About Polly Unsaturate

A lady of leisure. Working interferes with my hobbies, so I dont do it.

New state

Posted on Mon, 8 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

On the same day on which the Metro bus paper announced that an Oxford policy studies group said that the war on terror was disaster and had resulted only in strengthening al-qaeda the news emerged that Derek Pasquill, a Foreign Office civil servant, was arrested, on 27 September, for a series of articles in the New Statesman, the Observer and Policy Exchange.

The New Statesman sees this as an “abuse of state power” and reported that

This case is said to follow the publication in the New Statesman, the Observer and in a pamphlet by the Policy Exchange think tank of a series of articles highlighting damaging and dangerous government policy. These included an expose of British acquiescence in the secret and illegal â€œrenditionâ€ (Rendition: the cover up) by the United States of terrorist suspects, and various revelations about government policy towards radical Islam.

This issue raises quite a few issues. Government employees are bound by a requirement of loyalty. However, if someone finds that their government has been acting in contravention of international law, doesn’t international law require the individual to speak out. Revealing policy is one thing – disagreement over policy is a matter of opinion. Civil servants are, quite understandably, obliged to keep their policy disagreements to themselves.

Acquiescence in activity that contravenes international law is a different matter. Did the Nuremberg trials not establish that “only following orders” was not an adequate defence, when those orders contravened international law?

It is hard to believe the absurdly named “rendition” is not an offence under international law. The very word breathes 1984. There is no single English word for “kidnap and delivery of suspects to places where they can be tortured” but there are plenty of English words that could be used to describe this much more accurately.

There is a fuller story on this on Index on Censorship. The New Statesman’s political affairs editor describes how he was getting so many stories on this issue at one point that it was almost impossible to keep up with them, alerting him to the existence of dissatisfaction with existing policies at a very high level:

The documents showed that senior figures in the Foreign Office believed that Britainâ€™s policy in Iraq had led to an increase in radicalism among young Muslims, something the prime minister was denying at the time.

…..The leaks provided me with a further news story for the Observer about plans to infiltrate extremist groups, and with features for the New Statesman on CIA rendition flights, diplomatic engagement with Egyptâ€™s banned opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the panic that had engulfed the Foreign Office as a result of the disclosures. …

……It is difficult to imagine a series of documents that could have been more in the public interest to disclose.

Hard to disagree with that conclusion.

Square-eyes

Posted on Sun, 7 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Watching over two hours a day of television is damaging to kids, according to the BBC, unselfishly reporting a study that clearly contravenes its own interests. This takes up a theme from past articles about stopping kids watching TV, on the grounds of behavioural problems, obesity or whatever is the current concern about kids and television.

Off the top of my head, I have a few questions about the evidence for all this.

Does “watching tv” mean sitting in rapt attention or having it on in the background, as so many of us do?
What are the mechanisms supposed to be that connect the square box and all these aspects of young humanity? Radiation? Mental torpidity? Engagement in popular culture? Exposure to advertising?
What type of tv? Are toddlers equally affected by watching CBBC or Men and Motors?
Does the content make a difference? I’m prepared to argue that hours of watching reality tv and soaps would blunt the brain capacity of Einstein, but that’s just my bigotry. What about watching non-stop thought-provoking and educational programmes?
What about class effects? Middle-class kids are generally less likely to watch lots of tv. They are also less likely to be judged as having behavioural problems or be obese. Why single out tv as the crucial lifestyle difference, rather than, for example, having a decent family income, better access to other activities, less depression in the parents or any one of a huge range of distinctions?
Why two hours? Think of a number…..

My main quibble with the evidence is that it comes from people’s reports. When it comes to characterizing one’s parenting, no one wants to see themselves as being a “bad parent.” So, if they have soaked up any of the current standards in parenting, (i.e if they have any contact with other humans), they will claim to be keeping to them.

Parents who see themselves as bringing up their kids responsibly (who are probably those parents whose kids are least likely to fall on the wrong side of all the behavioural bars) are likely to say their kids watch a moderate apparently-ordered amount of tv. When these people are responding to survey questions, 2 hours sounds about right. They aren’t not exposing their kids willy-nilly to trash culture nor eccentrically cutting them off from the mainstream. This doesn’t mean it’s true.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hours of tv that children of self-identified responsible parents see (according to surveys…) can tell you what are the current social values for responsible tv watching. This is not the same as meaning x hours are healthy and >x hours are bad.

Do you know how much tv you watch? I have no idea. I can’t even define “watching” let alone count the hours.

Chaplains cut

Posted on Sun, 7 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

There has been a cut of 54,000 NHS chaplain-hours, according to research by Theos, a theological “think-tank”. Theos admits that this might seem like less than an unmitigated disaster to some of us:

Cue secularist delight, with something like the following logic. “The NHS exists to provide clinical care. The NHS necessarily subsists on a limited budget. NHS funds, therefore, should not pay for anything but clinical care.”

Indeed. Good points. There is a constant debate over health spending. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence refuses to pay for lots of treatments because they are too expensive in relation to the benefits they might bring. So paying vicars would be my first choice for applying a cut.

Theos argued that hospital chaplains provide many services beyond bedside praying:

they are there to answer needs that are simply human: coping with the death of a loved one, the suffering of a child, the fear that comes with injury or sickness.

Well, why not provide trained non-sectarian counsellors instead?

Unless every church has a few dozen religious folk on its staff to cover the whole variety of beliefs, surely most people will get the wrong flavour of vicar/deacon/minister/priest/imam/guru/rabbi or moderator of the church of Scotland anyway?

There’s a joke on scientia natura blog based on the deep rancour between believers whose ideas are indistinguishable to outsiders. Let alone between warring religious belief systems. Is it likely that a sick Wee Free Scottish Presbyterian would welcome the ministrations of a priest? That a rabbi would be welcomed by a grieving Muslim family?

Theos’ stand on this is quite miffed. (It is a “theological discussion” site, remember….)

Where chaplaincy provision is removed it is not replaced by secular pastoral support – assuming â€œYou are only a ‘lumbering robot’ programmed by your genes so you shouldn’t fear an eternity of non-existence,â€ qualifies as pastoral support. Instead, it is simply lost to those most in need.

(I personally would be quite cheered by a deathbed counsellor who said something like that.)

Admittedly, NHS chaplains don’t force their attentions on the unwilling. However, the appearance of “caring” soul-seeking religious vampires can be one of the minor horrors of serious illness for non-believers and half-arsed believers alike. I know of a Catholic mother who called in a priest to sneakily administer the last rites to her (unconscious) dying atheist daughter, over the very strongly-expressed wishes of the dying woman’s husband.

There is a subtle idea underpinning the whole concept of the NHS chaplain that expresses the silly ” no atheists in foxholes” myth. This is that fear can not only overpower reason but that it should. Some things are too hard to bear. If our levels of fear or grief or pain are really enormous, we start craving for impossible, magical solutions and trying to bargain our way out. That seems to be a natural part of being a human. It doesn’t make religion true.

Religions promise false escape routes, in exchange for believing their myths, observing their regulations and, usually, handing over a contribution. This is basically taking advantage of the sick and grieving. So, I’d have to say that the loss of a 54,000 chaplain-hours is at least another half a million chaplain hours too few.

********************************************
Gratuitous aside for connoisseurs of tv so bad that it’s good
********************************************
Does anyone else remember an ultra-low-budget Scottish 1980s daytime tv production called “Airport Chaplain?” The entire series was in that title….
Storylines were things like “man has heart attack on plane. He needs the last rites! But there’s a snowstorm and a priest can’t get there in time! Can the C of E airport chaplain get away with delivering the last rites?”

It was so beyond any concepts of “naff” or “camp” that my brother and I even produced a fanzine for it.

Test-tube life gets a step closer

Posted on Sat, 6 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

The Guardian website announced this afternoon that Craig Ventner is about to announce the creation of a chromosome. The article headings are:-

I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer
Â· Scientist has made synthetic chromosome
Â· Breakthrough could combat global warming

I have less than zero capacity to judge the legitimacy of this news item. It’s obviously ‘pop science’ journalism. That normally means that I apply my one-tenth-understanding to some science journalist’s half-understanding.

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.

That said, taking the news at face value, this does seem to be a potentially huge ethical issue. It could be really good or really bad, depending on the social and political context that such research is sued in.

I can’t help having a bit of a doom and gloom response. I don’t think our track record as a non-creator species is good enough to justify us getting even greater power over the nature of life. (I’ve read Mary Shelley, ffs.)

The Guardian’s mention of a solution to global warming just reminds me that global climate change is the perfect example of an issue where we humans have created a problem and refuse to solve it. (Maybe we haven’t solved it because we couldn’t create artificial life? Sorry, I can’t follow that argument even in sarcasm)

The people in power won’t even admit to the reality of climate change because it might cut their profits and the voting public might object to anything except untrammelled consumer growth so cut off their access to power if they even tried. These are two very short-term concerns that affect a small number of people but they are what determine the world’s response to global warming.

Is our species about to change? Are our leaders all about to become wise and beneficent masters of the universe? In that case, the power to create test tube life is safe in their hands……

What pills would Jesus take?

Posted on Sat, 6 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Months late to pick this up but this clip from Current TV still interesting if you haven’t seen it. It’s a piece about a Christian “aid organisation” distributing pills with a cross and “Jesus saves” stamped on them (a sort of medicinal LoveHearts, for those who know the traditional cheap British sweets) to Indonesian Muslim tsunami victims.

Lots of comments claimed that it doesn’t matter what’s on the pills if people in need get medicine. A commenter called danm8r made the excellent point that:

I would love to see a medication distributed in this country (US) with the inscription “Allah Akbar” printed on it. I’m guessing it would be the people posting approvingly of the “Jesus Lives” medication that would be the first to freak out about a Islamic phrase on their medication.

And Skullboy said, in another spot-on comment:

Imagine how pissed a person of the Christian faith would be if they took a pill with an upside down cross or a pentagram on it. It’s Christians taking advantage of a peoples losses and the poor.

On one hand, there are lots of people with strong religious beliefs who are helping people in need. I think there many more people doing it just out of a sense of common humanity. In any case, all our attempts to help people can easily have unintended consequences that are bad.

In this case, the unintended bad consequences seem almost willfully present right from the start. The level of stupidity is awesome.

What were they giving out anyway? An anti-worm medicine seemed to have been taken as a toothache remedy by one man, as far as i could make out.

What sorts of lunatic distribute medicines to try and sneak fresh adherents into their fold?

Did they believe that writing Jesus messages in English on pills would mean anything to non-English speakers.

Did they assume the “Jesus saves” words would have a magical effect and heal the sick at the same time as insidiously converting them?

The most obvious impact this sort of activity does is to breed justified suspicion of medical aid ventures.

This justified suspicion of many forms of Western-originating medical aid is the very thing that is having a disastrous impact on world efforts to deal with diseases that threaten billions. The reaction to proselytizing western government actions and religious NGOs can be seen in a swathe of bad effects: HIV denial. Adoption of local diet and plant-based “AIDs remedies” that cure nothing. Refusal of polio vaccination as somehow “un-Islamic.” The spread of stories that make you want to kick the people responsible – such as the (physically impossible) idea that European condoms are deliberately infected with HIV.

Old road to ruin

Posted on Sat, 6 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Charges were dropped against 6 people who were arrested in July, when they protested at a council meeting against the remains of the 4,000 year-old Rotherwas Ribbon being buried under a road.

The road building is going ahead. Hereford Council has a site with its news. It seems that, after unsuccessfully and half-heartedly trying to pass it off as a natural artefact, the council’s arguments are:

the roadbuilding uncovered it in the first place;
they’ve done everything they reasonably could to get it investigated;
covering it up won’t do it any harm;
moving the road would damage other nearby sites;
the cabinet office says go ahead with the road as fast as possible

All reasonable points. It still seems a pity that we have to discard irreplaceable treasures just to make yet another road.

There is interesting information on the Ribbon on the Megalithic Portal written by one of the people in our blogroll at the right, Alun Salt from clioaudio

He says:

Archaeologists believe this major find may have no parallels in Europe, with the closest similar artefact being the 2,000-year-old serpent mounds of the Ohio river valley in America.

Turning the other cheek?

Posted on Fri, 5 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

An advert on Wingnut Daily leads to “The ultimate biblical exploration of self-defence”, a book with the title Shooting Back also available as “an exciting DVD.”

What would you do if armed terrorists broke into your church and starting attacking your friends with automatic weapons in the middle of a worship service?

Well, that is one form of terrorist attack that is never going to affect us non-believers….. You might therefore think a common-sense solution to that imaginary scenario for phobic believers might be to maybe stop going to church, but this book doesn’t go down that route….

It’s advice for his fellow worldnutters from a South African who was in a church that was attacked in 1993. (Don’t ask me if it was one of those extremist Terre-Blanche-style-white-hate-“churches” because they don’t actually mention that small detail. )

….But van Wyk was not defenseless that day. Had he been unarmed like the other congregants, the slaughter would have been much worse.
“Instinctively, I knelt down behind the bench in front of me and pulled out my .38 special snub-nosed revolver, which I always carried with me,” he writes in “Shooting Back,” a book being published for the first time in America next month by WND Books. “I would have felt undressed without it. Many people could not understand why I would carry a firearm into a church service, but I argued that this was a particularly dangerous time in South Africa.”

Many people indeed might not understand why someone would carry a firearm into a church service.

(I am a mite distracted by the odd physical conformation of someone who is naked without a gun. How much human flesh can a gun cover? Is he a really odd shaped human? Is it a pretty large gun like an anti-aircraft weapon. That might cover enough flesh to constitute an article of clothing. However, it would be hard for it to pass unnoticed by even the dumbest church-attackers.

If he put the gun behind a bench, was he was therefore conceptually naked in his church? No, my misunderstanding. The gun wasn’t behind the bench. To cover his conceptual nakedness effectively, it must have been stashed somewhere about his person that he couldn’t get at without having to do the modest thing and get behind a bench. )

Now, maybe I am being a bit too biblically literal here but from my school Religious Knowledge lessons, I don’t remember much in the New Testament about fighting back with maximum firepower? I thought it was all about loving thine enemies and turning the other cheek. My misunderstanding. That was another New Testament altogether.

But, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. In fact I’ll see his paranoid advice and raise it.

I myself feel in a state of mortal terror unless I’m armed with at least a couple of dozen inter-continental ballistic weapons. I mean, you never know when you might come under attack and have to protect innocents around you. So I always feel that a few medium-to-long range nuclear weapons gives you all the security you need. Why stop at carrying mere hand-guns into church?

And indeed, what utopian fool would go anywhere without wearing at least an NBC suit over a set of Kevlar underwear? And carrying a light submachine gun. We live in a dangerous world.

Bearing false witness

Posted on Thu, 4 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Loki forbid that this is something that will happen too often but this blog is forced to at least
emit a low mutter in defence of the religion correspondent of the Times.

(Yes that was the vile Murdoch rag, the Times and the words were indeed “religious correspondent”. I told you that this wouldn’t happen too often.)

Ruth Gledhill’s blog has been getting lambasted by her fellow Christians in the Christian chatroom at Ship of Fools. LA Dave says:

mouthpiece for the Anglican right.
Ruth Gledhill of the Times of London is plainly one of the celebrity religion journalists (probably because she is one of only a handful of reporters at the quality press who bother covering religion). Reading her blog, however, I come away with the opinion that her pieces tend to be sensationalist and forever proclaiming that schism is imminent. Moreover, she tends to get her notion of American opinion on Anglican matters from the right-wing American Anglican blogs, such as Stand Firm and David Virtue, while ignoring liberal or even centrist opinion.
What is Ruth’s reputation in Blighty?

Well, she’s hardly a “celebrity”. She is the writer of the most popular blog on the Times. She is obviously a standard Anglican but she’s pretty fair-minded in her discussion of most things.

(She has spoken well of this blog in the past. Not that that would skew my judgement or anything…… Well, OK, it completely skews my judgement. But do you thing Anne Coulter would recommend any atheist blogs to her readers?)

I very rarely agree with her opinions. I don’t share any of her beliefs. But no one could see her as an illiberal ranting conservative. So this makes me confused.

Just to whet her appetite: One liberal contributor to Titusonenine just described her as the “Anne Coulter” of something or other. To those of you unfamiliar with Ms. Coulter, she is a far-right commentator. Unfair to be sure, but she is not all that popular among TEC liberals.

What? Anne Coulter strikes any Brits who’ve ever read any of her stuff (e.g. moi) as an extreme far-right-wing religious fanatic. There is genuinely no point of comparison here. (Sorry, no idea what TEC liberals are.)

I had a look at Titusonenine to search for what they found so right-wing in her mild bicycling-to-communion style anglicanism. But the only reference I could find was a listing of her blog on their “Anglican / Episcopal News”

I tried to find out what Titusonenine was about as a blog but my boredom threshold is way too low to go into Anglican debates about ordaining gay bishops and so on. But that’s what it seems to be full of. No eccentric characterisations of a mildly traditionalist anglican reporter as a right wing fundy maniac.

I suspect that LA Dave has, oh my Ogum!, been bearing false witness against Ruth Gledhill. In a Christian chatroom? Surely not? I am shocked.

Egyptian cartoon

Posted on Wed, 3 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Life before death refers to a sort of online argument between a Swedish and an Egyptian cartoonist.

This is a pretty wierd story all round. What is it about Scandinavians and cartoons about Islam? How is that the Islamic world seems to be poring over Northern European newspapers and art shows?

I live in only slightly-less-Northern Europe and I couldn’t get my hands on a Norwegian or Danish or Swedish newspaper without getting on a plane.

And if I could, I couldn’t understand a word without some very serious Babelfishing.

Oh, I guess I’d just have to look at the cartoons then.

Which may explain why the Islamic world is on a hair-trigger with regard to any Scandinavian artworks that involve men with beards. For Freya’s sake, they could just stop having the Nordic press delivered every day and there wouldn’t be a problem.

One completely irrelevant thing about this debate is that the Egyptian lad is a genius cartoonist. The Swedish lad is outclassed here. (Yes, I AM too lazy to check the names and I want to sound a bit like a football commentator on this one) So, in my too-sceptical way, I thought. “Maybe this cartoonist is playing with the blogosphere to get some well-deserved exposure for his work”

I mean, if you are a cartoonist in the Islamic world, it must be difficult to go about your daily work of cartooning without offending someone. Then you look at the vast international exposure that comes to cartoonists from small Nordic countries that you probably never heard of before for doing a few uninspired but religiously offensive funnies.

Wouldn’t you say “I want some of that sweet fame”? You can’t actually produce an offensive-religious cartoon yourself. (After all, Salman Rushdie’s still in hiding well over a decade after writing an “offensive” novel and he lives in the non-Muslim world and has lots of wealthy and powerful friends…) But you can produce a cartoon that is meant to offend a Scandinavian cartoonist.

OK, the international cultural impact is a bit diminished by the Swedish lad being bowled over by the gratuitously offensive genius of the Egyptian lad’s cartooning and wanting to buy the work.

But it still sort of works. Those of us who would never have seen the Egyptian lad’s drawings have all seen them. And (despite some vitriolic abuse on their quality in the comments on Life before Death) we can all see he’s a world-class artist.

Give him a job on a Swediish newspaper, please. That’s got to be the perfect way to distribute your cartoons throughout the Muslim world.

And the Swedish lad strikes a blow for the Nordic good-natured rationality that we all love. Win win, really.

P*** yourself laughing

Posted on Wed, 3 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

For a truly fantastic psychic power that is too extreme even for Heroes, let alone the Fantastic Four, JLA, Teen Titans, see this on James Randi’s list of people trying to win the million dollar challenge:

Rosemary Hunter has applied for the Challenge, media presence requirement included, with the extraordinary claim that she can make people urinate themselves with the power of her mind.

Now that would be a ground-breaking experiment if it worked.

Sorry, I just had to share

Posted on Tue, 2 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

I decided I would see if good ol’boy Chuck Norris was back blogging about his doing the “cruel and unusual” thing and visiting US troops in Iraq. (Yes, some people are just really easily amused. I admit it.)

I lazily typed “worldnet daily” into the Google search bar, forgetting I was in Google Images rather than standard Google.

Showing that the singularity is here and that computer networks have achieved sentience, it said

Did you mean: worldnutdaily?

News on the Wire

Posted on Tue, 2 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Casual, even indiscriminate, blog searching came up the news that HBO have finally given the Wire Series 5 a release date in the US at least. (wahay, w00t, etc.) It’s supposed to focus on the media.

In the UK, FX is showing all series straight through from Series 1 and is then supposed to go straight into series 5, when it runs out of previous episodes. I make that about a year in the future in the UK, which you’d expect to be at least 6 months after the US. The HBO site seemed to show no signs of having any future series on the go at all so I was getting a mite worried.

I know I shouldn’t even think this, let alone say it, but some episodes of series 1 have been pretty poor. (Strike me down now, Thor.) Series 1 will morph straight into series 2 which was generally poor for most of its run. When I say “poor”, it’s a relative term. The Wire is still so far ahead of anything else that even its poor episodes are pretty gosh-darned good.

But put yourself in the shoes of someone (for example moi) who has been sounding off about the Wire being the greatest work of art ever shown on television, etc, for so long that people I know have even started listening to me and watching it.

And then I find myself shamefacedly having to say “Well, that one wasn’t a very good episode” or “You have to watch them ALL to really get into the characters and storylines” or lame things like that, that sound like I’m covering my back over boosting something that turned out to be a bit naff.

Rewatching series 1 for the third pass, it is indeed still stuck a bit too much in a “TV crime” genre. That is good. Nothing wrong with the genre as such. But, I have to admit there is more cliche TV crime stuff in the first series than you’d expect after you’ve been acclimatised to nature of the Wire series as a whole. The whole set of programmes just slowly edges its way out of the “crime” category and turns into genius.

Or maybe it’s just that I don’t like McNulty, who is the central character in the first series. His character is a bit too irritating. It’s rooted in the cliche lone-wolf Philip Marlowe “flawed investigator with integrity” mould. Series 1 was just finding its feet, so it too often took the easy way out. Someone decided that McNulty’s character was supposed to bring bad to all those around him as a result of his arrogance, or something. So the cast have to keep saying that, in case you haven’t picked up on it. I can’t say that I would have picked up on it, to be honest, but that doesn’t mean that repeatedly telling me that’s what I’m supposed to see constitutes character development.

Sadly, last night’s rerun milked the whole “officer-down” scenario to death. The corrupt and manipulative Commissioner Burrell turned out to be a tower of non-judgemental sympathy to Kima’s partner. Even the repellent Rawls was there to give out sensitive heartfelt manly consolation to a McNulty whose guilt was expressed by his hands being covered with Kima’s blood. Come on. Out damned spot and all that? He wasn’t even remotely to blame. (He even threw up in a bin because she’d been shot, which seemed a bit out of character for a homicide detective.)

When a TV cop show presents someone drenched to the elbow in someone else’s blood, followed by them doing a symbolic handwashing Pilate-thing, it’s time to start putting extra notches on your cliche gun.

(I guess this blog post must be an example of what is the Americans call “tough love”, by the way. I adore the Wire but I’m not letting it get away with self-indulgence……..)

If you have started watching the Wire reruns and don’t think it’s so groundbreaking, stick with it. Because it gets more and more subtle and complex and goes deeper and deeper into the way society works.

Plus, the McNulty character is barely in it after series 1 and a bit of the series 2. He must have been too busy being a digitally-remastered Spartan, for which much thanks.

What use are web applications?

Posted on Mon, 1 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

OK, this is a bit Luddite but I am unimpressed by the news that Adobe are entering the online document processing market, according to the BBC. They’ve bought the online word processor Buzzword, that lets several people edit a document online. It sounds like a good idea, in principle, but…

Have you ever tried collaborating on a document online? It’s usually a fiasco. At least, it is on Messenger, You change something. The other person changes something else. It saves over your changes. Or the program won’t either of you save because it’s trying to synchronise two documents. And failing to get either working.

One of you is bound to have a stylesheet that defaults to comic sans 18 point every time you press the return key. One of you is guaranteed to take Word’s offer of last Tuesday’s recovered version of the document, by accident, because it sounds more convincingly like the document you should be working on than the actual thing in front of you.

The problem isn’t the tech. It’s that two separate things are two separate things. They get out of synch. If you are both working on separate chapters and can merge the complete document that’s a different matter. But, in that case, why not keep two documents until you’ve finished your own bits?

Memetics

Posted on Sat, 29 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

We’ve been tagged by the excellent no more hornets blog with another meme. This time it is the “Evolution” meme. I am tempted to say that whydontyou blog actually disproves Intelligent Design by its very nature, as it definitely seems to be the product of chance events.

It’s a pity that we don’t have visual records because the look of the blog has changed a good few times, losing visibility a good few times when we’ve tried to change the theme. We tried a few themes, altered them a bit and finally decided it would be better to have control over the appearance of the site. Hence, we’ve had to learn how to create WordPress themes in the meantime and have even released some into the wild. This has brought us a weird collection of blogs that carry our name in the “designed by” bit at the bottom, with most ironically, a number of religious and even fundamentalist blogs, as well as (I kid you not) a penis enlargement blog.

The very first post here basically said Welcome. The next post was a recommendation for a book on philiosophy. I see a bit of a theme starting there:

Throughout the book Jamie Whyte uses logic to expose the common fallacies
that surround us day to day – ranging from the false authority given to victims of tragedies through to sheer evasive lies from the rich and powerful.

TW’s next few posts are also pretty interesting, a lot more astronomy and tech-centred than they tend to be now. My own posts soon degenerated into whinges about search engines being rubbish, so I’ll draw a veil over them.

We were much slacker about blogging in 2006. Whole months passed without many posts. But then nobody ever commented except on Ajax or Linux posts and we had no idea if anyone else ever read the blog.

I know the meme wants 6 posts but I’d listed too few, so now I’m going to list too many. A few selected posts from the old ones are Atheist belief, Prove or disprove, Linux partial success Happy Easter

The earliest post that is still unaccountably getting hits every day is a couple of lines pointing to an online source for Viking names with a sister post about Anglo-Saxon kings’ names that never gets hits although it has some actual content of its own. A lesson there maybe.

Other unaccountably still-hit-daily posts are the ones on food, imaginary megaliths in Liverpool and our alltime favourite, How to defend religion because it got us called an “entertaining blog” on the Times (We were planning to get t-shirts made) and got so many hits it temporarily broke our server.

Throughout the rest of the 2006, the blog rambled along, with some good posts, some rubbish ones. Very early in the blog, TW started posting on some of themes that he’s stuck to – including rubbish shops, internet magazines and digital photography. On one post, showing a photo of the Mithraic Temple on Hadrian’s Wall, he made this blog’s possibly first reference to the Biblical rains that have become a feature of the UK in the past year or so.

There were also plenty of anti-religion, anti-ID-cards and anti-1984-in-the-21st-century posts. The anti-ID stuff is starting to feel increasingly like flogging the proverbial dead horse, as more and more civil liberties disappear down the pan, so I think we’ve eased up on that a bit – not through optimism that the issue is dead but through despair that anyone can prevent it.

From January 2007, we were on the Atheist Blogroll, courtesy of an invitation via the sainted Nullifidian. This started to bring in some actual regular commenters, who constantly put us to shame, almost always outdoing the post they are commenting on, with their wit and wisdom,. (Bastards.)

This inspired us to try to hold a comment week, in which we commented on everything we read and solicited comments from anyone who was willing. This worked out pretty well except for me, at least, having to interpret “comment on everything” I read as meaning comment on blogs I read that have an easy-to-submit-a-comment capacity. (Registering with a google username or registering to read someone’s blog don’t count as “easy” for me.) After a few abortive attempts to comment on blogs that I really enjoyed, I also realised that it’s very lame to just say “I really enjoyed this” or “good post” so I often didn’t. It’s much easier to comment when you strongly disagree, of course, but I did little of that either, not much caring to argue the toss with nutters.

We are supposed to tag another 6 blogs and, obviously naming already-tagged ones would be pointless. There’s a good chance that the tagged blogs won’t thank us either. And I can think of a good few more that I’d like to pick, but Ill stick with the first half-dozen that come to mind. So here goes.
Nullifidian
Atheist Perspective
X is ….
Atheist ethicist
Clioaudio
Black Sun Journal

Zero sense

Posted on Fri, 28 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Zero tolerance is a pretty stupid policing strategy, closely associated with the American right-wing, so it’s had to understand how it is that the Home Secretary, Jaqui Smith, has decided it’s a good choice for the UK:

Jacqui Smith today announced a “zero-tolerance” crackdown on anti-social behaviour, burglary and drug and alcohol misuse. The home secretary’s tough message to delegates on the final day of the Labour party conference in Bournemouth was designed to outflank the Tories’ renewed push on law and order.

This is quite a confusing collection of activities to lump together under a “zero tolerance” banner. It mixes together a range of things from serious crimes to legal personal choices. A helpless drunk might be annoying, even frightening, but locking him/her up is not going to stop you getting your home burgled.

The Home Secretary is obviously being advised by people with a limited knowledge of criminology but a good ear for a soundbite. And a sharp eye for the opinions of the Daily Mail readership.

The introduction of local crime data is designed to address the fact that, despite a 35% fall in the national crime figures since Labour came to power, most people believe that crime has gone up. Ministers hope the provision of local crime data will make clear the real situation and reduce fear of crime.

Correct me if I am misunderstanding here, but doesn’t this suggest that current laws and policies are associated with a reduction in crime? However, the media – what other source could people have for their beliefs about the prevalence of crime, given its comparative rarity? – are giving people a false perception that crime is increasing.

Hence, government policies have to change to match the false perception rather than the reality and must provide whatever the media are demanding.

Does this mean that a grateful media will then report crime as falling, even if it rises?

Clearly not. That voracious part of the media that thrives upon keeping the British public in a state of constant fear will not be sated so easily. It will continue to oppose any (especially a Labour) government on its crime record, because that’s just what a large part of the media does.

Sadly, in the course of Jaqui’s finding out this simple fact -which should be obvious to anyone with the slimmest grounding in GSCE social science or media studies, let alone with an Oxford degree – ever more people will find themselves labelled as criminal and ever greater numbers of poor communities will be alienated by heavy-handed policing.

And just in case you thought our society had more than enough electronic surveillance and biometric data on record, the police are now to be issued with hand-held computers and portable weapons-detecting and fingerprint-taking devices……

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S	M	T	W	T	F	S
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19	20	21	22	23	24	25
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Why Dont You Blog?

Challenging the Zeitgeist

Author Archives: Polly Unsaturate

About Polly Unsaturate

New state

Square-eyes

Chaplains cut

What pills would Jesus take?

Old road to ruin

Turning the other cheek?

Bearing false witness

Egyptian cartoon

P*** yourself laughing

Sorry, I just had to share

News on the Wire

What use are web applications?

Memetics

Zero sense

About Polly Unsaturate

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