Black is white, according to the Guardian. Well, orange is purple at least.

Let me start by saying that my frustration with the "Occupy" London protestors is that if they put their energy and idealism into promoting practical ideas to reform the cronyist brand of capitalism that abetted the economic crisis, rather than throwing a temper tantrum against the vaguely identified system as a whole, or obscure structures of local governance (talk about going from one extreme to the other), then we might get somewhere.

I am all for protesting about this sort of thing - but performance art (as Hopi has put it) isn't protesting.

"Occupy" are not helped in their detachment from reality by the cheerleading of the likes of The Guardian. Maybe I'm going a little mad or blind (or at least colour blind) but can someone explain this to me?:



The Guardian website heads this up with a claim that it proves that thermal imaging photography doesn't work when someone's in a tent and so all those pictures of purply-blue tents taken late at night do not mean that everyone's popped home for a shower, hot meal and to catch up with TOWIE, rather than comitting themselves whole-heartedly to the New Jerusalem.

Butbutbutbutbutbut....the tent turns orange doesn't it? Doesn't it? The activist pops inside for five seconds and the tent starts glowing orange, no? And as soon as she leaves, it stops, yes?  

It's like something out of Orwell. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. And orange is purple. Or maybe they should have captioned it with "All tents ARE purply but some are more purply than others".

And one other thing. Well done Anti-Capitalist Hero Woman on getting hold of some state-of-the-art technology, quickly and cheaply. I wonder what sort of socio-economic system might allow us all to do that?

What? Oh.

UPDATE: And yes, I agree, the original thermal photograph probably didn't prove very much about tent occupation as it was taken at 11 pm-ish when probably hardly anyone had gone beddy-byes. But its "Occupiers" themselves who have been quite open about the optional nature of the overnight stages of this adventure in urban camping.

Things They Said Will Kill Or Destroy Us But Haven't.

When I was a younger, more scared, less intellectually developed man (and we're talking about a period that lasted well into my thirties, mind) I thought that the ability to ban something was an important tool in the progressive box. So many things were so obviously "bad"; their prohibition, so unchallengeably good.

I think that the only thing I have ever directly been a part of trying to get banned myself was Holocaust denial literature from my university's library. An act of which I am profoundly ashamed. Not because I'm now of the opinion that well, yes, 6 million does seem a little bit high, now you come to mention it. But because a) the idea that my fellow students would overnight become neo-Nazis based on reading such works was absurd and offensive, and b) even if they did, I had the arguments ready to deploy in defence of the truth.

I was reminded of my childishness in such matters by my own short post on Monday on the putting away of childish things, by @johnrentoul's highlighting of Richard Thaler's things we used to believe but were wholly wrong, and by this article about anti-comic book campaigner Fredric Wertham.
 
These also got me thinking about all the objects or media or ideas or cultural phenomena that have have been, in my lifetime at least, the subject of moral panic or dire warnings about adverse effects on health, life and civilisation as we know it. 

They all, of course, turned out to be either completely safe or passing fads or a lot less fatal and dangerous to Western society than "predicted".

So. I'm starting a list of Things They Said Will Kill Or Destroy Us But Haven't (TTSWKODUBH). Please add your own in the comments below.

#1 Tamagotchis...
...were going to disrupt classrooms, and turn children into gambling addicted, emotional wrecks.

Last seen: interesting only elderly, obsessive collectors. And NEITHER disrupting classrooms NOR turning children into gambling addicted, emotional wrecks.

#2 Mobile phones...
...were going to give us all (especially the young) brain tumours and other types of cancer.

Last seen: forming part of a Teenage Cancer Trust survey about cancer myths. And NOT causing cancer. Especially not amongst the young.

#3 Harry Potter...

...was going to turn children into occultist satan worshippers, gathering in covens to practice witchcraft and wizardry, rather than doing their trigonometry homework. 

Last seen: Hmm. Not sure. Might be a new film out or something, I think. Anyway. Trig homework is still getting done. With slide rules*, not wands.

*Yeah, alright. Calculators.

You don't have to be mad. But...

Theodore Dalrymple in today's Times (£) highlights the inflation in the official recognition of syndromes, manias and psychoses, as meticulously documented in and promoted by the ever-expanding Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Which got me pondering as to how the Labour Party leadership candidates are bearing up as we enter the thirteenth week of campaigning. With the DSM as my guide, I think I may have noticed a condition or five that point towards everyone needing to take a few days off:

SERRACUMMUSICUS INSILIOMANIA

an irresistible compulsion to jump on bandwagons

HYPERBOREAN TOURETTE'S

inability to stop mentioning one's regional provenance

PEDAGOGICAL INTERROGATIVE APHASIA

a speech impediment presenting as tongue paralysis 

when asked a question about education

HEALEY'S PARANOIA

unavoidable anxiety experienced by those 
diagnosed as the frontrunner
(see also Heseltine Syndrome and Acute Portilloism) 

CLP-TYPE MICRONUMEROPHOBIA

severe aversion to smaller than expected returns 

from the local party nominations

 
The good news is that most of these are reckoned to be seasonal disorders and that everyone should be cured by the 25th September.