Andrew Hickey

An exclusive story from EurActiv:

An ex-UK Independence Party (UKIP) MEP says that the party’s climate change scepticism was callow and so eccentric that party press officers often had to contradict the views of its climate spokesman, Lord Monckton.

“The policy was very rudimentary and their [climate change] position was very amateurish,” said Marta Andreasen, who left UKIP to join the Conservatives in February.

“Climate change is not a reality for UKIP,” she added.

The more you hear about UKIP, the more you realise what a shambles it is. So the question is why it has become so popular. The grumpy old right-wing Daily Express-reading vote can account for only part of it.

The main reason UKIP can thrive is that the three mainstream parties are all converging on an illusory ‘centre ground’ (as discussed previously here, here and here), with a similar non-ideological and managerialist approach, and so appear indistinguishable to voters. The Liberal Democrats, in losing the ‘protest vote’, seem to have forgotten why so many voters were disillusioned with the political system and protested in the first place.

First sale doctrine does not apply to MP3s in the US.

In 2004, Ohio voters decided to put a ban on same sex marriage into the state constitution. If this poll is correct, however, that ban might not be long for this world:

The constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman passed with 62 percent support.

But now, just days before the U.S. Supreme Court considers a pair of landmark gay-marriage cases, a new Saperstein Poll for The Dispatch shows that 54 percent back a proposed new amendment to repeal the 2004 measure and “allow two consenting adults to marry, regardless of their gender.”

Just 40 percent oppose the proposal, which also would allow religious institutions to determine who they will or won’t marry, and protect such institutions that refuse to perform a marriage.

To which I say, of course, good. As someone who is lives in Ohio, it’s embarrassing to me that this bit of bigotry is in the state constitution, and I’d be delighted to have it expunged, both for moral reasons and (somewhat more technically) because I think constitutions should generally be as uncluttered as possible. The tendency for states to allow genuinely dumbass things to be grafted into their constitutions via simple majorities in a popular vote strikes me as a bad policy in general.

It also reminds me that Ohio really is a middle America bellwether, which is to say, as goes Ohio, so goes the country. Ohio is neither on the cutting edge of social thought, nor is it a heel dragging reactionary state. It’s big and purple and right down the middle (see: the last several presidential elections). If Ohioans have come around on the subject of same-sex marriage, everything its opponents are doing from this point forward is a rear guard action, i.e., slowly backing themselves into Mississippi and hoping the Supreme Court never gets around to saying that not allowing same-sex couples to marry anywhere in the US is unconstitutional.

What’s happened in the decade in Ohio? The same thing that’s happened most everywhere else in the US: More gays, lesbians and bisexuals have come out and have become more vocal about who they are, meaning more people now know that someone they care about is something other than straight. Young people, who have far less of a problem with same-sex marriage, have grown into voting age. Old people, who have far more of a problem with it, are dying off. Same-sex marriage has been in the US for almost a decade now and the nation has not collapsed into a festering pit of licentiousness and sodomy (any more than it already was), meaning that most of the “slippery slope” rhetoric of the anti-same-sex marriage contingent is being seen as what it always was: hand-flapping gay panic.

This is not to say one cannot make a principled stance against same-sex marriage; one can. The problem today — and the problem for the future of those who are against same-sex marriage — is that for an increasing number of Americans who are straight, it’s becoming rather more difficult to parse the practical difference between that principled stance, and simple, garden-variety bigotry. More simply: If your principled stance condemns someone’s child, parent, relative or friend to a second-class existence, the chances are good that they’re not going to think much of your principled stance, or you for having it.

Ultimately, that’s what’s going to sand down opposition to same-sex marriage to a recondite nub: The fact is, almost no one likes to be seen as a bigot, and those who don’t mind being seen as bigots, no one else likes to be seen with. Ohio may or may not strike that 2004 amendment from its constitution this year, but it seems unlikely it won’t be stricken out. The Supreme Court may or may not rule that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages that are legally constituted in their respective states, but it seems unlikely that DOMA will be long for this world in any event. Ohio tells me so; I’ve learned to listen to Ohio when it speaks about these things.

Henry Porter in yesterday’s Observer has his doubts:

Tolerance of gender, sexual and racial differences is certainly much greater today. But can Britain be described as a more liberal society after a month that has seen all parties support legislation that will effectively license the press, and a second bill introducing secret hearings in civil cases pass through the Lords, with Liberal Democrat peers whipped to oppose amendments that were designed to support open and natural justice? I’ll come to the Lib Dems later, but the short answer is no.

There have been gains and losses in recent decades. Nowadays, we accept gay rights and people can say f**k on television. But more fundamental liberties are being sacrificed:

Things are happening that would have been unimaginable to democrats across the political spectrum 30 years ago. Personal rights have expanded and tolerance undeniably has increased, but at the same time we are behaving as though liberty were a limitless resource that can be endlessly compromised without loss to the individual, or to the sum total of rights that define our free society.

Porter said “I’ll come to the Lib Dems later” and he does:

That the Liberal Democrat party lost or betrayed its principles so quickly in government is, I suppose, to be expected, and I have to confess to very little surprise when I read Nick Clegg’s weaselly speech on immigration, which seemed to proclaim tolerance yet contained the subsonic message of rightwing dog-whistle politics. With every day that passes, he looks more and more like a member of Blair’s second administration home affairs team.

The problem is that as the liberal voice is all but disappearing from parliament we have a generation of leaders in their 40s who will seem almost indistinguishable to future historians. Clegg’s betrayal of liberal values was simply part of the process of his becoming a member of the pragmatic, basically non-ideological, homogenised governing class, which on these issues of liberty moves in lockstep.

British politics these days is reminiscent of beer in the 1970s, when the big brewers almost destroyed Britain’s brewing culture and the wide variety of beers. They wanted to replace them with a few bland, homogenised, TV-advertised keg beers such as Double Diamond, Courage Tavern and Watney’s Red Barrel. They would have succeeded were it not for CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale), which led a revival of craft brewing.

The blithe dismissal of civil liberties is the Watney’s Red Barrel of politics. We don’t just need a campaign for civil liberties. We need a Campaign for Real Politics.

I've not tried to hide my deep disappointment with the Government's same-sex marriage bill. Having read it, it is quite clearly not the marriage equality I, among others, had been hoping for. Don't get me wrong, this would be a great leap forward. But it'd certainly leave me unsatisfied.

You'd think that once the bill was published our opponents would have breathed a sigh of relief. This bill would, if passed, see the creation of a new concept that we can call "gay marriage" (the same approach the South Africans have taken). It would not "redefine" marriage. It'll be a separate institution.

But alas. As Lord Carey made clear in his article over the weekend, some who oppose marriage equality haven't even realised this bill is significantly different to that proposed in the Coalition's consultation document (Lord Carey still thinks the Government is trying to create a separation of "religious" and "civil" marriage, which is what was proposed originally, but that is no longer the case). Instead of grasping this compromise and laughing all the way to the wedding chapel, they are hell bent on defeating the bill in the House of Lords.

It would please me to see the Government's bill passed. But it might actually please me more to see it defeated. Why? I hear you cry...

1) Defeating the bill in the House of Lords will definitely give the pro-equality side a great cause to rally around. We'd become the "injured party" (something the anti-equality side have been desperate to show themselves as) and a new "narrative" could be weaved. And it might cause just an itsy bit more resentment towards the House of Lords which would please this reform supporter greatly.

2) It would give us a chance, regrettably delayed I know, in the next Parliament for a better marriage equality bill to be created and fix all those annoying problems a great many of us have with the current bill.

As I see it the anti-equality folk are now in a lose/lose situation. But they have a chance to put this issue to bed and come out of it with a small victory. Because the next version of this bill would be far less careful to avoid rocking the boat.

I'm not hoping that the bill gets defeated in the Lords. I'm hoping it gets amended. But if it does get defeated I'm pretty confident that it'll only be to our benefit, and not the other sides.

Remember to get lobbying those Lords!!

A reader brought this to my attention: PRISM Brain Mapping PRISM Brain Mapping is a sophisticated, online, neuroscience-based instrument specifically designed to identify the behavioural preferences that directly relate to personal relationships and work performance... It is about enabling people with no neuroscientific background to understand and use some of the latest discoveries of brain science in their personal and business lives. And so on. You do an online assessment, you get a report

There is a very old joke which says that if you ask three different Christians a sensible question about their faith, you will receive four different answers.
The joke is also told about Jews and Psychiatrists.
I am about to claim that I have spotted three different ways in which people write about Doctor Who.
It would be awfully pretentious to describe them as "schools of criticism"; so instead I shall say that they represent three possible ways of enjoying the programme.
The first way, which should and can be ignored, is to regard Doctor Who as a kind of loyalty pledge. Last week's was the greatest Doctor Who episode of all time; in fact, it was the greatest thing ever to appear on TV -- very probably the single greatest piece of drama since man invented the alphabet. And next week's will be even better. If you say differently you are not a true fan. At the very least you should refrain from saying that David Tennant was incredibly irritating when non-fans might be listening, in the same way that it's obvious evangelistic common sense not to debate the precise job of the Virgin Mary or the finer points of the Holy Communion while there are infidels in the room.
This is the voice of the mercifully defunct Doctor Who Confidential, and, to a great extent, of Doctor Who Monthly. It naturally includes a few people who are working on the series, and an awful lot of people who think they ought to be. 

I don't blame them at all. They have their reward. They get to feel that they are part of an in-group; the gnostics, the knowing-ones who are riding the crest of the zeitgeist like the young folks, not stuck in the past like the fogies who are frankly more excited about the animated reconstruction of Reign of Terror than Season 7b. And it is probably perfectly true that Doctor Who fans appearing on Points of View and saying that Time and the Rani was an embarrassment hastened the cancellation of the original show.
But I have never particularly wanted to be on the crest of anything. What I have wanted, ever since I was buying fanzines which referred to Tom Baker as the New Doctor, is to be one of those wise old fans who has seen every episode of Dalek Masterplan and knows what is wrong with every episode of Season Fourteen (OH-WHAT-HAS-HAPPENED-TO-THE-MAGIC-OF-DOCTOR-WHO). If I had found the proverbial bottle containing the proverbial genius, my proverbial wish would have been to have been born exactly ten years earlier than I actually was. Oh, to have seen Unearthly Child on the day it was first transmitted! To have lived through Dalekmania! To have been a teenager in the UNIT era! 

Doctor Who began in 1963: which was rather too late for me. [*]
Had the proverbial granted my wish, I would also have been exactly the right age for the Marvel Age of Comics although on exactly the wrong continent to have enjoyed it; have had an eight year window to write to C.S Lewis; and a seventeen year window to meet J.R.R Tolkien. I would have been exactly the right age for Sgt. Pepper and exactly the wrong age for Star Wars. I wouldn't have had to do National Service, but I would have had to sit the Eleven Plus, had a much smaller chance of going to University and a much greater risk of getting the cane at school. I'm sorry; what was the question again?
If you make Doctor Who a shibboleth in this way, you will find that you are left with very little head-space in which to actually enjoy it. But that kind of fandom never was very much about enjoying the programme. It was always about being the biggest fish in the pub; having your balsa-wood Daleks feted in the art-room; having that reel-to-reel tape that no-one else had, a complete set of Annuals and the Dalek Outer Space Book. (I still don't have the Dalek Outer Space Book.) If some keen fourteen year old had asked one of those Wise Old Fans "Do you actually like Doctor Who?" he would have got the same reaction as if he had asked the Vicar if he actually believed in God.
Hush, child. That's not the sort of question you are supposed to ask.


(*) You've done that one before. -Ed



continues....

Saturday:

Doctor Who returns with engaging and entertaining episode of chaotic plotting lifted by three winning performances from Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman and Celia Imrie, that looks and sounds wonderful but may not add up to a Shard of beans.


Perhaps we can start with a retcon: at Christmas, we saw “memory snow” or “mirror snow” falling to Earth. It fell from space through what we might call our “astral plane” and on its way it passed through the Great Intelligence of “The Abominable Snowmen”. So what we’re dealing with here is snow that thinks it is the Great Intelligence…

(And be thankful it was the Great Intelligence and not a Silent on Miss Babs’ screen of doom!)

But, if we’re thinking about questions of identity, who exactly does Steven Moffat think the Doctor is? It’s an important question in a season that purportedly will end with the revelation of the Doctor’s biggest secret (subject to many pinches of salt – see also “the Doctor really truly is dead in ‘The Impossible Astronaut’… oops, no he’s not.”)

Lawrence Miles described Moffat’s writing for the Doctor as “a stupid person’s idea of what a clever person is like”. I think that’s a bit harsh, but we do seem to be approaching “a dullard’s idea of what a bi-polar person is like”. If “The Snowmen” was about the Doctor being in a massive sulk for fifty years and rediscovering his zest for life, then why does “The Bells of St John” begin with him having another massive sulk, this time as a monk? (It’s clear he’s been there quite some while; they’ve had time to build a stone shelter around the TARDIS, as you can tell from the way the entrance is TARDIS shaped.) It really is a case of needing to do the set reading: the “prequel” this time has the Doctor losing heart in his search for Clara, having tried his usual method of “wandering about a bit and hoping she bumped into him”.

(And in typical “Moffat will eat himself” fashion, this is of course the young Amy Pond… er, I mean Clara not-yet-Oswin Oswald. Actually, to digress, there’s a lot of previous Moffat to be found here. To paraphrase the Moffat Times Table: “Monsieur, you’re in my television” (“Silence in the Library”) x “Donna Noble has been saved/revolve to spooky reveal” (“Silence in the Library”) = “Help I’ve been sucked into the Wi-Fi!”)

Anyway, what we appear to have is a Doctor with huge mood swings from hyper manic to brooding despair. I suppose we should be grateful that we’re at least one small step up from the usual Moffat writing where every male character is “Steve” and every female is “Sue” (see especially “Coupling” where literally all six leads are variations on his own Mary-Sue or his wife). We also have another typical Moffat morality-fail: it’s cool to see the villain “hacking” humans, dialling their paranoia or their obedience up and down; it’s emphatically not cool to see the Doctor doing the same. Particularly when you’ve had the Doctor explicitly say he doesn’t do that sort of thing earlier in the same scene! What I'd expected was the Doctor to dial conscience up to eleven, and let them sort it out for themselves. (Not that imposing conscience on people isn't without its problems: see also “The Keys of Marinus”, in case you think that “dicking about with people’s free will is baaaad” hasn’t been part of Doctor Who since year one.)

In fact, the Doctor’s moral core seems way off beam throughout this episode, where he’s entirely focussed on Clara almost to the total exclusion of the threat to absolutely everyone else. We, the audience, are aware that the “Wi-Fi” (yeah, whatever) is a threat to everyone, but the Doctor barely seems to notice. I had thought, when he sent his message – “Under My Protection” – to Miss Kizlet, that it would turn out he meant the planet not the person. But no, there was never any payoff for that, and pretty much all the other victims were just collateral damage to him. I think that the issues of terminating the lot of them are a bit too complex to dismiss with “they’ll all die” “at least they’ll be free”. When his dead girlfriend-from-the-future found herself in the very similar situation of uploaded into a memory chip, he went to the trouble of ensuring an entire virtual reality afterlife for her. Is this really the same Doctor?

It’s very hardline “Live free or die!” – ironically in view of how the Doctor has his latest Tesselector-Doctor use the meat puppet app – and ironically because if that’s his philosophy then that makes it not his choice to make.

As Alex says, if the alternative is eternity in hell, screaming they don’t know where they are with their brains being nibbled on by the Great Intelligence, then it might just make sense. It’s just that that doesn’t make sense either. How does that make them a useful part of a brain-gestalt thingy? In which case, why not put them in a ‘neutral’ VR like The Matrix, or even a VR paradise? Perhaps the Great Intelligence feeds off their despair, but it’s also said they’re being put to some use. Why splice computer genius powers into Clara's memories if she no more than a morsel on the smorgasbord? Did Moffat just not make up his mind?

If it was as simple as “in despair for ever and feeding the enemy,” that’s a relatively simple moral choice, but that’s confused and unclear in an episode that glosses over it in a single exchange of lines.

We do have the enormous talents of Matt Smith to thank for this being in any way believable. Even hugely talented actors like Jack Davenport or even Eccleston can fall into the “look at me doing comedy”/pulling faces trap. Smith manages to find ways of doing it that seem real, and adds little flashes of anger and sadness to give some edge to the madcap. He’s also been brave enough to start to add some of his own personality to the mix, in the freewheeling physicality and, dare I say, a little of the frustration at not being taken seriously. And, on re-watching, I see that he has a look of total self-disgust on his face when, playing the robot-pretending-to-be-the-Doctor, he turns up the “obedience”.

And boy it must be hard work when you’re given lines like “Doctor who?” “Ooh, say it again” to contend with. Yes, it’s a callback to the Christmas episode where Madam Vastra told him “it always begins with that question” so for him “Doctor who?” is as good as Clara asking him on a date. And yes, it’s the impossible-to-answer question that he’s going to face at Trenzalore and allegedly the end of this series (confession: I actually quite like the rumoured title for the finale of “In the Name of the Doctor” ‘cos it’s quite a clever word play for once). And yes we “geddit”: it’s the name of the series and it’s endlessly hilarious to reference it in the dialogue and draw attention to the central mystery of the character and to your absurd plot arc, but if you keep on doing this you’re going to wear a hole in the fabric of reality, never mind that any payoff you’ve come up with – he’s John Smith and the Common Men, or Leggy Mountbatten, or Rassilon or Clara’s father or Leela’s son or a monkey's uncle, or The Other or the Great Intelligence in mortal form or he just doesn’t darn well remember – no payoff is going to be enough for fifty years of a series called “Doctor Who”, so don’t set yourself up for the fall.

Over at the Mindless Ones, Andrew talks about Moffat’s writing lacking proper structure, that no effort has gone into the “craft”. He cites the missed opportunity of a Chekov’s antigravity motorcycle (for once not Moffat lifting from his own back-catalogue, but do check out 2000 A.D’s “The ABC Warriors” where Deadlock rides up the Eiger Building on Mars). He’s right of course. I’d also point out that the set-pieces are arranged to suit the pacing of a TV episode, rather than following the natural evolution of the story: the baddies go from cheerily willing to throw an aeroplane full of people at the Doctor, to preferring to show off their tech and chatter by taking over people in a coffee bar. Why aren’t those possessed people grabbing him and jumping off the balcony? Answer, because the plane in peril is the mid-episode climax and this is the talky bit before the big finish. And because we need to keep the aircraft-as-suicide-weapon as far away as possible from the very-tall-building lest anyone think we’re doing something a bit post-September 11 tasteless.

The possession scene is also much cooler than the plane – whose “bigness” is diminished by brevity and plot-irrelevance (it’s almost as though it’s only stuck in for the trailer reel; surely not!) – though it would seem to make more sense if they’re hacking the Doctor rather than all those people (that is they are altering his perceptions, like a Faction Paradox Shift, rather than taking over people and having everyone else ignore them).

But I think it’s deeper than that. There’s almost no exposition in this episode at all, hence the need to have Matt Smith gabble the bit about being a thousand years old twice. What we felt was that this was, for forty minutes, give or take the odd misstep, a perfectly acceptable “part one”; the problem is that there’s no explanatory “part two” and “part three” and “part four” are done in the last two minutes with a throwaway reference to UNIT tossed in to keep the fanboys warm.

But, as I keep on finding myself having to write in these Moffat reviews, this was enjoyable. Alex, particularly, said he didn’t mind Moffat rewriting himself for once so long as he was taking the things which worked poorly the first time out and doing them better.

Some of the direction was lovely. Especially the transition, dollying left to right as the Doctor grabs Clara by the hand and drags her into the TARDIS for the first time and the reverse when he falls out of the doors because the TARDIS is now on the plummeting plane.

Celia Imrie is delicious in a role lifted straight from Russell’s “Partners in Crime”, all the better for the little touches of humanity she gives the two-dimensional Ms Kizlet: her naughtiness at manipulating the emotions of her subordinates, her fear and her anger when she is caught in her own trap. Most tragic of all is the broken little girl to which she is reduced at the end, another shout back to the Christmas special where it was Richard E Grant's character who was seduced by the Intelligence as a child. As reward for a lifetime of service, that is terribly cruel.

Jenna-Louise Coleman is bright-as-a-button sparkling as Clara. There were good reasons for Amy to be spiky and unlikeable – and arguable Karen Gillan had a harder job portraying the more complicated character, and kudos to Moffat for at least trying to write a complicated, damaged person. But that doesn’t help with the fact that Amy was spiky and unlikeable. Clara is adorable, and has the least personality of any companion since the series returned (arguably since Mel, actually, and she was a whizz with computers too!). She’s the perfect companion. Which leads me to suspect that she’s artificial.

Didn’t for a minute buy “run you clever boy and remember” as a mnemonic for her Wi-Fi password, but again that was a Moffat-y writing trick to get around the fact that neither she nor the Doctor introduced themselves on their “helpline” phonecall. (Real people do that, you see, but never people on telly, 'cos it wastes screen-time.) “The woman in the shop said it was the best helpline in the Universe” did she? Like she won’t be turning up to haunt us later.

And it was the TARDIS that brought the Doctor together with this too-good-to-be-true sidekick: the TARDIS telephone (oh look! Another retro-Moffatism, this time from his first big hit “The Empty Child”) providing both the connection and the episode title. Hopefully, hopefully, that’s because there’s more to that than another throwaway gag in the first five minutes.

So who is the Doctor? For Terrance Dicks, the thing about the Doctor is that he’s a Time Lord from the Planet Gallifrey. For some of the people writing for Andrew Cartmel – and Paul Cornell in some moods – he’s god.

We have to arrive at the possibility that, in his eleventh incarnation, the Doctor’s finally just gone nuts. Arguments that this is the ruthless Time War of the seventh Doctor coming back to haunt him; or too much time on his own; or a consequence of that “Time Lord Triumphant” mania and then hanging on too long by the tenth; or an inevitable step along the path to the Valeyard can all be retro-fitted to try and make it look like this is an evolution of continuity rather than a vicious side-swerve on the lead character’s personality by the showrunner.

For Moffat, the Doctor is a story that writes himself, the ultimate storyteller.

I suppose at least that’s handy for the writer who always writes himself.

Next Time: Bells? Rings? Is there a theme developing here? The Doctor begins to unfold the mystery of Clara and we find out why that leaf is chapter one. Plus more cool aliens than we've seen since the End of the World when we visit "The Rings of Akhaten"

I'm fundamentally a liberal in my political ideology; I want to see a fairer society, I think the state has a limited (but not zero) role in bringing that about, and in terms of the UK's internal politics I would like to see electoral reform.

I joined both the Liberals and the SDP as a student (the only vote I've ever cast in a Westminster election was for Shirley Williams in 1987), voted for the merger both times and was a founder member of the Lib Dems, as they became; I was a candidate for Cambridge City Council in 1990, an agent in 1991, and chair of the Northern Ireland branch of the party (a not terribly onerous responsibility) for most of the mid-90s. I haven't lived in the UK since 1997, though I have maintained my membership of the Brussels branch of the party - a friendly group of people to hang out with occasionally.

I was grudgingly supportive of the coalition agreement of 2010 - which was basically unavoidable, given the numbers delivered by the electoral system and the personalities delivered by the Labour Party - on the basis that the fixed term parliament provisions meant that the Lib Dems would be less likely to be snookered by Tory manœuvring, and that the AV referendum offered a chance for change to the electoral system. More on the former point below; the latter has been brutally analysed from both sides. It's difficult to blame Clegg personally or the Lib Dems in general for the referendum's failure, though their mistakes certainly contributed to the disaster of the campaign, which has certainly killed electoral reform in the UK for a generation.

There are a couple of widely made criticisms about the Lib Dems in government which I don't share. I was always dubious about the proposed reforms to the House of Lords, and was not at all sorry when their collapse also brought down the planned redrawing of constituencies - two birds with one stone - though this was also a Lib Dem policy failure. On tuition fees, the mistake was the initail pledge not to raise them, when it was already clear that this was unimplementable.

However, I fear that the Lib Dems are being captured by some of the worst parts of Tory policies. Clegg's recent declarations on secret courts and immigration are, quite simply, a betrayal of what I thought he and the party stood for. But in particular the many appalling stories of harassment of the disabled (not just from professional campaigners - see for instance minnesattva's first person account here, here and here) simply disgust me; this is the state waging war on the most vulnerable members of society. To quote Harry Wilcock, I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing.

I know it's a biased source, but this list in today's Guardian of the changes being made by the coalition to the UK's benefits payments has given me further pause for thought. I have been out of the UK for over 16 years now, and will probably never again either contribute to or benefit from its social security system. But the picture is very clear - that the State's support to those who need it is to be implemented according to ideological prejudice, rather than on the basis of actual need. I am against this sort of thing too. (And I fear that the Labour Party would be exactly the same when back in government, given its vote on Workfare.)

I still like the fact that the Lib Dems are serious about Europe (though with no Lib Dems in the Foreign Office), serious on constitutional reform (if visibly ineffective in practice), and less bad than the other two main parties on other issues that seem to me to matter. In particular, I like and respect all of the party's MEPs, who continue to work hard for things I believe in, and they have my full personal support, individually and collectively. But "less bad" is no longer good enough for me. I don't believe I'm a party member any more, having let my subscription quietly lapse last year, so I can't exactly resign in a huff. The one thing I can do is request that this LJ no longer be syndicated to the LibDemBlogs aggregator. Visitors of all parties and of none remain welcome here. But I am no longer willing to stand up and be counted with the Lib Dems.

In the 1989 European elections the Green Party won 15% of the vote (a similar level to Ukip’s current showing in opinion polls). 21 years later the Greens won their first seat at Westminster.

The Liberal Democrats have already begun the process of drafting their manifesto for the 2015 general election. Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell reminds us of something fundamental the party risks forgetting:

The major political parties are worried that the voters will blame them for the state of the economy at the next election. But with opinion polls showing that voters share the blame between the last Labour government, the current coalition and the problems of the world economy, there is little to be gained for any party in trying to revisit the past and apportion blame to their opponents. Why?

Voters tend not to be interested in the past (if they even know about it). They are more interested in who can offer the best future. There are plenty of examples of voters ignoring the past (good or bad) and voting for what they believe will be the best option for the future.

This truth presents the Liberal Democrats with a practical problem. If you want to entice voters with “the best option for the future”, you need a vision, and for that you need values.

Liberals have no shortage of values, so why should creating a vision be a problem?

First, Nick Clegg is promoting the idea that he is a non-ideological pragmatist following the only possible course of action. Because he thinks his preferences are both obvious and inevitable, he will brook no argument. Left to his own devices, we will get a manifesto featuring a vague promise of ‘fairness’, an indistinguishable appeal to the mythical ‘centre ground’, patronising lectures about an endless need for austerity, inflated claims about the crumbs the party has picked up from the coalition table, and a tedious blame game (“the mess left by Labour”). What we won’t get is any vision of how society could be radically different. How can we, when above all Clegg will want to avoid saying anything that is implicitly critical of coalition government policy or that makes it more difficult to renew the coalition with the Tories?

Then there is the problem of David Laws, who Clegg has appointed to chair the working group that is drafting the manifesto. Laws has a strong ideological attachment to the failed economic orthodoxy of the past three decades. Left to his own devices, we won’t get a vision for the future but the promise of a better yesterday.

Ah, you may say, but what about the party’s Federal Policy Committee? The FPC is supervising the manifesto drafting process. Surely it will ensure the necessary vision and values? If only we could be so sure.

In 2011, the FPC produced a ‘policy development agenda’, a sort of pre-manifesto called Facing the Future. It was a depressingly timid, unimaginative and lacklustre document, which signally failed to face the future. That is why David Boyle and I wrote an alternative called Really Facing the Future, which suggested a bolder direction for the party.

As long as the Liberal Democrat leadership is reluctant to face the future but prefers to look to the past and cling to a clapped out orthodoxy, the party will fail to offer “the best option for the future” and will suffer the consequences at the 2015 election.

Hi there! Since you appear to be so afraid of me that I've been pre-emptively banned, I've had to take my response to your Eostre/Ostara promotional piece here. I'd rather have done it on your page on Facebook and kept it amicable, but hey ho. For the record, I'm actually very nice.

Anyway. This is a response to The Northern Grove's piece 'The Historicity of the Worship of Ostara' which can be found here.



First, let me say how incredibly heartening it was to read your own words concerning St. Patrick:

‘It's tedious to have to try to break down ideas into simple concepts and explain that just because you read something somewhere doesn't make it true, and what is valid history vs popular myth.’

I appreciate and understand your frustration when confronted with people who just damn well believe and won’t look the historical evidence in the face. So it’s strange to read how insistent you are on the subject of Eostre - insistent to the point of attempting to silence dissent, a tactic that never works very well.

I’d like to go through your article and see if we can’t get it a bit more watertight. Let's make a start:

Every year naysayers spread propaganda suggesting that the cult of Ostara never existed, and she was never worshiped as a Goddess.

Do they? In my experience, every year there’s a surge of unresearched, unsupported material circulated about Eostre, and in reaction to this, some people point out the paucity of evidence to back much of it up (citing the disagreements in academic circles). I haven’t seen many people take a firm stance regarding her nonexistence, though of course plenty of people argue for her reality. In general, people are happy to accept that she may or may not have existed.

But the first point I have to make is that there is a major difference between insisting Eostre never existed (which I personally don’t do) and debunking all of the unsubstantiated guff that people habitually assert along with Eostre, such as the ‘Eostre hare’ story, hot cross buns being Pagan and representing the moon, and so forth.

Eostre herself is unproven, but Dr. Shaw’s work is tilting the balance in her favour somewhat (though there are caveats). But the associated baggage can be, and should be, debunked. Fortunately, the very people debunking it are the pagans and heathens like me who one might have expected to be circulating it unquestioningly, just like you and the St. Patrick story.

This campaign has been going strong for about 1,500 years, so this shouldn't surprise anyone.

This is going to be problematic, since you seem to believe that there is some sort of active Eostre-repressing campaign in place, presumably managed by those evil festival-stealing Christians. I’m afraid that many of the people who shout loudest that Eostre was a real Goddess are fundamentalist Christians, while many of the people who are willing to look at the evidence with an open and critical mind are Pagans.

This is because many fundamentalist Christians don’t like Easter; they think it’s unbiblical and unchristian to celebrate it. It therefore suits them down to the ground to claim that Easter was originally Pagan.

In stark contrast, many modern pagans – especially those of us who actually live here in England and other parts of Europe – are more than willing to consider the historical evidence for their belief systems, rather than merely swallowing them whole as part of a received tradition. We’re just irreverent that way, I suppose. Professor Ron Hutton is far more warmly regarded over here, too, whereas in the States there seem to be any number of pagans trying to shout him down.

I’ve noticed throughout the years that American pagans do have a tendency to get very passionate about European culture in a way that we Europeans just don’t. I think this can be traced in part to the far, far greater influence of Christianity in present-day America (it’s taken much less seriously over here) which can make for manifest hostility to those who profess a pagan way of life, but also to the way European culture can seem, for want of a better word, exotic to those who don’t live amongst it. I drive past a Norman castle on my way to the supermarket, and past a possibly Neolithic chalk hill figure on my way to visit my mum. My local pub is older than the American Constitution. We’re practically falling over this stuff over here, seriously.

But my point is that in their enthusiasm to embrace our history and culture from a transatlantic distance, American pagans run the risk of swallowing a lot of chaff along with the wheat. This leads to the ‘Pagan Sausage Machine effect’ in which fact and fiction get mulched together, along with a sort of reckless blending of cultures that ought to be recognised as distinct.

In any case, it really doesn’t help to see any critical examination of the evidence for Eostre as inevitably part of some ‘campaign’. That’s just stifling freedom of inquiry, trying to damn and silence it. Moreover, it’s assuming the answers will be harmful to us. Is that really the paganism we want to see? Isn’t shutting down questions and rejecting scholarship (unless its conclusions happen to suit us) uncomfortably close to the worst manifestations of Christianity?

Here's a little refresher of the evidence...

Yay, let’s go!

Bede as a source has been debated because for long period there was little corroborating evidence, so scholars suggested that he invented Eostre.

For ‘little corroborating evidence’ read ‘no corroborating evidence’. Sorry, but that is the truth. It would have been wonderful if there had been just one scrap of documentary or archaeological evidence for Eostre turned up during that time, but there wasn’t. It would be even more wonderful if future archaeologists turned up an image, or an unambiguous inscription. Here’s hoping.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that there have been scholars defending Bede’s account for just as long as there have been scholars challenging it.

This argument doesn't make much sense.

I think we can give Bede’s detractors fairer treatment than that, surely. They would hardly have taken the stance they did if it hadn’t made some sort of sense, even if it only made sense to them.

Why don’t we go to the source? Let’s try asking a sceptical scholar why they would maintain that Bede invented Eostre – or, to represent the stance more fairly, why he would make a speculative assertion that Eostre existed in the absence of direct knowledge. Any suggestions who to approach?

Bede was a Christian monk writing at a time (8th century) when English Pagan customs surviving out on the outskirts and heaths (where the term "heathen" comes from, the country folk out on the heath practicing the Old Ways) were actively being stamped out by the Church.

Well, you’re right about Bede being a monk, at least. But ‘heathen’ does not come from ‘the country folk out on the heath practicing the Old Ways’. It’s a calque of ‘pagan’, which came to mean ‘mere civilian’ in contrast to the Christians who saw themselves as the soldiery of Christ.

As a side note, it’s really a disservice to historical pagans to force them into a rural role. Ever seen the Parthenon? Ever heard of the Goddess Cloacina? Historical paganism was just as much about urban practices as it was about the muddier agricultural side.

So WHY would a Christian monk invent a pagan goddess to encourage practice?

That seems to be two questions. Why would he invent a pagan goddess? Good question. But can we really say he was doing so to encourage pagan practice? No. Bede wrote in Latin, remember. Any remaining pagans in England wouldn’t have been his intended audience.

Logically speaking, his bias would be to brush it under the rug and not discuss it, not invent a new pagan goddess!

Only if you mistakenly interpret Bede’s work as somehow strengthening paganism within his country. I know you want to draw from it to buttress your own ideas of paganism, but that doesn’t mean Bede intended it that way.

We do know that Bede was not above speculation. I refer you to his account of Modranecht:

'That very night, which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is, "mother's night", because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night.'

Those two words, ‘we suspect’, are incredibly important. (Yes, I know, it’s one word in Latin.) Bede is admitting that he doesn’t know for sure. He’s making an educated guess. If he doesn’t know for certain why Modranecht was so named, then it stands to reason that he might not have known for certain why Eostremonath was so named, either.

So for centuries that was it, the lone source for Eostre. Makes sense since the Church chopped down sacred groves and destroyed pagan shrines and built churches on top of them, right?

Er – you seem to be taking Pope Gregory’s notorious letter as if it were a description of what actually happened, rather than a proposal for what ought to be done.

To quote from answers.com:

'It is in any case doubtful that the policy outlined in this letter was widely adopted. In the same year, Pope Gregory wrote to King Ethelbert, urging him to ‘abolish the worship of idols and destroy their shrines’ (Bede; book 1, chapter 32). The few other relevant documents include no other reference to any policy of accommodation, but on the contrary mention several temples deliberately destroyed; archaeology has so far found no traces of pagan Saxon shrines under any churches. David Wilson concludes: ‘There is no intimation from the literature that any attempt was made to convert these sites into Christian churches on the lines suggested by Gregory’ (Wilson, 1992: 29-43).'

So destroying the old shrines, yes; building churches on top of them, not so much. It seems to have been an idea that Gregory entertained for a short time and then abandoned.

If you have evidence to the contrary, of course, then please go ahead and cite it.

Then along comes Jacob Grimm.

Fine, let’s fast-forward through the intervening centuries …

The 19th century saw a revival in local folk legends and mythology. The field of Folklore was a new development. The Grimm Brothers did not just write fairy tales. They collected folk tales from all around Germany and neighboring German speaking regions.

Yep.

Jacob Grimm, went one step further. He conducted a massive survey of German oral tradition and found that the goddess Ostara (German form of Eostre) was found ALL AROUND German speaking areas!

Whoa. No, that’s not what Grimm says at all. Have you read Grimm? You seem to be taking what other people have said about his work – ‘Grimm hypothesised the Goddess Ostara based on German oral tradition’ – and drawing the erroneous conclusion that Grimm encountered oral traditions that explicitly mentioned the Goddess Ostara.

Let’s be clear on this. Grimm found no direct evidence for a Goddess called Ostara at all. He never claimed to have done so, so I’m not sure why you’re making a claim he never made. By all means, let’s consult Deutsche Mythologie – it’s easily available on the Web – and see this first-hand. Point to the passages you’re thinking of.

This is when there was no written record, no books, nothing to explain why people miles apart had folk legends passed down from generation to generation describing the same goddess.

They didn’t. So far as I can tell, Grimm never says they did. Again, can you cite the relevant passages?

He hypothesized that a pan-Germanic goddess of fertility, the spring, and the dawn existed among Continental Germanic people: Ostara. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Grimm

Yes, he hypothesised. That part is correct. What you don’t seem to realise is that he hypothesised the existence of Ostara because he didn’t have any direct evidence of her. If he had encountered direct evidence, oral or otherwise, he would have recorded it!

Fast forward to the 21st century and a new scholar is doing fascinating and ground breaking research into Eostre and other Germanic goddesses that we have known very little about thanks to the effective campaign against them.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of a campaign to obliterate supposed evidence.

A genuine problem facing that scholarship that provides us with precious crumbs of knowledge – more genuine, certainly, than any supposed ‘campaign’ - is the tendency to make stuff up because it tells us what we want to hear. Eostre in particular has suffered lately from the accretion of all sorts of unsupported nonsense.

You do agree, I hope, that making up stories about Eostre and her magic egg-laying bunny is disrespectful in the extreme? And that passing on such stories uncritically is polluting the wellspring of history? How can anyone who considers themself to be pagan, anyone who holds history sacred, stand back and just let that happen?

PhD scholar, author, researcher, and lecturer at the University of Leicester, Dr. Philip Shaw conducted a massive research study on previously neglected linguistic evidence for Eostre. Just as the field of Folklore burgeoned in the last two centuries and collected oral histories that the paper trail lost, the Linguistic field has been studying evidence for Old Pagan cults of worship in such things as place names and votive inscriptions.

If you’re referring to Dr Shaw’s book Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World, then I agree, it’s a tremendously exciting development.

Place names retain evidence of deities that were honored in the region. These, plus votive inscriptions along the Rhine prove that Eostre/Ostara was, indeed, worhshipped in both England and continental Germany prior to conversion.

I think we should look at what Dr. Shaw actually says, here:

"Many scholars have suggested Bede invented the goddess Eostre. I disagree: Bede was a careful researcher, and not prone to inventions of this sort, as far as we can tell. And we also now know that there were a group of minor goddesses with a related name worshipped by continental speakers of a Germanic language.
In 1958, more than 150 votive inscriptions from the second or third century AD were discovered near Morken-Harff in Germany. These inscriptions must mark the site of an important cult centre, and the goddesses to whom these inscriptions were set up were called the matronae Austriahenae, loosely translated as "the eastern matrons" or "the matrons of the easterners". The name Austriahenae comes from the same Germanic root as Eostre, suggesting that this was a root used in naming goddesses. There is also evidence of its use in English place names and in the names of Anglo-Saxon individuals. There is every reason, then, to trust what Bede says about Eostre: she was a goddess whose name was attached to a month by the pagan Anglo-Saxons. When the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, the name of the month in which Easter usually fell was transferred to the name of the festival itself. Eostre also provides us with clues to the way in which Anglo-Saxon paganism worked. The word from which her name derives means "eastern", and is found in place names in England, which suggests that she may well have been a local goddess. We are accustomed to think of pagan gods as having roles – war god, fertility god – but Eostre suggests that Anglo-Saxon goddesses may have been defined instead by their relationship to a local community."

You have apparently taken the worship of ‘a group of minor goddesses with a related name’ for the worship of Eostre herself. Don’t get me wrong; what Dr. Shaw says does strengthen the case that Bede didn’t invent Eostre. But you don't seem to be reporting his work accurately here. Now, you have (apparently) got Dr. Shaw's book to refer to, while I'm only working from a single newspaper article, so for heaven's sake quote from it if you can offer anything to contradict Dr. Shaw's own words above. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you both own the book and have read it, though you don't seem to have read Grimm.

Going by Swain Wodening's excellent review, Shaw’s conclusion is that Eostre was probably a local goddess, that is, a goddess found only in one specific place, and not a pan-Germanic deity – which is what you seem to think she ought to be. Indeed, from what I have read on Shaw’s work, he believes Eostre was a local goddess of Kent, and Bede found out about her from a Kentish document. (Kent is in the south-east of England, in case you didn’t know.)

In summary, Dr. Shaw presents strong evidence that Eostre did exist, but that she was local to Kent and not worshipped outside of that area. She certainly wasn’t worshipped all across the German territories as you assert, at least by Dr Shaw’s reckoning. According to Swain Wodening, Dr Shaw ‘also thinks that the German month names Ostermonat and Redmanot were carried to Germany and France by Anglo-Saxon missionaries, and uses this to back his claim that they were local goddesses.’

Further, Eostre is represented in entire month in the Old English calendar devoted to her (see first link above).

Bede certainly says so. But as we’ve already seen, not everyone trusts his account. I prefer to keep an open mind, myself.

In addition, it is fascinating to note that ALL OTHER Christianized countries in Europe refer to the Easter holiday as some version of Pascha - which is related to the word Passover. Only languages where Eostre/Ostara were important goddesses call it by a word relating to her!

That’s arguing backwards, since the only evidence you’re presenting for Eostre (or an equivalent) having been a Goddess in those regions at all is linguistic. We can certainly say ‘these countries refer to the Easter holiday as Easter/Ostern for some reason, and that reason may well have been a common Goddess’.

German Easter is Ostern. But further North in Scandinavia, although they are a "Germanic" people and practiced Germanic paganism, they did not have Ostara in their pantheon.

There’s just as little evidence for her there as there is in other places, yes…

So what do they call the holiday? In Danish and Norwegian, it is called Påske - variation of Pascha! This corroborates with the notion that the NAME of Easter is associated to the Old English Eostre and Ostern with Ostara. If not, these language groups would also use a form of Pascha or Passover.

Again, this just looks like circular argument.

Well. I must admit I was looking forward to discussing these issues with you, but it seems you're not interested in discussing history with pagans who don't agree with your personal views or who might point out the serious factual issues with your stance. There's also significant irony in an American being so in love with the idea of European cultural heritage that she thinks she can dictate what European cultural heritage means to actual Europeans.

If you change your mind and decide you're up for a discussion, I'm right here. And you already know I'm willing to change mine, because I'm the kind of fact-based pagan who accepts and admits it when he makes a mistake, as you saw on the Belle Jar blog. I would LOVE for you to prove me wrong.

If not, well... see you same time next year. :)

It’s December of 2003. Will Young is at number one with “Leave Right Now,” which lasts for half the month at which point Ozzy and Kelly Osbourne take over with “Changes” for a week. The Christmas number one goes to Michael Andrews’s version of “Mad World.” Girls Aloud, Westlife, Michael Jackson, Ja Rule, Outkast, the Black Eyed Peas, Dido, Evanescence, Christina Aguilera, and Darkness also chart.

It’s been a bit news-wise. Switzerland joined the United Nations, Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed during re-entry, SARS and the Iraq War broke out, the Human Genme Project was completed, Rowan Williams was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury, and Roman Abramovich took over Chelsea. This mont, meanwhile, the M6 opened a toll branch to relieve congestion, and Mick Jagger became a knight.

While in specialty shops, the first story of the Divergent Universe arc, Rob Shearman’s Scherzo. Scherzo takes Rob Shearman’s approach to its natural endpoint. All of Shearman’s stories are about self-made prisons: the worlds we cannot bring ourselves to fall out of. Over his first three he steadily expanded the scope of these prisons: the individual psychic hell of The Holy Terror into the indictment of the class system and its victims in The Chimes of Midnight out into a sprawling but incisive critique of the entire notion of collective mythology in Jubilee. He’s steadily gone larger and larger, and here, with his last full-out original Doctor Who story, he takes the last road open to this approach: he goes very, very small.

Scherzo is a two-hander. It cheats a little bit - it does actually have a third character - but that character consists entirely out of sounds made by the Doctor and Charley for most of the story, and when it does start speaking for itself it’s still played by McGann and Fisher. But virtually the entire audio consists of the Doctor and Charley talking. This makes it a profoundly intimate story - character driven in a way that no story since The Edge of Destruction possibly could have been. (And its debt to The Edge of Destruction is as profound an influence on Scherzo as The Power of the Daleks is on Jubilee.)

But the story goes considerably further than just the intimacy of scale. It’s not just that this is an audio with only two people, it’s an audio where the world is as small as it can possibly be. Scherzo, for virtually its entire length, features the Doctor and Charley making their way through a featureless void. But what’s really notable is the way in which the world collapses inwards: the Doctor and Charley lose all of their senses save for hearing, such that the phrase “walking” takes on a strange meaning. Eventually their physical bodies merge, rendering their very corporeality suspect.

What happens, in other words, is that their world collapses to be as small as it can possibly be - for much of the audio there is nothing to their world but what is in the audio. We’ve talked a few times about the idea of diegesis. The term usually refers to sound and music, distinguishing between diegetic music - music the characters can hear - and non-diegetic music - music the audience can hear but the characters can’t. We can extend this reasonably sensibly to talk about anything in a story, and create all sorts of nifty-terms like “meta-diegetic” - something that exists within the realm of the story but can effect the audience directly. And Scherzo, as I promised to talk about way back in the Vengeance on Varos entry nearly a year ago, introduces a new concept: hyper-diegesis. That is, not only is the sound in Scherzo part of the characters’ world, for large swaths of Scherzo it is the entirety of the characters’ world.

This is something that isn’t possible, or, at least, isn’t easy with television. The existence of the screen as a frame mitigates against this. The entire conceptual apparatus of the Albertian window and camera motion mean that the grammar of television and film continually implies the existence of things that the characters can see that we can’t. But audio works differently. Yes, it still implies the existence of things that the characters can see that we can’t, but it does this by discarding the screen entirely. Where film and television allow access to two of the five senses the characters have, audio goes down to one. But audio is un-framed. Instead of showing us a portion of the world (and typically one that is not co-extensive with any given character’s vision), it simply gives us the soundscape, which is not confined within the space of a screen but emitted out to expand and fill whatever space the audio is being listened to in.

Which means that when, as Shearman does, you engineer a situation where there is no visual, olfactory, tactile, or gustatory sensation whatsoever for characters, and then do away with any non-diegetic sound, you effectively collapse it so that the auditory medium is, in a literal sense, the world of the characters. There’s not a meaningful difference between the space the Doctor and Charley inhabit and the sound that vibrates your eardrum. Far from showing us a portion of a large world, Scherzo collapses and shrinks the world of the story to where it can fit through the membrane of media that separates fiction from reality and enter our world. I am well-documented as having little patience for or belief in the rhetoric of immersion and realism, but Scherzo, by dint of its extremely stylized and conceptual conceit, manages to break through all of my objections. Despite being about a space alien trapped in an alternate dimension and eaten repeatedly and continually by a creature of pure sound, Scherzo is in a very literal sense more realistic than any other Doctor Who story ever simply because it can be accurately and meaningfully said that it causes the Doctor to genuinely exist in our world for a time.

All of this makes the prison that the Doctor and Charley spend the story in ferociously small - as small as the human eardrum at times. This is a high stakes game, to say the least. Shearman, thankfully, is well-suited to the task. As a playwright with a clear love of absurdism, he’s more than familiar with an entire tradition of things like The Chairs and Waiting for Godot where what is on stage is, in a meaningful sense, the entirety of the universe. There is, in other words, a familiar structure to this sort of thing, and Shearman knows it well.

The heart of this sort of story is the character interaction. This can’t be called a surprise: obviously with only two characters you need the characters to be quite strong. Impressively, Shearman manages to rescue this strength of character out of the previously disastrous handling of the Charlie/Doctor love plot. And this is worth expanding on, since Doctor/companion romance is something of an issue for the new series. Really, it has been since the TV movie, which tediously followed the American insistence that any film must have a romantic interest for its male and female lead. Which made an abrupt about face on what had previously been an iron-clad maxim: no hanky-panky in the TARDIS.

That maxim was always problematic, of course. John Nathan-Turner’s zeal in making sure that there were never any hints that the Doctor might have romantic feelings about his female companions led to no shortage of homoeroticism, particularly in the Davison era when there was almost always a male companion around that the Doctor was allowed to actually, you know, come within five feet of. But it also meant that the Doctor was largely depicted as an asexual being. Then the TV movie came along and casually reversed it. But even if it hadn’t, frankly, it would have been something that someone got to eventually. This is clear enough from how it’s handled in Neverland and Zagreus, which is to say, barely at all and clearly with no serious thought beyond “you know what will be edgy? Hanky panky in the TARDIS.” Needless to say, this went poorly.

Equally, the new series has made Doctor/companion romances standard issue, to the point where it’s a subject that has to be tackled at least in brief for any new companion. So clearly this is not nearly so controversial as people thought it was in early 2004. Part of this is the disparity of audience. It was controversial among Doctor Who fans because we all knew the phrase “no hanky-panky in the TARDIS” and knew that a previously iron-clad rule was being changed. For anyone outside the cult, however, it was just something like Daleks climbing stairs that was an obvious question to ask about Doctor Who. And so the new series tackling it was straightforward - a case of admitting to a subtext that had always been there.

But it’s also true that the new series, to say the least, handles romance a bit better than Big Finish did in Neverland and Zagreus. The problem that Big Finish has is that their conception of having a love plot is to decide that Charley is the “in love” one in the same way that Ace is the punkish one and Tegan is the Australian one. It’s love plot by fiat - there’s nothing to it save for the declaration that Charley is in love with the Doctor. It’s too early to discuss how the new series handles this, but suffice it to say that with the arguable exception of Martha (and this is much of what’s wrong with Martha as a character) none of the romance plots have ever been quite so reductive. Which makes sense because, whatever might be said about Doctor/Rose shipping, Russell T Davies clearly did not do it for shock value.

Shearman, however, ends up in a strange position that can’t quite be replicated outside the odd context of the latter days of the wilderness years. He’s one of the writers good enough to work for television, and one of the writers who fits in with Davies’s vision for the series. But he’s in a structure that doesn’t support it and where romance is being played mostly for shock value. He knows full well that nobody is ever going to adequately deal with the Doctor/Charley romance, but that it’s the elephant in the room right now. And he has a story that requires him to not only deal with it, but deal with it in a way that is rich in characterization.

Shearman’s solution is clever, and could only really work in the context Scherzo came out in. Since Charley’s view on the situation - she loves the Doctor - is at least well-defined if, ultimately, hollow, Shearman turns to the other possibility: the Doctor. The Doctor’s view on the situation is altogether more ambiguous, having done “I love you” in Neverland and largely turned on that in Zagreus. So Shearman focuses on the Doctor’s view of love, constructing an alien view of it that both allows for the Doctor to genuinely love Charley, and to express it with a directness that Davies could never quite bring his Doctor to offer.

The result is the first time in the Eighth Doctor audios, and thus in Paul McGann’s tenure as the Doctor where he has actually gotten the chance to use his acting skills on good material. McGann gets to play familiar emotions with complex and strange reasoning behind them, and he clearly revels in the space between the familiar and the alien that he gets to inhabit. He’s never been better served by a Doctor Who script.

In every regard, of course, Scherzo is a one-off. But what great Doctor Who story isn’t, in some fashion, a case of going in an odd direction that can only be done once. That’s the heart of the flexible premise: you don’t need to build a lasting idea in Doctor Who, since the idea will be abandoned after one story anyway. But what’s more important is that Scherzo is a one-off that works within the context it came out in. It’s a one-off that works as the story after Zagreus. It’s a wonder - the perfect platform on which to serve Shearman’s big Doctor Who idea in its purest expression. But it’s also, thus, the story that brings that idea to a close. It shows Shearman’s ideas beautifully, but there’s nowhere to go from it. Once you’ve done it you’re back into the same fundamental problems that the Big Finish line has.

It’s not the last great Big Finish story by any measure. But it does, in a real way, mark a symbolic end of Big Finish: the point where one of their best ideas runs its course. It can go on longer, and even be quite charming. But this is, if you will, the end of its necessity. The end of the point where it was crucial to the continual nursing of Doctor Who’s flame. Scherzo, even though it leads directly into the next audio, would have done as an endpoint. That it wasn’t doesn’t mean Big Finish overstayed its welcome. But it does mean that it becomes, after this, a pleasant bonus to Doctor Who as opposed to a credible contender for what Doctor Who is.

The ever-so-lovely Alex Wilcock has invited people to blog about Lib Dem Values. Typically, I didn’t respond in a timely fashion ahead of Spring Conference 2013. Although in a sense I did, because one of my first posts on this blog asked “What does being a Liberal Democrat Mean?”. In the 2.5 years since that was published, I think it still stands up, but is not sufficient. The key argument is this:

However, Liberal Democracy is about finding the balance between the individual as an entity in its own right, and the individual as a member of a wider society; between a free market which encourages competition, and regulation which restricts that competition to efficiency rather than exploitation. Balances are always precarious things to maintain, which is why you often see news headlines about the party leaning towards “the left” or “the right”. It’s worth remembering that those shifts are compared to the party itself, and are relatively minor compared to our positioning relative to the other parties. These shifts are also within the context of the preamble itself.

However, that post is more about the Liberal Democrats from the perspective of a member, while I think what Alex is asking about is from the perspective of an outsider. I guess if I were to start again, inspired by that post and some of the others I’ve written here, and by Alex’s writing which is always my starting point for discussions on liberalism, and by the thoughts and words of other liberals I respect, it might look something like this:

The Liberal Democrats stand for increasing people’s freedom to enjoy their own potential, helping everybody to get on in life. We believe in meaningful representative democracy to balance people’s conflicting priorities, and in ensuring protection for the individual from the State and other powerful organisations.

We believe that nobody should be constrained by lack of opportunity, particularly by the circumstances of their birth. We believe that Government should set the rules by which society operates, so people are rewarded for hard work and innovation, but not for exploitation or pollution. We believe that people should be respected as individuals regardless of their gender, colour, wealth, sexuality, or any other quality – not as homogeneous groups defined by those qualities.

We believe in accountable, democratic institutions giving people more of a say in their immediate lives and local communities, as well as more of a say in the issues too big for one person, or one country. We believe in solutions which get to the root of the problem rather than just addressing the symptoms.

That’s closer to 200 words rather than 150, but I’ve thought about it and tweaked it a bit, and I think it’s both accurate and distinctive; what do you think?

There are but three explanations when the media almost as a whole praises a politician when they die, or as is increasingly the case, decides to resign to earn more money elsewhere.  First, they were a genuinely great figure, and there are ever fewer of those; second, they were known for their campaigning, or for being eccentric, and were therefore harmless; or third, they either gave great copy to journalists or lead such a colourful career that they didn't even have to speak to the press personally (that could be left to "friends").  Remember the incredulity when the England manager job went not to Harry Redknapp, the football bloke's bloke, always ready to stop his car and talk on transfer deadline day, but to the staid yet far more interesting if they could be bothered to actually do some proper work Roy Hodgson?  The same applies to politics.

Hence the gnashing of teeth over the exit of David Miliband to go and join Thunderbirds, or whatever the simply hi-larious gag still doing the rounds is now (it was worth a smile when alluded to on Newsnight last night; not so much the following morning on every news site).  The vast majority of the media decided that David Miliband simply had to be the next Labour leader, for the reason that he would be more of a continuation of New Labour than his brother, let alone the hated Ed Balls.  Of course, they had come to loathe New Labour, but in the same way that an aristocrat of old still had affection for a sprog spawned through a liaison with a scullery maid, they also felt they had helped to create it in the first place.  When Ed edged out his older sibling thanks to the votes of trade union members, this meant they had both been proved wrong and lost control over a party they thought they could still indirectly exert control over.

With David's departure to New York, they've now lost their least creative way of making mischief in the party.  The reality might well have been that David, although understandably originally embittered, has since reconciled with Ed and spent most of his time away from Westminster, but that's never been an obstacle to making stuff up in the past.  Nonetheless, too much can be made of the claims that if the elder Miliband had taken the offer of being a shadow minister that there would have been endless talk about the relationship between the two and potential policy clashes, including those from himself.  Miliband decided not to rejoin the shadow cabinet because he was doing just fine outside it, as his taking of the job at the International Rescue Committee underlines.  Who needs to be at Westminster full time or even an MP at all when you can still intervene occasionally from the sidelines, as both Blair and Brown have done and still be listened to intently?  Far more likely is that his return to frontline politics would have silenced those who still believe that the wrong brother got the top job, forcing them to accept what the man himself had.

Indeed, as others have noted, David's resignation as an MP only makes clear that regardless of what many, including myself thought when Ed unexpectedly won, he's been far more radical and agile a leader than almost anyone has given him credit for.  No, he hasn't got everything right, far from it, not least on his caution on opposing the coalition's demonisation of benefit recipients, something that David himself made clear in his last notable speech in the Commons, but he's clearly not going anywhere.

That's much to the disappointment of those who still believe the best route back to power is not to oppose the coalition on much of what it is doing, but to carry on in the great New Labour tradition of triangulation, offering much the same, just with a kinder face (except when it comes to civil liberties, where Labour arguably still remains to the right of the Tories).  Miliband senior's departure removes their final hope of the party returning to the politics that won three elections, and then, err, lost them the last, although they continue to try to convince themselves that was all Gordon Brown's fault.  It's never occurred to them that Miliband was just as much of a bottler as the right-wing press accused Brown of being, forever threatening to wield the knife and then always pulling back at the last moment.  Nor is there any indication that David would improve Labour's current poll ratings, which continue to show an average lead of around 10 points.

If today has reminded of anything, it was the remarkably similar response to James Purnell standing down as an MP.  Many of the same people then said what a massive loss to politics it was, what a wonderfully innovative thinker he had been, with some on the right claiming he could have saved the Labour party.  All this was code for the fact that he was a Blairite-ultra, and the man who helped to introduce the work capability assessment which continues to ruin the lives of tens of thousands of the sick and disabled.  If he achieved other than that, it was that he helped to set the stage for the coalition's even harsher cuts. 

The problem such politicians have is that they tend to be liked only by journalists; Purnell's resignation in an attempt to unseat Gordon Brown was followed by precisely no one, despite him imagining it would open the floodgates.  When Purnell went it was good riddance to bad rubbish, although he has naturally since found a job at the ever obliging BBC.  David Miliband could have been a real asset to his brother had he wanted to be, yet if his leaving signifies anything, it's that the TB-GB era of British politics is well and truly over.  And surely, that's something to welcome.

There’s quite a commotion in reader and writer circles over the acquisition of Goodreads by Amazon.com. Not too long ago people were wondering what would happen if Goodreads started selling books on its own, as the audience there was vital and quite happening.

Instead, it is now one of the many Amazon subsidiaries.

According to Tech Crunch:

Chandler also wrote in his blog post about the acquisition that Goodreads will “continue offering you everything that you love about the site.” For one thing, he told me that the entire Goodreads team will be staying on, and that it will remain in San Francisco. He said it will operate as an independent subsidiary similar to “how Zappos and IMDb are run.”

For those who scoff, it’s worth noting that Shelfari, a book listing company that was acquired by Amazon, has also continued to run semi-independently.

One reason I fail to join in the panic is that this is becoming self-fulfilling prophecy. Larger publishers view themselves as specialists in providing books, in whatever form that may be, and not in having a relationship with the customer. They don’t sell books directly, nor work hard at developing mailing lists to let customers know their favorite books are out or that their favorite author is in town on a signing or speech.

Places like Goodreads create permission-based marketing environs (like newsletters, forums, book listing sites, review sites, etc) that allow readers to develop relationships.

Is Amazon snapping up Goodreads something to be scared of? Well, as someone who believes mono-cultures and monopolies to be dangerous, I think it is in the long term non-desirable. Customers are going to love it, though. Some people in Goodreads are annoyed, sure, but having more reviews showing up on Amazon sales pages will drive more activity. There will be more communities around reading built.

But they won’t be communities that larger publishing houses have necessarily direct access to.

If people in larger publishing companies are upset about this, they need to stop depending on third party systems to provide reader relationships.

A flat technological world means all companies, authors, readers, websites are just a step away from each other. Those relationships are more important now than ever before. If you’re upset that someone else realizes that, you honestly need to create your own in-house versions to develop those reader relationships.

Apple created their own stores to create relationships directly out of the same impulse. They know their mission is create awesome products, and link up to their buyers. They harness direct buying on their own website. They ask permission to get your email and continue to talk to you.

Right now publishing is still depending on Circuit City, in this metaphor.

Long term, I prefer variety. For authors who are doing well via Amazon, it’s nice to see a boost coming. But what happens when all reviews go through Amazon? All books are sold there? And then Amazon changes something…

…the royalty rate goes from 70% to 35% (let’s not forget, the royalty rate at Amazon was originally 35%, it was Apple that posted 70% to launch iBooks and Amazon changed to match ahead of the iBooks launch, an indication of where Amazon corporate would prefer the rate naturally were it not for competition [ah that magic capitalist notion] from another large corporation)? What happens if all the buy buttons disappear due to an argument between indy authors and Amazon? Already Amazon requires you to go exclusively through them to get 70% royalty in several non-US regions now, a sign that Amazon is happy to use the big stick of changing the royalty on you to get you to behave how they want you to. And that’s fine, that’s their right as a large corporation. But it’s why it makes me slightly nervous.

Short term. For those with books for sale on Amazon, it will probably mean a boost in sales and community building. And that’s not going to be viewed negatively by many.

And hopefully it will also spur large book publishers to focus harder on their own permission-based marketing so that we don’t end up with a monoculture.

As for me, might I note that you can sign up for my newsletter on this website, thus letting me directly note to you when my books come out? It’s at the very bottom (not featured in a big way yet b/c the site redesign is still ongoing, but it will become a larger part of the blog/face and post single page redesign over the next few weeks as I do A/B testing to see how to push it without being too annoying).

Yeah, I’m not betting everything on other third parties myself, and a large part of having my own website, the blog, and my newsletter is my desire to build my own relationship with readers.

Just in case, you know?

I was the perfect age to soak in the super-hero craze of the 1960s. We all knew way back when how cheap these Grantray-Lawrence Marvel Super Heroes cartoons were – but we forgave them. It was TV versions of Captain America (on Mondays), The Hulk (on Tuesday), Iron Man (Wednesday), Thor (on Thursday) and Submariner (on Friday). In New York, we had some guy in a Captain Marvel suit named “Captain Universe” climb down a ladder to introduce the films and sell us Cocoa Marsh or Bosko chocolate syrups.

What these cartoons lacked in animation, they made up for it in other ways. The voice acting was ernest and intense – and pretty much how I expected to hear my favorite super heroes speak. The theme songs were catchy and memorable (I suspect more money was spent on them than anything else); and best of all – I enjoyed seeing Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gene Colon, and Bill Everett artwork on TV. Like radio shows of old, we had to bring something from our own imaginations to make these cartoons work – but we did.

Here’s the original sales brouchure that went out to TV stations (cover above, click below to enlarge the center spread below):

Yeah, Krantz Films distributed the show. The same Krantz who would later produce Bakshi’s Fritz The Cat and Heavy Traffic. The animation in the individual episodes is still awful, but the bumpers, opening titles and closing credits have a little more effort in them – perhaps because they were going to be used repeatedly. Unfortunetly the opening and closing sections are apparently very rare. Here’s the opening theme, and some Captain America interstitials:

The four page article below originally appeared in a professional cartoonists journal, The World Of Cartoons #3 (1967, cover at left). This might be the best (and only) article showing the process on how these cartoons were produced (click thumbnails below to enlarge). It should be noted that the Thor cartoons were produced in New York at the Paramount Cartoon Studio, under the direction of Shamus Culhane(!), the rest of the cartoons were made in Hollywood. Below that are the rare end credits (forgive the funky copy below; as already stated these are very rare) listing the folks responsible, including such veterans as Sid Marcus, Otto Feuer, Doug Wildey and Clyde Geronimi (who co-directed Disney’s Cinderella and Peter Pan – oh, how the mighty had fallen). Not sure why NY kids-show host Sandy Becker isn’t credited with the voices (he was Captain America), perhaps the show was non-union and he’s under a pseudonym?

(Special Thanks to Shaun Clancy and Albert Bryan Biglee)

This weekend, Doctor Who returns. Here’s a trailer of what’s in store:

There’s also this “prequel”, which sets off the purpose behind the upcoming half-season and features a surprising twist ending you’ll nev– oh you figured it out.

Obviously it’s hard for me to get excited about any of this anymore. I’m kind of just riding out the clock on Moffat at this point.

There’s no need for me to go into it, but here’s a blog post that just absolutely nails it. It’s pretty much everything I’ve been trying to say. How Steven Moffat ruined Doctor Who

Here are some of the great moments from that:

For better and for worse, Davies was more interested in people than in science fiction. Moffat, on the other hand, is a geek. Let’s clarify these terms. A major disservice done to SF/Fantasy is the way it is frequently confused with its duller brother, Geekery. SF/Fantasy is about the universe, the human race’s responsibilities, morality, life, death, fear, wonder, (proper) science and different ways of seeing things. Geekery is about things which not only don’t exist literally, but have no metaphorical value: bullshit science, people who come back to life after being killed off, different versions of time-travellers bumping into each other in different timelines and CGI “energy” emanating from people when the plot requires it.

—

In a work of Geekery, the text itself is fetishised: it might not raise any questions, tax the intellect or interest anyone other than fans, but at least geeks can watch it, and discuss who River Song really is, whether Batman and the Joker are mirror opposites of one another, what would happen if the Enterprise’s transporters malfunctioned and what Yoda’s midichlorian count is. It’s a lovely way for nice, often wonderful people to meet, but that’s that’s the sole value.

—

Its biggest hindrance is the reliance on arc plotting. In the first Russell T Davies series, the words “Bad Wolf” were hidden in several episodes. This wasn’t intrusive, even if it did hamper the end of the series with too much expectation upon one phrase. By the time of Davies’s final full season this had grown out of control. Each episode would contain references to the fact that “all the bees have disappeared”, disappearing planets and something called the “Medusa Cascade”, and in the season finale the lucky viewers were told what these things meant. This “Sesame Street was brought to you today by the letter A” style of television is a serious menace to quality drama, and the art of fiction itself. It’s flourished in America, with shows like Desperate Housewives, Flashforward, Heroes, Lost and 24 teaching viewers to judge tv in terms of how good the thing they think might happen in the next episode will be, rather than how good the episode they just watched was.

—

Instead we get a lot of adolescent scenes of a vaguely vampish woman with a laser gun shooting people while exchanging cutesy flirtatious banter (her other catchphrase is the truly vile “Hello sweetie!”). Is there a single reason to care about her? What has she done except shoot people, flirt in a way that Moffat seems to think evokes Lauren Bacall but comes across like someone’s drunken aunt at a wedding, and occasionally claim to be an archaeologist? It builds up to the single most disastrous plot twist ever devised: the revelation that River is Amy Pond’s baby daughter grown up. Its meaningless is spectacular: it’s too remote to make any emotional or metaphorical impact, and it doesn’t actually alter this drab character or raise any questions.

—

His Doctor is so carefully, almost admirably, tailor-made, it could be a brand name. Following the David Tennant model, it’s the same mixture of cute good looks, with a patina of geek chic, vaguely professorish but not so much it would alienate the girls and still with the hint of an action hero beneath the foppish lock of hair (looking at Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock in Moffat’s other “take a tried-and-tested character and do it safely and cutely” show, one wonders if Moffat is growing thousands of these guys in a vat somewhere), the costume with its reassuring resemblance to Tennant’s, the bowtie to remind us that he’s eccentric without rendering him unattractive or unusual.

—

…and so much more. Go read it.

I’d like to broaden my usual ranting this year and talk about a particular problem affecting not only modern paganism, but modern Christianity and modern atheism. In giving it a name, I hope to help others identify it and battle it wherever it occurs.

It’s the Pagan Sausage Machine Fallacy, or if you prefer, the Pagan Homogeneity Error.

This concept may not seem familiar at first, but I’m sure that the more I go on about it, the more easily examples will occur to you.

Neil Gaiman once talked to us about adapting Neverwhere for BBC TV back in the day. He commented that the BBC in those days was like a sausage machine. Whatever you may feed into a sausage machine, you get sausages out the other end. Similarly, whatever you fed into the BBC came out as Doctor Who.

The Pagan Sausage Machine fallacy is similar. Whatever pre-Christian religion you feed into the sausage machine of the early Christian missionary worldview, whatever the regional specifics may have been, whatever deities were involved, the undifferentiated sausages of ‘PAGANISM ™’ come out of the other side.

The Pagan Homogeneity Error is thus the mistake of considering disparate pre-Christian or non-Christian religions to be alike, related, interchangeable and/or sympathetic with one another purely because the label ‘pagan’ is affixed to them.

The error lies in the origin of the term ‘pagan’, which was a disparaging term. It meant ‘civilian’, i.e. one who was not in the army of Christ. By lumping together all non-Christian faiths under one umbrella, the early Christians deemed them to be all equally valueless. ‘Paganism’ was not seen as a religion but a condition, akin to barbarism.

From a missionary perspective, the Gods of the people you’re trying to convert are not interesting or unique. They are merely ‘demons’ or ‘idols’. There is therefore no point in distinguishing between them. After all, if your worldview holds that only Christianity is right and everything else is wrong, it really doesn’t matter what local flavour of wrong it is. This attitude is actually characteristic of Old Testament Judaism: ‘For all the gods of the nations are idols’, reads Psalm 96.5.

So, if you see the pre-Christian world as covered with an essentially homogenous practice called ‘Paganism’ from one end to the other, it’s very easy to conflate elements from completely separate religions. It doesn’t help that there is a certain measure of overlap in some pantheistic religions, sometimes stemming from common ancestry, and sometimes born of the practice of adopting foreign deities into one’s own religion. The Romans were especially keen on the latter, identifying various Gods as local examples of their own: http://www.unrv.com/culture/adopted-roman-gods.php

A monotheistic religion can’t do that, of course. Since there’s only one God in that system, you can’t very well go about claiming other people’s Gods as examples of yours. So what we find is a tendency to adopt local deities either as saints – see Saint Bride – or as demons. For example, the Caananite Goddess Astarte becomes the demon Astaroth.

This throws open the gates for all sorts of bizarre cross-associations with no historical basis. If you hold that there is a literal demon behind every one of your neighbour’s ‘idols’, then it follows that since demons are independent of such trivial concerns as time and place, they can therefore show up all over the globe playing the same sorts of roles in different garb. Pagan deity A and pagan deity B can thus be lumped together based on nothing more than a perceived common ‘pagan’ identity plus a similarity of function.

This is a great problem when it comes to analysing the history of pre-Christian religion. Because of the Pagan Homogeneity Error, Christians tended to deal with local pre-Christian religion in terms of Paganism™ as they understood it. This is why we read in the Lanercost Chronicle of 1282:

"About this time, in Easter week, the parish priest of Inverkeithing, named John, revived the profane rites of Priapus, collecting young girls from the villages, and compelling them to dance in circles to [the honour of] Father Bacchus. When he had these females in a troop, out of sheer wantonness, he led the dance, carrying in front on a pole a representation of the human organs of reproduction, and singing and dancing himself like a mime, he viewed them all and stirred them to lust by filthy language. Those who held respectable matrimony in honour were scandalised by such a shameless performance, although they respected the parson because of the dignity of his rank. If anybody remonstrated kindly with him, he [the priest] became worse [than before], violently reviling him.”

We may raise an eyebrow at the idea of a Scottish priest worshipping ‘Father Bacchus’.

The Pagan Homogeneity Error still persists today, arguably more so than ever before. It provides a sort of deranged hyperspace by means of which any non-Christian concept can be bolted on to any other non-Christian concept in support of whatever argument the speaker is trying to make.

The most obvious sign that a writer is committing the Pagan Homogeneity Error is this: they are associating ‘pagan’ ideas because of a similarity of name or function and not because of a demonstrable historical or geographic connection.

For example, take the error of thinking that the ‘Wheel of the Year’ is historically authentic. (One might think that this was not an error that many modern Pagans are likely to make, but a depressing number of them do.)

The Wheel of the Year uses the Irish/Scots festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas and Samhain and intersperses them with festivals from the Anglo-Saxon calendar, such as Litha. We can see at a glance that two entirely separate cultures have been cobbled together here; they have nothing in common but a shared ‘pagan’ identifier. But because people find it very easy to conceive of a winter ‘pagan festival’ leading on to a springtime ‘pagan festival’, they swallow the whole thing in one instead of discerning between the different cultural elements.

Similarly, a great kerfuffle is sometimes made at Easter about the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar, who is cludged together with the putative Anglo-Saxon Goddess Eostre. It would be hard to find a better example of the Pagan Homogenity Error than this.

By Google Maps, Ishtar’s holy city of Uruk lies a phenomenal 3,500 miles from Jarrow, where Bede wrote down the name of the alleged Goddess Eostre. (For comparison, that’s about the same as the distance from London to New York.) To make that journey today, you would have to travel through Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Germany and Belgium before crossing the English Channel and making the final trip up to Tyne and Wear in the UK.

Many of the people wishing you ‘Happy Easter’ on that journey wouldn’t say Happy Easter, of course. They’d refer you to ‘Paskalya’ in Turkish, ‘Húsvét’ in Hungarian and Pâques in Belgium. In fact, for a long time it was only the English and the Germans who called the festival anything like ‘Easter’ at all. The vast majority of nations called it a variant on Pascha. However, nowadays we have a lot more English speakers, thanks to a wonderful country called America that’s doing rather well for itself since Bede’s time. This tends to exaggerate the perceived importance of the English name for the festival.

Oh – and Ishtar was not only 3,500 miles away from Eostre, she was about a thousand years earlier in time, too.

On top of that, the names Ishtar and Eostre belong to separate language families. Ishtar pertains to the Semitic language family, Eostre to the Indo-European. If you don’t know what language families are, for heaven’s sake go and look them up. It’s fascinating stuff, I promise you.

Also, Eostre was probably a dawn-goddess (if she existed); Ishtar was much more about love and war. Eostre’s festival was in the lunar month roughly corresponding to April; so far as I know, we have no record of when Ishtar’s festivals may have been.

So, how on earth can anyone possibly conflate the two?

Handily, the Pagan Sausage Machine is as efficient as a TARDIS when it comes to ignoring the mundane limitations of time and space. Never mind all that tedious history, archaeology, linguistics and research that stands between them: just bung it all into the sausage machine, mince it all up, and Eostre and Ishtar come out the other side as alike as two pagan peas in a pagan pod:

1. Their names sound a bit alike, especially if you neck a pint of vodka first.
2. They’re both pagan goddesses, which obviously means they’re about sex.
3. Erm.

Now you too can create a Facebook meme. Have fun!

Next Easter Rant: Eostre, Ostara and the Easter Fox

There's an interesting piece from Dan Hodges yesterday in which he suggests that many Tories are so sick of having to govern in coalition with the Lib Dems that they may actually prefer to be in opposition.

The idea that Peter Jackson could direct an episode of Doctor Who is obviously ridiculous. The Hobbit is a small scale, rather gentle, leisurely paced children's adventure story. Jackson took out all the charm and magic and replaced it with melodrama, appalling sentimentality and ludicrously hyperactive sensationalist action and violence, most of which didn't even make sense on it's own terms.

Whereas...

Social mobility is in the news again recently. Nick Clegg is using it to promote the Pupil Premium and is today announcing forward-looking social mobility indicators which will apparently allow the Government to observe and possibly intervene earlier rather than later. There’s also been a lot of talk about public schools and Oxbridge university admissions. I think that a lot of the debate here is rather skewed – from enforcing minimum admission quotas through to banning public schools altogether.

To explain my position, I went to public school on a scholarship, and my parents worked their arses off to send me there nonetheless. I was the first person and only in my family to go to preparatory and public school. Academically, I did well at school – my A-level grades were AAAB. I liked most of my teachers, and a few of them really spurred my intellectual curiosity, particularly the maths teacher who, having finished the A-level curriculum early, spent my last summer term teaching us cryptography from Caesar to Diffie-Hellman between revision classes. It’s difficult to say how I might have fared at another school – one of my prep school classmates who went to the local grammar ended up getting better A-levels than me and a Double First in pure maths from Oxford, compared to my booze-soaked Desmond at UMIST. Certainly I was expected to go to Oxbridge, and chose not to out of a desire to escape the pubic school system in favour of a large student population in a vibrant city.

I think that the public school environment had a lot to do with my liberalism. Being surrounded by kids who largely had very few concerns about their future life in term-time, then going home to my rural village and drinking cheap lager on the Scout Hut roof with council house kids who were struggling to get menial employment gave me a sense of perspecive. Seeing some of the biggest vindictive bullies appointed to authority positions like Prefect and Head Boy, giving them more undeserved power to torment, made me very wary of unearned power.

In terms of University admission, Nick Clegg has already done one thing which has been widely ignored in this debate even when talking about admissions. He has required the Russell Group of “elite” universities to publish their admissions criteria. From this we learn that students who have studied core subjects at A-level, like Maths, Physics and English, are valued over students with equivalent grades in only more niche areas – even if those niche areas relate to the University course. We also see that public schools are getting more of their A-level students to take at least one of these core subjects at A-level.

This to me is highly interesting, and demonstrates an approach to University admission that isn’t based around quotas (which instinctively feel wrong to me as a liberal). We should look at why state schools are not getting more of their students good grades in these core subjects – if they find the niche subjects easier to teach and are chasing league table ratings, perhaps those ratings should be biased towards core subjects to make sure schools are encouraged to teach the subjects valued by top Universities. Perhaps the extra funding from the Pupil Premium is enough to help deliver that outcome, perhaps not – but if headteachers are chasing two contradictory goals, confusion will result.

However, in terms of social mobility, there’s more than just potential academic benefit. Part of what I missed out on by being a relatively poor pupil was the extracurricular activities with fellow pupils and the networking that goes with that. As part of this whole chicken-and-egg, my peers were more likely than average to end up in good jobs and good positions, and by rubbing shoulders with them I might have been able to build up useful relationships which would benefit me in my future life. This failed for me on two fronts – firstly, I was a geeky kid who didn’t fit in, and secondly, while my parents’ hard work and my scholarship got me into the school, it didn’t get me sent on the skiing holidays outside termtime and other places where my peers went to hang out together and form strong friendships. I remember a particularly cringeworthy school camping trip to the Lake District where my inability to afford a reliable pair of hiking boots meant I ended up staying at base camp with one of the teachers, sorting out the shopping and washing up while the rest took enjoyable romps over the hills.

I’ll admit then that I have no evidence that the friendships my peers made at public school were of material benefit in later life, but if that conventional wisdom is true, I don’t think that getting poorer pupils into public school, or Oxbridge, will automatically give them access to the kinds of networks and contacts that they’re supposedly missing out on. Or maybe just not being the fat geeky one who’d rather read Asimov than play football suffices; I don’t know.

To summarise then – getting kids from poorer backgrounds into public school won’t necessarily improve their ability to network at that age (though I doubt it’ll hurt it). It might make those kids more likely to get into Oxbridge through good teaching in core subjects, but there are other ways to address that problem. If employers look more favourably on Russell Group degrees and public school educations, then it might be useful to make sure a wider range of people get them. However, it still seems a little like tinkering around the edges rather than making sure that everybody gets a high quality primary and secondary education, has good literacy and numeracy by 16, and a wide range of both academic and vocational opportunities after that – this is where the Lib Dems are delivering in Government, and where I’m satisfied that the priority is correct.

As an aside, there are a couple of things, such as the charitable status of public schools and the new free schools and academies programme, which I haven’t mentioned here. While the former is worthy of debate I don’t think it’s directly relevant here, and I don’t think there’s enough evidence in terms of the social mobility outcomes to make any determinations about the latter – though Clegg’s new metrics announced today should help us make a determination sooner rather than later. Nor will I address George Monbiot’s claim that all private schools should be abolished, other than to say that it’s clearly fundementally illiberal, and attempts only to address the symptoms rather than the problems.

And on a finishing note, I’d like to point out that I’m not claiming to come from a poor background. My parents are solid middle class, probably the upper end of that, and I’ve had a privileged and comfortable upbringing – we just weren’t as well-off as many of the families we rubbed shoulders with at through my education, and I suspect that had an impact – which says something about the effects of getting people from poorer backgrounds into these institutions. I will also confess to getting one break out of public school – my first IT job was a summer programming job working for my maths teacher’s son, who later invited me back for future employment, giving me a useful CV boost.

The resignation of David Miliband as an MP means there will be a by-election in his South Shields constituency. But this will not be another famous Liberal Democrat victory, more a case of damage limitation.

Liberator has looked up the South Shields result in the 2010 general election so you don’t have to:

52.0% Labour
21.6% Conservative
14.2% Liberal Democrat
6.5% BNP
2.1% Green
3.6% Others

Labour majority 11,109
Turnout 57.7%

In short, it is a safe Labour seat and Labour will hold it. A Labour hold will not be an achievement. A Labour hold will not be news. There will be more interest in the performance of the other parties.

Liberal Democrat prospects are not good. The party’s vote in 2010 had fallen by 5% since the previous general election in 2005 and, on present form, may fall still further, with the risk of a lost deposit. There is no local government base and not a single Liberal Democrat councillor in the constituency; South Shields is in the Labour-dominated metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, which has 48 Labour councillors, 1 Conservative, 1 UKIP and 4 independents. The by-election will almost certainly be held on the same day as the local elections on 2nd May. For all these reasons, the Liberal Democrat campaign will not attract thousands of volunteers as in Eastleigh; instead, the party is more likely to play the whole thing down as it did in Barnsley Central and Rotherham.

The more observant among you may have noticed there was no UKIP candidate in 2010. That won’t be the case in this by-election. Indeed, the bookies reckon UKIP will come second, as it did in Eastleigh. This is not so much because of Eastleigh but because, once Tory voters realise the Tories have no hope of winning, they will feel safe in switching to UKIP as a protest vote.

The perception that a Labour victory is certain will, of course, have another consequence. The turnout will be abysmal.

You’ve doubtless heard the joke: We can’t call the Higgs boson the “God Particle” any more, because now we have tangible evidence that it exists.

But the label “God Particle,” attached to the poor unsuspecting Higgs boson by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi, continues to wreak havoc on physicists’ attempts to clearly explain what is going on. Last week’s announcements from CERN that the new particle discovered last July is looking more and more like the Higgs predicted by the Standard Model generated stories like this one, from CBS news:

The Higgs boson is often called “the God particle” because it’s said to be what caused the “Big Bang” that created our universe many years ago. The nickname caught on so quickly (even though scientists and clergy alike do not care for it) partly because it’s a great explanation of what it’s supposed to do — the Higgs boson is what joins everything and gives it matter.

That might be the worst paragraph I’ve ever read about the Higgs boson, and I’ve read quite a few. (H/t Faye Flam.) Originally I thought the journalist was just making things up, but it turns out that it’s Michio Kaku’s fault. (H/t Matt Strassler on Facebook.) There is a video linked to the article, in which Kaku says that the Higgs helped cause the Big Bang, and that’s why it’s called the God Particle. Another example where it would have been tempting to rag on sloppy popular journalism, where actually it’s a supposed scientist who is largely to blame. (Although the above paragraph is also wrong about things it should be easy to get right.)

For the record, the Higgs had nothing whatsoever to do with causing the Big Bang. (Kaku tries to link it to inflation, but they’re not related.) It also doesn’t “join everything,” whatever that means. It does give mass to elementary particles like electrons and quarks, which isn’t the same as giving “matter” (since that kind of doesn’t make any sense), and besides which it doesn’t give mass to protons and neutrons and therefore most of the mass in ordinary objects.

The “God Particle” label, despite being very catchy and therefore leading to more publicity than most elementary particles manage to muster, has done more harm than good for the public understanding of science. Non-experts, hearing that physicists have named something after God, might actually think they were being serious. Imagine that.

[Update: Matt Strassler adds his take.]

It’s not going away any time soon. Leon Lederman and Chris Hill have a sequel to the original book coming out, Beyond the God Particle, due later this year. I’m sure the book will be great at explaining the physics, and I’m equally sure the title will generate a lot more confusion. Get your disclaimers ready!

MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU.

So, I should probably talk about Star Wars at this point.

I’ve been tiptoeing around it for most of this series of articles, but it’s pretty widely acknowledged that the Fourth World Saga was a *huge* influence on George Lucas, and if you’ve been paying attention to my recaps, you’ve probably noticed this yourself. We’ve got a mythological cosmic epic that takes the form of a space opera but conceals more a primal, archetypal sensibility; good and evil in impossibly pure forms, with good represented by verdancy and the rejection of violence, and evil by the totalitarian domination of a chilling but charismatic master manipulator; an elaborate mythology full of strange beings, with a pre-existing backstory; and lots of other details, big and small. More obviously, you’ve got a villain named, phonetically, “Dark Side”, whose ruthless personality and will-to-power are more than a little reminiscent of a certain Sith Lord with whom we’re all familiar; throw in the physical characteristics (mutilated body encased in cloak and armour) of another of Kirby’s classic villains, Dr. Doom, and the connection is even more obvious. You’ve also got heroes worshiping and deriving their powers from something called “The Source” (and one from “The Astro-Force”), a gigantic technological hell-planet with great circular pits, and even Laser Swords make a brief appearance at one point. And there’s another major point of similarity which has been pretty heavily hinted at throughout the series, but which this issue, one of the best of the whole meta-series, will make abundantly plain. (This is gonna be a long one.)

“In the Beginning--The New Gods were formless in image and aimless in deed!!! On each of their two new worlds, their races had sprung from a survivor of the old!! The living atoms of Balduur gave nobility and strength to one!!—and the shadow planet was saturated with the cunning and evil which was once a sorceress!!"

With this opening caption, Kirby comes as close as he ever does to admitting that, yes, the Fourth World is supposed to have emerged literally from the wreckage of his imaginary destruction of the Marvel Universe, or at least the Asgard segment of it. I’m not sure why he even bothered to change the name of “Balder”, since he’s a mythological entity, and thus, not owned by Marvel. Although the way copyright laws are going…

So yeah, to recap, once he split with Stan the Man and the House of Ideas, Kirby basically performed a pretty stunning mental purge, metaphorically destroying the universe he’d worked on for so long and summoning a new work out of the ashes. It’s not hard to see how stuff like Countdown to Infinite Crisis That’s Final For Really Reals This Time and Spider-Man Sells His Continuity To The Devil and all the other status-quo-smashin’, father killin’, nothing-you-know-will-ever-be-the-same-again reinventions of the DC and Marvel Universes over the years were taking their cue from what Kirby did here—but none of them ever did it with the kind of breathtaking commitment Kirby brought to it (even though the world he ‘destroyed’ remained alive and static at the company he left behind).

There are almost too many ramifications to this to sort through, though as I mentioned elsewhere, it lends a surprising amount of logical consistency to the series if you imagine that the New Gods come from a parallel universe—this aforementioned far-future Marvel Universe that’s been destroyed and reborn. It would explain why they talk about Earth like it’s a relic of their own history, why they’re seemingly millions of years old despite the fact that their predecessors are clearly the gods of Earth mythology, and why no one in the DCU ever stumbled across them until Darkseid decided to stop by. 

Of course, there’s still some stuff that doesn’t really make sense, and it starts right on the first page, when we meet Izaya The Inheritor and his wife Avia, reposing in bucolic splendour on New Genesis.



Now, here’s the thing: Izaya is the man who will one day be known as “All-Father”, and I think Kirby meant for this to be a surprise, but I literally never even thought to question that they were the same guy until the end of the story; his beard isn’t grey, but otherwise the resemblance is obvious. Of course, there are some issues raised by this, like, um, New Gods can age? Also, he’s described as a warrior…yet we’re told that this is at a time before New Genesis and Apokolips went to war. So what was he fighting against? Did the New Gods just pull themselves out of the cosmic goop left by the Old Gods and say, “Hey, those guys fought a lot. We oughtta get some warriors, too! They get all the chicks!”

Tragically, Izaya is about to learn the true meaning of being a warrior, as he and his bride are attacked by Steppenwolf.



I’ve been waiting months to do that joke. And it was totally worth it.

No, this is the Steppenwolf we’re talking about:



Steppenwolf is simply German for “wolf of the steppes” (or Coyote), so it’s probably just a coincidence that it’s a band (and a Hermann Hesse novel) as well as a Kirby character. This particular Steppenwolf lives up to his name by being a pack hunter, who hunts the deadliest game of all: MAN. Or actually, NEW GOD. Yes, in what seems like a fairly suicidal move to me, Stepp has decided to hunt and kill a leader of their neighbouring planet for sport. Diplomacy: not an Apokoliptish strong point.

But then, this may be a classic case of a dumb, spoiled rich kid getting in way over his head, for you see, Stepp is the brother of Heggra, the witchly ruler of Apokolips…and mother of Darkseid. Who, we learn in very short order, was the one who suggested this hunting excursion in the first place. And while Izaya gives them a good run for their money at first, he’s rendered spiritless by the sudden death of Avia, who wandered back onto the battlefield to prevent Izzy from killing Stepp and got whacked herself. Izzy then gets taken out by Darkseid’s “Killing-Gloves” and left for dead. Stepp is just barely bright enough to suspect that something’s rotten in Denmark:

STEPPENWOLF: I don’t trust you, nephew! --Or your bizarre companions!
DARKSEID: Would you care to examine the body, noble Steppenwolf??
STEPPENWOLF: There’s no need! I know I’ll find no sign of life!!! Let me add further, Darkseid!! I don’t like you! You’re clever and cunning—and a plotter!!

Yeah, good thing you’re none of those things, Stepp. “I don’t trust you! Let me demonstrate this by falling into your trap with a minimum of goading!”

For of course, Darkseid set this whole thing up to ensnare New Genesis and Apokolips in a war. Izaya wasn’t killed, and when he wakes up, he’s ready to do some serious vengeance-taking against those who killed his wife. Darkseid’s motivations in setting up the war are never really spelled out as such, though obviously focusing Izaya’s wrath on his mother and uncle is going to help him seize power later. Plus, Apokolips seems to have been created as a world of warriors and weapon-makers, so it was inevitable that they would find someone to fight against. It just doesn’t speak very well of Stepp or Heggra that it took Darkseid to figure this out for them. What were they doing for the first few thousand years of their existence? Holding lavish banquets?



Oh.

The Darkseid family basically sits around rather pathetically in a bunker, squabbling for no particularly good reason except for the fact that they’re eeeee-vil, while the Monitors of New Genesis bomb the surface flat. Heggra castigates Steppenwolf: "You’re brash!! Arrogant! Loud!! You command an army which only produces battles and body counts!” As opposed to what, sensible shoes? Again, for all their sinister, warlike appearance and cackling and basically looking the part of a bunch of ruthless intergalactic warlords, these guys sure need the essence of conflict spelled out for them, don’t they? Fortunately, Darkseid is planning to betray them all and seize power, and it can’t happen soon enough—even though he’s clearly a million times more competent, it’s still kind of goofy to see Darkseid playing the part of someone’s runty nephew. (By the way, Hegg and Stepp and the rest of Darkseid’s immediate family are a bunch of lemon-yellow, red-eyed weirdos, looking like severely stylized versions of Ming the Merciless, but Darkseid is his usual, rocky self. I know, I know, they’re gods, and aren’t constrained to follow the usual laws of genetics. But still, he kinda sticks out.)

Darkseid is showing off a mysterious “X-Element” that he (or Desaad, who he’s apparently already got working for him) have stumbled upon in the labs. Suddenly, the party is interrupted by Metron, uncharacteristically flustered, bursting in and pleading like a little bitch with Darkseid to be given the X-Element.

If you remember, way back when, I mentioned that Metron’s status as a good guy was a little shaky, and that Orion was basically right to distrust him. This scene is a big part of why. Metron is overtly described as being part of New Genesis, yet he completely sells them out here, agreeing to use the X-Element to open the “Matter Threshold” that will allow Apokolips to transport heavy weaponry directly to New Genesis. His reasoning is that he desperately needs the X-Element to build his Mobius Chair.

“You’re a nice boy!!” croons Heggra. “Does it bother you---to create the means for mass slaughter??” “I have no link with the Old Gods—or New!!” rationalizes Metron. “I am something--different! Something that was unforeseen!!--On New Genesis—or here!!” “You’ll betray us all in time, Metron!” Glowers Darkseid. “But this thing—you shall build—for us!!”

OK, so, we’re going with a Cat’s Cradle-style “the detatched immorality of science” thing here, apparently; Metron just wants to build and discover, and he doesn’t give a thought to what anyone might do with his inventions. Makes him kind of a dick, though, and you have to wonder how New Genesis ever got around to trusting him ever again. As Metron leaves, Heggra laughs with joy, praising her son, and Darkseid grins for I think the only time in the entire series:



Creepy.

Next thing you know, the Dragon Tanks and canine cavalry of Apokolips are blazing across the serene fields of New Genesis, led by Steppenwolf, who, with his tiny, tiny brain, has gone back to thinking well of Darkseid simply because he let his uncle lead the raid. Of course, the inevitable happens: Izaya the Inheritor appears from between the ranks and gets his revenge on Steppenwolf, driving off the Apokoliptish forces while he’s at it.

Metron appears to be castigated by Izaya—though not nearly enough, it seems to me—and makes a lot of “Ooh, that Darkseid! I hate him so much!” noises which are apparently sufficient to placate Izzy.

Over the next couple of pages, the war and the carnage grow ever greater, as the two forces turn to genetic engineering and bacteriological warfare, call down asteroids to slam into each others’ planets, focus the energy of the sun into gigantic flaming lasers (Kirby literally draws them as huge, flaming gouts cutting across space) and just basically making a mess of the entire universe. Somehow, despite being right next door to each other, the two planets don’t manage to wipe each other out, but New Genesis is transformed into a barren wasteland littered with ruins, over which Izaya looks sorrowfully.

“We are worse than the Old Gods!” He cries, in a bout of typically Kirbian anguish. “They destroyed themselves!! We destroy everything!! This is Darkseid’s way! I am infected by Darkseid!! To save New Genesis—I must find Izaya!!”

He proceeds to wander out into the wilderness and do a whole “biblical prophet” thing, ruminating on his past choices, declaring that he rejects the way of war, ripping the armor and war-staff from his body and declaring that he’s rejecting the way of war forever, as the wind whips itself into a frenzy around him. “Darkseid’s game is not mine!!” He howls. “Where is Izaya!!!?? Where is IZAYA!!!??”

In the middle of a re-enactment of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it turns out, as suddenly a gigantic monolith comes into view across the plain. OK, so this one’s white and has a goofy little pointing-finger icon that writes “THE SOURCE” across it in fiery letters. Hey, I just realized: the Source is a Mac.

Some time elapses. Izaya returns to his throne in new robes, with a new staff; Darkseid, meanwhile, succeeds to the throne of Apokolips following the demise of his mother, and suddenly the war cools off. Darkseid and Izaya make a secret pact which involves their respective, and so-far unseen sons.

Yep, Darkseid’s got a kid: in fact, it seems he’s been married all this time, to this woman:



And as it turns out, the kid takes more after his mom, with the flaming red hair and the violence, than his rocky, pontificating dad. It’s not so surprising, either, since Darkseid never really wanted to raise a family anyway, and his son was raised on the other side of the planet, never knowing his dad. So the terms of the Pact seem fairly agreeable to him: he and Izaya will swap kids, the way ancient rulers were known to do, in order to cement a new truce between the two worlds. Of course, as it pretty much goes without saying, Darkseid just wants to buy some time and re-evaluate his options, so when Izaya’s young son is carried in by Granny Goodness, he immediately hatches a plan to someday break the truce: the kid will be raised in Granny’s Soldier-Orphanage, but he’ll harbour the dream of escape—and if he ever manages to do so, it’ll break the Pact and provide a convenient excuse to resume hostilities. In honour of this day, Granny names the kid “Scott Free”. (You’ve got to feel bad for Scott—it seems like his whole life, including his rebellion against evil, has been planned out by his archnemesis already. So much for being the living embodiment of freedom…)

At the signal, Darkseid’s son is thrust through his own Threshold and finds himself in a warren of tunnels, fighting and kicking the whole way. He’d kept a weapon secreted in his sleeve, and he now turns it on the first figure he comes across: Izaya, now in his white-bearded form of All-Father, offering him friendship and trust for the first time in his life. Orion—for it is he—screams that his father hates him, but Izaya responds with “‘Hate’ is no longer a word in this place!!!” Uh…but you just said…oh, never mind.

The point is that Orion is obviously in desperate need of a daddy, and with All-Father offering to fulfill this role, he decides to symbolically drop the weapon and embrace his new destiny as protector of New Genesis. Fade out.

Once again, I’m impressed by how much more confident Kirby’s storytelling is here than on the other series. The plot comes together much more tightly than I ever would have expected, and while I wish Kirby’s dialogue was smoother and more subtle, the underlying ideas are so powerful that it almost doesn’t matter. These characters’ actions convey who they are beautifully, even if what comes out of their mouth is kind of clunky, and while the forces of evil still seem to be more intellectually engaged (as it often does in these kinds of stories), the good guys actually manage to steal the show this time out. As usual, it’s hard not to think that Kirby was working out some personal issues in the sequence where Izaya rejects violence; perhaps he was coming to see the inherent conflicts in a cosmic war epic that revolved around hippie ideas of peace and brotherhood, and was making an effort to resolve them a little more clearly. As it is, this issue is a crucial peace of mythology that elevates the whole story quite effectively.

Oh, and that whole “hero turns out to be the son of the villain” thing? That’s a great idea. Someone ought to steal that for their own space epic.

This blogpost contains many and frequent spoilers for Prometheus, so if you're planning on seeing it, I recommend you don't spoil yourself.



Important update 12th Nov: Original Jon Spaihts script now online! Details at the end.

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.

Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.'

Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.

And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'

So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.

Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.

The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.

And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.

From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:

Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.

So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.

So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.

The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.

Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable.

Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.

But some humans do act in ways the Engineers might have grudgingly admired. Take Holloway, Shaw's lover, who impregnates her barren womb with his black slime riddled semen before realising he is being transformed into something Other. Unlike the hapless geologist and botanist left behind in the chamber, who only want to stay alive, Holloway willingly embraces death. He all but invites Meredith Vickers to kill him, and it's surely significant that she does so using fire, the other gift Prometheus gave to man besides his life.

The 'Caesarean' scene is central to the film's themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she's pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT'S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN. How many times has that image come up now? Four, I make it. (We're not done yet.)

And she doesn't kill it. And she calls the procedure a 'caesarean' instead of an 'abortion'.

(I'm not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don't think they're clear, and I'm not entirely comfortable doing so. Let's just say that her unwanted offspring turning out to be her salvation is possibly problematic from a feminist standpoint and leave it there for now.)

Here's where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a 'virgin birth' of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn't possibly be pregnant. And Shaw's the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born?

Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she's pregnant, and tell me that's not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can't possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it's no ordinary child... yeah, we've seen this before.

'And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.'

A barren woman called Elizabeth, made pregnant by 'God'? Subtle, Ridley.

Anyway. If it weren't already clear enough that the central theme of the film is 'I suffer and die so that others may live' versus 'you suffer and die so that I may live' writ extremely large, Meredith Vickers helpfully spells it out:

'A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.'

Vickers is not just speaking out of personal frustration here, though that's obviously one level of it. She wants her father out of the way, so she can finally come in to her inheritance. It's insult enough that Weyland describes the android David as 'the closest thing I have to a son', as if only a male heir was of any worth; his obstinate refusal to accept death is a slap in her face.

Weyland, preserved by his wealth and the technology it can buy, has lived far, far longer than his rightful time. A ghoulish, wizened creature who looks neither old nor young, he reminds me of Slough Feg, the decaying tyrant from the Slaine series in British comic 2000AD. In Slaine, an ancient (and by now familiar to you, dear reader, or so I would hope) Celtic law decrees that the King has to be ritually and willingly sacrificed at the end of his appointed time, for the good of the land and the people. Slough Feg refused to die, and became a rotting horror, the embodiment of evil.

The image of the sorcerer who refuses to accept rightful death is fundamental: it even forms a part of some occult philosophy. In Crowley's system, the magician who refuses to accept the bitter cup of Babalon and undergo dissolution of his individual ego in the Great Sea (remember that opening scene?) becomes an ossified, corrupted entity called a 'Black Brother' who can create no new life, and lives on as a sterile, emasculated husk.

With all this in mind, we can better understand the climactic scene in which the withered Weyland confronts the last surviving Engineer. See it from the Engineer's perspective. Two thousand years ago, humanity not only murdered the Engineers' emissary, it infected the Engineers' life-creating fluid with its own tainted selfish nature, creating monsters. And now, after so long, here humanity is, presumptuously accepting a long-overdue invitation, and even reawakening (and corrupting all over again) the life fluid.

And who has humanity chosen to represent them? A self-centred, self-satisfied narcissist who revels in his own artificially extended life, who speaks through the medium of a merely mechanical offspring. Humanity couldn't have chosen a worse ambassador.

It's hardly surprising that the Engineer reacts with contempt and disgust, ripping David's head off and battering Weyland to death with it. The subtext is bitter and ironic: you caused us to die at the hands of our own creation, so I am going to kill you with YOUR own creation, albeit in a crude and bludgeoning way.

The only way to save humanity is through self-sacrifice, and this is exactly what the captain (and his two oddly complacent co-pilots) opt to do. They crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, giving up their lives in order to save others. Their willing self-sacrifice stands alongside Holloway's and the Engineer's from the opening sequence; by now, the film has racked up no less than five self-sacrificing gestures (six if we consider the exploding Engineer head).

Meredith Vickers, of course, has no interest in self-sacrifice. Like her father, she wants to keep herself alive, and so she ejects and lands on the planet's surface. With the surviving cast now down to Vickers and Shaw, we witness Vickers's rather silly death as the Engineer ship rolls over and crushes her, due to a sudden inability on her part to run sideways. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the film is saying her view is blinkered, and ultimately that kills her. But I doubt it. Sometimes a daft death is just a daft death.

Finally, in the squidgy ending scenes of the film, the wrathful Engineer conveniently meets its death at the tentacles of Shaw's alien child, now somehow grown huge. But it's not just a death; there's obscene life being created here, too. The (in the Engineers' eyes) horrific human impulse to sacrifice others in order to survive has taken on flesh. The Engineer's body bursts open - blah blah lifegiver blah blah abdomen ripped apart hey we're up to five now - and the proto-Alien that emerges is the very image of the creature from the mural.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that the genesis of the Alien xenomorph ultimately lies in the grotesque human act of crucifying the Space Jockeys' emissary to Israel in four B.C., but that's what Ridley Scott proposes. It seems equally insane to propose that Prometheus is fundamentally about the clash between acceptance of death as a condition of creating/sustaining life versus clinging on to life at the expense of others, but the repeated, insistent use of motifs and themes bears this out.

As a closing point, let me draw your attention to a very different strand of symbolism that runs through Prometheus: the British science fiction show Doctor Who. In the 1970s episode 'The Daemons', an ancient mound is opened up, leading to an encounter with a gigantic being who proves to be an alien responsible for having guided mankind's development, and who now views mankind as a failed experiment that must be destroyed. The Engineers are seen tootling on flutes, in exactly the same way that the second Doctor does. The Third Doctor had an companion whose name was Liz Shaw, the same name as the protagonist of Prometheus. As with anything else in the film, it could all be coincidental; but knowing Ridley Scott, it doesn't seem very likely.

QUICK EDIT: Just noting down some of the other Christian symbolism I missed, with thanks to those who pointed them out: David washes Weyland's feet, and I'm told that when Janek and his co-pilots sacrifice their lives to save the Earth, they apparently stand in the form of crucifixes, their arms held out. ('Hands up'?) So you have three 'crucified' guys, one in the middle higher up, the other two on the sides, lower down. All a bit Calvary. However, I don't remember that bit very clearly myself, so I'll have to go see it again.

EDITED 10 JUNE 2012: I'm amazed that so many people are reading and discussing this. I'd like to make some sort of response to your various comments here and elsewhere, but it may take a while as there are loads. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@Cavalorn) and tell me your thoughts in the meantime, if you like.

EDIT 11 JUNE 2012: Here's a brief reaction to some of the responses I've received. Thank you all.

EDIT 13 JUNE 2012: Cleolinda Jones has done a M15M Prometheus post! Go and read that instead of this. You won't regret it.

EDIT 18 JUNE 2012: FILM CRITIC HULK SMASH PUNY ARTICLE. HULK ALSO TELL AUTHOR HE RAISE GOOD POINT DESPITE HULK DISAGREE, WHICH NICE OF HULK.

ANOTHER EDIT 13 JUNE 2012: Obligatory viewing, y'all.







UNEXPECTED EDIT 12th NOV 2012: The original Jon Spaihts script for Prometheus is now online and he's confirmed its authenticity. It's here in PDF form, courtesy of www.prometheus-movie.com.

The following speech by Holloway stands out (p.57):

'But I guess we know why they never came back to us. Something killed them
off - back around the time of Christ. Maybe He was one of them! A great
teacher, sent from Heaven? Jesus. The last Engineer.'

So now I guess we know what Ridley Scott considered 'a little too on the nose' and opted to remove from the script. As I've said elsewhere, the term 'on the nose' when used in scriptwriting means telling rather than showing. The ideas are still there, but implied rather than stated outright. This is how come Ridley then went on to articulate the background to the Space Jesus Engineer concept in the movies.com interview - Roman Empire running out of control, Engineers sending an emissary to fix it - which he obviously wouldn't have bothered to do if it weren't relevant to the movie.

That's what I think, anyway. Others will disagree. It's the Internet. :)

It's that time of year again: daffodils are coming up, the sun is re-establishing itself as a welcome and warming presence instead of some dimly remembered thing of olden time, and people who don't know any better are circulating that bloody story about Eostre's Hare. Again.

I've blogged extensively about Eostre in the past and don't intend to repeat any of that here. The short version: there is only one reference to her anywhere, in Bede; he gives absolutely no information about her except for her name; and everything else that people claim about her, such as having a sacred hare companion, is wholly unsupported by evidence.

This is not even a controversial stance. On the contrary, it is exactly what the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore states: 'Nowadays, many writers claim that hares were sacred to the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, but there is no shred of evidence for this; Bede, the only writer to mention Eostre, does not link her with any animal.'

The interesting question now, to me, is when this spurious association between Eostre and hares arose. It's not in Bede, as we've already established. It's not in Grimm. (EDIT: WRONG, SEE FURTHER EDIT NOTE BELOW.) Adolf Holtzmann, writing in 1874 in German Mythology, states "The Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara." This is the earliest example of this association I can find, and it is still speculative at this point.

K. A. Oberle, in the catchily titled Überreste germanischen Heidentums im Christentum, oder die Wochentage, Monate und christlichen Feste etymologisch, mythologisch, symbolisch und historisch erklärt (1883), writes "Wahrscheinlich ist der Hase das heilige Tier der Ostara gewesen" (Probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara), echoing Holtzmann.

However, it's worth noting that in 1892, Charles J Billson writing in the the British journal Folk-Lore states flatly that "Oberle also concludes that the hare which lay the particoloured Easter eggs was sacred to the same goddess," ignoring the 'probably' that both Holtzmann and Oberle included.

We find another speculative association in Charles Isaac Elton's Origins of English History (1890), in which it is suggested that certain Easter customs "were probably connected with the worship of the Anglian goddess Eostre", the customs in question being those in which "the profits of the land called Harecrop Leys were applied to providing a meal which was thrown on the ground at the 'Hare-pie Bank".

Elton's speculation is still a far cry from the modern assertion that Eostre's sacred beast was the hare, so who first made that assertion? John Lanyard's Lady of the Hare (1944) refers back to Billson, but writes as if the question were more or less settled, rather than being a matter of speculation: 'Since the Saxon Easter Goddess does seem to have been connected with the hare, and the hare so widely symbolizes 'dawn', and as dawn comes from the east, and Easter is the festival of the Resurrection symbolizing the birth of new life, it had occurred to me to wonder whether the actual word "Easter" might have a very simple explanation indeed - so simple that philologists and churchmen alike had missed it - namely that it was cognate to the word "east" as symbolizing the dawn from which new light came.'

By 1976, we have Christina Hole writing in Easter and its Customs: 'The hare was the sacred beast of Eastre (or Eostre) a Saxon goddess of Spring and of the dawn.' Any suggestion that this is a speculative association is entirely extinct. Somehow, along the way, supposition has become unexamined fact. I am not aware of any source between John Lanyard and Christina Hole who makes this outright statement, and would welcome any breadcrumbs from readers of this blog who know of one.

So, in summary, here is a very tentative timeline of Eostre's Bunny:

725 CE: Bede mentions Eostre. He does not associate her with hares.
1835 CE: Grim, in Deustche Mythologie, postulates Ostara; he does not associate Eostre with hares. (WRONG - SEE EDIT)
1874 CE: Adolf Holtzmann states 'probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara'.
1883 CE: K.A. Oberle also states 'probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara'.
1890 CE: Charles Isaac Elton states that Easter customs at 'Hare-pie Bank' at 'Harecrop Leys' 'were probably connected with the worship of the Anglian goddess Eostre'
1892 CE: Charles J Billson refers to Oberle's association of the hare with Ostara as a conclusion, rather than as a speculation
1944 CE: John Lanyard states that 'the Saxon Easter Goddess does seem to have been connected with the hare'.
1976 CE: Christina Hole states that 'The hare was the sacred beast of Eastre (or Eostre) a Saxon goddess of Spring and of the dawn.'

Please bear in mind that no new evidence arose during this time to change the speculative association into a definite one. The shift from 'probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara' to 'the hare was the sacred beast of Eastre' wasn't based on any archaeological discoveries, collected oral traditions or unearthed documents. It appears to have been based completely upon authors borrowing from other authors, and in so doing, shifting the goalposts of certainty until one person's speculation had become another's unchallenged fact.

Afterword: it's an interesting time in Eostre studies, folks. As you'll know, I have never been inclined to dismiss Eostre herself out of hand, though I am happy to take the axe to the massive amount of unsupported codswallop that is circulated concerning her, such as the bunny story. As far as Eostre herself goes, if she's good enough for Professor Hutton, she's good enough for me. She may have been a real figure of worship, she may not. The jury's still out on that one.

And now Doctor Philip A. Shaw of the University of Leicester has added something entirely new (to me) to the ongoing debate, namely linking Romano-Germanic votive inscriptions to the 'matron Austriahenea' to Eostre. I am therefore going to pick up a copy of his work 'Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons' just as soon as the next pay cheque arrives. Though one does have to facepalm at the sole comment on Amazon: 'It is not surprising that there is little "hard evidence" considering that there was literally a war waged over hundreds of years to stamp out "the old religion."' I imagine Dr Shaw would probably have a few words to say on that, too.

EDIT: This is fascinating stuff. According to Swain Wodening's review of the book, Dr. Shaw believes that Eostre really existed but that she and Hretha were entirely local to Kent! So, the selfsame academic who offers up new evidence for Eostre's existence also limits her to a very small part of south-eastern England. Not a pan-Germanic Goddess at all, then; and in affirming an entirely local Kentish Eostre, Dr. Shaw is effectively demolishing the hypothetical Germanic 'Ostara' proposed by Grimm. Indeed, he suggests that 'the German month names Ostermonat and Redmanot were carried to Germany and France by Anglo-Saxon missionaries, and uses this to back his claim that they were local goddesses'! So, the stance is that Christian Anglo-Saxons took those month names over, and (presumably) there is no connection at all to any cognate pagan goddesses in those regions. Well, that certainly jives with Charlemagne renaming the month of April to the old High German Ostarmanot; he would hardly have done so if there were lingering pagan associations.

IMPORTANT EDIT: I done screwed up, folks. Bound to happen one of these days. Holzmann's Deustche Mythologie was simply a reissue of Grimm. So it *was* Grimm who made the initial association between Ostara and hares. I'm going to leave the original with this correction in place rather than edit it out, because I'd rather not pretend to be infallible.

Next Easter Rant: the Pagan Sausage Machine Fallacy

As you will know, the Justice and Security Bill went unamended after the debate in the Lords on Tuesday, and so will now become law - and secret courts will become a reality in the Civil Court.  I find it extremely upsetting that this could happen with Lib Dems in government.

There is an excellent round up of the events of Tuesday over at LDV from Caron, where you can find a list of the Lib Dem peers who defied the three line whip to Vote against the government. Also over at LDV today there is a great piece from Paul Strasburger on the shenanigans that went on Tuesday both to keep Tory peers in the House (they all watched a film rather than the debate), and the delay on the debate which meant many peers sloped off home before it even took place.

All in all quite disgraceful

This debacle has cost us some wonderful members, notably Jo Shaw but I also learned last night that David Allen Green has now let his membership lapse as a direct result of the secret courts issue. A very sad loss to the party. I hope we get him back some day soon, and those of us staying need to fight to overturn this law  - and uphold party policy, that so many of our parliamentarians have ignored.

Jo is also founding 'The Project for Open Justice' and I hope many will contact her to see how they can help. As someone else has said, it's astonishing we find ourselves on the other side of a civil liberties issue from Reprieve, Index on Censorship and Liberty

Finally, here's an interesting little factoid.




Next up, as Liberator has pointed out today, is the Snooping bill, which it is rumoured may get introduced in the May Queens Speech. Again, if that's correct, our Westminster representatives can expect a fight.

I'm a Liberal Democrat and I'm against this sort of thing.

More information has come to light regarding Tuesday night’s votes in the House of Lords on secret courts. And it seems there is a fundamental problem of Liberal Democrats on the government payroll (i.e. ministers and whips) behaving as if they are suffering from a coalition equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome.

There were three key amendments in the Lords debate:

1. Amendment 6A (proposed by Labour peer Jeremy Beecham, which would have made secret courts a “last resort”). This amendment was narrowly defeated by 174 votes to 158, a margin of 16. 26 Liberal Democrat peers defied the whip and voted for this amendment, while 29 supported the government by voting against party policy.
2. Amendment 6B (proposed by Liberal Democrat peer Ken Macdonald, which would have empowered judges to balance demands for closed hearings with the public interest in open justice). This amendment was not moved to a vote.
3. Amendments 19A to 19D (proposed by Liberal Democrat peer Jonathan Marks, which concerned the review and renewal of the legislation). Amendment 19B was heavily defeated by 141 votes to 65, a margin of 76. 31 Liberal Democrat peers defied the whip and voted for this amendment, while 22 supported the government. The other Marks amendments (19A, C and D) were not moved to a vote. The increased size of the rebellion was largely due to the party leadership in both Houses privately agreeing that it was OK to rebel on this amendment, so the vote was not the display of cojones it might first appear.

Of those Liberal Democrat peers who backed the government, 12 of the 29 on the first vote and 10 of the 22 on the second vote were part of the so-called payroll vote (including whips who don’t actually receive any pay). The rebels therefore had a clear majority of those Liberal Democrat peers who were free agents.

There are reports that about 20 Liberal Democrat peers were in the building but abstained on both votes, while others stayed at home. Given the first vote was so narrow, it would not have required many more Liberal Democrat peers (and/or Labour peers) to secure victory. On the second vote, however, Liberal Democrat peers could not have salvaged the amendment no matter how many rebelled; the problem was the failure of enough Labour peers to vote. The timing was also a problem. The two votes took place later than expected (at 9.21pm and 10pm respectively, instead of 7pm).

The ‘what ifs’ extend beyond the conduct of Tuesday night’s votes. Liberal Democrat peers were put in a difficult position by their colleagues in the Commons. And the circumstances of being in coalition will in any case create frequent conflicts of loyalty.

But let us say you are a Liberal Democrat peer who feels that the discipline of being in coalition always overrides questions of liberal principle. You ought at least to vote for things like secret courts with a heavy heart and not act like one Liberal Democrat whip did on Tuesday night by being openly jubilant when the amendments were defeated.

This enthusiasm when fundamental liberal principles are abandoned suggests that being in coalition has created something akin to the Stockholm syndrome among Liberal Democrat parliamentarians who are either on the government payroll or aspire to it. They should remember that the coalition is a creature of circumstance and not political nirvana. If swallowing bitter pills makes you light up with joy, you really do need a good slap.

Talking of people in need of a good slap, there is more information on Nick Clegg’s recent immigration speech. Simon Hughes was shown the text only one hour before it was delivered and, in the short time available, is said to have prevented it from being even worse.

The BBC is showing a documentary about Mary Magdalene tomorrow lunchtime. Typical, pious, Good Friday viewing, reminding the public that Easter isn't all chocolate and bunnies but (for Christians at least) has something to do with Jesus, you might think. It's presented by Melvyn Bragg, for one thing, which is British broadcasting's ultimate stamp of intellectual seriousness. Better than Botney, even. But the loopy evangelical pressure group Christian Concern are aghast. In an "action alert" email tonight, they urge supporters to complain to the BBC about this forthcoming outrage, the timing of which they suggest is "highly inappropriate and inflammatory."

"The BBC's online complaint form only takes a few minutes to complete," they remind people. "The BBC's response will depend on what level of feedback it receives."

Because the Beeb is entirely unfamiliar with the concept of an organised write-in campaign.

"Inappropriate timing" is hard to sustain. The Gospels state that Mary Magdalene stood at the foot of the cross while Jesus was being crucified, and that she was the first person to see (or imagine she saw) the risen Christ. And those are the only definite references to her in the New Testament. So it's hard to see what would be a more appropriate time to celebrate her.

So what's so outrageous about it?

Christian Concern are disturbed by a Telegraph piece in which Milord Bragg discusses the "tantalising and elusive" evidence about Mary M, and the "fragments which increasingly hint at radical new truths about the woman who has been called the apostle to the apostles."

This is certainly over-egging the pudding. The "radical new truths" have been around for donkeys' years: a few passages in apocryphal gospels that hint at a unique closeness in the relationship between Mary and Jesus. Yes, all that Holy Blood, Holy Grail/ Dan Brown stuff that has been the stuff of speculative history and conspiracy theorising since I was a lad and probably long before. There is, Bragg offers, "one taunting scrap of record which may well lead to the conclusion that she was his wife."

Well, knock me down with an archangel's feather.

If there's anything to be aghast about, it's the fact that this utterly familiar idea, for which there is, of course, no definitive proof (nor will there ever be) is still being presented in TV documentaries and newspaper articles as new and shocking. Given that half the population of the planet seems to have read Dan Brown's poorly-written thriller, that ought to be a genuine scandal. But, of course, that isn't the scandal that Christian Concern is concerned about.

Their concerns are as follows:

1) In a broadcast at the precise time Christians are remembering his death on the cross, this programme questions the purity of Jesus.

The programme suggests that Jesus might, just possibly, have been married. To a woman. How does this "question his purity", exactly. I thought that Christian Concern approved of heterosexual marriage. Barely a day goes by without Christian Concern voicing their supposedly Christian concern about the "threat" to traditional marriage posed by the government's proposal to extend it to gay couples. Only this Tuesday they sent out a "prayer alert" urging people to pray that the US Supreme Court uphold California's ban on same-sex marriage "and that God's good pattern for marriage and family is not further corrupted."

Yet somehow God's good pattern is not good enough for the Son of God, that if Jesus had married it would have exposed him to "impurity". As Cranmer Tweeted to me earlier this evening, one might expect Roman Catholics, with their ideal of the celibate priesthood, to reason thus (though celibate Catholic bishops, like the very pure ex-Cardinal Keith O'Brien, have put themselves at the forefront of the campaign for traditional marriage). But Christian Concern is a largely Protestant outfits, and Protestants have never thought that marriage might be somehow "impure".

It's an odd objection.

2) The claims about Jesus are based on dubious scholarship... it feeds on Dan Brown's 'Da Vinci Code' hypothesis rather than taking account of sensible scholarship.

Well, they're on slightly firmer ground with this one, I suppose. The scholarship itself isn't dubious: the apocryphal gospels which imply a wife-like status for the Magdalene do exist, and to regard the statement that "he often kissed her on the [mouth]" as suggesting physical as well as spiritual intimacy is not wholly implausible. What is dubious is the notion, which no serious scholar makes, that these texts are historically reliable. But to say that is not to say definitively that Jesus was not married.

What we can say is that the mainstream Christian tradition has always assumed Jesus to have been celibate; but that there were, in the first few centuries AD, contrary ideas floating about. The Gnostic and other apocryphal gospels record some of these ideas. So while there is no real evidence that Jesus was married, there's also no direct statement in the canonical gospels that he wasn't.

How does this matter? What Christian Concern and their ilk can't abide is that, for many people, Jesus is a fascinating historical (or quasi-historical) figure about whom little is known but about whom many would like to know more. I suspect that very few people would be scandalised if proof emerged that there was a Mrs Christ. Most of us would be quite pleased, I would guess, because most of us (even including Richard Dawkins) feel quite warmly about the Jesus depicted in the gospels, and wouldn't begrudge him a little connubial happiness. The theory that Jesus was married keeps getting trotted out, in other words, not because it's scandalous but because, credible or not, it has popular resonance. It's also plausible that a church that acknowledged Jesus as married, or even gave equal prominence to his female disciples (a role which Mary Magdalene, as depicted in the New Testament, undoubtedly fulfilled) might have had fewer problems down the centuries with sexuality and the role of women.

3) It makes indefensible claims about the nature of the Bible (e.g. the process by which the books of the Bible came to be recognised and collated)

Bragg:

The Gnostic Gospels which were rejected by those who put together the authorised versions include the Gospel of Mary, found in Cairo in 1896 and widely argued to depict the character of Mary Magdalene, and, as important for her story, the Gospel of Philip – which was among the texts found by an Arab shepherd in the desert in 1945. These, like others, were excluded from the final political version of the Bible. When you read them you can understand why. Philip tells us that Christ “loved her” more than all the other disciples. In Mary’s Gospel she speaks of close and long dialogues with Christ himself. But the forces of men, later abetted by the forces of the manly state of Rome, and the masculine structure of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, were going to bring her down.

If all Christian Concern are saying is that the compilation of the canon of scripture was more than just a patriarchal plot to exclude female voices (even if that was the effect) they may have a point. But Christian Concern's idea of a "defensible" claim about the Bible is that it is the revealed Word of God, literally true in every particular, that may as well have floated down on a cloud, leather bound and written in Jacobean English. Compared with the view of scriptural fundamentalists, Bragg's "political" interpretation, simplistic caricature as it is, is rather closer to what modern scholarship has discovered.

I would however urge my few remaining readers (sorry about the patchy service of late) to bear in mind Christian Concern's valid points: that the BBC complaint form doesn't take long to fill out, and that "the BBC's response will depend on what level of feedback it receives."