Grief, it’s been a mad few days. The weekend passed by in spectacular form. I saw loads of people, had a neat time, and stayed out ridiculously late.
Of note was the Open Roleplaying Community session on Saturday – I was bringing to an end a game that has been running weekly for two years, with the aid of co-GM David Wright. In one of those couldn’t-plan-it moments, the group I was dealing with achieved their goal at the exact moment the group David was dealing with failed theirs. The exact order in which these two events happened would determine (dum dum dummmm) The Fate Of The World.
We gave it a 50/50 chance and rolled the dice. It didn’t go well. The bad guys won. The world went up in flames. It was a crazy end to an amazing game.
Now I’m in hardcore packing and sorting mode. Most of my stuff is in boxes. I’m almost ready to jump on a plane. One more day to go. It’s all rather exciting, really.
There are so many big things that I’d like to have formed some cogent thoughts about and posted here – the deaths of Robin Cook and David Lange among them. (Nice obituary for Lange in the Independent today, by the way.) But it’s just not been possible. This blog is going to be fairly quiet for the rest of the year, I think, but not completely silent.
We’ll see how we go.
End Of A Job
Today was my last day at work.
Finishing a job is always a weird thing, especially when you’ve been in the post for 2 1/2 years. There weren’t any tears, but I definitely felt a big sadness saying goodbye to folk today. It helps that I’m going to see them again when I’m back in Edinburgh in November – it makes this farewell not a final one and that makes it easier to manage.
It’s been good at QMUC. I’ve liked it there. Time for different stuff now though.
Wednesday morning I’m on the plane to Chicago…
Aieee! You Have Kilt Me!
So I’m sitting here in my new kilt.
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Went out for my farewell meal last night, with work folk. Was great. Went to Monster Mash. Yay for sausages and mash as a big important farewell meal. I had a wonderful time.
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You know that thing where you don’t lock your cellphone in your pocket and it accidentally rings someone?
I managed to send some text messages to my new friend Aaron. He’s used to it, apparently, because his name’s Aaron. But it was a special moment even for him – I sent more texts than people usually do in these circumstances.
How many more, I hear you ask?
Aaron, I should add, turned up at ORC a few weeks ago when I was talking with Malc. As you all know, I’m from Wellington (Lower Hutt really but Wellington too) in New Zealand. As some of you will know, Malc created the indie RPG A/State, which is not the most well-known game in the world. So Aaron walks up and introduces himself as Aaron. I say, so Aaron, where are you from, and what games are you into? And he says, I’m from Wellington New Zealand, and I’m currently into this game you might have heard of called A/State.
Malc and I looked at each other. Sayeth Malc: “Is there a hidden camera in the room or something?”
But no, it was all for real. Just one of those things. (Wellingtonians: Aaron worked at Weta with among others Svend and Katherine, and indeed flatted with Katherine. The law holds true.)
It was 58 texts, by the way.
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Not kidding about the kilt. It’s Blackwatch tartan because I couldn’t find a Gordon tartan long enough that I could remotely afford. And I’m wearing it.
Like a true Scotsman.
Paper Days
I’m preparing to store my stuff.
Shipping things to NZ from the UK is not cheap. I’ve tried not to accumulate many things while here, and I’m trying to be ruthless now in figuring out what I don’t need any more. But it’s hard. I like stuff that reminds me of times past.
I’ve had a strange evening, going through old stacks of paper, figuring out what I can dispose of and what I want to keep. So many surprises just from the 2.5 years I’ve been here. The biggest surprises have been the pages and pages of theory and philosophy and design and planning and manifesto and self-analysis and exploration that I wrote in my first few months in Edinburgh, before I had a job to take up my time; thousands and thousands and thousands of words. Some of it sounds scarily smart. I have a clipping from a newspaper of an article saying it’s time for Europe to get over its anti-Americanism, and tucked inside is a response in my own hand saying exactly why and where and how the article is full of shit. For four large and tightly-scrawled pages. I don’t remember writing that at all.
And letters, and postcards, and other bits and pieces. Emotions gently woken, so they turn over inside my belly before sinking back, or not quite sinking, for I still feel that strange tightness just beneath the ribs. All these people, all the things they meant and mean to me.
And plenty of wacky stuff. I liked all the wacky stuff.
I have several boxes of this sort of thing back home, too, sitting in the attic of my parent’s house. I have always been a scrawler; I’ve never kept a diary (except for one year) but I’ve documented pretty much everything important that happened inside my head on paper, somewhere, if you know where to look and how to decode the references. It’s evidence of the life I’ve lived; it’s proof of where I’ve been and where I’m going. It’s also, to be honest, assistance for the fact that I’m not nearly as good at remembering stuff as I think I should be (something that bothers me a lot).
This stuff is really important to me, and it’s coming home.
Beach Photos
Pics from the beach trip mentioned yesterday are up on Malc’s lj, and very fine they are too. He has a new camera. It is very nifty.
I am making pancakes. Except they’re turning out very strange, because I had an extra egg, and decided I’d just put it in the mix as well because I couldn’t see myself eating a lone egg soon, and it was best before a week ago already, and apparently that was a bad idea. My pancakes have a distinct omelette mystique. But I’m going to drown them in maple syrup anyway, so I’m sure it’ll turn out all right.
I am also trying to organise The America.
Yum. Pancakes. And maple syrup.
How I Spent My Summer Sunday-tion.
Sunday. A beach.
There is jumping off of things.
There is improvised two-lid flying discorama.
There is cheese. And cracker things. And olives and stuff.
There is, above all, good people.
It is… choice. It is choice. These are our Sundays in summer – great company, great food, and great places.
(And balancing. Lots and lots of balancing.)
Thought During The Black Seeds Gig:
Living is noise.
Living right is music.
Capitanchik Flowup
A quick flowup to the last post:
The Curious Hamster continues to carry on his own Capitanchik-watch, and offers a quick response to my previous post, over on Big Stick Small Carrot. I’ve started looking through his archives and he’s got a lotta good stuff in there, so go check it out if you follow UK politics’n’stuff.
And everyone’s favourite knife-wielding maniac made my day with this.
[mediawatch] A Fool And His Media
His name is David Capitanchik.
He first drew my ire during the G8 buildup, with frequent appearances in the Metro (free commuter newspaper) predicting that wicked anarchists would burn down houses and eat babies and so forth. I couldn’t work out then what he was doing providing comment – in a separate column with his own byline to boot – since he was identified as a ‘terrorism expert’.
He turned up in the Metro again on Monday, quoted in an article about the July 21 bombers:
Terror expert David Capitanchik, of Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, denied that July 21 bombers would have acted alone. He said: ‘People don’t wake up one morning and decide they want to be a suicide bomber. They are recruited, organised and trained.’
This, naturally, made my toes curl in disgust. The incredible straw man used to argue for a James-Bond-movie Al Qaeda – everything about this is wrong. He’s either a fool, or an incredible shill for the Bush-compatible worldview.
So I did a little digging about the guy. One google later I found a lot of work had been done for me already, by the Curious Hamster back during his G8 song-and-dance. He lists a bunch of Capitanchik media quotes, such as:
April 1
…David Capitanchik, a security expert at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University, said: “I was surprised when Gordon Brown encouraged people to join the anti-poverty march which I think is an occasion to worry about.
…terrorism expert David Capitanchick has warned north-east oil firms could be attacked by anti-capitalist activists.
And this brilliant, pre-mocked-for-your-viewing-pleasure account from the Dec 2004 ‘Tartan Bollocks’ awards for dodgy Scottish journalism:
…the Holyrood parliament could be attacked by �a lone terrorist with a lightweight mortar� standing on Salisbury Crags… David Capitanchik, �a terrorism expert� at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, who said he expected surveillance of the hills overlooking the parliament site to be stepped up in view of the danger of a mortar attack…
Well, Curious Hamster’s post was in June, so I’ve dug up a few more quotes:
June 5
�Most of the protesters who will come will just be ordinary people who will need to be protected,� says Capitanchik. �Strong-arm measures will have to be used against the anarchists that will not be appropriate for the crowd.�
13 July, in ‘Life Style Extra’ online news:
“The foot soldiers – the one who carry the bombs, the ones who blow themselves up – are the least important people in the operation. They are taken to the bomb, indoctrinated and given instructions. It is the planners, the organisers, the bomb-makers that make all this possible. That is the worrying thing.
I suspect they may be among the asylum seekers that have come into this country who are wanted for terrorism activities in their own country.
No-one knows just how many suicide bombers are out there
…Although the suicide bombers behind 7/7 were British born, it is impossible for these attackers to flourish without a complex organisation behind them…We may not know how many more bombers there are, but they are likely to be organised in small clusters, each group perhaps having no contact with the other. Behind the suicide bombers are those who orchestrate every move, indoctrinating and recruiting impressionable youngsters, and it is them that we have to thwart.
Terrorism expert David Capitanchik mused that al-Qaeda’s strategy was “Why attack the tiger, when there are so many sheep?”
etc. etc. etc.
What got me about Monday’s quote was that it was a direct response to Hussain Osman, member of the July 21 bombing group, who said
“We have no link with the Pakistanis [of July 7’s attacks]. We never had contacts with the Bin Laden organisation.”
It is abundantly clear that Al Qaeda is not a huge interconnected organisation with a hierarchy and small local cells operating according to instructions from on high. This myth was created by the Bush propaganda machine and propagated through a media that can soundbite a turbaned SPECTRE much more easily than the complicated truth of jihad.
Al Qaeda is a movement centred on a methodology and an ideology. It isn’t a big secret society, it’s a collection of micro-societies sharing a common perception of what is happening in the world, sharing information and encouragement with each other, and creating a mythology of honourable jihad amongst themselves. An appeal to Occam’s Razor is enough to establish that this is far more likely than Capitanchik’s layers of masterminding planners, constructing elaborate terror plots across the globe. If there is a secret society, we’d have lots more evidence of it than we currently have.
Now, this isn’t to say that there isn’t some level of planning happening – I find it easy to believe that a well-connected jihadi in Saudi Arabia can make phone calls to a bunch of different cells in the UK, and tell them some things to do. Isn’t this exactly what I’m saying doesn’t exist? No – for two reasons.
Firstly, the secret society theory relies on the assumption that all terror acts fit into a master plan of secret organisers. Some might fit the plans of some ‘secret master’ or other, but far from all do, and it is this lack of comprehensivity [is that a word?] that undermines Capitanchik’s worldview.
Secondly, the secret society theory relies on the assumption of loyalty to and dependence upon these secret organisers by any cell. There is no room for local initiative. This is, to be quite honest, ridiculous. If you have dozens of small groups of fired-up jihadis ready to murder for an ideological struggle, they aren’t all going to passively sit and wait for instructions from on high. Passion leads to action.
This is important. (I’m getting to the point here, honest.) The secret society theory has been peddled so heavily because it obscures the causes of Islamist terror. If we have a massively decentralised movement, then we need to accept that people are not joining that movement because they are brainwashed by malicious James Bond villains. They are joining that movement because they have severe grievances that they feel cannot be addressed any other way.
In other words, the secret society theory disguises the fact that the West’s actions have given rise to intense anger among segments of the Islamic community. It heads off entirely the question of whether that anger is justified. (And of course, whenever that question is raised on its own right, it is treated as if it is a moral apologia for suicide bombing, which it plainly is not.) It furthers the mythology that terror arises from people who have the inexplicable motive of ‘hating freedom’ or even ‘hating democracy’.
Hussain Osman:
The Iraq war was the ‘main motive’ for the attempted London bomb attacks on July 21…
David Capitanchik:
People don’t wake up one morning and decide they want to be a suicide bomber.
David Capitanchik, you’ve been sold, you’re part of the apparatus of disinformation, and for these grievous failings I mock you. I mock you lots. I mean, hell, a mortarman on the Salisbury Crags? Are you one of those people that takes ’24’ really really seriously? Does your bedtime reading revolve around those airport thrillers where a hero named Jack Thorn or John Steel or something tracks down devious terrorists and leaps through windows with his guns blazing, nailing the bad guys with his ex-Marine shooting expertise? And when you sleep, do you dream about being Jack Thorn? I bet you do. Yee ha.
(Any suggestions for getting the media to stop going to him for scary sensational quotes for their articles?)
Daffydmas
Today, 29 July, is the traditional date on which members of the Church of Daffyd celebrate the birth of Daffyd.
I mark this occasion with the traditional raised glass and bowed head and sacrifice of seven healthy goats.
I have been a member of the Church of Daffyd for nearly ten years now, and it has filled my life with emotional confidence and financial success. Yea, Daffyd knows how to lay down a good spiritual methodology, and he smacketh it down right in the solar plexus of his faithful!
I have cherished each day my privileged position as one of his two scions on this earthly plane, and I look forward to the day when I can once again sit alongside him and make bad jokes about Star Wars.
Best of all, he’s never minded terribly much that I’m also the founder of the Cult of Leon, and a member of the Boys of the Bread. Or maybe he doesn’t know. Whatever works.
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David is also, of course, the originator and host of the additiverich blog collective, and hence you’re only reading these words because of him. (So blame him, not me.)
Thanks, man. Happy birthday. See you in six months!