Well, what a week it's been. So much to write about – the end of my second year of my degree; terrorist attacks returning to the streets of London; the somewhat uncomfortable debate on same-sex marriage. All deserve a post of their own, so first up, same-sex marriage.

Over the past few weeks and months, I've seen some extraordinary justifications as to why libertarians might want to oppose equal rights to marriage for same-sex couples. Not only that, but some even suggest that support for state recognised same-sex marriage is itself promoting the enlargement of the state and therefore thoroughly un-libertarian.

But I want to suggest that in fact the opposite is true: that any progress toward the state supporting one group equally with another whittles away at a primary manifestation of state power. You see, the state is fundamentally all about taking one side over another, one interest over another. This is the very basis of privilege. Insofar as the state privileges one group over another, be that noble over serf, capitalist over working-class, or majority interest over minority interest in a democracy, it is exercising illegitimate power.

There will likely almost always be two possible routes out of such an imbalance: to grant the disputed privilege to the currently underprivileged group, or to eradicate the existing privilege. I doubt you will find many libertarians who would disagree that, all else being equal, the latter of these, eradicating the existing privilege, would be the better. But in a situation in which this ideal solution seems highly unlikely in the foreseeable future, achieving equality sooner even if it is by ostensibly increasing the sum total of privilege dispensed by the state must be an acceptable libertarian option. In fact, since it stops the state perpetuating whatever harm is caused, or appears to be caused, by remaining relatively less privileged, sooner, even if that be "in the meantime" while stronger or more characteristically libertarian solutions can be considered, and so errs on the side of liberty over convention, it can, I believe, be considered as the better libertarian option.

In all this, I stress that I am talking about "the state". I have written previously that I don't believe that whatever the state chooses to recognise should mean that individuals and businesses have to accord similar recognition, that people should be free to discriminate between each other on any grounds they choose. But, cliche it may be, "two wrongs don't make a right", and I think a persuasive case can be made that eliminating the inequality demands higher consideration. Why do I think that? In the case of same-sex marriage at least it's because the contingent harm, potentially forcing others to recognise things in conflict with their personal sensibilities, already exists, and is just being added to. It is, for instance, the case that Roman Catholics should not recognise marriages between divorcees, but insofar as we (for I am one too) are compelled in any way to give recognition to a relationship that offends our supposed moral customs, the addition of same-sex relationships is merely one of ordinal degree rather than any new imposition.

Of course, this doesn't even touch on arguments that should be of little concern to libertarians: is, or has, marriage always being religious rather than civil; whether the last government deliberately created a second-class institution in the form of "civil partnerships" and whether these should now be made available to opposite sex couples; whether there is a cost involved to the state, and therefore the taxpayer, or not in recognising same-sex couples. But along purely libertarian arguments, yes, we would prefer perhaps no state at all in my case, or for the state not to be involved in the business of recognising particular types of codependent domestic relationships, but given the unlikelihood of either of these positions arising in the foreseeable future, it is surely right that we use any opportunity to chip away at the state's ability to privilege one group over another.

Advertisement:

read more

Here's my latest piece from the New Statesman, which was meant to be all about why right wing Tory Eurosceptics may have done their party a favour in the run up to the 2015 election, but appears (if the headline is anything to go by) to also suggest that we need to get a little more radical...

A thing to love about The Moonbase: The scenes at the start of episode 1 where they put on space suits and jump gently around. This is reminiscent of the spacesuit business at the start of The Web Planet, which was as much about establishing the TARDIS crew's dynamic as it was about establishing the particular setting for this week.

This points to a way the Cybermen are used as recurring villains that differs significantly from the Daleks. When the Daleks show up it's a sign that things are going to go bonkers (with the exception of Power of the Daleks, which is the best-disciplined story of any kind to date). A Cyberman story is one of two types: either a slow-paced Hartnell throwback (this, The Wheel in Space) or a boldly confident statement that this is what the show is like now that doesn't break new ground but executes on old ideas better than you've seen before (Tomb, The Invasion). Maybe it's the effect of the different shapes. The Cybermen are the first classic person-in-a-rubber-suit monsters. For all the emotionless schtick they come with, the fact is that they have very expressive bodies in long and medium shot; also, because they aren't quite human, there's a tendency to think you can get away with putting them on harnesses or using dummies more than you could with stuntmen playing actual huams. They lend themselves to being gracefully contorted in the same way that the Daleks lend themselves to squawking slapstick. So we have the climax of this story, the spacewalk in Wheel in Space, the mad Cyberman in the sewers in The Invasion, all of which would look and feel very different if they had Daleks instead. 

As such the Cybermen are the perfect monster for the increasing professionalism of the show, which is now aiming for “how did they do that?” rather than “what the fuck just happened?”. The show is never in the black and white era going to be as exceptional as it was in Season 2, but episode to episodde it's going to continue to be very pleasant to watch.

Back to the Moonbase: also to love, the pattern of black veins on the back of infected people's hands — I think the first time we've had a special effect of a body changing, a very visceral representation of possession. 

Anyone who would like their faith in human nature restored should read this story.

The far-right English Defence League (EDL) organised a protest today at the mosque in York. However, two wonderful things happened to ward off the threat.

First, a large number of local non-Muslims showed up to express their solidarity with the Muslim community, far outnumbering the EDL protesters.

And second, the mosque invited the EDL protesters in for a cup of tea and a chat.

Whoever said Muslims aren’t assimilating with English culture?

Some political theories are easier to test than others. My theory linking geology to voting patterns can be seen to work fairly well by comparing a geological map of Britain with a political map. The broad sweeps of chalk land correspond very closely to the Conservative heartlands of rural England, Labour has its historical strengths in the coalfields and the Liberal Democrats have a near-monopoly on the granite uplands around the Celtic fringes of the country.

Matthew Paul Turner and vorjack both direct our attention to the trailer for the upcoming comedy Rapture-Palooza:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This makes me happy for several reasons, among them:

1. John Francis Daley was pretty terrific in Freaks and Geeks — honest, vulnerable, genuine — and it’s nice to see him getting a shot at the kind of post-F&G success that folks like Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Jason Segal and James Franco have enjoyed.

2. The cast includes Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Anna Kendrick, Ana Gasteyer, Thomas Lennon, and a host of other very funny people.

3. It’s a spoof of premillennial dispensationalist “Bible prophecy” nonsense — a horrifying, incoherent, anti-biblical body of folklore ripe for satiric skewering.

But I’m also dreading the downside of this movie, because here’s the problem: This movie — this low-budget, slap-dash summer comedy — will influence, reshape and add to Christian theology.

That seems like an audacious claim to make about what appears to be a very modest B-movie. Based on little more than that trailer above, my guess is that Rapture-Palooza will disappear from theaters after a few modestly successful weeks, and then enjoy a similarly modest DVD release before settling into a long after-life on Netflix and late-night showings on basic cable. It looks like it may be the kind of flawed-but-memorable flick that includes just enough big laughs and quotable lines to live on — much like screenwriter Chris Matheson’s first success, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. My guess is that it will enter the culture in the same minor way as movies like PCU or Back to School or Big Trouble in Little China or Better Off Dead. We may not think of these as good movies, or as favorites, but somehow we wind up watching them repeatedly, in whole or in part. And if someone says “I want my two dollars!” or “Triple Lindy,” then most of us know what they’re talking about.

But Rapture-Palooza stands to be more influential than Bill and Ted or those other little movies because it’s about folklore. And stories about folklore tend to merge with and to reshape that folklore. This has always been especially true of the branch of folklore that constitutes popular theology.

And that means that scenes from this B-movie — inventions dreamed up by Matheson, ad-libs by Daley or Kendrick or Robinson — will eventually take on the status of holy writ, of scripture. Jokes written for Rapture-Palooza will, a generation from now, have been absorbed into the folklore of premillennial dispensationalist “Bible-prophecy scholarship.” The punchlines will be left behind, but the set-ups and the incidental details of those jokes will be invoked and alluded to as though they were written by John of Patmos. They will become canonical ideas repeated at hundreds of “Bible-prophecy” conferences and seminars and cited in “Bible-prophecy” books. Students at Dallas Theological Seminary will be tested on them.

We can’t know yet which scenes — which jokes, ideas, inventions, visual details, plot points, etc. — will eventually be incorporated into the canonical PMD mythology. But some of them will be. They will be absorbed into the existing body of what “everybody knows” that “the Bible teaches” about the End of the World. The preachers citing and reciting these details will have long forgotten, or never known, that these details were originally invented for a B-movie comedy. They will simply assert, with utter confidence, that everything they are saying is “based on a literal reading of the book of Revelation” — an assertion that will be accepted, and repeated without question or qualification, in countless media reports.

This is the way the weird, heterodox pop-theology of premillennial dispensationalism has always evolved over the years. It grows and spreads and changes in the same way that any urban legend does in the telling and retelling. Each new “scholar” or preacher or author adds their own embellishments. They insert new details, abandoning or altering others that didn’t get a strong reaction, changing others to try to keep pace with a changing world.

And all along that process is being shaped and reshaped by outsiders — by storytellers and jesters, and even by skeptical would-be “debunkers” — who find in this pop-theology the raw material for their own stories. The pop-theology enters the pop-culture, and then the pop-culture reworking of it re-enters the pop-theology without any acknowledgement of where these changes came from.

Think of the relationship between Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. Both men are fundamentalist Christians who found surprising success as the authors of run-away best-sellers popularizing the pop-theology of premillennial dispensational End Times Rapture-mania. Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, became the best-selling nonfiction book of that decade. LaHaye’s Left Behind series have been some of the best-selling fiction titles of the 1990s and early 2000s. LaHaye didn’t want to seem like he was borrowing from Lindsey. Like everyone in the “Bible prophecy” racket, he sought to carve out his own market niche by differentiating his End Times scheme from previous popular versions. And yet LaHaye’s books are steeped in second-generation versions of ideas earlier taught by Lindsey. These weren’t taken directly from Lindsey’s books, but were absorbed into LaHaye’s scheme from the popular culture that followed Lindsey’s best-sellers.

Consider LaHaye’s portrayal of the “Antichrist,” Nicolae Carpathia. You can’t get to Nicolae without first going through Damien Thorn — the villain of Richard Donner’s 1976 horror classic The Omen, and of its numerous sequels and remakes and imitations. And you can’t have The Omen without first having Hal Lindsey.

Those participating in this folkloric cycle between pop-theology and pop-culture don’t seem wholly aware of the cycle’s existence. LaHaye would insist that Nicolae Carpathia has nothing to do with The Omen, but that he is based exclusively on a “literal reading of the book of Revelation.” Screenwriter David Seltzer, likewise, said he was inspired by the Bible, and not by the Bible as refracted by Hal Lindsey’s psychedelic reworking of Scofield’s footnotes.

And they’re not lying. It’s quite possible that Tim LaHaye has never even seen The Omen or that Seltzer never read The Late Great Planet Earth.  They may be wholly, or mostly, unaware that the “Bible” they’re invoking is really some abstract, reinvented reinterpretation filtered through countless iterations of the pop-theology, pop-culture cycling and recycling.

It’s similar to how the current “orthodox” doctrine of Hell — a vast collection of stuff “everyone knows” that “the Bible teaches” — came to evolve over many centuries. It’s quite possible that Dante had never read the Gospel of Nicodemas and that he genuinely believed that his notions of Hell came from the Bible itself rather than from the folklore developed over centuries of embellished iterations and reiterations of that fourth-century pop-culture phenomenon. And between Dante and the current bunch of preachers insisting that “the Bible teaches” a doctrine of Hell we have centuries of this cycle repeating itself over and over again.

Dante we know and remember, but over all those intervening years countless other storytellers have come and gone. Their names and their stories are long forgotten, but details from those stories live on. Those details were embedded back into theology as the building blocks of a doctrine of Hell now defended, centuries later, as nothing more than a straightforward product of a “literal reading of the Bible.”

Popular theology feeds popular culture which in turn feeds popular theology. Cycle. Recycle. Repeat.

 

 

I love this quote from the recent marketing guide that Smashwords published:

“we cannot promise you your book will sell well, even if you follow all the tips in this guide. In fact, most books, both traditionally published and self-published, don’t sell well. Whether your book is intended to inspire, inform or entertain, millions of other books and media forms are competing against you for your prospective reader’s ever-shrinking pie of attention.”

(From Smashwords — Smashwords Book Marketing Guide – A book by Mark Coker – page 7.)

This just does not get emphasized nearly enough. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal since I published The Apocalypse Ocean. One, because so many rah rah eBook advocates have been indicating to me that if I’d only just publish digitally first I’d keep 70% of the profits and *obviously* make more than I would with ‘traditional publishing.’

Since 2001, I’d been involved in selling eBooks. I initially began with stories being sold through Fictionwise. I did this to test the waters, and begin understanding what I felt was going to be a new way of reading. I also have been reading eBooks since the same year. I’ve since switched to selling a portfolio of short story collections, individual short stories, novellas, and a novel via various eBook outlets.

I lay down my bonafides, because usually the first thing I get is a lot of ‘booksplainin,’ by which I mean people lecturing me about what to do as if it’s self evident, obvious, and usually based entirely on their own anecdotal experience.

In fact, the self assured expertise of anecdotes drives me nuts.

Here’s the data. Mark Coker, looking at sales of *all* the books self published at Smashwords, points this chart out in a recent slideshare of information and best practices (for all that he’s been an initial booster, I’m grateful to him for sharing some raw data, unlike the other venues which highlight, boost, and act as if the superstars’ stories are average):

The problem, right now, in eBook direct sales, is that everyone is paying and listening to people in the green area. They’re listening to everything they say, and sifting everything they say as if it’s a formula for success.

Like in most cultish behavior, if you follow the rules and don’t get the results, you’re either ostracized, ignored, or it’s pretended you don’t exist. Many who don’t get the same results just shut up and go away. Thus creating an environment where people are creating massive amounts of confirmation bias by continually listening to the top sellers.

In an interview recently, David Kirtley pointed out that in business school there’s this point made that if you interview rich people who have won the lottery, you might come to believe that playing the lottery is the only way to become rich. I thought that was interesting. One of the things I’m constantly trying to point out is that we’re not doing nearly enough to highlight both median and failure modes, because that’s where the real lessons lie. As for myself, I find message boards where new writers struggle to sell more than a few copies interesting, and where I harvest data about the low end.

That survivorship bias is useful to understand, and I just read a very large article that I think should be required reading for authors.

If failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing information at all.

You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other.

and

Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. It’s an unavoidable tick, the desire to deconstruct success like a thieving magpie and pull away the shimmering bits. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning.

So here’s how survivorship bias affects people. Here’s a chart from Smashwords of how all the books do in their system:

Guess where on this tail-like chart above the books and authors with the most articles, blog posts, and largest followings sit?

Mark helpfully takes out the top 100 so we can get a better look at it. But remember, the people in the top 100 are the ones that everyone points to as if those results have some meaning for the rest of everyone else.

Does this mean I’m somehow against direct digital publishing? No, obviously I’m a hybrid player and have been for over a decade now. But my refusal to damn either version of publishing means I don’t get lauded by certain parties, ink isn’t spilled over me, I’m not some vanguard. I’m just a working stiff, a mid list writer with a decent but passionate audience. Both methods have benefits and drawbacks, and I’m fully aware of both and try to communicate that.

I am trying to say ‘please approach this with some rationality.’ I’m slowly building up a portfolio over time of work that I hope will offer me an additional income stream. There are some benefits to this form of publication that I like, but to be honest, in a direct apples to apples comparison, I’m making more off the much despised traditional publishing still. By a large margin. This piece of anecdotal data means that the formula for each writer is different, and the constant ‘us vs them’ battle going on is harming artists who are losing a chance to make more money, or get a larger audience, who are being led astray.

It is only by trying lots of different methods, and paying attention to real data, not cherry picked anecdata, that you will best succeed.

If you’ve been successful, good on ya. I’m thrilled when any artist breaks out to making a living. But genuinely understand that survivorship bias means there are plenty of people plugging the same formulas and not getting results that look even similar.

This is not bitterness on my part. I’m actually thrilled with where I am, which is far ahead of many. Over half my income comes from writing fiction (and if I weren’t in debt from having a medical crisis in 2008 I’d likely be able to make a living just on my fiction). I’ve been slowly building my career since 1999, since my first tiny sale. Each year my readership grows, my blog audience grows, the money I make off my fiction grows. I use eBooks, traditional publishing and crowdsourcing all as tools to survive. I’m playing the long game. And maybe I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m pretty open to that, but I’m always happy to report on what’s going on. Each successful career I’ve seen, though, requires a ton of hard work, and many people I see trying any method with a focus on shiny and new and ‘beating’ some system often flame out and fall away. Lots of people who’re doing the right thing and working hard flame and fall away too.

Making a living off art is hard.

But that isn’t a sexy sell.

That isn’t to say you should give up. Fuck that. But I am going to say: get ready to work, don’t expect riches. Focus hard on the art.

And pay attention to those charts and adjust your expectations accordingly.

There’s a lot of snake oil sales going on. And a lot of well meaning people who won the lottery telling everyone to go buy lottery tickets while financial advisors shake their head.

Pretty much the same as its always been…

PS: this survivorship bias also works for writing advice about ‘how to write’ if you think about it…

”... on the interweb, at the close of season 7B, when no blogger can speak falsely or fail to post comments, a question will be asked — a question that will very belatedly be debated: 'what was that all about anyway?' “

The front page of today’s Daily Mirror is simply absurd. Above the headline (“IS IT REALLY TIME TO CHILLAX?”) is a strapline across the top of the page:

Our country is in the middle of a terrorism crisis, Prime Minister. And you’ve decided to go on holiday to Ibiza.

The Mirror is not alone. All of this morning’s tabloids have had a go at David Cameron for taking a week’s holiday. So let’s get things in proportion.

Our country is not “in the middle of a terrorism crisis”. There has been one murder committed by freelance Islamist nutters. It was a shocking attack, yes, but a single murder – however appalling – does not constitute a ‘crisis’. To indulge in this sort of hyperbole is to do precisely what the killers wanted. This applies especially in the case of the Daily Mirror, which accompanies its self-righteous reporting with a lurid invitation to “watch shocking footage of terrorists”.

Suppose Cameron had bowed to the demands of the tabloids and stayed in his office. What could he have achieved that has not already been done? Resurrect the Communications Data Bill, perhaps? Better he takes a break.

At the Huffington Post, Mehdi Hasan is spot on:

To be fair to the PM, he’s the one who said we should all carry on with business as usual, with normal everyday life, despite last Wednesday’s horrific crime, and we all praised him for saying so. Now, it seems, some of us cynically want to have a go at him for practising what he preaches. I’m with Dave - the only way to defeat terrorism is to refuse to be terrorised. Oh, and the only way to get ‘normal’, ‘in touch’ people at the top of politics is to allow them to do ‘normal’ and ‘in touch’ things like go on holiday. Even if it is, ahem, to Ibiza...

If I am honest I am still quite bitter about the 2011 AV referendum campaign and its outcome. Let's not kids ourselves that AV would have been a panacea. It definitely wouldn't have been. But it would have been a small step in the right direction, introduced people across the country to the idea of preferential voting and helped to ensure our MPs had a moderately stronger claim to each be there with in some cases broader support than they get under first past the post. So I am disappointed about the legacy the loss of the campaign has bequeathed us.

But what I am despondent about is the legacy that the winning No2AV campaign has bequeathed us.

Because that camp has post-hoc legitimised the misleading and outright stupid tactics that they pushed. Never mind about the truth, let's just pretend that AV is going to cost £250 million. By the time the Yes side has come up with a response the lie will have taken hold and they will be on the back foot. I've got a good wheeze: Let's publish a picture of a soldier and strongly imply that if people vote for AV they will not get the bullet-proof vests they need.  No, no hang on! I've got an even better one. Let's publish a picture of a new-born baby and even more strongly imply that if people vote for AV, sick children will not get the equipment they need. Oooh, I've got it! Let's come up with a spurious and tendentious set of reasoning that suggest the BNP will benefit from it. Oh, hang on the BNP are against AV. Who gives a shit! Let's say it anyway! Once we've released the boogeyman from the jar the Yes campaign will be playing catch-up trying to rebut it.

And so on, and so on.

I'm not saying the Yes campaign were perfect, they certainly weren't. But the No side exhibited all the characteristics of a "Whatever we need to say to win and hang the truth" campaign.

And of course they did win. Massively.

So with the Scottish independence referendum campaign coming up next year and a likely EU in/out referendum campaign in the next parliament I genuinely fear what sort of utter bollocks is going to be pushed, probably by all sides.

We've already seen huge arguments over North Sea oil where as far as I can tell misinformation is being heavily pushed by both sides and also scare stories about Sterling (Scotland could easily carry on with the pound if they wanted but why let the truth get in the way?).

And with the incipient EU campaign there are signs of where this is all heading with Nigel Farage leading the charge claiming that 75% of our laws are made in Brussels. This is simply a lie. It is 10% at the absolute most. And the pro-EU side has been at it too with Nick Clegg claiming that 3 million jobs are at risk if we withdraw which is such an extreme reading of the possibilities that it is effectively a parody.

I'm not saying the AV referendum campaign has caused all of this. But it has taught everyone involved in politics a toxic lesson. No matter how ridiculous the lie during a referendum campaign there is no effective oversight or consequences so make em big and make em scary.

All that matters is that you win.

Wow, since beginning playing with Linux desktop composition, this desktop music stuff is insane! Prithee, why in blazes does it have to be so complicated? Let's count the dialogues and windows we have to have open just to record the simplest audio file:

1. Start QJackCTL. Its sole purpose is to make Jack Audio work.
2. Now open Seq24 and load the song (which was saved before in MIDI format). My example song uses percussion and four instruments, and it's a very plain tune at that.
3. Open Hydrogen, load the drum kit this uses.
4. All the instruments are in WhySynth, so WhySynth copy #1...
5. WhySynth copy #2...
6. WhySynth copy #3...
7. WhySynth copy #4...
8. Now to play the whole song from Seq24, open the song editor window in Seq24.
9. Now open... Wait, "Jack Capture" in my menu dies with "failed to open jack_capture_gui2." Forget it. Open a terminal to run jack_capture from the command line.

That's nine windows on the desktop:

Oh, and the command you see there, 'jack_capture --mp3', don't work 'cuz jack audio wasn't compiled with mp3 support. Ha ha, how stupid I was to expect that! OK, vanilla jack_capture gets it in .wav format and figure out what to do with it later (actually, it's just "ffmpeg -i file.wav file.mp3" if you don't care about quality).

One thing I've learned: Don't scroll the song editor window while it's playing. That made the first recording sound scratchy. Yes, I know, it makes no sense, but the second time I did this it worked and the only thing different was not touching the window until recording was over.

If you think that makes no sense, wait until you see this one: I was trying to set up my ancient and increasingly useless Fedora laptop to run all the fun sound toys. Except nothing worked, I had a dozen dead programs in my multimedia menu. No error messages, no crashes, nothing, just doesn't go.

I fruitlessly scoured the docs and searched the web frantically trying everything and breaking the system even worse many times. You know what the problem turned out to be? When you install Fedora, it doesn't write the hostname to /etc/hosts, and all the Jack-Audio-dependent tools' GUIs look there and won't run without knowing which computer to start on.

No, really.

How stupid of me to have not thought of that first, right?

So, for Googlable future prosperity: "jack audio" "GUI" "hostname" "/etc/hosts" "seq24" "hexter" "wsynth" "xsynth" "whysynth" "DSSI" I'm leaving out amSynth (which doesn't have a Fedora package and the tarball won't compile) and Hydrogen (which runs just fine).
First clue found here on Linux Musicians' forum, way at the bottom. Just slap you IP (127.0.1.1 or whatever) into /etc/hosts, plus your $HOSTNAME (what you named the computer when you installed the system; the part that helps other computers find it on the network without memorizing a MAC address), save, reboot, everything works now.

BTW, I got 90% of all this going on the original desktop Mint system, but jack_capture just plain old doesn't install there. No, really, I have dozens of "jack_*" programs on tab in the terminal, no capture.

So, two fixes to my former hacks: (1) Can finally compose, play, record, and play back on one machine. (2) No longer need notepad to write down instrument hook-ups when saving a MIDI from Seq24, because duh, just rename each module after whatever it's hooked up to.

Oh, almost forgot, the wretched little song I recorded:

greasy_burgers

That kinda takes the fun out of figuring this stuff out, when you suck so bad at music composition in the first place. But somebody who really groks computers needs to go discover how to make this work because there's hundreds of would-be musicians out there frustrated trying to figure out what the hell an "etc-hosts" is.

But I'm still going to make my own ringtones. And perhaps some custom "on-hold" music for my home office...

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the alacrity with which the likes of John Reid, Lord West and Lord Carlile used the Woolwich murder to call for the reintroduction of the Communications Data Bill (aka Snoopers' Charter) long before there was any possible evidence that giving the police and other authorities access to details of everyone's internet use would have made any difference. The sight of such bigwigs demanding draconian new laws, soon to be followed by others, might strike an uninformed observer as part of a co-ordinated campaign. To me, it merely confirmed what I have long suspected, that the security establishment retains undiminished zeal for its long-cherished programme of mass surveillance, and any excuse will do. This was no simple knee-jerk.

Even as it became clear that the two alleged killers (Michaels Adebelajo and Adebewale) already known to the security services - and could therefore have been comprehensively monitored and tracked under already existing law - Home Office sources were letting it be known that Theresa May was very keen indeed to press ahead with new legislation, the only obstacle to the passage of which was assumed to be Nick Clegg. The fact that the Bill was subjected to detailed and devastating scrutiny by a Parliamentary joint committee, and that the Home Office has failed to answer or even respond to the criticisms made of its disproportionate, heavy-handed, vastly expensive and impractical proposals, seems to have been forgotten. Something bad has happened; therefore Something Must Be Done, even something that would (as Eric Pickles, perhaps going off-message, admitted) have made no difference.

But of course something bad was always going to happen eventually, and so the security nuts win either way. They are constantly needy. Highly competent and professional, the true experts (which is why we are asked to trust them) with all the resources of a modern state to draw upon, nevertheless they present themselves as being in desperate need on ever-more power and ever-greater resources, as though they are helpless in the face of a small number of largely impotent and pathetic extremists. Politicians meanwhile want to be seen doing something in response to a crisis. Whether it will actually work, or is at all relevant, is of lesser importance than the legislative activity itself. Precisely because the CDB has been so robustly criticised on civil liberties grounds it has become a totem for people who like to talk grandly of balancing security with civil liberties, a phrase that always seems to mean giving the police and the security services (and a whole lot of other governmental and quasi-governmental outfits) ever more power over the citizen. It is something that authoritarian New Labour dinosaurs like the ex-Communist Reid can wave around as a virility symbol.

The murder of Lee Rigby cannot in itself be a plausible reason for introducing (or wanting to introduce) the Snoopers' Charter, given that the accumulation of masses of data on every British citizen would have made precisely zero difference in the case of men who were already on the authorities' radar. I would go further: Woolwich is actually a good argument against the CDB. Identifying potential terrorists and extremists isn't the problem. Despite the myth of the "clean-skin", almost all those involved in terrorist plots and actions turn out to be known to the authorities, often through a past association with Anjem Choudary. If opportunities were missed to intercept the two Michaels before they committed their outrage, it was not through lack of electronic surveillance, but rather because intensively monitoring even the relatively small number of likely terrorists (around three thousand at most) to the extent that would be necessary is impractical and probably disproportionate. Strangely, the one measure that actually would help to secure more convictions of terrorist suspects, making intercept evidence available as evidence in court, has long been bitterly opposed by the security services.

What the spooks' continued the desire for the CDB reveals is their continued obsession with technical fixes, with IT and with mass surveillance for its own sake. Having access to the information has become an end in itself. It wonuldn't prevent terrorism, but it would open up huge new avenues of potential abuse, as did RIPA. It would represent another giant step towards a fully monitored population, though not of course a final one. Indeed, from the point of view of the securocrats, the CDB is a very imperfect tool, allowing access to information about who someone was in contact with but not to the actual details of what was said. This lack, currently being stressed by the CDB's proponents as proof of its moderation and respect for citizens' privacy, would, before long, be presented by those very same people people as a loophole, one that needlessly prevents the security services and the police from having the evidence they need to keep the public safe.

You can bet that if the CDB or something like it is eventually passed, either by this government or the next, then the next unpredictable terrorist incident will swiftly be adduced as evidence that the Snoopers' Charter didn't go nearly far enough, and that something much more intrusive is now needed. This is a train that only goes in one direction.

Comres has conducted a poll for Open Europe on the European elections next year, the changes are from the European elections in 2009,

The fieldwork was from the 22nd until the 24th of May, and 2003 adults were surveyed

UKIP will be delighted with this poll, the Tories will be alarmed to be polling at 21% but delighted they’re only 2% behind Labour. The Lib Dems are polling higher than they did in 2009.

The other salient parts (from the Times report)

In a rare boost for the Prime Minister, the survey reveals widespread support for his strategy of reforming Britain’s relationship with Brussels.

Asked to select the best option for the future of Britain’s relationship with Europe, the most popular response reflected Mr Cameron’s stated strategy: 38 per cent approved of repatriating powers from Brussels but remaining in the EU. One in four wanted to withdraw completely.

No more than 61 per cent of UKIP voters said that they wanted Britain to pull out altogether, suggesting that Mr Farage’s party is profiting from discontent on a wide range of issues, rather than on Europe alone. Liberal Democrat and Labour voters also backed Mr Cameron, suggesting that Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg could find themselves out of touch with their supporters if they maintain their opposition to an EU referendum.

Apologies for the brief post, I’m taking the information from a Times article, and there’s very little in this article and there’s not much else on the internet.

I’ll update this thread when more information/the data tables are out.

 

UPDATE I

There was a comres poll in January.

Then the VI for the Euros was

ComRes/People – CON 22%, LAB 35%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 23%, GRN 5%, Others 8%

Which means changes since then are

UKIP +4

Lab -12

Tories -1

LD + 10

Others -2

TSE

We all thought the snoopers’ charter (aka the Communications Data Bill) was gone. We thought Nick Clegg had killed it off. We thought it was safely dead and buried.

But today, a loud creaking sound could be heard as two coffin lids opened. One coffin contained the Communications Data Bill. The other contained former Tory leader Michael Howard (who you may recall had “something of the night” about him). Besides Howard, various zombies from among the Labour Party’s former home secretaries also sprang into action, aided by the Liberal Democrats’ very own Alex Carlile, who seems to have gone over to the dark side.

The BBC reports:

Labour and the Conservatives could unite to push through the controversial communications bill despite Lib Dem objections, a former Tory leader says.

The reason Howard and other leading Tory and Labour politicians want to revive this bill – apart, of course, from rank populism and instinctive authoritarianism – is a knee-jerk reaction to the murder in Woolwich. It’s an example of “hard cases make bad law” if ever there was one.

In today’s Observer, Henry Porter explains why mass surveillance wouldn’t have saved Drummer Rigby:

Two former Labour home secretaries, a security minister and a former “independent” reviewer of terror laws have called for the swift review of the communications data bill, following the Woolwich killing. If I didn’t believe these were the first reactions to a shocking crime, I’d put the interventions of Jack Straw, Lord (John) Reid, Lord (Alan) West and Lord (Alex) Carlile down to cynical opportunism, because I’m afraid that is very much how it looked.

Give our guys the tools to fight terror on the streets, they say; “the proportionate tools”, eagerly adds the former reviewer of terror laws, Lord Carlile. But not one of them bothered to produce the smallest evidence that the type of surveillance proposed in the “snoopers’ charter” would have stopped the two suspects, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale.

The simple flaw in their case is that both men were already known to MI5, which was aware of their associations and radicalisation. The agency, it’s claimed, may even have tried to recruit Adebolajo. If intelligence officers had thought it necessary, they possessed all the powers they needed to monitor the pair’s emails, texts, phone calls and internet use. Some 500,000 intercepts are already granted every year. So the idea that giving police and MI5 untrammelled access to the nation’s communications data would have provided vital information that would have averted Lee Rigby’s murder is almost certainly wrong.

Porter warns us about the role of the civil service in persistently reviving this bill:

...the forces advocating oppressive laws are never far from the surface. At the Home Office, there are still several senior civil servants, most notably Charles Farr, head of security and counterterrorism, who are committed to mass surveillance. Not just out of the belief that the public would be safer, one suspects, but because their personalities incline them to authoritarian solutions – obedience and control over personal freedom...

Sooner or later, another surveillance bill will appear, probably devised by Charles Farr, and almost certainly supported by [John] Reid and his nervy, authoritarian pals. If interceptions are to be upgraded to meet the challenges of developing communications, we have to be sure that they are compliant with a fully functioning democracy.

It could be worse. We could have had a Labour government:

In response to this terrible event, the government didn’t do too badly and we should be thankful that, for the moment, we are not facing another Labour attack on our freedom.

This is why I have never shared the view of some of my friends on the left of the Liberal Democrats that we and Labour are somehow together on the ‘progressive’ side of politics. The enthusiastic support for the snoopers’ charter shown by John Reid, Jack Straw and Alan Johnson should serve to remind Liberal Democrats with short memories just how illiberal New Labour was.

Postscript: An excellent piece by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator:

On Friday, I was thinking how lucky we are not to have Tony Blair anymore. Had he been still in power, there would be about 12 new laws being rammed through parliament by now.

Patrick Troughton’s Doctor – Victoriana – dark fairy tales – rewriting the whole of time and space… No, it’s not the latest Doctor Who from Steven Moffat, but a fabulous story first broadcast forty-six years ago yesterday and, appropriately for John Stuart Mill’s birthday, one of the most blazingly Liberal of all Doctor Who stories: a Dalek Faust. Last Christmas, I wrote two guest pieces about it for my friend Nick Campbell’s blog: here’s the full version of what I sent him, not one of my usual style of reviews but a series of questions and answers – and spoilers.

“Somewhere in the Dalek race, there are three Daleks with the Human Factor. Gradually, they will come to question. They will persuade other Daleks to question. You will have a rebellion on your planet!”

Episode 1 of Doctor Who – The Evil of the Daleks was first broadcast on 20th May, 1967, and though it was repeated the following year, the BBC later junked all but one of its seven episodes. That means I’ve never seen six-sevenths of it, and only came to it on audio cassette at the age of twenty, a quarter of a century later. And yet ever since then it’s been one of my favourite stories across the whole fifty years – reliably at my number 2 spot – with terrific performances all round, the Daleks as you’ve never heard them before but influencing many Doctor Who adventures since, and above all a compelling script from David Whitaker, the series’ finest writer of the 1960s. So when it approached time for my friend Nick and his friend Sarah to cover it on their blog Campbell & Hadley’s Recorder, I asked if I might take him up on one of the ‘guest pieces’ he’s occasionally prodded me to write.

To make it more manageable to interweave three people’s thoughts on a seven-part story, Nick set a tighter word count than I’d usually keep to and split the story into two. His first blog post covers Episodes 1-4; his second covers Episodes 5-7. I’ve published everything I sent him below, and you’ll spot two significant changes of style between the two, one from Nick, the other coming out of my reaction to that. I’ve been thinking of an appropriate time to follow Nick’s Christmas excitements with my ‘uncut’ version ever since, and this week seems ideal – when I noticed yesterday was the birthday of both John Stuart Mill (at which I wrote my own piece about him and Harriet Taylor) and of this most Liberal Doctor Who tale, I pulled out my notes in the afternoon and got to work. Again, I should warn that this is quite different to my usual reviews: it doesn’t just feature spoilers, but reads best if you know a little about the story (though the more structured second part is easier to follow anyway). So here’s something of an introduction to start you off…

The Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his friend Jamie (Frazer Hines) have seen off the threat of the Faceless Ones to Gatwick Airport in Swinging 1966, but their usual departure for another time and place is prevented when the TARDIS is stolen and driven off in a lorry. Using the Doctor’s own cleverness against him, a trail of clues and crooks lead them to an antique shop with a secret and back into Victorian times… Who is behind it all? Timid but driven scientist Edward Waterfield? His big-guest-star-in-a-bigger-beard colleague Theodore Maxtible (Marius Goring), financier, scientific and alchemical dilettante and steampunk Goldfinger? Their peculiar house guests, or bewildered daughters? All right, so you’ll have guessed it’s mostly the Daleks, who’ve taken advantage of Waterfield and Maxtible’s captivatingly insane Nineteenth Century time experiments to capture the Doctor and his friend for experiments of their own… But as the climax approaches on the Dalek planet of Skaro and the Doctor faces up to the Emperor Dalek at last, who is really trying to deceive who? [A clue: almost everybody.] Mashing up Victoriana and modern science fiction decades before it was fashionable, this is utterly compelling – a marvellous morality tale in sci-fi trappings from its inspired fantasy science through a country house mystery to a civil war and a powerfully Liberal moral that champions questioning individuals over rigid authority and the impulse to destroy.

The Evil of the Daleks Episodes 1-4: To Set A Trap…

After thanking Nick and Sarah for letting me join in on one of my very favourite stories, I began by observing that the start has something in common with the previous story…

The opening has an intriguing mystery to it – the spy, the clue, the transmitter as hearing aid and someone listening in… Is it ‘Revenge of the Chameleons’? Fortunately not. Mr Waterfield almost has too much personality, not too little, ostentatiously Victorian, moral, full of self-loathing and unnerving all at the same time. Unusually for Doctor Who, there’s a sharply observed class divide here too: Hall’s a small-time working class crook who, even given extra money, still has his principles; posh, ambitious businessman Perry protests that he won’t do anything “dicey” only after Waterfield’s prevented the greedy weasel from stealing his suppliers (and he creeps in later to pinch a customer). So who’s the more crooked one…?

The Doctor’s very modelled on Sherlock Holmes to start with: mistrusting the easy clue; analysing the cigarettes; spotting the matchbook; the too-short study… All used to trap him, of course, but I wonder where it comes from – Whitaker’s character notes for Troughton’s Doctor, or making us have the Victorian period in mind from the start?

The Daleks getting an evil throbbing version of the Who Theme – like a sinister machine – pre-empts The Sound of Drums by forty years almost to the week…

I really must get round to getting the new Loose Cannon Recon, but I’d been saving it for a treat. As well as the pictures, the animation and the moving Daleks to entice me, there’s one scene with three different soundtracks due to rights problems: on the original ’90s cassette release, a coffee bar scene’s simply cut; on the CD, sound restoration engineer Mark Ayres has remarkably grafted in Hold Tight; it’s only on bootlegs that you get to hear the Beatles’ Paperback Writer as Jamie picks his way round the “lassies” (it sounds from the muffled reverb like the mono mix, fact fans). And that’s the first scene where the Doctor and Jamie are really together as a pair with great comedy timing, too: “Aye, well, maybe I’m used to you.”

Troughton has a brilliant flash of indignation as he tells thieving Perry “…and because it happens to be my property!” It’s an early hint of how he’ll react when faced with the Daleks and losing control:

“What have you done with your infernal meddling?”

That’s a sign, too, like them being labelled “Devils”, that this is a going to be a very different sort of Dalek story. In theory in Doctor Who, Mr Maxtible should be right when he tries to regard them as “different people. Alien,” but here more than any other time they’re less physical monsters than a force of spiritual evil, fading from their first scene like Victorian ghosts.

Maxtible is utterly magnetic as he spins his stories like a great and terrible fairy tale, an inspired scientific fantasy, all of a piece with his later alchemical lust. There’s so much foreshadowing of what the story will be about, too: going through the looking glass, “They forced me into the horror of time travel” transforms even the heart of the series into horror, prefiguring that anything can become Dalek; the Daleks and Doctor almost instantly present the Dalek Factor and its eventual downfall (“You will obey!” “Do not question!” “I will not be your slave!”); even the ‘be careful what you wish for’ of greed for transformation in the promise

“The Daleks know many secrets. You will learn the most important…”

It’s a brilliant mystery – funny, intricate, and deadly underneath, from Molly the maid assuming our heroes are plastered to the Daleks’ aggressive Weight-watchers. One bit of writing doesn’t convince, though: Chekhov’s Portrait is a clumsier bit of exposition than most, particularly when we’re told about it twice. And I know we’re meant to feel for Ruth, caught between her obsessive father and her schizophrenic fiancé, but I just find Brigit Forsyth very cold. Possibly because when, way back in my teens, I worked in a restaurant, she was the most horrible customer we ever had and made the waitresses cry.

Was it Maxtible who thought up “Leatherman”? I ask because much of the early part of Episode 3 is him getting his “man” from London to flex his muscles while he and a Dalek eye him up. But Episode 3 and, slightly less so, 4 would have been very visual, with much less pace or meat (other than Kemel) to them than the terrific openers. Part of the problem is that Pat is so blatantly on holiday, with only a few little scenes of the Doctor giving a DVD commentary on the plot, which are rather ahead of their time (the Doctor and a Dalek! Watching humans! On television! How postmodern). Toby’s plot, particularly, could easily be discarded, with the whole ‘the violent one looks to do some burglary but is exterminated’ end already used for Kennedy.

Jamie in a temper is quite raw – it’s not just that the Doctor’s talking about him behind his back, but has gone off with two new gentleman boyfriends. With his heavy emphasis on “There’s no-one I’d rather have with me” when he finds his own rebound guy, it comes across very much as hurt that the Doctor’s dumped him just as he thought they were finally an item. And yet he’s learnt from the Doctor and applied it, too: in The Macra Terror, the Doctor laid the groundwork for so much of this story, telling people not to do as they’re told. Jamie believed that, and now his loyalty to the Doctor’s ideals makes him refuse to do what the Doctor himself says.

All right, so the story sags a bit in the middle. But what’s coming more than makes up for that…

The Evil of the Daleks Episodes 5-7: Shut Your Trap [‘Exterminate’ Font]I-only-arsked[/’Exterminate’ Font]

Three people’s random thoughts, even more or less to Nick’s suggested word limit, meant he had quite a task to puzzle over it and fit them all together – so for the second week, he suggested some prompts to get us at least talking about the same sort of things. The good news is that I answered the questions. The bad news is that we sometimes gave much the same answers. The worse news for Nick was that he could have the word limit or the answers, but not both…

Subject: Evil Questions
No, not questions that are evil – well, I hope not, anyway.

“Do not question!”

So, not evil by my standards, but…

I've just relistened to those last three episodes for the first time in years (only the second time ever, too). I'd completely forgotten that episode six twist (that the Doctor had been tricked). That's probably my favourite moment – how about you?

The Episode 6 cliffhanger of the Doctor confronting the Emperor is probably my favourite, too! For a lot of reasons – the bluff and counter-bluff of it all, the Doctor being intelligent, afraid, ruthless, but above all defiant against the biggest bully and the Universe, the fantastic sight of that bully itself… With even a bonus innuendo. Crucially, though, it gets to the heart of me because the Doctor expounding on the Human Factor versus the Dalek Factor is so absolutely Liberal, freedom against conformity and hate, all leading into how just asking questions brings down the Daleks in the final episode. So I will tell you that (spoilers!) it’s coming up sometime in my year-long countdown of Doctor Who – 50 Great Scenes. You’ll have to wait to find out what chart position it’s reached.

The reason I asked if I might join in with you on The Evil of the Daleks is that it is simply one of my absolute favourites. Sarah talked about the cassettes last week; well, I listened to this one most of all, and of that curious but brilliant all-Troughton early ’90s selection, I loved them all to start with, yet two have since dipped a little for me while two continue to soar – perhaps it’s because this and The Macra Terror seem such close thematic bedfellows. And in seven episodes, there are many more than one great scenes. Two other crucial ones that come to mind are, appropriately, mirrors: the Doctor and the nice old man both being scary; the Daleks being friendly. There’s a great moment where the Doctor’s satisfied at the close of the experiment and Waterfield, sick with horror, tries to kill him – and the Doctor gives a hint of just what an appalling thing he’s planning. Later, perhaps only Pat’s Doctor could get away with gently telling Victoria he’d let them all die. So it’s no wonder Jamie’s the voice of the viewer in saying the Doctor’s turned wrong. Contrast that, then, with the endearing ‘child’ Daleks playing, particularly Omega with his incredibly deep voice (and note that the ruthless Doctor sends his innocent children off to war).

Of all Doctor Who stories, this has a fair claim to being the ‘ultimate’ one, and it was clearly designed that way – not just that it’s so well-done, full of atmosphere, characters and ideas, but that you could imagine it working as a Doctor Who film. Because it’s about adventures throughout time and space, almost all single Who stories would be lacking something in a standalone film – but this is structured almost uniquely through present, past and future / an alien world overlapping. The only thing that’s weird about this perfection is that the adventure is following the TARDIS, rather than aboard it.

Here we are back on Skaro, blowing it up. Is this an affectionate goodbye to the Hartnell era, do you think, or a slightly aggressive wipe of the blackboard (better metaphors are welcome).

I think it’s really striking out in a different direction to William Hartnell’s Dalek stories, which intriguingly raised the stakes and broadened the canvas with each return – and adds a dash of TV21’s Dalek strips (in the form of a rebellion among the Daleks, and ‘nicer’ Daleks) long before Russell T Davies did them in Bad Wolf. David Whitaker has a subtly different conception of the Daleks to Terry Nation; in some ways Nation’s is more powerful, with the starkness of space Nazis, but Whitaker makes them more insidious, corrupters, our bad angels – most of all here, as I’ve said, a force of spiritual evil for Doctor Who’s Faust. Though it does have curious (or not so curious, given that Whitaker was script editor behind both) parallels with both The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth – it’s the final end of the Daleks, in their city, again, and makes explicit the mash-up of different time periods that was a subtext in the invasion (technically the future / feels like the 1960s the viewers knew, smashed / but essentially the iconography of ‘what if the Nazis had won in the 1940s?’). I don’t think it’s really about the Hartnell era, for all that – Troughton is very distinct and his own Doctor here, and Whitaker is pitting the Doctor and the Daleks against each other in their essences rather than physically.

A lot of good work seems to be done with playing with Dalek voices, even having an untreated one in the form of Maxtible. Do you think this story would succeed with different audio, or cheaper visuals…?

It’s a brilliant script, but obviously that almost everything seems to work helps – I can think of other terrific scripts hated by fans largely because they’re not delivered nearly so well (Paradise Towers, for example). Here, the actors and the atmosphere are top-notch, and imagining it with, say, the Day of the Daleks Dalek voices doesn’t bear thinking about. Despite not being able to see most of it, knowing that some of it was filmed Grim’s Dyke has always been a bit of a thrill, as my Nana and Grandad lived near Old Redding when I was a boy, so I’d play just across the road from Maxtible’s house when visiting.

Do you or have you ever found the Daleks scary, and why? Do you like the Daleks? And if you do or don't particularly, do you think it affects your enjoyment of this story?

I’ve always found the Daleks powerful – in design and concept, as space Nazis in individual tanks, the embodiment of war and hate. Certainly the best Who monster… Though, unlike some, I think they were more tense or thrilling than nightmarish. Some monsters literally did give me nightmares as a boy, but, oddly, the scene from Genesis of the Daleks that did wasn’t one with Daleks in it. They have a fantastic vocal and insidious presence here, only really becoming a physical threat (despite the odd extermination!) at the close of Episode 6. It’s odd – I can never make up my mind whether effectively making them malevolent spirits displays them at their essence or very out of character. Either way, for me this is their best story.

Do you think Terry Nation could have written this story (I did wonder if the inclusion of a countdown was deliberate homage by Whitaker)? Do you think it was inevitable that this story – the final destruction of the Daleks – would be written?

I don’t think Terry Nation could possibly have written this story, but then I don’t think he wanted to. He banned Emperors, didn’t he, and he hated Daleks being ‘sent up’ (except when he did it, and far more dumbly than “Dizzy Daleks”). His writing Death To the Daleks as a riposte to Mr Whitaker’s The Power of the Daleks fell flat; arguably, he might have written Genesis of the Daleks as a comeback to this story, far more successfully, and Whitaker couldn’t have written that. I’m happy for different writers to be different.

As for “The final end,” well, Nation did that in his first story, didn’t he? So Skaro’s blown up already, with more to come (it’s worse than Atlantis). It was inevitable once Nation said he was taking them away that the BBC would do something big, but that’s not the only reason – it’s happened again and again. Russell did the final destruction of the Daleks four times, didn’t he?

Would you rather have Victoria, Kemel or her father surviving to go off with the Doctor and Jamie at the end?

Well, it would have to be Victoria Waterfield, of that lot, designed as she is from the archetypal companion template (slightly plucky but screaming, plus ‘my daddy was quite posh but he’s dead now, so the Doctor can be a substitute while a/nobody misses me and b/ until I grow up / fall in love / have a nervous breakdown and find a second set of surrogate parents’). Edward Waterfield being such a timid old stick wouldn’t fit the format, and Kemel not speaking would make him unable to say ‘But what is it, Doctor?’ or scream. Though I think there was a Kemel in-joke in Vastra Investigates on the Red Button tonight, about Strax: “Funny-looking fellow. Turkish, is he?”

[On watching it, it has rather a lot of Troughton references, notably the Yeti stories and The Box of Delights, so this was almost certainly deliberate.]

I’m strangely tempted to have Maxtible join the crew, though – he could wander round being charmingly patrician and exploring, then trying to nick everything, while everyone admires his enormous bouffant. It would be like Pertwee in the TARDIS a few years early. Or Beta the friendly Dalek – yes, Beta would be a good companion.

‘I like gliding about in circles and giggling tinnily! Why does everyone run away when I come out of the TARDIS?’

Would you swap episode 2 of this story for another surviving Evil episode?

Well, I’d like to see them all – Jamie awkward amid Paperback Writer and the “lassies”, even the slightly sagging middle ones for their visual impact, but any of Episodes 5, 6 or 7, especially, which are all spellbinding. Perhaps 6, counter-intuitively; we’ve got some of the footage of “The final end,” and while it’s better than it has any right to be, perhaps I’d rather see the Daleks’ strange playfulness amid the Victoriana and the Doctor’s big confrontation with the Emperor. I suppose the real answer has to be no, because I wouldn’t want to lose those marvellous scenes of the Doctor and Jamie creeping about and working it out, or the first sight of Maxtible’s magnificent beard, or most of all the whole gripping, dreamlike then nightmarish scene in the laboratory.

Last week I wondered whether Whitaker's Daleks are a nightmare of nuclear fallout. This week's episodes made me question that slightly. But what do you think this story is about?

The Evil of the Daleks is about as clear thematically as you get in Doctor Who – of course, it’s David Whitaker’s Faust. And whether he intended it with this story deliberately, or it arose naturally from his or the series’ views, it’s also as unambiguously Liberal as the show gets, as I’ve written on in my How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal.

This story raises the Daleks from a physical to a metaphysical threat – malevolent spirits that plot to seed all humanity with “The Dalek Factor”, taking even the Doctor for a ride. We see many transformations, with the ultimate conflict of our hero and the greatest villains each attempting to ‘turn’ the other, with alchemist Maxtible making this explicit as the Faust figure, though there’s temptation all the way through (and, as Dalek, he makes the devil as antichrist metaphor blatant, too, telling the Doctor to “Rise up and follow me”). Like Kennedy and Toby before him, Maxtible is overtaken by his greed – it’s almost ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of the Daleks: Avarice’, isn’t it? Mind you, both the Doctor and the Emperor are over-proud, Jamie is full of wrath (and fancies Victoria), Perry was envious and Terrall accused the Doctor of gluttony… You’d think in the seven episodes they’d have found time for Sloth. Or could they not be bothered?

It’s difficult to think of a more strikingly Liberal allegory than defining what makes humans Human as asking awkward questions and making your own decisions, with the Doctor contrastingly identifying the core of “the Dalek Factor” as “to obey,” even before “to exterminate”. While from the first and in many subsequent stories the Daleks have been metaphors for the Nazis, here they are broadened to encompass all enemies of free thought who simply do as they’re told. And where the anti-racism of the first Dalek story was a bit let down by the ‘normal people = good, ugly monsters = bad,’ here the human Daleks aren’t monsters, but Maxtible is, and his becoming a Dalek just hammers the point home.

In what ways has Doctor Who changed by the end of this story?

I’m not certain what you were after with “has Doctor Who changed by the end of this story?” The series, the character, and just within this story or since 1963? It’s certainly become more complex since then, with the Doctor here more palpably alien than he’s ever been (after developing that way in The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Tenth Planet), and more proactive (even starting as reactive in this story, he turns it around in a major way). For all that it introduces Victoria, it’s only in her fourth episode that she interacts with anyone or displays any character beyond ‘Wailing’ and ‘McGuffin’ – this is about Jamie, cementing him as this Doctor’s other half, not least when they fall out, and in the bigger picture, it introduces the idea of staging a story through different time periods as a thematic structure rather than random travelogue, arguably paving the way for but not a direct influence on the likes of Carnival of Monsters and City of Death (and certainly The War Games, much the same story if with a far bleaker view of human nature). At the time, it was establishing a more ruthless Doctor (a deliberate plan, rather than pretend bumbling) and clearing the decks of the Daleks, ready for new monsters, as well as, with The Macra Terror, pairing the peak of the series’ Liberal philosophy with mass destruction – well, freedom’s dangerous. This was the first purpose-built ‘season finale’, too, of which many more later – the first two seasons had ended with a triumphal scene, but here it’s the whole adventure. And, of course, if you’re asking about changes, much of this story’s about transformation, and yet it says that the Doctor is a transforming agent himself, a catalyst, and so can’t himself be changed. Which is lucky.

If you could change one thing about the story, what would it be?

Will the QI hooters go off if I say ‘The BBC to have kept all of it’? It’s tempting to truncate Episodes 3 and 4 into each other, but I don’t really want less of it, so coming in at Episode 5, that one’s gripping and fabulous but a couple of its ideas don’t quite deliver. Whitaker has a rare clumsy bit of writing in blowing Maxtible’s mesmerism within seconds of it being hinted at, which could do with a polish, but I think were I to change one thing it would be Arthur Terrall. His schizophrenic outbursts and, here, strange physical properties have been building to something, and then rather fizzle out. There are two possibilities that seem hinted at – that he’s an early attempt at the Dalek Factor, a failed experiment, which is why they have to call the Doctor in; or, more gruesomely (but what I was expecting the first time I heard it, when I was twenty and very much into existential crises), that he’s a Dalek android who doesn’t realise it, with his ‘real’ body that Ruth had fallen in love with long-dead. The control device and ‘get him away’ really aren’t good enough – his mystery deserves better, particularly after that terrific scene where the Doctor is flighty, enquiring, commanding, and generally winding Terrall up, with Troughton’s marvellous, mellifluously delivered line about his interest in all forms of life (contrasting directly with “There is only one form of life that matters – Dalek life”).

[It occurs to me after I’ve sent this that on top of doing Power with their tricksiness and “I am your soldier,” Mark Gatiss must have thought the same thing about Terrall – that’s where he got his boffin with the heart of Dalekanium from, isn’t it?]

Now, if this was one of my proper reviews, it would end in some kind of conclusion, but Nick didn’t ask me for one, and I can only obey. No… That’s not right! Then I’ll just finish with three other temptations, if the Faustian appeal of all of the above didn’t quite persuade you, which inevitably conclude with a final response – not an answer – to the story’s crucial question. The Daleks waking dizzily as humans and realizing they now have a sense of fun are so weirdly endearing that I put them on my first answerphone message; if you pay attention to the two key technologies they use at either end of the plot, you’ll realise that the Dalek plan is literally smoke and mirrors; and nothing can quite prepare you – or him – for the Black Dalek’s appalled, hysterical, ooh-I’ve-never-been-so reaction to the simple act of a Dalek asking a question:

“Who spoke? Who questioned a Dalek command?!”

Thanks as always for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

A thing to love about The Highlanders: Polly's best scenes, as she merrily passes the Bechdel test and outsmarts the English in a much saucier way than we're used to. Also, “I should like a hat like that”, the best catchphrase until “Are you my mummy?”. Admittedly, the competition is “Affirmative, Master” and “Excellent”, so maybe this isn't saying much.

And it's farewell, or rather fare-THEE-well, to the historicals. Even at their worst, they tended to be good, offering writers a chance to relax a bit about the setting and really get their teeth into the characters and plot. Only one, The Reign of Terror, is actually bad; all of the others are packed with moments of delight and humanity. The Highlanders is probably the second worst. It's remarkably inconsistent in tone, not sure how to play the scene where the Doctor and Jamie's party are all one kick away from actually being hanged. However, once it settles down and decides it's a romp, it's plenty entertaining. This was perhaps the death of the historicals: as the writers got more self-conscious, the middles of the historicals continued to be easy to write, but it got harder and harder to get the Doctor and his friends into the story and to get them out — and not just in a psychic paper way, in a way that caused as little damage as possible to the known facts. Fortunately, David Whitaker has just shown that the base under siege can be used to tell great stories as well; hopefully they'll use this knowledge sparingly.

In just over a week the Lords will have their Second Reading of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill. The House of Commons easily passed this Bill (with the usual ineffective Tory and DUP grumbling), but all signs point to a tougher fight in the House of Lords.

It is absolutely essential that, if you support marriage equality, you write to a peer or two to let them know how you feel. There is simply no time to hang around. Do it today.

Don't know what Lord to write to? Let me know, there are few that still need to be contacted.

The debate on the 3rd of June is looking to be very long and, I suspect, rather unpleasant. Positive voices may help keep it a little more civil that the Commons.

Write to a peer, be polite, be sincere and you never know what might happen.

The time to act is now!

GQ shows its ignorance of just about anything to do with the Liberal Democrats:

Now that Clegg is in the most stable position of all the party leaders – Cameron has overseen fractures with gay marriage and Europe; Miliband is facing his Waterloo over whether or not to accept Coalition spending plans – this Balham tête-à-tête sparked some mischievous speculation. With Alexander’s star rising, did the Italian dinner involve a Granita pact for the 21st century? If so, it would – in the event of a hung parliament in 2015 – see Clegg step down for Alexander to take over as both Lib Dem leader and Deputy PM.

Actually, they are also showing their ignorance of politics. Like the leader of any party is going to step down in the middle of Coalition negotiations, for a start.

And even if there were to be a vacancy, it’s not just like one leader can just hand over to the next. Unlike any other party, our leadership contests are decided exclusively by one member one vote,  no added influence for interest groups or parliamentarians.

Danny Alexander doesn’t do ever so well in our Liberal Democrat Voice members’ surveys although he edged himself out of bottom five, just, in our most recent one.

But apart from all of that, the act of two politicians going into a restaurant and having a meal together is hardly prima facie evidence of doing a deal on the future leadership of their party.

 

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

The Sunday Times is reporting that (££)

“A growing number of the talented 2010 intake of MPs, who could play a key role in deciding Cameron’s fate, now believe their party should withdraw from the coalition at least a year before the next general election in 2015.

They believe Cameron may have to lead a minority government to save seats.

“We are the ones who are going to be picking up the pieces if we go down in 2015. The prime minister may have to choose between insisting on staying in the coalition and keeping his job,” one respected 2010 MP said.”

What makes this story interesting is as the Sunday Times reports that this isn’t the usual suspects, who make no secret of their disdain for the Lib Dems.

The Sunday Times also reports the usual suspect Adam Afriyie

Now has enough secret pledges of support to trigger a “no confidence” vote in the leader.

However, his supporters do not believe this is the time to strike.

What may be focusing the minds of these MPs is the bottom left front of the front page of The Sunday Times, which is reporting

Tory donors eye UKIP in revolt against Cameron, which includes some of the party’s most prominent and largest donors publicly expressing their doubts over Europe and or gay marriage.

This follows on from the news in the last 24 hours that City firms switching from Tories to UKIP, says Nigel Farage

 

SUNDAY TIMES FRONTPAGE: Missed clues on terror suspects #SkyPapers twitter.com/SkyNews/status…

— Sky News (@SkyNews) May 25, 2013

The other thing that maybe focusing the minds of Tory MPs is the latest Survation poll.

 

 

This is the second poll from Survation that shows UKIP only two points behind the Conservatives, proving their poll earlier on in the week was no outlier.

As Mike said a few days ago, the Tories collapsing the coalition leads to an early general election.

The best odds I can see at the moment for a 2013 General election is 12/1 with William Hill and for a 2014 General election is 11/2, with both with Corals and Paddy Power.

A full range of odds on the year of the next election can be viewed here.

Ladbrokes offers odds on Cameron being replaced as leader before the General Election at 5/2

Whilst Paddy Power offer that  David Cameron, before the next election

To face no leadership vote of confidence – 4/11

To face a leadership vote of confidence and win – 4/1

To face a leadership vote of confidence and lose – 9/2

TSE

An anonymous reader sends news of a study which found that "two out of five medical students have an unconscious bias against obese people." The study, published in the Journal of Academic Medicine (abstract) examined med students from many different cultural and geographical backgrounds. "The researchers used a computer program called the Weight Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measures students’ unconscious preferences for 'fat' or 'thin' individuals. Students also answered a survey assessing their conscious weight-related preferences. The authors determined if the students were aware of their bias by seeing if their IAT results matched their stated preferences. Overall, 39 percent of medical students had a moderate to strong unconscious anti-fat bias as compared to 17 percent who had a moderate to strong anti-thin bias. Less than 25 percent of students were aware of their biases. 'Because anti-fat stigma is so prevalent and a significant barrier to the treatment of obesity, teaching medical students to recognize and mitigate this bias is crucial to improving the care for the two-thirds of American adults who are now overweight or obese,' Miller said. 'Medical schools should address weight bias as part of a comprehensive obesity curriculum.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is going to be a relatively short "Crib Sheet" piece: turns out I've already written most of it:

Here are my memories of the history of "Iron Sunrise", including an excised section with a talking cat sidekick.

Here's an explanation of the structural problems with the Eschaton universe which blocked me from writing of a third book in the series. (Note that some of the ideas for "Space Pirates of KPMG" eventually surfaced in a highly modified form, in different space opera project of mine — Neptune's Brood, which is due out early this July. Which, ahem has a fan.)

Now for a meta-note: I made a contractual mistake common to first-time novelists with "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", which I shall talk about below the fold, in case any other first-time novelists are reading these notes ...

When you sell your first novel to a major publisher, you will discover that they are not buying your first novel. Nobody knows who the hell you are (unless you're William Gibson) so it will probably disappear, and certainly won't be a runaway success. But the canny editor knows that if your subsequent novels are up to the same standard as the first, you will gradually acquire a following and begin to show a net profit around the second or third book. So rather than issuing a contract for just one book, they'll offer you a two (or even three) book contract, with an option (right of first refusal) on your next novel thereafter. Because what they're actually buying is a stake in your subsequent career.

These days, editors are workflow/production managers who work for (or at best, alongside) an all-powerful marketing department. They do not have the authority to sign off on an advance for a book (which may in a few cases be larger than their own annual salary, and is almost always more than a month's wages) without some oversight; in particular, there's no point buying a book if marketing think it's a turkey (because if the marketing folks lack confidence in the product, it almost certainly won't sell). So proposed acquisitions have to run the gauntlet of an internal committee meeting in which editorial, marketing, production, and finance all have to agree it makes sense to issue the contract.

It is much easier to convince such a committee that book #2 from an author is a safe bet if it is a sequel to book #1, because it is much easier to describe a sequel to an already-written book than an unwritten random-other-novel. So the contract offered to a first timer will typically be for Book One [insert title of the book that $AUTHOR is selling] "and a sequel, Book Two [title to be decided]".

Now, it's not hard to break out of this trap if you already have a chunk of book #2 written. If I'd said, "Book Two will be 'Iron Sunrise', a different and better space opera, and here's the first four chapters and an outline", my agent could almost certainly have decoupled "Iron Sunrise" from "Singularity Sky" in the contract — and, more importantly, given me a clean sheet to work with, rather than having to work with the design errors built into the universe of "Singularity Sky".

Unfortunately, at that time I still thought of "Iron Sunrise" as being book 2 in a series—rather than "Singularity Sky" as being a prototype for a space opera series, and "Iron Sunrise" as being the first book in the series I should have written. So I didn't object to the contract for "Singularity Sky and a sequel", and I wrote a sequel ... then subsequently tripped over my own first-timer mistakes.

The moral of this story is that if you're a first-time novelist, it's a mistake to assume that your first novel is the first book in a series. It's a first novel: there are probably flaws that you won't notice until you've written a couple more. Publisher try to lock you into a series because it's convenient for marketing purposes, not because it's mandatory: try to leave yourself some maneuvering room.

Finally, in 2007 I began writing "Saturn's Children". I was under contract to write a space opera: originally it was meant (per contract) to be that impossible third Eschaton novel. When I realized I couldn't do that, I didn't set out to design a multi-book space opera universe—but I tried to make the universe of "Saturn's Children" internally consistent. That helped a lot. A year after it came out, Jonathan Strahan approached me for a short story for a hard-SF anthology: I came up with a short piece set in the same universe as "Saturn's Children" and realized that, yes, this universe was sufficiently soundly constructed that I could set more stories in it without breaking things at random. Which is why "Neptune's Brood", due this July, was set in the same universe. (I have some reservations about the ending of "Neptune's Brood" which, arguably, changes everything—but it's a single-point change, and I don't think it introduces paradoxes in the setting that preclude further stories. In fact, it may even be a launchpad for other stories in its own right.)

 

Yes, you did read that headline correctly, it wasn’t a typo, I am going to discuss whether the Lib Dems can make net gains in parliamentary seats at the 2015 General election, which might seem odd, given the Lib Dems current travails in the polls.

Since the start of April, of the 37 polls conducted by YouGov, the Lib Dems have only led UKIP in four of them, averaging 10.4% to UKIP’s 12.8% in that period.

In the 16 non YouGov polls published since April, The Lib Dems have only led UKIP in one poll, that was the April ICM poll for the Guardian, where they led UKIP by 6%, by the time of May Guardian ICM poll, UKIP led the Lib Dems by 7% in that poll.

In these non YouGov polls, the Lib Dems averaged 9.4% to UKIP’s 16.1%

So why am I suggesting the Lib Dems could make net gains at the next election?

It was said UKIP cost the Tories anywhere from 5 to 10 seats in the 2010 General Election.

That was when they polled a little over 3% nationwide in The General Election.

Just imagine how many seats they can cost the Conservatives if they poll on election day anything like they are currently polling.

Even if they poll on election day half of what they are currently polling with ICM, that would be 9%, three times what they achieved in 2010.

There is evidence that UKIP surge is coming disproportionately from people who voted Conservative in 2010, per the ICM poll for the Guardian this month

Over a quarter of Cameron’s 2010 backers, 27%, had switched to Ukip by May. Some 13% of 2010 Labour supporters have gone the same way, together with 12% of 2010 Lib Dems.

(I’m making the assumption that the UKIP will do better in the South of England, than in other parts of the UK, hence the focus on the Southern seats)

The graph below shows the number of seats in the South of England where the Tories are the incumbents, the Lib Dems are second and the majority is less than 10%.

You can see exactly what seats could be in the Lib Dem sights here

If UKIP maintain their current polling performance at the General Election, then those seats have the potential to become gains for the Lib Dems.

There is precedent for the nationwide Lib Dem share of the vote to decline, but for the seat numbers to go up. In the 1997 General Election, the Lib Dem share of the vote declined by 1%, but in terms of seats, they went from 18 MPs to 46 MPs.

At the last General Election, the Lib Dem share of the vote went up 1%, but they suffered a net loss in seats, going from having 62 MPs to 57 MPs.

The Eastleigh by-election showed how effective the Lib Dem ground game is, particularly in the seats they hold, as Lord Ashcroft noted in January

The Lib Dems will almost certainly do better on the day than their poll numbers currently suggest, since local factors and popular MPs are a more important part of their appeal.

A few weeks prior to the by-election, the Lib Dems were polling 7% with phone pollster Mori, and trailing UKIP.

The irony that a mixture of first past the post and UKIP, could benefit the Lib Dems, will not be lost on some.

Currently the Lib Dems have 57 MPs, Ladbrokes have the following odds on the Lib Dem seat ranges at the next General Election

• 0-10, 12/1
• 11-20, 5/1
• 21-30, 4/1
• 31-40, 3/1
• 41-50, 4/1
• 51-60, 10/1
• 61-70, 20/1
• 71+, 10/1

The 51+ odds look enticing to me.

TSE

When it comes to how to deal with ex-gay therapy, I'm deeply conflicted.

On one hand:

- I'm pretty confident that it does not work. Suppressing your sexuality is not changing it. The evidence seems to back this up and even former ex-gay leaders are starting to admit this.
- As it doesn't work, giving "false hope" to those, often vulnerable, individuals who want to change their sexuality is dangerous. It serves only to make them feel even worse when they are told their sexuality can change but it doesn't.
- You don't go to a Doctor and expect to receive homeopathy (unless you're a little mad) so you don't go to a psychiatrist and expect to be offered ex-gay therapy. It seems to be deeply wrong for any professional psychiatrist or counsellor to offer this.
- I just don't really get it because I don't see why anyone would want to change their sexuality. But that's just my bias...

On the other hand:

- As long as there is no coercion, this seems like a straight-forward case of freedom both for the individual to pursue this sort of therapy and for people to offer it.
- I don't want people to be gay. I want them to be happy. If not being gay makes them happy, who am I to deny them the right to work on that? Although how finding one gender attractive and the other not can make you happy/unhappy I don't know. Oh bias again...
- Ex-gay therapy is often given a good kicking but when will we review all other sorts of dangerously unscientific therapies like "sex addiction" therapy or anti-masturbation counselling (trust me, the Mormons have this!)

So yes, I'm pretty conflicted on this subject but feel I should welcome Diana Johnson's proposal for Parliament to tackle the subject. Certainly the idea that NHS funds have been used for conversion therapy makes me feel a little sick. I just know that if this subject ever does make it to Parliament, the debates will be just awful to behold.

An anonymous reader writes "As we in the U.S. settle in for Memorial Day weekend, this article points out how our cultural addiction to technology is making it less of a vacation than it used to be. 'The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes. Meanwhile, government data from 2011 says 35 percent of us work on weekends, and those who do average five hours of labor, often without compensation — or even a thank you. The other 65 percent were probably too busy to answer surveyors' questions.' Even for those of us who don't have any work to do over the weekend, we'll probably end up reading all of our work-related emails as they roll in, and take time out of our day to think about what's going on — to the detriment of our weekend activities: 'A study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that new experiences fail to become long-term memories unless brains have downtime for review.' I imagine it's even worse for your average Slashdotter, who's likely plugged in to more technology at home and at work. How can we make our employers understand that downtime needs to remain downtime? 'It took labor unions 100 years to fight for nights and weekends off, some say, while smartphones took them away in about three years.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.