The Age of Consent: Slutwalk, Strauss-Kahn, and Secretary Clarke

Three stories have scarcely been out of the news this week. All three involve the issue of sexual consent and all three have elicited or involved the same category mistakes:

Slutwalk

After a Toronto police officer reportedly told a group of women at the local Osgoode Hall Law School that they should 'avoid dressing like sluts in order to not be victimised' a series of demonstrations have been held across the world to challenge such attitudes. [ref].

The subject even came up on Radio Four’s Moral Maze[1] programme and some commentators on the programme (especially Melanie Phillips) repeatedly made the point that women who “dress like sluts”[2] are thereby advertising their “sexual availability”. Now I suppose there is some truth in this claim but, as ever, it misses the point. A young woman may well go “out on the pull” and advertising her “sexual availability” but she is not thereby necessarily advertising her “sexual availability” to me. She is almost certainly out hoping to meet somebody she is attracted to herself.

Even more to the point, just because a young woman is advertising her potential “sexual availability” (if you insist on putting it like that) to men she might encounter and take a shine to during her evening out, this in no way constitutes and advertisement of availability to sexual assault. Arguably, a young man who successfully strikes up a conversation with a young woman “dressed like a slut”, and ends up spending the rest of the evening with her, is entitled to assume he might be “in with a good chance”. He is not, however - if at the end of the evening the young woman decides that she would on reflection rather go back home and spend the night catching up on sleep on her own – entitled to assume that – because she was wearing a short skirt – he is entitled to force her to the floor and rape her.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

The former IMF head accused (let us not forget[3]), of sexual assault and attempted rape, by a woman who was employed to clean his hotel room.

The media can scarcely report this story without bringing up the issues of French attitudes towards politicians who have lots of extramarital affairs. Why on earth is this relevant?

A case in point is Jeremy Paxman on News Night on 2011 May 17. He seemed to be explicitly suggesting (as I recall his remarks) that relaxed attitudes to consensual sex between adult public figures, in the French press and amongst the French general public, may have somehow contributed to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged behaviour.

This is nonsense. The woman that President Mitterrand had a long affair with consented to sex. The woman, who claims that the head of the IMF attacked her [4], did not.

Ken Clarke

And so to Ken Clarke.

Now the main point Ken was trying to make in the interview I heard is, I would argue, a perfectly valid one. The legal penalties for rape do vary according to the “seriousness” (in the court’s eyes) of the offence. There is a excellent summary of this issue here (though I disagree profoundly with the conclusions at the end of the article and have no particular interest in whether the Labour party are being opportunistic about Ken’s blunders).

It is also perfectly reasonable to suggest, as Ken did, that people accused of rape might be offered deals in order to persuade them to plead guilty rather than subject the victim to the ordeal of a trial. We can argue about the details, but I can see how this might be the lesser of two evils.

It also needs to be pointed out that Ken Clarke was wrong on some matters of fact about the law. An eighteen year old man who has consensual sex with a fifteen year old girl is guilty of unlawful sex, he is not guilty of rape and such cases do not, pace what Ken said, contribute to the rape case statistics.

But the key issue here is what Ken had to say about “date rape” versus “proper rape”. Now it’s not entirely straightforward to piece together Ken’s actual words because they came out in dribs and drabs in a series of interviews and various commentators have picked out various bits and made various comments on them. There’s the Channel 4 news report here and I’ve listened to the original interview throughout (though I have so far been able to track this down on the WWW).

It is, however,(even allowing for the fact the he rather fluffed his words) pretty clear that Ken shares (with many members of the public) the notion that “classic” rape involves a stranger jumping out from behind a bush and grabbing someone. In fact, in the vast majority of rape cases, the attacker is known to the victim [ref].

It is also clear that Ken Clarke also shares (with many members of the public) the related notion that so called “date rape”[5] is often somehow not “proper rape” (though, to be fair, he did concede when pushed that “date rape” can be just as serious as any other kind of rape).

What this episode reveals is that Ken Clarke is prone to exactly the same category mistakes as have occurred in relation to the two previous examples.

As the old slogan goes “Whatever we wear, wherever we go, 'yes' means 'yes' and 'no' means 'no'."

It really is that simple.

[1] I normally find it difficult to listen to the Moral Maze and my GP has advised that it;s not good for my blood pressure, but given that (the currently one-eyed) @DAaronovitch had struggled from his hospital bed to chair the episode I felt duty bound to at least switch on my wireless and stay to the bitter end.

[2] Not a turn of phrase I have ever used myself.

[3] Something Mayor Bloomberg of New York already seems to have forgotten "if you don't want to do the perp walk, don't do the crime" [ref].

[4] Again, assuming her claims are true.

[5] So called "date rape" may of course be harder to prove in a court of law, but that's a completely different issue.

Postscript:

Since this post was written, the credibility of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim has been questioned and charges against Strauss-Kahn have been dropped. We may, of course, have serious reservations about the balance of power between a rich white man and a poor non-white female in a case like this, but I think we have to conclude that there was no real prospect of the case succeeding (there's an intelligent article here that covers many of the legal issues). None of these developments impact on anything I said in my original blog post, but I suppose it will be interesting to see how Strauss-Kahn's reputation in French political circles fares over the coming months.

Spiked

Earlier today (2011 May 10) Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill published another of his presposterous Daily Telegraph articles entitled: Far from being a bastion of freedom of speech, Twitter can be a remarkably conformist, elitist and intolerant arena.

The article begins with a picture of the "liberal overlord of the Twittering set" Stephen Fry, a reference to the super-injunction outing nonsense (which personally I haven't even bothered to look into) and then the following gem:

it’s worth asking if Twitter really is a freedom-loving entity in which you can express whatever’s on your mind or in your heart. Because actually it depends. It depends on what you have to say and whether it passes muster with the shabby and incoherent yet surprisingly influential liberal overlords of the Twittering set.

He notes that twitter tends to give Daily Mail bigots like Jan Moir a hard time and that a celebrity called "Kenneth Tong", who apparently promotes anorexia on his website, was also the object of a great deal of Twitter rage.

Brendan goes on to note that twitterers (or rather tweets - which is not necessarily the same thing) were mainly in favour of AV and only 23.9% were anti.

These startling facts lead him to conclude that:

The liberal consensus, and its corresponding intolerance of consensus-breakers, has been fairly successfully transported into Twitter, making this social networking site a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena.

It almost goes without saying that all this is complete bollocks. I encounter a huge range of opinions on every possible subject everyday on twitter - I've certainly had a huge number of discussions and arguments about AV. Even groups of people on Twitter who kind of coalesce around themes like scepticism or atheism or interest in science tend to disagree about almost everything else.

I suppose there are some areas of consensus on Twitter. The twitterati do tend to take a dim view of racism, homophobia, misogyny, and paedophilia (though I've also come across BNP supporters and a number of apologists for the Catholic Church). I rather tend to the view that these "intolerances" are entirely justified.

But I didn't really want to talk about the article as such .....

Having read it (and a number of other contributions to public debate by Brendan O'Neill) I offered the following tweet:

Couldn't the US Navy Seals just take out Brendan O'Neill? http://bit.ly/kFVlEI - I'm sure even Noam Chomsky would go along w that

Which elicited the following riposte:

@Schroedinger99 That's hilarious - your response is a paradigm example of the kind of intolerance shown by Twitter users he's criticising.

For a moment I thought this tweet was in the same spirit of my original tweet and a continuation of the same joke. I took the "That's hilarious" literally and "your response is a paradigm example of the kind of intolerance shown by Twitter users he's criticising" as irony. But then I noticed that the tweet came from @P_Hayes who is, like Brendan O'Neill, a fully signed up member of the Frank Furedi Fan Club and a writer for it's mouthpiece "Spiked". In Necker-Cube-like fashion, @P_Hayes's tweet suddenly reversed its meaning in my brain.

So let me explain my tweet just in case anyone else from Spiked is reading. I realize this endeavour will leach all remaining humour from my 140 character essay, but it may reveal some of the true nature of Twitter:

1) I have no hatred for Brendan O'Neill.
2) I often find his views ridiculous, but I do not find them abhorrent.
3) There are a number of journalists (especially on the Daily Mail) whose views I do find abhorrent.
4) Because of 1, 2, & 3 above, I probably would not make a similar joke about certain journalists because it might almost seem as though I meant it and I think that would be in poor taste because, as a member of the aforementioned "liberal consensus", I don't really go only with the view that killing people I disagree with is a proper way to behave.
5) Because of 4, the highly illiberal suggestion that Brendan O'Neill be "taken out" was an example of irony.
6) In spite of the "liberal consensus", there has, in fact, been a very healthy debate on Twitter about whether the US assassination of Osama bin Laden was legal or justifiable - and very little "consensus" at all.
7) Noam Chomsky has famously (on Twitter at least) expressed the view (in this article) that the US assassination of Osama bin Laden was illegal and unjustifiable.
8) Almost nothing provokes heated debate on Twitter like the mere mention of "Noam Chomsky".
9) The final irony was that Spiked is a kind of reincarnation of a former publication known as "Living Marxism"*. The politics have changed, but the cult-like adherence to a set of ideas has not. I'm never quite sure how to characterize this set of ideas but, at least in part, it seems to involve being a contrary as possible - on every subject that crops up. In other words, Brendan O'Neill belongs (quite unlike the twitters he castigates) to "a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena".

If interested, you can read more about this group (who really do have an "overlord") here.



* "Living Marxism" bit the dust because of a fiendishly complex and highly disputed saga involving ITN, the Bosnian war, and a successful libel suit against the Magazine. Chomsky actually supported "Living Marxism" in respect of this specific case - at least to some extent - and I'm one of the few people on Twitter who has tried to defend Chomsky here (though I think he's wrong about the bigger Balkan analysis). As I say it's very very complicated.

Twitter, Sarfraz Manzoor, and blocking

I've been a fan of Sarfraz Manzoor's journalism for many years and have always enjoyed his appearances on BBC 2's Culture Show (which otherwise often hosts some of the most irritating people on the planet). He has also written movingly about his own family - one piece he wrote inspired a post on this very blog a few months ago: Why I’d be more than proud to have Sarfraz Manzoor in my family.

I began following Sarfraz Manzoor a few months ago on Twitter and tweeted the odd mention, RT, or comment on something he'd written. As with most journalists I like I don't necessarily entirely agree with everything Sarfraz writes, though I've certainly never been consciously rude or unpleasant about anything he's written.

For, I suppose, a number of weeks now (I wasn't paying much attention) I had not noticed any tweets from Sarfraz Manzoor and had vaguely assumed he'd gone quiet on Twitter. The other day, however, I tried to RT something he'd said - my attention to which had been drawn by an RT or mention (I can't remember which) from a third party and found that my twitter client wouldn't let me do this. At first I thought there was some kind of Twitter glitch but, to cut a long story short, I realized that I had been blocked by Sarfraz Manzoor.

Now the only accounts I've ever blocked on Twitter were spambots and a BNP supporter who began following me - as a result (I can only assume) of a misunderstanding as great (though in the opposite direction) as the one the led to Sarfraz blocking me.

Anyway, to come to the point, and to something that might be of interest to a wider audience, this experience of being blocked by someone on Twitter enabled me to gain a deeper understanding of what blocking on Twitter does and does not achieve. This may be of particular interest for those who have suffered from bulling, harassment, or stalking on Twitter (as a couple of people I follow have been).

NB all these finding relate to Tweet-Deck, but I assume other Twitter clients behave in a similar way.

Blocking prevents the blockee from seeing the blocker's tweets in his/her timeline, but the blocker's tweets can still be followed in a separate column.

Blocking prevents the blocker from seeing the blockee's normal tweets in his/her timeline, but un-following (or not following in the first place) would achieve the same thing.

Blocking prevents the blockee from RTing the blocker's tweets using the normal mechanism provided by the Twitter client, but if the blockee simply types in "RT @blocker whatever the blocker said" this gets round the block.

Blocking prevents the blockee from replying to the blocker's tweets using the normal mechanism provided be the Twitter client, but if the blockee simply types a new tweet with a mention (eg @blocker) in it, this gets round the block - though I'm not sure whether the blocker would see this in his/her mentions.

I am also unsure as to what happens once third parties start RTing or replying to the types of tweet mentioned above, but that's not so significant.

Finally, blocking un-follows the blockee and prevents him/her from re-following the blocker. The curious thing is, however, that the blockee has no explicit indication that or when this has happened and, therefore, no way of discovering what his/her offence was (though I suppose this will often be more obvious than it was in my case).

The upshot is that blocking on Twitter achieves much less than I had (vaguely) assumed - though I confess I had never given the matter much thought until now..... oh and (in the unlikley event Sarfraz Manzoor ever reads this blog post) I'd like to apologize unreservedly for any insult I might have caused, but I genuinely don't know what that insult was.

PS Funnily enough, there was some relevant discussion of these issues on Sarfraz Manzoor's timeline yesterday (04-05-2011) - not (unless blocking is even less meaningful than I suggest above) occasioned by anything I tweeted. Sarfraz complained that he gets lots of people he doesn't know tweeting him (which makes me wonder if he's quite got the point of Twitter) & if those people annoy/bore him he blocks them (which seems a bit like taking out an injunction against Jehovah's Witnesses rather than simply politely asking them to go away - albeit while secretly thinking "and while you're at it, stick your fucking Watchtower up your arse"). It also emerged from Sarfraz Manzoor's timeline that he is easily offended by people who make jokes about his hair. I have to plead guilty here - though, in my defence, I feel inclined to point out that when I made jokes about Brian Cox's and Jim Alkhalili's hair they both re-tweeted it. perhaps, flushed with my success, I got carried away.

Anyway, you live and learn. I shall, henceforth, read Sarfraz Manzoor's articles with a slightly different perspective ...... and try and console myself that I was one of the people who annoyed him rather than one of the people who bored him ;-)

The not so earnest Adam Rutherford (no relation) on genes rather than physics

There will inevitably be silly comparisons drawn between Brian Cox’s big budget Wonders series and Rutherford’s somewhat lower budget Gene Code, but we should treat all such comments with the contempt they deserve. There’s room in the modern digital schedules for science programmes of every genre and cost from 1970s OU style chalk and talk lectures (though preferably without the big ties) through to the cinematic grandeur of Brian’s efforts [my take on #wonders media coverage].

We should rejoice in all of these attempts to use the medium of television to educate us – while, one also hopes, entertaining us.

While I also love considering the profound questions thrown up by quantum theory, relativity, and cosmology, you have to admit that modern physics is a bit fucking weird. My original background was in genetics and biochemistry (though both sciences have come on a lot since I studied them and I can’t claim to have studied them very hard) and I had been really looking forward to being entertained by Adam’s Rutherford’s series safe in the knowledge that he was not going to come on and open with something like: “Ever since scientists first started looking at chromosomes they have wondered whether chromosomes go on for ever or if the two ends join up again in the 57th dimension”. You know that genes, at least, are something you can try get your brain around without giving yourself a migraine. But that is not to say there’s anything easy about genes. If physics is like an old fashioned library (albeit an old fashioned library stocked with some pretty queer books) genetics is like the internet.

Whether you know a little or a lot about genetics (providing you have a sense of curiosity about the worlds within us and without us) you will enjoy The Gene Code and I urge you to watch it.

Here (if anyone’s interested) is what I took away from the first episode……..

First a bit of basic genetics: The master tape of instructions for what goes on inside our cells is (as most are probably aware) a series of long strands of DNA (AKA “chromosomes”). From these master copies, our cells make lots of RNA copies (a bit like the building contractor keeping the approved drawings safe in a locked draw and making lots of slightly dodgy photocopies to hand round to the builders on site). From these RNA copies of the genetic code, our cells make proteins. Proteins serve two main functions in our bodies: they can be structural (like the proteins that make up our muscles) or regulatory (like the enzymes – which are also proteins – that make things happen inside – and sometimes outside – our cells).

The understanding described above gave rise to Francis Crick’s “central dogma of molecular biology” [see here for eg] which is that (though there are different formulations) “information flows from DNA to RNA to protein”.

Information flow:
DNA -> RNA -> Protein

Now here’s the wonderful thing about science: Almost before the ink was dry on the first statement of this “dogma”, scientists (including Crick himself) begun to make discoveries that (kind of) challenged it. Contrast this with what happens vis-à-vis the central dogmas of any religion or “alternative” medicine one might care to think of.

Proteins (called “polymerases”) can duplicate strands of DNA and RNA, so information can flow from DNA to DNA and from RNA to RNA.

Other proteins (“reverse transcriptases”) can make DNA from RNA – a mechanism used by some viruses such as HIV - so information can flow from RNA to DNA.

With the emergence of “Mad Cow Disease” and the flurry of research into prion proteins that episode prompted, came confirmation (long suspected – arguably from as long ago as the 1930s) that information can flow from protein to protein.

Proteins can also, it has been discovered, bind to chromosomes and “switch” sections of DNA on and off and those switch positions can be inherited. This is not quite information flowing from protein to DNA, but it’s pretty damn close.

What made me sit up straight in my chair watching The Gene Code was Adam Rutherford’s report of recent discoveries concerning a gene that is (or was) responsible for changing the positions of recombination “hotspots” (the points at which, as Adam splendidly demonstrated using only a pack of cards, chromosomes from each parent break and join with one another to swap sequences of DNA) from the positions where those hotspots existed in the human/chimp common ancestor.

It turns out (Thx @AdamRutherford on Twitter) that the gene in question produces a protein that helps to cause DNA mutations that lead to the hotspot position changes. But these are permanent changes to the DNA sequence that are occasioned by the protein product of another gene.

So is this a case of information flowing from protein to DNA? Not sure myself. It’s an essentially philosophical question and I would need to think about it some more. But it’s certainly fascinating – well at least to a nerd like me.

So next time you read that “boffins have discovered the gene for Daily Mail allergy” (or whatever) please bear in mind that it’s almost certainly a bit more complicated than that – and more interesting too.

Oh and watch next week (2011 April 25) at 09:00 pm on BBC4, and let’s have even more science on TV.

[show times for the gene code]

Is Melanie Phillips racist? Judge for yourself.

On 13 March 2011 Melanie Phillips published an article entitled "Armchair Barbarism" in which she wrote about the brutal massacre of an Israeli family in the West Bank.

On 18 March 2011, the Guardian reported that Melanie Phillips had been referred to the Press Complaints Commission over this article.

Today,28 March 2011, Melanie Phillips defends herself: How I became a hate 'suspect'

So I thought I'd try a little experiment. I've taken Melanie Phillips's article and reversed it: swapping "Jew" for "Arab" and "Israeli" for "Palestinian". I've also had to change a few other details (see especially numbered annotations) to make the "reversed" "article" make sense.

NB1 I would never have written an article like this myself.
NB2 I do NOT mean to suggest that any of the substitutions I have inserted in this "article" are equivalent to the items I have replaced.


Armchair barbarism

Today the massacred al-Badoui[1] family was buried in Jerusalem. And as anticipated, the moral depravity of the Jews is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media – a sickening form of armchair barbarism which is also in evidence, it has to be said, on the comment thread beneath my post below.

Overwhelmingly, the media have either ignored or downplayed the atrocity – or worse, effectively blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves, describing them as ‘hard-line land thieves’[2] or 'extremists'. Given that three of the victims were children, one a baby of three months whose throat was cut, such a response is utterly degraded.

The New York Times blamed Palestinian ‘defiance’ over renewed ‘illegal Arab sector construction’[2] in the wake of the massacre for throwing already shaky peace efforts into a new tailspin.

So to the New York Times, it’s not the Jewish massacre of an Arab family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ -- because the Palestinians will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages -- but instead Palestinian policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick.

Both CNN and the BBC, meanwhile, along with Harriet Sherwood in the Guardian, gave the impression that this was not a terrorist attack but the actions of an ‘intruder’ -- for all the world as if this was a burglary that got out of hand. CNN said:

Five members of an Palestinian family were killed in East Jerusalem early Saturday morning in what the Palestinian Authority is calling a ‘terror attack’...According to a spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Palestinian neighbourhood of Beit Hanina near the Israeli settlement at Neve Ya'akov around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children.

The BBC similarly reported:

The family - including three children -- were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home, Palestinian media reported...

Honest Reporting finds the BBC treatment of this massacre, all but burying the details of the attack on the al-Badoui family beneath a story about those wicked illegal builders, the most shocking and callous of all this dreadful coverage.

For those who don’t appreciate the role played by the ‘moderate’ Israeli Government in glorifying terrorism and inciting the mass murder of Palestinians, Israeli Media Watch has assembled some recent examples here – including the praise by Netanyah of a soldier who attacked and tried to kill Palestinians two months ago.

(Graphic pictures of the bodies of the slain al-Badoui family are circulating on the net and on YouTube. The relatives of the massacre victims have made them publicly available in order to show the world the full horror of the Jewish barbarism in Beit Hanina. However, I have decided not to link to these pictures. The reported wishes of a distraught family cannot in my view justify what is inescapably a gratuitous invasion of the privacy and dignity of the dead. But read this, and weep.)

What is being deliberately ignored through this travesty of reporting is not just the human tragedy of this terrible massacre. It is the politically crucial fact that it was apparently carried out not by Irgun[3] but by the IDF, the official army of Israeli's Likud government. Likud is the party of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Nakba[4] denier who is the allegedly ‘moderate’ Prime Minster of the Israeli Government – and who not surprisingly couldn’t even bring himself to express unequivocal horror at the atrocity.

This diabolical deed therefore gives the lie to all those who have been supporting, promoting and funding the Israeli Government as ‘moderates’ who deserve to keep the land they have annexed and settled. The fact is that America, Britain and the EU have been not only promoting this bunch of neo-Nazi fanatics and baby murderers. They have also been forcing their putative victim, the Palestinians, to offer them their own throats to be cut, along with that of Arab babies. And these craven governments in turn are being egged on by the bigots, useful idiots and worse of the British, European and -- it has to be said loud and clear -- Palestinian ‘liberal’ intelligentsia.

Truly, this is beyond desolation.

If I had read the above "article", I would have described it as "revoltingly anti-semitic". Over to you Melanie.


[1] This Arab name is taken from one of the victims of the Qibya Incident where Israeli troops under the command of Ariel Sharon massacred 69 Arabs [Ref].
[2] The notion of Arab "land thieves" is take from this article on "illegal Arab construction" in areas of Jerusalem annexed by Israel [Ref]
[3] Irgun was an Israeli terrorist organization responsible (inter alia) for bombing Arab buses [Ref]
[4] The "Nakba" or "Catastrophe" is the term Palestinians use to describe the episode when approximately 725,000 Palestinian Arabs left, fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. [Ref]

NB3 For the avoidance of doubt, I do NOT assert any sort of moral equivalence between the Nakba and the Holocaust.

Talking Bollocks about Cox

Physicist Brian Cox's current Wonders of the Universe series seems to have set off a chain reaction amongst UK journalists. I can't be arsed to link to all the articles I've read (one exception below) but some common themes emerge. I think the claims made in the press should be subjected to some rational (and empirical) scrutiny..

1) "This mop-topped stargazer revels in the insignificance of mankind"

This from Brendan O'Neill of the Frank Furedi Cult writing in the Telegraph. Brendan continues: "In contrast, today’s cod-Copernicans in the Cox lobby are drawn to the cosmos because its weirdness and bigness feeds their drab, down-to-earth belief that there isn’t much point to life." Hmmm, there must be some more words beginning with “c” one could insert into this sentence to help the alliteration along …. Hey, I’ve just thought of one!

I suppose Brendan would prefer it if Brian revised modern physics and cosmology in order to recognize just how important Brendan O'Neill really is. In any case, the claim that Brian "revels in the insignificance of mankind" is simply false. Utterly false! Brian repeatedly and enthusiastically revels in the fact that mankind is around to witness this stage of cosmological evolution and award it the significance it deserves – read his books!

2) Brian wears GoreTex

The “most expensive GoreTex money can buy” in some accounts. Indeed! He’s on top of a fucking mountain. You don’t need to spend long looking at what Brian normally wears to notice that he is not the sort of chap who gets off on sporting expensive designer clothes. I’m sure he has a mucky old cagoule with rips in it in his wardrobe, but I’m guessing the film crew thought it best if he wore something that would look better on camera. I dread to think what the hacks would have said if he’d worn his own cagoule.

3) Brian is standing with his legs apart

Again, he’s on top of a fucking mountain. There’s a sheer drop of several thousand meters on all sides. It’s windy. He’s being buzzed by a helicopter that has rotor blades and a down-draft.He’s talking about gravity which, I expect, kind of concentrates the mind in such circumstances. Of course it’s possible, in spite of all this that Brian’s just trying to pose in the style of Joe Strummer on the original Clash album but, on the other hand, Brian (as again we are constantly reminded in the media) was in a rock band. In fact he was in two. If he’d wanted to “pose” with his legs apart, he really has had his chances before. He really didn’t need to wait until they put him on top of a fucking mountain.

4) Brian is standing on top of a fucking mountain

I’m sure they’d have preferred to film him on the surface of the planet Zog in the constellation of Hyperbole but I think that was probably beyond the budget.

A lot of science education is about relating weird and wonderful concepts to stuff with which we earthlings are familiar. There’s an interesting and instructive analogy between the 4D geometry of space-time (versus the 3D geometry with which our intuitions are more familiar) and the 3D geometry of a mountainous landscape (versus the 2D landscape you’d see on a map).

Moreover, there are any number of (more subjective) analogies between the grandeur and scale and beauty and longevity of a mountainous landscape and the cosmos as a whole.

Putting Brian on top of a mountain got all this across succinctly and poetically and cleverly in a televisual way which (I hope we all hope) will inspire young people watching to appreciate the wonders of science and consider science as a career.

Nuff said.

5) Brian was dumbing down

A tricky area I admit, but are we really suggesting Brian should have stood in front of a white- board detailing the differences between Mesons and Leptons? In any case, many of the most baffling puzzles of modern physics and cosmology can be appreciated (though, of course, not solved) without understanding the details.

When they are engaging with the general public, it’s the job of scientists to and stay interesting and comprehensible for long enough to inspire that general public. It’s easy to be snobbish about Brian writing for the Sun or appearing on popular radio and TV, but as long as he does not misrepresent his subject through oversimplification (which he is careful never to do) it’s highly laudable that he makes the effort to appeal to a wider audience.

6) Brian has an ego the size of a planet

Bollocks!

Watch his body language! He walks on stage looking as self-conscious as any of us, less used to the limelight, would. He is self-deprecating and always ready to laugh at himself. All this slips away completely, however, when he starts talking, not about himself, but about the ideas that interest him and move him. At such moments he oozes confidence and (yes) shines like a star. He becomes Pete Towshend. Get him back on to the subject of Brian Cox and he reverts to John Entwistle (with a hint of Tommy Cooper thrown in). Funny sort of egotism.

7) Me

You could, I suppose, call me a “fan” of Brian Cox (though my respect for him predates his current TV star status). I do not, however, fancy Brian or have a “man-crush” on him or regard him as some kind of saint. I am sure he has all the failings and annoying habits that the rest of us mere mortals have. All this said, I get deeply pissed off when journalists (who typically understand about as much about science as I understand about the rules of American Football or the plot of Emmerdale Farm) traduce a fellow geek as a substitute for doing something that would – if they were capable of doing it – actually be interesting: Engaging with the fucking ideas!
/rant

Blackwell's bookshop and the art of deception UPDATE

UPDATE

Just had a very apologetic phone call from manager of Blackwell Art and Poster Shop at 27 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BS and had my £2 refunded. They were in the wrong, I was in the right but they are very honourable people and have put things right and if you are ever in Oxford you should visit their splendid shop.

Dear Sir / Madam

I visited your store in Oxford yesterday and bought about £40 of goods. I came away feeling I had been cheated out of £2 – a relatively small sum I concede, but I’m not the sort of person who simply lets such things go.

Let me explain the problem as follows (using prices rounded up do the nearest pound for simplicity):

If I had gone into your shop and bought 3 prints at £4 each under the “3 for 2” offer I would have paid £8, saving £4.

If I had then gone back into your shop five minutes later and bought another 3 prints at £6 each under the “3 for 2” offer I would have paid £12, saving £6.

So far so good. I would, by this time, have saved £10.

What I did yesterday, however, was (ignoring my other purchases) to buy exactly the same items as above under exactly the same offer, but all in one go. I only saved £8 - £2 less than I should have saved.

The reason (explained when I complained) is that the computer grouped my purchases thus: (£4+£4+£6) + (£6+£6+£4) and I saved 2 x £4. I was told that this policy was explicitly stated on the offer signs which explained that the cheapest item goes free.

I find your policy here misleading to the point of dishonesty. Either your computer should employ a more sophisticated (and fairer) algorithm or you should inform you customers in advance that they would be better off making separate purchases if making multiple “3 for 2” buys.

I suppose I could have taken this further within the shop, but I was too taken aback to complain further at the time. (Your staff were perfectly civil but quite convinced they were in the right.)

Upon further reflection, I feel as though I have been cheated out of £2 and I should like to have this money returned.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully

Mike Ward


PS Blackwell Art and Poster Shop at 27 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BS is a simply wonderful shop which I frequent and which I would encourage you all to visit. They should, however, refrain from these (I assume unintentionally) misleading promotions!

AV - not my first preference

The best electoral system, without doubt, is STV in multi-member constituencies. Since AV is all that's on offer in the coming referendum and since (at least in some scenarios) it's an improvement on FPTP I shall, albeit with a heavy heart, probably vote in favour. I worry that a "no" vote will be taken as a "no" to any attempt at electoral reform. (There's a reasonably good guide to the different systems here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-lses-simple-guide-to-voting-systems/)

Having said all that. there some serious flaws in the proposed AV system and I wish to focus here on one of them.....

Most critiques of AV focus on its main drawback, which is that it is not a proportional system. There is no guarantee that it will not produce barmy national results (such as the party with fewer votes winning the national election) just as the current FPTP system sometimes does (twice in my own short lifetime!).

I've constructed an highly contrived but simple example which shows one way in which AV can go wrong even within a single constituency:

Let us assume we have a very small constituency with 9 voters and 3 candidates: the usual Labour, LibDem, and Tory. Let us further assume that the preferences of these 9 voters are as follows:

*	Lib	Lab	Con
voter1	1	3	2
voter2	1	3	2
voter3	2	1	3
voter4	2	1	3
voter5	2	1	3
voter6	2	1	3
voter7	2	3	1
voter8	2	3	1
voter9	2	3	1

Where "1" = first choice, "2" = second choice, and "3 .... okay you get the idea. ;-)

The problem with the current system (FPTP) is clear: Labour wins with 44% of first preferences even though the other 56% didn't have Labour as their first choice and both the Labour and Conservative voters could clearly live with a Liberal victory.

So what does AV give us?

There would need to be 2 rounds:

In the first round, the results would be: Labour 44%, Lib 22%, and Con 33%. Since the LibDems come out last, they would be eliminated and the second preferences of those who voted for the unsuccessful LibDem candidate would be taken into account. This would give final totals of: Lab 44% and Con 56% - a Conservative victory.

This is a rather unsatisfactory result since, just looking at the figures in the above table, I think most fair minded people would conclude that the Liberal candidate was the best compromise given the range of preferences expressed.

The problem here, with the straight AV system, is that it gives second (and lower) preferences (once they are counted) the same weight as first preferences. Straight AV also ignores the second preferences of those who vote for the most successful candidate in the first round.

Why not simply weight each preference (in the counting system behind the scenes I mean - I'm not advocating a more complicated voting system)?

If a first choice got 3 points, a second choice got 2 points and a third choice got 1 point, the results in the above table would give: Lib 37%, Lab 31%, Con 31%. A LibDem victory.

This would be almost as easy to count as FPTP (only a single round required) and (in this example at least) produces a result which accords with our intuitions of "fairness" and the "best compromise".

I have made this example as small as possible and chosen the figures carefully to illustrate the point, but the example is not particularly far-fetched and could (in its fundamental features)easily be repeated in a real election on a larger scale.

In Which Melanie Phillips Refuses to Outline her Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem

Dear Melanie

I read your Address to Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media with interest. It is clear from this document – and the large number of other articles you have written on the subject of the Middle East – that you do not support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state. You believe that people of Jewish faith or ethnicity* have the right to settle anywhere within the biblical land of Israel as citizens of Israel, but you do not believe that people of Christian or Muslim faith and Arab ethnicity currently living outside the currently internationally recognized borders of Israel have the right to settle within those borders or, indeed, much in the way of rights as to where they settle outside those borders but still within the biblical territory. You do not accept that the Arab population within the biblical land of Israel but not living within the currently internationally recognized borders of Israel should be given the right to become citizens of a future Israel with expanded borders. (Please correct me if I have any of this wrong).

So now my question:

What is your proposal for what should happen to the non-Jewish inhabitants of these territories when you (and people who think like you) eventually get your way and Israel is expanded to include much or all of the biblical territories?

I have tried to make no judgements about who is right or wrong here and have tried to avoid opening any arguments about the historical background to the current situation. I am genuinely intrigued as to what your proposed solution is to the question I have raised. I cannot find the answer to this question in any of your extensive writings on this subject.

Yours sincerely

Mike

*I separate out these two facets of “Jewishness” because a number of members of my family have the right to go and live in Israel (or the areas Israel currently controls) under the “Law of Return”, but none of them are actually religious. Their recent ancestry is German rather than Middle Eastern.


Melanie's reply:

Your message displays a quite astounding degree of ignorance; virtually every one of your assumptions is based on a false factual, historical or moral premise. I have no intention of wasting my time answering you. There is ample information on my website already, were you able to understand it -- which clearly you are not.

Do not bother me again.

Melanie

Interesting that Melanie took the time to reply to me but did not use that time to correct any of my "assumptions" about (I'd call them "descriptions" of) her views or to answer my question.

I have read Melanie's website in some depth. I have read her forthright views on evolution, abiogenesis, and climate change and her descriptions of the various conspiracies amongst the world's scientists to keep us all misinformed in these areas. I also have read her extensive writings on the situation in the Middle East. While there is a great deal of material advanced in favour of Israeli policy - past and present - I have searched in vain for any proposals as to what should happen to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the territories in question under any future scenario that would be acceptable to Melanie P.

I think Melanie owes (not necessarily me but) her general audience a response here.

Why I’d be more than proud to have Sarfraz Manzoor in my family

Reading Sarfraz Manzoor’s moving article about the reaction of some members of his family to his marriage (to Bridget, who is white and not a Muslim) I began to muse on what sort of circumstances might prompt me to refuse to speak to my brother. I suppose that if I heard that he had disowned a member of his family because that family member had fallen in love with someone of the ”wrong” colour or the ”wrong” religious tradition*, that would do the trick.

After all, if someone cannot see for themselves that this kind of “not like us” view of other sections of humanity is morally repugnant, it is hard to think of any common starting point for any sort of discussion about ethical matters, or indeed about anything at all. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

I think Sarfraz Manzoor’s relatives who continue to oppose his marriage and who continue to refuse to talk to him are very lucky indeed that Sarfraz still seeks reconciliation with them. I find it hard to imagine that I could ever be so forgiving in similar circumstances.

I have not broached this with my daughter, Sarfraz is already spoken for, and if I were to meet him personally on a regular basis I’d probably break down and suggest he refrain from using a Van de Graaff generator to style his hair; but, these minor caveats aside, I’d be very proud to have Sarfraz Manzoor as my son in law.

Telling anyone in my “community" about this would not be a problem, since the only community I belong to is humanity.

*I use the term religious *tradition* advisedly since neither my brother nor I believe in any sort of supernatural overlords, but we are both, I suppose, “cultural Christians” who celebrate Christmas and Easter albeit in a largely (though not completely) secular fashion.