Sorry, we’re a bit slow here -the link is months old – but this could explain how god helped Manuel get to Guinness Book of Records size.
Author Archives: Polly Unsaturate
God does it again
The world’s heaviest man has lost body weight equivalent to a couple of adult males. Guess who’s responsible? Well, God, of course.
Alongside his copy of the Guinness World Records lies another text, The Bible.
“I have Claudia, my mother and God to thank,” said Manuel. “I am happy.”
You’d think a conceptual ruler of the universe would have better things to do than supervise an individual’s diet, but he must be working in his usual mysterious ways.
However, I’m afraid that the notionally all-powerful one might have been falling down badly in his new cosmic personal training role, to let Manuel Arribe get to weigh half a tonne in the first place.
Space liquid
Much interesting NASA news this week. Today, Phoenix has found water in a Mars soil sample.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.” (From NASA)
Yesterday, NASA announced that Cassini had identified a liquid ethane lake on
Saturn’s moon Titan. This makes Titan the only place in the solar system except Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface.
There are lots of awe-inspiring images on NASA’s site and the Cassini ones are particularly fascinating. Saturn and its moons must be the all time favourite space pictures, what with Saturn being the most photogenic planet by a few light-years.
But this picture is pretty good, too. A planet with surface water and water vapour and everything. Looks good enough to move to.
from Ciclops.org - earth and moon
A lie goes round the world before the truth has put his boots on
(A Terry Pratchett quote, from the Truth, possibly an old saying, possibly invented on the spot.)
A BBC article said that Birmingham City Council has banned atheist websites.
I read this news in my workplace (which seems to randomly ban or allow even this site. There is absolutely no discernable difference in cussword quotient or possible offensiveness between this site on the days when it throws up threatening warning messages that I’ve tried to access a forbidden site and should instantly alert my line manager from the days when it works normally.)
I was shocked. Bloggably shocked, even.
I didn’t – for more than a minute or so – think that Birmingham Council actually wanted to ban atheist sites. The BBC article made it pretty clear it’s some useless off-the-shelf netnanny software that they are using. (In comments on Pharyngula, Cronan, Quidam and Armchair Dissident made excellent points, about the software and way it is set up and used, suggesting that this isn’t a deliberate city council policy, so much as the unthinking use of disturbingly set-up software.)
Well, duh. It’s a local government office. Almost by definition, its software buying decisions are made by people who can’t even use a spreadsheet package. Who are suckers for any sweet-talking sales people on their Preferred Suppliers lists. Who would think it was wildly outside their purchasing remit to pay attention to the details of what the software actually does. And who would rather insert a parking permit into their own left nostril than consult the people who might actually use a program.
But, still, it’s outrageous and the National Secular Society is absolutely right to object to this.
However, tracing the evolution of the reporting of this story in the atheosphere made me aware how easily a news item becomes a myth.
Pharyngula – blogged the story. He had a link to the BBC story but there was no evidence in his text that indicated that this was Birmingham, England.
Some of the 80-odd commenters who responded to this brief reference to a BBC article clearly took it that Pharyngula was talking about Birmingham, Alabama. An easy mistake to make. (I make it in reverse whenever the BBC refers to Birmingham, Alabama.) If I had read the Pharyngula piece without reading the BBC source, I would have automatically assumed this took place in Alabama.
Quintessential Rambling obviously assumed it was Birmingham Alabama and delivered a classic rant then showed an amazingly good grace and regard for the truth by admitting his error. That is my kind of human being.
A fair number of people will now believe that Birmingham, Alabama, has banned atheist websites. That’s fair enough. It’s a mistake based on an error of fact. No blame.
It’s the way that the facts of this incident contribute to a general level of atheist myth-making that disturbs me more. Wouldn’t you expect atheists to be a bit better at processing information than the average moron? Maybe that’s wishful thinking. Well, OK, it is definitely wishful thinking, but I am going to persist with it, in the face of the evidence.
A Richard Harris comment on Pharyngula says:
I bet the feckin’ Submissionists (followers of the prophet Muhammad, piss be upon him) are behind this.
Well, no. That seems like yet another attempt to demonise muslims to me. Is there some knee-jerk hate response that is stirred up every time the word islam is mentioned in any context? Oh, yes, silly me, Of course there is.
Leki is more rational but still manages to throw in a social disorder theme, expressed in terms of religion. S/he strings together a lot of completely disparate incidents to support a characterisation of Birmingham people as almost engaged in some sort of inter-ethnic, inter-religious war.
Birmingham is always in the news for something or another. A few years ago there were riots at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre over a play that depicted a rape in a sikh temple; there have been issues with honour killings; gun crimes have doubled (highest concentration of guns in the UK is Birmingham).
Remember the raid of January 2007? Birmingham police rounded-up a bunch of folks who were planning to kidnap a British soldier (muslim group, muslim soldier). That was big, big news.
I’ve visited Birmingham several times and there is this huge chasm between ethnicities. People are screaming on all sides about what language to teach in schools, how many mosques are allowed per block, whether or not the ‘english’ way of life is disappearing.
Well, yes, Birmingham IS always in the news for something or other. It’s England’s second city. Even the London-centric British media must mention what happens to a few million people every now and again.
Huge chasm between ethnicities? I assume you have never visited a US city? People screaming on all sides about what language to teach in schools, etc? Admit it, this is just made up.
OK, there’s nothing wrong with hyperbole in a blog comment. My point is that a casual reader of Pharyngula – who’s read the comments far enough to realise that a US city hasn’t banned atheist blogs – will be left with a vague, but probably lasting, impression that Birmingham, England, is under siege by extremist mullahs who have banned atheism.
Now, I expect the gutter press to leave this subliminal hate-residue in the back of the minds of its readers. That seems to be what it’s for. Keeping the population in a generalised low-level state of xenophobia, to make it easy to manipulate. It’s hard to understand the rabble-rousing tricks when they crop up in the atheist blogosphere.
There are some real concerns in this Birmingham situation. For instance, it’s disturbing that the effects of decisions made by blocking-software providers – with their own illiberal agendas – can be unthinkingly transmitted to become public policy. These issues are a bit boring. They don’t produce the visceral kick that seems to come with identifying an alien scapegoat. But trying to find out the truth must be the truly “rational” response.
Exercising some Restraint
Who’d have thought that until today – when there was a humane judgement against it – that the law allowed the “physical restraint” of youths in custody by means that would surely count as assault in any other context?
Lord Justice Buxton said the methods used had amounted to “inhuman and degrading treatment” contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. (from the BBC website)
Examples of actions that are allowed are:
Methods used involved pulling back thumbs, and blows to the ribs and nose.
Why thumbs, ribs and nose? Because broken bones won’t be permanently disabling, I assume. Only excruciatingly painful. Hmm.
Private companies run four STCs in England and Wales for the Department of Justice.
Until June 2007, the rules restricted the use of physical restraint to cases where the approach was necessary for the prevention of escape, damage to property or injury.
The new rules, which were introduced after the deaths in custody of Gareth Myatt, 15, in Northamptonshire and Adam Rickwood, aged 14, in Co Durham allowed restraint when it was thought necessary to ensure good order and discipline. (from the BBC)
So “private companies” run youth prisons. Why does that not inspire confidence?
It looks as if the law used to allow officers to restrain young prisoners in the case of emergency, which seems reasonably fair enough, given the hellish task it must be to contain these damaged children, when containment seems to be all that we are socially capable of achieving.
The new rules – which don’t seem to have had massive publicity…. – talk about “good order and discipline.” Is it just me or does that refer to “anything the officers choose it to mean?”
People who assaulted their own children in such a manner would rightly be prosecuted. School teachers who assaulted their pupils would be sacked.
On first reading this, I assumed that these two teenagers had died as a result of attack by other prisoners. So there was some cock-eyed justification in it at least being intended to save lives. Not so.
Gareth Myatt, from Staffordshire, choked to death while being restrained at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre, near Daventry, Northamptonshire, in 2004.
And an inquest into the death of Adam Rickwood ruled that the teenager hanged himself after being restrained while at the Hassockfield Secure Training Centre in County Durham in 2004. He was the youngest person to die in custody in Britain. (from the BBC)
These kids died as DIRECT RESULT of restraint. Under the old rules.
Following the ruling, Liberal Democrat justice spokesman David Howarth said the full extent of physical restraint being used was “absolutely shocking”, adding that “it’s right that it is put to an end”.
“It’s a shame that it has taken the courts to force the government to stop this barbaric practice. Ministers should have done this a long time ago,” he said. (from the BBC)
However,
The Ministry of Justice said it was “examining the court’s judgement with great care” and added that it would also be “considering an appeal”. (from the BBC)
On reading the guidelines for so-called “ethical restraint” techniques, as used in prisons and care homes, I found this page of golden rules on a site that offers training. Rule 4:
Never place pressure on or around the back, chest, stomach, face, neck, shoulders, major joints or the fingers. (from ECCRUK website)
Hmm, where do the Department of Justice rules allow these private companies to apply pressure, again?
Methods used involved pulling back thumbs, and blows to the ribs and nose.
Maybe I’m mistaking my physiology here but, last time I checked, the ribs were on the back and chest;the nose was dead centre of the face; and I assume thumbs count as fingers. So, the forms of restraint used in youth jails are clearly contrary to these golden rules.
Respect to the Equality and Human Rights Commission for intervening.
‘As the case reveals, the Ministry of Justice has failed young people on two counts. It has allowed staff at secure centres to use unlawful force – in violation of one of our most fundamental rights – and failed to consider the effect of these new rules on young people from ethnic minorities.’
‘Restraint should only be used as a last resort in cases where the young person might do harm to themselves or others – it is never to be used a way of ensuring young people in custody behave. Using pain as a means of creating order and discipline is entirely unacceptable.’ (John Wadham for EHRC, quoted on the EHRC website)
Ex-archbishop sees News of the World as moral force
If you live outside the UK you probably don’t have newspapers like the News of the World. Just thank Freya. It’s not even possible to describe them adequately but the link might give you some idea of their idea of “news”
The NoW recently lost a privacy case based on its deeply unpleasant activities – paying dominatrix prostitutes thousands to secretly film a client (who was already paying more than my month’s salary for an evening of their services) and to add a fake Nazi element because his long-dead father had been a well-known fascist.
(Well, it makes a change from Amy Winehouse. Just don’t get me started on the Amy Winehouse coverage.)
You might think “comically distasteful, but definitely none of my business.” The good old News of the World tried to pretend this was somehow our business because his father had been famous in the 1930s and because he’s the boss of Formula One or something.
Well the guy won his court action and got a fairly huge sum, plus they have to pay some part of his incredibly huge legal fees. This seems fair enough to me, and nothing to do with freedom of the press. I can’t see what the private behaviour of the Formula One Boss has to do with public interest. To be honest I don’t even know what Formula One is. But, even if I did, I can’t believe I would base my private morality on the actions of its multi-millionaire boss.
Not so Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, apparently. He has written – in the News of the World, no less (LOL) that this judgement set a dangerous precedent.
Without public debate or democratic scrutiny, the courts have created a wholly new privacy law. In itself that’s bad enough.
But, as a Christian leader, I am deeply sad that public morality is the second victim of this legal judgement.
Unspeakable and indecent behaviour, whether in public or in private, is no longer significant under this ruling.
D’uh? D’uh, again? So, to the Archbishop, the News of the World’s use of techniques normally associated with blackmail isn’t “unspeakable and indecent” behaviour? Fear of the gutter press is a pillar of public Christian Morality?
More from the ex-Archbishop-
In the past, a public figure has known that scandalous and immoral behaviour carries serious consequences for his or her public profile, reputation and job.
Today it is possible to both have your cake and to eat it. But a case can be clearly made for a direct link between private behaviour and public conduct.
If a politician, a judge, a bishop or any public figure cannot keep their promises to a wife, husband, etc, how can they be trusted to honour pledges to their constituencies and people they serve?
Can the ex-Archbishop not see the difference between being the boss of some racing sports association and being a politician or a judge? Is this man’s public exposure actually doing any service to his wife? Who else is he supposed to have made promises to? What’s his constituency?
Lord Carey is upholding a view of “morality” that barely touches upon any version of the concept that I can recognise. I started to disentangle the contradictions in this argument and its bizarre conceptual basis but I gave up because it seems so self-evidently ludicrous.
I can only assume that the Church of England doles out a really mean pension to its ex-leaders, so they are reduced to producing moral underpinnings for the NoW’s prurience. Please, up the man’s stipend, ffs, Church of England. Thor only knows what shameful activities he may be forced into next in the search to earn a crust.
Reasonable doubt
New Scientist presents what it calls a debate about reason. Fond as I am of New Scientist, this debate is just silly.
It’s not a “debate” in any usual sense of the word. i.e. There isn’t a premise that is discussed by contributors. NS just seems to have assembled a set of articles that randomly touch on the topic of “reason” at any point. And define the word as meaning whatever suits their argument.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” (Wikipedia: quote from Alice through the Looking Glass)
How do you define reason? With great difficulty. And the articles in this special project issue don’t really start by overtly defining reason at all. This makes it very difficult to agree or disagree with the criticisms as you can’t really be sure at any given point what form of reason they are objecting to.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has a good stab at proving wrong all those of his critics who think he’ s too intellectual to be a church leader. (Toutatis forbid that we even try to imagine how unintellectual his critics must be, if they think that he’s too much of a deep thinker.) His article is entitled “Reason stands against morals and values” but he doesn’t actually put forward that viewpoint, it being too patently silly even for the NS special issue. He meanders through history, cherry-picking definitions as he goes, presents an unsourced redefinition of classical ideas of rationality then blames the nastier aspects of the French revolution on the role of reason, following an argument that boils down to “shaping a moral and humane world requires more than reason” (NS’s summary.)
Well, duh. Unarguable conclusion, but bearing only a passing relationship to the arguments that he presented. A bit like saying that water is not enough to sustain life. It’s not that it’s not true but it can’t be considered a valid attack on drinking water.
In similar, “No shit Sherlock” vein, a neuroscientist (Chris Firth) also points out that there are lots of mental processes that don’t involve the use of reason. “If we had to think logically about everything we did, we’d never do anything at all” Well, yes. And your point is?
His article is entitled “No one actually uses reason” which is, yet again, not borne out by the content and is blatantly falsified by the fact that he is employed as a bloody neuroscientist. If he himself isn’t using reason to earn his wages, then who else could possibly be using it?
What about
I hear “reason”, I see lies
Science is routinely co-opted by governments and corporations to subvert people’s ability to make their own decisions, say sociologist David Miller and linguist Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky’s couple of paragraphs seem to have been co-opted onto the page from a completely different context and say pretty well nothing nothing about alleged flaws in “reason” – indeed he seems to be challenging the triumph of unreason.
Miller is basically talking tosh here. To recognise that science can be distorted and misused is surely not the same as arguing that scientific rationality is inherently easier to misuse than any other area of thinking. If so, the products of reason would be uniquely more dangerous than the products of bigotry or fantasy.
This seems like a chap in dire need of a crash course in Social Theory 101. Power includes the power to define the parameters of our understanding. This has nothing to do with any inherent defect in reason or scientific thought. If Miller is indeed a sociologist, he should be aware that the use/misuse of science is a social and political issue and should be looking for social explanations, in relations of production, the operation of power structures and so on.
(More charitably, this article has the scent of an article written on another altogether different topic, drafted in and slightly reworded to fit into an non-existent debate.)
The next few pieces are just longer-winded ways of saying reason isn’t everything. Or, at least, of appearing to say that truism while actually saying nothing.
The pointlessness crown goes to Mary Midgely, though. She starts with a 1950 quote from Nehru, who said that science would be the key to India’s survival. “The future belongs to science.”
She ignores or skates over the obvious points that: this was a pretty universal idea in the 1950s; that it was a political speech, so can be assumed to have been mainly rhetorical; that it was spoken by the leader of a post-colonial country desperate to modernise; and the words were, in any case, uttered more than half a century ago. She notably ignores the fact that – as it turns out – Nehru was right. The intervening 58 years have indeed been dominated by science.
Instead, she follows this obscure speech (well, previously unknown to me, so I’m treating that as being obscure) with a load of nonsense about reason being the new religion. What? The woman is famous and respected philosopher. I.e, yet another one who gets paid to use reason. But is so poor at it that she can’t put together a remotely coherent argument.
Maybe that is too harsh. At least Midgely is consistent in her use of “reason” to refer to one thing only – scientific rationality – which puts her several steps ahead of some of the other contributors (hang your head in shame, Archbishop.) But, at that point, I have to stop giving her props. Because, the whole worship of reason thing is a complete invention.
Nobody worships reason. If you can find me a church of reason or a pope of rational thought or even a prayer for intercession by the spirit of rationality, then fair enough. Midgeley speaks disparagingly of “scientism.”
It is this exclusiveness that is the trademark of scientism: the belief in the unconditional supremacy of physical science – or of Science with a capital “S” – over all other forms of knowledge
OK then, let’s pretend there is some recognisable science-worship system. What do you call a believer in Scientism? The obvious answer is a Scientist. But, Midgely must have a dictionary, which will tell her that “scientist” means something quite different. There isn’t a word for a believer in scientism, is there? I think you could take that as prima facie evidence that there aren’t any such believers. I can’t say there are none. People will believe anything, after all. Some people believe they will be bodily ascended to heaven while non-believers get cast into hell, ffs. It’s not impossible that there are people who pray to rational thought. Just very, very unlikely.
Knives out
Grim numbers of stabbings have recently dominated the UK news. The popular press are baying for action. Increasingly hostage to the demands of the Daily Mail, the government is taking this to mean any action whatsoever, no matter how pointless or counter-productive.
A couple of days ago, there was a decision to take young people “at risk of being involved in knife crime” (a bit difficult to identify, surely…) to visit stab victims in hospitals. This made some sort of sense. Seeing the consequences of a stabbing might indeed put a few non-psychopathic people off contemplating carrying knives. Although it could possibly be a bit unnerving for victims. However, within a couple of days, this idea has come to be seen as too much of “a soft option” and the government denies it even contemplated it.
Targetting problem families is the new favoured solution. Targetting how?
More than 110,000 “problem families” with disruptive youngsters will be targeted as part of a crackdown on knife crime, Gordon Brown has said.
They will get parenting supervision, with the worst 20,000 families facing eviction if they do not respond. (from the BBC)
Duh? Run that by me again. Where do these numbers come from? Made up on the spot, like 42 days, 300 active terror networks and all the other bullshit numbers?
110,000 problem families
Firstly, what is a “family?” A whole kinship group, the nuclear family, any co-residents in a property? There’s no room for sociological niceties in this policy. However, without even a working definition of what counts as a “family”, the whole approach becomes hot air.
The UK government, under the pressure of the baying press, has been deifying the “family” for a few years, to the point that now well nigh all policies are presented as “family” policies. Which is odd given that a huge minority of people don’t live in “family” groups.
Even the government now seems to acknowledge that there may be sometimes be a dark side to its cosy “family” ideal. We all know there are whole families that any sane person will move to the next county to avoid. But still.
How are these bad “problem families” going to be identified? Are they families in which everyone commits crimes? We have laws that are supposed to bring penalties if you get caught. There is an old-fashioned idea of presumption of innocence surely. Are they “families” overwhelmed by poverty, illness and mental problems? Even the shittiest family grouping is hardly responsible if one of its number goes and stabs someone.
Are they going to be the sort of families who spends their lives under social services supervision, with the kids in and out of care? The forms of intervention don’t seem to be effective yet, do they? Maybe some serious action to help ease the misery of the kids involved might be more effective than heaping even more pressures on them.
The worst 20,000 facing eviction?
- Well, this assumes that ALL problem families live in council accommodation. A bit odd (a) for the party that was once identified with the labour movement; (b) when public housing is becoming almost non-existent and (c) when any successful criminal “families” are more than likely to own their own property.
- It assumes that some scale of “worst” can be applied. Again, this can’t involve actual engagement in crime otherwise the perpetrators should surely just be arrested and charged in the traditional manner. So what will it come down to?
- It puts a bizarre numerical value on the numbers of people judged “worst” and due to be evicted. Will there be targets? Will numbers of problem families be shared out equally between local authorities? In that case, playing football in the street might get you seen as a problem in some Surrey suburbs, whereas you might need to engage in a random arson campaign before you disturb teh neighbours in some Glasgow streets.
- Even imagining for one moment that these twenty thousand “families” are the genuine causes of all crimes, what about the children and adults in these families who are blameless? Are the innocent now to be punished for other people’s criminality?
- Can someone – anyone – please explain to me how making 20,000 families homeless will cut knife crime?
- Is there evidence that homelessness works wonders for child development? Are the homeless uniquely moral?
Hint to Gordon Brown – yet again. (Please start paying attention, Prime Minister…..)
Mad social policies that pretend to be “tough” but – in fact, show an incapacity to use simple logic and usually involve hammering the poor – aren’t going to win you the election. The hangers and floggers Tories in the Daily Mail readership are just not going to vote for you, no matter how much you pander to them. And it makes the rest of us despair.
Faking everything
Photoshop is so much of a celeb product this week that it may now only appear in public in an airbrushed slimline version of its own packaging.
The big Photoshop story was the picture of an Iranian missile firing that had been digitally enhanced to look like more of an explosive occasion. The BBC editors blog had to admit to having failed to spot the fakery.
The great Photoshop Disasterssite got lots of submissions of this image:
Not only do Iran’s missile pictures reveal a shocking gap in that nation’s ability to use the clone tool, our patented Extra-Contrast-O-Vision shows how clumsy they are at comping (from Photoshop Disasters)
Aleisha Dixon made a BBC3 programme about how all magazine pictures are Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives. (No, I don’t know who she is, either, sorry.) The objective was to get a picture of her on the cover of a magazine without enhancement. The idea behind the programme was to show the credulous public that these images of perfection aren’t real and, especially, to convince young girls that they aren’t hideous if they are just human.
However, this was a bit of an unfair test. She is (a) extremely good-looking and (b) was wearing about 5 kilos of makeup when they finally persuaded a magazine to agree to shoot au naturel. So, she was basically already greatly advantaged as well as airbrushed at source. But still, respect for trying.
I hope it was TV fakery when she told school girls that every magazine photo is retouched and they all acted astonished. I’d sort of assumed that everybody already knew that anything that can be retouched will be retouched.
Partly, it’s obvious because the digitally-enhanced world is often so much uglier than the real world. My favourite misuse of Photoshop is this picture of Clive Owen, advertising an anti-ageing cream for men. We don’t normally see this sort of Xtreem- Airbrushing done to men. In the effort to improve him, it manages to make an averagely good-looking man look even more alien than most of the women’s images that we see every day. 
(Pinched from Photoshop disasters)
Obviously, it doesn’t have the same global significance as Photoshopped missile tests.
But, I’m sticking with the comedy Photoshop angle on the missile portrait, because I don’t want to have to think about:
- What these images mean in terms of a potential war against Iran
- Whether they are even genuine Iranian productions
- Why the Iranians would feel obliged to airbrush their missile-testing programme, when you’d think that down-playing any such activity might be the safer course
- If there is any chance of avoiding another insane and suicidal/homicidal war about oil and Israel
A unique threat…
“‘Violence is taboo’, wrote Stephens in his in-house history of Camp 020 now available as a National Archives publication, “for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information” .
Stephens put the unprecedented successes of Camp 020 down to the rule of non-violence.
“Never strike a man” wrote Stephens in instructions for interrogators.
“In the first place it is an act of cowardice. In the second place, it is not intelligent. A prisoner will lie to avoid further punishment and everything he says thereafter will be based on a false premise”……
… On one occasion in September 1940, Stephens expelled a War Office interrogator from the camp for hitting a prisoner, the double agent TATE. As Liddell noted in his diary “It is quite clear to me that we cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect of the whole thing, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run”.
These quotations from an apparently famous British WWII interrogator Tin-eye Stephens are from MI5’s website. (I added some paragraph breaks.) As I blogged a couple of weeks ago, Alex Gibney said an interview about his film Taxi to the dark side that his father – who had been a WWII naval interrogator – was horrified at the use of torture, seeing it as both completely unethical and absolutely ineffective.
Many people believe that waterboarding and the associated horrors (like the emetically-named torture-lite) are justified because the current threat from Islamic terrorists is so extremely serious and unique.
I will spare you political arguments about manufacturing terrorism, through what I will politely call “misguided” foreign policies.
Instead, I’d like to question the “uniquely threatening” idea. I’ve already banged on about the decades of Northern Irish warfare having been a much bigger threat to the UK public than the recent terror episodes. But that was surely a playground scuffle compared to World War II.
The clue’s in the name. It was a world war.
Remember, there were Nazis who made lampshades out of human skin. Well more than 6 million Jews, disabled people, homosexuals, gypsies and communists were systematically exterminated. Most of Europe was overrun by the people slavishly following vile political systems. Any European country that hadn’t been invaded expected invasion at any moment.
Surely that was a pretty unique situation. So, do we find World War II veterans falling over themselves to justify torture?
In case you haven’t guessed, the answer is “No.”
From the quotations from Alex Gibney’s father and from the English interrogator with the nickname that could have come out of a Biggles book – it’ s pretty clear that the very people who might have justified torture in World War II saw it both abhorrent and completely useless at getting real information.
The phrase “Gestapo methods” expresses it all. People who took part in World War II on the Allied side were pretty confident of having the moral high ground. Torture was part of the horrors they were risking their lives to oppose. Indeed, after the war, the Nuremberg principle established that “just following orders” was no defence to war crime charges,
Can anyone seriously argue that the current terrorist threat is so much more threatening to the USA – let alone to Western Europe – that standing on the moral high ground should have changed to sinking into a filthy swamp?
Another “Christian” (head)case
A registrar who claimed she was discriminated against for her Christian beliefs because she wouldn’t officiate in civil partnerships has won an employment tribunal case.
The ruling appears to place the religious “conscience” of registrars above their legal duty to carry out parliament’s legislation. If it is not overturned on appeal, and it sets a precedent, where could it lead? (Terry Sanderson in the Guardian)
Indeed. The implications are disturbing. Could a Jain vegetarian doctor refuse to deal with your food poisoning case because you’d eaten meat? Might an orthodox Jewish nurse’s aide refuse to make beds if the sheets are made of mixed fibres? Could a barista who believes in Russell’s flying teapot refuse to collude in the serving of coffee?
The idea that playing the “religious conscience” card can somehow get you out of doing work you are paid to do – and even get you compensation at the same time – is so enticing. I am sorely tempted to form a religion that directly proscribes any unenjoyable part of my daily work. That’s my work day sorted out. And a sweet little compensation claim on the way, without the usual trouble of having to fake a whiplash injury
I am bit confused here, anyway. I have only a cursory knowledge of the bible, but I would be truly amazed to find that the New Testament mentioned civil partnerships, let alone forbade believers from officiating at them.
Naturally, the Christian Institute, which bankrolled this case, is cock-a-hoop. This is a result that they and other Christian activists have been trying to achieve for some time now. It will provide the platform they’ve needed to build their dream of a theocratic Britain. (from the Guardian)
Well, blow me down with a feather. How surprised am I to find that the good old Christian Institute is behind this? They put up the money. Again. (It’s not as if there were anything better they could so with their seemingly bottomless resource pit. I dunno, like feed the hungry and that sort of unchristian stuff. I think it’s called “charity” or something.)
The Christian Institute have a gloating list of references to the media coverage. For example the Daily Mail called it “A victory for Britain’s quiet majority”
I could only assume this is a new and counter-intuitive use of the words “quiet” and “majority.” I think it’s pretty clear that the Christian fundamentalists and the Daily Mail are neither humbly self-effacing nor a majority. I would probably have a lot of trouble sleeping at night if I thought these extremist bigots people had become a majority.
The Mail editorial managed to express its trademark depths of hypocrisy by phrasing the article in such a way as to imply “She’s black and she’s a bigot just like us. Did we mention she’s black? Well here’s a picture. This proves we aren’t bigots ourselves here at the Mail because we are agreeing with the multicultural society. See. We like black people when they hate gays.”
Two small points:
- If not performing civil partnerships is really a crucial part of Christian belief, why haven’t the mainstream Christians made it into some sort of sin? In fact, why haven’t they made wearing a crucifix and/or or a promise bracelet an obligation?These are the topics of the pro-Christian court cases that these zealots are happy to fund. So where are the Christian rules about them? I’m all for thinking for yourself and challenging authority and that, but I thought these fundy sects were all against it.
And now, here they are, redefining Christianity, not just in the face of those tiresome old sermon-on-the-mount beliefs, but in the face of pretty well all the established church hierarchies.
I can be a moralistic bitch. Can I get some association of non-believers to fund my own personal morality campaigns?
Lots of things offend me. I would quite appreciate being compensated for a whole range of things – from newspapers promoting being a footballer’s famous wife as the only reasonable life goal to young girls, to the increasing acceptance of torture. (Passing through almost any major social evil or minor irritation you can think of)
- The guy who sued the BBC for Jerry Springer the Opera and lost then whined that the BBC should pay his costs for suing them (!!!) may have set a precedent for the litigation-hungry Christians. Surely – in a spirit of fairness and decency similar to that demanded from the BBC by Green – Lilian Adele can just offer to let Islington council off with the compensation they are going to have to pay her…… Now how likely isn’t that?
Things for the USA to attack
TW’s last post referred to the New Scientist report that archaeologists are displaying common decency and refusing to list monuments to be protected in the event of a US strike on Iran.
Clearly, America hates anywhere that starts with the letters “IR”
And needs help to draw up attack maps. I will do the job that the archaeologists are too humane to do and list places that the US might like to attack:
- Iraq (Sorry, too late, they already thought of that )
- Iran
- Ireland
- the Iroquois nation (Sorry, too late)
Well there’s only Ireland left. And I don’t think it’s overburdened with recognised world-class archaeological sites to obstruct the handily disposable population. Be very afraid, people of Dublin. (Dublin museum has some fantastic Viking era relics but the site they came from has already been dug up, with an office block stuck over it. The artefacts are all in the museum, in handily lootable form.)
Don’t worry, USA. I checked your own states and only 4 even start with the letter “I” (Idaho, Illinois,Indiana, Iowa) However, I don’t want to worry the citizens of these states but you may be next in the frame after Ireland. Or at least, after wars have been waged against Italy (Luckily for Italy, it has way too much archaeology to be a first strike choice), Iceland, Indonesia and the Isle of Man. Oh, and Israel… (well maybe not that one.)
A few more suggestions for quick and easy wins, thanks to online dictionaries and wikapedia:
- Irish stew (an Irish excursion should do for this without using any extra firepower)
- Iridium (some sort of chemical. No idea if this is actually part of weapons tech but that would be killing two birds with one stone if it was)
- Ira Gershwin (He seems to be dead though.)
- Irenaeus 2nd century bishop of Lugdunum, Gaul (He’s likely to be already dead too. He may even count as archaeology.)
- Irapuã – a municipality in São Paulo state (seems to have population of 6,000 or so, barely worth the effort)
- Irony
(Not much good. You can’t wage war on an abstract noun, can you? Oh sorry, yes, you can. Terror. Drugs. Obesity, even. Ok irony stays in)
Wo/Man cannot live on Nutella alone
Experiment:
To live on foods without any packaging
Background:
We are often told that landfill is all our fault for using plastic shopping bags. I did the decent thing and bought a linen shopping bag. But
- it advertises Asda (Walmart), which makes me feel they should be paying me, rather than I should have paid them a pound or so for it.
- being too idle and disorganised, I never remember to take it out when I buy anything.
- being generally slack, I seem to have got it almost too filthy to take anywhere, without attracting public disgust.
- filling it up with foods packaged within an inch of their lives just seems to be hiding standard wastefulness under a hypocritical facade of concern for the environment.
None of my efforts at recycling are much use. On the sink top, there are a dozen slightly smelly jars and bottles that never made it to the correct recycling container on the right day. My compost heap is just a pile of rat-bait at the edge of the yard, appreciated only by the feral cat that turns up once a week. My pile of old Guardians and free bus-papers doesn’t have a proper collectible green plastic bag to store it in, so it’s just a fire hazard/burglar trap behind the front door.
Basically, inept recycling is changing my home into a transitional garbage dump. Too concerned about landfill to throw anything out. Too lazy to spend an hour a day on sorting, washing and packing trash for recycling.
The alternative plan is to avoid packaging. This won’t work with clothes or new electrical items. (Cutting down on buying them would help. But, I can generally rely on my income to do this for me, all by itself.) But food, surely I can do it with food.
Method:
I decided to try and eat only unpackaged foods that I can just drop into my non-plastic bag and carry home in their natural state. Blimey, there’s not much there. The list seems to come down to two things:
- Fresh fruit and vegetables
- Bread from a baker’s shop
Firstly, you can’t get fruit and vegetables from a supermarket. Even supermarket bananas are wrapped in plastic.
Secondly, it seems you have to concentrate on buying BIG foods. The shopkeeper is getting a bit irked when he has to collect together individual item groups, from a jumble of mushrooms, peppers and tomatoes, for weighing. Yams are ideal. (No, yams are a bad idea – transport miles – carbon footprint… Plus, buying up the staple food crops of the poor countries is not very defensible.) Well, big potatoes, then. Bananas are good – intrinsically well-wrapped and big enough to handle. (No, wait. Transport costs, staple foods in poor countries, etc. Big fruit corporations.)
OK, local potatoes, it is. By an uncanny stroke of luck, I live close to one of the few shops left that actually sells cheap,tasty locally-grown potatoes. But this could become a diet of Potato Famine- like consequences, if I’m to be stuck eating only potatoes. Oh, and onions. Cauliflowers. Broccoli. Apples. Peas. And a few other fruits and vegetables that can get tipped into my bag, however irritating it is for the lad behind the counter to weigh things that aren’t in handy plastic bags. (Berries are out. Grapes may be OK, if I can collect a big bunch all linked together.)
(Should easily achieve the 5-pieces-of-fruit-and-veg a day goal, however spurious its scientific basis. Then again, potatoes don’t count.)
Bread. Bah, there aren’t any local bakeries for miles. Can walk a mile to the supermarket and get a loaf there, though, from the instore “bakery.”
Eggs. There are still a few places that sell loose eggs. Buying eggs in an unpackaged state involves a dedicated egg-shopping trip, so as to avoid making an uncooked omelette in the increasingly filthy canvas advert-bag. Bugger, I have to boil or poach them, not having worked out a way to get oil back in my bare hands.
Butter. Cheese. Milk. No, can’t have them. Argh. How am I supposed to eat the spuds, without butter? Well, OK, then, fair enough. Veganism does always seem so much more definite and determined than my wishy-washy vegetarianism. (They would have to force those soya abomination foods into my cold dead mouth, though.)
Hmm, that’s it then. I won’t last long on this diet, I suspect. I’ll have to broaden it out a bit.
Extend the acceptably-edible categories of packaged food to include things with reusable packaging. Re-usable, not recyclable. (I’ve already said how crap I am at recycling.)
Cheese is back on the menu. w00t! The shop sells an Arabic soft cheese that comes in a drinking glass. (Even saving the packaging that a bought drinking glass would have. And increasing my store of guest cutlery by 100%.)
Nutella – also comes in a drinking glass.
There’s a SUMA peanut butter spread that comes in a huge hard plastic tub with a metal handle that makes a perfectly adequate plant pot (that I could use to grow some small food crop in, like a couple of radishes. If I buy soil and seeds. But they would both be packaged 🙁 )
Result:
Bread with spread. Some fruit. Some vegetables.
(Much more food than millions of people get. Way too limited for my pampered western self.)
The point:
Nothing, really. Just thinking about the absurdity of trying to change the world through our own individual consumption patterns, but, still remembering that we do make choices in the little things.
Welcome to Babylon
It’s pretty insulting to tell a musician that their music is an instrument of torture. Not that many musicians seem to care. Metallica (crappy band, of old-Napster-destroying memory) are quite unconcerned that their music was a Gitmo standby.
Unfortunately, some artists are not offended by their work being used to torture. “If the Iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then I’m glad to be part of their exposure,” James Hetfield, co-founder of Metallica, has said. As for his music being torture, he laughed: “We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?”(from Clive Clifford Smith in the Guardian 19th June 2008)
So respect is due to David Gray for speaking out about the use of his “Babylon” track. He, at least, doesn’t find what the US call “torture lite” particularly amusing:
“That is torture,” the singer-songwriter told Radio Four’s World Tonight programme……
..”No-one wants to even think about it or discuss the fact that we’ve gone above and beyond all legal process and we’re torturing people,” he added.
The Guardian piece had a few words from someone on the receiving end of torture-lite. (Is that almost the most chilling phrase you’ve ever heard)
Despite this, to date, the Pentagon’s semanticists have achieved their purpose, and many people think that torture by music is little more than a rather irritating enforced encounter with someone else’s iPod. Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who is still held in Guantánamo Bay, knows a bit about such torture. The CIA rendered him to Morocco, where his torturers repeatedly took a razor blade to his penis throughout an 18-month ordeal.
When I later sat across from him in the cell, he described how psyops methods were worse than this. He could anticipate physical pain, he said, and know that it would eventually end. But the experience of slipping into madness as a result of torture by music was something quite different.
“Imagine you are given a choice,” he said. “Lose your sight or lose your mind.”
David Gray pointed out that there might be legal implications in using music tracks without permission:
The singer wonders whether governments who use music as a torture technique without asking permission from the artists involved could face legal action. “In order to play something publicly, you have to have legal permission and you have to apply for that.(Guardian)
Just saying… VirginMedia have responded to pressure from the BPI by sending out threatening letters to customers suspected of sharing music illegally. Shouldn’t these copyright protection agencies be suing the US government, instead, if it turns out that they haven’t applied for permission, or paid for the rights, to broadcast music in their Gitmo free concerts?
Also on the endlessly enraging topic of torture, immense respect is also due to Christopher Hitchens for undergoing the euphemistically named “waterboarding” and reporting on how bad it was, even for a volunteer who knew he wouldn’t die and could go home at the end of the experience. (Hat tip to Quintessential Rambling for the link to this story.)
“Waterboarding” sounds so much like a fun new extreme sport, whereas those old-fashioned words like torture sound so cold and depressing. “Torture-lite” sounds so ironic and post modern, as if it’s not really torture at all. Something like being stuck in traffic on a really hot day. It seems that Newspeak can change anything from “morally abhorrent” to “familiar and acceptable.”
(There’s a good thought-provoking video of Stephen Pinker’s talk at the RSA, about how we use language – including the uses of euphemism.)
Raising an eyebrow
Time for a new topic. Why do so many women pluck or wax their eyebrows?
I find this really hard to understand. By definition, pulling hairs out by their roots has GOT to hurt. A lot.
So why is this a well-nigh universal female practice?
(Except for people like me, blessed with such a depth of vanity that we assume we are naturally close enough to perfect. And would, at least, need some damn good proof to the contrary before we underwent some painful beautifying process. )
Everybody wants to look acceptable, at least to the degree that strangers don’t stare and point at you in the street.
I’m not an eyebrow purist. If you have an embarrassing novelty eyebrow, I can’t see any problem with correcting it. It would seem perfectly reasonable to me to shave off the middle of a total unibrow. If your eyebrows were growing into eye moustaches and reaching your cheekbones, fair enough. Cut the buggers.
I’ve been carrying out an unscientific survey of men’s eyebrows. (This involves looking at brow ridges quite a bit more than would be considered polite if they were other body parts.) Even in this groomed-within-an-inch-of-its-life world, men’s eyebrows are still allowed to grow as they choose. And I haven’t seen more than – oh, I don’t know – one in a hundred men of any age who have eyebrows far enough on the outlying edges of a conceptual normal eyebrow-size-and-distribution curve to warrant a second look. Let alone a shriek or an instant gagging response.
So, do a disproportionate percentage of women suffer from gross eyebrow deformities? Perhaps there’s a bizarre tendency for women to grow comedy eyebrows, that can only be kept in check by pulling hair out at the roots.
All the same, I shudder to imagine a natural eyebrow growth of such a luxuriant excessiveness that it would be weirder than the eyebrows that I see on women every day. (Some of which actually do make me want to point and giggle. At the least, my eyes are inexorably drawn to the novelty eye furniture, to the point of being unable to take in anything the wearer says.)
My favourites include the one where the browridge has been depilated to the bone and the eyebrow replaced with an approximation of a eyebrow. Drawn on. Using a jet black pencil. Even when the wearer’s head hair has been bleached to a brilliant yellow. What do I mean “even when…” . The correct phrase is “especially when…”
This artwork is based on the “incredibly surprised” model from “Drawing cartoon faces 101”.
More sedate eyebrow models include simply plucking the hairs until the eyebrow is about 2 mm thick and starts to sprout just above the pupil. This also tends to make the wearer look constantly surprised, if slightly more mammalian.
(When I was at school, there was a brief fashion for girls to shave their eyebrows completely and then draw an unskilled approximation of a curve onto their newly-blank forehead canvases. This was initially quite impressive to a 14-year-old me, until the impressionist sketches were seen to be nesting in a visible lawn of brow prickles a week later.)
It’s hard to see what possible advantage this brings anyone, in terms of attractiveness. Do men really think “Well, I quite fancy her but she doesn’t look surprised enough?”