Andrew Hickey

Straight Pride UK try to censor their own press release.

Fuck ‘shareholder value.’

The most interesting, innovate companies right now don’t give a shit about their stock price. And here’s the evidence that middling, corporate drones are fucking everything else up with their quarterly obsessions:

“Over the last month, the Financial Times has been doing a great job in cataloguing the problems caused by the shareholder value theory. Now Robin Harding has terrific article pinpointing its role in undermining the US economic recovery.

In his article entitled ‘Corporate investment: A mysterious divergence’ he explores a conundrum that has puzzled the world’s top economists: why is net investment at a measly 4 per cent of output when pre-tax corporate profits are now at record highs – more than 12 per cent of GDP?

In standard economic theory, this makes no sense. When profits go up, companies should be seizing investment opportunities to lay the groundwork for even more profits in future. In turn, that investment should create jobs, generate more capital goods and lead to higher wages. That’s how capitalism is meant to work. So why isn’t it happening? Mr. Harding explores systematically why all the leading scapegoats for what’s gone wrong—regulations, Obamacare, tax policy, fear of another financial crisis and so on—and shows why they don’t add up.

Then he comes up with the kind of thing that you rarely see in economics—a study that enables us to pinpoint the problem by offering ‘with’ and ‘without’ data.

A brilliant study by economists from the Stern School of Business and Harvard Business School, Alexander Ljungqvist, Joan Farre-Mensa, and John Asker, entitled ‘Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle?’ compares the investment patterns of public companies and privately held firms. It turns out that the lag in investment is a phenomenon of the public companies more than the privately held firms.

‘They find that, keeping company size and industry constant, private US companies invest nearly twice as much as those listed on the stock market: 6.8 per cent of total assets versus just 3.7 per cent.’

As Matthew Yglesias at Slate writes:

‘On this account we are reaping the bitter fruits of the ‘shareholder value’ revolution. Executives at publicly traded companies are paid to generate higher share prices, which is done by hitting quarterly earnings targets. This leads to underinvestment relative to the behavior of managers of privately held firms. Not because managers of private firms are indifferent to the interests of shareholders, but because there’s less need for creating the shareholder value link via a simplistic relationship between compensation, share price, and quarterly earnings.’”

(Via How The ‘World’s Dumbest Idea’ Killed The US Economic Recovery – Forbes.)

Oh, look, Business Insider talks about this as well:

“One of the big reasons the U.S. economy is so lousy is that big American companies are hoarding cash and ‘maximizing profits’ instead of investing in their people and future projects.
This behavior is contributing to record income inequality in the country and starving the primary engine of U.S. economic growth — the vast American middle class — of purchasing power. (See charts below).

If average Americans don’t get paid living wages, they can’t spend much money buying products and services. And when average Americans can’t buy products and services, the companies that sell products and services to average Americans can’t grow. So the profit obsession of America’s big companies is, ironically, hurting their ability to accelerate revenue growth.”

(Via Companies Need To Pay People More – Business Insider.)

Slick. Refuse to negotiate lower rates or make the health insurance companies compete like in the other exchanges. When ACA exchange rates are announced for Florida, they’ll be crazy high. Prediction: lots of conservatives announcing ‘failure.’

Fuckers.

“Florida lawmakers have left the state vulnerable to unreasonably high insurance premiums in an effort to undermine Obamacare, say the state’s U.S. House Democrats.

Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature cynically stripped Florida of its ability to review rates for the law’s rollout, U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch writes in a letter signed by all 10 of the state’s Democratic representatives.

The letter, which appeals to the federal government to step in on Floridians’ behalf, blames a law Scott signed at the end of May for refusing to allow the state insurance commissioner to ‘negotiate lower rates with companies or refuse rates that are too high.’”

(Via PolitiFact | Democrats say Florida stripped insurance commissioner of power to set health plan rates.)

Dear small business people and freelancers of Florida. You have an honest-to-goodness actually enemy that doesn’t want you to be able to buy healthcare. Just an FYI.

Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Monday that the Justice Department will no longer charge nonviolent drug offenders with serious crimes that subject them to long, mandatory minimum sentences in the federal prison system. As my colleague Sari Horwitz explains, Holder “is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences.”

He’s also expected to call for the expanded use of prison alternatives, such as probation or house arrest, for nonviolent offenders and for lower sentences for elderly inmates. And he’ll endorse legislation by  Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would increase federal judges’ flexibility in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders.

The changes Holder wants will likely make a big difference at the federal level. But that won’t be enough to solve America’s mass incarceration problem.

Go home federal prison system, you’re on drugs

Focusing on drug offenses is a smart way to go about reducing the federal incarceration rate. According to data in Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, a new book by UC – Berkeley’s Steven Raphael and UCLA’s Michael Stoll, the most serious charge for 51 percent of federal inmates in 2010 was a drug offense. By comparison, homicide was the most serious charge for only 1 percent, and robbery was the most serious charge against 4 percent.

Tougher drug sentencing accounts for much of the increase in the incarceration rate. “If you go back and decompose what caused growth in the federal prison system since 1984, a large chunk can be explained by drug offenses, around 45 percent,” Raphael says. The other big category accounting for the federal increase is weapons charges, such as the five-year mandatory minimum faced by drug offenders caught with guns. Raphael estimates that that accounts for 18 to 19 percent of the increase.

There’s also been an increase in incarcerations on immigration charges, with the rest of the increase in other areas. But there’s no doubt that the biggest category of crime behind the increase in the federal incarceration rate is drugs. Easing up on drug sentencing would make a big dent.

The states are different

But the federal system isn’t really where the action is. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimates find that there are 1,353,198 people incarcerated at the state level and 217,815 incarcerated federally. So about 13.9 percent of U.S. prisoners are in federal institutions; the other 86.1 percent are in state facilities. And most prisoners at the state level are not there for drug crimes.

In 2004, about 20 percent of state-level inmates were incarcerated on drug convictions, Raphael and Stoll find. Compared with the federal population, those incarcerated at the state level are much likelier to have committed violent offenses. In 2004, 14 percent were in prison for homicide, 9 percent for rape or sexual assault, 12 percent for robbery and 8 percent for aggravated assault. In 2011, it was much the same, according to BJS stats on state inmates serving sentences of a year or more. Fifty-three percent of inmates were in prison for violent offenses, 18.3 percent for property crimes, 10.6 percent for “public order” offenses such as drunk driving, weapons possession or vice offenses, and 16.8 percent for drug convictions.

Raphael and Stoll’s estimates of what’s accounting for the higher incarceration rates suggest that violent crimes are a big part of the state-level story. They find that harsher sentencing for violent offenders explains 48 percent of growth in incarceration rates, compared with about 22 percent attributable to increases in drug sentencing, and 15 percent due to increases in property crime and other sentences.

Then again, most people who go through state criminal justice systems do so on drug offenses. If you look at admission rates, rather than incarceration rates, at the state level, drugs become a much bigger part of the picture. For admissions, Raphael and Stoll find “relatively modest increases for violent crimes and property crimes and pronounced increases for drug offenses, parole violations, and other less serious crime.” And while higher admissions for less serious crimes with shorter sentences don’t affect the incarceration rate as much as increases in sentencing for serious crimes, they do dramatically affect the lives of those admitted, who have to find work as ex-offenders and live with the sundry restrictions states impose upon those who’ve served time.

It’s not hopeless

Holder is taking a fairly plausible approach to reducing the U.S. incarceration rate at the level where he can effect it. But that’s not the level that matters most, and if we were to get serious about reducing the state-level incarceration and admissions rates, we need to talk not just about reducing sentences for drug crimes but also about reducing prison admissions for drug offenses, and perhaps also lowering sentences for property crime and even violent offenses, particularly robbery.

There has been growing enthusiasm for reforming state sentencing laws, even backed by many conservatives. The American Legislative Exchange Council has joined the cause, creating model legislation for loosening state mandatory minimum laws. Especially if it’s not just limited to drug offenses, that kind of reform could greatly reduce the state incarceration rate.

Most politicians are economically illiterate, preferring homespun wisdom to intelligent macroeconomic analysis.

Thanks to Liberator Collective member Gareth Epps, who (via Mark Pack) spotted an article by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis on his blog mainly macro. Wren-Lewis explains why Nick Clegg’s economics motion at this September’s Liberal Democrat conference is wrong-headed. He summarises the motion as asserting that:

...the best thing that has happened to the UK economy recently has been that the deficit has come down. The message seems clear: reduction of the budget deficit is the number one priority and all else has to be subsumed to that.

Now you might in Clegg’s defense say that he has to put it this way, as he has been part of a government which has made deficit reduction the overriding priority. I think that is simply wrong. He could say instead that the focus on deficit reduction was appropriate given all the uncertainty as the Eurozone crisis broke. However now it is clear that this was a crisis specific to the Eurozone, and with interest rates on UK borrowing really low and likely to stay there, the UK can make reducing unemployment the priority, while still of course operating a prudent fiscal policy in the longer term. In other words, he could begin to de-prioritise deficit reduction. The fact that he chooses to do the complete opposite suggests he is content to see fiscal policy as an extension of household financial management. We will see in September whether the Party as a whole is happy to follow its leader in ignoring 80 years of macroeconomic analysis.

So the conference will be faced with a choice between Clegg’s Tory-lite folk wisdom or intelligent macroeconomic analysis. If ever there were a case for delivering a humiliating defeat to the leader, this is it.

 This is a cross post from Radical Neurodivergence Speaking.

As a disabled person, I have experienced failure a lot in my time. I have experienced the kind of failure that can be turned into success by fine tuning the failure. I have experienced the failure that comes from being sabotaged by low expectations or unreasonable demands. And I have experienced the kind of failure that comes from just not being able to do what I am trying to do.

What does this have to do with presuming competence?

Well, the first part of presuming competence is presuming capacity. Presuming that the ability to learn and understand and do new things is there. This is good. I like this. Please, keep believing that I can do things, or at least should be able to give them a good honest try before doing them for me or moving on and putting it in the permanent failure pile. Assuming what you are asking of me is possible here in reality land (deciding to not have a seizure in face of triggers doesn't fall in this category, FYI. And is the inspiring events, plural, for this post), let me try it. I want to try it. I want to fine tune it. Probably.

So, presume I can learn. If I tell you I can do something, or may be able to do something but I need to try it first, run with that. Allow me to try. Help me fine tune if I'm close but not quite. Rephrase. Demonstrate. Whatever. If I think it's in my eventual capacities, and you support that, that is presuming competence and is good.

But. I have failed a lot in my day. There are things I just cannot do. It doesn't matter that I can speak usually or can do a backflip or follow complicated written down chemistry lab instructions or calculate gymnasts' trajectories preternaturally fast, I still cannot hold more than 2 auditory directions in my head on a good day. I still can't read a map in any useful fashion. Whether I can make food without setting it on fire is iffy. I cannot just block sounds out. I cannot sit still and think at the same time. I cannot always make decisions without substantial field narrowing. I cannot always write a thing on demand without significant scaffolding. Et cetera.

When I tell you I cannot do something, presume that I am competent to understand my own limitations. I am not being lazy. I am not manipulating others into doing things for me. I have legitimate support needs. I have workarounds for most of the things I listed above. Slow, ponderous, time and spoon consuming workarounds, but workarounds nonetheless. But the truth of the matter is there are things I cannot do and I know that I cannot do them.

Assume that when I tell you something is not in my skillset and never will be, that I know from experience, or am making an educated guess. If you want me to cross an unfamiliar city on transit using nothing but maps and paper timetables without getting lost? You are dreaming. That is not going to happen. Have I tried this in recent memory? No I have not. But I know:

-I cannot read a map in realtime
-I am significantly time agnosiac
-My ability to navigate places I know very well is pretty iffy, much less new places
-I know the above well enough to struggle deviating from any initial plan, even if the initial plan deviates from me.

So it isn't a stretch at all to say that this is a thing that is not going to happen. This is an educated statement based on my knowledge of my skills and skill holes.

If I say I cannot do something, I do not need to prove to you, and myself, yet again, that I cannot do it. To demand that I show you my inability is presuming incompetence: you are telling me that I am wrong about my inabilities, and my ability to know them, until you determine otherwise. This undermines both my own agency and the ideal of presuming ability. We all have inabilities. It's ok to have inabilities-unless, it seems, you are disabled. Acknowledging a difficulty is not the same as presuming global inability. It's part of seeing me as a whole, really real person. Really real people are allowed to not be able to do things.

Proving yet again that I cannot do something so that you can say you presumed competence, even when I told you something is not a thing I can do doesn't do wonders for me, either. The chances of me waking up one day with that set of skills in infinitesimally small. Forcing me through that particular failure above rather than meeting me somewhere or giving me detailed written directions for several options? That's anxiety attacks. That is an anxiety attack squared, because being late makes me panic, not knowing where I am makes me panic, and plan changes that I have no good way of dealing with? Those are near inevitable, and also make me panic! Putting me through that because maybe I magically obtained abilities heretoforth unprecidented? That's actually really mean. Don't do that. It sucks.

The ideal of presuming competence is lovely. I am all for it. But one of the skills we need to develop, and have acknowledged, is knowing where we struggle, where we fail again and again. Do not undermine this very important skill by telling us we are able to do everything but describe our own inabilities. That's not presuming competence. That's something else.

Everything you know about immigration, particularly unauthorized immigration, is wrong.

So says Princeton University’s Doug Massey, anyway. Massey is one of the nation’s preeminent immigration scholars. And he thinks we’ve wasted a whole lot of money on immigration policy and are about to waste a whole lot more.

Massey slices the history of Mexico-to-U.S. migration in five periods. Early in the 20th century, there was the era of “the hook,” when Japan stopped sending workers to the U.S. and the mining, agriculture and railroad industries begged Mexican laborers to replace them. It’s called “the hook” because laborers were recruited with promises of high wages, signing bonuses, transportation and lodging, most of which either never materialized or were deducted from their paychecks.

Then, during the Roaring Twenties, came “flood tide” — almost 650,000 Mexican workers came legally, causing the number of Mexicans in the U.S. to rocket to almost 750,000 in 1929 from 100,000 in 1900.

The Great Depression ended all that. Jobless Americans took out their anger on jobless Mexicans, and thus began the “era of deportations.” From 1929 to 1939, 469,000 Mexicans were expelled from the U.S.; by 1940, the Mexican-born population had fallen to 377,000.

Enter World War II. With so many American men fighting overseas, Mexican labor was once again in high demand. The U.S. and Mexico negotiated the Bracero Program, which gave Mexican workers access to temporary U.S. visas. That kicked off the “Bracero era.” In 1945, the program brought in 50,000 Mexican guest workers. By 1956, it was up to 445,000. Mexico was also freed from quota limitations on legal immigration, so by 1963, more than 50,000 Mexicans were immigrating each year. With so many legal ways to enter the country, illegal immigration was virtually unknown.

In 1965, the U.S. ended the Bracero program and began to limit Mexican immigration. The number of guest-worker permits dropped to 1,725 in 1979 from more than 400,000 in 1959. The number of residence visas declined to 20,000 after previously being unlimited. But the demand for Mexican labor remained strong. And so the “era of undocumented migration” began. Border apprehensions rose to 1.7 million in 1986 from 55,000 in 1965. But even as millions of Mexicans entered the U.S. illegally, millions also returned. About 85 percent of new entries were offset by departures. Consequently, the growth of the undocumented population was slow.

After passage of a comprehensive immigration law in 1986, the U.S. began militarizing the border with Mexico even as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and, later, the North American Free Trade Agreement strengthened economic ties with Mexico. From 1986 to 2000, trade with Mexico increased eightfold.

Until this point, there isn’t much to dispute in Massey’s narrative. But here his immigration story takes a turn that confounds Washington’s conventional wisdom and makes a mockery of the current political debate.

According to Massey, the rise of America’s large undocumented population is a direct result of the militarization of the border. While undocumented workers once traveled back and forth from Mexico with relative ease, after the border was garrisoned, immigrants from Mexico crossed the border and stayed.

“Migrants quite rationally responded to the increased costs and risks by minimizing the number of times they crossed the border,” Massey wrote in his 2007 paper “Understanding America’s Immigration ‘Crisis.’” “But they achieved this goal not by remaining in Mexico and abandoning their intention to migrate to the U.S., but by hunkering down and staying once they had run the gauntlet at the border and made it to their final destination.”

The data support Massey’s thesis: In 1980, 46 percent of undocumented Mexican migrants returned to Mexico within 12 months. By 2007, that was down to 7 percent. As a result, the permanent undocumented population exploded.

The militarization also had another unintended consequence: It dispersed the undocumented population. Prior to 1986, about 85 percent of Mexicans who entered the U.S. settled in California, Texas or Illinois, and more than two-thirds entered through either the San Diego-Tijuana entry point or the El Paso-Juarez entry point. As the U.S. blockaded those areas, undocumented migrants found new ways in — and new places to settle. By 2002, two-thirds of undocumented migrants were entering at a non-San Diego/El Paso entry point and settling in a “nontraditional” state.

In recent years, the net inflow of new undocumented immigrants arriving from Mexico has fallen to zero. Some of the decline is due to the U.S. recession and a falloff in construction, which employed a lot of migrant workers. But some is due to an improving economy in Mexico, where unemployment is 5 percent and wages have been rising. “I personally think the huge boom in Mexican immigration is over,” Massey said.

Yet the political debate over immigration is stuck in 1985. Congress is focused above all on how to further militarize an already militarized border — despite the fact that doubling the size of the border patrol since 2004 and installing hundreds of miles of barriers and surveillance equipment appears to have been counterproductive. At any rate, the flow of unauthorized immigration has slowed dramatically. “Listening to the Republicans, you’d think waves of people are crossing the border,” Massey said. “But illegal migration stopped four years ago and has been zero since.”

In light of these facts, the debate is backward. Republicans in the House of Representatives are focused on further militarizing the border against the people who are no longer crossing it; at the same time, they are loath to do anything about the millions of real undocumented immigrants who are the legacy of the last buildup. At best, we can hope to waste tens of billions of dollars on further enforcement in return for a lengthy and complicated path to citizenship. At worst, we’ll do nothing — in which case this will be known as the era of wasted opportunity.

This allegedly innocuous British Rail poster, which could be seen all around Scarfolk in the mid-1970s, is pertinent because it touches on issues raised by the recent controversial anti-illegal immigrant campaign in the UK.

The campaign, which threatens illegal immigrants with its 'go home or face arrest' message, smacks of 1970s racist rhetoric, in fact it quotes it outright. The Home Office's claim that the campaign is not discriminatory is also reminiscent of 1970s racist attitudes which were subliminally woven into public life.

When racism was finally exposed as being detrimental to society, it was blamed on foreigners.

This post is the last in a short series which addresses dolls in society. Many Scarfolk children took part in after-school occult rituals to animate their toys but this practice was banned after schoolboy Peter Colons brought to life an immense Slinky which killed 237 people and destroyed public property.

Some years ago, I used to drink beer with a chemist, who told me that in the 1960s he was employed by a large pharmaceutical concern in the UK to make synthetic THC. The idea was, that this stuff being so wonderfully non-narcotic you might use it to make all kinds of nifty drugs — analgesics, anti-nausea pills, pretty much a you-name-it and sky’s-the-limit proposition. Of course the major problem they had with this plan wasn’t the successful synthesizing of THC, but governmental reluctance to make a brand new kind of way for hippies to, as my Dad used to say, “stoke up”…and so the chemists were charged with a task quite a bit more difficult than simply “making super-potent THC in the lab”. That part, apparently, was easy.

But it was making it so the THC molecule wouldn’t get anyone high, that was the problem…and, in the end, it killed the project. Because the drugginess of drugs isn’t incidental to their medical efficacy, you see: not many drugs don’t get you high, and not many drugs whose high-making properties you break out of them, can stay drugs for long afterwards. And so it was, claimed my old drinking buddy, with the THC molecule; try as they all might, they could not make their synthetic THC unattractive to recreational users, without also making it useless to patients. Much like morphine, one expects…or codeine…or alcohol or caffeine, for that matter, but in those days it was just not politically feasible to let this particular drug stay a drug even though a drug is all it was, it could not be allowed such a hall pass as morphine has, and so the project just sort of…

…Went away, according to my old friend the chemist, and to this day it has never returned.

And…

I used to care a lot about this, Bloggers, in a very particular way: because I felt it spoke with particular eloquence about what I take to be the major error of conservative thinking. “If you don’t like something that’s happening, make it illegal.” Because then it’s not your problem anymore, you see? Being only something that “the criminal element” does, its remedy than becomes simple imprisonment, and no further thought required. Punishment.

But punishment doesn’t solve problems. By its nature, punishment comes after the problems, and all it really does is make some sort of accounting of them. Not that this is just a dumb thing, or an unnecessary thing…punishment may not solve problems, but it does have its place. “Vengeance restores the cosmic balance”, to paraphrase Jung…or, hmm, perhaps “vengeance is the proper name of cosmic-balance-restoration”? Same same? So I don’t disparage “punishment” entirely, not at all, but merely note that for some people, punishment is the only measure they’re ever willing to contemplate. Some would prosecute the rain if they could, and fill all the prisons with buckets full of it, all stacked up in bunkbeds and let out in the yard for exercise…and I’m a big believer not just in the law, but in its intimate relationship with the public morality, however even I can see that only a little way further down this road lies Stalinism, where there may be a law that forbids the sky to be blue, or for winter to not be summer. That we must have a rule of law, and therefore laws against things, is not really open to disputation (not in a practical sense, anyway)…but there can be such a thing as a bad law, and there can be such a thing as an engine of bad law, and if we were to name the engines of bad law I would propose that the very first one be named “wilful denial of the facts”.

However…

That’s still how I feel, but it’s not why I care about this story anymore. Because I caught something on TV the other night, a Nature Of Things documentary with David Suzuki, all about youth at risk of developing schizophrenia experiencing psychotic reactions to smoking pot. Understand, I’m pro-legalization, pro-recreational use of marijuana for that matter (though I don’t use it myself), but I’ve known a few people like this…and there’s no such thing as a drug that’s absolutely safe, anymore than there’s a such a thing as a drug you can’t like too much.

And it occurs to me that, now, that’s the very reason why we must move to legalize and regulate marijuana. Because it isn’t about the public morality anymore, but about the public safety — if David Suzuki’s show is right, then it’s more dangerous to young people to keep this stuff illegal, even illegal-but-decriminalized, than it is to make it fully legal.

Understand: I say “now it’s important”, because “now” is when I heard about it. None of this is really new information, it’s just that I never cared to know about it, in part because I never suspected there was anything to know. It was just, sort of…well, it was never on TV before, you know? But now I do know about it, so now I have no excuse for not being committed to legalization…because when people are getting sick, you don’t deal with it by making it illegal to get sick, do you? And you don’t say “well, they’re not really getting ‘sick’, because ‘sick’ is a thing that happens to the non-criminal element, the Good People…they’re not getting sick, they’re merely receiving the Lord’s just punishment”, because, hey…it may make you feel better to have all these neat little watertight compartments, but you still ought to know that they’re not gonna keep you from sinking when you hit an iceberg. And no one will tell you later that it was okay not to turn away because, after all, there was a law against icebergs hitting ships…

And it’s all about the business of THC vs. CBD, as many of you reading already know and have doubtless guessed, but it’s about more than that too. It’s about how do we manage this, how do we do it correctly from the beginning, what kind of steps can we take to make sure we minimize this problem, and how do we VOTE on it. Kids are gonna smoke pot. Kids are not going to be able to make good decisions about supply chains related to smoking pot. We can decrease the number of kids who get run over by the juggernaut of psychosis when they smoke pot. In other words, we can fix this, and it doesn’t have to mean that suddenly everyone’s a reefer addict or that they cease respecting their parents and God and the army, as they feared way back in the days when THC-based pain pills were spiked by the large British pharmaceutical concern my old drinking buddy worked for…

…Although there’s a funny thing about that, isn’t there? Because they were just going to use the super-potent THC, and they were going to use it for everything, so possibly — just possibly — the typical conservative error that so distresses and infuriates me was something that actually worked in our favour this one time? Like a stopped clock, we looked up and it just happened to be right, and we did not get a kind of…of…

…Of thalidomide for schizophrenics, or something, in the 1970s?

So maybe it never returned, but its fate hasn’t remained still unlearned, and to be completely honest it is something I never expected to have my head turned around about, so I am still a little bit shocked by it all, and most shocked of all by how conservative attitudes of the late 60s turned out to be something other than 100% full of shit. Mind you, it’s also true that the stopped clock is only right twice a day; I would expect a whacked-out right-wing person to spout something now about how “individuals are foolish but the culture is wise”, and go on to say maybe we had better keep pot illegal, you know just in case…except (I would say to that person) it isn’t noon or midnight anymore, the “in case” has already come, and this time the culture seems to be against the conservative position because eveybody pretty much smokes it now, Presidents and Prime Ministers have smoked it, high-school principals (I happen to know for a fact) do smoke it, of course kids smoke it, and our knowledge about it has grown to the point where the only real question isn’t “is it dangerous” but “is it getting more dangerous”, and if the answer to that question is “yes” then it seems like making a law against it being more dangerous, or just making the old illegality twice as illegal, is not going to confine the damage to the Bad People while leaving the Good People all untouched…

…Which, obviously, would be the only point of making a law like that.

But, denial being the stock-in-trade of conservative governments, and denial of fact being the engine of their Bad Law, I think we can expect to see some moves in that direction regardless. Will it matter? That sort of depends on us, in the following funny way: because conservative governments are notoriously anti-science, and in my country at least they have done whatever they can (it seems) to take scientific knowledge out of public hands, so they obviously think that if we see it we will act on it…

And if that’s true, then they may suppress and suppress and de-fund and de-fund, but they can’t suppress and de-fund all of it, and science doesn’t respect the line between Good People’s Issues and Bad People’s Issues, so eventually — eventually! — the sky will be revealed as blue, and winter and summer will peel apart into different seasons, and we will deal with this problem…!

Or, alternatively, their fears will prove groundless, and we will all be as placid moo-cows about it…but either way it’s all up to us, and whether or not we choose to believe in the science we’ve got: choose to seek it out, report on it, listen to it, and think about what’s the most responsible way to act on it. Right now, somewhere out there is a kid who’s about to get a very big and very nasty surprise from his black-market bathtub-gin pot. In five years, that doesn’t have to be the case.

Washington State did it.

We should do it too.

Because if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then obviously a little knowledge is what we need to have less of. I asked my Dad not long ago if he can feel the feedback loops getting tighter all around him…he said that back in the 50s if you threw a can of oil into the sea, you knew that it would be decades and decades before you had to worry about the potential consequences…but now if you throw a paper cup into the garbage instead of the recycling, you know somewhere a panda gets cancer five minutes later. We are not quite off the highway yet, we lucky people, but from the top of the occasional rise we can see the outskirts of the city of Scarcityville within the circle of our horizon, and it’s getting harder and harder to ask “are we there yet” and get any answer but “it’s all around us; we’re already here”. But it isn’t all disaster plain-and-simple; knowing that the thrown-away coffee cup gives the panda cancer is also to know beyond a doubt that we can affect the way things are, and so long as we don’t succumb to thoughtless assumptions left over from the less-aggressively connected days of the 20th century we can even affect them for the better. What should we expect, from a legalization of marijuana? We should expect that the knowledge accumulated by edge-of-society researchers is now given value by the government in charge of regulating the stuff, and is actively sought-out and catalogued, and dignified at the very least with a vote of thanks. We should expect that government is willing to do more than just collect taxes on it, or soak Parkinson’s patients with inferior non-custom-bred weed developed by guys with marketing degrees from community colleges. What we should expect from a government willing to legalize marijuana is that it should also be willing to work hard on it, that it should be willing to enlist and to educate members of the general public, and that it should be willing to put that public’s interest first from the very beginning. It’s time for a new kind of Drug Czar, you know?

David Suzuki would be fine with me, for that. I trust David Suzuki. Because he’s a biologist.

Maybe we need that more for this, right now, than we need a chemist.

But anyway I am sure we need something.

At least: more information.

Thanks for listening, Bloggers! And let’s get out the vote, if we can.

Uh…not exactly sure for what, yet…

A brand new Cindy & Biscuit 5-pager for all of you. Enjoy, and head over to Milk The Cat if you want to buy their comics…

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Nominations are open for the Liberal Democrat Voice awards, affectionately known as the BOTYs. Despite having a blog, I don’t really think of myself as part of the Lib Dem blogging scene; I’d have to update a damn sight more regularly for that! I started this blog to put up discussion drafts of articles intended for print, and sticking things on a piece of paper and putting them through somebody’s letterbox is still my authorial intent one way or another.

However, I am a LDV reader, and I do have opinions about who should be recognised for doing things online. I remain cynical about the merit of online campaigning as a replacement for real world activity (or indeed for online support, development and retention activities), but there is some good stuff happening online in two specific categories:

• Liberal Democrat Tweeter/Facebooker of the Year
• Best online campaign run by a Liberal Democrat

Many moons ago, when the Coalition was young, I posted about the negative narrative, and how uniformly negative comments about the Lib Dems (justified or otherwise; this is about narrative, not facts) tend to breed and reinforce themselves. Over on the party’s Facebook page, every post will attract at least half a dozen negative comments, most of them irrelevant to the post (usually about tuition fees, still).

Over time I noticed somebody called Pete Brown routinely going in and responding to critics – rebutting outright falsehoods, and contextualising the statements which were at least partly true. Where he led, I and others followed and now most posts by the party will have some positive comments from supporters, and most negative comments will be challenged where possible.

The immediate thing to note here is the disruption of negative reinforcement – the overall level of negative comments goes down.  The more reasoned and reasonable the Lib Dem side of the argument, the more antagonistic and illogical the opposition seems in comparison. And occasionally, just occasionally, people do engage in debate which leads to understanding each others’ position a little better.

I do not believe that this changes the minds of the people posting negative comments. But there are over 90,000 people who follow the Lib Dems on Facebook, more than the membership of the party. Not all of them will support us, of course – but for those who aren’t steadfastly opposed, seeing the negative narrative being challenged in the comment threads will help present a counter-narrative which will encourage them to make up their own minds.

It’s not fancy, it doesn’t have its own hashtag or the might of Campaigns Department behind it. But Pete Brown and his campaign to challenge the negative narrative and spread a bit of truth are, in my mind, the best online campaign we’ve got going right now, and well worth recognition. If my nominations make the shortlist, please consider voting for them.

LibDemVoice is running a daily feature, ‘Lessons of Coalition’, to assess the major do’s and don’ts learned from our experience of the first 3 years in government. Reader contributions are welcome, either as comments or posts. The word limit is no more than 450 words, and please focus on just one lesson you think the party needs to learn. Simply email your submission to voice@libdemvoice.org. Today David Allen shares his thoughts.

If It Won’t Work, Walk

In 1974, Ted Heath called on Jeremy Thorpe to join the Conservatives in a historic ‘anti-socialist’ coalition. Thorpe spent a weekend in negotiation, then declared that it could not work. The differences in philosophy and programme were simply too great to bridge. Thorpe had sacrificed the career opportunity of a lifetime on a question of principle. Others, of course, have done things differently.

Ken Clarke spoke on the 2010 election night about the risk of chaos in the bond markets the next morning. It was outrageous bounce tactics. No Liberal Democrat pointed that out. Instead, our own leadership itself used false parallels with Greece to justify a rushed deal. The bond markets stayed calm.

When nothing was signed immediately, Tories queued up to castigate the indecisive Lib Dems. No Lib Dem spokesperson pointed out that, in the rest of Europe, it is well understood that coalitions usually take at least a month to agree, and are all the better for that.

After five days, a detailed agreement was hurried out. It said amongst other things that the Coalition would stop top-down reorganisation of the NHS. Our party did not formally monitor government adherence to the agreement. It was, of course, ignored or twisted out of all recognition whenever it suited the Tories. Finally, Clegg broke the agreement over parliamentary boundaries. The Tories cried foul, rightly pointing out that Clegg had misrepresented the agreed trade-off in that particular area. They pointed out the mote in the Lib Dem eye. Both parties had ignored the beam in the Conservative eye.

Successive Lib Dem leaders had pledged that if ever coalition could be achieved, securing Lib Dem policies would be the priority. Jobs for our boys would not. Then Osborne offered, as he put it, to “pay the top price for the Turkish carpet”. On policies? You judge.

The Coalition has achieved little for Britain, apart from the private firms which have gained business in health and education. Our support has halved. Our youth vote has vanished.

We obsessed about our own weakness, the terrible risk that if we didn’t make a deal, we might have to fight another election and again come third. We ignored Cameron’s weakness, the risk that if he had called another election, he might not have again come first, thus ending his career. We didn’t plan, and we didn’t hold our nerve.

Not that Clegg is the least bit interested but, just for completeness, let’s add a footnote – Labour could also be very hard to deal with. If we meant it about equidistance, we would start some discussions with them now. Any chance?

If it isn’t going to work, you have to walk away.

Previously Published:

Stephen Tall: Stronger policy development and campaigning on issues that matter to the public (AKA where’s our liberal equivalent of the benefits cap?)

Mark Valladares: Better party communications responding to the realities of governing

Gareth Epps: Government: What’s Occurrin?

Nick Thornsby: Making a success of coalition government as a concept

Caron Lindsay: That old “walk a mile in each others’ shoes” thing works

Louise Shaw: One member, one vote for all party elections

Mark Pack: The invisible ministers should up their game, or be sacked

Robin McGhee: We should organise ministers better

Rob Parsons: Understand the mechanics of government

Richard Morris: Make the red lines deeper and wider

Bill le Breton: The Open Coalition and Its Enemies

Patrick Murray: Make sure our policies are reflected in our manifesto

“Archaeologists: We found piece of Jesus’ cross.” That’s the headline from USA Today. It’s also what the first sentence of the story claims:

Archaeologists working at an ancient church in Turkey think they’ve unearthed a piece of the world’s most famous cross, the one used to crucify Jesus.

But that’s not quite what the archaeologists themselves claim in the rest of the story:

They found a stone chest during excavation at a 1,350-year-old church, and the chest had a number of relics inside believed to be associated with the crucifixion, a historian at Turkey’s Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts tells the Hurriyet Daily News.

“We have found a holy thing in a chest,” she says. “It is a piece of a cross,” and they think it’s from the cross.

The entire chest is now undergoing lab tests, reports NBC News. Researchers aren’t sure who owned the chest, but it was probably a religious person of some importance, and that person apparently believed the cross relic was the real deal.

The lab tests should shed some light on the possibility, though NBC adds a little context courtesy of theologian John Calvin. He once joked that if all the supposed pieces of the cross in the world were collected in one place, “they would make a big shipload.”

I didn’t think the Institutes were all that funny, but credit where credit is due — that’s a pretty good line.

Point here is there’s a big difference between finding a 2,000-year-old relic that scientists think was part of Jesus’ cross and finding a 1,350-year-old relic that scientists think someone 1,350 years ago thought was part of Jesus’ cross.

This story reminds me of Michael Hollinger’s delightful play Incorruptible: A Dark Comedy About the Dark Ages. The script includes a one-sentence “Author’s Note” that reads: “This sort of thing really happened.” Because, well, this sort of thing really happened.

The story is set in a medieval monastery in France. “This sort of thing” refers to what’s going on at the beginning of Act 2, which finds the brothers very busy:

FELIX: Where’s this one going?

MARTIN: What is it?

FELIX: Looks like a collarbone.

MARTIN: That would be Saint Cecilia. Make sure it goes out to Strasbourg this morning. (Felix nods, setting it aside.) And remind them to pay us in cash, not books. …

FELIX: And St. Clement?

MARTIN: What about him?

FELIX: Milan wanted something from St. Clement.

MARTIN: Well … do we have any feet left?

FELIX: Three.

MARTIN: Give them a foot, then.

FELIX: Right or left?

MARTIN: I don’t care, just don’t break up a set.

A bit later, after Charles, the Abbot enters.

FELIX: Did you want to ask him about Siena?

MARTIN: Not just yet, thank you.

CHARLES: Siena?

MARTIN: A small logistical problem. I didn’t want to bother you. …

CHARLES: What is it?

MARTIN: They want the head of John the Baptist.

CHARLES: Sell it to them.

MARTIN: We already sold it to Lisbon.

CHARLES: So?

MARTIN: And Dresden.

CHARLES: Oh …

MARTIN: (Reading from his ledger.) And Naples, Madrid, Canterbury, York …

CHARLES: Will that send the price down?

 

Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 165-174

This chapter offers scenes featuring Rayford Steele at his Rayfordiest.

He and Hattie Durham are at a restaurant. That gives Rayford another chance to interact with people who are at work, and whether that’s at a restaurant, an airport, a store or a traffic stop, it’s an opportunity for more cringe-inducing Rayfordishness:

They were led to a table set for four. But even though two busboys hurried out to clear away two sets of dinnerware, and the waiter pulled out a chair for Hattie while pointing Rayford to the one next to her, Rayford was still thinking of appearances. He sat directly across from Hattie, knowing they would nearly have to shout to hear each other in the noisy place. The waiter hesitated, looking irritated, and finally moved Rayford’s tableware back to in front of him. That was something Hattie and Rayford might have chuckled over in their past. …

To fully appreciate the Rayfordosity on display here, keep in mind that this isn’t just any restaurant. This is Hattie’s restaurant. “Hattie herself had helped conceive it,” we are told. Rayford knows this, but — despite several pages of small talk in this chapter — he never says anything to her about it. No comments or compliments on the decor or the place’s success. No questions conveying an interest in her project. No acknowledging her work at all.

Most of us, on visiting a restaurant with an acquaintance who helped design the place, would find something encouraging to say about it, even if the place was a total trainwreck. “You must have had fun bringing all this together,” or some other such vaguely positive comment would seem like the least one should say. Hattie’s Global Bistro, we’re told, is doing very well. It’s a magnet drawing discerning patrons who have come from all over the world to work in the new global capital city.

Yet it never occurs to Rayford to say one word about it. Instead, within five minutes of arriving he’s giving the waiters a hard time for no reason (“I’d prefer to sit here, please,” would have avoided the irritation he seems to have provoked deliberately), rolling his eyes as though visiting such a restaurant is an ordeal. And he imagines that Hattie would be “chuckling” over this behavior if she weren’t otherwise in a bad mood.

The irony is that Rayford’s appalling behavior stems from his “thinking about appearances.” His aim, on arriving at the restaurant, was to appear virtuous — and he seems to believe he succeeded at doing so. He and the authors both seem wholly unaware that the main appearance he is creating is that of being a callous, condescending jerk.

That gets at the core of what it means to be Rayford Steele: the vast chasm between how he imagines he appears to others and how he actually is. That difference is a product, in part, of the fact that he seems to spend a great deal of time preoccupied with imagining how he appears to others and of the related fact that he is terrible at doing so accurately.

Consider this part of his conversation with Hattie, where he seems to think that imposing a lawyerly control on the terms of their former flirtation is a better way of asserting his goodness than, say, the long-delayed apology Hattie deserves from him:

“Well, to tell you the truth, when you dumped me –”

“Hattie, I never dumped you. There was nothing to dump. We were not an item.”

“Yet.”

“OK, yet,” he said. “That’s fair. But you have to admit there had been no commitment or even an expression of a commitment.”

“There had been plenty of signals, Rayford.”

“I have to acknowledge that. Still, it’s unfair to say I dumped you.”

One of the things that I find fascinating about Rayford Steele is the way he subverts the readers’ expectations about the significance of a character’s motive. Broadly speaking, we expect good characters to have good motives and evil characters to have evil motives. That’s a conventional way of distinguishing between the heroes and the villains of a story. Rayford doesn’t fit into such tidy categories. He has horrible motives, but he seems to believe — sincerely — that his motives are good. He’s a bad guy who thinks he’s one of the good guys, a cad who thinks he’s a gentleman, a jerk who thinks he’s a mensch, a negligent bystander who thinks he’s a hero.

This also separates Rayford from antihero protagonists. Antiheros may spend time “thinking about appearances,” but they tend to be aware of the difference between the appearances they strive to project and the characters they actually are. Antiheroes tend to be aware of their own conflicted motives.

With an antihero, redemption is always a possibility. Think of Tony Soprano. One could argue that the theme of The Sopranos was that Tony knew he needed to change to become a better person, and he even seemed to want to change to become a better person, and yet at every opportunity he chose not to. The show would have been a stagnant, repetitive mess except that Tony was perpetually aware of his need for redemption, of the possibility of choosing it, and of the cost of that choice.

Rayford is not aware of any of that. He thinks of redemption only in the past tense. Where The Sopranos gave us an antihero struggling, and failing, with the ever-present possibility of redemption, Left Behind gives us a Rayford, a man so wholly entombed in his delusion that he can’t even imagine changing or choosing or growing.

Whenever I think about this, trying to plumb the bottomless depths of Rayford’s shallowness, I’m tempted to think of him as a remarkable literary creation. He epitomizes the kind of delusional narcissism that enables one to enable evil. There are layers of complexity to his simple-minded self-absorption. Had any of that been a deliberate effect intended by his creators, these books might be read in literature classes. Jerry Jenkins — despite his shortcomings as a stylist, his tin ear for dialogue, and his delirious disregard for continuity and research — might be spoken of in the same sentences as Nabokov or Dostoevsky or, at least, David Chase.

But we don’t commend the authors for this achievement because they seem as wholly ensconced within Rayford’s delusion as Rayford is himself.

It almost seems unfair that such an accidental, unintentional achievement isn’t recognized. I suppose that’s partly because such accidents are all too common. Consider, for example, the polar opposite appreciation and literary reputation of Lolita and Known and Unknown. Both books feature an unreliable narrator desperate to charm the reader into forgiving the unforgivable by weaving a tapestry of self-serving rationalizations. Both narrative voices are a painstaking construct — the product of labor and artifice. Yet the former book is hailed as a masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of all time while the latter collects dust on remainder tables as an unwelcome relic from a time most of us prefer not to remember.

But imagine if “Donald Rumsfeld” was a wholly imaginary character and that the events recounted in his memoir were audacious fiction, a wicked satire describing an implausible campaign of deceit that ultimately ensnared even the deceivers themselves, leading to a catastrophically lethal blunder in which trillions were squandered and hundreds of thousands slain. Yet despite that all-too-predictable outcome, this fictional narrator with the oddly Dickensian name is unrepentant, effusively praising himself as a hero and a champion of virtue. If it were fiction — the product of conscious artifice rather than of unconscious artifice – Known and Unknown would be on the syllabus of English literature classes everywhere.

Now imagine the other side. What if Lolita was actually a memoir, written by a real-life Humbert Humbert? All that gorgeous prose would be reviled and rejected. Copies of the book would sit, unwanted and unread alongside copies of O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.

Rayford Steele is, in his own way, a literary achievement that ranks up there with Humbert Humbert and the Underground Man, and with “Donald Rumsfeld” and “O.J. Simpson.” But because, like those last two, Rayford was not a deliberate artistic creation, he isn’t celebrated as such.

I don’t want to celebrate Rayford, but I do want to learn from him. He has a great deal to teach us. And so do his creators.

That, more than anything else, is why I’m still reading these books after nearly 10 years (!) of slogging through them page-by-ludicrous-page.

I’ve seen this referred to as “hate-reading” — analogous to the diversion of “hate-watching” so-bad-it’s-good TV shows or movies just for the fun of mocking their shortcomings and reveling in their failures. I appreciate the pleasures afforded by this pastime. It can be a lot of fun in small doses — especially in the company of quick-witted friends.

But hate-watching for its own sake can’t be sustained very long before it turns into something else. The whole point of the exercise isn’t just to absorb the awfulness of some so-bad-it’s-good movie or show, but to respond to it. And that response leads to something richer than just quips and mockery.

Just responding, “This is bad,” is unsatisfying. It lacks specificity. To get more specific — to identify and articulate that specificity — means switching from statements to questions. Why is this bad. How is this bad?

And that, in turn, leads to bigger questions: What is the nature of badness in general? What is the precise nature of the precise badness we’re witnessing here? What, if anything, would make this good? What is the nature of goodness?

These questions are not asked explicitly or didactically — that would ruin all the fun of getting together with your friends to watch Plan Nine From Outer Space or The Real Housewives of New Jersey. But such questions are also unavoidable if you want to say anything funny, clever or incisive. Without considering those questions on some level, you’d be left with nothing but puns and funny noises. (Not that I’m opposed to puns and funny noises — I still giggle at this YouTube classic starring Robert Tilton. But we surely there are also more substantial critiques that need to be made of Tilton’s brand of deceitful, predatory sanctimony.)

Even if you only start asking such questions in order to sharpen the edge of your mockery, thinking about such questions leads you beyond mere hate-watching and into something more like what we could call apophatic criticism.*

“Apophatic” is a fancy word from the world of theology. It usually refers to a kind of negative theology in which we strive to clarify the nature and character of God by saying what God is not like. The idea was put forward by folks like Maimonides and Dr. Seuss (“the way to find a certain something is to find out where it’s not”).

The idea of “negative theology” sometimes gets a negative response because the word “negative,” of course, has negative connotations. So some people hear that word “negative” and assume that negative theology must involve destruction — a tearing down or a tearing apart. But it’s actually a helpful approach that yields positive results. Negative theology allows us to be more constructive — to speak with greater clarity and confidence about the nature of God than we are able to do when attempting to make “positive” statements, which tend to be inadequate, anthropomorphic, or limiting and, therefore, misleading.**

That apophatic principle from The Cat in the Hat is what allows us to learn so much from the World’s Worst Books. These books are an almanac of awful — an exhaustive catalogue of “where it’s not” that enables us to better locate many certain somethings. These books fail on every level — storytelling, characterization, continuity, theology, politics, ethics, logic. They’re also clearly “so-bad-they’re-good,” and thus suitable for the amusement of hate-watching, but more than that, they are instructively bad. Every page provides an opportunity to ask all those questions above — an exercise in negative theology, or negative literary criticism, or negative ethics.

We can learn, in other words, how not to do theology, how not to tell stories, how not to treat others.

This is the value of contemplating Rayford Steele in all of his insufferable, overwhelming Rayforditude. Rayford serves — albeit unintentionally — as a flashing red danger sign warning us of the perils of delusional narcissism. He is worth studying and contemplating in the same way that Charles Sheldon taught us to contemplate Christ. “What would Jesus do?” Sheldon famously asked. And we can ask — just as fruitfully — “What would Rayford do?”

The difference there, of course, is that we should then make sure we’re not doing it.

If you’re a storyteller and you’re trying to write a story with an actual hero, ask WWRD? Then write the opposite.

If you want to be the hero of your own story and of your own life, ask WWRD? Then do the opposite.

Try it out next time you’re at a restaurant and the waiter comes to your table. WWRD? Do the opposite. You’ll make one person’s day and help to make the world a better place.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* We shouldn’t make too much of this distinction between “hate-watching” and what I’m describing here as an “apophatic” approach. Don’t conclude that the former is frivolous or that the latter is ponderous. The whole point of hate-watching, after all, is to say something funny — and that means to say something true. So the real difference here may be something more like the difference between poetry and prose.

** This is part of why so many of my favorite bloggers are atheists — and why I often find myself agreeing with what they think and write about God. We can agree on the statement “God is not X,” even if we still disagree on the shorter, more sweeping statement, “God is not.” The atheist channel here at Patheos features several really excellent apophatic theologians.

When I came to the end of the William Hartnell Doctor Who stories, I said 'I feel strangely but genuinely bereft, as though my beloved Grandfather has run away and my granny re-married a little mop-haired git, who tries too hard to be pals'.  I was fairly sure - determined, even - that the Second Doctor wasn't for me, tough I couldn't actually have told you why.

Maybe it was over-familiarity?  In comparative terms, after all, Patrick Troughton as the Doctor was far more familiar to me than William Hartnell had ever been.  Leaving aside Target paperbacks, I'd seen the Three Doctors, Five Doctors and Two Doctors as a kid, which - expectation culled from the titles aside - all starred Troughton and barely featured Hartnell (and not at all in the last two cases).

Perhaps it was a problem with the companions?  Wendy Padbury is gorgeous, true, but from the stuff I'd seen in the past, none of the rest of the assistants seemed to have much going for them, even Jamie.  Certainly there were no Ian and Barbara to look forward to.

Or maybe it was just my usual wilful obscurity?  Everyone claims that Troughton is their favourite Doctor after all.

Whatever it was, I was wrong, though it took a while for me to realise that.

Troughton starts at a disadvantage, you see.  He's the new man in a role for which there's no history of new men.  Nobody really loves change, no matter what they might say, and I like change even less than that.

The fact that he almost immediately undercuts the gravitas of the Doctor by clowning about, playing the recorder, wittering on about hats and doing silly accents doesn't help - it feels at points like a deliberate attempt to remake the show as one truly for younger children (thank God they discarded the Harpo wig between Tenth Planet and Power!), and a real step away from the sort of intelligent if erratic science fiction that the Hartnell series had shown itself more than capable of doing.

Troughton - or his writers, rather - comes across in those early stories like the big bullying cuckoo in the nest, killing all the little sparrow babies that I loved and throwing their bodies away.  The main thrust of this unpleasant change can be summed up in two big accusations.

Accusation 1: this is where Doctor Who stopped trying to create societies which, if not fully realised, did more than just nod in passing to freaky, scary alienness (sic).  The Sense Sphere isn't really a believable society, but it is an attempt to sketch one within the confines of a handful of twenty five minute episodes; the Tenth Planet Cybermen have personalities which is reflected in their command structure and something more to them than mere conquest, the Web Planet attempts to build an entire world of different races, and so on.  Whereas, vague nods to Martian aristocracy aside, the Troughton era is filled with monsters, not aliens, and we don't see a story with a set of genuinely individual aliens until Doctor Who and the Silurians.

Accusaton 2:  Dr Who becomes horribly formulaic within a story or two of the regeneration.  John Wiles and Innes Lloyd wanted to squeeze Dr Who into a nice, simple shape which could be endlessly and effortlessly repeated, and the Base Under Siege was the shape they chose.  I can hardly deny that fact, having written an article in Outside In which said exactly that - Doctor Who, for a season or two at least became quite boring and repetitive.  Not forever, mind you, and not even for the entirety of the Troughton years, but for a while certainly.  It's like having a favourite Uncle, one full of brilliant stories of faraway places, the sort who always used to turn up unannounced with pockets full of foreign sweets and toys, who for some reason he takes to drinking too much and for a while every time he appears he's much less interesting and fun and tells the same old story over and over again.  You're a kid - you just have to hope it all changes again and you get the good Uncle back again.

Luckily, the Monster Season proved to be just that - a single season of drunken uncledom.  On either side there's the good stuff.  Season 4 lumbers about a bit, true (like a drunk, actually, now I think about it), as the show tries to find its feet again, but Power of the Daleks is so splendid, even reduced to audio and telesnaps, that it's worth the price of admission alone, and of the rest - tonally mental though they are - only The Moonbase actively disappoints.

Season 6 though is gold, packed with the kind of invention and experimentation which I thought had been left behind with Hartnell.  From the bickering Dominators, via baddies created from Grow Your Own Crystal sets, Cybermen on the steps of St Paul's and Ice Warriors strolling through Hyde Park in the bright sunshine, all the way to the epic series of misdirections which is The War Games, season six is a reassurance that they haven't entirely forgotten what made everyone fall in love with the show in the frst place (and that's without mentioning the wonder which is The Mind Robber).  It's more than that - it's a promise that change is coming again, but that we shouldn't worry, it'll all work out well in the end.

Some quick highlights which come to mind...

The most obvious gay relationship in Doctor Who - General Hermack and Major Warne in The Space Pirates.  Everytime the General turns and says 'Get to it, Ian' you could cut the sex in the air with a knife.

Philip Madoc as the War Lord, coming over all Olivier when he speaks.

Jamie and the Doctor canoeing through London's quiet canals in The Invasion.

Wendy Padbury's clothes - the coolest ensembles in Dr Who until Liz Shaw's white plastic boots and floppy hat in The Ambassadors of Death.

The Dominators arguing amongst themselves, made all the more brilliant by the fact that one of them is David Hunter from Crossroads.

The South African Krotons (and were they really named that as a pun on Croutons, coming out of their primal soup?)

And Troughton slipping and sliding in foam all over the place...

Now go away and read the whole of Ms Hadley and Mr Campbell's excellent blog about the Troughton Years.  It's ace.

From tomorrow's Observer:

David Cameron's vision of a compassionate Conservatism has been lost in a lurch to the right, according to the prime minister's former adviser who coined the "hug a hoodie" line.

Danny Kruger, Cameron's former speechwriter, said the prime minister had allowed his ambitions to be hijacked by a rhetoric centred on "bashing burglars and sending immigrants home", instead of an optimistic agenda that would benefit communities. 

Kruger said Cameron had lost his pre-election drive and energy and that his reforming programme, including the "big society" ethos, had fallen victim to cowardice in the face of criticism from the media and his own backbenchers.

Speaking as someone who had great hopes of the coalition, I agree with every word.

David Cameron's unwillingness to stand up for what he once claimed to believe is one of the principal causes of the widespread disenchantment with the Coalition among Liberal Democrat activists.

Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you.

There is growing pressure on social networking sites to do something about something tonight, as politicians and newspapers alike blame them for every single problem in the world today.

The prime minister David Cameron led the way, urging everyone to boycott ask.fm until it stopped working as any sort of service.  Speaking to Sky News, Cameron said: "These people have got to step up to the chicken basket and show some responsibility.  Simply allowing users of the site to block anonymous messages isn't good enough.  If someone makes nuisance phone calls, we obviously don't hold the caller responsible; we blame BT for allowing the call through in the first place, even if they have so-called call blocking available.  The same goes for the postal service.  If a mail bomb slips through the net and it kills someone, then obviously the postman who delivered it should be held accountable.  It's just common sense."

Expanding on his theme, Cameron continued: "Now while it's true that I hadn't heard of this ask.fm website until yesterday, that shouldn't stop me from talking about something I know absolutely nothing about.  I really do encourage a boycott, as I've also been told that the one organised by the delightful Caitlin Moran on Twitter was such a huge success last Sunday, at least until the new Doctor Who was announced.  If we stop using these sites, there's absolutely no chance whatsoever that people will simply move elsewhere, or that bullies will strike offline rather than online.  We must drain this eco-system of hate."

The tabloids meanwhile have called for more meaningful action.  Both the Sun and Daily Mail have demanded that ask.fm be banned, once again demonstrating their profound understanding of how the internet works.  Neither paper has any truck with bullies, as the comments section on the Mail website regularly demonstrates, regarded universally as a haven of informed, reasonable debate.  Likewise, columnists Richard Littlejohn and Jan Moir would never dream of writing about minorities in a prejudiced or inflammatory style.  As for the Sun, only those with extremely long memories can recall that during its campaign for Baby Peter the social workers involved with his case were urged to kill themselves by those commenting online, something that might cause a few regrets considering that two of the paper's journalists charged in connection with Operation Elveden have since had their own mental health problems.

We asked a random nerd slamming away at a keyboard for his take on these events.  "It's all a bit knee jerk, isn't it?  For a start, we don't know exactly why these four young people took their own lives.  Were they just being bullied on ask.fm, or were they being bullied offline as well?  Did they have other relationship problems, or had any relatives or friends recently been ill or died?  I've had depression myself, and I find it difficult to believe that it was just bullying online that led them to take such a drastic step.  It could have been the trigger, or the last straw certainly, but we can't just blame a website without knowing the full facts, and you would have thought anti-bullying and children's campaigners would know that."

"Besides, why is it that parental responsibility seems such a foreign concept when it comes to the internet?  Yes, it's difficult if you don't understand the technology and the slang, and when you can't have complete control due to almost every device now having net access, but clearly you have to talk with your kids about the sites they use and let them know they can always come to you if they don't feel safe.  It's no use blaming a service if you don't use the privacy settings it has available.  Those truly responsible here are the pathetic little shits who think it's hilarious to tell 14-year-old girls they're fat and ugly and should die. How about we go after the messengers rather than the message provider?"

"As for the tabloids, could you possibly tell it's the silly season? Any passing frenzy will do, even if it's likely that the internet as a whole helps those who feel excluded in real life far more than it harms those already vulnerable (just look at the It Gets Better campaign). They're also looking for anything to distract from their own far from honourable record when it comes to treating those who come to their attention with respect, especially as argument continues over the royal charter to establish the new press regulator."

A reward (a wine gum and a can of cream soda) is being offered for any information that leads to the tracking down of a Labour shadow minister.

There's a great parody in the current issue of Private Eye in which Craig Brown pretends to be Richard Dawkins on Twitter.  It captures perfectly, with almost documentary verisimilitude, in fact, the blend of irascibility, conceit and high-handed disdain for religion that shines through Dawkins' online persona.  A few examples:

Somebody tell the old ladies in the local church that arranging the flowers won't get them a place in heaven.  Such stupidity.

"You can't prove God doesn't exist." Er, no you can't.  But is anyone REALLY stupid enough to think that is a good point? Apparently yes.

Listening to St Matthew Passion.  Very beautiful in parts but why couldn't Bach try harder to keep God out of it?

Hard to overstate how deeply I despise St Augustine.

The only trouble with Brown's send-up is that it can't quite match the original for sheer obtuseness.  But perhaps Dawkins is merely trolling.  His usual technique is to say something pointlessly provocative, wait for the inevitable backlash (the traditional response, playing on his well-known love of grammar, is "Your a dick") and then express innocent bafflement that anyone could possibly object.  As often as not these days, his target is Islam and/or Muslims; a predeliction that seems close enough to an obsession to have attracted accusations of racism.  I don't believe that myself, but I do suspect that being accused of race-baiting has only increased his determination to push things.

Today's was a classic:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

For an Oxford man, that's some admission.  It's also true, as it happens: the 32 Nobels Prizes awarded to people with a connection to Cambridge's largest college far outweigh the number given to persons of Muslim background or faith.  It's dramatically true if you exclude the Peace Prize (and Dawkins was really making a point about science) and the prize for literature.  Only two Muslim scientists have won the Prize: the Pakistani Abdus Salam for Physics and the Egyptian-American Ahmed Zewail for Chemistry.  It's also true that (again excluding the peace and literature prizes) Trinity boasts more Nobel laureates than the entire female gender.  Only 17 women have ever been awarded one of the scientific prizes.

Clearly this signifies something.  But what?

Looking at the list of Nobel laureates since the prizes were first awarded in 1901, the most striking thing is the overwhelming predominance of Western countries, in particular the United States, and of a handful of institutions.  Of 863 individual winners, 338 have been American or based in the United States.  A further 119 have been British.  Germany is in third place with 101 winners, and France a distant fourth with 65 (which is more than Trinity, but less than Cambridge as a whole).  Most of the remainder come from other Western nations.  Again, the effect is even greater if Peace and Literature are omitted.  The university affiliations tell a similar story, with the top US institutions (Harvard alone has 147 affiliated winners) and Oxbridge dominating the lists.

The reason for this isn't an international conspiracy.  Rather, it shows that modern science (by which I mean academic, research-driven, resource-intensive science) has been and remains an overwhelmingly Western phenomenon.  To ask "where are all the Muslims?" as Dawkins does is to miss the point.  One might as well ask, Where are all the Chinese? China has just 8 native-born Nobel winners, and all but two of them are affiliated with Western universities, mostly in the United States.  There are approximately the same number of Chinese nationals in the world as there are Muslims, and China, like Islam, had its golden age (in China's case, several of them) when it led the world in technology and science.  Japan does rather better, with 20 winners; but then Japan adopted the Western model of university-based scientific research in the late 19th century, and even so only won its first Nobel Prize in 1949.

Given the type of work that wins a Nobel Prize for science, it's still remarkable that Trinity College has so many more winners than other Cambridge Colleges, but it's not all that remarkable that it has more winners than most non-Western countries put together.  It says something about the way modern science developed, and about the continuing place of Anglo-American institutions within modern scientific research, but it says no more about Islam than it says about China (or about women).  Which is to say, not much. After all, the country that boasts almost half the world's Nobel prize winners is also home to millions of creationists.

I suspect that what Dawkins wanted to suggest, if he wasn't being simply dickish, was that something in Islam is indeed responsible for the decline of Arab science, that was once so promising.  Here's another of his Tweets:

Why mention Muslim Nobels rather than any other group? Because we so often hear boasts about (a) their total numbers and (b) their science.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

Do we hear boasts about their science?  Jim Al-Khalili has written an excellent book, Pathfinders, about the medieval Arab pioneers of such fields as optics and medicine (has Dawkins read it?  It would be rather surprising if he hadn't).  Al-Khalili is President of the British Humanist Association, as it happens, so you won't find him "boasting" about the scientific superiority of Islam.  But he has written that,

... the scientific revolution of the Abbasids would not have taken place if not for Islam - in contrast to the spread of Christianity over the preceding centuries, which had nothing like the same effect in stimulating and encouraging original scientific thinking. The brand of Islam between the beginning of the ninth and the end of the 11th century was one that promoted a spirit of free thinking, tolerance and rationalism. The comfortable compatibility between science and religion in medieval Baghdad contrasts starkly with the contradictions and conflict between rational science and many religious faiths in the world today.

You can in fact make a similar case for Christianity, despite what Galileo experienced at the hands of the Inquisition.  Both Islam and Christianity, in their different ways, present a vision of the world that is ordered, that accords with natural law, and that as the product of an intelligent designer is inherently intelligible.  If you say that Christianity held back science, you have to explain why the modern scientific revolution took off in a Europe that remained profoundly Christian.  Newton, for one, believed that his scientific work was in large part a religious undertaking.  If you say that Islam is anti-science, you have to explain why for many centuries it was anything but.  It's probably true that the Muslim world became more religiously conservative, and thus more anti-science, just as Western Europe was becoming more religiously open.  Likewise, China under the Ming dynasty largely withdrew from international trade just as Europeans began their great voyages of exploration.   

There are many reasons why modernity originated in Western Europe and its American offshoot, and why the West continued to be ecomonically and politically dominant for so long.  Political, geological and geographic factors all played their part, as to a lesser extent did philosophy and theology.  But the long list of Western Nobel laureates has a more proximate cause: the weight of economic and intellectual capital that has accumulated in a small number of leading institutions, among which Cambridge university is among the most significant.   Religion has very little to do with this. I can't predict the future of the Nobel prizes, but I will say this: if you go to Cambridge today you won't have much difficulty finding Muslims doing science.  Among then may be a future Nobel laureate. She may even be at Trinity.

Lavabit, the more-secure e-mail service that Edward Snowden -- among others -- used, has abruptly shut down. From the message on their homepage:

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot....

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

In case something happens to the homepage, the full message is recorded here.

More about the public/private surveillance partnership. And another news article.

Also yesterday, Silent Circle shut down its email service:

We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.

More news stories.

This illustrates the difference between a business owned by a person, and a public corporation owned by shareholders. Ladar Levison can decide to shutter Lavabit -- a move that will personally cost him money -- because he believes it's the right thing to do. I applaud that decision, but it's one he's only able to make because he doesn't have to answer to public shareholders. Could you imagine what would happen if Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page decided to shut down Facebook or Google rather than answer National Security Letters? They couldn't. They would be fired.

When the small companies can no longer operate, it's another step in the consolidation of the surveillance society.

Food for thought:

“In het-female-oriented romance stories, the resolution of conflict between hero and heroine serves as the narrative justification for the romantic outcome: he has done Y and she has done Z, therefore they win each other. The story is about both their wants and needs, and while there’s often a stronger emotional focus on the heroine, the why of the hero’s attraction is still deemed important.

Traditional action narratives teach men that relationships are based on the successful completion of specific tasks, such that women’s internal thoughts, feelings and conflicts are a wholly irrelevant factor. 

Traditional romance narratives teach women that relationships are based on the mutual resolution of conflict. They are also constantly derided as not only lesser stories, but so inherently feminine as to be incompatible with male interest.

Which is why I will forever be deeply fucking suspicious of anyone who trumpets their love of action movies while laughing derisively at the very idea of chick flicks:”

(Via What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry | Action vs Romance.)

      The King said unto the prophet: "O Prophet of All the gods save One, shall I indeed die?"
      And the prophet answered: "O King! thy people may not rejoice for ever, and some day the King will die."
      And the King answered: "This may be so, but certainly thou shalt die. It may be that one day I shall die, but till then the lives of the people are in my hands."
      Then guards led the prophet away.
      And there arose prophets in Aradec who spake not of death to Kings.

This is another book available in its original format online, complete with illustrations by S.H. Sime. It is quite a remarkable achievement, a short collection of fantasy vignettes illustrating a new pantheon, led by the always-capitalised creator god MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ, who has fallen asleep and must not be woken (which may sound familiar); the people of Pegāna, and their prophets, have a very uneasy relationship with the various deities.

Both J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft, teenagers when it was first published, claimed to have been inspired by The Gods of Pegāna and one can see the links, though of course they took it in quite different directions. (Lovecraft also mentions Sime's art, and one can see its influence in Tolkien's drawings too.) Looking at it from the other direction, you can detect the influence of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, both of whom Dunsany would ave known well, along with perhaps some elements from his mother's cousin Sir Richard Burton. But Dunsany took all of these and made his own secondary creation; I don't think it is mch of an exaggeration to say that he helped set the tone for a whole genre.

[Introduction | Supers | Bats | Wonders & Lanterns | Solo Heroes | Justice  | The Grey Area | Magic]

That doesn’t mean no masks, and it doesn’t mean no superpowers, but it does mean fewer gaudy costumes, and a turn towards the more grimdark Vertigo/Charlton atmosphere, with two very obvious effects. There are no titles here aimed at young readers, but some are more inappropriate than others.

38. HELLBLAZER features John Constantine, hard drinking, chain smoking Londoner, magician and antihero, and while it’s not a continuation of the Vertigo title, it’s much the same in feel. John wanders London, battles the forces of magical darkness, and reluctantly saves the world. Being the only book set in London, while sometimes a character from Knight and Squire might show up, this book might as well be set in its own universe.

39. THE QUESTION is Vic Sage, a private detective and a martial artist working out of Hub City in an attempt to fix the broken city politics. He battles with his conscience constantly about how far he should go with his quest, and it’s a book about personal exploration more than anything else.

40. HQ. When the GCPD headquarters were destroyed in a bomb attack, there was only one survivor of the people within. (Jim Gordon, Maggie Sawyer and others were not in the building at the time.) Renee Montoya makes it her quest to hunt down the perpetrators: a mission that exacerbates her violent and alcoholic tendencies until she resigns from the force to pursue it full time. Her leads all point her in one direction: Mandragora. Meanwhile, Helena Bertinelli arrives in Gotham with a vendetta of her own: to find the man who killed her family. The women are at odds with each other, despite sharing a common goal, and each has strong Opinions about the other’s techniques. It is heated and angry, but a mutual respect develops, and of course, they have a whole buttload of sexual tension.

41. ADVENTURE COMICS is an anthology title focusing on non-powered or non-costumed characters: Vigilante (Patricia Chase), Roy Harper (Red Arrow), and a whole bunch of others I can’t think of right now.

42. DC: WASHINGTON. Joseph Wilson was scarred and left unable to talk by a knife attack by an enemy of his father: Slade Wilson, Deathstroke the Terminator. An adult,  Joseph wants nothing to do with the costumed community, except that occasionally he runs into associated problems in his job as Communications Director to POTUS. This is West Wing, if that story was taking place in a world where the most powerful force in the world is an alien living in an American City, where American cities are frequently hit by huge disasters, and where many ordinary people feel helpless against forces out of their control. Joseph isn’t vehemently anti-costume, but he deals with people who are. One of his staff members (the rest of the regular cast are all new characters) discovers shortly into the run that he is a White Martian, having had his memory wiped and given a false identity by the Martian Manhunter. Spoiler: he doesn’t turn into a supervillain, but realizing he is not an American citizen gives him pause to thought.

Tomorrow I will be run off my feet between derby and a ball, but next time when I get to it: OUT OF TIME

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

The very clever Debi Linton has been kind enough to think it meet to follow my lead, as far as as fantasy-league Nu52 stuff goes…but I can’t leave her a reply as I’ve recently lost my Blog-Purpose webmail account, and until I can locate another one that’s half-decent I’m unable to do a whole shitload of commenting on other people’s sites.

But, what a good opportunity to link her!  Science people are always fun to read, there is always something on their web pages that you didn’t know you wanted to know about, and Debi’s field is also one I’m not very well-versed in, and also also who doesn’t like dinosaurs?!

So thanks for the link, Debi, and right back atcha!

A couple years ago some of the Bureau Chiefs did a project called The Content Farm, which presented funny (to us) “how-to”guides on things. It didn’t last that long, but I wrote three articles over there:

How to Climb a Mountain

How to Housebreak Your Dog

How to Grow a Moustache

The other day I came across another one I wrote and submitted, but never made it to the site. Rather than let what is undoubtedly comedy platinum go to waste, I’m posting it here.

How to Get Your Dog to Swallow a Submarine

If you own a dog, chances are sooner or later you will need it to swallow a submarine. Whether it’s a small sport submarine or a huge nuclear sub, getting your pet to ingest it can be a difficult and traumatic experience for both of you. This is because submarines are usually larger than dogs, except of course for Marmaduke who is, no lie, a really big dog.

STEPS

1. Dogs love to eat things, and they love to pee on things, but they don’t generally eat the things they pee on. Do not let your dog pee on the submarine.

2. If your dog eats moist food, simply mix the submarine into its food. Chances are he’ll gobble it down without hesitation, especially if you don’t feed him for several days beforehand.

3. Dogs are nuts about peanut butter. In fact, they are peanuts about it! Ha ha. Slather the submarine with peanut butter and the dog will see it as a special treat. If your dog has a peanut allergy, try replacing the peanut butter with spaghetti sauce or a lovely kalamata-artichoke hummus.

4. Some dogs get off on sneakily eating people food. Pretend to eat the submarine yourself and tease the dog about how delicious it is. Then, either pretend to drop it on the floor or leave it unattended. The dog, realizing its opportunity to strike back against its hated human oppressor (you) will quickly devour the submarine in an attempt to quell the rage within it that daily strains against centuries of domestication.

5. Sometimes drastic measures are required. Hold the dog firmly and pinch its nose shut to get it to open its mouth. Put the submarine in quickly, then hold the dog’s mouth shut until it has to swallow. This may be take a while, so bring a book. Rub the dog’s throat to make sure it swallows the submarine completely. None of this hurts the dog and in fact you often see dogs doing this to each other in the wild.

TIPS AND WARNINGS

* Make sure there is no one on board the submarine before you begin. Under no circumstances should you allow your dog to swallow seamen.

* If the submarine carries nuclear weapons, check with your veterinarian before giving it to your dog. Some dogs react poorly to eating radioactive materials.

* Do not attempt to pilot the submarine into the dog’s mouth. Not only will he inevitably turn his head away at the last minute, but you probably don’t know how to pilot a submarine and may damage your furniture.

* Oh hey, in step 5, eventually release the dog’s nose.