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January 13th, 2015: I got a lot of emails asking to turn this comic into a t-shirt!  And I was like, man, there's a lot of different ways that could be done!  So I made THREE DIFFERENT VERSIONS, and for THIS WEEK ONLY, you can get them all! Right here. But the catch is they're all competing to become the REAL shirt, and you've only got seven days to get the one you want! – Ryan

While freedom of speech should, without exception, always be upheld and fought for, it was complicated in 1970s Scarfolk.

Take, for example, the case of the multinational New State Corporation, which converted decommissioned army personnel with psychological problems into soft toys that taught feral and left-wing children about Jesus. When two employees, Ed Manning and Julien Snowden exercised their freedom of speech to expose the company's illegal use of black magick (and candy floss) in the conversion process they soon found themselves in prison awaiting trial.

The problem was that there were so many (and sometimes contradictory) exceptions to freedom of speech that it was only practically possible to exercise it if you were a) very wealthy or b) the government had a vested political interest in what you were saying and were willing to endorse you, or c) you said what you had to say, then hid where no one could find you.

In addition to the help and guidelines offered in the 1975 leaflet above, the council also strongly recommended exercising one's freedom of speech in one's own head and not saying it out loud. A council spokesman said:
 "Everyone verbally exercising their freedom of speech at the same time not only contravenes a noise pollution bylaw, but also makes it difficult for our many council stenographers who are trying to illicitly record what everyone is saying".

Within the last couple months, there was a major milestone in the quest to build a scalable quantum computer, and also a major milestone in the quest to figure out what you would do with a quantum computer if you had one.  As I’ve admitted many times, neither of those two quests is really the reason why I got into quantum computing—I’m one of the people who would still want to study this field, even if there were no serious prospect either of building a quantum computer or of doing anything useful with it for a thousand years—but for some reason that I don’t fully understand, both of those goals do seem to excite other people.

So, OK, the experimental breakthrough was the Martinis group’s use of quantum error-correction with superconducting qubits, to preserve a logical bit for several times longer than the underlying physical qubits survived for.  Shortly before this came out, I heard Krysta Svore give a talk at Yale in which she argued that preserving a logical qubit for longer than the physical qubits was the next experimental milestone (the fourth, out of seven she listed) along the way to a scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computer.  Well, it looks like that milestone may have been crossed.  (update: I’ve since learned from Graeme Smith, in the comments section, that the milestone crossed should really be considered the “3.5th,” since even though quantum error-correction was used, the information that was being protected was classical.  I also learned from commenter Jacob that the seven milestones Krysta listed came from a Science paper by Schoelkopf and Devorret.  She cited the paper; the forgetfulness was entirely mine.)

In more detail, the Martinis group used a linear array of 9 qubits: 5 data qubits interleaved with 4 measurement qubits. The authors describe this setup as a “precursor” to Kitaev’s surface code (which would involve a 2-dimensional array).  They report that, after 8 cycles of error detection and correction, they were able to suppress the effective error rate compared to the physical qubits by a factor of 8.5.  They also use quantum state tomography to verify that their qubits were indeed in entangled states as they did this.

Of course, this is not yet a demonstration of any nontrivial fault-tolerant computation, let alone of scaling such a computation up to where it’s hard to simulate with a classical computer.  But it pretty clearly lies along the “critical path” to that.

As I blogged back in September, Google recently hired Martinis’s group away from UC Santa Barbara, where they’ll work on superconducting quantum annealing, as a step along the way to full universal QC.  As I mentioned then, the Martinis group’s “Xmon” qubits have maybe 10,000 times the coherence times of D-Wave’s qubits, at least when you measure coherence in the usual ways.  The fact that Martinis et al. are carefully doing quantum state tomography and demonstrating beneficial error-correction before scaling up are further indications of the differences between their approach and D-Wave’s.  Of course, even if you do everything right, there’s still no guarantee that you’ll outperform a classical computer anytime soon: it might simply be that the things you can do in the near future (e.g., quantum annealing for NP-complete problems) are not things where you’re going to outperform the best classical algorithms.  But it’s certainly worth watching closely.

Meanwhile, the quantum algorithms breakthrough came in a paper last month by an extremely well-known trio down the Infinite Corridor from me: Farhi, Goldstone, and Gutmann.  In slightly earlier work, Farhi et al. proposed a new quantum algorithm for NP-hard optimization problems.  Their algorithm badly needs a name; right now they’re just calling it the “QAOA,” or Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm.  But here’s what you need to know: their new algorithm is different from their famous adiabatic algorithm, although it does become equivalent to the adiabatic algorithm in a certain infinite limit.  Rather than staying in the ground state of some Hamiltonian, the QAOA simply

1. starts with a uniform superposition over all n-bit strings,
2. applies a set of unitary transformations, one for each variable and constraint of the NP-hard instance,
3. repeats the set some number of times p (the case p=1 is already interesting), and then
4. measures the state in the computational basis to see what solution was obtained.

The unitary transformations have adjustable real parameters, and a big part of the game is figuring out how to set the parameters to get a good solution.

The original, hyper-ambitious goal of the QAOA was to solve the Unique Games problem in quantum polynomial time—thereby disproving the Unique Games Conjecture (which I previously blogged about here), unless NP⊆BQP.  It hasn’t yet succeeded at that goal.  In their earlier work, Farhi et al. managed to show that the QAOA solves the MAX-CUT problem on 3-regular graphs with approximation ratio 0.6924, which is better than random guessing, but not as good as the best-known classical algorithms (Goemans-Williamson, or for the degree-3 case, Halperin-Livnat-Zwick), let alone better than those algorithms (which is what would be needed to refute the UGC).

In their new work, Farhi et al. apply the QAOA to a different problem: the poetically-named MAX E3LIN2.  Here you’re given a collection of linear equations mod 2 in n Boolean variables, where each equation involves exactly 3 variables, and each variable appears in at most D equations.  The goal is to satisfy as many of the equations as possible, assuming that they’re not all satisfiable (if they were then the problem would be trivial).  If you just guess a solution randomly, you’ll satisfy a 1/2 fraction of the equations.  Håstad gave a polynomial-time classical algorithm that satisfies a 1/2+c/D fraction of the maximum number of satisfiable equations, for some constant c.  This remains the best approximation ratio that we know how to achieve classically.  Meanwhile, Trevisan showed that if there’s a polynomial-time classical algorithm that satisfies a 1/2+c/√D fraction of the max number of satisfiable equations, for a sufficiently large constant c, then P=NP.

OK, so what do Farhi et al. do?  They show that the QAOA, with suitably tuned parameters, is able to satisfy a 1/2+c/D^3/4 fraction of the total number of equations in polynomial time, for some constant c.  (In particular, this implies that a 1/2+c/D^3/4 fraction of the equations are satisfiable—assuming, as Farhi et al. do, that two equations directly contradicting each other, like x+y+z=0 and x+y+z=1, never appear in the same instance.)

Now, the above is a bigger fraction than the best-known classical algorithm satisfies!  (And not only that, but here the fraction is of the total number of equations, rather than the number of satisfiable equations.)  Farhi et al. also show that, if the constraint hypergraph doesn’t contain any small cycles, then QAOA can satisfy a 1/2+c/√D fraction of the equations in polynomial time, which is essentially the best possible unless NP⊆BQP.

The importance of this result is not that anyone cares about the MAX E3LIN2 problem for its own sake.  Rather it’s that, as far as I know, this is the first time that a quantum algorithm has been proved to achieve a better approximation ratio for a natural NP-hard optimization problem than the best known classical algorithm achieves.  People have discussed that as a hypothetical possibility for 20 years, but (again, unless I’m missing something) we never had a good example until now.  The big question now is whether the 1/2+c/D^3/4 performance can be matched classically, or whether there truly is an NP-intermediate region of this optimization problem where quantum outperforms classical.  (The third possibility, that doing as well as the quantum algorithm is already NP-hard, is one that I won’t even speculate about.  For, as Boaz Barak rightly points out in the comments section, the quantum algorithm is still being analyzed only in the regime where solutions are combinatorially guaranteed to exist—and that regime can’t possibly be NP-hard, unless NP=coNP.)

[Above, I corrected some errors that appeared in the original version of this post—thanks to Ed Farhi and to the commenters for bringing them to my attention.]

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Update (Feb. 3, 2015): Boaz Barak has left the following comment:

in a work with Ankur Moitra, Oded Regev, David Stuerer and Aravindan Vijayaraghavan we were able to match (in fact exceed) the guarantees of the Farhi et al paper via a classical efficient algorithm. (Namely satisfy 1/2 + C/√D fraction of the equations). p.s. we hope to post this on the arxiv soon

There are at least four possible positions on the thermodynamics of weight gain:

1. Weight gain does not depend on calories in versus calories out, even in the loosest sense.

2. Weight gain is entirely a function of calories in versus calories out, but calories may move in unexpected ways not linked to the classic “eat” and “exercise” dichotomy. For example, some people may have “fast metabolisms” which burn calories even when they are not exercising. These people may stay very thin even if they eat and exercise as much as much more obese people.

3. Weight gain is entirely a function of calories in versus calories out, and therefore of how much you eat and exercise. However, these are in turn mostly dependent on the set points of a biologically-based drive. For example, some people may have overactive appetites, and feel starving unless they eat an amount of food that will make them fat. Other people will have very strong exercise drives and feel fidgety unless they get enough exercise to keep them very thin. These things can be altered in various ways which cause weight gain or loss, without the subject exerting willpower. For example, sleep may cause weight loss because people who get a good night sleep have decreased appetite and lower levels of appetite-related hormones.

4. Weight gain is entirely a function of calories in versus calories out, and therefore of how much you eat and exercise. That means diet is entirely a function of willpower and any claim that factors other than amount of food eaten and amount of exercise performed can affect weight gain is ipso facto ridiculous. For example, we can dismiss claims that getting a good night’s sleep helps weight loss, because that would violate the laws of thermodynamics.

1 and 4 are kind of dumb. 1 is dumb because…well, to steal an Eddington quote originally supposed apply to the second law of thermodynamics:

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against…thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

But 4 is also dumb. We have a long list of things that affect weight gain – for example, patients on the powerful psychiatric medication clozapine usually gain a lot of weight – fifteen pounds more on average than people on safer antipsychotics. Other medications are known to increase weight to a lesser degree, and some medications even decrease weight, though you wouldn’t like the side effects of most of them. Certain genetic diseases are also known to cause increased weight – Prader-Willi syndrome, for example.

One could try to rescue 4 by saying that people with rare genetic diseases or taking powerful prescription-only medications are a different story and in normal people it’s entirely controlled by willpower. But first, this is an area where possibility proofs are half the battle, and we have a possibility proof. And second, there are more than enough studies about genetics, microbiome, and, yes, sleep showing that all of these things can have effects in normal people.

So 1 and 4 are out. And although I do sometimes see people pushing them, they mostly seem to do a thriving business as straw men for people who want to accuse their opponents of saying something absurd.

The most interesting debate to be had is between 2 and 3. 3 says that all of the interventions that we know affect weight – certain pills, certain recreational drugs, changes in gut bacteria, whatever – do it by affecting appetite and exercise drive. 2 says that basal metabolism is also involved. 3 seems to at least leave open the possibility of just starving yourself even when your body is telling you really hard to eat. 2 says even that won’t work.

There’s room for a little bit of gradation between 2 and 3. A lot of people suggest that one way “fast metabolism” presents is by people fidgeting a lot, which is sort of the same as “your body increases its exercise drive”.

But in general, I think 2 is an important issue that does cause at least some interpersonal weight differences.

We’ll start with the “possibility proof” again. MRAP2. It’s a gene. Scientists can delete it in mice. These mice will eventually develop excessive appetites. But when they are young, they eat the same amount as any other mouse, but still get fatter.

Likewise, 2,4-dinitrophenol is a cellular uncoupling agent which increases metabolic rate and consistently produces weight loss of 2-3 pounds per week. It would be an excellent solution to all of our obesity-related problems if the papers on it didn’t keep having names like 2,4-Dinitrophenol: A Weight Loss Agent With Significant Acute Toxicity And Risk Of Death.

So what about everyday life?

A study of individual variation in basal metabolic rate found very significant interpersonal differences. A lot of that was just “some people are bigger than others”, but some of it wasn’t – they state that “twenty-six percent of the variance remained unexplained”. The Wikipedia article puts this in context: “One study reported an extreme case where two individuals with the same lean body mass of 43 kg had BMRs of 1075 kcal/day (4.5 MJ/day) and 1790 kcal/day (7.5 MJ/day). This difference of 715 kcal/day (67%) is equivalent to one of the individuals completing a 10 kilometer run every day”

Dr. Claude Bouchard and his team stuck 12 pairs of male identical twins in isolation chambers where their caloric intake and exercise could be carefully controlled, then fed them more calories than their bodies needed. All sets of twins gained weight, and in all twin groups both twins gained about the same amount of weight as each other, but the amount of weight gained varied between twin pairs by a factor of 3 (from 4 to 13 kg).

A lot of the sites that talk about this thing are careful to say that people “can’t blame” genes for their obesity, because obesity levels have been rising for decades and genes can’t change that quickly. I think this is wrong-headed. True, genes are not the source of the modern rise in obesity levels. But it’s entirely possible that a globally rising tide of obesity has disproportionately affected the people with the wrong genes. Just as Bouchard fed the same amount extra to all his study participants but some of them gained more weight than others, so if you put an entire civilization worth of people in an obesogenic environment, some of them might be genetically predisposed to do worse than the rest.

A more practical question – can individual people’s metabolism change?

I am personally predisposed to answer in the affirmative. In my early twenties, I ate a crazy amount every day – two bagels with breakfast, cookies with lunch, a big dinner followed by dessert – and I stayed pretty thin throughout. Now I’m thirty, I eat a very restrained diet, and my weight still hovers at just above the range where I am supposed to be. I know that people are famously bad at understanding how much they’re eating and exercising, but seriously if you try to convince me that I’m eating more now than I was then I’m going to start doubting my own sanity, or at least my autobiographical memory.

But there’s not much evidence to back me up. Metabolic rate is well-known to decline with age, but linearly and predictably. And it changes with muscle mass, but only minimally – and I don’t think I used to be any more muscular.

The sites that talk about drastic and unexpected ways to change metabolism seem mostly crackpottish. This isn’t to say their methods don’t work – green tea, for example, has a statistically significant effect – but it’s all so small as to be pretty meaningless in a real-world context.

So my own story seems to be on shaky ground. But as far as I can tell, the people arguing that they’re trying just as hard as anybody else but still unable to lose weight because of their metabolism are very possibly right.

First, let’s be clear — this is a single study from a single location with a tiny sample size. I mention this not as a criticism of the study, but because it’s something I’ve been repeating over and over to try to reassure myself that maybe the world isn’t as horrible as this study seems to suggest.

So keep in mind that these are, at most, initial findings. Before we can draw any solid conclusions, the awful results here will need to be repeated and confirmed with larger studies conducted at multiple locations. That, at least, is what I keep telling myself after reading Tara Culp-Ressler’s dismaying — and potentially disturbing and triggering — write-up of the study for ThinkProgress, “1 in 3 University of North Dakota Men Surveyed Would Rape a Woman If They Could Get Away With It.”

That’s a frightening headline. The details are, if anything, even worse:

Nearly one in three college men admit they might rape a woman if they knew no one would find out and they wouldn’t face any consequences, according to a new study ["Denying Rape But Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders"] conducted by researchers at the University of North Dakota.

But, when the researchers actually used the word “rape” in their question, those numbers dropped much lower — suggesting that many college men don’t associate the act of forcing a woman to have sex with them with the crime of committing rape.

According to the survey, which analyzed responses from 73 men attending the same college, 31.7 percent of participants said they would act on “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if they were confident they could get away with it. When asked whether they would act on “intentions to rape a woman” with the same assurances they wouldn’t face consequences, just 13.6 percent of participants agreed. …

“The No. 1 point is there are people that will say they would force a woman to have sex but would deny they would rape a woman,” Sarah R. Edwards, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at the University of North Dakota and the lead researcher for the study, told Newsweek.

So take your pick there as to which part of that is most disturbing. Is it that 13.6 percent of male college students in the study willingly volunteered to identify themselves as rapists? Or is it that an additional 18.1 percent of male college students freely volunteered that they would rape women, but don’t even recognize that this makes them rapists?

Put together, that total of 31.7 percent — nearly one in three — is a staggering finding of pervasive predatory criminality. Here we have one in three UND male students freely admitting that the only reason they refrain from “forcing a woman into sexual intercourse” is that they might be caught and punished.

That suggests one necessary first step in response, which involves blunt, forceful law enforcement. In the short term, and at the crudest level, it tells us that the threat of getting caught must be immediate, tangible and certain, and the punishment must be consequential and severe. If one in three male college students says that they only refrain from attacking women due to fear of a criminal/legal deterrent, then that criminal/leal deterrent needs to be made more forceful and obvious as an urgent matter of basic public safety. We need VAWA on steroids.

But the vast scope of the problem here also suggests that it’s beyond the capability of law enforcement to handle on its own. We can ask the police and the justice system to maintain law and order and public safety when the criminal element in society is a small percentage of the population, but when that element makes up a third of the male population, then a law enforcement response, on its own, will be neither adequate nor sustainable. Law enforcement can’t be asked or expected to work in a context in which legal enforcement is the only deterrent to crime — in which 31.7 percent of the male population freely admits that they’ll prey on others if they’re not stopped by police. Police aren’t equipped to handle such a context — for that we would need prison guards.

What we see here, in other words, is evidence of a complete breakdown at multiple levels of society. These are college students, remember. These are educated young men whose applications included their involvement in all sorts of extracurricular civic activities, and who were able to provide glowing letters of recommendation from mentors and civic leaders, teachers, coaches and pastors. These are young men who have excelled in and been commended by multiple spheres of civil society, with all of those spheres failing to recognize or to respond to the fact that these young men are also fundamentally warped, damaged and misshapen. This is part of what we mean when we talk about rape culture.

Changing that context therefore means fixing what has gone wrong with schools, sports, churches, and every other organization that was involved in the character formation of these character-deformed men.

Culp-Ressler offers a brief, but helpful, discussion of those implications from this study:

The push to address sexual assault on campus has sparked a widespread discussion about “rape culture,” a term once relegated to the feminist blogosphere that has recently become more mainstream. Rape culture refers to the larger societal norms that allow rape to thrive — the lack of consequences for people who commit rape, the assumption that this type of sexual behavior is a normal aspect of gender relations, and the obscuring of rape as a serious crime. Participants’ responses to the University of North Dakota study fit neatly into this worldview.

Previous studies have revealed similar attitudes among both men and women. Asweeping international survey of men conducted by United Nations researchers found that most men who had perpetrated rape simply believed they had the right to take control of women’s bodies. A survey of U.S. teens found that many young men are manipulating their partners into sex and getting away with it. And a study that focused specifically on teenage girls in the United States found that most of them assume sexual coercion and violence is normal, because they think men simply can’t control their sex drives.

In order to reach the population of men who don’t currently associate forcible sex with rape, the lead authors of the new study suggest education programs that focus on defining sexual consent and encouraging healthy relationships. Simply pushing an anti-rape message won’t necessarily reach those men, they point out, because they don’t think of themselves as rapists.

Similarly, the schools, teams, clubs, churches, businesses, etc., that have trained these young men to be sexual predators “don’t think of themselves” as training academies for rapists. But that is evidently what many of them are.

 

One of the most attractive things about Paddy Ashdown is that - in Denis Healey's famous formulation - he has a hinterland. That is, a whole range of interests beyond politics.

Today I came across an old Independent article in which he wrote of love for the poetry of John Donne:

Since the age of 16, I have had a copy of the complete poems of John Donne somewhere close at hand. For me, that was a watershed year. I had not been a good student – at best strugglingly average, to the despair of my father. In truth the classroom interested me far less at this age than the rugby pitch, the athletics field and the girls at the local Bedford high school. 

One evening a friend I admired but thought quite weird persuaded me, against my strong inclination, to go with him to the school poetry society run by one of the masters, whom I regarded as equally weird, John Eyre. The evening changed my life – quite literally. For that night I walked through a door opened by Donne into a world of poetry and literature I had never even known existed and have spent a lifetime joyously exploring ever since. The moment may have been life changing for me. ... 

After school, as a young Royal Marines officer involved in the war in Borneo, I took a leather-bound copy of Donne's poems which my wife had given me everywhere I went, until the ravages of jungle damp and termites dismantled it into a collection of mouldy pages. It has been replaced many times since.

Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for Liberal England:

I recall that Paddy Ashplant put his love for Donne to good use during the contest to elect the first leader of whatever name our party had in those days.

Many though Alan Beith was the frontrunner, but Ashplant began his speech to the first hustings by looking his opponent in the eye and declaiming:

Beith be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so.

This was widely counted as something of a zinger, and poor Beith's campaign never recovered from the blow.

Today is being celebrated as the centenary of Ladybird Books.

The blog Old Ladybird Books sounds a sceptical note:

So what happened in 1915 that gives the excuse for a centenary this year? Simply that the brand name 'Ladybird' was first registered by the company then known as Wills and Hepworth in that year. But in no real sense could Wills & Hepworth be called a publisher of children's books back then. ... 

The first 'real', small-size Ladybird Books (Bunnikins Picnic Party, Ginger's Adventures and The First Day of the Holidays) seem to have emerged blinking into the world in 1940 like cuckoos from the Wills & Hepworth nest - with no visible antecedence. And even then (and for over a decade later) the company saw itself as a commercial printing business with a minor sideline in publishing.

Let's leave that sticking to the wall, because Ladybird Books are worth celebrating.

On a personal note, I learnt to read with the Ladybird 'Key Words' scheme - in fact my mother taught me before I went to school.

The current Ladybird website explains how it worked:

‘Key Words’ are the most frequently occurring words in the English language. Research has shown that very few of these key English words form a very high proportion of those in everyday use. 

The Key Words with Peter and Jane books are so successful because each of the key words is introduced gradually and repeated frequently. This builds confidence in children when they recognise these key words on sight (also known as the ‘look and say’ method of learning).

There was, you will note, no nonsense about phonics.

And more widely, Ladybird books - like all children's books - are a wonderful resource for social history.

Years ago I quoted an article from a Ladybird collectors' site. That link no longer works, so I apologise to the author for doing so again without proper attribution.

He or she commented in particular on the way that the books I learnt to read from in the 1960s were issued with updated illustrations in the 1970s:

I wonder if the original target audience were aware of the nostalgic, retrospective feel to them when they first came out? Perhaps there was an awareness even then that these idyllic domestic tableaux were unreal and presented a world that had never existed. (Yes, I was part of that early audience, but at the age of 5, I don't think my powers of analysis were up to the job). Or is it that those years, between the mid-sixties and early seventies saw exceptionally dramatic social change for families. Is this dramatic period of change encapsulated by the 2 versions of the books? 

Because if you flip through the pages of a 1970s revised edition, it will still feel pretty modern today - which the first version absolutely does not - although produced nearly 35 years ago. No mobile phones, designer trainers or computer games - but the children have scruffy hair, wear jeans and T-shirt and don't tidy up after themselves. ... 

The first thing you notice is that Jane gets to wear jeans and is seen playing with roller-skates where once she played with dolls. The scenes portrayed look less ordered and serene. Play time is messier and the children appear to bicker more. 

However, if, like me, you are happy to spend a few evenings browsing through the two different versions, you'll find that the biggest changes in the first few books are all to do with sweet consumption. Whereas the Peter and Jane of the 1960s would visit the sweet shop, the 1970s Peter and Jane go to buy apples instead.

Deep down, you see, I am a child of the 1960s not the 1970s.

It is tragic that journalists – people – working for the magazine “Charlie Hebdo” were killed.

The magazine “Charlie Hebdo” looks as though it’s not un-problematic¹.

It should be quite easy to hold these two thoughts in your head at once. Outside of any other considerations, neither should really affect the other because, in my case at least, I take the stance, as I think quite a lot of people do, that in general people shouldn’t kill other people.

It shouldn’t need saying either, but I don’t think people should be killed for things they do, say, write, whatever. Thinking that the magazine should not have published Islamophobic images is not equivalent to saying “they got what they deserved” or anything of that nature, because of the aforementioned the general “killing people is bad” principle².

Further, I think it holds that a reluctance to jump on the #jesuischarlie bandwagon – to “stand with” a publication I don’t read but which contains material that, from what I’ve seen of it, could be construed as promoting bigotry in various forms. If something similar happened to, e.g. the Daily Mail or the Socialist Worker, I would be no less opposed to the murder and no more inclined to “show solidarity with” (perhaps words too strong to describe a hashtag) publications I don’t read but which each contain material I would find extremely objectionable.

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Put another way:

If I had said, a week ago, “Hey guys, maybe some of these cartoons in this French political cartoon newspaper thing are arguably a bit racist”, the reaction I would expect would mostly be, “Adam, why are you reading a French political cartoon newspaper? You can’t speak French and you hate political cartoons, and you don’t much like racism.” All of these things are true – I can’t speak French, and I dislike both political cartoons and racism.

If I had said, a week ago, “Hey guys, maybe shooting 12 people dead is a bad thing”, the reaction I would expect is… well, probably I’d get sent the picture of me with a manic grin holding a knife from a Christmas party a couple of years ago – maybe even the version with my mouth inverted and the words “he murder” underneath. Such is my friend group. What I wouldn’t expect are any voices of dissent.

I don’t think that both these statements would have been held as logically incompatible, or controversial. It would have seemed a bit odd, perhaps, and in a few days I would have been getting queried about why I was heard to be asking those specific questions, but I don’t think I would have had disagreement. Racism is bad, murder is bad. They are, I think it would be broadly accepted, bad in different ways, and bad to different degrees, but both bad. Yes. Fine. Why are we still talking about this?

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Some seem to imply that anything beyond the “murder is bad” line is as bad as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. In the binary established here, once can be either Charlie, or Against Freedom. You’re with us, or with the terrorists. No nuance, it seems, is permitted (I saw another piece today, in fact, which bemoaned the “fetish for nuance” present in people’s analysis. While I admit it’s certainly novel to see complaints of an overabundance of nuance, I fear I must disagree with the contention that it’s a bad thing. I don’t think the nuance fetishist would find themselves particularly well-catered-for at the specialist video store that is the online commentariat.

The key point here is that if we are not Charlie, we think Charlie is As Bad As The Terrorists, which is clearly patent nonsense. Charlie Hebdo may have, at various points, crossed lines, but you’d have to be very odd indeed to think that was the same line the terrorists crossed. In fact, it’s a line drawn in a different plane entirely, and the space we’re talking about here isn’t 2D or 3D, but infinite-dimensional.

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There is, in some quarters is an elision of people’s feelings towards the victims, their feeling towards the the subsequent outpourings of support and their feelings towards the form of the subsequent outpourings of support. I’m pretty sure the criticism is being levelled at the third of these things, not so much the first and the second. This is, if nothing else, true of me; it’s a case of “Good grief, those murders were awful! We might want to hold our horses with the whole ‘I Am Charlie’ thing, because that could, could, have some negative implications beyond just that ‘murder is bad’ thing”, rather than: “They got theirs, chickens home to roost etc etc” which would be both unpleasant and monstrously insensitive.

I’ve been informed that there is a pattern of such incidents, and a pattern of responses thereto, and the responses are always along such lines – and it forms a wider trend of unconscious collusion between advocates for restraint in offence and the radicals who wish to exploit situations like this one to their advantage. If that’s the case, it’s troubling – I certainly would not like to be a part of it. But this does not invalidate the specific complaints that have arisen here. Further, if this is your line of argument, you might not be on altogether firm ground if you were to suggest that assertions that the murders and the response could be related back to other trends, such as racism, is a wrong-headed or tasteless non-sequiter, and that the killing be treated as an atomised incident.

It’s true that in most cases, following tragedies people don’t feel moved to repudiate (to whatever degree) the publications for which the victims worked, and this has been condemned, in some cases not unfairly, as victim-blaming. The answer is, once again to do with the specific form of the response, which isn’t, in most cases, stating direct personal identification with the victim’s employer. There was no similar call for self-identification with the Norwegian Labour Party after Breivik’s rampage, or with the NAACP after the bombing of one of their offices by a white supremacist.

---

I have solidarity with the victims and their families and loved ones by dint of shared humanity. Do I mourn their deaths? Absolutely. Must I claim to “be” their employer, or implicitly side with the parts of said employer that I find repellent, in order to make such a display of solidarity? Absolutely not.

Fantastic Four #285



If there's one thing you should have picked up on by now, I genuinely love Secret Wars II. I think it was an ambitious and endearingly odd experiment, a massive line-wide crossover - only the second ever, really - masquerading as a weird personal statement on the part of Marvel's then Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter. To fully understand SWII you really need to follow it up with Shooter's Star Brand and his later Solar - Man of the Atom, in order to see him return again and again to the idea of a normal human being granted godlike powers, and in turn denied the pleasures of domestic bliss taken for granted by the rest of the population. You can read what you wish into Shooter's choice of reluctant gods as authorial proxies, over and over again . . .

However, not everyone working at Marvel was on Shooter's wavelength at the time. So while a number of SWII crossovers were interesting, many were also unmemorable, and a few were actively terrible. Those books fortunate enough to be scheduled for a crossover during the early months of the series - mainstays such as Iron Man and Captain America - lucked out with superfluous tie-ins that needed do little with The Beyonder. Later scheduled series were forced to shoehorn the character into their ongoing storylines - which worked well in the case of a handful of soon-to-be-cancelled series that needed well-timed deus ex machina plot devices, such as The New Defenders, ROM and The Micronauts. But the worst victims of the crossover were, oddly, Marvel's then-highest selling books: Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants, Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, and Fantastic Four. Whereas most of the Marvel line was on the hook for only one crossover issue, these five were stuck with a mandated three crossovers each - four in the case of The Avengers, which was also allotted the dubious honor of featuring the main series' aftermath as well.

Marvel's attitude towards crossovers is far less compulsory now. Often, lower selling titles participate more in high profile crossovers for the purpose of boosting sales, while higher-selling titles feel comfortable sitting out all but the biggest of big deals. Not so in 1986: your reward for producing one of Marvel's highest-selling titles was being pressganged into participating in the EIC's vanity crossover sequel not once but thrice. To their credit, Chris Claremont and John Byrne rose to the challenge and produced some of the crossovers' best efforts. For instance, in many ways Uncanny X-Men #203 is the series' "real" climax, with Secret Wars II #9 serving as that book's denouement (which, come to think of it, might itself have been a form of passive aggression on Chris Claremont's part). Fantastic Four #288 was a similarly climactic tale, featuring the Beyonder brought low by Dr. Doom and Reed Richards, while also cleaning up the last great dangling plothole from the original Secret Wars (again, any resemblance to actual animus between Jim Shooter and John Byrne is completely coincidental, I am sure.)

But, and this is putting it mildly, Fantastic Four #285 is no Fantastic Four #288.

Fantastic Four #285 isn't just a genial goofy misfire. It's not a clumsy, ambitious overreach. It lacks the charm of Peter Parker teaching the Beyonder how to use the bathroom, or even the sheer absurdity of the Beyonder curing cancer with a wave of his hand. No, this is worse: this is terrible, maliciously terrible. This is a wrong-headed comic with an inconceivably awful and profoundly confused "moral" that leaves a rancid taste in your mouth. I thought it was terrible when I first read it almost three decades ago, and it's still awful now. And the worst part is that the story hasn't been forgotten. It placed at #40 on Marvel's recent 75 Greatest Marvel Comics anniversary poll. It even made the deluxe Omnibus commemorating said anniversary. It received a sequel a few years later in Fantastic Four #342. Its endurance is astounding, considering just how blatantly, irredeemably offensive the story actually is.

Our story begins at the ending, with a coroner's report. Whose report? Why, little Tommy Hanson, age 13. Who is this mysterious Tommy Hanson, you ask? And how does his story intersect with that of the Fantastic Four?



Already on the first page Byrne tips us off the perceptive reader that this is going to be a heavy trip. Dead children! Sad professional brunettes! This isn't your father's Fantastic Four! This issue is going to be about . . . Issues.

It turns out that young Tommy Hanson is actually a member of that most harried and abused minority . . . a fanboy. And not just any fanboy, but a Human Torch fanboy, which is about as sad as it sounds. Especially since all the "cool kids" in the seventh grade know about Tommy's, er, proclivities.



Seriously, what's going on here? There's a new celebrity gossip rag out with a big feature on the Human Torch. Instead of being all, hey, I'll buy it with my allowance next time I'm in a 7-11, our pal Tommy immediately signs over his lunch money for a month, and agrees to do this guy's homework until Christmas. Even if lunch only costs a couple dollars a day, that's still at least $30 or $40. This was the 80s so a new copy of People magazine would have been, what, $1.50? I'm not even a mathematician and I can tell you that's a pretty steep mark-up.

So now you've met Tommy, in all his denim-on-denim glory. Let's be frank here: Tommy is a sad-sack without any redeeming features, in terms of the junior high pecking order. He's thirteen years old and 3'6", which is pretty sad all on its own. It's conceivable, based on the evidence here, that Tommy has serious medical problems besides just being a nerd.

Anyway, Tommy's joy over getting his seriously overpriced magazine is cut drastically short when Ms. Welsh discovers him reading the magazine in class.



Oh boy, there's a lot going on here, and none of it is good.

One of the more uncomfortable facts of life for many kids growing up liking stuff like comic books, sci-fi, or fantasy is that the reason they gravitate to these pursuits is because they have a hard time fitting in. It's often a chicken / egg situation - did you start reading comic books because you had a hard time in school or did other kids give you a hard time in school because you read comic books? When your peers were repeating dirty jokes they heard from their older brother and talking about which supermodels they wanted to bang, did they call you "faggot" because you didn't have an opinion one way or another? Or did they pull a pile of comics out of your backpack, spot some overly-muscled male superhero, and, well, you see a pattern here? Lots of sexual insecurity on display from all directions. Those examples aren't from personal experience, but they loom large in the racial memory of certain kinds of comics fans.

And this is where the story tips its hand. Because Tommy isn't just any kid, he's a Reader Surrogate. Not in a good way, mind you. He is standing in for the comic book nerd's worst possible self-image: the undersexed, physically weak, hopeless geek with nothing to live for besides his precious superheroes. But it's OK, you see, because Tommy doesn't have a crush on the Human Torch, no sir. He just really likes the idea of a flamboyant, flaming young muscular man.

Byrne has a, let's be politic here, questionable track record when it comes to homosexual characters. Of course they didn't talk about these things openly back then. But read his Alpha Flight, or his Namor. There are clearly gay characters in both series, but they're also not the best possible portrayal of LGBT characters. In fact, both Northstar and Desmond Marrs play up different angles of similar kinds of noxious gay stereotypes - finicky, flamboyant, scheming, bitchy. (Also, they both have strangely intimate vaguely incestuous relationships with twin sisters, which is . . . weird?) So gay people do exist in Byrne's world. But Tommy Hanson isn't gay. Because there is no way that Byrne could ever have given a sympathetic portrayal of a kid with ambiguous or confused sexuality. And because he's our perverse audience surrogate, Byrne has to bend over backwards to state as explicitly as possible that there is nothing at all gay about liking superheroes.

Anyway, we see the rest of Tommy's day, and it doesn't get any better from here.



Absentee mother? Check. Absentee masculine role model? Double check. But, there is someone around . . .



Here's Joss. What the heck is Joss doing here? Well, Joss is a guy wearing a leather vest with no shirt underneath, long hair in a ponytail and a Mephistophelian goatee. He also has to "call the office" when he gets a call on his "pocket beeper." Given that we know Joss spends his spare time tinkering with remote control airplanes and playing around with his own special formula of rocket fuel, because real rocket fuel isn't good enough for his toy airplane, what possible "job" could our pal Joss actually have? Does it involve selling special herbs from a van? Or does he spend his time driving around the countryside with three friends and a dog, supposedly "solving mysteries" but really just following the Grateful Dead's tour itinerary?

Anyway, in case you needed the help. Because the story really is just too subtle. Byrne provides foreshadowing. Did you miss the foreshadowing? Here's the foreshadowing again, in case you missed the foreshadowing:



Meanwhile, in case you forgot who the main characters of the book are, it's the Fantastic Four! At this period in their career, the Baxter Building had been demolished and the team spent a few months living in Avengers Mansion while their new building, Four Freedoms Plaza, was being built on the site of the old. And, oh yeah, the Beyonder was still skankin' around, somewhere, doing somethin' - nobody knows what! Will that be important? Who knows!



Now, the good thing about being on a team with Reed Richards is that you know he's going to spell out every plot point and thematic element precisely and at length. Now . . . I'm only partially joking here. From the series' very early days Reed was the obnoxious know-it-all lecturing to his best friends about anything and everything. But one of Byrne's better tricks writing for the series was subtly and not-so-subtly aging the other members of the cast so that they weren't completely dependent on Reed to provide all the series expository gravitas. If you recall a few weeks back when I tackled the Thing's participation in SWII, one of the themes of Byrne's run on the characters was the fact that the other members of the team - especially Ben - had grown resentful of Reed's treating them like children. This scene, which begins with Reed lecturing Johnny, turns out to be a reasonable conversation between more-or-less equals. It's a nice character piece that also touches on some of the themes of the main crossover. Byrne may or may not have resented the imposition of having to participate in the series, but he still had a good understanding of what Shooter was trying to accomplish with the Beyonder. He also managed to tie in the Beyonder's presence with themes Byrne established in the then-recent "Trial of Galactus" storyline.



But look who it is, it's that lady doctor from the first page. Which means that try as we might, we're not going to be able to forget that other, awful-er plotline . . .



You know how I said that Byrne matured the team a little bit? Well, even though Johnny was going steady with Alicia Masters (who would later turn out to be a Skrull, you know, so just think about the fact that he was married to a Skrull for five years), he still finds time to flirt with the woman doctor in the maroon pantsuit. Good job, Johnny, way to class up the joint.

Anyway, upon hearing that Tommy Hanson is dying in the hospital, Johnny beats feet.



"I only did it to be like you . . ."

Fans with long memories might remember that the Human Torch was excluded from the late 1970s Fantastic Four cartoon, replaced with longtime fan punching bag H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot. The rumor for years was that the character was kept off the show for fear of inspiring stupid children to set themselves on fire to emulate their hero. This was false. But the rumor stuck, and even though the series lasted a scant thirteen episodes, everyone hated H.E.R.B.I.E. so much that during Marv Wolfman's run (which immediately preceded Byrne's, and for which Byrne was partially the artist) the robot became mentally controlled by Dr. Sun and was subsequently destroyed after trying to kill the team.

So as absurd as it may seem, the grimly specific nature of Tommy's death was actually a reference to an urban legend about a cancelled TV show that remained a bone of contention with thin-skinned fans for many years.



Tommy's parents are, understandably, a little upset about what happened to their son. How exactly are readers supposed to read this scene? On the one hand, you have grieving parents who are reacting against the most proximate cause of their son's death - i.e., his emulation of his superhero idol, who also happened to be a man on fire. On the other, we've been given every reason to think that the Hansons are simply awful parents, leaving their son alone all day, oblivious to his problems at school, perfectly willing to let him spend his free afternoons with "Joss." So whose fault is Tommy's death? Is it Johnny's? Or his parents? The clear answer is that Tommy fell between the cracks, let down by his parents, his teacher, and his only "friend." But if there is one thing that the story goes out of its way to communicate, it's that the only person completely undeserving of blame is Johnny Storm, the actual guy who inspired the kid to set himself on fire.

Johnny reacts, I think, how most of us would in the same situation, rightly or wrongly:



OK, that's the end of the story. The Human Torch retires, never uses his powers again, and spends the rest of his life working for children's charities. The rest of the Fantastic Four carry on, and the world keeps spinning. The End!

















































Oh, shit. It's still not over.



Yep. This happened during the brief period where the Beyonder was on his whole life-affirming kick, teleporting around the planet in order to help people better fulfill themselves. So he hears Johnny's words in his moment of anguish and decides that there is no better time to pop in and help out by giving a timely pep talk.

Johnny doesn't take too kindly to the One From Beyond showing up to help, considering he - like the rest of us - remembers that just a few months back the Beyonder was taking potty training lessons from Spider-Man.



Just about everything about the issue up to this point has been remarkably offensive, but . . . this is simply ghastly. It's disgusting. It's the kind of "moral" that only makes sense in the wind-tunnel of comic book fandom, a world in which living vicariously through fictional heroes is somehow considered a legitimate alternative to "real" life.



Sure, we've all been there. We've all had those moments or those years where spending time with fictional friends has been far preferable to real friends. For some of us, comic books (or gaming or fantasy or whatever) were what we needed to get through hard spots in life. Tommy is that kid. That much is obvious: we're supposed to sympathize with the kid whose life was so bad his only respite was collecting celebrity gossip rags with Human Torch photo spreads in them. But how sublimely self-serving of this comic to tell us, the readers, that it's OK to be losers so long as we keep buying Marvel comics. It's OK because there is no way, no sir, that we're gay. Because that's obviously a fate even worse than setting yourself on fire.

To say that this "message" is garbage is an insult to garbage. The story stacks the deck against poor Tommy Hanson, giving us the worse possible model of the socially maladjusted, physically disadvantaged, sexually backwards adolescent nerd. There is nothing going on in this kid's life but reading comic books and being a fanboy. But that's OK! Nobody should feel bad about reading too many comic books and getting beat up at school because it's just fine and dandy to live vicariously through comic books. Why has this story lingered in the imagination of aging fanboys? Is it because it's provides the perfect excuse for growing up and into the kind of maladjusted Eltingville Club monsters who use their bad childhoods as all the excuse they need to spew abuse and harassment across the internet? Lifelong resentment against bullies both real and imagined provide all the rationale necessary to turn against the world that hates and fears you. It's OK because Marvel Comics are your only real friend. Marvel will never leave you.

Not only is the reader's expected sympathy towards Tommy heavy-handed, but the story's supposed life-affirming message is disconcerting and self-absorbed. Every ounce of sympathy towards Tommy dissolves the moment you realize the story is solely intended to make its readers feel better about being nerdy outcasts. The message isn't "it gets better" or that you need to be confident in yourself or stand up to bullies or that you should reach out for help to other people when you feel alone - the message is that some nerds are so far gone that the best they can hope for is a quick death. Is there a single coherent message to be salvaged from the story, or is it futile to even try?

And because this is a self-important superhero comic, we can't be expected to get off without a ham-fisted literary quote:



Tommy wouldn't say it had a happy ending. Nothing about this even vaguely resembles a happy ending. This is a shitty ending about how the world is a shitty place and even though shitty things happen, pretty people will always find ways to make themselves feel better about those shitty things, even when the shitty things are partially their fault. What's more, it's OK to be pretty and oblivious because it makes the peasants feel better about themselves to be able to look up and admire their betters. Or something?

I am confident in asserting that this is one of the worst comics Marvel has ever published. It's stuck in the middle of one of Marvel's most celebrated runs by one of its most celebrated creators, so not only has it historically received a pass, it's been celebrated for its toxic "message" by successive generations of fanboys too stupid to tell when they're being insulted.

Oh yeah, in case you were wondering:



Yep, even as Secret Wars II marches on, life continues, and the resurrection of Jean Grey for the purposes of launching the first non-Claremont X-Men spinoff was a story too important to wait. You know Byrne just had to get in on that action.

I.

Ozy recently taught me the word “phatic”. It means talking for the sake of talking.

The classic example is small talk. “Hey.” “Hey.” “How are you?” Fine, and you?” “Fine.” No information has been exchanged. Even if the person involved wasn’t fine, they’d still say fine. Indeed, at least in this country giving an information-bearing response to “how are you?” is a mild social faux pas.

Some people call this “social grooming behavior” and it makes sense. It’s just a way of saying “Hello, I acknowledge you and still consider you an acquaintance. There’s nothing wrong between us. Carry on.” That you are willing to spend ten seconds holding a useless conversation with them signals this just fine.

We can go a little more complex. Imagine I’m calling a friend from college after five years out of contact; I’ve heard he’s got a company now and I want to ask him for a job. It starts off “Hey, how are you?”, segues into “And how are the wife and kids?”, then maybe into “What are you doing with yourself these days?” and finally “Hey, I have a big favor to ask you.” If you pick up the phone and say “Hello, it’s Scott from college, can you help me get a job?” this is rude. It probably sounds like you’re using him.

And I mean, you are. If I cared about him deeply as a person I probably would have called him at some point in the last five years, before I needed something. But by mutual consent we both sweep that under the rug by having a few minutes of meaningless personal conversation beforehand. The information exchanged doesn’t matter – “how’s your business going?” is just as good as “how’s your wife and kids?” is just as good as “how are your parents doing?”. The point is to clock a certain number of minutes about something vaguely personal, so that the request seems less abrupt.

We can go even more complex. By the broadest definition, phatic communication is equivalent to signaling.

Consider a very formulaic conservative radio show. Every week, the host talks about some scandal that liberals have been involved in. Then she explains why it means the country is going to hell. I don’t think the listeners really care that a school in Vermont has banned Christmas decorations or whatever. The point is to convey this vague undercurrent of “Hey, there are other people out there who think like you, we all agree with you, you’re a good person, you can just sit here and listen and feel reassured that you’re right.” Anything vaguely conservative in content will be equally effective, regardless of whether the listener cares about the particular issue.

II.

Douglas Adams once said there was a theory that if anyone ever understood the Universe, it would disappear and be replaced by something even more incomprehensible. He added that there was another theory that this had already happened.

These sorts of things – things such that if you understand them, they get more complicated until you don’t – are called “anti-inductive”.

The classic anti-inductive institution is the stock market. Suppose you found a pattern in the stock market. For example, it always went down on Tuesdays, then up on Wednesdays. Then you could buy lots of stock Tuesday evening, when it was low, and sell it Wednesday, when it was high, and be assured of making free money.

But lots of people want free money, so lots of people will try this plan. There will be so much demand for stock on Tuesday evening that there won’t be enough stocks to fill it all. Desperate buyers will bid up the prices. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, everyone will sell their stocks at once, causing a huge glut and making prices go down. This will continue until the trend of low prices Tuesday, high prices Wednesday disappears.

So in general, it should be impossible to exploit your pattern-finding ability to profit of the stock market unless you are the smartest and most resourceful person in the world. That is, maybe stocks go up every time the Fed cuts interest rates, but Goldman Sachs knows that too, so they probably have computers programmed to buy so much stock milliseconds after the interest rate announcement is made that the prices will stabilize on that alone. That means that unless you can predict better than, or respond faster than, Goldman Sachs, you can’t exploit your knowledge of this pattern and shouldn’t even try.

Here’s something I haven’t heard described as anti-inductive before: job-seeking.

When I was applying for medical residencies, I asked some people in the field to help me out with my interviewing skills.

“Why did you want to become a doctor?” they asked.

“I want to help people,” I said.

“Oh God,” they answered. “No, anything but that. Nothing says ‘person exactly like every other bright-eyed naive new doctor’ than wanting to help people. You’re trying to distinguish yourself from the pack!”

“Then…uh…I want to hurt people?”

“Okay, tell you what. You have any experience treating people in disaster-prone Third World countries?”

“I worked at a hospital in Haiti after the earthquake there.”

“Perfect. That’s inspirational as hell. Talk about how you want to become a doctor because the people of Haiti taught you so much.”

Wanting to help people is a great reason to become a doctor. When Hippocrates was taking his first students, he was probably really impressed by the one guy who said he wanted to help people. But since that time it’s become cliche, overused. Now it signals people who can’t come up with an original answer. So you need something better.

During my interviews, I talked about my time working in Haiti. I got to talk to some of the other applicants, and they talked about their time working in Ethiopia, or Bangladesh, or Nicaragua, or wherever. Apparently the “stand out by working in a disaster-prone Third World country” plan was sufficiently successful that everyone started using, and now the people who do it don’t stand out at all. My interviewer was probably thinking “Oh God, what Third World country is this guy going to start blabbering about how much he learned from?” and moving my application to the REJECT pile as soon as I opened my mouth.

I am getting the same vibe from the critiques of OKCupid profiles in the last open thread. OKCupid seems very susceptible to everybody posting identical quirky pictures of themselves rock-climbing, then talking about how fun-loving and down-to-earth they are. On the other hand, every deviation from that medium has also been explored.

“I’m going for ‘quirky yet kind'”.

“Done.”

“Sarcastic, yet nerdy?”

“Done.”

“Outdoorsy, yet intellectual.”

“Done.”

“Introverted, yet a zombie.”

“I thought we went over this. Zombies. Are. Super. Done..”

III.

I’ve been thinking about this lately in the context of psychotherapy.

I’m not talking about the very specific therapies, the ones where they teach special cognitive skills, or expose you to spiders to cure your arachnophobia. They don’t let me do those yet. I’m talking about what’s called “supportive therapy”, where you’re just talking to people and trying to make them feel generally better.

When I was first starting out, I tried to do therapy anti-inductively. I figured that I had to come up with something unexpected, something that the patient hadn’t thought of. Some kind of brilliant interpretation that put all of their problems in a new light. This went poorly. It tended to be a lot of “Well, have you tried [obvious thing?]”, them saying they had, and me escalating to “Well, have you tried [long shot that probably wouldn’t work]?”

(I wonder if this was Freud’s strategy: “Okay, he says he’s depressed, I can’t just tell him to cheer up, probably everybody says that. Can’t just tell him to accept his sadness, that one’s obvious too. Got to come up with something really original…uh…”HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT YOU WANT TO KILL YOUR FATHER AND MARRY YOUR MOTHER??!”)

Now I tend more to phatic therapy. This happened kind of by accident. Some manic people have a symptom called “pressured speech” which means they never shut up and they never let you get a word in edgewise. Eventually, more out of surrender than out of a strategic plan, I gave up and stopped trying. I just let them talk, nodded my head, said “Yeah, that sounds bad” when they said something bad-sounding, said “Oh, that’s good” when they said something good-sounding.

After a while I realized this went at least as well as any other therapy I was doing, plus the patients really liked me and thought I was great and gave me lots of compliments.

So after that, “active listening” became sort of my default position for supportive therapy. Get people talking. Let them talk. Nod my head as if I am deeply concerned about their problems. Accept their effusive praise about how well I seem to be understanding them.

This is clearly phatic. I would say the ritual is “High status person is willing to listen to my problems. That means society considers my problems important and considers me important. It means my problems are okay to have and I’m not in trouble for having them.” As long as I seem vaguely approving, the ritual reaches its predetermined conclusion.

IV.

I was thinking about this recently several friends have told me how much she hated “therapist speak”. You know, things like “I feel your pain” or “And how does that make you feel?”

I interpret this as an anti-inductive perspective on therapy. The first therapist to say “I feel your pain” may have impressed her patients – a person who herself can actually feel all my hurt and anger! Amazing! But this became such a standard in the profession that it became the Default Therapist Response. Now it’s a signal of “I care so little about your pain that I can’t even bother to say anything other than the default response.” When a therapist says “I feel your pain,” it’s easy to imagine that in her head she’s actually planning what she’s going to make for dinner or something.

So just as some people find it useful to divide the world into “ask culture” and “guess culture”, I am finding it useful to divide the world into “phatic culture” and “anti-inductive culture”.

There are people for whom “I feel your pain” is exactly the right response. It shows that you are sticking to your therapist script, it urges them to stick to their patient script, and at the end of the session they feel like the ritual has been completed and they feel better.

There are other people for whom “I feel your pain” is the most enraging thing you could possibly say. It shows that you’re not taking them seriously or engaging with them, just saying exactly the same thing you do to all your other patients.

There are people for whom coming up with some sort of unique perspective or clever solution for their problems is exactly the right response. Even if it doesn’t work, it at least proves that you are thinking hard about what they are saying.

There are other people for whom coming up with some sort of unique perspective or clever solution is the most enraging thing you could possibly do. At the risk of perpetuating gender stereotypes, one of the most frequently repeated pieces of relationship advice I hear is “When a woman is telling you her problems, just listen and sympathize, don’t try to propose solutions”. It sounds like the hypothetical woman in this advice is looking for a phatic answer.

I think myself and most of my friends fall far to the anti-inductive side, with little tolerance for the phatic side. And I think we probably typical-mind other people as doing the same.

This seems related to the classic geek discomfort with small-talk, with pep rallies, and with normal object-level politics. I think it might also be part of the problem I had with social skills when I was younger – I remember talking to people, panicking because I couldn’t think of any way to make the conversation unusually entertaining or enlightening, and feeling like I had been a failure for responding to the boring-weather-related question with a boring-weather-related answer. Very speculatively, I think it might have something to do with creepy romantic overtures – imagine the same mental pattern that made me jokingly consider giving “I want to hurt people” as my motivation for becoming a doctor, applied to a domain that I really don’t understand on a fundamental enough level to know whether or not saying that is a good idea.

I’ve been trying to learn the skill of appreciating the phatic. I used to be very bad at sending out thank-you cards, because I figured if I sent a thank-you card that just said “Thank you for the gift, I really appreciate it” then they would think that the lack of personalization meant I wasn’t really thankful. But personalizing a bunch of messages to people I often don’t really know that well is hard and I ended up all miserable. Now I just send out the thank you card with the impersonal message, and most people are like “Oh, it was so nice of you to send me a card, I can tell you really appreciated it.” This seems like an improvement.

As for psychotherapy, I think I’m going to default to phatic in most cases when I don’t have some incredibly enlightening insight, then let my patients tell me if that’s the wrong thing to do.

Disorganized because every time I try to organize my thoughts on these topics recently they kind of squirm away. So, fine, disorganized it is, then.

1. As noted in one of the tweets shown above, as a newspaper journalist, as well as, you know, writing here, I’ve done my share of enraging people with words, by mocking ideas that they hold dear, because I thought they deserved mocking. I have had my share of angry responses and even the occasional threat, and my response to those typically has been to poke harder. When I took up the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, that’s what it meant to me. I’ve been that guy.

2. I also recognize that I know almost nothing about Charlie Hebdo, the newspaper, or the tradition of satire and comment that it exemplifies in French culture. From where I sit, a lot of what I’ve seen of it looks kind of racist and terrible. And I understand that Charlie Hebdo didn’t just go after Islamic extremists, and that it went after other groups and people just as hard (and just as obnoxiously). But it reminds me that “we go after everyone equally” doesn’t mean that I feel equally comfortable with all of it, or that it has equal effect. When I say #JeSuisCharlie, it doesn’t mean I want to create or post what I think are racist caricatures and justify them as satire, applied on a presumed equal opportunity basis.

3. But then again my comfort level is about me, not about Charlie Hebdo or anyone else. Free speech, taken as a principle rather than a specific constitutional pratice, means everyone has a right to share their ideas, in their own space, no matter how terrible or obnoxious or racist or stupid or inconsequential I or anyone else think they and their ideas are. I also recognize that satire in particular isn’t about being nice, or kind, or fair. Satire is inherently exaggerated, offensive and unfair, in order to bring the underlying injustice it’s calling attention to into sharper relief. Trust me, I know this. (Satire also has a high failure rate, and the failure mode of satire, like the failure mode of clever, is “asshole.”) A lot of what I’ve seen from Charlie Hebdo isn’t for me and seems questionable, and that’s neither here nor there in terms of whether it should have a right to be published.

4. At the moment there’s an argument about whether news organizations are being cowardly about showing the Charlie Hebdo covers that allegedly were part of the reason it was attacked — the ones with visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad, who many Muslims feel is not supposed to be depicted visually (let us leave aside for the moment the discussion of whether all Muslims feel this way (they don’t) or whether Muhammad has been visually represented in the past even in Muslim art (he has, here and there) and focus on the here and now, in which many Muslims believe he should not be represented visually). The argument seems to be that by not showing the covers (or Muhammad generally), newspapers and other media are giving in to the extremists.

I’m not going to argue that very large media companies don’t have multiple reasons for what they do, including making the realpolitik assessment that displaying a Charlie Hebdo cover puts their employees (and their real estate, and their profits) at risk for an attack. But a relevant point to make here is that aside from the asshole terrorists who murdered a dozen people at Charlie Hebdo, there really are millions of Muslims who are just trying to get through their day like anyone else, who also strongly prefer that Muhammad is not visually represented. It’s not a defeat for either the concept or right of free speech for people or organizations to say they’re factoring these millions or people who neither did nor would do anything wrong into their consideration of the issue.

5. Which is a point that I think tends to get elided at moments like this — free speech, and the robust defense of it — does not oblige everyone to offend, just to show that one can. I can simultaneously say that I absolutely and without reservation have the right to visually depict Muhammad any way I choose (including in some ways devout Muslims, not to mention others, would consider horribly blasphemous), and also that, with regard to depicting Muhammad, as a default I’m going to try to respect the desire of millions of perfectly decent Muslims, and not do it. Because it’s polite, and while I’m perfectly happy not to be polite when it suits me, I usually like to have a reason for it.

6. But isn’t Muslim extremists shooting up a newspaper a perfect reason? For some it may be, and that’s fine for them. But I tend to agree with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar here: shit like this isn’t about religion, it’s about money and recruiting for terrorist groups who use religion, at best, as a very thin binding material for their more prosaic concerns. I’m also persuaded by Malek Merabet, brother of Ahmed Merabet, the policeman and Muslim who was killed by the terrorists. He said: “My brother was Muslim and he was killed by two terrorists, by two false Muslims.” In which case, why offend the good and decent Muslims to get back at two very bad and false Muslims. I’m a reasonably clever writer; I have the capability to make my point regarding these asshole terrorists without a gratuitous display of Muhammad.

7. Hey, did you know that according to the UN, Christian militia in Central African Republic have carried out ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population during the country’s ongoing civil war? And yet I hear nothing from the so-called “good” and “moderate” Christians around me on the matter! Why have the “moderate” Christians not denounced these horrible people and rooted them out from their religion? Is it because maybe the so-called “moderate” Christians are actually all for the brutal slaughter? Christians say their religion is one of peace! And yet! Jesus himself says (Matthew 10:36) that he does not come to bring peace, but the sword! Clearly Christianity is a horrible, brutal murdering religion. And unless every single Christian in the United States denounces these murders in the Central African Republic and apologizes for them, not just to me but to every single Muslim they might ever meet, I see no reason to believe that every Christian I meet isn’t in fact secretly planning to cut the throat of every single non-Christian out there. That’s what goes on in those “churches” of theirs, you know. Secret murder planning sessions, every Sunday! Where they “symbolically” eat human flesh! 

Please feel free to cut and paste the above paragraph the next time someone goes on about how all Muslims must do something about their co-religionists (of which there are more than a billion, all of whom apparently they are supposed to have on speed dial), and how Islam is in fact a warrior religion, and look, here are context-free snippets from the Koran, and so on and so forth until you just want to vomit from the stupidity of it all. And don’t worry, there are similar cut-and-pastes for any major religion you might want to name, as well for those who have no religion at all, although I’m not going to bore you with those at the moment.

The point is that, no, in fact, I don’t see why I or anyone else should demand that every Muslim is obliged to denounce and apologize for any bad thing that happens in the world done by someone who claims to be doing it in the name of Allah. As it happens, many prominent Muslims and Muslim organizations did condemn the Charlie Hebdo attacks, just like pretty much everyone else. But silence isn’t complicity or endorsement, and if you demand that it is, you may be an asshole.

8. If there is one silver lining to the horribleness of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it is that people have been confronted with the fact of something they take for granted — the right to say what they want to say, how they want to say it — is something that others will literally kill to punish. That Charlie Hebdo is a problematic example — that is offensive, and intentionally so, and it does make people uncomfortable and angry — is, well, good isn’t the right word. Instructive. Sometimes we have to be reminded that free speech isn’t just for the speech we like, or the speech that’s easy to be reasonable about.

At the same time it’s okay to ask if this welcome outpouring of solidarity is because free speech was attacked, and it was decided that it was worth fighting for, or because a newspaper that mocked Islam was attacked by gunmen purporting to be Muslims, and that this may be less about free speech than another front in a religious/ethnic clash of culture.

My thoughts are that it’s probably some amount of both, and that neither is cleanly delineated. The two men who shot up Charlie Hebdo say they were Muslim; so were some of the people they shot. Those people — the Muslims who died — have been mourned, at least it seems from here, equally with all the other dead. They haven’t been pushed out of frame for a convenient narrative.

And maybe that’s part of the silver lining to this very dark cloud, too — that this isn’t just “us vs. them,” or at least that “us” now contain people in it who might have previously been considered “them.” And that all the people who are saying #JeSuisCharlie, and #JeSuisAhmed, or who are standing for free speech, or any combination of the three, are standing in memory of them as well.

So my wife and I were talking about old TV programmes this evening (to be honest, this was more me fulminating about how no-one seems to remember the TV programmes I used to watch as a kid on account of my great age and policeman getting younger every day, you get the idea), and our conversation settled on The Great Egg Race. I decided to show her a video of it to demonstrate how it had The Best TV Theme Tune Ever, but we ended up watching the entire episode. It was oddly compelling:

What’s interesting about this programme is that it marks an era when people could be intelligent on television without having to apologise for it. The basic format is essentially the same as any other modern “reality” show such as Masterchef or the Apprentice in which a group of people are set a challenge with limited resources and a limited amount of time and then get to square off against each other in a final contest. But beside that basic format, all other resemblances end.

Much of the programme consists of boffins muttering to each other under their breaths about how they plan to build their contraption, followed by Professor Heinz Wolff and his expert guest having discussing the week’s challenge without worrying especially about whether the audience was keeping up or not. The presenters do a rudimentary job at explaining things, but the viewer is pretty much left to it. There’s no Sean Pertwee sexily explaining what’s going on every thirty seconds. Neither is there much in the way of conflict; it is possible that they had their own equivalent of the Baked Alaska scandal, but I’m not aware of it.

The most striking contrast is with The Apprentice, and I think it says a lot about how our society’s values have changed over the past 30 years. While widely mocked as a piece of car crash TV, I can’t help but think that one of the reasons The Apprentice continues to be popular is that the corporate executive is now what we are meant to believe is what the ideal job to aspire to looks like. We might not all buy The Apprentice’s portrayal of corporate suits behaving like idiots and stabbing each other in the back to get ahead, but we at least buy into it as being a caricature of something real.

The Great Egg Race on the other hand is about engineers being set a similarly impossible and ridiculous challenge, who go about it by working together collaboratively and just getting on with it. They aren’t steered by the nose by producers who desperately want to drag a narrative into it all, and in the final challenge even the losers have a certain amount of dignity; they might have failed – they might even have failed badly – but even the biggest loser emerges from The Great Egg Race with a degree of dignity.

And they were engineers! A profession which our modern culture appears to simply ignore. Scientists are of course lauded, especially if they’re pretty ones like Brian Cox (sorry Heinz Wolff), but engineers seem to be pretty much invisible. Yet somehow our transportation systems, computers and widgets continue to get built.

There is, to be fair, a continuation of programmes which emulated the Great Egg Race. In the 90s we had Robot Wars, in which amateur engineers to pitch their robot creations against each other in a Thunderdome style arena. It was never really about the engineering however as much as it was about the occasional metallic carnage. It was an interesting programme to follow as both the robots and their builders evolved. You got to see the robots get slowly better over successive series and the builders become more and more up their own arses as their minor celebrity statuses (which appeared to involve opening the odd village fete and visiting children’s parties) reached their peaks. You would see them slowly coming out of their shells, wearing increasingly extroverted clothing. Some of them even (gag!) started to flirt with presenter Philippa Forrester (believe me when I say that this lead to some of the most excruciating television ever broadcast).

Scrapheap Challenge was perhaps more of a true spiritual successor to The Great Egg Race, just on a somewhat bigger scale. In so many ways, where The Great Egg Race was tweed and elastic, Scrapheap Challenge was METAL. With the number of bikers who took part in the latter, despite the years separating the two series, the amount of hair on both was about the same – they just wore t-shirts rather than suits.

But Scrapheap Challenge was ultimately a lot more like a modern reality TV show as well. Aside from the narration, there was a much greater focus on controversy and conflict, both inside the teams and between them. It did indeed have it’s own share of Baked Alaska Incidents. It was, to be fair, better at explaining concepts than its predecessor, but it was ultimately much more self-conscious about the fact that what it was ultimately about was a “boring” topic like engineering; it was certainly dressed up more. You can sort of see this in the team names; while the teams on The Great Egg Race were simply named after their place of work (Kontron Electrolab Ltd), the teams on Scrapheap tended to have jokey, ironic names like The Anoraks. I enjoyed it as a series, but it ultimately came across as a much less simple pleasure.

What am I saying here? Nothing more than that I feel that in the 20 years between The Great Egg Race and Scrapheap Challenge we somehow lost the ability to celebrate cleverness for its own sake and to simply take delight in people working together to do a good job under trying circumstances. Whether “we” have lost it or TV producers merely perceive we have is of course a moot point, but watching that episode did leave me feeling oddly nostalgic.

Feminism and the plight of the bitter lonely nerd.

This ran here on 6/19/02. I have a lot more examples now…

I have another theory. It's that many old TV shows have been secretly refilmed to make them cheap-looking and less entertaining. I formulated this notion a few years ago when I caught a couple of vintage reruns of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. I just know this series didn't look that chintzy and wasn't as silly when it first aired. Using doubles of Robert Vaughn and David McCallum — or perhaps employing sophisticated computer imagery — someone has managed to drain the entertainment value of them.

I started thinking the same kind of monkeying had been done to David Frost's 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon. I watched them when they first aired and I watched the first two hours again the other night on the Discovery Civilization Channel. Something, one can't help but think, has changed. Maybe it's CGI animation or maybe they found David Frye and got him to redo Nixon's role…but I don't recall our 37th president being that rotten a liar. He's really terrible. My recollection is that while Frost landed some solid punches, Nixon held his own for much of it and made some solid points on his behalf with regard to Watergate and its allied scandals.

I could then understand how his supporters could have believed him…something I cannot fathom after the other night. He seems nakedly insincere and his tactic for diverting questions is in full view and utterly ineffective. I never liked or trusted the man but I thought he was a better fibber than this.

Perhaps the tapes (Frost's tapes, that is) have indeed been altered. The shows now airing have been recut to include material that was previously unused. Still, I find it hard to believe they cut out Nixon's better moments for this version, or that they omitted his worst, the first time around. I find it more credible to believe that in the quarter-century since, we've endured so many lying, weasely politicians up-close and personal on the cable channels, the art form of political misdirection has had to advance. They've had to improve on what Nixon did, and his skills of misdirection are no longer State of the Art. I wonder if people who once supported him watched these shows this week and said, "I can't believe I voted for this guy."

I love this pic from the 2010 debates (via @JohnRentoul ) pic.twitter.com/ZvjCYnhhOB

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) January 8, 2015

The PM has just painted a huge target on his own back

The Green Party is not the fourth party of UK politics and never has been so why is it treated by media and opponents alike as if it is?

For most of the Greens’ history, the fourth party has been either the SNP or the dominant Unionist party in N Ireland: the former has consistently won fourth-most general election votes until surpassed by UKIP in 2005, the latter regularly had fourth-most seats. However, by their nature parties operating only in Scotland or N Ireland are not treated by the London media in the same way as those operating across Britain. In fact, the Greens haven’t even been the fourth party in England since 1992, having polled fewer votes and fielded fewer candidates than UKIP in every election since (for simplicity, I’m counting the three UK Green Parties as one which they’re not).

However, mental inertia in the media is strong and the Greens have the tremendous advantage of being the first respectable GB-wide fourth party, emerging in the 1980s and peaking with their spectacular (and very lucky) performance in the 1989 Euros – and that, plus enough friends in the media – has enabled them to punch above their weight.

All of which has nothing to do with David Cameron’s insistence that the Greens should be present at the General Election debates. The thinking there isn’t hard to decipher: as with Clegg in 2010, a new face making superficially attractive noises could easily peel off a lot of soft voters. If the Greens, with their ultra-left policies (see their recent wholehearted support for Syriza in the Greek elections, for example), are present then it would be Labour and the Lib Dems, who are at least trying to reconcile left-of-centre views with economic reality, who would be in the firing line. The second prize would be if the Greens are excluded then the whole set of debates might be off, which is usually good for an incumbent.

Except they probably wouldn’t be. The media like the debates: they simplify, they concentrate and they attract viewers and readers. It’s the X Factor formula for politics and not only does the X Factor formula work but the media and public understand it. If they can go ahead they will do, whether or not one invitee opts to boycott, even the prime minister. And if they do go ahead without one of the four main leaders, you can guarantee who’ll take most of the flack from the other three: the one man who can’t answer back (which is of itself sufficient incentive for those three to ensure they happen).

So unless the Greens are invited, that leaves Cameron with a dilemma. Will they be? Almost certainly not. OfCom’s judgement is sound: despite the Greens’ recent uptick in the polls, their behaviour and performance this parliament has not been that of a major party. Of the 19 GB Westminster by-elections, they’ve not contested seven and lost their deposit in the other twelve. They may be a factor in a handful of seats but then so will the SNP and others, who would undoubtedly challenge an invite to Natalie Bennett and not to them. Furthermore, less is more when it comes to debates: the TV companies won’t want crowded stages and stifled discussion.

If that scenario does come to pass – and there’s every chance it will – then Cameron will have to decide between performing a U-turn and participating after all, which will look weak and indecisive, and standing by his decision, which will allow Miliband, Farage and Clegg to paint their own portrait of him and the Conservatives without a right of reply. Oops.

Mike Smithson is due to take part in a discussion on prospects for the coming election with Ben Page of Ipsos-MORI on BBC Radio 4’s “The Week in Westminster” at 11am

David Herdson

P.s. My thanks to those on PB who gave me some advice about writing alternative history. I’ve put up a first story here. Please feel free to read and (if a member), comment.

Around the world, 2015 will probably be best remembered as the year of a twelve-issue Groo series, the first installment of which goes on sale January 21. It's called Groo: Friends and Foes and each issue, Groo and his faithful canine companion run into a different character (or two) from Groo's past. Here's a sneak preview of #1.

It will probably not do any good but I would like to (again!) try to correct a recurring error that people make about this comic. You see the credits over on that page? Well, unless they've changed them by the time you go there, they say "Story by Mark Evanier, Art by Sergio Aragonés." That's not really accurate. For one thing, Sergio made up the story in that issue, as he does in most issues. He's mainly responsible for the plots, I'm mainly responsible for the dialogue. Sometimes, we overlap or I suggest a plot idea or a visual gag or he suggests a line. Mainly though, he does the stories and I do the words…but not totally.

There have been instances in past comics where the guy who did what I do would take the entire writer credit. Those instances often have led to blatant misattribution of who contributed what and often to resentment and ill feelings. To avoid that, Sergio and I decided years ago on Groo to avoid credits that said one guy wrote it and one guy drew it. Once in a while, I contribute so much to a story that Sergio insists I be credited as Writer but usually, the official credits we designate say "by Sergio Aragonés" and then the credit for me is either a joke or something vague. Lately, it's been "Wordsmith."

You'd be amazed how infrequently it is that people get this. Not long ago, I found myself explaining this to a longtime comic book writer who kept asking me, "Which of you is in charge of the writing?" and was not satisifed with my explanation that we both are.

"No, no," he kept saying. "Suppose you want Groo to do one thing in a story and Sergio wants him to do something else. Who has the final say on that?"

I said we both do.

"No, no, no," he said. "Two people can't both be in charge. If you don't agree, one person has to have the deciding vote."

I said no, if we don't agree, we talk it over until we do agree. "Human beings can do that," I explained. "Not everything in life has to be a power struggle."

"No, no, no, no," he said, escalating yet another no. "There must come a time when Sergio insists Groo slay the green dragon and you insist Groo slay the red dragon and neither of you will budge."

I said, "We've been doing Groo since 1982 and that's never happened. The longest argument we've had lasted about three minutes before it was settled to our mutual satisfaction. And by the way, in that situation, we would probably have Groo slay both dragons and the maidens they were menacing."

The guy never got it. A lot of people don't get it…or else when they write articles or promotional materials for this comic, they see a blank space that says "Story by" and another that says "Art by" and they figure Sergio draws it so they'll give him the latter credit and stick my name in the first slot. When you see that, don't believe what you see. Usually.

This may sound trivial but I really feel uncomfy when I get a credit that rightly belongs to someone else…or sole credit when it should be shared. I don't really have a lot of respect for anyone who doesn't.

If I am unable to sleep, I turn to the diaries of Lord Bonkers - they usually do the job quite quickly.

Every now and then, however, I come across something that brings me up short. Like this from 2006.

Saturday 

It is hard not to sympathise with the New Party’s MPs: Blair has clearly gone barking mad – his public protestations of love for a chimpanzee, all those foreign wars, his plans to send children to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, before they are born – but their constitution makes it impossible to get rid of him. 

We Liberal Democrats recently had leadership problems of our own, but Kennedy’s fondness for drink never put the country in peril. Yes, he might fall asleep in meetings, sing raucous Highland ballads or try to kiss Alan Beith, but life was still more restful than under his predecessor, Paddy Ashplant, and – dash it all – I am rather fond of old Beith myself. 

A word of advice to the New Party: if you do succeed in tipping Blair out of the window, don’t replace him with that dour Brown fellow. Try someone younger and fresher like Tony Benn’s charming daughter Hilary or one of the Millipede brothers.

Speaking about the threat of terrorism, Chancellor George Osborne said: “My commitment is very clear. This is the national priority. We will put the resources in. Whatever the security services want, they will get.”

If there hasn’t been a terror attack in your country:
“We are doing all we can to stop the terrorists but our resources are stretched. We need more powers and resources.”
If there has been a recent terror attack elsewhere:
“That could happen here. We are doing all we can to stop the terrorists but our resources are stretched. We need more powers and resources.”
If there has been a terror attack in your country:
“We did all we could to stop it but we didn’t have enough to prevent it from happening. Our methods are not in question, we need more powers and resources to stop it happening again.”
If there’s a global outbreak of peace and love, sweeping across all nations as weapons are cast aside and humanity unites in a new era of joy of optimism:
“We cannot guarantee that this will last. Even now, people may be plotting against us under the cover of everybody getting along. We need more powers and resources.”

Whatever happens, they will always ask for more powers and more resources. If our politicians won’t stand up to them and say ‘no’, who will?

In the wake of two recent tragedies (the cafe murders in Sydney and the series of murders in Paris) there has been an almost immediate, on social media almost overwealming, movement to stand with "ordinary Muslims" against possible retaliation from the public. See for instance the very worthy "I'll ride with you" trend that occurred during the siege in Sydney.

Whilst I think those behind these movements are just worthy but also right to say they stand with their Muslim neighbours and fellow citizens against any pointless and cruel "retaliation" against innocents, I do find it all a little distasteful. Disrespectful might be a better word. This may be a wrong feeling but it seems we no longer care much for the actual victims of these crimes but care more about sideways affected "might-be" victims. And in some bizarre way it all seems to suggest there is a link between these murders and innocent Muslim citizens who thus need our protection (when quite frankly no such link exists).

Where was the "I'll ride with you" for the police after the murders at Charlie Hebdo? Would've been useful as the next day a police officer was yet another murder victim.

It all creates a narrative that seems to play into the right-wings belief that minorities are perpetual victims. Yes we should stand against attacks (verbal or physical) on innocents of all colours, creeds and religions. But this social media obsession just borders on the depraved.

And there's been a picture going round (one I won't be sharing given its subject matter) of one of the murderers shooting a Muslim police officer dead near the scene of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. It labels the murderer as "Terrorist" and the police officer as "Muslim" as if the highlight who the real victim is. But of course both were Muslim (as far as we know, although neither will ever have a chance to tell us what was truly in their hearts on the matters of religion at the moments of their death). This obsession with pretending that these murders had nothing to do with the beliefs of the murderers is only slightly less disgusting than the fact the police officer was labelled "Muslim" as if that summed up his entire existence. It seemed really quite unnecessarily disrespectful to the life of that individual who was murdered in the course of defending others.

Maybe I'm just a bit old-fashioned but when someone is murdered or injured I just think our thoughts should be with them and their families at the first instance.

This week the world was horrified when gunmen burst into the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed 11 people, including four of the cartoonists. Charlie Hebdo had previously been a target of violence by people who claimed to be Muslim fundamentalists, as they were known for doing things like putting out covers like this:

“The Koran is shit…it doesn’t stop bullets”

People who were rightly outraged by this crime stood up to denounce the perpetrators (and, as usual, the entire religion they were a part of and anyone who shared the same race as the people in the area where that religion was born) and show support for the murdered cartoonists. Satire, they shouted, is free speech, and killing people who say things you don’t like is vile. Vive Charlie Hebdo! Je Suis Charlie!”

Well they’re right, of course. Satire is a potent weapon against tyranny and injustice, often used to bring about social change. The French especially have a long tradition of this art. Satire’s job is to mock, and to respond with guns is to admit defeat and show how potent it is.

In the case of Charlie Hebdo, though, things are a little muddy. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I don’t support radical Islam or murdering cartoonists. (I don’t support much of any religion, to be honest, or any murder.) The victims are clearly victims, not perpetrators. But that doesn’t make them spotless heroes or noble martyrs.

Defenders of Charlie Hebdo and its ilk will point out that it was an “equal-opportunity offender”, mocking Islam, Judaism, and Christianity alike. I was told of how much they had mocked French racism. But, as author Saladin Ahmed said on Twitter, “In an unequal world, satire that ‘mocks everyone equally’ ends up serving the powerful.”

Folks may claim that it’s “not PC” to make fun of “radical Islam”, but that’s wholly untrue. Radical Islam and “jihadists” are one of the few groups you can have a field day on, as far as the majority is concerned. Especially in Europe, where nationalistic racism is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, fueled by concern over immigrants, usually Muslim ones. Mocking Islam is a clear case of “punching down”, of targeting a hated subgroup while the audience applauds. It’s not brave or noble, even if there’s a chance the target will strike back. That Charlie Hebdo also had covers rudely mocking Christianity doesn’t make the “Muslim” caricatures (all big noses, beards, and turbans) any less troublesome. If a comedian makes fun of spoiled white people and then goes off on a Mexican with a “wetback stealing hubcaps” gag, it doesn’t even out.

It’s especially problematic when “radical Islam” is to Muslims what “thugs” are to black people. In 2015 we still hear people saying, with deep sincerity, “Oh I don’t hate black people, only n—–s” like that somehow makes a difference. Lampooning the bomb-throwing fanatic carries little heft when, for much of the audience, he’s just a stand-in for any Muslim.

I grew up on my dad’s copies of Mad magazine from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Similarly, Mad claimed that no one was safe from its biting satire, and for the most part they were correct. But anyone can tell you, the “satire” reserved for, say, gay folks, wasn’t exactly biting or incisive, it was just plain reactionary faggot-bashing. You can’t argue that in those decades gays had a position of power and needed to be taken down a peg. Is this cartoon not bigoted, because it also supports native Americans and blacks?

Mad #145, Sept ‘71, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” — “To A Gay Liberationist” (source)

Good satire isn’t easy. Your target needs to be large enough to require it, which means it’s usually well-insulated. It’s always David vs. Goliath, and you have to have just the right stone and aim just right or else the target won’t even care. Bad satire throws a bunch of stones at Goliath and hopes one hits. Worse satire just throws stones at regular Philistines because they’re easier to hit and everyone hates them anyway.

“I may not agree with what you say,” Voltaire didn’t say, “But I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Is free speech valuable? Yes. Is it worth protecting? By all means. But defending your right to it does not mean defending your ideology. Being murdered for your free speech doesn’t make the content of your speech noble.

There are people calling for — demanding — that the images which offended the gunmen be widely circulated and posted everywhere as a show of solidarity for free speech and a middle finger against “radical Islam”. Somehow, reposting juvenile caricatures will unite all of us against the tyranny of, according to the French man-on-the-street reaction, mosques and kebab shops. There’s something troubling about insisting that countries with a non-Muslim majority disseminate anti-Muslim images “for freedom”, especially when there’s the added insistance that the Muslim countries do so as well, to prove they’re good sports and not one of the “bad” ones.

The Charlie Hebdo attack was cowardly and abhorrent. The victims should still be alive, should still be free to do whatever cartooning they want. They are not responsible for what happened. That doesn’t make what they did noble and praiseworthy, however. I’ll stand for free speech. I’ll stand for satire. I’ll stand for not killing people. I’ll stand for innocent victims. I won’t stand for bigotry and bullying.

One of the reasons I find electronic music a bit difficult to get into is that I don’t really have a particularly nuanced understanding of what differentiates “good” electronic music from “bad” or even “mediocre”. I experienced a similar thing listening to some popular songs from last year – all the songs (outside of obvious genre distinctions) seemed to be quite similar, and even if I can isolate a Run The Jewels song¹ from other rap songs, I don’t think I could differentiate any of their songs from one another. Then again, I imagine most people would have this kind of trouble with the music I listen to – the layman would find most ragtime, for instance, quite homogeneous. “Familiarity with subject matter yields greater understanding of it” is hardly a novel observation, obviously, but it stands out for me with the popular music because it’s quite alienating and odd listening to playlists people have constructed, then listening to the album one of the songs is on and realising I couldn’t identify the song they chose for the playlist for listening through, much less understand the reasons they might have chosen them. All the songs blurred into one.

Lab, LD and Green all up; Con and UKIP down

Christmas shopping, parties and other seasonal distractions may be nothing but credit card bills now but in and amongst all that fun – forced or genuine – a rather interesting swing was taking place in the polls.

Before getting on to that, let’s deal with a potential objection. December, like August, is a non-political month and as such the argument goes that the public isn’t paying much attention to politics therefore analysts shouldn’t pay much attention to them. I disagree: there is always value to be had in well-conducted research. In this case, if it is true that engagement was relatively low, it may be that it tells us something about voters’ current sense of identification with the various parties. That is, if they’re not being actively persuaded to (or dissuaded from) supporting one party or another, then the responses must come from a deeper level.

And those responses are fascinating for the right/left split. The December numbers are:

Lab 33.2 (+1.3), Con 30.0 (-0.9), UKIP 15.3 (-0.9), LD 9.0 (+0.4), Grn 6.1 (+0.4), Oth 6.4 (-0.3)

Put another way, there was a swing on the month from the Right to the Left of nearly 2%. Of the three left-of-centre parties, Labour has least to cheer. Their share, though up, was still their second-worst since 2010 and while their collapse in Scotland combined with their overall figures implies a modest lead in England, in marked contrast to the last election, it looks fragile. Whether Miliband’s absence from the TV screens had anything to do with the rebound is open to question but it may not be an entire coincidence that Labour’s share jumped in August and December and plunged in May.

By contrast, Nick Clegg’s team may finally have some figures to take some confidence from, if not quite shout about yet. Their 9% was their best score since May and represented their third consecutive monthly increase. That said, the effect came mostly from one very good ICM poll; the average YouGov number actually went back on the month while the Populus average remains in the 8.5 to 9 per cent range for the eighth consecutive month.

For the month’s big winners, it’s to the bottom of the table we need to look, with the Greens breaking through the 6% barrier for the first time: double what they were on at the start of the year. Again, that figure was helped by a single poll (their 9% with Mori) but they scored record monthly averages with Opinium and YouGov too: very good figures for a party with virtually no media profile at a time when the main parties are ramping up campaigning (even if it slackened a bit for Christmas). How much the Greens can take credit is open to question but the more relevant point is what effect the increased support will have on the Greens’ election plans: you would expect that if more deposits are anticipated being saved, more candidates will be run.

As for the right-of-centre parties, the Conservatives had a particularly poor month, dropping to their lowest share since June 2013 at a time when they’d want to be experiencing a pre-election swing back. There is still time for that and Labour remains only about 3% ahead – way down on its peak – but Cameron cannot rely on Labour declining to keep his office in Downing Street. UKIP too dropped nearly a percentage point but in their case it was from a near-record high. Indeed, the Oct-Dec period represents the first time that the Purples have scored a 15%+ average in three consecutive months. Farage won’t be losing too much sleep just yet.

So a month to ignore or a month to take seriously? That depends on what you’re looking for from the runes. My own take would be that the most significant stat is that of the Greens, which represents yet another rejection of the mainstream rather than any positive move. Although the Greens are probably too far back to make any direct impact on Westminster, if they do continue to poll above 5% and consequently run, say, 200 more candidates than in 2010, that could have a significant indirect effect on the LD and Labour scores particularly.

David Herdson.

p.s. Mentioning the number of Green candidates, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was a major factor in OfCom’s thinking in not granting the Greens ‘major party’ status. To be considered a major party, you first need to act like one. In 2010, the Greens only contested half the seats up for election – and that was their most ever. Since then, they’ve continued to opt in and out of the process. While the Big Four have all contested every one of the 19 GB Westminster by-elections since the General, the Greens only stood in twelve (losing their deposit each time). You simply cannot be a part-time party for four years and then expect to be in with the big boys at the sharp end of the parliament.

Yesterday, when news of the shooting at the Charlie Hebdo office was just emerging, my main reaction was simply to feel extremely sad. Fortunately I’m not a politician, a journalist or even much of a blogger these days so I’m allowed to feel that way without having my motives examined for signs of possible racism or bigotry.

Over the last day of so I’ve made a number of comments and shared stuff on my usual social networks using the hashtag #jesuischarlie. What I meant by it was merely “there but for the grace of God go I” – a simple statement of solidarity.

Apparently that isn’t the case however. According to countless righteous people who have been all too keen to leap on the bully pulpit, I used that hashtag because I’m either a crypto-racist/islamophobe or hopelessly naive, thinking of Charlie Hebdo as some kind of bastion of western satire when in fact it is a scurrilous rag and not even very funny. And apparently I’m an idiot for thinking that this was about cartoons when it was in fact about much wider issues. I’ve even read suggestions that any act of solidarity must automatically mean I’m in favour of cracking down on the very civil liberties that yesterday’s murderers were attacking.

As it happens, from what little I knew of it, Charlie Hebdo did seem pretty scurrilous, insensitive and unfunny. As it happens, I’m not so stupid as to believe this is simply about a drawing of Mohammed. And needless to say, the last thing I want to see as a result of this attack is a crackdown on civil liberties or the end of multiculturalism.

It is too much to ask for people to not use atrocities like this to advance their own agendas. Indeed, that can be useful. But is it really too much to ask that people don’t insult everyone else’s intelligence whilst doing so, inferring far more into a simple expression of grief than it warrants?

Thank you. As you were.

Here we have a posting that originally ran on this site on 2/20/07. I wrote it then and I repost it now to answer a question that I often get. In the comic books that Dell published in the forties through the seventies, we saw all these characters who were famous from Disney cartoons, Warner Brothers cartoons, MGM cartoons (etc.) and they sometimes weren't the same in the comics as they were in the cartoons. As you'll see, when I was a lad I made the erroneous assumption it was because the folks doing the comics weren't very familiar with the cartoons. Wrong. They not only were very familiar with the cartoons, they were often among the people who'd made those cartoons. Here's what I wrote then…

We all love Wile E. Coyote, the long-suffering Road Runner chaser. But, uh, what does the "E" stand for?

I guess I don't know. I mean, none of the cartoons directed by Charles "Chuck" Jones and written by Michael Maltese ever said. Only a couple of them ever even said his name was Wile E. Coyote.

But it has just (this morning) been brought to my attention — thank you, Devlin Thompson — that more than a thousand websites say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert. The source for this is a 1973 story that appeared in the comic book, Beep Beep the Road Runner, published by Western Publishing Company under its Gold Key imprint. This is noted by Jon Cooke over on this page and as he also reveals, it was the question/answer to the Final Jeopardy question on the 1/18/07 episode of the game show, Jeopardy!

In the story, which was called "The Greatest of E's," Wile E. Coyote realizes he doesn't know and gathers together some of his relatives to answer the question. One is an uncle named Kraft E. Coyote who informs him and the world that the "E" stands for Ethelbert. That is, as far as I know, the only piece of fiction licensed or otherwise blessed by the Warner Brothers company that ever said such a thing.

This raises one of those moral issues that has no firm answer. What makes something like this an "official" fact in the world of animated cartoons? I mean, we know Bugs Bunny is named Bugs Bunny because…well, we just know. But what is the name of the frog that sings and dances in the Jones-Maltese masterpiece, One Froggy Evening? It's Michigan J. Frog, right? Apparently…but that name appears nowhere in the cartoon. As I understand it, the moniker was coined years later when there was some merchandising interest in the character…or maybe when W.B. decided to try and generate some merchandising interest. Chuck or Mike may have come up with it then or someone at WB may have and then Chuck and Mike endorsed and used it…but anyway, that's the frog's name. I suppose. I mean, if the guys who made One Froggy Evening didn't argue the point, who are we to say it isn't?

For that matter, even if some "fact" appears in a cartoon that doesn't make it inviolable. There were WB cartoons where Sylvester the Cat could talk and was owned by Granny. There were others where he couldn't talk and was Porky Pig's cat. Quick: If I asked you, "Who owns Sylvester?," you'd probably forget about all cartoons to the contrary and say it was Granny, who also owned Tweety. There were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons where for no apparent reason, those characters lived in other eras. Elmer Fudd had a couple of different middle initials in different shorts and characters' appearances were often changing and we could list hundreds of other inconsistencies. The films weren't intended to have an airtight continuity from one to another. Some "facts" were meant to be forgotten.

It was the same with the comic books. Western Publishing licensed the right to do comics of those characters for around thirty years, and the editors at Western thought of the comics as separate entities from the cartoons. The Donald Duck that Carl Barks and others wrote and drew for Western's Disney comics was not exactly the same Donald Duck that appeared in the Disney cartoons. They adapted the character, rethinking and redesigning him for a different medium. (It's a funny thing: When I was a kid and read Bugs Bunny comic books, I always "heard" the wabbit's dialogue in Mel Blanc's voice from the shorts. But when I read a Donald Duck comic book, I never thought that duck spoke with the voice Clarence Nash supplied for Donald in his cartoon appearances…maybe because I understood so little of what the animated duck said and I could read every syllable of the comic book Donald's word balloons.) In some ways, the Donald of the comics was the same character but in others, he was a different but similar creature. And I never quite related the Mickey Mouse of the comic books or strips to any of his animated appearances.

While Western was doing the Warner Brothers-based comics, they changed a lot of the characters to make them — they thought — more workable for print media. They didn't think matching the cartoons closely mattered because, for one thing, those films weren't on TV every week then. During the forties and early fifties, they weren't on TV at all. Many of the kids who bought the comics rarely, if ever, saw the animated shorts and certainly didn't see them over and over and over, like they would in later years. So it didn't matter a whole heap if the comics matched the cartoons; only that they worked as comic book reading experiences. Back then in the Bugs Bunny newspaper strip, which was read by millions, Elmer Fudd rarely appeared and I don't think Yosemite Sam ever did…but Sylvester was a regular. He was a hobo who wasn't owned by Granny, didn't chase Tweety Birds and who had a British accent. Someone thought it made for a better strip that way.

This is why, for instance, the Road Runner in comic books differed so much from the Road Runner in cartoons. When I was a kid enjoying both, I was puzzled. I'd seen Road Runner cartoons. They were tough to come by then but I'd caught one or two and in them, there was one Road Runner and one Coyote and neither spoke. In the comics, the Road Runner not only spoke, he spoke in rhyme. He had a name — Beep Beep — and in some stories, he had a wife and a family of either three or four youthful road-running kids. The Coyote spoke too, though not in rhyme, though that didn't bother me as much. The Coyote had spoken in a couple of non-Road Runner cartoons.

I wondered aloud back then if the folks who made the comic books had ever viewed one of those hard-to-see cartoons — but of course, they had. As I learned much later, Michael Maltese wrote many of those comics and the early ones were drawn by Pete Alvarado. Pete handpainted all the backgrounds for the first Road Runner cartoon, Fast and Furry-ous. Almost all the other writers and artists who did the comics (Phil DeLara, Don R. Christensen, Warren Foster, et al) had worked for the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, if not in Jones's unit then right down the hall. They knew that in the cartoons, the Road Runner didn't talk — in rhyme or at all and it had been a conscious decision to change it for the comics. The editors and creators had also decided to not worry about consistency from comic book to comic book. In some, there was a Mrs. Road Runner and four kids. But there were several years there where the wife and one of the kids disappeared…except that every now and then, they'd inexplicably turn up for a story or two or in a reprint sandwiched in among new adventures.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's no more a "fact" that the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert than it is that the Road Runner is named Beep Beep, has a wife and kids and speaks in doggerel. It said the "E" stood for Ethelbert in one comic book story but that's just one obscure comic book story…and even the guy who wrote it didn't intend it as anything more than one joke on one page of one story in one issue.

How do I know this? Because, as some of you may have guessed by now, I was that guy. I wrote that story. I think I was around twenty years old at the time. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that that one was conceived in a lecture hall at U.C.L.A. while I was simultaneously jotting down script ideas and feigning attention to what a tedious Anthropology professor was teaching. Mike Maltese had been occasionally writing the comics in semi-retirement before me…but when he dropped the "semi" part, I got the job and that was one of the plots I came up with. For the record, the story was drawn by a terrific artist named Jack Manning, and Mr. Maltese complimented me on it.

Still, I wouldn't take that as any official endorsement of the Coyote's middle name. If you want to say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert, fine. I mean, it's not like someone's going to suddenly whip out Wile E.'s actual birth certificate and yell, "Aha! Here's incontrovertible proof!" But like I said, I never imagined anyone would take it as part of the official "canon" of the character. If I had, I'd have said the "E" stood for Evanier.