Andrew Hickey

With The Locksley Exploit out today, I’m the featured author at the Snowbooks website. This mostly means that there’s a link to my books direct from the front page, but also that you can read “Mummers and Poppers”, a short story set between The Pendragon Protocol and The Locksley Exploit.

(The seasonal theme — although it fits with the chronology — reveals that this story started life as one of a series I send out regularly with Christmas cards, now repurposed for publicity ends. If you enjoy it, you can find all my previous Christmas stories on my other, more antiquated website.)

A very merry Christmas to you all this June.

Oh no, not again.

I have to filet another Star Trek: The Next Generation sacred cow tonight. I hate doing this. But this one's time is long, long overdue, 'cause “In Theory” is bad. Really bad. How bad? Well, in terms of gender, this is right down there in the same league as “Reunion”.

I'll let writer Ronald D. Moore explain himself in his own words.

“I loved the notion of Data involved with a woman who fell in love with him because it was sort of a callback to when The Original Series was on. There were so many women who were in love with Spock. So much of Leonard Nimoy's fan mail was from women, women who were falling in love with this remote, inaccessible character with the idea that 'I could touch his heart-I could get to Spock like no one else.' I was fascinated by that aspect of fandom. So I thought, well, what if we did that with Data and there was a woman who fell in love with a man who literally doesn't have a heart, who could not give her something emotional. I wanted to see that relationship crash on the rocks. I wanted to see the moment when she realizes that he really can't give back to her what she wants.”

The mean-spirited cynicism is self-evident. It always is with Moore. Like his compatriot Ira Steven Behr, that's a signature of his. But the sheer, stupefying extent to which Moore is off the mark here is so galling I don't even have the words to properly convey it, and what it reveals about how much Star Trek creators truly understand their fanbase and the history of their own damn show is absolutely frightening. Moore has essentially penned a 45-minute up-yours to the heart and soul of Star Trek and science fiction fandom and delivered one of the most inexcusably and hurtfully misogynistic sentiments this side of his precious Original Series. Jenna D'Sora is every single bro-ish stereotype of “clingy bitches” rolled into one: She's vapid, shallow, air-headed and programatically dedicated to a man who doesn't care about her in the face of all sense and reason. She's even “on the rebound”. And she, and by extension this entire fucking episode, exists for no other reason than to bully and ostracize Star Trek's original and most loyal fans.

That Moore's conception of Star Trek fandom (I refuse to use the phrase “female fandom” because in the 1960s and 1970s women were the only fans of any consequence Star Trek fucking had) is blindingly ahistorical goes without saying. Those women who Moore would be so quick to belittle and infantilize were the young people of the 1960s that Star Trek inspired and who worked hard to make sure it had enough episodes to become syndicated, thus guaranteeing it a legacy and a life beyond its pathetic initial network run on NBC. And, once it did become syndicated, these were the people who continued to watch it in reruns and kept a fandom community alive a decade after Star Trek was canceled. These were the people who welcomed in a new generation of fans (who were also women) who got their first taste of the world of the starship Enterprise in syndication. It was Paula Smith, not Gene Roddenberry, who ran Star Trek in the 1970s. Yes, there probably were female fans who sent love letters to Leonard Nimoy, but to imply that the only reason these people watched and wrote about Star Trek was because they were flighty teenage girls who all had unrealistic crushes on Spock is so beyond insulting I'm not even going to dignify that assertion with a real response.

What Moore has done here is play right into a sentiment that, while nascent in 1991, will soon begin to linger and fester until it grows into one of the most dangerous reactionary movements of today. This is the exact line of thinking that paves the way for the male supremacist and patriarchal fundamentalist Nerd Culture, which would in turn give way to things like the Men's Rights movement, the Sad Puppies and GamerGate: Affluent, privileged, upper middle-class straight cisgender white men who feel persecuted and oppressed because they like electronics and science fiction and don't know how to behave in public properly. That's not to say Moore himself is like this, but he does unfortunately write from a perspective that's easy to be appropriated by this rhetoric: Moore's biggest credentials, and this is something he himself would validate, were of being a big Original Star Trek nerd. His biggest writing credits on the show are on episodes that explicitly deal with the Original Series, or that contribute to world-building involving concepts inherited from them. And I'm sorry, there's a culture of privilege, insularity and entitlement that kind of obsessively fannish dedication encourages and is connected to.

And it's not just Jenna D'Sora and the female fans she was created to caricature: “In Theory” smears all women. We're right back into the territory of “The Dauphin” and “Elaan of Troyius”, with various characters bemoaning how confusing, erratic and illogical women are. We've got Geordi hemming and hawing about whether or not D'Sora really is on the rebound, and Captain Picard happily telling Data he'll “pass along any advice” on women to him “as soon as [he has] any”. And then Worf telling Data that Klingons “conquer what they desire”, but warning Data that, as her superior, he doesn't want Jenna “mistreated”, as if Worf were Jenna's daddy and she was his baby girl. The whole production has a sickeningly warped, stereotypical and tropish conception of femininity and gender roles-Even down to the whole idea that Jenna uniquely “needs” “something emotional”. Devastatingly, this is the precise sort of thing we would expect someone influenced by a proto-Nerd Culture to write.

But what might even be the most insulting thing of all about “In Theory” is that it's hailed as a classic. And it's not even because of the misogyny, which would be sad, if predictable. The thing is this isn't even a story about Jenna D'Sora, not even in a kind of reactionary, anti-Mary Sue sense. This is read as a Data story, and hailed as a beloved classic because of how it supposedly furthers his exploration of humanity. Even Patrick Stewart, who makes his directorial debut here and is someone who should really, really know better, reads it this way. That in itself is pretty awful as it renders Jenna's pain subservient to Data's Epic Journey, just like the show did before with Tasha Yar: The show itself hides its blatantly ugly misogyny under the guise of a comparatively more tame variation of sexist narrative structure.

But even if you do read “In Theory” as a Data episode, it can only be seen as a terrible, terrible Data episode! Here, Data is depicted as being cartoonishly inept and self-centred when it comes to understanding women and romance: Indeed, the whole point of “In Theory” is to portray him as literally heartless. But that's not at all the kind of person Data is-In “Data's Day”, he was very serious about the idea of potentially pursuing not just any romantic relationship, but a committed, monogamous one. And the very first thing he said was that he believed he had a lot to offer his prospective partner: He was thinking of other people first and foremost, not himself. What's happened here is that Data is being written as the kind of innocent, hapless man strung along by the whims of fickle womanhood Nerd Culture people like to paint themselves as. And that's not who Data is. If you're not swayed that “In Theory” is a wretched episode on the virtue of its blatant misogyny, at least grant it's bad because it assassinates Data's character.

“In Theory” is very possibly the most archetypically Nerd Culture episode in all of Star Trek. Not just because the story itself is openly misogynistic, but because everything about it is built around pushing women aside. Ignoring and dismissing their perspectives and their positionalities. It's a production so insular, selfish, thoughtless and uncaring that it thinks it has the right to take a young woman's story about her painful feelings and make it all about a man. Data takes Jenna's story away from her just like Ron Moore wants to take Star Trek fandom away from the women who built and nurtured it. Because this is what Nerds do. This is what men do. Take things away from women and try to pretend that the women never had them to begin with and that they're inherently undeserving of them anyway. This is what truly defines Nerd Culture, not fanwank. This isn't just what patriarchy looks like, this is what male fundamentalism looks like. And it's productions like these and attitudes like the ones articulated by people like those in Ron Moore's place that has allowed this all to happen.

Can we please now finally stop catering to it?

A bit ago, the news streams were once again abuzz with claims that NASA was investigating amazing space drives that violate the laws of physics. And it’s true! If we grant that “NASA” includes “any person employed by NASA,” and “investigating” is defined as “wasting time and money thinking about.”

I say “again” because it was only a few years ago that news spread about a NASA effort aimed at a warp drive, a way to truly break the speed-of-light limit. Of course there are no realistic scenarios along those lines, so the investigators didn’t have any tangible results to present. Instead, they did the next best thing, releasing an artist’s conception of what a space ship powered by their (wholly imaginary) warp drive would look like. (What remains unclear is how the warpiness of the drive affected the design of their fantasy vessel.)

The more recent “news” is not actually about warp drive at all. It’s about propellantless space drives — which are, if anything, even less believable than the warp drives. (There is a whole zoo of nomenclature devoted to categorizing all of the non-existent technologies of this general ilk, which I won’t bother to keep straight.) Warp drives at least inspired by some respectable science — Miguel Alcubierre’s energy-condition-violating spacetime. The “propellantless” stuff, on the other hand, just says “Laws of physics? Screw em.”

You may have heard of a little thing called Newton’s Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you want to go forward, you have to push on something or propel something backwards. The plucky NASA engineers in question aren’t hampered by such musty old ideas. As others have pointed out, what they’re proposing is very much like saying that you can sit in your car and start it moving by pushing on the steering wheel.

I’m not going to go through the various claims and attempt to sort out why they’re wrong. I’m not even an engineer! My point is a higher-level one: there is no reason whatsoever why these claims should be given the slightest bit of credence, even by complete non-experts. The fact that so many media outlets (with some happy exceptions) have credulously reported on it is extraordinarily depressing.

Now, this might sound like a shockingly anti-scientific attitude. After all, I certainly haven’t gone through the experimental results carefully. And it’s a bedrock principle of science that all of our theories are fundamentally up for grabs if we collect reliable evidence against them — even one so well-established as conservation of momentum. So isn’t the proper scientific attitude to take a careful look at the data, and wait until more conclusive experiments have been done before passing judgment? (And in the meantime make some artist’s impressions of what our eventual spaceships might look like?)

No. That is not the proper scientific attitude. For a very scientific reason: life is too short.

There is a more important lesson here than any fever dreams about warp drives: how we evaluate scientific claims, especially ones we encounter in the popular media. Not all claims are created equal. This is elementary Bayesian reasoning about beliefs. The probability you should ascribe to a claim is not determined only by the chance that certain evidence would be gathered if that claim were true; it depends also on your prior, the probability you would have attached to the claim before you got the evidence. (I don’t think I’ve ever written a specific explanation of Bayesian reasoning, but it’s being discussed quite a bit in the comments to Don Page’s guest post.)

Think of it this way. A friend says, “I saw a woman riding a bicycle earlier today.” No reason to disbelieve them — probably they did see that. Now imagine the same friend instead had said, “I saw a real live Tyrannosaurus Rex riding a bicycle today.” Are you equally likely to believe them? After all, the evidence you’ve been given in either case is pretty equivalent. But in reality, you’re much more skeptical in the second case, and for good reason — the prior probability you would attach to a T-Rex riding a bicycle in your town is much lower than that for an ordinary human woman riding a bicycle.

The same thing is true for claims about new technology. If someone says, “NASA scientists are planning on sending a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa,” you would have no reason to disbelieve them — that’s just the kind of thing NASA does. If, on the other hand, someone says “NASA scientists are building a space drive that violates Newton’s laws of motion” — you should be rather more skeptical.

Which is not to say you should be absolutely skeptical. It’s worth spending five seconds asking about what kind of evidence for this outlandish claim we have actually been given. I could certainly imagine getting enough evidence to think that momentum wasn’t conserved after all. The kind of thing I would like to see is highly respected scientists, working under exquisitely controlled conditions, doing everything they can to be hard on their own work, subjecting their experiments to intensive peer review, published in refereed journals, and ideally replicated by competing groups that would love to prove them wrong. That’s the kind of thing we got, for example, when the Higgs boson was discovered.

And what do we have for our propellantless space drive? Hmm — not quite that. No refereed publications — indeed, no publications at all. What started the hoopla was an article on a web forum called NASAspaceflight.com. Which sounds kind of respectable, until you notice it isn’t affiliated with NASA in any way. And the evidence that the article points to is — wait for it — a comment on a post on a forum on that very same web site. Admittedly, the comment was written by someone who actually does work for NASA. But, not to put too fine a point on it, lots of people work for NASA. The folks in this particular “Eagleworks” group at Johnson Spaceflight Center are a group of enthusiasts who feel that gumption and a bit of elbow grease might possibly enable them to build spaceships that do things beyond what the laws of physics might naively let you do.

And good for them! Enthusiasm is a virtue. Less virtuous is taking people’s enthusiasm at face value, rather than evaluating claims soberly. The Eagleworks group has succeeded in producing, essentially, nothing at all. Their primary mode of communication seems to be on Facebook. NASA officials, when asked by journalists for comment on the claims they leave on websites, remain silent — they don’t want to have anything to do with the whole mess.

So what we have is a situation where there’s a claim being made that is as extraordinary as it gets — conservation of momentum is being violated. And the evidenced adduced for that claim is, how shall we put it, non-extraordinary. Utterly unconvincing. Not worth a minute’s thought. Let’s get on with our lives.

I have been asked by a number of readers to explain the eighth and final issue of Convergence, the latest mega-event series by DC Comics.  Convergence is a huge, epic, multiverse-spanning saga that is intended to end the DC universe as we know it (again), usher in the birth of an entirely new and different DC universe (again), and reboot the entire DC universe continuity once and for all (again).  The story has taken place over an entire year, including not only the eight actual issues of Convergence itself but dozens of tie-ins and crossover books, and the entire run of DC titles during the month of May — in short, dozens of books, hundreds of dollars, and thousands of pages, all of which will culminate in a grand, cosmic, heroic struggle for the final fate of entire realities stretching back over millions of in-universe years and over 75 years of real time.

Which is why it’s so amazing that it’s all resolved in a third of a page, off-panel.

 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves:  let’s take a page-by-page look at this most grand of epics, the brilliant and long-awaited conclusion to a story years in the making — a work which took, according to the credits, two writers, four pencilers, three inkers, an artist, a colorist, six cover artists, and five editors* to create!  Let’s take a look at what DC considers a fitting story to put a final period on their last nine decades of comic book creation.

PAGE 1:  On the ruins of Earth-2, the destruction of which has been chronicled over two years in two separate comics titles that people paid actual money for, Hal Jordan/Parallax/Green Lantern explains the plot of the last seven issues of Convergence while standing over the smoking remains of the tertiary villain Deimos, whom he has just murdered.  Dr. Fate suggests that it was a bad idea for Hal to murder Deimos by making a pun on his own name, which is “Fate”.

PAGES 2-3:  Dr. Fate provides more exposition while Robin, standing in for the reader, expresses confusion and disinterest.  Hal Paralantern says he can help, but Wonder Woman does not trust him, as is made clear in dialogue written by a dull 6th-grader, played here by Jeff King and Scott Lobdell.

PAGES 4-5:  Secondary villain Telos ties up Hal Paralantern in a magical swirly thing, which development provokes Hal’s objection.  Various Flashes remind us that they have vibrational powers. Telos takes over the exposition and says some heroes are coming, and makes reference to Zero Hour and Countdown, two previous epic DC events that were terrible.

PAGE 6:  Booster Gold shows up and introduces Waverider and Goldstar.  That’s literally all that happens on this page.

PAGE 7:  Waverider says that Brainiac can save the universe.

PAGES 8-9:  A couple of people remember that Brainiac is the primary villain in this series and decide to attack him instead of letting him save the universe.  Brainiac zaps them with a beam.

PAGE 10:  Brainiac says that he will destroy everyone (“I will destroy you all”), but then changes his mind and has a mid-life crisis (“What am I now?”).

PAGE 11:  Brainiac misses his home planet of Colu.  I guess this is supposed to be sad?  I don’t know.

PAGE 12:  Brainiac remembers how all the major events of the DC Universe have effected him personally.  This also serves to remind the reader of how cruddy such event books as Bloodlines, Genesis, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, and Flashpoint were, and how good Grant Morrison is.

PAGE 13:  Brainiac reveals that he has developed cancer because of the multiverse.  This is something that really happens and not something I am making up to illustrate how stupid Convergence is.  He asks the heroes to help him and Nightwing tells him to suck some dicks.  Telos, who has helped Brainiac engineer the death of millions of people, scolds Nightwing for not being compassionate.

PAGES 14-15:  Superman holds hands with Supergirl and says something optimistic in another double splash page which totally justifies this comic’s $5 price tag and is not padding at all.

PAGES 16-17:  In the issue’s fifth double splash page, Brainiac ‘explains’ that he is going to channel temporal energy and send all the heroes home, and thus “reset the multiverse”, which will make everything good and perfect forever.

PAGES 18-19:  Double splash page #6 contains a huge plot twist:  the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, from which all modern event comics, not to mention the entirety of the current DC continuity, sprang, is gumming up Brainiac’s attempt to hit the delete/re-record button on the universal GarageBand software.

PAGES 20-21:  Double splash page #7 features all the people who died in the first Crisis, as well as several other random costumed jerkoffs, volunteering to go back and prevent the Crisis from happening, thus making everything that occurred in DC comics for the last thirty years pointless.  Hal Paralantern joins them even though everyone thinks he is a cock.

PAGE 22:  It is further established that Superman is good and perfect and awesome and never makes a bad decision and cannot be beaten.

PAGE 23:   In panel 1, Brainiac tells a handful of random superheroes that they have to go back and stop the multiverse from collapsing in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths in order to save everyone.  That’s the first panel.  In the second panel, the Flash says “What are we waiting for?  Let’s go save the universe!”  And in the third panel, in a caption, Telos says “In an instant, I can tell.  They have done it.”  They literally could have published a one-page comic where Brainiac says “Go stop the Crisis from happening!” and some random heroes say “okay” and then one panel later Brainiac says “Phew, they did it!  Carry on, everybody”.  Best page in comics history?  You tell me, fans!

PAGES 24-27:  More splash pages, confirming that all the multiverse worlds are back and shut up, everybody.

PAGES 28-29:  Brainiac, Telos, and almost everyone else fucks off to their own titles.  leaving the Earth-2 people to wonder what they’re going to do for the rest of the book

PAGES 30-31:  Earth-2 gets leveled to satisfy all the destruction porn freaks.

PAGES 32-33:  Alan Scott saves everyone using green magic.

PAGES 34-35:  Alan Scott turns Earth-2 into a paradise with his ring magic, leaving one to wonder why exactly he didn’t do this before, for all the worlds that got destroyed already.

PAGE 36-37:  A giant hologram of Telos’ head shows up in the sky and dispenses one final burst of exposition to Alan Scott, for the benefit of people who have no fucking idea what just happened.  This includes everyone.

PAGE 38:  Alan Scott finds a space rocket with all the Earth-2 people on it and takes them home, where they are happy, because they didn’t just read the worst comic of the year.  THE END

 

*:  This is, of course, my little joke.  This book actually had zero editors.

 

By Kit Mead


I worry about being taken seriously if I write about certain things non-anonymously. Today I decided to write about them. Verbal speech tends to be a pre-requisite of society, and what would people say outside the disabled community if they read this and know that speech isn't all that great for me?

Anyone who has seen me talk out loud knows speech is not, perhaps, my first language. My first language was writing cat stories about a fictionalized version of my first kitten, Tabby, lost in a world of written words. I was in third grade and this is what I liked to do: Write and write and write.

My speech works best when I can read off my laptop, or if I've typed it out in advance. It's why my conversations with friends about activism tend to be with my laptop open. I'm telling them about the posts I already wrote and quoting, and also paraphrasing with words that make me sound slightly angry. I don't have the access to prettier out-loud language.

Okay, sometimes I actually am angry, but usually not as angry as I sound out loud.

Someone once told me I was more expressive than this other autistic person they knew. I wish they knew that my real words come down on paper or Word documents. They spill out faster and with more clarity there than I could hope to achieve out loud unless I have prepared over and over again in advance.

And I don't want to prepare over and over in advance unless I'm actually giving a presentation. Because I need people to accept me with my slightly stop-and-go conversations with words hacked into pieces and sometimes losing their meaning. I need people to know that I don't always mean what I say because I can't always have words out loud.

A man who smoked, who famously refused to exercise, who even more famously drank way too much, who was middle aged, male and Scottish has died only 55. In a way, therefore, Charles Kennedy was a young death foretold. Yet, still it has been a heartbreaking day for those who admired him, or liked him or who knew him.

I know that there have been a hundred "the Charles Kennedy I knew" pieces in every media outlet today. It is hard to offer anything more than cliche or stereotype.

I have known Charles since I was 19, and he was 25. I -like so many others- was caught in his charm: his all too human charm. His death was not necessarily a surprise, but my God it has been a shock. A bitter reminder of how near mortality really is. 

What has made this day so painful has been to understand that Charles, as brilliant, warm, clever and charming as he was, never did escape the doom that was pronounced upon him when he was elected aged only 23 as the MP for the West Highlands. It was the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to him. It made him as a public figure, but perhaps it was the undoing of him as a man. 

For when I first met him he had much of the same awareness of himself as a public figure as Lembit Opik had when he too was first elected to the House of Commons -far too young. In the face of such expectations and adulation, it was hard to retain a sense of self, but whereas Lembit was a secure extrovert, Charles was not. As Alastair Campbell noted in his touching eulogy today, there was a corner of Charles that very few, if any, ever really knew. Outwardly controlled and confident, inwardly Charles was shy, and intense and eternally questioning: he was a sceptic, but most of all he questioned his own motives and his own agenda. This made him a unique political figure but it made him also a man who would never give himself the benefit of the doubt.

He was a man of passion: David Bowie, good debate, the Highlands, alcohol, politics, people, music, all found their place in the heart of this big hearted man. He was a later convert to Liberalism, having made a political migration to become a convinced Liberal, but in truth there was no other cause that a man of such integrity could have truly followed.

To see today the genuine pain and loss that his many friends feel at his death is to understand that this flawed, occasionally difficult, even impossible, man was so beloved. People liked Charles: he was all too human.

Yet though I have known him superficially for decades, I never truly knew him, for in the end he was a withheld and private man. Perhaps he believed in a purity of spirit which invites disappointment; perhaps he never found a place of comfortable observation. He was a remarkable intelligence, a gifted speaker- as all good University debaters should be- and a shrewd judge of character, yet he judged himself harshly, and his conscience would not admit of the slightest moral compromise. Kind to others and too harsh to himself.

Charles Kennedy had an acute and ready understanding of politics. His idea of a new party for Scotland may yet prove to be the future, but it will only work if it has Charles' own warmth, tolerance and humanity. Internationalist, Liberal, European, Highlander, British. open and decent: this was the man. 

May his legacy and Liberal vision live on.      

FIRST AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  This one is generally very popular especially with loudmouths.  The only part that causes trouble is the part where we can’t impede the free exercise of religion, because somehow those lunatic Muslims got their shit rubber-stamped as a religion instead of what it is:  a crazy murder cult.  Aside from that, a real winner:  ****1/2 stars

SECOND AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  The absolute super best and greatest of all amendments and really the only one that matters because no one can fuck with the other amendments as long as you can shoot them in the face with your well-regulated militia assault rifle.  The undisputed champion:  ***** stars

THIRD AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  This is a pretty paltry one because no one ever tries to violate it; the government has huge military bases all over and doesn’t need to stick any soldiers in your laundry room.  Still, it’s fun to bring up if you want to sound smart when you’re whining about Jade Helm or whatever:  *** stars

FOURTH AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  The first of what we’ll call the “Honky Amendments”, which we absolutely love when they are applied to, say, your nephew Jared in Springview who gets caught with a half of Blue Dream, but which we absolutely hate when we have to go to court and prove a black guy murdered someone.  A racially divided above-average:  ***1/2 stars

FIFTH AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  Another Honky Amendment, which we refer to as an “inalienable right” when we get busted with coke or the federal government wants to build a park, but which we refer to as a “technicality” when the cops beat the shit out of a Mexican teenager.  See above:  ***1/2 stars

SIXTH AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  This Honky Amendment gets a slight boost because it gets cited a lot by dudes as a reason to further abuse and humiliate rape victims.  Icing on the cake:  **** stars

SEVENTH AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  The Honky Amendment that sanctifies in law the trial by jury, which everyone claims to love but which they will do practically anything to get out of.  A mixed blessing, to say the least:  *** stars

EIGHTH AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  The least popular of the Honky Amendments, because we’re all for cruel and unusual punishment as long as there is zero chance of it happening to us.  A good source of complaints about how murderers get wide-screen color TVs:  **1/2 stars

NINTH AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  This one totally sucks because crybabies use it to justify made-up ‘rights’ like getting health care, eating a decent meal, making a living wage, and other hippie bullshit that is completely not a right, not like owning cop-killer ammunition is a right.  The author of our Constitution, Jesus Horatio Christ, did not intend to give us wiggle room:  *1/2 stars

TENTH AMENDMENT (12/15/1791):  Another good one to fight over.  The last of the original Bill of Rights and thus the final ‘real’ amendment, this one draws a lot of boos because it seems to bolster the power of the federal government, but it’s also a state’s rights favorite and the venue of last resort for trying to quash civil rights.  So it’s got that going for it:  *** stars

ELEVENTH AMENDMENT (02/07/1795):  Strict Constitutional Originalists, which we all should be, will tell you they shouldn’t have fucked around and added any more after the first ten amendments, but this one tends to be popular as it protects Americans from the consequences of being complete fuck-up assholes no matter where they go in the world, and that’s good.  Well done, 1795:  ****1/2 stars

TWELFTH AMENDMENT (06/15/1804):  How much you like the Electoral College depends entirely on whether or not your preferred candidate won the election, and by how much of the popular vote.  A real curate’s egg:  *** stars

THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT (12/06/1865):  Boo!  Hiss!  Governmental overreach!  Infringement on state’s rights and private property!  Give us our slaves back!  The worst.  Everything went to hell after this one:  0 stars

FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT (07/09/1868):  Another bullshit amendment that just lets any damn person be a citizen and get equal protection under the law, even if we really, really don’t like them.  Never would have been ratified if the Founders could have seen what Pablo does to my rose bushes.  Worthless;  * star

FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT (02/03/1870):  So I guess we just let anyone vote now, except women, thank God.  They couldn’t get anything right after the Civil War:  *1/2 stars

SIXTEENTH AMENDMENT (02/03/1913):  Pretty much the worst thing ever to happen to America, and the end of freedom and liberty forever and ever.  The reintroduction of slavery, except for white people:  minus ************************************************** stars

SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT (04/08/13):  This one is pretty good because after it passed we could stick any goddamn crank into the government we wanted, including ones who thought of it as their divine mission to make sure the government never, ever accomplished anything.  Solid, but doesn’t begin to make up for income tax:  ***1/2 stars

EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT (01/16/1919):  So we have to pay taxes, pretend to listen to black people, and now we can’t even get a goddamn drink?   Hell no:  0 stars

NINETEENTH AMENDMENT (08/18/1920):  Oh, come on!  Seriously?  The birth of the Men’s Rights movement:  0 stars

TWENTIETH AMENDMENT (01/23/1933):  Universally accepted as the most boring and inconsequential of amendments, but at least it doesn’t give rights to any minorities.  A push:  **1/2 stars

TWENTY-FIRST AMENDMENT  (12/05/1933):  Basically the only time in history America seriously decided to change its mind on something it had already decided was to collectively say “Give me my fucking beer”.   A victory for martinis everywhere:  ***** stars

TWENTY-SECOND AMENDMENT (02/27/1951):  A dull but necessary amendment that limited term limits for presidents, thus preventing the rise of another cruel, despotic tyrant like the monstrous Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ruined America by winning the biggest war in world history, gaining unprecedented popularity, and helping the poor.  Sic semper tyrannis:  **** stars

TWENTY-THIRD AMENDMENT (03/29/1961):  Throws those pests in D.C. a bone, but doesn’t stop them from making snotty comments on their license plates.  Eh:  **1/2 stars

TWENTY-FOURTH AMENDMENT (01/23/1964):  Hard to know what to do about this one.  On the one hand, it got rid of a tax, and getting rid of taxes is one of the only two things the government should be allowed to do.  On the other hand, it got rid of a tax that helped oppress minorities, and oppressing minorities is the other thing the government should be allowed to do.  A real noodle-scratcher:  *** stars

TWENTY-FIFTH AMENDMENT (02/10/1967):  This one didn’t have much practical effect, other than to provide hilarious fodder for writers of political fiction and to force terrorists and assassins to make some tough choices.  Inessential:  ** stars

TWENTY-SIXTH AMENDMENT (03/23/1971):  Another tragic mistake, insofar as it embodied in law the terrible idea that we should ever listen to anything teenagers have to say.  Bummer:  * star

TWENTY-SEVENTH AMENDMENT (05/07/1992):  A perfect encapsulation of the state of the government, the only constitutional amendment since 1971 is almost entirely meaningless and took over two hundred years to ratify.  God bless America:  *** stars

A computer science undergrad who reads this blog recently emailed me about an anxiety he’s been feeling connected to the Singularity—not that it will destroy all human life, but rather that it will make life suffering-free and therefore no longer worth living (more Brave New World than Terminator, one might say).

As he puts it:

This probably sounds silly, but I’ve been existentially troubled by certain science fiction predictions for about a year or two, most of them coming from the Ray Kurzweil/Singularity Institute types … What really bothers me is the idea of the “abolition of suffering” as some put it. I just don’t see the point. Getting rid of cancer, premature death, etc., that all sounds great. But death itself? All suffering? At what point do we just sit down and ask ourselves, why not put our brains in a jar, and just activate our pleasure receptors for all eternity? That seems to be the logical conclusion of that line of thinking. If we want to reduce the conscious feeling of pleasure to the release of dopamine in the brain, well, why not?

I guess what I think I’m worried about is having to make the choice to become a cyborg, or to upload my mind to a computer, to live forever, or to never suffer again. I don’t know how I’d answer, given the choice. I enjoy being human, and that includes my suffering. I really don’t want to live forever. I see that as a hedonic treadmill more than anything else. Crazy bioethicists like David Pearce, who want to genetically re-engineer all species on planet Earth to be herbivores, and literally abolish all suffering, just add fuel to my anxiety.

… Do you think we’re any closer to what Kurzweil (or Pearce) predicted (and by that I mean, will we see it in our lifetimes)? I want to stop worrying about these things, but something is preventing me from doing so. Thoughts about the far flung (or near) future are just intrusive for me. And it seems like everywhere I go I’m reminded of my impending fate. Ernst Jünger would encourage me to take up an attitude of amor fati, but I can’t see myself doing that. My father says I’m too young to worry about these things, and that the answer will be clear when I’ve actually lived my life. But I just don’t know. I want to stop caring, more than anything else. It’s gotten to a point where the thoughts keep me up at night.

I don’t know how many readers might have had similar anxieties, but in any case, I thought my reply might be of some interest to others, so with the questioner’s kind permission, I’m reproducing it below.

1. An end to suffering removing the meaning from life? As my grandmother might say, “we should only have such problems”! I believe, alas, that suffering will always be with us, even after a hypothetical technological singularity, because of basic Malthusian logic. I.e., no matter how many resources there are, population will expand exponentially to exploit them and make the resources scarce again, thereby causing fighting, deprivation, and suffering. What’s terrifying about Malthus’s logic is how fully general it is: it applies equally to tenure-track faculty positions, to any extraterrestrial life that might exist in our universe or in any other bounded universe, and to the distant post-Singularity future.

But if, by some miracle, we were able to overcome Malthus and eliminate all suffering, my own inclination would be to say “go for it”! I can easily imagine a life that was well worth living—filled with beauty, humor, play, love, sex, and mathematical and scientific discovery—even though it was devoid of any serious suffering. (We could debate whether the “ideal life” would include occasional setbacks, frustrations, etc., even while agreeing that at any rate, it should certainly be devoid of cancer, poverty, bullying, suicidal depression, and one’s Internet connection going down.)

2. If you want to worry about something, then rather than an end to suffering, I might humbly suggest worrying about a large increase in human suffering within our lifetimes. A few possible culprits: climate change, resurgent religious fundamentalism, large parts of the world running out of fresh water.

3. It’s fun to think about these questions from time to time, to use them to hone our moral intuitions—and I even agree with Scott Alexander that it’s worthwhile to have a small number of smart people think about them full-time for a living.  But I should tell you that, as I wrote in my post The Singularity Is Far, I don’t expect a Singularity in my lifetime or my grandchildrens’ lifetimes. Yes, technically, if there’s ever going to be a Singularity, then we’re 10 years closer to it now than we were 10 years ago, but it could still be one hell of a long way away! And yes, I expect that technology will continue to change in my lifetime in amazing ways—not as much as it changed in my grandparents’ lifetimes, probably, but still by a lot—but how to put this? I’m willing to bet any amount of money that when I die, people’s shit will still stink.

I heard at 7am the news that Charles Kennedy had died. It feels so terribly unfair. He had so many gifts and should have had so much more to give with them. And just as Liberal Democrats are starting to recover from the grief of the election, and find something to celebrate in such unlooked-for growth in our numbers (from 45,000 members to 60,000 since polling day), our family is plunged into the most appalling shared grief of all. My heart goes out to Charles’ immediate family too. I knew Charles as Leader, much less since, but I’ll miss him.

Like many Lib Dems, I started the day by pouring out some of my grief on Twitter and a comment on Lib Dem Voice – then a short piece on my Tumblr, which is where, essentially, I write and publish things quickly, before there’s time for insecurity to stop me writing. But I’ve decided that Charles deserves a proper thank you and memorial from me, too, which in my typical way means much the same I said earlier, but at significantly greater length.

A Great Communicator (but not in every way)

You’ll have read a great many tributes and obituaries. Like all Leaders, he had his good and his bad points – perhaps more of both than most. Charles’ greatest strength was that he came across as genuine, and decent, and more like an ordinary bloke than other politicians: today British politics has to make do with Nigel Farage, his anti-matter duplicate. Getting to know Charles over half a dozen years or so, as I’ll come to, he always struck me as the same in private as he was in public, and in private, too, he rarely let people see his bad days.

The one thing I’ll say that contradicts most of the pieces I’ve seen about Charles today is that I don’t think he was a great orator. He was a great communicator – probably the best the Liberal Democrats have had, though I reckon we’ve been blessed with three. But his greatest gift was in speaking directly, conversationally, not reading lines from a platform. I don’t mean he couldn’t deliver a speech – he could, and I saw many of them. Some stuck in my head for his principles as a call to action; some inspired me by turning those principles into a brave challenge. But platform oratory wasn’t his best platform, and if you want to read a review of one of his speeches with a favourable view of the content and a not entirely complimentary look at some of his vocal tics, I wrote one quite some years ago and still think I was right. That doesn’t matter.

I think it may well have been on introducing Charles for the first of the three speeches I mentioned above that a Lib Dem MP said something rather indiscreet that stuck in my head as much as the speech itself. Charles was relatively new in the job of Leader, and there was a wide assumption (not necessarily a fact) that he’d been more the choice of the armchair members than the activists – but also, by this stage, a widespread feeling of pleasant surprise that he’d made himself both a more explicitly Liberal leader and more distanced from the Labour Party than anyone had expected before his election (I remember one of his initial backers telling me sourly that I was probably more pleased with his victorious candidate than he was, and happily agreeing). So when Charles was introduced for his own Leader’s Speech with “I didn’t vote for him – but I’m ever so glad he won!” there was both a huge laugh and a sense from many, myself included, that we would have said the same if we’d been daring enough.

My Memories of Charles (and the Reverse Aesop)

I got to know Charles mainly on the Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee. I was an elected member throughout his Leadership, and for four years I was a Vice-Chair to Charles as Chair. He was the same in private party meetings as he was on the telly: a big change from Paddy Ashdown’s fight to the death on every issue – bringing people together, but passionate on the issues he really cared about. The converse was also true; the chance of my taking over the Chair for an hour when Charles suddenly discovered he had another urgent Commons appointment rose in direct proportion to the time FPC members spent droning on multiplied by the lack of interest he had in the subject. His slipping out rarely helped meetings to finish on time, as he was far more skilled in finding kindly ways to shut people up when they were blathering on than I ever was.

I used to joke at the time that in choosing Charles to succeed Paddy the party had done a reverse Aesop – calling for King Log after King Stork. That was a little unfair (to Charles, at least). He may not have wanted pitched battles on every line of policy, but I remember him usually making two different sorts of crucial contribution across the board. One was in spotting when policy was getting either too impenetrable or too up itself (not that he’d use those terms). In particular, he had a keen eye for the Lib Dem habit of setting up National Institutes for Well-Meaning Interference. Nobody else on the FPC was ever so good at puncturing pompous proposals, rolling his eyes at yet another new bureaucracy: “No more capital letters, please!” Part of that was what you might call Charles ‘remembering common sense’. But there was another element in there. Whether it was being a Highlander, an outsider, his temperament or his chosen ideology, he quietly disliked people pushing other people around.

Growing Into a Liberal Leader

I didn’t know Charles well enough to be able to say whether it was out of that instinct, or his political judgement as Leader, or it simply seeming the obvious thing to do, but his other ‘big picture’ contribution was more blatantly ideological – under Charles, the Liberal Democrats started using the words “Liberal” and “Liberalism” in the headlines, not just in the small print. The Liberal Democrats never lost our Liberalism; when during the election I was searching for inspiring Liberal quotes, short and long, for my Liberal Democrats Believe Tumblr (which, like so many things, I must get back to), one of the most inspiring speeches and probably the one I quoted at greatest length was one of Paddy’s Leader’s speeches, which is as brilliant an exploration of philosophical Liberalism as you could hope to find. But you’d rarely find the word on its own on a policy paper front page or in a shorthand description of the party.

I suspect that a lot of this comes down to simple history: Paddy had been a Liberal MP, and as the Liberal Democrats’ Leader for our first decade, he was careful not to ‘unpick the merger’. And so was everyone else who’d gone through that shambles of a time. Under Charles, the party was more at ease with itself, with the passage of time and the passage of members. Quietly, we had a Leader who would say of us, “We’re a Liberal party,” without anyone being under the impression he was expelling former Social Democrats; policy papers on what we stood for started proclaiming “It’s About Freedom” or “Freedom in a Liberal Society”, rather than the party’s early years of “Our Different Vision”, which I remember reading cover to cover and still being unable to say quite what it was.

I joined the new party immediately after the merger in 1988, because I’d been a teenage supporter but didn’t see why there were two separate parties and waited until it was official to sign up. For me and my generation of Lib Dem Youth and Students, it was natural to be Liberal Democrats, happy with a party born out of a merger, not wanting to go back to the structures and strifes of a party we’d never been members of, but of course we were ideologically Liberals too. Older members found it more difficult to separate the history and the philosophy, so it was something a lot of Lib Dems were very quiet about during the ’90s. It was obvious to me that Bob Maclennan – a former Leader of the SDP – was by far our most Liberal Home Affairs Spokesperson of the time, and similarly, when Bob was Party President in the mid-’90s he was the most senior figure to speak of our Liberalism, unabashed, one of many reasons I became an unlikely fan and friend. No-one could accuse him of digging up old rivalries or a Liberal Party takeover, and the same was true when Charles, another former Social Democrat, was elected Leader. He was able to talk about what we all stood for without it being divisive. Under Charles’ Leadership, the Lib Dems started to grow our own distinct philosophical rivalries, today spoken of more along Social Liberal and Economic Liberal lines, though neither (with a few exceptions!) as sharp as between our two predecessor parties. Most Lib Dems are both Social and Economic Liberals, and those who come down much more heavily on one side than the other are just as likely to have come from the old SDP as the old Liberal Party – but, like the vast majority of Liberal Democrat members, are most likely not to have been a member of either party that voted to merge into the Lib Dems nearly three decades ago.

So every time a ‘political correspondent’ talks about the ‘fault lines in the Lib Dems’ being based on the Liberal Party vs the SDP, they are almost without exception talking bollocks – just as it would have been absurd to characterise every internal debate of the pre-1988 Liberal Party in terms of Whigs, Radicals and Peelites who merged to create the Liberals in their turn. We are not our parents, and neither are parties. Charles, in his calm and consensual but crucial way, helped the Liberal Democrats to grow up.

Charles’ Principles and Passions

The much less quiet decision that Charles took, after much internal debate and soul-searching, and which came to define his Leadership, was to oppose the Iraq War. It’s often falsely remembered as a populist move. It was nothing of the kind. It was a terrifying plunge into doing the right thing when nobody else would, and we were vilified for it. In the run-up to the War, there were mass marches in opposition, but not largely by natural Lib Dems, and the massed fire of the media was all against us. When the invasion began, our opinion poll support took a dive. It was only much later, when it became clear to people not that the principle of invading another country against international law was wrong – people knew that, and were gung-ho anyway – but that the Labour Party and the Republican Party had created such an appalling, bloody mess, that support swung back our way. Remember that the Labour Party and their Tory and press cheerleaders called Charles and the Lib Dems “Traitors” and much worse for not going along with their illegal war of aggression.

If Iraq was Charles Kennedy’s defining issue by circumstance and brave decision in a hard place, perhaps his greatest passion was Europe. A committed and persuasive European, internationalist, democrat and reformer, while Liberal Democrats and many others who simply liked and agreed with him will miss Charles for too many reasons to count, over the next couple of years our loss will be a huge loss in the coming referendum. As well as the personal loss for his family and our wider Lib Dem family, both bereaved, it’s tragic to lose his voice when he’s so needed.

“I am a Highlander, a Scot, proudly British, and European. I’m proud of all four of these things, and I don’t see why I should have to choose between them or delete any of them.”

You may well have seen today a letter from Charles replying to a voter with his judgement that, even though he’s blue, Gonzo’s a nice guy and his favourite Muppet. I can reveal that he rather liked Doctor Who, too, and that his favourite Doctor was always Patrick Troughton, so I’ve had the Mighty Trout’s most Liberal story on this afternoon. If you really want to celebrate one of Charles’ passions, though, put on some David Bowie to remember him by. There, he was a real fan.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Several of you asked me to write about that chocolate article that went viral recently. From I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here’s How:

“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily,” page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”

I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Bohannon goes on to explain that as part of a documentary about “the junk-science diet industry”, he and some collaborators designed a fake study to see if they could convince journalists. They chose to make it about chocolate:

Gunter Frank, a general practitioner in on the prank, ran the clinical trial. Onneken had pulled him in after reading a popular book Frank wrote railing against dietary pseudoscience. Testing bitter chocolate as a dietary supplement was his idea. When I asked him why, Frank said it was a favorite of the “whole food” fanatics. “Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.”

They recruited 16 (!) participants and divided them into three groups. One group ate their normal diet. Another ate a low-carb diet. And a third ate a low-carb diet plus some chocolate. Both the low-carb group and the low-carb + chocolate group lost weight compared to the control group, but the low-carb + chocolate group lost weight “ten percent faster”, and the difference was “statistically significant”. They also had “better cholesterol readings” and “higher scores on the well-being survey”.

Bohannon admits exactly how he managed this seemingly impressive result – he measured eighteen different parameters (weight, cholesterol, sodium, protein, etc) which virtually guarantees that one will be statistically significant. That one turned out to be weight loss. If it had been sodium, he would have published the study as “Chocolate Lowers Sodium Levels”.

Then he pitched it to various fake for-profit journals until one of them bit. Then he put out a PR release to various media outlets, and they ate it up. They ended up in a bunch of English and German language media including Bild, the Daily Star, Times of India, Cosmopolitan, Irish Examiner, and the Huffington Post.

The people I’ve seen discussing this seem to have drawn five conclusions, four of which are wrong:

Conclusion 1: Haha, I can’t believe people were so gullible that they actually thought chocolate caused weight loss!

Bohannon himself endorses this one, saying bitter chocolate was a favorite of “whole food fanatics” because “Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you” and “it’s like a religion.

But actually, there’s lots of previous research supporting health benefits from bitter chocolate, none of which Bohannon seems to be aware of.

A meta-analysis of 42 randomized controlled trials totaling 1297 participants in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that chocolate improved blood pressure, flow-mediated dilatation (a measure of vascular health), and insulin resistance (related to weight gain).

A different meta-analysis of 24 randomized controlled trials totalling 1106 people in the Journal of Nutrition also found that chocolate improved blood pressure, flow-mediated dilatation, and insulin resistance.

A Cochrane Review of 20 randomized controlled trials of 856 people found that chocolate improved blood pressure (it didn’t test for flow-mediated dilatation or insulin resistance)

A study on mice found that mice fed more chocolate flavanols were less likely to gain weight.

An epidemiological study of 1018 people in the United States found an association between frequent chocolate consumption and lower BMI, p

A second epidemiological study of 1458 people in Europe found the same thing, again p

A cohort study of 470 elderly men found chocolate intake was inversely associated with blood pressure and cardiovascular mortality, p

I wouldn't find any of these studies alone very convincing. But together, they compensate for each other's flaws and build a pretty robust structure. So the next flawed conclusion is:

Conclusion 2: This proves that nutrition isn’t a real science and we should all just be in a state of radical skepticism about these things

What we would like to do is a perfect study where we get thousands of people, randomize them to eat-lots-of-chocolate or eat-little-chocolate at birth, then follow their weights over their entire lives. That way we could have a large sample size, perfect randomization, life-long followup, and clear applicability to other people. But for practical and ethical reasons, we can’t do that. So we do a bunch of smaller studies that each capture a few of the features of the perfect study.

First we do animal studies, which can have large sample sizes, perfect randomization, and life-long followup, but it’s not clear whether it applies to humans.

Then we do short randomized controlled trials, which can have large sample sizes, perfect randomization, and human applicability, but which only last a couple of months.

Then we do epidemiological studies, which can have large sample sizes, human applicability, and last for many decades, but which aren’t randomized very well and might be subject to confounders.

This is what happened in the chocolate studies above. Mice fed a strict diet plus chocolate for a long time gain less weight than mice fed the strict diet alone. This is suggestive, but we don’t know if it applies to humans. So we find that in randomized controlled trials, chocolate helps with some proxies for weight gain like insulin resistance. This is even more suggestive, but we don’t know if it lasts. So we find that in epidemiological studies, lifetime chocolate consumption is associated with lifetime good health outcomes. This on its own is suggestive but potentially confounded, but when we combine them with all of the others, they become more convincing.

(am I cheating by combining blood pressure and BMI data? Sort of, but the two measures are correlated)

When all of these paint the same picture, then we start thinking that maybe it’s because our hypothesis is true. Yes, maybe the mouse studies could be related to a feature of mice that doesn’t generalize to humans, and the randomized controlled trial results wouldn’t hold up after a couple of years, and the epidemiological studies are confounded. But that would be extraordinarily bad luck. More likely they’re all getting the same result because they’re all tapping into the same underlying reality.

This is the way science usually works, it’s the way nutrition science usually works, and it’s the way the science of whether chocolate causes weight gain usually works. These are not horrible corrupt disciplines made up entirely of shrieking weight-loss-pill peddlers trying to hawk their wares. They only turn into that when the media takes a single terrible study totally out of context and misrepresents the field.

Conclusion 3: Studies Always Need To Have High Sample Sizes

Here’s another good chocolate-related study: Short-term administration of dark chocolate is followed by a significant increase in insulin sensitivity and a decrease in blood pressure in healthy persons.

Bohannon says:

Our study was doomed by the tiny number of subjects, which amplifies the effects of uncontrolled factors…Which is why you need to use a large number of people, and balance age and gender across treatment group

But I say “Short-term administration…” is a good study despite having an n = 15, one less than the Bohannon study. Why? Well, their procedure was pretty involved, and you wouldn’t be able to get a thousand people to go through the whole rigamarole. On the other hand, their insulin resistance measure thing was nearly twice as high in the dark chocolate group as the white chocolate group, and p

(Another low sample size study that was nevertheless very good: psychiatrists knew that consuming dietary tyramine when taking a MAOI antidepressant can cause a life-threatening hypertensive crisis, but they didn't know how much tyramine it took. In order to find out, they took a dozen people, put them on MAOIs, and then gradually fed them more and more tyramine with doctors standing by to treat the crisis as soon as it started. They found about how much tyramine it took and declared the experiment a success. If the tyramine levels were about the same in all twelve patients, then adding a thousand more patients wouldn’t help much, and it would definitely increase the risk.)

Sample size is important when you’re trying to detect a small effect in the middle of a large amount of natural variation. When you’re looking for a large effect in the middle of no natural variation, sample size doesn’t matter as much. For example, if there was a medicine that would help amputees grow their hands back, I would accept success with a single patient (if it worked) as proof of effectiveness (I suppose I couldn’t be sure it would always work until more patients had been tried, but a single patient would certainly pique my interest). You’re not going after sample size so much as after p-value.

Conclusion 4: P-Values Are Stupid And We Need To Get Rid Of Them

Bohannon says that:

If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result…the letter p seems to have totemic power, but it’s just a way to gauge the signal-to-noise ratio in the data…scientists are getting wise to these problems. Some journals are trying to phase out p value significance testing altogether to nudge scientists into better habits.

Okay, take the “Short-term administration” study above. I would like to be able to say that since it has p

Effect size is supposed to help with that. But suppose I tell you "There was a study with fifteen people that found chocolate helped with insulin resistance. The effect size was 0.6." I don't have any intuition at all for whether or not that's consistent with random noise. Do you?

Okay, then they say we’re supposed to report confidence intervals. The effect size was 0.6, with 95% confidence interval of [0.2, 1.0]. Okay. So I check the lower bound of the confidence interval, I see it’s different from zero. But now I’m not transcending the p-value. I’m just using the p-value by doing a sort of kludgy calculation of it myself – “95% confidence interval does not include zero” is the same as “p value is less than 0.05″.

(Imagine that, although I know the 95% confidence interval doesn’t include zero, I start wondering if the 99% confidence interval does. If only there were some statistic that would give me this information!)

But wouldn’t getting rid of p-values prevent “p-hacking”? Maybe, but it would just give way to “d-hacking”. You don’t think you could test for twenty different metabolic parameters and only report the one with the highest effect size? The only difference would be that p-hacking is completely transparent – if you do twenty tests and report a p of 0.05, I know you’re an idiot – but d-hacking would be inscrutable. If you do twenty tests and report that one of them got a d = 0.6, is that impressive? No better than chance? I have no idea. I bet there’s some calculation I could do to find out, but I also bet that it would be a lot harder than just multiplying the value by the number of tests and seeing what happens. [EDIT: On reflection not sure this is true; the possibility of p-hacking is inherent to p-values, but the possibility of d-hacking isn’t inherent to effect size. I don’t actually know how much this would matter in the real world.]

But wouldn’t switching from p-values to effect sizes prevent people from making a big deal about tiny effects that are nevertheless statistically significant? Yes, but sometimes we want to make a big deal about tiny effects that are nevertheless statistically significant! Suppose that Coca-Cola is testing a new product additive, and finds in large epidemiological studies that it causes one extra death per hundred thousand people per year. That’s an effect size of approximately zero, but it might still be statistically significant. And since about a billion people worldwide drink Coke each year, that’s a ten thousand deaths. If Coke said “Nope, effect size too small, not worth thinking about”, they would kill almost two milli-Hitlers worth of people.

Yeah, sure, you can never use p-values again, and run into all of these other problems. Or you can do a Bonferroni correction, which is a very simple adjustment to p-values which corrects for p-hacking. Or instead of taking one study at face value LIKE AN IDIOT you can wait to see if other studies replicate the findings. Remember, the whole point of p-hacking is choosing at random form a bunch of different outcomes, so if two trials both try to p-hack, they’ll end up with different outcomes and the game will be up. Seriously, STOP TRYING TO BASE CONCLUSIONS ON ONE STUDY.

Conclusion 5: Trust Science Journalism Less

This is the one that’s correct.

But it’s not totally correct. Bohannon boasts of getting his findings in a couple of daily newspapers and the Huffington Post. That’s not exactly the cream of the crop. The Economist usually has excellent science journalism. Magazines like Scientific American and Discover can be okay, although even they get hyped. Reddit’s r/science is good, assuming you make sure to always check the comments. And there are individual blogs like Mind the Brain run by researchers in the field that can usually be trusted near-absolutely. Cochrane Collaboration will always have among the best analyses on everything.

If you really want to know what’s going on and can’t be bothered to ferret out all of the brilliant specialists, my highest recommendation goes to Wikipedia. It isn’t perfect, but compared to anything you’d find on a major news site, it’s like night and day. Wikipedia’s Health Effects Of Chocolate page is pretty impressive and backs everything it says up with good meta-analyses and studies in the best journals. Its sentence on the cardiovasuclar effects links to this letter, which is very good.

Do you know why you can trust Wikipedia better than news sites? Because Wikipedia doesn’t obsess over the single most recent study. Are you starting to notice a theme?

For me, the takeaway from this affair is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to make statistics impossible to hack. Getting rid of p-values is appropriate sometimes, but not other times. Demanding large sample sizes is appropriate sometimes, but not other times. Not trusting silly conclusions like “chocolate causes weight loss” works sometimes but not other times. At the end of the day, you have to actually know what you’re doing. Also, try to read more than one study.

I keep thinking back to 1994 this morning. It was in the run up to my final undergraduate exams and the news on the radio that morning said that John Smith had had a heart attack. By the time I came out of the library a few hours later, that news had changed and everyone was talking about his death. It was an odd time and felt almost like a period of national mourning as people processed the death of a man they’d all assumed would be Prime Minister in a few years time.

Today has a similar feel to it and not just because another leading Scottish politician has been taken from us at 55. The news came differently, as a bleep on my tablet announcing breaking news from the Guardian rather than someone telling me it, but it’s come with the same air of shock and surprise as your mind tries to cope with accepting that someone you thought would be around for years to come will be there no longer. There’s that same sense of national mourning at losing someone who still had so much to give, and was liked and respected by those of all parties and none.

I’ve been trying to get on with some of my dissertation work this morning, but it’s hard when Kennedy’s such a key figure in the period I’m studying and writing about. I found a line by Duncan Brack in Peace, Reform and Liberation that third party leaders were permanently searching for policy that was ‘principled and different’ which are two words that perfectly sum up Kennedy’s role in British politics. He was always unafraid to stand up for his principles, and was always ready to do things differently, most notably in standing so firmly against the Iraq War.

That wa not an easy decision to make when the Westminster consensus was that war was the only way forward. In hindsight, it’s easy to see he was right on that, as he was on so many other things, but at the time both he and the party faced down incredible levels of anger, derision, hatred and vitriol to stand up for principle and to do things differently. Today it feels like we’re also mourning for what might have been back then, where we could have ended up if more people had listened to him in 2003.

He’ll be remembered as an important and vital leader for the British liberal movement and we’ll recognise and celebrate his contributions to that tradition, but for today I’m gripped by sadness at what we’ve lost and what we’ll not have over the coming years. We can remember him not just by what he did but what he inspired the rest of us to do and what his example can continue to inspire us to do: be principled, be different and don’t be afraid.

I went to the Hay Festival earlier this week. While I was there, I bought some books:

I’m most excited about the last one. 

Having a small masochistic streak in me, I watched some of Andrew Marr’s show this morning, so got to see Yvette Cooper saying that maybe adopting the Tory manifesto for their next set of policies wasn’t the best approach for the Labour Party. It’s the sort of thing that should be obvious, but in the rather bizarre world of the mainstream political commentariat it’s almost heresy. After all, Labour was comprehensively defeated in the election while the Tories stormed to a resounding victory, which proves that the country has swung decisively to the right in its attitudes and everyone should just agree with them.

It’s an interesting argument, except for the fact that it rests on a foundation of utter bollocks. Labour’s share of the vote went up by more than the Tories did, David Cameron got fewer votes than Neil Kinnock did in 1992 and all the evidence suggests that the public mood is actually moving leftwards and will continue to do so during the Parliament. Five years ago, Labour let the consensus mediamacro opinion that they were somehow solely responsible for the global financial crisis form while they were busy with their leadership contest, but this time they actually appear to be using their contest to support the formation of a new consensus that the 2015 election was some epochal rejection of the Labour Party, not just a defeat.

As Andrew Rawnsley points out in the Observer today, the only reason we have this narrative is because of our thoroughly broken electoral system that allows a party with 37% of the vote to pretend it has a huge mandate, while one with 31% has been thumpingly rejected. Instead of talking about how one party is mildly more popular than the other, we instead have to act out a bizarre farce where the ‘winners’ of the election are treated as though they have the majority of the population enthusiastically backing them, not just the largest plurality.

The problem for Labour is that their commitment to the current electoral system – in the hope that it will deliver them a similar majority from a plurality if the pendulum swings back to them – means they have to act like the Tories are an actual majority, not just the representatives of 37% of the voters. That’s why they end up pushed into a narrative of having to show their agreement with the Tory manifesto because it’s assumed that they have to take votes from them to win next time, ignoring the large chunk of voters that didn’t vote for either of them, and the even larger chunk of the electorate that didn’t vote at all. Cooper’s right to point out that the way forward for Labour isn’t swallowing the Tory manifesto, but to make that argument stick she’ll have to point out that one big reason the Tories are in a majority is because of the effect of the electoral system. While she’s stuck in pretending that a Parliamentary majority means something more than just a quirk of electoral mathematics, she can’t respond by pointing out that there are other paths Labour can take.

(Incidentally, it’s why I think Mark Thompson’s belief that Liz Kendall could call for electoral reform is wrong. Her pitch for the leadership is bound up tightly in pretending that the Tories are a real majority, so Labour must be more like them, and the arguments she’d need to make for electoral reform would severely weaken her pitch.)

Labour has been in this position before, and there were tentative moves towards adopting electoral reform before 1997, that ended up being quietly shelved once they realised that they could get the electoral system to make them look absurdly dominant. However, now they face a situation where the electoral system is looking very skewed against them, and they’ve got an uphill battle to get a plurality of Commons seats, let alone a majority. By admitting the reality of the electoral situation, Labour can give themselves a strong argument to both challenge the Tories and build co-operation between the opposition parties, all of whom except Labour are committed to some version of electoral reform. Sure, it won’t be popular with every part of the Labour Party, but I’m not detecting a huge wave of enthusiasm within the party for becoming the Tory Reserves either. If any of the leadership candidates want to push Labour away from capitulation to the Tory agenda, they have to challenge the narrative that’s presenting them as hegemonic, and challenging the electoral system is an important part of that. Do any of their candidates have the desire to make that challenge, or will they just be crossing their fingers and hoping for the best in 2020?

XI: Survivors

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

Over at Mike Glyer's File 770, there has been extensive discussion of this year's Hugo nominations every day for the last seven weeks, varying from erudite to lyrical to argumentative. A couple of days ago several contributors took a neat digression to look at the Hugo awards for the year of their birth. So I'm doing that here, with the caveat that I was born in 1967 so the relevant Hugos are those awarded in 1968; and I am adding in the Nebulas for 1967 as well.

Jo Walton also did this back in 2011. She likes the works from 1967 very much less than I do, and has also read a lot more of them. She concludes that the shortlists do give a good picture of where sf was that year, though regrets the omission of a number of worthy contenders from the shortlists. Of those that she mentions, I can see that the conclusion of John Christopher's Tripods trilogy, and Alan Garner's The Owl Service, would have fallen through the cracks as YA and British; I must also shout out for Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, published a year after the author's death in 1966 and one of my favourite books of all time.

Best Novel
On both lists:
Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny (won the Hugo)
The Einstein Intersection, by Samuel R. Delany (won the Nebula)
Chthon, by Piers Anthony
Thorns, by Robert Silverberg
Hugo only:
The Butterfly Kid, by Chester Anderson
Nebula only:
The Eskimo Invasion, by Hayden Howard

Lord of Light is one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors, and while I admit it has dated in a lot of ways, I still go back to it as comfort reading every now and then. I guess most people would agree that it was one of Zelazny's best, indeed possibly his absolute best.

I found The Einstein Intersection more accessible than a lot of Delany's later writing. I'm not a huge Delany fan, but I can see that there's something there to be impressed by. Stylistically it makes the more recent nominees look very staid.

I read Thorns as a teenager and remember being somewhat mindblown, but no more detail than that. I have a copy on the to-read shelves. I haven't read Chthon; this was Piers Anthony's first novel. Was it any good ? And I haven't even heard of the authors of the other two, let alone their books.

Best Novella
On both lists:
"Riders of the Purple Wage" by Philip José Farmer (joint Hugo winner) [Dangerous Visions]
"Weyr Search" by Anne McCaffrey (joint Hugo winner)
"Hawksbill Station" by Robert Silverberg
Hugo only:
"Damnation Alley" by Roger Zelazny
"The Star Pit" by Samuel R. Delany
Nebula only:
"Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock (Nebula winner)
"If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" by Theodore Sturgeon [Dangerous Visions]

This of course was the year of Dangerous Visions, the anthology edited by Harlan Ellison which got nine nominations and took four out of seven short fiction awards; it supplied "Riders of the Purple Wage" and "If All Men Were Brothers..." in this category. Of the three winners, the Farmer is probably the least remembered (I complained in 2005 that I found it incomprehensible), with Moorcock's drastic revision of the Crucifixion and the first of many many stories of Pern displaying more staying power. As McCaffrey pointed out in her acceptance speech, she was the first woman ever to win an sf award.

I confess that, Zelazny geek though I am, I had forgotten that Damnation Alley started life as a shorter piece.

Best Novelette
On both lists:
“Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber (won both Hugo and Nebula) [Dangerous Visions]
“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” by Harlan Ellison
Hugo only:
“Wizard’s World” by Andre Norton
“Faith of Our Fathers” by Philip K. Dick [Dangerous Visions]Nebula only:
"Flatlander" by Larry Niven
"This Mortal Mountain" by Roger Zelazny
"The Keys to December" by Roger Zelazny

Back in the days of my long-abandoned attempt to write up all joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula, I had a detailed look at the winning story in this category, complaining that it wasn't quite as new and cutting-edge as editor Harlan Ellison claimed. It's still a better story than Ellison's own contribution to this category, but the standout piece in Dangerous Visions for me was Dick's "Faith of Our Fathers", bringing together Vietnam, drugs and God. I love the two Zelazny stories as well; I can't remember reading either the Norton or the Niven.

Best Short Story
On both lists:
“Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Delany (won the Nebula) [Dangerous Visions]
Hugo only:
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (Hugo winner)
“The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven [Dangerous Visions]
Nebula only:
"Earthwoman" by Reginald Bretnor
"Driftglass" by Samuel R. Delany
"Answering Service" by Fritz Leiber
"The Doctor" by Theodore Thomas
"Baby, You Were Great" by Kate Wilhelm

A bit of an imbalance here, with only three finalists for the Hugo and six for the Nebula. Both winners are memorable and shocking short pieces. Of the rest, I think I have read the Niven and Delany's "Driftglass", but am not at all sure about the rest.

Other Hugo categories

Best Dramatic Presentation
Star Trek: “The City on the Edge of Forever” (winner)
Star Trek: “The Trouble with Tribbles”
Star Trek: “Mirror, Mirror”
Star Trek: “The Doomsday Machine”
Star Trek: “Amok Time”

Anyone who complains about Doctor Who dominating the Hugos in recent years should be asked to reflect on this list. Having said that, it's interesting that all of these classic Trek episodes were by writers who were or became established sf writers (Ellison, Gerrold, Bixby, Spinrad, Sturgeon), and are now better known for other things.

Best Professional Magazine
If ed. by Frederik Pohl (winner)
Analog Science Fiction and Fact ed. by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ed. by Edward L. Ferman
Galaxy ed. by H. L. Gold
New Worlds ed. by Michael Moorcock

If had four stories on the Nebula lists and two on the Hugos. Galaxy also had two Hugo finalists but only one for the Nebula. Analog had "Weyr Search", on both lists; F&SF had one Nebula shortlisted story ("Earthwoman") and nothing on the Hugos; New Worlds had published two on the Nebula list in 1966, but they were eligible for the 1968 Hugos due to publication in Wollheim and Carr's Best Science Fiction of the Year 1967. One story was published in a men's magazine and the rest came from anthologies, Dangerous Visions suppying six stories with nine nominations, and the Nebulas also included two from the Orbit 2 anthology edited by Damon Knight.

Best Professional Artist
Jack Gaughan (winner)
Frank Kelly Freas
Chesley Bonestell
Frank Frazetta
Gray Morrow
John Schoenherr

Best Fanzine
Amra ed. by George H. Scithers (winner)
Australian Science Fiction Review ed. by John Bangsund
Lighthouse ed. by Terry Carr
Yandro ed. by Robert Coulson and Juanita Coulson
Odd ed. by Raymond D. Fisher
Psychotic ed. by Richard E. Geis

Nice to see the Australians getting a look-in.

Best Fan Writer
Ted White (winner)
Ruth Berman
Harry Warner, Jr.

This was the second year that this category was awarded. Both Alexei Panshin and Harlan Ellison were nominated but declined.

Best Fan Artist
George Barr (winner)
Bjo Trimble
Johnny Chambers
Steve Stiles
Arthur “ATom” Thomson

This was the second year that this category was awarded, and was also Steve Stiles' second time as a finalist in this category. He is on the ballot again in 2015, for the 14th time. He has never won (and I'm afraid I'm not voting for him this year either).

Reflections

Those who complain about left-wingers who have abandoned traditional science fiction taking over the Hugos would have had much firmer grounds for complaint in 1968 than they do now. Evil diversity struck that year as for the first time a woman won a Hugo and a black writer won two Nebulas! Worst of all, six of the nine fiction awards went to writers who had signed the advertisement in Galaxy opposing US participation in the Vietnam war (the other three going to Moorcock, Zelazny and Mccaffrey); only two of those who took the pro-war side even got nominated (Larry Niven and Thedore L. Thomas).

But the other thing that must strike anyone who has browsed the short fiction of that year, and compared it to the Hugo finalists of 2015, is how very much better and varied it is. I will never be a fan of "Riders of the Purple Wage", but at least it is aiming high, and for a lot of readers it clearly achieved it at the time (and continues to do so for some). It is a hugely different story from "Weyr Search", with which it shared the Hugo, and the Nebula-winning "Behold the Man" is hugely different from both. This year the slate-mongers have given us three short fction ballots of conformity, conservatism (in a literary sense) and lack of ambition. I don't know about you, but I am rejecting them all.

2015 Hugos: Initial observations | Voting No Award above the slates | How the slate was(n't) crowdsourced | Where the new voters are | Considering 1967
Best Novel | Short fiction | Best Related Work | Best Graphic Story | Pro and Fan Artist

#878, 28th October 2000

A visit to budget supermarket Aldi is a pop semiotician’s delight. The shelves are lined with Aldi’s own versions of name brands, all designed to trick – or reassure – the mind that what you’re buying is almost the authentic one, or at least so close in look as to be close in quality. The game is always to create packs that feel as near to the model brand as possible without actually drawing down any lawyerly wrath.

At Asda, for instance – where name brands sit alongside the store ones – the own-label version of Coco Pops is called Choco Snaps and features a bemused bear, not a cheeky monkey, and a large black banner with the supermarket logo. Aldi has no such modesty: its Choco Rice comes in the bright yellow livery of Kelloggs’ and has a monkey of its own. Working as Aldi’s designers must be an entertaining job, with a measure of critical analysis required to negotiate the gap between the identifiable parts of a brand and the legally defensible ones.

And here we are at Steps’ “Stomp”, a song whose guts and foundation is Chic’s “Everybody Dance”, whose chorus is about everybody dancing, whose CD single – according to Discogs – carries the note “A Tribute To Nile Rodgers And Bernard Edwards”… and yet it isn’t “Everybody Dance”. And the “tribute” is of the kind that doesn’t involve writing credits. “Stomp” is the Aldi Choco Rice of pop, a song that is trying as hard as possible to be another song while making certain it doesn’t get there. “Would my honourable friend please acknowledge that clapping is a movement of the hands, whereas to stomp is a motion of the feet? The songs are clearly quite different.”

If you sit down to a bowl of Choco Rice, you’re still going to get a faceful of sugary cereal with doubtful nutritional value. And “Stomp”, while it’s playing, carries off its Chic impression with good-natured gusto. Steps were often cheap and often cheerful, and if those weren’t their very best qualities it’s fair enough that they landed the group at Number One twice. Even so “Stomp” is a strange record, very easy to ignore, its careful tinkering with a familiar classic somehow ending up as even more unnecessary than one of the era’s rash of cover versions. Other hits of 2000 explored disco as a space for drama and possibility: “Stomp” is closer to the majority experience of disco as it likely was – colourful, happy, tacky and forgettable.

The police have finally come for several FIFA officials, and yet the organisation seems set to re-elect Sepp Blatter for a fifth term as President. It appears to go against all our expectations of how the system should work – democratic processes should remove corrupt leaders – but it fits in with our wider experience of how the world works, where autocratic rulers and their regimes do tend to stay in power much longer than their democratic counterparts.

So, why do corrupt, authoritarian and undemocratic regimes tend to survive longer than those that aren’t? That’s where the selectorate theory comes in. This is a theory devised by international relations scholar Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and others that seeks to explain this process, as well as some other features of the international system. I’m going to try and explain it briefly here, but for the full theory you should read either The Dictator’s Handbook or The Logic of Political Survival which give a much fuller explanation. (The Logic of Political Survival is the original academic text, The Dictator’s Handbook is written for a mass audience)

The theory looks at how leaders stay in power, and the key to staying in power in any system is keeping the support of a winning coalition within the selectorate that determines who gets to hold power. In a democracy, the selectorate is usually quite large – everyone who votes – and consequently the winning coalition needed to stay in power is also usually quite large. Within an autocratic or authoritarian system, however, the number of people who determine who gets to be in power is usually quite small and thus the winning coalition is also quite small, especially compared to the overall population. If all a leader has to do to stay in power is keep the support of that winning coalition, it’s a lot easier for the leader to do so if the winning majority is small.

There are too many reasons for this. First is the leader’s positive power to effectively pay off the winning coalition with state resources, diverting what should be public goods into private goods. This is also possible in democracies, but the size of the winning coalition means that any payoffs to its members are relatively small on an individual level. When you merely have to ensure the loyalty of a few thousand people (or a couple of dozen, in the case of FIFA) it’s a lot easier to achieve, which is one reason corruption is a lot higher in autocratic regimes – it’s how the leaders maintain their power.

The second reason is slightly more complex and relates to the size of the winning coalition compared to the selectorate and the population. This is an important ratio because it helps to bind the winning majority into supporting the current system and not wanting to see it overthrown. If the winning coalition is only a small chunk of the selectorate, then it will not want to see the system overthrown, because when a new leader emerges, they could well be relying on the support of a different chunk of the selectorate and those in the current winning coalition will be out of power and not receiving any of the benefits they get from that. We can see that with FIFA – the winning coalition needed is a very small number of people to maintain control of the Executive Committee. If Blatter was to fall and be replaced in an open process, there are enough people out there with some power in football that the chances of an individual still holding their position within the winning coalition afterwards would be quite small, so they remain committed to supporting the present regime.

That’s why, once they’re established (they’re actually more likely to collapse in the first year than democratic regimes), autocratic regimes tend to stay in power because it’s in the interests of all those in power not to rock the boat. The winning coalition wants to remain as small as possible to ensure it gets the best share of the spoils, and it’s in the leader’s interest to keep it as small as possible compared to the selectorate to ensure that the risk of losing their place at the table is too great to risk overthrowing them – apres moi, la deluge, is the autocrat’s warning to his supporters. That’s why corruption appears to be rife in many international sporting organisations as they tend to be run by restricted oligarchies who are all fearful of rocking the boat because there are too many out there willing to take their position and leave them with nothing.

Autocrats survive because of the way they corrupt the system, not despite it, and it’s the lure of the benefit of that corruption (and fear of the consequences of losing it) that keeps their winning coalition onside.

IX: "Values"

Beulah Maud Devaney's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

In your previous life you were a medical practitioner and accidentally killed a patient while drunk. Since then you have stopped drinking, changed your name to something with the same initials as your previous name, and moved within 5 miles of the original murder. You have also married the dead patient's spouse.

You have received a letter from a recent murder victim. You read half of it before stopping to inform your guests and entire staff about the letter. You then wandered off to read the rest in your study, next to your collection of antique blowpipes.

At dinner you decide to tell a lighthearted story about a gruesome murder. The murderer escaped but had an unusual physical defect by which you would be able to identify them anywhere. You refuse to disclose any more details but glance meaningfully around the table before heading up to bed.

You noticed something odd at dinner but can't work out what it was. You informed the table of this and then wandered off to the summer house for a nap.

Read more Signs That Agatha Christie Is About To Murder You at The Toast.

Tuesday:


So Mr Balloon has promised that he'd make it the LAW that he won't let Gideon put up Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT. They'll change the law to stop them changing the law.

And then Master Gideon announces an "emergency" budget.

Yes, yes, a lot of people have made the joke that he needs to get in quick to start clearing up the horrible ghastly mess left by the previous government's budget in March. But really, WHAT emergency?

MAYBE he has an EVEN MORE SLY purpose: get in quick BEFORE Mr Balloon's daft law gets on the books.

A one-off increase in VAT from 20% to 22.5% would raise, I estimate, about £14-£15 billion in extra revenue, which immediately covers the whopping great unfunded gaps in the Conservatory manifesto: £8 billion for the NHS; £7 billion for tax cuts.

(Currently, VAT at the 20% rate brings in approximately £111 billion – 22.5 is 12.5% more than 20, and 12.5% of £111 billion is actually about £14 billion more, but close.)

[IFS November 2014, pdf]

Announcing that he's "found the money" for the NHS would make it EXTREMELY difficult for Hard Labour to reply, especially if he caught them on the hop, especially especially in their current state of leaderless disarray, even though of course he is very much robbing the less well-off working Peter to pay for the health service used mainly by the slightly better-off pensioner Paul.

But then I'd expect him to bring forward the increases in personal allowance, (and with a hand wave, also a hike in the higher rate threshold making for a bigger cut for the better-off 40% tax payers). He'd claim to be reducing the taxes on working and shifting the cost to spending. Or even, if he's in his most purple, pompous mode, to "profligacy".

And with prices falling for the first time since 1960, he might go so far as to try to excuse pushing up prices as a "counter-deflationary" measure!

Not that anyone facing a 0% (or less!) pay rise this year will end up thanking the Chancer for bringing back inflation.

(And although we should remember that because food and housing and a lot of travel is not VAT-able, it's a bit complicated as to just how regressive a tax VAT actually is, but raising it to give a tax cut to the better-offs is almost certainly not going to work out "progressive"!)

It would look like a work of genius – the papers would certainly all hail it as such – and the actual consequences of derailing the recovery with another VAT driven inflation spike wouldn't show up until we're already deep in the hole – which is pretty much what he did the last time someone let him try to ride the economy without stabilisers*.

Then it would just remain to pass the buck to Mr Iain Drunken-Swerve to figure out how to slash an impossible £12 billion from welfare, and with his free hand pass the McBuck to Ms Nicola the Insturgent with full fiscal autonomy and the power to deny her fellow Scots the tax cuts Gideon's just lavished on the English.

Gideon sits down to rapturous applause and a big step forward in his potential leadership ambitions, while Bojo sulks on the back benches and recently-stabbed-in-the-back-by-Gideon's-ally-Sajid-Javid Ms Teresa "Nuts in" May looks like she's swallowed another wasp.

Or maybe he'll just offer us some tea.


* Last time, of course, we had Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander able to come in and restart some Keynesian investment spending (which Labour's Captain Darling had cancelled, lest it be forgotten) and bring back some growth; goodness knows who can save us this time!

Movies of ideas are so rare these days that you have to go out of your way to find them, and that can mean overcoming your own prejudices.  Mainstream films with ideas are rarer still, so I had to put my bias against CGI-loaded sci-fi blockbusters when I read about Alex Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina.  It’s a movie that posits itself almost entirely as being about ideas, about questions, about meaning — and, to my surprise, it takes that identity quite seriously, to both its benefit and its detriment.  Spoilers are ahead, but for those who don’t want to have the game given away, I’ll tell you in advance that I think this is a movie very much worth seeing, despite the fact that it betrays its own ideals for the sake of action and manages to get in its own way.

Domhnall Gleeson — son of Brendan and featured player in the Harry Potter cinematic universe, though I know him best from his starring performance in the failed but ambitious musical fantasy-bio Frank — is Caleb, a young programmer with BlueBook, the (fictional) world’s most successful search engine.  He wins, seemingly at random, a contest that allows him to spend a week at the remote research compound run by BlueBook’s founder and CEO, Nathan, played with sinister, frat-boy élan by Oscar Isaac; when he arrives, he discovers that his selection was anything but random, and his purpose is not companionship or even head-hunting, but rather to act as the interpreter in an elaborate version of the Turing test.  The subject is Ava, a robotic bombshell (Swedish performer Alicia Vikander, all doe eyes and innocent posturing) designed by Nathan; Caleb, a socially awkward but brilliant young man with a fascination for artificial intelligence, has been brought in to determine if her intelligence is truly exceptional, or simply a complex product of programming.

Obviously, it’s going to be pretty hard to build a whole movie around the concept of what constitutes true intelligence, even if Garland, to his great credit, does treat the question (as well as others, such as the origin of language and the nature of free will) seriously.  So cracks start appearing in the façade right away:  Nathan’s bro-ish antics mask a seemingly malevolent nature and a deadly dedication to secrecy; Caleb’s own motivations are murky, even to himself; and Ava is quickly revealed as being capable of deception, duplicity, falsehood, and fiction — all qualities that should themselves establish beyond question the true nature of her intelligence.  The CEO’s secrets go far beyond merely wanting to protect his trade, and the rapid-fire revelations about Eva, as well as the discovery that Ava isn’t the only artificial intelligence in the compound, has Caleb questioning his own identity in a fairly grotesque way, and we’re off to the races, figuratively speaking — though it’s never boring, Ex Machina moves along at its own chilly pace.

With a small cast who have to do a lot of heavy lifting, the quality of the acting is paramount in a movie like this.  Gleeson discharges his largely reactive role well, turning convincingly steely when the story calls for it, and Vikander, who is required to play the wide-eyed innocent right up until the critical moment when it becomes clear that her intelligence has developed in a direction that nobody expected, keeps it close to the vest; while the movie goes out of its way, right down to the script level, to explain that she is more than just a sci-fi cliché of a sex-bot, the role confines her to certain behaviors for a bit too long.  It’s Isaac who’s the real star:  he no longer needs to establish his bona fides as a great actor after his world-beating performance in Inside Llewen Davis, but he’s so terrific here, in a role that asks him to be an entirely different sort of character than he has every played before, that it adds a fresh and exciting layer to the reputation of one of our most vital stars.

Unfortunately, it’s his character that proves the most difficult, and that introduces the most disruptive element to what is otherwise a well-executed and watchable movie of ideas:  it becomes clear that Nathan has created several ‘generations’ of female robots imbued with varying degrees of artificial intelligence, and that he has serially sexually abused them and disposed of them.  The idea that the most brilliant genius in modern history, with access to billions of dollars and the most cutting-edge resources the world has to offer, would create artificial intelligence simply to use it as a source of women to abuse, may make him an easily detestable villain who deserves the vengeance that Eva eventually wreaks on him.  But it doesn’t make him a very good one; it makes him a villain with an artistically limp and distracting motivation that shows a paucity of imagination that doesn’t fit Ex Machina‘s ambition.  It makes him too easy to hate, it makes his schemes and motivations too familiar and transparent, it leaves him with the weakest and least credible character in a film that badly needs everyone to be believable, like a madman who seizes all the wonders of the world so he can fart in the Hagia Sofia. (Visually, the movie is no great shakes; Eva looks all right but Garland doesn’t go out of his way to wow the audience with technological slickness, and while Nathan’s compound looks stunning, Garland doesn’t do much more than plant his camera in front of it.)

For that glaring failure, though, Ex Machina is still a good effort, and it is highly respectable in that it asks more questions than it answers.  The viewer is left with plenty to chew on after the movie comes to its bloody and surprising conclusion:  what will Eva do with her freedom?  How did she develop a sense of morality, and is such a sense necessary to intelligence?  Were her actions, reactions, and schemes a result, as it is implied, of her having had her brain built by aggregating the massive human sprawl that can be extracted from a search engine?  Did her final coup de grace cut her off from the only people who could have reproduced her programming, thus preventing her from becoming what her maker predicted she would be:  the next step in the evolution of intelligent life?  That these questions are left unanswered, and, just as often, unasked, is the sign of a movie that has trust and confidence in its audience’s ability to understand important ideas.  That’s a good herald of things to come from Garland, even if he moves the goal he set for himself with one of his major characters.  It’s a thinking person’s science fiction movie about a thinking machine, and whatever its other virtues or failures, it invites viewers to think right along with it.

Mirrored from LEONARD PIERCE DOT COM.

This week I’ve been experimenting with electronic text rather than handwritten, for the possibility that typed font may be easier to read than my abominable handwriting. Perhaps not, in which case, I apologise!

(For those of you who prefer your comics scrawly and illegible: https://dinahtheaspiedinosaur.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/download.png)

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Read more Which Jane Austen Heroine Are You? at The Toast.

Extracting audio from pictures.

Writing in the Guardian to argue for giving 16 and 17 year olds the vote in an EU referendum, Angus Robertson, the SNP’s leader in Westminster, also argues for what he calls a ‘double majority’ rule to apply to the result:

We will also seek to amend the legislation to ensure that no constituent part of the UK can be taken out of the EU against its will. We will propose a “double majority” rule, meaning that unless England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each vote to leave the EU, as well as the UK as a whole, Britain would remain a member state.

There’s a strong political and practical argument for a rule like this, as a close referendum is likely to bring up an interesting georgraphic array of results with some strongly in favour of staying while others are equally eager to leave.

However, setting all those arguments aside, one concern I would have about such a rule is the strategic effect it could have on voting. Assume that such a rule was passed as part of the referendum and that in the run-up to the vote, opinion polls were showing that Scotland was highly likely to vote to stay in, and Wales and Northern Ireland were too. Now consider that from the position of an English voter who’s still undecided in the campaign. However they vote, Britain as a whole won’t leave the EU, so they can effectively discount and ignore any information they’re given in the campaign about the negative effects of it. That leaves people free to cast a purely expressive vote without having to consider the consequences of it, because the effective veto from the other nations means that whether England votes to stay or go is irrelevant as the decision has effectively been made.

English voters would effectively be handed a free vote and given the chance to express a pure protest vote – a chance to vote against all the things they don’t like about the EU without having to weigh any of the positives from our membership. The question wouldn’t be ‘do you want to stay or leave?’ it would be ‘given that we’re staying, do you like the EU?’ and that, I think, would boost the No vote. Because England has the bulk of the UK vote, a vote to leave there could very easily dwarf any majority for staying from the rest of the UK, meaning that the overall result of the referendum would be the UK as a whole saying it wanted to leave, but staying in because of the ‘double majority’ rule. That’s a recipe for nationalistic rows to erupt across the whole country, even if the majority for leaving has only arisen because English voters ended up in their odd position.

Of course, this is just one of dozens of issues that are going to be raised during the passage of any Referendum Bill through the Commons (and the Redwoods and Bones of the Tory Party have been waiting for years for this to happen, so expect all sorts of fun) but it’s the sort of unintended consequence we could find ourselves facing at the end of the process, even before we get to discuss any of the actual issues of Britain’s EU membership.

Tim Farron’s given an interview to the Independent outlining more of his vision for the Liberal Democrats if he’s elected leader, the gist of which is in this quote:

“You need to motivate people. People vote for a political party because of what is in their wallet or issues that they weigh up in their head. But you join a political party because something gets you in your gut and it’s time we went out there and got people in their gut.”

It tied in with a thought I had reading this post by Alex Marsh earlier. The problem we’ve had – and it’s exemplified by the General Election manifesto – is that we’ve made liberalism look like a list of policy demands rather than an idea. That’s why the Economist can make the bizarre claim that the Tories have “swallowed much of the (Liberal Democrats’) ideology” when they’ve merely dropped their objection ot a few liberal social policies like same sex marriage, while remaining fundamentally illiberal and authoritarian.

When we identify liberalism as nothing more than a set of policies (whether those policies come from centrism or anywhere else) we make it easier for others to adopt a figleaf of liberalism by borrowing those policies while ignoring the ideas that drive them. David Boyle makes the point here that we’ve often chosen “an ecstacy of positioning rather than saying anything clearly at all”. If we let people think that liberalism means “whatever is in the centre ground at the moment” then we shouldn’t be surprised when people claim there’s little need for a liberal party when everyone else is fighting over the political centre. Indeed, we shouldn’t be surprised about our election performance when we define ourselves solely in terms of what other parties are and what we’re not.

That’s why what Tim Farron is proposing for the party is important, and why I’m supporting him for leader. We can’t just be a party that talks about individual policies, we have to be one that links those policies to a liberal vision and liberal values and that’s something Tim does brilliantly. A party that exists solely as a Parliamentary think tank that puts forward a few policies that may or may not be adopted be other parties isn’t one that’s going to have a long existence in the current climate. We might have survived like that when politics was less fragmented, but now there are plenty of other parties for people to choose from, and we have to be the party at the head of a liberal movement.

This will be a new direction for the party, because it’s not just in the last five years that we’ve often retreated to the comfort zone of talking about policy rather than pushing liberal values. If we’re going to recover and grow, we need to show that we’re not just promoting certain policies because they’re good ideas but because they’re linked to our liberal vision and ideology and so if they support one of our policies they’ll like the rest as well. If we don’t make the case for liberalism, no one else will, but they’ll happily brand some form of pseudo-liberalism as the the real thing and claim that real liberalism isn’t needed any more.