Behind Bars

Prisons are an odd thing in modern democracy; in some ways the pillar of our justice system, a testament to a way of doing things that means we can endeavour to transform criminals into productive members of society and a way of punishment that allows us to hold the moral high ground over serious criminals to whom we do not do the whole ‘eye for an eye’ thing. But on the other hand it is, when you think about it, a somewhat barbaric practice; to take a fellow human being, another person born free and equal, and to take away not only their freedom for the immediate future, but in some respects their equality for as long as their criminal record lasts. If crime is a contentious issue, then ideas concerning punishment are even more controversial.

The idea of imprisonment was invented less as a tool of justice and more one of political convenience; whilst an opposing warlord is locked up, he can’t orchestrate a war or rebellion (as I have found out whilst playing Crusader Kings II). Indeed, throughout medieval times, common criminals were never punished by imprisonment; they were either fined, had body parts (usually hands) removed, or were executed (usually by hanging; the chopping block was for noblemen right up until the guillotine, which was a great social leveller when it came to execution). Locking someone up meant they needed feeding and housing, which was only really worth the cost for noblemen who one could ransom. It was also considered somewhat dishonourable to kill noblemen in most cases, even more so the higher rank they were; indeed, there was much outrage when Oliver Cromwell ordered King Charles I executed despite the fact that he had been convicted of treason and was highly unpopular (as well as, by all accounts, something of an arsehole).

Quite a good way of tracking the history of imprisonment as a punishment is to study the history of the Bastille in Paris; a fortress built in the 1300s, it was first declared a state prison in 1417. Originally, it held whichever landed gentry and noblemen had pissed of King Louis the Whicheverwasinpoweratthetime, but over time this role changed, and the commoners started to find their way in too. This was fuelled by the fact that people often got very angry at seeing certain types of often petty criminals, many of whom were barely out of childhood, getting strung up on a gibbet, and riots were generally things to be avoided. Particular bones of contention concerned those who had Things To Say about the French monarchy and government (especially once the state tried to censor the material spewing from the newly invented printing press), and people whose religious alignment disagreed with whoever was in power, but would certainly agree with large sectors of the mob. To try and placate the populace, therefore, the Bastille began to take on more  prisoners who the ruling classes felt would cause… a disturbance were they to be publicly hanged. Increasingly, the Bastille began to be used as a place to hide away those who had spoken out against or in some way fought against the state (whose death would really infuriate the mob), and the prison increasingly became a bone of resentment, a symbol of the stranglehold those in power had over their subjects. As such, it was a natural target for rioters when the French Revolution broke out in 1789, and Bastille Day (14th of July) is still a national holiday in France.

The chaos following the French revolution and the social upheaval of the next few centuries did change the balance of power and the role of imprisonment within society; it was the punishment of choice for many crimes, the old days of hacking a thief’s hand off gone, and execution was now the reserve of the kind of people who the public felt deserved it. However, right up until the Second World War, the justice system was brutal in a lot of countries; dungeons were generally small, packed with poorly-fed prisoners and infested with disease or rats, and many countries still operated forced labour camps and penal colonies. There were two reasons for this; firstly, prisoners were still expensive to maintain and were not seen as worth expending any great effort for, so any way the state could get some use out of them was seen as all well and good. The other reason concerned the role that prison had to play. Imprisonment was in those days (as today) to prevent criminals from committing more crimes, to punish them for the crimes they had committed and to scare others into not performing the scare crimes; but what wouldn’t come along until much later was the idea of rehabilitation. Our modern justice system is such that almost every criminal, regardless of their crime, will return to the outside world one day, and we can all agree that it would be preferable for everyone if, upon said return, they didn’t commit any more crimes. Trouble is, prison does not do that role any favours; by simply throwing someone in a grotty cell for several years, all you are likely to build in them is resentment against you and the system, and since human beings are remarkably stubborn people, this is likely to lead to re-offending. We have also come to realise that prison on its own is frequently ineffective as a deterrent for serial criminals, who are generally less sorrowful about committing their crimes as they are about getting caught. Once released, they are most likely to just go right on with their old life, the life that was exciting and (in some cases) profitable to them before the law caught up with them. And then, of course, there’s the problem posed by a criminal record, making people far less able to find work and often forcing them back to crime just to keep their head above water. This has given rise to the fourth role played by the modern prison and justice system; that of rehabilitation.

I am no legal expert, nor have I ever spent time in prison, so I am undoubtedly underqualified to talk at length about how comfortable prisons ‘should’ be, the correct way to treat prisoners, how to correctly implement the role of rehabilitation, etc. But I think we can all accept that the role of the justice system nowadays is, primarily, to reduce the amount of crime in this world, and unfortunately, bars and guards ain’t gonna cut it on their own. And we must also remember that, whatever they may have done, prisoners are people too. They still have rights, they still deserve at least some respect; many are victims of circumstance as much as anything else. And in any case, there’s a reason that we don’t hang prisoners any more; because our moral code must be stronger than that of a murderer, because we must show at least a modicum of love to those who would give us none, because we must be better, nobler people than they.

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Arr, me Hearties…

Piracy has been in the news a lot recently, mainly concerning blokes in Somalia armed with AK47s running around attacking cargo ships. However, as some regular readers of this blog (if such there are) may be able to guess from the subtle hints I regularly drop in, the pirate news I have been most interested in recently concerns Assassin’s Creed, and the recent announcement of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. This is the first AAA game that I’ve ever heard of set in the ‘golden age of piracy’, and so I thought a post on this period of time might be in order. Plus, I think a 200th post deserves a cool topic.

When people think of piracy, the mental image conjured up is always of Caribbean piracy during these days; swashbuckling men in fancy hats & coats, swanning around in large ships with flintlock pistols, cannons and oversized cojones. Captain Jack Sparrow, basically. Specifically, they refer to the situation in and around the Caribbean from around 1650 to the early 1800s, peaking during the first 30 years of the 18th century. These were the days of colonial wars in this area; 200 years earlier the Spanish-sponsored Christopher Columbus had discovered the New World and Spain, which was at the time the richest and most powerful nation on earth, smelt an opportunity. Newly unified into one nation after pushing out the Moors and uniting the powerful crowns of Aragon and Castile through marriage, 16th century Spain was finally able to utilise the great wealth that centuries of war had been unable to use productively, and swept across the Atlantic (and, indeed, much of the rest of the world; theirs was the first Empire upon which ‘the sun never set’) armed to the teeth. The New World offered them vast untapped resources of gold and silver (among other things) that the local tribes, had not extracted; these tribes were also lacking in gunpowder, and were totally incapable of dealing with the Spanish onslaught that followed. Even small raiding parties were able to conquer vast swathes of land, and Spain pillaged, raped and murdered its way across the land in a fashion eerily preminiscient of the ‘rush for Africa’ that would follow a few hundred years later. America was rich, it was untapped, it was (relatively, compared to, say, India) close enough to be accessible, and Spain got there first. Seemed like a great deal at the time.

However, cut to a couple of hundred years later, and Spain was in trouble. The ‘Spanish Golden Age’ was on the wane, and Spain found itself at near-constant war, either with France or from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, whose Barbary pirates (the first time piracy enters this story) would frequently trouble Spain’s coastal possessions. In the colonies, things were just as bad; Britain and France had established their own empires in North America and fought frequently, if not with each other, with Spain for its colonies in Florida and Central America, constantly attempting land grabs in and around the Caribbean area. Spain simply did not have the ability to maintain a military presence across such a vast area, especially when a succession war started and all parties started fighting over the future of Spain as a country and an empire, making the game of ‘who’s on whose side’ even more complicated. The whole area turned into one chaotic mess of sporadic fighting, where law was impossible to enforce,towns were frequentl either destroyed or changed hands, and honest trade such as farming became an unreliable source of income when your crops kept getting burnt. However, at the same time, there were still lots of goodies being sent around all over the place for trade purposes so the various  countries involved in the conflict could make some money out of the whole mess, wherever possible. So, let’s have a sit rep; we have large amounts of very valuable goods being shipped all over the Caribbean & the high seas, frequently alone since all powers had so few ships to spare for escorts, nobody is able to reliably enforce the law and we have a lot of men unable to make a living from practicing an honest trade. Rocking up in a large ship and stealing everything has never seemed such a productive strategy, particularly when some towns turned lawless and became pirate ports.

Interestingly, all the colonial powers at one time or another made some acts of piracy legal; ‘privateers’ were sailors (such as Sir Francis Drake) employed by a country to ride around all over the place and disrupt other countries’ trade. All the other nations, of course, considered them pirates and put ‘dead or alive’ prices on their heads, but these people are pretty boring when compared to some of the genuine pirates who terrorised the Caribbean. In many ways, pirates were the first professional celebrities; reasoning that the whole ‘piracy’ business would be a lot easier if everyone would just shit themselves upon sight of them and hand over all the gold without a fight, they put a lot of effort into building up their reputations so that everyone knew who they are. This is one of the reasons why pirates are so famous today, that and the fact that they were simultaneously mental and amazingly charismatic. Consider Blackbeard, probably the most famous real-life pirate and a man who spread rumours about satanic powers and would stick flaming sticks in his beard so he smoked like a demon. Consider Captain John Phillips, whose version of the pirate code (because even criminals have honour of a sort; Phillips’ is one of just four surviving) included an article stating that any man who kept a secret from the rest of the crew was to be marooned on a desert island with nothing but a bottle of water, a pistol, gunpowder and shot. Just to let everyone know who’s boss. And what about Charles Vane, a certified arsehole even by piratical standards whose three-year career netted him the equivalent of around two and a half million US Dollars, which is made doubly impressive by the fact that he never lead a ship with more than twelve guns. For a more expanded (and rather hilarious) look at a few pirates and their stories, I refer you here.

After 1730, the age of the pirates was largely over; the Royal Navy in particular was exerting far more control over the seas and ports, and small pirate vessels were unable to sustain a living. The trade attempted to move overseas, but proved unsustainable in other colonies such as India. The law was finally organised enough to catch up with pirates, and they retreated back into history, leaving only their fearsome reputation and charisma behind. Pirates as we in the west think of them were many things; brave, violent, aggressive, borderline mental, and not the kind of people you’d want to invite to dinner. But one thing that they undoubtedly were, and always will be, is effortlessly, earth-shatteringly cool.

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?

Poverty Changes

£14,000 is quite a large amount of money. Enough for 70,000 Freddos, a decade’s worth of holidays, two new Nissan Pixo’s, several thousand potatoes or a gold standard racing pigeon. However, if you’re trying to live off just that amount in modern Britain, it quickly seems quite a lot smaller. Half of that could easily disappear on rent, whilst the average British family will spend a further £4,000 on food (significantly greater than the European average, for one reason or another). Then we must factor in tax, work-related expenses, various repair bills, a TV license, utility & heating bills, petrol money and other transport expenses, and it quickly becomes apparent that trying to live on this amount will require some careful budgeting. Still, not to worry too much though; it’s certainly possible to keep the body and soul of a medium sized family together on £14k a year, if not absolutely comfortably, and in any case 70% of British families have an annual income in excess of this amount. It might not be a vast amount to live on, but it should be about enough.

However, there’s a reason I quoted £14,000 specifically in the figure above, because I recently saw another statistic saying that if one’s income is above 14 grand a year, you are one of the top 4% richest people on planet Earth. Or, to put it another way, if you were on that income, and were then to select somebody totally at random from our species, then 24 times out of 25 you would be richer than them.

Now, this slightly shocking fact, as well as being a timely reminder as to the prevalence of poverty amongst fellow members of our species, to me raises an interesting question; if £14,000 is only just about enough to let one’s life operate properly in modern Britain, how on earth does the vast majority of the world manage to survive at all on significantly less than this? More than 70% of the Chinese population (in 2008, admittedly; the rate of Chinese poverty is decreasing at a staggering rate thanks to its booming economy) live on less than $5 a day, and 35 years ago more than 80% were considered to be in absolute poverty. How does this work? How does most of the rest of the world physically survive?

The obvious starting point is the one stating that much of it barely does. Despite the last few decades of massive improvement in the living standards and poverty levels in the world in general,  the World Bank estimates that some 20% of the world’s populace is living below the absolute poverty line of surviving on less than $1.50 per person per day, or £365 a year (down from around 45% in the early 1980s- Bob Geldof’s message has packed a powerful punch). This is the generally accepted marker for being less than what a person can physically keep body and soul together on, and having such a huge proportion of people living below this marker tends to drag down the global average. Poverty is something that the last quarter of the century has seen a definitive effort on the part of humanity to reduce, but it’s still a truly vast issue across the globe.

However, the main contributing factor to me behind how a seemingly meagre amount of money in the first world would be considered bountiful wealth in the third is simply down to how economics works. We in the west are currently enjoying the fruits of two centuries of free-market capitalism, which has fundamentally changed the way our civilisation functions. When we as a race first came up with the concept of civilisation, of pooling and exchanging skills and resources for the betterment of the collective, this was largely confined to the local community, or at least to the small-scale. Farmers provided for those living in the surrounding twenty miles or so, as did brewers, hunters, and all other such ‘small businessmen’, as they would be called today. The concept of a country provided security from invasion and legal support on a larger scale, but that was about it; any international trade was generally conducted between kings and noblemen, and was very much small scale.

However, since the days of the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution, business has got steadily bigger and bigger. It started out with international trade between the colonies, and the rich untapped resources the European imperial powers found there, moved on to the industrial scale manufacture of goods, and then the high-intensity sale of consumer products to the general population. Now we have vast multinational companies organising long, exhaustive chains of supply, manufacture and retail, and our society has become firmly rooted in this intense selling international economy. Without constantly selling vast quantities of stuff to one another, the western world as we know it simply would not exist.

This process causes many side effects, but one is of particular interest; everything becomes more expensive. To summarise very simply, the basic principle of capitalism involves workers putting in work and skill to increase the value of something; that something then gets sold, and the worker then gets some of the difference between cost of materials and cost of sale as a reward for their effort. For this to work, then one’s reward for putting in your effort must be enough to purchase the stuff needed to keep you alive; capitalism rests on the principle of our bodies being X% efficient at turning the food we eat into the energy we can use to work. If business is successful, then the workers of a company (here the term ‘workers’ covers everyone from factory floor to management) will gain money in the long term, enabling them to spend more money. This means that the market increases in size, and people can either sell more goods or start selling them for a higher price, so goods become worth more, so the people making those goods start getting more money, and so on.

The net result of this is that in an ‘expensive’ economy, everyone has a relatively high income and high expenditure, because all goods, taxes, land, utilities etc. cost quite a lot; but, for all practical purposes, this results in a remarkably similar situation to a ‘cheap’ economy, where the full force of western capitalism hasn’t quite taken hold yet- for, whilst the people residing there have less money, the stuff that is there costs less having not been through the corporation wringer. So, why would we find it tricky to live on less money than the top 4% of the world’s population? Blame the Industrial Revolution.

Questionably Moral

We human beings tend to set a lot of store by the idea of morality (well, most of us anyway), and it is generally accepted that having a strong code of morals is a good thing. Even if many of us have never exactly qualified what we consider to be right or wrong, the majority of people have at least a basic idea of what they consider morally acceptable and a significant number are willing to make their moral standpoint on various issues very well known to anyone who doesn’t want to listen (internet, I’m looking at you again). One of the key features considered to be integral to such a moral code is the idea of rigidity and having fixed rules. Much like law, morality should ideally be inflexible, passing equal judgement on the same situation regardless of who is involved, how you’re feeling at the time and other outside factors. If only to avoid being accused of hypocrisy, social law dictates that one ‘should’ pass equal moral judgement on both your worst enemy and your spouse, and such a stringent dedication to ‘justice’ is a prized concept among those with strong moral codes.

However, human beings are nothing if not inconsistent, and even the strongest and most vehemently held ideas have a habit of withering in the face of context. One’s moral code is no exception, and with that in mind, let’s talk about cats.

Consider a person- call him a socialist, if you like that sort of description. Somebody who basically believes that we should be doing our bit to help our fellow man. Someone who buys The Big Issue, donates to charity, and gives their change to the homeless. They take the view that those in a more disadvantaged position should be offered help, and they live and share this view on a daily basis.

Now, consider what happens when, one day, said person is having a barbecue and a stray cat comes into the garden. Such strays are, nowadays, uncommon in suburban Britain, but across Europe (the Mediterranean especially), there may be hundreds of them in a town (maybe the person’s on holiday). Picture one such cat- skinny, with visible ribs, unkempt and patchy fur, perhaps a few open sores. A mangy, quite pathetic creature, clinging onto life through a mixture of tenacity and grubbing for scraps, it enters the garden and makes its way towards the man and his barbecue.

Human beings, especially modern-day ones, leave quite a wasteful and indulgent existence. We certainly do not need the vast majority of the food we produce and consume, and could quite happily do without a fair bit of it. A small cat, by contrast, can survive quite happily for at least day on just one small bowl of food, or a few scraps of meat. From a neutral, logical standpoint, therefore, the correct and generous thing to do according to this person’s moral standpoint, would be to throw the cat a few scraps and sleep comfortably with a satisfied conscience that evening. But, all our person sees is a mangy street cat, a dirty horrible stray that they don’t want anywhere near them or their food, so they do all they can to kick, scream, shout, throw water and generally drive a starving life form after just a few scraps away from a huge pile of pristine meat, much of which is likely to go to waste.

Now, you could argue that if the cat had been given food, it would have kept on coming back, quite insatiably, for more, and could possibly have got bolder and more aggressive. An aggressive, confident cat is more likely to try and steal food, and letting a possibly diseased and flea-ridden animal near food you are due to eat is probably not in the best interests of hygiene. You could argue that offering food is just going to encourage other cats to come to you for food, until you become a feeding station for all those in the area and are thus promoting the survival and growth of a feline population that nobody really likes to see around and would be unsustainable to keep. You could argue, if you were particularly harsh and probably not of the same viewpoint as the person in question, that a cat is not ‘worth’ as much as a human, if only because we should stick to looking after our own for starters and, in any case, it would be better for the world anyway if there weren’t stray cats around to cause such freak out-ness and moral dilemmas. But all of this does not change the fact that this person has, from an objective standpoint, violated their moral code by refusing a creature less fortunate than themselves a mere scrap that could, potentially, represent the difference between their living and dying.

There are other such examples of such moral inconsistency in the world around us. Animals are a common connecting factor (pacifists and people who generally don’t like murder will quite happily swat flies and such ‘because they’re annoying’), but there are other, more human examples (those who say we should be feeding the world’s poor whilst simultaneously both eating and wasting vast amounts of food and donating a mere pittance to help those in need). Now, does this mean that all of these moral standpoints are stupid? Of course not, if we all decided not to help and be nice to one another then the world would be an absolute mess. Does it mean that we’re all just bad, hypocritical people, as the violently forceful charity collectors would have you believe? Again, no- this ‘hypocrisy’ is something that all humans do to some extent, so either the entire human race is fundamentally flawed (in which case the point is not worth arguing) or we feel that looking after ourselves first and foremost before helping others is simply more practical. Should we all turn to communist leadership to try and redress some of these imbalances and remove the moral dilemmas? I won’t even go there.

It’s a little hard to identify a clear moral or conclusion to all of this, except to highlight that moral inconsistency is a natural and very human trait. Some might deplore this state of affairs, but we’ve always known humans are imperfect creatures; not that that gives us a right to give up on being the best we can be.

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.

Fitting in

This is my third post in this little mini-series on the subject of sex & sexuality in general, and this time I would like to focus on the place that sex has in our society. I mean, on the face of it, we as a culture appear to be genuinely embarrassed by its existence a lot of the time, rarely being referred to explicitly if at all (at least certainly not among ‘correct’ and polite company), and making any mention of it a cause of scandal and embarrassment. Indeed, an entire subset of language has seemed to develop over the last few years to try and enable us to talk about sexually-related things without ever actually making explicit references to it- it’s an entire area where you just don’t go in conversation. It’s almost as if polite society has the mental age of a 13 year old in this regard, and is genuinely embarrassed as to its existence.

Compare this to the societal structure of one of our closest relatives, the ‘pygmy great ape’ called the bonobo. Bonobos adopt a matriarchal (female-led) society, are entirely bisexual, and for them sex is a huge part of their social system. If a pair of bonobos are confronted with any new and unusual situation, be it merely the introduction of a cardboard box, their immediate response will be to briefly start having sex with one another almost to act as an icebreaker, before they go and investigate whatever it was that excited them. Compared to bonobos, humans appear to be acting like a bunch of nuns.

And this we must contrast against the fact that sex is something that we are not only designed for but that we actively seek and enjoy. Sigmund Freud is famous for claiming that most of human behaviour can be put down to the desire for sex, and as I have explained in previous place, it makes evolutionary sense for us to both enjoy sex and seek it wherever we can. It’s a fact of life, something very few of us would be comfortable to do without, and something our children are going to have to come to terms with eventually- yet it’s something that culture seems determined to brush under the carpet, and that children are continually kept away from for as long as is physically possible in a last-ditch attempt to protect whatever innocence they have left. So why is this?

Part of the reasoning behind this would be the connection between sex and nakedness, as well as the connection to privacy. Human beings do not, obviously, have thick fur to protect themselves or keep them warm (nobody knows exactly why we lost ours, but it’s probably to do with helping to regulate temperature, which we humans do very well), and as such clothes are a great advantage to us. They can shade us when its warm and allow for more efficient cooling, protect us from harsh dust, wind & weather, keep us warm when we venture into the world’s colder climates, help stem blood flow and lessen the effect of injuries, protect us against attack from predators or one another, help keep us a little cleaner and replace elaborate fur & feathers for all manner of ceremonial rituals. However, they also carry a great psychological value, placing a barrier between our bodies and the rest of the world, and thus giving us a sense of personal privacy about our own bodies. Of particular interest to our privacy are those areas most commonly covered, including (among other things), the genital areas, which must be exposed for sexual activity. This turns sex into a private, personal act in our collective psyche, something to be shared only between the partners involved, and making any exploration of it seem like an invasion of our personal privacy. In effect, then, it would seem the Bible got it the wrong way around- it was clothes that gave us the knowledge and shame of nakedness, and thus the ‘shame’ of sex.

Then we must consider the social importance of sex & its consequences in our society generally. For centuries the entire governmental structure of most of the world was based around who was whose son, who was married to who  and, in various roundabout ways, who either had, was having, or could in the future be having, sex with whom. Even nowadays the due process of law usually means inheritance by either next of kin, spouse or partner, and so the consequences of sex carry immense weight. Even in the modern world, with the invention of contraceptives and abortion and the increasing prevalence of ‘casual sex’, sex itself carries immense societal weight, often determining how you are judged by your peers, your ‘history’ among them and your general social standing. To quote a favourite song of a friend of mine: ‘The whole damn world is just as obsessed/ With who’s the best dressed and who’s having sex’. And so, sex becomes this huge social thing, its pursuit full of little rules and nuances, all about who with who (and even with the where & how among some social groups) and it is simply not allowed to become ‘just this thing everyone does’ like it is with the bonobos. Thus, everything associated with sex & sexuality becomes highly strung and almost political in nature, making it a semi-taboo to talk about for fear of offending someone.

Finally, we must consider the development of the ‘sexual subculture’ that seems to run completely counter to this taboo attitude. For most of human history we have comfortably accepted and even encouraged the existence of brothels and prostitution, and whilst this has become very much frowned upon in today’s culture the position has been filled by strip clubs, lap dancing bars and the sheer mountains of pornography that fill the half-hidden corners of newsagents, small ads and the internet. This is almost a reaction to the rather more prim aloofness adopted by polite society, an acknowledgement and embracing of our enjoyment of sex (albeit one that caters almost exclusively to heterosexual men and has a dubious record for both women’s and, in places, human rights). But because this is almost a direct response to the attitudes of polite culture, it has naturally attracted connotations of being seedy and not respectable. Hundreds of men may visit strip clubs every night, but that doesn’t make it an OK career move for a prominent judge to be photographed walking out of one. Thus, as this sex-obsessed underworld has come into being on the wrong side of the public eye, so sex itself has attracted the same negative connotations, the same sense of lacking in respectability, among the ‘proper’ echelons of society, and has gone even more into the realms of ‘Do Not Discuss’.

But, you might say, sex appears to be getting even more prevalent in the modern age. You’ve mentioned internet porn, but what about the sexualisation of the media, the creation and use of sex symbols, the targeting of sexual content at a steadily younger audience? Good question, and one I’ll give a shot at answering next time…

Studying homosexuality

For part two of this multi-parter on sex & sexuality in one form of another, I would like to turn to the topic that first inspired this series in the first place: homosexuality. This is a subject that is notoriously hard to talk about without offending or angering one group or another, but I’m going to try and consider the subject (please tell me off if I ever refer to it as a problem) objectively, trying to analyse it as a concept. Not that this means I won’t end up using the wrong words at one point or another, but try to believe me when I say I’m not trying to.

From an evolutionary perspective, being gay doesn’t make much sense. Natural selection as a way of ensuring the ‘success’ of a species relies upon passing on genes to the next generation, and this clearly isn’t going to happen if the psychological imperative of a person is to mate with someone who they cannot have children with. It would seem, therefore, that since homosexuality is something not evolutionarily favoured, that it should have died out several million years ago, but this is patently not the case. This makes its root cause something of a poser- not being evolutionarily selected for would seem to root out any genetic cause, but it doesn’t appear to be simply a feature of just our modern society (both Leonardo da Vinci and King William II were probably gay) or even solely our species (bats, dolphins and lions are among a huge group of other animals to display homosexual behaviour). It’s not as if these are isolated cases either- between 8 and 15% of gulls on the Santa Barbara coast practice lesbian mating, and all bonobos (the smallest of the great apes) are bisexual. Compare this to the oft-quoted figure that 10% of human beings are gay, or even some of the other estimates that have been put about; I have heard it claimed that one third of British women are either lesbian or bisexual, whilst Alfred Kinsey, inventor of the notorious Kinsey Scale of Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating (o being totally hetero, 6 totally homo, 1-5 being various degrees of in between) claimed that less than 5% of people were exactly 0 or 6.

Homosexuality is, therefore, clearly nothing new, and from mere observation can certainly not be called ‘unnatural’. Indeed, for those of us who are gay, it clearly feels like the more ‘natural’ way of doing things. Just as the rest of us become attracted to and fall in love with someone in what is perceived the ‘normal’ way, so the precise same procedure is performed by homosexuals, the only difference (of course) being that their objects of affection are of their own gender. The fundamental difference is, then, simply a question of finding the ‘wrong’ group of people attractive compared to the norm, although exactly how and why this difference occurs is still a conundrum that has flummoxed far finer minds than mind.

So, if homosexuality has always formed a part of our existence, why has it attracted all the various degrees of hate that it has over the years? This, at least, we can clearly call a societal thing- the ancient Greeks are famous for their acceptance of homosexuality as a form of love (the Spartans even considering it the highest form), and since it is at least tolerated where else it occurs in the animal kingdom we must presume that the hating of it is something that has sadly developed within human culture. Among teenage boys especially, the very idea of homosexuality is considered kinda disgusting, presumably mostly because it appears so alien to the burgeoning sexual emotions of the majority of them. Then we encounter the fact that wanting to have sex with a man is a ‘naturally’ female trait, and since women have generally been shoved firmly into subservient positions for most of human history this does not hold well for the prospect of homosexuality gaining societal respect. It has also been postulated that the motions of male homosexual intercourse, requiring one of the men to adopt a submissive position and accept the penetration of an orifice that (let’s face it) wasn’t designed for the purpose, is quite a humiliating idea, further enhancing the level of disgust, and making homosexuality just seem ‘wrong’ to many, especially men, from quite a young age. Since young men who generally don’t get told what to do or think have historically tended to take up positions of power (ie sons of important people who tend to follow in their father’s footsteps), this has meant these burgeoning ideas are allowed to remain untempered and find their way into the upper echelons of society. From there, by means of both law (homosexuality has frequent been made illegal in various countries from time to time, when they ever acknowledged it actually exists) or religion (the Catholic Church render any further expansion of this point unnecessary), such views filter down and further reinforce the idea of it all being ‘wrong’. From there, persecution is merely a formality.

OK so… why is this persecution generally aimed at men? This one’s comparatively simple to answer, and the reason is twofold. Firstly, women have, as previously mentioned, tended to be considered less important then men throughout history and lesbian exploits have thus been less likely to be of any societal importance than those of their male counterparts. Secondly… well basically, straight men have tended to be in charge and set the rules, and straight men find lesbians sexy. And I’m not even going to try analysing that particular fact.

I’m not really aiming to try and draw any meaningful conclusions from this post, just to throw around a few ideas and explore a concept or two. Next post I’ll be sticking to another broadly sex-related theme, although I can’t tell you which as I have absolutely no idea.

Web vs. Money

Twice now, this blog has strayed onto the subject of legal bills attempting to in some way regulate the internet, based on the idea that it violates certain copyright restrictions, and everything suggests that SOPA, PIPA and ACTA will not be the last of such attempts (unless ACTA is so successful that it not only gets ratified, but also renders the internet functionally brain-dead). However, a while ago I caught myself wondering exactly why the internet gets targeted with these bills at all. There are two angles to take with regards to this problem; why there is any cause for the internet to be targeted with these bills, and why this particular problem has bills dedicated to it, rather than simply being left alone.

To begin with the second one of these- why the web? Copyright violation most definitely existed before the internet’s invention, and many a pirate business even nowadays may be run without even venturing online. All that’s required is a copy of whatever you’re pirating, some cheap software, and a lot of blank discs (or USB’s or hard drives or whatever). However, such operations tended to be necessarily small-scale in order to avoid detection, and because the market really isn’t large enough to sustain a larger-scale operation. It’s rather off-putting actually acquiring pirated stuff in real life, as it feels slightly wrong- on the web, however, it’s far easier and more relaxed. Thus, rather than a small, fairly meaningless operation, on the internet (which is, remember a throbbing network with literally billions of users) piracy is huge- exactly how big is hard to tell, but it’s a fairly safe bet that it’s bigger than a few blokes flogging ripped off DVD’s out of the boot of a car. This therefore presents a far more significant loss of potential earnings than the more traditional market, and is subsequently a bigger issue.

However, perhaps more important than the scale of the operation is that it’s actually a fairly easy one to target. Modern police will struggle to catch massive-scale drugs lords or crime barons, because the real world is one in which it’s very easy to hide, sneak, bury information and bribe. It can be impossible to find the spider at the centre of the web, and even if he can be found, harder still to pin anything on him. Online however is a different story- sites violating the law are easy to find for anyone with a web connection, and their IP address is basically put on display as a massive ‘LOOK HERE’ notice, making potential criminals easy to find and locate. The web is a collective entity, the virtual equivalent of a large and fairly open ghetto- it’s very easy to collectively target and wrap up the whole shabang. Put simply, dealing with the internet, if a bill were to get through, would be very, very easy

But… why the cause for dispute in the first place? It’s an interesting quandary, because the web doesn’t consider what it’s doing to be wrong anyway. This is partly because much of what a corporation might consider piracy online isn’t technically illegal- as long as nothing gets downloaded or made a hard copy of, streaming a video isn’t against the law. It’s the virtual equivalent of inviting your mates round to watch a film (although technically, since a lot of commercial DVD’s are ‘NOT FOR PUBLIC PERFORMANCE’, this is strictly speaking illegal too- not so online as there is no way to prove it’s not from a public performance copy). Downloading copyrighted content is illegal and is punishable by existing law, but this currently often goes unregulated because the problem is so widespread and the punishment for the crimes so small that it is simply too much bother for effective regulation. The only reason Napster got hit so hard when it was offering free downloads is because it was shifting stuff by the millions, and because it was the only one out there. One of the great benefits that bills like SOPA offered to big corporations was a quick, easy solution to crack down on copyright violators, and which didn’t entail lengthy, costly and inconvenient court proceedings.

However, downloading is a far smaller ‘problem’ than people streaming stuff from Megavideo and YouTube, which happens on a gigantic scale- think how many views the last music video you saw on YouTube had. This is what corporations are attempting to stop- the mass distribution of their content via free sharing of it online, which to them represents a potentially huge loss in income. To what extent it does cost them money, and to what extent it actually gets them more publicity is somewhat up for debate, but in the minds of corporations its enough of a problem to try and force through SOPA and PIPA.

This, really is the nub of the matter- the web and the world of business have a different definition of what constitutes violation of copyrighted content. To the internet, all the streaming and similar is simply sharing, and this is a reflection of the internet’s overarching philosophy- that everything should be free and open to everyone, without corporate influence (a principle which is astoundingly not adhered to when one thinks of the level of control exerted by Facebook and Google, but that’s another story in itself). To a corporation however, streaming on the huge scale of the web is stealing- simple as that. And it is this difference of opinion that has led to such controversy surrounding web-controlling bills.

If the next bill proposed to combat online piracy were simply one that increased the powers corporations could take the prevent illegal downloading of copyrighted content, I don’t think anyone could really complain- it’s already definitely illegal, those doing it know that they really shouldn’t and if anyone wants to grumble then they can probably stream it anyway. The contentious part of all the bills thus far have been those which attempt to restrict the streaming and sharing of such content online- and this is one battle that is not going to go away. At the moment, the law is on the side of the web. Whether that will stay the case remains to be seen…