Scarfolk Council had a few problems with outsiders, or "Scarfnots" as they were known, interfering in town affairs throughout the 1970s, so it developed a scheme to encourage civic discretion.

The severity of punishment for a "loose tongue" more or less guaranteed obedience, though a few Black Spot cards were issued.

For example, four year old Jeremy Chapped inadvertently discussed with his "Scarfnot" trepanning teacher the sudden, inexplicable appearances of ancient megaliths in schools and community centres, and found himself facing capital punishment.

In lieu of this penalty he pushed an unloved aunt in the path of a speeding hovercraft for which he received not only a cub scout badge, but also a £5 book token from the mayor.

It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at 'The Reign of Terror' for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should've been called 'That Isn't Right'. So I've given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.

I wasn't going out on much a limb dissing 'The Reign of Terror' (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it.  'The Aztecs', by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good.  It isn't that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it's Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.

I'm not actually going to say that it's bad, as such.  On the whole, it's very well made.  But....


Black and White and Red All Over

"Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa... do you approve of interracial marriage?"

Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people.  It's not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are 'darked-up' (what would you call it... bronzeface?).  It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they've been reddened.  But even if they weren't actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another.  Costume, ostensibly 'native' mannerisms and speech patterns, etc.  It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar.  Remember, not all blackface involves actual 'darking-up'.  These days, many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group, whether in overtly parodic form or not.  As China Miéville has observed, the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal "modern blackface" by putting speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they're not black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech) into the mouths of 'the Few', thus implicitly comparing today's supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, 'entitled' youngsters with the generation of the "finest hour".  Miéville points out that such juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys 'putting on' verbal fancy dress such as "innit") are the standard obsession of Radio 4 comedy panel shows.  The more overtly sinister version of these same assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.

While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of 'darking-up' was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when 'The Aztecs' (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made.  Even so, it's far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice.  It was common practice, but that isn't an excuse.  Lots of things are common practice.  Excluding young women from important jobs was common practice when Sydney Newman hired Verity Lambert.  Admittedly, when early Doctor Who puts actors in dark make-up, it's usually as part of an attempt to represent other cultures with a degree of integrity rather than to outright parody them.  The educational remit was (at least to start with) a kind of guaranteur that other cultures were to be represented more-or-less 'factually' rather than in parodic terms.  Lucarotti is clearly trying to 'play it straight' in both 'Marco Polo' and 'The Aztecs', as is David Whitaker in 'The Crusade'.  It's fair to say that people at the time may have genuinely perceived a gulf between 'appropriate' make-up conventions in drama about 'foreign' cultures and what went on in The Black & White Minstrel Show.  They were fundamentally different projects.  Still, the implicit assumption of 'The Aztecs' is that Aztec culture is 'ours' (i.e. white Europe's) to represent as we will.  This is the implicit assumption underlying all variants of blackface. It is an inherently imperialistic assumption.

It has recently been suggested to me that criticising old episodes on this basis is like criticising them for not having CGI effects: it is anachronistic.  This is, of course, partly true, in that the idea of this being a criticism would not have occured to many people at the time... but it obscures more than it reveals.  Firstly, it's actually just a restatement of the problem.  Secondly, the analogy fails because the concept of CGI was not only impossible but actually inconceivable in 1963.  There were no similarly ontological reasons why the idea of casting Mexican actors to play Mexicans was impossible and inconcievable.  CGI hadn't been invented then; Mexicans had.  (We must, I suppose, add the rider that modern Mexicans - Mestizos - are, unlike the Aztecs, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry.)  The fact that the idea probably didn't occur to anybody isn't an alibi for the series; it is, in and of itself, an indictment of the society of which the series was a product.  In short, it doesn't neutralise the criticism but rather widens it.  It takes us beyond aesthetic nitpicking, moralistic fingerpointing or identity politics, into the realms of broad social critique.

But am I really having a go at such a treasured old episode on these grounds?  Is that okay, even with the alibi that it serves as a 'way in' to wider social issues?  Well, yeah, I think so.  As I say, I'm not moralising (that doesn't interest me) but I am putting forward the 'bronzeface' issue - and its wider implications of appropriation - as a reason to criticise the story.  I think it's altogether too easy and casual the way we tend to toss off phrases like "oh, well, it was of it's time" as though that answers everything and makes it all unproblematic.  I'm sorry, but we're talking about a culture that was genocidally destroyed by Europeans.  Should we really be so sanguine about such sanguinary history?  Isn't there room for a qualm or two about the fact that Europeans are still merrily dressing up as people that Europeans annihilated?  (Yes, yes, I know the Aztecs were themselves conquerors, and Cortés had help from other indigenous Mexicans... that's not the point.  Every imperialist army finds local support and many conquered cultures had their own crimes to answer for... none of that effaces the issue of imperialism itself.  There is a fundamental, quantitative, qualitative difference between, say, the forms of slavery once practiced within Africa and the genocide stemming from the modern European slave trade.  To not see this is to be morally blind.)

There might be a case for saying 'let it go' if we weren't still plagued by blackface and its variants, as well as the social causes which make it seem entirely unproblematic for the dominant (white) culture to represent certain groups as it pleases, without their views being taken into account.  But.  Johnny Depp is soon to appear in redface as Tonto in the new Lone Ranger movie.  Ben Affleck played a hispanic-American character in Argo (which also assumed the right to use Iran as a foil for American moral superiority).  Look up how they celebrate Christmas in Holland, and have a look at Sinterklaas and his little helper Zwarte Piet, a comedy golliwog (played by white Dutch people in black make-up and wigs) who follows Sinterklaas around on a lead, performing menial chores, begging for scraps and generally being comedically stupid.  Even the Telegraph doesn't think it's acceptable.  Relatedly, anybody who wants to know about 'cripping up' in theatre, films and TV (i.e. 'able bodied' or 'full size' people playing the wheelchair bound or dwarves, thus taking work away from disabled and/or dwarf actors) only needs to mention it to Nabil Shaban on Facebook. 

The Aztecs may be gone, but there are still millions of oppressed people in the world who have to watch as dominant media culture appropriates their appearance and culture as it pleases, representing them in ways which range from the excluding to the patronising to the dehumanising. Does it help anybody if I snipe at an old episode of Doctor Who?  No.  But nor does it help to allow oneself to become innured to the cultural evidence of oppression, to the point where one doesn't notice it enough to be uncomfortable.  Discomfort is sometimes a duty.  It's just far too easy to be comfortable with the representation of others, especially for someone like me whose own group is never going to be patronisingly represented by someone else.  There's an argument you hear about, say, the casting of John Bennett as Chang in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  It goes something like 'well, they just cast him because he was a good actor who suited the role'.  Well, that way of doing things might arguably be fair enough in a post-racist society.  But we don't live in a post-racist society.  Not by a loooooooooong chalk.  Not by white-cliffs-of-Dover-levels of chalkiness.  At the moment, the privilege of behaving and thinking as if we do belongs to the people unaffected by racism. 


A Clash of Civilisations

Even if the actors in 'The Aztecs' weren't darkened with make-up (on the whole, I think they were but, as I said, it's hard to be entirely sure from the visual evidence) they were still part of a production which goes out of its way to excuse Europeans of responsibility for the genocide of the Aztecs.  Barbara, supposedly an expert, makes it very clear, though she doesn't say it explicitly: Cortés destroys the Aztecs because he is horrified by their practice of human sacrifice. If she can talk the Aztecs out of their barbarism, she can save them.  This is couched in terms or salvaging everything good about their culture... yet we see very little of this.  There is little in the story to support the (in itself patronising) idea that the Aztecs, as a whole, were as good as they were bad.  Even their splendid artefacts are only really shown in Yetaxa's tomb... with the emphasis firmly on a sinister, gothic, skull-like face. 

So... a fairly clear stance being elaborated there, I'd say.

The story does not even gesture towards the idea that Cortés and his men may have set about the violent subjugation of the Aztecs - leading to their effective extermination - for imperialistic reasons; for gold, conquest, power and the imperatives of religious bigotry.  Instead the story aligns itself with an excuse seized upon by the conquerors: that the Aztecs essentially doomed their own culture by dint of their backwardness.  The Spanish demanded conversion and obedience.  In this way, the Aztecs would be 'saved'.  Similarly, Barbara's project is to socially re-engineer Aztec society (from the top down, naturally) so that it loses those aspects supposedly most repellent to the Europeans, i.e. the civilised people.  That is how the Aztecs can be delivered.  The Spanish told themselves they were fighting the Devil.  Barbara is fighting History.  But the logic is the same.

Barbara's struggle is underwritten by the implicit assumption that European civilisation doesn't practice barbarism like human sacrifice.  With reference to the Conquistadors, this is so wrong it's almost funny.  Spain, and other European powers, slaughtered and tortured and enslaved their way through the 'New World' with unrelenting ferocity.  Even if we take this to be some kind of aberration, we need only look at what was going on in Europe itself at the time.  When Cortés arrived in Mexico, it was barely thirty years since the Alhambra Decree, by which Castille and Aragon had formally expelled all Jews unwilling to convert on pain of death.  (A clue that this didn't stem from barbaric practices, that Barbara might have tried to make the Jews renounce, lies in the fact that the expelled Jews weren't permitted to take any of their gold or silver with them.  Go figure.)  This genocidal cleansing was part of the Spanish Inquisition.  It was well underway when Cortés found himself shocked by the Aztecs.  The Spanish Inquisition, contrary to myth, was actually far more careful, sparing and legalistic with torture than most European courts of the time... they only used torture rarely, unlike just about every other legal system in Europe.  Also, the Spanish Church itself never executed anybody.  With Christian piety, they'd hand you over to the state for public burning (or garotting then burning, if you confessed and repented).

Let's imagine a Doctor Who story that never really happened.  'The Spaniards' by Johnvid Whitcarotti (broadcast 32nd Octember 1963½).  Hartnell, Hill, Ford and Russell arrive in 16th century Spain.  Torquemada is played by Dickie Henderson (thus doing Torquemada a disservice, to be honest).  Would the story have been about Barbara trying to convince the Spaniards to change their ways so that Napoleon wouldn't be so shocked by their backwardness and feel the need to invade and spread the Enlightenment by force?  Or would the story have been about the need for the heretics to change their evil ways and thus not incur the righteous wrath of the inquisitors?  I somehow doubt the fuck out of it.  It's usually fairly predictable which victims will be blamed and which will not.

Going back to the supposed binary character of Aztec culture, the dichotomy between their noble side and their savage side remarked upon by all the white, 20th century European characters and the aliens that look and act like white, 20th century Europeans...  Look, I'm sorry, but what culture in human history since the rise of settled civilisation hasn't been capable of both immense goodness and immense cruelty?  It reminds of 'The Visitation', in which the Doctor claims to be baffled that the Terileptils love both art and war... as though this is something unusual.  The unspoken assumption there is that there are cultures which, in distinction to the culture of England in 1666, get their moral priorities mixed up to the point where they can't tell the difference between civilisation and savagery.  To his immense credit, Saward subverts this rather crass implicit assumption by having the debate then swing back and forth, with the Terileptil pointing out that the humans also consider war honourable, whereupon the Doctor retorts that they (unlike Terileptils) have the excuse of not being from a technologically advanced culture.  It turns out that the Doctor's puzzlement stemmed from seeing a highly advanced civilisation still fixated on the 'honour' of war.  Now, the characterisation of any group as "primitive" is troubling, but at least Saward is talking about Europeans, not a culture decimated by Europeans.  Lucarotti, on the other hand, is dragging imperialist baggage along in his brain... and even in a text that bears hallmarks of being a 'labour of love', it shows.


Terror of the Autlocs

Even with some gestures towards Aztec spirituality, history, teaching and law, human sacrifice is still depicted as the central fact of their culture, the keystone to it.  It's hard to see how this stems from anything other than the European obsession with it.  It was undoubtedly a very important aspect of the Aztec worldview... and the story deserves a lot of credit for trying to show their cultural priorities.  However, sacrifice seems as unintegrated as it is dominant.  Its social hegemony doesn't seem to apply to everyone.  Meanwhile, we are given clear guidance as to with whom our sympathies should and shouldn't lie.  Autloc and Cameca are the Nice-But-Then characters (see here) in implied sympathy with the detached, modern observer in front of the TV.  They supposedly stand for us in their moral qualms.  Autloc in particular, in that he tells Tlotoxl that "the rains will come even without sacrifice".  He is something of a proto-sceptic and empiricist.  He accepts Barbara's assertion that people shouldn't be punished for breaking laws with which they're unfamiliar (a doctrine that even today we will not implement).  He regrets the violent punishments faced by Susan and Ian.  He is Barbara's champion and friend precisely because he is humane and rational, unlike his fellow Aztecs.  As Ian says "Autloc is the extraordinary man here", the civilised man, the man who can be saved.  The others are write-offs, utterly resistant to the reasonable words and moral teachings of European conscience.  Barbara's project of humanitarian intervention fails because she meets only one Autloc.

By the way... am I the only person uncomfortable with how much lying Our Heroes do to Autloc and Cameca in this story?  The Doctor manipulates Cameca's love for him and only her own perspicacity brings her to realise that he's going to jilt her.  Autloc, meanwhile, faced with the prospect of making himself a pariah by standing alongside Barbara when she forbids sacrifice, movingly pleads that she not prove false... and she lets him go on believing that she's the reincarnation of Yetaxa so that she can count on his support.  In the end, the Doctor asserts that Barbara has "saved one man" and helped him find "a better" faith.  Well, Barbara's own bad faith is itself a minor illustration of the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of this.  Her absolution of the Conquistadors and her victim-blaming of the Aztecs are the major illustration... with their impending extermination always lurking in the background, undermining any valid way in which superior European morality can possibly stand up as a notion.  Autloc, meanwhile, has lost his friends, his wealth, his position, his house and his religion, and ends up wandering alone, a social outcast.  I hope Barbara never helps me, that's all I can say.

This leads me to consider what is, I think, the biggest aesthetic flaw in 'The Aztecs', the flaw that either spoils it or comes pretty close (I fluctuate on this point).  Tlotoxl.  Everything else I've been moaning about in this post can be put aside, at least for a while, for the pleasure of watching the story.  I do that sort of thing all the time.  Indeed, the vast majority of capitalist cultural production is so multifariously offensive and repellent that, if I weren't capable of just pushing political qualms aside in order to simply enjoy things, I'd probably never be able to switch on the TV, log on to the internet, open a book or go outside.  No, no.  The thing I have most trouble with in 'The Aztecs' is the portrayal of Tlotoxl. 

Tlotoxl is the High Priest of Sacrifice and is supposed to be the representative of Aztec barbarism, opposed to Autloc who is the High Priest of Knowledge.  Well, okay, there's a problematic notion right there: that Aztec 'knowledge' was in some way distinct from, and contradictory to, Aztec religious practices.  I think part of the point is that they weren't antithetical.  But, we'll let that pass.  The point here isn't to critique the episode's inbuilt assumptions (that's what the rest of this post is for) but to track its internal, dramatic consistency... what makes it or breaks it as a coherent and enjoyable story.  So, Autloc and Tlotoxl are set up as antithetical.  Well... that's a problem dramatically.  Isn't part of the whole point of the story that sacrifice cannot be easily detached from the rest of Aztec culture, the 'good bits' so to speak?   If the place of sacrifice in Aztec culture were so separate, so totally bound up with one individual and his prejudices and power base, then wouldn't it be much easier for Barbara to combat?  Just as Tlotoxl tries to discredit her isolated ideas by impugning her and her friends, so she could attack his dogma by isolating him.  She cannot do this.  She doesn't even try.  The episode seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it.  Sacrifice is at once an integral and indivisible aspect of Aztec culture and the pathological ideology of one man and a few loyalists.  (Part of the problem, as ever, is that we're getting history from above, as something that occurs within the minds and maneuvers of the ruling class, without 'the people' being involved, or even much represented.)

There's a rather pleasant irony in the way Tlotoxl becomes a sceptic towards an apparent manifestation of the gods.  Autloc, the man of knowledge, the proto-empiricist, credulously assumes Yetaxa's reincarnation, while Tlotoxl, the man of faith, becomes a sceptic about it.  The man who charges others with heresy becomes a heretic.  The man who questions divine intervention becomes a villain in a story which revolves around the idea that people should be sceptical of apparent divine influence in the natural world.  We are meant to boo him for being a religious zealot and an opponent of Barbara's truth... yet he spends the entire story trying to prove her a liar (which she is) for pretending to be a god when she isn't!  These ironies, by themselves, aren't the problem.  The problem lies in the way Tlotoxl is depicted.  Tlotoxl is machiavellian.  

"I've got a hunch you're not really a god."

John Ringham plays Tlotoxl in full Richard III-mode.  Tlotoxl is hunched, insinuating, greasy, snide, etc.  He even adopts a clipped, sneering manner of speech that seems reminiscent of Olivier's movie performance as Richard.  This is something we're all so familiar with that the randomness of it seldom gets remarked upon.  Why?  What possible need is there for a Richard III-esque villain in a story about the Aztecs?  Of course, it isn't really Ringham's fault.  He takes his cues from his costume (he gets that sinister line of make-up across his mouth, messy dark hair, darkened eyes, etc) and from the rest of the production, including the script.  When first seen, Tlotoxl is loping around in a corner like a crookback.  He is made visibly different from the other Aztecs, to the point where Ian and the Doctor can immediately tell - just by looking at him - that he's "the local butcher" (that one-man pathology again).  This, in itself, isn't much like Richard III (most people in Shakespeare's plays tend to initially find Richard quite plausible) but Tlotoxl as scripted recalls Richard in other ways, especially in his villainy, his manipulativeness, his plotting, his promises of advancement to allies, and his theatricality.  He distorts others around him with his showish puppeteering.  Tonila and Ixta both get drawn in and set on sneaky courses that otherwise they'd probably have avoided. (It should be added that, though drawn from Richard, Tlotoxl is considerably different in that Richard is a kind of just punishment upon a set of people who have devoutly deserved him... something often not realised by people unfamiliar with the earlier plays in the tetralogy.)

Let's be clear: this is rubbish.  It does great damage to the whole narrative thrust of the story, which is supposed to be about a people inextricably both noble and cruel.  Whatever we might think of that characterisation, or the project of characterising an annihilated culture that way, that's still what the story is supposed to be about.  Instead, we get a culture that looks like it would probably be pretty much okay if only it could be rid of the evil, sneaky, oily, crafty, religious fundamentalist limping around the margins.  Just think how much more powerful 'The Aztecs' would have been if Tlotoxl had been a character of integrity, of dignity, of honest faith.  The tragedy here is that, dramatically, Autloc and Tlotoxl should be different aspects of one man.  At the very least they should be close friends who like and respect each other, more similar than different.  That would not only resolved a deeply jarring dramatic problem, it would also have resolved some of the thematic problems with the story, taking away the idea that Aztec 'knowledge' was antithetical to Aztec belief, taking away the easy Nice-But-Then character, etc.

On the whole, however, even a 'good' High Priest of Sacrifice would still leave us with the problem of Autloc as the one "extraordinary man".  Indeed, it might even exacerbate it.  At least Tlotoxl of Gloucester, the emblem of sacrifice as a lone villain, might be seen as undermining the idea that Autloc is unusual.  Tlotoxl looks like the extraordinary man instead... extraordinarily evil.  But, in that case, why did Barbara fail?

You see, much as I'm not in favour of human sacrifice (no more than anybody else anyway), I'm kind-of on Tlotoxl's side.  Who precisely is this person claiming to be a goddess, lying, cheating, undermining the law, foisting her alien values upon his society, endangering (as Tlotoxl and most others would see it) the continued favour of the gods and, thereby, the survival of the people?  Why does she know better than him and the rest of his society?  Of course, Barbara doesn't articulate why she assumes her greater wisdom.  But the story has its implicit assumptions about this (see above) and I don't like that the one guy who stands against them is depicted as a villain.  (Of course, from another angle, Tlotoxl is a member of the Aztec ruling class and, as such, I'm against him.  Historical materialism... which is one way of describing my outlook... requires this kind of flexibility all the time.)


Resistance was Futile

In the end, it's History that dooms the Aztecs.  All historicals are inherently conservative because they all have the immutable writtenness of History lurking in the background.  Even when the story doesn't tilt on the axis of changing or preserving history, there is always a shape to events that cannot be changed.  Owing to its educational remit and supposedly rationalist stance, the show cannot (Inglourious Basterds-style) change the pre-written plot and go against what Teacher Says at School.  In historicals, The Way It Happened (or at least The Way We Think It Happened) is always a limiting factor.  It patrols the boundaries.  It limits the perimeter of the possible, must as capitalist realism limits the range of the thinkable within the mainstream media.  This may be the reason why the psuedo-historical was invented.  Dennis Spooner chose the classic example of school history (1066 and all that) and stuck a time meddler into it, threatening to erase all the books.  But 'The Time Meddler' is the story that proves the rule.  No matter how cheeky or satirical it is about the whole concept of representing History (knowingly showing us the TV strategy of cliche, employed even in the 'straight' mode) it cannot escape the overriding imperative to stick to the established arc.  There is literally no escape from this innately conservative impulse within the bounds of the historical... and the inevitability of aligning with the history books creates a dramatic effect whereby those doomed by History come over as inevitably doomed, inescapably trapped.  They were always doomed.  Coupled with the implication of progress (to which all those Nice-But-Then characters implicitly attest) and the imperialistic appropriation involved in representing non-European cultures, you get an effect whereby There Is No Alternative but for the conquered to be conquered, the exterminated to be exterminated.  You can't have the Saxons beat back the Normans.  You can't have the French Revolution succeed against reaction and counter-revolution, thus becoming able to fulfill its promises.  You can't have the Aztecs escape the swords of the Conquistadors.  As the exhausted cliche goes: history is written by the victors... so you end up with an acceptance that you can't rewrite the judgements of the powerful, of the conquerors, of the imperial culture.

Not one line.

Apparently they were also noble and artistic.

I know I complain a lot... but I don't think I've ever gotten over just how much wasted promise there is in the fact that one of the very first things the series did was have a young person reading a school textbook about the French Revolution and declaring "That isn't right!". 

Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History.

Carmine Infantino is, quite rightly, being mourned across the Internet — everywhere lovers of great comic art lurk. I suspect he would not be happy with a lot of the obits in that they speak of him as a great illustrator (which he was) but say little if anything about his years as editorial director and then publisher of DC Comics. I didn’t have much contact with him the last decade or three of his life but when I was around him, he’d say things like, “There are a lot of good artists around, including many who are better than I ever was. I was the only one who went on to running a big company like DC.” That may be true. Other artists moved into management but I can’t think of another one who ever had the title of Publisher, at least not of a company anywhere near as big as his. [UPDATE, added a few hours later: Marv Wolfman reminds me that Jim Lee now has the title of co-publisher at DC.  Yeah, but that's now and he's co-publisher.]

Some of the obits are making the usual, understandable mistake of giving him sole credit as the creator of comic books and characters that he actually co-created with writers. Deadman, for example, was not created by Carmine Infantino. It was created by Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino. The Hollywood Reporter even said he’d “introduced” the concept of Earth-Two into the DC line. Translation: He drew the script in which Gardner Fox, working with editor Julius Schwartz, came up with it.

And a few are buying his more grandiose claims of creating Bat Lash, Kamandi and a few others where his input was from all accounts but his, microscopic. I was actually in the room for most of the creation of Kamandi and I wrote up the presentation and first issue plot synopsis based on Jack Kirby’s ideas — and they were Jack Kirby’s ideas. Carmine asked Jack to give him something similar to Planet of the Apes, Jack hauled out an unsold newspaper strip he’d done in the fifties called Kamandi of the Caves and proceeded to alter it to suit Infantino’s request. To put it in starker terms: I contributed more to the creation of Kamandi than Carmine Infantino and I sure don’t deserve even a scintilla of the creator credit. Carmine was the kind of guy who had enough impressive credits that it’s not necessary to give him someone else’s.

Since Infantino the Publisher is being neglected in the stampede to salute Infantino the Artist, let me say a little more about the former. When he eased into power at DC, Infantino took command of a ship that was heading in no intentional direction. “Down” was the prevailing one and no one around had any idea how to get anyplace else. There had been a recent corporate takeover and way too many of the rules were new. The company needed fresh ideas but it had this track record of almost punishing those who’d given them fresh ideas in the past. It wasn’t just that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster didn’t share in the revenues of Superman or receive credit. It was almost like Jerry and Joe had to be flogged as a warning to others who might create something successful and then express dissatisfaction with their share.

That was far from the only problem. The kind of old-line newsstand that carried comic books was going away in the late sixties. Those that remained cut back on their comic displays, the better to offer Playboy and Penthouse, which between them sold around ten million high-priced copies per month and spawned countless imitators. Newsstands thus were no longer a natural place for kids to hang out. Some even discouraged it because that made it easier to sell soft porn when few minors were about. In the meantime, DC’s distributor, Independent News, distributed Playboy and Penthouse and was naturally more interested in them than in Action Comics. Every month, a smaller and smaller percentage of what DC printed was available for purchase. In some areas, you could walk for miles and not find the new comics.

So that was the company Infantino inherited: His creators were discouraged from creating and his distributors didn’t want to distribute. Oh, yes — and the cost of printing was going up. Comics were 12 cents when he took power. Then before long, they were 15.  Soon, it became time to raise prices yet again. DC went to a very unappealing package — a mix of new material backed up by reprints that just felt like padding — for 25 cents. Marvel tried it for one month, then went back to the old size for twenty cents — which in light of DC’s 66% price hike didn’t seem so awful. For a year or so until they gave up and went to 20, DC got clobbered and it was some time after Infantino was ousted that the company fully recovered from that experiment.

Infantino always insisted he was not responsible for that failed strategy and he certainly didn’t cause the distribution crisis. He might have been able to make the company more creator-friendly but maybe not…and even with that impediment, he managed to come up with some pretty good books. What he couldn’t seem to do was to keep them running long enough to find an audience. The minute it was clear or even suspected something new wasn’t selling as well as Batman, it was terminated. A few comics were even, quite literally, cancelled before there were any sales figures in on them at all and there were rumors in the office that numbers that did come in where sometimes being misread or misreported. Whatever the truth was, readers learned not to fall in love with anything new from DC because, you know, the odds were good it would be gone soon. That was another problem that took a long time to go away.

A lot of those books were terrific. True, Green Lantern/Green Arrow by O’Neil and Adams only lasted fourteen issues but with a different man in charge, it might not have existed at all. Give him credit for that. Give him credit for helping move comics into a new era by among other things, treating covers as intended works of art rather than copy-heavy sales pieces. Give him credit for all the new careers that were launched during his time in charge. And a lot of comics that were considered flops during his regime — considered that by him as well as others — are still with us, some reprinted time and again in expensive hardcover editions with their characters turning up in other media and current comics. Time-Warner is now making a lot of money off some of Carmine’s “failures.”

For several years running, Infantino flew out for the big Comic-Con in San Diego. Few professionals did then and of course, since he was an artist we all loved and the Head of DC, he was a very big deal, indeed. Each year, he would make a speech touting the great, sure-to-revolutionize-the-field new comics DC was about to bring out. Each year, he would deftly avoid mentioning that all of the previous year’s great, sure-to-revolutionize-the-field new comics were either cancelled or about to be. I still think some of them would have caught on big if they’d been given more of a chance. Marvel’s concurrent Conan the Barbarian comic debuted to sales lower than some of the DC innovations that Carmine quickly axed but Marvel kept Conan running (and published monthly, unlike most new books DC introduced) until it found an audience and paid off big for them.

One evening at one con, I dined with him and Mr. and Mrs. Jack Kirby in the hotel’s semi-swank dining room. Fans kept interrupting the dining to ask for autographs or quick sketches and it went like this: Someone would approach and tell Kirby how much he or she loved New Gods, Fantastic Four and/or the Silver Surfer. Jack would say thank you. The person would then tell Infantino how much he or she loved The Flash, Adam Strange or the Batman comics he drew. Carmine would say thank you and then remind the person that he didn’t do that anymore; that he was now the publisher of DC Comics and, oh, wait’ll you see this great new book that’s about to come out.

Jack didn’t do quick sketches. He wasn’t good at them and there were other issues relating to how when he did them, they always seemed to turn up on some dealers’ table being sold before the ink was dry. But Carmine did quick sketches and he was amazing at them. “Whadda ya want?” he’d ask the fan — and if the fan said “Adam Strange,” a lovely profile shot would appear after the kid said “Adam” but before he got the “Strange” part out. If the fan was really smart, he’d ask for the obscure character, Detective Chimp, which Carmine always said was his favorite. He’d take more time and care drawing Detective Chimp. He’d spend, like, five seconds instead of the three it took him (appropriately enough) to draw The Flash.

At one point after that meal, I found myself alone with Carmine and I kidded him that he was slowing down: “That Batman you did for that kid took you almost four seconds.” He chuckled and I said, “I hope you take it as a compliment when guys like me tell you how much we miss seeing you actually draw comics.” He said he did…then he added, “I sometimes miss it too. It was so simple. I mean, I struggled with a lot of pages and did some over and over again to get them right…but I didn’t have to deal with all the pricks upstairs and down the hall.” I believe the pricks upstairs were his corporate overlords and the ones down the hall were Independent News. I don’t think any of them intentionally sabotaged what he was trying to do but they couldn’t have done a much more effective job if that had been their intention. And they had a lot of help…from him.

He went on to talk of how when he drew comics, he at least knew pretty much how to do that. Working the business side of things — dealing with numbers and sell-throughs and printing contracts and licensing deals — it was all so frustrating. I believe that was the word he used: Frustrating. Did I detect a bit of longing to go back to the easier, more appropriate, I thought, job description? Just for a second, I believe I did…but he knew what I was thinking and quickly set me straight: No, absolutely not. An executive he was now and an executive he would stay. He stayed one for about three more years before they called him in and told him he was no longer one, at least in their building.

Hearts broke for him across the industry, mine included, when they told him that. I don’t think he was suited for that job but he was so very, very proud of it. And besides, I’m not sure there even was anyone then good enough at publishing to stop DC Comics from crashing into icebergs.  It certainly wasn’t possible to be as good a publisher as Carmine Infantino was an artist. When he was at the drawing board…ah, that’s when he could really work magic. Just take a look at every single thing he did while in his prime.

Submitted by PhilGoetz • 10 votes • 3 comments

I used to teach logic to undergraduates, and they regularly made the same simple mistake with logical quantifiers.  Take the statement "For every X there is some Y such that P(X,Y)" and represent it symbolically:

∀x∃y P(x,y)

 

Now negate it:

!∀x∃y P(x,y)

 

You often don't want a negation to be outside quantifiers.  My undergraduates would often just push it inside, like this:

∀x∃y !P(x,y)

 

If that meant the same thing, then so would these claims:

 

A) Not every black thing is a raven.

B) Every black thing is not a raven.

 

To move a negation inside quantifiers, flip each quantifier that you move it past.

!∀x∃y P(x,y) = ∃x!∃y P(x,y) = ∃x∀y !P(x,y)

 

 

Here's the findings of a 1982 article [1] from JAMA Psychiatry (formerly Archives of General Psychiatry), back in the days when the medical establishment was busy denouncing the Feingold diet:

 

Previous studies have not conclusively demonstrated behavioral effects of artificial food colorings ...  This study, which was designed to maximize the likelihood of detecting a dietary effect, found none.

 

Rephrased to say precisely what the study found:

 

This study tested and rejected the hypothesis that artificial food coloring causes hyperactivity in all children.

 

Converted to logic (ignoring time):

!( ∀child ( eats(child, coloring) ⇨ hyperactive(child) ) )

 

Move the negation inside the quantifier:

∃child !( eats(child, coloring) ⇨ hyperactive(child) )

 

Translated back into English, this study proved:

 

There exist children for whom artificial food coloring does not cause hyperactivity.

 

However, this is the actual final sentence of that paper:

 

The results of this study indicate that artificial food colorings do not affect the behavior of school-age children who are claimed to be sensitive to these agents.

Translated into logic:

!∃child ( eats(child, coloring) ⇨ hyperactive(child) ) )

 

or, equivalently,

∀child !( eats(child, coloring) ⇨ hyperactive(child) ) )

 

This refereed medical journal article, like many others, made the same mistake as my undergraduate logic students, moving the negation across the quantifier without changing the quantifier.  I cannot recall ever seeing a medical journal article prove a negation and not make this mistake when stating its conclusions.

 

([1] also includes the peculiar statement that a sample size of eleven "appears to us to be sufficient, clinically and statistically," so perhaps expecting correct use of logic is overly optimistic when referees still admit claims justified only by wishful thinking.)

 

For the record, the conclusion is wrong.  Studies that did not assume that all children were identical, such as studies that used each child as his or her own control by randomly giving them cookies containing or not containing food dye [2], or a recent study that partitioned the children according to single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in genes related to food metabolism [3], found large, significant effects in some children or some genetically-defined groups of children.  Unfortunately, meta-reviews failed to distinguish the logically sound from the logically unsound articles, and the medical community insisted that food dyes had no influence on behavior until thirty years after their influence had been repeatedly proven.

 

 

[1] Jeffrey A. Mattes & Rachel Gittelman (1981). Effects of Artificial Food Colorings in Children With Hyperactive Symptoms: A Critical Review and Results of a Controlled Study. Archives of General Psychiatry 38(6):714-718. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1981.01780310114012.

 

[2] K.S. Rowe & K.J. Rowe (1994). Synthetic food coloring and behavior: a dose response effect in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, repeated-measures study. The Journal of Pediatrics Nov;125(5 Pt 1):691-8.

[3] Stevenson, Sonuga-Barke, McCann et al. (2010). The Role of Histamine Degradation Gene Polymorphisms in Moderating the Effects of Food Additives on Children’s ADHD Symptoms. Am J Psychiatry 167:1108-1115.

3 comments

Translation from bullshit to English of the Chrome Blink FAQ.

Synopsis of the April Fool’s Mess: One of Locus’ April Fool’s Day columns this year announced that all Wiscon attendees would now be forced to wear burqas. “…starting with this year’s Wiscon, we’ve made burqas mandatory for all attendees. Allah Akbar!” There were also cracks about making sure burqas were available in sizes “to 5XL,” and working to “eliminate rampant lookism.”

Part of how this piece showed up on the site, as I understand it, is because of the separation between the Locus website and the magazine. The website editor apparently saw nothing wrong with the post, but as soon as the rest of the staff realized what had happened, they yanked the article site and apologized. They’re also taking steps to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t go up again.

Look, I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that there are people out there who think “Islam” and can’t get beyond burqas and “Allah Akbar!” Likewise, it’s no shock to see people actively reenforcing stereotypes of feminists as fat, ugly, shrill harpies with no sense of humor. None of this is remotely new or original.

I’ve been working on an autobiographical essay, and writing a section of that piece today helped me clarify what was pissing me off as much as the incident itself. We know there will always be nasty, small-minded bigots. But once Locus pulled the article, a mass of people–mostly white men, for reasons I’m sure are entirely coincidental–rushed in to defend the article, and to decry Locus for censoring free speech.

It’s a familiar pattern, but the dynamic didn’t click until I was writing about my own experiences being bullied as a teenager.

I was a skinny, overly bright, socially inept, fashion challenged kid with glasses and a speech defect. My teenage years were utter hell. Looking back at any of those incidents of name-calling, having my books knocked out of my hands, being shoved in the hallway, tripped on the steps outside the school, having my belongings destroyed, and so on, very few of them in isolation were such a big deal. Real physical injury was relatively rare. But when those small jabs continue day after day, they add up. They whittle away at your strength and your hope, and it never, ever lets up, never stops, until you’re sitting alone in the bathroom with a syringe full of your father’s insulin, searching for a single good reason not to jab the plunger down and hopefully put an end to it all.

The backlash against the Locus article isn’t about someone taking cheap shots at Muslims and women. It’s about yet another person taking those shots, lining up to bully those who are already a popular target for abuse. And it’s about everyone else who stands around, encouraging and enabling that bullying.

25 years ago, I was told I should just ignore the bullies.

I was told I shouldn’t let it get to me. (“Why are you choosing to be offended? You’re just looking for reasons to be upset.”)

I was told they didn’t mean anything by it. (“It wasn’t intended to be racist or sexist!”)

They were just joking around. (“You people have no sense of humor!”)

That’s just how they are, and you need to learn to live with it. (“You need to be more tolerant of the people who are intolerant of you, and who are hurting you.”)

Stop making such a big deal about it. (“I don’t understand why you’re upset! …Ergo, you have no legitimate reason to be upset.”)

People complained about the Locus piece because it was hurtful. This wasn’t an example of the court jester speaking truth to power. While the author claims he was trying to write satire, what he actually wrote was another in a long line of jabs toward people who are already disproportionately targeted for a broad range of abuse in this culture.

It was bullying.

That’s what people are defending. They’re attacking Locus for not giving this person a platform with which to bully those he doesn’t like, based on an incident that happened several years ago. They’re telling the targets of ongoing bigotry that the best solution is to just ignore it.

That doesn’t work for the target of bullying. It only works for the bystanders who don’t want to deal with it. It’s a cowardly, ineffective, and downright shitty “solution.”

Yeah, I got through my teenaged years, and I survived despite the lack of support from those around me. But you know what would have helped a lot more? You know what might have saved the life of a classmate who, as far as we’ve been able to determine, killed himself as a result of bullying? If the bystanders had spoken up and told the bullies to knock that shit off.

Thank you, Locus, for taking that step.

Last year, there was quite a bit of excitement over a "Genetic Test To Predict Risk for Autism". The test was revealed in a paper in Molecular Psychiatry, by Australian researchers Skafidas and colleagues. The claim was that a statistical classifier could spot patterns of genetic variation that differed between people with autism and healthy controls - with 70% accuracy. For a good discussion of the paper, including comments from the lead author, see here. However, a Letter to Molecular Ps

It’s a fair question why this exists. The continuing adventures of the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard, long after their quasi-era had ended. Really, the entire existence of Big Finish as the last man standing from the wilderness years is strange. As we’ve pointed out before, almost all of the creative debates of the wilderness years are settled. Russell T Davies, by making Doctor Who an unequivocal part of the mainstream again, settled them. The future of Doctor Who was secured. What use can we have for the calx of the wilderness years? And this is, of course, the hardest to understand one. Nostalgia for the Davison or McCoy eras makes sense. Even nostalgia for the Colin Baker years makes sense as a sort of redemption. But nostalgia for the culturally irrelevant speck that is the McGann era? Why would we miss it? Why would we want to sustain it?

The Girl Who Never Was is discussed in the entry immediately below this. But I'm knocking that off the top of the post order because, well, this is more exciting. Slightly later than hoped for, but still miles better than last time, I am proud to announce the third book volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is now in print and ready for your purchasing pleasure.

Links follow:

US Print Edition ($14.99)
US Kindle Edition ($4.99)
UK Print Edition (£11.99 VAT excluded)
UK Kindle Edition (£3.49 VAT excluded)
Smashwords Edition ($4.99, for eReaders other than Kindle)

As ever the pricing is based on the model "Five bucks seems about right for the ebook, and I'll make the print edition so that it gets me the same royalty."

Over the next few weeks the book will appear on other major ebook sites like Barnes & Noble and iBooks, but for right now if you have a non-Kindle reader you'll need to get it from Smashwords and upload it manually. (And this is frankly the best way to do it anyway - if you buy from Barnes & Noble or Apple you're only buying the Smashwords edition but diluting my cut by giving it to Apple or B&N)

If you have a Doctor Who or sci-fi website, blog, or whatever and would like a review copy, drop me an e-mail and I'll see to it.

Furthermore, if you've not picked up previous volumes, the Patrick Troughton (US, UK, Smashwords) and William Hartnell (US, UK, Smashwords) versions remain on sale. Though to be open, the Hartnell version is going to get replaced with a shiny new second edition that doesn't have horrible typos later this year (more news on that in the next week or two), and so you may want to hold off on that. Equally, however, you can buy the first edition and then have a cool out of print book to show off. I'm certainly not going to tell you not to give me money twice.

Here's what this one includes:

• Revised and expanded editions of every essay on the Jon Pertwee era.
• Three book-exclusive Time Can Be Rewritten entries on the Barry Letts-penned audio The Paradise of Death, the Paul Magrs Companion Chronicle Find and Replace, in which Jo Grant, played by Katy Manning, meets Iris Wildthyme, played by Katy Manning, and Virgin's acclaimed Who Killed Kennedy?
• Various book-exclusive short essays, including an attempt to reconcile the Pertwee era with Torchwood, an explanation of how the TARDIS works, and a guest essay by Anna Wiggins that attempts to explain the Blakean extravaganza that is my Three Doctors essay.
• A phenomenally cool cover by James Taylor (no, not that James Taylor), who discusses his process here, in a very cool post that you should totally go read.
• Excellent copyediting by Millie Hadziomerovic. 
• A small but significant amount of money that goes in my pocket.

Carmine Infantino has died at the age of 87 and there is much to say…

In his day, Infantino was one of the great artists of comic books. Brooklyn born, he broke into comics while still in high school, mainly by assisting in the shop run by Harry Chesler. His initial ventures in actually creating pages were done in tandem with his boyhood friend, Frank Giacoia. At first, Giacoia drew the pages in pencil and Infantino inked, starting with the Jack Frost story in USA Comics #3 (Jan. 1942). Eventually, they switched roles and went their separate ways. Giacoia became one of the most respected inkers. Infantino became one of the top guys with a pencil. Carmine worked for DC, Timely, Hillman, Prize and other companies but from around 1955 on, almost all his work was done for DC and he became more and more important to the firm.

He drew dozens of features for the company but is probably best remembered as the artist who in 1956 designed and depicted the new, Barry Allen version of The Flash, launching a new wave of super-hero comics some would call The Silver Age. He also drew among many other strips, Adam Strange, Detective Chimp, Space Museum, The Elongated Man and in 1964 was the key artist for an update of Batman (the “New Look”) which modernized the character for the sixties. He drew sleek, graceful figures and was topped by no one when it came to designing a panel that would convey movement. He was even better at designing covers.

In the sixties, he won most of the major awards for cover design and was able to parlay that into a job as DC’s Art Director in charge of covers. At DC, the premise was that the cover sold the comic and it was not uncommon to design an exciting cover and then write the insides to go with it. By designing the covers, Infantino gained power and influence over the contents and before long, he was Art Director of the entire company. And he didn’t stop there.

When DC was acquired by Kinney National Services (a corporation that eventually turned into Time-Warner), the old Editorial Director, Irwin Donenfeld, was ousted. Infantino was chosen to take his place and charged with the task of reinventing the entire line, which was then plagued by falling sales. During his first year in power, Infantino turned DC into a brand-new company, ousting many long-time staffers and freelancers and bringing in new ones, canceling old titles, starting new comics and totally revamping all the ongoing books. It is difficult to impress upon people how much DC changed in a short space of time.

Many wonderful comics and characters emerged: Bat Lash, Anthro, The Creeper, a whole new Wonder Woman, the acclaimed Green Lantern-Green Arrow series, Jack Kirby’s Fourth World titles, the rescurrection of Captain Marvel (Shazam!), a new series of Tarzan comics, Swamp Thing, The Phantom Stranger, Mike Grell’s Warlord, Prez, etc. It’s a very long list because, alas, most of these comics did not last long and were replaced by others — and then the others were replaced by others. Some comics were cancelled when the first sales figures trickled in; others, even before that. A few managed respectable runs but they were the exceptions.

Last weekend at WonderCon, I fell again into the ongoing debate that some of us have as to what went wrong during this period. My take, for what it’s worth, is that as fine as Infantino was at designing covers and positioning creative folks to do good work, he lacked certain business skills that were essential to his job description. At the time, DC was plagued by an atrophying system of distribution and the management at Independent News — the sister company that disseminated DC’s product to the masses — lost confidence in Infantino and to some extent in the whole idea of selling comic books. When your salesmen don’t believe they can sell what you make, you probably can’t. I believe DC was too swift to give up on some books that could have found an audience…but Infantino may not always have had much choice.

He was promoted to Publisher when the post came open but fired in January of 1976 and for years after, he searched for some sort of executive position. He never found one and eventually, he returned to drawing comic books. At first it was for Warren, then for Marvel — where he drew many comics but particularly soared (artistically and in sales) on their Star Wars comic. In 1981, he reluctantly began drawing for DC again — including a return to The Flash — though I don’t believe he ever set foot in the DC offices after his dismissal as Publisher. Physical problems, mostly back trouble, eventually brought an end to his drawing days.

Infantino and I had a couple of unpleasant encounters over the years, as did some others who worked with him while he was running DC. I don’t feel it’s appropriate to go into them at length at this time. Maybe later, maybe not. I’ll just say I admired his artwork and much of what he tried to do in an editorial capacity at DC, especially his first few years in that capacity. I thought that as Editorial Director and Publisher though, he was installed in a job at which no one could have succeeded and then he did some things, both creatively and in how he dealt with talent, that warranted serious criticism. Even then, he was a man of tremendous gifts and it was impossible to look at the last few decades of his life and not feel your heart break a little. When he was good, he was better than just about anybody.

Yes, really.

Republican Reps. Harry Warren and Carl Ford may not realize that outlawing Baptist churches is among the things their bill would do, but it is one of the many, many consequences they don’t understand of their proposal to establish an official state religion in North Carolina. (These are not smart men. Bullies never are.)

This is an actual proposal. It was introduced by two Republican state legislators in North Carolina and now has 11 Republican cosponsors in the state House of Representatives, including party leadership.

Yes, this bill would clearly violate the First Amendment prohibition against religious establishment. That’s deliberate. The proposal is not so much un-constitutional as it is anti-constitutional — it’s another instance of the Party of Calhoun attempting “nullification.”

Here’s a summary from local news reporter Laura Leslie in Raleigh, “Proposal would allow state religion in North Carolina“:

A resolution filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.

The resolution grew out of a dispute between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In a federal lawsuit filed last month, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

This will be the official Southern Baptist baptistry, for baptizing all infants born into the official Southern Baptist Church of North Carolina.

… House Joint Resolution 494, filed by Republican Rowan County Reps. Harry Warren and Carl Ford, would refuse to acknowledge the force of any judicial ruling on prayer in North Carolina – or indeed on any Constitutional topic:

“The Constitution of the United States does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional; therefore, by virtue of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the power to determine constitutionality and the proper interpretation and proper application of the Constitution is reserved to the states and to the people,” the resolution states.

“Each state in the union is sovereign and may independently determine how that state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion,” it states.

The Tenth Amendment argument, also known as “nullification,” has been tried unsuccessfully by states for more than a century to defy federal laws and judicial rulings from the Civil War period to President Obama’s health care reforms to gun control.

The resolution goes on to say:

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

Eleven House Republicans have signed on to sponsor the resolution, including Majority Leader Edgar Starnes, R-Caldwell, and Budget Chairman Justin Burr, R-Stanly.

Erin McClam of NBC News focuses on the bill’s hostility to the Constitution, “First Amendment doesn’t apply here: N.C. lawmakers push bill for state religion“:

Republican lawmakers in North Carolina have introduced a bill declaring that the state has the power to establish an official religion — a direct challenge to the First Amendment.

One professor of politics called the measure “the verge of being neo-secessionist,” and another said it was reminiscent of how Southern states objected to the Supreme Court’s 1954 integration of public schools.

… The North Carolina ACLU chapter said in a statement Tuesday that the sponsors of the bill “fundamentally misunderstand constitutional law and the principle of the separation of powers that dates back to the founding of this country.”

North Carolina scholars also cast doubt on the bill.

“It has elements of not being American,” Gary Freeze, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College, told The Salisbury Post. “I think it goes far beyond religion and frankly doesn’t have a lot to do with North Carolina or tradition.”

Another professor at the college, Michael Bitzer, told the newspaper that the bill is based on discredited legal theory that the states can declare themselves exempt from federal law.

“We saw this in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education,” he said, referencing the integration ruling. “The belief is that the states hold more power than the federal government. If the federal government does something, the states can simply ignore it.”

Just curious, but has anyone ever attempted to invoke this right to “nullification” for any cause that was not morally odious? I mean, the idea started with slave-owners. Then it was tried again by segregationists. Now it’s being tried by sectarian bigots.

This makes the idea useful as a kind of red flashing warning sign. Whenever you hear someone speak favorably of nullification, you can conclude that they hate the Constitution and that they hate some other group of people. That’s useful to know.

Let me explain what I said above about this bill outlawing Baptist churches. As the name suggests, the key distinctive identifier of Baptist churches is their approach to baptism. Baptists practice believer’s baptism — based on a person’s profession of faith or, in other words, based on a person’s free choice. That free choice requires the religious liberty that can only exist with the separation of church and state. Establish an official state religion and you effectively criminalize — or, at best, marginalize — anyone who practices believer’s baptism.

(It’s no coincidence that Southern Baptist enthusiasm for sectarian government has accompanied the Southern Baptist enthusiasm for a Neo-Reformed theology that rejects both the idea of a believer’s church and the idea of the separation of church and state. Max Weber explained all this nearly a century before Al Mohler began demonstrating it.)

But while the theological implications of this North Carolina Republican plan are disturbing, this attempt to establish official sectarian hegemony isn’t mainly a religious effort at all. As Bruce Garrett noted yesterday, “This Really Isn’t About God“:

Arguments about religion are usually arguments about Who’s In Charge rather than arguments about religion. Same thing with arguments about Intrusive Government. Reverence allegedly paid to God is actually directed at the Tribe, in whose name God serves. Figure they’ll be holding a conclave down there somewhere in the old confederacy to elect the first Baptist pope any day now.

I think that’s right. This is about power. To the extent that it’s about religion at all, it’s about how religion can be used to attain and maintain power.

The only alternative to such power-struggles disguised as religion — the only way to keep religion from being consumed by and reduced to such power-struggles — is the separation of church and state.

One more point: If government is not secular, then it must be sectarian. The Republicans of North Carolina have not yet told us which sect they would elevate and establish as the official staatskirche. But they will have to pick one. It won’t do to attempt some broad, generic designation of “Christian” or even of “Protestant.” It will have to be specific.

Rep. Harry Warren is a Methodist. Rep. Carl Ford runs a Baptist radio station. If North Carolina follows their lead and abandons secular government, then at least one of their sects must bow to another. Since an established Baptist Church is an oxymoron, I suppose Warren’s Methodism has the upper hand. I wonder what Methodist Sharia would even look like?

 

‘Evidence-based policy’ seems to be all the rage these days. And little wonder. Because it is actually fallacy-based policy that is all the rage.

Reactions to the Philpott manslaughter case are the most recent example. The tone was set by yesterday’s appalling Daily Mail front page. The airwaves have been full of Tory MPs – oblivious of the old adage ‘hard cases make bad law’ – claiming that the Philpott case is an argument for cutting back on welfare payments generally.

Nick Clegg’s immigration speech last week was informed primarily by a need to mollify popular irrational feelings about immigration.

The most notorious case was the MMR vaccine controversy, which led to a sharp drop in vaccination rates, resulting in several deaths. And as the news from Swansea shows, this 15-year-old groundless scare is a gift that keeps giving.

Fallacies are powerful. They are promoted by charlatans, whipped up by the tabloids, swallowed whole by a credulous and irrational public, and adopted by cynical politicians eager to follow rather than lead public opinion.

And these fallacies are not isolated cases. Their prevalence can be judged by the need for websites like Dr Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog, Channel 4 News’s FactCheck Blog, and the independent fact-checking organisation Full Fact.

There is a rational answer to all these fallacies: evidence-based policy. Never mind fallacies, prejudices and dogma; just ask the experts what the evidence says and – hey presto! – there’s your evidence-based policy. And why stop there? If there is one evidence-based answer to every political question, why bother with elected politicians? We could simply be governed by unelected technocrats.

There’s just one snag. Technocracy has no place for morals. Which is important, because politics is ultimately about making moral choices. Evidence-based policy can tell you “what works” but even that is problematic. As Alex Worsnip explains on Prospect magazine’s blog:

The notion of “what works” is amorphous and vague. One can only assess whether something is working against some kind of a standard for what a well-functioning society looks like; for what it is that you want to work and how. As an economist might put the point, you have to have a utility function to maximise; you can’t just maximise.

Is a society “working” if GDP rises steadily but citizens are drastically unequal? What about if people of different races and religions have different access to opportunities and goods? These questions are ineliminably moral, and must be answered in detail before we can have a useable notion of “what works.” The attempt to find some value-neutral standpoint from which to assess what works – the aspiration for an escape from ideology altogether – is an impossible one. Deciding how to weigh up different social benefits and harms is hard; it goes to the core of what we want our society to be like. But these questions are just made harder by reducing a vast swathe of distinct and often competing considerations to a single, sweeping judgement of “what works.”

The error here is not just a philosophical one. When politicians talk about what works, they make tacit assumptions about various moral questions concerning the proper aims of public policy. But by presenting themselves as “non-ideological pragmatists,” they get away with leaving these assumptions unarticulated and undefended. And so we get a particular value-laden agenda – often, though not always, that of the ruling class – smuggled in, under the banner of anodyne pronouncements about the need to sometimes make compromises or to be sensitive to empirical evidence.

At its worst, this can amount to making a set of value-assumptions seem like incontestable and ineradicable features of the world; to what the sociologist Max Weber called the “routinisation” of value. Those who oppose a particular agenda are characterised as “living in the past’ or as failing to recognise the facts of the modern world. Likewise, talk of “possibility” is frequently used to delimit the range of political options, without it being made clear in what sense and why a particular course of action is supposedly “impossible.”

In short, ‘evidence-based policy’ carries the risk that it can be exploited by politicians claiming that theirs is the only option. It can be used to deny alternatives and shut down debate. This outlook is the source of Nick Clegg’s dubious claims that he is not ideological but “pragmatic”.

On the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog, Professor Michael Bassey suggests that the problems with evidence-based policy are basically methodological, arguing that the best we can hope for is “what may work” rather than a definitive solution. He is correct up to a point, but ignores the moral dimension.

We should always insist that policies do not fly in the face of the evidence. But evidence does not resolve moral questions, and moral choices are what politics is ultimately about.

There is a hole that can’t be filled. One of the greats has left us. Roger Ebert has passed away at the age of 70. suntm.es/Z4EIOF

— Suntimes (@Suntimes) April 4, 2013

I can’t say that I ever spoke to Roger Ebert, but I can say I was once in the same room with him — specifically, the critics’ screening room in Chicago, where as the entertainment editor for my college newspaper I watched a terrible movie called Farewell to the King, and he and Gene Siskel were there as well, sitting, if I remember correctly, in the back of the little theater. Other critics were snarking and catcalling the screen (I mentioned it wasn’t a very good film), and either Siskel or Ebert (it was dark and I was facing the screen) told them to shut it. They shut it. After the movie was done I rode down in the elevator with him. And that was my brush with greatness, film critic style.

For all that I consider Ebert to be one of my most important writing teachers. He was my teacher in a real and practical sense — I was hired at age 22 to be a newspaper film critic, with very little direct practical experience in film criticism (not withstanding Farewell to the King, I mostly reviewed music for my college paper). I was hired in May of 1991, but wouldn’t start until September, which left me the summer to get up to speed. I did it by watching three classic movies a night (to the delight of my then-roommates), and by buying every single review book Roger Ebert had out and reading every single review in them.

He was a great teacher. He was passionate about film — not just knowledgeable about films and directors and actors, but in love with the form, in a way that came through in every review. Even when a movie was bad, you could tell that at least part of the reason Ebert was annoyed was because the film failed its medium, which could achieve amazing things. But as passionate as he was about film, he wasn’t precious about it. Ebert loved film, but what I think he loved most of all was the fact that it entertained him so. He loved being entertained, and he loved telling people, in language which was direct and to the point (he worked for the Sun-Times, the blue collar paper in town) what about the films was so entertaining. What he taught me about film criticism is that film criticism isn’t about showing off what you know about film, it was about sharing what made you love film.

I saw how much Roger Ebert loved film that summer, through his reviews and his words. By the end of the summer, I loved film too. And I wanted to do what he did: Share that love and make people excited about going to the movies, sitting there with their popcorn, waiting to be entertained in the way only film can entertain you.

I left newspaper film criticism — not entirely voluntarily — but even after I left that grind I still loved writing about film and went back to it when I could. I wrote freelance reviews for newspapers, magazines and online sites; I’ve published two books about film. Every year I make predictions about the Oscars here on the site. And I can tell you (roughly) the domestic box office of just about every studio film since 1991. All of that flows back to sitting there with Roger Ebert’s words, catching the film bug from him. There are other great film critics, of course (I also have a soft spot for Pauline Kael, which is not entirely surprising), but Ebert was the one I related to the most, and learned the most from.

In these later years and after everything that he’d been through with cancer and with losing the ability to physically speak, I read and was contemplative about the essays and pieces he put up on his Web site. Much of that had nothing to do with film criticism, but was a matter of him writing… well, whatever. Which meant it was something I could identify with to a significant degree, since that is what I do here. It would be foolish to say that Ebert losing his physical voice freed him to find his voice elsewhere. What I think may be more accurate was that losing his physical voice reminded Ebert that he still had things he wanted to say before he ran out of time to say them.

His Web essays have a sharp, bright but autumnal quality to them; the leaves were still on the trees but the colors were changing and the snap was in the air. It seemed to me Ebert wrote them with the joy of living while there is still life left. I loved these essays but they also made me sad. I knew as a reader they couldn’t last. And of course they didn’t.

I had always meant to send Ebert a copy of Old Man’s War, for no other reason than as a token of appreciation. I knew he was a science fiction geek through and through (he had a penchant for giving science fiction films an extra star if they were especially groovy in the departments of effects and atmosphere). I wanted to sign the book to him and let him know how much his work meant to me — and for him to have the experience of the book before the movie, whenever that might be. I tried getting in touch with one of his editors at the Sun-Times, who I used to freelance for in college, to get it to him, but never heard back from her. Later it would turn out he and I had the same film/tv agent, who offered to forward on the book for me. I kept meaning to send off the book. I never did. I regret it now.

Although he can’t know it now, I still think it’s worth saying: Thank you, Roger Ebert, for being my teacher and for being such a good writer, critic and observer of the world. You made a difference in my life, and it is richer for having your words in it.

Coalition government is likely to become the norm in Britain because of the long-term decline in the combined vote of the Conservative and Labour parties (it peaked at 97% in 1951 and slowly fell to a postwar low of 65% in 2010).

But coalitions, now routine in local government, are still regarded as a novelty in national government. John Kampfner argues today on the Guardian’s Comment is free blog that, because coalition government is more likely, we need to learn to do coalitions better. He also suggests, paradoxically, that coalition could enable the parties to abandon “the Blairite straitjacket of triangulation that so stifles choice and debate”.

Kampfner acknowledges that the mistakes of the present coalition are partly due to the rushed procedure for coming to an agreement. But there is something else:

...there is a far bigger lesson, and it goes to the heart of the disconnect between the Westminster village and the rest of the country. The demographics of British politics are bad enough, but what happens when all the parties cleave towards similar policies and a small voting pool? On immigration, the three leaders find themselves dancing to Ukip’s tune. On criminal justice, drugs policy, Europe and elsewhere the recipes on offer, for all the rhetorical positioning that goes on, sometimes vary only at the margins.

Even on the burning issues of the moment – welfare, NHS reform and economic cuts – when it comes to the general election, how different will they sound when they are probed on the specifics of their commitments, and what these would commitments?

None of this should come as a surprise. Our rarefied political class is uniformly obsessed with the legacy of Tony Blair. The former prime minister bequeathed the art of triangulation – find out where your opponents are on any issue, and plonk yourself right in the middle. This is usually called “being on the side of the hard-working family”. It should be called the politics of caution. The hard worker/non-shirker/squeezed middle is a construct of wonks who don’t get out much. Voters have more variety, and are best served when given a choice.

Coalitions, far from limiting that choice, could – if done properly next time around – increase the options available. Parties could be required to set out before the election, as during any negotiations that take place afterwards, what they would be prepared to trade and what they would stick to: their “red lines”.

The risk-averse politics of triangulation does not offend voters but nor does it galvanise their support. It is why the Liberal Democrats remain stuck at 10% in the polls. Kampfner continues:

The Lib Dems, the beneficiary of coalitions, should rediscover some of their old radicalism, both for their own prospects and to reintroduce greater political choice. Clegg is correct when he juxtaposes the responsibilities of office against what he calls the empty wish lists of opposition.

Like any party, Clegg’s cannot and should not get all it wants. But the triangulation of the Blair era was little more than managerialism and safety first. It was the politics of a small minority of floating voters, and it was based in closing down areas of controversy. Paradoxically it was the Lib Dems who offered something different. Within Labour, the signals are mixed. Does the party think electoral success resides in an electorally self-selecting straitjacket, or does it have the courage to present something more galvanising?

Now, tragically, the only party that is refusing to play the game of cautious consensus is Ukip. Meanwhile, regarding the biggest issues of the moment – such as the failings of the financial system that led to the crash, the global shifts to the east and the rise of a new authoritarian model – mainstream politics is largely silent.

The reason Clegg repeatedly offends his party on issues such as secret courts and immigration is that he is being repeatedly advised to triangulate. To get out of this rut, he needs to set about his advisers and sack the “wonks who don’t get out much” – the merchants of triangulation, the believers in the “hard worker/non-shirker/squeezed middle”, the risk-averse advocates of converging on a mythical ‘centre ground’, the calculating cynics who believe you should construct policy on the basis of this week’s focus group data. If he doesn’t get rid of them but continues to triangulate, eventually the party will get rid of him.

I think I’ve finally hit on what, precisely*, I find frustrating about Steven Moffat’s tenure as show-runner on Doctor Who, and it’s this: the show is neither particularly bad or stupid or offensive, but it’s not exciting or compelling or very interesting either. The episodes in general, and Moffat’s in particular, tend to follow a pattern of being light and frothy as you watch them, hold up to no serious scrutiny or even thought, and are forgettable almost as soon as the episode is over. “Fear Her” may be regarded as the nadir of the modern series, but it’s still stuck in my memory more than most of the episodes we’ve seen this season. Heck, I can remember bits of “The Twin Dilemma” better than I can anything that happened in “A Town Called Mercy.” I actually had to resort to Google to even remember the title of “A Town Called Mercy.”

Take the 2012 Christmas episode, for example. While it had some cute bits, it mostly acted as a prologue to this episode. It featured guest stars who were charming at first, but ala River Song, are already in danger of becoming tedious through overuse. And while it should have introduced Jenna Louise Coleman as the new companion, it ended up simply teasing us with yet another stupid mystery that will either have a stunningly pedestrian resolution (River is Amy’s daughter) or simply be ignored (the TARDIS blew up). And that’s apart from the resurrection of the Great Intelligence as the new series “big bad”, a minor villain only familiar to long term fans, one who didn’t need an origin story to be effective, and with the whole “yetis in the loo” bit is at least partially responsible for the show’s reputation for being silly, stupid and childish back in the day.

So, what about this episode, then? Well, it had some cute bits, it was fun to watch while it was happening, but nothing in the plot holds up to any thought or consideration and it was ultimately pretty forgettable. Take Clara. What do we know of her? She’s cheeky and spunky and her big ambition is to travel. So she’s as stereotypical a Who-girl as you can get, basically. She’s brunette Rose without the dodgy accent. At least we might be spared the domestics, seeing as how the only relative we hear about is the sort of person who rants at strangers over the phone about politics. And there’s a mystery to her, because of course there is. Why else would significant hints be lingered over by the camera multiple times? (“Two years missing in her book? Why that must be a clue!”) This would be the fourth Moffat created companion with some sort of mysterious history to deciper, and I’m starting to suspect it’s his version of “outsider discovers they are special person in strange world adjacent to our own.”
That she just reappears in the Doctor’s life whenever she dies robs any danger she could be in of dramatic import just gets lost in the shuffle of all the other portentious clues. “Clara’s dead! Again! Guess I’ll pop off to ancient Rome and run into a version of her there.”

So what of the actual story. Well, we’ve got another monster whose gimmick is that their head spins around, and we’ve got the basic story of “The Idiot’s Lantern” being recycled. And that monster, while it’s visually unique, feels more like a writer flailing around for something mundane that kids might be scared of. A spoon, plus wifi and “the cloud”-two things kids have heard of but probably don’t really understand, and now you have a new toy to sell for Christmas. But the actual goal and intent of the villain? Well, it doesn’t make much sense. People are being uploaded into the cloud for the returning villain to eat? Okay…why? Someone had to set this up for the Great Intelligence, but the only agents we see are being controlled. And the Doctor uncharacteristically focuses on the symptom, the uploading, and doesn’t even bother to investigate the why, even when explicitly told that they are working on behalf of someone else. So not only does he let the real villain get away, setting up a second tedious “arc” for the season, but he seems disturbingly unconcerned that who knows how many people are simply going to die because he wants to save Clara. That’s the sort of situational morality I expect from Law & Order: SVU not Doctor Who. Heck, the Doctor even contradicts himself here: if the cloud is a “living hell” why would he be okay with sending River and her crew there in the Library? It’s the same damn thing, essentially.

So, that’s what we’re at with Who these days. “Turn off your brain” television that’s more interested in setting you up for the disappointing “secret” tomorrow instead of telling a compelling story today.

_{* apart from the general Tumblr-esque fan-wankery that permeates it these days, of course}

Would 21st century politicians would have any acted differently?

The politician allowing the unjust crucifixion of the Son of God was never going to get a particularly good press by history, particularly one the Church wrote.  Pilate accepting Christ’s innocence only causes his reputation to fall further: cynical political cowardice set against selfless suffering.  Yet the Church’s authorship of the story and the priorities of religion (as against government) do have quite a dramatic distorting effect.  Politics, after all, is the art of the possible; religion is not confined by such worldly limitations.

At this point, let’s not get too bogged down in the actual facts of the matter.  What’s important now is the myth rather than the man.  Partly that’s because the man is quite tricky to pin down given the partial (in both senses) and very distant evidence but mainly it’s because whatever the truth, it’s the image which resonates down the centuries.

Politicians have to reconcile any number of conflicting influences – the interests of their superiors, of their supporters, of their clients, of the mob (or these days, electorate); avoiding giving ammunition to those who have ill intent towards them; in office, governing effectively and avoiding excessive ferment, often with inadequate resources to impose a solution.  And that’s besides the advancement of any personal ambition or agenda that a politician has.  This remains as true today as it was two thousand years ago; it is simply a function of how power works.  Politics is compromise.

So when faced with what he would have seen as the Christ problem, Pilate first tried what many politicians would do: he passed it on to someone else.  When it landed back on his desk, he was faced with a choice between on the one hand, the demands of the mob and the local religious leadership, and of his imperial duty to maintain peace and order, and, on the other, of his inability to find good cause to satisfy the mob’s demands and of his own need to maintain Rome’s prestige by at least appearing to take decisions on his own initiative.  Unsurprisingly, he too tried to find middle way – Christ’s scourging rather than crucifixion and then the offer of his release (the alternative choice supposedly being unacceptable) – and twice they were rejected.  Such are the problems of governing irreconcilables.  Perhaps Pilate was fortunate that there was no tabloid press in the first century.

History records it as the ultimate act of political cynicism and indeed, standing for right against vested interest is a virtue, to a point.  If on a smaller scale, politicians go along with policies every day that they are not comfortable with or have actively opposed.  It’s part of the bargain that enables the state to implement other policies they do favour (or in opposition, the ability to build an electoral machine that can in future become the government).

Pilate in all probability wasn’t a pleasant person.  He certainly wasn’t a particularly successful politician or administrator.  Still, does he deserve the opprobrium of the ages?  I’m far from convinced so.  I doubt that many leaders, faced with the pressures he did, would have acted much differently.

David Herdson

It’s January of 2004. Michael Andrews is at number one with “Mad World.” After two weeks Michelle takes over with “All This Time.” Black Eyed Peas, Victoria Beckham, Atomic Kitten, Kelis, Franz Ferdinand, and Scissor Sisters also chart. In news, Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity land and do not discover Ice Warriors. Tony Blair narrowly avoids defeat on a Higher Education bill. BBC Director General Greg Dyke, successor to John Birt, resigns in the fallout from the Hutton Report. And a whale explodes in Taiwan.

While in audios, The Creed of the Kromon. First off, Charley gets raped. Again. Which is, what, the third time, basically? Minuet in Hell, Neverland, and now this? Never mind her being the “in love” one. Apparently she’s the raped one. Goodie.

Of course, what we have here is a classic case of sci-fi rape, which is to say, rape that would not be possible without a sci-fi conceit of some sort. This causes an interesting problem for people, in that a lot of them are really good at pretending that sci-fi rape is not, and I use this term with the irony dial set to maximum, legitimate rape. For some reason if you rape someone with science fiction concepts it’s just a metaphor for rape, in much the same way that killing them with a phaser is just a metaphor for them being shot. Note that, by this bit of sarcasm, I do not mean that fictional characters who are shot by phasers are shot in real life. What I mean is that phasers are not treated as metaphorical violence within the narrative. Whereas with sci-fi rape there’s a bizarre and horrifying tendency for everyone to act like it wasn’t really rape, it was just a metaphor in a story.

So we have Charley drugged, impregnated, subjected to brainwashing, and put through intense physiological changes whereby she becomes a giant insect. These are the events of extreme fetish pornography. Actually, I suspect it would be less upsetting as extreme fetish pornography, as at least then one imagines everyone would be willing to admit to the fact that this is a story about rape. Instead we get a story that seems to think it’s just a fairly usual romp about people getting captured by aliens and rescued, albeit one with a bit of a social conscience about runaway capitalism. Charley remembers nothing of what would euphemistically be called her “ordeal” and accurately called her “extended rape,” and so everybody decides it’s basically OK and they go off adventuring again. Without telling her what happened.

What bothers me here - OK, well, where to start, but what bothers me most fundamentally here is the fact that this would not be handled this way if it were anything other than sci-fi rape. It’s only rape that gets the magic veil of metaphor whereby as long as it happens with imaginary things it doesn’t count. Which is typical, really. I mean, it’s just the same mildly sociopathic crap that infests the program in almost all of its really stupid moments since the 1980s. It’s the blinkered view of the predominantly male cult television fandom that was, if not responsible, at least standing conspicuously close to the tiller for almost everything that went wrong on the program. Of course they don’t notice sci-fi rape. And that’s clearly what it is. It’s not some conscious conspiracy to work more rape fantasies into Doctor Who. It’s that Doctor Who is being written and produced by people who never go “wait a moment, we seem to be writing a story in which Charley gets raped for the better part of two episodes and yet nobody in the story is terribly bothered by it.” That’s the appalling thing. That nobody even noticed.

But as appalling things go, it’s par for the course in the wilderness years. This is, after all, ultimately their major crime. And it’s an odd balance. On the one hand the point where Doctor Who became fully subcultural was fertile for it. The wilderness years, for all their faults, produced a ton of ideas that were very influential to Doctor Who. But this influence comes in hindsight. At the time they happened there was no clear sense that the destruction of Gallifrey and the idea of a Time War would be huge to Doctor Who’s future but that looms were going to be quietly ignored. Nothing that was present at the time for Lungbarrow and Alien Bodies - books that, remember, came out in the same year and only eight months apart - that indicated which of them would have more influence.

Yes, these ideas came up because the subcultural, arcane nature of Doctor Who was productive at generating ideas. But the same thing has been its undoing far too often as an excessive number of clever boys go running off in their own directions without listening to each other. The wilderness years were productive only because we came out of the wilderness and back into the larger society. One thing that has been striking in writing this period has been the degree to which the Pop Between Realities posts hardly ever impact the material produced in the Wilderness Years itself. So yes, we pop off into Coupling or Buffy or Jonathan Creek, but it’s not like by doing so we discover new things about the Doctor Who of the time. Rather, that’s been a matter of meticulously setting up May 1st so that the Rose entry isn't 30,000 words long and prefaced with a history of television over the past sixteen years.

But in terms of how it’s impacted Doctor Who? It hasn’t. Here we are in early 2004, nearly a year after Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended, and it’s nigh-impossible to think of any stories that have been significantly influenced by it. I mean, you’ve got a Spike cameo in City of the Dead, sure, but have there been any Doctor Who stories that take any clear motivation from Buffy? And can anyone imagine a set of circumstances where, if Doctor Who had been on television in 2000, it wouldn’t have hit on doing a story set in a school with creepy seemingly supernatural things going on? And yet we went the entire wilderness years without ever doing a Buffy riff.

This speaks volumes about the level of isolation that Doctor Who existed in during this period. It simply wasn’t plugged in meaningfully to the outside world at all. It’s the flip side of its subcultural nature. The energy of the margins is generative, but it is, in the end, also a prison. And Creed of the Kromon illustrates that all too well, finding itself so far removed from any human concern that it can do an hour straight of rape and not even notice that it’s doing it. We’re back to Moonbase 3 territory.

Actually, we’re really just back to 1985-86. Because Creed of the Kromon is the exact same story we’ve seen twice before - it’s a redo of Philip Martin’s other two Doctor Who stories. And yes, it has the usual Philip Martin theme of “faceless profit-hungry corporations are bad,” which is at least a mild social conscience, but it has all the same problems of crass sensationalism and rape culture that those stories did.

At the time we assumed most of these problems were just part of the general malaise of Doctor Who in the era, largely because in other regards Philip Martin was much cleverer and more subtle than anything else going on at the time. But in hindsight, perhaps being sandwiched between Attack of the Cybermen and The Mark of the Rani flattered Vengeance on Varos, and that we may have forgotten how faint the praise “it’s the best story in Trial of a Time Lord” actually is. Which is to say that the myriad of very fundamental problems we noted with those two stories are, shocker of shockers, actually related to the writer of them. Which shouldn’t be a huge surprise, given that Martin, in interviews, has always basically taken Saward’s side in the drama of the era. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad writer - Saward had good taste in writers when he picked favorites - but it does mean that he was always likely to share blind spost with Saward. And sure enough, he did.

But why blame him? In the twenty years since Vengeance on Varos he’d managed a few scattered episodes of television, but it’s not like he was some superstar writer brought in from the heavens by Big Finish. He was one of the two good writers in a largely awful era, and, more to the point, an era that was now twenty years past. And yet as the first “proper” story in the big Divergent Universe arc - the one where we get to actually see parts of the Divergent Universe instead of getting a high-theory overview of it - this is what they turn to: the series’ vainglory days. So what would they expect? They hired a writer of mid-80s Doctor Who. Presumably they were expecting just that - mid-80s Doctor Who.

But there’s something bizarre about the decision to do it. Especially in the content of the Divergent Universe arc. The point of the Divergent Universe arc is presumably innovation. At the very least the point is clearly a “no classic monsters” run. First of all, one wonders why this needed an elaborate plot arc to accomplish. Surely a “no classic monsters” arc could be accomplished by, say, not commissioning any stories featuring classic monsters. I mean, the idea that you need an excuse to not use a classic monster is almost as strange as, well, the idea that you need an excuse to do any sort of innovative storytelling.

But the Divergent Universe arc clearly has no point if all it’s going to do is “the return of Sil only we’re pretending he’s a different species.” I honestly have no idea about the origins of this script, but it would surprise exactly nobody to find out that the Kromon were, in an earlier draft, the Mentors. Which, again, is presumably what you want when you bring Philip Martin out of retirement. But why wed that to the Divergent Universe arc? They’re not just separate instincts, they’re instincts that actively work against each other.

But all of this ignores the degree to which it’s just strange to be doing this in the first place. I mean, how “let’s do it like they did when the show was so wretched it nearly got cancelled” becomes a sensible course of action in the first place is at least slightly obscure. The strange and perverse reasoning necessary to get to this point in the first place is striking, to say the least. It’s a bizarre case of leaning into the critique - of simply acknowledging that Doctor Who is a minor and basically culturally irrelevant has-been of a series with nothing it can do but mining its own past. So much so that it’s stuck mining the worst portions of its past by virtue of having run out of anything else to say. But implicit in it is the abandonment of all hope that the series could possibly be more than a crass nostalgia trip. So of course this is the story with a bunch of cynical rape in it. Because it’s the story that’s decided that it just doesn’t care.

But haunting it is another opportunity. After all, this is a story that’s making an overelaborate effort to be original. That it considers innovation to require special effort is telling, yes. If we wanted to be snarky we could suggest that Creed of the Kromon does everything possible to be innovative save for actually being at all creative or original. It’s as though Doctor Who wants to be more than it is, but no longer knows the way. Buried under the weight of its obscurity, chasing a diminishing audience with increasing desperation, it knows innovation is out there, but it can’t find a way of getting there.

And this is, in effect, why we can walk away at this point from Big Finish just like we did a few years earlier from the BBC Books line. I say this, of course, with the intention of looking at another three audios, but as something to follow story by story it’s just not sensible. This isn’t a line that’s doing anything important enough to follow. It had some good ideas. The whole wilderness years did. But it’s time for them to be over.

I've been watching the whole Adria Richards fiasco with a sense of horror and disgust. I'm finally going to say something, but for the most part, it's going to be indirect.

See, I'm a white guy, born as a member of an upper middle class white family. That means that I'm awfully lucky. I'm part of the group that is, effectively, treated as the normal, default person in most settings. I'm also a guy who's married to a chinese woman, and who's learned a bit about how utterly clueless I am.

Here's the fundamental issue that underlies all of this, and many similar stories: our society is deeply sexist and racist. We are all raised in an environment in which mens voices are more important than womens. It's so deeply ingrained in us that we don't even notice it.

What this means is that we are all to some degree, sexist, and racist. When I point this out, people get angry. We also have learned that sexism is a bad thing. So when I say to someone that you are sexist, it's really easy to interpret that as me saying that you're a bad person: sexism is bad, if I'm sexist, them I'm bad.

But we really can't get away from this reality. We are sexists. For many of us, we're not deliberately sexist, we're not consciously sexist. But we are sexist.

Here's a really interesting experiment to try, if you have the opportunity. Visit an elementary school classroom. First, just watch the teacher interact with the students while they're teaching. Don't try to count interactions. Just watch. See if you think that any group of kids is getting more attention than any other. Most of the time, you probably will get a feeling that they're paying roughly equal attention to the boys and the girls, or to the white students and the black students. Then, come back on a different day, and count the number of times that they call on boys versus calling on girls. I've done this, after having the idea suggested by a friend. The result was amazing. I really, honestly believed that the teacher was treating her students (the teacher I did this with was a woman) equally. But when I counted?She was calling on boys twice as often as girls.

This isn't an unusual outcome. Do some looking online for studies of classroom gender dynamics, and you'll find lots of structured observations that come to the same conclusion.

My own awakening about these kinds of things came from my time working at IBM. I've told this first story before, but it's really worth repeating.

One year, I managed the summer intership programs for my department. The previous summer, IBM research had wound up with an intership class consisting of 99% men. (That's not an estimate: that's a real number. That year, IBM research hired 198 summer interns, of whom 2 were women.) For a company like IBM, numbers like that are scary. Ignoring all of the social issues of excluding potentially great candidates, numbers like that can open the company up to gender discrimination lawsuits!

So my year, they decided to encourage the hiring of more diverse candidates. The way that they did that was by allocating each department a budget for summer interns. They could only hire up to their budgeted number of interns. Only women and minority candidates didn't count against the budget.

When the summer program hiring opened, my department was allocated a budget of six students. All six slots were gone within the first day. Every single one of them went to a white, american, male student.

The second day, the guy across the hall from me came with a resume for a student he wanted to hire. This was a guy who I really liked, and really respected greatly. He was not, by any reasonable measure, a bad guy - he was a really good person. Anyway, he had this resume, for yet another guy. I told him the budget was gone, but if he could find a good candidate who was either a woman or minority, that we could hire them. He exploded, ranting about how we were being sexist, discriminating against men. He just wanted to hire the best candidate for the job! We were demanding that he couldn't hire the best candidate, he had to hire someone less qualified, in order to satisfy some politically correct bureaucrat! There was nothing I could do, so eventually he stormed out.

Three days later, he came back to my office with another resume. He was practically bouncing off the walls he was so happy. "I found another student to hire. She's even better than the guy I originally came to you with! She's absolutely perfect for the job!". We hired her.

I asked him why he didn't find her before. He had no answer - he didn't know why he didn't find her resume of his first search.

This was a pattern that I observed multiple times that year. Looking through a stack of resumes, without deliberately excluding women, somehow, all of the candidates with female names wound up back in the slushpile. I don't think that anyone was deliberately saying "Hmm, Jane, that's a woman's name, I don't want to hire a woman". But I do think that in the process of looking through a file containing 5000 resumes, trying to select which ones to look at, on an unconscious level, they were more likely to look carefully at a candidate with a male name, because we all learn, from a young age, that men are smarter than women, men are more serious than women, men are better workers than women, men are more likely to be technically skilled than women. Those attitudes may not be part of our conscious thought, but they are part of the cultural background that gets drummed into us by school, by books, by movies, by television, by commercials.

As I said, that was a real awakening for me.

I was talking about this with my next-door office neighbor, who happened to be one of the only two women in my department (about 60 people) at the time. She was shocked that I hadn't noticed this before. So she pointed out to me that in meetings, she could say things, and everyone would ignore it, but if a guy said the same thing, they'd get listened to. We'd been in many meetings together, and I'd never noticed this!

So I started paying attention, and she was absolutely right.

What happened next is my second big awakening.

I started watching this in meetings, and when people brushed over something she'd said, I'd raise my voice and say "X just suggested blah, which I think is a really good idea. What about it?". I wanted to help get her voice listened to.

She was furious at me. This just blew my mind. I was really upset at her at first. Dammit, I was trying to help, and this asshole was yelling at me for it! She'd complained about how people didn't listen to her, and now when I was trying to help get her listened to, she was complaining again!

What I realized after I calmed down and listened to her was that I was wrong. I hadn't spoken to her about doing it. I didn't understand what it meant. But the problem was, people didn't take her seriously because she was a woman. People might listen to me, because I'm also a white guy. But when I spoke for her, I wasn't helping. When a man speaks on behalf of a woman, we're reinforcing the idea that a woman's voice isn't supposed to be heard. I was substituting my man's voice for her woman's, and by doing that, I was not just not helping her, but I was actively hurting, because the social interpretation of my action was that "X can't speak for herself". And more, I learned that by taking offense at her, for pointing out that I had screwed up, I was definitely in the wrong - that I had an instinct for reacting wrong.

What I learned, gradually, from watching things like this, from becoming more sensitive and aware, and by listening to what women said, was that this kind of thing is that I was completely clueless.

The fact is, I constantly benefit from a very strong social preference. I don't notice that. Unless I'm really trying hard to pay attention, I'm not aware of all of the benefits that I get from that. I don't notice all of the times when I'm getting a benefit. Worse, I don't notice all of the times when my behavior is asserting that social preference as my right.

It's very easy for a member of an empowered majority to just take things for granted. We see the way that we are treated as a default, and assume that everyone is treated the same way. We don't perceive that we are being treated preferentially. We don't notice that the things that offend us are absolutely off limits to everyone, but that things that we do to offend others are accepted as part of normal behavior. Most importantly, we don't notice when our behavior is harmful to people who aren't part of our empowered group. And when we do offend someone who isn't part of the empowered majority, we take offense at the fact that they're offended. Because they're saying that we did something bad, and we know that we aren't bad people!

The way that this comes back to the whole Adria Richards fiasco is very simple. Many people have looked at what happened at PyCon, and said something like "She shouldn't have tweeted their picture", or "She shouldn't have been offended, they didn't do anything wrong", or "She should have just politely spoken to them".

I don't know whether what she did was right or not. I wasn't there. I didn't hear the joke that the guys in question allegedly told. What I do know is that for a member of the minority out-group, there is frequently no action that will be accepted as "right" if it includes the assertion that the majority did something offensive.

I've seen this phenomena very directly myself, not in the context of sexism, but in terms of antisemitism. There's an expression that I've heard multiple times in the northeast US, to talk about bartering a price for a car: "jewing the salesman down". I absolutely find that extremely offensive. And I've called people out on it. There is no response that's actually acceptable.

If I politely say "You know, that's relying on a stereotype of me and my ancestors that's really hurtful", the response is: "Oh, come on, it's just harmless. I'm not talking about you, it's just a word. You're being oversensitive". If I get angry, the response is "You Jews are so strident". If I go to an authority figure in the setting, "You Jews are so passive aggressive, why couldn't you just talk to me?". No matter what I do, I'm wrong. Women deal with this every day, only they're in a situation where the power dynamic is even less in their favor.

That's the situation that women - particularly women in tech - find themselves in every day. We are sexist. We do mistreat women in tech every day, without even knowing that we're doing it. And we're very likely to take offense if they mention that we did something wrong. Because we know that we're good people, and since we aren't deliberately doing something bad, they must be wrong.

For someone in Adria Richards' situation at PyCon, there is no course of action that can't be taken wrong. As a woman hearing the joke in question, she certainly knew whether or not it was offensive to her. But once she'd heard something offensive, there was nothing she could do that someone couldn't turn into a controversy.

Was the joke offensive? We don't know what, specifically, he said. The only fact that we're certain of is that in her judgement, it was offensive; that the authorities at PyCon agreed, and asked the gentleman in question to apologize.

Did the guy who made the joke deserve to be fired? I don't know. If this stupid joke were the first time he'd ever done something wrong, then he didn't deserve to be fired. But we don't know what his history is like. I know how hard it is to hire skilled engineers, so I'm very skeptical that any company would fire someone over one minor offense. It's possible that his company has a crazy hair-trigger HR department. But it's also possible that there's background that we don't know about. That he's done stuff before, and been warned. If that's the case, then his company could have decided that this was the last straw.

Did Adria Richards deserve to be fired? Almost certainly not. We know more about her case than we do about the guy who told the joke. We know that her company fired her over this specific incident, because in their announcement of her firing, they told us the reason. They didn't cite any past behavior - they just specifically cited this incident and its aftermath as the reason for firing her. It's possible that there's a history here that we don't know about, that she'd soured relations with customers of her company in incidents other than this, and that this was a last straw. But it doesn't seem likely, based on the facts that we're aware of.

Did either of them deserve to be threatened? Absolutely not.

This article gets at a deeper truth about why I despise most of how reading is taught, introduced, and talked about in a lot of educational circles and society at large. Several parents gather around a third grade text, and after reading it, find the questions asked about the text to be ridiculous:

“The truth is, even such a banal story cannot be reduced to a single theme, nor should it be. By asking young students to spend time taking tests like this we are doing them a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.

Consider for a moment what it would be like to try to answer this question of a major work of children’s literature. So: what is the story ‘Piglet Meets a Heffalump’ mostly about? Is it about hunting and trapping techniques? Facing one’s fear of scary monsters? Joining with others in a great enterprise? Trying to impress your friends by claiming knowledge you don’t possess? Or does it mostly reveal how friendship and love can transcend all our foibles?”

(Via Dear Governor: Lobby to Save a Love of Reading – SchoolBook.)

I call it the ‘cod liver oil theory’ of reading. So many people keep harping that reading is ‘good for you’ that this is often the main avenue to which kids are exposed to literature. Constantly being give texts to analyze and find ‘answers’ within. Guided to pre-determined outcomes.

Fuck. That. Shit.

No better way to kill a love reading than to beat it into some kid that literature isn’t fun, or reading a way to transport yourself elsewhere. No better way to teach kids that reading is only one thing; a boring task for infovores.

Here, eat your story vegetables you little shits. Eat them up and stop crying. It’s good for you. There can never be story steak, story potatoes, or story candy, or story dessert. Story food is only fuel, never pleasure. Don’t go listen to some chef, here’s your story cube. Find the nutrients. Find them now!

A whole class of college freshman recently read my novel Arctic Rising. While signing after a Q&A session a football player came up to have the book signed and said, embarrassed, that it was the first book he’d ever actually just enjoyed reading.

Sure, it had been assigned, but it’s a refrain I’ve heard over and over again. It does indicate a certain failure of the cod liver theory of literature he’d been living in until he turned 19.

For 14 or so years, literature for this person was only ‘you have to’ and ‘you need to find out the…’ and ‘it’s good for you.’

Shit, if that had been the way reading was taught to me, I wouldn’t have put up with that either.

And I still ran into cod liver bullshit. Teachers saying that it wasn’t good for me to read ahead of my level. Getting held back because I could read a whole book, but couldn’t recite my alphabet in order (I only mastered that, actually, like 5 years ago. Most of my life, I’ve had to sing the song in my head to figure out where the words were arbitrarily supposed to be).

I’m not a fan.

Since the turn of the New Year, I've been wondering whether I should renew my Lib Dem membership. Ever since the disappointment that was the failure of attempts to reform the House of Lords I've been sailing towards apostasising from the church resigning from the party. The recent spring conference controversy over secret courts and Nick Clegg's (formerly beloved round these parts) appalling reaction (or lack thereof) has done little to make me sing the party's praises.

But being a political independent doesn't sit right with me. I'm an idealist and political independence has a powerful and romantic draw. But what would it achieve? Very little I suspect. And the, serious, political alternatives just aren't really alternatives. The Conservatives have been doing a lot to appear more attractive to classical liberal sorts, but the crazy backbenchers show me all I need to see on what the party is really about. And Labour. Do I even need to spell out all of Labour's faults? I don't have the time nor the inclination. Short version: hypocrites (they don't get that when, perhaps rightly, they scream "Hypocrites" at Lib Dems they are actually being hypocrites! I'm being a hypocrite aren't I?), dreamers, warmongerers and plain old crazies. I just read the Guardian every time I start to feel like I might be getting nostalgic for old Left-Wing Jae.

So no thanks, they aren't for me. So why stay with the Lib Dems?

Loyalty is a big part of it. Tribalism, even my own honest sort, is a malignant but powerful force. But there are also all the good people I know who are members of the Lib Dems. Some of the most intelligent political thinkers with whom I have personal acquaintance tend to be in the Lib Dems (and even the ones I like outside seem to somehow end up in the party. My own bias? As if.). I've always been more interested in social issues and civil rights over economic matters so the Lib Dems social liberalism attracts me, but so does the success of their income tax allowance policy. If I imagine who I'd prefer in charge of the country out of the big three parties (don't get me started on UKIP...) then there is no confusion. A Lib Dem Government would be my choice without a shadow of a doubt.

I don't pretend there aren't major problems that I now have with the party. I'm no longer going to take party promises on face value. But they aren't anything compared to the problems I have with the other parties.

So yes. I'm a Lib Dem for another year. It'll be 10 years in the party in 2014. Scary huh?

So there are rumblings that the government is planning to freeze or perhaps even reduce the minimum wage for those over 21 years of age. This would be completely wrong-headed for at least three reasons.

Most importantly it is simply not fair to penalise those who earn the least (which by definition are those earning the national minimum wage). They are the so called "strivers" that George Osborne keeps banging on about. Surely this government should want to protect them rather than see their real-terms salary fall?

But if that's too wishy-washy namby-pamby sandal-eating muesli-wearing for you then here are a couple of economic reasons for you.

If salaries are reduced then benefit claims will increase. The government will simply be shifting the burden from the private sector to the taxpayer and hence helping to further subsidise companies that should be paying their staff more not less. If anything this will make the deficit even worse.

Also those earning the least are the most likely to spend what they get. This is exactly what you need to boost growth and hence the mooted policy is the exact opposite of what the country requires.

I hope this is just bank-holiday flag flying. I also hope that Lib Dem ministers will have nothing to do with this mean-spirited and economically dubious nonsense.

The second group treats Doctor Who as a kind of private religion: a Proustian umbilical connection to a collective past. You remember that story where the Daleks had to form a temporary alliance with Captain Kirk to prevent Cyborg and Muton blowing up the dining room table? No? But it's just as much a part of the history of Doctor Who and the Daleks as the Chase, which I missed, due to not having been born. (I have seen the DVD, though. It's not very good.) I have a much stronger memory of Doctor Who driving the Whomobile into Gerry Cottle's circus than I do of him driving it around dinosaur infested London. In fact, I rather suspect that the TV set was broken during Invasion of the Dinosaurs.(I have the DVD of that too. It's dreadful.)
The second approach holds that those kinds of memories are all equally part of a big messy wobbly thing called "Doctor Who". Not that it's limited to childhood, necessarily: sitting in a smoky bar watching a snowy VHS tape of the Gunfighters (and naturally singing along with the Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon) is just as much a part of Doctor Who as having a break between the twiglets and the jelly at Robert's birthday party in order to watch Genesis of the Daleks, (the DVD of which is bloody brilliant). 
A very wise man once said: "The Gunfighters isn't a TV drama: it's the fossilized remains of a Saturday tea time nearly fifty years ago." 
The astute reader (I know where he lives) will recognize that this is the approach that Lawrence Miles has been taking in his (I hope ongoing) series of essays, which are almost certainly the best things which have ever been written about Doctor Who. His remark about Doctor Who being something like a personal mythology has changed the rules of the game in a way they haven't been changed since, oh, the last five minutes of Curse of Fatal Death. And yes, he can indeed be rather annoying and sarcastic at times. Lots of us can be rather annoying and sarcastic at times, Nick, but not all of invented the Faction Paradox. [*]
The second approach is very close to my heart. It's the kind of thing I tried to do to Watchmen in Who Sent The Sentinels; and it's what I may yet get around to doing to Spider-Man. It's very much the kind of thing which the aforementioned Francis Spufford did in his wonderful Child That Books Built. 
It's also what Proper Literary Critics sometimes invites us to do with Shakespeare. Hamlet isn't just, or even, a text: it's the intersection between every actor who has ever played Hamlet; every academic who has ever lectured on Hamlet, and ever drunk old codger who has ever said "Ah, Yorick, but there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy" in the pub.
It has an obvious strength compared with the first approach. It allows you to carry on talking about Doctor Who without needing to pretend that it was ever really very good. If you were terrified by the giant maggots when you were ten, then you were terrified by the giant maggots when you were ten. That's a fact about the giant maggots and there is no need to carry on pretending that the giant maggots (inflated condoms, weren't they?) were actually particularly terrifying.
But it also has an obvious drawback. It's subjective. Carnival of Monsters was the first story I ever saw, but it wasn't the first story you ever saw, so it is naturally special to me in a way that it can never be to you. I first saw Unearthly Child at Panopticon 2, but you didn't. If we aren't careful, we will find out that we aren't talking about the same thing; that we don't know what we are talking about; that we aren't really talking about anything at all. [**]
Oh: and it's almost completely meaningless if you're under thirty five. 



[*] Alan Moore

[**] At the end of his long and difficult book about literary theory, Terry Eagleton comes to the conclusion that there probably isn't any such thing as literature to be having theories about.


continues....

Unlike our report on electoral reform yesterday, this is no joke. The government’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (which I seem to recall has two Liberal Democrat ministers in it) is worried the minimum wage may be too high.

Well, let’s have a look at the minimum wage. The rate for people aged 21 or over is currently £6.19 per hour. Does that sound too high to you? How would you know? You are probably middle class and think in terms of an annual salary, so let’s convert it into terms you will understand. Assuming a 40-hour week and paid holidays, £6.19 X 40 X 52 = £12,875. For people aged 18 to 20, the minimum wage is £4.98 per hour. £4.98 X 40 X 52 = £10,358. But these annual amounts are a best-case scenario since, for many low-paid people, work is often casual and holidays not always paid.

There is an argument that the minimum wage harms the economy and here is Jo Swinson (who ought to know better) making it:

Employment minister Jo Swinson said in February: “The level of employment is now above its pre-recession peak, but the employment rate is below the pre-recession peak.

“This means that we believe that caution is required – particularly as the minimum wage rate is now at its highest ever level relative to average earnings for adults, and remains high for young people.”

She is motivated by a fear that the minimum wage acts as a disincentive to job creation, but that is only the case if your job creation strategy is a race to the bottom on wages. Taken to its logical extreme, the government could eliminate unemployment tomorrow if it eliminated pay altogether.

Meanwhile, depressing pay levels can only harm the economy. First, low-paid people must spend what they have – they don’t have a surplus to save – so their income goes straight into the local economy to buy goods and services, which helps the economy. Second, the lower pay levels are, the more the government has to subsidise stingy employers in the form of Income Support. Leaving aside the arguments about unemployment benefits, surely anyone in full-time work should be paid enough to live on?

But then these arguments will cut little ice with those for whom austerity is more of a religion than a rational policy.

Postscript: The Living Wage Foundation has calculated the living wage for both London and the rest of the UK. For London, it is £8.55 per hour and for the rest of the UK £7.45. Converted to annual salary equivalents, that is (£8.55 X 40 X 52 =) £17,784 and (£7.45 X 40 X 52 =) £15,496 respectively, in both cases more than the statutory minimum wage. So, Jo Swinson, still worried that the minimum wage is “high”?