A Drunken Madman

Hi. It's me. We need to talk.

It's about that thing you believe. You know the one. Yes, that one.

As we've discussed before, that thing you believe is completely unsupported by evidence.

Yes, I know. You've tried to explain your "evidence" before. And we've told you why, in fact, it's not even worthy of the name.

No, it's not. We've talked about this. Your "evidence" consists of supposition, logical fallacy, confirmation bias, wishful thinking, observational error, groupthink and, frankly, a whole load of gullibility on your part.

I know. It's harsh, but it's time you were told. Everyone tiptoes around you because of this ridiculous belief, and we just can't keep doing it any more. Conside this an intervention.

You get angry when evidence contrary to your absurd belief comes up in conversation, and the big problem is this. The whole of what we call "observable reality" conflicts with this absurd belief of yours. So it seems like you're angry all the time.

You're just too heavily invested in it. You've even tied up your identity with your absurd belief. You "wear the t-shirt", as it were. You've woven your absurd belief in with many other beliefs in your day-to-day life, and it's unhealthy. Even stranger, you're perfectly rational about many other things, so you're clearly capable of sound logical reasoning. You just have a blind spot for this absurd belief, and it's getting to the point that you now hold many aburd beliefs, usually related to the absurd belief we're talking about.

Worse than that, you're constantly trying to convince other people to adopt your absurd belief too, and that has to stop. If nothing else stops, that stops. Now.

Other people don't deserve this kind of nonsense.

Look, I don't even like you that much, but you're a human and I think all humans deserve honesty, if nothing else.

So just stop it. Wake up. Come up for air and get a grip.

Your absurd belief is just that. Absurd.

Grow up.

I have a mortgage. Very grown-up, huh? Yeah. My mortgage is currently with NAB, or more specifically, with Homeside, the NAB's mortgage division. We switched to them a while ago when it became clear that Macquarie Bank were taking the piss with constant rate rises, and were a pack of suit-wearing moray eels with Louis Vuitton briefcases and expensive coke habits.

Anyway, I recently changed jobs. During the lead-up to the change-over some furious budget calculation went on, and it became clear that we were going to be a bit strapped for cash during the transition from job A (salary) to job B (contract rate fully in arrears). Not wanting to beg on street corners to pay for my overpriced food court sammiches for two weeks, I hit upon a bright idea.

I'll call the bank and ask if we can skip a mortgage payment! I'm a fucking genius!

"What's the worse that could happen? A refusal?" thought I, as I blithely called the number.

So I spoke to a moderately helpful guy at Homeside's call centre, wherever that happens to be, who said that he could organise something. He got a little confused, said he couldn't, then said that no, actually, he could, that's fine, next payment is now in November and there's a note on the account.

W00t.

Except in November, NAB called us and said we were a month behind.

We skipped a payment, we said

No you didn't, they said, we'd know.

We arranged it with you, dickheads, we replied

Don't care, said they. Give us money

OK, we responded, we'll give you some extra with next month's payment, then some extra the one after that, and we'll be level

Can't you give us $1000 extra a week instead, starting now? replied NAB

HO HO HO, said we. See how the corners of our mouths turn upwards and our bellies wobble as we LOL at your suggestion. NO

We'd really much rather $1000 a week, replied NAB, not quite getting the point

Sure. We'll send it over on the ROFLcopter. Monopoly money OK, is it? We chortled. You'll get the full amount over the next two payments.

OK, then we're going to put a note on your file calling you paupers, scumbags, wowsers and poopyheads. Then we're going to write nasty graffiti about you in the staff toilets. Then we're going to egg your house. With eggs.

NAB was clearly not getting it at all.

This situation is their fault - or more properly, it seems, the fault of an operator promising something he couldn't deliver - but they're going to blame us and call us defaulters? When we have a letter from you confirming the agreement?

Fuck you, NAB.

Oh, and get your phone system sorted out. I don't want to have to key my 9-digit account number in only to be immediately asked to provide it again when a human eventually answers the phone.

Oh, but the social media monitoring team are quick to respond and helpful of tone, even if the only thing they can really offer is more phone calls.

And while I'm on the topic. Bankwest. I have a mastercard with you. When you want to contact me to talk about this account, you always call me from an unidentified number - no caller ID - and immediately ask for my date of birth.

Stop doing this.

What you're doing here is training your customers to give out personally identifying information (PII) over an unauthenticated channel - effectively enabling a very simple phishing scam via phone. Here's how the little scam works:

• Bad guy does a mailbox run of the local area, to find the names of potential targets
• Bad guy hunts down phone number(s) of said targets, using name and address as gathered from mailbox run A.
• Bad guy calls number, claims to be from bankwest, asks for date of birth and mother's maiden name.

Bingo, bad guy has just effectively stolen target's identity, and can use said information to gather more information still. Bad guy then ROFLs all the way to the bank, where he takes out all your money and fucks off to Bali.

Bankwest: STOP DOING THIS. Bankwest customers: REFUSE TO GIVE THEM YOUR INFO WHEN THEY ASK

For a bank, you're very bad at information security.

@TinyDalek and I watched The Wicker Man last night. Obviously the original, starring Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. Not the remake. No. Perish the thought.

It's a fantastic movie. If you haven't seen it, hunt down a copy.

Of course I might not see it the way some others do.

The way the film is stereotypically seen is that protagonist Sergeant Howie (Woodward) is the victim, and the residents of Summerisle play the part of, if you will, The Monster - with horror mainstay Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle at their head - in classic adversarial horror movie form.

The thing is, I don't see Howie as a victim, and certainly not as an innoccent one.

Howie is a devout, celibate, and morally rigid christian who is appalled by the neo-pagan religion followed by the residents of Summerisle. He lets his prejudice guide his actions, belittling, scoffing and denigrating what is portrayed as a sincerely held belief system. He barges around the island, moralises to a schoolteacher attempting to explain the islanders' belief in cyclic reincarnation, then barges into a graveyard which he condescendingly insists is a churchyard. He mocks the burial rituals, throws a harvest offering from an altar and lays a rough-made symbol of his own credulous religion in its place. At no point does the character stand back and think "Hmmm. This is a sincerely held religious belief I'm up against. Perhaps it would warrant a more circumspect approach". On the contrary, he acts as an arrogant avatar of a christian state, pontificating that he acts on behalf of a christian country - a picture of a religious majority oppressing a religious minority if ever there was one.

Oh, sure. He's been lured there by the islanders - who require a sacrifice - but it does appear that they at least gave him chances to leave. The optimum sacrifice must arrive and stay of his own free will, which he does. Willow's seduction sequence could be viewed as offering Howie a chance to throw away his celibacy, making him less suitable for the fire. He's told specifically to stay away from the May Day celebrations as "strangers are not welcome". Reverse psychology, or sincerely offered escape route?

Indeed, he makes his way to the final sacrifice through his adoption of the "punch" disguise - called out in the plot as the "king for a day" who would be sacrificed at the end of the ceremony. It seems to me the islanders would have settled for the innkeeper/punch, or Rowan, had Howie kept himself away or somehow "spoiled" himself for the sacrifice.

Howie's arrival at the Wicker Man can be seen as the tragic terminus of a path which had many exits, all of which were wilfully refused because of a zeal for "christian" law.

All this being the case, I can't help but fall down on the side of the people of Summerisle as a quiet, self-contained religious minority forced into extreme action by their circumstances. Everything they do makes sense from their religious standpoint within the film.

Certainly they're transgressing the law in their actions, but the film clearly expresses that the laws in question are "christian" - they're not, but for the sake of plot let's run with it - and as such cannot apply to this non-christian enclave.

So I see the film as a tragedy of religious intolerance and credulity played out through stereotypes of the two conflicting religions, and I guess this ambiguity in the way it can be viewed has been part of the film's critical success. Both sides are as loopy as each other, but the Summerislers were decent, unprejudiced and frankly rather sporting about things, whereas Woodward's character is an intrusive, sermonizing bull-at-a-gate with no respect for belief systems outside his own. Blinded as he is by his own rigid morality, he blunders straight into the arms of the Wicker Man, with only gentle encouragement from the islanders.

It's a really brilliant film, do find a copy if you've not seen it.

Now... Discuss.