Andrew Hickey

We discussed this on the podcast, but I thought I should do the writing about it anyway, since it was half-done and I’m short on time. I mentioned on Twitter the other day that a problem I have with the Slate Star Codex is that some of his posts tend to go something like: “Here’s a controversial issue. Let’s assume that [my anecdotal experience related directly or tangentially to this issue] can be generalised. Now let’s make a mathematical model of that, and see what conclusions we can draw!” (this is exacerbated by having been told that this guy was something really special, inflated expectations that led to disappointment when he turned out just to be an okay-ish blogger, albeit one of a kind I don’t read a lot of¹)

Sidebar: It occurs also that this is a problem I have with a lot of psychology experiments – things like Chris Dillow describes here. Beyond problems like the fact that the subjects of these experiments are more likely to be uni students because those are the people kicking around willing to do stuff for a pittance (or sweets, or whatever) I always wonder how well the results of these experiments can be generalised. I’m sure they’re all very well-conducted, and many of them are doubtless interesting, important and other good stuff like that,but how many of them can actually be taken to demonstrate stuff in the real world².

Mr Alexander does some very interesting things: this sounds tremendous, and reminds me of “megagames” that comrades have described to me. Then I read this, which is one of the most that kind of thing things I can imagine. As Comrade Josef pointed out to me, this comment does a decent job breaking apart some of the issues with that whole thing (I hadn’t been reading the comments, because I had been specifically warned to not read the comments on this site in particular but this one is worthwhile).

There might be some element of essential difference to it, but while I, personally, have a degree of sympathy for the “can’t we boil all this down to some equations” mindset, I also have a slightly more base-level suspicion that “it’s probably more complicated than that” is a dictum worth applying in most circumstances. Moreover, sympathy for the mindset doesn’t amount to actually liking or subscribing to it, or even understanding exactly how you could work your way around to so doing. If your mind requires, for the sake of your sanity, consistent or meta-consistent behaviours in a specific and rigid framework (as the piece implies is the case for Mr Alexander), I think that might be a cause for concern in itself, obvious people-aren’t-robots points aside.

Plus, it all tends in a certain direction, which is the bored-consequentialist-CTO “to which charity should I donate my money in order to maximise positive effects” kinda thing. I can understand it to limited extent, but it does also seem like they’re attempting to maximise their ethical efficiency without actually doing anything beyond arguing on the internet and giving away some of their colossal stacks of cash³. Josef and I thought the end-point of this stuff would be a system of codifying ethics and a web startup where you upload a data structure defined in JSON which describes your conundrum and responds with the charity you should pick and with one click, sets up a direct-debit, an Uber-for-solving-all-mankind’s-problems. And thence, the Basilisk, somehow. Probably. It’s pretty much the logical endpoint of all that kind of Less Wrong thought, anyway.

Evolution with Foresight: an oxymoron, right? Evolution has no foresight. Natural selection only promotes what works in the moment. If a particular mutation doubles your reproductive rate, you will fill the world with thy numbers; the process doesn’t understand too much of a good thing, doesn’t care if greater fecundity today means overpopulation, starvation, and extinction tomorrow. All it cares about is whether the latest edit gives you an edge right now. Natural selection is the very incarnation of instant gratification (which, I’ve always thought, explains a great deal about human stupidity.)

But what if we could build foresight into the system? What if we could build a gene for— I dunno, say reduced fertility, give the biosphere a break— and let it loose in the human population? Obviously it would go extinct; people with that gene would breed less, the rest of us would breed more, and a few generations down the road you’d be right back where you started.

But what if— what if— you could force that gene onto the next generation, even if it reduced fitness in the classic sense? What if you could build code that would be beneficial over the long term, and ensure its spread even if it costs you in the moment? What if we could gift evolution with foresight?

Enter the Gene Drive, CRISPR/Cas9 for short. It’s a clever little machine built of enzymes and RNAs, and you can attach it to pretty much any gene you like. When a gamete from your transgenic organism hooks up with one from a baseline, CrisperCas detects the presence of the competing wild allele, cuts it out of the opposite strand, and splices your engineered code into the gap. It overwrites wild genes with engineered ones, turns heterozygous pairings homozygous. You can see how this would stack the odds.

And introducing engineered, virtually-unkillable genes into wild ecosystems to do our bidding?

What could possibly go wrong?

CrisperCas flew right under my radar when Esvelt et al took it on tour last summer (I was too distracted birthing Echopraxia). Fortunately this month’s piece in h+ got me up to speed, providing links to some of those earlier articles (also here and here). To do them credit, CrisperCas’s advocates admit that their technology has the potential to “alter ecosystems … so we’ll have to be very careful not to cause damage accidentally”. If that’s not enough assurance for you, Oye et al have also put out a piece in Science admitting that “Scientists have minimal experience engineering biological systems for evolutionary robustness”, and urging us all to get our ducks in a row before we start fiddling with their genes at the population level. They advocate extensive public consultation, careful risk management, and scrupulous regulation to make sure that nothing goes wrong. They introduce something called a “reverse drive”, which can be called upon when something inevitably does. (Reverse drives seem to be basically another iteration of the gene drive, configured to undo what the last one wrought. I’m thinking a better name might be “The Little Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly Drive.”)

As Esvelt and his buddies point out, it would take centuries to engineer human populations this way; we large mammals are relatively slow breeders. They’re much more excited about inflicting the tech on other pest species; disease-carrying mosquitoes, for example, or crop-eating beetles whose resistance to the usual pesticides might be undone by gene drives. But I’m looking even further down: down past the insects, the protists, even the bacteria. I’m remembering that line from Dawkins— life is information, shaped by natural selection— and my recurrent musings (admittedly less cutting-edge now than they once were) that life can be built from ones and zeroes as easily as from carbon and nitrogen. Hell, if you buy into digital physics, that’s all any of us are anyway.

Natural selection with foresight. It could change the world even up here, albeit slowly. Think of what it could accomplish in your smart watch.

I wonder if this has anything to do with how the Maelstrom gets started…

My memory of general election campaigns goes back to February 1974, but the 2015 campaign will be a first.

It will be the first election the Liberal Party or the Liberal Democrats have fought with an unpopular leader.

Jeremy Thorpe, David Steel, Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy were all wildly popular with the voters, even if it was sometimes possible to wonder why.

The one leader who was not popular with the public, Ming Campbell, was defenestrated before he could fight an election

In 2010 Nick Clegg was popular, even if the Cleggmania engendered by the first televised leaders' debate had largely dissipated by the time polling day came.

But in 2015 Nick Clegg is not popular. the latest Ipsos MORI poll to ask about such things found that his approval rating was a lowly -36.

All of which means that Nick Barlow is probably right when he says we should not expect the Liberal Democrats' poll ratings to go up during the election campaign just because they always have.

Perhaps wisely,  the optimists in the party are looking to a strong incumbency factor for our sitting MPs as the key to our defying the national opinion polls, and some constituency polls do give them a rational basis for their optimism.

The Lib Dems nearly always do better than their poll ratings said before a general election.

As David Boyle wrote in a recent post, anticipating that this will also be the case in 2015. (It’s not like David’s the first person to say that, and he likely won’t be the last, but he happened to say it on the day I felt like writing about the subject.)

It’s become a truism, often spoken by worried Liberal Democrat activists as a morale-booster to lift the hopes and the spirits as they see another set of polls recording the party in single figures and duelling for fourth place with the Greens. The election campaign will be starting soon, they eagerly say, and our poll rating always improves during the election campaign.

Unlike most political truisms, this one actually happens to be broadly true. If you look at the records of polling from 1970 onwards that are kept on UK Polling Report, there’s an uptick in Liberal/Alliance/Liberal Democrat voting intention in the last part of every graph, so it is true that Liberal Democrats have generally done better than the pre-election campaign polls suggest they would. And yes, I’m being careful to use the past tense there.

Two things worth remembering here:

Past trends do not indicate future performance

Trends in politics and other fields always continue applying right up until they don’t

At this point, I don’t know if the campaign will see a rise in Liberal Democrat support as happened in other general election campaigns, but given that there’s one major difference between this and those other campaigns, I think it’s misguided to just assume it will happen regardless.

(I did have a look to see if I could find any academic studies on this, but couldn’t find any – please point me in the direction of any you know of)

They key difference, of course, is that the Liberal Democrats have been in government for the last five years, something that wasn’t true at the time of any of the previous surges. Leaving aside issues of ‘party of protest’ votes, what this means is that the Liberal Democrats have been much more prominent in the media over the last five years than they have during previous Parliaments. Liberal Democrat members of the Cabinet and ministers are regularly in the news, and the party as a whole is getting much more coverage outside of election time than it ever has before. In short, voters are much more likely now to have much more information about the Liberal Democrats than they ever had before.

One of these days I’m going to do a longer post explaining Zaller’s Receive-Accept-Sample model of public opinion, but for now it’s important just to note that one of the important determinants of how people vote is the amount of information they have about a party. In previous elections, most voters came into the election campaign knowing relatively little about the Liberal Democrats because the party’s dearth of mainstream media coverage didn’t give them the opportunity to receive much information about the party. So, when election time came around and the media started featuring Liberal Democrats more at a time when people’s awareness of political issues was heightened, it understandably affected their voting behaviour. Coupled with an ability to run a strong campaign (one of the few campaigns where this effect didn’t seem to happen was 1987, when the Alliance campaign was a mess), this meant that when voters made their decision, they had a number of positive thoughts about the Liberal Democrats.

The situation this year is completely different as time in government means the Liberal Democrats are no longer an unknown and fresh party to voters. While the party will obviously get good amounts of coverage in the election campaign, this will not be received by voters in the same way it was before as they now already have a bank of opinions about the party to weigh any new considerations against. People seeing Nick Clegg aren’t seeing the effectively new person voters saw in 2010, they’re seeing the man who’s been Deputy Prime Minister and regularly on the news for the last five years with all the connotations that brings. In previous elections, voters were open to receiving campaign messages from the Liberal Democrats because they didn’t have many pre-existing views about the party, but now they do, and we don’t know how those will affect voters’ decisions.

The idea that voters in 2015 are going to react the same way to exposure to Liberal Democrats that voters in previous elections did completely misses out that the party is in a fundamentally different position going in to this election than it was in any of the previous ones where the ‘Liberal surge’ occurred. Expecting things to happen just as they did before when fundamental conditions have changed is nothing more than wishful thinking.

   “Did you ever discover or hear tell of the atomic theory?” the sergeant inquired.
   “No,” I answered.
   He leaned his mouth confidentially over to my ear. “Would it surprise you to be told,” he said darkly, “that the atomic theory is at work in this parish?”
   “It would indeed.”
   “It is doing untold destruction,” he continued, “the half of the people are suffering from it; it is worse than the smallpox.”
   He walked on, looking worried and preoccupied, as if what he was examining in his head was unpleasant in a very intricate way.
   “The atomic theory,” I sallied, “is a thing that is not clear to me at all.”
   “Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the atomic theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”
   “It would surprise me unconditionally,” I said.
   “Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the hills and into the deep ditches when the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than halfway now.”
   “Halfway to where?”
   “Halfway to being a bicycle himself,” said the sergeant.
   “Your talk,” I said, “is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
   “Did you never study atomics when you were a lad?” asked the sergeant, giving me a look of great inquiry and surprise.
   “No,” I answered.
   “That is a very serious defalcation,” he said, “but all the same I will tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small particles of itself, and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?”
   “Yes.”
   “They are lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jig on top of a tombstone.”
   “Now take a sheep,” the sergeant said. “What is a sheep, only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?”
   “That would be bound to make the beast dizzy,” I observed, “especially if the whirling was going on inside the head as well.”
   The sergeant gave me a look which I am sure he himself would describe as one of non-possum and noli-me-tangere.
   “That remark is what may well be called buncombe,” he said sharply, “because the nerve strings and the sheep’s head itself are whirling into the same bargain, and you can cancel out one whirl against the other, and there you are—like simplifying a division sum when you have fives above and below the bar.”
   “To say the truth, I did not think of that,” I said.
   “Atomics is a very intricate theorem and can be worked out with algebra, but you would want to take it by degrees, because you might spend the whole night proving a bit of it with rulers and cosines and similar other instruments and then at the windup not believe what you had proved at all. If that happened, you would have to go back over it till you got a place where you could believe your own facts and figures and then go on again from that particular place till you had the whole thing properly believed and not have bits of it half-believed or a doubt in your head hurting you like when you lose the stud of your shirt in bed.”
   “Very true,” I said.
   “Consecutively and consequentially,” he continued, “you can safely infer that you are made of atoms yourself and so is your fob pocket and the tail of your shirt and the instrument you use for taking the leavings out of the crook of your hollow tooth. Do you happen to know what takes place when you strike a bar of iron with a good coal hammer or with a blunt instrument?”
   “What?”
   “When the wallop falls, the atoms are bashed away down to the bottom of the bar and compressed and crowded there like eggs under a good clucker. After a while in the course of time they swim around and get back at last to where they were. But if you keep hitting the bar long enough and hard enough they do not get a chance to do this, and what happens then?”
   “That is a hard question.”
   “Ask a blacksmith for the true answer and he will tell you that the bar will dissipate itself away by degrees if you persevere with the hard wallops. Some of the atoms of the bar will go into the hammer, and the other half into the table or the stone or the particular article that is underneath the bottom of the bar.”
   “That is well-known,” I agreed.
   “The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them, and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.”
   I let go a gasp of astonishment that made a sound in the air like a bad puncture.
   “And you would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half human, almost half man, half partaking of humanity.”
   “Are you certain about the humanity of the bicycle?” I inquired of him. “Is the atomic theory as dangerous as you say?”
   “It is between twice and three times as dangerous as it might be,” he replied gloomily. “Early in the morning I often think it is four times, and what is more, if you lived here for a few days and gave full play to your observation and inspection, you would know how certain the sureness of certainty is.”
   “Gilhaney did not look like a bicycle,” I said. “He had no back wheel on him, and I did not think he had a front wheel either, although I did not give much attention to his front.”
   The sergeant looked at me with some commiseration. “You cannot expect him to grow handlebars out of his neck, but I have seen him do more indescribable things than that. Did you ever notice the queer behavior of bicycles in these parts?”
   “I am not long in this district.”
   “Then watch the bicycles if you think it is pleasant to be surprised continuously,” he said. “When a man lets things go so far that he is half or more than half a bicycle, you will not see so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at curbstones. Of course there are other things connected with ladies and ladies’ bicycles that I will mention to you separately some time. But the man-charged bicycle is a phenomenon of great charm and intensity and a very dangerous article.”
   At this point a man with long coattails spread behind him approached quickly on a bicycle, coasting benignly down the road past us from the hill ahead. I watched him with the eye of six eagles, trying to find out which was carrying the other and whether it was really a man with a bicycle on his shoulders. I did not seem to see anything, however, that was memorable or remarkable.
The sergeant was looking into his black notebook.
   “That was O’Feersa,” he said at last. “His figure is only twenty-three percent.”
   “He is twenty-three percent bicycle?”
   “Yes.”
   “Does that mean that his bicycle is also twenty-three percent O’Feersa?”
   “It does.”
   “How much is Gilhaney?”
   “Forty-eight.”
   “Then O’Feersa is much lower.”
   “That is due to the lucky fact that there are three similar brothers in the house and that they are too poor to have a separate bicycle apiece. Some people never know how fortunate they are when they are poorer than each other. Six years ago one of the three O’Feersas won a prize of ten pounds in John Bull. When I got the wind of this tiding, I knew I would have to take steps unless there was to be two new bicycles in the family. Luckily I knew the postman very well. The postman! Great holy suffering indiarubber bowls of brown stirabout!” The recollection of the postman seemed to give the sergeant a pretext for unlimited amusement and cause for intricate gesturing with his red hands.
   “The postman?” I said.
   “Seventy-one percent,” he said quietly.
   “Great Scot!”
   “A round of thirty-eight miles on the bicycle every single day for forty years, hail, rain or snowballs. There is very little hope of ever getting his number down below fifty again.”
   “You bribed him?”
   “Certainly. With two of the little straps you put around the hubs of bicycles to keep them spick.”
   “And what way do these people’s bicycles behave?”
   “These people’s bicycles?”
   “I mean these bicycles’ people or whatever is the proper name for them—the ones that have two wheels under them and a handlebars.”
   “The behavior of a bicycle that has a high content of humanity,” he said, “is very cunning and entirely remarkable. You never see them moving by themselves, but you meet them in the least accountable places unexpectedly. Did you never see a bicycle leaning against the dresser of a warm kitchen when it is pouring outside?”
   “I did.”
   “Not very far away from the fire?”
   “Yes.”
   “Near enough to the family to hear the conversation?”
   “Yes.”
   “Not a thousand miles from where they keep the eatables?”
   “I did not notice that. You do not mean to say that these bicycles eat food?”
   “They were never seen doing it—nobody ever caught them with a mouthful of steak. All I know is that the food disappears.”
   “What!”
   “It is not the first time I have noticed crumbs at the front wheels of some of these gentlemen.”
   “All this is a great blow to me,” I said. “How would you know a man has a lot of bicycle in his veins?”
   “If his number is over fifty, you can tell it unmistakable from his walk. He will walk smartly always and never sit down, and he will lean against the wall with his elbow out and stay like that all night in his kitchen instead of going to bed. If he walks too slowly or stops in the middle of the road, he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted and set in motion again by some extraneous party. This is the unfortunate state that the postman has cycled himself into, and I do not think he will ever cycle himself out of it.”
   “I do not think I will ever ride a bicycle,” I said.

You know the drill. DNA holds the source code; RNA carries it to the ribosomes; ribosomes build stuff for the cell. Of course, the details of cellular operation are a million times more intricate than this— some RNA acts not to courier code but to switch genes on and off, for example— but it’s this venerable three-step that puts the tinkertoys together.

Now. If a sufficiently unscrupulous RNA molecule had an agenda at odds with the wishes of Daddy DNA, it could do a fair bit of damage. Change an instruction or two while on the road, enlist some hitchhiking enzyme into provoking a frame-shift or a faux-point-mutation. The nucleus mails off an order for Game of Thrones and the ribosome receives one for Spongebob Squarepants.

The term is RNA editing and it occupies center stage in this recent paper on cephalopod genetics. RNA editing is generally a very rare event. This makes it all the more remarkable that Alon et al report over 57,000 recoding sites for the Longfin Inshore Squid— an order of magnitude higher than reported for any other species. Even cooller, all these hijacked codes seem to be involved in building the nervous system. (“Synaptic vesicle cycle”, “axon guidance”, “actin cytoskeleton”, and “Circadian rhythm” are all processes listed as massively rewritten downstream of the DNA.)

It’s right there in the title: The Majority of Transcripts in the Squid Nervous System are Extensively Recoded. As the authors point out, this necessitates a major rethink of the whole squidly evolutionary process. But there are applications beyond such obvious intrinsic biological interest.

If I was interested in rebuilding a cephalopod to my own ends— perhaps adding organic tasers, or extra eye-sockets repurposed as oceanographic sensors (imagine luciferin fluorescence as an indicator of dissolved O₂, which trigger photopigments in a modified retina, which in turn send that data back to a central nervous system via an extra optic nerve!)—

Well, let’s just say that a squid who comes pre-equipped with its own set of downstream editing enzymes, targeted to major CNS functions, might come in really handy.

(Coming up in Part 2: Selection-resistant genes. What could possibly go wrong?)

OK, I’m about to need to say some frankly critical things about the Rev. John Hagee, so let me start by saying something nice first. The pastor plays a mean saxophone:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hagee’s son, Matt, also has a fine voice. (I think he might be happier, and the world might be a better place, if he stepped away from the family business of anti-gay vitriol and “Bible prophecy” nuttery and headed off to Nashville or Branson to follow his musical dreams.)

Anyway, Hemant Mehta directs our attention to John Hagee’s recent appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network where, alas, he’s not playing the saxophone. Hagee is, rather, offering what he sees as the evidence that proves his belief in “Bible prophecy.”

Hagee, you see, is a “Bible prophecy scholar,” just like Tim LaHaye — a premillennial dispensationalist who regards the whole Bible as a series of predictions about the future and the End of Days.

On TBN, Hagee addresses “All the Prophecy Skeptics“:

This is for those of you who are riddled with skepticism about the accuracy of the inerrant Word of God. Only God could orchestrate this. This is a prophetic overlay that I’m about to give you. A prophetic overlay is something that is revealed in the Old Testament and becomes very obviously clear in the New Testament by an exact set of circumstances, but it involved another life centuries later.

Hagee believes the Bible is “inerrant” (excepting, of course, all that stuff in the Bible that says Jesus is the “Word of God”) and that it should be read “literally.” This “prophetic overlay” business is a way of getting around that. It’s his way of telling himself that he’s reading the Bible “literally” while he veers off into allegory.

He goes on to present a series of supposed parallels between the character of Joseph in Genesis (he of the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) and the character of Jesus in the Gospels. These parallels are strained, to say the least. As Hemant says, Hagee “sounds like he’s reading the (debunked) chain letter about the coincidences between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.”

But most of these alleged parallels don’t even rise to the level of coincidences. Hagee’s not wrong when he points out that both Joseph and Jesus had Jewish names, that both had fathers, and that both wore garments. But he is wrong to imagine that these things are worth pointing out.

To be fair, most of the writers of the New Testament also stretched and strained to find echos and allusions for Jesus in the Hebrew scriptures. They found — or invented — some rather creative and imaginative ways to make connections between Jesus and those scriptures. Sometimes that meant tweaking Jesus’ story a bit to better fit the scriptural allusion. Sometimes it meant imposing wholly new meanings on those passages of scripture.

Those New Testament writers – Matthew, Luke, Paul, the author of Hebrews – had a different agenda than Hagee. They weren’t trying to demonstrate the “accuracy” of biblical prophecy. They were making comparisons to teach their readers about Jesus. So unlike Hagee’s “prophetic overlay,” they didn’t just look for parallels, but for points of contrast. They tried to show how Jesus was like David, but also how Jesus was not like David.

John Hagee wants us to see Joseph as a “type” of Jesus — a prophetic precursor “revealed in the Old Testament,” the full meaning of which “becomes very obviously clear” in the prophetic fulfillment of Jesus Christ.

And that is horrifying.

The story of Joseph has been defanged and deformed by Sunday school storybooks and Broadway musicals, but it is not a happy story. Joseph is a predator, not a savior. He is, in this story, an evil, evil bastard.

You probably remember the bit with Joseph’s dreams foretelling seven years of plenty to be followed by seven years of famine, and how that allowed Joseph to store up food during the years of plenty to save the world from starvation during the years of famine. Yay, Joseph! Well done!

Except Joseph saved the world for a price — a very high price. He made the world an offer it could not refuse. Joseph took everything from everyone. He extorted all their money, all their property, and all their land. And when they had nothing left to extort from them, he enslaved them. He didn’t so much save the world, in other words, as he took it over.

Like most of Genesis, this is an origin story. It is the story of where tyrants come from. It is the story of Joseph inventing totalitarian rule:

So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. All the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe upon them; and the land became Pharaoh’s. As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other. …

It’s frightening, and probably blasphemous, for John Hagee to claim that Joseph’s tyrannical extortion matches the “exact set of circumstances” that the New Testament presents about Jesus Christ. When Jesus said “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he was not talking about making slaves from one end of the world to the other. He was talking about this:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Jesus called himself the embodiment of Jubilee. Joseph was the anti-Jubilee.

Even more appalling is the climactic final point in Hagee’s “prophetic overlay.” Joseph, he says, was released from prison “to stand by the side of the most powerful man on the Earth, which was Pharaoh.” That’s just like Jesus, Hagee continues, who was released from the “prison of death” and came “to stand at the right hand of the most powerful person in the universe, God Almighty.”

Hagee’s “prophetic overlay” of Joseph and Jesus thus ends by identifying God with Pharaoh. By presenting Joseph as a “type” of Jesus, he thereby winds up presenting Pharaoh as a “type” of God.

Oy. Not good.

This is particularly weird coming from a guy like John Hagee — a man who is obsessed with “Bible prophecy” and the book of Revelation. The ghost of Pharaoh haunts that book, from the beastly machine that Joseph first invented, to the liberating plagues of divine wrath sent to destroy the thrones of power.

Hagee’s weird little “prophetic overlay” about Joseph and Jesus thus highlights the way his “Bible prophecy” scheme turns the book of Revelation on its head. It portrays God as Pharaoh. It portrays Jesus as Joseph — “saving” the world by enslaving it with lethal coercion.

Like Tim LaHaye and the rest of the PMD “prophecy” crowd, Hagee doesn’t so much believe in a Second Coming as he does in a Second Chance. Like LaHaye, Hagee believes that Jesus got it wrong the first time around with all that proclaiming Jubilee and all that humbling himself unto death, loving your enemies, and all that regrettable inasmuch-as-you’ve-done-it-to-the-least-of-these business. So Hagee longs for a Second Coming in which Jesus returns to get his revenge, to destroy his enemies, ushering in the Millennium in a military coup.

This is how John Hagee’s “Bible prophecy” imagines the Second Coming of Jesus — as a replay of the story of Joseph. No thank you.

 

The extraordinary public attack on Tim Farron and his judgment by the Liberal Democrats' General Election Chair Paddy Ashdown was viewed with raised eyebrows by those who remembered his desperate attempts to pursue "The Project" with Tony Blair in 1997-8.

I wasn’t at Liberal Democrat Conference last weekend, because I had a much more relaxing and stress-relieving weekend away booked instead, but it seems that the Conference was used to make a major declaration: we’re now in Farron season. Yes, those who’ve been waiting for months, even years, to begin having a go at the MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale have been given official sanction to do so by Paddy Ashdown.

(And yes, in a week where the media’s been filled with the elder statesman of Top Gear being suspended for punching someone, it seems it’s still all right for former Marine commandos to threaten volunteers with violence if we say it’s only joking)

Farron season allows for threats on all fronts, so as well as being criticised for being too popular and too honest, he also finds ‘senior party insiders’ are briefing against him in the Times. Here he’s come up against the magician’s choice of politics, where whatever choice he’d made would be criticised on spurious grounds. Having weekly briefings as part of his Foreign Affairs brief apparently makes him ‘like Sarah Palin’, whereas if he didn’t have them he’d be attacked for being either uninformed or too arrogant to want them. In the same way, during the campaign he’ll either be criticised for ignoring his constituency and spending too much time helping others, or spending too much time worrying about his own majority while others are struggling.

It is interesting to see that despite the leadership’s claims that all is well and the party is heading towards inevitable Cleggite triumph at the election, whatever the polls say, there does seem to be a concerted attempt to amplify the Stop Farron messaging. It suggests to me that some people aren’t quite as confident about Clegg remaining leader after the election as he seems to be, and have realised that they need to be getting ready for the next fight. I suspect there are quite a few people currently in the leadership coterie who would be likely to not be so close to power if Tim Farron was in the role, but would remain there if someone else got the job, and they’re the sort of ‘senior party insiders’ who don’t get told to shut up and deliver leaflets instead of briefing the Times.

All in all, it seems to me that Tim Farron’s the one getting on with his job with the same candour he usually does it with, while others are skulking in the shadows, laying the ground for the fight after the election. It’s just another level of intrigue to add to an election campaign that’s turning into a giant policy-free soap.

Google proves, yet again, that their "Knowledge Graph" is so stupid that it will take the internet's word for anything.

Each July at the glorious Comic-Con International in San Diego, we present the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. And by that, I mean we give out two of them — one to a deceased writer of the past and one to someone who's still around and who can, we hope, show up to accept in person.

And each year, I solicit suggestions here of folks you think are deserving. Now, I should point out that we are not desperate for nominations. Last year alone, we received so many good ones that we could probably give out this trophy for nearly a decade, just drawing from that list. If you proposed someone in the past, you need not resubmit that name. Everyone who has been proposed in the past and has not won is reconsidered each year. My notes show me we've had around 200 people submitted for consideration since we started this. That breaks down to — well, let me do the math here…

Okay, got it. It's roughly 199 men and 1 woman. We recognize that for a long time, the industry was not exactly wide open for women writers. Few applied, fewer got in and there's not much we can do about that now. However, there have been very fine, important female writers of comics and if you want to think of names that our judges should consider, you might want to think in that direction. And then if you do have a name — male or female — that might not have been mentioned in the past, send it to me. Before you do though, read this…

1. This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer. Every year, a couple of folks nominate their favorite artist. Sometimes, they don't get that "writer" part and sometimes, they argue that their nominee qualifies because their favorite artist was in the field so long, he must have written an issue of something at some time so we can give him this trophy. No, no and no. A body of work as a comic book writer. Why is that so difficult to understand?
2. Bill Finger in his lifetime received almost no credit for his work and nowhere near a respectable share of the revenue it generated. This award is for a writer who has received insufficient reward for his or her splendid body of work. It can be insufficient in terms of recognition or insufficient in terms of legal tender or it can, of course, be both. But this is not just an award for writing good comic books.
3. And it's for writing comic books, not comic strips. We stretch that definition far enough to include MAD but that's about as far as we'll stretch it.
4. To date, this award has gone to Arnold Drake, Alvin Schwartz, George Gladir, Larry Lieber, Frank Jacobs, Gary Friedrich, Del Connell, Steve Skeates, Don Rosa, Jerry Siegel, Harvey Kurtzman, Gardner Fox, Archie Goodwin, John Broome, Otto Binder, Bob Haney, Frank Doyle, Steve Gerber, Robert Kanigher, Bill Mantlo and Jack Mendelsohn. Those folks are therefore ineligible. You cannot win twice.

Got a name to be worthy of consideration? My address is on this page. Any reasonable suggestion will be placed before our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee for contemplation. The selections will be announced some time in May and the presentations will be done at the Eisner Awards ceremony, which are usually Friday evening at Comic-Con.

(with apologies to Jung)

Job asked: “God, why do bad things happen to good people? Why would You, who are perfect, create a universe filled with so much that is evil?”

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying “WHAT KIND OF UNIVERSE WOULD YOU PREFER ME TO HAVE CREATED?”

Job said “A universe that was perfectly just and full of happiness, of course.”

“OH,” said God. “YES, I CREATED ONE OF THOSE. IT’S EXACTLY AS NICE AS YOU WOULD EXPECT.”

Job facepalmed. “But then why would You also create this universe?”

Answered God: “DON’T YOU LIKE EXISTING?”

“Yes,” said Job, “but all else being equal, I’d rather be in the perfectly just and happy universe.”

“OH, DON’T WORRY,” said God. “THERE’S A VERSION OF YOU IN THAT UNIVERSE TOO. HE SAYS HI.”

“Okay,” said Job, very carefully. “I can see I’m going to have to phrase my questions more specifically. Why didn’t You also make this universe perfectly just and happy?”

“BECAUSE YOU CAN’T HAVE TWO IDENTICAL INDIVIDUALS. IF YOU HAVE A COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF IDENTITY, THEN TWO PEOPLE WHOSE EXPERIENCE IS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SATURATED BY BLISS ARE JUST ONE PERSON. IF I MADE THIS UNIVERSE EXACTLY LIKE THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, THEN THERE WOULD ONLY BE THE POPULATION OF THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, WHICH WOULD BE LESS GOOD THAN HAVING THE POPULATION OF THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE PLUS THE POPULATION OF ONE EXTRA UNIVERSE THAT IS AT LEAST SOMEWHAT HAPPY.”

“Hmmmmm. But couldn’t You have have made this universe like the happy and just universe except for one tiny detail? Like in that universe, the sun is a sphere, but in our universe, the sun is a cube? Then you would have individuals who experienced a spherical sun, and other individuals who experienced a cubic sun, which would be enough to differentiate them.”

“I DID THAT TOO. I HAVE CREATED ALL POSSIBLE PERMUTATIONS OF THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE AND ITS POPULACE.”

“All of them? That would be…a lot of universes.”

“NOT AS MANY AS YOU THINK.” said God. “IN THE END IT TURNED OUT TO BE ONLY ABOUT 10^(10^(10^(10^(10^984)))). AFTER THAT I RAN OUT OF POSSIBLE PERMUTATIONS OF UNIVERSES THAT COULD REASONABLY BE DESCRIBED AS PERFECTLY HAPPY AND JUST. SO I STARTED CREATING ONES INCLUDING SMALL AMOUNTS OF EVIL.”

“Small amounts! But the universe has…”

“I WAS NOT REFERRING TO YOUR UNIVERSE. I EXHAUSTED THOSE, AND THEN I STARTED CREATING ONES INCLUDING IMMENSE AMOUNTS OF EVIL.”

“Oh.” Then: “What, exactly, is Your endgame here?”

“I AM OMNIBENEVOLENT. I WANT TO CREATE AS MUCH HAPPINESS AND JOY AS POSSIBLE. THIS REQUIRES INSTANTIATING ALL POSSIBLE BEINGS WHOSE TOTAL LIFETIME HAPPINESS IS GREATER THAN THEIR TOTAL LIFETIME SUFFERING.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“YOUR LIFE CONTAINS MUCH PAIN, BUT MORE HAPPINESS. BOTH YOU AND I WOULD PREFER THAT A BEING WITH YOUR EXACT LIFE HISTORY EXIST. IN ORDER TO MAKE IT EXIST, IT WAS NECESSARY TO CREATE THE SORT OF UNIVERSE IN WHICH YOU COULD EXIST. THAT IS A UNIVERSE CONTAINING EVIL. I HAVE ALSO CREATED ALL HAPPIER AND MORE VIRTUOUS VERSIONS OF YOU. HOWEVER, IT IS ETHICALLY CORRECT THAT AFTER CREATING THEM, I CREATE YOU AS WELL.”

“But why couldn’t I have been one of those other versions instead!”

“IN THE MOST PERFECTLY HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, THERE IS NO SPACE, FOR SPACE TAKES THE FORM OF SEPARATION FROM THINGS YOU DESIRE. THERE IS NO TIME, FOR TIME MEANS CHANGE AND DECAY, YET THERE MUST BE NO CHANGE FROM ITS MAXIMALLY BLISSFUL STATE. THE BEINGS WHO INHABIT THIS UNIVERSE ARE WITHOUT BODIES, AND DO NOT HUNGER OR THIRST OR LABOR OR LUST. THEY SIT UPON LOTUS THRONES AND CONTEMPLATE THE PERFECTION OF ALL THINGS. IF I WERE TO UNCREATE ALL WORLDS SAVE THAT ONE, WOULD IT MEAN MAKING YOU HAPPIER? OR WOULD IT MEAN KILLING YOU, WHILE FAR AWAY IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE INCORPOREAL BEINGS SAT ON THEIR LOTUS THRONES REGARDLESS?”

“I don’t know! Is one of the beings in that universe in some sense me?”

“THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE COSMIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.”

“Huh?”

“I MEAN, THERE IS NO MEANINGFUL ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF HOW MANY UNIVERSES HAVE A JOB. SORRY. THAT WILL BE FUNNY IN ABOUT THREE THOUSAND YEARS.”

“Let me try a different angle, then. Right now in our universe there are lots of people whose lives aren’t worth living. If You gave them the choice, they would have chosen never to have been born at all. What about them?”

“A JOB WHO IS AWARE OF THE EXISTENCE OF SUCH PEOPLE IS A DIFFERENT JOB THAN A JOB WHO IS NOT. AS LONG AS THESE PEOPLE MAKE UP A MINORITY OF THE POPULATION, THE EXISTENCE OF YOUR UNIVERSE, IN ADDITION TO A UNIVERSE WITHOUT SUCH PEOPLE, IS A NET ASSET.”

“But that’s monstrous! Couldn’t You just, I don’t know, have created a universe that looks like it has such people, but actually they’re just p-zombies, animated bodies without any real consciousness or suffering?”

” . . . ”

“Wait, did You do that?”

“I AM GOING TO PULL THE ‘THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW’ CARD HERE. THERE ARE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES TO THE APPROACH YOU MENTION. THE ADVANTAGES ARE AS YOU HAVE SAID. THE DISADVANTAGE IS THAT IT TURNS CHARITY TOWARDS SUCH PEOPLE INTO A LIE, AND MYSELF AS GOD INTO A DECEIEVER. I WILL ALLOW YOU TO FORM YOUR OWN OPINION ABOUT WHICH COURSE IS MORE ETHICAL. BUT IT IS NOT RELEVANT TO THEODICY, SINCE WHICHEVER COURSE YOU DECIDE IS MORALLY SUPERIOR, YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE THAT I DID NOT IN FACT TAKE SUCH A COURSE.”

“Actually, I do have some evidence. Before all of this happened to me I was very happy. But in the past couple years I’ve gone bankrupt, lost my entire family, and gotten a bad case of boils. I’m pretty sure at this point I would prefer that I never have been born. Since I know I myself am conscious, I am actually in a pretty good position to accuse You of cruelty.”

“HMMMMMMMM…” said God, and the whirlwind disappeared.

Then the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before, and healed his illnesses, and gave him many beautiful children, so it was said that God had blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.

[EDIT: According to comments, this was scooped by a Christian philosopher five years ago. Sigh.]

The Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "MISTAKES WERE MADE."

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 13, 2015

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE ME AT MY WORST, YOU DON'T DESERVE ME AT MY BEST."

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 10, 2015

The Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "I KNOW YOU'RE UPSET BUT THAT'S DIFFERENT FROM STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION" (h/t @simulacrumbs)

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 13, 2015

This is the speech I gave to the 2015 Liberal Democrat Spring Conference, introducing an amendment to the mental health motion to call for an end to transgender conversion therapy.

The amendment passed without opposition.

I’d like to read from a young girl’s Internet diary.

I really need help.

Hi, I’m Leelah, 16 and ever since I was around 4 or 5 I knew I was a girl. As soon as I found out what transgender meant, I came out to my mom. She reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl.

I wanted to see a gender therapist but they wouldn’t let me, they thought it would corrupt my mind. They would only let me see biased therapists, who instead of listening to my feelings would try to change me into a straight male. I would cry after every session because I felt like it was hopeless.

Please help me, I don’t know what I should do and I can’t take much more of this. I don’t know if my problem is serious enough that I can contact authorities for help and even if it is I don’t know how much that’ll damage or help my current situation. I’m stuck.

Two months after writing this cry for help on the Internet, transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn took her own life. This was in the US, but it could easily have happened here.

Studies show that when transgender people express a need to undergo gender transition, if they are not able to then 50% will try to kill themselves.

Conversion therapy does not work. This is not opinion, this is established fact. If you try to talk a transgender person out of changing gender, there is a better than evens chance they will try to kill themselves. This is not opinion, this is established fact.

If you subject a transgender person to conversion therapy, you might as well drive them to Beachy Head and tell them to jump. Conversion therapy kills transgender people.

When the NHS, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and other bodies signed a memorandum of understanding against conversion therapy for lesbian, bisexual and gay people in January, they called it “unethical and potentially harmful”.

They also left transgender people out.

Well, conference, conversion therapy for transgender people does worse than potentially cause harm: it kills them.

All this amendment asks is that transgender people are given the same protection from dangerous quackery that lesbian, gay and bisexual people are given.

Coercing vulnerable transgender people into discredited conversion therapy is not a valid psychological practice. It is not helping people who are struggling with their gender identity to come to terms with themselves.

It is attempted murder.

Conference, I implore you to support this amendment and put a stop to this appalling practice. Thank you.

We just finished the anthology workshop, the largest workshop we do in person. Forty-six attendees, eight instructors, seven days, and 250 manuscripts to read and discuss. All of the attendees are professional writers in one capacity or another (technical writers, nonfiction writers, fiction writers), so the manuscript quality was high—often award-quality.

Oh, the discussions. Oh, the fights (among the instructors). Oh, the laughter.

Yes, we had fun.

And now, with deep gratitude, I return to my writing routine.

The first two days after the workshop involved catch-up, a sudden rewrite, some small promotion for this month’s book release, and this thing called sleep. Today (Wednesday) is the first day I’m even approximating my usual schedule—much to the joy of my office cat, Galahad. (By Friday of last week, he took to standing in the door of my office and yelling at me as loudly as he could. He’s on my lap and purring as I type this [and yes, that means my typing posture has gone all to hell].)

Galahad isn’t the only one who is joyful. I’m bouncing around like a kid at Christmas, despite a lingering tiredness, a possible cold (allergies?), and constant interruptions from other people’s emergencies. My routine enables my writing productivity. My routine also takes away one aspect of my work day—the stress of time management.

I felt that stress during the workshop. I had left some reading for the middle of the week, assuming I would have time for it. I didn’t, but I had to get it done, which meant that the time came from the eight hours scheduled for sleep.

I had also vowed (to myself) to maintain my daily run, but I ran a route I’d never tried before. (I ran home for lunch.) The first two days were all about clock-checking. Am I late? Will I have time to shower, change, and eat lunch before my ride shows up? A few days were dicey, and then I got the hang of it—about the time I was headed back into my regular routine.

In my regular routine, I know if I linger too long at dinner, I will sacrifice my evening writing session. My brain shuts down around 10 or 11 every night. I plan for 10 rather than try to push for 11, because that way, if I’m particularly energetic, I feel like I’ve gained something rather than merely achieving my goal.

If I get started later than usual, I lose the all-important first session where I set my daily pattern. Often, I don’t tend to e-mail and everything that piled up overnight until I’ve completed my first writing session. That way, it’s harder to knock me off schedule.

And so on and so on and so on.

The routine enables the writing, not the other way around.

For almost two years, Dean has blogged nightly about his writing routine, pointing out to writers around the world that a writing career isn’t about pushing. It’s about a regular routine, almost clockwork in its repetitiveness. If you don’t understand what I mean, I urge you to take a look—and to make sure you read dozens of the blog posts, rather than one or two.

Even when Dean gets off-routine, he’s honest about it. And you can see in his numbers just how badly going off-routine impacts his productivity.

Going off routine hurts mine too. I had eight writing things scheduled for Monday. Instead, I spent most of the time cleaning up messes from the week before. Those eight things moved to Tuesday, along with Tuesday’s schedule. Again, I dealt with other people’s emergencies.

Today, I finally got to routine, and before I started writing this blog, I checked off six of the original eight things. The blog is the seventh. The eighth will move to Thursday, along with the rest of today’s items.

I suspect I’ll be shuffling due dates and projects for another week, even though I had planned around the workshop. The workshop didn’t cause the backlog as much as the loss of Monday and Tuesday did.

In The Freelancer’s Survival Guide, I have an entire section on scheduling. (You can find it here for free or in the Guide or in the short book called Time Management.) I reread this section before I started this post, and was rather stunned to realize I never talked about routine.

Let me define terms here:

A schedule is two-pronged.

First, a schedule includes calendar items. Your day job (if you have one). Your days off. The vacation you’ll take with you and your family. The writers conferences you’ll attend. The evenings you need to take for your daughter’s violin concerts. The lunch you have every week with your fellow writers. And so on.

Second, a schedule includes your writing (and publishing) deadlines. It shouldn’t matter if these deadlines are self-imposed or imposed from the outside (by a traditional publisher, for example). A deadline should be hard and fast. You don’t miss the deadline. In the Freelancer’s Guide, I show techniques for counting backwards so that you can find the right amount of time to get the work done—without pushing the deadline.

When I talk schedule, I’m not talking about routine.

Routine is the way that you shape your day. Every day.

From the time you get up in the morning to the length of your first writing session, your routine should have some kind of pattern to it. Dean posts his daily routine on his blog.

Here’s mine:

I get up around 11, take care of household stuff, and check the e-mail for emergencies. That can take anywhere from one hour to two hours, depending if there is an emergency or not.

I have a snack when I get up, but I eat a full breakfast after that one-to-two-hour period. If I’m running late (two hours), I eat quickly and drink my tea at my desk. If I’m on the normal schedule (one hour), I linger a bit.

Then I write for two sessions, with a longer e-mail/business break in between. I go on my run, eat lunch, feed the cats, and return to work for another session (or two) before cooking dinner.

After dinner, I return to my office for a last session or two, depending on how tired I am. When I’m finished, I do any reading I need to do. I join Dean for a little television, then come back to my reading chair to read for enjoyment for two hours before going to bed with enough time to spare so that I can get eight hours of rest.

Day in, day out.

Twice a week, I change the routine. Once a week, I go to a series of business meetings. I try to schedule other disruptive things on that day as well, like doctor’s appointments, podcast interviews, dinner with friends, car repairs, etc.

The other thing that alters my routine is our professional writers lunch on Sunday, which I try not to miss. I can miss it if I’m pushing a deadline. (Yes, despite my tough talk, I occasionally push a deadline—and regret it as I struggle to get my work done.) I schedule writing that requires less concentration for that day or maybe I do some business things, because the lunch can be really disruptive.

And that’s it.

The rest of the time, I’m following the routine I listed above. I know how many writing hours I have in the week and how much work I have. If I stay in routine, I can accurately estimate what I’m capable of writing and finishing and when I’m capable of finishing it.

Without the routine, I couldn’t estimate accurately.

But the routine is more than that. It’s also a structure that requires very little thought. When I go to my office at the usual time, my brain has already started to work on the current project even before I sit down. I’m ready to work right from the start.

The routine also organizes those around me. They know that when I’m in my writing office, I’m unavailable. Unless I’m between major projects, I don’t participate in social events on the five “regular” work days. Conversely, I’m pretty easy to reach at some point in the day, if the other person is patient.

I do set up routines when I travel or when I do events in town, like the workshop. Usually I try to plan those out ahead of time, although I wasn’t able to during this workshop. I do a lot of writing on planes, a lot of business while in the hustle and bustle of airports, and a lot of research while people-watching in strange environments.

In other words, routines are essential to my process.

Most effective writers have routines. I know that many of you who read this blog have day jobs and less writing time than I have. The day jobs give you structure. Writers who get a lot done have a set time after or before their day jobs for writing. Even an hour per day is enough to finish a lot of pages.

If you don’t have a routine, if you’re waiting for that elusive muse or if you’re “too busy,” time to write down everything you do for about two weeks. You’ll find some spare time in there. It might only be fifteen minutes in the course of a day, but even fifteen minutes should get you one page per day. One page per day 365 days per year is a novel. Take weekends off, and you’ll still get a lot of writing done.

So here I am, sneezing my way through today’s routine. The cat has moved to his evening nap spot, and I’m about to move to another project—with an hour in my regular routine to spare.

Life is good.

Nice to be back in routine.

One thing that routinely keeps me writing the blog is the support of all of you. Some of you send emails or make comments. Others forward the blog around the web. And some of you donate.

I appreciate all of it.

Click Here to Go To PayPal. (Yes, White Mist Mountain is my company name)

“Business Musings: The Importance of Routine,” copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The most popular Japanese import since ruthless corporate efficiency, the phenomenon known as karaoke helped every bar-hopping American realize their lifelong ambition of being a rock star, even if it was only for three minutes in front of a crowd of rum-soaked programmers hoping you finish up quick so they can do an hilarious whiteface Lil Jon song. But if there’s one dream dearer to American hearts than enacting our own sports-bar edition of American Idol, it’s being a movie star. Now, thanks to Movie-Oke, the latest permutation of karaoke, we can do that too.

Made possible by digital video technology, Movie-Oke (which, like most deeply obnoxious trends, started out in New York before finally hitting the flyovers with much fanfare, as tens of thousands of Brooklynites swear they never heard of it), uses the subtitling feature of DVDs to allow individuals or groups to act out scenes from their favorite movies as the flick plays on a big-screen projection TV behind them and the bartender wishes he’d gone ahead with Geeks Who Drink trivia instead. As with karaoke, patrons take turns fulfilling their silver screen fantasies by having the host cue up the scene of their choice of overly familiar mass-market fare, throwing back a few overpriced microbrews, and taking a crack at it; and, as with karaoke, the results are often, well, more exuberant than accomplished.

But the often-raucous crowds, filled with the same high-ABV steam beers and IPAs, are just as likely as karaoke crowds to appreciate a good effort or an amusing take on a scene just the same.  The first Movie-Oke event I attended saw a boisterous crowd (another shared quality with karaoke is the tendency of the crowds to become more enthusiastic, and the performers more broad in their dramatic interpretations, as their cocktail tabs increase in value) being treated to spirited amateur renditions of Travis Bickle’s mirror monologue from Taxi Driver, always a favorite of phony tough guys; merrily obscene songs from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, always a favorite of fun-loving libertarian coders; and the tellingly popular restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally, always a favorite of frustrated women whose partners cannot bring them to orgasm.  Oh, and also, Gollum’s mono-dialogue from Lord of the Rings:  The Fellowship of the Ring.  Lots and lots of Gollum.  That thing is like the nunnery scene in Hamlet for nerds.

So, as I see it, the main problem with Movie-Oke isn’t the concept, which is no more or less absurd than any other group entertainment in an era where handicapped Quidditch leagues are a real thing.  Nor is it necessarily the execution, which, I mean, you’re drunk watching someone pretend to be someone pretending to be someone else, how valuable is your time, anyway?  No, the problem is, as is also the case in karaoke, selection.  Aside from the probably-inescapable nerd factor of seing a neckbearded sad sack muttering “precious” to himself over and over again, there are people who pick scenes that are far too long, with the cinematic equivalent of a lengthy guitar solo; there are others who pick scenes way out of their range; and there are yet again those who, overestimating their own dramatic heft, pick some heavy emotional monologue that brings the whole proceedings crashing down into a major bummer, having failed completely to read the room.

And yet it need not be this way!  The very nature of Movie-Oke makes it infinitely more adaptable than even the most innovative, copyright-law-flaunting karaoke DJs could dream of.  The built-in subtitling capacity of most DVDs adds a unique feature to Movie-Oke that gives it an advantage over its musical forebear: patrons are encouraged to bring their own movies and play out their favorite scenes.  Even with physical media on the way out, replaced by streaming, Movie-Oke patrons have a whole universe of movies and TV shows with which to blow away their fellow drunks without having to rely on the same old…well, whatever the movie monologue equivalent of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” or “Carry On Wayward Son” is.  Thus, in the spirit of improving the medium, five suggestions for Movie-Oke performances that will blow ’em all away:

1.  The “Is this a dagger I see before me?” soliloquy from Orson Welles’ Macbeth.  A great one for people who want to impress with a Shakespeare monologue, but are afraid they lack the chops to elevate it past amateur status.  Simply deliver it in Welles’ incomprehensible Scots burr and no one will know what you’re saying anyway.

2.  Amilyn’s death scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Neo-nerds like to pretend the movie version of the House that Joss Built doesn’t exist, but recreating Paul Reubens’ prolonged expiration not only scores you deep-cut geek points, but requires very little heavy lifting:  all you have to do is slump over in the corner and noisily gurgle every few minutes to remind people you are still alive.

3.  John Giorno in Sleep.  Another sure-fire crowd-pleaser, because hip young people love to pretend they are deeply familiar with the anti-films of Andy Warhol.  This one also lets you really work the crowd while expending as little effort as possibly, requiring only that you fall asleep and remain so for five hours and twenty minutes.

4.  Lionel Barrymore in A Free Soul.  Normally, we’d suggest going for Howard Roark’s heart-stopper of a courtroom speech in Ayn Rand’s paean to assholism, The Fountainhead, but despite Rand’s participation, the movie version is a compromised monstrosity in which Roark’s speech, at six interminable minutes, is still considerably shorter than it is in the book, where it goes on for sixty grueling pages.  Instead, those wishing to show the sheer ballsy contempt for others’ time and attention that a true Movie-Oke master should aspire to are directed to this monologue from a 1931 picture; it lacks Rand’s all-encompassing hatred of human decency, but at 14 soul-grinding minutes, it will at least have your audience donating you all their spoiled fruit.

5.  Dan Hedaya’s telephone conversation at the beginning of Joe vs. the Volcano.  Listen, I don’t care how dumb an idea you think this is.  I will personally pay you fifty bucks to stand in front of a bunch of howling drunks as Mr. Waturi, endlessly muttering “I know he can get the job.  But can he do the job?”

If you’ve seen the #HighFunctioningMeans and #FunctioningLabelsMean Twitter hashtags, or more generally read or listened to a discussion by autistic people about functioning labels, you’ll know that, well, a lot of us really don’t like them, so I thought I’d write a 101 post about why that is, and what the alternatives are.

Wait, what’s a functioning label?
Many autistic people find themselves at some point being described as having “high-functioning” or “low-functioning” autism. Which label is given to the person can depend on a number of arbitrary factors, but often involves verbal ability, ability to live independently, and (especially in children) academic ability. In other words, functioning labels are basically another way of saying whether or not you think a certain autistic person can pass for neurotypical.

What’s so bad about functioning labels?
Well for a start, “passing for neurotypical” should not be the goal. We’re not defectively neurotypical, we’re autistic, and society needs to accommodate that. Being neurotypical should not be the only correct way to function. Calling an autistic person “low-functioning” is putting them down because they’re autistic. Meanwhile, calling an autistic person “high-functioning” works in much the same way as the “you’re not like other girls” trope – it sounds like a compliment and may well be intended as such, but in reality, you’re “complimenting” the person by insulting other people like them, which only serves to teach self-loathing and harmful attitudes towards those other people.

Having said that, I would argue that “high-functioning” is not only a thinly veiled insult, it’s a threat. People who cannot or will not pretend to be neurotypical to make you comfortable – the so-called “low-functioning autistics” – are treated appallingly in our ableist world; because their disability is visible, their personhood, feelings and strengths are ignored. Those of us who are more able to pass for NT more often – the so called “high-functioning autistics” – escape much of the worst of this hatred, but at a price; because we are accepted as people with feelings and strengths, our disability is ignored. When our autism is visible, if we openly discuss it, or – heaven forbid – if we request an accommodation, we’re told we’re over-reacting, we’re manipulative, we’re over-sensitive, we’re selfish killjoys; basically, we’re told we’re faking it, and should just try harder to miraculously not be autistic. In short, “high-functioning” means “act neurotypical at all costs, or we’ll see you as Really Autistic, and you know how we treat people who we think are Really Autistic”.

This binary stems from the refusal of abled people to recognise that disability and personality can co-exist – in fact, they ALWAYS co-exist, because disabled people are people. (And if, as an abled person*, you now want to correct me on my language because people-first requires literally putting the word “person” first, maybe think about why you feel the need to go against all syntax to show that in your words, and how instead you could show that in your attitudes and your actions.) It’s also used to silence autistic people standing up for themselves and their rights as a whole; we’re either too low-functioning to really know what’s best for ourselves, or too high-functioning to “count” as autistic (unless they want to include us in scare statistics, of course!) so in the end, the only ones that neurotypical people actually listen to are… well, neurotypical people.

Surely there’s some truth in them though? You’re not like my child!
There is a good reason why I’m not like your child, or anyone else’s child, or anyone else in general; every person is different. Autistic people are people. Therefore, every autistic person is different. I am an adult; of course I’m not like your child, I’m not even like myself as a child anymore. Anyway, leaving that aside, not only are functioning labels harmful, they’re also wildly inaccurate. Here’s a quick test, which I first saw by Musings of an Aspie but have also seen by various other autistic people online, in which I’m going to describe two autistic people.

Laura is verbal, and lives independently. Over the past few years she has undertaken a variety of responsibilities and committee positions, some related to her special interests, and has used these to develop an active social life. Laura is highly organised and rule-orientated, characteristics which have greatly helped her in her studies. She very rarely has full-scale meltdowns, and given the time and space, she is virtually always able to deal with shutdowns and the aftereffects of sensory overload by herself.

Faith is often anxious, particularly in social situations and crowds, and rarely leaves home without her earphones. She often prefers to communicate by typing rather than talking, and will avoid the phone wherever possible. Faith sometimes struggles to keep up with everyday self-care/household tasks, which can lead to overload in and of itself. She has a habit of pacing around her room on her tiptoes, particularly to music, and spent a large portion of last night listening to one song on repeat and spinning.

Based on these descriptions, one of these women would be considered high-functioning. One would be considered low-functioning. These women are both the same person, more specifically me. And that last part, about listening to one song on repeat? Muse are back! 90% of the fandom would have been doing exactly the same. The only reason “Faith” would be seen as weird for doing so is because of the additional stimming as well as the rest of her description; in other words, she’s already being seen as “low-functioning” so even the most innocuous of new information is automatically used to support that existing bias.

I include that last point to show how much of our “functioning level” is highly context-dependent. Everyone sometimes acts differently or feels more or less able to cope based on their mood, stress, events in their life, illness, being hungry or tired or uncomfortable, or even depending on where they are or who they’re with. As @theoriesofminds notes, functioning labels mean “how was your day going when you saw the person who diagnosed you”. It’s random, it’s arbitrary, and it’s based on two stereotypes in which no person wholly fits. So no, there isn’t much truth in them at all!

Okay, but some people do need more/less/different support to other people; how else can I acknowledge this?
As I said above, every autistic person is different, so in my opinion, the only way to accurately get across the support someone needs is to talk about them as an individual. For example, based on me again (though not my real name):

Gemma can communicate verbally, though in many cases finds typing easier, and finds the phone particularly difficult. She lives independently, but sometimes struggles to keep up with everyday self-care/household tasks. Gemma is often very anxious, particularly in social situations and crowds, but she very rarely has full-scale meltdowns, and given the time and space she is virtually always able to deal with shutdowns and the effects of sensory overload by herself.

Having said that, the support often depends on the situation. For example, in exams, I don’t need any particular accommodations, but another autistic person may need to, say, take the exam in a different room away from the distraction of other people. In parties, I might need my friends to occasionally check I’m okay and know to get me out of there/what to do if things go wrong, but another autistic person might not need any extra help at all. In short, functioning labels can be replaced with “you should be aware that this person is autistic, and in particular they have Autistic Traits A, B and C and will therefore need Supports D, E and F” and again answer any further questions based on the person themselves.

To sum up:
Functioning labels are used to demean and silence autistic people; they hold up “pretending to be neurotypical” as the ultimate ideal,and are based on two opposing stereotypes which no autistic person wholly fits. In addition, they are inaccurate due to being highly context-dependent; in the examples I use above, a band changes my perceived functioning level. Seriously, that’s how fragile these things are. As an alternative way of describing the strengths, weaknesses and support needs of the autistic people in your life, try talking about them as individuals, and actually describing those strengths, weaknesses and support needs rather than trying to force them into an ill-fitting box.

---

*I say “as an abled person” because some people with disabilities to prefer to be called “people with disabilities” and I don’t have a problem with that – it’s not what I use myself, but if that’s how other people want to refer to themselves, that’s their business, not mine. However, what I DO have a problem with is abled people reading posts and articles about the ableism they’re perpetuating and essentially reacting with “you’re the one who’s being offensive to yourself because I can’t see ‘disabled people’ as people”.

Tagged: actuallyautistic, Autism, functioning labels

Some of you may be aware that there's a tabletop role-playing game set in the Laundry Files universe, sold by Cubicle 7 Games.

It's available on paper, and as PDF downloads via the usual folks (such as DriveThruRPG).

Anyway, there's a special promo for the next couple of weeks; Bundle of Holding, who do humble bundle style sales of RPG materials, are doing a special Bundle of Laundry offer. For $8.95 or more, you get the core rule book and the player's handbook as PDFs; if you pay more than their median price (currently $24.32) you get a whole bunch of extra supplements—basically the entire RPG for under $25 (or about £16.50 in real money). Oh, and this stuff? Is all DRM-free.

So if you've had a vague yen to dust off a tabletop RPG for an evening's fun with friends, why not see if you, too, can survive your training as a Laundry operative without losing your mind?

Friendship is context-sensitive.

I wouldn't describe Terry as a friend, but as someone I'd been on a first-name acquaintanceship with since the mid-1980s. If you go to SF conventions (or partake of any subculture which has regular gatherings) you'll know the way it works: there are these people who don't really see outside of this particular social context, but you're never surprised to see them in it, and you know each other's names, and when you meet you chat about stuff and maybe sink a pint together.

I haven't seen Terry since the Glasgow worldcon in 2005. The diagnosis of his illness came in 2007; I'd been spending a chunk of 05-07 out of the country, and after the bad news hit I didn't feel like being part of the throng pestering him (for reasons I'll get to later on in this piece.)

I first met him, incidentally, back in 1984, at a British eastercon in Leeds. It was, I think, my first SF convention. Or my second. I was a spotty 17- or 18-year-old nerd, wandering around with a manuscript in a carrier bag, looking for an editor—this was before the internet made it easy to discover that this was not the done thing, or indeed before word processors made typewritten manuscripts obsolescent. (Let's just say that if in a fit of enthusiasm you borrowed your future self's time machine and went back to that convention in search of me you'd have been disappointed.)

There were plenty of other embryonic personages floating around there, of course. I remember meeting this tall goth dude with shaggy hair, dressed all in black and wearing mirrorshades at midday, who resembled the bassist from the Sisters of Mercy. He was called Neil, he wrote for a comic called 2000AD, and he had an oddly liminal superstar quality even then: everyone just knew he was going to be famous, or in a band.) And there was this thirty-something guy with glasses and a bushy beard propping up the bar. What set him apart from the other guys with beards and glasses was that he had a hat, and he was trying to cadge pints of beer with an interesting chat-up line: "I'm a fantasy writer, you know. My third book just came out—it's called 'The Colour of Magic'." So you'd buy him a drink because, I swear, he had some kind of bibulous mind-control thing going, and he'd tell you about the book, and then you'd end up buying the book because it sounded funny, and then you were trapped in his snare forever.

Back then, Terry was not some gigantic landmark of comedy literature, with famous critics in serious newspapers bending over to compare his impact on the world of letters to that of P. G. Wodehouse. Terry was earning his living as a press officer and writing on the side and didn't feel embarrassed about letting other people pay for the drinks. And so over the next few years I bought him a pint or two, and began to read the books. Which is why I only got hooked on Terry's shtick after I'd met him as Terry the convention-going SF fan.

Some time between about 1989 and 1992, something strange began to happen. I started seeing his name feature more prominently in bookshops, displays of his books planted face-out. He started turning up as guest of honour at more and more SF conventions. When a convention did a signing with Terry, suddenly there was a long queue. And when he walked into a room, heads turned and people began to close in on him. There's a curious phenomenon that goes with being famous in a particular subculture: if everybody knows you, you become a target for their projected fantasy of meeting their star. And they all want to shake your hand and say something, anything, that connects with what your work means to them in their own head. (If you want to see this at work today, just go to any function he's appearing at—other than the Oscars—and watch what happens when Neil Gaiman walks into the room. He is, I swear, the human Katamari.)

Being on the receiving end of this phenomenon is profoundly isolating, especially if you're one of those introverted author types who can emulate an extrovert for a few days at a time before you have to hide under the bed and gibber for a while: you're surrounded by strangers who desperately want to connect with you and after a time it becomes really hard to tell them apart, to remember that they're individuals with their own lives and stories and not just different faces emerging from the surface of a weird shape-shifting fame-tropic amoeboid alien. It's not just authors who get this: if anything we get off very lightly compared to actors, politicians, or rock stars. (For some insight into it, go listen to the lyrics of Pink Floyd's "The Wall".) I should add, this sort of introversion is really common among writers. It's an occupation that demands a certain degree of introspective self-absorption, alongside a constant distance from the people you're observing, who—they mostly don't know this, of course—may provide the raw fuel for your work. So, if you want to hang on to your sanity, eventually you either go and hide for a bit, or you surround yourself with people who aren't faintly threatening strangers who want a piece of your soul. Which is to say, you selectively hang out with your peers, or folks you met before you caught the fame virus.

Terry was not only a very funny man; he was an irrascible (and occasionally bad-tempered) guy who did not suffer fools gladly. However, he was also big-hearted enough to forgive the fools around him if they were willing to go halfway to meeting him by ceasing to be foolish at him. He practiced a gracious professionalism in his handling of the general public that spared them the harsh side of his tongue, and he was, above all, humane. As the fame snowballed, he withdrew a bit: appreciating that there was a difference between a sharp retort from your mate Terry at the bar and a put-down from Terry Pratchett, superstar, he stepped lightly and took pains to avoid anything that might cause distress.

Anyway, this isn't a biography, it's just the convoluted lead-in to an anecdote about the last time I saw him (which was a decade ago, so you'd better believe me when I say our relationship was "situational friend" rather than "personal friend").

On the last day of the worldcon in 2005, I was wandering around feeling extremely frazzled and a bit hunted. I'd just won my first Hugo award, and my right hand was sore from people I didn't know grabbing it. Eventually I realized that I just couldn't cope with the regular convention concourse in the conference centre—I was a walking target of opportunity for people who wanted to shake the hand that held the pen that wrote the ... something, I guess.

At a British worldcon, you can count on there being a really excellent real ale bar tucked away in a corner of one of the hotels or fan areas. I headed for the real ale bar and found a degree of comfort and shelter there, because it was mostly full of familiar faces who didn't need to push into my personal space because I was just some guy they'd been bumping into in convention bars for a decade or two. The rate of hand-grabbing dropped to a survivable level: I began to relax, and found a couple of old friends to hang with. And then I noticed Terry.

Terry had not won a Hugo. He didn't need to. (As he said, "I was in the audience at some literary awards ceremony or other with J. K. Rowling one time, and she was lamenting how they'd never give her one, so I turned to her and I said, Jo, me neither: we'll just have to cry ourselves to sleep on top of our mattresses stuffed with £20 notes." Money being, of course, the most honest token of appreciation a commercial author can receive.) Terry didn't need a shiny new Hugo award to find it nearly impossible to walk around a convention and just be a fan: I was getting my first taste of the downside of fame, but Terry had been living with being Terry Pratchett, OBE, Richest Author in all the Land, for more than a decade. He was looking tired, and morose, and a bit down in the dumps. So we went over to say hi.

At this point, he perked up. Omega, who I'd been chatting to, had first met him in the mid-80s, about the same time as me: Feorag got a pass for being married to one of us. He'd been having a hard time being Terry Pratchett in public for five consecutive days. He wasn't quite ready to go and hide out in his hotel room, but he needed some respite care from being a Boss-level target in every starry-eyed fan's first-person autograph shooter; so, as it was coming up on lunchtime, by mutual agreement we dragged him away from the SECC to Pancho Villa's in Glasgow for lunch. Okay, Glaswegian-Mexican food is not what you'd necessarily call good good. But it filled a corner and, more importantly, it got him far enough away from the convention to decompress a little in company that wasn't going to place any demands on him.

Now, Terry (like the late Iain Banks) seemed to feel a bit of noblesse oblige (or maybe just plain survivor's guilt) over the sheer mind-boggling scale of his success. ("I realized I was rich," he recounted, "when I got a call from my agent one Thursday. That cheque I mailed you—did you get it? He asked. And I realized I couldn't find it: lost down the back of the sofa or something. Can you cancel it and mail me a new one? I said. And he said, yes I can do that, but you realize you won't be able to deposit it before next week and you'll lose the interest on it? And I said sure, just go ahead, cancel it, and send me a new one. Then I put the phone down and realized it was for half a million pounds.") Things had obviously changed since the days when he had to cadge drinks off fans in convention bars: and I realised that I hadn't bought him a pint since about 1989, and this rankled a little bit. Nobody likes to think of themselves as a charity case. Also, I'd just won a Hugo and landed a new three book deal and was beginning to feel a bit of that survivor's guilt myself.

So at the end of the meal, while he went to the toilet, I tried to pick up the bill. But the waitress was slow, he got back to the table before she could make off with my credit card, and when he pulled out his gold visa card, snarled "who's the rich bastard here?!?", and chuckled to himself, I knew I was beat. And I never did get to buy him lunch, in the end.

Anyway, those are some of my memories of Terry Pratchett.

He was generous not just with money, but with his soul. He was irrascible, yes, and did not suffer fools gladly: but he was empatic as well, and willing to forgive. Witty. Angry. Eloquent. A little bit burned by his own fame, and secretly guilty over it, but still human. And the world is smaller and darker without him, and I miss him deeply.

I.

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney attracted me with the following pitch: there are only two quantities in psychology that have been robustly linked to a broad range of important life outcomes. One is IQ and isn’t changeable. The other is willpower and is easily changeable. Therefore, study willlpower.

I expected the book to center around Baumeister’s groundbreaking experiments in “ego depletion” – where people who are forced to expend willpower on one task have less willpower left over for future tasks – and “ego repletion”, where people who have been depleted of willpower get it back after taking some glucose. I’d been left kind of confused by competing claims about those studies and I hoped this book would fill out my knowledge of them and settle my confusion.

Instead, it spent a couple of chapters mentioning their existence and praising them as revolutionary, and then got deep enough into Pop Science Self=Help Book Mode to be almost a self-parody. Chapter three is called “The To-Do List From God To Drew Carey” and illustrates why to-do lists are a great idea with anecdotes from Drew Carey’s life and the Bible. Chapter four is the same but with Eliot Spitzer. Chapter six is David Blaine, Chapter seven is H.M. Stanley, Chapter eight is Eric Clapton, and Chapter ten is Oprah. All of these people apparently have important lessons about willpower to teach us, of which the interesting ones are:

– Willpower is a limited resource that is depleted by use and restored by glucose

– Having to make too many small decisions in a day causes “decision fatigue”, leading you to be exhausted and make bad decisions.

– Using willpower a lot strengthens your willpower, allowing you to be more effective.

– People with more willpower do much better in life; for example, in the famous “marshmallow test”, children who were able to resist eating a marshmallow for a few minutes in order to get two marshmallows had better life outcomes twenty years later.

– Careful quantification of goals, setting precommitments, and publicizing your success or failure to other people helps you stick to resolutions. (If you are wondering exactly how to do this, this might be a good time to mention there’s a new ad on the sidebar for Beeminder, a company that manages this for you with some neat evidence-based tricks.)

– Religious people have more willpower than non-religious people for some reason. But you have to believe if you want to get this benefit – you can’t just hang out at church and go through the motions in order to reap the willpower gains.

= Chinese-Americans do better than white Americans on willpower tests from toddlerhood toward adulthood. This is the most likely reason Chinese people outperform whites in the real world, and in fact although average white and Chinese IQ are pretty similar, Chinese people can break into “elite” professions at a lower IQ threshold than whites because their increased self-control compensates. The book admits this may be partly genetic, but also attributes some of it to Chinese parents teaching their children discipline and setting hard goals, which they contrast with white parents who tell their kids to “have fun” and “have high self-esteem” and “be self-directed”. Obviously in order to believe this result you’d have to believe parenting styles can affect children, which this book takes on faith but which is on shaky ground.

– Amount of self-control does not affect body weight (!) or success at dieting (!!) very much.

Overall there were some interesting findings in here, even if I found the pop sci tone a little bit over-the-top after a while.

II.

But I was disappointed. The reason I got this book is that there’s a big debate going on over “willpower”, “ego depletion”, and their younger cousins “growth mindset” and “grit”. All of these are slightly different constructs, but they’re all measures of stick-to-it-ness, and all of their proponents make grand claims about how small interventions to make people have them will bring those people success at school, work, and life. On the other hand, there are a lot of other people who think this whole area is a load of bunk.

For example, Mischel’s marshmallow test started all this off by “proving” that children who were able to delay gratification longest had higher SAT scores, higher parent-rated competence, and better coping skills. But now the test is under fire as people question whether it just shows that people from good environments learn to be more trusting and so more likely to believe the researcher’s promise of extra rewards for delayed gratification. Other people ask if it just shows that kids who are smart enough to think of good strategies to distract themselves are also smart enough to get good SAT scores and all of the other positive correlates of high IQ. Still other people point out the very low sample size, the reverse correlation in other subgroups, and an apparent failure to replicate. Mischel fires back in an Atlantic article where he says of course he took these things into account, that the test was done on a homogenous upper-class population.

This book just says the marshmallow test proves willpower is important, and leaves it at that.

Or how about the idea that glucose is the limited resource that willpower depletes? Robert Kurzban very correctly points out that the metabolic math doesn’t come close to adding up – we know how much glucose things in the body use, and these short little willpower tasks aren’t really going to affect blood glucose levels at all. Also, turns out that if you rinse your mouth out with a tasty glucose solution, you get just the same amount of ego replenishment even though none of the glucose actually entered your body. And for that matter, how come I can’t get infinite willpower just by snacking while I work? How come M&Ms don’t work as a poor man’s Adderall?

Kurzban goes further and says he doesn’t believe in willpower as a limited resource at all. He notes that even when you’ve stopped studying because you’re too ego-depleted and exhausted to make yourself go on any further, if I offer you a million dollars to study another hour then you’ll do it. Guess that resource wasn’t so depleted after all. He proposes a different model of willpower, where it’s your brain’s way of nagging you about the opportunity cost of your actions – “you’ve been studying three whole hours, don’t you think you could use that lobe of your brain for something else now?” But this strikes me as ridiculous – my brain is very concerned that it has better things to do than study, but is perfectly happy with me playing Civilization IV: Fall From Heaven forever or simply lying in bed doing nothing?

Finally, Carol Dweck finds that willpower is only depletable if you think it is, which sounds like exactly the sort of thing Carol Dweck would find. If Carol Dweck ever became an oncologist, we would have to revise all the medical textbooks to say that people only get cancer if they think they will.

There is a meta-analysis of about a hundred studies said Baumeister was basically right about everything. On the other hand, Baumeister’s theory failed what sounds like a formal replication. So it’s complicated.

I really want to know what willpower is. It seems like one of the big challenges of my life; I never have enough willpower for everything I want to do, and I’d at least like to have a theory of what I’m up against. This book did not give me enough information to navigate the controversy. Instead, it totally denied there was any controversy and spent chapter after chapter on cute pieces of trivia interspersed with stories about Drew Carey and Oprah.

III.

So let me end this with some thoughts that a good explanation of willpower should take into account.

First, mental willpower seems a lot like physical willpower – by which I mean our ability to push through exhaustion to keep exercising. Kurzban complains that willpower can’t be a limited resource, because even after it’s all depleted you can still force yourself to keep going for a big enough reward. But the same is true of exercise. I’ll get exhausted and stop running after a certain number of miles, but if you offer me $1 million to run another one I’ll probably make it. And the studies showing that rinsing your mouth out with glucose gives you the same willpower boost as actually drinking is identical to the results of similar studies measuring exercise duration.

So it’s probably worth asking what exactly causes exercise fatigue. This is less firmly known than I expected, but it seems to be a combination of decreasing levels of inputs (especially glycogen stores in the muscles), buildup of toxic metabolic waste (including heat, lactic acid, etc), and cellular damage. Exercise long enough and your muscles need time to replenish their stores, clear away waste, and repair themselves.

Second, mental willpower seems to do something a lot like budgeting. Money, despite being pretty much the classic example of a limited resource, shares some of the features of willpower that Kurzban mocks. A few days ago a pipe burst, my house flooded, and I may have to spend several thousand dollars unflooding it. This means I will have no money for the next forever and then some, and if you ask me to meet you at a fancy restaurant I’ll probably refuse on financial grounds. But if my mother is on her deathbed and her final wish is to see me one last time, I will find the money to get an expensive flight to California. How’s that any different from me not having enough willpower to keep studying until you offer me a million dollars to do so?

Likewise, if tomorrow my boss offers me a $5000 bonus to be handed out next month, I’ll probably relax my budgetary constraints and start buying myself nice things even before I get the paycheck. How’s that any different from the body reacting to sugar when it’s in the mouth but not the bloodstream?

Finally, the question that I as a psychiatrist find most interesting – how come drugs can change willpower so dramatically? The guy who can’t concentrate on a project for more than five minutes straight will pull a whole week of all-nighters when he’s on Adderall or modafinil. Those certainly aren’t increasing blood glucose, so what’s up?

The model that makes the most sense to me is of a stupid default system running on short-term reinforcement learning, plus an evolutionarily novel (and therefore poorly implemented) executive system that can overrule the default. The executive system’s overrule isn’t a simple veto, but a constant action, the same way holding your hand high in the air for a long period requires constant action by your muscles. This effort is metabolically costly in the same way that using muscles is metabolically costly, and so your body runs a general-purpose budgeting function on it that convinces you to turn it off before it overheats. Given enough incentive, you can let it overheat, but then it’s going to be damaged and need to repair itself for a few days before you can use it effectively again. This seems to fit all the evidence except the drugs, which I interpret as acting on the default system so that you don’t need to bring in the executive planner. I freely admit this is sort of cheating.

Overall I recommend Willpower if you want a quick and fun survey of a bunch of loosely connected psychology topics, but not if you want a deep and balanced exploration into the literature of anything.

I got this the other day from Johnny Achziger. Capa-Alpha, by the way, was kind of a fanzine club and I should write about it here someday.

I've known you for some 40 years, we met at least a few times at San Diego Comic Cons back in the '70's, we were in Capa-Alpha together for awhile and we corresponded briefly. It doesn't matter if you remember me or not, but I am an avid reader of your blog. I especially enjoy the stories you post of your childhood, in fact it inspired me to do similar stories of my own childhood on Facebook.

Now and then you make comments about religious people coming to your door and trying to convert you. I assume you mean either Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons as I don't know of any others who go door to door with their religion. Maybe there are others in you area. I became one of Jehovah's Witnesses in 1979 (and I'm not going to preach to you here, so please read on — I'll keep it short), and have gone to 1000's of doors over the past 35 years.

If you want to make comments about such people, feel free (some of them are quite funny), but perhaps I can clarify a couple items (in 25 words or less). We never ask for money (though we may state that we accept donations), we don't believe in instant conversions (nobody becomes a Witness without months of personal study), and we don't tell people that they are going to hell (we don't believe in a literal burning hell), and we only come to your door because we truly believe that Armageddon is coming (believe me, I do not enjoy being cussed at and threatened with deadly violence).

Okay, that was more than 25 words, but I recognize you don't wish to be preached to and I respect that. I'm not asking you to do anything. I just wanted to briefly explain a couple things. I know how annoying it is to be interrupted when you're busy but they're basically good people.

Have a nice day and best wishes for your continued health and, again, I love your blog.

I do remember you, Johnny, and would be pleased to run into you again at a convention…or really anywhere except my doorstep. Part of what I object to here is unsolicited appearances on my property and the expectation that I will interrupt whatever I'm doing (once in a while, it's sleep because I work odd hours) and answer my door and just stand there and listen for as long as it takes to hear a rehearsed sales pitch, usually for a product or service that's of no conceivable interest to me.

I've never liked that and I've gotten less tolerant of it since I've been having trouble with my knees. I'm usually upstairs in my office so I have to trudge down, just in case it's a signature-required delivery or a neighbor with a problem. Years ago, I tried posting "No Solicitor" signs but discovered that people who are selling door-to-door never think those apply to them or they fib and go, "Oh, I didn't see that."

My annoyance applies to those who are peddling religion but it also applies to realtors who want to sell my house for me, Girl Scouts hawking cookies, kids who claim they can get through college if I'll subscribe to magazines which will probably never be delivered, political activists even when I agree with their politics, and vendors of small kitchen appliances. Frankly, I think that if my "product" was along the lines of an acceptance of Jesus Christ, I wouldn't want to trivialize it by selling it via the same business model people are using to sell aluminum siding.

The least annoying, by the way, are the realtors. At least, they leave you free memo pads and occasionally a pot holder with their name on it.

I have had Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses at my door and also a few others. Most of them never get far enough to identify their particular cause. You may be pleased to know I never cuss or threaten. I sometimes tell them that my spiritual life is fine and then I see either great disappointment or disbelief on their faces. It's apparently never occurred to some of them — or perhaps they just don't believe — that anyone could survive in this world without their particular religion. News flash: Billions do.

That's one of the things I don't like about most organized religions — the disrespect of other religions. I am also very suspicious of any order that sends its followers out to recruit and raise money. I'd be more impressed if they sent out their followers to help people in actual need and without proselytizing.

I'm afraid I don't see a whole heap o' difference between asking for donations and saying you accept them. I also don't see much difference between (a) telling people they're going to hell if they don't sign up or (b) warning them that they'd better enlist because Armageddon is coming soon to a planet near you.

You can mock me when it really occurs but I do not believe Armageddon is approaching…or if it is, that the people so prophesizing have any sort of inside track as to when. I think it's just something that religions have learned to say for the same reason that companies that sell Home Security Systems try to convince you that the burglary of your house is inevitable and imminent. The key difference is that some homes do get robbed, whereas the world does not end, no matter how often we are told it's about to.

You say they're good people. I don't doubt that most are and for me, that's part of the problem. It's much easier to slam the door on not-good people. I am less certain that the folks who send them out to go door-to-door are good people.

Johnny, I am not questioning your sincerity or good intentions. But the folks who come to my door on missions are questioning — actually, doubting — that I could possibly have my life and head together without what's in their pamphlets and books.

Three days ago at about this time, a band of them — all dressed as if attending an upper-scale church, of course — rang my bell about this time of day and forced me to trek needlessly downstairs on a knee that's full of cortizone and short on meniscus. The lead pitchman started in asking me if I'd accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I interrupted to tell him he wasn't selling Jesus Christ; he was selling his organization's particular marketing of that esteemed figure.

I live in a pretty nice neighborhood but for some reason, we have homeless people sleeping in nearby alleys. They're not hard to find. You just look for the shopping cart full of discards covered with old trash bags and a homeless person is usually sleeping right next to it. I asked the gent on my doorstep why he didn't go try to "save" that guy…because that guy's in a helluva lot more trouble than I am or will probably ever be. Every day is a potential Armageddon for that guy.

My visitor stopped and stammered and didn't know what to say…because I'd knocked him off his memorized speech and he was used to letting it do his thinking for him. So I gave him the answer: "It's because homeless people don't have any money to give you."

Now, I remember you as a bright guy and I'll bet you'd have had an answer. And I'll further bet that some of the doors you knock on are opened by people who are not unhappy to see you…maybe even some who buy what you're selling. The kids pushing the overpriced, bogus magazine subscriptions make a sale every now and then, too.

I used to be much nicer to these people. I thought it would be rude not to listen to the whole dog 'n' pony show before I told them I wasn't interested. Now I figure I'm doing them a favor to cut them off and let them get on to the next house because they absolutely, positively ain't going to make a sale at mine. The reason some (as you say) cuss at you and threaten deadly violence is because though from your point of view, you just bothered them the one time…from their point of view in their neighborhoods, it's an endless parade of salespeople who drag them away from more important matters. Going door-to-door is an ignoble, pestering way to sell what are sometimes scams and sales campaigns that, like those e-mails that tell you you've won millions, hope to luck into the really gullible and desperate. I don't think it speaks well of any cause — again, including political ones I otherwise support — that it chooses to go this route.

As I was typing the last sentence of the above paragraph, my doorbell rang and I thought, "Oh boy! I have a great finish for this piece! I can limp downstairs in pain, have a blunt exchange with some annoying religion vendors, then limp back up here and write how they inconvenienced me. As it turns out, it was my gardener wanting to be paid. But if I'd written this three days ago at this time, I would have had the perfect closer. That's another annoying thing about door-to-door salespeople: They always seem to show up at the most inconvenient moments.

Somewhat along the lines of my last post, the other day a reader sent me an amusing list of questions about privacy and fundamental physics.  The questions, and my answers, are below.

1. Does the universe provide us with a minimum level of information security?

I’m not sure what the question means. Yes, there are various types of information security that are rooted in the known laws of physics—some of them (like quantum key distribution) even relying on specific aspects of quantum physics—whose security one can argue for by appealing to the known properties of the physical world. Crucially, however, any information security protocol is only as good as the assumptions it rests on: for example, that the attacker can’t violate the attack model by, say, breaking into your house with an ax!

2. For example, is my information safe from entities outside the light-cone I project?

Yes, I think it’s safe to assume that your information is safe from any entities outside your future light-cone. Indeed, if information is not in your future light-cone, then almost by definition, you had no role in creating it, so in what sense should it be called “yours”?

3. Assume that there are distant alien cultures with infinite life spans – would they always be able to wait long enough for my light cone to spread to them, and then have a chance of detecting my “private” information?

First of all, the aliens would need to be in your future light-cone (see my answer to 2). In 1998, it was discovered that there’s a ‘dark energy’ pushing the galaxies apart at an exponentially-increasing rate. Assuming the dark energy remains there at its current density, galaxies that are far enough away from us (more than a few tens of billions of light-years) will always recede from us faster than the speed of light, meaning that they’ll remain outside our future light-cone, and signals from us can never reach them. So, at least you’re safe from those aliens!

For the aliens in your future light-cone, the question is subtler. Suppose you took the only piece of paper on which your secrets were written, and burned it to ash—nothing high-tech, just burned it. Then there’s no technology that we know today, or could even seriously envision, that would piece the secrets together. It would be like unscrambling an egg, or bringing back the dead from decomposing corpses, or undoing a quantum measurement. It would mean, effectively, reversing the Arrow of Time in the relevant part of the universe. This is formally allowed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, since the decrease in entropy within that region could be balanced by an increase in entropy elsewhere, but it would require a staggering level of control over the region’s degrees of freedom.

On the other hand, it’s also true that the microscopic laws of physics are reversible: they never destroy information. And for that reason, as a matter of principle, we can’t rule out the possibility that some civilization of the very far future, whether human or alien, could piece together what was written on your paper even after you’d burned it to a crisp. Indeed, with such godlike knowledge and control, maybe they could even reconstruct the past states of your brain, and thereby piece together private thoughts that you’d never written anywhere!

4. Does living in a black hole provide privacy? Couldn’t they follow you into the hole?

No, I would not recommend jumping into a black hole as a way to ensure your privacy. For one thing, you won’t get to enjoy the privacy for long (a couple hours, maybe, for a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy?) before getting spaghettified on your way to the singularity. For another, as you correctly pointed out, other people could still snoop on you by jumping into the black hole themselves—although they’d have to want badly enough to learn your secrets that they wouldn’t mind dying themselves along with you, and also not being able to share whatever they learned with anyone outside the hole.

But a third problem is that even inside a black hole, your secrets might not be safe forever! Since the 1970s, it’s been thought that all information dropped into a black hole eventually comes out, in extremely-scrambled form, in the Hawking radiation that black holes produce as they slowly shrink and evaporate. What do I mean by “slowly”? Well, the evaporation would take about 10⁷⁰ years for a black hole the mass of the sun, or about 10¹⁰⁰ years for the black holes at the centers of galaxies. Furthermore, even after the black hole had evaporated, piecing together the infalling secrets from the Hawking radiation would probably make reconstructing what was on the burned paper from the smoke and ash seem trivial by comparison! But just like in the case of the burned paper, the information is still formally present (if current ideas about quantum gravity are correct), so one can’t rule out that it could be reconstructed by some civilization of the extremely remote future.

I don’t wanna be a burden on nobody. Here these things are if you want to read them.

1. It drives me near madhouse when someone says they have lived a life without regrets. It’s a good thing to keep moving and all, and we all like that song by the pretty little French dame, but if you can really say you have no regrets you’ve gone through life without paying any attention. Pay attention, you lick.

2. Three things that make me despair for all humanity: the way people drive, the way people carry on around money, and Laundromats. Three things that make me have hope for all humanity: good parents, people who are straight up in love, and the banjo.

3. We crossed a dangerous line when we started asking athletes what they think about things.

4. I sure do like me a good soda pop. Hats off to you Mr. John Stith Pemberton.

5. Similarly I enjoy drinking alcohol. Once I was a beer snob but that shit catches up to you in terms of efficiency and heaviness so I have since moved on to hard liquor. There is no fucking around with that content. I cannot drink wine because it makes me feel like bringing up a burrito, but you sit me someplace where I can get some whiskey or a good martini and you will find me a loyal friend.

6. Once, I wrote down what I thought were the five dominant themes in the kind of fiction I enjoyed writing as well as that I enjoyed reading. I can only remember two of them, which are “the uses of violence” and “the impossibility of perfection”.

7. It’s very easy to get me to want to go someplace if it can be described well in prose. I’ve moved to at least two places just because I liked the way someone set it forth to me in print, and almost moved to one more. I don’t even particularly cotton to Los Angeles, but I still occasionally find myself wanting to go there just because of one Mr. Raymond Chandler.

8. Women sure are pretty to me. Sometimes I think they will never stop being so.

9. I have affection for both dogs and cats. I would not kick either one of them off of my living room rug. But more and more I think I like cats better, on account of they will be very affectionate to you when the mood strikes them but on the whole, they are all well fuck you then, I’ll see you at dinner which you better have ready on time or I am going to so turn my bitch lights on you. A dog meanwhile, a dog you have to always ask, well what more do you want from me?

10. I don’t think I am going to live forever. This has allowed me to do all kinds of hurtful things to myself like drinking, pills, and eating far too many steak meals.

11. When asked to compile a list of 25 interesting things about myself, I can be counted on to take a restlessly ridiculous approach to the task.

12. Here is something I read somewhere that turned out to be pretty wise: a reasonably intelligent person can look at any decent piece of contemporary art, a movie or TV show or novel or what have you, and seriously consider having created it themselves.

13. Here is something else I read somewhere that turned out to be pretty wise: smoking a cigareet gives you something to do with your hands.

14. There is at least one thing in my apartment that could get me sent to prison. Maybe more, depending on where I’m writing this.

15. I am somewhat proud of my ability not to take disagreements over culture personally.

16. I didn’t get my first tattoo until I was 30 (I have nine now). I didn’t grow my first beard until I was 39. I didn’t get high on zoot until I was 25.

17. I ain’t really into the whole idea of foisting off the various fucked-upperies of one’s life on your parents, but I have a lot of theories about how family shit can really put the zap on your head. Most of these theories are stupid.

18. Contradictions: I am pretty heavy into the idea of animal rights, but I love to eat meat. I don’t like drunks, but I like getting drunk. I hate gun owners, but I love guns. I love to watch and play sports, but I generally hate sports fans. I hate what car culture has done to our country and our environment, but boy do I love to drive.

19. I spend a lot of time inside my own head, making up a world that’s different than the one I live in. Not better – just different. One way or another, I’m going to be someone’s God.

20. The whole self-loathing tip I’ve been on most of my life, I know that’s not much of a tip and it only makes you more of a schmuck in the eyes of them that matters. I try not to make that my tip so much any more. But I do say this: there are them that are going to their grave thinking that they’re good people when they’ve been spending their whole lives acting otherwise. My only goal in life is to not be one of those people.

21. When I was a kid, my dream was to be a sitcom writer. Come to think of it, that’s still my dream.

22. The first computer I ever had was a Texas Instruments that hooked up to the tee vee. I also had a Commodore 64, and an Apple IIc, and one of the very first Macs. And after all that, what’s the most I ever learned how to do on a computer? You’re lookin’ at it, sporto.

23. I spent my prom night sitting in the back of a truck with a guy named Schmidtsky getting drunk on bad beers and chucking the empties at all the kids who were happier than I was. That’s a metaphor right there.

24. I used to play pretty good baseball. In college I struck out a future All-Star on four pitches.

25. All told what am I good for? Not a lot but sometimes people miss me when I’m gone, and I tend to have a pretty good line on somebody when they’re shitheadin’. Worse can be said.

26. The wisest thing I ever learned from the Joker is that if you’re good at something, you should never do it for free. The second-wisest is that you should kill people with knives.

27. I was gonna go into my normal screed about how much I hate it that everyone thinks writing is easy, and that anyone can be a writer, but I realize it just makes me sound bitter and cranky. I’ll leave it at this: most people who call themselves writers are bad and they should stop.

28. I remembered one of the other Big Themes I am generally obsessed with in writing: the Futility of Human Desires. For someone who writes a lot of humor, I can be kind of a downer, apparently. Then again, these themes can all be funny as hell, because what’s funnier than someone not getting what they want?

29. I have an uncanny ability to say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. Once, for example, I walked into one of my high school classes, and everyone was looking really mopey and blue, and I said “Jeez, who died?” It turns out one of our classmates had drowned over the weekend.

30. I’ve never really gotten to the point where I’d actually attempt suicide, but I think about it all the time. I honestly don’t think it’s that big a deal, and if there’s something I’ll never understand, it’s why people get mad at people who kill themselves.

31. Speaking of suicide, once I was really depressed. Mostly it was over a girl (of course), but there was a bunch of other stuff circulating in my dome at the time as well. And I wasn’t suicidal in a put-a-gun-in-my-mouth sense, but I was thinking about snuffing it more than usual. And the thing that saved my life was listening to “Hey Swifty” by the Ass Ponys. I can talk about this at incredibly tedious length if prompted.

32. The biggest regret that I have that doesn’t involve not being a fucking heel to people I cared about is that I never learned how to draw. It’s especially frustrating, given my love of comics, and it drives me just about batso that most of the people I know who are good artists are also good writers. Motherfuckers.

33. I have been shot at twice, stabbed once, and beaten up a handful of times. I’ve been arrested nine times and served one hitch in county jail. I have dealt drugs, sold weapons, and attacked someone for money. Pretty much not a day goes by that I’m not committing some crime or another. And yet I think I’d be a pretty lousy professional criminal.

34. I’ve had money and I’ve been poor, but no matter what my financial situation, but I still carry with me a poor person’s distrust of institutions. I have a real hard time getting comfortable with banks, doctors, schools, and cops.

35. Speaking of cops, once a cop beat me up when I didn’t deserve it. Another time, a cop in the same city didn’t beat me up when I did deserve it. That’s humanity for you.

36. I’m a lot less fucked up about money than I used to be, but I’m still pretty neurotic about it. It’s the thing I’m most ashamed of.

37. I don’t seem to have a specific physical type when it comes to women I’ve dated, or even women I’m attracted to. I don’t say this is admirable, just apparently sort of unusual. Fucking women, man, they’re all pretty, right?

38. On the other hand, I do seem to have a thing for women who are, were, or will eventually be, lesbians. This probably says something horrible about me.

39. I have met three Presidents of the United States, including our current one. I have met one Vice-President.

40. Here’s another roaring annoyance: when people say critics are just people who can’t do art themselves. Even if it were not obvious to anyone who isn’t a total jackass that criticism is an artform in itself, haven’t enough great artists come from the ranks of critics by now to put the lie to this ridiculous notion?

41. If you ask most guys what character from The Office they are, most of them will say Jim, or Dwight, or maybe Creed. I, on the other hand, am more of a heterosexual Oscar.

42. I am good at flirting over instant messenger. I am bad at flirting in person, because I am a fat awkward drunk. Obviously this means I should only date computer-generated chat bots.

43. I wish I was on a road trip right now.

44. Among the theories about family that I believe despite the fact that it’s probably a really stupid theory is that it’s almost impossible for someone who grew up without brothers or sisters to relate to someone who grew up with them, and vice versa.

45. Doing something that you think will impact the future, that might still mean something after you’re dead, is an act so simultaneously optimistic and audacious that it’s probably insane. I’m glad I know a lot of people who are like that.

46. I have been to 19 of the 20 largest cities in the United States, and lived in five of them.  But I have never been to New York City.

47. I have the opposite of the tendency to talk shit about people behind their back. I love to shit-talk people to their faces. Conversely, I always seem to say really nice things about people when I know I’m in circumstances where they’ll never hear about it.

48. There are two main things that keep me from becoming a Unabomer-style hermit, and they are hot showers and cold ice. This is a ghastly thing to admit in these days of environmental peril but sometimes I take half-hour-long showers that don’t have anything to do with hygiene; I just like standing under hot water.  And sitting in the shower is all that I dreamed it would be and more.

49. Something that’s become clear to me in recent years that I wish more writers would realize: the more a character resembles yourself, the less interesting and believable that character is. If you were all that interesting, you wouldn’t need to be a writer. Of course, every character you create is in some way a part of you, but the real strength of the great authors is to access those parts of themselves that they recognize the least.

50. I can’t do a goddamn single one of these more.

I am not religious, and I never will be. But, just as I have been shown grace and kindness by Christians and Jews whose faith I cannot share, I have had the privilege of knowing a number of Muslims whose beliefs inspire me even though I will never follow them myself.

Of all the pernicious, slanderous nonsense that has emerged in the last two decades, perhaps the most harmful is the notion that Muslims are “silent” on the issue of Islamist terrorism.  It is a myth that has persisted since long before the terror attacks of 9/11, but it is since then that they have gained their greatest traction; it is commonly believed by many Americans that no Muslims have ever repudiated or condemned the terror attacks of 9/11. This is ludicrous. Hundreds, thousands of Muslims have spoken out in sympathy for the victims and against the perpetrators, beginning the very day of the attacks, and anyone claiming otherwise is deliberately ignorant and bigoted.

Not only are Muslims the greatest victims of Islamist terror — far, far more Muslims have died at the hands of their co-religionists than “infidels” — but they are also the greatest opponents of it.  While the West tends to react to Islamist terror only with violence, it falls to Muslims themselves to approach it from the inside, with reform, with scripture, with secularization, and with every other tool at their disposal, including, yes, vehement and absolute condemnation.  Yet after every attack by murderous gangs flying the colors of Allah — after 9/11, after the attacks in Spain and London and Mumbai, after Boston and Nigeria and the Levant, after every atrocity by al-Q’aeda and Boko Haram and ISIS, every follower of Islam gets the stink-eye, and the demand that they vocally and cringingly set themselves apart from the killers.  Meanwhile, no Christian is expected to apologize for the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army; no right-winger is taken to task for the heinous deeds of Andres Breivik; no atheist must do penance for the oppressions of Stalin; no Buddhist is held responsible for the hundreds of killings committed in Burma over the last few years by Ashin Wirathu’s 969 Movement.

Some of this can be attributed to the fact that Islam does not have an absolute, heirarchical church structure; it has no Pope with unconditional authority to define the contours of the faith.  But much of it is nothing but bigotry, hatred and resentment.  The following are only a few of the absolute condemnations of terror made by high-ranking officials and adherents to the Muslim faith only days after the 9/11 attacks; hundreds, even thousands more can be found after every terror attack involving Islamist fanatics with even a cursory search of the internet. It serves no one and accomplishes nothing to demonize a billion people over the violent insanity of a handful of fanatics.

***

“These attacks are against both divine and human laws, and we condemn them in the strongest terms. The Muslim Americans join the nation in calling for swift apprehension and stiff punishment of the perpetrators, and offer our sympathies to the victims and their families.” — Dr. Agha Saeed, national chair of America’s Muslim Alliance, 09/11/2001

“We condemn in the strongest terms possible what are apparently vicious and cowardly acts of terrorism against innocent civilians. We join with all Canadians in calling for the swift apprehension and punishment of the perpetrators. No political cause could ever be assisted by such immoral acts.” — Syed Mumtaz Ali, president of Canada’s Society of Muslims, 09/12/2001

“Following the bloody attacks against major buildings and installations in the United States yesterday, I am shocked and deeply saddened. These attacks led to the death and injury of a very large number of innocent American citizens. I denounce and condemn these criminal and brutal acts that run counter to all covenants, humanitarian values and divine religions.” — Dr. Abdelouqhed Belkeziz, Secretary-General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 09/12/2001

“Our hearts bleed for the attacks that have targeted the World Trade Center, as well as well as other institutions in the United States. Despite our strong oppositions to America’s biased policy towards Israel on the military, political and economic fronts, Islam, the religion of tolerance, holds the human soul in high esteem, and considers an attack against innocent human beings a grave sin.” — Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, chairman of Qatar’s Sunna and Sira Council, 09/13/2001

“God Almighty, the master of all rulers, has prohibited injustice among humans. Aggression against those who have committed no crime, and the killing of innocent people, are matters that Islamic sharia has dealt with: these are not permissible even during wars and invasions. Killing the weak, infants, women and the elderly, and destroying property, are considered serious crimes in Islam…Viewing on the TV networks what happened to the Twin Towers was like watching Doomsday.  Those who commit such crimes are the worst of people…Aggression, injustice and gloating over the kind of crime that we have seen are totally unacceptable, and forbidden in Islam. God Almighty says: ‘And let not the enmity and hatred of others make you avoid justice. Be just; that is nearer to piety.’ Inflicting a collective punishment is considered by Islam as despicable aggression and perversion. Killing innocent people is by itself a grave crime, quite apart from terrorizing and committing crimes against infants and women. Such acts do no honor to he who commits them, even if he claims to be a Muslim.  I would like to reiterate that Islam rejects such acts, since it forbids killing of civilians even during times of war, especially if they are not part of the fighting. A religion that views people of the world in such a way cannot in any sense condone such condone such criminal acts, which require that their perpetrators and those who support them are held accountable. As a human community, we have to be vigilant and careful to preempt these evils.  Muslims have to deal in good faith with those who live beside them in all societies, since Islam does not discriminate between humans: for they are all brothers. This barbaric act is not justified by any sane mindset, or any logic; nor by the religion of Islam. This act is pernicious and shameless and evil in the extreme. I pray to God to guide the devious to the path of righteousness, and to protect us from all evils and from our own bad deeds, and to be gracious to us.” — Sheikh Salih bin-Muhammad al-Luheidan, Chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council of Saudi Arabia, 09/14/2001

“Attacking innocent people is not courageous. It is stupid, and will be punished on the day of judgment. It’s not courageous to attack innocent children, women and civilians. It is courageous to protect freedom.”– Sheikh Mohammed Sayyid al-Tantawi, imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque, 09/14/2001

“The undersigned, leaders of Islamic movements, are horrified by the events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 in the United States, which resulted in massive killing, destruction, and attack on innocent lives. We express our deepest sympathies and sorrow. We condemn in the strongest terms the incidents, which are against all human and Islamic norms. This is grounded in the noble laws of Islam, which forbid all forms of attacks on innocents.” — A list of forty Muslim scholars and politicians, beginning with Mustafa Mashhur, general guide of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 09/14/2001

“The recent developments in the United States, including hijacking planes, terrorizing innocent people, and shedding blood, constitute a form of injustice that cannot be tolerated by Islam, which views them as gross crimes and sinful acts. Any Muslim who is aware of the teachings of his religion and who adheres to the directives of the Holy Quran and the sunnah will never involve himself in such acts, because they will invoke the anger of God Almighty and lead to harm and corruption on Earth.” — Abdulaziz bin-Abdallah al-Ashaykh, chief mufti of Saudi Arabia, 09/15/2001

“Religious zealots of any creed are defeated people who lash out in desperation, and they often do horrific things. And if these people indeed are Arabs, Muslims, they’re obviously very sick people, and I can’t even look at it in religious terms. It’s politics – tragic politics. There’s no Islamic justification for any of it. You can’t kill innocent people…the prophet Muhammad said ‘Do not kill women or children, or non-combatants, and do not kill old people or religious people’, and he mentioned priests, nuns and rabbis…no one can grant these attackers any legitimacy. It was evil.” — Hamza Yusuf, American Muslim leader, 09/15/2001

“The Arab League shares with the people and government of the United States the feelings of revulsion, horror and shock over the terrorist attacks that ripped through the World Trade Center and Pentagon, inflicting heavy damage and killing and wounding thousands of many nationalities. These terrorist crimes are viewed by the League as…deserving of all condemnation. Divergence of views between the Arabs and the United States over the latter’s foreign policy on the Middle East crisis does in no way adversely affect the common Arab attitude of compassion with the people of the United States at such moments of facing the menace and ruthlessness of international terrorism. It is indeed tormenting that any country or people or city anywhere in the world be the scene of such disastrous attacks. “ —  Statement of the Arab League, 09/17/2001

“The sudden barbaric attack on innocent citizens living in peace is extremely distressing and deplorable. Every gentle human heart goes out to the victims of this attack, and as humans, we are ashamed at the barbarism perpetrated by a few people. Islam, which is a religion of peace and tolerance, condemns this act and sees this as a wounding scar on the face of humanity. I appeal to Muslims to strongly condemn this act, express unity with the victims’ relatives, donate blood and money, and do whatever it takes to help the affected people.” — Sheikh Muhammad Yusuf Islahi, Pakistani-American Muslim leader, 09/18/2001

“We are horrified by the attack on the Twin Towers and express condolences and sadness for all the victims and their families. We strongly condemn such activities, which are against all humanist and Islamic morals. We condemn and oppose all aggression on human life, freedom and dignity anywhere in the world.” — Official statement of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 09/19/2001

“The people who attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and hijacked the fourth plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, are criminals who deserve the severest punishment the Quran elaborates. They are murderers and terrorists.” — Sheikh Muhammad Ali al-Hanooti, Palestinian-American mufti, 09/20/2001

“Any human being, regardless of his ethnic and religious origin, must never think of carrying out such a violent, evil attack. Whatever his purpose is, this action cannot be justified or tolerated.” — Mehmet Nuri Yilmaz, head of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, 09/21/2001

“It’s wrong to kill innocent people. It’s also wrong to praise those who kill innocent people.” —  Nizamuddin Shamzai, head mufti at Pakistan’s Jamiat-ul-Uloom-ul-Islamia seminary, 09/28/2001

“What happened on September 11th in New York and Washington, DC will forever remain a horrible scar on the history of Islam and humanity…if anywhere in your hearts there is any sympathy or understanding with those who committed this act, I invite you to ask yourself this question: would Muhammad sanction such an act? While encouraging Muslims to struggle against injustice, Allah also imposes strict rules of engagement. He says in unequivocal terms that to kill an innocent being is like killing humanity entire.” — Muqtedar Khan, professor of political science at Michigan’s Adrian College, 10/05/2001

“We strongly condemn the brutal terror acts that befell the United States, caused huge losses in human lives from various nationalities, and wreaked tremendous destruction and damage in New York and Washington. We further reaffirm that these terror acts ran counter to the teachings of the divine religions as well as ethical and human values, stress the necessity of tracking down the perpetrators of these acts in the light of the results of investigations and bringing them to justice to inflict on them the penalty they deserve, and underscore our support of these efforts. In this respect, we express our condolences to and sympathy with the people and government of the United States and the families of the victims in these mournful and tragic circumstances.” — Statement of the Organization of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers, 10/10/2001

“All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorize the innocents and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason. Islam has declared the spilling of blood and the destruction of property as absolute prohibitions until the day of judgment. It is necessary to apprehend the true perpetrators of these crimes, as well as those who aid and abet them through incitement, financing, or other support. They must be brought to justice in an impartial court of law and punished appropriately. It is a duty of Muslims to participate in this effort with all possible means.” — Fatwa issued by six Islamic scholars in the U.S., Egypt, Syria, and Qatar, led by Sheikh Taha Jabir al-Alwani, 10/11/2001

“Never in Islam’s entire history has the action of so few of its followers caused the religion and its community of believers to be such an abomination in the eyes of others…the nascent democratic movements in Muslim countries will regress for a few decades as ruling autocrats use their participation in the global war against terrorism to terrorize their own critics and dissenters. This is what Mohammed Atta and his fellow terrorists and sponsors have done to Islam and its community worldwide by their murder of innocents at the World Trade Center in New York and the Defense Department in Washington. The attack must be condemned, and the condemnation must be without reservation.” —  Anwar Ibrahim, former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, 10/11/2001

“Such destruction can only be condemned by any Muslim as an unacceptable attack on thousands of innocent people having no relation to American policies. Anyone familiar with Islam has no doubt about its rejection of collective punishment, based on the well-known Quranic principle that no bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another.” — Sheikh Rached Ghannouchi, chairman of Tunisia’s An-Nahda Movement, 10/13/2001

“Bombing embassies or destroying non-military installations like the World Trade Center is no jihad. Those who launched the September 11 terrorist attacks not only killed thousands of innocent people in the United States but also put the lives of millions of Muslims across the world at risk. Bin-Laden is not a prophet, that we should put thousands of lives at risk for him.” — Tahirul Qadri, head of Pakistan’s Awami Tehrik Party, 10/18/2001

“Islam prohibits terrorism as well as suicide. Jihad has no place for taking innocent lives, or one’s own life. No cause, howsoever noble or just, can justify terrorism…no thinking Muslim can go along with the use of securing political goals.” — Syed Shahabuddin, Muslim author in India, 11/01/2001

“Any attack on innocent people is unlawful and contrary to sharia. Muslims must safeguard the lives, honor and property of Christians and Jews. Attacking them contradicts sharia.” — Sheikh Muhammad bin-Abdallah al-Sabil of Saudi Arabia’s Council of Senior Religious Scholars, 12/04/2001

“If these acts of terror indeed have been perpetrated by Muslim radicals or fundamentalists, they have reaped nothing but eternal damnation, shame, and ignominy. For nothing – absolutely nothing – could remotely be advanced as an excuse for these barbaric acts. They represent a total negation of Islamic values, an utter disregard of our tradition, and a slap in the face of the Ummah. They are in total contrast to what Islamic reason, compassion and faith stand for. Even from the more mundane criteria of the common good…these acts are treasonous and suicidal. Islamic faith has been callously and casually sacrificed at the altar of politics, a home-grown politics of parochial causes, primeval passions, self-endorsing piety, and messianic terror.” — Dr. S. Parvez Mansoor, Muslim author in Sweden, 12/10/2001

They had the Digital Democracy debate in Parliament this morning. This link should take you to a transcript for the rest of today, but I’ll need to go to Hansard in the morning to get a permanent link to it. (UPDATE: Here it – hopefully permanently – is) That does show just one of the problems we have with the concept of ‘digital democracy’ and as I said before, I think a lot of the Commission’s proposals, especially around education and participation, are very good and the next Government needs to work to introduce them.

However, all those good ideas flee the room the moment online voting gets discussed. What we get at that point is the MPs doing the equivalent of demanding that everyone gets their own hoverboard by 2020, regardless of what the laws of physics might say about that possibility. If the House of Commons wants to ignore the laws of physics, it damn well should be able to!

Eppur si muove, as they say, and if I had better Latin, or any Latin at all I’d add ‘and yet it’s still not secure’ to all their beliefs that everything will be fine with online voting if we just wish for it hard enough. Robert Halfon gave a speech that was a masterpiece of Parliamentary because-I-wish-it-so nonsense, that in a true online and digital democracy would have been littered with ‘[citation needed]’ markers as he spoke. For instance, in one short paragraph of his speech:

People want new options[citation needed], and it is up to us to provide them with some[dubious claim – why can’t the people generate their own?]. We must not fool ourselves: the decline in voter participation is strongly linked[citation needed] to the fact that new generations interact in different ways[citation needed] and therefore require different ways of appealing to them[citation needed].

He then later goes on to discuss Estonia’s online voting as though no one had pointed out the many many security holes in that system but then, it seems that anyone who wrote to him about voting security was apparently ‘abusive’ and using a ‘farcical argument’ because our current voting system is not perfectly secure. By the same logic, the next time Mr Halfon needs to replace a bucket with a hole in it, I shall recommend he buys a sieve.

Robert Halfon is not alone in suddenly shedding any demands for reasonable evidence in order to embrace the bright shiny precious of online voting. Tom Brake manages it too, telling how a survey on Facebook reached a whole eleven people of which seven were in favour of it, and someone called Andy thinks it can be made secure. There’s your slogan: Online voting – Andy says your vote is safe.

There is a point here, and it’s that MPs need to be sceptical about claims of the proposed benefits of online voting because there are far too many people out there who’ll happily ignore all the flaws in the hope of making large sums of money from it. For an example, see this blog post from Electoral Reform Services (the commercial arm of the Electoral Reform Society) which asserts that online voting, and particularly their version of it that they want to sell to you, is perfectly safe.

It may be that we’re just days away from a breakthrough in security that will make online voting safe, just like physicists might now be putting the final working touches to the gravity-nullifying devices that will make hoverboards a reality. Then again, it might never come, and rushing ahead as though it will definitely come is asking for disaster. When we get tweets like this from MPs:

Agree with @halfon4harlowMP and @Meg_HillierMP a secure means of electronic voting at general (and other) elections must be found by 2020

— margot james (@margotjamesmp) March 10, 2015

I wonder what else they would like to legislate will happen before 2020? If Parliament wants to put serious investment into electronic security (particularly to educating people to keep the computers they’d be voting on free from viruses and malware) then maybe we might get somewhere, or at least the spinoff benefits of improved security systems would benefit us all. If they just want to rush ahead regardless, we’re all in trouble.

What happens if you subtract politics from itself? That might sound like a particularly difficult question from a Taoist political theory exam, but it’s something James Palumbo would like us to discover from the inside. (Yes, that’s Baron Palumbo of Southwark, appointed such for his important contribution to contributions)

Drawing on his experience of starting a business from scratch with only a large family trust fund and eight years experience working in the City behind him, he’s decided that we don’t need to be ruled by politicians any more (people with unelected seats for life in Parliament excepted, obviously). Apparently, based on his personal experience, Government only operates at ’30 per cent efficiency’ because politicians don’t know what they’re doing, and ‘experts’ would run everything better.

(Before you ask, don’t be silly, he doesn’t provide any evidence or quantification for his ’30 per cent efficiency’ idea, or any experts to back this up. You might think that this weakens his argument, but I couldn’t possibly comment.)

Yes, we don’t need democracy any more, because Palumbo’s invented ‘Democracy 2.0′ which would apparently ‘share many of the guiding principles to which our society holds dear’, though I’m not quite sure what they are as principles like choice, voting and the ability to remove a government don’t appear to be in there. Instead, ‘experts’ would run the country, and all of them would supposedly have some sort of qualification that would be mandatory before entering government. (Using qualifications as a barrier to stop people participating in the political process is something that would never be abused, of course)

Once in place, these experts would all then decide what was best for the country and make sure the country got it good and hard without having to rely on such outdated Democracy 1.0 ideas like elections, parliaments or accountability. Being experts, they would all naturally agree on what the country needed – which would be entirely in agreement with what James Palumbo wants – and be able to deliver it. Presumably, they all would be able to raise Palumbo’s perceived 30% efficiency level too using their magical powers of expertness.

From this viewpoint, Democracy 2.0 appears to have a lot in common with Technocracy 1.0 (and bears lots in resemblance with other people’s ‘upgrades’ of democracy) and suffers all the flaws common to technocratic dreams. Ironically, the biggest flaw of most wannabe technocrats is one they accuse democrats of: believing that there is only one way of doing things. It seems that in all his years, Palumbo hasn’t noticed that experts often disagree and there are many different ways to reach your goal, even assuming we can all agree on what the end goal is. You’d think someone in business might have noticed that there are are many different ways of doing things, or perhaps Palumbo thinks all clubs and record labels are run exactly like the Ministry of Sound. After all, I’m sure business experts agree there’s only one way to run a business, don’t they?

I’ve discussed this before, but Palumbo isn’t alone in his believe that democracy could be ‘improved’ by somehow removing all the democratic aspects from it. (For more on this concept, read Colin Crouch’s Post-Democracy) Indeed, I suspect that if we get an inconclusive election result in May, we’ll likely hear calls for it increasing in volume and frequency, and it’s already an undertone in some of the calls for a grand coalition.

I have a rule that whenever someone says ‘let’s take the politics out of this’, what they’re really saying is nothing more than ‘let’s all agree with me’. Proposing to take politics out of politics is nothing more than James Palumbo believing he’s right about everything, and any potential impediments to the people being exposed to the full benefits of his rightness must be swept away. It’s an incredibly illiberal and undemocratic position for a supposedly Liberal Democrat peer to take, but I’m sure anyone calling for the party to take action over it will find themselves denounced as being illiberal and undemocratic. Maybe we’ll need to call in an expert to decide it.

From Paperback Writer:

Ten Things You Should Probably Avoid Putting in Your Ad for a Ghost Writer
(all quotations found in actual Craigslist writing job ads)

“I will pay you in money and other valuable considerations.”

Just to be upfront about it, I’m not taking any more chickens in trade.

. . . .

“This is a pay per job position and you can do it from home or you can come sit on my coiuch with your laptop, doesn’t matter to me, as long as the work gets done and done right.”

Right as in . . . spelling the word couch, for example?

“You really have to get it done pretty quickly, because otherwise it’s too expensive.”

You really have to wait until you can actually afford to hire me.

. . . .

“The more views your articles get, the more you get paid.”

Let me reinterpret this one: The more views your articles get, the more we get paid — not that we’ll ever tell you how much that is, btw. You, we might toss a couple extra pennies. Maybe. If we’re feeling generous that day.

Link to the rest at Paperback Writer and thanks to Nicola for the tip.

This morning, there’ll be a Parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall on the report of the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy.

Overall, it’s a good report which you can see here. It proposes some interesting and useful new ideas for opening up Parliament and giving people new channels to get involved and be informed, while generally not running away with itself and succumbing to the techno-evangelism that has people proclaiming that the internet will solve all our problems.

However – you knew there’d be a however, didn’t you? – it drops the ball when it comes to online voting. Not quite as badly as the ‘Viral Voting’ report last week did, but it has a very worrying approach to security in its conclusions. Yet again, there’s an expectation that security problems don’t have to be bad if we want to pretend that they’re not bad, rather than facing them head on.

The section in question is here. The Commissioners deserve credit for speaking to the Open Rights Group and including their comments in the report which sums up the problems very well:

“Voting is a uniquely difficult question for computer science: the system must verify your eligibility to vote; know whether you have already voted; and allow for audits and recounts. Yet it must always preserve your anonymity and privacy. Currently, there are no practical solutions to this highly complex problem and existing systems are unacceptably flawed.”

Unfortunately, when faced with the fact that “there are no practical solutions to this highly complex problem”, the Commissioners don’t then adopt the sensible position that efforts need to be made to try and solve that problem before any real deployment of online voting can begin. Instead, they talk about how ‘the concerns about security must be overcome’. Not the issues or the fundamental problems, just the concerns. They then go on to recommend that ‘in the 2020 general election, secure online voting should be an option for all voters.’ And they can all be given a jetpack or a hoverboard as a reward for voting, I expect.

Yet again, the cart is being placed several miles ahead of the horse. Trying to push for implementation of an idea by a certain date in the hope that fundamental problems can be solved by then is asking for trouble, and for a system to be rolled out (probably alongside a massive PR campaign to assure that it’s perfectly safe) that’s riddled with security issues. I understand the appeal of online voting, and I understand the appeal it has for politicians who want to be seen to be engaging with technology, but engaging with technology means understanding it, and understanding it means accepting that security is a fundamental issue not a peripheral concern.

If you really want secure online voting to happen, then you’ll need to spend a lot of money and time developing a secure system, in the same way our current voting system evolved over time in response to security challenges. Rushing something through to meet an arbitrarily imposed deadline is always going to see security being compromised, and that’s an attitude we shouldn’t accept when our entire democracy is at stake.