Post for Galway Skeptics in the Pub: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from media hysteria. Amen.

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Number 9

I’ve never been a fan of the term “revolution”. I positively cringed while reading the Labour-Fine Gael plan for government; if the last General Election was a “democratic revolution” then we’re certainly doing the Arab Spring a disservice by describing it in similar terms. Major upheaval is a twentieth century fad, a peculiarity of a bygone era before television and low-discount airlines, but it is nonetheless safe to say that communication has undergone a revolution over the last decade. Although I’m living abroad, I’m up to date with everything at home as it unfolds thanks to Facebook, Twitter and online news sites.

Now, it’s been an exciting year back home from what I can gather. The biggest Student demonstration in a generation, an alleged democratic revolution, and State visits by the President of the United States and the Queen of Great Britain & Northern Ireland. I’m not saying Malta is without it’s charms (The Divorce referendum is this week. It’s like being in Ireland in 1996, but there’s free WiFi everywhere) but it seems that I’ve missed some fairly important goings on back home. Thankfully, I’ve been able to follow the comings and goings of my Homeland from the comfort of my own desk. I watched the hilarious videos of protesters trying, and failing to burn a Union Jack when the Queen arrived on YouTube, I followed the events of the No to fees march on Facebook and was treated to the election results in Galway West as they came in via Twitter. Today, thanks to a combination of all three, I was able to follow President Obama’s day out in Ireland; knocking back a pint in Moneygall, meeting the president with his entourage, and of course, watching him learn that you can kit out a limousine with the best bullet proof panelling money can buy, it can still be no match for Irish roads.

The standard of oration at College Green was certainly above average. The passionate rhetoric of actor Brendan Gleeson was later followed (after a series of mediocre musical acts) by, frankly, the best speech I’ve ever heard Enda Kenny give and certainly one that I imagine none of his recent predecessors would have been capable of delivering. I agree wholeheartedly with those on twitter who expressed the sentiments “Thank God it’s not Cowen”. The President’s speech was, it had to be said, the best political speech heard in Ireland in a while, although I’ve heard the criticism that it was essentially a remake of Bill Clinton’s speech set in 2011. The whole event seems to have been a sort of pep talk for the country and there can be no doubt that some words of encouragement are needed right now as we face another round of Airlines vs Volcanic Ash, Iran ignoring EU sanctions against its nuclear power programe and the National Debt rising to somewhere in the region of €23,250 per person. But perhaps it might have served us better, and earned him more favour with Irish-American votes if he took the day to have words with the ECB instead?

Apocalypse Not

I first encountered the devotional poetry of John Donne in secondary school. Because of his pamphleteering against my then religion, it took me a long time to warm to him, but eventually I came around. I particularly loved the title of his poem At Round Earth’s imagined corners, his attempt to square the circle of religious beliefs, and reconcile it with what had been discovered about the true shape of our world. There are lines of his work which will stick with me forever because of their beauty and eloquence: “Dull sublunary lovers’ love, whose soul is sense, cannot admit absence because it doth remove those things which elemented it”. In Batter my Heart, a poem with fantastically vivid imagery, he calls upon to God to beat him, break him and very shockingly, to rape him, but of course he puts it in a more artistic way than I have. It’s interesting to note this because tomorrow, Fundamentalist Christians the world over are hoping for the same; for God, Yahweh, Jehovah, El, in a sense, to “rape” them, the word rapture itself being derived from the verb ‘to rape’. In a Hades-and-Persephone-like manner, to snatch them up into the skies and leave the numberless infinities to our eternal damnation. If mandatory eternal praise of their dull, and obviously sublunary God is their idea of Heaven, and since Limbo is apparently off the cards, then I’ll gladly take alternative; I may be going to Hell, but at least all my friends will be there with me.

The latest in this line of idiocy, is the soon-to-be-proven-wrong Harold Camping who, like William Miller and Homer Simpson before him, added up some numbers in the Bible and believes that the world will end tomorrow. His reasoning, if it can be so-called, is that he believes tomorrow to be the 7,000th anniversary of the Deluge, a perfect time for God to smite us wicked sinners with our sinful life saving medical science and godless concept of Human Rights, and cast us into the Inferno. I can safely say that tomorrow, Saturday the 21st of May 2011 shall be as extraordinarily mundane a day as any other. Hungover College students will recover from a night of exam conclusion revelry, athletes will be out training at early hours, and kids will watch Saturday morning television. If you see shoes lying about on the street, don’t get too excited. The physical distance between us and the theocrats will sadly, endure neither breech nor expansion, it’s simply a joke being played by some witty skeptic, hoping to make one of these sheep panic and think that they’ve been left below. Despite the Zombie Warning issued by the Centres for Disease Control in the United States, I wouldn’t expect our graveyards to burst open either. Why? Because there is no reason at all for it.

I’ve heard it touted in the media at least three times since 1995 that the world was going to end, and yet here I am still. As I child, I was fearful of the end. Adults were talking about the Y2K while documentaries on the History Channel went on about Nostradamus and Biblical codes foretelling 9/11 and other disasters (consistently predicted after the fact). All of the prophesies of the end of the world from Jesus of Nazareth to Miller to Paco Rabanne have one thing in common; they’ve all been wrong. The first Christians expected the second coming to be within their lifetimes, and after not just centuries but millenia of being proven wrong by the dawning of each new Raptureless day, it’s absolutely insane of them to still think that maybe this time he’ll come back. Maybe this time Big Brother will come and usher us into the promised Celestial IngSoc, maybe Beloved Leader and Dear Leader will take us into the DPRK in the skies. It’s absurd, and it cannot be believed by any sane person that the Universe will come to an end tomorrow.

But there plenty of real ways that the Earth could end; meteor strikes could throw up dust and ash into the atmosphere and blot out the sun. A gamma-ray burst for a distant quasar could strip away our atmosphere, or far more likely, a group of religious fanatics, Muslim or Christian, could get their hands on apocalyptic weaponry and do God’s job for him since he apparently lacks the eschatological zeal of his disciples. Just see what one follower of Camping had to say about his relatives: “I know I’m not going to see them again, but they are very certain they are going to see me, and that’s where I feel so sad”. How bloody callous and unfeeling would one have to be to sit back and watch innocent people rounded up and tortured by an autocratic authority, while you suck up to it and wait for your reward? If it were true, it would be nothing less than collaboration with a fascistic regime.

Camping, like all his predecessors and all his successors will be proven wrong by the passage of time, but it won’t just be the Fundamentalists who believed him, who said their goodbyes to their infidel relatives, quit their jobs and sold their homes who will be disappointed. They may have to live in a world of Original Sin, but we’re the ones who have to put up with their lust for Catastrophe, their egging on the angels at oblate-spheroid-Earth’s non-existant corners to blow their trumpets and end it all.

Post for Galway Skeptics in the Pub: Our Lady of A-Stump-tion

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Maturity

If I were to go back in time and speak with myself in 2002, I’m fairly positive that he would not believe me to be his future self. I’ve done a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn on almost every point, habit and belief that I held during the early years of my adolescence. Not only am I no longer religious, I’ve officially defected from the Catholic Church. I no longer think that the United States government had a hand in the September Eleventh attacks. I no longer believe in alternative medicine, psychic phenomena or U.F.O.s. Now I like foods which I used to find repulsive, I enjoy watching sport on TV and doing physical exercise, and I’ve come to dislike soft-drinks and junk food.

All of these things I attribute to maturity. None of these changes happened over night, but over the course of nine years I’ve learned that it can be quite hypocritical to ever say never. Everyone goes through the experience of puberty and adolescence; and fumbling, awkward, confusing as it can be, many emerge at the other end with a different perspective on the world. A former lecturer of mine, Prof. Brian Arkins often noted about the Christian idea of being “born again” that the ancient Greeks would have remarked that going through the ordeal once was more than sufficient. The same applies to the experiences of frequent reflex erections, breaking voices and acne; it’s not really something you want to go through twice. But nowadays, people actually have to go through two stages of adolescence; one Biological, and one Digital.

The advent of the Digital age of Social Media and Online Fora means that we all have to essentially go through another adolescence, but because Hard Drives are better at memory storage than Neurons, there’s a good chance that the mistakes you make during you digital pubescence will haunt you for a very long time. On the whole some people did well out of Internet Fame; Rebecca Black, Antoine Dodson, and depending on how you look at it, Boxxy. But the online exploits of others did not fare so well, the most notable case being that of Ms. Jessi Slaughter. Her videos may only last a few minutes, but the memories and of course, the consequences will last a lifetime.

These are the big errors people make when online. But there are smaller things which I think are the trademarks of a Digital Teenager. There’s no age limit for a Digital Teen, they can be fourteen or forty, it’s just a label for their behaviour. There are simple matters of etiquette, much as there are anywhere, which ought to be followed but often are not. For example, take Twitter (And I refuse to use Fine Gael’s pathetic neologism of “twetiquette”. Only twats and twankers use twetiquette). The point of Twitter is to send short messages to your friends, people who find your musings interesting, and spambots. The messages have a limit of 140 characters, and you just have to be creative to meet that limit. But I’ve noticed that a lot of new users often use services like “TwitLonger” which let you extend the tweet beyond the limit, and that basically does away with the appeal of Twitter; Brevity is better. There are other mores like shortening URLs, keeping Follow Fridays to one Tweet and Hashtags which are often ignored by newbies, or in the case of the latter, overused.

But there are other habits which often make my mouse hand become trigger happy with the unfollow button. For me, there’s an Unholy Trinity of habits; three markers of an immature and boring digital persona. There’s no sin more unforgivable than to be boring, and perhaps I with my talk of Grammatical Fascism and the Internet’s Mos Maiorum, ought not to be the one casting stones. It isn’t my intention to chastise. I’ve made many online faux pas myself, I can list some of them if you like, or you could find them with the minimal amount of sleuthing. My intent is simply get across that I think that these habits are puerile and explain my reasoning behind my conclusions.

First in my troika of pet peeves is the formula “Dear X, Y, Regards, Z”, often seen in Facebook Statues and Tweets. For example “Dear people who talk in the Library, I hate you. Please die. Regards, Charles”. This is something which I’ve posted, and something which I now look back on and think it’s one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever done. I see this in other people’s posts about once or twice a week. What this says to me is that the poster, rather than confront the problem head on, has chosen to make a passive aggressive comment, where there is a minimal chance that the problem maker will see it. It would have been better of me to, as they say “man-the-fuck-up” and tell the clucking poultry to shut up and go back to playing Farmville. Seeing that I’ve done this myself has made me change my ways, and stand up for myself when I need to. But when I see this in others all this says to me is that the individual is so passive agressive and non-confrontational that they ought to be a character in Philadelphia, here I come!

Being a Male from a country that is both predominately Roman Catholic and part of the Anglosphere, I’ve been ingrained with preference for Stoicism and maintaining a “stiff-upper-lip” over excessive expressiveness. So in the second aspect of my Unholy Trinity sit individuals who wear their hearts on their digital sleeves. I’ve no quarrel with public displays of love and affection in real life or on online, just keep it in your pants, but I do frequently get put off by assertions of sorrow, sadness and self pity, much as someone crying in public makes those in their proximity grow uncomfortable. Annunciations like “I’m going to go cry now” or “God, I hate my life”, in a serious context say nothing more to me than “I want attention. Pay attention to me”. I’ve grown tired of even trying to console them or enquire; after all, any attention is good attention. I’ve read enough about depression to know that people who are genuinely in trouble have a tendency to keep their problems to themselves and to put on a presentable face. When I hear outbursts of rage and violent threats in public I often get a slight rush of adrenalin, even when I’m not the recipient, but they just loose their impact on Facebook. I wouldn’t accuse someone who posts vague threats to no-one in particular of being a bore like the attention-seekers in my last example, but I would accuse them of being puerile because of their employment of Cap-locks and superfluous exclamation marks.

Bringing this post to a close is my third major peeve, which I’ll admit overlaps with the second, but belongs less in the realm of Social Media and more to that of Message Boards, comment threads and Online Fora. There’s a saying on the Internet that goes “Not sure if Troll, or just really stupid”. Again trying to be at least somewhat self-deprecating here, but during my digital pubescence, I watched a YouTube video about Oliver Cromwell and then commented. I know, I know, I used to comment on YouTube videos of all things, but I being young and foolish, with common sense I did not agree. I can’t recall exactly what was said but at some point, Cromwell was praised as a great man. For those of you not in the know, there are two contrasting schools of thought on Cromwell on opposite sides of the Irish Sea. In Britain, he’s a hero who saved Democracy, and in Ireland he’s the Adolf Hitler of the 17th Century. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not well versed in Irish and British History, and I gave my knee-jerk reaction. Something along the lines of “Cromwell was a monster who killed innocent people for his God and his King”. Neglecting that fact had Cromwell treated his God as he did his Monarch, he would have been the Richard Dawkins of the 17th Century. Much the same as you ought to put down the Laptop if you’re in any way emotional, you probably should take the time to re-read what you’ve just written before clicking post.

It seems to me that one of the advantages of the everlasting records of our online actions can serve a more positive purpose. If you can look back at what you wrote, posted and commented on and feel pride, that’s great. You’re one of those rare mortals blessed with a great intellect and street-smarts alike. But if like me, you look back at your online adolescence with a slight cringe there is some consolation. Just as we look at ancient civilizations in a museum, we can look back at our younger selves and remark at how far we’ve come