MARIANA doesn’t really care who wins today’s referendum. The young pharmacist, working in a relatively poor part of Athens, has more pressing problems: she has been running out of medication fast this week. Greece relies almost entirely on foreign imports for its pharmaceutical supplies. But since capital control imposed last Sunday brought the country’s banking system to a sudden halt, some suppliers have stopped delivering key medication because they cannot get paid. Foreign bank transfers have been banned by the Greek government (with some complicated exceptions which in no way suffice) and Greek credit is no longer accepted outside the country (as stranded Greek tourists found this week when their credit cards stopped working). As things stand, she has another week’s worth of insulin in stock for diabetics but will then have to start turning her patients away. “Do you know what that means?” she asks, trying to keep a proud face, “Do you know what insulin does?”

Hospital employees report similar problems. They have already had their last cash reserves taken from them, by the current government in April, to pay...Continue reading

(Read this storyline from the beginning.)

(Read this storyline from the beginning.)

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Hey, kids, do you like punk rock?

Remember back in the halcyon days of this morning when the comics internet was up in arms that DC had hired a coterie of aging white male comics writers to create new series featuring some of their signature characters? You know, like Marv Wolfman writing Raven and Len Wein writing Swamp Thing? Dan Didio has already been execrated for saying that "[their] task was to 'freshen up and contemporize' . . . We want the best writers working on our characters, and these are the best writers for these characters." If he had simply said that these were the best writers for the characters at hand, that may still have been a questionable point, but it would at least be an arguable point. You would have a hard time arguing that Len Wein, for instance, wasn't a good choice to write the character he co-created, after all. But he went a step further and said that these writers were tasked with "[freshening] up and [contemporizing]" - which brings to mind the idea that perhaps these original creators aren't the best choices to go when looking for something new. It's simply disingenuous to assert that these men are the best people for that job.

Which isn't to say the books might not be good. They could very well be. But whether or not they are fresh and contemporary remains to be seen.

And then the other shoe dropped and it was announced that Grant Morrison would be taking over as the new EIC of venerable hesher institution Heavy Metal. All well and good, you might say.

“We’re trying to bring back some of that ’70s punk energy of Heavy Metal, but update it and make it new again,” says Morrison, 55, adding that his first comics work, in the Scottish comics mag Near Myths, was directly inspired by Heavy Metal. “One of the things I like to do in my job is revamp properties and really get into the aesthetic of something, dig into the roots of what makes it work, then tinker with the engine and play around with it."

The average age of the writers hired by DC to head their new "fresh and contemporary" initiative is 62.3. Grant Morrison is 55, but it's that 7.3 years that makes all the difference - the difference in this case being whether you roll your joints on a Hawkwind LP or snort amphetamines off a Plasmatics 7".

But what other secrets does the press release have to offer? "Morrison plans to write comic strips and prose material for the bimonthly magazine, too. He says he’s just beginning to reach out to talent in hopes of recruiting them. On his radar: Past collaborators Chris Burnham (Nameless) and Frazer Irving (Annihilator)." When asked to name future contributors to his magazine, he lists off two artists he knows personally, both competent journeymen mainstream comics artists, neither of whose personal styles would have seemed particularly out of place in the old Heavy Metal:



If posting promotional materials from their respective Batman runs seems like a cheap shot, well, it is. Instead of occasionally interesting if mostly puerile European imports, the magazine is going to be giving us the cream of the American mainstream's occasionally interesting if mostly puerile creators, now free to draw all the tits they want.

Is that a cheap shot, too?

Grant Morrison has never been a professional editor. He likes to put his face and his name on things - books, movies, conventions, and apparently the cover of Heavy Metal. Probably more important is the announcement that Brian Witten will be the new President of Heavy Metal, the company. Witten is a Hollywood producer with copious experience in genre film - stuff like the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot, and 1997's Spawn. He got his start in Hollywood by partnering with Rob Liefeld, so he has lots of experience working with egomaniacal flakes.

Morrison doesn't have the best track record in looking outside the bubble of his immediate surroundings. His Heavy Metal - inasmuch as we will be able to call it "his" since the actual day-to-day editing work will almost certainly be someone else's responsibility - will probably not feature an influx of new indie creators ready to take real chances. This won't be Kramer's Ergot 2015 - nor should we expect it to be. It'll be a facelift designed for the express purpose of leveraging a soggy brand name into a "bleeding edge" IP farm. It will be very interesting to see when and if the new Heavy Metal contracts leak - who will own what rights, and for how long? They wouldn't be hiring someone like Witten if they weren't poised to write a new business plan as a prelude to a capital influx, and inevitably what investors are going to want is not to be attached to a creatively ambitious white elephant futurist magazine, but an established brand name with ambitions of being an adult version of Marvel Studios.

And oh, hey, what else does the EW press release explicitly say?

While Morrison works reinvigorate Heavy Metal magazine, [brand owners] Krelitz and Boxenbaum are looking to build up Heavy Metal in other media. There’s now a Heavy Metal record label with BMG. There are television shows in various stages of development. And Krelitz is mapping out a bold plan for a shared movie universe, comprised of different Heavy Metal-branded franchises, analogous to the Marvel Studios and DC Entertainment philosophy. Where Marvel and DC make PG and PG-13 films, Heavy Metal will make PG-13 and R-rated films. The goal is to develop live action movies, in the vein of Avatar, not animated films. Says Krelitz: “It’ll be a series of films leading into a Heavy Metal movie, with another series of films leading into a another Heavy Metal movie.”

Grant Morrison is a past-his-prime creator who has in the past shown great sympathy for corporate properties at the expense of the creators themselves. (The original point was made by Matt Seneca, who apparently deleted his blog a while back, which I either missed or forgot at some point.) I would seriously suggest that any creator, veteran or new, take a close look at any contract they might be offered by the company going forward.

So this is Morrison completing the career arc that began when he accepted a pseudo-editorial position at DC, finally stepping behind the lines to become The Man, an editor, fully committed to getting his pals on board to create original IP for a burgeoning content farm explicitly styling itself in the mold of Marvel Entertainment - only "for adults." Morrison built a pretty good Brand, and it works for him because he's become what he always wanted to be: a marketable meme ready to be consumed by unsuspecting customers eager to take a ride with a talented showman.

Punk rock? Actually, yeah, pretty much.

Smart move by Tim Farron as the LD leadership race draws to a close http://t.co/QY5nhfdiSJ pic.twitter.com/y1IgZ5r3a9

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) July 4, 2015

With the Lib Dem leadership race drawing to a close the favourite, ex-party president Tim Farron, according to the Observer, has said that the UK should take 60,000 immigrants to help deal with the current crisis. According to Toby Helm’s report:

“..“We should support this because we are decent people. Our party should not have a mixed message about this. We should not turn people away,” he said.

The former Lib Dem president has written to David Cameron to say the UK should be proud of its record on taking in refugees, citing the admission of many thousands of Ugandan Asians who were expelled by President Idi Amin in 1972… “

In my judgement this is a wise move by Farron which will resonate well with the 60,000 party members who are currently voting on who should succeed Nick Clegg.

All the polling suggests that Lib Dem voters have a different view on immigration from those of other parties and my guess is that this will be more so with actual party members.

This call will help Farron reinforce his liberal credentials which have come under attack from some quarters in the campaign.

Mike Smithson

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Why Polls End Up Saying The Same Thing

Following the General Election, the pollsters have been accused of having herd instincts.  How else do so many polling companies, acting independently, get to the same – wrong – answer?

In the final days of the campaign, the polls mainly agreed on the likely outcome, and even a late movement to Labour.  Polls of polls ironed out small differences and gave an even greater feeling of certainty.  But the natural belief that the average of independent observations is likely to be most accurate does not apply to vote intention polls.  Almost all the final polls in all general elections since the Second World War show bias and not error.  Put simply, they almost always err in one direction or the other, mainly underestimating the Conservatives.  In short, beware the average, it is only better than the worst and worse than the best.

Nevertheless, apart from a few days, or at the most weeks after a general election, pollsters are judged by media commentators mainly on the proximity of their predictions to the average, whether that average is calculated or more vaguely expected.  That pressure is steady and, as polling day approaches, increasing. 

A pollster with results diverging from the average will be asked by their client and others to examine every aspect of the methods for anything that might be “wrong”.  A pollster with results on the average can relax.

Those soft but sustained pressures, over the years, will tend to give greater prominence to those perfectly justifiable methods that tend to lead in the direction of conformity, and less attention may be paid to methods that lead to a greater degree of divergence.  So, the average is not only where the pollsters feel most comfortable, clients and political commentators believe the average is likely to be most right.

However, the pressure to conform to the average of the polls in turn restricts the tone of political commentary.  Common sense might have told us that the Conservatives would do very well in the General Election.   Nowadays it is more similar to a presidential election, with decisions by ordinary voters based only or primarily on the look of the leader, his aspirations for Britain, goals and ambitions.  Cameron vs Miliband was a mismatch.  Inasmuch as party and policy matter, Old Labour was so last century; the policy proposals lacking resonance in modern Britain.  The polls did not have the right smell about them.  Why did so few say so at the time?

Rather than herd instinct, the process by which pollsters and commentators influence each other may be better described as an informational cascade.  Over the long term, the publication of vote intention polls adds to the expectation of what any new poll will predict, sometimes irrespective of any other signals pointing in a different direction.  The theory would suggest that the publication of vote intention polls, strongly promoted as being reliable by the media owners who pay for them, suggesting certainty both for the overall prediction as well as small fluctuations, can rapidly influence a much larger group to accept the likelihood of a particular outcome.  At some point, the theory goes, any person with a correct prediction (however it is obtained) can be convinced, through social pressure, to adopt an alternative and incorrect view of the likely outcome.

Following a 1992 sized polling debacle, pollsters now need to take a hard look at the methods. Still relevant are the recommendations made by the Market Research Society in the report published after 1992:

“We would encourage methodological pluralism; as long as we cannot be certain which techniques are best, uniformity must be a millstone – a danger signal rather than an indication of health.  We should applaud diversity; in a progressive industry experimentation is a means of development.  No pollster should feel the need to be defensive about responsible attempts to explore in a new direction …”

Now that is a lot easier to suggest than to do.  Between 1992 and 1997 I changed from quota face-to-face interviewing to random telephone polls (“you can’t do that not everyone has a telephone”) started weighting by past voting (“you can’t do that, people imagine they voted for the party they now support – Hemmelweit et al”) and adjusted for the likely votes of those who could not or would not say who they would vote for (“you are making up the answers”).

Defiantly, and with the backing of The Guardian, as the General Election in 1997 approached I produced very different predictions to the rest, and in the process had my ear well and truly bent by many political commentators who had come to believe the average of the polls, most of which used methods in 1997 unchanged from 1992.

As it turned out the ICM prediction was most accurate, but in the run up to polling day the pressure to adopt the alternative, less accurate average of the rest, was intense.

Now, as then, pollsters should be seeking new solutions, and be unafraid of producing results very different to each other.  The average is clearly not to be trusted.  Sadly, I suggest, the likelihood is that come 2020 both pollsters and political commentators will again be converging on the average.

Nick Sparrow – former head of polling at ICM

One of the most annoying things that people say. That’s not why it’s called a spectrum, folks.

Tagged: silly comments

A myth is growing up about the Liberal Democrat debacle at the last general election. It holds that we lost almost all of our seats because the Conservatives ruthlessly targeted them and won over former Liberal Democrat voters.

So they did, but there is little sign that our lost voters went to the Conservatives instead.

To find out what really happened, read an article by Seth Thévoz and Lewis Baston on the Social Liberal Forum site.

Here are a few extracts:

The Conservative-facing seats showed a remarkably consistent pattern; the main factor at play was Lib Dem collapse rather than Conservative recovery. In each of the 27 seats lost to the Conservatives, the collapse in Lib Dem votes was sizably larger than any increase in Tory votes, by a factor of anything up to 29.

And:

This means that although the Lib Dem position in many Tory-facing seats is dire following a collapse of the party’s vote, the Conservative position is not necessarily ‘safe’ or stable; the Conservatives have won many of these seats on relatively small popular votes, and there still exists in these constituencies a reasonably large non-Conservative vote which could potentially be mobilised around a clear anti-Conservative candidate with a more appealing pitch than that of the 2015 Lib Dem campaign. 

Nor is the Conservative vote appreciably growing much in such areas. In seats like Lewes, Portsmouth South, St Ives, Sutton and Cheam, and Torbay, the increase in Conservative votes was negligible, and Lib Dem defeat can be laid down entirely to so much of the Lib Dem vote having vanished.

And:

In particular, while the Green ‘bounce’ in most of these 27 seats was smaller than the UKIP ‘bounce’, it is noticeable that the rise in Green and UKIP votes taken together – the votes for the two main ‘protest vote’ parties in England – was larger than the Tory votes gained in 26 of these 27 seats. In other words, the Lib Dem loss of the protest vote, and the protest vote being transferred to both UKIP and the Greens, was almost certainly critical in the loss of 26 Lib Dem seats to the Conservatives.

You can argue whether this shows there never was a coherent Liberal Democrat vote or that such a vote exists and we failed to appeal to it. And you should certainly note how poor Labour was at winning our former voters over.

But what is certain that the idea that we would have done better if only we had played down our differences with the Conservatives is false.

I had a good time yesterday at the Social Liberal Forum conference, despite the sauna-like nature of some sessions (who knew that 200 people stuck in a room with only a couple of fans would get so hot?) but there was a comment made in one session that I wanted to address.

One of the participants in the session on political pluralism was former Tory MEP Tom Spencer, who talked about how he didn’t think the Liberal Democrats should be part of a ‘progressive majority’ but should be a continental style liberal centrist party that alternated between supporting governments of left and right, ensuring there was liberalism in both. I talked about this in a post during the week but I want to reiterate the point I made then: there aren’t parties like that any more, and even when there were they were in party systems completely unlike Britain’s.

There are three countries where there was a two-and-a-half or three-party system of right, centre and left parties and where the centre party formed coalitions with both the right and left parties: West Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands (though the Dutch example isn’t quite as clear cut). However, all these are distinguished by something else: as well as the liberal party forming governments with parties of left and right, the parties of left and right would form governments with each other. Essentially, what these countries had was a triangular political system, with shared interests around all three sides of the triangle. In Germany, there was an FDP-CDU link on bourgeois issues and some economic liberalism, an FDP-SPD link on social liberal issues but also a CDU-SPD link on the corporatist aspects of the German system. (An important fact to note is that the FDP, like the Dutch VVD liberal party, is regarded as being further to the right economically than the CDU)

This was the system in Germany from the 50s to the 80s, and most notably from 1961 to 1983 when they were the only three parties in the Bundestag. There are two key things to note here: there was a grand CDU-SPD coalition in the 60s before there was an SPD-FDP one, and the last SPD-FDP coalition ended in 1983. Indeed, the SPD has spent almost as much time in government with the CDU as it has with the FDP.

It’s a similar picture in the other two countries. Belgium had three principal parties from the end of the Second World War to the start of the dissolution of the parties from national institutions to Fleming or Walloon-specific ones in 1968. Coalitions between any two of the three were possible during that period, so it wasn’t just a case of the liberal party switching between the two sides.

Finally, the situation in the Netherlands is slightly more complicated because of the presence of two liberal parties – the more right-wing VVD and the more left D66. It was also in a later period than the other two, as the parties of the right didn’t come together into a single party (the CDA) until 1978. However, from 1978 until 2002, there were governments on all three sides of the triangle, involving any two of CDA, VVD and the social democrat PvDA. As in the other two countries, this was a situation that lasted for about 20 years, and ended when new parties entered the system and made it more complex.

You can see an attempt to push a similar message for Britain in the 40s on the cover here (PDF file) but the relative weakness of the Liberals, and the system giving majority governments to Tories and Labour meant it developed differently. However, the 50s and 60s in Britain were known as the era of the Butskelite consensus, with Tories and Labour seen as being relatively close ideologically until the 70s. However, after that the situation changed with the parties moving further apart and the Tories taking the economic liberal ideas that remained with the centre parties in Germany and the Netherlands.

This idea of a liberal party switching between two sides comes from a very limited sample. In other countries, there’s either no liberal party, or multiple ones of right and left that tend to support other parties within their bloc, but don’t switch back and forth. Alternatively, they’re parties like the Centre Party in Finland which have roots as an agrarian party as well as a liberal one, and are one of the principal parties in a multi-party system.

In short, it is possible for a liberal party to alternate between supporting governments of left and right, but it only happens in systems with three or four parties where the liberal party has created a distinct ideology for itself beyond mere centrism, and where the parties of left and right are close together and can form governments with each other, excluding the liberal party. When those conditions don’t apply – especially when there are more parties in the system – it’s rare to find a liberal party remaining in the centre. Instead, they tend to pick a side and work within it, not alternating from one to the other.

As you may remember, I left the Liberal Democrats (of which I was a founding member back in 1988) a few years back. I was angry about the so-called welfare reforms, started by Labour and continued by the Conservatives, which the Lib Dems in government colluded with, in some cases with unseemly glee. Any notion of a war on poverty and disability seems to have been transformed into a war on the poor and disabled, and the families of the disabled; and not enough of the Lib Dems were audible on the right side of the debate for me to continue feeling comfortable. I am fortunate enough to live in a country with a real welfare state. I pay huge amounts of tax, and I get every euro-cent of it back one way or the other. But people here retain confidence in the system as a back-stop for everyone.

I was angry also that two significant constitutional reforms, electoral reform and reforming the House of Lords, were comprehensively botched. The AV referendum was a stupid idea for anyone who actually wanted change in the system. On the House of Lords I recognise that I'm an outlier anyway, in that I'd prefer to abolish it than make it an elected body, but the actual plan proposed was massively silly and would actually have increased the percentage of bishops among members. It was right that it failed and wrong to propose it.

I remain angry about both of those sets of issues, and the party deserved the kicking it got in retribution from voters. There was no alternative to coalition with the Conservatives - Labour had neither the necessary numbers nor any serious intention of making it work - and the party was right to do it but wrong in the way that it was done. The rot set in early, with the debacle over university tuition fees (which in fairness was more a question of presentation, but a catastrophic failure in that regard), and it was never stopped. I do not say this with any joy. I feel sorry particularly for the ten MEPs who lost their seats (or in a couple of cases stood down pre-emptively) in last year's election. I know almost all of them personally, and they were tremendous contributors to the European Parliament, for the party, for the UK and Europe. They paid the price for other people's decisions.

It would be better for the UK if there was a stronger voice for liberalism which actually believes in the sorts of things I believe in, and doesn't screw up when in government. The two lasting public policy changes forced on the coalition by the Lib Dems, equal marriage and (more wonkishly) fixed-term parliaments, are very good things; and the Lib dems did stand up against the loopy anti-immigration policies of both Conservatives and Labour. My feeling was that if the Lib Dems stopped colluding with government policies I find disgusting and started sounding a bit more effective, I might give them another try.

In anticipation of this, I kicked in £20 to a party fund-raising appeal during the election campaign. The premise was rather silly; it was to enter a draw for a dinner with John Cleese. It was also fairly early in the campaign, so of course meant that having paid once, I got further despairing appeals for funds as the campaign went on. I'm in political communications myself, so I smiled and then ignored them. Rather to my dismay, one thickish envelope arrived by snail-mail, labelling itself a membership pack. I hadn't rejoined; I'd just made a small donation. So I binned it.

When the exit poll was handed to me in the TV studio in Belfast at twenty to ten on election night, my first reaction was that 10 seats might be an over-statement and we could well see the Lib Dems level-pegging with the DUP. Fortunately for me, I said so on camera, so my reputation for predictive power is maintained. Unfortunately for the party and (on reflection) for the UK, I was right. As the Lib Dem seats tumbled in all directions, I watched with some anxiety for the fate of one old friend in particular.

In roughly 1988-1991, which a brief spasm again in the mid-1990s, I was active in student politics with the Lib Dems, and became briefly a large fish in that rather small pool. Way back then, Tim Farron, who is three years, a month and a day younger than me, was already someone to watch. We were both involved in a certain number of political battles which seemed awfully important at the time but whose details have mercifully faded from memory. What I do recall is that when Tim and I differed politically, he usually won; and on reflection, that was usually because he was right and I was wrong.

Watching from afar, I had supported his candidacy for President of the party, and appreciated that he was on occasion prepared to vote against the government, notably on tuition fees at the beginning, and continued to keep up the pressure, including on immigration. Some complained that he had not taken responsibility by accepting a government position; frankly that doesn't look to me like a stupid move at all, in the light of the performance of the party in government. When it became clear that the choice of new leader would be between Tim and another candidate who had held office in the coalition government, and who had emerged since I moved away from the UK in 1997, I resolved privately that I would rejoin the party if and when Tim got elected.

Well, the decision has been partly thrust into my hands. Because the party has chosen to treat my £20 as a membership renewal rather than a one-off donation, a membership ballot arrived the other day. And although I feel it's frankly sneaky of the party to count me among its (supposedly burgeoning) numbers before I had really decided on that for myself, I will fill in the form and send it back for Tim. Whether I renew again next year depends on what he does with the leadership once he gets it, as it seems likely that he will. Good luck to him.

A certain mindset sees the movie Aliens and thinks it would be awesome to be a Space Marine. Because it’s like being a Marine, but in space.

A certain mindset skims a bit of cyberpunk fiction and thinks the future will be amazing, because Ruby-coding skills will clearly translate to proficiency with katanas. You know, katanas.

A certain mindset learns a little about the Victorian era and is instantly off in a fantasy of brass-goggled Gentlemen Aviators, at once dapper and wind-swept, tending the Tesla apparatus on their rigid airship. All art in the genre carries the tacit disclaimer in its caption, “(Not pictured: cholera.)” In the designation steampunk, the -punk has nothing to do with anarchy (in the UK or elsewhere), the suffix having been conventionalized into a mere signifier of anachronism. A steampunk condo development promises units for the reasonable price of 2 to 7.5 million dollars apiece.

[To be fair, Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990), which is in some part responsible for the whole wibbly-wobbly steamery-punkery, did spend some of its time with the run-down and the passed-over. It also, I’m guessing unintentionally, underscored the incoherence of the premise, when in its final pages, Ada Lovelace describes a fanciful notion of the late Charles Babbage, whose fictional version dreamed of doing computation with electricity. The fictional Babbage’s never-implemented plan relied on such hypothetical devices as resistors and capacitors. The book’s plot begins in 1855; the Leyden jar was invented 110 years earlier. Carl Friedrich Gauss built a working telegraph years before the historical Babbage even designed his Analytical Engine. But our aesthetic can’t allow that, of course.]

It is against this background that we should read “Silicon Valley is a Science Fictional Utopia,” a recent piece in Model View Culture. I have enjoyed and appreciated MVC quite a bit in the past few months, which is why I was rather flummoxed to find a statement in that essay that just refused to parse. The overall thesis sounds roughly right to me, but not all the examples seem to fit as written. Here’s the part that jumped out at me:

Awesome things, and great ideas. This is what SF is all about.

This is also the drive behind Silicon Valley culture. It’s about a better future through human industry, like the Cyberpunks.

It’s a better future through ingenuity, risk-taking, and a rock-solid belief that technology is humanity’s best chance at a better future.

Cyberpunk—cyberpunk!—is “about a better future through human industry”?

Cyberpunk, the genre in which multinationals own everything and humans have to fight over what’s left; cyberpunk, which saw the Campbellian heroes of the Golden Age, staring at the stars with wonder and ambition, and said, “Fuck you, you get rain.” A cyberpunk future is a prosthetic heel grinding into a human face, if not forever, at least until the owner of the heel gets bored. The idea that success flows to the privileged was wired into the genre from the beginning. Technology can be incorporated into our bodies, but never trusted. “Progress” in the Sprawl means moving a little hot RAM. The Los Angeles of the Tyrell Corporation is no Utopia, and it never pretended to be.

But after a couple decades of the genre being reduced to ZOMG trenchcoats and mirrorshades, perhaps it’s not so surprising that looking back at the stories themselves can be a bit of a shock. It’s so easy to geek out over the superficial trappings, and so much harder to see ourselves complicit in the systems that the stories railed against.

In Blade Runner, Captain Bryant tells Deckard, “If you’re not cop, you’re little people.” Escaping into a story about being the cop has a much more obvious appeal than escaping into one about being the little people. As a friend of mine once noted, nobody reads Atlas Shrugged and says, “Why, I must be one of the unproductive slobs who are everything that is wrong with humanity.”

To say that cyberpunk fiction was “about a better future through human industry” is absurd; to say that of the aesthetic, of “cyberpunk” recoined by back-formation from “steampunk,” is rather less so.

Among the other SF stories mentioned in the MVC piece is one that I’ve thought a fair bit about: Asimov’s The Naked Sun (1957). This novel is, in spirit, an Agatha Christie yarn in space. A man is bludgeoned to death at his isolated country estate. His wife discovers the body. The murder weapon is missing. A detective comes from the big city to investigate, and everyone the detective meets had a motive to kill the victim. At the climax, the detective gathers all the principals to listen as he solves the crime.

Asimov greatly admired Christie and the “cozy mystery” genre, and I don’t doubt that this structure was intentional. The unintended consequence has to do with another novel published in 1957: in building the setting for his perfect murder, Asimov created Galt’s Gulch—with the crucial difference that Asimov’s version has the robot labor force necessary to keep everyone from dying in a couple weeks.

The planet Solaria was settled by wealthy people who wished to avoid the regulations of their home planet. Personal autonomy is sacrosanct. On Solaria, everyone is either the best or the only practitioner of a trade.

And, incidentally, their society is stagnant and moribund. Once something goes wrong, they have to call a cop from New York to fix it. At the end, the detective spells out what he has learned:

Baley said, “The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it’s something that made everything else possible.”

“I don’t want to guess, Baley. What is it?”

“The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals. Solaria has given it up entirely. It is a world of isolated individuals and the planet’s only sociologist is delighted that this is so. That sociologist, by the way, never heard of sociomathematics, because he is inventing his own science. There is no one to teach him, no one to help him, no one to think of something that he himself might miss. The only science that really flourishes on Solaria is robotics and there are only a handful of men involved in that, and when it came to an analysis of the interaction of robots and men, they had to call in an Earthman to help. […] Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone. […]”

The final message is that Earth and Solaria are both stagnating, in mirror-image ways. But more to the point is that vintage male-as-default language: “a handful of men,” “robots and men,” “call in an Earthman.” Aren’t we glad that casual sexism is a thing of the past? There’s more that one could dissect in that scene, including some talk of the evils of “ectogenesis,” a suggestion that gestating fetuses anywhere other than women’s bodies is dehumanizing. One really ought to unpack that at greater length, but for now, let’s step back and consider the novel more broadly. The “accusing parlor” scene, in which Baley presents the solution to the mystery, contains two women and five men, along with one robot, who is coded male in both the social and technological senses of the word. Three other male characters appear at various points, not counting the murder victim and assorted robots, all of whom are treated as male. Two women out of eleven characters—for this writer and that era, that’s practically Madoka Magica!

Earlier, we touched on how self-congratulation can enter the act of reading science fiction. There’s another angle to that: When one grows up reading books full of robots, it’s easy to say, “I’m willing to bestow my empathy upon artificial intelligences. I can think of these robot characters as human, in the ways that matter. Surely, then, from my enlightened perspective, the petty differences among flesh-and-blood humans must shrink to insignificance!” With this kind of thinking, it is simple to convince oneself of one’s own freedom from bias. Even though the books which inculcated this enlightened philosophy are replete with biases themselves!

Likewise: The Federation in Star Trek is largely a meritocracy. For the most part, promotions in Starfleet seem to happen on the basis of professional competence. I like that. Civilization triumphing, day by day, over its own worse elements—that’s a good story. But there’s a flipside. “I grew up watching Star Trek, where progress is based on merit,” I say to myself, “and so I learned to judge people fairly. Therefore, when I evaluate a person’s potential as a scientist or as a programmer, I will do so on their merit alone. Any suggestion that I might not is an insult against my character, made by someone who doesn’t understand people like me.” Psychology is probably seldom as straight a line as that, but at the very least, it’s a mental trap we should look out for. The more admirable our fiction makes our ideals sound, and the more we identify ourselves as devotees of that fiction, the harder it is to admit when we fail to live up to those standards.

Some novels just don't happen when you expect them to. That was the case in mid to late 2013. I was supposed to be working on The Lambda Functionary, a third book in a thematic trilogy that started with Halting State and Rule 34, but it was turning out to be tough—much tougher than I expected. Partly I'd loaded too many ideas into it, but I was also becoming uneasily aware of the impending Scottish political singularity. The world of Halting State diverges from our own because I dreamed it up in 2005-06 as a plausible projection for the world of 2017, and we're much closer to 2017 now than we were back then: the flaws are visible. Given that the SPS will extend through 2017 (thanks to the coming referendum on continuing UK membership of the EU) it became impossible to write a third book in that universe. So I shelved it (although a bunch of those ideas will turn up, sooner rather than later, in a different near future novel).

So in August 2012 I was getting a bit panicky over the book I was failing to write. I was at the world science fiction convention, and had a date to do dinner with my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, lately of Ace. (She retired in March 2014.) So once we'd eaten, I raised the topic of The Lambda Functionary. "It's being difficult," I said: "I really need an extra year to write it."

Ever told a project manager that you're running a bit late and please can I have an extra year? Yeah, it went down about the way you might imagine: except that Ginjer had been editing me for over a decade and has my number. "You're thinking of something else," she suggested.

"Well yeah. The annoying thing is, there's this Laundry Files idea that's been bugging me. It's a bit different to the earlier novels in the series, but ..."

"How is it different?"

"Well for one thing, it begins like this: Don't be silly, Bob, said Mo, everyone knows vampires don't exist!"

And she looked at me silently for about half a minute, then nodded and said, "tell your agent to write me a deal memo."

So, yes, I can honestly say I sold The Rhesus Chart on a one-sentence proposal—an elevator pitch, in fact. (Although it really helped that it was for the fifth book in a series, and I was pitching it at an editor who'd successfully published books one through four.)

The meeting I pitched it at was in September. There were some minor contractual complications—the P&L on a Laundry novel back then was lower than for a high-profile SF novel—so I took a survivable haircut on the advance. Flip side: I sat down to work on September 15th, 2012, and wrote "THE END" on December 1st, 2012. This was a big surprise to me (the previous Laundry Files novel, The Apocalypse Codex, took me nine months to wrestle into submission), but it just came out so smoothly. Yes, it went through two subsequent redrafts: that's normal. But what's not so normal is for the first draft to come out in ten weeks flat, with no hiccups.

In part, what made it easy was the pivot I'd decided to make in the series.

The first Laundry Files stories recycled a bunch of personal experiences: my love for British cold war spy thrillers, and my experience in the IT business. But the cold war ended in 1991 (although I hear they're trying to restart it) and I last worked in IT as anything other than a peanut-gallery pundit around 2000. If you don't use a skill set you lose it, and my programming chops and workplace experience were over a decade out of date and ageing. Also, I'd run out of British spy thriller writers I really wanted to pastiche. (John LeCarre and Graham Greene are way above my pay grade, I am not touching William Le Queux with a barge pole (even if I go full retro), John Buchan bores me, and the Laundry series is fundamentally incompatible with non-British writers (although I do have a weird fondness for the work of Richard Condon which I've gotta do something about one day)).

So some time in 2012 I took the decision to switch to hitting on fantasy subgenres and tropes rather than spy thriller writers, on organizational dysfunction and politics as much as IT, to broaden my scope and use viewpoint characters other than Bob, and to work the series round slightly closer to the urban fantasy 'mainstream" in search of a broader audience.

(Note that this doesn't mean I'm abandoning Bob, bureaucracy, and devops-related lunacy. It just means I'm targeting a bunch of new material and hopefully making the books more accessible to readers with less of a technical background as well.)

Stuff that went into The Rhesus Chart: well, I did a whole bunch of background reading about the culture of banking for Neptune's Brood and some of it had to show up eventually. Added to which, back in the mists of dot-com one point zero I had far too many encounters with soi-disant "banking IT" people in the course of my day job. My opinion of them wasn't high. Over the subsequent decade, though, I ran into folks from the other end of the banking IT sector—the people who make the back end software on which investment banks run. Banks are huge IT users, and it seemed reasonable to assume that events of interest to the Laundry would be happening inside some of their more secretive software development teams.

Vampires: well, who hasn't read enough vampire books or watched enough vampire movies to claim some expertise? Maybe I'm anomalous in having a low taste for urban fantasy, but while I'm writing a novel I can't unwind by reading something similar to what I'm working on—so during my hard-SF phase in the 2000s I read far too much UF as a source of brain candy while writing books like Iron Sunrise or Saturn's Children.

There are huge inconsistencies in the vampire mythology, largely because the idea of blood-sucking corpses (or the more abstract transferrable-curse-of-vampirisim) crops up in many different cultures. Northern European vampires seem to have their origins in primitive misapprehensions about the process of decay of bodies after death, and in the way contagious diseases spread through families living in close unhygeinic conditions (such as tuberculosis). Religious trappings got layered on top early on, because religious beliefs are a way of making sense of the universe, especially its more inexplicable aspects: hence the holy water/crucifix allergy. So it occured to me that given the Laundry Files universe as a setting, it ought to be possible to come up with an "origin story" for vampirism that fits the mythology sufficiently well to explain most of the core elements and that was consistent with the previously established motifs of supernatural brain parasitism. If instead of pure parasitism (the eaters in night, the K-syndrome parasites) we posit a commensal symbiote, or a parasite that uses the host to harvest food, you end up with something like the V-parasites—and indeed, this sort of parasitism is something we see in nature.

One of my beefs with the urban fantasy genre in general is that there's a tendency for less thoughtful authors to absorb the eschatological trappings that have cohered around the monster myths they're adopting without questioning them. (Holy water and vampires would be one example.) I wrote The Apocalypse Codex in large part as a response to this problem—to underline the fact that the Laundry Files universe is not driven by Christian religious eschatology (unless Cthulhu worship really is going mainstream). Another problem I have with many UF series is that they posit a hidden world of magic and monsters coexisting with our own ... without any friction visible around the edges, even as vampires and demons rack up an impressive body count. The Rhesus Chart is part of my fix for this in the Laundry Files (although The Concrete Jungle makes some interesting observations about the true purpose of the Mass Observation programs of the 1930s to 1960s). Vampires are predators and predators are territorial. It's also not a great leap of the imagination to postulate that if vampires exist and were identified as a problem in public, the scale of the response would rival that of the reaction to terrorism: mandatory naked noonday identity parades, police patrols with mirrors and stakes, and so on. So the first rule of vampire school is: vampires don't exist ... and if you see one, kill it and dispose of the evidence because it's carelessness is a direct existential risk to your own survival.

So.

I finished the first draft and fired it at my editors. And my extremely energetic and young new British editor at Orbit pitched in with a suggestion: "can you make this a new entrypoint to the series?" She asked. "Because if so, we can really push the marketing and give it a big boost."

"Sure," I said, and wrote a boringly infodumpy prologue, which she rejected. So instead I got to rewrite the beginning again.

In the first draft, Bob manages to save Andy from his highly inadvisable 10% project before he hits the button. As my editor pointed out, this was a cop-out: "if you have him hit the button, you can then show Bob in action, and the sort of universe he lives in, really on in the book," she pointed out. It's a bit like the action sequence at the start of every James Bond movie, that sinks the hook for the story into your head and then throws special effects at you until you get the idea that yes, James Bond is some kind of Saville-Row wearing action superhero who makes problems go away, usually in a huge explosion. The action sequence at the beginning of The Rhesus Chart is there to show new readers that Bob makes supernatural problems Go Away (with a little bit of help from his mentor). All the better, then, to set him up for being out-maneuvered in committee meetings later on ...

Final note. An interviewer once asked Lois McMaster Bujold how she planned her novels. Her answer was along the lines of, "I work out what the worst possible thing I can do to my protagonist is, then I do it to them." If you're setting out as a writer this is really good advice and you should act on it. If you can't think of a "worst possible thing" to do to your protagonist short of dismemberment or death, then you don't know your protagonist well enough. By The Rhesus Chart Bob has had four books in which he's taken a level in bad-ass. But Bob has weaknesses he is unaware of. He's emotionally immature for his age (late thirties by this point). He's also, like all of us, somewhat self-deluding about other people. When Mhari re-appears, hopefully his 15-years-on reappraisal of her should make it obvious that his evaluation of her circa The Atrocity Archives was not merely highly subjective, but simply wrong: there's foreshadowing here for the revelation (at the end of The Rhesus Chart, and explored in merciless depth in The Annihilation Score) that everything he thinks he knows about his marriage is ... questionable to say the least.

Seth Thevoz and Lewis Baston have a very interesting new post on the Social Liberal Forum website, looking in detail at the 57 seats the Liberal Democrats defended at this year’s general election. It’s worth reading the whole thing because, as Jonathan Calder points out, it helps to explode the myth that so many seats were lost because the Tories persuaded huge numbers of Lib Dem voters to switch. In a similar vein, it’s worth looking at this diagram of voter movements from Martin Baxter of Electoral Calculus, which tells a similar story: the biggest movement of 2010 Lib Dem voters in 2015 was to Labour. That diagram also helps to explain why the ‘Lib Dem vote went down, UKIP vote went up by a similar amount; therefore Lib Dem voters switched the UKIP’ idea is also mostly wrong.

(Update: Since I first posted this, the second part of Thevoz and Baston’s analysis, looking at links between general election and local government election performance, has been posted)

However, there are two main points I want to bring up from reading Thevoz and Baston:

The first is a general one about their data, where I’m heartened to see that their analysis of the result is based on changes in the actual numbers of votes received, rather than shifts in the percentage shares. I’ve argued before that turnout is a crucial factor often ignored in British elections, and coupled with that is the effect of shifts to and from not voting, as well between parties. Using percentages often carries with it the assumption that the people voting in this election are the same as the people who voted in the previous one, which I think leads to some lazy analysis.

I think it also – though it’s not something highlighted in this case – helps to show why local government elections and Parliamentary by-elections aren’t always a good indicator of how general elections will go, because you can’t assume the smaller sample at the former are indicative of how the larger sample at the latter will vote. I think that was especially the case this time and looking at high-profile by-elections helps to show it. Mike Thornton got 13,342 votes in the Eastleigh by-election and won, then got a small increase to 14,317 votes in the general election and lost because the Conservatives added 13,000 votes between the two The overall increase in turnout between the two? About 14,000 votes. Similarly for UKIP, Mark Reckless got 16,867 votes in the by-election and 16,009 votes in the general, that small shift downwards eclipsed by the 10,000 extra votes Kelly Tolhurst got for the Conservatives in the general election. Similarly, Douglas Carswell’s position in Clacton looked a lot less secure when 7,500 extra Tory voters turned out at the general election.

One final point on turnout: the graphs show, perhaps even more impressively than the swingometers, the scale of the SNP’s achievement in Scotland and how it was heavily driven by persuading non-voters to come out and vote for them. Again, only reporting percentages hides some of the true picture, particularly the unionist tactical voting that’s likely behind the increase in the Lib Dem vote in some of those seats.

The second main point is that there isn’t a consistent story to tell about what happened to the Lib Dem voters. There’s a degree of tactical unwind as Green and Labour votes go up, there’s a loss of the anti-system vote to UKIP and Green as well as a shift to the Tories which could either be a coalition detoxification effect or because of Project Fear driving voters who didn’t want to see Miliband in Number 10 towards the Tories. I expect there’s also a strong element of former Lib Dems staying at home, somewhat hidden by a number of former non-voters coming out to vote for UKIP. There does also seem to be in some seats an amount of ‘soft Tory’ tactical voting for Liberal Democrats to keep Labour out in some seats, though it’s hard to tell the extent of it as some of the drops in the Tory vote (especially in ‘safe’ Lib Dem seats) may be Tory voters taking the opportunity to protest vote for UKIP. However, it doesn’t appear to be on anything like the scale of the Lib-Lab tactical voting we’ve seen over the past two decades.

This is an important factor both in explaining the 2015 result and in looking at the strategic options for the Liberal Democrats going forward. One interesting book on electoral theory I’ve been reading recently is Gary Cox’s Making Votes Count which looks at how voters strategically co-ordinate their votes for maximum effectiveness. One example of this is his application of Duverger’s law, and the way it structures the vote within constituencies so that they tend to become two-party contests in single member plurality (‘first past the post’) elections. (Duverger is often taken to apply solely at the national level, but Cox points out that his work is just as, if not more, relevant at the constituency level)

I should probably write a longer post specifically on Cox in the future, but the important point he makes is that winning individual elections is a co-ordination problem for both parties and voters: the latter trying to determine who are the potential victors, the former trying to work out how to position themselves as a potential victor. However, the key point here is that even if a party can show that it is one of the potential victors, it can only attract tactical votes from those who won’t win if those voters can perceive a relevant difference between the two potentially victorious parties. Thus, it’s hard to get a hardcore UKIP voter to tactically vote Tory to keep Labour out because both parties are part of the ‘LibLabCon‘ they despise, and it was hard this year to persuade Labour and Green voters to vote Lib Dem to stop the Tories when they saw no difference between the two parties. Because the non-Tory vote was heavily fractured and generally not co-ordinated, that allowed the Tories to win a number of seats with relatively small shares of the vote – as Thevoz and Baston point out, many Tory gains from Lib Dems were with smaller numbers of votes than had won the seat in 2010 because of this effect.

There’s a good news and bad news conclusion to this. The good news is as Thevoz and Baston say: the Tory majorities in a lot of the seats they gained from the Lib Dems aren’t overwhelmingly massive and impossible to overwhelm in the future, but the bad news is that the only way those seats can be won back is by convincing non-Tory voters that not only are the Lib Dems capable of challenging the Tories in those seats, but that there’s reason for those voters to believe there’s a sufficient enough difference between us and the Tories to make it worth their while shifting. That part isn’t as simple as it sounds, because it’s not just about the messages Lib Dems put out, but how much they co-ordinate or clash with the messages coming from the other parties and the media generally. It’s one thing to persuade the sort of person who turns out at a local council by-election that it’s OK to vote Liberal Democrat again, but how do you get that message over to rest of the electorate?

I.

Old news, but I only just heard about it: Long Island woman says psych ward doctors believed she was delusional for insisting Obama follows her on Twitter.

The story: a woman was brought in for psychiatric evaluation. During the evaluation, she said President Obama followed her on Twitter. The psychiatrists decided she was psychotic and forced medication on her. But in fact, President Obama does follow her on Twitter, just as he does six hundred thousand other people. So they committed a perfectly sane person for telling the truth, leading to what the article calls a “frightening eight-day ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ ordeal”.

I don’t know anything about this case or this person, and I definitely don’t want this to sound like I have anything to say one way or the other about this person I have never met. But I’ve been involved in enough similar cases to have a different perspective, and wonder whether it was quite as much of an outrage as the article makes it out to be.

Consider: the comment occurred when she was in a hospital for psychiatric evaluation; that is, she was brought in before the Obama comment. According to the article:

The bizarre experience began Sept. 12, when the NYPD seized her prized 2003 BMW 325Ci in Harlem because they suspected she was high on weed, her attorney, Michael Lamonsoff, said. Cops found no marijuana but confiscated her ride anyway, he said. The NYPD declined to comment.

The following day, Brock walked into the NYPD’s Public Service Area 6 stationhouse in Harlem to retrieve her car, her suit charges. Brock — an eccentric 32-year-old born in Jamaica with dreams of making it big in the entertainment business — admitted in an interview she was “emotional,” but insisted she in no way is an “emotionally disturbed person.” Nevertheless, cops cuffed her and put her in an ambulance bound for the hospital, her suit charges.

This sort of elides over everything in between “went into police station to ask for car back” and “cops put her in an ambulance bound for the hospital.”

I’ve had patients sent by ambulance from the police station. It’s almost always because they started screaming and yelling threats at the police. Now, screaming and yelling threats at the police, although not a very good idea, is not always evidence of psychiatric disorder. But it often is. If you’re manic or on drugs, you’re a lot more likely to have the particular type of bad judgment that makes screaming threats at the police a seem like a good idea.

I don’t know what happened with Ms. Brock, and the article doesn’t say. I did take a look at her Twitter account, which is mostly angry tweets about Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and police brutality. A typical example is “Police should NOT be allowed to Murder the Citizens of this Country!!! We are not Animals!!! @BarackObama fix it NOW!!! #BanGuns”. Other Tweets seem maybe a little threatening, like the ominous “@NRA you people deserve the wrath that will come on you in the very near future” and “#KillRacists”.

So – cops have just done something very unfair to a person who likes making threats and doesn’t like cops, and who herself admits to being “eccentric” and “emotional”. Again without knowing what went on, my guess was that her “discussion” with the police was sufficiently exciting that they thought calling an ambulance for a psych evaluation was in order.

So imagine you’re the psychiatrist, you’re receiving a patient from the police for evaluation after she got in some kind of screaming match with them. And now she tells you Barack Obama follows her on Twitter. The article says:

“I told (the doctor) Obama follows me on Twitter to show her the type of person I am. I’m a good person, a positive person. Obama follows positive people!”

This is weird. At best, it displays a surprising ignorance of how Twitter and/or the world works. Yes, Obama follows 600,000 people on Twitter, but this does not prove that each of them is “a positive person”. I would assume he has some program that auto-follows anyone who mentions him. When you think this is a good thing to bring up during, of all times, a psychiatric evaluation, then I start to wonder.

(I should also add here that, in my limited experience, social media is God’s gift to grandiose psychiatric patients. None of them are “a guy with a Facebook page”. They’re all “social media celebrities with hundreds of followers”. It’s always “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I HAVE HUNDREDS OF FOLLOWERS ON TWITTER! EVEN [NAME OF TWITTER PERSON I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF] FOLLOWS ME! THIS IS GOING TO GO VIRAL!” One patient even told me, in a threatening manner, that his blog had over a thousand hits. “You mean a day?” I asked. “No, total,” he answered. Then he wondered why I was so utterly failing to look impressed.)

So I’ll be honest – if someone had just been brought in for a shouting match with police, and the first thing they told me was that President Obama follows them on Twitter, well – among the most common symptoms of mania are irritability, grandiosity, poor decision-making, and flamboyant dress/behavior. Getting in a fight with the police sounds like irritability and poor decision making, thinking the Obama follow is relevant sounds like grandiosity, and this woman’s Facebook photo certainly suggests a flair for the dramatic. I’m not saying I would commit her on these factors alone, and a lot would depend on the rest of the history. But she already would have started digging quite a hole for herself.

Remember, psychiatrists have to err on the side of admitting people. Even if this lady didn’t have bipolar disorder, admitting her for further evaluation seems like the sort of thing that could be an honest mistake.

(and remember, all we have here is her side of the story. Goodness only knows what other things she might have said or done that she didn’t leak to the news for their sympathetic article based entirely on her testimony.)

But then there’s the hospital’s subsequent conduct. They said that she was unemployed. She said she was employed and could prove it through her Internet presence. The hospital apparently didn’t check and continued to say she was psychotic for thinking she was employed. How could the hospital possibly be so incompetent as to not check the link to her employment documents that she was personally giving them?

II.

Let me tell you about Professor T.

(this would be a good time to reiterate that every patient story I tell here is a composite of multiple different people with all of the details changed around to protect anonymity. The gist of the story points out a true thing, but the specifics are all twisted around so thoroughly that even the people involved couldn’t recognize themselves.)

Professor T came to me in handcuffs. The police had picked him up in response to a call at the local university, where he was trying to give a lecture to a class that wasn’t expecting him and didn’t want him. The class’s actual professor had asked what the heck he was doing, and he had explained that he was Professor T, world-famous physicist, and that the head of the college had invited him to give a lecture on his theories that day, and it was too bad she hadn’t communicated this with the rank-and-file teachers, but he was a very busy man and they should all be honored by his presence and stop what they were doing and listen to him. A quick call to the administration confirmed none of them had any idea who he was either, and when he refused to go away or stop trying to lecture, the police were called to remove him. He started yelling and screaming at the police and telling them they were fools who were too small-minded to recognize a great scientist when they saw one, and they’d get what was coming to them. The cops decided this was a job for a psychiatrist and brought him to me.

Professor T said he’d just been really angry that the bureaucracy had screwed up badly enough to make him miss his lecture and that no one was willing to accommodate him. He was, after all, a very important leading scientist with a busy schedule. He moved in elite circles! Famous people like Edward Witten knew him well, and I was welcome to call to confirm that! He was used to being shown more respect!

I got a weird vibe from Professor T during our discussion. I know that distinguishing between professors and hobos is a famously difficult problem, but he just struck me as a little too much towards the hobo end for comfort. So I asked him if I could see any proof that he was who he said that he was.

He was happy to comply, and once we got to a computer he showed me some scientific papers with his name on top, suitably peppered with complicated words like “tachyon” and “chromodynamics”. He showed me a picture of him winning some prestigious physics prize, dressed in a lab coat with a medal around his neck. He even showed me what looked like a press release: “Professor T comes up with new Theory Of Everything that may explain Higgs Boson”. It was pretty convincing.

But.

First, a bunch of patients had cancelled on me that day, so I had way too much free time.

Second, I used to be in a really complicated geopolitical simulation. One of my roles was the local investigative reporter. I researched and published stories about all of the weird conspiracies and manipulations going on. I was pretty good at it. One day, a trusted source sent me links to what turned out to be the biggest story I’d ever stumbled upon. A bunch of forwarded emails and a password protected forum (which my source helpfully provided the password to) proved that the people nobody trusted were in fact involved in a large and highly illegal plot against everyone else. Delighted, I published the story, only to be met with total denial from everyone involved. Not the sort of denial I usually got in situations like this. The kind of denial you get when someone actually didn’t do something. Further investigation eventually revealed that my “trusted” source had made it all up. He’d laboriously faked both sides of all the email conversations he sent me, then made the entire secret forum by himself, posting daily under five or ten different aliases for weeks in order to create the illusion of a large community. Some famous magician – I can’t find the quote right now – once said that the secret of magic was to spend more effort preparing than any sane person would think possible. That was how my trusted source got me, and it was a lesson that really, really stuck.

So since I had the time, I started looking into Professor T’s credentials a little more. His papers were hosted on a private site and didn’t show up on Google Scholar and didn’t seem to be affiliated with any journal. The press release was on the same website, and seemed suspiciously badly written. There was nobody else in his photograph, and it was impossible to see what was written on the medal. Was it possible that a crazy hobo had just written some things that looked like papers, written something that looked like a press release, and then bought a lab coat and medal and taken a picture with them? Do real theoretical physicists even wear lab coats?

So I asked him if I could talk to Dr. Witten, whom he said he knew well. Professor T agreed. I Googled his phone number and called him up.

(It wasn’t actually Dr. Witten whom I called, but the case I’m adapting this story from involved someone else about as famous)

His secretary answered the phone, and I said I was a psychiatrist, and I asked if I could speak to Dr. Witten. The secretary was reluctant, but when I said it was about Professor T, she immediately asked me to hold, and I got Dr. Witten himself. I asked him if he knew Professor T.

“Absolutely,” said Dr. Witten. “He’s a crazy guy who keeps calling me up and telling me he’s solved physics. I don’t think he’s actually a professor of anything. I read one of his papers once, just for kicks, and it’s just a bunch of science terms like ‘tachyon’ and ‘chromodynamics’ strung together without rhyme or reason. It might fool a layman, but trust me, it makes no sense. I told him to stop calling me, and he wouldn’t, and finally I had to block him on my phone, and now he’s sending me letters in the mail, and it’s always same ranting about tachyon chromodynamics, which isn’t even a real thing. Did you say you’re a psychiatrist? Perfect, I’m so glad he’s finally getting treatment.”

I told Professor T about this, and he nodded his head. “Yes,” he said “I told you that Dr. Witten knows me well. I didn’t say he liked me. He still doesn’t fully understand my theories. But I am sure he’ll come around.”

I kept Professor T in hospital for about a week, and I can’t count how many times he yelled at me and complained that I was being unfair to him by not doing whatever the heck he wanted me to do that day. Read another one of his papers that would convince me his theories were sound. Call up yet another famous physicist he “knew”. Look at yet another of his fake websites devoted to himself. Every day, he threatened to sue me and my boss and the entire hospital for keeping him there even though he’d “proven” to us he was who he said.

Remember, delusions are fixed false beliefs. People are quite sure they’re true, quite sure they have evidence for them, and nothing (except occasionally really good psychiatric treatment) will convince them otherwise. They’ll keep demanding you take time to investigate more and more bizarre “arguments” and “evidence”, and if you ever stop, even after days and days of everything they say being one hundred percent refuted, they’ll accuse you of acting in bad faith.

(it’s like Internet arguments, only more so)

In everyday life, we get by on an assumption of trust. If I tell my boss I’m sick, he probably believes me. If he doesn’t believe me, and I send him a doctor’s note, he probably believes that the doctor’s note isn’t forged. If he doesn’t believe that, and he asks me for a number to call the doctor at, he probably believes it’s a real doctor and not my brother pretending to be a doctor to help me out. Yes, there are a couple of people who abuse that trust, but few enough that the rest of us are usually able to get by.

In psychiatry, there are a bunch of delusional people, paranoid people, narcissists, compulsive liars, and others who deliberately or unknowingly stretch the truth past the breaking point. Worse, a lot of the cues we use to detect liars, like “Are they shifty-looking?” don’t work, either because the person involved really believes what they’re saying or because they’re too far from the neurotypical norm for our usual intuitions to apply. A lot of the assumptions of trust we usually use crash and burn. If the person sitting next to me on the train says he’s a physics professor, I believe him. If the person brought in by police for a psychiatric evaluation says he’s a physics professor, maybe I don’t, and “how much time do I spent assessing the evidence and how much do I believe?” is a really tough question.

I am not trained as a police officer, detective, or judge. I’m also not paid to do their jobs. I’m also stuck in a system where the primary incentive is that if I ever fail to commit someone, then if they do anything bad after that I can be sued for everything I own. So I am stuck drawing partial conclusions, from incomplete evidence, in time I don’t have, from people I can’t necessarily trust, without even the ability to err on the side of caution.

I don’t think the hospital in the article followed great practices – in particular I’m unclear on how they came to believe the person was unemployed. And sending her the bill for her own involuntary commitment is an obvious injustice (albeit a universally practiced one). But the mistakes in the admission process are all ones I can imagine any psychiatrist making. Including me.

And that means something. You can trust me. After all, four different Dalai Lama accounts follow me on Twitter.

From author Amy Stirling Casil:

We wrote about how Barnes & Noble is a lonely, frightening place for a young book: and it is. Any retail consultant would be appalled by what goes on in most B & N stores. Crowded aisles, merchandise on the floor, dusty shelves, merchandise used as decoration, uninspiring displays, and we did not even go into the stockroom, where we have heard some book shipments are simply stored until it’s time to return the unopened boxes. Those books (midlist, usually) aren’t ever even shelved since clerks don’t think any customers will want them. That’s some broken sales pipeline. Much like the troubled businesses on Bar Rescue, Restaurant: Impossible, The Profit and the late, lamented Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares: nothing about the business itself could possibly contribute to flat or declining sales and profit. Barnes & Noble is in trouble because “no one reads any longer” and “young people don’t read” and a million other excuses.

So, a lot of people who love reading and writing think Amazon is the solution. The Amazon Kindle is an amazing device, and I personally use it extensively: I am right in the middle of that device’s sweet spot demographic. I’m a college-educated woman who appreciates the ability to make the e-book type any size and shape I like. I know how to quickly find books I’m interested in.

. . . .

[W]e caught some blowback because we supported Ursula Le Guin’s contention that Amazon’s system is causing a problem for books and readership by focusing on quick-selling, short-term books.

The blowback was from Hugh Howey adherents and enthusiasts. We were informed we should look at Author Earnings Report to find out what was really going on with books and readers. Some commenters suggested we were not aware of such options as Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) or quality print on demand options like Amazon’s CreateSpace. Those were the nice folks. The other ones were getting a kick out of slagging on a National Book Award winner (Ursula Le Guin) and calling me names.

. . . .

So, here’s the deal, new writers. To you, this report means exactly nothing. This is heat, light, smoke, almost totally wasted time and effort. It covers Amazon Kindle book sales and nothing else. It covers pricing information and what it presents is pretty dubious. The report has simply proven that non-traditionally published e-books sell in the Kindle format on the Kindle device. It refers to a “shadow industry” of books without ISBNs – i.e. books with ASINs only, the Kindle identifier. Similarly, books can be sold via Smashwords without an ISBN.

. . . .

When people talk about the large share of the book market that Amazon has, they are referring to their print sales plus their e-book sales. No one really knows what Amazon’s aggregate total really represents in terms of market share, except the overall trade publishing industry is a $27 billion industry in the U.S. and we recently determined that Amazon’s maximum revenue for books was about $7 billion last year and we’re being very generous about it: 26% of the market. That is a whole lot. But if e-books just overtook the paper book sales via Amazon less than a year ago (they did), that’s 13% of the book buying market — and that is stretching it.

If I deal with the numbers that “Author Earnings Report” is trying to use to represent the market opportunity for indy-published writers, I’ll just extrapolate the “1 day earnings” for indy-published writers it estimates for May 1 sales: $1.1 million USD x 365 days = $401.5 million. That is 1.4% of the total market. Amazon’s practices mean little good news for Amazon-only authors, that’s for certain. And Amazon does not seem to be growing readership.

. . . .

All you have to do is walk into any tech/electronics store like Best Buy or mobile provider store like ATT or Verizon and talk to customer service reps about who is buying what. The Kindle Fire, despite all of Amazon’s efforts, isn’t being adopted at the high rate of Apple, Samsung or other products. Marcus Lemonis, the Profit, could easily tell you why; and Amazon’s policies regarding its book content and acquisition aren’t going to help the situation much. Right now, the Kindle is a tablet, but it didn’t start out that way and Amazon’s business was built on getting books — paper books — into the hands of 1995′s readers. Now it’s 2015.

People don’t read books much on tablets so far (overall), but they are starting to do it more and more. Students definitely want textbooks and resources on their mobile devices. They do, consistently, when questioned, say they prefer paper books.

. . . .

The Kindle serves people who already liked to read before they got one and who were a particular type of book buyer and reader. It’s a secondary, downstream device and market. It will never be an upstream, introductory device and market unless it changes a vast number of things about how it acquires content.

Link to the rest at Amy Stirling Casil and thanks to Cedar for the tip.

Here’s a link to Amy Stirling Casil’s books

Despite all that has happened at the Telegraph, its obituaries are still the best.

Here it is on Patrick Macnee's childhood:

His father was a racehorse trainer, a diminutive man known as “Shrimp” Macnee whose dapper wardrobe his son later recreated for Steed. He had a taste for gin and enlivened his dinner parties by levelling a shotgun at those guests he suspected of pacifist tendencies. 

Macnee’s mother took refuge in a circle of friends that included Tallulah Bankhead and the madam Mrs Meyrick, before absconding with a wealthy lesbian, Evelyn. Young Patrick was brought up by the pair and was instructed to call Evelyn “Uncle”. He managed to resist their efforts to dress him as a girl, wearing a kilt as a compromise. His father fled to India, from where he was later expelled for urinating off a balcony on to the heads of the Raj’s elite, gathered below for a race-meeting. 

Evelyn financed Macnee’s education, at Summer Fields — where he first acted, playing opposite Christopher Lee — and then Eton. His corruption began when he was introduced to whisky by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff, who had escaped into the garden with a bottle when brought in to consecrate Evelyn’s private chapel. Macnee was then expelled from Eton for running a pornography and bookmaking empire.

All of which made Matthew Sweet suggest:

Maybe explains why Steed's gentlemanly response to 60s feminism: grateful, exhilarated, conspiratorial, slightly turned-on?

— Matthew Sweet (@DrMatthewSweet) June 26, 2015

That seems exactly right to me.

Robert J. Smith thinks there might just now be five votes on the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the Death Penalty unconstitutional. I do not know if that's so but if you think the decisions last week made some people angry…

The post Recommended Reading appeared first on News From ME.

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June 29th, 2015: LAST DAY FOR THIS BAD BOY: Are you a time traveller from the future? Yeah, me neither, I am definitely not that thing I just said. Here is a limited-edition shirt I made that explains how you are for sure native to 2015, just like everyone else! – Ryan

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July 1st, 2015: Happy Canada Day! This year you get a comic on Canada Day, because I don't take holidays off anymore after going to 3x a week. UNFORTUNATELY THIS COMIC DOES NOT DIRECTLY REFERENCE CANADA?? – Ryan

On October 24, 1991 Gene Roddenberry passed away.

It may seem strange to grant him an entire chapter in this book. Roddenberry has, after all been an undeniable presence since the very beginning of Star Trek, and no small amount of digital ink has been spilled on my part, or on the part of others, trying to piece together precisely who he was and what his contributions to Star Trek really were. I'm not going to do this every time a major creative figure exits our story permanently, but given the stature Roddenberry had, and to some extent still has, and the synchronicity of his death happening almost exactly parallel with Star Trek's 25th Anniversary, there's no way this was going to be seen as anything other than a massive event even among a 24-month year marked by massive events. There's only one other primary creative figure in all Star Trek who casts a remotely comparable shadow over the series' heart and soul to the one Gene Roddenberry does: He'll get his due when his own time comes (in fact he's in many ways *more* deserving of tribute than Roddenberry, a true unsung hero), but right now this is something that needs to be properly addressed for good.

From the beginning of Vaka Rangi, I have been exceedingly and harshly critical of Gene Roddenberry. I did not, I want to make eminently clear, start this project with a chip on my shoulder and an ax to grind. This was supposed to be a voyage of peace and understanding. And I went out of my way to be as even-handed about him as I possibly could in my inaugural essay on “The Cage”: That episode is, without question, Star Trek as Gene Roddenberry saw it. It's the purest, most distilled version of his original vision for what the series should be, and even though he had a ton of help cleaning it up and making it presentable from Bob Justman and Herb Solow, that remains plainly on display in the finished product. But the other thing about “The Cage” is that, unfortunately, it is fucking terrible. So that's also where things start to go wrong for both Gene Roddenberry and Vaka Rangi.

The period of the original Star Trek Gene Roddenberry was the showrunner for, from “The Corbomite Maneuver” through “Dagger of the Mind”, does not inspire confidence (with the extremely notable exception of “Balance of Terror”). Nor does the fact Roddenberry thought, for whatever reason, that “Mudd's Women” and “The Omega Glory” would have been suitable pilots for Star Trek. Once I started to actually dig into the behind-the-scenes history of Star Trek and actually cast a critical lens upon it, I discovered two things. One, I wish I had never thought to do that because the whole thing is way over my head and way too dangerous for me to me to even conceive of messing around with. And two, in the accounts from people who were closest to him, Gene Roddenberry comes across as a positively unlikeable person. Far from the singularly gifted visionary accepted history continues to paint him as to this day, those who worked with Roddenberry on the Original Series seemed to think he was an attention-hungry, domineering, misogynistic, thoroughly talentless hack and a pathological liar. And, well, the quality and content of the scripts that bear his name do little to refute that assertion.

It was at this point I realised my project was going to need to be way more contrarian and negative then I had ever feared. With the first volume I did set out to try and dispel some myths about Star Trek and get at the heart of what it really was...But as the true terrible reality of what that was going to entail began to sink in, it left me with mental scars I still bear to this day. I think Vaka Rangi lost something at that point, and you can probably track the exact moment in my writing when the full extent of what I'm in for and what I'm going to have to do hits me. Because there was no way I was going to let stuff like this go unchallenged.

The litany of Gene Roddenberry's faults should be fairly well documented by now. I myself have, at times, taken what could be construed as a kind of perverse cathartic glee in pointing them out. We all know how most of what was good about the Original Star Trek came from D.C. Fontana, Paul Schneider, Gene Coon, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and John Meredyth Lucas. Roddenberry's behaviour in the context of things like “Assignment: Earth”, both the abortive TV show and the Star Trek episode it became, are obvious and inexcusable. Add to this the fact that he was, even very late in life, an alcoholic and a womanizer who compulsively cheated on Majel Barrett and was perpetually stoned (no, really) and tried to lure people to his inner circle on the basis of his status, Star Trek's success and nude Beverly Hills pool parties...And one slowly begins to behold a picture of a man who doesn't exactly seem to deserve the status in pop culture history he still enjoys.

But as I've tried to make clear over the years, this is not a contrarian blog. I don't want to be down on absolutely every aspect of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry included. I'm firmly convinced there is true goodness in what Star Trek became, and I still remember those principles of Vaka Rangi I set out fresh-faced with years ago. I'm still looking for ways to bring them back somehow. And so I'd like to remind us all that when we think of Gene Roddenberry, though his vices must be addressed (maybe even brought to centre stage), we must also remember the side of him, also undeniable, that did really seem to understand what Star Trek had come to mean. Here was a man who once said “there is no more profound way in which people could express what Star Trek has meant to them than by creating their own very personal Star Trek things”.

In spite of what fans today think, Star Trek grew far beyond Gene Roddenberry. And I think this is something Gene Roddenberry himself was acutely aware of, especially as he neared the end of his life. While his initial pitch and writer's guide for Star Trek: The Next Generation is as much an endurance test in excruciating unreadability as anything else he penned, from the beginning he was steadfast in his belief that the utopianism he saw in the show was something worth fighting for. He wrote the better future fans of the Original Series saw in it and came to love into Star Trek: The Next Generation diegetically, and that might be the most important part of his legacy. Yes, this caused undo strain on the various creative teams deep in the trenches of the show's material reality (though this current one seemed to have a far more amiable relationship with him by the end), but for the first time in Star Trek's history failure was on them, not Gene Roddenberry. Because this time Gene Roddenberry was right. Utopia is worth fighting for.

A case could be made, and has, that the reason Roddenberry was so unwavering (some would say fanatical) on this issue was that because, as he came to grips with his own looming mortality, he wanted to see a world free of strife and conflict he knew he was never going to see in this life. Also, he was very probably literally losing his mind, growing actually senile and delirious all throughout his three year association with Star Trek: The Next Generation leading to his stroke and eventual death, which would sadly explain a great deal. But I'd like to think it might also have been because he had genuinely had his worldview changed, if ever so slightly, from his experiences with Star Trek fandom. He knew what Star Trek meant to people and could come to stand for, even if it wasn't the Star Trek he actually created. Gene Roddenberry learned from his own creation its most fundamental lesson and became a better person because of it. Maybe not an entirely good person, but a better one than he had been.

Maybe Gene Roddenberry's most important message can be divined from his final acts. Though he gave his blessing to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, telling Rick Berman and Michael Piller he wanted to hear more about it, he must have known that conversation was never going to happen and that he would never live to see the show. But he must have also known that the new show could not have been in better hands. As was Star Trek on the whole, because Star Trek now belongs to everybody. And as he himself had stated just a few years earlier in 1988 (as quoted by Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann in Star Trek: The Next Generation 365)

“I would hope that there are bright young people growing up over time who will bring to [Star Trek] levels and areas that were beyond me. And I won't feel jealous of that at all...It'll go on without any of us, and get better and better and better. That really is the human condition-to improve.”

I.

A while back one of my patients was having a foot problem, so I consulted the hospital podiatrist. He met me in my workroom, and I explained exactly what I needed from him, but over the course of the explanation he started looking more and more uncomfortable and distracted, so finally I stopped and was just like “Okay, out with it, what’s your problem?”

And he said: “That guy with the wild hair pounding on the window and shouting threats and obscenities at us.”

And I said: “Oh, him? That’s just Bob. Don’t worry about him, he always does that.”

The podiatrist seemed inadequately reassured.

I thought about this because as of today I am halfway done with my four-year psychiatry residency.

One of my teachers told me that you go to medical school to learn things, and then you go to residency to get used to them. It’s not quite that simple – you certainly learn a lot in residency – but there’s a lot of truth to it. I remember that my first week on call, somebody had a seizure and I totally freaked out – AAAAH SEIZURE WHAT DO I DO WHAT DO I DO? – even though I had previously been able to pass tests on that exact situation. But my last time on call, somebody also had a seizure, and I sort of strolled in half-asleep, ordered the necessary tests and consultations and supportive care, then strolled out and went back to bed.

And then there are the little things, like learning to tune out a psychotic guy banging on the window and yelling threats at you.

II.

It’s interesting that psychiatric hospitals are used as a cliche for “a situation of total chaos” – I think I’ve already mentioned the time when the director of a psych hospital I worked at told us, apparently without conscious awareness or irony, that if Obamacare passed our hospital would have too many patients and “the place would turn into a madhouse”. There’s a similar idiom around “Bedlam”, which comes from London’s old Bethlehem psychiatric hospital.

In fact, psych hospitals are much more orderly than you would think. Maybe 80% of the patients are pretty ‘with it’ – depressed people, very anxious people, people with anger issues who aren’t angry at the moment, people coming off of heroin or something. The remaining 20% of people who are very psychotic mostly just stay in their rooms or pace back and forth talking to themselves and not bothering anyone else. The only people you really have to worry about most of the time are the manic ones and occasionally severe autistics, and even they’re usually okay.

For a place where two dozen not-very-stable people are locked up in a small area against their will, violence is impressively rare. The nurses have to deal with some of it, since they’re the front-line people who have to forcibly inject patients with medication, and they have gotten burned a couple of times. And we doctors are certainly trained to assess for it, defuse it, and if worst comes to worst hold our own until someone can get help.

Yet in the two years I’ve worked at Our Lady Of An Undisclosed Location, years when each doctor has talked to each of their patients at least once a day, usually alone in an office, usually telling them things they really don’t want to hear like “No, you can’t go home today” – during all that time, not one doctor has been attacked. Not so much as a slap or a poke.

I am constantly impressed with how deeply the civilizing instinct has penetrated. When I go out of the workroom and tell Bob, “I’m sorry, but you’re disturbing people, you’re going to have to stop banging on the window and shouting threats, let’s go back to your room,” then as long as I use a calm, quiet, and authoritative voice, that is what he does. With very few exceptions, there is nobody so mentally ill that calmness + authority + the implied threat of burly security guards won’t get them to grumble under their breath but generally comply with your requests, reasonable or otherwise.

III.

I’d like to say I’ve taken advantage of this to go mad with power. But it’s actually a really crappy situation for everyone involved.

The most common reason for admission to a psychiatric hospital is “person is a danger to themselves or others”. The average length of stay in a psychiatric hospital is about one week.

Some clever person might ask: “Hey, don’t most psychiatric medicines require more than a week to take effect?” Good question! The answer is “yes”. Antidepressants classically take four weeks. Lithium and antipsychotics are more complicated, but the textbooks will still tell you a couple of weeks in both cases. And yet people are constantly being brought to psychiatric hospitals for dangerousness, treated with medications for one week, and then sent off. What gives?

As far as I can tell, a lot of it is the medical equivalent of security theater.

The most common type of case I see is “person who was really angry, said ‘I’ll kill myself’ in a fit of rage, and then their partner called the cops and they were brought to hospital.” These people stop being angry after a day or two and then no longer make these comments, even assuming they meant it in the first place which most of them don’t.

The second most common type of case I see is “person who was really angry, did try to kill themselves, and it didn’t work.” Again, these people have stopped being angry. Failed suicide attempts also have their own interesting way of clearing the mind for a little while, so they’re in a sort of grace period. Sending these people to a psychiatric hospital makes the public feel good because they’re Doing Something About Suicide, and makes psychiatrists feel good because after a few days they’ve stopped being suicidal so it looks like we’re Making A Difference. There is no way we could leave this equilibrium now even if we wanted to, because if we didn’t keep these people for a week and they ever attempted suicide again, we would get sued to oblivion.

The third most common type of case I see is “severely mentally ill person who’s been living at a care home for twenty years, but then they got in a fight and so their care home sent them to the hospital.” We shuffle their medications around and send them back to the care home where they’d been living happily for twenty years until some random trigger set them off.

We don’t call this “security theater”. We do sometimes call it a “holding environment”. Psych hospitals are kind of boring. There’s no boyfriend to get in a screaming match with, no boss pushing you to work harder, and no drug dealers to get heroin from. On the other hand, there’s lots of structure – art therapy at 10, meeting with your doctor at 11, recreation group at 12, and so on. It’s like a terrible vacation in the world’s least attractive hotel. People get a chance to cool off and forget about whatever set them off. Then they go back to their life. If they’re lucky, our social workers have managed to connect them to a better outpatient psychiatrist, care home, or support group, and maybe that will improve their lives sometime down the line. But I don’t think anyone imagines there was some fundamental Quality Of Dangerousness in them which is now gone.

To the degree that it is all security theater, it’s really hard to give an honest answer to a patient asking why they have to stay in hospital.

When I first started this work, my reaction to these people was “Come on, it’s only a week, it’s not like you’re stuck here forever, just deal with it.” This lasted until I remembered that when some stupid policy forces me to come into hospital on a day I would otherwise have off, I freak out, because I value my free time too much to be okay with having it taken away from me for bad reasons. Heck, my power was out the past couple of days, and I couldn’t use the Internet, and I was calling the power company and being like “COME ON YOU NEED TO FIX THIS ALREADY I AM LOSING DAYS OF MY LIFE THAT I COULD OTHERWISE BE SPENDING IN IMPORTANT STUFF.” So now I try to avoid throwing stones.

(there’s another aspect of this, which is that people constantly protest that horrible things will happen to them based on that week. For example: “My boss said if I miss one more day of work, I’ll lose my job, and then I’ll have no way to support my family.” Or: “My rent payment is due tomorrow, if I miss it I’ll be evicted and all of my stuff will go to the landfill, and there’s no way I can handle this through Internet or telephone or asking a friend to help.” I assume 90% of these stories are false, but the 10% that are true are still bad enough to more than outbalance any good we can do.)

After that, my reaction to these people was “Yes, you may be angry now, but you will thank us later.” This is true of many people, including some of the most histrionically upset. But I’ve since learned that it’s probably not true of the majority. The Shrink Rap blog surveyed former psychiatric inpatients and found that 62% said their experience was not helpful and they were “the same or worse at discharge”. I’d like to dismiss this as people just carrying a grudge for having to be there at all, but the same survey finds that a very similar 56% of voluntarily admitted patients said the same thing (although not all “voluntary” admissions are as voluntary as the name expects). Now, I don’t know for sure what to think about that survey – a lot of people describe their hospitals as doing things which are super illegal and which I wouldn’t expect a hospital to be able to get away with and stay open for more than twenty-four hours, and the population of psych patients who read psychiatric blogs is probably a nonrandom sample – but I no longer feel like I can confidently say that our patients will thank us later.

(none of this is to say that you shouldn’t check yourself into a hospital if you’re feeling suicidal – you’ll get the holding environment that makes sure you don’t kill yourself for the immediate future, you’ll get connected to a system that can give you useful referrals and medications much faster, and 38% will also end up being directly helped.)

So now what I tell people is the Cliffs’ Notes version of the above – “I’m sorry you have to be here, but we are going to keep you for a few more days to evaluate you, your estimated day of discharge is X but that’s not a promise, if there’s anything specifically making you uncomfortable please let me or the nurses know and we’ll see what we can do.”

I can’t figure out a good way to say the spiel without the last sentence, which is too bad because then they do let me and the nurses know things. Most of them are things that I, as a low-ranking doctor who cannot totally rearrange the unit according to my will, have no ability to change. Some of them are things nobody can change.

Like! It turns out when you lock constitutionally anxious people in a new environment full of psychotic people, they become really really anxious. They tend to request antianxiety drugs. I am happy to give them reasonable doses of the non-addictive anti-anxiety drugs, which then totally fail to do anything, because their idiot outpatient psychiatrist was giving them heroin mixed with horse tranquilizers every day or something. They demand whatever they were getting on the outside, but twice as much, and I can’t give it to them even if I want to because of our safety policies. And now I’m the bad guy.

Or! Some people don’t like noise. I sympathize with this as I am just about the most misophonic person in the world. On the other hand, there’s always one screamer in a psychiatric hospital. Sometimes this screamer chooses to do their thing at four in the morning. The law gives us limited ability to lock them in a soundproof room, and definitely not all the time. So if you are startled by loud noise, you are kind of out of luck. Even if we can put you on the other side of the ward, you’re still going to be bothered by staff coming in your room every fifteen minutes to make sure you haven’t killed yourself, which they are legally required to do. You can complain that the lack of sleep is hurting your recovery, and I believe you, but aside from showing you where we keep the earplugs there’s not much I can do. Once again, now I’m the bad guy.

Add to this people with picky tastes that our kitchen can’t satisfy, people who get bored in the absence of some kind of entertainment we can’t provide, smokers who are unsatisfied by nicotine patches, and the occasional very honest drug addict who just wants some drugs, and I spend about 30% of my day patiently explaining to people why their preferences are totally reasonable and I realize they’re in pain but there’s nothing I can do for them at this moment.

And I know it sounds really selfish of me to say so, but this is really exhausting.

Sometimes I wonder if the concentration camp guards in Auschwitz ever had this problem. Like, the ones who weren’t especially sadistic, but who took it because it was a 9-5 job, and word around the water cooler was that it was an easy way to make Scharführer after a few years. And every night they would come home to their wives and be like “Gott in Himmel, Helga, you have no idea what I have to put up with every day, all of these prisoners won’t stop asking me for food and water and stuff, and I try to give them a couple of extra scraps when the regulations allow, but even after I do that they just want more food and they never stop, don’t they realize it makes me feel really guilty and there’s nothing I can do, and every day is more miserable and draining than the last, and I mean, seriously Helga, how entitled can people get?”

I know that’s a horrible metaphor, and our hospital is really good and run by some of the best staff and nurses and doctors I have ever met and tries 100% to help patients whenever it can. It’s just how I feel sometimes.

As you may have guessed, I do not very much like inpatient work. You can adjust to having to treat someone having a seizure. You can adjust to somebody banging on the window and screaming. But it’s really hard to adjust to constant moral self-questioning.

IV.

Now I am halfway done with my residency. I will be switching to outpatient work. Everyone who sees me will be there because they want to see me, or at worst because their parents/spouses/children/friends/voices are pressuring them into it. I will be able to continue seeing people for an amount of time long enough that the medications might, in principle, work. It sounds a lot more pleasant.

I have two equal and opposite concerns about outpatient psychiatry. The first is that I might be useless. Like, if someone comes in complaining of depression, then to a first approximation, after a few basic tests and questions to rule out some rarer causes, you give them an SSRI. I have a lot of libertarian friends who think psychiatrists are just a made-up guild who survive because it’s legally impossible for depressed people to give themselves SSRIs without paying them money. There’s some truth to that and I’ve previously joked that some doctors could profitably be replaced by SSRI vending machines.

The second concern is that everybody still screws it up. There’s an old saying: “Doctors bury their mistakes, architects cover theirs with vines, teachers send theirs into politics.” Well, outpatient psychiatrists send their mistakes to inpatient psychiatrists, so as an inpatient psychiatrist I’ve gotten to see a lot of them. Yes, to a first approximation when a person comes in saying they’re depressed you can just do a few basic tests and questions and then give them an SSRI. But the number of cases I’ve seen that end in disaster because their outpatient psychiatrist forgot to do the basic tests and questions, or decided that Adderall was the first-line medication of choice for depression – continues to boggle my mind. So either it’s harder than I think, or I’m surrounded by idiots, or I’m an idiot and don’t know it yet. In which case I’m about to learn.

Still, if it’s a disaster, it will be a different type of disaster.

And the thing I love about psychiatry – other than, I am contractually obligated to say, The People You Meet and The Chance To Make A Difference – is the lore. If all science is either physics or stamp collecting, psychiatry is stamp collecting par excellence with the world’s most interesting postal system, hunting through this incredibly confused and unsystematic mass of work done by thousands of brilliant people and trying to drag some kind of meaning out of it. Sometimes that involves dredging up weird drugs that no one else thinks about or remembers but which are perfectly suited for the precise situation at hand. Sometimes it’s disentagling complicated claims about what does and doesn’t work so you can be sure to give your patients the former. Other times it’s something totally out of left field, like reading this study and massively increasing the amount my consult patients liked me pretty much overnight with zero work.

I think outpatient will be good for this. There’s more freedom, more focus on treatment rather than warehousing, and a little bit more of an academic bent to it.

In the meantime, I am now a third year resident. There are people beneath me, and sometimes they do what I say! I get enough of a raise that I can say, for the first time in my life, that I am making the US median household income! I mostly get weekends off, except when I don’t!

And in two years, I’ll be done in Michigan and maybe I can move somewhere else and hang out with some of you people full-time.

So, Phil left a comment here which he’s since expanded into a full post. I suppose I should respond before the expansion rate of his responses really picks up and it turns into a book, but be warned that this may ramble.

Phil is quite scathing of my suggestion that Labour and the Liberal Democrats could work together in the future, saying it “would evince heroic levels of chutzpah (and not in a good way)” on the part of the Lib Dems. In that, he’s probably right, but I’m an optimist about this sort of thing right now, and to join a party that’s not one of the big two in a FPTP system is taking a position where you know you’re going to need huge reserves of chutzpah if you’re going to accomplish anything. However, I’m not suggesting that the two new leaders should be getting together this year and agreeing a joint strategy for the next few years, just that given the situation both parties find themselves in, working alone isn’t going to help anyone.

And yes, for every “making five years of Tory government possible and laying the groundwork for another five” we could respond with questions about just how much responsibility Labour has for the ongoing chaos in the Middle East and enabling the re-election of George Bush in 2004. We all know the past is an important part of politics – one force that keeps political parties together is a shared understanding of their past, I’d argue – but I think there comes a point where you have to put that behind you. It may be that mutual distrust means nothing can be agreed, even informally, before 2020 – one of the things that made 90s co-operation easier was David Owen finally disappearing from the stage – but it feels to me that the actual facts of voter behaviour make it the best opportunity for both parties.

One thing I’ve been looking at in my dissertation research is the question of equidistance and the idea of a centre party in a two-and-a-half party system being able to switch between supporting either of the other two parties. The example normally given is Germany’s FDP, and that’s because it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t occur much in party systems, with the only other example I’ve found at the moment being Belgium from the end of WW2 to the break up of the parties along language lines. However, while in both of those the liberal party was a part of governments of both left and right, there was an additional factor present there – grand coalition governments where left and right worked together and excluded the liberals were possible. The political system of both countries in that period wasn’t a straight line of left-centre-right but a triangle with socialism, Christian democracy and liberalism at the three points and links between all three being possible.

Even for all the talk of Labservatives, that’s not the system we have here – and it’s not the situation they have in those two countries either. Belgium’s party system is now quite chaotic with multiple new types of parties split across linguistic divides, and Germany’s become much more multi-party with more distinct left and right blocs. Given the electoral kicking the Liberal Democrats have just received while running on an almost explicitly equidistance campaign, it might be safe to say that it’s not a workable strategy anywhere any more, if it ever was.

The point here is that if the Liberal Democrats have a future (and Dan Falchikov makes some good points on that) within the current electoral system, we have to pick a side. We may have to wear hairshirts for a few years to show our atonement for previous errors, but what’s more important is having an actual message and identity of our own, not a split-the-difference middle of the road one.

Series 3 of Hannibal is, of course, largely about people who have been horribly wounded.  Cut to pieces.  Shattered.  Reassembled.  Stitched back together in new shapes.  They’ve spent months ‘recovering’, only to discover that the process has fundamentally changed them.  They cannot ‘recover’ their old selves. 

The show itself is taking episodes to ‘recover’ from the trauma of the end of Series 2.  That episode horribly wounded the show itself.  Cut it to pieces.  Shattered it.  Dismembered it.  We are now watching a show, a formula, a set-up, in fragments.  Roughly stitched back together but unable to return to its former shape. 

If Series 1 was a police procedural slowly going mad because of its own affinities, and Series 2 was a police procedural actually being slowly and gradually usurped and warped by those ascendant affinities, Series 3 is a police procedural shattered into fragments and glued back together by a triage doctor in an afterlife casualty ward. 

Because Series 3 shouldn’t exist.  It shouldn’t be on the air.  It is the ghost of a television programme.  It is the reanimated zombie corpse of a television programme.  Series 3 is what television programmes look like after they’ve ended, after they've been cancelled and are no longer being made and only exist in the television afterlife.

Which is bitterly ironic, if you think about it.

I was in the airport last Friday when the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage came down, and one of the first thoughts I had on that was, “Looks like I picked the right week to go to San Francisco.” And you know what? I was right! The city was, verily, bedecked in rainbow flags and happiness. After my events at ALA on Saturday I went with friends to City Hall, where the pride celebration was in full swing, and watched people being happy, all over the place (plus occasional hippie nudity, because San Francisco). It’s very rare to be in the right place at the right time, when history is actually and genuinely happening around you. But I was, and I was delighted in the happy circumstance that put me there.

I’m even more delighted that my country is now a better place than it was at 9:59am on June 26, when a minority of states still didn’t allow gays and lesbians the simple, basic right of marrying the person whom they loved and wished to spend their life with. Those days are now gone, thankfully, despite a few pockets of resistance, which I don’t suspect will last very long. Texas, as an example, is a place where the Attorney General is telling county clerks they may defy the Supreme Court; it’s also a place where two octogenarian men, together for more than 50 years, became the first same-sex couple to wed in Dallas County. Who do you think history, and Texas, will celebrate more: The two men confirming their decades-long love to each other, or the government official symbolically standing in front of the courthouse door to oppose their right to confirm that love?

Bluntly: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is going down in history as a bigot. So will Texas’ governor and lieutenant governor. So will Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and all the other politicians (and would-be politicians) who are thumping around now, pretending not to understand what it is that the Supreme Court does, or the legitimacy of its rulings under the Constitution, and pretending that their religion makes that feigned lack of understanding all right. Dan Patrick, the Texas Lieutenant Governor, has said “I would rather be on the wrong side of history than on the wrong side of my faith and my beliefs.” Well, Mr. Patrick, you’re not only definitely on the wrong side of history, but you’re also on the wrong side of your professed faith. Jesus never once said “be a bigot in my name.” If you believe He did, you might want to recheck your Bible. That admonition is not there, although the admonition to love your neighbor as yourself is.

On a related topic, this Time magazine article by Rod Dreher on orthodox Christians being “exiles in our own country” struck me as a bit dramatic. Not being in step with the mainstream of American life and opinion does not make you an exile, especially when you suffer no estrangement under the law. When the mainstream of American life did not include the idea that same-sex marriage was a viable thing, which was an opinion different than mine, I was not in exile in my own country — although same-sex couples may have been, as the law estranged them from the rights they should have had under the Constitution, now affirmed by the Supreme Court. The affirmation of those rights did not and does not take away rights from anyone who believes same-sex marriage is wrong. You may still believe they’re wrong; you just can’t stop those couples from getting legally married. Unless you think it should be your right to deprive others of their rights, everything’s the same for you as it was before. And if you do believe it’s your right to deprive others of their rights, then you’re a bigot, whether you cloak it in religion or not.

I suspect that this is the thing Dreher is really worried about, whether he’s aware of it or not — that the perception of certain religious sects will change from them being depositories of rectitude to cisterns of intolerance. Well, this is a fair concern, isn’t it? Over the last twenty years in particular, nearly every American learned that someone they cared about or even loved — a family member, a friend, a co-worker or neighbor or a person they admired — was not straight, or 100% conforming to society’s ideas of gender. Over the last two decades, Americans decided it was more important to tell those people they still loved them and that they deserved the same rights as everyone else, than it was to listen to those people who said, through their words and actions, that these people we loved represented some sort of threat. Your mom is not a threat to America, if she happens to be gay or bisexual. Nor is your dad. Nor your sibling, or your best friend, or Doug from Accounting or Jillian down the street or Ellen DeGeneres. Who are you going to choose to stand with? Your sister, or some dude at a pulpit demanding we believe the bowels of Hell will empty if she marries her girlfriend? Your sister’s girlfriend is awesome! That guy is a jerk!

Which is the thing: the religious sects terrified that they will now lose their moral standing lost that standing long before, when they said, in so many words, in so many actions, that the people we love and know and know to be good, and their desire to have the same rights as everyone else, are what’s wrong with America. Dreher laments we now live in a “post-Christian” America, but he’s wrong. The Americans who are standing with their loved ones and neighbors are in fact doing exactly what Jesus asked them to do, when he said that we should love each other as we love ourselves. It’s possible, however, that we live in a post-accepting-bigotry-cloaking-itself-in-the-raiments-of-Christ America. And, you know. I can live in that America just fine.

Regardless, the America we do live in now lets anyone person marry any other person who they love. I like this America. I am glad I live in it.

Yes, I have a story about the (now) late Patrick Macnee. In fact, I have two but I'm afraid neither one is much of a tale.

I always liked him on The Avengers but I couldn't possibly have liked him as much as a couple of ladies I knew back in my high school and college days. These were women friends of the platonic variety and it wasn't so much that they had crushes on him as that they wished that all males could be as polite, debonair, charming and well-dressed as Mr. Macnee was on his series. Compared to him, all of us were unkempt boors. I always assumed these ladies spoke to me because I wasn't quite as unkempt or boorish as some guys on the campus.

I think I knew four different women who had this dream that all men would be like Patrick Macnee. Two of them were corresponding with him. One day, one of them — a classmate named Sally — informed me that she'd received a letter from Mr. Macnee inviting her to lunch. He was in Southern California for a few months shooting some kind of film or TV show and living in a rented home in Malibu. He suggested that she drive up the coast some afternoon to meet and dine with him. She accepted…

…then had second thoughts. What if the witty, urbane gent who played John Steed had in mind something of a sexual nature? She had no reason to expect that but, hey, these things do happen. And even more than she feared an assault on her body, she was concerned about an assault on her respect for him. She said, "If he tried something…if he even suggested it, I'd just be devastated." Figuring that would be less likely to happen if she were escorted, she asked me to come along. I wasn't to be so much a bodyguard as a spoiler for any possible romantic conversation.

I agreed and on the appointed day, we drove up to the home Mr. Macnee was renting in Malibu. He greeted us warmly and Sally was immediately devastated…not because of anything he did. It was because of how he was dressed.

She later admitted it was foolish but she'd expected him to be dressed like his character on The Avengers. He wasn't…and he probably wouldn't have been even if it hadn't been over 90°. No bowler, no suit, no gentlemanly attire. He was in a short-sleeved sport shirt, shorts and sandals. He looked like almost everyone else in Malibu. Having not shaved in a few days, he looked a lot like the guys on our campus she found so unkempt and boorish.

We were there about two hours and he served us a fine lunch of cold cuts and breads he'd purchased at a nearby store. He was charming and witty and really an excellent host and he wound up talking more to me than to Sally. Mostly, it was about the differences between American television and British television. He was not saying one was better than the other; merely musing on how interesting it was that we did something this way while they did something that way. Sally enjoyed the afternoon but not as much as if she'd actually met the man she was expecting.

That's about all there is to that story. The other one is much shorter. It happened about three years later.

I was on a date with a young lady and we'd just come out of a movie in Westwood Village. We were discussing whether or not to go somewhere for ice cream when she suddenly shrieked and ran towards a man she'd spotted. "It's the man who starred in the greatest TV show ever," I heard her call out as I jogged after her. Before I could stop her, she ran up to man who about to cross the street and told him, "Mr. McGoohan, I just have to tell you that I think The Prisoner was the greatest TV show ever made and you are a genius."

The man thanked her but said, "I'm sure Patrick McGoohan will be pleased to hear that but my name is Patrick Macnee and I was on a TV show called The Avengers." Then he looked at me and I'm pretty sure he didn't recognize me. But he did say with a smile, "Don't worry. This happens all the time." What a nice, classy gentleman.

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