Longform
Why Can't We Find Out What the Green Party is Proposing?
I’ve been hearing about the Green Party’s conference motion against ‘Zionism’, and how it seemingly is deeply antisemitic, and will effectively have them supporting Hamas. I didn’t want to write about it without reading the actual motion. But that appears not to be possible unless you’re a party member. It’s behind a login requirement. I can’t find anywhere that actually quotes the motion.
The Guardian and the BBC don’t seem to have reported on it at all. The Daily Mail has something behind a paywall, but its headline claims the motion ‘would make it party policy to back Hamas terror attacks’. The Canary’s article on it1 speaks warmly about it, saying it ‘could be a game changer for UK politics.’
Well, yes, and not in a good sense.
It’s one thing to be against some actions of the current Israeli government. Quite another to support — even tacitly — an organisation dedicated to the eradication of the entire nation and people of Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah are Nazis, and all people of the left should oppose them and their aims just as much as we opposed the National Front and the British National Party.
But without being able to read the motion, it’s hard to know how extreme it is. You might argue it’s a private matter for the party, unless and until it becomes their policy. Up to a point, that seems fair. But I think political parties have a duty of transparency. They want people to join them and vote for them. Therefore they should let the public know the kind of things they’re talking about.
And the mainstream press should be reporting on it.
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And hey, who knew The Canary still existed? ↩︎
The First Band I Ever Saw, 46 Years Later
As I teased, Saturday saw me and my friend Johnbuggerdefanoblog.wordpress.com heading for Camden once again to see Stiff Little Fingers. It is far from the first time I’ve seen them. They were the first band I ever saw, back in 1980, at the Glasgow Apollo, and they might be the band I’ve seen most often. I’m not sure, but they’re certainly up there with The Pogues, The Fall, and James.
But before they got going the other night, there was a support band. The Meffs are that slightly unusual format, a two-piece. And in a mirror image of perhaps the most famous band of that format, they have a female singer/guitarist and a male drummer (and singer).
They were pretty damn good. Noisy, shouty, melodic at times, and well worth a listen. Plus the guitarist, using the incredible power of a pitchshifter (the effects pedal, not the band), we must suppose, created an incredible bass sound along with her lead/rhythm work. Remarkable.
And then on to SLF. They tour in March most years, and to be honest there were no surprises — one new song, which was pretty good. But I enjoyed it a lot more than the last time, and that was partly about atmosphere. I don’t really care for the Roundhouse as a venue. It’s a great building, but I feel like, for a rock venue, the ceiling is too high. Not to the detriment of the sound, it just feels too open above your head.
Which doesn’t make much sense, given the atmosphere can be great at an open-air gig. But there you go, it’s a feeling. However, that’s what I was feeling before I went. This time it was much better, and I think that’s at least partly due to getting there early, seeing the whole of the support act, and generally getting into it. They don’t call it a warm-up slot for nothing.
They love a backdrop, so SLF, as you can see there.
Next year it’ll be 50 since they started out, so we should expect something big. Or not, but I hope they’ll be back, and us too.
📚 Books 2026, 5: Red Menace, by Joe Thomas
Red Menace is the sequel to White Riot. As the first book starts with the 1978 anti-Nazi festival in Victoria Park, this one starts at Live Aid. We have similar backstage access, with Suzi Scialfa, photographer and writer, and her partner Keith, sound man to The Style Council.
Thomas does a very clever thing in this book: he makes us be sympathetic to, on the side of, one of the main characters, Parker, who is a spycop, with all that implies. He’s in a relationship with a woman who doesn’t know he’s an undercover police officer. He’s gathering information on left-wing and community protest movements.
He seems to be doing it for good reasons — one of the main crimes he’s trying to father information on is police corruption. This is a time when Stoke Newington Police station was the source of much of the illegal drug traffic in Hackney, a hotbed of police corruption. Parker and his handler are working agains that. At least partly.
In the last one Parker was infiltrating the National Front, which makes me wonder why nobody in the left-wing organisations he’s involved with in this one are aware of that. I suppose you didn’t really do background checks if you were a community organisation on the Broadwater Farm estate, or union organisers in the Wapping dispute. Those being two of the real-world political struggles the novel covers.
It’s told from multiple viewpoints again, most of them characters from the previous novel, and mostly in third person. There are a couple of the younger characters who get first-person sections. And one mysterious gang-boss character whose italicised chapters are in the second person. We’re told ‘you’ are behind various criminal activities around corrupting land deals in the London Docklands redevelopment, corruption involving ‘Right to Buy’, and so on.
I’m not sure why exactly Thomas chooses to do things in this way — particularly the different grammatical persons. Perhaps to help with keeping the different voices distinct; perhaps just as an exercise for himself (or to show off, you might say). It could be confusing, but it never is.
As before, the story is not finished, with a third volume planned. But most things that concern us in this book are wound up, for better or worse, and stories in the real world don’t really have endings, do they?
The striking thing about these books is how he weaves his fictional characters into real-world events that he — and most of his readers, I’d imagine — lived through. Or at least lived through the time in which they happened. And how he has real people interacting with his fictional ones. He gets away with it, I imagine, because he doesn’t have real people say anything they didn’t actually say, and he cites his sources. Political pamphlets, interviews with The Style Council, and so on.
It’s tense at times, and I recommend it.
Identity Is The Crisis, Can't You See?
I recently read Alembic Offerings, by hippieish writer Erik Davies. It included this line, which intrigued me:
I cut my teeth in the post-structuralist 1980s, more interested in difference than identity.
It reminded me of how I had long been confused by identity politics. That is, for years — possibly decades — when I heard the term ‘identity politics’, I had supposed it to be about individual identity, about how each of us is different.
Which means I must have actually been confused by some of the things I read that used the term, since it means almost exactly the opposite.
My misunderstanding came from the idea of proving one’s identity, of identifying yourself, showing identity documents. Identifying a suspect, even. They all mean demonstrating that a person is a specific, unique individual.
Whereas identity politics is about memberships of groups.
It feels like a linguistic shift. I am a member of several groups, but none of them uniquely identifies me. Even the intersection of all of them doesn’t do that. So why does the politics of group membership get tagged with the term ‘identity’?
Well it turns out the Latin root of the word relates to similarity:
mid 16th century (in the sense ‘quality of being identical’): via French from late Latin identitas, from Latin idem ‘same’.
to quote the Mac OS dictionary. But different fields use it differently. From Wikipedia’s Identity (social science) :
Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, or expressions that characterize a person or a group.
Identity emerges during childhood as children start to comprehend their self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout different stages of life. Identity is shaped by social and cultural factors and how others perceive and acknowledge one’s characteristics. The etymology of the term “identity” from the Latin noun identitas emphasizes an individual’s “sameness with others”. Identity encompasses various aspects such as occupational, religious, national, ethnic or racial, gender, educational, generational, and political identities, among others.
But in its Identity (philosophy) we find:
In metaphysics, identity (from Latin: identitas, “sameness”) is the relation each thing bears only to itself. The notion of identity gives rise to many philosophical problems, including the identity of indiscernibles (if x and y share all their properties, are they one and the same thing?), and questions about change and personal identity over time (what has to be the case for a person x at one time and a person y at a later time to be one and the same person?).
So the politics version appears to come from the social science use of the word, unsurprisingly.
Funny old word, identity. I think, like Erik Davies, I’m more interested in difference than identity, in the group-membership sense.
Claim Chowdering Gruber's Claim Chowder
John Gruber makes a ridiculous assertion, or so it seems to me. In criticising Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic’s claim that ‘AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in [their] software in a year’, Gruber takes things the other way:
It may well be true that 90 percent of the lines of programming code that are written today, Friday 13 March 2026, will have been generated by AI. If anything, it’s probably a higher percentage.
This seems like nonsense to me. Certainly AI-generated code is being created, and some of it released. But I work in software development, in a real company making real software that moves people’s money around. There’s some experimentation going on, people will use it to try things out, or better understand things, as I mentioned a few weeks ago. But there are millions of lines of code out there being written and managed every day by real humans.
And when you’re working in a highly-regulated industry like the payment card one as I am, or medical systems, say, it seems unlikely to me that we will ever let significant applications into the world if they were not written by humans.
Maybe I’m being naive, at least by saying ’ever’: if there’s one certainty it’s that things will change. But the idea that we’re already above the 90% AI-generated mark? Sure, Anthropic are likely to be at that level. They build these tools. Eating your own dogfood and all that. But for normal, day-to-day development? It just doesn’t ring true to me.
Plus, of course, software development is about a lot more than writing code. But that’s a discussion for another time.
Purity Poetry
A great post from Ian Betteridge, called Zen fascists will control you…. Dead Kennedys fans will recognise the title as a quote from ‘California Über Alles’, their single and album track from 1979. Ian builds on it to write a history of the various movements, ideas, cults, that have believed or supposed that humans can be improved or perfected, by diet, exercise, drugs, physical enhancement…
Or by following the word of an ’enlightened’ leader, for example.
He sees the overarching theme as purity:
This is the thing about the politics of purity that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn’t require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.
Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It’s how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you’ve made a wrong turn.
He traces the idea through Joni Mitchell singing ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ to the Human Potential Movement and the Whole Earth Catalog, to est, and from there to the modern biohacking idea1, and billionaires trying to extend their lives using the blood of young people.
You can draw a straight line from est to the productivity cult of contemporary tech culture, to the biohacking movement, to the particular flavour of self-optimisation that has become the dominant religion of the Silicon Valley overclass.
And connects it to the Nazis:
The line from the organic farm to the death camp is not straight. It requires many other things to be true simultaneously. But the fact that it is possible to draw the line at all should give us pause, every time we find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very, very concerned with purity — of whatever kind.
It’s an excellent piece, and the guy’s a great writer. So it slightly surprises me that, after he writes:
somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.
he doesn’t extend his argument to the state of the modern ‘woke’ idea. Detached from its origins in Black US culture, its adherents demand such a strong acceptance of all parts of the ‘omnicause’, that any disagreement about one tenet of the belief system can lead to ostracism. Purity politics at its purest.
Or so it seems, at least. And indeed, Ian appears to insulate or distance himself from such an attack in his first footnote:
I should make this clear up front: when I talk in this essay about “purity politics”, what I’m not talking about the kind of instant condemnation that happens on social media platforms (Bluesky, I am looking at you). That’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m interested in right now.
Those attackers on Bluesky sound like exactly the type of hyper-woke folks I’m thinking of.
OK, he’s mainly talking about the danger of these beliefs from today’s super-rich; but they need foot soldiers. Mobs can be as dangerous as rich individuals.
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Which I see doesn’t have a proper Wikipedia article, but there are various related links at that page, and if the proper article is ever written it should go there and this footnote will be obsolete. ↩︎
The Olympic Park, the V&A, and Bowie
The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) is in Kensington in West London. At least, its original and main site is. It has others. The newest (I believe) is in the Olympic Park, over in East London, quite near me. They call it the V&A East Storehouse, and it’s in a building that I think was the broadcast centre in 2012, and afterwards was a shared-use office-for-hire sort of place, I believe.
I guess that business must have dried up, because the museum takes up the entirety of the building now, from what I can tell. And it’s a really intriguing way of presenting parts of their vast collection. It’s a bit like an Ikea warehouse. On tall shelves, over three floors, items are arranged in seemingly random order and mostly without grouping, and minimal information. There’s a web site and QR codes so you can look things up, at least as to a title, description, and date.
I like this way of seeing a museum’s collection. The randomness leads to interesting juxtapositions: you might get a 14th century mahogany chest next to a 1960s electric guitar; a Piaggio scooter, decorated by a modern artist, sits with ancient pottery, and so on.
There’s a good article about it at Visit London, with photos that give a flavour of it.
Our main reason for going there was the permanent collection of David Bowie’s archive. Only a tiny fraction of his huge collection is on display, but it’s worth a look. Mostly photographs and letters and such, and some costumes and the odd guitar or synthesiser.
My favourite thing was a rejection letter Bowie received in 1968, saying he wasn’t quite right for the label. Which was Apple Records! Can you imagine what it would have been like if Bowie had joined the Beatles’ label?
Automatic Introspection
On texts created by prompts. If you can express your meaning in a prompt, why not just send out the prompt?
Ablative Irony
Also via Kottke comes this article by Claudio Nastruzzi at The Register, where he talks of ‘semantic ablation’ in text generated by ‘AI’:
When an author uses AI for “polishing” a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and “blood” reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks “clean” to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its “ciccia” – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.
It’s about how LLMs — probability-based machines, after all — tend to push text in a generic direction, away from a writer’s unique voice, towards a common mean.
So let’s all not do that.
The irony is, I was trying to look up an unfamiliar word in that quote — ‘ciccia’. The dictionaries installed on my Mac had nothing useful, and nor did Wikipedia. DuckDuckGo’s search only came up with uses of the word as a family or brand name. I used the ‘!g’ syntax to send the query to Google.
It must be the first time I’ve had to do that in quite a while. I’ve heard people mention — complain about — the ‘AI Overview’ the Big G provides, but I’m not sure I’ve every seen it before now. But it was what had the answer:
informal Italian term for meat or, idiomatically, body fat (flab).
Clearly Nastruzzi is using it as we might say ’the meat of an argument’, or similar.
Google’s AI thing does not cite its source, though, and none of the next few search results give a reference for that use in English, though one is to the meaning of the Italian word.
Anyway, my recommendation to all fellow writers, would-be writers, and people who want to or have to communicate by writing: express yourself. Don’t let American machines do it for you (and use as many em-dashes as you need, as I have done here).
Asbestos Intrusions
AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok.
Cory Doctorow’s latest piece is the script of a talk he gave on ‘AI’, or more specifically, ‘how to be a good AI critic.’ He’s writing a book on the same subject.
I found it weirdly comforting in one specific area. That of the supposed copyright-infringement of the training of LLMs. Cory explains why it did not, in fact, infringe copyright:
First, you scrape a bunch of web-pages. This is unambiguously legal under present copyright law. You do not need a license to make a transient copy of a copyrighted work in order to analyze it, otherwise search engines would be illegal. Ban scraping and Google will be the last search engine we ever get, the Internet Archive will go out of business
And he goes on from there, explaining why the subsequent steps in training also do not infringe. Some would disagree, of course, and many would say they put their work on the web with a ‘Not for commercial use’ type of licence, such as a Creative Commons one.1
Which is fair enough too. I don’t think many would disagree with the idea that using the web to train these things was unethical; even more so with using pirated books. But it wasn’t strictly in violation of copyright (at least the current state of US copyright).
Why do I find that comforting? What I mean is, it removes or slightly reduces one of the reasons to be opposed to, or appalled by, these prediction machines, which I alluded to in one of my earlier thoughts about the matter. And in doing so maybe helps me in my quest to understand my own feelings, by at least reducing the number of things I have to consider.
Something like that, anyway. Read the whole of Cory’s piece, it’s very good.
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I have done so myself in the past, though my site doesn’t currently show any licence. ↩︎
Essentials Playlist, Allegedly
This was an Apple-Music-generated playlist. It considers the following to be my ’essentials’, as of yesterday.
- The Fall — Kicker Conspiracy
- The Velvet Underground — White Light/White Heat
- James — What For
- John Cale — Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend
- The Beatles — I Am the Walrus
- Joe Strummer — Gangsterville
- Warren Zevon — Something Bad Happened to a Clown
- New Order — Your Silent Face
- David Bowie — The Motel
- Kenickie — Spies
- Big Country — Harvest Home
- The Stranglers — Dagenham Dave (1996 Remastered Version)
- 10,000 Maniacs — My Mother the War
- Cocteau Twins — From the Flagstones
- Wet Leg — Convincing
- Radiohead — Anyone Can Play Guitar
- Sonic Youth — What We Know
- The Long Blondes — Separated By Motorways
- Arctic Monkeys — A Certain Romance
- Ramones — Baby, I Love You
- The View — Same Jeans
- Stiff Little Fingers — Go For It (Remastered)
- Grizzly Bear — While You Wait for the Others (BBC Maida Vale Session)
- The Big Pink — Dominos
- Thea Gilmore — Heart String Blues
I can see where it’s coming from, to a degree. The Fall, of course, and I’ve been playing them a lot recently for reasons I’ll go into later. Joe is there (though not The Clash), The Velvets, John Cale on his own (though not Lou). James, SLF of course (but the strange choice of their only instrumental).
All fine. Odd choice of Bowie track, but then, I did play through all his later albums recently, for reasons that I also might go into later.
10,000 Maniacs, though? I hardly know the track (though I like it), and I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an album by them. I don’t much like Arctic Monkeys, though that song is fine. But the Grizzly Bear one? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything by them, including that one.
Oh yeah, and a very odd choice of Warren Zevon track.
It closes well, though: I love that Thea Gilmore track.
But you’ve got to wonder what goes into the algorithm that generates this kind of thing.
📚 Books 2026, 3: How to Seal Your Own Fate, by Kristen Perrin
As I said a couple of days ago, the second Castle Knoll Files book isn’t quite as good as the first. It’s a fun enough read, but it feels slight as a work of detective fiction, compared to, say, Christie or Rowling, the main crime writers I’ve read recently.
And there are some incongruities. The writer is American, though she has lived in the UK for years, and it shows. Especially in the parts that are written as being a diary from 1967 (the main narrative is present day). Modern terms are used in ways that they wouldn’t have been back then. No examples come to mind right now, but I might update this if they do.
And there are occasions of dialogue that reads more like exposition. People just don’t talk like that.
Apart from those relatively minor points, I enjoyed it a lot, and will doubtless get the third book, which is due out in April. I wonder both for how long Perrin will be able to keep coming up with titles that match the style; and for how long our intrepid investigator, Annie Adams, will be able to find cold cases in great-aunt’s notes.
Watched: ¡Nae Pasaran! 🎥
¡Nae Pasaran! is a great wee documentary about some workers at a Rolls Royce plant in East Kilbride (near Glasgow), who refused to repair the jet engines for Hawker Hunter aircraft belonging to the Chilean air force, because of Pinochet’s coup and atrocities.
The filmmaker, Felipe Bustos Sierra, is the son of Chilean exiles, and he manages to track down various people in Chile who were connected to the events. Former air force officers who refused to support the coup and who were arrested and tortured thereby. An air force general who did serve in Pinochet’s murderous regime, but wasn’t flying the day they bombed the parliament building, honest guv!
There were eight engines in East Kilbride for maintenance when one of the workers realised they were Chilean. As a union shop steward he ‘blacked’ them: marked them as disputed and not to be worked on.
Eventually they were moved outside. After six months in the Scottish weather, we learn, even crated up, they would be useless.
Well worth a watch if you can track it down (It was available to buy on Vimeo). A celebration of international workers’ solidarity, and reminder of a time when unions were strong in this country.
Little Lost Machine
A little while ago, which turns out to have been June 2024, I microposted saying I ought to write about my thoughts on the current state of what people like to call AI. LLM-based prediction machines, some might say. Then about a year later I briefly wrote again about my negative reaction to the whole idea.
But I didn’t go into detail. And I’m still not going to; at least not today. I have several thousand words of attempted essays, if that’s not a tautology1, wherein I try to understand my own thoughts and feelings.
And time passes. And the development of the things is lightning fast. It’s a moving target that annoys me.
Still, I do have thoughts. And feelings. And the best way to understand them is to write about them. And the best way to write about them is publicly. Maybe. So I’m going to try writing about them here. A series of short posts around that theme. This is the first.
Maybe I’ll give them their own category, though I have too many categories as it is. I discovered it’s hard to search my blog for ‘AI’. Micro.blog’s search is good, but that’s just such a common set of letters. Weirdly, it brought up all my Crucial Tracks entries, as if it was also finding the ‘IA’ in ‘crucial’.
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What with ’essay’ originally meaning ‘attempt’. ↩︎