Save us, please, from the tyranny of the non-existent ‘ordinary person’.

An ordinary person is incapable of understanding sarcasm or irony and thus takes things literally instead. An ordinary person doesn’t like any fruity or challenging activities – they go to work, probably in a factory or a shop, and they come home and watch Coronation Street and Eastenders then put their 2.4 children to bed.

An ordinary person has no truck with scientific mumbo jumbo, or other ‘nonsense’ like foreigners. Maybe they read the Daily Mail or the Sun. They lead a simple, uncomplicated life perfectly adapted for a simple, uncomplicated brain.

Except, uh oh, this stereotype of a dimwitted ‘ordinary’ person is just that. There is no such thing.

So, of course, when Judge Jacqueline Davies decided to condemn Paul J Chambers, ruling that the tweet he’d written..

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!

… as “obviously menacing” and that any “ordinary person” would find it so, I felt like I wanted to go on a violent rampage myself. Perhaps I’ll blow up a few court houses, or pull the ears off the Judge’s cat, something like that.

But pity Paul J Chambers: Condemned by a stereotype, condemned because the Judge thinks we’re all so witless, dull and childlike in our comprehension of the subtleties of adult communication that Paul has injured us and must be punished, by the State, on our behalf.

But, despite that, we should all thank the Sweet Lord for this Judge, I say. She understands that we ordinary people need protecting from menaces like Paul. You can’t have people telling jokes on Twitter, that would lead to chaos! It’s impossible to communicate that you’re being sarcastic or ironic electronically and you have to rely on context and pre-established criteria to understand what people are saying! THAT’S JUST WAY TOO COMPLICATED FOR US ORDINARY PEOPLE!

No, I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being sincerely flattering, obviously so, and, yes, any ordinary person would agree.

I’m sometimes amazed that there’s anyone who, with a straight face and a complete lack of shame, can condone or approve of torture.

It’s part of a package of things that ‘real’ and ‘serious’ politicians feel they must subscribe to once they’re in power and they take onto their shoulders the responsibility to protect every citizen in the country no matter what it takes or what it might cost.

In abandoning morality – in the form of approving of torture, or willingness to use information obtained under torture and being willing to erode rights we won under Magna Carta – they shift the blame onto us. It’s our fault. We must be protected, and whilst they themselves aren’t happy about it, they understand their solemn duty to protect.

Yet, really, I’m pretty sure the deal is that we expect them to protect us from, specifically, foreign threats and domestic criminals within reason and, preferably without actually making things worse or becoming a problem far bigger than the threat of terrorism.

And we’re grown up about this too. We assume that we’re not protected perfectly and that, sometimes, we’ll get lucky and there’ll be a positive intervention of some kind and that’s great.

Yet the truth is that our only real protection – such as it is – are the limits on the number of people who combine the desire, the motivation and the means to commit terrorist atrocities and then manage to go from inception to completion without anyone finding out or getting suspicious, without blowing themselves up prematurely or without simply doing it wrong.

Anti-terror efforts tend to concentrate on the means – find the bomb before it’s detonated, keep the information out of the public domain, limit the supply of potentially dangerous materials – and it’s in this murky territory that the pro-torture people lurk.

“What,” they ask, “about someone who knows where there’s a dirty bomb?” Or perhaps they muse about whether it’s okay to use information already obtained.

Yet these are the great hypothetical questions and they all reduce down to the ends justify the means and it’s how people have justified every repulsive crime, horror and abuse ever committed. It’s because of this, because you can justify anything that we need to be more careful in evaluating these things. Sure, these questions are never that simple, but where is the “greater good” here?

In truth no torturer begins an interrogation certain they will extract useful information (otherwise, duh, they wouldn’t need to be torturing someone). Nor can any information obtained ever be regarded as credible without being verified and checked by other means because, again, the source is an individual under duress. We don’t admit such evidence in court precisely because it has no measurable value.

People only get tortured because someone reckons an individual is guilty of something or might, one day, be guilty of something. Lacking actual proof of guilt, the only real hope is to cause them as much suffering as necessary until the consequences of confessing seem preferable to continued torture.

The basic problem is that we wouldn’t want to torture innocent people (and really once you’ve proven someone’s guilt then torture becomes an act of sheer sadism), and yet since the time of King John we’re all innocent until proven guilty.

It doesn’t say, “well, you know, unless they’re terror suspects, in which case better safe than sorry, what ho?”

I’m willing to live in a society that ignores information obtained via torture. The increased risk – if there even is an increase that could even be measured – is a price I’m willing to pay in order to protect the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” and deny Governments the power to use physical force and psychological warfare to extract confessions out of people. I tend to believe that is the greater good, that the overall amount of harm done is actually reduced.

Let’s call it the ‘Don’t be a dick’ school of politics and let’s save torture for those who really deserve it: Reality TV Producers and contestants… um.. no… wait…

I’m taking part in NaNoWriMo, which is a challenge to write a 50,000 word Novel during November.

I’ve tried before – and failed, but this time I’m approaching it differently this time. First, I don’t have a master overarching plot already worked out. Turns out a ‘fill in the blanks’ approach to writing isn’t for me, while seeing where characters seem to want to go themselves is. Perhaps I’m just more interested in the premise this time. All I’m willing to say, right now, is that the Novel currently has the name of ‘Jones Versus the Dark’.

Secondly I’m assuming that by the end of the month, if I’ve hit the target of 50,000 words, I’m likely to be a better fiction writer than I am right at this instant. It might not sound like much, but it gives me permission not to worry about how good or well written this early stuff is. Better to review this stuff and improve it after I’ve had the benefit of a month’s worth of experience and better understand exactly what this story is about and what my ‘style’ might be.

The schedule for NaNoWriMo is somewhat punishing, especially with other commitments, so I suspect I’ll be updating this blog even less. I just thought it might be an idea to explain why.

What is the Tea Party? It’s an umbrella under which US political activists, supporters and politicians can sit, marking them as supporters of the Tea Party’s mission.

The mission, as printed, to campaign for lower taxes and a smaller state. It is, officially, concerned only with matters economic. In this regard it’s quite libertarian indeed – it leaves matters of ‘personal conscience’ to the individual, exactly where it should be.

Is that it? Not really. For the true significance you have to understand a bit about how US politics actually works.

The mechanism for political change is the US Open Primary system – very different from the British party system, where anyone – literally anyone – can use the Primary system to get themselves selected as either the GOP or Democratic candidate. Traditionally the ruling bodies of these two parties – the DNC and RNC – have been able to get ‘their guys’ in place without much difficulty.

So this is what Daily Kos and the Tea Party are all about – they’re about skipping the DNC and the RNC and talking directly to the grassroots registered voters, getting them involved with primaries and getting candidates in seats they actually want to vote for. Obama was the Grassroots guy. Hilary Clinton was the DNC’s choice. In the end the DNC did not get their way – Democrat voters did.

So, in many respects, just as the Democratic Party has been transformed by grassroots activism so the Tea Party seems to be having a similar effect on the GOP. There’s enough people involved with the Tea Party, or sympathetic to it, that it has a powerful effect on primaries.

My gut feeling on this – and that’s all it is – is that it really marks a continued polarisation of American Political Life. Grassroots movements don’t campaign for more moderation and compromise with the opposition – they demand the opposite. If both the GOP and the Democrat Party become entirely controlled by their respective grassroots then I think we can expect more extreme politicians of the kind we simply couldn’t even imagine here in the UK.

Is it a good thing? Well, it’s democratic and it’s empowering, but lost in the middle are the people who don’t think that you have to choose between Big Government/Small Church and Small Government/Big Church, and that’s when things start to get nausea inducing.

Much has been written and said about the Tea Party being ‘astroturf’. The true test of a Grassroots movement is whether or not it actually works. The Tea Party does – its supporters are very real, casting real votes and influencing real elections. It’s filled a niche that people wanted filling. The source doesn’t actually matter. It’s a real political movement and the fight against it has moved on from claims of ‘astroturf’ to general queries about the sanity of its candidates.

In reality, despite – or perhaps because of – the Tea Party’s focus entirely on tax and spending and indifference to everything else, it’s proven itself to be a handy vehicle for people with (what I consider to be) theocratic tendencies to bypass the GOP’s ruling body.

Part of me thinks that the rise of religion as an important part of the American Right Wing politician’s identity is a reaction to the general belief that liberal (in the British sense, not the American sense) economics are somehow “evil” and that it’s supporters lack morals. Certainly, that’s the problem faced by the British Coalition, who by merely taking spending levels back a few years are presented as representatives of Hell here on Earth, with no moral direction and no desire to achieve anything other than to make poor people suffer as much as possible.

By presenting themselves as people of strong faith and moral convictions this line of attack is somehow neutralised or circumvented. They just need to give people a reason to feel that voting for a particular candidate is a Good Thing To Do.

And that, really, is why the Tea Party ain’t my Cup of Tea. It needs one small change – that its candidates and politicians offer the people they will ultimately represent the same freedom of conscience that the Tea Party grants them, that they will never support Government interference in people’s private lives. That means letting people choose for themselves. It means not using the public money as a means to teach Christian propaganda to children, too.

Sadly that’s not going to happen. The Grassroots will see to it. The choice for Americans is between political and religious freedom OR economic freedom. They’re moving further and further away from the distinctly grassroots, non-mainstream dream of all three.

Ruthless, evil Capitalism. Under it, jobs exist to do useful productive work that absolutely needs doing. Companies employ the least number of people they can get away with in order to provide a specific service or goods, and they’ll always be trying to find ways to do the same job with fewer people.

Jobs themselves are a mixed blessing and a curse. In return for turning up at a specific time on specific days and doing a specific quantity of work, you get paid a fixed rate for that. You get the money no matter what. It is a direct trade of freedom for security.

Throw the public sector into the mix, where the ‘company’ can never go ‘bust’ (not strictly true though) and suddenly there’s the option to keep people working for the sheer sake of people continuing to have jobs, because it’s ‘nice’. No dirty competition. No dirty market forces. Just human beings loving and caring for each other.

But why should public sector workers be able to trade *my* freedom for their *their* security. That’s not part of the deal. You take my money, you take my freedom. Literally. Leave me living hand to mouth and my life choices are reduced to zero, and yet that’s exactly what the current burden of tax does to the vast majority of people whom all this tax is supposed to be in aid of.

You trade your own freedom and it’s none of my business, but my freedom? That I have a problem with.

Public sector jobs are at the mercy of the will of the public who pay for them. What we give we can take away, on a whim, for whatever reason we like. We don’t even need a reason. We’re paying for it, you’re ours, we own you. I’d rather we didn’t, but I’m democratically outvoted on that one. We like having National Butt-monkeys, apparently.

For this reason the public sector aren’t blessed – they’re cursed. Only the public sector can face redundancies and that be a cause of celebration for the people who pay for it. When Woolworths collapsed, people were universally dismayed by the news and worried about the staff. When a Quango gets axed, people jump for joy.

The lesson here isn’t that people should care more about the public sector. It’s that people shouldn’t work in the public sector if they don’t like the idea of having something much, much, much worse than market forces in control of their immediate future. At least competition’s fair. If you’re doing something people want, you’re going to survive. If you’re not, you won’t. In the public sector it’s about how strong your union is or how kindly disposed the public are to your department or your function. Usefulness or otherwise doesn’t come into it. That’s a damned way to live.

UPDATE: I was damned grumpy when I wrote this. I should have added, “which is why we tend to choose to treat the military and the police and others very, very nicely “)