From the album ‘Roll The Dice’ (2010)
It was no surprise that a vote in the House of Commons for the UK to join the military action against Islamic State in Syria was passed. The more pertinent questions about military intervention have followed; whether this is how taxpayer money should be spent during austerity? Will it work? What’s the long term plan? Why wait until now? The UK’s contribution, as it stands, will be quite limited and airstrikes had already begun. Not that this affects the morality of the issue, if you’re against it, you’re against it. If you believe in it, you’ll believe in the value of even the smallest contribution.
But it does make me wonder why in binary votes of its kind, which limit the scope for debate, that there aren’t more abstentions, aka ‘don’t knows’? We should also consider whether it is right that there are external pressures placed on MPs to take a side in such matters. The general public aren’t subject to those same pressures yet the desire to take a side remains ingrained. It would be fair if this was us consciously holding ourselves to the same standards as we hold MPs, but it’s not. Elected members are automatically tarred with the accusation of being preoccupied by self-interest, so an abstention can be construed, or spun, as a cop out, or even worse as indifference. MPs have to be wary of the majority opinion of their constituents as well as the position held by their party’s leadership. For them it’s often not as simple as just considering the evidence.
Not helping is the myopia of party political squabbling and media commentators with a clear bias or agenda using such an issue for political point scoring. This shite really is the absolute worst, and stupid too when we consider this: the SNP were criticised for all of their members agreeing with the leadership’s position not to join the bombing campaign, while the Labour leadership were pilloried because several high ranking party members disagreed with the shadow cabinet’s position, yet there were seven Tories who voted No and seven who abstained.
Regardless, I find it staggering that, out of well over six hundred MPs, only twelve abstained. Deciding how to intervene in a civil war can be complex. This is the case in Syria, there are so many factions involved with their own interests and goals, with countries backing different factions for the same reasons, either openly or clandestinely. Some would argue that it’s easier to decide who should be attacked, but will dropping bombs on targets within IS controlled regions diminish them significantly? And if it does, who’ll take their territory? Is it a step, within a strategy, towards achieving stability in the country? Is that even the motivation for joining in?
One of Iraq’s woeful legacies is that military operations in foreign conflicts are framed with overwhelming cynicism and aren’t judged on their own merits. With Syria, the chaos there is deemed to be a result of past interventions in neighbouring states, and that these have only served to harden the resolve of the Taliban and other Islamic extermists into forming a more militant theocracy in Islamic State. So, given that belief, it’s hard not to see the UK’s (or any other state’s) decision to join the fight against them in Syria, and only now with airstrikes, as a cowed form of hypocrisy, as deferring action against the brutality of the Assad regime has allowed IS to make territorial gains and gain support among those who Assad has oppressed. Most western governments were largely unconcerned with the Syrian civil war and its outcome unless it was perceived to affect them directly, an opinion which has changed due to the recent attacks in Paris.
If you were to be sensible about it, no two situations are the same and every situation would be judged in isolation. But the UK’s part in the Iraq invasion is an open sore, as support for it in the commons was enriched by lies, and people, rightly, still feel cheated. In retrospect it now looks to be a smash and grab, a piece of blatant opportunism concocted by arrogant ideologues in haste, facilitated by the heightened hysteria after the 9/11 attacks, one that’s left an entire region in tatters and left the west no safer from extremism.
But what’s done is done, and extremism isn’t going away. Indeed most victims of Islamic extremism are Muslims, Muslims who still believe, but whose beliefs aren’t right, or pure enough. If they’re subject to such scorn and pathological hatred by the caliphate, then the other infidels, whether it be non-believers, secularists and hedonists, aren’t likely to be treated any better.
Set against the backdrop of this wider issue all the vehement arguments for and against military action in Syria seem, to me, to be woefully inadequate. I suspect there is no right choice, just a series of undesirable choices, each with their own dire and unforeseen consequences. That’s why I’d abstain on a proposal which mandates an airstrikes only campaign, as outright supporting or opposing it fails to formulate an answer to any of these essential questions: will it work? What’s the long term plan? What’s the most effective means of defeating Islamic State? Which of the opposition factions in Syria should be supported or opposed?
Faced with genuine uncertainty, and with such a limiting choice of action, it makes sense to abstain or admit that you don’t know and ask these questions, than to abdicate responsibility by making a wholly uninformed one. Make enough of those and we end up with what’s going on right now in Syria.
From the album ‘Bad Guyneacology’ (2015)
I fucking hate Tesco. I hate their patronising slogan. It irks me that they flatten hundreds of family run shops or small businesses every year. They pay their shop floor employees fuck all. Their brand products are all, without exception, absolutely minging, and they’re ubiquitous, but…yeah, that’s actually a positive in this instance as there’s one a five minute walk away from me on Maryhill Road. Even better some of their stores are open twenty-four hours a day, as the one closest to me is.
Or so I assumed, as I turned up to find it wasn’t early last Friday morning. You see, as I’m completely unconcerned with most vacuous cultural phenomenon, it hadn’t registered that it was “Black Friday”, the product of a quintessential American trait – cultishly venal capitalism, that’s been shamelessly transplanted to all four corners of the globe. Regardless, quite why this meant that the twenty-four hour Tesco in Maryhill would be shut at 6:45am on “Black Friday” I wasn’t sure. That is, until I did some reading on last year’s mania that occurred on “Black Friday”.
Remaining closed until 7:30 in the morning was, I assume, to allow them to prepare for any onslaught, but at a reasonable hour, and I hope, but doubt, to show compassion for their staff. The Tesco bosses seemed convinced that if they let them, these peculiar, paganistic, rabid, shameless, fixated, unfulfilled, desperate because they’re unfulfilled shoppers would burst through the doors at one minute past midnight to fight over televisions, laptops, toasters, and the assorted garishly cheap kitsch that seems to only be produced to quench rampant materialism.
I’ll confess that I find the love others have for shopping confusing. At best it’s boring and time consuming, at worst you feel like you’re being extorted. It doesn’t matter how you do it, either online (clearly the lesser of the two evils) or in person, which is now an unbearable experience where you have to navigate aisles filled with people not watching or caring where they’re going. Sometimes they’re looking at their iPhones (because they’re bored), or scanning the shelves while on the phone to someone else (because they need reassurance or advice for something this banal). Invariably you’ll encounter a couple thoroughly debating which salad dressing to buy. Or worse yet they have their kids with them, and in an attempt to placate them for the depressingly mind-numbing ordeal of being dragged around a supermarket, they’ve been indulged with enough sugar to send them into mouth foaming hyperactivity (just to raise the collective family blood pressure even more). Most commonly you see shoppers just wandering around in that overwhelmed trance like state that seems to descend when too much choice and too little time combine to create perpetual indecision.
But that’s what makes “Black Friday” different. It’s been cleverly constructed to ensure consumer indecision is vanquished. Customers are aware in advance of the promise of a discount, so the decision to buy something has already been made, as it’s easier to justify when you’re getting a bargain, or believe you are. This is motivated by an attempt to right a perpetual injustice foisted upon consumers for the convenience supermarkets offer, as we all know that, deep down, we vastly overpay for pretty much everything in them. Throw Black Friday’s timing into the mix, Christmas is all but a month away, and unless you’re a selfish narcissist like me you’ll have already given some thought as to what to get your mum, dad, sister, daughter or husband for the biggest annual extortion of them all. All you need to do is find something that matches what you had in mind and it’ll have been a success. You’ll have beaten, or ‘gamed’, the system, just this once.
The explanation for the extreme examples of brawling for Black Friday bargains we’re shown is simple, it’s a manifestation, or better yet a means of releasing the pressure we put on ourselves to make our wages count when married with the natural selection instinct to subjugate and hoard at the expense of competitors. This takes many forms, some ingrained into our cultural identity by tradition – getting on the housing ladder is the most common, and specific to Black Friday it’s an extreme affectation of what motivates people to queue outside a shop overnight for the latest gadgetry advance, as they derive pride and receive acclaim by the very thought of being able to reminisce that they were one of the first to have the right to buy the latest games console or smartphone.
I recognise that any endeavours, which are impulse driven, are rarely rational, but Black Friday’s case, will you, three years from now, lament your failure to secure a bargain, that saved you, say, £65? Of course not, it’s about feeding instant validation, especially in the digital age where money is mostly theoretical, so being able to boost your vanity and self-worth with physical representations of earnings and wealth carries more significance than ever. But any justifications for partaking in the event are never as honest as that. Why would one of those who were victorious on “Black Friday”, relinquish the opportunity to bask in the superciliousness its narrative affords? ‘I suffered just to get it for you babe. I went in the trenches, just like my great-grandfather did at the Somme, and survived going over the top (literally I did – this Samsung S6 came from the top of the tower) and held on to it for dear life as the limbs and gnashing teeth whirled around me, and when some dickhead blocked the checkout I escaped by bayoneting him with my car key’.
Perhaps I should be thankful that I was spared an ordeal worse than what usually constitutes my regular Supermarket Sweep (I just wanted to buy some dental floss, eggs, tomatoes, tangerines, a lettuce, a pack of Twixes and some milk), but in reality nobody is quite desperate enough to go all ‘Midnight Express’ just after midnight on Friday morning at a twenty-four hour supermarket. Still, as I’m (hopefully?) moving to Knightswood in January, these precautionary measures will probably never inconvenience me again. Or do they observe Black Friday the same way there too?
Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard 
You must be logged in to post a comment.