Tom Morris

BBC News and The Independent report on a Dutch woman who is donating a kidney in a reality TV show, and contestants compete in order to get the kidney.

And, of course, the moralists are out saying that it's immoral.

Quite why is not explained.

If you want to sell your kidneys or let people compete for them on a reality TV show, I think that's absolutely fine.

You own your own body and should be able to do with it as you like. Now, the idea of people competing for a kidney may seem fairly disgusting, and, if I lived in Holland, it would be unlikely that I would watch this show - but I think it's fine that people want to do it.

If people had the option of donating organs under their own terms (whether it be selling them or setting up a reality TV show and getting people to compete for them), it may mean that more people will donate organs. That is the only moral consideration, as far as I am concerned.

That people might want to make money from their kidneys should not concern us. If we allow people to make money from their labour, their image and their sperm and ova, I think we really ought to allow people to do what they want with their organs.

Comments | TrackBack

I've been trying to get Remember the Milk to function as a decent GTD system for me. It does a pretty good job, but I have found a useful trick with 'Smart Lists':

"( NOT dueAfter:"1 week after today" ) AND ( NOT tag:someday )"

This is a smart list search that gets RTM to give you actions that are due in the next week and that you haven't tagged 'someday'. This, for me, is the ideal 'Print' view - you set this up as a list, hit print and get everything you need.

You tag things that aren't immediately actionable ("Learn French") as 'someday' so they don't appear. When you get a list like this, you need to know only that which you can act on now and this does it for me. The search criteria system is very flexible in RTM, and makes it pretty easy to customise your system. Now, the only thing I wish is that the print view allowed you to have a view of the tags attached to an item, or a decent XML export that you can get from them listing 'everything', so that custom views become a bit easier to build. (This also applies to Vitalist who are slowly getting there).

Tags: gtd, getting things done, gettingthingsdone, productivity, rememberthemilk, remember the milk, rtm

Comments | TrackBack

I was just sorting through my old copies of MacUser today (and by sort I mean "sit and read"), when I cam across a story about how the BBC are planning to build a DAB digital radio add-on for the iPod. Neat!

Except it kind of isn't. Honestly, who cares about broadcast radio anymore? I can't honestly remember the last time I listened to broadcast radio. My parents watch more broadcast TV and listen to more broadcast radio than I do. I've got four and a half hours of unwatched videos sitting in iTunes, and over 100 hours of unlistened audio podcasts. (There's about a 50-50 split in there between 'professionals' - BBC, NPR, commercial - and 'amateur' podcasters)

Where I live we get only two terrestrial television stations (BBC One and ITV). We do not get digital 'DAB' or Freeview. We don't get mobile phone signals either. And, no, I'm not out in the middle of nowhere. We have trains to London every half hour and it takes about an hour to get to Charing Cross. As the crow flies, we're about fifty miles from London and yet we don't get virtually any of the radio signals.

We live at the bottom of a hill though.

Does it matter? No. The Internet has pretty much replaced any need for it. Podcasting, peer-to-peer and so on make it all irrelevant. By the time that the BBC has implemented it's future strategy, the only people who will actually use any of the technology will be the over sixties. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but us young'uns will get everything off the Internet.

We won't use "iPlayers" either. What is the point?

I'm sorry to the guys and gals at the BBC, but, like the rest of the broadcasting world, you've been routed around by the Internet. The UKNova guys are the pirate radio DJs of the twenty-first century while the iPlayer is the tame crap that they played on domestic radio. It's against the law, but everyone will be tuning into Radio Torrentmania for a little while longer.

Comments | TrackBack

In a bid to increase the availability of the content from this blog to a wider audience, a syndication feed on LiveJournal has been set up which you can see at tommorris_feed. If you add this to your friends list on LiveJournal, you will be able to keep track of what is going on with my blog. (David McNett (aka. Nugget) did it, I think)

I am also syndicating my Twitter updates via tommorris_twit.

And, finally, I have set up LiveJournal syndication accounts for all of the Tube trackers. You can find them on the original blog entry. When you add them as friends, you may want to use your LiveJournal IM, SMS or e-mail notifications. If there's any problem with 'em, drop me an e-mail or post a comment.

Again, if the Tube fucks up (as it will do at the most inconvenient moment), don't get angry. Grab one of them 'Customer Charter' forms, fill it in and get a free Tube ticket in return.

Comments | TrackBack

I have to apologise to users of the MySpace API. It has been taken offline! My web host took my site offline for about 90 minutes this evening because the MySpace API was using up too many system resources. I have removed the MySpace API from the website. It will return when I have debugged the script to make it less resource hungry.

Until that happens, the API will be offline. I am very sorry about this, but it's outside of my hands. Either the API goes or the whole site goes.

Comments | TrackBack

Sir Harry Kroto has a breathtaking piece in the Grauniad today on the fact that the UK is turning out shockingly few scientists and engineers. The root cause is - in my experience - the 11-18 period, where science just isn't a draw for students. A lot of people who would be doing science at university aren't because of the fact that science at school is taught so badly.

The root cause of so much distrust of things like computers is that people do not think scientifically about them, but just look on and give up. It's not going to bite you. But if you approach the problem logically, you can try and solve it. Like, if you push a button and it does something every time, you can make a tenuous hypothesis of how it works. But people don't.

Understanding the scientific method was one of the best things that has ever happened to me, because it's formalised something that I do every single day. If I am debugging a piece of code, I am engaging in a scientific practice of sorts. If I am reading the manual (as I find myself doing quite often) and try out a code sample, I am testing a hypothesis.

I can, if I am so inclined, open up the machine which is processing the code and see what is going on. Which is kind of a more useful way to look at the world than "the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it", which, once you clear off the (post-)modern spin, essentially the position of Blair et al.

Link via Dave Cross.

Comments | TrackBack

Speaking of science, the BMJ reported last year on a double-blind, randomised controlled study performed on people who claim that they have a 'sensitive' headache in the presence of GSM signals. Only one problem. There's no evidence to suggest that it has anything to do with GSM signals. The wi-fi scaremongering is likely to be of the same kind - "psychological factors" (to use the Rubin et al. study's terminology).

But, just to see, I would like to offer people who think they suffer from wi-fi-induced headaches or other symptoms to take part in a small-scale test.

I will arrange for equipment to be set up in a central London location and we can conduct a battery of tests on wi-fi using commercially available equipment to see whether this is true or not.

Think of it as open source science, outside of academia and laboratories. It'll be a fun day and maybe we'll find out some interesting things about human beings and low-energy radio waves.

Comments | TrackBack

The Guardian reports on the Vatican's reaction to the BBC Panorama programme on the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic Church and their willed inability to do anything about them.

Based on the evidence presented, the whole Catholic Church seems to be the biggest conspirator in sexual abuse ever perpetuated. It must be a step down. In previous centuries, they had the ability to kidnap, torture and kill people with whom they disagree. Now they only get to have sex with the underage offspring of their followers.

The Catholic Church is one of the most ghastly and repulsive organisations on this planet. Having studied Catholic theology and so-called Catholic morality, I find the whole setup repugnant and utterly vile. No other organisation of it's size could be let off so easily. Imagine if the British civil service covered up for civil servants who committed sexual abuse of children. Or if Microsoft or Wal-Mart or another large, multi-national corporate offered their employees the benefit of helping cover up for their paedophilic actions.

What, then, is the reaction from Rome?

The head of the parliamentary committee that oversees RAI [the Italian public service broadcaster], Mario Landolfi of the formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, said yesterday that he had written to the director-general urging him not to allow screening of the documentary. To do so would be to turn the public network into an "execution squad ready to open fire on the church and the pope", he said.

Oh, we wouldn't want dear Mr. Ratzinger or whatever he calls himself subject to any criticism, would we?

The Roman Catholic church accused Mr O'Gorman of misrepresenting the documentary evidence. It said that the Vatican's directive, first issued in 1962, was intended to avoid the misuse of information gathered in confessional. It imposed an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest and any witness.

Why did nobody from the Vatican speak to BBC reporters then? Are the Holy Ones so deepy in contact with Him Upstairs that they are unable to pick up a telephone and call the journalists at the BBC and give them the full story?

No other organisation in the world has been as unforthcoming and uncooperative as the Catholic Church in the investigation of it's members in to the crime of sexual abuse. Again, you would not get this if there was sexual abuse going on within any other organisation of a similar size. Say what you like about globalisation, but give me rule by the corporations over rule by the utterly absurd, hypocritical, equivocating, sexual-abuse-endorsing, homophobic, reality-deprived vermin in the Vatican. If these people are getting annoyed by a television programme, that should be only the start of it.

Back in the 80s, people started conjuring up sexual abuse charges out of the blue. That is true. Conspiracies were conjured up of how 'Satanic ritual abuse' was being conducted all across the Western world - including allegations of torture, drinking human blood, cannibalism, even ritual sacrifice being carried out in the chamber of the House of Commons and even twenty-sided die. The Freudian idea of 'repressed memories' was dragged out - apparently, children who were subjected to all of this 'repressed' it - despite there being no evidence at all of human memory acting in a 'repressing' manner.

And here, with the Catholic Church, we have a preponderance of evidence of men engaging in institutionally-supported rape and sexual abuse of minors, and nobody is getting nearly as angry about it as this kind of pious evil deserves.

Comments | TrackBack

O'Reilly Radar has a roundup of the popular programming books (via Alex Barnett). They consider Rexx an irrelevant programming language. Aww! I actually still use Rexx on my Palm Pilot (I wrote a Twitter client in Rexx for Palm). According to this report, ASP is losing ground compared to Rails. I'd like some analysis of how different technologies within the Web stack are doing. For instance, it'd be interesting to see how the different XML-based technologies are doing comparatively.

I'd also be careful about drawing any 'I shouldn't learn this' type of analysis from this. Book purchases correlate with how hard the language is to learn and how fashionable it is and how bad the online or in-built documentation is. For instance, I have bought Eric van der Vlist's book on XML Schema, but I don't use XML Schema as much as RELAX NG. XSD is a pig of a schema language, while RNG is great.

On SemWeb topics, I have difficulty suggesting books for people to read. Practical RDF (Shelley Powers) is one I do recommend, although beyond that, there's nothing really worth reading (there's a crapload of books titled 'Semantic Web' which have nothing to do with the Semantic Web too, which hardly helps us help other people understand what the Semantic Web is). That's part of the motivation for GetSemantic.

I haven't really bought any books on Python, because it's very well-documented internally and on the Web (Dive into Python, for instance). The same is true for UserTalk - O'Reilly do publish a book for it, but there's decent online resources (DocServer, some built-in docs for various functions and the full text of Matt Neuberg's book). Ruby, on the other hand, most people buy PickAxe and a Rails book.

O'Reilly's statistics are interesting, but they aren't everything when picking what to learn. Don't trust me either. I never pick the trendy technologies (UserTalk, RDF - I bet Fortran-powered coffee machines are next).

Comments | TrackBack

Good news. The government are going to allow human-animal hybrid embryos in scientific research. Cool!

The ethics behind this seem pretty simple. If you agree that an embryo is not a 'soul', there does not seem to be any good reason to oppose this treatment. The embryos that would be used in hybrid research are all of six days old, at which point the stem cells are isolated and then have human DNA inserted. At this point, the development process continues for a few days longer in order for cells to divide and specialise in to early stage cells from particular organs.

The reason why cytoplasmic hybrid embro cells are used is simple. Donated eggs are a scarce resource, and, rightly, most donated eggs are used in IVF treatment. Instead, the plan goes something like this: the egg cell is only a 'container' for DNA and mitochondria. We remove the DNA from the source animal (rabbits and cows are the suggested animals) and replace it with DNA from a donated human cell (from an adult), and then let the cell develop for a few days.

At this point, the spectre of 'horrific' human-animal clones is brought up but it is a red herring with no basis in science. It is sourced in an over-active imagination, fuelled by wonderful literature on the subject. The idea that there might be a human-rabbit hybrid created in a bioscience lab is ridiculous, because it would not work! If a male human tries to reproduce with a female rabbit, there is never a pregnancy as a result.

The proposal put forward would require that laboratories obtain a license from the government, and be subject to inspections and there would be criminal punishments for any researcher who did create a human-animal hybrid that goes beyond what is allowed by the government's rules (ie. a human-animal hybrid that became a baby).

There doesn't seem to be any good moral reason to forbid this research. It seems predicated on vitalistic conceptions of human life - ie. that we are somehow completely different from animals. The idea that 'special' human DNA would be mixed with 'lowly' animal egg cells. This has no basis in reality, of course. Humans are animals, and the fact that we can fly to the moon and download pornography from the Internet does not make us sufficiently different from animals to make them 'unclean'.

In the BBC article, this kind of unthinking repugnance at the idea is represented by Josephine Quintavalle, who says:

This is a highly controversial and terrifying proposal, which has little justification in science and even less in ethics. Endorsement by the UK government will elicit horror in Europe and right across the wider world.

This is perhaps one of the most vapid responses I have seen on the subject. A lot of things that are done in the world may 'elicit horror' or be 'terrifying', but the question is not whether that horror is elicited but whether there is reason for that horror. If a wild animal takes a shit in my garden, I may be horrified. But is there good reason for that horror? I would argue 'no' in both cases. The proposal to the government is restrictive enough to prevent abuse - criminal penalties for researchers and a licensing system for research labs. We have not seen abuse of the current law on embryological research, and the folks involved in scientific researchers aren't five-year olds poking at things with sticks.

'Ethics' is always brought in to this debate, but the 'ethics' that people bring in is a very different kind of ethics to the sort that should be engaged in. Ethics should be a reasoned assessment of action in order to see whether it is consistent with other well-reasoned values and ideals. It should be entered in to in the spirit of reasoned analysis, not faith-based macabre horror.

In the case of human/animal hybrid research, we need to see it for what it reallly is - embryos less than a week old being used to potentially understand diseases and develop treatments, not giant minotaurs, unicorns, fairies and mermaids. The former doesn't 'horrify' me, and it shouldn't horrify you either. 'Ethics', in this case, is an unreasoned opposition to something that may potentially be useful.

Whether or not it will be useful has no connection to it's ethical viability - it is an empirical rather than ethical question. It may be that this research serves no purpose at all, in which case, we roll back to where we are now and say "well, that was an interesting experiment - now we know not to bother". That's how science works, but unfortunately, it's not how the ethics of luddite squeamishness works.

Comments | TrackBack

XML guru, Uche Ogbuji, has published a critical article on microformats. I think it's quite misguided.

XML was, of course, designed to express complex and specialized structures for content, and it seems a step backward to use a far less expressive construct just to embed the structure within HTML. Microformats folks do this because they feel that XML is too complex, not yet ubiquitous enough and, more importantly, doesn't allow for graceful degradation, which means that microformats look like regular HTML to user agents that do not understand more advanced technologies such as XML. This is a fairly weak argument, in part because XML is supported by most user agents these days and also because sometimes a scalable design for the Web is worth such tradeoffs and inconveniences.

What? We should use XML instead? I'm not reflexively anti-XML as some people tend to be. But XML on the Web isn't happening nearly as quickly as any of us would like. That's why people persist in keeping tag soup alive rather than moving to XHTML. The idea of microformats and other data-in-HTML approaches is to use the built-in constructs of (X)HTML (@rel, @rev, @class, profile URIs, semantic elements etc.)

Ogbuji gives an example of this:

I start with hAtom, because it has such an obvious XML alternative in Atom. There is already an XML form of Atom. It is enjoying healthy growth and support... Adding this feed link is much simpler than jumping through the various hoops of hAtom. Any Weblog software likely to support hAtom is even more likely to support pure Atom.

But that's the thing. Take my comment areas on this blog. They now have a form of hAtom built-in, so that I can parse them to turn out RSS feeds (Atom requires titles and blog comments don't have titles!). hAtom is not meant as a replacement for an Atom feed - it's useful for situations where an Atom feed would not be possible. All tools provide HTML, which is why data-in-HTML approaches (like microformats, eRDF, RDFa, GRDDL) work in such a uniform way.

Yes, you should try to make data available in a wide variety of ways - XML (and flavours like RSS/Atom), JSON, Atom and so on. The point about microformats and data-in-HTML is that it's to get to places where the standard approaches don't reach. That is exactly why they are useful!

Comments | TrackBack

I've had a last.fm account for a while, but rarely use it.

This is because the default behaviour of most AudioScrobbler/last.fm tools is to scrobble podcasts I listen to. This is not behaviour that I particularly like, and there's no easy way to turn it off.

I've just found that there is a way of turning it off if you use iScrobbler for OS X. Here are the instructions. You just use the 'defaults' command to set the preferences of iScrobbler to exclude podcasts.

defaults write org.flexistentialist.iscrobbler "Track Filters" '("Podcast")'

Do that and iScrobbler will submit only non-podcasts to last.fm. Which is kind of what it’s intended for, see.

Comments | TrackBack

Kent Newsome has a great post today on blogging and fun. You should read it. But, because you won’t, I’ll give you some choice cuttings:

“I’ve noticed a trend lately when reading my feeds. There are so many bloggers churning out earnest posts about supposedly earnest products and events that the fun quotient in the blogosphere is really taking a hit. My feeds look like hundreds of little sleep-inducing Wall Street Journals.”

“But fun makes the earnest blogger uncomfortable. This is serious stuff for him, and he believes that serious and fun just aren’t compatible. It saddens me to see all this brainpower, potential and effort directed at something so…indistinguishable.”

“Otherwise, you’re just another boring newspaper nobody wants to read. Fun beats smart every time, and in every way.”

That’s a manifesto I can live by. Yesterday, I wrote about Scientology (assholes), Jerry Falwell (a man who was shockingly close to being like an STD) and, of course, the HTML Working Group. I take none of this with much seriousness. In fact, there’s very little I take seriously.

Then again, I have a feeling that the blogs I prefer to read are the ones which are liberal in their use of words like ‘bullshit’ and ‘[arse/ass]hole’ than the ones who think that every new social networking startup out of the Valley is going to change everything. This is one of the reasons I listen to Yeast Radio.

Comments | TrackBack

Interesting quote from Skype’s press release:

“Mac users have very high expectations,” said Carter Adamson, Skype’s general manager of desktop products. “So we take the time to get things right. Whether it’s quality, stability or choice of features, we try to deliver exactly what is important to them. With 2.6 we have launched a new feature on Mac first, demonstrating our commitment to this fast-growing segment of Skype users.”

I guess I do have high expectations for software. Having it not give me a virus, trojan or piece of spyware helps. Having it offer the basic functionality in a reasonably easy-to-use way is another.

Is the Windows world ‘low expectations’ by comparison? Or is it a sort of modified Stockholm Syndrome?

Yes, smug Mac user. Not really. I have a Windows box on my desktop that I struggle to keep running.

Comments | TrackBack

Keith Alexander pointed me to discussions by members of the public-html mailing list on the @profile attribute of HTML’s ‘head’ element.

I would respond on list, but I am waiting for my W3C HTML WG membership to come through. I have to say I think the W3C process is needlessly complex, especially if they are trying to make the process of joining the HTML WG transparent. While I wait for approval, I will have to resort to posting on my blog instead.

Lachlan Hunt posted on the public-html list:

The profile attribute (which was actually defined for the head element in HTML4) is, in practice, useless.

Not true. The GRDDL specification uses the @profile attribute to specify a method of transforming XHTML in to RDF. GRDDL is supported by RAP (RDF API for PHP) and Jena, the Java-based RDF library.

GRDDL processors can parse data in a more liberal manner. For instance, the GRDDL parser that I wrote (but have not released) does look for the class declarations of various compound microformats (hCard and hCalendar) and uses those to add the relevant parsing stylesheets to the engine if they have not already been declared. But, since domain-specific information may be included on a web page, we cannot rely on GRDDL processors to keep track of all possible semantic formats, nor can we limit the Semantic Web (lower case or upper case, take your pick) to the work done by the microformats community. If a thousand compount microformat-style formats bloom, then a GRDDL processor should be able to do something with them.

@profile allows that to happen. It is non-intrusive - you don’t have to use it, but if you do, it makes it easier to scrape data from your site and others in a uniform way.

For more information on GRDDL, see the GetSemantic wiki article.

Microformats defined profile URIs for many of their formats. But in practice, there are many sites that don’t bother using them properly, if at all, and more importantly, there are also many tools available that are able to work with the microformats, without even checking if it’s present.

Indeed, most sites do not properly use the profile URIs for microformats. If most people didn’t brush their teeth, would the British Dental Association stop reccomending it? The fact that tools exist which can parse microformats without profile URIs is no reason to stop using profile URIs. There are tools which require profile URIs to provide data.

So such real world usage and implementation experience indicates that the profile attribute is not necessary, and so it shouldn’t be included in HTML5.

No, trotting out the word ‘microformats’ is no reason to stop using the profile attribute. As for ‘real world usage’, how can anyone work out what real world usage is? This is the Internet. Netcraft tracks 48m active web servers. Google no longer provides a figure for how large their search index is, but we can guess it’s pretty darn huge. How big does ‘real world usage’ have to be? “Real world usage” is usually a cover for ‘I don’t use it’.

Karl Dubost wrote:

The profile attribute is, in practice, difficult to use with CMS systems when the *users* want to add more semantics.

That may be so. We can’t base tomorrow’s HTML on the poorly designed CMS systems of the past. The CMS systems I use allow me to add profile attributes with ease. Hence why my blog has them. Unfortunately, the HTML WG can’t specify how people are going to create things.

If we were to take the ability of CMS and authoring tools to produce something, we would have thought CSS ‘un-pragmatic’ and abolished it a long time ago. Dreamweaver and other authoring tools are still not doing great on the CSS front. But CSS is technically a better way of doing things than tables, and so we persist.

The profile attribute serves a useful purpose. With GRDDL, it allows people to extract domain-specific information from web pages. Cool though microformats are, the road to the Semantic Web has many different routes. Though using class-names like ‘vcard’ is a good decision for the hCard standard and other microformats, the profile attribute allows other possibilities. Closing off this avenue because it’s supposedly not ‘practical’ would be a tragedy for future development of the Semantic Web.

Tags: html, xhtml, htmlwg, web standards, grddl, semantic web, rdf

Comments | TrackBack

My college has recently implemented some really poorly designed web filters. I am finishing on Wednesday, so I’m not making a big fuss about it, but let me just give you a list of the websites that are no longer accessible on the college’s wifi network:

Grazr, Reason Magazine, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, CrunchNotes, Digg, Slashdot, WordPress, Creating Passionate Users, DailyKos, Instapundit, Aral Balkan, Guardian (woah!), Telegraph (double woah!), Independent (triple woah!), New York Times (quadruple woah!) Xenu.net, Vecosys, Amazon UK, Open Rights Group, RDFa.info, Wikitravel, .

Some more: 43 Folders, Cubicgarden, the W3C’s XHTML2 pages, the W3C Markup Validator, the ‘basic HTML’ view of Gmail, NBC, ABC News, TailRank, The Sun, ITV, Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the LA times, CNN, FOX News, Daring Fireball, Londonist, Adobe, Remember the Milk and, most ironically, the University of London Union (my college is part of the UoL)… the list could go on and on.

This is why web censorship is doomed to fail. I bet that within ten minutes, I could find some hardcore pornography. But I can’t read the goddamn New York Times thanks to a misconfigured filter. This is what the filtering advocates want to give children. It doesn’t affect me. if I seriously want to read something on a website, I will find a way. But there are many people who can’t do that.

The RSS feeds for a great number of these sites work fine, by the way. The filter seems to be reading the HTML pages for their content and then deciding whether I can see them on that basis. It doesn’t seem to be working for XHTML content (any pages I’ve visited that are delivering back properly MIME-typed XHTML are working fine) - Jyte (XHTML 1.1), my blog and Adactio are working fine. I’m sure someone could do MIME type spoofing in order to get around this filtering system. Except that when I went to make a Jyte claim “Attempts to filter or block Internet resources are doomed to failure”, it conked out (probably the word ‘filter’ or ‘block’ in the URI being caught by a URI-based filter).

Just remember, British public, the University of London is a public body. Your taxes pay for it, but misconfigured filters are limiting the academic freedom of scholars and students alike. This is something that nobody ever seems to get concerned about.

Comments | TrackBack

I can’t believe there are actually people who will miss Tony Blair. Seriously. Have you guys never heard of Stockholm syndrome?!

Let me just remind you.

Septicisle: “I think Blair will eventually be remembered for two things, both connected. The mendacity of his government has made the public so cynical that politics may well have to be completely rebuilt, from the bottom up. This will be an uphill struggle because in destroying trust in government, he’s at the same time helped convince vast parts of the media, if not the public, that ideology is dead, that long-held principled beliefs, whether they be on the right or the left of the political spectrum, are something to be suspicious of”

“The most CCTV cameras in the world, the removal of the right to protest within a mile of parliament, the police more powerful and influential than ever before, despite all the moaning that they can’t do anything without filling in a form. In the name of the war on terror, we’ve been complicit in the transporting of suspects to places where they can be tortured, we’re prepared to deport people back to their country of origin on the basis of a piece of paper which says they won’t be mistreated, honest, and for a while we even suspended habeas corpus. Blair has led us into four separate wars, only one of which can be called truly successful”

Jan in San Fran: “Because Blair has always had an elastic relationship with truth, he thrives on a dazed public. Encouraging fear after 9/11 and even more the London 7/7 bombings served his purposes. Fear enabled his government to gut historic British expectations of civil liberties… So today, Brits find themselves in the condition we hope to bring ourselves to in November 2008: a reviled politician is on the way out; something/someone will come next”

Blair is a scoundrel-in-jeans. He has been a terrible influence on this country’s civil liberties. And he’s caused an absolute mass of terrible things to happen. The fact that this man is soon to be leaving a position of ‘leadership’ (yuck) in this country is something to be loudly celebrated. Unfortunately, this only means that another liberty-sucking scoundrel will come and take his place. Politicians never die, they just metamorphose in to worse politicians.

Comments | TrackBack

I’ve recently been watching quite a lot of debates and reading quite a lot of reviews of what has somehwat strangely been called the “new atheists”. By ‘new’, they mean ‘vocal’, although the word vocal isn’t ‘media’ enough, so that becomes ‘fundamentalist’ or even ‘evangelical’.

Criticism is made of said ‘new atheists’ for not providing a comprehensive account of why people are religious. Not to draw any equivalence, but they say something along this line:

“Of course, Dr. King has a powerful argument against racism - showing the ways that it is based on an incoherent and incorrect understanding of human nature, and how the belief in the difference of races leads to quite a lot of unfavourable consequences for blacks including racially-segregated schools, buses and drinking fountains. But this doesn’t get to the root problem! Dr. King can huff and puff all he likes about the inequities of the situation, and talk about how illogical and unreasonable racists are, but unless he finally gets to the point of providing a coherent explanation for why racists exist, we really should sneer disapprovingly. Dr. King has not understood the many complexities of the different types and strands of racists - he has not seen how racists differ in their opinions. He just blithely discredits their opinion as unfounded and immoral. This kind of simplistic thinking will not do!”

Before I get anybody howling, I am not drawing an equivalence between the conditions of blacks in the time of Martin Luther King and the conditions of non-believers in the era of YouTube. That’s not what it’s about. What it is about is the thought process that goes along with it. It’s a modified form of wishful thinking. If you substitute racism for religion and ‘Dr. King’ for ‘Professor Dawkins’, you have got one of the drearily tedious tropes of the reviewers of the books by “new atheists”.

Combine that with “but people need religion, don’t they?” (notice it’s always a third party who needs religion - young buck in the Opinions and Editorials has no such need, for he writes for a newspaper, but the dear Common people need their religion, so we best not take it away from them), and we have all these ridiculous reviews stitched up. Of course, there’s the old “but Dawkins is so theologically unsophisticated” argument (as if being able to tell the difference between a Franciscan and a Cathar makes any of it true).

If you wish to become a newspaper columnist, I can offer some advice - learn all of the logical fallacies, and then find new and creative ways to sneak them all in to your columns. A sterling career awaits those who combine that with a savvy collection of the clipped cultural currency. In the case of Dawkins, I’d recommend using the following phrases: “high Victorian atheism”, “atheism is a faith too!” (if I hear that statement one more time, I am going to strap on a bomb, praise Bertrand Russell and blow up a fucking commuter train! I think this faith is getting to my head!) and, oh, whatever other nonsense you can concoct - make sure you include ‘reductionism’ - that usually quietens the mind in between sips on the latte.

Here’s a good one - simultaneously accusing Dawkins of both being a novelty-peddler (and then draw symbolic parralels between the good Professor and, well, L. Ron Hubbard or Sun Myung Moon) or some kind of ancient demon from times past (again, the ‘high Victorian atheism’ thing - tie it in with our good friend Ebenezer Scrooge, since Dawkins wants to rob the proletariat class of it’s religious beliefs and replace it with the cold, hard logic of the capitalists). All of these techniques allow you to have had an ‘opinion’ that’ll hold aforementioned latte-sipper’s attention for fifteen minutes while you scamper off without having to actually provide any type of