More units of annoyance than there are grains of sand

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...

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

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

(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!

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

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

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?