Interesting Times

Words, musings, rants and questions about the world we live in.

[psmithkhanna]

Napoleon's new rep.

Who would have thought it, one day, I would come to see Napoleon and his legacy with disdain! It feels as though it was only yesterday I was sitting in class in my 3rd year of university listening to a lecture on the french revolution - on how it created the modern age of nation-states and opened the era of democracy - and feeling a certain pride swell inside me.

Did I not take heed of that first sign? Pride for what!? As if I had had a hand in the revolution myself… But that pride enraptured me (as it does many-a-frenchman) and I found myself writing an essay praising “the rights of man, emancipation from prejudices, and equality of citizenship, and all these ideas [that] Napoleon has retained in full force” as my namesake put it so passionately in those opening passages of War and Peace.

How easy it is for the imagination to latch on to some fanciful emotion. How humbling it is to see where that emotion came from to begin with - the shallow shores of ego. The desire to be different and respected by flaunting some past glory spuriously attributed to your own persona!

Well… What a revolution it was. I already knew it didn’t start off terribly well, with Robespierre’s Terror-turned-civil war. Although prior to that the revolution might be considered commendable. But we students are usually taught that it’s only after the Terror and the Directoire that the going gets good. Glory awaits with the battle of Valmy, the first Consul, the coronation of the Emperor and the consolidation of an Empire not seen in Europe since the infamous Alexander the Great.

But what good, in reality, did Napoleon bring the world? For - and this is the irony of it all - it is not only the French who admire the man. No! The English, Americans, Greeks, Indians, Chinese… you name it. Everywhere the man is considered one of the greatest men in history. Michael E. Hart places him at n.34 in his 100 Most Influential Persons in History, ahead of the likes of Edison, Hitler, Calvin and Mao. I can understand why the French adulate him in virtue of this very fact (Pasteur and Lavoisier, ranked 11th and 20th on Hart’s list aren’t, for some reason, as glamorous). But the question remains unanswered: what good did he actually bring the world?

Two answers are often repeated and I don’t have any qualms with them: Napoleon brought the world the Code Civil and the metric system (by standardizing them across his empire). The third answer I am tempted to replace it with something altogether different in view of accurately praising this man history books are so adamant upon. The very thing I sincerely admired about Napoleon was the belief that he had taken the virtues of the Enlightenment as his foundation and spread them across Europe. Liberté Egalité Fraternité. Who isn’t enraptured by them? France’s mantra seemed to embody those beautiful philosophical ideas and was subsequently placed on a pedestal in my imagination, which, on the basis of god-knows what information, was subsequently embodied by Napoleon himself.

Liberté. Napoleon didn’t bring freedom to anyone but himself. If the claim that he truly was freeing other peoples by bringing the revolution to their doorsteps isn’t dubious enough, let us not forget that Napoleon reinstated slavery. That’s right - France has the extraordinary status of being the only country to abolish slavery twice. Once a pioneer in human rights, it had officially abolished slavery in 1794. That Napoleon reinstated it in 1802 is testament to some of his backwardness. Egalité. He may have instilled a notion of equality in the military pecking order based on merit, as he did with the Code Napoleon, but that is as far as enlightened ideals went for him. Fraternité. He propped up his (actual) brothers as kings, as he did with his half-brother. That wasn’t quite the fraternity the Enlightenment had in mind.

Rather than prolong the Enlightenment, the progress that was made came to a brutal halt and actually saw a reversal under the cool guidance of the world-celebrity Napoleon. Who else gets the Pope to come down to their place to crown them Emperor (while reinstating Catholicism as the state religion)? Napoleon was simply a megalomaniac with a genius for strategic thinking, and innovative, bold war tactics (which also cost him key campaigns in both Egypt and Russia). Rings a bell doesn’t it.

To come to what we might be better off remembering him by, should we want to remain somewhat fond of the man: it is thanks to the devastation he wrought across Europe that Spain lost control of its colonies in South America, enabling the independence movements there the flourish. More generally, he shocked Europe to the point that its rulers pledged against any such war to reoccur and to keep the peace at all cost. In the event, they were a little ahead of their time - they had WWI and II to go through. Yet the Concert of Europe assembled in Vienna back in 1815 once Napoleon was finally defeated arguably set the foundations for the League of Nations, the EEC, the European Union and the United Nations: the idea of having a supra-national body police member nation-states to retain the peace so painfully fought for.

In a curious twist, the man who, like all leaders before him, fought for glory, gave nations the desire to fight for peace. All fighting is bad. But let us not qualify greatness with glory. Napoleon reminded the world of the dangers of one man’s ambitions, of glory run riot fueled on the nationalistic and utopian fever of his people. That is what we should remember of him, too. As to the French, they should be humbled by facts and put away their selective memory. They’d do better to follow Hart’s advice and pick Pasteur and Lavoisier as their national heroes - a lot more to be proud of there.

[psmithkhanna]

Is War finally losing out to Peace?

Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity is convincing me that it is. Not yet half-way through and I'm finding his argument as robust as it is convincing.

Balancing (a lot of) statistical analysis with history, criminology and psychology, Pinker's questions our assumptions about violence and his answers are illuminating. Was, for instance, the 20th century really "the most violent ever" as is commonly thought? Certainly it had two World Wars, Stalin and Mao's purges, and genocides to boot. But we have a myopic tendency to remember things that are closer to home. What of the 40 million slaughtered during the Moghul conquests of the 13th century, up to 36 million killed during the An Lushan Revolt in 8th century China, or the annihilation of 20 million Native American Indians?

Pinker not only carefully sets out the sources of his data and their interpolation, he also stresses the poor condition of the historical record which gets fuzzier and fuzzier the further you tread down the road of the past. Despite this, it remains hard to deny the many trends which point to the notion that violence and war are on the decline. A mere glance at attitudes towards them during the Middle Ages reveals the gulf between our moral compass and that of our distant cousins. Both in numbers and in our mindsets, violence is no longer what it used to be. That the world media reacted so strongly when a US drone inadvertently killed ten Afghan civilians during a military operation (February 2010) is testament to how far we've recently come. As Joshua Goldstein put it:

The point is not that killing ten civilians is OK, but rather that in any previous war, even a few years ago, this kind of civilian death would barely have caused a ripple of attention. Civilian deaths, in sizeable numbers, used to be universally considered a necessary and inevitable, if perhaps unfortunate, by-product of war. That we are entering an era when these assumptions no longer apply is good news indeed.

In the same chapter on changing attidues towards war and violence, Pinker shares a letter he received from a Canadian armed forces captain from Kabul in 2003. Again, something of this kind would be unthinkable in the times of traditional, regimented warfare.

During this morning's Kalashnikov converto, I was waiting for the tower guards in our camp to open fire. I think they were asleep. That's par for the course. Our towers are manned by the Bundeswehr, and they haven't been doing a good job ... when they're actually there. I qualified that last comment because the Germans have already abandoned the towers several times. The first time was when we got hit by rockets. The remaining instances had something to do with it being cold in the towers. A German Lieutenant with whom I spoke about this lack of honour and basic soldier etiquette replied that it was Canada's responsibility to provide heaters for the towers. I snapped back by mentioning that it was Germany's responsibility to provide warm clothing to its soldiers. I was tempted to mention something about Kabul not being Stalingrad, but I held my tongue.

The German army of today is not what it once was. Or, as I've heard mentioned here several times: 'This ain't the Wehrmacht.' Given the history of our people, I can make the argument that that's a very good thing indeed. However, since my safety now rests upon the vigilance of the Herrenvolk's progeny, I'm slighty concerned to say the least.

Pinker's dollop of wit after 300-odd pages of serious enquiery is received with a smile, but the point is not lost. There is cause for optimism, and Pinker makes solid ground for them. As of May 15, 1984, for instance, "the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Romain Empire." And with the exception of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, not a single interstate war has been fought between countries in Europe since 1945. That's 69 years of peace - "Keep in mind that up until that point European states had started around two new armed conflicts a year since 1400."

This is not to say that all that matters is Europe or the great powers. It isn't hard to point to their wars in other countries to realize that they are far from being angels. But it is the case that wars between great powers are the deadliest. So a decline there is a decline in total deaths. So too has there been a decline in deaths when these nations do fight abroad - just think of the deathtoll in Vietnam as compared to those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, in understanding what factors lead to this "long peace", one might hope to spread its achievements elsewhere, and I'm eagerly approaching the latter half of the book which attempts to explain these factors in a bid to harness them. As he put it so well in the preface:

The shift is not towards complacency: we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time. Indeed, it is a recognition of the decline of violence that best affirms that such efforts are worthwhile. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, 'Why is there war?' we might ask, 'Why is there peace?' We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is.

Watch this space.

[psmithkhanna]

The evolution of the Human Billboard

As you take your seat on the tube for your morning commute, you find yourself distracted by a flashing light. Glancing up from your paper, you are greeted by a video of Miley Cyrus's latest show at the Grammies and the words "Get 20% off the album now!". The man sitting across you is wearing an iPad on his chest, streaming advert after advert. You look at him and he smiles back, then checks his watch to make sure he isn't late for work.

Part time billboard. £20 a day.

Not a bad deal if you ask me. Nor is this science fiction. I happened to witness it, yesterday. I had the pleasure to meet Adrian Brown who was wearing this iPad paraphernalia while on Jubilee line, on my way to work. Staring at the screen on his chest, which had revolving logos and graphics effectively advertising his advertising, I wasn't quite sure what to think. "May I take a picture?" I ask. He smiles and gives me a nod. "Free advertising" he must have thought. "Is this your business?" "Yes" he replies: "I was just waiting for the patent to come through, now we're fully operational" he says with pride.

Imagine that! Patenting the idea to stick an iPad on your chest. The guy who 'invented' the analogue version of the human billboard ("a piece of human flesh between two slices of paste board" as Charles Dickens put it) must be furious. You gotta keep with the spirit of the times I guess. Our times being characterised by the proliferation of technology amidst a recession, Mr. Brown has harnessed the two with his ingenious invention!

"It's not just the tube you know" he tells me, "in shopping centres, at promotional events, festivals..." As his strap-line goes: Now you can really sell anywhere with Media Pouch™. Does this mean we can expect to see scenes like yesterday's on a daily basis? If Adrian Brown has his way, the answer is an emphatic "yes". Given the limited nature of advertising space in public places, should this take off, you would expect it to lower advertising prices, in turn helping companies bombard us with their logos, slogans and offers with no respite in sight. If only we could take a page out of São Paulo Mayor Gilberto Kassab's book and ban advertising from public view altogether. Now there's an ingenious idea.

Trailer below for those who agree.

Trailer from This Space Available.

[psmithkhanna]

Challenging Existing Paradigms - Too much for TED

A year on, and it's still as embarrassing as ever. TED sponsored a TEDx talk in Whitechapel, London, in Jan 2013, with the theme "CHALLENGING EXISTING PARADIGMS" to then censor two of the evening's best talks. Rupert Sheldrake on science's materialistic paradigm, and Graham Hancock on opening our consciousness to new levels, through the responsible use of Ayahuasca, in a call for a return to spirit.

The two hit the nail on the head, but TED's sponsors, or their 'Scientific Board' thought otherwise:

TED respects and supports the exploration of unorthodox ideas, but the many misleading statements in both Sheldrake's and Hancock's talks, whether made deliberately or in error, had led our scientific advisors to conclude that our name and platform should not be associated with these talks.

Not only do Sheldrake and Hancock reply to each of the allegations made against them ('credit' to TED for posting them on their blog?) but TED is shockingly hypocritical. It's bad enough to censor an idea from a talk that is supposed to be challenging to begin with, but to then pretend that "TED respects and supports the exploration of unorthodox ideas" directly after taking a jibe at Hancock's career:

He seems to offer a one note explanation for how culture arises (drugs), it's no surprise his work is often characterised as pseudo-archaology.

Is that TED talking or some fanatic blogger with a chip on his shoulder?! No, best to presume it's TED's 'scientific board', of which Richard Dawkins is no doubt the chair. 

In a pithy remark on Hancock's talk, TED says that he "makes statements about psychotropic drugs that seem both nonscientific and reckless." What kind of scientific board could produce such a vague remark, I have no clue. But what the statement is insinuating, is that naive listeners will take Hancock's advice and go get high on DMT thinking that they will "connect directly with an ancient mother culture" (in TED's words). 

I wonder what would happen if someone (perhaps those "militant atheist bloggers Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers [who] denounced me [Sheldrake]") bombarded Jill Bolte's TED talk on consciousness. Perhaps then TED's scientific board would deem her talk to be reckless too, that naive listeners would all seek out a stroke to inhibit their brain's left hemisphere. "I found Nirvana" Bolte says.

And if I have found Nirvana, and I'm still alive, then everyone who's alive can find Nirvana. And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposefully chose to step to the right of their left hemispheres, and find this peace [...] So. Who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to chose moment by moment who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where We are - I am - the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power, the fifty trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is.

Filmed and posted in 2008, less than a year after TED's site went live, Bolte's talk might have benefited from the bold attitude characteristic of start-ups (it certainly worked - Bolte's talk is the fourth most viewed TED talk of all time). Maybe if this talk had been released a little later it would have been banned too. 

TED respects and supports the exploration of unorthodox ideas, but the many misleading statements in Bolte's talk, whether made deliberately or in error, had led our scientific advisors to conclude that our name and platform should not be associated with these talks. Science lays no claims to empowering humans to be "the life-force power of the universe" and Bolte, under the veil of her scientific credentials, falsely assumes that we can achieve peace in the world through the connection to our "deep-inner-peace circuitry of our right hemisphere". 

That TED decided to leave Bolte but censor Hancock and Sheldrake is nothing less than embarassing and entirely presumptuous. Since when has TED become the judge of what does and doesn't qualify as science? Worse still - since when has TED's anonymous'scientific board' become the standard bearer of all things scientific?!

What is the difference between Bolte's talk and Hancock's? Their final messages are identical: achieve a purer state of consciousness. Hancock talks of an outdated world view which values productivity: 

[that] alert, problem-solving state of consciousness [...] But I think everybody realises that the promise of a society over-monopolistically based on this state of consciousness has proved hollow [...] and that urgently we need to find something to replace it.

Is this not, in Bolte's terms, nothing more than an over-reliance on the left hemisphere? The two differ solely in how to achieve this better state of being. Hancock proposes a return to consciousness-altering substances whereas Bolte doesn't in fact propose anything concrete because we don't find ourselves in the midst of a stroke. For Bolte, we are perpetually presented with a choice: to use our left or our right hemispheres. Presumably we might train ourselves to use one or the other. Hancock's proposal is interesting insofar as it might be a key to doing so - maybe that's why it was banned. 

To top it all off - having censored Sheldrake and Hancock on 'scientific grounds', which TED was unable to back up with any evidence whatsoever (rendering their judgement un-scientific, which goes to show their beliefs are based on something else altogether) - TED then went on to revok a license they had given for aTEDxWestHollywood program, just two weeks before the event, on the basis that it too, was pseudoscience - this, without TED having even read the speakers' talks!

That TED is adjudicating what counts as science and censoring perfectly good science makes a mockery of it'sself-professed passionate belief "in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world." This poses a wider threat to us - interested as we are in challenging existing paradigms - because we naively believe TED to be benevolent and righteous when, as this entire episode has demonstrated, it clearly and regrettably isn't.

What challenge - if any - does TED pose to the existing paradigm?

[thegirlwhocrieswolf]

More poetry by Lang Leav here

[psmithkhanna]

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

[psmithkhanna]

Russell Brand should go to Switzerland

I wrote a post about Russell Brand’s second Paxman interview a few weeks ago, and made the elementary bloggers mistake of not reading other bloggers responses to it. I had done my own research and was quite happy with what I thought was a tame article.

Low and behold the naive incredulity on my face when friends drew my attention to some other responses to Brand’s call to revolution - which tore it apart. They all started off on the same footing “let’s be generous and take Brand’s idea seriously - oh wait, look, it’s fraught with problems - it’s incredibly vague, full of fantastic words and ultimately meaningless”. Paxman himself wasn’t sure of Brand’s call to “not bother voting” - the single concrete action the entertainer recommended his followers in both his interview and his editorial for the New Statesman.

I was disappointed with the general negative reaction to the fanciful Mr. Brand, because I thought - and still do - he was genuinely trying to make a positive change. Contemporary politics suck after all. It was all too easy to pick him apart with analytical rigor, if only because Brand isn’t a politician nor is he an academic - and insists on being variously funny, witty, smart and outrageous. You can’t expect to convince the skeptical in that manner.

In the event, the Swiss votes against won by 65.3% to 34.7% in favour. But that’s not the point. What Brand (and anyone wanting to make a positive change) should recognize is the process democratic states have put in place to enable its citizens to have a collective voice and actually do something with it. The UK’s e-petitions offer just that (get 100,000 signatures, get the motion into parliament). Indeed, someone’s even gone and started a petition emulating the Swiss in its call to cap executive pay at 12:1.

Perhaps the fact that it currently has a mere six signatures has to do with its lack of visibility. As a Oxford researcher has suggested - these e-petitions work best when there is a big initial uptake - 3,000 or so signatures in the first ten hours. Brand, who thinks that governments “shouldn’t create massive economic disparity” and is outraged that “the Tories are taking the EU to court because they’re trying to curtail bankers’ bonuses” may well have the ability to create that uptake should he want to. Guest-editing the New Statesman was a golden opportunity to do something of the like.

That he didn’t doesn’t mean he’s an idiot. He’s just a novice. Nothing is to say that he won’t grow wiser. If one has positive change in mind, to shun Brand’s very first step into politics is as apathetic as not voting. Sure, poking-fun is rewarding and serves its purpose. But Oh how easy it is to do! As clumsy as it is, Brand’s foray into politics displays a lot more concern for serious matters than those who lambasted his words. Either grow up and lend a hand or stay idle with your conceited belief of holding the higher ground.

[psmithkhanna]

Each and every film poster you see nowadays will invariably quote the words "brilliant", "wonderful" and "amazing", above or under a row of five neat, golden stars.

When confronted with them (as you are, generally when on the tube) I would always make sure to check where the quote was pulled from - being under the belief that words from The Times would be somewhat more meaningful than those of The Daily Star. Yet it doesn't take long to realise how easy it would be to pull quotes out of context - more likely, the reviewer said it was "brilliant" as a script but the acting and production were poor. I haven't tested this theory out on each and every film poster out there, but you get the idea.

What this also demonstrates, is just how widespread the careless use of language has become. Every reviewer - no matter who you write for - seems just as generous with their use of superlatives as the next, dishing them out like some premature pinata dropping sweets before getting hit. Certainly one could seek out some astute review - but who has time for that in the age of snippets sound bites?

As expected, advertising giants are all too eager to exploit our 140-character attention spans: the PR campaign behind The Book of Mormon is the first I can think, and the ad for The Secret life of Walter Mitty I saw slapped across this morning's Metro's, the latest. The internet has made it all too easy to find thousands of praiseworthy posts and comments - no matter how good or how utterly rubbish the product.

Could we blame them if they stopped quoting 'informed, critical' reviews altogether? I'm not sure it would make much of a difference to us twits: indeed, Walter Mitty's PR team is already up to it - the review section on their website is nothing but a stream of suggarcoated as-good-as-anonymous tweets.

Now, it may well be that The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a great film. I'm not judging it. It's the loss of quality I don't like - off screen but also on it - and that doesn't look like it'll stop. They should just give up 10% of their advertising budget to smaller, cheaply-produced, probably quality films. 10 % of $36 million (the average PR budget per hollywood film) would go a long way to enriching our cinematic experience and make piffling ads in the tube a little more bearable.

[psmithkhanna]

ASTROV 

Man is endowed with reason and creative power so that he can increase what has been given him, but up to the present he's been destroying and not creating. There are fewer and fewer forests, the rivers are drying up, the wild creatures are almost exterminated, the climate is being ruined, and the land is getting poorer and more hideous every day.

[psmithkhanna]

“The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself [...] What exactly the struggle into being consists in, is the question. But most obviously, [...] the first and chiefest factor is the struggle into love and the struggle with love: by love, meaning the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man. The via media to being, for man or woman, is love, and love alone."

[psmithkhanna]

"Nobody amongst us had any interest in men who went home. They were all right; they did not count any more. Going to Europe was nearly as final as going to Heaven. It removed a man from the world of hazard and adventure."

[psmithkhanna]

Definition of life: an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

[psmithkhanna]

'Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it,' wrote Charles Darwin in his autobiography, 'poetry of many kinds ... gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for pictures and music. ... My mind Seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive ... The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.'

[psmithkhanna]

TUTZENBACH All right then. After we're dead, people will fly around in balloons, the cuts of their coats will be different, the sixth sense will be discovered and possibly even developed and used for all I know. But I believe life itself will remain the same; it will still be difficult and full of mystery and full of happiness. And in a thousand years time people will still be sighing and complaining. "How hard this business of living is!" And yet they'll still be scared of death and unwilling to die just as they are now. VERSHININ [After a moment's thought] Well, you know... How should I put it? I think everything in the world is bound to change gradually - in fact it's changing before our very eyes. In two or three hundred years or maybe in a thousand years - it doesn't matter how long exactly - life will be different. It will be happy. Of course we won't be able to enjoy that future life, but all the same what we're living for now is to create it; we work and ... yes, we suffer in order to create it. That's the goal of our life, and you might say that's the only happiness we will ever achieve.

[psmithkhanna]

IRINA- [...] We must work, work! The reason we feel depressed and take such a gloomy view of life is that we've never known what it is to make a real effort.

The Three Sisters - Anton Chekhov

[thebirkbeckartsreview]

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”

— Franz Kafka

[psmithkhanna]

For the love of Kafka

[psmithkhanna]

Russell Brand's Revolution

The celebrity has once again grabbed the headlines by virtue of guest-editing this week’s New Statesman, with Revolution at the heart of his theme. Having already defiled the limelight at the GQ Awards last month - with the additional kudos of a second interview with Jeremy Paxman, rather than remaining an archive on the Guardian website, Mr. Brand’s dissident views are gaining momentum.

The last time I came across a celebrity somewhere you wouldn’t expect them to be, was Shakira’s article about child education in The Economist back in 2010. I remember thinking ‘Wow... They’ve sunk low.’ My reaction to Brand’s cameo at the New Statesman betrays a bias of some sort. I didn’t believe Shakira could do anything in terms of changing the status-quo (and probably believed that The Economist thought just the same), whereas I do believe that Brand has something a little more important to offer in that direction. 

Paxman was quick to challenge Brand, pointing out that his talk of political change is ‘vague’ at best. “Why”, he asks, “would we take you seriously?” to which Brand replied:

I’m here just to draw attention to a few ideas [...] there are people with alternative ideas that are far better qualified than I am and far better qualified - more importantly - than the people that are currently doing that job. Because they’re not attempting to solve these problems, they’re attempting to placate the population.

And drawing the public's placated attention he certainly is. With hundreds of comments for his article on the New Statesman and over six million YouTube views in 4 days for his Paxman interview (up from 240,000 for his first one), comments to Shakira’s article on The Economist website - all five of them - look rather meek in comparison. Perhaps no-one reads The Economist’s website. 

Both Brand and Shakira share a key ambition: to put an end to the disparities between rich and poor. In fact, Shakira’s actions are probably more to the point than Brand’s insofar as she has actually taken action and already set up a program to meet these ends. Yet who payed attention to Shakira’s stunt in The Economist? Concrete proposals aren’t, it seems, what count.

It wouldn’t be unruly to venture that the response to Brand’s outbursts stems from their contents resonating, quite strongly, with a thoroughly disenchanted public. Shakira’s foundation might be helping kids out of poverty, but Brand’s call to revolution sounds a lot more exciting for a population tired of “the mundanity of our everyday lives” as he put it to Paxman in 2010. Or, as he put it his week in his inimitable manner:

If we can engage in that feeling - instead of some moment of lachrymose sentimentality trotted out on the TV for people to pour over emotional porn - if we can engage with that feeling and change things. Why wouldn’t we? Why is that naive?

Funnily, while watching the interviews with Paxman, one has the quaint feeling that the Great Interrogator is in fact sympathetic to Brand's plight. If Brand were to ditch the 'vague' talk of a spiritual revolution to replace it with something more tangible - imagine his call to abstain from voting was heeded by a substantial portion of the population - it wouldn't be surprising to find those he is poised against decide that the entertainer has had enough fun as it is - and put an end to his ‘triviality’.