Andrew Hickey

Dan Crawford commends John T. Harvey’s blunt reminder, “Why Social Security Can’t Go Bankrupt.”

It is a logical impossibility for Social Security to go bankrupt. We can voluntarily choose to suspend or eliminate the program, but it could never fail because it “ran out of money.”

… It’s not a pension fund into which you put your money when you are young and from which you draw when you are old. It’s an immediate transfer from workers today to retirees today. That’s what it has always been and that’s what it has to be – there is no other possible way for it to work.

… This is how Social Security actually operates. As you can see, this needs no prior financing or savings, nor would that appear to be particularly helpful. At the national level, maintaining a class of retirees (whether via Social Security or private pensions) means redistributing existing output, not putting money under your mattress. Although you can run out of money for retirement, we, as a nation, cannot.

What, then, you may ask, is the Social Security Trust Fund, the pool of money that people say will dry up and make it impossible for anyone to receive their Social Security payments? It is the surplus that resulted from having collected more in taxes than was necessary to pay out to retirees. Let me say that again: it is how much existing workers were overtaxed relative to the need to pay retirees in the past. It was never the source of the money we’ve been paying to Social Security recipients all these years. Strictly speaking, it’s completely unnecessary if we are able to precisely and continuously match tax revenues and pay outs.

Yes. Please remember this: Anyone who tells you that Social Security is “going broke” is either lying to you or, at best, does not have the first clue how Social Security works.

Social Security is not going broke. Social Security cannot go broke.

It is not an account that can be depleted, it is an arrangement between generations. As long as there are generations, then Social Security will continue to exist.

There is no debt or deficit that can interfere with that arrangement. The arrangement, like any promise, can be deliberately broken, but it cannot go broke.

Only two scenarios can be imagined to make Social Security stop working:

1. Our grandchildren all turn out to be selfish assholes and oath-breakers, deciding en masse to screw over their retired parents and grandparents while also being so short-sighted as to invite their own children and grandchildren to screw them over in turn upon their retirement. If all of our children turn out to be evil and stupid, then Social Security will not be sustainable. But then if all of our children turn out to be evil and stupid, nothing else will be sustainable either.

2. Some kind of science-fiction, P.D. James, Children-of-Men scenario in which the human race mysteriously becomes incapable of reproducing. That would mean no future generation of workers to pay for Social Security benefits, and thus would entail the end of Social Security. But since it would also entail the end of everything else, including the human race itself, it’s hard to view such a potential problem as a flaw in the design of Social Security.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen! I've got a very big announcement!

At long last, I've written a book based on this blog. It's being published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf. The way that the Prags work, you can pre-order the book now, and immediately download the current draft. As I update the rest of the book, you'll get all of the updates, up to the final printed version of the book.

I'm very proud of this thing. It's the result of a whole lot of work, and I think it should be a lot of fun for mathematically curious folks to read.

For this book, I've collected up a bunch of my favorite posts from the history of this blog, and revised/rewritten them in a much more polished, coherent form. The book includes:

1. Numbers: some basic number theory, what numbers mean, how they're constructed.
2. Funny numbers: a collection of strange but interesting numbers: 0, e, i, ...
3. Writing Numbers: Roman numerals, egyptian fractions, continued fractions, ...
4. Logic: first order predicate logic, proofs, temporal logic, and prolog.
5. Set theory
6. Computation and computing machines

Aside from being a fun read, buying it will support Scientopia. From the time that Scientopia got started, I've been paying all of the hosting bills. That's about $250 a month, for the last three years. Making some money from this book will make it possible for me to continue supporting it, and maybe even pay for some help with technical support!

Not to mention the fact that if this book does well, there will be more volumes down the line. In particular, I've got my eye on doing some stuff about the math of programming: type theory, category theory, algebraic data structures, etc.

Enjoy!

I believe that there are programs like that, programs like education and others, that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [applause drowns out end of statement].

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

– Ronald Reagan, August 3, 1980, near Philadelphia, Miss.

Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign for president in 1980 with a speech at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi. It was his first public speech since his nomination at the Republican Convention.

And, like the speech he gave at that convention accepting his nomination, it never mentioned abortion.

It was, instead, about “state’s rights.” And no, the choice to give this speech near Philadelphia, Miss., was not a coincidence.

This was seven years after Roe v. Wade, and no huge backlash against that decision could be detected in Reagan’s campaign or in the groundswell of white evangelical support bolstering his run for the White House. You can’t find a hint of that in either speech and you won’t find much more than a hint of that in the 1980 election.

If evangelicals recoiled in moral horror after Roe v. Wade, as Al Mohler asserts, they did so very quietly and almost imperceptibly throughout the 1970s.

White evangelicals certainly were upset with the U.S. Supreme Court in those years, and Roe fit broadly into the pattern of the decisions about which white evangelicals were angry. But that anger wasn’t about abortion at all. That anger was about — to borrow Reagan’s preferred euphemism — “state’s rights.” It was about the belief that “that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.”

It was about white evangelicals’  desire to run tax-exempt private schools without federal interference.

Roe was a scarcely noticed footnote to the list of Supreme Court decisions that white evangelicals believed had, in Reagan’s words “distorted the balance of our government,” overriding their “state’s rights” in a way that was “incompatible with the sovereignty of the States, and of the Constitution itself.”

Mohler’s column reiterates what religious historian Randall Balmer calls “the abortion myth” — the creation story of the Religious Right:

Roe was the catalyst for the moral revolution within evangelicalism. The reality of abortion on demand and exposure to the logic of the abortion rights movement led to a fundamental shift in the evangelical conscience.

No it wasn’t. No it didn’t.

Look, we’re not talking about competing interpretations of ancient history. We’re talking about the 1970s. Mohler is 53 years old. He was there. The Bicentennial, Disco, Star Wars, Mr. October, Fonzie on water skis. He’s old enough to remember all of those things, and so he’s old enough to remember that the big flip-flop on legal abortion he calls “a fundamental shift in the evangelical conscience” came after the political realignment of “state’s rights” evangelicals, not before it.

I argue that white evangelicals’ reversal on abortion politics is a consequence of the political realignment that preceded it. It’s possible to disagree with that argument, but it’s not possible to argue — as Mohler does — that this reversal caused something that preceded it.

Balmer discusses the actual, rather than the mythic, origins of the religious right in his book Thy Kingdom Come, from which I’ve typed in the big excerpt below:

In the 1980s, in order to solidify the shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and “secular humanists,” who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the 19th century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court’s misguided Roe decision.

It’s a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn’t true.

Although various Roman Catholic groups denounced the ruling, and Christianity Today complained that the Roe decision “runs counter to the moral teachings of Christianity through the ages but also to the moral sense of the American people,” the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about it; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision. W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote, “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” Indeed, even before the Roe decision, the messengers (delegates) to the 1971 Southern Baptist Convention gathering in St. Louis, Missouri, adopted a resolution that stated, “we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” W.A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, expressed his satisfaction with the Roe v. Wade ruling. “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” the redoubtable fundamentalist declared, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

The Religious Right’s self-portrayal as mobilizing in response to the Roe decision was so pervasive among evangelicals that few questioned it. But my attendance at an unusual gathering in Washington, D.C., finally alerted me to the abortion myth. In November 1990, for reasons that I still don’t entirely understand, I was invited to attend a conference in Washington sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Religious Right organization (though I didn’t realize it at the time). I soon found myself in a conference room with a couple of dozen people, including Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition; Carl F.H. Henry, an evangelical theologian; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Edward G. Dobson, pastor of an evangelical church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and formerly one of Jerry Falwell’s acolytes at Moral Majority. Paul M. Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist, head of what is now called the Free Congress Foundation, and one of the architects of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, was also there.

In the course of the sessions, Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.

Bob Jones University was one target of a broader attempt by the federal government to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Several agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sought to penalize schools for failure to abide by antisegregation provisions. A court case in 1972, Green v. Connally, produced a ruling that any institution that practiced segregation was not, by definition, a charitable institution and, therefore, no longer qualified for tax-exempt standing.

The IRS sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school’s regulations forbade interracial dating; African Americans, in fact, had been denied admission altogether until 1971, and it took another four years before unmarried African Americans were allowed to enroll. The university filed suit to retain its tax-exempt status, although that suit would not reach the Supreme Court until 1983. …

Initially, I found Weyrich’s admission jarring. He declared, in effect, that the origins of the Religious Right lay in Green v. Connally rather than Roe v. Wade. I quickly concluded, however, that his story made a great deal of sense. When I was growing up within the evangelical subculture, there was an unmistakably defensive cast to evangelicalism. I recall many presidents of colleges or Bible institutes coming through our churches to recruit students and to raise money. One of their recurrent themes was, We don’t accept federal money, so the government can’t tell us how to run our shop — whom to hire or fire or what kind of rules to live by. The IRS attempt to deny tax-exempt status to segregated private schools, then, represented an assault on the evangelical subculture, something that raised an alarm among many evangelical leaders, who mobilized against it.

For his part, Weyrich saw the evangelical discontent over the Bob Jones case as the opening he was looking for to start a new conservative movement using evangelicals as foot soldiers. Although both the Green decision of 1972 and the IRS action against Bob Jones University in 1975 predated Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Weyrich succeeded in blaming Carter for efforts to revoke the tax-exempt status of segregated Christian schools. He recruited James Dobson and Jerry Falwell to the cause, the latter of whom complained, “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”

Weyrich, whose conservative activism dates at least as far back as the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, had been trying for years to energize evangelical voters over school prayer, abortion, or the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution. “I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” he recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

During the meeting in Washington, D.C., Weyrich went on to characterize the leaders of the Religious Right as reluctant to take up the abortion cause even close to a decade after the Roe ruling. … “What cause the movement to surface,” Weyrich reiterated, “was the federal government’s moves against Christian schools.” The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, “enraged the Christian community.” That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. “It was not the other things,” he said.

Ed Dobson, Falwell’s erstwhile associate, corroborated Weyrich’s account during the ensuing discussion. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” Dobson said. “I sat in the smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

… The abortion myth serves as a convenient fiction because it suggests noble and altruistic motives behind the formation of the Religious Right. But it is highly disingenuous and renders absurd the argument of the leaders of the Religious Right that, in defending the rights of the unborn, they are the “new abolitionists.” The Religious Right arose as a political movement for the purpose, effectively, of defending racial discrimination at Bob Jones University and at other segregated schools. Whereas evangelical abolitionists of the 19th century sought freedom for African Americans, the Religious Right of the late 20th century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.

It’s not surprising that astronomers are discovering new planets almost every day. Almost all of them are the same boring type as our old Earth — wisps of gas and dust orbiting around a star that, under the influence of their mutual gravitation, gradually accrete into planet-sized bodies. But last year, Yale researchers found out [...]

“Why,” one might reasonably ask, “are you suddenly doing late 80s Doctor Who Magazine comics featuring the Sixth and Seventh Doctors when you’re supposed to be hip-deep in the Eighth Doctor era?” And one would have a fair question. The answer, dear reader, is that we’re beginning a bit of a thing with this post: a four essay run that leads up to Lawrence Miles’s mad masterpiece Interference. The gameplan is simple: next Wednesday we do Interference. Monday we do the lead-in to it with Dead Romance, Miles’s second Benny New Adventure, albeit one without, you know, Benny in it. Friday, meanwhile, we’re going to do The Invisibles so that we can be ready for one of the major things people compare Lawrence Miles to, namely Grant Morrison. Which brings us around to today, where we finally get around to looking at the three Doctor Who comics Grant Morrison wrote in the late 80s, having skipped them at the time because, well, they just didn’t fit anywhere well.

It’s not that Grant Morrison isn’t an influence on Doctor Who. But he wasn’t at the time these comics came out, and he wasn’t going to be for a good long while. More to the point, he was nowhere near the approach anyone else was using for Doctor Who around this time. He didn’t really start making a splash on his own terms until the tail end of the Cartmel era, and the fact of the matter is that it was Alan Moore and then Neil Gaiman who was serving as the major influence for writers in the late 80s/early 90s. The first time you can really point at something and say “that’s Grant Morrison’s influence on Doctor Who” is Daniel O’Mahoney’s The Man in the Velvet Mask, which is blatantly taken from the second storyline of The Invisibles. So I held this back until now.

First, then, an overview on Grant Morrison. He’s one of the bigger names of the British Invasion of comics, and one of the first to make the jump to the US (his debut on Animal Man came in 1988, although he had some text pieces in 1986, which was the beginning of his mainstream career). He’s also a prominent magician/occultist, favoring the style of magic generally described as Chaos Magic, which first popped up in the late 1970s, and which we’ll talk about in more detail on Friday. He’s still quite active in comics, currently writing both a Batman and Superman title for DC, as well as having some creator-owned projects in the pipeline. And he’s endlessly linked to some big Hollywood deal or another, none of which ever seem to materialize.

Yes, if you think this all begs for a comparison to Alan Moore, you’re not wrong. Of course two prominent practicing magicians/British comics writers who emerged at around the same time get compared to each other. And more to the point, they don’t get on at all. Cards on the table: since the Moore/Morrison rivalry forms the spine of what will be my next sprawlingly over-large project after I finish TARDIS Eruditorum (still over a year away, so fear not), I can’t exactly leave it be. To be fair, calling this a rivalry is a bit misleading simply because it’s almost entirely one-sided. Grant Morrison slams Alan Moore about once a year. Alan Moore remains almost entirely silent on Grant Morrison, however. I am only aware of two public statements Moore has made about Morrison - the first is a veiled slam in his essay “Fossil Angels” (Moore writes, “If that still sounds too difficult and time-consuming, you could always make the acquisition of profound artistic talent and success your heart’s desire and simply spadge over a sigil. Never fails, apparently.” This is almost certainly a swipe at Grant Morrison’s essay “Pop Magic!,” where he explains his version of sigil magic, including the use of masturbation to “launch” the sigil, and further comments that “I’ve been using them for 20 years and they ALWAYS work.”) The second is a lengthier statement, made during a webchat about a year ago, in response to a question from some obvious troll who asked Moore to talk about Grant Morrison. And by obvious troll I mean me. Oops.

Obviously, given that I’m planning on spending a million words or so on the topic someday, the full scope of this is miles beyond what this post can possibly sustain.  But let’s make some initial notes. The one-sided nature of the rivalry is telling: it consists almost entirely of a less-acclaimed, younger talent shouting at a more acclaimed and respected one and getting ignored. This requires some explication of its own - Morrison, in response to Moore’s webchat comments, makes much of the fact that his comics career started earlier than Moore’s, but this is misleading. Morrison spent years in the Edinburgh comics scene, it’s true. It’s also true, as Morrison says, that Bryan Talbot was a part of that scene and made the jump to the mainstream. But it’s also true that Moore made the jump to the national comics scene in 1980, six years before Morrison did, and the jump to America five years earlier. He is, in any practical sense, the senior of the two writers, and the more acclaimed of them. There is also a strong philosophical difference between them, although since we’re doing The Invisibles on Friday and, you know, a million words on this topic starting sometime in 2014, we can mostly table that. But equally, there’s just no way not to compare Morrison’s three bits of Doctor Who comics with Alan Moore’s, and I’m not going to try to hold back from that.

But for the most part, we’re here for Doctor Who. Morrison wrote three Doctor Who stories, which we won’t quite deal with in order. The first two, “Changes” and “The World Shapers” (from 1986 and 87 respectively) feature the Sixth Doctor and are drawn by John Ridgway, while the third, “Culture Shock,” features the Seventh and is drawn by Bryan Hitch. There is little to recommend “Changes” as a story - it’s a bog standard bit of “an alien invades the TARDIS” that is interesting only in that it has slightly more of a sense of awe and wonder about the TARDIS and its size than a lot of stories, but when we remember that these were going out in the same era (and with the same artist) as “Voyager” nothing about how “Changes” depicts the TARDIS feels too radical. The idea of there being vast landscapes within the TARDIS idea is, I think, new to this comic (though I could be very wrong on that), but it’s still just a high-budget version of The Invasion of Time. More troubling, Morrison blows the structure of the piece horribly. It’s a flaccidly plotted bit of filler with no structure to speak of that fills its pages with little regard to pace. This is no worse than what Parkhouse did with his demented dreamscapes, but Parkhouse isn’t hailed as one of the most brilliant comics writers ever. Morrison is.

This is, in other words, one of the places where the utterly stark difference between Moore and Morrison becomes clear. Morrison was writing filler Doctor Who Magazine comics at the same time that Watchmen was coming out. Watchmen is admittedly one of my least favorite Moore works, but its sense of structure is startlingly immaculate, so much so that the only comparison that feels like it can be made between it and “Changes” is a bemused laughter at the question. But even if we want to be fairer and compare “Changes” to Alan Moore’s Doctor Who work it’s difficult to make Morrison come off the stronger. Much as I criticized the pacing and structure of Moore’s work in places, even his weakest piece, “Business as Usual,” is leagues ahead of this. There you could see the things Moore would become good at eventually. “Changes” feels like it could have been written by anyone.

The third Grant Morrison comic, 1988’s “Culture Shock,” is mostly sounder - it has a basic understanding of how long it is, and uses a relatively elegant parallel structure as it jumps between the cellular world that the Doctor intervenes in and the Doctor. There’s also a coherent idea to it, finding a scale at which the Doctor can properly be viewed as a religious, transcendent figure, and thus getting to that point years before the New Adventures starting playing with it. The idea of looking at the Doctor from the perspective of psychic cells being attacked by a virus who are subsequently saved by his intervention is a very cool perspective. The art, by the these days quite acclaimed Bryan Hitch, is mediocre at best, but for the most part this holds up as an interesting story. Indeed, Morrison has something of a good case in being aggrieved here: this is every bit as fundamental as Alan Moore’s Time War stuff, but nobody ever borrows his concepts, probably because he doesn’t come up with awesome-sounding epic names for them like “The Deathsmiths of Goth” or “Order of the Black Sun,” both of which sound like really crap metal bands and so are far more appealing to wanky fans.

All of which said, there are problems here, and ones that exacerbate the sense of Morrison being unable to muster the skill to get out from under Moore’s shadow. The biggest is that the culture’s narration is both utter dreck. “We do not know how the invaders penetrated the homebody. We know only that they are among us. Mindlessly, they pump DNA into our cytoplasm, making of our bodies terrible nurseries for the nurture and release of their armies. The luminous architecture of their protein shells glitters with a fathomless lust.” Oh dear. It’s not merely the lack of quality that hurts here, but rather the fact that Morrison is trying to do an imitation of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and mostly ends up showing how much better Alan Moore is at this sort of thing. This isn’t a chronic problem that spans his entire career or anything, but equally, in 1988 at least, he was doing crap Alan Moore imitations, and it’s not exactly a surprise that people went for the real thing, even if a few years later other writers independently came to the same idea he did. Simply put, Morrison may have come to the “Doctor as a god to the little people” idea before the Virgin writers did, but they clearly didn’t get it from him.

In between “Changes” and “Culture Shock,” however, came “The World-Shapers,” a three-part Colin Baker story that is by any standard the most interesting one here. Because if we want to ask the question of why even in 2005 Russell T Davies was slipping references to Alan Moore’s work while nobody ever makes anything of Grant Morrison’s Doctor Who work, this is the one we have to look at. There is, after all, surely no doubt that had Alan Moore written an origin story for the Cybermen that established the far future of the Cybermen as well it would be taken seriously. And yet save for a hazy reference in the comic “Planet of the Dead” a year later, nothing about this comic was ever spoken of again.

Of course, to be fair, had Alan Moore tried to sell us on an origin of the Cybermen whereby they turn out to secretly be the Voord, with Mondas originally being Marinus, it’s entirely probable nobody would have listened to that either. Which is to say that this is an exceedingly strange story. It’s by far the most continuity-heavy thing to be published in Doctor Who Magazine as of its publication date, containing as it does references to The Keys of Marinus, The Tenth Planet, The Invasion, The War Games, and “The Fishmen of Kandalinga.”

No, it’s not just you. That last one is a bit odd. “The Fishmen of Kandalinga” is a short story from the 1966 Doctor Who Annual. Given that Morrison was four when The Keys of Marinus aired, and that “The Fishmen of Kandalinga” reused the Voord, it’s almost certain that this was where he got all of it, which also helps explain how he ended up thinking Marinus was a water world: he’s obviously working off of his memory of the short story and a brief summary of The Keys of Marinus. And from this he stitches together a truly bizarre bit of Doctor Who continuity, explaining the “Planet 14” reference in The Invasion, providing the aforementioned new origin of the Cybermen (which suggests pretty strongly that he hadn’t, strictly speaking, seen The Tenth Planet either), bringing back and then killing Jamie McCrimmon, and then dropping the Time Lords in to clean it all up.

Actually, just about the only stories Morrison gets at all right are The Invasion and The War Games, which gives a pretty good idea of when he was actually watching Doctor Who: around his ninth birthday, in late 1968/early 1969. So, yes, that all fits, then - right down to why he would be particular attached to the Doctor’s lone Scottish companion. Indeed, one gets the feeling that his goal here is to give Jamie the proper sendoff Morrison thought he deserved when he was nine, including a total handwave of an undoing of the memory wipe.

So what Morrison is doing here is a riff on the Doctor Who of his childhood. Except it’s a totally idiosyncratic riff, or, perhaps more accurately, a totally idiosyncratic Doctor Who that consists of about 3/4 of a season and a World Distributors annual. To anybody whose sense of Doctor Who extends beyond Season Six, which is to say, essentially anybody reading Doctor Who Magazine, this is as unlike Doctor Who as the comics got - a Doctor Who that thinks somehow that tying the Cybermen to an almost completely forgotten (and generic) 60s villain is interesting in any way, shape, or form. The result is a comic that is full of good ideas, but that somehow fails to quite be about anything. This is no more a Cybermen comic than “The Best of Both Worlds” is a Cybermen episode. And while Morrison is onto something interesting when he raises the question at the end of whether the posthumanist ideas behind the Cybermen are actually as awful as the series defaults to assuming, this is dumped at the end without serious consideration. This isn’t indefensible - realistically Doctor Who is never going to give up one of its best monsters in order to reconsider posthumanist ideas, and dumping that at the end of a story is probably the safest call. But it’s telling that the entirety of that quite interesting idea gets lost in the mire of a story that makes a spectacular hash of being Doctor Who.

This is not something that indicts all of Morrison’s career, but it’s still a significant problem, and a criticism that has broader implications. But those are mostly better saved for Friday and, more broadly, for a million forthcoming words. For now, let’s leave the focus firmly on Doctor Who.

If Alan Moore’s Doctor Who comics were mediocre, they at least pointed to future genius on Moore’s part. Morrison’s comics, on the other hand, feel like a much more wasted opportunity. It’s not that Morrison isn’t a great comics writer - I won’t lie and say I prefer him to Moore, but he’s solid, and when he’s on his game he’s downright spectacular. No, what’s bothersome here is that this is such a good comic and yet such a failure. Morrison does have skill, especially with “The World-Shapers,” which is quite well-plotted and structured. This is clearly a passion project for him - however idiosyncratic his knowledge of Doctor Who is, nobody references “The Fishmen of Kandalinga” without caring about the series in the first place. And yet despite all of that there’s just nothing here that adds anything of weight to Doctor Who beyond the trivia that Grant Morrison wrote some comics for it.

The Observer’s Nick Cohen isn’t Lynne Featherstone’s biggest fan: “I cannot tell you how much I dislike this stupid, two-faced and dangerous politician,” he writes affectionately in The Spectator.

He later labels her a “menace”, a “hypocrite”, and curses her “wittering” (I wonder if that’s a verb he’s ever applied to a male politician, by the way?).

All of which means poor Nick is in despair. Why? Because, he laments, Labour is completely failing to get its act together in Hornsey and Wood Green, allegedly one of their top Lib Dem targets at the next election:

Labour should retake the seat in 2015. Indeed, Labour has to retake the seat if it is to have any hope of forming a government. Pundits who talk about Miliband presiding over a ‘united left’ overestimate Labour’s strength. In most Liberal Democrat seats in the shires, if left wingers vote Labour because they can no longer support the party of Clegg to keep the Tory out, the Conservatives will come through the middle and win. If you look at Labour’s list of battleground seats, Hornsey and Wood Green is one of the few Lib Dem seats the party hopes to capture.

Yet when I went to the pub with the Labour activists, they were in despair. They did not have a candidate in place, and probably would not get one until the summer. They had no one to introduce to the voters: no one even to call the local papers and argue the Labour case.

‘What?’ I said ‘Why ever not?’

My hosts explained that bureaucratic manoeuvrings and political correctness at Labour’s regional office had paralysed the local party. It was telling them to have an all-woman shortlist, which was taking forever to arrange. I suggested they called Tom Watson or another national organiser. My companions shrugged. No one cared about them, they implied.

Parties that are steaming to power do not behave like this. They cover every angle. Think of every eventuality, and deal with every objection a nervous voter may raise. In short, they have a restlessness and an urgency about them that Labour at the moment lacks, and not only in North London’s leafy suburbs.

All of which might mean there’s a few more years’ “wittering” left in Lynne Featherstone yet. Good.

Incidentally, one of the reasons Nick Cohen takes against Lynne with such crude vigour is her denunciation of Julie Burchill and the Observer’s editor for publishing that article on trans-sexuals.

I’m a First Amendmenter when it comes to free speech. Journalists should be free to write what they want. Newspapers should be free to publish (or indeed unpublish) what they want. And it seems I’d go a stage further than Nick Cohen and extend free speech to politicians to say what they want. All should, of course, have to live with the consequences of their own actions.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

A while back, I ran a few scans from this little gem I assisted Joe Kubert on back in 1976.  You can peruse the whole thing now as 20th Century Danny Boy has the complete book on-line. MAGAZINELAND USA was a special promotional comic book created by and for the printer of almost all comics books in North America, World Color Corp. The story walks the reader through the printing plant,and since I was the studio guy who was pretty good with machinery, Joe had me pencil most of the backgrounds for this.  And I think did the color guides. Looks like Elaine Heinel’s lettering.

...but on the other hand, this is what he had to say to Richard Littlejohn...

Here’s a link to a complete transcript of President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address.

For me, this bit was the crescendo and highlight of the speech:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth. It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.

(White House photo by Sonya N. Hebert)

That is our generation’s task – to make these words, these rights, these values – of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – real for every American. Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life; it does not mean we will all define liberty in exactly the same way, or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time – but it does require us to act in our time.

For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.

Wow. “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall” struck me as historic. I heard that and expected those allusive, alliterative references to be left to stand alone, but then Obama went on to make a more specific and explicit endorsement of the continuing struggle for the rights pursued by the unruly patriots of Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.

I was also very pleased to hear this surprisingly blunt section on climate change:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snow-capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

That language on climate change will be tested, over time, to see if it is more than only language. Same with the bit that followed it, a welcome rejection of the idea of “perpetual war”:

We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. Our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of battle, are unmatched in skill and courage. Our citizens, seared by the memory of those we have lost, know too well the price that is paid for liberty. The knowledge of their sacrifice will keep us forever vigilant against those who would do us harm. But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.

We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear.

Odd coincidence: During the massive protest marches before the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, I carried a sign that read, “Engagement Can More Durably Lift Suspicion and Fear.”

And my friends told me it would never catch on as a slogan.

It was also good to hear Obama’s forceful and clear endorsements of the common good and the programs that embody our commitment to it — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, infrastructure, education.

One final note from this speech, which began with this:

We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Obama isn’t saying anything original there, but he’s embodying it in a way that no previous president has. He latches on to that sweepingly inclusive first-person plural “we” and employs it throughout the rest of the speech — more than 70 times.

But let me just note that this was the umpteen-hundredth time we’ve heard President Obama recite that passage from the Declaration of Independence. It’s a familiar passage from all of his stump speeches, his addresses to Congress, and nearly every big-occasion speech he ever gives — all of which were public and remain in the public record. Presidents do not give covert speeches.

And yet, for four years now, we’ve heard a constant stream of white evangelicals repeating the zombie lie that Obama never says what he always says — that he never says what he just said, yet again, before the entire world in a live television broadcast. Despite the frequent, documented and very public nature of the president’s many, many recitations of this passage, numerous white evangelicals still claim that Obama always omits the Declaration’s reference to “their Creator” when reciting this passage. He does not, but that doesn’t stop them from repeating the claim.

Even now, just hours after Obama quoted the full passage again in the most public forum imaginable, some white evangelical leader somewhere — Tony Perkins, Bryan Fischer, James Dobson, Charisma magazine — is preparing to assert, yet again, the nonsensical lie that Obama never says what we all just again heard him say.

It’s a particularly weird lie, given that the president is so enamored of this passage and repeats it so often and so publicly. But when all you’ve got are weird and obvious lies I guess you have to make peace with accepting your role as weird and obvious liars. (Hi there, Mark Driscoll!)

 

"I now own Greta Garbo’s Beatles records, her twist records (she was a big fan of the dance craze and even ventured out to the Peppermint Lounge to see it for herself on the dancefloor), her Linda Ronstadt records, and mind blowingly — her own copy of Gene Clark’s “No Other”."

"So I found a great little vintage decoupaged record box from my office to put them in, and bought a little red Crosley Spinnerette portable record player so I could play them easily without hassle, and if I wished, create mp files from them too."

"But I also thought it would be nice to share these records.  So that’s the intent of this blog:  with each post, I will share the experience of pulling a record from Greta’s collection and playing it all the way though, as we might imagine what Greta was doing when she was listening."

Let’s go play Greta’s records!

Related articles 45's Of The Week: The Covers File (Gentle sounds) The Beatles - Fan Club Christmas Flexi's - Free Download The Greta Garbo auction and the things I wish I'd bought...

From this blog, Jan. 21, 2004: Cheetohs of mass destruction

The Cheetoh-factor, in which every additional adjective makes the noun in question less true:

• ”Cheese” = cheese

• ”processed cheese” = cheese, sort of

• ”processed cheese food” = cheese, sort of, plus other stuff that’s not cheese

• ”processed cheese food snack product” = the food in question is orange, but contains no actual cheese.

Everyone remembers Winston Churchill’s ‘ratting’ and ‘re-ratting’ between the Conservative Party and the Liberals. But, Churchill was not the most prolific defector. 

This title goes to Edgar Granville, who had five changes of party label to his name. He was first elected to the House of Commons for Eye in Suffolk as a Liberal in 1929. In 1931 he became a Liberal National, but left to sit as an independent during the war, before returning to the Liberals just before the 1945 election. After losing his seat in the Liberals’ worst general election performance in 1951, he joined the Labour Party. Granville was never re-elected as an MP, but he was created a Labour peer. However, his allegiance to the Labour Party did not last and he ended his days as a cross-bencher – and he had a lot of days. He lived to be 100 years old, dying just two days after his centenary.
Edgar Granville was thus the most prolific defector and the longest lived. According to my research, defection was, on average, a career-enhancing move, but not much of a life-enhancing measure. Defectors on average survived to the age of 74, just one year longer than party loyalists.

Lib Dem Voice have produced a remake of the old ‘where is the British West Wing?’ posts of a few years ago by asking ‘where is the British Borgen?‘

(The answer to that question is ‘waiting for someone to forget the poor ratings previous dramas about politicians got or for someone to come up with a good story’, by the way)

However, the part that struck me (from Alistair Campbell’s tweet that kicked it off and used repeatedly in the following discussions) is the idea that there aren’t ‘pro-politics’ dramas on British TV. The problem with that belief is that there are lots of incredibly political dramas on British TV, it’s just that they’re not about politicians. Campbell et al believe that ‘politics’ solely relates to ‘what we do’ – usually white men in suits arguing with each other – whereas politics actually covers a much wider range of interactions between people and power.

For instance, Jimmy McGovern’s stories are usually intensely political, showing what effect the system and its policies can have on people, but they rarely feature actual politicians. Spooks – particularly in the early series – often addressed the fundamental political issue of where the balance between liberty and security should be struck, and how dangerous it can be to give the state too much power. Even Holby City and Casualty have regularly shown the effects of changes to NHS policy over the years.

‘Political drama’ does not have to mean ‘drama about politicians’ – indeed, making it about politicians can get in the way of making a political point. The old adage of storytelling and scriptwriting is ‘show, don’t tell’, and a political drama needs to show the effects of the policies it’s looking at. Those effects aren’t normally felt within the corridors of the power (except sometimes changing who gets to walk them) but they are felt outside Whitehall and Parliament. Great storytelling is about great characters and the way they deal with the world around them, and the story of someone dealing with the consequences of a political decision and how it affects their life is normally a much more interesting story to watch than the debates that led up to that policy being enacted.

Politicians forget that they’re just a part of the political process and that their little bubble of process isn’t the entirety of it. Britain has a long and fine tradition of drama that’s pro-politics, and doesn’t flinch from showing the effects policy has on people’s lives. To ignore that, and imagine that politics is only important when it’s about politicians is another reflection of how the practice and the reality of politics are becoming completely separated in this country.

Jimmy Smith's take on Muddy Waters' by-way-of Ann Cole's immortal "Mojo" is the personification of mod-approved jazz. Smith displays his gruff-and-ready voice, and the track is practically designed for either dancing or looking sophisticated with a cocktail. 

Smith was truly the king of the jazz organ; a pianist since he was a child, in his early 20's (c1953) Jimmy purchased a Hammond B3 organ, rented a warehouse space to practice and emerged a full year later with his whole new thing perfected. What a story, right?

Admittedly, my interest in jazz runs shallow ( I *am* a 45 fanatic after all, and long improvisation doesn't bode well at 3 minutes per side nor with my attention span) but the way Smith always made his music move and groove makes him stand out as someone I can truly dig. And dig often.

from 1965...

JIMMY SMITH - GOT MY MOJO WORKING (PART 1)

(originally posted 2/20/09)

This incredible southern soul artist (from the deep south of Alabama) was a huge influence on the British invasion (his songs were covered by the Beatles, Stones, Hollies and was a huge influence on John Lennon's vocal stylings). He recorded regularly up until the mid 70's, then drove a bus until he recorded a comeback album in 1993. At the same time, much of his music had been reissued for the first time. Sadly, Arthur died of a heart attack shortly after his comeback album was released, at only 53 years old.

Yet another incredible artist who never got the respect and adulation he deserved during his lifetime.

from 1962...

ARTHUR ALEXANDER - SOLDIER OF LOVE

A startling graph published by PoliticalBetting.com shows that public opinion on Europe is not where most politicians imagine it to be.

Voting intentions in a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU are changing. Successive opinion polls show that the proportion of people who would vote to stay is increasing, while the proportion who would vote to leave is decreasing.

That’s not all. A poll on voting intentions in the next European parliamentary elections shows that support for UKIP has fallen to fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats. And this is a poll by YouGov, which usually gives the lowest ratings for the Liberal Democrats.

We need to be cautious and see whether these trends continue. In any event, there is no cause for complacency – a referendum and the European elections still require a campaign. The point is that – for all the bullying by the eurosceptic press and for all the cowardice of pro-Europeans – euroscepticism is not as popular as we are led to believe.

And that means there is no excuse for the Liberal Democrats to run another defeatist European election campaign in 2014, as they did in 2004 and 2009. Both those campaigns were run on the assumption that it was more important to mollify Eurosceptic opinion than to enthuse the party’s more cosmopolitan base. Both campaigns were a failure, securing fourth place behind UKIP.

Say what you like about UKIP, but at least it campaigns for what it believes in. The Liberal Democrats should do the same – if they don’t, pro-European voters have nowhere else to turn.

"To Boys and Girls, Brothers and Sisters, Mothers and Dads: PICTURE NEWS looks the same as other books, but with appearance and method of presentation the likeness ends. PICTURE NEWS reports the news, the news with its endless appeal and its prophecy of things to come, in action and speaking and color pictures.

Drawn pictures in bright colors with balloons, which are comics, have thrilled, amused, informed and taught. The U.S. Army has used them, so have important advertisers, and schools are beginning to know their value.

Most of these comic books have their virtues. Their millions of eager readers devour the drawn stories of dramatic adventures and sudden success. And many a comic character has become better known and admired and more widely imitated than Cousin Jack or Aunt Tillie.

Why is this so? Because the leading comic book characters personify the energy, dash, unbeatable spirit and the pure motives of our American ideal. And it is this ideal and that spirit that will make America enduringly great.

Now PICTURE NEWS for the FIRST time uses this new medium of action pictures and color and dialogue to make life real on the printed page. And life, as we know, has its ups and downs. It is what it is - life. And we, being what we are, work and play, and sometimes suffer and die to make life more secure and better. Everything that happens is news. Reporting it, is an important job. To PICTURE NEWS, it is a challenge."     (from the "January 1, 1946" introduction to the first issue)

That is an excerpt from the long inside-front-cover mission statement for the new book, and in it, among other things, we'll learn about musician, composer and actor Hoagy Carmichael in a tidy little four-page tale. Come feast your eyes and glut your soul - right after the jump.

Sadly, there is no information about the authors and artists who worked on the bulk of this first issue (in the Grand Comics Database), and the whole book is quite interesting and attractive. Something else that the GCD did not mention though, is that amidst the many stories inside divided by topic, there is a Jack Kirby - illustrated 'true' yarn about 'Bosco' the dog ("You Can't Lose a Faithful Dog") and a four-page humor sequence by Milt Gross, two very talented and famous names of the period.

We'll be seeing more from Picture News in future posts in this series, as they regularly covered the music and radio scene, sometimes spotlighting people almost wholly forgotten today. "Put the mad element in it!"

Via Jennie, Michael Crick on how many new peers need to be appointed to make the House of Lords representative of the votes cast at the last election.

It’s an absurd number, but then it’s part of an absurd system where people get appointed to jobs for life on the whim of the Prime Minister of the day to serve in half of the legislature of a country that’s ostensibly democratic.

One thing from it stood out for me though, from David Cameron’s interview in the House Magazine:

I think it’s important to keep refreshing the talent in the House of Lords

I can think of a system that would allow the upper house of Parliament to actually be refreshed on a regular basis. It would ensure that anyone who’s been in their for a long period could be replaced, or if they wanted to stay on, they’d have to prove that they could still do the job to a large number of independent people. The number of members of the house could be fixed, and over a period of time, the whole place could be refreshed without having to resort to the anti-democratic absurdity of needing to appoint people.

But then if he really did believe in refreshing the Lords, he wouldn’t have allowed the reforms to create a democratic Lords to disappear. Yet again, Cameron’s actions show his real priorities, not his words.

Related Posts

• A few thoughts on Cameron’s speech
• David Cameron is eight years old
• Customer service in the House of Commons
• Worth Reading 46: Two conspiracies for the price of one
• Worth Reading 42: Where Chris Chibnall rules

News reaches Liberator of the Liberal Democrat membership figures for 2012.

Membership of the federal party (i.e. the whole of the UK) was only 42,501 at the end of December 2012, down 9.2% from 46,810 at the end of December 2011 (and not 48,934 as the party’s annual report for 2011 originally claimed). The renewal rate has remained at about 75-80% throughout the year.

This drop is bad, but not as bad as in 2011, when membership fell by 25% over the year. That fall wiped out the gains from the 2010 election ‘Cleggmania’ – and then some.

However, the good news is that the month-on-month decline in membership appeared to end in the autumn. Membership fell to an all-time low of 41,925 in September 2012, but rose by a few hundred each month for the remainder of the year.

Membership of all political parties in Britain has been in slow decline since the high point of the 1950s. Following the merger of 1988, there was a catastrophic fall in membership for the ‘Social and Liberal Democrats’ (as the Liberal Democrats were then named), as many former Liberal and SDP members failed to renew. However, membership picked up during the 1992 general election campaign and peaked at about 102,000 that year. It has been in steady decline ever since, but never suffered such a sharp drop as it did in 2011.

2012’s figures, or at least those for the final quarter, suggest that the fall in membership is bottoming out. But the gains are modest so far and any claims of a ‘revival’ should be treated with suspicion.

The figures also suggest that the coalition has done its worst and that, if the party wants to rebuild membership, it must now tackle the longer-term issues of political disengagement, which were analysed by the Power Inquiry in 2006 (full report and executive summary).

Someone who goes by the handle of Oswald (and is presumably neither the rabbit nor the lone assassin) writes to ask…

I marvel at the ability you or any professional writer has to sit down at the keyboard and just work, work, work until the script or article is completed. When I’m walking around, I think I could write and I think of many things I would like to write. When I sit down at the keyboard and try it, I get restless and distracted and can only write for about 20 minutes at a time before I have to jump up and go do something else. Needless to say, I can’t get much written that I could ever do anything with. Is there a secret to sticking with it for a long stretch of time until you get something finished?

This will sound too glib but the secret is to just do it. You can always find something else you want to do when you could be or should be writing. In fact, the writers I know who get a reputation for missed deadlines and undependability share this common trait: They’re all real good at finding something else they have to do, thereby giving them an excuse for not writing.

I write for any number of reasons, starting with the fact that I liked the whole concept and process well enough to make it my life’s work. If I’d decided my dream was to work at an Arby’s, I wouldn’t wake up any morning and think, “Oh no! I’m expected to go in and slice faux roast beef all day!” I’d change professions if I felt like that. So one of the things you have to say to folks in your position, callous as it may seem, is “Hey! Either be a writer or don’t! If you don’t have the skills or motivation to do it, don’t try to do it.” There are thousands of professions I don’t attempt because I know I could never do them. I sometimes tell people who ask that I became a writer because of all the occupations I could have chosen, that was the one at which I figured I might be the least incompetent.

I also write because I have things I want to buy, food included. And I write because I have things I want to say and I like the satisfaction that comes with packaging them into a format that someone else out there will read or watch. I like those things so much that sitting down here and working on something never feels like a chore or hardship.

That was one of the main things I learned being around the late/great Jack Kirby. Jack had an incredible work ethic. You would not believe the long and intense hours he put into writing and drawing comic books. I looked at him and I more or less thought, “I may never be able to create anything half as memorable as what he does…but it may be possible to work that hard.” And his secret, I came to believe, was that he did not view the word “work” as a negative; that he defined it as something he wanted to do for himself as well as for remuneration. If you can’t view your work that way, maybe you need to find a trade where you can.

My father hated his profession and couldn’t find anything else…and I saw what it did to him, physically and emotionally. Often, he told me how happy he was that I seemed so happy in what I did. It dawned on me what the difference was in our “chosen” professions — or maybe it would be better to say the difference between the one I chose and the one he got himself stuck in. If no one was paying him or he didn’t need the money, there’s no way he would ever have done any of the things he did in his occupation, which was with the Internal Revenue Service. He would not have gone out and dealt with delinquent taxpayers in his spare time.

On the other hand: If no one was paying me to write, I might be doing something else to make a living but I’d still make time to write. I think that’s why it never feels like a job to me. It’s just what I do and it’s nice that sometimes, checks arrive after I do it.

I think I've already mentioned how my cousin likes building things that are far too complicated...

Constitutionally, the local party is a key organisation in the Liberal Democrats. It is the principal route by which ordinary members can influence party policy, receive training, and meet other members. The principal route by which groups of Liberal Democrats can fundraise, campaign, select candidates, and fight and win elections.

I’ve not had much experience of effective local parties. I believe them to be a minority, and not a large minority, of all the Lib Dem parties. Most local parties don’t have enough engaged members to form an executive which engages its members, leading to a clear downward spiral. Some local parties are fiefdoms, with the same people gripping onto power year after year, ineffectually lording it over an ever-declining membership and actively keeping volunteers away in case they do something productive.

In practice, party members don’t need local parties as much as we used to. Many (most?) of us are on the Internet, and we can hang out with other party members online. Groups of conference reps can sponsor policy motions directly. So why bother with local parties at all?

I believe that the Lib Dems is and must remain a grassroots organisation. We need to be rooted in local communities. The federal structure exists to allow the grassroots to exert power upwards as well as allowing the Federal Executive to distribute organisation downwards. I also believe that as Liberal Democrats it is healthy for us to mix with other party members with whom we might not agree on every policy issue, and to work alongside them. The problem with online membership engagement is that it’s very easy to form inward-looking cliques.

If we can’t hone our skills at persuading others where possible, or agreeing to disagree on some issues but collaborate on others, within the party then what chance do we have of working with potential supporters and voters outside? Meeting local people face to face remains the best way to bring more people into the Liberal Democrat family, introducing them to our beliefs, philosophies and policies.

The difference between being a member in a strong local party and a weak one is one of energy and vitality. A local party with good leadership and engagement makes its members want to get out and do stuff. It gives them a reason to be a Liberal Democrat and stay a Liberal Democrat. It gives them a voice at the highest levels of the party. Some people find reasons outside their weak local party to stay involved, but that’s a minority. People who get enthused and join a weak local party will fade away when their membership first lapses, lost to us. Strong local parties are vital to the future success of the party and of liberalism.

The serif readability myth.

When I was an undergrad in college, I was a philosophy minor. I spent countless hours debating ideas about things like free will. My final paper was a 60 page rebuttal to what I thought was a sloppy argument against free will. Now, it's been more years since I wrote that than I care to admit - and I still keep seeing the same kind of sloppy arguments, that I argue are ultimately circular, because they're hiding their conclusion in their premises.

There's an argument against free will that I find pretty compelling. I don't agree with it, but I do think that it's a solid argument:

Everything in our experience of the universe ultimately comes down to physics. Every phenomenon that we can observe is, ultimately, the result of particles interacting according to basic physical laws. Thermodynamics is the ultimate, fundamental ruler of the universe: everything that we observe is a result of a thermodynamic process. There are no exceptions to that.

Our brain is just another physical device. It's another complex system made of an astonishing number of tiny particles, interacting in amazingly complicated ways. But ultimately, it's particles interacting the way that particles interact. Our behavior is an emergent phenomenon, but ultimately, we don't have any ability to make choice, because there's no mechanism that allows us free choice. Our choice is determined by the physical interactions, and our consciousness of those results is just a side-effect of that.

If you want to argue that free will doesn't exist, that argument is rock solid.

But for some reason, people constantly come up with other arguments - in fact, much weaker arguments that come from what I call sloppy dualism. Dualism is the philosophical position that says that a conscious being has two different parts: a physical part, and a non-physical part. In classical terms, you've got a body which is physical, and a mind/soul which is non-physical.

In this kind of argument, you rely on that implicit assumption of dualism, essentially asserting that whatever physical process we can observe isn't really you, and that therefore by observing any physical process of decision-making, you infer that you didn't really make the decision.

For example...

And indeed, this is starting to happen. As the early results of scientific brain experiments are showing, our minds appear to be making decisions before we're actually aware of them — and at times by a significant degree. It's a disturbing observation that has led some neuroscientists to conclude that we're less in control of our choices than we think — at least as far as some basic movements and tasks are concerned.

This is something that I've seen a lot lately: when you do things like functional MRI, you can find that our brains settled on a decision before we consciously became aware of making the choice.

Why do I call it sloppy dualism? Because it's based on the idea that somehow the piece of our brain that makes the decision is different from the part of our brain that is our consciousness.

If our brain is our mind, then everything that's going on in our brain is part of our mind. Taking a piece of our brain, saying "Whoops, that piece of your brain isn't you, so when it made the decision, it was deciding for you instead of it being you deciding.

By starting with the assumption that the physical process of decision-making we can observe is something different from your conscious choice of the decision, this kind of argument is building the conclusion into the premises.

If you don't start with the assumption of sloppy dualism, then this whole argument says nothing. If we don't separate our brain from our mind, then this whole experiment says nothing about the question of free will. It says a lot of very interesting things about how our brain works: it shows that there are multiple levels to our minds, and that we can observe those different levels in how our brains function. That's a fascinating thing to know! But does it say anything about whether we can really make choices? No.

"Shall I?" I said briefly; and I looked at his features, beautiful in their harmony, but strangely formidable in their still severity; at his brow, commanding, but not open; at his eyes, bright and deep and searching, but never soft; at his tall imposing figure; and fancied myself in idea his wife. Oh! it would never do! As his curate, his comrade, all would be right: I would cross oceans with him in that capacity; toil under Eastern suns, in Asian deserts with him in that office; admire and emulate his courage and devotion and vigour: accommodate quietly to his masterhood; smile undisturbed at his ineradicable ambition.

"Jelly baby?" asked that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor grinningly, a crumpled paper bag in his hand.

I don’t have any pictures of my father. I just realized that now, two days after he died sitting on a toilet in frigid fucking Edmonton, 2700 km from home. He was visiting my brother. He was supposed to be back by December 21^st, we were going to go out for dinner before Christmas. But the stress of that journey kicked his state variable off whatever high, unstable equilibrium it had been teetering at these past months: sent it sliding down to some new low that just proved unsustainable. He fell ill the day after wheels-down, and never recovered.

He was 94. Nobody could claim he didn’t have a long life.

Nobody could claim he had a happy one, either.

He was a minister way back before I was born, but by the time I came onto the scene he’d already founded the Baptist Leadership Training School in Calgary and was serving as its first principal. He held that post for 22 years; then we moved east so he could become the General Secretary of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec. He held that position until he retired. Not your average Baptist preacher, my dad. A church leader. A scholar.

He was also gay, although he refused to use the word because “it’s brought me no joy at all”. He preferred the term “nonpracticing homosexual”. He never acted on it, you see. He spent his whole life hiding it. He only came out to Jon and I a few years ago, and even then it was only in extremis:  pulled from the clutches of an abusive wife whose dementia had demolished any thin façade of Christian charity, rescued too late to escape the welts and bruises and near-starvation she’d inflicted, still he was making excuses for her behavior. Your mother’s had a hard time of it, he told us. I haven’t been a proper husband. See what I am.

It’s my fault.

He did come out to Fanshun, the day after I was born in fact. Offered her a divorce. Think about that: a man of the cloth, a star in the Baptist firmament in the fifties-era bible belt of the Canadian prairies. Divorcing his wife. It would have been pitchforks and torches for sure, but he offered, and she turned him down: I’ll stay with you for the children, she said, and the job. She knew which side her bread was buttered on: in the Baptist community of that day, Dad was a rock star.

Why did you get married in the first place? I asked decades later. Why dig yourself into such a no-win scenario? I still don’t know if I believe his answer: because, he said, he thought he was alone in the world, that no other man on the planet might like a little cock now and then. Back when he married my mother, he had no idea what a homosexual even was. He’d never even heard the word.

Really. Ronald F. Watts, biblical scholar, Doctor of Divinity, a man who not only knows the scriptures inside-out but also taught them for two decades. What did you think Leviticus was going on about, huh? How could you possibly think you were unique when your own sacred book singled your kind out as an abomination to be killed?

He told me that he’d never read anything like that in Leviticus. He thought I was making it up. I had to dig out his own King James and point him to 20:13; even then, his reaction was one of confusion and disbelief. He was in his nineties now, and not as sharp as he’d once been — but I’m still astonished at the degree of cognitive dissonance that brain must have been able to support.

He never came close to the fire-and-brimstone stereotype of the Baptist preacher. He never had any trouble with evolution. He always encouraged me to ask questions and think for myself, so convinced of his own beliefs that he probably thought it inconceivable that any honest search could end up at a different destination. Closer to death he admitted to regretting that: “I have been a poor parent,” he wrote just back in November, “who spent so much time teaching scores of young people about faith in God that I failed to teach my own kids”.

I could never pretend that I found his religious beliefs anything but absurd, but I hastened to tell him that I’d found him a far better parent than most. He never, ever judged the sinner. Back during my high school days I’d come home staggering drunk and reeking of beer; while Fanshun’s first concern was whether anyone from Central Baptist had seen me (all about appearances, that woman), Dad would gently knock on my door, lie down beside me on the bed as the ceiling spun overhead, and ask how my day had been. He made no mention of the fact that the room would probably have gone up in flames if anyone had lit a match. We’d just talk about our respective days until I brought the subject up myself; then he’d sigh, and roll his eyes, and quote some obscure Shakespearean line about what fools men were to put a demon in their mouths to steal away their brains. I can’t begin to count the number of stupid things I did as a teenager; but my father never made me feel as if I were stupid.

When I was twelve or thirteen, he found me reading From Russia With Love. He cleared his throat, and remarked that Ian Fleming knew how to tell an exciting tale, and that was good — but that this James Bond guy did not treat women at all well, and I probably shouldn’t use those books as any kind of guide to healthy relationships.

I’ll say it again: Baptist preacher. Bible Belt. Sixties.

Of course, in hindsight his Judge Not Others perspective was a bit more self-serving than it might have seemed— but then, so many things make sense in hindsight. The way his wife kept harping about the other men she could have had (I remain skeptical to this day); the endless invasions of privacy, her needy demands that we be  friends and confidantes as well as sons. Her outrage at the prospect that I might want to leave some thoughts unshared. The endless nitpicking and ridicule she heaped on her husband over the years. I thought he was a fucking pussy at the time; I couldn’t understand why he never stood up to her, why he always took her side. Because he knew that so-called truth that he told himself year after year, the truth she never let him forget:

It was all his fault.

Retired from the Baptist Convention, he threw himself into volunteer work for Amnesty International (my late brother Jon, who worked for the Feds at that time, told me that Dad’s advocacy on behalf of the oppressed earned him a CSIS file.) He got his first computer back in the eighties, almost in his eighties: an old XT with an amber screen. He had some trouble with the concept of software at first — “I’m trying to write this letter for AI, but it’ll only let me write a line or two and then it just jumps to a new line and says Bad command or file name c colon…” — but how many old farts of that generation even bothered to try coming to grips with the computer revolution?

He got the hang of it eventually. Figured out the whole internet-porn thing just fine. His last computer was one Jon and I bought for him a few Christmases ago. I helped him set it up; he sat there across the room, smiling beatific and oblivious as a Windows dialog box announced each in a procession of files and bookmarks journeying from old machine to new:

ukboysfirsttime.com

alt.erotica.gay.bondage

alt-erotica.gay.deathmetal.

I would have hugged him, but he’d have been mortified if he knew what I’d seen.

Porn was as far as he got. By the time he found out that he wasn’t alone, he was: so locked down that even fellow gays who’d known him for years had no clue. Once I offered him a male escort for his birthday, but he said he’d be too embarrassed (“And besides, do you know what they charge per hour?”). He did manage to connect a little, vicariously, near the end of his life. A childhood friend of mine came to the rescue, visited Dad whenever he was in town, kept him up to speed on news of his boyfriend in New York and life as an opera singer.

But it was too little, too late. This kind, decent, wonderful man spent his whole damn life in hiding, died without ever experiencing the simple comfort of a decent lay. I may never understand the contradiction inherent in that life: his unshakeable devotion to a community which, for all its strident insistence that God Is Love, never let him feel safe enough to be who he was.

Now he’s dead, along with his legacy (BLTS, the school he founded and nurtured and built from the ground up, was sold for scrap a few years back and is now being run as a private school). His wife is dead. Even one of his sons is dead. There’s nobody left for his dark secret to shame— nobody left to be ashamed, except for that vast intolerant community of spirit-worshippers with whom my father, for reasons I only half-understand, threw in his lot and his life. But so many of them are shameless, too.

Maybe he was right. Maybe those ancient dumb superstitions have some truth to them after all. If so, I guess he knows that for certain now. It’s the great injustice of the atheist position: if we’re wrong about the afterlife, the rest of you have all of eternity to rub our noses in it; but if we’re right, no one will ever know.

I wouldn’t mind being wrong, just this once.

 

Postscript (after midnight):  Caitlin has also blogged about Dad, here.  She says more, she says it differently (with much less bitterness), and you will know him better if you take a minute to read what she has to say.

Try as I might, I can’t stop getting annoyed by the whole debate surrounding Suzanne Moore and her continuing feud with the so-called “trans cabal” (this isn’t really an article by the way, just a series of random points – but at least it is mercifully shorter than my last effort).

Yesterday, Moore wrote a bizarre article in which we sought to argue that her persecution at the hands of transgender and queer activists is a freedom of speech issue.

What’s got her and, for example, Padraig Reidy at the Index on Censorship, jumping up and down is that the International Development Minister Lynne Featherstone tweeted on Sunday that she thought Julie Burchill should have been “sacked” for her Observer article attacking transgender people. Now, for the record, I don’t think Featherstone’s intervention was very sensible. As has been pointed out by others ad infinitum, Burchill is a freelancer and any intervention by a government minister was bound to end up a distraction – and so it has proven. Both Reidy and Moore have leapt on this as an example of state censorship and proof that Leveson report is dangerous nonsense that will lead to government interference of newspapers. The fact that this was a junior minister who is a member of a junior coalition partner just expressing her personal opinion (and the fact that Leveson wasn’t actually arguing for a government body to regulate the media but rather self-regulation underpinned by a statute to be overseen by the judiciary) gets ignored amidst all the shrieking.

The fact is, this is not a freedom of speech issue. The Observer did not take down the Burchill article (and I agree with Jane Fae that it was counterproductive for them to do so) because of Lynne Featherstone or any other government minister’s intervention – you can bet they’d be shouting about it right now if they had done so. It will be interesting to see what they say about it on Sunday but right now it appears that the editor John Mulholland took it down for the exact same reason he put it up in the first place: good old fashioned venality. They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.

I’m highly suspicious of people who are quick to leap up and down about Featherstone’s intervention being somehow sinister and an attack on civil liberties, while being so blithe about the assymetric power dynamic between Moore and her critics. There are a lot of pissed off trans and queer people out there right now who feel that Moore has been using her considerably privileged media platform to utterly misrepresent them in this debate. Again, Stavvers sums it up better than I could. What I don’t understand is why Moore is sticking to her guns in terms of her right to express her “anger and pain” while at the same time is so utterly blind at the fact that the people who are furious with her are doing exactly the same thing. At the end of her article she writes:

So I regret not making it clearer that we need both love and anger to be free. And you may continue to hate me, put me on lists, cast me out of the left. Free-thinking is always problematic. But if you take away my freedom to love, be intemperate, silly, angry, human, ask yourself who really wins? Who?

Yet it has been clear from the get go, that the problem has been her capacity to love in the first place. She escalated this row, and she continues to do so on an hourly basis on Twitter. As Deborah Orr said in response to her latest (at the time of writing) explicit troll:

@suzanne_moore Are you SURE you want the “trans cabal” to stop?

— Deborah Orr (@DeborahJaneOrr) January 18, 2013

The most telling line in Moore’s article is when she compares Featherstone to being a “humourless, authoritarian moron” (my emphasis). She isn’t the first to imply, or even express out loud that the problem at the heart of this debate is people who just “can’t take a joke”. Usually claims of humourlessness are the preserve of people like Jeremy Clarkson in their unending defence of “banter“. I’ve seen an awful lot of people over the past week making pretty similar defences, only suggesting that it is only transgender people and their friends who need to “get over it”. For some reason we are supposed to feel great at the progress we’ve made in fighting cissexism, homophobia and racism – yet we are meant to accept that trans people are an exception it is fine to laugh at and casually dehumanise. The debate seems, at its heart, to be between people who see this as an intolerable contradiction and people who don’t.

Finally, if we are to believe that this is a freedom of speech issue, and that Lynne Featherstone represents an oppressive, authoritarian government determined to crack down on the freedom of expression, why is it that the same government has just this week agreed to scrap Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986? Both Padraig Reidy and Suzanne Moore chose to ignore this inconvenient little factoid. In the case of Reidy, and the Index on Censorship, they have failed to acknowledge this at all on either their blog or weekly email newsletter. Perhaps this is because it’s a little bit of state oppression that never really affected journalists? Throughout this week I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that the real anxieties at the heart of this debate are rooted in professional self-interest rather than any genuinely noble concerns about the state of democracy; I’ve seen very little to shift this notion.