Except for a few professional women, (police, DA, nurse, teacher)  the women in The Wire and The Corner are almost all basically evil – malignly manipulative – like the mothers of Di Angelo’s  baby and the kid who gets adopted by the saintly Bunny – or psychopathically murderous for fun –  Snoop

I should take some exception to this. It is certainly an example of the stereotyping of women as exemplifying pure good – nurturing –  or (im)pure viciousness – destroying or providing seriously bad nurturing. I also take exception to the fact that the Wire’s central female police officer is gay and acting as a male in relation to her “child” . Yes, it’s good to have positive gay characters. But couldn’t there have been an equally brave and intelligent  female police officer who was straight? Do all the “good” women have to be involved in caring? (Bloody hell, Cagney and Lacey were ahead on this one – thirty years ago.)

I’ll not press this point too far though. Because:

• Most of the evil females are fantastically evil – Lady-Macbeth style evil.
• They are truly manipulative and really forceful at using social expectations to get their own way, twisting “family values” to their own ends, using women’s people skills – promises, threats, violence, emotional blackmail and whatever it takes.  We all know people like that, which is a bit scary.
• They have some great lines.
• They are really funny.
• Thay are much watchable than the relatively pallid good characters.
• Snoop is in a class of her own, completely without any motivation except the pleasure of the killl and she seems only moderately uninterested in that. The banter between her and Method Man’s character is like a more true-to life version of the conversations of Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta, in Pulp Fiction . She has a magnificent but totally chilling contempt for human life –  shown best when she shoots someone more or less at random in an unfounded belief he is from New York. (Someone claims in a  Youtube  comment to know the real one. Argh)

Fran in The Corner has her own episode. It is her fault her husband has fallen from success (a good job, a house, a family) to the corners, according to her son. She is doing her best to send him down the same path, despite also wanting him to do better. She steals from everyone, including her son, then subtly tries to drop him in it when he brings the  owner of the monety to her – criticising him for saying it was her. The problem with this character is that the writesr have tried to give her some complexity – she wants to  better herself and tries to get into rehab – but there  is no character development. She swings from one approach to the other. You can’t care about her whether she is being  unscrupulous or seeking to improve. Which is a pity beacuse the actress is good and some of the things she does and says are very funny.

After three episodes of The Corner (I am trying to ration them a bit) I can report that it’s pretty good.

For The Wire fanatics, it’s the undeveloped low-budget version. It would probably seem really good if The Wire didn’t exist. This series allowed us to get The Wire in its full glory, so even if it was rubbish it would be worth watching.

Each episode in the series takes a Baltimore individual and shows his or her story, with a focus on the dissolution of the neighbourhoods. The actions and the dialogue can be as witty as parts of The Wire. Central concerns are the same, with a focus on how the family reproduces the fractured relationships of the neighbourhood, similar to the focus on the kids in Wire Series 4. The street shots are the same neighbourhoods used in the Wire. Lots of the action takes place in the Series 3 Hamsterdam area. Many of the same production team were also involved, and some stylistic marks of the Wire, such as the introductory quote and the good credits music are present in embryonic form

Most of the cast are the actors who appear in The Wire, often cast in diametrically opposed roles. Several Central Wire police are street addicts or dealers in The Corner. The Series 4 headmistress is a clam shop supervisor. Avon Barksdale is hustling for scrap to sell, and so on. This adds another level of entertainment value that can not have been foreseen by the original team. You can watch it, picking out actors and trying to remember who they were. For instance, I think I saw Method Man in there. I have a suspicion that one character is an unfeasibly young version of the main female police officer from the original team – the one who gets moved to Homicide in Series 5, as part of the first Mayor’s plan to sink the expanding investigation in the period leading up to an election.

The focus on individuals builds up into a composite picture, with each person forming a part of the others’ stories and each instalment sheds more light on the previous episodes.

When compared to the Wire, it is less than satisfying. The stories (so far) are unremittingly dismal, focusing only on those at the bottom of the heap, the moralising is too overt and the characters aren’t consistently strong enough to carry so much interest. The Wire has such an incredible array of fascinating morally complex characters from all social levels that this series can’t compete with its scope and complexity. However, it is brilliantly experimental televsion in itself.

Further to the post on No winter, it seems that the Americans are currently getting the winter for 6 other countries.(Typical Americans, you might say.) There are some pictures on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6267273.stm showing beautiful snow scenes in unlikely locations.

Americans use even more resources than we do in Europe. They are responsible for a disproportionate share of the activities that are seen as responsible for climate change. They are also fairly forward in refusing to accept any responsibilty for restraining human impact on the climate.

Appalling as the impact of freak weather – such as the ice storm and last year’s New Orleans disaster, is on individual Americans, maybe some general good could come out of it. The US population might start applying some political pressure on its leaders to take the issue of climate change more seriously.

(No smugness, here. Europe is hardly blamefree or immune from the impact of changing weather patterns.)

What happened to the winter? Today was like a beautiful March day. So far the winter in the UK has been surprisingly mild, except for the aoccasional winds that can push a pedestrian into oncoming traffic.

Global warming can only be identified as a statistical change and there are natural variations in temperature. All true. Still, this really feels like a serious change in the climate. There is discussion of the issues on http://www.sci-tech.co.uk/globalwarm.php

This blog writer thought she yielded to no one in her admiration for The Wire. But I have found a post on the onetoein blog that is well more enthusiastic than anything I’ve said.

To say The Wire is the best show on television doesn’t do it justice. It narrows the playing field, especially for those who see television as a ghetto. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call The Wire one of the best and most important pieces of American art of the early 21^st Century, and even that narrows it down.

I have to agree except I think it’s probably the major work of art that’s ever been presented on television.

In the year’s gap before the next series appears, I have found a potential substitute in the HBO mini-series that gave birth to The Wire. It’s called The Corner and is a set of 6 hour-long programmes, each based on a separate story. It won lots of awards and made it possible for the Wire to be created. I’ve only just glanced at the intro episode – in preparation of aserious 6 hour session) but it looks a lot like The Wire, though obviously it was made on a much lower budget .

So far it loooks promising. Even the first few minutes are shaping up as pretty funny and shrewd (once you get past the double set of serious intro talks – one is from a man who grew up on the corners and another is a mock interview with the man whose story provides the first episode.)

Buy The Corner dvd from Amazon

Just got this picture from another member of the blogging team at WhyDontYou.org.uk. After exhaustive research (Google images then) I think it’s a praying mantis? If anyone sees this and recognises it, please let us know.

There are two incomprehensible things with Technorati (whose name be praised – this is CONTRUCTIVE CRITICISM) at the moment.

1. It is supposed to drop blog links that are more than 180 days old. technorati’s blog It seems to interpret this at random. I.e.Even though there seems to be no change in the number of linked blogs less than 180 days old, the number goes down 🙁 (and occasionally up 🙂 ) seemingly at random.
2. Much more serious, it delays noticing the existence of some new posts until they are so old (say twenty minutes) appear on page two, when ranked by time/date. This can be really frustrating. It means that a post on a remotely popular tag topic doesn’t even have its conceptual Warhol’s five minutes of fame.

Only posts tagged with really unpopular tags are certain to stay on the front page for long enough for anyone to see them, and, obviously they are unpopular tags because almost no one ever clicks on them.

I keep hearing people saying things like “I’m being good todayand not eating any chocolate.”

Maybe it’s my concept of morality but I can’t see how denying yourself certain foods can constitute being “good.”  It’s not easy to define goodness, but there can’t be many definitions that don’t involve helping other people or saving the planet or rescuing dumb animals, and so on.

People  who talk about being “good” in relation to food aren’t talking about not eating meat or eating only local grown organic products – i.e. food choices that come into the realm of morality. They are talking about refusing sugar and salt and fat and eating fruit and vegetables. That is, their own diet.

Even accepting that the health and weight loss benefits of these dietary choices are real – a huge obstacle, given that most of what passes for knowledge about diet is based on the most spurious science imaginable – the only person to benefit would be – guess who? The person making the “sacrifices.”

There’s nothing wrong with self-interest in terms of choosing what to put into our bodies.  Seeing it as a moral choice is a different matter.

Traditional exhortations to kids who don’t want to eat something was to refer to the starving millions. They still exist, (although they are still never going to get a chance to eat your unwanted sprouts.)  I think pepople on the edge of starvation can see quite clearly that it isn’t “good” that we have access to far more food necessary for our survival and it’s  definitely “bad” that they are starving.

On a full scale rant, I’m going to suggest that the phrase reveals an infantile morality – seeking to please an imaginary authority who will punish us for indulging ourselves and reward us for self-denial.  We are constantly at war with our natural desires.

This relates to our whole disturbed mind-set around food.  Most of us are so far from the state of eating when we are hungry that we have no idea what hunger feels like. Daily media bombardment focuses on celebrities’ losses or gains of a few ounces of bodyweight. People who accept this sort of thing despise the celebrities - and despise themselves even more –  for being either anorexic or obese, with a 5 pound window between these extremes.

If we have to detect goodness and badness in relation to individuals’ responses to food, then why not look at it in terms of how our behaviour influences other people, especially children.   It is surely “good” to eat what you need when your body tells you it needs it and surely “bad” to obsess about your own body shape. “Good” to approach food rationally and to stop consuming planet-threateningly large quantities of industrialised crap but to enjoy food as one of life’s main pleasures. 

This is just as selfish but I contend that it’s a socially and psychologically healthier selfishness.

Global imbalances in the distribution of resources won’t be solved or even improved at all by individuals giving our food money to charity either, whatever rock stars might believe. (They are rock stars, ffs, not agrarian economists) Shifting the inequalities in the global food balance requires a lot of hard choices from all governments – minimising dependence on imports in the overconsuming countries, encouraging production for local needs in the hungry countries and so on. However, an adult concept of morality is one of the preconditions for this sort of thing.

This source for part of the blog (i.e. me) must confess to being too pompous and argumentative in recent posts, so I’m hoping this will be mellower.

So, in diametric opposition to my normal posts, I am going to list what’s good in religions.

Almost all religions meet our need for a philosophy of existence. We all feel a sense of wonder at the universe. As far as I can see human beings will never grasp the nature of being, just because we  only have our human capacity for thinking.  This is not an argument against pushing our capacity to know things to its limit.   From our perspective, the universe can only know itself through us.

The best of religion provides a language by which we can conceive of our existence.  (In this sense only, I agree that science acts in the same way as religion.)

I suppose that’s saying the main value of religion is in its contribution to philosophy. There are plenty of other valuable things that religion can provide, such as a sense of community, rites of passage, rituals to help us deal with the unbearable.   But we would barely be able to conceieve of anything in philosophical terms without concepts that have been refined over thousands of years.

Religion provides metaphors for the knowledge that is always hanging outside our grasp.

Thought alone is not enough to express the complexity of our experience. 

Where religion – and any magical belief systems –  are distinct from raw philosophy is that they let us interact with the knowledge. They can integrate wonder into our logical-thought knowledge of the nature of  the universe. They offer ways to express this physically – good works, prayer, dance, song, exercise, observing fasts, taking part in pilgrimages, meditation or, even, fighting as in the case of kung fu.

Buddhism, taoism, hinduism, African pantheism and so on all seem to achieve this much more creatively than the God-of- Abraham religions. However, I suspect that may be partly because, in the West, we tend to know them only after any dubious social content has been filtered out (e.g. the caste system) and their philosophy has been interpreted for us. There are also plenty of brilliant things in the God-of- Abraham-style religions.

In that sense, even those of who can admire myth and metaphor without taking it as literally true can play with the ideas. This is a bit like being the kids who know there isn’t really a tooth fairy but will take the coin the tooth fairy leaves. 

The problems with religion are to do with power and ideology. The more powerful the religion, the grubbier it becomes. Religions are not just collections of insights and myths. They are forms of social organisation. They amass resources. They hold power or provide support to the powerful.

I disagree with Dawkins where he treats religion as if it, in itself, has power to cause social effects. I feel that this ignores the ideological role of religion, i.e. the power to influence opinions in favour of particular social groups. (Just because something serves as ideology doesn’t mean it’s not true.) Social change and religion are inextricable, each feeding on and shaping each other.   I don’t think it matters what we actually believe about the nature of the universe or morality.  It matters what we do about it. Specifically, what we do to people who think using a different set of metaphors.

The trend towards fundamentalism in several religions can be explained in a million ways, and although i am obviously more than tempted, (Curse this hubris [note use of religious metaphors])  I’ll have to pass on that now, or this blog will never get published. The relevance here is that  you can’t just dismiss it as silly nonsense (OK, you can)  We need to think about what people are expressing when they hold to those beliefs and try to address the causes. 

(Tough on religion, tough on the causes of religion, following Blair.)

Sorry, I was blatantly lying about not being so pompous and argumentative. I promise to try harder in the next blog.

Realising that I might be setting the comprehension bar too high for some blog-readers, I am going to put this as simply as possible.

State-funding for religious schools is a scandal.

There are lots of reasons behind this opinion but the main one is divisiveness. There is already too much distrust and suspicion and dehumanising of each other. Culturally mixed schools won’t solve these problems, but culturally separated schools certainly make them very much worse. 

The Northern Ireland conflict might not have been dragged out for decades if children from Catholic and Protestant families lived in the same neighbourhoods and went to the same schools. Some might have even seen each other as friends before they found out what religion they were.

Extending state support for religious education to Muslims at a time of so much intercommunal mistrust is potentially socially suicidal.

Teachers in Muslim faith schools are really unlikely to represent the views of the average British Muslim. However, when an Islamic school is set up in a neighbourhood, community pressure will soon compel the average Muslim to support it. After all, people brought up as Catholics often feel obliged to send their children to Catholic schools even when they themselves have no faith.

Obviously, state funding for C of E and Catholic schools should be withdrawn, as it should have been over a century ago.

If people want their kids to be indoctrinated into specific religions, that is their own decision. There is no control over indoctrination in the home, hence little justification for banning religious education altogether. However, let them pay for it.  If they are really willing to fork out thousands each year – and/or send their kids to schools with rock-bottom facilities and equipment – why stop them?

However, those people who fake belief to get into a religious school because of its good GCSE results would probably find better uses for their money – paying for better private schools; moving to a district with better schools – they might even – god forbid – start demanding improvements in their local state provision.

Those half-believers who send their kids to religious schools to fit into the values of their community or kin would probably put up a stronger fight if they have to stump up the cost of a private education just to make sure that little Simon learns the Creed as well as the alphabet or that little Ibrahim knows how often to prostrate to Mecca.

The most devout Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Jew won’t be put off by having to pay a few pounds to save their offspring from the taint of secular education.  Which would leave the religious schools as the province of the true believers.  Which is tough on the kids, yes, but they already have the cards heavily stacked against them by being born to rabid parents. There’s only so much you can do to save them from that.

The previous post  didn’t mention – possibly because of the Guardian article’s  unreadability – that the writer claimed that Dawkins’ utimate objective was to exterminate believers.

This was just slipped in to the text in about the third paragraph. Granted that reading further made you want to gnaw your own toes off in preference, few readers will have got much further. 

Other minor absurdities included the claim that believers were treated like soft drug users – OK if they keep it to private consumption but not when they act as dealers, i.e., try to spread their message – and that wise atheists pretend to be Christians by attending church to get their children into a Church of England school.

First of all, in everyday social life, the mass of people might indeed treat devout Christians more favourably if they keep their beliefs to themselves than if they start preaching. (This is why the local C of E vicar gets more public respect than doorstepping mormons.) However, in most of the world, practising religion is not criminalised, whether a matter of personal belief or public proseletising. No matter how publicly you preach, the police in England will studiously ignore you. Hence the drug law analogy is nonsense, put in just to make religious belief seem edgily hip maybe.

On the point of atheists pretending to be Christians to get their kids into a decent local school, funded by the taxpayer but free to teach nonsense to kids- don’t even get me started on this one. (Too late, it’ll have to be another blog.) The wierd thing is that he thinks this hypocrisy is a good thing. Kids seeing their parents observing a religion they don’t believe is supposed to set a good example of morality in action, then?

In World’s Strongest Man final (5th January, 2007)  the winner thanked God, as is becoming well nigh obligatory  in televised acceptance speeches. This still seems sacreligious to me. Surely God has better things to do than fix the result of a sporting contest? If we assume that He hasn’t, a few issues need to be explained.

1. Shouldn’t God be concerning himself with sick people’s suffering, starving babies, torture victims or at least the fall of single sparrows?
2. Does he have enough spare time to make sure that person x wins competition y? Maybe he should be encouraged to get some rest so he can  really concentrate on the day job. 
3. For instance, couldn’t he provide a bit more help with GCSE results then?
4. Would the score of a US vs Saudi Arabia baseball match prove that the Judeao-Christian god was more powerful than Allah? Or vice versa, depending on the result?
5.  What about India vs Pakistan cricket matches? Surely access to the huge  Hindu Pantheon gives a massively unfair advantage to India. Maybe the rules of the sport should be rewritten to level the playing field. (Lame pun clearly intended.) A montheistic team could bring in a thousand-strong praying section to compensate for every polytheist prayer.
6. Over the past ten to twenty years, the World’s Strongest Man title has passed from people all called things like Cnut Cnuttsson through Marius (Polish, so he may be Catholic but his first name suggests he may have secret access to the full set of Roman deities) to people called things like Jethro. Does this finally prove that the Norse gods have been defeated?
7. God might not draw the line at intervening in the Olympics – given its global signficance - but World’s Strongest Man?  Is there no sporting event too insignificant for his attentions? Pro-celebrity golf? Schoolboy football? Pub darts? Infant’s school Parents’ Day sack races? (In which case, I have along-standing grudge with His failure to act in one particular long-past Roscoe Juniors race, in which the writer of this post- who erroneously considered herself quite a good sprinter – was utterly trounced by some unlikely looking mums and dads.)
8. You notice that I suggested mainly amateur events in point 6.  Sorry, I wasn’t thinking straight. There is a big cash prize in WSM. Maybe God prefers to save his interventions for sports with decent prizes? In which case, he must spend so much time acting as an unacknowledged pools panel for the Premier League that he obviously has no time left for trying to bring about peace on earth.
9. Does this mean God had heard the prayers of the losing contenders and found them wanting in some way? Could Marius not rustle up enough Hail Marys? And those contenders who never even got through the heats must have been pretty lacklustre in their faith.
10. Is there a slight suggestion here that God may be engaging in a sporting version of  insider trading?  He had a side bet with the Archangel Gabriel and just tipped the odds so that his man won.  
11. He doesn’t play dice. Einstein said it (and obviously knew everything because he could do hard sums) It makes sense, who would play dice against someone who could make the dice land on a point in an alternate universe if he chose.  So, he’s obliged to get his sporting pleasures through secretly fixing other sports and games.
12. Ask nicely enough and make enough Eminem-style silly hand gestures when you win (as in WSM winner Pfiser) and God will treat your opponents’ prayers with the contempt they deserve?
13. And why did Don Pope only come third then? 

Technorati tags: World’s Strongest Man 2007, religion, hindu, Atheist, sport, Einstein, television

I have to take issue with the argument that it’s mistaken to believe that it is a matter of chance wherther you get cancer. Granted, this means that you have to interpret “fate” as chance. So I admit that it’s my assumption people who use the word “fate” mean “chance”.   If the belief rests on some predetermined “Kismet” or “destiny” view, then it is indeed blatantly silly. But I take my devil’s advocate role pretty seriously.

My point is that – even cancers caused by heavy irradiation are due to chance, although the chance may approach 100% with regard to certain substances. With most cancers, you can only consider the impact of lifestyle choices statistically. (And having some acquaintance with epidemiology, I can say this is a pretty arcane art).   If 1 in 5 people in continuous long-term contact with substance x get cancer, there is a one in 5 chance that each will contract cancer.  i.e. It’s a matter of luck (chance, fate, or whatever you call mathematically random phenomena).