“Have you ever thought that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be…”

Human beings love nostalgia, perhaps strangely. For all the success of various self-help gurus and such telling us to ‘live in the moment’, there are few things more satisfying than sitting back and letting the memories flow over us, with rose-tinted spectacles all set up and in position. Looking back on our past may conjure up feelings of longing, of contentment, of pride or even resentment of the modern day when considering ‘the good old days’, but nobody can doubt how comforting the experience often is.

The real strangeness of nostalgia comes from how irrational it is; when analysing the facts of a given time period, whether in one’s own life or in a historical sense, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the past is usually as bad as the present day, for some different and many of the same reasons. The older generations have, for example, have always thought that current chart music (for any time period’s definition of ‘current’) is not as good as when they were a teenager, that their younger peers have less respect than they should, and that culture is on a downward spiral into chaos and mayhem that will surely begin within the next couple of years. Or at least so the big book of English middle class stereotypes tells me. The point is that the idea that the modern day is worse than those that have gone before is an endless one, and since at no point in history have we ever been rolling in wealth, freedom, happiness and general prosperity it is a fairly simple process to conclude that things have not, in fact, actually been getting worse. At the very least, whilst in certain areas the world probably is worse than it was, say, 30 years ago (the USA’s relationship with the Middle East, the drugs trade, the number of One Direction fans on planet Earth and so on), from other standpoints it could be said that our world is getting continually better; consider the scientific and technological advancements of the last two decades, or the increasing acceptance the world seems to have for certain sections of its society (the LGBT community and certain racial minorities spring to mind). Basically, the idea that everything was somehow genuinely better in the past is an irrational one, and thus nostalgia is a rather irrational idea.

What then, is the cause of nostalgia; why do we find it so comforting, why is it so common to yearn for ‘good old days’ that, often, never truly were?

Part of the answer may lie in the nature of childhood, the period most commonly associated with nostalgia. Childhood in humans is an immensely interesting topic; no other animal enjoys a period of childhood lasting around a quarter of its total lifespan (indeed, if humans today lived as long as they did in the distant past, around half their life would be spent in the stage we nowadays identify as childhood), and the reasons for this could (and probably will one day) make up an entire post of their own. There is still a vast amount we do not know about how our bodies, particularly in terms of the brain, develop during this period of our lives, but what we can say with some certainty is that our perception of the world as a child is fundamentally different from our perception as adults. Whether it be the experience we do not yet have, the relative innocence of childhood, some deep neurological effect we do not yet know about or simply a lack of care for the outside world, the world as experienced by a child is generally a small, simple one. Children, more so the younger we are but to a lesser extent continuing through into the teenage years, tend to be wrapped up in their own little world; what Timmy did in the toilets at school today is, quite simply, the biggest event in human history to date. What the current prime minister is doing to the economy, how the bills are going to get paid this month, the ups and downs of marriages and relationships; none matter to a childhood mind, and with hindsight we are well aware of it. There is a reason behind the oft-stated (as well as slightly depressing and possibly wrong) statement that ‘schooldays are the best of your life’. As adults we forget that, as kids, we did have worries, there was horrible stuff in the world and we were unhappy, often; it’s just that, because childhood worries are so different and ignore so many of the big things that would have troubled us were we adults at the time, we tend to regard them as trivial, with the benefit of that wonderful thing that is hindsight.

However, this doesn’t account so well for nostalgia that hits when we enter our teenage years and later life; for stuff like music, for example, which also is unlikely to have registered in our pre-teen days. To explain this, we must consider the other half of the nostalgia explanation; the simple question of perception. It is an interesting fact that some 70-80% of people consider themselves to be an above-average driver, and it’s not hard to see why; we may see a few hundred cars on our commute into work or school, but will only ever remember that one bastard who cut us up at the lights. Even though it represents a tiny proportion of all the drivers we ever see, bad driving is still a common enough occurrence that we feel the majority of drivers must do such stupid antics on a regular basis, and that we are a better driver than said majority.

And the same applies to nostalgia. Many things will have happened to us during our younger days; we will hear some good music, and ignore a lot of crap music. We will have plenty of dull, normal schooldays, and a couple that are absolutely spectacular (along with a few terrible ones). And we will encounter many aspects of the world, be they news stories, encounters with people or any of the other pieces of random ‘stuff’ that makes up our day-to-day lives, that will either feel totally neutral to us, make us feel a little bit happy or make us slightly annoyed, exactly the same stuff that can sometimes make us feel like our current existence is a bit crappy. But all we will ever remember are the extremes; the stuff that filled us with joy, and the darkest and most memorable of horrors. And so, when we look back on our younger days, we smile sadly to ourselves as we remember those good times. All the little niggly bad things, all the dull moments, they don’t feature on our internal viewfinder. In our head, there really were ‘good old days’. Our head is, however, not a terribly reliable source when it comes to such things.

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The Price of Freedom

First of all, apologies for missing my post on Wednesday, and apologies in advance for missing one on Wednesday; I’ve had a lot of stuff to do over the past week and will be away during the next one. Ah well, on with the post…

We in the west set a lot of store by democracy; in America especially you will hardly be hard-pressed to find someone willing to defend their ‘rights’ and freedom to the hilt, regardless of how dumb you think that particular right is. Every time a government attempts to ban or restrict some substance or activity, vast waves of protesters will take to the streets/TV/internet that their right or ability to do X or Y is being restricted in direct contradiction to every document from the Magna Carta to the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

However, if we were permitted to be totally free (the ‘Altair’ end of the Order of Assassins/Knights Templar spectrum), with no laws restricting our activity, then we would quickly descend into an anarchic society. Murder, rape and theft would go unpunished as the minority of the evil-minded quickly became the majority by simple need. Various models of a system of anarchy, including mine predict an eventual return to an ordered society of laws and structure, and we can all agree that serious crimes are Bad Things that probably are worth restricting, even if it requires us to restrict our ‘freedom’ to a certain degree. Clearly, freedom is not worth such crimes, and thus we have laws.

In fact, most of our legal system can be counted as a direct result of the law-setter in question asking ‘what is freedom worth?’. If the law is in place to restrict an activity, then freedom is counted as not being worth this activity for either moral, financial or practical reasons (or a combination of the three), whilst other, more unrestricted, activities, freedom is considered worth allowing. And, perhaps more interestingly, a vast majority of political debate can be essentially boiled down to two people’s different opinions concerning what price we are prepared to pay for freedom.

Take, as a simple example, the British government’s recent ‘pastie tax’, levied on hot baked goods. This was partly an attempt to bring in some much-needed cash for the government in their efforts to cut the deficit, but also has some  degree of a health motivation. Such food is frequently sold cheaply from fast food retailers and the like, meaning it is an easy source of hot, tasty food for the poorer or lazier sections of society; but their fat content is not kind to the waistline and an overconsumption of such foods has been linked to ‘the national obesity epidemic’ that everyone gets so worked up about. This obesity problem is a major source of concern to the NHS, and thus the government who pay for it, since in the long term it causes a dramatic upsurge in the number of diabetes cases. This is an expensive problem to combat and presents a major health hazard for the country as a whole, and the government (or at least George Osborne, whose annual statement the tax first appeared in) decided that this dual cost is not worth the freedom to enjoy such a snack so cheaply. This, as with all vaguely new and interesting decisions in a rather dull report concerning how poor the country is, was debated aggressively in the media, with the healthy eating people and economists broadly speaking backing the idea (or complaining that there was not enough done/government is stifling growth/insert predictable complaint about economy here) whilst others criticised the plan as just another example of the Tories targeting the lower rungs of society who most frequently enjoy a cheap meal from these sources. To these people, today’s world is an expensive and difficult one to live in, and the ability to have a hot, greasy, tasty meal for a price that they could easily budget for in the long run is a freedom well worth whatever obesity problems it is causing. Such fundamental differences of opinion, particularly concerning taxation policy, are the irreconcilable forces that mean two political opponents will frequently find it impossible to back down.

In some other cases, the two participants of an argument will agree that freedom isn’t worth cost X, but will disagree on the mechanism for restricting said cost. The debate concerning the legalisation of drugs is one such example, for whilst part of the debate centres around a difference of opinion as to whether the freedom to get stoned is worth the cost of a country full of stoners and the consequences thereof (don’t believe anyone who tells you marijuana is a harmless drug; it isn’t, although the degree of harm it causes is generally the cause behind such debate), another cause of disagreement concerns the problems of the drugs war. Opium is the biggest source of income for the Taliban (and a very large one for Afghanistan as a whole), whilst the gangs and cartels who operate the Latin American drugs trade have been directly linked to human trafficking, prostitution and other atrocities during the ongoing drugs wars with their local government. This is a particular problem in Mexico, where since the government’s announcement of the ‘war on drugs’ there have been over 47,000 drugs-related murders. Everyone agrees that this is a Bad Thing, but a difference of opinion arises when considering which course of action would prove the most successful at combating the problem; the ‘legalise’ faction say that to legalise drugs would be to force the small-time criminals out of business as the well-policed official channels of trade took over, where sourcing and supply is performed by businessmen held accountable for their actions. At the very least, they suggest, it could do us good to lessen the sentencing of drug offenders and try to encourage quitters rather than just clamp people in jail, as this allows us to discourage people more easily and get to know more about the problem. This approach is implemented to an extent in Europe (especially the Netherlands), whilst the more stringent laws of the United States (states such as Colorado excepted) take the opposite line; they say that to relax drug restrictions simply encourages use, gives more trade to the cartels and only increases their power. Whether they are right or not is very much up for debate since the alternative hasn’t really been tried on a large scale, particularly in America; but the growing movement to look for an alternative solution to the problem, combined with the statement from former presidents of Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia that ‘the war on drugs has failed’ means that we may soon see how the other approach ends up. For the record, I remain undecided on the issue- the stats from the Netherlands tell me that drug use will increase with decriminalisation, which I don’t especially like the prospect of (that stuff’s not for me, and I’m not entirely sure why it should be for anyone else either), but it strikes me that this approach may reap dividends when it comes to combating the secondary problems caused by the drug wars. A friend who is kind of into this business (and, incidentally, comes firmly down on the ‘legalise’ side) recommends the YouTube film ‘Breaking The Taboo’, which you may want to watch if this kind of thing interests you.

…OK, that one slightly got away from me, but the discussion got kind of interesting. The key message here, really, is one of self-examination. Take a look at your political views, your outlook on life in general, and then ask yourself: to me, what is freedom worth?

The Hairy Ones

My last post on the subject of music history covered the relatively short timespan between around 1950 and 1965, leaving off at about the time The Beatles began leading the ‘British Invasion’ of American music culture. This invasion was a confluence of a whole host of factors; a fresh generation of youths wishing to identify with something new as ‘theirs’ and different to their parents, a British music scene that had been influenced by the American one without being so ingratiated into it as to snub their ability to innovate and make a good sound, and the fact that said generation of youngsters were the first to grow up around guitar music and thus the first to learn to play them and other genre-defining instruments en masse. Plus, some seriously good musicians in there. However, the British invasion was only the first of a multi-part wave of insane musical experimentation and innovation, flooding the market with new ideas and spawning, in the space of less than a decade, almost every genre to exist today. And for the cause of much of part two, we must backtrack a little to 1955.

Y’see, after the Second World War Japan, the dominant East Asian power, had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies and there was no dominant force in the region. This created something of a power vacuum in the area, with a host of new governments trying to rise from the post-war chaos and establish themselves as such a power. Many of these new nations, including those of China, Cambodia, North Korea and North Vietnam, were Communist states, and therefore were a serious concern to the western world. The US in particular, as a fiercely capitalist power, were deeply worried by the prospect of the whole of South East Asia, according to communist theory, just amalgamating into another great communist superpower and landing them with next to zero chance of triumphing in their ‘battle against communism’ against the already hugely powerful Soviet Union. As such, they were hell-bent on preserving every ounce of capitalist democracy they could in the area, and were prepared to defend such governments with as much force as necessary. In 1950 they had already started a war in Korea to prevent the communist north’s invasion of the democratic south, with the practical upshot (after China joined in) of re establishing the border pretty much exactly where it had been to start with and creating a state of war that, officially, has yet to end. In 1955, a similar situation was developing in Vietnam, and President Dwight D Eisenhower once again sent in the army.

Cut to ten years later, and the war was still going on. Once a crusade against the onward-marching forces of communism, the war had just dragged on and on with its only tangible result being a steady stream of dead and injured servicemen fighting a war many, especially the young who had not grown up with the degree of Commie-hating their parents had, now considered futile and stupid. Also related to ‘the Red Scare’ was the government’s allowing of capitalist corporations to run haywire, vamping up their marketing and the consumer-saturation of America. This might have lead to a 15 year long economic boom, but again many of the younger generation were getting sick of it all. All of this, combined with a natural teenage predisposition to do exactly what their parents don’t want them to, lead to a new, reactionary counter-culture that provided an impetus for a whole wave of musical experimentation; hippies.

The hippie movement (the word is, strangely, derived from ‘hipster’) was centred around pacifism, freedom of love and sex (hence ‘make love not war’), an appreciation of the home made and the natural rather than the plastic and capitalist, and drug use. The movement exists to this day, but it was most prevalent in the late 60s when a craze took the American youth by storm. They protested on a huge variety of issues, ranging from booing returning soldiers and more general anti-war stuff (hippies were also dubbed ‘flower children’ for their practice of giving flowers to police officers at such demonstrations) to demonstrations on the banning of LSD or ‘acid’, one of their more commonly used drugs. This movement of wired, eco-centric vegetarians didn’t connect well with the relatively fresh, clean tones of rock & roll and The Beatles, and inspired new music based around their psychedelic and their ‘appreciation’ of drug use. It was in this vein that The Beatles recorded Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, and why Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rose to fame in a new genre known as ‘acid rock’ (named after the drug from which most of the lyrics were ‘inspired’). Characterised by long, confusing and hideously difficult solos (I’m looking at you Hendrix), this was the prominent genre on show at the infamous Woodstock festival of 1969, featuring Hendrix, Joplin, The Who, The Grateful Dead & Carlos Santana among other things. Woodstock was the high point of the hippie movement, with over half a million fans attending to smoke, listen to the music, skinny dip and make love in and around the lake and generally by as hippie as possible.

Hippie culture went downhill post-Woodstock; public outcry following the Altamont Free Concert close to San Francisco (where Hell’s Angels provided security and shot a concert-goer during The Rolling Stones’ set for brandishing a gun) coincided with ‘the hippie generation’ mostly growing up. The movement still exists today, and it legacy in terms of public attitudes to sexual freedom, pacifism and general tolerance (hippies were big on civil rights and respect for the LGBT community) is certainly considerable. But their contribution to the musical world is almost as massive; acid rock was a key driving force behind the development of the genres of folk rock (think Noah and the Whale) and heavy metal (who borrowed from Hendrix’s style of heavy guitar playing). Most importantly, music being as big a part as it was of hippie culture definitively established that the practice of everyone, even the lowliest, ‘commonest’ people, buying, listening to, sharing and most importantly making music themselves was here to stay.

The story of hippies covers just one of the music families spawned out of the late 60s. The wave of kids growing up with guitars and the idea that they can make their own music, can be the next big thing, with no preconceived ideas, resulted in a myriad of different styles and genres that form the roots of every style of modern rock music. This period was known as ‘the golden age of rock’ for a reason; before pop was big, before hip-hop, before rap, decades before dubstep, before even punk rock (born in the early seventies and disliked by many serious music nerds for being unimaginative and stupid), rock music ruled and rock music blossomed.

You could argue that this, then, marks the story of rock, and that the rest of the tale is just one long spiral downwards- that once the golden age ended, everything is just a nice depressing story. Well, I certainly don’t like to think of that as true (if only because I would rather not have a mindset to make me stop listening to music),  but even if it was, there is a hell of a lot of stuff left in this story. Over? Not for another post or two…

Copyright Quirks

This post is set to follow on from my earlier one on the subject of copyright law and its origins. However, just understanding the existence of copyright law does not necessarily premeditate the understanding of the various complications, quirks and intricacies that get people quite so angry about it- so today I want to explore a few of these features that get people so annoyed, and explain why and how they came to be.

For starters, it is not in the public interest for material to stay forever copyrighted, for the simple reason that stuff is always more valuable if freely in the public domain as it is more accessible for the majority. If we consider a technological innovation or invention, restricting its production solely to the inventor leaves them free to charge pretty much what they like, since they have no competition to compete with. Not only does this give them an undesirable monopoly, it also restricts that invention from being best used on a large scale, particularly if it is something like a drug or medicine. Therefore, whilst a copyright obviously has to exist in order to stimulate the creation of new stuff, allowing it to last forever is just asking for trouble, which is why copyrights generally have expiry times. The length of a copyright’s life varies depending on a product- for authors it generally lasts for their lifetime plus a period of around 70 years or so to allow their family to profit from it (expired copyright is the reason that old books can be bought for next to nothing in digital form these days, as they cost nothing to produce). For physical products and, strangely, music, the grace period is generally both fixed and shorter (and dependent on the country concerned), and for drugs and pharmaceuticals it is just ten years (drugs companies are corrupt and profit-obsessed enough without giving them too long to rake in the cash).

Then, we encounter the fact that a copyright also represents a valuable commodity, and thus something that can potentially be put up for sale. You might think that allowing this sort of thing to go on is wrong and is only going to cause problems, but it is often necessary. Consider somebody who owns the rights to a book, and wants someone to make a film out of it, partly because they may be up for a cut of the profits and will gain money from the sale of their rights, but also because it represents a massive advertisement for their product. They, therefore, want to be able to sell part of the whole ‘right to publish’ idea to a film studio who can do the job for them, and any law prohibiting this is just pissing everybody off and preventing a good film from potentially being made. The same thing could apply to a struggling company who owns some valuable copyright to a product; the ability to sell it not only offers them the opportunity to make a bit of money to cover their losses, but also means that the product is more likely to stay on the free market and continue being produced by whoever bought the rights. It is for this reason legal for copyright to be traded between various different people or groups to varying degrees, although the law does allow the original owner to cancel any permanent trade after 35 years if they want to do something with the property.

And what about the issue of who is responsible for a work at all?  One might say that it is simply the work of the author/inventor concerned, but things are often not that simple. For one thing, innovations are often the result of work by a team of people and to restrict the copyright to any one of them would surely be unfair. For another, what if, say, the discovery of a new medical treatment came about because the scientist responsible was paid to do so, and given all the necessary equipment and personnel, by a company. Without corporate support, the discovery could never have been made, so surely that company is just as much legally entitled to the copyright as the individual responsible? This is legally known as ‘work made for hire’, and the copyright in this scenario is the property of the company rather than the individual, lasting for a fixed period (70 years in the US) since the company involved is unlikely to ‘die’ in quite the same predictable lifespan of a human being, and is unlikely to have any relatives for the copyright to benefit afterwards. It is for this reason also that companies, rather than just people, are allowed to hold copyright.

All of these quirks of law are undoubtedly necessary to try and be at least relatively fair to all concerned, but they are responsible for most of the arguments currently put about pertaining to ‘why copyright law is %&*$ed up’. The correct length of a copyright for various different stuff is always up for debate, whether it be musicians who want them to get longer (Paul McCartney made some complaints about this a few years ago), critics who want corporate ones to get shorter, or morons who want to get rid of them altogether (they generally mean well, but anarchistic principles today don’t either a) work very well or b) attract support likely to get them taken seriously). The sale of copyright angers a lot of people, particularly film critics- sales of the film rights for stuff like comic book characters generally include a clause requiring the studio to give it back if they don’t do anything with it for a few years. This has resulted in a lot of very badly-made films over the years which continue to be published solely because the relevant studio don’t want to give back for free a valuable commodity that still might have a few thousand dollars to be squeezed out of it (basically, blame copyright law for the new Spiderman film). The fact that both corporations and individuals can both have a right to the ownership of a product (and even the idea that a company can claim responsibility for the creation of something) has resulted in countless massive lawsuits over the years, almost invariably won by the biggest publishing company, and has created an image of game developers/musicians/artists being downtrodden by big business that is often used as justification by internet pirates. Not that the image is inaccurate or anything, but very few companies appear to realise that this is why there is such an undercurrent of sympathy for piracy on the internet and why their attempts to attack it through law have met with quite such a vitriolic response (as well as being poorly-worded and not thought out properly).

So… yeah, that’s pretty much copyright, or at least why it exists and people get annoyed about it. There are a lot of features concerning copyright law that people don’t like, and I’d be the last to say that it couldn’t do with a bit of bringing up to date- but it’s all there for a reason and it’s not just there because suit-clad stereotypes are lighting hundred dollar cigars off the arse of the rest of us. So please, when arguing about it, don’t suggest anything should just go without thinking of why it’s there in the first place.

The Price of Sex

This is (probably, I might come back to it if I have trouble thinking of material) the last post I will be doing in this mini-series on the subject of sex.  Today’s title is probably the bluntest of the series as a whole, and yet is probably most descriptive of its post’s content, as today I am going to be dealing with the rather edgy subject of prostitution.

Prostitution is famously quoted as being the world’s oldest profession, and it’s not hard to see why. Since men tend to have physical superiority over women they have tended to adopt overlord roles since the ‘hitting other people with clubs and shouting “Ug”‘ stage, women have, as previously stated, tended to be relatively undervalued and underskilled (in regards to stuff other than, oh I don’t know, raising kids and foraging for food with a degree of success often exceeding that of hunting parties, although that is partly to do with methodology and I could spend all day arguing this point). In fact it can be argued that the only reason that some (presumably rather arrogant) male-dominated tribes didn’t just have done with women as a gender is purely down to sex- partly because it allowed them to father children but mostly, obviously, because they really enjoyed it. Thus the availability of sex was historically not a woman’s most valuable asset to her male peers, but since it was something that men couldn’t/would rather not sort out between themselves it took on a great degree of value. It could even be argued that women have been ‘selling’ sex in exchange for being allowed to exist since the earliest origins of a male-dominated tribe structure, although you’d have to check with an actual anthropologist to clarify that point.

Since those early days of human history, prostitution has always remained one of those things that was always there, sort of tucked into the background and that never made most history books. However, that’s  not to say it has not affected history- the availability of pleasures of the flesh has kept more than one king away from his duties and sent his country into some degree of turmoil, and even Pope Alexander VI (a la, among other things, Assassin’s Creed II) once famously hired 50 prostitutes for a party known as the Ballet of the Chestnuts, where their clothes were auctioned off before both courtesans and guests (including several clergymen) crawled naked over the floor to first pick up chestnuts, and later compete to see who could have the most sex. In fact, for large swathes of history, prostitution was considered a relatively popular profession among lowborn women, whose only other choices were generally the church (if you could afford to get in), agriculture (which involved backbreaking toil, malnourishment and a generally poor quality of life), or serving work if you were lucky. It was relatively well-paid, required no real skill, was more exciting than most other walks of life and far less risky than a life of crime. Even nowadays sex workers are held with a degree of respect in many countries (such as The Netherlands and New Zealand) as being people stuck in a difficult situation who really don’t need the law trying to screw over (if you’ll pardon the pun) what little they have.

However, that doesn’t mean, and never has done, that prostitution is just some harmless little sideshow that we should simply ignore. The annual death rate among female prostitutes in the USA is around 200 per 100,000, meaning that over a (say) 10 year career one in fifty are likely to be killed. Compare that to a rate of 118 per 100,000 for America’s supposedly most dangerous profession, being a lumberjack. Added to this is the fact that prostitutes, many of whom are illegal immigrants, runaways or imported slaves, are rarely missed or even noticed by society, so make easy victims for predators and serial killers. Prostitution is often seen as a major contributory factor in the continued spread of STD’s such as HIV/AIDS, and is often targeted by women’s rights groups as being both degrading to women both directly involved and indirectly associated as well as slowing the decline of chauvinist attitudes. Then there is sex tourism (aka travelling to somewhere like Thailand to hire prostitutes because at home people might see you coming out), which is rapidly becoming one of the most distasteful, as well as dangerous & counter-productive, aspects of 21st century tourism. And then, of course, there is sex trafficking, perhaps the lowest of the low as far as all human activities go. Sex trafficking is the practice of abducting young women to sell into slavery as prostitutes, both within a country and across international borders, which would be morally repugnant enough if it wasn’t for the fact that a significant proportion of those trafficked are children, sometimes sold even by their own families. Around three-quarters of human trafficking today, the largest slavery operation in the history of the world, is concerned with the global sex trade, and is the fastest growing criminal activity on the planet. Much of it is connected to other aspects of organised crime, such as the drugs wars in Mexico, and can therefore be directly linked to large-scale theft, murder and smuggling, amongst other crimes. In India & Bangaladesh, some 40% of prostitutes are thought to be children, many of whom use a highly addictive drug linked to diabetes and high blood pressure to make them seem older & fatter (research suggests that men find fuller physiques more attractive when under stress or hardship). Looking through some of these figures & reading some of the stories surrounding them, it’s hard not to be struck by how low humanity has the potential to stoop when it ceases to think or care.

Over the last 100 or so years, as life has got less hard for the average woman and job opportunities have expanded, prevailing attitudes towards, and the prevalence & amount of, prostitution have declined heavily, and it is now frequently seen more as a rather distasteful sideshow to modern living that most would rather avoid. But to contrast against this we have the fact that the industry is both very much alive across the world, but could even be said to be thriving- the ‘labour’ of slave prostitutes is worth tens of billions of dollars worldwide. The trouble is, because it is an inherently seedy sideshow, it is impossible to get rid of, with legislation usually causing it to merely go underground and leading to further degradation in living conditions and welfare of sex workers, and regulating it is similarly tricky. Thus, it’s very hard for governments to know what to do about an industry that they recognise will always be there but is immensely prone to crime, human rights abuse and health issues. Unless the world, in a rather unlikely twist learns to live largely without prostitutes, a black stain is unfortunately likely to remain on our pride and dignity as a race. Exactly how this should be dealt with is still a little unclear.

Rule Brittania

As I have mentioned a few times over the course of this blog, I am British (I prefer not to say English unless I’m talking about sport. Not sure why, exactly). The British as a race have a long list of achievements, giant-scale cock-ups and things we like to brush under the carpet (see the Crimean War for all three of those things), and since we spent most of the 17th-19th century either fighting over or controlling fairly massive swathes of the earth, the essence of Britishness has managed to make itself known in the psyche of just about every nation on Earth. Or, to put it another way, people have tons of stereotypes about the Brits, but not quite so many about, say, the Lithuanians (my apologies to any Lithuanians who end up reading this, but the British national psyche at least isn’t that good at distinguishing you from the rest of Eastern Europe).

British national stereotypes are a mixed bunch. We have the ‘ye olde’ stereotypical Brit- a top-hatted, tea drinking cricketer for whom the word ‘quaint’ was invented and who would never speak out of turn to anybody. Then there is the colonial stereotype- the old-fashioned, borderline-racist yet inherently capable silver-moustached ‘old boy’ living in a big house somewhere in the tropics with a few servants. He puts a lot of cash into the local public school down the road, paying for the cricket facilities. Or something. And then we have the hideously polite- just as obsessed about manners as his ‘ye olde’ cousin, but this time in a very subservient, almost Canadian, manner (I should clarify that I get this particular Canadian stereotype from the internet, since the only Canadians I know all seem… actually, I’ll get back to you on a generalistic stereotype)

However, modern Britain is, of course, not really like this- we are a very modern, incredibly diverse culture (despite David Cameron’s insistence that “multiculturalism has failed”- not one of his better lines) with a surprising geographical diversity too, for such a small country. So, since I am not really in the mood for anything particularly heavy today, I thought that this would be a good time to inform the internet as to a few new British stereotypes for you, just to bring you up to date.

1) The Chav
Used to be that inner-city Londoners all got classed as Cockneys- nowadays we have chavs instead. The chav in his natural state is a pack animal, rarely seen without company, and vulnerable when alone. His is the main market for bad rap music, oversized baseball caps and hoodies two sizes too big for them. They are a notoriously hard to become assimilated with, partly due to the natural verbal aggression of the pack, but also due to their strange tongue- officially known as London Street English (LSE), this bizarre dialect, calling from influences ranging from Vietnamese to Arabic, has now spread across large tracts of southern England, where it is generally confined to council estate, and has more recently been simply dubbed ‘Chav’. Despite a reputation for drugs, violence and vandalism, they are not to be feared by the confident, especially if numbers lie in one’s favour.

2) The West Country
The farming stereotype- round-cheeked, stick-bearing and (to complete the look) with a length of straw poking out of the mouth. Their dialect (a rather bumptious, heavily accented tongue where many a syllable may be lost beneath an ‘Aarrr’) can be no less strange and confusing than LSE, and despite being typically associated with the area west of Bristol (excluding, of course, Wales), is also to be found in East Anglia. Since we have progressed from the days of needing an army of bored young men to till the fields, leaving us to use combine harvesters and such instead, this tends to be a reasonably well-off group- there are no longer starving farmhands, only really farm owners & family. They tend to drive Land Rovers, and view science with roughly the same suspicion as an oncoming bush fire.

3) The Gap Yah…
The modern public schoolboy. Eton being a touch old-fashioned nowadays, the stereotype will now come from Harrow or Stowe (for whatever reason). Typically long of face, short of hair and severely lacking in both age and experience, these come in two subtly different classes. There is the overbearer- the one whose intense access to the very best that Daddy’s money can buy has left them better than everybody else at practically everything they care to mention, and will point this out to you at every opportunity. These may be recognised by the incessant and constantly nagging desire to break their face. The second is the wannabe- the kid who got bullied at Whitgift, who isn’t actually that good at anything but is still richer than you and likes you to know it. They are characterised by always pretending to be of the overbearer class, and endeavouring to be as competent as them, but always cocking up. Interestingly, failure provides the main distinction between the two classes- whilst a wannabe will just act cool and pretend that you cheated them, an overbearer will simply cut out all the timewasting and begin the vitriolic hatred then and there. Both classes are likely to drink heavily (of proper drinks of course- stuff like cider is for plebs and Muggles), travel widel, and hopefully meet their match one of these days soon.

That list was not what you’d call exhaustive, but it’s reasonably accurate from what I’ve experienced. Plus, it was quite nice and relaxing for me.

(If I have in any way offended you or the stereotype you represent over the course of this post, then please feel free to ignore it and laugh at the other ones instead)