Month: February 2011

Categories
Politics

Interactive Television

Interactive TV CartoonI wish we had Al Jazeera here. I mean we get it of course – I’ve been watching it for hours every day recently – but I wish we had an Al Jazeera of our own. In the West, TV stations can be accused of having a liberal bias if they don’t actively advocate shooting Mexicans. Al Jazeera – now that’s a liberal bias. While they try to keep up the traditional detached tone with neutral headlines like “Overnight Disturbances in Tripoli”, occasionally a “March of Freedom” slips through.

They’re perfectly aware, and proud, of the active role they are playing in bringing down dictatorship in the Middle East. “There we are!” said a news reporter, as footage from celebrations in Benghazi showed that they were projecting Al Jazeera onto a wall of the square. This is the most important TV news channel in the world today, the only international broadcaster that could effectively advocate democracy in the Middle East.

Of course Friday was a good day for democracy here too. Saturday may be better, may be worse, as we discover how people actually voted. Join me here through the day as I watch them prise open the boxes.

Categories
Politics

Voted Yet?

Mubarak PosterCourtesy of  Broadsheet.ie, a lovely piece of what, back before political correctness ruined a perfectly good word, we used to call Art Terrorism. The logo in the top left of the poster is – naturally – that of the Fianna Fáil party.

Well I’ve just been out with my ballot hammer, adding my own small nail to the lid of Fianna Fáil’s coffin. An interesting thing: Everyone in the station and in local shops seemed to be in a good mood, chatting about the election and how it was a lovely day for one. OK, the weather was pretty nice, but I really think there was more to it. People were glad it was an election day. After all, a change of government is the first grounds for hope they’ve had in years.

Categories
Politics

Get Up and Vote

P45 CartoonWe should be having a revolution here. Instead, if polls are to be believed, we may be electing a government even further to the right, even more willing to elevate rich over poor, than the one we are throwing away.

Don’t believe the polls, it’s too easy for such prophecies to become self-fulfilling. There is everything to play for right to the end. Which is why I’m up at 3:00 writing this so you can read it before you leave in the morning. It isn’t too late to send a message to all the political parties, to their wealthy friends, to the other countries of the EU. We are in a hole that was not made by the ordinary people of Ireland, and certainly not by those who are going to suffer the most because of it. The message is that we will not put up with this shit.

Don’t vote for Fine Gael to punish Fianna Fáil. There are much better punishments. Vote for people who don’t mince words about repudiating the awful “bailout” arrangement. That’s there to save the Euro, not us. Remember we have a hostage.

This means voting for out-there parties like the United Left Alliance – or even Sinn Féin. Few things would give the establishment more pause than a substantial rise in the SF vote. It also means voting for Labour, even if I am disappointed on the stand they’ve taken. Or lack thereof. Essentially we need Labour in government if there is to be any hope of the next few years not turning into an orgy of punishment for the poor.

Please, get out there now and warn those who act like they own us. Remind them where power really comes from.

Meanwhile, back in Galway West

My own constituency is going to go to the wire. While there are some laudable independents running, I don’t personally think any of them have a chance – except the ones who are independent more in name than in outlook. These are Noel Grealish, the ‘last PD’, and Labour’s lost candidate Catherine Connolly. It seems very likely that the final seat will be between these two, and I hardly need to tell you which is the vastly preferable outcome.

Indeed I like Catherine Connolly better than Labour’s official candidate, Derek Nolan. I’ll be putting her ahead in my order, and I hope a lot of others do too. I believe Galway West can elect them both.

And there may be an extra trick that more daring voters can play, if Kernan Andrews in the Galway Advertiser is correct:

Senator Healy Eames needs to outpoll Deputy Grealish and stay ahead of him to ensure she takes the seat. If she does, she will knock Grealish out and this will free up the last two seats for the Galway Left – which means victories for Labour’s Derek Nolan and Independent Catherine Connolly.

So that’s my only FG vote – Senator Fidelma Healy-Eames. Remember that name. She may help us simultaneously finish off the last PD and elect, for the first time in the history of Galway West, a second TD on the left.

Which… would be nice.

Categories
Humour Politics

Introducing Approval Cat

King CartoonAnother weird thing about broadcasters in Ireland is the ‘moratorium’. Under this rule, they’re not allowed to discuss tomorrow’s election today. They still broadcast the political shows though, so right now we’re witnessing the unedifying spectacle of hot leftish forum Tonight with Vincent Browne studiously ignoring the most important ballot in living memory.

But what is there that doesn’t relate to the economic and political train wreck we’re living through? The only even vaguely topical issue they found is the mooted visit of the reigning British monarch, an idea so disconnected from current reality that you wonder if the media started it just so they’d have something to talk about tonight.

I couldn’t bear to watch. For the sake of TV, the argument had to be over whether we should actively despise or be really quite fond of royalty. Both unreasonable positions to my mind; I would prefer to simply not give a flying fuck about the British or indeed any monarch. I am a republican.

Not in the usual Irish – and certainly not in the American – sense, but in that I am opposed to inherited respect. So I would prefer if persons holding office simply by privilege of birth were not fawned upon by our leaders. On the other hand, she’s the symbolic head of a country with which we are trying to heal and mature our relations. If we do this right (as in polite and dignified, NOT flattered and awestruck, monarchophiles) it could – could – help improve life for people in Northern Ireland.

So I’m in a bind. In these situations, I’m forced to defer to Approval Cat.

Approval Cat, where do you stand on an official visit by the UK’s Head of State?

Approval Cat

Guess that’s settled then.

Categories
Politics Technology

Fine Gael to Tax Freedom


Barring a miracle of the ballot boxes, it looks like Fine Gael are going to be our masters for the next few years. So I guess some people will have to actually drag their eyes through the bloody manifesto and see what may be in store. Friend and fellow cartoonist Allan Cavanagh alerted me to this gem:

TV Licence: We will change the TV Licence into a household-based Public Broadcasting Charge applied to all households and applicable businesses regardless of the device they use to access content.

Do they really mean to charge all households for RTɹ, whether they watch TV or not? That would be a new general tax, just one that’s collected through its own separate – and therefore ridiculously wasteful – system. Further, it forces me to pay for something I don’t want. I do not own a TV, and one of the reasons for this is that I don’t think what RTÉ broadcasts is worth paying for. If you saw it, you wouldn’t too.

RTE ThumbnailBut perhaps they mean you will be charged if you have any device in your home capable of viewing RTÉ ‘content’. (Do you get nervous whenever anyone uses that word?) They’re hardly going to come round and check what sort of phone you have, so unless they go the unthinkable² route of tracking all internet activity to make sure no one secretly watches television, the logical and simple way to do this will be to charge a tax on every broadband connection or data tariff.

So in the guise of a TV licence, they introduce a tax on freedom of information and of expression. No way, Fine Gael.

  1. RTÉ is the publicly owned broadcasting service, funded in part by a television license fee in a similar fashion to the BBC. In a highly dissimilar fashion, it also has commercials.
  2. Please God they do realise this is unthinkable, don’t they?
Categories
Cosmography Humour

The List

Commercial CartoonIf you want to loudly use the word Fact! in your advert, you can’t also say that your product kills 99.x% of “all known bacteria including the flu virus”. Bullshit like that brings you awfully close to… The List.

The list? My unshopping list. Like a shopping list, except of the things I don’t want to buy. The saying is that one half of all money spent on advertising is wasted – only nobody knows which half it is. Well, I intend to show them. The wasted half, is the half that annoys me.

Advertisers you see know that if you remember the product, you are more likely to buy the product. It’s true. All other things being equal, we’ll prefer the brand we’ve actually heard of before. Why wouldn’t we?

Advertisers also know that if an advert annoys you, you’ll remember the product. And that is true too, obviously.

So some of them come to the conclusion that if an advert annoys you, you will remember the product, and so be more likely to buy the product. It’s just logical, no?

No. Because what they forget is, I will also remember that it annoyed me.

I reason that the purchase price of the product pays the advertising agency. If I bought it therefore I would actually be paying a team of professionals to irritate me – indeed, to keep coming up with inventive new ways to irritate me, actually do research into finding what really gets right up my nose. What rational person wants to pay for that? Hence the list.

It’s not a real list of course, I don’t write them down. I don’t have to because – hey – I remember them.

And I will boycott products that I actually like. You’ve got to be firm here. They stay on the list not merely until they stop broadcasting the offending commercial, but for as long as I feel they deserve. There’s a brand of low-fat spread I didn’t purchase for ten years because in 1988 they promoted it with a white man rapping badly. Really, that’s at least a decade’s worth. Some – a certain Australian retail shouting chain for example, an online operation that is not fussy about what cars it buys – will be on the list until one of us dies.

What products are on your list?

Categories
Humour Technology

The Computer Whisperer – Part 1

Red Button CartoonA couple of days ago I mentioned that I had to help a friend with a very sick computer. I’d run into him in Dublin, and he’d told me he wanted to add the drive from his old PC into his new one. I assured him that as someone with mechanical skills, he should have no problem. These things are quite straightforward.

How naïve I can be.

A day or two later he texted me. Something was wrong, the screen had gone mad and he couldn’t read it. I thought at the time he just meant that there was an error message he didn’t understand. When I saw it later I couldn’t believe it: Neat vertical stripes like a butcher’s apron making everything – including an error message – completely unreadable. Weirdest way I’ve ever seen a screen go awry.

But that only came later. First, while investigating the screen problem, he’d found a switch. A red switch. Red-for-a-reason red.

That’s right.

Just about any PC can work on the two most common voltages used worldwide: 110v (US etc.) and 230v (Europe etc.). Most switch between them automatically, but older and/or cheaper ones have – you guessed it – a red switch, on the back of the power supply. Throw this in the US and your PC shudders to a half-powered halt. Throw it in Europe…

Bang.

You know, I can’t be annoyed with him. Sure, they made the switch red so that people would know it’s not something you can just throw. And in most cases that works. But there’s another kind of person that it has a completely opposite effect on.

I like the people who can’t resist red switches.

Categories
Politics

Ireland – Read This And Pass It On

Rightwards CartoonDammit, I am not looking forward to life under Enda. The reason Fianna Fáil went so wrong is that they were far too involved on a personal basis with business, banking and property. Fine Gael are meant to be the cure for that? Hmm.

Over the last ten years or so, the idea prevailed that if you let banks go crazy they’d magic up enough money for everyone. Since this failed so disastrously, you might think we’d consider voting for the sole major party that wasn’t in favour of it. Yet instead we’re going from one lot of laissez-faire capitalists to another. This is like voting for five more years of British rule after the Great Famine.

For the first time in our entire history, Ireland had a real chance of returning a mildly socialist government. Not a Labour overall majority, but at least a government led by the left. Yet even after the parties of the right destroyed the country, we still do not. Incredibly, there’s even a small danger of electing the furthest-right government we’ve ever had – a single-party Fine Gael administration. I almost wish that on the electorate. Go on, do it. Find out for yourselves just how right-wing Fine Gael can be without the moderating influence of Labour.

(God no, don’t. It would be like staring into the unmasked face of the national id.)

Why, even when kicked and spat on, are we incapable of voting for real change? It’s true Labour failed to present themselves as well as they might, and I don’t think Gilmore is their most impressive leader ever. But Christ, look at Kenny. There has to be more to it. Labour started dropping in the polls when voters decided that Kenny was the clear favourite in the race to be Taoiseach. They chose him like punters choose a horse. In other words, a substantial number of people out there vote not for what seems just, or even for what they think is necessary. They vote for who they think is going to win.

It’s insane, it’s stupid, but people do it anyway because it gives them a sense of being on the winning side. Like Man United supporters – only they get to decide our laws. As soon as it became clear that Enda Kenny was most fancied, people started clustering around him. The media unconsciously give him a softer ride (as they did with Brian, and Bertie, and…), suddenly he no longer looks like an uptight, ineffectual bumbler. Well actually he still does, but he’s going to be Emperor now so shut up about his nakedness.

People who vote like that deserve bad government, deserve to have their money stolen by laughing rich people. But they are not all of us. Don’t live in a country where that kind of person decides your fate. If you’re reading this on Friday and you haven’t voted yet, get up from the computer and run. Run to the polling station.

Or just keep on running. Let’s face it, the place is going to shite.

Categories
Technology

Greetings From Uncanny Valley

Uncanny DiagramThere’s a strange phenomenon, familiar to people at the cutting interface of technology and art, that goes by the name of “the uncanny valley”. As a general rule, the more something looks like a living human, the more humans like it. We like photographs or drawings of humans. We like kittens and monkeys, lively animals with human-like faces, even better.

So naturally in fields like CGI or robot design, people have striven to make their work look more and more like reality. And this is where they hit a strange snag. Because though the relationship between realism and likeability is pretty much a smooth straight graph, as soon as something looks almost, but not quite exactly, like a living human, it suddenly scares the living toothpaste out of us.

It may be because our minds are upset by the category conflict. We like things that seem human, but we aren’t fooled into thinking they really are. When we actually become uncertain, it’s disturbing.

Or perhaps it is simply, if sadly, that instinct tells us something which looks and acts almost but not exactly like a human is a human – but one who is severely diseased and therefore dangerous.

The worst effects occur when something is very human-like in one way but not in another. A robot with very realistic human skin and features for example, but whose movements are unnatural. Or one that moves right, but has an inhuman, skeletal face. These things are as creepy to adults as clowns are to children. So it seems if we ever do have mechanical companions, they will either be friendly, cartoony machines we will never mistake for people, or so damn realistic we wouldn’t know they weren’t without being told.

The computer-animated film Polar Express was said by some to be stuck in Uncanny Valley, the motion-capture technique giving the CGI characters uncomfortably too-natural movements. But today, I came across another example:

Baby sloths.

That’s right. Baby sloths are really cute, really silly-and-sweet-looking. But the way they move… creeps me the fuck out. See for yourself.

Categories
Humour Politics

What Debate?

Micheál Martin Cartoon“The big issue here… The big issue…” says Micheál Martin, attempting to talk over someone in the RTÉ debate. I look forward to hearing him say that a lot more. Preferably on street corners.

Really, what is he doing in this studio? His party will be lucky to make it into opposition after this election, never mind government. His opinions are irrelevant, his policies fantasies.

But then the whole debate is a polite fiction. The election results seem to be pretty much a foregone conclusion, the only real thing at stake the precise relative strength of Fine Gael and Labour in the mix. So in effect we’re watching a debate between Gilmore and Kenny, with Martin there as punching bag. That’s a thought actually. If they just wrestled the fucker to the ground and took turns kicking the jam out of him the electorate could go to bed with a smile tonight. Miriam there keeping count of the points. “Nothing below the belt. Oh, go on then.”

But instead it’s just the usual three grown men bickering like siblings. Not only is it pointless, it is actually bad for democracy. I mean, it makes us fantasize about solving problems with violence. That can’t be good.

Mmm. Violence.