Sam Iles's Blog

Well this is interesting. Retired US Army General Wesley Clark, recipient of many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, gave a speech a few years back, in which he laid out the US’s plans. Here’s a transcription:

About ten days after 9/11 I went to the penatagon and I saw secretary Rumsfield and Deputy Secretary Wolfweitz.

I went down stairs to see some of the staff who used to work for me and one of the Generals called me in and said “Sir, you have got to come in. Come in, you have got to come in and talk to me a second.”

I said “Well, you’re too busy”.

He said, “No, No, we have made the decision to go to war with Iraq”. This was on or about the 20th of September [2001].

I said “We are going to war with Iraq? Why?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.”

So I said “Well did they find come information connecting Saddam to Al-Qaeda?”

He said, “No, No. There is nothing new that way, they just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.”

He said, “I guess its like, we don’t know what to do about terrorists but we have a good military and we can take down governments.” I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

So I came back to see him a few weeks later and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.

I said “Are we still going to war with Iraq?”

And he said “Oh, its worse than that.”

He reached over on his desk and picked up a piece of paper.

He said, “I just got this down from up stairs from the Secretary of Defence’s office today. This is a memo that describes how we are going to take out 7 countries in 5 years.”

“Starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon. Then Libya, Somalia and Sudan. Then finishing off with Iran.”

Iraq? Check.

Syria? Check.

Lebanon? Check.

Libya? Check.

Somalia? Almost check.

Sudan? Check and check.

Iran? Just wait.

Obama and Gay Marriage

The big news this week was that President Obama officially endorsed gay marriage! Now, I’m not saying this is a bad thing because it’s clearly a wonderful thing. However, it has very little meaning. I’ve heard a lot of people here in UK say that Obama has legalised gay marriage in USA. This is completely wrong. The federal government has absolutely no say in how marriage works and therefore Obama is in no position to legislate over it. Marriage wasn’t mentioned in the constitution. Obama even had the gall to say that the federal government would not pass any federal ban on gay marriage. But the fact is that in America state law always trumps federal law. So, even if the federal government pass a law making gay marriage legal in wouldn’t affect all of the states which have passed a law making gay marriage illegal.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing or that he shouldn’t have said it. I just think people need to be clear on exactly what happened. Obama didn’t legalise gay marriage, and he couldn’t even if he wanted to.

The Double Agent Terrorist

There’s also been a lot of talk this week about the foiled terrorist plot. I’m not going to talk about whether or not it’s a true story, but one part of it has really been bothering me. It turns out that the guy who was involved in it and was going to ostensibly carry out the attack was actually working for the US government. But the media has consistently been referring to him as a ‘double agent’. This is completely false.

To be a double agent, you have to be working for one country while telling another country that you also work for them. So, the Russians hire you to spy on America, but you really work for America.

He was not a double agent because Al Qaeda didn’t think that he was spying on the USA. He was just a single agent. It just makes no sense!

What he was actually ostensibly doing was working for Al Qaeda and telling Al Qaeda that he was working for Al Qaeda when he was really working for the Americans. This is a complete change of what it means to be a double agent. It makes no sense. And it’s really annoys me.

He’s not a double agent! Even the BBC ran that as their headline. Grr!

Anyhoo, I’ll end this now. I don’t really have a point, just a little bit of clarification for us all to enjoy.

I download a lot of digital content. Whether it’s music and movies from iTunes, Mac and iOS apps from the App Store or books from Amazon, I get a lot and spend a lot of time deciding what to get. One thing which doesn’t help are user reviews.

In fact, user reviews are generally terrible, for a lot of reasons.

The first reason is that people don’t understand what they’re talking about.

For example, if you look at the reviews for the Spotify app in the app store, you’ll see that it has an average of three stars which, in App Store terms, is pretty bad. But, if you actually go and read the reviews, you’ll see that the vast majority of them are either one star or five star. The people giving it one star reviews are nearly all people complaining that they downloaded it but can’t use it because they need to pay a £10 per month subscription.

In my mind, that isn’t a reflection of the quality of the app or service. It’s a reflection of your stupidity for not knowing what Spotify is. To qualify as a reviewer, you need to have tried the app. By all means, try it with a subscription and then give it one star for saying it isn’t worth the money or doesn’t perform well. But, please, don’t give a product you haven’t tried one star.

A similar phenomenon happens with iTunes movies. People either give a film five stars or one star. The one star mob are predominantly complaining that the film is too expensive.

Well, I can see with my own eyes if the film is too expensive. What I can’t see is if the film is good and that is what I way to know from you. I want to know your subjective opinions of the film so I can decide if I want to see it – not your subjective opinions of the price.

The problem with this is that these products are given average ratings which are prominently displayed. Often, a five star product will end up with a three star rating because mindless idiots complain about something unrelated.

So there’s problem number one: unrelated, annoying drivel driving down review averages.

Problem two: five stars don’t work. Looking through reviews, you’ll see they fall into two categories – positive and negative. In most circumstances, positive reviewers give a five and negative reviewers give a one. There are very few reviews in between (the odd review from an intelligent person not-withstanding).

Certain products don’t suffer from this as much (book reviewers seem to be able to hand out a few more stars) whereas Apps on the app store are particularly bad. Most app reviewers end up giving a one or a five.

What this means is that it’s actually a case of how many fives versus how many ones. If it’s equal, the average comes out at three, and so on. This isn’t helpful.

Google recently realise this, removing the option to star videos on YouTube, as they said nearly everyone gave either five stars or one star. They replaced it with a like and dislike button.

I think Apple (and friends) should do this with something like Apps too. Not necessarily ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’, but perhaps ‘Would you recommend this App to a friend?’ with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ as the option and then display a simple percentage. I think this would be a lot more valuable than star ratings.

Problem three (and this realise is a more personal, non-techy one which kind of makes the rest of the post moot, but…): I don’t care about what the Internet thinks. Some arbitrary star rating placed with one second’s thought isn’t enough for me to decide if I want to download an app or read a book.

Take the Women in Black book by Susan Hill. This is an incredible ghost story published in the 1980s, and generally considered to be classic of the genre. However, its average rating is dragged down to four out of five stars by one star reviewers like these people who lament that the book has no “excitement” with one reviewer complaining that “Books are meant to be exciting”. What they don’t realise is that this is the point of a ghost novel. They are supposed to be understated, focusing on the characters’ fear and not their excitement. A scary novel full of excitement and action is a horror novel, a scary novel full of understated fear is a ghost story.

And, yes, I can understand that this is their opinion. For them, a book is clearly not fun unless it is full of action. I dread to think how they’d cope with Dickens or any number of other books which aren’t scary. The problem here isn’t that the book is bad or deserves a one star review, it’s that they’ve gone into the book with bad expectations. If you expect Twilight to be a gritty Anne Rice style horror vampire novel, you’re going to have a bad time. But, if you know that Twilight is a teenage romance novel featuring vampires, you’re probably going to have a better time.

Let me make one thing clear: it doesn’t matter that these people don’t know this. That’s OK. The problem is that it skews the perceived quality of something by people who take these reviews seriously.

I will gladly read a book which has three Amazon reviews because it has been recommended to me by someone whom I trust or it won some award or is on some list of whatever.

I suppose that my message is this: be careful with your reviews. A review for an app on Macworld is, I think, much more valuable than a thousand reviews from Joe Public on the App Store.

[Note: I wrote this about four months ago, and Spotify had a three star rating then. It now has four and half stars for the most recent version. I guess people have become less stupid. You'll also note that the average rating for all versions of the app is actually two and half stars.]

When I was in school, our head teacher used to have a message that he’d tell us in assemblies and such: “I wish, or I’m glad.”

The case was, when you open your exam results, do you want to be saying “I am glad about these results” or “I wish I would have worked harder”.

Whenever we were told this message, I used to think how bad it was.

On a basic level, it makes sense. But, I’ve just never liked it. Maybe I should have said something. In fact, I remember writing a kind of monologue which I thought would have been more useful to tell everyone one lunchtime in the library (I had a lot of spare time, it would seem) but I can’t find it now. Hmm. I have no idea if it’s still used in the school. Anyway. I’m sure the creator of the message had his heart in the right place and he was no doubt a smart man but, as a general exercise in thinking, let’s discuss why it might not be all that good.

First off, it pushes the problem off to a distant date. If you are trying to beat this message into people in year nine, ten, or even eleven it’s not going to work because the point at which you are required to attach some consequence to is months away. If I get to go home tonight, with results day a year away, of what consequence is it to me right now whether I decide to watch TV or revise?

Second: Even if you do manage to get through to them and realise that they are going to feel something in a year’s time, the consequence isn’t that much of a big deal. Will you be wishing you did better, or will you be happy? Well, so what? What does it matter? All this does is say you will either be happy, or… slightly not happy when you open an envelope. After that, it’s back to normal. The message fails in giving a bigger meaning to results day. Sure, with a little bit of thinking, we can see there is a deeper consequence, but we’ll get to that later in the post.

Third: even if you can make them see that this fleeting emotion is somehow important, the message of “I wish or I’m glad” couldn’t be more lacklustre. I’m glad? When do I ever use the word glad? And, I wish? Really? Wouldn’t “I am glad or I am sad” have a little more kick. Or “I am ecstatic” or (perhaps best of all) “I am proud.” But, ‘glad’? Now, I get it: as a caring teacher, you don’t want to stand there and tell a bunch of sixteen year olds that they might be sad in a few months time. But, powerful words get through to people. Not some vague promise of gladness.

There is, I think, a far better message which could be used to convince tired 16 year olds to revise. (This is where we might get useful for you, too.)

Let’s imagine a (short and to the point and not what I would really say) monologue which a head teacher might give to a room of students, in the January of their final year of secondary education:

So, your exams are four or five months away. Seems like a long time, doesn’t it?

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you want to be a vet. How are you going to do, that? Go to university, right? How are you going to go to university? By getting good results in your exams. And, how do you get good results? It’s by revising, and revising hard.

It may seem like watching TV instead of spending thirty minutes revising is what you really want to do, but when you start from top, start from your dreams, and work your way backwards, you can see how important that revision is. If you want to be a vet, then you know that what you really want it to go to uni, to get good grades and to revise.

What I want you to do is ask yourself the question, ‘do I want to be doing what I am doing right now?’ If the answer is no, you need to change it. That means that whenever you’ve spent an hour staring at Facebook or three hours watching repeats of a TV show you’ve seen a hundred times, you need to ask yourself what the value is in that. Does that help you achieve your dreams? No. Do something that does.

Do you see the difference? Rather than externalise the problem to some distant, fleeting emotion which you can worry about later, the message becomes “the decision you make every single day has a huge material impact on the rest of your life.”

It’s not about the consequences on results day. That is so, so irrelevant to everybody except the people running the school who want to look good in the league tables. You think students care about grades? Of course they don’t. They care about what those grades mean for them.

The connection between grades and the rest of your life may seem obvious, and, of course, it is mostly obvious. But you don’t motivate people by leaving them to connect the dots themselves.

Let me put it this way. I did badly in my GCSEs. Far worse than I should have done. I got one A and a whole bunch of bad grades. I started of school loving education and loving school, and ended it up hating school and everything about it. I can go into why I think things went wrong (about 98% me and 2% the school) but I won’t bother. Maybe I will one day.

Ultimately, however, I opened my envelope on results day and I said “I wish I would have done better.” But, you know what, I could have come to that conclusion on my own. I know that “I wish,” but it sure didn’t help me when it was going on. Why? Because I didn’t care about this single day in my like that was months and months away. I cared about the rest of my life.

Finding the time and attention to do the things that you want to do is, I think, just about the hardest thing in the world to do. But, before you can even begin to direct your time and attention to the right places, you need to know what those right places are, and understand that you really do want to revise. Get a 16 year old to realise that they literally want to revise and the whole thing is sorted.

I’d probably round it off with one of my favourite paragraphs in all of literature from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot:

“Consequently, he had about five minutes left to live, not more. He said those five minutes seemed like an endless time to him, an enormous wealth… The ignorance of and loathing for this new thing that would come presently were terrible; yet he said that nothing was more oppressive for him at that moment than the thought: ‘What if I were not to die! what if life were given back to me—what infinity! And it would be all mine! Then I’d turn each minute into a whole age, I’d lose nothing, I’d reckon up every minute separately, I’d let nothing be wasted!’”

Will what I’m doing now matter in a year’s time? Getting a C does not matter to people. Becoming a vet does matter to people. That’s what they need to see.

BBC News:

[Ian Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions] also said the government would reward marriage in the tax system.

This would help prevent a repeat of the riots which blighted English cities this summer, Mr Duncan Smith argued.

Um, ok. Wait – why?

BBC news:

Meanwhile, the [BBC] Trust also ruled that a sex scene in an episode of Torchwood did not breach BBC guidelines.

More than 1,200 viewers complained about the scene, which featured characters Captain Jack and Angelo Colasanto, saying it was screened too close to the 21:00 watershed and was inappropriate for children as it featured two men.

In other words, man and woman – no problem. Man and man – problem.

A lot of people seem to hate gay people. I’m not talking about an “eww, men kissing” type thing, but a genuine homophobia – fear, hatred, call it what you will.

I can’t help but think that people who get so worked up about how consenting adults choose to love and do things in the bedroom are… damaged.

I mean, seriously, in what possible way does it affect you? I get that maybe you think your religion tells you it’s bad (which it probably doesn’t) or that you think gay people want to ‘turn’ you (they don’t) or that they want to molest your children (they don’t). The fact is, gay people don’t want to molest your children any more than a straight person wants to. If two men want to touch each other’s junk in the privacy and comfort of their own rooms then I strongly encourage that they do so.

No matter how hard a racist concentrates on hating a black person, that black person won’t suddenly wake up white one morning. And, no matter how hard you hate a gay person, they won’t become straight.

In fact, they know this, and therefore they have adopted the plan of simply reducing the legal rights of gay people in any way they can, be that not allowing them to marry or adopt or serve in the military and what have you. This isn’t a genuine way to protest against something which you think is bad. No, it’s simply a way to be as hateful and cruel as you possibly can.

You know, people kill themselves or are killed all the time because they are gay. But, people don’t kill themselves because they have blonde hair. They reason is that being gay is no worse than having blonde hair, but society tells them it’s worse. That’s not all of society, but it is a lot. Even the non-homophobic people fall into that non-helpful part of society group. You know those bed adverts which switch between five or so couples sitting in their beds and being generally loving and playful? Well, when was the last time you saw a gay couple thrown into the mix there? Never, right? There was a time when it would have been unthinkable to show a mixed race couple in bed together in an advert like that, but we got past that – in fact, we got past that to a degree where now pretty much every one of those ads has a mixed race couple.

I’m confident that will happen for gay couples one day. When we won’t bat an eyelid when seeing such a thing on the TV. Who knows, maybe in some distant future a version of me will be writing a blog post about some other type of discrimination writing: “Did you know that there used to be a time when it was unthinkable to show a gay couple in a TV advert?!” I sure hope so.

When I see politicians like Rick Santorum talk about how awful being gay is, it literally blows my mind. They are the people that are the problem. Rick Santorum is clearly in a horrible hateful place that he thinks he has to behave like this. And, so are all the rest of them.

I shall leave you with the immortal words of the Buddha, which sums up this issue pretty well:

Hatred never ceases by hatred in this world. By love alone it ceases; this is eternal law.

Hating isn’t going to change anything. So, stop it.

So. I recently read ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ by Stephen Chbosky.

I know I say this about a lot of books, but this one really was amazing. It’s a simple epistolary novel in which the pseudonymous author Charlie writes anonymous letters to an unnamed recipient. Someone he heard was a nice guy, so wants to write letters to.

Charlie is a ‘freshman’ which, in UK terms, makes him year 10. His letters chart his journey through his freshman year of friendship, girls and being a wallflower.

It’s a wonderfully simple premise, like so many other of these type of coming of age novels, but what sets this one apart is how achingly beautiful it is. Charlie is such a uniquely likeable character and the book feels so uniquely… possible. There’s no tragic deaths or other unexpected and outlandish plot twists which feature in so many of this type of coming of age story – just a pleasant, realistic story.

Oh, and to top it all off, it’s being made into a film featuring Nina Dobrev (of Vampire Diaries fame) and Emma Watson, due out this year. So, yeah. Go read it.