Andrew Hickey

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October 30th, 2014: HEY GUESS WHAT?? Adventure Time #33 is out today! You can read a preview here, read a REview here, and buy the book digitally or at your local comic book zone!! – Ryan

Paul Davidson tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the Ark of the Covenant but were afraid to ask: “Readers of the Lost Ark: Following the Literary Trail of an Ancient Religious Symbol.” After tracing the various (conflicting) biblical traditions and narratives about the ark, Davidson notes that “diverse traditions about the ark continued to develop into the Christian era.” His post also, of course, includes some Indiana Jones allusions and images as a lighthearted touch.

But I take those Raiders references seriously, because even though Stephen Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas didn’t intend to reshape our understanding of the Ark of the Covenant, they contributed mightily to the way we imagine it, the way we think of it, and thus the way we read and tell and understand all those biblical stories.

When you read Davidson’s summary of the work of actual biblical scholars, you can’t help but notice that their understanding of these stories is very different in many ways from the popular understanding most Christians acquire in Sunday school. And it’s not just that scholars know more than what is communicated in those popular lessons. In many cases, the difference is that scholars “know” less — the popular lessons include all kinds of little details and glosses, embellishments and assumptions that can’t be found anywhere in the text.

The text itself gets popularized and its stories are retold. Its stories provide the basis for other stories about those stories, and details from those new stories seep back into the popular understanding as though they were part of the original. The revised and expanded idea of the original then provides the basis for even more new stories, and the cycle repeats itself. The text feeds into popular culture and popular culture, in turn, feeds back into the text, and after multiple repetitions of that cycle we lose the ability to distinguish one from the other.

That’s where 90 percent of what most Christians “know” about Hell or Satan or “the Antichrist” comes from. They’re confident that all this stuff they “know” is in the Bible somewhere, but you can’t find it in the text itself, only in the idea of the text that exists after generations of this text-culture-text cycle has done its work.

We learn new stories and then we carry those stories with us when we go back to the text and those stories influence what we see and don’t see when we read the text. This is true of horrible stories that intend to reshape the way we read the text itself, such as for example Left Behind. But it’s also true of really good stories that don’t seem intended to do this — like Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Omen or Dante’s Divine Comedy or The Vision of Tundale.

The new stories employ vocabulary that comes from the text, and those new stories give the words from the text new connotations and new associations that we carry with us when we go back to the text. And in that return to the text, we begin to imagine that we find those new connotations and new associations there in the original story. We read a Bible verse with the word “Hell” in it and we bring 2,000 years of other stories with us, assuming that all of that is what the writer meant when it’s neither true nor possible that the writer could have meant any of that.

Indiana Jones may not be a character you’ll find in the Bible, but then “The Antichrist” isn’t a character you’ll find in the Bible either, and that hasn’t stopped generations of Christian readers from finding him there.

I don't know if I should believe the allegations of rape by Bill Cosby and this posting is not about whether they're true or not. It's about how if even two of those surfaced about most other stars, that other star's career would be kaput, over, bye-bye. But multiple, similar claims against Cosby have been around for years and not only has no one arrested him, I don't think any talk show ever didn't invite him on or mention them.

The Queen Latifah Show apparently just canceled an upcoming Cosby appearance…though I believe the official story is that he asked to postpone. That and some reported cash settlements with accusers seem to be the only damage Mr. Cosby has sustained.

Like you, I love Bill Cosby the Performer and perhaps a little of that love is protecting him. Mostly, I would imagine it's that we've never heard talk of an actual arrest or prosecution. If we hear about the allegations at all — and many people have not — a little part of our brain thinks, "I don't want to believe that about Bill Cosby…so I won't until the cops come for him. If they don't, maybe it's not what they say."

We can all understand why some victims in such a situation would be reticent to push for prosecution. The Cos is a beloved and powerful person. He could easily afford lawyers and detectives who would go through an accuser's past with a microscope. If he were ever to go on trial, a media circus is more than likely with TMZ and other outlets milking it for every drop. It might be very hard to put such a horrendous incident behind you if you became notorious as The Woman Who Accused Bill Cosby.

We don't always treat rape victims well in this society. In the O.J. Simpson case, the prosecutors and investigators had their reputations assaulted, too. Maybe some of them are a little leery of engaging the kind of legal team William Henry "Bill" Cosby could afford.

As you can probably tell, this whole thing bothers me a lot, starting with the fact that if he is guilty, there's a good chance he can get away with it in terms of the law. But I'm also amazed that he's gotten away with it as much as he has in the court of public opinion. Thirteen accusations? My God.

The Scottish Political Singularity is not only far from over, it's showing every sign of recomplicating, bizarrely.

From The Guardian:

a new poll by Ipsos Mori for STV showed that a record 52% of Scottish voters would vote SNP if there were an immediate general election, implying the SNP would win 54 Westminster seats - a nine-fold increase on the six seats it currently holds - leaving Labour with just four. Carried out in part after Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont's sudden resignation last Friday, the poll put Labour at just 23% - its lowest figure in over six years, with the Tories cut to 10% and the Lib Dems down to 6%, tying with the Scottish Green party.

What does this mean?

Firstly, it's important not to read too much into this poll. It's been criticized elsewhere, and the timing (coincidental with the Scottish Labour leader and deputy leader's resignations) is iffy.

However, Scotland runs on first-past-the-post, like the rest of the UK, in general elections (of which one is due next June). And even if we knock 10% off the SNP voting intentions across the board, Labour is going to take a very deep, very cold, bath—punishment by their voters for running an unremittingly negative campaign during the referendum. Lots of Scots didn't actually want to leave the UK, but deeply resented being told that they were too wee, too poor, and too stupid to go it alone: this is the payback.

How crazy is it going to get?

Well, if the SNP pick up on the order of 50 MPs, they'll be the third largest party in Westminster (replacing the Liberal Democrats, who are in meltdown as voters desert them—the LibDem core are mostly centre-left, and the coalition with the Conservative party was pure poison for that base).

Alex Salmond, the former SNP First Minister of Scotland, has been rather coy when asked if he was going to run for Westminster in next summer's election. But he's been an MP before, and he'd be a shoo-in for a safe seat as party leader if he wanted one. In the wake of a "No" vote on independence, a Westminster seat would give him a good base on which to campaign to hold the UK party leaders' feet to the fire over promises they made during the campaign.

There are (still) going to be 650 seats in play at the election. A number will go to independents and minor parties: one or two Greens, a handful of Ulster Unionists, an indeterminate number (5-15) Liberal Democrats, plus independent MPs and maybe even a few UKIP. (My sticking-my-neck-out prognostication is that UKIP will get lots of votes, but distributed thinly enough that they win relatively few seats.) The Conservatives and Labour would, as before, each win roughly 250-300 seats. With 50 seats, the SNP would be the turd in the punchbowl: it would literally be almost impossible to form a stable government without them (unless we look at the apocalyptic scenario of a Labour/Tory coalition, which in the past has only happened during a World War government of national unity). It would be hard to spin Alex Salmond smirking and demanding Devo Max as being tantamount to Hitler! so quite possibly some sort of deal would be done. As the SNP already firmly ruled out a pact with the Conservatives (it'd be a political suicide pill for their base in Scotland), that leaves two likely options:

1. A full formal coalition with the Labour Party. (I think this is unlikely, although Labour might have learned a lesson from the consequences of Brown's refusal to compromise with Nick Clegg in 2010: Labour and the SNP are natural rivals for the governing party/centre-left niche in Scotland.) Terms would be: the SNP get Devo Max and some ministerial posts, and in return they vote in line with Labour policy on any items that the parties don't actually disagree on, and abstain from voting on purely English non-budgetary matters.

2. An understanding (like the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977) whereby a minority Labour government operates with SNP support contingent on them not pissing in the SNP's wheaties. This might work, if Labour are willing to cut a deal over Scottish powers. Otherwise ...

I could be wrong.

The most unpredictable alternative would be a landslide in the direction of UKIP. I find it hard to imagine UKIP picking up more seats than the SNP, because while they may have more voters across the UK, the SNP's are concentrated in constituencies where they stand a chance of winning: but if UKIP were to pick up 50 or so MPs, roughly matching the SNP's showing, then we're into total terra incognita in British politics. I don't think we're going to get into "rainbow coalition" territory in just one election—Labour and the Conservatives—aren't going to completely crumble just six months from now—but the number of possible combinations that could form governments in Westminster just exploded. And so did the outcomes. UKIP appear, ironically, to be intensely hostile to Scottish nationalism and devolution in general (they're a vastly stronger party in England than in Scotland, where they are out-polled three to one by the Scottish Greens). So we have the prospect of two historically ideologically polarized major parties (neither of whom can form a government without external assistance), and two ideologically polarized minor parties (one or both of whom might enable one or other of the larger parties to govern, with a tail-wind and some independent help).

Anyway: I can't be sure of the outcome, but as far as I can tell British politics is about to go sideways, very fast, next June—largely as a delayed consequence of the Scottish independence referendum. Order up the pop-corn: this is going to be interesting.

MONSTER:  Dracula

REAL NAME:  Vladimir T. Dracula, Jr.

COLLECTIVE NAME:  Draculae

POWERS:  immortality, flight, mental domination, control over vermin, moodiness

PET PEEVES:  inability to eat aïoli

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  RZA

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  Seven Golden Candelabras of Dracula (1958, Allied Antiques, USA)

***

MONSTER:  Wolf Man

REAL NAME:  Avram Levidowitz Wolfman

COLLECTIVE NAME:  Wolfs Man

POWERS:  physical transformation, heightened strength and endurance, enhanced speed and agility, claws and fangs, ability to attract mates with loud whistle and bugged-out eyeballs

PET PEEVES:  doesn’t get any royalties from awesome t-shirts and calendars

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  Inspectah Deck

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  The Wolf Man Slobbers (1943, Baume’s Rush Pictures, USA)

***

 

MONSTER:  Frankenstein

REAL NAME:  Adam Quintullus Frankenstein

COLLECTIVE NAME:  Frankensteiner Brothers

POWERS:  great strength, invulnerability, can jump-start cars with neck bolts

PET PEEVES:  when people say “Frankenstein is the name of the doctor, not the monster”, when in fact, by a bizarre coincidence, his name is also Frankenstein

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  GZA

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  Frankenstein’s Funky Four Corners (1976, Blaxplosion Studios, USA)

***

MONSTER:  Gill Man

REAL NAME:  Charlotte Perkins Gill Man

COLLECTIVE NAME:  Gill Men, but with a soft ‘g’

POWERS: amphibiousness, armored skin, superhuman strength, can play any Dick Dale guitar solo from memory after only having heard it once

PET PEEVES:  demanded human rights and respect during the liberation wave of the 1970s, at which time people began calling him “the creature from the African-American lagoon”, having failed to understand which word he took offense to

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  Method Man

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  He Gurgles By Night (1947, Derwin Eggboiler Productions Inc., USA)

***

MONSTER:  King Kong

REAL NAME:  Massimo Adelberto di Kong

COLLECTIVE NAME:  “a merriment of Kongs”

POWERS:  huge size, ability to climb tall buildings (New York only), right to demand fealty and feudal tribute from lesser Kong nobility

PET PEEVES:  being drugged, chained, and shipped across the ocean to be put on display like some kind of circus freak, and only getting a flat fee and a small percentage of the door with no points, franchise fees, or a cut of the merchandising

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  Ol’ Dirty Bastard

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  Urban Destruction Modalities of the Contemporary Gorilla-Monster:  Reconciling Projections with Opportunity Costs, Part 2 (1971, British Civil Engineering Association Documentary Films Division, UK)

***

MONSTER:  Godzilla

REAL NAME:  Henry “Dust-Humper” Gojira

COLLECTIVE NAME:  Pantheonzilla

POWERS:  colossal size, armored scales, atomic breath, stomping ability, weak throwing arm but surprisingly good speed on the base paths

PET PEEVES:  that fucking Blue Öyster Cult song, enough already, I get it

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  U-Godzilla

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  Crazed Assault of Lizard Employer III (1953, Nippon Film and Milkshake Board, JAP)

***

MONSTER:  The Mummy

REAL NAME:  Khufu Imhotep-Delahanty

COLLECTIVE NAME:  Mumsies

POWERS:  immortality, great strength, resistance to injury, vengeful determination, notary public license

PET PEEVES:  other reanimated ancient Egyptian man-gods are always eating his food out of the fridge even though he writes “MUMMY”right there on it

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  Ghostface Killah

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Also a Mummy (2009, Birdshit Features, USA)

***

MONSTER:  Invisible Man

REAL NAME:  George Cluny, no, no, it’s C-L-U-N-Y, yeah, I get that a lot

COLLECTIVE NAME:  The Differently Visible

POWERS:  it’s right there in his fucking name, do I really have to spell it out?

PET PEEVES:  people don’t treat him seriously when he talks about Invisible Men’s Rights activism

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  Masta Killa

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  The Invisible Man Who is an Actual Man Who Becomes Invisible and Kills People, Not the Invisible Man Who is a Metaphor for the Difficult Sociopolitical Issues Facing Black Americans (1968, Cinematica Literalus, ITA)

***

MONSTER:  The Phantom of the Opera

REAL NAME:  Gaston Le Phantomoftheopera

COLLECTIVE NAME:  Fandom of the Opera

POWERS:  mask, formal outfit, ability to sing mawkish show tunes that appeal to high school theater nerds

PET PEEVES:  could menace any kind of public entertainment, but only ever gets invited to operas

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  Cappadonna (come on, dude)

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  The Phantom of the Complete Ring Cycle, Part XXXII (1984, The Corporation for Punitive Broadcasting, CAN)

***

MONSTER:  The Hunchback of Notre Dame

REAL NAME:  Leotis Dingenschratz

COLLECTIVE NAME:  Fighting Irish

POWERS:  hunchback, birth defects, severe facial deformities, low dignity threshold

PET PEEVES:  is actually not from Paris at all, but you never hear anyone call him “the Hunchback of Sillé-le-Guillaume”

FAVORITE WU-TANG CLAN MEMBER:  Raekwon

MOST REALISTIC FILM DEPICTION:  Leotis Dingenschratz and the Very Merry Feast of the Assumption of Mary to Heaven (1998, Lemmy Kilmister’s Carnival Funtime Pictures, UK)

 

 

 

 

 

#826, 12th June 1999

“Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” is an artefact from the Pre-Cambrian of social media, a fossil ancestor of today’s viral hits. You could go further: by making the jump into offline culture, it’s a kind of missing link to them. Natively, though, it belongs to the long, grey, clickless epoch of text-only circulation: paragraphs indented by lines of arrows, replicating in the unseen spaces of email accounts, far from the light of analytics.

This murky ecosystem was home to a variety of inhabitants. One – the dominant species, perhaps – was glurge: ultra-sentimental stories of cancer patients, puppies and soldiers, the plaintext descendants of death ballads or “No Charge”. Another was inspirational quotes and advice. Nowadays single aphorisms roam free and agile across the social media plains, shedding and acquiring new images, gifsets and inspired carriers as they do. In the late 90s, the climate for uplifting messages was somewhat harsher – the dynamics of email meant that people would not pepper their friends with individual quotes or snippets of wisdom. Instead the inspiring quotes bunched together to increase their survival and circulation chances. They formed colonies tens strong, collections of “wit and wisdom” or “20 facts about…” that offered better value to the habitual emailer than a lone insight could.

“Sunscreen” is in format one of these, two dozen or so pieces of advice strung together. But it has a single author – Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich, and she isn’t especially famous or inspirational. That was the point – “Sunscreen” was Schmich’s fantasy of what she would say, were she ever offered a commencement speech, but written in the awareness of how unlikely this was. The column reflects this, constantly equivocal about the value of giving advice in the first place. It’s a forty-year-old’s fantasy of being wise and old enough to offer advice to kids, laced with a forty-year-old’s awareness of how much they still don’t know.

This origin was, it turned out, sub-optimal for viral circulation. As soon as it began taking off, “Sunscreen” was re-authored, credited now not to some barely-known woman but to famous (and male) author Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut, recently retired, stated – rather generously – how flattered he was. The text was shared, credited mostly to Vonnegut, several million times. And in this form it found its way to Baz Luhrmann.

Luhrmann enlisted voice actor Lee Perry to do the song. Perry had a background in animation, but also in advertising voiceovers, and it’s that side of his talents he brings to bear on his bumptious, insincere “Sunscreen” recital. The fifth most annoying thing about this record is that Perry has lousy timing and at times sounds close to disgusted by what he’s being told to say. I can’t exactly blame him, but the audible sneer on “maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken”, for instance, rather undercuts the message of welcoming life’s many possibilities.

Perry is also a guy, reading words written by a woman, which accounts for the fourth most annoying thing: lines that might come over wry or light on paper sound very much like finger-wagging when Perry booms them out. “Do NOT read BEAUTY magazines, they will ONLY make you FEEL UGLY” he bellows. Well, OK, but if Glamour sounded as condescending as he does, nobody would buy it. A few lines later he’s giving out advice about hair treatments.

Not all “Sunscreen”’s instructions are bad or patronising – I quite liked the lines about your body being an instrument, for instance. In fact, it’s hard to single out any as being particularly egregious – it’s more the slow drip of homily, the pile-up of disconnected, bland instruction that repulses. And, to be honest, the bad luck of us encountering it at all. The third most annoying thing about this record is that it exists. It fell into the gap between the Internet being established enough for woeful things to rapidly spread, and the Internet being a fast and cheap mass medium which meant people could simply see and hear them at a click. “Sunscreen” is a novelty hit, the latest in a line of same. But it’s also a viral video in waiting, a YouTube proof of concept – though without such easy means of circulation existing channels had to be used, which means someone had to go and make the thing. Thanks, Baz.

Luhrmann’s specific contribution to “Sunscreen” is in the music – an instrumental reinvention of Rozalla’s “Everybody’s Free” as an ambient cloud of mellow vibes, midway between elevator and beach hut. At first this gaseous burble gets out of the way of the speech, but gradually it asserts itself. Every so often Schmich drops in a one-word admonition – “Floss”, “Stretch”, “Dance” – to break the flow. And it’s on “Dance” we hear the second most annoying thing about this record – a rusted old trip-hop beat lurching back into service, bringing home how musically exhausted “Sunscreen” sounds, a fag-end of once interesting styles. The enveloping fug of trip-hop was surprisingly flexible: it could be paranoid or nurturing, aggressive or enigmatic or torchy. “Sunscreen” is none of those things. Its drum loops sound lumbering and obvious, shown up by the sickly brightness of the rest of the arrangement.

But in the end, a better voice or better music could hardly save this song. The most annoying thing about it is inescapable without a complete rewrite: it’s so bloody noncommittal. Every piece of advice comes with a caveat, an opposite to nudge you back onto safer ground. Leave New York before it makes you hard. Leave California before it makes you soft. Don’t worry, or worry. Read the instructions, even if you don’t follow them. Don’t congratulate yourself, don’t berate yourself. Don’t trust me. Buy my record anyway.

There’s a name for this endless, whimsical self-undermining. Not an accurate name, but that didn’t matter, it stuck to the 1990s anyway, poisoning its reputation: irony. Commit to nothing, always leave yourself an exit route, wear sunscreen. It’s not that this record has no beliefs: sometimes gaps appear in its skin of chuckling self-regard and you hear the terror of mortality poke through – failing bodies, departing friends. But it hides that, turning away into offhanded wryness. “Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth: oh, nevermind.” Oh well, whatever, nevermind – a disgusted, spasmic shrug at the start of the decade, reflected here as a smug chortle. Nerveless trip-hop and reflexive irony: we are still 18 songs off the end of the 1990s, but here they are, ready for their grave.

Here's an announcement I've been looking forward to making!

The brilliant Bafflegab Productions are making a series of new audio adventures for Brenda and Effie, starting this December.  Anne Reid is going to be our Brenda, and just wait till you hear her in action.  There's a clip from the first mystery here, as well as the opportunity to subscribe to the series.  I hope you will - and that you'll share the news about these new Brenda adventures far and wide!  The more you support us in this, by buying and talking about them, the more we'll be able to do!

I read an upsetting story this morning. An old friend had shared it on Facebook from a local newspaper. It was about a girl of eleven in a school down south, whose teacher had singled her out for disobeying a non-existent rule. The girl was made to feel exposed and ridiculed in front of her classmates.

The picture with the story showed the girl in a crazy acrylic wig of bright pinkish purple. She was smiling. She had the prematurely aged features that come with the disease that gives a child the face of someone at the end rather than the start of their life. These kids have a life expectancy of fifteen years. They get a quick burst of a life with none of the experience and less of the actual living than they might reasonably expect. The faces of these kids are often striking because although the actual flesh is wrinkling and aged, it is still animated and lit by their intrinsic youthfulness. They can seem elfin - especially when they're sporting bright pink wigs.

On top of everything else this girl had alopecia. Her family couldn't afford to buy her a wig made of human hair, that would perhaps look more natural and lifelike and less conspicuous. they couldn't afford to help her fit in. All they could get her was this fluorescent number, and it was this that her teacher made her take off in class.

And it wasn't because there was a rule about not wearing colourful wigs in school. Later, after the mother went to the paper, the School Head and the Head of Inclusion were keen to point out that no such rule existed. The problem was that the girl just turned up one day wearing the offending article, with no warning, when she had seemed okay in the past with an almost bald head. It was too conspicuous, was the problem. It stood out too much. She should have sought special permission, and perhaps found something more appropriate.

Her teacher felt that the pink wig might cause mayhem. It might encourage all the other children to run riot and start wearing extravagant wigs. It might drive all the incipient rebels to dye their hair unnatural hues. And then what kind of anarchy might break out?

So what if they did all have pink and purple hair? What would be wrong with that? The little girl's world - and our whole world - might be better off if her fellow pupils took it upon themselves to colour their hair or don wigs en masse in solidarity with the girl who'd chosen pink hair.

How wonderful it would be if - rather than panicking over procedures, non-existent rules and the counter-productive angsting of the school authorities - the teacher had let herself act with more compassion and humanity, and let the girl carry on flaunting her space age, disco, fairy tale hairdo? And wouldn't it have been just smashing if the teacher had turned up the next day in a flashy, glittering wig of her own?

When did we become so conformist? When did the paperwork and admin and ad hoc regulations become more important than the actual people? When did it become a terrible thing to have people standing out in a crowd? When did it stop being the job of educators to encourage us to explore our individuality and not be scared of it?

The girl in the story had no choice about standing out and being conspicuous. She was bravely making the best of it. At the tender, tiny age of eleven she was courageous enough to choose to sport a wig that was fabulous and glam and the very opposite of humdrum conformity.

I want to write to her school board of governors. I want to write to her teacher, her school head, her head of inclusion. I want to write to her family, her mother. Most of all I want to tell her that I hope she knows that, if she wants to wear her pink wig day and night and wherever the hell she wants to, no one has the right to tell her she can't.

I was not a member of the Liberal Party in 1976 because there was no branch in Market Harborough to recruit me.

But I knew I was a Liberal and that my favourite MPs were David Penhaligon and John Pardoe. So when Pardoe stood against David Steel for the leadership of the party I knew whose side I was on.

And you could argue that the 1976 contest set a pattern for later Liberal and Liberal Democrat leadership elections.

One candidate (Steel) was orthodox, sensible and just a little dull. The other (Pardoe) was more charismatic, more open to new ideas and just a little unreliable in his judgement.

So in later contests Paddy Ashdown was a Pardoe and Alan Beith was a Steel. And Chris Huhne was a Pardoe and Ming Campbell and then Nick Clegg were Steels. In all these cases I voted for the Pardoe.

It doesn't always work: in 1999 there were five candidates. I suppose you could make a case for Charles Kennedy being a sort of Social Democrat Steel, but a clear Pardoe failed to emerge.

Can we project this pattern back into past? I don't know, but it tempting to see Asquith as a Steel and Lloyd George as a Pardoe.

And was Jo Grimond a Steel or a Pardoe? He seems to have combined the better qualities of both.

I don’t normally read LabourList, but this morning someone on Twitter linked to this article about Labour’s fight against the Greens. It starts out almost sensibly, then descends into such a pit of belligerent tribalism that I began wondering if it was a parody. (Then I noticed it was by arch-Blairite ‘moderate’ Luke Akehurst, and was assured it was serious)

There’s a certain category of politico – and I’ve seen them more in Labour, but they exist in every party – who are convinced that theirs is the One True Party and argue that case with a near-religious zeal. In this world view, anyone who disagrees can only do so because they are evil or misguided. There are only two sides to any political debate – the right side and the wrong side – and the One True Party is invariably on the right side. Anyone who disagrees with the One True Party is obviously evil, and anyone who suggests there might be a way to achieve something that’s not the One True Party’s way is misguided.

This is what lies at the root of Akehurst’s assault on the Greens – that they’re getting in the way of Labour, his One True Party. His arguments aren’t based much on ideology (and when they are, it’s all about how hard it is to triangulate Greens) but purely on the principle that Labour are always right, thus Labour need to be in power, and thus anyone who gets in the way of that is harmful and needs to be stopped. The Greens didn’t actually win a seat in Hackney – in Akehurst’s view, they ‘blocked’ someone from Labour getting their rightful place on the council. Greens aren’t people with different views and arguments, they’re ‘a huge drain on campaigning resources’, because all that matters is how the One True Party does. It’s probably the statement that ‘if you want PR for councils at least let your primary motive be improving Labour representation in rural areas, not giving a free pass to the Greens in councils where we have been fighting for years to stop them getting elected’ that shows the One True Party view most clearly. The idea that PR might be a good thing in itself cannot even be processed, and everything must be judged in terms of how it helps or hinders the party.

One True Party types exist in all parties, though, not just Labour and we shouldn’t pretend that they’ve never served a useful purpose for their parties. In a time of tribal and class-based politics, where voters (and even activists) generally had little information to work on, it was important to build loyalty to the party as an institution, not necessarily the ideas behind it. When most elections were just about two parties, descending into tribalism ‘the One True Party is always right’ partisanship does make a certain kind of sense.

We’re not in those times any more. Obviously, for some people politics still is a predominantly tribal affair, or even just a game between opposing sides where winning is the only important thing, no matter how you get there. However, I’d argue that with the breakdown of strong loyalties to parties amongst the voting public, this sort of approach isn’t likely to attract support in the way it used to. Trading insults back and forth with your opponents might feel good to the One True Party activist, but it’s not likely to attract the voter who knows that there are no true parties, just a group of different parties that might do different things. When offered with ‘you must vote for us because we’re right about everything’ in several different forms, is it any wonder when they go for something entirely different?

One of the few pleasures of growing older, from the perspective of cultural criticism, is watching America mythologize itself.  Sometimes you have the enjoyment of seeing this happen just as it develops, as H.L. Mencken spotted in his observation of the immediate aftermath of the Dempsey/Carpentier fight; other times, it rolls out slowly, like how everyone in the 1990s pretended to like the Velvet Underground from the very beginning, or how every white guy today pretends to have liked hip-hop in the 1990s.  The reverse can happen as well:  America develops cultural amnesia all the time, and can today not recall ever having liked M. Night Shyamalan, Dane Cook, or Pamela Anderson.  As the generations pass and new waves of critics and writers crawl their way into the bright sun of a national audience, they figure out new angles to express old opinions, while all the while having to experience the same stuff we elderly folk have already gone through in a completely different context.  Thus we regularly receive dispatches from a world where yacht rock is appreciated both ironically and non-ironically; the Rolling Stones were never relevant, dangerous, or exciting; and the co-option of black music by white musicians is a fresh outrage rather than the literal foundation upon which all modern music is built.  Live long enough and everything will seem both old and unfamiliar at the same time.

The latest diktat from Yegg Central concerns the public image of Mr. William Martin Joel, a pop crooner of some small renown.  Despite his millions of dollars, vast international fame, massive numbers of chart hits, and legions of adoring fans, despite his multiple stages of ubiquity (first on rock radio, then on MTV, and finally in the offices of dentists and general practitioners across America), Billy Joel — a man whose attitude towards his fans has usually been one of petulant contempt — feels underappreciated, and he has somehow managed to sell this gross egomania to a generation of music journalists and culture writers.  Mistaking his self-pity for a lack of appreciation, they have attempted a downright Soviet attempt to rehabilitate his reputation:  and, indeed, it is reputation that is at the heart of the matter, which is the most frustrating aspect of the whole shameful show to those of us who think that Joel is an overexposed and undertalented embarrassment who should no more be celebrated in this day and age than Leo Sayer or Gino Vannelli.  It is nearly unthinkable that he could be wealthier, more famous, more popular, or have more hit songs; it is only that he has failed in the one single aspect of creation in which he will always fail — winning the respect of critics and the reputation that goes with such praise — that frustrates him, and he has passed his frustration down to a surprising number of people who ought to know better.

When I was younger and scrappier, I thought I had dealt with Billy Joel in a more or less definitive manner, but it is more fitting for Jesus to think he had a chance at ridding the world of sin than for a mere scribbler to think that he might convince a single pair of ears to reject the works of Billy Joel.  So, like some kind of mixed metaphor consisting of a whack-a-mole game populated by zombies who sing “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, just when you think he is dead, he rises again to begin a residency at Madison Square Garden and to convince hapless pop-culture writers to come to his defense, as if he is R. Dean Taylor and not Billy Joel.  This week alone has seen the emergence of not one but two separate articles attempting to convince their peers that Joel deserves a place at the table occupied by the Lou Reeds, Joan Jetts, and Elvis Costellos of this world.  They do not base their arguments on simple longevity, however; convincing as it might be to simply report that since Joel has been going strong after almost 50 years, he’s got to have something going for him, they eschew that approach, since it might place them in sympathy with other widely known hacks who enjoy a loyal audience but not a reputation as someone whose music is worth listening to.  Instead, they focus, particularly in the New Yorker piece, on the fabulous notion that the reason Billy Joel is not respected by the critical establishment is because he isn’t cool.

Of all the egregious bogosities foisted on the pop-listening public, the idea that reasonable people avoid the songs of Billy Joel like they would avoid alone time with a rabid badger because Joel is a square-seeming schnook who wears tan jackets with the sleeves rolled up instead of a Johnny Cool-Guy with a slick haircut and punk rock clothes who sings about how much he hates The Man has got to be #1.  #2 is the equally bizarre notion, advanced in the AV Club article, that Billy Joel’s fans, far from a throng of tens of millions who have seen the object of their affection become culturally ubiquitous, earn huge amounts of money, and dominate the pop charts for two decades, are to the contrary some sort of oppressed minority, cowering in fear at the reprisals of a conspiracy of the hip who have been engaged in a years-long struggle to guilt them out of liking a man who deserves to sit on a throne made of melted-down platinum records with we unappreciative rabble kissing his Florsheim-clad feet. Since I made the shocking discovery a few years ago that taste is personal, artistic success is largely arbitrary, and that the public will swallow one load of horseshit while spitting out an identically flavored load, I have no dog in a number of rock-crit fights, and I don’t really care that America has embraced such an obvious nudge as Billy Joel; what continues to baffle me is why he, of hundreds of other popular but cruddy pop singers, keeps on inspiring these pouty think-pieces in which it is imagined that he is a prodigal son banished from his rightful homecoming feast by a cabal of snobby haters, and that his fans, who number enough to have given him dozens of top 40 hits, continue to believe that they are under the smug Doc Marten heels of a hipstertariat who will not recognize his genius.

This whole pretense that nobody could possibly not like a beloved performer because he is self-evidently great and anyone who feigns to dislike him is affecting a cool-kids pose is ludicrous, as is its twin, the pretense that nobody could possibly like a less popular kind of music because it clearly sucks and anyone who pretends to like it is just putting on airs to be different.  Let’s not mince words:  I think Billy Joel sucks, and it has nothing to do with a too-cool-for-school rejection of well-crafted pop; I idolize ABBA, for goodness’ sake.  But I’m also old enough to have lived through Joel’s first wave of radio omnipresence, and I can also read Billboard charts, so I’m incapable of swallowing the lie that he or his fans are some kind of outsiders.  This kind of conspiratorial thinking, where you are both a triumphant and discerning listener unafraid to admit to the obvious genius of this titanic songsmith and a put-down minority who cannot peacefully enjoy the simple pleasures of your humble crooner because of the cruel barbs of others, is better suited to Tea Party types.

To be clear, while I think Billy Joel is genuinely awful, I don’t think the people who love him are delusional, except insofar as their feelings of guilt are probably not instilled in them by people like me, but may rather come from within on the sneaking suspicion that Billy  Joel is as awful as we say he is.  I’m never going to demand that Joel’s fans give up their love of him and embrace the joy of making fun of the puffy old hack.  What still flips me, though, is that his fans — at least the cult-stud division of same — are unwilling to just accept that there are just a rump of ne’er-do-wells who just happen to have noticed that Billy Joel sucks.  They have to invent a reality where Joel is only separated from Leonard Cohen by a thin red line of uncoolness, that there is a fifth column of snipers drunk on haterade who are determined not to admit the truth of his greatness; they have to keep ignoring his flaws, accepting his disdain, and attributing to him depths that he clearly does not possess in order to maintain the fiction.  Look, Billy Joel fans:  by pretty much every objective measure, you won.  Your guy is rich, famous, celebrated, awarded, praised, and in possession of success by almost any metric the world of music can devise.  Isn’t that enough?  Can’t you just bear with grace the fact that some people think he’s a clown, or must you keep up this Bieberesque masque of oppression?  Remember:  you can dance and still look tough!

Here's a brief thought-experiment for you: imagine what the UK would look like today if the outcome of the second world war had taken a left turn early in 1940, and the whole of western Europe somehow ended up under Soviet control by 1946. (No nuclear weapons or gas attacks need apply: this speculation is about outcomes, not processes—so discussion of precisely how the British People's Democratic Republic comes about is left as an exercise for the reader (and is not to be explored in comments)).

Let us further postulate that Stalinism passes with its creator, much as happened in our own experience of history: that the Soviet empire eventually undergoes the same fiscal crisis and collapse (alternative discussion of the same process by a former Soviet minister—you can forget the urban legend that Ronald Reagan did it) much as we remember, except possibly somewhat later—as late as the early 21st century, perhaps.

What interests me, in view of recent revelations about police spying and the extent of the British surveillance state is: How would the practice of internal suppression of dissent and state surveillance have differed in a post-Soviet Britain from what we appear to be living with right now?

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent": as we have no way of knowing when the regime of the British Democratic People's Republic fell, or what level of technology was available to them, purely technical aspects of the Communist surveillance state of the British Isles must be excluded.

However, we know the general shape of the ideological envelope within which Warsaw Pact regimes operated (or were allowed to operate, before the Kremlin jerked their choke-chain), and so we can speculate as to the structure and objectives of the British regime under Actually Existing Socialism.

As with all such governments, Parliament embraced a number of divergent factions—nominally all part of the Communist Party, but in practice splintered between doctrinaire and pragmatist poles. The doctrinaire faction wanted to establish a true socialist state and work towards achieving communism; the pragmatists were more concerned with reconstruction, economic development, and not rocking the boat and thereby inviting Soviet correction (the lessons of East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 did not go un-learned). Nevertheless, both factions agreed on the need for internal monitoring and control of dissent.

Although the regime initially enforced its rule savagely (the number of executions in the immediate post-war consolidation period is believed to be in the high five digits), after Stalin's death it moderated its approach. Control proceeded by surveillance, harassment, and public ridicule of non-active political deviants, with prosecution and imprisonment reserved for those who actively took steps the regime deemed to be "hostile to the security of the state"—questioning the dominant ideology in public, writing pro-democracy or anti-communist tracts, or engaging in a variety of other activities seen as subversive. These included promoting animal rights, protesting against industrial pollution, and complaining about corruption in the administration as well as more overt political right-deviationism.

From the 1990s on, under the policy of New Liberalisation, increasing diversity in public expressions of political sentiment were tolerated as long as they fell within unspoken guidelines. Questioning of the key tenets of Marxism-Leninism was off-limits, and people who published arguments against the dominance of the Governing Party tended to find themselves targeted for tax audits or charged and imprisoned for possession of illegal pornography. Attempts to organize ad-hoc pressure groups on specific issues would only be tolerated if the issues in question did not contradict specific state interests, be they economic or political. The fate of Greenpeace UK remains a particularly salient example of the limits of the regime's tolerance for dissidence, although the protestor's eventual release when their conviction for malicious hooliganism was overturned (after their protest against the acid rain emissions from the Drax B power station was found to have been orchestrated by a police spy operating under instructions from the British Coal Collective) deomnstrates that towards the end of the regime the administration became increasingly concerned with its image, and tended to blame excesses on zealous subordinates rather than crediting them as the inevitable outcome of state policy.

As to the mechanisms ...

The BDPR maintained the traditional British system of local constabularies, augmented by a national-level Security Service derived from the previous organization MI5 (suitably purged). The SS's remit included monitoring of high-profile dissidents and intellectuals, identification of foreign spies and saboteurs, and coordination of action against threats to the state (insofar as the state existed as a vehicle for the Party): it did not generally engage in extralegal assassination or wetwork because by definition the targets of SS monitoring were suspected of crimes against the state and could be prosecuted by the police and courts, thereby maintaining constitutionality and the rule of law.

The Police, for their part, maintained some thousands of active undercover officers who infiltrated illegal groupings, where necessary leading anti-state activity that could be prosecuted.

The London Metropolitan Police acquired responsibility for any national-level activities directly supporting SS operations. This included running the Special Demonstration Squad for monitoring and controlling dissident protestors at non-local events, e.g. protests against global warming or Party corruption (in particular, the revolving door between the Politburo and the well-padded boardrooms of state enterprises).

Telecommunications in the BDPR remained the monopoly of the General Post Office and, later, it's spun-out subsidiary, British Telecom. State enterprises were created to operate three rival cellular mobile phone networks (one of which was reserved for party, police, and military usage). The BT monopoly on connecting terminals to the national trunk backbone was preserved until very late in the process of de-Sovietization, and ensured that the post-BDPR internet architecture of the UK made is particularly easy to insert taps into all routers: these were subsequently mandated under the Communications Data Bill. This permitted the regime to make enormous cost savings by downsizing its army of paid informers from an estimated five million (at peak, circa 1965) to less than 50,000 by the turn of the century, allowing GCHQ to focus on traffic analysis based on metadata logging. In London, in 1970, the GPO had five thousand staff permanently listening in on wiretaps among the capital's estimated 500,000 telephones; by 2005, this had shrunk to an estimated sixty personnel in one call centre, but the capital's 9,200,000 cellular devices all contributed location tracking and call data to the surveillance system.

---

The citizens of the British Democratic People's Republic, languishing under the Communist yoke, were roughly where we are today in terms of their relationship with the panopticon presided over by an entrenched political elite who share a consensus ideology and differ only in their approach to it.

Today, we are dominated by the Washington Consensus (much as the BDPR operated under the unquestionable diktat of the Fifth International). Conservative, Labour, or Liberal Democrat, our main parties are dominated by an elite of wealthy technocrats who all share a common set of assumptions not only about the way the world operates, but about the way the world should operate. To question this neoliberal capitalist consensus singles one out for attention as an enemy of all right-thinking persons just as emphatically as questioning the commissars of the BDPR singled one out during the dark years of the 1970s. We do not have a single governing party riven by factional splits; we have that situation's Rubin Vase counterpart: multiple governing parties united by a common cause.

The tools of the modern surveillance state require fewer direct telephone taps, fewer eyeballs on email, fewer envelopes to be steamed open, and fewer police spies. That is because the machinery of surveillance has largely been automated. The ends of surveillance remain the same in a neoliberal capitalist democracy as they were in a Communist satellite state: the difference in scope and severity of punishment is merely one of degree, not of kind.

A comic about seagulls.

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October 21st, 2014: This "bodies as machines that turn food into ideas" idea was actually well-established way back in 2005 on this here website! T-Rex has considered it and has further OPINIONS on the matter, almost a decade later. :0 – Ryan

Yesterday, Richard and I celebrated our twentieth anniversary by getting married.


It was wonderful, and we’re incredibly happy.

Thank you to all the many lovely people who came to celebrate with us – and many who couldn’t.


Among the huge highlights for us was a reading performed by our lovely friends Nick and Simon. Like the TARDIS, it was something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue – we wrote it ourselves, but over thirty other writers had written it first, before we assembled nearly ninety quotations from Doctor Who into something uniquely us. How many can you identify?

As I can’t be online much for a couple of weeks to say all the things I’d like to about our wedding and my husband, here to keep you busy in the meantime is our reading, which we carefully scheduled for the middle of the wedding breakfast, when people had already had something to eat and drink and were sitting down. You’ll be able to see how the two readers alternated lines as they went along.


Before I get back online, how about putting your guesses in the comments section? Though if you’re like Richard and can place every single one at once, please don’t take the lot (though you can email me to show off if you like. That’s what I’d do).

Oh, and before I go – you were wonderful. And because we were wonderful too, please send us your photos and videos, by email, website, memory stick for the big ones and carrier pigeon (if my Dad’s not eaten them all). We’ve nicked some photos to start with.

Master of Ceremonies: Peoples of the Universe, please attend carefully. The message that follows is vital to the future of you all. Here are Simon Fernandes and Nicholas Campbell with tonight’s reading.

Richard and Alex in an Exciting Adventure with Doctor Who

Of course we’re getting married. Oh, but there’s another man. Always. The Doctor.

The Doctor is impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him.
The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly.
In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around.

Thank you for this. Thank you for my life, for my wedding, and my husband.

By the way, did I mention – it also travels in time?

Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles? Susan and I are cut off from our own planet, without friends or protection. But one day, we shall get back. Yes, one day. One day…

You had to pick a Sunday, didn’t you? You bring me back to ‘Boredom Capitol of the Universe’; you pick the one day of the week you can’t even get a decent television programme.
So what’s so terrible about Stockport?
Nothing ever happens here.

Nothing for you but pitiless damnation for the rest of your lives! Think on it!

The two Silurians were now hot on the Pakhars’ heels, their big clawed feet making good speed along the cobbles. They kept glancing over their shoulders and squealing. ‘Barbarians!’ yelled Jacquilian at the mob behind them. ‘You’d think it was the twenty-first century!’
‘It is the twenty-first century!’ Sanki told him. ‘So let’s not have any of that Earth Reptile Pride rubbish – let’s just find a barn or something and hide!’

I think you’ve been listening to some very bad advice. Well, it’s just possible that you’ve been given a series of orders while you’ve been asleep. You know – do this, do that, do the other thing. My advice to you is don’t do anything of the sort. Don’t just be obedient. Always make up your own mind.

In the end, we all want the same thing; an ordered society, with everyone happy, well-fed… What’s best for Global Chemicals is best for the world – is best for you!
Such as a little touch of brain-washing.
Freedom from fear, freedom from pain…
Freedom from freedom!

I can hear the sound of empires toppling.

Everything is history, if you look at it from the right perspective.

I used to think – ‘I’ll never get married’… But now I’m not so sure.

That was over twenty years ago. Why must you remind me? I offer you – everything.

Still – the future lies this way.

’Pon my Sam – I may have had a bang on the head, but this is a dashed queer story.
Oh, corks!

Why can’t you talk normally?
What? And be just like everyone else?

Redvers has the whole Universe to explore for his catalogue. New horizons, wondrous beasts, light years from Zanzibar!
Doctor, something tells me you are not in our catalogue – nor will you ever be.

‘What’s that?’ Miles asked as she held the paper up.
Piper remembered what the Doctor had told her, and suddenly grinned.
‘Hope,’ she said, as the powder was carried away from them, like a flurry of sparks, upon the wind.

Now that’s much better. I can believe that.

There was a sudden intensity in his eyes. Ace sensed that he wanted to say something.
Mike offered her the bacon sandwich instead.

Vivien is making some sausage sandwiches. Nothing like sausage sandwiches when you’re working something out.

Personally, I have never seen the necessity for starting a meal with a – what was your word?
Hors d’oeuvres.
Ah! Quite unnecessary, in my opinion. Eight – or nine – main dishes are quite enough.

Unlimited rice pudding, et cetera, et cetera!

The only other solution she could think of was impossible — Daleks didn’t and never, ever had eaten crunchy brown finger biscuits.

Let’s try the pub!
Five rounds rapid.
‘What do you want to drink?’
‘What have you got?’ asked Roz.
‘Hey,’ said the table smugly. ‘You name it we’ve got it.’
‘In that case,’ said Bernice, ‘I’ll have an exaggerated sexual innuendo with a dash of patriot’s spirit and extra mushrooms. Roz?’
‘I’ll have the same,’ said Roz, ‘but with an umbrella in it.’
‘Coming right up,’ said the table.

‘The sky appears to be reflective,’ Holmes replied, more hesitantly than usual. ‘Perhaps, like Dante’s inner circle of Hell, we have ice above us. If you look closely, you will see a reflected glow from something over the horizon. The nearest Earthly equivalent would be the lights of a town or city.’ He coughed. ‘I am merely speculating, of course. It could be an incandescent chicken the size of the North Riding for all I know.’

Jamie, I’m being stared at. Is there something wrong with me?
You mean up here, Doctor?
Is my hair in disarray?
What, no more than usual.
Do I look strange or bizarre?
Aye, well, maybe I’m used to you.

You really ought to come and join me, Pex. It’d do you the world of good. There’s really nothing to be frightened of. …Help!

Doctor, look, here what approaches?!
Oh no, run! It is a Taran Beast!
We’ll meet elsewhere. Now flee with haste
You go West, me East!
Exeunt at different sides, pursued by Taran Beast.

I imagine the whole business caused quite a stir.
No, the Cabinet’s accepted my report and the whole affair’s now completely closed.
You mean it never happened.
Well, a fifty-foot monster can’t swim up the Thames and attack a large building without some people noticing – er, but you know what politicians are like.

And even if it did come after him, the Doctor wasn’t too worried. He didn’t have a very high opinion of monsters, however large and powerful.

Doctor, you – you’re being childish.
Well of course I am. There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes. Are you coming?

Am I naked in front of millions of viewers?
Victory should be naked! Rejoice in it. Your body is – magnificent.
Ladies – your viewing figures just went up.

Look, Brigadier! It’s growing!
Look, Brigadier – look. I think it’s started.
Well, here we go again.

Men out there – young men – are dying for it!

Thou craggy knob!

David said, ‘Well, then.’
‘Well then,’ said Chris.
At the far end of the street, hostile armed men came to party, and twenty minutes passed.

Was that bang big enough for you, Brigadier?

No, no, the Zigma Experiment was a success! A brilliant, total success!

In many ways, we have the same mind.


Time’s roses are scented with memory. There was a garden where they once grew. Cuttings from the past grafted on to the present. Perfumes that recalled things long gone or echoed memories yet to come.

Listen to me, both of you. I want you to remember. I want you to remember everything. Every single day with me. Every single second. Because your memories are more powerful than anything else on this planet. Just think of it. Remember it. But properly. Properly. Give the Memory Weave everything. Every – planet, every face, every madman, every loss, every sunset, every scent, every terror, every joy, every Doctor.

My father Sidney was a – a watchmaker from Nottingham, and my mother Verity was – erm – well, she was a nurse, actually.
Oh! We make such good wives.

You probably can’t remember your family.
Oh yes, I can when I want to. And that’s the point, really. I have to really want to, to bring them back in front of my eyes. The rest of the time they – they sleep in my mind, and I forget. And so will you. Oh yes, you will. You’ll find there’s so much else to think about, to remember.
Our lives are different to anybody else’s. That’s the exciting thing. Nobody in the Universe can do what we’re doing.

You know, when you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all, ‘Grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid’, and that’s it. Oh… But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker, and so much madder. And so much better.

Two birds circled each other in the sky above the Lincolnshire marshes. They were owls in love, as much as owls could love.

Are you ready?
If you are.
What? Well, I’d feel more confident if you just said ‘Yes’.
Yes.
Good. Here we go, then.

You look wonderful.
You’d best give me some warning. Um, can you actually dance?
Um… I’m not certain.
There’s a surprise. Is there anything you’re certain about?
Yes. Yes.

And where do you think you’re going?
Well, we’ll have to find out for ourselves, won’t we?

Happy days, my dear.
The happiest of my life, dear heart. Was ever such a potion brewed? In bliss is quenched my thirsty heart.
Very prettily put, my dear.
Oh, sweet, favoured man, you have declared your love for me. And I acknowledge and accept your gentle proposal.

Oh, no, they’re not gonna – oh, people are eating! Nobody over 22 should be doing that in public. Actually, at all.

You see before you the complete killing machine – as beautiful as you, and as deadly as the plague. If only she were real, I’d marry her.
You deserve each other.

Hah! And is not Grendel a faméd coward?
Is the Archimandrite’s hat not silly?
Why then, be gay and deck the hall with spog!
You shall have a husband great or none.

If all the stars were silver, and the sky a giant purse in my fist, I couldn’t be happier than I am tonight.

‘Indeed, Doctor,’ growled the Master. ‘I merely required some time to finish my experiments. I didn’t anticipate the arrival of this maladjusted couple and their wedding plans. I have learnt to be only mildly surprised when you arrive to disrupt my work. But this time you bring with you a full platoon of UNIT troops, numerous armed aliens, an Ice Warrior battlecraft, a couple of Time Lords and Sherlock Holmes! You have excelled yourself!’

I always drezz for the occasion!

Already the Time Lords are gathering, donning seldom-worn robes with their colourful collar insignia. The scarlet and orange of the Prydonians, the green of the Arcalians, and the heliotrope of the Patrexes – and so on.

The latest batch of guests included an upright four-armed blue elephant, who was looking around nervously. ‘Anybody else I know, coming to this wedding?’ he asked.

‘Bestwishesforyourfuturetogetherbut youwillfallbeforethemightofourinvasionforcebythewaywhat
sortofringsarethose?’
Love, the Cybercontroller, Telos.

Don’t mind me. I’m just toasting the happy couple.

Now, remember – enjoy yourselves. Happiness will prevail!

Build high for happiness!

I’m glad you’re happy.
And I’m happy you’re glad.

Sixty million robots danced through the streets of Milky-Pink City. They had never been programmed with dance lessons but what they lacked in style they made up for with enthusiasm. All around, metal limbs twisted with abandon. Tall robots did something that looked like a rumba, lifting robots did the Mashed Potato. And weaving in and out between them raced the Doctor and Martha Jones.

For one vertiginous moment the Dalek Supreme wanted to skip.

Just remember. The future. No looking back, that’s our motto. We’re heading towards a new life… Drive off into the sunset. The future. Adventure. The open road and whatever it might bring.

The sphere experienced, for the first time in its history, the glories of a full cinemascope Technicolor sunset.
Just so Chris and Dep could fly off into it.

So what happens now, then? Tell me what happens now.
In the mid Twenty-First Century, humankind starts creeping off into the stars, spreads its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the Universe. And it endures ’til the end of time. And it does all that because one day in the year 2014, when it had stopped thinking about going to the stars, something occurred that make it look up, not down. It looked out there into the blackness and it saw something beautiful, something – wonderful, that for once it didn’t want to destroy. And in that one moment, the whole course of history was changed.

Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It’s only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds. They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts, and now – here they are out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life, ready to out-sit eternity. They’re indomitable. Indomitable!

In case there is any fear in your heart and doubt in your mind at this awesome moment, let me remind you that you take with you all our pasts. You carry the torch that has been handed down from generation to generation.
The challenge is vast, the task enormous, but let nothing daunt you.

During all the years I’ve been taking care of you, you in return have been taking care of me.
One day, I shall come back – yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.

There are worlds out there where the sky is burning. Where the sea is asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger. Somewhere there’s injustice. And somewhere else, the tea is getting cold.
Come on, Ace – we’ve got work to do.

The light on the TARDIS flashed like a bright idea.
The TARDIS was on its way to new adventures.

It’s far from being all over!

It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for.

It’s a new beginning. And the moment has been prepared for.

Until I’d read this Guardian story about it I’d never heard of KidZania. That was possibly a good thing, because now I’m despairing that we live in a world in which it exists. If you’ve never heard of it until now, here’s how they describe themselves:

KidZania provides children and their parents a safe, unique, and very realistic educational environment that allows kids between the ages of four to twelve to do what comes naturally to them: role-playing by mimicking traditionally adult activities. As in the real world, children perform “jobs” and are either paid for their work (as a fireman, doctor, police officer, journalist, shopkeeper, etc.) or pay to shop or to be entertained. The indoor theme park is a city built to scale for children, complete with buildings, paved streets, vehicles, a functioning economy, and recognizable destinations in the form of “establishments” sponsored and branded by leading multi-national and local brands.

Yes, your kids can have a fun day out learning that their lives will be worthless unless they hand themselves over to a multinational brand. KidZania, it seems, allows kids to have a small amount of fun at the start, but then they have to go and earn themselves some ‘KidZos’ by working before they can do anything else. Yes, someone’s finally found a way to drain all the fun out of kids dressing up and role-playing, and made sure it’s now a ‘learning experience’ where kids can ‘acquire real-life skills, learn about working and having a career and are introduced to the fundamentals of financial literacy’. Because that’s a fun day out, not a hideous penetration of the adult world into the child’s. What is wrong with letting children just have a good time? In other contexts, child labour is a bad thing, yet somehow KidZania strives to make it acceptable.

I’ve written before about how we’ve let workism conquer the world, and this is a perfect example of it. People don’t usually accept and adopt ideologies out of the blue, and they often just accept the ideologies they’re exposed to as a child. Just like Soviet children could join the Young Pioneers to develop Marxism-Leninism from an early age, so KidZania can instil the value of workism and loyalty to corporations from an early age. There’s something sickeningly admirable in how it takes something kids already do by themselves, removes all the imagination from it, sticks some advertising on top and then charges for the privilege of doing it. (And, of course, makes sure that the parents have plenty of opportunities to spend their money in the nearby shops while their kids are kept busy)

I’m all for giving kids a chance to play in their own world and not be told what to do by adults, but KidZania is only pretending to be that. Read through their site and you’ll find that this supposedly child-run world is anything but:

“Zupervisors” are on hand to introduce AND provide support for each activity. Zupervisors are trained adults who guide and help kids accomplish their tasks as they work and play.

Everything in KidZania is planned out and organised, with children being led through an experience, not set free to discover for themselves. It’s perhaps a perfect metaphor for a world run by workism, where big corporations have laid out the unalterable framework of experience and everyone’s task is to process along the appointed routes, with supervisors in place to make sure no one wanders too far from the crowd. Notice that the ‘jobs’ on offer are all about working for someone in a prescribed role, not about anything involving creativity, individuality, learning for its own sake or researching.

All it needs to completely represent their future is to allow rich parents to buy currency for their children so they don’t have to do any work while they’re there and can just enjoy watching all the others work while they don’t have to, but still get all the rewards. Or maybe that would lead to the kids learning too much too young?

The opposition between town and country is a perennial obsession of modern Western narrative art.  The idea of the division becoming diffuse and permeable, of the one bleeding through into the other, appears to be deeply threatening.  For Titus Andronicus, in a play in which precisely this bleeding effect occurs, Rome's degradation leads it to become a "wilderness of tigers".

This obsession is one that began at around the same time as modern map making.  

What people don't realise is that maps lie to us.  They present a geographical landscape which is profoundly at odds with human psychic landscapes.

We think of the town having borders, beyond which there lies the country.  No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.  We think of the country as a great field of emptiness between cities and towns.  No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.

What actually happens is that the further you venture into the country, the more country you find.  The country isn't a two-dimensional field, it is a three-dimension well which stretches ever downwards into more of itself.  Like the fractals generated by the Mandelbrot Set, the further you go into the country, the more it expands out ahead of you.  The more you sink down into it.  The towns get smaller, the desolation gets more and more desolate, the isolation gets more and more isolated.  The sinister vibe gets more and more sinister. 

The city, meanwhile, has no borders.  It is carried across all borders inside the mind of the city-dweller.  And all cities are connected.  If you walk far enough into London you will eventually find yourself in Paris or New York or Rome.  The more you walk into any city, the more you walk into its history, and the history of every city is the history of its relationship with other cities.  Walk far enough into modern London and you eventually find yourself in ancient Rome.

[EDIT 10/27: Slight changes in response to feedback; correcting some definitions. I am not an expert in this field and will continue to make changes as I learn about them. There is a critique of this post here and other worse critiques elsewhere. My only excuse for doing this is that I am failing less spectacularly than other online sources writing about the same topic.]

I’ve worked with doctors who think Alcoholics Anonymous is so important for the treatment of alcoholism that anyone who refuses to go at least three times a week is in denial about their problem and can’t benefit from further treatment.

I’ve also worked with doctors who are so against the organization that they describe it as a “cult” and say that a physician who recommends it is no better than one who recommends crystal healing or dianetics.

I finally got so exasperated that I put on my Research Cap and started looking through the evidence base.

My conclusion, after several hours of study, is that now I understand why most people don’t do this.

The studies surrounding Alcoholics Anonymous are some of the most convoluted, hilariously screwed-up research I have ever seen. They go wrong in ways I didn’t even realize research could go wrong before. Just to give some examples:

– In several studies, subjects in the “not attending Alcoholics Anonymous” condition attended Alcoholics Anonymous more than subjects in the “attending Alcoholics Anonymous” condition.

– Almost everyone’s belief about AA’s retention rate is off by a factor of five because one person long ago misread a really confusing graph and everyone else copied them without double-checking.

– The largest study ever in the field, a $30 million effort over 8 years following thousands of patients, had no untreated control group.

Not only are the studies poor, but the people interpreting them are heavily politicized. The entire field of addiction medicine has gotten stuck in the middle of some of the most divisive issues in our culture, like whether addiction is a biological disease or a failure of willpower, whether problems should be solved by community and peer groups or by highly trained professionals, and whether there’s a role for appealing to a higher power in any public organization. AA’s supporters see it as a scruffy grassroots organization of real people willing to get their hands dirty, who can cure addicts failed time and time again by a system of glitzy rehabs run by arrogant doctors who think their medical degrees make them better than people who have personally fought their own battles. Opponents see it as this awful cult that doesn’t provide any real treatment and just tells addicts that they’re terrible people who will never get better unless they sacrifice their identity to the collective.

As a result, the few sparks of light the research kindles are ignored, taken out of context, or misinterpreted.

The entire situation is complicated by a bigger question. We will soon find that AA usually does not work better or worse than various other substance abuse interventions. That leaves the sort of question that all those fancy-shmancy people with control groups in their studies don’t have to worry about – does anything work at all?

I.

We can start by just taking a big survey of people in Alcoholics Anonymous and seeing how they’re doing. On the one hand, we don’t have a control group. On the other hand…well, there really is no other hand, but people keep doing it.

According to AA’s own surveys, one-third of new members drop out by the end of their first month, half by the end of their third month, and three-quarters by the end of their first year. “Drop out” means they don’t go to AA meetings anymore, which could be for any reason including (if we’re feeling optimistic) them being so completely cured they no longer feel they need it.

There is an alternate reference going around that only 5% (rather than 25%) of AA members remain after their first year. This is a mistake caused by misinterpreting a graph showing that only five percent of members in their first year were in their twelfth month of membership, which is obviously completely different. Nevertheless, a large number of AA hate sites (and large rehabs!) cite the incorrect interpretation, for example the Orange Papers and RationalWiki’s page on Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, just to keep things short, assume RationalWiki’s AA page makes every single mistake I warn against in the rest of this article, then use that to judge them in general. On the other hand, Wikipedia gets it right and I continue to encourage everyone to use it as one of the most reliable sources of medical information available to the public (I wish I was joking).

This retention information isn’t very helpful, since people can remain in AA without successfully quitting drinking, and people may successfully quit drinking without being in AA. However, various different sources suggest that, of people who stay in AA a reasonable amount of time, about half stop being alcoholic. These numbers can change wildly depending on how you define “reasonable amount of time” and “stop being alcoholic”. Here is a table, which I have cited on this blog before and will probably cite again:

Behold. Treatments that look very impressive (80% improved after six months!) turn out to be the same or worse as the control group. And comparing control group to control group, you can find that “no treatment” can appear to give wildly different outcomes (from 20% to 80% “recovery”) depending on what population you’re looking at and how you define “recovery”.

Twenty years ago, it was extremely edgy and taboo for a reputable scientist to claim that alcoholics could recover on their own. This has given way to the current status quo, in which pretty much everyone in the field writes journal articles all the time about how alcoholics can recover on their own, but make sure to harp upon how edgy and taboo they are for doing so. From these sorts of articles, we learn that about 80% of recovered alcoholics have gotten better without treatment, and many of them are currently able to drink moderately without immediately relapsing (something else it used to be extremely taboo to mention). Kate recently shared an good article about this: Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out Of It: Why Is This Widely Denied?

Anyway, all this stuff about not being able to compare different populations, and the possibility of spontaneous recovery, just mean that we need controlled experiments. The largest number of these take a group of alcoholics, follow them closely, and then evaluate all of them – the AA-attending and the non-AA-attending – according to the same criteria. For example Morgenstern et al (1997), Humphreys et al (1997) and Moos (2006). Emrick et al (1993) is a meta-analyses of a hundred seventy three of these. All of these find that the alcoholics who end up going to AA meetings are much more likely to get better than those who don’t. So that’s good evidence the group is effective, right?

Bzzzt! No! Wrong! Selection bias!

People who want to quit drinking are more likely to go to AA than people who don’t want to quit drinking. People who want to quit drinking are more likely to actually quit drinking than those who don’t want to. This is a serious problem. Imagine if it is common wisdom that AA is the best, maybe the only, way to quit drinking. Then 100% of people who really want to quit would attend compared to 0% of people who didn’t want to quit. And suppose everyone who wants to quit succeeds, because secretly, quitting alcohol is really easy. Then 100% of AA members would quit, compared to 0% of non-members – the most striking result it is mathematically possible to have. And yet AA would not have made a smidgeon of difference.

But it’s worse than this, because attending AA isn’t just about wanting to quit. It’s also about having the resources to make it to AA. That is, wealthier people are more likely to hear about AA (better information networks, more likely to go to doctor or counselor who can recommend) and more likely to be able to attend AA (better access to transportation, more flexible job schedules). But wealthier people are also known to be better at quitting alcohol than poor people – either because the same positive personal qualities that helped them achieve success elsewhere help them in this battle as well, or just because they have fewer other stressors going on in their lives driving them to drink.

Finally, perseverance is a confounder. To go to AA, and to keep going for months and months, means you’ve got the willpower to drag yourself off the couch to do a potentially unpleasant thing. That’s probably the same willpower that helps you stay away from the bar.

And then there’s a confounder going the opposite direction. The worse your alcoholism is, the more likely you are to, as the organization itself puts it, “admit you have a problem”.

These sorts of longitudinal studies are almost useless and the field has mostly moved away from them. Nevertheless, if you look on the pro-AA sites, you will find them in droves, and all of them “prove” the organization’s effectiveness.

III.

It looks like we need randomized controlled trials. And we have them. Sort of.

Brandsma (1980) is the study beloved of the AA hate groups, since it purports to show that people in Alcoholics Anonymous not only don’t get better, but are nine times more likely to binge drink than people who don’t go into AA at all.

There are a number of problems with this conclusion. First of all, if you actually look at the study, this is one of about fifty different findings. The other findings are things like “88% of treated subjects reported a reduction in drinking, compared to 50% of the untreated control group”.

Second of all, the increased binge drinking was significant at the 6 month followup period. It was not significant at the end of treatment, the 3 month followup period, the 9 month followup period, or the 12 month followup period. Remember, taking a single followup result out of the context of the other followup results is a classic piece of Dark Side Statistics and will send you to Science Hell.

Of multiple different endpoints, Alcoholics Anonymous did better than no treatment on almost all of them. It did worse than other treatments on some of them (dropout rates, binge drinking, MMPI scale) and the same as other treatments on others (abstinent days, total abstinence).

If you are pro-AA, you can say “Brandsma study proves AA works!”. If you are anti-AA, you can say “Brandsma study proves AA works worse than other treatments!”, although in practice most of these people prefer to quote extremely selective endpoints out of context.

However, most of the patients in the Brandsma study were people convicted of alcohol-related crimes ordered to attend treatment as part of their sentence. Advocates of AA make a good point that this population might be a bad fit for AA. They may not feel any personal motivation to treatment, which might be okay if you’re going to listen to a psychologist do therapy with you, but fatal for a self-help group. Since the whole point of AA is being in a community of like-minded individuals, if you don’t actually feel any personal connection to the project of quitting alcohol, it will just make you feel uncomfortable and out of place.

Also, uh, this just in, Brandsma didn’t use a real AA group, because the real AA groups make people be anonymous which makes it inconvenient to research stuff. He just sort of started his own non-anonymous group, let’s call it A, with no help from the rest of the fellowship, and had it do Alcoholics Anonymous-like stuff. On the other hand, many members of his control group went out into the community and…attended a real Alcoholics Anonymous, because Brandsma can’t exactly ethically tell them not to. So technically, there were more people in AA in the no-AA group than in the AA group. Without knowing more about Alcoholics Anonymous, I can’t know whether this objection is valid and whether Brandsma’s group did or didn’t capture the essence of the organization. Still, not the sort of thing you want to hear about a study.

Walsh et al (1991) is a similar study with similar confounders and similar results. Workers in an industrial plant who were in trouble for coming in drunk were randomly assigned either to an inpatient treatment program or to Alcoholics Anonymous. After a year of followup, 60% of the inpatient-treated workers had stayed sober, but only 30% of the AA-treated workers had.

The pro-AA side made three objections to this study, of which one is bad and two are good.

The bad objection was that AA is cheaper than hospitalization, so even if hospitalization is good, AA might be more efficient – after all, we can’t afford to hospitalize everyone. It’s a bad objection because the authors of the study did the math and found out that hospitalization was so much better than AA that it decreased the level of further medical treatment needed and saved the health system more money than it cost.

The first good objection: like the Brandsma study, this study uses people under coercion – in this case, workers who would lose their job if they refused. Fine.

The second good objection, and this one is really interesting: a lot of inpatient hospital rehab is AA. That is, when you go to an hospital for inpatient drug treatment, you attend AA groups every day, and when you leave, they make you keep going to the AA groups. In fact, the study says that “at the 12 month and 24 month assessments, the rates of AA affiliation and attendance in the past 6 months did not differ significantly among the groups.” Given that the hospital patients got hospital AA + regular AA, they were actually getting more AA than the AA group!

So all that this study proves is that AA + more AA + other things is better than AA. There was no “no AA” group, which makes it impossible to discuss how well AA does or doesn’t work. Frick.

Timko (2006) is the only study I can hesitantly half-endorse. This one has a sort of clever methodological trick to get around the limitation that doctors can’t ethically refuse to refer alcoholics to treatment. In this study, researchers at a Veterans’ Affairs hospital randomly assigned alcoholic patients to “referral” or “intensive referral”. In “referral”, the staff asked the patients to go to AA. In “intensive referral”, the researchers asked REALLY NICELY for the patients to go to AA, and gave them nice glossy brochures on how great AA was, and wouldn’t shut up about it, and arranged for them to meet people at their first AA meeting so they could have friends in AA, et cetera, et cetera. The hope was that more people in the “intensive referral” group would end out in AA, and that indeed happened scratch that, I just re-read the study and the same number of people in both groups went to AA and the intensive group actually completed a lower number of the 12 Steps on average, have I mentioned I hate all research and this entire field is terrible? But the intensive referral people were more likely to have “had a spiritual awakening” and “have a sponsor”, so it was decided the study wasn’t a complete loss and when it was found the intensive referral condition had slightly less alcohol use the authors decided to declare victory.

So, whereas before we found that AA + More AA was better than AA, and that proved AA didn’t work, in this study we find that AA + More AA was better than AA, and that proves AA does work. You know, did I say I hesitantly half-endorsed this study? Scratch that. I hate this study too.

IV.

All right, @#%^ this $@!&*. We need a real study, everything all lined up in a row, none of this garbage. Let’s just hire half the substance abuse scientists in the country, throw a gigantic wad of money at them, give them as many patients as they need, let them take as long as they want, but barricade the doors of their office and not let them out until they’ve proven something important beyond a shadow of a doubt.

This was about how the scientific community felt in 1989, when they launched Project MATCH. This eight-year, $30 million dollar, multi-thousand patient trial was supposed to solve everything.

The people going into Project MATCH might have been a little overconfident. Maybe “not even Zeus could prevent this study from determining the optimal treatment for alcohol addiction” overconfident. This might have been a mistake.

The study was designed with three arms, one for each of the popular alcoholism treatments of the day. The first arm would be “twelve step facilitation”, a form of therapy based off of Alcoholics Anonymous. The second arm would be cognitive behavioral therapy, the most bog-standard psychotherapy in the world and one which by ancient tradition must be included in any kind of study like this. The third arm would be motivational enhancement therapy, which is a very short intervention where your doctor tells you all the reasons you should quit alcohol and tries to get you to convince yourself.

There wasn’t a “no treatment” arm. This is where the overconfidence might have come in. Everyone knew alcohol treatment worked. Surely you couldn’t dispute that. They just wanted to see which treatment worked best for which people. So you would enroll a bunch of different people – rich, poor, black, white, married, single, chronic alcoholic, new alcoholic, highly motivated, unmotivated – and see which of these people did best in which therapy. The result would be an algorithm for deciding where to send each of your patients. Rich black single chronic unmotivated alcoholic? We’ve found with p

So, eight years and thirty million dollars and the careers of several prestigious researchers later, the results come in, and - yeah, everyone does exactly the same on every kind of therapy (with one minor, possibly coincidental exception). Awkward.

“Everybody has won and all must have prizes!”. If you’re an optimist, you can say all treatments work and everyone can keep doing whatever they like best. If you’re a pessimist, you might start wondering whether anything works at all.

By my understanding this is also the confusing conclusion of Ferri, Amato & Davoli (2006), the Cochrane Collaboration’s attempt to get in on the AA action. Like all Cochrane Collaboration studies since the beginning of time, they find there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of the intervention being investigated. This has been oft-quoted in the anti-AA literature. But by my reading, they had no control groups and were comparing AA to different types of treatment:

Three studies compared AA combined with other interventions against other treatments and found few differences in the amount of drinks and percentage of drinking days. Severity of addiction and drinking consequence did not seem to be differentially influenced by TSF versus comparison treatment interventions, and no conclusive differences in treatment drop out rates were reported.

So the two best sources we have – Project MATCH and Cochrane – don’t find any significant differences between AA and other types of therapy. Now, to be fair, the inpatient treatment mentioned in Walsh et al wasn’t included, and inpatient treatment might be the gold standard here. But sticking to various forms of outpatient intervention, they all seem to be about the same.

So, the $64,000 question: do all of them work well, or do all of them work poorly?

V.

Alcoholism studies avoid control groups like they are on fire, presumably because it’s unethical not to give alcoholics treatment or something. However, there is one class of studies that doesn’t have that problem. These are the ones on “brief opportunistic intervention”, which is much like a turbocharged even shorter version of “motivational enhancement therapy”. Your doctor tells you ‘HELLO HAVE YOU CONSIDERED QUITTING ALCOHOL??!!’ and sees what happens.

Brief opportunistic intervention is the most trollish medical intervention ever, because here are all these brilliant psychologists and counselors trying to unravel the deepest mysteries of the human psyche in order to convince people to stop drinking, and then someone comes along and asks “Hey, have you tried just asking them politely?”. And it works.

Not consistently. But it works for about one in eight people. And the theory is that since it only takes a minute or two of a doctor’s time, it scales a lot faster than some sort of hideously complex hospital-based program that takes thousands of dollars and dozens of hours from everyone involved. If doctors would just spend five minutes with each alcoholic patient reminding them that no, really, alcoholism is really bad, we could cut the alcoholism rate by 1/8.

(this also works for smoking, by the way. I do this with every single one of my outpatients who smoke, and most of the time they roll their eyes, because their doctor is giving them that speech, but every so often one of them tells me that yeah, I’m right, they know they really should quit smoking and they’ll give it another try. I have never saved anyone’s life by dramatically removing their appendix at the last possible moment, but I have gotten enough patients to promise me they’ll try quitting smoking that I think I’ve saved at least one life just by obsessively doing brief interventions every chance I get. This is probably the most effective life-saving thing you can do as a doctor, enough so that if you understand it you may be licensed to ignore 80,000 Hours’ arguments on doctor replaceability)

Anyway, for some reason, it’s okay to do these studies with control groups. And they are so fast and easy to study that everyone studies them all the time. A meta-analysis of 19 studies is unequivocal that they definitely work.

Why do these work? My guess is that they do two things. First, they hit people who honestly didn’t realize they had a problem, and inform them that they do. Second, the doctor usually says they’ll “follow up on how they’re doing” the next appointment. This means that a respected authority figure is suddenly monitoring their drinking and will glare at them if they stay they’re still alcoholic. As someone who has gone into a panic because he has a dentist’s appointment in a week and he hasn’t been flossing enough – and then flossed until his teeth were bloody so the dentist wouldn’t be disappointed – I can sympathize with this.

But for our purposes, the brief opportunistic intervention sets a lower bound. It says “Here’s a really minimal thing that seems to work. Do other things work better than this?”

The “brief treatment” is the next step up from brief intervention. It’s an hour-or-so-long session (or sometimes a couple such sessions) with a doctor or counselor where they tell you some tips for staying off alcohol. I bring it up here because the brief treatment research community spends its time doing studies that show that brief treatments are just as good as much more intense treatments. This might be most comparable to the “motivational enhancement therapy” in the MATCH study.

Chapman and Huygens (1988) find that a single interview with a health professional is just as good as six weeks of inpatient treatment (I don’t know about their hospital in New Zealand, but for reference six weeks of inpatient treatment in my hospital costs about $40,000.)

Edwards (1977) finds that in a trial comparing “conventional inpatient or outpatient treatment complete with the full panoply of services available at a leading psychiatric institution and lasting several months” versus an hour with a doc, both groups do the same at one and two year followup.

And so on.

All of this is starting to make my head hurt, but it’s a familiar sort of hurt. It’s the way my head hurts when Scott Aaronson talks about complexity classes. We have all of these different categories of things, and some of them are the same as others and others are bigger than others but we’re not sure exactly where all of them stand.

We have classes “no treatment”, “brief opportunistic intervention”, “brief treatment”, “Alcoholics Anonymous”, “psychotherapy”, and “inpatient”.

We can prove that BOI > NT, and that AA = PT. Also that BT = IP = PT. We also have that IP > AA, which unfortunately we can use to prove a contradiction, so let’s throw it out for now.

So the hierarchy of classes seems to be (NT) somewhere in there we have this class of everything else that is the same.

Can we prove that BOI = BT?

We have some good evidence for this, once again from our Handbook. A study in Edinburgh finds that five minutes of psychiatrist advice (brief opportunistic intervention) does the same as sixty minutes of advice plus motivational interviewing (brief treatment).

So if we take all this seriously, then it looks like every psychosocial treatment (including brief opportunistic intervention) is the same, and all are better than no treatment. This is a common finding in psychiatry and psychology – for example, all common antidepressants are better than no treatment but work about equally well; all psychotherapies are better than no treatment but work about equally well, et cetera. It’s still an open question what this says about our science and our medicine.

The strongest counterexample to this is Walsh et al which finds the inpatient hospital stay works better than the AA referral, but this study looks kind of lonely compared to the evidence on the other side. And even the authors admit they were surprised by the effectiveness of the hospital there.

And let’s go back to Project MATCH. There wasn’t a control group. But there were the people who dropped out of the study, who said they’d go to AA or psychotherapy but never got around to it. Cutter and Fishbain (2005) take a look at what happened to these folks. They find that the dropouts did 75% as well as the people in any of the therapy groups, and that most of the effect of the therapy groups occurred in the first week (ie people dropped out after one week did about 95% as well as people who stayed in).

To me this suggests two things. First, therapy is only a little helpful over most people quitting on their own. Second, insofar as therapy is helpful, the tiniest brush with therapy is enough to make someone think “Okay, I’ve had some therapy, I’ll be better now”. Just like with the brief opportunistic interventions, five minutes of almost anything is enough.

This is a weird conclusion, but I think it’s the one supported by the data.

VI.

I should include a brief word about this giant table.

I see it everywhere. It looks very authoritative and impressive and, of course, giant. I believe the source is Miller’s Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches: Effective Alternatives, 3rd Edition, the author of which is known as a very careful scholar whom I cannot help but respect.

And the table does a good thing in discussing medications like acamprosate and naltrexone, which are very important and effective interventions but which will not otherwise be showing up in this post.

However, the therapy part of the table looks really wrong to me.

First of all, I notice acupuncture is ranked 17 out of 48, putting in a much, much better showing than treatments like psychotherapy, counseling, or education. Seems fishy.

Second of all, I notice that motivational enhancement (#2), cognitive therapy (#13), and twelve-step (#37) are all about as far apart as could be, but the largest and most powerful trial ever, Project MATCH, found all three to be about equal in effectiveness.

Third of all, I notice that cognitive therapy is at #13, but psychotherapy is at #46. But cognitive therapy is a kind of psychotherapy.

Fourth of all, I notice that brief interventions, motivational enhancement, confrontational counseling, psychotherapy, general alcoholism counseling, and education are all over. But a lot of these are hard to differentiate from one another.

The table seems messed up to me. Part of it is because it is about evidence base rather than effectiveness (consider that handguns have a stronger evidence base than the atomic bomb, since they have been used many more times in much better controlled conditions, but the atomic bomb is more effective) and therefore acupuncture, which is poorly studied, can rank quite high compared to things which have even one negative study.

But part of it just seems wrong. I haven’t read the full book, but I blame the tendency to conflate studies showing “X does not work better than anything else” with “X does not work”.

Remember, whenever there are meta-analyses that contradict single very large well-run studies, go with the single very large well-run study, especially when the meta-analysis is as weird as this one. Project MATCH is the single very large well-run study, and it says this is balderdash. I’m guessing it’s trying to use some weird algorithmic methodology to automatically rate and judge each study, but that’s no substitute for careful human review.

VII.

In conclusion, as best I can tell – and it is not very well, because the studies that could really prove anything robustly haven’t been done – most alcoholics get better on their own. All treatments for alcoholism, including Alcoholics Anonymous, psychotherapy, and just a few minutes with a doctor explaining why she thinks you need to quit, increase this already-high chance of recovery a small but nonzero amount. Furthermore, they are equally effective after only a tiny dose: your first couple of meetings, your first therapy session. Some studies suggest that inpatient treatment with outpatient followup may be better than outpatient treatment alone, but other studies contradict this and I am not confident in the assumption.

So does Alcoholics Anonymous work? Though I cannot say anything authoritatively, my impression is: Yes, but only a tiny bit, and for many people five minutes with a doctor may work just as well as years completing the twelve steps. As such, individual alcoholics may want to consider attending if they don’t have easier options; doctors might be better off just talking to their patients themselves.

If this is true – and right now I don’t have much confidence that it is, it’s just a direction that weak and contradictory data are pointing – it would be really awkward for the multibazillion-dollar treatment industry.

More worrying, I am afraid of what it would do to the War On Drugs. Right now one of the rallying cries for the anti-Drug-War movement is “treatment, not prison”. And although I haven’t looked seriously at the data for any drug besides alcohol. I think some data there are similar. There’s very good medication for drugs – for example methadone and suboxone for opiate abuse – but in terms of psychotherapy it’s mostly the same stuff you get for alcohol. Rehabs, whether they work or not, seem to serve an important sort of ritual function, where if you can send a drug abuser to a rehab you at least feel like something has been done. Deny people that ritual, and it might make prison the only politically acceptable option.

In terms of things to actually treat alcoholism, I remain enamoured of the Sinclair Method, which has done crazy outrageous stuff like conduct an experiment with an actual control group. But I haven’t investigated enough to know whether my early excitement about them looks likely to pan out or not.

I would not recommend quitting any form of alcohol treatment that works for you, or refusing to try a form of treatment your doctor recommends, based on any of this information.

Have I Got News For You has been on the air for twenty-four years, and last night it managed to do something it’s never done before. For the first time ever last night, the majority of people on screen for an episode of the show were women – Victoria Coren Mitchell as the host, and Katherine Ryan and Janet Street-Porter as the guests, alongside regulars Ian Hislop and Paul Merton. As I’m here to write this today, it appears the sky didn’t crack asunder and the world did not come to an end as a result.

As some of you will know, I’ve got a spreadsheet of the gender breakdown of guests on the show since it started (created mostly with the help of this Wikipedia page) and it’s usually been pretty grim reading.

Across the history of the show, less than a quarter of the guests (24.27%) and hosts (24.65%) have been women. During that time, there have been 8 shows (including last night) where all the guests were women, but the first seven were all from the period when Angus Deayton was the show’s permanent host and thus men were still a majority on screen. The last of those seven was in 1997. For comparison, there have been 181 shows (44% of the total) where all the guests were male, and thus everyone on screen was a male. The BBC has announced that there will be no more all-male panel shows, so this percentage will drop, but the fact it happened at all is ridiculous. Consider that in the time since the last show with all-female guests, there were over 100 all-male episodes of Have I Got News For You, and think what message that sends out to anyone watching.

Hopefully, last night is a sign that attitudes are changing, though I also fear that for years to come they’ll bring up the ‘all-woman’ show as an excuse for not doing it again for several years. This series might be the one that has the highest percentage of female guests on the show, a record which currently stands at 37.5%. The trouble for anyone hoping for progress is that that record was set back in the very first series of the show, and it’s failed to reach that mark in the 46 series since.

The current series is actually at parity for the four episodes broadcast so far – and there have actually been a majority of female hosts in those episodes – so who knows, it might finally be possible for a high-profile BBC series to almost accurately reflect the nation. (If we assume that 40% of the country are Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, of course…)

I was sorry to hear of the death of Alvin Stardust. His first hit reminds me of my first months in Market Harborough. The song was played for what seemed like months by Radio Luxembourg before the BBC took it up and made it a hit.

Rather improbably, I find that he inspired one of my columns for Liberal Democrat News back in 2006.

So, by way of a tribute here it is again. The investigation into Lord Levy came to nothing, though all parties sell honours to some extent.

Identity crisis

Identity can be a complicated business. Take the case of young Bernard Jewry, who developed a love of rock music and hung out with a band called Johnny Theakston and the Tremeloes. In 1959 the band sent a tape to the BBC under the name Shane Fenton and the Beat Boys. Then tragedy struck: Johnny died.

When the BBC wrote back asking Shane Fenton and his band to play on a live radio programme Bernard Jewry became the new Shane Fenton - he even changed his name by deed poll - and a pop career was launched.

But musical fashions change, and after four hits Shane Fenton faded from view. Until in 1973 he was reborn as Alvin Stardust with the single "My Coo Ca Choo".

There are two reasons why the career of Bernard Jewry/Shane Fenton/Alvin Stardust is topical.

The first is that makes you wonder how the government's identity card scheme would cope with him. According to Joan Ryan at home office questions on Monday, everything is in on course. Cards will be phased in from 2008. "I repeat: 2008," she added, on the basis that if you say something often enough it must be true.

If you prefer to believe the officials working on the scheme, then the current plans are not remotely feasible. According to leaked e-mails, they fear a botched introduction that could delay ID cards for a generation.

Of course, for Liberal Democrats that would be very good news. But we must be wary of relying solely upon government incompetence to see ID cards off. We must continue to argue about the principle, showing people how these cards threaten a fundamental alteration in the relations between citizens and the state.

The second reason for being interested in Alvin Stardust is that his manager was a streetwise young accountant called Michael Levy. Today he is better known as Lord Levy.

What would people in 1973 have made of the idea that one day Alvin Stardust's manager would be arrested and there would be excited talk of the prime minister resigning?

Lord Levy once said that he and the prime minister were "like brothers". I doubt he would say that now. Tony Blair will have to find someone else to be his coo ca choo.

Take it away, Alvin...

(Trigger warning: discussion of food, specifically the issues I have in making food happen. Oh, and today’s song-title-used-as-blog-title comes from here!)

In a shocking plot twist, I promised blog posts in a certain time-frame and have actually delivered for once! If all goes to plan, blog posts will be written and published on Wednesday evenings like clockwork until at least Christmas. Well, almost clockwork – at some point I’m bound to miss one, or I’ll be busy doing something else, or something along those lines – but to start with, I need to follow my new “on Wednesday evenings, I blog” rule so that it becomes a norm. Because at the moment, I am in serious need of some routine. So, why is it that many autistic people often plan and stick to fairly rigid routines? Obviously I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I have a number of reasons. Long-term, one major reason is fear of uncertainty which essentially boils down to fear of sensory overload/not handling it/whatever else – in other words, problems with the nature of the deviation – but in this post, I’m going to focus on the routines themselves. It might be helpful to first read Musings Of An Aspie’s summary of executive function and recent post on the spoon theory.

At the moment, I’m on a new course in a new university in a new city in a new country, so in many ways I’m starting from scratch. The baseline – the straightforward bit – is formed by everything that needs to take place at certain times, so in my case that’s lectures and classes. They’re all planned out for me. But once they’ve been slotted in, I’m left with a finite block of time in which to do the work for the classes, socialise enough to not feel massively left out, blog, complete a couple of application forms for summer internships, vaguely attempt to keep up with Tumblr and my main fandoms, buy and cook and eat food, sleep, keep the place clean… Yep, it looks like I’m officially grown up. Contrary to popular belief, autistic adults exist! Anyway, if I leave it at “this is your time, this is what you need and want to do with it, go”, I will forget things. I’ll forget to blog, and then end up leaving it for weeks at a time. Or I’ll forget about applying for internships, so they won’t happen. Or, who knows, I might forget to eat, which evidently shouldn’t happen. Setting up vaguely regular times at which to do these things means I’m more likely to actually do them. The other issue with leaving myself with just an amount of time and a list of things to do with it is overload – half the time I already feel like there’s too much going on to process, so the sheer number of things I need to keep in my head means it all seems completely impossible and consequently none of it gets done. To the point that yesterday, when a special interest decided to rear its head completely out of the blue, my immediate thought was “great, another thing I’ll have to deal with” and clearly that’s not ideal!!

As a student, I’ve got used to regular cycles of new baseline of contact hours -> previous routine no longer available -> PANIC -> eventually create new routines and consequently sort my life out. The current situation is of course a little different – I’m not in the same place with a different timetable, I’m somewhere completely new and that means the general sorting-my-life out is a slow and ongoing process – but the principles are the same. It often takes quite some time to sort out; one Friday evening, I cleaned the room and thought “I’ll clean my room on Friday evenings after the lecture” but the following week, it became apparent that if I was going out on a Friday night cleaning probably wouldn’t happen so cleaning day was revised to Sunday, only for that day to end up being really busy in terms of doing the reading for the classes, so it’s been revised (as of today) to Wednesday. Meanwhile, last week, I realised I’d have my essays out of the way by Wednesday, and therefore I’d have a decent block of time to write a blog post; so now posts will be published on Wednesday evenings, and this set time should hopefully ensure that I actually do bother to write posts regularly! Everything else, over the coming weeks, will gradually also begin to slot into place.

…And once all that’s sorted, there’s the small matter of the self care stuff you literally have to do to survive. Like eating. Food is hard. On the one hand, the standard vague socially acceptable mealtimes means there’s sort of already a routine in place for remembering to eat. On the other hand, first you need to work out what you’re going to have. And buy everything you need, if you don’t have it already. And then have time and energy left over to actually make it. Sounds simple, but for some reason it never has been. The solution, as thought up earlier today: like everything else, planning ahead. I should know, when I’m buying food, what I’m going to have for dinner for the next couple of days. I should consider that on Tuesday I only have just over an hour in between classes in the evening, on Wednesday I’ll have just finished two late nights writing essays, on Thursday I won’t get home until fairly late, etc, etc. My cooking skills are somewhere just marginally above non-existent, so perhaps once a week (provisionally Fridays or Saturdays) I should try and do something different, because increasing my options is surely only going to make things easier.

It’s a slow process, but once I’ve got routines for most things, I don’t tend to have any problems with sometimes deviating from them, as long as it’s expected and vaguely prepared for. It’s just a matter of waiting for a plan that works, and knowing that eventually, everything will be so much easier.

Tagged: actuallyautistic, asperger's syndrome, Autism, change, executive function, food tw, routines

It is a complicated world, and today’s worker, student, and/or working student intern has to memorize more data points than ever to prove useful to his instructor/employer.  In the internet age, when all data is instantly accessible to everyone at all times, you might think that rote memorization would be increasingly less important, and that we might turn our minds over to such frivolous pursuits as self-actualization, critical thinking, or plotting the perfect crime.  But studies have shown again and again that employers are not looking for people who have started to wonder why they have to go to an office eight hours a day to do work they could just as easily do from home in three hours!  They’re looking for people who will unquestioningly commit to memory facts, procedures, and lists of activities without asking a lot of time-wasting questions like “If you make six times my salary, why don’t you just remember this stuff yourself?”

Besides, the world is changing every day because of new social patterns, technologies, and economic necessities.  New investigations into situational ethics, for example, have revealed that every good boy does not, in fact, deserve favor; increased road safety standards have ensured that dumb kids playing catch on the freeway no longer get squashed; and while your mother may still be very eager to serve you nine of something, she has now been reduced to serving nine of  nothing.  In light of these changes, LP.com is pleased to present these mnemonics for a new generation.

Sign of the Cross:  Due to an influx of Latino workers and an uptick in workplace shootings, it is more vital than ever for even non-Catholic workers to be able to give the sign of the cross.  However, the most common mnemonic for this activity — Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, and Watch — is not relevant to younger employees who carry their wallets in their hip pocket rather than in a jacket, who are unfamiliar with watches or spectacles that are not used for leaving Yelp! reviews, and whose constant sitting and snacking has rendered them incapable of remember the location of their testicles.  We therefore suggest the cardinal points be referred to as Brainless, Gutless, Heartless, and Soulless, to remind them of the vestigial growths they got rid of to gain career success.

Colors of the Spectrum:  Designers who have misplaced their Pantone wheels may occasionally have need to refer to colors by non-numerical communications; however, a 2013 survey by the Glusterbrook Working Group revealed that 67% of employees under the age of 26 believe that “ROY G. BIV” was the bass player for My Chemical Romance.  We therefore suggest, for British employers, the color mnemonic “Rotten Old Yanks Give Blowjobs In Vitro”), and for American employers, allowing their graphic designers to frantically gesticulate and their favorite coffee mug.

The Pythagorean Theorem:  The formula “a2 + b2 = c2″ is still as vital a tool in the engineer’s toolbox as are libertarianism, Esperanto, and a deeply-seated hostility towards women.  However, because of declining mathematics standards and our own organization’s inability to come up with a useful or interesting mnemonic for the first three letters of the alphabet (see Art, below), we suggest simply handing your lead engineer a box of Scrabble tiles and letting the department sort this all out on their own.  N.B.:  The results may necessitate an increase in premium on your liability insurance.

Principles of Professional Conduct:  The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ principles of ethics have recently come to have been considered out of date, inimical to corporate goals, and innaccurate, as really petite insects do not, in fact, often do squats.  The new mnemonic for “Responsibility, The Public Interest, Integrity, Objectivity and Independence, Due Care, Scope and Nature of Services” is as follows:  “Really Toady If Interested in Collecting Salary”.

Elements of Art:  It has been determined by the International Society of Business Accounting that art is an unnecessary expenditure.  Therefore, remembering Space, Form, Texture, Shape, Line, Value, and Color is no longer an important skill for employees.  If you still have any artists on your payroll, we suggest telling them to memorize the following phrase:  “Drop Off Your Badge At Human Resources”.  If they inquire further, tell them that it’s not a mnemonic.

The Tories have clearly decided that they have to win the Rochester and Strood by-election, and are willing to throw everything they have at ensuring they get their victory. As happened with Newark, they’ve told all MPs they have to pay a number of visits to the constituency, and David Cameron may well go there for five campaign trips. (Another sign of my advancing age is that I can remember when Tony Blair’s one visit to the 1997 Uxbridge by-election was regarded as a major change in protocol for a Prime Minister)

Throwing the kitchen sink at trying to hold a seat in a by-election from UKIP isn’t a rare event any more, but some of the news that’s coming out is making me wonder if the Tories are so focused on the short-term gain of holding the seat, they’re not seeing the potential damage they’re doing in the long run.

First up, there are already rumours floating around that someone is doing push-polling that’s attacking Tory MP turned UKIP candidate Mark Reckless. (‘Push-polling’ is a practice common in US elections where negative messages about a candidate are spread by means of purported phone polling) Whether this is happening or not, the idea that it is has caught traction amongst UKIP supporters, as I discovered when I mentioned it on Twitter on Sunday. Now, there may well be nothing in these rumours, but they fit in with the mindset and narrative of UKIP supporters that they’ve got ‘the establishment’ frightened, and the only way it can stop them is to fight dirty.

As part of the Tory campaign to hold Rochester and turn back UKIP, they’ve used an open primary to select their candidate, giving everyone in the constituency a postal vote to choose between the final two contenders on the Tory shortlist. As you might expect, mailing every voter in a constituency (and paying for their freepost return envelopes) costs a lot of money. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, as Tories tend to have (or be able to get) a lot of money and election spending limits don’t usually apply to candidate selection. However, that might not be the case in Rochester. As Channel 4’s Michael Crick reports here, the Tories are working under advice from the Electoral Commission that this spending doesn’t count towards the £100,000 spending limit for the by-election, but other lawyers aren’t so sure that’s the case. As Crick points out, this raises the prospect of the Tories winning the by-election, but then having that victory invalidated in an election court. Given the time it would take for a complaint to be filed and an election court to sit, it’s unlikely there’d have to be a second by-election before the General Election, but I don’t think that’s the important point.

The key about the push-polling story isn’t whether or not it’s happening, it’s that it feeds into the existing UKIP narrative. We’ve all seen the way they rant about ‘the LibLabCon’ and complain about how they’re excluded by the metropolitan elite consensus. Now, I’m quite sure that the regular media commentators would probably dismiss a challenge in an election court as just some arcane quibbling over the rules, but imagine how that story would play out amongst UKIP members and supporters? Cries of ‘they had to break the law to beat us!’ and ‘we played by the rules, they didn’t!’ would be rife amongst them and what’s more, it would feed into the narrative they give to their voters. We’re proper hard-working people who believe in doing the right thing and playing by the rules, but those politicians up in Westminster don’t think the laws should apply to them. They broke the law to stop us winning in Rochester, what makes you think they’re going to listen to you? and so on. As with Matthew Parris’s comments on Clacton, media commentators dismissing any legal challenge would be portrayed as out of touch and ignoring the concerns of the ‘real people’. It’s the perfect way for UKIP to show that they’re the victims of an Establishment stitch-up. It might not appear that way amongst the commentariat, but it would play well on the social media grapevine.

For their sake, I hope the Tories aren’t just relying on the Electoral Commission’s advice that their spending on the primary doesn’t count towards the by-election, and have taken some other legal advice. If they win in Rochester and Strood, they need to do it fairly and be above challenge, otherwise the short-term anti-UKIP firewall it creates could be buried beneath the greater costs they’ll pay for winning it.

In truth, I didn’t pay a tremendous amount of attention to iOS8 until a post scrolled by on my Tumblr feed, which disturbed me a good deal: The new iteration of Apple’s OS included “Health”, an app that – among many other things – contains a weight tracker and a calorie counter.

And can’t be deleted.

Okay, so why is this a big deal? Pretty much all “health” apps include those features. I have one (third-party). A lot of people have one. They can be very useful. Apple sticking non-removable apps into its OS is annoying, but why would it be something worth getting up in arms over? This is where it becomes a bit difficult to explain, and where you’re likely to encounter two kinds of people (somewhat oversimplified, but go with me here). One group will react with mild bafflement. The other will immediately understand what’s at stake.

The Health app is literally dangerous, specifically to people dealing with/in recovery from eating disorders and related obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Obsessive weight tracking and calorie counting are classic symptoms. These disorders literally kill people. A lot of people. Apple’s Health app is an enabler of this behavior, a temptation to fall back into self-destructive habits. The fact that it can’t be deleted makes it worse by orders of magnitude.

So why can’t people just not use it? Why not just hide it? That’s not how obsessive-compulsive behavior works. One of the nastiest things about OCD symptoms – and one of the most difficult to understand for people who haven’t experienced them – is the fact that a brain with this kind of chemical imbalance can and will make you do things you don’t want to do. That’s what “compulsive” means. Things you know you shouldn’t do, that will hurt you. When it’s at its worst it’s almost impossible to fight, and it’s painful and frightening. I don’t deal with disordered eating, but my messed-up neurochemistry has forced me to do things I desperately didn’t want to do, things that damaged me. The very presence of this app on a device is a very real threat (from post linked above):

Whilst of course the app cannot force you to use it, it cannot be deleted, so will be present within your apps and can be a source of feelings of temptation to record numbers and of guilt and judgement for not using the app.

Apple doesn’t hate people with eating disorders. They probably weren’t thinking about people with eating disorders at all. That’s the problem.

Then this weekend another post caught my attention: The Health app doesn’t include the ability to track menstrual cycles, something that’s actually kind of important for the health of people who menstruate. Again: so? Apple thinks a number of other forms of incredibly specific tracking were important enough to include:

In case you’re wondering whether Health is only concerned with a few basics: Apple has predicted the need to input data about blood oxygen saturation, your daily molybdenum or pathogenic acid intake, cycling distance, number of times fallen and your electrodermal activity, but nothing to do with recording information about your menstrual cycle.

Again: Apple almost certainly doesn’t actively hate cisgender women, or anyone else who menstruates. They didn’t consider including a cycle tracker and then went “PFFT SCREW WOMEN.” They probably weren’t thinking about women at all.

During the design phase of this OS, half the world’s population was probably invisible. The specific needs of this half of the population were folded into an unspecified default. Which doesn’t – generally – menstruate.

I should note that – of course – third-party menstrual cycle tracking apps exist. But people have problems with these (problems I share), and it would have been nice if Apple had provided an escape from them:

There are already many apps designed for tracking periods, although many of my survey respondents mentioned that they’re too gendered (there were many complaints about colour schemes, needless ornamentation and twee language), difficult to use, too focused on conceiving, or not taking into account things that the respondents wanted to track.

Both of these problems are part of a larger design issue, and it’s one we’ve talked about before, more than once. The design of things – pretty much all things – reflects assumptions about what kind of people are going to be using the things, and how those people are going to use them. That means that design isn’t neutral. Design is a picture of inequality, of systems of power and domination both subtle and not. Apple didn’t consider what people with eating disorders might be dealing with; that’s ableism. Apple didn’t consider what menstruating women might need to do with a health app; that’s sexism.

The fact that the app cannot be removed is a further problem. For all intents and purposes, updating to a new OS is almost mandatory for users of Apple devices, at least eventually. Apple already has a kind of control over a device that’s a bit worrying, blurring the line between owner and user and threatening to replace one with the other. The Health app is a glimpse of a kind of well-meaning but ultimately harmful paternalist approach to design: We know what you need, what you want; we know what’s best. We don’t need to give you control over this. We know what we’re doing.

This isn’t just about failure of the imagination. This is about social power. And it’s troubling.

Sarah Wanenchak is a PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her current research focuses on contentious politics and communications technology in a global context, particularly the role of emotion mediated by technology as a mobilizing force. She blogs at Cyborgology, where this post originally appeared, and you can follow her at @dynamicsymmetry.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

I mentioned Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracyin a post during the week, so thought it was time I explained the area of his theories that has possibly had the most impact on politics.

Downs’ work originates from the work of twentieth century rational choice theorists. Downs was looking at all areas of how rational individuals approach politic, but for this post we’ll just be looking at the ‘Downsian Model’ (also known as spatial theory and the median voter model). This assumes that voters are arranged in a normal distribution, with the bulk of voters in the centre and gradually reducing numbers of voters to the left and right of that centre. (See the diagram, where 50 is the ‘centre ground’, 0 is extreme left, 100 is extreme right and the vertical axis is the number of voters of that view) It’s important to note that this is a model of the real world, an approximation of the actual position in order to create and test theories, not a claim that this is exactly how people are organised. Downs was seeking to explain why political parties in a majoritarian system like the USA’s tended to converge ideologically upon the centre ground.

Downs assumed that a rational voter would vote for whichever party was closest to their views. For instance, a voter at point 70 would be more likely to vote for a party at point 75 than one at point 50, and a voter at point 50 would be more likely to vote for a party at point 40 than one at point 65.

The key to electoral victory – and why this is also known as the median voter model – is capturing the centre ground and the median voter at point 50. In a two-party system, whichever party best appeals to that mass of voters at the mid-point (which includes the theoretical median voter, whose views are the exact ideological centrepoint of the nation) will win a majority of the vote. As Downs assumes that parties are vote-seeking and power-seeking, this gives them a clear motivation to appeal to that median voter. As an example of how this thinking works:

If we assume that a ‘left’ party exists with an ideology at point 25 and a ‘right’ party exists with an ideology at point 75, what we would expect to see is votes splitting 50-50. The median voter (the one sitting at the ideological centre point of 50) will be equidistant between the two parties, while everyone to the left of them would be closer to the left party and everyone to the right of them closer to the right party. If the left party then moved its ideology towards the centre (say to point 35), things would change. The midpoint between the two parties would now be at point 55, and everyone to the left of that would back the left party, giving them a majority as they are now closer to the median voter than the right. The right party would then be expected to react by moving its ideology closer to the centre, and so on and so forth until both parties are right up against the centre.

It’s important to note that while this is the most commonly seen use of Downs, he didn’t say that all societies had preferences distributed in the same manner, and also looked at what might happen with different distributions of voters. For instance, in one where voters were distributed roughly equally between views, or with a number of peaks in the distribution, parties wouldn’t have the same pressure on them to move, and there would be more of an opening for multiple parties to emerge. It’s also missed by many that Downs was proposing a model, and models in political science are always simplifications. As with many rational choice theories, Downs was trying to establish a framework of how things would be if everything was fully rational, not saying that was the way it had to be. Indeed, by setting up a model of what should happen if everything was rational, we can see where things are actually irrational, which are more likely to be interesting to study. After all, where’s the fun in writing ‘everything went exactly as the theory predicted’?

That hasn’t stopped people – including many who advise, or want to advise, political leaders – of assuming that Downs was making recommendations, not theories, and since the publication of his work in the 50s, we’ve seen many people assuming the only way to assure political victory is to head to the centre. Note that this is to take all of Downs’ assumptions – including the left-right spectrum and the normal distribution of voters along it – as given, when they might not necessarily be the case.

There’s been a lot of writing that’s followed on from Downs in the decades since An Economic Theory Of Democracy was first published, and it’d be foolish to try and summate it all in a single blog post. Suffice to say, though, that there’s been plenty studied and written on every aspect of it, from the question of whether people form coherent enough political views to be able to judge which parties are closer to them to the ongoing issue of whether the left-right spectrum is the best way to look at people’s political views. So, the objections you’re already thinking of have likely been asked already, but it doesn’t mean they’ve been answered.

A comment by Andrew Hickey got me thinking this morning about how the SNP’s surge in membership fits in a European context. In the post-referendum period, the party now reportedly has 80,000 or more members which makes it the third-largest UK party by membership, but also means its membership is about 2% of the total Scottish electorate. (As a comparison, to achieve that UK-wide, a party would need a membership of over 900,000)

Luckily, to place that into a European context, I don’t need to do a huge amount of work because someone else has already looked at party membership in general across Europe. Van Biezen, Mair and Poguntke looked at the decline of party membership across Europe and their original paper not only includes the overall membership figures for each country, but breaks it down by party. By looking through their figures, I’ve found the following parties that all have around 2% or more of the electorate as members:

Austria: Peoples Party – OVP (700k members/11% of population) and Social Democratic Party – SPO (300k/5%)
Bulgaria: Bulgarian Socialist Party (210k/3%)
Cyprus: Democratic Rally – DISY (40k/9%) and Democratic Party – DIKO (19k/4%)
Finland: Centre Party – KESK (192k/5%)
Greece: New Democracy (350k/4%) and PASOK (210k/2.5%)
Spain: People’s Party (725k/2%)

(Note that these figures are from around 2008, so don’t include new parties that might have reached the 2% milestone by now, or reflect any drop in members since they were obtained. I’d be very surprised if the Greek figures were still even vaguely accurate, for example. They also don’t include regional or national parties like the SNP like the Catalan nationalist parties or the Italian Lega Nord that might make an interesting comparison.)

What these figures do show is that the SNP’s relative size is definitely a rare feat in modern Europe. To have 2% of a population as members of a single political party is rare, even when there’s a general trend of higher party membership than there is in the UK. Most of the countries with a higher percentage achieve that by having membership scattered across several parties, with none reaching 2% or more of the electorate.

While the trend across Europe has been for a gradual decline in party membership, I do need to re-emphasise that these figures aren’t based on current data and so don’t reflect the appeal of new parties and movements. While I suspect the SNP’s tripling of membership post-referendum isn’t common, it would be interesting to see membership trends in other nationalist/regionalist/separatist groups since 2008, as well as the membership levels and trends of new political movements like Greece’s Syriza or Italy’s Five Star Movement. The interesting question is whether the downward trend in membership is set to continue inevitably or if it’s linked solely to the persistence of existing parties and can be reversed by introducing new ones to a political system.

There's some kind of bizarre curse hanging over my Laundry Files series. Or maybe it's a deeper underlying problem with writing fiction set in the very near future (or past): I'm not sure which. All I'm sure is that that for the past decade, reality has been out to get me: and I'm fed up.

My first intimation came a long time ago—in 2001. I'd just finished writing "The Atrocity Archive" and it was being edited for serial publication in issues 7-9 of the Scottish SF magazine Spectrum SF (which folded a couple of issues later, in 2003). It was late September, and I found myself reading a terse email from the editor, Paul Fraser: "Charlie, about your story—do you think you can possibly find some new bad guys for Chapter 4? Because you've just been overtaken by current events ..."

In Chapter 4 of "The Atrocity Archive" Bob learns from Angleton who the middle eastern bad guys who kidnapped Mo, intending to use her sacrifice to open a gateway to somewhere bad, really were ... and when I originally wrote the story, in 1999-2000, they were a relatively obscure bunch of anti-American zealots who'd blown up the USS Stark and an embassy in Africa. I know this may boggle the imagination of younger or more forgetful readers, but Al Quaida and Osama bin Laden had not at that time hijacked any airliners, much less etched themselves into the pages of world history: they were not, at that time, the Emmanuel Goldstein of the New World Order.

So, on the 12th of September, 2001, the score stood at Reality 1, Fiction 0. And I hastily did an edit job, replacing ObL and AQ with Yusuf Qaradawi as inspiration behind a hypothetical radical group based in groan Iraq (hey, this was before the invasion, all right?). And lo, part one of "The Atrocity Archive" was published in November 2001, and parts 2 and 3 in March and June of 2002.

I don't recall being bitten by any such copy edits to reality in the process of writing "The Concrete Jungle", which together with "The Atrocity Archive" forms the first book, "The Atrocity Archives". Nor did anything particularly batshit derail me late in the process of writing "The Jennifer Morgue". But the Laundry Curse came back to haunt me again when I got to "The Fuller Memorandum", and it's been moaning and rattling its chains at ever increasing volume with every subsequent book.

I wrote "The Fuller Memorandum" in a cold-sweat panic in 2008. (It didn't come out until 2010 because I emitted it out of sequence in a frenzy of 24 consecutive 12 hour working days.) You may recall that the impact of the financial crisis of 2007/08 took a while to trickle down to affect all levels of the economy, precipitating a full-on economic recession in 2008/09.

For reasons of plot, I wanted to move Bob's office from the Laundry's HQ building at Dansey House—hypothetically, somewhere between Leicester Square and Charing Cross: the legacy of wartime spillover from Westminster—to a New Annexe located above a department store somewhere unspecified in South London. An ongoing background story arc that surfaces in book 7 concerns the abortive attempts to redevelop Dansey House, and their catastrophic consequences. While I was writing in the autumn of 2008, it seemed perfectly reasonable for the New Annex to be a dismal 1970s brutalist slab squatting on top of a branch of Woolworths, a downmarket department store chain that had been around for almost a century—at least until the chain's collapse on November 26th, 2008 left me grinding my teeth in frustration.

Take two: I briefly considered Marks and Spencer (too high profile, and anyway, these days they've all gone multi-storey), John Lewis (far too up-market), and British Home Stores (too likely to make non-UK readers go "whut?"). But the risk of any retail chain going bust before the book saw print seemed too great: so in the end I copped out and placed the New Annex atop a branch of C&A—who do not currently operate in the UK (although they have within living memory, and still trade elsewhere in the EU).

At least that zinger got sorted out before the novel went anywhere near a publisher. Right?

The next book I wrote was "Rule 34". I think I've already explained about how the first plan for "Rule 34" (titled "419") didn't survive contact with the global financial meltdown enemy, so let's tip-toe past it. This brings me to the next Laundry Files novel, "The Apocalypse Codex"

Early in "The Apocalypse Codex", which I wrote from April 2010 to March 2011, Bob gets sent on a training course at the National School of Government at Sunningdale Park, the civil service training campus. However, in March 2012 the NSG was closed down for good—some of its tasks were taken on by Civil Service Learning, part of the Home Office, but it was a thing of the past four months before the book finally saw print. I'm a bit burned about that: I spent quite a few days finding out all the publicly accessible information I could about the NSG and talking to a few folks who'd passed through its doors, only for HMG to pull the plug after the book had been typeset (at which point changes are virtually impossible to make without pulping a whole shitpile of printed book blocks—which publishers are loath to do because it costs lots of money).

For a while I thought "The Rhesus Chart" might actually have dodged the curse. It looked pretty bulletproof when I put together the first draft between September and December of 2012, and it didn't have a long lead-time to publication: but the curse struck yet again, this time in the way that the NHS Central Data Warehouse was set up and accessed via users of NHS Connecting for Health. I am told I nailed the description of Bob's project closely enough that an actual medical statistician working with that hairball of hideous Excel-generating big data didn't stumble over the reading—and it's murderously hard to get the minutiae of someone else's job right when you're writing a work of fiction. So I was still patting myself on the back when I learned that the NHS Spine Secondary Uses Service had been completely reorganized between me handing in the final manuscript (in June 2013) and the book being published (in July 2014). As wikipedia explains, "NHS Connecting for Health ceased to exist on 31 March 2013 ..." And to put the final nail in the coffin, The Spine was migrated to a new Open Source system in August 2014.

Which brings me screeching up to the event horizon of the present.

I cannot discuss the contents of "The Annihilation Score", Laundry Files book 6, without some risk of spoilers. This book is so fresh it hasn't been copy-edited yet; it's due out in the first week of July 2015. But I am going to have to modify it to explicitly set it in 2014 or 2013 (coincidentally setting the Laundry Files chronology in stone, something I've been reluctant to do before), because ...

I don't think it's a spoiler if I mention that a big plot point in "The Annihilation Score", is goings-on involving an organization called ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers. (The specifics of which are quite intricate, and totally central to the novel.) Indeed, I don't think it'd be a spoiler to say that ACPO is as central to the plot of the new novel as the Black Chamber was to "The Apocalypse Codex". But I fucked up, because I didn't make ACPO up: they're a real thing. Or they were.

I handed the manuscript of "The Annihilation Score" to my agent and editors around September 28th, 2014. That's last month. On October 17th, 2014, it was announced that ACPO is being scrapped and replaced by a new body, the National Police Chiefs' Council, which will be hosted by the Met and have a somewhat different role and responsibilities.

(You may now pause to imagine yr hmbl crspndnt. leaning on his desk, weeping and clutching his forehead.)

I'm officially done with this shit. The Laundry Files explicitly exists in an alternate history to our own, okay? Word Of God speaking here. "The Rhesus Chart" is set in mid-2013, and "The Annihilation Score" in summer/autumn of 2013. I'm going to kick "The Nightmare Stacks" (or whatever book 7 is titled) down the road into a 2014 which will be well in our past and nailed down by the time the book is handed in, in autumn of 2015. Because I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions. It's gotten to the point where if I write a book that is dead on target when it's handed in, at just the most inconvenient moment before publication reality will snicker and pull out its blue pencil. And I am too old for this shit. Do you hear me, reality? Do you hear me?

(Author screams quietly, then gets up and slowly backs away from the keyboard before turning and shuffling dispiritedly in the direction of the kitchen, and another mug of tea.)

As discussed in the current open thread: Velma Bowen de Selby died yesterday, in Seattle, 18 Oct 2014, at...