that destroys people’s connection and sense of control over their environment (while quietly ignoring that the vast majority in our own system who are forced to pay lifelong mortgages to banks and live in rental properties where they can’t even put a nail in the wall undergo the same same detachment and loss of control and freedom) then you’re wrong as there are many ideas for alternatives to the current property laws.

My own personal favourite is a form of stewardship which maintains small scale holdings relative to the wealth of the community but all resources beyond that are held communally (where the community is a network based directly democratic one). You may also argue that a system without the freedom to acquire property and capital is a system without incentives, and in that case I recommend reading some books on psychology and anthropology and acquainting yourself with the myriad forms of social incentive and you might that find that desire to acquire excess wealth is often just a desire for social status which can be met in other ways in different social systems.

But the point I’m trying to make is not to argue my ideas on possible alternatives to property but simply to point out that while the right to own and acquire property is most certainly a freedom, it is also a gross imposition on the freedoms of others, to the extent that these impositions outweigh the justification for it. So I see the laws of property as a barrier to freedom and I don’t believe that anyone who supports them can honestly call themselves a “Libertarian”, hence my ongoing use of quotes around the word.

So whether you agree with me or not I think you would have to accept that freedom is not as clear cut as the sloganeering of Ron Paul would make out, and his ideas, even though I disagree with a good many of them, would be more honestly served if he spelled out the details rather than the headlines.

Step in the right direction?

Now of course some people have said to me “Okay so you don’t support Ron Paul’s American Style “Libertarian” ideas but you’re against big centralised government and believe in individuals and communities doing things for themselves, so wouldn’t his polices be a step in the right direction?”. This argument is somewhat akin to that of horizon anarchism whereby getting closer to your goal in increments is seen as a viable path. I’m not against this idea in principle but it doesn’t hold true in all cases especially if the incremental move forward blows away other incremental moves already made.

What I’m saying in relation to Ron Paul’s policies is that while removing centralised taxation and large centralised government would bring certain freedoms it would still leave the imposition of property in place and as long as this is so we need the things that big government and taxes provide like welfare and health care to ensure people don’t starve and die due to their lack of property and resources.

So while I’m not against incremental steps towards a better society I believe that the removal of big government and its associated benefits and disadvantages has to go hand in hand with the removal of excess private property otherwise we’re just gaining some freedoms in exchange for others.

The other point is that while large government maintains some basic freedoms for a lot of people (the freedom not to die from starvation when you lose your job for example) the freedoms most people would gain from Ron Paul’s reduction of government would be minimal, as most freedom would be gained by those with the most assets. I hear a lot of Ron Paul supporters thinking that Ron Paul is against large corporations but I think they are misunderstanding him. He’s against the way certain large corporations are supported by goverment though lobbyists and handouts and the like. So while his policies would certainly affect these companies they would either adjust to the new playing field or be replaced by companies that could. It would not however affect the existence of large corporations but would instead give free reign to the dynamics of capitalism to allow them to exert even further undemocratic control over our lives (and before you say it, ordinary people exerting consumer control is not a democratic counter balance, as some people and corporations have more consumer power than others – see explanation on property above )

So with all that said and done…

So there you go, Ron Paul has a sound and ethical foreign policy which might be reason enough to vote for him given that America’s still in the thick of a war. He’s out there actually talking about things like the nature of the economy and the purpose of government, which are things which need to be discussed and explored continually rather than glossed over and accepted as they are by the usual gaggle of self-serving baby kissing sound byte politicians.

However he is not a great new hope for America, his “Libertarian” policies are not some great new idea but hark back to the old and flawed ideas of individual-anarchism and right-wing “Libertarianism” which have been argued over and refuted many times in the last 150 years or so by people more able than myself. While I’ve no doubt these policies would be good news for capitalism and those who benefit greatly from it, it would leave ordinary people worse off in the long run.

So now that I’ve explained it could you people please stop with the badly edited YouTube homages to Ron Paul that just say freedom about a hundred times while building up to an emotional crescendo with a cheesy soundtrack, I can’t take them any more

But at some point things started to go wrong. I didn’t realize it at the time but I think it was around the time they moved into a new phase and changed their look, joined a new generation if you will. I never liked their new clothes even then but I overlooked it in the excitement of it all. Maybe it was me that changed or maybe it was the new people that they started hanging around with that ruined it. I knew it was going south when Rick and Brannon started exerting more and more control over them and referring to our relationship as “The Franchise” and in a way they were right, we had very little spark or creativity or originality left, it was just about mindless consumption and I began to wonder why I was still there.

And so I drifted way, although there was some good moments towards the end, especially when our mutual friend Ron Moore helped make that last arc of our relationship so deep. Once we went our separate ways I was happy doing my own thing and I heard the other half had gone off voyaging somewhere far way and I didn’t care.

But then one day they walked back into my life and promised me it could be like it had been in the beginning, that we could have a fresh start and it could be gritty and real and we could make it work. I should have known better but they were irresistible and I fell for them again. If only I’d been stronger I could have avoided the pain of that failed enterprise, which was more abysmal than I could ever have imagined.

When we broke up that time I swore it would be the last time I would ever go back with them. I’ve held to that promise, but today I got a video message from them and I can feel it happening all over again, the tingle in my skin, the warm flush, my mind fading into the night thinking “what is this thing you call love” and waking up in a haze to find myself putting my boots back on.

I know its wrong, I know it won’t work but… but.. you see there’s this new guy JJ on board and he’s really cool and he says it ‘ll be okay and he doesn’t say “franchise” every second, so maybe it will work, maybe we can be happy again. Oh please let us be happy again, I can’t go through this again, let it be like the old days before they started wearing lycra unitards, before the 80′s PC blandness and, and before they started dressing like they were characters rented from FHM. Let it be like our glorious technicolor youth when plots were cheesy and skirts were short, when… real.. men… spoke… dramatically… or had southern accents or pointy ears and real women had subspace antenna or were just simply green.

Oh please… let it be like I remember… let it be good… oh please…

These grinchy types come in many forms, such as the post-modern too cool for school “Too Commercials” who usually reckon Christmas is too tacky, uncool and generally beneath them. They tend to say “Oh Christmas has got too commercial it’s all about money and gifts drone blah moan….”. Yes I agree Christmas has become very commercial but do they have to keep moaning on about it, I wish they’d just ignore Christmas or make their own Christmas less commercial, you know don’t spend a fortune on presents or maybe get those charity voucher thingies instead, but whatever they do I wish they’d just shut the hell up and stop being such moaning bastards.

The most common form of these spiritless Christmas-phobes however are “The True Meanies”. These are the people who like to say in pious tones “Now, let us remember the true meaning of Christmas…” and proceed to drone on about baby Jeebus or human goodwill, or whatever their fascistic one true meaning happens to be.This true meaning idea is of course more full of faecal matter than a stuffed Christmas turkey. I don’t mean this in the dour wiccanoid “Dude who stole my ancient festival” way either. Christmas doesn’t belong or originate solely from anyone’s religious or spiritual beliefs. The way I see it it went down like this …

Winter, 50,000 BC – Humans Migrate to Northern Europe

Gruuk The Hunter: Fuuk it’s cold out there
Fuuk The Gatherer: You’re telling me, and the rain, snow and biting gales don’t half make it miserable when I’m out scrounging for food.
Gruuk The Hunter: Yeh it’s almost enough to top yourself what with not getting enough vitamin D from the lack of sunlight.
Fuuk The Gatherer: What we need is a party to liven the whole cave up and give us something to be happy about.
Gruuk The Hunter: Great idea but we’ll need an excuse to get people to join in. Oi Schmuuk, you’re good at making people believe any old codswallop, have you got a good idea for a party?
Schmuuk The Shaman: Hmmmm what about celebrating the death of the year.
Gruuk The Hunter: Death! Come off it that’d make us even more depressed and didn’t we use up that excuse for the hooley at the end end of October anyway?
Schmuuk The Shaman: Okay then what about the rebirth of the year, you know hope in the gloom, life will return etc.
Fuuk The Gatherer: That’s great and we could decorate the cave with those little red berries and maybe some evergreen trees just to brighten the place up.
Gruuk The Hunter: It’s a plan then, right Schmuuk you work on the details, like not just the year’s rebirth but make up a sun god or father god or something and nice little story to go with it that will go down well. Meanwhile Fuuk you nip down to Cave Depot and get the decorations while I nip to Tesco for booze, I think it’s open 24 hours this time of year. God can you believe its only a few days to Cheer-Us-The-F*@k-Up-Mas and I haven’t got any presents in, I’m stressed already!

Once started this basic idea of a having a party in the middle of winter was co-opted by various peoples and cultures in northern climes as after all there’s no better way to get on people’s good side than by throwing a party. The most recent such reinvention has of course been Christmas which probably went down like this …

Winter, Dark Ages – Humans Still Stuck In Northern Europe

Serf Muck: This winter is gonna be even more miserable than ever.
Serf Suck: Don’t say that sure isn’t it nearly SchmuukMas.
Serf Muck: Haven’t you heard, that’s been cancelled by that new Bishop. He says it’s a pagan rite or some such.
Serf Suck: Ahh bollox I was really looking forward to that, looks I’ll have to top myself after all.
Serf Muck: Wait a minute… we could throw another party on the same day more in tune with the new Bishop’s brand of gibberish. Oi Tuck, what would be a good excuse for a party in this new church thing?
Friar Tuck: Hmmm, What about remembering the souls of the dead!
Serf Muck: The Souls of the Dead! Come off it that’d make us even more depressed and didn’t we use up that excuse for replacing our party at the end of October anyway!
Friar Tuck: Okay… hmmmm… what about the birthday of baby Jeebus!
Serf Muck: Excellent everyone loves a birthday! Right, Tuck you work out the back story for this Jeebus kid and run it by the Bishop, Suck you get down to Mud Hovel Depot and get some decorations while I nip to Tesco for booze, I think its open 24 hours this time of year.

So you see down through the ages there have been many overlays put upon Cheer-Us-The-F*@k-Up-Mas but through it all there has ever only been one true meaning that’s amenable to all, and that is that any excuse for a party is a good one especially when it’s when it cold, wet and miserable outside and all you want to do is cosy up and remember the good things in life.

Some would argue of course that there is a more spiritual dimension to it in that its a time to reflect and admire the beauty of winter and be with loved ones and such like. I agree, but without the party and celebration there would be no reason to get time off work and you’d just be left oppressed by the winter as it beats down upon you on your trek to work and continue stuck in the same old routine. But with an excuse to party you get time off to take those walks in the wood and see winter and the world in a different more magical light.

So whatever your take on it, have a Merry Christmas / Yule / Corporate-End-Of-Year / Cheer-Us-The-F*@k-Up-Mas as being merry is what it’s all about (he says ignoring obvious irony of imposing his own true meaning ).

Growing up not far from inner city of Dublin and living there most of my life I never really needed a car. My father never drove and my mother tried for a while but gave up after two cars in a row were stolen. Most of my friends families didn’t have cars either and all my friends and I walked, cycled and used buses without thought, practically no one in my school was dropped off in a car. Effectively I grew up in a culture that was not car dependent, all the facilities we needed to live were easily accessible without a car. Thats not to say Dublin is car free utopia, it’s not, especially so in recent years with American style suburban sprawl and population growth with little or no matching investment in public transport. Dublin has become a car culture but due to its density and the legacy of having some sort of bus system its still possible to live there without a car if you live somewhere within the city proper rather than the sprawl into Meath and Kildare. More importantly in a way car culture hasn’t fully infected the minds of a lot of people there, there are still lots of younger people who don’t have cars and don’t consider it to be a extra limb.

Galway on the other hand is built and designed entirely on the assumption that everyone has their own personal car. There’s a small city centre but beyond that there is a ring of housing estates with little or no facilities and a minimal poorly run bus service. Beyond that there is a ring of smaller villages and one-off houses here and there with no bus services except perhaps the occasional regional coach bus with no capacity for wheelchairs or prams. Outside the small city centre the roads descend into a pedestrian and cyclist death trap. The city is plagued with roundabouts which have no way to cross them. Instead of proper crossing points with lights Galway has a gazillion “implied” crossing points. These are slight dips in the pavement either side of a multiple lane road, some even have white paint marks but there is no green man or zebra crossing or any compunction on traffic to let you cross. I spend nearly 15 minutes just trying get across one of these on my way home some evenings as as I have to get off my bike to traverse roundabouts.

Most Galway people aren’t aware of this as a problem as they all have cars and increasingly have two cars per household. They are perfectly comfortable with this for the most part and see public transport as some kind of quaint oddity, the only change they want in Galway’s infrastructure is bigger roads and more of them. One of my aunt in-laws once smiled at me endearingly when I told her I was getting the bus into town and remarked that it had been years since she was on a bus and that none of her children had ever been on a bus. Overall most people have an attitude that I should just grow up and get a car.

So you may ask why don’t I drive, amn’t I just being some kind of greenie weirdo, shouldn’t I just get with the program and get a car? Well I nearly did several years ago when I first moved to Galway, did driving lessons, the whole thing, you know learning how to drive several tons of metal through a built up area at high velocity while putting out of my mind how ludicrously dangerous such an act was so I could do it every day without thinking.

But then I came across some information which changed my mind and made me decide never to drive a car, made me decide to live my life in a way that would not be reliant on cars insofar as was possible, even if it meant, as it does, still renting, as the only house I can afford to buy is out in the sticks where cars are essential. I’m prone to doing this I admit. By this I mean discovering new things and changing my life because of them, thats why I’m a veggie and I’m continually altering my political and spiritual views on life. I know a lot of people don’t do this they just put things out of mind and get on with life. I do that too for a lot of things but some things I just have to take action on, and the minimum action I can take on most issues is to at least make changes within the sphere of my own day to day life. I’m not saying personal change is the answer to everything, but it is often a good start and at least helps me keep sane.

As I mentioned there are are a lot things I just ignore and this is why I don’t judge people who don’t make the same decisions as me as for all I know they are doing a million other wonderful things that I do not, and my decisions might be wrong anyway. However for people who do drive cars and for the the entire city of Galway there is something that will judge them, rightly or wrongly, in the very near future. That something is the information I discovered several years ago concerning geology and economics and its called Peak Oil. Rather than bore you with the details you can read all about it at the links below and I challenge to research and and at least read the rebuttals to all the refutations you’ll immediately start to come up with as your unconscious mind tries to justify your lifestyle:

Wikipedia On Peak Oil (Lots of links here)

Google Blog Search (Subscribe to this search’s Atom/RSS feed and monitor it for a few weeks)

Basically our supply of oil is dwindling (or not increasing) while our demand is increasing. Alternative energy supplies are either not viable on a large scale, or are not as portable or flexible as oil so would entail massive social restructuring. There are a host of social repercussions to peak oil many of which are subject to heated debate that varies from “we’re all going to die” to the “the invisible hand of the market will keep us all safe” but one repercussion that’s guaranteed is the effect on transport. Basically when Peak Oil hits hard the average Joe will not be able afford to run a car. To put that in the context of Galway where I live, 90% of the people I work with in my job live in one-off houses in or around the many town lands circling Galway and they will have no way whatsoever of getting to work.

So when will this happen fifty, sixty years away? Well all signs now indicate that peak oil has occurred and we’ll soon be entering the downward slope on the other side, we’re entering a reduced energy and perhaps zero growth economy. To put this in context, Oil was around $30 dollars a barrel in the year 2000, and every year since then it has increased in price. Every price spike has been followed by people denying the reality of Peak Oil by saying it was just temporary due to the latest hurricane or middle eastern event. And sure enough when oil would go back down by $10 they’d say they were vindicated. What they never seemed to notice was that even though it had gone down it was still a few dollars above the pre-spike price and that 10 years previous the same events wouldn’t have caused such a spike as there was so much spare capacity in the system. At the moment all it takes is someone on an oil platform to go for an early lunch and the price shoots up 10 dollars. In 2004 when peak oil hit the mainstream news for the first time people continued to say it way thirty years away and laughed at the idea that oil might hit $100 dollars a barrel in the near future. Well in the last few weeks oil has risen to be almost at the magical figure and around 65% up on the price this time last year.

Its becoming increasingly apparent that as science-fictional as it sounds we will be facing a major social upheaval in the near future. Oil is still affordable, but another year or two of the price increasing at the same rate as it has for the last ten years and the average people of Galway will not be able to drive cars. Galway as we know it today will cease to function as it will be incapable of operating, people will not be able to get to work as running down the larger roads and bypasses they voted for will not get them into town any quicker (maybe the proposed light rail system most people still ridicule would have though (although I can’t talk as I voted for Grianna Fail  The Green Party and all that got us was another Fianna Fail government!)).

Its as simple as that. Most people won’t get peak oil until its too late because most people don’t recognise that history isn’t a clear line of progress from the past into the future, it’s a jagged line wracked by constant and sometimes rather abrupt change and when you zoom out from the present moment of moaning about traffic and wishing for larger roads, and leading a resource inefficient lifestyle this becomes all too apparent. Now most people aren’t wholly responsible for this, I mean we all do our best to get by on the information we have to hand but unfortunately for whatever reason be it economic or social we’ve all had a rather blinkered view (including myself until recently) of the larger scale picture and constructed a highly inefficient energy intensive society which is unsustainable and is on the brink of collapse. We just don’t notice yet because we’re too materially comfortable to question its basis. Its also understandable why people move out to houses where they need to drive to commute as for many its the only real economic option and often the only other choices are a cramped flat or soulless block in an architecturally mono-cultural housing estate. This is because we leave all design and planning decisions to profit motivated developers who develop the cheapest crap they can sell with no concern for its impact on the structure of community or the facilities it will need. The problems with our society go deeper than our approach to energy usage and I fear that with our current social organisation we are incapable of even recognizing problems never mind solving them, the only responses we seem capable of as a society are complacency or panic.

So to get back to the point, why I don’t I drive a car? Well I figure there’s no point getting one when all it’ll be good for is scrap metal in a few short years. As well as that I believe a lot of people will have problems changing their lifestyle caused by their inflated sense of entitlement, the “who moved my cheese” effect. I believe that often the best way to prepare for and adjust to change is to change now at your own pace rather than have it forced upon you, as it looks likely to be be quite soon.

Of course the other reason I don’t drive is that I don’t really like car culture. I loathe the dehumanising environment and negligent town planning that springs up around it and the way all services, facilities and workplaces become enmeshed within it, forcing those who don’t drive to the edges of society. I mean I live relatively close to the city yet supermarkets and facilities are few and far between and if it wasn’t for Tesco home delivery I’d find it very hard to get food. Most shops don’t deliver large items any more unless your getting some kind of mega load, try getting home in a taxi or bus(when it actually turns up) with an argos flatpack bookcase!

Some might say that such a standpoint might feed a desire for the outcome of peak oil in a “I told you so” kind of way. Well it would if we had a sensible approach to it, I would certainly welcome human scale urban planning and increased public transport, but instead I fear it will mean major economic collapse and a very tough time for most ordinary people and that includes me!

So to recap I don’t drive because I don’t need to, because its unsustainable in the short and long term, and because I don’t like car culture. Perhaps I also do it in the vain hope that it might inspire others to do so and we’ll have enough cheap oil left to run our public transport and emergency vehicles not to mention stave off the collapse of our petroleum dependent food chain. But at this point with oil nearly reaching a $100 a barrel I’m tempted to encourage everyone who already has a car to just enjoy it while you can still afford to run it!