Rob Newman

The importance of being idle

From today's G2:

A new report says that we waste three hours a day faffing around, doing nothing in particular, pootling, dawdling, pottering, hanging about. The survey was carried out by the Learning and Skills Council, who, not surprisingly, argued we should instead use those three hours to Learn some Skills.

I beg to differ. Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing.

Faffing of course does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens. Take the new BlackBerry ads. An unsmiling Teutonic model, a supreme non-faffer, boasts about the number of things he or she manages to get done in a day, thanks to their BlackBerry. Clearly these sorts of ideals are designed to make us faffers feel bad. Well, don't.

Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden. Go to the shed with the intention of tidying up and instead fall asleep. Make mental notes. Read every single word of the newspaper - even the job ads - before getting down to work. Lose yourself in erotic reveries. Pat your pockets. Resolve to be more organised in future. Be useless.

Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back. In 1966, John Lennon memorably asked people to leave him alone because after all, he was only sleeping, and I urge the busybodies to do the same: after all, I'm only faffing.

Every kid owns a toy gun ...

... but one SNP councillor likes to take his children to the Kashmiri border to teach them how to use real ones.

"Specialists neither in fatwas nor in military affairs"

The excellent Frank Gardner chronicles how Islamic scholars — including one who literally fought alongside bin Laden — are denouncing al-Qaeda in a further indication of the rejection of terror.

UPDATE: Quite by contrast to Gardner's piece, Matthew d'Ancona writes at the Spectator website that "10 years after the US Embassy attacks [in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which led President Clinton to order rocket attacks], al-Qaeda is winning":

We agonise about "hearts and minds", about the threat to Magna Carta, about the military consequences of 9/11 and the appropriate timetable for withdrawing from Iraq. AQ is winning because there is more introspection and hand-wringing in the West than there is united determination to defeat the enemy. It is as simple as that.

There's something in this — something similar to what Tony Blair said at the conclusion of the 3-part interview with him hosted by David Aaronovitch earlier this year, when he worried that some of our enemies believe that we don't have the long-term struggle for the fight against this extremism and that they can "outlast" us — but on a more objective assessment of where we are militarily and politically, it's hard to agree with d'Ancona. As is pointed out in the comments to his piece, the only explicitly pro-al-Qaeda government, the Taliban's, is no more; a pro-Western democracy now exists in Iraq; and countries which have suffered atrocities at the group's hands have cracked down internally on extremism. Of course, terrorists only have to get lucky once — but the lack of a spectacular outrage in the West since 2005 is also an indication that the group's activities are being successfully disrupted.

I think that Gardner is more on the mark when he references the rejection of al-Qaeda's philosophy (if it can be termed such) of violent jihad, not just by clerics previously loyal to bin Laden, but also most dramatically in the Sunni Triangle. The switch in allegiance by Sunni tribes in Anbar province was the most decisive factor in al-Qaeda's failure in that part of Iraq, and the most significant development in liberal democracy's struggle with totalitarianism in the region since Saddam's military defeat.

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside

PMQs at the beach:

Dave stood up in rather fetching Speedos and a snorkel and asked, ‘Does the Prime Minister want a Mivvi or a 99?’ Gordon responded that since 1997 sales of both types of seaside delicacy had increased in real terms by over 400% and that this record showed that only a Labour government could guarantee the traditional seaside holiday ... under Labour, he could have a Mivvi and a 99 and a choc ice, whereas in 1997 he would only have been able to afford a Lemonade lolly. He asked Dave if he had had enough ‘lolly’ stick for now and suggested that he use it to dig himself a hole to hide in.

More here.

Not now, I'm busy

From today's Times:

For a few days I thought I was going deaf. Then I concluded that it must be a problem with my mobile phone. Why else would I keep getting so many missed-call messages? Why else would frustrated callers keep leaving me voicemails and apologise for having missed me again?

Then I realised what was happening: I was the victim of the latest trend in Los Angeles: “antisocial networking”. In other words: people wanting to give the illusion of staying in touch - while going to great lengths to eliminate the risk of any actual interaction taking place.

It's a symptom, I like to think, of a maxed-out population. After MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and a zillion other ways of remaining interminably connected with everyone you've ever met since birth, people just can't take it any more. They want peace. They want isolation. They want time alone to break wind and feel depressed about the economy. And so the very same software engineers who once brought us closer are now working on new ways to keep us apart.

Hence all those missed-call messages. Turns out they're made possible by a service called Slydial, launched a week ago and already proving to be hugely popular. To make it work, you call a freephone number (it only works in the US), listen to an advertisement, then enter the digits of the person you don't want to reach. It puts you straight through to their voicemail while delivering a missed-call message to their phone, thus creating the illusion that you at least made the effort to have a conversation. As ingenious as this is, however, I can see problems. For example: I used the service on Sunday to return a call from a friend I didn't much feel like talking to. Five minutes later, I received a text message. “Hey, did you just Slydial me?” it said.

Appalling.

The strange art of the attack ad

The party political broadcast is a strange beast at the best of times, and notoriously difficult to get right. In America, as I've noted before, they also carry a different sort of air — more personal, often more saccharine than we're used to in Britain.

Most importantly of all, though, they have to convey a simple message, do so succinctly and not get over-complicated. Here's a good example:

And here are two really, really bad examples:

As Daniel Finkelstein has noted:

The latest McCain video makes every mistake it is possible to make. First, it intercuts pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton with Barack Obama. The ideas is to make Obama look small. Instead it makes McCain look small. The video shows that they don't get it. They are making a video that appeals to the people making it, and to their view of Obama, not to voters ... the video shows vast crowds shouting "O-ba-ma!" This is supposed to be an attack video, for goodness sake. A vast crowd cheering Obama is about the most potent pro-Obama message you can possibly send.

I honestly wonder if the McCain people know what they are doing.

I'm glad they don't.

UPDATE: Hat-tip to Tom in the comments for pointing out this post on the same ads at Guido Fawkes. Understandably for a right-wing commentator, Guido is appreciative of the fact that, whatever the content of McCain's ads, it has had the effect of bringing him and Obama level in the polls. More interestingly, he says: "Can even you political obsessives remember any of Obama's ads? 'Hope, change, blah'." If without remembering any of the content, people will boil down Obama's message to 'hope' and 'change', then I say point proven.

Ubuntu

Michael Gove gave a speech on social policy today to the IPPR which contained another one of those personal digs at Gordon Brown:

There is one thing Bill Clinton understands which Gordon Brown simply doesn't get. Actually, there are probably several things the former President has which the current Prime Minister doesn't enjoy. Including a record of winning elections. But there's one crucial concept that Bill Clinton understood instinctively which has eluded our own Prime Minister: Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a Bantu word which, broadly translated, means "I am because you are". President Clinton has made it something of a mantra, and deployed it to great effect in his speech to the 2006 Labour Party Conference.

It resonated because it spoke to a deep truth. Each of us is defined, and enriched, by our relationship to others. It's the strength of our relationships, the warmth of our friendships, the time we have with our partners, parents and children, the respect we're given in the workplace and by our peers, the achievements we forge collaboratively and collectively, which generate real happiness and fulfilment. We are fully ourselves because others believe in us ... Under Labour there is only one relationship which really matters. The relationship between the individual and the state.

All of which would be a neat criticism, if it didn't contradict directly Gordon Brown's own personal and political philosophy. To demonstrate this, let's consider something else he was criticised for a little while ago: his choice of favourite poem, "The Hands of Others" by James Stockinger:

It is the hands of others who grow the food we eat,
Who sew the clothes we wear,
Who build the houses we inhabit.
It is the hands of others who tend us when we’re sick
And raise us up when we fall;
It is the hands of others who lift us from the cradle
And lower us finally into the grave.

Quite aside from Gove's point being wrong, it is always slightly nauseating to hear any Tory talk about how the quality of our lives is defined by the strength of our relationships with others — when the history of the Tories has been to devalue certain types of relationships and to saddle families with unemployment and debt while sewing social division.

Beautiful

Totality is at 1:37, when the assembled cheer at the sky.

A long way to go

Good for Jim Murphy, who blogs about the Foreign Office's disquiet at violence at Pride marches across Europe. The Minister for Europe rightly contrasts this disgusting situation with the fact that India — a country facing serious challenges to LGBT equality, not least the fact that homosexuality is illegal — saw the first Pride march through Delhi at the end of June.

The Haltemprice farce

It appears that David Davis, in embarking on his by-election ego trip, is inconveniencing royalty too.

Far more amusing than the fact that the Queen may have to put off going to Hull for a bit, though, is the list of those "who have indicated that they are planning to stand" in the July 10 run-off, according to the BBC:

• David Davis - Conservative
• Eamonn Fitzpatrick - Independent
• Gemma Garrett - Independent
• George Georgiou - Generalist Party
• Neil Glass - Independent
• Hamish Howitt - Independent
• The Mad Cow Girl - Official Monster Raving Loony Party ("Why don't decent citizens have a "Human Right" not to be assaulted, blown up or harassed, when the criminals can scream human rights if their handcuffs hurt?")

The BBC isn't ruling out any further raving loonies entering the fray, either:

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