Saturday 17 November 2018

The shape of evil

My 1931 beginners' guide to astronomy, The Stars In Their Courses by Sir James Jeans, really is the gift that keeps on giving. Currently loving this passage on the Coal Sack Nebula from the very end of the book:
This region contains one of the most brilliant parts of the Milky Way, and also one of its most remarkable features, a pear-shaped black patch on the sky 8° long by 5° wide, which the early navigators and astronomers called the Coal Sack. Early Australian folk-lore interprets this as a yawning pit of darkness and also as the embodiment of evil in the shape of an emu, which lies in wait at the foot of a tree represented by the Stars of the Cross for an opossum driven by its persecutors to take refuge among its branches.
If you grew up watching British TV in the 1970s, the idea of the embodiment of evil in the shape of an emu will ring a few bells...
"Hello, Possums!"

Wednesday 3 October 2018

Lionheart: a cosmopolitan Euro elitist

There's apparently been a bit of a to-do over the statues outside the houses of Parliament, about who we should honour and who we shouldn't. When it comes to Oliver Cromwell and his record, my take is that, like some social media relationships, it's complicated, but he's an important enough figure to stay, warts and all. But what caught my eye was one particular reaction to the debate. Here's what Ukip's Gerard Batten tweeted:


"Whose statue are they going to demand goes next? First Nelson, now Cromwell, next Richard I from outside Parliament? After all he was a crusader - and a great one at that."
I can't quite believe that I'm here in 2018, still having to critique an opinion about a 12th Century monarch belched forth by the leader of a tiny single-issue party of far-right fanatics which should, by rights, have been thoroughly discredited by the chaotic implosion of their single policy. But with the mainstreaming of even their most deranged ravings, up to and including the UK's foreign secretary recycling their historically illiterate "EUSSR" trope, even their apparently obvious idiocy needs examining and taking to bits.

First, there's the obvious incongruity of the leader of a party of extreme UK nationalists, which even has "UK" in its name, latching on to Richard I. Not only was there no such thing as the UK at the time of Richard I, but Richard wasn't even that English. Born to an Anglo-French dynasty, this French and Occitan-speaking ruler spent most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine. After being crowned, he spent less than a year in the English part of the Angevin Empire. Although his territories didn't constitute a nation state in the modern sense, in geographical and cultural terms he embodied that archetypal Ukip hate-figure, a leading member of Europe's cosmopolitan elite.*

There's a paradox, or at least an irony, here. The most deeply reactionary voices in our national conversation, the ones who do nothing but harp on about past glories and promise to drag us, kicking and screaming if necessary, back in time, seem to be clueless about the supposed golden ages to which they want us to return. The ones who obsess about how everything was better in the past are the ones who seem to know least about it.

Then there's a whole new layer of irony when Batten praises Richard as "a crusader - and a great one at that." Most 21st Century politicians who praise warriors for prosecuting a holy war call them by another name - Jihadis. In their intolerance, belligerence and obsession with identity, the anti-Islamists have become the mirror-image of the Islamists they claim to stand against. Slicing even deeper into the multiple layers of historical irony, one of the unintended consequences of the Crusades was the diffusion of ideas, from technology, science and literature, to taking a bath, from the Islamic world and the Byzantine Empire. If the Crusading movement can be said to have left any positive legacy to counterbalance the slaughter, suffering and betrayal, then that legacy takes the decidedly un-Ukip-like form of an exchange of ideas between cultures.
Effigy of that Euro elitist traitor, Richard I, buried in the church of Fontevraud Abbey, somewhere in the EUSSR, because GREAT Britain obviously wasn't good enough for the half-French snowflake (image credit Adam Bishop).

*Yet more irony - Gerard claims to hate elites, yet his hero is a feudal monarch. How does that work?



Friday 28 September 2018

A flying dog, technicolor pigeons and a pig's head

Sometimes, you come across a Wikipedia entry that's so perfect it makes for the ultimate in lazyblogging. So, without further ado, or any input from me, here are some of the things Wikipedians have to say about the life and times of the aristocratic composer, novelist, painter, aesthete and eccentric, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners*:
Berners was born in Apley Hall, Shropshire, in 1883, son of The Honorable Hugh Tyrwhitt (1856-1907) and his wife Julia (1861-1931), daughter of William Orme Foster, Apley's owner. His father, a Royal Navy officer, was rarely home. He was brought up by a grandmother who was extremely religious and self-righteous, and a mother who had little intellect and many prejudices. His mother, a wealthy ironmaster’s daughter with a strong interest in fox hunting, ignored his musical interests and instead focused on developing his masculinity, a trait Berners found to be inherently unnatural. Berners later wrote, "My father was worldly, cynical, intolerant of any kind of inferiority, reserved and self-possessed. My mother was unworldly, naïve, impulsive and undecided, and in my father's presence she was always at her worst".

The eccentricities Berners displayed started early in life. Once, upon hearing that you could teach a dog to swim by throwing him into water, the young Gerald promptly decided that by throwing his mother's dog out the window, he could teach it to fly. The dog was unharmed, though the act earned Berners a beating.

After devising several inappropriate booby traps, Berners was sent off to the boarding school Cheam School at the age of nine. It was here that he would first explore his homosexuality; for a short time, he was romantically involved with an older pupil. The relationship was abruptly ended after Berners vomited on the other boy. ...

...In 1918, Berners became the 14th Baron Berners after inheriting the title, property, and money, from an uncle. His inheritance included Faringdon House, which he initially gave to his mother and her second husband; on their deaths in 1931 he moved into the house himself. In 1932, Berners fell in love with Robert Heber-Percy, 28 years his junior, who became his companion and moved into Faringdon House. Unexpectedly, Heber-Percy married a 21-year-old woman, Jennifer Fry, who had a baby nine months later. For a short time, she and the baby lived at Faringdon House with Heber-Percy and Berners...

Berners was notorious for his eccentricity, dyeing pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and at one point entertaining Penelope Betjeman's horse Moti to tea...

...His Rolls-Royce automobile contained a small clavichord keyboard which could be stored beneath the front seat. Near his house he had a 100-foot viewing tower, Faringdon Folly, constructed as a birthday present in 1935 for Heber-Percy, a notice at the entrance reading: "Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk". Berners also drove around his estate wearing a pig's-head mask to frighten the locals.

Full Wikipedia article here

There's also a fun Berners-related anecdote over at The Dabbler:
...Berners' mother seemed blissfully unaware of her son’s homosexuality and was horrified to hear that he’d been spotted ‘stepping out’ with one of the most notorious society lesbians in London. Concerned that Berners was risking both a broken heart and his reputation, his mother pleaded with him to publicly disassociate himself from this woman.

Berners agreed and place the following announcement in the Times:

Lord Berners wishes to announce that he has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man.



* I was inspired to look him up after hearing Radio 3's introduction to a piece of music from his ballet The Triumph of Neptune (based on a story by Sacheverell Sitwell) this morning.

.

Thursday 20 September 2018

Close, but no cigar...

The initial mission will therefore last for two years, and cover almost the entire sky, looking at 200,000 stars in total for exoplanets.

Given what we’ve learned about exoplanets from previous searches (like with Kepler), TESS [the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite] is expected to find anywhere from 4,500 to upwards of 20,000 such worlds. Mind you, the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, and we’ve found roughly 4,000 more in the 26 years since then. TESS will likely double that number in just two years.

It sounds exciting, and it is. The first exoplanet wasn't discovered until 1992. Since then, astronomers have found thousands and it seems from their initial results that planets are incredibly common. This wasn't always what astronomers believed. I've got a very old guide to astronomy, The Stars In Their Courses by Sir James Jeans, first published in 1931.  

As I've blogged before, I like this book, particularly for the way it conveys something of the incomprehensible vastness of our solar system and the distances to the stars using simple language and scale comparisons with everyday objects and distances on earth.

But it is also a book of its time and it includes a number of theories which have now been superseded. Notably, Jeans supposes that the solar system came into being as the result of a close encounter between the sun and another star which passed close by in the distant past. The gravitational pull of the passing star, he thought, ripped a "long filament of hot filmy gas" shaped "rather like a cigar" from the surface of the sun. It was from this cigar of matter that he supposed the planets condensed, with tiny Mercury and Pluto (Pluto was still an official planet back then), forming at the thin ends of the cigar and Jupiter and Saturn condensing in the fat middle where there was more stuff:

 

If the solar system really had been the result of such a chance encounter, we might expect planets to be rare and for most stars to shine their lonely lights on planetless neighbourhoods. Our world - in fact, our whole solar system - would be a rare aberration.

But now astronomers believe that planets formed from clouds of gas and dust left over from star formation. These protoplanetary discs are thought to be a normal part of star formation, meaning that we should expect most stars to be accompanied by the planets which condense out of these discs.

Less than a century ago, many astronomers thought that most other stars were barren, companionless points of light. Less than three decades ago, they hadn't detected a single planet around another star. Now they've found thousands and expect to find as many more in the next couple of years. And that's just scratching the surface of the billions that are probably out there in our galaxy.

Contemporary readers of James Jeans' book would have been staggered, as I was, by the sheer inhuman immensity of the universe. What they didn't know about was the sheer number of worlds, scattered like dust across that vast emptiness.


Tuesday 7 August 2018

Brutalism in SPAAACE!

Oh, I do like to be beside the brutalist architecture beside the seaside. The looming concrete bulk of Torquay's Riviera Centre, doing a fair impression of an angular space cruiser in low orbit around a blue planet (possibly Earth).

Wednesday 1 August 2018

"Policy based evidence making"

Simon Wren-Lewis, on what comes out of the wrong sort of think tanks:
The Knowledge Transmission Mechanism (KTM) is how knowledge produced by academics and other researchers is translated into public policy. Evidence based policy is the result of this mechanism working...

...There are two types of think tank. The good kind can be a vital part of the KTM. There is often a genuine need for think tanks to help translate academic research into policy. Sometimes these think tanks will be very like universities (like the IFS for example). Other times they will be think tanks that have a broad left or right orientation. These think tanks are an important part of the KTM, because they can establish what the academic consensus is, translate academic ideas into practical policy, and match policy problems to evidence based solutions. The IPPR is an obvious example of this type of think tank. They are part of evidence based policy making.

The bad kind are rather different. These produce ‘research’ that conforms to a particular line or ideology, rather than conforming to evidence or existing academic knowledge. Sometimes these think tanks can even become policy entrepreneurs, selling policies to politicians. This is often called policy based evidence making. It would be nice to be able to distinguish between good and bad think tanks in an easy way. The good type seeks to foster the KTM, and ensure policy is evidence based, and the bad type seek to negate the KTM by producing evidence or policies that fit preconceived ideas or the policymaker’s ideology.

I would argue that transparency about funding sources provides a strong indicator of which type a think tank is."
As Business Insider's Ben Moshinsky wrote last year:
A group called Who Funds You? has rated think tanks based on how much information they provide on where they get their money, assigning an A, B, or C rating to those who publish details of their annual income and a lower rating for those who don't...

...And here's how they stack up:
Think tank warfare:
"There's definitely nothing dangerous being covered up here, nothing at all to see, move along..."

Wednesday 4 July 2018

The eternal mystery of Piers Morgan

That noted public intellectual, Piers Morgan, recently posed an interesting question to Twitter.
Atheists can never say what was there before the Big Bang. They just say 'nothing' but they can't explain what 'nothing' actually is. No human brain can, which is why I believe in something that has superior powers to the human brain. 
OK, I was being sarcastic. His question itself isn't that interesting. Dara Ó Briain more or less answered it in a stand up session where he had a go at the sort of people who justify their supernatural beliefs by saying "But science doesn't know everything!" His response was something along the lines of "But science knows it doesn't know everything. That's why we still do science."

What is interesting is how Piers's statement challenges theology. Think about the logic here: "The human brain can't explain everything about the universe, so why should I accept your incomplete atheistic world view?" Yet Piers is happy to believe in a God who is supposedly beyond human understanding. So why should I believe theists who can't fully explain what "God" actually is?

At best it's a draw between two incomplete world views. I don't understand everything about the universe. You don't understand everything about God.

But the universe is the thing that we both agree exists.

The mystery of faith...

Thursday 28 June 2018

"Because they're morons"

Mark Blyth's take on the Brexit vote is harsh, bleak and and it isn't new. But it's as true now as it ever was.

Of course, the use of the phrase "morons" will provoke the usual tedious accusations about Remainer elitists sneering at the views of ordinary people. But if you listen, this is a more nuanced explanation of what happened and the "morons" in question include the UK's political and media elite who incubated the stupidity.

As for Mark himself, he didn't get where he is today because he belongs to some privileged elite. In his own words:
I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1967. I grew up in relative poverty, in a very real sense a “welfare kid”. Today I’m a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere.
Now check out the first three minutes or so of this video (if I've done this right, it should start playing about 49' 40" in):

Sunday 24 June 2018

Random photoblogging

Idly scrolling through the snaps on my phone's camera...
Sculpture on a mound above Furzton Lake, Milton Keynes. The lake and surroundings are well-tended, but the mound has become a bit overgrown, giving this scene a faint air of those neglected Soviet-era sculptures in the former Eastern Bloc.
Although he's too young to know about Twitter, my son drew this picture of a rampaging robot flame-breathing egg in school, which sums up the state of the Twittersphere with uncanny accuracy.
Chickens. Because everything is better with chickens.
After seeing this I went home, took the vase of flowers off the mantelpiece and replaced it with a hammer drill.
Caledecotte Lake, Milton Keynes, in the evening sun.
The offspring hits peak peak in Peak District.
Snow in Newport Pagnell. Not remarkable in itself, but this was the beginning of March, for crying out loud.

Friday 15 June 2018

"Destination community wet"

No - me neither. Sounds more like random output from AI Weirdness or Botnik than something written by an actual human. It's getting hard to tell these days, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness pointed out recently:

When you find yourself wondering whether what you just read was written by a bot or just by a human pretending to be a bot pretending to be a human, maybe it's time to give up and go to the pub. If so, the Dolphin's OK and no wetter than the average pub, despite what it says on the brewery's web site.

Wednesday 13 June 2018

How not to communicate with parents, part 2

A while back, I had a bit of a go at my kid's school and its use of social media.  To be fair, it does do something to do with social media at least approximately right. The school's Home School Agreement is worded fairly reasonably:
"Respect the school through the individual and joint use of social media including the posting of pictures following a school event."
"Respect" is a bit ambiguous and weaselly, but you could interpret this to mean "Use social media responsibly, don't post pictures of other people's kids, or blurt out confidential information better discussed with staff in private, or say anything defamatory - in short, we expect you to behave like a reasonable adult", in which case, fair enough.

At least it's better than the Home School Agreements some other schools try to enforce. For example:
"Parents will ... Not make reference to the school on social networking sites."
There are things a school would quite rightly want to control - I've already mentioned a few examples. But a social networking ban on mentioning the school that your child goes to, ever, under any circumstances? Is it just me, or isn't that a bit unreasonable?
Parent: "Little Topsy is loving Year Four at Sunnybrook Community School* and doing really well!"

School: "You're in breach of your Home School Agreement. Don't let this happen again!"

Parent: "So proud of young Timmy for winning the Sunnybrook Community School inter-house athletics cup!"

School: "We warned you..."


* A name I just made up - any resemblance to any actual school of that name, if one exists, is entirely coincidental.

Thursday 31 May 2018

Dilbert and Hyde

The hideous transformation of Scott Adams from rational human with a dry, mordant, deadpan sense of humour into crazed right-wing outrage monster is almost complete.

In episode 87 of his podcast, "Roseanne’s Ambien Defense", he goes full Alex Jones:

  • "Sanofi took a despicable position on the matter 
  • Sanofi blamed the likely VICTIM* of their drug"

Looks like Scott's been frying his brains with something way stronger than Ambien lately. At least, I hope that's the explanation. I'd hate to think he suffers from these disturbing fever dreams without being out of his tree on something seriously powerful.





*The screaming tabloid caps are, as Scott would say, a "tell", although I'm not 100% sure what they're a tell of. Maybe of uncontrollable inner rage, maybe of a wannabe troll trying to raise the emotional temperature in order to get a bite.

He boasts about being a master of persuasion and routinely accuses others of making "outrageist" statements while doing the same thing himself, in what looks like a deliberate attempt to create cognitive dissonance, so I assume there's at least some element of method in his madness. Not that  there's much difference between somebody who really is a frothing loon and somebody who genuinely thinks that a clever way to persuade other people is by pretending to be a frothing loon...

One of these things is not Orwellian

"Orwellian" has become one of the most over-used expressions in the English language (or Oldspeak, as we still don't call it more than three decades after 1984). To give just one ridiculous example, Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League has just been jailed for contempt of court, after he continued to make broadcasts on social media which could have prejudiced an ongoing court case, despite being told to stop it.

Cue a flurry of Tweets calling his trial and conviction "Orwellian." Which is, of course, very silly. Rules to make trials as fair and impartial as possible would have had no place in Orwell's satire of an unfair, arbitrary society where  rule by the most powerful has replaced the rule of law.

Also, Orwell went to Spain to shoot people like Tommy Robinson in the head, as somebody less silly just pointed out on Twitter.

In contrast, here's what "Orwellian" really looks like:
“Since the school has introduced these cameras, it is like there are a pair of mystery eyes constantly watching me, and I don’t dare let my mind wander.”
... said an unnamed student in a Chinese high school, which recently introduced facial recognition technology to monitor students’ attentiveness in class.
Winston turned around abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.
1984

Sunday 27 May 2018

The absent fathers of Brexit

So the blame-shifting begins: "Daniel Hannan has noticed that Brexit isn’t going well. And he’s blaming Remainers", while Dominic Cummings has written "a letter to Tory MPs & donors on the Brexit shambles." The headlines are new, but the failure to take resposibility is old and familiar.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK said "victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan."

Go back a bit further, to 1941, and Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, was saying something which sounded equally proverbial: "As always, victory will have a hundred fathers, but defeat will never be acknowledged by anyone at all."

Even further back, at the end of the First Century AD, Tacitus said "This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone." (Agricola 27:1)

Saturday 26 May 2018

Empire of the sun 2.0

Here's the full text of the recent extraordinary communication from Dominic Cummings, former campaign director of Vote Leave.
Dear Tory MPs and donors

After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure.

We have ordered our government to communicate to the European Union that our Empire 2.0 accepts the provisions of their joint declaration.

To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all nations as well as the security and well-being of our subjects is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by our imperial ancestors and which lies close to our heart.

Indeed, we declared war on Europe out of our sincere desire to ensure the UK's self-preservation and the stabilisation of Europe, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandisement.

Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of Vote Leave, Leave.EU and Ukip, the diligence and assiduity of Her Majesty's government, and the devoted service of our seventeen million supporters – the Brexit situation has developed not necessarily to the UK's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion which may engender needless complications, or any fraternal contention and strife which may create confusion, lead you astray and cause you to lose the confidence of the world.

Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibility, and of the long road before it.

Unite your total strength, to be devoted to construction for the future. Cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility of spirit, and work with resolution – so that you may enhance the innate glory of the imperial state and keep pace with the progress of the world.

Best wishes

Dominic Cummings

Former God Emperor of Vote Leave
Any resemblance to the surrender broadcast made by His Imperial Majesty Emperor Hirohito is purely coincidental.

Tuesday 22 May 2018

Free speech on campus update

With apologies to Maajid Nawaz and LBC news:
Snarky McSnarkface: Why I Refuse To Use Special Forms of Address For Qualified People 

Doctor Snarky Mc Snarkface, professor of sarcasm at the University of Toronto, told LBC he is refusing to let the university tell him what he can and can't say.

The authorities at his university have requested that he stops publicly referring to his colleague, Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology, as "crazy lobster guy", and are insisting that he uses more politically correct forms of academic address.

And Dr Mc Snarkface, who has shot to prominence in recent months, says it is not the university's role to control what language he uses.

Speaking to Maajid Nawaz, he said: "There are these prescriptive forms of language being used to hypothetically describe this crazy lobster guy, who is apparently "entitled" to be addressed as ‘Doctor’ or 'Professor', something I don't understand conceptually.

"A person is now compelled by the university authorities to refrain from deliberately insulting colleagues, even the obvious kooks, on pain of dismissal.

"And I thought, no that's not acceptable.

"It's one thing to put limits on what a person can't say, like in hate speech laws, which I also don't agree with.

"But to compel me to use a certain content when I'm formulating my thoughts or my actions under threat of dismissal, I thought no, the university has introduced compelled speech into the academic sphere. Basic civility has never happened before in the history of academia, so I said there's no way I'm abiding by that.

"I don't care what you're damned rationale is. 'We're being civil'. No you're not. You're playing this entitled, censorious academic game. You're trying to gain linguistic supremacy in the area of academic discourse.

"You're doing this by using good manners as a guise and you're not going to do it with me."


They can take our lobsters, but they will never take our FREEDOM!

Monday 21 May 2018

Universal Basic Transport

Goodbye, car nation?
Estonia To Become The World’s First Free Public Transport Nation

...Now celebrating five years of free public transport for all citizens, the government is planning to make Estonia the first free public transport nation...

...To ride Tallinn’s network of trams, buses and trains for free, you must be registered as a resident, which makes the municipality profit €1,000 from your income tax every year. All you need to do then is getting a €2 green card and carrying your ID on public transport

How does this work out for the municipality?

“There’s no doubt that we not only cover the costs, but also come out with a surplus. We earned double as much as we have lost since introducing free public transport. We’re happy to see that so many people are motivated to register as residents in Tallinn to make use of free public transport.”

Who is profiting the most from free buses, trams and trains in Tallinn?

“A good thing is, of course, that it mostly appeals to people with lower to medium incomes. But free public transport also stimulates the mobility of higher-income groups. They are simply going out more often for entertainment, to restaurants, bars and cinemas. Therefore they consume local goods and services and are likely to spend more money, more often. In the end this makes local businesses thrive. It breathes new life into the city.”
Radical? Unrealistic? Maybe.

On the other hand, buses, trains and trams already exist. So does Tallinn’s experiment in making them free to use, so other nations and regions will be able to watch and see how well (or badly) this works.

Worth watching by anybody who's even a tiny bit serious about traffic congestion, the effect of traffic emissions on the environment and human health, or road accidents. We're still a way off from renewable-powered electric cars for the masses, but most trains and trams these days are already electric, as are increasing numbers of buses.

Free at the point of use might be far-fetched, or even undesirable (affordable is good, but a perverse incentive to use energy for unnecessary journeys is bad). But investing in existing modes of public transport, in tandem with things like the road infrastructure needed to make cycling less hazardous might even turn out to be a quicker and cheaper solution to our traffic problems than waiting until every car showroom sells nowt but 'leccy vehicles and every home, garage workplace and car park has enough charging points.

If nothing else, you could use a radical pro-public transport agenda to generate a bit of free electricity, by making Margaret Thatcher spin in her grave:
"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." (Quote widely attributed to Margaret Thatcher, who apparently never said it,* but it's the sort of sentiment she'd have endorsed).






*According to Wikiquote, the misattributed quote was based on these words by Loelia Ponsonby, one of the wives of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, who said "Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life". Always good to hear people being mocked for not pulling themselves up by their bootstaps by somebody whose fame rested almost entirely on being born to titled parents (the courtier Sir Frederick Ponsonby, later 1st Baron Sysonby, and Lady Sysonby), being brought up in St James's palace and entering into a disasterously unahppy marriage with a Duke.




Thursday 17 May 2018

"Gammon": not racist, just a bit rubbish

There's been a tweetstorm in a teacup over the word "gammon", used as shorthand for angry, red-faced right-wingers. Because black or brown people can't go red in the face, some people have been quick to call this anti-white racism. Personally, I'm more convinced by the people who just roll their eyes at the idea of angry white guys as an oppressed minority.

Dubious claims of racism aside, I don't like the term. I don't mind the comparison in context ("a furious middle-aged man with a face like gammon") although, like all similes and metaphors, this one will quickly get tired with over-use. But when you start using "gammon" as shorthand for a certain type of person, you're already talking to, and about, people in a private language. And, from the outside, private languages can sound very silly.

For example, look at the bizarre private language being used by various subgroups on the political right these days: snowflake, feminazi, RINO, cuck, remoaner, libtard, EUSSR, Chad, beta, SJW, virtue signalling, triggered, red pill, incel, normie, femoid, postmodern neo-Marxism...

This sort of shared jargon is mostly restricted to hardcore cranks and fanatics. Almost nobody you meet in everyday life uses that sort of language. It doesn't reach out and change minds. It's so niche that even the insults don't hurt. If "SJW" is the worst thing you can think of to call somebody, you definitely need some better trash talk.

And that's the danger with "gammon." Insulting somebody with an in-joke only that you and your mates get doesn't win arguments, or persuade people. It just makes you look a bit weird.

Look again at the right. When they talk in their own private jargon, they just sound like a bunch of sad oddballs. They only succeed and go mainstream when they use the same words as the rest of us - like "Make America great again" "and "Take back control." Using everyday language seems to be far more effective than making up your own terms and hoping they'll gain traction (they mostly don't).





Saturday 12 May 2018

The last straw?

Whoever's idea this was, it sounds like a good one:
The European Commission has hinted the EU could ban single-use plastics after Michael Gove said there was “some concern” Europe may prevent the UK from outlawing plastic straws.

Frans Timmermans, vice president of the EU’s executive cabinet, told Mr Gove on Twitter: “One step ahead of you. EU legislation on single-use plastics coming before the summer. Maybe you can align with us?”
The Devil, as always, is in the detail. For example, would the wording of any ban include these?


I see a lot of these little plastic straws littering spaces where children get together. But they're not drinking straws.
Other brands are available

Yes, the straws aren't used for drinking, but for delivering a microdose of fizzy sherbet, before being thrown away.

I can see how these pocket money novelties would appeal to kids. I can also see that they don't meet the functional definition of a straw. Unless things like this are specifically mentioned in any legislation, these might be the "straws" that survive the great cull.

Debating the essential nature of the sherbet straw could keep the lawyers and philosophers as busy as the great Jaffa cake controversy of yore.


Friday 11 May 2018

Dead sardine is a red herring

So the Electoral Commission has fined Leave.EU a record £70,000 for breaking spending limits in the EU referendum. Leave.EU co-founder Arron Banks isn't happy:
“We view the Electoral Commission announcement as a politically-motivated attack on Brexit and the 17.4 million people who defied the establishment to vote for an independent Britain.”

He added: “The EC went big game fishing and found a few ‘aged’ dead sardines on the beach. So much for the big conspiracy!
“What a shambles. We will see them in court.”

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he added that the commission was made up of “former MPs, liberal MPs, the SNP, former Labour leaders of councils, all sorts of people that all believe in Remain”.
Two things:

1. This is what Arron Banks has previously said about facts and persuasion:
What they [Political strategists Goddard Gunster] said early on was ‘facts don’t work’ and that’s it.

“The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally."
Which explains Banksy's fishy response to the fine. But if you can see what he's trying to do, you can get past the emotive language he's using to dodge the issue. The question here is "Did Leave.EU break the spending limits or didn't they?" Comparing the EC's findings to a dead sardine doesn't answer that question. That's no dead sardine, it's a red herring. As is his angry allegation of an "attack" on the "the 17.5 milion people who voted for Brexit."

It was an attack - on people who break the rules which are there to protect those 17.5 million people (and the rest of us) from cheats. The question, again, Banksy, is "Did Leave.EU break the rules?" The Electoral Commission think they did. If you want anyone to think differently, put up or shut up.

2. Having spent zero per cent of his statement addressing the substance of what Leave.EU did (or didn't) do, Banks had time to insinuate that his opponents were a bunch of conspiracy theorists, before launching into a conspiracy theory of his own which invited us to believe that the Electoral Commission itself was a vast establishment conspiracy. This from a man who wasn't above getting his underlings to smear an investigative journalist by photoshopping a tinfoil hat onto her picture:
I'll leave the last word to that same journalist:

Tuesday 8 May 2018

A special nation, just like all the others

"Just after the referendum someone predicted that the brexit negotiations would be a process of 'controlled capitulation'. Which has come to pass. At least our egregious sense of national exceptionalism is being nailed ever deeper into the cross of astounded leaver righteousness."
Perhaps the most egregious thing about the United Kingdom's sense of national exceptionalism is that it's almost exactly like everybody else's sense of national exceptionalism. This, for example, is what "taking back control" looks like in Viktor Orbán's Hungary:
A few weeks ago, in a small town in Hungary, two Catholic nuns were stopped on the street and berated by people yelling, “Migrants! Migrants!” After pushing the old ladies a bit, they called the police, believing they had seen Muslim women in a burqa and hijab. The police saved the nuns from the Christian crowd.
Those eejits might have been wearing the Magyar version of the MAGA hat but, from the UK, this sort of thing  looks depressingly familiar. Remember this story from 2014?
Nigel Farage’s local Ukip branch has rebuked the BBC for its ingrained liberal bias in holding a straw poll on the party leader in front of a London mosque. The mosque in question was Westminster Cathedral...

...This isn’t the first-time a rightwing party has got its buildings confused. The English Defence League mistook Brighton’s Royal Pavilion for a mosque last year.
Different flag, same stupid.

Lose that flag and other people's national exceptionalism starts to look a whole lot like our own:
The Orbán government’s first legislative move is the Stop Soros Act, which will force human rights groups to register as foreign agents and submit to regular police surveillance, fiduciary controls, and punitive taxes. Groups that have absolutely nothing to do with immigration — those looking after Hungarian citizens’ human rights, advocating education and prison reform, representing the homeless and ethnic and religious minorities, etc. — will be persecuted [Brits may not be able to get a decent cup of tea on the Continent, but at they'll at least have enough of a "hostile environment" to make them feel right at home]...

...Orbán’s semi-dictatorship ... unlike its post-Stalinist predecessor, is not statist or centralizing. Its guiding principles are arbitrary, capricious rule and, above all, informality. The real centers of power in Orbán’s Hungary are formally independent institutions (state foundations, semi-private companies, purportedly private firms living on state credit) that are outside the control of normal government administration and of judicial control as well [in the UK, think how policy is shaped by a shady spider's web of obscure, unaccountable interest groups - the Legatum Institute, the European Research Group, the TaxPayers' Alliance, Migration Watch, the Adam Smith Institute...]. Meanwhile, regular administration is being dismantled and well-trained civil servants are being thrown out in droves ["Brexit minister fuels conspiracy about 'rogue' civil servants"] . Drafting of bills happens behind the backs of ostensibly leading politicians and bureaucrats, and rushed through parliament [Henry VIII clauses, anybody?] — usually without discussion.
There's nothing special and unique about people insisting that they're special and unique.

Friday 4 May 2018

Pestilence unpopular with public, apparently

When I wrote this, I wasn't asking a serious question, just being sarcastic:
These people [Brexiteers] have really taken the "never waste a good crisis" idea and run with it. I wonder how long it's going to be before one of them comes out as pro-global pandemic, given the widespread historical view that the Black Death gave medieval society the biggest stimulus to get its butt in gear that it had ever had?
But, once again, I fought Poe's Law and the law won. So, just under two years after I wrote this, Paul Oakley, Ukip’s general secretary, said this:
"Think of the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It comes along and it causes disruption and then it goes dormant, and that’s exactly what we are going to do. Our time isn’t finished because Brexit is being betrayed." 
Bless Oakley, he's even gone one better than me - not just "We love the plague" but "We are the plague." Which invites the obvious thought that voters should probably avoid them like the plague. Oh look, they just did. Like they did last year.
There's dancing in the streets as the people of the UK prepare to exit the European Union and celebrate their Independence Day...


Tuesday 1 May 2018

Data guru for hire

Back in 2014, somebody in the Labour Party thought they'd been very clever when they out-bid Ukip for the services of a freelance "election guru":
The Labour party has hired a Bolton-based betting expert to be its general election data guru after a bidding war with Ukip.

Ian Warren, 44, a self-taught election forecaster, spent the past 10 years working as a sole trader betting on election outcomes in the UK and the US.

Just like blogger Nate Silver across the Atlantic, Warren correctly predicted the electoral college in the 2008 and 2012 American elections, earning big money for his secretive corporate clients and funding his PhD in statistics and criminology at the University of Manchester.
Maybe the phrase "secretive corporate clients" didn't ring any alarm bells in the days before Cambridge Analytica became a household name. So when the guru came up with a cunning plan to outflank Ukip, nobody thought to ask why a supposedly progressive party was being advised to ape a gaggle of extreme nationalist single-issue fanatics with a grand total of one MP who, as we've since discovered, never even had a workable plan for achieving the single goal they were set up to achieve.

No, the "Blue Labour" tendency lapped it up and duly added "very real concerns" about migration to Labour's austerity-lite offer, leaving Ed Milliband to crash and burn:
“While many retain their loyalty to Labour, a sizeable proportion is moving to Ukip,” said Ian Warren, an election data analyst who contributed to the Fabians’ research. “In many constituencies that Labour is targeting in 2015, almost half of all households are comprised of these groups… when asked whether they are comfortable living in close proximity to people from different cultures and backgrounds, they are more likely to say no.”...

...[Tom Watson] said it was very important for the “Blue Labour” agenda championed by Lord (Maurice) Glasman and Jon Cruddas, the policy chief, which is based on “faith, flag and family”, to be an element in its election manifesto.
Yeah, trying to out-Ukip Ukip really worked out well for everybody, didn't it? Thank you, o guru, we are not worthy.

Of course, it would take more than merely being disastrously wrong to dissuade a guru of Warren's stature from lecturing the Labour Party on the folly of not heeding his ineffable wisdom. Maybe the fact that he chose to deliver his lecture from the bully pulpit of Conservative Home should also have rung alarm bells:
One of the most important examples of ‘walking across the aisle’ comes from Mark Reckless in Rochester & Strood; a story which has largely been untold, but which I would like to speak to Mark about.

Mark’s back story is straight from Conservative central casting: Oxford, career as a barrister, Policy Unit at CCHQ, elected MP in 2010. However, in 2014 he defected to UKIP. All of a sudden, he was forced to canvass Labour streets in the hope of peeling voters away from them. I know this, because I did a report for UKIP at the time. The point being that he was now forced to take the time to see the world through the eyes of Labour voters in Strood – a demographic he hadn’t needed to win before.

I haven’t spoken to Mark, but I do know that the campaign team found this experience energising. It’s a pattern other UKIP candidates raised as Conservatives have seen. It’s powerful because, for those candidates and activists, it alters their perspective, forcing them to challenge their own preconceptions. Who knows, for some it may only serve to reinforce them but I know that, for others, the experience has been somewhat cathartic.

So when I witness the partisan and abusive nature of the election of Corbyn [because there's nothing partisan or abusive about Ukip, obvs], you’ll see me slowly walking away from the scene, shaking my head. Having advocated a listening and understanding approach for so long, I wonder whether it might be best to vacate the area for a bit and let both sides tear each other to pieces...

...Because if Labour thinks it can understand UKIP voters by hectoring them it’s going to continue to lose them, and will deserve to do so.
Fast forward to 2018. Mark Reckless has left the sinking ship that is Ukip, a turn of events which Ian Warren might find embarrassing, if he didn't have more important things to worry about right now:
Data based upon demographics, class, finances and ethnicity, was used to identify core groups of Labour voters to be targeted with UKIP-led messaging and was instrumental in deciding where Nigel Farage appeared to speak during the Brexit campaign.

Leave.EU, Cambridge Analytica, the RMT Union and Trade Unions Against EU, and Labour MP Kate Hoey – associated with Labour Leave – gained access to the information via Labour’s 2015 general election data guru before referendum campaigns were officially designated by the Electoral Commission.

Blue Collar workers, struggling families, students, and ethnic minorities were among those specifically designated valuable to tailored social media targeting and doorstep canvassing. The data provided specific postcodes to be targeted on and offline, in order to attract millions of votes across the country – enough to swing the divisive referendum result.

The postcode and demographic briefings are being released in full, in the public interest, to assist any concerned voters in establishing whether they were affected as Labour have remained largely silent on the issue of Cambridge Analytica and concerns over data profiling....

...The huge dataset, based on the information of millions of Labour voters across the country, was allegedly built using Mosaic demographics and the results of party canvassing. It is believed to have been amassed during 2015 by political consultant Ian Warren, before he passed it on in a series of detailed briefings and a postcode targeting spreadsheet in early 2016.

He first met with Cambridge Analytica to discuss the use of the information as part of Leave.EU’s campaign at the end of 2015.

Warren was head-hunted by Labour for the 2015 election campaign after his successful work with UKIP and continued to be closely associated with the party, polling members and working with Owen Smith on his leadership challenge during the remainder of 2016.
This is what Labour's privacy policy says about the personal information the party holds:
"We will never sell or share your personal information with other organisations for their direct marketing purposes without your explicit consent. We may share your data with third parties to perform services on your behalf and to help promote the Labour Party by serving you advertisements and content online about our politicians, campaigns and policies we think you might be interested in.”
Ian Warren insists that he's done nothing wrong, that the data he passed to Leave.EU was "bespoke" data created by himself and that "The data I used to inform this work for Leave.EU is NOT personal data; it is neighbourhood level data." But even if he is completely innocent of having breached data protection laws, it seems to me that he's guilty of having done more to help the people who put forward a failed bid for his services, Ukip, than he did to help the Labour Party, who were actually paying him.

They should ask for their money back, but I guess they'll have to make do with this uncharacteristic piece of humility from the great guru:
I am truly sorry to my friends in Labour for having to read this. There are some decisions I have made that I regret deeply; working with Leave.EU being one. But I have always acted professionally and in good faith, and will do so in the future. I am of course more than happy to speak with the party, and I am sure I will be soon. This whole thing is deeply embarrassing but the party should know one thing – neither I or the Labour party have done anything wrong here.
The cry of an innocent man, unjustly accused, or the squawk of chickens coming home to roost? Time will tell.


Sunday 29 April 2018

The great leader inspires the youth

20th Century authoritarian kitsch: Roses for Stalin, by Boris Vladimirski
21st Century authoritarian kitsch: Teach a Man to Fish, by Jon McNaughton


For a didactic, ideological painting with a clunkingly obvious propaganda message, Teach a Man to Fish sure poses a lot of questions. I'd add one more question to the list. Who's morally worse, Vladimirski or McNaughton?

You could say Vladimirski was worse, on the grounds that his painting was a fawning celebration of a mass murderer. Say what you like about Trump, but he can't come close to matching Stalin's body count, and probably never will (unless he pokes the nuclear button).

On the other hand, Vladimirski and his fellow socialist realists were churning out obsequious hack work in a society where dissent could be punished by a one-way ticket to the Gulag, or a bullet to the back of the head. McNaughton doesn't have the excuse of acting under duress when he churns out his obsequious hack work.

Friday 27 April 2018

A simple (part of) the solution

The UK population is growing by more than 500,000 people every year but only about half the homes required are built. I believe there is one key reason behind the UK housing problem: a lack of apartment living. But it’s possible to change this. I’m originally from Greece and one thing that has struck me about the UK is that British people dream of living in houses.

As the chart below shows, just 14% of British people live in apartments. This is one of the lowest percentages in Europe. In Germany the figure is 57%, in Spain it is 66%, and the Euro area average is 48%.
At first sight, this seems like a good idea. My only quibble is with the title of the piece, "The simple solution to UK’s housing problem – apartments." Simple? Really? I very much doubt whether there's just one simple solution to such a complex problem. To be fair, the article does talk about wider issues, like the need for rent controls and stronger tenants' rights as a prerequisite for turning flats in the private rented sector into proper homes.

But building more apartments does seem like a sensible part of the solution. As the article acknowledges, a shift in mindset is needed, so that flats aren't just seen as the sort of cramped, shoddy places where you'd only live if you had no alternative, so we're talking about building properly designed quality homes. Having lived in a flat in the past, these would be my top three suggestions for turning flats from those unloved boxes from which most Brits aspire to escape, into proper homes:

  • Abolish leasehold for residential properties. Even this government seems to be inching towards doing something about landowners jacking up and creaming off ground rents, but the whole leasehold system is a worse than socially useless subsidy for the rentier class, and it needs to go.
  • Decent soundproofing is a necessity, not a luxury, for people living in high-density accommodation.
  • Put balconies on flats (or patios, if ground floor). I'm no gardener, but one unanticipated thing I grew to love about moving from a flat to a house was the patio. Just having a little bit of outside space of your own really does a lot to make your home feel less claustrophobic. Of course, in a block of flats, this is the one area where decent soundproofing won't help if your neighbours are making an unholy din on their balconies but inconsiderate people is a whole other problem to which there's definitely no "one simple solution."

Tuesday 24 April 2018

Europe to blame for Windrush scandal, claims cretin

This might sound rude, but that impeccably well-bred gentleman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has just confirmed that it is perfectly acceptable to describe political views with which one disagrees as "cretinous." O tempora o mores!

Sarcasm aside, I don't mind people like Rees-Mogg saying stuff that's silly (or "cretinous", if you want to answer abuse with abuse). What annoys me is seeing the media treat his nonsense like holy writ ("It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of Mogg"). As somebody just said, in a slightly different context:
"This is the part of ... inequality ... that doesn't get talked about enough. One percenters ... aren't necessarily more prone to stupid ideas than the rest of us, but when they have stupid ideas, their enormous power shakes the world."

Monday 23 April 2018

Creating a hostile environment™

Sadly, it's not only Theresa May who believes that designing unpleasant environments is a good thing...

We don't need no stinkin' (Br)exit strategy!

From last week, but still pertinent, here's Tim Harford on how a chaotic, incoherent non-strategy can be a feature, not a bug - at least for a while:
The Brexiters seemed hamstrung by the fact that they ran two mutually suspicious campaigns — Leave.EU and Vote Leave. “It wasn’t one of my adverts,” said Nigel Farage about Vote Leave’s bus, while Boris Johnson said Mr Farage’s inflammatory poster about refugees was “not my campaign” and “not my politics”. This left the Leave campaign, as Sun Tzu advised, “without ascertainable shape”, so voters picked which ever message resonated, while the Remain campaign did not know where to look. Dominic Cummings, of Vote Leave, later said a united Leave campaign would have been easily defeated.
This got me thinking about the parallels with the almost equally protean strategy that got the 2003 Iraq War on:
We know how the 2003 decision worked out. The 2016 decision still has a way to run, but it's already brought us to the absurd paradox of being at the mercy of people who've spent decades developing their monomaniacal obsession with exiting the European Union, but never agreed a coherent exit strategy.

The poetic justice would be highly satisfying, if only the rest of us didn't have to survive "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology."


Friday 20 April 2018

Though cowards run and traitors sneer...

... we'll keep the pink flag flying here:

Where does this vexillological curiosity come from? I didn't realise, until reading this, that some of the international volunteers fighting for the Kurdish People's Protection Units, against Daesh and everybody's favourite fascistic frenemy, Erdoğan, have started organising themselves under the banner of the International Freedom Battalion (IFB). The IFB is a loose collection of national and factional groups, some of which are called brigades, with a nod to the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War.

There is, for example, the Anglo-Irish Bob Crow Brigade and the French Henri Krasucki Brigade (also named for a promenant trade union leader).

And the pink flag? It's the flag of another IFB unit, The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA), formed in response to the persecution of LGBT people by Daesh.

What Comrade Kalashnikov would have made of his deadly brainchild adorning the flag of a group of radical gay anarchist guerrillas I don't know, although it wouldn't be the first time its image has been appropriated for a flag:
The image of AK-47 appears on the flag of Mozambique as well as coats of arms of Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso (1984-97) and East Timor. The Kalashnikov rifle is also present on the flag of Lebanese militant organization, Hezbollah. 
It's probably one of those things that reactionary numbskulls everywhere will seize upon as futher evidence of the collapse of civilization, even though the combination of same-sex action and military action has a venerable history going back at least to the Sacred Band of Thebes.




Thursday 19 April 2018

Catwoman: hostile, yet global

The "hostile environment" policy is a straightforwardly awful idea from straightforwardly awful people with straightforwardly awful consequences for the designated victims. But it also seems to form part of a wider agenda which is also awful, but not in quite such a straightforward way.

Exhibit A: 2012: Theresa "Catwoman" May "chooses her words with feline delicacy" as she tells her adoring Telegraph fanbase that "We're going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception":
Exhibit B: The sidebar of immigration stories which appears next to that same Telegraph interview. Nestling in among the stories about migrants rioting in Calais, swamping the country, stealing our jobs by working too hard, or being gypsies, there's an intriguing article headlined "New VIP visa service for wealthy foreigners", next to another pic of the kitten-heeled dominatrix:
Taken together, the two articles make very interesting reading:
...soon, she insists, [net migration] figures will fall, as restrictions on student and working visas are reflected in the statistics. “We are seeing the number of visas issued going down, but there is a lag between those and feeding through into the net migration figures...”

...Today though, her focus is on those who are in Britain illegally, and her language becomes uncharacteristically vivid. “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration,” she declares....

...Ministers are creating a new visa system for global business leaders amid concerns that moves to tighten immigration rules are deterring “high-value” individuals from overseas.

Around 100 wealthy foreigners will initially be invited to join a new “bespoke” visa service which the Home Office said will ensure their passage through the UK border system is “swift and smooth.”

Members of the “GREAT Club” will get a personal “account manager” at the UK Visas and Immigration service to deal with their travel plans. The manager will arrange visa services “tailored to each individual’s needs at no extra cost”, the Home Office said.
Personal account managers for oligarchs, a Kafka-style bureaucratic nightmare for the "lower value individuals" from the Windrush and the EU who settled here under the mistaken impression that this was a country ruled by decency and fair play, rather than a private club where the rich and powerful get to shove everybody else aside as they push their way to the front of the queue.

If you ever wondered what sort of hybrid abomination will emerge from the apparently contradictary goals of creating a "global Britain"* which is simultaneously a "hostile environment" for those guilty of being insufficiently British, and insufficiently rich, these two articles paint a vivid picture.




*Again, sorry Northern Ireland - blame the people who came up with the phrase "global Britain." Although it looks as if you'll be getting your revenge on the "global Britain" mob, as their misty-eyed Empire 2.0 fantasies are shredded on contact with your border with the Irish Republic. It's a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology". Or, as sombody once tweeted, rather magnificently, "there are unicorns as far as the eye can see. And many of them are eating cake":