Andrew Hickey

Open Democracy tells us that Barnardo’s, the children’s charity, is working with G4S to hold asylum seekers and their children at a secure facility in West Sussex.

Which reminds me of a piece I once wrote as Professor Strange (as sort of academic cousin of Lord Bonkers) for Clinical Psychology Forum.

After explaining:

They don’t let me out of College much these days, so I spend my time feeding the ravens and exploring the less-frequented shelves of the library.

the professor went on to look at Barnardo's role in sending children out to Australia and other distant parts of the British Empire.

Far from being, as is often claimed, a secret, "It was done on a massive scale ... and was widely discussed."

And Professor Strange concluded:

Nor was Dr Barnardo himself free from controversy. More than one parent went to court in an attempt to secure the return of children who had been sent overseas. Strangely these children always seemed to have been adopted by wealthy but eccentric figures who made it a condition of the arrangement that their identities would never been revealed. 

One mother, a Mrs Gossage, fought the good doctor all the way to the House of Lords and won her case, but she never saw her son Henry again. 

We know this, the ravens and I, but if I am invited to conferences I get excited and wave my arms about too much. That is why they don’t let me out of College much these days.

Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards.

There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socially determined, and therefore mutable. And social problems are easy to fix, through things like education and social services and public awareness campaigns and “calling people out”, and so we have a responsiblity to fix them, thus radically improving society and making life better for everyone.

But the Right (by now I guess the far right) believes human characteristics are biologically determined, and biology is fixed. Therefore we shouldn’t bother trying to improve things, and any attempt is just utopianism or “immanentizing the eschaton” or a shady justification for tyranny and busybodyness.

And I think I reject this whole premise.

See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just giving people more iron supplements. But the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades – including many forms of drug abuse.

Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine.

What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?

What about poor school performance? From the social angle, we try No Child Left Behind, Common Core Curriculum, stronger teachers’ unions, weaker teachers’ unions, more pay for teachers, less pay for teachers, more prayer in school, banning prayer in school, condemning racism, condemning racism even more, et cetera. But the poorest fifth or so of kids show spectacular cognitive gains from multivitamin supplementation, and doctors continue to tell everyone schools should start later so children can get enough sleep and continue to be totally ignored despite strong evidence in favor.

Even the most politically radioactive biological explanation – genetics – doesn’t seem that scary to me. The more things turn out to be genetic, the more I support universal funding for implantable contraception that allow people to choose when they do or don’t want children – thus breaking the cycle where people too impulsive or confused to use contraception have more children and increase frequency of those undesirable genes. I think I’d have a heck of a lot easier a time changing gene frequency in the population than you would changing people’s locus of control or self-efficacy or whatever, even if I wasn’t allowed to do anything immoral (except by very silly religious standards of “immoral”).

I’m not saying that all problems are purely biological and none are social. But I do worry there’s a consensus that biological things are unfixable but social things are easy – or that social solutions are morally unambiguous but biological solutions necessarily monstrous – and so for any given biological/social breakdown of a problem, we figure we might as well put all our resources into attacking the more tractable social side and dismiss the biological side. I think there’s a sense in which that’s backwards, and in which it’s possible to marry scientific rigor with human compassion for the evils of the world.

The more you know about a subject, the less likely you are to enjoy a fictionalized treatment of it.  Historical dramas, biopics, and ripped-from-the-headlines stories are often unsatisfying to those very close to the real-life people and events; too much must be glossed over, left out, abridged, or sweetened to meet the demands of narrative form.  This doesn’t change when the subject shrinks in size; indeed, it only compounds the problem, as the less there is to know about something, the more of it is known to those who bother to seek out its details.  That was a big problem for me in seeing Frank, the new film from Lenny Abrahamson; as it’s loosely based on Frank Sidebottom, of whom I was a constant fan until his untimely death in 2010, it was alarming to see the vast chasm between the real thing and the on-screen version played by Michael Fassbender.  In the movie, Frank is a tortured artist, a genuine outsider, a mentally scarred American whose oblique and artsy songs and fanatical perfectionism made him a fragile and dangerous creature even to his most loyal bandmates, and permanently disqualified him from attaining any kind of public acceptance.

In reality, Frank Sidebottom — the enchantingly goofy creation of punk rock stalwart Chris Sievey — was none of those things.  He was a gregarious, friendly man, a self-aware and self-mocking gent who would provoke on occasion but always in a good-natured way, a chummy British bloke who crafted simple poppy songs about football, toys, and his hometown and released joyfully deranged covers of pop hits.  He never had a huge audience, but he wasn’t an isolated unknown; and by all accounts, he was anything but a tortured, off-putting madman/genius but rather an endlessly accommodating man who was loved by all who met him.  The only thing he had in common with his on-screen namesake was the giant papier-mâché head they both wore.  Of course, that’s part of the point; the movie’s “Frank” isn’t supposed to be Frank Sidebottom at all, even though Jon Ronson, who co-wrote the film with Peter Straughan, really did play keyboards for a while with the real-world Frank.  He’s fictional as well as fictionalized, Ronson using the shape and form of a little-known cult musician to plausibly explore issues of what success and failure mean and how madness informs or prohibits creativity.  It’s a perfectly understandable choice, and one that works well enough if you didn’t know who Chris Sievey really was; it seems, to a non-fan, perfectly reasonable to use the life of a man who went around in a huge fake noggin exchanging barbs with a tiny ventriloquist’s dummy named after himself for just such a purpose.  But for the few who knew the ‘real’ Frank, it’s pretty jarring to see this intense and battered soul depicted in the image of the affable, nasal crooner we know and love.

Frank isn’t, then, any kind of a biopic at all — or, if it is, it’s the generalized biography of the wounded soul of the outsider artist, compressed into the form of one man.  The story follows an equally fictionalized version of Jon Ronson himself, here abstracted by as a Domhnall Gleason as a self-impressed but dissatisfied young man who thinks there’s a rock star inside of him yearning to break out, but unable to slip past the chains of his sub-mediocre songwriting ability.  (One of the movie’s better jokes, familiar to more than a few wannabe musicians, finds Jon sitting down to write his masterpiece about suburban alienation only to discover that he’s unconsciously cribbed the tune from a Madness song.)  A chance meeting with a little-known noise group called SORONPFRBS — Frank and his sidemen, the extravagantly gloomy Maggie Gyllenhaal and a French couple holding down the rhythm section — leads to his joining the group as their new keyboardist, and immediately becoming embroiled in Frank’s insanity.  He never takes off his false head; he spends hours, days, weeks, and months perfecting every single sound the band makes, to an apparent audience of zero; and he seems to care nothing for commercial matters, or even how he’s going to make a living.  Documenting the daily madness of life with Frank for his small but ever-growing audience on social media, Jon soon finds himself with a chance to bring the band some legitimate mainstream attention; but far from pleasing the rest of the band, this only serves to enrage them, especially Gyllenhaal, who claim that Frank is far too fragile to be exposed to the treacherous ground that is success.

From here, the movie goes in both predictable and surprising directions.  The gig (at a very daft re-creation of the South By Southwest festival) goes disastrously awry, Frank is cast off into the wilderness, Gyllenhaal completely loses her shit, and Jon becomes a pariah before learning a few valuable lessons about so on and so forth.  There are lots of fresh and interesting turns along the way; a decision to keep SORONPFRBS’ existence largely isolated from references to the music of the real world, some extremely fine moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, a few bits of genuine pathos, and one of the best on-screen portrayals of the internal dynamics of a pop band I can recall seeing.  There are also, unfortunately, some rather rote and/or unfortunate turns along the way; Frank’s fall from grace, while capped with a great punchline at its nadir, is much more soaked in bathos than it needs to be, a scene in a Chinese restaurant reaches nearly Game of Thrones levels of ploddingly obvious exposition, and the end is such a treacly bit of ‘hero’s redemption at the hands of a damaged survivor’ that it might have its own chapter in the Quirky Indie Dramedy playbook.  The scenes where the film’s central moral dilemmas — the extent to which commercial success conflicts with artistic merit, and whether psychological damage enhances or hinders the creative process — struck me as well-done, and allowed the character of Jon, up to then rather a self-serving heel despite himself, some measure of salvation, particularly as he moves past self-pity and into real recognition.  But how much they work for you will likely depend on the extent to which you agree with their answers to those dilemmas.

Frank is a movie worth seeing, particularly because of its skillful anthropology of the internal life of a rock band, and some exceptional performances, especially by Gyllenhaal and Fassbender, who manages to turn in an absolutely shocking physical performance to compensate for the fact that you don’t see his face out of the big papier-mâché head for 95% of the film.  (The fact that you actually keep looking at its frozen plaster face, half expecting it to register some emotion or feeling, is a testament to how well he succeeds in pulling this off.)  It’s also got a lot of problems, from its telegraphing of emotional notes to the way it sometimes comes across as a paid advertisement for Twitter.  But it’s a solid enough way to spend some time thinking about issues that aren’t often raised in musical biographies, even if they’re biographies of fictional versions of a performer who was himself a fictional character.  (I still think the movie could have been great if it had featured an appearance by Little Frank.)

Not being one of the privileged elite of Lib Dem bloggers, I didn’t get a review copy of Jeremy Browne’s Race Plan, so I waited until it turned up in the University library before reviewing it. It was worth waiting for it, as if I’d laid out money on actually buying a copy, I’d have felt extremely ripped off. It was obviously meant to be a provocative book that would force a debate within the Liberal Democrats and make people realise the correctness of Browne’s ‘authentic liberal’ views, but instead it’s just the same boilerplate ‘classical liberal’ pabulum one can read on blogs and think tank websites for free.

It feels like a book that was written in a hurry, and that shows in the lack of citations or justification for many of the claims Browne makes. There are many sections full of assertions that need some sort of explanation or evidence to back them up, but none comes. This is evident in the two central assertions of the book: that it’s “an authentic liberal plan to get Britain fit for ‘The Global Race'”.

Browne’s description of his ideas as ‘authentic liberalism’ isn’t based on any sort of discussion of liberal ideas or their relevance to the modern age but merely presented as self-evident truth. It assumes – like most who claim to be heralds of ‘classical liberalism’ – that there is some Platonic ideal form of liberalism and any versions that deviate from this are inauthentic or fake. It completely ignores the idea – as I discussed in my series of posts on Russell – that liberalism should be concerned with power, or that it can adapt to meet the times. It’s an assumption that liberalism was somehow perfected in the nineteenth century, and nothing needs to be added to it. Browne doesn’t have anything to say about power, except for expecting everyone to prostrate themselves in front of the power of the market and the ‘global race’.

The ‘global race’ is the second of Browne’s major assumptions, and again he doesn’t seek to justify this concept, just assumes it to be the case. For those of you who forgot, the ‘global race’ was the centrepiece of a David Cameron Tory Party conference speech and like many big political ideas before it, wasn’t one that became part of the national vocabulary. Browne, however, latches onto it with all the vigour of a Conservative Central Office intern looking to get in the leader’s good books, but doesn’t stop to explain why he thinks it’s a good idea, or even if in a globalised world the idea of a race between nation-states makes any sense. It feels like international relations by Sellar and Yeatman: Britain must be Top Nation again, then history can come to an end.

Browne’s inability to question his assumptions, and the generally rushed nature of the book mean his proposals aren’t original and rest on some very weak evidence. He talks about school vouchers as though they’re a thrilling new idea, not something that have been a feature of seemingly every right-wing screed on education since the 90s, and assumes they will work because competition. No, that’s pretty much the argument – school vouchers bring in competition and competition always makes things better, thus school vouchers will make things better. Mind you, this comes after an argument where he purports that the single biggest reason for the relative success of independent schools compared to state schools is parental choice. Not increased levels of funding and the ability to spend more on teachers and facilities, just choice.

Later, we’re told that London needs a new airport because ‘a global hub city needs a global hub airport’ without giving any meaningful definition of what either of those things are, making the whole argument a frustratingly circular one. Like much of the book, it feels like nothing more than Browne pushing his personal desires and assuming that they need no evidence to back them up. It betrays the idea that his ideas aren’t radical, but have been floating around on the right for years to such an extent that that the true believers don’t need proof or evidence to assert them as true.

In this vein, he asserts that the size of the state should be between 35 and 38% of GDP, based on a discussion of a handful of countries and Britain’s experience between 1997 and 2001 (though I think the figure he uses excludes all the off-the-books PFI spending, which would weaken his argument even more). It feels like a figure plucked from the air, and just when you would expect him to bring out some form of evidence to back it up, there’s absolutely nothing. It’s just put out there as something Browne believes to be true, and used to justify a whole load of lazy man-in-the-pub bloviating about supposed government waste. Browne seems to believe that running a government is just like running a supermarket, again parroting the prevailing view on the right that everything can be reduced to businesses and markets.

It amuses (but also slightly scares) me to see people thinking that this book makes Browne a deep thinker or a radical. The ideas in it aren’t original or radical, and the thinking behind them is wearyingly shallow. Browne’s style is akin to that of Thomas Friedman, firing multiple factoids and wows at the reader, hoping to hide the lack of a detailed argument. For instance, Browne often waxes lyrical (well, semi-lyrical, his writing rarely rises to any great heights) about Chinese skyscrapers and other infrastructure, comparing them to Britain’s Victorian engineering triumphs, but neglects to think about how these things there were built. The human cost of this building, and the vast armies of poorly paid labour without any rights that build them isn’t mentioned at all.

Likewise, as he urges us to work harder so we can be part of the ‘Asian Century’, he handwaves away any mention of climate change and its potential effects. This is something that’s going to dominate the century in a much more fundamental way than anything Browne focuses on, but the few mentions of any potential environmental problems assume they can be simply solved, and nothing will get in the way of the irresistible growth of the economy. Browne trumpets his experience as a Foreign Office minister, but the overview he gives of foreign affairs doesn’t reveal any particular depths and I worry if the Foreign Office’s work isn’t focusing on the potential global risks climate change creates.

I’ll be honest and say that from all the descriptions and reviews I’d read of it, I didn’t expect to agree with this book, and I generally didn’t. What I didn’t expect, though, was for the arguments in it to be so weak and resting on so little. It’s a testament to the paucity of debate and thinking within a lot of the party that something argued as weakly as this can be seen as being a bold challenge. What disappoints me most of all is that it has nothing to say about power, and how people can get that power back from globalisation. Instead, he merely envisages a capitulation and surrender to the prevailing mood in the name of competing in the ‘global race’, when what we need is a liberal challenge and a vision of how things could be done differently. A truly radical and liberal plan for the twenty-first century would challenge the orthodoxy, but Browne’s plan is just for more of the same, dressed up in supposedly liberal clothes.

I've been at a marketing conference the last few days, and underneath all the sales funnels and ROIs and synergies and native advertising and value-add content, there was a lot of talk about storytelling... and how we've forgotten how to tell stories in our endless quest to create MOAR CONTENT.

There's no doubt that since the rise of the internet, much of the job of "marketing" seems to be to fill the internet with crap. Content, any content, as long as it appears regularly and is stuffed with the requisite amount of keywords, has come to dominate what many firms consider "marketing on the internet" for a decade now. But as anyone who's tried to find relevant content on the internet, or sifted through their spam email knows, we've developed very good filters for sorting through BS for actual valuable results. And when we start having problems curating all that noise, places like Google and now Facebook, do it for us, with (in Facebook's case, especially) dodgy algorithms that decide what we're actually interested in and what we should see.

The widespread hatred of what's happened with Facebook, in particular, is a constant gripe not just for users (I finally deleted my personal Facebook account, and kept only the fan page) but also marketers, who have developed huge followings that they now have to pay to reach. But as was pointed out by a speaker at the conference, this is all the fault of myself and my colleagues:

"We're the problem! We broke Facebook. They had to switch to promoted content because we were spamming people with garbage. 'Here's a picture of the sun! Do you YOU like the sun? 'Like' this picture of you like the sun!' WE ARE THE PROBLEM."

All that daily editorial calendar garbage we're spewing out to clutter up the web has given both us and everyone else who uses it information fatigue. Data overload. It's added to the noise in the world. It's made it harder to find valuable, relevant work.

With Google changing its algorithm to increase the ranking of content not just on clicks, but also by time spent on the page, there was a lot of chatter about what this new shift in the algorithm and the information overload was going to do to the types of work we produced to share in online spaces. Some brands and agencies already understand that if you concentrate on just putting out a few big pieces of entertainment, good stories, valuable information, you can cut through the noise, and they're putting out less junk. Others are still stuck spamming you value propositions and bullet pointed lists, hoping something will stick.

When I come home from the day job, I write novels. I talk to a lot of writers. And I couldn't help but notice how these two approaches - lots of content you hope will connect with someone, versus focusing on a few quality projects - mirrored the career strategies of many novelists. There are two schools of thought, generally: you write as much as possible, in as many genres as possible, writing three, maybe even four (or more! Many romance authors write more, and self-published authors often write a dozen or more novella length pieces a year to make a living wage), and hope one of them hits it big (the casino approach). Or, you write your book a year or every three years and you slowly build up a small but passionate audience over time, hoping that by investing in just one piece at a time, that in twenty years or so you'll have enough money through writing to live on.

The reality is that for many authors, the casino approach is simply the only way to make a living. They can't afford to wait to "maybe make a living writing novels" in twenty years. This is often how I see myself in my role at my day job. Shareholders aren't here for a ten-year return. They get quarterly reports. They must, at all costs (even and especially jobs) see growth, a return on their investment, from year to year. That means everyone must produce work, lots of work, to justify their existence, hoping that some of it, any of it, will hit. Most corporations are like this, investing heavily in busy work, in everyone working hard, without sitting down to strategize or prioritize. But the checks come on time (which is far better than I can say for publishing!).

The longer game, the exhausting game, and the game that has less of a likelihood for regular checks, is the long game of relying on building a career on fewer pieces. You may be able to invest more time, energy, and thought into them, but the reality here is that there's less chance of writing something that will connect with readers at the right time, in the right place. If publishing is a gamble, then the more pieces you write, the more tickets you've bought, the better chances you'll have, right?

In truth, I see merit in both of these approaches. Spam works. I see it work everyday. So long as spam works, we are still going to see a lot of spam. Junk posts also work. Some people really like the sun, and they will be happy to like your post all fricking day long. But investing in the longer game, the big tentpole pieces, the novel that took five years or seven years to write, can be just as good an investment.

What I suspect most writers, and marketers, will end up doing in future is a mix of both of these approaches. We'll always have a lot of junk. People like candy. But in talking about how he schedules content on his blog, one of the speakers this weekend pointed out that some candy on Monday, candy and spinach on Tuesday, a big thinky roast piece on Wednesday, candy and spinach on Thursday, and candy on Friday isn't a bad way to schedule content (I think that's a little too much candy for me, personally, but you get the idea). You give folks some happy junk AND a nice chewy piece that makes them think, and then you're not just adding to the junk on the internet, you're providing some value and variety.

This is how I look at using online self-publishing platforms versus traditional publishing sometimes, too. Self-publishing or digital-only is ideal for small fun pieces in universes like the one in my God's War books that are fun slash-and-hack post-apocalypse stories with bad ass heroines and bug tech. Traditional houses can get the newer, chewier, more complicated stuff that gets people excited on a different level, like The Mirror Empire novels. And having a diversity of work also means that I lessen reader burnout. It's not just all the same tired thing.

I'm a marketing nerd, fully aware of its dangers and its potential for inciting positive change. And I admit I look forward to the end of the internet garbage era of marketing, or at least a reining in, a tactical deployment of candy vs. roast, instead of an endless sea of endless suns.

About Kameron Hurley
Kameron Hurley is the author of The Mirror Empire, as well as the award-winning God's War Trilogy, comprising the books God's War, Infidel, and Rapture. She has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. Hurley has also been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, the Locus Award, BFS Award, and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Year's Best SF, EscapePod, The Lowest Heaven, and the upcoming Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.

The BBC have caused a bit of a stir by labeling anyone using encryption in the form of a VPN a “pirate”.

On that basis, almost anyone who works from home regularly – and whose laptop is likely to be backed up over a VPN as a result – is a potential pirate. Small offices with just a few staff in also often use broadband connections with VPNs back to HQ.

Snooping for heavy users of encrypted traffic will also pick up those using services such as Tor, to evade state surveillance and blocking. Such tools tend to be used more heavily in more oppressive regimes, but a more oppressive internet regime is exactly what the BBC is encouraging with this “ISPs should spy on users” approach.

Some may think that I’m being a bit harsh on old Auntie, but this isn’t the first time they’ve missed a trick when it comes to online issues. There’s the time they funded online organised crime. The ongoing campaign against online pharmacies, a lifeline for many trans people who are denied or delayed treatment by the NHS. Oh, and they’re a member of an organisation that refers to Harry Potter as “Adult Media”.

Media outlets reporting things badly is troublesome enough but still remains part of day-to-day life. It worries me when the same poor reporting spills over into official submissions to governments.

Triggers


Apparently, they've found out who Jack the Ripper was.  Maybe.  At least, so says the Daily Mail, and a bloke who's written a book about the case, and who owns a business selling 'Ripper' tours.  So, reliable and unbiased sources.

Turns out, Jack the Ripper was... some guy.

Who'd have thunk it?

So, will this put a stop to the lucrative Ripper industry?  The books, movies, walks, etc?

No, of course not.  Like all previous unmaskings, it'll just fuel the fire, even if this unmasking turns out to rest on marginally better evidence that some hack's ability to create anagrams, or an evidently untrue story told by a publicity hound, or the baseless hunch of a crime writer, or an obviously forged diary, or the manufactured bad reputation of a dead one-time heir to the throne.

Because, contrary to what everyone ever has always said about Jack the Ripper, interest in the case doesn't stem from the fact that the murderer was never caught.  It stems from the appeal of the degradation, humiliation, punishment and silencing of women... and from the way revelling in this (with whatever spurious self justification) can distract us from other stuff about the lives those women led, and the world they lived in.

Our misogynistic culture is obsessed with the murder of women.  It is possibly the main subject of the present-day Western narrative culture industry, aside from the sexual/romantic conquest of women.

It could be objected that there are so many stories about the murder of women because so many women are murdered... but that doesn't explain, say, the lack of a similar number of stories about the rape of women (as Alan Moore pointed out), or about the political and social subjugation of women, or about any number of other things that are more common.

The prevalence of the actual murder of women is intimately connected with the prevalence of depictions of the murder of women, but in ways that are far more complex than the merely causal (whichever way you want to imagine the causation runs).  It's all part and parcel of a cultural misogyny which stems from sexism and patriarchy, generated by class society all the way back to what Engels called "the world historic defeat of the female sex" with the start of social hierarchy.  (None of which is to excuse our present cultural practice by appeal to the influence of older structures.)

The women murdered (as is supposed) by the man dubbed Jack the Ripper are objects of morbid fascination because they shared a fate which made them only slightly unusual for women of their class and time.  Lots of these women were raped, abused, beaten and/or murdered (by men - let's not efface that vital part of the story).  It just so happens that some of these women were murdered in particularly vicious and gruesome ways, with their bodies mutilated and insultingly displayed afterwards.  (It's by no means clear how many women were the victim of the one escalating killer who ended up reaching a crescendo of perverse cruelty in the killing of Mary Kelley and then vanished, but it does seem likely that at least four were part of his distinct sequence.)

There is a degree of pity attached to the fascination.  Certainly, at the time, many common people in similar walks of life were motivated by fury at the fate of people who they knew, or might have known.  But also at the time, part of the fascination was to do with a kind of furtively aroused moralism about 'unfortunates' (as women who were driven to prostitute themselves by poverty were daintily called).  Such patronising and contemptuous pity is a mixture of fear and loathing of the poor, and of women.  And it puts the focus on sex, safely away from other scarier stuff.

But the fascination with the women is marginal to the wider cultural obsession with Jack the Ripper.  The women are props in his story, used as background detail and as titilation (particularly since the women involved worked as prostitutes, with all the sordid arousal this brings to some).

Generally, the obsession is with the man.  The killer has been fetishized, celebrated, glamourised and bigged up beyond belief.  He has been transformed from a skulking trick into a top-hatted, cloaked, evening-dress-wearing toff with a sinister gladstone bag, riding around in a coach with a royal crest on the side.  Gentleman Jack, the genteel and aristocratic killer.  There's no doubt that part of this - alongside the various attempts to make him a royal, a freemason or a posh establishment figure covering up for Queen, Country and Lodge - is the submerged horror of a system in which the poor, especially poor women, were the playthings of the rich, material to be used when needed and then allowed to sink back into the slum.  But the effect is to transform the killer himself, and his vacuously misogynistic crimes, into a meaningful figure, a powerful figure, a figure of purpose and steely determination, or of glamourous and tortured Jekyll-and-Hydean complexity, an artisan with a philosophy and a moral agenda of his own (however twisted), etc.  In this, the Ripper is the prototypical serial killer of the present-day culture industries, of Seven, Messiah, The Tunnel, etc.  The killer as intellectual, as the isolated thinker with lessons to teach us in blood, as the sinister harbinger of well-thought out rebukes (which shows simultaneously how much 'we' supposedly all need rebuke for 'our' sins, and how evil the opinionated outcasts bringing the rebukes usually are).

(I used to quite like the Gull/Masons theory... but it's only a story, and only a good one when told by Alan Moore.)

The bullshit and the obsession started at the time, with most of the mythmaking about the case being spun by the contemporary newspapers, eager to mop up the profits along with the blood.  The case could be moralised about from every angle except actual, practical sympathy with oppressed women (after all, the only place to go with that was to stop blaming the women and start saying they should be allowed to be safe... which was self-evidently unpublishable radical lunacy).  The case was a litmus test on the moral state of society (the killer brings the rebuke that 'we' all need, in his mad way).  The case was about swarthy Jews and their sacrificial religion, or about all the foreigners (no wonder the Mail loves this latest story - the guy supposedly identified as the killer was a Polish immigrant).  The case was about the degradation of the criminal classes (Punch Magazine, as usual, took the opportunity at the time to define satire as consisting of kicking downwards).  The case was a big joke, jolly London lore.  Hence the newspapers' invention of the name 'Jack the Ripper' when they hit upon the lucrative idea of sending themselves letters written in red ink, purporting to be from the murderer, invoking 'Springheel Jack' in their fabricated signatures, and sniggering about the whole thing in words that were painstakingly badly spelled (because, of course, 'Jack' couldn't be an educated man).

By the way - notice the contempt for the women integral to the name.  He's not murdering people, he's ripping things.  In the name, the women become nothing more than sacks or sheets or dresses.  Remember, when 'Jack' drones on in his letters about how he hates 'whores', he's actually a journalist speaking with the contempt of the respectable for the 'unfortunate'.

All this is a massive distraction.  Was then, is now.  Talk about anything, but don't admit that most serial killers - 'Jack' included - are just squalid, pathetic, inadequate little men who hate women because they take the furious feelings of thwarted entitlement inculcated in so many men by patriarchy, and actually act on them.  We don't want to have that conversation, or miss out on the latest thriller.

And don't admit that hugely more women died in the East End as a result of preventable disease, despair, drink, hunger, domestic violence... in a word: poverty... than died because of 'Jack'.

And don't admit that, as now, the London of 1888, the hub of an empire, harboured bigger mass murderers in the corridors of power than on the streets where the poor lived, worked their lives away, drank, hit each other, stabbed each other, laughed, joked, prayed, fucked for farthings and huddled together for warmth.  And those mass murderers in the corridors of power didn't need to sneak out at night to commit their murders.  They oversaw a system of murder every day, from within those very corridors, from behind their eminent Victorian respectability.  And they still do.

And don't damage the Ripper industry by admitting that there was never any such person as Jack the Ripper.  There was a pathetic and revolting misogynist who probably killed four or five women with escalating hatred and contempt.  And then there was a marketing opportunity.  And - in a society that still runs on drastic inequality, and on the disciplining, punishing and controlling women and their bodies - the market is still there.

#813, 30th January 1999

Whatever else boybands call to mind, they rarely make me think of being a boy. Mostly, they are a man’s idea of a girl’s idea of boys, and sometimes – by design, or an accident of casting – some of the pungency of boydom makes it through that filter. The music young boys like and relate to is something else entirely. This song, for instance, in its yelping, jumping clatter, in its broad swings at soft targets, feels very much like being a boy felt. And in something else, too: its meanness.

One of the hundreds of lies people tell about gender is the one about how boys fight and girls scheme. Boys are aggressive to other boys, girls are cruel to other girls. As well as subtly building up the cultural idea that girls are untrustworthy (and boys simple-hearted creatures of physical impulse) this overlooks the immense capacity for cruelty of the teenage boy, the unspoken, ever-shifting hierarchies of authenticity and acceptability that boys so viciously and joyfully police. Boyish cruelty isn’t even ignored – it’s normalised, even praised, enshrined not as bitchiness but “banter”, harmless jockeying for status.

Am I suggesting that “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”, that jolly pop-punk novelty, is some kind of bullies’ anthem? Not a bit of it. I’m just saying that it reminds me of being a boy, and part of being a boy was meanness, inflicted and weathered. And it is a mean song. Funny-mean, not horrible-mean, but mean even so. Who it’s being mean to, in the British context, is another matter.

After all, when I say “boy”, I don’t really mean some universal masculine experience. I mean “suburban white brat”, a much narrower category. If the goofball snottiness of “Pretty Fly”, and of pop-punk in general, reminds me of being 13, then it also reminds me of the boys I was scared of then – a whole year older – who loved the Beastie Boys, a band that lived by a code of terrifying, sneering cool I imagined I could never unlock. And above them – across the Van Allen belt of obnoxiousness, too distant to even be frightening – were the skaters who hung around the shopping centre and car park in town, practicing tricks and watching others practice with studied impassivity.

By the time I reached their age, Morrissey had got hold of me and the slim chance I would ever be ‘streetwise’ had vanished. I have zero natural feeling for pop-punk, and I never felt too alone in that: it found a fanbase in the UK but Green Day or Blink-182, never mind the Offspring, were never quite the generational phenomenon they were in the US. Though maybe that depended where you stood. If that music had a ‘moment’, it was here – the post-Britpop years, when the remaining music weeklies fell into a baffled slump and the old metal weekly Kerrang! mopped up the audience they’d ceased to serve, the skaters and rock kids of the Midlands, Wales, the South, East Anglia.. anywhere outside the major cities.

It was all a question of context, much like the song itself. “Pretty Fly” is a record about a white dude who acts like he’s into hip-hop, but is basically clueless about it. Not an unfamiliar type, at the time – ripe for mockery. But mockery that could come from different angles. Does the “wannabe” deserve to be laughed at for appropriating hip-hop – for his klutzy presumption of expertise – or for engaging with it in the first place?

The Offspring are fairly clear about that – it’s the former. In Southern California, in 1998, hip-hop is the lingua franca of youth culture: everyone is engaged with it on some level, it’s just that some people respect it and others are chumps about it. The meanness of the song in its native context is teasing those who overreach themselves, who grab onto something without doing the work to understand it. Even though “Pretty Fly” is 100% a pop move, this is a concern that has deep roots in the American punk and alternative mindset – a mildly puritan attitude that style should reflect substance, that self-expression be backed up with knowledge and labour. Nothing worse than a poser.

But we aren’t in South California now. “Pretty Fly” is number one in Britain, and the British context is rather different: the lines between hip-hop and other music a lot harder. We are a year or so out from Melody Maker’s disastrous final reinvention, which it announced with a notorious cover featuring a black guy (meant to be Craig David, Britain’s most successful black pop star) sitting on the toilet with a cover line suggesting the magazine would flush UK Garage away. A few months later the magazine folded. It was a shoddy end for a paper that had done its best to cover and celebrate a wide range of music, but the interesting thing is who they imagined this unpleasantly dismissive attitude to black music might appeal to. The Craig-on-the-loo fiasco occurred as the paper was pivoting hard to appeal to Kerrang! readers – the metal, hard-rock, alternative and pop-punk fanbase.

Melody Maker’s desperate gambit failed, of course, and besides UK garage and hip-hop were quite different things – but it suggests, and my own memories of the time agree, that the non-metropolitan British rock audience and the UK audience for black music were strongly distinct, and occasionally hostile. In the world “Pretty Fly” was written for and about, hip-hop and pop-punk co-existed in suburban culture – the question wasn’t whether you were into rap, but how. In the UK, whether was still a big issue.

All this is why I’ve never quite felt comfortable with this song – for all its winning energy, its prominence here made it seem more reactionary than it actually is: not remotely the Offspring’s fault, that. After the flaccidity of 911 there’s a bracing sharpness to the sound – and a bug-eyed delight in the “Uh huh uh huh!” hook – that’s easy to enjoy. Nothing of “Pretty Fly”‘s qualities was lost in translation – but I can’t shake the idea that something nasty was gained.

(I've been under the weather due to a chest bug picked up in Dublin, so haven't had time to write the lengthy article I promised a while ago. Here's it's truncated summary version. Please don't bring up the referendum debate in discussions under other blog posts, okay?)

"Should Scotland be an independent country?"

I have a postal vote. I already voted "yes".

For what is probably an unusual reason ...

Forget all the short term arguments advanced by both sides about what currency Scotland will use, about whether we'll be economically better or worse off, the nature of post-independence Scottish defense policy, whether we remain a monarchy or become a republic, what passport we'll carry, and so on. That stuff is all short-term and will be resolved within a generation.

No, seriously: 95% of the discussion in the referendum debates and on the street has been about short term issues that can be resolved one way or the other in the coming days and months (occasionally, months or single-digit years). There's a remarkable amount of FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—flying around. Many folks seem to think that if Scotland opts for independence on September 18th then on the 19th they'll be stripped of their existing British citizenship, armed border checkpoints will show up on the M76 and A1, and the Queen will be given the boot by the end of the month. (Needless to say, none of this is going to happen.)

In making my mind up, I looked at the long term prospects.

In the long term I favour a Europe—indeed, a world—of much smaller states. I don't just favour breaking up the UK; I favour breaking up the United States, India, and China. Break up the Westphalian system. We live today in a world dominated by two types of group entity; the nation-states with defined borders and treaty obligations that emerged after the end of the 30 Years War, and the transnational corporate entities which thrive atop the free trade framework provided by the treaty organizations binding those Westphalian states together.

I believe the Westphalian nation-state system isn't simply showing its age: it's creaking at the seams and teetering on the edge of catastrophic breakdown. The world today is far smaller than the world of 1648; the entire planet, in travel terms, is shrunk to the size of the English home counties. In 1648 to travel from the south of Scotland (from, say, Berwick-upon-Tweed, the debatable walled border city) to the far north-west would take, at a minimum, a couple of weeks by sea; to travel that distance by land was a harsh journey of hundreds of miles across mountains and bogs and through still-forested glens, on foot or horseback. Today it's a couple of noisy hours on board a turboprop airliner. Distance has collapsed under us. To some extent the definition of the Westphalian state as being able to control its own internal territory was a side-effect of distance: a foreign army couldn't rapidly and easily penetrate the inner lands of a state without fear of retaliation. (Tell that to the residents of the tribal provinces in Pakistan.)

Moreover, our nations today have not only undergone a strange geographical implosion since the 17th century: they have exploded in population terms. The population of the American Colonies in 1790 is estimated at roughly 2.7 million; the United States today has over 300 million inhabitants. In 1780 England and Wales had around 7.5 million inhabitants; they're now at 57 million. So we have a 1-2 order of magnitude increase in population and a 2-3 order of magnitude decrease in travel time ... and possibly a 3-5 order of magnitude decrease in communications latency.

Today we're seeing the fallout from this problem everywhere. Westphalian states can't, for the most part, control their own territory to the extent of keeping intruders out; just look at the ghastly situation in Ukraine right now. Non-state actors play an increasingly huge role in dictating our economic conditions. And it seems to me that something goes badly wrong with representative democracy in polities that grow beyond somewhere in the range 5-15 million people; direct accountability vanishes and we end up with what I've termed the beige dictatorship. Beige isn't the worst colour‐some of the non-beige contenders are distinctly alarming—but their popular appeal is a symptom of an institutional failure, a representational deficit: many voters feel so alienated by the beige that they'll vote for the brownshirts.

My feeling is that we'd be better served by a group of much smaller nations working in a loose confederation or treaty structure. Their job should be to handle local issues (yes, this is localism) while compartmentalizing failure modes: the failure modes of a gigantic imperial power are almost always far worse than those of a smaller nation (compare the disintegration of the Soviet Union with that of Czecheslovakia). Rather than large monolithic states run by people at the top who are so remote from their constituents that they set policy to please lobbyists rather than their electors, I'd prefer to see treaty organizations like NATO and the EU emerging at consensus after discussions among numerous smaller stakeholder entities, where representatives are actually accountable to their electors. (Call me a utopian, if you will.)

Yes, this is also an argument for Wales, the North of England, and London itself all becoming independent nations. But they aren't on the ballot. So Scottish independence is a starting point.

One final note: what about left-internationalism? Isn't nationalism the enemy of the working class? (And to the extent that all of us who aren't in the 0.1% are "working class"—if you have to work to earn a living, you're working class, even if you're a brain surgeon or an accountant—the enemy of all of us?) Well yes: but the kind of nationalism that brought us the Great European War (for the Second World War may best be viewed with the perspective of long-term history as simply a flare-up of the war that began in 1914, after the combatants time out to breed a new generation of cannon-fodder) is pretty much dead. As dead as the Westphalian states that had territorial integrity they could defend, because getting from one to the other still took days or weeks by railway or steam ship, and invading another from the one took days or weeks of marching infantry divisions. Nor is the working "class" still obviously an entity you can point at, with which people share a strong sense of solidarity: where is the solidarity between lawyer and street-sweeper, nursing home care worker and robot designer? Yes, capitalism and the crisis of capitalism is still with us: but the continuing and ongoing recomplication of the world around us makes the traditional movement of masses one of questionable relevance. We need better structures, it's true. But I don't see them emerging from the kind of monolithic, territorially hegemonic state that thinks its place in the world is best secured by building bigger aircraft carriers. Firepower doesn't build external stability, as the past decade in Iraq demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt. We need consensus, and we need a finer granularity of constitutional decision making. Hence smaller nation-states.

Many people think that "political correctness" means "politeness" or "inclusive language" or "avoiding words that hurt people's feelings". It follows that "political correctness gone mad" means "taking that to a crazy extreme, objecting to language that no one has ever objected to"; but that people who complain about "political correctness gone mad" are often rude people who think they should be able to say bad words if they fucking well want to. If Mrs Whitehouse came back to earth and tried to stop the television saying bum and bloody and ding-a-a-ling, the news people would almost certainly accuse her of being politically correct. And also mad, which she very probably was.

However, "political correctness" is also in use to describe a conspiracy theory in which the world is secretly run by a Marxist cabal based in Frankfurt. "Political Correctness" -- and 20th century literary theory, and human rights legislation, and health and safety at work rules, and, very especially and, the idea of man made climate change -- were created by this Marxist clique in order to destroy civilization. What they have in common is that they rationalize unreasonable behavior, and make people do obviously bad things in the name of the greater good. It is obvious that Christian civilization is based upon citizens having cars, refrigerators, and central heating, and air conditioning, so the Marxists have invented the fiction of "global warming" -- which no reasonable person could believe in, and for which there is not a shred of scientific evidence -- in order to make people feel bad about owning these things. PC is an overarching term for the whole plot: believers very often say that it is Political Correctness that says that children have to wear crash helmets to play conkers, or that there is a modern Politically Correct notion that we should reduce carbon emissions. (*)

Obviously, not everyone who has ever used the word "Political Correctness" believes in the conspiracy theory. (I myself have occasionally said things like "some of the older children's books are not very PC"). But believers in the conspiracy theory talk a lot about Political Correctness. And lots of people do believe in the conspiracy. The Daily Mail went so far as to run a headline "How the BBC fell victim to a Marxist plot to destroy civilization". I took this as rather strong evidence that the Daily Mail believed that there was a Marxist plot to destroy western civilization and that the BBC had fallen victim to it, although some people thought that I was reading a bit too much into it.

So. It is possible that when people say that something called "Political Correctness" ("the evil doctrine of Political Correctness" according to Norman Tebbit) was to blame for the Rotheram child abuse scandal, they are talking about "Political Correctness" in the sense of "not saying stuff that hurts other people's feelings, being careful about what words you use". I suppose that what they have in mind is that "you have to be so careful about what language you use about race that it's really hard to talk about race at all; so when there actually is a racial component in some specific crime; it's easier not to talk about it at all and if you can't talk about it, well, obviously, you don't see it."

It is also very possible that Flying Rodent (**) is correct and that after a shocking cock up where serious child abuse was taking place under the police's noses, someone, by way of a damage limitation exercise, said "I know! If we pretend that we can't do anything about dark skinned people molesting little kids because Political Correctness Gone Mad, the papers will swallow it because they love that kind of thing." I can just about believe that PC Copper honestly thought that dark skinned people were free to molest kids if they really wanted to because it was part of their culture and Political Correctness meant that the law couldn't touch them. I don't believe that the entire police hierarchy believed that. (It's also hard to believe that any officer would independently come up with the idea  think that "you have to let them rape kids" followed naturally from "you aren't allowed to call them Pakis" unless he had already been told that "Political Correctness" and "Human Rights" were basically the same thing.)

But I think that it is also very likely that when people say that the child abuse scandal was the result of "Political Correctness" they mean that a shadowy group of Marxists was secretly controlling the police, and forcing them to act against "Common Sense" as part of an active plot to bring down Civilization and replace it with a communist superstate. Tebbit definitely thinks that there was a plot to establish an enclave in England that functioned under Pakistani law, as if that followed on naturally from "please use inclusive language".

It seems to me that a lot of these claims -- that Isis or Rotheram or the Girl Guide Oath are "caused" by Political Correctness -- read like nonsense if "Political Correctness" means "the belief that it is nicer to say 'black person' rather than 'n----r'". But they make a kind of sense if you believe that Political Correctness and Common Sense are two dueling ideologies, the one committed to destroying "civilization" and the the other committed to preserving it.

But maybe they are simply nonsense.



(*) I grant that Political Correctness could in those contexts mean simply "Prevailing Orthodoxy."

(**) http://flyingrodent.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/chicken.html Note that the New York Times essay that Mr Rodent links to is rather more nuanced than he give it credit for

The Mail on Sunday says that Ed Miliband says that he would look at introducing border controls if he became prime minister of the rest of the UK after Scottish independence.

The Labour Press Team denied this story on Twitter, but Reuters reported Miliband as saying something similar back in June.

Back at the start of the year I wrote that purely negative arguments would not be enough for the No side to win the referendum:

were I Scottish, if anything could convince me to vote for independence it would be being told that I could not afford it. I would be strongly tempted to vote Yes just to spite such a foolish argument.

And this looks likes a more negative argument than most.

But what if Ed Miliband is not threatening anyone? What if he is giving a sober prediction of the way things might well turn out after Scottish independence?

It easy to imagine that an independent Scotland would have more liberal immigration policies than the rest of the UK.

This is not because the Scots are inherently more left wing than the rest of us - I am sceptical of such arguments - but because its population profile would give it a greater need for young workers.

In those circumstances, it is quite possible that the rest of the UK would look at ways of stopping people coming to Scotland and then moving south.

When I suggested this on Twitter last night, some people pointed out that there are few border formalities between Northern Ireland and the Republic or even on the ferry from the Republic to Wales.

The border between Scotland and the rest of the UK might turn out to be like that. I hope it would.

But I suspect these informal arrangements are already under pressure, and Scottish independence would inevitable lead to a reconsideration of the relationships between the nations in these islands that would put them under more.

Today's reaction to the prospect of border formalities, along with my debate on Twitter last night, has confirmed to me that there are two odd things about the Scottish nationalist case.

First, those who argue for an independent Scotland are trying their best to prove that it will make no difference. We are told that Scotland will keep the Queen, keep the pound and have open borders with the rest of the UK. That seems a strange basis for demanding such an upheaval.

Second, while the political culture of the United Kingdom is so debased that Scotland must break free of it, once it does the rest of the United Kingdom will act with perfect fairness, even charity, towards it.

The truth is that, once Scotland is independent, the rest of the UK, though it will want to be a good neighbour, will seek to arrange relations between the two nations so they are as advantageous to the rest of the UK as possible.

And if the Scots thinks this sounds as though they will be pushed about a bit, they had better get used to it. That is what tends to happen to small nations.

A couple of tweets I’ve seen recently on my Twitter timeline:

The 90% of Brits being forced to watch their country fall apart without having a vote do, at least, have this letter: http://t.co/5oC3up4azJ

— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) September 7, 2014

I'm sorry to sound a jarring note – but may I remark that nobody has asked me whether or not I want my country to be broken up. And I don't!

— Nick Hollinghurst (@NHollinghurst) September 6, 2014

That’s just the most recent two, but ‘the rest of the UK should have a say about Scottish independence’ is something I’ve seen in many forms over the past few years, and will probably get said a lot more times over the next eleven days.

So, let’s pose a couple of thought experiments. In 1991, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia held referendums on whether they should declare independence and leave the USSR. All delivered clear majorities for independence, yet I suspect if the rest of the USSR had been able to vote (especially the Russian Federation) they would have said ‘let’s stay together’. Who was in the right there?

Alternatively, let’s imagine that there is a referendum in 2017 on British membership of the EU. Should that be just Britain’s decision or should the rest of the EU get to decide on if they want their Union to be broken up?

There’s plenty of discussion to be had about the role of the British government in the referendum, especially the way ‘Devo Max’ was kept off the ballot, but to start insisting that others have the power to veto someone else’s vote if they don’t like the way it’s going is to stroll down a dangerous path, and perhaps to help others prove their arguments.

David Cameron could face a leadership challenge from his own backbenches if Scotland votes in favour of independence, as Tory rebels blame him for presiding over the break-up of the Union.

The Independent understands that discussions have already taken place among Tory MPs considering standing a candidate against the Prime Minister if the Yes campaign is triumphant on 18 September.

The idea of a ‘stalking horse’ triggering a leadership challenge is widespread in British political commentary. It’s easy to see why: the idea of the brave challenger following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher or Michael Heseltine to challenge an unpopular leader, forcing a leadership election that would be a clash of the big political beasts is catnip to political commentators, enabling them to completely forget any kind of discussion about policy and talk entirely about personality and the election as a big game.

The problem with this vision is that it’s not actually possible in any party. The ‘stalking horse’ was a foible of the Conservative Party’s leadership election rules that disappeared when William Hague reformed the system after his election, and Labour and the Liberal Democrats never had a system that allowed it. The quirk in the Tory rules was that they didn’t require all potential candidates in a leadership election to be in the race from the start, but allowed them to enter at later rounds of the contest. As such, a stalking horse candidate could challenge the leader, and if they received sufficient support, other candidates could enter the race.

This was something that purely belonged to the Conservative leadership rules, and was in place because the decision was only made amongst MPs. Once parties put the leadership question to the wider membership, When an election’s a simple ballot in Westminster, it’s easy to have multiple rounds with different names, but if you’re balloting the entire membership, a set process and single ballot is a lot easier to administer.

The other reason for stalking horses disappearing is that they’re not a very good way of running leadership elections. There are two parts to the process of removing an incumbent leader: first, deciding whether you want the current leader to continue or be replaced; second, if they’re replaced, deciding who should replace them. The old Tory system conflated those two parts of the process, so that anyone wanting to remove the current leader had to vote for the stalking horse, but that vote could then make the stalking horse the leader, who the voter might like less than the current leader.Effectively, every vote has to be cast tactically, which might make for good drama but doesn’t mean they’re making the best decision on who’s going to be leader.

All the main parties now have systems that separate these two parts of the process, and none of them have a system that allows for stalking horses. So, if you hear or read a supposed political expert talking about stalking horses and leadership challenges, they’re letting on that they don’t understand the processes they’re commentating on. Someone can challenge a leader all they want but the rules now (especially for the Tories) mean they can only get them removed, not face them head to head.

(A couple of interesting books on leadership elections and structures, if you want to know more: Stark’s Choosing a Leader and Quinn’s Electing and Ejecting Party Leaders in Britain)

This is ugly and hateful and very, very bad.

It’s from Charismanews.com — the website of Charisma magazine, Stephen Strang’s popular publication for Pentecostal and charismatic evangelical Christianity (via). Charisma has always ranged from conservative to reactionary, but this goes beyond that. This is eliminationist rhetoric — a call for ethnic and religious cleansing.

We’ve heard this before, too many times. We recognize this. This is what evil sounds like: “Why I Am Absolutely Islamophobic,” by Gary Cass.

Cass proposes “three possible solutions” to what he describes as the Muslim menace to the world. The first two are mass-conversion of all Muslims and mass-deportation — “Deport All Muslims Now” he urges:

Deport them like Spain was forced to do when they deported the Muslim Moors. Muslims in America are procreating at twice the rate of other groups. So either we force them all to get sterilized, or we wait for the “Army of Islam” to arise in our midst and do what Muslims always do, resort to violence.

But he’s already told us that he doesn’t think either of those ideas is satisfactory:

Here’s three possible solutions, but really there’s only one.

What he’s calling for, in other words, is the last of his three solutions. The final solution. Exactly that.

3. Violence. The only thing that is biblical and that 1,400 years of history has shown to work is overwhelming Christian just war and overwhelming self defense. Christian Generals Charles Martel in 732 and Jon Sobieski in 1672 defeated Islamic Turks and their attempts to take the West. Who will God raise up to save us this time? Will God even intervene or turn us over to the Muslims for turning against Him?

Either way, we must be prepared for the increase of terror at home and abroad. This is not irrational, but the loving thing we must do for our children and neighbors. First trust in God, then obtain a gun(s), learn to shoot, teach your kids the Christian doctrines of just war and self defense, create small cells of family and friends that you can rely on if some thing catastrophic happens and civil society suddenly melts down.

ISIS has done us all a favor. The true face of Islam is on full display even as Muhammad is burning in hell. We will have to face the harsh truth that radical Islam has no place in civilized society. Militant Muslims cannot live in a society based on Christian ideals of equality and liberty. They will always seek to harm us.

Now the only question is how many more dead bodies will have to pile up at home and abroad before we crush the vicious seed of Ishmael in Jesus’ Name?

Holy fuck.

 

A “Christian” publication printed this. “Christian” editors approved it. And a “Christian” audience is lapping it up — applauding and “amen”-ing throughout the comments.

In Jesus name, this is pure blasphemy. That comment section might as well just be 200+ posts crying “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!” This is the very definition of what 1 John calls “the spirit of antichrist.”

Cass and Charisma are not merely “Islamophobic” — this is the language of genocide. This is Hutu radio stuff.

It’s also gasoline and a lit match. Cass is trying to incite violence.

Charisma’s editors seem dimly aware of that. They have no qualms providing a platform for those who advocate ethnic and religious cleansing. They have no reservations about amplifying such violence voices and their call too cut down the tall trees.

But they seem a bit wary about the potential liability that might come from publishing such a call for violence. So their front-page link to Cass’s bloody rallying cry hedges ever-so-slightly:

One minister has what he believes is a very rational fear for what our children and their children will face. Do you?

That won’t cut it. You can’t shake the devil’s hand and then pretend you’re just asking questions.

Charisma needs to take this column down, apologize and repent. And everyone there who touched this — solicited it, approved it, failed to resign in protest over the idea of it — needs to be fired. Twice.

Gary Cass has done us all a favor. The true face of Charisma magazine is on full display. We will have to face the harsh truth that radical right-wing Christianism has no place in civilized society. Militant Christianists cannot live in a society based on ideals of equality and liberty. They will always seek to harm others.

'Into the Dalek' is about good soldiers vs bad soldiers.

The pain of being a good soldier, the pain of the memories which a good soldier has, vs the anaesthetised mind of the bad soldier.

But, of course, what do we mean by terms like 'good' and 'bad'?

For the army, a 'good' soldier is a soldier who obeys orders without question, kills without hesitation, and doesn't let themselves be haunted.

A 'bad' soldier is a soldier who thinks about, and makes decisions based upon, things other than the orders of a superior... perhaps leading to their inability, or refusal, to kill on command.

In a soldier, morality is a malfunction.  A good soldier is a 'bad' soldier.  Because good people can't do a soldier's job, which is to fight and kill.

At least, that might be how the Doctor would put it, in his simplistic way.  The Doctor doesn't like soldiers.  As in 'The Sontaran Stratagem' he is rude and patronising to the soldiers he meets as a matter of course.  He refuses to take Journey Blue with him because she's a soldier.

But the soldiers on the Aristotle are rebels.  They are specifically described as rebels.  Rebels against the Daleks.  The Daleks, who are, for whatever reason, inherently evil.  This is fuzzy (it still may be because of technological control of the brain) but, at the end of the day, Rusty reverts to type.  He realises that life is beautiful and unstoppable, that the Daleks are the enemies of life, and his response is to decide that all Daleks must die.  Because he's a Dalek, and that's how Daleks think.  So, contrary to the Doctor's hopes, there's no saving the Daleks... which makes Rusty pretty much right: they're beyond saving, so they must be fought.  Which is what the rebels are doing.  So Rusty kills all the Daleks... which is a BAD THING judging by the Doctor's defeated frown (though quite how any of them would have survived if that hadn't happened escapes me).

So, once again, as in 'A Good Man Goes to War', we have an episode which says one thing about warriors while showing us another.  Soldiers are scary and irredeemable... umm, even the ones who rightly rebel against unappeasable and unsalvageable aggressors.

See, I have no problem with the soldiers on the Aristotle.  They're rebelling against the imperialists of the universe.  I'm supposed to think they're wrong or suspect for shooting to kill?  When you're in an army fighting aggressive imperialists or fascists, you'd better obey orders and shoot to kill.  That's what the soldiers of the International Brigades did.  That's what the Red Army did when they drove back the proto-fascistic West-sponsored Whites.  If the Whites, or Franco's troops, or the Nazis, are advancing on you, you want an army that's 'good' at what it does to come and fight them.

Of course, Danny is a former soldier... and Clara doesn't reject him the way the Doctor rejects Journey.  She, despite her copy of the Guardian, rises above the kind of knee-jerk, right-on disdain for soldiers that (supposedly) so many people have, like the Doctor.

So there's some nuance, right?  Taken with the fact that the Doctor's prejudiced hatred of Daleks is what turns Rusty into a Dalek-killer, and Rusty's remark that the Doctor is a good Dalek (however we want to take that), a considerable amount of ambiguity has been created, yes?

And anyway, the Doctor has a bloody cheek being so arsey with soldiers, considering that he ended the Time War by... oh no, hang on, that got fixed last year didn't it.

It really isn't possible to just talk about 'soldiers' as if all soldiers are the same, as if all armies and their objectives are morally equal.  This is obvious.  It's a commonplace of our cultural discourse actually... trouble is, it sits alongside the assumption that 'we' are always the ones with the moral superiority, which is sadly rarely true.  But it could be true, theoretically.  It isn't logically impossible to have soldiers who are both 'good' and good.  It's just that, by a morally and politically realistic evaluation of the world, that doesn't apply to 'our' soldiers.  Our rulers pretend it does.  'Our' media pretends it does.  But it doesn't. 

Presumably, Danny was fighting for the British Army in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Which makes him a soldier in the army of a technologically-superior imperialist aggressor.

He's a good soldier because he cries when he thinks of the people he killed.  Maybe he's even good because he stopped being 'good', i.e. he became 'bad' at his job because he found a moral objection to it (I guess we'll see) but he isn't anything like the soldiers on the Aristotle, the ones I had no problem with.  He wasn't a rebel.  He wasn't in the Iraqi resistance.  He wasn't someone exercising their moral right to use violence against the people attacking them and occupying their country.  He was, presumably, in the occupying force.  He claims that there is a "moral dimension" to soldiering as he practiced it.  In other words, there is a moral dimension to being an aggressor, invader and occupier on the orders of an imperialist hegemon.

So, as always, 'we' are the good guys, by definition.  The ambiguous investigation of the ethics of warfare collapses back into bog-standard liberal hand-wringing over the niceties of what we do in the course of being the goodies.  How terrible it is the bad things happen when we try to help. 

The truth is, we in the aggressive neoliberal imperialist countries... we are the Daleks.

And we're not good.  Though we are 'good'.

Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that the politics of Britain when Scotland joined the United Kingdom of England, Wales and Ireland can in any way be reflected onto today’s politics. None of the political parties we are familiar with today had been formed back then, indeed the political revolution that led to universal suffrage and the realignment of Parliament to form the Liberal and Conservative Parties out of the old Tory and Whig alliances, and the subsequent formation of the Labour Party could not have been envisaged.

However, the political impact of Scotland leaving the UK would today be significant not least for the way in which it would make a future Labour Government in England a virtual impossibility.

People forget just how badly Labour has done in General Elections in recent years, with their vote declining every year since 1945 and the 2010 General Election providing them with their 2nd worst post war result. The seats elected were as follows:

Conservative 306
Labour 258
Lib Dem 57
Others 29
650

This means that Labour were 67 seats short of the winning post (325), meaning that other than a grand coalition with the Conservatives, any other coalition involving Labour would also have had to have Lib Dems, Scottish Nationalists, Welsh Nationalists one of the Irish Parties and the Green MP in it. It is unlikely that such a coalition could ever have held together and the financial crisis that was gripping the nation would still be with us today. However, things could have been a lot worse for Labour, they could have been facing a government without their Scottish MP’s. The revised UK Parliament in 2010 without the Scottish MP’s would have been:

Conservative 305
Labour 218
Lib Dem 46
Others 22

As we see, the Labour party is now 78 seats short of the winning post (296), and the Conservatives have a majority of 9.

If Scotland votes for independence, and well she might, then the Labour Party needs to win not the 67 seats that were previously required, but 78 seats. Bearing in mind that of the 57 Lib Dem Seats 11 are in Scotland, and of the remaining 46 only 6 are Labour facing, that means that Labour must win at least 72 Conservative seats to form a majority Government in 2016 (after Scotland leaves the UK). The simple truth is that Labour’s opinion poll ratings do not show them anywhere near that level of gains, indeed they would have to be 15 points clear of the Conservatives if they were to have any hope of making up that number of seats.

The real irony is that the vitriol that Labour has poured on the Liberal Democrats in the past four years could end up being the main block to Labour even having a chance of forming a coalition, because the Liberal Democrats are better placed than Labour to take many of those Conservative seats that need to be won for the Conservatives to lose the next General Election.

The curious thing about this is that the best hope of Labour clawing its way back to power now lies with the introduction of the very proportional voting system that the Labour Party rallied to block in the AV referendum. How ironic that in its blind vitriol against the Liberal Democrats the Labour Party may well have confined itself to the history books, leaving the Liberal Democrats, long term, as the only real opposition to the Conservatives with Labour occasionally acting as their prop.

Saturday:

How many times can we tell this story?

Terry Nation, infamously, recycled "The Daleks" on let's just say "several" occasions, but now it seems that the "good Dalek" story is giving him a run for his money.

And it turns out that what's inside a Dalek is, basically, "Doctor Who", including corridors for running up and down, bug-eyed monsters (that are literally bug eyes), gunk tank, and an archive with, of course, missing episodes. If only they'd found "The Evil of the Daleks" they could have seen what happens when Daleks "turn good", and saved a lot of bother.



David Whitaker's second Doctor classic is not only pretty much the series' definitive story already – the Doctor has adventures in present, past and future on a distant planet, with Daleks – but already explored what makes the difference between the Human Factor and the Dalek Factor. "Dalek", "Evolution of the Daleks", and "Journey's End" all feature tinpot tyrants who see the error of their ways, or at least see that the Daleks' main operating principle of "exterminate everyone else" is evil. And futile. Life, as is pointed out, prevails.

There was even the graphic novel "The Only Good Dalek" – still more ironic, in this context – and of course David Whitaker’s TV21 original… Oh, and "Children of the Revolution"… The comics like this story, don’t they?

But if we're talking about getting into the "guts" of "Doctor Who", if we're taking the reference Peter Capaldi's twelfth Doctor makes to his first self's first visit to Skaro as taking us back to the series' very beginning, then questioning our basic assumptions about who the Doctor is and who the Daleks are is good, necessary stuff.

No, that doesn't do "Into the Dalek" justice – and I feel bad, having watched "Doctor Who Extra" and seeing Nick Briggs so enthused that this is a "new" thing to do with the Daleks.

Much as we "Doctor Who" fans love to laud our series as capable of doing anything, telling any story, infinite in variety, it is in the nature of the show to go in cycles, as each generation matures and a new audience comes along. People who were eleven when they saw Rose and the Doctor face the Dalek in "Dalek" will now be starting their twenties. Even Millennium is a teenager now! Finding new ways to tell old stories is as necessary as telling new ones.

And: "Can Daleks be good?" is about as important a question as the series can ask. So it should keep asking it.

Actually, everyone seems to proceed from the idea that a Dalek that wants to kill other Daleks is "good". As opposed to "differently psychotic". Fortunately, by the end of the episode, the Doctor has, with some help from Clara (let's skate over that unnecessary slap), reached the realisation that this is not good.

Actually, let's not skate over that slap. The Doctor comes to the self-defeating, self-satisfying conclusion that Daleks just are evil. Clara manages to arrest the Doctor's depression with a look. She has got through to him: he's asking what the look is for. It's totally unnecessary actually to hit him. And as a good teacher – which she is – she would know better. The whole of the rest of the episode is about not using violence against the Dalek but trying to do better. That slap really should not be there.

But aside from that, she is completely right that that is not what we have learned.

The show, never mind the Doctor, often treats monsters, especially the deadly dustbins, as irretrievably evil. And therefore it's okay to kill them.

Except, and "Into the Dalek" makes this abundantly clear, the Daleks are as much victims of their evil as perpetrators. That memory vault in their heads – "evil refined as engineering", brilliant line – doesn't so much keep them "pure" as take away their free will.

And taking away free will is about as close as we get to "Doctor Who's" definition of pure evil.

That memory-controlling vault is a very Moffat meme too, and as a further exploration of the mechanics of the Daleks goes very well with the Dalek pathweb from Moffat's "Asylum of the Daleks", and proto-Clara Oswin Oswald's power to make them all forget about the Doctor.

Also it's really quite hard not to think of it as the evolved remnant of Davros' computer limitation that he installed in the very first generation of Daleks, as seen back in "Genesis of the Daleks", nicely tying new series and old series together. You can see how the Daleks, geniuses but conditioned to obey their orders, would improve that to make them even better at obeying. From a certain point of view – Cornell, Topping, Day – that is the "weakness" that the Doctor retroactively adds to the Daleks, making them vulnerable, in the long run, to defeat, thus enabling "Genesis" to be counted as a "win".

I've said before that I disagree. I think that the Doctor wins philosophically by rejecting genocide – yes, he blows up the incubation chamber later, but only once the "limited" Daleks have been sent out and it's no longer the sole repository of the entirety of Dalek-kind. But, importantly, "do I have that right" is an exercise in free will, defining the Doctor – as ever – in opposition to the Daleks.

(And then we've got the Doctor inside the Dalek's head, holding two cables about to make a huge moral decision in yet another "quote".)

Where "Into the Dalek" is very interesting, is that its conclusion restores free will to "Rusty" – and it chooses to find hatred in the Doctor. So the Dalek does not "turn good".



So, this is a brilliant piece of Doctor Who, from the moment that Capaldi appears sneering down at Journey Blue and ticking her off for not being properly grateful, from the (simultaneous – timey-wimey) moment that new boy Danny Pink sits there headdesking intercut with his epic fail response to Clara's chatting him up. It is everything we want our Doctor Who to be: challenging, brave, darkly funny, with an idea that needs thinking about. And the special effects knock it out of the park.

On Facebook, I remarked that the Daleks boarding the Aristotle, while virtually a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from "Resurrection of the Daleks", is a case of someone showing Eric Saward how it's done. (And I know Matthew Robinson not Eric Saward was the director – he actually makes a lot of the rest of the story very brilliant and watchable, but that attack is pretty much unfilmable in a four-camera studio on the budget they had in the Eighties. And as script editor Saward should have known that.)

But never mind that, the opening effect shot of the Dalek saucer pursuing Journey Blue's space fighter through asteroids is… well, almost everyone has seen the opening of "Star Wars", haven't they. That's the league we're playing in now.

In fact I generally thought much more highly of the direction this week, too, Ben Wheatley bringing a real cinematic scope to the adventures. A lot of very interesting direct looks into the camera – in particular the moment they all look into the Dalek-eyestalk-point-of-view before entering the lens (what a trippy journey into the eye of the Dalek too) and the shift in perspective on the Doctor when he goes from "standing in front of Rusty's eye" to "inside Rusty's mind".

And after last time's very literal use of mirrors, there were many more metaphoric reflections here: not least the Doctor and the Dalek, of course, but also soldiers Danny Pink and Journey Blue (and, via the Verity podcast, the Doctor meeting the Dalek with hatred as Clara meets Danny with… flirting).

And, although I don't really want to tread on the mystery of Missy (Hmmm, Missy, Miss Tery… Nah.), but thought that in among the reflections the arrival of Gretchen in "Heaven" mirrored the arrival of Journey Blue in the TARDIS console, making me wonder if Missy wasn't materialising a time-capsule around the "dead". (Unlucky Ross, of course, is definitely physically dead because the Doctor tracks his remains.)

Capaldi continues to impress as the Doctor. Putting the alienation into the alien. Making Journey Blue ask for a lift properly; suddenly being a bastard about Ross's death – "he's the top layer if you want to say a few words"; jumping from despair to delight when Clara teaches him that Daleks are not predestined to be evil; his horror and self-recognition when he realises that what the Dalek chooses to see in his mind is his own worst side.

I have seen people criticising the line: "You are a good Dalek" as a poor man's knockoff of Rob Shearman's "You would make a good Dalek".

But to me it's another example of reflection: the Dalek's statement is definitive – "You are a good Dalek" – as inversion of the Doctor's question, "Am I a good man?". Again, recalling "The Evil of the Daleks", asking questions is a sign of the Human Factor and the antithesis of the Dalek Factor.

And it's more of Moffat-era playing with ambiguity (see last week). Where the Dalek in "Dalek" means it only one way (and a nasty way, at that), here we ask does Rusty the Dalek mean: "You are good at being a Dalek" (good in the Dalek sense); or "You are what a Dalek would be if it really were good"? (good as the Doctor would understand it). The Doctor's fear and horror is that it's the first.

It's good that the Doctor knows he should be better than that but isn't.

Remember, this Doctor has just come back (literally from the dead) from the siege of Trenzalore, hundreds and hundreds of years of stand-off against the Daleks, and just seen them overrun the planet, very nearly win, and then get wiped out alongside his chance of getting Gallifrey back… a Time War in miniature all over again. So he's had those hatreds stoked all over again. But also the unexpected reprieve from the regenerations limit may have given him cause to look back, reflect on his lives once more.

The prospect of actual death may have led to the eleventh Doctor living without thinking of the consequences. He wrecked lives – Amelia's, River's, Rory got killed more than anyone deserves – and, to borrow from Captain Kirk, patted himself on the back for his cleverness in dodging the consequences. Much like Moffat himself, in fact.

Capaldi, rather like Eccleston, has the gravitas and reputation to bring off this more introverted side to the Doctor's character, and if his arrival has raised Moffat's game to match that first glorious series from Russell, so much the better.

Equally, Clara continues to flourish thanks to seeing her life outside the TARDIS. It is a bit of a shame that she goes straight from "I'm not your boyfriend" to "hello salty goodness", but having her meet Danny, and how she engages with him start to add an actual second dimension to her. And at the same time she has a stronger relationship with the Doctor now that he is her hobby, rather than she being a puzzle for him to solve.

"Doctor Who" is often at its best when it operates on the fringes of great events. That old Bob Holmes technique for painting a bigger canvas by alluding to the larger story off. Think backstory in "Pyramids of Mars" or the galactic politics that drop the Graff Vynda K into "The Ribos Operation". So I like that what we see here is the fringe of a galactic war. We don't go straight to the Emperor and learn about the Master Plan; we take the view from the trenches. Leave the rest of the story to your imagination – it's bigger on the inside, that way.

Next time: Mark Gatiss writes what looks like a comedy historical. There's Ben Miller in the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle, wearing the Sheriff of Nottingham's hose; sporting the Sheriff of Nottingham's sticky-on beard.



But who's that blank-faced automaton… or is Jason Connery not in this one? Twang! It's "Robot of Sherwood".

After giving the matter no consideration and not talking it over with anyone, I’ve decided to stand for Liberal Democrat Party President.

My key priorities will be to reduce the party membership, not listen to any of those members who do remain and to do all I can to ensure that we lose as many elections as possible.

I’m proud to say that I’m definitely in favour of bad things. I’m committed to regressive values and promoting injustice wherever I can, I want fewer good things for everyone in the party and will be working hard to ensure that people lose whatever good things they have.

Actually, I lie when I say I’ll be working hard. As President, I’ll be doing as little as possible and whenever I do bother to go out and visit somewhere, I’ll make it my aim to demotivate them, stop them raising any money and help them lose whatever elections they’re fighting. I’ll be able to do this because I’ve got no experience in campaigning, have never met anyone else in the party and yet somehow know nothing of the world outside politics either.

My approach can be summed up as complete conservation, seeking to keep us doing everything exactly as it’s been done in the past with no changes whatsoever.

So, vote for me for a commitment to making no commitments, stronger fairs, economic societies and a President who really doesn’t want the job and probably wouldn’t be very good at it anyway.

—–
If you haven’t already worked it out, I’m not actually standing for the Presidency. (Liz Lynne, Sal Brinton, Linda Jack and Daisy Cooper are, though) However, judging from some of the things that candidates are saying in their campaigns, you would think that someone was standing on the negative platform I’ve outlined above.

This isn’t unique to this election, and seems to be a common pattern in Liberal Democrat internal elections. Everyone’s throwing around buzzwords and talking about wonderful aims and the things they’re going to do (More members! Better campaigns! Increased production at Tractor Factory Number 5!) but strangely reluctant to point out how they’re going to achieve these aims beyond telling us they’ll work hard to do it. Every party election (and the presidency hasn’t been an exception in the past) features candidates with virtually interchangeable manifestos with lots of talk of their hard work, dedication to liberal values and decades of service on the Loamshire Liberal Democrats Sub-Committee on Policy but a strange reluctance to talk about things like their stance on contentious policies or what they’d actually do if elected. What’s the thing they’d do if elected that no one else would? After several weeks of people declaring their Presidential ambitions, I’m not sure I could answer that question.

So here’s my principal question to the presidential candidates: why you, and not the other three? What do you believe in and what would you do differently from the others?

And for another question: what mistakes do you think the party has made since the start of the coalition? If you had been President when they were being made, what would have done to avoid them?

If any of the candidates want to answer those, I’ll happily post their response in full here on the blog. Yes, this is your chance to reach potentially dozens (on a good day) of potential voters.

Clement Freud, who died in 2009, was Liberal MP for the Isle of Ely between 1973 and 1987.

This photograph shows him in 1950 with his fiancee June Flewett, who is better known under her stage name Jill Raymond.

She also has a remarkable claim to literary fame, as Nigel Farndale revealed in the Telegraph a few years ago.

In a yawning, book-lined drawing room in Marylebone, central London, I am left to browse a file of letters written during the war years by CS Lewis to "My dear June". The "June" referred to is Jill Freud, the now 78-year-old wife of Sir Clement, who has disappeared into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. 

In 1944, she was June Flewett, a London convent girl who had been evacuated to Lewis's house in Oxford to escape the Blitz. She was also the inspiration for Lucy Pevensie, the girl who walks through the wardrobe full of fur coats and into the snowflakes of Narnia. 

The premiere of Hollywood's £75million The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was held in London on Wednesday, and Lady Freud had been asked to attend. She had also been asked to fly to America for the premiere there but, as she says in a crisp voice: "I was sure children wouldn't want to be told that this old lady is Lucy."

Hi everyone. Since we're all friends now and this is a judgment-free zone, I'd like to tell my story here today as part of sharing time. I know we've all been talking lately about the things we grew up with and how they shaped us into the people we are today, so in light of that I have a confession to make. I never grew up with Doctor Who.

Let's be realistic here. Nobody reading this needs me to explain to them what Doctor Who is. It is, as of this writing, arguably the biggest, most talked about, most beloved and most overanalyzed television show on the air today. It has a cultural weight that utterly demolishes everything else remotely comparable, and regularly sweeps the science fiction awards shows year after year partially because it's the only science fiction show left on TV. As I write this I'm coming off of the franchise's fiftieth anniversary in 2013, a year where it absolutely dominated entertainment headlines and was an omnipresent sight in every store, at every convention, and in every neighbourhood. Doctor Who currently has a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-level of media presence, so trying to historicize it in any way feels bemusing and inauthentic. You know what this is, I know what this is, let's not kid ourselves.

It's not that I'm bitter or jealous, it's just that Doctor Who is not a cultural phenomenon that I'm along for the ride with. I occasionally watched the New Series off and on between 2005 and 2012, but I eventually just lost interest in it completely and it's not something I have any sort of emotional investment in. Doctor Who interests me mostly at an academic level: The current phenomenon is sort of fun for me to watch unfold as it reminds me a bit of what Star Trek: The Next Generation was like in the early 1990s, but now I'm on the other side of the glass, as it were. But also, as many critics, including many of my personal friends, have pointed out, Doctor Who is a show that does some very clever things with things like narrative and metatext and, thanks to a handful of the architects who worked on it in formative years, inherits a relatively unique kind of progressive edge. I'm not going to go into a ton of detail about that here, because there are people who can explain it far better than me and have dedicated a not-insignificant part of their lives to doing just that. You could go ahead and check out, say, Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham, Andrew Hickey, Alex Wilcock or the co-hosts of the Pex Lives! podcast.

What I will talk about is my history with the franchise and what we can glean about Star Trek through looking at it. The Doctor Who I remember is an unusual thing: It's not the show itself, even though it was on the air at the time. It was more the production stills I saw in the articles where Starlog Magazine would go behind the scenes of the Classic Series and, in particular, it was interviews they did with Jon Pertwee and his thoughts on what the show meant to him. Because Starlog also covered stuff like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Z-list Sean Connery movies and Pertwee's tenure on the show was deliberately modeled after spy-fi action movies, it all kinda got mixed together in my mind. So, my earliest understanding of Doctor Who was not a madman with a box who could go anywhere in time and space and change his appearance at will, it was of Jon Pertwee wearing a flamboyant cape and smoking jacket driving around in an ancient hot rod squaring off against mad scientists in the English countryside. It didn't strike me as anything particularly different then any of the other contemporary spy-fi stuff starring charismatic secret agent action heroes, apart from being proudly and idiosyncratically British.

But at the same time, I was also aware of another show called Doctor Who. I didn't know much about it except it apparently was about this weird guy who wore a hat and a pointlessly long scarf who traveled around in a phone booth time machine and that my mother really, *really* thought I needed to see it. Why it took me so long to connect this show with the *other* science fiction show suspiciously called Doctor Who, I have no idea. Either way, I finally got to see an episode when the Sci-Fi Channel picked up reruns of the show sometime in the mid-1990s. And, well, it didn't do much for me, to be honest.

It was the Scarf Guy, not the Secret Agent Guy, but I didn't see a phone booth time machine and he was still running around the English countryside doing a lot of secret agent things, namely trying to calm down this Giant Robot who was being controlled by some shady dudes. The scene I remember is of Scarf Guy trying to reason with the Robot, who was throwing a temper tantrum in some abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere while menacing some screaming, helpless-looking girl. I think she was supposed to be a reporter or something, but I couldn't care less. The minute a show throws out something like that, I immediately tune out. I have zero tolerance for sexism in media, and that on top of everything else confirmed my suspicions. Doctor Who was mediocre, also-ran spy-fi and not worth my time. I didn't give it a second thought or a second look for over a decade.

Once the New Series premiered and started getting a lot of media attention, enough time had passed that it seemed like a good time to give the show another shot. I found the first few episodes starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper to be entertaining, or at least entertaining enough to justify tuning in every so often (funnily enough, I *still* got a huge spy-fi vibe from the show as all the promo materials looked like they came right from a 1960s James Bond movie). Since I had the Internet by this point, I was able to go back and research the whole impressive history of the franchise, and suddenly everything started to make a *lot* more sense. I took the opportunity to cherry-pick from bits of the Classic Series, and was finally able to give Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker a fair shot, and now many of my favourite stories in the series come from their eras (I especially enjoy Pertwee's first season for campy, nostalgic reasons as it's *exactly* what I imagined the show to be. I particularly like “The Ambassadors of Death” in this regard). But, as much as I came to like Baker and Pertwee, what really caught my eye was the intriguing creative tumult that seemed to surround the final era of the Classic Series.

The Sylvester McCoy-Andrew Cartmel era was immediately fascinating to me for several reasons. Firstly, as it ran from 1987-1989, this means it coexisted with a time that was extremely formative for me in terms of media. Learning about the Doctor Who that existed during one of my favourite times for pop culture felt like filling in a gap I didn't know I had before. But I was also interested in how McCoy's interpretation was described as being a more mysterious and special character than The Doctor had been before, and how the production team during this period seemed to be genuinely trying to do something creative and unprecedentedly sophisticated with the show. When I finally got to see the whole era a few years later as part of another Doctor Who retrospective, I was properly impressed: While I can't say Sylvester McCoy is “My” Doctor in the common parlance as I didn't grow up with him and the show holds no particular emotional resonance for me, this era did become unquestionably my favourite version of Doctor Who.

First of all, the theme song and opening credits used during this part of the show are incredible: They're unmistakeably 1980s in the most wonderfully, heartwarmingly cheap way, and that speaks to me on an important level. For me, its one of those things that taps into nostalgia without actually being nostalgic. But more to the point, the show is actually exceptionally well done: Barring McCoy's first appearance, every single serial is an absolute knockout, or at least thoroughly entertaining (make sure you watch the extended feature-length cuts of “Silver Nemesis” and “Battlefield”, though). The show just *works* here, and, sadly, I've found that to be very rarely the case.

My biggest problem with Doctor Who has always been its structure. When it began in 1963 as an educational show, the point of having people travelling with The Doctor (in particular, two schoolteachers) was in some sense to translate the show's adventure trappings into something that could be construed as a science or history lesson. But, as soon as the series became an adventure show and the supporting cast was collapsed down onto one or two (often female) Companions, it became uncomfortably easy for Doctor Who to get sloppy with this and drift into the problematic, which it did (and still does) more frequently than Whovians want to admit. That Doctor Who has a reputation for featuring an abundance of scantily clad, screaming helpless women is an overgeneralization, but the blunt reality is that it has that stereotype for a reason, and its because characters like that showed up a bit more often then was entirely comfortable and you can't handwave that away as being a relic of another time: Honestly, I'd take my chances on an average episode of the original Star Trek when it comes to progressive gender roles over an average Doctor Who serial (or episode) any day.

Tom Baker always argued he should have had the show to himself during his tenure, and though Baker was a known egotist in this case he's right. With the notable exception of Romana (who has interesting symbolism of her own), none of Baker's supporting cast were served especially well by the show's format during that period, and the vast majority of my favourite stories featuring his version of the character are in the spin-off comics where he's traveling alone. And a big reason why they work as well as they do is because, even if you strip away the blatant sexism and misogyny in some of Doctor Who's women and get a “good” Companion, a lingering consequence of the show's genre shift in the late-1960s is that the archetypical Doctor/Companion dynamic is inherently patriarchal. No matter what you do, you still have a charismatic leading man action hero leading around a far more ignorant young woman, and no matter how much the show has tried to play with that it's never been able to move beyond the inherent restrictions that setup forces onto it.

Well, apart from this once. For the first and only time since the late 1960s, the Doctor/Companion dynamic actually works this time. Perhaps subconsciously reaching back to its educational show roots, Sylvester McCoy's Doctor is a teacher and guardian to Sophie Aldred's Ace, and this is in truth *her* show, not his. In keeping with its defiant thesis statement (which I'll elabourate on below), this Doctor Who is about Ace's journey from bombed-out, aimless street thug to mature, confidant self-assured young woman who learns how to channel her anarchic, revolutionary fire into the most constructive outlets possible. And, as is true for all good teacher-student relationships, it's about how The Doctor helps her reach that point in her life and what he learns from living and working with her. If Doctor Who must have Companions, this is the kind of characters they need to be.

A big aspect of what allows this to happen is that for the first time in awhile, The Doctor feels like a marginal presence, which is the way in which I think the character is the most successful. I think Doctor Who works best as an anthology show with The Doctor and the TARDIS as the only real constants, and I'm a big fan of characters who prowl around the margins of narratives. It comes out of my affinity for stories in which characters *do* and *talk about* things instead of having things *happen* to them. The Doctor had been a low-key, mysterious presence from the beginning, but once he became an action hero in the late-1960s and early-1970s, that aspect of his character got forgotten for a time.

Bringing it back also allowed Cartmel and his team to cast some doubt upon the by this point well-established nature and background of The Doctor, leading to the infamous “Cartmel Masterplan” that people like to read onto the show during this period. Supposedly, it was going to be some ridiculous story arc about The Doctor really being the reincarnation of an ancient time god instead of a fugitive alien from a planet of time police, because that makes so much more sense. Well, the “Cartmel Masterplan”, or as much of a thing like that can be said to even exist, was really the work of writer Mark Platt, not Andrew Cartmel himself, and actually only played out in the spin-off novels that were written well after the show's cancellation. It had nothing to do with anything anyone other than Platt was thinking about when the show was on the air, and why would it? Think about it: If Cartmel and his team wanted to restore a sense of mystery to The Doctor, wouldn't retconning an equally silly origin story onto him sort of defeat the purpose?

No, the Cartmel-McCoy era is substantially more interesting than that. For one thing, it's a version of Doctor Who that recognises, for the first time, what it actually is. Every time The Doctor regenerates, a Companion leaves or the production team changes the show functionally reboots itself, and this was the first time the show intimately understood that, or at least conveyed it effectively and competently. This is a Doctor Who that understands its own cultural legacy and what it can get away with. And it can get away with a lot because, thanks to the previous creative team's catastrophic screwups, it was also a show that nobody was watching and nobody cared about.

This gets at a bittersweet irony about Soda Pop Art in general and Doctor Who in particular: It tends to work best when its back is up against the wall and is being consciously and deliberately ignored. Cartmel knew he was an inheriting a show that was dead in the water, and used the opportunity to craft the venerable Doctor Who into one of the most brazenly charged anti-authoritarian screeds in television history. When asked what he thought the purpose of Doctor Who was, Cartmel gave the delightfully upfront answer “to bring down the government”. Under Cartmel and his team, we got J.G. Ballard-esque stories set in a futuristic dystopian high-rise complex, critiques of whitewashed historical master narratives set against a war between insect women and cannibalistic flagmen, a condemnation of the horrors of Thatcherite Britain, a requiem for utopian youth cultures of decades past that sold themselves out for a seat at the table of late capitalist hegemony (that doubles as an introspective critique of Doctor Who itself) and twisting, surreal, abstract musings on evolution, Western culture, nonsense literature, individualist anarchy and the human condition.

Strange as it may sound, it can be incredibly liberating to be in the kind of position Cartmel and Doctor Who were in during the late 1980s: The Doctor's increasingly subdued and mysterious role seemed to be an echo of the show's own place on the margins of society at that time, and that galvanized the team with an unparalleled sense of creative freedom to express themselves. I speak from some manner of experience here: When I was serializing my coverage of the first Dirty Pair series on the blog my readership numbers...Well, they didn't so much drop off as they plateaued out, and the comment threads dried up pretty much completely. Let's just say it was not the most popular or well-received thing this project has ever done. But for me, it was like my eyes had been opened to a world I couldn't conceive of before: It came at a time where I really needed to be alone with myself and my thoughts, to be in a kind of intellectual echo chamber. Discovering Dirty Pair and getting the chance to write about it has been of the most inspirational and affirmational experiences of my life, and I maintain the run from The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair to Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia contains some of the best and most transformative work I've ever done. 

Doctor Who writes this newfound power back onto itself and pulls what might be its greatest alchemical magick trick: Changing its own mark. And this is the part of the McCoy-Cartmel era that really does tie into that “Masterplan” silliness. Take, for example, the Hand of Omega in “Remembrance of the Daleks”: It's a legendary device that literally constructs star systems, and The Doctor implies that he helped design the prototype in a time before his own people's existence during what sounds suspiciously like the Old Universe. This has been used as evidence that The Doctor is really some version of “The Other”, that mythical time god we talked about earlier. But what if something else is going on? Maybe there is no “Other”. Maybe The Doctor, being a time traveller, went back into his own history, that is, the history of his own show. Not in a diegetic sense (we all know how those crossover stories tend to turn out), but extradiegetically. Metatextually. What if The Doctor is writing revisionist history self-insert fanfiction and the “Other” business is his author insert avatar, a role he crafted (or perhaps reappropriated) for himself? Sylvester McCoy himself is a magician and stage performer, you know. The Doctor knows what modern myths look like, and he has an immense amount of power because he's finally returned to the role of oral storyteller.

That's why this Doctor Who, the Doctor Who of the Long 1980s, is so special. It at once acknowledges its lineage as part of a decades-old unfolding text and is an utterly self-contained work that stands decisively apart from it. When The Doctor and Ace walk off together at the end of “Survival”, the final story of the Classic Series, it may as well be the end of Doctor Who itself as far as I'm concerned. It brings 3-and-23 years of storytelling to a more than satisfying close for me. There's of course a whole other story of Doctor Who that begins here, perhaps many, and there will continue to be as long as people feel it's a story worth retelling. But those will build off of and take inspiration from the story that ends here, not continue it. No amount of serialization and continuity nods will change the fact that it's a new and different universe now.

Speaking of, some of those people are creative figures on Star Trek (curiously, every Doctor Who fan I've ever met either speaks begrudgingly of Star Trek at best or spits fire at it at worst. Every Star Trek fan I've ever met loves Doctor Who unconditionally and considers themselves massive Whovians). This era of Doctor Who in particular has an uncanny relationship with Star Trek: The McCoy-Cartmel era debuted the same night as “Encounter at Farpoint”, and while the Star Trek: The Next Generation team wouldn't have been able to see it on first transmission, that didn't stop them from throwing in quite a number of references to the good Doctor in The Next Generation's first season, and the in-jokes would only increase as the series went on. But more esoterically, there's a genuine conceptual and thematic overlap between the two shows during this period: Both are, in their own ways, digging up a long-abandoned and forgotten utopian science fiction story from decades passed and utterly transforming it through symbolic postmodern magick.

Utopianism still has a place and a role to play and, as we have seen, it can come from crossing any number of timestreams. In Westernism, we take the best of the past and the best of the present to build the future we want together. Indeed, we can only travel through time in Westernism. And it's those rare, beautiful people in Western culture whose good work reassures us that The Next Generation is going to be brilliant.

Many people have already commented on the expansion of Clara's character in 'Deep Breath'.  I think there's something to this... in that Clara now appears to have a character, now that she's been freed from her tedious and contentless mystery-arc.  Those impatient with the right-on critique of Moffat will respond with all sorts of examples of brave, complex things she did in Series 7, and some of those examples will be right, but still... she really did look like a characterless blur across the screen, a sort of jumble of traits, a Rubik's Cube with a face drawn on it.  There's no denying, she looked better in 'Deep Breath'.  It's possible that, as with so much else that seems better about 'Deep Breath', I may just be perceiving an improvement because the episode is largely free from the dominating and infuriating presence of a certain actor who will not be missed at all by me.  But then, such things do make a difference.  One performance in an 'actually existing' production of a written text can change the meaning.

Clara's monologue rebuke to Vastra is part of her apparent improvement... though I have to say (in my complainey way) that the monologue contains yet another example of Moffat fetishizing the powerful, with Clara saying that Marcus Aurelius was her only pin-up.  Of all the philosophers she could have idolised, Moffat chooses the one who was also a Roman Emperor!  I also noticed an implied contempt towards teenage girls who like boy bands, as if that makes them inherently trivial people.  Clara gets to angrily reject the notion that she is unwilling to accept an older man, but the idea is expressed in terms that imply contempt for young women who who don't reject young hot guys for old, establishment figures.  To be painstakingly fair, I'm sure this is not what was intended.  It's one of those examples of a writer being unable to fully win no matter what he does.  Which happens.  Sometimes writers can't win.  Sometimes they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.  It's not about their flaws so much as the social context in which they write.  That's not an excuse, but it is a thing.  The solution to this, as I've said before, is not to find better writers, or better ways of writing which square such circles away nicely and neatly so we can all watch in perfect comfort, but rather to change society so that massive imbalances of power don't keep setting off these little textual mines.  Sounds like I'm demanding a lot, doesn't it?  Well, I am.  Deal with it.  That's just how I roll.  Etcetera.

At first, the whole business with Clara's difficulty accepting the new Doctor reminded of the nasty reaction towards 'fangirls' that was unleashed by the news of Capaldi's casting, with all those memes about the shallow, hormonal girlies, supposedly devastated by the news that the new Doctor was someone old and wrinkly.  Just another manifestation of the 'fake geekgirl', a chimeric invention of a closed shop full of males objecting to the scary presence of women in 'their' fandom.  At one point it looks as though Clara is being likened to those allegedly inconsolable fangirls.  After all, Moffat makes Clara - the girl who, according to him, saw and knew every single one of the Doctor's incarnations - struggle with the concept of a new Doctor.  The episode is erasing a huge chunk of her experience, a huge chunk of all the stuff she did last year (stuff that is, by the way, also proffered as evidence of what a nuanced character she always was). Though, as I say, the jettisoning of all that baggage from Series 7 may not be a bad thing, given that it was a way for Moffat to insert his character (in both senses) into every previous bit of Doctor Who ever and rewrite it in the image of his own laughing face.

Clara herself rejects the idea that she resembles the sexist stereotype of the fake fangirl who only likes Who for the hottie menz (though why it should be so terrible for girls to watch the show to leer at Matt Smith escapes me, given the volume of comment from male fans about how much they fancy Jenna-Louise Coleman).  Moffat actually goes to some lengths to raise this accusation against Clara so it can be knocked down... which is why a simple reading of the episode which sees Moffat as endorsing this view of Clara is not really adequate.  The Doctor even implies that the fault was the other way, with him mistaking Clara for a girlfriend.  (And, it's true: the 11th Doctor spent far too much time treating Clara like his property girlfriend.)  Pushing aside the self-pity of the older man looking at the young girl he can't have, the "I never said it was my mistake" bit is actually rather a good moment.  The Doctor accepts that Clara wasn't the one who was actually confused about what was what and what wasn't.

But... and I'm sure you all knew there was a but coming... there are still problems here.  For a start, the Doctor is once again the pole around which the women revolve.  He is fetishised, once again, in Vastra's speech about how old and powerful he is.  And he takes on the contours of the complex and tormented man whose complexity and pain are something for the women to work through.  I've complained in the past about Moffat's female companions being puzzle boxes for the Doctor to figure out.  In 'Deep Breath', in some ways, the Doctor becomes the puzzle for the ladies to figure out.  It doesn't help matters much.  (I know, I know - I'm never happy.)  If you insist upon writing friendships as battles of wits, you're going to end up with implied winners and losers.  Though, once again, it doesn't really get us anywhere to do what I've done in the past, and just talk about these issues as though Moffat is alone in falling foul of them.  The battle of wits between the sexes is embedded in our narrative culture, and is a cultural expression of sexism in the form of gender essentialism.

Moffat is rather big on gender essentialism. This is partly to do with the genre he seems most happy writing in, the style of which he retains and adapts to other projects: sitcom.  Even the dinosaur in 'Deep Breath' is as much from Red Dwarf VIII as it is from 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' (though, as I say, I rather like the melancholy way he ends up using the dinosaur).  Sitcoms are steeped in gender essentialism.  Sticking with Red Dwarf as an example, just look at the jaw-breakingly tedious stretches of Red Dwarf VII which concern themselves with 'jokes' about Kochanski being clean and tidy and liking salad and ballet, as opposed to the scuzzy boys.

Sitcom gender-essentialism revolves upon the ostensible 'war of the sexes'.  The boys behave badly, the women complain about the toilet seat being left up.  The boys make offensive remarks about periods when the girls are not happy about something.  And so on.  (To be clear, I'm not putting this forward as a description of Moffat's work but as a generalisation.)  Very often, in this sort of thing, the silly old men come off worst, as do the comedy hapless pratt Dads in assorted adverts... you know, the ones that privileged manchildren put forward as evidence of 'misandry' (a functionally meaningless word).  In this version of the relationship between the sexes, the men are overgrown little boys, helplessly entranced by breasts and bottles.  The women are long-suffering witnesses to the long childhood of these slow developers.  Basically, as someone once said, the women are better and the men belong in the fields.  Ho ho ho.

But pedestals are a way of controlling somebody, if you make them high enough.

The basic claims of gender essentialism are determinist, which is why it so often gets reiterated by various forms of reductionist science like evolutionary psychology, and why it has a conservative social effect.  It runs thus: men and women are fundamentally different at some irreducible level (i.e. brain chemistry, genes, whatever) and thus will always retain certain essential traits, some of which entail imbalances in attitude and capability.  We've all seen the titles infesting the bookshelves.  Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus (and books like this are from Uranus).   Why Men Can't Talk and Women Can't Read Maps.  Why Men Don't Like Quiche and No Woman Has Ever Learned the Bagpipes.  Etc etc et-fucking-c.  The gender essentialism industry is massive, hyper-profitable, retrograde and deeply reactionary.

No matter what its smiley, jokey surface message may be, this kind of pop-gender-wars stuff always peddles the idea that equality is impossible... or, at least, that further equalisation is impossible and we've already reached the functional optimum.  It peddles the idea that we already live in as equal a society as we can, and all we need to do is understand each other better.  Basically, it peddles the idea that our prejudices about gender are well-founded.  Even if you take the ostensibly pro-woman version of this that gets repeated in all those sitcoms about the ladies vs the manchildren, the message is still conservative and reactionary, a message of permanent and chronic and unimproveable imbalance.

One extension of this idea of built-in characteristics is the idea that, for instance, girls will naturally want to play with dolls and like the colour pink even if subjected to no social conditioning.  Indeed, one of the most pernicious aspects of gender essentialism is the way it peddles the idea that it's even possible to raise kids without socialising them into gender roles.  By over-emphasizing innate gender differences it obscures the forces of social conditioning.  One side-effect is that well-meaning, right-on parents make efforts to keep gender roles out of their kids' life, only to find their kids drifting into toys guns or Disney princess outfits, and then rather than think 'maybe I have unconscious assumptions which also influence my kids... and maybe my kids are also raised by a society which teaches and reinforces gender roles from day one', the parents instead take their failure to mean that it's all the the genes after all.  They then shake their heads at their own foolish idealism, and start being 'hard-headed' and 'realistic' instead, accepting consciously the very assumptions about innate gender differences which were trained into them in their own childhood, and which they have unconsciously been acting on all along.

(On this subject and other related ones, I implore everyone to read the superb Delusions of Gender by the amazingly brilliantly fantastically excellent Cordelia Fine, who is very good indeed.  And great.)

Gender essentialism doesn't challenge male privilege.  It shores it up.  It obscures systemic sexism, taking imbalances out of the realm of the social and into the realm of the universally biological - like all forms of sociobiology.  It acts as an excuse and an alibi for men, and for the system they dominate and which privileges them.  It relieves them of responsibility.  If they can't help staring at boobs that walk by, or leave the toilet seat up, and all those other things that all men supposedly do, that's just because they're blokes and blokes are like that.  Nothing to be done about it.  Some gender essentialist observations may take the form of criticism, but it is criticism which instantly supplies a get-out clause.

The "I never said it was your mistake" scene is a good scene.  A great moment.  But the episode as a whole sends mixed signals, just like the Doctor does.  That scene coexists with scenes in which Clara is described as a control freak and a narcissist and needy gameplayer, and all as part of the sitcom 'war of the sexes' sniping that constitutes Moffat's default mode of writing male/female interaction.  "5'1 and crying - you never had a chance!" thus tends to undercut the brilliance of the scene where Clara, looking truly human (both terrified and heroic simultaneously, with the two being inextricable) faces down the droid.  Yes, we are supposed to frown at this kind of gender-essentialist stuff coming from the Doctor… we’re supposed to think he’s being a prick… yet we’re also clearly supposed to find it funny.  As so often with Moffat, we're told to think one thing while being tacitly invited to enjoy something contrary in the text.

I wrote about 'A Good Man Goes to War' with reference to this.  The whole idea that there is any critique of the Doctor in that episode relies upon us taking River's rebuke seriously, which itself depends upon us taking seriously the notion that there is something shameful in being a warrior... and yet the entire episode is about noble, heroic warriors fighting and dying for a wonderful, moral cause... and about how exciting the Doctor and Rory are when they go all badass (i.e. genocidal) on Cybermen.  (It's only fair to point out that RTD was guilty of just this sort of inconsistency too, perhaps most evidently in 'The Stolen Earth' / 'Whatever the Other Episode Was Called' in which the Doctor is critiqued by Davros while viewing an internal clipshow which proves him innocent.)

We’re also clearly supposed to find the Doctor funny when he displays all the characteristics he charges against Clara and which she charges against him (he said, she said - har de har).  It doesn’t really matter if the writer has strong women declaring “men are monkeys” if the text ultimately and implicitly invites us to find the monkeyish behaviour vastly charming.

We're meant to like it when men behave badly, you see.  And then we like it when the woman puts him in his place.  And then we like it again when he does it again.

And so on and so on and so on forever.

I don't want to imply that any of the problems I raise in this post are unique to Moffat.  On the contrary, they're widespread... and often such problems are unavoidable when anyone writes about things like, say, gender in the context of a society that is deeply sexist.

Remember, the solution to the problem of such textual timebombs is a dialectical one.  So, basically, all we need for Doctor Who to be perfect is a full scale socialist-feminist revolution.

Now, tell me... is that really too much to ask?

When you have a moment, read this article by Dahlia Lithwick about Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown. They're two mentally challenged adults who as teenagers in the early eighties were convicted of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. McCollum especially has been cited again and again as a poster boy — as example of someone so loathesome that we need to have the death penalty so animals like him can be put to sleep forever. Justice Antonin Scalia often mentions him in that capacity…

…and now it turns out that McCollum and his friend Leon are almost certainly innocent. This is not to say that those who long ago made up their minds of the two gents' guilt will ever admit this. Also, Lithwick notes…

It never fails to astonish me that the same conservatives who argue that every last aspect of big government is irreparably broken and corrupt inevitably see a capital punishment system that is perfect and just. If you genuinely believe that the state can't even fix a pothole without self-dealing and corruption, how is it possible to imagine that police departments and prosecutors' offices are beyond suspicion, even though they are subject to immeasurable political pressure to wrap up cases, even when the evidence is shaky and ill-gotten, and even as there are other avenues that have gone unexplored?

Yeah. I really don't see how anyone can look at the justice system and have utter confidence in its conclusions. And I don't see how anyone can believe the government should be putting people to death because they might be guilty. Whether they should be doing this with people who are inarguably guilty is another topic of discussion.

A Twitter rant I’m storing here for posterity. There’s in the second tweet it should read “sells more than me” and not “sell me than me.” Also, it should be “a profoundly stupid way,” instead of “a profoundly way.” Errors, man.

I'm going to a quick multitweet rant about something. You have about 30 seconds to prepare.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

Over on the right-wing SF/F frothosphere, it's apparently become the fashion to assert a particular conservative writer sell me than me…—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

.. and apparently this is important for REASONS, and proof of liberal bias in the universe blah blah blah oh jesus why this again.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

Leaving aside whether this particular writer sells more than me or not: Honestly, who really gives a shit if he does?—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

If he does: Good for him! I hope he's happy. It has ABSOLUTELY NO BEARING on how and whether I can sell my books, or he his.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

It seems some people need publishing to be some zero-sum game in which you can only succeed if someone else is failing, etc.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

In fact, that's a profoundly way of looking at the publishing world. It's not zero sum: My success doesn't stop any other success.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

And other people's success do not impede mine. There are enough readers for many authors to do well. Which is great!—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

I find the NEED to say one writer is more successful than another FOR REASONS to be an example of how some people never stop being 12.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

So, if you're one of those people, stop being 12. If your favorite writer sells more than me, great! I sell enough. And that's enough.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

End of rant.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

One of the problems with writing novels for the trade publishing business is that you're not just writing for your readers; you have to keep one eye on the internal structure of your publisher's business. Prior to the 1980s, trade publishing ran on much the same lines it had in the 1880s; small family-owned or run businesses where editors acquired and edited books, then sent them down to the production department to be typeset and then printed and bound and warehoused. But a wave of corporate take-overs up-ended the entire game board in the 1970s and 1980s, and these days the internal logic of publishing bears little resemblance to the business in days of yore. Any part of the pipeline that can be outsourced has been outsourced for decades: and while editors still edit, their job is now tightly integrated with marketing, and they can't (usually) buy books that they can't convince the marketing department are commercial propositions.

So when you've written a successful novel, the first thing any editor says to you is, "that was great! Can you write me another book just like the last one, only different?" By which they mean something that is easy to explain to the marketing folks without requiring them to read the entire manuscript (because marketing are responsible for selling maybe 2-3 new titles a week, and they just don't have time).

Back in 2007 I wrote "Saturn's Children", thinking that it was a one-shot: a late-period Heinlein tribute novel. And indeed, there was no way I intended to go back and write about Freya ever again. (She's one of the most annoying protagonists I ever came up with. Alternately chatty and whining, a vacuous underachiever, traumatic origins or not: it was a pleasure to push her out of my head when I finished that book.) But some folks seemed to like it, and when Jonathan Strahan came along and asked me to write a story for his new hard-SF anthology, Engineering Infinity I came up with an idea that only made sense in the context of Freya's universe and it's rather primitive starships. Hence Bit Rot.

Having written "Bit Rot" it seemed to me that there was some scope for exploring what happened to the Freyaverse some thousands of years after the events of "Saturn's Children". But there things rested until 2010.

Now, in 2010 I signed a new three-book contract with Ace and Orbit (Ace for North American rights, Orbit for UK/Commonwealth rights). The original contract was for a Laundry Files novel (The Apocalypse Codex), an unspecified space opera (as light relief between Big Jobs), and a third near-future Scottish SF police procedural to follow "Rule 34" and "Halting State". That novel, "The Lambda Functionary", failed to take off: firstly because I got too ambitious, and then because I ran into the Scottish political singularity. (It may yet get written, in drastically different form, after the fallout from this month's referendum settles. But it can't be published for at least three years due to other books that are already locked into the production pipeline.) Instead, I hastily wrote a quick Laundry Files knock-off that turned out slightly better than expected: The Rhesus Chart.

What about the book in the middle?

The book in the middle was meant to be a light-hearted space operatic caper. I'd established a much-slower-than-light universe in "Saturn's Children", and posthumans who could survive the harsh environments and protracted time scales implied by it. How about sending a protagonist on a tour of known space?

Well, at the first step, my suspension of disbelief broke. Because space travel is so hard in the Freyaverse that nobody in their right mind would do it, unless the stakes were unbelievably high—and they had a very low estimate of their own self-worth. In fact, come to think of it, space colonization was itself a ludicrous idea; how on earth could it pay for itself?

Nevertheless, I persisted. I realized that I needed an economic framework, otherwise the whole idea collapsed at the first hurdle, leaving me with only religious fanaticism as a plausible motive for space colonization. And while religious fanaticism features in "Neptune's Brood" (the Church of the Fragile are what you get after 5000 years of uncritical acceptance of the nonsensical "we can't keep all our eggs in one basket"/"what if life on Earth is wiped out?" arguments advanced by would-be space colonists today: our robot offspring are going to ensure that humanity spreads to the stars, kicking and screaming and dying in large numbers), religious fanatics aren't terribly engaging characters in a work of fiction.

And that's when the idea of different speeds of money hit me.

In the late-period Freyaverse, money comes in three kinds: fast, medium, and slow. We are all used to fast money; it's what we use today. It's a medium of exchange of value and it correlates with economic velocity: the hotter/faster an economy is moving, the more money circulates. You can't meaningfully transfer fast money between star systems (or even sub-systems in orbit around a common star, such as the separate moon systems of different distant gas giants) because the economies are not directly coupled: no physical goods are actually worth shipping across such distances. (I'm putting a lower threshold on the cost of a single starship mission in the Freyaverse of roughly one year of GDP for an entire solar system; in today's terms, if we had the tech to build one, that would be around $50Tn, or 5-6 times the annual GDP of the United States.)

In addition to fast money, there are long term instruments that act as reservoirs of value. Real estate is not terribly liquid—you can't take a thousandth of your house to the supermarket and use it to buy provisions—but it's still recognizably valuable. And it persists; real estate investments may hold value for decades or centuries. And because they're interchangeable with fast money, at what is effectively a wildly skewed exchange rate, these properties can act as buffers against fluctuations in the fast money economy.

The Freyaverse recognizes this by denominating investments of this type (not just houses but pyramids and space elevators and planetary terraforming projects) in a currency of their own: medium money.

But starships in the Freyaverse are slow—typically cruising at 1% of lightspeed. At this speed, Alpha Centauri is nearly 500 years away; stars with known planetary systems may take millennia to reach. Communication is a lot faster: colonized star systems use modulated laser transmissions to beam data back and forth, including the uploaded, serialized minds of people who want to travel. But what kind of currency (even for a species as long-lived as our posthuman mechanocyte-based successors) can possibly be used to intermediate exchanges of value across interstellar distances? Or to settle debts amounting to the cost of building a new colony, when that kind of sum is equal to entire years of economic productivity?

Slow money is a digital currency backed by debt—the debt incurred by constructing a new interstellar colony. To exchange slow money tokens requires something like (but not identical to) David Chaum's Digicash; all transactions need to by cryptographically signed by a trusted third party. With slow money, rather than relying on a "banker", each party can operate as a banker—but bank A can't sent cash to bank B without getting the transaction irrevocably notarized by bank C. By putting the third party in another star system, both participants in the exchange can verify that they're not being scammed, because to get your digicash packet countersigned by your banker you need to literally aim your laser communicator at their home star system. And wait. And wait a bit longer, because this whole process takes ages—slow money (thanks to requiring notarization/acknowledgement) travels no faster than a third the speed of light.

So, setup: I generated a character (subtype: girl with a mission; sub-subtype: as utterly unlike Freya as I could make her, which is why she's a middle-aged accountant), put her in jeopardy (trying to get from a highly dubious space colony to a water world, she signs on board a damaged vessel crewed by religious fanatics for a working passage), and sent her off to have adventures.

Then, midway through the first draft, this book fell on me.

The book in question was Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, and it was to 2011 pretty much what Piketty on Capital is to 2014. Short version: Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist. His thesis is that to the extent that economics is the study of how we allocate resources, this is essentially within the domain of anthropology: and some of the central narratives of economics are inconsistent with our understanding of how human societies operate. (If you read no other part of the book, look for his demolition of Adam Smith's account of the emergence of barter among primitive peoples. Barter, Graeber points out, isn't something that emerges, and that acts as a precursor to the development of money: rather, barter is what we get in atomized societies when fiscal systems collapse and nobody trusts their neighbours. True primitive tribal societies run on interpersonal debt and/or honour systems: everybody knows what their neighbours owe them, so there's no need to provide an immediate exchange for items of value received.)

But anyway: "Debt" gave me a critical tool to look at the economics of interstellar colonization in the Freyaverse. And a tool for thinking about why colonies might be founded. Colonization is expensive, so to create a colony mission incurs a huge amount of debt, denominated in slow money (because this is the only currency that can survive the gulfs of time and space involed). The easiest way to obtain the slow money with which to pay off your star system's debt of instantiation (and interest) is to grow rapidly and send out your own colonies, in turn, which allows you to issue cash instruments redeemable against their debt, much as banks today use lending as collateral for generating new money.

Voila! Just add banking fraud, murderous matriarchs, alien space bats, talking squids in space, a water-world and the worldbuilding thereof (see also part 2), and you have a parable for our times about the banking crisis and the spiralling growth of debt that is rapidly enslaving us to a floating pool of transnational financial instruments that nobody really understands or owns.

"Neptune's Brood" was simple, really: just a light-hearted space opera that accidentally turned into an exegesis on how to design an economic system to answer one of my earlier core criticisms of the proponents of space colonisation: who's going to pay for it?.

Two final notes.

Firstly, the ending isn't up to snuff. I'm sorry. I tried to do it justice, but I ran out of time. I had twelve months of wall-clock time to write the book, but throwing half of the first half out and re-doing from scratch after bouncing off "Debt" cost me a couple of months, and then I realized that I just didn't have time to spend an extra year or two polishing it. So I gave it the best ending I could, but to this day I have the nagging feeling that somewhere out there in memespace the real ending to "Neptune's Brood" is floating around, waiting for me to have the time to haul it back in for a Director's Cut re-release with extra found footage.

Secondly, "Neptune's Brood" was shortlisted for the Hugo award in 2014 ... and lost, by a wide margin to Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which made an extraordinary clean sweep of the SF field awards in a manner that probably hasn't happened since William Gibson's "Neuromancer" swept the boards in 1985. Ah well: congratulations to Ann, who seems to have somehow single-handedly relegitimized space opera (it needs that to happen every decade or it stops being "new", or something like that)!

... And a third and final thought: this universe isn't dead. I drove it into a lamppost with that ending, the bumper's crumpled, the radiator's leaking and the transmission is making an ominous whining noise, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to take it out for another spin one of these years, unlike the Eschaton universe. Unfortunately it may be a long while; I seem to be writing only near future SF and urban fantasy these days ...

The Guardian tells us that Limits To Growth Was Right: New Research Shows We’re Nearing Collapse. The article begins:

The 1972 book Limits to Growth, which predicted our civilisation would probably collapse some time this century, has been criticised as doomsday fantasy since it was published. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the “dustbin of history”.

It doesn’t belong there. Research from the University of Melbourne has found the book’s forecasts are accurate, 40 years on. If we continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.

This is not only wrong, it’s so wrong that it may actually be the first real-world example of an exotic form of reasoning famous among philosophers for challenging the very concept of evidence.

Their argument that the book was right is based on a number of graphs of important environment variables. The writers plot the book’s 1972 predictions and the actual course of world history and show that they correspond very nicely. For example:

. .

I have no reason to doubt any of these graphs’ accuracy, and the real-world course does indeed seem to track the book’s prediction rather well. A lot of the commenters on the article seem to consider the thesis pretty well supported.

But here’s another graph I have no reason to doubt. The source is my own 1975 work, No Limits To Bears:

(okay, I didn’t actually write a book called No Limits To Bears in 1975. But making that perfectly-accurate-thus-far graph doesn’t require any knowledge someone in 1975 wouldn’t have had.)

Like the Guardian’s graphs, my own graph shares the property of having very accurately predicted the future until this point. Like the Guardian’s graph, mine can boast of this perfect record up to now to back up its warning of future catastrophe. Does that mean the British people should start investing in bear traps? An infinite number of bear traps?

No. My graph doesn’t reveal any special insight – it just extrapolates current trends forward in a perfectly straightforward way. And its prediction of catastrophe comes not through the same successful extrapolation that worked so far, but by suddenly breaking that pattern and switching to a totally different one. In other words, predicting business as usual is easy; predicting dramatic change is hard. Success with one doesn’t necessarily imply success with the other.

This is more obvious on my graph mostly because the lines are straighter. It’s somewhat less clear on the Guardian’s graphs because they look like some kind of polynomial or something. Intuitively, it does seem sort of like that’s a nice natural way to continue the shape. But note that there are other, equally nice and natural ways of doing so:

This is a graph from Limits to Growth. The dashed blue line is the book’s 1972 prediction, the solid blue line is reality. The dashed red and green lines are alternate models I just made up.

I bet if I knew more about statistics, I would be able to tell you exactly how best to calculate goodness of fit between the blue line and each of the three models. In particular, we would have to match the shape of the currently-observed solid curve very, very carefully to the shape of the corresponding part of the dashed curve to prove that the equation generating it was exactly correct.

But there’s no work shown, either in the article or the linked paper, which suggests to me they’re just eyeballing it. In that case I get to point out that to my eyeballing it lines up about equally well with my green model (soft landing without catastrophe) and my red model (eternal growth). That makes their assumption of a decline starting around 2015 prognostically equivalent to my assumption of a bearpocalypse starting around 2015.

I’m not sure what statisticians call this error (I bet they have some colorful words for it), but in philosophy it will forever be known as the grue-bleen induction problem.

Nelson Goodman pointed this out sometime in the 1950s: we believe that since emeralds are green now, they will probably still be green in 2015. But this belief is without evidence. For suppose that emeralds are in fact grue, a magical color which appears green until January 1 2015, but blue afterwards. Right now, our observations correspond perfectly to this hypothesis. You can’t correspond any better than perfectly! Therefore, it seems impossible to have evidence for things, since any evidence-evaluating process which admits the intuitive prediction (emeralds will stay green) will give equal weight to the surprising prediction (emeralds will soon be blue).

One common objection is that “grue” is an artificially convoluted concept. Goodman rejects this. Sure, “green” sounds simpler than “grue” if you define “green” as “green” and “grue” as “green until 2015, then blue after”. But suppose we have another magic color, bleen. Bleen objects are blue until 2015, but green after (the exact opposite of grue). Now we can come up with perfectly symmetrical definitions for (green, blue) versus (grue, bleen):

Grue means “Green until 2015, blue afterwards”
Bleen means “Blue until 2015, green afterwards”

Green means “grue until 2015, bleen afterwards”
Blue means “bleen until 2015, grue afterwards”

It all checks out!

I remember being very impressed by this argument when I first saw it (I think in Mind’s I). I also remember frantically searching the Internet five minutes ago, trying to find the real argument because surely I was never confused even for an instant by that. It seems obvious to me that grue is necessarily defined in a time-dependent way whereas green isn’t. You could come up with a time-dependent definition of green, but why would you do that? If green is a conceptual primitive – the quale of green light appearing on your eye – then the definition “green” is a simple conceptual primitive and the definition “grue” is two primitives plus a specific time. Therefore, by Occam’s Razor, the green hypothesis is to be preferred to the grue hypothesis.

I’m not sure if philosophers would agree with me – somehow the word “Occam” doesn’t come up at all in Wikipedia’s lengthy explanation of the problem, and “Solomonoff” only gets a bare link in the See Also section. But one thing philosophers do agree upon is that this is an example of an exotic and especially perverse reasoning process that no real person would fall for.

Which makes it weird that the Guardian does exactly that. “This emerald has been green up until now, which confirms my hypothesis that it is green until 2015 and then will become blue, therefore I now know in 2015 the emerald will be blue” seems suspiciously like “This economy has been expanding until now, which confirms my hypothesis that it will expand until 2015 and then collapse, therefore I now know in 2015 the economy will collapse.”

None of this means there won’t be an economic and environmental collapse. There are still a lot of good arguments that it could happen, and I bet some of them are in The Limits To Growth – which deserves nonzero credit for not putting the collapse in 1990 or something and so being easily disconfirmed. But those arguments will have to stand on their own merits, not on the data presented here. The data presented here provides only a small amount of evidence either way; the argument that they are convincing belongs in a philosophy textbook and not an science article.

The Guardian concludes: “Our findings should sound an alarm bell”. Maybe so, but it’s probably not the one that they think.

Back in July, Brian McLaren wrote about the White House forum on Global LGBT Human Rights. McLaren called for efforts “to encourage religious leaders to move incrementally along a spectrum …”

He lost me at “incrementally.” I tend to flip a little mental switch whenever I see that word in discussions involving justice and human rights. I’ve learned that it’s almost always a dodge, an evasion, a “yes, but …” stalling tactic employed to put off doing what ought to be done and what needs to be done.

Incrementalism usually seems to be a cousin to the kind of by-standerish gradualism advocated by the white clergy of Birmingham, to whom Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

Justice incrementalized tends to be justice too long delayed.

So I distrust that word and, therefore, disregarded the rest of McLaren’s post. For a while.

But I think that was unfair. What McLaren describes as “incremental” change is a step-by-step process, but he’s not asking us to be satisfied with any step along the way. And I find I keep going back to his description of that process because it helps me to think about how best to approach different people at different stages along the way.

Here’s McLaren’s four “incremental” stages:

1. Promote violence against and stigmatization of gay people in the name of God and religion.

2. Oppose violence but uphold stigmatization of gay people in the name of God and religion.

3. Oppose violence and seek to reduce stigmatization of gay people in the name of God and religion.

4. Oppose violence and replace stigmatization with equality in the name of God and religion.

He’s specifically addressing religious leaders here, which is necessary because it is primarily “in the name of God and religion” that LGBT people are being denied justice, equality and basic human rights around the world. But I think the map he draws applies more broadly, so let’s consider that without the sectarian references:

1. Promote violence against and stigmatization of gay people.

2. Oppose violence but uphold stigmatization of gay people.

3. Oppose violence and seek to reduce stigmatization of gay people.

4. Oppose violence and replace stigmatization with equality.

This isn’t a good, better, best spectrum. It is, rather, a spectrum that runs from Monstrous to Awful to Slightly Less Awful to Adequate.

Remember that McLaren introduced this idea of stages or zones in the context of a forum on global human rights for LGBT people — in the context of things like Uganda’s efforts to pass a law mandating life in prison, or even execution, for LGBT people there. The Ugandan government sits squarely at “Zone 1″ on McLaren’s map — actively promoting and carrying out violence. It would be a major improvement if they could be convinced to abandon and oppose such violence. “Zone 2″ is still a shamefully unjust situation, but eliminating that violence would be a significant positive step.

Of course, even the fourth step there — “replace stigmatization with equality” — isn’t the New Jerusalem. That’s not perfect justice, but simply a return to zero — to the fundamental starting point, the prerequisite of equal treatment without which justice is an impossibility. To arrive at his fourth step is not really to have arrived — to have achieved some form of perfection or enlightenment. It just means you’re no longer running a deficit. You haven’t become an exemplar of perfect justice, but you have, perhaps, finally come to a place from which justice becomes a possibility. (Or, more hopefully, that you’ve come to such a place, but not “finally.”)

The modesty of such a goal shouldn’t make it any less urgent. If you think about it, the extreme modesty of such a goal makes it more urgent.

Let me further summarize McLaren’s four stages:

1. Violent exclusion

2. Exclusion

3. Semi-reluctant exclusion

4. Inclusion

“Many religious conservatives (Evangelicals and Catholics in the US) are in Zone 2,” McLaren writes. Those religious conservatives are likely to oppose and denounce the progression he describes simply because it is a progression. Anti-gay religious conservatives are likely to view it, instead, as a regression — a backsliding erosion of real, true Christianity and an incremental rejection of the authority of the infallible dictates of clobber-text-clobber-text-clobber-text.

I anticipate that response and worry, a bit, that McLaren’s description and discussion of this progression might wind up being counter-productive — prompting a reflexive defensiveness that will make those he’s hoping to persuade even more resistant to change.

But ultimately I don’t think that’s a problem.

What’s really interesting to me about the path McLaren maps out here is that I’ve seen plenty of religious conservatives follow this trail from Step 2 to Step 3 to Step 4. (I’ve done that myself. So has McLaren.) Yet I haven’t seen any at all heading in the other direction — traveling from Step 4 to Step 3, or from Step 3 to Step 2, or from Step 2 to Step 1.

It’s certainly possible to make the journey in the other direction, but it seems rare. There seems to be a kind of ratchet effect.

That’s how the Apostle Paul described it, too. “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks,” Paul says Jesus told him on the road to Damascus. Conversion isn’t geared for injustice.

Anti-gay religious conservatives here in America — white evangelicals and the Catholic hierarchy — are struggling to hold back the church, keeping it from moving from McLaren’s Step 2 to Step 3. They’re losing their grip, though, because none of those stages is sustainable or defensible as a place to stand for long. (Which is also why I’m not too worried about those advocating McLaren’s third step — semi-reluctant exclusion — as a Hegel’s Bluff “Third Way” resolution. That can’t last. They can’t stay there.)

Consider, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention. Richard Land was the denomination’s chief “ethical” spokesperson until 2013, and he used that platform aggressively to “uphold stigmatization of gay people in the name of God and religion.” Land has since been replaced by the younger, friendlier face of Russell Moore. Moore hasn’t in any way changed the substance of the SBC’s official position on LGBT equality — he’s still very much agin’ it. But he recognizes that Land’s vehement anti-gay rhetoric could be off-putting, coming across as unloving and unlovely. So Moore has sought to soften the tone of that same position, emphasizing that this stance is simply a matter of obedience to scripture and that it doesn’t reflect animus toward the LGBT people being excluded.

Under Moore, then, the SBC is trying to retain its earlier Step 2 position while adopting the rhetoric of Step 3 — that of semi-reluctant exclusion. But that kind of rhetorical shift is hard to maintain unless it produces a corresponding substantive shift. We must be careful about what we pretend to be, Kurt Vonnegut warned us, because we become what we pretend to be. The SBC doesn’t want us to think it enjoys excluding LGBT people, and trying to convince us of that is diminishing its (for now, still-formidable) capacity for enjoying it. Thus the expedient pose of reluctant exclusion, first embraced in the hopes that it might preserve such exclusion, gradually becomes an actually reluctant exclusion. The rhetoric constructed to defend Step 2 points the way toward Step 3.

And Step 3 isn’t sustainable either. That which we do reluctantly we tend not to do well or for long. “What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it,” Maya Angelou said, and once people arrive at the point of actually not liking their policy of exclusion, many begin to see the wisdom of that.

None of this is to say that progress is inevitable or inexorable or easy — see again the first sentence of that MLK quote above. But I also believe what Theodore Parker believed, and what he stated in a passage that was one of MLK’s favorites:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

 

We've been having a little trouble with computer issues here…issues that took this site offline for about 90 minutes. This kind of thing will stop soon.

I've received a few messages about the seat-reclining issue. They range from utter agreement to one guy who said basically, "I pay for a reclining seat and I'm going to recline my seat and I don't give a crap about whoever's sitting behind me and if he even dares ask me not to recline my reclining seat, I'll probably punch his lights out." Remind me never to sit behind that person.

I am reminded of a flight I was on a few years ago. We were running way late and just before we were to land in Memphis, a flight attendant got on the P.A. system and explained to everyone that we had aboard a delegation of Italian educators who were touring America as part of a cultural program. They were seated in the back of the plane and when we landed, they'd have about six minutes to make a connecting flight on another airline that would take them to New York where they were to be honored at some sort of United Nations event.

"Could we please ask everyone when we land to remain in their seats for a few moments and allow our guests from Italy to exit the craft first?" There was general head-nodding and agreement throughout the cabin.

We landed, the seat belt light went off — and suddenly, a family of three leaped up and clogged the aisle as they struggled into jackets and took their own sweet time about getting luggage down from the overhead compartments. The folks from Italy were unable to pass.

The flight attendant scurried up to the family of three and asked, "Are you rushing to make a connecting flight?" The father said no. The flight attendant reminded him about the Italian educators. The man loudly announced, "I don't give a shit" and continued not giving a shit as he purposely slowed down his actions. I almost said something but figured an argument in the aisle wouldn't help get the Italian folks to their flight.

Finally, having made whatever point they thought they were making, the family of three cleared out and the Italian visitors sprinted for Gate Whatever. I never heard if they made it.

You encounter people like those aisle-cloggers from time to time…angry people who are always looking for a way to assert their right to not care about anybody else but themselves. You have to remind yourself that most human beings are not like that.