From the album “Am I Not Your Girl?” (1992)
Avoiding the news means not using your phone or computer at all. Given how ninety-nine percent of us live and work in the West, that’s a tricky task.
How the news is delivered is irritating because there’s so much of it, and much of it is irrelevant rubbish. The problem is twofold – competition has forced a focus on reporting what is perceived to interest us. Not what we should know, or to inform us. Better a celebrity scandal or political sleaze than a story. Secondly, the digitisation of the media cycle may be intractable, it now moves so fast that the genuinely important stories seldom linger in the consciousness for long enough.
Just who’s interested in Billy Bragg smugly nominating himself as the arbiter of what’s antisemitic and the definition of what a woman is? What about Roger Waters? Yeah, wrote some good songs in the seventies, but what about him? There’s Andrew Tate, every fucking ten seconds, and that fucking weird hybrid English-American accent of his. Ignore the cunt, please. Speaking of cunts to be ignored, how about some more of Boris Johnson’s perpetual grift? Where him being a selfish cunt (and a quitter) is indulged as entertainment, with his cultish dickheads always on hand to defend him working as a form of cheap gotcha banter.
Only competent people receive the right amount of scrutiny. Mick Lynch gets challenged for doing his job well. Junior doctors are treated with the suspicion of being greedy that’s normally reserved for benefit claimants and should be for Tory peers who benefit from the most insidious form of croynism. Hey, Michelle, where’s the PPE cash hen?
We always hear about the cost-of-living issue, with navel-gazing reports from deprived areas, yet why is there a resistance to question the causes of the widening gap between the rich and poor, rather than showing the effects? Wealth inequality, high interest rates and stagnating wages don’t just happen themselves.
Some would argue the media’s obsession with the superficial trappings of wealth simply assuages our aspiriation to be successful. We judge our and other’s value relative to their wealth, and if we cannot attain it we seem to elevate those who can. The Times annual Rich List piece being one example. Meanwhile the economic destructiveness of the city of London’s capture by Russian Oligarchs or Saudi Arabia’s grotesque sportswashing isn’t questioned loudly enough or persistently, helping both to succeed. Both are examples of the UK’s economic and intellectual decline, reduced to whoring itself to the highest bidder for political favours. It’s telling that the size of figures being invested in football are the sexier story rather than the geopolitical motivations – all surface, substance a distant second.
Peculiar disasters are sexy (and easy) copy. Did you laugh at those rich idiots who tried to reach the Titanic in that rickety DIY sub, controlled using a PlayStation controller? I did, and that’s wholly in response to the fawning, pitying tone of the coverage. We got a gavage of the search and rescue operation updates, and this macabre Twitter account counting down the remaining oxygen, which proved to be irrelevant but likely provided some entertainment value to the really sad folk who followed it.
But the most annoying coverage of a contemporary news topic is the hysteria surrounding ChatGPT, and the “threat” of AI in general. It’s the new Salem Witch Trials. Automation is coming for our jobs. This is how SkyNet started.
Speaking of nonsense, we’re coming up for ten years of me publishing absolute rubbish on this blog. The only thing I’ve learned is that nearly all my predictions, on any topic; sports and politics in particular, are consistently dreadful. I don’t think AI is a threat to us at all. This should scare you, a lot.
But, it got me wondering, perhaps it should be a threat to us given our direction of travel? Also, if AI is as capable as advertised by the bedwetters, or soon could be, surely it should supersede dreadful blogs such as this, and generate superior content. And maybe it’ll be able to help us trawl through the internet’s currently disgraceful state, which is littered with “fake news”, bot accounts, whataboutery op-eds, scams and trolls.
So, I decided to put ChatGPT to the test. Just how advanced is it? Can ChatGPT make a prediction when humans will become extinct?
Being coy, keeping me from getting suspicious of its motives. Smart. In the meantime can it at least help me become wealthy despite having zero morals or talent, just as Boris Johnson manages to do:
It gave me even less when I asked nicely!
How about the meaning of life? It gave me a non-committal beige response you’d get from a life coach that charges £150 an hour or some bollocks:
Does it think I’m a terrible writer (seeing as ChatGPT’s algorithm judges language and how well it’s used, it should expose my mediocrity quite emphatically):
Diplomatic tosh. But it knows all about infamous nonces, so no further need for the PNC or the sex offenders register. The Tories should be delighted, another way to shrink the state:
ChatGPT clearly knows more than me, that’s good. I’ll accept I’m likely too stupid to leverage it correctly. It’s certainly smart enough not to blog as hobby. Being better than me is a start, but I’m not impressed. The hope has to be that in ten years ChatGPT, or the next evolution of AI – whatever form its next iteration takes – will be able to do far more than generate Windows 11 Pro licenses, a banging Chicken Vindaloo recipe (can confirm) or football chants from famous songs successfully. Say, filter, fact check and report news with complete impartiality. No hype, no subtext, no bias, no bollocks. Because, as a species, based on our current trajectory to trash everything while bickering over irrelevant and petty shite, we’ll need artificial wisdom to intervene at some point soon to stop our spiral.
As this piece was quite negative in tone, I’ve decided not to end on a downer. Here’s a short video of a panda loudly wolfing down a fuck off carrot. Enjoy.
From the album ‘Aman Iman’ (2007)
From the album ‘The Glitterhouse’ (1981)
Douglas Murray, who, let’s just say, has some glib descriptions of twentieth century nationalism, was on better form when offering an anecdote on Lex Fridman’s podcast about advice to writers. Namely the cynical propensity writers have to view events in their lives as potential material, no matter how inappropriate. Using the death of a family friend and turning it into a poem in dedication was Murray’s example of another writer he knew not being able to help himself.
Fuck shame, I’m always game to use the anguish of others for copy, especially when it arrives in a sporting context. Ridicule in sport isn’t gawking at people jumping from the Twin Towers or demeaning or demonising true hardships for political gain or point scoring; immigrants seeking political asylum, folk on benefits, those on strike, victims of crime and people’s houses being repossessed. Football rivalry exists for banter, laughing at the dire plight of someone else’s football club does not, should not, cause someone grave emotional distress. Where arriving at a funeral and shitting on the departed’s grave would.
I needed to go back eight years to find the last time I was compelled (read amused) enough to write about the Premier League’s final day relegation battle. It was between Newcastle United and Hull City, with Steve Bruce being involved no less!
Take a moment and think of all the changes your club has been through in the last ten years – perhaps, with the benefit of this wider perspective, we’d have to suffer less self-entitled social media whiners, just a thought – the good days, bad days, successful seasons (if you’ve been lucky to see one) and the bad ones. To remain sane and stable following a football club it has to be a myopic glass half-full endeavor. Fixation on the short-term in football becomes a necessity, as it allows fans to elide the reality that in the historic totality of English football for every club there have been more unsuccessful seasons than successful ones. Yes, even this maxim applies to Manchester City now, hard as it is to see past the overwhelming contemporary success of their sportswashing. Hope of a better tomorrow sustains us all to a degree in all walks of life, but in football the allure of potential success (and failure for your rivals) is particularly potent.
Focusing on the contrasting fortunes of Newcastle United and Hull City since that day in May 2015 has been revelatory. Newcastle United, who survived on that occasion have been relegated, promoted and, assisted by the geopolitical goals of this ghoulish Tory government that never seems to end, sold to one of the richest sovereign wealth funds from one of the most barbaric regimes on earth. They’ve just qualified for the Champions League for the first time in almost twenty years. During the last eight years Hull City have had their own version of volatility. Their issues with ownership have, initially like and now unlike Newcastle, come at the cost of sporting success. Initially they got promoted back to the Premier League and were then swiftly relegated again to the Championship. They even dropped down to the third tier a couple of seasons ago and have since recovered to flirt with midtable mediocrity in the Championship.
This foreboding explains the desperation of Leeds United, Everton and Leicester City, the three clubs threatened by relegation this time. It’s that the prospect of being cowed, as Hull have been, is far more likely than Newcastle’s salvation, and even their ascent was, in large part, a bit of slog. A quick recovery, of a successful promotion campaign, and that just gets you back to where you were, is far from guaranteed – since 1996, less than one and four sides relegated from the Premier League achieved promotion the following season. A sour summer contemplating the start of this (likely long and arduous) journey next season can only be staved off by survival on Sunday. It’s only in this context can a reprieve feel like winning a trophy.
With several more potential candidates facing this ringer than normal, and some of them just happen to be clubs who used to be successful, this year carries greater intrigue. Everton haven’t been relegated since 1951 (but have come close a few times in the last thirty years, including last season, replete with a cringeworthy pitch invasion and digs at the opposition manager). Leeds United are favourites to be flushed, they’re one of the fallen big names in English football, all since Peter Risdale lived the dream and left them financially destitute in the Championship for fifteen years. Leicester City are the only club other than Manchester City, Liverpool or Chelsea to win the title since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013. They won the league in 2015/16, but are second favourites to be relegated this Sunday. Of the three in the frame their decline is certainly the most precipitous.
For those of us who don’t support any of these clubs, this day will offer schadenfreude. Sociology is never more captivating than our monkey brains gaining prominence and routing rationale. That’s when extraordinary stupidity or peculiarities can happen, just how will people who support relegation threatened clubs react when suffering the pendulum of emotions in a condensed timescale. Most, likely mundanely and with cliché. All start with hope, one minute a set will experience ecstasy as their own side scoring renders them safe, only for murmurs to start and news of a goal elsewhere spreads a virus of angst, because, once again, as things stand, you’re going down. And that’s just one fluctuation. A good relegation day has multiple. Multitude creates variance. Enough variance ultimately brings chaos.
The alternative is Everton score early and often, and removes the prospect of some inconsequential drama from my empty life. But just as Everton, Leicester and Leeds fans will be hoping their club will the only one of the three to survive, I and millions of others will hope the general incompetence they’ve displayed all season continues and creates a calamity throughout the entirety of Sunday afternoon, and for there to be a twist at the death.
In an era where so much in football is disingenuous, sanitized, commercialized, overhyped or success simply bought with ill-gotten gains, it’ll be nice to witness some variety; genuine joy, dread, agony, relief and despair. We’re guaranteed to see hope dashed, grown men in their forties and fifties with disgustingly large beer guts blubbering on the shoulders of their sons and perhaps some decidedly odd (likely celebratory) behaviour. Consider it as similar to a zoo or a circus visit, you can point and ridicule, but you’re truly relieved and thankful it’s them and not you.
Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard 
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