Violetta Crisis

On not throwing poo in the Twitter zoo

2011-10-06T07:38:00.000-07:00

Fully aware of how oversensitive I was being, I've spent much of this afternoon frustrated, in tears, and on the phone*, because two people I'm friends with in real life, and whose general well-being I care about very strongly, were having the mother of all punch ups right there on my Twitter feed. It doesn't matter who started it; they're both in the wrong for having an argument on Twitter in the first place. Here's why:

Twitter is still a very small world. That person you just called a cunt, and invited to commit suicide? There's a good chance that someone following you knows them and will be more than a little upset at what you've said.
Twitter is public in the worst possible way. It's true that most people won't pay any attention to what you've said and it's almost possible to assume that you'll only piss off followers you were best off without anyway. However, the only people who will see the whole argument are those who follow you both, and they might not want a screen full of their friends hurling abuse at each other.
Twitter is not the context. Everyone sees their own stream and their statements are not taking place in the same environment as your statements. Twitter's weird in that the pool of people whose comments we read and respond to, particularly indirectly, is not the same as the pool of people who read our commentary. Brevity means that we can't introduce our remarks by explaining what prompted them. Anything anyone says is likely influenced by a lot of other stuff you've not seen, and it's not for you to judge whether their irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, self-deprecation, or outright venting was appropriate or not.
A lot of that anger you're feeling is because someone who doesn't know you has had the barefaced cheek to misjudge and insult you. Their anger is most likely rooted in the same feeling. The mere fact that you're in vague communication with them means you have a lot in common with them compared to the majority of the population, so refrain from projecting too much hatred onto them.

If you're reading this, you're probably a friend of mine. I only tend to befriend, follow and interact with people I think are good, sensible people: left-leaning, human-rights supporting, critical-thinking, humourous, self-aware people who'd go miles out of their way to help a stranger. They're also mainly a bit messed up, selectively thin-skinned, provocative and prone to very dark days. You know, humans. So be nice to each other or I'll bang your bloody heads together.

If, like me, you struggle to keep you cool and maintain a sense of perspective during online disagreements, stick a bit of Bill Hicks on the wall by your screen:

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

*Essentially trying to do this, but without the superpowers: http://xkcd.com/438/

Suggested supplementary training for ticket-inspection staff

2011-08-24T14:37:00.000-07:00

To whom it may concern,

I wish to bring to your attention a recent encounter with Virgin-affiliated ticket-checking staff working at Preston Station, following my journey on a Northern Rail service. In doing so, I hope to make staff at both Northern Rail and Virgin aware of the levels of rage they are conspiring to evoke in customers unlucky enough to have to negotiate between them.

At 8.55am on Wednesday 24th August, myself and around 40 other passengers boarded Northern Rail's Colne service at Ansdell and Fairhaven. Railcard in hand, I was ready and waiting to pay for an open return to Manchester. Anyone familiar with this service will know that there is no means of buying or collecting tickets at the station (or at the next two stops) and that during the summer in particular, this hourly service can reach sardine-tin levels of overcrowding. Unsurprisingly and despite his best efforts, the conductor on this train was unable to sell every passenger a ticket by the time the train reached Preston, where most of us disembarked.

It transpired that the unsmiling, bouncer-like ticket inspection staff at Preston were not at all familiar with the hourly train from Ansdell and Fairhaven, as first evidenced by their inability to find "Ansdell" on their machines. Never having found myself mid-journey without a ticket before, I assumed that the staff were stationed between platforms partly as an auxiliary means of selling honest passengers coming from unstaffed platforms on overcrowded trains the correct tickets. Apparently not. Apparently the job of these enforcement personnel is first and foremost to make people without tickets - whatever the reason - feel as though they were about to be hauled into custody at any moment.

I was told, sniffily, that railcard discounts could not be applied to tickets bought "after you've set off", by which I assume was meant "after one leg of the journey has been completed". Unwilling to add another 50% to my travel costs due to my own honesty in the light of circumstances beyond my control, I explained the situation again, emphasising that this really was the earliest time I could have bought a ticket. Taking on the tones of the strictest of Victorian schoolmistresses , the woman in question told me that it was my responsibility to find the conductor, wherever he may be on the train. She repeated this statement at least four more times, despite my increasingly vivid accounts of the conductor's valiant passage down the train, pausing in his epic task of supplying tickets only when called upon to open the train doors. No, it was still my responsibility to procure from him a ticket, presumably via some kind of death-match competition against other passengers. Regarding her manner, I cannot remember having been subjected to such tones of belittlement and assumed guilt since I was last falsely accused of eating in class at primary school.

A further suggestion from the front-line, friendly face of Virgin customer service: "You should have found the conductor on the platform when you got off here". If this is standard practice, and I have to say that I've never seen it attempted, I think we may have identified a major cause of those delays you're all so keen to cut down on.

I had tried my best to remain calm and polite throughout this exchange, but I fear I was only saved from paying the penalty (for that is what the extra 50% most certainly is) by the fact that a far more openly enraged (and smartly-dressed) ex-banker next to me was having the same argument regarding her daughter's fare. Maybe if my t-shirt had featured "Mature Student and Ex-Teacher" in an imposing font, rather than a cartoon picture of an owl, I'd have been treated with less obvious contempt. On the other hand, maybe the supposed social standing and lung capacity of the passenger should have no bearing on how they are treated.

I am long beyond hoping that the overcrowding on my local branch-line will one day cease to be a problem. If, however, you are to continue with the system of having staff from one company check that passengers travelling with another company have bought a ticket when they should have done, then those staff should be familiar with the conditions on that route. I therefore recommend a "gauntlet day" to be added to whatever training ticket inspection staff currently receive. This will consist of the following:

Trainees should be deposited at one of the unstaffed stations on the Blackpool South line, preferably coinciding with the Pleasure Beach's opening weekend, the Illuminations switch-on ceremony, or a local derby at Bloomfield Road, and instructed to purchase a ticket from the conductor before the train reaches Preston. In the interests of health and safety, helmets and knuckle-dusters should be supplied.

If unsuccessful, they will be required to accost the conductor on the platform and purchase the required number of tickets from him or her, in the face of those passengers still on the train, whose journey they are now delaying.

To ensure that this training exercise conforms as closely as possible to the real-life user experience, trainees will be expected to figure out this final step on their own, as there are no signs in either train or station - or, I suspect, anywhere outside of certain ticket-inspectors' imaginations - indicating that this is an acceptable course of action.

Of course I do not expect my suggested remedy to be adopted immediately. In the meantime, I would like to have official confirmation that I should have either jumped in ahead of other customers on the train, or held up the conductor on the platform, in order to avoid paying a much higher fare a few metres further into the station.

Yours faithfully,

Stefan Collini on University Funding Reforms

2011-08-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

The full article is well worth a read as it goes into some detail about how the government will attempt to control student numbers while maintaining the façade of university autonomy and student choice. This passage is from the final paragraph, and states something which should be right at the core of education policy:

The expansion of the proportion of the age-cohort entering higher education from 6 per cent to 44 per cent is a great democratic gain that this society should not wish to retreat from. To the contrary, we should be seeking to ensure that those now entering universities in still increasing numbers are not cheated of their entitlement to an education, not palmed off, in the name of ‘meeting the needs of employers’, with a narrow training that is thought by right-wing policy-formers to be ‘good enough for the likes of them’, while the children of the privileged classes continue to attend properly resourced universities that can continue to boast of their standing in global league tables. There is nothing fanciful or irresponsible in believing that this great public good of expanded education can and should be largely publicly funded.

Thanks, homeopaths!

2011-07-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

..for providing me with the easiest blog-post ever. Here are my answers to this survey on the regulation of homeopathy (which contains not one molecule of balance, within bucket-loads of both leading and misleading questions).

Preamble: "Homeopathy as a profession is under attack from groups such as Sense about Science and groups such as the Nightingale Collaboration. This Research will gauge public opinion as to the amount of information that the public and prospective patients wish to be able to access from professionally Qualified Practitioners only."

(I would like to point out that I am not a member of either group, but of a group which would no doubt be considered similar. I still count my answers as part of 'public opinion'.)

1. "Do you know what Homeopathy is?" - Yes

2. "If you had a health concern, would you consider supplementing conventional medicine with alternative medicine such as Homeopathy?" - No

3. "Have you ever taken a Homeopathic Remedy?" - No
(I've drunk a lot of bottles of water, many of which were whacked about quite a bit beforehand, but none of them have the kind of price-tag which would indicate that they were intended as remedies for anything other than thirst.)

4. "Qualified Homeopaths are no longer permitted to explain how Homeopathy works or offer any evidence on their websites because of a ruling by the Advertising Standards Agency. Do you think Homeopaths should be allowed to explain how Homeopathy works?" - No. Homeopathy does not "work" (i.e. perform better than placebo). Any explanation of how "qualified homeopaths" may believe it works is therefore misleading.

5. "Qualified Homeopaths are no longer allowed to state which medical conditions they treat. If you visited a Homeopaths website, would you find it useful or not useful to know which conditions they can treat?" - Not useful. The number of conditions which can be treated by homeopathy is zero. Attempting to list them is a waste of time.

6. "Qualified Homeopaths are no longer allowed to give testimonials from genuine patients if those patients want to state that their health has improved as a result of homeopathy. (Testimonials means comments only from verifiable, genuine patients). Do you think testimonials giving details of improvement from genuine patients should be not allowed or allowed?" - Not allowed. There is no way of knowing from individual cases whether the improvement was due to the treatment given or any number of other factors. Personal anecdotes are not evidence that a treatment has worked.

7. "Why do you think Homeopaths are being treated in this way?" - Because they have so far failed to check properly whether their treatments actually work, relying instead on the good-will and hopes of their patients. If homeopathic remedies did indeed have provable physical effects, this lack of testing and accountability would be reckless. Luckily for their patients, there is no trace of active ingredients.

Nothing's that amazing so no, we're not ecstatic.

2011-06-06T05:19:00.000-07:00

Charlie Brooker's right; it is incredibly petulant of us all to complain about something excellent and free suddenly becoming a little less excellent. Louis C.K. is also right; we do have a tendency to complain about tiny insignificant aspects of a process which is, by the standards of previous generations, mind-blowingly awesome. Like air travel, for example:

Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story. And it's like a horror story. [...] First of all we didn't board for twenty minutes. And then we get on the plane and they made us sit there. On the runway. For forty minutes. We had to sit there.
Oh really, what happened next, did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle that is human flight, you non-contributing zero?

Valid point. But we didn't get this spoiled all by ourselves. We don't expect stuff to be perfect just because it's for us, we also have its providers constantly screeching at us about how life-changing an experience we're going to have just taking it out of the packaging.

Brooker's Guardian piece centred around complaints that Spotify, as a free service, now limits you to a maximum of ten hours' listening a month. The next level up is £5 for unlimited, advert-free listening. Both of these options are much better than any way of getting hold of music that existed before it all became noise anyway*. But I can still understand why people are annoyed with Spotify, because I am too. Around 50% of the adverts - unmutable and significantly louder than the music - are for their own services. Don't have a smart phone? No matter, you'll still be told every ten minutes how much better the Spotify experience would be if you did. Synced the playlists on your computer already? That hip, young, friendly voice will still keep telling you what a swell idea it'd be to do so, right in the middle of you listening to one of them. Because nobody's allowed to be happy with a basic free thing any more, we have to be constantly told how much better it can get.

Yoghurts. I'm struggling to find a variety of yoghurt that claims to only feed me, without reconfiguring my digestive or immune systems too. I don't want a fabric softener that makes strangers want to smell me or causes giant flowers to follow me to the shops. If I drove, I think I'd want something mostly like a car, not like a panther or a grand piano.

We've developed this slow-burning, unfocused feeling of dissatisfaction and annoyance because we know that we're constantly being lied to by companies pushing their largely unremarkable tat. Yes, it's pretty damn fantastic that little old me can fly through the air and be in another country in less than an hour. I will never lose my sense of wonder at looking down on a cloud from above. But I will still be annoyed if you claim that making me print my own boarding card somehow benefits me, and if the plane's filthy but you still keep badgering me to make sure I've not left any rubbish behind. And incidentally, where's the smiling, flirting cabin crew your advert featured so prominently?

Advertisers have trained us to be both spoiled and cynical. We may often choose the wrong targets for our complaints, but there's only so many sky-high expectations we can suppress at once. I've just about got the toiletries side of things under control. I can accept that foundation does not need to be breathable, that there is no DNA in skin cream but nor would it be better if there was, and that no camomile-scented, precision-engineered plastic backed wad of tissue will make me "have a happy period". But something's always going to give, so I'll be disappointed when a posh chocolate fails to make the room go all swirly, no matter how thankful I am that chocolate was invented at all.

*Roughly around the time Beethoven started to lose his hearing.

A long-overdue follow-up

2011-05-31T19:56:00.000-07:00

...to my post back in April about David Cameron's utterly infuriating immigration speech. This one's over on my history blog because it includes a quote from the olden days and a picture of Frederick the Great.

Cake!

2011-05-31T13:17:00.000-07:00

Regardless of whether I baked them as a headache cure or a feminist statement on the worthiness of women's work (both quite dubious claims), they taste pretty damn good.

Chocolate butterfly cakes with whisky butter cream.

Anecdotal lack of evidence

2011-05-31T11:48:00.000-07:00

About two hours ago I got a really bad headache - one of those that makes your eye sockets burn and makes you want to run and throw up as soon as the room stops spinning. Even half an hour after taking painkillers it hadn't let up. Now, thankfully, it's gone. I'd love to know what stopped it so I can try the same thing again next time but I don't know whether it was:

Having a glass of water
Lying down for 15 mins
My flatmate coming home and distracting me for a while
Having my tea cooked for me
Drinking a glass of fizzy sugary stuff
My flatmate leaving again and no longer distracting me
Looking at cake porn for a bit, deciding what to bake for a picnic tomorrow
Baking the usual basic chocolate fairy cakes
Listening to the White Album*
The painkillers finally kicking in
The temperature dropping slightly
Someone in the vicinity doing a bit of yogic flying
None, all, or several of the above

There's absolutely no way to say for sure, and no way to even come close to an educated guess. That's why next time any of my friends has a headache I won't be advising them to drink water lying down in a cool room for fifteen minutes, as someone bakes cakes for them while singing along to Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey... not even if I thought telling them that would distract them enough to make them forget they ever had a headache. I'll fetch the water and painkillers, because at least that's worked on more than just me.

*Actually, I'm pretty sure this didn't help. The White Album is one of the worst possible things to listen to with a headache, second only to Einstürzende Neubauten.

Stop blowing holes in your plots

2011-05-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

I'm looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean team. On Stranger Tides was a great film, and worked well even without reference to the previous three. The silliness works well, to a point, but there's only so much my disbelief can be suspended before at least part of it has to drop. Here are the top five groan-worthy moments:

Does coal really catch fire that quickly?
I'm not convinced by that combination of king, palace, interior and location relative to the rest of London.
We have other prisons, you know, not just the Tower of London. If you're going to always go for the most popular local references, why not go the whole hog and drive them there in an anachronistic red bus?
Why would a pirate ship be so badly looked after? And holes in the sails? Your main character is pretty much entirely motivated by his love for a ship, and the freedom it represents to a pirate. Are we really supposed to believe that Blackbeard, with all the resources at his command, would put up with his ship having sails like fishnet stockings?
If you stand on a small tree, loop a rope around a thicker tree, and pull on the rope, the first thing that moves will not be the big tree.

There was so much else that was done well in this film, it seems a shame to not put just that little more thought into it, and not set good actors out in very leaky vessels.

Letting everyone eat cake

2011-04-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

I watched this video on the Private Eye website, and nearly screamed. Going into a sweet shop is as far removed from the democratic system as you can get, because voting is not about you, as an individual, getting a favourite chocolate bar to eat all by yourself. The only system which allows that is a dictatorship, if you're lucky enough to be the dictator.

Democracy is more like trying to settle on a set menu for a large group, to make sure that most people get a lot of what they like or what is good for them, and nobody has to go hungry. I tried to think through if AV is a better way of doing this, and realised that it's not really the system of voting that's the problem:

What I would like to hear in a speech on (im)migration

2011-04-14T01:50:00.000-07:00

No-one can compare Britain's communities today with the communities of the past and not see a decline in cohesion. Time was when people had roots in the place where they lived, and a useful role to play in society. People understood each other, took an interest in each others' business, took care of their common areas, and respected one another. Individuals sacrificed their time and resources for the good of the group, and outsiders had to work hard to prove their worth and justify their presence.

Then a great plague came to Europe from the East, ripping the heart out of this age-old system. It was called the Black Death. As the death-toll grew and the feudal lords' workforce was decimated, those peasants who survived suddenly increased in value. They no longer needed to be as grateful for the mere fact that they were allowed to exist and to scrape out a living on the planet they had been born onto. They got it into their heads that maybe it wasn't just the very rich who could move to a different area, try new ventures, and improve their lot, but maybe everyone had the right to take some control over their lives. Quite often the question was not one of advancement, but of continuing survival.

By the seventeenth century, however, most people were still staying where they had been put by Almighty God. Whether urban or rural, communities were stable, self-regulating entities, largely free from disruptive influxes of outsiders (who mostly just died by the roadside). But once again a change came to turn this peaceful, ordered world upside-down. Tens of thousands of people were forcibly evicted from their homes, and whole communities wiped off the map, as land was enclosed by those who were presumed to own it. Suddenly survival depended on the value an employer would place on your labour, and being valuable meant being in a city.

The developments of the following four centuries; the growth of industries, better travel and communication, global imperialism, lower mortality rates; have meant that those same migration patterns, and the disruption they cause, are now happening on a massive scale. The same problems with integration which were once caused and faced by, say, families from rural Cheshire moving to slums in Stockport, is now caused and faced by groups of ex-pats working in Irish pubs for English tourists in Prague.

Communities can be destroyed, conflict caused, people displaced and isolated for all kinds of reasons. Every time a residential area is bulldozed to make way for new business development, every time a large employer ups sticks to somewhere cheaper, every time a housing estate is built with no public buildings where people can congregate, every time a library or a community centre closes due to lack of funding, every time a village becomes the latest trendy target for holiday-home buyers or part of a city is owned almost entirely by student letting agents; each of these things prevents integration and stunts the growth of healthy, supportive communities.

The only way to counteract the negative effects of migration both within and between national borders - apart from the reestablishment of the feudal system - is through government spending. It is local councils, charities and organisations which provide spaces where people can interact, and interaction is the only path to integration. If there's no museum or library to learn about local history, no town club day to bring people together, no drop-in centres for people to come to for help, then of course society will fragment as people have only their own families and friends to turn to.

It would be wrong for a member of this government to blame immigrants from abroad for the damage done by market forces and crippling cuts to local services. It would be utterly perverse for them to demand integration while denying people the means to do so. It should be acknowledged that every individual has the right to earn a living, and that no-one should be punished for seeking work elsewhere, when the place of their birth cannot adequately support them due to forces beyond their control.

This fact should certainly be acknowledged by those in power, who benefit from the very mechanisms which make migration from one's home and community a necessity for so many people.

One of the benefits of disorganisation...

2011-03-28T08:29:00.000-07:00

...is that sometimes it saves you from having to retract a hasty post.

I was going to blog about this Observer article earlier today, under a title along the lines of "Government significantly improves the relevance of my research into the pressures placed on Third Reich academics". The gist of the article is that the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) had been coerced into making research on the "Big Society" a priority, in order to secure funding. If true this would be utterly reprehensible, starting universities down a path to becoming little more than Conservative Party think tanks (as if that wasn't enough of a problem already).

As it happens, the AHRC has issued a statement rebutting the claims. Their position is that there was a pre-existing programme of research into a related area, and that although any conclusions from this now have increased relevance to current government policy, funding for individual research will continue to be decided by peer review based on its quality:

The AHRC has been working for over two years, since 2008, with four other research councils, on the Connected Communities Research Programme which has been developed through extensive – and continuing – consultation with researchers. At the core of this Programme is research to understand the changing nature of communities in their historical and cultural contexts, and the value of communities in sustaining and enhancing our quality of life. These issues are serious and of major concern. They also happen to be relevant to debates about the ‘Big Society’ which came two years later. To imply that these important areas for investigation constitute a government-directed research programme is false.

I'm not prepared to breathe too huge a sigh of relief. As Iain Pears explained in an excellent piece earlier this month, there are still plenty of reasons to be concerned about the preservation of independence in academic research. Even if this particular claim turns out to be unfounded, there still remain other hoops that applicants for funding need to jump through, including proving the 'impact' of the work (particularly difficult to prove when the research hasn't been done yet and won't be read by anyone for another four years). With so little funding now available, there is an enormous amount of pressure to make proposed research sound as relevant and economically beneficial as possible.*

What I have been seeing in my own research (funded by the AHRC) into historians and non-fiction publishing in the Third Reich, is that censorship and suppression were by no means the only ways by which Nazi ideology gained respectability as areas of academic consensus. Funding was made available for researchers to find evidence for and 'prove' the regime's foregone conclusions. By shifting the focus of research in a few small ways, academics in all manner of fields - from anthropology to Ancient Greek archaeology - could retain their status and funding, meaning that even the most seemingly apolitical papers would lend their support to the regime, and to its main goal of creating a "people's" or "racial" community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which all Germans would work together to reverse Germany's social degeneration.

Godwin's Law makes it tricky to invoke a comparison with the Nazis and still be taken seriously, and I'm wary of sounding more than a little hysterical in my concluding sentence. The fact is that every time I hear "Broken Britain" and "Big Society", I'm reminded of the ongoing debate about the role of the Volksgemeinschaft ideal in securing support for the Nazi regime, and this latest suggestion of academic meddling rang all too true as a result.

*It's difficult to say that in a way that makes it clear why this is not a good thing. Basically, if the benefits of the research are that obvious from the outset, there are chances of funding from private sources. AHRC funding should be for projects which fill a gap in current research, the impact of which we won't necessarily know until it's been completed (and will be tricky to quantify even then).

EDIT: Iain Pears has posted more on this topic today: http://boonery.blogspot.com/2011/03/ahrc-observer-and-mr-haldanes-principle.html

Daft as a brush, but just as useful

2011-02-21T02:36:00.000-08:00

David Allen Green, lawyer and libel reform campaigner, on "The daftness of UKUncut" (New Statesman):

However, this campaign is misconceived to the very point of daftness. Companies have to comply with the relevant tax regime: they really have no choice. Companies have to pay all tax which is lawfully due. Lawfully due tax cannot be avoided, regardless of ingenuity or greed. Accordingly, if certain companies are not paying enough tax, then the only solution is to improve tax legislation and properly resource its implementation by HMRC.

I can see the logic here but that doesn't mean there's no logic to the UKUncut campaign. This illustrates a typical catch 22 for protesters: any campaign which captures the public imagination enough to be successful will have simplistic aims and will be directed at an easy target several rhetorical meters away from the real cause of the problem. Campaigns which perfectly identify the best solution to a problem, taking into account complex legal or tax issues, as well as a change in regime, will be accurate but largely unnoticed.

This doesn't mean that no protests can be effective, however. The point is to draw attention to a wider, ongoing problem and create enough pressure that something has to give. Any legal changes which result from this will be more subtle and better targeted than the protests themselves. It may be a little unfair on shareholders and customers of a few high street chains in the meantime, but the government set the standard for unfairness in this battle when it started cutting budgets like an axe-wielding maniac.

Look at any revolution in history and you'll find that the most symbolically effective elements were also the least logical. When the creators of the problem are no longer in power, when the ruling party clearly doesn't give a crap about the consequences of its cuts, when those who could make the changes are shrugging their bespoke-suited shoulders or condescendingly explaining the realities of high finance to a population facing job loss, pension losses, pay freezes, benefit cuts, inflation, increased VAT, repossession of their homes...

In the face of all that illogical, "daft" unfairness, you might as well storm the bloody Bastille, if only to get some exercise.

Taking the peace (just a little)

2011-02-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

The other day, this note went up in one of the bathrooms of my friend's house. They have two bathrooms, for males and females, and he routinely uses the male one. I sometimes use the female one, which is quite often swimming in water. They have a pretty powerful shower which is very close to the toilet. I feel that may be relevant.

I really can't stress enough how much I hate notes and signs as a form of communication. They are used almost exclusively by people who know they'd never be able to say everything they want to in person without having to, you know, have a conversation and maybe listen to the other person's point of view. This kind of rant has no function beyond pure, one-sided, vindictive catharsis. They are no better than shouting at someone and running away. In fact it's worse than that because you have to walk past them over and over again.
So, out of all the possible ways in which someone could react to such a pollution of their home environment by a self-appointed head matron, my friend and I settled on a brief post-it note. With an arrow pointing somewhere between the words "made my peace" and "you do fuck all" (it could apply to either of those claims) it read:

[citation needed] -->
The next sweeping accusation will be
submitted to passiveaggressivenotes.com

Turns out matron doesn't have much of a sense of humour. To protect the anonymity she seems so keen on (enough to want to keep it all to herself), the following text exchange refers to her as 'Glenda'.

Glenda: I presume u 2 wrote that note? [9.43am]

Glenda: If uve got enough guts 2 write it at least be able to admit it [9.47am]

(If you squint and wait for the words to overlap a bit, you can sort of see what she was trying to say here.)

Friend: Hey Glenda. Sorry, I've had no signal this morning. What note are you talking about? :-) [10.54am]

Glenda: Ok so you or vicki dont know anything about the reply in the bathroom?x [4.54pm]

(This woman is doing a business management degree. One day she could be neglecting to capitalise the names of the employees under her and using kisses to sweeten redundancy-related emails.)

Friend: No, I've been spending the day installing cat litter under my mattress on the off-chance... :-) [6.13pm]

Glenda: Well to be honest every1 else denies it so that only leaves u and vicki. Did vicki write it? I just want to know because its quite cowardly for whoever to not admit to writing it [6.20pm]

(*Whoosh*)

Friend: Does that mean that the original anonymous rant was yours then? Either way, I'll ask her about it next time I see her then :-) [6.36pm]

Glenda: Yes it was because im fed up of cleaning the bathroom after boys peeing on the seat.x [6.38pm]

(If she's going to overreact this much to an anonymous reply to an anonymous note, best give her something she can properly get her teeth into.)

Me: Hello, this is [Friend]'s Vicky. I did stick a post-it to the anonymous note in the bathroom. This would be the cowardly unsigned note which made sweeping, unfounded accusations against all males in the flat, swore, threatened to urinate in their people's beds... I felt a little piss-taking was entirely justified. [1.18am]

Glenda: Thanks I really appreciate being text at early hours when I have work at 8am [7.57am]

(She's got a point there. I also wouldn't appreciate "being text" when I have to work early. Hell, her bathroom's probably full of ink now too.)

Glenda: Actually my note wasn't anonymous because any1 who LIVES in our house who DOES socialise knows I spokt to them about it. I think its disgustin boys pee over the seat and floor and leave it 2 b wiped up so if I wana have a rant in my own house I will. And its not a sweeping a statement because every 1 of them knows they have never hoovered, cleaned or done anything. Cleaning bathroom the odd time in 6 months doesnt really count. I think its damn rude of u who doesnt live in our house or when u r there all u do is keep other people awake that u would undermine me or get involved in something which is clearly an issue. [8.53am]

(Considering she thinks this is none of my business, it's nice of her to keep me so thoroughly informed. Especially 53 minutes into her shift.)

Me: Really can't stress this enough: you threatened to PISS on the BED of the most obsessively clean and tidy man I know. I tried to point out in a very gentle way that the note was unfair. By all means have a rant in your "own house" but don't go off the deep end if someone mildly objects to your tone. [11.06am]

Glenda: And what u dont seem 2 understand is that I dont know who pissed on the seat and why should I have 2 wipe the bathroom down every morning! I will threaten that because I cant use the bathroom! I was aiming at everyone 2 think about their hygiene! And hes clearly not obsessed with being clean or hed clean up after himself! If [friend] has an issue it has nothing 2 do with u! [11.15am]

Me: I am 100% behind your desire for better bathroom hygiene, but if someone really is missing the bowl that often they need a carer, not a page of abuse. However, as I've clearly upset you far more than intended, I hereby promise to keep my concerns to myself in future. And sorry for waking you last night. [11.26am]

(Either she thinks she's won, or all that irrelevant venting has used up her credit. So far, that's been it.)

We Were Promised Nanobots

2011-02-03T16:23:00.000-08:00

One claim often made about complimentary or alternative medicine is that it treats the 'whole person' rather than just symptoms. Leaving aside the fact that conventional medicine (you know, actual real medicine) is about interpreting symptoms in order to find and treat the underlying causes, there is a very good reason why this claim is bunk: none of the non-sentient entities within the process, whether they are acting for better or worse, is aware that there is a 'whole person' to treat.

Neither the active ingredients, the passive ingredients people like to believe are active, or the complete lack of ingredients in homoeopathic remedies know a damn thing about human beings. All they can do is react as they always do when in contact with other substances, whether inside or outside a patient. They do not magically transform into those whizzing brightly-coloured, perfectly targeted balls of healing you see on adverts merely by having a label stuck on them. Medicines, conventional or otherwise, are just stuff.

For the same reason, the division between effects and side-effects depends entirely on what it is you're hoping to achieve by using a particular substance. It is highly unlikely that anything you put in your system - even something as pure, natural, organic and additive-free as water - will have only one effect. Oh, and 'good' and 'bad' bacteria are not classifications known to natural history, and no kitchen cleaner will be able to distinguish between them.

Fortunately for the sellers of alternative medicines, people don't like to be reminded that they're essentially a bunch of cells and chemical reactions which by chance have got themselves into jeans and t-shirt. We can feel that we're a whole person, when we're ill then our whole person feels ill, and we naturally want something which will make the whole of us healthy. We want to feel that we're balanced, detoxed, vitamin-rich and with our glowing natural-immunity shield at full power. We especially don't want someone to tell us the inconvenient truth that bits of us are going to deteriorate, no matter what we do, and that we just have to make the best of what's left.

Alternative medicine can sell its customers a more pleasant image of themselves, but nothing can make that a reality.

Feed the troll (to the goats)

2011-02-02T15:09:00.000-08:00

In case you've been away from the internet for a while, this happened:

Melanie Phillips (never a good name to have in the first twenty words of a post) wrote an article claiming that children were to be "bombarded with homosexual references" in lessons on all kinds of subjects. Tabloid Watch has a good run-down on how the story evolved to that hysterical point.
Partly due to her use of the term "normal sexual behaviour", partly because of her clear disregard for the very serious and widespread issue of homophobic bullying in schools, and - I guess - largely because she so frequently writes 'kick me' on her own back, lots of people got very angry about what she wrote.
Johann Hari wrote a very good, detailed explanation of how the 'gay agenda' extends no further than trying to reduce discrimination and bullying, and how no amount of references (or avoidance of references) to the existence of homosexuality will change the sexuality of children.
Melanie Phillips wrote a follow-up article about how the reaction to her piece proves her point - gays and their liberal supporters want to smother free speech, Johann Hari has missed the point of her article (he really, really hadn't) and, hold the front page, threats against her person had been transmitted via email and Twitter.

What reassures me about this whole kerfuffle is that even though such an outdated, divisive and inaccurate piece was printed in a national newspaper, so many people had a problem with it. This is very definitely progress from a few decades ago. What is less reassuring is the form that this outrage has apparently taken. Even discounting the alleged death threats, most of it wasn't at all productive. On the day the article was printed, my Twitter feed was full of people informing the world, with differing levels of eloquence, wit and strong language, that Melanie Phillips is homophobic, and a bad person. This I knew.

What I didn't learn until I read her article and went looking for the Schools Out website, was what exactly it was that she had portrayed as an "abuse of childhood". It looks like an excellent project. It also looks like it would benefit from some positive public attention, and the cooperation of more teachers and politicians. It would have been nice if, instead of stringing swear-words together and venting against one person's homophobia (which is unlikely to change, no matter how many people offer to beat it out of her) more people had publicised what it is that Schools Out is doing, and why Phillips' representation of this was false.

So here's the project. They have a donate button. If we use it as a Mad Mel-Induced Swear Box, it might bring something positive out of a needlessly negative couple of weeks.

First-hand account of the Femail sausage-factory

2011-02-01T09:50:00.000-08:00

Yo reader(s).

I'm going to try to update this blog every day this month. There'll be a lot of waffle, and a bit of recycling from my Twitter feed, but it's about time I put myself under some deadline pressure and see what I can squeeze out.

Day 1

This is a very good guest post by Juliet Shaw, at No Sleep 'Til Brooklands. It explains, in an admirably calm way, what happened when she - to all intents and purposes an ordinary member of the public - took part in a feature for the Daily Mail, and was well and truly misused. After an interview represented as being on a far less intrusive topic, the tiniest scraps of information about her private life, grudgingly given, were inflated into an almost entirely misleading account, allegedly in her own words, which morphed her into some kind of man-hungry, delusional Liz Jones figure. Relations with the rural community she had recently moved to were understandably damaged, a simple apology was sought and denied... court battle... costs... bullying... and a settlement born of pure exhaustion was reached after two years (reimbursement of costs OR apology, but not both).

What baffles me in all of these cases is why the journalists bother to grow these hideously mutated articles from a tiny seed of truth, when making something up from scratch would be less hassle. They've clearly decided before finding interviewees what the angle will be: rather than use a real person and include just enough truth for them to be identified and have to face the consequences, why not just invent a name, hire a model for the photoshoot, not bother with the expense of bringing someone to be interviewed... and suffer absolutely no risk of a lawsuit because there's no-one to sue you?

Or are they still clinging to the idea that what they're doing is 'reporting', rather than writing fiction?

For your interest and entertainment...

2011-01-03T03:54:00.000-08:00

...here are a few things I've been happily distracting myself with over the holidays:

Right at this very moment, Amanda Vickery ('er that looks at Georgian 'ouses on the telly) is hosting a very absorbing discussion on her Twitter page about what may attract different kinds of viewers to history documentaries.
Yesterday Heresy Corner posted an excellent Cluedo-based parody of the media's sneering, marginalising (yes, to the point of demonising) coverage of a murder suspect.
There's also a very useful post on Banksy's Blog explaining how the current Contempt of Court legislation came about, and what it means for newspapers covering cases such as the murder of Joanna Yeates. It's worth reading through some older posts there too, as quite complex matters (for example libel reform) are clearly and engagingly explained.
I've also been reading through the archives of Primly Stable and The Web of Evil, to make up for only having come across both blogs so late in the year.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a rather large skeptics-related post designed to rock your world. So find a good cup-holder (but don't hold your breath).

My computer is a plant.

2010-12-11T03:15:00.000-08:00

I've got a new netbook, which is very lovely and cute and won't replace my old laptop but has the advantage of not sounding like a squadron of World War II bombers - an impersonation which must take a lot of energy to achieve because the poor thing only has a battery life of about six seconds. The new one lasts eight hours. I can stay in bed to work ALL DAY. But I wouldn't be telling you about my new purchace unless there was some aspect of it to rant about, because that's what this blog is for. I don't like being badgered and coerced and damn well lied to, and especially not by a tool which I bought to make my life easier.

Firstly there's the fact that this device - specifically purchased for its fast booting and lack of distractions - came pre-installed with an aggressive marketing campaign from Norton, which screams at me every 30 mins or so that I need to BUY THIS NOW OR WE'RE ALL DOOMED THIS IS THE ONLY SOLUTION BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT YOU STUPID LITTLE PERSON YOU. This is like having cold calls pre-recorded as part of your voicemail service, or a small pink Vanish lady who lives in your washing machine and forces you to watch her remove tough stains from a kid's favourite t-shirt before you're allowed to do your own washing.

And then there's Microsoft themselves. Now, the man in the shop tried very hard to convince me that Open Office would unleash an eleventh biblical plague of compatibility issues upon my academic life, even though it was clear from his expression that he uses it too. The only issue I have ever had with Open Office is Microsoft throwing a tantrum over it. The other day, when trying to download a .doc I got this entirely inaccurate pop-up:

This is a downright lie. The thing they are telling me I need to purchase is not "necessary" to open the file. I have a way of opening it, and I know it works because that's what I wrote the file with in the first place. I only saved it as a .doc for the benefit of people who are restricted by less open-minded word processing software. If that's supposed to be a helpful box of information, it should give me an option to choose a different program to use. If it's an advert, it has no damn business being on my computer.

It also does this when I'm reckless enough to want to look at a .pdf, which strikes me as more than a little paranoid:

Again, this is a tool which I bought to be useful to me. I did not intend it to be yet another way for companies to ambush me every bloody minute of the day and waste my time attempting to part me from the money I am trying to concentrate on earning. As many people have pointed out about computers, we simply wouldn't put up with this from any other household appliance. Can you imagine having a fridge that played adverts for a certain supermarket every third time you opened the door, that delayed you from removing things from other shops until it had told you how they 'can be harmful' to you, and which sometimes spat out products altogether and told you it was 'necessary' to buy a far more expensive brand? Let's all hope and pray that Microsoft don't start selling groceries.

Tuition fees: If access to education is the main issue, today's vote is irrelevant.

2010-12-09T08:41:00.000-08:00

Something very important has got lost in the dramatic and newsworthy scuffles over higher education funding. Both sides of the debate are confirming a view of universities, degrees and graduates which should, in a truly progressive society, be challenged and overturned. I'm talking about the idea that society is divided into those who go to university, and those who don't. What is at stake in this vote is the question of how many people, from which backgrounds, will have the chance to pass through this magical land, to complete the transformation from non-graduate to graduate, and how much of that cost they should bear as individuals. The land and the transformation are taken as read.

A lot of anger has flared up on both sides at assumptions made by the other, and it is this binary presentation of graduates vs non-graduates which is clouding the issue to such an unhelpful degree. Here are a few of the stereotypes and tropes which have been crystallising for decades, and which are shaping the public and parliamentary debates:

Hard-working people on lower incomes should not have to pay for other people to go to university and therefore go on to earn more.
Those same lower-income non-graduates need other people to go to university to learn to become doctors, teachers and solicitors because one day they will need to call on that expertise.
People go to university to gain access to higher earnings. Once they have passed through the system, they can afford to pay for their course.
The awarding of degrees helpfully separates those who are intelligent and hard-working enough to pass a course from those who aren't. This is a good way to determine who is fit to do certain jobs.
Too many young people go to university. Many of them are studying subjects which have no benefit to society, or the courses they are on are not of a high enough standard to guarantee that they deserve the status of 'graduate'.

This is all bunkum, and does not fit with the real-life examples people encounter every day. These two discrete groups do not and should not exist. After a few years doing a job, there is little to choose between an employee who studied for three years full-time before gaining any experience, and one who learned everything they needed to on the job. Most white-collar workers will have gained their skills via a combination of academic and on-the-job learning, having been through a mixture of training courses, work-experience placements, evening courses etc. You can (I think) become a qualified accountant by leaving school after your GCSEs, working for and being trained by a firm, working your way up through the ranks, attending a part-time course at a university or college, and passing certain exams. Or you can study for three years, maybe with a 'sandwich year' to gain more first-hand business experience, then join a firm to get more experience and expertise, then pass your final exams. How does it matter if one route makes you a 'graduate' and the other doesn't?

What I've hopefully illustrated here is entirely unrevolutionary idea that there is no natural division between graduates and non-graduates. This categorisation only exists in the elitist rhetoric of both sides of the debate: the politicians who wish people to pay more for their own elite status (and, as raising tuition fees is clearly not intended to plug the hole in the country's finances, to keep that elite status out of the hands of the more disadvantaged parts of society), and the current and aspiring students who are protesting to maintain the current slightly more open and affordable access to that elite status.

What we should be doing is tearing down that division.

Why should a university education consist of the three-year degree or nothing, regardless of how much it costs? Why should it be a choice of paying to have three-years' access to lectures, tutorials, library books, online journals, careers services, student societies and study-skills workshops... or having no access to any of this? Why are these institutions, which have benefitted from public funding of various kinds for so long, only there for the benefit of the lucky few who have the time, funds, and the previous qualifications to be allowed full access? Why should people who aren't affiliated with a university, including those who graduated a month earlier, have to see public libraries cut their opening hours, evening schools cancel courses or increase fees, smaller museums and galleries close, but still not be allowed to benefit from the resources on a campus on their own doorstep?

In short, how is it justifiable to keep all of that knowledge and teaching expertise behind such high walls? Where does this leave the interested amateur, the employee looking to move to a different sector, the employer who wants their workforce to have the most up-to-date knowledge?

Here are a few ideas, which I readily admit are off the top of my head:

University lecturers should run short, affordable courses for anyone who wants to come along, regardless of age or previous qualifications.
People should be able to pay for a month's access to the university library and its online resourses over the summer break, when these facilities are underused.
Systems need to be put in place by which amateur research projects can be assessed by academics, published by university-run journalsand given the chance to make a contribution to knowledge.
All universities should provide some free-access e-learning courses, covering a mixture of core knowldege from different subject areas, study skills, and current developments.

I also have a question for all of my fellow students who have put the time and effort into protesting over the last few weeks. If this is about solidarity and fair access to education, would you be willing to put the same time and effort into sharing your notes and the knowledge you've gained with one of the unfortunate sixth form graduates who decided they could not afford to join your number? Would you put one hour a week into running an open-access course, writing a free online guide, publicising an open lecture? Are you actually willing to undermine that elitist division between graduates and non-graduates? Or is this all a knee-jerk reaction to an attack on our privilleged, well-guarded domain?

Free, fair access to education at all academic levels can be achieved whether fees are set at ten pounds or ten thousand pounds. Knowledge is free, so long as we are willing to share it.

Cold Calls for a Warmer Britain

2010-12-02T02:50:00.000-08:00

We have a new front-runner in the All-Comers Cold Call Completion World Championship (ACCCWC)!

This caller successfully established that the number he had phoned corresponded to the address on his list, despite the non-residence of the elusive 'Mrs Taylor'. Where he fell down was in speaking far too quickly and unclearly to be understood by someone with limited patience who had only just got up:

Caller: That was to establish that I have the right number and the right address, but the wrong name. So what is your name please, madam?

Me: I'm afraid I'm not willing to give that information over the phone.

Caller: Don't worry madam, I'm calling on behalf of the UK government.

Me: Oh yes? [Gah! Council tax? Student loan? Office for the Prevention of Plant Cruelty? (the basil in the window is looking decidedly peaky)]

Caller: So I'm not selling anything. [Aha, so someone will be making money from this somehow...]

Me: Can I ask which part of the UK government, exactly?

Caller: I'm from the rabarber rabarber insulation rabarber.

Me: [Insulation again?] I'm sorry, could you repeat that please?

Caller: a little louder From the National Utility rabarber rabarber.

Me: Sorry, I still didn't understand the name of the...

Caller: shouting, but just as quickly THE RABARBER RABARBER RABARBER RABARBER!

Me: I don't need you to shout, just to say the part of the government slowly so I can understand it.

Caller: very annoyed The point is you don't need to worry madam, it's on behalf of the UK government and...

Me: I don't understand who it is I'm talking to so I'm ending this call.

Dialing 1471 failed to produce a number to call back. Typing 'national', 'utilities' and 'insulation' into Google turned up a few government schemes but nothing with those words in that order in its name. I suspect that this is the same list of phone numbers that the angry (by the end of the call, anyway) Northern Irish man from British Gas was using a few weeks ago. I also suspect I'll be having similar conversations all winter. While I fully support the plan to make sure everyone has the best kind of insulation, in an affordable way, cold-calling on a week-day morning isn't going to turn up many home owners with time to listen. And I'm still not giving out my details or my landlady's over the phone.

A few people who read my previous post admitted to deliberately winding cold-callers up to waste their time. This is me trying to be helpful and they still end up confused, angry and empty-handed. The point? Unless it's a scam, calling landlines out of the blue is not the best way to get what you need.

I'd have run out of breath anyway.

2010-11-23T17:07:00.000-08:00

I used to work part-time at a slightly upmarket supermarket (we don't have Waitrose in the North West, just Waitrose adverts) and as many of our customers had an overblown sense of entitlement, myself and colleagues were often on the receiving end of a barked "I pay your wages". Here's what I never had the guts to reply:

Yes, yes you do. You are the provider of a miniscule portion of the total revenue that this company receives from its millions of customers. You would therefore appear to be in a position of authority over me, as I rely on another miniscule portion of that revenue for my livelihood. However, this subservient position is one I share with a few thousand other employees, including admin staff, supervisors and management, as well as all of our suppliers and the advertising agencies and other outside contractors this company employs. Let us also, in the hierarchy, not forget our many shareholders. At the same time, you share your position of authority with every other person and company who buys from us which, considering we shop here too, encompasses most of those same people whose wages you claim to pay.

Now, in case you've not considered this economic system in its entirity - this system which you are citing as reason to be rude to me - have a think about where else this vast workforce (and management, and shareholders) spends its money. Please don't forget to take into account the money they pay in taxes, national insurance payments, interest on loans, contributions to pension funds. Can be sure that you are in no way - past, present, or future - a recipient of any of that revenue? Because the economy is not a hierarchy of payers and paid. It is a bafflingly complex web in which there is no straight up and down, no absolute authority or servitude, and in which collectively everyone at some point pays everyone else.

But do not despair, dear customer, for there is another system in place by which we can determine how to treat another human being, despite such a bewildering set of interdependencies. It's known as common fucking courtesy, and if you want me to do as you ask and carry these two packets of organic fat-free rice cakes out to your car for you, you're going to have to show me a little thereof.

Amazingly, not one call interrupted the writing of this post.

2010-11-18T04:33:00.001-08:00

I spend a lot of time in my flat, flanked by possibly the two most irritating phones imaginable. So far today I've had five cold calls, and that's not particularly unusual. No-one who has any actual reason to contact myself or my flatmate needs to use the landline for this so the only reason I haven't unplugged the damn things is because I am becoming fascinated by one simple question: just how stupid can it get?

A little background: there used to be two Mr. Taylors at this address. One has moved out and the other has levelled-up to Dr.Taylor. Either one of them could be person that the cold callers have on their list of victims, but I've never yet managed to find out which, let alone pass on any information (or the phone) to them. Here's why:

*bzzzzzzzrrrrr PEEP PEEP PEEEzzzzzzzzzzbrrrrrEEEEPP bzzzrrrEEEEEEzzzzzzzzzzrrrP*
Me: Hello?
Caller: Is that Mrs. Taylor?
Me: No, there is no Mrs. Taylor at this address.

...and you asking that has already told me all I need to know about this call: 1. You aren't genuinely interested in talking to the person on your list because you didn't ask if they were available. 2. You are unaware of who actually lives here and therefore you're not important enough to have been informed of these changes. 3. You're an idiot. Just because a female voice has answered, does NOT mean that I am the wife of the person on your little list.

After this it can go a number of ways. One caller today, blessed with staggering levels of both persistence and incompetence, has hung up all three times, apparently unable to deal with the non-presence of a person they'd just invented. One last week decided to play a guessing game, attempting to establish whether I am any relation to Mr.Taylor ("No, I just happen to live here." *long pause* *click*). A couple have launched straight into their sales pitch regardless, and have been interrupted with the question "As I'm not the person you're looking for, isn't this now a waste of time for both of us?". So far, only one caller has scraped together the intelligence to say, "Well, this could be of interest to you anyway".

Sometimes I take pity on them and decide to throw them a life-belt, just in case this particular numpty is the single route by which one of the Mr.Taylors, current or recently upgraded, may receive an important message. Stranger things have happened.

Me: There is a Dr.Taylor here. Would you like to leave a message for him?
Caller: Er... / Ummm / *long pause*
Me: Look, if you haven't got a message for him, there would seem to be no point to this call.
Caller: *click*

Very rarely indeed, one will get their heads around the fact that perhaps the person on their list would be worth getting hold of in preference to his fictional wife / the dogmatic cow who's answered the phone, and so they ask when would be a convenient time to phone back. At this point I go into secretary mode and my flatmate is elevated to the status of a VIP, whose time is incredibly precious (isn't everyone's?). I tell them (again) that I'm happy to take a message and that Dr.Taylor will call them back, within a time-frame convenient to him, if he deems the matter to be worthy of his attention. (Ok, I leave out the last bit). Not one caller has ever taken me up on this offer.

So what of Mr This-could-be-of-interest-to-you-anyway, so far the only one of our starters not to fall flat on his face at that initial made-up-person-is-non-existent hurdle? Well he was from British Gas, had the urgent matter of cavity wall insulation to get off his chest, and was getting almost as irritated as me at the way the conversation was going:

Me: I'm afraid you've interrupted me while I'm working. Is this important?
Caller: Well actually it's very important. It's about the type of insulation in your home, which could be affecting your heating bills.
Me: I'm not the home-owner so I have no idea what kind we have and can't do any...
Caller: So who is the home owner?
Me: There's really no earthly reason why I should give you that information.
Caller: Now look here...
Me: *click*

This might all sound like a petty rant at people who are just doing their job, and an unpleasant and thankless one at that, but companies - some of which I have to pay money to - are wasting that money on getting people to waste my time. It's not difficult; successful telephoning is something I mastered before I hit secondary school, let alone started working for more than pocket-money. There's someone you need to communicate with, you ask for that person, you leave a message if they're not there. IT'S THAT BLOODY SIMPLE.

And these are the companies who actually have the correct combination of name and number. Last year I was treated to a whole series of answerphone messages from a company representative giving very important information about a rescheduled delivery. She declined to mention her name, the name of the company, or any contact details at all, and so never found out that I was not Mrs. Wainstrop (or possibly Winscott, or Windtop... if you happen to be reading this, sorry about your new and probably now waterlogged settee). A previous flatmate of mine once received a call on her mobile about four-bedroomed properties in a county a few hundred miles away. On explaining that this was a wrong number, she was asked if she knew the couple the call was intended for. After learning that that's not how mobile numbers are assigned, the agent then asked - with admirable opportunism - if my flatmate was thinking of moving house at all.

A swing and a miss.

Links

2010-11-17T07:57:00.000-08:00

My head's a mess. Here are some people who've made sense recently*:

Tabloid Watch and Angry Mob, both give excellent examples of shoddy and potentially dangerous health reporting in the papers.
Avocados on Toast ends in the following very good point about Lib Dems being used as human shields and far too many people shooting right at them:

"I know it's easy and it's rational, because of the narrative of betrayal, but it's unfortunate that it's led to those who are actually the leading party of government - who never opposed raising fees in the first place and would clearly have done this anyway with or without the Lib Dems - getting off scot free."

Usually fairly calm about these things on Creepy Guys, Nice Guys and The System. Any day now I'll have thought of some way to respond that doesn't involve bashing humanity's collective heads together.

Also, take a look at How to be a Retronaut. I stumbled across the site this afternoon and am going to have to set aside most of Sunday to wallow in it. Lovely stuff.

*Which isn't to say they don't make sense usually. Mess. My head. Told you it was.

Bad MOSI, No Biscuit.

2010-11-04T20:47:00.001-07:00

This has proven a somewhat tricky post to write because part of my readership* will find the issue self-explanatory and get little from this, and other parts will think that I'm nitpicking, or theorising a conspiracy, or shaking a bee from my bonnet, or any number of other accusations which can be levelled at somebody who appears to be making a fuss about nothing. It's also tricky because someone a bajillion times more proactive and organised and all-round better than me has made the main points already.

I went to my favourite museum last Sunday, and found it full of herbalists.

Ok, so it wasn't full of them. It also contained a lot of mathsbuskers, who are utterly lovely people dedicated to communicating proper information to the general public, in a fun, useful, non-profit-except-to-society-as-a-whole kind of way. This made the presence of an exhibition by the National Institute of Medical Herbalists (NIMH) even more disheartening. What the exhibition represented was pretty much the opposite of science communication, and therefore had no place in the Museum of Science and Industry**.

It certainly looked sciencey, did this exhibition. It had a definite air of the scientific about it, of the primary-school-biology, let's-colour-in-a-leaf variety. There were units of science arranged within, decorated with a sprinkling of twigs and a half-dead basil plant. However, unlike the other areas of the museum, which chart the rocky progress of various fields from less to more knowledge or from experimental to efficient machines, this exhibition was an incoherent mess of information. This meant that while all of the individual facts presented may have been true, the main message for people to take home was, "Herbs Good; Herbalists Lovely", and, due to the presence of a table covered in leaflets by the entrance, "Go And Book An Appointment".

It's at this point that I wish my phone hadn't run out of battery, because photographs would have been the best way to accurately represent the content. In the absence of more reliable data, here's what I remember from the various information boards. In an order no less logical than how it appeared on the day:

Plants are awesome. For years and years and years people have used them for shelter, houses, food and medicines.
Lots of plants are endangered through the actions of bad people. Good people are trying to look after them. Good people respect plants.
Herbalists respect plants.
Lots of medicines used by doctors are made from plants. In the future, we might find medical uses for other plants, which is another reason why we shouldn't destroy ecosystems.
Eating plants is healthy.
People who aren't doctors have also used plants as remedies for thousands of years. In many parts of the world, this is the main kind of medicine. In this developed, modern part of the world, more and more people are realising the benefits of...

...at which point I find it hard to summarise without slipping into the language of a sales pitch, because I can't view all of this as anything else.

So my main beef with the exhibition is that it was a jumble of paragraphs about plants, herbs, medicine, health, conservation and herbalists, which drew no clear distinctions, offered no temporal or causal coherence, and was overshadowed by the huge, very professional-looking sign explaining who the NIMH was, next to a lot of its individual members' advertising bumf.

*breathes*

Now for the non-science bit. In common with organisations of all types and sizes, the NIMH has to define its members and provide them with an identity. As with all processes of identity-creation, this also assigns an opposing identity upon those excluded from membership ('the others'). When an organisation is trying hard to persuade their audience of a distinct identity - whether it's Cornish separatists or a local bakery - a clear opposing identity emerges as the main 'other'. In this way, every statement of a characteristic implies a second label, which is slapped onto the 'other'. In the case of alternative medicine, of which 'medical herbalists' are a part, the other is always conventional medicine.

Therefore, when the NIMH's own leaflet say that their members "are trained to look beyond the obvious, to find the root cause of a problem", it is heavily implying (to the point where they might as well just come out and say it) that any doctor you consult will go for the most obvious answer, and not get to that 'root cause'. I'm sure many of you can see the next sentence looming large on the horizon. All together now: "we do not treat symptoms, we treat people".

Even the title of the leaflet offers a distinction: "Herbal Medicine: for a naturally healthy life". Because you wouldn't want to be unnaturally healthy now, would you? Similarly illuminating statements can be found on their website, including the utterly nauseating:

For many, that first visit to a medical herbalist can be a life changing experience, a chance to experience true healthcare as it should be practised. Your medical herbalist is a genuine, caring partner in health from the cradle to the third age.

Even more frustrating, considering that these leaflets were on offer within - and therefore implicitly endorsed by - a science museum, are the members' own explanations of what herbal medicine is. Compare and contrast the two following statements. Exhibit A is from "medical herbalist and registered osteopath" Catherine Wasik BSc (Hons) MNIMH, BSc (Hons) Ost.***. Exhibit B is from "consulting medical herbalist" Kirstin J Bamber BSc (Hons) MNIMH.

A

Herbal medicine, just like all forms of medicines, can cause unwanted side-effects, however in the hands of a qualified medical herbalist treatment plans are designed to be safe and effective.

Many pharmaceutical drugs are based on isolated chemical parts of plants. In contrast herbal medicines are extracts from part of the whole plant (e.g. the whole root, leaves etc.) and contain numerous plant constituents.
Herbalists believe that the therapeutic actions of a plant are due to a balanced relationship between all the plant's constituents. Using a plant in this way prevents the many side effects that are often associated with pharmaceutical drugs.

What I would prefer to see from two people with the same degree, belonging to the same quality-assuring association, advertising their £7-per-week multiple plant constituents in a gosh-darned science museum, is some kind of agreement as to whether herbal medicine has side-effects.

And, to avoid devaluing the letters after their names even further, a working knowledge of commas would be nice too. That's the part where I'm picking nits.

* The collective noun for automatic googlepixies.
** Except that they're representing an industry. That's kind of the point but doesn't fit with the flow of what I was saying, y'know?
*** Who doesn't appear to have a web address, although the little picture of a pestle and mortar on the front of her leaflet does.

More units of annoyance than there are grains of sand

2010-10-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

I've walked past this poster on average twice a day for the past month and every time it annoys me roughly twice as much as the last. If I don't get this out of my system, there's a risk I'll become a maths anecdote.

1. Are giant black apples glued to the head really the height of French fashion these days?

2. The model appears to be looking into the face of Shelob, suspended above the unsuspecting photographer. You'd think she'd warn him. Or is she another giant man-eating spider in disguise?

3. Seriously, what's with the clumsy cutouts? She looks decapitated. Maybe Shelob's got herself a woman's head on a pike, and the vision of horror in her eyes is the last thing she saw.

4. I don't like the idea of lashes with which I could fatally impale myself or others.

5. Apparently they can't guarantee that they'll be any clumps at all. I DEMAND clumps, dammit.

6. (see below) So why bother with the decapitated, fruit-wearing, probably-a-giant-spider's-decoy woman at all? Why not just have some massive black lines on a white background and say: "Want lashes longer than your nose? Coat them in our very expensive black gunk! Smells better than crude oil. (But we can't promise any clumps.)"?

Make-up: because you're not worth shit without it. Apparently.

In which I kiss goodbye to being an agony (inflicting) aunt...

2010-08-05T06:58:00.000-07:00

Ok, one more pointless, indulgent music post and then I swear to almighty Glod I'll fill your eyes and thinkmeats* with something more interesting.

Songs you should never ever listen to in times of emotional turmoil, unless you're very good at self-administered catharsis:

Thin Lizzy - Still In Love With You (the live version's the worst / best)
Joan Armatrading - Weakness In Me
Crowded House - Fall At Your Feet

Songs you should listen to instead:

Death in Vegas - Aisha
Queenadreena - Pretty Like Drugs
Tool - Aenima
Soulwax - Much Against Everyone's Advice
Die Toten Hosen - Warum Werde Ich Nicht Satt?
Primal Scream - Kill All Hippies
Metallica - Call of Ktulu (S&M)

And that should ease you nicely into something classical to finish off the night:

Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre

(*Not my word, one of Angryyoungalex's)

...in which I fail to get a room

2010-06-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

Love is a very strange thing. It provides us with people who, in order to ensure their safety, we would hack through hoards of clawing, biting zombies to get to. And yet after a couple of days in a bunker with them we'd probably end up wanting to kill them ourselves. Equally, there are people we'd happily spend the rest of eternity with, if only we could feel a little more attracted to them.

Some pub chat a few weeks ago concerned the fact that the contradictory, irritating, or even just banal sides of being in love - and the many possible ways of dealing with it - aren't represented in your typical love songs. A few exceptions were mentioned and I've been (largely against my will) thinking of others all day. I've also been noticing a few songs that can invoke utterly different emotions in me on different days. And so it comes to pass that I am presenting you all here with a playlist for the fucked-up-in-love:

Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division
Strange Glue / Mulder and Scully - Catatonia
My Beloved Monster - The Eels
Underwear / Something Changed - Pulp
Ava Adore - The Smashing Pumpkins
Coin-Operated Boy - The Dresden Dolls
Flinch - Alanis Morissette
Shiver - Coldplay
Denkmal - Wir Sind Helden
Fever - Peggy Lee
Trash - Suede
Laid - James
Romeo and Juliet - Dire Straits
A Rainy Night In Soho - The Pogues

And here are some straightforward happy ones I use to blast through all that Leberkäse:

Be With You - Transvision Vamp
Let Your Love Go - Bread
In Your Room - The Bangles
Big Scary Animal - Belinda Carlisle
Private Universe - Crowded House
In These Shoes? - Kirsty MacColl
I Believe In A Thing Called Love - The Darkness (oh yes!)

Plus of course the best song ever written: Love And Affection - Joan Armatrading

Victims of the Frightwash

2010-06-25T18:05:00.000-07:00

(frightwash, n - a communication formulated in such a way as to ignore all balance, positivity or solutions to a given problem, in order to induce the highest possible level of blind panic in its audience)

It's not often I'm compelled to whip out a notebook and pencil in my local chippy, but unfortunately for me and my blood-pressure, this one tends to have a stack of old Daily Mails piled up for the entertainment and irritation of their customers.

"VICTIMS OF THE NIGHTWATCH" was a story in the 'Good Health' section (pp.36-7) on Tues, June 15th. The story is on the website - roughly the same as the print edition, from what I can remember - but on page 37 there was an additional black banner with large white print declaring:

Just one junior doctor to look after 400 patients, nurses too harried to help... no wonder even the medical profession is worried about hospital care at night.

I beg your pardon? "Even" the medical profession? As if they're normally the last group of people to worry about the welfare of patients? As if they chose their careers based on a predilection for natty green uniforms and the smell of disinfectant? In Daily Mail Land hospitals are a battleground not between humans and diseases, but between Joe and Josephine Everyman and The Axis of Evil Medics, whose goal is to incapacitate the Everymans in order to sell their organs on the black-market to supplement their gold-plated pensions. Or something. Motivation isn't something the Fail usually bothers to explain; public servants are feckless, self-serving, interfering drones. Nuff said.

The Everyman's only hope is to arm themselves with first-rate medical information from their trusty daily newspaper. What's that they see on the very same page? "HOW SUPERFOODS CAN BE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH!" Quickly, Josephine! Better cancel the Waitrose home delivery.

Speech? Criticism? Er... oh look, a butterfly!

2010-06-25T05:01:00.000-07:00

I've just read this post over at Tabloid Watch and was nearly moved to tears. This week Jamie Reed, MP for Copeland, Cumbria, made a speech in Parliament slamming the national media for its coverage of the recent shootings, with particular anger reserved for the journalists who personally turned up to trample on the grieving process of the families and wider community. The extracts picked out by Tabloid Watch form a very moving picture of the pain caused by such intrusions in the name of profit, as the bereaved and their neighbours and friends are hounded for stories, photographs and gossip by people who frankly don't give two shits about them, beyond their potential use to generate money.

We can all agree that such strategies are despicable - they quite obviously cause a great deal of unnecessary distress to those targeted. I'm sure most readers, given the choice, would rather forgo such snippets of information if they knew just what was done to obtain them. Yes, the news from Cumbria was interesting, but most people's tea-breaks would have been just as diverting if the space had been filled by some amusing PR piece about a pig in wellies. No less revenue would have been generated if all papers had told their staff to back off.

And yet, nothing is going to change. Reed's point has been made time and time again whenever there is a major tragic event. Hands are wrung, vague promises of more comprehensive voluntary ethical codes are made, only for the exact same thing to happen next time. So what's to be done?

First of all, the issue needs to be made public. So far, no national news outlet seems to have bothered reporting on Reed's speech. This is an elected representative, calling for a genuine improvement, in the institution dedicated to making such changes (not at a press-conference, media schmooze event, wire-tapped conversation to a colleague or any other of the less appropriate times when the media bother to actually listen to MPs). He is genuinely speaking on behalf of his constituents and he and they deserve to be heard.

So then, fellow dwellers of the blogosphere: pass it on.

Personal Skeptical Mission Statement

2010-06-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

Or a skeptical statement about a personal mission. Or the personal statement of a skeptical missionary. Or... er. That's it. Basically, before I make further attempts to go through some of the stickier issues arising from the last two posts - and from related chats I've had with people over the past couple of weeks - I thought I'd better set down some of my own goals, principles and doubts as a skeptic.

Admirable goals of 'skepticism' as a movement:

Promote critical thinking and freedom of speech and information, especially concerning access to reliable information on scientific (and other fields of) research.
Work with the media to improve the quality of reporting, and exposing mistakes, misinterpretations and downright fabrications where necessary.
Expose the techniques used to part the uninformed from their money.
Campaign against the introduction of policies which are based on bogus reasoning or misinformation.
Provide a welcoming environment and accessible platforms for the discussion of issues related to all of the above.

In this way, we can hopefully change the way in which science, the scientific method, the notion of 'evidence', and the importance of critical thinking are viewed by the general public, and by key decision-makers. The main aim as I see it is to put evidence at the heart of all areas of policy-making, and to help people to apply the same principle to decisions they make in their own lives.

What 'skepticism' should not do:

Form a closed community of like-minded people, in a way that appears intimidating to outsiders, either by automatically assuming that everyone present will agree with your position, or by assuming too much prior knowledge in your audience (not a problem I've noticed so far, but something we should always be on guard against).
Indulge in blanket attacks on a whole aspect of society simply because it is not based in rationality. Better to target individual instances of bad reasoning or potentially damaging policies. For example, there's no point decrying the fact that the Catholic Church's policies on contraception are based on rules whose origin cannot be conclusively traced back to a supreme being. Nobody needs to be told that. There are other, evidence-based ways of proving that such policies are damaging to society.
Give in to the temptation to insult or make fun of people and groups purely to ease our own frustration. Humour is useful if it helps an audience to see a situation in a different light, and to attract people to what could otherwise be a fairly dry and sombre field. On the other hand, it also serves to polarise the debate and to ostracise portions of the target audience.

Essentially, I worry sometimes that there's too strong a temptation within the movement to achieve a sense of release and self-gratification by shouting at stupid people. It's immensely satisfying to tell someone plainly that you're right and they're wrong, and it's also reassuring to surround yourself with people who agree. Viewed from the inside, skepticism is a friendly, welcoming, egalitarian movement in which everyone's contributions, however small, are passed around via blogs, podcasts, tweets etc and thus appreciated. Viewed from the outside, it can often look like a self-referential, self-important circle-jerk of... jerks.

As I said, this is a very personal mission statement, and I'm not going to hassle people into conforming to it. One of the best things about the movement is that there is no prescriptive set of rules, or a PR push to present a united front on all issues. Debate and diversity of opinion are what drive us on, and if you'll allow me to rip off Groucho Marx slightly: I don't care to belong to a club that only accepts people exactly like me as members.

This message will not self-destruct: a couple of responses

2010-06-06T15:49:00.001-07:00

A little clarification on the last post (or back-pedalling, squirming, whatever you want to call it): I still think there's space for skeptical podcasts, blogs etc. to discuss religious beliefs, but it has to be a proper discussion. The hosts have a lot more to offer their listeners than just "look at these superstitious idiots". And I'm definitely in favour of keeping the soap-box section completely open for whatever the guest host wants to sound off about. In hindsight, I possibly should have separated my criticisms of Andrew's argument from my niggles with the rest of the podcast.

Anyway, this is a response which an interested party left on Facebook. He's kindly agreed to have it reproduced here:

I take your point, but unfortunately there are things more consequential than hurt feelings involved in the the practice of taking your morality - I won't say ethics because there's no system involved - from an invisible friend who supposedly conveyed guidance/instructions for life based on the experience, interpretation and, perhaps, imagination ... See moreof desert tribesman with none of the tacit or explicit, not-subject-to-post-modernism scientific knowledge that I, you and practically everyone in the western world or urban environment now takes for granted.

Idealism is interesting in philosophy/ to philosophers counting angels on pinheads, but irrelevant to why you feel grief, how you come to be in the biological form you are, the reasons why and consequences of the fact that GPS systems work (Quantum effects and Relativity), how the systems of nature function, why disasters occur, the nature of disease, the bonds between beings and countless other elements of how my and your everyday life occur. The bounds of knowledge in many areas thought exclusive to arts, humanities and 'social sciences' are quickly falling to probabilistic description by empirical investigation. More so every day.

The idea that you can take the founding elements of your life and society from texts so openly against critical thinking; against and contrary to inter-subjective, falsifiable scientific knowledge; completely at odds with how we live our lives everyday is abhorrent to a rational mind. This is the reason that fundamentalists are shunned by almost all; this is the reason why the hand-wringing moderate person who cannot bear to give up the invisible friend who monitors, influences and dictates is wrong. The unthinking agnostic provides the excuse for the moderate, who provides the scaffold for the fundamentalist. They are all utterly bankrupt on any measure possible to hold up for scrutiny.

It's not bigotry, but a critical mind that dismisses religion, religious 'convictions' and their influence on society.

Andrew's soapbox - a deeply held, honest account of someone's thought on a subject - is well justified in my opinion.... and for every person who might immediately turn their face from GMS for its airing, there may well be many others who turn towards.

AFAIK - All soapboxes are welcome?

This message will not self-destruct

2010-06-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

Not to name-drop or anything but I happen to know first hand that the hosts of the Just Skeptics podcast, and this week's guest host Andrew Taylor, are all lovely people. I'm sure none of them would hesitate to replace a crying child's dropped ice cream or to help an old lady down from a tree. I'm also fairly sure I owe a couple of them drinks. But if I had no source of information other than this week's episode I'd assume they were a bunch of angry, confused and mean-spirited gits.

The first couple of items made for good listening, but then things morphed into a special flicking-chewing-gum-at-religion edition. Treatment of the two news items represented sadly missed opportunities: a few minutes of essentially just poking fun at something which warrants more serious treatment, followed by a diatribe from Alex Dennerly, which contributed little other than some inventive combinations of swear words. There was no real analysis of either case so that it seemed a waste to have four self-professed critical thinkers discussing this, rather than a group of bemused grumblers down the pub. I know damn well they can do better than this.

Then came the guest host's 'soap box' section. Andrew did a good job of wrestling the over-used soap-box back from Alex, putting forward his objections to the moderately religious. After years of practice, he can be relied on to produce a well thought out and amusing rant on most topics, usually leaving the reader with a clear idea of how the world could feasibly be made to work a little better. In this case the rant started with an admission that otherwise sensible people who aren't atheists just don't fit into his 'internal model' of a rational universe. The solution was that every religious person should accept that they're wrong and agree to have that 'fixed'. The analogy he used doesn't really help his case:

There was even some disagreement about whether stamping out common delusions constituted education or genocide. And it reminded me of deaf people who refuse a cure because they see it as implying that they're worse than hearing people. And it's absurd. It's like refusing a superpower. You're not Nathan Petrelli, no bad thing is going to happen. Being deaf is objectively worse than being able to hear and in exactly the same way, being wrong about something as important as whether or not an omnipotent being will save you is objectively worse than being right. And if someone helps you fix that, say "thank you".

I treat religion as a regrettable fact of human nature. Like phobias or weird celebrity crushes,* it seems irrational and silly to the outside observer, can cause a lot of problems we'd all do far better without, but still won't go away not matter how much or how amusingly you complain about it. It's also so bound up with people's self-image, identity and sense of where they belong (similar to when you've built your life around coping successfully with a disability) that the more moderate or wavering believers come under attack, the more likely they are to retreat into the sanctuary offered by a community of people who have shared their experiences. If a 'cure' is going to cause serious mental trauma, it is not acceptable to force people to go through with it.**

Admittedly, I've oversimplified Andrew's argument here. There are parts which I agree with and it's worth a listen. However, in terms of the skeptics movement as a whole, I find rants like this not only pointless but massively unhelpful. It's difficult enough to make any kind of progress against woo, superstition and willful ignorance even when we have hard proof. We need to pick our battles and not go marching off into the treacherous swamps of religious belief, firing shots of "How do you know, you cretins?" into the mist.

I've really enjoyed the skeptics events I've been to and I'm trying my best to encourage friends and acquaintances - some of them moderately religious or buyers of alternative remedies - to come along for a drink, attend the talks, read the blogs and listen to the podcasts. I'd rather not spend too much time having to reassure them that they won't get spit-roasted in some angry atheists' piss-take of ritual sacrifice. In this case, Just Skeptics sadly didn't do justice to the all-round wonderfulness and friendliness of the Greater Manchester Skeptics.

* Stuffed animals and Alan Davies respectively, in case you were wondering.
**Actually, this is my main phobia (just searching for that link was a struggle). I've heard about possible therapies and I'd rather just carry on dealing with the problem, much ta.

If an infinite number of historians...

2010-06-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to catch up with podcasts from the skeptical community, and something in the latest* Righteous Indignation niggled at me for slightly the wrong reasons. It was an item on the proposed revisions to social studies textbooks in Texas, and this was the end of host Trystan Swale's bit:

George Orwell, of 1984 fame, famously said that, “He who controls the present, controls the past. And he who controls the past, controls the future.” Of course there are rational people on the state education board fighting these changes, and any insidious changes will be slow and creeping, but this is one of the reasons why I think that the continual promotion of the ideas of the Enlightenment and scientific reasoning, and investigation into bullshitters and snake-oil salesmen needs to continue through vehicles such as this tremendous podcast. Rewriting history to agree with your rhetoric to me is morally bankrupt and intellectually bankrupt, and ironic coming from a religion that lays claim to moral superiority.

While I agree that the proposed changes to the curriculum are clearly an act of politically-motivated revisionism, and could have a very negative effect on the quality of education, I can sense an underlying assumption on the part of the podcasters here which needs to be examined. This is the assumption that there is a 'correct' version of history, which should be found in all textbooks. In other words, that there is a fixed benchmark against which the accuracy of the information in these books can be measured.

Sorry to go all postmodern on yo' asses, but there isn't. Or at least, it's not as fixed and clear as you might hope. Yes, if a book states that the American War of Independence was started in 1509 by a secret society of Welsh feminist trumpet players, it can be pretty conclusively disproven with reference to a vast body of archival evidence. On the other hand, when it comes to assessing which factions of revolutionaries deserve the most credit for victory, and the creation of the United States... there is no 'fact' to be uncovered, just a mass of different interpretations to be weighed up. If this sounds like I'm working up to the line “teach the controversy”, it's probably because I am. But I'd like it taught well.

When 'science' is taught, it is really the scientific method which is being learned. Ok, you get some facts like the structure of cells, or that some stuff floats, but wherever possible this is not taken out of a book, but demonstrated practically. Even better, the kids perform the experiment themselves and discuss their findings (before being told what it was they did wrong). 'Science' is not a static, monolithic thing you can memorise for an exam. It's a system, an engine, constantly adding new knowledge to the pool, or designating previously held 'truths' to be false.

History is the same. The idea of kids learning 'history' from a single textbook, or even a limited selection of textbooks, fills me with horror. History is not a 'story' to be learned by heart and recited. History does not, strictly speaking, exist to be learned. What can be learned is the discipline of history, the methodology of historians, and – as a basic starting point – some of the main things that the majority of historians would consider to be accurate: key events, dates, and actors; probable causes and consequences; aspects of everyday life at different times – whatever gives the lessons some substance, and interest. This should be done, at all levels, via proper engagement with sources (not just texts), examination of locations and artefacts where possible, and the development of critical thinking skills. Something like:

“Right kids, based on this information about French and English weaponry and on the location of the armies, who do you think won the battle of Agincourt? Discuss it in groups for a bit; your homework is to find out the answer – and remember to double check with at least two different books! Next week, we'll discuss a little how historians define one side as 'the winner'.”

What should emerge from this is a sense that history isn't something which is remembered and preserved down the ages, but something which is constantly being pieced together, reshaped and reinterpreted by new information or different methods of analysis. The most useful thing which can emerge is the knowledge that everyone, however well-intentioned, 'rewrites' history, and that statements along the lines of “x was our past, therefore y should be our future” are always total hogswash.

*Second to last, i.e. episode 49. I'm a slow proof-reader.

Recommended 'reading'

2010-06-02T23:07:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with some cartoon-y things. Only four so far, there's a lot wrong with them, and as with all my hobbies I'll almost certainly lose interest soon. But still, watch this space if you want to. (And if you think the last one makes no sense you're by no means the only one).

Even better, read the cartoons / web comics that give my week most of its structure:

Multiplex by Gordon McAlpin is subtly wonderful. The story-lines mature slowly and the jokes are understated and often pushed into second place by film-related news (no bad thing, in itself), but the characters and set-up are so believable and likeable that you can easily forget you're reading a web comic.

David Malki's Wondermark and Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant are what I wish studying history was like - stuffed full of suspiciously modern historical characters and weird and wonderful contraptions.

Dresden Codak definitely wins my vote for most beautiful artwork and most thought-provoking plots.

Regular, unmissable one-shots: xkcd, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and Doghouse Diaries.

Things that aren't primarily funny but are strange and sad in a way that makes you feel better: A Softer World, Pictures for Sad Children, and Cyanide & Happiness.

NSFW stuff where a few good jokes justify a lot of bodily fluids, tentacles and goodness knows what else: Curvy (for which you really have to start at the beginning) and OGLAF.

EDIT: This is the original illustration used for my thing above.

EDIT #2: I forgot Jump Leads! Forget my own head next...

Soapocalypse.

2010-05-28T06:25:00.000-07:00

Hang on a sec, Dettol. When I do go and "touch a germy soap pump", it tends to be just before I wash my hands. With the soap from the dispenser. Are you telling me your soap alone isn't good enough to protect me from the hazards of your packaging, hence the need for your otherwise pointless motion-sensing gadget?

I'm sorry to say that modern advertisers, however hard they try, will never match the glorious efforts of a hundred years ago: www.vintageadbrowser.com

The French Veil Ban, and other well-meaning interventions

2010-01-23T01:07:00.000-08:00

This is a response to a post over at Feminazery, a little later than I'd hoped. The details of the proposed ban on 'people on the public street whose face is entirely covered' in France are pretty much irrelevant - I was having a think about the idea of banning any aspect of personal appearance. The post has been difficult to write because it's more personal than I would normally consider being. Nonetheless, there's a couple of things I want to say on this topic.

Should we consider banning any items of clothing related to a particular religion, we will have to word the legislation very carefully indeed. I'm sure that there is no way to make such a law both workable and non-discriminatory. Say we decided that women covering their hair with a headscarf was 'intimidating' and that banning this practice in public would be a step forward for women's rights. Either many things would be included unintentionally (Hair nets and swimming caps? Will the headgear of Queen Elizabeth, and many other women her age, be banned too?) or the headgear will have to be defined as a symbol of a particular religion. Practically speaking, the only way to determine whether something is being worn as a religious symbol is to determine the religious beliefs of the wearer; if two women are both covering their hair, and only one is a Muslim, only one would be breaking the law. Clearly, that sucks.

My second point is aimed at those who would like to see some practices banned because they are a symbol of female subjugation. It is widely accepted that Muslim women follow rules on covering skin and hair because they will be punished if they don't, and if you are sure of this fact then it must be upsetting to see evidence of this walking around. But forcing a change in behaviour is not the answer. Not only is it denying that women have the right, even the ability, to choose for themselves, but it completely disregards how they may feel about the new, enforced level of exposure.

This is where my personal experience comes in, which should explain why I'm (quite arrogantly) attempting to speak for a group of women I don't belong to. I wear a wig. I have done since the age of about three, due to some piffling genetic oddity, the only symptom of which is that it makes my 'natural' hairstyle resemble that of a mad scientist caught fraternising with the enemy. And there lies the probem - lack of hair in a woman has certain cultural associations. We no longer shave the heads of female fraternisers, prisoners or asylum inmates, but it is still considered a sign of criminality, illness, deviance, or extreme politics. Just look at the perplexed derision that awaited Britney Spears when she shaved her head, even though leaving it an inch longer would have been accepted. As I don't want to attract such associations purely based on my appearance*, I cover my own hair most of the day.

Looking at it logically, it's silly that I should feel this way. Natural -looking wigs aren't cheap. They're also hot in the summer, and uncomfortable under winter hats. They make me worried about going on roller-coasters (and I LOVE roller-coasters) and getting caught it the rain loses much of its romance. My life would improve if I just did away with the blasted things, and the only thing stopping me is the culture I grew up in; because of the way long, thick, shiny hair is fetishised in western culture, and the fact that lack of hair is still considered a legitimate target for ridicule**, I would rather walk down the street with a bare arse than a bare head.

...And I think the same goes for any culturally-imposed rules on clothing. However unfair and unnecessary they may appear to those looking in, imposing change from the outside amounts to a twisted form of bullying. No state has the right to force people to feel uncomfortable, all day every day, as they go about their normal, law-abiding business. Anyone who thinks it a good idea to force women to feel exposed had better be prepared to go naked the next day.

*And because I don't have Sigourney Weaver or Natalie Portman's beautifully-shaped cranium.

** That episode of Johnathan Creek where they repeatedly take the piss out of a bald girlfriend was easily the most traumatic TV experience of my early teenage years.

Resolution for Britain #1 - Positive Patriotism

2010-01-21T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm English, and I love Britain.

For four out of the past five years I've been loving it from afar, from various parts of the EU, teaching foreign kids and business people about our funny language and our even funnier ways. I've been one of those really irritating long-distance lovers, who enthuse, starry-eyed about the object of their affection to anyone who'll listen (and the best thing about being a teacher is the captive audience). I even spent hard-earned cash on British cheese, beer and fruitcake for my students to prove to them that whatever overpriced cardboard they ate and despaired of on their one trip to London is not the sum total of our culinary offerings. I found it a little frustrating that, unlike that of other countries, our produce is not widely promoted abroad*, to the extent that many Europeans think we all live off 'ham and eggs' and perfectly square pieces of dry 'toast' bread.

(Cheddar makes everything British)

The thing that frustrated me much, much more than that though was the attitude of the British media - my main link to what was going on back home. Holy smoke, the place fell to pieces the second I left. And - allegedly - thousands of Brits were leaving their beloved home country, being forced out by the changes they had seen to "their" "culture" and the mismanagement they were no longer prepared to put up with. Which was news to me, as I thought I'd left to try my hand at being an immigrant. We live and learn.

It amazes me that people who claim to be patriotic Brits - both in the media and in real life - also tend to be the people who complain about it the most. For all their yammering at how our culture is being destroyed, our institutions undermined, and how we need to stand up for ourselves and MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN, there's rarely a mention of what might make Britain 'great' in the first place**. And until those elements are defined, no way am I going to advocate curbing the rights of anyone living here in order to 'defend' the British 'way of life'.

To kick things off, here's a list of some things I think we do well and which it would be a shame to lose:

Food. Specifically our massive range of fantastic desserts, biscuits and cakes which aren't too sweet or made of 90% cream. Also sandwiches with deep, well thought-out fillings (most of the ones I got in Germany were 1 slice meat, 1 slice cheese, 1 gherkin). No-one else does pies quite like we do, and I have never encountered a better variety of sausage. More importantly, we're happy to take elements of other countries' cuisines and make them our own.
Free entry to museums and galleries. This means that nearby residents can just wander in for ten minutes, whenever they're in the area, and soak up some of that culture that's allegedly disappearing. Same goes for our excellent, integrated system of free libraries, which is certainly not a universal concept. Our tourist attractions too are generally well-run with excellent facilities and genuinely informative exhibitions, even if the gift shops are getting a bit silly.
Music. That largely silent phase we went through while geniuses abroad were composing their operas and symphonies? We were just saving ourselves for the second half on the 20th century. Ok, so I grew up to be a bigger than average Brit-pop junkie, but really there's something for everyone there.

And you know what? All of that wonderfulness has only developed in Britain because of our contact with other cultures. Our explorers went out and found the potatoes that we bake so well***, we were happy to adopt the Jewish invention of battered fish, and some incredible curries have been created as an adaptation to British tastes. Those same international connections brought us much of our museums' collections, and their size is testament to the status we reached on the international stage. Much of our musical talent and their influences are of international origin and that mix has helped its constant reinvention and continued popularity all over the world.

Of course, these aren't innocent achievements****. I would be the first to point out that Britain's culture is the result of a lot of suffering, most of it inflicted on the populations of other countries, which we didn't give a monkey's for at the time. But that doesn't mean I'd be happy to see that culture disappear. I believe in political correctness (more on that in a later post) but I wouldn't advocate changing something in the present to appease the past. That's just illogical.

What I find far more illogical though, is the two very contradictory views that many people are able to hold simultaneously; that Britain was once 'great', and that our achievements abroad were a good thing, but also that the country is 'broken' and that the evidence of those international links which remains in Britain (our immigrant communities and mixed marriages, our general willingness to acknowledge the contributions made by other cultures to our own) is something to be attacked and stamped out. The two sides simply don't add up.

We could, perhaps, attempt a 'return' to a culture which is devoid of all foreign influences but most people would agree that living off beans and turnips, with fewer attractions to visit and very little music to enjoy on our 'made in Britain' gramophones, wouldn't be all that 'great' after all.

*Incidentally, after writing this I'm going to bake an apple crumble for a Frenchman. In this area at least, I'm prepared to practice what I preach.

**Sure I know it's a geography term. You know I know that. We're cool.

***Imagine my shock at German restaurants serving them still wrapped in foil and smothered in sour cream. Seriously tricky to eat.

****A severe understatement , I know, but not something I want to get into here.

Resolutions for Britain

2010-01-02T10:23:00.000-08:00

Yes, that is indeed a very arrogant title and sounds like a straight-to-recycling election leaflet but a new decade has begun and I'm going to slap down some optimism here and now, before it starts to look just like the old decade.

Most of the time I'm hampered by the overwhelming feeling that our species is doomed, especially those parts of it which have been living well beyond their means for centuries by screwing over other parts and the planet they view as their own life-sized Risk board. Every time I try to write something pro-active and political I remember that groups of people, regardless of the personalities of the individual members, tend to behave as if humans are inherently ignorant, self-centered, self-serving bastards. But as this is the designated time of year for setting unrealistic goals for the future, here are a few of mine for the country. If I stick to one of my personal resolutions, these will be expanded on over the next few weeks.

Focus on the real positives - let's try and break through all this hell-in-a-handcart, make-Britain-great-again whining from self-pitying (often ex-pat) wind bags and occasionally celebrate some of the things that Britain genuinely does well. Then maybe we'll accept that none of these things are really under threat from immigration, multi-culturalism or anything else people kick off about when they don't want to admit they're scared of foreign-looking hats. Which brings me on to...

Political correctness doesn't mean what a lot of idiots think it means, but that doesn't matter any more. It's still used as an excuse for people to hide behind nasty little euphemisms and pretend they're being a brave spokesperson for the silent majority. Now we're entering an age in which 'human rights' is a dirty word; 'asylum seeker', 'Muslim' and 'terrorist' are practically synonyms and the only tactic employed against this shift in rhetoric is to shout "racist!" and run away. Speaking of which...

The left have to get a grip. Seriously guys - we're accused of running the country, we're even accused of having taken over the USA, for heaven's sake, and yet viewed from the inside, we're a fractious bunch of cynical, defeatist, lone-rangers who've forgotten where the common ground is that we're supposed to be defending. We're losing, and it's our fault.

So that's what I'd like to see in the next ten years - a better-defined, more positive and winnable battle against the forces of prejudice, division, and racist self-interest. Please?

I have to agree with this one

2009-12-29T10:22:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, everything I read of Gayatri Spivak's In Other Worlds passed at least 10 inches above my head. I place the blame squarely at the feet of my brain (so to speak).

Not your place to say

2009-11-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

That urge to leave angry comments in any available space, even though the writer you're annoyed at isn't going to read your insights and everyone else will think you're a prat? It's not just an internet thing:

From Marianne Hester's Lewd Women and Wicked Witches

Ok, so it's within the bounds of possibility that the reader had genuinely linked two thoughts in their brain and was worried they wouldn't remember, just as they hadn't remembered to buy any paper before starting their course. This one, however, is pure spite:

From Nancy S. Love's Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity

These are just the ones I found today. Anyone else found a good one?

Cameron wants a return to narrative history in schools. I don't.

2009-05-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

David Cameron has pointed out that the BNP "are not pleasant people". Well done him. On the other hand, the same Q&A session brought up this:

A mother raised the issue of her two children not knowing what it was to be British because they did not learn history at school.

Mr Cameron said: “It is one of the great betrayals of school children that we have swept away with narrative history.

“We should be proud of what we have achieved as a country. Teaching people about the British Empire does not mean covering up the bad things that happened. It means having an honest explanation about the good and the bad.”

Now, I'm seriously contemplating a whole academic career of looking at narrative history and the problems it throws up, especially when it's the main way that history is spoon-fed to children, and especially when one of the aims is to "be proud of what we have achieved as a country". Naturally it would be unthinkable to cover the history of the British Empire without bringing up "the bad things that happened", but simply covering the negative sides isn't necessarily enough.

I'm currently reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which has some brilliant observations about the way in which atrocities can be trivialised or brushed over, even when the events are described accurately (very long quote coming up, but it didn't seem fair to cut it down):

Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multi-volume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus’s route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”

That is one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. [...]
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
But he does something else - he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important - it should weigh very little in out final judgements; it should affect very little what we do in the world.
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others, This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographical information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the mapmaker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economical or political or racial or national or sexual.
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious (“This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation - for short-range, you’d better use a different projection”). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not an intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.

I don't have enough information on current history teaching in schools, and I know that many people are scathing of the 'transferable skills' approach which has taken time away from providing children with an overview of British history. On the other hand, I don't want to see a return to the situation 100 years ago, when history was taught to the proles primarily to foster unquestioning patriotism and respect for the all-important drive for 'progress'. I'd much rather children learned that one narrative, from a single narrator, is never enough to understand past events, that every historian has a point of view and limits to their knowledge and understanding, and that critical thinking skills are the only real protection against the bullshit they'll have to deal with when they enter adulthood.

It doesn't surprise me all that much that the leader of the Conservative Party might prefer the Victorian approach.

Guess the paper

2009-05-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

Now here's a surprise:

It's a story about public funds being wasted.
It contains a quote from the Taxpayers' Alliance.
It suggests that the findings are just common sense.
It's linked to from the front page under the sarcastic heading: Science advances - ducks 'like water'
There's no evidence that the words 'like water' appeared in the original research.
An amusing picture of a duckling takes up rather a lot of space.
You have to wait until the end of the article to find out the real, useful point of the research.
In no way can the title be considered an accurate summary of these scientific findings.

So in which tabloid can this shrieking piece of anti-public-funded-science fluff be found?

The Guardian

On the other hand, at least they're not warning working mums that their house-husbands might be cheating on them.

The original's always the best.

2009-04-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

First of all, I've put another book up on Tatty Jackets.

Secondly, I'm a bit bemused by the controversy - if there is indeed a fire lurking behind the Daily Mail's industrial smoke machine - surrounding the BBC's Robin Hood series. I seem to remember some previous grumblings about them making it all dumbed down and relevant (as if making a program no-one's interested in would be a better use of the license fee) but it's the introduction of a martial arts expert that's caused the latest kerfuffle. Hang about, that should read "black martial arts expert".

Now, I can sometimes be a stickler for historical accuracy, but it only has steam coming out of my ears when it's a rubbish, misleading reenactment in what's supposed to be a serious documentary. This is fiction. It's a fictional series loosely based around a character who has appeared in lots of other fiction. Absolutely none of his appearances can be considered more 'accurate' than the others.

Maybe some people would disagree and claim that you can trace a likely candidate for the 'real' Robin Hood, find his mortal remains, discover his height and build, run DNA tests, reconstruct his face, pin down exactly what years he was alive and dress him only in the fashion of the time, in the materials that would have been available. Above all, make sure he speaks only medieval English, in his local dialect. Oh, and perfect teeth are not an option.

Does this sound like any Robin Hood you've ever seen? A quick image search reveals variety of hair colours and facial hair arrangements, shoes ranging from hobnailed and durable, to ridiculously pointy:

There's been a futuristic Robin Hood, a vain, idiotic Robin Hood whose band was led by Maid Marion (also on the BBC) and I don't think that was considered a problem. Nor do I recall howls of protest when Disney "reinvented" Friar Tuck as a bear.

This process of making stories more relevant to the audience is not a feature of modern political correctness or dumbing down. It's been carried out in various art forms for centuries. Artists have always sought to present characters in a new light, to make their audience think and see new aspects of the stories or morals they portray. That's the whole damn point of art - that's what separates fiction from fact. Do an image search for Helen of Troy or the Virgin Mary (ignoring any result involving toast) and you'll see how their clothes and hairstyles and stance were altered as tastes changed. Those medieval manuscripts that every European country is so proud of - most of those are rehashed old tales, chopping and splicing stories from different centuries and different areas, changing names, adding or removing characters. Digressing from these 'original' stories isn't some kind of travesty or a betrayal of our heritage. It's merely continuing an artistic process that those manuscripts were one small part of.

I only read through a few of the readers' comments before deciding that life is too short for that kind of thing but I still found one worth getting very, very angry about.

Well what a surprise, the BBC does it again. They won't be happy until they have completely removed all traces of native English culture from our land by brainwashing the public, gradually introducing anti English and dare I say it anti White propaganda; and by the way, its not racist to highlight the concerns of white people who want to hold on to their own culture!

Why is it suddenly racist to say I'm proud to be White? It's not racist to openly say I'm proud to be Black!

Why is it racist to say I love my country and my culture? It's not racist for a Black person to say I'm proud my homeland and my culture!

Having other races and faiths in the UK is fine, but don't tell me I'm racist for being proud of who I am!

These issues are a concern when we have the BBC trying to rewrite history in an attempt to put other cultures first!
Click to rate Rating 234

- John, Birmingham, England, 28/3/2009 14:52

Now, David Harewood was born in Birmingham. He has British citizenship, and no other. The legends of Robin Hood are as much a part of his cultural heritage as of any other Brit. We could of course decide that only actors who can prove that all of their ancestors since the reign of King John were born on English soil are worthy enough to play these characters. On the other hand, that would result in Robin Hood disappearing from our screens altogether. Then we'd have a real example of 'native English culture' being lost.

As always, my heartfelt thanks go to MacGuffin and all other bloggers who trawl their way through the tabloids so the rest of us don't have to.

Once you start looking you can find it everywhere

2009-01-22T09:43:00.000-08:00

This was going be a short post about one stupid thing but has ended up covering four very different kinds of stupid. I've attempted to rein in my criticism as far as possible, firstly because it's more fun if people find the stupid for themselves, and secondly because if I analyse these masterpieces of mindfartery for much longer the bile is going to reach and kill my brain.

PETA's "Sea-kittens" campaign - As I wrote a post on this last year, I was delighted to see this topic hit the Guardian and - far more importantly - Unspeak. Ingrid Newkirk's defence of the campaign is less than convincing:
And while "sea kitten hunting," formerly known as angling, is cruel to animals, commercial sea kitten hunting is environmentally catastrophic. It has devastated the ocean's ecosystem to the extent that large fish populations are only 10% what they were in the 1950s. Scientists warn that the damage caused by the fishing industry is irreparable.
[...]
We invite everyone of any age to play the sea kitten game and find out more about Peta's Sea Kittens campaign. It's a bit of fun with a serious message: never dismiss any individual's interests just because they look a bit funny.
I completely agree that overfishing is a huge environmental problem which needs to be prevented as it cannot be cured later. What I don't get is why "everyone of any age" should be invited to wade through a flood of drivel before they can find out important facts about the situation. And how is that "serious message" in any way linked to the campaign? My mental faculties clearly aren't up to scratch, maybe I should start eating fish.

Elizabeth Wurtzel's explanation of how all criticism of Israel is anti-semitic - One reason I love the Guardian's Comment is Free section is that people are given space to explain opinions that you may have suspected were only straw-man positions. I've come across many things refuting this idea but never met anyone who supported it. Wurtzel's article is similar to Newkirk's defence of PETA, in that it only serves to inspire fresh counter-arguments. I have one thing that I'd like to add to the existing criticism of this article, specifically countering this assertion:
[...]while I'd like to artificially separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism, like most American Jews, I'm not willing to make that false distinction: when there is more than one Jewish state, the world's hatred of Israel might become no different from its exasperation with any other country, but since Israel is the only homeland, and really it is nothing more than six million Jews living together in an area the size of New Jersey, I can't pretend that the problem with Israel is that it's a poorly located country that happens to be at odds with its neighbours and only coincidentally happens to be Jewish. The trouble with Israel is the trouble with Jews.

In fact it's easier to make a distinction between "the Jews" and Israel than it is to separate a country from its citizens. Whether you're talking about Judaism or "Jewishness", you're discussing a worldwide community of millions of people, with vastly different backgrounds and opinions, with members who have inspired profound respect in many different fields. Israel is just one political / geographical entity. It's really very difficult to confuse the two, unlike discussions about "Iran" and "the Iranians", for example.

"Six months after the MMR jab... a bubbly little girl now struggles to speak, walk and feed herself" - If there's one word I'd like to ban from Daily Mail headlines, it's "after". This article made me very angry indeed, being the shameless exploitation of a parent's fear and misery in order to shamelessly exploit other parents just to sell cheap paper to wrap potato peelings in. Every damn line is either persuading parents to mistrust vaccinations or manipulating their emotions to make the persuasion all the more effective. It's such a dangerous campaign to run, with absolutely no reason for it, but once tabloids get up on a high horse they'll happily trample anyone into the mud. It seems impossible to me that a literate individual could write the following sentences and not grasp the reality of the situation:

[Doctors] have told Melody's mother Alicia Ellis, 25, there is no reason to believe the MMR vaccine has anything to do with her condition.
However, Miss Ellis is convinced it is the only logical explanation and there could be a connection to a neurological problem she had as a newborn baby.
Miss Ellis, from Leeds, said: 'Show me the evidence that it's not linked to the MMR jab and I might be all right, but they can't.
[...]
The tiny baby was seriously-ill in hospital and was close to death. Doctors feared she would suffer from developmental problems as a result, but to their amazement she made a complete recovery and grew up as a normal, healthy little girl.
[...]
'I think the jab has attacked the part of her brain that was damaged when she was a baby. It's just too much of a coincidence for this to happen just two days after her jab, but no-one wants to listen to me.'

It only seems like too much of a coincidence if you've been manipulated into believing that vaccinations are very dangerous and that doctors don't care if they are, and a child has only "grown-up" healthy once they've stopped growing. Furthermore, it's impossible to provide proof of a non-link which would convince a lay audience (*trivial parallel warning*)- the more you tell someone that there's no evidence linking their choice of underwear to their team's performance in a cup final, the more they'll suspect you of rooting for the other side.

"foul, lowest-common-denominator, sub-literate emotivist twattery" - I couldn't think of a better description of this video. For goodness sake, don't follow this link. It's not worth it. It's billed as "tear-jerking" but then so is waxing your nose-hair (probably). I learned two things from it: A. that presenting single-braincelled judgements on the state of modern Britain in the voice of a child only highlights their over-simplicity and B. that it's not a good idea to watch something which someone called "Pigdogfucker" finds offensive.

"simple, unpolitical children's stories"

2009-01-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

I've recently been reading ,,Lügendetektor" by Saul K. Padover. Padover was a US intelligence officer responsible for interviewing German citizens or foreign workers recently returned from Germany, in areas occupied by American forces. It looks like it was published in 1946 under the title "Experiment in Germany" (or "Psychologist in Germany" in the UK) but is out of print, and only available as an expensive second-hand hardback. I bought the 1999 German translation from a bargain basement for 2 Euros, funny old world.

Even though it may be a monumental waste of time to translate something into English which was recently translated into German from an English transcript of interviews conducted in German... that's exactly what I've done. While the actual words the interviewees used have been repeatedly mangled, hopefully the meaning has been passed down intact. Just imagine it's been written by a 12th Century monk.

Chapter 17 - Padover and his men are stationed in Roetgen, recently captured without too much trouble:

As a matter of fact it was here that we first noticed a phenomenon which we would often encounter in Germany; the level of skepticism and defeatism stood in direct relation to the suffering that people had experienced. In largely destroyed towns, attitudes of defeatism or criticism of the regime were widespread, while untouched areas were filled with fascism and confidence of victory. In the small, undamaged town of Roetgen, around one third of the population counted as between convinced and fanatic Nazis. Those left over were running with the pack.

(p. 67-8)

Tatsächlich bemerkten wir hier erstmals jenes Phänomen, das wir in Deutschland noch sehr oft vorfinden sollten: der Grad an Skepsis und Defätismus stand in direkten Bezug zu dem Leid, das die Menschen erlebt hatten. In schwer zerstörten Städten waren regimekritische und defätistiche Haltungen sehr verbreitet, während unversehrte Orte von Faschismus und Siegesgewißheit erfüllt waren. In dem kleinen, unzerstörten Roetgen bestand etwa ein Drittel der Bevölkerung aus überzeugten bis fanatischen Nationalsozialisten. Die übrigen waren Mitläufer.

A local boy who runs errands for them urges them to interview his old school teacher, Agnes Pernitz. He describes her as one of many "Mußnazis" - people who claim they supported the Nazi Party out of necessity:

She had worked as a teacher in a Volksschule [standard state primary school before 1968] for forty years and claimed to be unpolitical. “In political matters,” she said, her whole face beaming, “I am like a child, like a real child. All that I know about this complex subject matter, I have from my husband.”

(p.72)

Sie habe vierzig Jahre lang als Volksschullehrerin gearbeitet und sei unpolitisch. „In politischen Dingen,” sagte sie und strahlt über das ganze Gesicht, „bin ich wie ein Kind, wie ein richtiges Kind. Was ich über diese komplizierte Materia weiß,habe ich alles von meinem Mann.”

Had she taught any political subjects or told her pupils about political events?
“For heaven’s sake, what can you be thinking?” she cried, as if shocked. “I only taught reading and mathematics. I read simple, unpolitical children’s stories to them, from the life of the Leader*, for instance.”

(p.73)

Ob sie politische Fächer unterrichtet oder ihren Schülern von politischen Begebenheiten erzählt habe? „Um Gottes willen, wo denken Sie hin?” rief Frau Pernitz wie schockiert. „Ich habe nur Lesen und Rechnen unterrichtet. Vorgelesen habe ich einfache, unpolitische Kindergeschichten, etwa aus den Leben unseres Führers.”

Did the party exert its influence on the syllabus in any way?
“Not at all. No-one laid down rules for the teachers to follow. Naturally the school books were all changed after the Leader came to power, but we teachers had complete freedom. We were completely at liberty to choose different topics from the teaching materials provided for us and nobody supervised us in any way.

(p.74)

Hat die Partei in irgendeiner Weise Einfluß auf den Lehrplan genommen? „Keineswegs. Niemand hat uns Lehrern Vorschriften gemacht. Natürlich wurden nach dem Machtantritt der Führers die Schulbücher ausgetauscht, aber wir Lehrer hatten völlige Freiheit. Wir konnten aus dem Lehrmaterial, das uns zur Verfügung gestellt wurde, ganz nach Belieben die verschiedensten Themen auswählen, und niemand hat uns in irgendeiner Weise kontrolliert.”

She offers a schoolbook description of Germany’s recent history:

Wilson didn’t keep to the Fourteen Points. Germany needed a rescuer. Then Ebert came, who was a socialist, and everything got worse. Then came the inflation and the situation got even worse. The German people yearned for better times, and then came Field Marshal Hindenburg. He was getting older and suddenly the Leader came forward. He promised the workers a better life. Hindenburg named him Chancellor and after Hindenburg’s death he became the Leader of Germany. He won over the people because he gave then work and because they could go travelling with the organisation “Strength through Joy”. Ordinary Germans were overjoyed at the Leader. And when industrialists recognised that the Leader had brought them a better life, they joined with the workers and adopted the new ideas as their own. In the end, the whole German population was behind the Leader.

„Wilson hat sich nicht an die Vierzehn Punkte gehalten. Deutschland brauchte einen Retter. Da kam Ebert, das war ein Sozialist, und alles wurde schlimmer. Dann kam die Inflation, und die Verhältnisse verschlechterten sich noch mehr. Das deutsche Volk sehnte sich nach besseren Zeiten, und dann kam der Feldmarschall Hindenburg. Der wurde immer älter und plötzlich trat der Führer hervor. Er versprach den Arbeitern ein besseres Leben. Hindenburg ernannte ihn zum Reichskanzler, und nach Hindenburgs Tod wurde er Führer des Deutschen Reiches. Er gewann die Menschen, weil er ihnen Arbeit gab und sie mit der Organisation „Kraft durch Freude” verreisen konnte. Die Masse des deutschen Volkes begeisterte sich für den Führer. Und als sie Industriellen erkannten, daß der Führer den Arbeitern zu einem besseren Leben verhalf, schlossen auch sie sich den Arbeitern an und machten sich die neuen Ideen zu eigen. Am Ende stand das ganze Volk hinter den Führer.”

On the factors which led to the war:

“That's quite simple. England started the war. The English wanted to dispute Germany’s rightful position in Europe. They have their own great empire of colonies but again and again, when Germany tries to gain more space for the population*, they put obstacles in the way.”
And how did the war with Russia start?
“The Russians,” she said darkly, “had been arming themselves for a long time because they wanted to launch an assault on Germany. And so we defended ourselves by attacking them. We’ve always found the Bolsheviks to be abominable, there’s no place for them on German soil. That’s why we attacked them before they could attack us.”
And Poland?
“That was purely a defensive war. Germany needed to protect herself from the Poles.”

(p.75-6)

„Das ist ganz einfach”, sagte Frau Pernitz. „England hat mit dem Krieg angefangen. Die Engländer wollten Deutschland seinen rechtmäßigen Platz in Europa streitig machen. Sie selbst haben ein großes Kolonialreich, aber wenn Deutschland versucht, Lebensraum zu erwerben, legen sie uns immer wieder Hindernisse in den Weg.”

Und wieso kam es zum Krieg gegen Rußland?

„Die Russen,” sagte sie düster, „hatten schon seit langem aufgerüstet, weil sie Deutschland überfallen wollten. Also haben wir uns verteidigt, indem wir sie angegriffen haben. Die Bolschewisten sind uns schon immer ein Greuel gewesen. sie haben auf deutschem Boden nichts zu suchen. Daher haben wir sie angegriffen, bevor sie uns angreifen konnten.”

Und Polen? „Das was ein reiner Verteidigungskrieg. Deutschland mußte sich vor den Polen schützen.”

*Due to the overwhelming extra connotations the words Führer and Lebensraum have acquired since World War Two, I’ve decided to translate them as everyday English terms. I believe that that’s how an “unpolitical” person such as Agnes Pernitz would have used them.

Extra, extra: I was wondering how Germany's invasion of Poland could have been seen as self-defence and came across this info on "Operation Himmler", a false-flag campaign in which German positions close to the Polish border were attacked by German soldiers, who left dead concentration camp prisoners at the scene dressed in Polish uniforms. I'm not sure why this didn't come up in any history lessons.

(White) Christmas Lies

2008-12-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

Being lied to by your parents is an important part of growing up, teaching us valuable lessons about trust, critical thinking skills, and not reporting everything as cold hard fact to all your friends. It also gives you material to use on your own kids, making up for the CDs they just used to create a mosaic. For example, telling them that a haggis is a highland rodent with two legs shorter than the others, which only ever runs round mountains anti-clockwise and is always hoping to meet one of the lady haggises (haggi?) running clockwise* - this does no lasting harm and gives your kid an ice-breaker for any social occasion.

Christmas lies are more dangerous, particularly those about a mince-pie-guzzling intruder, who ignores the laws of physics, biology, geography and stranger danger (it's ok to sit on a stranger's knee so long as he's got a big sack). I may be overreacting a little here, but once that damage has finally been undone by big school, one warped idea tends to remain long into adulthood; you can write a wish-list to Santa, containing everything from non-itchy school vests to a talking, flying elephant, scribble "Santa, Norf Poal" on the envelope, smear it with jam in place of a stamp, shove it in a post box... and get at least one thing from the list on Christmas morning.

Of course kids don't think it happens by magic. They know that a postman, probably assisted by a cat, takes the letters out, gives them to another postman, who passes them on to another, and so on, until they find the right elf. That's the damaging part. They begin to believe:

that there exists a person or group who have the power to give you anything you want and will do, if you only ask them to enough times.
that there is a network of public servants who will go to all lengths to deliver your Very Important Requests to the relevant official, no matter which bit of the system you threw your requests at.

This psychological damage during childhood is what conditions many people's behaviour towards large, complex organisations. This is why they think that the local mayor should grit the roads on his day off, or that they can shout at a lowly call-centre worker because they don't like the company's new TV jingle. It's also the only explanation I can think of for this, this and all of this.

Happy Holidays everyone.

*thanks go to one of the friendliest, funniest families you'll ever meet

The enemy of your enemy still hates your guts

2008-11-23T09:28:00.000-08:00

The reassuring thing about rabid xenophobes is that they have difficulty forming long-term international alliances.

Take for example Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS), an EU coalition of right-wing parties, which fell apart when an Italian MEP (Mussolini's granddaughter) called Romanians "habitual law-breakers". The Romanian members were shocked to discover that other people viewed them the way they viewed the Roma population, and went off in an indignant huff. I've a prediction that Metapedia, online reference point for people who consider Conservapedia to be a little too left-wing, will have similar problems if its supporters ever learn a foreign language.

A little back story: this week's flea market trip has convinced me that what I really want from Santa Claus is Raubstaat England ("England the Robber State"). It's a very large album for cigarette cards published in 1941, featuring all the least flattering parts of England's history and confidently predicting our imminent downfall. For a few examples of the pictures see this site. The copy I found was more than a little over my budget so I've been hunting down incomplete copies over the internet. This brought me to the entry for "England" on the German language version of Metapedia:

England ist ein Land (kein Staat) in Europa, das durch Willkür das Vereinigte Königreich Großbritannien und Nordirland erschaffen hat. England ist somit das größte und am dichtesten besiedelte Landesteil dieser Konstruktion. Oft wird England fälschlicherweise auch als Synonym für den Staat des Vereinigten Königreichs oder für die gesamte Insel Großbritannien gebraucht. Der Name England stammt vom westgermanischen Volk der Angeln (altengl. Englas) ab.

Translation: England is a country (not a state) in Europe, which arbitrarily created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. England is consequently the largest and most densely populated area of this construction. England is often also used wrongly as a synonym for the state of the United Kingdom or for the whole island of Great Britain. The name England comes from the West German people the Angles (old English: Englas).

... And that's it. Compare and contrast this paltry offering with the reams of patriotic information on the English language page, and you can almost feel sorry for two contributors in the discussion section, who have such a very long way to go before their "Projekt" will be complete. Apparently the only literature they have to go on is an official document holding England solely responsible for the bombing of civilians during World War 2, and their trusty copy of Raubstaat England. Maybe they could ask the English contributors for some help.

Picture "knights 4" from stock.xchng.

Update: More information and extracts from Raubstaat England on my other big blogging project, Tatty Jackets. It's good. Take a look. Now.

Some rebranding needed

2008-10-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

Until they actually break the law, or wreck the lives of people who have a vague connection to a practice they disagree with, I can't bring myself to dislike animal rights groups. I think it's excellent that so many people are finally questioning mankind's historic attitude that the whole of nature is there for us to use, and finally use up. I reserve my hatred for people who spit flaming feathers, on principle, at anyone who attempts to express a view which may mildly suggest that something they are doing might not be very nice, and please could they think about reconsidering. (If you'd like some examples of unnecessary anti-protest bile-spitting, try googling a combination such as 'PETA', 'fluffy' and 'morons'.)

On the other hand, PETA's advertising strategy doesn't really do them any favours. Take this campaign. When I followed the link on Badscience.net I firmly believed that I would be taken to The Daily Mash website. But no, to my utter amazement, they really are trying to rebrand fish as 'sea kittens'.

The logic seems to be that if children realise that fish can also be cute and lovable, they will refuse to eat them. This seems to ignore two basic facts:

1) Parents, not kids, plan the family dinners. Kids have their fads and tantrums, but most parents can undo the influence of one little website.

2) Lots of kids have pet goldfish. Many more have visited aquariums at some point. Thousands of little girls want to be The Little Mermaid (the Disney one, of course) and while we're on the subject of films, who didn't have a serious emotional investment in the fate of Nemo?

So the basic concept of the campaign seems to have a few flaws. Can they overcome this with brilliant, inspired execution? No.

PETA have proven before that they aren't always great with children. Whoever wrote the text for the site has no idea about their alleged target audience. Remember when you were six years old and your Mum's colleague - the one with no kids and really strong perfume - came to visit and spoke to you like you'd both been lobotomised? It's like that, but more so.

The moment I lost all control and started rolling around the floor of the staff-room was when I got to the "Sea Kitten Stories". Apparently, "You can learn a lot about a culture from its bedtime stories". Excellent. I've always been ashamed at my ignorance of fish culture. Here's an illustrative example:

Tony the Trout is the smartest Sea Kitten in his school. Already litter-trained at 2 months old, Tony went on to double-major in neuroscience and environmental studies at Clamford University, eventually graduating with honors.
When Tony is caught and fed to a precocious young child who, having eaten one mercury-filled sea kitten too many, falls to the bottom of his class, the irony is not lost on him.

Remember, this is a site for children, or at least people of a mental age at which you want to Create your own Sea Kitten. 'Precocious'? 'Double-major in neuroscience'? Why would a fish be litter-trained, at two months or otherwise? Shouldn't the people who invented the term 'sea kitten' know if it should be capitalised or not? What on earth happened to the structure of that final sentence?

I would like to point out at this juncture that I love the animated pages of the 'bedtime story book' and am genuinely fond of the cartoon fish in cat masks. The site looks very professional, as does the more grown-up version. How the designers could bear to associate with the pea-brained numpty who wrote the text is beyond me.

Hopefully PETA will realise at some point that they're wasting their money on these campaigns, and will pump their considerable resources into a useful discussion of animal-rights issues - not to mention environmental and economic issues such as how to protect ever-decreasing fish populations. This will have the happy side-effect that they will be viewed less often as pack of howling lunatics.

Links:

The "Milk Sucks" campaign, where you can find all those oh-so-desirable trading cards.

Picture "My cat and fish 1" from stock.xchng

In Science We Trust: without free public access to the data, belief is all we have.

2008-10-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a colleague about the relative benefits of alternative and conventional medicine on Friday and realised, quite quickly, that I didn't have a leg to stand on. As I've hopefully made clear in previous posts, I place my trust in evidence-based medicine; I'd much rather swallow or inject a substance (naturally occurring or otherwise) that has proven effects and recorded, minimised side effects than something about which little or no data has been formally collected. Unfortunately I don't have access to a lot of the research and even if I did, it would take a very long time for me to read and understand it (particularly if I'm ill and panicking, which tends to affect my ability to assess the statistics).

So my trust in science can't happen directly - I have to place my trust in people. I have to believe that the data has been collected and assessed properly, that the sources I have access to are reporting the findings accurately, that policy decisions within the health system have been based purely on the most accurate information, and that my doctor has taken absolutely everything into consideration when diagnosing and prescribing.

The end users of conventional or alternative medicine suffer from a serious lack of the source data needed to make a fully informed choice. For every genuinely useful study reported in the media to prove one thing, there'll be a dubious one (or even a good one) claiming to prove the opposite. Thanks to the woolly and simplistic media coverage and journals which only provide an impenetrable abstract for free, the lay person has no way to tell by themselves which study produced the more reliable result. For many people, myself included, the decision to go for a conventional or alternative treatment is based on a tiny amount of information, and bucket loads of trust.

Looked at from the outside, science seems very elitist and self-protecting. This impression is reinforced when there's a focus on misuse of the 'Doctor' title or degrees popping up that claim to be science but don't quite measure up. As I wrote in a previous post, science is really about the method and not the people. Information should be judged on the methods used to obtain it, not the qualifications of the person who reports it. Unfortunately, the news reports about science and medicine rely very strongly on the perceived authority of the source.

People inside the world of science are understandably frustrated by claims that the scientific method is not the standard by which everything should be judged. To outsiders, science's perceived attitude of "believing in something is stupid, you just have to accept that we're right" seems arrogant, elitist, cold, and somewhat hypocritical whereas a sales pitch along the lines of "this treatment may be right for you, let's try and see, if you're not happy we can try something else, guaranteed no dangerous side-effects" seems warmer and more intuitive and is easier to trust. When we choose an 'alternative', we feel like we're making an informed choice, while few people feel well-informed about conventional medicines or feel like they really have a choice in what happens to them.

Couple all this with the reports of dubious practices within the pharmaceutical industry, terrible, personal stories of mistakes made by doctors, the general impression that the NHS is falling apart and that no-one within it has a clue what they're doing and only want to get paid well and retire early - it's easy to see why there are so many conspiracy theories about conventional medicine out there, and so many people ready to believe them.

The end user, the patient, is faced with two systems. From the point of few of an individual, both systems have their risks: misdiagnosis, failed treatments, mistakes, malpractice and so on. Each system provides information which contradicts information from the other system and it's virtually impossible, with the time and sources available, to assess the accuracy of this information. The decision the end user makes is almost entirely based on which people they believe and trust.

In my case, I've invested my time in attempts to get beyond newspaper headlines and advertisements, to try to understand what everything means, what claims can be legally made by pill companies on both sides of the line, how statistics are and should be reported, and many other issues. I place my trust in conventional medicine because - based on everything I've read - it seems better regulated and better at learning from its mistakes. Other people are hesitant to place their trust in a group of people who seem to hoover up funding, hoard the resulting information behind pay walls, insult people who don't have the same qualifications as they do, don't have time to listen to people's concerns, and generally present a united and closed front to the outside world.

There are many, many reasons why science and scientists aren't trusted as much as they deserve. A good start at solving the problem would be to make more research papers available to the general public, written up in a way which doesn't take a decade of university education to understand. No articles should be written about new research without clear information about where this research can be found by readers. The same should definitely apply to advertisements from companies on both sides of the fence. This way, trust and belief will no longer have to be the deciding factors in patients' decisions.

Here's an example of what I mean. To some customers, an invitation to do their own research into the possible benefits of a product might sound empowering and flattering. It might reinforce the impression that the patient / alternative therapist relationship is more equal and open that that of patient / doctor. In reality, telling someone they can find the information on the internet is like telling them to ask someone in the street, or to toss a coin, or open a valued book of their choice at a random page and interpret a few lines of text. Unless you work in the relevant field, the information has to come third, fourth, twentieth hand.

Extra! First direct quote! Nellie the Arts Grad has been looking into Ben Goldacre's humanity grad phobia in more detail than I can be bothered to and raises some important concerns about his book.

Republicans create their own worst case scenario of positive discrimination

2008-09-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

The Daily Telegraph wasn't all that impressed by Sarah Palin's CBS interview. What surprised me most was this:

Ed Rollins, who managed Ronald Reagan's landslide victory in 1984, said: "I would let her do fundraisers, I would send her to the party base. I wouldn't put her in many more interviews like this."

Palin is proud to have overtaken Hilary Clinton as the woman who's come closest to the President's chair (no lewd joke intended). We've had weeks of hearing about her family life, her busty side-kick type humour and her dress sense (there's Austrian news reports about her glasses, for goodness sake). She's the ideal Republican female: evidence that a woman can be successful in politics without demanding any silly little laws that might benefit her kind. Now it turns out that she can just about be trusted with a bake sale but should under no circumstances be allowed to talk about politics. How delightfully progressive.

Picture from stock.xchng

Oh, the humanities!

2008-09-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

Ben Goldacre doesn't think much to humanities graduates which is why, for a fan like me, reading his column often feels like being kicked in the teeth by a favourite uncle. To alleviate the intense emotional damage caused by his blanket dismissal of my kind, I've been considering the wider implications of his - and other science bloggers' - pet hate.

There may be a deeply buried psychological trauma to blame; was he rejected by the school history club as a kid, or repeatedly stood-up by Shakespeare-loving French exchange students? Either way, his stated reason is that some humanities graduates work as journalists, that some of those write stories involving science, and that many of these stories contain errors or misrepresent the facts. As generalisations go, this is more than a bit crude. What he's describing is a group of media professionals entrusted with the dissemination of information to the general public, who couldn't give a monkey's about accuracy, scientific or otherwise. To label these people "humanities graduates" is a moronic and offensive kind of joke, on a level with saying "Irishman" when you mean "idiot", and it sounds more idiotic and childish the more you say it.

The humanities are not by definition unscientific. What we may be dealing with here is confusion of the words science and scientist, both referring to "The Sciences", and the word scientific, meaning "the scientific method". The way I understand it - and I welcome correction - a person striving to achieve scientific accuracy should collect as much data as possible, include all information in their analysis regardless of whether or not it supports their ideas, consider and seek to eliminate all possible causes of error in their method or argument, and then present the information for peer review in such a way that someone could do exactly the same as you: look at the same source data (whether it's results from a trial or secondary literature) and apply exactly the same approach from start to finish. Different academic disciplines may use different forms of data but the attention to accuracy, the disclosure of source material and method, and the willing exposure to ruthless criticism should be the same in all 'good' researchers (and that applies to everyone, from schoolchildren to life-long enthusiasts carrying out investigations in garden sheds).

There are 'bad humanities' examples aplenty, just as there is 'bad science'. Those who seek to discredit all scientists by using a few examples (like banging on about doctors carrying out experiments in Nazi concentration camps) are considered twunts by science bloggers. Quite right too, but a little less hypocrisy would be nice.

Am I getting too worked up over a harmless in-joke? Well no, actually, because there are serious issues at stake. Goldacre's column in the Guardian has changed a lot over the years I've been reading it. It used to be a collection of short "look at these idiots" anecdotes, misleading labels and stupid statements by media 'experts'. It's now a very serious criticism of the way pseudoscience is becoming increasingly indistinguishable - for the lay person - from the real thing, through a combination of manipulative charlatans and lazy, sensation-seeking reporting. It's now less of a science blog and more of political / media studies / cultural / history of ideas blog. Solving the very serious problems that this decline of science (or whatever we should call it) is causing, for example the fact that so many HIV sufferers in Africa are choosing herbal remedies over anti-retroviral drugs, will take more than just scientists. We need people who have spent years studying the history and culture of the communities to explain exactly why they are so ready to believe that western drugs companies want to kill them. We need linguists, diplomats, social policy experts and other humanities graduates to combat the sophisticated anti-drugs propaganda.

We need people from all backgrounds to read Goldacre's column and the badscience blogs and to become just as outraged by the issues they investigate. We need humanities graduates to pitch in to solve those social problems made worse by bad science. Repeatedly wiping you knob on their collective reputation isn't the best start.

Links

Here's an example of the humanities graduate comments in Goldacre's blog. I admit it's only a few words but I've never seen him qualify it properly: Make your own ID. It's also a really good article, of course.

Here's a good explanation of the difference between scientists and people who just try to sound like them: The Epiphenomena of Quackery

And here's a recent example of rubbish reporting of a non-story where all journalistic skills seem to have been disregarded: Nine in 10 women 'cheat' to look good . You don't have to be any kind of graduate to know that this bit makes no sense:

The poll also revealed the perils of attempting to look beautiful.
Top of the list was the visible panty line, followed by smudged mascara and unshaven legs.

Yes, my legs are hairy due to vain attempts to increase my feminine wiles through 'cheating'. Pillocks.

Matthias Rath's websites: Concerns

2008-09-14T09:03:00.000-07:00

Update

Angryyoungalex has looked into the claims that the records of the IG Farben trial are being purposefully buried. Results here.

In my previous post I described a close-knit group of websites for various campaigns, initiatives, awards etc. all of which have been set up either partially or entirely by the Dr Rath Health Foundation. Having looked at yet another other official Dr Rath site this morning (clearly this is what Sunday lie-ins were made for), I've decided there's enough *ahem* interesting aspects to fill a whole book. I'll just stick to the points I was planning to make yesterday:

There seems to be a deliberate attempt, through repeated use of the phrase "the Auschwitz Survivors", to suggest that the foundation have been singled out for an official award from a group representing all former prisoners of Auschwitz. I've carried out several searches, including on the official website for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. There's a brief mention of the hospice foundation stone being placed but nothing on Rath or the "Relay of Life" award.

The relationship between the small group of Auschwitz survivors and the Dr Rath Health Foundation could be described - depending on what you've read elsewhere - as anything from ironic to utterly sick. If reports of his actions in Africa are accurate then "profit before life" would be a fitting mission statement. Although I should probably add here that his foundation is reported to have distributed dietary supplements for free, not to make a profit, and this statement appears prominently on drrathvitamins.com:
All profits from the sales of our natural health programs go to the Dr. Rath Foundation.
This Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to research and education in natural health worldwide.

The scale and complexity of this operation is staggering - to accuse regulated medicine of deliberately murdering countless patients, to gather 'proof' that World War II was started by a pharmaceutical company, to warn us that the 'oil and drug cartel' ruling the USA and France are planning a nuclear war (either before November 4th 2008 or October 2007, depending on the website) or that subjecting dietary supplements to "unreasonable and arbitrary risk/benefit assessments" is a danger to democracy - all of this is an impressively wide range of goals. There have been other organisations in history who adopted a similar approach and they've rarely changed the world for the better.

All the websites I looked at were well designed and had their own, individual style. Clearly, a great deal of effort has gone into widening the foundation's online presence; buying appropriate domain names, choosing the right message, the right pictures and layout, adding content from other sites in a different format etc. There are campaigns to appeal to various different groups of concerned citizens. Decisions have clearly been made about whether the links between sites should be obvious or hidden. For example, Profit Over Life has a link to the Avenue to Life funding appeal whereas visitors starting at the Avenue to Life site would only know that 'Dr Rath Health Programs' have bought a tree. There are also significant differences between different language versions of the same sites. For example, the foundation's German site doesn't seem to mention the 'award', or at least not as prominently as the English version.

Opponents of Matthias Rath could view this creeping network of semi-independent campaigns website as a cross between a hydra and Voldemort's horcruxes. Should it come to the point where legal action is taken against Matthias Rath, dismantling this massive operation could be an impossible task. If the man is removed but others pledge to carry on work in his name... this is how new religions form.

Before I get too carried away with Da Vinci Code style international plots, I have a small legal concern too. The Avenue to Life site is calling for donations from English speakers without providing information about the project in English. The project is a memorial - and it's excellent that a memorial is being built to those who helped escaped prisoners from Auschwitz - but it will also be a working hospice. Before they collect more donations for the project, they should make it clear - in all relevant langauges - how the hospice will be run, who will pay for the staff and equipment, whether treatment will be provided for free, and who will provide the medication required by the terminally ill residents.

Matthias Rath: An online self-portrait

2008-09-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

Matthias Rath has been in the news this weekend after ending a long-running legal dispute against the Guardian and columnist Ben Goldacre. Having read quite a lot of what other people say about him, I thought I'd take a look at what he says about himself. The results were something of an eye-opener.

The first part of this post sets out the route I took through the various websites, with several illustrative extracts. The second part (probably a separate post, this is turning out to be very long indeed) explains why parts of this made me slightly uneasy, to say the least. I've tried, as far as possible, to stick to facts and direct quotes, though it's been extremely tempting to jump to conclusions along the way.

The trail:

A large banner on the Dr Rath Health Foundation website reads:

Recipients of the "Relay of Life" from the Auschwitz Survivors

This sounds like an excellent achievement and one worth finding out about. The page this links to explains how a group of more than 30 survivors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps proposed their own constitution for Europe at a ceremony in Auschwitz in November 2007. here are some extracts from the constitution (full document here):

Today, the building of a New Europe occurs at a time when, we, the „witnesses of time” are still giving our testimony as to the consequences of the disregard for human lives and the needs of people. Our lives were shaped at the time when human life did not have any value and the slave was needed only for his labor. The absolute owners of a human being were not so much SS-men but the robots of money and power from IG Farben Auschwitz.
[...]
The most fundamental human rights are the rights to health and life. These rights are not only threatened by military conflicts, but also by corporate interests and their increasing attempts to exploit the human body and knowledge of it as their exclusive property and source of profits.
WE THEREFORE PROCLAIM AS INALIENABLE RIGHTS FOR EVERY EUROPEAN:
THE RIGHT TO HEALTH
Our health and our bodies are the most valuable goods we have. They must not be exploited as a marketplace for patented drugs or any other form of commercialization. The expansion of diseases as markets for drugs is unconstitutional. Any healthcare system based on these principles and promoting them should be outlawed.
[...]
THE RIGHT TO NATURAL FOOD
The genetic information of all plants and the food that has been growing in our fields and gardens for millennia belongs to all mankind. Manipulation and alteration of the genetic code of plants with the goal of patenting them and creating global market monopolies bears the danger that our food supplies are controlled by corporate interests. As with health and life, the monopolization of food leads to the control of entire societies.
SUCH ACTIVITY IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL
The reason why these fundamental human rights are not yet universally accepted and applied is the principle of patenting. Patents are the economic instrument of inflating returns on investments for entire industries including those industries that directly affect human health and life.

The "Auschwitz Survivors" (as capitalised on the original banner) presenting their ideas for an EU constitution sounds like interesting and important news but I don't remember hearing much about this at the time. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. The award sounds impressive though, and the recipient clearly considers it worth shouting about. Strangely enough, a Google search has yielded no information on other individuals or organisations to have been given this award, as both hits lead back to this website.

The Dr Rath Health Foundation wasn't just marked out for a special mention at this conference, they took a very active part in it:

The conference was jointly organized by the Dr. Rath Health Foundation a long time critic of the pharmaceutical business with disease. For their work in the service of humanity this organization also received the “Relay of Life” from the survivors of Auschwitz, with the symbolic request to carry the remembrance of Auschwitz into the future.

In his speech Dr. Rath stated that the same corporate interest groups, namely the oil and drug cartel that already prepared WWII, are now openly discussing WWIII – including nuclear holocaust. “After the exposure at this conference these plans can no longer be executed.”

At the bottom, we are invited to go to www.relay-of-life.org for more information. At first I was surprised to find exactly the same text, just with the well-known photograph of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gates of Auschwitz above it. However, this was easily explained by the copyright notice: "© 2008 Dr. Rath Health Foundation". On other pages we can find Matthias Rath's speech, photos of the event, and a speech by Helena Wisla, President of the Auschwitz Hospice Foundation (probably about the constitution, although it's in Polish, with no English transcript).

Hospice? There's a link to that too. Blast, it's all in Polish.

Another google search turns up the website Avenue to Life:

A new website offering you the unique opportunity to participate in a worldwide project to help preserve the memories of the people who survived the WWII concentration camp at Auschwitz. By filling in the registration form on this page, and donating to the Auschwitz hospice fund, you can learn about history directly from those who experienced it and, in so doing, help carry their ‘relay of memory and life’.

The idea seems to be that you donate money to help build the memorial / hospice and a picture of a tree with your name under joins the others at the top of the screen. One of the six so far is Dr Rath Health Programs. That's nice of them. In fact, back on the hospice site we can learn (with the help of a Polish - English dictionary and a rudimentary knowledge of the grammar) that the Dr Rath Health Foundation are the third on the list of "Honorary memorial builders", right after the Italian and Japanese governments. Impressive stuff, and clear evidence that they deserve that "award".

For people who prefer to find out more before buying a virtual tree, there's handy links scattered around the site... all of which take you back to that page in Polish. It's actually not that bad though, as there's also a page in German, and - in common with all potential donors from the UK - that's a language I speak fluently. Here's my translation of the first few paragraphs (originals underneath, criticism from other German speakers more than welcome):

For half a century, the former prisoners of the concentration camp at Auschwitz have attested to the good which was born in the shadow and in the neighbourhood of the gas chamber. This has been achieved through every imaginable type of documentation - in the form of books, press articles, memorial plaques, and documentary and other films, but also through annual festivals, radio and TV broadcasts, and so on.

However, in the opinion of the former prisoners, all these tokens have not been capable of remembering the names of all those who provided life-saving, spontaneous help throughout the whole 5 years of the Auschwitz concentration camp's existence.

After taking off the prisoner uniform and returning to freedom, the former prisoners of Auschwitz still felt indebted to the inhabitants of the town of Auschwitz and the surrounding area because these very people had contributed to the fact that so many human lives were saved.

[...] In order to thank the inhabitants of the town of Auschwitz and the surrounding area who helped the prisoners of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, an initiative was started to build a memorial to them

Ein halbes Jahrhundert lang haben die ehemaligen KL Auschwitz- Häftlinge ein Zeugnis vom Guten abgelegt, das im Schatten und in der Nachbarschaft der Gaskammer geboren ist. Das geschah durch jede erdenkliche Art von Dokumentation - in Form von Büchern, Presseartikeln, Gedenktafeln und Dokumentar- und Spielfilmen, aber auch durch Jahrestagfeierlichkeiten, Radio- und Fernsehsendungen, usw.

In der Meinung der ehemaligen Häftlinge jedoch waren alle diese Zeichen nicht imstande, an alle Namen derjenigen zu erinnern, die lebensrettend spontane Hilfe geleistet haben, durch die ganzen 5 Jahre des Bestehens des KL Auschwitz.

Nach dem Ausziehen des Sträflingsanzugs und nach der Rückkehr zur Freiheit fühlten sich die ehemaligen KL Auschwitz – Häftlinge immer noch als Schuldner der Bewohner der Stadt Oświęcim und der umliegenden Ortschaften, weil eben diese dazu beigetragen haben, dass viele menschliche Leben gerettet wurden.

[...] Um der Einwohner der Stadt Oświęcim und der Einwohner der umliegenden Ortschaften, die den Häftlingen der KL Auschwitz und Birkenau geholfen haben zu gedenken, entstand eine Initiative, ihnen ein Denkmal zu errichten.

It goes on the describe the founding of the Memorial Hospice Foundation by the well-known Polish actor August Kowalczyk, who was brought to the camp in November 1940, escaped during an uprising in 1942, and survied due to the help of local residents. His tremendous efforts to maintain a dialogue between Germany and Holocaust survivors and to keep the memory of the events alive are well documented, (here, for example).

Further down the page we can see an artist's impression of the finished hospice, photographs of the building work so far, and a breakdown of the funding needed to complete the work. It explains that using a hospice as a memorial is a particularly potent symbol, being a place where "those who are ill and suffering can be helped in the last phase of their illness". The project had the support of Pope John Paul II and the foundation stone was laid by Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski. Unfortunately, the project seems to have run into serious financial difficulties.

I'll try to get further paragraphs translated over the next few days but there are two other avenues to explore first, and very interesting avenues they are too. First of all, there's another official-looking hit for the EU constitution proposal. The address is www.eu-referendum.org, very impressive, and it's the site of the "European Referendum Initiative". There are seven language options on the front page. It's stated aim is for every citizen:

to have the right to vote in a referendum whenever significant changes to laws affecting them are made at either national or European level. In particular, we believe that all citizens should immediately be given the opportunity to vote in referendums on the Lisbon Treaty.

The petition from the "Auschwitz Survivors" has a prominent position here so this could be evidence that I'm just being pig ignorant when it comes to the big splash the conference must have caused. I wonder who wrote the website though... "© 2008 Dr. Rath Health Foundation". Hmmmm.

Here's an extract from the blurb about their other big campaign, "A Referendum for Natural Remedies":

Draconian laws, intended to ban information on many natural health remedies and their uses, are increasingly being introduced throughout Europe under the guise of the "protection of public health." This is being done despite the fact that millions of people die every year from chronic diseases such as heart attacks, strokes and cancer and that thousands of clinical and scientific studies already show natural remedies (including vitamin therapies) can prevent the occurrence of these diseases.

.
One more chance to break out of this maze of circular links. On the Avenue to Life site, one of the very few links takes you to www.profit-over-life.org. This is an online academy, no less, containing "The Authentic Records from the Nuremberg Tribunal against the Oil and Drug Cartel", by which they mean the trial against pharmaceutical company IG Farben (maybe I should be more wary of adding wikipedia links, after reading what Matthias Rath thinks about them. On the other hand, as this entry references his own foundation's website it's probably more reliable than the rest). As this site explains, the evil activities of the "oil and drug cartel" is one of Matthias Rath's favourite topics and this site would certainly seem to confirm his view. Take this page, for example:

The US prosecution during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals made clear that neither the rise of the Nazis, nor WWII nor the holocaust would have been possible without the financial and logistical support of IG Farben.

Today, more than six decades since the end of WWII, mankind has yet to solve one of the greatest riddles: How come that none of the international organizations that set out to preserve the memory of this war and the holocaust has not pointed their fingers at these historic facts?

Until today these organizations chose neither to publish the important proceedings of the decisive Nuremberg trial against IG Farben nor the tens of thousands of pages of trial evidence connecting this chemical/pharmaceutical cartel to these crimes against humanity.
[...]
The purpose of this website is to call on the people of the world to go one step further and expose the economic interests that helped to finance the holocaust, those forces that used the hatred against the Jewish people and other ethnic groups as a tool for the psychological mobilization for a war of conquest and those groups that benefited economically from the holocaust. Among those economic interests one name stands out above all: the chemical cartel IG Farben.

There is a burning reason why the exposure of IG Farben Industries as the economic interests behind WWII is important now.

Today, in October 2007, the world may only be weeks away from another World War deliberately launched by the very same interest groups that brought the Nazis to power and sought to control the world then – the chemical/petrochemical/pharmaceutical investment business.

70 years after the political puppets of the chemical investment business launched World War II, their stakeholders today – namely George Bush (USA) and Nicholas Sarkozy (France) – are openly preparing a nuclear attack against Iran with the deliberate risk of throwing the world into a nuclear abyss.

Perhaps this other online archive is just a figment of my imagination then, anything seems possible now, but there's a more urgent question on my mind. In the face of such dangerous, well connected and clearly insane enemies, who would be brave enough to fund such a heroic archive of earth-shattering truths?

This online archive has been made possible by the Dr. Rath Health Foundation, a non-profit organization.

Not suprisingly, "Profit Over Life" links directly back to both "Avenue to Life" and "Relay of Life". How long, I'm beginning to wonder, before a certain foundation tries to claim "Life" as a trademark? Only joking, in fact I'm just trying to cover up the intense awe inspired in me by this one man: whether you want to explore both the horror and the humanity during the Holocaust, or destroy the democratic deficit within the EU or uncover the real reason behind the impending (or slightly overdue) nuclear world war, all roads inevitably lead to Rath.

Britain’s culture must be quarantined

2008-07-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

The evidence is now undeniable; British culture is at death’s door and all it will take to kill it off is one more immigrant, or one fewer grocer using pounds and ounces, or one more sighting of that spine-chilling omen Political Correctness.

Skeptics may shake their heads but it’s true. Did you know that every time a multi-racial partnership is shown on the BBC, five listed building collapse without warning? Or that just one schoolchild learning beginner’s Mandarin causes 10,000 copies of Oliver Twist to spontaneously combust? Or - and here’s the thing ‘New’ Labour are trying to keep under their cloth caps - that if the number of history lessons in which Winston Churchill is mentioned drops below 40%, garlic sausage will become the only legal breakfast foodstuff?

Some may claim that it’s the responsibility of the native population to keep a country’s culture alive. We say RUBBISH! What honest hard-working Brit has time to plough their way through Wuthering Heights when they could be watching South Park? Or has time to cook roast beef and boiled sprouts when they can send out for a curry? Every week, more taxpayers’ money is spent on left-wing intellectual projects like restoring a mouldy old stately home or poking about in yet another viking burial. This is money which should be spent on keeping other cultures OUT of Britain. Only by cutting ourselves off completely will we native Brits keep our heritage from dying out.

Don’t forget: every time a Brussels Eurocrat issues a new directive, Judi Dench dies. FACT.

Bravery in Modern Britain

2008-06-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

Reading a November 2007 edition of the Spectator today (the staff kitchen is worse than any dentist's waiting room for up-to-date reading material), I learned that Melanie Phillips, writer and blogger for the Spectator, is "one of Britain's best and bravest columnists".

Now, for a magazine which is constantly spitting feathers over the decline of traditional virtues, it's a bit rich of the 'tater to downgrade bravery to such a extent. Has she fought any dragons recently? Carried wounded comrades across no man's land? Led a rebellion against the Galactic Empire armed with just a stick and some sound effects? No. She writes stuff.

Of course, the act of writing can be very brave indeed under the right circumstances. There's still a high percentage of the world's surface upon which writing critically about the government can have very nasty results. Translating the Bible into the local language has often required a great deal of courage and fortitude (other good books-for-boys words). But when a columnist in a country with a free press is described as 'brave', it usually means that they're a bile-spouting hate-monger.

There's a persistent idea that people who say things which could cause offence are bravely standing up to political correctness and other imaginary monsters under their beds. It seems to be assumed that the silent majority are afraid to say what they really think, that the truth is being stifled for fear of... well, that bit's rarely specified. Now for my part, I try to avoid insulting people because it's not something I want to do. The fact that so many British people don't blame immigrants for all of their problems isn't because they're scared, but because that's not how they view the situation.

Having said that, if you do believe in a all-powerful Muslim conspiracy poised to destroy Western society, you might consider yourself brave for speaking out against them. This is the same kind of bravery shown by James I in his fight against witches or the noble Christian soldiers who fought to rid medieval cities of dangerous Jews. To people outside of the delusion, you're just picking on a much smaller group, who don't have the same capacity to fight back. And there's really nothing brave about bullying.

Of course, I'm not singling Melanie Phillips out for special criticism. There are plenty of people doing that already. But here's her blog, for the sake of completeness: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/

Violetta Crisis

On not throwing poo in the Twitter zoo

Suggested supplementary training for ticket-inspection staff

Stefan Collini on University Funding Reforms

Thanks, homeopaths!

Nothing's that amazing so no, we're not ecstatic.

A long-overdue follow-up

Cake!

Anecdotal lack of evidence

Stop blowing holes in your plots

Letting everyone eat cake

What I would like to hear in a speech on (im)migration

One of the benefits of disorganisation...

Daft as a brush, but just as useful

Taking the peace (just a little)

We Were Promised Nanobots

Feed the troll (to the goats)

First-hand account of the Femail sausage-factory

For your interest and entertainment...

My computer is a plant.

Tuition fees: If access to education is the main issue, today's vote is irrelevant.

Cold Calls for a Warmer Britain

I'd have run out of breath anyway.

Amazingly, not one call interrupted the writing of this post.

Links

Bad MOSI, No Biscuit.

More units of annoyance than there are grains of sand

In which I kiss goodbye to being an agony (inflicting) aunt...

...in which I fail to get a room

Victims of the Frightwash

Speech? Criticism? Er... oh look, a butterfly!

Personal Skeptical Mission Statement

This message will not self-destruct: a couple of responses

This message will not self-destruct

If an infinite number of historians...

Recommended 'reading'

Soapocalypse.

The French Veil Ban, and other well-meaning interventions

Resolution for Britain #1 - Positive Patriotism

Resolutions for Britain

I have to agree with this one

Not your place to say

Cameron wants a return to narrative history in schools. I don't.

Guess the paper

The original's always the best.

Once you start looking you can find it everywhere

"simple, unpolitical children's stories"

(White) Christmas Lies

The enemy of your enemy still hates your guts

Picture "knights 4" from stock.xchng.

Some rebranding needed

Picture "My cat and fish 1" from stock.xchng

In Science We Trust: without free public access to the data, belief is all we have.

Republicans create their own worst case scenario of positive discrimination

Oh, the humanities!

Links

Matthias Rath's websites: Concerns

Update

Matthias Rath: An online self-portrait

The trail:

Other links

Britain’s culture must be quarantined

Bravery in Modern Britain