Quick Political Notes…
Proper post (about music) coming up tonight, but two things of note:
First, Aung Sang Suu Kyi could be facing five years in a prison well-known for torturing its prisoners. Write to Than Shwe and ask for her to be released.
Secondly, for those near Manchester, Hope Not Hate are having an anti-fascist day of action on Saturday, and also having a free Billy Bragg gig for anyone willing to spend a bit of time leafletting. See http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/billybragg for more details.
I Aten’t Dead
But I’ve got a migraine that means I’ve been unable properly to focus on the screen for several days. Posting resumes shortly.
Very Quick One…
Just to say a belated congratulations to Bot’swana Beast of the Mindless Ones, who got married yesterday. Congratulations, mate.
Private Finance Initiative – Or Why We’re All Broke
I’m trying to get back to posting at least something here every day… as my comic shop still has no League, and the Star Trek film doesn’t have much to say about it, you’re getting a politics post.
Before I start, as with many of my posts, this will be wrong in detail. I’m trying to give a broad overview here, so it’s full of sweeping generalisations. If you don’t want sweeping generalisations, don’t read my stuff, look at the wikipedia page for PFI instead…(that Wikipedia entry is being accused of bias at the moment, and I can see why, but it’s just because there really is only one side to this…)
Those of you who are, like me, fans of 1980s Thatcherite sitcom Yes, Minister, will remember one particularly funny episode. In it Sir Humphrey is trying desperately to keep the fact that he made a cock-up thirty years ago hidden, because it was such a momentous blunder that, were it found out who was responsible, he would face instant dismissal.
What he’d done was get a private firm to build an army barracks, so the initial expense would be less, agree to pay the costs over thirty years, then let the private firm own the buildings at the end of that time. A stupid decision, of course, but that satirical decision has for the last couple of decades been the basis of British economic policy, under the name of the Private Finance Initiative.
Now PFI is a boring name, and many people thus gloss over the details of this when it’s mentioned in newspapers, so perhaps a better name for it would be Greedy Boomers Stealing From Their Children. Certainly it would be a more accurate name.
What PFI essentially means is that if you want, say, a new hospital, the government makes an agreement with a private company to build and maintain it. The contract goes over thirty years or so, and then at the end of that time what happens depends on the contracts. The earlier ones, implemented 17 years ago, had clauses which say ownership reverts to the private company I believe, while later ones tend to more sensibly say the government owns them. But we can’t be sure, because the contracts are often ‘commercially sensitive’.
In itself, this isn’t too dreadful in principle, even though it adds a huge (30% or so) overhead to the cost… but principle and practice are two very different things. In practice the PFI is a fast-track to complete economic destruction. Here’s why:
The reason PFI is attractive to governments is that it doesn’t appear on the balance sheets – it’s not money ‘borrowed’, so doesn’t count towards the national debt, but you also don’t have to pay it all at once. It’s like being given a credit card that somehow doesn’t impact your credit rating, no matter how much you spend, so long as you make the minimum payments. This means the government can announce massive amounts of spending without putting tax rates up. I’m sure you can see some of the problems that can come from that.
But that’s not the only problem – PFI often becomes the only method by which funding happens for services, and this can be catastrophic. Take this entirely-hypothetical-and-nothing-to-do-with-any-organisations-I-used-to-work-for-honestly example:
Say you’re an NHS trust, and you have a unit with four twenty-bed wards, but it’s becoming run down – it’s forty years old or so, and it needs work doing. But you haven’t got enough money to do all the work – it’s serious business, after all, renovating hospital wards, and requires serious money. So you ask the central government for funding.
Now, you can’t use PFI for renovations, only for new builds. So the government say “No, we can’t give you money for that, but we can give you an entire new unit as part of a PFI scheme. Of course, you’ll still have to pay a few million up front, and make the rest of the payments on time, but you’ll get a new unit along with a service contract.
So the trust agree to get a totally new building, but they will have to give all their staff a pay freeze for a few years, not even giving them legally mandated raises, to raise the few million they have to pay themselves. And the new unit will have to be smaller than the old one, of course, because the PFI funds don’t stretch that far. But they go ahead because they’ve got no choice…
And two years later huge cracks are appearing in the walls, the lift doesn’t work, the air conditioning’s broken and staff are going off sick, never mind the patients. But you can’t do anything because the company that built it (usually one of the very big construction firms who are very litigious, so I won’t name any, but I’m sure most of you can think of one or two that fit the bill) are also the maintenance people, and they get the money regardless of quality of service.
Meanwhile, while patients are having rain dripped on them from leaky roofs, the government boasts about how much money it’s spent on the NHS. This is why no matter how much money the government claim to be pumping into things, services constantly get worse – the money isn’t going anywhere where it could be useful, but just to enrich already bloated businesses.
And then to make matters worse, the government ‘has to’ keep those companies afloat so they can continue to provide their ‘service’ (because the hospitals belong to the company until they’re paid for), so now, because of the recession, the government is paying billions in bailout money to keep those companies going so it can keep paying them money for providing an expensive, substandard service.
And all this is just because ever since Thatcher got in, just over thirty years ago, the most spoiled, narcissistic, greedy generation ever to have been born in human history has insisted on having the best possible services for itself without paying. Whether this means pulling the ladder up after them for charging for services they don’t need (like saddling the younger generations with debts for attending universities that they attended for free), or just racking up mountains of government debt and postponing paying it off until they are retired or dead, political culture for my entire lifetime has been based on the idea of getting anyone born after about 1956 or so to pay for the rest of their life for whatever their elders want.
We need, urgently, to get rid of the idea that you can have good services and not pay for them – if nothing else because actually being honest about the payments is vastly cheaper and more efficient in the medium-to-long term. Government projects should only be paid for either by direct taxation or by money borrowed and added to the national debt in a proper, above-board manner. Anything else is inviting the kind of financial catastrophe we’re going through now…
Fishtar
I’ve half been putting off reviewing Seaguy: Slaves Of Mickey Eye 2 because I know that when the Mindless Ones get round to their annocommentations there will be very little left to say, and then I can look very clever by just pointing out one or two things that they’ve not said. However, they’re holding out on us, so now I might have to write an actual review!
(And having written that sentence, straight away Sean posts a review which says half of the things I was going to say. I disagree with him about Multiversity though – it sounds like Morrison has a good idea of who he wants to work with on that, and he might get them… And while I’m linking Sean, here‘s his rant about comic shops which I meant to link to at the time…)
In this review I’m mostly going to talk about the writing, because that’s the part I’m most qualified to talk about, but I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I think this is ‘the Grant Morrison show’. Cameron Stewart’s work in this series is exemplary, and it couldn’t have been done with any other artist – he is at least as important to the story’s success as the writer is. He does some of the best facial expressions in comics, without exaggerating them a la Kevin Maguire – his expressions are naturalistic, even though most of his art is towards the cartoony end of mainstream USian comics. Just look at Seaguy’s face on the cover – his head cocked, his brow furrowed… it’s clear that this is *serious* to him, and he’s getting quite annoyed – but in the way a non-aggressive little boy would get annoyed. Though the art style couldn’t be more different, I could imagine that expression on the face of a Peanuts character.
Stewart’s style manages to make the ‘normal’ look absurd while making the ‘surreal’ look workaday, allowing us to accept the story’s dream-logic for long enough that the story can sell itself to us. And it’s just gorgeous to look at. My one criticism (and it’s a small one) is that his ink line is thicker than I would like, and has the effect at times, to my eyes, of turning the panel/page into a set of distinct almost abstract figures, rather than an integrated composition. But that is only a very minor criticism, and only affects a couple of images negatively.
Now, of course, many of the things I said in the review of the last issue still hold, but here’s some thoughts on the second issue…
Firstly, if Grant Morrison hadn’t been so over-complimentary about Geoff Johns for so long, I would have taken the Prismatic Age stuff at the beginning (and he is definitely riffing on the Prismatic Age stuff here, with Threeguy splitting into three different-coloured Seaguy lookalikes, though obviously this has precursors both in Triplicate Girl from the Legion Of Superheroes and Superman Red/Superman Blue) as being a rather savage attack on Johns. Three ‘legacy heroes’ inspired by the main hero, all indistinguishable apart from the colour of their uniforms (like the different coloured Lanterns?) who do naughty swearing and kill and maim people (the injury-to-the-eye motif!)? That sounds like… well, everything Johns writes during the large amount of the time that he’s on autopilot. I would *swear* this material was a dig at Johns, were Morrison not such an obvious admirer of his…
Of course, the big story that’s going on in this whole miniseries, and this issue in particular, is the dark night of the soul – Seaguy going down under the sea and then rising again and ending the issue with a diving leap. The whole thing’s about identity – he’s submerged under water and reborn/’baptised’ as El Macho, the bulldresser (and of course dressing bulls up in women’s clothes is another way of playing with identity – in Seaguy, as in most superhero comics, one’s clothing is intimately bound up with one’s role (though I do wonder if the bulldressing is also inspired by PETA’s Running Of The Nudes). The only way he can defeat the bull, and also his rival Cortez, is by stripping himself totally nude, and handing his ‘crown’ to the bull.
The removal of clothes/symbols of power, descent, and rebirth are all, as anyone as obsessed with mythology as Morrison is knows, intimately tied – in fact, this issue contains symbolism that goes back to the very oldest known stories. Ishtar, in Babylonian myth, went down to the underworld and had to remove a symbol of power/piece of clothing at each of seven doors, before dying at the end and having to sacrifice her husband in order to escape (much as Seaguy ‘sacrifices’ his girlfriend (whose name means Sea Of Death, if my cod-Spanish is right) here) .
And in the epic of Gilgamesh – the oldest known piece of what we’d now call fiction – Ishtar sends the Bull Of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh, but he and Enkidu kill the bull instead. Of course, Gilgamesh was as close to the first superhero as you can get, and his search for immortality parallels a lot of the stuff in a lot of Morrison’s writing. For those unfamiliar with the story of Gilgamesh, there’s what looks like an interesting comic adaptation of a lecture about the saga online here.
The birth and rebirth themes show up throughout the comic of course – for example the ‘eight months pregnant’ Carmen/Maria pulling Mickey Eye out of her dress (which reminded me of this classic Bron/Fortune sketch). However, everything in here is multi-layered, and this can easily fit in with the series-as-metaphor-for-adolescence, with this story being the equivalent of the time in many people’s lives when they try to pretend to be cool to impress people they don’t really like, before giving up and just being themselves.
That said, one minor quibble – I saw an arrow (and before anyone thinks that what I’m about to say is a terrible attack on the comic, please read this, and also remember that I’ve defended comics by Dave Sim before now…)
If you combine the figure of Seaguy’s girlfriend (the only female character to do anything other than pose prettily), who lies to Seaguy about everything, tries to keep him stupid, and pretends to be pregnant in order to trap him in the fake life he’s living, with the bulldressing sections, where the bull is humiliated by being dressed in women’s clothes, there is a hint of misogyny to this. As both Morrison and Stewart are too self-conscious and self-critical to do that without realising it, I’m willing to assume for now that there’s a point to that, and that it’s something I’m missing. But it may just be a bad note in an otherwise near-perfect comic.
Spotify A Capella Playlist
It’s going to take me a little longer than I thought to get my thoughts together about Seaguy, so I’ll be posting about that and Cerebus Archive tomorrow, instead of today. In the meantime, here’s a Spotify playlist.
This one’s an a capella (almost entirely) collection, which happened by accident when I noticed the first couple of tracks I chose were already a capella, and I decided to go with it, and can be found here.
The Way I Feel Inside by The Zombies is a song I’ve been listening to over and over for the last few days – I picked up the Zombie Heaven box set after seeing them live and will be reviewing that soon (in brief my conclusion is that every original they did was astonishingly good, but the best Zombies album is still Blunstone’s first solo album, One Year). You might remember this from the funeral scene in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, one of the best uses of music in a film I’ve ever seen (I’ve not actually watched that film since I saw it in the cinema, but can remember huge chunks of it nonetheless). This shows what difference an arrangement can make to a song – there’s a demo version of this which is done in a Beatles-esque arrangement, and it does nothing for me at all, but this is great.
Old Molly Metcalfe by Jake Thackray is a gorgeous, beautiful pseudo-folk song, and the saddest thing that Jake ever wrote. Incidentally, Jennie, if you’re not a Jake fan already, you should listen to this. It’s the most Yorkshire song I’ve ever heard, and is also very obviously the basis for The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett.
I Hear Your Heart by Vocal Group Cosmos was Latvia’s entry into the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest. Despite that, it’s quite astonishingly good – pretty avant-garde and atonal in places, sounding just like Queen in others, and like a bad 90s boy band in yet others – all these styles mixing and merging in unpredictable ways. The bulk of the song unfortunately is generic boy-band, but the stuff surrounding that is just…weird.
Dido’s Lament by The Swingle Singers is a vocal-group-and-human-beatbox arrangement of the aria from Purcell’s Dido And Aeneas. Dido of course, as every Doctor Who fan knows, was really the Doctor’s companion Vicki, which means that this actually has something in common with Who’s Doctor Who? by Frazer Hines. Not much, but something…
God Only Knows (a capella mix) by The Beach Boys is a vocal-only mix (apart from some low instruments during the break) from the Pet Sounds Sessions box set. Carl Wilson takes the (double-tracked) lead vocals, while the backing vocals and the tag are Brian Wilson and Bruce Johnston (Brian taking the first and third lines on the tag, Bruce the second). Gorgeous.
Where Have All The Flowers Gone? by Pete Seeger is yet more evidence that actually the first people to do collagey, mix-and-matching of diverse influences were the folk singers. Practically nothing in this song is original to Seeger – the main text he took from an old Russian folk poem he found in a novel, just adding the ‘long time passing’ and ‘when will we ever learn?’ lines, while the melody is a traditional one – but it’s definitely Seeger’s song.
From Seeger we go to Black Betty by Leadbelly, Seeger’s friend and colleague. A medley of prison worksongs, this song gave hits to both Ram Jam (Black Betty) and Johnny Cash (I Got Stripes) – two more different records from the same source couldn’t be imagined.
Honest Work by Todd Rundgren is from his A Capella album, an album where all the ‘instrumental’ parts were Rundgren’s electronically-treated vocals. This one is one of the more traditional songs on the album.
Jesus Gave Me Water by The Five Blind Boys Of Mississippi (not to be confused with the more well-known Five Blind Boys Of Alabama) is a classic gospel song – I love the screamed “Yeeeaaah!”s.
One For The Boys by Brian Wilson is from his eponymous 1988 solo album, and has that 1988 sound to it, unfortunately, but it’s still a wonderful piece of vocal arrangement, and one of the best things on that album. It’s all multi-tracked Brian, except I think Andy Paley might be doing some of the low notes.
Country Life by The Watersons is from their classic For Pence And Spicy Ale album. The Waterson family are to English folk music what the Carters are to American country, and while Spotify unfortunately has almost no traditional English folk on there, it does have this album, which is as good an example of the form as any you’ll find.
Another Man Done Gone by Odetta is a wonderful track by a singer who is so horribly overlooked I had no idea until today that she died six months ago.
I’m Always Chasing Rainbows by The Four Freshmen is an example of what was called in the 50s ‘modern harmony’. While this stuff sounds odd or corny to our ears, as the style almost completely died out by the early 60s, it’s incredibly complex if you listen to the movement of the different parts, and this band in particular were a huge influence on Brian Wilson – the Beach Boys’ early attempts at harmony sounded almost like a tribute band.
Don’t Look Back by The Persuasions is a cover of the song Smokey Robinson wrote for the Temptations. This is from the 70s, but the Persuasions are one of the few a capella vocal groups still going – their tribute album to Frank Zappa in the 90s was particularly good.
Zilch by The Monkees is just an exercise in building up a sound from the cross-rhythmic repetition. Apparently one of the lines in this was sampled by Del Tha Funkee Homosapian, and caused a rumour that ‘mister Bob Dobalina’ was a SubGenius reference…
And finally Thomas Rhymer by Ewan Maccoll is some traditional Scottish folk to go with the traditional English folk from earlier. This song, about the supposed journey of 13th-century Scottish prophet Thomas Learmouth into the land of Faerie, was a huge influence on Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers (it’s quoted on the first page of issue zero). It’s also the source of the more recent Tam Lin ballad (itself also the other main source of Pratchett’s Wee Free Men, tying in nicely with Thackray’s song earlier).
Just a reminder for some people, incidentally – if you are in a country that says you can’t use Spotify, you can try the free software despotify client (which only supports the premium accounts, but imposes no geographic restrictions). It’s still so poorly-usable that even I, a free software supporter, choose to use the proprietary app and run it under WINE, but it’s definitely better than nothing…
My Liberal Conspiracy Resignation email
If you’re going to change what I’ve written, after it’s already been through the Netcast editor and been posted, and without consulting me, but leave my name on it, then I want no further part of this site. It’s not the first time you’ve done it, and I’m not the only person you’ve done it to (I happen to know that the author of the piece about whistleblowing in the NHS is furious about what was done).
It is damaging to my reputation to have people think I’m someone who considers Derek Draper leaving a blog, or David Cameron’s bike being stolen, more of a ‘Top Story’ than the use of the city I live in as somewhere to trial one of the most illiberal measures this government has brought in.
ETA The ‘top stories’ has now been edited by one of the editors there to say ‘by Newswire’ rather than ‘by Andrew Hickey’, for those of you wondering what the fuss is about. I’ll delete this in a day or so, but I just wanted to make it very clear, publicly, that I’m not the kind of person who gets obsessed by the staffing of Labour blogs or other such non-issues – I think focussing on that kind of trivia is counter-productive in the extreme.
Westminster, So Much To Answer For…
So now, we in Manchester are apparently going to be the first people ‘allowed’ to apply to pay £60 for ID cards. Lucky, lucky, lucky us. Is this like that time when we were allowed to be the first people to not have the right to speak to a duty solicitor? I know that was an entirely popular, well-thought-out move too…
Even ignoring all the many, many arguments against an ID database, and the fact that there isn’t a single good argument for one, the idea of starting a national project with a regional rollout makes no sense, as the cards will be effectively useless even were one to take their supposed uses seriously. And the idea that people in Manchester are going to have sixty quid spare to give to the government in return for a useless piece of plastic, at a time when we’re in the worst recession in most people’s lifetimes, is frankly ludicrous. I could theoretically see a few of the “I’ve got nothing to hide!” brigade signing up for this were it free – but those are generally the kind of people who most object to spending a single penny of their own money anyway.
I’ve not been active enough in No2ID so far – I’ve only helped out a couple of times at the monthly events they have, although I’ve started being more active recently – but I’ll be down at St Anne’s Square on Saturday afternoon (details here) and I expect any readers of this blog within a ten-mile radius of Manchester City Centre to be there as well, or I’ll want to know why.
Manchester is to this Labour government as Scotland was to the Tories in the eighties – a place they don’t care about, where they can try out all their most unworkable, unpopular, vote-losing policies. The reasons are opposite, but really the same – the Tories knew no-one in Scotland was going to vote for them anyway, while Labour think they can’t lose Manchester because it’s their ‘core vote’ and they won’t vote for anyone else.
Let’s prove them wrong…
ETA Alix has a good post on this too…
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ – Helicon Prime
Yes, I’m going to start doing these again – and I hope to get them back to something like weekly posting as well.
As some of you will have noticed, I’ve not posted as much in recent weeks – that’s because I’ve been doing a lot more stuff offline, and so haven’t had quite the online time I normally have. One of those things was on Sunday, when I attended my first ever Doctor Who convention (I’m not much of a one either for social events or organised fandom) – a one-day affair at the Fab Cafe in Manchester. Now, if you’d followed this on Twitter, you would have thought this was the Black Hole of Calcutta, but slightly less pleasant. In fact it was just a typically cramped small venue with a broken hand-drier in the gents’ toilet.
A lot of the fan complaints just seemed to me to be totally missing the point – if you’d told me when I was ten years old “You know, one day you’ll get to meet two Doctors and four companions on the same day!” my reaction would not have been “well, I’d like to do that, but not if I have to wipe my hands dry on my trousers after washing them”.
But worse fan entitlement was the complaints that the same anecdotes were being told by the guests as they always tell. Now the clue there is ‘always’. If you know, in advance, that, say, Colin Baker is going to make the same jokes he’s made before, then if you’re tired of them, just don’t go. Don’t go, laugh sycophantically, then complain about it behind the man’s back. These people (and the line-up was exceptional – Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Nicola Bryant, Sophie Aldred, Mark Strickson and Frazer Hines, plus the Big Finish people, including Lisa Bowerman) are talking about jobs they had for three years or so, and they’ve been talking about them for twenty to forty years. How many different anecdotes could anyone have about a job they did for a few years twenty years ago?
Some of what they said was familliar to me from interviews and so on, but enough was fresh that I was entertained, and I shall keep it fresh by the simple expedient of not going along to see the same people tell the same stories every few weeks.
The reason I bring it up is that the bonus tracks to this audio, Helicon Prime, include an interview with Frazer Hines where he tells exactly the same stories about working with Patrick Troughton as he told on Sunday, and I would hate anyone to undergo the terrible torment and suffering of having to hear someone tell the same anecdote twice, and have to pay for it.
Helicon Prime by Jake Elliott is one of a low-budget series of single-CD adventures that Big Finish do called the Companion Chronicles. As the first three Doctors are, unfortunately, all dead, and as Tom Baker wants nothing to do with Big Finish, the only way to tell new stories featuring the first four Doctors is to do what they do in these stories – take a supporting character, usually a companion, and have them tell the story in first person.
The results are closer to talking books than to the radio drama that the main Big Finish line resembles, though they do include sound effects and there’s usually a second actor to fill in one supporting role.
In this case the story is being read by Frazer Hines, in character as Jamie McCrimmon, the Second Doctor’s companion, and features Suzanne Procter. Hines actually does an excellent job of imitating Troughton, when reading the Doctor’s lines – in context it’s Jamie telling the story and imitating the Doctor, but it works.
The story itself is just a pleasant little nothing, a pastiche of the stories of the time – the Big Finish people at the convention the other day said that the brief for this one had been to ‘make it sound black and white’, and it does – the plotline (what is the sinister truth behind an unexplained death on a resort planet?) is exactly the sort of thing they would have done in the sixties (it’s actually more a Hartnell type story than a Troughton one, because the Troughton stories were almost all ‘monster’ stories, which this isn’t, but it doesn’t seem out of place for the second Doctor and Jamie). The descriptions manage to conjure up a sense of place very well – rather better, in fact, than many of the regular Big Finish audios, as Hines can just read out a description of the people or surroundings – and while Hines does have a couple of duff line reads, there are surprisingly few for what is essentially a solo performance.
The only problem with it is an unavoidable one. The character of Jamie McCrimmon is not meant to be especially articulate (and, depending on the writer, he’s sometimes characterised as actually stupid, though I think the character works better when he’s resourceful and quick on the uptake but ignorant). Here, he has to be the narrator of the entire story which, given that this is not some avant-garde experimental piece, means he has to have a much larger working vocabulary, and a much better turn of phrase, than the character ever had on TV. (Part of me would almost like to see what could have been done by having Jamie tell the story while being characterised as he was on TV – I’m imagining the story told now in something like the way Alan Moore wrote the first chapter of Voice Of The Fire…)
So if I listen to this as Frazer Hines reading a Doctor Who story, it’s entertaining, but if I try to think of it as Jamie McCrimmon telling the story I keep getting pulled out of it.
The story itself is nothing special, but it’s nicely characterised – the relationship between the Second Doctor and Jamie is captured perfectly – and if you’re a lover of the all-too-few Troughton-era stories we still have and want more, this isn’t a bad substitute, But at half the length of a normal Big Finish story it can’t be anything like as ambitious as the regular series, so go into this expecting an enjoyable, fluffy piece of entertainment, rather than a great work of art, and you won’t be disappointed.
Unless, of course, you’re the kind of person who’s heard it all before…
Edited to add
Just a little extra here. Once again, I’m getting people coming to my blog searching for ‘Nicola Bryant’ along with various sexual keywords. I usually find that quite amusing, if nothing else because there could be nothing less sexy than my blog, except possibly my body. However, someone at the con asked Ms Bryant if she’d consider posing for a ‘lad mag’ (for those who aren’t British, these are soft-core pornographic titles aimed at people too scared to buy anything harder). This kind of thing, to my mind, crosses the line into sexual harassment, and while Ms Bryant was polite, if clearly embarassed, I won’t be. That person is presumably quite likely to be one of the people who arrives at my blog through those search terms, and I’d just like to say to you “Fuck off and die, you festering wart on the scrotum of humanity. Publicly humiliating someone just because she happens to be a good-looking woman is not the behaviour of a civilised human being, and by doing so you have waived your right to be treated as one.”
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