Here’s a brand new Cindy & Biscuit strip for you. I’m doing these on a semi-regular basis here on Mindless Ones. Check them out here.
Also, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of the brand new 56 page Cindy & Biscuit no.3 from my shop at Milk The Cat. You can pick up my other comics while you’re there.
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| A post, yesterday |
This week’s issue which is calling some premium-grade nonsense to fly forth from the mouths of feminists is the topic of banning face coverings, specifically the niqab. It is something which appeals to politicians, satisfying both their desire for racist policy and managing to get a bonus bit of giving themselves further reason to mass arrest protesters as a shitty little cherry on top. As always, there are hordes of feminists who are perfectly happy to deal with this as it manages to sate their appetite for controlling other women.
I don’t think I need to go into why getting the state to dictate what women may and may not wear is hardly a feminist position, and is simply a manifestation of a white saviour complex. Go and look at what Muslim feminists are saying about this; this is not my argument to make.
Among certain strains of feminism, we see a lot of attempts at controlling what other women do, wear and exist as.
We see it in Nadine Dorries, who calls herself a feminist while simultaneously craning her neck for the best viewing angle of our uteruses. She literally wants to control our reproductive freedom, and believes this stance to be a feminist stance.
We see it in the TERfs, the bigoted feminists who bully and harass trans women for existing, who spread lies and misinformation, who exclude and who try to deny access to treatment. They call themselves feminists, yet they are trying to control women’s bodies, to set themselves up as gatekeepers to womanhood through establishing a firm grasp on what a woman must be like.
We see it in a lot of high-profile campaigns calling for bans on this or that manifestation of sex work. Behind all of this is a desire to control what work is acceptable for women to do. We see it in the entire prohibitionist angle towards sex workers.
Am I saying these people are not feminists? No.
They are feminists. They are simply feminists who will ultimately do more harm than good.
See here’s the thing. It’s a little bit Captain Obvious to suggest that patriarchy places controls on women’s bodies and women’s behaviour. We know that this is terrible and bad and we rightly kick up a fuss about it. And yet to many women, the control imposed by certain strains of feminism is just as bad as these manifestations of patriarchal dominance. It is no different, aside from the perpetrators. And this is why we see so many marginalised women turning away from feminism: feminism just appears as rebranded patriarchy, rebranded control and coercion.
The feminists who want to control other women will defend their stance by saying that the women they are attempting to control need rescuing somehow, that this control is salvation. You will note that they are never trying to save themselves, only others who are somehow letting the side down by letting themselves be oppressed.
And yet this defence is much the same as the patronisingly sexist attitudes we face from men. We don’t know what’s good for us. We need someone to sort it out for us, someone who knows best. We are literally incapable of knowing what it is we need.
We reject it from men, and we must also reject these impositions of control from women.
If we want to help marginalised women to be liberated, our task is not to lead or to legislate, but to listen. We need to ask what help is required, rather than barging in like a carceral Leeroy Jenkins and making everything worse. It is support, not control, that will lead to freedom.
if you’re a Conservative and you have a Labour MP, you can be forgiven for being predisposed to being dissatisfied with what they’re doing, and vice versa.
But Lib Dem MPs appear to be able to reach across that divide. Even among non-Lib Dem voters, Lib Dem MPs scored +7. Amongst Lib Dem-voting respondents who had a Lib Dem MP, the score was an astonishing +61.
We need to be cautious here: once you cut the data in a normal-sized survey down to focus just on Lib Dem voters (of whom there are currently not many) and who have Lib Dem MPs (of whom there are even fewer), you’re soon down to very small numbers of respondents and large margins of error.
Still, while all MPs do better among those who will vote for that party than those who won’t, Lib Dems appear to be able to connect with non-supporters in a way that neither Labour nor Conservative MPs can.The poll also found that
the views of those who've contacted their local MP about that MP are almost entirely dependent on how satisfactory the contact was. This relationship holds true regardless of the party leanings of the constituent.
Nick Clegg has launched an inquiry into claims that aides have been involved in a "dirty tricks" campaign against his leadership rival Vince Cable.
The Liberal Democrat leader is investigating an allegation that members of the media have been briefed with erroneous information damaging Cable's position in the party.
The move followed an angry complaint from an MP during a meeting of the parliamentary party at last week's Lib Dem conference in Glasgow. The dispute centres on an economic debate held during an away day for Lib Dem MPs last month.
A number of reports, including one by the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson, alleged that Cable lost heavily when he proposed at the event that the government should borrow more, at current very low interest rates, to fund more capital spending. One source, reportedly close to Clegg, told the Sun: "The good doctor has been well and truly put back in his box."I blogged about this "back in his box" comment at the time. What I heard in return amounted to "Well, Matthew Oakeshott started it", which was not particularly encouraging.
Our senior sources need to spend their time making sure that we respond quickly enough to major stories like the Go home poster vans or David Miranda’s detention. Two days in each case to get a Liberal Democrat approach out there was about 47 hours too long. That phrase “on message, in volume, over time” applies to them too.
You aren’t doing anything to create a stronger economy in a fairer society enabling everyone to get on in life while you’re giving a completely inaccurate account of a meeting to a journalist.I'll never be as on message as her, but Caron is right to identify a problem in basic competence about the leader's press operation.
President Obama is considering appointing, among others, Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal reserve. Predictably, opponents and proponents both take her gender into consideration: she’d be the first female head of the central bank.
Yellen’s supporters think having a woman as chair would amount to a breakthrough for gender equality, but opponents have worried about “the Female Dollar.” Have we entered, asks the New York Sun, “the era of the gender-backed dollar? The Wall Street Journal quotes this language in its editorial denouncing the fact that Yellen’s “cause has been taken up by the liberal diversity police as a gender issue ”
My book Face Value looks at the way race talk informs money talk, but I could just have easily looked at how gendered language filters into money debates.
In American history gold and silver are usually referred to as “hard” money, paper as “soft” money. Need I say more? Hard money is held to have good character, and to be the devoted companion of the higher races, hard money is on board the warships of imperialism, while its subjects, or victims, use flimsy paper.
The Civil War was financed by printing legal tender paper money, the famous greenbacks. Following the war, Americans split over what to do with these paper dollars. These arguments were never simply about money; they always involved questions about social stability and the meaning of difference
Thomas Nast in particular loved to characterize paper money as “the rag baby,” a grotesque, floppy doll masquerading as a real child. The child had parents, and in the pages of Harper’s Weekly Nast usually inverted their gender roles, to demonstrate that paper money emasculated its supporters.
Here we see Benjamin Butler, a radical republican and political champion of paper money, as a woman with a “rag baby,” paper money.
Below presidential candidate Samuel Tilden is instructed to nurse his rag baby by his wife. Uncle Sam looks on sadly. Paper money, made of old rags, could no more be real money than a rag doll could be a live baby
In this cartoon Henry Carey, Lincoln’s financial advisor and the man most responsible for Civil War greenbacks, lies prostrate surrounded by “her” rag babies.
Nast regarded paper money as an inversion of natural order, confusing meanings.
There’s a long history of associating money with women. Though Hermes/Mercury was the god of commerce, Fortuna was female and Roman coins were minted in the temple of Juno Moneta, from whom we get the word “money.”
Fortuna is capricious and unreliable, in Carmina Burana (you’ve heard it in a bunch of movies) she waxes and wanes like the moon and “strikes strong men down.”
Credit, fortune’s sidekick, was itself was often viewed as female. In the U.S. Jacksonians, who hated and detested paper money, constantly referred to the Second Bank of the US as the “Mother Bank,” a grotesque, swollen figure that must be made to vomit forth coins, in a parody of birth.
Here Jackson, shirtless on the right, boxes against bank director Nicholas Biddle. The woman on the right is the Bank
Here Jackson watches through the window as his supporters make the bank sick, so it vomits up its gold coins
Heavy, loving luxury, the “mother” bank promoted weak dependence rather than manly virtue.
This cartoon shows the bank, a woman, taking refuge in the barrel of hard cider offered by William Henry Harrison
These are highly sexualized images–the half naked boxers; the man with his legs spread behind the “bank’s” head; the voyeuristic spectators violating the bank in its bedroom; the bank in a clinging dress about to be…approached by Jackson and Van Buren as dogs. Clearly there was much more than money to the money debate.
Money is always bound up with reproduction: coins and bills are both themselves reproductions, but in circulation they reproduce the labor and wealth of the person who holds them. But money, invested, can grow. Critics of banking often talked about how a bank “breeds” money, creating illegitimate inflated offspring that then circulate promiscuously. John Adams denounced the “swindlign and barren gains” that banks produced. There are any number of accounts of how paper money puts people, especially women, above their station: paper money is also called “loose” money. An anonynomous pamphlet of 1721 complained that thanks to paper money
[T]he inferior sort will be clad in as costly Attire as the Rich and Honourable … ordinary Tradesmen’s Wives … dressed in Silks and Sattens . . . Inferiour Apprentices and Servants, having just obtained their Freedom shall be dressed like Lords of the Mannours; & in publick Congresses were it not for the different Seats they sit in one would scarce know Joan from my Lady by Daylight.
Paper money seemed to initiate not just high prices, but social inflation, the wrong sort of people in charge
In those days strange sights could be witnessed in the streets of Columbia [South Carolina] at any time,” recalled ex-Confederate James Morgan of Reconstruction, and the greenback economy. More than once he remembered seeing “a handsome landau drawn by a spanking pair of high-stepping Kentucky horses and containing four negro wenches arrayed in low-neck and short-sleeved dresses, their black bosoms and arms covered with real jewels in the middle of the day, draw up in front of a barroom on Main Street where the wives and daughters of the old and impoverished aristocracy did their shopping.
The election of Barack Obama initiated a frenzied speculation in gold as and new calls for a return to the gold standard. No less a blowhard than Donald Trump insisted, in 2011, that he would now take “rent on one of his New York office buildings in gold bullion instead of dollars, because of his concerns about President Obama’s reckless financial policies.”
“It’s a sad day when a large property owner starts accepting gold instead of the dollar,” Trump said in a statement, reported The Wall Street Journal at the time. “The economy is bad, and Obama’s not protecting the dollar at all.…If I do this, other people are going to start doing it, and maybe we’ll see some changes.”
Gold has fallen in price since then, and the much predicted inflation hasn’t appeared, and Trump is still taking paper money. But what about Janet Yellen?
According to the LA times
In what has been a highly public campaign for Fed chairman, critics have portrayed Yellen as being softer on controlling inflation than her chief rival for the nomination, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers.
That has added to an overall perception that Yellen — a soft-spoken, diminutive woman — may be too soft in general to lead the world’s most influential central bank, a criticism that some say reflects a gender bias.
Gee, ya think? they managed to get the word “soft” in there three times. Google “Janet Yellen” and “soft” and you’ll find a lot of results, mostly articles worrying about whether or not she’ll be “soft on inflation.” Soft, and yielding.
If I had a lot of surplus cash, which I don’t, I’d think about buying gold. If Yellen is appointed, I’d expect the same kind of concern about the instability of the “soft” “female,” “gender-backed” dollar that led to the gold boom after Obama’s election.
Government and industry have betrayed the Internet, and us.
By subverting the Internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical Internet stewards.
This is not the Internet the world needs, or the Internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can -- and should -- do.
One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don't cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.
We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the Internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.
Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the Internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.
We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems -- these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.
Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the Internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.
Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's Internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.
Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the Internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don't only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.
Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.
Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We've had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.
To the engineers, I say this: we built the Internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.
This essay previously appeared in the Guardian.
EDITED TO ADD: Slashdot thread. An opposing view to my call to action. And I agree with this, even though the author presents this as an opposing view to mine.
This is really interesting research: "Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans." Basically, you can tamper with a logic gate to be either stuck-on or stuck-off by changing the doping of one transistor. This sort of sabotage is undetectable by functional testing or optical inspection. And it can be done at mask generation -- very late in the design process -- since it does not require adding circuits, changing the circuit layout, or anything else. All this makes it really hard to detect.
The paper talks about several uses for this type of sabotage, but the most interesting -- and devastating -- is to modify a chip's random number generator. This technique could, for example, reduce the amount of entropy in Intel's hardware random number generator from 128 bits to 32 bits. This could be done without triggering any of the built-in self-tests, without disabling any of the built-in self-tests, and without failing any randomness tests.
I have no idea if the NSA convinced Intel to do this with the hardware random number generator it embedded into its CPU chips, but I do know that it could. And I was always leery of Intel strongly pushing for applications to use the output of its hardware RNG directly and not putting it through some strong software PRNG like Fortuna. And now Theodore Ts'o writes this about Linux: "I am so glad I resisted pressure from Intel engineers to let /dev/random rely only on the RDRAND instruction."
Yes, this is a conspiracy theory. But I'm not willing to discount such things anymore. That's the worst thing about the NSA's actions. We have no idea whom we can trust.
This article points out that as people are logging into Wi-Fi networks from their Android phones, and backing up those passwords along with everything else into Google's cloud, that Google is amassing an enormous database of the world's Wi-Fi passwords. And while it's not every Wi-Fi password in the world, it's almost certainly a large percentage of them.
Leaving aside Google's intentions regarding this database, it is certainly something that the US government could force Google to turn over with a National Security Letter.
Something else to think about.
Update (9/24): This parody post was a little like a belch: I felt it build up in me as I read about the topic, I let it out, it was easy and amusing, I don’t feel any profound guilt over it—but on the other hand, not one of the crowning achievements of my career. As several commenters correctly pointed out, it may be true that, mostly because of the name and other superficialities, and because of ill-founded speculations about “the death of locality and unitarity,” the amplituhedron work is currently inspiring a flood of cringe-inducing misstatements on the web. But, even if true, still the much more interesting questions are what’s actually going on, and whether or not there are nontrivial connections to computational complexity.
Here I have good news: if nothing else, my “belch” of a post at least attracted some knowledgeable commenters to contribute excellent questions and insights, which have increased my own understanding of the subject from ε2 to ε. See especially this superb comment by David Speyer—which, among other things, pointed me to a phenomenal quasi-textbook on this subject by Elvang and Huang. My most immediate thoughts:
Many readers of this blog probably already saw Natalie Wolchover’s Quanta article “A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics,” which discusses the “amplituhedron”: a mathematical structure that IAS physicist Nima Arkami-Hamed and his collaborators have recently been investigating. (See also here for Slashdot commentary, here for Lubos’s take, here for Peter Woit’s, here for a Physics StackExchange thread, here for Q&A with Pacific Standard, and here for an earlier but closely-related 154-page paper.)
At first glance, the amplituhedron appears to be a way to calculate scattering amplitudes, in the planar limit of a certain mathematically-interesting (but, so far, physically-unrealistic) supersymmetric quantum field theory, much more efficiently than by summing thousands of Feynman diagrams. In which case, you might say: “wow, this sounds like a genuinely-important advance for certain parts of mathematical physics! I’d love to understand it better. But, given the restricted class of theories it currently applies to, it does seem a bit premature to declare this to be a ‘jewel’ that unlocks all of physics, or a death-knell for spacetime, locality, and unitarity, etc. etc.”
Yet you’d be wrong: it isn’t premature at all. If anything, the popular articles have understated the revolutionary importance of the amplituhedron. And the reason I can tell you that with such certainty is that, for several years, my colleagues and I have been investigating a mathematical structure that contains the amplituhedron, yet is even richer and more remarkable. I call this structure the “unitarihedron.”
The unitarihedron encompasses, within a single abstract “jewel,” all the computations that can ever be feasibly performed by means of unitary transformations, the central operation in quantum mechanics (hence the name). Mathematically, the unitarihedron is an infinite discrete space: more precisely, it’s an infinite collection of infinite sets, which collection can be organized (as can every set that it contains!) in a recursive, fractal structure. Remarkably, each and every specific problem that quantum computers can solve—such as factoring large integers, discrete logarithms, and more—occurs as just a single element, or “facet” if you will, of this vast infinite jewel. By studying these facets, my colleagues and I have slowly pieced together a tentative picture of the elusive unitarihedron itself.
One of our greatest discoveries has been that the unitarihedron exhibits an astonishing degree of uniqueness. At first glance, different ways of building quantum computers—such as gate-based QC, adiabatic QC, topological QC, and measurement-based QC—might seem totally disconnected from each other. But today we know that all of those ways, and many others, are merely different “projections” of the same mysterious unitarihedron.
In fact, the longer I’ve spent studying the unitarihedron, the more awestruck I’ve been by its mathematical elegance and power. In some way that’s not yet fully understood, the unitarihedron “knows” so much that it’s even given us new insights about classical computing. For example, in 1991 Beigel, Reingold, and Spielman gave a 20-page proof of a certain property of unbounded-error probabilistic polynomial-time. Yet, by recasting things in terms of the unitarihedron, I was able to give a direct, half-page proof of the same theorem. If you have any experience with mathematics, then you’ll know that that sort of thing never happens: if it does, it’s a sure sign that cosmic or even divine forces are at work.
But I haven’t even told you the most spectacular part of the story yet. While, to my knowledge, this hasn’t yet been rigorously proved, many lines of evidence support the hypothesis that the unitarihedron must encompass the amplituhedron as a special case. If so, then the amplituhedron could be seen as just a single sparkle on an infinitely greater jewel.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that the unitarihedron is what used to be known as the complexity class BQP (Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial-Time). However, just like the Chinese gooseberry was successfully rebranded in the 1950s as the kiwifruit, and the Patagonian toothfish as the Chilean sea bass, so with this post, I’m hereby rebranding BQP as the unitarihedron. For I’ve realized that, when it comes to bowling over laypeople, inscrutable complexity class acronyms are death—but the suffix “-hedron” is golden.
So, journalists and funders: if you’re interested in the unitarihedron, awesome! But be sure to also ask about my other research on the bosonsamplinghedron and the quantum-money-hedron. (Though, in recent months, my research has focused even more on the diaperhedron: a multidimensional, topologically-nontrivial manifold rich enough to encompass all wastes that an 8-month-old human could possibly emit. Well, at least to first-order approximation.)
I believe that it’s important for the Liberal Democrats and its members that more people get more involved more widely in the party. I’ve been trickling out posts about background and procedure, but it’s time to flip around the Kolb learning cycle from Abstract to Active, and encourage you to do something. Mostly, I’ve been talking here about local parties because it’s the most obvious and geographically proximate way for people to get involved.
For this post I’m going to talk about party interest groups, because it’s Conference now (it wasn’t when I started this post a week ago, but I’ve been busy) and most party interest groups have their AGMs at Autumn Conference. The Lib Dems has a wide, eclectic, federal structure. There are many ways to get involved, if you know about them. Unfortunately, few people do know about them and it’s not easy to find out. New members get details about Specified Associated Organisations in their member packs now, which is a vast improvement; there’s a horrible hard to navigate list of party bodies on the party website. But if you’re at Conference, go look around the Exhibitions to find party bodies which are at least organised and funded enough for a stall.
If there’s an area of Lib Dem policy you’re interested in, stand for election to the executive committee that runs the interest group – pretty much all of them are elected democratically at each autumn conference, either at the AGM or by postal ballot shortly afterwards. If you can’t get elected, ask the executive to co-opt you to any vacant spaces. Get involved and become part of a team – rope in a friend to stand with you, for moral support. If you’re not sure what to do, I’d make sure the following are happening:
In my experience, an executive list on the party list server or another mailing list provider is very helpful for the last point.
This is the bare minimum that an organisation needs to do to self-sustain. It’s not enough to make it an effective and useful organisation, but it’s a way of getting more people more involved and engaged to achieve that. People can’t do everything themselves, and organisations need to encourage strong teams of diverse talents. Once those requirements are being addressed – not necessarily perfectly, but things are moving in the right direction, think about:
Party bodies don’t exist just to sell the party to outsiders – that’s why these external goals are secondary. But they should exist to make the Lib Dems do the right thing (in their opinion) and to engage the public with these issues. Organisations need to be inward-facing to sustain themselves and grow, but they also need to look outward for fresh ideas, and to make sure we’re either representing or persuading the public in liberal directions.
This guide is nearly short enough for a Lib Dem Voice article (and following LDV is not a bad way to find out about some of the things happening in the party, particularly in its member-only forum). I hope it sets out how you can get involved in an SAO and what you can do. Getting more involved in the party can be frustrating at times, and can involve a lot of work if you haven’t got a strong team pulling together – or if you’re trying to bite off more than you can chew. But it can also be incredibly rewarding, from the small victories to the big ones. It can teach you skills, and lessons, and talents you can put to use in the rest of your life. It’s worth it for you, and it’s worth it for the cause of Liberal Democracy.
The Art Institute of Chicago is currently hosting a special exhibit on Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, featuring impressionist paintings alongside extant garments from the period.
Impressionist work and 19thc fashion being two of my favorite things, I went to visit the exhibit while I was in town for DjangoCon.
I’d been told the Art Institute has “substantial holdings of impressionist and related art,” and I can’t say I was disappointed. There was much geeking to be had. The dresses were great, too. I may have, on occasion, crouched down next to certain dresses to get a look at how their hems were done, or put my nose a little too close to their glass cases to be dignified.
I do, however, have a bone to pick with whoever did the descriptive placards that accompanied the artwork.
Édouard Manet’s Woman Reading, 1879/80
Manet’s Woman Reading is one of the first paintings you see when you enter the exhibit. It depicts a woman reading a newspaper at a café.
They wouldn’t let me photograph the accompanying placard, so I copied the last sentence down by hand. It read:
These illegible calligraphic squiggles suggest that the woman is focused less on the newspaper’s printed words than on the fashion illustrations and advertisements.
…I’m not art historian, but I’m pretty sure the illegible calligraphic squiggles suggest that this is an impressionist painting.
Come on, placard-writer. The woman may be doing the 19thc equivalent of taking her laptop to a coffee shop, but even my apparently sub-literate ladybrain knows that impressionists weren’t concerned with capturing their subjects in photo-realistic detail. Manet most likely rendered the newspaper in ‘squiggles’ because that’s all he needed to give the impression of a newspaper.
Also, not for nothing, but those squiggles look way more like a rendering of a figure than of text to me. So maybe they’re ‘squiggles’ because she’s too busy reading up on the first class of female students at Oxford University to pay much attention to the advertisements.
A stronger economy, a fairer society, a million jobs… It’s a good tune, but it sounds a lot like what everyone else is playing. We need that competent, managerial message, but we need passion, too. To make our signature tune sing it needs something more – and freedom is a tune only we can play.
It’s great to see my favourite bit of the Preamble in here. It’s a start. But it’s politically streetwise to pump up freedom higher in the mix. Freedom says we’ve got principles – it inspires our activists and attracts those converts that no-one else can reach.
And it’s streetwise because if we don’t stand up for freedom in the campaign, it will be much harder to make it cast-iron in Coalition, or to make voters understand why we’ll give up other priorities for it.
Make no mistake – it will be much harder next time. When Labour were the most authoritarian government in modern British history, the Tories discovered a taste for freedom. Back in power, they’ve rediscovered how much they love to boss people about. And still, the Labour bully-boys’ first reaction on every liberty is to attack the Coalition from the far right.
Yet if you combine freedom and economic responsibility, austerity can be a friend to some freedoms. Because appalling illiberal authoritarian schemes aren’t just appalling illiberal authoritarian schemes – they’re always expensive appalling illiberal authoritarian schemes. So make the Lib Dems the party of economic responsibility by attacking the other two for wasting a ton of money on their bullying pet projects when there’s so little money to spare.
ID cards waste a ton of money, so don’t.
Snoopers’ Charters waste a ton of money, so don’t.
“Go Home” vans, and porn filters, and every massive intrusive database waste a ton of money, so don’t.
Of course there are positive Liberal commitments I’d like to see in the Manifesto too.
I want to say a personal thank you to every moral Liberal Democrat at Westminster – on our twentieth anniversary next year, Richard and I will be getting married. Thanks to you voting for equal marriage. But the Manifesto should have more than a picture celebrating the partially equal marriage we have now – a commitment to fully equal marriage, so that trans people can be as happy as we are.
I want to see in this Manifesto a Greater Repeal Bill, to expand on the Freedom Act the Tories watered down.
I want to see us repealing all the victimless crimes that waste people’s lives and waste court money and waste police time.
But most of all I want to see a ringing rallying call.
Your mission, David, should you decide to accept it, is to set out a clear, concise vision that combines our big slogan message, our priorities for government and our Liberal principles.
It sounds like mission impossible, but it can be done. And as readers of my blog will know, here’s one I prepared earlier.Sing Along
The Liberal Democrats stand for freedom for every individual – freedom from poverty, ignorance and conformity.
To make that freedom real needs both fairness and economic responsibility: an economy that works, that encourages enterprise, and where everyone pays their fair share.
So freedom from poverty requires responsible spending, not debt, built on fairer taxes where lower earners pay less tax and the wealthiest pay more, and building green jobs for the future.
Freedom from ignorance needs better education and training, so people have the opportunity to realise their potential.
And freedom from conformity, supported by freedom from poverty and ignorance, means everyone should have the liberty to live their lives as they choose – without harming others; with equality before the law; with a better say, because no government always knows best.
That’s why Liberal Democrats are working for a greener, stronger economy in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life.
Each year at this time, the Grady McPhailey Foundation releases a list of the annual recipients of the McPhailey Foundation Scholarship Grant, popularly known as the ‘Grady Train’.
Mr. McPhailey, heir to the McPhailey Ear Shortener fortune, spent his 72 years on Earth attempting to be a poet. Although he never completed any works of more than two lines in length, his dedication to wearing ratty black turtle-neck sweaters, becoming drunk and unruly at parties, being dangerously underweight, and gazing moodily out the window of his Bossier City, LA loft while chain-smoking imported cigarettes was unrivaled by any poet of his, or any other, generation. Late in life, he realized the great truth of his existence: you are an artist if you say you are an artist. Placing the majority of his great wealth in a perpetual trust, he stipulated that upon his death, it should be used to give cash rewards to Americans and Canadians who show great promise in pretending to be artists, behaving like artists, and generally living an artistic lifestyle without ever actually producing any art. In the last 14 years, the McPhailey Foundation has distributed over $7 million to deserving poseurs, wannabes and hangers-on throughout North America. It has been called “the lazy man’s Pulitzer”; the New York Times recently noted that “what the MacArthur ‘genius grant’ is to people who accomplish things, the McPhailey Foundation Scholarship Grant is to people who think about accomplishing things”.
This year, in the spirit of the late Mr. McPhailey’s favorite motivational saying, “You can do it! Or, at least, you can tell people you do!”, we are pleased to announce the following grant recipients.
- To Roger Wilco, a self-described “prose sonnetier“: $24,000 for the purchase of a number of partially filled-in notebooks to scatter around his garret to make it appear that he has been writing.
- To Jean Valdenim of Detroit, MI, who wishes to be thought of as an experimental composer, $50,000 to purchase field recording equipment to make a document of ambient sounds to sample into a song cycle he does not intend to complete.
- To Betty Lou Handbag, an “antikinetic actualist” because that sounds more important than “sculptor”, $10,000 to fund her travels to art museums around the world so as to study the works of other sculptors who have actually engaged in the creation of sculpture.
- To Mark Laandgraab, an investment banker, $75,000 to invest in high-yield tech futures so he can afford to have other people paint paintings and then he can sign his name to them, “you know, like that one guy”.
- To Ned Cheezit, who has studied neither physics nor art, $20,000 to determine if he can think about coming up with some sort of unified field thing that totally explains both art and science forever.
- To Sidney Brokeback, photonovelist, $30,000 so he can transcribe this really amazing dream he once had to an actual novelist and see if the guy can “do anything with it”.
- To Karl Spurgbeer, a student of filmistry, $25,000 to take a year off and finally see a bunch of the movies that he has very strong opinions about, and then publicly denounce them in an even more vociferous way than he has done previously.
- To Charity Balles, head of the Cultural Studies Department of the Charity Balles College of Western Apartment #3F, $40,000 to have some letterhead and business cards made up, with raised gold leaf lettering and everything.
- To Alison Ra, jazz motionographer, $10,000 to go to jazz clubs every weekend for the next 6 months and listen to real cool sounds and order drinks while telling people seated near her how, if someone were to choreograph them for an avant-garde dance troupe, that would be so awesome.
- To James Ganngg of Williamsburg, $50,000 to be seen at all the best parties and hire a couple of people to talk about how breathtaking his work is so that everyone will admire him and invite him to even more parties because they just assume that he’s doing something vital and new, even if they aren’t exactly sure what it is.
“The reason I’m a Liberal Democrat, is because I believe Liberal Democrats are a voice for the voiceless - and I know it because I’ve been there.
“When I was young, successive Conservative governments vilified single parent families to the point that mothers including my own were given enough money to feed their children but not themselves.
“When I was growing up and realising that I wasn’t like other boys, Labour legalised Civil Partnership but still didn’t believe that I should be able to marry – actually, properly, marry – the person I love…
“The only people who come to bat, every single time, for people like that, people like me, people who are marginalised are the Liberal Democrats…
“If we don’t do it, nobody else will do it for us. That’s why I’m a Liberal Democrat, and that’s why I’d like to be an MP, because people deserve a voice and people need to have someone on their side.”
“We believe the political economy should empower all citizens with the capability to secure for themselves the freedom and means to live fulfilling lives free from poverty, ignorance and conformity – and that where it falls short, we should promote social justice and tackle barriers of inequality in wealth, voice and power.”
“Believing in an individual’s right to self-determination and control over their own lives, as well as how governed.”
“The Liberal Democrats stand for increasing people’s freedom to enjoy their own potential, helping everybody to get on in life. We believe in meaningful representative democracy to balance people’s conflicting priorities, and in ensuring protection for the individual from the State and other powerful organisations.Dave’s title for his piece, “This Is What the Lib Dems is About”, always puts this fab track into my head. ‘Moo moo! Moo moo! S-L-F!’ as Dave would no doubt sing. “All aboard, all aboard, woah-oh!”
“We believe that nobody should be constrained by lack of opportunity, particularly by the circumstances of their birth. We believe that Government should set the rules by which society operates, so people are rewarded for hard work and innovation, but not for exploitation or pollution. We believe that people should be respected as individuals regardless of their gender, colour, wealth, sexuality, or any other quality – not as homogeneous groups defined by those qualities.
“We believe in accountable, democratic institutions giving people more of a say in their immediate lives and local communities, as well as more of a say in the issues too big for one person, or one country. We believe in solutions which get to the root of the problem rather than just addressing the symptoms.”
“I believe the party stands for: ‘fairness, equality and community’… For Fairness, I am extremely thrilled at the decisions taken like raising the tax threshold and a commitment to green issues… For Equality – Everybody is given a fair start and supported in the necessary way for them to be able to participate in society. For example, schools in poorer areas are given extra support and guidance to help the pupils have a fair start in life, and the equal marriage bill… For Community – demonstrated at local levels by our superb councillors who are in tune with the needs of their local communities; and party campaigners.”
“We believe in a society that works to maximise the happiness and potential of every individual, one that works to give everyone the opportunity to live their life as they want, providing they do not harm others. We seek to create an open, liberal and democratic world, where power is spread around, people have a real say in decisions that affect them and fair and impartial justice is available to all. A liberal society should protect the environment, promote education, create opportunity, reward enterprise and encourage innovation. Everyone should be free to participate in society and we seek to both tear down the barriers that restrict them and help people to overcome circumstances that limit them. In a liberal society everyone should be free to live their lives, free of restraint by poverty, ignorance or conformity.”
“Liberal Democrats exist to promote the freedom of the individual within a society in which all can achieve their potential.
“Liberal Democrats have a fundamental belief in the equality of all regardless of income, wealth, status, gender or gender identity, disability, personal capacity or sexual preferences – and that this should be enshrined and supported in law.
“Liberal Democrats believe the role of the State is to facilitate the ability of individuals to reach and exceed their potential and to provide an underpinning of support for those who fail to do so. They believe that spending to meet these aims is of benefit to all and that the burden of taxation should be progressive but not punitive.
“Liberal Democrats are pragmatic, concerned with outcomes not methodology and resisting traditional dogmas of left and right in favour of evidence-based policy which demonstrably support our aims.
“Liberal Democrats support these aims in the UK, in Europe and internationally.”
“It’s about freedom. That one word is the call for all Liberal Democrats. Liberal Democrats believe that maximising personal freedom is fundamental to a liberal society. We believe that freedom means the opportunity to make the most of our lives, while recognising that our actions must not prevent others from sharing those opportunities and that we may need to take active steps to extend freedom to all.”
“The freedom of the individual is, however, limited or non-existent if he or she is prevented by economic deprivation, lack of education, disadvantage or discrimination from exercising choices about how to live or from participating in the democratic process… Institutions are required which keep markets free and prevent monopoly. Other mechanisms are needed to ensure that individuals have access to the things which markets are unable to provide.”
“We reject the use of the state or the law to enforce beliefs… Liberal Democrats do not have a blueprint of how life should be lived, but we do have a set of principles with which to approach problems and decisions.”
“Our first political duty – particularly if we are ourselves in power – is to ensure that mechanisms to protect freedom are in good order, and power is as widely shared as possible.”
“My first political memories are of shouting at bullies… With all the division in society, a political party should be for everyone, not hating half the people all the time – or even hating other countries – and that with what I was experiencing personally, everyone should have the freedom to live their own life, too. And that naturally led me to the Liberal Democrats, who were not just appealingly internationalist but, to their core, the only party saying that society should be for everyone, and that every individual should be free…
“Liberalism means that if you start with every individual, you can’t put any person on the scrapheap or hate them for who they are. The founding principles of Liberalism over the centuries – of individual freedom, equality before the law and controlling arbitrary power – are living, breathing, vital ideas that I’d discovered for myself in the desire to choose my own life, my belief that everyone should be treated the same, even as a little boy knowing that you had to stand up to bullies… Part of not favouring any one ‘side’ is realising that anyone can be a bully, or can be bullied – or, in philosophical terms, any sort of power can threaten liberty, but any sort of power can protect it, too. Whether it’s the state, or big business or big unions, or just other people, any of them can boss you around and anyone can help stop you being bossed around. So you can’t do away with any of them – and you can’t say any of them are right all the time, or be in their pockets. Which means aiming to create The Perfect Society will always be a disaster, but working at making a better society means there’s always more real life to be listened to and more work to be done…
“That’s why for me saying what we stand for is more important than any single policy. It’s important because unless we keep sight of why we bother, there’s nothing to inspire us. And it’s important to remember that we’re for everyone, that everyone should be free to live their own lives, and so we’re here to bring everyone together, as far as we can, and to stop people being pushed around, as far as we can… We’re still the only party that says society should be for everyone, and that every individual should be free.”
“The Liberal Democrats stand for freedom for every individual – freedom from poverty, ignorance and conformity.
“To make that freedom real needs both fairness and economic responsibility: an economy that works, that encourages enterprise, and where everyone pays their fair share.
“So freedom from poverty requires responsible spending, not debt, built on fairer taxes where lower earners pay less tax and the wealthiest pay more, and building green jobs for the future.
“Freedom from ignorance needs better education and training, so people have the opportunity to realise their potential.
“And freedom from conformity, supported by freedom from poverty and ignorance, means everyone should have the liberty to live their lives as they choose – without harming others; with equality before the law; with a better say, because no government always knows best.
“That’s why Liberal Democrats are working for a greener, stronger economy in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life.”
‘So I want us to move out, and you’re nervous you won’t like the new place. But it’s OK! Putting Britain through a divorce they don’t want and stiffing them with the rent won’t change anything. We’ll still be able to shag them whenever we want and borrow all their stuff – just no strings! What do you mean, you’re not convinced? How could anyone resist my charms?’You know, he sounds just like a load of other men I’ve heard boasting after their divorce.
The music is so soft, so delicate, that only those with keen perceptive hearing, will be able to distinguish this melodious charm of music.
Take a look at this picture:
Cards used in the Asch conformity experiments (image credit: nyenyec)
The line on the left-hand card is the same length as one of the lines on the right hand card. But which one – A, B or C?
You’re probably thinking C. But what if seven other people had answered before you, and they had all said B. Would you be so sure of your response then?
That was the situation that faced the subjects of the Asch Conformity Experiments, started by psychologist Solomon Asch in 1951. The subjects were told that they were part of a group of eight volunteers taking part in a psychological experiment, but in reality the other seven people were working for Asch, and had been instructed to all give the same, incorrect answer.
The results were striking. Three quarters of the subjects gave the incorrect answer at least once, while only a quarter consistently answered correctly. By contrast, a control experiment showed that subjects gave the right answer more than 99% of the time when they were on their own, so it was definitely the deliberately wrong answers of the seven actors that were causing people to pick the wrong line.
When Asch interviewed the participants afterwards, he found that their reasons for giving the wrong answers were varied and complex. Some of them truly believed that the group must be right, despite the evidence of their own eyes. Some were well aware that the group was wrong, but went along with the majority in order to avoid being the odd one out. And a few became convinced that there must be some inadequacy in themselves that was preventing them from seeing the correct answer.
But perhaps the most striking result came when Asch changed the experimental set-up very slightly. Instead of all of the actors giving the wrong answer, instead all but one of them did so: the other was instructed to give the correct response. In these circumstances, the conformity rate dropped drastically, to about a quarter of the previous rate. It seems it only takes one dissenter to break the spell of conformity.
This of course, if the famous climax to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. The emperor and his courtiers have been persuaded by con men that the emperor is wearing a suit of the finest fabric, which cannot be seen by the stupid or incompetent. The emperor duly parades naked in public, showing off what he believes are his marvellous new clothes to the astonishment of the watching public, who all cheer his fine garments until a child says “But he isn’t wearing anything at all”. The cheers turn to jeers as the crowd all realise the emperor is naked, but he and his courtiers continue parading as best they can, determined to carry on the show.
The truth in Andersen’s parable was realised earlier by the great political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. In chapter 23 of The Prince, “How Flatterers Should Be Avoided”, Machiavelli recommends that
a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires, and of none others; but he ought to question them upon everything, and listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions.
Here, Machiavelli treads a careful path between unbridled dissent that would undermine the prince’s authority, and the dangers of a court in which the prince hears only what he wishes to hear and is blinded to the truth.
But what if someone wants to encourage conformity? They may be con men trying to sell invisible clothes, a time traveller caught impersonating a famous musician, or a politician wanting a country to support a war or acquiesce in mass surveillance. In these cases, relying on the psychology of conformism isn’t enough. After all, Solomon Asch found that a quarter of people will not succumb to the pressure to conform, and that is a dangerous level of individualism for these deceivers and authoritarians. They need to add an extra factor: a penalty for speaking out.
In Andersen’s tale, the con men claim that the cloth cannot be seen by anyone who is unfit for office or unpardonably stupid. Naturally, no one wants to be thought of in that way, so everyone pretends they can see the beautiful material. The Doctor insists that only those with keen, perceptive hearing can discern the music, but in this case he only really has to appeal to Nero’s vanity: the dangers of contradicting an impulsive dictator with the power of life and death would surely keep any subordinates quiet.
None of us in the democratic West is in much danger of being summarily executed for speaking our minds. However, there are still systems to cow dissent, and the more significant the groupthink in the ruling establishment, the more critical the political situation, the more powerful the suppressing influence that is brought to bear. People with ideas just a little outside the political mainstream are dismissed as nutters and obsessives, poorly dressed and socially undesirable. This isn’t just a way of rejecting their proposals, it’s a way of ensuring that the rest of the group gets the message: don’t take these ideas seriously, or you’ll be a social outcast too.
And when it comes to matter of war, espionage and national security (which principally means the security of the governing class, and only incidentally the security of the rest of us), well in those cases dissent becomes all the more intolerable. The British weapons inspector and scientist David Kelly endured intense pressure and public smearing when he dissented from the Government’s assessment of Iraq’s weapon stockpiles in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. Within a few days he killed himself in the woods near his home. Here was the man who spoke up to say the emperor had no clothes, and the emperor drove him to take his own life. If dissenting voices on both sides of the Atlantic had been valued instead of scorned, a disastrous war might have been avoided.
More recently, the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who each punctured myths of the US security establishment, one now imprisoned, the other an exile, show the lengths to which the deep core of the state will go to suppress dissenting voices. But they might also show the value of such dissent. The current disquiet among US telecoms and hosting companies as they suddenly find potential customers wondering about their reliability, and the increasing questioning of the surveillance state, is starting to feel like a spell has been broken, and that the people are looking at the emperor with new eyes.
It’s too soon to say how these recent developments will play out. What we can say for sure, though, is that there is great wisdom in allowing ourselves to be questioned, and great danger to any society in shunning or persecuting those who question the received wisdom. The open society may seem unruly and difficult to manage, bit it will always win out over a society that refuses to question itself.
MY N.F.L. PICKS FOR THE 2013-2014 SEASON (IN ASCENDING ORDER OF FINISH)
32. Cleveland Browns. Frankly, this is just confusing. Is it the color brown? If so, it’s too conceptual to win. Is it a person named Brown? If so, it all depends on if he’s closer to Jim than to Charlie. Is it some kind of filthy industrial version of the blues? Frankly, until this is sorted out, I can’t even begin to properly rank these guys.
31. Buffalo Bills. “Bills” seems to be a pun of some sort, and puns don’t fly in the heat of battle unless you’re Spider-Man. And let me tell you something: Spider-Man doesn’t lose 4 Super Bowls in a row.
30. Arizona Cardinals. ‘Cardinals’, for Christ’s sake? Why not ‘Robins’? How about ‘Finches’? What, was ‘Nuthatches’ taken?
29. Miami Dolphins. Dolphins are very intelligent sea creatures, and if the contest were taking place in the ocean rather than in a large stadium with grass or AstroTurf surfaces, I would like their chances more. As it stands, I predict rapid asphyxiation.
28. St. Louis Rams. Okay, fine, they’re big, they’re strong, they’re tough. You know what else they are? Easily slaughtered. It’s in the Bible, people.
27. Seattle Seahawks. I don’t even know what a seahawk is. They could have just made it up, for all I know. Assuming it’s something like a regular hawk, I guess it might be pretty tough, but I’m ranking it low because it might be an invention, like ‘landshark’.
26. Baltimore Ravens. I like ravens, myself; so much classier than, say, crows. But when you get right down to it, they’re really just birds, and not even birds of prey. As Baltimore native E. “Al” Poe illustrated, ravens are really more irritating than they are dangerous.
25. Indianapolis Colts. A colt is a baby horse. They’re cute and all, but they really don’t have the skull-splitting, head-kicking power of, say, a bronco. I think pretty much anything that’s not a bird could kill a colt without too much difficulty.
24. Atlanta Falcons. We’re moving up a bit in the bird hierarchy to a razor-taloned, vicious little fuck who likes to kill things, and at the very least, is a hunter of sorts. Alas, they’re easily fooled by a tiny cloth hood, and they’re more used to hunting rats and squirrels than lions.
23. San Diego Chargers. Ranked here only if you interpret “charger” as “fast horse”. Rate these guys three spots higher if you interpret “charger” as “person or device capable of channeling electricity into something”, and three spots lower if you interpret “charger” as “person with a credit card”.
22. Philadelphia Eagles. Okay, so, eagles are majestic, and noble, and awe-inspiring, and they have talons and sharp beaks, and if they really had to, they could probably take out a small horse. But they’re still just birds, man. Also? Endangered.
21. Denver Broncos. Quite an improvement on the Colts, but still, horses have a long history of being broken by actual humans, especially if those humans are equipped with tiny whips or sugar cubes.
20. San Francisco ’49ers. Upside: possibly armed. Downside: long-handle underwear, crazy frontier gibberish, old-man beard, often played by ineffectual, non-threatening Gabby Hayes types.
19. New England Patriots. Although patriotism has gotten a boost lately in the social arena, and is now enforced by law by way of the USA-PATRIOT Acts, this could still easily be interpreted as some mulletted yahoo on a street corner waving a homemade cardboard sign that says “U.S.A. NUBMER #1“.
18. Green Bay Packers. I’m guessing “meat” or “furniture” or “crate” rather than “suitcase” or “fudge”. Okay, so, burly Wisconsin teamsters. All well and good, but a bit bland. No match for a glamorous steelworker, I’m afraid.
17. Houston Texans. Sure, Texans have a reputation as tough ol’ hombres, but this would inspire a lot more confidence with a specific reference, like the Texas Rangers, than with the generic “Texans”, which could mean a bad-ass motherfucker like George Foreman, or a creampuff like Renée Zellweger. I need more details before I can rank them higher.
16. Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Ranked unusually low because ‘buccaneer’ — more than ‘raider’, ‘corsair’, ‘privateer’, ‘plunderer’, ‘dacoit’, ‘brigand’, or even ‘rapparee’ — is the wimpiest possible way to say ‘pirate’.
15. Oakland Raiders. Again, this is a little vague to base a prediction on. What is a raider, exactly? Going just by the logo, it’s some schmuck in a leather helmet. Sure, he’s got a knife, but he’s also got an eyepatch, and you know what that means? No depth perception. Doesn’t bode well for his chances.
14. Washington Redskins. Points added for the fearsome Indian warrior imagery. Many, many more points deducted for the racist name.
13. Jacksonville Jaguars. The jaguar is an awesome animal — a big, lightning-quick cat with fierce fangs and deadly claws. Not quite enough to take out a Bengal tiger, but pretty fearsome provided you don’t pronounce it “jag-you-were” like a sissy Englishman.
12. Pittsburgh Steelers. Now, steelworkers seem pretty tough. They’re probably less likely to be armed than Texans or patriots, but they’re used to hard work, they’re big and muscular, and they might have access to molten lead.
11. Carolina Panthers. I would rate the panther above the lion and just below the tiger if it weren’t for the fact that panthers are apparently prey to certain unfortunate genetic tendencies. I can’t in good conscience rate these guys over the Bengals when there’s a chance they’re the Dalmatian of the big cat world and they’ll have a stroke in the heat of battle.
10. Detroit Lions. Depending on the type and temperament of the lion, this team could do some real damage.
9. Kansas City Chiefs. I’d love to rank the noble Native American higher up, but I can’t, for two reasons: the chief was often a political timeserver, and not the most able warrior of the tribe; and also, because as I learned from the picture shows, the Cowboys always beat the Indians.
8. Cincinnati Bengals. I’m assuming from the helmets that what we’re talking about is the tiger, not the citizen of the Bengal region of India. If, in fact, the reference is to a mild-mannered guy named Nilawar who works in a birdseed factory, drop the ranking down eight slots. But we all know how dangerous a tiger is, especially when it’s really hungry. Like, say, if it’s never eaten a full meal in 45 seasons.
7. Minnesota Vikings. Vikings, as we all know, were really good at raping, pillaging, looting, killing, and destroying. I think they’re going to be severely limited here because of the invention of gunpowder, but they could still make some real noise, particularly if they’re playing near a large body of water.
6. Dallas Cowboys. I’m putting these dudes near the top of the ‘humanoid mascot’ pole if for no other reason than that you know for a fact that cowboys are always strapped.
5. Chicago Bears. Now, say what you will, but a bear is nothing to fuck with. They’re huge. They’re bad-tempered. They have powerful claws, massive jaws, gigantic rending teeth, and enormous, muscular bodies. They can climb trees. They can move very quickly. And even if you shoot them, they ain’t necessarily going down. They can take out some punk cowboy.
4. New York Giants. This is very much dependent on how giant, exactly, these giants are. If they are merely Andre the Giant sized, just give them a couple of kegs of beer and let nature take its course. If they are, say, the-giant-in-Jack-and-the-Beanstalk giant, that’s much better, but they’re still not going to stand much of a chance against a screaming, missile-spewing fighter jet. But if they’re, say, Godzilla giant, it might be a different story. I’m erring on the side of caution and saying that they’re about frost giant size (14d8+70 HP, AC 21, 40′ ground movement), which can’t stop a jet, but can easily take out a tiger or Wyatt Earp.
3. New York Jets. Now, this is a formidable team. Whether you interpret ‘jets’ as full-bore F-16 Fighting Falcons piloted by top guns and bristling with the most current in smart bombs and laser-guided missiles, or just as a couple of passenger jets guided by the hands of a Saudi religious maniac, they have serious destructive power.
2. New Orleans Saints. These guys get the nod over the Giants and the Jets because there’s a good chance they can call in a favor from God.
1. Tennessee Titans. Okay, I’m picking these guys to go all the way based on one assumption: that they are, in fact, the Titans of antiquity — Helios, Tethys, Gaea, Uranus, etc. It took the combined might of all the Greek gods to defeat them. They’d be able to take out a couple of jets easily, no matter how well-armed they were, or even some medieval schmuck God put in charge of wheelwrights. Titans all the way in 2014! Go, Cronus!
The motion calling for internet filtering was defeated overwhelmingly via a reference back earlier today. I was not called to speak – apparently, there was a “huge stack” of cards put in to speak, “most on one side of the debate”.
But if I had been called to speak, here’s what I would have said.
Conference,
I am what many of you might regard as a geek. I have worked in IT for many years, including over a decade of experience working for Internet Service Providers.
But that is not why I am up here today.
I am also a parent. I have three school-aged children and I am opposed to this motion because it does not do what it says on the tin. Where filtering is in widespread use, we already see issues with overly aggressive blocking. Undesirable content is in the eye of the beholder, and to avoid complaints companies will block first and ask questions later.
We see blocking of support sites for mental health issues such as anorexia and body image issues.
Blocking of support sites for sexuality and gender issues.
Blocking of support sites for bullying.
The British Library even blocks Hamlet on it’s own wireless internet access, because it contains violent content. It’s simply not possible to get this right. The people who are pushing for the filters will be campaigning to make them stricter. Imagine the headlines if just one web site the Daily Mail deem to be questionable slipped through the ‘net.
There is no appeal if you are blocked, because the decision on what to block is left to private companies. Do we want private corporations censoring our internet? Who decides what sites are acceptable? The logical extension of such a policy is a British Board of Internet Censorship, a terribly draconian and unwelcome idea.
Senior Talk Talk staff once came to talk to me, when I had expressed concern about their filters. They assured me that it was not possible to bypass their filters and offered a trial – but they never made good on their promise to let us test it. Why not?
Software exists to bypass such filters, that’s why. Tor is one such mechanism and is part-funded by the US Government to allow people to bypass filtering, for the benefit of those living in oppressive regimes…!
As a parent, I do worry about my children online. But I am more worried about cyber-bullying and stalking, which filtering does nothing to prevent. Reliance on technology gives a false sense of security, something we must avoid. The best solution all round is Education, Education, Education – of both parents and children.
And that’s a view with widespread support in the party. A Liberal Democrat Voice survey published in the last 24 hours shows that a whopping 81% of party do not support the form of filtering described in this motion.
There is an amendment to this motion, but it does not do enough to address these issues and I cannot support it. But we do want a policy, because we know this is an important issue. Conference, I would urge you to vote to refer this motion back so that these issues can be addressed properly and a new, more robust policy bought to a future conference.
But if that fails, please vote against the motion.
Thank you.
Originally published at Sarah Brown's Blog. You can comment here or there.
I put in a card to speak an, for the first time at a federal conference, I was called! Here is what I said:
Conference, I was recently in Plymouth, and being not overly familiar with it, I asked the Siri assistant on my iPhone for driving directions from one side of town to the other.
It tried to send me via Warsaw, in Poland.
Automatic systems behave like this because they don’t know enough to realise when they’re doing something obviously ridiculous. They just do it anyway.
This is the folly of automatic censorship on the Internet. There is so much stuff out there that you can’t possibly do it all by hand; you have to use automated systems and, like my iPhone’s bad driving directions, they get it wrong.
As an equality campaigner I have seen first hand the effects of Internet censorship. I have been frustrated when trying to access LGBT news sites, or reading blogs of people campaigning for quality, sex education, breast feeding, safer working conditions for those involved in sex work, drugs information, and so on.
I have even been disallowed access to my own blog, which, by the way, was shortlisted for a Lib Dem Voice award this year, because, apparently, it contains “adult content”.
Perhaps campaigning for equal rights for vulnerable and abused minorities is “adult content”, but so-called porn filters shouldn’t be blocking it.
While I do not doubt the intentions of those behind this motion, and the amendment, I do doubt the technical literacy they represent, or rather the lack of it. In seeking to “protect children from porn”, automated filters will block political campaigns, satire, support sites for victims of homophobic bullying, sexual abuse, eating disorders, breast feeding campaigners and the blogs of members of this party.
This motion, amended or not, is unfit for purpose. Conference, send it back so that it can be reexamined with the full participation of minority groups and young people, those affected by it. If you don’t send it back, then please vote it down. It’s profoundly illiberal and it will cause real harm to the things we value.
