Andrew Hickey

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November 11th, 2014: CUT LINES: Dromiceiomimus! Can I talk to you for a second? YOU HAVE INVESTED TIME IN A FRIENDSHIP. +1 POINT(S)! I need a favour! I need to know how to get points at Life Quest!! YOU HAVE EXPLOITED A FRIENDSHIP FOR PERSONAL PROFIT. -1 POINT(S)! Aw dang it YOU GUYS: I MADE A SHOT GLASS – Ryan

I have become convinced that the fundamental appeal of the detective story lies in fantasies of autonomy.

Think about it.  What does every detective story have in common?  The hero or heroine who can move as freely as they choose from place to place, doing what they wish according to their own judgements as they make those judgements, managing their own time, roving from person to person conducting interviews, or from scene to scene gathering evidence or perceptions, entirely under their own steam.

Sherlock Holmes hangs around in his rooms until he decides to take a case, whereupon he follows the scent wherever it leads.  He makes money from his cases and doesn't do any other kind of work.  Poirot similarly - when he isn't on holiday, that is.  Like Miss Marple, Poirot is retired and financially self-sufficient.  Other classic detectives combine one or more of these traits.  Spade and Marlowe run their own detective agencies.  Some detectives are aristocratic and wealthy, some live off their earnings, but they are all, essentially, either unemployed or self-employed.  Even the police detective characters - Morse, for instance - manages his own time.  He leaves his batchelor home and goes to work, but once on the job he and Lewis perambulate around Oxford as they please, stopping off in pub after pub, etc etc etc.  Most detectives, like Morse, are single.  Some are apparently asexual, some widowed, some divorced, some eternal bachelors, whatever.  But they tend to live alone or with a same-sex buddy like Watson.  The queer dynamic is often there, but usually non-diegetic.  There are detectives with families or busy personal lives - Wexford, Bergerac, etc - but even they leave their domestic or romantic entanglements behind while on a case, and rove around freely instead.  Often, in these days when cop shows have to include loads of dour and gritty stuff about how being a police officer harrows your soul and consumes your relationships, the detectives with family lives are resolutely miserable, those family lives being a catastrophic mess of some kind.  They then leave the mess behind when they zoom off to investigate.  In this case the pleasure of ditching the domestic may be furtive and guilt ridden (the trope of the cop's wife glowering when he gets a phone call that will take him away from her) but it's still there.  Called back to work, he doesn't have to go and sit in an office.  Whatever the fictional copper's notional complaints about paper work, the body of the story will see him or her cruising from suspect to suspect in a car.  The appeal is of not being tied in some way in which most of us are tied.

The original fictional detectives were a focus of anxiety about transgression of privacy boundaries.  They tended to be eccentric masters of disguise, or common-as-muck policemen who broke into the middle class home to snoop (like Mr Whicher).  The detective story settled into such a popular staple of modern fiction when the detective was transformed from a figure of disconcerting and nosy instinct (i.e. Dickens' Inspector Bucket or Collins' Sergeant Cuff) into the bourgois man of leisure (Holmes).  He stops being an uneasy mixture of proletarian and spy, and becomes instead a middle-class investigator-as-hobbyist-or-small-businessman.

Here's the secret fantasy.  It works in a way reminiscent of the American fantasy about solving guilt-problems held over from conquest which lies at the heart of the American ghost story.  American ghost stories are all, fundamentally, about disputed real estate.  British ghost stories are, of course, far more about the haunting of the modern by the feudal.  Both are about capitalism vs some flavour of pre-capitalism.  The detective story is, transatlantically, about some fantasy of freedom from the capitalist organisation of time or, relatedly, from the schedules imposed by the bourgeois family.

The Secret History Of Band Aid

Everybody remembers Band Aid. And – despite everything – most people remember Band Aid 2. And now we have Band Aid 20 30. Which rather begs the question – why does nobody ever talk about Band Aids 3 to 29? Take a trip down memory lane as we remind you of the charity singles we all forgot.

Band Aid 3: Recorded in a secret corner of the Hacienda, “Baggy Aid” in 1990 melded social conscience with a wah-wah break and found Shaun Ryder offering to feed the starving his melons. That Line was sung by Bobby Gillespie, but nobody heard his reedy mewlings and the single flopped.

Band Aid 4: Top One Nice One! Altern8, Shaft, The Prodigy and many more superstars got together to give the classic tune a new boshing 90s sound – though it was B-Side “E For Ethiopia” that found favour with the DJ community. But a secret orbital party for famine relief was busted and the marketing juggernaut found itself turned back at a police roadblock.

Band Aid 5: Comedy was the new rock and roll, and 1992′s underbought effort saw Rob Newman and Bob Mortimer reading the lyrics to “Do They Know It’s Christmas” in funny voices for three minutes.

Band Aid 6: Rob out of Senser spat fierce rhymes over a vigorous backing from fellow agit-poppers Chumbawamba and Back To The Planet. “99p buys a bar of soap / Give it up and you can give them hope!” – but the public would not listen.

Band Aid 7: Liverpool superclub Cream hosted the recording of the seventh Band Aid, as superstar DJs like ‘Sasha’ and ‘Oakey’ retooled the classic tune for the dancefloor. “One of my appearance fees can feed a continent for a month,” said a house pioneer, “It’s humbling.”

Band Aid 8 and Band Aid 9: The blackest hour in the long history of Band Aid saw a schism as Blur and Oasis insisted on recording separate versions of the legendary song for Christmas 95. Blur’s video featured Keith Allen in a dress riding a desert goat and Oasis’ contribution ran into trouble when Liam punched Michael Buerk in the face. A disgusted public turned instead to Kula Shaker’s Crispian Mills, who promised to feed the world with his cosmic love.

Band Aid 10: “This year we’ve got a sixth member – Hungry Spice”

Band Aid 11: 1997′s Di Aid saw Jennie Bond and Viscount Spencer in a flower laden studio as Elton played a piano made from frozen tears. The public seemed all emoted out, but in retrospect letting Lord St John Of Fawsley do a rap was an error.

Band Aid 12: Who can forget the year Fatboy Slim played the biggest refugee camp party ever (it’s official – just ask Guinness). His version took the line “when you’re having fun” and looped it 500 times for a dancefloor classic – but with a message!

Band Aid 13: There was no Band Aid 13. But you bought it, you say? From where? But… but… there’s been no record shop there for forty years! And the man singing That Line, it sounds like… ELVIS!? NOOOOO!

Band Aid 14: Europe joined the party with Cartoons, Eiffel 65 and Aqua lending their sizeable talents to famine relief. “Come on Barbie, let’s save Mali”.

Band Aid 15: Radiohead’s “Kid A(id)” was more challenging than most interpretations, being a 17-minute video installation showing Thom Yorke being chased by a bear to the sound of a whimpering child. Retail response was sluggish.

Band Aid 16: The honorary BA 16 broke with tradition by being a version of “What’s Going On” recorded after the tragedy of 9/11. A panoply of stars contributed, including Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, who rapped “we got humans using humans for bombs!”. Perhaps the most unlikely Band Aid yet.

Band Aid 17: “Get Ur Christmas Freak On” by the Freelance Hellraiser was the toast of the London scene for those two heady minutes in 2002. How we laughed.

Band Aid 18: It was becoming clear that the Band Aid brand needed a revamp. The appeal of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was potent, but limited pretty much to December. There were eleven other months of the year in which famine could strike. And so was born “Tan The World (Let Them Know It’s Summer Time)”. “The people in Antarctica, they’re fuckin’ freezing” said an angry Geldof. “Tonight it’s Factor Ten instead of Two” sang Bono.

Band Aid 19: A fragile acoustic rendition of the song by Gary Jules really revealed the underlying quality of the songwriting craft. A rival waxing by The Darkness, “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Pies End)”, made less impression.

Band Aid 20: Nothing happened this year. Certainly nothing involving Joss Stone. Or The Thrills.

Band Aid 21: The Crazy Frog’s ringtone version became a mobile smash. “Let them know it’s Crazy time, DING DINGDINGDING” said a Jamster spokesperson, “Though if you want something more tasteful, a Clanging Chimes Of Doom ring is available.”

Band Aid 22: Looking for teen appeal, producers turned to My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy. “Feel’s The Word” they crooned. The B-Side, featuring 30 fans reading out different definitions of Emo, found less praise.

Band Aid 23: A landmark year as the cream of British indie music – Scouting For Girls, the Kooks, the Pigeon Detectives, Razorlight – were flown out underneath the burning sun. Then left there. There wasn’t a record or anything.

Band Aid 24: At last, a credible charity single, as TV On The Radio, Vampire Weekend, Bon Iver, Black Kids and more formed BNM Aid. Sales were bafflingly poor. “Like, don’t they have blogs in Africa?” said a hurt Panda Bear.

Band Aid 25: Big Band Aid week on the X-Factor with twelve performances of the same song. Jedward’s enthusiastic routine as buzzing dayglo flies around a giant fibreglass child saw them safe once again. “It’s meant to be FUN, Simon.”

Band Aid 26: EDM stood for “Every Donation Matters” as David Guetta organised the “biggest drop in history”. “It’s not just about food, we’re sending out everything they need over there – medicine, glowsticks, mouse masks.”

Band Aid 27: Spotify’s Daniel Ek announced a new business model for Band Aid. “It’s Christmas time, and there’s no need to be afraid – of digital disruption” quipped the entrepreneurial Swede as he distributed one grain of rice per play of the charity anthem.

Band Aid 28: A beautiful advert about a boy and a baby vulture broke hearts and records for John Lewis, and helped Lily Allen’s emotive ukulele rendition of “Do They Know” soar high in the charts.

Band Aid 29: The year pop got a social conscience, and Macklemore stepped up to do his Band Aid duty. “People often say I look a bit thin, so I can speak for the starving. In a sense, we’re all Africans.”

Band Aid 30: In a last-minute attempt to stop a crisis – the release of a deep house version by Robin Schulz and Mr Probz – the world’s stars come together once again for Band Aid 30. “Buy the thing, don’t download it from iTunes”, said Sir Bob. “Bob, I already put it on their iTunes” said Bono.

(SERIOUS BIT: The need for a new Band Aid record is disputable, the need for medical aid in West Africa and elsewhere isn’t. Medecins Sans Frontieres donation page.)

From TechCrunch:

The technical implausibility and unintended consequences of digital locks are big problems for digital-lock makers. But we’re more interested in what digital locks do to creators and their investors, and there’s one important harm we need to discuss before we move on. Digital locks turn paying customers into pirates.

One thing we know about audiences is that they aren’t very interested in hearing excuses about why they can’t buy the media they want, when they want it, in the format they want to buy it in. Study after study shows that overseas downloading of U.S. TV shows drops off sharply when those shows are put on the air internationally. That is, people just want to watch the TV their pals are talking about on the Internet—they’ll pay for it if it’s for sale, but if it’s not, they’ll just get it for free. Locking users out doesn’t reduce downloads, it reduces sales.

The first person to publish a program to break the digital locks on old-style DVDs, in 1999, was Jon Lech Johansen, a fifteenyear- old Norwegian teenager. “DVD Jon” took up the project because his computer ran the GNU/Linux operating system, for which the movie studios wouldn’t license a DVD player. In order to watch the DVDs he bought, he had to break their locks.

. . . .

In 2007, NBC and Apple had a contractual dispute over the terms of sale for Apple’s iTunes Store. NBC’s material was withdrawn from iTunes for about nine months. In 2008, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University released a paper investigating the file-sharing impact of this blackout (“Converting Pirates Without Cannibalizing Purchasers: The Impact of Digital Distribution on Physical Sales and Internet Piracy”). What they found was that the contract dispute resulted in a spike of downloads on “pirate” sites, and not just of NBC material—it seemed that once people who had been in the habit of buying their shows on iTunes found their way onto the free-for-all file-sharing sites, they clicked on everything that looked interesting. Downloads of NBC shows went up a lot, and downloads of everything else went up a little.

More interesting is what happened after the NBC-Apple dispute ended, and the shows returned to iTunes. As the CMU paper showed, download rates for those shows stayed higher than they had been before the blackout. That is:

• Refusing to sell their viewers the content they wanted in the format they preferred drove those viewers to piracy.
• Once the audience started pirating the content they wanted, they quickly turned to pirating other content, too.
• Having become aware of and proficient in the ways of downloading, the audience developed a downloading habit that outlasted the end of the blackout.

Digital-lock vendors will tell you that their wares aren’t perfect, but they’re “better than nothing.” But the evidence is that digital locks are much worse than nothing. Industries that make widespread use of digital locks see market power shifting from creators and investors to intermediaries. They don’t reduce piracy. And customers who run into frustrations with digital locks are given an incentive to learn how to rip off the whole supply chain.

. . . .

It’s harder if you’re a creator, because many of the biggest investors have bought into the idea of selling with DRM or not at all. When it comes down to negotiating DRM, you just have to make a decision about whether you’re willing to let your creative work be put in some tech company’s jail in order to make your investors happy, or whether you’ll keep shopping for a saner, better investor.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch

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November 5th, 2014: Here is a sequel poem I wrote to thank you for reading down here! Sometimes it's hot outside But sometimes it's too cold Sometimes I wear a jacket But sometimes -- SOMETIMES -- I don't It's not QUITE as good as the other one and the "abcd" rhyming scheme has never been what I'd call super popular. I'll workshop it! – Ryan

There are no referees in a pick-up basketball game. Amazingly, though, pick-up games still work — they’re still fun and fair and enjoyable — because players learn to call their own fouls.

This is a skill, an ethos really, that you’ll see displayed wherever there’s a hoop and a ball and a bunch of people getting together to play. One key to making this work is an almost magical phrase: “My bad.” Admire the efficiency of that. It’s only five letters and two syllables, yet it communicates everything that needs to be said. It acknowledges the infraction and accepts ownership of and responsibility for that infraction. It accounts for the subsidiary matter of intent without allowing that to distract from the more pressing and tangible matter of the foul itself.

That pithy declaration — “my bad” — means that no further negotiation or litigation is required. The matter is settled and the  game can proceed from there. I own the foul, you get the ball, we can get back to playing the game without any lingering concerns. Fouls happen in basketball. Admitting to one doesn’t make you a dirty player — a dirty player is one who never says “my bad.”

“My bad” can be just as effective, and just as important, off the court as well. Just as in basketball, it can be an efficient ritual: Accept responsibility, give up the ball, and then play on.

Outside of the context of pick-up basketball, though, we tend to make things more complicated. In the rest of life, we’re more likely to get bogged down in that secondary matter of intent. That’s understandable, because intent matters. But if we’re so intent on defending our purity of intent that we become unable to say “My bad,” then the game screeches to a halt.

Here’s a personal example: A while back I responded to some vile thing Rush Limbaugh had to say by quoting the title of Al Franken’s book. Like Franken, I was trying to punch up — trying to deflate this hurtful, hateful and harmful radio host and to subvert his damaging influence. But others called a foul. They pointed out that in trying to punch up at Limbaugh, my words were also landing punches down at other people who were hurt by those words.

My bad. My intent there mattered, but it was not exculpatory. My intent was precisely the problem — or, rather, the gap between my intent and my actual effect was the problem. There’d be no point in trying to argue about good intentions. If you really have good intentions, then you can only be aghast to realize that your effect contradicted those intentions. My intent may not have mattered much to those who were hurt by my words — they were, rightly, primarily concerned with the effect of those words. But to me, it mattered a great deal that I had failed to achieve my intended effect — that I had, in fact, achieved its opposite by punching down instead of punching up.

Good intent, if it’s actually good intent, compels one to correct the disparity between intent and effect. If you’re shown such a disparity and your only response is to defensively reassert the goodness of your intent, then you’re demonstrating that you don’t care about the effects of your words or actions — which is to say, you’re demonstrating an utter lack of good intent.

I want my intent to align with my effect. That’s what “intent” means. So I took a cue from pick-up basketball and owned the foul. My bad.

 

Interstellar

Spoilers, I guess? If you care? I don't think the shelf life for discussing this movie is going to be very long, if that matters.

If you don't like Christopher Nolan, this isn't the film that's going to change your mind. Take me for example: I don't really like Christopher Nolan. He learned all the wrong lessons from Stanley Kubrick and makes films that look great from straight-on but are revealed to be resoundingly hollow the moment you change your perspective. With Interstellar he succeeded in making a film that I really wanted to like despite all my past experiences with the man, but which let me down because it ultimately refused to cohere as anything other than a Christopher Nolan film.

I wish I could remember where I saw this . . . an interview? One of his afterwards? There's a great bit from Stephen King where he talks about themes in stories. He says that you should never put themes in stories, but that the themes should arise naturally from the story you're trying to tell. That is fantastic advice. Obviously not always completely applicable, but, it's a bit of advice that more screenwriters could stand to learn. Because Interstellar? You know this was a story that began theme-first. You know it did. The reason you know it did is that, as with every other movie Nolan has ever made, the theme is the only truly legible thing about it, even if it makes no sense (more on that in a minute). As with Inception, as with all his Batman movies - they're great at establishing and developing themes, completely terrible at every other part of telling a story. He's a great, fantastic, filmmaker but an awful storyteller. And if he hasn't yet figured out the difference yet, having made a number of the most successful movies ever, he may never.

Which may partly explain why, time and again, given the most interesting subject matter with which to play around, he unerringly finds the least interesting part of whatever subject matter he has at his disposable. Given Batman, he gravitates towards a dull brown and steel gray palette, gives us a gritty urban Batman set in freakin' Pittsburgh, and figures out the precise way to make all his villains as surly and mundane as possible. Bane's voice was the best part of The Dark Knight Rises because it was the only part that felt remotely fun and interesting. Inception was awful because, given the opportunity to make a movie about dreams, he made a dream movie about a heist movie with all the visual appeal of a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond flick. Nolan has yet to meet a fantasy genre he cannot somehow drag through the mud of oblivious banality, and you can now say the same for space opera.

Tell me you are making a film about space travel and the first thing I want to know is, how much time are you going to spend hanging out with farmers? Because the amount of time you spend hanging out with farmers is going to be inversely proportionate to the amount of time the movie spends doing interesting things. Someone at some point told Nolan and his screenwriting bros that all movies need to begin by establishing the human stakes of any narrative, and that requires spending a half hour to forty five minutes telling us about dust and famine and dumb ass crackers. The movie is about space ships. I can see the script wheels turning: we need to establish our characters. We need to establish our setting. We need to establish our conflict. We need to do all of these things as methodically as possible. Because, you know, the audience just will not know who to root for if we don't spend all this time telling them about the main guy's family and hardship and all that stuff. We're going to mistakenly start rooting for the robots because we haven't been given enough reason to think that Matthew McConaughey is interesting or important enough. Well, guess what: I rooted for the robots anyway because every motivation in your entire movie was as boring and predictable as the proper indentation on your screenwriting software. The robots, at least, were interesting, something I really hadn't seen before. Give me a whole movie about those awesome robots.

This belief that the human story is the most important element of whatever story you're trying to tell is erroneous and deadly. The audience doesn't need a human stake. The audience can figure out what the stakes are by seeing the characters do thing - not by seeing the movie spend 45 minutes running in place telling the audience what the stakes are. The audience isn't stupid enough that they need to be told that Matthew McConaughey is a human being with real feelings. You could cut out a great deal of the Matthew McConaughey Is Sad and Frustrated preamble and be left with a lot more than you think. Setting up your human characters with such painstaking and tedious emotional exposition is simply condescending to an audience you do not believe to be smart enough to understand the movie. And yet everyone does it.

Also while we're on the subject of what everyone is doing (so why can't we?), everyone is so far comparing this film to 2001. OK. If you want to play that game, it's not a game that works in Nolan's favor. How much time does Kubrick spend establishing Dr. Bowman's motivation? He goes right from a monkey throwing a bone to a spaceship flying through Earth orbit. Any contemporary screenwriter would tell you that you needed to spend twenty minutes establishing David Bowman's family life and relationship with his wife or girlfriend, and a relationship with some kind of father figure who relates some kind of wise koan whose meaning will only be understood in the film's final moments. (2010 does a little bit of this, it should be noted. Another unfair comparison.) Spending so much time giving us so much of Matthew McConaughey's motivations has the perverse effect of making him seem undermotivated: his motivations, such as they are, are actually kind of stupid. Drilling them into our heads again and again doesn't make them any less stupid. Maybe they're "relatable" in Hollywood-speak. But they're stupid.

(This makes for a great point of comparison with Transformers 4. That movie spent a little bit of time on Mark Wahlberg's motivation, but really, just enough to get you going. And the fact that Wahlberg's motivations stayed precisely the same throughout the entire running time of the film despite the fact that the fate of the world was at stake was awesome, and an attention to detail of the kind that Nolan can only hope to conjure. I have to stand by any movie that makes sure to tell us that the main human character is more concerned with his daughter losing her virginity than the fate of the world. It works better than all of everyone's motivation in Interstellar because it at least doesn't ask us to voluntarily lower our IQ in order to believe that real people might ever in a million years have emotions like these.)

What I've seen discussed less than Kubrick is the obvious debt Interstellar owes to Terrance Malick. There are scenes straight out of Days of Heaven - I mean, really, if you're going to burn a field, you better know people are going to pick up on that one. It's hard to imagine what this movie would have been - whether it could have been anything - in a world without Tree of Life. It's not just the presence of Jessica Chastain that drives that one home. Every time Nolan brings the music up, lowers the sound on the dialogue, and slides into a montage - particularly on Earth - you can't help but see, immediately, the seams of Nolan's construction. The themes in Interstellar have been carried over lock, stock, and barrel from Tree of Life.

Part of the problem is that, philosophically speaking, the movie doesn't have a brain cell in its head. Malick is a heady filmmaker in part because he is a philosopher. When he uses Heidegger to structure a film like Tree of Life, it makes sense because it's coming from a place of deep understanding. The problem with Interestellar is that, while Nolan pays a great deal of attention to his themes, he doesn't really understand them. He papers over his lack of understanding with some trite bullshit about the power of love, and that just doesn't cut it.

Early in the film Matthew McConaughey explains to his daughter the meaning of the phrase Murphy's Law:

Murphy's law doesn't mean that something bad will happen. It means that whatever can happen, will happen.

This would appear to gesture towards the establishment within the film of a Humean world of absolute contingency. But in practice, the film - supposedly about the limitless possibilities of space travel - devolves into a closed-loop time travel narrative, an intricate structure of precise causality monitored by fifth-dimensional beings unhindered by our concept of time. Nolan as a filmmaker is unable to move past the closed loop: despite every opportunity to the contrary, he is unable to break free from the gravity of necessary causation. He is addicted to symmetry, and his movies suffer. His world remains doggedly, persistently Kantian. The frustration at the heart of the narrative - the inability and unwillingness to break free from necessity - could have been fixed by a copy of After Finitude.

Where is this radical contingency, the sensation that "whatever can happen, will happen"? Nowhere to be found in Nolan's film. The visual effects, while nice and occasionally breathtaking, are still nothing particularly new. Instead of grasping the opportunity to give us something new, Nolan gives us a brief flight through subspace, a handful of monoclimate planets, and finally a trip into the heart of a black hole. Maybe I'm jaded, maybe I should have approached the film from the perspective of someone who had never seen a sci-fi film before. Because that is unfortunately necessary in order to accept that this is at all visually interesting. My immediate takeaway from the film was that Nolan is a filmmaker who loves making sci-fi movies but dislikes sci-fi, and the lack of imagination on display here - a water planet with big waves! an ice planet with glaciers! - speaks to a larger lack of motivation. It all makes sense for the story, yes, that these are useless planets with no appeal, but that brings us back to Nolan's motivation at the heart of the movie - with all the resources of the most technologically advanced movie-making apparatus in history at your disposal, this is what you choose to show us? Ice Planet? Planet Waves?

I understand that some attempt was made to keep much of the film's science close to something we could reasonably call "hard sci-fi." In practice what this often (not always) means is that they take all the fun stuff out of the genre in exchange for people explaining why they can't do things. The film gets some play out of the divide here (in another echo of 2001), establishing that humans are limited more or less by the capabilities of real-world science, while the mysterious beings who give Earth the wormhole are not bound by the same laws. What we get is the hand-wave that the fifth-dimensional beings who set the plot in motion are able to do things - such as play with the laws of space-time as if they were taffy - that otherwise are impossible according to the laws of the universe. But after we establish that, the movie should obviously be heading towards some kind of revelation regarding these mysterious beings. 2001 gets around having to explain what the monoliths are and who built them by giving us instead more deeply intriguing questions, until finally ending the movie on a note of supremely satisfying mystery. There's no mystery in Nolan's universe: the question of who the mysterious beings are is answered by Matthew McConaughey in a toss-off line, with no real explanation as to how he came to that conclusion. Nolan can imagine blasting off to distant galaxies, but he can't imagine finding anything to look at more interesting than a mirror, and no mysteries more bewildering than the human heart.

For point of comparison, look at Contact, a movie that only gets better with every passing year. There was a movie with a startlingly similar premise that stubbornly refused to wrap everything up in a neat package. It also had Matthew McConaughey, which proves again that even though I get older, these actors stay the same age.

Maybe that's what some people want to hear. Maybe the fact that the movie essentially ends by reiterating that "the fifth dimension is love!" is a great way to end a movie in 2014, reassuring the viewing audience that regardless of how scary the universe may be we can stay grounded by sticking close to our good old fashioned down home values. I do like the fact that Anne Hathaway gives a big stupid speech about the power of love right before being shot down by the more pragmatic Matthew McConaughey - even if she is later revealed to be right because love will keep us together. No matter how big space is . . . and while we're on the subject, why did the put the wormhole next to Saturn? If they wanted humanity to use the wormhole to save civilization, why not put it somewhere closer? Like, say, anywhere closer than Saturn?

Also: the twist about halfway through the movie is the exact same twist as was in Saving Private Ryan. It's like all the filmmakers in the world looked into the heart of America and decided that the thing we most wanted out of our movies was surprise cameos by Matt Damon. I did warn you there'd be spoilers.

The Doctor learns that he is bigoted because he refused to accept the idea that a Dalek could be good.  Indeed, he hates Daleks so much that the one time he is prepared to even countenance the idea of a good Dalek is when he meets a Dalek which says all Daleks are evil and should die.  So he hates genocidal racists so much that the only member of that race he can think of as good is the one who says that it would be a good idea to exterminate an entire race.  But, of course, that isn't good.  That's bad.  That makes you as bad as a Dalek.  Indeed, that's Dalek-thinking.

Ironic, fairly interesting, and doubtless intentional.

But there's another interesting irony here, which probably wasn't intended.

As has been frequently pointed out, SF often falls into the trap of a race essentialism.  Alien races in SF all have the same characteristics.  The same sort of thing is true in Fantasy, and in other forms of storytelling featuring sapient non-humans.  All Vulcans are logical, all Sontarans are militaristic, all House Elves are servile, all Orc are psychopaths, etc.  The problems with this are obvious.  It rests upon a reductionist view of race, society and sentience... not to mention a set of assumptions directly related to biological racism.  But that's all obvious, and well covered elsewhere.

Back to the unintended little irony in 'Into the Dalek'... which, to be fair, is more an irony about the Daleks themselves.  No, not the irony of creatures which metaphorically express the evil of racism themselves being based on race essentialism.  I'm not really talking about race here.  I'm talking about politics.

Because, as is also well understood, the Daleks are metaphors for the Nazis.  Actually they hardly even bother being metaphors.

So we wind up in a peculiar situation politcally when we question the idea that there is something wrong with assuming that all Daleks are evil (an assumption that 'Into the Dalek' more or less explicitly questions).  We wind up essentialy questioning the idea that all Nazis, all fascists, are bad.  But you see... they are.  By definition.  The DWM review of Timewyrm: Exodus said that Hermann Goering was the closest thing to a nice Nazi (a pretty startling remark if you know anything about the man).  But you can't have nice Nazis.  You can't even approach that.  It's like talking about dry water - if it's dry, it ain't water.

We have bumped up against a standard misunderstanding about discrimination.  It isn't something that can happen to anyone or everyone.  There's no such thing as 'reverse racism', or 'misandry' (at least as the term is meant by the crybabies who object to feminism on the basis of their bruised manfeels).  There certainly isn't any such thing as unfair discrimination against fascists.   That's why they shouldn't be allowed on Question Time, no matter how many people vote for them.  You can't have democratic fascists.  Obviously, therefore, you can't extend them the boons of democracy.  I'm not in favour of banning fascist parties or imprisoning fascists - because it would be counter-productive - but it isn't an unreasonable idea in itself.

(Similarly, I don't think its an unreasonable idea in itself for capitalist democracy to lock me away too, since I've repeatedly voiced my desire to see it destroyed... though it makes considerably less sense than locking fascists away, since my dissatisfaction with capitalist democracy is based on a rejection of its own rhetoric about democracy, and a demand for more democracy, whereas the fascist objection to capitalist democracy is based on a desire for less democracy.)

My saying that it is right to discriminate against fascists certainly doesn't make me as bad as a fascist.  That's wishy-washy, purblind piffle.  That idea rests on a false equivalency, like many liberal cul-de-sacs.  The eternal phantasm of the level playing field, the balanced middle-ground; the idea of the centre as the rational point between irrational extremes, and fairness as the equidistant zone between claims.  All that childish, politcally-illiterate shit.

You don't become a fascist when you discriminate against fascists; you become an anti-fascist... just as you don't become a sexist when you challenge patriarchy, or a reverse racist when you challenge white privilege.

Of course, it might be objected that you can label everyone who ascribes to a political philosophy 'bad' without accepting that it would be a good thing if they were all killed... and you'd have a point.  But it's still interesting that, even today, we are more comfortable playing around (albeit questioningly) with the reading of the Daleks which is based on race essentialism than on the reading which is based on political philosophy... even when they openly represent a political philosophy that 'we' supposedly all despise.

Originally posted by nwhyte at The Fall of the Wall, twenty years on

Four thoughts come to mind:

Can you trust any ‘new leader’ polling?
So, we now have polling that shows that having Johnson, Umunna or Burnham would give Labour a bigger lead in the polls right now. Anthony Wells often counsels against putting too much faith in any ‘how would you vote if..’ polls, and I think that is the case here. Voters may well take a ‘grass is always greener’ approach to any suggestion of change, but no one has any idea just how people will react should the Labour leadership change. When people have no idea how someone will actually perform as leader, it’s not a good idea to rely too much on their judgements of how they will vote in a hypothetical scenario.

That said, I do wonder if changing the party leader could have an interesting effect of poll shares by changing the likelihood of party supporters to vote. That’s a question that I’m not sure is ever asked in the hypotheticals, but for me could be a key factor. I’ve said before that I think a lot of UKIP’s success is down to the fact that they can motivate their base to vote better than the other parties, and I wonder if a new leader would motivate Labour voters more – the lesson of Heywood and Middleton is that Labour do seem to have a motivation problem.

Where can Labour get votes from?
Anthony Wells’ excellent diagrams of vote shifts reveal the problems all the main parties are having in holding on to voters in an extremely volatile political environment. The question they pose, though, is where are Labour going to win the voters they need from? They’ve shed votes to Greens, nationalists and UKIP, and it’s hard to see the strategy that can draw voters back from all three of those. Is drawing a small percentage of voters back from the SNP (with the possible benefit of protecting all those Scottish seats) a viable strategy? Or does the party need to be looking at how they draw more voters back from the non-voters, and hope gains from there can dwarf any losses?

Young cardinals, old popes
Alan Johnson is the perfect king over the water because he hasn’t been assembling a faction around him ready to take the leadership, and so all the Shadow Cabinet members who have can step aside in his favour, ready to go for it the next time. (I suspect their scenario imagines Johnson as a one-term PM, with the real leadership contest in 2019/20) However, is it necessarily in the interest of the more established contenders like Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham to take a pass this time? Putting their ambitions on hold for five years would give the next generation (Umunna, Reeves, Creasy et al) plenty of time to stand out and shine, and give Prime Minister Johnson a real influence through Cabinet appointments and the rest in who gets to follow him.

What if?
We’re in a very strange time for British politics, one that’s certainly unlike anything else I’ve seen in my lifetime, where all of the established parties are under threat. In this position, Labour ditching Miliband would have inevitable knock-on effects in the other parties. If he goes, that’s just the beginning of the story: suppose a new leader does open up a poll lead for Labour, while UKIP win the Rochester by-election. That seems likely to trigger more Tory defections and/or more calls for Cameron to quit. Given the volatility of the polls, and the variability in shares across the pollsters, it’s entirely possible in that scenario for us to see a poll (however rogue) that puts UKIP in second place and the Tories in third. Could Cameron survive then, and what would be the effect of the Tories trying to replace a sitting Prime Minister a few months before an election when one of the leading candidates to replace him doesn’t have a seat in Parliament.

We live in interesting political times. I look forward to when the historians of the 2030s get to tell us just what was going on, because I’m not sure we’ve got much of an idea right now.

Bruce Bartlett, who was a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and also worked for the first President Bush, explains why Barack Obama is actually a Conservative. I don't completely buy this argument but I sure agree that he's accomplished a lot of things that Republicans would have thought made him The Greatest President Ever — greater than Reagan even — had they been done by a Republican. (To get some to that view, he'd also have had to have been a white Republican.)

If all a Republican president had accomplished was the deficit reduction charted in Bartlett's piece, the G.O.P. would have started clearing brush on Mount Rushmore to add another face. If that president had also presided over the killing of Osama bin Laden, they would have dynamited the four likenesses already there so they could make the new one bigger.

Ian Dunt gets it spectacularly right on politics,co.uk.

First on Norman Baker's achievements in his year at the Home Office:

Baker accomplished more in one year in the Home Office than most people do in their entire career. Baker went into the Home Office as the Liberal Democrat's man. He performed that task with aplomb, forcing through an international study of drug policy - an investigation long-resisted by the department because it suspected it would show its policy caused harm. ...

Baker fought the battle over that report behind the scenes for months. The department refused to publish it. The civil servants involved in writing it were blocked from making any recommendations on the basis of their findings by the prime minister. The establishment is terrified of any accurate assessment of British drug laws. 

Baker eventually succeeded in forcing publication. It was arguably the most important government drugs report for a generation. It found that half a century of drugs policy was mistaken. Harsh drug penalties do nothing to reduce drug use, but they do significantly reduce the health of drug users. 

Against a hostile media, dogmatic Labour and Tory MPs, and a hugely bureaucratic department, he had scored a significant victory. It will be mentioned as a key moment in the drug debate when, a decade or two from now, Britain finally adopts a more liberal policy.

One might add that Norman was highly regarded in his time as a transport minister too. And, as the video above shows, he sings too.

Second, he is right about the silly attacks on Norman today:

The attacks on Norman Baker could almost have been pre-written. As soon as his resignation was announced, his critics reminded everyone of his weakness for conspiracy theories. Videos of his band were circulated, mockingly. Others focused on the fact no-one outside the Westminster bubble knew who he was, which is true for pretty much all ministers. And there was criticism of his admittedly theatrical astonishment at the fact the Home Office does not proceed on the basis of evidence.

Among those making the attacks are the Guardian - though note the supportive comments from readers and and even a Lib Dem blogger.

And Dunt is most right of all when he contrasts the reputations of Norman Baker and Jeremy Browne.

I am too much of a party loyalist to quote what he says about Jeremy, but the moral he draws is spot on:

And yet Browne was treated almost like an elder statesman when he left the Home Office. And therein lies the key to media treatment of politicians: Look vaguely presentable and don't rock the boat – they'll treat you like a sage. But fight for radical policy and they consider you an embarrassment. 

Baker accomplished more than most ministers one can care to think of. It is entirely unsurprising that he is now a subject for mockery.

My suspicion is that the worlds of politics and political journalism are now so dominated by the products of public schools and Oxbridge that they find the idea of someone from outside playing a role ridiculous.

The fifth and final part of my Alan Moore interview.

As I was finishing up the book, I was re-reading an interview with you [in Reflex, December 1991] and there was a one line reference to a project called Underland that I’d never seen mentioned anywhere else.

That may even have been a follow up to A Small Killing for Gollancz. Somewhere around that time. I had a book called London Under London, that Neil Gaiman had sent me when I was researching From Hell. I wanted to do something with Steve Parkhouse, and I came up with the idea of a subterranean world under London that linked up all these interesting underground spaces and had its own inhabitants and its class system. It was going to have a girl whose sister had vanished, been spirited away into this underland, and the girl – I meant it as a grown up children’s story, the adventures of this girl exploring this world and finally rescuing her sister. The same length as A Small Killing, something like that. I mentioned this in that interview and I got a phone call from Neil Gaiman saying he’d signed a deal with Lenny Henry’s production company to do Neverwhere. Given that Neil had sent me the book originally, I felt duty bound to say ‘oh well, you were here first, so I guess I’ll forget Underland’.

You’ve not done many children’s stories, is it a genre that appeals?

I submitted a proposal, I forget who to, to someone who was looking for a children’s book. This was prior to Bojeffries. It was about an unprepossessing, oddly willful child like a younger Ginda Bojeffries who was a belligerent genius who could have adventures on the Moon. It wasn’t what they were looking for, they wanted something for very young children. I got the impression I wouldn’t be that good writing for young children, I’m a tiny bit bitter and ironic. That said, Blanket Shanty with Shawn McManus, that was a Tom Strong story done as a bedtime story.

You’ve got Timothy Tate and Lobelia Loam in 2000AD …

They were still horrific stories. Blanket Shanty was aimed at small children … I probably could do children’s material in the right circumstances. Whether I’ll get round to it now, I don’t know. I avoided it for a while because it was trendy. I like some of the things about children’s stories, but I didn’t want to be jumping on a JK Rowling bandwagon. The whole middle section of Jerusalem is about a gang of children running around time in a four dimensional afterlife. It reads like a children’s book, but it’s not because it’s a much stranger story, it’s adult, it’s not meant for children.

One thing I can’t work out is where your music fits in. Clearly some of the recent work is linked to the magical … project, if that’s the right word. But with things like the Emperors of Ice Cream, is that a hobby, is that you letting off steam, or is that part of your serious artistic endeavours?

I’m basically still at the Arts Lab, it’s just an incredibly enabled Arts Lab with whatever contributors I want. With the Arts Lab all of my needs to express myself, all my urges, had an outlet. I could do comic strips, I could do poetry, I could do music. My emphasis has had to be on writing, but I’ve never abandoned drawing or performance. There’s never been a need to. I don’t define myself purely as a writer. ‘Magician’ is a handy word, as it’s almost the same as saying ‘artist’, but artist sounds so pretentious. Like Tony Hancock in The Rebel. My approach has always been the same, and I’m more mature and capable, but it’s the same impulse.

I don’t feel I’m part of the comics industry, any more than when Jerusalem is done I’ll feel like I’m part of the literature industry. I certainly don’t feel part of the music or film industry. I am probably at an Arts Lab in my head. An enthusiastic amateur. Yes, I get money for it now, but in my heart I’ll always be an amateur – someone who does it for the amour, for the love.

So, do you have hobbies that aren’t artistic?

(Laughs) No. I don’t have time for anything other than reading, and that generally ends up being unexpected research. Just read a book today, by my friend the magician Joel Biroco, A World of Dust. Interesting, really good stuff. I continue to enjoy books and the very occasional film. The last enjoyable film I saw was A Field in England. So, I don’t really have hobbies. I’ve taken to going for walks lately, generally with Alistair Fruish, a very knowledgeable young man, we have walks all around Northamptonshire. I’ve known him since he asked me back to the Grammar School to talk to the kids. He works in the prison system now, he took me over to Wellingborough nick a couple of years ago, the lifers. They don’t get much entertainment, but I’ve apparently got a strong part of my readership inside. And these are ordinary blokes who had a really bad day and did something fucking stupid and after that point they would never be ‘not a murderer’. For the rest of their lives they can’t ever be ‘not a murderer’.

The other day, on a riverside in Northampton, Alistair and me found the source of the industrial revolution and capitalism. Check out the cotton mill founded in 1741, the first powered mill in the world. So there’s the birth of industry. Adam Smith heard about it or visited it, and said ‘all these looms work without anyone to manage them, it’s almost like an invisible hand’. So that’s the central metaphor of capitalism.

[Discussion has turned to Jerusalem, a massive novel Moore has been working on for many years which is set in Northampton.]

You’re nearly finished?

I’m on the last chapter, but then there’s an epilogue. So about one and a half chapters to go.

What are your hopes for it? How do you think it’s going to be received?

With Jerusalem, I embarked upon it purely because it was the book I wanted to write. It’s about the neighbourhood I grew up in and its very fascinating history, also the history of my family in the area which has its unusual side. Lots of lots of fantasy is mixed in there, and theories of the nature of time and life and death. When I was speaking to Melinda [Gebbie – Moore’s wife (and the artist on Cobweb and Lost Girls)] about it, she very perceptively said that it sounded to her like ‘genetic mythology’, and I thought, after all why should it be only aristocrats and pharaohs and monarchs that have genetic mythology? Shouldn’t people in slums be entitled to their own? So that was part of the urge, and in writing it, I realised that this is exactly the novel I wanted to write.

I am really proud of it, I think it’s sensational. That is, of course, just my own opinion. I am aware that conventional criticism will probably say that it’s about ten times too long, that it’s difficult in places, that some of the passages were deliberately alienating.

Actually I’ve just discovered – I’ve been reading lots of books of literary criticism, mostly about HP Lovecraft to do with Providence, which is a really big job that I’m about halfway through. My armchair is walled in with Lovecraft reference books, I’ve got everything. And I’m starting to pick up ideas from literary criticism, which I’d previously dismissed as poncey because I hadn’t seriously looked at it.

The concept of ‘literary difficulty’ – doing something that will put off a percentage of the audience but will force those who remain to engage with the work on a deeper level. It will challenge people. Now, if I’d had that concept before I’d written the first chapter of Voice of the Fire [told as the first person narration of a Neolithic settler, using a limited vocabulary], I’d have done it exactly like I did, except even moreso. That’s exactly what I did it for, even though I couldn’t have explained it like that.

There will be elements of literary difficulty with Jerusalem – actually lifting the book will be among the difficulties. It’s going to be a very forbidding book in terms of its sheer size and because it’s about the underclass. There is no better way of ensuring that you don’t get a readership of your book than making it about underclass people. In the current climate getting any fiction published is difficult.

I can take unfair advantage of my position. Only I could do this, only I could spend eight years of intense work on it, only I could actually recount what happened in that neighbourhood with those people, and only I am in a position where I could do that without worrying about getting it published. I don’t need to go with a big publisher, they don’t really have anything to offer me. It’s not a big, popular book or a beach read, I’d much rather have a small publisher who had some understanding of what I was doing.

The only ambition I have for Jerusalem is for it to exist. I’m under no illusions that anybody is going to say this is the greatest book of the century. No, no, it’s probably far too difficult for that. It’s just an accurate expression of part of my life and part of my being that also includes lots of other subjects that have become part of that: history, economics, poverty, the Gothic revival, the Gothic movement which started in Northampton with James Hervey, Charlie Chaplin, wars and ghosts, psychological and factual. Family and famous people who’ve passed through this neighbourhood.

Beyond that, fate will have to take its course. I don’t have another prose novel in mind after this. Maybe a really big poem at some point in the future, I have an inkling for one. There’s more League stuff, there’s the book of magic, there’s Providence which I want to be – in my terms – the definitive Lovecraft story. Then there are the films, we’ve got the Kickstarter money for that, and then there’s the possibility of a feature film and TV series after that, both called The Show. Pipe dreams at the moment, they may not come in to land. But a lot of things that have been brewing for years are falling into place.

The folks at Mashable have put up a video — which I think is new but I'm not sure — called "5 Facts About Batman (with Adam West)." I've embedded it below.

The first one is about how Bill Finger really created Batman and not Bob Kane. I absolutely agree that Finger has been tragically, almost criminally deprived of recognition for his work. (I am, let us remember, the Administrator of the annual award that bears his name because the comic books and movies of his character do not.) However, there are two large problems with the Mashable video…

1. They woefully understate Kane's contribution when they say, "All he really did was drawn a blonde guy in a red suit with bat wings." Well, no. First off, the drawing they show of what folks will assume is Kane's contribution is actually a speculation on what Kane's design might have looked like. I believe my pal Arlen Schumer did this drawing a few years ago. Secondly, Kane also sold the strip to DC Comics and worked quite a bit on the early stories. I don't think any of that makes him the sole creator of the character — others did as much or more — but he did a lot more than that one drawing that's actually by Arlen.  He did, for example, a lot of drawings that were actually by Jerry Robinson.  (No, seriously, Bob did do a lot of drawing and head up the crew that produced the early material.)
2. They say "Finger got no recognition" as they show a photo that they think is of Bill Finger. It's actually a photo of DC writer Robert Kanigher…and I think I know how they made this mistake. The Bill Finger Award goes each year to some writers who, like Finger, have not received proper recognition. Last year, one of the ones who received it was Robert Kanigher. I obtained a photo of Kanigher from his family, did a lot of retouching on it to make it look decent and used it on my site and in our press releases. Obviously, someone at Mashable did a search for "Bill Finger photo" or something of the sort, that pic came up and they grabbed and used it.

So once more, Bill Finger is not receiving his proper recognition. And I don't consider it a welcome change that Bob Kane isn't, either. Here's the video. Adam West's participation is, uh, interesting…

UPDATE: A few folks have written to ask me about the claim in this video that Bill Finger created The Joker. Well, Bob Kane claimed that Finger created The Joker and Jerry Robinson said Jerry Robinson created The Joker working with Finger and I believe the weight of evidence is on Robinson's side. So Jerry was a bit wronged here.

Pushing Last War in Albion until tomorrow - was just about to image it up when this crossed my desk, and I want to deal with it.

So, in the wake of Dark Water, the site usvsth3m ran a piece entitled "16 sexually confusing feelings that Doctor Who fans have had since The Mistress revealed her secret." It's a fun piece that reveals the pathetically blinkered attitudes of a lot of Doctor Who fans for what they are, which is to say the attitudes of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic assholes. It's a sobering reminder of the at times appalling attitudes of orthodox and longstanding fandom, and was absolutely something worth doing. And to their credit, they played nice and clipped usernames, thus avoiding publicly naming and shaming people for their actions, not that publicly naming and shaming the person who said that they felt "as though something sacred has been violated" because the Master was a woman now would have been in the least bit unreasonable.

Which is probably why the forum tried to demand that the site take the article down and banned the writer over it on the supposed grounds that they're a "private" forum and that one needs permission of people to quote their posts off-site. Like the entirely sensible people they are, usvsth3m aren't backing down in the least, and more power to them.

But let's be clear here. GallifreyBase's claim that they're a "private" forum is absolutely ludicrous given that they have open registration and nearly 80,000 members, which is to say, about the entire population of Bath. The forum is private in the same way that the Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium is private, except that Yankee Stadium only has a capacity of about 52,000.

What this amounts to is the largest single community of Doctor Who fans declaring that they have the right to have their views go uncommented on and unreported on. It amounts to a declaration that scholarly research and ethnography on Doctor Who fandom is forbidden. It amounts to a declaration that journalists can't cover Doctor Who fandom. It is a morally indefensible position that actively aims to have a chilling effect on entirely legitimate topics of media research and journalism.

I'm sure that many of you are members of GallifreyBase. If so, please use their Contact Us form to tell them your views on their efforts to stifle freedom of speech.

And seriously, check out usvsth3m. They're a lovely mixture of fun "wants to go viral" content and leftist politics. And really, in a war between a cesspit embodying the worst aspects of Doctor Who fandom and a site with an interactive "Slap Michael Gove" game there's only one side you can possibly be on.

Back tomorrow with the start of our coverage of the fantastic "Swamp Thing attacks Gotham City" arc.

The art of not working at work.

It’s an odd evening to defend the MP for Lewes, given that his constituents are currently behaving like a bunch of spoiled children blacking up and attempting to set fire to “politically incorrect” effigies. Nonetheless, I share a lot of the views expressed elsewhere that he performed an excellent service in his role as Home Office minister and can well understand his reasons for resigning.

This blog post isn’t about the rights and wrongs of his resignation though. Rather, it’s a simple observation. Most of the media coverage was transfixed by the idea that Norman Baker was in a band, that it isn’t a wildly good one, and that these facts alone are wildly hilarious. Every TV and newspaper report I came across seemed to fit in a quip about it somewhere

I suspect that it doesn’t especially matter that his interests are in music. In fact, the Reform Club’s middle of the road style from what I can make out is pretty inoffensive to anyone. What seemed to provoke the lobby was that he was doing something – anything – that was slightly out of the ordinary.

When that slightly out of the ordinary thing is practicing music skills on a regular basis, you’ve got to wonder how they’d treat any MP who has personal interests that are really unusual.

Several years ago, I spent an enjoyable afternoon at a games club playing a game of Puerto Rico with a Labour MP, at the time a Parliamentary Private Secretary. After the game, we looked over our shoulders to see another group having a raucous game of Cash’n’Guns. He observed “I have to be really cautious about what games I can play in public” at which point I pointed out, to his horror, that he’d just spent the last couple of hours playing a game about the slave trade.

I mention this because he’s right: playing a game in which you wave foam guns in each other’s faces would potentially be career suicide for an aspiring politician, no matter how silly a game it is (which is certainly the case of Cash’n’Guns). But the reason isn’t because doing so would be wrong or wicked in any way, but because it would be seen as weird. And being weird, as Ed Miliband has learned to his cost, is an almost unforgivable crime in modern politics.

The result is, paradoxically, that all our politicians are deeply weird. It’s been almost 40 years since Denis Healey scathingly noted that Margaret Thatcher lacked a hinterland. These days almost none of them have one. William Hague is allowed to write books, albeit on political history. Beer and football are permitted interests, as is primetime television (in moderation). But anything else is treated as shameful and hidden from view, a bit like being gay in the 1950s.

But the weirdest thing about all this is that at the same time, being “wacky” is increasingly the norm for how political journalism is conducted. The model established by Andrew Neil on This Week and the Daily Politics, has now become ubiquitous. Politics is now typically presented on television by people who can’t wait to dress up in silly costumes or wear outrageous hats to make some leaden point or other. Newspaper journalists all seem to consider themselves to be side-splittingly hilarious comedians if my twitter feed is anything to go by. Norman Baker’s crime seems to have been to be sincere in his interests. If he’d done an appallingly awful duet with the chief correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, then it would have been considered perfectly acceptable and not even worthy of mention.

We expect politicians to be “real” and then lay into them when they are. That doesn’t seem terribly healthy to me.

I.

Part of what bothers me – and apparently several others – about yesterday’s motte-and-bailey discussion is that here’s a fallacy – a pretty successful fallacy – that depends entirely on people not being entirely clear on what they’re arguing about. Somebody says God doesn’t exist. Another person objects that God is just a name for the order and beauty in the universe. Then this somehow helps defend the position that God is a supernatural creator being. How does that even happen?

“Sir, you’ve been accused of murdering your wife. We have three witnesses who said you did it. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Well, your honor, I think it’s quite clear I didn’t murder the President. For one thing, he’s surrounded by Secret Service agents. For another, check the news. The President’s still alive.”

“Huh. For some reason I vaguely remember thinking you didn’t have a case. Yet now that I hear you talk, everything you say is incredibly persuasive. You’re free to go.”

While motte-and-bailey is less subtle, it seems to require a similar sort of misdirection. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it’s a fact that needs to be explained.

When everything works the way it’s supposed to in philosophy textbooks, arguments are supposed to go one of a couple of ways:

1. Questions of empirical fact, like “Is the Earth getting warmer?” or “Did aliens build the pyramids?”. You debate these by presenting factual evidence, like “An average of global weather station measurements show 2014 is the hottest year on record” or “One of the bricks at Giza says ‘Made In Tau Ceti V’ on the bottom.” Then people try to refute these facts or present facts of their own.

2. Questions of morality, like “Is it wrong to abort children?” or “Should you refrain from downloading music you have not paid for?” You can only debate these well if you’ve already agreed upon a moral framework, like a particular version of natural law or consequentialism. But you can sort of debate them by comparing to examples of agreed-upon moral questions and trying to maintain consistency. For exmaple, “You wouldn’t kill a one day old baby, so how is a nine month old fetus different?” or “You wouldn’t download a car.”

If you are very lucky, your philosophy textbook will also admit the existence of:

3. Questions of policy, like “We should raise the minimum wage” or “We should bomb Foreignistan”. These are combinations of competing factual claims and competing values. For example, the minimum wage might hinge on factual claims like “Raising the minimum wage would increase unemployment” or “It is very difficult to live on the minimum wage nowadays, and many poor families cannot afford food.” But it might also hinge on value claims like “Corporations owe it to their workers to pay a living wage,” or “It is more important that the poorest be protected than that the economy be strong.” Bombing Foreignistan might depend on factual claims like “The Foreignistanis are harboring terrorists”, and on value claims like “The safety of our people is worth the risk of collateral damage.” If you can resolve all of these factual and value claims, you should be able to agree on questions of policy.

None of these seem to allow the sort of vagueness of topic mentioned above.

II.

A question: are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? Take a second, actually think about it.

Some people probably answered pro-Israel. Other people probably answered pro-Palestine. Other people probably said they were neutral because it’s a complicated issue with good points on both sides.

Probably very few people answered: Huh? What?

This question doesn’t fall into any of the three Philosophy 101 forms of argument. It’s not a question of fact. It’s not a question of particular moral truths. It’s not even a question of policy. There are closely related policies, like whether Palestine should be granted independence. But if I support a very specific two-state solution where the border is drawn upon the somethingth parallel, does that make me pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? At exactly which parallel of border does the solution under consideration switch from pro-Israeli to pro-Palestinian? Do you think the crowd of people shouting and waving signs saying “SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE” have an answer to that question?

But it’s even worse, because this question covers much more than just the borders of an independent Palestinian state. Was Israel justified by responding to Hamas’ rocket fire by bombing Gaza, even with the near-certainty of collateral damage? Was Israel justified in building a wall across the Palestinian territories to protect itself from potential terrorists, even though it severely curtails Palestinian freedom of movement? Do Palestinians have a “right of return” to territories taken in the 1948 war? Who should control the Temple Mount?

These are four very different questions which one would think each deserve independent consideration. But in reality, what percent of the variance in people’s responses do you think is explained by a general “pro-Palestine vs. pro-Israel” factor? 50%? 75%? More?

In a way, when we round people off to the Philosophy 101 kind of arguments, we are failing to respect their self-description. People aren’t out on the streets saying “By my cost-benefit analysis, Israel was in the right to invade Gaza, although it may be in the wrong on many of its other actions.” They’re waving little Israeli flags and holding up signs saying “ISRAEL: OUR STAUNCHEST ALLY”. Maybe we should take them at face value.

This is starting to look related to the original question in (I). Why is it okay to suddenly switch points in the middle of an argument? In the case of Israel and Palestine, it might be because people’s support for any particular Israeli policy is better explained by a General Factor Of Pro-Israeliness than by the policy itself. As long as I’m arguing in favor of Israel in some way, it’s still considered by everyone to be on topic.

III.

Some moral philosophers got fed up with nobody being able to explain what the heck a moral truth was and invented emotivism. Emotivism says there are no moral truths, just expressions of little personal bursts of emotion. When you say “Donating to charity is good,” you don’t mean “Donating to charity increases the sum total of utility in the world,” or “Donating to charity is in keeping with the Platonic moral law” or “Donating to charity was commanded by God” or even “I like donating to charity”. You’re just saying “Yay charity!” and waving a little flag.

Seems a lot like how people handle the Israel question. “I’m pro-Israel” doesn’t necessarily imply that you believe any empirical truths about Israel, or believe any moral principles about Israel, or even support any Israeli policies. It means you’re waving a little flag with a Star of David on it and cheering.

So here is Ethnic Tension: A Game For Two Players.

Pick a vague concept. “Israel” will do nicely for now.

Player 1 tries to associate the concept “Israel” with as much good karma as she possibly can. Concepts get good karma by doing good moral things, by being associated with good people, by being linked to the beloved in-group, and by being oppressed underdogs in bravery debates.

“Israel is the freest and most democratic country in the Middle East. It is one of America’s strongest allies and shares our Judeo-Christian values.

Player 2 tries to associate the concept “Israel” with as much bad karma as she possibly can. Concepts get bad karma by committing atrocities, being associated with bad people, being linked to the hated out-group, and by being oppressive big-shots in bravery debates. Also, she obviously needs to neutralize Player 1’s actions by disproving all of her arguments.

“Israel may have some level of freedom for its most privileged citizens, but what about the millions of people in the Occupied Territories that have no say? Israel is involved in various atrocities and has often killed innocent protesters. They are essentially a neocolonialist state and have allied with other neocolonialist states like South Africa.”

The prize for winning this game is the ability to win the other three types of arguments. If Player 1 wins, the audience ends up with a strongly positive General Factor Of Pro-Israeliness, and vice versa.

Remember, people’s capacity for motivated reasoning is pretty much infinite. Remember, a motivated skeptic asks if the evidence compels them to accept the conclusion; a motivated credulist asks if the evidence allows them to accept the conclusion. Remember, Jonathan Haidt and his team hypnotized people to have strong disgust reactions to the word “often”, and then tried to hold in their laughter when people in the lab came up with convoluted yet plausible-sounding arguments against any policy they proposed that included the word “often” in the description.

I’ve never heard of the experiment being done the opposite way, but it sounds like the sort of thing that might work. Hypnotize someone to have a very positive reaction to the word “often” (for most hilarious results, have it give people an orgasm). “Do you think governments should raise taxes more often?” “Yes. Yes yes YES YES OH GOD YES!”

Once you finish the Ethnic Tension Game, you’re replicating Haidt’s experiment with the word “Israel” instead of the word “often”. Win the game, and any pro-Israel policy you propose will get a burst of positive feelings and tempt people to try to find some explanation, any explanation, that will justify it, whether it’s invading Gaza or building a wall or controlling the Temple Mount.

So this is the fourth type of argument, the kind that doesn’t make it into Philosophy 101 books. The trope namer is Ethnic Tension, but it applies to anything that can be identified as a Vague Concept, or paired opposing Vague Concepts, which you can use emotivist thinking to load with good or bad karma.

IV.

Now motte-and-bailey stands revealed:

Somebody says God doesn’t exist. Another person objects that God is just a name for the order and beauty in the universe. Then this somehow helps defend the position that God is a supernatural creator being. How does that even happen?

The two-step works like this. First, load “religion” up with good karma by pitching it as persuasively as possible. “Religion is just the belief that there’s beauty and order in the universe.”

Wait, I think there’s beauty and order in the universe!

“Then you’re religious too. We’re all religious, in the end, because religion is about the common values of humanity and meaning and compassion sacrifice beauty of a sunrise Gandhi Buddha Sufis St. Francis awe complexity humility wonder Tibet the Golden Rule love.”

Then, once somebody has a strongly positive General Factor Of Religion, it doesn’t really matter whether someone believes in a creator God or not. If they have any predisposition whatsoever to do so, they’ll find a reason to let themselves. If they can’t manage it, they’ll say it’s true “metaphorically” and continue to act upon every corollary of it being true.

(“God is just another name for the beauty and order in the universe. But Israel definitely belongs to the Jews, because the beauty and order of the universe promised it to them.”)

If you’re an atheist, you probably have a lot of important issues on which you want people to consider non-religious answers and policies. And if somebody can maintain good karma around the “religion” concept by believing God is the order and beauty in the universe, then that can still be a victory for religion even if it is done by jettisoning many traditionally “religious” beliefs. In this case, it is useful to think of the “order and beauty” formulation as a “motte” for the “supernatural creator” formulation, since it’s allowing the entire concept to be defended.

But even this is giving people too much credit, because the existence of God is a (sort of) factual question. From yesterday’s post:

Suppose we’re debating feminism, and I defend it by saying it really is important that women are people, and you attack it by saying that it’s not true that all men are terrible. What is the real feminism we should be debating? Why would you even ask that question? What is this, some kind of dumb high school debate club? Who the heck thinks it would be a good idea to say ‘Here’s a vague poorly-defined concept that mind-kills everyone who touches it – quick, should you associate it with positive affect or negative affect?!’

Who the heck thinks that? Everybody, all the time.

Once again, if I can load the concept of “feminism” with good karma by making it so obvious nobody can disagree with it, then I have a massive “home field advantage” when I’m trying to convince anyone of any particular policy that can go under the name “feminism”, even if it’s unrelated to the arguments that gave feminism good karma in the first place.

Or if I’m against feminism, I just post quotes from the ten worst feminists on Tumblr again and again until the entire movement seems ridiculous and evil, and then you’ll have trouble convincing anyone of anything feminist. “That seems reasonable…but wait, isn’t that a feminist position? Aren’t those the people I hate?”

(compare: most Americans oppose Obamacare, but most Americans support each individual component of Obamacare when it is explained without using the word “Obamacare”)

V.

Little flow diagram things make everything better. Let’s make a little flow diagram thing.

We have our node “Israel”, which has either good or bad karma. Then there’s another node close by marked “Palestine”. We would expect these two nodes to be pretty anti-correlated. When Israel has strong good karma, Palestine has strong bad karma, and vice versa.

Now suppose you listen to Noam Chomsky talk about how strongly he supports the Palestinian cause and how much he dislikes Israel. One of two things can happen:

“Wow, a great man such as Noam Chomsky supports the Palestinians! They must be very deserving of support indeed!”

or

“That idiot Chomsky supports Palestine? Well, screw him. And screw them!”

So now there is a third node, Noam Chomsky, that connects to both Israel and Palestine, and we have discovered it is positively correlated with Palestine and negatively correlated with Israel. It probably has a pretty low weight, because there are a lot of reasons to care about Israel and Palestine other than Chomsky, and a lot of reasons to care about Chomsky other than Israel and Palestine, but the connection is there.

I don’t know anything about neural nets, so maybe this system isn’t actually a neural net, but whatever it is I’m thinking of, it’s a structure where eventually the three nodes reach some kind of equilibrium. If we start with someone liking Israel and Chomsky, but not Palestine, then either that’s going to shift a little bit towards liking Palestine, or shift a little bit towards disliking Chomsky.

Now we add more nodes. Cuba seems to really support Palestine, so they get a positive connection with a little bit of weight there. And I think Noam Chomsky supports Cuba, so we’ll add a connection there as well. Cuba is socialist, and that’s one of the most salient facts about it, so there’s a heavily weighted positive connection between Cuba and socialism. Palestine kind of makes noises about socialism but I don’t think they have any particular economic policy, so let’s say very weak direct connection. And Che is heavily associated with Cuba, so you get a pretty big Che – Cuba connection, plus a strong direct Che – socialism one. And those pro-Palestinian students who threw rotten fruit at an Israeli speaker also get a little path connecting them to “Palestine” – hey, why not – so that if you support Palestine you might be willing to excuse what they did and if you oppose them you might be a little less likely to support Palestine.

Back up. This model produces crazy results, like that people who like Che are more likely to oppose Israel bombing Gaza. That’s such a weird, implausible connection that it casts doubt upon the entire…

Oh. Wait. Yeah. Okay.

I think this kind of model, in its efforts to sort itself out into a ground state, might settle on some kind of General Factor Of Politics, which would probably correspond pretty well to the left-right axis.

In Five Case Studies On Politicization, I noted how fresh new unpoliticized issues, like the Ebola epidemic, were gradually politicized by connecting them to other ideas that were already part of a political narrative. For example, a quarantine against Ebola would require closing the borders. So now there’s a weak negative link between “Ebola quarantine” and “open borders”. If your “open borders” node has good karma, now you’re a little less likely to support an Ebola quarantine. If “open borders” has bad karma, a little more likely.

I also tried to point out how you could make different groups support different things by changing your narrative a little:

Global warming has gotten inextricably tied up in the Blue Tribe narrative: Global warming proves that unrestrained capitalism is destroying the planet. Global warming disproportionately affects poor countries and minorities. Global warming could have been prevented with multilateral action, but we were too dumb to participate because of stupid American cowboy diplomacy. Global warming is an important cause that activists and NGOs should be lauded for highlighting. Global warming shows that Republicans are science denialists and probably all creationists. Two lousy sentences on “patriotism” aren’t going to break through that.

If I were in charge of convincing the Red Tribe to line up behind fighting global warming, here’s what I’d say:

In the 1950s, brave American scientists shunned by the climate establishment of the day discovered that the Earth was warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to potentially devastating natural disasters that could destroy American agriculture and flood American cities. As a result, the country mobilized against the threat. Strong government action by the Bush administration outlawed the worst of these gases, and brilliant entrepreneurs were able to discover and manufacture new cleaner energy sources. As a result of these brave decisions, our emissions stabilized and are currently declining.

Unfortunately, even as we do our part, the authoritarian governments of Russia and China continue to industralize and militarize rapidly as part of their bid to challenge American supremacy. As a result, Communist China is now by far the world’s largest greenhouse gas producer, with the Russians close behind. Many analysts believe Putin secretly welcomes global warming as a way to gain access to frozen Siberian resources and weaken the more temperate United States at the same time. These countries blow off huge disgusting globs of toxic gas, which effortlessly cross American borders and disrupt the climate of the United States. Although we have asked them to stop several times, they refuse, perhaps egged on by major oil producers like Iran and Venezuela who have the most to gain by keeping the world dependent on the fossil fuels they produce and sell to prop up their dictatorships.

We need to take immediate action. While we cannot rule out the threat of military force, we should start by using our diplomatic muscle to push for firm action at top-level summits like the Kyoto Protocol. Second, we should fight back against the liberals who are trying to hold up this important work, from big government bureaucrats trying to regulate clean energy to celebrities accusing people who believe in global warming of being ‘racist’. Third, we need to continue working with American industries to set an example for the world by decreasing our own emissions in order to protect ourselves and our allies. Finally, we need to punish people and institutions who, instead of cleaning up their own carbon, try to parasitize off the rest of us and expect the federal government to do it for them.

In the first paragraph, “global warming” gets positively connected to concepts like “poor people and minorities” and “activists and NGOs”, and gets negatively connected to concepts like “capitalism”, “American cowboy diplomacy”, and “creationists”. That gives global warming really strong good karma if (and only if) you like the first two concepts and hate the last three.

In the next three paragraphs, “global warming” gets positively connected to “America”, “the Bush administration” and “entrepreneurs”, and negatively connected to “Russia”, “China”, “oil producing dictatorships like Iran and Venezuela”, “big government bureaucrats”, and “welfare parasites”. This is going to appeal to, well, a different group.

Notice two things here. First, the exact connection isn’t that important, as long as we can hammer in the existence of a connection. I could probably just say GLOBAL WARMING! COMMUNISM! GLOBAL WARMING! COMMUNISM! GLOBAL WARMING! COMMUNISM! several hundred times and have the same effect if I could get away with it (this is the principle behind attack ads which link a politician’s face to scary music and a very concerned voice).

Second, there is no attempt whatsoever to challenge the idea that the issue at hand is the positive or negative valence of a concept called “global warming”. At no point is it debated what the solution is, which countries the burden is going to fall on, or whether any particular level of emission cuts would do more harm than good. It’s just accepted as obvious by both sides that we debate “for” or “against” global warming, and if the “for” side wins then they get to choose some solution or other or whatever oh god that’s so boring can we get back to Israel vs. Palestine.

Some of the scientists working on IQ have started talking about “hierarchical factors”, meaning that there’s a general factor of geometry intelligence partially correlated with other things into a general factor of mathematical intelligence partially correlated with other things into a general factor of total intelligence.

I would expect these sorts of things to work the same way. There’s a General Factor Of Global Warming that affects attitudes toward pretty much all proposed global warming solutions, which is very highly correlated with a lot of other things to make a General Factor Of Environmentalism, which itself is moderately highly correlated with other things into the General Factor Of Politics.

VI.

Speaking of politics, a fruitful digression: what the heck was up with the Ashley Todd mugging hoax in 2008?

Back in the 2008 election, a McCain campaigner claimed (falsely, it would later turn out) to have been assaulted by an Obama supporter. She said he slashed a “B” (for “Barack”) on her face with a knife. This got a lot of coverage, and according to Wikipedia:

John Moody, executive vice president at Fox News, commented in a blog on the network’s website that “this incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election,” but also warned that “if the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.”

Wait. One Democrat, presumably not acting on Obama’s direct orders, attacks a Republican woman. And this is supposed to alter the outcome of the entire election? In what universe does one crime by a deranged psychopath change whether Obama’s tax policy or job policy or bombing-scary-foreigners policy is better or worse than McCain’s?

Even if we’re willing to make the irresponsible leap from “Obama is supported by psychopaths, therefore he’s probably a bad guy,” there are like a hundred million people on each side. Psychopaths are usually estimated at about 1% of the population, so any movement with a million people will already have 10,000 psychopaths. Proving the existence of a single one changes nothing.

I think insofar as this affected the election – and everyone seems to have agreed that it might have – it hit President Obama with a burst of bad karma. Obama something something psychopath with a knife. Regardless of the exact content of those something somethings, is that the kind of guy you want to vote for?

Then when it was discovered to be a hoax, it was McCain something something race-baiting hoaxer. Now he’s got the bad karma!

This sort of conflation between a cause and its supporters really only makes sense in the emotivist model of arguing. I mean, this shouldn’t even get dignified with the name ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem fallacy is “McCain had sex with a goat, therefore whatever he says about taxes is invalid.” At least it’s still the same guy. This is something the philosophy textbooks can’t bring themselves to believe really exists, even as a fallacy.

But if there’s a General Factor Of McCain, then anything bad remotely connected to the guy – goat sex, lying campaigners, whatever – reflects on everything else about him.

This is the same pattern we see in Israel and Palestine. How many times have you seen a news story like this one: “Israeli speaker hounded off college campus by pro-Palestinian partisans throwing fruit. Look at the intellectual bankruptcy of the pro-Palestinian cause!” It’s clearly intended as an argument for something other than just not throwing fruit at people. The causation seems to go something like “These particular partisans are violating the usual norms of civil discussion, therefore they are bad, therefore something associated with Palestine is bad, therefore your General Factor of Pro-Israeliness should become more strongly positive, therefore it’s okay for Israel to bomb Gaza.” Not usually said in those exact words, but the thread can be traced.

VII.

Here is a prediction of this model: we will be obsessed with what concepts we can connect to other concepts, even when the connection is totally meaningless.

Suppose I say: “Opposing Israel is anti-Semitic”. Why? Well, the Israelis are mostly Jews, so in a sense by definition being anti- them is “anti-Semitic”, broadly defined. Also, p(opposes Israel|is anti-Semitic) is probably pretty high, which sort of lends some naive plausibility to the idea that p(is anti-Semitic|opposes Israel) is at least higher than it otherwise could be.

Maybe we do our research and we find exactly what percent of opponents of Israel endorse various anti-Semitic statements like “I hate all Jews” or “Hitler had some bright ideas”. We’ve replaced the symbol with the substance. Problem solved, right?

Maybe not. In the same sense that people can agree on all of the characteristics of Pluto – its diameter, the eccentricity of its orbit, its number of moons – and still disagree on the question “Is Pluto a planet”, one can agree on every characteristic of every Israel opponent and still disagree on the definitional question “Is opposing Israel anti-Semitic?”

(fact: it wasn’t until proofreading this essay that I realized I had originally written “Is Israel a planet?” and “Is opposing Pluto anti-Semitic?” I would like to see Jonathan Haidt hypnotize people until they can come up with positive arguments for those propositions.)

What’s the point of this useless squabble over definitions?

I think it’s about drawing a line between the concept “anti-Semitism” and “oppose Israel”. If your head is screwed on right, you assign anti-Semitism some very bad karma. So if we can stick a thick line between “anti-Semitism” and “oppose Israel”, then you’re going have very bad feelings about opposition to Israel and your General Factor Of Pro-Israeliness will go up.

Notice that this model is transitive, but shouldn’t be.

That is, let’s say we’re arguing over the definition of anti-Semitism, and I say “anti-Semitism just means anything that hurts Jews”. This is a dumb definition, but let’s roll with it.

First, I load “anti-Semitism” with lots of negative affect. Hitler was anti-Semitic. The pogroms in Russia were anti-Semitic. The Spanish Inquisition was anti-Semitic. Okay, negative affect achieved.

Then I connect “wants to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine” to “anti-Semitism”. Now wanting to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine has lots of negative affect attached to it.

It sounds dumb when you put it like that, but when you put it like “You’re anti-Semitic for wanting to end the occupation” it’s a pretty damaging argument.

This is trying to be transitive. It’s trying to say “anti-occupation = anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism = evil, therefore anti-occupation = evil”. If this were arithmetic, it would work. But there’s no Transitive Property Of Concepts. If anything, concepts are more like sets. The logic is “anti-occupation is a member of the set anti-Semitic, the set anti-Semitic contains members that are evil, therefore anti-occupation is evil”, which obviously doesn’t check out.

(compare: “I am a member of the set ‘humans’, the set ‘humans’ contains the Pope, therefore I am the Pope”.)

Anti-Semitism is generally considered evil because a lot of anti-Semitic things involve killing or dehumanizing Jews. Opposing the Israel occupation of Palestine doesn’t kill or dehumanize Jews, so even if we call it “anti-Semitic” by definition, there’s no reason for our usual bad karma around anti-Semitism to transfer over. But by an unfortunate rhetorical trick, it does – you can gather up bad karma into “anti-Semitic” and then shoot it at the “occupation of Palestine” issue just by clever use of definitions.

This means that if you can come up with sufficiently clever definitions and convince your opponent to accept them, you can win any argument by default just by having a complex system of mirrors in place to reflect bad karma from genuinely evil things to the things you want to tar as evil. This is essentially the point I make in Words, Words, Words.

If we kinda tweak the definition of “anti-Semitism” to be “anything that inconveniences Jews”, we can pull a trick where we leverage people’s dislike of Hitler to make them support the Israeli occupation of Palestine – but in order to do that, we need to get everyone on board with our slightly non-standard definition. Likewise, the social justice movement insists on their own novel definitions of words like “racism” that don’t match common usage, any dictionary, or etymological history – but which do perfectly describe a mirror that reflects bad karma toward opponents of social justice while making it impossible to reflect any bad karma back. Overreliance on this mechanism explains why so many social justice debates end up being about whether a particular mirror can be deployed to transfer bad karma in a specific case (“are trans people privileged?!”) rather than any feature of the real world.

But they are hardly alone. Compare: “Is such an such an organization a cult?”, “Is such and such a policy socialist?”, “Is abortion or capital punishment or war murder?” All entirely about whether we’re allowed to reflect bad karma from known sources of evil to other topics under discussion.

Look around you. Just look around you. Have you worked out what we’re looking for? Correct. The answer is The Worst Argument In The World. Only now, we can explain why it works.

VIII.

From the self-esteem literature, I gather that the self is also a concept that can have good or bad karma. From the cognitive dissonance literature, I gather that the self is actively involved in maintaining good karma around itself through as many biases as it can manage to deploy.

I’ve mentioned this study before. Researchers make victims participants fill out a questionnaire about their romantic relationships. Then they pretend to “grade” the questionnaire, actually assigning scores at random. Half the participants are told their answers indicate they have the tendency to be very faithful to their partner. The other half are told they have very low faithfulness and their brains just aren’t built for fidelity. Then they ask the participants victims their opinion on staying faithful in a relationship – very important, moderately important, or not so important?

There is a strong signal of people who are told they are bad at fidelity to state fidelity is unimportant, and another strong signal of people who are told they are especially faithful stating that fidelity is a great and noble virtue that must be protected.

The researchers conclude that people want to have high self-esteem. If I am terrible at fidelity, and fidelity is the most important virtue, that makes me a terrible person. If I am terrible at fidelity and fidelity doesn’t matter, I’m fine. If I am great at fidelity, and fidelity is the most important virtue, I can feel pretty good about myself.

This doesn’t seem too surprising. It’s just the more subtle version of the effect where white people are a lot more likely to be white supremacists than members of any other race. Everyone likes to hear that they’re great. The question is whether they can defend it and fit it in with their other ideas. The answer is “usually yes, because people are capable of pretty much any contortion of logic you can imagine and a lot that you can’t”.

I had a bad experience when I was younger where a bunch of feminists attacked and threatened me because of something I wrote. It left me kind of scarred. More importantly, the shape of that scar was a big anticorrelated line between self-esteem and the “feminism” concept. If feminism has lots of good karma, then I have lots of bad karma, because I am a person feminists hate. If feminists have lots of bad karma, then I look good by comparison, the same way it’s pretty much a badge of honor to be disliked by Nazis. The result was a permanent haze of bad karma around “feminism” unconnected to any specific feminist idea, which I have to be constantly on the watch for if I want to be able to evaluate anything related to feminism fairly or rationally.

Good or bad karma, when applied to yourself, looks like high or low self-esteem; when applied to groups, it looks like high or low status. In the giant muddle of a war for status that we politely call “society”, this makes beliefs into weapons and the karma loading of concepts into the difference between lionization and dehumanization.

The Trope Namer for emotivist arguments is “ethnic tension”, and although it’s most obvious in the case of literal ethnicities like the Israelis and the Palestinians, the ease with which concepts become attached to different groups creates a whole lot of “proxy ethnicites”. I’ve written before about how American liberals and conservatives are seeming less and less like people who happen to have different policy prescriptions, and more like two different tribes engaged in an ethnic conflict quickly approaching Middle East level hostility. More recently, a friend on Facebook described the-thing-whose-name-we-do-not-speak-lest-it-appear and-destroy-us-all, the one involving reproductively viable worker ants, as looking more like an ethnic conflict about who is oppressing whom than any real difference in opinions.

Once a concept has joined up with an ethnic group, either a real one or a makeshift one, it’s impossible to oppose the concept without simultaneously lowering the status of the ethnic group, which is going to start at least a little bit of a war. Worse, once a concept has joined up with an ethnic group, one of the best ways to argue against the concept is to dehumanize the ethnic group it’s working with. Dehumanizing an ethnic group has always been easy – just associate them with a disgust reaction, portray them as conventionally unattractive and unlovable and full of all the worst human traits – and now it is profitable as well, since it’s one of the fastest ways to load bad karma into an idea you dislike.

IX.

According to The Virtues Of Rationality:

The tenth virtue is precision. One comes and says: The quantity is between 1 and 100. Another says: the quantity is between 40 and 50. If the quantity is 42 they are both correct, but the second prediction was more useful and exposed itself to a stricter test. What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world. The narrowest statements slice deepest, the cutting edge of the blade. As with the map, so too with the art of mapmaking: The Way is a precise Art. Do not walk to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less. What is exactly the right amount? To calculate this you must study probability theory. Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.

The official desciption is of literal precision, as specific numerical precision in probability updates. But is there a secret interpretation of this virtue?

Four top secret Virtues known only to the Highest Clergy: 1) Fnorg 2) Turlity 3) Charigrace 4) Love-231.

— Deity Of Religion (@deityofreligion) October 24, 2014

Precision as separation. Once you’re debating “religion”, you’ve already lost. Precision as sticking to a precise question, like “Is the first chapter of Genesis literally true?” or “Does Buddhist meditation help treat anxiety disorders?” and trying to keep these issues as separate from any General Factor Of Religiousness as humanly possible. Precision such that “God the supernatural Creator exists” and “God the order and beauty in the Universe exists” are as carefully sequestered from one another as “Did the defendant kill his wife?” and “Did the defendant kill the President?”

I want to end by addressing a point a commenter made in my last post on motte-and-bailey:

In the real world, the particular abstract questions aren’t what matter – the groups and people are what matter. People get things done, and they aren’t particularly married to particular abstract concepts, they are married to their values and their compatriots. In order to deal with reality, we must attack and defend groups and individuals. That does not mean forsaking logic. It requires dealing with obfuscating tactics like those you outline above, but that’s not even a real downside, because if you flee into the narrow, particular questions all you’re doing is covering your eyes to avoid perceiving the the monsters that will still make mincemeat of your attempts to change things.

I don’t entirely disagree with this. But I think we’ve been over this territory before.

The world is a scary place, full of bad people who want to hurt you, and in the state of nature you’re pretty much obligated to engage in whatever it takes to survive.

But instead of sticking with the state of nature, we have the ability to form communities built on mutual disarmament and mutual cooperation. Despite artificially limiting themselves, these communities become stronger than the less-scrupulous people outside them, because they can work together effectively and because they can boast a better quality of life that attracts their would-be enemies to join them. At least in the short term, these communities can resist races to the bottom and prevent the use of personally effective but negative-sum strategies.

One such community is the kind where members try to stick to rational discussion as much as possible. These communities are definitely better able to work together, because they have a powerful method of resolving empirical disputes. They’re definitely better quality of life, because you don’t have to deal with constant insult wars and personal attacks. And the existence of such communities provides positive externalities to the outside world, since they are better able to resolve difficult issues and find truth.

But forming a rationalist community isn’t just about having the will to discuss things well. It’s also about having the ability. Overcoming bias is really hard, and so the members of such a community need to be constantly trying to advance the art and figure out how to improve their discussion tactics.

As such, it’s acceptable to try to determine and discuss negative patterns of argument, even if those patterns of argument are useful and necessary weapons in a state of nature. If anything, understanding them makes them easier to use if you’ve got to use them, and makes them easier to recognize and counter from others, giving a slight advantage in battle if that’s the kind of thing you like. But moving them from unconscious to conscious also gives you the crucial choice of when to deploy them and allows people to try to root out ethnic tension in particular communities.

There’s an article in Warrior by Steve Moore from 1982 where he explains that the way to get into comics is to do what he did: spend ten years working as a production assistant and junior editor, patiently learning the craft. He then says – and I imagine him saying it through gritted teeth – that the other way is ‘the Alan Moore Method’, which is just bombarding editors with scripts.

I love that quote. I don’t think Steve was saying it through gritted teeth, it was just that he’d never seen it done that way before.

Did you ever try the Steve Moore Method of breaking into comics?

When I was still at school, I’d written a letter to Mike Higgs, who’d done stuff for Steve’s fanzine Ka-Pow, saying I wanted to make it as a comic books artist. He gave me some really good advice: join any sort of art studio, even if you’re just making the coffee. Just learn the ropes, watch what other people do, try and get better. And then maybe have a go at comics.

When I was expelled, I noticed that there was an advert for ‘cartoonist wanted’, somebody to draw advertising, and they asked as a trial ‘give us an illustration that would work as an advert for a pet shop’ and I did this – in retrospect – quite scary dog, and I’d used Letratone on it to show that I was au fait with sophisticated shading techniques. It was rejected of course. What they actually wanted was a smiley picture of a puppy, which I could have done, but I’d thought they wanted to see what a brilliant artist I am. No, they actually wanted to see you could follow a brief intelligently, which I was incapable of doing. So, with that, I gave up. That’s when I decided to go down to the Labour Exchange and take whatever was available. So the next stop was the skinning yard. So I did make a feeble attempt at following Mike Higgs’ advice. It wasn’t until I was about twenty-four that I came up with Plan B.

And that was to write and draw an epic space opera, possibly one you could sell to 2000AD. You’ve said you had elaborate plans, but after a year you only had a couple of pages completed. I don’t think you’ve ever gone into detail.

It was all in my head. I think it was called Sun Dodgers, but whether I lettered that up, I doubt it. They were a group of superheroes in space, with a science fiction explanation for each of these characters. They were a motley crew in a spaceship, probably going back the kind of strips Wally Wood was doing in witzend and The Misfits. That was certainly the model Steve Moore was building on with Abslom Daak. I was thinking along the same lines. I can remember somebody looked a bit like a futuristic samurai –

Like Warpsmith?

– I suppose so. A coincidence. It was Garry Leach who came up with that look, I gave him a free hand, I wasn’t adverse to it. There was also a humanoid robot thing with a big steel ball for a head, which probably later surfaced as the Hypernaut in 1963. There was a half-human, half-canine creature who ended up as Wardog in the Special Executive. I only got a couple of pages done. The ideas I had … actually, thinking back, there was a character whose name was Five, and I don’t think I ever got around to drawing him, but my vague idea was that he was a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, room five, that might have been an element which fed into V for Vendetta. I don’t think there was anything else that ended up in anything.

[We’re working through the manuscript in order, with Moore offering corrections and clarifications. We’ve come to the longest passage that got cut out. In the draft, I’d said this: ‘March 1983 saw the last of Moore’s strips for Sounds. He says that it was simply because he was now getting so much writing work, he didn’t have time to continue drawing The Stars My Degradation (for the last year, Steve Moore had been writing the series). This would make sense, but may not be the whole truth. Sexually explicit panels from the 18 December 1982 instalment were omitted from the published version – note the gaps and editor’s note:

Moore – both Moores – may well have been ready to move on, but it is reasonable to imagine that an act of censorship like this might have provided an added incentive. Alan Moore had thought about producing a strip for Sounds centred on Mycroft the Crow from Roscoe Moscow, but in the event his work for the paper ended when The Stars My Degradation came to a cataclysmic halt seven episodes after the ‘Censorious Ed’ issue. He would say the following year ‘They treated me OK … I had my stuff censored fairly regularly – certainly enough to irritate me.’

Moore corrected this:

When me and Steve stopped doing The Stars my Degradation, yeah, there had been some explicit panels censored, but we’d kind of expected this and it was a minor irritation. I loved Alan Lewis, an old school music editor. I stopped simply because I didn’t have time to do the strip any more. I’d been gradually winding it down. That was why the last issues look so rubbish. I always heard real professionals use a brush, and I understand that is true, but I have no facility with a brush, and some of the artwork in those final issues show that. I wanted to continue it, but it was completely impractical. It wasn’t because of any instances of the odd little bit of very infrequent censorship. We got away with an extraordinary amount, and I don’t have any grievances regarding that.

Oh, a couple of pages on from that I’ve given you a big tick. You’ve got the line, ‘While Moore is not a ruthless man or a cunning businessman, he clearly does not like coming second.’ I thought that was quite funny. That actually made me laugh.

Right. Later, you quote Rob Liefeld saying: ‘He once called us up to tell us that he had just been in the dream realm and talking to Socrates and Shakespeare, and to Moses, dead serious, and that they talked for what seemed to be months, but when he woke up, only an evening had passed … etc etc … I think it’s all shtick … That’s the kinda stuff Alan would say all the time.’ OK. I’ve never spoken to Rob Liefeld at all in my life. I don’t ever remember ringing the Image office. I have had some conversations with [Image partner] Eric Stephenson, er –

OK.

For the record I have never had conversations with Socrates, Shakespeare or Moses.

If this was a magazine feature, I think I’d just have got my headline.

[laughs] Then there’s the urinal anecdote.

Ah. Not true, either? [Legend has it that at one comics convention, Moore was standing at a urinal when he realised that the queue of people behind him didn’t want the bathroom, they were after his autograph].

No, but it’s charming. I may have had one person follow me into a urinal and say ‘can I have an autograph?’ . . . there certainly wasn’t a queue of people, so that’s a piece of entertaining apocrypha.

The second part of my Alan Moore interview. The first part is here.

Me: When I wrote my Pocket Essential I typed the line ‘Alan Moore was a member of the Northampton Arts Lab’ and left it there and I didn’t really have a clue what that meant. It’s really only when I wrote this book that I found out anything at all about them …

Alan Moore: They were a strange little bubble, the Arts Labs. What happened in Northampton, how it was instigated, was that there was a couple called Dick and Janice Smith. There was a hippy venue called Badge after the Cream track of the same name. They used to meet in the Carnegie Hall at the back of the library. I never went there, I was slightly too young. But one night after the music had been played, they put out an announcement that if anyone wanted to join an Arts Lab, they should contact Dick and Janice. So a few people attending that night, including my friends John Woodcock, Brian Ratcliffe and Nick Bunting – who I think was the only published poet out of the whole lot of us, he had a poem published in the Love, Love, Love anthology from around 1967, 1968, and he was a member of the international socialists, and he had a Stalinesque moustache – they became the nucleus of the Arts Lab.

They met on Tuesday nights at the Becket and Sargeant Youth Centre. They and a few other people were doing gigs around town. The first I heard of them was through Ian Fleming, who was younger than me but hipper. He was in my year at school. He collaborated with me on the first issues of Embryo, and he mentioned that he knew these people who’d formed an Arts Lab and we should go along and join. I admit I was suspicious at first, because I didn’t want this magazine we’d just got off the ground to be absorbed by this larger body. But I went along, and I got on with everybody, and we became members. And yes, I really loved going down there on Tuesday nights. I wasn’t enjoying my school work, didn’t see any future in it. I did see a future in the Arts Lab, a completely hallucinated future with little practical application.

Arts Labs thinking has been an underlying factor in a lot of my subsequent work. It is how I do tend to organise projects: let’s have fun, let’s experiment. We always tried to be practically-minded at the Arts Lab, although we very often failed miserably, albeit enjoyably. I can remember me and Brian Ratcliffe had the use of an overhead projector, and we thought ‘can we do some sort of performance around this?’ And we came up with the idea of doing a live comic strip, where we would project up speech bubbles and an array of characters stood in the right positions on stage acting out this drama. It certainly wasn’t a total success (laughs). It was an interesting fusion of two forms, neither of which I fully understood. It was a lot of fun, some of the gigs were really tremendous.

I remember Ian Fleming writing a poem called ‘Message to the Winter Trees’ that went, in its entirety: “Message to the winter trees: cover yourself up”. And he wrote this on an end roll of newsprint which had been liberated from the [local newspaper] Chronicle/Echo and the audience unravelled this fifty foot long poem. It was immense fun. We kept coming up with more complex ideas going into the performances and into the magazine.

So would this be individual members performing just to the rest of the group?

What would generally happen was that we would have a gentlemen called Paul Green, and he didn’t have any artistic talent, but he was brilliant with that crew of people, he was a great organiser, he would sort out the venues, he would sweet talk the management, he would get them as cheaply as possible, he would do all the practical work. We’d ask ‘shall we do a poetry reading, shall we do some kind of event?’ Paul would book it, and once we had a date, we’d all start to work towards it – maybe we could do this, maybe we could do that.

We never had a shortage of poets (laughs), and as a way of relieving the monotony of the evening, we invited [local musician] Tom Hall. Tom took me under his wing. I later found out that his mother and my father had been dance partners back in the fifties. My mother didn’t like to dance, Tom’s father didn’t like to dance, so they’d sit down and chat and my dad, Ern, and Tom’s mother, Kitty, would take a turn around the floor. Tom came along and would listen to all our poems, and he’d play something impromptu and we’d perform it with that, and it would be beautiful. We had a splendid evening.

Later, there was a rather caustic member of a northern Arts Lab who’d relocated to Northampton, and he was abrasive about how we did things, the Arts Lab and Northampton in general, and he took a dislike to Tom Hall. And he was saying ‘let’s not have Tom Hall there, he just lives off benefits and turns everything into the Tom Hall Show’. I remember Nick Bunting angrier than I’d ever seen him, saying in a very cold and deadly voice: ‘Tom Hall does not accept a penny of benefits. If Tom Hall can’t live by his music he can’t live’. Which was the first time I’d actually heard that spelled out. I remember thinking that was awesome. That that’s what I wanted to be: somebody who could be completely themselves, who did not have a master or boss and who subsisted entirely upon the fruits of their own creativity. Tom was a real formative idol.

Those were great days. When it was over, it was over, and we could all feel the vitality had gone out of it. The end of the sixties. There wasn’t going to be a revival of that spirit. Some of the people who joined later perhaps didn’t really fit, but they couldn’t be excluded under the general ethical code of those times.

If we’d have seen you back then, would we have imagined you’d go on to bigger and better things?

I have heard some people from back then saying ‘oh, it was obvious. You knew just what you wanted to do, that you’d be something like you are now’. I’m not sure I believe that. It may be obvious in retrospect. It wasn’t obvious to me back then. I felt that I would feel most comfortable working in the arts, supporting myself. Whether I would be able to do that, I really didn’t know.

If you’d have seen me back then, you might have thought I was good at reading poems, I could engage an audience, I was a decent performer. I’m not saying the poems themselves were any good, but I was increasingly aware of what an audience responded to.

The pinnacle of that way of thinking was 1974, 1975, when I wrote Old Gangsters Never Die as a recitation piece. The language in that, and the rhythms, that was the pinnacle of my style of writing at that time and I’d written it to perform. I realised it had great emotional effect, it had a got a lot of punch, especially with a little bit of music in the background. I also realised it didn’t mean anything. Other than evoking this very rich material about gangsters. It didn’t say anything. I started to think the best thing to do would be write stuff with the same command of language this stuff has, but if it means something as well, I might be getting somewhere. It was a gradual process mastering that.

One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do a very good job of it. The original discussion is in the middle of a post so controversial that it probably can’t be linked in polite company – somewhat dampening its ability to popularize anything.

In order to rectify the error, here is a nice clean post on the concept that adds a couple of further thoughts to the original formulation.

The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.

Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a great big nuclear furnace. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.

The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.

Some classic examples:

1. The religious group that acts for all the world like God is a supernatural creator who builds universes, creates people out of other people’s ribs, parts seas, and heals the sick when asked very nicely (bailey). Then when atheists come around and say maybe there’s no God, the religious group objects “But God is just another name for the beauty and order in the Universe! You’re not denying that there’s beauty and order in the Universe, are you?” (motte). Then when the atheists go away they get back to making people out of other people’s ribs and stuff.

2. Or…”If you don’t accept Jesus, you will burn in Hell forever.” (bailey) But isn’t that horrible and inhuman? “Well, Hell is just another word for being without God, and if you choose to be without God, God will be nice and let you make that choice.” (motte) Oh, well that doesn’t sound so bad, I’m going to keep rejecting Jesus. “But if you reject Jesus, you will BURN in HELL FOREVER and your body will be GNAWED BY WORMS.” But didn’t you just… “Metaphorical worms of godlessness!”

3. The feminists who constantly argue about whether you can be a real feminist or not without believing in X, Y and Z and wanting to empower women in some very specific way, and who demand everybody support controversial policies like affirmative action or affirmative consent laws (bailey). Then when someone says they don’t really like feminism very much, they object “But feminism is just the belief that women are people!” (motte) Then once the person hastily retreats and promises he definitely didn’t mean women aren’t people, the feminists get back to demanding everyone support affirmative action because feminism, or arguing about whether you can be a feminist and wear lipstick.

4. Proponents of pseudoscience sometimes argue that their particular form of quackery will cure cancer or take away your pains or heal your crippling injuries (bailey). When confronted with evidence that it doesn’t work, they might argue that people need hope, and even a placebo solution will often relieve stress and help people feel cared for (motte). In fact, some have argued that quackery may be better than real medicine for certain untreatable diseases, because neither real nor fake medicine will help, but fake medicine tends to be more calming and has fewer side effects. But then once you leave the quacks in peace, they will go back to telling less knowledgeable patients that their treatments will cure cancer.

5. Critics of the rationalist community note that it pushes controversial complicated things like Bayesian statistics and utilitarianism (bailey) under the name “rationality”, but when asked to justify itself defines rationality as “whatever helps you achieve your goals”, which is so vague as to be universally unobjectionable (motte). Then once you have admitted that more rationality is always a good thing, they suggest you’ve admitted everyone needs to learn more Bayesian statistics.

6. Likewise, singularitarians who predict with certainty that there will be a singularity, because “singularity” just means “a time when technology is so different that it is impossible to imagine” – and really, who would deny that technology will probably get really weird (motte)? But then every other time they use “singularity”, they use it to refer to a very specific scenario of intelligence explosion, which is far less certain and needs a lot more evidence before you can predict it (bailey).

The motte and bailey doctrine sounds kind of stupid and hard-to-fall-for when you put it like that, but all fallacies sound that way when you’re thinking about them. More important, it draws its strength from people’s usual failure to debate specific propositions rather than vague clouds of ideas. If I’m debating “does quackery cure cancer?”, it might be easy to view that as a general case of the problem of “is quackery okay?” or “should quackery be illegal?”, and from there it’s easy to bring up the motte objection.

Recently, a friend (I think it was Robby Bensinger) pointed out something I’d totally missed. The motte-and-bailey doctrine is a perfect mirror image of my other favorite fallacy, the weak man fallacy.

Weak-manning is a lot like straw-manning, except that instead of debating a fake, implausibly stupid opponent, you’re debating a real, unrepresentatively stupid opponent. For example, “Religious people say that you should kill all gays. But this is evil. Therefore, religion is wrong and barbaric. Therefore we should all be atheists.” There are certainly religious people who think that you should kill all gays, but they’re a small fraction of all religious people and probably not the ones an unbiased observer would hold up as the best that religion has to offer.

If you’re debating the Pope or something, then when you weak-man, you’re unfairly replacing a strong position (the Pope’s) with a weak position (that of the guy who wants to kill gays) to make it more attackable.

But in motte and bailey, you’re unfairly replacing a weak position (there is a supernatural creator who can make people out of ribs) with a strong position (there is order and beauty in the universe) in order to make it more defensible.

So weak-manning is replacing a strong position with a weak position to better attack it; motte-and-bailey is replacing a weak position with a strong position to better defend it.

This means people who know both terms are at constant risk of arguments of the form “You’re weak-manning me!” “No, you’re motte-and-baileying me!“.

Suppose we’re debating feminism, and I defend it by saying it really is important that women are people, and you attack it by saying that it’s not true that all men are terrible. Then I can accuse you of making life easy for yourself by attacking the weakest statement anyone vaguely associated with feminism has ever pushed. And you can accuse me if making life too easy for myself by defending the most uncontroversially obvious statement I can get away with.

So what is the real feminism we should be debating? Why would you even ask that question? What is this, some kind of dumb high school debate club? Who the heck thinks it would be a good idea to say “Here’s a vague poorly-defined concept that mind-kills everyone who touches it – quick, should you associate it with positive affect or negative affect?!”

Taboo your words, then replace the symbol with the substance. If you have an actual thing you’re trying to debate, then it should be obvious when somebody’s changing the topic. If working out who’s using motte-and-bailey (or weak man) is remotely difficult, it means your discussion went wrong several steps earlier and you probably have no idea what you’re even arguing about.

PS: Nicholas Shackel, original inventor of the term, weighs in.

The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer was, in hindsight, a train wreck in waiting. It's easy to imagine another universe where the UPN's - and later the CW's - signature series never made it past its first season. It's hard to see with sixteen year's hindsight, but the first season of Pfeffer was rough - needlessly crass, irreverent, skating very close to sheer offensiveness based solely on its premise. If it hadn't been for surprisingly strong ratings to buoy what was initially a universally panned show, the program may never have survived to a second season.

Even though the network renewed the series, there were still some reservations on the part of the network brass. Series creators Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan were notoriously problematic, butting heads with the fledgling network's Standards & Practices department many times during the show's first year. The UPN wanted the show, only without the headache of Fanaro & Nathan. The creators were demoted to the permanent rank of Executive Producers, but essentially cut out of the loops regarding all future decisions regarding the show. (Fanaro & Nathan have consistently declined to speak on Pfeiffer since they left the series.)

Enter David Simon. A former journalist who had written the acclaimed book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets as well as having produced the book's television adaptation on NBC, the writer found himself in a unique position following the end of Homicide's seven-year run. "I was the most well-loved failure in town," he related to Charlie Rose in a 2009 interview. "I had produced what many considered to be one of the best shows, ever, and six weeks after production wrapped I couldn't get Dominos to take my calls. I'd go to parties where people would line up to shake my hand and tell me how great the show was. I think everyone who watched the show wound up shaking my hand at some point. That respect - sincere respect, don't get me wrong - got me a few meetings, but when people figured out that I was only going to pitch shows in the same vein as Homicide, the offers dried up. Nobody wanted to invest in making another depressing cult show no advertiser would touch."

"I even had a meeting with HBO," Simon explains. "This was after they did OZ - remember OZ? - and they were looking to do more in the way of scripted dramas. At they time they had bought a script off a friend of mine named David Chase - he had this mob drama script called "The Sopranos" that they kept in development hell for a few years. He said they were good people, though, so I went and talked to them. They were nice but they were riding high off Sex in the City and it was obvious they wanted more like that. We parted ways, amicably."

Chase's "The Sopranos" would eventually be freed from HBO and go on to be produced by ABC, where it lasted three years as Jersey Boy, starring Michael Chiklis. But Simon's career changed forever right after his fateful meeting with HBO, at the moment he had almost given up hope. "I had a script treatment for this book I wrote in the late 90s called The Corner - it was going to be a miniseries about crack dealers and addicts in Baltimore. It was the kind of thing that executives get excited about reading, because it's good and they all want Emmys, before they start asking questions like, ' do you think we could get a Wayans brother to play this guy? How are gonna change this to get a happy ending?' I told my manager to stop showing it to people, I was going to give up. I didn't want to go to work on Sex in the City. I knew I could write another book, so I was going to do that. But not a week after I told my guy to stop selling that script, he called me up and told me there was an offer I needed to hear."

Initially wary of any further meeting, particularly at the UPN - a new network with a less than stellar reputation - Simon agreed only to humor his manager. "I thought it'd be another one of those where I listen to people telling me how great Homicide was before they tell me they want me to do something completely different. But it wasn't like that at all. They spent about 30 seconds blowing smoke up my ass, but then they came out and made me the offer."

The offer was simple: with Desmond Pfeiffer the UPN had a semi-popular show with a terrible critical reputation that had just lost its creators. The first season was not a creative success. The ratings were good but not great, and the feeling was that they had nothing to lose. They offered to give the show to Simon wholesale - make him producer and show-runner, with no restrictions. "The feeling at the network at the time," says TV historian Kathleen Olmstead, "was that they had nothing to lose. The controversy had kept the show on the air for the first year, but the prospects of a second year on the same material were not promising. They saw Simon as a man with a critic-proof pedigree who was also at the end of his rope in television. It could have backfired, it could have imploded. But it didn't."

In a 2006 interview with Vanity Fair, Simon recalled the night after he first met the executives at UPN. "On first - hell, second and third blush, it was a stupid idea. It was a suicide mission. It was a terrible idea for a show, and I had never done anything even remotely funny in my career. I told my manager I wanted to turn them down that night, but he asked me to sleep on it. I went back to my hotel room and switched on the TV. It was spring of '99, so everyone was still talking about the damn impeachment. There was something on PBS, a Frontline documentary about it. I wasn't paying any attention at first, just sitting in bed and daydreaming. But after a minute I realized I was looking at the TV, really looking at the drama being replayed from the senate floor, all those senators and congressmen and (Chief Justice) Renquist looking like a Gilbert & Sullivan character. Pure political theater, completely content free, but dressed up to look as if it were the revelation of some great new chapter in American democracy. And then I remembered, really out of the blue - Andrew Johnson had been impeached, too. Right after the Civil War, right after Lincoln's assassination."

Before he knew it, he had pulled out a stack of videotapes from his meeting with the UPN executives earlier that day. "The jokes were bad, but the actors were pretty good. Chi McBride especially, seemed above the material. But it all clicked for me with Dann Florek." Florek, a television veteran with experience on L.A. Law and Law & Order, gave the role of Lincoln a unique gravitas that belied the dirty jokes and cheap innuendo he was forced to sell. "I knew from just a handful of episodes that I could jettison just about everything else on the show, as long as I kept McBride and Florek," Simon continued. "I called the network back first thing in the morning and said yes, I'd take the job."

True to their word, the UPN did not interfere with Simon as he tore the program down to its roots and rebuilt almost from scratch. The only thing left were the sets and the actors. He fired the entire writing staff, replacing them with Homicide veterans and old hands from shows like Taxi and M*A*S*H, writers who had produced the last good sitcoms Simon had enjoyed. "He got a lot of people who hadn't worked in TV for a while," remembers Vince Gilligan, a former producer and writer for The X-FIles and later one of Simon's assistant producers. "We didn't have a lot of money, but he managed to get a lot of people who wanted to do something more interesting than Friends." In addition, the kept a revolving door of historians and consultants on the show, to guarantee historical accuracy.

When The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer premiered its second season in Fall of 1999, the show instantly became a critical darling. Ratings were stable. Although the show was in no danger of becoming a runaway hit, its respectable showing had vindicated the UPN's gamble. At the following year's Emmy awards, at which the show was nominated for six awards and came home with two (one for Florek's performance as Lincoln, another - the first of many - for Simon as writer), Pfeiffer had been heavily favored to win best comedy. They lost to Will & Grace, but most critics derided the choice. It would not be the show's last trip to the Emmys.

The first two years of Simon's Pfeiffer are now considered some of the most important television of the era. In a period, post-Seinfeld, when most had given up on the sitcom as a viable creative format, Simon had succeeded in making the most unseemly of vessels into a vehicle for creative renewal. The final product had little in common with Friends or Everybody Loves Raymond: Simon's hybrid show more resembled a 30-minute Playhouse 90, with dashes of Norman Lear's All in the Family. It was smart, literate, hyper-verbal, but could still be devastatingly funny.

Simon remembered a visit to the writers room by Lear in the Winter of 2001. "He came down to visit, because he said he was a big fan. Well, obviously, it was a big day. He sat in the corner and watched us bat around some ideas - I think we were trying to write some material about Sherman's March. We were getting to the end of the war by then. He got up and left after about forty minutes, without saying anything at all. I excused myself and ran down the hall after him. I asked him, 'what's the matter? What are we doing wrong?' and he replied, 'Not a thing. I needed to get out of their before I joined in and started giving you free ideas.'"

Ratings were still healthy, but after two years Simon's run they had begun to erode. The show returned to the 2001 Emmys and won the Best Series trophy they had been denied the year before. Florek again won in the Best Actor category, a bittersweet accomplishment since he had two years' running beaten out his costar McBride for the same award.

Given the acclaim, UPN seemed to be in no danger of canceling the show. Nevertheless, industry watchers were surprised when Pfieffer was absent from its Fall 2001 schedule. Although the series remained in production, it had been pushed forward to Winter in favor of game shows. "That was rough," Simon recalls. "There were a couple years where all the networks gutted their scripted programming in favor of game shows and reality shows. Faddish crap. We had a few more months off, is all, because they wanted some Who Wants to be a Millionaire? clone in the slot for Fall sweeps."

Production for Season 4 of Desmond Pfeiffer had only just begun in early September, 2001. The actors had returned for read-throughs and a pile of scripts remained in various stages of development. The 2001-2002 season posed a significant challenge to the creators, even before the events of 9/11. "The show had been dancing around history from the first episode," Olmstead relates." Everyone knew there was only so long the Civil War could continue. It had a conclusion and everyone knew what that conclusion was. The second half of the 2000-2001 season had focused on Lincoln's second election, ending with his inauguration and segueing into where they were supposed to be at the beginning of Season 4 - the last days of the war. The plan - which had been solidified in meetings with executives the preceding spring - was that Lincoln would die during spring sweeps. All the episodes written for Season 4 were building to that. I've read Simon's draft of the original death episode, and I believe they've been circulating online for a while. It was very good, even in outline."

But that script would never see production. Simon woke on the morning of September 11th to the news that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been demolished by acts of terror. "The phone was ringing. I didn't want to answer it, it was still really early. I didn't have to be in work until later. But my family was still on the East Coast so they were awake before me . . . finally I answered the phone and they just said, 'David, turn on the damn TV.'"

Like everyone else, Simon spent the day of 9/11 glued to his TV. Work was canceled. Every channel overrode regular scheduled programming in favor of around-the-clock news coverage. But after eight hours of watching the horrible images repeated on an endless loop, Simon turned the TV off and went to work. Three days later he appeared at the empty set. The only other staff were a handful of PAs and technical crew hovering around the TV. He went into his office and started making calls.

"No one was working that week," McBride remembers. "We were scared to leave the house, that's what it was like then. You couldn't get on a plane. Everything was up in the air. So I get a call from David on Friday morning, I'm expecting him to tell me we're postponing the start of filming for at least a little bit. But he says, "no, Chi, you need to come in today. Now. We have to get to work."

"I remember distinctly, we all got there around two or three. None of us were expecting to come into work that day. We had gathered on the main stage, and we were sitting there shuffling our feet and laughing nervously when David came tearing in from his office. He and his assistant were both carrying giant bankers' boxes filled with scripts. He passed them out without saying a word but he didn't need to, we opened the first page and saw exactly what it was. None of slept much for about a week, until it was done."

The scripts, for Simon's hastily written two-parter, completely changed the plan for Season 4. Instead of building slowly to Lincoln's assassination, Simon's new plan began, literally, with the fatal shot. It's one of the most famous opening sequences in television: twenty seconds of darkness and silence, followed a loud gunshot and screams. Then a tiny light slowly becoming larger, a small figure carrying an oil lamp down a darkened hallway. A tap on a door. Rustling of bedclothes. McBride's Pfeiffer peers out of his dark room to see the lady's maid, crying and shaking in the hallway. She utters just three muffled words before the show cuts to the opening credits - "He's been shot!"

The two-parter "Our American Cousin" / "Oh, Captain," broadcast two weeks to the day after the attacks, was immediately hailed as one of the most significant television programs in history. UPN had been ignorant of Simon's intentions practically until the day he delivered the finished episodes to the network. "It was a complete surprise when he walked in with those shows," remembers an executive who was present when Simon presented the episodes. "Everyone was still in the doldrums, we were all still panicked and running news and repeats. He walks in the room, puts the tape down, and just says, 'we're running this.' We didn't even know he had been working. I called everyone down the hall, put the tape in the machine, and I swear no one in that room, a room full of TV executives and advertisers and secretaries and interns, no one said a word for 45 damn minutes. But when the show was over we were all crying."

The Season 4 premiere of The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer became the highest rated scripted program for the 2001-2002 season. Although the audience was small the first night, due to the lack of advertising, it was already being hailed in the papers on the morning of September 26th as an instant classic. A rebroadcast later in the week octupled the original's ratings.

Pfeiffer had made the jump from being a critics' darling to becoming a touchstone for American media. Teachers started showing the episodes in history classes across the nation, in reference to both the Lincoln Assassination and the September 11th attacks. Simon's stroke of genius - using our great-great-great-grandfather's national trauma as a means of better understanding our own contemporary trauma - earned him another Emmy, as well as a personal compliment from none other than the President of the United States. His relationship with George W. Bush would not, however, remain so cordial.

The one person seemingly left behind by the making of "Our American Cousin" / "Oh, Captain" was Lincoln himself, Dann Florek. Although he had known all along that his work as Lincoln had a set expiration date, he had expected a full season to prepare for his death scene. Although he was disappointed by the contents of the episode - beginning, as it does, moments after the President is shot - he made one more appearance, in the final minutes of "Oh, Captain," appearing before Pfeiffer's as a ghost to reassure his long-suffering friend. Florek's last words as Lincoln, before fading away forever, quickly entered the lexicon alongside some of TV's greatest quotes:

Although we suffer now, we do so with the understanding that suffering and patience are the great materials by which we construct our character, both as a nation and as a people. It is easy to strike in vengeance, but it is difficult to do so without destroying yourself. A sacrifice made in the name of perpetual strife is a sacrifice made in vain. It is most difficult to show mercy in triumph, but you must. You simply must.

The show retained its place atop the ratings for many years. As the contemporary news continued to report catastrophe and paranoia, in the midst of rising calls for wars, Pfeiffer set about to tell the tragic story of Reconstruction with a candor and violence that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. Just as the second President Bush led the United States into ill-fated foreign wars, Pfeiffer methodically showed the failure of Reconstruction to effect permanent change in a war-torn region.

Simon had never made a secret of his antipathy towards the president, but Season 7 became the moment of the show's fiercest critique. Although Simon had initially imagined the Johnson impeachment as a corollary to the absurd Clinton impeachment, circumstances had changed significantly by 2005. According to Hendrik Hertzberg, writing for The New Yorker, "The impeachment of Andrew Johnson has become, for David Simon, a dry run for the hypothetical impeachment of George W. Bush. In Johnson's betrayal of Lincoln's spirit of emancipation, Simon see's Bush's failure to use the 9/11 tragedy as anything more than a malicious, partisan power grab. All the anger, all the righteous indignation over the Iraq and Afghan wars, came out in the unlikely vehicle of a half-hour television sitcom. Although, it must be noted, Pfeiffer long ago gave up any pretense of being a comedy." Under Simon's pen, both Bush and Johnson were callow pretenders, promoted by accident of history to the most important job at the worst possible moment, figureheads completely unprepared - or unwilling - to exert themselves positively in a moment of unparalleled crisis.

Although Pfeiffer had remained strong in the ratings since 2001, the show's increasing politicization in the final years of the Bush administration began to erode its audience. After Johnson's impeachment, McBride's Pfeiffer left Washington altogether, resigning from his hard-won appointment in the gutted Freedman's Bureau in favor of an low-level appointment in the Department of the Interior. With the events of the Grant administration set in the background (although not altogether ignored), the next few seasons of Pfeiffer stepped back from politics and focused on post-Civil War industrialization across the country, particularly the systemic corruption at the heart of the newly-constructed intercontinental railroad line. A much-heralded storyline in Season 9 focused on the connections between the abuse of Chinese immigrant railroad workers and the corrupt regulatory environment that encouraged their exploitation, with a focus on the mechanics of the late nineteenth century opium trade, returning Simon to the subject matter of his aborted script for The Corner. Although critics continued to laud the show for its consistency, ratings continued to drop as the subject matter became increasingly esoteric.

In 2009, ten years after receiving the offer to take charge of the sitcom, Simon stepped down. In his place, the CW (the network formed in the mid 2000s from the combination of the UPN and WB networks) appointed Matthew Weiner. Weiner had worked with David Chase on Jersey Boy before coming joining the Pfeiffer crew as head writer under Simon in 2007. All eyes were on Weiner to fail in Simon's wake: given the cultural prominence of Simon's Pfeiffer, Weiner faced universal skepticism.

"I didn't want the job," Weiner told The Atlantic in 2013. "It was a poisoned chalice. David Simon may not have created The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, but in any every way that mattered it was his baby. He had turned it into something special. I didn't think anyone should take it over. Simon came to my office - that was interesting in itself, I usually went to him - he came into my office and told me that he and the network had agreed his time on the show was done. The first thing I asked him was if he had any ideas for a final episode. He shook his head and said, no, they want it to continue."

"I laughed and told him I was quitting, and that I didn't think anyone else would stick around either if they were throwing him under the bus like that. But then he said, no, Matt, no. They want you to do it, and I want you to do it too."

With Simon's advice still ringing in his ears - "make it your own" - he planned a radical departure. The years since Pfeiffer had left Washington had been creatively fertile, but the lack of geographic focus has perhaps alienated an audience accustomed to a stable supporting cast and consistent setting. At the beginning of Season 12, Pfeiffer retired from government work to life in New York City in the mid-1870s, during the Grant administration and the waning days of Reconstruction. After years in government service, Pfeiffer had managed to amass a significant amount of money, so he settled into a semi-retirement as a businessman and real estate speculator.

"One of the great shames of Reconstruction," Weiner said, "and this isn't just in the South but across the country, is that during that period there really was a fair amount of success in the black community as a result of some of Lincoln's policies, many of which were eventually reversed by Johnson, before evaporating entirely. So we had a small black middle-class coming into its own for the first time. Pfeiffer was a man of the world, a British national who had served the US government for almost fifteen years. So wouldn't it be interesting to see what happened to someone like Pfeiffer in this environment, in a place - late nineteenth century New York - where there was a lot of money to be made?"

Weiner's Pfeiffer became a sumptuous period piece, a close look at a small group of what would eventually become Manhattan's richest families in the years just before the height of the Gilded Age. Set down in this milieu was Pfeiffer, consistently underrated because of the color of his skin but nevertheless managing to become a rich man in his own right through judicious investments. Weiner's soft relaunch was well-timed: the next year would see the arrival of the massively successful British import, Downton Abbey, an arrival that catalyzed a new fascination with fin de siecle period drama for American audiences. The CW had again gambled wisely: Weiner's shift from the overtly political tone of Simon's run was a perfect fit for an audience who returned to Pfeiffer looking for a period drama that critics hailed as a perfect mating of Edith Wharton and Charles Chesnutt.

If Simon's later years had focused almost exclusively on Pfeiffer's character as he traveled across the country, Weiner's era introduced a new large ensemble cast. The primary action of the thirteenth and fourteenth seasons was the conflict between Pfeiffer's American cousin Terrence (played by another Jersey Boy alumnus Michael K. Williams) and the enigmatic Don DuRapier, played by Jesse Williams. "I think audiences respond to Don's character because we all relate to mysteries," Simon asserts. "We introduced this man, extraordinarily competent and suave, with a complete blank slate for a past. People like him, they want to find out more about him. Set him off against Terrance, who at first the audience hates, because of what he does to Desmond's daughter - that's the conflict. Pfeiffer's inability to keep these two powerful, willful people from colliding is the tragedy of his later life." Pfeiffer was once again a hit. The climax of the Terrence / Don war, "Indian Summer," saw the series' highest ratings since 2001. The revelation that Don DuRapier was not in reality a white businessman from Pennsylvania but an African-American former slave from Maryland who had stole a white man's identity during the Civil War and had successfully "passed" in business and society circles since 1865 won the show another Best Series Emmy, its first in six years. "We have a responsibility to history," Weiner said during his acceptance speech at that year's ceremony, "Desmond Pfeiffer is one of the great American stories because it has never been afraid to show us ourselves at our best and at our worse."



But the show couldn't continue forever. After dodging death multiple times, the CW announced last Spring that Chi McBride had opted not to renew his contract, and that the following season - the show's seventeenth - would be its last. In an interview from earlier this year, Weiner stated, "when Chi told us he wanted to move on - I don't think there was any doubt as to whether or not to continue. This is his show, as much as it was ever David's. Desmond Pfeiffer has been America's conscience for sixteen years now - longer than anyone ever could have guessed. The idea of killing Desmond and continuing with Terrence in his place, or one of the sons - it never even crossed our mind."

But even as the show prepares to take its final bow, the country won't be done with Pfeiffer anytime soon. "When Barack Obama said in 2008 that his favorite TV show was The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, it came as a surprise to no one," Olmstead says. "Even given the controversy of the second half of Simon's run, it was still part of the national conversation. Funny thing is, after spending eight years excoriating the Bush administration, people thought that the post-Obama Pfeiffer might be kinder and gentler towards the powers that be. Well, we know that didn't happen, and the funny thing is that whereas during Bush's administration Simon's attacks were seen as largely partisan, by the time he started using Grant's disastrous presidency as a means to criticize what was already becoming an ill-fated, morally corrupt administration in the here and now, people from both sides of the aisle paid attention. Obama regretted having said that in 2008 because he had to eat his words during Simon's last year on the show."

Speaking to the show's impending end, Weiner is characteristically mum. "I have an idea for how it's going to end. I've discussed it with David, actually. He likes it. It might not be the ending people are expecting, but after seventeen years we are bound to disappoint someone."

The Flash is my favourite superhero. He has a simple but amazing power, he’s a scientist and he’s an uncomplicated hero; what’s not to love? So I was quite looking forward to the new TV series, and the extended trailer they released over the summer whet my appetite. Now though, a few episodes in, I’m about ready to call it quits.

It’s worth pointing out that they’ve done a lot right with the series; the special effects are fantastic given the demands of television. Grant Gustin is just right for the role (it’s interesting comparing his frame with John Wesley Shipp’s in the 1990 TV series; it never made sense for Barry Allen to be as bulked up as Wesley Shipp was back then). And I applaud their decision to go for a multi-racial cast. But there are three main quibbles I have with it [SPOILER WARNING FROM THIS POINT ON].

The first is to include the backstory that Geoff Johns created for The Flash: Rebirth, in which it turns out that The Flash’s prime motivation has always been clearing his father for murdering his mother. I’m not a fan of this subplot because it is a classic fridging; murdering a female character to give the male hero a tragic backstory and motivation. The Flash never needed such a dark origin – it doesn’t add anything to his motivation. All it did in that series, and all it does here, is create some foreshadowing for some loopy time travel plotlines. In this particular case, it makes the series relatively unsurprising as we sit there awaiting for the Reverse Flash to appear (which may be Detective Eddie Thawn – who has the right name but that could be misdirection – or may be the suspicious and seemingly duplicitous Dr Harrison Wells). Indeed, many of the most boring aspects of the series are when it cosplays the comic strip. So it is that we’ve just seen Captain Cold begin to recruit the Rogue’s Gallery.

Secondly, all the villains thus far have been psycho killers – including the Rogues who have already appeared. One of the features of the comic is that The Flash’s main foes aren’t actually that villainous. The Rogues themselves have a strict code; they don’t kill. In the latest episode, Captain Cold has been offing people left, right and centre. Like all the other villain’s who have thus far appeared, he’s a grim, humourless monster. They’re all uniformly boring and lack characters.

Tonally, it seems almost dated when compared to Marvel’s cinematic output these days. Like the Man of Steel in 2013, they’ve made the costume dark and avoided naming the main character in the show itself. As I’ve already mentioned, the character himself is driven to get justice for his mother’s murder. And yet it balances this with a main character who simply isn’t dark, who spends half of each episode drinking cappuccinos with the main love interest. Is this The Dark Knight or Moonlighting? It can’t seem to decide, to it’s detriment.

Thirdly, they’ve pretty much ripped off the Smallville copy book. In Smallville, Superman’s arrival on Earth coincides with a meteor storm which goes on to pretty much explain every unusual event that happens for at least the first four seasons (I lost interest after that). At first, it was quite a nice idea, offering a neat explanation for all the weirdness that took place in such a small town. It got old, however, very fast. Ultimately, it was to the detriment of the show because it made everything too small scale for what was meant to be the origin of the most powerful superhero around. The show struggled to outgrow its origins ever since.

In the original Flash comic, Barry Allen gains his powers when he’s hit by a bolt of lightning while working in his police lab one night. The TV series keeps that basic idea, but adds the fact that the lightning storm was formed as a result of a malfunctioning particle accelerator. What’s more, just as Smallville’s villains were all people mutated by “meteor rocks” (kryptonite), in The Flash, almost all of the superpowered villains who have appeared thus far were similarly affected by the particle accelerator accident.

Of course, this is an even more restrictive premise than the meteor storm as it depends on everyone being affected in the same evening. Again, it makes the world of The Flash small by having pretty much everything revolve around his own origin. Even Captain Cold, who for once wasn’t given the particle accelerator origin, only acquires his cold gun because it was created as a potential weapon to stop The Flash. I dread to think how they plan to bring in Captain Boomerang, if everything has to have such a localised origin.

But the Smallville comparisons don’t stop there. Iris West, his love interest, has been made into a Lana Lang stand it, and is now a girl that he grew up with who considers him a friend but doesn’t know his secret. He father, Detective Joe West, is his foster father who performs functionally the same role as Jonathan Kent. The format, like early Smallville, is ruthlessly freak-of-the-week. They clearly found their formula and decided to squeeze The Flash into it.

Overall, what we have is a series which is overwhelmingly formulaic, which has imposed DC’s penchant for darkness onto a frankly very undark character, and offers us nothing new or interesting. Of course, most TV series start off fairly shakily and following an established formula before they find their feet. But this one, I fear, lacks any spark to suggest that it might ultimately become greater than the sum of it’s parts. Which is a shame.

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This week, I’ll be posting an interview I did with Alan Moore. This is one of the very last things I did when writing my biography of Moore, Magic Words.

I interviewed Alan Moore twice via telephone, on July 9th and July 24th 2013. He had read the manuscript of my book, and he wanted to work through the book and offer a number of clarifications and corrections in the first call, then we had a more conventional interview in the second session. Each call lasted a little under two hours.

A lot of the first interview involved matters of detail – the name of the caravan site where the Moore family stayed when he was a child, that kind of thing. There were places in the manuscript where I wasn’t sure about something and I’d said things like ‘perhaps Moore hoped’ or ‘Moore probably thought’, and Moore was able to clarify many of those.

This is an edited transcript that splices the two interviews together by subject matter. I’ve omitted a lot of the nitpicky stuff from the first interview. Some of the material that doesn’t appear here is in the biography itself, either because it’s suitably juicy or (more often) because without the context of the book it would mean very little.

I’d read a lot of interviews with Moore as I was researching and writing my book. As with the other people I interviewed, I was keen not to ask things he’d already been asked a hundred times. I was also keen to get names and dates, and to dig into some of the details. As a result of that, some of the following is a little wonkish, but I think it covers some ground that’s not been discussed before. And, obviously, if you want the full and rounded picture, then there’s Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore, available in all good bookshops, and possibly even some lousy ones.

We start with me fumbling incompetently with my Skype Recorder …

-ot sure it’s recording … er … yes, OK. On. Recording.

[Moore:] Shall we steam into my long list of complaints? OK, the first thing is David Lloyd’s view of anarchy. [when I’d interviewed him for the book, David Lloyd – co-creator of V for Vendetta – had expressed some scepticism about the practicalities of anarchism] Fair enough: his views aren’t mine, but there is a point I felt compelled to answer. He said ‘when was the last time something like anarchy worked?’ That would be the Paris Commune, which worked fine until they sent the troops in. Before that, there were the Spitalfields Huguenots. They had a completely self-contained system that worked fine, which didn’t really sit well with the British government. So they put a crippling tax on lace and ribbon, which were the two Huguenot staples. When the Huguenots went out onto the streets in protest, they sent the troops in.

You’re a distant descendant of those Huguenots, aren’t you?

It turns out that there is a Huguenot that made it into the family, in the seventeenth century. So that may be when they were dispersed from Spitalfields. Anarchy has worked, and worked well on occasions, and on those occasions it’s been ruthlessly suppressed.

The other point [again, he’s quoting Lloyd]: ‘the earliest form of society is tribes, who leads tribes? Somebody.’ This isn’t actually accurate as far as I know. In the New Scientist over the last six months or something, there has been an informative article about the earliest human societies, the Paleolithic and Neolithic, so thousands of years, where the biggest taboo was status, anyone seeking to acquire a larger cut of the pie or higher status than the other members of the tribe – anyone bigging themselves up – would be ridiculed and persistent offenders ostracised. Once status and authority enter a situation, society will become unstable and you’ll get resentments that will destabilise these fairly precarious social groups. This was the prevalent mode for thousands of years.

If it worked so well, why don’t we still have it? There were other forms of culture that were hierarchical, and they were unstable and those who were cast out would join a non-hierarchical group and destablise it. This is the latest theory: anarchy, far from being the unnatural and unworkable state that it is assumed to be, may conceivably be our natural state of being.

As I understand it, when a situation is disastrous, or it’s disastrous in an economic sense, when people have nothing, that is the place where human society starts to cohere and people genuinely start looking out for each other. A terrible cliché, but in the Boroughs, you didn’t have to lock your doors because no one had anything worth stealing, so that removed a lot of social tensions.

[Moore is from the Spring Boroughs area of Northampton, once of the most socially-deprived areas of the UK. The town had traditionally been known for shoemaking, but even by the time Moore was born in 1953, the industry was in decline. For the book, I contacted Jeremy Seabrook, who has a long career writing about the global issues around poverty, but who started with The Unprivileged, a 1967 book about Northampton].

Oh … this is one of the things I thought was one of the best bits: you got in touch with Jeremy Seabrook. I quoted him in Voice of the Fire, he was my first year French teacher. I really like his quote: ‘The shoe people were generally narrow, suspicious, mean, self-reliant, pig-headed, but generally honourable and as good as their word.’ I don’t think I’m narrow or mean financially … but everything else is spot on.

So coming from the background you did, what did your parents make of you, do you think?

I was regarded almost from the outset as unusual, but this was within a family tradition where unusual people were not actually that unusual. There had been previous people in the family line, mostly on my father’s side, who were quirky, talented and, in certain instances, certifiable. Generally my parents seemed to be very impressed that I could draw a picture and string words together, sometimes in rhyme, in a way that they did not feel competent to.

As I started to realise some of these idle teenage ambitions, it was … I don’t think they quite believed it at first. At least to start with they thought it was probably going to end in disappointment and it would prove to be impossible. But they didn’t discourage me, they just looked on anxiously. It started to work out. My father was very impressed when he saw me on television for the first time. That meant a lot. He never read my work, he used to read pulp novels and books about anthropology, but didn’t have any time for airy-fairy fantasy stuff. But he thought it was good if you appeared on television and people said nice things about you.

My mother read a volume of Swamp Thing and she said she enjoyed it, she thought she wouldn’t. My mother listened to the first Moon and Serpent CD and that seemed to really affect her. She was saying ‘ooh, I could have gone’. Gone into the music, something like that, gone into the words. The odd thing was that when I announced I was a magician, it didn’t faze my family at all. My mother really, really liked the picture of Glycon I gave her.

And my devoutly Christian Aunt Hilda, her sister, who had a little shrine of religious items in the corner of her living room, she asked if she could have a copy to put on this shrine, a picture of a snake with long hair and surrounded by all sort of strange magical symbols … I think they recognised that this was something benign. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t want a copy of the Asmodeus picture

in the house, because she recognised that was something that wasn’t benign. But they didn’t have any problems at all with the fact I’d just announced something ridiculous and, to rational examination, impossible – that didn’t seem to bother them at.

My parents and my family accepted me as, in my mum’s phrase, ‘a funny wonder’. That was an all-embracing phrase that included an awful lot of things. It was something that was slightly wonderful, but funny in the peculiar sense. Such people were not unknown in the bloodline. ‘Oh, we get one of these every hundred years or so.’ I always had an odd relationship with my family, because turning out to be someone like me did sometimes bring problems with it. It sometimes changes things. Luckily with my close family I don’t think it has at all.

I don’t see them as much as I used to, largely due to the pressures of my work and my lifestyle. We get together at funerals and weddings. I’ve started to even find funerals quite pleasant experiences. That seems a bit odd, but you get to see a lot of people that you’ve not seen since the last funeral, and you find you’re having a good time seeing everyone again. It connects up the family fabric, in a way which is probably necessary after part of it has suddenly become missing.

One of those problems was you being expelled from school for dealing LSD, and you said last year that the police were involved. Were you charged with anything, or fined?

No, no, no, no. The expulsion was technically groundless. I was searched, but there was absolutely nothing on me and the only thing that they had was the hearsay evidence of a number of my school friends who had named me – we were young then and easily intimidated by the police – and that wasn’t conclusive proof. I was expelled from school, but there were no charges brought. I have a clean record, but I did have a headmaster who tried to prevent me from … my first thoughts were “I don’t want to get a job”, so I applied to Northampton Arts School and had somebody there make me sit through a lecture that in substance was quite like that PJ and Duncan anti-drugs rap before telling me I couldn’t have a place at his school. Ironically, a couple of years ago the same institution offered me an honourary degree. I told them I turn down all that kind of thing on principle, but in this instance, no, I particularly still associate it with being expelled from school. A bad time.

Talking of turning down honours: Grant Morrison has an MBE. Mark Millar has an MBE. A fair few comics’ fans have speculated that, um, if they’re working down a list of prominent comics creators …

Mark Millar has an MBE? Well … I was approached during Gordon Brown’s premiership. I think some people had raised a petition, which I wasn’t involved with of course, that said I should be given some sort of honour for being a national treasure or something, and they had received a message from Gordon Brown’s office saying they were considering giving me an award. Something like that. Immediately after that, I did an interview with Padraig O Méalóid, and he asked me if I’d accept any kind of award, and I’d said of course not, because to accept is to give tacit approval to the government involved, and institutions like the British Empire and monarchy and things like that. So, I told them that I couldn’t take anything like that.

When I heard that Grant Morrison had received an MBE, I could only assume it was the MBE you get for not unleashing a horde of thousands of masked anarchists on the global political stage, which I’ll admit he’s always been better at than I am. But whether you accept an MBE or not is entirely up to you. I told Padraig I hoped no one offered me one, because I didn’t want to ostentatiously turn one down, because that’s pretty tacky. I’m happy how things turned out.

[Part Two will be posted here tomorrow]

(This post is my submission for Autistics Speaking Day. There are loads of great posts on there already, and many more will be added today and over the next few days, so please go and have a look!)

Hello there. Let me introduce myself. I’m a human.

I have a name, although I don’t really use it on here. I’m a student, a blogger, a feminist, a sister, a daughter, a grand-daughter, a friend, an autistic. Not mutually exclusive.

Right now, I’m typing this because I lack the necessary executive function skills to stop what I’m doing and actually get a good night’s sleep. That, or I’m just enthusiastic about this post. In reality, it’s a bit of both. Also, like so many of my fellow humans, I spend far too much of my life procrastinating from studying. I take BuzzFeed quizzes, I tidy up, I play 2048, I make tea, I listen to music, I pace and pace and pace across the floor on my tiptoes because that’s what music does- sorry, does that sound weird? Fair enough, I suppose some people prefer coffee. But at the end of the day, I almost always somehow manage to get that essay written on time, and I tend to last longer with actually going to the lectures than a lot of my friends too; maintaining the routine helps me feel safer.

Outside of that, I play guitar (or rather, I should practice more often!), I go to a few student societies, and I quietly blog, mainly about feminism and autism, under the world’s least imaginative pseudonym. I’m currently catching up with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I also really like Doctor Who. Really like Doctor Who. Nonononono but you don’t understand. Actually, I think you might; there’s no bold obvious line where the “slightly above average level of fandom enthusiasm” ends and the “autistic special interest” begins.

When you first meet me, I am almost definitely quiet. Nervous. Awkward. I’m better at the whole “people” thing some days than others, depending on a million and one other factors. Sometimes I feel like I can take on all the world, sometimes I feel like it’s all going to crash down on top of me, most of the time I’m somewhere in the middle. This doesn’t make me “high-functioning” nor “low-functioning”. I don’t suddenly regress, or am suddenly cured. I have varying emotions, and I have varying energy levels, being a human and all. Having said that, I find online interaction far easier even just amongst people I know in real life. On Facebook, I’m known for my love of and constant use of reaction GIFs, despite sometimes finding real-life, real-time facial expressions impossible to navigate; I don’t have any logical explanation for this, but maybe that’s okay. I mean, most people don’t find themselves having to explain their personality to people like that.

Let’s go back to emotions for a second. There still seems to be some confusion on this re: autistic people for some reason, so just to confirm, I do have them. It’s just that they’re often over- or under-expressed. I cry with laughter far, far more often than I cry with… um, crying, which is a rare occurrence. Unless, of course, I’m having a meltdown. Anger, frustration, lashing out was a real problem when I was younger, but these days I’m better able to nip those situations in the bud before they arise, and rant freely into the void of the internet instead. These days, I think it’s fair to say that my primary emotion is fear. I’m scared of talking to people, family arguments, sudden loud noises, sudden total darkness, crowds, my ex-boyfriend, and yesterday I managed to creep myself out – intentionally, in a sort of fun way – watching YouTube videos of game corruptions. But my biggest fear, for some reason, is probably that pesky heat/suffocation/being-trapped combo that, combined also with an actual over-sensitivity to temperature and humidity, just sort of gets in the way of everything far too much. But I’ve totally missed out on the whole bugs-and-spiders thing so, y’know, swings and roundabouts. Anyway, sometimes I panic and/or get too overloaded with sensory input, so I have a meltdown or, more commonly, a shutdown. If I can get out and get back to my room or somewhere else that’s nice and safe and quiet, these days I can generally handle it myself. What I can’t handle is your judgement.

Yet, despite the perceptions of autism as a tragedy, I find that the good is at the very least equal to the bad. Sound hypersensitivity means that music is even better, for one thing. Special interests are just the best thing, many of which have stemmed from music, although of course there’s Doctor Who too. And I’ve grown to love my neurodivergent body language, even as those around me don’t understand it or, in some cases, want to suppress it because it’s weird and therefore bad or because they think some other group of people won’t like it (and they say autistics don’t have a concept of irony…). My fingers flutter or fly inwards in defence, I tap the walls, the tables, the floor, my toes bounce with my full weight whether I’m pacing in my room or exploring the outside world and I’ve never had to think about high heels, I repeat words and phrases to myself and rehearse and perfect my lines for the conversation I’m about to have, I’m jumpy and twitchy and sorry sorry sorry sorrysorrysorrysorry. Okay, so that last bit’s sort of a pain, but I’ve even found it to be a great conversation starter. It’s a thing I do; it’s a part of me as much as everything else I’ve mentioned. I’m not perfect. I’m human.

I worry about how I’m going to get my work done on time, how I’m going to talk to whoever I need to talk to without drawing a complete blank and not being able to use words, my family and friends back home, what to have for dinner, how on earth I didn’t immediately realise that remark was sarcastic, the weather, the weather, what I’m going to do this weekend, if that guy could even possibly like me back, if I could even possibly risk going to that social event that sounds really fun and exciting but also loud and crowded and scary, whether or not the world and its people can overcome and recover from the effects of kyriarchy, whether or not I can overcome and recover from the effects of that constant, constant, constant feeling I’m being judged for not being neurotypical.

My autism cannot be separated from my humanity; my autism is a part of my humanity. To me, all person-first language does is imply that my autistic traits need to be somehow isolated from the rest of my personality for me to be seen as, well, a person. But they’re not. I am multi-faceted. I can be good, bad, flawed, happy, sad, angry, scared, so so scared, strong, weak, changing, all of the above. Most of the time, my general state of being has been influenced by my being autistic, positively, negatively, sometimes both. So, because I’m often afraid to be visibly neurodivergent in public, I’m often afraid to be multi-faceted around other people too. Of course, then I’m apparently too robot-like and stereotypical and feel bad for that too, but I digress.

I’m autistic. I’m also a person. An autistic person. And if that doesn’t make sense to you, perhaps you need to re-think your idea of what is required to be human.

Tagged: actuallyautistic, Autism, autistics speaking day, language, passing, stimming

Today is November 1st, which means the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, in which newer writers are encouraged to write a novel in the space of the month. To my mind the challenge is not to write a good novel, or even a salable novel, but just a novel — a story of sufficient length to be called a novel (NaNoWriMo uses 50,000 words as a marker, which is actually slightly short for modern novels — 60k is usually the lower bound — but even so). “Good” and “salable” come later. The real advantage to NaNoWriMo, at least in my mind, is to get folks who are intimidated by the length of a novel to realize that it’s not actually an intimidating number of words if you just plug away at it, every day. That’s in fact how writing gets done.

I don’t have a lot of handy information on how to tackle NaNoWriMo — if you’re a new writer and you want some help on that score, Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbelestier have a whole stack of NaNoWriMo advice columns here, which I can heartily recommend — but I do want to offer some encouragement to folks who are wondering if the “just power through a novel in a month” idea is a good, useful or even sane idea. So, lean in, people, and hear my secret:

Lock In? My novel that was released this year? Totally a NaNoWriMo novel.

Which is to say that the vast majority of it — roughly 90% of its 80k length — was written last November. I had written a previous version of the book that did not work at all and had to chuck nearly all of it, create a new main character and substantially revise the storyline to accommodate the new character. And I was looking at a December 1 deadline.

So what did I do? Well, I sat down in front of the keyboard every single day in November and wrote at least 2,500 words. And piled up the pages. And at the end of the month, I had my novel. It was done. And then I sent it in. And then I slept for a week.

I did it that way because at that point I had to, deadline-wise. But the fact of the matter is that it was possible to do it that way because every day I wasn’t writing 80,000 words, I was writing 2,500. That’s ten pages, double-spaced. Totally doable.

And how did it turn out? Well, in my case, pretty well. Lock In’s got some of the best reviews of my career, was a best seller on several lists including the New York Times hardcover list, and it’s been optioned for a television series. Bear in mind I’m a professional novelist and this is what I do and that I wrote ten novels before this, so obviously my personal experience as a writer comes into play here. But none of those things would have been possible if I didn’t first just sit down and write the thing. Writing the novel — getting it done — is the key to anything and everything else that can happen to a novel.

So yes: Writing a novel in a month can happen. And that novel you’ve written in a month can perhaps go on from there. But first, sit down and write it. Put it into words and don’t worry about anything other than getting it down on the page. A couple thousand words a day and you’re on your way. You can revise and shape later, worry about whether it is good and whether you can sell it later. For now, just get it down. It’s not rocket science, it’s just work. And you can do it. I know because I did the same thing, last year.

Good luck.

Some thoughts on Jian Ghomeshi, about whom I feel entitled to opine because I was once a guest on his show — talking about the little fundraising thing I did last year which included RAINN, an interview which now in retrospect is sadly ironic.

(For those of you not up on this, Mr. Ghomeshi was a radio show host in Canada, who was let go by the CBC because of then-mysterious reasons. Mr. Ghomeshi took to Facebook to allege that he was fired because he participated in consensual BDSM play which was now being used against him by vengeful exes, and sued CBC for wrongful termination “breach of confidence and bad faith.” Since then a number of women have come forward to allege totally non-consensual abuse and/or harrassment at the hands of Mr. Ghomeshi.)

So, a numbered list.

1. There’s nothing wrong with consensual BDSM play; if that’s your thing and you can get other people to go along with it in a safe and consenting manner, then you kids have fun with that.

2. Suddenly smacking the hell out of someone and/or choking them without prior discussion or agreement is pretty much the opposite of consensual BDSM play, now, isn’t it. (Note: this is a rhetorical question. The answer is: Yes, it is the opposite.)

3. As a matter of law (to the extent that I know anything about Canadian/Ontario provincial law, which I don’t so I might be entirely wrong), Mr. Ghomeshi is innocent until proven guilty. Currently there is no criminal investigation against Mr. Ghomeshi. (Update, 8pm: Toronto police have opened an investigation.)

4. The procedurally laudable governmental presumption of innocence does not mean, however, that as a matter of opinion, one cannot believe the allegations against Mr. Ghomeshi. As a matter of personal opinion, I believe the women who are coming forward and saying that Mr. Ghomeshi attacked, abused and harassed them. I could be wrong, but I don’t really think that I am.

5. I think it’s possible that Mr. Ghomeshi deluded himself into thinking these attacks equated to consensual sexual play, which is both not an excuse at all, and a good argument for availing one’s self of educators in that particular field who can teach one how to do one’s play safely and to know what “consensual” actually means. However, I think it’s rather more likely that Mr. Ghomeshi, who is a full-fledged adult and someone with some evident facility for words, was in fact quite aware that what he was doing was not in the least consensual and relied on his position at the top of the Canadian cultural heap to protect him from the consequences of his actions, as indeed it appears to have done for a very long time.

6. If what is alleged against Mr. Ghomeshi is true, and to reiterate I rather strongly suspect that it is, then his being fired from the CBC is, bluntly, the least worst thing that could happen to him at this point. If the allegations are true, he deserves a stint in prison, full stop, end of sentence.

7. It was canny of Mr. Ghomeshi to try to frame his assaults in the context of BDSM, but also disingenuous and false. BDSM is not my thing, but I know a lot of people for whom it is. None of them would see what Mr. Ghomeshi did as something relating to their particular kink. Attacking someone without their consent isn’t about sexual gratification, it’s about the assertion of power — the ability to say “I can do this to you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” And sure, maybe Mr. Ghomeshi got a rise out of that, too. But at the end of the day choking a woman who is not consenting to the experience and saying it’s BDSM is akin to stabbing someone in a bar and claiming it was a martial arts test match. Again, BDSM isn’t my thing, but it’s a thing I know enough about to know that what Mr. Ghomeshi was doing wasn’t that.

8. The irony of the above point is that if it really was about BDSM (which it was not), then there was no reason for any of that to happen. What little I know about BDSM is that those who enjoy it are happy to share and to teach and to provide a safe space for that enthusiasm. Mr. Ghomeshi, I am certain, would not have lacked for willing, consenting partners — if this was really about consensual sexual exploration and enjoyment. But, again, I don’t really think it was ever about that.

9. I don’t know Mr. Ghomeshi other than through a very brief professional encounter. I don’t envy the people who do know him who are now learning about the allegations and who suspect that they are true. What do you do with a friend like that? Do you drop him? Do you maintain he is your friend but acknowledge what he’s done is wrong? Do you fight for your friend, right or wrong? One of Mr. Ghomeshi’s friends addressed this in a post of his own, which is worth reading. I don’t have any answers for this one. I know what I think I would want to do; I don’t know if it’s what I would do because I’ve never had to be in this situation. What I can say is that I hope I never am in this situation.

10. To reiterate, because it’s important: I believe the women who have come forward to allege assault and harassment. It’s been noted by other people better able to testify on the subject that one of the most radical things you can do when a woman speaks up about abuse and harassment is to believe her. Which initially seems like an incredible statement to someone like me, who is almost always believed by default when he chooses to speak up about something. I have that luxury. Not everyone does. It’s a fact I strongly suspect Mr. Ghomeshi knew, and used.

Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher.

—John J. Miller

 

We had a shooting up here in Canada the other day. Like most things Canadian it was a modest, self-effacing affair, nothing that even a couple of losers from Columbine would write home about: a single death, a geriatric hero. A Prime Minister cowering in the closet, scribbling back-of-the-napkin notes on how best to exploit this unexpected opportunity.

He didn’t have to think very hard. Harper’s always seemed almost pathetically eager to turn Canada into a wannabe iteration of the US— think the dweeby eight-year-old, desperate to emulate his idolized older brother— and the Patriot Act has, I suspect, always been his Beacon on the Hill (or his Castle Anthrax grail-shaped beacon, depending on your cultural referents).  So our beloved leader is once again trying to resurrect all those measures he couldn’t quite sneak into C-52, or C-10, or C-30— all those measures that no sane citizen would ever oppose, unless of course we chose to “stand with the child pornographers“.  You know the list: lowered evidentiary standards. Increased powers of police surveillance. Increased powers of detention and “preventative arrest”.  Increased data sharing with the US.

Basically all that stuff they were doing anyway with impunity, only now more of it will be legal.

But here’s an interesting proposition: new legislation making it illegal to “condone terrorist acts online“.  The money shot from Ivison’s story:

There is frustration in government  that the authorities can’t detain or arrest people who express sympathy for atrocities committed overseas … Sources suggest the government is likely to bring in new hate speech legislation that would make it illegal to claim terrorist acts are justified online.

Read that again, just to make sure you’ve got it.  We’re not talking about real hate speech here.  We’re not talking about advocating genocide, or gay-bashing, or threatening real violence of any type. We’re talking about looking at people the government doesn’t like and saying You know, maybe those people have got a point. We’re talking about criminalizing statements like— oh, for example, “Omar Kadhr was a kid on a battlefield, under attack by the US Military: why wouldn’t he fight back?”

And don’t even get me started on what they’d do with this.

It would be bad enough if it stopped there. I don’t think it will. Look what happened in the US, once the word “terrorism” acquired its magical power to short-circuit higher brain functions and call down showers of government cash at the invocation of its name. It took about thirty seconds for anything any right-wing nutbar didn’t like to be reclassified as a terrorist act. Here, for example, is a piece of US legislation that would literally define taking pictures of animal abuse as an act of terrorism.

Call it “Terrorist Creep”.

Harper has always taken his lead from his idols to the south— perhaps that’s why, just a couple of weeks ago, a bunch of bird-watchers got threatened with a tax audit after writing a concerned letter on the plight of honeybees affected by government-approved pesticides.  (Nor is this an isolated incident.  Harper’s ideological antipathy to science is notorious around the globe.  I’ve heard first-hand accounts of government biologists being reprimanded for using the term “tar sands” instead of “ethical oil” in casual conversation, of field biologists being told there’s no need to monitor wildlife populations this year because they already did that last year. Just last week the Union of Concerned Scientists—  one of the few US organizations Harper does not seem eager to emulate— sent our esteemed PM an open letter signed by 800+ scientific professionals, protesting the routine muzzling of Canadian scientists by their own government.)

If it’s an act of terrorism to document instances of industrial animal abuse, what about documenting governmentally-induced disasters from the collapse of Atlantic cod populations to the toxic catastrophe spreading across northern Alberta?  What about whistleblowing the wholesale spying on Canadian citizens?  What about writing a polite letter of concern about colony collapse disorder?

What about just publicly sympathizing with the folks who are doing those things?

So far, it’s legal to say “Yay Edward Snowden” when his revelations uncover abuses by the Canadian government.  But at least one MP quoted in Ivison’s story seem to think we need “new offenses” on the books.

A segment of society—the largest segment, in all likelihood — believes that we all have a duty to obey The Law, whether we agree with it or not. Society, they say, isn’t some kind of Red Lobster buffet where you get to pick and choose what statutes to obey. If everyone availed themselves of the freedom to decide right and wrong for themselves we’d have— why, we’d have Anarchy!  (The argument generally ends there; nobody feels especially compelled to spell out what exactly would be wrong with anarchy, presumably because its consequences are so self-evidently horrific.  Although it seemed to work well enough on Annares.)

But there’s a down side. If they pass a law saying you can’t criticize the government, you gotta shut up and like it. If the law says that flinching while being attacked by the police is “resisting”— or even “assault”— there’s not much you can do about it. Historically there are so many laws allowing the government into your bedroom— telling you what kind of sex you’re allowed to have, or which way you have to swing if you want The Law to regard you as Human— that we’ve had to store them out in the garage.  (Here in Canada, you’re SOL if you get pleasure out of pain; a lot of BDSM between consenting adults is illegal because you’re not allowed to consent to “assault” whether it gets you off or not.)

This little statute over in the corner sends you to jail for documenting cases of animal abuse.  That big five-hundred-kilo behemoth on the coffee table says the gummint can do whatever it likes to whoever it brands a “terrorist”, and that one with the FISA tattoo on its butt says Big Telecom isn’t liable if they help the gummint do that.  And if the law presumes guilt unless you can prove innocence— well, that’s just the Canadian Tax Code.

We’ve already seen laws down south, lurking in the shadows, that define you as a terrorist if your ethics run sufficiently counter to Big Agro. Now, up here, we’re hearing whispers behind closed doors that maybe we should criminalize the mere suggestion that “terrorists”— whoever they are this week¹— might have a point. And most folks will shrug and say Yeah, it sucks, but you know. Gotta obey the Law.

Personally, though? If someone were to take another crack at Parliament— get into the House of Commons with a loaded Tavor, mow down everyone on the blue side of the aisle— I might just say, let’s not be hasty.

Maybe they’d have a point.

 

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