Too much pushes the blues and purples apart

Split parties do not win elections, so the saying goes.  Nor, by extension, do parties whose natural support base is divided between parties, particularly under FPTP – which is why from time to time we hear calls from some on the right-of-centre for an electoral pact between the Conservatives and UKIP, who look at the 45-50% that the two parties poll between them and dream of landslide governments rather than impotent oppositions.  It won’t happen, not least because such dreams ignore certain inconvenient realities.

One such reality is that there is a very clear message from history as to what electoral pacts mean, which is the end of at least one party as an independent entity.  That may come through merger, takeover or reduction to irrelevance but come it invariably does.  Where one party is clearly the dominant member of an alliance, a pact effectively means a delayed takeover.  The Conservatives have particularly strong form on this, having taken over the Liberal Unionists that split from Gladstone, the National Liberals that split in 1931, and dominated the Lloyd George-led government between 1918 and when it fell at a time of their choosing.

That, of course, is one of the main reasons why the larger party agrees to it in the first place and why those Conservative supporters who advocate it now, do so.  UKIP would in effect be given a certain number of MPs while their capacity to operate independently would be slowly extinguished.  The dynamics are simple: once there are several dozen (say) UKIP MPs whose future presence in the House relies on continuing to be given a free run by the Tories, it becomes extremely difficult for them to act in such a way that would provoke an ending of the alliance.

However, that self-same dynamic is also the biggest stumbling block to such a deal.  Many UKIP activists left the Conservatives because of disillusionment at the policies and tone of its leadership.  Why then set their new party on a course back to where they started?  For those who left a party of government for one on the fringes, a share of power alone is an insufficient inducement otherwise they’d have stayed in the first place.

This is before you add in the antipathies, egos, pride and other personal factors that would prevent the two from working amicably together.  Not the least of the problems would be identifying which party would stand in which constituency; decisions that are fraught with the capacity for upsetting the candidates and foot-soldiers of each party alike.

That’s compounded by the fact that many UKIP voters – and to a lesser extent, activists – don’t identify with the Conservatives as fellow-travellers who’ve simply slipped from the right path.  An increasing number are ex-Labour or at least have values that align with where Labour once was.  We know from the polling that a sizable minority prefer Labour to Tories and in the absence of a UKIP candidate (which would be the case in most constituencies were there a pact), those UKIP votes would transfer red rather than blue, if they get cast at all.  The electoral benefits of any Con-UKIP pact would be far lower than a simple sum of the scores would suggest.

There is one alternative that may prove attractive, however, if the Tories have the ambition and audacity to seize it: a pre-election advocacy of PR. 

If implemented, it would do away with the need for pacts.  It would also greatly diminish the effectiveness of negative campaigning and tactical voting – two aspects of modern politics that have proven so corrosive to public trust. Getting in ahead of the game may also be tactically wise in case the election produces a particularly unfair result.  On the other hand, if a hung parliament results, virtually all the minor parties might be expected to view PR with favour and with a manifesto commitment, there’d be no need for a referendum.

The new four-party line-up also fundamentally changes the political battlefield, as the Conservatives now have one potential ally to either side of them on the spectrum while Labour doesn’t.  That might change if the Greens could up their support but on their current polling they’d still be of only marginal significance under most systems of PR.

What is clear is that despite the damage FPTP does both parties, there won’t be a pact before 2015: there are just too many things pushing UKIP and the Tories apart.

David Herdson

It must be a thing if two Sunday columnists have both noticed it – Andrew Rawnsley and Matthew D’Ancona both notice that there are simultaneous plots against both the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition and attempt to work out what it means.

For me, it’s Rawnsley who finds the best explanation:

In Britain, it runs deeper than that. Austerity has sharpened and accelerated a much longer-term trend of disintegrating support for the two major parties. They’ve gone, the solid blocks of red and blue voters that the major party leaders used to be able to mobilise. There has been a decades-long decline in the blue-red duopoly. It is the bad luck of Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband to be leaders of their parties when the music finally stopped.

As I’ve said before, we’re still living through the process of a long and slow breakdown of the old party system in British politics. The number of people not voting has steadily risen – 1997 was the last election when a party got more votes than the number of people not voting – and amongst those who are voting, support for the main two parties has been continually dwindling to the point where polls are now showing them both dropping below 33%, meaning ‘other’ could now be said to be topping the poll.

The various plots – in all parties – are often coming from people who are trying to persuade themselves that this is only a temporary blip and that normal service will be resumed as soon as they confidently state that they’ve rediscovered what normality is. Once they’ve got their particular Johnson as leader, everyone will suddenly realise what fools they’ve been and things will go back to the way the plotters think they should be. That ‘the way things should be’ hasn’t been the way things are for almost fifty years now is entirely inconsequential. Some people have an assumption that Britain should be a two-party state and any diversion away from that is just a temporary blip that will be corrected as soon as the right people are back in charge.

Maybe I’m wrong and getting the right leaders in place is all it would take to magically revert the system back to its default settings, but I suspect not. It feels to me that what people want and expect from politics and politicians has fundamentally changed, and the current system can’t address it. A continuing series of tweaks can stave off a full collapse for a short time, but not for good. The foundations of the system are crumbling away from beneath us, and that must be acknowledged before any real fix can come.

I can’t find my copy of The God Delusion. It wandered off to join the fairies in the Boston Public Garden, or something. This is only a problem when I’d like to look something up in it, to point to a passage and say, “Ah! If we’d read more carefully, we could have guessed that Dawkins was that terrible all along. It should have been obvious, even before he discovered Twitter!”

I could say more on this, and perhaps if the book turns up, and I have important work to procrastinate on but no Columbo episodes to watch, I might write at greater length. For now, I’ll just comment on a little thing which I don’t recall anyone pointing out before. The epigraph of the book is the Douglas Adams quotation to which I alluded, the one to the effect that the beauty of a garden should be satisfaction enough, without having to imagine “fairies at the bottom of it” in addition. This quotation comes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where it is part of Ford Prefect’s inner monologue. Ford is rejecting Zaphod Beeblebrox’s claim that their stolen spaceship is currently orbiting the lost planet of Magrathea. To Ford, Magrathea is “a myth, a fairy story, it’s what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to become economists”.

As Ford gazed at the spectacle of light before them excitement burned inside him, but only the excitement of seeing a strange new planet; it was enough for him to see it as it was. It faintly irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy onto the scene to make it work for him. All this Magrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

But, of course, the planet is Magrathea, the legendary, but not wholly mythical, home of custom planet-builders.

And that’s the epigraph to the book, mind you.

Meanwhile, down by the foxgloves, a pair of iridescent wings catches the morning sun.

Is that not just perfect? Could we have asked for a better encapsulation of that Dawkinsian self-absorption, that imperious satisfaction, that willingness to stop with the most superficial notion and consider it in isolation—that indifference not just to quidquams and filioques and theological arcana, but to deeply consequential matters of lived human experience?

"And owing to ... what's that something of circumstances you hear people talking about? Cats enter into it, if I remember rightly."

Would concatenation be the word for which you are groping?"

"That's it. Owing to a concatenation of circumstances...."

Thank you, Jeeves.

Owing to an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances, as Stephen Tall makes clear, there are to be no female Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers in this parliament now that Nick Clegg has decided not to have a reshuffle before the next election:

It’s an understandable decision in some ways. The best time to promote Jo [Swinson] (and there’s no doubt she deserves to be in the cabinet on merit) would have been a year ago, when Nick reshuffled his ministerial team. That would have given her 18 months in post, time to achieve something in office. However, she was just about to go on maternity leave. Promoting Jo now would mean she has just six months in post at a time when she’ll want to focus all her political energy on retaining her marginal East Dunbartonshire constituency. 

But the decision not to reshuffle does mean the Lib Dems will have gone an entire five years in government without a single one of our female MPs becoming a cabinet minister. That’s not a record in government of which we can be proud.

I would only add that it is not a record of which Nick Clegg can be proud.

As he should have learnt by now, people have an unfortunate habit of judging you, not on your words or intentions,but on your actions.

Today is my 50th birthday. As Terry Pratchett noted, "inside every old man there's an 8 year old wondering what the hell just happened". In the absence of some really big medical breakthroughs I'm almost certainly more than halfway through my span: so what have I learned?

(Note: I'm putting this in a blog entry rather than a novel because this is the right place for self-indulgent bloviating and miscellaneous wankery. Put it another way: if you read it here, you don't have to get angry at me because you paid good cash money for it. Just file under getting-it-out-of-my-system and move on.)

Rule 1 is "don't die". If you fail at Rule 1, by definition, you failed at everything else.

NB: some people of a theological bent are of the opinion that personal experience continues after you fail at Rule 1 (and that's before we get stuck into the simulation hypothesis). I'll believe them when I get a bad review for a new book from a long-dead critic. In the absence of such feedback, I'm proceeding on the assumption that this is the only chance you get: no do-overs. Nor do you win some kind of prize for dying with the most toys, or the most money: you don't even get a prize for dying with the most children (they, on the other hand, might have reason to drink a toast to your memory) ... personal extinction is forever.

There are several corollaries to Rule 1, but they're mostly obvious: coronaries have right of way, for example; or never eat anything bigger than your head (unless you're a gulper eel). Some are less obvious: start exercising now because it'll hurt less than starting when you're older. (I generally hate exercise, but I hate it less than the idea of failing at Rule 1.) Or take the meds your doctor prescribed you, in the manner directed unless they make you feel really ill: in which case go back and TELL THE DOCTOR (don't just stop taking them). NB: medical professionals can argue the toss, you probably can't.

Rule 2: Idiots are everywhere: fixing their idiocy is not your problem (unless it really really is — which is seldom the case). No, seriously, XKCD nailed it:

Remembering this rule (and figuring out how and when to apply the exceptions) will save your blood pressure, your hair, and a lot of stress: it will also contribute to you obeying Rule 1. Unfortunately obeying Rule 2 may prove difficult if you are a bit obsessive-compulsive, but what the hell, at least you'll have fun Being Right on the Internet ...

Seriously, if you hold with Richard Dawkins' exegesis on the extended phenotype, there's a reason for this. We shaved apes can acquire cognitive tools from one another. So rather than having to think outside the box for ourselves, we can rely on the normal distribution of smarts among our species to ensure that some outlier can think outside the box for us, and we can then copy their technique. Once we developed language (the platform for horizontally transferable skills) we were no longer under an evolutionary selection filter for better individual general intelligence. We are, quite literally, no smarter than we need to be: we're the dumbest possible species of intelligent tool-using talkative mimics, except for African Gray parrots and Fox News commentators. (Who might actually be African Gray parrots in disguise, trying to bring about our downfall; that's no crazier than some of the things they come out with, is it?)

If it amuses you to do so you may occupy yourself by trying to do something about the stupids, or to contribute to the long-term commonweal for people who will never even know you existed. That would be good. But seriously, bear in mind Rule 2 — and beware of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

Rule 3 is the Golden Rule, in the original (non-Jesus, i.e. negative) formulation: do not do unto others that which would be repugnant were it done unto you. (This is not the same as that meddling do-gooder's manifesto, "do unto others as you would be done by" because, hey, everybody likes to eat shit just like me, right?) Honourable exceptions for self-defence (as long as you didn't start it) and Being Right on the Internet, as long as you do not wallow to excess in Being Cruelly Right on the Internet. Ahem. No, seriously, a lot of things would be a whole lot better if we all just tried not to inadvertently stomp on each other's corns.

Oh, and by the way? These days I'm convinced that the reputation grumpy old men have for being grumpy (not to mention old) is a side-effect of the way chronic low-grade pain goes with the ageing process. It's a sad fact that once you pass your thirties you get increasingly creaky: and constant low-grade aches and twinges do bad things to your temper. It's another sad fact that, for better or worse, most of our world leaders are middle-aged or elderly men, who should be presumed grumpy due to low-grade pain until proven otherwise. (There's probably a political solution to bringing about world peace through better access to analgesics, but that's a topic for another rant.)

(There is an inverse corollary of Rule 3, of course: as some 19th century wag remarked in a Victorian ladies' etiquette guide, "a true lady never unintentionally gives offense". (At least, not in front of witnesses.) If you're going to hurt someone? At least be clear about what you're doing, and why. Hypocrisy sucks, especially when this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.)

---

And that's basically it.

There's a bunch of minor stuff I'd love to have been able to tell my 15-year-old self ("son, buy shares in a Californian company called Apple, that's AAPL, and don't sell them until 2014") but they're mostly spurious. There are also some regrets, but again: no point crying over spilled milk. And of course, with full foreknowledge some of my life choices would be different (I'm thinking of you, Mister school careers guidance teacher whose name I've forgotten). But all of that is me-specific, and probably meaningless to you.

---

So that's my distillate of fifty years of obeying Rule 1. What have you learned that you'd like to see engraved on your tombstone?

For idealists like me the last 4 and half years have been deeply unpleasant. Compromise at every turn. Disappointment on so many fronts. Proportional representation deep in the long grass, House of Lords reform stalled, removal of tuition fees scrapped. The list of things I thought (and still think!) are important which failed to come to be is long (and covered in unhappy smileys).

Of course very well-meaning (and mostly correct) Lib Dem loyalists with tell you how the Lib Dems didn't win the 2010 election, had to compromise in Government, made tuition fees less onerous and did lots of amazing things as part of the Coalition. All this is very good, but I've yet to see any unconvinced person who's frown gets turned upside down by those arguments. 

Those arguments are rational. But they don't appeal to me. And despite my gratitude for the income tax changes and for the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act they aren't reasons for me to vote Lib Dem in 2015.

It is what is happening right now that leads me to continue to support the Lib Dems. The Tories and Labour are currently suffering from extreme weakness. Polling shows they are nearly neck and neck once again and they are desperate to gain any extra votes they can. Meanwhile both parties suffered shocks in recent by-elections at the hands of surging UKIP support and, rather than standing up to them, both have let the tail wag the dog by beginning to contemplate policies that will attract UKIP voters. David Cameron is leading the Tories back on an anti-EU campaign whilst Labour have decided to throw away any pretense of being a progressive alternative by hardening their stance on immigration.

How did the Lib Dems react to UKIP? Well MONTHS ago Nick Clegg challenged Nigel Farage to debates on national television. Clegg put forward our case for free movement of peoples and for Britain within the EU. Sure, it didn't have any effect on the subsequent EU elections but at least someone stood up and gave an alternative to UKIP's message.

Whilst Labour and the Tories try to out UKIP each other, the true believers of UKIP aren't going to be convinced. Why would they vote for the two parties who have so utterly failed to do anything about their main concerns? Meanwhile Labour and Tory voters will find themselves with "I can't believe it's not UKIP" after the next election if they aren't careful. Voting for the Lib Dems allows me to say: Not in my name. I don't want any part of an attempt to undermine the freedom of movement of EU citizens nor do I want to see us out of Europe.

Worse... Labour seem to have completely failed to learn the lessons of their 13 years in power and continue to support anti-liberty "surveillance state" initiatives whilst the Tories are eagerly planning to repeal the Human Rights Act (just keep reading that, it only gets worse with each re-read). No, the Lib Dems have not been perfect on the liberty agenda in this current Parliament. But they are streets ahead of the two main parties. They blocked the "Snooper's Charter".

And Labour and the Tories are engaged in self-interested attempts to ensure that any future constitutional arrangement for England, following devo-max in Scotland, falls in their favour. Labour won't support English votes for English laws because it'd mean they'd struggle to maintain a majority on English laws if they were in Government. The Tories oppose regional devolution because of ideological "little Englander" reasons as well as because it doesn't favour them in several regions. The Lib Dems plans for a federal United Kingdom might be wishy-washy at the moment but at least they are trying to be consistent to all constituent parts without self-interest.

So yes, it is the Lib Dems still for me. A party that defends free movement, the EU, human rights and constitutional stability.

She is not like the women in those other films, those dangerous women that she has come to bury just as surely as she will soon occupy a sad and lonely grave, sunk in a pond, crammed in the trunk of her brand new car.  They are professional criminals, or at least in league with such people; she is a nervous if determined woman who has made an impulsive decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life — a life that will be over far sooner than she could ever imagine.  Right at this moment, she wakes in that eerie, panicked terror that comes from waking up in a place you do not expect to be and seeing someone you do not expect to see:  exhausted and stressed beyond reason by her sudden theft of $40,000 in cash from her employer, she has pulled over to the side of a California road and fallen asleep, only to be woken up by the granite face of a highway patrolman.  At the moment, her beautiful face is hatched across by flickering fear:  fear of being found out, fear of going to jail, fear that her spontaneous crime will mean the doom of her passionate love affair rather than its salvation, and, perhaps, on this lonely desert road where no one else can see, faced with an emotionless and humorless cop who has decided to make her his special project for the day, fear of something else.  While we have seen her be decisive and willful, there is nothing in her of the cool, easy calculation of the femme fatale, and her own nervousness gives her away; all she wants to do is get going, get somewhere quiet, and figure out how to fix the mess she has made of her life.  What she doesn’t know — what she will learn just as we, the audience, the collective understanding of moviegoers as the noir era comes to its definitive end, will learn — is that there are things far more terrifying than going to prison.  She will learn that lesson the next day, and it will be the last thing she ever learns.

Alfred Hitchcock is the last director one could ever credit as having any sympathy for the subjects of the male gaze.  He wasn’t one to mount a critique of it; indeed, given not only the paces he put his female characters through, but the often-disturbing ways in which he treated the women who played them, Hitchcock was far more a perpetrator of the harm done by the possessive (and obsessive) eye men cast on women, not a crusader against it.  But it is without question that he understood it; much of the emotional impact of his finest thrillers came from his frightfully first-hand understanding of the portrayal of a woman in the grips of fear at what a man who has abandoned the pretense of social control might do to her.  Watching parts of Psycho, the 1960 film that was his last masterpiece and that signaled the ultimate transition from the crime dramas of the noir period to the crime thrillers of the decades that followed, it’s hard not to compare it to a similarly groundbreaking story of a serial killer — Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, which appeared over 30 years later and acted as a similar bellwether to a change in the attitudes of moviegoers.  Both Hitchcock and Demme use a number of very noticeable, very tight, and very controlled close-ups of the faces of women, and of the men who interact with and attempt to control them, to communicate the emotional and intellectual state of their characters.  Marion Crane is the unsuspecting victim of a serial killer’s insane violence, while Clarice Starling is the protector of those victims against a similar killer, but both are constantly bathed in the male gaze.  Both must struggle through their intents and decisions under the almost always hostile eye of men who want to restrict their actions; Marion’s encounter with the killer finds her disarmed by his seemingly open and friendly demeanor, leaving her unprepared for the reality of what he truly is, while Starling finds herself dealing with a monster whose nature she already knows, but whose motives in helping her catch another killer are murky to her until it’s too late.  Marion reflects Hitchcock’s distrust of authority by having her interact with a relentless cop who, seeking to bring her to justice, almost literally drives her into her grave; Clarice seeks acceptance among the police, but must cope with the fact that most of them don’t want her in their boy’s club.  Janet Leigh and Jodie Foster both communicate the determination of these remarkable women almost entirely through their faces, with the former being full of expression and conflict and the latter single-minded and intense.

Did Hitchcock know, when he went ahead with his risky project to film Robert Bloch’s novel of a mad killer, that he was plunging a knife into noir?  Probably not.  If he had, he wouldn’t have cared; most of his best films are crime dramas, but very few of them could really be considered noir.  Strangers on a Train is perhaps the closest, and certainly its origins as a Patricia Highsmith novel put it squarely in the noir camp, but his ingenious structural tinkering gave it an entirely different tone, and his change to the ending removed much of its moral bleakness.  Shadow of a Doubt, too, had elements of noir, but its delivery was straight out of classic Hollywood (albeit with a strongly Hitchcockian touch) that dampened its dark stretches.  Psycho was the movie that murdered the genre, that came at just the moment when making a tightly controlled black-and-white film that delivered its moral pulse through shadow and light was becoming a retro gesture; that positioned itself outside the psychological murk of the post-war era and faced a post-post-war environment of ambition and success; that replaced the cruel but competent professional hood, with his badness a relative thing to be weighted against factors like police corruption, economic desperation, and pure bloody-minded fate, with the morally stark image of the serial killer, whose crimes were unambiguously evil, unmotivated and thus unfathomable.  Ironically, though, up until that one sudden and unexpected first slash of the knife that turned Psycho into a very different movie and crime dramas into a very different genre, it was perhaps Hitchcock’s most noir film:  the hapless romance of two people who should never have been together (though gender-swapped, with Leigh in the ‘man’s’ role), the doomed lead who can never escape a split-second bad decision, the harsh pools of black split with light (on Marion’s rain-soaked flight down the freeway, in the one illuminated window at the Bates house, in the basement as the final horror is revealed with a bare bulb madly swinging), the inevitability of a bad outcome, and the overall tawdriness of the whole affair that sets off the chain of punishing outcomes.

That low-rent, sordid feel, indeed, is not only central to the success of Psycho, but also is indicative of what a highly risky film it was; it’s a testament to Hitchcock’s genius that he was able to pull off something so completely removed from his previous work so effectively.  His incredibly protective attitude towards spoiling the film’s twist was a gimmick, to be sure, and a highly successful one; he was nothing if not a natural salesman.  But it was also a calculating and difficult choice to preserve the tonal shift that makes it such a great piece of storytelling.  It was vitally important to maintain the illusion that the star, and the protagonist, of Psycho was Janet Leigh and not the younger, less well-known Vera Miles; and it was just as important to project her early on — this majestic, gorgeous woman at the peak of Hollywood glamour — as a deeply flawed figure in an fiery but ill-advised relationship with a man who seemed to be a failure at everything except satisfying her sexually.  Having just come off making some of the most spectacular films of his career, gigantic, colorful, epic thrillers in the classic Hollywood style, filled with elaborate stories, studded with big-name talent, and in full, vibrant, mid-century color.  Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North By Northwest, Vertigo — Psycho could not have been more different than these in every way, and Hitchcock establishes that right off the bat.  It is not just violent, but bloody; it is not just sexy, it is dirty; it is not just thrilling, it is terrifying, with its stakes so much smaller than in these other films, but in other ways so much greater.  The pop-psych exposition at the end draws a lot of eye-rolls, but it wasn’t the first time he had engaged in faux-Freudianism, and clumsy as the scene may be, it probably allowed the movie to be made.  Despite his recent track record of raging success, Hitchcock had a hard time getting a studio to back Psycho; there was too much controversy, too much that was vulgar and vile, too much at risk.  So in order to get it done, he jettisoned every technique and method he’d been perfecting over the last decade and made the movie on the cheap, using a stripped-down crew borrowed from his TV series and, like the best noir films, stripping out all the extraneous material until it purred like a very dangerous motor.  The result was as distinctly Hitchcock as it was significantly un-Hitchcockian.  By the time it was over, it had taught audiences a lesson about fear that they would never forget, and completed a crown for him of three jewels:  the master of suspense, the transformer of the crime drama, and the anticipator of modern horror.

He didn’t have much left in him.  Only The Birds, which took him three years and much difficulty to make, held any of his previous greatness, and even it was beginning to split along the edges by the time he got it to theaters.  But even if Psycho had been the last film he ever made, it would still stand as something almost unthinkable, even by today’s standards:  a movie made by a great director using few of the methods that made him great; a genre film that both subverts and transcends its genre; a true masterpiece made on the cheap; a gimmicky picture with a gimmick both essential and disposable; a work of its era that fully ushers in a new one; and a story that wrings much psychological insight out of the shallowest kind of psychology.  It may be the supreme statement of greatness by a director who rarely used great source material and never tackled great issues, but almost always managed to make great movies.

Tom Collins writes…

In your recent post, "The Deadline," you made it very clear how you feel about writers unable to deliver work by the date promised. (You were against it.) Which is why I'm curious to know how you feel about George R.R. Martin.

I don't know whether you're a fan of Game of Thrones, either the novels (which are known collectively as A Song of Ice and Fire) or the TV show, but I'm sure you know the situation surrounding Martin's falling behind on writing the book series. The first three books were released fairly regularly, appearing in 1996, 1998, and 2000, which is not atypical for an epic fantasy series. Then the deadlines began blowing up, and Martin kept falling further and further behind. Book 4 took five whole years to hit the shelves (2005), which was apparently practice for blowing deadlines compared to Book 5, which took six years (2011).

Meanwhile, HBO created the TV adaptation, also released in 2011. American TV obviously has a slightly more stringent system of deadlines it must adhere to, which means that as the 5th season of the show is set to debut next April, there is not even a hint that Martin is making equal (or any) progress on Book 6. At this point, the TV show is almost certain to surpass the novels in terms of plot progression. In effect, HBO will be writing an ending to this epic story before Martin does.

Genre fans, as you may have encountered from time to time, are not renowned for their patience. In response to a query from a frustrated fan about Martin's blown deadlines, in a blog entry called "Entitlement issues…," Neil Gaiman famously responded, "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch."

Do you have an opinion here? Is Gaiman right in thinking that Martin's fans are acting wrongly entitled — are treating Martin like a "bitch" — for expecting him to deliver a book in a timely manner? ("Timely" is subjective, but I'd suggest expecting delivery of subsequent books on a schedule comparable to the first three books, or expecting at the very least adherence to the numerous publicly stated and blown deadlines for the next two, is not unreasonable.) Or is Martin an artist whose timetable ought not be questioned, who should be immune from deadline expectations?

First of all, you're wrong: I didn't know the situation surrounding Martin's falling behind on writing the book series but I guess I do now. Secondly, Neil is right. Neil is always right. And if he says I'm wrong when I say that, he's right about that, too.

This is actually quite some distance from the issue I was talking about, which is that writers need to finish their work for themselves. They need to not find excuses to not write (very easy to do) and complete their projects if they really want to claim to be writers. There's a whole other set of reasons to finish work and it has to do with not screwing up your collaborators, destroying production schedules, etc. I've written about that in the past.

In the matter of Mr. Martin and Game of Thrones, I have to admit I'm not familiar with the circumstances. I'm always a little hesitant to jump on the Blame the Writer bandwagon because I have seen a number of times when the writer is not to blame for a project's tardiness but it's easy for everyone else to presume he or she is at fault. I'm sure someplace on this site, I've told a few of these stories but sometimes, the reason something comes out way past the announced on-sale date is that the folks who did the announcing announced an unrealistic, never-gonna-happen date. That has been done by accident and it's also been done quite deliberately.

There are also delays of the "Act of God" variety or which come close to that. Our Groo Vs. Conan mini-series didn't meet its advertised on-sale date because Sergio was hospitalized.

And of course, sometimes the writer is just plain late. That may well be the case with Game of Thrones, I don't know.

If it's late because George Martin is lying on a beach somewhere, partying with bikini girls and chortling, "Those dweeb fans of mine can suck it and wait," those dweeb fans might well be justified in their anger. I wouldn't blame them one bit if they stopped buying his books and put that money towards the purchase of, say, the new Groo mini-series — which will be out on time. Somehow, given Martin's reputation for excellence and his many years writing good stuff and meeting deadlines before anyone ever heard of Game of Thrones, I doubt that's the case here.

And if it's late because it's just taking longer than it should for Martin to be happy with the material…well, if I were a fan of that series (which I probably would be if I read it), I'd be inclined to cut the guy some slack. I'd have affection and understanding for a guy who was giving me something I loved so, rather than anger. I might even think, "Boy, given how he's sweating over this next book, I bet when we do get it, it'll be especially awesome."

In the piece I wrote the other day, I wasn't talking about guys like George Martin. At least, I don't think I was. I was talking about someone who's screwing his own life up and blaming others for the fact that he can't get his work done. I doubt that is the case with Game of Thrones. My guess is it's just taking longer than anyone expected. If I were in his position — yeah, like there's a chance of that happening — I might have a little trouble with the expectations and also with the ancillary demands on my time that come with that kind of success. If you love what he does, grant him the right to be a human being and not a machine.

Britain is in a fractious, ill tempered mood.

Discontent with the political class festers, and every mountebank, from Alex Salmond to Nigel Farage is being seized on as someone who can break the perceived corruption in Whitehall and Westminster.

Politicians are held- especially in the media- in widespread contempt.

That, of course is the problem. It is not that politics is necessarily more negative or even more corrupt than it used to be, but rather that we have grown used to a mocking chorus from journalists who are guilty of even more egregious corruption than the politicians they condemn so loudly.

MPs are paid a fraction of the sums given over to the self important blow-hards whose oleaginous faces adorn the top of their columns of angry and often surprisingly badly informed copy. Those who happily take their living from such dubious newspaper owners as the sinister and bullying Barclay brothers, the tax-avoiding Rothermere family, a Russian oligarch, a pornographer and of course Rupert Murdoch still presume to make moral judgements over those who have often made substantial sacrifices in order to serve their country.

So as I read yet another load of twaddle from these people, I find it hard to suppress a very hollow laugh. The scandal that haunts Britain is not in politics, but rather in the media, which picks and chooses its stories to fit a biased and immoral agenda.

So as a further storm of hypocrisy echoes across the op-ed pages of the British press, I find myself wordlessly turning the page and passing by such drivel.   

Across all political parties are people of genuine integrity and honesty, working to improve the country according to their lights. I may not agree with them, but I respect them. It is time for the media to accept that politicians are not all rogues or fools and to engage with the political process with a skeptical, rather than a contemptuous, eye.

The CEO of a local business is upset because the city has subpoenaed transcripts of a bunch of public speeches he gave earlier this year.

On the one hand, it’s kind of weird that the CEO is upset and that he’s claiming victimhood over this. These were public speeches in public settings — speeches that he had, at the time, public-ized. The CEO had crafted these words with the intent and desire to have them heard and read and disseminated as widely as possible. So it seems odd, now, for him to turn around and claim that the city is somehow violating his privacy or his right to … something or other, by attempting to read those speeches now.

It’s just weird that he is acting as though the city had subpoenaed his medical records, or his browser history, or his private diary.

But on the other hand, isn’t there something kind of creepy about the city just going around, willy nilly, deciding to subpoena private citizens for no apparent reason? Even if the particular materials being sought here — public speeches — don’t make this particular case seem intrusive, doesn’t this still seem like an abuse of power? Or, at least, doesn’t it seem like it might be similar to something that one could imagine turning into a form of something that’s close to what might become something like an abuse of power?

And that’s Bad, isn’t it? It seems bad if you look at it like that. We don’t like to think that the city can just go around arbitrarily issuing subpoenas for no reason.

Turns out, though, that the city does have a reason for subpoenaing these public speeches from this CEO. The city is defending itself in a lawsuit — a lawsuit filed against the city by … wait for it … that very same CEO.

Oh. So, in other words, this is discovery — the routine legal business that occurs whenever two parties go to court. The CEO’s speeches are part of the facts of the matter in question. In defending itself against the CEO’s lawsuit, the city has a right to access to those facts. Those facts — and those speeches — are what this lawsuit is about.

OK, but still … why is this CEO suing the city? Whatever the particulars of his lawsuit, he’s got to be the Good Guy in this, right? He’s literally fighting City Hall. Doesn’t that automatically make him the hero in this story? That’s how the trope works, after all — when a private citizen stands up to fight City Hall, City Hall is never the Good Guy in the story.

But this is real life, not a Hollywood movie. In real life, City Hall isn’t always the big, corrupt oppressor abusing its power to crush the little guy. Sometimes it is! But in real life, City Hall is also, you know, the government — doing the job of the government in a democracy by standing up for the little guys.

And in that capacity — when City Hall is acting in its proper role as the Good Guy — cities get sued. A lot. They spend a lot of time in court fighting lawsuits filed by slumlords, tax cheats, wage thieves, racketeers, polluters, and all manner of other powerful, wealthy scofflaws who have deeper pockets than the taxpayers and who would rather tie the city up in court than comply with the laws that apply to everyone else.

So no, fighting City Hall doesn’t automatically make you the Good Guy. But it doesn’t automatically make you the Bad Guy, either.

Which kind of story is this one? Which kind of lawsuit is this one? Is City Hall the Good Guy or the Bad Guy in this case?

Well, here’s what happened. The city council passed a law protecting minorities from getting fired just for being minorities. Specifically, the city’s new law protects LGBT people from employment discrimination.

The CEO doesn’t like this law. What’s more, he thinks most people in the city don’t like it either. It’s quite possible he’s right about that. After all, laws protecting minorities from being treated unfairly wouldn’t ever come up in the first place unless it weren’t the case that a big chunk of the majority population was inclined to treat them unfairly. It’s often the case that a majority of the majority doesn’t like it when the law keeps them from taking advantage of a small minority.

But the CEO was so sure that a majority of the people of the city saw things his way that he launched a petition drive to force a ballot initiative that would allow the people of the city, by direct vote, to overrule their elected council and repeal the anti-discrimination law.

I will now pause to allow you to decide for yourself whether or not this CEO is the Good Guy in this story.

But that’s not ultimately relevant. It doesn’t matter if you think the city’s anti-discrimination statute is just or unjust, or whether you think the CEO’s ballot initiative to overturn it was just or unjust. Because that’s not what the CEO’s lawsuit is about.

The CEO filed his lawsuit after his petition drive failed. He didn’t manage to collect enough valid signatures to get his repeal initiative on the ballot.

But the CEO argues that he collected a whole bunch of valid signatures that were unfairly disqualified by election officials. If you count those, he says, then he’s got enough to get his repeal initiative. So he’s suing.

This lawsuit, in other words, isn’t about discrimination or anti-discrimination laws. It’s about something far more technical, mundane and boring. It’s about the electoral rules involving petition drives – about things like the number of signatures collected, how the validity of those signatures is determined, and the legitimacy of the tactics used to collect them. Some of those laws can be technical and complicated, but the function of such laws is quite clear: to ensure that all signatures represent actual people who intended to lend their name to the effort.

And that is why, in response to the CEO’s lawsuit, the city’s lawyers wound up subpoenaing the CEO’s speeches.

Not all of his speeches, mind you. They’re not interested in all of his speeches — just the ones related to the failed petition drive. Just a limited number of public speeches that were delivered publicly in support of the thoroughly public matter of an intrinsically public and political petition drive.

You can understand why such speeches are relevant to the matter of this lawsuit. The CEO’s descriptions of his petition in those speeches have a direct bearing on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the methods he was using to collect signatures. The content of those speeches is essential to the legal questions the CEO’s lawsuit addresses. What instructions were given to those who were collecting signatures? Did those instructions comply with election law or not?

So no matter what you think of the anti-discrimination statute, or of the CEO’s position, or of the city’s position, the necessity of examining his public statements offering instruction, direction and support for his petition drive shouldn’t seem weird or unseemly or inappropriate. That’s the heart of the whole lawsuit.

The subpoenas filed by the city’s attorneys are utterly predictable, mundane, and unavoidable steps in the process the CEO himself began by filing his suit.

If there’s any whiff here of anything unseemly or inappropriate, it’s coming from the CEO’s sudden perturbation over the prospect of close legal scrutiny of the tactics and rhetorics he employed in his petition drive. He’s quite a bit more worried than we might expect someone to be if they were confident they had followed election law properly.

But here’s the wrinkle: I’ve streamlined some of the description above to make the outlines of this case easier to describe and to understand.

The actual lawsuit involves not just a single CEO, but several CEOs of nonprofit corporations in Houston, Texas.

And those CEOs are also clergy, and the nonprofit corporations they oversee are Christian churches.

Now, churches are not — legally — just exactly like every other business. And clergy are not legally just like every other CEO. Those legal differences are, in general, a very important thing.

But I don’t get why those differences substantially change anything in this case. I’m not sure how or why those differences should make any difference.

Nothing in this case involves either the establishment of religion or the city attempting to restrict the free exercise thereof, so this doesn’t seem to raise any First Amendment issues.

The separation of church and state is an enormously important principle in American, but I don’t see what it would mean to invoke that principle here.

The separation of church and state does not forbid pastors and churches from participating in petition drives. Nor does it mean that pastors and churches are prohibited from filing a lawsuit against the city. But it also does not and cannot mean that when pastors or churches do file such lawsuits, they are magically exempt from the laws that govern such lawsuits or from the legal process and legal rules that the city and everyone else has to obey.

So what am I missing here? These sermons have direct bearing on the facts being disputed in this lawsuit — a lawsuit initiated by the churches themselves, not by the city. Those sermons have direct bearing on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the methods used to collect signatures, which is the center of this entire legal dispute.

If the city’s subpoenas involved the speeches of a CEO in an otherwise identical lawsuit, no one would bat an eye at the obvious necessity of collecting and consulting such relevant material in the case.

What is it about the fact that these public speeches were sermons that significantly changes that?

For more on this legal battle: Off the Kuff; Marc Campos; Texpatriate; Snopes; Pat Robertson.

Where do you start with dreams?

People say you’re asleep when you dream, but you’re not really; it’s just that the input you’re consciously processing is generated internally, instead of coming from outside. It’s a kind of consciousness that believes the most ridiculous things, though. Your best friend doesn’t look anything like your best friend actually does in real life. Your girlfriend is a biker chick with three thick hairs the diameter of birch saplings growing out of her head. Doesn’t matter; you recognize them instantly and without the slightest whiff of discontinuity.

You can fly, in dreams.  Converse with the dead. Oozing octopus suckers sprout across your face for no reason. You swallow it all, without reservation, without question. In terms of critical analysis, dreams are the Tea Party of cognitive states.

It’s only upon waking that you realize, in retrospect, how utterly absurd it all was.

The circuits you have to thank for that belated insight lie in a little strip of tissue along the orbitofrontal cortex. They say it acts as a reality-checker, tells you whether the input you’re processing makes sense or not.  It doesn’t always get it right, even when you’re awake; if someone actually does turn into someone else in the middle of a conversation, or if a building really does disappear without warning in the background, you’re not likely to notice it consciously because that OFC censor throws it into the garbage  before you’re aware of it.

Usually the censor is powered down during sleep. Sometimes, though, it works overtime. That’s when you realize, mid-dream, that you are dreaming. That’s when you can take the reins and control the narrative, become the architect of your perceived reality instead of its passive observer-victim.  That’s when dreams turn lucid.

Once I was in a hotel elevator when it went rogue: shot right out through the roof like a cannonball, fifty stories up, and plummeted towards the earth. I realized this made no sense, conjured up a little control panel out of the wall, talked the elevator car— which now had panoramic wrap-around windows— into sprouting stubby little wings, and glided us down to a soft nighttime landing on a coral reef (which we could now explore at leisure because the elevator car also doubled as a submarine. It was awesome).  That’s a rare level of control in my experience, though.  More often I simply remember at the worst possible time that people can’t fly, or the red wagon I’m riding shouldn’t be able to travel in space even if I did tie two lengths of 2×4 onto its gunwales— and suddenly I’m  tangled in high-tension wires twenty meters up, or what I thought was flying turns out to be, on closer inspection, just me hanging off a climbing rope in some high-school gym whose dingy roof and rafters have been coated with a thin layer of blue paint and some cheesy cartoon clouds. Sometimes the recognition that I’m dreaming is more of a Hail-Mary, when I realize that the Thing In The Basement isn’t going to leave me alone and I might as well just get it over with and hurl myself into its maw.  The dream generally changes channels at that point.

Sometimes, though— sometimes dreams are positively inspirational.

Kekulé dreamed the structure of the benzene molecule. Ramanujan swore that the mathematical theorems he derived were served up to him in dreams by Hindu deities.  The solution to my own Master’s thesis came to me in a dream (although I wasn’t nearly as excited by that revelation as I was by another dreamed insight, a solution to the age-old problem of how to build a walking beachball: I had the blueprints right there in my head).

So you are asleep when you dream, and you are awake. Dreams are unconnected to reality; dreams provide fundamental insights into reality. Dreams reduce you to passive observer; dreams elevate you unto godhood.

Or to paraphrase what Corlett et al report in a recent paper that Sheila Miguez pointed me to: dreams make you psychotic.

They mean this in the clinical, not the Gamergate sense: psychotic as in dissociated from reality, unable to distinguish fact from hallucination. (On second thought, maybe they mean it in the Gamergate sense after all.) Perhaps psychotics are merely dreamers who have not awakened, sleepwalkers whose experiences are not being properly filtered through the Orbitofrontal cortex.

Corlett et al looked at two possibilities. On the one hand, a high level of dream awareness might imply a greater grasp of waking reality— if your OFR is so on-the-ball that it even functions when it’s supposed to be off-duty, how much better will it perform during regular business hours? Alternatively, a high level of dream awareness might imply a reduced grasp of waking reality— because lucid dreamers are supposed to be characterized by “thin boundaries”, or a tendency to confuse fantasy and reality. Aspects of waking experience tend to leak across that boundary into the dream state (leading to greater “dream awareness”); but perhaps, by the same token, aspects of the dream state leak back into the waking world across the same semipermeable membrane.

Corlett et al ran groups of lucid and non-lucid dreamers through a repeated series of memory tests;  subjects had to decide whether they’d seen a given image previously in the same experimental run (as opposed to previous runs in which that image might also have appeared). They describe this in terms of  “Signal Detection Theory”, but what it comes down to is the ability to distinguish between recent memories and old ones. A parameter called d-prime scales to the width of the uncertainty zone between new and old. The higher d-prime is, the narrower the zone and the more confident you are in your response. If lucid dreaming indicates an elevated grasp of reality, then lucid dreamers should have higher d-primes.

The other criterion is called, um, criterion— but that’s such a dumb and ambiguous name that I’m just going to call it C. C describes any tendency to make a default guess one way or the other in case of uncertainty.  If, when in doubt, you’re more likely to guess that the memory is old, C<0. If you’re more likely to guess that it’s “new”,  C>0. If lucid dreaming implies a reduced grasp of reality in the waking state, C should be lower for Lucids than for Nonlucids.

(This is the way I understand it, at least.  You can go to the paper for more specifics, but don’t blame me if you end up even more confused.  If it’s clarity you’re looking for, Corlett et al couldn’t write their way out of a fortune cookie if you held a gun to their heads.)

You may wonder what the conclusion would be if lucid dreamers turned out to have both a lower C and a higher d-prime than nonlucid dreamers. I wonder that too; I can’t see what in principle would prevent such a result. The two hypotheses that Corlett et al are testing here are mutually exclusive, but the actual tests are not. Statistically, this leaves me a bit queasy.

Fortunately for the authors, that bullet never fired. They found no difference in the width of the Uncertainty zones of Lucids vs. nonLucids, but they did find that C was significantly lower in the Lucid group (P=0.013), suggesting that Lucids were “more likely to indicate that a picture was familiar to them, even if it was novel.”

So. If you buy this, lucid dreamers have more difficulty than non-lucid dreamers when it comes to distinguishing fantasy from reality. As Corlett et al put it, “individuals with high dream awareness make a pattern of memory errors consistent with an impairment in a reality monitoring process involving the function of the OFC”.

More succinctly, lucid dreamers tend to be more psychotic. Do we buy this?

The Royal We would certainly like to; anyone familiar with my recent work might be reminded of the multithreaded “dream state” I imagine for vampires, or the increasing sense of disreality Daniel Brüks experiences as the conscious wetware is incrementally disassembled during the course of his salvation. Corlett et al embed their findings in all kinds of neurological context— schizophrenia, false memories, the role of dopamine in “reality monitoring”—  that’s pure uncut catnip for the likes of me. They even call up the Default-Mode-Network I invoked a couple of years back to explain my dumb gullible vulnerability to scam artists (and to explore the role of competing neurological subsystems in the production of conscious experience).  They describe déjà vu as a kind of neurological false-positive:

“False familiarity signals have also been invoked to explain Déjà vu and Déjà vecu experiences, which bear phenomenological similarity to lucid dreams – people report the uncanny (and surprising) experience of having had an experience before in their past (O’Connor & Moulin, 2010). This false familiarity is believed to emanate from fronto-hippocampal dys-interaction (O’Connor & Moulin, 2010). These models of comparable phenomena perhaps point to the generality of predictive learning mechanisms in the brain (Friston, 2009) and the consequences of disrupted predictive learning across brain systems (Corlett et al., 2010)…  We believe our data support the idea that dream awareness involves the intrusion of reality onto the dreaming state and that this overlap is also manifest during waking, whereby high dream awareness subjects experience false familiarity for memoranda causing them to make false alarm responses.”

How can I not cream my jeans over all this technobabbly goodness? Think of the extra infodumps that Echopraxia could have contained, if only I’d read these results earlier!

And yet. In so very many ways, this paper is just bad. It leaves obvious methodological questions unanswered (even if you squint past the nonexclusive nature of the hypothesis testing, doesn’t the probability of error increase throughout the course of a task?  Isn’t the question “Have you previously seen X during this run?” a lot easier to answer for the first image in a sequence than it is for the last?).  One of the figure captions contradicts the legend in the same figure. The sentence-level writing is, to be charitable, not as clear as it could be. And for all the fancy neurological terminology being thrown around, the study reports no neurological findings (although we’re told that the subjects completed “a series of further neuropsychological tests to be reported elsewhere”).

This was basically a button-pushing test performed on a small (N=57) sample of self-selected male volunteers. Admittedly, even a journey of a thousand miles has to start with a single step— but did it have to be such a timid and slapdash one? Would it have cost anything more than a bit of additional time to— oh, I don’t know, include women in the study, double the sample size, and test for between-sex interactions? Cognitive Neuropsychiatry isn’t the most prestigious of journals, but it’s supposed to be peer-reviewed. Someone should at the very least have caught the figure errors.

This all might be a bit easier to take if Corlett et al didn’t seem to have mistaken their one small step for a Giant Leap for Mankind. As it is, it seems a bit questionable to go from Lucid dreamers slip up more when it comes to remembering how long ago they saw something to the claim that their errors are

… consistent with … patients with neurological damage to the OFC and its connections who  let old memories override or govern current perceptual inputs and they allow memory fragments to intrude upon their current conceptual understanding of the world, generating a set of beliefs about themselves that is bizarre and insensitive to change (Nahum et al., 2009; Schnider, 2001, 2003; Schnider et al., 2005).

Consistent with? Maybe so. But “consistent with” doesn’t necessarily translate into “evidence for”. This deep in the 21rst Century and we still need to keep reminding people that correlation ≠ causation?

Of course, that’s me the former-scientist talking. Me the SF writer is thinking Oooh,  programmable déjà-vu.  Deja-vu and pareidolia.  Pareidolia and intuition and the religious experience.  Maybe Bicamerals can be hacked, I’m thinking. Maybe vampires can be; maybe the connection between dreams and déjà vu and multithreaded dream-state awareness gives us a weapon to use against the Legions of Valerie.

Or a weapon for something to use, anyway. If we’re not around…

So for all their failings, let’s keep an eye on Corlett’s & Crew. Follow their follow-ups. See if hard neurochemistry supports their soft speculation. Draw up battle plans.  Scientist-me says, stay skeptical.

SF me says, Prepare to pillage.

I have a script that needs to get done by tomorrow morning and somehow, instead of writing it, I'm writing this piece about how to deal with deadlines. There's a famous quote from the great playwright George S. Kaufman that was uttered when a producer asked him if he could have a certain script done by Tuesday. Kaufman asked him, "Do you want it Tuesday or do you want it good?"

There's a point in there but it's not the one that some writers want to extract from it. That quote is used to justify lateness and it's employed as such by folks who forget that Kaufman did operate under deadlines and did meet them. He had to. An awful lot of his best work was produced on the road when a play was in tryouts and wasn't working. Kaufman and his collaborator (whichever one it was at the moment) would hole up in his hotel room, write an entire scene by dawn and then rehearse and stage it in the morning. That was probably the most grueling deadline-meeting you could have in his profession.

Others have said that what you have to do is to make it as good as you can by Tuesday. That's one of the things you need to learn to do as a professional writer. And what that involves usually is not seizing on any of the eighty thousand reasons you can come up with not to write and not to finish by Tuesday. There's always one. Sometimes if you're sharp, you can use all eighty thousand.

I have a couple of writer friends who sometimes need to be scolded a bit in this regard. Recently, one wrote me to detail all the things that were happening in his life that were preventing him from finishing his novel by the deadline. Actually, this was about his fourth deadline on this alleged book. He blew the first one so they gave him another. Then he didn't get it done by that date so they gave him an extension…and so on. I would ordinarily be more tactful and friendly in my response but this friend's recent antics seem to demand something more like this…

Stop explaining to me how it's everyone's fault but yours that you're not going to finish your book by the latest in a long series of deadlines. I'm surprised you haven't found some way yet to blame Vladimir Putin, Tony the Tiger, me and Edward Everett Horton. If you took all that effort you're putting into blaming others and applied it to the book, you'd be autographing printed copies by now.

Yes, yes…I know this person distracted you and that person put you in a mood where you couldn't write and some other person didn't get your computer fixed on time and on and on. There is always a reason to not get one's work done and you're seizing on every one of them. You probably won't get anything done before Thanksgiving because you have to decide which dinner to attend…so it'll be the Pilgrims' fault your book isn't finished.

Look, I'll say this simply: Get the book done. A writer who can't get his or her work finished is like a plumber who can never fix a leak. You're kind of useless. 20% of your excuses are probably valid but we all have those things happen to us and still, we get to the last page and type "The End." The other 80% are you looking for excuses not to write or, at least, not hand in anything.

Remember our friend [Name Redacted]? She never got anything finished which is why she's now in another line of work. I understood why she couldn't finish her work and it wasn't all those problems, not unlike yours, which she claimed to have. It was because she was terrified to finish the script and hand it in. She was terrified of the moment that the editor would call up and say, "I have some real problems with his." Or she was terrified of it getting published and then getting bad reviews or not selling or something. As long as she didn't finish, she was putting off those catastrophes.

I'd be sympathetic if this happened once in a while. It happens once in a while to everyone. But you have developed this dogged determination to not accept the responsibility for what you're doing…or more significantly, not doing. I like you and your writing too much to go along with this. Finish the script or give up and go apply for a job at Subway making sandwiches.

In case you haven't figured it out, this is me being supportive. I'm always supportive. If you decide it's time to go work at Subway, I'll have a foot-long meatball on Italian bread with provolone cheese. Toasted. And a bag of Baked Lays.

At last report, the novel wasn't finished yet but I think I got him from Chapter 8 to Chapter 9. He was almost to 10 before his sister came into town to visit for six weeks. And as we all know, you can't possibly be expected to do your job when your sister is in town. Since I have no sister, I'm going to go finish my script.

Ed Miliband has managed to dominate today's news cycle with his revelation that Lord Freud, speaking at Conservative conference 2 weeks ago made comments implying that some disabled people may be better off if they were not paid the full minimum wage.

Outrage aplenty today from almost everyone on the left and also lots of disability charities.

But in 2003, whilst Labour were in power, the government published an "Information Note" entitled "The Minimum Wage and Therapeutic Work" (opens PDF).

The document seeks to clarify the legal status of certain groups of people such as those who are disabled with reference to the minimum wage.

With reference to potential therapeutic work it states: "There may be no employment contract if there is no mutual obligation between the parties i.e. the individual is genuinely not obliged to perform duties and the employer is genuinely not obliged to provide the activity or pay the individual."

It then goes on to give a number of examples where it considers the minimum wage would probably not apply such as this one:

(c) A trust runs a facility for mental health out patients, who do various activities such as packing and assembly. They are paid varying amounts up to £20 per week. If they do not attend there are no sanctions. If they go along and do not want to do any activity they don’t have to. There is a production line but the speed is set by the users and if they want to they can turn it off;

Surely this idea is not far off what Lord Freud was saying today? That there may be circumstances where disabled people could derive benefit from a working situation where they were not paid the full minimum wage. Of course Freud did not heavily caveat and nuance his statement and it was clearly not properly thought through.

But the fact that when in power Labour clearly recognised there could be cases where disabled people could provide labour in limited circumstances and not be remunerated to the full extent of minimum wage law demonstrates that Freud's is not such an outlandish idea.

That won't of course stop Labour from continuing to attack him until he eventually has to resign which I predict will happen before the weekend. Because seemingly one thing you never have to worry too much about in politics is being consistent.

Not when there's a shitstorm to kick up anyway.


Hattip to Senior Sceptic on Twitter for highlighting this document to me.

The broadcasters are struggling to arrive at fair arrangements for leaders' debates in next year's general election and risk being snookered by the realities of multi-party politics and threats of legal action.

But would it be such a tragedy if there were no debates?

Many argue that the 2010 debates were a breakthrough and interested new people in politics.

But the most striking thing about those debates was the way that all three party leaders avoided talking about what the secretly regarded as the biggest issue facing the country.

Because there was barely a mention of the public-sector deficit - and even fewer of the tax rises and spending cuts that would be needed to reduce it.

So while the debates were certainly a novelty, it is hard to argue that there content was a revelation.

And from a partisan Liberal Democrat position, Nick Clegg will never be able to repeat the impact he made in the first debate in 2010.

You can even argue that Cleggmania (that short-lived phenomenon) ultimately harmed the Lib Dems. The breakdown in our targeting strategy as more and more constituencies dreamt of victory meant that a small increase in our vote actually resulted in a loss of seats.

So I should not be too concerned if there were no leaders' debates in 2015.

And there is a precedent from over the Atlantic.

Everyone knows the 1960 debates where JFK bested Richard Nixon. But far fewer realise that there were no televised debates in the US after that until 1976, when both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter judged that they needed more exposure and so agreed to debate.

"By 2015 I will have been the Member of Parliament for Taunton Deane for ten years. That is generally long enough to do the same job. 

"It is not my ambition to remain in Parliament until I retire. I have been very committed to the role and I have done it to the best of my ability. It is time to do something different. 

"There is a world beyond politics full of opportunities and it will be exciting to explore it."

I do wonder what the chair of Taunton Deane Liberal Democrats made of Jeremy Browne's resignation letter. I suspect Jeremy's excitement about his own future was the not the chair's first concern.

But I am sorry to see Jeremy stand down and wish him well for the future. The Liberal Democrats need their Whigs as well as their Radicals (as Donnachadh McCarthy used to say), and Jeremy was one of the more interesting figures on the right of the party.

He has even published two books this year, though I have to say his blend of turbo-capitalism and National Efficiency in Race Plan did not do it for me. And it was positively odd for him to claim that such an idiosyncratic view of the world constituted "authentic liberalism".

I suspect Jeremy still feels hard done by because of his sacking as a minister. As I argued last year, he was unlucky to be moved from the Foreign Office, where he at least seemed at home, as part of what I suspected was a deal to get David Laws back into front-line politics.

But on the whole, I think he has been lucky in the press he has received, The Conservatives have consistently said warm things about him, presumably in the hope of getting him to join them.

Here is Nick Boles tweeting today as an example:

So the last proper liberal announces he is leaving the LibDems. The modern Conservative Party is the true home for Gladstone's heirs.
— Nick Boles (@NickBolesMP) October 15, 2014

It seems Boles has not received the memo about flattering the protectionist instincts of Ukip and its supporters.

But the left has been complimentary too. Here is George Eaton in the New Statesman:

In appearance and ideology, Browne is as far from the Lib Dems’ beard-and-sandals brigade as it is possible to be. With his crisp suits and gleaming shoes, it’s easier to imagine him in the boardroom of JPMorgan than canvassing in a wet by-election.

But Jeremy's career has taken him nowhere near Wall Street. What Eaton is saying is that Jeremy has a public-school accent and wears good suits.

I suspect that tells us more about the state of British politics (or about George Eaton of the New Statesman) than it does about Jeremy Browne.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

I’ve been re-reading Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy again for part of my MA course, and it reminded me that I need to write a long post explaining some of his ideas in there as they are pretty fundamental to how a lot of modern party politics is conceived and reported.

But I don’t have time for that today, so instead I’m going to share with you an interesting couple of paragraphs from it:

According to our hypothesis, party officials are interested only in maximizing votes, never in producing any social state per se. But voters are always interested in the latter. Therefore a rational voter who is not a party official himself cannot assume members of any party have goals similar to his own. But without this assumption, delegation of all political decisions to someone else is irrational – hence political can never be the agents of rational delegation.

There is only one exception to this rule: if a voter believes a certain party will seek to maximize votes by catering to the desires of a specific interest group or section of the electorate, and if his own goals are identical with the goals of that group or section, then he can rationally delegate all his political decision-making to that party.

Downs’ book looks at what’s rational for voters and parties to do, rather than what they necessarily actually do, but this section jumped out at me as an interesting description of what’s happened to party politics in Britain since the 50s. (There’s probably an interesting debate to be had about whether An Economic Theory Of Democracy was a self-fulfilling prophecy in some countries, with the question of if parties began acting in the way Downs predicted because he said they would, rather than vice versa, but we’ll leave that for another time)

What strikes me is that Downs’ ‘one exception’ matches with the way things were in the UK (and other countries too) in the 50s and 60s. Parties then defined themselves as the representatives of certain sections of the electorate and for most (though never all) members of those sections, it made sense to not think much about politics and assume that the party would get on with the job of representing them. This is the classic era where of cleavage politics where two parties represented each side of a cleavage within society. The classic societal cleavage – and the one on which most party systems developed around – was class, though there are others (church and state or centre and periphery, for instance). When there were strong cleavages in society, more people would closely identify with ‘a certain group or section of the electorate’, but as those cleavages have faded, the nature of the parties has changed and they are now more preoccupied with vote-seeking than representation, as Downs had assumed they would be from the start.

Seen in this light, it’s no wonder that the membership of political parties has dropped so precipitously since the 50s, followed by the support for the traditional parties from the electorate. However, what’s also dropped since that period – matching up with the first part of Downs’ prediction – is that the amount voters in general identify with parties has dropped dramatically as well (I don’t have the figures to hand right now, but they can be found in Elections and Voters in Britain). The number of people willing to describe themselves as ‘Tory’, ‘Labour’, ‘Liberal’ or whatever else has dropped over time, with a corresponding drop in their willingness to vote the same at every election. Ironically, becoming organisations that are more about seeking votes has made them less likely to get them.

First some tweets, and then some commentary.

There’s something both telling and sad about the sort of dude who literally thinks that a) impugning my masculinity is the worst possible thing they can say about me, b) that it’ll somehow lessen me if they do. On the former, meh. Given the ridiculous ideas that they have regarding masculinity, I’m happy not to meet their definition. On the latter, whatever. They’re idiots. I’m not inclined to care, outside of the opportunities it provides for pointing and laughing.

But I do think it’s useful to publicly mock their stupidity on such subjects, for the amusement and edification of others. I also think it’s particularly useful to mock their definition of masculinity and gender, and their baseline assertion that being male is the apotheosis of the human condition. It’s not; it’s merely one way to be. I’m okay with gender being more than binary; I’m okay with people having a gender other than mine; I’m okay with people shifting their idea of what their gender is over time. Because I don’t think one’s essential value is rooted in gender, and someone else’s gender is nearly always not my business anyway. I am for people being who they are, not who anyone else wants them to be, or demands them to be for their own selfish reasons. I’m for letting the world know that I think such a position is the most correct one to have. I’m for calling out people who try to make difficult for those who don’t conform to their own, usually bigoted, expectations.

Want to declare that because I don’t meet your pointless and stupid definition of “masculinity,” I should identify as another gender entirely? Awesome. I get to create a gender that doesn’t have your jackassedness riddling it front to back. The folks in my gender won’t be focused on being a “real man” or a “real woman” but on being “really me.” My gender will have all the best parties because we can do what we want, free of gender expectations! Because there are no gender expectations! My gender gets to love whoever they want! My gender gets to be whoever they want! My gender doesn’t care what you think my gender should be! My gender rocks. And it doesn’t need you, or care what you think of it.

If only it were as easy for people of every gender to be as free in theirs as I am in mine. Because of course that’s the thing: Even when these idiots declare me “not a real man,” it doesn’t change that I am always seen to be a “real man,” and that I get all the benefits that accrue to me for being biologically male, identifying as a man, and conforming to social standards for what both of those mean. The worst these dudes can do is be mean to me on the Internet. It doesn’t change anything about what I get from the world. And while I can mock them for it and proclaim the new Scalzi Gender in all its awesomeness, let’s just say that I know that it’s easy for me to do so, because in the end society has my back. Not everyone else gets to say the same. We need to be working on that.

Since 1583, the British Empire has been a name you can trust for all your industrial, cultural, and brown-people subjugation needs.  We’ve brought you the railroad, tbe spinning jenny, the difference engine, and the electronically controlled bassoon, not to mention William Shakespeare and a little show called Doctor Who.  Whether we’re bringing you world-transforming culture and technology, stealing world-transforming culture and technology, or just taking credit for world-transforming culture and technology, the British Empire built its unique brand for over five hundred years.

But we know not everything can last forever.  Ever since you Americans showed us up in a mostly fair fight in 1776, and again in 1812. we’ve been able to enjoy newer and better markets for our products while, admittedly, losing a bit of the prestige that comes with shedding an important subsidiary.  Due to the unpleasantness of the 1930s and 1940s, the bloom went a bit off the colonial rose, and we made the heartbreaking choice of getting out of the brown-people subjugation business.  And due to various manifestations of nationalism, economic upheavals, and and the widespread availability of mobile phones, we’ve had to take a hard look at our business model and admit that it just isn’t going to work in this new economy.

Hence, this Kickstarter.

For you see, we here at British Imperial Concepts, Inc., believe that the old lion still has some fight in it, and that we offer a product which, though it may not have the broad and forcible appeal that it once had, is worth preserving into this new millennium.  The American Century may be on the wane, and the Chinese Millennium may just be starting (don’t blame us, blame market research), but that doesn’t mean, with a slight retooling of our mission statement, we can’t ensure the British Empire still has a place in the sun.  This Kickstarter campaign is the first step to ensure that the legacy of dear old Blighty will still exist outside of museums and history books, Texas excluded.  Under the guidance of a hand-picked panel of genuine British citizens pulled from the Tory voter rolls and a few high-profile American and sub-continental Anglophiles, we have developed a three-pronged approach towards the preservation and expansion of English heritage:

- LANGUAGE.  Everyone knows that English is the only acceptable language for telephone voice menu options, Bible stories, and movies that don’t have those incredibly annoying yellow subtitles at the bottom, like you paid nine dollars to read a bloody book.  But what many Americans don’t realize is that the English language was actually invented right here in England!  Your donation will help declare English the official language of everything, saving millions of dollars by removing the need to press “1” on your touch-tone phone and finally wresting aviation away from those stuck-up French.  However, to prove that we are in step with the times, William Shakespeare will be replaced as the canonical figure of British cultural dominance in pedagogy with J.K. Rowling.

- INDUSTRY.  Since Great Britain brought the world the Industrial Revolution, we have seen innovation in technology and practical economics arise from every corner of the globe.  Sometimes it seems like we can’t outsource it to former colonial holdings fast enough!  But, as the country who first invented modern slavery and the country who first abolished modern slavery, we feel certain that we can make sure that “labor” is no longer a dirty word.  With your help, we can not only reach at least 85% full child employment overseas (and that includes you, Yanks!), but also restore the former glory of the workhouse (emphasis on work!), the debtor’s prison, and the sweatshop at home.  And for you craft cocktail enthusiasts, the restoration of gin from snooty club drink to necessary tonic to alleviate the agony of backbreaking manual labor will benefit your alcoholic hobby immeasurably.

- ARISTOCRACY.  Part of the British Imperial Concepts Restoration Initiative operating plan is that at least 33% of our Kickstarter funds will go directly towards restoring the British aristocracy.  This will not only have the salutary effect of channeling millions of pounds into the deserving hands of worthwhile industries such as gambling, Empire snuff box manufacturing, falconry, and wigs, but also will provide gossip-hungry Americans with a permanent subclass of celebrities who couldn’t stop being famous even if they wanted to.  Making the class antagonism of society explicit instead of implicit will save time and money, a new pay-per-view scheme for even the most modest royal weddings will be a guaranteed revenue-generator, and our proposed “Win A Minor Lordship For A Year” lotto will create millions in revenue without having to pay blackmail to the state educational system.

Our initial goal of £3.5 trillion will initially be channeled into important upgrades in infrastructure, military power (including the reintroduction of a rum ration to the British Navy in conjunction with our corporate partner Bacardi), baksheesh, and, of course, marketing.  Our estimates are that this should be sufficient to re-establish British imperial hegemony in such hot sports as Cairo,  Kabul, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Johannesburg, where we can really get this project moving.  But with your help in reaching our push goal of all the money in the world, we can pursue even more ambitious projects to make the New British Empire even better than ever!  These include:

* Rec-colonizing Australia with a whole new shipment of boatloads of convicted criminals, with whom the current Aussies will have to fight it out for dominance of the continent — in front of our reality TV cameras!

* Project:  Orwell, in which we rewrite all existing history books to make it so none of those dreadful little wog countries ever got their so-called ‘independence’ in the first place.

* A comprehensive £6 million program to finally teach a small group of Americans the rules of cricket.

* A wide-ranging assistance package to the culinary industry with the aim of establishing British dominance in cuisine, including saving millions in spice expenditures with an ambitious food blandification initiative.

* Genetically breeding an indestructible breed of foxes; forcing everyone in banking to go back to wearing derby hats; and an exciting new reboot of Yes Minister starring Bernard Cumberbatch and various Minogues.

And, of course, as with any good Kickstarter, there are multiple levels of rewards!  We’re still sorting this out with our accountants, dream technologists, and a small but business-forward group of druids, but here’s just a few of the many highly desirable rewards to be had as part of this project:

DONATION OF £25:  Your name (last name only) is inscribed in a new edition of the Domesday Book as the owner of two fine and healthy goats.

DONATION OF £100:  Steampunk Rewards Package!  We’ll send you a box full of old toss we fetched out of a storage room at the British Museum.  Guaranteed to contain at least one pith helmet or goggles!

DONATION OF £250:  Become an official regimental soldier!  A lot of golliwogs are going to have to take it in the neck for this project to happen, and you can be the one to give it to them, in a brightly colored regimental coat, a ludicrous nickname (choose from “Spotty”, “Eggs”, or “Wish-Wash”), and official membership in the Queen’s 245th Royal Kingslandshire Fusiliers, or something along those lines.

DONATION OF £500:  Invitation to the Bechuanaland Legation Ball!  The event of the Mafeking social calendar!  Guaranteed to include dinner companion who is an Anglican vicar; he knows at least two saucy stories but is a bad dancer.

DONATION OF £1,250:  Absurd British given name!  You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and you can’t move in decent society if your name is Kevin, Doug, or Cheyenne!  This reward level gives you your choice of Beverly, Cecil, Jenkin, Willoughby, Streynsham, Otho, Probyn, Rokeby, Granville, Welbore, Cuthbert, or Eustace.

DONATION OF £2,500:  Membership chair on the Regency Committee to De-Stigmatize Paddling, where you will do vitally important work in replacing intercourse with le vice Anglaise of bum-spanking as the human race’s default sexual expression.   Comes with your own set of stationery, a ball-gag, and a rooster mask!

DONATION OF £3,000:  A complete DVD set of the Jeeves & Wooster television programme; for an additional £2,000, Mr. Fry or Mr. Laurie will visit your home and attempt to explain what on Earth is happening.

DONATION OF £7,500:  Tea!  You may say any absurd thing that pops into your head during teatime and no one will be allowed to mention it, because that sort of thing simply is not done, you  know.

DONATION OF £50,000:  Footie package!  You take complete ownership of the North Leigh F.C. Yellow Army, their ground at Eynsham Hall Park, and the right to dictate what is showing on telly in the clubhouse should the match prove altogether too exciting.

DONATION OF $10,000,000:  Sir Cecil Rhodes Name-That-Country Reward Package!  We will subjugate the African tribal area of your choice, put the natives to work mining tungsten, and name the whole bloody lot after you!  You’ll live forever in the minds of your countrymen — and theirs!

Risks and challenges:  Running any sort of hegemonic global empire runs great risk of bankruptcy, military entanglement, and the need to give diplomatic positions to your laziest and least competent friends.  Additionally, you may find that your ability to maintain an erection suffers every time some fuzzy-wuzzy who picked up a few Marxist phrases at big school calls you an “oppressor”.

Always bet on text.

Logical fallacies: your baloney detection kit sucks.

The general election debate dance used to be simple. The leader of whichever of the Conservative or Labour partes was trailing in the polls demanded one, then the one who was in the lead hemmed, hawed and put so many conditions in the way of having one that they could never be accused of turning it down, but guaranteed that it would never happen. The leaders of the third and other parties presumably had opinions on this, but as the debates were never a serious proposition, they didn’t get aired, unless their inclusion or not was one of the roadblocks thrown in the way it happened.

Then in 2010, the stars aligned in just the right way and we had our three debates between the leaders of the three leading parties. Understandably, this has created an expectation that they’ll happen again, which would set us off on an even more complicated path of negotiation even without the changes that have happened in politics over the last few years.

In that context, the initial proposal for the debates – a debate with Cameron and Miliband, then a debate with Cameron, Miliband and Clegg, and finally one with Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Farage – would make sense as a wrecking proposal from someone who didn’t really want a debate. It’s bizarrely convoluted, it ignores the Greens, it means each debate is going to end up covering the same ground as the new inclusion in the later debates will want to revisit that and it doesn’t appear to satisfy anyone. Job done, except this came from the broadcasters, not a politician, and I’ve no idea how they managed to come up with such a dog’s breakfast of a proposal.

The key point here is that the broadcasters are in a position of strength as the public will be expecting debates this time, so they’ve got the ‘we’re going ahead with this format, with or without you’ card to play. The public would accept an empty chair, if they think the broadcasters have been fair and it looks like someone being petulant. As it is, this proposed system just guarantees Cameron and Miliband having the same discussion for three weeks, with extra guests being invited to interject on the reruns.

The way I see it, there are five parties that pass the credibility test for being included in a UK-wide debate: they’ve all had MPs and MEPs elected, polls suggest they will get MPs elected at the next election and they’re standing in a majority of the seats at the election. (To the best of my knowledge, no party is intending to stand in all of them) That means debates between the leaders of the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP and the Greens, and the formula should be on the same lines as last time: one on the economy, one on foreign affairs and one on domestic issues. The one thing I would agree with David Cameron on is that because of fixed term parliaments we now know exactly when the election will be, they could be spaced out over a few months before, not all crammed into the campaign. I’d also suggest that similar debates with similar criteria for entry should occur in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and that the broadcasters should commit to showing these across the UK on free-to-air channels.

The debates worked last time because they were simple and everyone could understand what they were about and why the leaders were there. The political system now isn’t quite as simple, but that doesn’t mean we need to add an extra level of complexity into the debates. Three debates, each on a theme, with five leaders at each is the best way of achieving that this time around.

One:

So he can disenfranchise all the people on holiday in [shudder] Europe

Two:

So he can cut off any campaigning period in which people might ask questions and get themselves informed rather than just voting with years of newspaper prejudices

Three:

So he can promise to prop up a Tory Government of the far right… Then drop it after two months and run away laughing while Mr Cameron implodes

Four:

So he can exploit what he assumes’ll be the public mood at the highest high water-mark of his populist Party’s popularity before the inevitable consequences of failure to deliver or (worse) compromise with another party or (worse) with reality by having to make a single difficult decision prove he’s just the same as all the other politicians

Five:

…Er, that’s it.

The screwup with the print version is resolved, and it is back on sale. Sorry for the glitch. Details in comments.

The blog version of TARDIS Erudiorum will run on Wednesday and Thursday this week. Today, some long overdue good news.

The latest volume of the TARDIS Eruditorum book series is now for sale. You can get it at the following locations.

US: Kindle, Print
UK: Kindle, Print
Smashwords (For non-Kindle e-readers)

It'll be popping up on other ebook stores over the next couple days/weeks, including Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and iBooks. I make the same royalty off of all of the channels linked, so whichever one is most convenient for you is the one to go with. Previous volumes are available at the same sites, although the nature of the books is to be pretty self-contained, so if this is an era that interests you, don't worry about the first four volumes.

This one covers the back four years of the Tom Baker era, primarily the Williams years, but also the first year of John Nathan-Turner's run, covering everything from The Horror of Fang Rock through Logopolis. It thus contains:

• Revised and expanded versions of every relevant essay, including all the Pop Between Realities, Time Can Be Rewritten, and other side trips of the era, and the gargantuan Kabbalistic Choose Your Own Adventure essay that is "Recursive Occlusion (Logopolis)," now with actual page-turning or clicking around. 
• A book-exclusive Pop Between Realities post on Target, the show Graham Williams was poached from, and Philip Hinchcliffe was placed on following Season Fourteen of Doctor Who. 
• Book-exclusive Time Can Be Rewritten entries on Big Finish's The Auntie Matter and BBC Books' Festival of Death
• An essay exploring the Guardians' role in Doctor Who "canon."
• An essay on the John Nathan-Turner era and whether it was a complete and utter disaster.
• A second "Now My Doctor" essay on Tom Baker, exploring what makes these latter years of his era so good.
• An essay entitled "The Shada Variations" looking at the numerous attempts to complete Douglas Adams's great unfinished story.

A comedy club in Spain is using facial recognition technology on its customers to determine how much they laugh and charging them accordingly. The more you laugh, the more you pay.

It's only a matter of time before it spreads to this country and I can see the advertising now: "Come see Carrot Top! Save a fortune!"