Andrew Hickey

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November 25th, 2014: YOU GUYS: I ALSO MADE A FLASK – Ryan

Lembit Opik was in Rochester and Strood as "media adviser" to fringe candidate Charlotte Rose.

“Charlotte calls herself a ‘sexual therapist’," Lembit told BuzzFeed News, "because it’s less loaded but, yes, she is essentially a sex worker. But she does it in a way which is absolutely open and honest, and I’d say her profession and the way she does it is more honest than a lot of politicians,"

How did Lembit and his candidate get on? Over to Andy McSmith:

In 2010, the Lib Dems lost Montgomeryshire, a seat which they or the Liberals had held for 96 of the previous 110 years. Lembit Opik, the Lib Dem MP who pulled off this rare defeat, has been consistent ever since, in that everything he has tried has turned to disaster. 

His latest in an unbroken run was to act as “media adviser” to Charlotte Rose, the sex worker who contested the Rochester by-election. The target was for Ms Rose to beat the 56 votes she harvested in the Clacton by-election. With Opik’s help, she scored 43.

That's right. He couldn't even beat the Liberal Democrats.

According to the Open Rights Group, (ORG) who are often right on soon-to-be-published legislation, the forthcoming bill on “IP Address Matching” is about mobile networks performing NAT.

There are probably a few reading this whose eyes have already started to glaze over, given the first paragraph mentions a three letter acronym. It is likely that a few civil servants and ministers suffered from the same. That is worrying because it is entirely possible that this bill may, if ORG are correct, involve collection of communications data – here’s why:

Network Address Translation (NAT) is a way of hiding many computers behind a single Internet address. It was invented because under the system of addressing currently in use in much of the world, there are not enough addresses for every computer to connect at once. Using the analogy of a telephone system, it is like a company having a few well-publicised phone numbers for their major services but hiding all their other staff behind a single generic phone number whenever they make an outbound call.

If someone is making nuisance calls that you are trying to trace, being told that the call came from your generic phone number is not much use. As with IP addresses hidden behind NAT, there could have been tens of thousands of phone calls being made outbound from that phone number at any point in time. You can only trace who made the call if you also logged which number each handset dialed.

Now, the internet also uses port numbers. They are fixed for servers (web servers typically run on port 80 or 443) but randomly assigned for outbound connections, so that the address and port will be unique for anyone talking to a particular service. This makes it theoretically possible to trace a user using both the address and port if you already know which service they were talking to.

Unfortunately for that approach, servers in the internet generally only record source addresses and not source ports.

If the Home Office want the data they are collecting to be useful, this means they will likely also be asking service providers to be storing destination addresses, which brings us back to having to store communications data. It would allow security services, police or even an anti-piracy company with a court order to ask a service provider questions such as “tell me everyone who accessed www.aljazeera.com in the last 12 months”.

Hopefully I’m wrong.

(Some further reading for the more technically inclined is over at ISPReview. The comments are also worth a read.)

"What Wikipedia taught me about my grandfather."

Hooray!

Celebrating fifty-one years today of Doctor Who – and four weeks today of our marriage.

And as this blog is one of our projects together, we’ve not forgotten it, either. Alex even took – steel yourself – a book on honeymoon. He read it, too. But in the light of his impressive record so far, he’s making no rash commitments.

You can of course and appropriately read for yourself the full text of the reading given at our wedding, with not a few lines from the New Adventures, but it may be more approachable to see Maius Intra Qua Extra delivered with pace and energy on video as well. A bit like Shakedown.


Many, many thanks to four very lovely men: Nick Campbell (hair) and Simon Fernandes (hat) for performing for us, and both of whom have previously guest-written for this very blog; Simon’s partner Barry for shooting them; and Nick’s partner Jon for looking sweet in the bottom of shot. And, of course, to Richard, for marrying me.

If any reader happened to record any other part of our wedding (or another take of the reading) on their hand-held devices, please let us know, as we’d love to see any videos that any of you have. New-fangled moving pictures were, alas, something we never got round to sorting out, so thank you again, Barry.

Richard and I are currently sorting through wedding photos for our next project, but here’s one that I particularly like: a shot from during the ‘gratuitous sexual innuendos’ part of the reading, showing the reactions of the two delighted grooms – and of our parents. Fantastic.



If you’d like to hazard a guess at identifying any of the intimidating number of mashed-up Doctor Who quotations, please chip in either below or on the written version.

I will at some stage just give up and attribute them all on my main blog, but if you’d like a hint for what’s left, though it was all assembled into one piece by Alex Wilcock and Richard Flowers, there were a few other writers.

As is traditional, with additional dialogue by William Shakespeare.

But mainly by David Whitaker, Gareth Roberts, Terrance Dicks, Paul Cornell, Russell T Davies, Anthony Coburn, Rona Munro, Ian Briggs, Ian Stuart Black, Robert Sloman and Barry Letts, Graeme Curry, Christopher H Bidmead, Robert Holmes, Simon Guerrier, Marc Platt, Jim Mortimore and Andy Lane, Ben Aaronovitch, David Fisher, Terry Nation Tom Baker, Stephen Wyatt, Robert Banks Stewart, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, Anthony Steven, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, John Lucarotti, Johnny Byrne, Matthew Jacobs TV’s Eric Roberts, Andrew Cartmel, and Peter Harness.

Thanks to them all, and to so many others.

Hal Lindsey turns 85 years old today, something that Lindsey himself has spent decades telling us should never come to pass.

Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth — a blockbuster best-seller — told us that the End of the World was nigh. And not just maybe a bit nigh-ish, mind you, but really, really nigh.

Lindsey made a fortune interpreting the signs of the times and explaining what it all means according to his premillennial dispensationalist “Bible prophecy.” And the signs were clear and undeniable, Lindsey said back in 1970. The Rapture was imminent. The End was near and could come at any moment.

No one who read and believed The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970 would have expected that the world could possibly still be around on Hal Lindsey’s 85th birthday. The “countdown to Armageddon” had started, Lindsey told us — and that countdown wasn’t supposed to last for another 44 years.

Lindsey’s big selling point — the angle that made his variation of the usual “Bible prophecy” scheme stand out — had to do with the idea that the Rapture would have to come within one “generation” of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. A biblical generation, Lindsey assured us, was about 40 years — maybe a very little bit longer than that, but surely not 66 years, which is how long it’s been by today, the 85th birthday that prophecy had prophesied Hal Lindsey could not possibly still be around to see.

I worry about Hal Lindsey’s financial security now that he’s midway through his 80s. Sure, he made a fortune back in the 1970s and 1980s — Late Great sold more than 29 million copies. But surely Lindsey couldn’t have invested all that money in long-term savings. After all, he spent his whole career insisting that there couldn’t possibly be such a thing as a long term remaining for this late, great planet and its inhabitants. If the 1980s were the “countdown to Armageddon,” then surely Lindsey’s financial planning wouldn’t have extended decades beyond the 1990s. That would’ve been absurd! It would have contradicted everything he’d ever written.

Fortunately, Hal Lindsey can still rely on Social Security — that program remains fully funded, despite another lucrative strain of apocalyptic literature that’s been insisting for decades that it, too, was on the verge of imminent collapse. (Strangely, some of the same people who have spent decades telling us that Social Security was going to go bankrupt 30 years from now are also the people who have spent decades telling us that the Rapture is imminent and the world would end well before then.)

Lindsey’s admirers will likely celebrate his 85th birthday today without pausing to realize that this celebration disproves everything Lindsey ever taught them. The same thing happened in 2009, when admirers of the Scofield Reference Bible marked the 100th anniversary of that volume. And it will happen again next year, when Left Behind fans celebrate with a 20th anniversary edition of that novel.

Hal Lindsey turns 85 today. He told us that could never happen, but it just did.

From LinkedIn:

Wednesday, famed sportswriter Bill Simmons released a podcast where he interviewed Lorne Michaels, the man who created and still runs Saturday Night Live. In the interview, Michaels said something particularly interesting about the creative process.

Simmons asked him about the grueling nature of SNL, where Michaels and his staff have been putting on a live hour of television each week for the past 40 years. Specifically, Simmons asked if that sort of schedule was too difficult, if there would be a benefit to cutting back.

Michaels’ answer: no.

“There’s a mantra that I have, which is fatigue is your friend,” Michaels said. “There’s a point at which, in anything artistic, at least from my perspective, the critical faculty can overwhelm the creative faculty… When you’re tired, you just write it, and all sorts of different kinds of work comes out.”

Michaels, who developed talent like Will Ferrell, Chris Farley, Eddie Murphy and hundreds of others, went on to say that when creative types are tired, they lose their filter. And then, “someone takes a chance that they would never, if they were cautious or they were smart, would have ever attempted.”

“And those kinds of things are what you remember now as hits,” he continued.

. . . .

There have been several scientific studies into the exact issue Simmons and Michaels talked about. And while there are some splits in the findings, the majority say that, indeed, sleep deprivation can actually increase creativity.

One study by Mareike Wieth at Albion College probed into this issue by giving people problems to answer at their non-optimal time of the day; i.e. times when they were tired (morning people were given problems in the evening and evening people were given problems in the morning).

What Wieth found was that people answered math questions better when they were well-rested. However, for problems that required more creative thinking, the people who were more tired did better.

“The findings indicate that tasks involving creativity might benefit from a non-optimal time of day,” Wieth wrote in her study.

Additionally, Italian researcher Marcello Massimini found that the brain becomes more sensitive throughout the day, as it continues to form new synapses for as long as you stay awake. When you finally sleep, those synapses are pruned down.

Link to the rest at LinkedIn and thanks to Dennis for the tip.

How bad is the politicization of white evangelical religion? How thoroughly has every trace of the gospel been replaced by partisan political sloganeering? It’s this bad:

After speaking to a Sunday school class about immigration, a woman asked if she could talk to me. She pulled me aside and whispered, “I think there’s a girl in my daughter’s class this year who is, umm, not legal. What should I do?”

She explained that her daughter had befriended a new girl. When they talked, the student was evasive and said she wasn’t allowed to say where she lived for fear someone would take her mother away and send her back to Mexico. The woman asked me, “What should I do? Do I need to turn her in?”

I assured the woman that she had no reason to report the girl or her mother and suggested she encourage her daughter to invite the girl over instead. “But couldn’t we get into trouble if she’s not here legally?” the woman asked.

I often hear these kinds of concerns when I speak about immigration.

That’s Dale Hanson Bourke writing at Christianity Today. What she means there when she says “I often hear these kinds of concerns when I speak about immigration” is that she often hears these kinds of concerns when she speaks about immigration to white evangelicals.

Because they’ve completely lost the map.

What does this show us? It shows us a people whose “concerns” — whose response to the actual stranger in their midst — is not primarily shaped by the gospel, by their “relationship with Jesus,” by “the authority of scripture,” the Bible, or any of the other stuff they’re always on about. Their response is not shaped by those things at all.

It is shaped by Fox News. And AM talk radio. And the National Religious Broadcasters. It’s shaped by the explicit right-wing partisanship of Charismanews and by the the implicit right-wing partisanship of Christianity Today.

It has been reduced to a shrinky-dink caricature of Christianity, one in which that phrase — “the stranger in your midst” — is not even recognized as a massive biblical motif, except perhaps maybe out of context, in reference to a fetus, because that is the primary and almost the only meaning that “Jesus” and “the Bible” have anymore, as a shorthand for criminalizing abortion.

Just consider how many utterly wrong turns one has to take to arrive at the position in which a little girl comes to your Sunday school class and your first thought is “Do I need to turn her in?” That’s sick.

Sure, it’s good to see Christianity Today pushing back, ever so slightly, against some of the ramifications of this sickness. Hanson Bourke offers a helpful explanation for CT’s readers to correct some of the more ludicrous lies they’ve apparently ingested wholesale from Fox and “Christian” radio. But here again, the goodness of what’s being said is overshadowed by the fact that it needed to be said at all.

Here’s the final point in Hanson Bourke’s article. Just consider what it means that a group of Christians needed to be told this:

5. It is not against the law to welcome a family into your home or help them, even if they are undocumented.

Including new children in the classroom in your family events is a wonderful way to help them feel accepted. Showing hospitality to a child or a family whose immigration status is questionable does not create legal problems for citizens.

New children in any classroom often feel lonely and need a friend. Children whose families are from a different country or culture can feel even more alone. As I assured the woman at church, reaching out to such a child is not only legal; it is a special act of kindness that will benefit not only that other child, but her child as well.

OK, so now these Christians know that there is no legal barrier to stop them from helping undocumented children. Against such there is no law.

But consider the deplorable modesty of the argument Hanson Bourke has to make for her evangelical audience. She’s not reassuring them that they won’t get in trouble for all the help they’ve been providing to immigrant families, because their Fox-addled Republicanism has barred them from providing any such help up until now.

Actually, helping these families is an idea introduced by Hanson Bourke. The “concern” she’s heard from evangelicals wasn’t about whether or not they would get in trouble for helping other people. Their concern was, again, “Do I need to turn her in?”

Jesus Christ. By which I mean, listen to Jesus Christ: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” Therefore you “are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Do I need to turn her in? Holy motherloving hell.

A century ago, American churches were busily expanding their “home mission societies” to minister to immigrants arriving in America. They cooked meals, helped provide housing and clothing. They taught English lessons and helped immigrants find work. That early-20th-century home mission work was also harmfully entangled in all sorts of colonial attitudes, problematic ideas about assimilation and Anglicization, etc. But even if their acts of mercy were, in part, due to imperfect motivations, those Christians were still responding to the arrival of new immigrants with acts of mercy because that’s what Christians do.

They knew this. They did not have to be argued into it or persuaded and cajoled into accepting the idea. White evangelicals today apparently do not know this. Such acts of mercy are not a part of their identity. Particularly not when it comes to the Others they hear demonized in their daily devotionals from Fox News and Christian hate radio.

Something has gone very, very wrong.

 

There are some days when I couldn’t feel more alienated from UK politics, and today is one of them. While we are still struggling to comprehend why the people of Rochester and Strood just re-elected an MP who is a virtual caricature of every worst Westminster character trait imaginable in what they seem to think is a defiant anti-Westminster rebuff, Labour opted to lose it completely. They sacked Emily Thornberry from the front bench for posting a picture of a house with three England flags in the window alongside in a way that might be construed as mildly passive-aggressive. Sacked immediately by an apparently furious Ed Miliband, we’ve been bombarded today by pictures of the house’s occupant, nicknamed “White Van Dan” riding around Islington in his van, which has now been covered by Sun newspaper stickers. Meanwhile, asked what he thinks whenever he sees a white van, Ed Miliband came up with the ultimate Thick-Of-It-ism by replying “respect“.

Hanging over all this is the spectre of Gillian Duffy, the pensioner from Rochdale who Gordon Brown unwisely called a bigoted woman while wearing a live microphone during the 2010 general election campaign. In both cases, the response has seemed as out of touch if less authentic than the original offence. In fact, the only thing less authentic is the manufactured outrage whipped up by the media and Labour’s rivals which caused the apologies in the first place.

Labour aren’t just the victims of this. Just yesterday, Labour’s new anti-Green unit had managed to get the Evening Standard to publish a story attacking Green Party leader Natalie Bennett for the apparently egregious offence of travelling across Europe in a comfortable train instead of the indignity of squatting in one of those flying toilets that passes for a RyanAir plane. As someone who did something rather similar last month, albeit mostly out of a desire for comfort rather than wanting to minimise carbon emissions, I struggle to understand what the fuss is about. I certainly struggle to understand why Labour thinks this is going to alienate potential voters from the Green Party.

Much of what I wrote about Norman Baker’s treatment following his resignation earlier this month also applies to this latest debacle. I’m growing increasingly despairing of politicians’ craven need to indulge every reactionary twinge, as long as it emerges from a housing estate. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is genuine concern for the poor and marginalised in society however; I have no idea if White Van Dan receives benefits or not, but under different circumstances he is exactly the kind of bloke that the Sun typically vilifies for being a scrounger, with Labour cheerleading behind it. If you’re poor, the political class hate you; yet if you say something like “it’s not racist to want to kick brown people out of the country”, you are fêted and patronised as the authentic voice of the working classes. Meanwhile, the under-25s are looking at having their benefits slashed regardless of whether Labour or the Tories win a plurality at the next general election. And despite housing being one of the biggest single causes of poverty and social immobility, none of the parties appear to be interest in doing much about it.

The thing is, as a strategy for marginalising the far right, it doesn’t work, at all, as Ukip’s surge in recent years and the BNP’s upswing before that has repeatedly demonstrated. We are fortunate in this country in that most of our far right parties are so venal that they tend to turn in on themselves as soon as they get a whiff of success (helped along by organisations like Hope Not Hate). The BNP and English Defence League both spectacularly self-destructed, as indeed did Ukip 10 years ago following Robert Kilroy Silk’s attempts at a takeover. And looking at the oddballs which Ukip got elected as MEPs this year, there’s a good chance they will self-destruct again.

But by not challenging the very thing they stand for, all the main parties have achieved is to grow the reactionary core vote. As parties collapse, new ones rise up and quickly take their place. If Nigel Farage does self-immolate at some point, you can bet that there’s another smooth talking, slimy public former public schoolboy ready to take his place.

As it is, when people say idiotic things like immigration is a taboo subject in British politics, the main parties all nod their heads sagely, despite knowing that it’s all they ever talk about. I’m hardly the first person to notice that “Ukip are right, don’t vote for them” has spectacularly failed as a political message. And while politicians are falling over themselves to come up with ever harsher anti-immigration policies, whilst straining to appear non-racist, immigrants themselves meanwhile are shoring up the NHS, the treasury and our cultural life.

With the vast majority of the public not willing to even consider voting Ukip, is it really that inconceivable to actually challenge their bullshit? I don’t mean in a mealy mouthed, apologetic way as Labour currently practices, but in a robust and pro-active way. It did not, admittedly, work particularly well for the Lib Dems during the last European elections, but their credibility has been shot to pieces. Imagine if Ed Miliband had decided to take Ukip to task at his party conference this September, instead of spending the last couple of months indulging them? He certainly wouldn’t be in a worse position than he is at the moment. I suspect that his failure to do so has more to do with the rise in Green Party popularity than any newfound concern for the environment.

I’m not a fan of nationalism, but I will confess that some people seem to be capable of practising genuine civic nationalism, and I respect them for it. In the run up and aftermath of the Scottish independence referendum, I came across dozens of examples of it campaigning for Yes. As someone who has always been quite dismissive of SNP claims to be this generous form of nationalism, as opposed to the defensive, hateful kind, this has represented something of a challenge for me (for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not suggesting that all SNP supporters are twinkly civic nationalists; far from it).

The Anglo-British political class however seem to be reacting to the nationalist challenge by adopting an equally reactionary form of nationalism. Throughout the Scottish independence referendum campaign, my twitterfeed seemed to be dominated by No campaigners and English politicos talking about how a Yes vote would force them to erect a border between Scotland and England – not to keep the nationalists out, you understand, but all the dreadful immigrants that the SNP was going to be willing to accept into the country. Self-defined lefties, progressives and Europhiles were talking about Schengen in increasingly shrill tones. This seems to be all that British nationalism has to offer; togevverness in the face of the awful outside world, and nothing but spite for Scotland if it chose to go its own way. As someone who simply doesn’t understand why I should treat Scots as any more or less comradely than the French or Danes – or Liberians for that matter, I found it weirdly alienating.

The Ango-British are really bad at nationalism, not least of all because no-one seems to be able to decide whether to wrap themselves in the English or British flag. I don’t doubt the integrity of people like Billy Bragg wanting an English civic nationalism, but even he isn’t very good at articulating it, and no-one is really listening to him in any case. Instead of trying to invent something that isn’t there, the progressive, civic nationalist thing to do is to simply not worry too much about it, and instead focus on values such as mutual respect and solidarity. Those ought to be our starting points, not a concern about alienating people who have become intoxicated with nationalist lies.

There’s a possibility that Labour might actually realise this over the next couple of months and respond accordingly, but I’m not going to be holding my breath. If they don’t however, I suspect that all we’ll see is a further fragmentation of the Labour vote as haemorrhages between the Greens and Ukip. In many ways, this isn’t a bad thing – the collapse of the established political order is looking increasingly inevitable. But while it might be a positive thing in the long term, in the short term we are likely to just see British politics adrift on a tide of racist and hateful effluent.

I.

“Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish.

(this is going to end up being a metaphor for something. Yup, we’re back to Whale Metaphor Blogging.)

The argument goes like this. Jonah got swallowed by a whale. But the Bible says Jonah got swallowed by a big fish. So the Bible seems to think whales are just big fish. Therefore the Bible is fallible. Therefore, the Bible was not written by God.

The first problem here is that “whale” is just our own modern interpretation of the Bible. For all we know, Jonah was swallowed by a really really really big herring.

The second problem is that if the ancient Hebrews want to call whales a kind of fish, let them call whales a kind of fish.

I’m not making the weak and boring claim that since they’d never discovered genetics they don’t know better. I am making the much stronger claim that, even if the ancient Hebrews had taken enough of a break from murdering Philistines and building tabernacles to sequence the genomes of all knownspecies of aquatic animals, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong, false, or incorrect with them calling a whale a fish.

Now, there’s something wrong with saying “whales are phylogenetically just as closely related to bass, herring, and salmon as these three are related to each other.” What’s wrong with the statement is that it’s false. But saying “whales are a kind of fish” isn’t.

Suppose you travel back in time to ancient Israel and try to explain to King Solomon that whales are a kind of mammal and not a kind of fish.

Your translator isn’t very good, so you pause to explain “fish” and “mammal” to Solomon. You tell him that fish is “the sort of thing herring, bass, and salmon are” and mammal is “the sort of thing cows, sheep, and pigs are”. Solomon tells you that your word “fish” is Hebrew dag and your word “mammal” is Hebrew behemah.

So you try again and say that a whale is a behemah, not a dag. Solomon laughs at you and says you’re an idiot.

You explain that you’re not an idiot, that in fact all kinds of animals have things called genes, and the genes of a whale are much closer to those of the other behemah than those of the dag.

Solomon says he’s never heard of these gene things before, and that maybe genetics is involved in your weird foreign words “fish” and “mammal”, but dag are just finned creatures that swim in the sea, and behemah are just legged creatures that walk on the Earth.

(like the kelev and the parah and the gavagai)

You try to explain that no, Solomon is wrong, dag are actually defined not by their swimming-in-sea-with-fins-ness, but by their genes.

Solomon says you didn’t even know the word dag ten minutes ago, and now suddenly you think you know what it means better than he does, who has been using it his entire life? Who died and made you an expert on Biblical Hebrew?

You try to explain that whales actually have tiny little hairs, too small to even see, just as cows and sheep and pigs have hair.

Solomon says oh God, you are so annoying, who the hell cares whether whales have tiny little hairs or not. In fact, the only thing Solomon cares about is whether responsibilities for his kingdom’s production of blubber and whale oil should go under his Ministry of Dag or Ministry of Behemah. The Ministry of Dag is based on the coast and has a lot of people who work on ships. The Ministry of Behemah has a strong presence inland and lots of of people who hunt on horseback. So please (he continues) keep going about how whales have little tiny hairs.

It’s easy to see that Solomon has a point, and that if he wants to define behemah as four-legged-land-dwellers that’s his right, and no better or worse than your definition of “creatures in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree”. Indeed, it might even be that if you spent ten years teaching Solomon all about the theory of genetics and evolution (which would be hilarious – think how annoyed the creationists would get) he might still say “That’s very interesting, and I can see why we need a word to describe creatures closely related along the phylogenetic tree, but make up your own word, because behemah already means ‘four-legged-land-dweller’.”

Now imagine that instead of talking to King Solomon, you’re talking to that guy from Duck Dynasty with the really crazy beard (I realize that may describe more than one person), who stands in for all uneducated rednecks in the same way King Solomon stands in for all Biblical Hebrews.

“Ah course a whale is a feesh, ya moron” he says in his heavy Southern accent.

“No it isn’t,” you say. “A fish is a creature phylogenetically related to various other fish, and with certain defining anatomical features. It says so right here in this biology textbook.”

“Well,” Crazy Beard Guy tells you, “Ah reckon that might be what a fish is, but a feesh is some’in that swims in the orshun.”

With a sinking feeling in your stomach, you spend ten years turning Crazy Beard Guy into a world expert on phylogenetics and evolutionary theory. Although the Duck Dynasty show becomes much more interesting, you fail to budge him a bit on the meaning of “feesh”.

It’s easy to see here that “fish” and “feesh” can be different just as “fish” and “dag” can be different.

You can point out how many important professors of icthyology in fancy suits use your definition, and how only a couple of people with really weird facial hair use his. But now you’re making a status argument, not a factual argument. Your argument is “conform to the way all the cool people use the word ‘fish'”, not “a whale is really and truly not a fish”.

There are facts of the matter on each individual point – whether a whale has fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et cetera. But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish. The argument is entirely semantic.

So this is the second reason why this particular objection to the Bible is silly. If God wants to call a whale a big fish, stop telling God what to do.

(also, bats)

II.

When terms are not defined directly by God, we need our own methods of dividing them into categories.

The essay “How An Algorithm Feels From The Inside” is a gift that keeps on giving. You can get a reputation as a daring and original thinker just by copy-pasting it at different arguments with a couple of appropriate words substituted for one another, mad-libs like. It is the solution to something like 25% of extent philosophical problems.

It starts with a discussion of whether or not Pluto is a planet. Planets tend to share many characteristics in common. For example, they are large, round, have normal shaped orbits lined up with the plane of the ecliptic, have cleared out a certain area of space, and are at least kind of close to the Sun as opposed to way out in the Oort Cloud.

One could imagine a brain that thought about these characteristics like this:

One could imagine this model telling you everything you need to know. If an object is larger, it’s more likely to be round and in cis-Neptunian space. If an object has failed to clear its orbit of debris, it’s more likely to have a skewed orbit relative to the plane of the ecliptic. We could give each of these relationships Bayesian weights and say things like large objects have a 32% chance of being in cis-Neptunian space and small objects an 86% chance. Or whatever.

But this model has some big problems. For one thing, if you inscribe it in blood, you accidentally summon the Devil. But second, it’s computationally very complicated. Each attribute affects each other attribute which affects it in turn and so on in an infinite cycle, so that its behavior tends to be chaotic and unpredictable.

What the human brain actually seems to do is to sweep all common correlations into one big category in the middle, thus dividing possibility-space into large round normal-orbit solitary inner objects, and small irregular skewed-orbit crowded outer objects. It calls the first category “planets” and the second category “planetoids”.

Obligatory Less Wrong picture

You can then sweep minor irregularities under the rug. Neptune is pretty far from the sun, but since it’s large, round, normal-orbit, and solitary, we know which way the evidence is leaning.

When an object satisfies about half the criteria for planet and half the criteria for planetoid, then it’s awkward. Pluto is the classic example. It’s relatively large, round, skewed orbit, solitary…ish? and outer-ish. What do you do?

The practical answer is you convene some very expensive meeting of prestigious astronomers and come to some official decision which everyone agrees to follow so they’re all on the same page.

But the ideal answer is you say “Huh, the assumption encoded in the word ‘planet’ that the five red criteria always went together and the five blue criteria always went together doesn’t hold. Whatever.”

Then you divide the solar system into three types of objects: planets, planetoids, and dammit-our-categorization-scheme-wasn’t-as-good-as-we-thought.

(psychiatry, whose philosophy of categorization is light years ahead of a lot of the rest of the world, conveniently abbreviates this latter category as “NOS”)

The situation with whales and fish is properly understood in the same context. Fish and mammals differ on a lot of axes. Fish generally live in the water, breathe through gills, have tails and fins, possess a certain hydrodynamic shape, lay eggs, and are in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree. Mammals generally live on land, breathe through lungs, have legs, give live birth, and are in another part of the phylogenetic tree. Most fish conform to all of the fish desiderata, and most mammals conform to all of the mammal desiderata, so there’s no question of how to categorize them. Occasionally you get something weird (a platypus, a lungfish, or a whale) and it’s a judgment call which you have to decide by fiat. In our case, that fiat is “use genetics and ignore all other characteristics” but some other language, culture, or scientific community might make a different fiat, and then the borders between their categories would look a little bit different.

III.

Since I shifted to a borders metaphor, let’s follow that and see where it goes.

Imagine that Israel and Palestine agree to a two-state solution with the final boundary to be drawn by the United Nations. You’re the head of the United Nations committee involved, so you get out a map and a pencil. Both sides have sworn by their respective gods to follow whatever you determine.

Your job is not to draw “the correct border”. There is no one correct border between Israel and Palestine. There are a couple of very strong candidates (for example, the pre-1967 line of control), but both countries have suggested deviations from that (most people think an actual solution would involve Palestine giving up some territory that has since been thoroughly settled by Israel in exchange for some territory within Israel proper, or perhaps for a continuous “land bridge” between the West Bank and Gaza). Even if you wanted to use the pre-1967 line as a starting point, there would still be a lot of work to do deciding what land swaps should and shouldn’t be made.

Instead you’d be making a series of trade-offs. Giving all of Jerusalem to the Israelis would make them very happy but anger Palestine. Creating a contiguous corridor between Gaza and the West Bank makes some sense, but then you’d be cutting off Eilat from the rest of Israel. Giving all of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank back to Palestine would satisfy a certain conception of property rights, but also leave a lot of Jews homeless.

There are also much stupider decisions you could make. You could give Tel Aviv to Palestine. You could make the Palestinian state a perfect circle five miles in radius centered on Rishon LeZion. You could just split the territory in half with a straight line, and give Israel the north and Palestine the south. All of these things would be really dumb.

But, crucially, they would not be false. They would not be factually incorrect. They would just be failing to achieve pretty much any of the goals that we would expect a person solving land disputes in the Middle East to have. You can think of alternative arrangements in which these wouldn’t be dumb. For example, if you’re a despot, and you want to make it very clear to both the Israelis and Palestinians that their opinions don’t matter and they should stop bothering you with annoying requests for arbitration, maybe splitting the country in half north-south is the way to go.

This is now unexpectedly a geography blog again.

The border between Turkey and Syria follows a mostly straight-ish line near-ish the 36th parallel, except that about twenty miles south of the border Turkey controls a couple of square meters in the middle of a Syrian village. This is the tomb of the ancestor of the Ottoman Turks, and Turkey’s border agreement with Syria stipulates that it will remain part of Turkey forever. And the Turks take this very seriously; they maintain a platoon of special forces there and have recently been threatening war against Syria if their “territory” gets “invaded” in the current conflict.

Pictured: Turkey (inside fence), Syria (outside)

The border between Bangladesh and India is complicated at the best of times, but it becomes absolutely ridiculous in a place called Cooch-Behar, which I guess is as good a name as any for a place full of ridiculous things. In at least one spot there is an ‘island’ of Indian territory within a larger island of Bangladeshi territory within a larger island of Indian territory within Bangladesh. According to mentalfloss.com:

So why’d the border get drawn like that? It can all be traced back to power struggles between local kings hundreds of years ago, who would try to claim pockets of land inside each other’s territories as a way to leverage political power. When Bangladesh became independent from India in 1947 (as East Pakistan until 1971), all those separate pockets of land were divvied up. Hence the polka-dotted mess.

Namibia is a very weird-looking country with a very thin three-hundred-mile-long panhandle (eg about twice as long as Oklahoma’s). Apparently during the Scramble For Africa, the Germans who colonized Namibia really wanted access to the Zambezi River so they could reach the Indian Ocean and trade their colonial resources. They kept pestering the British who colonized Botswana until the Brits finally agreed to give up a tiny but very long strip of territory ending at the riverbank. This turned out to be not so useful, as just after Namibia’s Zambezi access sits Victoria Falls, the largest waterfall in the world – meaning that any Germans who tried to traverse the Zambezi to reach the Indian Ocean would last a matter of minutes before suddenly encountering a four hundred foot drop and falling to pretty much certain death. The moral of the story is not to pester the British Empire too much, especially if they’ve explored Africa and you haven’t.

But the other moral of the story is that borders are weird. Although we think of borders as nice straight lines that separate people of different cultures, they can form giant panhandles, distant islands, and enclaves-within-enclaves-within-enclaves. They can depart from their usual course to pay honor to national founders, to preserve records of ancient conquests, or to connect to trade routes.

Hume’s ethics restrict “bad” to an instrumental criticism – you can condemn something as a bad way to achieve a certain goal, but not as morally bad independent of what the goal is. In the same way, borders can be bad at fulfilling your goals in drawing them, but not bad in an absolute sense or factually incorrect. Namibia’s border is bad from the perspective of Germans who want access to the Indian Ocean. But it’s excellent from the perspective of Englishmen who want to watch Germans plummet into the Lower Zambezi and get eaten by hippos.

Breaking out of the metaphor, the same is true of conceptual boundaries. You may draw the boundaries of the category “fish” any way you want. A category “fish” containing herring, dragonflies, and asteroids is going to be stupid, but only in the same sense that a Palestinian state centered around Tel Aviv would be stupid – it fails to fulfill any conceivable goals of the person designing it. Categories “fish” that do or don’t include whales may be appropriate for different people’s purposes, the same way Palestinians might argue about whether the borders of their state should be optimized for military defensibility or for religious/cultural significance.

Statements like “the Zambezi River is full of angry hippos” are brute facts. Statements like “the Zambezi River is the territory of Namibia” are negotiable.

In the same way, statements like “whales have little hairs” are brute facts. Statements like “whales are not a kind of fish” are negotiable.

So it’s important to keep these two sorts of statements separate, and remember that in no case can an agreed-upon set of borders or a category boundary be factually incorrect.

IV.

I usually avoid arguing LGBT issues on here, not because I don’t have strong opinions about them but because I assume so many of my readers already agree with me that it would be a waste of time. I’m pretty sure I’m right about this – on the recent survey, readers of this blog who were asked to rate their opinion of gay marriage from 1 (strongly against) to 5 (strongly in favor) gave an average rating of 4.32.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen enough anti-transgender comments recently that the issue might be worth a look.

In particular, I’ve seen one anti-transgender argument around that I take very seriously. The argument goes: we are rationalists. Our entire shtick is trying to believe what’s actually true, not on what we wish were true, or what our culture tells us is true, or what it’s popular to say is true. If a man thinks he’s a woman, then we might (empathetically) wish he were a woman, other people might demand we call him a woman, and we might be much more popular if we say he’s a woman. But if we’re going to be rationalists who focus on believing what’s actually true, then we’ve got to call him a man and take the consequences.

Thus Abraham Lincoln’s famous riddle: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” And the answer: “Four – because a tail isn’t a leg regardless of what you call it.”

(if John Wilkes Booth had to suffer through that riddle, then I don’t blame him)

I take this argument very seriously, because sticking to the truth really is important. But having taken it seriously, I think it’s seriously wrong.

An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false.

Just as we can come up with criteria for a definition of “planet”, we can come up with a definition of “man”. Absolutely typical men have Y chromosomes, have male genitalia, appreciate manly things like sports and lumberjackery, are romantically attracted to women, personally identify as male, wear male clothing like blue jeans, sing baritone in the opera, et cetera.

Some people satisfy some criteria of manhood and not others, in much the same way that Pluto satisfies only some criteria of planethood and whales satisfy only some criteria of mammalhood. For example, gay men might date other men and behave in effeminate ways. People with congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome might have female bodies, female external genitalia, and have been raised female their entire life, but when you look into their cells they have Y chromosomes.

Biologists defined by fiat that in cases of ambiguous animal grouping like whales, phylogenetics will be the tiebreaker. This was useful to resolve ambiguity, and it’s worth sticking to as a Schelling point so everyone’s using their words the same way, but it’s kind of arbitrary and mostly based on biologists caring a lot about phylogenetics. If we let King Solomon make the decision, he might decide by fiat that whether animals lived in land or water would be the tiebreaker, since he’s most interested in whether the animal is hunted on horseback or by boat.

Likewise, astronomers decided by fiat that something would be a planet if and only if meets the three criteria of orbiting, round, and orbit-clearing. But here we have a pretty neat window into how these kinds of decisions take place – you can read the history of the International Astronomical Union meeting where they settled on the definition and learn about all the alternative proposals that were floated and rejected and which particular politics resulted in the present criteria being selected among all the different possibilities. Here it is obvious that the decision was by fiat.

Without the input of any prestigious astronomers at all, most people seem to assume that the ultimate tiebreaker in man vs. woman questions is presence of a Y chromosome. I’m not sure this is a very principled decision, because I expect most people would classify congenital androgen insensitivity patients (XY people whose bodies are insensitive to the hormone that makes them look male, and so end up looking 100% female their entire lives and often not even knowing they have the condition) as women.

The project of the transgender movement is to propose a switch from using chromosomes as a tiebreaker to using self-identification as a tiebreaker.

(This isn’t actually the whole story – some of the more sophisticated people want to split “sex” and “gender”, so that people who want to talk about what chromosomes they’ve got have a categorization system to do that with, and a few people even want to split “chromosomal sex” and “anatomical sex” and “gender” and goodness knows what else – and I support all of these as very important examples of the virtue of precision – but to a first approximation, they want to define gender as self-identification)

This is not something that can be “true” or “false”. It’s a boundary-redrawing project. It can make for some boundaries that look a little bit weird – like a small percent of men being able to get pregnant – but as far as weird boundaries go that’s probably not as bad as having a tiny exclave of Turkish territory in the middle of a Syrian village.

(Ozy tells me this is sort of what queer theory is getting at, but in a horrible unreadable postmodernist way. They assure me you’re better off just reading the darned Sequences.)

You draw category boundaries in specific ways to capture tradeoffs you care about. If you care about the sanctity of the tomb of your country’s founder, sometimes it’s worth having a slightly weird-looking boundary in order to protect and honor it. And if you care about…

I’ve lived with a transgender person for six months, so I probably should have written this earlier. But I’m writing it now because I just finished accepting a transgender man to the mental hospital. He alternates between trying to kill himself and trying to cut off various parts of his body because he’s so distressed that he is biologically female. We’ve connected him with some endocrinologists who can hopefully get him started on male hormones, after which maybe he’ll stop doing that and hopefully be able to lead a normal life.

If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life. There’s no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn’t, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.

V.

I’ve made this argument before and gotten a reply something like this:

“Transgender is a psychiatric disorder. When people have psychiatric disorders, certainly it’s right to sympathize and feel sorry for them and want to help them. But the way we try to help them is by treating their disorder, not by indulging them in their delusion.”

I think these people expect me to argue that transgender “isn’t really a psychiatric disorder” or something. But “psychiatric disorder” is just another category boundary dispute, and one that I’ve already written enough about elsewhere. At this point, I don’t care enough to say much more than “If it’s a psychiatric disorder, then attempts to help transgender people get covered by health insurance, and most of the ones I know seem to want that, so sure, gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder.”

And then I think of the Hair Dryer Incident.

The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.

Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.

It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.

So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”

And it worked.

She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.

And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?

I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard and the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.

Miyamoto Musashi is quoted as saying:

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

Likewise, the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the means. Someone can concern-troll that the hair dryer technique leaves something to be desired in that it might have prevented the patient from seeking a more thorough cure that would prevent her from having to bring the hair dryer with her. But compared to the alternative of “nothing else works” it seems clearly superior.

And that’s the position from which I think a psychiatrist should approach gender dysphoria, too.

Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.

Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?

VI.

Some people can’t leave well enough alone, and continue to push the mental disorder angle. For example:

There are a lot of things I could say here.

I could point out that trans-Napoleonism seem to be mysteriously less common than transgender.

I could relate this mysterious difference to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender, including unusual variants of the androgen receptor, birth-sex-discordant sizes of various brain regions, birth-sex-discordant responses to various pheromones, high rates of something seemingly like body integrity identity disorder, and of course our old friend altered digit ratios. If our hypothetical trans-Napoleon came out of the womb wearing a French military uniform and clutching a list of 19th century Grand Armee positions in his cute little baby hands, I think I’d take him more seriously.

I could argue that questions about gender are questions about category boundaries, whereas questions about Napoleon – absent some kind of philosophical legwork that I would very much like to read – are questions of fact.

I could point out that if the extent of somebody’s trans-Napoleonness was wanting to wear a bicorne hat, and he was going to be suicidal his entire life if he couldn’t but pretty happy if I could, let him wear the damn hat.

I could just link people to other sites’ pretty good objections to the same argument.

But I think what I actually want to say is that there was once a time somebody tried pretty much exactly this, silly hat and all. Society shrugged and played along, he led a rich and fulfilling life, his grateful Imperial subjects came to love him, and it’s one of the most heartwarming episodes in the history of one of my favorite places in the world.

Sometimes when you make a little effort to be nice to people, even people you might think are weird, really good things happen.

People are screaming “censorship!” today again after a student debate was cancelled. The ridiculously named Oxford Students for Life attempted to stage a debate about abortion, with Telegraph journalist Tim Stanley arguing against and fellow Telegraph journalist Brendan O’Neill arguing for. It didn’t happen after a horde of students threatened to disrupt the debate with (presumably musical rather than gynaecological) “instruments”.

Cue manufactured outrage, with Brendan O’Neill’s article on the topic making the front page of this week’s Spectator. But what’s really going on here? Who has been silenced? Not the well paid journalists, and certainly not Brendan O’Neill who has managed to make a quick buck out of it. Not the Oxford Students for Life, who are now being discussed up and down the country. Not the feminists who protested against the debate, who have also received a media platform from which to air their views.

It is clear that the debate was calculated to offend. That’s what you do when you put Brendan O’Neill on stage, who if you don’t know is a sort of Katie Hopkins for dullards – especially when you invite the notorious misogynist to speak in favour of abortion. They might have wanted the debate to go ahead, but you can bet they wanted people to be making a noise about it. For O’Neill, this is his meat and drink, and he’s managed to churn out another lazy article drawing huge generalised conclusions out of a single incident.

What we’re actually looking at is a well functioning, democratic discourse. Something to be celebrated. Paradoxically however, the only way this discourse is maintained is by everyone running around insisting that important democratic principles have been chucked in the gutter. Let’s assume for a minute that no-one had been offended about anything in this incident. The debate would have happened, listened to by a desultory bunch of spotty Herberts, and it would never have entered the public imagination. A couple of well paid men in suits would have got to play a game for 60 minutes, that’s all. It’s bizarre that O’Neill and the Spectator’s assistant editor Isabel Hardman think that freedom of speech is really that dismal, and disregard everything else that has happened over the past couple of days as just noise. But then, this is by no means the first time that I’ve seen journalists imply that freedom of speech is a thing only to be valued when it comes to the views of professional journalists.

It is very lazy indeed, not to mention potentially dangerous, to equate protest – especially disruptive, effective protest – with state censorship. It leads you down the dangerous path, which governments are quick to encourage, that protest should be silenced. The next step is that the only people who’s views are allowed to enter the public realm are those well paid men in suits, while the noisy, dirty – and yes, sometimes idiotic – masses get their heads bashed in.

If you genuinely believe in freedom of expression, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to tolerate the fact that it works both ways. And sometimes it even inconveniences privileged men.

Looking for something else, I came across Adam Gopnik’s 2008 New Yorker essay: “The Back of the World: The troubling genius of G.K. Chesterton,” which was published to mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the writer’s dazzling masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday. (That novel really is an astonishing thing — creepy and hilarious, enlightening and bewildering. You should read it. You’re welcome.)

Chesterton is, like Oscar Wilde, more quoted than read, and he is, as Gopnik writes, “an easy writer to love …”

– a brilliant sentence-maker, a humorist, a journalist of endless appetite and invention. His aphorisms alone are worth the price of admission, better than any but Wilde’s. Even his standard-issue zingers are first-class — “Americans are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices;” “There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle;” “‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying. … It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober’” — while the deeper ones are genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and profound: “Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.” Or: “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” Or: “A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock.”

That’s terrific stuff. Chesterton had a knack for making his insights sound like jokes and his jokes sound like insights. But he is also, to use the current euphemism, problematic, as Gopnik also discusses: “Those of us who are used to pressing his writing on friends have the hard job of protecting him from his detractors, who think he was a nasty anti-Semite and medievalizing reactionary, and the still harder one of protecting him from his admirers, who pretend that he was not.”

Gopnik’s essay is particularly sharp in confronting, and trying to understand, Chesterton’s “Jew-hating”:

A reader with a casual interest in Chesterton’s life may have a reassuring sense, from his fans and friendly biographers, that his anti-Semitism really isn’t all that bad: that there’s not much of it; that a lot of it came from loyalty to his younger brother Cecil, a polemical journalist in the pre-war years, and to his anti-Dreyfusard friend Belloc; that he had flushed it out of his system by the mid-twenties; and, anyway, that it was part of the time he lived in. …

Unfortunately, a little reading shows that there’s a lot of it, that it comes all the time, and that the more Chesterton tries to justify it the worse it gets.

And towards the end of his essay, Gopnik grapples with the fact that Chesterton’s anti-Semitism “is not incidental” but is inextricably tied up with the underlying logic and philosophy at the core of his thinking. As with Martin Luther, “The anti-Semitism is easy to excise from his arguments when it’s explicit. It’s harder to excise the spirit that leads to it.”

That concluding argument is, I think, a smart and wise discussion and a helpful one for anyone who admires Chesterton and his often otherwise admirable writing. But here I’m not so much interested in Chesterton himself as I am in what we can learn from him about how bigotry works.

Here was a brilliant, educated man with a nimble wit, religious devotion, and a capacity for empathy, irony and humility. And yet even he managed to wind up obsessively consumed by the willful ignorance, stupidity, blasphemy and arrogance of bigotry. He had education, Jesus, and a sense of humor — three things that it seems ought to preclude such crude prejudice and hate. Yet they did not rescue him. Or, at least, he did not allow them to rescue him. He still swallowed whole all the cognitive tricks that such bigotry teaches and requires — and then fortified them with his formidable intellect, religious fervor, and wit.

After World War I, Gopnik writes, “Chesterton’s hatreds became ugly and obsessive”:

From then on, however, Chesterton hammers relentlessly at the idea that there is “a Jewish problem,” the problem being that Jews are foreigners, innately alien to the nations into which they’ve insinuated themselves. Writing in 1920, he tells us that Jews are regarded, by the Arabs in Palestine, as “parasites that feed on a community by a thousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation.” Chesterton then adds that this charge may not be entirely true but needs to be addressed by the Jews — as though they were compelled to consider themselves permanently on trial by their persecutors. Later in the decade, writing about a journey to America, he says, in defense of Henry Ford, “No extravagance of hatred merely following on experience of Jews can properly be called a prejudice. … These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they might have struck oil; because it is there, and not even because they were looking for it.”

It’s a deeply racial, not merely religious, bigotry; it’s not the Jews’ cupidity or their class role — it’s them. In his autobiography, Chesterton tries to defend himself by explaining what it is that makes people naturally mistrust Jews. All schoolboys recognized Jews as Jews, he says, and when they did so “what they saw was not Semites or Schismatics or capitalists or revolutionists, but foreigners, only foreigners that were not called foreigners.” Even a seemingly assimilated Jew, in Chesterton’s world, remains a foreigner. No one born a Jew can become a good Englishman: if England had sunk into the Atlantic, he says, Disraeli would have run off to America.

The dynamics here, the mental mechanics and gymnastics at work, are all too familiar to anyone who has ever visited the United States. Everything Chesterton says there about “the Jews” is precisely what white American culture has been teaching for centuries about “the blacks.” Them. Perpetual foreigners whose citizenship is always, and will always be, suspect. Parasites. Self-evidently other. “People naturally mistrust” them because they’re a separate category — not a part of the category of “people.”

And then, in our more generously liberal moments, a passing acknowledgement that all of these accusations may not be entirely true in every case, but that they still need to be addressed by the accused who are “compelled to consider themselves permanently on trial.” The existence of the prejudice is thereby acknowledged, but only in order to claim that its existence somehow is self-justifying. Where there’s smoke there must be fire. Guilty unless proven somewhat less guilty. We couldn’t possibly be treating them this way if they didn’t somehow deserve it.

Chesterton’s crooked construct of what he insisted on calling “the Jewish problem” can help us better understand the crooked lies embedded in white American culture that insist on imagining white America has a “Black Problem.” They are the same lies — the same deliberate deceptions and delusions. This is the infernal mechanism, the cognitive machinery of hate. This is how bigotry works, and how it persists.

A grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, is preparing to announce whether or not charges will be filed against a white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. Watch the way this is discussed and the way this discussion is framed. It will be, as it has been, discussed in corrosive, corrupt terms that echo Chesterton’s vile anti-Semitism. The other is identified, classified as a perpetual foreigner, and defined as a “problem” that must somehow be dealt with. We will be given “both sides” of this debate — the side that argues that it is sad and regrettable when lethal police violence is administered lawlessly in response to the Black Problem, and the side that argues that such extra-legal lethal violence may sometimes be appropriate and necessary as a response to the Black Problem.

Both sides will lament that it has come to this, and they will shake their heads sadly that, after so many generations, the Black Problem remains intractable.

Todd Klein is one of the best comic book letterers in the field. It's a profession that has largely transitioned from working with pen and ink on the artwork to working in Adobe Illustrator on a computer. Recently, Todd did a stunning amount of research to chart the evolution of that change for a seven-part series on his blog. Wanna read it? Start with Part One, then read Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

The one omission that struck me in Todd's otherwise exhaustive piece was Stan Sakai, who still letters Groo the Wanderer and his own Usagi Yojimbo the old-fashioned way, right on the art boards. Sergio Aragonés, who of course draws Groo, is well aware of the advantages of computer lettering. It makes it much simpler to translate the work for overseas publication, for instance. Still, there is something comforting about having the lettering right there on the pages he's drawing.

If you are one of those people who have scoffed at the idea of words and phrases like “cis”, “TAB” (Temporarily Able Bodied) and “Neurotypical” when really you just want to describe yourself as plain old normal, then I have created a diversity monitoring form just for you! Enjoy!

Sarah’s Diversity Monitoring Form for Normal people

Question 1: Eye colour
Blue
Green
Normal

Question 2: Age
0-9
10-19
Normal
50+

Question 3: Sex
Male
Normal

Question 4: Religion
Practising Christian
Normal

Question 5: Hair Colour
Blue Rinse
Normal

Question 6: Relationship Status
Married and Monogamous
Normal

Question 6: Ethnicity
White British
Normal

Question 7: Voting intention (optional)
UKIP
Conservative
Normal

Thanks for taking the time to fill this in!

Myleene Klass may be deeply confused about how the mansion tax will work in practice, but she probably isn’t the only one. As a supporter of land value taxation, it is no surprise that I think it is a flawed policy, but what’s really problematic is the way both Labour and the Lib Dems are attempting to sell it.

In many ways, Klass’s tustle with Ed Miliband sums up the problem. She seems to think that, as a tax which will only apply to properties worth £2m and over, that in parts of London that applies to garages. She’s wrong. The £2m figure was calculated to be as painless to as many people as possible. In fact, under Vince Cable’s original proposals in 2009, the tax was to apply to properties worth £1m and over. This was quickly adjusted following an outcry from Cable’s fellow South West London MPs who feared a backlash (and even £1m is a bit steep for a garage, Myleene).

The UK – and London in particular – has a real problem with rising house prices. Home ownership has reached extremely low levels compared to recent history and the fears of another housing price bubble, despite the views of fantasists like Danny Alexander, are very real. The UK ought to be having a very serious conversation about how it tackles this.

Instead, we try to kid ourselves that this is just a problem for the very rich. Hence the mansion tax’s £2m threshold. We ought to be having a national conversation about restructuring our economy to avoid property bubbles. We ought to be talking about a property tax which kicks in at much lower levels. But we’re too busy blaming everything on immigrants and the poor.

Meanwhile, our existing domestic property tax, the council tax, has not been revalued in England since 1991. If our politicians lack the courage to even do that, what hope is there for us to have a serious conversation about what’s needed.

Ironically, the Lib Dems in particular, are in a better place than they have been in years to make the case. 10 years ago, they were transfixed with the idea of scrapping all property taxes and making taxes on employment take up even more of the strain. Now they are making the case for more taxes on property and taking people out of income tax altogether. Yet there is no narrative connective tissue between the two. They aren’t making the case for a fairer society and stronger economy in which a hard day’s work is taxed less and wealth is taxed more.

Ignore policy for a minute, which is largely irrelevant these days in a world of coalition government. What a liberal party ought to be making the case for right now is a new economy with significantly different priorities. It can’t be done overnight, but it can be done over time, piecemeal. There can be a direction of travel. It can’t however be done by stealth; the public need to buy into it or it will fall apart after the first Daily Mail headline.

The mansion tax could be step one of a new economic plan; as it is, it’s a policy cul de sac. Assuming it eventually happens, it will probably suffer the same indignity as council tax, and never be touched again. Or worse, start going up by inflation to ensure that only a tiny minority ever pay it and its true revenue potential is never realised. It’s emblematic of the political malaise; instead of dealing with the big political issues of the day, we’re reduced to soundbites.

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November 17th, 2014: YOU GUYS: I ALSO MADE A FLASK – Ryan

Speaking to a CentreForum and Prison Reform Trust event today Simon Hughes said:

The sad reality is that the political consensus needed for real reform remains the victim of an arms race between the two largest parties on who can sound toughest on law and order. 

Michael Howard’s 1993 declaration that ‘prison works’, contrary to all the evidence in so many cases of course, became an ideology which was then enthusiastically embraced by Labour Home and Justice Secretaries including Jack Straw, David Blunkett and John Reid. 

That misguided consensus has been directly responsible for a near doubling of the prison population: from about 44,000 in the early 1990s to the 84,656 people in prison at the end of last week.

You can read the whole speech on Simon's own website.

Why we should give free money to everyone.

Or, more technically, douchebags are disproportionately Republican. But I figure with this title I’m guaranteed front-page links from Salon and Daily Kos.

A while back, I argued – not especially originally – that “conservative” and “liberal”, far from being mere descriptions of political views, pointed to two very different tribes of people who might as well be considered totally different ethnicities.

One marker of ethnicity is different name preferences – we all know what groups people named Juan, Tyrone, or Mei are likely to belong to – and a recent article in Vox confirms that names differ between Democrats and Republicans at very impressive rates. For example, of the 200,000 registered US voters named “Willie”, 81.8% are Democrats. Of the 40,000 registered voters named “Rex”, 59.4% are Republicans (and I assume the others are Rottweilers or tyrannosaurs). You can find some impressively complete statistics at this site, including what percent of people with your name have a gun, go to church, attend college, et cetera.

But looking through Vox’s list of most Republican names, I was struck (or possibly stricken) by a resemblance to a different list I had seen a couple years ago.

Reddit: I fear my first name is the biggest douche bag name an American male can have. In your opinion, what is the cliche douchebag character name?.

This seems like a relatively popular internet question, and thetoptens.com maintains a Most Douchebag Names list as well. This provides two independent lists of douchiest names (my Reddit list is the first name proposed in the ten most upvoted first-level comments there). They both turn out to be pretty similar.

THETOPTENS:
1. Chad
2. Trent
3. Guy
4. Brad
5. Paul
6. Blake
7. Brody
8. Chaz
9. Tad
10. Keith

REDDIT:
1. Chad
2. Chase
3. Tyler
4. Brody
5. Brad
6. Trey
7. Hunter
8. Scott (@#$% YOU TOO, REDDIT)
9. Biff
10. Preston

Clarity Campaigns can tell us what percentile each of these names are on the political spectrum. When I plugged all of them in, the median douchebag name was in the 98.5th percentile for Republicanness. In other words, with a little bit of noise the top ten douchiest names are pretty much the top ten most Republican names.

(The big exception is “Chaz”, which leans Democrat. But I refuse to believe that “Chaz” is a real name anyway.)

I tried to test alternate hypotheses that Clarity just over-Republicanned all names, or that it was a function of these being male names, or white names, or names of a certain generation. I tested the top ten most popular male baby names of 1990 (that being the generation probably in its peak douchebag years right now) and combined their full name and nickname versions (since I didn’t want to confound by whether Republicans or Democrats are more likely to go by a nickname). The median popular 1990 male name was in the 73rd percentile for Republicanness. This isn’t surprising – men tend to be more conservative than women, and this effect probably swamps any within-gender name effects, so if all male names are more conservative than all female names we would expect the average male name to be about the 75th percentile for Republicanness. Our popular 1990 control group comes very close.

But the average douchebag name is in the 98.5th percentile for Republicanness.

I can think of two three hypotheses.

First, douchebags are disproportionately Republican.

Second, the parents who name kids douchebag names are disproportionately Republican, and Republicanism is partly hereditary (I almost missed this one, but JayMan reads this blog and I know he would call me on it if I forgot).

Third, “douchebag” is a tribally-coded slur. If someone asks “Have you ever noticed that all assholes are named things like ‘Moishe’ or ‘Avram’ or ‘Menachem’?” – then they’re telling you a lot more about the way they use the word ‘asshole’ than about the Moishes and Menachems of the world.

I expect there are many more fun things I will think of to do with this name list.

This is now unexpectedly a geography blog.

That’s Ohio and Indiana as seen from space.

And that’s Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota as seen from space.

Each small grey dot is a town. Are there straight horizontal or vertical lines that connect more than a chance number of towns? And are the towns arranged in a consistent coordinate grid pattern?

As best I can tell there are a few short straight lines probably representing more-used local roads, but few that persist across entire states. I don’t think there’s any consistent grid pattern. This is the opposite of my initial impression, which was that there was a clear and striking coordinate grid. But when I try to measure the native unit of the coordinate grid, I find that my mind is confusing a whole bunch of vaguely square-ish patterns into one illusory system.

There is a square pattern to the Midwest, deriving from the Public Land Survey System, but its scale is 6 mile x 6 mile squares, which is smaller than any of the distances on either of these maps. There is supposedly a higher level of grid, the 24 mile x 24 mile quadrangle, but it doesn’t seem to be as important and I don’t see that on this map either.

I titled this post “Ley Lines” as a joke, but we might as well see if there are any actual ley lines. The best candidates seem to be the cities between the yellow dots – which are Waterloo, Davenport, Peoria, Bloomington, and Champaign – and the cities between the red dots – which are Springfield, Champaign, Lafayette, Fort Wayne, and Toledo. If you want to stretch it, you could also imagine a horizontal line between the blue dots – Madison, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Flint, Sarnia, London, and continuing to Buffalo just off the map.

As far as I know there’s no explanation for any of these – no highways, no rivers, nothing – and they’re all just coincidences.

We had some interesting discussions about Midwestern geography during our last Michigan Rationalist Meetup. My favorite part was learning that the town of Zilwaukee, Michigan was named by two brothers hoping that would-be settlers on their way to Milwaukee would get confused and settle there instead. It sounds like a dumb urban legend, but it was previously admitted to on the Zilwaukee city website. I notice their new website doesn’t mention this, which means either that it’s been disproven or they decided to stop advertising to the world that they’re descended from morons.

[EDIT: And here’s a church website that uses Zilwaukee as a metaphor for the Devil]

It's not surprising that the Troughton era is, in effect, reduced to a celebration of Troughton's acting, and for the most part, this is a dramatic improvement over the standard narrative prior to this. It is, like the Hartnell era, still entirely about leading up to the present day - the main hook for Troughton is that Matt Smith based his performance on him. This is put up front and trumpeted. So celebrating Troughton for his acting is necessarily about glorifying the present.

All the same, it's not wrong. And it's worth contrasting with the previous official narrative of the Troughton era, in which Season Five was the high point of it because it had all the monsters. Sure, the Ice Warriors get center stage for a bit in what is, in hindsight, blatantly just a teaser for Cold War (with Moffat reflecting that we never see the actual Ice Warriors), but the previous take on the Troughton era where he was the clownish Doctor and it was good because it had Yeti isn't even alluded to.

Instead we focus on Troughton's acting, which is fitting, because it really is extraordinary, in a way that holds up today. He's astonishingly subtle and meticulous. He always was. And Tennant's statement that every Doctor is really just doing variations on Troughton now is absolutely true. And it's a triumphant moment to see Troughton himself get the credit for that, because he genuinely deserves it. He invented the part of the Doctor as we know it today.

The problem, if you think it's a problem, is that there's nothing to replace the celebration of the monsters. The Troughton era becomes almost entirely about glorifying Troughton's performance. Of course, this isn't entirely unfair. The era played the base under siege card too many times, and didn't do enough brilliant and weird stuff. It's not that the bases under siege were bad, but the mix was off on the era. And, of course, there's the problem of what survives in the archives (or possibly of what Phil Morris has turned over) that makes it tricky to valorize any particular part of the Troughton era except for Season Six, which is the toughest to glamorize in many ways.

Not that they don't give it a good try with an impassioned defense of Zoe that, watching it, also feels overdue. Moffat speaks with genuine conviction of the way in which Zoe was a triumph for young female audiences because she was made so competent, and it's true. She may have gotten gratuitous catsuit ass shots, but she was a bolder character than the show had tried with the female companion since Susan petered out.

(Also hilarious is John Barrowman's account of being excited to see Jamie debut and enthusiastically telling his mother there was a Scotsman on Doctor Who, since he would have been doing that from inside the womb.)

But for all of this, there is something frustrating about where the narrative focus ends up. The selected story for showing after this special was Tomb of the Cybermen, because of course it was. It really is hard to complain too much - for all the story's faults, and they are numerous, it does have some good visuals. Perhaps more to the point, it's pretty solidly acted. The script's naff and the casting's a bit racist, but everyone is trying on the day, and that really does help. Moffat admits to some of the faults in his introduction (though, of course, not the racism), and, look, I recognize I'm being a grumpy old man about Tomb of the Cybermen.

It's just that The Mind Robber was the right length too. And that's the thing. The official narrative is at least getting the high point of the Troughton era right, which is to say, Troughton himself. But the top-line executive summary required by a half-hour special can't really encompass the fact that Troughton's material was uneven, and so goes for the simplest triumph it has instead of emphasizing the weirdness. It's a better Troughton era than "the monster era" lets it be. But it's not allowed to be quite as good as the Troughton era itself was.

ANNOUNCEMENT TIME!

A lot of writing advice boils down to: write the book you want to read.  So that's what I did with We Could Be Villains. It's primarily a lighthearted action/adventure story, with elements of superheroes, sci-fi, heists, and chick lit. (If you've read any of Scott's books, you already know that ours is not a household dealing in super-serious dramatic works.)

 

At first I referred to it as "a geek girl beach read," but half of the early readers were guys who enjoyed it. Plus, beach reads were more of a thing back in June, when I started writing. Anyhoo, if it sounds like something you might enjoy, the book is currently available on Kindle, with the paper version coming in the next week or two (it takes more time to get the print formatting just right).  And it's available through Kindle Unlimited as well.

I wanted to single out one paragraph from this article I linked to about James Randi…

Randi has never smoked, taken narcotics or got drunk. "Because that can easily just fuzz the edges of my rationality, fuzz the edges of my reasoning powers," he once said. "And I want to be as aware as I possibly can. That may mean giving up a lot of fantasies that might be comforting in some ways, but I'm willing to give that up in order to live in an actually real world."

I've never done any of those things and I sometimes have a devil of a time explaining to people why not. Every so often, someone takes it as a condemnation of them for doing one or all of them, or as my attempt to feel superior to them. The smoking part is easy. I dislike being around cigarette smoke so much (and sometimes feel nauseated from it) that the last thing I want to do is ingest it directly. Once, I asked a smoker near me to smoke in the other direction. Just to be an asshole and assert his right to smoke anywhere he damn pleased, he turned and blew smoke in my face. I felt so sick I threw up on his pants.

I didn't do that intentionally but I wish I had.

So that's why I don't smoke. What about the non-drinking? Well, I could say it's because I've seen friends and one very loved one killed by drunk drivers and also seen friends destroy their own lives by drinking. But that's not the basic reason.

Really, it's just kind of an instinctual thing. I just have no yearning to drink alcohol or take drugs. To the extent I have a rational, explainable reason, it's kind of like what Mr. Randi says…plus I'm usually quite happy with my mood and see no reason to try altering it.

If you get something out of it, great. Don't let me stop you. Also, if you get to the point where someone should stop you, don't count on me to stop you. And if you must smoke, don't do it around me. Especially if you're wearing your good pants.

[Later. More on George Watson here.]

I learn from Mark Pack that the Liberal Party thinker George Watson died last year. I am sorry that I missed his death at the time

Watson was part of the party's intellectual renaissance under Jo Grimond. Mark links to a tribute by Julian Huppert:

“George Grimes Watson was a great thinker, an English don and a life-long liberal. 

“He stood for Parliament in 1959 in Cheltenham, unsuccessfully, and then became a Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge, where he became a noted scholar in literature, literary criticism and liberal political thought, including being a key member of the unservile state group, rethinking liberalism and welfare. 

“His 1959 campaign literature shows how little has changed, with one section saying 'Liberals made them get rid of identity-cards – but the State Still has far too much power in our lives’, ‘The Home Secretary thinks the police ought to tap private phone-calls’ and 'We need the European Common Market – Tory policy closes the door of Europe in our faces.' 

“He was a deep thinker and a great liberal, and is much missed.”

As Julian's tribute was posted today, I fear I may not be the only person to have missed George Watson's death.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Watson was taught by C.S. Lewis and went on to teach Douglas Adams himself.

I have read Watson's The English Ideology, which was subtitled "Studies in the Language of Victorian Politics".

As I recall, it is more interesting than that may make it sound, Watson argues that the English ideology is representative government and that the writers who described and championed it, such as Disraeli and Trollope, deserve more attention than its flashier critics such as Ruskin and Carlyle.

The reason for Mark's post today is that the Electoral Commission’s table of party donations for the third quarter of 2014 reveals that George Watson left almost a million pounds to the Liberal Democrats in his will.

I hope we spend it wisely.

My most recently published story, a bit of neouromil  that appears in Neil Clarke’s cyborg anthology Upgraded, contains the following passage:

Monahan had inventoried Sabrie’s weak spots as if he’d been pulling the legs off a spider. …  Not into performance rage, doesn’t waste any capital getting bent out of shape over random acts of microaggression. Smart enough to save herself for the big stuff. Which is why she still gets to soapbox on the prime feeds while the rest of the rabies brigade fights for space on the public microblogs.

A couple of phrases— “performance rage”, “rabies brigade”— were consciously inspired by my 2012 dust-up with an online shapeshifter who, at that point in her career anyway, went by the names “AcrackedMoon” and “Requires Hate”. At the time I got a fair bit of blowback for my use of the phrase “rabid animal” to describe her; Cat Valente equated my use of that term with a death threat, slung against a woman who was, she told me, “vibrantly engaging” with the SFF community. (There is an irony to this; its magnitude will be old news to most of those assembled here today.)

Funny story.  The piece immediately preceding mine in that same anthology was penned by a bright new up-and-comer named Benjanun Sriduangkaew: lauded in progressive SF circles, Campbell Award nominee, by her own admission a newcomer to the field who hadn’t even dipped a toe into the genre prior to 2011. Bright of eye, bushy of tail, her biggest flaw seemed to be a disposition so sugary sweet it would rot your pancreas from thirty paces.

Turns out Benjanun Sriduangkaew and CrackedMoon/RequiresHate are the same person. So are Winterfox, pyrofennec, and Christ knows how many other online personae.

Benjanun-This-Week has been very busy over a number of years, wearing a number of guises. She has stalked, harassed, and threatened. Some of her actions have proven actionable, to the point that authorities are now apparently involved.  She drove at least one person to attempt suicide, has induced PTSD symptoms in a number of others. She has told people who disagree with her that they should be raped by dogs, dismembered, and/or have acid thrown in their faces. She habitually deleted these comments shortly after making them, then gaslighted her targets (fortunately there are archives, and screenshots).

She got caught last month— outed by an advocate in a self-declared act of damage control—  and has since “apologized”. Apparently all that prior nastiness was just youthful indiscretion during the thirteen years when she was nineteen, and is now ancient history.  She feels much better now. She’s learned a lot about love. So if you’ll just believe her good intentions and let her get on with her career, we can all let bygones be bygones.  Also I have some farmland to sell you on the Sea of Storms.

The initial outing raised a bit of a storm in its own right, but it was only the opening act. The curtain on the main event went up November 6, when engineer and author Laura J. Mixon posted a comprehensive report— amazingly comprehensive, given RH’s tendency to cover her own tracks— drawing together records from as many varied incarnations as we know of to date.  Mixon presents timelines, quotes, links, demographic breakdowns of RH’s targets. Bar graphs and pie charts and tables. It’s a trove, and it’s indispensable, and it contains a wealth of links to a variety of other sources. (For that reason, I’ll be relatively sparse with my own linkage in this post.  Just go to Mixon’s page and follow the spiderweb of cracks proliferating across the internet. If I make a claim here that isn’t link-supported, you’ll probably find the documentation over at Mixon’s place.)

Mixon offered her comments section as a safe place for people to speak about their own experiences with the Winterfox Colony Creature. My own case was cited a couple of times (as one of the few honest reflections of RH’s true nature, since she couldn’t employ her usual strategy of deleting her comments and then denying she’d ever made them). I haven’t posted there myself. Partly this is because Mixon wanted to maintain an environment free of angry epithets and name-calling, even when directed at RequiresHate, and I’m not in the mood to practice such charitable restraint. More importantly, though, I don’t think it’s really my place to speak there because I’m not one of RH’s victims. I was a minor target for a while, but only because I spoke out in defense of a colleague. RH didn’t even know who I was until I mentioned her on my own blog. I was, as they say, asking for it.

The blowback pissed me off, at the time. I readily admit that much.  It pissed me off to see Valente blatantly misrepresent what I’d said, it pissed me off to get a lecture on the  power imbalance between Powerful White Authors and Poor Vulnerable Fans in a world where five minutes with Google reveals my home address to any anonymous darling who wants to take a rusty meathook to my scrotum.  (Being called a racist by someone who publicly rhapsodizes about “killing all white people”, on the other hand, was just funny.) Caitlin will attest that I wasn’t very nice to be around sometimes.

Still, anger isn’t injury. I wasn’t victimized, wasn’t driven from the field. If the righteous outrage of RH’s minions cost me any sales, I didn’t notice it. On balance it may have even been a good thing; at the very least, episodes like that show you who your friends are. (Richard Morgan, for one: a truly honorable dude who dived into the muck and engaged RH on her own blog, something I never had the stomach for.)  (You also learn about the fair-weather opportunists in your life; turns out there were a few of those, too.)

I was targeted, but I wasn’t a primary target. And that’s the curious thing: not even Scott Bakker was a primary target, not when you came right down to it. What both of us probably were, it turns out, was camouflage. We privileged white dudes provided cover so that RequiresHate could go after her real victims: Minorities. People of Color. Aspiring writers. People who, to put not too fine a point on it, might be considered competitors of one Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

It is at this point one has to stand back and emit an appreciative whistle for the sheer sick sociopathic brilliance of Benjanun’s Long Con.

Go, if you haven’t already. Look at Mixon’s figures. See for yourself.  The fact that RH occasionally went after the Bakkers and Bacigalupis of the world let her claim that she was Speaking Truth To Power, but in fact People of Color were four times more likely to be targeted than us privileged white boys.  Four times more likely to be hounded across every social media site they appeared at over months, sometimes years. More likely to be told that they should have acid thrown in their faces, or raped by dogs, or have their hands cut off.  A lot more likely to be considered insufficiently Asian, or “white on the inside”.  (Although to be fair, arguing that Paolo Bacigalupi should be flayed, dismembered, immersed in acid, set alight, and forced to eat his own genitals goes to show that RH wasn’t exactly phoning in her assault on the big names, either).

Now go read the comments below the report (461 as I write this). Read the first-hand testimonials of people hounded relentlessly for the crime of liking a book that RH didn’t. Read about the blackmail and the death threats. Read the stories of those who left fandom entirely, abandoned their own authorial aspirations, dared not speak out for fear of catching the baleful Eye of a CrackedMoon. People who could barely even see the word “Requires” on a computer screen without feeling sick to their stomach.

Those are your targets.

It’s been suggested that if RH really is a sociopath, she can’t be held accountable for her behavior because it’s hardwired. This is factually wrong. Sociopaths are not compelled to do horrible things. They’re simply not constrained from doing those things by anything we’d recognize as a conscience. They can choose to hurt the innocent, or not to; the fundamental difference between them and us is, if they choose the former it won’t really bother them.

As I mentioned above, I caught some flack back in 2012 for referring to RH as a “rabid animal”. I intended it as a precise echo of the sort of invective RH was slinging at others for no good reason (in fact the very next sentence was “See what I did there,” followed by an explicit rumination on dehumanising terminology)— but in hindsight I do regret my use of the term. Rabies victims truly do have no choice; their foamy-mouthed aggression is compelled by their affliction. RH is clearly not in that camp. I apologize to all rabid animals for the comparison.

Anyway. The news has spread like Ebolaphobia. It’s on too many blogs to link to. It’s all over the Westeros boards.  It’s also being discussed behind the scenes, in online writers communities where the shell-shocked share their stories behind closed doors— because even now, they don’t feel safe speaking openly.

Requires Hate still has friends, you see. Her legions have thinned somewhat as former allies scramble to cover their asses but she still has supporters, even if they might not all describe themselves as such. Some grumble at ground level, some huddle all the way up in the hallowed halls of Tor.com (where apparently they helped to blacklist and exclude authors of whom RH disapproved). [Editorial clarification: it’s been pointed out that this might be construed as an indictment  of Tor.com as an entity entire. I’d like to make it super clear that I’m only talking about someone affiliated with Tor.com, not any kind of corporate policy.  I have no reason to believe that Tor.com blacklisted anyone; we’re talking a standard bad-apple scenario here. Again, check out Mixon’s post for details, and apologies if I wasn’t clear on that point.) The usual outgroup rhetoric continues, oddly oblivious to the recent stark evidence of where such groupthink leads; Mixon’s  analysis has even been questioned on the grounds that it was performed by a privileged white woman. Apologists still mill about, decapitated since RH went to ground but still sparking fitfully with the same reflex-arc clichés.

Some would have us draw a distinction between RH’s abuses and her “legitimate” literary critiques, as if somehow there might remain a kernel of edible corn buried in all the shit. They don’t seem bothered by the fact that said “reviews” were often based on publisher’s blurbs, or quotes mined and presented out of context; I guess they’re also cool with the fact that RH bragged openly about not having read the books she critiqued.  It’s increasingly evident that book reviews for their own sake were never part of the plan anyway; they were just another bile-delivery platform, another iteration of patterned abuse extending back years before she ever discovered the joys of hacking social-justice paradigms for fun and profit— repurposed, now, to take out the competition. Perhaps a valid insight did slip through every now and then; as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Others opine that RH, wearing her saccharine new Benjanun costume, should continue to get her stories published based solely on their literary merit. (Let’s put aside for the moment that “merit” exists at least partly in relation to other work in the same field, a metric which might be compromised after said field has been burned to the ground in a campaign to eliminate potential competitors.) I’ll admit that there is sometimes a case to be made for separating the art from the artist.  This is not one of those times. This is not a case of a brilliant writer who happens to be an abusive shitstain in some unrelated aspect of their personal life; this is someone being an abusive shitstain as a deliberate strategy to further her writing career. Arguing that that career should be decoupled from past abuses is like catching the guy who stole your car, then letting him keep it because you like the way he drives.

Still others mourn the enablers, revile RH but sympathize with the eager minions she recruited in her campaign of abuse and intimidation. Not their fault, we’re told; RH merely hacked the progressive paradigm of “punching up”, turned it to evil instead of good. And after all, she made some good points.

I fell for this myself, briefly: back in 2012, when a couple of ‘crawl regulars ran the “some good points” argument up the flagpole. So I dialed back my rhetoric, asked you all to do the same, even tried to engage RH directly until she sprang the trap. But even I figured it out after a day or two, and I live in a nerdly bubble way over in the Science-is-Cool wing of the SFF mansion (which might be a problem; maybe I should get out more). I hardly ever stray across the quad to Social Commentary, where everyone’s presumably way more familiar with these moves.

“Punching up”? The premise, to me, seems corrupt at its heart. If someone walks into a pub and swings a crowbar at the first person they see, it doesn’t matter which one of them is a poor queer WoC and which is a rich straight white dude. It doesn’t matter whether the assailant is punching up, out, or down; they’ve got no claim to outrage if the target punches back. (Note this only applies if the targeting algorithm lights up indiscriminately, based solely on demographic profile. If you’re targeting the specific rich straight white dude who assaulted you the day before, I won’t get in your way.)

Apparently, RH was adept at positioning herself “below” pretty much anyone she wanted to punch. She’d deride a target as being white, and therefore privileged/punchable.  If the target turned out to be Asian, RH would redefine herself as “Asian-Asian” and her target as “white inside”. (I’m not joking. I know it sounds like I am. Read Mixon’s post.) It’s a fundamental weakness in the concept— you can always punch up if you win the race to the bottom— and I’m not sure how much sympathy I should have for people who fall for something like that. If you buy into the cult of some Nigerian Prince you met on the Internet, maybe you shouldn’t expect much support when you end up with egg on your face and a zero credibility balance— especially if you got that way by abusing people who didn’t deserve it, or by being complicit in their abuse.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve read endless lamentations about the sundering effect that Requires Hate has had on the “SFF community”. I wonder if there ever was such a thing; I don’t see a “community” so much as a bunch of squabbling tribes forced to share the same watering hole. That’s how she did it, for crying out loud: by exploiting those pre-existing fracture lines, by setting different tribes at each other’s throats.  If SFF were truly a community, would one sociopathic pissant have been able to wreak such havoc?

Blame Benjanun Sriduangkaew, by all means. She deserves it. But she didn’t do it alone. She’s not a sorcerer, she didn’t use any Jedi mind tricks to enlist her troops. They had a choice. Even those she tricked into confiding their vilest thoughts, then blackmailed by threatening to betray those confidences— she couldn’t take that power by force. She could only encourage them to give it to her. They chose fealty— either to a sociopathic troll, or to an ideology whose tires they really should have kicked a few more times before taking ownership.

So I have a question for the person who claimed to like RH’s reviews, only to jump onto the Garment-Rending bandwagon when the jig went up. I have something to ask the self-proclaimed progressive who chummed around with RH’s shock troops even while admitting— in private, with no one else around— that yes, maybe RH goes too far, but her friends follow me on twitter. I have a question for the outspoken social justice advocate who didn’t speak out when the lies spread across a site with their own name on the masthead, because they didn’t want to “fan the flames”. I’d like to ask all those self-proclaimed champions of the disenfranchised, all those defenders of up-punching, all those opportunists who are so busy now disavowing the whirlwind they helped sow:

Where were you, when RequiresHate called Cindy Pon a “stupid fuck” and a rape apologist? Where were you when she made Rachel Brown’s life a living hell? Where were you just last year, when she and her buddies went after a rape survivor for the crime of saying that recovery was a good thing?

Where were all you people?

Edmund Burke once said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. I think that begs a question.

If you do nothing, what makes you any fucking good?

The last ever episode of Time Girls (and supposedly Bob Grant’s last ever TV appearance). What is the rudest word Katy will manage to say before the end?

(Stay tuned for the denouement next week.)

(CONTENT WARNING: This story will deal with sexual violence and mental illness. See Help Links for more information about these issues.)

MANDY: We’ve reached the last ever episode of Time Girls.

KATY: It finished just when it was getting good.

MANDY: Now, in the last cliffhanger, the robots were killing everyone, and it looked as though they would kill us.

KATY: The extras are making a meal of their death scenes. Some of them couldn’t really act.

MANDY: I expect it was all they got to do. Oh, now they’ve killed Bob Grant.

KATY: See. That’s a much better death. He didn’t overplay it.

MANDY: My best death was in Casualty. Clive did his best to save me, bless him, but it was too late.

KATY: How many times have you died on screen?

MANDY: I’ve lost count. Here’s poor old Garfield.

KATY: Is he out of work too?

MANDY: I think everyone is.

KATY: That’s Bob Holmes for you. No good ever comes of anything.

MANDY: But we’re trying to get everyone to work together.

KATY: With Bob, you never know if that’s going to work. You might win or you might all get shot.

MANDY: By this time, we knew it would be the last episode, so I suppose they could have changed it so that we all died.

KATY: Maggie is very pleased with herself.

MANDY: She has such a wonderful evil smile.

KATY: They’re still only celebrating with fizzy water.

MANDY: Well, it would have been tea time when it went out. Mustn’t set a bad example.

KATY: Is Garfield Morgan still with us?

MANDY: I don’t think he is. Although I could be wrong.

KATY: It’s so hard to keep track of everyone.

MANDY: I know. Once I put my foot in it because I thought Trevor Eve had died.

KATY: Oh no!

MANDY: Of course, he’s still going strong now, I’m glad to say. I felt such a fool.

KATY: The robots have got a bit further. That one nearly tripped over.

MANDY: I’ve just noticed, they’re wearing moon boots, which used to be quite trendy.

KATY: Used to be. Everyone thinks the future will be all silver, but it never is.

MANDY: We’re all getting together now.

KATY: I hope we’re plotting a revolution.

MANDY: Oh no, Bill doesn’t want to.

KATY: He’s so woolly.

MANDY: He’s got principles.

KATY: He’s got the wrong ones.

MANDY: Even the yuppie has come over.

KATY: Mercenary!

MANDY: Bill is so sweet in this scene. He just doesn’t realise how awful the yuppie is.

KATY: (LAUGHING) Oh Bob! You evil old bastard!

MANDY: Language, Katy. This makes it so ambiguous. It’s very clever.

KATY: Yes, you could never accuse Bob of having rose-tinted spectacles.

MANDY: I think that’s settled it.

KATY: Yes! Get the guns! What are you doing?

MANDY: I think I’m making something to zap the robots. It always makes me laugh when I have to use these gadgets and gizmos. I’m really not very technically minded at all.

KATY: We can’t see her face, but I think this is a double. I don’t run like that.

MANDY: I don’t think you’re in it any more.

KATY: Oh. … This must be when I was having my … problems.

MANDY: I think you were very unlucky to get caught. You weren’t really doing any harm.

KATY: It was a very difficult time for me. The tabloids wouldn’t give up. They were desperate for a nude photo, but of course there wasn’t one.

MANDY: You were very brave to get through it all.

KATY: You were an enourmous help. And I was lucky to get the best treatment.

MANDY: I felt very sorry for you, but I think it did you good to leave Time Girls.

KATY: I still feel awful about letting everyone down.

MANDY: You mustn’t. I don’t think it would have lasted very long in any case. The people upstairs had turned against it, and I think they were already looking for a reason to cancel the rest of the series.

KATY: I was blacklisted for years afterwards. That’s why I’ve never done Eastenders.

MANDY: I wouldn’t have thought Eastenders was really your sort of thing.

KATY: I don’t know. It’s more theatrical than people make out. They still use multi-camera. And the dialogue is very refined. It’s not how common people really speak.

MANDY: You see, the thing is, common people are so … inarticulate. The writers wouldn’t be able to get their ideas across.

KATY: It’s only because they didn’t get into grammar school. We never heard their voices on telly in the old days.

MANDY: There was Fred Dibnah.

KATY: Now he was fascinating. And so different.

MANDY: But some of the words he used. Dear, oh dear. I think it would frighten the horses if Eastenders went too far in that direction.

KATY: (IMPECCABLE RP THROUGHOUT) Mary Whitehouse would have a fit. It would be all “you fucking cunt” and-

MANDY: Katy! Really!

KATY: But this is what they’re like. It’s a shame that people are judged by how they speak.

MANDY: I managed to change. I’ve done alright for myself, really.

KATY: It’s a shame that you had to change. They made us all the same.

MANDY: I didn’t mind. It’s a wonderful thing that in Britain anyone can get on if they’ve got brains and work hard.

KATY: I think our generation was luckier than most. Nowadays the public school boys get all the best jobs again. My old school went private after I left.

MANDY: It cost us a fortune to send Vicky there, but it did her the world of good.

KATY: I don’t know whether my parents could have paid for me.

MANDY: Oh, the poor snake. … I think this is a joke about Jeremy Thorpe, isn’t it?

KATY: Bloody Jeremy Thorpe. We were doing so well and then it all went wrong. That always happens.

MANDY: Roy Jenkins and David Steel didn’t get into any trouble.

KATY: No, they were good. It was the bloody awful voting system that did for us.

MANDY: We all have so much to thank Roy Jenkins for.

KATY: Yes. It seems funny now that in the sixties and seventies we thought things would always keep getting better.

MANDY: Well, this is the end of the very last episode, and so it’s time for us to say goodbye. We’ve enjoyed doing these commentaries very much, haven’t we Katy?

KATY: It’s work.

#831, 7th August 1999

“You say it best when you say nothing at all.”

Fair enough. I can take a hint.

(Trigger warning: Rape, harassment, victim-blaming, rape culture generally)

The criminal system in England and Wales operates under the legal principle that a person accused of a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty; as anyone who’s ever publicly believed a rape survivor will know, because no doubt you’ve been told this a thousand times over by people who see it as a get-out-of-jail-free card (literally) for all those accused of a crime that really isn’t taken seriously enough as it is. Really, though, these people care more about maintaining the status quo of rape culture than any legal principle – otherwise, they wouldn’t be simultaneously presuming the accuser to be guilty of making a false accusation, and they’d join everyone else in condemning accused rapists if and when they are convicted.

In April 2012, Ched Evans was convicted of rape. Convicted. The very definition of “proven guilty”.

Evans himself maintains his innocence, as do his fans, and other people who are generally vocal about not believing rape survivors ever. “Miscarriage of justice” apparently. Whenever an acquittal of rape hits the headlines, or a case that never reaches trial, many of these same people don’t acknowledge that miscarriages of justice exist; he hasn’t been proven guilty in a court of law, they say, therefore he must be innocent (and by extension, the accuser must be lying) – this, despite the current shockingly poor conviction rate that so often discourages survivors from coming forward in the first place. So it’s telling that, when a guilty verdict happens, the world suddenly notices that the legal system is flawed. There’s a support website with the aim of clearing Evans’ name. “Judge for yourself” it implores, invoking the usual tropes about women generally and rape survivors in particular being irrational, liars or just plain wrong.

Proven guilty – but that didn’t stop people harassing the survivor. Accusing her of lying for money and attention, although in reality there’s no money coming from anywhere and the woman is anonymous; in fact, it’s those who accuse her of lying for attention that have tried to reveal her identity, to give her the attention she doesn’t actually want so they can use it against her. The sadly commonplace victim-blaming; she should take responsibility for being drunk (note that she feared her drink had been spiked), she shouldn’t have been alone at night, she shouldn’t feel entitled to exist whilst female in a public space, the works. The threats – some explicit, some more subtle about speaking out against a convicted rapist having “repercussions they could regret”. This woman – the victim of the crime, not the perpetrator – was eventually pushed to flee the country and change her identity.

Evans, having been found guilty, was sentenced to five years; last month he was released from prison after half of that sentence. Just to reiterate: Two and a half years, for rape. Apparently, he’s “learned his lesson” and so deserves to walk straight back into his professional football career. How someone can maintain their innocence and at the same time claim to have learned their lesson is beyond me. He’s apologised… but only to his girlfriend, for cheating on her. He has yet to apologise to the woman he raped (express language I still find difficult to use because, despite being convicted in court, the media continue to use words like “alleged” and “claimed” and put details of the crime in quotation marks), who in contrast has to spend the rest of her life living with the consequences of somebody else’s actions against her; not only the trauma of the rape itself, but the effects of the harassment and victim-blaming that followed.

Those constantly silenced by the manipulation of innocent-until-proven-guilty to defend accused rapists have found themselves having to carry out the same level of campaigning even when the situation involves a convicted rapist. Or, according to the rape apologists, “looking for attention”. Yes, we do want people to pay attention to us, because frankly the whole situation is just awful – others, on the other hand, would prefer this to just blow over, like so many other “isolated incidents” of sexual violence before it, because otherwise we’d have to start challenging current gender politics and we don’t want that, do we? There are claims – making national headlines – that Evans, the convicted rapist, is a “victim of feminists”. Let’s not forget that this isn’t some hypothetical debate, but a real incident of violent crime that happened, and Evans was the perpetrator, not the victim.

Today, Sheffield United indirectly referred to the change.org petition calling for the club to drop Evans as “mob justice”, despite taking no action whatsoever, not even so much as a statement, when a section of their fans harassed a rape survivor who dared speak out, revealed her identity online, and continue to send online abuse to anyone supporting her. But an online petition calling for a legally proven crime to be taken seriously? That’s mob justice. A letter to a local newspaper, published as the “Star Letter”, reduced this petition to “supporters of other clubs who have ‘clicked a mouse’ against him, not once but many times”. I’ll ignore the fact that you need to enter your details and an e-mail address to sign the petition and instead focus on this: THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOUR FOOTBALL RIVALRIES. This is a pattern I’ve also noticed with the recent high-profile incidents of racial abuse; many fans decide who is and isn’t blameworthy in a way that conveniently has positive consequences for teams they like, and negative consequences for teams they don’t. It’s why my brother thinks the racial slurs by Luis Suarez were just blown out of proportion but John Terry deserved everything he got, whereas my dad thinks exactly the opposite. The oppressions behind the incidents – the very real, very damaging oppressions – are ignored entirely.

There are also claims that preventing Evans from return to his high-profile role, in which he and his colleagues are seen as role models by many, is the same as preventing him from integrating into society. Not so. Football is just one job. You wouldn’t re-employ a teacher, or a doctor, after being found guilty of rape, and besides, the media have happily called for the sacking of employees for much much less, and even for the deportation of immigrants they accuse of committing much lesser crimes; with Evans being white, male and famous, though, we are instead being asked to offer him a second chance even when he has been convicted of his crime.

It’s also worth noting at this point that being prevented from integrating into society is actually what’s happened to the woman who reported the crime against her, but I suppose her welfare won’t affect the League One table so maybe that’s why people don’t seem to care as much.

So, it looks increasingly likely that Ched Evans, found guilty of rape, will make a return to football. There are already terrace chants referring to the rape, mocking it, mocking the survivor. Aside from that, the focus will probably return to his actions on the pitch, his rape conviction will fade from the public eye, and the world will forget.

Imagine being the victim of sexual violence at the hands of a perpetrator who happened to be famous, reading the newspapers, knowing how these events have played out. Would you still report your rape? I highly doubt I would.

And this is what happens when the person accused of rape is proven guilty. Because these people aren’t really interested in innocent-until-proven-guilty at all, unless it suits their rape apologism.

Tagged: ched evans, consent, feminism, harassment, rape, rape culture, sexual violence, victim-blaming, violence against women